Pauline 

Paul, can you tell me who you are and what are you known for?

Paul Stovell 

Uh, hi. Um, so I’m Paul Ovl, uh, founder and CEO of Octopus Deploy, uh, octopus.com.

Pauline 

And what does Octopus Deploy do?

Paul Stovell 

So we are a continuous delivery company, so we focus on deployment automation, um, all the things involved in helping companies ship working software into production.

Pauline 

And, um, just so we can zoom out a little bit and understand how Big Octopus deploy is, uh, what’s your turnover at the moment or what status do you have claim to?

Paul Stovell 

So we are just crossing 80 million US dollars. So not sure. Exchange rates haven’t been, uh, that great lately, but yeah, north of a hundred million Australian.

Fantastic. Um, we’re about 330 people, uh, spread around the world. Big r and d, uh, in Australia and New Zealand, um, and Israel through an acquisition that we made recently. And then, uh, sales marketing kind of spread around the world, um, support and so on. We have about 4,000 customers, mostly in North America and then Europe.

And then probably Australia’s about 10% of our business, so pretty geographically distributed revenue wise. Wow. Um, and our, and our customers range from, you know, global two thousands through to SMBs and pretty much everybody in between that has a software team.

Pauline 

Fantastic. Congratulations on reaching that scale.

Paul Stovell 

Thank you.

Pauline 

Um, now tell me where I can see a beautiful, um, what looks like a octopus tentacle behind you. I assume that’s your offices. Where are you based?

Paul Stovell 

I am. So, uh, so we live in Brisbane, in Queensland, and uh, we haven’t, we have a couple of offices around the world. One’s in Israel, and then the other is, uh, is here in Brisbane.

Um, we did this space, uh, actually it was during COVID. We decided we needed to get a new office. We’re a fully remote company, interestingly, so everybody works from home almost all the time. But there’s something special I think about having a, a headquarters and a place to come to. So, uh, yeah, during COVID we negotiated a lease here, and then because we got such a good deal, we spent the money that we saved on a big tentacle in the middle of the office.

Pauline 

Oh, it’s hilarious. So obviously, um, very entertaining and I’m sure, um, people feel very connected to the octopus. Um, when they come into work. How big is the office and why did you, when everyone was deciding to leave the office spaces during COVID, you decided to go in. What changed that?

Paul Stovell 

Yeah, we’re a little bit, uh, contrarian, aren’t we?

Um, so when we started the company, we started with, uh, like working from a library at, at the beginning. So we would go down to like the city, um, uh, Brisbane City Council library. We would work from there kind of every Wednesday. And then otherwise, people were working from home most of the time. And then at some point around 2014, we got a small office.

There was something about like, you know, I think we’d probably employed five or six people by then. And we thought, okay, we’re becoming a real company. We should get like a real office, right? ‘cause that’s what real companies do. And then we found actually, like going into the office every day wasn’t actually really helping productivity, let’s just go back to what was working, which was people working from home and just coming in sort of once a, once a week.

Um, and so we stayed in that office, that office fit about 12 people, and we stayed there for like seven, eight years. Um, at like, the company got to probably a hundred plus people by the time we moved out of that office. Wow. Um, because no one was. In there all the time. And so, yeah, so I think actually during COVID, I think a lot of people were discovering remote work for the first time and I think probably falling in love with a lot of the benefits of remote work, whereas, you know, we’d been doing it for so long that we also saw some of the positives of occasionally getting together in person and felt there’s, there is still value in having a space that people can come to.

Pauline 

I love that. So that’s a good segue into, um, you being 13 years old, so obviously 13 years old and, um, celebrating this year. Uh, well done and I can celebrate as well ’cause River City Labs is also 13, uh, years old, one of the labs that I head up. Um, but obviously the ecosystem has changed for building startups and, uh, in Australia over time.

And you started off in a library. Uh, so what’s the differences that you’re seeing between starting a business back then and now with the ecosystem?

Paul Stovell 

I think the ecosystems definitely, I would say, you know, bigger. Uh, more capital available to people starting than, than it was back then. I think back then it didn’t feel like there were too many options and, and there wasn’t as much, I think, of a supporting network around it as well.

I think also the, the visibility of it, like, uh, when, when Octopus was starting, I don’t think it sort of felt like, uh, raising money to build a business is something that people do in America, but not something that we do here. Yeah. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing actually, because it kind of meant that we.

Picked a particular path that went down. And I think it was also a little bit of a timing related thing too. Like if I remember when I was coming up as a software engineer, I taught myself to code when I was 17, started to get really into the software industry. And this was kind of just following like the.com crash.

And so venture capital had poured into it at that time in the lead up to the two thousands. And VCs had this reputation of investing in companies firing the founder, CEO, and putting a a grownup, CEO in charge, right? And these businesses would, would always fail. And so there was like a, I think a, at that point, following the.com bus, like this, real lack of trust in investors and particularly venture capital, early stage venture capital.

And so then that, that was like the period where I was kind of getting quite inspired by let’s just build small software businesses that are successful and profitable and we don’t need outside investment. And I probably carried that perception of what venture capital was and what seed funding was for a very long time.

And then I think by the time Octopus started in 2012, I think again, we just sort of come out of the GFC and just pools of capital just weren’t so readily available. Anyway, it felt like a really good time to start a business and just focus on the fundamentals.

Pauline 

Okay. So let’s go into that. Um, starting the business.

So you have a co-founder with Sonya. So she’s not only your co-founder, but she is also your wife. So can you tell us a little bit about when Sonya came into the picture with you? Obviously you were starting to code a lot earlier than that, um, meeting. And at what point did you guys decide to go into business together?

Paul Stovell 

So, uh, we had, had met and been dating, um, for, for quite a while. Uh, and then around I think 2011 I had moved to London to work for, uh, credit Suisse there. And it was while I was working at Credit Suisse, just doing some contracting that I started to really work on octopus as a sort of, maybe one day this could be a business, but really it’s a hobby project.

I’m having fun, I’m gonna write some code and maybe some other software engineers will use it and they’ll think I’m really cool. Yeah, that was like the main driving motivator of, of the first parts of building it. And then, so I did that as like a nights and weekends project it, people started following it, they started using it.

Um, at some point we started to make it so you could buy a license key and customers would occasionally buy a license key for like $500. And I would take the day off work contracting and just spend the day. Working on the product, Sonia and I would talk about it and like, Hey, maybe this could be more than just a hobby, you know, maybe it could be something bigger, and then sort of around.

Uh, 2011, uh, Redgate software had been using Octopus during this time. And so they approached us to buy the company and, uh, they offered us, I think it was a hundred thousand dollars at the time. And so I phoned Sonya and I’m like, ‘cause I think by this time, uh, I’d probably proposed to her. Um, but she was still living in Brisbane.

I was in London and, you know, was thinking of coming, coming back, starting a life together. And, and I told her, you know, what they’d offered. And she was like, oh, I didn’t think you should do it. And I’m like, well, it’s a hundred thousand dollars. We should, we should totally do it. And she’s like, no, you’ve been talking about doing your own thing for a while.

I think you should, you should back yourself on it. So I phoned Redgate back and I said, no, we’re, we’re not going to sell. And they upped the price to 400,000. And I said to Sonya, no, like, now it’s 400. Like, we should totally sell. This is like life changing. And uh, but again, I think she kind of saw that. I think her worry was like, in the long run I would actually regret doing that.

And so she, um, obviously it wasn’t her decision, but I think just encouraged me to just back myself and make a decision that was more oriented towards the long term rather than the short term. Um, and so what we ended up doing was Redgate forked the code for Octopus. And so I spent six weeks at their office helping them, um, sort of make it red and, you know, help them kind of launch a new product.

And then I finished my consulting work at Credit Suisse and decided, right, I’m gonna, with the money that Redgate paid us to fork the code, uh, I’m gonna move back to Brisbane, you know, we’ll, uh, we’ll we’ll go and get married and start our life together. And then we had to decide what to do. So I moved back to Brisbane and it was like, I can either get another job, go back to consulting, contracting like I was doing, I was about 25 at the time, 25 years old.

And, um, I. And we thought, you know what, this octopus thing seems like it’s working. Redgate was certainly interested in it. You know, maybe we should actually, instead of allowing people to buy a license key, but then the product not require them to activate it ‘cause we’re too worried they wouldn’t, maybe we should see what happens if they do.

And so, um, so from that point, this is sort of in 2012, Sonia started, uh, we’d turned it into a, an actual company. Sonia started, um, doing all the financing, the books. Even started doing a bunch of the marketing and, and other stuff we were doing, I was working on the code and we started charging for licenses.

And within, in October of 2012, it made $10,000 in that, in that month. Uh, fantastic. Yeah. And, and like, that sounds like an overnight thing, but you know, we’d, I’d started this in like 2010, so it had about two years of nights and weekends effort to, um, to get it to that point working product. Yeah. Yep.

Pauline 

I love that.

So basically she’s like your advisor slash uh, guru that has your best interest at heart, but obviously has the commercial mouse to see something there and just, which you already knew that was there, right?

Paul Stovell 

I, I think I could definitely see that people were interested in it. I think the question was, you know, like.

Going, I, I was a software developer to go to actually turning something into a business was something I was always interested in doing, but also felt like, where do you begin on something like that? Like, it’s such a big journey. It’s such a hard thing to do, you know, I don’t even know how to register the a BN, you know, like where do you sort of begin on those things?

Whereas she actually had a finance background, so, so to her a lot of that stuff didn’t seem like the hard thing. Um, and so, and then I think just that, you know, the, the benefit of having someone in your life that believes in you, you know, it can never be, uh, underestimated. And I think it’s, we definitely work really well as a team.

And, and so we work together. She ran the finance function at Octopus for the next eight or nine years up until like, you know, we were hundreds of people. She was doing all the payroll herself. She was, uh, processing everything that was coming in, producing reports, you know, um, really kind of grew as, as the business grew and, and, uh, and also they’re not just that, I think.

There’s a huge part of like the octopus culture around profitability, not, not getting too crazy, not following, just because companies in Silicon Valley have ping pong tables. We need ping pong tables. Mm-hmm. There’s a lot of that kind of mindset that I think she just brought a real common sense element to it and I, and I think it’s been really good that we’ve been quite thoughtful about those things over time.

Pauline 

Yeah, I’ve listened to a few of your, um, sessions. Like I’ve attended an events that you’ve, um, talked at and, um, I replayed one of the episodes, um, from something Tech 2024, where you were interviewed by Rohit Bava on stage. Um, and one thing that you’ve repeatedly said throughout was, um, deliver value, profitability and deliver value that was to your customers.

Um, so I could definitely see that in the way you speak and obviously what you’ve just said with Sonya that it sounds like you only had sight to build a traditional business, not what you see obviously on the highlight reels in Silicon Valley and also in the startup ecosystem at large, where capital raising is sort of worshiped as a success measure rather than profitability.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. If you think of like, what do you have to do to get written up on the front page of a newspaper in this country, in like startup world, like. You have to raise money or you have to do something really bad. Like there are the two reasons that you’ll turn up in a, in a paper. And I think that’s unfortunate because I do think there’s so many great businesses to be built that would be great outcomes for the people building it.

If you focus on the fundamentals, and I, and I think like in, in the entire history of the company, uh, we’ve never created a pitch deck for investors, and which means I’ve never wasted time creating a pitch deck to investors, right? And I’ve never wasted time delivering pitch decks to investors. So every minute of effort that’s gone into building octopus has just gone into making a better product, providing better customer service, and doing the right things for our customers.

In that respect, I think like every customer we have is our investor, right? ‘cause that’s how we built the business. And so every customer, um, chooses whether we make the next funding round or not by renewing their license or not. And that’s the way it should be. Like if we disappoint our customers, we should be out of business, but we shouldn’t be out of business because my pitch deck didn’t follow the right format that a particular investor expects a pitch deck to follow and isn’t rehearsed well enough.

Yeah.

Pauline 

Yeah, I, um, could not agree more revenue first considerations. It’s a novel idea. Right? Um, okay, so before we go into the capital raising, ’cause I do wanna talk about that later. Um, I wanna go back to your comment about building and creating and you kind of knew you wanted do a business, but it was a little bit, you know, I dunno how to do an a, BN and things like that, that sort of stuff.

Now I had the luxury of checking out your blog, which obviously has not been updated for a few years. I’m sure you’ll go and update it at some point after this. But I had no idea. And I’ve obviously researched you a little bit that you are not only a builder of technologies, but you are a builder of many things, including household furniture.

I see. I think it’s your son’s bedding, um, that you built basically what looks like a tractor and you’ve got obviously renovations around your house, which is like, looks impeccable. So you’ve obviously been a creator and a builder from the beginning, and you later talked about in the blog that, you know, you, you actually started programming at 15, definitely self-taught.

And you built something that was not even public at the time with other open source web servers that they couldn’t do. And you did that in year 12. Um, so you’ve obviously had a tenacity, um, and curiosity and obsession, like obviously personal interest in technology and building. Um, where did that kind of come from?

Paul Stovell 

I think, uh, yeah, there is a part of it, which is. Curiosity and obsessive nature of just finding things really interesting and wanting to learn more about it. I, I think also coupled with like this sense of, if there’s people in the world who can do a thing and they’re humans, well I can do that thing ‘cause I’m also a human, right?

Like a, a huge underestimation of how hard things are. That actually sort of, I think, allows you to embark on some of these things. And that’s definitely. Being something I think I’ve gotten leaned into more and more over time. Like I think there’s a big part of life and building companies and just life in general, which is around the continued acquisition of skills and competence.

So like, you know, I think when I think about like my own personal identity now, there’s a, a big chunk of that that is like related to octopus and the, the company and the culture that we’ve built that I take a lot of pride in. But I also think there’s, you know, like at the moment I’m restoring a 1960s car and this started out as like, I.

Let’s buy the car and, you know, pay an expert to fix it and, you know, get it working. And then over time became, well, I could do that myself and I could do that myself. And how hard can that be? And so now I’m six weeks into a lot of the welding and replacing the sills and panel beating work and all the stuff that it takes, and I’m doing it all myself, doing it all with Sonya.

But it all just starts with like, how hard can it really be? You know? And then you find out and then you get through it and you, and, and you grow from there. And I think that’s a life in a lot of ways. Just, just how hard can it be? Take it on learner skill. And so if I look back, like that’s been the most fun thing about octopus.

I know how to run a marketing team. I know how to send a email campaign. I know how to prepare financial decks for investors. I know how to help customers be successful with things. I know how to fill in the Wisconsin State tax return. Just all this stuff that you just have to overcome as part of building a business.

And, uh, and the same is kind of true in, in life, just taking these things on.

Pauline 

Thank you for sharing that because I think that’s really valuable. And insights for emerging founders who are coming up and have a huge road ahead of them. You have to kind of enjoy the journey and those challenges and lean into those hard things, uh, because it’s not the result and it’s not the destination, it seems.

It it’s the, the traits that I’ve seen between founders who have been successful and those who are still building and, and some who have. Not succeeded is that persistence to actually get really interested in the hard thing, to overcome it more from a personal perspective, rather than just going, ah, it’s blocking me from my destination.

I need to get to, you know, this much MRR or this much RR. So it’s like that sort of, it’s, are you, yeah, it’s, it’s a personality trait. Um, would you say that’s true?

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, I mean, I know that schools talk about this a lot, but it’s this idea of a growth mindset that I think at some point you do really internalize, as, you know, when you start a a new task, it’s totally fine to be really bad at that thing.

And I see, like, I see this with my kids, right? Like they’ll, they’ll play a sport for the first time and they’ll complain, oh, I’m no good at, you know, table tennis or whatever. And it’s like, really? Like, you’ve never done this thing before. You’re surprised that you’re no good at it. Of course you’re no good at it, but guess what?

Like it’s only up from here. Keep learning. Like as long as you’re enjoying it, keep doing it and it’ll become just another one of the hundred things that you previously once weren’t good at and one day you are good at. And, and that’s, there’s so much joy that that comes from that. And I think too, there’s something about like.

There’s something I think fundamental, I suppose, to my sense of what it is to be a person or a man in the world, which is, there’s like competence. There’s something about competence at the heart of that. I’m not sure exactly what it is. And so becoming increasingly competent at as many things as you can be, I think is a sort of noble aspiration for its own sake.

Pauline 

Yeah, I agree. Like I think, um, some might call it enlightenment. So some people have the journey to get enlightened. Um, right. Uh, I’m definitely one of, I subscribe to that, but it’s more from the point of yeah, being able to hack myself, how, how can I be the best person that I can be and take advantage of the experiences this world has And then truly yeah, get excited about those hard things.

And when you like really overcome something, it’s like, shit, I just did that. That’s pretty cool. Yeah.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. And you stack those things on top of each other all the time and it just gives you more confidence to just try more things and, and to take bigger swings at things.

Pauline 

I love that you seem to have that outlook and obviously you’ve built a significantly large business.

Um, and obviously, you know, you’ve got the car that you are now, um, leveling up, but have you been doing that the whole time during building, like was the first one or two years like that as well? Did you have that balance of I need to do this in life as well as in building this thing?

Paul Stovell 

No, we did. I, I think it’s been a natural, uh, thing.

Um, I, I think in the, I, the reason I think I fell in love with software is like software. You never run out of stuff to learn. Like there’s always a, a new language to learn, a new framework, a new way of solving a problem, a new way of thinking about problems. And I think if that’s, if there’s a common trait, I think between the things that I’ve got really curious in and wanting to just obsess about and become good at, it’s, it’s things where, you know, when you are, you’re going to sleep.

I. There’s a problem that you need to solve tomorrow and you’re puzzling over it. So when I did, like we, uh, around 2016, we bought our house and it was this old Queenslander that we needed to do a lot of work for. And so we, we did what everyone does, which is you hire trades people. And then we had the experience that most people have, which is trades people don’t really care that much about the work they’re doing.

And it’s a bit of a, you know, sometimes you get good people and sometimes you don’t, and you start to look at the things they’re doing and think, you know, that doesn’t seem so hard. I could learn that. And, but these days with YouTube, you know, you can learn a lot of, you can become like fairly decently competent at a lot of skills pretty quickly by mostly because you make up for your complete lack of talent and skill by caring about the outcome and, and taking the time to do it right.

So, uh, let’s say, you know, we would do that when we did a lot of the house stuff ourselves in sort of 2016 to 17. And there was even a period I think in building octopus where like through 2017, I probably reduced my time to like. Working half time at Octopus and the other half making progress on the house and, and other things that we were doing at the time.

In that part of life.

Pauline 

Had you already, you had raised capital by then, obviously.

Paul Stovell 

Well, no. So, uh, no. So the first, uh, there’s, there’s really only been two investors in octopus. So one was, was Redgate in around Yeah. 2014.

Pauline 

Okay. Yep.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. But that, uh, that was actually, so what had happened is Redgate forked the code.

They made their own product, uh, and then we were competing with them, with effectively a similar product. And then we out iterated them. We just built way more features than they did during the next couple of years. And so they cried uncle and they approached us to sort of say, okay, we wanna shut down our product.

If you let us invest in Octopus, we can at least direct the customers. And we thought, well, this is kind of good. We get rid of our competitor, we get all their customers. Um, but in exchange they’ll have to be on our board. That’s a little bit annoying, but Simon seems like a nice guy, so maybe we’ll learn something from him.

‘cause Redgate was about 400 people at the time. Um, and, and that, and that turned out in hindsight to be been a really great decision. ‘cause Simon’s a wonderful person and I think he’s brought a lot of value to the business. Um, but it wasn’t done to bring capital into the business. The business never needed it.

We were just profitable from the beginning and, and stayed that way. But I even at that point when Redgate invested in it, there was no view that it would be much bigger than it was. You know, if it got to 10 people, 20 people, that would’ve been totally fine. Yeah.

Pauline 

Okay. So you taking a few days off to renovate, um, was not a problem from your board’s perspective at the time?

Paul Stovell 

No. No. And, and we, we were still majority owners then. Yeah.

Pauline 

I love that. Um, so back into that lifestyle and business, um, balances that you had, obviously you and Sonya, you’re married. You also were newly married, you’re building a business, and then you’ve obviously had some children. Yeah. Yeah. How, how was it balancing that out with both of you?

Paul Stovell 

It’s, uh, it’s never, it’s, it really is never easy. Like anyone who sort of makes it look easy, it, it really isn’t. I, I think, yeah, so during that period, you know, we, we renovated a house. We, uh, had two babies during the time of octopus and, um, you know, raised kids during that period and, and we built octopus obviously.

Um, plus probably a bunch of other stuff that came and went that we did through the years that kept us busy. And I don’t know if there was ever a point in time where we stopped and said like, we’ve got the balance right here. It was kind of more like a perpetual, keeping the plate spinning on all of the fronts.

I. But being able to lean on each other, I think was a, was a huge part of it. There’s, there’s definitely some challenges, like big, um, discussion at the moment, like around how parental leave or something works within Australia. But when you’re sort of a, a couple founding a business and you have a baby, there is no paid parental leave for it because you are paying for it.

Mm-hmm. And, uh, you can’t really afford to hire anyone to cover the work that, that they’re doing. So like, the night that, um, our, uh, our youngest was born, Sonya did the payroll the night before, like, because no one else was gonna do it. I couldn’t do it. I have the attention to detail to do it well. So, uh, so, you know, there’s just, just hundreds of stories and experiences like this where you’re just doing your best to make it all work.

And trying to find Yeah. Lots of moments to enjoy it along the way. Like I think one of the nice things we have is we’ve never thought about octopus as like a destination to get to. It was always just like, let’s kind of keep enjoying every step along the way.

Pauline 

Mm. It’s like your third child, maybe your first child.

Paul Stovell 

Very much and, and very much like a child in that, um, you know, like you can never give your children enough time. In fact, like the days where you devote the entire day for them tend to be the days they sort of misbehave the most. Right. They sort of need them most there. There’s never enough you can give them.

And the business is the same. Like, I could give 24 hours a day to octopus and it would not be enough. It, it would always want more. And, and so you have to sort of find, find ways to disconnect. That said, like, working together in building the business is one of, I think, the highlights of my life, like.

Marriage and a partnership is, is is sort of one thing, but then also to be sort of spending every working day together with the same problem in mind. And we are, we are two quite different individuals too. We, we have, um, very different ways of looking at the world and very complimentary ways of looking at the world and, and that also causes friction.

But I think together definitely, we, we sort of form up this superhuman that’s like, at least in my case, four times better than what I would be by myself. Yeah.

Pauline 

I love that insight into it being like your child, but you obviously have some detachment to it because you can set boundaries and not give it.

You’ve obviously balanced it and set boundaries there because you’ve recognized that. Yeah. The more you give them what’s gonna suck the life out of you

Paul Stovell 

sometimes, and there’s, and then sometimes like a child, it will not respect the boundary and misbehave, right? So you’ll get, like, you’ll, you’ll be on holiday and then you’ll just get this urgent thing from a customer or an employee or something that you just can’t.

Ignore. So there is, there is that element. It, it’s also a little bit like raising a child though, in the sense of, you know, like, uh, with our kids, we, we sort of look at it as we can see their intelligence and we can see their passion for things and we have no desired outcome of where we want them to get to.

But you can sense a potential and you want, you sort of feel it’s your obligation to push them to that potential. Love this because otherwise this, you’d be letting them down. Love this. And the company is exactly the same. Like there’s a sense of what the company’s potential could be and there’s a delta between the path that’s on today and what it takes to reach that potential.

And it needs to be a natural potential. It can’t be a sort of unnatural thing that you’re pushing it towards.

Pauline 

Mm-hmm. It sounds like you both have a very healthy objective view that you are raising. It’s a business, you are getting to profit. It’s an thing external to you, it’s not you. So whether you do this, whether you do another project and how you persist at it, obviously you’re gonna put everything into it. But at the, it sounds like you’ve got that healthy sort of space where if you had a trouble or a problem within it, you are not gonna sink at the same time ’cause you are so identified with it.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah, that’s right. I think not having your identity wrapped up in the outcome or the success of the thing is a really healthy place to be and not, not that, I wouldn’t say that’s a hundred percent. Certainly when we have days where you know, something isn’t going great in the business, you can’t help but also feel a bit personally down about that. Right, of course. Yeah. Yeah man, it’s really hard to distance. Yeah, well see. The most fun thing I enjoyed about software when I, when I first got into software, when I was a kid, is like every other thing I wanted to do as a kid, I needed money to do. Right? So if you said like, I’m gonna get into cricket. Well, okay, you’ve gotta go buy the equipment to play cricket. Well, I couldn’t afford the equipment to play cricket, so I just didn’t play cricket. And, and, you know, maybe I want to be, almost, almost anything you could think of. I wanna be a musician. Well, you have to go buy a guitar. I can’t afford a guitar. But then with software, like if, as long as you’ve got a computer, and by that, by that point in time, a lot of houses had computers. Everything else is free and unlimited. Like the only limit is your imagination and time. Hmm. Like, it’s, it’s probably the most purest form of that, right? Just the unlimited nature of your aspects to create stuff. Maybe the differences are like if you are creating movies or you’re creating some form of art, but those things still cost a bit of money to start. And, and every project costs a bit of money. Software doesn’t have that. You can build a massive business or a product that’s used by thousands of people with. Coffee as the only raw ingredient feeding into that. And that’s, so I love that about software. And then I think, um, octopus in some ways is like a really interesting canvas to sort of express yourself on. So, you know, you can sort of take things that you’re passionate about or care about, you know, my own experiences being an employee at places, and then thinking about what, what would it look like if I wanted to work at a company and, and how do I sort of manifest that in the company that I’m building? Mm. Um, like those are the things that it’s worth taking pride on. And those are the things that you can sort of couple to your identity and, and those things don’t really depend on what the ultimate outcome is either. You can be very proud of a company you’ve built, even if it turns out to be a total failure in the end.

Pauline 

Yeah. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Um, I wanna dive into a bit of building your product and getting started. And first part is, let’s go back to the very, very beginning, um, 2010. I think you started dabbling around in this. So building the product and getting started. Obviously you saw a problem, you’re working in the environment, we. I definitely know from firsthand, um, DevOps, thank goodness that it’s come around because there’s a lot of, um, improvements that needed to happen around that, um, sort of code management, release management. But at what point did you start dabbling around, had that sort of site, that this was a product that was needed and started bringing on users? And how did you go about doing that?

Paul Stovell 

So I had taught myself to program and then at some point joined a consulting firm and I was there for about five years. And then I sort of branched out on my own. It was spent some time at Credit Suisse and some other places, and being a young engineer, sort of coming in, particularly coming in as like a consultant, you know, technology, but that’s kind of all you really know and no one really takes you that seriously. So I learned very quickly, like as a, a 19-year-old walking into the Commonwealth Bank as, as the consultant here to help with, you know, some technology they were doing is that no one was ever gonna take me seriously. Unless I figured out what it was that they valued and how I could deliver it quickly. And so that kind of set the tone, I think for like the next five or six years of, of that work. And so every time I would start on a new engagement, there’d be a bunch of fundamental scaffolding that you would just try and get in place really quickly. I want source control, I want, um, daily builds, and then I need some way to get the thing I’m building into production or a test environment or something so that every single day I can show the person who’s paying me to be there that I’m making some kind of progress. And if I’m making the wrong progress, I can correct it quickly. And at the time, you know, those first couple of things, source control, you’d set up within a few minutes. The build system might take you a couple of days to get up and running, and then the deployment. Process at that time was so difficult. It was so hard to just ship anything to any kind of test environment. So Octopus was kind of really born out of that frustration. There was a lot of talk around continuous delivery, uh, a lot of talk around sort of build pipelines. But then deployment was kind of almost this afterthought actually, in my mind, the hardest thing. It was the most risky thing. It’s where people care about what’s going into production, who’s got control, who’s got access, the auditing that needs to happen. So to do any, any of this kind of stuff. Every company I saw was building their own deployment tooling to take care of that. And it’s funny, there’s so many people who work at Octopus Today who as part of their job application basically said, in my current job, I built. The thing that we used before we used octopus, right? ‘cause every company was just kind of building their own to solve this problem. So, um, I kind of built it to solve my problem. And there’s something around, like, as you build a product, when you build a product, you have a point of view on how a problem can be solved better. And so that becomes the thing that you embed in your product. Otherwise you’re just building someone else’s product, right? So you’re building, there’s some unique insight that you have and then you, you begin this conversation with the market. So in my case, I built the first couple of versions of it, took some screenshots, posted them to the blog that I was running at the time. And you know, I had this small audience of people who’d been following my blog as a T net developer for a while. And a lot of them commented, I think I got like 20 comments or something saying, Hey, this is really cool. This is solving a really valuable problem. And that was like a really nice signal to keep going. And a couple of the comments even suggested things that would be really helpful. And so then I would iterate on that, right? Take the ideas, embody those in the product, think deeply about them, express them in the product, um, and post something the next day or the next week, showing that progress. And so over a couple of years, just through that channel of blogging about it, showing a little bit of progress along the way, um, talking about the ups and downs, uh, people really kind of attached to it and, and bought into it, and I think wanted to see it be successful. Yeah.

Pauline 

So how did you bring on those users? Obviously they were people who were following. You were developers that could use the product or.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. Um, I think a lot of them either were in a position where they could just use the product or more likely sort of introduce it to someone on the team who would be the kind of person that would look after a thing like this. And then, so we bought the domain name octopus deploy.com. It was a thing you could download and install and uh, lots of people did that. And at the time I, I sort of felt like, ‘cause I actually thought about open sourcing it for a long time and I started to think actually for this to work it needs to be something that lots of people can use together. Like, it’s not a thing people are gonna run on their desktop, it needs to be a server thing. It needs really good documentation ‘cause it’s gonna be doing stuff in production and so it needs some kind of commercial model around it that allows that reinvestment into making the product better and better. And, you know, documentation and all the other things that just is really hard to do with open source. So, but at the time I also just wanted feedback on it. And so that’s why for the first couple of years I. There was no way to buy a license key, or if you bought one, the product never asked for it in the first place. ’cause I just wanted people to use it and just gimme the feedback and let me know how it could be improved. And so many current Octopus customers came through that process of just using it when it was free and then maybe feeling generous and buying a small license or something, and then growing from there.

Pauline 

Beautiful. Um, at what point did you decide to then, okay, right, we’re gonna register the business. Like what was the tipping point? How many users did you have at that point to go, okay, we start charging?

Paul Stovell 

Yeah, so in the time I was living in London and doing the credit suis stuff, and then we’d started that transition with Redgate when they forked the product. You know, by that point I think we’d probably sold. Eight license keys. Right. And each one was about Yeah, just eight. Mm-hmm. And each one was about $500. So this is not like quit the job kind of money. Um, but that’s because the product didn’t ask for a license key. So every one of those eight was somebody who just maybe felt sorry or just wanted to sort of buy a, you know, make a small donation or didn’t realize the product wasn’t gonna ask for a license key. I’m not sure.

Pauline 

And they loved your blog.

Paul Stovell 

And they loved the blog. Yeah, exactly. And so, um, and so then it was like that, that moment of moving back to Brisbane and thinking, okay, I am, I’m gonna have to start applying for jobs, but in the meantime, let’s change the product. So it asked for a license key because if we could turn it into a full-time business, that would be a really fun adventure to go on. Um, and so we did that. And that’s where I think, I never realized what the sort of. Pent up demand and the user base was like, ‘cause you couldn’t really measure it. ‘cause it wasn’t a SaaS app then. Yeah, it was a downloadable thing. So we had no idea how many people were using it or would be willing to pay for it. Um,

Pauline 

you did not do any sort of surveying out to see if anyone was using the product before turning that on?

Paul Stovell 

No. I, I think there’s a definitely, uh, you know, the Lean startup book kind of talks about a particular way of going about building a product and building a business or something that just never quite resonated with me. I think Octopus was very much, I’m a creative person and I see a better way of solving something that would, you know, I think would work better for me and maybe would work better for a enough other people to be worth investing time and effort in productizing, you know, let’s kind of see where that takes us. And then I think we were quite surprised when, when people just started buying it.

Pauline 

And you said you had, um, in your first month, 10,000 in revenue?

Paul Stovell 

We made $10,000 that month and then we made I think $8,000 the next month. $7,000 the next month, $9,000 the next month. You know, it just sort of stayed at that range and then it very slowly built up. So then by about, so from that point, you know, it was just me and Sonya and we probably did that. So from 2012 through to 2014, it was just the two of us. Yeah. Um, uh, we brought someone on as a contractor for a little while and it would just creep up. So like, it started getting to like $40,000 a month and you start to think like, gosh, could we employ someone else to work on this? Well, I don’t know how to employ people. That feels like a really hard thing to do. Right? Like, how do you do that? And um, but again, like how hard can it be? So we, we just started doing, started, right. I think, I think the, the worry was because we used to sell like perpetual licenses, it always felt like, okay, we sold $40,000 this month, but next month. Like, what if that was the last customer? Yeah. And there just isn’t any. And then after like 12 months of that not coming true, we thought like, okay, there’s enough money in the bank built up that if we did hire someone, ‘cause we saw it as this massive. Obligation that we would be taking on, right? Like, you don’t wanna hire someone and then six months later have to let them go because you didn’t understand your business well enough. We, we really felt the burden of that obligation, and so we were quite slow and quite deliberate in the decision to bring somebody on.

Pauline 

I, I just wanna track back to what you said about, um, you being a creator and building something that is solving your problem and, and you, you can basically refine that and you’ve got the benefit, obviously, of being, um, a software developer yourself to be able to do that and have really close insight. And you also worked in the environment. So that’s, that’s all the upside you get. But let’s not forget, and that this is more for the, um, founders who are listening to this, who are still coming up and building. Um, you actually had it out there in the market. You were testing and getting feedback. In fact, I think what you’ve showed through your blogs and in the earlier days and just your, your generals, like the general sense I get from you from watching your interviews and chatting to you prior to this is you have a, um, complete freedom and transparency in what you’re doing. You’re building publicly, like they say, build publicly, but you truly were building publicly because you were exposing everything and giving access to it.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. Like in those days, you know, we had, I had the blog where I was talking about what we were doing. We also had like a public roadmap and everything, which was pretty unusual at the time. And so like, I would. Bump into people at conferences and they would say, Hey, I recommended Octopus to our company, even though there’s this bigger competitor or something. Because out of the competitor we just can’t figure out what they’re doing next. Whereas you just have this public tr board where you’re putting all the stuff that you’re planning to work on next, and we see cards moving left to right. And like to me, there was just no downside or the downsides that people might feel about building stuff in public, I think are sort of overblown in their minds and don’t really come to fruition. Whereas like the upsides of it, there’s a lot of upsides for it. People just start to, I think, really latch onto what you’re doing. They wanna see it be successful. They want to have input in it. They’re glad when you listen to the input. Um, so that, and, and we’ve kind of tried very hard, I think to keep that model of transparency. We, we even have, uh. If you apply for a job at Octopus, before you apply, one of the things we encourage you to do is read our public handbook. It’s at handbook octopus.com, and it lays out everything. It lays out our compensation philosophy. It lays out how you get promoted. It lays out sort of the values and what we expect of people. It lays out when we talk about remote work, what does that do? Uh, when we talk about like, uh, how we think about politics at work, you know, all these things are just laid out in this public handbook, and it’s fantastic because people read it. And they either decide that we are a terrible company, they never apply, which is great. That doesn’t waste our time. Self-select. Yep. Yeah. They select out of it or they read it and they come to the interview with really intelligent questions that we can, you know, structure around and they know what they’re getting into. So there’s no downside to that. And it’s funny that more companies don’t do it because it’s a really effective recruiting strategy, I think.

Pauline 

Yeah. And I think you, like that’s recruitment strategy both for customer and employees. Right. So I think, um, there is a lot of fear that, you know, oh, they’re not gonna like what I want, or they’re not gonna come back. I always try and tell, um, companies that I work with is, you know, I. Okay, how big is your market? How many customers do you potentially have? Okay, you have a few million, right? So if you go and burn the first a hundred, you are gonna cry over it. No, you’re gonna keep going. And the thing is, it’s all about how you do it. Like you have a humility about you. And I can imagine, and I can see the culture of octopus deploy, that the intention of what you’re trying to do to solve their problem earnestly is really felt. So really, yeah, there there is no downside. And yeah, if you kind of make a few people’s life uncomfortable for a period of time, I’m sure, and during that earlier days that you would’ve been super focused and getting the feedback and turning it around.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. Yeah. I think like the product that you build it, it evolves through this conversation with the market, right? Where you are, um, trying things. And I think, I think this is where like product managers get this wrong sometimes. I think product managers can spend a lot of time interviewing customers and asking questions, but they often won’t show up with. A concrete, like, here’s the straw man of what we’re actually thinking of building. Give us feedback on the thing. They’re sort of, they hesitate to do that for some reason, whereas like, to me, that’s actually the most valuable thing. I don’t wanna hear what the vision is. Like when I, when we meet with vendors, I don’t wanna hear about the vision, I don’t wanna hear about the kind of problems you’re interested in solving. Show me the Figma and I’ll tell you if I think the Figma is gonna solve my problem or not. That’s so much more interesting conversation to have.

Pauline 

I agree. Completely agree. And um, I used to work with product managers and uh, UX designers and uh, it was definitely a pain point is like, yeah, let’s just actually show them what we are thinking, because most of the time, like, like the books say, is your customer doesn’t really know the answer other, otherwise they would’ve solved it already. So you’ve gotta have some point of view and throw it up against the wall.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. Yeah. And at some point you’ll, once you talk to three or four of them, you’ll start to hear those common themes anyway. At that point, it’s best to just put something out there and be willing to be wrong, be willing to told it’s a bad solution, but at least it’s like, it’s a starting point. Yeah. Great

Pauline 

insight. Thank you. Now you, um, mentioned that you had raised from two investors, so obviously Simon, who’s amazing, I’ll have to meet him one day. Um, who was your first one? Uh, and that was not obviously intentional, but your competitor gave up and came on board, um, the second time you raised, um, when was that?

Paul Stovell 

So we, at that point, you know, from 2014, Redgate sort of joined the board and then we, we just ran it as a slowly growing, and I say slowly, like we grew 30 to 50% every year, basically from that point forward. Uh, and then around 2020 we started hitting 20 million r

Pauline 

Wow.

Paul Stovell 

Through that sort of bootstrapping product led growth model that, that we’d been doing. And, and this was sort of around the time investors really started to, to notice us. And so I think instead of us putting pitch decks together and going to talk to investors, we actually had the opposite thing starting to happen. So you start to get investors reaching out, wanting to learn more about it. And the way a lot of that would come about is investors who invest in companies will often, you know, talk to the CTO, talk to other people, like, as part of their diligence, they’ll ask them what kind of products they use and they just heard octopus over and over and over. And so they started to, you know, reach out to our, and, and, and want to talk. And, you know, we would talk to a couple of them, but most of the time we just wouldn’t answer the emails and we wouldn’t, uh, take it any further because. We had a profitable business that was growing well, that was generating, like we were growing 30 to 50% every year and generating like 30, 40% free cash flow as well. Mm-hmm. And it never felt like we had the kind of problem that you need capital to solve. So in that case, what’s the point of bringing in a investor on, it’s just gonna be, you know, mismatched expectations. And so we ignored most of them, or, you know, politely declined to meet a, a lot of them. And then around, yeah, 2020. I think the thing that had stood out to me is over the, you know, six, seven years leading up to that every single year in order to keep growing and sort of push the company to reach towards that potential of what it could be, we were having to get a lot better at a lot of different things. So like in the early days, uh, we worked on the product, we had terrible design. It was like purple and green. You know, the user experience wasn’t great. The, uh, support. There was like no support experience in the early days. Like if you emailed every Friday, I would go and answer the emails, but I didn’t really feel like answering them the other days ‘cause I was enjoying coding. So like if you contact a support on a Monday, bad luck wait till Friday, you know? And then, and so every year we had to get better, like significantly better at, at everything. So, you know, you hit this point where having good product gets you to a couple of million a RR but if you’re not providing good customer support, um, you’re gonna plateau there. And so to get through that plateau, you have to kind of get good at doing customer support. You have to start to get good at marketing, you have to start to get good at sales. And so definitely around around 20 million a RR we are feeling this sense of there’s doesn’t seem to be a reason this thing won’t keep growing, which surprise us. Actually. It took me a long time to feel comfortable with that notion. But if we are gonna keep growing, there’s a lot of new things we’re going to have to become good at. Mm-hmm. And. Maybe it is time to bring on people who have done this before, have been through this journey as long as we are aligned around some of the fundamentals, like being profitable over the long run and, you know, building a great business and everything. Um, and so at that point, uh, I, I actually went through a bit of a, a reflection journey of when we started Octopus. The goal was never to build something big, and yet every year it just kept becoming bigger and bigger. And the reason investors were so interested in us is I think they could see how big the TAM is. And, and I think to give. To give you a sense of like what that is. I think if you imagine every company in the world has a software team. 90% of the bugs that those software teams create, they get tracked in a product called Jira from Atlassian, and Jira makes $2 billion a year just tracking bugs by software teams who build software and then they use Datadog, which they spend $3 billion collectively on to monitor the applications they’ve deployed. And so the idea that the product that is deploying those things in the first place, the whole continuous delivery pipeline in between the bugs being tracked in Jira and the application being monitored by Datadog wouldn’t be doing billions of dollars of a RR is actually quite hard to believe it. It makes sense. There would be a really large business doing that and you know, with 20 million a RR at the time, but thinking, you know what, like I think they might be right. This actually. It could be really big. And, uh, and why not us? You know, we, we do have the makings to do it, I think, and I think we’ve got a great culture, so why not give it a shot? So then we, we did like a reverse process where we had, uh, a whole bunch of investors come and pitch to us. We ran a bit of a structured process around that.

Pauline 

Wait, pause, pause there. Who led, who led that and whose idea was that?

Paul Stovell 

There was probably a conversation between like Sonia, Simon and I around, like, does it make sense to bring someone on? And, and we sort of, so, so what we started to think about is, do we believe that TAM is as big as. People seem to, otherwise people seem to think it is. And so we built conviction around that. Yeah, we think the opportunity’s big. Then we went to, okay, in order to achieve that, does it make sense to, to have to bring other people on who can help us do that? Or is that gonna be more of a hindrance? You know, are we gonna be aligned? And so I think we, we agreed it would make sense to bring someone on. And then, uh, then we started to think about, okay, what’s, what’s sort of the right way to do that? And there was definitely like insight partners who we ultimately ended up going with. They had. Been the most prolific and the most, um, they had the most conviction about our business. Like by the time, uh, they, they were kinda the ones that triggered the process in some ways. ‘cause they built so much conviction in talking to our customers that they sort of came and pitched to us with, um, the plan of like how they could help us grow and accelerate and, and all the ways in which they would help. Which, uh, they’ve largely been really good partners on.

Pauline 

What year was that?

Paul Stovell 

This was, so this was the end of 2020. Um, okay. So then we ran a bit of a process though because, you know, we talked inside, we talked to a couple of other firms, but we hadn’t really got to know a lot of them. So we ran a bit of a process, um, had a bunch of other top tier firms, uh, participated in that process. And yeah, ultimately they ended up, it was hard to get around just the amount of conviction insight had built around the business in the lead up to it. And, and they’re a really, uh, really amazing firm. I think they’ve got like $20 billion asset under management or something. Yeah. And the team there is really nice. So. Uh, the New York folks are, they, they’re really, uh, easy to work with ‘cause they’re fairly straight talking. Um, which I, I struggled to get from some of the east coast, uh, the west coast, uh, VCs that we talked to. Hmm. But, um, yeah, and so, uh, so we sold a minority stake to them. Um, and, uh, and then they joined the board.

Pauline 

How much was that?

Paul Stovell 

So in total, uh, it was 172 million US dollars. Mm-hmm. Um, and so we sold by that time, I think, uh, uh, most of that went to Redgate at the time. ’cause Redgate sold a, a chunk of their shares. Yeah. Um, they still owned about 10% and then we sold I think about 20 ish percent of our shares too. So, um, so yeah. And, uh, that was an all secondary sale too, which I think Okay. Wow. Uh, is a pretty, um, uncommon, uh, yeah. Event.

Pauline 

Correct? Correct. So, um, and at that point you were about 30 million revenue,

Paul Stovell 

uh, 2020 1 million US dollars. Yeah. At, at that time.

Pauline 

Abby, how big was your team at that point?

Paul Stovell 

I think about 78 people, maybe, maybe just a touch over a hundred. I’m trying to remember the exact timing. And, and the thing is, like, the company had been so cashflow positive, like how many startups do this? We were paying dividends. We were kind of getting towards the end of every year we had, we had all this profit, we had to pay tax on it. So you pay the tax and then you’ve got the profit left and it’s like, well, I guess we’ll just dividend it out. We can’t, we could spend more on Google ads, I suppose, but that doesn’t feel like a great use of money. So we didn’t, um, and so we would, we were sort of paying dividends, uh, through that period. But then I think, but the other thing I, I do think though is because it was like the only thing we’re putting all of our time and effort and love into, and because it was profitable, I think in a lot of ways we also maybe held back on, on growing the business and really pursuing that opportunity. And so there’s a period where we also started to think like. How, you know, could we be bigger and grow faster and solve more customer problems if we were to accelerate this instead of holding ourselves back a little bit? And so bringing insight on for us personally was a nice way to sort of de-risk that. And to say, you know, from, from this point on, octopus has been a success for us. And everything from this point is, is upside and and fun challenges to, to go after.

Pauline 

What changed at that point when you got that investment? So how much sort of, I guess, control and directorship did you both have over the business?

Paul Stovell 

So we still own a majority of the company. Um, and that’s a nice place to be in. And I would say nothing really changed too much. Like at that. At that point we used to do a monthly. I suppose you’d call it a board meeting, but it was just a zoom call between, you know, Simon and I most months just chatting about how the business was going and ideating on things. Um, and then when Insight joined, I think there’s a couple of spreadsheet reports we fill out once a year. And, uh, the board meetings sort of became two hours long and they became quarterly, but it’s much the same thing. Um, you know, it’s, uh, people and a firm who cares about the company being successful and are leaning in trying to understand it, and you’re trying to share your problems with them and, um, get their ideas on, on the, how to get through them together. So, uh, actually nothing changed all that much, but, but one thing I think we were very careful of is making sure that the investor that we chose to bring on would be able to help us achieve what we were trying to achieve. We wanted to be really aligned on that and that it wouldn’t fundamentally change how the business was operating. So if we like. If there was an investor who said, look, we wanna put hundreds of millions of dollars into this and we want you to push towards like growing at a hundred percent year on year and start to really burn the money and you know, growth at all costs kind of model because you’re gonna build this giant unicorn or die trying. That’s not the deal that we were interested in doing. We, we wanted someone that understood that this is a huge market that we’re going after, but we’re gonna go after it in a way that makes sense.

Pauline 

Yeah. Well you guys already were on a trajectory, so the success and the pattern had been created, so you didn’t wanna change that and that makes absolute sense.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah, we asked them specifically about like the return profile they were looking for. Mm-hmm. And then we looked at the return profile we’d already delivered over the last six years and thought, yep, we can feel pretty confident doing that. And I mean, when they invested, this was in 2021, so this was like peak uh, valuation multiple period. Right. ‘cause it was like in that, in that sort of COVID period. And like I’m really proud that they’re still in the money on that investment. Like our valuation has grown, uh, even though multiples have dramatically dropped since then, um, they’re not upside down on that investment. And I take a lot of pride in that. ‘cause I think that’s a really important thing the founders should do is like. You have a fiducial obligation to the investors that you bring on to deliver a return for them.

Pauline 

Hmm. It, it sounds like as a, as a team, including Simon in this, um, you had a really clear strategy to engage investment, but also strike, um, a commercial deal and what you were looking for and what you asked for. Was that the case? Like, is, was there any point during the process you were like, shit, I don’t know what I’m doing, and how do we navigate these gigantic beasts and what if they take us for a ride?

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. Uh, that’s always the case. Like you’re trying to figure out is, is this gonna be a match, right? Because, I mean, it sounds really cool to bring money on or something, but like you’re gonna be doing board meetings with folks for the next 10 years, you know, working together on something.

And so a lot of it, I think it was actually a little bit more at the interpersonal level, like getting a sense of, you know, can I work with these people? Can I give them feedback that they’ll listen to, you know, all those things. So. You spend time and effort on that. And then, and then just aligning on expectations and getting comfortable with all of those things.

We did actually work with, um, an investment bank at the time. Uh, it was a sort of software focused M&A investment bank called Shane Co out of Boston. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and they, they were really good at helping us kind of navigate that process. And uh, like one of the things we did is like we knew we were at about 20 million ARR, but ARR isn’t actually like a very well-defined metric.

And there’s a lot of different ways you think about it. And we just calculated ourselves, we had our own sort of the software program we wrote to, to figure out what our ARR was. And I didn’t wanna get like halfway through this process with all these firms just to find out that I double counted or that, you know, got it wrong or something.

And so, yeah, we worked with them to sort of like, Hey, can you do a bit of an audit of our business and present back to us? We think we are here, but it would be good to. No, before we get any further, um, yeah, did.

Pauline 

You guys often, um, engage like sort of external advice throughout your journey and how, how early did you do that?

Paul Stovell 

I’d, I’d say by and large we’ve leaned into doing things ourselves where we can probably out of a stubborn sense of how hard can things be. Mm. And, and then only in specific cases probably reached out. And I, and I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing because I’ll give you a example. Uh, so, so like accounting and tax, you know, you.

You obviously go to external people do do that partly ’cause you have to, but it still actually is really beneficial to try and deeply understand them yourselves. And so when we figured out we needed to start collecting sales tax in the US we spent six weeks figuring out what that means and how to do stuff in our business.

And then once we figured it out, we started to then find external people that could help us, you know, implement the things that we needed. Another good example, after Insight invested, we thought, okay, let’s bring in an employee stock option program because the goal of the business was changing, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, and so that’s when, like, that’s a very messy field, but it felt like really valuable use of our time to spend, you know, a good couple of months trying to understand it really in depth so that we could set up a program that that made sense. And then the more we understood it, the more comfortable we felt to bring someone external in and give them specific things to do to, to help us doing that.

Um, and I do think that’s generally a. A good approach. ’cause otherwise what happens is you just end up, at some point, you end up becoming an expert in this thing. Mm. ’cause you, you made a mistake or that you overlooked or you trusted the expert or something. Um, it tends to work a bit easier going the other way.

Pauline 

Yeah. I love that. I think, um, I definitely encourage, you have to be able to, I, I use this term, you have to see the kitchen floor. So if you can’t do the work on the kitchen floor, then you know, just don’t look for the cake that’s been baked at the end. It’s, it’s actually getting involved, getting your hands dirty.

Um, and you have to really do that building because that’s gonna give you also that confidence in your business and what you’ve built. Like there’s no gray areas, so you can kind of like, answer any question and get that gets thrown at you.

Paul Stovell 

That’s right. And it’s like a, it’s a trap I think founders fall into it’s, it’s this like hire the expert trap.

And this is like, I think boards fall into this, this a lot where, uh, you’ll say, uh, we’ve got a problem with leads. Board, what do you suggest we do about it? And the board will say, well, you know, what we suggest is you hire someone who knows how to solve it. And like, and that’s like the only suggestion a lot of the time, right?

Um, unless you’ve got a really good board, so. The problem with that is like, then you convince yourself that like, oh gosh, if I could only hire the right person, my problem would be solved. Mm-hmm. And so you spend six months recruiting the person and that’s great ‘cause you don’t have to think about the problem for six months ‘cause you’re just recruiting.

And then you spend six months onboarding the person you’ve hired. And that’s great ‘cause you know, it’s only been six months, they, of course they wouldn’t have solved the problem yet. And then you spend 12 months realizing that you hired completely the wrong person. It’s not their fault, it’s your fault.

You’re gonna have to part ways. And like, you know, two years later you still have the same problem, but you just bought yourself time to have to deal with it and, and flipping it around and saying, okay, this is a problem worth solving. I’m going try and become the expert in it first. And once I’ve got a really crisp idea of exactly what the problem is, I’m gonna go out and hire someone who’s world class to implement what I think needs to be done.

Um, and give them some guidance around exactly how you want it solved. And then let them really, I. You know, make it world class from there. That seems to be the only thing that works, but it’s, it’s a trap I think we all fall into. I’ve certainly fallen into a lot.

Pauline 

I think so, agree. Um, don’t tell me you didn’t have any mentors though, along the way to give you guidance, advice, help you troubleshoot stuff.

Paul Stovell 

Absolutely. Um, so there was a period in, I think like late 2018. I don’t wanna give the impression that everything’s kind of been up into the right in terms of like revenue growth. It kind of has been, um, on a sort of annual or quarterly basis. There’s definitely months where it’s slower or whatever.

Pauline 

Oh.

But, but let’s, let’s be clear, like you didn’t switch on the revenue model till a much later. So there was the first two years where you were just users, there’s nothing.

Paul Stovell 

Yes, that’s right. And then, and then it’s, you know, it’s gone up from there, but. But, you know, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes it’s been really hard.

Uh, the hardest parts of building the company though, ha has been people related stuff, at least for me. So, um, and particularly when it comes to hiring people, particularly when it comes to hiring people in fields that are not my background and I’m just having to learn. And unfortunately, you learn these things by doing it, by failing, by disappointing people, by making huge mistakes and undoing them.

And I definitely reached a point, I think in 2018 where I thought, I’ve kind of mishired a person in this role for the third time. I can’t seem to get it right. It seems like an important thing for the company to get right. And in fact, there’s all kinds of people related issues that I’m just kind of struggling to navigate.

As you know, I’d never managed people before Octopus. And I’m just trying to learn it as I’m going. And, uh, I, you know, I, I reached this point where I thought, you know, I think actually we needed A-A-C-E-O that knows how to do all of these things. But somebody, I think Simon, uh, Simon encouraged me to. Speak to someone that he had been working with who is the chairman of Redgate’s board and is also an executive coach.

Um, his name is also Simon. Um, so Simon Brown. And from about 2018 I’ve, I’ve been working with Simon and like having that, um, that coach, that mentor that you can share problems with that they’re not helping to solve, but they’re helping you kind of think through and, and to solve and give you sort of mental frameworks to think about and reason about a problem and bringing their own experience.

Like in his case, he’d been quite senior at Microsoft during the Bill Gates era. And so it’s seen a lot and had a lot of relevant. Knowledge to bring. That’s the only reason I’m still here. Like, I, I would’ve quit the job and totally failed at it. And, you know, probably have a whole ton of one star Glassdoor reviews to show for it if I hadn’t had sort of really leaned in and, and worked with Simon and, and tried to grow.

Pauline 

Thank you for sharing that. I think that’s so important. Again, you’re just transparent. I listened to one of your, um, interviews and you did mention, and maybe this was after that sort of 2018 period where you were having a few challenges, I guess scaling where you, you said you felt lost and that was in 2020.

What was going on during that time? You said you, like, you hadn’t really seen that you had a unicorn. You explained that from a market perspective. You hadn’t really seen it, but, but yeah. What, what was going on?

Paul Stovell 

So, I, I, when Octopus had started, the goal was, let’s hire three or four people. Like, like once we started to turn into a business, we thought it’d be kind of cool to have three or four people.

To write code to sell the product for a bit more than we spend making it. And to reinvest that in, in and, um, and sort of build a slow business from there. And, and that I think was modeled probably on like the heroes I grew up with. I. Wasn’t like the VC because this, again, this was like the.com bust, right?

There was no talk of VC backed companies. It was like the Joel Polsky building fog bugs, and then Trello and Stack Overflow. Back in the day, it was Eric Sink had this blog about micro ISVs, right? Like building small little products as like side hobbies. That’s the thing that like really inspired me, and so that’s what octopus was always intended to be.

And so when we would hire people, we didn’t talk about. Stock options or growth or anything like that because it wasn’t supposed to be a growing company like we are hiring you because we have excess profit and we have a problem with solving. And instead of working at a bank, you can work for us and it’ll be more interesting than working at a bank, but it will be sort of just as safe because we’re a profitable, successful company.

That was like the deal that, that we had with folks. And so I think, yeah, by, by sort of 2018 I was starting to feel out of my depth, particularly as I think I realized the product was fine at this point. Sales and marketing were gonna be the things that held us back and I just had no clue what I was doing.

And I was, I’d spent a good couple of years stepping on rakes and hitting myself in the face, trying to do things in the sales and marketing world. So, so I think there was that going on. And then it was also this sense of like, what are we doing with 78 people? The revenue just won’t stop growing. So, ’cause I think like when, when I joined the consulting firm, when I was kind of 18, 19, I felt like.

I’m gonna be here forever. And then about five years in, I think I started to feel like I’m hitting a place where I’ve learned what I can from this and I’m starting to get itchy feet and to think about what’s next. And so by this point, I’d sort of been an octopus for seven years or so and started to think about like, okay, like honestly anything I could have imagined achieving with octopus back when it started compared to then I’d well and truly achieved.

Like, and so then without like a vision of like, where do you go to next, you start to think about, well what, what am I doing? Like, I could do this for another 20 years, but do I want to, and where’s it gonna go and am I gonna enjoy it? Like I still, at that point, I was still writing code on different things.

You know, I kind of knew as the company gets bigger, I probably won’t be able to write code as much anymore, and would I enjoy that? And so I think it was, it was just a lot of figuring out what’s next. And then I think when we built conviction around it and started to ask this question of why not us, that’s probably what, what got me back into the mindset of like, okay, I’m in this, I’m in this for the next 10 years and I’m gonna at least, you know, and I’m gonna, um.

Build this and take it to the next step. But yeah.

Pauline 

So it’s, it sounded like you just needed to reframe your perspective or your goal. So you were, your goal was to get to five employees and build like sort of a lifestyle business that led you to tinker around and still create.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah.

Pauline 

Okay. Now we’re strapping in and we’re going for the big market.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah. And it’s funny, like, I’m actually going through a little bit of that right now because, um, back then in 2020, I sort of set this bit of a vision as to like the size and scale that we would be, and we’re actually approaching that now. And so there’s a sort of point where like you’ve, you’ve never quite achieved your goal because like back then you would’ve listed 15 metrics or something, and you’ve probably hit 13 of them, and two of them weren’t important anyway.

So you never quite feel like you’ve achieved your goal. But sort of when you look at it in aggregate, you kind of have mm-hmm. And if you haven’t set a new goal, you get a bit lost and say, actually, I had a lot of people. In the last couple of months pushing me of like, Paul, you know, you, you wrote this sort of 2025 vision.

We sort of dare, like, if you haven’t noticed it’s 2025, like what’s the, what’s the plan? Right? So I’m putting, putting effort into that now, trying to figure out the next five years.

Pauline 

I love that. So your, your, um, goal setting that you’ve done, and your metrics obviously have played a big role given your, um, emphasis to focus on profit from day one.

Uh, well, not from day one. From the time you decided you’re gonna do this as a business and to where you are now, and then being able to resize that every now and then as you feel like, oh, I’ve hit it now. Now what do I do? It sounds like you had metrics and tracking from the start. How fundamental has that been?

No, for you.

Paul Stovell 

You know what, um, I think it’s like the part of business culture I find the least useful is like, okay, metrics, KPIs, OKRs, that whole conversation, I, I tune out of it. I think, I think what is really good to have is a sort of aspiration and a bit of a backtracking for like, okay, in my case, I know how big the TAM for octopus can be.

I know how big we can be if we sustain that growth rate. So I’ve got like the big, there is a big number in mind, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. You’ve got that. And then I think, like, I see these conversations where people will say like, alright, so what we need to do is we need to, like, for every department, we need to set some KPIs and we need to manage towards those KPIs.

And I think that confuses, that confuses the entire thing. So for example, let’s say that you owned a toll road, right? Mm-hmm. Like you just, you bought a toll road or something. There’s so many cars that travel on your toll road a day. So for us that’s like, there’s so many trials that happen per day.

There’s so many things, and it’s really useful to think about like in an ideal world, how many cars would travel on our toll road, right? And, and you’d say like, oh, today there’s a thousand to travel on the toll road, but in the future I want it to be 10,000. You know? So that’s, that’s like the big goal.

Everything from that point on is a waste of time. I sort of feel like the, because the real question is, do we want more people on our toll road or less? We want more. Okay. We know we want more. What is the credible plan that we are going to do that will actually get more people onto the toll road? And like as an executive team, 99.9% of our time should be spent talking about do we have the right plan and are we executing things in all the right ways?

And are we regretting anything about how we spent the last three weeks in a way that could have got more people onto that toll road or not? Mm. There should be like the zero zero 1% of the time is spent talking about the KPI of, you know, by November we should have 1,047 people on the toll road. Like, ’cause most of that comes down to how good of a job you did at picking the goal in the first place.

And very little of it has to do with like, decisions that you make. And so I think we are just generally big believers that like KPIs are not strategy and managing people towards KPIs is a waste of time. You manage people towards, do they, do they have clarity on the thing that you want them to do? And are they executing in the best possible way that’s most likely to create the outcome that you want and, and you sort of manage around that. But. KPI’s, a kind of waste of time.

Pauline 

I think, I think, um, that makes sense for your team, like I tend to agree, like the more time you spend talking about it, the less time you’re doing it. But for, for you and Sonya, you know, did you track top line numbers then? Like how did you know when, obviously you reflected on the numbers of people you had on the toll road every three weeks, but

Paul Stovell 

was that it?

Yeah, no, that’s right. There’s, there’s a backwards looking view of these things, which is important. So you, you can look back and say, um, like, uh, our revenue is slowing down. What’s to be done about that? And, and again, that’s like 99% of the conversation is the what’s to be done about a question. And if none of these metrics lead you to a, a really important, what’s to be done about it, then it’s kind of useful, useless metric.

So, so we would definitely, like, I would be in, we were using Xero for accounting back then. We would both be in it on a daily basis. Like every day I’d run the p and l and kind of see how revenue is tracking or something. Uh, but only because. Like revenue is the constraint to growing our business. So if I’m hoping to hire someone next month, it’s gonna depend on the revenue that’s coming in this month.

So you’re, you’re tracking it from that point of view. But I don’t think there was ever times where we set a goal for one of those numbers and then sort of watched our progress against that goal. Like a, it just didn’t really work. ‘cause the question, I think it’s, it’s more better to look at it and say, well, revenue this month isn’t kind of where we might’ve hoped it would be.

It hasn’t really grown the way we hoped. Is there anything in the last month that we would’ve done differently or anything that we’re planning to do in the next month that we should do differently that would sort of correct that and fix it up? And if there’s nothing, then there’s no point sweating about it.

Like the number is what it is. Just just focus on the thing that you do have control over. I.

Pauline 

Yeah. Love that. Um, so obviously, um, you guys have had a lot of, I guess you’ve built a product that is obviously needed in the market and you’ve had significant success with your revenue from an early stage. Well, as soon as you turned on the actual, um, business model, some would say.

And like from listening to your story and how you’ve had the, um, sort of options I guess to sort of focus on revenue, build a goods sustainable company, be selective with how you bring on investors and who you bring on as investors, and then also being able to build it and balance life and work in the way you want to.

So it could seem like, oh, you know, wow. It just, like, it’s such a sort of privileged spot to be in. It’s such a unique story, and I guess it is because, you know, that’s why there’s not everyone can do what you’ve done, but you’ve, you’ve obviously found a problem in the market. It’s a needed, people are willing to pay for it, and you are, you’ve gone and hit there.

Have you had any points in time and you’ve, you’ve, you’ve mentioned a few of them where you thought, oh, well, if you hadn’t had revenue and you could have gone that way, have you had a point where you’ve gone, okay, this is not working, we should give up? Or like, has, what has the challenges been like and how have you navigated those?

Paul Stovell 

There’s, there’s definitely been a lot. I’d say not too many of them, uh, stress me or worry me apart from the people related ones. Like people related ones are always like the most heartbreaking. Ups and downs to, to deal with. So there’s, we’ve definitely had our share of those over the years. I, you know, the business has definitely had its challenges.

So for example, in, uh, around sort of 2017, we were probably the only vendor really in our space at our sort of price point. And then in 2017, uh, Microsoft announced that they were gonna be making a competing product that it was gonna be effectively free. Um, it wasn’t gonna be as good, but it would solve a big chunk of the problem for the market.

And so we suddenly found ourselves competing directly with Microsoft and that really knocked us, and we had to change our strategy a lot. But, uh, you know, we, we got through that, uh, we’ve changed a lot of parts about how our business model has worked over the years. Some of those changes, um, particularly around pricing.

I think pricing is something people underestimate the power of sort of growth acceleration through pricing changes. Um, but you know, we, I. We’ve done those and many of them have worked and many of them have worked. They’ve gone really badly and so we, you know Correct, correct. From those, we’ve definitely had years where we spent tons of money building features that nobody used.

We’ve spent very little money building features that everybody used. It’s really hard to predict some of those things. Uh, we’ve reorged, we’ve reorged again, some of the reorgs were bad, some of them were good. There’s been nothing like ruined us, I suppose at, at this point. We’ve, we’ve had a couple of cases, I think one where, uh, one of our competitors at this point is, has raised tons and tons of money and is burning through it.

Like, to give you a sense, you know, we, we grew in one year from like 36 million to 50 something million, and we did it by being profitable. Uh, while in that same year, that vendor went from like 50 to a hundred million and burned a hundred million dollars doing it. Holy.

And like, I just am not gonna spend that sort of silly money because like, where that vendor is now is their whole kind of company. Economics are upside down and they’ve got their own problems, but they, they sort of scale bigger than others. But that’s one where you sort of watch it coming up and you like a really fast car coming up behind you and you sort of looking back and you can sort of see it and you sort of wondering like, is this, should I stay my course, or, you know, what should I do about this?

And it’s, it’s hard to watch a little bit. You know, you, you sort of pick your course and you stay with it a bit and surround yourself with people that can test your thinking. Like, I think there’s a big part of when, when people join the executive team at Octopus, actually it’s kind of funny ’cause they say like, Paul, you, you need to be more assertive and make more decisions, right?

Like, that’s, that’s the feedback I’ll often get from like, a new executive joining. And, but then I think after a while, uh, one of the things I, I try to really lean in on is this idea of, you know, I’ve got, I’m a bit stubborn about my belief in the, uh, what the business can grow into, but otherwise, um, I think I’m really trying to just optimize for, for that outcome, which means it won’t be my idea half the time.

So a lot of the times I’ll, I’ll put out an idea or someone else will put out an idea and we’ll bat it around and explore it. Not looking for consensus necessarily, but really trying to figure out what is the best thing to be done, what’s the thing that’s gonna maximize the outcome for the business? And it’s pretty rare that I need to make a decision because.

Like, if you and I have the exact same information and the exact same experiences, then we would always make the same decision, right? And so if you and I are leaning towards different opinions about what should be done, about something, it must be because we’ve either got different experiences or different data that we’re working with, which means we just have to have more conversation to figure it out.

And so that’s a lot of like how our executive team works. But it’s not how people like executives are supposed to work, right? Like as a CEO, I’m supposed to yell at people and throw telephones around and give, give people orders and hold them accountable to a KPI. And like, I don’t, I spend most of my time trying to figure out are we doing the right thing and what, what might we be, what might we do about the things that aren’t working?

Pauline 

I think you are suited to continue your business in the new culture because those days of throwing telephones around are the old days that I grew up in with Hewlett Packard. So definitely have shifted, but I do remember them and I’m thankful that you’re not that.

Paul Stovell 

Yeah.

Pauline 

Um, so you seem, obviously you’re grounded, you’re pretty, you come across grounded.

You and Sonya have steered the ship and created something magnificent. Um, you’ve got a hundred million revenue tracking a UD that is obviously over 300 people in your team. Um, you’ve raised capital, some capital, extremely intentional, and, uh, now with where you guys are at, what sort of, what’s happening with your capital raise journey and sort of.

You do come across at some times when I have seen you and I, I did attend a angel summit in Queensland, um, recently where you were talking to a room full of angel investors and a lot of the time you were really clear and kind of telling them stop investing in companies or sort of not stop investing in companies.

That’s probably the wrong way to say it, but, um, you, you came across maybe a little bit anti investment. Um, so is there, is there a capital raise on your horizon or, or, or what’s your thoughts on capital raising overall? I.

Paul Stovell 

No, at this point, like, I think Octopus is on the path to being and continuing to be a, a world class business.

And I think, like I said, I think there’ll be a company doing huge amounts of revenue in our space, and I think we’re pretty well positioned to do that. And so at some point it would seem pretty natural for a company like that to be a public company. And I think, again, given how much transparency we operate with, um, in fact if, if people want to, uh, just kind of track our, you know, from an investor point of view, what it’d be like to be an investor in Octopus, if you go to, um, ir like investor relations octopus.com, you’ll, you’ll see, uh, we publish our numbers there.

We just started publishing like a quarterly report if you, if you wanna see it. So I think that’s like, that’s the, that’s the sort of long run at this point. Again, we don’t feel capital constrained. Uh, we’re, we’re always kind of like. Talent constrained, idea constrained. But the problem with bringing on capital to solve those things is you find yourself spending it and then you find yourself being unprofitable and then you sort of find yourself having to make really difficult decisions to fix that or, or be at the mercy of our follow on rounds.

And, and I think when I look at our space. There was a lot of money that flew into DevOps, you know, four or five years ago. A lot of people kind of bet that, like with Cloud Native and Kubernetes, there’d be these giant businesses to be built right now. Like all of those companies are kind of wiped out. So there’s a big part of octopus’s success, which actually just gonna be that we survived.

While all the other companies have just kind of struggled, like every company, I would say, not even that we compete with, but that’s sort of like adjacent to us that our customers also spend money on. Uh, if I look on LinkedIn, their number of employees has declined. You know, it’s pretty obvious their revenue is, is declining, they’re getting acquired.

Um, whereas we are just growing and just doing our thing. And you know, there's one public company GitLab in the space and I think it's got its own challenges and they, they're not really going after the same opportunity that we're after anyway. They're going quite wide. Whereas we are going very deep and I think that's a more durable business anyway.

So yeah, we we're putting up with like our strategy and no immediate plans around capital raising or, or requirement for it. I think my, my thought on Nin. Investors is, I think here, here's, here's the thing I, I struggle with, you know, so, uh, they go to my kid's school and they'll ask this question of like, what, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

And everyone says, at my kid's school, uh, we wanna be a YouTuber. Right? And you sort of think like, oh, really? Like these kids? They wanna be YouTubers. But actually I think there's something really nice about that, which is in the old days, what they would've said is, I wanna be a TV star. But there's a big difference because I wanna be a TV star means I need to go to all of the auditions.

And some talent scout is gonna decide whether I'm good enough to be on tv. But if I wanna be a YouTuber. I just need a phone and I can make my own videos and the people who watch it will decide if I'm good enough to spend time watching. And I think that's just a really, like that disintermediation of like talent making its way into our screens is a really good thing.

And I think the same is sort of true with startup culture though, which is this idea of like when people wanna start a company, nothing actually prevents you from doing that. You don't need anyone's permission. In fact, like the kind of people who I think do a good job starting companies tend to be people who don't feel like they need other people's permission to do something in the world.

Um, so then why would you spend so much time trying to convince a whole lot of people to give you permission to start to start the business? Why not put that time into finding some other way to do it? And, and then I think what happens is they spend so much time pitching. When someone finally says, yes, I'll give you the check.

That's kind of like the desperate musician who spent ages sort of sending out demo tapes and some, and, and someone has finally spotted their talent and they give them the contract. Right. And, and they're, they're, they're so excited that someone finally believes in them that they signed the contract. And next thing you know, like you are Taylor Swift and you're, you know, you, you're regretting this contract that you signed.

Right? Like, I didn't know the story, but you know what I mean? And, and, and so I think, and that's just the wrong way to think about the whole thing. Like these investors, they are doing the, a really important thing for the market, which is there are some types of businesses that are capital intensive to start.

Mm-hmm. And there is capital looking for long-term investments to spend. And so they are providing a way in which. That capital makes its way to the companies that need it, that otherwise couldn't start without it. Or that can be accelerated by starting it, but that's all it is. And so, so you're not, you're not pitching, you're selling a financial product to these folks and you have to be so conscious of it.

So I'm talking to so many founders at the moment who are sort of 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years into that journey. And their entire, you know, last half a decade of work is being undone because they finally realized that. Five years ago, it wasn't that someone spotted their talent and decided to put them on tv. It's that they sold a financial product five years ago and they're looking for a return.

And that's not, that's not the investor's fault. It's probably arguably the founder's fault for not quite realizing what they're getting into. And so I think when I talk to founders, I try to sort of help them understand that part of the dynamic, because I think if they're conscious of it and they consciously decide to pursue that path, then, then that's great.

But I've seen founders exit their company for very little to show for it when they easily could have made three, four, $5 million. Had they not gone for the unicorn and, you know, they could have found financial independence for their family had they not gone for this great big exit by be, because once you bring investors on you, that's, that's the profile that you're committing to, especially early stage.

You're saying, you're gonna give me some money and I'm gonna do my best to build a unicorn and I'm probably gonna fail and that's okay. I'll try and fail fast. Right? But if that's not actually the deal you want to make, then don't, don't make that deal. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, it's not, I'm, I'm definitely not anti investor and I love the investors that we, we have in Octopus and I think everyone here is a good participant in making this thing successful.

I do think so much money flew into venture capital over the last few years. It does kind of distort. So you do end up in some markets where you think. I better raise money because everybody else is right. Mm. And I'm bringing a knife to a gunfight here, so maybe there's no choice. I see this a lot in AI at the moment, so that's, that's challenging.

But generally I think as long as people are conscious of it, then it's gonna be a much better outcome for everyone. And, and, and my message to investors like at that conference was just be really upfront about this. Like, make sure, because you as an investor, you have a portfolio and you can afford a whole lot of failures.

In fact, your model assumes there will built around that. Lot of failures. Yeah. Like that's the whole model. But they have one business that they're spending 10 years building and maybe that's not the pro, like the model they want to be in. So just tell them that that's what it is and make sure they understand and and agree.

And then yeah, from there.

Pauline 

Well, I appreciate your candid views on that because you’ve just told them, so. There you go. Okay. So let’s, let’s go down to a little bit of a, um, your, your personal life, um, and some of the habits maybe that you’ve formed over some time. Uh, so I’m really curious because obviously you’ve built a gigantic beast.

It could consume you. You’ve put boundaries up, you’ve worked out that balance, although obviously there’s peaks and troughs with it all. I wanna zoom into sort of your personal traits and, and your health, I guess, or lifestyle that you’ve built over time and how you’ve maintained that. Because I definitely work with a lot of companies where, you know, it’s kind of promoted or, um, celebrated that I haven’t slept or, you know, the hustle culture that exists around where I think the hustle culture is only moment to moment.

It’s not all the time and you can’t be that all the time. We’re not robots yet. Um, so tell me, how have you approached, um, your habits around sleep?

Paul Stovell 

Um, so when we had younger kids, it was, uh, much harder than it is now. Um, we generally, yeah, we generally manage to get seven hours sleep most nights. Um, the exceptions for me tend to be, I love a lot of what I do, not all of it.

There’s, there’s chores you have to do, but there’s a lot of what I do with octopus, I really enjoy doing. So I find it quite hard. To, um, like fully disengage from that. And, and particularly if I find an interesting problem I really want to obsess about and dive deep into, I’ll find myself kind of being up late at night thinking about those things.

Or, and, and as the company’s growing, we have a geographically distributed team, so the day tends to be kind of more split up. And I have nights where I do a lot of evening calls and things like that, but generally speaking, we, we sleep pretty well. Uh, we, we start most days at six o’clock. Um, one of us, I tend to drive the kids to school most days.

That’s kind of important to spend that time with them, drop them off, and then Sonia will pick them up for the afternoon most days. And, uh, and then, yeah, the day will kind of start, usually I’ll, I’ll sort of drop the kids off and then by about sort of eight o’clock, and then just as I say goodbye at the gate, there’s a call that starts at eight o’clock and I’ll, I’ll kind of do that as I walk back to the car.

Um. Spend probably way too much of the day on Zoom, try and carve out a bit of time to focus on things and then, uh, try to sort of build blocks of time to focus on thi