Transcription
Think about your favorite company, and now imagine that they let you see into every meeting, in every room, from day one. We're building a media company and an investment fund. This is Flight Story.
We've been working for the last 12 months on an idea that I think has never been done in podcasting like this. What if we could have digital screens that were so high quality that they looked like podcasting sets? What if you could click one button, and it would change it into my set? Click another button, and it would change it into Paul Brunson's set. Click another button, it changes it into Deina McCall's set. What if any of you could come to our studio, click one button, and have any set emerge?
And let me tell you why this is so important. I pay £1.4 million a year in rent to have this building, our headquarters for Flight Story, here in central London. And if we start more shows and we haven't got digital screens, that means we need more space. And there's nothing more expensive than space in central London. So if we can film hundreds or thousands of shows from the same space, it will be a massive breakthrough.
And I'm going to go downstairs and take a look at it for the very first time. And I couldn't be more excited. I could not be more excited. Have you seen the screens? Uh, just going down to now. I'm excited. So, how much do they cost? 200. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh, I'm at home. Oh, wow. It is in [ __ ] now. It's so insane because it it it means that we can run multiple shows without having to pay more [ __ ] rent. Yeah. is is just a big conundrum that we had was how do you scale a company like this when rent costs so much money. So that's absolutely insane. I'm absolutely shocked and I'm blown away. I'm so excited. So how hard how hard and quick can you is it for you to change from this set to we need to talk ready. see if we need to talk. It's so clearly the future of like podcast um podcast like rental. It's like someone's basically going to set up a room. Um this is my business idea. Um this is someone's going to set up a room with like five of these in that soundproofed and you go there, you click your background, you record, you bounce. Thank you so much foring particularly nice of you guys to have gifted us these three screens. You shouldn't have to do that. So excited. Thank you. Thanks. You've got my off now.
You absolutely never know who is watching and how they might be able to help you in some way. And that is part of the reason why I think everybody who watches Behind the Diary should probably start creating content, even if you don't get a ton of views. Because what I'm about to show you is maybe a really good example of this. A team member of mine sent me a Slack message saying, "Hey, Steve, I know you like to invest in companies. I know you like to meet exciting founders. I've seen this girl on Instagram called Alice who's starting a women's runear brand." And there's just something about her. There's something about her personality. There's something about her vision. There's something about her tenacity. You should meet her. She lives in Dubai. Um, so I sent her a DM out of the blue, said, "We'd love to meet you. You're doing some interesting things. We've been talking over the last couple of months in the leadup to her launching her women's wear brand." And today, Alice has arrived at the office. So, we're going to go downstairs and meet her, and I'm going to try and give her the advice that I wish someone had given me when I was at the very start of my journey. Do you want to come meet her? She's amazing. Let's go. It's really good quality. Such good quality. I'm film. Wait, wait, wait. What size is it? [ __ ] You're losing customers. We're losing customers. Oh, it's pretty. It fits. At least it at least it fits. Small. I love the It goes further down. It doesn't rip, which is good. No, it's really good. What's this? Extra extra small. Yeah, I think small. I really I really think a lot about like who you need and how we find them. And are they going to be Dubai based? But this is the or structure like yeah how where we build out things with it and if people are being hired where makes sense. I would highly recommend them being close to you wherever you are. So when you're in a startup and you're all in the same kitchen is not the same as like hiring someone in Sheffield and you zoom with them. I would say that you get like 100% more output and the last 10% that you get from them being close is actually it's weird thing to say but it's actually worth like 100 100 200%. I would have everyone in the same room I'd hire a certain person who's willing to at this point in their life give up their life and focus on this is as obsessed as you. The most the most critical thing though is that you the there's like three of you and you're all sat in the same room and you're all absolutely in on this and you just you're obsessed because also that what you're what you create at the start there is ultimately what scales like what how the first 10 are as a team um is is the clearest influence of employee 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
I want to give you a little bit of context on why I said what I just said to Alice. In my book, the Diary of a CEO, 29 of the 33 laws is called create a cult mentality. And let me be clear, cults are venial, sinister, manipulative, and use psychological brainwashing to control their members. What I'm really saying is you want a cultlike commitment from your team members to specific values. The most important decision you will make when you launch a company is picking the first 10 people. Each of the first 10 represent 10% of your company culture, your values, your philosophy. And that core team's values and standards will spread like a virus. That initial team of 10 is a window into the culture that you will have when there are hundreds of you. Steve Jobs once said, "I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go to through the incredible work to find, you know, five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they they've never had a chance to do that before. and they don't want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-p policing and they only want to hire more A players and so you build up these pockets of A players and it propagates and that's what the Mac team was like. You've got to be really clear on your expectations and maybe more importantly willing to enforce them. You you'll come we'll have a conversation in two years because this has happened every single time I've said this to a founder. We'll have a conversation in two years time where you didn't listen to what I just said and you'll come back and tell me there's this particular person on my team. They've been letting me down so much so that I'm actually now just doing the work for them and um I don't know what to do about it. And actually what what happened there was they met there was an unmet expectation 18 months ago. You kind of knew it was unmet. You didn't have the guts to tell them that they weren't meeting your expectation. So, you know, their quite dissatisfaction grew and now the business is paying the price.
About a decade ago, I met with Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. He found that it was Steve Jobs. And back then, they told me that I could just ask him one question because he just had 5 minutes. So, I went up to Steve Wozniak and I said the following: Steve, I'm a founder. I've built a fast-growing company. What one question should I be asking you? And Steve Wozniak said to me 10 years ago, he said, "The most important question you should ask me is how do you keep the specialness as your company grows?" And he was completely right because when companies grow, they change. And so you have to be intentional. You have to be aggressively clear on who you are and who you aren't. And you have to defend that despite increasing temptation.
I'm about to have a meeting with my product team here involving Leon and Natasha, and I'm going to talk to them about the power of this thing called Culture Test. It's basically a survey that we've built that tests how you would behave in certain situations. And we've had 9,000 people fill out this survey. Now the score basically just tells you if someone is aligned to whatever company culture, whatever behaviors you want to have. And the key thing that people get wrong is they think of culture as a bunch of values you write on the wall. The real insight that we've had is something I shared two weeks ago in Behind the Diary, which is culture is the decisions that someone makes. It's not the words you write on the wall. It's not ambition and empathy and all these things. So, I'm building out this great survey and it asks these really interesting questions like it is Christmas Eve. You get a text message from a client. They need the login details to their account. They're a really important client. You don't have the details, but one of your colleagues does and they're on their honeymoon. What do you do? And it gives you four options in that moment to decide what you do. And every single option sounds good. But by all options sounding good, you kind of have to fall back on your own judgment. And that is what culture is. It's how you behave. You can go to cultureest.com, put your email address in, and when it's live, I'll email you personally letting you know. But going to go have a meeting now downstairs with the team. All right, let's go.
So basically, I'll I'll try and give the background context. The background context is um the most predictive way I think I've discovered to figure out if someone is right is to ask them how they would respond in certain scenarios. It roleplay them in certain scenarios where the the correct answer could quite clearly be anything. Mhm. But here the correct answer is something at another place the correct answer would be something else in that moment. But when you give someone all of these questions that are like ultimately testing how they respond in different moments, the remarkable finding for me has been how honest people are. I would say anyone above 50 is what we call like very aligned. So when we surveyed the best founders in our portfolio without exception, they all score above 50. Um when we survey our our best potential leaders here, they all without fail score above 50. CB scored 83. M Georgie scored 83. I've never seen an 83. It took me 1,657 people to find some people over 40 and there's only this many. There was there's literally 20 people out of 1,700 that are above 50. All of this brings me to my point. You're playing roulette with your company if you don't have some kind of alignment test.
Speaking of Culture Test, I just had a kid that scored 57 on my survey um come through. So, I'm on my way to do a talk, but I'm going to call him in the car and see who he is and chat to him. It's very, very rare for someone to score 57 on on my culture survey. So, when someone does score that highly, I always like to give them a call as fast as I possibly can. Hello, mate. Sorry, I just thought it'd be quicker just to call you. Can you are you free to free to talk for a second? Yeah. Yeah. So, um so TLDDR is I run lots of different businesses. Um I have my private office team which span like lots of different companies 40 50 different companies but in particular the big one of the big focuses at the moment is my company Flight Story and within Flight Story we have a media company where we're building lots of new shows and podcasts and things like that and we have our investment fund. We're conducting some really interesting experiments at the moment with scaling AI shows and I'm I've got this small team. When I say small, it's basically myself and a guy called Isaac who Matt who's a data scientist and we we've assembled this kind of small little crack team to try and crack the potentially billion dollar opportunity of like AI building AI shows. I was thinking that that might be a really interesting project for you to be involved in to work with to drive with me and my small little team of that that I've assigned to work on this because you want to build something that could really be disruptive and yeah, we're aligned. The ideal outcome I think would be to kind of be like be involved in some sort of tech breakthrough because I I really like the kind of the raw engineering and the raw technology of something. Okay, great. I'll send you a WhatsApp and we'll try and figure Friday out then. Awesome. Speak to you soon. Thanks, man. Speak to you soon. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. I like him a lot.
Hiring people in your company is the single hardest thing. The single hardest thing a founder has to do. If you want an understanding of how costly it is to accompany a project, how fatal it is if you hire the wrong person, here are some stats that I found earlier that I pulled up and I've been using in some uh decks for Culture Test. Check this out: 97% of founders say that they struggle to find great people, specifically people who align to their unique company culture. 80% of employees turnover is due to bad hiring. The wrong hire in a customer service facing role can cost 10 times more due to brand damage and lost clients. A bad hire can cost up to 30% of the employees' first-year earnings. Companies with poor hiring processes are three times more likely to have low-performing teams. Top performers are 400% more productive than average ones. 67% of hiring decisions are not successful, meaning two-thirds of hires underperform or leave. A single bad hire can drag down team performance by 30 to 40% due to disruption, morale loss, and time drain. The average time it takes to recover from a bad hiring decision is 17 weeks, which is 4 months. In my whole portfolio, I would say 95% of the founders still hire people based on vibes and gut instinct. But the definition of the word company is group of people. It is actually what you're building. You build the people and the people build the company. So your obsession reflected in the hours you spend per week on this should be on finding truly exceptional people. That is the first responsibility of a founder. So I built Culture Test, and Culture Test is magic. Magic. It's changed my life. It's changed my whole company. And so Sish, who I just had a phone call with, did the survey, get this, one hour ago. He did the survey one hour ago. And because he scored so highly, um, he scored in the very, very aligned category. It sends me an email and it's basically an alarm and it says, "Stephen, someone's just applied for a job. They scored as extremely aligned. This is their details." I emailed him within 10 minutes of him doing the survey. I said, "WhatsApp me." He sent me a WhatsApp. He said, "Hey, it's Sush." I said, "I'm going to give you a call." He's coming in on Friday. These people are rare, so you've got to you got to you got to collect them.
Your ability to make decisions quick. Is that something you've always kind of you let you hone it over time? Because you kind of you play out the scenario of slower decisions. If I compress my cycle times by half of my competitors, I will accomplish in 6 months what it takes them a year to accomplish. Double. And it's just by speeding things up. So when we think about making efficiencies or extending our resources or raising investment, the easiest way to raise your resources, increase your capacity, increase your productivity is to speed things up and just have this pretty aggressive attitude to delays and to paper walls I call them. What I mean by paper wall is you push on it and you realize it was fake. And this is what happens in in business in life generally is you develop these religions and one of my we can call them principles. first principles or principles. One of my religions is to whenever I'm given a time frame or whenever I'm given a deadline or whenever I'm faced with a challenge, one of my primary lenses is how do I speed this thing up? I would not have known that lesson if I hadn't been building businesses for the last decade plus. It like formulates as a thesis and then the thesis serves you well. So you become religious about the thesis, about the principle. It's like it grows in you and it's like a pattern recognition. Like more and more you see these patterns in business and in life. The pillar goes from being like polystyrene to like wood to steel to non-negotiable titanium and you just believe it. So you then become it. So you become urgent. You become impatient. It's the biggest cost in business. The biggest cost is not being wrong. The biggest cost is the time you waste making a decision. Yeah. Think about what like a normal corporate company would do. Someone would have an idea and then they'd spend like 12 months, 18 months, sometimes two years like doing a analysis of whether it's worth the investment and like who should we put on it and they do procrastination paralysis by procrastination. How do you find people that are the inverse of that? They love to roll the dice. How do you create a culture where the people that love to roll the dice are unable to roll the dice? Um, I guess it all starts with you as the founder or CEO of the leader believing that failure is feedback. Feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power. So, how do we fail faster, which is compress cycle times, speed things up, empower people, don't care too much about outcome. So, if something doesn't work out, don't throw a hissy fit that it didn't, the experiment didn't work. Focus on the part you can control, which is the input, which is did we run the experiment? Did we do it quickly?
Okay, I've got a phone call now with a guy called Rox. And I've probably not told you about Rox before, but Rox is a co-founder of mine in a new technology company that we've started here at Flight Story called Flight Cast. Here is the problem we're solving. If you look at some of the stats that have emerged recently, video podcasting is very much the future of podcasting. And I think YouTube might have just overtaken all other platforms as the home of podcasting. So, what are we going to do about that? We're entrepreneurs. We're builders. And there's a bunch of new problems that have emerged for video podcasters like mine. The video podcast that we do is a 20-gigabyte video file. And if all of the platforms like Apple and Spotify and YouTube are now going to do video podcasting, which they are, that means that our editors have to upload a 20-gigabyte file across loads of different podcast platforms at once. It's just impossible. So, we've made a tool called Flightcast. It's the world's first video hosting podcast platform. Also, we've built in tools into Flightcast that allow you to do A/B testing, so you can test your titles and many more things down the line. We also give you an AI data scientist who can look at all of your data from all of your platforms in one place. So, you don't have to log into your hosting platform over there, YouTube over there, Apple over there, all in one place. and some incredible other features to do with AI and experimentation to help you make sure that your podcast or your YouTube channel grows faster than anybody else's show. And that is at flightcast.com. If you're a podcaster, if you want to join, go to flightcast.com now and check it out. It is insane. Me and Rox have been building this company for the last 12 months. We've just gone live to our first set of customers. I've invested about half a million dollars into the company. And as is the case with any technology company, we underestimated how much money it would need. So I'm having a conversation now about the money side of things, how we be more aggressive. We're also going to do some crazy things on the platform where we'll make all of your clips for you for your show. So if you have a 2-hour podcast conversation, instead of having to hire editors, you can use Flightcast. We will cut your clips for you using AI. It's very, very exciting. Come meet Ross with me. I'm still constantly like ah we can probably keep ourselves alive at current revenue. And what's the what is the funnel at the moment? What's the the bottleneck in the funnel? Is it just you having time to do these sales? Uh before this week it was leads. We had no leads and then a LinkedIn post blew up and now we have more than enough leads. Like we've sort of got our V0 here and it's running and people are using it and people are happy with it which is great but there's still, you know, it's like we have an electric car. It's not a Tesla, but it's an electric car and it's maybe the first electric car. So people are like, "Holy [ __ ] electric." But until it looks super cool, feels super cool, does [ __ ] no one's ever seen, I I don't think we're taking over the world yet. Uh we really could be. and someone's going to launch and the other electric cars aren't going to be far behind, you know. Yeah, that's really what gets me. Okay, just wrapped that conversation with Rox and we have made the decision that I'm going to invest another 500k into flightcast.com so that we can accelerate the development of the platform. Couldn't be more excited. This is I should say this is probably probably part of the overall flight thesis, right? Like at Flighttory, we don't just want to build our media company or our investment fund. there's going to be so much technology on the way that we discover is needed and we will build that technology and we will give it to the world. So just like u Mr. Beast launched Vuestats which was his software platform which he wanted as a creator, we're launching flightcast.com which is a platform that we wanted as podcasters. So we're a media company, we're an investment fund but we're also a technology company as well. I really believe like we're really good friends with the guys at Spotify, really good friends with the founder. I really believe that in X number of years about 50% of the content on Spotify will be purely AI content. That is cuz they do courses, they do audio books, they do podcasts, they do music. I I especially believe, especially as it relates to podcasting, informationentric podcasting, there's very little reason why AI content won't win out. Um, and then with the work we've been doing over the last couple of about a year now on trying to crack the three pillars of how you make a great AI podcast. So, pillar one is like can you get AI to synthesize a voice in a way that's non-jarring. We kind of made a bet that with any imagine any rate of improvement 10% a month with the LLMs and the technology, it will happen. Point number two was can you get it to write content that is engaging, informative, and valuable. It will get there. And then the third point is the hardest which is like how do you make the thing grow and I think the thesis that is is I think the strongest is actually if it's a if the podcast is associated to an existing community/IP then you have an inbuilt ready to go audience. So Steven Bartlett launching Steven Bartlett's book club where it's a 1-hour AI podcast telling you about my favorite book the books that changed my life to my audience they go I would like to listen to that because they're coming with me. People always underestimate why their customers are buying from them and it's always slightly egocentric and romantic. I.e. no people are listening to Darvis because they like me and the questions that I ask and how I ask them. You no no no no no no no no people are listening because they want information. And it wasn't until like last week that we saw the retention graph on an air podcast was pretty much equal to the human one. I think the media companies of the future will actually just be that create creative process will just be figuring out the technology to publish at scale at speed. um and then to do the growth part. So that's kind of what we've been playing with and
We've been getting closer and closer, and this is like the the the bet here is like, can we disrupt our core media business, or can we add to our core media business by producing large-scale AI end-to-end shows? Cuz no other podcast is going to do it. They're going to be so romantic. They're going to be so obsessed with themselves. I mean, history tells a very clear story about new innovations coming in, people being romantic, backlash, and then value winning out. What is better wins out. What would you want to get out of being being a key figure in building something big and something something that actually has value?
Um, so like I have an offer from another company, and I chose that company because of the culture, but I don't care about that product in the slightest, and I think most people do. It's just like a B2B SaaS. Um, so they they don't provide and they provide value cuz they get money. They don't like change the world. Um, and I kind of want to be part of a company that does that. So, yeah. Cool. Thank you, mate. Thanks for coming in. Really appreciate it.
Um, just about to leave the office here at Flight Story HQ. And I'm going to go meet the core Dire of SEO team, which is about the 15 people that originally started the Diary of a CEO. We're going for dinner in London because the Dire of SEO is about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube, which is so [ __ ] crazy. Like it is so unimaginable to me that I'm a YouTuber that has a channel with such a big audience because it wasn't a goal that I had um to be a YouTuber. Like I just loved doing the podcast, and I did think that I would write a book someday about the podcast, but I never had a goal in mind in terms of size of audience. Many other areas of my life, I had like a measurable goal, but as it relates to podcasting, I did it because I loved it, and I wrote the book because I loved it, and it grew way beyond what I ever imagined.
But these moments where we hit these milestones, they matter and they don't matter. They matter because it's an opportunity to reflect and have a moment with your team, which is what I'm about to do tonight. We're going up to we've booked a private room at Sushi Samber with the first 15 members of my team. Um, so we'll have a moment to reflect and to say a few words to each other, but they also don't matter because it's a number, and actually the game we're playing here is both impact and journey. It's the impact we'll have on the world, and we do everything we can to make sure that's a really good one. And it's the journey along the way, which are these moments with each other, the ups, the downs, the pain, the anxiety, the struggle, all of that. That's what matters. It's the impact and the journey. Guys, we're 90 away. No, we're not. That's not how it works. We're We're 990 away. But that's a really nice thought. Three. Yeah. Okay, we have a present. And this is for Bera to open. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Okay, we got some more presents here. Yeah. So, um, we're all going to Cape Town, and, um, we've planned, Sophie's planned, I think it's five days in total there, doing lots of different things, lots of different activities, lots of fun, and it's one of the most incredible places on earth, I think. So, I'm so glad that you guys get to experience it. So, well done. But some words, Jack, you got anything you want to say?
Oh, that hurt. No, I think the main thing actually is just saying how incredible every single person here has been at getting it's just one thing you do every single day gets you closer and closer to this. And we're all such huge advocates of the 1%, and this is literally it shows every single 1% that every single person has done here. I think everyone here should be so so proud of themselves. It's hard to get one of these. There's not many people in the world that get one of these. Not many people get a million. For people to get 10 million, that is nuts. Yeah. From like the kitchen at Steve's when we were scrambling around to now we're like we're working in office and people are looking up to us of what we're doing. This is just a representation of just all your hard work. So, you should be very very very proud of yourselves.
I I just wanted to say as well like um it's so it's so surreal for me like I had a moment on the car on the way here and I was trying to think about what it meant and how significant it is and all those things and obviously we all know it's just a number at the end of the day but like it's the closer you get to the number the more you realize that on one end it was never about the number and it was about like the journey there and how like all of us as individuals have grown and developed and the experience we've had but the number becomes this real marker of the like the scale of the accomplishment and I think the platform's is 20 years old and there's only we're in the top roughly in the top 50 of all channels ever in Great Britain and I just think in four years for a bunch of people from shortage there's really it's really really special and you won't realize it in the moment you won't you never do you realize it afterwards you realize it in a couple of years in 5 years and 10 years that you were involved in something really really special to to have done this and had this impact and the scale of it in in one lifetime is is something else. But you all everyone in this room is so [ __ ] young. This was like your first thing that you did. This was your first journey. Life is these seasons. And for this to have been the first thing you did. It's just so unbelievably special. And it's a consequence of like Jack said, it's a consequence of the obsession about detail, all those late nights, that Sunday, that that weekend when you could have said no, when you could have on July 4th just packed it in. It's it's a culmination of all of those things. A bunch of decisions other people weren't willing to make and for whatever reason you all were. So enjoy this cuz it's it's truly legendary. It's a life worth living and uh thank you for the you've changed my life. We've changed each other's life. So I just want to say thank you as well from the bottom of my heart. So yeah, thanks.
I think one thing that a lot of us have the huge privilege of now is whether we wanted to or not, we've now become people that like on LinkedIn, people will come to us for advice. They'll come for us for methods, tips, they'll want to show us their work, and they learn so much from the work that we do. And this is like a privilege that uh like Will sent me a voice note the other weekend of a guy who's learning everything about his career from the work that we're doing. And I think that's an undervalued privilege that I I thought I would never have in my entire life. especially like growing up, you don't think that you're going to amount to much, let alone amount to being someone that people look up to. That's that means the world to me and it's sort of it's saved my career. It's it's added so much to my life, to my happiness. And so for that, I thank every single one of you and Steve and Jack. I got let's get emotional tears coming up. Ash just sent me a WhatsApp I sent him in 2017. Part of me thinks the diario gets big and I think I do it by talking to CEOs and having dark conversations with them about their experiences, the deep [ __ ] and then I think it becomes a book and then fire emojis. 2017 that's a wrap. That's a wrap. That's a wrap. That's the end of buying a diary.
I've got a favor to ask you. Um we've just broken 200,000 subscribers. Me and Will very happy. He said thank you. You probably can't hear him because he's not on the mic. Um we're in the office here on Saturday. It's 400 pm on Saturday behind the DAR team. Works harder than anybody on planet Earth. Yeah. And we're growing the team. So right now it's Will who's sat over there grinding it out. And we've now got another guy who is usually sits there. He's actually just left a second ago to go get lunch, which is Alex. Okay, there's Alex. um who's joined the team now to video me behind the scenes. And the reason Behind the Diary is growing is because of you guys. Because you engage with the channel, because you've left comments, because you've subscribed, because you've liked the videos. That is why it's growing. I couldn't be more excited because I love doing this. I love it. So yeah, let's go to the bloopers. My face looks [ __ ] I look like I've got black eye. Peppa the Pig has 39 million subscribers. What the [ __ ] We haven't overtaken Peppa the Pig and we're celebrating. We should cancel the celebrations until we overtake Peppa the pig. Peppa Pig. Imagine that. We're going to go celebrate, but Peppa the Pig is whooping her ass. Smiley, there's a curb there, mate. Yeah, there's a curb there. Yes, I I climbed it on purpose. See, that's You climbed it from the side. Have a look when you get out. It's going to be like an on ongoing uh thread some plop just smiley bouncing up curves and I was recording it. You should zoom in on the scarf of the tire.