Risky business: why the right gamble pays off

Announcer:
Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech? Welcome to the XTech Podcast, where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry.

I’m delighted to be working with Fox Agency as the host for XTech Podcast and as a curator for the XTech community. Today I’m delighted to be joined by Sanjay Lobo MBE, the CEO at OnHand. Welcome, Sanjay.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Hi there, Debbie. Great to be here.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So, Sanjay, we always try to kick off with letting the audience get to know you a little bit as a human before we dive into the tech. How did you get into tech? Was it a straightforward process or a bit of a surprise?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Okay, right, so my journey was probably unusual, but I’m 48 and so when I started work, it was late ’90s and, hey, this internet thing had suddenly arrived, right? So I’d qualified as a lawyer and joined a law firm called Olswang, and at the time they were big on film production and music law and I thought, hey, that’s going to be really cool. Actually, film production and music law is really boring. It turns out to be giant contracts, hundreds of pages long contracts that are essentially just financial arrangements. So very large numbers, but incredibly boring. And as a lawyer, the most exciting that you get to see as you see someone famous, you see their signature and that’s it. That’s as exciting as it gets.

But this law firm, it kind of realised the internet was going to be this huge thing. And so very, very early doors, pre Amazon, pre Google, they decided we’re going to be the law firm that really understands ecommerce and internet law. In fact, we’re going to create it. And so that’s when I got involved. It was late ’90s. I was a trainee lawyer and I started to see lots and lots of startups who essentially just added dot com to their names and suddenly we were getting an investment of millions of pounds at the time pre the first dot-com bubble. So that was a really great intro for me and certainly piqued my interest.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Lovely. So what then was your first transition when you decided law’s not for me and you want something more than looking at rich signatures? Where did you go from there into tech?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
The transition was interesting. So I qualified right at the moment where the first dot-com bubble burst and essentially everyone in tech, lawyers and whoever else, lost their jobs. So everyone new qualified, so a few years qualified as a lawyer, just got laid off and I was very lucky to be picked up by a company that owned Travelocity. They were called Sabre technology at the time. They’re a massive tech company behind a lot of travel technology. They owned Travelocity and as part of Travelocity’s strategy to figure out how it came into Europe, they acquired Lastminute.com, which I was part of the deal team on that, which was amazing. I was a fairly young lawyer. It was a billion-dollar deal, questionable whether it was worth that. But as part of that transition, I moved over to Lastminute.com, got to run their legal team, sat in the exec team over there and just learned so much about business by just being part of that exec group.

And from there I joined a company called VistaPrint, much younger earlier stage company, but growing like crazy and because of the growth was asked to do more things than law. So got asked to run the property team, which sounds really boring, but actually it was, hey, how do we have a call centre in Europe, figure out how to buy the land, figure out how to design the building, build the building, then fill it up with a call centre south. And we were growing across Europe at the time. Incredible clip. So I joined when we were under 100 employees. We got up to 400 employees, grew revenue to hundreds of millions, and at that point was asked to flip out from legal to, hey, can you take over design and ecommerce and site and product teams? Which is quite a leap, quite a leap, but it was growing at such a pace. Hey, if you had shown common sense and been able to deliver on projects, you just got asked to do more and more and eventually asked to lead legal and join other teams.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Fantastic. So I mean that’s two really big hyper-growth brands that you were part of. What were your takeaways? What were your big learnings from working for those big organisations?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
I definitely got a number and very common themes. There’s something about once you got that really clear product market fit, you don’t put barriers in the way. So perhaps the strongest one I’ve ever seen was at VistaPrint where a typical organisation, it all reports into the same place. It goes international, still all reports in the same place. Very typical for a US company is, hey, UK company ultimately reports into the US and all of that kind of stuff. Not the way VistaPrint did it. They kind of said, “Hey, we want to go and launch into Europe and we want to go as fast as possible, therefore we realised decision-making has got to sit locally. In fact, you’re not going to report into the US, and so the guy that founded it, he sat right at the top obviously and president for the US company reported to him, the president for the EU company reported to him and none of the departments underneath, tech, marketing, sales, whatever, none of them reported into their US counterparts. They all reported into an EU leader. So getting out of the way of decision-making was the huge thing. Hiring great talent and just letting them run, that’s the other massive thing.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think that’s really important of companies of any size is, yes, it’s important to have systems and accountability, but it is about that taking risk and the bigger you are, the easier it is to become incredibly risk averse. And so whatever size, how are we getting out of the way to let great people do great things? There’s accountability, but there’s that risk aversion that you have to really think about.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, totally. The risk stuff is also interesting and partly it explains my story from being a lawyer to how do you stop being a lawyer in high-growth tech? Well, very early in the days at Lastminute.com, we realised we hadn’t quite got it right on how we registered people that consented to email marketing. Email marketing for us back then was the biggest channel, and technically you’ve probably got to say, well, we shouldn’t be marketing to any of these people if we can’t record that we’ve got consent. Now, if you make that decision, you’re potentially tanking revenue for that business for the rest of, I don’t know, for a substantially long period. So we didn’t do that. And as a lawyer, that’s probably one of the biggest risks you can take. You’re talking about data, you’re talking about data protection and the rules around data protection, so you don’t take risk with that kind of stuff.

And I expected we’d get massive blowback from taking the risk and we didn’t get any. And that was just this huge waking up moment for me where if you can take risk on something like that, and the upside is tremendous revenue potential for the business, the downside’s ginormous loss of revenue, but also there’s a risk on the legal side. And if you can take a risk like that and it works out, it’s okay. Then it becomes really interesting to reassess how risk works and what the upside and downsides potentially are, probably lends into my mindset of why I shouldn’t be in legal and took me to a different place.

So then having learned from that decision, things like, I don’t know, when I joined VistaPrint, the biggest thing was how do we get people to sign up for emails and it’s copy what Amazon do, don’t have a consent box. It’s a hundred percent of people get subscribed immediately. So we did that at VistaPrint and that was a massive revenue. It’s probably one of the top five revenue generating things we did that year. And all of a sudden you’re not looked at as a lawyer anymore. You’re looked at as a core part of how we make decisions in marketing. So that probably, I think we started off talking about risks there, but the ability to take risks lend itself to how do you jump into other functions.

Debbie Forster MBE:
But I think that’s important and that’s important in tech because within tech you’re always breaking into new horizons. And so really grappling it with your attitude to risk. Risk is there and you’re stupid if you don’t understand that and really understand the ramifications of it. But it is about how can you create willingness and safety and grappling with risk, not just averting risk. And we’ve seen companies that go too far that just don’t want to, they plug their ears and pretend there is no risk. I think it’s important that you need the lawyers to say, here’s the risk, but you grapple with it and you understand and you’re making educated choices, and some of them need to be bold ones.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, you’re right. So I was fairly flippant in the way I described that, hey, we made this choice just to keep email marketing going with people we didn’t have the records for consent from. When you would analyse it, you kind of, well, people have bought for us, given us their email, so we know a lot of them did provide consent. We just don’t have the record for it. So when you take it apart, I kind of described it fairly flippantly, but really there was a lot of, okay, let’s analyse where we think the real risk is and is it as big of a risk as we think?

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, super. Okay. So I’m also aware as well as thinking about that these were great big brands, they were also, you began your work in the age of unicorns. It sounds like something from Tolkien, doesn’t it? But there was a time, that’s all we talked about. There’s another one of those bubbles, unicorn, unicorn. I had in a recent meeting, people were talking about futurecorns, which I’ve promised them they must never say in my hearing again. But is the age of unicorns gone and is that a bad thing or a good thing?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
I think this is a really interesting topic. So you’re right, I grew up in that age of unicorns and did that billion dollar deal with Lastminute.com so I can help make one of them. And that has been for the last 20 years, it’s just been the path. You expected as a startup founder that you will go and raise and you will spend more money than the money that’s coming in for growth and growth and more growth. And the path towards profitability doesn’t always need to be explained as long as you’re growing fast enough and become that unicorn. And that’s been the path for as long as I can remember.

Now over the last couple of years, I think we all know the story has massively shifted to, hey, what about this profit thing? Which almost seemed like a dirty word 10 years ago or whenever. Really interesting time. Side note, when I was at Lastminute.com, we never really talked about the profit at Lastminute.com. So at VistaPrint, we always talked about it. So every meeting was about the profit element, which was kind of interesting. They were profitable from day one, by the way.

But the unicorn story, I love that there’s been a rise in people talking about how you bootstrap and how you don’t need to raise and raising is not the only way to do startups. And that narrative shift is really noticeable over the last year or two and very welcome. It’s like how’d you create a business without having to borrow? How can it be profitable from day one? And even to the extent where, hey, we’re VC backed, but the VCs now talk to us about when will you be profitable? Actually you can grow slower. Profit has become much more of a thing we need to be seeing. So very different stories even from the VCs that have backed us to date.

Does that mean unicorns have gone forever? No, I don’t think so. I think we’ll still have a number of unicorns that just are those absolute rocket ships that have incredible, incredible growth, but there might be less of them because the backing to just grow and grow and here’s the money to just grow and grow without thinking about profit isn’t the same. And then I think there’s going to be a different generation of companies that do that kind of stuff. Again, I think we all know AI has become the latest big thing. Are we going to see lots of AI unicorns? Yeah, I think so.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think though in looking at that, it’s the sign I would suggest of maturing markets that we’re going from the importance of bootstrapping, what is the business model? And hopefully in doing so avoid yet another bubble. Tech has to move beyond bubble to bubble to bubble. Let other industries play that game for a while while we lean in deeper.

Okay, so the journey goes from a lawyer to tech, to OnHand. Now I’m aware that possibly, unfortunately not everybody has heard of OnHand. Do you want to give me that quick moment of what you are and then we can talk about how that change came about?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, absolutely. So OnHand is a platform to engage employees in doing good. So either volunteering, giving back to your community, donating maybe or environmental actions.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, so that’s a move into what we would call CSR to some degree. Which came first, the interest in CSR, the interest in doing good? What was that about?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, it is really interesting. So I think during career there’s always been a tendency for me to be interested in CSR that companies were doing. At Lastminute.com we had a green team, we started talking about how I guess offsets weren’t a thing back then, but we started talking about how you could do environmental good whilst travelling. And that was something I really lent into when I was at Lastminute.

And then when I went to VistaPrint, I also started thinking about the good VistaPrint was doing with a bunch of customers who turned out to be charities and then exposing those charities to the workforce was just a massive moment. We were just a money making machine. And all of a sudden when we started talking about the charities that we helped and giving our employees the ability to go and help those charities, the uptake from employees was just tremendous. Probably to the extent that some employees left because they enjoyed that experience so much. And actually I look back on that in a very positive light, it was that people’s lives changed because we started getting much more involved in impact in the world. And so for me, yeah, it feels like a natural journey.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think there is something what you said and we’re seeing that play through, particularly with Millennials and then the Gen Zs as they come into the work market, that purpose, that need for purpose or for good. Smart companies, smart brands, for-profit companies are trying to find ways that allow employees to do both. And it’s a great retention tool, it’s a great attraction tool and I suggest it has good brand affiliation for our customers and clients in that respect.

Okay, so talk to me about how did you come up with the idea, full stop, for OnHand because it’s an interesting approach.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, you’re right. And I’ll come back to your topic there around CSR approach from companies and how interested they are or aren’t in it. I’ll come back to that. But I guess five, six years ago when we started, the idea wasn’t mine. It was a number of very large charities, people like Macmillan, Red Cross, RNIB, Royal British Legion, British Heart Foundation, WaterAid, giant national or international charities who as very large charities recognised they had messed up volunteering. Volunteering is really hard to do. You can source stuff yourself from Googling, you can apply, “Ooh, that’s great.” You may hear back straight away, fantastic if you do, but you may never hear back. And that’s a really common experience. If you do hear back, you typically have to sign up for a bunch of training, usually it’s 10 weeks and at the end of that training you’ve got to sign up for the same time every week for the next six months. And surprise, surprise, the only demographic that’s growing in volunteering is the retirement age demographic. Every other demographic is declining.

And so the charities kind of realised themselves, we’ve messed it up, we’ve made it far too hard, we’ve got to find a different way. And their idea was, well, what if we can make volunteering just like using Uber? What if it was just like using Netflix where you could browse the things that interest you, find the one you want to watch and do it on your time, on demand. How can we make it on demand in your local neighbourhood and you get giant choice? And introduce flexibility. Do it today and don’t come back for a year. That’s okay. A completely unheard of approach.

So that was the idea for OnHand. I got involved in 2019 when it was just idea stage. I had left my last company, wasn’t quite sure what to do next, but in my personal life was struggling with how to get shopping to my dad. He was late 70s, lived in London, I live in Brighton. He got to the age where he had a bit of Parkinson’s, couldn’t carry shopping anymore. And when I heard about the idea, I thought, well, that solves that issue for me and I bet there’s 100,000 other people who immediately tomorrow we could solve the issue for them and grow from there. So then couldn’t get the idea out of my head.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Fantastic. So you started that, and if I understand it correctly, when you first started, this was a B2C model, wasn’t it?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, totally correct. Yeah.

Debbie Forster MBE:
How did that change? When did that change? Because I note from the date, it’s what I call BC, Before COVID. Talk to me about when you pivoted from a B2C to a B2B model.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, you’re right. So pre COVID, the launch idea was B2C. We used Facebook ads to sign people up and very successfully signed up thousands for very, very low cost. I think when I came into think about taking on OnHand, the one metrics the charity discovered is they could acquire these volunteers a download and sign up essentially for a few p. And that made me think there’s got to be a way we can monetize and become a sustainable outfit. The model was let’s charge the person that needs the help. So today someone like my dad, you could use a professional character to get your shopping. That would be frightfully expensive because they’ll be £20 an hour in London plus VAT, double essentially your price of your shopping.

So the idea was, well, what if we just charged them £10 for the help they get and almost all of that, £8 of that we’ll donate to the charity. So the charities who had the idea, they were delighted. They get a revenue stream straight away and in fact, it was their idea. And we keep a platform commission. So OnHand will keep £2 as a platform commission. The problem with that is unless you’re going to be Deliveroo or Uber size, a platform commission model does not work. Going in, I kind of knew that. I thought we’d find a different path as we went, but was happy to start that way and then was forced into the change by COVID and COVID, when it struck, of course the most vulnerable person on the planet is an elderly person. Exactly the type of person we were helping. So day one, we stopped charging, didn’t really know how we would generate revenue again, but we were lucky to have done a fundraise right at the end of the year before. So we knew we had runway.

The luck part was we’d met a few businesses earlier in the year, weren’t quite sure how we could work with them, but they started to call us. So businesses started to call us to say, “Hey, we’ve let all of our employees go home or we’ve had to. They spread across the region and we don’t know how to engage them. Can you help?” And that was a massive light bulb. It was like, wow, of course we can. We’ve got this app that connects you with a local neighbour or a local charity to do good, very easy for the employee to use. And then we thought about the virtual circle this makes, it’s like the person getting the help no longer has to pay. The employee giving help is delighted to have something to do and give back. And the employer gets all of this great data and kudos from doing good. Of course they’re delighted to pay. So it was a wonderful virtual circle.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Fantastic. And you’ve gone from success to success in that and that’s wonderful. In that shift, was there anything that you found in going from B2C to B2B that helped or hurt?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, right, so I’ll give two bits of answers here. One is going back to the point you made earlier around how attractive or not is this to a business? Five years ago, I’m not sure it was, I think a lot of businesses were tick boxed on CSR and we had a lot of businesses come our way that just wanted to tick a box or were just interested in something during COVID. But that dialogue has changed over the last few years, especially in the last two, three years where the rise of responsible business is just, I feel like we’re right at the start of a wave where you can see it in B Corp or you can see it in the rise of impact reports. You can see it in investors pressurising boards to do more good for consumers or society and the planet. And you can see that in consumer demand and employees themselves. You mentioned earlier Gen Z and Millennials, the stats are just enormous on the purpose they need. So there’s something about businesses changing.

The B2C side has really helped us with businesses who want to do good. We started B2C because of that. The app and platform looks completely different from if we’d started as B2B. It’s all about that consumer user. It’s gamified, it looks fun. It looks like an app you’d want to use versus a lot of B2B tools aren’t quite that. They kind of look backwards. Because of that, we’re really different to anything else out there that was built for a business. We’re just cooler. It’s easier to use. The interface is great, it’s just something you’d want to be doing.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think that’s something I’m hearing from a lot of people who’ve been on the show that since COVID, it probably would’ve happened before, but it’s accelerated. More and more companies, I mean they spend their free time as consumers, so when they come to B2B, they expect that customisation, they expect that UX, that UI. So companies that are B2B really need to get ahead of that curve to meet that demand. You can no longer hide behind, well, it’s B2B, we don’t have to do that.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
I think there’s such a convergence there and very hard for a company that started as B2B. I think it’s hard. I think it’s very hard to do that flip. For us, day one, it was like, well, what consideration set do we want to be in? And it was, well, I want to be an alternative to Tinder. Do you go on a date tonight? Or I want to be an alternative to going to the gym or I want to be an alternative to Netflix and watching the movie. Why don’t you go and do some good instead of going on Tinder or going to the gym or watching a movie? And that’s the consideration set we had from day one and therefore built the tech and a user experience to match that user.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And that’s the aspiration I think more B2B companies need to be thinking of is think about those great consumer apps and how are you matching those expectations, but to your business customers. Now I agree with what you’re saying and have seen it myself in a number of organisations, including some that I’ve run over the last five years, this real surge of companies seeing real business positivity, bottom line benefits from the CSR, the D&I, the for good piece. I’m hearing and seeing some stats over the last nine months that that might be changing. Are you seeing and hearing the same thing?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think over the last 12 months we are seeing budgets tighten. Folks want to spend less. There is consolidation on B2B SaaS products in general, and I think CSR and certainly what we do falls into that bucket. So, yes, it’s different. For us, we have to have much more focus on the ROI. We’re great at engagement, fab, but let’s translate that into the data that shows you how this helps you retain folks, it helps you show those folks are more productive and it helps you acquire folks as well, ultimately leading to that saving. And if you can show that, fantastic.

That’s the kind of story we need to sell in now versus before we didn’t seem to need that a year ago or two years ago. The conversation is different and it’s with a different level. It’s CFO that needs to sign off on a lot of things these days. So we’re definitely seeing that.

Ultimately, I still think we’re very much at the start of the trend on responsible business. So, yeah, I think there’s a harder patch we’re going through as budgets tighten, but that won’t be forever. And the stats coming from Millennials, like 84% I think-

Debbie Forster MBE:
Exactly.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
… wanted purpose for their jobs. With Gen Z, it’s like almost 90%, it’s 89% in the latest Deloitte survey. That’s not going to go away. That’s a generation just starting work. So, wow, the trends are right at the start for responsible business.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think that’s what I’m hearing and what I would be saying to companies, there is a bump in the road with the current climate, but the smart companies are playing the long game and they’re remembering, yes, absolutely anybody that is in this space has to be demonstrating the ROI. You have to get it into the P&L. But the smart companies see beyond the immediate P&L. The smart companies are realising their future talent. And let’s be clear, when we’re talking about Millennials, that’s management as well as the Gen Zs coming in.

From a talent perspective, the great companies, the companies that are really going to be attracting and retaining great talent are the companies who’ve continued doing this, the performative switch the light on, switch the light off, and maybe what no one will notice, there’s more transparency, there’s more expectations. But we also need to remember those very same people are also our clients, our customers, our users, and again, who want to see the impact, want to see mission led for good practises in the companies that they’re doing. We’re in violent agreement here. Let’s just make sure that everyone else is, Sanjay.

Okay, so now we get a step back from the great work that you’re doing at OnHand. We’re going to look at the horizon. One of the things I love doing is talking with guests to understand what’s on the horizon that’s capturing your attention, good or bad. What are you seeing that occupies your mind?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Interesting. Well, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about LinkedIn and I’ve been on LinkedIn 2009 or so, I remember when I left Lastminute and I went to join VistaPrint was when I started because I just want to stay connected. I think it’s an incredibly useful resource. I’ve loved being on it, I love posting on it. And over the last few months I’ve been thinking, hey, I’ve been hearing a lot about LinkedIn influencers, I should probably grow my following and become one of them because it leads to new business and all of that kind of stuff.

And so it’s been really interesting looking and watching a number of people who are able to grow their followers by thousands, tens of thousands in a fairly short timeframe and I absolutely admire it and I was like, wow, must copy. And as I started thinking about how to copy that model, it became really clear that there’s a formula you can follow on LinkedIn, which has changed the way my feed on LinkedIn looks. And the formula essentially is, hey, say you are an influencer, post about burnout, stress, leadership, what great companies look like, remote work, hybrids, but you have so many people doing the same content, almost copying their own content and then commenting on the others’ content as well. And that does drive the algorithm.

So I was looking at this thinking, well, I could do that, I could do that and I need to comment on their posts as well. And that does lead to hundreds and hundreds of followers almost a daily basis. I’m not taking this away from the people that do it, by the way. You have to be dedicated. You have to post daily to really generate that volume. Where does that end? I haven’t jumped into that game. I guess feeling it’s not quite right for me. Where does it end? It feels like my stream is taken over by almost identical posts, gurus without it really adding much value. That’s been on my mind a lot.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I have found that, and it’s another platform where it feels like it could become a victim of its own success and some of its own algorithms because there’s that risk that we’ve seen on other platforms. Because there are people who are influencers and started that, but that’s that hype curve again. And if we’re not careful, we get those echo chambers and I’m starting to see some behaviours and content on LinkedIn that I think, wait a minute, this is supposed to be the platform where I don’t have to see that kind of thing because this is the grownup platform, isn’t it? This is the professional platform where you can trust and you can do those things. So I feel the same thing and I feel disappointed. I’m finding myself sort of pulling back from it sometimes. I agree with you, there are some people who are writing great content on, but I think I feel there’s a difference between people who have something to say and people who want to be an influencer.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Right. Right. I think I could talk about this for a while because it’s… I don’t know. Until realising about, hey, the influencer and what type of things they post, which tends to be very similar to other influencers, until that moment, I guess a lot of LinkedIn was showing off too, and I’m guilty of this. We definitely post all the great news about OnHand, not the reality. It’s just great news. So it felt like a platform to show off a bit on stuff.

Something that’s also shifted and actually that’s a good shift if we shift away from just showing off and show some reality. I think that’s it, that’s a really positive shift. The other shift I think is caused by remote work and hybrids where maybe some of the stuff you’re talking about where, hey, this is a professional platform where it shouldn’t exist. I’m not sure. I feel like in the world we’re in today, some of that stuff that connects us, I don’t know, I got married or I’ve had a kid or whatever, which you wouldn’t have seen on LinkedIn five years ago or whatever. I don’t know. I think there’s a place for it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I like the humanity. No, I’m with you on that because I think it’s reflecting what happened under COVID, which is more and more companies felt we bring our whole selves to work and we’re seeing people as humans, three-dimensional humans. I think there’s a difference between the humanity that I think I see, which is lovely and it is useful to know that not everybody’s getting up at five A.M. and doing all those behaviours that we all hear about that just feels like clickbait. And genuine content and thought leadership are just a little sceptical on the rise of influencers and it’s so easy to get caught up in the algorithms and the stats that come out of that, the engagement numbers and looking at the clicks. It’s just-

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Completely addictive, right? So as I was thinking about how I should go on that journey, essentially analysing, well, what should I post, and then come to that conclusion. But it’s addictive. If you want to have that amount of followers, well, here’s the formula to do it, why not? And for me, I think it then comes down to how do you curate who you follow and that should, and I think it does lead to what does your host stream look like? It gets so much more curated to the stuff that’s relevant and useful for you.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So either a shout-out to LinkedIn to think this through or maybe there’s another business model, maybe there’s somebody listening that can return to some of those first principles that would make it very, very sticky as a platform.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
I’ll say it. I think there’s space for a different business social network, which is… I’m in responsible business. A responsible business social network would be very, very cool and incredibly useful for hundreds if not thousands of organisations.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Completely agree. All right, well, you heard it here on XTech. When that spins up, Sanjay, you and I will know that we threw the idea out into the universe.

All right, then last we sort of pull out into you as a human. We love to hear what people are reading or watching or listening to. What is that for you, Sanjay?

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
I’m incredibly boring, so I’ve been thinking about this question. Maybe controversially, I don’t listen to podcasts, like zero, zero.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Except this one, of course. Sanjay, of course, this one. Of course, yes.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
This one, of course, I will be listening to. I don’t know where to fit it in. I watch TV, probably that’s something I do largely into where my kids are. One of them is into fantasy. I love watching fantasy with them. Another will watch anything. So pass the time with them too. I’m typically always in a business book. There’s always a business book on the go. Lots of them may lean on historical books. And so the one that I tend to go back to a lot is the Good to Great Jim Collins one, which I only read a few years ago. I’m 48 and it’s been around forever and it’s always been mentioned as this book you must read.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s a classic.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
And I only read it a couple of years ago. Yeah, right. It’s a classic, which I hadn’t read until a couple of years ago. And the principles in it are just simple. Well, they’re simple, but actually are really hard to apply. I love the hedgehog idea. You have these three circles and you’ve got to define them for your business. It’s really hard. Really, really hard. That’s one that’s currently on my mind.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Brilliant. Okay. So what I heard was great work-life balance, watching with the kids and family and we should do, and Good to Great. That’s fantastic. Sanjay, thank you so much for joining me here today.

Sanjay Lobo MBE:
Pleasure. Absolute pleasure. Thanks for the invite.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So we’d love to receive your comments and thoughts on what you’ve heard today and you can share them with us at fox.agency/xtech. If you’d like to appear as a guest on the show, don’t waste a moment. Email us now at [email protected]. I’d like to thank the whole team of tech experts at Fox Agency for making this podcast possible. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to XTech.

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