#270 Luke Anear: Burnout to CEO Again, Reinventing SafetyCulture as Mitti, and Why He's Flying Helicopters

Hi, I'm Vitt at the Founder and Heser this podcast, The High Fliers. Hi, I'm Luke, the CEO of Safety Culture, which is now known as Mitty. Big news. I think, yeah, you just announced that and you're back in the chair, Luke. You're back in the chair after 14 months, is that right? Yeah, this has been probably the busiest time of my whole life. The last four and a half, five months have been back. I've probably made more changes than I did in the previous 10 years that I was here. And yeah, I think it's an exciting time to be building product and the company name change is not actually a new problem. We've been told for 10 years that customers use us for so much more than safety. They use us for operations across their whole business. And we tried to change our name back in 2019 and we didn't end up with a name we liked. And so we've finally done it now and we feel really good about it. Well, why don't we start there? Tell me the story behind the name change. We were just joking that in different languages it has different meanings. How did you settle on Mitty? Yeah, look, to get a short name these days, the dozen in fringe on any trademarks and that you can also get.coms for is actually quite difficult. And so we wanted something shorter, something that was catchy that we could build a narrative around and also we added extra words to it like our Mitty insurance or our Mitty marketplace. It's not too many words. So the problem we have is safety culture was, hey, we get pigeonholed to being just safety, which we're actually 80% of our business is outside about its quality, its improvement, it's all these things. And so to be able to break away from that, have a short name and something that doesn't necessarily have a connotation, I guess, that people automatically go to it. You know, in India means soil, earth and there's some other definitions around the world in different languages where it's sort of middle or sand, so all of that kind of work for us. But we already own the name Mitty, we'd used it years before in our insurance business. So in the end, it was a straightforward decision. Hi, okay. Hey friends, welcome back or welcome to the High Flyer's podcast where we do reimagine a high flyer showcase the brightest and most relatable role models and companies and their journey from sunrise to today. As one of the premier products, inaccurately center, the lineup providing on-demand intelligence to help you be once in bed every single day. Homey host, Vittitagol, and let's have some fun. Our listeners have called this podcast as a meticulously researched biography unveiling the extraordinary lives and decisions of the most remarkable individuals and companies from around the world. We hope you're enjoying our catalog of 200+ episodes. Since we launched in 2020, with many of our guests appearing in rare public interviews, it's now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy. Let's set the scene with some fun facts to get us going, where we born and where do you live now. I was born in Mount Gambia in the bottom south-east corner of South Australia where it's very cold and we constantly growing up with AFL and Australian rules football. And now I live on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, which is where I spent sort of second half of my childhood was up in Townsville in Queensland. And so now they're back in Queensland, it's probably back home again. And am I right in understanding that you commute to Sydney every week? Yeah, so I'm often sort of down here Monday to Friday. It just depends. I've been here for a few weeks, so the majority of my time's down here now. That's amazing that you haven't actually moved to Sydney. You've been running the company for what 12 years and you haven't actually moved full time to Sydney, is that right? I did, in 2017, I moved from Townsville to Sydney for three years, and then 2020 I moved back to Queensland. So I guess at the end of the day I'm a country loud at heart and the big cities are great. There's lots happening and there's plenty to do, but I also love just the nature and having space and time to think and I tend to gravitate towards more regional areas than necessarily the metropolis. Nice and work, what was your first job and what do you do now? My very first job was working for a palm farm digging up palm trees in the north of Townsville, but that was only for like a few months and then I worked at a petrol station. That was like the first real job, I guess $4.20 an hour I was on, so I get about $160 at the end of the week. And today CEO of Midi, which is a global tech business that also has an insurance business, we also supply all the PPE and wearables and things that people wear and monitor temperature of food and telemetry of vehicles, all sorts of stuff. So that's my job today. I've been told you had 18 jobs before you started Safety Culture, so maybe you can tell me a bit more about that as we chat. And Luke, as you know, the purpose of this show is to re-imagine the concept of a high flyer to go beyond just job titles. Is there a person you know who you feel hasn't got the recognition that is Earth? Probably Chuck Feney, have you heard of Chuck Feney? I don't think so, no. Chuck Feney started Judy Free Worldwide and then gave away $8 billion on the condition that no one revealed where the money came from. And so he gave away the majority of his wealth and it was never to be revealed. And until an actual court case in the US, in New York, meant that it had to get revealed. And then he wrote to his foundation, wrote to everyone and said, you can now reveal where the money had come from. But he given away $8 billion. On the basis that it'd been matched $1 for dollar by some other funding from government or elsewhere. So yeah, he ended up doing a lot for a lot of people and most people have never heard of Chuck Feney. That's so interesting. And you've met him, I guess? No, I haven't never met him. But General Atlantic is the fun that he set up. Oh, right. And so a lot of people know General Atlantic. So General Atlantic came from Chuck Feney from Judy Free. Interesting. That is interesting. I came across him when I read a book called The Billionaire who wasn't because he was never written up as a billionaire. No one really knew him as a billionaire. And yeah, at the end of the day, oh, sorry, the other way around, people were saying that he was a wealthy guy, but in fact, he'd given it all away. I think in 1984, it sounded all over to a charitable trust. So yeah, it was a cool story. That is so interesting. I recently went to the Getty Museum in LA and he's the kind of opposite of this guy. Getty, you want it all the fame and all the tropes of success and he built all these museums around the world. So yeah, yeah, I guess people want recognition in different ways. Back to the episode in a moment. Something I've heard a lot from business owners and leaders is that speed only matters if you still feel confident in the output. And it's particularly an important point in this world of AI. Zero's answer to that is accountable intelligence. AI that shows you what it's doing and works from your own real data and is designed to keep you in control before anything happens. Has zero puts it most AI, I see to trust it. Accountable intelligence shows you why you can. And that's how it works with jacks zeros in platform AI finance partner. So whether you're running the business, advising the client or working with your board, jacks ensures that you get the upside of automation without giving up any of the control. If you're on a sitting's practice, head over to zero.com/highflies for 90% off your plan for the first six months. Terms apply and go to the website that zero xeiro.com/highflies. Now back to the episode. Let's one back the clock and spend a bit of time in each other and this is interesting because you've touched on this in interviews over the years. So I tried to pull out a few new aspects. I joke to you about 18 jobs. Is that true that you had 18 jobs from 14 till safety culture? Yeah, jobs slash businesses that I'd started. So a lot of them have failed businesses. I had the rights to a trolley locking system that could be installed in shopping centers to lock the wheel of shopping trolley so they didn't end up all over the streets. I spent 10 months trying to get that off the ground Australia and sleep in my mates couch and never ended up getting a single sale and fast forward 15 years later and nearly every shopping center in Australia has that system, the exact same system. So the right idea at the wrong time in that case and there was just yeah lots of other businesses and things that I tried. Townsville glass recycling was my very first business when I was 16 years old. I'd go around all the nightclubs and bars and collect all their at-glass and their empty wine bottles and spirit bottles and then I'd put them on a train to get center Brisbane and I had friends from school helping me out in the afternoon. So I think I was costing about $400 a week to run that business and I think I was getting about $250 a week back in glass payments. So you know that was great lessons. I was 16 year old. It was it was fantastic. So yeah there was lots of things that I tried over time that ultimately didn't work out. I had a gym on the central coast in New South Wales called Ultimate Fitness. There was about 450 odd members there. There was a lease I had and again after about nine months I couldn't make that work. I found out after I took it on that the previous two or three people had also gone broke there. So I guess I learned a bit about due diligence at that point but yeah so many things you know that I try to do. I had a photography studio filming Photographing everything from weddings to commercial stuff up in Townsville and obviously I was a private investigator, I had my own private investigation company at one point as well and what else are so many things we built software training platform to train people that never took off. You heard you had a boxing ring, you tried to have a boxing ring at one point, is that true? Yeah, so I did a tough man challenge in Darwin, I was living in my car for a month and put on a no-rules boxing competition, something I knew nothing about and had never even seen before but I rode down a goal at a Tony Robbins seminar in 1997, I was 20 years old and I rode down a goal to make $40,000 somehow in one month and I had no idea how to do that and I came up with that idea and went and slept in my car, drove to Darwin and put it on and told the media about it and 1,509 people paid through the gate and it was a, I made $42,000 profit in one night, it took in 64,000, it cost 22 to do it so yeah, it was a pretty valuable lesson at 20 years old. Where did that personality come from? Like do you put that down to your parents? Were they entrepreneurs? No, my parents were not entrepreneurs at all. My mum who raised me for the most part, she, I think, had a pretty utopian view of the world and people, she was very optimistic and somewhat naive I think as well which is a good thing for the most part and I think I adopted a lot of that, you know, I probably assumed the best, believe anything's possible and then silly enough to actually go and try and do it and so I think a lot of that came from my mum but not because she was an entrepreneur just because she believed in me, she believed that you know, I guess there weren't really limits to what you could do in life and I remember she got into AMI, mum was always into stuff, she got into AMI which is like network marketing, one-on-one, it was like home cleaning products and stuff and I went along to one of these things when I was like 14 years old and they had books there that are recommending people and I remember the first book I picked up was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and as a 14-year-old I was pretty impressionable and I thought wow this is really interesting so I think that probably also introduced me to just people who had done successful things, I've had a lot of autobiographies after that and wanted to study what success looked like and what people had done that had worked and what had failed, what they'd learned from their failures so I guess it was a quest that started around that age of understanding people and business and then I was very fortunate my first real job was with a business, local businessman in Townsville by name of Bill Smith and he was very good at just teaching me the fundamentals of business and that was not something I'd ever really learned in school so yeah that helped. It sounds like my parents I always say my mum's the believer and dad's the bestest, if dad always thought I wouldn't do much in life and mum always said you can like I'll help you out so it sounds like maybe you had elements of that. Yeah, yeah perhaps it's a good thing I reflect back on a lot. Yeah, tell me about the personality growing up because now you know I've spent a bit of time like you're a confident guy, like I always joke like someone could put you in a room and you will convince that room to buy your product. Will you like that as a kid? Like your high school teachers, how would they have described the young look? I don't know, first of all though I think it's interesting you say if you put me in a room I'd convince people to buy me a product. I've always thought about making great products and then make it easy for people to want to buy them but I've never been much of a salesperson so I think there's a distinction there that's important. I think if you build great products and find a need for them then the sales process is quite straightforward and people will pull you into their business they want what you have as opposed to trying to educate a market that they should buy from you. So I've always thought that's quite an important distinction. What was the first part of my, how teachers and stuff saw me? I was probably I struggled with the school system I think and early on grade one, grade two or remember finishing the years maths books by maybe April or something like I was just I took to maths and really found that fun and easy. And then writing as well used to write quite a bit pretty early but I can remember by about grade four I was kind of over it and I probably wasn't the best student so I think teachers would probably say I was what they would call today, ADHD, kid that didn't have a whole lot of discipline or focus at the time probably but I had sport I could run from a really young age from about the age of 10 or 11 I could run and I think that helped as well and the mental discipline of running particularly 10 kilometres I'd run 60 kilometres a week at the age of 11 on the road and I don't know there's something about pushing myself and running that I think translated into other parts of life. Oh wow that is incredible and he told you that now I'm in now you fly as you've kind of gone from running to flying. My knees unfortunately they're not in the best shape my meniscus on both knees I've had had surgery and stuff and I can't run any more long distances so yeah it's unfortunately not something I get to do much these days but you know tennis and things like that I try to stay active and can ride a bike and stuff so yeah but I remember though you know the kind of moment when I was probably 12 years old I was thinking I ran under the Australian record for 800 metres and I remember then thinking like there's something different about you know what I was doing that most kids were struggling with and I guess that served me a lot going forward because I was used to being in unfamiliar territory and I never was one to really just conform or go along with the status quo if it didn't make sense. I mean with all these experiences when you said did you finish high school though right you didn't drop out. Grade 9 was the last report card I got I hung around in grade 10 but I didn't sit any exams I was fishing down the river when the exams were on and then I did the first term of year 11 and then I went and went and worked there was no point at that stage I was I think it'd been to eight schools by grade 11 so mum had moved around a lot and every time we moved even in towns or she would move me to a different school and so yeah I'd been to a lot of schools my education was pretty disrupted and I probably just wasn't the best student either. That is so interesting so I mean I always like asking guests if you think of age 18 because you've got some understanding of the world right but with yours that's so different because you kind of experience so much of real life business from the age of what 12 you said to the age of 18 so maybe the question is which which of these businesses best prepared you for safety culture. The tough man challenge like living in my car with no money with no certainty no real expertise in what I was doing and to wake up each day and have a little voice in my head saying this is crazy what are you doing and ignore that and keep going and then to pull it off you know months later to achieve a goal that I'd set which was a ridiculous goal I was earning $800 a week as a private investigator a trainee private investigator when I was 20 and so I set this goal you know to make 40 grand a month and so there was just no logical way to do that and and I think that has served me more than anything else in my life because you know to have just just the clothes I'm wearing and walk out in the street and know that I'll figure it out to have that sort of belief I guess in myself is something that has served me time and time again and then also the power of of setting big audacious goals like if you don't set a goal to go after then you know you're definitely not going to hit it and so you know it's the all saying Wayne Gretzky you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take and so you know I think for me that experience is something that I've thought about over and over again and and the feeling probably more than any of uncertainty the feeling of not knowing what is going to happen today and still stepping forward and taking it on and showing up yeah even some days building this company all I could do a show up I didn't have anything left in the tank and you know I think sometimes that's that's enough though that's if you do that you'll figure it out if you don't show up then it's very hard to figure it out so I think I think the tough man challenge is probably the one that that's shaped me the most out of all I always joke in my own story that early on I had a lot of rejection as a kid I was always told I was not a smart kid kind of because exactly like you I didn't fit into the school system I've always been a practical kind of guy I've never been a bookie theoretical person and now I look at it and I speak to my mates and I go I'm very happy with rejection like I don't look forward to it but if I get it I go that's fine I'm going to start at that point that's my default starting point of rejection so I've got to work my way out from there and maybe that's why you're a founder and I'm a founder because I just don't wait for anyone and I go I will just even like call the emails people go why would you send a call the email I go why not if I don't send it I don't know if that person is going to respond. So I'm just going to send it. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, tell me about the start of safety culture. Because I've been told a guy Wade is that his first name. He was one of the early mentors and was it called the Wade's business free safety culture. Tell me that story. So Bill Smith, who had the service station at work for, he had a son named Wade. And so he created a business called Wade's distributors in Townsville, which was the local cash oil distributor. And my mom, I ended up getting my mom to buy that business for $28,000 with her superannuation from when she worked at Telstra. And she bought that business. She got a fork lift, a little truck and some oil that she knew nothing about. And I said, "Don't worry, I didn't know anything. I'm not that long ago either." And she built that into actually a decent business in Townsville called Wade's distributors. And so when I went to start producing safety and training documents, I thought, "Well, everyone knows Wade's distributors in Townsville." And this is back to setting big goals. The biggest goal I thought was maybe one day all the businesses in Townsville would use what we were selling. And so I thought, "Well, everyone knows the name Wade's distributors around town because they deliver oil to places. So I should call this business, Wade's business solutions." And they'll, you know, "Oh, it's a sister company to Wade's distributors." Oh, that's great. Well, we quickly outcrew Townsville and very fast, you know, ran into people that had no idea about what the heck Wade's business solutions was around the else. And so that was my first experience in, you know, not getting a name right, I think. And three years later, I changed it. I was 2004, 2007. I then changed it to safety culture. And that would be, that was a great name for many years after that. It really spoke to what we did for quite a while. So you've been full time at this since 2007. So nearly 20 years. 2004. 2004. And then changed the name to safety culture in 2007. I mean, let's, let's go back and forth here like, so we're now in 2026, August 2026. If you had to restart safety culture today from scratch, how would you start it? That's an interesting question. Because we always always think, "Oh, well, you do it faster." And I think the decisions that we make, I'd probably be able to make them quicker and faster. But it's funny. Everything we've got to, everything that's brought us to this point has been built on all the things that have happened before. And the way we've solved these problems, you know, whether it be the way teams work across all these different industries or even the industries that we ended up solving for, none of that probably would have happened if we hadn't gone through all the things we went through. And so, you know, if we start today, obviously you'd make it an AI first play, which is now what we've built the company into. But I don't know, it's, we're an insurance business, we're a software business, we're consumables and wearables business. We've got a pretty big opportunity. So, I wouldn't change too much. We just need to execute and get the best people that possibly can to realize the vision. It sounds like you're saying the process is still the same, right? Even the today's AI and back then it was SAS and Cloud and whatever else. Tell me about, like, when you think of, let's call it safety culture 1.0 now you got Mitty, so SC2.0, when you think of the 1.0 journey, what were the key moments that you take into the second part of the business today? Like, well, they're key, let's start with the highlights. What have been the key highlights in the last 12, 14 years prior to name change? Building our first cloud, like we didn't have a cloud when we started. So, this is before cloud was the thing and we had customers losing devices working on rooftops of buildings and I would say, oh, where's it all backed up? Alan and I were in the garage saying it's not backed up anywhere. So, I think when we built our first cloud, I think that really, I guess, was a pivotal point. And then obviously taking funding, that changed the trajectory of the company. And they forced to change anything today. I would probably not have taken funding as soon. That's probably one thing I'd do differently. I'd probably-- Can we double click on that? Tell me and tell me more. I think bootstrapping as far as you can is a good thing. But then it becomes a point where the way that you're thinking about the problem may be not big enough and that's where external people can help. The capital and the resourcing thing today, you can build a company cheaper, particularly a software company, cheaper than ever. And even physical goods company, the distribution paths now are much easier to utilize than ever. Costs, I guess, in a lot of ways have gone up. But what I would think is, is if we were going to build it today, we'd build it in a way that you don't need to take a lot of capital and you'd get the customers to validate the business by paying for the product, which then can fund more growth. And I'll do that as long as I possibly could. We sold 28% of safety culture for $2 million in their first round. Wow. And I rolled in the original Docs business, which was doing about 800K a year on a 70% margin. I think the longer you can go alone, the better, but then recognize where your limits are and then time. When I met my counter-rux and Scott Farqua, who were part of the Blackbird investment, I realized really quickly that these guys had been doing it for a decade already. They were further down the line and could offer insights that would help us. And so, you know, Townsville wasn't the epicenter of the tech world and so meet those guys and to get the experience from them through Blackbird, I think it was a life-changing experience for us back in those days. So that was really good. And then I think that the highlights would be more the customer stories, the customers that have shared with us how they help us or how we help them do their work each day and go home and gives their work a sense of meaning and purpose. You know, we get customers that contact us. I've had one in tears on the phone a while back saying how this had given his life a purpose that he hadn't had before. You know, we've had let tenants in the fire department come and join us and work for us because they felt it was such a good purpose and they could see the impact it was having. So, you know, we save people's lives every day. We work in a business that actually makes a really positive difference in the world and we take that responsibility seriously. And it's something that I think everybody here feels and is proud to be part of and perhaps some of the other parts of the tech industry maybe haven't got the same motivation behind their work. And we're fortunate that we do. So it's a really nice thing to hear from customers about how we help them do their work each day and what that means to them. I wanted to look at that in a second. On the fundraising point, it's really interesting you have that reflection because I feel most founders, you could almost say you're a second-time founder. Not a second-time, you're a 50-time founder, but like in this in this safety culture, meaty scenario, you've come back as a, you're kind of doing it in life too now, right? I've noticed that it's a trend with every second-time founder where they are reluctant to take VC and they don't get absorbed by the call aid. Was any first-time founder I speak to, they go, "I want VC tomorrow." Because I want that social validation that comes with that. But as you know, disappear overnight. Like that, you might get a newspaper article tomorrow. The next day, no one cares. Is that part of it as well? Like you've been around this game long enough and you've realized the VC hamster wheel doesn't solve everything? Look, I think there's a role for venture capital and important roles. So I think to be able to accelerate growth, then venture capital is one of the best ways to do that. So I wouldn't knock venture capital per se. We've benefited from it considerably. I would just say delay it as long as possible. I think that's my message. Taking too much money or too early can cause other problems. So and two high valuations. I think we did a very good job of managing our valuations. We're in other companies. We're accepting big valuations. We were saying no to them simply because we wanted to make sure that we could grow into whatever expectations were set in a reasonable time frame, 18 months after the funding. Whereas I think I've seen other companies take valuations that years, four or five years later, they still know where near growing into and it hurts them and it hurts their shareholders and the employee. So I think there's some of the lessons. But I came back fresh. I didn't have an 18 month break. I was gone. I said I've had enough. And when Kelly Voss, who I know, you've interviewed before, he was employed. He was coming on as president out of the US. And when I decided I wanted to step down, he was a person I rang and said, would you be willing to take it on from New York, which was a big ask? Can we both knew that? But he took the job on and understanding that he had a family in New York. He was never going to move to Australia. That was never part of the deal between us. And so when the AI wave came through and everything else, it made sense for me to come back. But I was fresh. I wasn't thinking I've got a time period that I'm not there and then I'll come back. I was thinking, well, I'll be the exact chair and continue to steer from that point of you. But yeah, so when the board sort of said to me, I think, you need to come back and we've talked about it. I was ready. I had an idea on how to do the job better than before. I think in the past I just spread myself thinner and tried to do a bit of everything and over time just did a worse job of all of those things. Now I came back and said, "Look, the exact team can run the day-to-day. I'll lead product strategy and the vision and not get distracted with the day-to-day million decisions that have to get made to lead a team and keep it company going." I think I've had a different approach to the role this time, which has been great. Since you brought it up, let's go into this. I recently interviewed Caroline Rollins and those who come in as the cultural MCO, Didier has moved on and I did a lot of research for that. I mean, Black Peter are being invested there as well. Most people said that was the best transition they've seen. I mean, time will tell. They're still six months into it and hopefully it doesn't end up badly, but it seems to be the foundations are set. If you could do the transition again or say, "I reached out to you and said, "Look, I've got a business that is as big as yours." I think the time is right for someone else to come in and take this to the next stage. What advice would you give me? What are things that you could have maybe done differently in hindsight? I don't know that I do too much differently because we didn't go to market and look for a CEO. It wasn't like we went in Canvased everyone that was out there. I simply offered the role to Kelly and he accepted it. I think if someone wanted to do a search where they're going to go and find someone and they don't have a candidate, then you'd be looking for someone who's a builder and someone who can take the vision and build on top of it and not just be iterating in a small way. You want step changes still to happen. I think that's important. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't in the background working on to work with Kelly and through Kelly. I think that I would say anyone should do that. To the exact team, if you ever have an issue, you go to Kelly, you go to whoever the CEO is on the day. You don't want to go back to the founder for stuff. I think they're the sorts of things you want to get right. Otherwise, it makes it harder for that person to be successful. I think being clear about handing over and giving them the opportunity to succeed is really important. I will hand the reins over again. I don't expect I'll be here for the next decade. I think I'll land the E.A.I. plane and help the company transition, rebrand, all these pieces to the puzzle. The insurance business now stood up in the U.S. It'll be in the U.K. next year. Then I'll look to find someone that loves being a CEO and all the things that come with it. At the end of the day, I'm still a pretty simple person. I come out of Townsville and I didn't do this to try and be a CEO or even make heaps of money. I just did it because I wanted to solve a problem. I think there's probably better CEOs than me out there. In the meantime, I think we just need to keep innovating. I'm pushing the team hard and we've made lots of progress on that front. We've got a lot of products in market in the last three months because we don't have to ride every line of code anymore. That was the challenge. I think the last 10 or 15 years was everything had to be manually done. It meant that it was resource heavy. I think now it's much easier to build software. It's not necessarily easy, but it's easier. Particularly software that scales is still complicated. You still have the right infrastructure and still have to build things the right way. What I'm seeing, I'm curious if you agree with this. What I'm seeing is that it's very easy to start a business now or launch a new product, but it's really hard to stand out because it's just so much noise. Back to fundraising, the amount of ideas that are being funded at the early stage that I think are coming into a traffic jam and they will not get to any scale. How do you, like, again, we jump around. How do you not get caught up in the noise where you look at someone else doing something or you speak to another founder friend and they go, "Hey, we're trying this." You go, "No, that's not right for me. I should not do that." You need to know the problem you're solving well. I think that's what guides you, is your customers and the challenges they're having and how we best solve them. Yes, there's lots of people now spinning up businesses, but I think that adds to customer fatigue. Customers are getting fatigue with all these different platforms and things that get thrown at them. It's getting harder for them to know I had someone the other day looking at an aviation platform and it ticked all the boxes from the outside, but it's two people sitting somewhere without any experience in running aviation platforms and the infrastructure behind it was not solid. Do you want to put your airline onto that? I think you'll see customers getting fatigued and those that businesses that have a customer base or can leverage others really well will be the ones that get traction, I think, because it's going to get harder and harder for people to try and win the attention of customers. Remember the period pre-COVID? A lot of the founders of the interviewer on the show, they talk about that period being a make a break moment and I spoke to some of your team, I wasn't name who, but I spoke to some of your team right to this and they said, "Yeah, that was a big reflection point for you where if you could do things differently, you maybe would do that period differently." I think you're not by yourself. I think most founders would say that. Curious if you could reflect on that period pre-COVID. Is that Brian Swift is factoring probably whom I'm thinking of? Look, I have my sources. He was in the trenches with us. He's back in now. It's great we acquired his company earlier this year, but 2015 to 2018, we went from maybe 25 people to 300 odd and it was crazy. We'd open Sydney office, Stuss, hiring as many people as we could. We had people who didn't know how to do a job well, hiring more people to do their job. It was chaos. I think for us, we grew too quick. We didn't know how to scale the team. You got everybody sharing your own venture capital, giving you plenty of capital and everyone saying, "Go, go, go." That's what we did. I think it's not unusual to have those growing problems because then you figure it out. Then we had COVID happen and the whole world has grown to a halt. Some of our customers went to zero like airlines and cruise ships. They went to zero. Then distribution centers where all the packaging and supplies were going through, they went through the route because if they had anyone there with COVID, they would get shut down. They were rolling out safety coach everywhere. That was a crazy, crazy time for sure. It was a tough time for us. Tell me what people say. You're the de facto CPU of the company. Nothing that's the founder's job. You don't think you're the salesperson, you're the product guy. I think everyone verified that when I spoke to Blackbird folks or your team or even some of you investors today, they all said, "Yeah, Luke's the CPU of the company, an official capacity." I don't think that's your title on your email signature, but that seems to be the role you're doing. Tell me about that. I've never worried about titles too much. You're the boss. You know that. You're the boss. Tell me about the product journey. If you compare that period to now, and let's get into the weeds a bit because I think you're right, you have expanded into all these verticals, right? Which is part of the name change. You make it sound really easy. That is not easy. Starting up an insurance business, expanding to new markets, scaling a big company that's a big ship now to use your metaphor. How do you think about product building? Talk about pre-AI and today with AI. What are the fundamentals of good product? Well, I think the good product piece is all about solving a problem for enough people that it becomes valuable. The method, I guess, has changed dramatically. Some things have stayed true and some things are gone. I'd say what's gone is the old method of going to customer research, then go and sit down with a designer, come up with some user experience designs, then go on validate that with customers, then go and meet with engineering managers to think about how they're going to build it, scope it up, give it time frames. Then we go back to this whole process. I give it what gone for weeks. That is all gone. Now you can take an idea on how to solve a problem, build a prototype in minutes, hours, maybe refine it over a couple of days if it's really well thought through. Then you've got something you can validate with customers and see if it actually solves their problem. Then you can start building it for production scale deployment. That time frame is compressed dramatically. What we can do with the resources we have is much more than before. We can solve bigger problems. At the end of the day, we were an inspection checklist app. That was our bread and bread. As we now solve training for customers as we manage their assets for them, just the idea of building scheduled maintenance for an asset. That is a difficult thing to do pre-AI. Now it's much easier to do. It's still hard, but it's much easier, particularly when you have a customer base that you can give that product to and they start using it. We can go deep into these industry verticals. We build now for restaurants. We used to give them inspection templates for checking their restaurant each day. Now we can help them manage their inventory. We can help them keep track of, you know, three grams of mayonnaise that goes on every burger and four grams of pickles. Like that comes off their inventory and integrate it with their point of sale system. We never did any of these things before. We never integrated with other other platforms very well. We didn't need to, you know, we got a lot of data, three and a half billion images, all manually taken, all labeled billions of data points that peer would check. And so we have a very unique data set. And before AI, trying to make sense of that unstructured data was actually a pretty big job. It was hard. Now we can actually synthesize a lot of information way quicker. We're giving customers for the first time a five star rating. So we can now tell you what great looks like. We can tell you what you need to do in order to improve. We never did that. We just gave people a circular workflow that was based on activity. If you do more checks each day on your trucks or your airplanes, then that must be better. But we didn't actually tell you what great was. And so this is now all possible. So, you know, my vision on the wall here, that's, you know, sort of the 10 year road map, we're now finally able to build that out. Whereas in the past, we were kind of biting off a piece and 80 months later, we would deliver it and maybe it was good, maybe it wasn't. Now we can move much quicker and just solve industry vertical problems instead of generic problems. And we solved 80% of customers problems, but never 100%. And now, you know, we released agents on our platform last week. So customers can create agents. You know, they've made thousands of agents already where they can build their own compliance agents that looks at the local regulations. If they've got food handling standards, they have to comply to or if they've got building codes. And you know, these agents can take all of the local information and help them, you know, get ahead of their businesses. So for us to be able to do that and then tie that to their insurance, to their premiums, we see we handle their claims, we've been in insurance now for five years. We see all the things that go wrong. We help them avoid it. It becomes a full loop. It's like the virtual circle now has come, I guess, to life. And before AI, it was still years away. And it's compressed. I think over the next 12 months. And that's why we're, you know, midi is a different company, a different brand. It's because now what we can do for our customers is much deeper and much more comprehensive for the business. Just on the 10 year roadmap, I heard in my research that you apparently have that on a cardboard for years and you made people carry it on planes. Is that is that true? Well, it's here. It's all around the office. Okay, but do a regional version like you had her on a cardboard and you would actually fly that from town. So yeah, if we got about that, we did, we'd have it rolled up and we'd have it in a cylinder and we'd take it and show people stuff. Yeah, absolutely. But now at AI, maybe you've got it on your phone and you can just bring it up, right? Yeah, but there's something about having it big on the wall. It is, yeah. You know, you can point to it and talk to it and take it in. There's a quality to that aesthetic that you don't really get on a screen. And so when something is important as the product vision, I think it's good to have it large and have it accessible and you know, around the office and places. Tell me about what you were saying before, which I think is spot on as the horizontal versus vertical. So traditionally, you were a horizontal business for years and now if I'm understanding correctly, you become a vertical business, right? When did that realization happen? Was that again, back to data that you said, a new uncovering customer insights that made you realize these new verticals could be opportunities? Last year, as I was watching AI evolve and I think February the fifth this year was when Opus 4.5 came out, they could then hold a million tokens around 750,000 words in its memory and stay focused. I think once I saw that come along last year and start developing to a point where we could give it bigger tasks, I started to experiment then around the idea of we could build industry verticals now instead of being industry agnostic. And as I started to experiment whether I could see how this could be really powerful. And you know, we've got, we treated whole groups of industries as one industry. We called transport and logistics and industry in the past. Well, inside transport and logistics, you've got shipping, you've got aviation, you got road transport, you got rail track, like we just kind of grouped it all together because it was too hard for us to go and solve all their problems. Whereas now we're able to solve specific industry problems. And we're just getting the rails in place so that over the next few months, customers will be able to come to us, just tell us a little bit about their business. If they run, you know, cement trucks in, you know, Wichita and Kansas City and Texas, we can give you an experience that's going to do a pretty good job of helping you manage all of your team and your trucks and your business. And so I think that wasn't possible before where we could repurpose our modules, like assets, for example, so that that could be reused for a truck company or reused for a shipping company. And be adapted well enough that it actually speaks to what they're doing. So I think, yeah, we just weren't necessarily great at speaking to a particular industry problem. And now we are. And connect that to market. So you've told me the other day that you're in the US, you're in the UK, we talked about India earlier. Which market forced you to rethink the product? Like even in the last 12, 18 months. Yeah, I wouldn't say a product is forced, a market is forced to rethink the product as much as we can solve problems across more markets better. Like we've been in, you know, multi-language, multi-region kind of, we've been in that world for quite a while. So those different markets working in India or South America, that's not new. But it probably isn't localized well enough for business. Like if you're doing something simple, if you're building a dating app or whatever, then perhaps it's quite easily localized that. But when you're talking about the way businesses operate in different countries and different markets, we probably weren't able to localize as well as we now are able to. So I think that's changed for us a bit. It is a market that you had to spend most time in again, back to being the CEO and the CPO. Like I hear from a lot of Australian companies where they go, you can't just copy paste right. And you would know this with the US where Australia would think one culture, one market essentially where US, North Southeast West is very different. They buy differently. They think differently. They kind of talk differently, even though they're speaking English. Can you share a story about a market that maybe surprised you or even made you rethink your own prize? Look, I think when you look at developing countries, I took some of the team over to Kathmandu in Nepal and we met with the aviation regulators over there and they'd had the earthquake in Nepal and there was still a lot of work being done there. So, you know, I think when you go to a job site and everyone's either barefoot or wearing thongs, my first reaction to that is let's get all these guys' work boots. But the boss of the site said, even if you do that, they won't wear them. It's just not part of their culture. It's not how they work. They're not going to wear wear work boots. And so, you know, I think when you see the different cultures, the different ways of people work, you have to step back a little bit. You can't impose, oh, this is what works in Australia. This is what works in the US. So, therefore, this is what will work in China or in Indian places. So, I think, you know, understanding the nuance of different cultures is really important and asking them what they need, rather than assuming what they need. And so, I think, you know, often it's much more simple than what we make it. Sometimes we overcomplicate things. And so, you know, the penetration of secondhand smartphones into those markets, I think, has been really important. Once the secondhand smartphones got below $20 US, it made it a lot more accessible to developing countries. So, you know, the great thing about our work is that at the end of the day, it's helping humans be better. And so, no matter where they are or what they do, there's something we can do to help them. And if we listen and we ask, usually they'll tell us and we can do a good job of making our lives better. And have you built teams on the ground? Like, I know you've got a leadership team that, I know, John's not running the insurance business funders in correctly. But have you put people on the ground that are subject matter experts in that local market? We've had US teams, it's probably 2015, I think. And then UK came the 2016. And then Yumeo, the Amsterdam office that we recently just pulled out of actually, we're going back to London for a bunch of reasons. But, you know, they sort of came maybe five years ago and then South America, we do trips down there and regularly get to different places Canada, we go up to and see people and then all through Europe. So, we go to where our customers are located today, back to my point around creating products that people want to buy rather than trying to educate a market. And so, we're not really out in markets trying to convince people to use our products as much as making sure that we are able to give them what they need when they need it. And it solves their problems really well. So, I think we'll be under a lot more now in developing countries than we have in the past. because we were a checklist app really, we were just a single point and a lot of those countries don't even use checklist. So now we're much broader platform. It's I think a much more relevant offering for them. I think you're right getting pulled into a market right? I think that's a mistake a lot of founders made is they throw money at it and often raise VC money and throw it at a market but don't have customer customer market fit. How do you in this AI world like what are some of the signals you're looking for? So like I saw somebody a dashboard like every week you probably sit down to team on me every day and you look at certain metrics or certain signals. Give me an insight into that like what does that look like for Luke and the air when you open your laptop where you find at the end of the day you want more people using our products today than yesterday and that sounds simple right? How does that work in practice? Wow it is simple it's not easy. There's a difference between simple and but let's use an example is that more demos or is that more usage on the platform or is that more? Yeah it's people people use now products each day. That's you know we had a self-serve model where people download our app for free and start using it and so you know I think the more people you've got doing that each day the better but we you know had a narrow use case two to five percent of any team used inspections like it was usually the the frontline manager and now as we touch everyone on a team we bring in rostering and shifts and you know these kind of features that touch everyone that changes I guess how people interact with us so we want to see more and more people our AI assistant you know what that's been out three months and people are able to put in tender documents for you know going for tenders and we can take all the knowledge we have about their business and build them a well-class tender document that in the past they wouldn't have even been able to produce or it would have taken them weeks so that kind of usage I think we're seeing like you know thousand percent a week growth at the moment on our AI assistant and so that's the stuff I'm looking at how are people using it what are they doing with it and how are they how are they I guess evolving their their experience with us like what are the problems they're getting us to solve stuff we've never even thought of then they're doing on our platform thousand percent a week that's a pretty good response to the naysayers who say SaaS business are dead right yeah no it's it's it's real business like you know people don't wake up in the morning and say oh let's swap out our operations platform like this is stuff that businesses depend on so yeah we're not going anywhere we're solving more and more problems for them every day so this unlocks I think the the growth opportunity of the bigger play and you know the deal size is like we've averaged ten k a deal there's been our average for quite a while because that's what an inspection app really did which is small considering we service lots of big companies but it's small amounts and so you know as we add hardware and sensors and things if I have fridges and food now we we bundle that in then we bundle insurance as well and up until now we've been underwritten by Alions insurance and going forward we'll split some of that up and underwrite some of the risk ourselves and that changes our insurance business significantly we go from you know a few percent inch like 15% commission to something much bigger and and so the deal sizes then start we've seen deal sizes go from you know 10 on 20k to 600 700k deals now and so I think that'll unlock a whole lot of growth and opportunity for us as well yeah and insurance also moves you away from the traditional cycle of the subscriptions and people signing upright you get more stickiness and more just conversion and upsell and all that good stuff yeah hardware is sexy again yeah 20 years everyone's been saying I'll be hard-regnostic like it's just a race to the bottom you don't want to try and make hardware now say oh hang on a minute everyone who has a hardware they control the data where it gets collected and where it goes and so yeah it's it's good for us to be involved in in hardware it's good for us to be involved in insurance and also the wearables like you know people buying all their gear we got 200,000 products that we supply to people that's a midi you know manufacturing it though right no we don't manufacture but we distribute it all in all the top brands and 3M and all those honeywell and things and so that's that's real-world stuff that doesn't go away and it's great to be be building a business around you know physical things as well take me inside so we talked earlier about the transition then he came back into the seat as the CEO many have always been the founder and you always will be what is that like like some of the recent conversations I've had on the podcast with a lot of the big AI native companies think of like the Decigons and the Legoras and the Vacelles and I've had their founders or their CEOs on one of the things they've all talked about is being a leader today like a CEO or founder is really hard because a playbook doesn't exist and it's changing every week like they can't sit back on their results and go next week will be fine they're constantly paranoid more than ever before and people have said you've come back in and you are reviewing things you talked early about some of the team changes take me into that process how are you doing that because there be so many things you could rip apart and so many things you could just reinvent which parts of the company do you keep and then which parts do you go know this needs to be thrown away and changed well the first question is what are we here to do together and clarity around the problems of solving who are solving it for is is the first place to start that creates the opportunity then that brings everybody together so having clarity around what exactly are we doing who we're doing it for and why do we do that there's been a lot of work on that front and we've got this week we've got a couple hundred of our go-to market team here in town that come from the US and other places UK and they you know if it's the front line at interacting with our customers in terms of making sure that we are solving the right problems for them and that we're doing it in the right way so that's that's the first thing you know you mentioned the playbooks been thrown out I never really knew there was a playbook because the people that I saw rolling playbooks out from the last place they worked out usually didn't work and so you know I think that was a Silicon Valley kind of concept where you just scale businesses all the same way and there's been plenty of good businesses built you know copying playbooks but I think you're never going to be truly transforming the way the world does something if you're following a playbook that already exists and so for us it's always about how do we do something that no one else has done before and you know do it in a way that makes a huge difference to people's lives and I don't know what playbook that is like maybe maybe the Tesla playbook or SpaceX playbook whatever that looks like in terms of you know created that took 20 years yeah it's great it's something new yeah taking big bets like that's probably the playbook is go after some of the big opportunities and train big and if it if it doesn't sound ridiculous the first time you say it's probably not big enough tell me about the point of being elated today so some of your team John Blake's back Brian's back hey mish is now see oh I believe you probably there's a pretty other changes that haven't been announced at different levels of the business I mean that's smart you putting the Avengers back at people you trust and people who've built the business with you how do you get the best out of them and how do you again like one of the challenges I have as a founder is I can be a micromanager at times because it's my business and it's my identity and people say do it step back just give us give us autonomy and I go no it's my business like I'm gonna be here how do you manage that like how do you two part question how do you be a leader today coming back with that break you had and maybe some reflections and then how are you working with these leaders that you've reappointed in putting important roles yeah I think the better or the more capable the people are you get the less you need to be managing them the best people don't take a lot of management so as long as they're clear about the goal and and they have their vision too that they want to bring to that and and build on it then it's more a matter of empowering them and getting out of their way I think it's great you know Brian Swift he he went and worked in the couple of places and started his own company and then we got chatting again and and it just made sense for us to team up and he'd been leading a good AI team and with what he'd been doing with Twine so you know I think we've had a bunch of people come back to the the business and you know they get the opportunity and I think when you're building and you're in the weeds every day it can get quite I guess claustrophobic or a bit feel like it's just a bit hard and and then people get perspective they step back and go actually that is a very unique opportunity and and they think about how they want to contribute differently to how they have in the past and for John Blake you know he's come from a pretty unique experience he was a lawyer then he was a Goldman Sachs New York and he's got a broad perspective on on different types of businesses he's seen a lot he's you know met with the top software companies in the US and the founders and different things and and Travis and Uber and all sorts of stuff so I think you know when people come back with that perspective on really what the opportunities what they want to do then it gets easier because everybody's a line they're motivated they want to go whereas in the past first time around I was probably dragging them more and saying come on like this is the vision and people would say to me, I don't understand why we're doing insurance. I don't understand why we're now trying to do training. I would always find opposition to doing these extra things. Even investors and people would say, you guys are trying to do too much. If we just stuck to being a checklist app, I would be pretty worried these days. I don't know why it would be because anyone could spin up a checklist app. It's because we built these other parts of the businesses that they became a moat. I think there's a lot of energy spent early on on trying to get everybody up to the vision. I think now, in phase two, I guess, with Mitty, the people who are here, they get it. They realize how massive this is. If we can't build a business that's doing $10 billion in revenue over the next 7, 8, 10 years, then we've missed the opportunity. Every single one of our customers is 85,000 teams using us. Every single one of them already pays for insurance. They just don't pay us. Most of our customers don't even know we sell insurance. This is early days. We've sold $180 million worth of insurance in Australia in the last five years, 70 million this year. That's about to go through the roof. We've just started selling into the US. That alone is going to be a massive business. Let alone our software business, which all ties with that. Let alone all that consumed. People get it now. I just took a while. I feel like we're finally now seeing what this can be. Someone said to me just last week, and said it's pretty unusual to be 15 years into a company and feeling like it's genuinely day one. We've got this crazy opportunity now. That's how it feels. It's a really exciting thing. It sounds like the break was a good thing for you. Just to step away from the day-to-day. You're still involved. I saw you in the office a bunch of times. It was a different role. So you could say in hindsight it was a good thing. It was one of the best things ever happened. I was cooked. I was just traveling all the time. Personally, my tank was empty. It was the way I was doing the role. It wasn't scalable. I needed that time to reflect and think about it. As I said, I wasn't planning on coming back. I wasn't taking that time as preparation. It just so happened to be that. It was wonderful to have any months where I didn't have to wait up every single day and deal with 100 problems that I don't have answers for. So when I've come back now, I've made sure that the problems that land on my desk are the highest value problems for me to solve. That means there's opportunities for other people to be able to build a business and develop themselves and their careers and their roles in ways that they couldn't before. I'm trying to do everything. In hindsight, it's silly. But that's just tends to be what happens. How did you realize that? Did you have people you spend time with doing that break that made you reflect on that? No, I just knew I couldn't do it a lot. I did it before. And you just had that self-realization? Yeah, there's just no way. I wasn't prepared to go back to that and just throw myself into it without any real strategy on how to scale myself across the business. As found as you're constantly putting yourself out of a job, and you're usually hiring people to do a job that you've never really done before or you don't know what great looks like. And so, I think experience helps a little bit and perspective. And just, we often take too long to move people on if they're not working out or we don't get the right people in the first place. And so I think there's been a lot of sort of, I guess, consideration gone into how we structure teams, how we build teams now, and make sure that people can get things done. There aren't dependencies where you can't get something done because some other team, you know, not doing their thing. So just a lot of the noise that happens as company scale, stripping all that out so people feel, you see it in their eyes now. They walk around, you know, they've got their laptops open because they've got, you know, AI running in the background and they don't want to stop it and it's running a little bit of ice and things. And it was just, it's a different time to be building product. It's really cool. Tell me more about the team point. Again, just culture, recently, or some of the other companies who are going through a revolution or reinvention and Caroline talked about it openly, where she said they've set up a new office that is independent of their office in Melbourne and they've got a SWAT team that works on things. They're trying to manage spend and they're trying to manage tokens. Again, back to the CPO role that you kind of are doing de facto. What are you saying to the engineers and the product managers where there's obviously been uncertainty and of course, you being a founder, maybe being a founder, we have high expectations. How are you assessing who's right for this phase two and maybe who's not? Like what are some of the outputs you're looking for? We made a bunch of changes earlier in the year, pretty much as I got back. And so I think that work's been done now. And there's a lot of uncertainty. Then people worried about, is AI going to take our jobs? How do we use AI to do our work? There was all of this fear and now I think things have come down quite a bit. At least here, the rate of change is still the same. Like it's still crazy. But there's an understanding now that we can leverage this to do a lot more than we could ever do before. And we know how to do it. And now we run our own infrastructure, we're buying our own chips. We've never done this sort of stuff before. We always, we're in the cloud. And so I think that's created new opportunities for people. There are roles, industry chief roles that we never had before, where they truly understand and have worked in an industry before, that they're building the products for. And so I think that's some of the changes that we made. We don't have gone and done anything off site, but we've set up teams who are focused on industry problems. We've got computer vision now. We've got teams that are outwiring up cameras inside restaurants and things. And they can tell them how long customers wait for. We can see as foods prepared, whether or not it's of the higher standard or not based on portions and all these sorts of stuff. So computer vision will play a bigger part. And that's an example of all those teams that can go and get things done, I guess, really quickly. There's a mix of legacy teams who are working on the foundational pieces. And then there's these newer industry vertical teams. And there's been a little bit of, I guess, argument about the way things we built, because some of the newer teams are just standing stuff up and running. But I think the first thing is you've got to iterate and validate and make sure it actually solved the problem. And then build it into a production scale code base. So we've figured out how to do that now. But at first it was a bit chaotic. But it's amazing how quickly everybody's got on board, got their heads around it and a building. It's really good to see. I message some of your board members who want to really well whether it's Craig or Kel or one of your investors Rick. And I said, what's one question you want me to ask Luke? And they also asked him to assess strengths and weaknesses. So I wonder they said that'll be an interesting question, particularly because you have that reflection period. So I'd be curious, how would you assess your strengths and weaknesses today? Thanks to whoever asked that question. Oh, look, I'm pretty focused and determined person. So I'd say that would be one of my strengths. I think it's funny. I think people who don't work closely with me would probably not see the empathy side. I think those that work close with me see more of that. So I would say the EQ and empathy helps understand people and try and set them up so they can succeed. And then in terms of, oh, Annam, ambitious, I'd say that's probably a good thing as well. In terms of weaknesses, probably the insecurities around what other people think and trying to do the right thing, that still takes its toll. I'd say it probably affects me more than it should. And I'd say I've got better, but it still holds me back. And that cost me, I think. The other thing is you'd say, I'm not detailed enough. You could argue that either way, because if I'm too detailed, then I'm not thinking on the bigger stuff. So that definitely, I guess, holds me back sometimes, because I don't spend enough time on the detail. Weakness is, I don't know, sometimes probably make decisions too quickly, but again, you could argue that the other way too. It's pretty interesting. I mean, what do they say? I mean, you know, someone like Craig Tiley really well, and I think I've gone to know Craig pretty well the last two years. One thing I really appreciate about him is he will tell you. And I think that's why he seems to like you. He maybe sees a vision of himself in you, right? Like he's got that army background and I get shit down attitude. So I think that, but I think on the insecurity point, that's really interesting, because I think most founders have that. I'd say I definitely have that. My wife tells me, I met her, she says, started my business and I'm 70s into it now. She's like, you're still the same guy. You're terrified. And she's like, you've got more money. You've got a bit more success with your wake up every morning, terrified. And I go, yeah, maybe that's the prerequisite to be a founder. Ah, fear can be a great motivator for sure, fear of failure, fear of not being liked or accepted. Sure. And I think that's, you know, it took me probably 10 years as a manager to stop overindexing for that, trying to be liked all the time. Some people just won't like you and that's just part of it, particularly if you're making big decisions and not everyone's going to agree. So yeah, it is common. It is common. But Craig could be one of the best or the best CEO I've ever met. He is. a rare mix of vision and execution. Like usually you get someone who's quite strong one way or the other and they're pretty weak on the opposite. But he has a really rare mix. He cares deeply about people. He's just a phenomenal leader and CEO and it's lost for the Australian open that he's gone and it's a big gain for the US open. Maybe a new customer, maybe a new customer of safety culture in the future of midi in the future, right? Hey, let's see. Let's see what happens. Well, one thing he actually said, he gave you a big compliment. He said the ability for you to understand content and the entertainment world, which maybe goes into your hobbies. Like you've done quite a bit of that. He said, and he's been in the entertainment world for 20 plus years, right? He said, you're one of the people who like sees it really well and you can predict where it's going to go. Tell me about that hobby. Like how have you talked about it as a kid? You were doing all these things. How have you built these hobbies and found time to do more of it? I think it's core. I'm fascinated by humanity and people and storytelling has come natural for me. I think over my life and using cameras to document that, whether it be still cameras and photography days or whether it be cinema and some of the documentaries and things we've done and producing a feature film at the moment on these kids in Tasmania that grew up. You dream about being car races and racing car drivers and they they ended up living out their dreams. I think the storytelling piece is important because if you can move people emotionally, then they're more likely to remember something. I tend to try and think about what are the emotional stories or the arcs that we can tell that people will remember and retell. I think that's something I've always enjoyed. It's a hobby and I'll continue to do that as much as I can. I've also heard you filmed a few documentaries with your kids when you've gone traveling on holidays. Did that right? Yeah. When they're little, take about a school and they do their own. I'd say to them, every person you meet has magic inside them somewhere. And every place we go to has magic in them. But sometimes you got to dig a little bit to find it. So their projects were to find their magic. They would interview people and make little mini documentaries, they'd be filming them stuff. We'd go and live with Aboriginal families out across Australia in different places or we'd go and live for a bit with some kids in the Pango Village in Bano-Wado or kids in Vietnam and different things like that. I think I was great for them to have that as children. We didn't have a lot of money. We were living out of a camper trailer and paying $12 a night for a campsite and things like that. It was just good fun. I got to know the girls as people, not just as my daughters. We would sit around the campfire and chat and we got to spend time in ways that you don't in normal life. That was a really cool thing and something that I guess it's just part of that storytelling stuff I always did and they benefited from it. Then tell me what are the other hobbies now? Helicopter. Helicopters, you've been flying them for a while and then rally car driving as well? Yeah, I don't do that anymore. I was in rally up till 2023. Aviation has been really interesting. Helicopters for me is just a photography platform in the sky. This allows me to see things from a different perspective and capture it. I photographed out of Helicopters a lot and planes. Even in 2002 as a problem investigator, this is before Google Maps, remember. There was no aerial imagery and I rented a sester in Townsville and I did a grid flight over the city and I photographed it out the window of the sester. I went out hand in my surveillance reports to the insurance companies. I'd give them these high-resolution aerial images of the properties and they couldn't believe it. This is before any Google Maps kind of existed. So I think photographing and seeing the world from above has something that I've always enjoyed. I did my first helicopter lesson in 2012. It was a birthday present on 2011. And yeah, it's something I really enjoy but not to be that guy that flies around in helicopter, but just because I love seeing the world from up there, that's all. It's pretty low-key affair. My brother is actually obsessed with aviation. He used to sit up. He works for one of the BL lines now and he would sit up as a kid and listen to the pilot talking to air traffic control. Even now when we're out for dinner or something, he'll see a plan go over. He'll bring his phone out. He's like, "That plane is going from this place to this place. That's the model number. He's obsessed." I think there's a term for those people. They're called "error-sexuals." Well, he even told me there's like YouTube channels where people just film planes landing and taking off and they've got millions of followers. They love it. And trains as well. People do that for trains as a guy in the UK that follows trains around. He's got millions. It's great. People passionate about different things. That's what makes the world colorful. It's so good. It's so good. So we're sitting in August 2026. If I could ask you in 12 months time and we record this again, what would you have wanted to achieve with Mitty in the next 12 months? Look, I think for us to be known as an operations platform that can run a business end-to-end. That's where it's going for us. So the next 12 months is all about that. Tying out insurance business to our customers operations is the key. Up till now, it's kind of been loosely tied together. And now it's tied up foot on the gas and get those built out. So I think the next 12 months is the focus. And that sets us up for what's to come. So yeah. Very good. Let's move to rapid-file sprint. Anything I haven't asked on Mitty? That you want to touch on? That's all good. So he's there one non-work investment. Ideally of time and energy and we talked a bit about your hobbies. Is there a course or a holiday that you consider the best? Oh, look. Tony Robbins, David Destiny event, the sixth day one. He's getting a bit older nowadays. He still does them. That was pretty formative for me. That I think has been one of the most powerful things I did. That was quite a while ago, the early 2000s. But I think reading, getting access to other people's stories and how they think has always been a consistent hobby, I think, in a good way to get outside information. Was there anything you did in your break that you really value now? Time. Having time. Any particular hobby you activity during your. I mainly just flying like I did a lot of. I flew 300 hours last year. So yeah, so there's plenty of flying. Nice. One thing you want to learn outside work in the next six months? I'm getting pulled more into satellites and imagery from space at the moment, which is quite interesting and being able to take live telemetry feeds. So I see a few different businesses here, where we kind of give, I guess, our customers a view of their business from the inside out and what their teams are doing every day. I think there may be an opportunity for us to also give them the outside perspective physically when there's big sporting events on or natural disasters and things like that. We see customers that want information in real time. And so there's a whole another world to getting that data down, being able to process it at base stations. There's just different layers. I think there's drones at one level that are playing a bigger, bigger role. You've got helicopters, sort of up to 8,000 feet. You got planes at 15,000 feet that are observing. And then you got satellites that we're trying to be available to most people. So I think there's a whole ecosystem there that I'm getting pulled into at the moment. And autonomous vehicles, particularly on water. I think there's a big opportunity there, particularly Australia's borders. So yeah, there's some fun stuff like that that I'm learning about. There's a company out of Sydney called HEO, HEO that I just put a small investment into. They're about to close a series B soon. That fits right into that. I'd love to connect you to if you haven't come across them. Yeah, they're selling to the governments and NASA and all that. Yeah, that'll be awesome. Love to have a chat. Yeah, they're one of only two providers actually getting satellite imagery globally, apparently. Yeah, well, which is pretty incredible. Them and then fleet. You probably know fleet space. You might know Flavia. They're stuff they're doing with mining exploration and satellites is fascinating. And the pivot they've had is incredible. Yeah, Flavia is a dynamite. I would never bet against her. She's one determined lady. She's fantastic. Absolutely. Is there one interview question you love asking prospective candidates in a hiring process? The main thing for me is what are you passionate about? What do you want to do? What do you love? Like that's the main thing I'm interested in is what drives people and what can we do together? That's my biggest thing. And they're a billy to communicate that and show understanding of what they want to do and have a unique perspective on how to do it. I think that's what I look for in people. Do you still interview candidates? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. And I think most people are capable of a lot more than they realize. So, you know, I think looking for the potential in people is something that's really rewarding as well when it comes to seeing, you know, how people have made decisions in their life in their career that sets them up. for what they're about to do next. And so yeah, I try to unlock what that looks like for them and how it can help them realise their dreams. Last two, one pet peeve. People who sit in the right lane on a dual carriageway and don't get out of the way, it's very specific, I like it. It drives me nuts, especially in Australia, terrible drivers. They just sit out, they pull out in the right lane and pull out a little picnic table and set up hair out there. And you go to Europe and places and Autobahn and things like that and they know to keep out of the way. So I wish Australia is a better at that. So what do you do? Are you a Hong Konger or are you just supposed to be a waiter? No, no, I usually just pass them, go around them on the left to get out of the way and just. Right. No, no, no. There's no point arguing with people on the road, you're mousel, just work around them. Totally, totally. Particularly with some of the road rage these days with people like, "Do weird shit." And last one, I ask every guest if you could recommend a question for the next guest. Of course you don't know the next guest. Anything I should ask the next person? If you had one month to live, what would you do? Yeah, that's a hard one. A hard one. Yeah, good question. I won't ask you that. I've asked you enough hard questions. I'll let you go on that. But that brings us to a wrap, mate. Thank you so much. And yeah, huge congrats on what you're doing being back again in the seat. And I'm excited to follow along. Thanks for that. Nice to talk to you, man. See you. That's a wrap. So it's something in this episode. It's back to the thought. Send it to a friend or colleague. And if you're curious, that partnering with us and the Curiosity Center, where there's this podcast, to our reports, events and more, and join the ranks of existing commercial partners, including Google, KPMG, Vanta, the University of Melbourne, and others, my details and the show notes. Until next time, I'm Vity Tagawyle and this is the High Files Podcast.