Summary

Ray Bradbery, a former IT professional and entrepreneur, shares his journey from working in the IT department of a major bank to starting his own consulting practice and later owning a cafe and restaurant. He emphasizes the importance of understanding customers, doing thorough research before starting a business, and having the grit to overcome challenges. Ray also discusses the lessons he learned from his time at Borland, including the power of saying yes and the importance of product management. He shares stories of successful entrepreneurs he has worked with and highlights the need for optimism and resilience in the startup world.

Takeaways

• Do thorough research and understand the market and customers before starting a business
• Have the grit and resilience to overcome challenges and keep pushing forward
• Say yes to opportunities and be open to trying new things
• Product management is crucial for getting the product right and understanding customer needs
• Optimism and a positive mindset are important traits for entrepreneurs

Sound Bites

"Sure, why not? I've never done it before, but how hard can it be?"

"So I started to look at how Borland operated. And the thing that I think was the first eye opener was they had this thing called team B."

"Because we don't do what you tell us to do, we do what we think is right."

Links

Ray's current startup: https://www.datalynx.com.au/

Please leave us a review: https://podchaser.com/DesigningSuccessfulStartups

Tech Startup Toolkit (book): https://www.manning.com/books/tech-startup-toolkit

Jothy’s website: https://jothyrosenberg.com

Jothy's non-profit: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

03:04 Transitioning from IT to Entrepreneurship

08:05 Lessons from Borland and Building a Consulting Practice

14:06 Understanding Customers and Overcoming Challenges

19:09 The Importance of Product Management in Startups

25:04 Grit and Resilience: Keys to Success in Entrepreneurship

And here's Ray, all the way from Australia.

Good afternoon, good evening, whatever time it is where you are.

Yeah, it's afternoon here and it's morning for you.

Yeah, it's going to be a great day tomorrow because we're already there.

You're already there. I know that's always pretty strange. So I always like to kind of start with asking you where are you originally from and where do you live now?

Yep.

It is.

Okay. So I was born here in Sydney. unusual story. I was actually born in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, so I couldn't wait. but lived most of my life in Sydney. I did spend two years in Papua New Guinea. I got sent up there to help a bank up there computerize. So move from a accounting machines to

Yeah, well, and it's pretty much a long flight anywhere from you, from Australia.

Hahaha

Yeah, what?

So I know you had a pretty long career in the IT department of a major bank. And then it was after that that you joined Thorland. And that's where we first met.

Correct. Yep.

Right? Yeah. And then you made another shift. Well, when you were at Boil and they asked you to make the company have a shift to building a consulting practice, which they'd never had before. So you had to create something new that Boil and never had. You had to do it.

thousands of miles away from the mothership. And I never asked you back then, how did that work out?

Well, it was funny because, yeah, as I said, I was at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for 23 years in their IT department. I was head of IT strategy for five years. I was CIO for their insurance business for the last couple of years I was there. And I think that really set me up when Belinda Hanna, who was Managing Director of Ballin in Australia, came and said, could you start a consulting practice?

Sure, why not? I've never done it before, but how hard can it be? And I think the thing that set me up is for a long time, I had been working with a range of suppliers to the bank because when I was running strategic planning, we did all of the purchasing of technology for the bank. So hardware, software, I worked with Microsoft's IBM, StoryTechs, whatever of the world.

But I also worked with small consulting practices or small software companies who were looking to sell whatever they had to the bank. And so I understood their mindset. How does a company that really hasn't got that much credentials sell to, in those days, I think the bank had about 56 ,000 employees and it was the largest bank in Australia, which it still is today.

And so when I, Belinda asked me to do the job, I sat down and said, how do I make this work? I've got no budget. I've got no support from anywhere other than a blank sheet of paper that says start a consulting practice. But I started to look at how Ball and operated. And the thing that I think was the first eye opener was they had this thing called team B.

where they had all of these fans out in the community who were providing support. And so I started to reach out to the team B people in Australia and started to work out what their capabilities were, what they did. And then, so essentially started a virtual consulting practice. So there was me who was out there selling, writing procedures and policies, et cetera. But I had a team of.

virtual consultants who would go in, pretend they were ball and so, you know, it was ball and selling to these large organizations. So that gave us the credibility because we were well known. but we were giving these consultants a lifeline into organizations. They could never have hoped to get in through the door. And so that's how we built that consulting practice. And we turned over a million dollars in the first 12 months with one employee, me.

You

So obviously, Borland asking you to do this was because they thought it would help sell more product because it was a product company. And I'm just curious, while you were doing that, I was over in the languages division and eventually was running the languages division. What were the products from like?

Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Borland C++, or was it over in the application space? What was the product that you were going to do the consulting with or for?

Okay. So the initial projects we won were around paradox. So we won a contract at Citi to build a system to track some of their financials. We built a system for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to track their securitization of products. So it was mainly around paradox in those early days, but then it quickly shifted to Delphi.

As it became, you know, the VB killer, everyone was talking about it and people were looking for solutions and we would go in and pitch a Delphi solution. And, but then we also started to expand in some of the other products that Ball and had that were on the proof. So there was Delphi 400, which I'm not sure whether you remember that or not, but we successfully sold that there was Delphi connect for SAP.

And so we successfully sold that. So we were pretty much listening to what the customers were asking for and creating something no matter what the ball and product was. And the reason that they were thinking about this consulting, and as I say, it was a renegade project kicked off in Australia. So it didn't have any formal endorsement by the company was they were in Australia. They were watching Oracle.

who in those days was expanding into services to complement their product sales. And so, you know, the thinking was that if we could provide solutions to customers, we could also sell product into those companies as well. You know, we did some massive projects for Brisbane City Council, where we built a standard common desktop where they could access all their backend applications using the

Corba as the interface to those backend systems. We built a system for JB Weir, which was one of the biggest stockbroking firms in Australia at that stage. Again, punching well above our weight. But I think part of the reason was because I had previously worked in a very large organization and had had a CIO role, had credibility, but I also understood how they thought.

So I could put myself on the other side of the desk and for example, they'd say, we've got no money. You knew that what they were actually telling you was I can't spend any capital, but I maybe could spend operating. So you would pitch it and don't pay us for the product upfront, pay us over six months or something, cause that relieves their budget issues, et cetera. So that helped.

Sure, One funny story I can tell you about Delphi is that when I first got to Borland, they had recently shipped Turbo Pascal 10. And they had been on a very steep decline in how much revenue they made on each version of Turbo Pascal.

At a time previous, they had almost gotten to 100 million a year on Turbo Pascal. And they were now down to about, I don't know, in the 20s maybe. And it was a disaster. And at the same time, the new client server revolution was taking place. And so the leaders of the

Hmm.

Yep.

Pascal team, Anders Heilsberg in particular, figured, okay, we pretty much own Turbo Pascal. We can do anything we want with it because there's just no one else selling it at all. And we're gonna make it into a client server tool. And the other thing we have to do is stop calling it Pascal. And so they came up with the name Delphi, which is another story, but.

Mm -hmm. Mm

And then, so basically Delphi was turbo Pascal 11. And in its first go out into the market, it went back above 100 million a year.

Yes, I was, I did the launch of Delphi in Australia and I can still remember the enthusiasm in the audience for the VB killer. and we got some great press. we converted one of the, you know, entrepreneurial software companies in those days to use Delphi to rebuild their product from VB. We got threatened with lawsuits by Microsoft.

for disparaging their product. But yeah, was, was an incredible way to ride.

And as the person in charge of Borland C++, I also had Microsoft threaten me.

Well that must mean we're doing something right.

Yeah. So the other thing that you did, again, you could do things that we didn't notice and you could get away with doing whatever you wanted basically. And one of the things you did was you set up operations for Borland and China and India and South Korea and maybe there's others.

Each one of those was basically a startup. And I just wonder what were the, because there's no easy startups. So what were the challenges of, you know, trying to move Borland into those new markets?

Well, China was the interesting one because they had regulations that said you couldn't have an operation there unless you had 51 % local ownership. And there was nowhere we were going to do that. So we battled for nearly 12 months to Joanne Birmingham, who was legal counsel in those days, helped me and we kept fighting and fighting and eventually got a wholly owned subsidiary in China.

But that was interesting, you know, negotiating with government in China, where you walk through the door with someone walking behind you with a rifle was always interesting, but that was probably the hardest. And of course the piracy issues that you had trying to sell into that market, because we were always guarding our intellectual property very carefully because I think it was.

one of the J Builder releases where we had built in anti -piracy software. And before we even launched it, there was code in China to crack it. it was, but I always saw that as an opportunity that we would offer amnesties, for example, you know, we know you've got an illegal copy of this stuff. We'll give you a lower price if you become legal. So that was one.

The language barriers are always interesting. and I guess the other thing you're always dealing with is. Asia Pacific is very different to the U S but headquarters always had a view that. Well, what it works in the U S it must work everywhere else. And so we used to pride ourselves on again, doing something totally different. And, I remember it was a Dale Fuller coming to me and say, how come you're selling this and no one else can? said,

Because we don't do what you tell us to do, we do what we think is right.

And sometimes that's just what you gotta do.

Was it, I assume you got the translation into Chinese done locally, you didn't get that done back in the States, you had it done in China, I assume.

No, we didn't translate. We sold English product into China. yep. The only market we actually, changed the product for was Japan, where we had an R and D lab there who would do the localization. And that was always a challenge, but we found that mostly the IT communities in China and Taiwan, et cetera, were.

Really?

able to use English products.

I'm sure the Japanese could have as well, but they just preferred not to. Okay, they refused.

No, refused. Correct. Yeah. They had a very big R &D lab there that they liked to keep. But it was always a challenge again, because there was always a six month lag between you releasing one of your tools and us being able to ship a Japanese version. So it meant that there was always a lag in the revenue, which again, the US had difficulty understanding.

Yeah, yeah.

Why there's six months lag.

So after you left Borland, you've actually, it sounds like at two different stints, you've helped mentor startups. And I guess you mostly focused on their sales and marketing. What stands out, what sort of lessons or key takeaways do you?

offer up to entrepreneurs that are listening to this about what you learn doing that sort of mentoring.

Yeah, I think one of the common pitfalls is you will find that they'll build a product because they think it's a good idea and therefore the market must want it without doing the research that you really need to do upfront is, know, who's going to buy it? How are they going to use it? What price will they actually pay? And, know, I kind of

learned some really important lessons around that at Borland when they were creating Kylex, the open source version of Delphi in that we priced it really high and tried to sell it into a market that was expecting product to be free. And I think that was the death knell of the product. It was a great product. did everything they said it would do, but it was just

not priced in a way that the market would pay for it. So, it failed. and so that's one of the things that when I'm talking to an entrepreneur is what research did you do before you even started building this? Did you work out who's the market, how you're going to sell it? You know, I've worked with a couple where they thought the, the way that you launched a product, give it away for free. And, without a strategy that says, well,

That's all well and good to get the product into the marketplace. But what strategy have you got to actually monetize it at some time in the future? And, you know, I was working for a period of time with the company called service rocket, which was Atlassian's first partner in the world. And, you know, I observed what they did, which is they early entry to the market was they gave product away, but then they would build an enhanced version of it that you paid for.

And so built a really successful software business. so yeah, it's do your homework upfront, make sure that there is the demand for the product, that it's not just you think it's a great idea, therefore everyone will buy it. and also, you know, how are you going to market the product? Again, I quite often found that they would just put it up on a website somewhere and wonder why no one came knocking.

So it really does need that upfront promotion, et cetera. And again, that was a lesson I learned in the Delphi days is that product was sold based on hype more than it was sold on its capabilities in the early parts of it. Cause everyone was talking about this thing coming. And so the market was anticipating it. And that's what a lot of these startups fall down on is they don't do the upfront work to build a hunger.

for what it is they're building.

I think you're basically right, but I want to give credit where credit is due. There was a product manager, and he was sort of a sidekick to Anders Heilsberg, who was really the genius architect. And the guy I'm referring to is a guy named Zach Erlacher.

you

I know Zach extremely well. I was talking to him a couple of months ago.

And, and one of my favorite people and, and Zach and, and there were, there were the equivalent kind of person in almost every successful product, at least within the, languages domain. I mean, I had one for J builder. had one for C plus plus. had one for, I own D base too, which was kind of not really in that same mix, but, I had D base too. And.

OK. Yeah.

And it's funny because I have a hard time explaining to people nowadays that a product management person ought to be really early in the hiring at a startup. And instead, people like to, know, the first marketing person that they want is an outbound marketing person. And I've done that too.

But you need an inbound marketing person. That's what product management is. And Zach would go out. He would be testing messaging. And he would come back and say, when I said this to them, the way they said it back to me was different. And I recorded it. And that's how we're going to have to do it from now on. And he would do the same thing when it was ready to start giving demonstrations.

Yes.

demo it and then they would say, yeah, but this is what I would do next, not what you just did in the demo. And he would bring that back and Anders would listen to him and change the product. And I thought this was, this was genius. And, I've retained, that's one of the most important lessons I've retained from Borland is the, the, the power and the importance of product management to get the product right. I mean, if you ha if you

can't just do, you know, I also understand that sometimes you can't just go into customers with a blank sheet of paper and say, well, here's what I'm thinking of building and let's talk about it. Cause sometimes you actually have to show them a proof of concept or something, right? But, you know, then you're back and forth until you sort of have this concept of a minimum viable product worked out.

And they were really good at that. Borland fell apart eventually, we were both there during some very good years where Borland did extremely well. I mean, the loyalty that the customers had.

that Team B, I mean, I don't think I ever told you why I joined Borland in the first place. I had done my first startup in Sunnyvale and I'd been there four years and I was ready to kind of look at what else I was gonna do next. But this was before we used the internet for doing updates.

No.

And we had shipped a hundred supercomputers in four years. And we were having to updates, bug fixes to people like twice a month on floppy disks for a supercomputer. And I was frustrating to all get out. And so I said to everybody I knew, because I had only lived in California for four years at that point, I asked people,

Who in the world builds the best quality software? And everybody said, it's easy. They're right in your backyard, because I already lived in Scott's Valley. And they said, it's Borland. I said, wait, I've been driving down this horrible hill an hour commute and back, and they're two miles from my house, and that's where I should go work.

Yeah.

Yeah

Okay

And I literally locked knocked on the door and until they gave me a job because it was it was about about quality. And I'll talk to people now and I'll say, yeah, we did an alpha and we would do a beta. We would do several. We would do beta one, two, three, and then we would do gamma one, two, three. And we would do bug hunts and we would pay big cash rewards. And people just look at me like I've got two heads.

Yeah.

And I said, well, that's how they built really good quality software and had, in those days, two million very loyal customers for one product.

Yep. No. And as I say, I leveraged them when I was starting the consulting practice because they were, they were our best promoters. I mean, they would talk. And I mean, Delphi still exists today. The funny thing is the company I'm helping at the moment, their product is built in Delphi and their CTO, who's one of the smartest guys I've met in a long, long time, swears by it. says, why would I move? It works.

It's fast. I can't build anything that small in anything else or as quickly. I mean, we had an opportunity with a customer who wanted us to do something in the data management area that we'd never done before. Over the weekend, he built a solution. So, and it's all in Delphi. We just don't tell customers that.

No, but I don't know if you know those, I'm sure you do actually. So Anders got an offer he couldn't refuse from Microsoft. And then he went up there and he did what he said he just never wanted to do when he was at Borland, which is do a C++ version of Delphi. And he called it C sharp.

Yeah.

Yep. Yes.

Yeah. Yes. Yep. There. I still remember the horror when he jumped ship.

You

yeah, yeah, was, it we, we kind of knew that they were tearing us apart at that point.

Yeah. Yeah. But as you say, they were great days, but talking about that made me think of something is when I was at the bank, you know, one of the challenges we had, one of the largest OS two networks in the world. So Microsoft, that was two, not IBM. And the challenge we had was we had branches all around. So we had client service. So we had servers sitting in the branches.

running workstations and the challenge we had was we had to distribute software to them. And so I found a little startup who had built a solution to do something totally different, but it had the capability to be able to transfer bits and bytes from one location to another. And so we worked with them and they repurposed the software to be able to distribute upgrade updates to our software all around the country.

So again, taking a product that wasn't designed to do something and make it do something else. But then they got bought by a company called Candle Software who got bought by IBM. So success story. Yep.

Yeah, well, sure. OK, so then at a later point, you decided to create a vastly different type of startup, one that's not, I guess, high tech. And somewhere along the way, you became like a registered barista and a really proficient Greek

You

Yep.

you

Cook?

So yeah, the story behind that is after I left Balland, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and I was sitting in our local cafe and we knew the owner pretty well. My wife and I were sitting there and he says, geez, I hate this business. He said, I need to get out. He said, I wish I could find someone to buy it. Hey, I'll buy it. And so I went from being an IT

person to being a cafe owner. And I made all the mistakes that you could possibly make because, how hard can it be? And so what I worked out was to be a successful cafe owner. had to understand the customers and the business. So I actually went away, did a barista course, did some basic cooking courses.

And started to stand behind the counter and would listen to the customers, what they were asking for, et cetera. And from that, I then went on to create my own menu, which was unique. So, my wife is Cypriot and so I would go and sit down with her father and talk about Greek recipes, et cetera. And so I created wraps and things that had this Cypriot flavor.

But yeah, the mistakes I made was presuming that what I'd learned in IT would work in a cafe. And it didn't, it was very much more about understanding the customer, remembering who they were, what their name was, what kind of coffee they drank, know, what kind of food they ate. so that's how I ended up being a cafe owner. And then the restaurant was a friend of mine said,

There's a need for a Greek restaurant in this suburb of Sydney called Cronulla. Your cafe is going really well. Why don't you start a Greek restaurant? How hard can it be? And so I made again some mistakes, but from that I learned again, you've got to understand your customers and what they need, et cetera. So again, I learned to cook Greek more than I had in the cafe.

I learned to make cocktails, et cetera, because I figured if I was going to manage people, had to understand how they felt, how they thought, how they worked. But I also had to understand the customers and what was driving them. So.

What was the, when you first said to the, to the gentleman that wanted out, that you wanted to buy it, was it already a Greek food or was it something completely different?

No, it was a corner shop with a little toaster out the back and a flat pan that he used to cook stuff occasionally on. And so I had to fit it out. So put in a proper kitchen, put in, you know, exhaust, et cetera. So turn it into a proper cafe, rearrange everything, new counters.

So I spent a lot of money to make it look Greek. Got the Greek paintings, it got to put on the wall. So totally changed it. So from, know, he would probably do 10 customers a day. We were doing 50, 60, 70 customers a day. I hate to think how many coffees I made in the five years we had it.

It just seems to me that owning either cafe or a restaurant just seems like an exhausting job.

It that's why eventually we gave it up. was just too many hours. now being the technologist I am, everything was computerized. So, you know, everyone was carrying around, Palm pilots to enter orders, et cetera. Everything was tracked. All the orders coming in were tracked, et cetera. So that side of it was pretty well pinned down, but it was, you know,

understanding what the customers wanted, how to market to them, why they came back, remembering their names, all that kind of stuff that wrapped around it that was the change. Plus it has, you know, having worked in the IT industry for so many years, there is a set of ethics that we ascribe to. The hospitality industry doesn't necessarily have those same ethics.

So, I see.

Yep.

Are either or both of them still serving Greek food?

No, no, I, I sold to Australians in both. So one became a, well actually, no, it just sold again and it's Greeks have bought it and they've turned it back into a Greek cafe. So after a, know, 10 year gap, it's back to being a Greek cafe and highly successful again. And the restaurant is now a burger shop.

So bought by one of the chains down here called Betty's Burgers.

Did you get your members of your family involved in either of those food establishments?

I learnt again when I bought the cafe, I, my brother -in -law and his daughters went in to help and I immediately learnt you don't have family in a business. So we parted company after about three months, which is when I went in and started to run the business. yeah, friends, et cetera, don't necessarily work.

Okay.

So.

One of the things that has become really obvious to me as I meet lots of founders doing lots of different kinds of startups, because one of the really fun things about this podcast is that I've had people who are young founders creating a new farming startup and someone else that's figured out a way to really revolutionize the property management business.

Mm

But one thing that's really a common thread is that people that do this have a lot of grit. Now, I imagine that everyone who lives in the land of crocodile Dundee must have a lot of grit.

Yeah, or stupidity, one of the two.

But I used to love that show, but I'm sure I'm dating myself by even mentioning it. not the show, the movies. But seriously, you have exhibited a lot of grit. And I wondered if you could tell us maybe the story of where you think that comes from.

Yeah.

I think it comes from a, I came from a very working class background. So my father ran a factory where we, they made,

Wadding, which is what goes into upholstery of chairs, et cetera. so from a, well, plus he was the home handyman. So I was one of eight. And I remember that I think my earliest memory of the house was it was a small cottage in a working class suburb. And over the years, my father would pull out a hammer and put another room on as the family grew. And so it ended up a fairly large house and he did it all himself. But.

He had his apprentices, which was my two brothers and I. And so we learned to swing a hammer. But then I think I was about 12 when he put me on the trucks. So every school holidays, he would insist that I didn't sit around and do nothing. So I would be the off -sider on the trucks delivering the materials to all the upholsterers around Sydney. And so I

at the age of 12.

At the age of 12, my favorite was I would get a fish cake for lunch from the driver. So that was my reward, but, but it taught me that you got to work hard. and then when I turned 16 in school holidays, I would be in the factory on the machinery, well, you know, creating the product. And so I think it came from that, that, you know, you just gotta work hard, stick with it.

and then, when I left school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do and kind of fell into it by chance, but then quickly worked out that I had affinity for solving problems. And I guess, you know, I remember being called in one day to one of my senior managers said, you've got no future in it. He said,

You'll probably be here another six months and then you'll be gone. We'll send you back to the Commonwealth Bank branches. And here I am, know, 50 something years later, still in IT. So thankfully he was wrong.

And where do you think he is?

Well, I'm truly retired now, but interesting was that he became my mentor in later years in IT. So took me under his wing and I ended up being his personal assistant for a number of years while we were building one of the largest computer centers in the Southern hemisphere. So I was part of that team that designed it and commissioned it, et cetera. again, great experience.

I think that's again, one of where the resilience comes from is over that 23 years I was with bank, other than the five years I was head of strategic planning, I don't think I ever did one thing for more than two years. So I was always doing something different, learning something new, challenging myself. And so I think that helps in later life is that you take all those key learnings because I still sit down.

And listen to a customer talking about what their problems are and say, we haven't gotten an exact solution, but I'm sure if we did something else, which is this product we created over the weekend for one of the big prospects is, Hey, surely we can do this. How hard can it be to convert code if you can convert data?

think you must say, how hard can it be, quite frequently. I've heard you say it three times just in this session.

I do. Well, it is, it's about challenge. If someone says, no, we can't do it. My response is always, why not? What is it stopping? Hey, if you can convince me that we can't do it, then I'll back off. But until I've got an answer that's sad, and again, I think it goes back to my strategic planning background is, you

I was always looking at what the business needed out of technology and the working out what technology is there out there that might be able to do this, even though it wasn't designed to do that.

But yeah, I guess that's where some of the grit comes from. Just always questioning, never accepting that no is a word.

Well, it's definitely one of the things I used to really admire in teams that I built at a startup is that more often than not, these were people whose first instinct is to say yes. This current company, the founding CTO,

He was this guy who was a really brilliant hardware architect. And I'm using the past tense because he doesn't work for us anymore, but he was our founding CTO that was with us for five years. And if somebody said, it would really be great if the product could do this. And everybody, of course, assumes that, it's going to be a really hard thing to change hardware.

But to him, it was not a lot different than software because he was essentially nowadays, you're writing a high level programming language called system Verilog that's actually designing the hardware for you. you have what look like functions and you combine them. And he would come in the next morning and say,

Hmm.

Yeah, it was a good idea. It works.

Yep.

I mean, of course at that quick moment it was working on a simulator, but he would have it then working on hardware and FPGA, you know, the programmable chips that afternoon. you know, within two days he'd have it working in hardware. I just think there's so much power to the word yes. And he was a good example of it.

Yeah. Well, when I look back at my career, think the other thing that I've seen in the entrepreneurs, cetera, that there's just something about them that you know is going to be successful. So I mean, when I ball and acquired Open Environment Corporation, which you're well aware of, we had one of the consultants.

Well, that's why they moved me to Boston.

a guy, Graham Porter, and Graham said, I've always wanted to be in marketing. And I said, what background have you got? He said, none, but I want to always want to do it. So I said, okay, well, you've got a passion for it. Convince me you can do it. And he turned out really successful, but he then transitioned into running his own business and he became the

lead reseller of Marketo in Australia until Marketo eventually came and set up in their own right, but highly successful. Rob Castaneda, I hired at Balland, he was a kid and there was just something about him. I knew he was going to be successful. And now he's built a global company after starting in a garage in Toon Gabi, which is an outer suburb of Sydney.

there is another who's now running a Salesforce solution company. So it just does people, you know, there's something about them, you know, that they're going to be successful because they've got grit and they're prepared to say, yes, I can do that. Or yes, I'll try it. I might fail, but Hey, you know, the thing I've always felt is if you fail, that means you're trying.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, it's That's true in this and it's true in sports too. And we always used to say to somebody that skied the entire day and said, I didn't fall all day. And it's like, well, then you weren't pushing yourself hard enough.

Yep

Yep, correct. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, just don't make the same mistake twice is what I always say.

Yeah, well, I'm afraid I have done that in some of the startups where made the exact same mistake twice. you see it happening and you're watching this in slow motion. like, wait a minute, I've seen this movie before. know this, something's got to change. then the other thing that's true about startup people is they're incredible optimists.

Yeah

Yes.

And then that can work against you, which it has for me sometimes. Because then I say, OK, I definitely made this mistake before, but I'm going into this knowing that, and it's going to be different this time. But you don't always have control over everything in a business situation sometimes.

Yep. And it never is.

Yeah, nah.

Well, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation to have with you. everything I've said to you, I don't know how you're getting it because you're in tomorrow. But it's worked amazingly well. We've got this time warp between us. But anyway.

Yes.

Yep. Well, I can tell you tomorrow is going to be a nice day.

I am sure of it now. I can see it. Well, thank you so much.

Yep.

I've really enjoyed it.

I have too. It's been great to catch up again and we'll stay in touch.