#162 Adam Jacobs: How he built 'The Iconic' and now 'Hatch', Learnings from selling kitchen knives, personal identity and dad's influence!

Vidit Agarwal
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Tickets are almost sold out again, all details are in the show notes on how to register, so maybe pause this episode. Now read our show notes. First, get involved and then press play to listen to today's episode. My guest is Adam Jacobs. In this episode 162 Adam is the co founder of the iconic Australias largest online fashion retailer and is now the co founder of Hatch, a new venture whose mission is all for people to find meaning in work.

Adam was born and lives in Sydney, Australia, with brief stints living in Boston and Copenhagen. In this conversation, learn about Adam Sunrise being the second of four siblings with a lebanese mother and a jewish father, and the influences of his mum, a teacher and then a stage actor and his dad, a lawyer. Key highlights we cover include where his calm demeanor comes from, why sailing is now his favorite type of sport, and it's actually very affordable. His learnings from spending a year selling kitchen knives, growing the iiconic from 50 to 500 people in three years, and how his personality traits evolved during that time, why everyone should start their career in sales, and we reflect on whether his sense of identity changed after the success building the iconic and why he doesn't identify as an entrepreneur. I really enjoyed diving into an interesting case study with Adam to compare and contrast the iconic and hatch in terms of the differences, raising funding, the right number of co founders, the initial product founder led sales and the types of growth levers in both companies.

Adam is professionally reflective on each of these aspects and we go deep into how he did it at the iconic and how he's doing it a second time at hatch. Plus, to really get to know Adam, listen in to learn how he's MC'd nine weddings, what he's learned from his girlfriend, a candid story about his dad caught up in a terrorist attack, 50 hours, and his contribution to a program called the school of life. It's now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy.

Adam Jacobs. Welcome to the show. Hey, vinit. It's great to be here. I am so excited to do this.

Let's start with our fun facts. Where were you born and where do you live now? Born in Sydney and I live in Sydney. In between, I spent a bit of time in Boston while I was studying and in Copenhagen way back when I started my career in consulting. Always had the edge to live a few more places, but mostly Sydney.

Yeah, we'll talk about Copenhagen shortly. I know that connects to iconic really well. And from a work perspective, what was your first job and what do you do now? So my first, like, my very first job was at a little kiosk near where I grew up. And I just worked summer holidays while I was at high school, kind of cutting out pizza bases, you know, which was sweaty work and taught me the value of work ethic.

Adam Jacobs
My first full time job after university, I had a couple interesting ones during uni, but my. Actually, no, my first full time job before uni, I spent about a year selling kitchen knives, which sounds really sleazy, but it's not this really high quality american product. And you do these in home demonstrations. And as an 18 year old, I built these incredible sales skills. And anyway, what I do now is I'm the founder and the CEO of Hatch.

Vidit Agarwal
I did hear you talk about the knife story in a recent podcast where you actually went in quite deep for a few minutes on it, which is fascinating. And you were studying astrophysics while you were doing it, is that right? Or you took a year off? Yeah, I mean, when I graduated school, I went to uni. The first degree I started in was a combo art science degree.

Adam Jacobs
The science for me was, and I was really interested in going into astrophysics. But I was really only in that degree for three or four months. And alongside it, I was doing this job selling knives and wasn't sure I was in the right degree. I loved the job I had. It was teaching me all this incredible communication and teamwork skills.

And I was working with this really fun team of people around my age. And so I thought I'd just take the rest of the year off uni and take a pause and do that job for a while and figure out what I wanted to do. And then I came back in to uni the following year in a totally different degree. We'll come back to that in a moment. And, Adam, as you know, the purpose of this show is to reimagine a high flyer.

Vidit Agarwal
Is there a high flyer, you know, who you feel hasn't got the recognition they deserve? So I don't know about has it got the recognition? But, like, a high flyer in my life that I think of is my older sister. She's a composer of musical theatre and she's been in New York for about ten or 15 years and just had a musical released off Broadway called Teeth. And ever since she was at school, just been so passionate about music.

Adam Jacobs
And she's made an incredible amount of compromises and sacrifices in her life to put her message out through her art. And seeing that happen and seeing the amount of work that goes into it is just astonishing to me, and I'm so impressed by it. And I feel like those kind of artists don't get the recognition they deserve. Let's wind back the clock and go back to your Sanri childhood. You talked about your sister.

Vidit Agarwal
I believe you're one of four siblings, is that right? What was that like growing up? It was a blast. It was a blast. We had a very open household where our home tended to be the centre where everybody's friends came after school or on the weekends.

Adam Jacobs
Yeah. Four kids. Girl, boy, girl, boy. I'm number two. My parents are very warm, welcoming people, so we kind of had this centre of activity.

And I loved having three siblings. You know, I got something different from the relationship with each. I'm sure I was a good brother to them sometimes and a bit of a shitty brother to them other times, but we just. We had the most amount of fun together. I've been told one of your sisters had a box of grievances because you were such a troublemaker growing up.

I can't believe you told you that. This is only recently, I want to say four or five years ago or something. So, like, we're all adults now, and, you know, we're over at my parents house for dinner. We tend to do a Sunday night dinner every week, and someone mentioned this box of grievances and it was stored away and it came out. And while.

While we were all teenagers, my siblings decided to gang up on me, and they created this box where they would write down things that I did that pissed them off or annoyed them, and they put it on a little note and put it in the box until later. And we pulled out these grievances and, I mean, I feel like half of them were fabricated, but it was definitely. Yeah, it was definitely a bit of fun. And talk about your parents. I was fascinated by learning about their cultural influences.

Vidit Agarwal
I think your mom's Lebanese and dad's Jewish, is that right? Like Lebanese Christian and dad's Jewish? Yeah, that's right. How relevant was culture growing up? Did you have a lot of lebanese culture and then other influences as well?

Adam Jacobs
Yeah, we definitely had strong influences from both sides. I mean, my. My grandmother on my muM's side was an incredible cook, and she was born in Lebanon. And so we would have. When I was quite young, we'd have weekly lunches, I think Sunday lunches with the extended family over at my grandparents place, and they'd put on this, you know, beautiful lebanese lunch.

And then, you know, on their side, religiously, they were christians, so we would celebrate the christian holidays. And on my dad's side, he's jewish, so we'd celebrate the jewish holidays. You know, it's interesting when. When they first got together, which would have been the late sixties, early seventies, it was really taboo for two people of their backgrounds to come together. And my mum's family in particular, were pretty unhappy about it.

And so it took a bit of time to get the two families comfortable with a young lebanese girl and a young jewish boy coming together. And I think navigating for my parents, having to navigate through that taught them a lot about cultural understanding and cultural empathy, you know, because they really had to reach across to a totally different culture and connect with it and understand it and show that they, you know, could be part of its community. And that really flowed through to the household that we grew up in. You know, having those two totally different cultural influences and a very liberal mindset or an open mindset of inclusivity meant that growing up, we were always encouraged to explore different cultures and explore different religions and explore different ideologies and really, you know, decide for ourselves what was right for us. And what did your parents do for work?

So my mum when she was younger was a teacher and mostly an english second language teacher. She then went on to have a bit of a amateur acting career, stage acting. So she's an exceptional like comedic actress on stage. My dad's a lawyer, he's a commercial lawyer. He spent a lot of his time in tourism law, did quite a lot of timeshare law.

I feel like in the eighties and early nineties when there was like this timeshare boom up and down the australian east coast, joined a global firm, Baker and McKenzie, and then went into leadership positions of the global firm. And so I had this really incredible career in law firm leadership as I was growing up. You might know one of our previous guests, Martin Wilder, who was the head of climate law at Baker McKenzie and he's now running his own climate tech fund. And then I've been told you and your dad have a really strong bond over boats. The water.

Vidit Agarwal
Tell us about that. I'm sure my brother told you that because he always complains that we talk about it when the family gets together for dinner. But yeah, I think where did that start? Maybe tell me the origin. Where did the boat fascination start?

Adam Jacobs
I think we as a family probably growing up we all had a strong connection to the ocean. You know, living in Sydney you spend a lot of time at the beach, at the ocean if you're close by. I had a couple of teenage best friends who loved to surf and so we'd always be in the water. When I was twelve my dad took me to a scuba diving course and because he'd been diving for a while and so all through my teenage years, he and I scuba, went scuba diving together. We did some really fun trips to Southeast Asia where we'd stay on a boat for a few days and dive different regions.

So I think the ocean was always this big part of our life. And my dad with one of his friends when I was quite young, I want to say around about ten or so, they bought this shitty old sailing boat and they didn't really know how to sail. I think they kind of had done it a little bit before but they just thought it'd be a fun idea to by this tiny little sailing boat and we used to go out in it. I remember hating it when I was like eleven or twelve because it just felt like a whole lot of chores to me. But then, you know, through my early teenage years I came to love spending a morning or an afternoon just lying in the sun on the boat listening to the waves wash over the side of the hull and it just felt so relaxing.

And then in my mid to late twenties, I then got into it myself. I bought a boat with a friend of mine, with two friends of mine, actually, one of the co founders of the iconic and another friend. And, you know, we'd regularly go out sailing on the harbour on the weekend and I guess it's just developed into this love that my dad and I share. For me, the best kind of holiday is a sailing holiday. I've done lots of holidays where I'll charter a sailing boat somewhere in the world with a bunch of friends and spend a week sailing around turkey or around Mallorca, around Sardinia and sailing.

Like, people think of it as this uber luxury activity, but often it's like, quite an affordable way to travel. Like, you're not paying for a hotel, the boat's not that expensive. It's not like a motor boat, it's just a fairly simple sailing boat. So it's a really great way to see the world. Yeah, it's one that I haven't gotten into, but you're definitely convincing me here.

Vidit Agarwal
And then all the people I spoke to said to me, you're very calm. Like, even your iconic team said that in the darkest of moments, Adam is just calm. And this problem solver I've been told stories of, your dad's been lost in Tasmania and you've managed to find him. And it sounds very similar to me. I'm very similar in that.

That I'm just calm. Doesn't matter what happens, you won't see me agitated and people go, are you not excited? What's the matter? Where do you think that comes from? Is that family or was that an experience in childhood?

Adam Jacobs
Yeah, you know, I think that it definitely comes from traits I've developed through childhood. I would say that growing up in a really stable, loving environment has given me a solid sense of insecurity and it means that if I'm in a crisis or if I'm in a high stress or high pressure environment, it doesn't challenge my sense of being, it doesn't challenge my confidence in who I am. I have decent depth of inner security and it gives me the ability to look at that thing as an incident in the moment as opposed to. As a broader rocking of my world. I would say that I think that one of my beliefs is all of our personality traits are dichotomies and there tends to be a good side and a dark side of all of them.

And on one hand, it's so useful that I'm very calm in high pressure environments. On the downside, it probably means that I emotionally connect less with what's going on than other people, and that's something that I've probably wasn't as aware of earlier in my life, and I've become more aware of in the last five to ten years. That's so interesting. Would you say this? We're jumping around, but did you have that reflection post iconic, or was that during iconic, probably during.

And then afterwards. Having an experience like I did with the iconic and like many people did, who are on the team at the Iiconic, where we grew so rapidly over a period of time, really forces you to develop very quickly. You know, as a leader. I was trying to manage this company that went from 50 people to 500 people in about three years. And so all of my personality traits were put under the microscope, and some of them were helpful for the company and some were not helpful for the company.

And I had to have this very fast learning curve of introspecting and developing and growing as a leader quite quickly. And so I think that furnace helped me develop better self awareness for who I was as a person. Because your leadership traits are really just your personality traits in a certain context. They come back to who you are deep down underneath. Then towards the end of the iconic, I started doing some therapy.

I think that, like, everybody should do some therapy. I feel it's probably the most useful reflection I've done more so than executive coaching. And I probably went into therapy with a mindset of, you know, I just want to see what I can find out here. I feel like there's not too much quote unquote wrong with me. And about a couple of months in, I was like, oh, wow.

There's actually a lot here that I am totally unaware of that needs some exploration. And that process has been incredibly valuable. I'm not sure if you've done much meditation. I found meditation has been that for me, where mum would tell me to meditate for years and I'd go, to your point, I'm fine. I don't need to meditate.

Vidit Agarwal
I'm not broken. And then I'd meditate and it's just, you don't have to be broken or have an issue, but just the calming effect it provides after a busy day is incredible. Yeah, I mean, I've totally failed at meditation attempts so far. Like, I just. I can't calm my mind.

Adam Jacobs
Two minutes in, I'm like, my to do list is like, running through my head, so. Well, that's the point. That's the reason to meditate, right, is to get rid of that monkey brain that we all have. But let's fast forward to when you were 18, because I feel 18 is a period where we're young enough, but we have some understanding of the world. What was fulfillment at that age?

Vidit Agarwal
What did you want to do with life? Yeah, I mean, I think when I graduated high school, I was really into physics and science. I've always been a curious mind and a bit of a problem solver, and I was interested in, like, the edges of our understanding of the universe and how to explore that further. And that's why I started in that degree that allowed me to explore astrophysics. I found myself sitting in a lecture hall one day realizing that whilst I liked the content matter, I wouldn't enjoy the work itself.

Adam Jacobs
You know, very long research horizons, long research projects where you don't really know if you're going to add value or discover anything at the end of it. And I also found that the type of work felt quite isolating. A lot of individual work deep down in a lab by yourself. And alongside that experience, I was having this knife selling experience. We talked briefly about where, honestly, it came out of nowhere.

One day I was 18 and my mom's, hey, it's time for you to get a job. More than just the kiosk. And she found this flyer in our letterbox that said, student jobs call here and left it in my bedroom. I caught it and it turned out being this, this job selling knives. And it was this incredible experience where I learned how to sell from a very basic level, like, they taught us very strong basic and fundamental communication and sales skills.

I learned how to work with a team. Within about eight weeks, I was their top performing salesperson nationally and then internationally in that company, and then moved into a office manager role for about six to nine months where I was running a sales team, about a 50 person sales team. So I'm like an 18. I think at that point I just turned 19, like 19 year old. Running a 50 person sales team of, like, other 19, 2021 year olds.

Teaching them how to sell that office became the best performing office nationally for that company. And this was sort of my first, like, personal growth curve where I was like, wow, if I, like, really apply myself into something that I'm passionate about, I can create really cool things. And I think I learned that I loved working in a team. Like, I loved doing that with other people. I loved having a group of people and a unifying goal to run after.

So that really shifted my path, you know, that's why I dropped the degree. It's why I stepped back and thought, maybe there's like a different path I want to take. I saw through that sales job for a year. Honestly, I think everybody should start their career in sales. I've used those skills ever since, every year of my career.

And then I decided to go back to uni in a commerce degree because I just love that experience of running a mini business. But I paired that with an arts degree that was mostly philosophy because I still had that hunger to explore deep, dark questions and try and push the edges of our understanding. Have you ever thought about what life would have been like if you didn't have those early sales experiences? I mean, that's something I think about a lot. Where you went into consulting, from what I understand was I actually went into go to market sales operations roles because that's where my interest was.

Vidit Agarwal
Have you ever thought about what life would have been like if you hadn't had that experience early on in your 18 to 20? It's a really five. Honestly, it's a really good question. I haven't thought about that so much. What I have thought about is if I hadn't taken the opportunity to co found the iconic, where I would have gone.

Adam Jacobs
Cause that was a real sliding doors moment for me and I think my life probably would look really different to what it is today. Where do you think you'd be? Like, this is a very deep question now. Do you think you'd be a lawyer or a consultant or something? So, living in Copenhagen.

I transferred to Copenhagen with BCG when the opportunity to co found the iconic came along. And at the time I just finished applying to. To MBA programs. And BCG are great. They sponsor MBA programs and I'd been accepted into a couple in the states, you know, so my path was spend another year in Copenhagen, go do an MBA program in the states.

You're then tied to BCG for a couple of years after that. So I probably would have sought to go to an interesting office like Buenos Aires or somewhere in Latin America or Europe to spend a couple of years. I think that path would have taken me to a more traditional blue chip corporate career where maybe I would have spent more time in consulting and then perhaps moved into an interesting role in a corporation that I respected and was doing something in the world that I wanted to get behind. Honestly, I think when I reflect, I think my reflection on that path has actually changed recently. If you asked me this question six or seven years ago, hey, like that sliding doors moment.

How would you felt about that other path? I would have said, no way. I'm so happy that I took this chance to start a business that became the iconic and that put me on this journey to be a founder myself. And then I built on that with creating hatch something that I deeply care about. And that's put me on a path of a much more personal manifestation of my values in the world.

That would have been my answer six or seven years ago. You know what? There's really no good or bad path for us in life. Like any path we take, hash pros and cons, and any path we take, we can make the most of. And if I'd taken that path, I probably still would have found myself gravitating to opportunities that connected with my personal values and allowed me to build something in the world that I really cared about, just not as a founder, rather, you know, rather probably as a leader within an existing corporation.

And that would have had some upsides, like a lot less stress, to be honest, and probably some downsides, like maybe the opportunity for impact was a little more limited. But I think I also would have enjoyed that, too. And, yeah, I think I've. I think we all have this trap of comparing where we could have been. And I think more recently, I've tried to stop doing that and just embrace at any point where I am and live the most authentic version of that.

Vidit Agarwal
And there's also a lot of confirmation bias built into that. Right. I'm sure there's a lot of other people in Copenhagen that started businesses that didn't work out. Oh, as you did, and it did work out. One thing you've spoken about in other interviews, which I was going to ask you later, but you've touched on it, is sense of identity.

And you spoke about how iconic helps people express identity through fashion and then hatch does it through a sense of work. How has your sense of identity evolved? Because, as you've said publicly many times, coming into the iconic, you were an unknown person in the ecosystem, and then you had this really rapid success relatively early in life, and now you're going at it again in a very different manner, and you've raised capital. Has your sense of identity, through these various crucible moments, changed? Do you know, I actually want to say, I don't think so.

Adam Jacobs
I really don't think so. At heart, I am still the 20 year old boy studying philosophy. I'm still looking at the world and I'm interested in it, and I'm asking questions about it, and I'm looking to impact it and make improvements in areas that I care about. I wasn't from a fashion background when I co founded the iconic. I learned an incredible amount about fashion in ecommerce and logistics.

I don't now identify as an ecom person or a logistics person or a fashion person. I identify as a problem solver and a builder, and that's what I'm doing again with hatch. I also don't identify as an entrepreneur. I find that word, like, a little bit icky. I don't know, it doesn't quite sit well with me.

There's something about the idea of an entrepreneur that puts value in the means rather than the end, as in, it's good to be an entrepreneur just because it's cool or it's sexy to be one and to build something. I don't think it really matters unless you're building something that counts and it's a problem that you care about. So I'm more interested in solving a problem than being an entrepreneur or having a certain label. But yeah, it's. I mean, the question you've asked me just now reminds me of a really particular moment in time.

And it would have 2021 coming to the end of COVID And during COVID hatch pivoted like many startups. We were only like a one or a two year old startup at the time. And when we started Hatch, it was a jobs marketplace for students, uni students, to find paid work alongside their studies. And the way it operated is we matched them to work based on not just what they were studying, but who they were underneath, their skills, their interests, their values, and was going really well. COVID happens, nobody's hiring interns or uni students anymore.

And so we had to pivot the business. And what we did was we pivoted to helping people who lost their job due to COVID be redeployed to totally different parts of the economy, using their transferable skills into jobs they didn't even know they could do. You take a Qantas pilot, you can't fly planes for a couple of years. What else can you do? And we'd redeploy them into managing a government contact center using their operational skills and their leadership skills.

So we did that for about a year, was really successful. We redeployed tens of thousands of Australians. And then afterwards we had to sit back and ask ourselves the question, where does hatch now go? We started in this intern space. We did this totally wild, unexpected pivot during COVID which was really successful.

Do we go back to the intern space. If we go into a new space, what does it look like? And there were a few paths we were considering, and some of those paths were maybe a little more driven by commercial opportunity, and some were driven a little more by missions. And I remember at that time, it would have been like mid 2021, having a chat about this with John Henderson, who's a partner at Airtree. And John and I, really close old friends, we were at BCG together, and we were in a grad cohort together, and we were sort of in the trenches together.

And that's where some really strong bonds are formed. And I was, like, talking about these different pathways with John, and he just looked at me and he said, come on, you know who you are. Like, you're the philosopher. You need to do what's right for you. You need to build a business that solves a problem in the world you care about, and any other path isn't going to feel right for you.

And it was such a, like, wake up moment of, yeah, like, that is who I am and I should be confident and I should be brave enough to just stick with, like, me and my own identity rather than try and chase a goal that probably is somebody else's goal just because it looks commercially attractive. So good. So good. And John's fantastic. John and I talk on WhatsApp frequently, and he's a great mentor, so I'm glad he's given you that advice.

Vidit Agarwal
I want to change things up. I think in most interviews, people ask you about iconic and you go through the steps. This is how I started, this is what I did. I think you've shared that enough. I don't want to repeat that.

What I thought we could do is compare iconic and hatch in terms of raising funding. The number of co founders initial product, if you are up for that'll, be a good case study, and I think a good chance for you to show your second founder skills as well. So first one is probably the founding team. Now, if I understand correctly, you were, I think, Rocket Internet brought you into co found iconic with five other co founders, whereas Hatch is you and one other co founder. Compare and contrast the two.

Like, how do you. Five or four co founders and then two, what are the pros and cons? Yeah. So with the iconic, the way it happened was there were four of us, including myself, who co founded the business, all from BCG, and one of them, Finn, was really close friend of mine at the time. He's the guy that I co owned the sailing boat with.

Adam Jacobs
Finn's German. And he had a connection to the Samwa brothers, who are the brothers behind Rocket Internet. And they'd actually previously tried to convince Finn to be one of the co founders of Groupon in Australia, and he wasn't so into that. They then re approached him when they were thinking about e commerce because the Samura brothers backed an Ecom player in Europe called Zalando, which is central Europe's largest online fashion retailer. It was a blinding success.

They wanted to replicate that success in other markets and they were thinking about which markets were under potentialized when it came to e commerce. And Australia was wildly underpotentialized. I mean, if you cycle back to 2010 and 2011, the major retailers like David Jones or Harvey Norman were basically saying, the Internet's a fad. We tried online one time, it didn't work. Nobody wants to buy clothes online.

They weren't getting behind the opportunity that australian shoppers were looking for it and they were shopping from asos and net a porter and boohoo and all these overseas retailers. There was just nobody doing it in Australia. So there was clearly an opportunity. The Samuel brothers and Finn start talking about it. They say, hey, why don't you quit BCG and move back.

Sorry. And take some seed capital and start a business? Who would you want to do it with? And he said, yeah, my friend Adam from BCG, I think, would be a really strong founding team. So he tapped me.

We had a chat about it, to be honest, I said no for two or three months because I was in Copenhagen. I was excited about being in Denmark. I was excited about going and doing an MBA next. I just really wasn't in my plan to, like, ditch that path and move back to Australia. But after about eight weeks, I flew to Munich and I had a lunch with Ollie Samoa.

And we sat down and he kind of ran me through the success they'd seen in Europe and why he thought the australian market was really great opportunity. And after that lunch, I saw it myself and I got on board and I got excited about it. And I'd always wanted to build something, and that was a problem. I was interested in retail, and I'd done quite a lot of consulting in retail and I was interested in that space, so I got really excited about it. Finn and I then tapped two other bcgs to join the founding team.

People that he and I both worked, both knew, but he'd worked quite closely with himself. So the four of us all left BCG around late 2011 to co found the iconic. The other three all left within the first 18 months. And they all left for various personal reasons. For Finn, he wanted to move back to Europe to be close to family.

There was another german co founder. He had a baby and wanted to bring it up back in Europe. And then Cam, who was an australian co founder from Brisbane, he realized once we had about 200 people, he realized he just didn't enjoy managing a lot of people and wanted to go back into businesses that he was, like, more excited about, which is super self aware of him. So we had this really great time starting the business up together, and we divided and conquered, and that worked really well. But then I found myself alone as a co founder for the next seven or eight years.

We brought in another ex BCJ called Patrick, who actually ended up being the co founder of Groupon in Australia. And Patrick and I ran the business together for about seven or eight years. I definitely had a partner there, and he was CEO and I was MD. And that worked really well, and we enjoyed that relationship a lot. So that's what happened with the iiconic with hatch.

Totally different story. Chaz, my co founder, had been a longtime friend of mine. We had often had conversations. We were the kind of people who, like at a house party, would find a quiet couch and a glass of wine and just have a chat about the world, what we believed in, and what we cared about, and what businesses we might want to build. So we always had this idea in the back of our mind that we wanted to create a company together.

He was one of the co founders of Zip, so he had a really great founding experience himself. In late 2016, we started thinking about it seriously, and we went and did a trip in the himalayas for about three weeks or four weeks, and did a long trek in Nepal and used that time to talk about our values and our beliefs and what kind of businesses we could be excited about. And that eventually led to hatch. I would say that in all cases, both the iconic and hatch, the founder skill sets amongst us, looked pretty similar, as in, like we were coming from a consulting or a banking background, you know, the iconic. We're all from a consulting background with Hatch.

Chaz started his career in investment banking. I started mining consulting, but, you know, fairly similar skill sets. I think an interesting reflection is that on paper, it would be better if you had a co founding team with more diverse skill sets that a technology company requires. It would be better if you had a co founder who was an engineer and could run, and maybe if you had one who was a designer and could be designing the product at the iconic, maybe it would be good if you had one who was from a logistics background or a fashion background, and on paper that, you know, theoretically would be better. But what's played out in reality, particularly if I think about hatch, because that was quite a deliberate pairing of Taz and myself, is we're just super values aligned.

Like super values aligned. And that means that we are rock solid as a founding team. We're not political, we don't really bicker, we don't debate. We care about the same thing in terms of what we want to build with the business, and then we bring in the skills around us that are required to build an incredible company. And I think that's the right trade off to make.

I think the right trade off is to go with a co founder that you can weather the storms and the ups and downs that startups inevitably bring because you're coming from a base of deep trust and deep values in alignment, no matter what your skills profile look like, rather than trying to put together the perfect team of like different skills. The other thing I'd say is I think four co founders were good early on at the iconic because it's quite an operational business model and it meant we could divide and conquer. I was looking when we got started, I was looking after operations and logistics and fin after marketing and tech, and the other two were on inventory and buying. As we got a bit bigger, I think that model started to get a little bit strained and we needed tighter leadership then for people who were quite dispersed. And I think when it moved to just me and Patrick, that was quite a good model, a little bit tighter.

At hatch, we've only ever had two founders since we started, and I think that's been a good number and that's worked well for us. It's meant quite tight decision making loops, and it means that we both have a good overall view of the company. Back to the episode in a moment. If you're new to the High Flies podcast and enjoying this episode with Adam Jacobs, you might enjoy episode 120 with Tim Doyle, co founder of Eucalyptus, and Alex Badron, co founder of Spriggy Talking all Things founder life and company Scaling. Or episode 118 with Anil Subrawal.

Vidit Agarwal
That's Anil, an I l who built and led three of Google's 9 billion user products in Google Chrome Drive and Google Photos. And as always, access all 160 plus episodes@thehighfliespodcast.com. That's thehighfliespodcast.com. Now back to the episode you mentioned earlier about sales and something I think a lot about is founder led sales, whether it's founders I work with. We had Lee Jasper a while ago on the show from Aconnex and he spoke about his secret sauce.

He felt in the early days, econnex was founder led sales. Compare and contrast that at iconic and hatch. I mean, iconic is b, two c. So I get the sales element is very different to hatch, but what role have you played in terms of founder led sales at iconic versus hatch? So I didn't do much at all at the iconic.

Adam Jacobs
The equivalent of founder led sales at the iconic, it would be relationships with fashion brands and really selling the story to the fashion brands to bring them on board and convince someone like Nike that their brand will be looked after in this new retail channel. That's a little bit unproven. And actually, I would say that our fashion, our senior fashion buyers did a lot of that because they had quite deep relationships with those brands. And then the co founders on the team were the ones that were responsible for the relationships with the fashion brands and they did a really great job of it at the iconic. For me, I spent a lot more time on partners in other parts of the business model.

So logistics partnerships with Australia Post. For example, at the time, Ahmed Farhul was the CEO of Australia Post. I know he's been on your show recently and he's now been our key angel investor in Hatch. So we developed a really strong relationship in building out the delivery proposition. I spent quite a lot of time on marketing channels and partners, for example, like large media companies doing tv deals or radio deals.

So that founder led sales in a, B, two C model was probably more about distribution channels and channel partners. And that's where I put a lot of my time there. With Hatch, I've done an unbelievable amount of founder led sales to employers that use the marketplace, probably more than I could have ever imagined, to be honest. I've spent a lot of time since we started the company with employees, talking to them, understanding, you know, how they currently recruit, how they feel about sourcing channels on the market and where the opportunity for something better is. I love it.

I get a lot of energy from it. You know, at the end of the day, they are our end customers. And the thing that I get the most energy from in building a business is building user experiences that solve real problems. So I love hearing about the problems from those customers and then putting experiences in front of them and getting their feedback and iterating on those experiences and then delivering them and seeing the results that they deliver. I would say that two things that pop out for me from my experience of doing a lot of founded led sales.

One is even if you don't like it, and I like it, but even if you don't like it, it is so critical for any founder to do, to understand, just to build this judgment over how your customers think. Like, you need to be talking to them to understand how they're feeling, how they're thinking about your product, rather than take it as secondhand from your team. The second thing that pops out to me is you need to find a way to scale yourself. And you can't just keep doing founder led sales the whole time to grow the company. And that's hard.

It's really hard. You know, I think that we still, I'm still very involved in a lot of sales and we're still building a scalable go to market model on the employer side of our marketplace. And it takes time to crack that. How do you sort of scale the founders? You can start bringing them out.

I don't really know if I have any secret sources in that space. One other thing is how growth is different at iconic versus hatch. And I think iconic. You spoke about the importance of inventory, to your point earlier, impressions, the search results. And it was also at a time where, as you would know, Facebook and Google was just a different game from a CPM perspective, from a marketing perspective.

Vidit Agarwal
And I think you've spoken about this, how life is just different today. Compare and contrast that from a growth perspective. Iconic and hatch, what are the things that you did then that you can't do now? And what are the things you didn't do then that you can do now? Yeah.

Adam Jacobs
So for the iconic, ecommerce was really nascent in Australia. And the time that, the time where the market was when we launched was australian shoppers were interested in e commerce, but they weren't doing a whole lot of online shopping. So there was like an opportunity there, but it hadn't been realized yet. I think if you look at the fashion category, when we launched, about 1% of overall fashion was bought online in 2011 when we launched the iconic. And so the growth opportunity was really about building trust and showing to australian shoppers that here's a website that you can trust and you can put your credit card details in.

And we did that a lot through our USP's, our unique selling propositions. We did that with a very fast delivery proposition, with a free returns policy, a really seamless returns experience with a really good website. That was seamless, Goodux, all of those things build trust. As you use that service you're like wow, okay, this thing works, it's reliable, it's fast, I can return if I want to, it's risk free. And then we made sure that we got the best brands on board first so that we build a bit of brand credibility by having Sass and byte there or Nike there or adas there.

That did a lot of the heavy lifting of the marketing. So I'll talk about marketing in a sec. But actually the marketing wouldn't have been effective without some of those building blocks in place in order to build trust and communicate trust to the australian audience. When it came to marketing we basically had two strategies that worked really well. We did some halo above the line marketing so we do tv ads and billboards and buses and we were pretty smart about it.

Like we bought a lot of distressed media inventory. We weren't going after very premium inventory so we weren't spending big bucks on it but we had high frequency media so you saw it around a lot on buses and billboards and you heard it a lot on the radio and that sent this message to the australian audience of these guys are for real. This isn't like a bit of a scam online play. This is a genuine retailer. Other ecommerce brands weren't doing above the line marketing at the time so we really stood out.

The other thing we did was we built very strong internal capability on digital marketing that basically took our inventory of products and marketed across lots of different growth channels. Affiliate marketing, display marketing, social media. We got really good at SEO and SEM. You know, as a retailer, as an online retailer the products you're selling are really your strongest marketing assets. And so we had data feeds that were pumping out to lots of different digital growth channels to drive traffic back into the website based on people searching for nike shoes or searching for formal dresses or whatever it may have been.

And that worked really well. We were pretty focused on cost per acquisition of new customers and so we just each month kept optimizing that channel mix to drive down the CAC the cost per acquisition and drive up the volume. Hatch is interesting. Hatch looks a little bit different. I mean, you know, the iconic is a one sided marketplace.

It's australian shoppers buying fashion and footwear. Hatch is a two sided marketplace. It's candidates and employers coming together and there's a lot more tricky dynamics when it comes to a two sided marketplace. The candidate side of Hatch's marketplace is more like b two C marketing and the employer side is more like b two B, marketing. But just stepping back for a second, like, really what we're, what we're doing, trying to disrupt with Hatch is the traditional job boards are very much an advertising experience.

You know, as a candidate, you go onto a board, you see a bunch of text based ads. Those ads are quite hard to differentiate. They kind of say the same thing, long dot points of responsibilities and buzzwords. As an employer, you post a job ad and then you get a whole lot of cv's in your inbox. And those CV's can be hard to differentiate.

And often you're not finding the people you're looking for. It's a fairly negative user experience as reported by both companies and candidates. What we're doing with hatch is we're really rethinking that experience into a better way for candidates and teams to discover each other and understand each other. And so it's more like an Airbnb or a dating app or an Uber experience than a traditional advertising board would be. And that means it's profile based.

So we're getting candidates to sign up and create profiles, we're getting teams to sign up and create profiles. And those profiles have information not just on your cv or what you've done before, but information about who you are as a person, like your skills and your values and your interests. Same thing on the team side. And then we match. We have some smart AI recommendation systems in the background that match together.

The growth model that unlocks is a little bit more like a product led growth model, where there's a lot of interactions in the marketplace that can drive growth and can acquire more users. For example, if an employer is looking at a candidate profile that they like the look of, they can share it with one of their colleagues, and that drives a sign up by their colleague. The other aspect of our growth model that is quite interesting at hatch is jobs are an inventory that already exist on the Internet. With the iconic, we had to go and buy a whole lot of fashion, and we had to wholesale it, put it in our warehouse, photograph it, put it in our systems, and then make it available for sale for Hatch. With jobs, companies already post their jobs on their careers pages.

So we already see the inventory on the Internet. And that is really a leg up for us to break the cold start problem when it comes to how do you acquire candidates and how do you acquire employers if you don't have either one of them? First, we can start by putting the existing jobs up on the marketplace, matching those jobs to candidates to demonstrate value to those candidates, and then going to the employees and say, hey, look, we've been promoting your jobs to candidates. There's lots of them who are interested. Why don't you claim those jobs to start receiving applications?

And that creates a really nice growth flywheel for us. So that's a growth strategy that we've seen quite a lot of success in. Let's talk about fundraising for a bit. This came up with, I spoke to people that you connected me with and they said, you've really reflected on this. And I think through hatch, you learned a lot.

Vidit Agarwal
And I was also fascinated that you chose to fundraise a lot later in hatches journey, whereas at iconic, and you put me in touch with fi, one of your early employees at iconic, and she shared the story of often at night, at 08:00 you'd be sitting at your desk and you'd get an email from the german investors and it'd be like, Adam, why have you not hit this target? You'd be so calm and relaxed and she'd be blowing her brains out going. Adam, what do we do? And you'd be like, it's okay, we've got this under control. So you've clearly learned a lot about how to work with different investors.

Talk about fundraising, like, all the learnings that you took from iconic. How did you approach fundraising at hatch? Yeah, I mean, again, totally different experiences with the iconic. When we started 2011, there just really wasn't much of an australian venture scene. It was starting to pop up, but it was definitely not interested in e commerce.

Adam Jacobs
So we would have liked to raise from australian investors, but there was an appetite for Ecom from that community, which is why even though rocket were the first investors, actually the major investors pretty quickly became a swedish family office called Shinnevik. And they've been very successful. They're also behind Klarna, they're behind a bunch of really successful tech ventures, and they saw the e commerce opportunity globally and they were great to work with through the iconic. They're very sort of focused on good governance and long term thinking. I think maybe what Fi is referring to there is.

That's probably the mindset I took out of that experience is long term thinking. There's this analogy that I remember Ollie Samuel, the initial rocket investor, said to me one time, I think he said this to me because I'm australian and he just assumes all Australians surf. But he said, it's less important when it comes to surfing. It's less important that you have the best board or the best wetsuit or you've had the most healthy breakfast that morning. What's actually most important is just you're positioned at the right time when the wave comes along, and if you're positioned at the right time when the wave comes along, then everything else becomes easy.

And I think that's the mindset I had with the iconic, is we are on a megawave here, like E.com, it's a megawave. And yeah, there's going to be fluctuations in things that go right or wrong, month to month, and there's going to be fires to fight, but we know it's worth it because we're on the wave. I think that is a mindset that I've taken into hatch. Hatch is also on a megawave, like, we're on a megawave of workforce transformation and AI, and we're really putting those two things together. It's a totally different way to match people in jobs, and that's the AI aspect, but it's also prioritizing different information about what a match is, putting values and culture first, and that's part of the workforce transformation.

It's also on the wave of marketplace transformation. If you look at how marketplaces evolve, they tend to go from ads in the newspaper to ads online to two sided markets. And we're doing the hop to two side of marketplaces in the professional job space. So I think what I've done with Hatch is now that there are some really fantastic australian investors available in the 2020s that weren't available a decade before, is I've looked to find the ones, and not just me, but me and my co founder Taz, we've looked to find the ones who are excited about that long term megawave and they see the opportunity, they see the opportunity for the right application of AI in a jobs marketplace. They see the opportunity for building upon what was there before us.

Those traditional job boards have done a great job, but I would say their second wave and building on that with the third wave to start a marketplace, and so really trying to find the investors that are aligned on that long term vision. And that means that, yeah, we're going to have problems along the way. Any startup has problems along the way. If you don't, you're not trying hard enough. But we're all in it for the same vision and the same reason completely.

Vidit Agarwal
I want to bring the conversation back to some of your habits and routines. And there's some fascinating stories I've heard here that hopefully you can share with our audience. I've been told you've MC'd twelve weddings and you've been a best man at five. Tell me about that. So the numbers are close.

Adam Jacobs
I'm Mc'ed eight, and I'm actually going to a really close friend's wedding next weekend in Sonoma, north of San Francisco. And that'll be number nine one. And, yeah, I think I've been in the. I think I've been a groomsman or a best man for a bunch. Yeah, probably five or six or something.

I don't know what it is. I feel like I MC the first couple and then I somehow just got stuck with this stereotype of, oh, Adam knows how to MC wedding, so you should just get him to do it. It's kind of, it's a really fun job. It also means you can't really drink until quite late in the piece, you know, so you're sort of a little bit stressed out while you're doing your mc, dude. I love it, though.

Like, I love trying to help create, like, the vibe and make everyone feel comfortable and, yeah, just kind of enjoy. Enjoy the moment. And you've also. Have you. Did you introduce Chaz to his wife?

Vidit Agarwal
Is that a true story? That is a true story. That is a true story. Chaz and I are really close friends and we also, for a year or two, were housemates. And around that time, I want to say it was like 2015, I think was about then his now wife Shari, who's a well known journalist, she was having a New Year's Eve party.

Adam Jacobs
And Shari and I are really close friends from university and at uni, I actually worked for both of Shari's parents. Her dad, Max Markson, was a well known celebrity manager, and he brought out, like, Bill Clinton and Buzz Aldred and Nelson Mandela and Chubby Checker and all these amazing figures to Australia to sort of do speaking to us and other things, things like that. I did a bit of work for him and then her mum romarcs and ran a really, or still runs a really successful pr business. And I worked for her a little bit at uni. So I got to know Shari really well through her, you know, working for both of her parents.

And we became close friends. And, yeah, around 2015, she invited me to her New Year's Eve party and she was single at the time and she said, hey, I've got a couple of single friends and is there anyone, any guys you want to bring along that, you know, might be fun for them to meet? And I'm like, yeah, amazing friend, Chaz. And she's, oh, cool. Because I've got this one friend in mind who sounds like they could be like a really good match.

And so I brought Chaz to the new year's Eve party. And I think like 1 minute in Shari's, no, that he's a match for me, not for my friend. And they just hit it off straight away. And they got married, I think two years later. That's so good.

Vidit Agarwal
That's so good. Now you put me in touch with your partner and we were both laughing and I said, what's one thing that Tamsin's taught you? Tamsin's? Did she ask you to ask that question? I know.

I said, I'll ask you that. And she said, yeah, he's asking us. She's very curious. I've learned a lot from Tamsin. A lot, Tamsin, because I think while.

You'Re thinking maybe you should pretext, I think a lot of people forget that founders. There's so many supporters in your journey and even in your own story where you're giving to other people and helping. But you need people when you come home and on the weekends and people you can just have a shoulder to go, you know. My day was shit. This is what happened.

Adam Jacobs
Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think we learned a lot from our partners and I've learned a lot from Tamsin. But I guess one learning that I'll call out, which kind of refers back to an earlier part of our conversation around emotional connection.

She's incredibly good at emotional honesty. She will express how she's feeling, she'll put it out to the world and it's a way to really connect with others around them her. And I've learned more courage myself in how to just share what's going on the inside. You know, you've mentioned a couple of times I'm quite good at being calm. But often what comes with being calm is holding in what's going on in the inside and then presenting a slightly more managed front on the outside that's a little bit calmer than maybe how you're feeling.

And I think something I've learned from Tamsin is like, how to have the courage to have congruence between what you're feeling on the inside and how you're expressing it on the outside. And it's little things, right? It's little communication tricks, or it's just encouragement, or it's seeing her doing it and seeing the results that she gets from it and how healthy it can be. And so I think I've really, like embraced that and done it a lot more, and that's her influence. It's so funny.

Vidit Agarwal
I see so much of your personality in me. One thing that came up a lot in the research was you like to talk to people about decisions. And I laughed because I said, I'm exactly that. Like, what do you think about this? What do you think about that?

And they were like, Adam does exactly that. He wants to speak to everyone about his decision making. Yeah, I'm definitely the kind of personality type that likes to get data, external data on decisions. It could be like talking to people. It could be doing research, whatever it is, you know, I remember when I was in Copenhagen and deciding to whether to join the founding team of the iconic or not, I spoke to, honestly, like, everybody I knew in my life, and I did these incredibly long pros and cons lists, and none of it helped me in the end.

Adam Jacobs
Like, all it got me to was a decent understanding of the pros and cons, but it didn't help me figure out which way to go. And in the end, I just had to look internally and listen to my gut as to what was right for me, and that led me to the right decision. And I think to your question about Tamsin, I think that's something that she's helped me with, is not needing to go and do that, outsource decision making, but be a bit more comfortable in looking at what's inside and maybe sharing that more with others and leading from there. We talk a lot about painful learnings on the show, and we've spoken. I think you've been quite candid, and I'm wondering if you're happy to share this story relating to Mumbai with your family.

Vidit Agarwal
I'll leave that and give you an opening if you want to talk about that and what you learned from that story. Yeah, I'm really happy to talk about it. So my dad, David, was in the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. There were two hotels where the terrorists were attacking. One was the Taj and one was the Oberoi.

Adam Jacobs
And he was in the Oberoi, and he spent 50 hours hidden in his closet, just like living off the minibar on the floor where people were being killed and where, you know, bombs were going off before finally he was rescued by the indian army. And he was very lucky to survive. I mean, he's jewish, and he definitely would have been targeted. And he knew people who were shot and killed. And during that time.

This is this 2008. This is back when everyone had a BlackBerry. I was like, if we can think back then. And so he had his BlackBerry, and we were communicating the family and him and I was the main person in the family, was trying to help run the communications. We were communicating with him throughout.

We were constantly over email with him. We were also communicating with the indian army and trying to send messages back to him and help him understand what the safest course of action would be. At one point, he thought he would have to try and is escape through the window, and then we had to retract that plan. It was a terrifying time when we didn't know whether he would make it through. To his credit, he showed so much humor and levity through it.

Like, instead of going into panic mode, he tried to keep it light and not freak out and made a lot of jokes and just tried to stay in a good headspace throughout it. And, you know, eventually he came out. I think, you know, I think, what do I take from it? It was really interesting. It's been interesting watching him reflect on that experience.

And as a family, we often come together at milestones of that terrorist attack, you know, five years on or ten years on, to have a dinner and to celebrate the life that he's lived in that time that he otherwise would not have lived if he was killed in that terrorist attack. And it just allows us to show gratitude to each other of family and, like, having that time together. I think. I think my dad, like, he'd already, a couple years before that, he had this very high flying corporate career as a lawyer. And a couple years before that, he'd already made a bit of a pivot in his life of priorities.

Like, when I was younger, like zero to ten, he wouldn't come home before 11:00 p.m. Or midnight, like most days. And then when time I was around, I want to say mid of teens, the he did this development course and he realized that he was just losing all of this time in his life to work. And he shifted his priorities towards a bit more family first. But I think that the Mumbai attack was a real punctuation in that journey and just showed us, at the end of the day, what matters is your relationships and your family and the people you love most.

And they're the ones that you have to prioritize and show gratitude for. Appreciate you sharing that. And I know how important your dad is. I've heard a lot about your walks with your dad through the iconic years. And since clearly he's an important sounding board, we're running short in time.

Vidit Agarwal
So I want to move to rapid fire final sprint. Is there one non work investment of time and energy that you consider the best in your life. So I've already talked about therapy. I think the other one I would talk about is the school of life. So the School of life is a program that was set up by a contemporary philosopher, Alanda Potton, who wrote a whole bunch of interesting books, if anyone hasn't read them yet.

Adam Jacobs
And it's a series of classes that seeks to teach adults things that they should have learned around emotional intelligence at school but never did. How to have a good relationship, how to think about death, how to deal with loss, how to tap into your creativity, you know, what to do for work, how to fail. And I taught, you know, I've got a philosophy background, and so I really wanted to get involved. And for quite a long time, I taught a class called how to find meaning without religion. So if you're coming from a more secular path and you're trying to find meaning in life, you know, religion plays that role for many people.

If you're not religious, like, where does meaning come from? And I got so much out of teaching that class. Like, it was constantly this melting pot of people of different ages, of different religious dispositions, of different reasons why they were in the room talking about some very personal questions over what gives them meaning in life. And it sort of enhanced my own empathy to so many different walks of life. And I got a lot of energy from that.

And that connection to philosophy is something that I sort of try and continue to maintain in my career. Is there one thing you'd like to learn in the next six months? I, like, have brought my grandfather's piano to our apartment, and ever since I brought it, I've played it, like, twice. And I'm just. I really want to.

Yeah, I want to find myself a piano teacher and get stuck in. Nice. Is there one interview question you love asking prospective candidates? Yeah, I'm going to check and give you two. One is, tell me about a mistake you've made and what you learned from it, which tests humility.

The other one, which I love to ask, is, what is a piece of work you're most proud of and why? And the reason I ask that question is, I want to know where they go to. Do they talk about a financial outcome? Do they talk about a team achievement? Do they talk about a process improvement?

Do they talk about a customer outcome? What is it that really motivates them? And that quite open question can be very revealing to someone's, like, motivators. Is there one pet peeve you have? Yeah.

When people take too long to make a point. It's like, it's a really. I feel like it's a really rude pet peeve. But honestly, like, when you're a co founder or you're running a business, there's just so much to do in the day. And I'm always like, once I understand a point, I'm ready to, like, talk about it or move on to the next thing.

Vidit Agarwal
So that's like, that's so interesting. That's something fi mentioned. She said that you used to say a lot, got it. Like, two minutes in and where she wants to finish, like, her five minutes. Feel two minutes in, you be like, got it, move on.

Adam Jacobs
What's next? She's actually really, really brilliant. I never noticed from. I think she's pretty succinct, but, you know, like, people have different communication styles, and that's fine. It's just like a pet peeve I can't get around.

Vidit Agarwal
How do you find that in email? Because I think a lot of people will write you an essay. Like, you've heard that line, I couldn't write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long letter. Do you find that an email where I think, particularly in the startup ecosystem, where I often don't even say hi and thanks, I just write the response back. Yeah, I don't find that.

Adam Jacobs
I mean, like, internally at hatch, we communicate on Slack, and I really like that. It's funny, I remember when I was at BCG, I did a case for one of the big four banks, and it was a bit of an.org transformation case. And something, this is like 2010. And something I was pushing at the time was to try and experiment with moving away from email as the primary internal communication channel towards real time chat. I mean, this is pre slack, so I can't remember what was available at the time, and everyone was like, no, no, this is never going to happen.

Email is just, like, entrenched, and now, like, a lot of organizations are running on Slack. And I love it. I think it's much better. I think that it facilitates faster, more useful conversations. I think you got to have some, like, pretty good boundaries around how you use slack.

Otherwise you just spend your whole time chatting to people. But if you can use it well, I think it's much better than email. Oh, it sounds like you've got a down pat. I've got WhatsApp iMessage, slack, email. It's chaos.

Vidit Agarwal
It is chaos. But I'm glad you've got a dent. But that brings us to a finish line. Adam, thank you so much for joining me and thank you for being so candid. I think that was the best part about this, is you were very vulnerable and open to sharing your successes, but also pitfalls.

So appreciate the time and chat soon. Thanks vidit and thanks for all your research. It's been really fun hearing all your questions. So much. Appreciate you diving into my story a little bit.

Well, there you have it. That's the end of my conversation with Adam Jacobs in this episode. 162 this was really fun. A lot of mutual friends prior to this said to me, Adam is one of the most sharpest and most candid minds they make and that absolutely came through in this conversation. We went down parts he hasn't openly talked to one before, such as his sense of identity, learnings from his dad, terrifying moments, building the iconic and seeking therapy, and I loved spending a chunk of time to compare and contrast various aspects of the iiconic with hatch, including the right amount of co founders, how to sell growth drivers, fundraising different and more.

I hope you really enjoyed this one. And as always, all my details are in the show notes. If you want to get in touch anytime, especially if you want to partner with us as a sponsor brand, my email is there and if you missed it at the start, we've got some really exciting announcements. For a free ticket to sunrise by Blackbird, all you have to do is fill out the form in our show notes and we have not one, but two two live events happening in Melbourne in May. Again, all details in the show notes if you want to register with that.

Hope you enjoyed the episode and I'll catch you soon.

#162 Adam Jacobs: How he built 'The Iconic' and now 'Hatch', Learnings from selling kitchen knives, personal identity and dad's influence!

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

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Episode Chapters

1. Introduction and Background

2. Building 'The Iconic'

3. Founding 'Hatch'

4. Personal Reflections

5. Future Aspirations

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

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