(upbeat electronic music)- Hi, Peter Boolkah here and welcome to today's edition of The Transition Guide. Now joining me today in the studio is Jason Kingsley. He is founder and CEO of the Rebellion Group. Welcome Jason, how are you?- I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's a little hot where we are, unseasonably warm here in the UK, but it's rather nice as well.- No, absolutely yeah, unseasonably warm. That is the word. Now your story to me, is a fascinating story because you wouldn't sort of appear to have been traditionally, but I would say a gaming founders, CEO.- Well, you couldn't really be when I was growing up because the games industry is so new that I was growing up, maturing, as the games industry was being sort of founded or the various earliest foundations were being laid of technology. I can remember my first, the first computer we had at school took up about a third of a classroom in a forgotten corner of a room. And it had been donated by a big business. And I think it was probably about as powerful as most people's microwaves are today. It didn't have any visual display units. It was ticket tape so it had that sort of punch tape. So you could make programs on it. And you could take that program away with you rolled up in your pocket, physically. So that was my first encounter with high tech and then my love of computers and my love of role playing games and fantasy, you know, reading books, sort of combines to mean that computer games seem to be a good place to continue to explore. An exciting thing was, it was a new market. It's a new area of exploration. So rather than going into something else, like medicine, which had been going for an awfully long time or veterinary science, which was always, it was an option for me, I wanted to do the sort of creative entrepreneur role. I saw myself doing that as much creative as it is entrepreneurial.- Did you do, I mean, was that your journey? Did you know that you wanted to do that before you studied zoology?- Well, I think everybody's life is a little bit of a guided random walk, things happen and opportunities come along and you can't guarantee that opportunities will come along at the right time. What you can do is control your response to those opportunities and try and build on them and build on the success and embrace them or reject them as you see fit. So I always think where you end up in life or where, your journey, because basically, we all end up in the same place eventually, but you know, our journey to get there is about how we deal with the circumstances that fortune flings at us and sometimes those things are awful. And sometimes those things are really lucky and great and other times their neither, is just what you make of them.- So how did you end up starting a gaming company?- Well, my brother and I were very interested in computer games from an early era. We had a Commodore pet, but I also think it was slightly peer pressure to get a proper job. I go through a more conventional education system, you know, I did O level what are called O levels, which the exams you do used to do at the age of about 16 in the UK, then what are called A levels, which are ones you take two years later, which are around 17, 18. And then I went on to Oxford University to do a degree and I did love animals and I loved to study of animals. And I loved learning about animal behavior. That was a sort of passion for me. And that was reflected in my love of horses and training horses, which I'd had in my life since I was eight years old. So I was a very successful competitive horse rider at a very early age. By successful, I mean, competing internationally and winning. But it was far too expensive, long term thing for my parents to be able to afford, but I still loved horses. And I loved looking at how they've behaved and like the way they responded to you. And I had some skills in that area. So there was that as well. So Zoology, getting a degree was a sort of sensible path. If you like, I guess a sort of a backup, if everything else fails, I can always go and get a job in a bank or something. And then kicking off the games company was really a passion between, you know, my brother and I. My brother's very much more technical than I am. And I was more into the game design and art side. So between us, in those early days, we could make computer games as the two of us. These days, it takes 250 or more people, three years to make a big computer game. But in those days you could make it with two of you. And it just seemed like a fun thing to continue to explore rather than sort of giving up on dreams of trying something new. Actually give it a go until it proves you can't do it. Too many of my colleagues had dreams at university of whatever, doing some kind of exciting thing. And then 10 years later you find them and they're sort of, they're okay, you know, they're doing reasonably well. You know, they've not really pushed the boundaries. They've got a sensible job and they've got a sensible lifestyle and good for them, you know, but, there's a part of me that wonders when the child inside them died or when they first noticed. And I just think business should be combined with passion as well. I think it's hugely important.- But it was a cottage in when you started looking at gaming, it was very much a cottage industry. I mean, you're talking about, I mean, I went down the Commodore, the Commonwealth stocks, 64, Commodore mega. And they were like your mainstream gaming leagues.- Yeah, there were few and far between, shops didn't really, they, I don't really remember, but you could go and buy, you know, data was difficult to transport back in those days. I mean, for those that, that can't conceive it, the internet didn't exist, you know, it was not possible. You could just about use phone lines and it would sort of, you could almost hear the data. It was that slow, you know, it was literally, if you were a fast typist, you could probably get the data down the phone line as fast as, so everything was, was on a physical medium. It still is to a certain extent now, you know, on Blueray and that kind of thing. But back in that time, cassettes were a big thing, you know, storing data on what were effectively repurposed music cassettes was a big thing. And also the market was such that, you had small ads at the back of computer games magazines, for games. You didn't really know what you were buying, it would turn up and it would be in a, a Ziploc bag and you'd load it up and you'd find something that was usually marginally disappointing, but, you know, it was still a kind of the early frontier of this massive medium that is computer games these days.- So was it just a hobby that you kind of wanted to just develop further at the time?- I never, I'm a funny one. When people ask about hobbies and things, hobbies and work and lifestyle and, you know, life work balance. I always think it's a bit of weird dichotomy because I can't, I wouldn't want to do a job that I didn't enjoy doing, and I wouldn't want to do something that I didn't think was productive. So the idea of, I've pretty much always turned my hobbies into a business, or rather professionalize them, not necessarily always to make money outta them, but to try to do them to the best of my ability. And as a result sort of ended up somehow monetizing it or, or making it work for me in a different way. So, yes, I mean, conventionally, you would say a lot of my, you know, I turned my hobby into my business, but I actually think that's probably a rather over simplistic way of looking at it. I continue to build on my passion and almost by accident, it's become a big company. I mean, most of my entrepreneurship I've had to learn on the job as it were, right. I have never, you know, I've, I've tried to go on training courses and I just think, you know, you got it wrong, cuz I've been in negotiations and that won't work or yeah. That might work with certain types of people, but it won't work with that kind. You've gotta have empathy when you're negotiating, you've gotta work out what the other, what the other people are trying to achieve. You know, if there's a log jam in negotiation, try and work out what that log jam is all about. Cuz it's rarely about, it's rarely about the, the fundamentals of the deal. If person, A and person B want to do a deal, there's usually a reason they both want to do the deal. So what is it, what are the details that are getting in the way and what are they trying to protect by a certain clause? Or what are they trying to guarantee by a certain clause? And why would you object or not to it? So I've gone off the thread a little bit there, but, but I feel that computer games were a hobby, but it was a lifestyle choice perhaps, more than a hobby.- No, no, I understand that. So how early into your entrepreneurial journey did Rebellion grow from just you and your brother?- Oh, well we set, we set up Rebellion and we went to pitch to Atari back in the day, Atari is an interesting company because it once bestrode the globe like a, huge giant. I mean, it was, it was the equivalent of, I guess you could say it was like, you know, the equivalent to Google, I suppose, or something like that. I mean, in terms of people's awareness, it was the thing, it was it. And it had fallen on hard times. It had collapsed and it was in Slough, we went to Slough and if anybody knows the, the place in the UK called Slough, there's a very famous poem. I can't remember who it's by, but it says,"Come friendly bombs fall on Slough." I mean, I'm being unkind to the place, but you know, it's very industrial. It's an industrial structure. It's improved markedly over the last few decades. But back then it was very hardcore, industrial chic. Let's put it that way. We went into a vastly oversized office that was on, you know, it had fallen on hard times really, to present. And I remember thinking this is amazing. It had hessian wallpaper. For those of those of you that are old enough, you probably don't remember. But there was a sort of a flock kind of wallpaper that had a fabric component to it. And this was brown. It was sort of 70's brown and it wrapped around corners of this reception area. But of course it had worn out on the corners a little bit. So it had frayed and it had gone through to the backing. So it was very obviously, very obviously passed it's sell by date. And I remember looking at that, going,"That's just brilliant." That's like something, that's something out of history. It's fantastic. You know, it once really expensive wallpaper is now frayed and torn on the corners and it, it represented everything about the company Atari at time.- Exactly.- But they were launching a new computer games platform called the Atari Jaguar and they asked us to make some specific games for it. So we negotiated a deal, said yes, set things up. They then halved the budget on us the week before starting, a sort of ambush negotiation tactic. And we still went, "oh right, well," we've kind of committed to all of this, so we better get on with it and try and do it. And that was very useful early lesson, negotiating from a position of weakness is, is always harder than negotiating from position of strength.- And most people actually do start negotiating from a position of weakness and that's how they learn.- Yes, absolutely. And in a way, you have to learn, it would be absurd to, you've almost got to do your apprenticeship in business. You've always got to have these war stories and have learned from them and gone through the mill of forming your, your business perspective and your business style.- There's an article.- By having bad experiences, Yeah.- There's an article. The apprenticeship of getting screwed.- Yes, exactly right. Yeah, and I think, yeah, we all, we could recount these stories and I've got more than a few and some of them, I still can't publish yet, because you know, I can't release them yet, one day maybe in my memoirs, but I think it would be crazy to not expect at the beginning of your business journey to not be on the receiving end of sharp practice. It just seems to be the way of the world. There's probably a few lucky people that haven't been, but actually, if you look into it, you probably find they've got very wealthy and powerful dad or mum behind them. And that stopped, that protected them.- It does, yeah. So in the early days you started off, you did Atari gig and you grew from there. How did you make sure you had the right team in place?- Yeah, well, that's a difficult one. I think typically I try to work with people I like and people that I get on with, because life's a bit too short to work with people who have incompatible personalities. That doesn't mean you should work with people that always tell you yes, that's different. I want to work with people that I get on well with, that I can have a conversation with, that we can have a bit of a to and through, and have a difference of opinion and end up processing that difference of opinion, coming to a conclusion. I'm a huge believer in emergent strategies, in talking to the team around you, because let's face it anyway, if you don't respect their opinion, what the bloody hell are you working with them for? You really shouldn't be working with people whose opinions you don't respect. I would say it's an ongoing challenge to choose good people to work with. And somebody might be really good on paper, but you just get a feeling they're not, kind of, they won't slot into the organization properly, or maybe, maybe they're used to a different way of working or in our case, Chris and I are very hands on and very not sort of MBA trained and very not process driven, but outcome driven. And I think that can slightly wrong foot people. I can remember a member of staff who's with us today. Hello Matt, coming in. And he'd just come from a major, massive multinational. And he had his first presentation. So he obviously spent a lot of time and energy on this. He'd done a 30 page presentation. He'd sort of done the usual preamble. And I said to him, "is this PowerPoint 30 pages?" And he went, "yes, yes, yes." And, I said, "well, okay, fine." Bare with me. So he started and I said, "yeah, yeah." We know the setup. We know what you're trying to establish. Where do you start talking about options and solutions? He said, "oh on about page 15." I said, "okay, fine." Can we just go to page 15? And he's got this look on his face, just slightly crestfallen, Okay, fine. He skipped to page 15. I said, okay, yeah, fine. I've got that. I've read it before you've even said anything, right, now, can we skip to your conclusions? And can we then have a conversation about your conclusions? And he said, really? I said, yes, let's get to the last page. So we skipped to the last page and we had a really interesting conversation about that. And he said, "right, okay, that's substantially different than I'm used to." He said, "it's a real breath of fresh air though." He said, that's great. Cuz, you've got the issue. I didn't need to go into too much preamble. You understood the options. You've completely understood what I would recommend. And you've questioned a few things. You've challenged it and you've modified it slightly. And you've just agreed with what I said and I mean, yeah, well we wouldn't, why would we be paying you your salary if we didn't, if we didn't appreciate your skills. So he's never done a 30 page PowerPoint ever again, you know, he literally, we come in with a, with some bullet points for the conversation.- So you decorporatized him.- Yes, I think so. I hope we haven't spoiled him for, you know, if he ever ha has to go back to that, he's probably forgotten how to put 30 page PowerPoints together. But I'm a great believer in having meetings of the necessary length and get to the point quite quickly. I dislike, I think we've all been in committee meetings where somebody puts their hand up and they want to talk and they go,"I would just like to say that I fully agree with the last speaker and I want to wholly" and you go, just shut up. And if you object say so, if you don't object, we'll assume you're okay with it, move on. I don't need to hear you speak. We're all busy.- Sounds like question time in parliament.- Exactly, yes. I would just like to speak really slowly and waste everybody's time for a bit longer. So yeah, I believe in the necessary level of information exchange, whatever that is for the project at hand.- So most entrepreneurs, I mean they dream of scaling. They dream of seeing their business grow. How far into, how long after founding the business did you start to see it really grow?- Well, almost immediately actually. I mean, you think about rate of growth. It's probably the fastest at the beginning. You know, you come up with an idea and then by the time you've employed your first member of staff, you've got a enormous, infinite growth rate that very moment. But I would say by the time you've got your first office, you've got five or six people work there, plus, cuz one of the things I think, with members of staff is, not just them, that you're affecting, you've got their relationships and their life as well and their partners, children, whatever it might be. So it suddenly becomes actually quite a big responsibility. But I would say really the company has been at its biggest growth rate over the last 10 years because we moved over to self-publishing. We moved over to making, developing, releasing our own games, direct with partners like Sony, Microsoft, Steam, and Epic and doing it largely digitally or a lot of it digitally. We still do manufacture physical goods. But the bulk of our work these days is digital. And that was the biggest sea change because we went from pitching our services to other people, to making games for people to buy.- Yeah.- And so that's been the biggest, rapid change. You talked about dreaming of scaling and I've, I dream about it the other way around actually, I dream about having just enough people to do the cool things I want to do and no more. I just, it's a nightmare for me, the thought that the company would ever get so big that I couldn't know and enjoy the products and the ideas and the games that we were making or that something would be a surprise to me.- Right.- In the company. I wouldn't like that. We are big enough that I can't read all the books or read all the comics or play all the games throughout, you know, from start to finish. But I do try to do as much of that as possible because at the end of the day, I run Rebellion because I want to do cool stuff. Not because I want to build a company. And that's sometimes confused people, because that's not the traditional way of being an entrepreneur, for some people anyway.- Unless you end up building cool stuff that other people are really interested in. And then your business has a value proposition that forces it to grow. What challenges did you face when your business started to grow?- Oh, finding the right people and integrating them. I think one of the biggest challenges is, is when you are hiring very rapidly, how do you maintain the positive aspects of the company that's caused you to grow? How do you not dilute it? How do you keep the ethos and the spirit of things without bringing a whole bunch of people in, and losing the thing that's allowed you to grow in the first place? So I would say, I would say onboarding people and, and helping them understand what makes the company great and getting them to share in that exciting journey as well, because in an ideal world, everybody that works for you should be enjoying the process of creating something cool. Not always the case and not every day, do I get up and go,"oh, it's really exciting to be at work." Because there are always mundane aspects to any job, wherever you are. And there's stressful ones and boring ones. But I would hope that the, the bulk of people that work for me more often than not, sort of enjoy their job and sort of appreciate it.- Did you have any challenges along the way where you put the wrong people on board and had a negative impact on what you were trying to achieve?- Oh, crikey. Yeah, I've had some doozies, yes. I have to be careful. I don't breach any nondisclosure agreements, but I have had members of staff who were stealing things from the computers in the office and,- Wow.- One IT, piece of IT going well, where are all these expensive graphics cards? See, I thought this computer had an expensive, It seems to have a low power graphics card. And what this particular person turned out to be, have dependency, drug dependency issues and was using, was selling the high value graphics cards from the computer, replacing with low value ones, arbitraging it, and had been doing that for quite a few months. And nobody had really noticed until the pressure was on for the computer parts and, and suddenly people going, where are these supposedly wizard graphics cards, where have they all gone? So that was a shock when you realized that somebody who was in a position of trust was not worthy of that trust. You know, we've had people, less obvious case of criminality. People who had evening jobs for example, were DJs. And we typically allow people to, to do things as long as it doesn't conflict with their main job, but we had one particular chap, was just not getting enough sleep because he was going clubbing and DJing. And we had to sort of say to him,"look, you know, go clubbing on the Friday night and the Saturday night, make sure you get your sleep on a Sunday because you've gotta work on a Monday." You know? And, there's a reason, it's not like you're, you know, you're not doing your job, but also what you're doing is requiring all your colleagues to work harder, to make up for your partying. And that isn't fair.- No- It's not right. And it's also not fair on other members of staff, when you are snoozing on a Monday morning, because you are up till six in the morning.- And it can actually cause a lot of resentment if you're not careful.- Hmm. Yeah, has a knock on effect. And people are saying, well, why is person X allowed to slack off on a Monday when I got to do all the blooming work? And that can cause retention issues, it causes, you know, can cause stress and anxiety, cuz sometimes another member of staff who's doing their job diligently doesn't want to, you know, to report on somebody. Who's not doing the job diligently because they don't wanna be seen as causing trouble, but it is causing trouble for them and it's causing them stress and they might end up going. And the reason they're going is because they're very good and diligent, working hard and they don't understand why somebody else is allowed to get away with it. So I think that there are, there are ramifications over and above somebody's poor performance that isn't just about their poor performance. It's about how other people perceive their performance as well.- And that can be really destabilizing in a business- Yes, absolutely. Yeah.- What do you think your biggest success has been within the business and how did you achieve it?- Well, I would say just blooming, staying alive as a business. To anybody out there who runs a business, big or small, that's still going, especially in difficult situations, like, you know, pandemic, congratulations, you know, just, you know, you might not be the biggest or most successful company in the world and let's face it. Only one company can be the biggest and most successful. But if you are just still going, well done, you know, that's difficult. Then I would say transitioning from working for other people, to working with other people and making our own games and investing in our own products and our own intellectual property. So that's really been the biggest change for Rebellion over time, increased risk, but significantly increased reward when it goes well.- Oh, that's a really good way of putting it. How important is personal growth as a CEO?- Personal growth? Yeah, I'm funny like that. I don't really have a concept of personal growth. I've always spent my life doing things to the best of my ability that I enjoy, but the objective has never been to be the best. My objective is to do things, have experiences, enjoy it and feel good about myself. I've never been particularly success driven. It's a bit of a weird thing to say. I do like success. I do like winning, I do like being the best, but I also like doing things where I'm just achieving something or learning from the journey. I liken it a little bit to training horses, for example. So I train horses from when they're born to performing high school dressage maneuvers, and, you know, rears and jumping in the air and that kind of stuff. I can do the whole thing. So I can watch a horse being born or see it first thing in morning and it's just being born. It's just starting to walk. And in 10 years, see it performing athletic feats, which are absolutely astonishing and I've kind of, I've allowed it to do that. I've taught it to do some of those things or, or improved it, enhanced it. And given it an opportunity and training a horse is a bit like running a business. There is no real end game. I suppose you could look at running a business and you float it and then you're done. But that isn't really the end of the business at all. That's the beginning of a new chapter in the business history. I suppose the only end of a business is if you run out of money and have to close it down, but even then the idea can be reborn in another form or in a better form. So I, for personal growth, I take on slightly uncomfortable new challenges because I think the equivalent of going back to school is quite humbling and keeps you kind of welded to the ground a little bit. So recently I've started to dabble in horse archery, which may sound like a very specialist area. It is, I'm very good at the horse riding stuff. I can do archery up to a point, but not combine. I've never combined the two. And suddenly combining the two, you suddenly realize you're an idiot at the beginning of a journey, which is actually a really good place to be sometimes, especially when you've achieved huge success in other areas. I think it's important to be taken back down right to the beginning and appreciate where you've come in other areas. And so I would say what I do for personal development is try and discover new challenges and try to make those happen. I find the horse and equestrian and history side of my stuff, my YouTube channel, Modern History TV, fairly successful, but I'm doing things like learning about how ordinary people lived their lives in the 14th century, I'm doing a lot of research into it. And trying to explain to an audience that, they were the same as us. They had different levels of technology though, and different expectations. And I find that quite interesting and exciting. I'm just reading at the moment, I'm reading about the origins of the chariot, you know, chariots go back 3000 BC or longer. And, you know, who's the first person to think of attaching a horse, or an ass, you know, any creature to a set of wheels and what were they thinking? And, it massively changed, revolutionized warfare transportation. You know, if you think about it, the, the ability to carry more, to transport more than your human being can carry at much greater speed. And with much less effort, was a massive change in the ability of that civilization, of those people to achieve things. You know, it's a massive, it's a sea change. And we don't really know how it came about. Nobody can quite work out who invented or how wheels were invented. There are lots of theories, and I guess we'll never know, but I find that fascinating. How did it revolutionize communications, for example, anyway, sorry, I've kind of gone off the topic a little bit, but for personal challenge, new knowledge, new experiences are what drive me.- We're now in a situation where let's be honest. I mean, the last four years in particular have been quite tough economically with Brexit, with pandemic, and now with a high inflation market, supply chain issues, people issues. I mean, it's kind of an interesting place at the moment. What can CEOs and managing directors do to limit their liability?- Well, I think one of the things you've got to admit if you're a leader, is that you, you can never anticipate all the challenges, you can anticipate some of them, you can prepare for them. You can avoid doing super risky things unless you are that kind of an entrepreneur. I've never been one of those bet, everything on red or bet everything on black kind of entrepreneurs, I've always wanted to have a portfolio approach to things. And therefore not to be a brittle company I've always wanted to, yes, I want to be successful. But at the same time, I know that not everything will work out. So what happens if that goes wrong, are we gonna lose the company? No, we're not, great. Okay, fine. Move on, we have another role of the dice. So I think as leaders, especially in the last few years, who would've ever thought that we would've been in, first of all, a pandemic and the pandemic would've been dealt with in the way it had to be, the lockdown and the economic impacts there. And then just as we're sort of psychologically starting to sort of think that the pandemic might be over, although I don't think it actually is, but it's less lethal these days. It appears, or we've worked out ways of keeping people alive more than before, a bloody land war in Europe. I mean, and you're thinking, right, well, we can, we can prepare for marginal downturns, but for example, one of our areas of business, it's called Rebellion Unplugged, which is to do with board games. And we have a big board game coming out based on one of our franchises, the Sniper Elite series, and the costs for shipping that were factored in. And we'd factored in a certain, you know, when we first started the project for shipping the container across, from where it was being manufactured in China was, you know, five, six, $7,000, sort of roughly, the actual cost ended up being well over $50,000. So you're not talking about estimating five, six, seven, and it being seven, eight, nine, you know, not even estimating it being 14 or 20, you know, you meant $50,000 and very late. And you think that you couldn't do your business thinking that that trache of costs would be a 10X. None of your spreadsheets would work. You might as well just stop doing the business. So you have to prepare, but you have to prepare within reasonable parameters, but you also have to be aware that things can come up, that will utterly knock your predictions for six.- And I think a lot of people have been there right now, their predictions are being knocked for six, as we speak.- Yes, and it's incredibly challenging. So what can you do? Well, I suppose you've just gotta lift your head up and work out, right? What can we save? What can we save? How can we turn a bad thing into a better thing? Can we, for example, what might happen is you might look for local manufacturers in our cases, exactly what we're doing. We going, right. Well, that's absurd. You can't, we can't rely on manufacturing in China. It was gonna be 50% cheaper, but we've now had these huge costs for transportation, right? There's an opportunity, who do we know locally? How can we work with them to make things better? How do we approach them and say, Right, well, you're much more expensive than the Chinese, but getting things from China is incredibly expensive and unreliable as well, expensive and unreliable is like two things out of the three things that you really don't wanna happen. But you suddenly think, right? How do we use fewer air miles for making our stuff? How do we focus on our carbon footprint? You know, this is given us a shake up moment. It's given us one of these moments where you sit down and you go, right, okay. Everything's cocked up. How do we get outta this mess? And I think actually that can focus the brain quite nicely. You know, when, as a leader, when you know you are utterly FUBAR, you think, right, I'm not gonna pretend anymore. It's FUBAR. How do we now de block it? How do we now take it from where we are to where we need to be, having to acknowledge that everything is different than we expected. And that actually can be quite invigorating for everybody. Cause you challenge people to rise above themselves. You challenge people to think outside the box, you challenge people. You say, well, we can't do it the old way anymore.- Which isn't a bad thing.- Exactly. I actually think it can be quite energizing if you survive as a company, it can, it can kick you into a different place almost against your will. And I'm not saying it's comfortable, but it, but it actually can be a major catalyst for growth and change.- Yeah. And I think we're seeing that now across so many industries. What's been the biggest lesson you've learned from building a successful business?- Try to do deals that work for both sides. I have always felt that I didn't want to take advantage of somebody who was in a bad situation because that feels wrong. So there have been situations where outsources or third parties have put a bid in and I really want to work with them. But their bid for working with us was too cheap. And I felt it would not be responsible. I want to work with them, but I've actually been in situations where I've said, guys, right, we want to work with you, but we don't think your bid is expensive enough. Is realistically expensive enough, because we think what's gonna happen is you want this deal from us. And well brilliant. You know, we're gonna save a ton of more money than we thought. We've got a budget. Not gonna tell you what it is, but it's more than you've suggested. So give us a sensible bid that gives you some margin and gives you some opportunity to then build your business off the back of working for us. Because I wanna be working with you in the next three to five years. Yeah, I don't wanna just, I don't wanna sort of destroy your business, destroy your psychology and then move on. I want to build your business so that you can help build my business. And this is sort of really weird thing that happens then within certain parameters, you end up making colleagues and friends in other businesses and you end up with the right kind of people. You end up them doing you favors later on that you hadn't really asked for because they know that you are a good person to work with and they'll recommend you. And they're pleased that you've helped them run their business. And you know, they don't necessarily become best buddies, but you know, they kind of have become valued business colleagues. And that way you build up a network of people that you can call on in constrained circumstances, or that are just more fun to work with. And as I say, coming back to my thing about, do cool stuff and have fun, it's much more fun to work with people that really want to be working with you, than have to be working with you.- That's a good point. What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?- Oh gosh, that's a wide open question. What advice would I give? Right, the first step, the hardest step to take in your entrepreneurial journey is the very first one to actually decide to do something, the biggest drop off between, the biggest failure of business isn't actually when businesses start and fail, the biggest failure of business is people not starting the business in the first place because is never tracked. Nobody knows, somebody has a good idea. Good ideas are hard to have, but you know, lots of people have good ideas, but then they don't do anything about it. So that's automatically failed. And I would say if circumstances allow, if you can work out how to have a go, because the biggest drop off for any entrepreneur is not actually starting, not giving it a go. You might fail. In fact, probably, statistically speaking, you will fail and failure brings growth and development as well, but you will not learn. You will not succeed if you don't actually start and try, and don't be embarrassed to be a beginner. We're all a beginner at some stage in, in everything we do and is why I quite like personal development, going back to the beginning, trying something I've never done before and realizing I'm blooming useless at it. And I've got to learn. I think that's hugely important. And don't expect to be as big and successful as your business heroes that you read about in the press, because there's a whole bunch of stuff they've done that they don't popularize, and they don't publicize that probably wasn't successful. And, and they just don't talk about it. Very few people broadcast their failures. Very few people will tell you how many things they started that just collapsed or didn't work or anything like that. They'll only tell you the successes. So you're always getting this confirmation bias, this survivor bias of entrepreneurial stories. I sometimes illustrate this by explaining to people, imagine you enter the lottery and you win the lottery. And that doesn't mean you are better than anybody else at choosing numbers. You really aren't better. You're just lucky. And business is sometimes about luck. It's also about how you manage that luck and how you go on to build on it. But don't underestimate luck and timing. There is probably a good time to start a business and a bad time for certain people in certain situations. So, you know, starting a business when you're just starting a family is probably asking for trouble, you know, starting a business before you have dependence is probably easier, but doesn't mean you don't have wisdom after you've got dependence and start something then. When, you know, starting a business, when you've lost your job might be a really good time. It might be a time to go, right, just lost a job. Previous company went bust on me, right? How do I build on this, how do I make this failure into a success? I've got the opportunity. So I would say, just try it and see, be sensible, but just try it. But don't expect to be a billion dollar company overnight. Almost nobody has a billion dollar company overnight, whatever they like to tell you, you know, you can't just do that. Nobody does it.- Now, I know that you're on multiple channels. If people wanna follow you.- Yep.- And sort of keep up with what you're up to and things that you're sharing, what's the best way to do that?- I'm in multiple different places. So I have multiple hats. So my Modern History TV channel, which is just available on YouTube is all about the medieval period. You'll see me talking about medieval obscure things. You'll see me riding horses and using swords and horseback and that kind of thing. Then I am Rebellion Jason at Twitter, or is it Jason, Jason Rebellion? I can't remember, anyway @rebellionJason, I think on Twitter and I comment a little bit more, I do a lot more on my business areas there. So tips and tricks, little bit of historical stuff. Science, I do quite a lot of science there as well. Interesting scientific things. And also about the computer games industry, publishing and the things that we do there. I also have a podcast called Future Imperfect, which is nothing like your podcast at all. It's not really about business. It's about interesting things to do with history and science. So we did one recently about soil and how important soil is as a, as a natural resource and how fragile soil can be if it's not treated well. And what that means for the planet. We also did one on medieval sports and jousting as well. So it is very eclectic mix of interesting things. Yeah, those are the sort of the places really to, to see my really odd smorgasbord of interests.- Brilliant. Well, thank you for joining us today. It's been absolutely awesome. If you've liked today's episode, please like it, share it with others and subscribe. So you don't miss future episodes. If anything's resonated today, you want a bit more information, head over to boolkah.com and get in touch. Always remember that failing to learn is learning to fail. So please stay safe. And Jason, thank you so much for being an awesome guest.- My pleasure, it's been lovely. Thank you.- Thank you.