053 Matthew Cleevely - 10to8

Speaker A: Foreign. From salesflare. And this is Founder Coffee. Every few weeks I have coffee with a different founder. We discuss life, passions, learnings in an intimate talk, getting to know the person behind the company for this 53rd. In the third episode, I talked to Matthew Clevely, co founder of 10to8, a scheduling platform that is built for less digital environments such as your dentist or the National Health Service. When Matthew was doing his PhD in entrepreneurship, he and his co founder talked with a dentist friend of theirs who wanted to digitize his business. They dug in, analyzed how his dental practice worked, uh, and found out that their friend had a large no show rate because scheduling was a true pain. That's when 10 to 8 was born. We talk about building water rockets and designing mouse mats, picking things apart to learn how to build things, the stress of running out of money and how to make yearly plans, you'll actually realize. Welcome to Founder Coffee. Hey Matthew, it's great to have you on Founder Coffee.

Speaker B: Hey, it's great to be here.

Speaker A: So you're co founder of uh, 10 to 8. Uh, for those who don't know yet, what do you guys exactly do?

Speaker B: So 10 to 8 is an appointment and scheduling business. So we allow people to simply and kind of quite powerfully, um, book and schedule meetings. And really it's for businesses who have clients, kind of really diverse clients, and they provide services. So anyone, whether you know, part of your service is providing, um, appointments, 10 to 8 goes in, removes any hassle to do with scheduling appointments. Make sure clients turn up in a way that's super friendly and accessible to them. So we kind of, we make bookings happen.

Speaker A: Yeah, I guess other SaaS, founders, uh, who are listening to this now are wondering like, okay, that's, that's cool. I know scheduling software. I know Calendly. I know maybe, maybe you can book me. Calendly, I think is the biggest one. What makes you guys different because you're focused on service industry. But what sort of product differences are there then?

Speaker B: Well, really, I guess I'll go back to like how Ten8 was founded or why we found it. We were founded because we realized that businesses have a problem is that they deal with people in the real world, um, who are kind of fallible. So they forget things, they forget to turn up. They like to organize their own time on their own terms. Um, and we found that, I mean you look at tools like calendar, I mean they're great tools. Um, they're really for people who have kind of quite organized lives, who have quite scheduled, um, who Live in digital diaries already and they're not targeted at kind of imagine a dentist, a dental practice, right, who has 10,000 customers of every type of every age, of every technical background. Um, you can't send them a link to say hey, book with me. It just doesn't work. And when you actually go into all of those kinds of service businesses and there are millions of them around the world, um, you find that the way in which they approach their scheduling and the way in which they approach their bookings is quite complicated. So the business logic actually in there is quite complicated and it becomes very difficult for a simple tool to go in and deliver value. And so 10 to 8 is the tool that can go in and deliver value match. Ah the business logic. At the same time it's making it accessible um, to all of your customers. So some of the really cool customers we've had areas where we've really helped over the last couple of years. Um, you know we started to book a lot of um, appointments in the NHS for example. Um, and you know, some of the really important things there around kind of firstly adhering to all the kind of relevant data security standards around medical um, information but also making something where you're reducing no shows increasing actual capacity for people providing appointments, providing the data insights to do that uh, at scale and then also kind of making all of those bookings completely um, accessible. So the model we have is can your grandmother or your mother um, or grandfather, um access the system in a way that's as accessible as someone who's digitally um, who's very digitally confident. So all of those things together um, are actually quite a complex set uh, of capabilities that allow us to go in and deliver a lot of value in a lot of different areas to these kinds of businesses and organizations.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So if I heard it, well it's not for you and I basically uh, most of the time uh, we are digital people. It's not really targeted that. It's more like uh, like you said for the non UK listeners, uh, the NHS is a national health service. Uh, so uh, grandma booking at the NHS for instance. So it needs to be very easy on the front end, very complex on the back because NHS M likes to make things uh, complex uh, and reminds people, uh, not via email or so but other ways as well to make sure they turn up.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it's kind of that third element that communications that was the original kind of observation about 10 to 8 was that whenever there were problems for businesses that rely on scheduling, um, whenever anything, anything goes wrong. They communicate. So they, you know, they'll pick up the phone, they'll drop an email, they'll, they'll actively try and communicate with their clients, however that client wants to be communicated with. Right. They'll ring their landline, they'll send them a letter. And so it's a scheduling system with really the communications came first and then the scheduling came second, if you like. So yeah, it's the

Speaker A: connection of the scheduling system to the real world is stronger somehow?

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: And is that, why did you exactly start that? Is that some issue you had in some other job or why did you start this company?

Speaker B: Um, we started it because, um. Well, really because, uh, a friend of ours who's a dentist, I use this example of a dental practice all the time. Um, it's a friend of ours who is a dentist, um, had this problem at his practice and he was like, all dentists do go on skiing holidays. Um, um, the ski resort, um, had an app and he was kind of like, well, why can't I have an app for my dental practice? Wouldn't that be great? Um, and so me and a friend kind of said, well, okay, that's interesting, but why do you, what are the real problems that you face? And we went in and we investigated how his business worked and we kind of sat in with his, um, um, receptionist and administrators. Administrators of the practice.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And we kind of, we saw this real problem. We saw, you know, he had a 12% no show rate. I think typically in dentistry, um, in the uk, because it's provided, lots of, it's provided publicly, not privately, um, the no show rates are sky high. Um, and it caused huge problems for administrators. And the real problem was that if everyone turns up on a day, um, so you have say 10% no shows and you have 10 slots in a day. So you think that one slot's going to be free. So you book 11 people. Well, if all 11 people turn up, you're going to be there an hour later. Um, and if you don't do that, you've got an hour on average where you're sitting doing nothing. So, um, it's a real operational problem. Um, and we realized that that was a really interesting problem and we started looking at kind of, well, how many businesses does this really affect? And that's what we're seeing now. The Fun side of 10 to 8 being kind of because we're free in SaaS, we kind of got hundreds of thousands of businesses who have kind of signed up and we Used from. We've got large banks in the US using US and healthcare providers, um, all over the world, um, to piano tuners and um, alpaca farmers in New Zealand, I think is my favorite example. And it's just useful to everyone just

Speaker A: to paint the picture a bit more clearly. So. So you were on ski vacation with this friend of yours.

Speaker B: No, I wasn't. No, I wasn't. He came back from a ski location.

Speaker A: He came back.

Speaker B: He came back. No dentist. Uh, it's kind of a joke in the uk. I discovered this is my. Yeah, it's kind of found out that it's kind of an in. Joke with. With the, um, met with the dental practitioners. Just how often the um, the dentists go on ski holidays because it's the. It seemed to be their most. The bane of their existence that they had to mass rebook dental appointments because there was good powder in the Alps and all the dental practitioners decided to go and scheme.

Speaker A: And that's where 10 to 8 comes in. I see.

Speaker B: Yeah. And then 10 to 8 we, when we looked into it and then the name. Right. Is, is we realized that basically about. For every appointment that was being booked, the practice was wasting 10 minutes of time. And so 10 to 8 was 10 minutes of wasted time to 8 seconds of, you know, simple automation.

Speaker A: Got it. So, so if you were not on ski vacation, were you in a pub or.

Speaker B: I probably was. I was a student at the time

Speaker A: or in the uk. So, uh, you were a student at the time? Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I was doing a PhD, um, actually at Imperial College Business School, um, looking at entrepreneurship policy, um, so how governments can encourage entrepreneurship, which I then obviously dropped out of to start a business.

Speaker A: Yeah. And your friend, uh, is the developer or also did a similar thing.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, friends also, yeah, A, um, couple of engineers, um, yeah. Um, who are at Cambridge and Oxford. Um, so very diverse set of educational backgrounds, um, but doing various PhDs. One of us finished our PhD, um, Richard, who's now our managing director.

Speaker A: Nice. So based on your, uh, top, like the subject of your PhD, you were always interested in, uh, entrepreneurship.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, um, I grew up in Cambridge with an entrepreneurial family. So my, My father was an entrepreneur. Uh, my mum now runs her own business. Um.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it's kind of like conversations at the dinner table where, you know, those kind of classic estimation questions. You know, how many trucks does it take to move the pyramid of Giza? You know, that kind of, that kind of conversation bubbling up every so often at the dinner table. It's kind of, um. Yeah, it's kind of. I've been doing it for ages. The, um. My first job, um, I think was, um, working for a tech company dismantling computers until I was marched out because they discovered that I was too young to work. But I'd be writing Cambridge has got an amazing, um, startup and science sector. And I'd just write to companies on the science park saying, can I have a summer job? And I've been doing that since I was yet technically too young to have a job.

Speaker A: Got it. If this were a movie, you were sort of like, act, act, act one, you were, uh, you come from an entrepreneurial family. Act two, you. You try to do something in entrepreneurship by doing a PhD about it. And then Act 3, you finally decide you want to be an entrepreneur and you storm out and start into it.

Speaker B: I think so. I think that that sounds about right. I'm trying to think of a. Yeah.

Speaker A: With.

Speaker B: With lots of. Lots of. Lots of mess in between that you ignore. In a film.

Speaker A: Yeah, why not? As a. There's a sequel in which you actually built into it, obviously. But, uh.

Speaker B: Uh, Matthew Cleighly, you just got to obviously set up the sequel. The, um. Yeah, I just. It was. It was very funny though, because. Because even when I was. Yeah, even. Because I did. I did undergrad engineering and then I did, um, a diploma and master's in economics, and then I did a PhD. But the diploma and masters in economics, that was. There was always quite a lot of ten there, um, between me wanting to do academic research and, um, entrepreneurship, uh, and starting businesses. Because I ended up. I think when I was doing my diploma and my masters, I ended up working. Let's be careful. I was working far too much, uh, for another startup, um, which actually did a brilliant exit last year, which is really good. Um, but I did their original kind of like raise plans and business plans and things like that. So there's always been this kind of tension and now it's kind of slightly the other way, where I'm kind of thinking about academia every so often and policy. But it's nice. I think it's nice being in the real world and doing things.

Speaker A: What interests you in the academic version of it?

Speaker B: Well, I haven't done much for a while. The last thing I did when Covid first hit, um, I co authored a paper with some colleagues, um, which got published in a few places, which was quite nice, on COVID testing strategies. Um, so again, another friend had made an observation. This is when Covid was new. And, um, no One quite knew what they were doing. Um, and yeah, it was an observation that, um, if you tested regularly because of the pattern of infection of COVID the testing on its own with the original variants at least, um, could entirely stop the spread. So if you had a mass testing regime where everyone tested themselves every few days, um, you could detect from what we knew about the virus early enough, you could detect it enough to stop the spread entirely, um, without disrupting people's lives. Um, yeah, it was an interesting paper. Um, I mean, the practical observation really was that, uh, testing regularly helps you identify who's infected and gets them to stop being infectious to other people. Especially when you have something that is asymptomatic. Uh, it is pretty simple, but it was a nice mathematical proof and it got a bit of traction, um, from the policymakers in the UK at the time.

Speaker A: I feel that, uh, one day you're going to be a professor for entrepreneurship at some business school or something.

Speaker B: He's going to retire in a dressing gown and pair of slippers.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, A pair of slippers is, uh, you've added it, but sure. Cool. Actually, talking about these kind of things, is there any, um, startup or founder or so that you look up to and you're like, this is a person or a company. I would like to be like that.

Speaker B: Uh, there are lots of companies that I admire and lots of founders that I admire. The real problem with saying that I admire anyone in particular is they're all deeply flawed. I guess the one that impresses me the most in terms of what he achieves, and this is really, um. Yeah, I think it is a very boring answer. But if you look at, uh, from a purely engineering perspective, what Elon Musk has done over the last 10, 15 years, it's genuinely, I mean, it's kind of almost. I now follow, you know, follow that stuff mostly because it's just, it's entertaining because, you know, the engineering achievements are now just, just, just absolutely incredible. And this, yeah, really, really cool. And I, you know, it's. I got my kids to watch the, um, um, the flip maneuver tests at the beginning of last year. And uh, so my kids, whenever they want to build something now, they kind of say, how do you build something? It's like, well, we're going to test it first. What are we going to test?

Speaker A: I got a book here also next to me. Uh, it's my next book. I'm going to read Lift off of Eric Berger. It's Elon Musk and the desperate early days that launched SpaceX Uh, it really inspires me as well. Just, just crazy. The sort of things they can uh, achieve by, by rethinking things a bit from the start and thinking how can we do this better and not just uh, like uh, rely on the common way of people solving stuff but always taking one step back and saying okay. But people are always doing it like this.

Speaker B: Have you seen. There's a, there's a, there's a brilliant walk around video. I've circled this internally and externally with a few people. Um, whenever you get musk talking about metrics.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Um, it's like cost per kilo to orbit or the metrics for his engines and things like that. The really brilliant thing about those is that uh. You think. Yeah, actually that is the thing you want to optimize on. Everything else is irrelevant. That is what you want to optimize on. I think that some of those things as well are just kind of deeply impressive and I kind of. Yeah. Anyway, I really like. I. Anything where you can see really tough engineering challenges, people really breaking through and doing them, I like. Yeah. Anyway, rockets is a kind of hobby uh, of mine as well. So not, not real rockets, water rockets, um, water rockets. It's a thing with my kids. But um. Yeah. So those are the things in terms of companies.

Speaker A: There are just.

Speaker B: There are lots of companies that I admire you kind of. I, I mostly kind of end up admiring them through interaction with them. Right.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: So you know, companies, you can kind of get a sense of really good companies when you work, when you use their tools. You, you know and you just go yes, that's impressive. Yes, that's, you know, I can. This is really, you know, this is a great tool. Um, one that always kind of. Yeah. Is wise or transfer wise. Mhm. You said, you know, again, just a really nice, slick, simple tool and it's allowed me to um, scale my business without being dependent on banks, which has been a problem in the past.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah. We're using it as well together with Revolut, uh, to organize some of our uh, international cash flows. Yeah.

Speaker B: It's just kind of. We kind of feel like, especially when it comes to um, banking that there's a lot to be said for just leaving old banks and just starting again.

Speaker A: It's true. The old banks have such a history and it's uh, a lot of technical depth, uh, as we would call it, uh, is stacked up there that is just so hard to get rid of. So restarting from scratch. That's also why uh, for banks, the Best interface for a long while. Used to be their mobile app because they started that way later from scratch and they weren't carrying the whole history of the PC banking system, uh, like the desktop web app. Many, um, banks still have a horrible one there, although they're trying to redo it. The back end is even way worse.

Speaker B: Yeah, you got the, um. Yeah, hopefully you got a few interesting companies out there doing, um, doing interesting things with the back end of banks. Trying to, trying to transition. All the traditional banks as well. I'm trying to remember the name Beans with M. There's another one, Thought Machine. Uh, yeah. Anyway, not my sphere of expertise, but there's a few of them that are, that are trying to do interesting things there.

Speaker A: It's true. How do you look at entrepreneurship? Is it more of a, let's, uh, say something you like to do, um, just gives you energy or it's a lifestyle thing, or do you have really big, big ambitions? And did you guys raise funding? Actually, I don't see anything on Crunchbase,

Speaker B: but, um, yeah, I mean, we have raised money. Um, we've raised, uh, not very much, um, for the scale we thought to, but yeah, we raised kind of what I would say, large friends and family rounds, um, that kind of scale, kind of pre seed. And we're looking at the moment we might raise a bit more to grow faster. But it's, you know, it's, um, we're in a nice position now where we're kind of growing at a decent pace and, um, don't have any need to raise money, which is having, having ground away for quite a long time. Getting the business off the ground is a nice, nice feeling. Um, it doesn't make it any less stressful. It feels a bit like, you know, when you're climbing a mountain, you see all these false peaks and whatever and you think, oh, I'm almost at the top. I'm almost at the top. You know, after, after we achieve this milestone. Life is going to be easier. No, they're just different challenges. M. But you asked kind of what, what motivates me about entrepreneurship or new businesses and where I'm going and those things or where I hope to be going. Um, yeah, I'm really just deeply interested in new things, um, learning, um, new challenges. Um, at the moment, the most interesting challenge in front of me is scaling a business. And that's just fascinating and really interesting. Um, I love new technologies, talking to people. I love talking to entrepreneurs who are building things. I talk to a reasonable number in Cambridge, where I'm based reasonable uh, number people who kind of start their businesses and I help some of them get off the ground. Um, yeah, it's kind of a hobby of mine, um, or kind of part time thing that I do and it's just great finding out how other businesses operate, how other industries operate because nothing works how you expect it to work on the outside. Now if you just look at an industry from the outside and think, oh okay, I think I have an idea of what the shape of this industry is, who the players are. And then you kind of, you scratch under the hood and it's always kind of this complex fractal thing that's a product of history and is complicated and not intuitive at all. I always find that interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah. So you really like to uh. You're the kind of person who uh. For instance like you're like the first job you had, like you like to take computer apart, see how it works and then build a better one.

Speaker B: Yeah. I'm not sure you could rebuild any of the computers I've taken away. Um, but. Yeah, exactly. And I think that was like even my, my summer jobs, I think they were like I designed a mouse mat. That was my second, my first. Yeah. First job taking a product computer, second job designing a mouse mat. I built an accounting database kind of. I was, I was, I was, Yeah. I was employed to do some accounts reconciliation stuff for uh, something that was making um, antennas, um advanced antennas for com. For back all mobile comms. And um. Yeah. I just, I realized that if I made myself redundant a week before my summer internship finished, which was good, so I built some software that could replace me. Um.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And yeah, statistical analysis on medical data was another one. Yeah. All quite diverse but just going in, learning stuff. Yeah.

Speaker A: But it's striking how for you it's uh, it starts very often with uh, picking things apart uh before uh, doing the building. Many entrepreneurs ah, are not so much into picking things apart. They just like to build stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah. I look back on when I started 10 to 18 and I think we spent too long picking things apart and not enough time building. If it definitely, if I was doing it again I'd spend more time building and less time picking things apart because there was a lot of time we spent not only um, because it's like any, when you're thinking about a problem in isolation, like anything. Yeah. You can, you can spend any amount of time doing that kind of thing. Yeah. So how long is a piece of string? You know, how much time do you want to spend doing an activity So I think we spent. I spent, yeah. Because I like doing that. Understanding a bit too much time trying to understand exactly how, uh, you know, how people were organizing appointments, how you could conceptually kind of define the entire appointment space and those kinds of things, which, I mean, it's great. There's still nothing we haven't done now that. Well, very little we do now that we hadn't thought of, uh, when we started. But, you know, equally, it wasn't relevant until, say, now. Um, so spending a day thinking about it a few years ago, it's not that helpful.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think I understand what, uh, gives you energy, but what is taking your energy right now? Like, what are the things that keep you up at night lately?

Speaker B: Uh, concretely, um, things that keep me up at night.

Speaker A: Um, if nothing keeps you up at night, what keeps you up at day? I mean,

Speaker B: I can tell you what makes me, you know, it makes my heart sink. It's a slightly different. Different question because there's, um. I'm not. Yeah, it's kind of. I kind of helped found a scheduling tool company and, um. But it's. I'm not a very organized person, right. So I have lots of things, like I've got my electronic, uh, paper. I've got lots of reminders everywhere, and I've got people helping me be organized, but I'm not particularly organized. And what makes me really, you know, my heart sink is when I forget to do something I've said I'd do. Um, that's. That's really, um. That's really bad. It was, um. I was off. I was. Last year, I was off on paternity leave, which is great. I had a month off. Um. And, um. But when I came back, there was a whole load of. It didn't. It was bad because it kind of came back and I couldn't remember. It was just like someone had flicked a reset switch. It was great. I felt very rested. But there was a whole load of things that were kind of in motion before I went away that kind of got ignored then when I came back because I just forgot about them. Um. But, yeah, so those kinds of things. I think I'm trying to think about other things that actually keep me awake at night.

Speaker A: Is there any.

Speaker B: I used to really worry. I used to really worry about the business running out of money. Um, kind of, you know, um, that really used to be uncomfortable, um, and stressful. And we had. Ages ago, we had a funding round fall through, so we kind of founded the business and we had a funding round Fall through. And we had to lay people off, um, and went from kind of a moderate team to a tiny team, um, when we went into kind of conservation mode. And, um, yeah, that. That gave me a lot of sleepless nights a long time afterwards because it's not a very fun thing to do to come into an office one day and kind of announce that, you know, things are not going well. Um, you haven't managed to raise funds, and that means people are going to lose their jobs.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I. I don't lose sleep over that in particular anymore. But the stress of. The stress of running out of money used to be. Yeah, used to be really quite horrid, I think.

Speaker A: Yeah. But that's not there anymore.

Speaker B: It doesn't keep me awake. No, the threat is always there. But it's. I mean, there's multiple things. I mean, the business is doing better, you know, and we've grown, which is great. But also having. Having been through it, um, you know, once you've been through a few things, you kind of get a bit more used to things. Used to it. Um, but it's tough. Um. I used to. I used to lose sleep worrying about people leaving as well. You know, there's always that feeling if. If people leave your business, what's the. You know, how do you cope with that? Or what does that mean? Um, yeah, and I used to worry about that a lot and that, um, I'm better at now. Uh, but also if you. I think if you like people who you work with and you employ good people, both, it means that when they find. If they need to move on and they find something else, then that you can see now there's a positive thing. Um, and also if you do. If you do ever have to let them go as well, you can be confident that they'll find employment elsewhere because they're good. Um, so. But. Oh, I'm trying to think of anything else.

Speaker A: Are there any big problems you're solving right now?

Speaker B: Um, biggest thing I'm working on is our annual plan. So our annual plan for the year 2022 is still not finalized, and we're 13 days into it, same year. So that just kind of feels like. So we've got a big model. Um, we've got all the departmental budgets that we're just trying to nail down and trying to nail those down quickly. And practically that's the biggest stress at the moment. And just. Just working out how we scale in particular territories and things. So there's a mixture of kind of strategic and tactical stuff. Trying to be smashed together into something that people can actually use.

Speaker A: Uh, make some sort of, um, plan that you can actually follow.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Because I think that's the thing is, like, over the past years and years with the business, there's been plenty of plans and they haven't mattered too much. Um, because if you're burning cash and you're just building products, you can have plans and it doesn't matter too much what you hit and what you don't. But now we're getting to a point where the plans mean a lot more. So our annual plans are becoming more and more important. Bigger company stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. You know what's worked for us there? We, um, we set results we want to achieve, like numbers. We want to achieve this kind of. But then we also translate, um, that into things we're actually going to do and we think we're going to do on a consistent basis. So we say we're going to do this X times per month and that X times per quarter and that. Ah. And that makes it way easier to actually follow a plan than, uh, than just setting numbers.

Speaker B: Okay. Because there's kind of an OKR approach. Right. Here's our objectives and then here's. But if you're doing. But you're then saying, like, we're going to do these things that are specifically targeted. Yeah.

Speaker A: We define, for instance, uh, what is important for us is, uh, uh, new features. So we're going to build one to two per month. And uh, what is important is to keep improving our onboarding. Okay. We, uh, doing onboarding improvement every two months. Uh, we need to get more SEO traffic. Okay. We write an SEO article at least one per month and things like that. Uh, and then every month we know what to do. And uh, in the end these things, if we've done our job well, uh, planning wise, the results will follow the, uh, results.

Speaker B: I like that because that gets around the problem of saying we're going to do this and we're going to deliver this in month five, and then you get to month six and it's like, oh, yeah, we just looked at the plan.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: We were meant to do this this month, last month, and we didn't. Okay, so what? But if you say it's important and then you just say you actually regularize it, that's, uh, that's neat. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Doing that from Monday.

Speaker A: Still. Still big projects to do as well. Yeah. Like we need to redo the website. You cannot say we're going to redo the website every month. You can say uh, we want to improve the website every month. Sure. But if you have to.

Speaker B: But then if you make little steps

Speaker A: and you don't have a big project to redo it then, then, then you, that doesn't really fit in there. Then it's just a plan for the year and you can say we want to have it in that quarter or something. Um, but it doesn't fit into the things you do regularly. But most things actually fit in the regularly uh, schedule.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, I can kind of imagine that. And if it's um, it's a bit like I remember just going fully, fully agile down to one week. One week Sprint with the company that is just um, but forcing the entire, we forced the entire company onto um, onto Sprint Cycles. So um, not just the engineering team. And um, it was quite good fun. Saying it's like if you can't do it, if you can't do it in a week, it's not a thing that you can do, it's just it, that's

Speaker A: something we also do the Sprint cycles. We have two week Sprint cycles. The developers have one week Sprint meetings now. But we in the uh, the growth team, um, sits together every two weeks and then we plan our work. Uh, and it's partly based on that thing we set forward in the beginning of the year. Uh, and it's just other stuff that we add on top. Um, and then we plan the two weeks, we do our work, we have the stand up meetings and all that, you know. And then uh, the two weeks after like next Monday we sit together again and we define our two weeks.

Speaker B: Cool. Yeah, I think it's, yeah. Trying to improve how you do things. It's kind of continuous isn't it?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's just.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And beginning uh, of the year is a good moment to rethink uh, everything. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I just started. Yeah. What are you doing about offices at the moment?

Speaker A: We had a full time office.

Speaker B: He says we're both working at home at the moment.

Speaker A: That was uh, useless for a long while. Sometimes somebody was there, but hardly ever. Policy uh, also keeps changing. Here in Belgium currently we're on the maximum one day a week policy from the government. Um, and that's actually the policy we had already set forward internally one day a week. So what we did was um, we went for the difficult uh, search of finding an office that we could use one day a week without paying for the full week and we found one. Um, so we're paying one fifth of the cost now which is a good thing.

Speaker B: Brilliant. That's cool. Yeah. And I'm always interested because it's kind of um.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: It almost feels old fashioned to me now thinking about the idea of going and having an actual office in which you say everyone has to work here five days a week. Um, but it's um. Yeah, I'm kind of. That's another thing. I'm concerned if you're thinking about things. I'm worried about that. Worried about making the right choice because you want somewhere that everyone's going to go so you can have a company which gets together but at the same time. Yeah. You don't want the cost of five days a week somewhere. It just seems ludicrous.

Speaker A: That's the difficult part. Yeah. And actually what we're dealing with now is that we try to get people actually one day in the office because once you get used to uh, is some sort of step to go that one day. Uh, but it is beneficial because it keeps that group vibe alive. You see people in real life, they're not just on a screen. We see each other every day on the screen. Like we have stand up meetings and all that. But still um, it's good to sometimes be together. Um, it just makes a difference, uh, both as a group and as individuals. Um, to have that feeling.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's so much the inertia of like, okay, we're going to go into the office now actually get out of the house. The worst thing, I end up being about 20 minutes late to any physician, like in person meeting at the moment because I'm, I don't, I can't, I don't instinctively know how much time it takes to get my laptop into my bag. So I go and unlock my bike and to cycle somewhere else in Cambridge to go and see someone. It's terrible. It's just um. Yeah, it's a kind of. Yeah. Weird, weird situation. Just I've completely forgotten how to get physically somewhere.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Much easier when you just say okay, my next meeting is with so and so. Open, open a zoom window or whatever.

Speaker A: What have you been doing actually to keep your uh, working at home a little light and still have some joy in the days and not have this long drag. Have you changed anything?

Speaker B: Um, I've invested in a cool home setup. So I've got nice speakers so I can listen to good music. Um, I've got a standing desk so I'm kind of on a wobble board so I can kind of wobble around like this some. So I keep myself moving. For me that's you know, just. Just a bit of movement rather than sitting in a chair all day. Um, that's been really important. I go to the gym twice a week. Occasionally I play the cello. Um, so play the cello to a decent standard. So that's, That's a bit of fun. Um, I'm trying to think what else I do. Do some Lego and I build stuff for the kids. But it is, it is kind of. You just. Yeah. I occasionally realize, well, I haven't left the house today, and then I just go for a walk. Yeah, I think that's the real thing. If you haven't. If you, if you don't leave the house for two days in a row, that's bad. Um, so it's just going for a walk and just getting out.

Speaker A: But you go to the gym also. Or that doesn't count.

Speaker B: So it's a home gym. So it doesn't count.

Speaker A: Oh, it's a home gym. Yeah, okay.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, exactly. So that doesn't count.

Speaker A: Got it.

Speaker B: Yeah. I go and volunteer to go to the shop. So we just go. Yeah, Go for a walk in, in the countryside or something. Just anything to get out once a day.

Speaker A: Sorry.

Speaker B: Or once at least every two days.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And otherwise you go mad.

Speaker A: It's a, It's a good place there, around Cambridge to have a walk.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's really nice. And the, uh, weather's beautiful today, unlike Belgium.

Speaker A: The, um.

Speaker B: Yeah, but it, yeah, getting exercise, getting out. But the other one is to realize when I'm not working, I don't know if anyone else has this, but I end up, uh, sometimes I end up working from home, just sitting there, being. Or standing there, being absolutely unproductive, not getting anything done and just acknowledging that and taking a break, saying, right, I'm not going to work now. I'm going to go and take half an hour and watch some crap on Netflix or something. I just need to take some time out, just sit on slack, taking a break and go and say, right, I'm not being productive at the moment for whatever reason. I'm going to try and stop. I'm not going to pretend to work. That's the other one. I think in the office you have people around to stimulate you, uh, so

Speaker A: you can have a little, uh, like, social interaction and then restart work. I was actually reading a book. Peak Performance is the last book I read. Uh, it's written by Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus. Uh, you cannot read it, and the listeners definitely cannot read it. But it's also, uh, one of the Things they suggest there is to take breaks at least every two hours. And then they have a few things that they suggest as breaks. Uh, walking is definitely one. Um, taking a shower, doing the dishes, listening to music, uh, sitting in nature, meditating and uh, recovering socially. Some of the suggestions they give as breaks, uh, so you can reset your mind and then afterwards get in that flow.

Speaker B: Uh, again, yeah, that's uh. Hang on. The slight pause at this end is me just adding it to my Audible account. Um, the other thing is I do, if anyone recommends a book to me, usually I just go and get it, um, on Audible and I will, um, I usually um. That means I'll usually read it within a month.

Speaker A: Uh, I do a similar thing. I open my Goodreads account and I add it to my To Read list. And then next time I uh, like I order books by the five. So I go through that To Read list and I'm like, which five books do I feel like reading now? And then I just order them on Amazon. I'm still old fashioned. I still read books like books, um, but um, in batches. Always what I feel like for me

Speaker B: audiobooks are a complete revelation because um, so I'm dyslexic and I, I think before like I'll read more books, I would have read more books in 2021 than I had read in my life before I got an audio app.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, it's just I never, I'd quite like reading but never really finish a book. And the only things I'd read from start to finish would be academic papers, which is pre. Pretty, pretty dull. Um, yeah. So things like Audible and other stuff coming along. It's been um, kind of a revelation for me because it suddenly means that I don't have to read in order to read books or to digest books. Um, yeah. So I'll go and do some exercise and listen to an audiobook.

Speaker A: It's brilliant talking about that. What is the latest good book you've listened to and why did you actually choose to listen to it?

Speaker B: Um, I always listen. Well, I always listen to books when they've been recommended to me basically. So books have been. I only listen to books that someone's recommended to me and I kind of. There's a bit of advice that I don't remember where it came from about books is that uh, it's kind of if you're reading books because you want them to help, like you know, to help with business or to understand creating businesses or running businesses, the time, the time to read the Title and to put it in a library somewhere, you know, just write it down that there's a book here that can help you do it is whenever you discover it, the time to read it or listen to it is when it's actually a relevant problem because otherwise it's just entertainment because you won't retain the information properly. And so I quite like that, uh, advice. But now I'm kind of. So I'm reading the High Growth Handbook at the moment. Um, which, which is great but kind of painful because it's, it's got lots of kind of challenges. Um, it talks about lots of challenges which are kind of going on at the moment. So it feels like, feels like a lot of work listening to it. It doesn't feel like it's. It doesn't feel like I'm taking a step, taking a step away from work. It feels like I'm working harder when I'm listening because it's like, here's more stuff for me to do, but it's

Speaker A: a good time to listen to it. Like you said. I, I hate, I hate like, like you said. Also, uh, reading such a book if it's not. I'm not directly going to do something with it. These kind of books, at least there's other types of books where it's uh, you can read at any moment. It's just inspiring and it gives you a different idea on things and it might make, uh, you start doing something. That's another type of books. But then these kind of marketing growth books are usually of the, of the type you said.

Speaker B: Yeah. The one recent books I enjoyed. Have you. Do you know Exponential.

Speaker A: No.

Speaker B: Right. It's Azim Azar. Um, which I. Okay. Thoroughly recommend it. So Exponential by Azim Azar. It's a brilliant. He runs Exponential View, which is a newsletter, a tech newsletter. Um, which firstly I recommend subscribing to. Um, but also his book. It's a really nice overview of the tech space and what's happening and what has happened and why what's going on at the moment is so seismic.

Speaker A: Um, Is it Salim Ismail, you said

Speaker B: Azim Azhar.

Speaker A: Azim Azhar. Uh, okay. Uh. Oh, I found it. The Exponential Age.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: Somebody to read list.

Speaker B: Yeah. Again, that's kind of right up my street because anything I use that kind of completely on my own. I'll listen to two things, kind of fiction purely for entertainment and then, you know, stuff about general technology that's not too specific to running a business because it doesn't feel like I'm relaxing I read usually to relax. Um, and then occasionally I'll read stuff that's tactically useful or strategically useful to read and yeah, so that definitely fits into the kind of, you know, just tech understanding and things. I really, really enjoyed that. And um, yeah, other books, books like that, you know there's the kind of names are escaping me temporarily. No worries flick through my library. Um, but um, yeah that was, that was the most recent one I think that came out last year, towards the end of last year.

Speaker A: Yeah. Get good scores and goodreads.

Speaker B: He also recommends some good books. So he recommends some. Really the other ones I read are kind of economic history books and things like that.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Um, which I just like. My academic interest originally was in um, growth theory and that's why I was kind of interested in the policy around entrepreneurship because it's kind of where does kind of wealth creation come from? Um, and where. How do economies grow? Why do they grow? So just finished one on the history of inequality or why inequality is a kind of weird concept in the context of human history. Um, but also there's a good book on that which is beIN Hocker is quite old now the Origin of Wealth, which is kind of a really good kind of general view of um, how wealth is created. If anyone's interested in that. That's the Origin or the Origins of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker. It's a very good book. Yeah.

Speaker A: Slowly closing off uh, further on learning since there. If you were to start over with 10 to eight or with another company, um what what would you have done or what would you do differently?

Speaker B: Um, there's a few things about

Speaker A: I

Speaker B: think as very described paralyzed by fear. Um at the beginning always worried about running out of money. Um and always worried about not getting enough done fast enough. Um and not worrying about I don't know, it's difficult to put my foot on, put um, my finger on um, exactly what. But I think just be generally less worried about um, running out of money or resources or anything like that. Planning to live forever. Basically your business just, just behaving like your business is going to live forever until it doesn't kind um of approach and um. Yeah I think at the very beginning we were quite waterfall. We weren't agile, you know. So there's, there's plenty of operational stuff that just wasn't completely state of the art. So I would have, I would have looked, I would be you know much more focused on how we did things. Um, you know, and making sure that that was absolutely state of the art. Because it wasn't, um, when we started. Um. Yeah. And I think I would have, um. Yeah, I don't know. I think that changes over time as well. Like, what I'd change now is different to if you'd asked me that question a couple of years ago. And it will probably change in a couple of years. What I'd change any different. I think it always comes down to absolute focus and realizing that time. I think time isn't really a relevant pressure in businesses. It's how fast are you burning resources and are you getting the best people. And I think I would have spent more time looking for really great people who I think I could have bought in earlier to kind of join in on the journey. Um, and I think that, you know, we're at the stage where we're now scaling up the business and kind of feel like we can afford to go out and search for really great people to join our team. And I feel like actually, well, maybe I could have done that at the beginning and thought about. Not that anyone, um, joining 10 to 8. I think they're all brilliant. But it's the question of kind of like, who are you trying to bring into the business and why and what are your ambitions? I think I would have done that differently, um, at the very start. Is that a coherent answer? I'm not sure. It's a very honest kind of, uh.

Speaker A: It's a few answers. Yeah. Final question and, uh, maybe one answer, maybe multiple. Uh, we all get.

Speaker B: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how much. You can hear the kids coming home from school now.

Speaker A: I can hear them a little, but it's fine.

Speaker B: Yeah. Usually at least one of them is quite unhappy.

Speaker A: Finally, uh, what is the best piece of business advice you ever got? The first thing that comes to mind doesn't really need to be the absolute best.

Speaker B: Um, the one that immediately springs to mind is that it's much, much easier to hire someone than it is to fire someone.

Speaker A: That's true.

Speaker B: Um, and I think that that's a really, really important thing.

Speaker A: What do you do with that?

Speaker B: Um, be really, really, really careful about who you bring into the business. Um, you should make it hard to hire people. Um, not, you know, you always want to bring people into the business. But, um, we want to kind of, you know, we have rules now that if there's any doubt about someone, we just don't hire them. We just. We're just cautious because it's, um. Yeah, because the. I like working in environments. Collaborative and open and helpful. Um, and the environment that we have and that we work in is really important to us. And having, you know, in that kind of environment, we want to help people. If people struggle at their role, our, uh, response is to help them at their role, not to get rid of them. And so we have a very. So if we help people a lot, then we need to be very cautious about who we bring on. That's how it works at the moment.

Speaker A: Great advice. Thank you again, uh, Matthew, for being on Founder Coffee. It was really great to have you.

Speaker B: Great. Great to be here. Cool. And thanks for the book recommendations. I shall read them this week.

Speaker A: That's it for this episode of Founder Coffee. We hope you liked it. Let the world know if you did. Thanks for listening, guys.

Speaker B: Sam M.