[00:00:00] Sean: Let's fast forward a little bit to the next company that you built. Why do you say that it was a very interesting time for you? You mentioned that you have 14 people you're working with you like them. They like you. What are some of the lessons that you learned from them?

[00:00:16] Jason: Well, I mean the first company, I wasn't the boss, I was one member of the band who happened to have created the record company. Because I was the only person who had any kind of experience in money and business through the economics degree, although I didn't actually have any real experience.

And then I got to Mauritius and we had, we create basically a blue dog and a yellow koala cartoon online. And we ended up with 5 million visits a month and a hundred million page views a month on the site for kids up to 10 years old.

And obviously, I couldn't run that on my own. Initially, I did the first three years just myself. And when we got to Mauritius, I thought, right okay, I need to get a team together. So that they can help me, especially with the client support with the technical side, with the animations, which we weren't very good at, I wasn't very good at.

And it turned up in Mauritius and it didn't occur to me that when you move from France, where there is 56 million people, incredibly well-educated country to Mauritius, where there are a million people and it's part of Africa and it's obviously kind of not got the skillset that I had come to expect in France.

I didn't really think, oh, if I turn up and say, I need a PHP and my SQL developer, there actually won't be anybody qualified to do the job. And it was literally, that was my problem. And so I did, I announced, I advertised sorry for these jobs and it would be PHP, my SQL developer, cartoon animation, somebody else to do some cartoon animation, and I would get applications from people who had absolutely no idea what they were doing.

And somebody came in and said, well, I do a bit of excel. And when you say excel, isn't, you know, high level - server level database management. It's excel, which is a spreadsheet and it's nothing to do with it. So then what I eventually realized was there was no point in trying to find people who could do specific jobs. I needed to find people and then fit the jobs to them.

So, what I ended up doing is doing interviews for jobs that I advertise and then taking just the people that I thought, yeah, this is going to work out, we're going to get on. And then saying to them, what do you like doing? What don't you like doing? How can we build this job around you so that both you are enjoying the job, you're bringing value to the company, you know, moving the company forward? And that was an incredibly big wake-up for me, that helps me. It helps me out today because I'm doing the same thing again. But, you know, I got one guy who came in and he was supposed to be doing marketing and it turned out that he wasn't very good at marketing.

He wasn't very interested in marketing, but he was really good at spreadsheets. And he was really good at calculating weight ratios, for words and pages for search engines. And I said, why don't you just do that? And he locked himself in his office for a month and came up with a spreadsheet, that could calculate the exact ratio of words you needed in a page to rank number one on Google, this was back in 2002.

We ranked number one on Google. Some of the pages still ranked number one on Google, which is an astonishing achievement. And that was just a case of standing back and saying, actually, what are you good at mate? And he said, "well I'm, I like that and I'm good at that."

And believing in his ability to do it and giving him the leeway to actually get on and do it. That was a big eye-opener.

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