Greg Sheehans Podcast
The crazy nature of early stage startups (the uncertainty, the doubters, the rejection) can be similar to the forces felt by those who at some point in their lives felt the need to make seismic shifts in their personal worlds.
My aim as your host is to bring the raw stories of startup failure and fuckup, alongside the inspirational messages of encouragement, tips and suggestions.
Alongside the business chats we will also hear stories from people living interesting and inspirational lives.
The podcast is recorded alongside the beautiful ocean beach of Mount Maunganui, New Zealand, but our guests and their experiences will be from around the world.
Thanks for your support of the show.
Greg Sheehan
Greg Sheehans Podcast
Ep 2: Tim Boyne - Navigating Startup Success (LawVu and SmartSpace)
Picture the grit of a seasoned rugby player fused with the sharp intellect needed to co-found a legal tech startup. That's Tim Boyne, and he's our guest on today's episode, taking us through his incredible evolution from sports to Tech Titan. From marine biology to IT, Tim's academic odyssey laid the foundation for LawVu, a platform revolutionising legal operations. He opens up about the challenges of nurturing a fledgling company while maintaining a full-time job and family life, and how critical support and partnership with co-founder Sam Kidd were instrumental in his leap into full-time entrepreneurship.
Venture further into the episode, and the concept of SmartSpace emerges—a cutting-edge GenAI infrastructure play that Tim founded. We discuss how this plug-and-play solution is a game-changer for enterprises wary of cloud-based data storage, particularly for sectors that handle sensitive information. Tim shares his insights on the varied market reception of SmartSpace compared to LawVu and the strategic approach to capitalising on generative AI in the business world.
But it's not all algorithms and innovation. We also peel back the curtain on the personal side of startup life. Tim reflects on the delicate balance of co-founder dynamics, the emotional peaks and valleys of entrepreneurship, and the profound resilience required when business intersects with family lives.
Join us for this authentic glimpse into the tenacity and collaborative spirit that drive success in the startup landscape.
Coal Mine Rhythm - Short Version B by Dan Ayalon
My guest today is Tim Boyne. I met Tim when was that? I think, december of last year, december 2023, and we had a beer locally in Taronga and I was really impressed when I met him. He was not what I was thinking. He was a guy who. He was clearly an ex rugby player and you have an image in your mind when you meet Tim, particularly in what he is doing now as the co-founder of Lawview, he's going to be a particular type of guy and he really kind of surprised me, blew me away, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Tim is a, as I said, is a guy who went from rugby into the world of startups and actually was checking out his profile earlier this morning and he studied a variety of things. He did a bit of marine biology, he did a bit of zoology and then he got into the world of IT. In fact, yeah, that was something sort of quite interesting in his zoology. It's another famous New Zealander actually that has a zoology degree. Steve enjoys the politician. So, anyway, enough enough rabbiting on. I'm going to throw across the term and get him to introduce himself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, greg. Yeah, quite an intro, but yeah, certainly not too far off way. So obviously I grew up in Tauranga which is something we can talk about at some point as well in terms of starting a standing company as part of the world but grew up here very sort of middle class I'd bring, but you know it was a really full job. Lots of mates, lots of rugby and all that kind of stuff Went to school boys college then as you said, I went to uni down in Dunedin.
Speaker 2:I spent some time down there but never really knew what I wanted to do. School for me was I wasn't a high teacher, but I'm one of those entrepreneurs that just sort of skimmed through or the skin on my teeth or other way through. But getting into uni down south, came back and got a diploma in marine studies, as you said, and then I thought what a hegel waste time this. That was when I started to realize that sort of real world applications for heading down that path, got into IT and then a bunch of stuff over the sort of proceeding 12 years, ultimately ended up working in a law firm and I spent about eight or nine years there in sort of IT and operations essentially legal operations and picked up a bunch of tricks. You know I'll keep a lot about the industry, about what makes lawyers tick, but I got particularly interested, I think, during that time in the other side of the transaction, the demand side of the legal market and the pain points that they had. I saw the way lawyers dealt with and thought about the people on the inside of the market and this is not just the firm, this is just across the industry right, bill of Lows and the E-E-Wals that come with that, and I just really felt like there were problems to be solved and started to dig into that.
Speaker 2:Layered in things like practice management and project management, I got stuck into 30 years worth of data at the firm that I worked at, which was just an incredible experience, and sort of all of those things really came together to the point where I thought, well, how about a bundle up all of these learnings, drop them onto the client side of the transaction, give them a tool that they can use to empower them, particularly large companies that had high-volume legal matters on the go and see if there's something there. So I prototyped it, started talking to people. One of the people that I spoke to, or that I was introduced to, was Sam Kitt, who was my co-founder at Lawview, and he was exiting an online project management company that him and his mates had built in Ireland, but he was Kiwi, so he moved back to New Zealand and he was looking for the next thing and him and I were introduced and I sort of pushed him the idea and really the rest is history, and we started iterating our way towards what ultimately became Lawview.
Speaker 1:And when you first kicked off, did you dive Boots and All into Lawview, or did you have other gigs on the side that kept food on the table? How did you approach that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so. Sam had exited, so he had an exit under his belt so he jumped into Boots, and All even full-time, right from the start, and this was in 2015, but I had to item all which and a family and had no prior anything of note to sort of find me through.
Speaker 1:So I kept my day job and the phone that I was working at was really understanding.
Speaker 2:I was pretty upfront with them about what I was doing and they were really supportive actually. So for two years I worked on Lawview sort of as a side gig, probably spent a little bit too much time on Lawview, but anyway. And yeah, we sort of got to the point where we had customers, we had revenue, we had raised, I think around I think we raised a bit of mail and that was the point when the embassy said right at, simon, get you jumping full-time, that's good, we'll craig one actually who's a local tenant I ain't having a best of, you might know but top-loak, everybody instrumental in those early days at Lawview. But yeah, he said, jump in. So yeah, kind of the rest of history. I got stuck in at Lawview but the product was my thing. But certainly in those early days it was everything. And as the company progresses in year to start giving away all of your Legos, I really sort of focused in on running the products sort of how did it feel being in your own startup?
Speaker 1:Was that startup number one for you? You hadn't really done anything prior to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was my first at-bat.
Speaker 2:I mean, I had lots of entrepreneurial. I had to go to lots of things, particularly prior to my daughter surprising us by coming along, but I think once she came along, I realized I had to double down and that was really a blessing. I think, instead of chasing after the shiny idea, you see something new. You see everyone else, you all try to come up with some new idea. Being able to double down and really understand an incredibly boring industry, at least on the surface, and figure out the problems that needed to be solved, there was a real blessing, I think, in disguise for me.
Speaker 2:But yeah, certainly first at-bat, and I guess the missing part of the story is that in 2020, I set the weight on the worldview and I think that that was part. We can talk a bit about that, but a lot of that was driven by the fact that lobby for me was my first at-bat and I really treated it as a learning experience. Going through those various stages and trying to understand those stages was the whole time for me. I consciously knew that I was going to have another go at this, because it was the first time for me and you make mistakes and you have frustrations and you're like the only thing better than a time machine is to be able to get back and fix those mistakes, as it clings late, and that's why I'm now sitting in the offices of Smart Space.
Speaker 1:Tell us a bit about Smart Space. I've met a couple of the people that you're building Smart Space with. We're really cool to hear in your words what Smart Space is all about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, I guess all of us you know we're aware that chatGVT came along in 2022 and sort of set the world on fire, and but for me, with the Enterprise tech background, it was sort of instantly obvious where the opportunity really was going to lie for this thing and that was trying to use the stuff in Enterprise. I think no one really knew how difficult that was going to be in 2022, but it needed I. But you know, sort of fairly early on I put my head together with another ex-lawyer, marco Benimenez, and we started to figure out what a solution might look like in their space. So obviously the big problems are that when you, you want to use.
Speaker 2:GNAI in your business. It's difficult, right, there are there's a whole bunch of friction points, but I think the one that I focus on is if you don't want to put your company data into the cloud, then the only other option is to build it yourself. You've got to build a solution yourself by combining together all these various services from various providers in this place. It's going to cost you six figures If it costs you $100 to do that. It's going to take you six to seven months if you can find a team that can actually help you execute on that point. The last space is play-and-play GNAI infrastructure. This is how we're framing it up Basically.
Speaker 2:We want organizations to leverage the power of GNAI quickly, securely, but with all the flexibility that comes with building something in-house. Basically, what we are is you go to the Microsoft Store it's on private mode, so you have to get in touch with us if you want to deploy it. But you go to the Microsoft Store, you deploy it, you decide on your use cases, you connect your various data sources, you choose the language models that you want to power each of those use cases so you can work with one or more GNAI models, we don't care, you can work with hundreds. Each one of those models can power a different workspace for a different use case. Then you essentially deploy it. You've got two ways of interfacing with it. We've got WebUI, which is basically a chat, gpt, a private one for your own company where you can search. Now you've got what we call fancy search. We don't call it that. The engineers hate it.
Speaker 2:Fancy search for content generation that while applying all the context that you have within your business. But I think probably the most common use case for it over time is going to be to power, to be the intelligence layer within automated workflows. So API accessing those workspaces via APIs is probably the key use case that we see going forward. It's really about becoming that hub for your business. Every business in the world is going to go through a transformation journey over the next five to 10 years and we're trying to set ourselves up to be that hub for that journey. Particularly, we want to own all of that infrastructure. You don't want your data leaving your servers. So government, fintech, healthcare, legal those kind of industries that are really sensitive about their data. That's kind of our sweet spot.
Speaker 1:It's a super cool space to be in and obviously you're right on these early days of seeing what generative AI can do. Was this an idea that came about through your time at Lawview, or was it something that sort of was only percolating just prior to starting it?
Speaker 2:So Lawview? Yeah, good question. Lawview was in our earliest 2015,. We were talking about Lawview as being an AI play slash big data play. We wanted to have the largest, most complete, most comprehensive structure data set in terms of how the world goes about solving legal problems, and so AI was always kind of front of mind. We never really got there. It was always. We had bigger problems to solve from product perspective, just in terms of being a boring old system of record, but we certainly had all that data there. I think when I had. So I had sort of just announced that I was going to step away from Lawview and take some time, probably three weeks before Chatchity was released or the version, that sort of cool thing. So it was kind of when I saw that, I was like that's what we've been waiting for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this podcast has an explicit warning on it, so you find it be able to use whatever local language you prefer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're probably going to wish you hadn't said that at some point. But anyway, the the. So, like I said, that was that was kind of the moment that I was waiting for. So I thought, well, you know, either way, sort of present this and get back into applying this stuff to legal or I do something else with it, and I think just the general sort of wider enterprise play you know for applying this stuff was was just obvious, I think, to me and to a whole bunch of other people. I think you know it's probably the big difference between SmartSpace and Lawview was that with Lawview no one gave a rate for what we're doing.
Speaker 2:for five years no one gave a shit, Whereas with SmartSpace I've jumped directly into the hottest, most competitive space you can possibly imagine. But we're certainly, you know, spending a lot of time sort of figuring out whether, whether, whether, white spaces in the market in terms of the solutions that the big guys are offering and, you know, looking at their time, it's still pretty, pretty present.
Speaker 1:You would have no doubt picked up a huge amount of experience and learnings and just things that you I guess you worked out, that you knew about yourself or that you knew about how to build a company through those seven years of Lawview when you started SmartSpace. Were there things you know, specific things that you said when I do this, I'm going to do it differently, I'm going to do X, y or Z. This is something that's important to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think so. There was certainly a lot that we got right at Lawview, and you know a lot of stuff that I wanted to that I want to continue, which you can talk about as well, but the it was really about the, the team that I built around me. I think I I was, I just wanted to be really conscious of making sure that I had support. No, I don't know, I'm trying to frame this up the right way. I wanted to build a team structure that was there to amplify what I did, as opposed to putting myself in the middle of a team that needed me in order to move, you know, to progress, if that makes sense, kind of like flipping the flow of energy, and so that's, you know, that's that's certainly what I've done with the team here that we've built, just so that I can be a better version of me.
Speaker 2:Partly partly that's that's, you know, it was a conscious decision. Partly, I think it's a change of roles from being a non CEO founder to being a CEO founder. I think it's more natural to do to do that. I think I was a bit too proud at Lawview in terms of, you know, trying to have this persona or somebody who doesn't need help. I'm to point, you know, I've got this on the man and I think it created pressure on myself that I didn't need and that I would do. You know, if I could do things differently, I probably would have changed just the, just the structure, not the people, the structure of the way that that we built things. That will be particularly where I was concerned here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what have you done differently, then, with structure at at Smart Space?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's really about hiring, having more fat, having more support, people around, people who can just get stuff done. I think there was my team at Lawview. They were all incredibly high functioning individual contributors and that's essentially what I became, as well as an individual contributor in terms of running the product thing. There wasn't a lot of administrative help, I think is really the key thing that I'm getting at people to just help just get shit done. That wasn't about creating a new product and that's I'm struggling to articulate it, but that's kind of the main thing I've done here but certainly continues. You know, most of the people that are working here now are people that I know and that I trust that came. That bring that same cultural essence and flavor that we had at Lawview. That, I think, is really one of the keys to the success that we had there. But you know it's still early days in terms of company. We're sort of only at about 10 FTEs here at Smart Space now, so it's sort of hard to have acquired too many of those reasons yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Another sort of interesting aspect to all of this is the way that we engage with our co-founders. I know from my own experience I really struggled with that, and I think a lot of people do. In the early stages, where you've got two, three, four, five co-founders, generally you've got quite different skill sets and so that can lead to some tension because you have a different view of the world, which is a good thing. But when you're creating something, when you're sculpting something, you want to sculpt it maybe in different ways. Have you got any advice for other founders or wannabe founders around either selecting or working with co-founders? Because, as I say, I know in my own case I fortunately I'm still friends with these people, but shit, we had so much tension and all sorts of trouble. So any thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I love Sound Like a Brother and we couldn't like. The adventure that we went on together was pretty special and I don't we didn't ever really have anything but sort of brotherly you know, sort of scrap, sort of stuff Like the kind of you know the way that you know you hear about all these nightmare founder stories. That was enough. So I can't get a little insight into that because you really get on like a house in a flat. Really similar backgrounds, our old, our dad's. You know we got on like a house in a flat.
Speaker 2:We were quite similar, I think, in terms of who we were and where our skill sets lay. I was, you know, I was a little more technical and Sam came from more of a sort of just a general business and customer support, you know, sort of roles in his previous company. But we were very much aligned in terms of how we saw the world and where we saw the opportunities and Lobi, I think there was a lot of overlap in terms of you know, again, for me it was my first time at it, so I was sort of across everything and wanted to be across everything and Sam was sort of similar in that respect. So he had. It took us a while to figure out where our sweet spots were.
Speaker 2:So I think that you know the advice would be to make sure that when you choose a pair of founder, then you get you're both really open, up front, you know before you agree to engage, you understand where your specialties are going to be and the things that you're going to focus on, and that you trust each other implicitly to get that done. That said, there's not a lot about the relationship between Sam and I that I've changed, even though you know, even though there was that confusion, that complexity, I think it just meant that we were, you know, we were interrogating each other's thought processes more deeply than if you've just got one person who's arguing with themselves over how we're going to go from a technical perspective and another person hate themselves over how they are going to go from a go to market to speak to them. Being across all those things in unison, I think you actually added something.
Speaker 1:I mean you seem like a super confident guy. You know you've played contact sports, you've played rugby. You look like a guy who likes to get shit done and doesn't like to I guess, sort of you know, you know beat around the bush. Having said that, I mean, do you, do you have insecurities around the startups? Do you have, you know, have there been things that have kind of freaked you out a little bit?
Speaker 2:I think I'm not comfortable doing stuff like this. I'm not, and it was probably what Sam and I were most different. It's that he was, you know he was. He had to be the front guy and to be out there and doing stuff. I don't really like making it faster than my, rather be the most successful company that you've never heard of, as opposed to all the all of the fanfare that comes with startups. Actually, you know that's, that's stuff. I'm kind of a boost to, you know the Hollywood side of being a founder. It doesn't seem useful to me. It's all about ego. You have a bit of ego as an entrepreneur, but yeah, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:I don't really like about it. But terms of company building, in terms of solving problems, it's all just opportunities, bars I'm consuming. We're other people, you know that's. You know what separates us as entrepreneurs from the rest of the world, right, so it's always the opportunity. So it all kind of excites me.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, certainly, as you say, patience is not something that I'm known for. Probably you know a big part of why step away from long years. It will just be, it will be coming such a big beast and I think, as the you know anyone who's taking the company to scale. You know, the more mature the company gets, the further along you get, the further away their vision gets, if that makes sense. You know, in this early days, every day you come in, you can shift down, you're working, you know you're in fifth gear, everything's humming, you're making progress every day and then, as that company gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you hire these people to have to get faster. Obviously, you know, we all know this then lose is true, you go slower, but it's really, it's really frustrating when you've got a vision and you built this company to reach this vision, knowing that every day that goes by there's just that little bit of extra friction coming into your processes and your workflows and everything, to the point where you step away, which is what I wanted.
Speaker 2:As I said, that patience I was like I needed to feel like I was getting up every day and getting something done every day, and that was it was either that or it became somebody different at all. You became a you know, essentially corporate executive, which, as you know, is not me. I'm a guest at Dungloy, so that's what I'm doing here and having a great time.
Speaker 1:And have there been times where you know you've woken at three in the morning just scared shitless about something that's going on inside the business, or you know fair overfunding or a team member hire that you didn't get right, or something that has really rocked you? Or are you just not wired that way?
Speaker 2:No, I mean, the things that would keep me up with frustrations are the frustrations and decisions that were made, or frustrations and not being able to get something done or sold to keep from. That's the only kind of stuff they got me. They woke me up, that said. You know, sam was really sort of a commercial guy and I know that he had a lot of stuff. That's not worrying about money and that kind of stuff. I didn't Although that's it's a bit different now Like it. Certainly, you know, we've spent a year building tech and we've only just in January really sort of launched very quietly but got to the point where we've got a product that's really market and, yeah, probably a few. You know, if you say worry, some worry some nights, you know, before I drop off, but nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing too concerning which I should be thankful for.
Speaker 1:And have you screwed anything up? Have you, you know, really cocked something up that you, that you did, or you collectively did as a team, or you know whether that's in law viewer or in smart space?
Speaker 2:Yeah, certainly certainly some, some rushed fires, I think, particularly in sort of the middle stages of of walking we, we didn't get the culture, but right. Or we got the culture but right, but not skill set. Um spend way too much time getting excited about partnerships with people like the big four and and, and you know there's big, exciting brand name organizations that consume the the world of mind space. Um, at a time when we could have been focused on other things.
Speaker 2:Um, uh, obviously you know tech data is something that you always that you know that's probably the one of the things that keeps you up at night is all those silly rush decisions that you made. You need to get a feature built for a customer to get the contract signed. You had to do it, you wouldn't change it, but now you pay the price. Um, you know those kinds of things are frustrating, but that's just kind of just a natural part of growing up as a technology business. Yeah, because it's really not the GMO thing. There's lots of things that change, but certainly nothing that jumps out the same. Then you fuck it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Conversely, if you look back at the time that you guys were building Lawview, or now that you've jumped into Smart Space, is there something that you think that made a huge difference to the success of the business? It was a decision that we took and it was a really good one. Aside from the obvious around good co-founder selection that you had with Sam, are there other things that you would look back on and go? We nailed that we got that right.
Speaker 2:Certainly, when I say I'm not patient, I like to make sure that stuff is always happening. We're always making progress, always moving forward, but certainly having a long-term vision of what the correct version of the problem that you're trying to solve should look like in 10 years. That's what we had at Lawview and I think that we really did change the landscape. We changed the nature of the corporate legal market globally, not just in Tarana, but around the world. Our mission and the vision that we put out there has really been adopted by a lot of people. I think having that long-term vision is incredibly important.
Speaker 2:If you look at the AI space, I'd say that Q122 was probably one of the worst quarters in the history of BC in terms of the number of companies that popped up, put a wrap on top of church of UT and said it's going to be a billion dollar company. There's no vision there. That's just an opportunistic way of trying to build a business. We've been in stealth for 12 months now because we know that what we're building has to have an enduring and robust value proposition and it has to be built well because we want to be here in 10 years time. Certainly, the long-term vision, the aspirational long-term vision is something that I think I've always had, and a lot of people have taken the maki out of it at times, but I've got a lot more confidence in that and messaging and articulating those long-term visions now.
Speaker 1:You're a family guy. You've got a wife and kids and therefore you've got a life outside of being a startup founder, but you are a get-shit-done kind of guy as well. How do you balance life in a startup where there's always more to be done with just being able to spend time with family or do whatever it is have a beer with a mate or whatever? How do you manage that?
Speaker 2:I think prioritisation prioritising the right things, cutting the shit that doesn't matter, or having a team around you that can help with stuff that doesn't matter so much for me as CEO certainly helps, but obviously the biggest part of that is having a wife and partner who is completely on board and who supports you in that way is the biggest thing. Certainly, I've been much more conscious of this time, I think, but the law view it was just the right. It was the adventure. We were on it. That was happening. My family suffered.
Speaker 2:Nobody sacrifices more in the pursuit of a vision than the family of the visionary. So that suffered that time and I knew that that was probably number one. If I was going to start out a company this time around, then I was going to make sure I looked time for them. So I'm home. Generally, when the kids get home from school, I jump back online, I'm off to set up, and so I was working but just trying to be more present and then making sure that when I'm present, I'm present, which is again something that I probably didn't get quite right for a long time during that time at law view.
Speaker 2:So you're still being conscious about it and certainly having been through it once before, I know what's coming. So that helps.
Speaker 1:And how do you relax? How do you get time away from smart space Golf?
Speaker 2:You know, time with the family. We live in Tudon, which is a pretty cool place to well. If you can get there through the traffic, it's a pretty cool place to live in terms of the options that we have available going to the beach. We spend a couple of we hide in an apartment over there around the summer for two months because I realised that my son, who's nine years old, has probably been to Auckland more times than he's been to the Mount Main Beach in his life, because it's just so painful to get over there. We hide a place over there and a lot of time down the lake. We've got a boat and it's been a tough time down there. But yeah, like certainly when you get to 40, I think it's not uncommon for blokes to realise that their 30s has passed and by and they've been focused on business and they've been focused on careers and now it's time to rekindle those friendships that mean so much to us as men, those ones that you make during school and playing rugby and those kind of fall away during your 30s.
Speaker 2:But I'm certainly a lot more conscious of making sure I can make good boys and connect with family and the oldest my mum and Charlie's parents are all getting older, so you've just got to be conscious about making time for that stuff. I think is important, really important, and I certainly feel really good at the moment and more fulfilled probably, than I have for a very long time.
Speaker 1:That's so super cool to hear when you get to be an old man. Let's assume you get to say 80 and you're looking back on your start-up career or even your career in general. So, just putting family aside for a second, what do you want to be known for? What is it that you aspire to be?
Speaker 2:Okay, not a question. I spent time considering, I think, as you've probably picked up, a get-your-done guy, I'm pretty proud of what we've been able to do from a little old toe-to-toe. I love the city, so I love this part of the world, so I guess I'd be known as somebody who plays the trail for people in this part of the world, people from backgrounds like mine, which is probably very different to your typical Silicon Valley founder, just somebody who asked the question why not? And showed that there is no reason why not, whether it's in industry. We went after legal, we went after corporate legal. We had a big law from Zara and we've made a dent, so I'm pretty proud of that with it. I don't know slightly different lens of what do you want to be now and for, but I can certainly talk about things that I'm proud of?
Speaker 1:Do you think that there's an advantage in being a startup founder based in New Zealand or do you think net net, it's actually harder from here? What's your view? You are building a global business and you're doing it from Fodora. What's your thoughts there?
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean it's doubly right. There's a lot less noise, so it's a lot easier to get momentum and stand out in the crowd here than it is in Silicon Valley. Obviously, the talent pool that you have to put in over there is much richer, and I think it's an early stage, late stage question. I think early stage is better to be here. I think late stage is better to be over there, because having people on the team that have done stuff at scale is incredibly important once you hit scale, but you have to get to scale first. So, yeah, that's a tough question. I think I don't think there's a correct answer but, like I say, wouldn't change anything in terms of how we did it.
Speaker 1:Because you're quite a sort of contrarian thinker. You can see in you that you like to do things a little bit differently, like why not? Is there something and I'm throwing this one at you, it's a bit of a surprise question Is there something that you believe strongly in in the world doesn't have to be in startups can be in anything that very few people do. So you hold a strong opinion about something and actually very few others do.
Speaker 2:This question is going to warn me, because I always have these thoughts and it's interesting, god. I'm interesting for thinking about it, and now that you've given it to me, I'm going to struggle. That's okay, yeah, no, no, no, but I do. I mean, I'm very mistrustful of mainstream narratives, whatever it is, and I'm not just going to admit you here. I always look for fault in whatever narrative is. I don't know why. Maybe I'm just a jerk, but I certainly. Yeah, I mean, it's a good observation because I would describe myself that way, but I actually put the ball down.
Speaker 1:I can see it. I can see it on your face.
Speaker 2:Carry on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, I can see it on your face. I can see there's something brewing there that actually maybe there is something, but let me know if there is. And I guess, as we kind of sort of close this out, is there something that you do wish, a question that you wish I did ask something that you would want people who are listening to this to know, either about you or about startups in general, or about their belief in getting started on a new venture, whatever it is. Is there something that you would kind of want to be able to share? You're a humble guy, you're a very humble guy, so you know, this might come from a fairly deep place, without it necessarily being something that everybody should do, but what would, what would that?
Speaker 2:be, and you know, maybe, maybe, maybe this relates to the previous question that not being an entrepreneur isn't for everyone. You have to have a particular mindset, you have to think about seeing things in a particular way, and a lot of people who aren't suited to being entrepreneurs believe that that is them, but it's just not, and I think it's.
Speaker 1:You know, being an entrepreneur is you know, building startups is.
Speaker 2:It's easier than a lot of people think For those kinds of people and it's much you know, but it's also more difficult for other cohorts than they think.
Speaker 2:So I don't know.
Speaker 2:Just you know if, if, if you know in your heart that you're somebody who isn't afraid of big, hard problems, if you see opportunities that you know that other people don't see, if you've had some kind of validation in your life that you do see the world in particular way and you think you have the energy and the and the mindset to, to start a company and to be able to take, take people on their duty, then just get stuck and just go for it.
Speaker 2:Go for it and fail, go, fuck it up, fix it, do it again. I mean, you know, miss the big part of all of the, all of the things that I fucked up on the way through to be to, to starting raw view, but, but. But you know it's got to be done and if you can, and if you can take those, those failures, as learnings, then then get stuck in, because a lot of people will fail once and they'll and they'll quit and they'll go back to corporate life or whatever. So I don't know, I don't know, that's you didn't ask me how much would be interest.
Speaker 1:There you go. Give us the answer. It'll be way more than me. I can tell you that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Don't be shy, give us the answer.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:I've seen those shoulders and you know, even as an ex rugby player, you definitely, you can definitely tell that you've been to press a fairly significant amount. Do you find actually that weightlifting helps with? You know? Just data that's stuck.
Speaker 2:Yeah, usually, and it's nothing to do with setting up your bs or how you look. Actually, I mean it's a good point. It got me through. It got me through the last few years at the law firm that I was working at, because of the sort of intensity of the work that we're doing here, but certainly those early days at the law firm, which was super for long. I reckon you probably two or three times more productive if I train hard in the mornings. So it's all about clarity, meter clarity and productivity, avoiding those two block slumps. Really, yeah, really the power, power power me through their period of time for sure. And it's you know, a lot of people run a lot of walk, a lot of people do other things. It's all sort of based on your body type and my body type is built for exercising in a particular way. So let's go with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, I think you know when, when you're doing a startup resilience and it's an overused phrase, but it's really hard, like startups are really, really hard this is constantly issues in front of you, the things that you need to be able to, you know, make decisions on you. You've just got constant headwinds is all sorts of things that make life really really, really challenging. So you have to be the kind of rooster that really really is okay with dealing with hardship, and I think you're right. The physical exercise and activity that you, that you know you can bring into your day, just makes that so much easier, because your headspace is better, you're physically feeling better.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I said you also think I worked out a lot of those things that you asked about that they would keep you. That would totally keep you up at night. I think I left a lot of them in the gym as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you had, you know you were starting again and you and you know what you know now about startups, would you? Would you do startups again or do something?
Speaker 2:easier. Yeah, this is what I'm here for. This is what I'm here for, sure, and I always knew that about myself, and it was about finding an opportunity again, here and here, and trying to find, you know, trying to start a business. You know like it was. There was a lot of luck involved in terms of getting that start. You know, maybe, sam, you know raising, raising my ideas a tremendous amount of luck involved in that.
Speaker 2:But I think once I got on that track it's supernatural for me, and, and, and yeah, I mean, I'm doing until I can, you know, until I can step away and get full time on trying to pay a card.
Speaker 1:Well, one final question then, just to actually around you, around your children and you, you would have grown up in a certain way. You know you grew up in and and the Bay of Plenty and in New Zealand and then, at whatever point in life, you then made the decision to go and do startups and you, you've got a ton of resilience that has and and grits and get shit done in your attitude, which has helped you do startups. Your children and I'm guessing here, but I'm assuming just given you know, the life you've been able to kind of build for yourself and your family in the last few years may mean that they get a different type of childhood. And how do you, how do you view that? How do you sort of see them being prepped for the world, given they've had a quite a different upbringing to potentially the one you had?
Speaker 2:But go on. But yeah, I mean you spot on, I think, is as a, as a dad every day wants to give their kids the childhood that, well, the best childhood for me is trying to give the kids a childhood that I didn't have. Now, with that said, I had a wonderful childhood, full of love, but you know, there wasn't a lot of money flowing around. Mum was a single mom, you know. We grew up in a suburbant, so to call Maryville, which is not the Maryville Christ Church, it's kind of the opposite of that when he came here. So yeah, it was, it was a, it was a. It was a particular type of childhood, very sort of low middle class. But you know the kids and the kids have got the opposite and so certainly trying to keep them humble was as important. I think in the early days of my old my girls one 16s, one and one's 40, they certainly remember what it was like before we had money and when mum and dad used to stress about mortgages and they didn't have a lot of stuff. They remember that stuff and said they've got a lot more humility than my nine year old boy who's spoiled with shit.
Speaker 2:But certainly, you know, we're conscious of it. You know we're conscious of talking to them about the reality of the world. You know they understand, I think very deeply how privileged they are, but particularly the older girls, because they can articulate it, and it's about arming them, about trying to try to talk to them about the things in the world that are important. Talk to them about how important getting good grades at school is or isn't, when it comes to the real world. There are other things out there that are more important to know and to be good at than necessarily the things that they teach at school. I mean, all you can do is try and take your perspective as an adult and arm them with this stuff.
Speaker 2:One of the things about getting good advice from people who have done things before you is that most of the time you completely ignore it, and the only way to truly embed those learnings is to live it yourself and to make those cock up. So I expect a ton of that from my kids, but hopefully they'll only do it once. Apply that to the learning that we tried to give them and say, right, I won't do that again and you know, take that forward. But no, I've got my kids a great, a better dream, and you know again, mostly thanks to the work of my wife, who you know, laughey wouldn't be a smart space, wouldn't be a. It wasn't without but my wife, and the same is true of Sam's wife, emma from Lawview, and you know all of the other halves that make these companies whole. You know, they are really are the unsung heroes of a lot of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I couldn't agree more. Look, I want to really thank you, tim. You are the kind of guy that likes to and we have the phrase here in New Zealand around rugby, you know hit the rock hard, and you are one of those guys and you do that in the world of startups. You hit the problem, you're very direct, you get in there and you get shit sorted. And yet you are also the kind of person that's quite a humble guy who doesn't necessarily like being the front man for something, and so being able to hear your insights today, actually, and just your genuine thoughts around being involved with startups, and hearing the story of Lawview and Smart Space, it's been really cool to be able to hear it. So I really, you know, I thank you, really appreciate the time that you've given today. So, thank you, awesome, thank you, thank you, okay, thanks, bye, bye.