Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Hi everybody. This is a brand new podcast.
And the idea around this podcast is that we're going to interview founders from different startups and to basically show how many different people are building all sorts of different companies, different voices, different ways of looking at stuff. And the format is we're going to try and start with asking the founders some personal questions. What drives them to do this? Then ask them some questions about their startup, and then kind of ask them questions about the market they're in, what gets them excited about that market, et cetera, how they're trying to change the world. We're going to try and keep the questions consistent. Always ask the same ones so you, dear listener, can get an idea of comparing different people who are doing different things in this space and just to see all the different things that contribute towards a healthy, thriving tech ecosystem today. We're going to have a slightly different way of doing this, though, because we've got a very special guest here. We'll go through the initial questions as just described, but additional to that, today's guests have reached out to me a couple of months ago with a kind of specific topic they had in mind that they wanted to talk about. And once we've gone through those basic questions, we'll talk about that topic in more detail.
So all that, I'm very, very happy to say hi to Omar Tofail, who's sitting opposite me. We're doing this face to face from the startup. Lupzio. Thanks for coming, Omar, thank you so.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Much, Stephen, for having me. I'm really excited to be here in person to get a chat with you.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Cool. We've been talking for ages already.
We've still got something to talk about on live mics, so let me just start then.
So what's your background? How did you get into this game?
[00:02:14] Speaker B: The game? The tech game.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: The tech game.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: How did you get into the tech game?
Tech is just interesting to me, as is, I'm sure, to a lot of people, in that it allows you to have an outside impact, I think, and it involves so many different parts of a person in terms of creativity is involved, logic is involved, business. There's a whole bunch of things that you can bring to the tech game and feel that you're engaged on multiple levels. So, I mean, computer games and just the tech scene in the States and all over the world, it's an exciting space. And so I felt drawn by that, by the people running these companies and making massive changes around the world. There's an interest in Sci-Fi as well so there's a whole bunch of stuff why I'm in tech.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: And I would look at you as a kind of tech co founder. You've got a computer science background as.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: So. Yeah, I studied computing science at Glasgow, but as we were talking about when we came in here, my real education was in my mom and dad's shop, and that's where I learned the real world. How do you interact with people? How do you manage the customer? How do you create a proposition? There's so much I learned there and that's what I'll go back to. That was my real education.
And then, yeah, later on, I did go classical union do computing.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: Cool, cool.
And what made you build a startup, man?
[00:03:50] Speaker B: It's always something I wanted to do, so it's not my first. What do they call it? Rodeo.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: It's not really a term I use, but that's how it's described, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's not the first thing I've tried a startup. Neither is it the first thing I've put out there. So I've always been making things and putting things out there. So this is the latest in a long line, I would almost say it's like a darwinian process we were talking about earlier. I'm getting better at building these things.
So this latest one is.
Shall I get into it?
[00:04:29] Speaker A: I'm trying to bring slow format to this.
So what's your startup called?
[00:04:34] Speaker B: It's called lupcio.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Lupcio, okay. And what would you say? What's the elevator pitch?
[00:04:40] Speaker B: The elevator pitch is it's a student driven tech agency that pairs students from scottish universities who are doing computing related degrees with customers who are looking for early stage software. That's it in a Nutshell.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Okay, so you're taking.
Well, I guess I'm saying young, but there'll be different ages, I guess.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Predominantly young, though.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Yeah, predominantly young who've got skills, got some understanding, some knowledge and education on this. And you're connecting them to people who want to build software, stuff like products, I guess. What kind of range of things do you build?
[00:05:20] Speaker B: So we are best placed to build prototypes, early version ideas. So there's a really catchy, cheesy phrase that I say we take people from PowerPoint to prototype.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Nice, Chapo.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Do you like that?
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's very good.
[00:05:36] Speaker B: I've got a whole list of those. I've got a whole line of those kind of lines. Right. But that's what we do, because where we see the gap in the market is that I'm not here to compete with traditional agencies. They do what they do and they do an amazing job, but they'll charge you ten k upwards off it for it, at least, which is fine. Or what's the other option for someone, say, that goes through an incubator or an accelerator and has done business model canvas of death and lean startup, and they know who their customer is and USP and blah, blah, blah, and now they want to build the bloody thing. What do you do if you don't have a tech co founder or you don't have a tech background yourself? You're almost left to your own devices. I was almost like, do you go to an agency? Do you go abroad? Do you outsource it? How do you even know what to ask for?
[00:06:31] Speaker A: I was a non technical founder, so I know exactly all the hells you're talking about.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: There is also the no code option as well, which I know you love.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: But what's your view on that?
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Look, we use no code tools to build solutions for customers who can't be bothered doing it themselves or don't know where to start. So we built an ER application on literally two k, which was a budget that was not going to get that person anywhere with an agency. And if they went abroad, I don't know, maybe it would be hit or miss, right? So we researched. We said, listen, your budget is next to nothing. We're not building something from the ground up using ar tech, from Apple and Android. There's this tool, there's no code. Why don't you go use that? And they were like, listen, can you do it for us? We were like, yeah, we can, but we were fully transparent with them. So we'll use Webflow, we'll use framer, we'll use notion and airtable. I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: Got you.
[00:07:28] Speaker B: I want to deliver a solution.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Got you. Okay, thanks. That's really clear.
This is a wider question, a really big question, actually. But I'll ask it. How does your startup change the world?
[00:07:42] Speaker B: We change the world because we give students work experience before they graduate, and we don't say to them, hey, listen, do four years of a degree, go work in some supermarket stacking shelves, and when you graduate, then you can start making money and getting real world experience. Software engineering is a field where you need practical experience. It's like medicine, it's like plumbing. It's a hands on thing. If you give me a software engineer that's never touched a database, never logged into a server, never messed up something, somewhere. I don't want them anywhere near my software. It's like a doctor. I'm not going to let a doctor operate in me that's never had any practical experience. So I'm saying the way the education system is set up right now for software engineers is wrong.
Yeah, there's placements and internships, but the majority of these students are pumped through a process whereby at the end of it they're told, here's a shiny little piece of paper. No good luck, and go out and get a job.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Makes me think that you've almost got two customers. On the one hand, you got the people who want to sort of build those prototypes or commission the building of it. On the other hand, you've got almost. You're always kind of doing sort of economic development on the fly.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: We're disrupting education, but we're also bringing people on. In the first rung of this digital transformation ladder that everyone's always banging on about, we're bringing them on at a cost effective rate. So we're solving two.
Got you.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: Cool. No, very interesting. Thanks, Omar. Next question.
What excites you the most about the space you're in?
[00:09:13] Speaker B: Tech, man. What is it not to like? It's amazing. It's Sci-Fi, it's the future. It's like AI and robots and what is there not to like about it? Tech is amazing. Where do I even start with that thing? If you've seen a few Sci-Fi movies, tech is just cool. Technology is like. It's not just computers and whatnot. It goes right back to fire. Technology changes communities and societies and it changes humanity and it changes things, as jobs used to say. Right? It changes everything.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: So I can put you firmly in the tech optimism box, then?
[00:09:50] Speaker B: No, I'm not thinking of a tech utopia. Tech doesn't solve everything, it's a tool. Right. I'm not going to say, oh, here, use this shiny little thing. It's going to solve all your economic and societal problems. No, it's a tool. It's a one thing that can solve a lot of things, but it's not a one thing to solve everything.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Interesting.
What would your thesis be of the future of the space that you're building in? What do you think is going to happen in that space?
[00:10:23] Speaker B: I think the traditional way of.
So the workforce of the future.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: I guess there's two parts. What do you think is going to happen in the space of building prototypes, part one. Part two. What do you think the future of students learning how to code CS students.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's start with that second one first. I think the way it's currently done is broken in that universities take hundreds of students into these programs. They teach them what they think is relevant for industry. I've got a lot of colleagues in university. I'm not going to really like this, but it's a reality, right, in that the question really is our university is the best place for this workforce of the future.
Are there other ways that people can learn to be productive and contribute to that workforce of the future? And we know there are. You don't have to go to university to be able to build software. In fact, a lot of companies you know now, and a lot of people know, don't even need a degree now. Show me what you can make, what you can build. Show me your portfolio, show me your passion. Boom, you're in. And so that traditional route through university for software engineers and computing scientists, I think that is going to change massively if you're going to be going into theoretical side of things, research. Yeah, cool. Go to uni. Go and learn from people who are already academics. They can teach you to be an academic, but are academics really the right people to teach you to be someone who's productive in industry? I don't know. I don't think so. I think it's one part of the puzzle, but I think what's missing is the practical experience side of things. And that's where we are coming in, in the game, trying to give students paid work experience, but also solving a problem whereby there are not enough people out there who are able to build these early version ideas.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: Yeah, no, really interesting.
I think universities are starting to see what you're saying as well, and I think they're sort of changing how they're looking at the world. But, yeah, it takes all sorts of prompts, et cetera, to make that happen.
And what do you think about the future of creating from going from PowerPoint to.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: All right, well, there's loads of ways to go from. I know, exactly. Right. There's loads of way to go from an idea to an initial tangible thing. And that's the thing with software. It's not just some people have that big bang approach, let's build this thing in stealth, six months, twelve months, and then we'll release it upon the world and they'll all follow our feet. And we've seen that work, not work again and again and again, because it doesn't. You could pump millions, billions into that strategy. It's the wrong way to do things. The lean startup, though, where you go with a messy kind of darwinian, an evolutionary kind of approach, where you go, what's the idea?
What's the essence of this thing? How can we put that into a format that shows that thing beyond just a scribble on a whiteboard or a verbal presentation?
How do you deliver that to the market? How do you build that thing? How do you guide customers through that process so that they've got the thing that they can then take to the market and then go, what do you think? Is this an interesting thing, or is this just a waste of time? All right, you like this, you don't like that, and then you iterate. And that spiral process is what we bring also to the table in that. Yeah, we know how to build tech, but the way you build tech is just as important as what you.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And Jimmy, want to talk a little bit about what you think. The role of AI, no code, those kind of new developments could be in that space. Yeah.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: I've got a subscription to Chat GPT. It's that good. I don't have a subscription to a lot of things, but that I make an exception for. Right? I use Trello to death. I still don't subscribe to it.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I know, exactly.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: You know what I mean?
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: But I make an exception for Chat GPT, because that is a bloody useful tool. Is it going to replace humans? Is it going to wipe us out? Man, I don't want to get into that kind of like AI versus humanity thing. I think we're going to find a balance. There's going to be an initial, immediate disruption to our economic and societal way of doing things. But eventually, as with any technology, there'll be a symbiotic relationship. We'll have as we have with any technology. We'll adapt. Society will adapt. New jobs will be created. We'll get rid of horses, we'll start using cars.
And so there'll be new jobs that prompt engineer and all those kind of things that you've seen. And so AI is just another technology. Yeah. It's going to have a massive impact. Right. I don't know how that's going to pan out. We do need to be careful. There are a lot of negative side effects that can take place here. But I'm happy AI is here, and we just need to be careful about how it's regulated and whatnot, as with anything else. But do I want to put it back in a bag? No, I don't.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't think that's possible.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: It's not even possible. It's out.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: Cool. To be honest with you, I find it really hard to get my head around it, to be brutally honest.
Next question. What would you say are the most exciting developments in your space?
[00:15:54] Speaker B: The most exciting developments? I think what's most exciting is that the students that we work with, they consume and live digital every day. And I find just being around them exhilarating because they are at the cutting edge. They live that world. They're not just in it for 95. That is their world. And they are best placed to build the future, build the tools, build the platforms. And so just working with them is the most exciting thing for me.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: It's fascinating that you're taking the kind of human centric piece being the exciting bit and not going, hey, Steven, I think Chat GPT connecting with.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: Got to come back to the humans, man.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Cool, thanks.
Okay, next question. Do you think you've got product market fit?
[00:16:46] Speaker B: No, and I think that is a process as well, whereby we have learned. I think it's almost like a jigsaw piece. You're trying to find out what the market wants, and it's almost like you're blindfolded, right? But you can hear and you can see. You've got certain metrics. How many people are buying this thing? How many people have rejected my call? Who else is in the market? And you pick up these things and you become smarter, and then you learn to hopefully find product market fit. Because if you don't find product market fit, then you need to pivot and do something else. But I think what we're doing, we have found that.
I think you're never going to jump into the market and hit the bullseye.
You got to be brave enough and go, here's this thing I've got is interesting.
And then iterate on those interesting aspects, and that's finding product market fit.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: I love that metaphor of being sort of blind, but you can sort of hear, sense things, you can feel things. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Who's your ideal customer?
[00:17:52] Speaker B: My ideal customer? Anyone's willing to pay.
Sorry, I'm kind of being tongue in cheek there. The ideal customer for me is someone who has a really early stage idea but has no avenue to realize it. I love being that platform for that person to take their idea and realize it for them and see the excitement when they see their vision being realized. There's nothing like that for me, just from a personal excitement point of view, that's exhilarating. And I see that again and again and again where people go, that's amazing.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: So it's kind of your existing sort of customer base. Would these mostly be, is it organizations, is it individuals, is it people who.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Want to build startups themselves, startup founders who don't have tech capability within their current team, people in universities, researchers who have an expertise in a certain domain but don't have the ability nor the interest to realize that, say, through a software tool.
That's probably predominantly our customer base right now, but with larger corporations, we're seeing talent pipelines being of interest to them. How do they access not just one university but multiple universities? In fact, there was a company who messaged me and said, listen, I don't want to go putting up jobs on every single job board in every uni. I don't want to go the LinkedIn route and get recruiters spamming me. Have you got anyone that can afford this job description? I said, send it over to me. Literally in two days he got someone interviewed them and they're working in the company. And I thought that's a game changer right there to me in terms of there's a recruitment process that's currently broken and we kind of solve that because we are multi university and we're able to create teams. So I've got a project right now that has got students from St. Andrews, Strathclyde and Heady at Watt. So we're creating these multi cross university teams where heady at what have got an amazing digital design program.
St. Andrews and Strathclyde have got great software engineers and we're creating these cross country teams. Who else is going to do that? A single university can't, but we're doing it and giving these students that experience of working on projects with students from other unis and with real customers.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Man, that's amazing. Really, really impressive.
Yeah, I guess.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: And this is with a customer in London, it.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Wow. No, very cool.
What one big thing would help you most?
[00:20:32] Speaker B: I think right now our customer base has come through just word of mouth and me just spamming LinkedIn.
It needs to grow beyond that. So we've got an initial product market fit. But I know there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of there's this resource, these students, they're able to build products, but they're able to do a lot of other things. Right. They're able to tutor, they're able to go in and teach some thing. They're able to go in and do a little bit of consulting or give feedback on the digital marketing campaign. So I think the resource is there has not been tapped at all. And so what was your question again?
[00:21:13] Speaker A: One big thing would help you most.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Getting the word out further, getting more customers to try this. And it's not even expensive. It's like two to five k. We can change a company, we can change our business, we can change your processes. This company in London, for example, they're a waste management company. They deal with boots and Whatnot, and they pick up stuff that will go to the tip and they upcycle it and recycle it and all that kind of stuff. They were literally using WhatsApp to manage a company. They did a multimillion pound company, but one WhatsApp group became two, became three, became four. They've got contractors up and down the country, and then they eventually had 40 WhatsApp groups, and they're running the company of spreadsheets and WhatsApp groups. That's not going to scale. So now we're building them a solution. We've literally used two students over twelve weeks to build them a portal that automates a lot of this. Now it's in a phase two and then it's going to go into a phase three. But we need more customers and we need people to go. Here's an interesting option from what has traditionally been available to us. Let's take a punt on this building.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: From that in five years. You sort of close your eyes. Where do you see yourself? How many people are working for this company? What's your turnover?
I love asking people this question because it's a really hard question, I think. And I think it unearths people's kind of ambitions and their soul somehow, right?
[00:22:39] Speaker B: So that's kind of where I'm coming from. I'm all on or all off kind of person. It's zero or it's 100 for me. So if I'm going to do something, it's all in or it's nothing. And so if I'm doing this thing, I want to try and take it to the moon and there will be a physical limit that I hit saturated the market, or I've done this or done that, but whatever that limit is, I don't know what it is right now. So I'm aiming beyond whatever that limit is. And so I think if this works in Scotland, and it already has, to the point where we're profitable, right, I need to scale it up, I need to get the word out more, I need to automate a lot of the things that we're doing. I need to standardize a lot of the things that we're doing. That whole thing that Paul Graham from Y combinator says, do things that don't scale. I'm doing that. I'm burning a candle at both ends.
And I know software can solve a lot of my own problems, but I don't want to optimize things before I've even got any semblance of product market fit. So what I'm trying to do right now is just increase the momentum, get more projects in, and I think it's going to work in Scotland, then it works in England. So here's some stats. There's 10,000 students in higher education computing subjects in Scotland. It's about 80,000 in England, about five in Wales, and about five in Northern Ireland. You've got about 100,000 students who are just sitting there stacking shelves.
I'm saying, use that resource to digitally transform businesses in those localities. So every university has a local ecosystem, whether it's Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Dundee, Aberdeen, Leeds, Manchester, London. I want to scale it up and down the country and then across the world, because I think it disrupts the way we teach the future workforce. So if we're like, oh, AI is going to take our jobs. Yeah, it is. What are you doing about it? Are you putting these students through these four year programs and saying, only after four years can they contribute to the economy? And even then it takes them six months to twelve months to really learn what the real world is all about? Because university is everything but the real world. Right?
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Yeah. I think a dear friend of mine, who's very, very smart, one of the smartest people I know, she told me that if you think about it, the university students are almost like a kind of sovereign wealth fund in Scotland, because you've got really smart people who get, if you're scottish, free education, the highest level. So I think that's really true, and I think we need to take advantage of that. And I think universities will get there. I think universities will be open to change. Yeah, but how many people are going to work for you in five years?
[00:25:28] Speaker B: In five years, if this goes according to my hopes and dreams, tens of thousands of students will be going through this.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
What are the bottlenecks for you, for your growth? What are the blockers?
[00:25:45] Speaker B: I suppose just creating awareness in the market.
This is a way to do things, this is a way to resource software. And it doesn't have to be, like, custom built. Like you said, there's no cool solutions out there. But someone said to me, I don't know where to start. There's just so much out there. Someone's asking me, how can I learn a program? So jump on YouTube. What programming language should I learn? What about this? What about that? There's so many things I take for granted being in the space as a tech person that people who are not in that space, they just don't know where to start. What, no code Tool should I use? What platform am I going to be locked in if I use bubble or something else? Where are the constraints?
So it's like the bottleneck is just creating awareness in the market that this is another option that exists. The talent is under our noses here in Scotland. Why are we not using them? And some of these students you will not be able to use once they graduate, because they're going to go to Barclays, they're going to go to JP, they're going to go to Google and Apple, and you're not going to be able to work with them. And I'm saying those same students that are doing internships and whatnot, and Apple, you can work with them right now and they will have a game changing effect on your business. And these are the tech leaders of the future. Access them now while you.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: Cool. So, got four more questions that are about startup culture, and they actually might be a nice lead in to the extra conversation we're going to have the end of this.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: So I'll start with those.
I'm just saying that because you might already weave in some of the stuff. Sure, you might.
So what's your favorite thing about startup culture?
[00:27:29] Speaker B: Possibility. If I was to put into one word, startups to me, are pure possibility.
I don't know what to say other than that you decide the constraints, you decide how you're positioned in this thing. You decide the product or the service, you decide the team. It's just pure open possibility. And then eventually you will come into some hard realities. The market responds in a certain way, competitors, product, blah, blah, blah. But it's almost like a newborn child.
That's what a startup is. It's pure possibility.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Yeah, nice answer.
What's your least favorite thing about startup culture?
[00:28:13] Speaker B: This is going to be a hard one, because even the bad things, I think are good things.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: I guess I'm not just talking about like a startup concept of doing something new, specifically the culture.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: A startup is like a newborn. You shape it, you decide the culture. So what I love about startups is that you've got business to it, you've got creativity, you've got technology, you've got culture, this kind of intangible thing, but it exists and it influences how the company operates. I love that.
Creating culture in the psychology of people, how do you intrinsically motivate them? How do you position a team?
How do you execute? How do you strategize everything? So there's nothing bad there?
[00:29:04] Speaker A: What, your least favorite bits? Just more favorite bits? No, that's cool. I understand.
It's a kind of privileged space to be in if you think about it. Right. It's a cool place to be. Okay, now this is my favorite question, but it might be a bit to me or something, so feel free to push back. Are there any earned secrets or any bits of advice you've got for other founders? Anything? Earned secrets. So very quickly earned secrets are kind of. I think it's an Andreessen Horowitz thing. The example is that the Airbnb people, their earned secret was they worked out building Airbnb by asking themselves the question, what was the hotel world or the staying over somewhere world, staying, sleeping outside of your house world? What was that like before there were hotels, all right, and sort of took it from that direction and said, we're going to see the world through that lens, and that is looking at the world that way. He's unlocked a bunch of secrets for us that you wouldn't normally take for granted, that you would normally take for granted. And those are the ones we have. So is there any kind of particular to you, particular to Lucio kind of stuff that you went through that might seem contrarian or OD or ODs with the normal sort of narrative that you think is interesting that could filter into being kind of advice for other founders.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: Something I've learned along the way that's now possible advice for other people and referencing the Airbnb. So that was like an insight they hit upon that helped them then position the service and the product in a certain way outside that traditional hotel way of looking at things?
[00:30:51] Speaker A: I just get that as guidance.
It needn't color your answer. But just as an example, is there any kind of thing that you've come across that you perhaps wouldn't have expected going into it but now have sort of realized and think that's the one thing you would say to other founders who want to do something like this is the one weird trick that doctors hate to success. Yeah. Just to building a startup, just being in the game.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: When I was thinking of doing this, I had a day job and I still do have a day job. This is not my full time thing. But I'm evolving towards making this my full time thing, because for me, this is my day and night, my obsession and my day job. When I said to my supervisor that I initially said to him, I'm quitting. I'm out of here because I'm going to go do this thing.
And the analogy that I used for them was, I'm at this cliff edge and I don't want to remain where I am in this day job, which is a nine to five and Monday Friday. To me, that existence is just killing me inside. I want to do something that consumes me. I have energy inside that I need to channel into something.
And this day job isn't that. Because the return on investment on this day job is nothing there. If I go 200% or 500%, I'm still getting that flatline salary. And it's not just about the salary. It's about recognition, getting to work with people, making an impact in the world. I'm a cog and a big thing, and so I need to leave.
And to explain the kind of state of mind I was in, I was like, I don't have a parachute, but I'm on this cliff edge. I'm going to jump anyway, and I'm going to figure out how to make a parachute or open the one on the way down. You've heard this many times before, right? A startup is where you jump out of a plane and you figure out how to build a parachute on the way down. And I think that mentality, a lot of entrepreneurs can, a lot of people are going to go, that's just nuts. Are you off your head? And those people are not entrepreneurs, but the entrepreneurs are going to relate to that because there's a thing that grows inside you, that pushes you towards entrepreneurship, because you're making a choice of leaving something that's comfortable, that's dependable, that's reliable to something that's full of risk. You don't know whether the market is going to respond to this thing that you're thinking about. It's pure risk. And to me, that spirit is the spirit of people who go out and venture and discover new lands and invent new things. That spirit has been a constant throughout humanity's history. And coming back to actually answering your question, my advice would be, listen to that thing inside you that no one else understands and no one else relates to. But it's a risky thing, because how do you know that you're not nuts, right? How do you know that you've not just completely lost touch with the reality. And that's the leap of faith. It's a leap of faith. You could do all the data and pull all the stats and do all the studies, and you could still be wrong, because at the end of the day, it's based on an intuitive sense that the entrepreneur has about the market, the landscape, the competition.
Everything's in flux. These things are constantly moving.
They're all dynamic. And as an entrepreneur, you're watching this play out, and you go, right, see, as these things align here, I'm putting this thing over there, and it might work. It might not work. And I would say, don't put all your hopes on that one shot. Try it again and again and again and again. And I know different people have different privileges to be able to take many shots. Some people just have one arrow, some people have an infinite supply of them. But if you've got that entrepreneurial spirit, try and take as many shots as you can and just don't give up. I suppose that's it. Just keep going. Keep moving.
[00:35:16] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Yeah, I agree. It's so tough.
There's a bunch of privilege. There's a bunch of time as well.
It's not just how many arrows. How many shots do you.
Yeah, okay, cool.
Omar, the last question I have here is, is there anything else you would like to share with listeners?
[00:35:41] Speaker B: Is there anything else? You ask that, in a way, because, you know, there is something I want to share. There is, and I want to share something, but I want to preface it by saying, well, let's talk about how we came to it. So there was a picture. So this is not an easy conversation, and I'm grateful for having a space to be able to speak about it, but I don't want to be. Oh, my God, thank you so much for allowing me to speak about this. These are things that need to be spoken about, and it's good that you are sensitive and aware enough that if you don't speak about them, then there's a problem. And so the thing was talking about is diversity. And so how this kicked off was, again, to preface it by saying, and I know Stephen absolutely hates when he hears this, but I love what Stephen's doing, and I love what codebase is doing, and I love how it all kicked off from the Logan report. And I love what Jamie Coleman and the just.
I love what's going on here in this space. I love tech. I love Scotland. And so there was a picture that was put out. So I love all of that. Right. And so there was a picture that was put out by the codebase team on LinkedIn that showed the code based team on some retreat or some workday getting together, right? And I looked at this picture and I'm brown, obviously, if you can't tell from my name, but born and bred here in Scotland, right?
So I looked at this picture and I thought, wait a minute, something wrong with this picture? And then I downloaded a picture and I individually counted how many people were in a picture as you do. There are 53 people in that picture and one maybe at a stretch, two were people of color.
And obviously I'm going to look at the world through that lens because I'm a person of color, right?
But when I looked at this picture, my initial reaction was like, nah, come on, codebase. There's Stephen and there's codebase. And I love codebase. And I stand behind codebase and I'm on the front line with codebase to spread tech across Scotland and let Scotland reap the benefits of what I think can come through technology and software and all that kind of stuff.
But this ain't the code base. The code base even itself speaks about and talks about itself, because when I go on their website, it's about diversity and inclusivity and all this and that. What is going on with this picture?
I was questioning, am I actually seeing this for real or am I missing something here? And so I thought, my initial reaction was that I was pissed off and I was going to reply under the post and go in a really sarcastic tone. And I thought, nah, calm down.
Think about this logically and rationally. Is that going to lead to the response you want? Is that the relationship that you want to build with codebase? Because here's an organization you think has massive potential for change in Scotland. I support what they do. And so I don't want to get on a side of them where I'm just throwing shots at them. So I already had been in touch with Stephen and I thought, you know what? I'm going to message Stephen privately and do this in a civilized way. So I messaged you and said, stephen. And I took a long time toward that message because I wanted it to come across as sensitive.
And I took a while to craft it.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: It was well written because I wanted.
[00:39:44] Speaker B: It to come across in a nice way in that. Steven, I love you. I love codebase, but this ain't cool.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you?
Kind of. When I read it, it was horrible to read. It was like stabbing heart does action of stabbing himself in the heart.
But I'm saying it was well written because it's not fair for us to rely on your eloquence to point this out.
[00:40:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I wanted to throw a brick through the window. That was my first reaction.
[00:40:25] Speaker A: Anyway, this is for me to shut up and listen.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: No, it's not. We're here to have a conversation. But you said that there are challenges, which I acknowledge. It's not easy scaling an organization. It's not easy taking a remit to a whole country.
And it's like a startup. You've got 100 things, 100 fires, you're trying to put.
[00:40:49] Speaker A: Yeah, we do, but that's not a defense, and let's not go down that route.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: No, what I'm saying is that I acknowledge there are challenges, but I'm not here to say that that's the excuse and let's do nothing. This podcast is the start and end of this conversation. This is just the beginning. And so what I'm saying is things need to change. I know you guys have got processes and whatnot in place. They're obviously not working. And why they need to change is because something we spoke about before we started recording this was Scotland's playing in a global game. Tech is not limited to just this. We part of the world. We're playing up against global players here. And if we want to compete, we got to take our a team and software and tech is not like we spoke about a vertical industry. It's a horizontal. And what that means, it cuts across every industry. So it doesn't matter whether you're in finance, education, government, whatever it is, you touch tech in some capacity. And so tech is the fabric of our societies now. And if we're going to say to the world here, check out our tartan, and it's only built with a certain subset of society. That was nice, wasn't it? That just came to me there. But if we're going to go to the world and say, here, check out this world class product built with a very small subset of our country, we've got a very mono unicultured outlook, and we're going to put that on the world stage with the states and China and India and the Middle east. Are you having a laugh? Right. So I'm saying I want to win this game. I'm in tech. And if we're going to go to that world level, which I think Scotland has a rightful place there historically, and so if we're going to go there and say we're a world leader digitally, we don't just consume tech and repurpose it. We create tech, we take it out. Deep tech, low tech, whatever it is, it's made here in Scotland. But if you want to do that, then you've got to bring your a game. And your a game means you need your a players and they come from all over Scotland.
So I'm saying not just a color diversity, I'm saying a neurodiversity, every diversity, bring them into this room. Let's create chaos. Let's create products and services.
I know this is a family friendly podcast, so what's my language? But let's do stuff.
[00:43:29] Speaker A: Yeah, no thanks. And I think that energy momentum that you're displaying and talking about is one of the most crucial ingredients to doing good stuff.
Omar, I'm really grateful that you've come on the podcast and you've so happy to be here. No, the thing is, we've known each other for a while, we've always gone well, so it's just hard to kind of go, shit, I've done it now we should have done.
[00:44:02] Speaker B: I think that is what allowed me to reach out to you.
[00:44:05] Speaker A: Thanks, man. Thanks. I think what we really love to get across is that we totally believe that diversity is a strength and a necessary ingredients and a USP and all that stuff. It's just the what is not in question. The why is not in question. The bit we need to do a better job on is the how. So how do we reach out for everyone listening to this? This is just the beginning of this. I hope our heart's in the right place and I hope it's clear to people that that's the. But it's not clear, is it? But we're genuinely trying to make this as diverse a group and as you said, not just on race, on gender and neurotype, all sorts of places as possible. So any feedback, any comments, any prompts, any help, frankly, we can get will be super appreciated.
But yeah.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: You do need help, because if that picture is going to change back to the future where he's got the picture, you need to change that picture. And there are people in that picture that I want to remain in that picture.
I'm going to shout out Mark Sutherland, who I met in verness. Absolutely top class guy. I'm so happy he's part of Codebase. I drove 3 hours just to go see him. I stayed overnight in Inverness just to meet him. And then I met the community, the codebase community in Inverness. Absolutely amazing. And I want to get into more of that highland community. So I don't want to take anyone out of the picture. But what I'm saying is more people need to be included in the picture. And so the analogy is there's this room of tech which has these amazing possibilities. It's the most exciting space to me ever. I don't want to be anywhere other than tech and startups. But I'm like, there's so many other people that would add to the room, but they can't get in the room because they look at the room from the window and they go, no one in there looks at me, and you need to go out and grab those people. It can't be enough to just say, hey, you're welcome. If they see a different reality in the room, they're like, I don't belong there. That's not my space. They're not my people. So it's going to be difficult. But you've got people like me, and there's other people who are already in the space.
Give us a platform. Give us the opportunity. Put people in like us.
We're here, I'm here, I'm here talking to you about this. And so it's great that you realize that this is not the way forward, even just from a competitive financial capitalist point of view. It's the wrong strategy. Forget morals and all that. Kind of the right thing to do, right side of history. Forget all that. Let's just look at the bottom line here. Profit, business, it's the wrong business strategy. You're not going to win the game with this strategy. So switch it up. And obviously the right thing to do is always the right thing to do. So it's nice of that in the equation here as well. And I know you want to do the right thing. I know it's in code based DNA to want to do the right thing. And so there's those two aspects. There's a financial strategy, and then there's the right thing to do. And on both of those fronts, I think there's no one fit size. I can't come here and go, here's the key you're missing. Here's the magic ring. Sure, right. But having this conversation and then realizing that you're going to have to make an extra effort to pull these people in. And once, have you seen that video of that guy on the side of the Hill? Yeah, the dancing guy. It's that you got to be that outlier on the hill and you've pulled one in and you pull two in, next thing you know, you've got a revolution on your hands, you've got a movement, but it's building that momentum and that early founder, co founder, those early people are going to be vital and then it's exponential from there.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: For that video, I love that. I've seen that tons of times. And if people haven't seen it, you go online, YouTube, we'll put it in the notes.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: We'll put it in the notes.
[00:48:30] Speaker B: It's brilliant because it's such a powerful message for founders and startups and people. Anyone trying to do.
[00:48:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:41] Speaker B: I think end on that, that image of that guy dancing loony on the side of the mountain and then by the end of it, the whole mountain is dancing with them.
[00:48:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:52] Speaker B: That's beautiful.
[00:48:53] Speaker A: It is a good place to end it. Thanks, Mark. Thank you. Really, really appreciate it.
[00:48:57] Speaker B: Thank you, Stephen.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: Oh, thanks for coming. Cheers.
