Stef the Hacker - Sketching with Code

Full transcript: Stef the Hacker on London Real

0:20 This is London Real, the video podcast dedicated to the people of the London technology startups scene. I am Brian Rose. I also host London Real, which is a similar trialogue format with guests like UFC Dan Hardy, we’ve had the 4-Hour Work Week Tim Ferriss, we had futurist Jason Silva, and even drug smuggler Howard Marks have all been in that chair, Stef, so be careful.

0:46 My co-host today is Mr Bryce Keane, who is the founder and director of Albion Drive. He is also a member and co-founder of The Three Beards, and if you don’t know who they are, you haven’t been paying attention for the last 11 episodes. Beards are back, baby. I’m back. They’re back with a vengeance.

1:02 The Beards run, among other things, the weekly Silicon Drinkabout, which is an event in shortage every Friday, which I’m pretty much always at. It’s a lot of fun. You don’t have to reserve it, it doesn’t cost money. You just come and hang out with people that are involved in the tech scene, people that want to get involved, people that want to look at people who are involved. Everyone’s welcome, right?

1:21 Indeed, indeed. There’s a lot of looking. Yeah, there’s a lot of looking. It was fun. That doesn’t S that mean, I don’t know.

1:27 Not there, not a lot of looking. Everybody is very friendly and looks at their Fe. Yeah, anyways, come check us out. We’ll be there this Friday every Friday. You also run the events Digital Sizzle, which is quarterly, Don’t Pitch Me Bro, which is monthly, and you have a new one coming up called Che the fat.

1:40 Che the fat on Monday evening, fireside chat with a high-profile VC or entrepreneur, kicking off Monday the 16th, just around the corner in Masa, and we’ll be moving on from there intimate chat. It sounds a bit like our format. Well, it is, it is, but we’re but we’re having Ben Southworth return to the stage, original co-founder of the Beards, to interview and now number X, number 10 Downing Street, he will be kicking off with Rohan Silva, David the Prime Minister David Cameron’s special adviser on Tech, will be his first guest, so he’s basically grilling his old boss, which I think is going to be a glorious way to kick it off.

2:12 Yeah, payback as a b**** as they say. Exactly. Awesome, we’re looking forward to that. Definitely. I just love everything you guys do, and I’m glad you’re a part of this, and I’m glad you’re back.

2:20 It’s good to be back. Thanks, it’s been like a month or so. So anyways, there you go. Our guest today is Mr Stef, wait for it, Lonowski Levandowski ski, a AKA Stef the Hacker, which works for me. I like that.

2:34 Who is a designer, a software developer a startup person. I believe your work focuses on playful approaches to technology and its cultural, social and political applications, is that about right? Yeah, hacking for sure. Okay, hacking for sure. You are general badass.

2:48 Yeah, that’s cool. You are the the co-founder and hacker at Makeshift, where you are building a series of web, mobile tech products aimed at giving a leg up to the little guy, and your motto is create something every day. I like that. That’s good. We talk about that.

3:02 Yeah, we should. Welcome to London Real. Thank you for having me, dud. Thanks so much for being here. You know, it’s weird because we’ve had all of these people.

3:09 This is episode 12. You know, we’ve had VC guys, we’ve had CEOs of this company and that company, and Bryce has been like, you got to get Stef the Hacker on, you got to get Stef the Hacker and I actually thought that was your name for a while. Change My Name by Depot at some point. Yeah, and you know, before we started the show we were talking earlier about that word hacker, and it’s you know, I think it comes even from that Angelina Jolie movie, like 20 years ago.

3:29 Was it called hacker? That’s amazing if you watch it now, by the way. So funny. If you go back and watch it, screens they actually doing on the screen, the green screen, and they’re like, is Johnny Lee Miller in that? Yeah, before they were married or something, but I mean, like I, you know, and now there are hackathons, which I know The Three Beards, you know, sponsor, and these are regular events, but I mean to a guy like me who’s new to this whole scene, I don’t know what this term hacker means, and I think the general public is, it feels a little bit weird about it, as in they think what do they think of?

3:57 I don’t know. WikiLeaks, do they think of Anonymous? I’m not not quite sure, and so I wanted you to talk about what this word means to you and what’s it like when you tell your parents friends that if that’s what you are. My son is Stef the Hacker. You know what, he’s on the YouTube now that happens.

4:13 You go out with your parents and over dinner you explain to, you know, their friends that, yeah I’m a hacker, and then you look at their face, and then if you just, by looking at their face, you know whether they’ve heard the term before, and I think a lot of people have that reaction. A hacker, it sounds like a really really bad thing, right? Yeah, kind of. There’s been a lot in the press recently about hacking in the newspaper industry and all this stuff about the NSA hacking, hacking in those areas is like, well, that’s def definitely a bad thing, right?

4:45 If you’ve got personal data and someone breaks it and steals it, that’s bad. But the thing is that the origins of the word actually go back to a much more positive era. Back when people were first experimenting with computers, they used to just call themselves hackers. They were playing around, they’re making, and it was a word that kind of meant creatively inventing things with technology. Okay.

5:12 Do we know where that term, where the name came from? It’s probably like a tech name. Who knows where it came? I have looked into this. It’s a bit mysterious.

5:20 It’s quite an old old word. It used to mean something to do with riding, so you’d hack across the countryside, and I think it’s back to getting through something quickly. That’s what it really means. So hack, as in you’ve got a big knife and you’re going through the jungle or you’re going through something in a fast pace. So if you’re riding across the countryside, you’re hacking across it, perhaps so I think that the speed has always been part of the meaning of the words, but if you look at what people think about nowadays in terms of a hacker, like the kind of general populace, assume that the word means someone who breaks into computer systems all the time.

5:57 But actually the way I describe myself, and way other people have described me. This is a word that’s been given to me rather than me choosing it for myself, is kind of creative technologist, using technology in a creative, rapid way. And actually, if you go back, after the term was first coined. In that period there was a battle between the word cracker and hacker and cracker CER. A cracker is someone who does all the illegal stuff, and a hacker is just someone who enjoys playing with tech.

6:27 You said cracker, and in America a cracker is like an old white man, racist dude, so in the South you get called a cracker. It’s like, it’s a fight. Yeah, it’s like you cracker, you know, like a Kentucky Fried cracker. I get the like cracking a safe is more where it came from, but cracking is an old word, right? That was kind of like an ’80s or ’90s word.

6:44 Yeah. I think the obviously words change every time, right? You can, you can never have a static term. It always depends on the kind of the culture around it. The interesting thing that’s been happening happen recently that I’ve noticed is that there was kind of a resurgence of interest in doing things quickly with technology, and that’s been something that I’ve become part of for a long time, the way that software was made and designed was based on this kind of waterfall model of running a project.

7:19 So you’d, at the beginning, you’d have a client. Okay, and they’d have a need, and then you’d get some consultants to work out what you should do about the need, and they’d write big document, and then that would be presented to a board, and then someone will go, okay, right, great. Now we’ll get someone to produce a full plan of how this project is going to be made with all these milestones and so on, and then someone will deliver it over time, and then, like, four years later, out will pop some software.

7:46 Yeah, sounds like the auto industry that is that, the IBM Model A Ford Motor Company? Back then it was a valid way of doing things, because you needed all those people around to kind of design that stuff, but it’s not disruptive technology, is it? Well, good, that was a good, a good way of building software up until, you know, the 2000s or so, maybe a bit earlier. The thing is that there was a kind of shift in the way that software was designed and way that technology was produced, in that actually it became cheaper and cheaper to produce things, and the length of time it would take to make stuff meant that if you’d spent 6 years building a piece of software and someone else had got the same idea in the meantime, they could do it in a year.

8:28 So by the time you’ve released your software or several years out of date and it will fail, so the response to that was to constantly be producing Shar results along the way and that was the beginning of the agile way of doing stuff for the web and doing stuff for software and that basic is essence is rather than waiting to release something all the way down the line once you’ve got it all planned out and it’s all working and everything, you release something iteratively, so you design something small and then you add the next bit and add the next bit and add the next bit, and that meant you could respond of changes in the market, and that meant that you could reduce risk in your project. Okay, but that’s not that’s not hacking. Well, I think what happened is, when that happened, that moved to this kind of agile way of doing things there was a sudden regaining of interest, that actually being able to respond quickly to your environment and using technology that was suddenly quite freely available, tools that didn’t actually cost anything, any money, to use were available to anybody to have the cost of computing went way down, access to broadband went up, and all these things converged at a point where people were just going, well, actually there is value now in working rapidly to test out ideas.

9:40 Right now there’s Cloud space, there’s app stores available at anyone, so people can monetize. Sure, and seen, you’ve seen how, you know, you get billions of downloads of apps in a couple of years just after release, so being able to do things quickly means that you can get things to market more rapidly, and you can be more successful. So I think that that was definitely a big part in it. And personally, I was running a web agency for a good few years and I saw this kind of stuff going on around me and I was in that kind of time for higher world where you basically find a client to pay for your time, and then you have some other people around you and you build their time to them and hope that that pays everyone’s mortgage and maybe a bit of profit, but what I saw happening.

10:23 Familiar? Yeah, sorry, dude. I just critiqued your entire model. Is I Crush it’s now called Al be and drive. I’ve got to, I’ve got to confront this sooner or later.

10:33 Carry on, car on. So you’re saying adding no value to the world? No, I’m just kidding. Price you a. There is a lot of value in doing that but the law of going and doing a kind of tech startup is what really kicked me out of that mode.

10:47 Yeah, and things really took a change after the dot-com bubble burst, and things started stabilizing, and you saw the emergence of these tools that enable you to work quite rapidly in test out ideas quite quickly and I just started spending time in cafes with friends, and testing out little ideas, coding or just designing, thinking talking, and I quickly realized that actually you can demonstrate an idea quite easily by just building the beginning of it, and that, so over coffee, I made something with my friend Andrew Duber, who’s a radio DJ and a lecturer at Birmingham City University. He’s a professor there now, and he had this idea, and it was back when everyone was complaining about radio licensing for music and how it was really complicated, and he said, well, you know what, why don’t we release a silent radio station?

11:43 And so we built it over coffee, and it’s a stupid idea but if I say Hey Jude to you now, okay, what’s playing in your head? The song, yeah, so it’s like license free music. Okay, so you just say those two words, you don’t pay the publishing, so he made a really dumb app that just gave you the name of an earworm track to play in your head to clear another earworm and you could just listen to this list of listen to this list of stuff. Now it sounds really stupid, and it was a stunt.

12:12 But it was funny, and a lot of people, kind of, and it’s kind of an example of what you do, and we did it in about half an hour or something over coffee. Can you give another example of like a hack, just so people who aren’t familiar with the industry or something, or just something you might do in a couple days or something you did in the past where it was like, I saw this thing I wanted to go in and see if I could solve it, and then that was a hack, just to give people something they can put their hands on. I think maybe talking a little bit about hack days and hackathons, probably be wise, the what what are those things?

12:38 So this is this is a thing that’s come from America, and it’s been part of that kind of maker hacker scene for some time that people enjoyed gathering together and making stuff together, sitting by yourself at home, you know, plugging away at something. Well, it’s cool, like you can make interesting stuff happen, but people enjoy making together and showing the result results to each other is collaboration. A big part of hacking, I think. So yeah, and does it have to be physical collaboration?

13:04 Not necessarily. I think there’s a lot of people who enjoy doing things with with technology, and they often give away their work for free on the web. I mean, this is something that’s really really big thing, and it’s a real force for good. There’s a company called G GitHub in America, and what they’re doing is absolutely fascinating because they’re making it so that anyone who makes something that has a digital component if they want to, they can apply, you know, relevant license to it, so someone else can use it, and then they put it up on online for them to use, but not just to use, they can then take it, adapt it reuse it and then apply the adaptations back into the original code, and so by so doing you’re enabling millions of people to collaborate on.

13:49 Is that how like Linux was written and things like that? Yeah, a lot of Open Source technology has being written in a similar way. Obviously that predates GitHub, but similar thing applies, and once you’re in that scene it’s pretty addictive because you know, you have an idea and you just Google it, and it’s already on GitHub or the little bit you need is there, and so you’re able to work really really quite quickly, and it’s quite, it’s quite inspiring.

14:11 Meeting those guys and seeing what they’re doing, okay, so he same kind of spirit, it’s where you get everybody in the same room, which, and we’ve hit this a lot of times on the show, where that, whereas the world is virtual and everyone’s on social media. Amazing to think that when you actually get people looking at each other in the same physical space you do get a lot of innovations happening. Definitely. And when you mash together people with different disciplines in a space with a time constraint, okay, and some kind of social pressure, you get interesting things happening, and so that’s what a hack day is.

14:43 You get, so these guys, the Three Beards guys, they do good hack days. I mean wow, that’s a ringing endorsement. Yeah, we never, well, yeah, we’ve never done one before. We do one, one annual one and I guess I would call it a bit of a, they call it a culture hack, like it’s an art, it’s an art meets Tech hackathon. Okay, and the premise was simple.

15:02 It was, what happens if you take 50 artists and 50 techies, developers, hackers, makers, put them together in a room for a weekend, give them all the food and drink and whatever they need so they don’t have to, they only have to focus on, and the only thing is, take data and turn it into something creative. Now, the difference is that a lot of hackathons, you’re building a product or you’re launching a like a business or you know, like there’s a specific goal. Ours was a completely open brief, and we did on purpose it was meant to be, cuz it’s all about creative, which for me I think is the interesting part about hacking is for people that maybe haven’t gone tons.

15:36 I mean, we did it so that artists who may never get a chance to work with techy people, in a normal situation, could come along and feel like they didn’t have to know how to code, and Dev, this was like opening it up, and vice versa. So like all the techies might not necess get a chance to work with somebody who’s a, you know, a painter or a sculptor or, you know, just generally, you know a millionaire or what whatever. And the, that was this crazy idea that came out of a beard.

16:03 Are these usually all night events? I mean, is it usually kind of reminiscent of like a university where people are staying up all night and doing it can be a bit like that. The general idea is that you gather today on a Friday evening, meet some other people, have some quite open-ended conversations, and then for the whole of the Saturday you’d be making something together with a team that had just come together at that event, so people you’ve never met before you would then immediately be trying to make something with, and then it can continue through the night on Saturday.

16:35 I’m I’m not so hot on the idea that kind of digital creativity has to be about working long hours. You know, in my company I’m there, you know, leaving the door at 6.00. I call it leaving by example because I don’t believe in a, I don’t believe in language hack. Yeah, it is, that’s a language hack. Long culture isn’t very helpful to people, and I think if you go to too many hack days, you get this idea that you have to work through the night, and it’s all about heroism, and it’s not really.

17:02 I’m more interested in the collaboration that occurs, and then on the Saturday you’d be kind of finishing up on whatever you’ve made, and then and then there’s a kind of demonstration point, and that’s the social pressure part, so you’ve got this very rapid coming together of people to make something to a brief of some kind, in this case it was producer work of art or something to do with the point where art and technology collide, and then people who are your peers or people who you respect will then come in out from externally and then be judges, so you don’t want to look like an idiot. Social pressure again, you need something in there to motivate, yeah, so time constraint, a bit of social pressure about you know, a demonstration, an end point or a beginning.

17:48 And then some kind of decent brief, so a tightening of it, because if you just said, hey everyone, come to this space and we’re going to make some stuff, right? well, you’re not going to get anything done, you’ll begin something. And, you know, you find that there are those kinds of events where it’s a bit unknown what’s supposed to happen, and okay, by having the absolute deadline of 6 p.m., you’ve got to have something demonstrable. Okay, so besides the silent radio station, what would you say is was one of the hacks you’re proud of?

18:20 I think the thing that I’m most proud of as a hack probably is what we did for Comic Relief last year. So I’ve been to lots of hack days. I’ve you know, I’ve done quite a wide variety of ones, some with prizes, some with just, you know, just for the love of it. The thing that we did for Comic Relief is we took that kind of hack day principle and we extended it out over six one we periods, and so a team of us, three or four of us, went into Comic Relief and we set up a little area, and it’s called the Explorer laboratorium, and the idea is that we found six people in Comic Relief who had an idea for a way that they could raise money all year round, so rather than just on the day that they have to kind of spread their bets by being able to raise additional funds throughout the year.

19:10 And we started on a Monday with one of these people, and me and a designer, and a project manager, and by Friday we would have built a web app and deployed it and have users on it, and then demonstrate it to the CEO, like 1 1, p.m., which is pretty intense. International listeners, Comic Relief runs Red Nose Day red day, that’s a British thing. Red Nose Day, right? It is. I have in Australia and New Zealand as well.

19:36 We have it at home, but which is like a big big day to raise money for some charities, and all the comedians get sick kids, specifically for sick children. No, no, that’s children need. So this Comic Relief is a kind of meta charity, they fund other charities, so they’ve raised money for a wide variety. That’s right. Yeah, and Red Nose Day is one and Sport Relief, Sport Relief is the other one.

19:55 Yeah, that’s, they two big ones, but of course those are two big points which happen every, they alternate, don’t they? Each year, is it like a different one? So you hacked, you basically created a product that you could argue might not have been able to have been created in 3 months by a team of 50 Engineers. By getting, like, a small team, sounds like Navy Seals, you know, crack team of elit the tougher the mission, the smaller the team. I mean, but in a way you guys go, and you don’t get to get stopped by, like you said, all these processes that used to happen in bigger corporations, longer lead times.

20:22 You need some of that. You need to have some safety in there, because you know you might be dealing with children, or you might be dealing with money, or there’s issues in there that you need to be aware of. What we were attempting to do by going into that organization and kind of demonstrating that you can build something very quickly in a 5-day period or 4-day period. Wasn’t that the hacks necessarily need to be of high value? They did show them like directions they could go, go as a company, and some of them were really funny.

20:47 I mean they had to be funny because it’s Comic Relief. I’ll give you an example of one. It’s called The Last Laugh, and it’s a will writing app and the idea is that you write your will with the service, and then you put something funny in your will. And then the end result was you downloaded, and you got a kind of a legal document that was your will. So I was like, you know, here’s my will.

21:09 In the event of my death, I would like the executives of my will to ensure that in my coffin is a recording of my voice saying, let me out to be played during the service, you know, or something like that. You’re not me, so that’s now a legal document. I was just thinking about my own world, but it was, it was stupid, but the big comment there was that actually, for charities like that, they’re not really taking advantage of legacy giving. Some charities are really on it and they’re making millions and millions a year, and there’s a gap there for charities to make money in interesting ways by providing a service.

21:44 And it was a fully legal document by Friday, and so the thing is that we weren’t really saying these are finished things, please release them, put them out to the world. It’s the hackers, the message is the concept here. We were showing them possible futures for the organization, and you can hack something together very quickly, and that shows you a potential direction you could go at low expense, and you can Chuck it away. Okay, because it doesn’t matter or you can invest in it, right?

22:09 So it’s like proof of concept. You deliver something that that works in a way and they can go with it if they want, and it inspires people. You’re in a room with, well, we’ve experienced this you’re in a room with people making something very, very quickly. There’s a kind of heightened sense of creativity, and then this end point where you’re doing a demo. It’s a really really exciting way to work.

22:29 It feels a bit like TV like a reality show, like you’re on a deadline and you’re like, got get this out, that’s the end point. and the thing there, I hope that happened, was that we kind of prototype that idea for Comic Relief and for other charities, so we showed that, what you could do to kind of think about what your organization could be is to hack it to make something quickly or a series of things, to give yourself a bit of a bit more room to Innova in, rather than feeling like, oh, you know, to get any idea out the door takes 6 months and I’ve got to get the approval of the board and everything. Eventually you could maybe do something slightly different.

23:09 Oh I like this. I want someone to come in and hack Silicon Rail and London Real. I mean, like, sounds like you get a bunch of people in, and then they show you all these things that you didn’t know were possible, or things that your own organization was slow to address. So you’re right, there, a big organization’s now kind of cutting onto this and you get people who do organize hack days for corporates. I’m, I’ve not done so much of that.

23:31 I kind of feel like I’m giving, giving a lot in that time. It’s quite intense emotionally, so I just decided I decided to throw all that energy into starting a company. And that’s, that was the beginning of Makeshift when we realized that this model of doing multiple things rapidly, and seeing potentially that, you know, these things could turn into startups or apps or whatever. The logical next Next Step, the gap was, what happens if he did that process repeatedly all the time with sufficient investment funds behind you to be able to take the ones that worked and turn them into startups.

24:09 It almost seems like a company hiring you to break into their security. It seems like a derivative of that, cuz like if they hired a team, they come in and show you other things you’re doing completely wrong, whether it’s product development, marketing strategy, all this stuff you know that you couldn’t really see. I don’t know. There’s a danger there that you look like the smart consultant guys are coming in and showing you how everything should be done, and you can demotivate everyone, so what we didn’t do was try to be all bigheaded about it.

24:33 We went in, we involved the people who were in the organization. We made sure it was their ideas that we built, not ours. And then we made sure that it was like a demonstration to everybody, and they were involved in choosing which ones to do. Yeah, that’s, otherwise you just look like some smarty pants guys coming in, and you know, it’s, you know, what it’s like, it’s like, oh, here we go, the tech kids are going to come in and show us, and actually it’s like, the whole point of it is showing them that it’s about creating, not breaking or changing.

24:58 It’s about creating something with what you have. Okay, that’s good. Let’s talk about Makeshift, cuz we usually, we try to talk about someone’s business, you know, in the early part, but Makeshift, what is Makeshift? I mean you just kind of discussed it, but like I always ask simple questions like what have you done with Makeshift, and what are your plans or what are you going to do and what makes you different or I always say, why will you win? I know that’s a bit of a egotistical frame I’m putting on that, but I’ll leave you with those questions.

25:21 What is Makeshift? Makeshift is a startup studio, and that is a reasonably new type of business operation that takes signals from the kind of incubators and accelerators of the world and also kind of gives a nod to the towards a kind of VC model. So what we do is we are a team of people who work on our own ideas. We are all makers, so there’s about 12 of us in the company now and your title is makers. Yeah, makers, digital makers, that’s the way we look at it.

26:02 Generalists, people who can kind of turn their hand to lots of different parts of a startup, and the idea is that we are repeatedly making things that could turn into digital businesses. So each month we’re releasing a new product, so this year we’re ahead, actually. I think we’ve done 13 hacks and we’re probably going to hit about 20 by the end of the year or something. So we are letting a thousand flowers bloom, so rather than a startup, which would be which you’re familiar with one idea, one idea, one team, and a very singular direction in where you’re going to go and you’re going to die or fail or win and succeed based on like whether you’ve got your idea right at the beginning or whether you can adapt fast enough to find the right idea by pivoting.

26:49 That’s what L people call it. I like that word and hate that word at the same time. I have a similar feeling about it. The our approach is quite different to that because we’re not going after one idea. We could have done that, but actually the three of us we found in the company, we all come from kind of different backgrounds that converged on this model, this startup studio model.

27:13 There’s a bunch of different reasons for them. Paul Birch, who’s my one of my founders. He was one of the guys who benefited from the Bebo sale. He was there, right at the beginning of that. And he Michael Birch’s brother, yeah, the founder of Bebo.

27:28 Okay, the name, and he he’s probably most well-known for Birthday Alarm, which was an early kind of viral hit. It’s a very simple idea where you get reminders about people you know and when their birthdays are right, and it’s brilliantly viral and it’s it just says for this service to work really well, please upload your entire address book, and then the next person gets it and then maybe one out of 20 or something will upload their entire address book, and then on it goes. so you get a lot of people on it very quickly, and so that was very successful.

28:00 So Paul’s had some big wins. He’s also had some pretty big losses. He’s had some, you know, failures as well as successes, but because he’s done pretty well, he’s been investing in some of the most well-known startups in London as an angel, but he really wanted to get back to the craft. He wanted to get back to the early making feeling rather than being involved just at the kind of governance level. Is this hacking or is this design?

28:29 For Paul it’s I think it’s the process of designing startups. I think that’s what he is interested in. Nick, who is my other founder is the design. So Paul is like the experienced entrepreneur on the team. Nick used to be the design director at Psychic Studios and they’re doing some really great design work.

28:53 They continue to do great work and we formed a really good relationship because I’m the kind of tech guy. He’s the designed guy, and then we have the kind of experienced entrepreneur guy and that’s a it’s one of those T-shaped startup setups, right? Yeah, hack of the Hustler and the hipster, right? That’s B The Hustler and the hip. We fit that model totally What we decided to do was to take what we’d learned from the Comic Relief process and what learn what Paul had learned from doing kind of repeated angel investing, and do something quite innovative in that we would repeat that process of having a good idea and then doing a hack and then testing it out very very rapidly by putting out really really quickly but doing it in repeat.

29:37 So if I walk into Makeshift today, what would I see? Like how many people are there, what kind of workstations are they on? What’s like a typical day at Makeshift? About 12 of us in a little studio just by Old Street roundabout. We had to be there really, yeah.

29:50 Talk about accelerating serendipity and you know, if you’re in that area it’s probably the most Indus area in East London, right? Everyone’s around, it’s easy to bump into people. You get the advantage of having a space that you can have events in. So a typical day is probably a couple of us in there reasonably early. It’s quite calm, 8ish, 9ish.

30:15 I’m yeah about 9ish probably kicks off. It’s kind of got a quite relaxed aesthetic kind of feeling to it, it’s quite dimly lit. Everyone’s sitting there with the on a bean bag or on a desk. Music sometimes, yeah. it feels like a home cuz it was a home, someone’s flat, so got a kitchen in it.

30:39 It’s really nice environment, and we’re trying to make it the kind of optimum environment for digital makers to be in. Okay, so we’re kind of self-analyzing, like is this good? Do we like being here? What can we do to make it better? We’ve got a two-story shed out the back.

30:55 We call it the shed scraper. I don’t even know what it’s for yet. It’s just there. You have a Shar we have sh all your Hardware just we’re going to have to have we’re going to have to have a 3D printer in there or something. You’re going to have to put something bigger, something like that.

31:06 But do you need any of that stuff right now, or is like an iMac enough for it. It’s really mini yeah, everyone just has a laptop, and we will work on in the way that we want to work. We have standing desks and things going on. And will there be client projects you’re working on? Will a company come in and pay you X to do something for them, or is this just all ideas you have?

31:25 We don’t take on any client work? No, that crucial thing. Like we could go and do that or we could go and do a startup but we want do something very different and so the on the walls of our studio is kind of our status, we Post-it notes and Bits of Paper stuck everywhere. But the crucial thing is that we’ve got all of the products that we’re working on kind of as a little status view, and we’ve got this process that we’re now developing, which is probably the most important part of Makeshift.

31:58 Should I just talk a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah, go. So, having ideas isn’t hard. We’ve all got loads of ideas. There’s no problem with having ideas.

32:09 It’s kind of filtering the good ideas from the bad ideas is the trick. So what we do as a team is we’re always constantly scratching our own itches. Like if we’ve got found a little problem, we’ll do little hacks and anyone can just at any point just go and do a little tiny little experiment, just a few hours testing something out, experimenting with something. And then once a quarter we all get around together and we would have prepared presentations about the things we’ve learned from scratching our itches.

32:37 And we proposed doing a hack on an idea. So I proposed a few ideas of the last one of them got made and we did a little hack day. So this was build Grabber, and it’s everyone’s building websites all the time. Wouldn’t it be great if every day something’s just taking a snapshot of the homepage and putting in your Dropbox? Like that’s a really dumb idea, but you can see a lot of people wanting that, like a time lapse of so you can then make a video of what your website looked like through time for months or years, or you look at your competitor’s websites or yeah, very simple idea okay.

33:12 So that’s an example. Or maybe Attending, which is an event service that was very very minimal just lets you see who else is attending an event that you’re going to, and you can follow them on Twitter. It’s very very minimal. That now for drink really we test we be I don’t know alpha beta testing it it’s great. Oh yeah, I’ve seen you asking if you’re going to go and that.

33:34 So it’s like it’s basically like for silic and drink, about it’s not a registered event. It’s not a ticketed event, even you know, like the other three events. So we needed a system where people could kind of just see, but like just with their Twitter account so they didn’t have to go through a hassle. So these guys built it and we were like, yep, we will test that and it’s working really really well. Seem, let me ask like just an obvious question.

33:54 Like how do you fund yourself? Do you have to sell an idea or is an idea have to become something that? Well, we’re very lucky in that Paul has had some big successes in the past so he’s able to fund us entirely. Okay, and at some point I’m sure that we’ll be taking external investment in the things that we make, but we’re not at that point yet because we’re quite early. So you’re kind of all before an incubator, before an accelerator, you’re just generating ideas?

34:17 Well, the trick is that because we’re able to come up with these small hacks, we can then test them quickly. So we pitch these ideas to ourselves, and then we pick the things that we’re going to go for, and then we do like a one day hack or a week hack or a two, we hack depending on what we want to put in, and then we release it and we test it with live people. Okay, and that’s it. It’s out there, and then we learn based on won’t sell it per se, you’ll just no, not that point.

34:40 It’s just an experiment and then if we get a good signal back from it, we get people saying this is lovely. So I mean, drink, the drink about guys using Attending is a great signal, because that means anybody in the world who’s organizing a meetup or tech meetup would be able to use our service and they’re to. So that would mean other people would be, so that means to us, right, that a signal that we should then invest. So we then put in 3 months of three-person time, up to about £100,000 into that idea to get it to the point where we’ve got it to that crucial kind of product market fit point or get or approaching that where you’ve sufficiently improved it or moved it around to fit what the customers or the clients or the users are saying about it, and so that it’s actually useful and they’re willing to pay, or there’s some obvious umel.

35:28 It’s not a business yet. It’s not a business yet, but at that point you’ve then de-risked it because we have had another handful of ideas that just didn’t make it. So they’ve all been killed, right? So we we’ve tried a bunch of stuff out. Something just doesn’t work, we don’t do it, and that’s totally opposite to what happens if you’re doing a startup because you go, you’ve got an idea, one idea for a startup, you go and pitch at your friends and family.

35:54 Your friends and family then give you their life savings, yeah, and then you’ve got to make that idea work. Now that’s great if the idea works, right, or you’ve got time or you got enough runway to be able to get off the ground, but if you’ve got a really bad idea, then you could really get sucked into following through on that idea just because you’ve had that trust from people, and you’ve got to, you got to keep going you’ve got to keep going, and I’ve been there. You know, I’ve kind of sucked myself into products and things that just weren’t working, but because I’ve promised that they’ve got to work and I’ve put my reputation on the line behind it you, like, you end up with this massive opportunity cost where you spent so long that you’ve got to spend more time on it.

36:33 Yeah, social pressure is really power, and what we’ve done at Makeshift is to say, you know what, we’re going to try all of these guys. Please help, please have a go, check them out. We’ll learn from you, you know suggest stuff to us. If we think they’re going to work, then we’ll follow through, but if they’re not working, we’re just going to kill them. Okay, have you spun out different businesses?

36:52 Have you done this, like, 100 grand here, 100 grand there multiple times? We have. We’ve got about four things in that kind of product point now, I think okay. We haven’t. I think probably two of the things that we’ve gone for, we’ve got to that point now, when if they get a critical mass, will you def when you go out and find someone outside of your space to you know, be the CEO, be the this, be the that?

37:18 That’s the crucial question at the moment, because we could bring in external entrepreneurs at the point where we’ve kind of de-risked those things, so we’ve, they’ve gone through that big filter and we’ve got it so that we’ve got some users, we’ve got, you know, some revenue. That’s possibly a good point to bring someone else in. It could be a point to spin it out as a separate company so with one of our things that we’re releasing next month, because it’s banking-related, we had to do it as a separate entity and get FCA approval and all that sort of stuff, and it did kind of require that extra step.

37:50 We are looking at that, and actually we’re trying to learn from what other people who’ve done similar stuff around the world have done. There’s few of these kinds of models, some guys in Germany, there’s Betaworks in America, there’s Science a lot of these people have us, they usually have a kind of an industry focus. So it will just be like healthcare or you know or web tech or something, and the trick for us is at what point do we decide to do to make that change, or do we try to keep it as our own team and just grow the team to the point where we get there.

38:29 So there’s questions there. I think you kind of laid out the, you see, why I wanted to get him in. This is why I’m quite fascinated with Makeshift as a con was quite new, but if you think about it, it’s like of all the startups we speak to and they’re like, you know, so far we’ve been very lucky, we’ve had lots of wonderful big founders, but you know, there are many that obviously fail, but they’ve got 20. Did you say products so far? We’re going to be going for about that this year, I think, which, and four at the moment are just in a point to have 20 ideas, and bearing in mind that the team, I know a few members of the team aside from Stef the Hacker, they’re very talented people.

38:57 Everyone was quite like, in the scene, was very like, what are they doing over there? Cuz you suddenly had these interesting, very talented people who’d all done various levels of startups and businesses coming together, but I, the idea, I think is really interesting and worth keeping an eye on, is because it’s this just rapid iterative real-time, 20 ideas, crank them out, see which one flies and get back four. No, that’s good. This is usually where we hit with a few Devil’s Advocate questions and I hope you have one.

39:24 I got one, and since I didn’t know exactly what, did I didn’t really have this prepared, but you know, you mentioned the fact that especially when it comes to angel investing when it’s friends and family, I mean, Jesus, a lot of people would feel really bad or feel really indebted to anyone who gives them that kind of capital, and yeah, they could follow that idea like years past even necessary, and I can see that a problem with some startups, but I guess on the flip side you could argue that since you don’t live and die by, you know, the equity in the next round, and you know, you look at guys right now with their startups and they’ve had the joyous few hundred grand rate raised and now they’re going in for their Series A or Series B, however you qualify it, and they’re like really sweating bullets.

40:01 They’re trying to make payroll and they really have to make this product work, and in your situation you’re not really married to one of these things. And does it ever become a danger of you walking into, like, a think-tank atmosphere? I know you want people to be creative, but there is there ever a point where it’s like, well, that might work, but if it doesn’t, then we’ll do this. If it doesn’t, we’ll do that? Do you ever think that there’s a point where it becomes too creative and not about the bottom line?

40:24 I do worry about that. And that’s a perfectly valid criticism, because there’s always the danger of oh shiny, and we have hired all these amazing people in oh and we have a big oh shiny room, right? Wow, wooh shiny, you know, let’s try this out over here, let’s try that over there. The trick that we’re going for is that each of these ideas someone has to passionately care about. So, am I waking up in the morning excited about the idea?

40:53 Am am I like getting up and going, getting out the laptop over breakfast and going, I’ve just got to do this little thing on this thing, you know, I’ve got to make a change over here, because that passion doesn’t go away. We talk about strong ideas loosely held, and I think it’s a really good principle to have. We really care passionately about these things until we realize they’re just not going to work, and then you have to kill your darlings. I mean, it’s tough just to go, oh God, I love this product and I don’t think it’s working.

41:27 Right, you know, it’s really hard, but just to look at it and go, wow, I’ve just sunk four months of my life in on this thing and I’ve been up, you know, at night working on it. I’ve been doing everything to do it to get it off the ground, that takes a lot of conviction just to go kill it. Yeah, that’s why directors don’t edit their own films cuz they’re married keep that scene that we spend all night on in the lighting, but you know the editor comes in, it’s like, it’s got nothing to do with the story, it’s gone, but I SP so much time, so and it’s also T to stay passionate about one project for a long period of time.

42:02 I mean, I see Jeff Bezos and I’m like, dude, aren’t you sick of selling stuff over the web? But I mean it must be hard to stay excited about a project unless it’s the ultimate thing for even a period of time. I me I think I a lot of people now have this opinion of me that I’m like a kind of a butterfly when it comes to tech products. You know, I’m interested in one thing one day and not interested in the other. The thing is I ran an agency for like 10 years.

42:27 You know, that’s waking up every day and absolutely nailing it on making sure there’s new clients in the door and building thing. Yeah, I’ve done that, and my last startup was like, I mean, we’re putting in like a 100 hours a week or something. It was crazy. Some of those weeks were just really intense and you know, that’s the opposite end of it, so that’s when you care so much, you’re kind of killing yourself to make the idea work. Yeah, and the trouble is tightly held idea, not yeah, so not a loosely held.

42:58 The problem there is that you’re kind of forcing the product out. So sometimes, I mean, Paul talks about this, that actually not putting too much effort in on your idea gives you a better idea of whether people really like it or not, because if you’re having to force it and force it and force it, what is, is it working? Is the thing working, like, is the viral loop on it good, or is it you just kind of sending good emails to people, and if you were to suddenly stop doing that, what happens?

43:26 Would the product continue by itself, and so we’re kind of going off this class of product that does have a sense of continuation within it. There’s this magical number of like 1.1. If you can get each user to get 1.1 more users, you’re you just get end up with this curve of growth. Yeah, now if you can magically find one the build itself, then lucky. There are many are many of those things around, but there is something about like over pushing your early ideas because you might be kind of interfering with your own signal.

44:00 So let’s say we went, we started doing product launches and all the things we put out and we get loads of press on everything we do. Well, great, you’re on TechCrunch and you know, you get some early uses, and that’s brilliant. That’s, I mean, it’s absolutely brilliant exposure for everything we’re doing, but we do look at it as for that kind of exposure as just general exposure for Makeshift in the products we’re going for, because you can really get into a point where you’ve kind of interfered with your own measurements.

44:27 Yeah, press can be misleading too. Yeah, because you, oh wow, got loads of people clicking this page and now our numbers are all out. You kind of got to wait for that to die down before you realize you can work out what’s happening, and people do talk about that. Signal noise being a crucial thing that you’ve got to, like, any startup. Brian, what’s your question, or what angle am I missing?

44:45 Cuz I always never know the full story that goes behind these businesses. Oh, what’s my well, so my Devils have a question, more of a sort of a life is a hacker question. So Stef the Hacker has four wonderful children all under about six, I believe. I just assumed hackers you know, were single, and you know their hair is a mess, and they go home to a nasty flat. You’re in Angelina Jolie hackers territory from 1991, still I know if I’ve seen that movie right?

45:10 Okay. These days they run web agencies for 10 years and then create their own ideas, but and I want to hear about leaving by example later, but go ahead. Yeah, yeah, and so Stef the Hacker’s got four wonderful kids, under I think, under about seven, under seven, and they come along to a hackathon that’s a startup there, a beautiful wife Emily. For the record, I’m terribly sorry if you’re watching this about keep him out, so later to hackathons. I just want to get that in there.

45:29 I really did keep him out on some of the, we had a whole weekend, our was like Friday night right through Sunday night and it really it went on. I kept him out far too late, cuz he does have little ones, but my question is, the reason I bring that up is, how do you explain to four kids under seven, dad’s a hacker and what does that mean? Like, in a in a in this world of as you referenced, you know, hacking when we look at in a mass media context, what they might be exposed to indirectly through media would be certain things like the phone hacking scandal and NSA, not that they’re probably still too young for that, but I’m always curious about this from a, you know, from a family point of view, and then how do you kind of, how do you explain to your kids?

46:07 And are you, do you think they may go down the same path? Are they quite curious about technology? The other day, Emy said to me, she’s my oldest, she said, when I grow up I want to be an artist like you. Nice, interesting, though, right? She’s come to both of our art hacks, yeah, so she’s seen the idea.

46:30 She’s seven, she’s six, six kids are smart. She’s seen that, the way that I work is I call it sketching with code. Yeah, and so it’s not like kind of sitting there engineering something. It’s all very kind of sketchy. So at home we’ve got, I’ve been trying to introduce them to the idea of technology in the home and always making things.

46:54 So my create something everyday thing I’m trying to instill into, do they have Raspberry Pis at home or anything like that? We haven’t got that yet. We have got this thing called Scratch on the Mac, which is a free piece of software that MIT invented, and it’s what Code Club runs on as well. Yeah, Code Club do a lot of the kind of workshops on Scratch. Have you seen Kano?

47:19 I haven’t seen kme. It’s like build a computer out of a box, this new startup, like for teach kids how build a hub with Raspberry Pi in it and you put it together and then you do the software might be a good one. I’m kind of trying to go take us long that route because I got a little outboard control Bo board. It’s got no, it’s got no plastic top on it. It’s just the circuit board and then a bunch of controls, and like it looks really technical, you know?

47:46 What’s this? Wow. But it has things on it like a sound sensor and a light sensor and little slider, and the thing is you can make a cat jump up and down on the screen depending on how loud you’re shouting into the this microphone, or you can make it say things. Yeah, and it was about 30 or something, and I just kind of left them there with it, and then sometimes of an afternoon I kind of walk in, at the weekend, and they’re just on Scratch and they’re playing with it.

48:09 It’s theirs. They just go on there. Oh, I’m just on Scratch doing this thing now and the hardware plugs into the Mac, so you can use like a software front end, and then you can, okay, and it looks like it looks, it looks like you’re hacking it, it looks like, you know, it’s a bit of circuit board. So the other day, I mean, this is, I don’t know where this came from really, but I was just walking along talking to her and she said, Daddy, I want to make something.

48:33 I’ve got an idea, I want to make a seat with wheels on, that make that I can make it go, so I can go down the road on my seat, and you can carry the seat on your back, and I said okay, well, we could build that. Yeah, let’s make it. How would you control it? And then she said, we just make an app for the iPad. Jeez, wow.

48:56 Okay, and you’re like, oh. So well, I mean, I have to do it now, right? You can’t get a suggestion like that from a six-year-old and then go, well, maybe later. You have to sit there and do it. So I’m now researching things on Maplin.

49:11 I’ve never done anything like that, presuming you have to find some motors and some wheels, and this is the awesome part about having a hacker as a dad as well. Can you imagine that? Your kid, it’s like, can we make this? And it’s like, actually I can, yeah, but also I think 30 years ago the kid would just stop there, cuz it wouldn’t be possible. They’d be like, oh yeah, we can’t do that and then like creativity would, but now she’s like, we could make an app, and like opens all these possibilities.

49:34 Let’s do that. And I think because we do have quite a making household, that’s like a it’s a place where we’re always drawing monsters. So I always draw these little monsters with the kids, and they color them in, they cut them out and we have the recycling bin right next to the like the kitchen table and that sounds really messy. It is pretty messy, but it means whenever they want to make something they just go into the recycling bin pull out a big cardboard box turn it into a helmet or whatever, and then we just put it back in the recycling a bit.

50:04 It’s like, reuse, what is it? Reuse, recycle. We let them reuse the stuff in a creative way before Before we chuck it, and it just means you end up with these really strange costumes and bits everywhere and but they do have this opinion that they’re able just to make things okay, and you see that with other kids and I don’t know, there’s something about instilling the idea that you can create and you can make, and if you look at what’s been happening with the school curriculum, it does, it has scared me a little bit that kids are being convinced to get into that tech.

50:35 Yeah, I’m glad you brought this up because we’ve had this discussion, I think, when you were first on London Real, I asked you about this, but you know you’ve got four kids. What do you want to make sure they learn as they’re growing up and what alarms you about the curriculums that you see lack. The big thing is that we don’t know what the careers are going to be like. Do we? We’ve got no idea.

50:56 Can you imagine me going to my career advisor when I was at school, even at like 17, just saying, you know, I want to be something when I’m older, and you know, a lot of people can’t even describe what their job is. I don’t I don’t I wouldn’t know how to describe your job at all. I don’t either, neither than my parents, if honest, and what’s your job? Something about content or something. I mean, something yeah, you still Haven an explained your job take more hours.

51:20 So all right, so there’s that issue. I think there’s that issue, and I think it’s prep preparing children to have versatility, and for me personally I’m trying to instill in them the idea that they can make with the computer because I do see some horror stories that kids coming out of school H have it’s kind of we assume that they are able to use computers because they’re digital natives, or whatever but actually they’re locked behind loads of layers of stuff that keeps the inner workings of the computer hidden way in a nice package until it go goes wrong, and actually the one of the dangers of having someone like me in a household is that if anything goes wrong on the computer, oh, I’ll just fix it, and we’ve had a we’ve had this kind of few years, I think, where the kind of ZX Spectrum BBC hacker people, like you know who know how the computers work on the inside have just been kind of not letting the kids take control and you know, sort out the problems at home, whereas when I was a kid my dad didn’t know too much he was great at bringing home computers for me to play with and things but then he just kind of left it to me and then I was the expert of their household but I think as we’ve grown up the parents are still like oh I’m in control, I’ll do this thing on the computer, and we kind of hide them away by behind these shields of protection that are like one-way information flow.

52:45 Sometimes it’s like a video game or a movie or something with indeed it’s not about digital technology being there for creativity, it’s for consumption, and if you look at broadband it’s the perfect example. You get a broadband contract with u. Look at the download versus upload speed, download versus upload. It’s a symmetric, and that asymmetry isn’t just at that point, it’s through the entire industry, it’s in everything we do, you know there’s a there a tendency to consume rather than produce, even on the devices we have, iPads are harder to consume on than they are harder to produce on than they are to consume, and so I tried to, you know, instill an inversion of that trend.

53:21 And I think that that’s probably something I would, you want them to understand, kind of the inner workings of the technology they’re using, and then it sounds like you just want them to stay creative, which is very non-specific non-technical thing, frame of mind. Yes, and realizing that creativity is in all things. It’s just a it is just a frame of mind. I think people say, oh, you know, I’m a creative technologist, and I just think, well, that’s obviously you’re creative because you’re a technologist.

53:47 I mean, you have creative everything, everyone’s in some way creative. It’s just how you let that come out and what you do. Let me hit you with another hard question here. We usually ask people about if they had to switch industries, what would they do? But I’m going to hit you with something similar, if if you had to, if you got, if you got sacked out of Makeshift tomorrow and you had to go start a company and say I gave you some money, you know, a couple million quid, and you had to actually pick one idea and roll with it.

54:14 I know, like a prison sentence, but if you did, what sector excit you, right now, you know, and be as specific as you can. So if I had to do something completely other than what I’m doing now. So like I have to sign a deal saying I will not work in the internet industry. You say you have to be the CEO of a company that’s going to have to produce a product and you’re going to have to live with that for the next 3 years. I know, he’s like, ah, I’m melting, but if you had to choose, like a, you know, an industry or, I don’t know, a product.

54:42 What would it be? I’m really excited about what is coming with biotech. I think that there are huge changes going to come from the technology that’s coming out of the ability to, you know, sequence the human genome in, you know, next to no time for less than $50 I anything specific in biotech that excites you? Because I’ve heard that mentioned here before. Yeah, so a friend of mine is a professor and he once showed me a piece of machinery that he was working on that, it sounds crazy.

55:20 Basically he invented a robot that could print stem cells that would survive and could be used to spawn of parts of the body, and when you look at what happens with 3D printing and what they what, people have been doing about replacing TR exactly, and the and the human heart M a mouse heart was completely rejuvenated with through the use of stem cells. Recently there’s some very very interesting technology that’s going to come around healthcare and using technology that now looks way, way, way, way ahead, but I think isn’t as far away as we think. So the chance for that to do to give the human race lasting improvement or and quality of life is a big deal.

56:11 I wouldn’t have thought you would have said that, you know, really? Yeah, just because biology is something very different than what you’re talking about before, at least what I assume it is, of people in the room coming up with ideas and, you know, I’m thinking information technology. Well, I’m interested in it because you know, the gene sequencing is just a bunch of characters. I did the hack at SZ and I made a thing called cryptog Graphics, which was a way of representing data in a kind of graphic that you could wear secret passwords displayed in your living room in a visual form or in the objects around you, that’s crazy.

56:46 It was really cool, and somebody on Twitter who’s a guy who’s been using help me wrs which is one of our products, got in touch saying Stef, you’ve just done this hack. It’s that’s really interesting, and I’ made a website you can put in any information you want and a password, and then it encodes it into a graphic do Brian Rose silic real and you get, and it’s an image, a graphic with a certain number pixel by pixel but it’s a set of color triangles, and it’s the idea was to hide information in the humble Ikea print it looks like a like a it just looks like a dumb Ikea print for your W, right? But actually it holds your credit card, Swiss bank accounts.

57:25 It gets, it gets more interesting, cuz Stef also made one out of Bitcoin PBC it was a Bitcoin. Oh, was it? He put a Bitcoin into a physical object that was laser cut. It was multi four bits of plastic at different layers with different sculpting, and it unode that, that’s the m at the moment, you well I’ve made a page now where you can decode any of the images if you know the password, so you just sit there and you can kind of work it out. It’s a grid of triangles, so you can kind of work it out.

57:53 But going back to my story, this guy got in touch and said, this is really interesting. You mean, can encode any information at all? Well, I’ve just taken the genetic sequence for this bacterium and I’ve put it into a cryptographic and here it is, and he sent me the image, and I realized then there’s lots of interesting stuff to do where you kind of mash entire new industries together in interesting ways. So, I think there’s that’s the point when you know, the little hack gets interesting when someone does something completely unexpected with what you’ve made.

58:24 Yeah, and it sounds like you like putting those ideas immediately out on the web for people to consume, criticize, use, suggest? I mean is it all about greatest wisdom of the crowd being public? True. I think that I’ve said that a few times you know we put it out immediately and, you know, that’s the line I often take to make it simple for people to understand, but in this conversation I do have a gradient, so some stuff just you just won’t see it I won’t put out, so at the moment I’m very interested in looking at how the London map of Twitter could be made, how could you gather the connections that are formed around Twitter and use that as a map to improve all the products that we’re making in the city, so find ways to kind of connect people together, so find little clumps of people, so it’s easier to launch things in London, and then offer that as a way of other people doing things.

59:18 So that’s a little experiment I’m doing on my, just on my computer, that just, I won’t put that out, probably because I probably not allowed to. Okay, so you’re not putting out everything, but you’re but then at the other end I do something in a day like attending, and then go, hey, I’ve made this thing who likes it, you know? All right, let me, let me hit you with a few more questions, and then I’m going to see if you got something for him. Look, I just want to address this one thing really quickly, which is leaving by example as opposed to leading by example.

59:41 I’m from the states. We know that. I mean, I talk to Americans in the states, and like 20% of the time they’re telling me how hard they work. I’m like, Jesus, I haven’t lived there in 10 years, but it’s almost like this ethos of we work all night and we do this, we do this, we put in the hours. And you said leaving by example, you want to leave by a certain time in the day, can you talk about why, and is that a British thing, and how that compares with what the Americans do This is a reaction to having done the opposite for a long time.

1:00:09 I have just been always working since I don’t know since the day I left University, I, when I was at Uni, I was quite seriously ill. I had a small brain tumor. J and it I was basically acutely ill, and had a near-death experience, and at that point I realized I wanted to, like, really make something of my time, because you know, we only have so much time, and if you speak to anyone who’s had a similar kind of near-death experience early on in their life they tend to have this kind of drive, this, like, I’ve just got to make this stuff happen, like, you know, I don’t know how long I have left in the world and all of that.

1:00:54 You know, I’m perfectly fine. I’ve don’t have any health problems now. It was just at that point it was quite quite bad, but that stuck with me, and actually that threw me into this mode of always working all the time, like every weekend in into the evening, coming up with stuff and, you know, building my agency or whatever it is. I would always be always be on, and I mean that’s that that did mean that I got good fast at the stuff that I do. You know, they they talk about this kind of 10,000 hour to become at something, and if you can, if you can crunch those hours down by working all hours of the day then obviously it means you get more adept faster, perhaps.

1:01:34 So I’ve been there and done that long long hours long working culture. The thing that I learned at my last company was that actually by doing all of that and doing those long hours, I was actually writing really awful code. So I’d go off and I’d go off in my own little spin by myself, and I’d bash something out, and then come back to the office and then three other people would have to debug it and fix it, and then there’d be long-term problems down the line because I checked something out or had a conversation with someone, or you know, but going off on your own it’s kind of her work heroes, and it sounds good that you have a work hero around, but actually that that kind of puts this weird spin on your organization because you end up with a situation where there are people who have families or people who are sane in the room who want to leave, you know, given the contract that they have, they want to leave at a certain time, and then you have the work hero around, and by implication you’re working harder.

1:02:34 These guys are slackers, what a bunch of losers, you know, and they’re thinking, damn, there’s this work here around. I hate it, I keep having to clear up his mess when he comes in, and you end up with this animosity between people, potentially merging, we didn’t see that too much at the company I was at, but I’ve certainly seen that in other companies. You know we had a really great team, were like, you know, solid group of people who worked really hard together, but I did see some of that emerging, and it was mainly through looking at my own behavior that I realized that it probably wasn’t really helping me.

1:03:05 Doing much much work after six, you can maybe have a different mode where you do reading or you write. So I’ve started writing recently as my, I’m doing some work because I’m always on, always thinking, right? So I write about the processing on. So I just started working on Medium, so that is that’s kind of blogging, but it’s subt I think it’s subtly different, that’s a whole other conversation. I don’t know what I don’t know what Medium is yet I’m still trying to work out.

1:03:30 Started by the Twitter guys, right? Yeah, it’s by f, and it’s kind of collaborative collecting and blogging and writing and thought sharing, so you’re work in the evenings but you try to shift shift gears a bit, try shift, do some research, or maybe do some sketching. I do like tinkering, so that’s I enjoy tinkering, but tinkering is a different mode, so whereas when I’m working on something that’s going to end up as something that other people will use or work do in a certain way, but tinkering, I’ll just have something over here that’s on one side and I’ll be making it, but that probably won’t end up being part of a product that I’m working on.

1:04:10 By separating those modes off, it’s more like play. You’re kind of, oh, I’m just, you know, tinkering in the tool shed, right? Right. Play, Brian, how do you deal with that? You’re working a lot.

1:04:21 Yeah, I think I’m already late for an event now can wait. They can wait, they can all wait. I, yeah, I mean this is an interesting conversation, cuz I have this. I have the Beards, I have Albi and drive the agency. I’m out a lot.

1:04:37 I’m quite publicly available, and then I tend to, I’m quite easy to find, I guess, and I think that in a large part has contributed to being able to do it, but I think, I mean, lately it’s been a little bit more like I get to the weekend and I kind of shut down, and I’m like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to look at Twitter, and I don’t want to be on, I don’t want emails, or I don’t refuse to sort of, I draw a bit of a line because I found I found at least in, you know, my professional career is if something is an emergency, people will find you, like they will contact you, right? But if you start answering every email after hours on weekends, people will set that as the standard, and you never lose, and you’re always doing that nervous thing where we’re having a chat, blah blah blah blah, and you’re kind of like, yeah, hey, Brian, anyway phone goes up, phone goes back, you know what I mean?

1:05:27 And it’s so Tim Ferriss trick. He called the information diet which was he never checked his emails before noon, and he trained people to know, if it was an emergency, to call and if it’s not an emergency, then it’s not a phone call, and so then they would send the email, which he would check one a day, so he had a certain business where he could do that. But yeah, I think you need to do that. If you don’t draw the line, the line will be drawn for you. Exactly, I, you have too much or you just won’t enjoy what you’re doing anymore.

1:05:51 Work is like a gas, it just grows to fill the available space so if you make yourself available for it, it’s just going to be there all the time, and the big thing for me is my family, you know. People do find it odd that I’m doing this kind of hyper hacking, rapid making company because they assumed that you have to have an unsustainable work ethic where you are constantly on and always trying stuff out and trying to max out and be really bro about it, and actually we’re trying to have a really sustainable company, cuz we could to overload. I mean, that’s a real risk, because we have several things going on, any one time there’s always something to be done all the time, yet there is also something else to be done, and that is going home, like that is important.

1:06:34 You have to be able to go home, coming in fresh the next day, put your kids to bed and, you know, wake up in the morning thinking about the what you’re going to do, and I think, you know, a lot of writers, they give themselves 500 words a day. They say I’m going to put in 500 words today, and that means for the rest of the year they’re just going to be doing 500 words, and they’re probably four pages ahead in their head, but they don’t allow themselves the next 500 words, because that’ll screw up the next the next few days afterwards, and so they keep the rhythm going and having this rhythm of making, I think, is a healthy thing to try and go for. So I do see startups around here, you know, say, oh, you know, I’ve pulled another 2 a.m. thing, and I’m not sure that that’s that wise.

1:07:14 I can see why people do it because they’re frighten of the, you know, the money is going to run out, or, you know, we’ve got to get this feature out the door. But maybe there’s another way of looking at it. Maybe you need to be simpler, maybe you just need to cut features. Simplify your product. You see the stuff that we put out, and often people look at it go, it does one thing and well.

1:07:35 The response to that is it does one thing reasonably well, you know, it doesn’t have to do all things. You just has to do one thing, and then if it’s any good, then yeah sure, we can add that stuff later, and I think that floats back into your life that you try to just give yourself a little bit of a time constraint so that you’re not killing yourself, and then you always feel good about what it is that you’re doing. Brian is like, I wonder what that’s like.

1:07:58 That suffice it to say you haven’t figured this work life B out. Well, you know, it’s funny, it’s weird talking, actually, cuz I’ve just, I’ve just started a month off the booze, and I saw you sipping the Coca-Cola. I was scary, right? And I started, I got a friend, Andrew McDonell, who runs a sort of a sports social network called Tribe Sports, lovely guy and he’s we’re kind of getting up and trying to do a bit of a jog in the morning, so that I can kind of be tired by the time I get home at night, and you know, like, I actually sleep instead of being like always on and going to an event, then coming home being like, I need to send 10 emails, need to do these things, cuz the thing is, like, it’s always going to be there, you know, like that, like you said it’s never going to go away, but I think my philosophy now is that, like, at this point in my life it’s about kind of pulling back a bit.

1:08:43 You know, like, when you’re, when you’re kind of at the beginning of your career you have to go for everything. I mean, you know, I had to move halfway around the world to the other side of the planet and knew no one and had to start all over again and building everything from nothing, and you were willing to, cuz you’re young, and that’s what young guys do. Could I do it again? Don’t know. I don’t know if I could.

1:09:00 Your work will be more productive with that physical training and with this whole thing. I really think, and getting excited the morning to do something that you haven’t been doing till midnight the night before, there’s something, there’s something there. I just shut off when I leave here at 8:30 or 900. I don’t check emails or Twitter or anything at home I just force myself not to look at it unless it’s total emergency, and then I wait till the next day, and I’m kind of excited to come in and be like, all right, what do we have to do different modes.

1:09:25 I’m always, I’m always on Twitter, like I that seems more like a conversation. It’s like a vast conversation that’s always going on, whereas email, I’m absolutely awful at it, seriously. I’m terrible. You people email me, and if and I think if I should probably do a hack looking at my own email use to see what really happens. I suspect if you get, if you get an email within like 10 minutes or half an hour, you’ll get a reply, but possibly if you don’t, then the chances just extend very rapidly that I won’t actually get around to reply because I’m too busy doing this, doing the stuff, not kind of writing emails about the stuff, if that makes any sense.

1:10:06 Does so I do come across, it’s quite rude on email. I think this is actually that’s a real danger I don’t I don’t like that. Well, that’s the thing that Tim Ferriss said when he was here. He has an application that runs and it just doesn’t allow him to access the web or anything, or even his email for like a certain period of time, because he said an email is someone else’s agenda for your time. Always, it’s always someone who wants you to now, it’s time for you to look at this, and as opposed to something you have to get done today, you have to create something, and so I’ve been trying now not to look at mine till noon and just get my projects done, but it’s really hard.

1:10:37 I got three inboxes that I constantly, like, overflowing, ridiculous. All right, I have to ask our final question to Stef, and then hopefully wrap this thing up, and this is a question we ask everyone that’s been here, and we ask everyone on London Real as well, and this is it. If you Stef the Hacker could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Stef and give him a bit of advice, and it can’t be to buy Apple stock or something crazy like that, but a bit advice to that young man.

1:11:02 What would you tell him? Quit earlier. Definitely, okay The, I think, the biggest mistakes I’ve made are not factoring in opportunity cost in my decisions, and to and following through on things just because of the sunk cost I already had in the thing I’m doing. So I’ve already invested 5 years in this, I’ve got to keep going, wasn’t a good idea, and sadly I surrounded myself by with other people who were like Stef, you’ve already invested 5 years in this idea, keep going, keep going, and actually learning to quit and fail a bit earlier would have been.

1:11:39 Well, it would have been different. I’m not sure, if well, who can say what would have happened, but definitely it would have stopped things a lot earlier than weren working out, and learning that one earlier on, I think, is helpful for anyone. So to have a few things that don’t work out rather than just constantly having everything work for you is probably good, because if you’re not if you’re not breaking stuff, if you’re not, if you’re not making enough mistakes, you’re probably not going fast enough.

1:12:07 Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. That’s interesting, we never heard that one before, you know. Winners never quit, quitters never win. It’s the opposite Okay, that’s good on that same, you know, on that same type of a thought process. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?

1:12:21 Best advice is one that I ignored. And I spoke to the guy who G gave me this advice the other day, actually. It was very funny, cuz we were a meeting of companies that have a similar model, and I won’t give his name because that would be unfair, but he told me Stef, you’d listen to all of my ideas, I’d given him loads of different pictures for startups I want to do and it was brilliant, and I’ve got this idea and this idea and this idea, and this was several years ago, and he just said Stef, can I give you some advice?

1:12:51 Just do one thing. And of course I’ve totally ignored him just do one thing, that’s pretty good. All right, and the last bit of advice is to that, you know, to that 20-year-old that’s listening to this podcast or watching it somewhere around the world, what advice do you give them if they want to, you know, be like Stef one day, you know, if they want to get into the business or be in a company like yours, you know, Makeshift. That sounds really fun and creative.

1:13:16 Yeah, what do you tell them? Tinker. Getting good at tinkering is something that no one really tells you to do, and are all of the stuff that has been useful for me over the last few years. The only reason I’m doing what I’m doing now is because I was tinkering around in my spare time. How would you define tinker?

1:13:37 Taking a short-term, highly focused interest in something that’s reasonably esoteric and going, that’s interesting. I wonder what it would happen if and actually that could be changed so you can do this, this and this, and just playing with it a bit until you’ve explored it. And the thing is that people often ask me another question, and that’s what’s the best question you should ask in an interview, so if you’re hiring someone to be on your team and you look at the people in the room that we’ve hired at Makeshift and all the all of those people have answered this one really well, and it’s what are you doing in your spare time, and I’ve spoken to a few people about this, and the what are you doing in your spare time is this amazing filter, because that’s the filter on, are you do you really care about this, are you really thinking about what you’re doing, are you really introspecting or you experimenting, you trying stuff out, cuz all of that will flow through into your day-to-day work.

1:14:33 If you’re really interested in something, and if you saying, when your spare time is like, well, don’t really don’t know, go to the cinema and okay to know, just do some sport. You want to hear a, I want to hear somebody say I’m making some kind of 3D model printing experiment that’s based on my walking data or something I don’t know, like, just something really weird. I don’t really mind what it is, but the, I think that there’s definitely something about just allowing yourself to experiment and tinker, and I wasn’t always that way, so I think it’s something you can learn, and certainly if you were to go into the kind of thing that I am doing, and there’s other people around in this area, the way they’re working, that kind of instinct for experimentation is probably highly valuable and will continue to be highly valuable in the future.

1:15:21 Good stuff. I don’t know if I’m going to get a job at Makeshift anytime soon. I don’t know if I tinker in my spare time, but I’m going to think about that. That’s great stuff. That was one of the best answers we’ve had, Brian.

1:15:30 What am I missing, or what’s going on with you? What’s you know, I anything to finish this up? No, I think this has been really good. I’ve really enjoyed this, actually. I mean, I was always, I’ve always been quite curious about Makeshifts, why I’ve been saying to get Stef the Hacker on, I just think the concept is interesting, and the people there are interesting, but of course, like many people, even I had no idea at the extent of what they do, which is kind of part of the magic I think, is like we’re always working on something.

1:15:52 So it’s been really good, and I did want to ask you about your hacker in residence in the Isle of Eigg in Scotland, which I thought was, but I don’t know if we’re going to have time for that, but that he basically got seconded to a tiny island off the Scottish coast, really to be hacker in residence, the Isle of Eigg. It’s a beautiful place, you have to go there. It takes you 36 hours to get there from London to Scotland, which is a 4-hour train ride. Yeah, what is it, a boat or something?

1:16:19 You got to wait for the boat. You got to stay in a hotel. It’s like going on adventure, and by the time you you get there, because you’ve spent 36 hours traveling, you’re in a different frame of mind, and then you arrive in this beautiful island with these amazingly friendly people, all who kind of live out there, in this, just this really interesting community where those guys are hackers. They’re amazing. The, there’s about 90 people who live on this island and and can I give you an amazing story?

1:16:51 This brilliant place. They, the island used to be owned by a lead Scottish Lord. Okay. And one day, because he didn’t have an heir, he decided to sell his leadship and this internationally renowned artist, who’s world famous in the world of fine art, bought it and became the new lead the trouble was he wasn’t actually an internationally round artist. He was actually just a scammer, and there was no money and so they were all faced with the prospect of being evicted, and so this was in the 80s, and they did what would now be called a Kickstarter, and they kickstarted their own island, and they did a newspaper campaign, and people all around the country sent in little packets, little envelopes of money, and they raised, like, whatever it was a few million pounds to buy the island for themselves, and so this little community bought out the island, and then now they have their own power grid, with all like worldon fully renewable, like triple sourced power grid.

1:17:51 They run it themselves. They have their internet connectivity that they’ve set up themselves. It’s like this kind of, like, view of the future of how communities could operate. So people travel from all over the world to go to visit this island, and I was lucky enough to go there and be a hacker in residence for some time last year to help them think about technology and creativity, and the island is a place where you could go to do your project away from the buzz of the city, but with the fat internet con.

1:18:22 It’s a brilliant place to work. The Isle of Eigg, it’s spel I spelled e i g g right. It’s slightly, I suppose, there American sort of audience. Why not get, I didn’t get the Yeah, I said EK the first time I saw it, but it’s egg, he that, or you guys are just winding me up with that. Awesome.

1:18:36 I’m stoked, I asked about that. Even I didn’t know that. I just, we went to an island off the coast of Scotland and sat there for, like, quite a while doing te creative technology things. Inspirational story. Those guys.

1:18:45 I mean, kickstarting your own island. Yeah, that’s strong. All right, well guys, we could probably talk for hours, this has been fantastic. Stuff, it’s really exciting what you’re doing. Thanks for coming on.

1:18:54 If people want to get a hold of you, you’re Twitter at Makeshift. I’m Stef the Hacker on Twitter. St Step at Twitter F and Makeshift on Twitter. How long have you been on Twitter since they launched it, South by Southwest. I was there on that day.

1:19:08 It was and you just that crazy day where it was all an SMS, really? Yeah, it was brilliant. Very expensive on the SMS. At stuff is a strong statement when that’s your Twitter. It’s like, St, what?

1:19:20 Okay, that’s cool. All right, and is that the best way to get you websites or anything, or Makeshift doio, and I’m Stef the Hacker. So, and there’s links to all the other stuff from there. I’m writing on Medium, that’s there, some of the stuff I’ve talked about with you guys just now. I’ve written kind of more at length on my Medium page.

1:19:40 So, have a read. Fantastic, we’ll do that. Okay, very good. We’ll be at the drink about on Friday, the, this, the keeps continues The beers can keep continue, right? The beards are getting bearder.

1:19:51 Yes, it’s getting bigger. One’s the true fat event Monday night. Rohan Silva, David Cameron’s former special adviser on technology and policy. Okay, and then go to three beers to get tickets for that. Yeah, or chew the fat.

1:20:04 Okay, that’s hot. Now, okay, awesome. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can see all of our lovely faces. Brian is looking very good today. Not that you’re norming, or not, you know he’s dressed for success.

1:20:15 Yeah, and that’s Channel London Real, we’re also on London Real TV as well. We’re on Twitter at London Real, and you can send us an email, whatever. If you want to get involved, please do. This is episode 11. It’s fun as hell.

1:20:27 We’re going to keep doing this. Brian, thanks for all your help. Stef the Hacker, thanks for being here. I hope I meet you out in the future and hear some more stories about what you do, having me that was great conversation, guys. Okay, awesome.

1:20:37 Till then, it’s about the people, guys. Take care, take care. All right, see you, peace. A language translation company, it completely went bust. Most of that team today, it powers Google Translate.

1:20:48 Rockstar guys. And the that company had a complete. It was a terrible trajectory, you know. Lots of mistakes inside the company started in Japan, versus in the US. You know, founder was a little nuts and kind of quirky, you know, but and you know, lots of scars there, but the people were exceptionally talented, and they’ve all ended up in good spots then, so that was a failure for him.

1:21:07 Second business that he went to, was he joined a