Startups & software development Insights with Peter Laurie
Get ready to dive into REDD’s Business & Tech Podcast, Episode 024: “Unlocking the Secrets to Startup Success & Agile Mastery with Peter Laurie!” 🚀
Join our dynamic duo, Jackson Barnes (REDD’s Business Dev Guru) and Brad Ferris (REDD’s CEO Extraordinaire), as they sit down with Peter Laurie, a River City Labs mentorship maestro 🧙‍♂️ with 30+ years of software development team advising, startup consulting, and university lecturing under his belt.
You won’t want to miss this 🔥 episode if you’re into startups and software development! We’ll explore the ins and outs of creating a winning startup, the power of AGILE frameworks, and the great debate: outsourcing vs. insourcing software development 🤔. Plus, we’ll tackle the million-dollar question: what percentage of startups actually make it? đź’° And discover how established businesses can tap into the startup world for even more success!
So, tune in now to catch all the wisdom and cool insights you won’t find anywhere else! 🎧
#StartupSuccess, #AgileMastery, #REDDPodcast, #SoftwareDevelopment, #OutsourcingVsInsourcing, #BusinessGrowth, #TechInnovation, #PeterLaurie, #RiverCityLabs, #StartupCommunity, #EntrepreneurLife
Recorded Tuesday the 21st of March 2023
00:00:00 – Opener
00:00:20 – Intro
00:00:40 – Peter’s career background history
00:04:35 – The role of an Entrepreneur in residence
00:06:41 – Cutting edge of start-ups is the use of technology
00:08:18 – Product point of view
00:09:04 – Peter’s current projects and roles
00:11:44 – Accelerator Program
00:17:18 – Entrepreneur in resident
00:19:24 – How do you define a start-up?
00:21:59 – How would the audience and REDD’s client base engage the start-up community?
00:23:13 – Engaging in River City Labs community
00:27:40 – Relationship building for working on-site vs. work-from-home arrangements
00:29:12 – Corporate innovation stuff
00:31:17 – Start-up focus
00:31:57 – Peter’s favourite start-up
00:32:15 – Floodmaps
00:33:57 – Explorate – Digital Freight Forwarding
00:35:21 – How do you want a successful start-up?
00:39:56 – What process would you take if you were in a business?
00:40:52 – A lot of the software outsourcing degrades
00:43:11 – Outsourcing vs the internal capability to do it again
00:43:52 – MVP – Minimum Viable Product in Start-ups
00:46:45 – Context of start-ups
00:47:21 – Finding three bright young things
00:49:53 – Software Development in Universities
00:52:25 – What is a three out of ten in Peter’s words?
00:54:40 – Expectation management
00:56:36 – How is ChatGPT going to affect businesses?
01:02:14 – Using ChatGPT to get code written
01:06:45 – Increased rate of entrepreneurs that involve AI
01:10:47 – Solar power
01:19:48 – How to reach Peter Laurie?
01:22:19 – Outro
If you would like to discuss any of the topics discussed in this episode further with a REDD expert or if you would like to be a guest on the show, please get in touch either via our website, [email protected] or through any of the links below. https://redd.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/company/redd-digital/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksonpbarnes/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradley-ferris/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pjlaurie/
Thanks for watching!
About REDD
REDD is a Technology Success Partner business headquartered in Brisbane, Australia. The Business and Technology podcast focuses on the commercial application of digital technologies in business. Guests will include industry experts, vendors, customers, business owners and anyone with unique insight to share. We discuss and explore current events, issues and stories relevant to business leaders, entrepreneurs, technologists and everyone in between. The show will have a mix of hosts from the REDD leadership anchored by co-founding Director and CEO Brad Ferris.
REDD is a leading provider of the following services
- Digital Advisory Consulting
- Managed Technology
- Cloud Computing
- Cyber Security
- Connectivity
- Unified Communications
Our Vision
We believe, in the not so distant future, that people will not only deserve, but demand greater access to frictionless tools and systems that enhance and uplift their lives. Technology can create a truly blended lifestyle between work and play that prioritises mental health and wellbeing for our people, while increasing efficiencies and the effectiveness of emerging technologies in the workplace. We believe the future of work is built on perfectly balanced and curated tech stacks that seamlessly interface with the people they are built for. And it’s that future we’re building toward.
You can read the full transcript below:
Hello and welcome to REDD’s Business and Technology Podcast. I’m your host, Jackson Barnes. I’m your co-host Brad Ferris. And today we’re sitting down with Peter Laurie, who’s had decades of experience running successful startups at advising the startup community in Brisbane and with a background in software development. Peter, thanks for coming in. Really appreciate your time, mate. Do you want to start with your background and how you got here?
(00:00:40):
So thanks for having me in there. It’s good having in here. It’s good to be in here. So my background, started out in electrical engineering, but never worked as an electrical engineer because this thing called the internet turned up and I burned my fingers a lot less on the internet. So I’ve been doing software development since I was a little attacker because dad put together a computer in 1979. So I’m at the front of that generation that’s always had a computer in the house. So when it came through engineering, just a natural progression from university into high school into university, and then doing software development. Cause at the time you could come out of engineering. We doing six or seven software development projects, software development subjects, but you could do it at the time and come out with one. And that was in Garden Point Modular, right.
(00:01:24):
So as an engineer we had a lot more software development stuff that we were doing. So I jumped into that because that was a really good place for me. And for me, it’s a really creative tool. So you sit down, you can work with it. So I worked in various businesses going through and then in 2001 of the businesses I was working in went to absolute crap, but we nailed it technically. So for the people with the software development background, we were doing continuous integration loops. We were doing test driven development. It was called Extreme Programming back then. Not Agile,
(00:01:51):
Extreme Programming. Extreme
(00:01:53):
Programming. We’re running with a team of about eight or nine people and we were delivering every two weeks and then adjusting to what went on, but it still went to crap. So I went and did an MBA to work out what went wrong with that. Turns out we did an invoice often enough. That wasn’t the reason it went to crap, but it
(00:02:09):
That took an MBA
(00:02:10):
If we Yeah, that’s right. So two weeks in, I’ve worked out what I needed to learn. That’s the
(00:02:15):
Truth. It’s my daily speech in here. Nothing
(00:02:17):
Changed, it’s just because Yeah, it is. And well the invoicing every two weeks doesn’t solve it, but it means you’ve only got two weeks worth of work in the air, so you get paid for that. So we nailed that technically though, and then did the MBA to work out what went wrong. So about two weeks in, I worked out what we did wrong, but then was sitting there to learn. So I came out of that with strategy and entrepreneurship and microeconomics, which fits my megalomania quite well. And then we jumped in and started the business. So me and a mate of mine, and then my brother came along and joined us, started the business in developing software for businesses. And because of our experience, we knew we could do, we were talking about it as venture capability. So we knew we could build what they wanted.
(00:02:58):
The problem that the people that we were working with didn’t really have as good an idea as we thought they did. Cause we thought our ideas were crap. So someone else out of industry would’ve a much better idea. So we did about eight or nine of those sorts of new ventures with them and it went to crap. And then in 2000, this is a long answer to the question. No, you’re right. Then in 2011, end of 2011, down at the Waterloo Hotel, we’re talking to Steve Baxter, who’s a friend of the family as well, and he said, I’m starting a co-working space up here. I said, shut up and take my money because that’s going to bring the people that I need to work with. And so instead of us going out and finding ’em, we should be able to find them there. Then there’s this really weird situation there where I’ve got this technical back, deep technical background and then this formal training and how the business is supposed to work.
(00:03:42):
And then there’s all these people that weren’t really executing well. So I’ve got to go in and help and there’s a real moral hazard that turns up. So I’m taking them through their business and how they should be attacking it and then saying, so what you really need is an organization that can do the software development in this mechanism and all this way. And oh, by the way, we do that. So there’s a real moral hazard there. So you’re sort of coaching people to need you. So it’s almost grooming. And so then that never worked really well because I’d be doing the coaching for free basically, and then charging a proper amount for the software development and that most people couldn’t handle that. So started doing more stuff commercially. So back into that stuff. So a lot of work with Oracle, which led to Virgin Enex, Telstra, those sorts of places, n a Suncorp.
(00:04:30):
So doing that sort of work and then doing a whole bunch of work in the startup ecosystem just purely as a mentor or what they call an E I R. So an entrepreneur in residence is normally the role that I’m playing. So I’ve been applying the stuff that I’ve learned over the last 30 odd years, which makes me sound really old cause I am and into the new venture space. So that’s where I spend the majority of my time. A lot of stuff here in Queensland, a lot of stuff in Melbourne as well. So Victoria,
(00:04:56):
So that is really your advising startups on what technology they need and then all what development they need and then how to go and do it. You’re not doing any of the developing anymore, the more strategic advisor?
(00:05:07):
Well, it’s kind of interesting because I spend the majority of my time denying that technical background
(00:05:13):
Because you
(00:05:13):
Get well put in this bucket, right? Oh, well you fix my website for me it’s like, no, no, I won’t, right? But I’ll tell you why you don’t need your bloody website and how you should work properly. So I try and stay away from a lot of the tech, which is confusing for a lot of people. So a lot of the, I’m a business nerd, so business models, all that sort of stuff about how to execute and working in uncertainty, which is the stuff we might talk about a bit later, but in spaces where nobody knows what you’re going to do. So if nobody knows what we have to do, we’ve got to work it out for ourselves. So how do we go about working it out for ourselves? So we go through that sort of thing. And then part of solving that in the current environment is obviously technical based. Technical based. So where those sorts of advisors would normally stop there and say, now go and find someone do it for you. I can run through the whole gamut with them as well. So it’s actually, it’s a very big part of what I do, but it’s not where I start because most things aren’t a technical problem. They’re a business problem first.
(00:06:10):
Yeah, I was going to say, so the startups that you’re dealing with are the businesses that you are working with and not necessarily tech startups. They could be any business doing anything. And again, it’s like, okay, well here’s the problem we’re trying to solve. Here’s our mission, here’s what we’re trying to do. Yep. You will first look at that business problem and if there’s a techno technology function or technology solution that can work for that business, that’s when you are get tools
(00:06:36):
Out. Exactly. The bit that I’d add to it is that the vast majority of them, the solution or the cutting edge part of it actually uses technology. So it becomes very quickly becomes part of it. But it’s certainly starting with the business first and working the way through that. Because like I said before, every every technical problem that you run into is a business problem first. So yeah, I can solve it, but how do we get here and why am I solving this thing? So I spend a lot of time either working with tech teams to teach them what they should be solving rather than what they’re optimizing around, which is normally how do we do as many story points a week as we can, or how do we make sure our backlogs as short as it is, and then teaching them that these other things they need to do and they can actually do all the cool things they want if they can justify it in a business terminology. And then from the business side, I’m sort of taking them through, well business is a bit tricky taking from the business side through, hey, if you ask them for the right things, they can probably build it. And then there’s the whole product aspect where I’ve been spending a bunch of time at the moment as well around sort of product versus tech versus the business. Do
(00:07:38):
You come across many founders in your work experience that have a level of commercial acumen or that business experience or is
(00:07:46):
That, it depends. They all come from different places. So they definitely are tech founder ones that come through and they’re actually great because they already know the really complicated stuff and I can teach ’em business, right? The business is that complicated. Can’t the people that come in from business and say, I want to do this tech, I can’t teach them how to program, I can’t teach ’em how to do that stuff. Well I can, but it’s a lot harder for them to do, especially because I have that tech background. I know how to get them through from a tech person across this. And the same thing from a product point of view. So from a product point of view, you understanding what people actually want’s, lovely, but it needs to be tamped by what we can actually build and what they’ll actually pay for. And so we’re coming from different spots and it’s about getting them into the middle and working out how to play. So a lot of the stuff that I end up doing is actually sneaky teaching them how to be a high performing team and getting them to communicate properly and realize that some of the time people dunno the answer. So holding your breath until you get lied to so you’ve got something to work off so you can efficiently deliver the wrong thing is the way it sort of degrades most of the time.
(00:08:53):
Looking forward to getting some valuable insights out of you from you’s experience of that business mentor side with that tech background is really interesting actually. So let’s set the landscape for the audience listening. What are some of the current kind of projects and roles that you are doing now before we jump and ask you a bunch of questions?
(00:09:09):
So I’m doing at River City Labs, which is what’s been around for, we talked about before for about 12, 13 years now. So in a role called the mentor on residence, which is basically I stick my nose into other people’s stuff until they unify against me with pitchforks and torches and taste me away. Cool. But the important thing is they do it as a team.
(00:09:28):
So what does that look like at River City Labs? Obviously I’ve heard about it, but I don’t Yeah, know the specifics. So
(00:09:32):
It’s a co-working space.
(00:09:33):
So you pay, I’m a guy, I want to rock up, I got to want to rent a desk kind of thing. Yep, yep.
(00:09:39):
Okay. Or there’s a digital membership that’s coming. I’m not sure if it’s been deployed yet because obviously co-working space is a tough business model at the best of times a global pandemic, it gets tougher. So finding a way to actually provide that community and collaboration is important because the entrepreneurship journeys, I’m sure you remember, is a lonely thing to start with and ups and downs. And so having that community together is really important. So it’s a membership based thing. It’s actually run by ACS at the moment. So the Australian Computer Society, so that was they board River City Labs from Steve, I think it was about 2017. But it’s a membership and then as part of that membership you actually get access to be able to book me. Okay. So just before this I was doing a 45 minute call, 50 minute call with the team
(00:10:25):
And then mentors and residence. Is there a few of you
(00:10:31):
There? So the mentor and residence thing is because there’s a lot of mentors that are involved, but I was there every day and then I’d have someone who’d been there once last year turn up and try and get treated the same as I did. It’s like, ah yeah, we’re going to have to change this otherwise I’m not going to do it anymore. Yeah, just personal motivation stuff. So just sort of bumped it up a bit rather than taking away their title. Bumped my title up. But there’s probably, there’s a whole bunch of mentors there that have the specialization in their particular film. So my specialization is probably being around for the last 12 years, having seen thousands of startups come through and knowing what their problems are. Isn’t
(00:11:07):
That number the past
(00:11:08):
Thousands? Yeah, it’s a bit weird. So I feel stupid when I say it. I’m getting better at saying it. But look it, it’s 12 years, a hundred a year, which is two a week. I definitely do two a week.
(00:11:20):
And of those of thousands success stories,
(00:11:25):
Oh yeah, there’s percent huge there. Percentage? Percentage is an interesting one. It depends where you draw from. So it’s a people that have an idea
(00:11:32):
Still with us today,
(00:11:33):
Still with us, but it’s about the number that you start with, right? Yeah. Is it people that turn up and have an idea or is it people that had got something and decided they were going to do it full-time
(00:11:42):
Until the truth, right.
(00:11:44):
And part of the brief of an accelerator program is to take those people that decided to do it that this is what they’re going to do with their life for at least for the seven years or something like that. And take them through and actually help ’em get there. So from an accelerator program point of view, I think it’s much higher than that. So normal, I reckon it’s about 60%, 67%. Oh really?
(00:12:05):
Expected. Much lower to be
(00:12:06):
Honest. And then, okay, so that’s the semi established if you like coming in and then the others just, mate, I got an idea, I’m having a crack. Yeah,
(00:12:15):
Yeah, I’ve got a great idea. Find someone to build it for me and that’s it. Yeah, look it, it’s harsh it, it’s very hard to be general with it. Yeah, okay. There’s people that come in that are undeniable, they’re definitely going to do it. There doesn’t really matter what they do, they’re going to find a way through it. There’s people that come in that definitely can, and it’s about making sure they see that. And then we give ’em the tools to be able to do it and the confidence to be able to do it and explain it to them, which is sort of where I spend a lot of my time just saying, no, you’ve got everything you need. Just go and do it. Right? It’s not quite that simple. But demonstrating to them they’ve got everything they need. And then there’s some people that this starts to get a bit harsh, but there’s some people that are there just because startups are cool and I get to turn up at 10 o’clock in the morning and I get to wear t-shirts and I really like bad pizza and bad beer, so this is my place must crazy.
(00:13:06):
What was it talking about in the show? But I mean, geez, the amount of patience and EQ that would be required. Cause you’d be dealing with all different kinds of personality types.
(00:13:15):
But it’s also that there’s people there that actually have something that’s genuinely their passion. And so the way that I fell into a lot of this stuff is basically how much of a, well I normally say how much of an asshole do I have to be to withhold how helping them, but I can help ’em. So I’m going to jump in and help them. Which again was the whole thing we talked about earlier about the moral hazard. So I need to earn some money somewhere because food’s nice, it’s nice to have a place to hide at night. So it’s about balancing that sort of stuff. But there are people that are undeniably should be in there. And there’s a couple of things that I was involved in. One called Startup Catalyst, which we took 2018 to 29 year olds across the San Francisco Silicon Valley, blew their minds and bring them back.
(00:14:01):
The idea was to actually build more CTOs locally. So we picked over technical skillset, so not necessarily software development or network or engineering or security. So machine learning stuff, a bit of robotics, even ui ux, which is a very technical skill when you get deep into it and you bring them all over there. And we selected on that. And then we also selected on their leadership capabilities because we could only take so many over. So we wanted to come back and lead and bring other people through. And that was one of the most important things I’ve done in the ecosystem there. How
(00:14:35):
Many people did you take over?
(00:14:36):
We’ve taken on the youth mission, it was 20 a time, but we did four, so we did 80. Cool. I’d probably tell you where about 50 of them are now. And what they’re doing, it’s a real slow burn that’ll have a big impact, but it’s hard to maintain. So
(00:14:47):
50 successful staff
(00:14:50):
Entrepreneurs? Well, it depends how you measure success. So there’s a couple that went over and did this thing and they worked out that it’s not for them and that’s successful as far as I’m concerned. And then we also put them on, not a pedestal, but we put ’em on panels and stuff and say, talk about why it’s not right for you. Because what we want is more people actually participating in this. Because one of the things that we’ve got locally is we’ve got an unending stream of talent coming out of our universities. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. So after we did the first intake for Startup Catalyst, I thought, right, we’ve caught up with everybody and now we’re going to get four or five a year.
(00:15:23):
Sorry, what’s Startup Catalyst?
(00:15:25):
That’s the mission that we That’s
(00:15:26):
Okay.
(00:15:27):
And then the next year it was better and the year after that it was better again. And I think that that year and the year after that one, we actually went national. So it was just ridiculous. So we’ve got these, this talent coming out of our universities and we don’t really have the roles or the things to
(00:15:44):
Do. So how does that work? So they come out of uni? Yep. This is through River City?
(00:15:48):
This through River City Law. Well, yeah, through.
(00:15:50):
So I assume River City has a connection with the universities.
(00:15:53):
Well, it was where we ended up was getting university students because that they were easy to access from a market perspective. Cause we could go through the universities and advertise to them, but we didn’t really constrain it to university stuff.
(00:16:05):
And then they’ll come out to the age group that you would take over is generally around that age.
(00:16:11):
18 to 29 is where we ended up. Okay. Yeah. So we started 18 to 25, but that wasn’t quite right. Then we went, started to go to 21, 29 to just, because sometimes it’s a disservice to take someone over too early because they haven’t really worked out who they are yet. I don’t worry that. But there was one guy that we took over and we we’re doing the interview and it’s like, yeah, you’re great, but we are not taking 18 year olds. So justify it. So that was in the interview, harsh question. And he’s just did, it’s like fair enough. Wow. Come along. Right. Awesome. They’re we’re just talking about the success part of it there. Ones that have gone through and done founding really good big businesses. There’s a couple of that taken a shot and haven’t quite worked and now they’re doing really well. And then there’s people that are still turning their career around. So you come out on some sort of trajectory this way and you’re shown that the bright shiny place that the land of milk and honey over here where you’d love to be and you got to turn the ship and get there.
(00:17:09):
So I want to circle back to the Start community have this, but before we do, apart from River City Labs, what else are you working on now?
(00:17:16):
Oh yeah. So I do stuff. I was the E I R at UQ in 2018. So did two intakes there. I’m currently lecturing at UQ in
(00:17:23):
E I R
(00:17:24):
Is Entrepreneur and Residence. Oh, yep. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Terminology. It’s not to exclude you guys, just so you don’t have to say entrepreneur and residence every time. So the lecturing in the NBA capstone at UQ in entrepreneurship there with Cam Turner. So there’s stuff down in Monash that’ll be coming back as well. So it’s sort of in their student staff and maybe a little bit of research at Innovator. I’m also doing a little bit of investing directly myself at a really small scale, but it’s sort of finding that talent that we’re talking about before and saying, please don’t drive Ubers, please concentrate on your business. There’s some money. And then a little bit with a bit with River City Labs, it’s sort of scattered in a lot of different places. Basically
(00:18:09):
Nobody, it’s the same by the sounds of it.
(00:18:12):
Yeah, well it feels that way sometimes. And it feels exactly the same every week sometimes as well. Are you
(00:18:19):
Directly involved in any of these businesses as a board member or a strategic advisor?
(00:18:24):
A lot of strategic advisor staff. But it, it’s interesting because there’s ones that I work with that I’ve been working since they were two people. Right now they’re 60. Oh, there’s another one that might be even more than that. So I kind of top, I walk in, I know everything that’s going on, I can help it, but I don’t really have a formal relationship there. So some of them I have, I’m an investor in them, but really early stage investment stuff. So
(00:18:45):
In your words, Peter, what is the current state of the startup community in southeast Queensland?
(00:18:50):
I think it’s strong. I think it’s it. There’s a bit of an ebb and flow going on. So up until about 2017, 16, there was a lot of activity there. The state government was throwing a lot of money in that sort of direction. And to everybody’s surprise, including theirs, a lot of it stuck. So there’s a lot of good programs that came through, made things happen since then. I mean Covid help, but it wasn’t really the cause of it. I think we just lost a bit of steam there and then people basically tapped out a bit that we put a lot of effort in for five or six years and now or maybe a little bit longer and now it’s time for someone else to come through.
(00:19:24):
So how do you define a startup? I mean, maybe how did the state government define a startup?
(00:19:30):
A point of contention. So especially when you put it inside entrepreneurship. So you can argue that the hairdresser and the butcher are entrepreneurship. They’re starting a new thing. So what do we normally talk about with the startup is the fast growth and high potential. So you’re normally looking to make it happen in 18 months or something like that. So really get through and do it. And if you are onto something, you can make it happen that quick. And then it’s also not just going to stop at a geographic region, it’s going to just keep going.
(00:19:57):
Yeah, right. Okay.
(00:19:58):
And if part of the mission for the startup Catalyst stuff was to illustrate to them that the people in San Francisco, which is where we went, there’s no real difference in how they work. There’s no real skys still blue people, laptops work the same way. What it is, it’s an intent. It’s a way of doing. So getting them to create their own futures, which fits back with the education because we teach them everything they need and then they end up doing something that’s just not sufficient that they look like. So instead of over saying, oh we’re them, let’s teach them less, it’s like, no, well keep teaching the same stuff and give the ability to build something, give the ability to work on it. So the state, it was off. So the chief entrepreneur was the sort of thing that came through with Mark Salby. So he was the first one and then Steve Baxter was the second one and they really opened up the space a bit. I like to think of the role as preferred agitator
(00:20:52):
Preferred. Okay. So when you say the heat came out of it around,
(00:20:56):
Yeah. Cause a lot of it was around events and getting ready together and that dropped away a bit
(00:21:02):
So that when you say it dropped off a bit like the amount of startups coming through or the amount of startups kind of
(00:21:08):
Coming through, the amount of activity. So I’d say that part of what comes through is a reaction to the activity. There’s people that we’re going to do it anyway. And there’s still, to be honest with you, there’s still a lot of people outside of it that I’d consider part of the startup ecosystem, but they don’t consider themselves part of it because they look at it and think that I’m not 19 years old and I don’t skate to work. So it’s an interesting sort of space there. But part of the value of me talking to you guys about this is to make sure everybody understands that anybody can come along and participate. You don’t need to be 19 years old, you don’t need to skate to work. And that there’s a whole bunch of value there that we can help unlock. And you can probably point to the fact that I spend a lot of my time with 19 year olds, but that’s because the only people that turn up.
(00:21:53):
So how our audience and our client base manager is more in the established business space. How would they engage the startup community?
(00:22:01):
It’s a good question. So really the core of this startup stuff, in my opinion, is working on a value, valuable, hard problem. And a lot of startups, especially the less successful ones, sort of come out and they’re working on a hard problem, be it technical or bit IT social or whatever it is. They’re working on that. And just because it’s hard doesn’t make it valuable. So one of the things that a lot of businesses that are in your listenership, that’s the right word, but the listen checks out listening right now computer says yes, sorry, Jack p chat, TBT must have got that wrong. So the, they’ve all got valuable hard problems. They might even have some valuable easy problems. So the real thing is making sure that the ecosystem knows, or ecosystem sounds weird, but we’ll come back to that in a sec. But make sure the people there know that they’ve got that problem. So we’ve got smart people who can build anything and at the moment they’re choosing things that sound like they’re hard and valuable, but they’re not valuable.
(00:23:00):
So give me a real example. So let’s say there’s someone that owns a trucking company and they have a hard problem, they should just, where they go and they just float the problem by start a community. How does that
(00:23:13):
Work? So I think that a good place to engage would be at River City Labs. So to come down and just sort of speak to the community down there and say, Hey, I’d love to speak to someone who can help me solve this particular problem.
(00:23:23):
So maybe practically so literally if I just rock up Yep. What’s it going to be? Kind of bunch of dudes sitting around.
(00:23:31):
Well, so when they’re all working the same way you guys are working, right? Basically there’s stuff going on, but there’s normally events that are there. Okay. There’s certain events that are around. So I think there’s a community coffee one coming soon. Yep. Well, well perpetually there’s one every week I think, or every two weeks we should go. Yeah,
(00:23:49):
I’ve never actually been down there. Absolutely.
(00:23:51):
And sort of just turn up and talk to the people there, ask about what they’re doing, listen to what they’re doing. So have you considered doing these things right or Hey, listen, so you’ve got a take background or you’ve got a background at working in problems that are hard. I’ve got this really hard problem. Do you reckon you could solve that?
(00:24:08):
Right. And relationships just form ideas get thrown around, sparks happen and off you go. Yep.
(00:24:13):
And it may well be, it’s not for me mate, but you have a chat to that guy, have a chat to that girl over there. She, she’s into that sort of space. So it’s a real, it benefits from participation normally when I’m talking to people about it when they come in. So I do a sort of group mentoring. I do every now and again down there as well. So I get sick of doing one hour with everybody individually. I just say, okay, everybody, I’m about to do one, everybody in the room and it turns into two hours, but it’s the first hour and a half for everybody. So I get very time efficient. For me, one of the things I talk about is you’ll get 10 times back from what you put in, but if you put zero in, you’ll get zero out. And even if we made the space a hundred x, if you put zero in, we’re still going to get zero out.
(00:24:58):
So you got to put something in. So it’s really about getting there and participating and being open and genuinely curious is what I’m normally talking to people about. So what could we do? How could we work? But it’s really disappointing to see some teams get stuck, especially on the tech side. Oh, what we need to do is put this on Kubernetes and then it’ll be perfect if we build it, then they’ll come right When that’s not what people care about. And it’s also not the problem that they’ve got right now. They don’t need to be able to work out how to scale to be something the size of Netflix. They just need to work out how to get the value done.
(00:25:26):
Are there any other ways that the business, established business community can engage a startup community apart from physically walking down there? Well,
(00:25:33):
I mean, okay, we’ll solve it. They can reach out to me for starters. Okay. Lot. One of the roles that I play in the space just by accident is sort of routing people around to the right spot and speaking to the right people about it. Because I’m floating between a lot of different places. I’m not only really a one. And it’s interesting, once you, you’re genuinely curious about what people are doing, you understand what lights them up and you’ll run into someone else, you remember how to connect them and you put them in the right spot and then the sparks happen, like you were talking about before, right? Because there’s so many things that we could be working on. And there’s so many, there’s only so many jump the queue apps and so many coffee ordering apps and those sorts of things that we can get through. But there’s some really hard valuable problems out there that we can solve. And they’re actually easier than a lot of the stuff they’re trying to do.
(00:26:21):
You see that QR code on tables in restaurants and stuff? Yeah. Now it’s a tiny problem. Wasn’t really a hard problem, but yeah, geez. Probably did well
(00:26:29):
Waiting for iPhone to actually use it. Yeah.
(00:26:31):
So you mentioned before it’s kind of a membership type system. So you have in the office memberships, you mentioned digital memberships. Yep, yep. So if you have a, I’ll call a physical membership, you basically have a full-time
(00:26:47):
Desk. So you can either have a full-time desk if there’s an office there or there’s hot desks as
(00:26:51):
Well. And then so on at any given time, how many people are, I mean I guess what’s the capacity of the place and then at any given time, how many physical members that there be
(00:27:00):
At the moment? I mean you should get Paul in here to talk about this actually. So she runs River City Labs. What kind of fascinat actually? Yeah. And I think Laura’s there as well now. So the, it’s worth having a chat to them about that. So at the moment it’s not heavily patron because everybody’s worked out that they’ve got a spare bedroom, no matter had a Zoom work now. So I’ve made it even harder. But I think another way to engage for an organization is to sponsor an event or to be a business sponsor of the space.
(00:27:29):
Do you ever have businesses who just place someone there that have a hot desk and they’re like, well, we’ll just rotate. I don’t know. For us, we’ll just rotate somebody working down there and have a chat to people and again, see if, yeah, you can build relationships. Good idea. I mean you never, it’s, I guess it’s the philosophical debate about working from home versus in the office. Yeah, personally I’ve come more to the hybrid. I was pretty staunch on office because of that relationship building, team working. Yep. Spark building. You definitely can do things remotely, but I just went to the Philippines for two weeks and my relation, we’ve had people over there for over a year, but the change in relationship, the change in dynamic based on the personal experience we have is just a hundred x, not 10 x. So there’s definitely, I look, I believe in physically showing up. Yep. Yeah. Do you see businesses? Yeah. Just placing someone there and yeah, what value
(00:28:25):
Do they get out of it? Let’s put it that way.
(00:28:27):
So it’s a newer way of working. So it’s it normally you’d measure performance or traditionally you’d measure performance by attendance. They’re there, they look busy, therefore they’re doing stuff which you know, laugh. But a lot of places you still go there.
(00:28:43):
Bumps and seat mentality.
(00:28:44):
Yeah, that’s right. And where are you? I was talking to a customer outside now you were having a smoke, right? So
(00:28:49):
A vape these days, man. No.
(00:28:51):
Yeah, however they choose to kill themselves, it’s fine. So it’s their own thing, man. So I think it’s a bit of a change in way of doing it. So 2000, so the mid two thousands, 2010, so teens I suppose you’d call them, there were businesses dropping teams in there to do something different. So part of the problem when you’re talking about the corporate innovation stuff is that it’s very hard to do something in a different way if you’re sitting next to someone who’s doing something in the traditional way. So this concept of an ambidextrous organization, so you need to be able to work a little bit differently. So getting them up and putting them somewhere else actually helps them feel different. It sort of gives them approval to move in a different way. And part of it’s about seeing how fast a high performing startup can’t move.
(00:29:37):
So whereas it might take us six weeks to do a wide set of wire frames in corporate, it’s like, no, I did it just then. Do you want me to do it again in front of you? I can just do it now. Yeah, yeah. Right. So that sort of exposure to how much faster it can be in different ways of working I think’s really valuable. There’s some problems with it. I mean we could talk for an hour about the corporate innovation stuff, but there are people that are doing it. But part of it, I mean you guys got the ping pong table here. I normally talk about the way that most businesses think about it is, look at the ping pong table
(00:30:06):
Mate. You see the turntables and the
(00:30:07):
Sound system? Yeah. I didn’t want to throw you guys onto the bus frigidity yourself, right? You don’t know what I’m about to say.
(00:30:13):
Edit this out, Brad.
(00:30:16):
But so a lot of people will think that the innovative thinking and the innovative way of working comes from ping pong, table bean bags, bad pizza, bad beer, and being able to turn up at 10 o’clock and wear t-shirts, right? But where it actually comes from is the lack of cons in my opinion, is the lack of, well, the constraints that they have to work in. So they’ve only got, they’ve got to do everything in two weeks. Why? Because they’ve only got two weeks worth of runway. So they’ve got to operate in a certain way. And that brings creativity because you’ve got to be creative to work in that environment. And one of the things that falls down in the larger corporates is they think that we’ll just put smart people in a room and we’ll give them free coffee machine and they can turn up whenever they want in the swipe card and we’ll treat them differently.
(00:30:56):
Then suddenly innovation will happen. But for me it’s really around that constraint stuff. So then seeing those startups actually operating in that constraint, they can say, well hang on, they were being super pragmatic and it just worked barely enough to be able to work out whether it’s worth doing properly as opposed to, well we’ve got to go through and show all our working and then deliver something in 18 months so that the startup focus is I’ve got to deliver something in two weeks or in four weeks or in two days. So it’s a different way of working. And where the value comes from that is actually that you learn a lot quicker, right? Because your feedback loop’s a lot tighter. And if this is part of where I’m in the coaching part with it, if they’re actually learning from that feedback, so they’re not just scattering and shooting at everything, but if they’re actually learning about how to do stuff and what they’re doing and they’re building up theories around how the market works or how their customers think and they very quickly track into where they need to be.
(00:31:49):
So Peter, you’ve been a strategic advisor for thousands of startups now I didn’t actually pay for this question mate. That’s put play on the spot here. What’s your favorite one of all time and why?
(00:32:03):
There’ll be people that’ll be upset with this, but okay, I’m going to do two, right? So
(00:32:08):
Which one first? Let’s
(00:32:09):
What one is flood maps? Okay, I’ve heard of them. Yeah, so they found a way to do flood mapping. It’s about 10 years old. Oh no, they’d be four or five. Okay, maybe. I think so they came through River City Labs accelerated with me. Okay. So Juliet, who’s the ceo and Ryan who’s the cto, they found a way to do flood mapping, which is traditionally something once in a hundred years sort of thing to do it 130 times, 130,000 times faster. And I thought they were making that up and it wasn’t. It’s gone from 10,000 to 50,000 to a hundred thousand to 130,000 times. So what that means is instead of saying, oh it’s flooding Peter, you better head up. It’s water’s coming from this way, you can drive out that way and don’t worry about it. You are going to be fine, but you better get to your mum’s place. So that’s sort of stuff that they can do that depending on where the rain’s coming from, whether it’s coming from straight down or whether it’s coming from up the river or whether it’s coming from flood from below. So that they do that sort of stuff there. And that’s great because flood engineering traditionally couldn’t see that solution
(00:33:18):
And they went over to the US and then I believe they supplied with the US as well.
(00:33:22):
Yeah. So they’ve got an integration with Waze. Yeah, I think it’s somewhere in Virginia.
(00:33:27):
And why are they your
(00:33:29):
Because
(00:33:29):
The first of two favorites. Sorry. Okay.
(00:33:31):
So because they had something, they stuck to their guns, they’ve made it happen. And Juliet’s just basically a force of nature. She made that stuff happen and she’s the flight engineer. So having the arguments with the people of doing it in a inefficient way for the last 30 years and convincing that change in navigating that stuff. It’s just they, they’re really, really good. They’re one of my favorites. And the other one that comes to mind is one called Explorate, which is does digital freight forwarding, so logistics and freight forwarding stuff. So I’ve got a container full of stuff in China, I need to get it to Australia, make it work. So it, they’ve navigated their way through, no pun intended to be able to come through a particular business model and then changed to a different one and found the right spot to do it. Now they’ve found it. There’re 60, 65 people right now.
(00:34:23):
So they’re one, they’re your second factor. Second, yeah.
(00:34:26):
Because
(00:34:30):
How they’re able to pivot and then become a good spot and then Grown done that risk.
(00:34:34):
Both ones that I’ve spent a lot of time with. So I’ve been really involved in those ones. And then there’s other ones in the startup ecosystem like Vault performance that they do a whole bunch of sports performance testing. They’re based down opposite the Baran hotel. So down near Bunnings, down at Newstead, that sort area. Yeah, big orange building, they’re great Go ones down. Incredible things. And there’s another one Octopus Deploy. They came out of nowhere actually
(00:35:01):
For us. Oh, you were an advisor for No,
(00:35:02):
No, no, I wasn’t, no. Didn’t barely knew anything about them. I I’d heard of them and then all of a sudden it’s 175 million investment that was cut of the
(00:35:10):
US couple years ago.
(00:35:11):
Yeah.
(00:35:12):
So from your years of experience from solar developer and then our advising startups as well, in your words, if you could put it down to a paragraph or a short sentence, how do you run a successful startup?
(00:35:24):
So it really, the biggest problem is that most people that jump into this startup, it’s a big difference. It’s a big change. I’m probably on a decent job or I’ve got this opportunity, this burning desire to do this thing and I’ve got a solution in my head, so I’ll jump in and the whole idea is to build that solution as quickly as I can. The field of dreams sort of play. If I build it, they’ll come, right? And what the problem with that is, is that you’re very likely wrong with that idea. Not because you’re bad, not because you’re stupid, not because you haven’t got experience, not because you don’t have insight, it’s just because you are probably solving your problem. Not everybody’s problem. So the big thing to do is to actually get that really tight feedback loop that we’re talking about before and be able to get that feedback and work out whether you are right or not. But instead of working out how to very quickly build the thing which may be wrong, you’re actually working out how to very quickly work out what the right thing to build is and then build that.
(00:36:21):
So kind of rapid prototyping, rapid market feedback.
(00:36:25):
Yeah, and I mean I normally draw a lot of this when I’m presenting, so it’s like being at the whiteboard. So it’s really about finding the three big things, which is what do they actually want and then what can you build? And then also what will they pay for? And the nice thing about tech is that what you can build is generally getting bigger and bigger. I mean the AI stuff now is basically magic and we’re basic. We’re almost giving that away or we’re giving it away by the second or charging by the second for it or by the word for it. The big puzzle is then you’ve got to work out what people actually want and then what actually people will pay for. And you’re looking for the intersection between those three things. So most people would normally then say, well it’s easy, you’ve got to talk to customers.
(00:37:06):
Well there’s a problem there and that the customers lie, they don’t so much lies, they don’t know what they want, they don’t know what they need. They’ve got no idea what you can do. And even if they did, they don’t have the vocab to express it. So you need to be building things in front of them to show them, if I build this thing properly, this is a long paragraph to build this thing properly, would they pay for it? And then you’re working out, then you’re working out whether you can build it properly and then you’re working, then you’re trying to getting in front of them and trying to get them to pay for it early. So the pilots and proof of concepts and those sorts of things. And then you’re actually very efficiently finding the right thing and building it at the same time, which isn’t the way that software development works normally.
(00:37:48):
It’s not the way the software development works in corporate, it’s actually the business case for Agile because we don’t do agile, which comes to the software development stuff. You sort of preview before, a lot of people will do our Agile because it’s from the book of Agile and we have to do it. And the HIM book says that we have to do it this way and if we don’t do it this way, then I dev, I’m going somewhere else that does it properly. But the problem is is that you don’t really know what you need to build. So instead of very quickly building the wrong thing in a perfect way that’ll scale to infinity, it’s much better to build a three out of 10 and deliver that and put that in front of the customer and see if that’s the right thing. If we built this as a five out of 10, would you start paying for it?
(00:38:24):
Which is a discipline that’s very different than build perfect software, which is normally turn all the dials up to 11 and then deliver what you’ve got at the time you said you were going to deliver it, which is normally four out of 10 or something like that. It’s a really weird way of operating, but it’s like I said, it’s the business case of Agile. So which a lot of people forget that that was what it was for. So basically a lot of what happens in the IT organizations is they like to optimize around those tickets. If you give me perfect requirements, I will give you software on time. Exactly what you ask for. What they don’t realize is that the product person who’s defining this thing does not know what the right answer is. So they tend to complain and the IT organization basically holds their breath until they get perfect requirements and the business basically says, fine, there’s your perfect requirements. So they’re asking to be lied to and they partially deliver on the lie and then get upset that it was a lie. It’s like no, it was always a lie, right? Because our customers dunno what they want, they don’t know what they need, they’ve got no idea what we can do and they don’t have the vocab to ask for it anyway. So we’re sort of over optimizing, around optimizing that IT organization, it’s optimizing around tickets and delivery, not on value to the business.
(00:39:35):
So say one of our listeners or someone in the established business community has a problem, but then they dunno if they can get solved and they want to get something a bit of software developed, for example. What would be the advice you would give them around to go and find a software development house or personally on develop something for you? Yeah, what process would you take if you were in a business?
(00:39:58):
So the gold standard for that is to have someone do it internally and you’ll hear a lot of people get up and say, Hey, don’t even come to me if you don’t have a CTO in your business. So this is more startup stuff, but if we’re going to build this thing, just make sure you’ve got someone technical to do it with. And the way that degrades is, people will go out and get a technical person and put ’em in a headlock and say, here’s my technical person and then try and lock them into that business. But the practicality of it is that you normally can’t find someone like that because if you think about it from the, it’s not just come someone coming and build software for me and then disappear. So you’re actually starting something that’s probably going to be important for you, hopefully important for you.
(00:40:41):
You need to be able to maintain it and change it and update and support it. So you’re starting a sort of a relationship here. So outsourcing it just to get something built for you is the way a lot of the software outsourcing sort of degrades because they just want the product, they think it’s the software they want, but you also want the software built and then you also want the source code for it and you want the capability to build it and improve it. And if you’re talking about mobile apps, you also want the keys to be able to deploy the thing.
(00:41:07):
So your advice would actually be to hire a CTO or someone technically internally, and then software developers.
(00:41:13):
I would not hire a CTO internally, and that’s more around the motivations of people hire someone who’s a senior dev or a head of engineering, even head of engineering’s probably a bit higher and say, right, so we are going to build in this space. Part of what we are building is if we get this right, then there’ll be a role there. So we’ll grow you into head of engineering will grow you into CTO if you want. But when I’m working with some of the startups and some of the other business as well, just designating someone as cto, they come in thinking they’re much higher than they are, right? When really and when you need to pull them back then hang on, I’m a cto, right? So it actually ends up hurting those people a little bit more than it helps them. But I’d recommend getting someone in who’s into the space, understands how to deliver a three out of 10 right product, which is really weird to ask someone to do, especially when they’re default is I can do a four out of 10. It’s like, no, no, no. That’s wasting money and effort. We don’t know if we need four out of 10 yet, just deliver a three out of 10. So on time, on budget at three out of 10. It’s a weird skill and I find it really difficult myself because I’m engineers time by, well you
(00:42:20):
Might actually get something done. It’s better to have something than nothing. Yeah,
(00:42:24):
That’s right. Especially because we are doing it to work out whether it’s the right thing to build. I’m not asking you to build something that’s gold plated. I’m asking you to help me drop this in front of our customers and work out whether they want a proper version of
(00:42:37):
This. So to that end, just devil’s advocate, there’s arguments around offshoring for POC or to build that two out of three because you’re going to pay perceived two out of three probably. Any thoughts on on that? Or you’re still,
(00:42:55):
So as long as it’s,
(00:42:58):
You have those things, like you mentioned the source code
(00:43:01):
And you’re trying to get the capability to build it, right? So the reason that I don’t, I’m not a massive fan of outsourcing of stuff like we’re talking about before, outsourcing stuff that you compete on, right? Is that you want to have that capability internally to do that again, right? So it’s really about capability transfer for me because the software, if it’s a three out of 10 is throwaway anyway, right? So it doesn’t really matter how it’s got built,
(00:43:24):
But you’ve got the experience
(00:43:25):
You’ve got and you know how to deliver. So you can take something through to deployment and use the way a lot of people will attack the software development as well, let’s do the login first and let’s do this and this and this. When can we use it? Oh, when we finished everything, but you said it you you’re doing this in agile manner. We are. We’re delivering it incrementally. It’s like no, no, no, it’s got to be usable as a product first for us to be able to get the feedback from the customers we’re talking to. Yep. Right? And that’s where you hear the term MVP and startups. So minimal viable product or minimum viable product.
(00:43:56):
Yeah, and I would almost call that poc, but yeah, MVP P,
(00:43:59):
So you
(00:44:00):
Against offshoring cyber development
(00:44:02):
Or offshoring is outsourcing, so yeah,
(00:44:05):
Yeah, yeah. Outsourcing and offshoring, unless you’re over there is outsourcing, but it’s more around not, so there’s some practicality to it if you can’t find someone to hire to do it and you can’t find someone well to with the offshoring stuff. But if you can’t find someone to hire to do it and nobody in your organization can do it and you can’t do it right, your alternative is not do it or get someone else to do it.
(00:44:30):
Yeah. And I guess if I speak from someone’s got to own it internally and you would like that person to own it internally to have some capability in the subject I, I think you can make an, I see the point you’re trying to make and I guess it’s not black and white, no, per se, but definitely somebody internally in the company has to understand it has to. We we’ve seen working with some customers that they’ll hire us and then they’ll just go, just make it happen. That’s not how it works. Make work. You’ve got to engage as well. You can’t just snap your fingers and it’s all just going to happen. So as long as I found, as long as there’s somebody who truly owns it internally is working with that offshore or outsource, which is a bigger catch off or they’re just not in your company, they can be local or not. If you get those people that really buying, really managing it, understanding it, then you’ll have a higher probability
(00:45:24):
Of success. So as long as it’s not the contract managers, so they own their relationship, so they have actually got to be in there and doing it. So the way
(00:45:30):
That I’m on the team,
(00:45:31):
Yeah, yeah. And their goal is to understand it and have the capability. That’s sort of the hurdle that I use as well. We should be building that skills internally so long term we don’t need them. Right? Which is part of the way that outsourcing, especially around software development’s really tricky because most organizations
(00:45:50):
Zero
(00:45:50):
Capability, well, they have zero capability, but they’re also not interested in building any capability. And then when they work out that they don’t have enough money to keep that software agency engaged anymore, interested anymore, then it’s like, where are we? It
(00:46:02):
All goes down the toilet. Yeah,
(00:46:03):
That’s right. And that’s where it’s sort of naturally structured to go that way. So the way I normally get, especially startups, but it works for businesses that don’t really have that function but want to build their own software as well, is outsourcing that software development’s probably necessary because they can’t get the person or they can’t afford the person that they’d like to have, but have a junior in there who receives the software, receives the source code is first point of call when something goes wrong and their job is literally to understand as much of it as they can. And then over time they start to work out. So you want the software, you want the ability to build it and then the keys and all that sort of stuff. So they can do a spelling check, spelling mistake change at some point. So you build up that capability internally and then they can actually execute on it.
(00:46:49):
Because in the context of the startup or the scale up that I’m normally scallops, that I’m normally talking to the value of the business is normally dictated by their ability to do it. It’s like, oh yeah, we can do this, but who builds your software? Oh, we got this Ukrainian one and these’s ones out of the Philippines and all that sort of stuff. The value probably isn’t in your business then the value that lives outside of it. Oh, but we’re great at contract management. Well, yeah. Okay, cool. But that’s not worth than the multiples that we’re going to be talking about here. So there’s stuff that needs to be done around that. But normally I say find a bright young thing. Actually the best thing to do would be finding three bright young things, because then there’s always two against one. It’s the dynamics work really well, I like this.
(00:47:31):
You find that you find them and they receive it, and their job is not to be able to build. It’s to understand it and then grow into being able to do those things. So what you’re looking for in those people then isn’t an apex beast like software developer like me has been doing it for 30 years. Who argues with enterprise architects and solution architects and all that sort of stuff. It’s someone who genuinely loves what you’re working on and has the capability and the inclination to jump in and do it. Whatever needs to happen. Yeah. It’s written, this language
(00:48:00):
Gets the vision.
(00:48:02):
Yeah. Has aligned. Where
(00:48:03):
Would you find three people like that?
(00:48:06):
So I, I’ve got a real bias around this. I like speaking to people that, so I like word of mouth. I like referrals. I really don’t like going through recruiters. I really don’t like that dynamic. But practicality, especially early on, because they got to pass the beer test or the fishing test. So would I go fishing with this person or would I go to the pub with this person? So you’re trying to build up that sort of a culture there. And because if you’re thinking about it in terms of, like I said, it’s a long-term relationship. It’s not just come in and do this thing and get out because that’s where you get your mercenaries from. And if someone who does mery work every now and again, I don’t really care when I’m in there. I’m in there to do a job and that thing’s not in my scope and it’s not worth it for me to push outside that scope. So I’ll just execute it and I’ll go to the next contract.
(00:48:55):
I’d say, to be honest with you, someone who owns an established business, maybe like 50 staff or whatever, and they have a problem they want to solve for them to actually find three bright young software developers.
(00:49:05):
I go for Not in
(00:49:06):
Your community, be very, very hard to do. Yeah.
(00:49:09):
Well, they’ve got some hot tips in this podcast. Let’s just read out out to Peter.
(00:49:12):
Well, yeah, I mean, sure, why not? So I mean, next week I’m presenting at, so code networking at Q ut, which is their sort of student software development organization for a presentation I’ve been doing for the last eight years, which is the six key things of software development.
(00:49:29):
So what’s that look like over the last eight years? The growth in that area, the amount of students coming through?
(00:49:35):
Oh yeah, the, it’s sort of unending right there. There’s just constantly people coming through. I mean, it ebbs and flows right around how many people there are that are interested in that space. So at the moment, I imagine we’re about to go down a bit because of all the startups having problems. So there’s a lot of playoffs happening, all that sort of stuff. But for me, that software development stuff is a value creation center of the universe at sometimes because you’re actually, you can sit there with a laptop and have an idea and build a thing, and if it’s an Apple one, you can pay Apple a hundred bucks and then you’re allowed to access 3 billion people on their marketplace and they’ll charge you 30% of your revenue that you do through. So you can sit there and list, really come up with something. So there’s a very creative aspect to it.
(00:50:19):
I’d like to see some more entrepreneurship with it, which is where we spend a bit of time in the university, or I spend a bit of time in the universities around trying to get them to understand that they build their own thing. So it’s not about getting a job at Canberra. Atlassian, it’s about building their own Canberra. Atlassian. So there’s a real, I think there’s enough coming through to make that happen without starting fights with the universities, that they’re teaching them things, that there’s things that we can teach them, which is what this presentation’s about. It’s a two hour rant and I’ve got to swear cause I’ve got to get the kids attention. So if they did those things and they’re really simple. They’re source code control and formal releases and automated builds and developer tests and continuous integration and collaboration tools. If they learn those things, then they’re useful straight away.
(00:51:07):
I don’t really care whether they know what a F actually, I care if they know what a full loop is, but I don’t really care what language it is. I don’t really care how well they work because it’s very hard to screw things up if you’re operating in that environment. But if they don’t know that, I’ve got to teach them that and then they’re productive. So it’s very much a master builder sort of thing. So it’s pragmatic, measure twice, cut once stuff. So we go through and get them that, and then they’re valuable out there. And the next thing is just getting them to understand that building that 10 out of 10 product isn’t really what’s required. Especially if it’s internal facing. If it’s internal facing three out of 10, it’s probably going to be fine forever because you can be trained to not press a button that doesn’t work.
(00:51:48):
Well. And some of these, you’re right, it’s creative. So there is no right or wrong. There is no 10 out of 10. Really?
(00:51:55):
Yeah. Well, it moves. So it’s subjective and it moves over time because the value of say, product and the value of say, where people can spend their money depends on where else they can spend their money or what else, what are other products they can get. So it’s not an absolute measure, it’s a relative measure. So the name of the game is to be able to control the cost of change because we have to adapt, we have to do it. So part of that is not overinvesting. And part of that is also accepting that we might have built the wrong thing.
(00:52:22):
Can you define that? What is a, define exactly what a three out of 10 is, in your words.
(00:52:26):
10 out of 10 divided by 10 mile pop by three, right. But yeah, so it’s a deliberately low quality thing because what you’re doing there is you’re trying to build this really small prototype to elicit from your users about whether this is the right thing to build. So one way to think about it is, if you think about a process that you need to execute, so business process, and there’s all these cases and all these corner cases that you’d need to cover to be able to say it’s a hundred percent complete. But the majority of that business process would probably be a really simple use case where everything goes and nobody asks for support, and it just works. So if you can make the assumption that we’re happy with say, 80% of our work being supported by the process, and the other 20% will just handle manually, you can deliver a three out of 10 from an entire process point of view, but it’s still hitting 80% of your use cases.
(00:53:21):
So that’s a three out of 10.
(00:53:22):
Well, it starts out as a real still threat. It’s the smallest thing it possibly
(00:53:26):
Can be. No, when you were saying it, I was, and we’re in that kind of MVP prototype stage and we’re trying to get rapid feedback. To me it’s just got to be enough for the end user to get it and go, yeah, I can see this.
(00:53:37):
So it sort of evolves over time. So it, it’s very iterative. So it’s like the agile stuff, it’s very iterative. And the third where you start out is actually a decent pitch. It’s like, Hey, if I built this thing, I’m thinking about building this thing. Is that valuable to you? Right? Yes. Cool. MVP one done iterate. So it sort of evolves over time. Where it starts to really hit the traction is to get that so you can actually execute a transaction through it. So you can do a thing, and there might be all these special cases that you can’t do. So as long as they’re, it’s a procedure, as long as they’re all from Australia, they’ve all got a tax number, they’re all doing these things, they type in everything perfectly and they haven’t got any problems with it, then we can execute that.
(00:54:18):
Yeah, you’ve done the one thing and then the viewer can envision all the other things that you said. Yeah. That you’re promising you’ll be able to do if it’s seven out of 10. And are those things valuable to your user now that you can see them? We’ve kind of painted the picture. And if you go, yeah, that’s cool. All right, cool, then we’ll keep going this way.
(00:54:34):
And when I’m talking to product teams, I don’t say three out of 10, I say seven out of 10. Cause you know, don’t want to scare, scare everybody, but one of the ones that I normally talk about a lot is expectation management around this. If you deliver a seven out of 10 and you told someone it was a seven out of 10, they’re really happy with that, stoked with that. They’re fine with it. If you tell them it was a five out of 10 and deliver a seven out of 10, they’re kind of, yeah, okay, that was fine. But Peter, I could have had the five, two weeks early. I was happy with the five. You didn’t give me the five, you gave me a seven. That’s great. So it’s under promise overdeliver, that’s great. But I was happy with the five. Could you have delivered it earlier or don’t overinvest in it?
(00:55:12):
Oh, that’s interesting, huh?
(00:55:12):
Yeah. Okay. But if you tell them it’s 10, right? And deliver ’em a seven, then they’re ringing up, they’re complaining and threatening to leave, they’re going to sue.
(00:55:20):
Yeah,
(00:55:20):
Done. Now the interesting thing in this is that in all three of those cases, very different reactions from your customer. Same quality software delivered seven out of 10 or same quality product delivered seven out of 10. So the expectation management’s actually what controls that reaction. So instead of delivering stuff to people, well, instead of promising 10 and delivering seven when someone is a 10, wants a 10 out of 10, you’ve only got a seven. Just say it’s not ready for you yet. We’ll deliver to you later
(00:55:47):
Right’s. Such a fundamental life skill.
(00:55:50):
Yeah, it is
(00:55:50):
Expectation management. I mean communication, managing the expectations. Just tell people it’s going to be a day late or interesting, or it’s going to be a day early.
(00:55:59):
Well, just don’t tell ’em on the day. Right?
(00:56:01):
Yeah. Tell ’em before. Oh yeah, no, you’re
(00:56:02):
Fine. Well, that’s right. The phone call of, Hey, listen, we’re looking ahead in two weeks. We might be a couple of days late. Yeah, mate, no problems at all.
(00:56:08):
Exactly
(00:56:08):
Right. Absolutely. No problems at all. What happened? Yeah.
(00:56:12):
Morning of different story.
(00:56:13):
Yeah, yeah. The morning ofs when you,
(00:56:14):
Yeah, such a fundamental killer. Anyway, so Peter,
(00:56:17):
What was, wasn’t going to go here actually, but chat pt.
(00:56:22):
Yep.
(00:56:23):
A lot of hybrid now and a lot of businesses are talking about it. Yeah.
(00:56:27):
Saving me time. Yeah,
(00:56:29):
Saving Brad time. We’re looking around the podcast that we can help automate some words, that kind of thing. What’s your thoughts on how it’s going to affect businesses and I guess that and the evolution of ai?
(00:56:42):
Yeah, I mean, it’s a deep topic, so it’s progressing very quickly, but the dynamic that happening is nothing new from a technology point of view.
(00:56:54):
What was that? Sorry, what?
(00:56:55):
Is that? The dynamic that’s happening? Oh, yeah. Right. Isn’t that different? So I’m on a panel coming up around education. So what the teachers do with this stuff, which is really interesting, but if the industry that you’re working in measures the quality of what you do by how hefty the report is, so how many pages it is, and you are competing on the ability to write knight’s big document. Yeah. You are in trouble.
(00:57:19):
So the way that we measure whether something’s great or not, is it whether they’ve spent the time writing about it, that’s not going to be a valid measure of whether it’s good thinking anymore or whether it’s well thought out or whether it’s well done. Whereas previously we’d used that as an indicator. So the value of it will change. And it’s interesting, I was working with a startup in this sort of space as well, and they were saying, oh, we can generate all of this text for you in the tone of your voice of your company, so we can train it on the way that you guys write. So it’s not just how chat c p t writes, it’s how you write. It’s like, okay, that’s really good value. And it’s like, okay, so we can do as big as you want. It’s like, okay, cool, but how are you doing that? But we’re putting a prompt in. Okay, so as someone who’s reading these documents, I’d rather read the prompt,
(00:58:05):
Sorry, they’re putting a prompt
(00:58:07):
In the prompt in to chat pt. So they’re saying, here’s the thing I want you to talk about in this tone. I’d rather read the prompt than the 300 page document that the prompt generates.
(00:58:16):
So I’ve interesting. I’ve started playing with it really, probably more so in the last month. And so a problem that I was trying to solve, we were talking about earlier, was the amount of work that’s involved in producing this podcast. And then we cut it up into the individual episodes and I was doing all that work, but there’s a lot of work just scheduling, doing the transcripts, doing the editing, doing the summary, doing the artwork, posting it on LinkedIn, posting it on the website, and then you’ve got to write summary text and you’ve got to do these other things. But now I guess this is ai, but the way the automatic transcription has gotten a lot better, especially if you give it a nice clean signal. So we’ll take that text. Okay, so now I’ve got a text based version of this podcast. I need a quick summary, bang, so I’ll bang then a chat, G B t I need hashtags.
(00:59:07):
Okay, give me some TA hashtags. Cool. So that’s for the main episode, but then we cut it up. So I’ve got an editor, I won’t publish anything until I’ve checked it and I gently write the summary, but she’ll do the cuts. So we can end up out this episode, probably get a few more, we might get 10 to 20 little cuts and little snippets, but each one of those needs to be summarized. So that can take, then it needs to be posted, then it needs the hashtags, then you need all that stuff. So that can take up to 30 minutes per nip. So 20 times 30, I’m looking at 10 hours on top of my, already extremely full week. So now I’ve worked out, I can do is I can just take that text, file the transcription, upload it, and I’ve kind of worked out how I need to ask chat G P T to summarize it, to get to, it’s not perfect, but we were saying it’s a seven out of 10, it’s a five out of 10. It’s better to keep moving and get something out than, oh, it’s not perfect. I’m going to spend two hours and just keep,
(01:00:00):
Especially because you can update the spelling mistakes and everything like that. So it doesn’t really matter. It’s
(01:00:03):
More, it’s probably more if
(01:00:06):
It needs change, if it changes, if you need to change it. My point is that you put it out there and if you need to change it, you can just
(01:00:11):
Change it. Yeah, we can change it. I, I’ll still review it, but I can get a lot done really quickly. So it’s a simple use case, but I’m quite impressed that I can give it a transcript file. And the transcript file will have timestamps and a lot of other noise text if you like. It’s not just a straight paragraph, but it can obviously recognize it. I tell it, this is a.srt file, write it in the second person. I’ve worked out what to ask it to get a decent just paragraph summary of what it is. And then I also, then I once it’s, so I like, okay, cool, give me the suggested hashtags I should use. It’ll do the hashtags. And then I’ve effectively now just saved myself. Well say it takes, would take me 10 hours probably. Now it’s like an hour for me to prompt, instead of taking 10, it’ll probably take me an hour. So I was like, that’s actually really cool. And I am quite impressed with how it can interpret what I would consider a lot of noise text and then spit out something meaningful. So for
(01:01:05):
Me it’s, look, it’s absolutely magic. And my point is, is that previously in market, we look at a high quality produced podcast or vodka or whatever it is that had the SRTs done and nicely separated out everything. And so that must be good because they’ve spent 10 hours on it, so it must been worth spending 10 hours on it. So now the bar move down. So if someone can spend an hour on it and get the same quality, it’s no longer a good indicator of whether it’s a good podcast anymore. So we’re going to be flooded with content. We are going to need a different way to measure whether it’s high quality or not. So that for me, that’s the dynamic that I see.
(01:01:45):
Yeah, because it will over time. Yeah. So it’s not going to be immediate, but over time it will renormalize or reset that. Yeah, that benchmark. Yeah. Again, it goes back to your entrepreneurial piece though. People have to have the foresight and the intuition to actually apply it and try it and think of how to use it as a solution, which comes back to that entrepreneurial,
(01:02:05):
An understanding of how the industry sits. Because that used to be hard, and it’s no longer hard. So the whole industry moves now. So where’s the right place to be if everything moves?
(01:02:15):
Are you seeing anyone using Tay b t to get code written?
(01:02:19):
Yeah. Yeah. I saw it as what I saw someone talk about as a stochastic parrot. So it just basically randomly puts out what anybody else would put out if you just kick it off in that direction. The other one is that it’s basically a big predictive text. So the thing is that it’s trained off the data that’s had in there. So it depends on where you sit philosophically in this, right? Well, this could be another, we’ll bring in some other people as well,
(01:02:47):
This properly.
(01:02:49):
But the, it’s, what it’s doing is it’s modeling the way that people actually, what word do they, what’s kind of, not word, but let’s say it’s a word. What words do people normally say next after this one?
(01:03:01):
And so the way it actually works is like half of a translator. So the original paper actually talks about taking say French and translating it to English, and it says there’s the French sentence now translated to English, and it looks at it and says, here’s what it should say. So the way chat G P T, well G P T works underneath it, is roughly the, well, let’s give it that prompt and just let it hallucinate afterwards. It’s hard to keep going. And that’s what it does. It just keeps talking, talking, talking. Yeah. So it’s really interesting, but it’s very much a, it’s saying this is what people would normally say after this word right now from without too philosophical about it. I mean, okay, that’s how that works. Is it how humans work? It’s easy to be disappointing if that’s all we are, right? But it could be,
(01:03:45):
I think it can get, as I said before, don’t expect a 10 out of 10, but I think if you just need to get that three or five out of 10, you can get it pretty quickly. And then it probably redefines what, a 10 out of 10 years or things like that. So yeah, nothing it’s done is like, whoa, this is amazing. But I’m like, shit, thanks. You’ve just saved me a bit of time. Yeah, I’ve got my five out of 10. I can move on to the next thing.
(01:04:11):
Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty amazing to sit there and watch it. It’s basically magic. So is the audio to text transformation,
(01:04:17):
Right? Oh yeah.
(01:04:18):
And so yeah, that
(01:04:19):
Has gotten so much better.
(01:04:20):
And then the mid journey stuff. So the image generation stuff, draw from text, draw me a picture of this, doing this thing.
(01:04:26):
Actually I haven’t tried that,
(01:04:27):
Tried that. It’s a bit hit and miss, to be honest.
(01:04:28):
I’ve just seen all the social media people on YouTube going at it, check this out, and they’ll have three eyes or, because it will do a little bit of a hit and miss.
(01:04:37):
Yeah, yeah. But I mean that they’re basically typing in text and then generating these high quality HD images out of it. It’s incredible. And the next one that’s coming is the video.
(01:04:46):
Yep. That’ll be interesting.
(01:04:48):
So it’s just absolutely incredible. But now it’s a creativity tool. So it’s an interesting thing to think about. But if, again, for me it’s, it’s a little bit, say books or it used to be that if you’re going to do a book, you’d have to convince a publishing house to do it. You’d have to have all these editors go through it. Because producing a book’s really expensive. So it’s going to be a high quality book. It’s going to be well thought out, it’s going to be edited properly, it’s going to be type set properly, right. Because we’re going to do it suddenly when we get to the point where everybody can do a book. It’s no longer a good measure of, it must be good thinking because it’s in a book. No, it’s a book. And it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
(01:05:24):
It’s kind of the same thing happened in music, right? Like the democratization, if you like, of the music industry. When we went from effectively analog to digital and used to have a million dollar studio to produce any song that with this laptop you could produce a multi-platinum,
(01:05:38):
Well, especially with the microphone. So just quickly, there’s a company, a startup over in. So they’re based in top of 42 Valley. So Morrison, Morrison Ventures, but I think Pop Gun or Pop Guns where they came through and now it’s called Splash, right? They actually pop actually did an AI that will accompany you music. So you start playing something in music, piano music, and it will play something with you. And then they actually got it to the point where it’ll sing with you as well. So you could type in the lyrics and it did sing.
(01:06:07):
That’s pretty cool. Dig. Yeah, the digital art, because you seen some of my history out there, and that’s why we do this because I was just big, was never very good at it, which is again, why I’m sitting here. But I’m always fascinated by, that’s a whole, the digital signal processing and all that is a whole nother area of tech that sits out of the side. But when you apply ai, I can look at any of those things. Yeah, it is quite fascinating what you can do. And just some of the tools in music production now that I see just from 10 years ago, it’s
(01:06:35):
Incredible.
(01:06:36):
Quite fascinating. So
(01:06:37):
You have hear two pitches a week or so, something like that. Probably, maybe more actually. Yeah,
(01:06:42):
Two today.
(01:06:43):
Yeah. Well, there you go. Are you getting an increased rate of entrepreneurs coming through with ideas that involve AI and chap tea and how they can leverage that? Is it creating a lot of, I guess, new opportunities?
(01:06:55):
It is there. There’s part of the thing that I got get dropped into because I’ve got that technical background, it’s okay, we’re doing this thing and we’re ai, okay, cool, what sort? Right? And they say, oh, they say, okay, well what sort and four or five levels deep? And then we find out whether they’re doing it or not. Two things happen, it turns out either someone else is doing it for them, so it’s through an API or something like that. Or they’re really using Excel and they just wanted to drop some AI on it. Cause I think it make it sound sexy, but
(01:07:23):
You use ai, don’t you want to have a real problem? And like you’re saying before, so someone come with a, there’s a problem in the world I want to solve. And you’ll go like, okay, well how can we solve this? And yet, if technology is the way to do it and the ones that come to you, then we’ll use it. And AI forms part of that stack to
(01:07:39):
Use it. So it depends how people are coming at it. So we’re talking about the business one before. So, hey, this is what we need to do. We use AI to do it. Okay, cool. Right? But then you’ve got people coming out of technology as well, so I just want to use AI on something, right? Or I just want to use blockchain on something. So let’s find the thing to do it with. So there’s a little bit of technology first sometimes as there’s business first sometimes, and a lot of the times I’m working with people that are technology first.
(01:08:05):
And would that be a case sometimes of joining two different pitches together?
(01:08:09):
Well, yeah. Yeah. Well actually a lot of the time. So you get a business person, say, we’re an AI and blockchain company, we’re doing this thing. It’s like, no, can you please just pitch it? You’re doing this thing. And the way that we’re doing it so efficiently is because we’re using AI and blockchain, then it’s actually a business pitch. Otherwise it’s a technology demo. Look at the cool thing we’re doing with this hammer, right? So it’s a little bit about framing it, which is where I spend a bit of time as well. So around the pitch coaching stuff and getting people to do it, which again relies on that technical background as well. It’s like, okay, cool, I know what you’re doing. Can you please present it this way? Because then they’ll understand the value of it. So a bit of translating. So again, which ties into the hard valuable problem thing. So there’s another business recently that came through that’s doing sort of imports. They’ve actually had a good last week. So they’re doing imports and they’re working with out of China, and they’ve actually got the integration with the Chinese block blockchain court. So when someone screws something up, they can just go straight back and say, no, you’re done. And that doesn’t just stop them selling to Robo here in Brisbane, but it also stops ’em selling anywhere.
(01:09:17):
Wait, blockchain court?
(01:09:19):
Yes. Yeah. I don’t really know a lot about it, but they’re trying to get that trade being much more efficient. And so part of that is getting the ability to do conflict resolution much more efficiently as well. So you should really have a chat to them. But they’re registering what’s coming through on the blockchain. So when there’s a dispute, then we know exactly what happened. We know who touched it and what happened.
(01:09:42):
Blockchain, when you say it’s on the blockchain, you mean because it’s on some kind of, I guess, blockchain technology, what’s crossed multiple different areas and change when it changes, all that kind of thing? It’s
(01:09:53):
More, it’s on a ledger. So allegedly it can’t be rewritten or can be rewritten, but not with compute, not so practically can’t be rewritten. So then it becomes this thing that everybody agrees to us that’s happening. And if it goes to crap, then we can look back at what happened. But one of the ways I talk about log blockchain is my favorite log format.
(01:10:10):
So renewable energy. Yep.
(01:10:13):
Oh God, we’re going,
(01:10:14):
Well no, look, this
(01:10:15):
Cause one of the business suspects this morning,
(01:10:17):
Well, because we used to dabble in software a little while ago and yada, yada, yada. And anyway, I met, I can’t remember how I met this guy and he wasn’t in River City Labs, but he was working out of the camp. What’s the one in,
(01:10:30):
He used to be called The Capital. Yeah,
(01:10:31):
No, Brisbane city Council has a,
(01:10:33):
Yeah. So Brisbane,
(01:10:35):
It’s like in the Queen Street Mall.
(01:10:36):
Yeah. Yeah. It used to be called the Capital. Okay. And now it’s called Brisbane Business Hub.
(01:10:40):
Yeah. Yeah. That one. Look, anyway, it, it’s a renewable, it’s a complicated thing, right? The energy market’s a complicated thing, but to me, so I love solar, love tech, love, just seeing my apps, love batteries, love the fact that I’ve got a solar power plant on my house and you’ve got the situation, right? The sun is shining during the day, we need to store it. And there’s an economic factor as well. And I don’t understand why this isn’t solved. And you have all these various hardware companies and they’re all going to have their kind of api. But ultimately I just want to pay cheap during the day, charge my and release it at night. Sorry. Do you see people working on that?
(01:11:17):
Yeah, I mean literally the guys I was talking to this morning is a company called Alexis.
(01:11:21):
Okay.
(01:11:22):
And they’re doing basically exact that, exactly that. And so did
(01:11:27):
You like that pitch?
(01:11:28):
Yeah, I like these guys for a while. They’re really good. So distributed generation needs to happen in my opinion. And this gets me into big fights with dad, but because dad used to be general manager network for an Jacks,
(01:11:39):
Okay,
(01:11:40):
All right. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff around this, but basically the legislation is a big problem. And then also there’s some engineering stuff which is returning that much energy to the grid causes problems,
(01:11:54):
Right? I heard they literally just change the rules that if you’ve got more than 10 KVA ejects like in South Australia where ejects, you must have something installed that allows ejects to basically turn off your soil.
(01:12:06):
Yeah. And to be honest, they’ve been doing that for a while with a thing called a Zelle Weger system with your hot water systems. So they’ll be able to turn your whole water on and off, but that’s a little bit less focusing than your power going off. But
(01:12:17):
Well, I’m just literally at home and I’m bloody, there’s Amber. Have you heard of them? Yeah. Yeah. So they’ve tried to do something cool where they’re like, okay, we’ll give you wholesale prices. So theoretically when there’s lots of renewables in the grid should be cheaper. And they’ll give you like the am amber traffic light system. So if it’s green, go for it and it’ll tell you the price and it kind of tries to forecast it. But really also, I want my inverter battery to know to get those signals because I’m here on my phone, all right, got to charge battery now. It’s just ridiculous. But you’re trying to one, do the right thing, but two, save money whenever there’s an economic, if you can make this renewable thing
(01:12:53):
Yeah,
(01:12:54):
Money in the pocket for people. That’s a big driver. So don’t, it’s annoying me that there’s not a solution for this where it can automate just if power is cheap on the grid, charge my battery. So I’m sure, I know there’s a lot of politics and there’s ejects and there’s a network and there’s a lot of parties involved. That’s definitely adds complication. But to me it should be like, here’s a signal from the grid charge.
(01:13:20):
And there’s also companies talking about using EVs. So electric,
(01:13:25):
Electronic as
(01:13:27):
A battery transfer. So instead of using the network at all, so charge over here and then take it home and run your house off the car battery
(01:13:34):
Overnight. Yeah. So we’re two electric cars. I’m about to add a bunch more batteries cause I’m kind of have to do it. Not a cost effective way to do
(01:13:43):
This. It makes you feel like a prepper as well, right?
(01:13:45):
Well I am prepping, I just need my air con to run. So getting three phased air con, I’ve got rain water and I’m like, mate, I just need to be, if the world ends and I can run my air con, I can stay out here forever. As long as I
(01:13:56):
Drink food. Not so much.
(01:13:59):
You wouldn’t be surprised how hard it is to achieve this.
(01:14:02):
Yeah, yeah. And it’s because an expensive, one of the interesting things is, and this is where the Alexa stuff we’re talking about this morning, is the distributor generation stuff is the way it should work because we don’t really need to have it centralized and then
(01:14:15):
Transmitted it. So distribute generation or distributed, distributed,
(01:14:18):
Distributed, distributed generation.
(01:14:20):
Which is effectively, which is what you are doing right? Solar?
(01:14:23):
Yeah. Well it can be solar or can be wind or
(01:14:25):
Can be as a part. We got generational all over the place instead of coal plant.
(01:14:28):
The thing I like about it these guys is that you can do that. That’s an individual decision and then you can also return your energy to the grid, which is the stuff that they’re working on. Because they’re the guys that actually help set up the grid so they know what’s going on when it was built.
(01:14:44):
So these are guys, this is a different kind of startup that have been working in the industry for ages?
(01:14:48):
Well no, this is Lexus. So the guys used to be energetics, Ergon, or right
(01:14:53):
Energetics. So they’re not the 19 year olds. These are season
(01:14:55):
Veterans? No, these guys, the found they got the CEO there up until recently was 72.
(01:15:01):
Oh, okay. 70. And this is a hard problem,
(01:15:04):
Very hard problem. But they’re also very smart and they know what they need and they know how the industry works and they know why the industry’s set up that way so they can just jump in and build stuff. But the problems that they’re running into isn’t so much the engineering problem or the legal problem. It’s the fact that a energy Queensland for the last years have planned this certain way and they’ve got all this infrastructure out there that will make this money back this way and this will destroy that. There’s a whole bunch of really economics incentives. But I love the fact that as an individual you could do that and you could oversupply from whatever you needed. So you can build it to the maximum number of solar cells you could buy and return it to the grid. And if you can do that on the low voltage circuit, you can actually sell that to people that are inside your low voltage circuit.
(01:15:48):
Low voltage circuit.
(01:15:49):
So
(01:15:50):
I’ll have to look it up
(01:15:50):
After. So the generation, so they created transmission, which is powerlink, right? Yep. And then it goes to the distribution. Yep. Distributions now
(01:16:01):
10,000.
(01:16:02):
Yeah. Yeah. Well 110, 110 kv down to
(01:16:05):
10,000.
(01:16:06):
I think it 11 and then 11 to the four 15. Which is what goes down your three wires, three phases. So the three phase down there. So the low voltage circuit is the low voltage three haze. Oh,
(01:16:17):
Right, okay.
(01:16:17):
Stuff. Yeah. So normally, I can’t remember how many, couple hundred houses on that each one. So you could share energy between it. And then once you get six of them, then you can start to do some really cool things on that low voltage
(01:16:29):
Circuit. So it’s creating a little
(01:16:30):
Virtual power plant
(01:16:32):
Amongst a community. Yeah.
(01:16:35):
And that’s the lovely economics part of it is the love that they can be doing that and then an individual will buy it, then more individuals will buy it and it makes economic sense for them individually. And then once they get to a certain level, then they
(01:16:47):
Get, so what is their product?
(01:16:50):
Like a
(01:16:50):
Software or
(01:16:51):
Hardware? No, it’s a hardware. Hardware. So it’s basically looks like two racks.
(01:16:54):
So you’d already have solar and then you’d add this technology.
(01:16:58):
So I think you can think of it as the inverter. So it sits in between, it’s basically the meter. Okay. So and lets you produce more to the grid back and then also take stuff in from the grid if you need to.
(01:17:12):
It’s about, is this out in the market already?
(01:17:14):
Yeah, but it’s more, not really resi. It’s probably they’ve got doing a pilot program now with Ikea was the last one that I saw. Okay. Because if, you know the nice thing, it’s interesting that residential, so you can buy as much as you want, but if you’re saying that, say a company like Woolworths or iCare, right? They can afford to buy as many solar cells as they can. They’ve got a big roof up there and they can buy the batteries, right? So now your cost center, that used to be power can be a profit center.
(01:17:40):
It’s like a sdwan for solar
(01:17:45):
Energy
(01:17:46):
Powered, renewable powered wide area
(01:17:49):
Network. Finding the legislation for that. Right? Now
(01:17:50):
If you, I not think
(01:17:52):
About that. If you think about that in terms of, okay, so Australia needs another coal fire power pan or something like that, right? Or south Southeast Asia does, right? Yeah. So instead of building a new coal fire power pan, everybody individually can build their own stuff and be standalone much more robust. Right? That’s a interesting sort of trade off there. So instead of a couple of billion dollars to build that, well we could do this where everybody pays
(01:18:16):
Their own. Yeah.
(01:18:17):
Yeah. That’s the distributed generation stuff. Alright,
(01:18:20):
So is it retro fitable
(01:18:24):
First? It do. Depends on who you’re talking to. So yeah, again, we’re outside of my area of practical expertise, but I know I have to be able to talk about it. So I’m expecting a whole bunch
(01:18:34):
Of solid pitch. Was it? Yeah. Was it a solid pitch today?
(01:18:37):
I know these guys really well.
(01:18:38):
Maybe we can get them into pitch to Brad. I think he’s keen. Oh
(01:18:41):
Look, whatever. It’s one of those things I’m just interested in. I enjoy it and
(01:18:45):
It makes sense. I’m
(01:18:45):
Well invested into it.
(01:18:46):
Yeah, it makes sense, right? I want air conditioning when it’s hot. When it’s hot, there’s generally solar energy there. I’m going to use it, right? So it’s this beautiful engineering fit. Not everything fits that well. Yeah.
(01:18:58):
But it’s really hard, at least from the conversation I have to get three phase battery backup off grid. They call it three phase synchronous backup.
(01:19:09):
Do. Depends if you want to connect us to the grid or not. If you’re doing it
(01:19:13):
Totally off grid. Totally off
(01:19:14):
Grid. Yeah. Different. Yeah. Should be.
(01:19:15):
Yeah. So I’m almost there. I’m almost there. Yeah.
(01:19:18):
Good. I’m conscious of time, Peter, you’ve shared some awesome insights and we’ll be able little bit in the end there. Geez,
(01:19:24):
This is the longest one we’ve done. Yeah, it’s almost an hour and a half. Should we just go for another eight minutes?
(01:19:31):
We’ll just ask politics next. No,
(01:19:33):
Well, but let’s bring it back to the stuff that you wanted to talk about cause Cause we will cut that,
(01:19:38):
Right? Yeah, no, we can cut that out. But maybe Peter really appreciate you coming in. You shared a lot of good valuable insights from the running successful startups and your software development background and what you would do in that kind of approach. If someone listening has a problem they want to get your feedback on or want to get someone to start a community, how can they reach you?
(01:19:55):
So LinkedIn’s normally pretty good, email’s better. And then also on Twitter, so the internet hate machine that has Twitter at the moment. Oh, on Twitter? Yeah. So that, that’s normally where I’m there as much as I’d prefer to be other things, but that works. But if they reach out, I’m normally happy to have a chat. First chat with everybody is normally fun. So you work it out, second chat’s where you work out whether you worth anything. But the first one, especially if they tell us that, that it’s through the podcast or through that they heard about it through this. So give me some context, right? There’s a lot of interesting people in the ecosystem. They’re all trying to do really things and there’s a big really good things and there’s a big lack of hard, valuable problems. So if you’re sitting on something that’s hard and valuable and maybe doesn’t make sense from a core business from you guys, but if it was solved, we definitely buy it.
(01:20:45):
You can drop some money into that and it can turn up and if it doesn’t then nobody cares, right? It’s fine. And we took a shot, we did some stuff, it didn’t turn out, let’s go again. That that’s the sort of way we can do it. And I like that mechanism better. So even talking to some businesses about, instead of outsourcing an app development for two or $300,000, which I’ve heard of, which is incredible for me. But anyway, how about you just set up a startup, you know, get three bright young things to build it and give them a hundred thousand bucks and if it’s great then buy it. And if it’s not, then set them free and if they keep going or they don’t, right? And that’s much more entrepreneurial way of running at this thing. Then trying to work out how to engage the right people that will apply for a sort of job. Because doing that as a startup brings entirely different people to play, right?
(01:21:35):
That’s good advice because business, some business get one functional, but a solar built can spend half a million bucks sometimes getting that thing built. If they could do that as a startup and then fire it away
(01:21:44):
From, or even do it as three, right, two or three startups and race ’em right there, there’s a real opportunity there to do that stuff. And there’s, the interesting thing about that is that if you’re a person coming out of university, you can go and get a job where you get paid, which is low risk, it’s great, it works. Or hey, I can go and do this startup, learn a whole bunch of new things, and maybe be a business owner, get through that startup and get bought, get an acquisition and go again. So that brings a different sort of person to play, right? That you can’t recruit into an organization.
(01:22:19):
Thanks Peter. Really appreciate you coming in. Welcome.
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