Summary

Episode four features Ian Charles Stewart the “serial entrepreneur” with a diverse background in technology, media, and investments.

Ian shares his journey from his early days as a photographer to his involvement in founding Wired magazine and his subsequent ventures in the tech and media industries. He discusses the challenges of launching Wired in the early 1990s when the concept of the internet was still new to most people. Ian also reflects on the evolution of photography in the digital age and shares his thoughts on AI-generated images.

He provides insights into what he looks for when investing in startups and offers advice to entrepreneurs seeking funding. Ian expresses his optimism about the future of technology and its potential to transform various aspects of life, drawing parallels between the current era of technological advancement and the turn of the 19th to 20th century.

Throughout the episode, Ian emphasizes the importance of adaptability, resilience, and the excitement of being involved in transformative technologies.

Transcripts

Neale (00:00):
Thank you so, so much for your time on this. I really, really appreciate it. I mean, you’ve got such an established career without trying to big you up too much from photography days through to various investments traveling abroad overseas. Without the morbid analogy, I think you’ve had more fingers and more pies and Sweeney Todd could. For the people who don’t know, could you just give us a quick overview of where you’ve come from and where you are now?

Ian (00:45):
My goodness. Quick overview. I’ll do an outline and you can pull out more detail if you wish, as you wish, as and when. Yeah

Neale (00:52):
Thank you.

Ian (00:54):
So I’m originally theoretically in New Zealander, a Kiwi from the other side of the world down under. My father was a journalist for the New York Times, which is why there’s a media thread through pretty much everything I’ve done. I think we’re often influenced by what our parents do, whether we like it or not, whether we think about it or not. But I always thought of media as a worthwhile endeavor in the days when it was about helping people understand the world rather than just about selling advertising. So I grew up in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and then went to university in New Zealand. Dad’s old school, dad’s old university Hong Kong because my father was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times at the time New Zealand obviously because that’s where he was born. He wanted me to go back to his old Alma Ma. I think I had an odd background in that I was comfortable on both sides of the sort of brain divide, so creative and tech, creative and maths, and was reasonably bright.

Ian (01:50):
So they pushed me forward in the years, I think, by the way, for parents listening, pushing kids forward because they’re bright isn’t necessarily the best thing to do for them. It means they can pass exams, but they lose all the social developments and understanding how to deal with friends and girls and all sorts of stuff. But I ended up at university at 15 doing maths and particle physics and computer science. In the days when computers were new, we were coding in punch cards in a borrowed six to 800 using Fortran, and then later Al and Al 60 cobol, various other things. So I was a gee, but I was also a photographer. I mean there were no girls in the maths department at Auckland University at the time. So the only way to meet girls was to, I decided to become a photographer and they were three years older than me, so very early on right from university I was both taking pictures, getting them published. The Auckland, was it the Star at the time? God, I forget the name of the newspaper, would publish pictures that I’d done and then at the same time I was doing maths and physics at university and learning how to hack into the system so we could work out how much the were really being paid and sort of things.

Ian (03:02):
So yeah, early stage nerd, but also both. So that combination of tech and media, tech and arts, tech and creative stuff has been throughout my career.

Neale (03:13):
I was going to say, it seems the art and the tech does seem to sort of flow through, but yeah, and also I was going to say also I started to play the guitar for very similar reasons why you start photography. So I can completely relate what to you with that one.

Ian (03:27):
Boys are all the same

Neale (03:28):
Indeed.

Ian (03:30):
But from there, I mean that’s a long slow start. But from there, basically everything I did from there on was either related to an arts or media project that I wanted to do or was involved in technology. I cared and understood about some of the things that were going on and was interested in its impact on the world. So the 10 years post university was mostly being a photographer. I did a book on the people of Indonesia, which was the country where my mother was born. I did another on ShopHouse architecture in Singapore. I then ended up hitting off to Paris to work for the AGA K and Time life and various other magazines and that paid bills for 10 years and it was great. The only trouble with that is I found myself spending more and more time just taking pictures and less and less time thinking about how the world worked or making any big changes.

Ian (04:17):
I also realized at the time that you made more money if you owned the magazine than if you worked for it. So I think it was in Paris. I first bumped into some kids who’d just come out of INSEAD very early MBA school at the time. There weren’t many in the world in the 1980s and I was excited by what they said they’d learned about their approach to life and I thought that was the right thing for me. It would allow me to take a left turn or get back into a world where I was using stuff.

Neale (04:43):
I suppose if you’re taking, you are watching the world for so long, you can see sort of faults in it and how you wish it would be and to make changes I suppose.

Ian (04:51):
I suppose that’s true. I mean I was doing, as part of the work I did for his high K in Paris and also some of the other corporate work I had in Paris, I was photographing CEOs for annual reports and I would sit in on meetings and listen to people talking while I would take their portraits in sort of casual mode as they were having these meetings and thought I could contribute to this conversation better than the fellow I’m photographing. And I think that’s part of what pushed me into go into business school.

Neale (05:19):
Absolutely.

Ian (05:20):
Coming out of business school, and I’ll bake this fast, coming out of business school, I ended up being hired by the Pearson Group in the uk, so Addison Wesley, Penman Publishing Financial Times economists, but also B, sky, B Broadcasting and various other entities. And that was tremendous fun because I got to spend four years running the Pearson Media Development Fund, which is their internal corporate venturing fund sitting down at Lazard, which meant I was practicing on their money. I was investing in that overlap between technology and media. So the technology had caught up with me. I’d learned business and finance at business school and I was allowed to invest Pearson’s money, essentially an assurance policy, an insurance policy for their businesses. So what would pose a threat to or provide opportunities for Penguin Books or Addison Wesley or B, sky B, and that was just tremendous fund for four or five years and then I

Neale (06:10):
Great opportunity as well.

Ian (06:12):
And during that period, friends of mine were trying to build a magazine in Holland called Language Technology. Language Technology became Electric word, electric word. We shut down, moved across to San Francisco and that launched as Wired. When they came to me, they were friends asking for guidance. By the time we got to San Francisco, I’d realized I’d offered the magazine to Pearson and they turned it down because it was just a magazine. And by the way, that was the story of the first couple of years of Wired first before it actually launched. We could not get anybody to fund it. We were doing Louis Rossetto was the founder of the editor. It was his idea, it was his baby. I just tagged along and tried to help Lewis a understood technology in a way that many people didn’t. He understood how to make it approachable, understandable, and he thought about impact much more than he thought about the tech itself. He’d get past the technical stuff really quickly and talk about how it might affect your life, your world, and the world. We lived in language technology, talked about machine translation, electric word added desktop publishing, and then we realized with what was going on at the NCSA in Chicago and elsewhere, that this whole bundle of new technologies that was coming along was seriously going to have a major impact on the world. Now that sounds obvious now, it absolutely wasn’t to anybody

Neale (07:30):
The time. I was going to say back in, it was 93 I think when January

Ian (07:33):
93 is when we launched and when also Mosaic was launched as well, the first web browser.

Neale (07:38):
So I mean at that point in time, I mean most people hadn’t heard the word internet. No one had any concept of how it would impact us. So what were those initial conversations? I mean there must been some, it must have sounded alien back then. How did that go?

Ian (07:56):
I guess the best way to say it is it took two years to get funding to get issue number one and we could barely pay for issue number one,

Neale (08:03):
Right?

Ian (08:04):
First of all, our problem was we weren’t a technology magazine and we weren’t a consumer magazine. We were a magazine talking about technology and how it would impact consumers and no one would buy that. And at the same time we would meet early stage venture capitalists who would be interested if we were going to try and build some of the technology we were talking about, but all we wanted to do was write about it at that point in time to explain what was going on. And so it was a tough sell and as we would in the first days of when we finally got the magazine out, we launched with money from friends and family essentially including by the way, Nicholas Snicker, Ponte from the director of the media lab at the time, who I’d known for a number of years in my work at Pearson, and he took money out of his own pocket to do this, which is great, but as I said, we barely had enough money to, for issue number one, we had a ridiculous printers bill because we were using eight inks and I mean Lewis always did want to do things to the nth degree as well as we possibly could.

Ian (09:03):
He did have a point. If you’ve got something that’s brand new coming out, you want as many different ways for people to talk

Neale (09:09):
About, it stands out. And yeah, a hundred percent

Ian (09:11):
Great advertising, great paper, great inks, all that stuff made it a story for different communities and I think that was what launched it and got a lot of people talking about at the Buzz at the time, and it was tremendous fun, but we still had great trouble getting funding for it all through that first year.

Neale (09:30):
Yeah. What do you think was, obviously you talked about the struggles to get up and running. What do you think was the continued success? Why did people gravitate it? Was it something in the air? Was it that the new technology was coming? Were people getting excited about what you had to say?

Ian (09:44):
First of all, I think Lewis’ editorial style was tremendously innovative. He was, even in the days, I mean the first magazine language technology, which caught my attention when they came to see me was talking about machine translation, which isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, and yet the magazine was tremendously fun to read. Interesting. He brought in and wove threads of humanity into the technology, which made it compelling. And I think WD has always done that. Wyad has always been that magazine that helps you understand not just what the world is like now, but what it might be. It’s that what it might be, stuff I think, which attracts people

Neale (10:18):
The potential that people can daydream about and fantasize about, I suppose.

Ian (10:22):
Yeah, fantastic.

Ian (10:23):
And then so Wired, I mean we made mistakes in terms of the business itself. The magazine itself did super well. We then launched, finally launched our digital products, hotwired suck.com, web Monkey and the various other tools we developed, and they became part of the digital side of the magazine when we eventually, three or four years later, wild Ride ended up selling. We ended up selling it in different bits. At that time, the appreciation of the digital stuff, even late nineties, wasn’t as clear as it might be. Our original investors, the people that I helped bring in as investors at the beginning, Conde Nast for the magazine, they bought the magazine office but weren’t at the time interested in buying the digital bits. We sold the digital bits for more money the following year to I think it was Lycos at the time, Lycos, this is end of 99, so it was getting late and we felt it was getting late.

Ian (11:20):
Lycos then sold itself to Terror, the Spanish Telco, and suddenly we were liquid towards the end of 99, which was just before the crash in end of March, beginning of April, 2000. So we were able to sell, which was great. So it ended up being okay. As I said, it should have been much more, there was enough power, understanding and drive and clever people inside the company to have done more. And if we’d not had a problem with our IPO, I think Wired could have been a bigger organization than it ended up being, but it found a happy home. We’re very happy. Conde Na took it. They believed in us from the beginning. They were our first external investor in 93 and then eventually bought the magazine from us in 98 and that was a happy home. And eventually later by the way, we helped them buy back the digital bits from Terra who ended up struggling with it later. So the digital and the electronic bits ended up in the same house, and I think that was a good result.

Neale (12:19):
So I wanted to start off actually to, I know we’ve got a little bit more to talk to, we’re not even halfway, but just to loop back to sort of photography, obviously it’s your first passion, it’s still something that you keep a hand in now and just like online publications, it’s changed dramatically from dark rooms and films. How much has it changed for you as an art form? Is it for the better, for the worse, and what keeps bringing you back to it?

Ian (12:49):
I wish I knew that I need to talk to a psychiatrist about the last bit. I think image making is a compulsion after a while. My father was a journalist, as I said, so I grew up with some of the world’s greatest photographers, photojournalists at least coming through the house for dinner at some time to time in Hong Kong, and I was captivated by what they were able to do with a single image. The idea of being able to communicate a complex story with one image has always been something that I’ve enjoyed, and my early work was all really editorial, photojournalism. I did a little bit of corporate work because it paid better. You got paid 150 to $300 a day to do editorial work and $5,000 a day to do corporate, so why wouldn’t you do corporate? It was mind numbing, but it paid bills

Neale (13:31):
Paid for the film.

Ian (13:32):
Yeah, so today I came back to photography actually because of some of the digital, the cameras got to the point where they were as good as my old film cameras, which I still have. Of course, most of ’em, some were stolen. The digital dark rooms like Photoshop and now capture one, make it feel like I’m doing some of the same dodging and burning that I used to do in the darkroom, and so that gave me the tools with which to return to it without having to create a darkroom or work with film again. And also the fact that every photo is marginally cost free at the moment. You don’t pay for developing and printing all the time, so you can experiment and try things without the worry about the expense of film and processing and then printing and everything else. All of that makes it interesting again, so I think some of the digital technology has reawakened an interest certainly in me and others, which had gone away for a while.

Neale (14:32):
That’s great.

Ian (14:33):
The AI stuff that makes it more complicated. I’d like photos to be labeled photos. I’d like images to be labeled when they’re AI versus non-AI. It’s not that I’m against the use of tools in general, but I want to know what I’m believing. That notion about a photo being worth a thousand words was only true when the photo was real.

Neale (14:52):
Yeah, absolutely.

Ian (14:53):
Now the images, I mean even I don’t use Photoshop anymore because I found the ability to manipulate the image, like change the shape of someone’s face was too tempting. I didn’t like that level of impact

Neale (15:04):
On the image, extra control. It

Ian (15:06):
Was too much, and AI takes it a step or two further at the moment. We can mostly tell the difference, but they’re going to get to the stage where we can’t tell, and that’s going to be challenging. National Geographic has started demanding that photographers provide raw images in raw data form to prove that they’re not doctored and then that they’re an in-house. People do it. That may be something that happens. I think somewhere along the line we’re going to have to create boundaries. If what we’re after is something which tells a story which is worth believing in, if it’s just imaging for entertainment, that’s fine. I don’t mind if someone does an entire entertainment film, a feature film that’s a hundred percent AI generated. As long as I know that what it’s,

Neale (15:49):
Yeah, I have truth to it, then it has to be

Ian (15:52):
True. I come from the journalistic side of photography, I come from the storytelling, help the world understand the world side and that stuff. If it’s going to be augmented by any form of technology, I’d like to know so I know what’s been adjusted,

Neale (16:05):
Affected your technique at all. Because I know if you used to shoot on film, you’d have a finite amount of film, whether there’s 12, 24, whatever that is in a reel, you’ve got a camera now you can take, what is it, 120 frames a second, something. So in some you take crazy cameras. Yeah, can you, there’s a skill in every show has to count on film, whereas digital, you potentially can’t take a bad shot. Has it changed your technique or view of composition or are you a bit more free?

Ian (16:36):
So it’s funny, I think when you learn something young, that tends to be scarred into you, right? It becomes the framework from with which you then do everything forward from that particular skill base. So I still try to shoot in frame. I’m trying to frame it exactly. I’m not going to crop later. I’m not intending to crop later. I try to get the color right and the exposure, right? So I will under or overexpose on purpose depending on what I’m doing, and I will try to do minimally a minimal amount of work in post afterwards. Having said that, the fact that it’s much easier to adjust, well adjust exposure for a start. The fact that you’ve got levels of leeway you’ve never had in film, if you were two stops over in film, that was pretty much a photo you couldn’t use. You can now bring back comfortably four or five under and maybe two over on most digital processing platforms, and that’s changed what you can do. So we have more leeway, which is nice.

Neale (17:39):
Our md Neil Carter described you as a serial entrepreneur. Obviously you’ve made lots of investments in the past. You’ve worked with lots of companies. Are you now mental and teach interpret? I can’t say that word, but that’s fine. We’ll just skip over that.

Ian (17:54):
Starting things, starting thing. I help people start

Neale (17:57):
Things. Well, this is it. You help people start things. What for you makes, what draws you to an investment? If you were to look at a proposition and opportunity, what gives you green flags? What gives you red flags?

Ian (18:12):
So the first answer is going to be the obvious cliche. It’s the person, not the project. It really, really is. When I speak to the MBAs at IMD, which is the business school in Switzerland where I’m in executive and residence, read that as unpaid professor, I consider that my job is to expose them to the notion that they might be able to do something on their own rather than just go and get a job with a big brand name. When they ask me what it is that makes a potential project, either for me as an investor or for them as potential entrepreneurs, I say they’re looking for three things. One is a halfway decent idea, halfway decent because they tend to change. Second is team. That’s everything for me as an investor, for them as potential entrepreneurs, it’s just you can do something on your own.

Ian (19:01):
It’s just easier when you’ve got two or three of you because one of you is going to be down at some point, the other two can bring them up. If you’re speaking to a wall, there’s a limited amount of feedback you’re going to get back. If you’re speaking to two others, then hopefully positive. But in any case, however the feedback comes back, it’s going to help. And then the third thing is access to some capital. I give commencement speeches at universities sometimes, and the number of students in a room graduates in a room thinking about starting something is orders of magnitude higher than it was 30 years ago. We used to say it would be three to 4% of a graduating class at university might think about doing entrepreneurship and only half of them if that would try. Now you’ve got 25, 30% of a class thinking about it.

Ian (19:47):
But I say to ’em, you don’t have that choice. You need these different elements for it to be at least plausible for you to start. But in the end, as I said, it’s down to the team. Are they going to be able to get through a brick wall or over it or round it? Are they going to be able to solve the problems, the multitude of problems that hit every startup? Are they going to be able to deal with a sudden left turn or a sudden competitive environment which they hadn’t been expecting? It’s the team.

Neale (20:13):
So we work with lot of, a lot of people have got great ideas and if they have a team or not, one thing they’re always looking for is funding. They’re always chasing funding. If they get to a prototype stage, they’ll need some capital. If they’re going to take to the next level to sort of go out and get further funding, they need funding. Funding. I’ve worked in companies where I’ve been in a company that’s acquired another one, and you get a lot of founders syndrome and people very precious and want to hold onto that. What advice would you give to someone who has a great idea, may be a little bit about someone coming in, investing their money, that they might change things. Is there much friction there? Is there a case of get over it, there’s going to be, what would you say to them?

Ian (20:58):
I think the first thing I say is remember that money always comes with a voice. So if you’re going to take money from someone, be sure that that’s someone, is someone you want in your ear on a regular basis, make sure it’s someone you’re willing to talk to. In addition, I would say money is a lot easier to raise than I think the general public thinks. Of course, I hear complaints from wouldbe entrepreneurs saying, we’ve not been able to attract interest in our project, but if I listen to their project and listen to the team, I can tell them why that’s the case. You have to know also that I also talk to lots of friends who are investors either at angel level or at formal VC level with firms and fiduciary responsibility to LPs, and they complain. They see lots and lots of projects and nothing worth investing in.

Ian (21:50):
There’s truth between those two, and it is about how coherent the project is, how believable the team is, where they are in their stage of development, and whether it fits the investment targets of the fund. Don’t walk into a room selling a technology company to people who only invest in ice cream. Yeah, know who you’re pitching to, know what they invested in the last year. Know as much as you can about how they do things before you walk into that room. But back to the main question, you are going to gain a voice and hopefully some help in developing your company if it’s a good investor. There is a difference between North American VCs and UK and European VCs in North America. The gps, the general partnerships, the investor side of the table tends to be populated with former execs as well, former entrepreneurs. So they often know as much about the sector you are trying to start in as you do, and it means there have a tremendous help.

Ian (22:53):
They’ve got relationships, they’ve got understanding, they’ve got process. They really can add value to you. In Europe, we have, if I’m being blunt, a few too many investment bankers and lawyers and accountants working in VC firms who’ve never built anything on their own, and that means, it doesn’t mean they’re not good people or bright people. It means they don’t have the experience with which to help the startups that they’re investing in. I think that’s a struggle. So if you’re a startup guy, don’t sell yourself short. Look for investors that seem to understand the sector that you’re in, the market that you’re in, who seem to get what you’re saying, who ask smart questions. Choose your investors carefully. Now, if you’re struggling and everybody’s saying no, try and work out why don’t assume you have it right. Ask them afterwards politely as well as you can tell me what it is I’m missing. We’d love to back if we can. Sometimes they don’t. Most, by the way, venture capitalists have this rule. They don’t tell people why they reject them because they don’t like them and they don’t want ’em to come back.

Neale (23:52):
Wow, okay.

Ian (23:53):
I will always tell people what’s wrong in the hopes that they might be able to fix it for themselves. I can’t help but try to be a mentor even with the projects that I’m rejecting because I’d like everybody to do better, but it is about making sure you understand your investor, making sure that your plan is as good as you think it is, making sure there are no holes in it, making sure it’s believable that you are believable. If you satisfy all those conditions, you should have no trouble raising money. There is not a shortage of venture or angel money in Europe. There is not.

Neale (24:25):
So essentially if you start enough, get to know yourself, get to know the product, and be careful who you’re investing with basically.

Ian (24:33):
I think so. I think, and I was thinking it’s a matchmaking project, but it’s not a matchmaking project you let someone else do. You have to do it yourself. None of us respect teams that have engaged someone else to write their business plan for them or to make the engagement. If you can’t do that on your own, then that’s a red flag already,

Ian (24:56):
But it’s not as hard as you think. The hard bit is get a business plan outlined that’s really, really comprehensive and fill in every bit, not just the bits you like, but the bits that every single bit of that. If you fill that out properly, if you do the homework, if you think about all the things that you are not very good at, then you’ve got a better chance of presenting to professional investors who see 2000 businesses a year. I mean, well, I saw 2000 business plans a year. I’d bothered to see maybe a hundred, and then we’ve invest in maybe five to 10 out of the a hundred.

Neale (25:27):
Going back to not so as far back as the wired days, but after the bubble burst and we started to build the world sort of backup online mean you’ve been involved in lots of different websites, b, BBC news online, obviously it was up my street. You’ve been involved in these projects very, very early on. You’ve seen websites develop in the early days. Are they at a stage now where you thought they were going to be? Have they veered off in a different direction? I’m not trying to portray you as a fortune teller. You’ve just been involved in a lot of projects and it’s been very exciting, but is the online world where you saw it now, is it different? How is that shaped up?

Ian (26:08):
It’s a good question. It’s not an easy question to answer. The first thing I’d say is that a lot of the things that we talked about in the late nineties have happened. Some of them took longer than we thought, and some of them happened a lot quicker than we thought. So timing not easy. There’s also been a series of things which were hard to predict. I’m currently helping a museum in the US trying to them understand what the future of museums might be like, and with the number of different technologies that are around at the moment, it is genuinely super hard to predict what the interaction is going to be like between the average member of the public and the work of art in 10 years time, nevermind 25 years time, and to illustrate that, I tend to tell people or ask people to look back, those of us who are old enough to think about what was life before the mobile phone and after the mobile phone, when I left Australia to travel around the world, my parents didn’t hear from me for 18 months. They had no idea where I was or if I was alive, I would occasionally send physical letters

Neale (27:29):
Or postcards or

Ian (27:30):
Postcards, and every now and then I would book a ridiculously expensive phone call, which would cost me $30, which was two weeks rent that I could get for three minutes down to the post office in some country. I mean, the world is just extraordinarily different. Nevermind all the things you can do on your phone now. So I think it’s hard to predict. I think some of the things have come true, which are obvious. Some of the things that happened were less obvious, and that’s part of what makes it exciting right now. I’m not the first person to say this, but we have so many things in development and accelerating at the moment. Again, you look back to periods like this, the last period that I can think of that’s like this turn of the 19th and 20th century. We went from horse-drawn carriages and candles, right? Horse-drawn carriages and candles to electricity in the home. The telephone cars eventually planes in a 30 year period. That’s what’s happening now with AI 3D, printing automation and the various other things that are going on. It is a very interesting time.

Neale (28:41):
On that note then, what excites you about the future and do you have any fears for the future in regards to technology?

Ian (28:48):
I’m not afraid of smart technology. I’m afraid of dumb humans. I think misuse of tools has always been an issue for mankind. Misuse isn’t even the right word. Clever, but inappropriate use of tools has always been a struggle for mankind, and yet I remain optimistic. But that’s survivor syndrome. If you look in the past, we’ve survived all these silly things that went on the invention of the atom bomb, the invention of various ways to do all sorts of things. That doesn’t mean we’re going to continue to survive, but I’m generally optimistic. I think that society in general has proven to be resilient, adaptable, and clever. I think people are extraordinary. I think that we shouldn’t be afraid of brilliant if strange people because they take us forward and that’s a good thing.

Ian (29:38):
I think about the world. As I tell my daughters, I was 30 again, the MBA students that I mentor, I wish I was 30 again, because it’s so, so many things going on. The world is going to transform dramatically even more and at a pace faster than it has done since the mobile phone or since the arrival of electricity. It is a tremendous time. Turn of the 19th and 20th century, the world got smaller because of what’s going on or what was going on at the time. It’s possible that our solar system or the universe gets smaller over the next 30 years. I mean, that may be a push, but it’s that direction, right? We are being able to do things that we thought were unthinkable 10 years ago, and that’s really quite fun.

Neale (30:16):
You make it sound really exciting. I have to say

Ian (30:19):
It is. It genuinely is. I wish I was younger, not just because I could play better volleyball, but because there are so many things I would do. I’m not sure. I know that I don’t have the energy now to start companies again, although I am helping people start companies. It’s what I spend most of my time doing. It’s not just because maybe it’ll make money one day, and in fact, that’s never been a reason for me to invest in the company. It’s always been, is this project fun? Do I like this group of people? Am I happy to spend time with them over the next couple of years until four o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night trying to get something out the door? If the answer’s yes to that question, then I might get involved.

Neale (30:54):
Ian, I think that’s a really good spot to end it. Thank you so, so much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and listening to you. You’ve been a great guest. Thank you so much.

Ian (31:06):
My pleasure, Neil. Thank you for having me on. It’s a delight to be able to encourage people anywhere to do things they don’t think they can do.