Full transcript: Martin Bjergegaard on London Real
4:36 Our guest today is Mr. Martin Bjergegaard. I’m going to try this out. Bjergegaard, it’s close enough. How would you say it? Yeah, it’s not fair, but it is really bore bagore.
4:48 Yeah, that actually really okay. All right, very good. Martin started his first company when he was 18 years old, and then for the next 5 years after that he started five more. He’s been an entrepreneur most of his life. A few years ago, in 2006, he co-founded something called Rainmaking, which from what I understand is a startup factory, which I guess helps promote startups become bigger companies, and you’ve had some success, I think.
5:14 You had a few exit scenarios, multi-million dollar exit scenarios with some of those companies, and I think now you’ve got a total of 100 employees, you know, $50 million in annual revenue, and you’ve got businesses in London, Copenhagen, and Munich. Is that about right? Yeah, we switch to Berlin, but apart from that it’s quite accurate. Okay, but the good news is this guy only works 45 hours a week. At least that’s what his claim to fame in, and he’s written a very cool book, which is a bit about, I think, your work life balance, which is what we’re going to talk about, and it’s called Winning Without Losing.
5:48 There is a copy there, you can pre-order this on Amazon, and we’re going to talk more about the book later. But I just wanted to say, welcome. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for coming.
5:58 You know, this whole work life balance is something that I know Patrick has struggled with in the past. I have struggled with. I think, well, part of the reason maybe you left the city is cuz you were trying to be a trader and a fighter at the same time, with not much time left over. Is that right? For sleep?
6:14 Yeah, no, for time to sleep. So yeah, work life balance, I think, is something that, whether you’re in a big city or whether you’re wherever you are in the world that you struggle with, and I know that I did, and I would imagine that you did, to a certain extent, as well. Yeah, I had no work life balance until I was 30 years old. All I did was, I’m American, so in America you probably know it’s just work, work, work, the more work the better. Constantly push yourself to work.
6:43 Taking a vacation is considered a sign of weakness in the states, and while we’re probably unproductive, we still insist on working all the hours. Then I went into Finance where it’s like, the more hours you work the better, how come you’re not working later, how come you’re not working weekends, all that stuff. And finally when I came to London, I started training Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and that’s the first time I really had a hobby. So, it’s interesting to hear you talk about this project.
7:08 So can you just tell us a little bit about the book and your work life balance? Yeah, absolutely. The book came about because I always felt that this common perception that success requires sacrifice, there needed to be another way as well. I’m absolutely certain that a lot of successful people have sacrificed a lot, but I was interested to find out if also there were some very successful people who hadn’t sacrificed a lot. So together with my Canadian co-author, Jordan Milner, we started looking for that three years ago, and we found 25 role models from all over the world who were, you know, amazingly successful, running multi-million, even billion dollar companies, and at the same time managing to have a good private life.
7:56 And we felt that they were incredibly inspiring to us and could be to others as well, so we decide to write a book about it. So it’s a very personal quest, also kind of inspired by, I have a daughter myself. I tried to, now you’re talking about Goldman Sachs, and I also tried to work for McKinsey for a while and so I know that, you know, the challenges, and it’s an ongoing challenge. It’s not like you’ll ever get perfect at it and have no trouble at all with your work life balance, but there are definitely some techniques that can help, help you improve tenfold on that dimension.
8:31 What was McKinsey like? You were a management consultant for 15 months at McKinsey, is that right? Yeah, what was that like? It, first of all, felt like 15 years, right? But I think it was a good experience for me at that time.
8:49 Mainly in the sense that it took away some of my arrogance, and some of, you know, I was a bit spoiled before, maybe because I started my first company when I was 18, as you mentioned, David, and I never tried to work for anyone, basically, so I think I needed some, I needed to learn something about how it was to be on the receiving end of a boss-employee relationship, because I was probably a pretty terrible boss when I was in my younger days, so I learned a lot from the experience, but what I also learned was that it was impossible there, in that context, to get the life that I wanted to, because all the rules were laid out. It was like chess, right? You can’t just start playing chess your own way, and I wanted to change the rules, and that wasn’t really possible at McKinsey, because it’s an old firm, it’s successful firm, they know what they’re doing, they’re really good at it, but they’re doing it a certain way, so you just have to do it that way or get the hell out of that way.
9:48 And after 15 months I felt that it was the ladder that was the right thing for me to do. Did you ever consider management consulting? No. And management consulting is much more akin to investment banking, so where, you know, you’d start the day slightly later, but you, if you’re working on a project, then you’d finish significantly later or actually not go home. So the great thing about a market-based job is, yes, you start at 7:00, but everything finishes, you know, around 6 o’clock, and you get your evenings free.
10:15 So yes, you’re not your own boss, but at least you have, you know, a little bit more a little bit more free time. Yeah, management consulting, you’re traveling a lot potentially, and you have billable hours to clients, and have you seen that show House of Lies with Don Cheadle? Yeah, yeah, okay. It’s about management consulting. They really take the piss out of it very much.
10:33 You should watch it, because it’s this show that’s like on HBO or something. It’s a half hour show but they show these management consultants like fly in and try to like squeeze all the money out of their corporate clients and give them a bunch of, like, you know, tell them what they want to hear, and then yeah, it’s a bunch of nonsense, but it’s fun to watch. Yeah, it’s good. You know, you said something with Rainmaking that you base something on the 3 Ws, and it kind of like came out and hit me.
10:59 Could you talk about what those are? Yeah, it’s the worldwide web. Yeah, it’s first of them, I, first of all, is warm-hearted. Okay, because when I left McKinsey and co-founded Rainmaking, and I did it together with a guy from, who came from Accenture and another guy who was in a big law firm in Denmark, and the fourth guy was finance guy done a lot of downsizing, and stuff like that, and there was one thing that we wanted above everything else, and that was actually we wanted warm-hearted company, warm-hearted culture, warm-hearted partnership.
11:32 We wanted to, you know, we were already friends, the four of us who started the company, but we wanted to continue that spirit, because we basically, one of the emotion that we could remember from when we were kids or teenagers, when we went to the, you know, the after school club. This great feeling of going to play with your friends, and we thought that even though we adults now, we want the same feeling. We want, it shouldn’t be work. It should be play, actually, and you can only do that if you like the people you’re playing with, whereas work is some kind of weird phenomenon where we accept to be around people we don’t really like, and for many hours, and we thought that now that we are defining our own company and our own future, you know, reinventing it, then why not think about what would the ideal be, and the ideal would be that we all friends and we have a very friendly culture.
12:22 So that’s warm-hearted. Another one is whole person, because that was definitely something that some of us had had experience. Whole person, whole person, exactly, to be a whole person. And it’s not, it’s not about cutting down on workouts per se, because we love what we do but of course that becomes a natural consequence if you also love other things in your life, like you love jiu-jitsu for instance, or yeah, and I, I like to exercise also, you know, four or five times a week and travel the world and be with my daughter and my wife and my friends, etc., and just have some time also for myself, walk, walk in the forest, things like that.
13:02 And if you want that, then of course you can’t work 100 hours per week, so we defined all the things that we also wanted, in addition to having a, you know, very ambitious, visionary project together. Then there were a lot of things we also wanted to, and that’s the whole person, whole person. The second W. Okay, the second. Yeah, the last one is world focused, and by that we mean that we want to be a part of the solution in the world, not part of the problem.
13:29 I think, you know, in every situation you can basically be on either side of that fence, part of the solution or part of the problem, and we, we, we, we knew, of course, that a lot of, you know, startups and new companies and do things not necessarily by the book, and sometimes it’s, it’s even, you know, almost okay, and, and nonetheless we won’t, we didn’t want to judge anyone, but we want to make sure that we, you know, did things in a way that we could be proud of. So we agreed that no writing off things on the tax report that shouldn’t be written off, or all those kinds of things, being, treating employees with, you know, in a good way, treating competition in a good way, not badmouthing anyone, all those things. And also giving back, I think it’s quite unusual for a young company to start giving back, especially also when you have investors who are kind of looking to you for return, but very early on, we hosted some remarkable charity dinners.
14:29 And of course, I had to answer a lot of questions about why, why do you do that, you’re not even profitable yet, and it was just like, but if we, we believe that if we build it into the DNA now, then it’s, you know, it’s going to stick, and it’s going to be real, whereas if it’s just something about that, we, when we have made tons of money, we start, you know, giving away 10%, and it, it’s not the same thing. We want to do it from the beginning. So we have started a school, and, and sponsoring a school in India, for instance, and those charity dinners, and we travel to see those projects in Bangladesh and G Honduras, Ethiopia, places like that, and it’s been, you know, amazing.
15:03 That’s the whole, the world focused element of it. Okay, now, those are almost the opposite of the values of the companies we used to work for. Well, I was about to say that’s not actually true. Goldman Sachs had 12 founding principles, which don’t sound, you know, obviously the whole person definition isn’t necessarily in there, but the company, and Goldman’s known for having its fantastic culture. The company started, based off these 12 principles, and obviously you, you have three, and they’re probably slightly more general, and they didn’t refer to markets, but they refer to treating people how you want to be treated, etc., etc., and what it was trying to do was build up a culture and in shine a culture, and it was the same thing, so it’s just, it was just interesting to me as you came through and said, yes, I want to build the culture and I want to start these things from an early stage.
15:55 Goldman Sachs did exactly the same thing with its 12 family principles. I think there were 12, and that’s because they wanted to get, obviously, it’s a company of many thousands of people, but they wanted to get everybody on the same page, and to a certain degree they did build up a very strong culture. Yeah, but I mean, I mean, IAP had our charity day, but I must say, as walking around that company on a regular basis, I don’t feel like the CEO would have come on and said, Brian, are you whole as a person?
16:23 Oh absolutely, I’m not, I’m not, I’m just saying that the similarity stems in these are our principles and these are what are going to guide us, and the fact that you wanted to get it into the DNA of the company, that’s where I’m drawing the comparison, but a lot of large companies can’t claim those kind of, oh, absolutely. Okay, especially when you’re not even profitable, it’s one thing to go and do charity days when you’re already making money to, to do that without having, you know, money in the bank is a, is a big step, and, and in our case the trick was just to invite our investors to the dinner, give them a good wine, and, you know, applaud them in front of hundreds of people and say, this is only possible because of our, our, kind investors. Yeah, and then suddenly they started to come on board with the whole idea.
17:06 Yeah, absolutely. Now, this is all really good in theory, but, like, you know, in 2008, a couple years after, you know, Rainmaking started, did you get to a point where you’re like, okay, we need to work those 100 hours a week now, or we need to make a few things happen where your life balance is going to be out of whack for a while? I mean, there must have been times where this plan didn’t work perfectly. I think if you start with me personally, I think that I’ve always been, during Rainmaking, able to you know, to have a good work life balance in terms of working those 40 45 hours and then doing something else the other hours.
17:46 What has sometimes been difficult is to get my mind along with me, if you know what I mean, because I can go home from the office, but if there’s some s*** going down in the company, then it can be quite difficult to just switch mentally, and that’s also part of why it has been useful for me to write the book and to be inspired by role models, because I felt like I constantly needed new inspiration to do that. I could decide, you know, on willpower, self-discipline, to, you know, go home at whatever at 5:00 or whatever it was suitable, but it was more difficult to not worry about something, and that’s been sometimes CH. Do you think you could have done that if you hadn’t already been successful?
18:31 Because once you’re already successful and you, you know, have a certain degree of wealth stored up, it’s, you know, sometimes it could be potentially easy to say, you know, what, I am going to go home now and spend time with my children. But did you find that you were able to keep that love and that passion for the business at the same time? Yeah, yes, absolutely. In our case we started just before the crisis, and we didn’t foresee the crisis, right? So it meant that it was quite easy to raise investment.
19:01 That was nice, that was a good starting point for Rainmaking, but quickly after that we had the crisis coming in during 2008. And I simply decided that, you know, you never, if you first start this deferred life track, then you never know when you’re going to stop again. So it’s right now, today, that I want a great day today whatever that is for me personally, but I need to take responsibility for that, and I cannot start this deferred life crap where I’m thinking about, you know, when the crisis is over or when I’m rich, those things.
19:36 So I just you know, made a principle out of, you know, sticking to it, sticking up for my balance throughout the whole lifespan of Rainmaking, and I, you know, I felt that we needed some really cool role models to aspire to and to build a book around, because I didn’t want to base it on, you know, on me personally. I’m, I’m not clever enough for that. I’m not experienced enough. I don’t have, you know, track record enough for that. But what I felt was interesting was to go out and find some people who were, you know, extremely successful and learn, learn from them, and then put it together for something very tangible that both I could use and other entrepreneurs and, you know, basically all busy people could use to make the work life balance better.
20:23 Who are some of your role models? It’s, for instance, Mr. Mie, an Indian billionaire who created Infosys, the IT outsourcing company, very inspiring person that, you know, just built that company from nothing to, you know, hundreds of thousands of employees, and what is a person? What makes him inspiring as a person? Because we read his bio before we interviewed him, and he sits on the board of HSBC and the Ford Foundation and Stanford, and, you know, a long list of board positions, and and this, quite, I imagine, still challenging company with Infosys, and so we kind of expected someone fast-paced, a bit, you know, too busy for the interview, and he was just so down to earth and so present, and that it made, you know, made me wonder how, how can you actually do that?
21:20 And we asked him about it, and in this, you know, very nice, Eastern way, he just said, like, very simple and every day I just make a today list where I determine what will be a good outcome for today, what would I believe is the task that I should be focusing on today, and when will I be pleased with my progress, and then I go and do that, and then afterwards I focus on my private life. So he’s been able to come home and be very present actually. So, he found a way of, you know, being in the present moment not thinking about all the stuff he also needed to do in the next days, weeks, months, being overwhelmed, like we often do, I think, in a modern context, but just prioritizing, focusing on it, do it as good as you can and then be at peace with it, let go of anxiety.
22:13 Actually, so that, but, yeah, it’s a bit difficult to explain. It was the emotion, right? The feeling that you’re together with someone who’s really present, even though he must be or a lot of people would at least feel extremely busy and even stressed out by having those demands to the calendar. Do you think that’s a really important quality to have in business? Cuz you talk about it in the book too, about just being present.
22:38 You think that’s like one of the most important qualities in business? Yeah, I actually do, because if we look at what, what the criteria today is to be successful, I think it’s a lot about creativity. It’s a lot about being clear-sided. It’s a lot about collaboration with other people, because you can’t really, with the complexity today, carry out projects on your own. You need teams who have the skills.
23:06 So that’s all about collaboration, and also you can’t just deliver what already is on the market 10 times. You need to be creative, come up with innovation, new ways of doing things, if you want to be successful, and I actually think it’s a lot easier to do those things if you are one feeling great and if you’re two, really present, in the moment. It’s incredibly difficult to be present in the moment in today’s society when you have your iPhone or your smartphone that has Facebook and Twitter and your emails and your text messages you know, you just see people on the train, they’re always just scrolling through, looking at their messages, scrolling through seeing who’s put something on their feed, and it’s just very distracting.
23:47 There’s so many distractions, so if you can find somebody that can ignore that and can focus just on the tasks at hand, that can be present in the room, you know when you’re discussing what’s going on, and I think it would give you, you know, your efficiency has to improve. Do you struggle with being present? I never used to, and then I had more time, and now to feel because I have more free time than I’ve had before, I’ve, you know, I spend more time, like previously I would never look at Facebook, you know, because it never really interested me, but now that I have a couple of free three hours a day, then I’ll, then I’ll scroll through it, scroll through it, but then I think one of the skills that I do have is when I turn my task to something, to turn my attention to a task, I can give it my all.
24:34 So when you were trading, you didn’t have a problem with that? Oh, absolutely not because there are certain restrictions to what you can access. With, you know, you can’t have your Facebook up, you know at work, but I, you know, just seeing the number of my friends that, you know, are who I know are at work and post stuff on Facebook, it’s an incredible, like, the first thing I would do if I, you know, was a boss, I would, would be to ban it, in terms of getting people to be able to focus.
25:00 But then maybe that doesn’t fit into all the W’s of your, of your founding principles, but to really get people to be present, you need to take away all the distractions that social media provides. I think, no, I think that’s right. You know, you’re from Denmark, and it’s one of the most advanced countries in Europe when it comes to people working at home, and even men spending time at home with the kids, as for, like, maternity leaves, and a lot of this flex time and things like that.
25:25 Well, why, why are you guys so advanced, and do you think that’ll ever make it to the States, you know, or even here in the UK? I’ve never heard of much of that in the UK. Yeah, I think it’s the way of the future, but, and I think it needs to happen in a certain way, because if you take a lot of employees who are not really motivated, who haven’t, you know, chosen the task themselves or don’t feel really committed to it, and then just say you can flex, you can do whatever you can, you can be on Facebook, you can, you know, then of course it goes to hell, basically.
26:01 So I think where you need to start is that, when you get an idea for a project, when I get an idea for a project, I’m looking for people who can be passionate about this together with me, and then I simply look for passion in people, and passion is more important than skill, because if you’re passionate, you learn the skills. If you just have a normal intelligence or a little bit above, so just looking for who can be passionate on this journey together with me, and then I forget about all ideas about hocy Among Us that I came with the idea, therefore I am you know something special. I, you know, I just put that aside, because you kill people’s passion the moment you start being the boss.
26:42 Okay, so no hierarchy. No, we’re just a bunch of guys who are incredibly enthusiastic about making this into reality. So we, and I, have one role that role might be, especially in beginning, to talk about the vision. What could this become? Another guy has another role that is, maybe, to program the beta version.
27:03 That role is just as important as my role, so it doesn’t really, and just because I came up with it, that’s just because that’s my skill. Someone else is going to end it because I’m, I’m too impatient to end it, so that person is just as important, even from the beginning, to get that person’s spy in to be able to, you know, continue at it after I’ve fallen in love with something else. So I think that I’m just finding some people who would, you know, do this together with me, be just as passionate about it and then we’re just doing it as a bunch of guys, SL girls, and that, and when you do it that way, it doesn’t make sense even to talk about, you know, 9-to-5 or anything like that.
27:40 So people do exactly what, you know, what they want to do, and who am I to tell them something else. And if we’re suddenly, you know, losing speed on, not line, then I think it’s not about me banning Facebook, because that’s, you know, just treating a symptom, and making, making it all worse, because then I’m the boss, and then they lose more motivation, even more than they already have. So in that case, it’s, it’s going back to the vision again and maybe also sometimes acting on, you could have gotten some wrong team members on board, and just acting on that.
28:12 You need to take responsibility for that, as long as it’s your responsibility to take, so to make sure that the team is the right team, and we have a passion, and we have a vision, and then I’m sure the people will go out of their way to make it happen together. Do you sack people? Yeah, that happened a lot. And is it how do you make that decision? My philosophy is that it’s actually, you know, it’s a mutual benefit, both for them and for me, basically.
28:41 If they’re, you know, just sitting there and hanging, not motivated about this, it’s not doing them a favor to let them sit there. Actually, it’s just having the conversation up front you know, did I call that? It didn’t used to be that way. Did I do anything to, to, to make that happen? Because I would like to learn from that, if I took away your motivation by being, you know, a fool in some kind of way?
29:02 It wasn’t intended. I’d like to learn about it, and if that isn’t the case, then maybe you’re distracted by something else, maybe you have evolved during the process and you’re not passionate about this anymore. Something has changed because you still have a normal intelligence or above, so for some reason you’re just not delivering anymore, and we can figure that out. We can see if you can fix it, and if we can’t fix it, then we need to, you know, go separate ways, and I think that’s just a natural thing, and often we see those people, you know, going on and find another challenge and suddenly flourishing again, and we can often, I think, almost all the times, actually, keep friends during the process, because if you just honest with people and saying I see something changed, can you, you know, can we talk about what it is?
29:46 Then, just based on a normal conversation, you end up with the conclusion. So it’s not old-school sacking. You know, “I need to fire you,” doesn’t happen that way. Just be frank with, in my experience, just be frank with people, say what you observe, and then at the end of the discussion, it’s obvious what to do. I think this might work in some great ideal world of wonderful collaboration with these entrepreneurial, you know, gifted spirits, but what he’s talking about, the majority of people, what he’s talking about, ties in perfectly with one of the previous guests that we had on, where he talked about, the world is innovating and changing at such a pace that you can’t rely on the old structures of work that have been used previously, where you had the boss that knew everything, and if you ever had an issue, you would go up to the boss, cuz he’s experienced everything, he’s done everything, he’s made these widgets for so long, he knows how to market these widgets.
30:36 What you’re describing is, you take passionate people that are intelligent and know how to adapt to stuff, and you don’t have a hierarchy where the boss is the overall man in charge, and he’s done everything. It’s just a more collaborative process where everybody has to work together in order to achieve a goal, and you know that, just what you’re seeming to put into place is exactly the theory that he talked about, Eddie Obeng, we had on last week. Yeah, that’s true, but what about the Maj, what about the people out there that aren’t passionate about something, and you need to get them in for their 40 hours a week to do some work that they’re not passionate about, in order to create, but those guys tend to work in, in more menial jobs, jobs that don’t, well, in, I think, if the, if your business is an example of where the future holds then I think definitely, I could point out a lot of tra in the city that are doing the exact same thing absolutely, but those are still enshrined in the old business, which will have to react to the future if you believe what Eddie said, and you know what you’re doing, and you’re implementing, and has been successful, seems to be the future, and obviously it’s going to take a while for everything to move over there, but that seems to be the future, and it’s tying in with the theory of what you know, the educators and sort of cutting-edge people seem to be thinking, and you’re putting it into practice.
31:52 So would, would you see trading in the city ever coming this way in the next 10 20 years, where you could do some flex time and play with the kids and have a brainstorming session? I don’t think you’re going to have. I don’t think you’re going to see that. To a certain extent, maybe you’ll be able to see, you know, there’s a lot of traders that trade from home. Yeah, hedge funds do more that.
32:09 Yeah, hedge funds do more, more of that. But traders generally tend to be incentivized because their performance and their bonuses are intrinsically linked, so that gives you an incentive to go in there and be passionate, and you know, as soon as that’s not the case, you tend to start losing money and sort of fall out of the game, to a certain extent. We had, you know, we had a guest on last week that said people aren’t motivated by that incremental chunk of money that they’re getting.
32:35 Well, I think once you’ve earned it all, it’s like the law of marginal utility, right? As soon as that hits zero, you know, there’s only so many in incremental returns that you can get, but if you’re a young, fresh guy, then yes, you’re incentivized. If you’re 30 years in and you’ve got five houses and three cars, then you’re obviously going to be less incentivized to go in and do that but then what you’re describing is you need that guy, then needs to step out of the way and let somebody else who’s passionate about it step in the way, and I think in jobs where that people want to do, creative-type jobs, entrepreneurial-type jobs, jobs where there are, you know, there are potentially decent rewards, you will get you know, the allocation of resources towards those kinds of jobs.
33:22 So, do I think it’s going to happen overnight? No, but it’s very, in that, what you’re doing seems, you know, seems to demonstrate that potentially that is the mold for the future. Do you think there’s industries where your business model wouldn’t work? Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely. Like, why?
33:39 We, we, we tried some of that ourselves. It’s not like all corners of our companies operating that way, because we also have some routine work. We have a call center in two of our companies, with and there, first of all, people need to be there between 9 and 5, because we are, you know, on the phone. It’s a hotline, a customer service. Yeah, customer service, so, you know, people need to be there from 9 to 5.
34:04 That doesn’t need to be the end of the world. You know, some people actually like the feeling that they have that structure and security, and security, and that, and then, you know, the benefit of that is that they don’t need to worry about in the evening whether they should work or not, whereas, you know, me as a person, I like more to follow my energy, so sometimes I might work out in the middle of the day, and then I might work in the evening, because I know that I can be t times more efficient if I’m in flow and doing it the time. So I like that flexibility, but not everyone does, and that’s also a journey, I think a lot of people still think that for them it’s impossible to find their passion.
34:40 They look towards a lot of people. People think that, yeah, a lot of people think that, and I sincerely believe that it’s possible for everyone, even though if you come from a poor country, a rich country, even though you have a, you know, a low education or high education, it’s only your mindset, because we can find examples of that, right? We can find examples of people without education going out pursuing a passion, being extremely successful with it, and if we test them, intelligence-wise.
35:05 It’s in many cases, you know, they average or a little bit above, so as long as you have a, you know, normal intelligence, the rest is just your mindset. You don’t even need arms and legs for that. There are also examples of people with sincere, severe handicaps who have managed to do that, so already just by having a full functioning body and a normal brain, you are in front of a lot of other people who actually managed to find that passion and live it out.
35:31 So of course we can all do that. That’s a fact. But if you don’t believe it, then of course it’s natural that you can’t. So, it’s one of those things that whatever you believe, it’s true. And, but so, so, so, so that just means that there are still a huge, huge proportion of the work force who who don’t believe that yet, and as long as they don’t believe it, then it’s a fact, and then you need to be a little bit in the old paradigm as well when you’re working with those people, and that’s, and if you’re running a call center, then it’s quite likely that you’re going to fill it with people who think a bit the old school way about having a job, and that’s perfectly okay.
36:12 I think they can be very valuable employees, and yeah, and I think that’s great, but I just would never, I would hate to see them stay in that job but dream about becoming like one of those entrepreneurs in the book, for instance, because I know that they can you know, they can also pursue their passion. I should be the first to, you know, to help them and encourage them if they want to do that, but as long as they like the security of 9-to-5 and the fixed salary and just knowing that, you know, execute on whatever comes your way within your job description, and then everything’s good. Then I think that’s fine too.
36:44 We don’t all, all of us, you know, the business model works a lot better in sort of creative, innovative roles, and obviously once the creative and innovation has cemented into an idea, then that moves on to a different stage which requires a different group of skills, and yeah, execution, implementation, and then I guess just sustaining it, so and then you will move on to think about something else, and I guess that’s where that model is because there is so much change going on in the world at the moment, so much technological advancement, then I guess that’s where all the creative and innovative guys are focusing, and that’s why there’s more of them seem to be. Ur, I find, you know, there’s this whole book called The Innovator’s Dilemma, which, you know, argues that it’s the new company that’s going to come up with the groundbreaking idea, because the old companies will keep their existing revenue base, and they just don’t think that way, and I’m, I remember feeling in my old company that that I wish we had one of these, like, breakout creative weekends where we could throw ideas out there and completely rip things apart, but it was like everyone was still back in the old school.
37:52 They were just, keep the old money coming in and I just felt they had lot of those weekends, but they ended up with people getting drunk and inappropriate behavior. I just didn’t feel like they were trying to get you to be creative, to come up with the next idea, because this is just an old FTSE company. We were like, okay, let’s get these 9% returns, let’s do what we’ve always done and it feels like a company like that can’t, can’t create the next new product.
38:16 Do you think that’s true? Do you think certain companies aren’t able to innovate because of their size? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that’s one of the reasons that I wouldn’t take on, you know, a management position, even if there was something I was passionate about, and take over a lot of team members that I hadn’t selected myself and created the culture, because it’s just extremely difficult to change because you have, I think, you have to respect that a lot of the employees in that company, they have been given another promise, a promise about stability, and a promise about, we do things here in a certain way, and that kind of attracted them.
38:59 Now they’ve done it for years, and then just if some new manager or leader or CEO comes in and says, now let’s do it in a different way, you, you kind of disrupting that promise, and that reason why, why they feel secure, and it’s easy for the manager or the CEO just to say that you should just be more open to change, like I am, but that person is not really open to change because he’s just doing what, you know, he’s been doing for a while and has chosen to do so. So I think that’s a very difficult situation. That’s also why I love startups so much because we start from the ground up.
39:32 We can do whatever we want. You just, you know, create some kind of czy vision, and start finding people who, who like to be on that journey. Of course, you can do a lot of things also in a big company, and there’s, for example, in a Danish company called Lego. Sure, you know, Lego. Lego, oh, in the building blocks, yeah.
39:52 And it was a, you know, it’s a very old, famous company in Denmark, in the world, and they were in deep shed basically. They had their culture had gone a bit wrong, and they made all the wrong decisions, and then they got a new guy, actually, also from McKinsey as the CEO. Okay, when was this? It was like five years ago that he was appointed CEO. It was a big bet because he was too young basically to that position.
40:16 Okay. And he turned it around, completely turned it around, and now they’re, you know, making tons of money and being celebrated and win awards, and it, it’s just you know, it’s, it’s amazing. It’s a new success story all over again. So I think, you know, you shouldn’t give up on it. It’s just something that I for sure don’t have the patience and skills to do, but I see that some people do, so it is definitely possible.
40:40 It’s just a lot more difficult. Okay, well, talk to me about this book. I mean, I love the title Winning Without Losing, but what are, I mean, I know there’s like 66 strategies, and you have a bunch of different things like efficiency boosters, and be aware of time and energy wasters, but can you give us a rough idea of what it’s about? You know, yeah, it’s about, actually, before you do that, you talked about playing The Macho and the Martyr card, and I really love that intro, and I was wondering if you could explain what you meant by the Macho and the Martyr card?
41:11 I think that a lot of people keep themselves stuck in this success-requires-sacrifice paradigm, okay, because they either like the sweet pleasure of playing the martyr card, like pity themselves basically. Okay, explain the martyr card, like what? Yeah, I think we all know it, you know, let’s not pretend, right? At least I know that sometimes, if you were working really late, I remember that from McKinsey. McKinsey, yeah, that when I was sitting there really late in the evening, I felt sorry for myself I had another chocolate bar and, iel, I’m being, you know, tweet P here, or something like that.
41:49 I, of course, I didn’t, you know, I’ve chosen it myself, but I could feel self-pity, and there’s something, you know, in the moment a little bit nice about feeling self, about pitying yourself, that’s why, you know, we do it probably, and all of us probably know some old aunt or friend or family member or something who you know does that a lot always working without the recognition, in general, just pitying themselves. Yeah, but they maybe have the recognition, maybe they don’t but they’re just feeling sorry for themselves because they like the fact that they can say to their friends, oh, you know, you know, you know, I worked 100 hours last week, and I had to take five flights, and blah blah blah blah. Well, in the end, you’re saying they chose it, so yeah, and that that energy affects the organization.
42:32 You think that martyr energy can kind of rub off in a bad way? Yeah, absolutely, and it also destroys efficiency, but most importantly, I think it destroys their own life quality. You know, they can do it for my sake, but I, and I’ve been a part of that, but I definitely think that there’s a lot of life quality to be released the moment you just take full responsibility for your life and say, if I don’t like the situation I’m in right now, I have the freedom to change it.
42:59 And if not, before you’ll definitely realize this on your deathbed, and all people who you know, when they reach that level, tell that they suddenly realize that, maybe not in these words, but essentially, if you, you know, read biographies and research about that, then it’s very common to at that time have the epiphany that you didn’t have to do anything in your life, you didn’t have to do anything, you chose everything. Everything was a choice. You didn’t need to go to that job you hated for 40 years.
43:34 You could just go another direction, that’s like the most common deathbed confession now is that you should have spent more time with family and friends and should have worked less. It’s like top one or two. They did a study, I think. It’s to some, yeah and I think there’s definitely some truth in it, and to some extent it’s also one of those things that now are becoming the new modern thing to say, because I think also something that we should acknowledge is that we might have a purpose in life, something that we really, you know, are enthusiastic about, and to the extent that we have that, then we should also pursue that, and that will only make us, you know, more interesting as human beings, more inspiring as a parent, as a spouse.
44:13 So that’s a new concept. I think you’re very intrigued by the whole thing with purpose, right? How do you get someone who has no stored wealth, has responsibilities in the form of family and children to be able to sacrifice in the short term to gain in the long term, because then obviously the decision is a lot more weighted, because, yes, maybe they work 9-to-5 in a job that they don’t like, but it enables their family to have a better life now. Obviously that changes your well, to me, that CH, that makes the decision to completely sacrifice something to go and, you know, do something that you’re passionate about but doesn’t put food on your family’s table, a lot more difficult, and that’s, of course, the most common excuse for not pursuing your passion, yeah, that you need to provide for your family, and in some ways I’m privileged there, because I come from Denmark.
45:15 I think it’s a great society in many ways, because we are quite sure that we’ll never end on the street unless we have a drinking problem or something like that. A lot of social safety nets. It’s a lot of social safety. I would say in a country like Denmark, you know, go at your passion, but of course people still don’t, and that’s a paradox maybe because in a country like Denmark where you have the least to risk, is actually a place where people are very risk-averse.
45:37 I love to come to London, because people are more, I just met for lunch to entrepreneurs that I’m talking to once in a while, and they’re just wild and crazy and very risk-willing, and we don’t have a lot of that. We have some, but we don’t have a lot of that in Copenhagen, so that’s also great about Silicon Valley and places like that. So it’s a bit of a paradox, but if we’re just talking out of a, you know, Danish context, then a lot of people are holding themselves back, and thinking about, I need to preserve face because now people are used to me driving in an Audi.
46:09 I need to keep driving in that car. I need to keep having this house with four bedrooms, because otherwise it’s embarrassing, but what is really embarrassing is that you know that you’re depending on those things, and if you think it makes you a better parent, you, I think you’re definitely wrong because there’s nothing that is more, you know, true to kids that if you’re passionate about something, it drops off, and they get more hope for the future, because life can be, you know, exciting, whereas it’s deadly boring if you just have some parents who are living in this house and doing those things and not really being passionate about it. That’s definitely true.
46:47 Kids can see right through that. I think so. So sometimes you’re making up excuses for not pursuing your passion, and of course that’s, you know, again, you can, I say, you can do basically anything you want in Denmark. You won’t end on the street anyway. It’s only a little bit your own vanity that can be a problem there, and then you have context like maybe here, maybe even more so in the US, where you’re from, Brian, where you can actually end on the street, and might need to be a bit more cautious.
47:17 But then again, also in the US you can go bust, and you can just rise again the next day, because the system forgets, you know, forgets and forgives, and forgets. No, I don’t think quite to that extent anymore. Well, with bankruptcy and things like that. Yeah, I think you can now be CH, I think you can now be chased, you can. In the US it’s interesting now, because in the US, for a standard employee now to hire they run credit checks and stuff, which I find, I mean, they used to run drug tests, but now they run credit checks on employees, which I think is going a little too far sometimes, but the system itself allows for bankruptcy and for that kind of retraining of people and stuff, but yeah, maybe that’s what you’re talking about.
47:55 I think I’m not 100% sure, but I think now that there’s some kind of clawback if you just declare bankruptcy, and you can’t just your creditors don’t just get nothing if you have earnings. The future might be now, you talked about the martyr effect, what’s the Macho effect? The Macho, finish that circle, yeah. That’s probably also a lot, something that a lot of us recognizes in ourselves. I do for sure, that sometimes it’s nice to play a little bit tough.
48:23 You know, I only got two 2 hours of sleep. I’m tough, you know, I can do it, you know, a whole week actually. Okay, my eyes get a little red, but you know, I can get going, so you, it’s actually bragging in a sense, and it’s of course silly, but to some extent a lot of us probably do it a little here and there, especially entrepreneurs, right? Especially entrepreneurs. Sleep, sleep when you’re dead kind of thing.
48:49 I’m cool, you know, launches for losers, things like that. I heard a lot about that at McKinsey, and it’s, it’s very stupid, of course, and it’s not like a corporate philosophy that you should be a match, a match or a macho. It’s just probably a hardcore company that attracts a lot of Macho types, and so it comes in the back door, that culture. But I think it again kills your efficiency, because the problem is, if, if you only sleep two hours, then almost all of us, I would actually say all of us, we need to repay that sooner or later.
49:23 Yeah, and if you don’t eat lunch, your blood sugar drops, your ability to concentrate yeah, completely silly. It only destroys efficiency, and also it doesn’t do any good to your personality. You’re not going to be a more inspiring person or more present person or a person that people like more by becoming like that but a lot of entrepreneurs are that macho guy. It’s the 100-hour-a-week guy, and he expects the rest of the people in his company to do as he does.
49:50 Think of Wall Street, the film, right? Greed is good, all that stuff. Yeah, there’s definitely, I think that’s enshrined in the American dream. Is that, you know, you don’t stop working until it, you know, until you get what you deserve, and you work harder than that guy’s held up because he’s always working, and you know, I think that’s changing now. I think that mindset is changing, but I think it is definitely still somewhat prevalent.
50:14 Absolutely. And just the phrase that you often hear that people saying, I work 24/7. I think no you don’t. That’s impossible. You know, you said something earlier about being in the flow and how, like, you like to work when you’re in the flow, and that can happen in the morning or at night, or maybe it can happen after you you know, run a marathon or something like that.
50:32 And I’m noticing that much more is that if I try to come down here and force myself to edit something or do something, and I’m not in the flow, I just find that it’s just almost impossible, but if you are in the flow, then eight hours goes and you don’t know where the day’s gone, but you’ve got all this fantastic work, and the perfect thing is, and I haven’t experienced it a huge amount but when you just get in there, you get involved in something and the time just disappears, and you don’t even look at the clock, and you just work, and you just produce, and you, I think that’s when you’re at your most effective. Yeah, and when you’re not in the flow, I think it’s important that you make sure you just get some basic task. I want to hear what you think.
51:05 I try to just get some basic tasks done that don’t require a lot of creativity that I’ve been letting go, and then don’t beat myself up for it, and get out of here, go for a walk, or go train hard, hit a bag, or something, and then just try to switch my brain. what do you do? Absolutely, I, for instance, meditate a lot. 12-minute meditation, 12 minutes. Yeah, my meditation teacher, he has written a book about that actually.
51:30 12 minutes, that’s enough if you do it every day. I don’t do it every day. I have to admit, I do it. I did for a while, but now I do it when I need it, and I learn to sense when I need it, and the paradox is that when I need it the most, I feel like doing it the least. Yeah, same with me, because it’s when I’m, you know, too excited.
51:53 I love to be excited about something for a while, but when I’ve been excited for maybe 4 hours, then some fatigue enters into my mind, and I’m not really willing to admit it, because it’s still exciting, but my brain is not really working in the flow anymore. I’m starting to get distracted to work on, you know, open up emails and not maybe finishing it at the first sign of that. It’s deadly important, not deadly, but it’s wildly important that I go meditate for 12 minutes, because if I do it at the first time of, then I can come back you know, 15 minutes after and be good again, for another flow period of 3 4 hours or something like that, but if I surpass that limit and I push myself for an hour or two more at high speed, then the rest of the day is pretty much destroyed.
52:37 It would never be full efficiency again before the day after, because I went past my limit. I won’t even be able to enjoy the evening as much, because I’ll be kind of distracted a little bit if I pass my limit. So, but I think we’re all different, and in our book we encourage people to, you know, look to take the choice of taking responsibility for their own efficiency and for their own life quality, and then figuring out who they are and optimizing on that, because you know what works for you and what works for me won’t necessarily work for Patrick, and vice versa.
53:11 It, it’s funny, there, you know, they show The Ultimate Fighter. It’s the reality TV show around mixed martial arts. Yesterday there was a new episode. One of the guys, you spoil it for me. No, go ahead, no, this is this one.
53:24 So, of the guys, his mind is always racing all over the place. He becomes unhappy, he becomes aggressive, he becomes not as effective, because his mind is just thinking, I need to train more, I need to do this, I need to do that. His, and so the coach sits down next to him in the middle of practice and goes, one of the things he said is I want your mind to be still. I want it to be still like a pond. You know, you’ve got to stop your mind racing over to all of these different things, because it’s making you ineffective.
53:52 And then we saw, you know, the previous episodes, how because his mind was all over the place, that, you know, he was becoming irritable, and he was becoming, you know, he was creating tension, because, you know, of this impact of not having a still mind. So he needed to go off for 12 minutes and calm his brain down, and then he would have come back as a much more effective person, and also probably a much more pleasant person, because if you’re in there and you’re irritable and your mind’s all over the place, it’s very, it’s much harder for you to interact with people, you know, and function, and obviously in a, in a world like yours, where you need to be collaborative in order to, to be fully efficient, then that’s, you know, that’s also a significant negative.
54:32 Yeah, absolutely, and you can destroy a lot of value in a very short period of time if you’re irritated, for instance. Yeah, because you know it takes, as we all know, it takes long time to build up trust, but you can tear it down in just a second by snapping at someone or giving a direct order, or something like that, sending an email while you’re agitated can, you know, cost you two hours of extra work and some damaged trust. And maybe you just did it because you only slept four hours last night, and you need to sleep seven or eight to feel great.
55:04 So it’s those things where we, you know, destroy our own efficiency, and we only end up having a lower performance and a lower life quality, and that’s what I’m trying to, all the time, look for in my own life, to reduce that waste, and to increase my you know, the, the content I feel at every moment, and that’s also what we are trying to inspire other to do. Now, this is a book about kind of lifestyle. It’s about entrepreneurs. It’s about, you know, new ways that the new business businesses are evolving, but do you find that to be a very difficult space to sell a book in?
55:40 I mean, we alone have had Tim Ferriss in here and Daniel Pink, and talking about all these ideas, is it, is it hard to sell this book? It hasn’t been so far. It’s a best seller in Russia, which was, it came out there recently. It’s, it, you can pre-order it on Amazon in English, but it’s not out in this, in, you know, in the sale, in England yet, but it’s out in Russia, and it’s the best seller there, and what do you think differentiates yourself from something like the 4-Hour Workweek, or something like that?
56:13 The 4-Hour Workweek is, I of course read it when it came out, and I was quite inspired by it, and I also implemented some of the things too in the book, the low information diet, for instance. Yeah, the information diet, me too. Yeah, I don’t know anything now, basically. You know, I just stopped reading newspapers and F the news flow, but instead I chose something to know something about, to have my own Circle of Knowledge, as we call it in the book, to figure out I want to know something about work life balance, let, let me look into that, and let me interview those great role models instead of just reading that someone was killed yesterday in the outskirts of Copenhagen, and I tell people don’t watch the BBC anymore, just watch London Real.
56:56 Yeah, I, I have some of my friends that, that’s all they watch now is London Real. They stop watching the news. They stop watching Sky and they just get this, cuz they get somebody inspirational like yourself every week to tell them something new about what’s going on. Okay, my plug’s over. No, but it makes a lot of sense.
57:11 I think so. So, you asked me what I, what I, you know, how it’s different. So that’s just to say that I read it. I liked it. I was, also, to some extent, a bit disappointed after a while, because some of the things that I tried to implement, for instance, I had an assistant in India, like it says in the book.
57:29 I went all in, got an assistant, and it was a pain in the ass. Okay, so I, and I, I felt really that you know, I did a decent attempt at many of those things in the book, but at the end of the day I felt a little bit disappointed, maybe it, you know, it, it doesn’t all work to the extent that it, you know, claims to. So I felt that there could be a need for a more realistic book. That was one thing. Also, another thing was that the attitude towards work is a bit sad.
57:54 In my, you, you need to reduce it to 4 hours, I was thinking, but I love my work. You know, it’s not work, we just using that word, but I, I love doing it. I would be sad if I could only do it four hours a week. What else should I be doing then? And I know Tim Ferriss’ answer is, you know, to go surfing and Tango dancing and things like that, but I don’t want to, right?
58:14 I, I’m, I’m on my purpose here. I only create a company if I just simply need to see that company being created. So the difference is passion, then, you know, yeah, passion about, about the project that I’m on. So for me it’s not, it’s not about reducing it to 4 hours. It’s more about that even though I love what I, what I’m doing, then still there is a consequence if I only do that, and that is I’ll be a lousy father, a lousy friend.
58:43 I end up being quite depressed, and all those things that I just know because I read about it, and I can feel it very, very, very soon when when I just go a little bit over the board. So, so it’s just, I think, taking responsibility for having both in your life, right? Cuz you can work too little, I think. In your book you talked about the guy that’s working 10 hours a week, probably living off of someone else’s money and just feeling lousy about the whole thing.
59:07 Yeah, I know some of those people. Absolutely, they working too little. Yeah, absolutely. I’m currently one of those people, although I’m living off my own money, but I don’t have enough in my life to really, you know, get my juices flowing every day, so I’m looking to find something to be passionate about again. So it’s very honest, but I can definitely see I can definitely see, you know, when you work too little, esec, you know, especially if you have an inquiring mind, it’s you know, you feel as that, that’s going unused.
59:36 So yeah, in defense to Tim, I think obviously he wrote the 4-Hour Workweek as a model, although he did do it for a while when he was Tango dancing and doing other passionate things, so yeah, it is a rough model of things you can do with your life, but I was actually having dinner with one of our previous guests, the mountain climber guy Derry Lell and Davies, and he said this same thing. He said, I love my work. I wouldn’t want to work 4 hours a week. I want to work you know, I get my teeth into it, you know, so I’ve got a question about your passion.
1:00:02 Do you think you’re passionate about each individual business, or do you think your real passion is taking something from nothing and making it into something, or being collaborative with people, being creative with people, inventing something new, helping people to, you know, solve problems that they previously had are you really passionate about just the business, or is it about everything that, you know, all the common denominators that you’ll see in all the businesses that you have chosen, that, you know, help you feel as though you’re learning, help you feel as though you’re being creative, help you, help you feel as though you’re being sort of innovative, or can you not differentiate that? Yeah, I think it’s, it’s about creating something, right?
1:00:38 That, and it’s about feeling useful. I love feeling useful, that I can, you know, create some value. I think it’s just a very basic human need, and I love the situation where I can see that right now I’m, I’m contributing if I weren’t here, in the team, in the group, then something would be missing. I love that, and actually I step out of the, my projects the moment that I sense that I’m redundant, because I, I don’t need to claim a space, so I only, you know, basically say anything or do anything when I feel that it needs to be said, it needs to be done because there’s something important that we’re missing here, and as long as I have that feeling, then I’m passionate about it, but I can see the moment, and just happened recently, I’m just about now to start up a new project, because this feeling just happened over a period of 6 months in my past venture where we did an online platform for charities.
1:01:37 We’re working with UNICEF and Red Cross and a lot of organizations around raising money in a new way online, and I’ve just been passionate about that, but then recently I just had a feeling that now the team is just so awesome that I would only be saying the same as them. I don’t have anything because I’m, you know, I’m not any better at building the software, so you really like the process, that’s what you’re passionate about? Yes I think so. Yeah, and then I’m looking back at those things that I created and kind of you know, like seeing it, but I don’t need to, definitely don’t need to.
1:02:13 Does it matter what it is? It just some, it has to be something that does something good in a way. I would never, you know, and not that I have anything against those people who do that, but run a, you know, for instance, a parking house where your revenue model is the fines, because I hate getting a fine when I parked my car, and if I knew that every time we made revenue we made someone sad, you know, I just didn’t I wouldn’t run a company, world contribution basically.
1:02:45 Yes, world focused, that’s it. So here’s my question. There’s a 25-year-old out there listening to you, and he’s got a business idea, perhaps he’s, he’s started a business, or he’s an entrepreneur and he’s going to come in and he wants to pitch to you. What do you want to hear, and what don’t you want to hear when you get pitched on an idea? We, yeah, it’s, let me mention we have two different formats, because we’re running an accelerator program that’s called Startup Boot Camp.
1:03:17 Okay, and we invented that three and a half years ago, because so many people started coming to us with ideas and in Rainmaking itself we have a format where we are nine partners in Rainmaking like, we were four guys who started, and we have added five more partners over the last six and a half years. Okay, so we are nine guys now, and we each run a company, as, you could say, like track and St yeah, as like the CEO of each, as the CEO, exactly. So, and the ninth guy, he’s a lawyer.
1:03:52 He works across, make sure that, all that is okay. So that means we have a bandwidth of eight companies. And when someone comes in with a brilliant idea, maybe that person is very talented, maybe we want to do something together, but we didn’t have a structure to allow for that, because then we’d be defocused and doing a million things, and I don’t think you can be successful as an entrepreneur unless you’re quite focused. So this is our model, our way, that I’m only focusing on one project at a time, and so are my co-founders and partners at Rainmaking, but we wanted to find a way to work with this 25-year-old talented guy, so that’s why we came up with a Startup Boot Camp, which is an accelerator program, three months long.
1:04:34 It’s very much like, why not so much like Y Combinator, as TechStars in the US. If you know that, no, what is it called? TechStars. It’s, they started in the US, and the idea is that you take 10 teams, startup teams, with two, three, four, five co-founders in each, so you have basically 30, 40 people. You put them in a room for three months, you add a lot of mentors, you give them some seed investment, and then you just work extremely intense for three months, because you have this deadline, and you have all those mentors, 30 or 40 people.
1:05:12 Yeah, Jesus. Okay, and on 10 different, you know, they from 10 different startups, 10 different companies. Okay, and each of them pitch on stage for 3,400 investors after those three months, with the purpose of getting, invest, a good investor to take them onwards so then they’re alumni in the accelerator, and it’s a model that’s become very popular in the startup community. There are dozens of accelerators now. We were one of the first ones, and through that vehicle we are investing in 70 startups this year.
1:05:44 So that 25-year-old person should really go to Startup Boot Camp, and, you know, and pitch, and what we’re looking for there is, it has to be a scalable idea. It has to be a great team. There needs to be at least a sales guy, market, sales, marketing guy, biz guy, and a programmer. Okay, and ideally also a user interaction design person, maybe. So, team scalability, it’s something within it or mobile because that’s kind of scalable by definition.
1:06:17 Yeah, it’s scalable, and it’s our focus, so they come to you as a team and then they get accepted to, like, your Startup Boot Camp, and you do, you fund them, or you just give them access to all the advisers and give them an audience at the end. We give them 15,000 euros as a micro investment for those three months, and then, you know, free office space, and that we have a lot of sponsors so they can get, you know, all different kinds for free, server hosting and IT tools and all that. Is part of this philanthropic, is part of this venture, just trying to promote all sorts of wonderful ideas.
1:06:50 It’s, it’s a mix of that, and then still there is the business model. Okay, because we, Startup Boot Camp, gets 8% equity in each of the startups. Okay, and of course, it’s a long-term business model, because you need to wait until they grow big and get acquired. But then again, there are some pretty cool examples from the US. Dropbox comes out of Y Combinator, that’s an accelerator.
1:07:15 Airbnb comes out of that. Which one? Oh, bad. Airbnb, exactly. So, so it’s called Y Combinator in the states.
1:07:21 Yeah, okay. So if you get a home run like that, then it can also be a good business, but you must build up so much goodwill over time by fostering all those people, and you must, you must meet all sorts of great talents by having the Startup Boot Camp. Yeah, we, we definitely meet a lot of people, and my partner colleague Alex Fet, who is running that division, because that is his, his baby. He’s focusing on that. He knows, you know, tons of people here, and I guess you can put them together to create powerful combinations.
1:07:51 Have you done that yet? Said one guy’s come with an idea, another guy’s come with the idea, they haven’t quite worked out, but you put one guy with somebody else in order to create something bigger and stronger. Not in a systematic way, but we’re definitely trying to do something like that more and more. And also, what often happens is that four guys come in the door and they all, they got to know each other at Goldman Sachs or business school or something like that, and they have the same profile, they want to start a company together, and then five minutes later four other guys come in, and they got to know each other at Google or at the university, and they’re all programmers, and they should actually go out, have beers together, and mix up, and come back as more balanced teams.
1:08:31 Right? So we try to facilitate that, because it’s really all about the teams. I think, do you ever get surprised when an idea comes your way that isn’t, say, mobile-related or Tech-related that’s still scalable, or are most of the businesses you look at going to be mobile-related or Tech-related? I think in Rainmaking core, those eight companies who we run ourselves, we can be quite flexible. Okay.
1:08:57 It’s what’s really the key there, that the partner who is going to go with it, if that was, for instance, me, I would have to be completely in love with the idea, because otherwise I wouldn’t do it. So something has to ignite in my brain, and I haven’t figured out why it does that, because sometimes I listen to an idea, I think that’s, you know, rationally a really really good idea. I just don’t feel it, and can’t really explain why, you know, but that’s just my, yeah gut reaction, and if I don’t have, I, I tried the other thing, you know, just using self-discipline to work on it and rational, but it does, it, it can work in the job properly, but it can’t work as an entrepreneur.
1:09:40 There are so many obstacles that you need to, and even in a job, I wouldn’t, you know, I would advise against it, because we all deserve to be on our purpose and be passionate about what we do, so I only want to do projects that I definitely, I just need to see them executed. Yeah, I think the passion gets you through the hard times, cuz when you have a hard time where things aren’t going well, if you don’t have the passion for the product, then you’ll, you’ll, you know, you’ll, you’ll kill it basically. But if you do have that passion, it’ll get you through.
1:10:07 You know, absolutely. You’ll just, you, when you’re passionate about something, you’re just a bulldozer, right? And anyone who have ever achieved anything truly significant has been passionate about it. It just doesn’t happen based on the rational, and all those things we like to celebrate. It doesn’t happen as something that’s very structured and very planned.
1:10:30 It happened when something ignites in your head, like for instance that you wanted to do this London Real show and if you just had sat down and done a business model and analysis and kind of McKinsey like, and it probably wouldn’t have happened, never. So it’s driven by passion, and that’s also what makes it successful, because I think people can sense that. You draw people to you when you’re passionate about something. Everyone wants to be a part of that, because it’s so exciting with passion, and you ignite their passion, and you kind of feed off each other’s passion.
1:11:04 When you’re, when you’re down, you get reinforced when you talk to your co-founder, and Magic just happens there and you can never, you can never do that based on rationale. Wow, wise words. What are the three things you’re most excited about in the next 10 years? You know, technology or businesses you’re working on, or can you name three they’re like, this is going to be the next big thing. If, I think that there are some things out there that are pretty amazing.
1:11:32 Okay, and I, for instance, 3D printing. I’m quite fascinated by the idea that maybe in a year’s time this computer will be printed in a 3D printer, just like we would normally make a photocopy of something, then you can just print a tool or a computer or whatever you need. Basically you could print a whole house, and put it together. Also, some of those materials, it hasn’t so much to do with it but some of the materials that are being invented as we speak.
1:12:04 And a new material that’s only one atom thick, meaning nothing, so you can spray it on things, so you could have a, you know, there’s no reason for a table to be this thick in the future. It could just be so you almost couldn’t see it, and that just opens up a lot of interesting options in building construction and design and all those things, so I think that’s the revolution we’ve seen in it, and still there’s a lot to happen. There can also happen in other areas like the more physical world, and also Google are talking about driverless cars, and if we got that I hadn’t thought about that, but actually that would solve all kind of infrastructure problems, because the roads, traffic problems.
1:12:48 Yes, roads are less than 10% filled. Even when there’s a traffic jam, it’s less than one third filled. so there’s lots of space on the road. The problem is that the vehicles are driven by human beings, and therefore we need to have safety, distance, but if cars were talking to each other through computers, then they could drive, you know, just with, yeah, almost connected, and then we could have roads to half the sides and half the, half half the wire that they are today.
1:13:19 Right? What, what do you think of the Google Glass also very, very interesting. You tried one? I haven’t. I, the thing is that, just from the look of it, I think that it would only make me more distracted, talk about not being present.
1:13:37 Maybe, yes, you know, I could have wear one now, right? And I could see a lot of things going on while I was talking to you. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t enjoy that, right? Would that wouldn’t be allowed? No, but you know, it’s probably no, it wouldn’t happen to be allowed here, because we are old school, but when, when, when you see young people today, when they’re together, they are looking at their mobile phones at the same time, and sometimes chatting with each other electronically, commenting on, on your friend’s photo that’s just posted next to you.
1:14:07 You do that, dude? What? Sometimes I hang out with you and you’re on your phone, sometimes, but but not, but I’m not trying to talk to you on it. True, oh yeah, you’re saying they’re communicating with each other, yeah, so we’ll be sitting next to each other, and you posted a photo, and he just said, nice photo, and just going, that’s a nice photo that you’ve got there, Brian, but one thing, though, that’s reassuring about that is that overall the next generation, they’ll be going to be so much cooler than us.
1:14:34 You, but is that cool? No, not talking to each other’s cool? No, not, no, not that. Not playing computer games rather than sports. Let finish, let them finish.
1:14:43 Yes, I completely agree. But when I get that emotion, I just remind myself that our generation can do a lot more than our parents or our, you know, grandparents’ generation, and I’m pretty sure that the same development will continue, even though each generation thinks that, okay, this is the best one ever. Then if you look 10 generations back they’ve actually just overall improved, more humanity, more able to enjoy their lives better with their kids, more equality between the sexes.
1:15:14 Those things have just evolved from generation to generation, more respect between people, and those things, of course, there are you know, exceptions, and there are cultures and countries that are f***ed up on these dimensions, but there also used to be. So in general, for humanity, it’s going better and better. And of course, every generation ends up thinking that it, the improvement ends here, but it’s quite unlikely that it should end here, so I, I comfort myself with that all.
1:15:42 Evident points toward that: my daughter’s generation is going to be happier, more productive, friendlier than our generation, even though they have some weird, she’s only six, so she doesn’t have that happy yet, but even though she’ll probably do some really really amazing, weird things in my view, like talking to her friends on the phone while she’s together with, I are you crazy, and then I would, I’ll probably be likely to think something like, okay, those young people, it’s, it’s f***ed up. I just demonstrated my age there. Quite consider grumpy old man Vicor.
1:16:18 Exactly, that’s awesome. Martin, how do people get a hold of you? And, you know, I think you do a blog and just you know, what are the ways they can find you on Twitter, etc.? This weird name you mentioned, Martin Bjergegaard, also has a version called okay, and that’s everything about me in two minutes, so, and also my email address we definitely going to have to spell that one out on the screen. Yeah, I’ll put it as a link on our YouTube if you want to find it, Martin, beard.
1:16:46 Yeah, pretty good, huh? Also, the book is, is it win, winning without l.org, is that how they? Yeah, exactly. And also Rainmaking.co.uk. Okay, startupbootcamp.org, they, yeah, okay and you’re on Twitter at that same app.
1:17:03 I’m on Twitter. Exactly, at beard. Exactly. Okay, fantastic. Good.
1:17:06 I’m going to talk with your publicist. There’s a chance we might be giving out copies of this book to the best quote tweeted from this episode, so I’ll let you guys know in the intro to this great. Yeah, that would be cool. I like it already. I just started reading the PDF, and yeah, I mean, I get in and with books here, cuz we, we have 100 guests a year here at London Real, and probably 60% of them have written books, and some of them are not very good, so I apologize to whoever that might be, but this one looks really interesting, and it’s nice to read, and you can tell that you guys develop the theories from your own business.
1:17:42 You know, you can tell it’s very personal, and you’re, you’re living the life, you know, you, you’ve got, you’re living in Copenhagen, and you know, you’ve got the daughter and the family, so, yeah, it really rings true, so, thanks yeah, it’s a good start, so far, so thanks so much for coming on. Patrick, always a pleasure having you here. Thank you. You know, this is beginning to be a habit. A good, he, I hope, yeah, no, it’s really good, and yeah, good luck with whatever is happening in your future.
1:18:06 Yeah, and come find us on Twitter at @londonrealtv. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, please subscribe if you want to see the extremely good-looking Martin come to our YouTube channel at londonreal TV, and we’ve got a subreddit now. I’m going to try to see if Martin will do a Reddit, I am where you answer questions from people. We’ve been doing those lately, and had huge success with with some people, like, big, big, like, thousand comments and things like that, so we’ll try to get that going on in Reddit, and we’re on Facebook too at Facebook group London reers.
1:18:37 That’s it. Until then, guys, it’s about the journey. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right.
1:18:43 About you know, girls when they do that, you know, it’s like, and it seems like you’re doing something similar. You’re like looking at something like the ation system, and you’re like picking out things that to you seem ludicrous. You know, you’re talking about Jesus and Muhammad and all these people that, you know, were they educated formally or not? And you’re talking about people like Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg?
