In this episode of Digitally Diverse, we sit down with Gareth Rydon, co-founder of Friyay, Australia’s first generative AI studio. Gareth shares his unique career journey, transitioning from accounting to human-centered design and eventually to the cutting-edge world of AI. He discusses the challenges and rewards of starting a value-driven AI company, emphasising the importance of augmenting human capabilities rather than replacing them. Gareth offers insights into maintaining work-life balance as an entrepreneur, the significance of continuous learning, and the power of asking good questions in the age of AI. He also shares valuable career advice, stressing the importance of aligning work with personal values and the benefits of diverse experiences. This conversation is packed with wisdom for anyone navigating the tech industry or considering a career change, highlighting the crucial role of designers in shaping the future of AI and technology.
Please note: this transcript has been auto-generated and may contain some errors.
Thank you for joining us for another episode of Digitally Diverse, where we do a deep dive into the minds and the career journeys of some of Australia’s most influential leaders in the creative and tech industry. So today we are joined by Gareth Rydon, who is a co founder of Fri AI. Thank you so much for joining us.
Gareth, welcome. Thank you for having me on. Thank you.
So, for those of us who are unsure of what you do and what Fri is, would you mind just giving us a brief overview of, you know, where you’ve come from and your career up to. Up to the moment, you might have to strap yourself in because it’s a bit of a random journey. Always is.
By no means. It’s definitely not a straight line. It does meander and take some hard left and hard right turns.
So I started out. I started out my career, to be honest, as an accountant, did my ca. I used to wear a suit and tie a lot, and as you can see, I don’t wear a suit and tie anymore, so I’m no longer in that field.
You know, I spent a few years being an accountant and then I transitioned into more of a management consultant strategy base for a couple of years. And then partway through my career, I saw, I got really curious about human centered design and design and started studying design at night. I think I did a UX course at General Assembly, a ten week course, which is fantastic back in the day.
Hopefully they still offer it, and spent quite a few years in more a service design role because loved the creativity aspect, talking to humans, designing things for people. And that took me through the ATO for a while as a designer and then in some more traditional consulting style roles. And then now it’s found me where I have co founded a generative AI studio called Fri AI, which was last August.
So, started as an accountant, and now I’m a human centered designer, designing generative AI tools for small businesses. Love that. I mean, there’s plenty of weird and wonderful journeys that we’ve heard on the podcast so far, but I’d have to say that’s one of the most stark contrasts between the beginning point and the end point.
So fill us in on Friday. Like, what are you doing there? What’s your big goals at the moment? So, Friya, we founded as Australia’s first generative AI studio, and I what we’re really focusing on, our purpose is we want to spread the benefits of AI as fast and as wide as possible, because we really think it’s a true bottom up revolution. I don’t know if you’re the same as me, but I own a smartphone and I’ve got a data plan, so I’ve got access to all these tools.
So our focus is really trying to spread those benefits, get people familiar with these types of tools and then as they get familiar, really helping small businesses adopt either existing solutions in the market and building as their workflow, or helping them design specific solutions for them. So for us, success would be if australian small businesses are competing and winning on a global scale. So a five person small business in Australia competing with a five or 600 person, mid to even large, large corporates.
So that’s sort of our aspiration. Yeah, yeah. Nice.
And what is it that you are specifically doing there? Obviously, you’re one of the co founders, but what does a typical day to day look like for you? One of the most important things. And I’m really fortunate that I’ve got two brilliant co founders, and one of my co founders is incredibly experienced with building new ventures and another is another service designer. So really, for me, it is about to bring that human centered approach to generative AI.
In particular, we’re making sure that we don’t go towards really cool tools, looking for problems, to understanding what our clients, what challenges they’re facing and then designing solutions around those needs. So for all of your listeners in that creative and design phase, they were saying, yeah, that’s exactly what we do. And 100% that’s what I’m doubling down on and involves even just interviewing, like really speaking to people, speaking to employees, walking a mile in their shoes, seeing what they’re doing and then seeing how we might augment them, how we understand what those tasks are.
Because it’s only, our belief is it’s only once you understand those tasks which you learn about by talking to other humans, that the real opportunities can start to emerge around these tools. Yeah. And that makes incorporating the human experience into technology like this.
There’s definitely, I think, a time and a place to really push the boundaries of what this kind of tech is capable of. But it sounds like you guys are taking a bit of a step back and really assessing what people are actually going to have a real impact, or what this technology is actually going to have a real impact, especially with small business. Is there any twelve month goals that you guys are looking ahead to? Or are you just exploring this phase at the moment because you’re less than, well, nearly, nearly a year old at this time of recording? Yes.
Yeah, it’s going to be a year next month. That’s and a year in AI terms is like 16 years lifetime. Yeah, it’s because it moves so quickly.
But great question. So for the next twelve months, there’s the very practical side of things where we want to be able to pay ourselves a reasonable wage so we can afford our mortgages, because we do live in Australia and that’s always a focus. But then what we’re looking to do in the next twelve months is we want to start to look, to expand, and not just in Australia, but we’ve got a couple of other countries we want to test in.
And the reason we want to actually do that is we want to prove to our clients that it is possible that no matter how big or small you are with the right use of these tools, is that you can really look international. So there’s the, let’s make sure we continue to build our pipeline of work so we can generate revenue for the business. And then where would the next couple of countries that we want to target be? And if we can have one experiment in the next quarter, one country we want to experiment in, and then over the next twelve months, sort of excite to expand that, if that first experiment goes well.
Yeah, no, that’s super exciting. So already, already looking at expansion, always a good thing. It would be great to maybe just take a step back and I’d love to hear, obviously you started way back when in accounting, so would you be able to walk us through what compelled you to start a career in design or in tech and how, how you kind of broached that subject to your nearest and dearest? What did that look like such a good way of framing that question? Because it’s, by the way, I’m just going to completely change careers.
We were both okay with that. From something very, very stable into the great unknown. Yes.
So what I always found interesting was even when I was in the end in the accounting profession, there was a lot of good stuff that I was able to learn. And you learn different things. I found they used my brain in a different way.
But what I found more and more, the longer I was in that part of my career, I really started to look at what aspects of the job I really, really enjoyed. And time and time again, it came down to the early stages of working on projects, when I was getting to meet the client, learning about their business, trying to understand their problems. It was around that time, I think it was 2009.
Between 2009 and 2011, I started just reading about human centered design and I think one of my colleagues talked to me about it. And the more I read about it, the more it seemed to resonate with me, in particular about, you can experiment, you can make something really quickly, and then you put it in front of the people you want to learn from. And also, it seemed to really value people that listened to, understand, and rewarded that type of thinking.
And so I started reading everything and anything I could. I think I did a couple of the free Ido acumen courses, which are fantastic as well. I read everything I possibly could from Ido, followed Tim Brown a lot, and then the more I started to learn, I started to be able to paint a picture of what that could look like.
And as I say, my better half, I really talked to her about it and said, I think this is something I want to do. What I’ll do is I’ll start studying it. I studied at night while I still kept my traditional job, that really, I think my wife, my now wife really worked out.
It was just clear that it was my passion. So very, very fortunate she was fully supportive of it. And then the way I transitioned was, it was a couple of steps, because going from being a.
And I actually even did my ca. So I was deep in accounting, like, I did that, did accounting at university, and then did my childhood accountant qualification as well. Yeah.
So I was quite deep in that space. So coming out of that, probably the biggest challenge I found was try to find the roles in there, because, you know, I had ten odd years, ten or eleven years of built up experience, but not anything that looked like the field I was trying to get into. And I got really, really lucky because I met who was going to be my boss at the time, and he was willing to take a punt on me and saw how passionate I was about it, saw the effort I was putting into learning and reading about it, and I got more of a somewhat of a sideways step and a little bit back.
And it really was just taking a chance on me. And I think that was the way I ended up getting in there. And then, because I loved it so much, I think it really helped me excel because it didn’t feel a huge amount like work early on, because I was like, I get to go and sit down with customers and talk to them and learn stuff, and then I can make something based on what we’ve learned.
And it didn’t feel like work. It felt fun. So I think that really helped me establish myself a bit faster when I did make the move.
That’s something that I hear quite a lot is most people make the transition into design from another industry, but, yeah, it sounds like you didn’t necessarily come in purely because you love design or you might love art. And that’s a lot of reasons why people like to get into design. It’s more like the user experience and that user research and that connection with the users, that was something that was your prime motivator.
Would you say that’s the case? Yeah, absolutely. Probably as far from an art school student as you could. If there was a spectrum and there’s someone who’s sort of on one end, which is goes to art school, if there’s someone on the other distance, left hand side, that would definitely be me.
I was deep in spreadsheets, spend my all day and all night in excel. Get me to sketch something. I was like, can I put that in excel instead? That was sort of where my background was.
Is there a formula to that? Yeah. Yes. There’s a need for those super duper, creative, very, very talented designers on the other end, but there is still definitely a huge need for very data centric, research focused designers as well.
So, yeah, I’m really glad that you were able to see your niche and know that there was a place for you within the industry in that kind of role. Is there anything else about your job or about tech at the moment that it really, like, lights you up and inspires you to do what you’re doing? It’s definitely the possibilities of what we can do individually as humans and even collectively. So our core thesis at variety is that the current crop of generative AI tools like chat, GPT, or Claude are easier than you think, but more powerful than you can imagine.
And so we started dabbling and doing a little bit of work in this space in March last year, and then went full time, founded the business in August. We haven’t even scratched the surface. And this is why I think having a designer mindset about being curious, where I really believe designers can really excel, is that curiosity is going to help us see where we can go with these tools.
So the ability to go, I wonder if it could do that for me. And asking that question almost every day and still being blown away by what it can do, even in my daily life. We just moved house, and I’m not a green thumb at all, and we’ve got this enormous, enormous lemon tree in the backyard, and I do need to prune it, but I don’t want it to die.
So chat GBT helped me, right from telling me it was a lemon tree to me taking pictures of all the tools that I had in my shed and say, could I use any of these? And it saying, no, you shouldn’t use those very rusted secateurs and that terrible saw, because it’ll probably poison the tree. So things like that even really just blow me away. And that gets me really excited.
Like, if there’s those moments that are helping me, imagine if more and more people were able to do that, how much that can help them as well. So that gets me super excited and wanting to share as much as I possibly can. Yeah, I think that’s so true.
Like, even if it’s something as, you know, chilled as gardening, imagine what this technology could be doing if you’re applying it to really juicy, nitty gritty business problems. Yeah, it takes my breath away sometimes at how much we can do, but how little we know about it. So, yeah, no, it’s super exciting.
So, Gareth, we’ve already spoke about that you started your career in accounting. Obviously, you would have, I’m guessing, needed to do some higher education to get into that field. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that looked like and how, you know, if at all, you found skills that you learnt in that space to be relevant to what you’re doing at the moment? When I made the transition.
So there were three to four main spaces where I got educated quite quickly. So I started out with the free. This is because anything free, I’m, like, climbing all over it.
Yeah, the. The free ideo course. And that.
That was fantastic, because the way they structured it was you had to learn with other people, you had to find other people and collaborate with them. And I love that. The.
I did. I did just a very traditional UX design course with general assembly, that ten week course at night. And then I found a couple.
And when I transitioned and I managed to get. My role is learning from other people in design and tech was insane. And we all know that old structure where it’s 70, 2010, 70% of your learning comes from on the job.
And I think that 70 is even higher when it’s with people that know the space. And from my perspective, just being an absolute sponge, that approach where any and every moment is learning. And I find, as well, and I’ve noticed this other people, that transition is maintaining that curiosity to ask questions, because when you transition and you’re new into a field, you don’t know anything.
Don’t embrace that by asking a lot of questions, because I think it’s. To people who’ve been in a field for a long time, it’s to their detriment that they stop asking questions. And I don’t know why.
Maybe it’s because I should know everything or people just fall into a bit of a routine, but you lose out on so much learning. And I take so much inspiration because I’ve got two young kids and the biggest question they ask is why all of the time about random stuff. But I really look at them and listen and understand they’re learning, using that to understand the world.
So the more so from that education perspective, taking what I learned in the courses, but then being able to ask why as much as possible and ask those questions, I found that be quite a powerful combination because the way I embraced the traditional higher education and knowledge change because I was really enhancing it by being really curious and not just saying, okay, well, I need to learn this thing so that I can get this qualification to, ah, that’s something interesting. I’m being taught that I can use in my role. Not.
So that little shift really helped me around. I want to learn to get the educational tick versus actually want to learn, which. And I know, I know I lost that after in because I’ve done a fair bit of study and in a lot of my studies, I know I did end up losing that because it was just a case of I just need to learn to get through this thing to this is really interesting.
And then the way I consume the information just changed so much and the way I absorbed it. Yeah, yeah. And that’s, that comes up a lot as well with, you know, people who, you know, your first job is always so much of a learning curve, but especially when you are coming from another industry, it just adds another layer on top of it where you’re like, okay, I really have to soak all this in now because I’ve got to make a good go of this.
You know, with all of that being said, and, you know, I’m sure hindsight’s 2020. What would you, would you like if you were to have that time again? Would you take the same path or would there be anything that you would do differently? That’s such a good question because it’s interesting. When I hear that question, I think it makes me reflect on what did I take out of each of those experiences.
And I think the combination of those experiences I had on my path have sort of helped me be who I am today, which I feel is unique. So that somewhat hard left, hard right, all over the place journey to where I’ve got here, I feel has created who I am today. I think if there was anything I would have done differently I probably would have made the move earlier.
And the reason I probably didn’t at the time because earlier in my career I was really stuck in this mindset of, well, I need to get to that next promotion and taking a sideways step or changing is too risky because I don’t want to start again and I’ve invested all this time, I shouldn’t do it. And then I ended up doing it anyway. So that’s probably, I probably would have challenged myself more early on to say, well, if it isn’t necessarily what I want to be doing, stop building foundations on a space where I don’t end up want to be longer term and it’s okay to go across because so much of what I’ve learned would be transferable.
So probably a shorter way of saying that is be willing just to go, okay, well, it’s okay to go across and even back because for quite a while I was way too proud to go back and take a backward step in my career because I thought, you know, I’m a high performer, I’m accelerating through all these promotions, look how young I am, and I’m doing all these things. I was placing importance on the wrong stuff and in hindsight, I probably would have moved earlier, much, much earlier, and just been parked my pride a bit because that just didn’t, it didn’t really add anything to my end result. Yeah, just let the ego go is sometimes some really good advice.
Even when I, even when you don’t even realize it is playing a part in the moment, sometimes it is. I definitely look back on some decisions that I’ve made with my career and I’m like, I could definitely have looked at that a little bit longer or just dwelled on that decision a little bit longer or vice versa, similar to what you’re saying made the jump a little bit quicker. But, yeah, it’s interesting what you can reflect on and what, you know, what certain tidbits of information you can pick up.
In hindsight, obviously making a career change or making that jump I’m sure would have been quite challenging. Have there been any other speed bumps in your career or any kind of pivotal moments where you felt that something has really shaped your career at the moment? Yeah, there’s two things, and they’re somewhat the same thing. And it was working, spending too long working with people who didn’t share the same values as me.
And when I reflect on that, one of the most lasting pieces of career advice that I’ve got, and I wish I’d got it sooner, was when you’re working, you can adapt your ways of working to fit a role, but you shouldn’t try and adapt or compromise your values. If you feel that you’re having to compromise your values, then there’s no amount of adapting the way you’re working that’s going to make you happy in that role. And you’re reflecting on my career.
I worked for two people that weren’t the right people for me and didn’t share my same values. And when I look back there, I stayed too long. And those are probably the most unhappy I’ve ever been in my career.
And not just career, I was deeply unhappy because we spend more time, well, probably less now that we work from home. But back then, pre Covid, you’re spending more time face to face with your work colleagues and your family. And when that’s not a happy place and when you’re not working with someone that shares the same values as you, it was so destructive.
It was so destructive to my mental health, it was destructive to my relationships. And lucky I had supportive people in my life that stayed with me through that from since then. When I look at my new roles and now even with my new business, I’m so lucky to work with the two people that I’m working with because we share the same values and that’s a no compromise for me at all.
And if it’s in the future with wherever I might end up being, even clients we work with now, we are very deliberate in terms of the companies we choose to work with. And my family sort of says to me, sometimes you’re a bit crazy. You need to get paid, so you shouldn’t be saying no to paid work yet.
And I’m like, well, I disagree. I think even if it means a short term sacrifice, companies and people that I want to work with need to share that same value set as me. And if they don’t, then that’s fine.
I just choose not to be working in that space with them. Yeah, I think for a lot of people, that would raise some alarm bells, but I think for, especially with the line of work that you’re in with AI, there is a lot of ethical red flags and lots of gray area that I’m sure people are going to be trying to figure out for a long time yet. So I think being value led, especially as a small business and working with other small businesses, I personally respect it.
And I think that I had hoped that a lot of other bigger businesses would follow with that as well. So, yeah, has there been, what kind of challenges. Has that, like, thrown up for you guys? Or have you also noticed that it’s been well received with your clients? The challenges it throws up is we said no to some work and there’s an immediate in my bank account challenge there.
But we’re finding our people and we are really upfront straight away. And to share with you and your listeners is that we want generative AI solutions to augment humans, not replace them. If this is about replacement, if you want to get rid of a whole department, we’re not the company for you.
If you believe in your people, you want to liberate their time, you want to bring joy back to their work than we are for you. And it’s been amazing when we share that, because then when we work with the clients that say yes to that, the way we work with them is amazing. We were working with a climate tech advisory business and they were absolutely about that and it felt fantastic.
And when we were working with their staff and with their leadership team and the team that was bringing us in, you could just feel it in terms of why we were doing it and why they were introducing us to the business. It’s just paying back in dividends. And now what we’re finding is the referrals from that client are with other like minded businesses.
So a bit of short term pain, but it’s helping us find the clients and the companies that we want to work with. And the more we do that, we hope that in one small way, we set a bit of an example, even though we, like you said, we are small. But I believe is it only takes one or two examples of how it should be for something to get started.
So that’s fingers crossed that we can help shape it a bit in that way. And we can see more people thinking about making their teams and their employees or themselves better with AI, not replacing themselves with the tools. It would just be so much better with everyone being on the same page.
Right. Everyone knows what they’re there for, everyone knows what they’re getting. There’s absolutely no benefit to trying to be everything to everyone.
So it’s great that you guys are really focused on your specific niche and what you’re trying to achieve. So, Gareth, is there anything that you do regularly to keep you motivated or keep you productive? Whether that be outside of work at work? Do you have any hacks? Definitely the time away from work and it’s a bit harder now that I’m in the space. I am not.
Because your co founder, you should be hustling and working all the time because I’m so curious about the space. And I could work every day of the week, but I become less effective. And the way that I get away from it is I ride my bike.
It sounds so simple, but I’ve always found that really helpful. Even when I used to work in the city and I’d commute home, I really found this fundamental difference when I would cycle home versus get the bus home. When I would cycle home, work would be on my mind for the first five or ten minutes of turning over the pedals.
But by the time I got home, I had really left work behind, and a. I was really present with the family, and my brain was just focusing on other stuff. And I always imagine it that I’d pushed a lot of what I was thinking about the day back to my subconscious, and I would find more and more that I would have more of those breakthrough.
Those mornings where I would just be in flow faster. When I had that time away when I didn’t, I really did notice in the mornings, I found it harder to get into a flow state because it was almost like I hadn’t cleared all of. Not the trash, but all of the stuff floating around in my brain and put in a different space to be processed.
So whatever, it works for others. But I find any, like walking my dog or jumping on the bike. And I really having that time to just focus on something else.
And what. What we’re. What are our ambitions at Friar is that we do want to.
We really, really want to get to the three or four. Three or four day week and the last two fry, fry days, getting used to saying Friday again. I’ve had off because it’s school holidays up where we are, and I’ve just been buzzing on the Mondays, having a three day weekend and really trying to switch off.
But it’s, it’s. It is a. There’s a.
There’s a real tension there, because I could be out of spending a lot of time building our profile on LinkedIn, as example, LinkedIn and Instagram. And you can put a lot of effort in there and spend a lot of time on there, growing the presence, the profile, commenting on stuff. And time away, it’s like, oh, I’m time away from there.
Am I losing out? But I have to keep reminding myself that a bit of time away means when I’m back on, it’s a lot more effective. And then the other thing, what I try and do is I have a bit of a pack down ritual on Friday because it used to be a case I’d leave the office and I might take my laptop home. But for me, I’m a big believer in those rituals.
So I’ve instituted a ritual on a Friday where I pack down, I shut down my Mac. Like, I shut it down, I put it in a cupboard, even the. And I really lean into that ritual.
I’m unplugging all the cables, I’m taking off my lights, unplugging the microphones, shutting down the laptop. And that for me, I do that same process each time on a Friday now. And for me, that’s my pack down.
That’s work finishing. And sometimes it happens on a Saturday afternoon because I haven’t done on a Friday and my work sort of moved into the weekend. But I make sure that I have that ritual every week.
So then I’ve switched the laptop off and I packed it away for a bit. So those are two things that help. Help me a bit.
Yeah. Almost like that compartmentalization of, okay, this is work time, and work time is finishing, and now it’s weekend time. Yeah, I’m a big believer of that as well.
Usually at around 430, I’ll start to, you know, go through the inbox and make sure everything’s ticked off, you know, get the sanitizing wipes out on the desk and make sure everything’s all cleaned up. So, yeah, I totally agree. It’s like just that little switch in your brain that’s like, okay, we’re finishing up now.
And you’re right, just work from home has made it so much easier, but also so much harder to switch off and have that. That contrast between work and home. So, yeah, having.
I think everyone’s got those little tricks to help them, you know, signify the end of the day or the end of the week. And that. That wipe down, that’s a.
I love that idea because cleaning is so cathartic. And there’s something. I’m gonna add that in that wipe down.
And having a clean desk, I’m gonna use that. Thank you for that. You’re welcome.
Yeah, no, happy to help. Yeah, any. Anything to be a bit more clean, because I don’t know about anyone else, but when it gets to a Friday, my desk is just like, you know, cups of tea is just everywhere and just like, bits and bobs everywhere, pens, little bits of post it notes.
I’m like, no, I need to clean slate for the weekend. I guess my next question, you know, going back on, you’ve probably seen the tech industry go through quite a transition over the last few years. What do you see in the future for people working in design and technology? Do you have any predictions? I hope this prediction comes true is that designers are central to the tech revolution.
Absolutely front and center. And I really, really hope for that. I believe it all come true because the tools, the solutions that are built with design in mind with a human centered design led approach are the ones that are going to be successful.
And I’m seeing that firsthand already. So we’ve been brought into a couple of clients where they’ve used other larger consultancies, and it’s been a tech led drive. And you can’t really fault the tool.
The tool is sort of cool, but no one uses it. No one. No one.
Because, and I also, the main question I ask is, how did you go about doing this? What was the way that you designed it? What do you mean designed it? We got the tech, we focused on the integration, and we drove it through our it department. And that, time and time again, is almost every single time when we come in to clean up a bit of a mess with the generative AI integration, that’s the common pattern that we’re seeing. So my prediction is that designers are going to be really big winners out of the generative, the fourth industrial revolution.
The ones that are very curious, that ask really good questions, that want to create stuff quickly and test it, and always keeping the humans at the center. That’s going to be one of my hypotheses. And any people from a traditional tech background that learn about design are only going to win and only going to benefit.
So we’ve got an amazing CTO, and he’s very, and he’s astrophysicist, like, so clever. It’s such a wonderful human as well, so smart, and he’s so curious. Wow, you would make such a wonderful designer.
And he’s just learning as much as he can from us, and that’s fantastic. And that’s going to be benefiting us and benefiting our clients as well. Yeah, and like, the end users at the end of the day, like, yeah, that’s, I think that that curiosity piece is something that’s just so important.
You know, not just with people that work in tech, but like part of any, any job at the moment and asking those questions, if you can lead with asking the right questions and having that user research frame of mind, it’s only going to benefit. And it’s something that I’m really passionate about as well. Like when I was recruiting in the UK, I feel like they nearly every medium to large design team had at least one user researcher because they were like on top of it.
They knew that to not have to do iteration after iteration, just get it right the first time and know what the problem is. And you need data behind you to do that. Right.
So the more data that you can have, the better. So, yeah, that sounds great, I think. Yeah, the collaboration between tech and design is just so, so important.
And could I add something there, because you made such a great point about questioning, and this really runs so true, is that if you imagine the space we’re in right now, everyone on the planet with a smartphone has got access to infinite expertise. So all of the answers. So it’s not the answers, it’s the questions to get access to the answers.
Because a generative AI tool is not going to say no, you shouldn’t have prompted that, you should have written this prompt. It’s going to answer your prompt. So the people that can ask really good questions are the ones that are going to be able to tap into that infant expertise.
So the more we can focus on those questions, asking really good questions, the more benefit you’re going to get. So that’s going to be a huge point. Where we’re moving into now is even more emphasis on curiosity, even more emphasis on questioning is that’s how you can unlock this literally infinite amount of expertise we have access to now.
Yeah, no, that’s so true. We have all the answers, but how do you get there? Like, okay, light bulb moment. Thanks for that.
I’ll be thinking about that for the rest of the week now, but I’ve just got a couple of quick questions to finish this up. Is there any great podcast that you love to listen to, or you mentioned before that you just love any kind of free content, which is so great? Is there any recommendations that you would like to share? I am a huge fan of Ethan Mullik. He’s a very well known professor.
He’s really championing a lot around the what we can do with AI space. But why I like reading his stuff is the smartest people I’ve ever worked with are the ones that can explain things in simple concepts to people like me. And he does that really well.
So he’s, he’s got a blog, one useful thing, but I read as much as I possibly can. His book co intelligence is very, very, very worth reading. And the podcast, I think there’s.
This is the challenge for me with the podcast, is what I try, and I try and listen to really, really random podcasts because I was always told that read widely and weirdly. And so I’m trying to do. I’m trying to listen widely and weirdly.
So what I’m listening to a lot at the moment is anything around any experts in coaching and not like business coaches, but sports coaches, you know, like famous people who are very good at coaching, because I’m trying to learn as much as I can because I believe that the more we can learn about coaching, the more we can actually get out of tools. Now, because you move into that, the curiosity questioning coaching space, that’s how you can start to coax a lot of answers out. It’s as simple as I’ll jump onto Spotify and just search latest coaching podcasts in a random sport.
Yeah. And it was, it’s as, it’s as odd as that. So I think the other day was I listened to a lot of cycling coaching podcasts, but it was, I’ve forgotten even the name of it.
It’s that event used to be at the Winter Olympics where they’ve got a big thing on ice and then they scrubbing the ice in front of it. Do you know what that’s called? Curling. Yes.
And it’s going to sound odd, but there was this really well known Olympian who’s now coaching curling teams who was talking about their curling journey and how they coach curling teams. And it’s so interesting. Like, so interesting because all of this calls around coaching but applied in a different context.
So I know that might be a bit of a strange answer, but I’m just trying to listen to as many weird and wonderful ones usually when I’m on my bike as I can possibly get my ears on. Yeah, no, that’s great. I think there’s so much to be learned from.
You would know your specific sphere with design and with tech, but there’s always going to be a different flavor if you go into other types of coaching. That makes sense that you would pick up little bits of extra information if you were to go a little bit outside your bubble. So not many people do that as well.
Lots of people are very interested and happy to be in their stay in their bubble. So. Yeah.
Good for you for branching out a little bit. Thank you. I guess.
Do you have any mentors or business leaders that you might listen to their podcasts or any past managers that you still stay in touch with? Yeah, I’ve been. I’ve been really, really lucky with mentors over my career and years and years ago when I was working at PwC, I was really fortunate to work with some great leaders there and one of the leaders I worked with was, he was the CEO of the firm for a little while, but incredible human being and, and like, still devotes his time to mentor me and he’s mentored me through all of my very bizarre turns in my career. And I think what I found is by having a long term mentor and to be honest, it took me ages to get value out of a mentoring conversation.
I genuinely didn’t know how to do it. So I was like, what do I do? Because I asked, because I thought, oh, in my career I should have a mentor. Can you be my mentor? And he was like, yes.
And I was like, cool. Now what? Like, what does that look like? What do I do? What do I do? So, because we both invested many years, it’d be probably ten years now for me, it’s been so beneficial, that’s been really helpful is investing the time in that one mentoring relationship. And now I’m finding more and more now that I’m further on in my career is people that I’d worked with early in my career who are my peers.
I’m getting tapping into advice from them as much as I can. And even more recently from a FRIA perspective, is that we’ve got, we’re reaching out, we’re forming, I wouldn’t even call it a broad, but an advisory panel because there’s so much we don’t know and it’s people. And we’ve even set a really key criteria amongst the three of us.
We said, what type of people do we want? And one of the criteria is that they’ve tried a business and failed at it and another person that’s succeeded and sold a business and all of those aspects and we want to be able to pick up the phone to them and get advice and help. And the more, the longer I am in my career, the more I’m realizing about how little I know and trying to make sure that that drives humility in me and being able to ask anyone for advice. Even people are new in their career.
Like, just because I’ve been around for 20 something years, I’ve lost count. I definitely don’t have the answers, but someone who’s only just started might have a different perspective and answers for me. So even designers that used to work for me, I often give them a call and get their advice and help on things because it’s a different perspective, it’s different point of view.
And the genuine desire that they want to help make me better makes a really, really big difference. Yeah, definitely. And I guess in doing that, you’re really giving them the power to have their perspective heard and to have them help shape what you’re up to, which would be super rewarding for them as well.
But no, that’s great that you’ve got not only just one specific person that you go to for mentorship, but it’s a bit of a village feel. Everyone chips in. I like to finish the podcast on my favorite question.
If you were to give your younger self some career advice, what would that be? If I was to give my younger self some career advice, well, probably the big one would be that great questions he asked before, which helped me articulate that your ego doesn’t. It doesn’t help your career at all. There’s no benefit.
Doesn’t. It has never served me well in my career. Just park, park the ego.
And it’s okay to start. Absolutely. Okay to start again and finding that place.
So I think early on my career, I would have basically said to myself, oh, you’re curious about trying that someone’s offered you a role in a completely different way. You’re not going to remember that promotion you got. If you got that promotion in twelve or 18 months, three years down the track, it’s going to be completely blurred.
So don’t worry about that. Just try something new. And the other thing probably would be, end of the day, it doesn’t matter what other people think about your choices in your career.
That really tripped me up so much early on was when people ask me what I do, it’s, you know, I should be able. I want to say all this stuff and I want to be impressed. I’m like, who cares? Like that? I cared about that way too much.
And I was always, you know, I was promoted to this sort of role, you know, 20 and 21. Like, that’s just so. It just doesn’t matter.
All that matters is that you do something that’s really fulfilling and that hopefully brings you joy, and then you work with people that you value. And if that means taking a sideways step, taking a pay cut, taking a role with a lower title, those things are secondary to finding your space that brings you to the joy in your work. Yeah, completely agree.
Yeah. Keep the ego at the door. It’s kind of.
Yeah, I think that’s very sage advice for a lot of us, especially in the tech world. Sometimes that could be very relevant, but Gareth, thank you so, so much for chatting with me today. I felt like I’ve come away with quite a few light bulb moments.
So thank you again. And I can’t wait to hear what happens with Fria AI. You’re so welcome.
Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you.
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