#164 Connor Archbold: Living in 28 homes, Unpacking the magic and learnings building 'Tracksuit', New York, NZ & Family!

Primary Topic

This episode explores the dynamic journey of Connor Archbold, co-founder of Tracksuit, as he navigates through extensive personal and professional experiences, from living in 28 homes to establishing a successful brand measurement platform.

Episode Summary

Connor Archbold shares his fascinating journey, delving into his upbringing in multiple homes and the pivotal experiences that shaped his career trajectory. He discusses founding Tracksuit, a company providing real-time brand health tracking, which now serves over 1300 brands and has raised significant Series A funding. The episode covers the cultural and operational challenges Connor faced while expanding internationally, particularly into the U.S. market. The discussion also touches on personal aspects such as his family, the impact of moving back to New Zealand during COVID, and his philosophical approach to life and business.

Main Takeaways

  1. The influence of a global upbringing on personal and professional life.
  2. Insights into starting and scaling a tech startup like Tracksuit.
  3. The significance of cultural adaptation in international business expansion.
  4. The importance of resilience and adaptability in overcoming personal and professional challenges.
  5. Reflections on work-life balance and the impact of significant life events on career decisions.

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction

Connor and the host discuss the concept of "high flyers" and the goals of the podcast. Connor Archbold: "I'm so impressed by people who just do the work."

2: Tracksuit's Genesis

Deep dive into the founding of Tracksuit and its impact on brand measurement. Connor Archbold: "Tracksuit was born from a need to see real-time brand health data."

3: Scaling Internationally

Exploration of the challenges and strategies of taking Tracksuit to international markets. Connor Archbold: "Expanding into the U.S. was both challenging and exhilarating."

4: Personal Journey

Connor reflects on his diverse upbringing and its influence on his career. Connor Archbold: "Living in so many places taught me adaptability and resilience."

5: Future Aspirations

Discussion on future goals and the potential post-Tracksuit. Connor Archbold: "I'm thinking about how to impact the world positively after Tracksuit."

Actionable Advice

  1. Embrace cultural differences to enhance business expansion.
  2. Leverage personal experiences to build resilience in business.
  3. Foster a balance between professional aspirations and personal life.
  4. Utilize setbacks as learning opportunities to fuel future successes.
  5. Stay adaptable and open to change in both personal and professional spheres.

About This Episode

Connor is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Tracksuit. Tracksuit provides always-on, beautiful tracking to measure brand health. Tracksuit today covers 1,300 brands including many household names and recently raised $20M dollars in funding from leading investors to fuel their next phase of Growth.
Connor was born in California, USA and now lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

It's now time to explore your curiosity.

If you're keen to discuss sponsorship and partnering with us, email us at vidit@thehighflyerspodcast.com today!

People

Connor Archibald

Companies

Tracksuit

Books

None mentioned

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Transcript

Vidi Tagawal
What if we could reimagine the traditional notion of a high flyer? Hey friends, welcome back. Or welcome to the High Flyers podcast where we do reimagine a high flyer. Showcase the brightest and most relatable role. Models and companies and their journey from sunrise to today as one of the.

Connor Archibald
Premier products in our Curiosity centre lineup. Providing on demand intelligence featuring Olympic athletes. Business and cultural leaders, students, journalists, investors. Founders and more from around the world to help you be 1% better every single day. I'm your host, Vidi Tagawal, and let's have some fun.

Vidi Tagawal
Thanks to you, this podcast continues to rank in the global top ten podcasts by both Spotify and Apple podcasts for. The past two years running. And we hope you're enjoying our catalog of 150 episodes featuring guests from twelve. Countries across nearly 30 industries. Before we get to today's episode, I want to share some news just with you.

We've recently partnered up with our friends at KPMG across our suite of products at the Curiosity center that includes this podcast, our events series, our newsletter and more. And I'm excited to share applications are now open to pitch big breakthrough ideas at KPMGS 2024 Global Tech Innovator competition this is an annual competition run by KPMG High Growth ventures that brings the best in market together to compete for an amazing prize, a fully funded trip to take your idea to the world stage at Lisbons World Web Summit. Sapia AI took out the trophy last year and if I was building a high growth tech startup, I'd jump on this opportunity. So click on the link in our show notes now to complete your application today and in partnership with KPMG nclimate 200 have organized their special live and in person event happening on the 16 May in Melbourne featuring the head of public policy at Tesla, Sam McLean, and the founder of Climate 200, Simon Holmes. A court it's free and quickly filling up again.

Link in our show notes to register today. So maybe, just maybe, pause this episode, read our show notes, get involved and then press play to listen to this conversation. My guest this week is Connor Archibald. In this episode 164 I learnt so much. Connor is the co founder and co CEO of Tracksuit.

Tracksuit provides always on beautiful tracking to measure brand health. Founded only 20 months ago, tracksuit today covers over 1300 brands, including many household names, and recently raised a $20 million series A from leading investors in Australia, New Zealand and the US to fuel their next phase of growth. Connor was born in California in the US and now lives in Auckland, New Zealand. In this conversation, learned about Connor sunrise his childhood. I was amazed to learn that he lived in 28.

That's right, 28 different homes before he was 18. Hear about the influences of his parents, his dad, who was a teacher and then entrepreneur and now a real estate agent and his mum, who was a Pilates teacher and, as Connor says, his best friend. Highlights from these conversations include the source of Connor being empathetic but fiercely competitive. How the dream to play professional soccer was crushed once he got injured at 17 and never played again. How working in operations at Mishguru shaped Connor's views on building a tech startup and his learnings on how to open offices and expand to Sydney, Berlin and New York.

And learning not to be reliant on a specific provider or system, as Mishguru was with Snapchat, we deep dive into various aspects of his now startup tracksuit that's quickly becoming a global success story, including why is culture so important, how to scope out a new market and Connor's views that if you fund a project with money that isn't from customers, it's very hard to tell whether you have product market fit or not. The importance of understanding the regional state based approach in the US, the founders role in sales early on and how it evolves as the company scales. Connor's biased toward decisions being made by a small group of people versus collaboration with a large group and whether that's a strength or a weakness. And thinking through problem and solution hypothesis for customer partnerships. And we unveil Connor the human being, including how he met his wife Kat when they were both lawyers and went on a one year travelling trip to run a surface and yoga retreat.

Our living in New York for five years has shaped him. His reflections on moving back to New Zealand during COVID with his first daughter on the way. And what would he spend his time on post tracksuit? Alright, that's enough for me. It's now time to explore your curiosity.

Please enjoy.

Connor Archibald
Connor Archibald, welcome to the show. Thanks. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. I am pleased to do this.

I don't know if I've told you this. Phoebe from Blackbird had mentioned you in early 23 and she had said, we've invested in these two guys. And then I think you went on Matleave. You went on Matleave straight after your seed round for your second daughter's birthday. Yeah, we might have even.

I think we announced it while I was on parental leave. Yeah. So February 2023. Yes. I've spoken to a lot of people leading up to this, so let's start with the fun facts.

Where were you born and where do you live now? I was born in a little surf town called Encinitas, California, sort of just north of San Diego. And now I live in Auckland, New Zealand. And from a work perspective, what was your first job and what do you do now? My first job, I can't remember which came first, but I did landscaping on the weekends as a young teenager and also worked at a retail clothing surf shop, shakas all around, mainly helping grandmothers pick up board shorts for their kids.

And so, yeah, both of those as a young teenager. And how would you describe your role now? I roll. Now I am co founder and co CEO of Tracksuit. We will talk about that in a few minutes.

And Connor, as you know, the purpose of this show is to reimagine a high flyer. Is there a high flyer, you know, who you feel hasn't got the recognition they deserve? That's a good question. I think I'm always just. I'm so impressed by people who, like, just do the work.

And there's a young entrepreneur in New Zealand named Amber Joseph who just raised her first round. And I just think she's going to do great things because every month she just, like, puts in the work and she's solving problems. So, yeah, shout out to Amber. She's definitely a high flyer. Yeah, I saw that announcement just this week.

I think it was on the press. Very interesting. Funnily enough, my, you know, intern that used to work for me actually works for her now. So it's a great flywheel and she's helping them with the bunch of content stuff. But let's delve back to your sunrise, as I call it, your childhood.

And you mentioned growing up in the surf town. Tell us about that. What are your memories of growing up there? Oh, dude. No, I mean, I.

We were probably there for my first six months, so I don't have heaps of memories of it, but, yeah, we bounced around a lot growing up. I think I lived in 28 different homes before I was 18, so a fair number of moves in there. How many different schools was that? No. Pretty.

Bounced around, stayed at the same schools for most of it. So, yeah, like, it was just a change in circumstances meant that we would move between, you know, different places. But my parents were focused on us staying largely at the same school, so. Yeah, so not a lot of. But Encinitas was early, then it was New Jersey and Arizona and then New Zealand when I was like, 1999, when I was like, twelve.

You did the rest of your high school in New Zealand and lived in New Zealand till you went to New York later in your career. Right. So that probably explains the accent, being a blend of american and kiwi all over the show. No one knows where I belong, where I'm from. Yeah, but.

And what did your parents do for work? Dad was. He started as a teacher and then he became an entrepreneur, and now he's a real estate agent. And my mom was a teacher as well. She taught Pilates and did Montessori.

Teaching. Yeah. A lot of people that I spoke to leading up to this, I asked them, how would they describe Connor to someone who's not met you? And it was interesting. It was a blend of two worlds.

Everyone said you've got high iq and EQ, but you're fiercely competitive. And they said they would not want you as their enemy. Unpack that for me. Does that from childhood. How do you balance between being such an empathetic, good bloke but then you're fiercely competitive?

I mean, I don't know. That's just my. That's who I am. Yeah. I am extremely competitive.

I love to win, hate to lose, but maybe. I mean, it's one of tracksuit's values is, like, extremely competitive, but don't be a jerk about it. And it plays out a lot in that, you know, it's not. I guess, like, life isn't a zero sum game. You know, you can win, but other people can also win.

So maybe that's how it shows up. And I think probably my parents read that book, like, seven habits of highly effective people. And one of the habits is having an abundance mindset, so maybe that plays a role in how that was created. Yeah. Did you have any heroes growing up?

Were there any posters on the wall or people you looked up to?

I mean, I definitely. My mom was probably my best friend. I'm like a huge mama's boy. But if you asked me maybe who inspired me, I probably would have said my dad. He was a great runner and a good thinker.

And so I had them as role models to look up to and still do look up to them. And did soccer play a part in your childhood? That came up in my research. Whether soccer shaped you or didn't shape you, tell me this story with soccer. Yeah, it's cool that you did all this research and a little scary.

Yeah. So I was. I was a competitive soccer player in my teens and was largely focused on that almost as a career, I would say, until I had a very intense leg break playing soccer when I was 17 and so didn't play ever again after that one game where I got really badly injured and so it changed my trajectory from playing club and trying to get scholarships to, you know, going to Otago University and, you know, focusing on friends and becoming a lawyer and all sorts of stuff that changed. So, yeah, it's one of those sliding door moments and I think it was really good. I probably wasn't that good a soccer player.

I wasn't going to be in the Premier League or anything. But that's so interesting because neither the US or New Zealand has a big soccer culture, right. So, yeah, I'm just not big enough to be like a good rugby player. So you just play soccer? Not tough enough either.

If you're seriously competitive, you do the things you can win at, right. You don't just do the things you're going to lose at. Smart, smart approach. So that's so interesting. And you were 17.

You've answered my question, which I love asking is what was fulfillment at age 18? So maybe unpack the soccer experience. So I lived with a housemate a few years ago in Sydney whose dream was to play rugby professionally in Australia and he had an injury where he's now paralyzed from the waist downs. He's in his mid thirties and he's in a wheelchair. And he also went into law, funnily enough, and he's still a lawyer and he's a fantastic bloke.

But he spoke about. I mean, yours is not as horrific as that, but he spoke about how that just twisted his world upside down. He didn't know what to do with his life because rugby was such a big part of his life. Were there elements of that in your journey with soccer where that just consumed your life? Yeah, it was probably a pretty big change and I think.

I don't know, I probably ended up following a path that was more, you know, normal, like that was more expected to go into professional services and university, etcetera. So I think by having that injury and then going down the more expected path, I faced less resistance. So maybe that was like good and easy. But also for me personally, I think it was really good. I ended up.

Otago uni is definitely a very social university. I made lots of great friends and ended up changing my community and how I saw the world probably. And. Yeah, changed my goals and aspirations a lot. So I think that was good overall.

Tell me, how does one go from soccer to law? How does that transition happen? No, like studying law. No one knows what. No one knows what they're gonna.

I like going to university is absolutely an awesome thing to do, simply to extend your childhood longer. But yeah, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I studied law, finance and economics because I thought those would give me heaps of opportunities. And ended up, I came out of uni during the GFC, so there were no finance positions. And law was pretty cool.

Seemed like a great thing. So I jumped into that and yeah, did it for three and a half years. It actually, it was really good for my brain. I'm probably more like an entrepreneurial minded person and working in a big law firm where you just get like details and no mistakes drilled into you every single day. Helpful to kind of make me a more balanced professional isn't the joke.

If I, someone said if you. I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I became a founder. Yeah, I think that's a good one. I just took me a little while to do that. I didn't know what I wanted to do.

So I accidentally became a lawyer and then found a way to found her later on. Well, you're here now, so you, it seems to be working out, so you should be okay. But I want to move into your career. And we love talking about some of these crucible asterisks moments. And we'll definitely spend a chunk of time on tracksuit in a bit as well.

Is you touched on your law experience, and I've heard you talk in a lot of other interviews about how that was quite random and you fell out of it quite quickly. But from what I understand, you were there for almost four years. So I want to ask you about each of the roles you did. But what I am curious is were there any elements of lore that you had to delete from your mind when you left the industry and went into tech? Are there any behavioral changes you had to make in 2014 when you left law?

Honestly, I think, like what I said before about the balance, I think I over, I over indexed on the optimistic entrepreneur. Before law and law teaches you a healthy dose of pessimism, you see how things don't work out. You are privy to mistakes that people make when you're drafting law documents and shareholders agreements. You basically have to consider all of the worst case scenarios in order to protect your client. And so I don't think I changed behavior since I already had the entrepreneurial optimistic drive.

But I took away from law that the learnings from thinking a lot about the kind of pessimistic worst case scenario. And it was able to balance myself with that which I which, yeah, was hugely helpful. And, you know, if you are an optimistic, entrepreneurial person, you're constantly in go mode. And this is like a nice, you know, pull off the highway for a second, check for future speed bumps, and if your tires are pumped up and then get back on the highway and keep driving. I've got to say, you're the first person I've met who actually talks about law being helpful.

I think everyone before you tries to distance themselves and they're like, law is so bad. And what's that word? They're recovering lawyer. I think a lot of people like using that as their titles. No, it was good.

It was good for me. Maybe not that's good. There's a role on your cv that's hidden that I don't think people have asked you. But for about seven years, you were managing a fund called, is it Nuv Limited? Nueve.

Yeah. You were the founder and director. So were you making investments? Yeah, I mean, that was like. There was like nine.

Nueve is nine in Spanish. That's how awesome we were at naming things back then. But there was nine of us who put small amounts of money into a fund and we made investments famously. We did not invest in bitcoin. Voted four to five.

I was one of the nos. No way. Maybe that's my pessimistic lawyer biting me later on, but I was one of the nos. And we chose to invest in foreign penny mining stocks instead of bitcoin as one of our risky choices. And it didn't turn out quite as well as bitcoin, unfortunately, you and me both.

I remember in my work, the job I was in, we'd sit at lunch with colleagues and they'd tell me about bitcoin and I'd go, what is this rubbish? Not putting money in? I don't know. They look like geniuses and I look very stupid. They're retired, probably.

And is this also the. So you put me in touch with Harry from your product team, and he said you had a generalist group. That's how you met. Is this the same group that he was talking about, the generalist group? Generalist was when I came back to New Zealand after COVID.

And when I was, like, thinking about, you know, starting tracksuit, I just. I'm a generalist. I feel like it's an underserved market of tech folk. There's lots of product meetups and et cetera, but there weren't any generalist meetups. So I created a little group of, like, chief of staffs and coos.

And other people. And yeah, Harry was vp of ops at an amazing New Zealand tech company. And so he was there and he magically wanted to do a little bit of product. So he joined tracksuit as our product person. He called it a therapy group.

So let's see if we have time to unpack some of that therapy session in a bit. But I love that we jumped around and I want to get to Mishguru because I get the sense we've spoken a bunch of times leading up to this and you've done other interviews that was quite formative in your thinking about what to do and what not to do as you scale a high growth tech startup. So tell me about Mishkaru, because you were there for three years and you've spoken about how you followed the Snapchat growth and then a flatline for, I think it was nine or ten quarters and that was your chance to move on. But talk about the early days of particularly operations, because that's a very underrated area of startups. I think everyone wants to work in product and engineering and growth and chief of staff and all these fancy titles.

You went into operations. What kind of work were you doing and how did that shape you early on? Yeah, so mesh was a Snapchat third party app that basically you would manage your Snapchat account as a enterprise company through a desktop computer app, which was misguided. Donald's Paramount Pictures. It was awesome product, great.

It is an awesome product, great team. And it was my, like, you know, first job in tech, I'd done an accelerator pro. I'd ran an accelerator program before that. And then they came through the accelerator program and that's how I met them. So, yeah, it was fantastic.

And I jumped into ops because that was like the only job I could get. You know, I was an ex lawyer generalist to, was happy to sweep the floors and write up employment contracts and do whatever needed to be done. And yeah, when I talk to other lawyers or other generalists who are young and want to get into tech, I sort of describe what I did. And essentially you just talk to the CEO and say, what are all those annoying things on the bottom of your to do list that, like, are need to haves, but in the next six months? And usually that's like formalizing an ESOP scheme.

Formalizing an ESOP scheme. Writing some employment contracts that you've got people there but you haven't formalized it. There's all sorts of stuff that gets behind and it's often what they would engage lawyers to do or what, they just need someone to go clean up for them. And so that's what I was like, oh, I'll just do that stuff. And eventually led to me being coo and lucky that I have three passports.

So I opened up offices in Sydney and helped with the Berlin one and then landed in New York and opened up the office there. So yeah, it was a blast. It was a wild ride, had product market fit, and then, yes, Snapchat flatlined, and so did we, so. But also learned a ton. And I think, you know, New Zealand and Australia are benefiting now from like second and third time founders coming through and people who have had experience and worked in other startups.

And I feel really grateful that Matt, that's where Matt and I met current co founder Matt, and I think we both learned just so much and were able to then bring those learnings to tracksuit. I want to get to learnings, but he said, three passports. You've got an american passport in New Zealand. What's the third one? Irish.

My dad was born in Ireland. Oh, great, that explains, you can just travel all over the world, just jump on a plane and go across. That's so good. Pretty lucky. Tell, tell me about the learnings.

I think this is really unique in that you had that experience because to your exact point, particularly in New Zealand, you could have been building tracksuit for the first time and been naive, which sometimes can be good, but you wouldn't be able to preempt some of those mistakes. How did you learn how to spot some of those? Because I'm sure no one at Mishkaru expected Snapchat to flatline. Right. Otherwise you would have all fixed it or done something about it and you would have still been there.

Did you learn something in reflection about how to predict that or what to look for that you didnt do at Misgarub or you do now at tracksuit. Like, how do you prevent that downward spiral? Well, I mean, thats, I guess the learning there for me for my next founding journey was not to tie yourself to a single system or provider or something. That means that you are completely reliant. We knew that was a risk at Mishguru.

It wasn't like we were naive, but it just, yeah, was when it happened, it was the worst case, you know, result that we kind of had possibly anticipated and prepared ourselves for. But there was nothing you could really do. But, yeah, I think in this attracts you. That's, you know, don't build a product that's standalone, that doesn't rely on something else for it to keep going. Does that shape your mindset now where maybe this is me projecting my insecurities, where that would really worry me.

I'd keep that at the back of mind every day going, I remember that back five years ago. Is that going to happen at tracksuit where suddenly the numbers just start going down? Do you think about that like on a. When you sit and reflect on your own? I mean, I think every founder, when they're running a company, is always thinking about what are the things that could bring down the ship, and you want to create a business that, where that's unlikely to happen.

So if you're sleeping well, it's because you've strategized sufficiently to, you know, make it so you're not thinking about it all the time. But, yeah, that's always possible. But, you know, I think with tracksuit, we're trying to, I guess, build a culture where people are empowered and everyone's thinking about that a little bit, which you, you know, she is the load. And that's something that we're excited about with being able to get a lot of high performers together and, you know, build something really big. Let's talk about culture.

This was one question that came up a lot in the homework I did prior to this, where why is culture so important to you, particularly given you're so early in tracksuits journey?

When Matt and I started tracksuit, we were both almost, like, interested in doing something else, like not Martech. We were like, what's next for us? And Matt's a passionate vegan, and he was looking at opportunities in the plant based protein space. I had kind of come back to New Zealand and was thinking, oh, it'd be great to do something, apply my skills in the, you know, help the environment, save the world. And then tracksuit became this very obvious product market fit when we were testing things, and it was just such a great opportunity.

And we loved the mission and vision of helping brands grow, like the challenger brands grow. And we love brand building in general, so we got excited about it, but we didn't want to completely leave behind our, like, kind of wholesome intentions. So we promised ourselves that we would spend as much energy on building a company that would change the way companies were built. To think differently from a first principles perspective about the culture and kind of bring in, you know, whatever is the most forward thinking policies you possibly could for a startup at our age and stage, and to be brave and think through that stuff as much as possible. So putting equal energy into culture and how we build the company as well as what we were building in tracksuit and its products.

I felt like maybe a good exercise might be to compare and contrast two aspects of Mishguru and tracksuit. Not the product, but the internal raw ingredients. One is opening new offices. So I understand you talked earlier about Miskuri opened offices in New York, Berlin, Australia, New Zealand. And I know a truck suit.

You've now got a presence in essentially the same countries, or I think it's the UK, not Berlin, if I'm correct. What are the key ingredients? I've never opened a new office in a country, so to me, it seems really easy. You just find an office, open it, hire a couple of people, go out and start selling. But I'm sure there's a lot more to that.

What are the key ingredients of opening a new office and doing it really well? I think Mishguru did this really well and the founders there were very intentional and thoughtful, and I learned a lot from them. So we've copied a lot of their playbook, which includes sending people from the existing office to that office. So Matt, my co founder, has just relocated to London to kind of lead the northern hemisphere team. And we've got visas on the way for some of our senior kind of cultural pillars to go to New York and be the kind of cultural pillars of that office.

And so that's one of the things that I think is really important. If you want to scale your culture, you need to have a healthy blend of the existing kind of home office culture with the culture of wherever it is that you are opening an office. And you get that by kind of bringing some of your people and then hiring new folks in. So, yeah, that's really important. And we at Tracksoot have taken the view that being in office is kind of better at this age and stage of company.

So it's not required in office all the time, but we sort of say it's office first with full flexibility. So you can kind of choose your hours, choose, you know, people will have work from home days or quiet, you know, deep work days. But everyone does come to the office and contribute to the culture, and that's important. So we do that in each country as well. So it's sort of like, instead of going global and hiring people wherever they are, sort of go global and have your bases in specific places and create culture in those bases.

Is there a step before that about scoping out the market remotely? Like you'd be sitting in your office in Auckland and you do some online research to see if there's an opportunity. I think an example is a lot of your team said to me, the US is very different in that it's very regional, the brands are regional, and you've got to have a different strategy. So you can't just copy paste your approach in Australia, New Zealand, how have you done that? Because I think a lot of founders who are listening to this are at that stage, and I've spoken to some just this week where their question is, vidit, how do we scope out a new market?

And I'm going to recommend speaking to someone like you. So maybe on this podcast you can scale your mind and give us some exercises on how someone should scope a new market. Yeah, well, the tracksuit, we sort of have quite a bootstrap mindset towards a lot of things. And I guess that comes from the belief that if you fund something with money that isn't from customers, it's very hard to tell whether you have product market fit or not. So in New Zealand, we bootstrapped for the first kind of 20 months of our life as tracksuit.

And that was because we didn't. The only money that we wanted coming in the door had to be customer money. Otherwise you don't know if you're building the right things. And so we treat new markets the same. So we raised our seed in early 2023.

Then that was because we'd proven product market fit in Australia. We wanted to launch a team in Australia and we wanted to test the US and UK as markets. And by test, what we meant was, like, we would fly in, me and Matt would fly in. We did that two or three times. We had 2030 meetings a week with prospects and we just kind of would see what would happen.

Like we would put in the work, we would meet with them, we would keep in touch email. And if that just turned into revenue in the same way that it did in New Zealand, Australia sort of tracked, like, how many conversations you've had, how many deals that turns into if those deals close or not, and if that kind of word of mouth, no marketing outside of that. If that word of mouth pressure turned into revenue at the same rates that it did in New Zealand and Australia, we felt confident that we could invest marketing dollars and it would show the same results that it did in New Zealand, Australia. So we spent a year sort of flying in and out, having meetings, checking whether the marketing messaging would land in the same way. And it did.

Like we signed up. You know, there's pretty much the same number of customers that we did in our first year in New Zealand in both of those regions. So we were like, okay, now let's raise a series a. We feel comfortable that we could take on non customer money and put it into that market and see results. And yes, but the regionality in the States is something that everyone talks about when they go to the states.

You like, like 50 different countries. So you just have to, I guess, be prepared for whatever that means for your product and whatever that means for your marketing and messaging. And for us, you know, we're sort of like, we chose New York because we're martech and we like, work a lot. We work closely with agencies of brands, and New York sort of has that perfect combination of it's got a big consumer brand like space and community, it's got strong agency networks, and it also just has great talent to hire from. And it's where I lived for years.

So it sort of was an easy choice from where our existing connections were. Back to the episode in a moment. If you're new to the High Flies podcast and enjoying this episode with Connor Archibald, you might enjoy episode 129 with Sam Wong, partner at Blackbird and an early investor in tracksuit. Or episode 111 with Laura Henshaw from Keep it cleaner, a fantastic brand and story. Access all 160 plus episodes@thehighfliespodcast.com.

Vidi Tagawal
That's thehighfliespodcast.com. Now back to the website.

Connor Archibald
A lot of experienced founders that I've spoken to, to that I respect talk about founder led sales as being a critical unlock in the early days, and we've had a number of them on this show. I've heard your team tell me about magical customer experiences being really important to both you and Matt, and you put a lot of time into that. And we'll get to some stories that your team shared about a customer you lost recently in the US, but your approach to it was magical. And you really, you sent an email, I think, to the team, even though you lost a customer to a competitor about how to approach that. Is that something that's important for tracksuit, being founder led sales and particularly important even though you're scaling the sales team now?

Yeah, I mean, founder led sales early on. I guess it's sort of like product management in a way. That's how I think about it. You have conversations every day with people who could be prospects or they could be partners or they could be investors or they could be, and basically everything single conversation you have, you iterate on that for the next time you talk to a person who fits in that bucket. And I think Matt and I both do that naturally.

Like, we will talk to someone who might be a customer, and you sort of, like, already have. You're like, okay, this is a 50 to 150 employee company. Their marketing budget is x. And they're in this, like, they're in the fintech space or something. And you're like, okay, cool.

I know this. And this is how I just talked about tracksuit. And you see what landed, you see what doesn't land, and then you iterate on that conversation for the next time, and you do that with, you know, whether they're agency partners or investors, and you just completely revamp that. So you're, like, doing kind of product management and marketing, messaging management by talking that through. And if you say something that doesn't land, that is quite integral to your productivity and you see that over and over again, you need to, like, change that in your product.

And so, you know, that's. It's how Matt and I built tracksuit. We sold tracksuit before it existed. We had conversations. We said, hey, if you sign up to be in our first cohort, we will go build this thing.

But we need 100 grand to build it. So we need ten customers paying ten grand each. And, yeah, through a bunch of conversations, we got those. And then while talking, like, when we started those conversations, it was a different product to when they ended. And that was exactly how we've always managed it.

Now Matt and I are doing that in the new geographies with sort of like, you're a brand new startup in the US and UK, and you're having those conversations. You're doing that product management in New Zealand, Australia, we're almost, like, more in scale up mode. And you're able to sort of pass that to the team and productize it and push it out wider. I would love to keep double clicking on that, but I want to zoom out and talk about team because I think this is a really important aspect. And you've got some really interesting philosophies in team building that I'd love to unpack.

Again, if you compare and contrast Mishguru, I believe you oversaw 400% staff growth in, like, under just under two years. Maybe the numbers are slightly off, but approximately, from what I understand personally written down, I spoke to your team and they said that Conor has a big bias towards decisions being made by a small group of people versus collaboration with a large group. And they said that can be a strength, but can also be a weakness. Can you unpack that. And how did you reach that as a current way of working, given it might change again in the future?

Yeah, I think it's sort of a, it's almost like a. It's almost like a brand led philosophy in that you sort of have to have an opinion. Like, I guess office versus remote versus hybrid is an interesting example of this that we've already kind of touched on. But if you asked everyone, not just people attracted, but if you were like, let's do a survey of 500 people and ask what the best situation is for working, all of those people would end up hybrid, because you'd have some people that said work from home, some people that said work from office, some people that would have said hybrid, and it would have obviously ended up in hybrid. Hybrid.

And I think hybrid is really hard to do well because you're trying to satisfy for everybody and it's very difficult to do that. But if you make a choice and you say, okay, we're in office company, then you can, like, invest in really good offices. You can invest in good office perks. You can decide, you can say that in interviews and make sure that the people that are coming into your company are okay with that and sort of build culture around that. If you say were remote, then you can actually do that really well.

You can invest in people's home offices, you can pay them more so they can have houses with an extra bedroom. You can think about that from a first principles basis and, like, how to make that as awesome as possible. But hybrid is really hard to do that with because it's sort of like being everything to everyone. So that's just an example where, you know, making a values based decision, and then I guess sticking to that is a different result than would have happened, but if it was decision by large committee. And so, yeah, I think we try to elicit feedback from everyone.

And if you look at, like, employee experience, design principles, it's often about eliciting feedback from everyone on a certain problem and hearing everyone and making sure that they have a chance to participate in that survey and contribute to that decision. And then you look at all of it, and then you make a decision that's in line with the company values and then let everyone know what that is. And so, yeah, it's important that people are participating, but I think it's also important to make decisions in line with the values. Otherwise, decision by committee sort of always ends up in the same place. I'm excited to share.

Vidi Tagawal
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Connor Archibald
Your point reminds me, I recently had a conversation with Adam Jacobs, who was the co founder of the iconic, well known ecommerce marketplace in Australia and internationally, and we both laughed because our personal styles are decision by socializing. So we'll socialize it with our friends or with co workers or with mentors. Whereas both our partners will go off for a walk, our life partners will go off for a walk on their own and make a decision and come back and then tell us about it. Where do you sit on that as a person, as a human being, in terms of decision making? Are you a socializer or do you like to make them yourselves and then talk to people about it?

Oh, no socializing for sure. I think out loud. And I just talked about with the product management through validation, like it's almost the same. Like I'd be bringing people in on the thought process and watching how they react to that and then potentially changing it based on their reaction and their feedback in almost real time. Interesting.

We've got two jumping off points now, and you tell me which one you want to go down. One is we can unpack the beautiful world of marketing, or we can talk about some of your life experiences and the learnings from your partner, your life partner. Which. Which path would you want to go down first? Life experiences.

Vidi Tagawal
Okay, cool. Good, good, because you've spoken about marketing on many interviews, so very good answer, Choda. Now, people might not know this. I think you took, was it a year out or two years out and you built a bed and breakfast and surf school in somewhere in the world with your wife. Tell me.

Connor Archibald
Maybe give us a time stamp on when that was and how long did you do that for? Yeah, so my now wife and I met as lawyers, and we kind of ditched the legal profession and went to Nicaragua for a year, and we didn't build it. I'd love if I was handy enough to build something, but we just ran a surf and yoga retreat in Nicaragua for a year, which was awesome so far. And was that in between jobs? Did you use that as a chance to think about your next step?

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't that relaxing. Like, it was, you know, 20 to 25 guests a day. And we were the general managers. We had eight staff who, eight spanish speaking staff, so we had to. We learned to speak Spanish.

And then, you know, Kath, my amazing wife, did a 500 hours yoga teachers training course and taught yoga every day. And I basically had to learn how to surf so I could teach surfing properly. I'm still not that good at surfer, but I got enough to teach, like, beginner lessons and. Yeah, so it was when Cath and I, early in our relationship, we talked about, like, the idea of living as many lives as possible in our life. And we thought it would be interesting till we did corporate law and then to go to the other end of the spectrum and kind of be hippies, running a surf and yoga retreat in Nicaragua for a year and to see what that was like as sort of small business owners and runners and operators and, yeah, it was so fun.

And again, learned a ton about running a small business and I guess, like, showing up every day and doing the work and, you know, you host breakfast dinner. We were cooking for all those guests. We were teaching the yoga and the surfing, running the bar and restaurant. It was pretty cool. And, yeah, I love that experience that we had.

And where did that movie go? Post that? What did you do when you finished that? So after that, we basically ended up in New York. Like, I sort of had picked up the mishguru thing in connection.

We came back to New Zealand briefly to kick that off. And then, you know, the next life we wanted to live was startup people in New York. And you were in New York for five, six years, is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you've spoken a lot about the marketing side.

You learned about direct to consumer and all that good stuff. What was it like from a personal side? Do you think this is a what if question? Do you think tracksuit would have been different if you didn't have the New York life experience? I don't know.

I mean, I would be different. What ways? Give me some examples. I don't know. I think New York is a really interesting place.

Like, you, it can chew you up and spit you out and all those other good things that people say, but you kind of just have to bring your a game to New York every day. And that's something that I think is fascinating. And also, like my wife, she was coo of a thing called creative mornings, which is a global. It's a bit like TEd talks. It's in 250 cities around the world, and it's a monthly in person catch up that is focused on the creative community, but it's massive.

And she was able to kind of. She was CEO of that. I was CEO of Mishguru, and we were comparing notes constantly. But the people that we were able to be inspired by, who were part of that creative mornings community, the founder of creative mornings herself, Tina, you know, just, I think we were very lucky in what we got to see and who we got to meet as part of that community, and learned a lot through that about an example being like, Priya Parker did one of those talks and Cath got to hang out with her. And if you don't know Priya Parker, you should read her book, the Art of Gathering.

But that was like, you know, just one example, one month, one speaker out of the whole time we were in New York that we were lucky enough to kind of get to know. And intentional gathering is such a cool thing to learn about and has influenced a lot of the way that I think about the world and even think about leadership. And so, yeah, I think we were very lucky to spend that time in New York. I was lucky that my wife, Cath, is phenomenal and got this amazing job that opened my eyes to heaps of things. So, yeah, it was just a cool city to be in in your twenties as well.

Like, it was our Peter Pan years. Like, before the kids arrived and we could pretend to be young and dumb and run around, party, all the fun things. So, yeah, it was amazing. And now I get to kind of visit through work, and we've opened an office there. But we've got our beautiful home in New Zealand and our two daughters and feels a really nice chapter of our life that if we were there full time now, it'd be pretty tough.

It's a city that requires a lot of energy to be put into it. It does give you energy back. But I think that New Zealand is amazing for us right now in this early years of parenthood. If my homework is correct, you moved back to New Zealand just during COVID your first daughter was on her way. And I'm curious, how did you make the decision to move back?

Because one, a cynical view is New Zealand's a small place. Startups aren't really a thing. You're in New York, you're in the place to be. But the positive view is quality of life's awesome. I'm sure you've got family there.

You can buy a nice big house because be cheaper in some aspects of some parts of New Zealand. Take us inside the decision making between you and Kath about how you decided, how you were comfortable with coming back to New Zealand. Yeah, I think, I mean, COVID was pretty disastrous in New York. It was a scary place. And if you were pregnant in those early days of COVID like cath was, you know, it was more lethal and more damaging for pregnant people.

So that was what was in the news. And it was like, right, there's this island that we can go to that really does not have COVID right now. We just have to sit in a quarantine for two weeks. And so I think it's super privileged that we were able to do that. But, yeah, we made the kind of decision for our health and for our baby to come back to New Zealand, and we definitely didn't.

If COVID had never happened, we probably wouldn't have left New York at that time. You know, I'm honestly, like, I've always been bullish on New Zealand as a startup nation. And I think that it's tracksuit might not have done. I don't think it would have done as well if we didn't start it in New Zealand. I think if you have a good idea that you can test product, market fit really quickly and gain momentum and then, like, quickly get it offshore, New Zealand is just phenomenal.

It's like a beta testing nation. So you, like, launch it, prove it, and then hit Australia, hit the US, hit Singapore, whatever your next big market is. And New Zealand's so amazing for that. So I think it almost helped me and Matt build confidence quickly that we had good product, market fit, helped us hire from our networks that amazing people that we knew and trusted, and then we were able to kind of lean on that momentum into new markets. It just gets hard with time zones after a little while.

Endless distractions. I think I spoke to your investors footwork prior to this, and that was one thing they brought up, is that, yes, it's a smaller market, but there's less distractions and you can stand out from the crowd. I think Nikhil was an early backer of canva and he said that, yeah, it's like finding a needle in the haystack, but if you do stand out, you really stand out. Whereas in the US, as you know, there's so many startups and so many vc's. So I think that's an advantage we've got and probably lower capital intensity, I'd say.

I think australian and New Zealand startups are better known for using capital in a smarter way. I think american startups will come up with a random idea and burn through a lot of money pretty quickly and just go back again. So that's interesting. I want to talk about the early days of tracksuit. I know we spoke previously about some of the aspects and we jumped around a bit.

Is previously unavailable. So I know Simon, I've met him a couple of times, and I know Barnaby at icehouse and, and I've heard. You talk about how pivotal James has. Been, and I think people have a perception about venture studios, but I know you've spoken about how pivotal they were, you were with them in those early iterations of tracksuit. Can you talk about your experience with previously and how that shaped that first innings of tracksuit?

Yeah, I mean, so we spun tracksuit out of previously unavailable, which is a brand studio, a brand and innovation studio, and also Tra Labs, which is like a market research innovation studio. And so between those two things, there was sort of, we had the brand and marketer know how, we had the market research know how. And then Matt and I were the software as a service business model scale know how it was. I think something like tracksuit, which completely upends an entire industry like market research, it required those three inputs. If me and Matt had tried to do it by ourselves, we wouldn't have been able to build absolute best practice market research.

If we didn't have previously unavailable involved, we wouldn't have been able to focus it on the right growth brands and figure out that niche part of the market which we went after initially and helped growth brands sort of take on incumbents. And they were the, you know, they basically had that initial problem that they wanted solved because James is one of the world leading brand strategists and he was frustrated that every time he did brand strategy for growth brands they couldn't see the value of it because they couldn't track it. And so, you know, that problem existed. Then we came up with a hypothesis of the solution and then Matt and I were able to kind of spin it into a high growth software beast. Relatively quickly.

So it was definitely all powers combined, you know, helped make tracksuit what it is and very grateful for those early partnerships. I think one aspect that's really interesting as part of that, which I was told is you grappled a lot with bootstrap versus fast growth venture backed model. Can you talk about that? Because I think that's something every founder goes through. And there's this sense of VC funding is success, but as you know, it's the start.

It's a ticket. I say it's a ticket to the race. It's not winning the race. Can you maybe compare and contrast bootstrapping versus venture backed for a company like yours? Yeah, I think so.

Disclaimer that tracksuit is something that's relatively easily commercialized. So you could go from zero to having customer dollars by almost like manually doing all the stuff in the background. There are a ton of startups that that's not an option for. They've either got big hardware demands or they've got, you know, big technical build that requires ten engineers. That's very expensive, and it's very hard to bootstrap those sorts of things.

So I guess with that disclaimer in mind, here is my opinion. I guess I believe in like a thing called VC validation, which is it's easier to raise venture money than it is customer dollars. And if you write a nice slide pack that sort of nicely elicits a problem and solution and can show like a big tam, and you sort of follow the standard hockey stick slide pack, you should be able to raise VC money. There's lots of capital that needs to be deployed, and someone will sort of buy into your vision, and you actually might get feedback that your deck isn't very good initially. And then you start changing your deck and changing the positioning, and by the end of the VC validation, you've completely changed the product and solution based on investors feedback, which has nothing to do with your customers whatsoever.

So if you go through that process, if your goal is to raise VC money, that can be quite disastrous to your product and business. So me and Matt, we wanted to do that, but with customers, and we wanted to build something that customers wanted. And so we focused on customers. First we raised our money from customers, and then we waited until we were so sure that we had product market fit, and we were like getting pulled into new markets, and we had to make a decision of either to slow down growth and stop selling tracksuit or raise money. And that's when we raised money, was like, customers are pulling us.

So hard that we have to raise money in order to, like, satisfy their demand. So that's where we come into that. I think one aspect, as you know, I spent a number of years in FMCG and retail, and I know a lot of your customers are there. And Harry, your head of product, and I were nading out about this on a call the other day when he connected us is he said, you and Matt were very clear on who you're building for and not chasing revenue, which can drive bloat. And I think that's a really interesting one, particularly when you're.

A lot of your customers are in that FMCG CPG space where they're also iterating as, you know, like they're launching a new drink or a new peanut butter brand or a new donut and they don't know if it's going to work and they want to do a survey. How do you decide? Which do you like, say, if it's me, it's vidit's bakery. I probably am not a customer, but let's say it's a bakery brand and I come to you, or you come to me and go, hey, we want to do this. Do you know what that longer term partnership can be?

Or do you set smaller milestones and then build up to it?

Yeah, I think it's. We had a problem and a solution hypothesis and when that was validated, you know, with some small changes, when that product was validated, we committed to that. It was cool. That's the thing, like, this has reached our threshold of validation and commit, and so then we committed and then we didn't change it from that point onwards until we were going into new markets or needed to like, re. So, yeah, I think that's probably what Harry means is, like, we were.

We didn't listen to every demand from that point onwards. We didn't build a, you know, we didn't kind of bloat our feature set. We knew that we would go fastest by focusing on a niche product. You hear founders and investors who have talked about, like, driving the wedge in, and so you have a really fine wedge that you drive in as deep and hard as possible. And in tracksuits case, we do brand tracking, which is a small wedge in the massive market research landscape.

We get requests to do all sorts of other market research outside of brand tracking and we say no to all of that because we found that there's sufficient validation for the brand tracking product. And you drive that wedge in as deep as you can and then eventually, once you've sort of captured all your low hanging fruit and maybe you're starting to see or predict at some point that growth would slow down with that driving in of that wedge, you start adding in more wedges and you start, you know, building out more features. But yeah, we are hyper focused on doing one thing and doing one thing really well. And that's allowed us to move quickly. And it also really helps customers like refer you.

It helps partners know how to talk about you. Because if you do like more than one thing, I think this company might do that. I'm not quite sure. They do a few things, but if you just do brand tracking. Oh yeah, they do brand tracking.

I heard you say brand tracking. That's what they do. You should talk to them. The other aspect that really fascinates me is the balance between the price of your software and credibility. And if I share a personal experience, I early in my career worked at the Kohl's head office here in Australia and we had all the brand tracking in house and we had Iri and Nielsen and you name it, and I went from there to a startup and they had nothing because we didn't have the money to pay Coles and Woolworths or anyone.

And I think we would steal reports from my contacts at Coles, then email me the reports three months late because it would expire by then and we'd make an assumption. And I know that's a big part of your focus. Right? Again, Harry, you're saying this like people work at these big corporates and then go to a startup and they see the benefit of brand but don't have the budget to pay for it, so they come to you. But is there an element of, oh, if it's too cheap, how do they validate the credibility of your data?

Is that me just making an assumption? I guess some people might, yeah. I mean, pricing, you know, if you're like the cheapest product out there, then people might assume you're a crappy product. We're sort of, you're significantly cheaper to your, to Nielsen and Iri and these guys. Right?

We prefer the word affordable rather than cheap from a branding perspective. No, we are much more affordable. And I guess like we're trying, we're a premium offering that is more affordable. And it's essentially like when people ask that question, the way that we talk about it is it's just a change in business model. Like we have committed to scale, we have committed to technology.

And so by using technology and committing to track every brand in the world, then the margin is there to offer it at an affordable rate. It's like open sourcing the data. And the crazy thing about market research is that a brand like Coca Cola will pay $10 million for a set of reports from a market research provider, and then Pepsi will pay $10 million for a set of reports from another market research provider. And they're sending the same sort of email surveys to the same panels and then building very similar reports, but those aren't shared in any way, shape or form. It's just two distinct reports that cost a lot of money.

And I guess if you're tracking every brand in the world, you can make that data available at a more affordable rate because you don't have to go do all these bespoke reports and then provide them individually. And so, yeah, we committed to scale. We committed to using technology to get that scale which makes it more affordable. Yeah, that flywheel opportunity I think is really interesting. I want to bring the conversation back to you and then we'll close with the rapid fire sprint is.

I know you said to me the other day that he took a bit of time off after your recent series a because you were burnt out in your words and you did crispy, crispy. I like your play on words, Connor. I've got to get better at this grammar. And you did the unyoked stay. I'm a big fan of the unyoked business and brand.

How did you recognize that you needed to take time off? Because I think I'm a victim of this, where we live in this world where I say, I'm better than this. I'm not weak. I'm going to go to the gym and I'll be fine and I'll just have more coffee. But you're clearly smart enough to recognize that something in your body is not working.

How do you recognize that? I mean, I think, first of all, shout out to my wife for taking care of our two kids while I went away for three days and stayed in unyoked. I think it was, it was pretty clear I caught every daycare bug that was coming into our household for weeks in a row. My appendix had randomly burst. So I was like, you know, that's, it's.

They say there's no reason for that, but I think it was sort of like a come down off of the capital raise and make the adrenaline leaving my body and then being like, oh, my body's not doing so good. So I just had been in the hurt locker for a couple weeks and felt like I needed a sleep and so unyoked were there for me, and I went out and had a good sleep. But honestly, I'm not that good at recognizing that stuff myself. Or maybe I recognize it, but I'm not that good at acting on it. And so, yeah, I have good people around me that are, hey, man, just take a couple days.

My co founder and I constantly push each other to set good examples. You know, like, we can't build a good culture, an anti hustle culture. If you're hustling all the time, you have to set that example. So, yeah, we push each other to make sure that we're showing up in a way that the team will emulate and look after themselves. Are you good at turning off your emails and your slack and actually switching off?

Yeah, I'm not too bad at it. Like, for those moments when I need to, I'm good at it. That's good. Day to day. I don't do it too much.

I mean, I fantasize about a world in which, like, I think someone should build a home operating system that only operates if your phone is plugged into it. So, like, you can't turn your electricity on in your house unless your phone is plugged into the wall. So, like, you get home, you put your phone in and it, like, plugs into the speakers and everything. So if you get a phone call, you can pick it up, but you can't have it in your hand, because I would love that. Like, I, you know, if it's in my pocket, I'm like, everybody.

I just, like, randomly find myself in email or slack or LinkedIn without even noticing that I did it. But I would, you know, I love it when I sort of plug my phone in somewhere and I am able to play with my kids and forget about it for hours. I think kids, I don't have kids yet, but I've heard that's a great switch off because they just force you to switch off. Right now you've got two and that. And I know how important timing and systems are for you.

I love asking if you imagine a metaphorical hall of fame room or let's say a learning room, and you can invite four people that ideally, you know, and you get to spend a couple hours with them. Are there four people that come to mind that you'd love to have in that room? Room with you? I tripped on it. Like, the people that I know.

I mean, if I could just hang out with four people of my choice, it would be my wife, my two daughters, and my mum. So it's sort of cheating, but that's. If I could. You could learn from those people, right? So, yeah, I learned from those people every day.

That's who I'm inspired by. You know, no one is more creative than a three year old set of Jupiter. You spoke earlier about fundraising. I mean, negotiation, three roles are the best. That is true.

But, no, I think that that's. I would, you know, if I could invite people to dinner, I think that's. What I would do. And my mom passed away a few years ago, so that would be like, a really. She's never met my kids, so if I got to invite anyone, I get to see her play with her grandchildren, which would be pretty special.

Yeah, maybe. This takes me to my next question, and then we'll move to final sprint. To close us is let's fast forward a decade, and let's assume tracksuit's been giantly successful. You've sold it, or it's IPO'd or what have you, and you're away sitting on the beach with your grown up daughters. What.

How would you want to spend your time? Do you think you'd want to build another company or you'd become an investor or you'd be a soccer player? I don't think my knees are up for it anymore. Yeah, I mean, I think right now, if you have three parts of your life, you've got, like, family and you've got work, and then you've maybe got, like, you and yourself as a three circle Venn diagram, I'd say my work is probably a bit larger than I would like that balance to be. And so I would love for that to be the balance to be more family and me than maybe work.

And if I had no. Nothing to think about, but I would find it. I think. I'm not a person that can turn that off. Like, I love solving problems, and I love.

So, in ten years, I imagine, like, it would be solving problems based on, like, I think the loneliness epidemic is a really interesting problem to solve. Wework had an. It was, like, an interesting problem set that Weworked went after and that they were trying to build schools and community and places to hang out and places to work. I think there was a really interesting way to go about it, and execution was, you know, so ambitious and. But didn't quite make it.

I think, like, there would be something really fun to solve in that space, which you would need time and careful consideration. To do what? Well, so maybe a post exit problem to solve when you have the time and the ability to think a lot about that. Let's move into the rapid fire to close us out. Is there one non work investment, ideally of time and energy, that you consider the best in your life that you've made?

I mean, I think fictional reading is, like, really important to me. Yeah. I sort of tell myself I'm not a to read unless I'm reading fiction. So, like, the first book I have to pick up is fiction. If I'm doing a good job at reading fiction, then I'm allowed to also read non fiction and sort of self help self improvement business books, I've been told.

That actually reminds me, my notes say that there's a book. Is it John Stiebeck's travels with Charlie in Search of America? Yeah. You've given that book to a lot of people. I'm giving, yeah, I've given it to a few people, yeah, it's a.

I love John Steinbeck. I don't think everyone loves John Steinbeck. They have the memories of having to read Meissen men at high school, which they didn't enjoy. But I love John Steinbeck. And travels with Charlie in search of America is like, very good escapism for me.

I can just pick it up and I'm immediately transported to this caravan driving around the national parks of America, which is a nice place to be. And speaking of books, I believe your leadership team has been reading the unreasonable hospitality book recently, which sounds fascinating. That's on my to read list, so. Yeah, good one. Is there one interview question you love asking prospective candidates?

We commit, we believe, really, like a lot in a take home task, and we try to. So we pay people to do a take home task. And I think it's a really great way to just assess how someone thinks. There's not necessarily a right answer or wrong answer. And I love being able to, like, yeah, ask the same question of lots of people and see what comes back and how they present and how they think.

And, you know, we. A principle, an operating principle of tracksuit is like, we, SaaS software as a service has been around for a long time. It's quite easy to find best practice. Now, like, you can Google customer journey, twelve month SaaS best practice, and you'll get, like, a beautiful picture of a customer journey. So you can kind of implement that process relatively quickly and know what best practices.

So we try to say best practice and then incrementally improved and then made tracksuity. And I love seeing a take home task that sort of incorporates those things. It's very, you know, it's people will often show up and just be like, here's this thing that I found online. It's perfect. Best practice.

Yep. That is great. You're right. How would you improve it? And this is, you know, ask them what something they would do and then like, how would you design it in line with your values or in line with Trexit's values?

And I really like asking that question. Is there one thing you'd like to learn in the next six months? I'm going to try and be a little more handy, like around. We just bought a house, our first house, which is crazy and awesome. And so I guess there'll be things that I have to do, you know, with that.

And so that's. Watch YouTube videos on how to fix grouting in an old shower and. Or is it grout grouting? I don't know. See, these are the things I have.

You got something like Bunnings in New Zealand? Yeah, we have a bunnings. Oh, you do? And I think because Bluey and Bunnings are now so related, we will always go to Bunnings because my daughter is obsessed with Bluey and so am I. Yeah.

Right. So, yeah, that could be a good. Customer survey opportunity where you could, I don't know if they're a customer yet, but that could be a way to learn about their business. And last one, is there one pet peeve that bothers you or a pet peeve you have? I'm not that pet.

I'm not like a pet peevey. Oh, maybe when people don't clean the steam wand on the espresso machine at the office, you know, like you steam the milk and. Yeah, just ends up really gross. I think it's pretty important that people like think about the next user of the coffee machine and wipe down the steam wand. Yeah.

Nice and simple. But that brings us to a finish line. Connor, thank you so much for doing this and hopefully I asked you some new questions, but thanks so much and wish you all the best. Thanks, Pettit. It was great.

Great chat. Really appreciate it. Well, there you have it. That's the end of my conversation with Connor Archibald in this episode 164. How good was that?

Vidi Tagawal
It felt calm and easy conversation. We still come a lot of ground and went deep on so many topics. I learned so much. What stood out to me most is Connor's easygoing attitude, balanced with his fierce desire to achieve his and tracksuit's potential. And hopefully he got a good flavor on some of the aspects of how they're doing.

Connor Archibald
This and how his personal journey to. Date has made him the person he is. So I hope you really enjoyed this one. And I 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 like KPMG. My email is in the show notes and make sure to read the show notes to apply for KPMG's global tech Innovator competition and or register for my live event coming up next week on the 16 May in Melbourne.

Vidi Tagawal
Catch you very soon.