BBC iPlayer to SeedLegals + Anthony Rose's Startup Success Formula

I was so excited to sit down with Anthony Rose, founder and CEO of SeedLegals to record this episode and unpack the challenges and strategies of startup leadership from his perspective. 

In our chat ( could have talked all day! ) Anthony shares insights from his journey at the BBC to becoming a serial entrepreneur, offering practical advice on product development, team motivation, and sustainable growth. 

Whether you're a new or an experienced leader or founder, you'll find valuable takeaways in this candid conversation about building customer-centric businesses and navigating the uncertainties of entrepreneurship.

Chapters: 
00:00 - Introduction and Anthony's background 
07:07 - Validating startup ideas before heavy investment 
15:23 - Implementing inclusive decision-making in product development 
23:45 - Balancing short-term revenue with long-term vision 
31:18 - Maintaining founder energy and motivating teams 
39:52 - Navigating fundraising and alternatives to the VC treadmill 
48:06 - Leading through uncertainty and making decisions with imperfect information 
56:30 - Closing thoughts and where to find Anthony

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Transcript

Em (00:02.35)
So welcome Anthony to the show. How are you doing?

Anthony Rose (00:05.089)
Thank you. Very well.

Em (00:07.63)
Good. How's today going? I know that you're in England, right? At the moment. Today is a big day in England.

Anthony Rose (00:12.513)
Today is going very well. We had our Sea Legal Summit offsite yesterday, a whole company offsite, team bonding, strategy planning was great. Great to see everyone in person. And of course, there was like a thousand emails the next day. So yeah.

Em (00:23.406)
Amazing.

Em (00:28.942)
Yeah, that's really, I used to do a lot of off -sites and the, I mean, people are in two camps, like, I don't know if off -sites are gonna be helpful, but I always find them so, number one, for bringing people together and number two, just for like blitzing through things. What was your experience yesterday?

Anthony Rose (00:45.249)
I think, well, I think, you know, when you have a team that works hybrid, most people you only end up seeing on Zoom. So for a team, particularly new joiners to see each other in person is fantastic. It's a place to share the big picture strategy things that otherwise get lost in day to day. And we also had a fantastic inspirational speaker who helped Team GB on their gold medals on performance growing faster. So that was the rah rah team thing as well, which was brilliant.

Em (01:15.053)
Amazing. Well done in putting that together. I know it's not easy to get everyone in and everyone aligned. But before we jump in, for the people who are listening, they know that this is not conventional. I don't just go through questions. I don't just talk about the normal things. I'm interested in you as a person, Anthony. And I want to talk to you about the ins and outs of your world. And I'm really curious, actually.

And I've been thinking about this, about asking a few people, you're the first person I've asked this question to is, if I could spend, if you could spend, sorry, a day with little Anthony, what would you tell him and what would you show him now from this world that you're in right now?

Anthony Rose (01:56.929)
It's a good question. So, you know, as a startup founder, well, there's the personal part and there's the professional part, right? So as a startup founder, you start with these hopes and dreams for what you want. And then five or six or whatever years later, you figure out if only I'd done some things differently. So that's the professional part. And then there's the personal part. It's hard to know. I think the on the professional side, I think

Em (02:04.812)
Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (02:24.705)
one of the first things which I tell many startup founders is that ideas are cheap and execution is expensive, which means you think actually the hard part is going to be building something, but it turns out the hard part is getting people to want it. So you really need to validate it rather than just start an idea. Everyone's going to love this, build it. And then later, a couple of years later, you realize you've raised this money, you've got people to follow you and actually nobody wants what you've built. And you've only

you could have learned that sooner. So that's one thing. I think the other thing is, which, you know, often when you've got young, enthusiastic team members and you've got a small startup, people may well get burnt out. So you might want to remind people it's a marathon, not a sprint. And so if people are there putting in way more effort than their compensation,

Em (02:56.939)
Mmm.

Anthony Rose (03:19.809)
at some point, then there might be a mismatch and there's going to be much unhappiness. So you want to make sure that particularly, you know, if you're older and wiser, you realize if you're going to be doing this for several years, you need to pace yourself accordingly. But if you're young and joining a team, then working those weekends and not doing other things is going to be great, but not sustainable. So those were two things that jumped to mind. But let me know the ones that you'd like to talk about.

Em (03:43.051)
Mmm.

Em (03:50.043)
yeah, no, I love this response because it's very much about one, what came at me that from a product perspective is find people who want your products. And I'm really interested to understand how that's come up in your journey. The challenge of finding product market fit, what's gone wrong, how did you get through that?

Anthony Rose (04:12.449)
So, I mean, on one side it's...

for me, but also I talk to many, many founders. And what I usually find is when you talk to a founder, they explain passionately the problem, you know, doctor, mother, dialysis machine, something, whatever, solving problem. And then you go to their website and it doesn't explain anything at all. It says, you know, we use blockchain and distributed ledger with artificial intelligence to solve a set of problems. And you're looking at going, dude, I have no idea what you're doing. And the problem is

Em (04:16.235)
Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (04:44.691)
is if the website isn't explaining what they're doing, your customers aren't going to know what to buy. So the number one problem I see, I mean, after validating things is not explaining to firstly an investor, and then also a customer and maybe even your team, the real problem you're solving for somebody rather than just the stuff that you're doing.

And the way I like to think about it, actually, when I look at someone's website, I know we're deviating a little bit from your question, but when I look at somebody's question, someone's website, if their website says, we use AI and so whatever to connect something, I know they have no customers at this point. But if they have a button saying login, and where do you want to go today, then I know they've got customers. And so if you think about booking .com,

Em (05:15.079)
time.

Anthony Rose (05:34.081)
When you go to booking .com, it could say we use advanced machine learning and you know, we've got a massive database and we connect you with relevant hotels and flights using advanced algorithms. They don't. They just go, where do you want to go today? And so a lot of what you want to do as a startup is fake it till you make it. So if you can think ahead, so this goes back to your, what would your younger person do? Actually, I'm turning it around to what would your older person do? So if you are a startup founder,

and you're watching this, then your website today, it probably represents kind of the stage that you're at today. And it probably says, you know, we doing X or Y, are we planning to do X or Y or book a demo or call us to learn more? But imagine that your site was now really popular and you had 20 ,000 active users, you know, if you're a B2B SaaS company or something, what would your site look like then? And if you can

turn your site into, you know, without misleading somebody. Say if it says, you know, you know, where do you want to go today? And it doesn't work at all, then that's not going to work. But if you can make it look like the site that is successful, then everyone will perceive, whether it be your investors, or people joining your team or your customers, that you've built it. So make it jump forward into my site is successful, my business is successful.

And then how far can you go to make it look like that today? And if you're thinking, no, no, no, we can't, it's dishonest, well, no, what you can do, the other part of fake it till you make it, not terra -nostal, is that you do things manually that you plan to automate later. So let's say that you come to, you know, match people with destinations.

Em (07:07.011)
Mmm.

Anthony Rose (07:25.921)
So in your dream, you've got AI machine learning, you've got a bunch of experts and a database of 20 ,000 places and you haven't built any of this stuff. So, you know, you could either in model number one, raise lots of money, hire all these people, build all this stuff and only then decide and realize that nobody's interested in such a service. So how could you learn that first and actually get some revenue first? So you could just have a site thinking ahead.

Where would you like to go today? People put in something. Then you run a Google query and you've got an air table and you've got a Zapier link to it. And so you've got three people, interns who are now running a query to find out what places you've got. And then you type in a reply or email them a reply. So you've built hardly anything and you're validating whether people want it. Your site looks like you're successful.

And maybe you're even charging for your service and only then do you realize from the questions customers are asking or the queries and so on, which things they really want. It may turn out a hundred percent of people looking for your site are looking for music festivals or that's the one that converts best to whatever it is. So you go in that direction. So I like the almost the reverse. What you know, it's like, what would you know now that you would then your older self would do differently. So yes.

Em (08:47.776)
Yeah.

Brilliant answer. I love this. Okay, so let's unpack that. So one of the things that I always make notes, one of the things I got here was turn the vision into an actual actionable product or positioning statement. That's easy to communicate. Number one to potential customers, potential investors and your team. If you have a team, that's number one. And I left when you talked about blockchain because this is prevalent. You've probably seen this.

Blockchain Web3, this is something that I worked so hard on in the exchange space to try and turn around because product marketing is, it just didn't used to be a layer there. And so, nail the product message I got there. Have clarity yourself of where you're going. And I love that you brought this up because my business coach, she always taught, she's called Karen Cassane, she's amazing. She always talks about plan for where you're heading. Be the person where you're heading.

Be the person that you want to become basically and act that way, visualise it, whatever. And I think it's such amazing advice because if you're currently making decisions in the state that you're in right now, how are you going to grow to where you want to be?

Anthony Rose (10:04.673)
Great point. So let's talk about that in two parts. So number one, just staying with solve a problem or show people how you solving a problem. My epiphany in this space was when we launched Seedlegals and I wrote to Mike Butcher, the editor of TechCrunch, who I somewhat knew to say, you know, Seedlegals is fundraising. This is going to be exactly perfect for TechCrunch readers.

Can I send you some information? And he wrote back, which was great, saying, sounds interesting. Tell me more. Do not send me a press release. By the way, when I say that, do not the press release is dead. Do not send a press release. In fact, I wrote an article on the press release is dead. Read the article. So I read the article and the article I think if you Google Mike Butcher, the press release is dead, you'll still find it. And essentially what he does is says

Em (10:43.549)
You

Em (10:54.301)
Pretty.

Anthony Rose (10:55.937)
Here are a dozen questions. Answer these questions and if you can answer them properly, send it to me and then I'll go write up something. And the questions are things like, what do you do? Why does anyone care? What's your business model? Why is the timing now? Who are your competitors?

Really, why would someone actually want your service? And if you can't answer those, you really don't have a business. So anyway, when he sent me this link, I wrote back saying, Yeah, great. I'll get back to you after the weekend. It actually took me three months till I had sorted things to the point that I was ready to reply. And and the first problem was my website. So my website said, exactly as I mentioned before,

the what we do, how clever we are, rather than the problem we solve for you. So our website said, you know, we do contract automation and document template generation. And then I after reading his, you know, the press release is dead, I realized zero people in the world wake up in the morning and go, you know what I'm looking for? Document automation.

Zero people do that. What everyone wants is the fastest way to close their funding round. Where do I find investors? How do I give share options to keep my team happy? So I completely redid the site. It barely mentions the word legal, doesn't mention the word document, and says, you know, the fastest way to close your funding round. Here's how to get your tax incentives so you get more investors. And here's how to keep your team motivated, you know, incentivized with share options. And so I always recommend this to founders.

Em (12:04.699)
Yeah.

Anthony Rose (12:33.185)
And to me it was really pivotal in changing, pivoting my entire website proposition so that not only would I get a TechCrunch article, which I did, which was excellent, but also so that I have the proposition that customers would actually relate to.

Em (12:38.713)
Mm -hmm.

Em (12:51.61)
Wow. Okay. So the next question here that I can hear people asking is like, how did you know what people were asking? What was like the first step that you did to try and find that answer?

Anthony Rose (13:04.097)
Great question. So here's an observation that I've seen from myself and from founders, which is if you are your target audience, life is much better than if you're not. So, you know, as a founder, you've been doing something in a day job before you've now want to do something. And I think there are two models that come to mind. One of them is you've just got this burning passion.

You know, you're driving your car, the rain was thing, the windscreen wipers weren't working properly, and you've got a new windscreen wiper and you're obsessed with a new windscreen wiper. You don't know if anyone else in the world is, but you are obsessed. And so you're going to solve this problem by making it work on your car first. I'm just picking random examples. So that's one way personal passion point. The second one is that you analyze scientifically well.

These are my skill sets. Kind of like a Mckinsey Accenture person would do. These are my skills. This is a very intersection of what's hot, what's paying, what's the care of revenue, what people are buying, the world's going to end me. And it may turn out that you've come up with a vanity project that in theory sounds good, but no one actually wants. And also it may turn out that you're not the real audience. So if you are the audience, that's great. And so here's an example where people are not the audience themselves.

Em (14:02.424)
Yeah.

Anthony Rose (14:21.665)
You know, there are companies that working on better funerals and better divorces. Well, the divorce probably comes from personal experience. The funeral probably doesn't. And so your audience for funeral bookings is probably elderly people. Doesn't have to be, but very often the case. But your developer team are in their 20 somethings. And you're in your 20 or 30 something. So your target audience.

Are they on iPhone? Are they on Android? Do they have a mobile phone? What font size do they use? Will they really want your rockety modgy? Are they on Twitter for your content marketing? You don't know any of this. So you're just going to make stuff up. And so you may build it in your teams, your teams going, yeah, we want to follow button and a share button. And your actual 80 year old audience is going, I have no idea what you're talking about. So what you want to do is you want to be your own audience and

Em (15:08.311)
Trust him.

Anthony Rose (15:12.481)
I learned this actually back in my BBC iPlayer days. So when I was heading up iPlayer, the BBC commissioned a study of early iPlayer users. And they worked out that there was sort of, you know, upper middle class, gadgeteers, typically males, you know, middle aged or whatever. And they looked around the room and went like, Anthony, that's exactly you. And I realized that it was somewhat successful because I just saw

if it would work for me watching Top Gear, it would work for everyone else. And so the problems at that point were all about buffering and would the internet fall over and could you get the video encoding? And so they're really geeky things. And as a geeky guy kind of trying to make it work for me, if it made the program play for me, it was going to be great. But that reflected that the early audience was exactly those Gadgeteers, geeks, early adopters. But then I began to notice

that the most popular programs were not, you know, Top Gear anymore. It was now Waterloo Road or EastEnders. So it had morphed into a much wider audience. And when I started doing audience research, I came up with all sorts of surprising things like, what features do you want? Well, I would love that I can operate the key that I play with one hand while I have a sandwich at lunch and watch a snippet of EastEnders. And it needs like content that I can have in like five minute bite sizes, no pun intended.

and then remember where I got to yesterday to pick up the next day and like I don't watch TV over lunch so I would never have thought of that so only by now finding your real audience will you learn what they really want and if not you'll build stuff that actually nobody really wants

Em (16:58.74)
That's genius. Especially the... How did you... We're going completely off -tangep, but it's fine. People listening will be interested in this. What kind of user research did you do? Was it lots of polling and surveys and stuff?

Anthony Rose (17:14.753)
Right, so this is for seed legals. So, okay, so for seed legals, right, okay. So here's the more generally the challenge is when you build a startup, you've got several problems you've got to solve. And one of them might turn out to be the dominant problem. And I'll tell you why that's something to focus on. So the first one is, can you build it? Can you get investment? Can you build a team? Will you be able to find users?

Em (17:18.003)
Yes. Tell me about Sea Legal.

Anthony Rose (17:44.481)
And these are your key problems. And whenever I talk to a founder, I'm always thinking as I'm talking to them, which of these is the major problem? And what you want to do is try and solve the major problem before you solve the minor problems. Of course, mentally, you always want to do the easy things first. But doing the easy things first leaves you with the most difficult problem later. And if you can't solve that, everything else you've done is a waste of time and money and other people's lives and so on. So in my case,

I'm a tech guy, been around for a while. I was pretty sure I could build this. I knew because I'd been around and my co -founders at XVC that we could raise investment. I was pretty sure from my network I could build a team. And as a serial founder myself and I've invested a few times and my co -founders are multiple serial angel investor, we were pretty sure that no, I mean, you talk to founders, how many people love going to lawyers? The answer is not very big.

So we knew that founders would want this. So ticked all the boxes, but there was one problem. What if we built this wonderful system and it turns out that the investors said, sorry, you can't use seed legal, so you have to use a lawyer. Or the deal terms were too complicated and it just wouldn't reflect any particular deal. So I had these particular problems and I just didn't know the answer. And of course, when you've got that quandary,

You can either sit around, you can try and use a test, or you can take a punt. So what I want to do also in the fake it till you make it, because you've got to drink your own Kool -Aid medicine, whatever, is that it would be ridiculous for me to spend years building this platform to realize nobody would use it. So what I could do is I could build the front end so it would look like the online thing, but behind the scenes, my

Em (19:22.096)
Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (19:37.281)
lawyer or lawyers would be using Microsoft Word to build the document to give back to the user. So obviously, I couldn't say your legals are like MVP, beta, they might have legal problems. No, I mean, the legals had to be perfect. But it didn't have to be the computer building, it could be a human. And so we did that. It was great, because you learn very quickly that half the things that you thought people would want, they don't want at all. And a whole bunch of stuff they did want you never thought of.

And if you're just building the front end website and somebody says, I'm looking for a thing to pay an advisor for the great, you can add this really quickly. And all the complicated stuff you thought that people want preference shares and all sorts of things. Actually, zero people want this in early stage rounds. It was like a year before the first customer even wanted some of the things that we sort of de scoped. So you can learn very quickly.

and then you can build the things that customers want before you spend millions. And then when you when your legal team, in my case, we're going, my God, Anthony, you're killing us. We're drowning. We can't cope. Please automate it. And then you'd go quickly work out, okay, great, guys, tech team, we need to build this before we kill our poor legal team. So yes.

Em (20:45.358)
you

then you step in.

Em (20:52.334)
Yeah.

Awesome, so it's like you've already you've generated the demand, then you start to build the stuff. It's interesting.

Anthony Rose (21:00.097)
Yes. And by the way, you also you can also generate revenue because you know, in the UK investors always obsessed with revenue. And if you can get revenue, I mean, there are two things. Number one is you much more investable because you've proven that people pay for your product and you can have a product even if you're doing it manually. And secondly, you've got revenue so you don't have to raise as much investment. Or if you can't raise investment, you okay, you can't grow as fast as you want. But

you know, and maybe some people are paying on a deferred salary or getting equity or options instead, but you can continue the business. So, you know, quest for revenue is highly desirable. Obviously, if you're doing nuclear power, you have to spend many years and many millions before you'll have anything. But in many other cases, you can actually do things manually to get revenue much sooner.

Em (21:48.974)
Yeah, that's what I see a lot of actually is that this absolute mission to go and get VC backed and but just missing all of this, the filling of the sandwich, the stuff that you've just told us, which is find something that works, make it simple, find the right people to help you, make money, then consider, do I need investment now? Do I need to build X, Y and Z now? And I think what it takes for a lot of founders and leaders in general, and this is a big...

A big challenge for a lot of leaders is how do I know what to do? How do I know what to prioritize here? And I probably know what you're going to say here, but in your opinion, how do you know how to prioritize? Where does that knowledge come from?

Anthony Rose (22:35.329)
I'll get to the prioritization in a moment because I think you've raised a really interesting point which is about raising investment and this is something most founders don't really think about but once you understand the way VC works then everything falls into place. So the way venture capital works is a VC fund will raise a big chunk of money hundreds of millions and

they've got an investment committee and because they have to spend, you know, lots of money in a year, they and they can only process a certain number of funding rounds a year to do the legals and the due diligence. They end up doing like a dozen rounds a year or six rounds a year, but then they have to write big tickets, millions of pounds. And the valuation when you fundraise is usually about five times the amount that you are raising. So you are diluting by 15 % roughly. So

This means that essentially, so the other thing to note is VCs have recognized that the return on investment obeys a power law. And this means if they make 10 investments, five of them, they'll either lose money completely or make no money, might just return their investment. And two or three of them might return three to five times their investment and one of them will return hopefully 50 times and that they call returning the fund.

So the way a VC, a fund, invests is they treat each investment as if it's going to return 50x, but knowing that will probably fail. So this means that for them, the only companies they want to invest in are the ones that are going to be unicorns. So they're playing it like a game of roulette where, you know, putting money on 26 red or whatever, but for you...

That's not what you want. You don't want to go home to your spouse and go, hey, honey, there's like a one in 100 chance we'll be zillionaires and a 99 % chance that we're going to go bang. Your partner is going to say, dude, give up that startup thing and go get a proper job. What you really want is you want to go, honey, there's a 30 % chance that we're going to exit for 5 million pounds in the next few years. That is great, right? That's life changing.

Em (24:40.264)
Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (24:54.369)
and you and your investors get a return. So now with that in mind, there are three ways you can think about your company. So way number one is what investors will often slightly derisively call a hobby business. So hobby business is one that gets to profitability. It's a great business for the founders and the team. They're paying themselves themselves a salary. You know, you're employing people, you're doing good for the world. Hopefully you're having fun.

but it's not an investable business. So let's say you're a cheese shop, right? You're going to buy and sell cheese and you can grow the cheese shop. It's great. You're employing people, you know, having a great time, hopefully, but for an investor, there's no point investing that because they're never going to get a multiple on the return of investment. So that's the hobby business. At the other end of the scale, there's the VC treadmill business, which is you're going to raise a ton of money. Let's say you're raising 10 million on a

50 million valuation. This means for the investor to get a 10x return, only a 10x return, you have to exit for 500 million. To exit for 500 million, you have to be doing 50 million a year in sales. To do 50 million a year in sales, you need to have like 500 people in the company or something. So you're now going to spend huge amounts of money hiring to try and chase the stream. But it's a high stakes game of roulette or poker, because

If you don't get sales, you're hiring and spending a lot, but if your revenue doesn't get there in time and you can't fundraise, you're dead in a massive way. So this raise investment, VC investment is only for those who really want to be on that treadmill. And I think that's actually a small number, but I think happiness is really in between. And the in between stage is where

Often you're looking for angel investors and angel investors are only doing a few investments a year. There's no point in their investments having a one in a hundred chance of returning zillions because statistically they're never going to be that one. They're much better off picking companies that will reliably, fairly reliably give them a three to five X return on their investment.

Anthony Rose (27:12.065)
They'll get their SEIS tax benefits to tax deduction when they invest. They'll pay no capital gains tax when they sell their shares, thanks to the SEIS scheme. And if they can get three to five extra turn, that's amazing. So actually, there's the tech crunch hype that everyone sees, the big unicorns. But the reality check is the 99 % use case for most companies is that never happens. But that's not a failure.

That's just totally fine. You just need to plan accordingly. And the median exit in the UK is like 20 million pounds. So 20 million pounds will not excite a VC investor. But imagine you go home and go, honey, we sold the company 20 million pounds, I've got 30 % equity, they're going to be going, you know, nice work.

Em (27:53.445)
Mmm.

Anthony Rose (28:02.369)
And when you go a few months later, I'd like to do another startup, please, because that was fun. Then they'll probably go, all right, knock yourself out. That worked well. So think about the different models. And I think too many people don't realize that they might be signing up for this VC treadmill when actually that's not the lifestyle they wanted. It's way too stressful. And you then have to

Em (28:02.789)
Yeah.

Em (28:11.427)
Yeah. Interesting.

Anthony Rose (28:27.809)
do a lot more of faking it till you make it and you have to keep pushing to be this unicorn proposition. But that might mean actually making the company way more risky and making your culture way more toxic as you have this relentless drive for growth to satisfy VCs instead of just a great proposition that your customers will love and of course rewards you and your investors and your team on an exit.

Em (28:44.45)
Mmm.

Em (28:52.161)
Yeah, it's such a refreshing perspective. Like, and the word that's coming up is like sustainable. Okay, how can we be sustainable? And what you were talking about earlier when we were talking about your younger self is don't burn yourself out. And it's just being more sustainable in the process and allowing yourself to take one step at a time, setting expectations that are, and I don't like to use the word realistic, but that comfortable -ish. They're not, they're a stretch.

but they're not ridiculous and they're not going to put you under pressure and make you act in a way that you're not happy with. And it's lovely because I'm getting an idea of what kind of lady you are. And I've worked with big, like big, really growing companies, especially in the ICO world back then, where they just got ridiculous amount of capital in a very short period of time and they'd never run a company before. And so the pressure is huge.

The change management is non -existent. The hiring is upside down. And so it's very interesting to be able, in my head, as you're saying, is to compare the different kinds of approaches.

Anthony Rose (30:01.473)
Yeah, and by the way, there's no obvious right or wrong. And I don't want someone listening to this to go Anthony's in quest for mediocrity and modest growth. Because I'm not saying that at all. I mean, you know, the world doesn't change if you don't have people who take major risks and want to go to Mars and so on.

Em (30:11.04)
Hahaha!

Anthony Rose (30:20.993)
that you are getting on a particular train or roller coaster if you do that. And so you should think about whether that's the roller coaster you and your team want to be on. And if you want to live super dangerously, you know, I don't base jump, I don't parachute. I spend my time listening to German opera and writing emails. And there's a certain set of risks that I'm delighted to take, ones that don't kill me if they don't work out.

Em (30:35.775)
Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (30:46.721)
But others will live a lot more dangerously and maybe the world needs a combination of all, but so long as you realize which of those you want to be and what you don't want to do is you don't want to inadvertently find yourself in the place that you regret being later, if only you as your younger self had known that. See how we nicely tied that back again.

Em (31:06.879)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And I think it's and it comes into it because my world is very much like somatic, the somatic approach to leadership. And so it's coming back to this, your inner self, like knowing what's OK for you, being tied to your values. So like if I ask a random person on the street, what are your values? They probably couldn't really tell me apart from like the obvious choices like health, well -being, money, whatever. And I think.

Something that I see a lot of leaders struggle with is being conflicted with their values, but it's showing up in a different way. So for example, going back to the prioritization, they're not sure how to prioritize, they're not sure how to make decisions, and it just becomes a lot easier when you are tied to your values and you have non -negotiables, for example.

Anthony Rose (31:56.609)
Right, so that's a great point. And I didn't get onto the prioritization. And I must say, if anyone has the answer for me on prioritization, please let me know. I did not in any way think that I have the answer. But of course, it's one that concerns me and takes my time every day. So there are many ways of doing prioritization. Let's just, you know, for fun, explore them. One of them is you run a democracy in your company. Anyone can have ideas.

and you have a vote as to what you do next. Advantage, everyone feels they have an input. Disadvantage, I think if you don't have a link between action and ownership, then you end up with mismatched things that are random. So if some random person has an idea that you should launch in a new territory, but there's no outcome, good or bad, accountability for them, then that's a bad thing. And also,

Em (32:28.386)
Hehehehe

Anthony Rose (32:51.937)
you know, there needs to be a strategic vision. So scenario number two is the CEO says we're going to do X or Y. And, you know, if the CEO is right all the time and doesn't run out of ideas, and everyone respects him or her, then that can be a good model. But you know, at some point, maybe the CEO

was great when the product was at a certain stage, but now it's outgrown that and they don't have ideas or they're not the target audience. So that's not really scalable. So maybe you devolve it to product teams and focus groups. And it's really tricky to what to do. And I think then, that actually as your business grows, I like to think of this almost two phases. Phase one is you've made your bet, we're going to build a whatever.

and the bet's going to work or not and it's going to take off or you're out of money and you need to do something else. That's your first big bet. But actually, if that bet pays off, you've now got a growing sustainable business. And the question is, do you take other bets or not? And so if your business just says, okay, we we built something, we've got customers, we're never going to spend any more money on development, it's going to be awesome, we're profitable. Well, of course.

Sooner or later, someone's going to eat your business, your tech stack's going to get old, your website's going to look old, and you're going to be out of business because you'll be disrupted. On the flip side, if you go, great, that was good, we're going to take a huge bet. We're going to be a crypto exchange in the US. We're going to do a launch. It's like, okay, that was a big bet that's going to be betting the farm. Was it a necessary bet?

And maybe if you know it's your last roll of the dice and your business is dead, you might want to try that. But if you've got a sustainable business, it would be extremely risky to make such a big bet and an uncalled for risk. So how do you do it? So the way I like to think about it is spread your bets. So thing one is you've got your current business with your current paying customers. It's a growing business. You have to do more in the future. So we're going to put let's say

Anthony Rose (34:58.817)
60 % of our resource and money towards our current business. Make sure things are updated, the latest changes, updates, selling more to your current customers. Then we might say we'll do 30 % to adjacent businesses to expand into adjacent ones where there's a fairly high chance that it's going to work. You know, your customer base, your segment, it's new things may not work, but it's not.

straying too far from the fold. And then you might put 10 % on like slightly wacky things, right? If it works, some new AI thing to do whatever, you know, it's a bit far from what we do. If it works, awesome. If it doesn't work, well, it's not going to kill the business. So I like this sort of spread betting. And the way I came upon this was sort of just naively, as I looked at all the tickets that we would want to do, and thought how can I group them together?

And then I was on a panel with some MBAs and actually there's a term for it. And I was delighted to learn the stuff that I kind of made up as I went along without any training in that. In larger companies, there's whatever word for it on the sort of multiple bets thing. And I like that. And also when you explain it to the team, then they can see why you're doing some, what might be confusingly different things. These are safe bets.

This one is a slightly braver one in a new era. This one, you know, it's going to be fun. It's going to be exciting. The pace of it's great. If not, you know what? You know, it's it's okay. Not all bets have to pay. You know, things don't have to work. Otherwise, if you play everything so safe, you'll never grow a business.

Em (36:28.183)
out there.

Em (36:41.205)
Interesting. So spread betting. I haven't heard that before. It's a really interesting way to see the business and I always have lots of ideas popping up all the time. But when it comes to retention of users, that used to be my world. When it comes to retention, where does that come in? Is that like the 30 to 40 % that you keep the investment of? It's like keeping the business running.

Anthony Rose (36:43.905)
Okay.

Anthony Rose (37:11.585)
Well, you know, customer retention, I mean, there are different angles to it. But the first thing to think about is acquiring a new customer costs a lot more than marketing to an existing customer. So you always want to retain your existing customers. Now, sometimes some businesses are ones which can retain customers, some of them are not when the customer solve the problem, great, they don't need your business anymore. So, you know, it's not going to be your churn is going to be built in but

you know, in our case on Seedlegal startups find our company, hopefully love us and the stats show that they do and then they grow with us.

So if we can, as they grow their businesses, offer them more products and things that they'll want for a growing business, you know, initially the core business and then slightly more adjacent, then that's great for us and great for them. So as the business grows from two people to 10, 2200, you know, they keep looking and go, amazing, you've got the feature I need. And, you know, when I've seen now huge companies like Slack or HubSpot or others, when we started out,

their features were a lot more basic and I would wake up and go, I've only slack had this feature and then guess what a few days later, slack's got this feature. So, you know, growing in response to things. Exactly. So, you know, thinking what your current customers want. But you know, at some point, you might max out that market segment and you have to look elsewhere. So then you're going to pick other ones. And now you of course, when you're going to pick these other things, you go back to the problem is

Em (38:29.266)
Read in your mind.

Anthony Rose (38:48.769)
Who chooses? And I love this concept of, you know, trying to find maybe it's a channeled funnel democracy. So ideas come from everywhere, but it doesn't mean that everyone's got an equal voice because there's no accountability. So have ideas and then filter them in a way that everyone knows and feels valued for their input, but it matches a company strategy. And I think that goes back to your point, which is your mission.

your strategy, your values, and then you can assess whether things fit that or not. I mean, sometimes it's a bit of a nebulous thing. If your values be nice to people, we'll kind of like, how does this fit it? But putting through that lens, and it might be, NPS, customer satisfaction, could be a good one. It could be something about obviously being good for the world and sustainable.

Em (39:31.922)
Mm.

Anthony Rose (39:44.065)
Clearly, if you don't have one related to revenue, you would be a very nice charity, but not a growing company. So there has to be a revenue one. And there might be one about competition or market share or others, you know, to drive the growth mindset or number of users and so on in the case of, you know, that kind of platform. So you're going to think about your core metrics. And the problem is just focusing on, you know, is it going to drive revenue? Where is it going to do X?

problem is if you're doing long -term bets they're never going to change your revenue next month so that means you by focusing too much on short -term revenue you're just doing little things which are great but they're not going to be big things in the future because big things are never going to pay off in the short term they're going to cost lots of money and only deliver later so you know it's never quite as simple

Em (40:22.863)
Hmm.

Em (40:36.399)
I like that you've brought that in actually because number one, it was like in seed legals, for example, maybe your product guy has had some feedback from somebody, maybe a bug came up and then they discovered something else and they brought something to the table. First of all, I wouldn't understand. How do you decide whether you're gonna actually pay attention to this, bring awareness to it and maybe implement a change? How does that work in your company?

Anthony Rose (40:48.929)
What?

Em (41:05.103)
at the level that you're at right now.

Anthony Rose (41:08.161)
Right, genius question. And I should lie on the couch and tell you how it is and how we got there. So, I mean, what I've observed for. Right, so.

Em (41:13.486)
I'm a coach. I talk like this.

Anthony Rose (41:22.657)
What I've observed, by the way, as a background is some companies are tech dominance and some of them are sales or marketing dominance. And what I mean by that, it means that when it comes to choosing product features, sometimes the sales or marketing team just have this big feature list and the tech team are slaves to building it. And so you end up with something that's more and more sales and marketing features.

And the tech team just never get a voice for the things that are important to them, upgrading to the latest tech stacks and ideas that the tech team would have, the marketing team would never have thought of, you know, using enabling technologies.

And some teams are tech dominated. So the tech team is running riot on we've upgraded to the latest authentication systems and we're now on SSL 18 .0, whatever it might be. And the marketing team's going, dude, what are you doing? I've got nothing to sell to customers. So how do you find a happy medium? And of course your customer support team are going, we're dying here. You know, fix the damn login or whatever it might be. So how'd you do it? So I think.

Em (42:07.341)
You

Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (42:24.673)
prioritization comes from taking a blended mix of inputs from all of these. And so, you know, what you usually end up is a Trello board filled with lots of tickets. And then you've got some, you know, hopefully you've got a nice democratic means that everyone who's got an idea can get their ticket on the board. And then some set of people are going to move the tickets from idea to backlog, you know, research and then, you know, you know, epic or doing.

and then in sprint and then done. And it's the choosing of which things to do, which is the interesting one. And so maybe your product team pick things. But that to me is interesting, but leaves it maybe it's pretty too devolved. Maybe the CEO picks things. I quite like that, but the rest of the team may not like it. So that's not really good. So the method we've come up with actually is that

Em (43:16.588)
Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (43:21.632)
We've got a G sheet where we take all the tickets, they go in a G sheet and then there's six sort of voting things. The CEO gets a vote, marketing gets a vote, sales gets vote, tech gets a vote, legal gets a vote because we're a legal company and I forget what the customer support of course gets a vote. And then that bubbles the things that we mostly agree with to the top.

And it doesn't mean that we slavishly pick that, but it's a great sort of filtering system. And now you look at the things at the top and firstly, if something doesn't make it to the top, one of the key things, by the way, with prioritization is not only to pick wisely what you want to do, but to explain to people whose things never get done, why it doesn't get done. They're going to feel unhappy. I keep asking for these features. Nobody does it. And so if somebody

sees that their request isn't happening, you know that you have to go and do some electioneering and go and hustle to get people to vote for your thing to go further up, or you discover actually you're the only person who cared about this, no one else cares. So I'm not saying this method we've got is perfect, but actually to me a good sign of how good it is, is if I go to our G -Sheet and broadly the things at the top of the list, because I've been in 350 things in the list.

Em (44:32.488)
Yeah.

Anthony Rose (44:47.137)
If the top 20 things was we've got three scrum development teams. So, you know, maybe they can between them, you know, each do maybe 10 things they focused on now or coming up. So maybe the top, you know, above the fold on the web page, if those broadly look like the most valuable things we should be doing right now, then I think it's a good thing. And if they're like random stuff, then either, you know, it's super important, we have to do the security fix for some reason.

The sales team don't care about it, the marketing team don't, but dude, we have to do this fix. But I quite, I don't know if it's the best of all possible worlds, but I quite like that. And then each of the groups within the company, it's like their champion who then goes and votes. And we've got a product manager whose job it is to go and add to the list and socialize. So every couple of weeks, I get a list of like 10 items to go and prioritize.

and then we see what's there and then the product managers will pick for their team the relevant ones and of course it's not written in stone that it has to be precisely like that because computer may give the wrong answer but broadly if you're working on something that's not on the top of the list you probably have to explain why and and of course that also means you get to buy into for example at Seedlegals we want to launch in the US soon

Em (46:04.231)
Wow.

Anthony Rose (46:10.689)
So we've got obviously no revenue from the US and won't have for some time. So it's never going to change revenue now, but everyone understands that this could be a great revenue driver later. So you'll see, okay, the legal team are in and this team's in and now that gets support. And I quite like that approach. And it feels also one that's inclusive, right? Because the support customer support team get a way to handle their requests as well. And by the way, the beginning of the funnel,

is we have a Slack channel, product ideas, and everyone in the company can have ideas and put them in the Slack channel. And of course, to make sure that, you know, people don't go, well, great, I put things in this channel and I'm ignored. We have one of the product team whose job is to take the items in the Slack channel. And obviously, if they fit the company goals, values, and so on, and you know, they're kind of in scope, then to take those, ticket them.

and then get them on that conveyor belt to being done and prioritized. So and I very much like that. And you get great ideas from across the company. And of course, everyone understands that not only is their day job doing in X, Y, Z, everyone is a mini product person and entrepreneur. And I think that makes life a lot more fun as well.

Em (47:14.087)
Yes.

Em (47:30.375)
Yeah, no, this is brilliant. I actually haven't heard of many companies who have been doing this actually. In fact, most companies should be doing this. And one second, I'm just going to pause a sec because I just need to make sure.

Em (47:59.382)
I've just disconnected a second. I'm putting a pin in it and remembering where we are. And we're still recording. Fab. Okay. Fabulous. now we've switched camera.

Let's turn the camera around. Bear with me. Hold on. I'm, no, wait. I can't pause, but we're going to keep recording.

Em (48:41.494)
you

you

Em (48:53.302)
So weird.

Em (49:01.934)
Not quite sure why the camera's not working.

Anthony Rose (49:05.665)
Okay. I'm in no rush. Leave it with you. Keep going.

Em (49:09.142)
It's I don't know if there's ever a time to do. If you have these USB brick things that you plug into your laptop and then they just decide to have a breakdown. Let me see. I might just change the camera around, it's fine. We can just use the laptop camera. It's not me, my face. Your face is going to be the one that's

Okay, here we go. I'm going to switch around.

Em (49:45.014)
there we go. So run the laptop one you can see the booth but it's fine we're ad -libbing. I quite like this angle actually. So I'm gonna have to not turn this way around. We were talking about

Anthony Rose (49:58.305)
Your continuity is going to be, your continuity is going to be weird. Suddenly there's going to be this big microphone in shot. Okay.

Em (50:03.83)
Yeah, I'll drop something in, don't worry. Guys, if you're listening, we've just changed camera. We had a bit of a technical output, but we are fine now. So where were we? We were talking about, and we're going to edit all this out, don't worry. When it comes to this amazing product list that you've got.

I wish that we had had this channel of, like you said, inclusivity, this feeling that I'm not just working for a salary here. I'm actually having a huge impact on the company. And the way that you're prioritizing is like you mentioned, it's like, you've got to go and hustle and get your ideas out there and talk and make sure that people understand why you want this idea to go ahead. Now, as part of this, it's a ton of communication, right? Number one.

the communication that this is happening in the company. How did you explain that actually? How do you, I'm going to stop layering questions, but how do you introduce things like this into your company? What's the internal comms like?

Anthony Rose (51:08.609)
think the idea at Seedlegals, you know, we're a startup that's designed to help startups. And turns out lots of people study law and then want to work for Seedlegals because they don't want to work for a law firm. And I still insist, even though we're 160 people, on doing the final interview with everyone.

And I explain in the interview, and you'll see why I'm going slightly off -piste here, that the interview is as much for them to ask me questions as me to ask them questions. But I also explain that my goal at Seedlegals is I think a lot of people joining our company are going to be founders, entrepreneurs themselves. And my goal is to help them be founders, because this is the best place in the world to learn the art and craft of a founder, because you're talking to thousands of founders. Hopefully not be a founder too soon, but...

But anyway, with that in mind, having done the interview for each person and explained that I'd love to help them be a founder themselves, of course, I need to act in that way afterwards. And the first way is to go well, as an entrepreneur, you're going to have ideas. So why don't you be able to be the aspirant founder yourself within our company and have a channel for your ideas and

And that sort of sets everything. And the other thing is I also explain when you hire somebody, you can hire somebody who's good at doing a task. You need somebody to code something, you know, seven years of Java, whatever, you give them tasks and they do it, which is great, but a bit boring. Much better that somebody doesn't do exactly what they're told and rather questions the underlying goal and also takes the initiative to do things themselves.

So you might have somebody on customer support and people periodically ask some question. Well, instead of, you know, trying to deal with an issue, wouldn't it be great if you could come up with a solution? So it could sometimes be very complicated, right? Or sometimes it's really simple and better hint text or the chat bot does something or maybe use AI to do something these days. So how do you enable each person to be a mini products person and to come up with a solution?

Anthony Rose (53:24.897)
And so the first step is to make it easy and visible for everybody. So you might post in our Slack channel. And then of course you'll get upvotes and you'll get emoji and rockets and like, yeah, I was thinking of that as well. And then to encourage that, even though as CEO, if it's something I can do, I'll personally code that, you know, that evening. Sometimes it's as simple as a hint exchange. Obviously I'm not going to do the complicated things.

Em (53:47.349)
Wow.

Anthony Rose (53:51.649)
But sometimes they're really easy. Hey, I'm using the feature on the platform and it hasn't told me that I need to do X. Okay, great. I'll just update that tonight. And then everyone gets into the vibe of actually we're all product people. And I really like that. It keeps life much more fun. And I think it's also much more valuable for the company because it's getting all of these inputs. And then of course that creates a separate problem that if you've got lots of inputs, then how do you nicely prioritize?

Em (54:06.548)
Wow

Anthony Rose (54:19.649)
Now there's one thing which I've learned that also I wish my younger self would have known, which is that for about 30 years of my career I was always really frustrated that the list of things on your to -do list was much longer than the things you could actually do. So you've got your Trello list or wherever you keep your product backlog or GitHub and maybe you've got like 300 items, but you can only do

10 items a week and the list is getting bigger. I would see this as a massive failure to, you know, have enough velocity. Maybe we need to raise more money to do more things. Now, actually, I see the things on the backlog list as liberating. Because what you're doing is you're picking from all the things you could be doing, the 10 most important ones, you know, each week or month or whatever, and you're just going to focus on those. So the fact that something's on the list on the backlog list,

isn't a failure to do it, it just means it wasn't the most important one. So I actually see it now as a kind of deliberation. My colleagues need a bit more mentoring to get there, but I quite like that approach. And so again, if you just focus on the most important ones at this time, it might turn out there was something, you know, actually, I look in GitHub, the tickets that I put

Em (55:27.381)
Haha

Anthony Rose (55:43.841)
from 2019 that are still not done. And one part of me goes, that's outrageous. It's terrible. Even as CEO, my own requests are not being done. And another part of me goes, actually, that's brilliant. Obviously, it was not as urgent as I thought it would be because five years have gone by and the company's grown quite a lot without that. So clearly, it wasn't really important. Anyway, we've morphed from people into product, but that was a lot of fun.

Em (55:59.765)
Mm -hmm.

Em (56:07.765)
Yep. Yep.

Em (56:12.374)
No, but it's very relative because anybody who's leading the team, building a business, this, honestly, I speak to a lot of founders. This is one of the biggest challenges. What do I work on first? And then the next one is, how do I, once I know, how did I then create a culture of frameworking, SLPs, prioritization? And I, as an entrepreneur and as someone who's led teams and...

and I lead myself and my little small team. I've played around with this for years. Like I had, what is it? Eisenhower's quadrants. I played with like ABC prioritization, like tons of stuff. I found something that works really well for me. And this is the thing, everybody's different. Your brain works in different ways. Your focus, your concentration is so different. I do a 12 week cycle. I work in sprints for myself every day, three tasks max. And that's how I work.

But the reason I'm able to make those decisions is because I know why. I know exactly why each task, sorry, I know exactly what each task is going to contribute to. And I also know that this is incredibly hard to thread into the company or a company. So I'm really interested in how you thread that why through and do you have any tiering? And what I mean by that is, mine's very basic style. It's money now.

money maintenance, money later. And then my why is a bigger why. I know that I want to impact so many other female founders and leaders. I'm interested to know what's the why of the company internally and how do you tier it?

Anthony Rose (57:55.937)
That's a great point. And I think, by the way, the prioritization method that's going to work for your company is going to firstly evolve as the company grows, right? So when you're three people, you don't really have much of a priority problem. One person is going to be coding, one person is going to be selling, and one person is going to be, you know, fundraising or something. It's pretty simple and doesn't matter kind of what the priority because

Em (58:13.366)
Exactly.

Anthony Rose (58:17.569)
Bob is working on all of it anyway. And the other thing, so it morphs with as the company grows. The other thing is going to be very dependent on the personalities. It might turn out your CEO has no interest in product development, but is great at fundraising and will not be interested in that as long as the business is growing. It may turn out you've got a really strong product manager. It may turn out the CEO is all over products. It may turn out that your marketing team is really dominant or you're

Em (58:19.862)
You

Anthony Rose (58:47.105)
tech team is really dominant. So you should look within your company to see either what works or maybe what you want to shift. And then coming to your other point about, you know, money now or money later. And I think this is a fascinating one because, you know, different people in the company are going to have different views. Your sales team who often

You know, get a remuneration of combination of salary and bonus and bonus for hitting sales targets. They would love to have more stuff to sell. Now, if you tell them you've got stuff to sell in a year's time, maybe if it takes off, then it's no good. But on the flip side, you've also got strategic things. You've got competitors. You want new markets. So how do you balance this? If you just listen to the sales team, it'll always be money. Now, if you just listen to maybe the CEO, it'll always be

Yeah, pie in the sky things later. And if you don't have money at any point, because you're always chasing later, you're going to be running out of money or fundraising forever. So I don't know if there's a particular answer, but I think it might go to those bets. And the majority of things you're doing are probably going to relate to, you know, the service in your current customer base, which is more relates to money now and more money soon.

and the braver bets will probably relate to money later. Of course, it also varies on the company stage, because if you have no money and you're just starting, well, obviously, 100 % of what you're doing is the big bet for money later. And it also depends on how fast your business is growing at the moment. So if it's growing, doubling year on year, you don't need to necessarily be focused as much on new things. And if business is flat or revenue isn't there, then you have to be

much more aggressively pursuing new things or figuring out why your current thing isn't working. Are you needing more features? Is it your website messaging that's wrong? Do you need to do more marketing? Is it a competitor? Is it price? So, you know, into this mix, of course, you start with what's working and what's not. What do you want to do more of? And then where do we go from product from there? That sounds easy to say, but much harder to do.

Em (01:01:01.621)
Yeah, yeah, no, I think you've brought up some really interesting points, especially the everyone has different priorities in the business, especially when you're a company of your size. And how do you keep everyone happy? How do you communicate something that you know might conflict with somebody else's goals or values or whatever? So that's really interesting. I feel like we should just do another podcast on this. This this part. But.

Anthony Rose (01:01:22.209)
By the way, I joke with product people that the goal of a product person is to figure out whether it's best to keep one person really happy and everyone else really unhappy or to minimize unhappiness for the most number of people. Because that's essentially what you're doing. You've got lots of things that people want and you can only pick a small number.

Em (01:01:41.205)
Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (01:01:47.969)
Are you trying to pick fairly, which is nice, but actually strategically may be disastrous? Or are you picking the person who shouts the loudest, or are you picking the CEO or whatever? That's kind of the game or what your customers want, which is obviously valuable and you can't ignore, but maybe short -term is not strategic. They're not thinking about the class of things that you've thought about that they haven't thought about yet.

It is, you know, I'm learning as much as everyone else is and I pretend to have the answer, but delighted to share what we've been doing.

Em (01:02:24.725)
Yeah, brilliant. There's so many different angles I want to go down, but we only have so much time. I'm going to bring you back on and we're going to answer these questions. But I do want to touch on, because this is something that comes up a lot, is...

And actually all my clients ask me this question, which is, what do you do to like keep up the energy? How are you always energised all the time? And it's funny because as founders or as entrepreneurs or whatever, you do sometimes feel like you have elevated energy. You do also feel like you've had a plug pulled out of you sometimes. We like to put ourselves forward with the energy part most of the time. And so I'm interested to know how do you keep your energy?

How do you use that to motivate other people as well?

Anthony Rose (01:03:09.217)
Well, firstly, I think some people are just generally optimists and some are pessimists. I'm just born optimist. You know, anytime there's a problem, it's not a problem. It's looking for a solution. So the that's just me.

Em (01:03:16.149)
Mm -hmm.

Em (01:03:20.565)
Yes.

Anthony Rose (01:03:23.905)
You know, you may have other people that seem who naturally the pessimists and maybe matching an optimist and a pessimist is good because the optimist will drink too much of the kool -aid, want to do every crazy thing. The pessimist will say no to everything and never do anything, but the combination might be about right. But in terms of energy, I think I'm not saying it's right, but I love and thrive on people using what I've built and my team have built and loving it.

Em (01:03:37.013)
Hehehehehe

Anthony Rose (01:03:53.793)
And I think this started back in my Kazaa days. I was with Kazaa, the music file sharing company. And I mean, on a good week, 16 million people would install the app. So when you woke up in the morning, it was like a million plus new users.

And this meant that every little thing you did to move a button up or make it more intuitive or reduce this bug or something would be magnified. This little bug, if like one in 100 people has this bug, there's like 10 ,000 people tomorrow who would have this bug. So you get into this routine of a drug of waking up and seeing the number of people who've used your app. And it's, you know,

It really is a drug. And if it's like only a half a million, it's like a down a day, you know? So and then, you know, I moved on to iPlayer and that wasn't tens of millions, it was millions of people each day. And then you'd look at how many of them had buffering problems or whatever. And of course, you'd look at your NPS scores and you look on Twitter, you know, people saying, love iPlayer, it's like great. And if somebody says it's not, then you're going to be immediately on to why. And to me, it's that energy that

that really fuels me. And it's illegal. It's obviously not millions of users because they're B2B, they're startups. But it's tens of thousands. And, you know, when I see when people write to me, going, love what you're doing, or in founder groups, you know, someone asks a question, it's like, I know, just go to see legal. It's like to me, that's like my drug. And, and when our customers love because I'm obsessed with, you know, with customer awesomeness.

Em (01:05:23.317)
Yeah.

Anthony Rose (01:05:30.881)
And that to me, now it doesn't mean it's the right thing as a CEO, but that drives the culture and of course there's team awesomeness as well. And I think if you remove that feedback loop, I would have a lot less energy.

Em (01:05:47.829)
Hmm.

Anthony Rose (01:05:48.161)
But that's what I strive for. Other people, of course, have very different things. Our tech team, I'm sure, loves something that compiles beautifully on the first attempt. But that's what turns them on. So you're going to figure out where you sit in the scheme of things in your company based on the things that turn you on. Also, I love building things. I love going from an idea where you have no idea if it's going to work or not. It's the uncertainty.

Em (01:06:04.949)
you

Anthony Rose (01:06:16.065)
that actually is the exciting part and then building it is the resolution of that is fun, whereas others are going, my god, this is uncertain. We don't see. Yes, let's go do it. And as you can see, I'm usually pretty enthusiastic and quite passionate about the things we do. So and then hopefully that's infectious across the team as well.

Em (01:06:25.621)
Mm -hmm.

Em (01:06:32.885)
Yeah.

Em (01:06:37.813)
Well, it definitely is infectious. And I don't know how much you know about energy and frequency, but my belief is that separateness is an illusion and that the way we show up, the energy, the frequency we omit will impact to the people because energy and mass can be frequency and mass at the same time. Anyway, that didn't make sense. But the thing is...

When you show up in that way, other people will also be elevated to another level. And it just comes back around to leadership. How you show up is everything. How you show up to your customers, your team, your home life, your social life, whatever. If you're bringing that energy, at some point, other people will be like, aware of their energy, at least, if that makes sense. And I think it's so important as a founder to just come on, we're going to do this. And you were telling me a bit about

dopamine reward system I think you've got going on.

Anthony Rose (01:07:31.265)
Exactly. Now, it has to be said. So firstly, by the way, I completely agree that, you know, the founders energy will trickle through to everything and people mimic the founders for better or for worse and pick up on their tone of voice and what is acceptable behavior and things like that. So it's super important, you know, having enthusiasm and energy.

is easy when things are going well. But when things are not going well, this is, I think, one of the real problems, which is, you know, if you pitch up to work and you know you've got limited runway left, or whatever it might be, or you, you know, some internal conflict or whatever, and you're down, that's not really the go. But then the question is, how can you fake everything being awesome? And then it turns out, it's not awesome at all.

And for you, there's an internal conflict. So this is one of the challenges that I think you have to master as a founder. And I think one of the interesting things is, you know, looking within to see how well or poorly you are doing as a founder. And the things, you know, most of the things are in your control, right? The product, the people, whatever. And then occasionally there are perturbations to the system that challenge you. And the one I think that, you know, challenge all.

founders and leaders was when COVID came along. And because you had no idea what to do. But you can't go in, you know, to the team going, wise one, what are we going to do? And you can't go fucked if I know, they're gonna go, we'll find somebody else to lead. But you can't also, you know, bullshit and go, yeah, it's gonna be fine. We're gonna do this because you don't know the answer. So how do you sort of wisely

Em (01:09:03.893)
Mm -hmm.

Em (01:09:07.701)
Mm -hmm.

Em (01:09:12.501)
Yep.

Anthony Rose (01:09:14.657)
you know, steer away through things. And you can also look at the people in power in the government and going, are they doing a good job? Or are they doing a terrible job? As the case may be, and how can I, you know, bring sufficient certainty and a path when I don't really know the way any more than you do? But I but saying I don't know the way isn't acceptable. So I have to have some path.

even if I don't have all the answers or know all the information, I have to take the best guess. And of course, there can always be a plan B. And then the question is, do you even have to talk about the plan B when we're not? So I mean, you know, okay, team, the good news is, you know, we've got millions in the bank, even if business is down for a while, we don't need to lay off anybody. But you know that if business is down for too long, then that may change. But

Em (01:09:45.109)
Mmm.

Anthony Rose (01:10:07.361)
Do you have to mention it or not? So you've got all these quandaries to talk about. I mean, in our case, we were in the fortunate position that, you know, we did have cash in the bank and business wasn't down. It was down a little bit, but not greatly. So that other companies had much harder problems to solve in this space. And that's why I think we're, as the leader, you have to look within and go, am I doing well here? What can I do better?

Em (01:10:10.453)
Yeah.

Em (01:10:32.182)
Mmm.

Anthony Rose (01:10:32.833)
What do I need to do if I don't know the answer and it's well outside of my comfort zone?

Em (01:10:38.839)
Yeah, and it comes back down to this being able to have the resilience to keep going and look at, like you said, looking into yourself and tapping in what's going on with me. How do I need to show up today to make sure we keep moving forward? And I was talking about this on my Instagram, talking about how do you lead through change when you don't know the answers? So it's really funny that you're mentioning this and it's admitting I don't know all the answers right now, but what I do know is this, this and this. And so...

It's transparency, isn't it? It's being able to be that person, this solid rock, if you want to call it, in the face of all the ups and downs of business life.

Anthony Rose (01:11:19.457)
Exactly. In many cases, you don't know the answer, right? In most cases, you don't know the answer, but to not have any answer is not acceptable. You know, one of the things you learn quickly as a founder is you have to make decisions. If you don't like making decisions, don't give up your day job. You should not be a founder because making not making decisions is basically death for a startup. You have to make decisions and most decisions you have imperfect information. You know, we want to launch a new

Em (01:11:24.054)
Yeah.

Em (01:11:37.366)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, exactly.

Em (01:11:43.99)
Yeah

Anthony Rose (01:11:49.364)
territory. Will it work? I've absolutely no idea. I can't say for sure. Should we not try it at all? Well, not trying it, of course, is safe, but doing any safe things, the company is never going to go anywhere. So you have to pick a certain level of braveness. And now going back to our early conversation about raising VC money, you figure out how brave and how dangerous you want to play. And somewhere in this scale will be, you know, the company.

Em (01:11:52.983)
Mm -hmm.

Anthony Rose (01:12:17.377)
bright for you and hopefully your team and what type of investment and investor money you should raise that matches that.

Em (01:12:24.886)
Yeah, definitely. Okay, we could go on forever here. There's so many things to talk about. Could go in different angles, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to pop us into the bubble instead. Very fun, silly questions to just get people to get to know you a bit under non -leadership, non -worky side. And I just like to do it to elevate the mood, which we've already got an elevated mood. We're great, but let's pop into the bubble.

What we're going to do is I'm going to ask you fun silly questions and I just want you to answer one. Coffee or tea?

Anthony Rose (01:13:01.921)
Coffee. One.

Em (01:13:04.086)
Yes, love it. Perfect. What music makes your heart sing? So, ooh, okay, we can get into that later. I like this. And if you had all the money, all the resources in the world, what would you be doing?

Anthony Rose (01:13:10.049)
Wagner Opera

Anthony Rose (01:13:23.073)
probably exactly the same as I'm doing right now.

Em (01:13:26.391)
Love it. Wonderful. Thank you so much. It's been amazing. We've talked about so many things, investment, VCs, decision -making prioritisation. Is there anything that you'd wish I'd asked you?

Anthony Rose (01:13:42.593)
I don't think so. I think this is a wonderfully expansive discussion. Definitely going to give the viewer listener quite a lot. I don't know if it'll be in one segment or more, but hopefully it was valuable. And as you can see, I love talking about this class of things and I hope that in my small way, I can help founders on that journey to know upfront the things that will help save them.

Em (01:13:44.502)
Okay.

Anthony Rose (01:14:11.969)
time and issues later.

Em (01:14:15.766)
Love it. Thank you so much. And do you want to share where people can find you?

Anthony Rose (01:14:19.969)
Yes, you can email me Anthony at seedlegals .com or Anthony Rose on LinkedIn. And if you're looking for any information on the art and craft of being a founder, if you head over to the seedlegals .com website, go to the resources section. And there are lots of videos and articles often by me on any number of topics related to, you know, starting a company, raising investment, where to find investors.

you know, giving equity to the team and also things where I have done webinars myself with people who are domain experts on, you know, launching in the US or hiring marketing people or doing LinkedIn outreach and so on. All the things, hopefully, for your company, we and I would love to have information to help. And sometimes I'm the source of information and sometimes people I talk to are there to help when I'm not the expert myself.

Em (01:15:17.174)
Wonderful. That's an amazing resource. I'm going to link everything down below in the show notes. Thank you. Thank you so, so, so much. And I will hopefully we'll have you on again. Have a wonderful day.

Anthony Rose (01:15:21.921)
Amazing.

Thank you.

Anthony Rose (01:15:31.809)
Alright, thanks. You've got a bit of editing in the middle, but otherwise...

Em (01:15:33.206)
Bye.