Simon Hackett: 0:00

Be yourself, be honest, but be out there and be prepared to be criticized. If people tell you in public, what sucks about the business environment, that's the big learning for me was they weren't trying to bring me down, they wanted me to fix it. And if you respond to that, by fixing it, credibility goes through the roof. And people talk about emotion of work life balance, what they should be doing is talking about work life separation, is the fact the work, the work actively damages the life of rest of you. And it's got worse, not better in the last day. Now, we're expected to have the gadgets, the time you're expected to be interrupted. That expectation is extremely toxic, and I think should be. Again, if you delegate come back, just let me come back to that idea of hiring a CEO. I'm very strong on the notion of delegating everything you're not passionate about someone else could to do that. And if you build enough culture around what you're doing, you can be absent from that for a while without damaging the business. That's key.

Daniel Franco: 1:06

Hey there, my name is Daniel Franco. And this is the creating synergy podcast, your business and leadership podcast where we speak to high profile leaders and thinkers about their careers and dig deep by asking the questions we all want the answers to uncovering their stories, strategies, leadership lessons, and their secrets to success. Today on the show, I had the privilege to sit down with a great man Simon Hackett, an Australian technology entrepreneur, who co founded internode in 1991. And after growing it to 450 staff with 190,000 customers, and an annual turnover of 180 million. He sold it to inet for $105 million dollars in December 2011. Simon has also done some amazing things in his life, which we touched on in this podcast. So he was part of the conglomerate of universities that actually bought the Internet into Australia. He bought the Internet into Australia. Sidenote, for those who remember, Simon actually explains the noise that those modems used to make every time he logged into the internet. And he informed us that it actually wasn't even required. We've been sold a lie our whole lives. In 1990, he co created the world's first internet toaster. You heard that correctly, the world's first internet toaster, they cooked a piece of toast from the other side of the world. It's unbelievable. This has been touted as arguably the world's first IoT gadget. He's also a huge advocate for electric vehicles. And as such, he imported the first Tesla Roadster into Australia, and he documented the process of driving it 501 kilometers on a single charge during the global green challenge in Australia. This was reported to be a new world range record for our production electric car at the time. He went on to spend some time with the great man himself Elon Musk and then subsequently appeared in a testimonial for Tesla. How many of us can say that we've done a testimonial for Tesla. Simon has also started the Hackett Foundation which undertakes target philanthropy in the world in support of community endeavors, and most notably, is the main sponsor of the world famous festival. WOMAdelaide is also invested in multiple companies, and he's a significant investor in redflow Limited and is six listed company that is doing amazing things in the battery manufacturing, renewables and environmental industries. This episode is epic. Not only did we hear about his amazing journey, his career and his innovative marketing techniques that he used to scale into No, but Simon and I also deep dive into his thoughts on the skills required to be successful in business, the difficulties of leadership, the art of delegation, the role that a CEO plays and why he chose not to be the CEO of internode, managing your mental health and much much more. So without further ado, here is my chat with Simon. Welcome back to the creative synergy podcast. My name is Daniel Franco and today we have the great man Simon haddock, Simon Hackett on the show. Welcome Simon. Good ideas. Good. Yeah, exactly. Exactly the way through it. Sorry. Well, thank you again, it's been I'm really excited about this podcast. I have been for some time, you know, I've had a couple of chats before. And we've gone down so many different rabbit hole. So I'm assuming this is gonna go down the same, same path. You are, you are in the midst of writing a little bit about your journey. So a lot of today's podcast will be tailored towards your journey and the creation of internode and everything that you've done in that space. All through to what we would like to look at from a new renewables point of view. I know you're very interested in that world and everything you're doing post internode. So we're going to follow that structure by really want to start off with a couple of fun facts before we do. There's none. None of this is like something that you haven't heard of. But Fact number one you bought and owned the first ever Tesla Roadster in Australia. Is that correct?

Simon Hackett: 5:16

Absolutely. And repeatedly, repeatedly. Yes,

Daniel Franco: 5:19

I yes, you're a repeat customer, you drove it five, over 500 kilometers on a single charge, which was the longest drive by any commercial electric vehicle

Simon Hackett: 5:30

at the time. That was the longest drive in a production electric vehicle. It was 300 and something kilometer theoretical range that

Daniel Franco: 5:37

that's amazing. And then this is the part that really sort of you went on to do a testimonial for Tesla. Is that correct? Yeah. That's amazing. Because you've met Elon haven't

Simon Hackett: 5:46

Yeah, I have. you.

Daniel Franco: 5:47

Yeah. And you were instrumental in bringing Tesla's over into Australia. Yeah, I

Simon Hackett: 5:51

kind of annoyed Elon into realizing that market was here. And it worked. And there's a lot of a lot of happy Australian customers now.

Daniel Franco: 5:57

that worked. That's, that's brilliant. Well, I am I'm I like it's in my bucket list to to audit. What sort of put that all together?

Simon Hackett: 6:08

Yeah. In the mid 90s, I had the opportunity out of short part of a longer story I was in in California a fair bit through the 90s in my business career, and some friends they had an instance of the second coming of the the, the what we're in now is a third company. Yeah. And the second coming of the Evie was, I think, or the GM Evie, one, a device that GM were forced to build in California under sufferance and they leased them and they took the back and they crushed them. There's a whole backstory there. But I got handed the keys more accurately the pin actually to one of these and spent the weekend driving it. And I was hooked. Daniel EVs actually are just a nicer way to drive a car was nothing to do with saving the planet at that point, it was all about, they're just a bit of way to drive a car. And so I was committed to finding someone who would sell me an Eevee. That didn't suck ever since that point. And Elon was a part of Tesla, the the first people to be able to sell me an Eevee that didn't suck and I got the roaster didn't suck. Yeah. Wow.

Daniel Franco: 7:03

What was the process like of trying to get one of those things ever? And then it like, how did you charge it?

Simon Hackett: 7:08

Oh, yeah, yeah, it wasn't actually sure if I could charge it when I got it here. So I bought 110 volt adapter transformer just in case I had to use it. I didn't the car actually drinks anything. So I met him at a conference in the year or two before the roasters came out. And at that point, it was nothing but him on a stage and a Word document with a picture of how good it was going to be. And I said to him after the talk he gave if I buy one of these things and take it to Australia myself, is that cool? And he said, it's perfectly cool as long as you don't mind the servicing challenge. an awful long way from the mothership. Yeah, so I ordered one and N shifted out to Australia. And if left hand drive us registered car couldn't drive it legally in Australia. One of the things I discovered to my enormous annoyance is that Australian road rules make it very hard to drive a left hand drive car in Australia, you have to you can drive old ones, you see the old cars, that's because they're grandfathered under the old Australian design rules. But unless it's a very old car or a garbage truck, it's actually really hard to get it to get permission to register really. So all the driving I did was in special events on special permits. I drove from Darwin to Adelaide, along in a thing called the Global Green challenge alongside the solar cars. It's what you were referring to earlier. Yeah. And I rent on the racetrack as demo laps in the sorry, in the Formula One track in Adelaide. Yeah. And then it wound up back in America. I bought the first right hand drive one because by then Tesla had actually started making right hand drive ones. So earlier so that's the one I drove around

Daniel Franco: 8:35

and then amazing so the first so you've your two first in so first first Tesla ever to be brought into Australia.

Simon Hackett: 8:42

First road legal one the right hand drive one Yeah. And then I wound up the Roadster I own now I still own one. It's actually the last right hand drive one Tesla ever delivered to right and drive country. Oh, so the last best roadster will ever be. And it's an awesome little orange car and I love it. Yeah,

Daniel Franco: 8:58

certainly California. Yeah, that is brilliant. That's an amazing story. And we could go on about that experience. But I want to go into the second point, which is going to be more of a segue into Korea and and where you where you've come from and where you are now heading heading in your life. So you were the first person to ever connect a commercially domestic appliance to the internet. Yeah. To the best of my knowledge, which was a toaster or toaster was like, like why a toaster? Were you dislike you? I know you're a problem solver. We didn't want to get up off you say like what was the what was the reason for the toaster

Simon Hackett: 9:41

in the mid 80s toasters were a thing there was there was there was an app I can't remember the name of it now, someone will remind me afterwards with flying toasters. And so totals were kind of a geek thing in the mid 80s. And well, I co created this thing with some collaborators in the States. Again, sort of halfway down this story. You know, it's story on the actually the pre animated story. And we, it was the answer almost a joke, which is what happens when you combine two aspects of my business knowledge, which is computer networking and industrial machine tool control? Yeah, you get the opportunity to burn the bread from the other side of the world, just because you can just because in the mid 80s, this whole IoT thing, Internet of Things thing did not exist. You could argue this was the first IoT gadget ever built. And we had a ball building just to prove the point. And it was actually just to drag people into a booth in a technology show in California, that the collaborators I was working with at the time said if we made one of these things, and at the time, was working at Adelaide Uni and they said, If you come over to the states and spend a few weeks with us and actually make that work, we'd flopped. We pay you to come out and make it work and that you show this thing at the booth. And I'd ever been to America as a young kid just starting a job at Adelaide Uni after graduating. Yeah. And yeah, you know, why not? So we built this thing to burn the bread veil. That is amazing. I actually started internode because of that toaster. Oh, wow. The word internode is a collapse of internet and node. Right? No visible device on a network? Yeah, the whole idea was to make IoT gadgets. Only. The term IoT didn't exist. There was no market and that IoT gadget cost $1,500 to build. So I was 30 years too early.

Daniel Franco: 11:18

Yeah. Wow. Thinking about that as a business if you? Yeah. Because you because so going into the journey. You started off internode. We'll talk about you talk a little bit about before how it all started. But But are there was a slogan that I think that you wrote somewhere I read on one of your or maybe you sent it to me that you wrote interest that you started out to build interesting black boxes. Interesting things on networks, right?

Simon Hackett: 11:43

Correct. Like the toaster. Yeah, so Exactly. So we didn't I wasn't exercising directly. Now what you call IT, exactly that network connected devices that control something in the real world. That's a long term passion of mine. The toaster wasn't the start of that it was the middle of that I when I was a university student I might, I had a part time job writing software for industrial machine tools. Well, before I understood the term public liability, and I had software running on things like Apple two's Yeah, driving enormous amounts of hydraulic equipment, all over factory floors. Yeah, I had a ball doing it. And it but it created that real passion in me for getting computers to do something useful physical in the real world, not just for making things right it race across the screen.

Daniel Franco: 12:28

What was it about computers at that time? That just drew you in? Like, well, interesting

Simon Hackett: 12:35

question. Yeah. I, I realized through a nice combination of factors that had a real aptitude for computers, by which I mean an aptitude for understanding and caring about how they work. And knowing at a visceral level, right down to the ride down to the wires, how they work and why they work. It was a great era to do that. As a, as a school student, started out marking cards and sending them off to a thing called the angle Park Computing Center. Yeah, something the state government had built. And they didn't realize what a great thing they built. It started the computer related careers of multiple people I know, in my kind of cohort and access to computers big expensive mainframes. Yep. And that place lent my school and Apple two, back when that was an expensive and esoteric thing and it and it came with this little red book, which was had both the circuit diagram and the manual for how to program it in machine code, something that no one would care about, except for some reason I did. And I opened this up. And for some reason, Daniel, it all made sense. And I just started doing it. And I realized I had this deep interest and understanding of how it works. And I liked being in there, doing the thing that aptitudes, so just yet spoke to me absolutely did. So that opportunity was created by dropping this computer, which at the time was expensive, and the lapse of me and a few other people at my school, a few other people only because there was this tiny cohort that actually found that interesting and the rest of the kids went outside and you know, kicked balls and played football and, and we were we were the boring kids sitting inside playing around on this computer thing. Yeah, trying to avoid the sport. That's and we really loved it

Daniel Franco: 14:04

and you'd love to it's a different type of sport isn't it really is

Simon Hackett: 14:07

it is actually d it's a real sport and a real logic puzzle.

Daniel Franco: 14:11

And yeah, so we're putting it Yeah. Just a quick note, this episode is brought to you by Synergy. IQ leaders in enabling change. Synergy IQ are the ones you call when the change or challenge seems so complex, and you don't know where to start. But more importantly, were the ones you call when you want to make a change that will actually last if you want to check them out. It's at Synergy iq.com.au Do you can you explain to us just how it all started then like do you see your this kid that's taking this interest in computers? You're working your way up through the ranks obviously working at Adelaide University all the above? What's the story? How did it come about to to one day you saying actually you know what, I want to start my own business here.

Simon Hackett: 14:55

Right? Right. Happy to tell you that story. I will start at the end and say for some reason I I always felt like I wanted to start a company. At the earliest I can remember an answer to that question, what do you want to know? What do you want to do when you grow up? For me it had it had some aspect of actually having my own company. I don't know why. I think it's actually a form of mental foible that a small percentage of the population have had can't necessarily explain. And it's not a bad thing, right? Yeah. So school student got exposed to this apple two, which was really damn cool and interesting. Coerce my parents into buying me one. My pocket money by making hardware to go into that Apple 2 and selling it to the local computer store, the joysticks, computer joysticks to plug into the apple two for games so that the local computer store the top apples at the time, that's amazing. Got my first education in globalization, because about a year after I was making these things in, in the shed out of the back of the house, the guys had this joystick that they brought in from overseas that was cheaper for them to import than my parts cost. welcomed with globalization, right? I immediately gave up and found something else today. And that won't be writing software on these things. So when I've had early Junior, as a student, I did a degree you call a computer science degree, except they didn't exist in the mid 80s. So it's an applied math degree with computer science as a major. Keep writing industrial machine tool software in my spare time, graduated from Adelaide Uni, had a job interview for my first and only job that I've ever had a job interviewer which is to go back and work at the uni. Yeah, as a thing called is called a systems programmer,

Daniel Franco: 16:28

because you're doing this unique course but potentially smarter than lecture that's in computing,

Simon Hackett: 16:34

right? At least what at least high aptitude let's put it that way. So I got a job at Adelaide Uni, helping to run the big mainframes things sort of digital Vaccinium as computers that the university had. And while I was working at the uni, I was there at the right place at the right time. So I was working at one of these people that was that we're maintaining and running, you know, being a sysadmin modern parlance for these computers that the students are on that I used to be one on there, I'm doing that. This is the point where the internet gets founded in Australia. It was a creation of the university sector. There's a thing called the Australian academic and research network on it. And it was the Australian universities building the first Australian Internet knowing through collaboration with their colleagues in the US what they were missing out on. The US internet was already 10 plus years old. We had none. We had an email system only. And a pretty, pretty interesting Australian built one. So What year was this era? This is this is mid 80s. So I I got my job at the uni in 1987 graduated 96. And then I was working at Union 987. I was born in 85. Right? So So 1988 ish, was the point where the unions got together. And they they decided they were going to build the first Australian Internet. And that team was about 20 people and I was one of them. And we had meetings had a meeting at Adelaide Uni the year before the thing was built. And by sheer coincidence, it was Adelaide Uni where I was based. And there was a company that these big computers the university use digital vaccinators computers, the little things you would mentally associate in the modern world with people in white coats. Yes, on mainframes. Big things like things that make a fridge look small. Yeah, with with a CPU power, probably less than this watch. Yeah. And you would tune them up. So you could have 70 radio people logged into them doing stuff. So those existed, those things needed specialized software added to them to connect to the internet because the internet was a new thing. It didn't come with them. And there was a little company in California called TGV and they made the software that you needed for that. And they sent one of their guys out their first employee after the two founders. TGV actually stands for two guys in evacs. And that third guy, Stuart Vance got sent out to Adelaide, got when this was happening, and successfully sold that software to all the universities because they had no choice. They needed it. But I got to be friends with the guy. And I really got the hang of this software. He was the man that he and I were the ones that decided to do that toaster demo, right. He then called me back a few months later, and he said, Hey, you know that thing we were talking about over dinner, that that that stupid idea of making a toaster connection? If you can do it, we'll take you out to our place in California and that you show that to the world and so I did that took three months leave of absence of the uni winter went to California first time I went out of the country had a ball working with these really smart guys in California. What an education for a little kid, right? Yeah. And I came back and not surprisingly, in hindsight, the next thing they did was offered me a job because they knew I was bloody smarter this and there weren't a whole lot of people that knew their software backwards like I did. And I turned them down. Oh, wow. They were offering me three times my uni salary, another 10. Grand us, you know, to move and this is the mid eight series offered a job to go go to California and work for TGV and in Santa Cruz in California, a fabulous place with really smart people. And I said no lifetime opportunity. I said no, because I wanted to start my own company dammit. Yeah, that was this incredible fork in the road, right, that version of Simon would still be there. Working for Google, and would have would have made millions. Yeah. Being a small part of a large machine, but I wanted to start a company. Right. So I turned them down. They did something hugely generous. They said to me, yep, fair enough. We get it. Because they weren't they were startup. But we trust you. And so how about we hand you the distributorship for our expensive software that runs on these big expensive computers, and you sell and support it in Australia, because we trust you to do that. And so that happened. They lent me 25, grand us a lot of money at the time, again, mid 80s. And to start up, to start up doing that so that I get to share in your business. No, no, they just lend me the money. And that software, Daniel was really expensive, but also because it's software really high margin, I kept half of whatever I could, I could sell, like 15% a year maintenance cost for upgrades and support and I didn't support. Yeah, so that's their return? course they did. Yeah. But the point is that they bootstrapped in and out, I was going to make little black boxes, like the toaster, but in my spare time selling their software, the software sells really well. My accountant got really confused. Because I'd come in after two or three years, I'd handed my books which are really simple, which is that we, we we made $500,000 in and we kept off. And it was that was it. Apart from paying a few people. It was really simple. Yeah. But that software and those computers were heading towards the sunset that was already obvious, right? They were not going to be there and technology is changing right? microcomputers taking over the world. So I knew the last I knew like going to have my best year selling that software before everything crashed in terms of selling it. And that happened. And that last year, we made a quarter million dollars profit. Selling a license to Cole's Meyer nationally, I think it was for running that software on their Vax famous computers around the country. And I immediately spent 100% of it deters turned us into an ISP. I bought all the hardware I needed to become an internet service provider in Adelaide. Because I knew how to do that I was one of the people in Australia, one of the 20 people that knew how the Internet worked by starting it here. Yeah. So I took that knowledge and said I can be an ISP, and bought a whole lot of modems and routers and stuff. And started doing the internet thing hired a few more people. So, so Right. So they're right, but also bet all the money quite happily. Yeah, the upside is no debt. Right. And so we didn't know it until much later never had any debt. And that's a minute. And I was quite happy to bet the money.

Daniel Franco: 22:27

Bet you're quite literally another first Another fun fact that you're one of the people that bought the Internet into Australia. Yeah. Is that correct? Yeah,

Simon Hackett: 22:36

we're what was one of the team at the university sector that figured out what that was, and made it work. I got the university to buy a Cisco router when Cisco has didn't exist in Australia, because I sent email to this company called Cisco that I found on the interwebs. And their tech support was actually really good. So I said to the uni, these guys know what they're doing. Let's go buy one of those things. And wow, I've been playing with Cisco routers for a long time.

Daniel Franco: 22:59

All the water story. Does that, like the whole, but you're

Simon Hackett: 23:03

right place right time, right? aptitude? Low Right place, right time. You need all three of those. It's one of the deep lessons for me, right? And you don't want to be to up yourself about the fact that if you're on the wrong time, the aptitude isn't good enough.

Daniel Franco: 23:17

So I'm gonna ask you a question. I come from a construction background, right? I have I have done a property developing in my time. And, and my dad's a builder and family full of builders, right. Yeah. And the typical thing you would have heard this before, as you walk down the street. My dad did this 1000 times. And I've that to my kids a couple of times as well. Right. So you're driving down the street and you drive past the house. And you see that house I built that house like that's when the house that I built right. Do you have that same thought process with just the way we run business here in Australia now? Like I like this whole world, like right now there's internet everywhere in this room. And it's come so far, it's come amazingly far. But there's this connection to that point. And you're part of it.

Simon Hackett: 24:08

Yeah. I like the sense of being part of it. I mean, none of none of that old in that original infrastructure rebuilt. It's still there. It's all been superseded 100 times. Yeah. But yeah, I was there on the ground floor of it. And my business career is consequential to having been fortunate to be one of the little cohort of Australians that were the first people to figure out what the internet was in Australia and mess about and kind of make it work. And the what became the commercial internet was a thing that just glommed on to the university network that the universities had built on, and it's still around, but the university that's now a separate network, to the commercial sector, really, of the internet, but yeah, it's fun to have been part of the genesis of that. And really, a lot of what I did in internet was about one of the ways I describe what I did at internet is high technology plumbing. Yeah, you come from a building background. Well, I do was well, with my plumbing In my pipe, your electronic pipes, but the concepts are annoyingly annoyingly appropriate. Yeah, that you are building a tree structure distributing something through pipes. Yeah. You really, right? Fundamentally you do lots of stuff. But that's that's what's at the bottom of that and a lot of fun in in and out putting physical infrastructure out in the country, along with other ISPs that were doing it to try to accelerate that process. In the broadband era think what ideas? Yeah, we had a lot to do with the ADSL. You're so

Daniel Franco: 25:28

random question. Is this come into my mind as you're talking through this? Sure. Do you remember when we used to log on to the internet, like he used to, with a modem with a modem? Made that

Simon Hackett: 25:40

make this strange mating call? What

Daniel Franco: 25:42

was that? What was the point of that noise? What like, right, can you explain that noise? To me? I've always wanted to know this.

Simon Hackett: 25:48

Yeah, I mean, the, well, there's two things, right, the what the point of the noise is, and the fact that you could hear it, you didn't have to hear it, or you have to write it's just

Daniel Franco: 25:56

a lot going on. Now. It that was that was I used to hate it because my parents could know what I was doing. If I was looking at.

Simon Hackett: 26:02

Well, you couldn't actually you couldn't actually suppress the noise. But the reason the reason is playing the noise is so you need to actually dial the right number. And you didn't have a human at the other end saying hello, hello. Yeah, no, that was the reason for making living here. The first part of that transaction is actually for you, as a human to make sure that things work. Yeah. And you can sit you could suppress that. That noise. Yeah. If you if it's if you want to,

Daniel Franco: 26:24

because that takes you back doesn't remember the amount of times that the fax machine would just keep on ringing because someone's trying to.

Simon Hackett: 26:31

And then those noises that that thing you were hearing is actually the two modems at each end, characterizing the quality of the line actually working out what audio tones are working and what audio turns are not working in that particular phone call that particular phone line. And then they use the ones that are working to transmit information. There were actually incredibly sophisticated device like a locksmith type thing. Yeah, well, it's running different sounds to actually so that so the two ends actually know the sequences happening. So they build an audio map in software, of which audio frequencies are running properly right now, which ones on and then restrict the communication to the ones that are

Daniel Franco: 27:08

so is that why it used to take like 10 times to log on because it was just trying to find it? It was it was rubbish line? Yeah, I wasn't interested line. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's amazing. Sorry, I digress. I just wanted to ask that question. Because

Simon Hackett: 27:22

dial up internet. Hey, that is where it all started. And you Gosh, it was slow. Yeah, it was. Yeah. And give you a sense of scale. Right. The the most advanced dial up modems wound up being the 56k ones based actually get 56 kilobit modems. The first link between Australia and the US the first internet link was 64k. It was the equivalent of one dial up connection that when we first built the internet in Australia, that was all there was. And then long time to get that. Okay, yeah. And then it went up about I think it was 256k. So you know, like for them? Yeah. And then imagine this the year after we did the toasted demo, we did an audio demo, I was actually one of the people involved in some of the first experiments with with sending sound over the internet, which is ironic given that what's underneath it was dial up modems. Just sound the point is that, that I did these demos where we put a CD player in Australia, and radio tuner in Australia and then played the sound in packets across the Internet and played it on the same show floor that we demoed the toaster the next year, we were demoing sound over the internet. When I was doing it. I was monopolizing 95% of the entire Australian Internet at the time sites because I was using an older synth sound. Actually, really? Yeah, it was actually the cricket. We're looking at the cricket from Australia. Yeah. On the show floor of this trade show in California. You need you'll appreciate that for your listeners today. That is incredibly boring. What do you mean, it's hard to have sound over the internet? You know, all my radio? Yeah. There was none of that. You This was the start of you had to create someone had to create it. Obviously one of the people involved in designing the protocols for carrying sound in network packets in order to get that job done. Yeah. So

Daniel Franco: 28:55

there's that I know. There's anything I know about trying to download that sound on a one on a dial up modem I had. Yeah, it was a bit crazy. Everyone had Limewire. Right. We're all downloading music and just the whole virus. Yeah. Yeah. So So internode has taken off, right? It's, it's in that point of now, like things are happening, right. So

Simon Hackett: 29:16

yeah, let's set the context. So you didn't know it was I turned down a job offer and started in 99 in May 1991. And turned us into an ISP dial up ISP and about 94 95

Daniel Franco: 29:28

that hard was that as a decision to just

Simon Hackett: 29:30

No, no, no, no, because you were the thing that pivot? was so that the intervening three years or making is plenty of money selling that software, but I knew that would end and it did was obvious it was going to end. So Kodak. Yeah. And unlike Kodak, I was I was not prepared to die, right? Yeah. So immediately reinvested in becoming an ISP. I knew how to do it because I helped build the internet in Australia. So of course, I knew how to do it. So did that. Call it 94 By the turn by the end of the 90s by just 1999. InterNote had gone from zero to about 10,000 dial up customers in South Australia 2000 Roughly was the point at which the real acceleration began that that growth was was steady, steady. 2000 was the point that broadband turned up in Australia, implemented as a thing called ADSL. The point where you stopped delivering megabits per second over over those phone lines, many megabits a second, not just kilobits per second. And by the way, the way you do that is by remembering that you don't just have to carry sound, you can use a much wider band than you can the human ear can hear. And if you use the entire possible frequency band, not just the bit that yours can hear, you can do 24 megabits, not five, not 56 kilobits. Okay, so that's what those devices do. You can't hear them these the whole line. So 2018 has all turned up, Telstra started deploying it. And then people like us started putting our own ADSL gear and exchanges over the next little while. But the point is the 2001 broadband hit, you had a country already keyed up with dial up, wanting to go faster. So that's the point where we again, reinvested pretty much all the cash we had in buying hardware and deploying it in every capital city to interface into the Telstra ADSL network, and then to start to build our own. And, again, through through everything going from 10,000, customer, South Australian dial up ISP, to being a national broadband, internet provider. And between 2002 1010 We went from zero broadband customers to 200,000. And that's this enormous acceleration began, everyone wanted it. And it wasn't about marketing stuff. It was about holding on trying to keep the quality high, something like really care about its quality. I think it's one of the reasons it succeeded. Yeah, different different rabbit hole. But it was an amazing ride. And we were set up for it because we were really an Internet service provider. So we got on with it. And we're ground floor on that started that growth curve, which is fantastic. Right, right.

Daniel Franco: 31:58

So you mentioned marketing. Yep. And you did no marketing. How do people find out about this stuff?

Simon Hackett: 32:04

Right? Two ways. Word of mouth. Yeah, really. We were word of mouth marketing company. I've always had this huge belief that if you deliver a very high quality product, people will tell their friends. Yeah. And, and I know we talked about this the other day that there's also two sorts of businesses broadly if you want to start a business. Yeah. Very high demand, very high mark, high margin, relatively low numbers of customers, or very low margin, very high numbers of customers like a supermarket. Yeah, right. Nothing wrong with either business. But we we wanted to do the high, high quality one. Nonetheless, we found ourselves in an enormous growth curve as well. So sudden, that's how the business we are S curve. Vertical. We have a signing of 1000 9000 customers a month in the middle of that from so every month, we are ready with no marketing. No. So every month in the middle of it, we're adding the number of customers, it took us six years to build in dial up right now. For 994 to 2000. Wow. So no direct marketing, our friends told their friends. One of the things that happens in the geeky world is that if you've got the designated geek in your family, and they get asked who they recommend, as an internet provider, they're going to recommend one that works well. So they don't have to help their families handle later when it breaks. Yeah, it's self interest. Correct? Right. Yeah. The marketing we did do in the end was actually credibility based marketing in the era before social media. Yeah, there was web forums. Right. There were just discussion forums on on web pages, which still exist as well, right. But they're distinct to social media, which, which feels about building followers and wearing bikinis.

Daniel Franco: 33:36

But yeah, where people are Goodman.

Simon Hackett: 33:39

web forums are one of those places where people discuss things and there was a forum in Australia called Whirlpool. Everyone knows well, right? Well, I was in I was involved in Whirlpool from the early days and it was a place where internet broadband customers would discuss the trials and tribulations of making this work. I did a bit generally with a scroll through all the generally with Anonymous handles, talking about lambasting various ISPs, right? I did something which seemed obvious to me, but at the time was unusual. I, I registered an account there in my real name with my real affiliation as someone who ran a little broadband company, and I just started answering people's technical questions about how this stuff worked. Yeah, brilliant. What happens education? Yeah. And what happened over the next 10 years and credit Yeah, exactly. In hindsight, it looks plan but it wasn't. I wound up for a longest longest time I was one of the Top 10 Top 10 Posting rate people on Whirlpool by quantity. They kept a leaderboard. By the time I

Daniel Franco: 34:33

busy enough, though,

Simon Hackett: 34:36

this is really deep. It's actually really deep. I was but this was incredibly useful. I'm a very fast typist. And I become a fast typist. Interesting, interesting, silly statement, right? How do I live like I type fast with lots of mistakes? And I'm feeling so here's the thing, I'm Whirlpool doing that, and people start interacting with me and start telling me about things that don't work on internode So I'd fix them in plain sight interactively with these people on that web forum, right? And people would suggest things and fix them until goes wrong and I'd fix it. And that built enormous credibility. By the time I was done with that journey, I'd made over 30,000 posts on Whirlpool, because it keeps track of that. Yeah. And I lived in it. And I lived in it as a combination of in hindsight, credibility based marketing, but also real time feedback about whether your Internet Service is working. Those people would tell you if the internet was down. Yeah. And you could actually you could fix it real quick. Yeah, it was, how are they running

Daniel Franco: 35:33

it if there was a dial up?

Simon Hackett: 35:38

The point is that it became a feedback loop between me and my customers. I wound up with our key technical support people also then highly involved on on Whirlpool. I hired my first great tech support leader in internode. from Whirlpool, because he was so good at this stuff, I wound up saying, can you just come and share it with us? That's amazing. And that feedback loop and that credibility in that reality? Just just amplified the credibility of what we were doing and the believability of it incredibly well.

Daniel Franco: 36:09

Isn't that an amazing lesson for anyone who works? So we're always building a business. We're trying to grow a business. Just

Simon Hackett: 36:15

be yourself. Be honest. But be out there and be prepared to be criticized. Here's the cool thing.

Daniel Franco: 36:19

You would just consulting right. Yeah, that's exactly for free. Which is yeah, like,

Simon Hackett: 36:22

right. But if you if people tell you in public, what sucks about your business in that environment, the big learning for me was they weren't trying to bring me down. They wanted me to fix it. Yeah. And if you respond to that, by fixing it, credibility goes through the roof. It's astonishing, right? If you responded by running around, pretending it's not their political thing, then you will get rightly lambasted?

Daniel Franco: 36:46

Well, because people accept that you can make a mistake, you're just hurry up and fix it, right?

Simon Hackett: 36:52

So Whirlpool was the marketing. That's

Daniel Franco: 36:54

brilliant. So in this, like the world of exponential growth, right, like the word exponential growth, and chaos, are thrown together. And entwined so beautifully. Yeah. And for good reason, right. But from your point of view, how did you guys manage through what would have been chaos? Surely,

Simon Hackett: 37:18

yeah, it was quite a journey. It was really quite a journey. And one of the ways I managed through it is realizing that no individual person can be great at every aspect of the business here, right. So the the conscious decision I made was, I said, Look, I'm a good communicator, I'm good technique. I've got good with technology. I love being a technical leader. I don't really love being a people leader, other than by side effect of, of hopefully inspiring people who are geeks by doing good geeky things, right. So very early on, I hired a CEO. Okay, so I was the managing director, but I was not the CEO. Interestingly, I deliberately hired another another lovely man whose name's Pat Tapper. In the second company of internode, we actually had a near death experience. But after the near death experience, Hi, Pat hats, the one that grew the business from at that point 20 Something people to just under 500. On the on the books, by the time we ultimately sold, sold the company to run it. So he built the business as a business as a as a thing that has a structure that has HR that has resources that has departments, all of the stuff you saw and found that right when you've gone from in that 10 years, 20 people to 500. Yeah, along with the customer growth to keep up with the customer growth. And two thirds of those people were in tech support. And so here's, here's a list. So the answer is I hired someone to the competency that I didn't have and trusted him to do that.

Daniel Franco: 38:39

I love it really, really

Simon Hackett: 38:40

important.

Daniel Franco: 38:41

Very important lesson. So your question to that, then? Would you would internode have been what it was? If that didn't if you went now, I'm holding this on myself? No,

Simon Hackett: 38:50

it would have failed. Yeah, it really failed. And is that the near death experience that you know what it is? Now it would have failed because I would have been crap at it. And I wouldn't, wouldn't have that to actually manage the business. And it would have made me sad, and I would have stopped, you know, or I would have would have had a heart attack or I would have or the business would have performed so badly that it wouldn't have succeeded. Because it was justifiably crap. Yeah. Right. And I think it's justified with the opposite. The near death experience was before that, right. Which was actually that back when it was still a dial up ISP. Late 90s. I, I reached a point where I was in a relationship with a lady who was in Boston, one of the side effects of traveling to the US a lot, right, I got to meet Americans, and some of those Americans were nice people. Yeah. And I can tell you that a long distance relationship between Adelaide and Boston is a hard thing to manage. It's was 28 hours door to door because I used to actually do the trip. Yeah, it was brutal, right. But I was not achieved. Right. And no, and I was getting distracted with that. Because I'm a human being. Yeah, in the end, it didn't work out nicely. And that that actually got me even more distracted. So In the meantime, we we needed in order to keep running when for a year or so my brain was out to lunch and I wasn't really involved in running it at all right? I was around, but my brain wasn't really home. Right? I was a sad puppy dealing with sad puppy things that had happened. Yeah, yeah. So we took one person we had in the business at the time and promoted them to being the CEO, one of our sales people at the time, in the in that that software you're being sold. Yeah. And it turned out to be the wrong decision, one of the things you can really easily do is promote people beyond the level of competency and or beyond the level of comfort, right? And it was a knee jerk reaction, it was wrong. And a year later, I figured out that she was solving every problem by hiring more people and spending more money, doing it badly hadn't admitted that to me. Yeah. And I had this wake up call. And I realized that the business was actually sitting there with the classic problems, right? mounting debts, everything was going pear shaped going to die by cash flow, right, we were going to die. And I wound up having to, we had to take the business from 20 people back to 10. Had the day when half the half the staff got out. Ouch. and spent the next year hand managing every fucking Bill climbing back out of that hole out. The second time we went for someone who hated that, and somebody who hated that with a passion. The second time we climbed past 15 people we didn't stop before 500. Right? Because I was damn sure I was going to hire somebody brilliant at doing that. And it wasn't that person's fault. We put them in a situation where they were we set them up for failure. Right? My fault, not hers. Yeah, that's important.

Daniel Franco: 41:36

I 100% agree. The question I am going to ask you though, which is one that's probably not talked about enough. But is a key contributor to culture? Yep. Have a business to leadership to everything? Which is your personal life as a leader in twining with the business with the business? Absolutely. What lessons did you learn from that?

Simon Hackett: 42:04

We are all real people, Daniel and the other parts of their life in a business sense. I was gonna say get in the way, which is not the right way, not the right way to frame it at all. But the point is that they don't. They don't indirect necessarily well, with the business or another phrase, I remember reading somewhere. And I'm fond of it, which is that when people talk about the notion of work life balance, what they should be doing is talking about work life separation, because in fact, the work the work actively damages the life, yeah, the rest of your life. And it's got worse, not better in the last decade. And now we're expected to have the gadgets all the time, you are expected to be interruptible. That expectation is extremely toxic, and I think should be banned. And the problem is that we all train ourselves into that you get the dopamine hit every time you get another message and you want to keep getting another messaging, right? It's actually all the tools let you shut those things off. And people like Apple are getting better at making it easier for you to do that automatically. Which is great. Because you need to you need to shut it off. You need to have a life otherwise why bother working right? We don't we you and I are suspect don't want to be like Steve Jobs. Right? Whose whose life was defined by his work in a positive sense, I think but that was so much of his life. The rest of us would like to have I think, you know, a family and dogs and cats fish. And well, I mean, it's really important to appreciate those things are separate of the business and try your hardest to make space of them. And it sounds like a platitude because it's a true one. And again, if you delegate come back, just let me come back to this. That idea of hiring a CEO, I'm very strong on the notion of delegating everything that you're not passionate about someone else, if you do that. And if you build enough culture around what you're doing, you can be absent from that for a while without damaging the business. Yeah, that's the key can and so when you need to be you should then go out and do it. Right. None of us. None of us are machines, and we shouldn't be

Daniel Franco: 43:52

what if. So, this applies to not just the CEO level, not any, any anyone in leadership roles. Yes. Any guessing. I mean, you're not in

Simon Hackett: 44:03

a role where you take that we take the problems home with you in your head, even if you don't want to, because you have to be correct, because you're the one that feels like you have to.

Daniel Franco: 44:09

But let's talk about later. I mean, a big, big part of our listener base, our leaders, if they are in a position that they are even entrepreneurs right to start their own business, and you're not the first that I've heard that said I actually need to put a new CEO in. We did a podcast last week with David Fogarty, who I don't know if you've probably not heard of this, but he's built an E commerce brand that the $400 million business online and it's selling blankets and nobody's heard it. It's here in South Australia. And he's made the decision recently announced it on the podcast that he's looking to get a CEO because again that chaos was all part of it right? Yeah. What if this self awareness is not there? Number one, right, right. Number so first question, what is what if the self awareness of the individual Obviously, you have the self awareness that this is not me

Simon Hackett: 45:02

this isn't. And when I when I do these things, it makes me feel sad. Correct. So don't do that.

Daniel Franco: 45:08

But what if you really like, if you like the idea,

Simon Hackett: 45:13

I like the idea of being the head honcho, the idea of holding all the pieces. And I think that is actually a fantastic way to have your business fail. Some people get away with it, but the people to get over that are rare. Yeah, right. Yeah. Because if you're not passionate about that thing, you're going to do a bad job of it. Or it's going to make you sad while you do it and wishing you're doing something else. All of which is a waste of the one thing you and I don't have more of, which is hours, minutes and seconds time, right? Correct. One irreplaceable thing. So delegate the shit out of it. You've got to, but it's very common. You're right, that thing of wanting to say, Well, I'm dammit, I started the business, right? I want to be the CEO, I want to be the big hat. I'm the big boy, I want to be the big pet big pants, the big hat, right? I deliberately didn't want to wear the big hands of big hat. I wanted to change the world. And I could do that by throwing broad ideas at my CEO and getting into execute them.

Daniel Franco: 46:03

Yeah. Right. What does that relationship look like the managing director and a CEO? Yeah,

Simon Hackett: 46:09

for me, and Pat, it was extremely effective, just high trust trusted each other. Pat trusted my technical ideas that I was going to actually be be taking the big the big picture ideas about, let's get into broadband. Let's get into this. Let's do that. That they were rational things to do that I was an expert in that room. And I trusted him that he would grow the business appropriately in terms of staff and staff management to support that need. So as to pipelines work together. Really? Yes. And I absolutely just trusted him to do it. Was he a technical guru? And so he was a people person, he business person because of people specifically designed? Yeah, yeah, he was he was he was in a senior management role in business in the AV industry before we hired him into into Internet. He was a great people person. And that business, he likes technology, AV AV industry, right, like technology as a thing. Yeah. But he was not a geek. Yeah. And he didn't need to be a geek. And it meant because he wasn't the gig, there was actually never any conflict about whether I had the right geeky idea, because I was I was the Head Geek. And that's the bit I did want. Yeah, and the bit I did hold and in a node was built in the shape of what what my geeky brain said it needed to be Yeah. Hiring a CEO and delegating a whole lot of things gave me the ability to pull those strings. Yeah, to actually achieve that. It gave me leverage. And what you need to build a big businesses levers, and you need to appreciate that the levers involve other people, you've got to, I've convinced other people successfully at times to do this to their claim their benefit, right? That, that you can't have a big business where you're the CEO, unless, unless being a CEO is your superpower. And for some people it is, but then they need to hire really good people under them to do the rest of the work because I saw a nice definition of what CEO is right which is make everybody happy. There's no There's no other god for and point about that is make everybody happy in the face of everyone around you. Bing, bing, bing likely to carry your reason why you're about to become sad that they need you to fix. Right now this, you know, this person's nasty, we need to get rid of him. This has happened. That's wrong. I need more money. Like, you know, I want to go on leave. Whatever it is, right.

Daniel Franco: 48:24

Yeah, that make people happy. make people happy. Why? And if and if not working to the objective. Yeah,

Simon Hackett: 48:29

exactly. Exactly. But but a lot of ways I think a good CEO, especially for large company isn't by definition running the business. They are running the senior management team, and the culture. Yeah, it's the senior management team that are running the business. Currently, if you don't trust them to the then bloody fire them and hire people that you do trust, because you're not doing it, right.

Daniel Franco: 48:50

So there's so much in this, what if you can't afford to bring in those really great people? Like, right, right in? Spades? Right. Yeah. And

Simon Hackett: 49:00

this is this is a challenge. And I was lucky in the internode space that the growth rate was so high. And the investments I made initially in hardware worked so well that we didn't have debt, we could actually just do it. Yeah. Good, old fashioned way. Yeah. In the modern world, there's a tendency to use your venture capital or otherwise to do it. So one of the ways is that notice, in fact that a lot of ways that's the most effective way to to explain the point. The other aspect about you get people that want to be the CEO and want to run everything. The other equivalent piece of that is ownership stake in businesses. You have people that quite rationally as people have started a business, especially if they started on their own versus versus a collaboration of two or three people. If you if you if you're TGV that company, as mentioned before, two guys in a VAX that started out as a 50 thing. Yeah, so they already had in their heads the notion that they were each owning a smaller chunk than 100% in order to collectively build a bigger pie. As a soul have found it, I think it's worth considering that is usually still the right answer there too. If you need the capital, if you don't have the cash, one of the ways of doing it is to use equity instead, right? It's to sell a share of the business to somebody, either because that's somebody, you might you might actually just, if you, if you think they're the right person to run the business, and you better be right about it. In this case, you might have hand them a chunk of equity in lieu of paying them enough money, so I can't afford you. So how about I pay you half of what I can afford your whatever, and you have a slice of the business? That's high risk, right? Because if they're a bad if they're a bad person at it, you know, now you've handed a chunk of the business to somebody you can't take back. Yeah, so the more conventional answer is, in fact, VC, right? It's to find an investor to hand a chunk of the business to now you've got some money in your pocket with which you can hire that CEO. And the point being if you've hired the wrong CEO, fire them and hire the next one. Yeah. Yeah. And this other person is an investor that now and it's a chunk of your business, but it's that classic thing, and it's obvious, but I want to reiterate it, there's two ways to make a large amount of money in business right? To own 100% of the business that does decently well. Or to own 10% of the business that does fabulously. Well. To borrow a phrase, a good friend of mine, John Lindsay is fond of money is fungible, right? If those two parts gave you the same amount of money, neither is wrong. Except that one of them may be incompatible with the way your brain works. That's terrific. So work out which one is incompatible with, take the ones compatible with internode grew. When it was sold, it was sold for the most astonishing amount of money 100 and $5 million. Right.

Daniel Franco: 51:32

In what year? Did you sell it? 2012 2012.

Simon Hackett: 51:36

nother another rabbit hole where you go down? I actually, I agreed to sell it. Yeah, I agree to sell the year earlier. And then I changed my mind. Which, at the time, decided I didn't want to, but But here's the point that the price go up after no down, down, down, except it went up. Okay. Right, so I'll see if I can hold these. Actually, let me start with

Daniel Franco: 51:57

a whirlpool conversation, right? Yeah.

Simon Hackett: 52:00

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So So yeah, that second time, what I insisted with Lynette was that half the sale proceeds were in line and shares, and I net, but as a matter of policy never did that. They only required their targets in cash. But I said, the only way you get me is that way. And I owned the last largest privately held ISP left. And so the reluctantly agreed to do that. So that 100 and 5 million wound up being worth more than that, because the I net share half of that actually quadrupled over the next few years. So I accidentally made a good business. But here's the reason I did it, because I wasn't really ready to sell yet. So what that kept me with was a minority ownership. And what I'm saying to you is even a minority ownership stake is still ownership. So it's still involved to live very comfortably. And I still felt like I was a beneficiary of some of my actions, right? As a shareholder.

Daniel Franco: 52:53

We've had a good you made a few good stories, which in relation to the shares, because it was the whole Tesla thing. You

Simon Hackett: 53:00

Yeah, I bought as many Tesla shares as I could afford, as early as I could afford them. Not as a business decision, but because I believed in the damn product. And and I believed in Elon, white, white to the eyes, he was not going to fail. I had no idea it would become the answer to the question. 10 years ago, what stock should you have bought? If you one of the largest return in the NASDAQ ever? Yeah, it's Tesla. Yeah. Right.

Daniel Franco: 53:23

It's like 1000 times. Yeah,

Simon Hackett: 53:24

it's crazy. It's crazy number. But it was just out of belief.

Daniel Franco: 53:27

Anyway, I digress. So, so

Simon Hackett: 53:31

lucky, like Elon, that could have been worth zero. Absolutely.

Daniel Franco: 53:36

So there was another when you were talking about through the different options of hiring and bringing a CEO give him giving them some share.

Simon Hackett: 53:44

Yes or no order. Be clear. If you're not sure if that's the right CEO, actually, the one I prefer is actually the other one, which is actually not get a business investor who believes in your business, sell them a share of the business, and then use that cash to buy the CEO you want to hire. Yeah. So that if that CEO is the wrong one, you can change them? Well, that's different to the ESOP concept, right, like the American concept of of handling of handing a small amount of shares to senior management. I think that's a great idea. And then if that's the wrong person, that's okay. They walked off with 3% of your company. Yes. Right. But what I was referring to earlier was the idea that if you if you needed to handle a third of the company to somebody, then lose money. Oh, yeah, that's a big risk. Well,

Daniel Franco: 54:22

I was thinking you could structure in a way that if they hit their targets, then they activate

Simon Hackett: 54:27

it. That's true. Yeah, you're right. You can do it that way. So you can set up a vesting structure. The downside for that person is that means that if you fire them, they've got nothing for the rivets. Yeah. So if they're smart about it, they want to negotiate something in the middle. That's why I'm in hindsight, I reckon it's actually simpler to find an investor who wants to put money in your business because you can convince them it's a rational business just needs the cash to hire the right CEO to accelerate it, and then use the cash to hire the CEO. And that's a perfectly rational business plan that any rational investor will look at and say, Yeah, I get that. Yes, that's an incredibly rational use of funds. Because then you want Don't explode. Yeah. Right. And if you explode, that's not good for the business. Yeah.

Daniel Franco: 55:06

Great idea is absolutely key in that in amongst all this growth and chaos and everything, though, and you know, you've hired the CEO, who obviously, was instrumental in that S curve going into that vertical line. Was there any defining moments during this period of growth that really stick with the, you know, was it one piece of advice? Was there one course that you did, like a piece of learning that you did one decision that you made outside of the CEO? Was there one thing or a multiple few things that you just remember thinking? Who yeah, that's, that's the game changer. In terms of surviving that growth, interest was in terms of what enabled the growth, right. And enabled you because like, on that growth curve, we it was a weird situation, you can actually really make a lot of mistakes. And you can and, and the weird

Simon Hackett: 56:03

situation was that we were not encouraging the growth. We were not marketing ourselves. The growth was coming at us because it was Right Place Right Time, right. And people were converting themselves from dial up to broadband. Yep. And so to what I'm what I'm getting at is that one of the ways you can deal with growing too fast is to slow the marketing down a bit. So the phone calls slowed down a bit, so you can keep up, right? We weren't doing any marketing, that tap was turning itself. So so the entire thing was hanging on by your fingernails.

Daniel Franco: 56:32

That's amazing. Dreams.

Simon Hackett: 56:35

Exactly. It was astonishing, right. And it wasn't about getting rich, it was about holding on and what is holding on me, I have this strong belief in doing the best possible job in terms of quality of what we were doing. We were very strong on high quality, high support quality, high network quality, it meant that we bought our own gear nationally to keep the quality of the thing going right to control the outcome. That's what led us to get this hyper growth phase to happen, because we're actually bloody good at it. Yep. So what we did, Pat just kept hard enough people to keep up with the right, we wrote all our own internal software to manage the process of dealing with people. So we automated everything we could very much automated everything we could, we had to say to every other ISP, and it's all bespoke software, because the industry was too new. You couldn't buy stuff to do this. We so key bits of the code were written by people, including me to manage that growth, to manage accounting and tech support and everything else. And look, I'd say to you, we just we just hung on. And we were honest about what we were doing. And where we did have a choice about not intentionally accelerating growth we would hold back from until we could actually keep up with the rate.

Daniel Franco: 57:47

Was there ever a point where you were just saying, No, we can't do that?

Simon Hackett: 57:51

Yeah, it's that's an interesting question. As a more general statement, one of the piece of business knowledge it's worth appreciating is if you've got a choice between doing the right thing by your current customers, or doing the right thing by customers that aren't by people that want to become customers, you need to keep doing the right thing by your current customers as priority. You need to not piss them off for having supported you early versus someone who's just turned up in the door suborning running that's

Daniel Franco: 58:16

that's an there's a lot of customer experience things. It's critical to understand where someone is on their

Simon Hackett: 58:24

on their journey. Right. And especially since our signups were predicated on references from existing customers, you they want to be the people that you prioritize the experience of. So in fact, in fact, to answer your question, there were situations where we suspended signups in particular geographic areas because that network was full. Okay. Right. And it's really important this is this is this is that lesson embodied, it was really important that we didn't produce crap performance for the people that we currently had, by signing up even more people are boiling that frog even harder until we could make that network link bigger. So we would actually suspend signups in geographic areas, if the link to that area wasn't capable of to preserve the quality of the experience that the people were already already paying us money. Right? Really important. Makes sense, right? The other point of adding a node and the success factor for it becoming successful, by the way is it happens to be a subscription based business. And it that's good luck. That's just what I knew how to build that subscription based business versus say, lawyers, right? Who charge by the hour. So when you're not working, you're not you're not earning money. Yeah, the beautiful thing about internet accesses people are paying by the month and even if they have, even if you do deliver them a bad month, it takes a lot of sustained bad results to cause them to actually bother to change, but just they're all real people with real lives. Yeah. And sure, they might be annoyed and things aren't paying 10 bucks too much for this thing and I should change to someone else. But then, but then the phone rings or the dog bites your foot or comes home from school, and you get on with something that matters. Yeah, so making money while you sleep. On training, it was dream and so subscription businesses like ISPs are an instance of that which is fabulous. and also very large number of customers spending a relatively small amount each produces enormous income stability, they will not all simultaneously get the chips with you. And even on days when we had to put the prices up and the message on Whirlpool would say, the people are Whirlpool would try to convince me I'm leaving, and everyone else is leaving. When you looked at the numbers at the end of the month, yeah, maybe the turnout rate had gone up from 2% to 3%. That month. Right. Like, like in the real world, people other than the ones on Whirlpool with no lives, including me. Have lives. Yeah. And don't leave, unless they listen actually isn't working. They won't leave. Now, you don't want to burn that credit. No, you want to fix it. But you get the idea. I get the idea. Yeah. Which brings me to a question around values, then. He's there. Yeah. And those are very strong values. Value story.

Daniel Franco: 1:00:50

Yeah. And so did you. Was values a really big piece of your puzzle when trying to create and grow this business? Yes. Yes, hugely. And what what? What emphasis did you put on values as a business?

Simon Hackett: 1:01:03

Well, in my case, the values were about the things that led me to be on Whirlpool, right, they were about about actually about honesty and accountability and openness, which is something I believe in, and some of the inspiration I've got from from various other businesses that have done that, you know, that's a choice, not a requirement, that opened a value that openness, I had a very strong ethos about delivering high quality customer outcomes, and believing that that would cause people to sign up. And so everything was about that when my and my team got to realize that culturally, if they would give me two options for how to upgrade something, I would take the one that produced the better result, even if it cost more. Because in the end, that was why we were all there were and we felt, Daniel we felt at that time that the industry felt like in a good sense. We were the cowboys and Telstra with a with a with a bit annoying big Indians run with all the reverse. The entire internet industry other than Telstra was united in that period, and would in fact help each other. And there's not collusion, that's cooperation, things like things called Internet exchanges. We connect our pipes together to get better economics when our customers wanted to talk to customers of another ISP. So I was a co founder for a thing called the South Australian Internet Exchange. Yeah. We do that because he had a common enemy. The common enemy was Telstra, who was who represented not not David, David and Goliath. Exactly. And it was not emnity in the sense of they weren't bad people. They were big, boring Blum Monge, people, they represented a lack of innovation and a lack of a lack of coolness that we would exploit. And so culturally, we really felt like we were the good guys building good things for good people. And that culturally, it drove all of us. We felt like we did a great job, we'd go home at night feeling happy, and our customers would reward us by staying as customers. And it worked. Now, not all businesses allow you to do that. But this one did. And that era did right now. And the end of that 10 years, right, the Internet was the internet, broadband industry was saturated, saturated, meaning like mobile zone, meaning if you wanted broadband, and you could get broadband, you already had it. So now it was just about businesses, growth rates, having come all the way off the S curve, stop. Now you're about eating each other's Young. That's a completely different world. Broadly, the period in which I sold the business into on it variety of reasons, but one of them was that the music had stopped. And the music that drove me had run out. Right, because that race was incredibly invigorating. Yeah, that race to keep up? Well, I

Daniel Franco: 1:03:38

think that's part of the you know, you said earlier in this conversation, you said there's a few type of people that want to start their own right. And now I was getting this huge reward for Yeah, and there's an element of me, because I have started my own and there's an element of me that thinks the chase is more exciting than the end game.

Simon Hackett: 1:03:59

And and what I've just told you is yes, it's exactly that right. And so when the nature of the business shifts you need to evaluate whether this new journey is the one you want to stay on or not. Now it turns out actually is holding on to for a related but different reasons. It's actually the NBN coming in, yeah, drove the economics of the industry in a way that meant that I needed to either buy another company or be bought or the company would have died economically Yeah, saturated. But the higher the the other part of it you've just correctly drawn out, which is the nature of the game had changed. Yeah, that that era had ended. And now it was no longer hard in the middle of that journey. Building broadband in Australia was hard and fun and exciting. And we were when we got to carry a license and we literally started digging up holes in the street and laying optical fiber in there because we needed to accelerate the rate of getting pipes in the ground. So we started putting our own pipes in as well. Literally digging up the ground. And it was fun. Yeah, you know, we can genuine plumbers. Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Franco: 1:04:58

I mean, not just theoretical on the road. destroys the there's no one really dictating what you were doing, then yeah, exactly. Then when the competition comes in, like really comes in and the game changes now you've got a follow up process and you're exactly. But again,

Simon Hackett: 1:05:11

think about halfway. When all we can do is keep up. There's no issue about chatting to the other ISP of your sport up the road. Yes, we both were both our shared enemy as both the sheer boring nature of Telstra, and they are the customers you want, you're gonna sell. Right? And the fact that we're so busy keeping up the last thing we need to do is compete with him. Yeah, with what we were competing with. To come back to an earlier point was our selves. Yeah, the competition was can we actually grow this business without it exploding? Yeah, it was that hard. And that exciting?

Daniel Franco: 1:05:42

Well, yeah. Internet coming out. Everyone wants it. Right. Yeah. It's a novelty. Now. It's just the Yeah, now now it's now it's a non negotiable

Simon Hackett: 1:05:51

nowadays, it finally the thing that we knew it would become, but it's become it right, which is that it comes out of the walls. And it also comes out of the air. Yeah. And so my kids are astonished if they can't get broadband. In the car, or in the plane halfway to Tasmania. Yeah. Because it's not quite in coverage right now. Yeah. Like, well, you know, this used to be hard. Yeah. What do you mean? Yeah, it used to be really hot.

Daniel Franco: 1:06:16

So he talked about cultural and culture a few times in that situation just then. For me, we work in business. So, synergy IQ, the business that I run and operate is the we're a consulting company that really specialized and complex change and complex change. You can imagine culture is sort of short, someone asks you a question about that, in the sense that What lessons do you learn about culture in that exponential growth period? And how important was it to to the growth of your business?

Simon Hackett: 1:06:48

Yeah, I think culture is tremendously important. And I also think it's something you can't force, correct. You really can't, right, I would claim to you, hopefully, accurately the internodes culture reflected my own right, reflect the beliefs. We were talking about the values, my beliefs and my values. I started the company, you know, yeah. But it is important that you communicate those values, but the way you communicate them, in my opinion, isn't with words, it's with actions. And so I would, I was highly involved, right? I was not an ivory tower person, I would be writing bits of code in the process of us trying to fix software, I'd be out out doing things. All of my team, I would say to you knew that they couldn't pull the wool over my eyes in terms of software engineering, because I've written a whole lot of software. Now, the latter half of the internode career. I didn't write anything particularly. But I still couldn't, I still understood it. So I couldn't be fooled. in a positive sense, right. But it meant I could be a team player I can someone in the technical room could explain to me that a problem was hard. I they could trust that I that, that, that I believe them. Yeah. So demonstrate the culture you've got by doing it is Dean, I've certainly tended to the extent I let it was I'd lead by doing stuff hoping that the examples I left behind were things people would correctly emulate. Yeah, I think all businesses work that way. Successful business and culture terms. Right. Apple? Yeah. Apple to this day, is a business that does what every Apple staff member believes Steve would have done. Yeah, for better and worse, right. But my God, there's a culture that is

Daniel Franco: 1:08:22

as an entrepreneur, startup, business, or even a, let's just call it any business that has a fast paced moving leadership group. Right. So it's play hard. Top. Yeah, scenario, work hard play hard work hard play hard, tough scenario, right. Yeah. There are some people that can't move at that pace. Right, nor do they want to, right. You would have seen that happen? A quite a fair amount in your time, right? Where you're 100 miles per hour. getting shit done. Yeah, solving problems. And then so you set that expectation that this is how it gets done.

Simon Hackett: 1:09:07

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. And it leads to almost a toxic expectation in some modern businesses that everyone else is going to run on the same as ours that you are I never I never worked that way. I never expected that other

Daniel Franco: 1:09:21

people but it's it's the example thing because you lead by example, then by you, by the nature of the beast and the want and desire to grow.

Simon Hackett: 1:09:32

I what I'd say to you, I think is that lesson internodes case. I think people saw selected whether that was the journey they wanted to stay on or not. Right. And if it was too much for them, they they achieved and I would say to you and I hope this is true that the business as a business would not blame people for leaving work at work and going home and having a life. All the geeks geeks are the worst at doing that. They tend to take home plenty of the things time from a compute erode the rest of business, like, you know, the accounts team would go home at five o'clock and nothing would happen until nine o'clock on Monday morning. And that's fine. Right? I what I'm saying is that I would never want never wanted to blame someone for not for not deciding that they needed to have a life as well as having a business. And I think the business needs to be compassionate in doing that someone wants to keep working hard, they're allowed to but shouldn't be forced to. So I think I want to hope that we were pretty good about that. I think that

Daniel Franco: 1:10:30

morally, you wouldn't have expected people to

Simon Hackett: 1:10:34

write but the example assignment, living on Whirlpool correct time would certainly drive a lot of the geeks in the organization to feel like they had to do the same. How do you manage that? I don't think I did manage it. I think I just let it happen. And what an individual does about that is up to them. I'll try but right there, what I wouldn't do and what I think some American hyper sort of hyper growth startups do do is they wouldn't be running around the corridors building a culture of saying, you can't go home. You're not finished yet. Yeah. Right. have actually have actively blaming people or berating them for stopping. Yeah. Because that's useless, in my opinion. That not not a universally held belief, right. And by way of agreeing with it, some of you it's clear that some of the sort of hyper growth us startups, it's absolutely, you know, stay on that bus or go hunt, you know, get off the bus. Yeah, we'll leave the late it was, it was never like that. Definitely in that space, right. Yeah. I never never wanted to drive a culture like that. If people infer that, from my activity, I couldn't necessarily stop them. But it was never an explicit thing of me saying, You must be as welded to this business as I am. And I would never have said

Daniel Franco: 1:11:44

it's it's funny, because if you're a founder, a CEO, a managing director, someone in a position of leadership, and you walk in through a room, and you say something like, that table would probably look better over there. Right? And you just saying, Yes. Has Yes. It's like, you know, where I'm going the next day, come back with tables moved.

Simon Hackett: 1:12:10

What that used to happen.

Daniel Franco: 1:12:12

It happens everywhere.

Simon Hackett: 1:12:14

Yes, I agree with you. I remember being quite troubled by that. You did write that I'm someone who absolutely likes to discuss thought balloons with people. Correct. And yes, it's very hard for people to hear the thought balloon and not infer an actual call to action. 100%. Yeah. Some of that's always going to happen. I tried hard to communicate to my especially the technical team, I'd be throwing thought balloons around with that, that the thing I most wanted is to be told I'm wrong. Yeah. Because I am as fallible as you are. We are all fallible things, right? My my enormous nonwork passion is flying things, right. And aviation is an enormous example of the fact that not that you, you can't be a great pilot by not making mistakes. You're a great pilot by not making a chain of mistakes, you will make a mistake, the trick is not to compound it with the next two or three. Every fatal flying accident typically involves multiple failures, not one you can blow one thing. Any that you blow one thing all the time, right all the time. So the people I got on best with are the ones that figured out I really meant it when I want them to tell me that I was blowing smoke up their ass and I was wrong. Yeah, I want to hear that. Yeah, it's the way I learned the same way you do. Right is but you human beings learn from their mistakes. And one of the challenges if you're the CEO of an organization, or in my case, the Technical Director of it is you don't want to get their god complex that says because I happen to be the one that owns the shares and started the business. I am therefore always right. In fact, the reality is is complete a precise reverse. Yeah, right. And the more that you are driven up that chain the more disconnected you can be from the knowledge that used to make your right Yeah,

Daniel Franco: 1:13:59

agreed and

Simon Hackett: 1:14:01

my best to encourage my such argue back and and they would see it they would see that I enjoy the debate and that that's the point. You got to it's such a fine line. It isn't and it's not something you can perfectly do.

Daniel Franco: 1:14:15

No you just have

Simon Hackett: 1:14:15

to you have to do the best you because I as you're absolutely right about that effect.

Daniel Franco: 1:14:19

I will that down i think and i i employee the Steve Jobs, attitude of hire great people and get them to tell you what Yes, you're right. Like that is absolutely believe that. Yeah,

Simon Hackett: 1:14:34

and in general, hiring people is an incredibly important decision. Yeah, if you haven't found the right person, and you desperately need somebody now and you've got the second best person that you regret it. Yeah. Like Well, easiest to see. I mean, it's so easy to hire people so hard to find them Jim

Daniel Franco: 1:14:54

Collins Good to Great right. Yeah, get the first rule number one is get the right people on the bottle. You know, that want to go in that direction?

Simon Hackett: 1:15:02

Yeah. And if you if you haven't found them yet, keep looking. Yeah, don't don't hire rubbish people, you will regret it enormously.

Daniel Franco: 1:15:10

I love it. When we caught up last time, I remember you said something that about the skill set needed for a business to be successful? Well, there's a couple of skill sets that you probably put high. It's about bringing people together, and then working on what you're passionate about, which is obviously something you really stuck to was doing what you're passionate about the firstly, what's your definition of success, because you said, for a company to be successful. You need to bring people together and work on what you're passionate

Simon Hackett: 1:15:43

about. Yeah. And you need to be fortunate enough to be doing that in a manner that means that you achieve economic sustainability and doing it. It needs to be something that actually causes income to occur. But the distinction being Are you it's that classic one, right? Are you in business to make money or is making money, the side effect of building a sustainable business? And for me, it was always, like I said, it was always the latter, right, I wanted a sustainable business. Because being in my business was the reward of that day one passion for wanting to start a business or want to be in business. Now, for the business to stay there. It means it needs to be sustainable, correct means you've got to earn enough money to make it sustainable. And I always chose the amount of money we charged for services, not on the basis of what the market price was, but on the basis of what we needed to charge for the business to be sustainable. And to trust that enough people would choose to pay that more that money even if it was more than a guy up the road. Yeah, there was a point in time where another company, the low price leader in the internet game in that era TPG who there was a point where they released broadband plans at a price that just made no sense to me. They were charging X dollars a month where I couldn't see how how it was possible. You match that price without losing money. And it wasn't about us having more expensive infrastructure. I just had no idea what he was smoking. And it caused me a great amount of erupts. Yes. And then I got up one morning and thought, Oh, that's okay. We just don't live on the same planet as him. Yeah, I don't care. We're going to charge what we need to charge to stay alive. And we just kept right on going and ignored him. Yeah, right answer. Yeah. Right. Charge what you need. And if you fail, so be it. Yeah. Right. But but if you kill yourself, here's the thing you could in a business a lots of competitors, like we had, you can get this mutually assured destruction sinkhole problem, right, that somebody drops their price to get more customers. Yeah. And the answer to their economics don't make any sense might be that they're idiots. Yeah. Or that they lost leading. And either way. If you then match it, someone else looks at that and says, but in a note, who are these expensive people on the ship? I better charge that too. Because yeah, and it's kind of rabbit. This is Whirlpool.

Daniel Franco: 1:17:54

The spiral. I think if you're don't do it, in that scenario, someone like yourself, using the internet example. TPG comes in puts the prices down. You guys should double down on customer service and strike. You play off?

Simon Hackett: 1:18:09

Exactly. And you say, look, it's more expensive, but there are things we can demonstrate the achieve from that matter. Yeah, that we will deliver to you. I agree.

Daniel Franco: 1:18:18

Beautiful. I love that. So looking back, I want to get into another sort of part now and this shortly. Good segue. But looking back, what was some of the most critical things that you learned about yourself through that growth and rise of internet before you start? Well, now looking back then, yeah,

Simon Hackett: 1:18:39

yeah. I did trust myself. And that worked. Right. I know, there was I trusted that the things I believed in, were actually things that would cause the business to be sustainable. That obviously worked. And I had to learn like everybody that none of us a Superman in some, sometimes some days, some weeks or months, you haven't got the motivation. If you've built a good enough business up around you, you can step out of that for a little while, and it won't, it won't die. And there's something this this it was really deep learning for me, right? There's a classic classic thing here, if you if you or a member of your staff, is irreplaceable. You must figure out how to how to make that not the case as rapidly as possible, right? Like it like nobody's irreplaceable. Yeah, you cannot have that staff person. Right. Right. And the answer to that is solid. And that that comes to the question of because then any want because all of us can have a media hitters, right and various media's hit me over time, that hit all of us. And we're all human beings. We're not perfect.

Daniel Franco: 1:19:42

Well, that comes to your point of sustainability. Yeah, actually, there was a question I was sustainable and sustainable. 100%. So actually, can we just jump back quickly? Because then you've said that it's just gone yet. I need to ask this question right. So the the sustainability Part of the business and you're saying you wanted to build this business that was sustainable, right? Which is an absolute goal of mine as well. Right? How do you know when you are sustainable? What's the key critical factors that come into play that, you know, when you ask?

Simon Hackett: 1:20:17

Yeah, I think it's well, that that you're making more money than you're spending, right now that you've achieved financial stop overnight, right, then, you know, it can but in a subscription based business, it actually can't. So every business has to find out what that right they did sort of in a subscription based business, as long as the product you're selling is still deliverable, then actually, you're extremely sustainable. So that's, that's useful thing. If the business is based on on, on delivering labor services to people, then your risks are around your own human availability. And around that the market, you're working into shifting Yeah. But if you've got economic sustainability out of that, the other piece is what I was talking about with key man risk, right? Yeah, you want to try and build a world where you can make yourself replaceable? In a perfect world, correct? Because otherwise, the problem with the problem we're not doing that is the whole existential kind of load thing. And something that I feel like I should have felt, but because I think we build a good business with a CEO, that wasn't me didn't feel that notion that I could get up in the morning. Here's, here's the funny one run your bank manager. At that point, right, my bank manager would would give her a home loan to any of my 500 staff, because they had a job. Yeah, I wouldn't give one to me, because I was a company director, that's not a reliable income. It's not a reliable business.

Daniel Franco: 1:21:42

I couldn't go belly up and right.

Simon Hackett: 1:21:44

Isn't that funny? That's right, but your income would have been. But the point is to flip it is that I can if I got the sheets and just turn the business off 500 people to be out of a job. So therefore, you know, maybe 1200 Petrova and families would be looking for another source of money, right? That's a lot of mental load at one level, right? It never really hit me. I was aware of that intellectually. It didn't impinge on me mentally, because the business was so sustainable, right, that it was ticking along. And so I could just let it tick along for a while. And

Daniel Franco: 1:22:16

I think it's a fear that a lot of entrepreneurs face in this audience. Is this the thing about the people relying on?

Simon Hackett: 1:22:24

If they're relying on me? I must I must work the long hours. Yeah, people are relying on what's right. If that that's your problem, not theirs, and you need to fix it by making yourself not someone they're relying on or convincing yourself that they're wrong about. Yeah. And those things can both be the case, right? They're wrong about that. And maybe so are you

Daniel Franco: 1:22:43

Yeah. Oh, that because it successfully shuttle he was you'll get sick, what's definitely something that sits in my gut, right. And I find myself always, always getting always telling myself stories. Yeah, that probably aren't true. The one person in my team said this to me one day when we were having, you know, a bit of a deep and meaningful sort of conversation. And they said, Then, we're all very, extremely talented people. Yes, we will be okay. Yes,

Simon Hackett: 1:23:20

exactly. Right. Exactly. And if you hired Well, what they said is true, correct way badly, it might not be.

Daniel Franco: 1:23:27

Absolutely. And that no, that's what I mean, we I mean, the head wobble here, we only you're gonna Gabs here, right? If it wasn't for her, this podcast wouldn't be up and running. But so that's a really excellent self thought, or how do I how do I? How do I work with remove the key person risk for myself? How do I make myself redundant? So you should do? Absolutely.

Simon Hackett: 1:23:58

And you should keep working on that until you feel like you've got there because it's actually worth doing. Apropos that earlier conversation, right? If you don't have the money to do it, sell a chunk of equity or borrow some money. And now and do it see calls, that if you borrow some money from someone aimed at the classes that you borrowed from the Bank of Bank of family, and hire that CEO, have a think about how much leverage you get back in your own brain to go do the cool shit. Yeah. brings in more business. Yeah, pays that person's salary that makes the wheel turn by itself. Yeah. And yes, there's a risk there. But business is risk. If you're afraid of risk don't play.

Daniel Franco: 1:24:37

Well, if you're if you're afraid to risk you wouldn't have started your business.

Simon Hackett: 1:24:41

Right. Right. And also wouldn't wouldn't decline plan Yeah, right, which is an exercise not zero risk, but of extremely conscious continuous risk management. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You understand the risk, you have a mitigation in place, you keep going.

Daniel Franco: 1:24:59

So now that you've sold the business. Yep. Okay became hugely successful. You sold the business? What is your biggest fear in your life that you're living right now?

Simon Hackett: 1:25:13

I tell you one thing I found as a struggle is slowing down. Yeah, I spent 20 years ish in Illinois, 10 years in this enormous hyper growth phase. It's been really hard for me to figure out how to slow down and relax. Because that fills your brain is excited dopamine hit? Yeah, it's exciting, right. And it fills your world. And it's a constant kind of positive generally noise in the background. Yeah. Getting used to actually slowing down and smelling the daisies. It's actually been a struggle. And I'm still not used to it. I'm still I'm busier now and busy now in different ways. Yeah. Are you in podcasts now? Yeah. And I'm not I'm not. I would, I was gonna say I'm busier than I've ever been. That's not true. I was incredibly busy in the midst of that growth curve, I had an understanding and our family, right, that would cope with with the impacts of that. It's, it's a lot better now. But I'm still driven. And there's a mental bent that causing a node to be successful, which is for some reason, I'm tremendously driven to solve other people's problems. I can kind of leave no stone unturned. Yeah. And my family find that very annoying. Because they might not right, right. Right. The phrase my wife correctly uses is you keep causing us to acquire learned helplessness. Stop fixing stuff. Yeah, right. But it's but it's the holdover from a business where my entire passion and drive was solving the problems of 200,000 customers. By building system becomes a becomes an addiction. It's absolutely an addiction. And it's taking a while to slow slow down from that. Right. And, and enjoy just doing less stuff. And for me, you know, the chewing gum thing for me is watching watching procedural crime dramas. Yeah. Because they're harmless. And they're relaxed. Yeah, right. Absolutely. I'm currently you know, it used to used to be NCIS. And then working with the FBI.

Daniel Franco: 1:27:09

Oh, they write good shows. Yeah, they.

Simon Hackett: 1:27:13

But but but relaxing because they're predictable? Yeah. Yeah. That's the white. That's why they work. Yeah. Everyone's a miniature mills and Boon story. Well, that

Daniel Franco: 1:27:26

that's, I think, leads into another question that I have, which is, so this struggles of an entrepreneur, like you said, the ability to stop?

Simon Hackett: 1:27:36

Yep. Yep. The downside of the complexity to run is working out how to stop running.

Daniel Franco: 1:27:43

So in amongst all that, is the ability to stop and smell the roses. Right and appreciate the success. Appreciate the wins. Because that's the other thing. There's an element of me that just keeps running. Yes, yes. And there's a there's a win.

Simon Hackett: 1:28:01

It's the reason you succeed, but it's also the curse when,

Daniel Franco: 1:28:03

like, I am such a goal setter, you know, I know where I want to be what I want to do. And I run, and I run past run past and I keep running. It's like, why haven't Why can't I personally and how did you manage to if you did, I don't know? Did you manage to slow down? And and appreciate the wins along the way?

Simon Hackett: 1:28:26

Not well enough, yet? I'm still working on it. Yeah, it's 10 years later, you know, 10 years after selling and selling into that I'm still working on that.

Daniel Franco: 1:28:32

Why? Why are there some people that can do that? So well? And then why are there some that can't? And is there is that a formula thing? Is the person who keeps running more successful? I think some of businessman I think so

Simon Hackett: 1:28:44

it's just I think they are more successful. We're not promoting that, by that self driven, is why the business succeeded. I've gotten a lot of other things since Yeah, they are also, you know, the business parts of those are succeeding because of that high involvement as well. Yeah. But it's something I'm much more conscious of these days trying to manage that balance. And long way from having managed to successfully but the first step, which I think I've taken is at least being mindful of it. Yeah. In the middle of that enormous hyper growth period. There was nothing to be mindful of the business was everything. That's no longer the case in any sense. Yeah. And somewhere along the way back to my uni days, I learned to fly gliders and now fly gliders and our planes and things and that's my that's what I do to relax right as I go fly things. That's my military. Yeah. And I get very antsy and my like, family will affect toss me out to go flying if I haven't done it, because I become hard to live with. Because I can't get the pressure out. Yeah, but we've all got got to have that. That safety. That's so true. It's incredibly true, and you need to respect it.

Daniel Franco: 1:29:46

Because it's a family having the self awareness to that you

Simon Hackett: 1:29:49

need to understand that while you might have while you might have just come back from a busy week's work, and they'd like to spend time with you, it might be more important that they toss you out to go flying for a while first. Otherwise the human life by themselves faced with the dinner table might in fact be quite hard to get along with. Yeah, right. Which is which which does not achieve the intended effect for your your family. And it's a it's a running challenge. It's not a, I'm not claiming to have solved this at all. No. But again, mindfulness of its nature isn't start right.

Daniel Franco: 1:30:20

acknowledging it. Yeah. Because there's this family piece in here as well, that we need to touch on real quickly, which is how do you fully pursue and realize your visions and your goals? While at the same time cultivating those loving relationships with your family? Yeah, like, if you don't know how to stop?

Simon Hackett: 1:30:42

Yeah, then then you reach a point, we actually going to have to figure out how to stop or you don't have a family to start with. Right. And that is, that is the case isn't the case. And certainly, I'm incredibly fortunate now because the exit of internode was so successful, right? That money is not a challenge to me anymore. My own life. And what I do with it is more. And I do have a lot more time to hang out with the kids than I used to have, you know, so when when my youngest youngest wants to be run out somewhere, I can do it because I'm fundamentally so I'm mostly kind of working from home. Yeah. The COVID here even made that normal. Yeah. And if he needs something, he comes first. And that's good. Right. One of the things I've learned as each of our kids have grown up and left the house is that you don't get those days back again. Yeah. So it's not a chore, it's a joy damnit. Did you say we'll leave eventually? And then you'll miss them?

Daniel Franco: 1:31:32

So did you consciously manage that through your growth period into No,

Simon Hackett: 1:31:37

no, not nearly as well. Right. Again, in that high growth period, it was just about holding on. And various pieces of family life suffered significantly as a result is.

Daniel Franco: 1:31:49

So if you were giving advice to an entrepreneur or someone who's leading in business, or high growth business, or CIO, or a senior leader or whatever, it might be someone who is obsessed with their work. Yeah. What advice would you give in managing their families?

Simon Hackett: 1:32:03

This? It's a really good question. Because the answer will vary by person, it's a question of what matters more. And what I'm getting at here is this the platitude that we always hear from politicians when they retire, whatever that I am. I am retiring to spend more time with my family. It sounds like the classic kind of nonsense phrase, what I've come to learn is that I suspect in more in the majority of cases, it's absolutely true. That is the reason, right, it's they've had the epiphany that says, if I want to still have a family, I need to stop doing this other thing, or I need to do less of this. People lose their families in the meantime, right. So some, some people succeed in business at the expense of their families, you've got to accept that your mental health to be more general about this right, which is tied up in family and friends, and what you do on the weekends and what you don't do on the weekends. You have to accept that, by definition, you will achieve less work this week, if you spend some time not working. I know that sounds really stupid. But it comes back to that point about the only the only asset, we don't have more of his time, you need to accept unless you're a superhuman Steve Jobs, that your business may not succeed quite as well as it could have if you spent the extra hour in the office. But you know, maybe that's all right. Maybe that's right is critical is an acceptance of that is critical. The other thing about it, which is actually the reward for accepting it, is I have watched people spend too much time in offices, you know, or even just a student's right, you reach a point where you've spent too many days working on something I used to say in the office these days, you might be at home, right? You spent too many hours working on something, and it is better to stop and go home. Because the five hours you're gonna spend getting bigger all done because you're tired already making mistakes is better. You just go home and come back and hit it again in the morning. That those times when you feel like you must stay on with your nose on this Grindstone is probably the time at which you should fucking stop. Get out of the office and go for a run or go fly a plane or, or go get a hamburger. Yeah. Because it's that thing you it's the lens, you need to remind yourself of right. on my deathbed, will this tender really matter this much to me? Yes. Oh, no, no, no. And it's important, and it does not feel that way in that moment. But no, it doesn't matter. Actually doesn't. It's a hard lesson. Because it doesn't really doesn't feel that way.

Daniel Franco: 1:34:26

Well, I think and you hit the nail on the head that everyone's going to have different varying levels, right? Of what that might look. Yeah.

Simon Hackett: 1:34:32

And what trade off they're prepared to have in the rest of their lives. And it might be it might be family, it might be friends, it might just be your own happiness, it might be all of those things. If your happiness is defined solely by your business, then maybe you can just be a single person that that's incredibly good at that. Maybe that's alright. Like, that's okay, too. That's it, but you need to have made that it's a choice, but it's also a decision, you know, yeah.

Daniel Franco: 1:34:55

So if that is the case, and everyone's got their own, sort of version of event And then what might be best for them? If happiness was a recipe? Yeah, yeah. And that had all different volumes in different mixes and different, right? What would yours be? Yeah, what recipe would look great question?

Simon Hackett: 1:35:15

Yeah. Because obviously, it's different for everyone. It has to be right. And it's what that sort of mix of what you might call work and what you might call life. It's I mean, the thing is that my work never felt like work. It was an inherently a source of enormous pleasure. Otherwise, I wouldn't be wouldn't have done it right. It was hugely stimulating thing. So for me that former involve doing that stuff that made me feel good, we all want to do things that make us feel good, right. And that's, I guess, the, the trick is figure out what makes you feel happy and fulfilled and motivated and try to try to maximize your opportunity to do it. And that is different for all of this. Like, as I mentioned earlier, for me, one of the challenges is actually slowing down and relaxing, finding pleasure in in doing nothing. That's not the same as being bored, right? My kids have a tendency if they haven't immediately got something to do in the scroll, they're instantly bored, which is a kind of learned behavior. thing that causes me as a completely different segue to wonder whether these smartphones are a bad idea. We can you know, like, Cuba, Cuba, an obvious long conversation. Yeah. But I, you know, I will say to them and say to you, I can remember the last time I was bored or recognize about other humans about 13. I've never been bored since because if I if I let them by let the music stop. Some broad idea wombs its way about something. At the moment, we're building a new house in Tasmania. And there's all these ideas in the back of my head about how I'm going to build energy systems and geothermal systems and control systems. Yeah, of course, I'm going to write the control system for it. Because I can Yeah, and this isn't work. This is fun. Yeah, right. It might look like work from the outside, but it's not. It's passion. Yeah. Passion is an enormous thing. And like everybody else, Daniel, I get up in the mornings at times, and I'm sad and I'm unmotivated. And I wondering why I'm here, and I'm feeling like I'm old and I'm gonna die. And I'm not you know, none of us are like this all the time. We can't be. You just got to work your way through it. And eventually, something will pop back up. That's interesting again, and you'll get on with it. You know, we've got to pick ourselves up and get on. Yeah, one of the most annoying things in my life is the idea that I can't live nearly long enough to keep up to have sufficient fun with it. There's a motto I really enjoy that I did not invent. Right? i My intention is my intention is to live forever or die in the attempt. Because I'm busy. doing shit I like yeah. Wow, what a great situation. I remember once a taxi in Sydney, and the taxi driver was was was yammering on about how he hated his job. And I'm thinking to myself, is it alright, if I like mine? Said, Okay. Yeah, it's actually like my job. Yeah.

Daniel Franco: 1:37:50

You mentioned boredom. Right in that, right? And so something went and you said, there's this idea that oozes into my head, right always fills the gap. Yeah. And I was just pondering on that, as you were speaking, thinking about being bored. If you sit in a quiet space for 30 minutes, or half an hour, or whatever it might be without any distraction. Put the gadget, put the gadget down, preferably put the gadget in some of the room. Yeah. And preferably sit outside in nature in the fresh air. Absolutely. It is really difficult to be bored. Because the amount of stuff that is going on in your head. Right? It's just like it comes out. Exactly screaming at you. And

Simon Hackett: 1:38:39

when you when you knock out the noise, the loudest noise. There's all those other stories underneath. Yeah, absolutely.

Daniel Franco: 1:38:47

Yeah. And yeah, and that's the self awareness piece that really, I don't think we spend enough time on. I agree.

Simon Hackett: 1:38:55

And nice, right. So names like meditation. Meditation is a very, very good thing to do. I get my meditation flying gliders. Yeah. And because when you're applying a glider, you can't be answering your email, flying a thing with no engine. I mean, myself launches with the engines put away, right? Yeah, so I'm flying something my life depends on getting it right. Doesn't feel bad. It's the opposite. I'm literally out there hanging out with the Eagles. And you're in the world being in the world, synchronizing yourself with the weather and the light and the sound and,

Daniel Franco: 1:39:25

and we're not thinking about anything else. No, it's about staying alive. Is I think, I think meditation is one of those things because I like the guided meditation where they teach you to concentrate on breathing and shut out the thoughts. Right. There's an element of me that loves just sitting there within my thoughts. Yeah, and just exploring, trying to unravel the mess is in there. And that's a good thing, too. Yeah, not the same thing. And it's not it's also correct. Yeah. So I think there's two parts of it. So we got to think about it. So I'm saying this

Simon Hackett: 1:40:01

I agree. The second one feels more like sort of almost more like mindfulness. And the first one is, is is maybe meditation. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

Daniel Franco: 1:40:09

So consciously your time we've gone through quite a bit, but I want to talk a little bit about now after sure you're in like you're doing some amazing things in renewable energy. Where else whereas he saw like you, you're flying, I think you said you're building your house. I know that you've built an airstrip on that volley. You've got all the issues there, but we've improved in building new hair. So yeah, you're doing amazing things like tell us what's what's happening in so renewable, I know is a very big passion of yours. Yeah, it

Simon Hackett: 1:40:36

is. So when I told him to note I suddenly had a huge pile of money burning a hole in my pocket. Immediately it's a

Daniel Franco: 1:40:43

tough life, isn't it? Yeah.

Simon Hackett: 1:40:46

Having a lot of money does not solve all problems. But you got it solves a lot of need, right? Like it really does. We're all working to try and get that problem. And it gives you it gives you a whole other other avenues of opportunities so so I did two things immediately immediately sold the company paid off the mortgage on the house, fantastic field and bought the expensive incredibly awesome plane I'd wanted I'd always wanted and and then proceeded to get trained to fly the thing. And I'm still flying that thing. I'm enjoying the hell out of it right because that was my reward to me was just really nice thing for for your listeners that might know about planes. It's a thing called a politest PAC 12. It's a fantastic 10 seat turboprop. Same thing with flying fly. Yeah, great. And it's a it's an awesome piece.

Daniel Franco: 1:41:32

Because you've you've flown the FAA and haven't flown it. Is that the Top Gun?

Simon Hackett: 1:41:38

Yeah. I think they had some FAA things and that it's I mean, they're old school fighter. They're Pregel fighters.

Daniel Franco: 1:41:44

What was that? Like? Awesome. Yeah,

Simon Hackett: 1:41:47

just a lovely rush.

Daniel Franco: 1:41:48

Did you fly like by yourself was

Simon Hackett: 1:41:52

flying solo unless you're a ref pilot. Yeah. So it was a two seat one that I got, I got the opportunity to fly in. Which is actually a rare opportunity. This was another long story, right? That got me into it. But actually the least interesting plane to fly other than the enormous power of it, because they're computer driven planes. They're very boring to fly. Because, yeah, because the idea is the pilot needs to have their head available to shooting things. But back at the ranch, because you're gonna have a different restaurant. So let me think, sold the business paid off the house bought the plane. What I decided I wanted to do by way of investment, which is so what I've done since if we made a lot of investments and things right, we bought property or chairs invested in various startups invest in various other businesses. Yep. For drive I formed in my head, Daniel was that I wanted to find ways to invest in businesses that use technology to enhance the sustainability of the world in the renewable sense, right. Which led me to investing for instance, to becoming what I'm the largest investor in an advanced technology battery company based in Brisbane called redflow. Yeah, they make a battery that's not lithium and not lead acid. It's incredibly cool. And when it's a zinc bromine flow battery, okay, so it has fluid in it in water, zinc, zinc, metal and bromine running around in distilled water. And it's ridiculously smart people, it stores energy by plating zinc into the electrodes in the battery. And when you're retrieving energy, it's depleting back into back into solution.

Daniel Franco: 1:43:21

Because you've Oh, yeah, that's amazing.

Simon Hackett: 1:43:23

So briefly, the point of that is that thing about size of average stores 10 kilowatt hours of energy, won't burn, there's a good thing that lithium doesn't do won't burn completely discharged. And and it doesn't, it doesn't hurt. It can sit there totally discharged forever without damage. You can charge it up fully turn it off, turn it back on two years later in the energy still in it. So you can use like a genset with no fuel. Wow. Very cool device. I'm the largest shareholder and announced public company. I'm the largest shareholder in the thing. I've got seven or 8% of the company. I am no, no, not especially couple 100 million mark. And I think if there is a course like all of them. But here's the point. It was the result of me saying to myself, Daniel, I want to invest in a company making a battery that isn't just somebody importing South Korean lithium and picking a different colored box to put it in. It must be someone in Australia that makes an energy storage devices more interesting than lithium and lead acid. The entire list I could form in Australia was redflow. Yeah, so I invested it. And then I wound up being invited to get on the board. I invested more I wound up being the chairman of the board. We wound up deciding that we needed to change CEOs. So I wound up being the executive chairman for a year i i thought i was over running businesses. I ran a public company for a year as the executive chairman, oh my god, while I set up a new board, new management structure and then got the hell out again, because it wasn't my aspiration to run companies anymore, but I felt I had to, or it would die. And I claim that if I hadn't it would have it's going great again,

Daniel Franco: 1:44:56

is the ultimate goal to sell to companies like Tesla and and batteries like to for them to sell I use the slides because

Simon Hackett: 1:45:01

Tesla want to put things in transport devices and that battery is a stationary energy batteries. It doesn't have the energy density. It's less dense if you put it in buildings. Homes offices, okay. Right different market. Yeah. So anyway, the point is I've started investing in things to come back, pop the stack three levels that use technology to advantage sustainability in the world. And so battery company, I got into sort of taught myself and work with lots of people that sit in the in in the industry that build solar and batteries. I've got a big solar and battery deployment using grid flow batteries in my office in Adelaide. Yeah, build a really big similar deployment in a farm we bought six years ago in Tasmania, that's the one we mentioned. It's got farms got a runway, it's got 800 sheep, it's got a river on a river running through it. It's got 210 kilowatts of solar and a 300 kilowatt hour red flow battery array. Underground three phase wiring ran all the buildings, including to the new house we're building optical fiber data network ran all the buildings because of course right What did I do for a living so we had gigabit fiber running running all over this farm to all the buildings and what we an electric vehicles, I got a Tesla down there electric ATV, I want to get electric tractors when some bastards sell me one I want to get rid of rid of diesel on the farm. What I'm building is an exemplar of zero carbon agriculture, damn it. And I'm enjoying and building it, right? Because I can afford it. And like the early days of computers, what I'm doing Daniel is expensive. It's not cheap, it's got bad, it's got incredibly low running costs incredibly effective. And like like computers, in 10 years time, this stuff won't be expensive. And this exemplar will be 10 years old, like internode. I thrive on building exemplars of things for two reasons. One, I enjoy it too. I hopefully inspire other people to do the same thing. And that's the culture piece. So I've actually taken the interior culture in an odor making an exterior of having a ball honestly doing I love

Daniel Franco: 1:46:53

it, because yeah, she just is setting us up for success. Because they can see the people that have been leading by example.

Simon Hackett: 1:47:01

And the contractors in Tasmania that have built this stuff are winning awards for it, and are inspired to do more of it. Yeah, winner winner chicken dinner, then, because I don't need the money. What I need is the change. What I want to do is inspire the change, having the lamb right. I'm an A minor example of girls who put a bit of money we we were one of the significant contributors to the climate. 200 exercise. Right? What's What's the cloud Flumps you 100 Things Simon Holmes A court started to reach out to reduce funding and more importantly, information for independent federal election candidates. The teal independent, that thing? Because I'm highly because because if I could do one thing in the world, Daniel, it would be to find a way to exercise enough mind control on politicians to get on with this shit. Yeah, the the frustration I feel, and the and the future, blaming our children will correctly give us for not getting on with fixing the ship because we can fix it. It's incredibly frustrating. So I'm leading by example,

Daniel Franco: 1:48:03

with sloping mindset, isn't it? Right, right, just roster is no different to the conversation we just had with Adrian timbul. Yeah,

Simon Hackett: 1:48:10

it's it's horrible lack of vision. And it's the one downside of democracies are democracies that are arguably the least worst form of government. But what they lose out of compared to the Japanese and the Chinese systems is the is the lack of capacity to have 100 year plan for anything. Yeah, yeah. God, do we need 100 year plan to play the

Daniel Franco: 1:48:28

long game, then I am. I often say this to my wife, at home, and where decisions are made from government. And I often say, I am really frustrated at being dictated by people who actually, well, they've got the information at hand, but they're thinking more about getting reelected than what that's what it feels like

Simon Hackett: 1:48:56

thinking about getting reelected, and annoyingly, more than I have wanted to believe they're also thinking about what the lobbyists are telling. Yeah, the fossil fuel industry is incredibly good at loving politics. And it's the same reason and it's the same lobbyists that used to used to work in the tobacco game. Yeah, the money spent on the consultants that achieved the lobbying makes more money every day. Compared to the delay in improving things, right, like it's in their financial interest to delay the inevitable. Yeah, it's incredibly frustrating and embarrassing again, in the light correctly in the eyes of the children who are being educated today about how bad this shit is, and they're right. How powerless must they feel? Looking at their peers doing nothing? is remarkably frustrating. Yeah. And, and so again, I just build exemplars. Yeah. Hope that when people when people are ready to do the good stuff, study there. Write as many case studies as possible to at least eliminate eliminate the perception that there's any execution risk. Now it's just about get on with it. Yeah. I love that that.

Daniel Franco: 1:50:02

Yeah, we could talk about this forever. Yeah, but

Simon Hackett: 1:50:05

I do like this stuff. Let's be weird.

Daniel Franco: 1:50:09

Yeah, maybe there's a part two and all this. Let's talk quickly before we round up just about you're doing some philanthropy stuff as well giving back as well with money events. So it's a really nice story to sort of round off the podcast with Can you talk to us about that? Surely.

Simon Hackett: 1:50:24

Well, I mentioned one. Interestingly, it just didn't the climate 200 years Yeah, form of philanthropy. Trying to advantage the notion that independence would be a better thing to have in Parliament. And hey, it seems to be working. We when we needed oversold, the other thing we did was started a little foundation. We took some of the money and whacked it in a, you know, private ancillary fund, what you do a little thing called the Hackett Foundation. And we use that to make donations to various very eclectic things, Daniel, it's an aquatic eclectic there all the way from little donations to little things to big donations and big ones. Yeah, the biggest single one that we support is actually a thing called WOMAdelaide. The world of music, arts and dance here and here in Adelaide, and it's great. It's a fabulous thing. Briefly, WOMAD is actually the outgrowth of something Peter Gabriel started 40 years ago, one of my absolute idols. And in the late 80s, in the Internet era, I found myself in Peter Gabriel studio in a box in the UK with a little team of people hooking his studio onto the internet, when that was hard, got to meet him got a media studio manager Mike large, who is still a friend of mine to this day. And Peter founded WOMAD WOMAD, a world of music, arts and dance was his intention of trying to bring artists from countries that weren't getting mainstream music exposure and bring them to people. And so 40 years ago in the UK, that became a festival that was on every two years and then became annual 10 years later, the Australian version of that fret effectively franchised from the UK version will start at WOMAdelaide in Adelaide was started 30 years ago, still going was started as an experiment of the Festival of Arts. And then it became a standalone event. And about 10 years ago, when more than 10 years ago, I used to wish the internet could sponsor the internet, we're gonna have to sponsor that event to be the major sponsor, because I just love the events so much. It's a beautiful place. You go from Friday night to Monday, Monday night, and you send your kids around and they're safe. And this incredible smorgasbord of music, music and arts and dance. It's gorgeous, and everyone feels good. It's meditative in its own way, right? If you don't like that, ask walk along to the next stage. And the next one. Yeah. So I wanted to sponsor it. And I got it, there was no financial rationality, you need to know being the major sponsor of that, but I did it anyway. And then we sold him a deal on it, and I kept sponsoring it in internodes name, then TPG bought on it, and TPG shut off all the sponsorships immediately. And we immediately took up the sponsorship at that event in our own right as the Hackett Foundation. And we are to this day, the major sponsor of that event, it's a significant annual contribution to a significant event. And I feel so warm and fuzzy walking around that event feeling like it exists in part because of because of that decision to support it. And it's directly giving something back to the state that I love in the country I love and giving back in the form of music. I mean, what a great thing. I have no musical talent. My mother was a great pianist. My son Gabe is awesome. He plays he plays the cello and the electric guitar and a bit of piano. The only keyboard I can play has letters on it. So I make up for that lack of musical talent by hanging around with artists. Yeah. And when he gives me the fabulous excuse to hang around with us and make people smile. And it just it just gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling. And that's another answer to that question in the thing we were talking about. What do you do to feel like, effectively Why do you want to get up in the morning? Right, that gives that makes me feel happy about getting up in the morning? I feel like I'm giving something back.

Daniel Franco: 1:53:51

I look thank you so much for doing it. I mean, the people of South Australia and the world really are experiencing an amazing event. Yeah, like so much richness and and color. And I've

Simon Hackett: 1:54:06

got to say the upcoming one in March, march 23. Definitely go to that one is 31st 31st year since it went on. We're bringing the feathers back. Oh, wow. Yeah. Just the gritty Yeah. Yeah. This is an incredible fringe troop, the fit that there are there'll be angels playing above you on wires. And then this incredible amount of duck feathers falls down out of the sky like snow. And by the time you're done, it's everywhere. You've got kids and adults playing in a snow made of duck feathers with this fabulous music is so involving everybody's smiling and happy and it'd be on every night a woman and 23 We put it on. It's an explosion of sensors. It's beautiful. We did it five years ago. Yeah. And we thought we thought this and we thought it would never come back and we thought no we got to do this one more time. It's just it's gonna kill a duck's you know, it's interesting, but frankly not, it's a great question. And the answer is that they buy duck feathers from the clothing industry that would otherwise wind up in a Patagonia jacket. They pay big bucks for ducks that are actually sustainably driven to produce this duck down. And it's biodegradable, and they ship a shipping container full of clothing grade duck feathers to Adelaide, what a crazy statement, and then proceed to drop it on the audience every night. It's awesome.

Daniel Franco: 1:55:28

So rounding out the podcast, thank you again. There's what a good way to. I've got a bunch of quickfire questions. Okay, we really just want to ram through, feel free to elaborate should you need this is a good way to finish off the blower eyes. So we are big readers. Yeah, crazy dingy. We love our books and constantly striving to improve ourselves and read and so what is one book that you're reading right now?

Simon Hackett: 1:55:56

I've been reading I like rereading old science fiction books I like so I've actually Ringworld Okay, Larry. Larry Nivens Ringworld. Awesome book.

Daniel Franco: 1:56:04

Yeah, yeah.

Simon Hackett: 1:56:05

Totally awesome science fiction book. That's that. And the non nonfiction book I read most recently actually reread, again, is a book called exact. Simon Winchester as the author. It's about the evolution in humanity of high precision measurement. And believe it or not, it's a really interesting topic. Like, hey, you go from the end of the Lexus to micrometers. And why. And the revolution is produced in the world of manufacturing. It's actually a bloody Yeah. Wow. It's quite entertaining.

Daniel Franco: 1:56:33

It would be. What's one book, though, that you feel that stands out from the crowd from a nonfiction point of view?

Simon Hackett: 1:56:40

Well, I was thinking about that the other day. And let's say in it and effectively in terms of business book, there's, there's again, an old one I really quite enjoy, called Maverick. The author is Ricardo Semler. So it's a book about a very unusual, and this won't surprise you very open book business, this guy inherited from his father, and decided manufacturing business decided to run in a very, very open way with his staff. So open that, for instance, he he educated his his main factory guys in accounting, and then said, you guys figure out how much to pay yourselves. You know, here are the books you work it out. Let's make it sustainable. But the thing I learned from that is quite deep. He's got this fabulous chapter in there about time management. And the thing I took home from that Daniel is the following. When people tell you that you're harder to contact than the Pope, you need to take it as a compliment. Yeah, right. In other words, you're doing it right. Yeah, your major asset is your time, and you need to be really careful about whose time you give it to. Right who you give that time to aren't like that. Yeah. Isn't that great? That is fancy. Let's take that as a compliment. Don't feel like you've got to be valuable to every bastard all of the time. Because it comes right back to the conversation we had about fixing other people's problems. First, fix your

Daniel Franco: 1:57:53

bank cup that right? What is one lesson that's taking you the longest to learn

Simon Hackett: 1:57:59

through? Bill, believe it or not, it's actually that one stop fixing other people's problems. It really has been that it's been the key to my success, but it's also in a sense. One of the worst things. Yeah. Well, your

Daniel Franco: 1:58:12

greatest asset is also your greatest

Simon Hackett: 1:58:13

liability. Yeah, right. You got to manage it. That.

Daniel Franco: 1:58:17

Yeah. I can walk that same path. Yeah. What? If you could invite three people for dinner? Who would they be?

Simon Hackett: 1:58:27

Yeah, I thought it thought I really had to think about this. Elon Musk? Yeah. Surprise, surprise, surprise. Elon Musk. Peter Gabriel. I didn't once love to spend more time with him and ideally with his with his buddy, Kate Bush. And Tyco. ytt. The director, yeah. Who? I don't know what's going on in his head, but man I'd love to. And the thing about those though, that sort of people is, but that's three separate dinners because those human beings you would want to provide with your undivided attention. Yeah, when I'd like them.

Daniel Franco: 1:59:04

Can you imagine the chaos on at one table? Here all at one time? Yeah, exactly.

Simon Hackett: 1:59:09

Yeah, it would then strangely.

Daniel Franco: 1:59:12

What's some of the best advice that you've ever received?

Simon Hackett: 1:59:18

Yeah, interesting. I haven't. I might sound strange, but people don't seem to give me much advice. I tend to be doling it out more than Whirlpool. Yeah, yeah. And I think the thing I'd say which is not quite an answer your question because I can't directly identify a piece like that. It's what I've had to had to keep learning is is about fallibility and humility, right? You are fallible role that have humility. None of us deserve too many tickets on it. We're all gonna die eventually. Yeah. So that's what I've that's what I've kind of imputed from various places. But yeah, that's kind of the answer I can give you.

Daniel Franco: 1:59:59

If you had access to a time machine? Where would you go?

Simon Hackett: 2:00:06

I think I'd like to go forward a couple of 100 years to figure out how the Hill this current story ends. The whole the whole planet story thing, that whole sustainable thing, only a couple of 100. Yeah. Because in a couple of 100 years time, there's going to be a hell of a lot less humans this right. And it's interesting to see what that world looks like. You only if you already is. The other thing I'd love. Why do you say that? Because the climate change thing is going to cause nonlinear destruction of habitat. Right? We are we are, it's, it could be a very tough couple 100 years if we don't actually start not destroying the planet. See, I started getting really worried. It's nonlinear is the point right? When the ice caps melt? Everything happens really quick, all of that stuff. I'm thinking of the world right now. Yeah. Right. Like, see how that comes out. The related thing is that I'd really love I would love to indulge in space travel, and I'm on the edge of we're on the edge of managing that at the moment, but it gives another couple 100 years, it'll hopefully be routine. Hopefully, you know, I'd love to fly. And that's why you're inviting Elon right? Yeah, exactly. So you might say, What do I do to get a secret? Yeah, give me give me on that rocket? Yeah,

Daniel Franco: 2:01:07

yeah. And so to live on like a place like Mars or?

Simon Hackett: 2:01:12

No one does. I don't I like to thanks. And look, to be clear, I'm an optimist about the future of the planet. One of the things people get wrong of course, is the planet won't end it's just the humanity that's threatened not the action the planet or throw it all off. 1000 years ago, this year, anybody? Yeah, exactly. The there's too many of us. But, you know, I'm actually pretty optimistic that we will be able to throw enough technology at fixing the problem well enough and fast enough. It's just as we've touched on incredibly annoying that we have

Daniel Franco: 2:01:41

to Yeah, I think it's I think it's a shame that we have yet to change we have to That's exactly right. But the one of my favorite TV shows when I was growing up was Stargate, do you remember? Yeah, do you remember? Just instantly go to another planet through a gate? That's what I'm waiting for. I don't want to travel. Yes, base. I just want to walk through a gate.

Simon Hackett: 2:02:00

You reminded me of a show. I used to watch it. Watch it. My son gave his age which is space 1999 Yes. Terrible. Terrible. That's what made it so good. Yeah, everything was everything was kind of curvaceous wipe. It all look like 2001 A Space Odyssey Yeah. And all these people were very broody expressions

Daniel Franco: 2:02:20

if your house was on fire, and your family your parents everyone they're all safe. What would you run back in and grab?

Simon Hackett: 2:02:28

You know, I wouldn't necessarily run into grabbed very much because honestly the family and the pets are about the only things that are hot, actually hard to replace. And if I've learned something it's that almost no other chattels you've got actually matter very much. I mean, you can be sentimental about that. You know, that ring all that bit of jewelry. I suppose the thing I'm the most sentimental about is little box. I've got full of actual physical souvenirs from that business career and all those early days in America, like physical photos and little badges from conferences that when you haven't uploaded them yet, no, no, it's just, it's just this little pile of stuff that just sits there. But Larry Niven, the author, who I'm rereading at the moment, he said it well, I think I'm pretty sure it was him that said, you never really own anything that you can't carry with you at a flat out run. That's true. What you own is what's in here and the capacity to to use that to do other things and you own your understanding of relationships.

Daniel Franco: 2:03:20

What's what's going through my mind right now is have you ever read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl? No, I've heard of it. I haven't rides. One, it's possibly my favorite book of all time, right? So Viktor Frankl was a psychotherapist that went was involved in Auschwitz, and the camps and, and whatnot. And so when he was captured, he and taken to the prisoner camps, he was then stripped, that all the people in in, in that scenario was stripped. And so he talks about the feeling of losing all possession. Yeah. And how the only thing that you actually own is your body. Yes. And your microcycle. Yeah. And it's just, it's just remarkable. I recommend you sounds

Simon Hackett: 2:04:07

remote. Sounds great. And the thing is that in our modern world that is full of so much noise that comes at us through our gadgets. You've got to imagine that a shockingly large proportion of the human population in the first world haven't nothing like that experience. And they never have anything experience. They never, in fact slow down enough to realize the truth of that. Yeah.

Daniel Franco: 2:04:29

Yeah. It's a play. Actually, can you please just read it and I want to have a conversation with you about is the first part is about his experiences in the camps. And then the second part is the thought process, mindset. So it's almost like a two part piece. Sounds great. You will love it. If you had one superhero power, what would it be? And you're not allowed to say fly, right?

Simon Hackett: 2:04:52

Because that was the mind control. Yeah. So it's those damn politicians to get on with ignoring the fossil fuel industry. That's it. Mind Control done. Let's

Daniel Franco: 2:05:02

leave that there. Now. One of my favorite parts is do you have a dad joke? Yeah, I'm

Simon Hackett: 2:05:08

really tragic with their jokes. I often I need context to come up with them that I can think of lots of dad jokes. Let me give you a knock knock joke. Go

Daniel Franco: 2:05:16

knock knock. Who's there?

Simon Hackett: 2:05:17

Interrupting cow into? I knew. And I'll give you another couple of demons law, which is you're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on. And the last one, the last not quite sacred work. One used to be applied to Reagan, but it works even better with Trump, which is, which is why does Donald Trump always have sex lying on his back was because you can only fuck up.

Daniel Franco: 2:05:48

Sorry, no, that's really, that's not getting. Simon, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a pleasure. It's been a remarkable conversation. One that I know that many leaders, entrepreneurs, business owners, whatever it might be, will listen in and get some really great knowledge. So thank you. And look, thank you for everything that you need, from silly things from Tesla, bringing that into Australia or being a part of that, yep, to create an internet, everything that we kind of do. And the way we work today has got a little bit of your fingerprint in there, which is just just a teen Anna and amazing, just utterly amazing. accomplishment. And you must be very proud of yourself. So thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, everyone. That's that's all we've got time for to actually one last question. Where can we find you if we want to get in contact with you or if people want to follow you?

Simon Hackett: 2:06:44

Okay. Twitter's the social media place I hang out on so at Simon Hackett one word. Yep. Very easy. And I've got it with a double T Yes, hack it with a double T and I've got a website with a blog on it that I post things intermittently about on a lot of these topics, actually. And that's at Simon hacker.com.

Daniel Franco: 2:07:02

Perfect, easy. Excellent. Thank you, everyone. We will catch you next time. Thanks again, Tom. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the podcast or you can check out the show notes if there was anything of interest to you and find out more about us at Synergy iq.com.au I am going to ask though, if you did like the podcast, it would absolutely mean the world to me if you could subscribe, rate and review. And if you didn't like it, that's alright too. There's no need to do anything. Take care guys. All the best