Launching a Remote, Asynchronous Venture Studio

Today I sit down with my friend Barry O'Reilly, who’s a co-author of the bestselling book “Lean Enterprise” and author of “Unlearn: How to Let go of past success to achieve extraordinary results”. He’s also the host of the Unlearn podcast. He’s also the co-founder of Nobody Studios, a global and asynchronous Venture Studio in the middle of raising a crowd-funding round (500K so far!) on Republic where anyone (including me!) can be part of their mission to fund 100 companies in five years.

As part of my ongoing series about co-founder relationships, I wanted to bring Barry on to unpack how he and his co-founder connected and decided to make this project happen, how they cross-pollinate insights from venture to venture and how they use a platform-centric approach to create synergies among their portfolio companies.

Along the way, we explore how Barry has learned to leverage serendipity and intentional connection to build his ideal life and lots of insights about how to run remote-first!

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Learn about all things Barry here

Minute 10

I always think half, again, to your serendipity piece, half of the fun about people getting to know you is artifacts and finding resonance in different things that you're interested in. I always think it's fun, especially when we're on these, so much of our time is spent on these remote calls that when you have a couple of small artifacts, things that you're interested in, pictures, books or photos. I have my guitar here as well, which I sometimes play people with, which is always super fun. Some people in our team actually, we get on a jam. It's real fun.

Minute 18

What do you feel like you've had to unlearn the most in order to get to where you are now?

Barry O'Reilly:

I think just not being so hard on myself is probably the first thing. When I was in university-

Daniel Stillman:

Do you have a secret for that, for everyone listening? I don't think it's just me and Barry who are hard on ourselves.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, no. It's crazy. I had some experiences where I put myself in very bad positions because I almost had unrealistic expectations for myself. First example was when I was in university, I got into my mind that I had to do well. I had to get a first or an A1 or whatever the equivalent is in the educational system. I put so much pressure on myself to say, "If I don't get that, I've wasted the last four years. I still remember our final exams had eight exams to do and we were on the fourth exam, or the first three had gone really well. But in the middle of the fourth exam, my mind just went totally blank. I mean I couldn't even remember my own name. I sat there for I'd say most of the actual exam period, just staring at a blank page and I couldn't write words. It was one of these sort of first moments where I'd actually realized I'd put so much pressure on myself that I'd sort of flipped, if you will. I had frozen.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, you'd basically choked out enough blood to your brain through stress that you couldn't think anymore.

Barry O'Reilly:

Nothing. It was just one of these moments where it's like, what am I doing to myself? It was really interesting and I still remember leaving the exam hall and walking home, whatever. I spent the rest of that day almost sort of totally removed from myself. That was sort of one moment where I really got a glimpse into, "I need to find ways to manage myself." That was probably one of, at the time very difficult, but also a great learning moment for me. Over time, I think all of us and a lot of people like yourself and others who we've big ambitions, we're trying to do bold things. We like to all get outside our comfort zone and do well. What I remembered is that it's not about perfection, it's about excellence and just how can you show up and give your best rather than have to be the best.

Minute 35

Barry O'Reilly:

It's been really fascinating to bring all these people into a collaborative portfolio. This is probably a little bit of a difference from a superpower if you will, that a venture studio has. It's because all the companies in our portfolio are essentially, everybody in each individual company earns equity in the company they're working in, but they also earn equity in the studio as well. So they're collaborative. In many, many respects, and that's very different from a typical venture capital portfolio because they might have three analytics platforms or two food delivery products, so there's competition, if you will.

But in a studio it's collaborative. Also we have this notion of building blocks. So there's companies that are in our portfolio that we use to build companies on top of. A simple example is Thought Format, it's a serverless, no-code platform. We build another one of our products ovations, which is a virtual events platform for speakers and emerging talent on top of that no-code platform. So these businesses sort of first customers if you will, were each other. So they can learn faster, hire trust, iterate quicker, and they have really good conversations at one another to improve both of their products.

Minute 41

Barry O'Reilly:

I always remember one of my, so two of my family are chefs and one of my friends always says, "The sign of a great dinner party is that when you arrive and the person is still cooking and they're cleaning the kitchen as they go." That's the ultimate chef.

Minute 47

Barry O'Reilly:

In the earliest stages of starting companies is a huge lift. It's all the energy to turn the flywheel is manually created by just you showing up, trying to do as much as you can. Push the boulder up the hill if you will. It will always want you to be pushing it.

You have to learn how to self-regulate. This is again, another really strong lesson I learned even going back to this, your point about when I sitting there in university thinking, "Oh, I've got to work the most," or, "I've got to show up the most." Or, "I can't miss a meeting," or. It's easy for people sometimes to fall into that trap. I see it in myself, our team and our founders, but we're also one of our other values is people first in the studio. We constantly, you see the team check in with it one another and go, how are you doing? How's your energy?

Did you have a meeting last night that finished at 10 o'clock and now you're on a call at 4:00 AM? What's going on? Are you okay to do that? There's empathy there. That is because we are irrationally global, the sun does not set on the studio. There is somebody up working at high velocity somewhere all the time pinging you on asynchronous communications if they're blocked. So one of these notions of setting boundaries and having systems is imperative. One of the things I've made an intentional investment about is exercise.

So I literally book time in my diary, just like a meeting, where I go and train. Some of that training is I enjoy mixed martial arts, so I get a trainer to come to my house and we train in the house. Or else if I play sports rugby, I love playing rugby, I play that. These things are systematically built into my schedule that forced me to do them.

More About Barry

I work with business leaders and teams that seek to invent the future—not fear it.

I've been an entrepreneur, employee, and consultant. After several startups, my focus shifted towards venture company creation, and advising entrepreneurs and executive teams where I've pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation.

I'm the author of two international best sellers, Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale—included in the Eric Ries series, and a Harvard Business Review must read for CEOs and business leaders. I'm an internationally sought-after keynote speaker, frequent writer and contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review.

I'm faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity’s executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco, and throughout the globe.

I'm a cofounder of Nobody Studios, a venture studio with the mission to create 100 compelling companies over the next 5 years.

Founder ExecCamp, the entrepreneurial experience for executives, and management consultancy Barry O'Reilly LLC.

My mission is to help purposeful, technology-led businesses innovate at scale.

Reach out via barryoreilly.com/contact

Full Transcript

Daniel Stillman:

Barry O'Reilly, welcome to the Conversation Factory. This is your first time here.

Barry O'Reilly:

Oh yeah, it is. Well-

Daniel Stillman:

It's crazy.

Barry O'Reilly:

... I wonder what's taken us so long to do this, man?

Daniel Stillman:

I don't know.

Barry O'Reilly:

Well, I'm a huge fan of your work.

Daniel Stillman:

You have a podcast, I've got a podcast.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah. No, it's great to catch up and get to do this show together. I have obviously, been a huge fan of your work. I was very lucky to attend one of your short workshops many years ago when, I think, Google were holding their Design Sprint Conference and kicking that off.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

And Kai is a mutual friend of ours and I just loved your facilitation class, one of the best classes I've done on that. It's been a pleasure getting to know you then and continuing to know you now, so thanks for having me on the show.

Daniel Stillman:

Thank you, brother. It is, if this is a nice context. How did you know Kai and come to be at the... For those listening, this was a secret conference that was very cool.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, so Kai Haley...

Daniel Stillman:

And I was like how did know these, because there was internal Google people and then there were consultanty, thought-leadery folk like you and me. And it's like I felt lucky to be there with a friend of a friend. So how did you find yourself?

Barry O'Reilly:

Yes. So Kai Haley's a fascinating lady. She actually ran the Design Sprint community for Google inside of Google. So most people probably know Jake Knapp as sort of the advocate. He wrote the book, "Design Sprints," but Kai was basically the lady that trained everybody inside Google how to do them.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

So there was a group of people that were trying to advocate for design thinking in UX inside Google. Herself and Jake being just a few of them. But yeah, Jake obviously left Google and went on to Google Ventures, but Kai stayed within Google, ran design relations and started these conferences. I actually met her through a mutual friend, would you believe?

One of the things I used to do when we lived in San Francisco is we would have these dinners where three people would go out for dinner and every other dinner you would give up a seat and introduce another person to come along. So it was a really interesting way to network and meet new people in the city. And the guy who introduced me to Kai, his name is Bruno. He was actually looking after, sort of partnerships for Visa at the time. And yeah, he was like, "You got to meet this friend of mine, Kai." Yeah, that's how we became friends. And me and Kai speak regularly. She's at Coinbase now setting up their international design work. Fantastic lady and I'd highly recommend people check her out and follow her.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, I had Kai on the podcast a long time ago. I admired the work that she did inside of Google greatly. [inaudible 00:02:38] Because people do have, there's this story about sprints and like, "Oh, this is how Google works." And it's like, well, it's because Kai and a few other people built a really, really thoughtful train the trainer program, and-

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

... that did not happen by accident.

Barry O'Reilly:

No, not at all, like you know. And I've worked in companies where it's a very strong engineering culture. My sort of last definitive real job, if you could call it that, was working at a company called ThoughtWorks, which was one of the early pioneers of the agile software movement. And a lot of people, continuous delivery, continuous integration. These types of techniques were born out of there. But it was a really strong engineering culture. I still remember when I joined, it was still a small company, maybe a couple hundred people at the time. And everyone kept asking me like, "Do you write code?" And I'm like, "No." And then the next question was, "Well, what do you do then?" "Oh, you are a manager?" And I was like, "Well, no, I'm kind of interested in building products."

I remember as we brought designers into ThoughtWorks, there was always this sort of reticence against anyone who wasn't writing code. And I know Kai felt a lot of that as well inside Google-

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

... where it's just a strong engineering culture and trying to bring design thinking, getting people to spend time with customers, doing actual good UX, was the transition the company had to make. And herself, Jake and a bunch of other people I think, should instrumental in that happening.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. Yeah, the classic going slow to go fast. Making sure we're having all the right conversations, which as you know is one of my favorite-

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

... axes to grind, rows to hoe. You mentioned something though that I think is totally worth diving into and was not on the docket at all. One of my most passionate curiosities these days is this idea of having serendipity engines in our life. And I feel like we used to have many serendipity engines. The office was a serendipity engine, coworking spaces, conferences were serendipity engines. Bars. I used to have a Sunday night gathering at a fairly well frequented neighborhood bar for many years. And that's how I made a lot of friends. Now that group of friends has migrated from bar to bar and we still meet together on Sunday nights. It's been 10 years, but it's not the same serendipity engine. It's now more an intimacy engine.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

The idea of a three person, who started this, or is it just lost in the mists of time? Who started this format and does it still exist?

Barry O'Reilly:

No. [inaudible 00:05:19].

Daniel Stillman:

Is the dinner still happening someplace?

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

Well it's still happening in the Bay.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yes. Someplace. Yeah. Well, it really started because one of my colleagues at ThoughtWorks, Steve Ambosh, he's a great guy and he was sort of ran a lot of business development in sales and these types of things. But he says someone who's great, at like joining dots. I'm sure those people in your network. He's very kind and liberal with his time, his connections and his network. But he was like, "When I moved to San Francisco," he was like, "Hey man, we should catch up for dinner. Let's you and me, and why don't I just bring someone along that I think you should meet?"

He actually brought Bruno along to this first dinner and they had met at a Salesforce convention. He went up and talked to him because I don't know, he liked the jacket he was wearing or something. Anyway, those two became friends. So we had that dinner and then Dean said at the end, "Well you guys should stay in touch and why don't you invite somebody different onto the next time? That's literally how it started. I met Kai and then at the next dinner I didn't go and I suggested that David Bland, who wrote "Testing Business Ideas," he should go and meet Kai and Bruno. They all hit it off. That was just a little way that we started to network. At different times I'd go out for dinner with Kai and she would bring someone along or vice versa. It was just a great way, especially as I was new in the city when I just first moved there. It was just a fantastic way to meet some great people who've now become great friends.

Daniel Stillman:

This is wonderful. I did an interview last year with a guy Nick Gray, who wrote a book called, "The Two Hour Cocktail Party."

Barry O'Reilly:

Oh yeah?

Daniel Stillman:

So my recent experiment, I love the philosophy of gathering. As you know, you've been in a MasterClass around facilitation with me. I'm a nerd about it. And I think it's great to nerd about.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, you're good at it.

Daniel Stillman:

Gathering in general, but it was, it's so interesting to talk to somebody like you or with Nick who's like, "Here's one recipe," it is the sprint. There is a power to giving somebody a recipe that says, "Here, this will help."

Honestly, I've been running, I ran one in October and I said to my wife, I was like, "Can we do this every month?" She was like, "No, but we can do it every couple of months." We gather 15 or so people, and it's just seven to 9:00 PM on a weeknight. It's like, "Oh, this is a recipe for creating serendipity. It's a recipe." I've been calling it a serendipity salon. It's a recipe for getting people together and a three person mystery swap dinner. Like fascinating. Maybe that should be your next book. The secret to a great career is a mystery, a three person rotating dinner, but we needs a better name. We don't have, what did you call it?

Barry O'Reilly:

I can't even remember what we call it. Was it, "Dinner with Stranger," or something? I can't even remember. But as you say, you can design serendipity and it's such a huge part. I definitely, I would say in retrospect, thinking about my own journey about how I've met people. You have to put yourself in situations for those things to happen, if you will.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Barry O'Reilly:

Even today, I lived in San Francisco for six years and we moved to Manila 12 months ago. Actually, I'm celebrating one year living in Manila today.

Daniel Stillman:

Holy... Has it been a year?

Barry O'Reilly:

Been a whole year. Yeah. Time flies as well.

Daniel Stillman:

I just feel like so recently you were just like, "Ah, my container's not here yet. Oh, it got here, I'm sitting at my desk."

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, no. That was eight months. Thank you, COVID and the supply chain damages. Yeah, my container sat in the port in Oakland with oh, 75 ships sat outside the Bay of Oakland for four months.

Daniel Stillman:

Oh dude.

Barry O'Reilly:

[inaudible 00:09:29].

Daniel Stillman:

I feel that that happened to my books during my book launched during COVID and they got stuck in the container someplace as well. So you can stay, but it's not the same thing as, so we're not going to have this video up, but behind you is an Optimus Prime, a really nice one.

Barry O'Reilly:

I got that for... Yeah, my wife got me that. I'm a Lego nut. She got me it for the holidays. Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

Is that a Lego Optimus Prime? Because I was thinking, "Wow, did he bring this all the way from San Francisco," your Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the Optimus and the mask. Tell me about the things behind you and how they help you through your day. I'm really curious.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, well, it's super fun. So yeah, I'm a Lego junkie. You might be able to see here. I also have the "Yellow Submarine" Lego.

Daniel Stillman:

Oh.

Barry O'Reilly:

Which is-

Daniel Stillman:

But it's still in its box.

Barry O'Reilly:

Still in its box. The piece de resistance is, I've actually got the original Death Star logo or a Lego down on the bar here. It has to remain covered because my kids, when they see it, will want to tear it apart. So that's one thing, but.

Yeah. I always think half, again, to your serendipity piece, half of the fun about people getting to know you is artifacts and finding resonance in different things that you're interested in. I always think it's fun, especially when we're on these, so much of our time is spent on these remote calls that when you have a couple of small artifacts, things that you're interested in, pictures, books or photos. I have my guitar here as well, which I sometimes play people with, which is always super fun. Some people in our team actually, we get on a jam. It's real fun. But the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man always gets a shout out. I think he's the childs of the eighties. It's the state, they shout it out.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, I'm definitely dating myself. Is he a Lego as well?

Barry O'Reilly:

No, he's not.

Daniel Stillman:

No, I was going to say.

Barry O'Reilly:

He's actually a savings. He's pretty cool.

Daniel Stillman:

Oh, nice.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, people love it. Then I've obviously got a, "V for Vendetta," mask because there's something that's quite subsurface about everything I do and contrary. I think if you know anyone who's watched, "V for Vendetta," it, there's a certain type of person it speaks to and I guess I'm one of those people.

Daniel Stillman:

Okay, okay.

Barry O'Reilly:

I kind of love it.

Daniel Stillman:

This is the one of great check-ins that I've done in some of the men's work that I do is the question, "If you really know me, you would know. If you really knew me, you would know." I'm one of those people that, "V for Vendetta," resonates with.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, totally. That's why I've got bee's mask and it reminds me that counterculture taking this sort of path less traveled, all those things that resonate with me in terms of going against the systems, trying to shake them up and innovate them and do something better.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Barry O'Reilly:

That's sort of a lot of the inspiration that I take from the philosophy, if you will, from those types of ed books, films and so forth.

Daniel Stillman:

That's wonderful. So this is actually interesting. You started to tee this up earlier, and this is I think a great place to circle back around. One of my other favorite ways to think about things is the conversation between our past self, our present self and our future self. In the coaching work that I do. I think it's really awesome to hold that space. You started talking about in the beginning of your journey and how you started to... I'm a product person in a technology field. How do you feel like your journey in that started? I'll put this in context. What would that person who at the beginning of his journey, looking at Barry today, how would he understand where you are now? Would he understand where you are? Looking from the beginning to now, would he get it?

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah. Well, the story is always twists and turns, right? But I think I'm a person who's generally had a clear idea of what sort of vision I wanted to move towards. In some respects, each experience along the way has helped me refine that and get more conviction about it. I started as an engineer, that's what I studied in university. I was a software engineer, I just sucked at it. I would do it for five days a week and one day I would have a flow day, if you will, where I really enjoyed it. But four days of the week, I hated it. I was just banging my head against the wall. I guess at the time, this is 20 years ago, there wasn't really this notion of product management, if you will. But there was the people who came up with what to build and then the people who figured out how to build it.

And I just naturally, because I was in a startup, we were building a mobile games development company at the time. I just started to get this exposure to figuring out actually what were we trying to build, what would the product look like? What were the features? Who would use it? I just actually started to draw towards a natural affinity in that area rather than actually coding it up. That's how it started for me, to be honest. I didn't really call myself a product manager. I was probably more project manager really in that day because somebody sort of had to get the team organized about what they were going to do. I guess that's more what it was called in those days.

From there it really just moved on to working in the startup was great fun. We built this Tamagotchi-esque type cute pet game called, "Wireless Pets." It was the first game to be where you could, phones were had just got connected to WAP, so you could play distributed mobile games and it just exploded. Then that got the business up and running. Next thing we had Sony, Sega and Disney ringing us up to build computer games for them. I built a, "Lilo & Stitch," game in sort of 2002. It was pretty crazy and it just, when we were just a couple of people outside of Edinburgh and Scotland building these things.

Then from there, it really was just a case of each experience I've had more opportunity to either boat work in early stage building companies right through the working and consulting companies to doing my own advisory around that. I always knew over time that I liked the creation process, figuring out ideas, how they can turn into businesses and how you can build teams to get those things created. So I always love travel. So I've lived now in I think maybe nine countries, and this is my first time living in Asia full-time. I've traveled a lot around Asia, but never had it as my postal address, if you will.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

This is such a fascinating place at the moment. The Philippines even in itself is, it's the youngest population under 25s, huge percentage to the country is that. It's got the highest percentage of Crypto wallets in any country in the planet. So there's-

Daniel Stillman:

Wow.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, there's so many unique aspects to this whole region as well as the amazing innovation that's happening in places like Indonesia. 400 million people were onboarded it into the internet in the last nine months in Southeast Asia, which is just phenomenal. So there is just some very unique aspects of what's happening in this region. I'd lived in San Francisco for six years before that. It was a great experience. London for five years before that. So yeah, I guess there's parts of me that's not surprised and there's parts of me that is, but I know I like traveling the world and I know I building things. So here we are having fun trying to do it.

Daniel Stillman:

In a way it sounds, what I'm hearing you say is as we look to where we are now, from where we started, it actually sounds like, dare I say, an unlearning of things or letting go of things that you knew you didn't resonate with, that you didn't like. What do you feel like-

Barry O'Reilly:

That's pretty fair.

Daniel Stillman:

What do you feel like you've had to unlearn the most in order to get to where you are now?

Barry O'Reilly:

I think just not being so hard on myself is probably the first thing. When I was in university-

Daniel Stillman:

Do you have a secret for that, for everyone listening? I don't think it's just me and Barry who are hard on ourselves.

Barry O'Reilly:

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah, you'd basically choked out enough blood to your brain through stress that you couldn't think anymore.

Barry O'Reilly:

Really the thing you're just trying to improve is with yourself. It's not anybody else.

Daniel Stillman:

No.

Barry O'Reilly:

Just how you can get better every day. That was a huge sort of, at the time I would never have called it "unlearning," but it was these things where I was like, "Right, this is a lesson I've got to really take about myself." I see that a lot even today with whether I'm helping startups, working with advisories or working in our venture studio where there's lots of entrepreneurs trying to be successful and build companies. And they're hard on themselves. There's no two ways about it. So I think that's one of the things that I suppose really stands out to me is just it's about the pursuit of excellence rather than perfection. And recognizing that and giving myself a little bit of not so hard on myself as you shouldn't be either, Daniel.

Daniel Stillman:

Thank you. Well, the phrase, giving your best versus being the best is a really interesting and subtle difference because it is the process versus the achievement. It's being rather than becoming, which people have been talking about that since Socrates and Plato. There's a huge difference. I've been actually reading an essay somebody was writing about a book actually, this idea of mimetic desire. There's a French philosopher whose theory is, I think his name is Gerard, that most of the things we want, we want because other people want them. So we see something and we say, "I want that, or I want to be that." Or the way I think of it is, we're living someone else's story. We want to get that A-level because that means-

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

... that we are something that is good. Where do you feel like you got that from? Was that just general society? Was that your folks? Was that something, where do you think that narrative came from for you?

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, no. It's really fascinating. I like to get the best out of myself. Well, and that's something that I've always felt in a strange way, I feel that Judy, both to the opportunities that my parents and family created for me and that I've just been given in this world compared to other people. I was lucky to be born into a situation where I was fed, I was clothed, I was highly educated relative to most of the population of the planet. So I feel like there's a... I've always felt even at that level, there was something that I, either you're meant to do and give back. I also played sports at a really high level growing up. So rugby was my favorite sport. I played it at a really high level and I learned a lot about teams and the values that go into creating something great is as a system, it's a group of components of people working together to achieve more.

It's just such a very unique, I found, or took away from those types of experiences. So I just always felt, for me, that's what it was more about. It wasn't necessarily about trying to beat the person beside me, it's just get better myself. I remember even quite recently watching a great podcast with Kevin Hart and he was talking about this idea too as well. For as a comic and a standup, every night he goes out there and he's just trying to make that show a bit better and gauge the reaction.

And so much of comedy in a way is very like a product. You're testing features of the conversation to your point and seeing what resonates, what doesn't. What gets traction, what makes people laugh, what makes people cry is that what your intended response to your action. So there's a lot of things like that that I just enjoy the process, if you will, of improvement, but in a directed way. And so I think that's something that's always been interesting for me. I generally like things where I have to get outside my comfort zone. If the helicopter is leaving in five minutes, there's a 5% chance of survival and most people aren't going to come back. I kind of grab in the bag and jumping on the chopper. That's my jam.

Daniel Stillman:

Is that a movie? Is that a specific movie reference? Is there a specific scene?

Barry O'Reilly:

I'm in the Philippines, so I feel like it's some sort of-

Daniel Stillman:

On the chopper.

Barry O'Reilly:

... Francis Ford Coppola.

Daniel Stillman:

Get down.

Barry O'Reilly:

A platoon or whatever it might be.

Daniel Stillman:

Probably in our, I'm thinking there's got to be a Schwarzenegger movie or maybe it's, "Alien." It's possible. So now I feel circle around. One of the things that always stumps me, I think when we have something big that we've created is the, "Well, how did that get started?" I think about, "What was the first conversation between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak?" They had a conversation. They, this is of course my trope, it's they had a conversation and that conversation grew is it's a meet cute in a rom-com.

They had a conversation, then it became another conversation and then somehow they were making a company. You mentioned before we got started that Nobody Studios, the venture group that you're launching, creating is LaunchED. You have not met these, a lot of these people in person. It's like how does that conversation get started to, I think of it as the old movies where it's like, "Hey everybody, let's put on a show."

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

You're putting on a big show. Somebody's doing the props, somebody's got the lights, we've got costumes, there's a script, we're selling tickets. It's a whole show.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, no.

Daniel Stillman:

It's like, "The Muppets Take Manhattan." That's my eighties reference.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, no. It definitely feels like, "The Muppets Take Manhattan." I think that's definitely what the startups can feel like.

Daniel Stillman:

Who's Kermit in this? Who's Kermit in this analogy?

Barry O'Reilly:

I'm trying to remember. I definitely had Kermit as a child, but actually my favorite was Fozzy Bear. So because I like the gags. So that's always there, the one that resonated for me. But yeah, as you say, at the end of I guess 2019, I was living in San Francisco, I'd been doing advising at for probably, I don't know, it felt like independently for maybe seven years. I'd just been working with a few startups and done some advisory seats and it just really reminded me how much I loved building. I was missing building. One of my friends who was with me on one of the companies I worked on, Agile Craft, which we sold to Atlassian, it's like Jira Line now. His name's Lee Degal. Lee was sort of, yeah, he sort of reached out to me and was like, "Hey, I've met this guy, Mark McNally, who I think you should have a chat with him.

He introduced me to Mark and Mark was, literally, I'd never met him before in my entire life. He lived in Orange County, he's done 14 startups and was trying to create this thing called, "Adventure Studio," which the idea being, "Could we create an entity where you raise capital, you have a bunch of ideas, and then you build teams to go after those ideas and try and build these early stage or pre-seed stage companies." Incubate them, fund them, incubate them, support them, and then try and grow them and get them acquired. One of the things that I enjoyed about my time at ThoughtWorks is that you would work on lots of different projects and lots of domains. And one of the things I liked about advising was that you'd be helping teams as they build businesses. So I just felt like this was the perfect crucible for me to bring all my skills to bear and actually create equity in something.

Beyond that though, to the, "V for Vendetta," we sort of had this idea that venture is so locked up. It's a place that most people don't really get access to. Often, you have to be a high net worth individual to even invest in early stage companies. So one of the other things that Mark had mentioned is this notion that he was going to try and crowdfund the financing of this startup in a way where anybody, whether they were retail investor, which means everyone from a bus driver to a nurse, a restaurateur would be able to own a piece of this company. So we would, if you will, give access to more people to bring their talent, their influence and their capital to an entity where they could help build startups that are going to have a massive impact on their future. So the mission was fascinating.

The constructs was perfect. I did a call with Mark's when he's sitting in his garage and he had a really sort of to your point about what's in the back of your phone calls, he had this really perspective sign that just said, "Nobody Studios," on it. I was like, "Man, I love this name first of all. He's like, "Yeah, because, "Nobody," we park your egos at the door just people might have done lots of things, but we're trying to create something together." I just had a huge amount of resonance with one another. Yeah, we spent the next three or four weeks talking to each other and really just talking about the vision for what, "Nobody," could be and the values that it would have to represent that started the conversation where Mark had been in his own journey to reflect on his career and figure out what he wanted to do in the second half of his career, if you will.

I was just looking to start putting my energy into something that would create something much longer and lasting than me, create equity for myself and for putting energy in. Then something that could have a real impact, social and economic impact for people that were involved. So it just ticked all the boxes. Here we are two years later, we're on a mission to do 100 companies in five years. We've got 11 in development, four in the market. We've just launched our crowdfunding, which very kindly you are an investor as well. So welcome to the Nobody.

Daniel Stillman:

I think of myself as a symbolic investor, but I wanted to be part of the-

Barry O'Reilly:

No man.

Daniel Stillman:

Part of the journey.

Barry O'Reilly:

No, you are. Yeah. That's what, you're a nobody, that's what it's all about.

Daniel Stillman:

I've always wanted to be a nobody. Now I am.

Barry O'Reilly:

Now you feel the counter-culture when you say that.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

That's why we love it. It's like people joke, they spend so much time trying to be somebody to become a nobody and here we are. It's [inaudible 00:32:28].

Daniel Stillman:

I just want to give my best versus be the best.

Barry O'Reilly:

You know it, brother. That's it. That's exactly it. Yeah, it's just been super fun. Here we are now, the campaign is live. We're ticking over raising half a million dollars. We've got a couple of hundred investors from people all over the world. It's been amazing and we're only getting started. So it's super fun times and hopefully there's like people listening here who might be interested and go and look at thinking about what they want to become a nobody too.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

I'm nobody. Who are you? Maybe you're a nobody too.

Daniel Stillman:

What do you feel? So we're in this moment where I'm hearing the weird Al Yankovic song, "Dare to be Stupid." You have to put all your eggs in one basket, but that is what you're taking the things you know and instead of advising seven or so companies disparately, it seems like the concept of a venture studio is trying to achieve some sort of nuclear fusion. That there is some sort of sustaining heart of innovation, that there is a way that... Because I'm new to the concept of a venture studio. You and I had a conversation offline where you're like, "Anybody can start one. You could just be two guys in a garage." But if it's a good venture studio, I presume there is some knowledge, resources and approaches shared amongst companies. What-

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, no.

Daniel Stillman:

... do you feel like that beating heart is of a venture studio?

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah. So it is very much an emerging asset class. A lot of people have felt, if you will, that especially over the last few years, the valuations of startups have just gone crazy. These friends of mine, even in San Francisco were getting funded millions of dollars with just a pitch deck and not even a prototype. It was blowing my mind that a lot of the checks and balances have just disappeared from the system in some respects. And VCs have a lot of capital that they need to deploy, are paying high prices for startups that have not really sort of if you've validated or proven that they've got traction. So one of the ideas really was, "How do we get back to doing things a little bit more frugally about creating companies?" So at Nobody, we invested about a quarter of a million dollars to incubate companies over 12 months.

The idea is that we're taking it, something from a post-it note to a prototype to a working product. That when it sees sort of traction in the market, then we would go to get an external capital and funded. So it's sort of a part of the ecosystem we believe that has lost it, maybe a little bit of its natural built in checks and balances. So we think that we can create very high quality early stage startups that have to go through a sort of a quality bar, if you will, to make sure that they're performing before we either keep investing in them or we look for external folks to invest in them. So it's real fund that we have our own ideas that we work on, we've identified or met some early stage founders who might have ideas or early prototypes and have come into the studio.

Daniel Stillman:

I see, yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

All great, all great picks, three companies to win. So it's not collaborative. So that's why we've tried to bring our mix to having raising capital that we can invest in ideas, people bringing their talent that they can help build ideas, and then us bringing our capabilities to help those founders build faster and be more successful quickly.

Daniel Stillman:

So given that everybody's remote, going back to the beginning of our conversation around three person dinners and serendipity salons. In the same way that Google Sprint, the Google Sprint style that lived inside of Google evolved and grew over time as part of many conversations, collaborations and people committed to growing that community effort. What are the mechanics for creating that collaboration? If we were to look under the hood?

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, it's hard.

Daniel Stillman:

How do we structure it? Yeah.

Barry O'Reilly:

One of the things I probably have learned along the way is that asynchronous communication is a skill. It's a skill that even pre-pandemic most people didn't have. Even through the pandemic, I don't think a lot of people learned good practice of it. I think everybody was waiting for it to end. So one of the things I think we learned very early when we were starting to build this business is that the discipline of writing things down, of having a clarity and almost standard operating procedures about how you run meetings, how you capture notes, how you communicate afterwards, where do you put content that you want for discussion and feedback? How do you make sure that people are engaged? How do you reach folks? Some people like to be on Slack, some people like to be on WhatsApp, some people like to read emails still. There's so much coordination about conversation design, which actually made me think a lot about the work we did in your workshop to be honest.

These simple things like readmes. I remember we did this and your workshop too, you made us draw shield to represent different parts of us. These sorts of and techniques are so powerful when new people join a company that if I've like a read me file, it's like, "Read me. I'm Barry. I live in Manila. These are the hours I like to work. This is the best way to communicate with me. Here's if you need any documents. This is the style of my meeting deed, here's my phone number."" All of these small little things have such a huge impact when you're working remotely and asynchronously because it's not like you bump into people in the hallway and go, Hey, oh, you're in my department too? Cool. We all sit together. We'll go for lunch." So you have to create the signposts and you have to create the content to help people collaborate successfully. That's been one big aha. I think that, yeah, I'd be curious for your thoughts on what you've seen through that time.

Daniel Stillman:

I mean we're talking about in a way hygiene.

Barry O'Reilly:

Man. We talk about tidying up all the time. Tidy as you go. Every so often it's like we got to clean the he. It's like, but it's really, it's like honestly.

Daniel Stillman:

That's what great chefs do. Great chefs tidy as they go.

Barry O'Reilly:

Damn right. I always remember one of my, so two of my family are chefs and one of my friends always says, "The sign of a great dinner party is that when you arrive and the person is still cooking and they're cleaning the kitchen as they go." That's the ultimate chef. I was like, "Yeah, okay. Cool." But it's so true because this stuff can get un-wielding very, very quickly. And I think that's one of the things that's certainly learned along the way is every so often we have to clean up all the Slack channels. All the orphan channels that have got the same, Nobody town hall, Nobody hall town, Nobody water cooler, Nobody, Nobody. You're like, "What are these things?" Because people come to the company, people go from the company and when they join and there's confusion about where to go, these are always good signals that you don't have good information architecture if you will. And you're not moving information around.

Daniel Stillman:

So that's like, that's platform. I guess one of the things I'm thinking about is structures or mechanics of connection versus a person or people who are those connectors?

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah. Well, so I think the third person we hired in the company was Thacha Thacker is the Chief Culture Officer. She was actually an employment attorney who got so frustrated with having to defend people in courtrooms that she was like, "I need to go upstream if you will and see if I can address this problem further in the value stream if there is that thing." She was one of these things that we talk a lot about because one of our values is irrationally global and the team are from-

Daniel Stillman:

Irrationally global?

Barry O'Reilly:

Global. Yeah. The team is everywhere. I'm in the Philippines, we've got people in Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel, Dubai. We got people in Italy, Dublin. We got London and all the Americas. We don't have anyone in Africa and Antarctica yet. That's our goal is to get a team set up there, but already we've got a hundred plus Nobody's all over the world, which means our meetings are instantly global. So this morning we were doing our portfolio review and I had to get up at 4:30 AM or it was at 4:30 AM my time. So I had to get up at 4:00 AM and that is the way to try and get a portfolio review where you can cover Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa. People have to flex. So it's fascinating as well just recognizing how to work both remotely, across different geographies and cultures because what works in downtown New York in your neighborhood is very different from how people respond in London and [inaudible 00:44:20].

Daniel Stillman:

You know how we do downtown as we said.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Right? It's been fascinating again to see that sort of culture emerge and find ways to communicate. Yeah, no. It's a work in progress as always. But I think that and the advent of video, we use a lot of video.

Daniel Stillman:

You mean like asynchronous video?

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah. So we do a lot of everything from live streams to tools like Loom where you can record five minutes and send it to people.

Daniel Stillman:

Loom is amazing.

Barry O'Reilly:

So it's really fascinating that how important the gesture goes with the commentary if you will. Because especially when there's a lot of feedback on prototypes, mock-ups or the ability to put video with sound is really quite fascinating. Even in our hiring process as well, we ask people to create a video and talk a bit about their inspiration. Why they found the studio, what inspires them about it? Because it's a huge part of how we communicate with one another. Yeah, so it's fascinating just trying these little experiments as you go along.

Daniel Stillman:

So one other thing I'm curious about is I've been doing a series around co-founder relationships and similarly to you and your relationship with your co-founders at Nobody Studios, each company is got their own conversation of, "Oh, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it." They have their internal conflicts as you're saying, "Going up the value change to understand how do we build the company that each one of those people has their own opinion about, the type of company that they want to build."

Barry O'Reilly:

Oh yeah, for sure.

Daniel Stillman:

One message I heard that I'm wondering how you communicate to each of your founders is this balance between giving your best versus being your best, versus running on fumes and creating systems. Because it's not sustainable to.

Barry O'Reilly:

No, not at all. Right. The fascinating thing about Nobody is, so I'm a co-founder of Nobody Studios, but we're also co-founders of all the companies we create. We're not an overlord looking over these portfolio companies with judging them. We're actually co-founders of them with them. So there are kids too. We want them to be successful. So even that dynamic between, if you will, the CEOs of the NewCos and us as co-founders of those businesses is fascinating to consider. But to your point about managing expectations and just energy, because that is what I have found is so important. In the earliest stages of starting companies is a huge lift. It's all the energy to turn the flywheel is manually created by just you showing up, trying to do as much as you can. Push the boulder up the hill if you will. It will always want you to be pushing it.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Barry O'Reilly:

I actually invest in paying for a trainer because it makes me do it. If I just had a meeting in there saying, "Exercise," nine out of 10 times I'll take another meeting. Because it's just the exercise time.

Daniel Stillman:

Right. The system, the accountability to another person like the change of context. This is really, really true.

Barry O'Reilly:

It's amazing. Right?

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. What other systemic approaches would you suggest to co-founders getting started to make sure that the Boulder pushing part and the next phase, which is running after the boulder, I presume on the other side of the hill.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, we're getting there.

Daniel Stillman:

Because there is that part where you're running after the boulder and you're like, "Oh, we have to hire people and we have to suddenly be more capable of in things that we never thought we had to be capable of.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, no. We're there. We're there right now at the moment. Yeah, because again, it is relentless. The demand for energy never goes away. It's all there. So I have to really be intentional about managing my energy, setting those boundaries, putting systems in place like exercise and what I eat, when I eat. One of the companies we're building is actually with Dr. Gina Poe. She's one of the leading researchers on sleep and dreams in the world. She runs the sleep lab at UCLA, previously at Harvard. This is one of the fun things about working in a studio, Daniel, because health and wellness is a big part of the studio. We've loads of ex UFC fighters and all these what I would call, "High performance bio-hackers." It's just hanging out with these people. You suddenly are like, "What?" So Gina Poe has been teaching me about sleep and it's, I am now, I will not for hell or high water sacrifice not getting a minimum of seven hours sleep every day.

So just as for men, especially if you're getting six hours or less sleep of hours a day when I'm in my early forties now, I would have the equivalent testosterone rate of a man in his mid fifties. Which is, and this is huge because in order to the two leading indicators for longevity and high quality of lice, what the muscle mass is one of them, your ability to actually maintain your strength if you will. The other is the qualities of sleep that you get. So I'll just sit there going, "These are the leading researchers in the world who have been studying this for 20 years and they're telling me these things. So if I don't design them into my approach to getting better and managing myself, if you will, and I'm not listening to the lecture, if you will." And-

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Barry O'Reilly:

So it's all a design to me. I know you enjoy this too as well. It's a design problem.

Daniel Stillman:

It is a design problem.

Barry O'Reilly:

Then if so, I can experiment. I can, all these simple things that I have become quite focused around. Because if you want can put on biometrics like a whoop or aura ring and you can see the difference when you get less sleep, when you eat, aren't exercising when you aren't. So those have become real core tenants of me managing my energy so I can give that energy both to myself and the teams that we're working with. So we're all our best. Sure there's times where you stretch and you flex, but that cannot be sustained. I think we're good as co-founders recognizing that in one another and saying, "You should take a week off, you should not take those calls in the afternoon."

You should... You're wedded to these people because you're trying to do something totally irrational. Like a startup is totally irrational. You have an idea that to try and build something from nothing, does anybody want to join me in doing that? It's, there's a 5% success rate actually lower than that. So I think we've really become friends though you go way past colleagues because you live in people's lives together to create this. It takes that much energy and I think that's one of the things we've been really good is taking care of one another.

Daniel Stillman:

That's beautiful. I love the idea that earlier you were talking about the synergistic effects of companies within the portfolio utilizing platforms and it sounds like sleep quality is going to be a new foundational component of-

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, SleepCloud. Check it out. It's coming to an app store near you soon.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, and if anybody's listening, so my hack, by the way, Barry has been at many people suggested keeping my phone plugged in another room. Because reading the phone before bed does not help you go to bed.

Barry O'Reilly:

Nope.

Daniel Stillman:

I have a brown light e-Ink tablet that I read fiction on before bed and-

Barry O'Reilly:

Nice.

Daniel Stillman:

... and blackout curtains. They're the best.

Barry O'Reilly:

There you go.

Daniel Stillman:

Those are my hacks.

Barry O'Reilly:

Yeah, well that's it. But it's all part of the design and I, like that. That is, if you asked me these questions 10 years ago, I would've been like, "No, the way I relax is I have a glass of wine, I do these things. I stay out late or I unwind my friends." But as I've evolved both physically myself and as I get older, but also just being more in tune with, these are the things that help me be at my best. I get frustrated if I don't show up as I know I can.

I think that's being, again, a learning part. I wouldn't tell myself 10 years ago not to go out, have fun and have a white, red wine. That has shaped me to who I am today. Absolutely. I think it's just, I've learned that for the tasks that I'm trying to do today, there's the way they help me be my best requires changes. Those things like exercise, sleep, diet, and also this idea of, to your point about serendipitous conversations, I work from home. So every two weeks I go out and meet someone new for lunch.

So I go and experience like being with people here that I've never met before, whether it was in the Philippines or in San Francisco. I do those things because they give me a change of mode. They give me a different way to look at the world and meet new people. So I try to be as intentional as I can thinking about the things that have helped me, both systematically and serendipitously and work them in. Yeah, hopefully I keep persisting with that and it's working for me as far as I can tell. I think it is.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, this is continuous improvement. We have to notice.

Barry O'Reilly:

Right on.

Daniel Stillman:

We have to be intentional experiments and intentionally noticing. "Oh yeah, that works." I mean there was a guy who hilariously tried to do the sleep pattern that I think it was like Leonardo da Vinci did this thing where he would sleep for 90 minutes every... Or he'd spread out his sleep schedule and he did something. He totally, he was maybe the original biohacker and it worked for him and a guy tried it and he was like, "I don't actually, turns out I don't have enough creativity to fill all the time that Leonardo da Vinci did." So I'm going to go back to it.

Barry O'Reilly:

Well, here's a tip for you man, that as Gina Poe has discovered that there is a rhythm to sleep cycles and surprise, surprise, guess what the time is?

Daniel Stillman:

What? I couldn't...

Barry O'Reilly:

It's 90 minutes.

Daniel Stillman:

Is it really? Wow. Leonardo. Biohacking to the truth. Well listen, I, it's very late where you are. You've had a long day. Is there anything I have not asked you that I should ask you. What haven't we talked about that we should talk about?

Barry O'Reilly:

No, I just, I've enjoyed catching up as much as sharing some of what I've been trying to do and hearing more of what you've been up to as well. So yeah, thank you very much for having me on the show. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you and I welcome as well to the Nobody Network. I'm looking forward to again, to you come and talk to all our portfolios about designing great conversations. I think one of the great parts of building these companies is every nobody can bring their talent, their influence and their capital, and you've abundance to bring in all of those things. So I appreciate you very much and thank you very much for supporting us and being part of the Nobody journey. I think it's going to be a pretty fun adventure.

Daniel Stillman:

So where should people go to learn more about being part of, because there's just one month left. When this comes out, it'll be less than a month.

Barry O'Reilly:

Oh, great. Yeah, right.

Daniel Stillman:

To be part of the crowdfunding part of things. Yeah, well after that what can they do?

Barry O'Reilly:

We may never raise funds again, so this might be the only time we ever do it. So yeah, please go to republic.com/nobodystudios and there's lots of information. You are buying securities, so don't be surprised. We have to go through the same level of, if you will, sort of rigor as a SEC regulated IPO in some respects. So yeah, be, go have a look at what we've shared. If you've any questions we're constantly doing live streams. Ask me anything open, Q and A, so you can find that on at Nobody crowd, pretty much everywhere in all your favorite social platforms. Thanks again for having us.

Daniel Stillman:

Thanks for making this time, Barry. I know your system was like, "Daniel, none of the times on your podcast schedule match Manila time." I'm like, "Good point." That is a solid, solid point because my working hours are usually, I know that I'm not usually my best at 7:30 in the morning. That's my a [inaudible 01:00:34] experiments.

Barry O'Reilly:

Well you have been today experiment. Thank you very much for that.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, when you texted me and you're like, "Can I have 10 more minutes?" I'm like, "Yes, I will enjoy my shower now." Because I was about to run in and run out. So thank you for giving me an extra 10 minutes. I really appreciate it, Barry.

Barry O'Reilly:

Thank you. Appreciate you too. Thank you very much.

Daniel Stillman:

Well then we'll call scene. I think we can successfully do that.

Barry O'Reilly:

Nice.