Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Adam Jacobs

Intro: Change happens. How we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how influential and authentic people lead through change. The good, the bad and everything in between because whether we like it or not, change happens.

Jenelle: Hi, I’m Jenelle McMaster and welcome to Season Two of the Change Happens podcast where we continue to have conversations with influential leaders on leading through change and the lessons learned along the way. Today I’m joined by Adam Jacobs, co-founder of the Iconic. A company that shouldn’t need too much intro and he’s also the co-founder of Hatch, an online employment platform that connects young people to meaningful work by looking at underlying transferable strengths rather than what's on the CV and the purpose of Hatch is to design the future of work and if you’ve met Adam before, or listened to him before, you’ll know that that intention is not a marketing slogan. It’s absolutely what he will do. Adam started his career in strategy consulting before establishing Australia’s number one online fashion retailer, the Iconic, in 2011. A company that fundamentally disrupted the massive “bricks and mortar” incumbent retail players. He’s interested in how technology is changing societies and aims to build global tech companies that positively influence the future. Key to Adam’s success is his emphasis on customer experience and the power of purpose led teams. In 2014 Adam was awarded the Young Executive of the Year and runner-up for Managing Director of the Year by the CEO magazines annual awards. I’m excited to chat with Adam, not least because he’s right here in the room with me. I haven’t had a face to face interview happening since February last year, so forgive me if there’s a little too much excitement in my voice but I’m excited because I know this is going to be an awesome chat, no pressure Adam. Adam has a big brain, huge heart and he is the embodiment of what this podcast is all about, making change happen. Adam, welcome.

Adam: Hell, what an introduction. I’m going to play that back to my Mum, she’s going to be so proud.

Jenelle: [laugh], well she should be.

Adam: Thanks for having me, its great to be here.

Jenelle: Oh I love having you in here, thank you. Now when I was thinking about this interview, I was going back and forth in my mind about how and where to start. The ordered sequential part of me wanted to kind of start at the beginning, you know, the “what did you want to be when you grow up” kind of question. The current context part of me wanted to sort of dive into the impact of covid on your business but the fashion lover in me wanted to dive into all things The Iconic [laugh]. So my plan is to absolutely cover all of those things, that’s how I calmed myself down about it but I’m just going to start with a bridging question of the current to the past and that’s this “how is it that the head of a tech company, or two tech companies, is a student of philosophy and a major proponent of studies and humanities”.

Adam: Yeah well I’m really glad you asked that question. Its something I’m really passionate about. You know I think if we think about the world we live in today, there is just huge amounts of rapid change happening around us. You know, there’s change in the way we access products and services, the way the economy is structured, there’s change in the guys to what's important in our lives, in our societies and that rate of change is somewhat unprecedented, you know compared to 100 years ago or 500 years ago and so really what it means is there’s an opportunity to think from first principles about how the world is structured and how it might be improved, amongst all that change and that’s kind of what philosophy is. You know, philosophy is the exercise or breaking things down to its component parts and asking some really tough questions and navigating your way through it and so you know, from my experience, studying philosophy and the humanities was almost the most valuable bedrock I could have had into eventually becoming an entrepreneur. You know, it gave me the toolkit to look at the world with a critical eye, to assume that the status quo wasn’t there for a reason, to ask confronting questions and not be afraid to ask them and to reimagine how things could be put together.

Jenelle: Love it and I … you know, we all explore the lack of fear of questioning the rules and not being afraid of the unknown, throughout the conversation no doubt. I want to talk to you about both of your businesses but I want to start with The Iconic. Talk me through the early days when you were starting out, where were you, what did it look and feel like at that time.

Adam: So it was really an accident, to be honest. Like people love romantic start-up stories of, you know, I was toiling away in a garage for years and finally my grand vision came to life and that’s just not at all what happened in my journey in founding The Iconic. I was living in Copenhagen, I transferred to the Danish office of BCG. So I started with BCG in Sydney and then transferred to Europe and was approached by a European venture capitalist who was investing into e-commerce models in Europe. Most noticeably Zalando which is Europe’s largest online fashion retailer and basically said “look, you know, our VC’s been thinking about Australia, the market there seems really ripe for online fashion, would you think about leading BCG, dropping the MBA you’re about to do in the States and instead going and founding this company with, you know, one or two other BCG colleagues.”

Jenelle: And you’d just got into Copenhagen, like what was the timing …

Adam: I was only there literally two or three months I think when I was approached and I said no. You know, I said it sounds amazing and really fun but I’ve just got here, you know, I had literally packed up my whole life in Australia, I sold all my stuff, I moved out of my apartment, I told my girlfriend we were breaking up …

Jenelle: So “awkies” to come back [laugh].

Adam: [laugh], it was a little bit awkward and had just been admitted to a couple of MBA programmes in the States and that was my plan for the following year and so, you know, life had a plan and I didn’t really want to deviate from it and this VC, they were like … they were really persistent and over a month, they’d call me every few days and in their very German direct ways, say “come on, how about now, how about now”. You know, eventually after thinking about it further, I thought to myself, this is a pretty unique opportunity to start with the backing of a VC that is proven in e-commerce and has capital and to build a company with some people I trust because I was discussing it with some colleagues from BCG and I, you know, wandered the canals of Copenhagen and made pros and cons lists and talked to all the people in my life because that’s how I tend to make decisions, I’m very analytical and in the end none of that helped and so then I just thought to my stomach as who what would I be more excited to do when I woke up in the morning and felt you know what, I would like to build a business. Like I had always played around in creating and building things, businesses or clubs, you know, societies and saw it as a unique opportunity and so, took the plunge and I think the first thing I learnt from that was there really is no blueprint to starting a company. You know, people sort of hold in mind this Steve Jobs inspired archetypical story of how companies … how great start-ups come about and the reality is, not just from looking at my own story, but a lot of friends, close friends, who have been successful entrepreneurs, everybody comes from a different background, a different path. You know, there’s no blueprint. I think, you know, to the second part of the question, what we got right. I sort of moved back from Copenhagen and started The Iconic very quickly. We put an initial team together quite quickly and got the website up. What we got right was probably two things. One was the timing. Like 2011, it seems an age ago now but it was the perfect time to be disruptive in e-commerce in Australia. No one was doing anything interesting. There was just a lot of negative views towards e-comm. So we got the timing right and we just didn’t listen to the status quo. We basically gave ourselves the permission to do something different and to bring forth this model that was based on customer experience rather than on yield. Like mostly retailers at the time were thinking of e-commerce as clearance channels. How do we take stock that’s not moving, put it online, get as many dollars for it as we can, bargain basement and we sort of put that to the side and said “no no no, that’s not what we think e-commerce is going to be in the future, we think its going to be a superior shopping experience and we’re going to bring that to life.”

Jenelle: How do you knock down those belief systems. How did you convince people. How did you tell the story in a way that the best brands would come onto your platform, that you would go “okay, this isn’t about clearing stock, this is about attracting the right labels.” Was there a tipping point. Was there some … how did you do it?

Adam: I think there … I think there were three tactics that worked really well for us. The first one and the most by far, the most important one was we did a really good job of painting the vision and telling the story. We would sit down with a brand that was really important to us, like Nike or Adidas or you know, Levis, and we’d say to them, “look, we know that in Australia, e-commerce is not a big share of your revenue but lets look at America and let’s look at Europe and lets take those markets as a crystal ball as to where Australia is going to be, you know, not even five years, probably two to three years from now. We’re creating that future and do you want to be a part of it because if you don’t want to be a part of it, you may well be left behind”. That last bit we may not vocalise, that’s sort of the implicit message or you know, you better jump on this ship or … but that… you know it wasn’t too hard to paint that story, just by looking at more mature markets, that really were about five years ahead of Australia and what was going on in those markets. That was really effective. The other two things that we did that were quite effective was we started with the most aspirational brands. Mostly boutique designer brands. So like an Ellery or a Sascinbide and once we had them on the website, then it gave a little bit more credibility for the next tier to come down and then the next tier and so we had this sort of trickle down effect of brand acquisition by starting at the most aspirational ones.

Jenelle: And were they hard to convince.

Adam: Yeah they were hard but if we went after local brands that had only one or two people that needed to be convinced, rather than a global brand where it was quite a stakeholder complex environment, then we could get them across the line and we do deals with them. We’d make it attractive to them because we knew the value of getting them on first. That was pretty effective. The third thing we did in our first year was above the line advertising and everybody thought we were crazy in doing TV ads …

Jenelle: What does that mean.

Adam: Yeah, so its … non digital advertising. So you know, for us it was …

Jenelle: Non digital advertising for a digital business.

Adam: Exactly. Mostly broadcast channels. So for us it was TV, radio, billboards, buses, street furniture and no Australian e-commerce company to that point had done any above the line marketing because, as you said, if you’re a digital company you advertise in digital channels and the reason was really simple was … which was that Australia as a customer base hadn’t yet become comfortable shopping online. Australians didn’t put their trust into websites and so we had to send a signal of our credibility, that we were here, that we were real, that we were tangible and quite simply, if you see it on TV, then it must be true.

Jenelle: [laugh], but what you did was create a bridge between the two worlds. So if the world was operating in an analogue way and you wanted to get them to digital, you had to find the bridge between the two so you communicating on the way.

Adam: Exactly yeah yeah, so I often use the term “the familiarity bridge” and that’s what we did, yeah I agree.

Jenelle: Now the purpose of The Iconic as stated on the website, because I checked it out, is “liberation. It’s a big word. Liberation, we create seamless and inspiring experiences. How did you arrive at that and what's the story behind the liberation purpose.

Adam: I think … I think a company’s purpose is one of those things where it comes from the culture primarily. Where I see purpose is, become a little bit trite or superficial is that they’re trying to meet the convenient or a strategic goal. Where I see them to be authentic and powerful is where they start with the core belief system of the people at the centre of the company and so in the first couple of years of building The Iconic, just through who the founding team was and who the first, you know, 20 to 50 employees were, what we found was we very quickly built a culture that believes in disruption, that believed in rejecting the status quo and in thinking big and in reimagining what online retail and fashion could look like in the future for Australia and that is a form of liberation. Its like casting aside the structures that take hold of you today and saying “look, just because they’re there don’t mean that they’re there for a good reason, you know, they don’t have to have been put there by someone who is smarter or with more authority than us”, like we have that intelligence. We have the same capabilities to build the future as anyone else. So that was a very tangible cultural aspect that you could feel every day in The Iconic’s office and so I think it was mirrored to the outside in the way that we bought the brand to life in going after really bold initiatives early on like three hour delivery when no one else could even do like one week delivery, you know, in 2012. Even in bringing out a mobile app experience three years before most of our competitors. Those forms of initiatives sent a signal to Australians, you know what, we can be leaders, like we don’t have to just be behind the eight ball or like what's going on in Europe and America. Like we can liberate ourselves from the status quo and reimagine and take control of our own destiny. That’s where I really came from.

Jenelle: It feels to me that it works on a macro and a micro level when you talk about liberation because I can see the liberation in the way in which you approach the business and the psyche and the mindset and challenging the status quo but I also think its on a micro level so your customers who are coming into the website and liberating themselves from kind of the fashion norms that might have … like it’s such a broad range of items and you know, was that an intent as well.

Adam: Definitely yeah. Yeah those two things definitely fuse together and the moment that I would witness time and time again where I most saw the macro brand message and the micro shopping experience come together was when often in the first couple of years, at the end of the day if I was coming back from the warehouse, I spent a lot of time in our warehouse which is a big part of The Iconic’s operation, now called the fulfilment centre, it’s much more tech … tech driven than it used to be. I would grab a couple of parcels and I’d deliver them myself to the doorstep of customers because I would just want to ask them how was your experience, what was good, what was bad, what could we improve and you know, what really made a difference was when I grabbed a three hour delivery parcel and I would deliver it to the customer within three hours and the joy on their face of just like receiving … like it was almost like unbelief, like the unbelief of receiving something that they ordered, like barely two hours before on the doorstep, made our brand seem limitless in their mind, made them feel limitless as a result and then that was laid onto the product they were buying and so the dress, the jeans, the shoes, the jacket – whatever it was – was imbued with this feeling of like boldness and limitlessness and that’s really the moment. Like the delivery experience plus the product like coming together in the delivery moment, that’s when it all came to life.

Jenelle: I love that and look, I get excited when packages arrive, no matter how long it takes to get to my door but if its within a click or two and then its there, absolutely. What did you learn about yourself as a leader. I have no doubt that it has evolved over time but perhaps at that point in time, what was your style of leadership. What did you learn about yourself in that role.

Adam: Yeah. Do you know the moment I started seeing myself as a leader, I was in the HR office, I think it was the only team in the company that had an enclosed office for good reason, it was a wild couple of first years [laugh] and the … I was in there and there was a member of the HR team, Kikki, who I worked really closely with the whole time, she was at The Iconic and she … she said to me, like you know, like Adam, you’re really the leader of The Iconic and you know, I know the other guys have moved on now but like that’s, I mean that’s always been your role and we’ve always looked at you in that regard and I was really taken aback. It almost required someone else to like play it back to me as a mirror to become aware and I asked why and her answer, which I think is consistent with how I now sort of come to see my own leadership style is I focus a lot on how you can bring a large group of people together around a singular goal, in a very authentic way, in a way that that goal means something to them and means something to the company and unites them as a group of people but then I also focus, deep down in the detail, on the mechanics of how it all works. You know, I was a very busy builder of the company. I wasn’t sort of trying to yeah, just hand things off to other people. I was really like, hands and elbows, you know, in the detail and I loved that but I think that mix of being in the trenches plus having the … painting the clear vision of what we’re all here for and constantly reminding everyone of that and bringing them back to it were hallmarks … or are hallmarks of my leadership style.

Jenelle: So what happens then when you move out of start-up phase and you’re into scale up or hyper scaling the business and perhaps you’re not as hands-on – you can’t be as hands-on as you … you’re not on the tools they way that you might have ben before. Were there other attributes that you kind of had to develop in your leadership arsenal, you know, when your preference point wasn’t as available to you maybe.

Adam: Yeah yeah. You know its funny. I was reflecting on this last week. I had dinner with a really close friend who’s the CEO of Wiser, which is a publicly listed FinTech company and he was actually my housemate during this time, we were living together. You know, I was only late 20s/early 30s when hypergrowth was happening for The Iconic. We went from 50 people to 500 within three years I think.

Jenelle: Wow.

Adam: Maybe a little bit faster and so she had a front row seat to all of this and we were sort of reflecting on this together …

Jenelle: That you were a joy to live with [laugh].

Adam: … yeah, he just never saw me [laugh] and you know it’s funny, I actually think in the development of someone’s leadership career, I skipped a step and the step I skipped was like being a good manager. Like I went from a really strong individual contributor to really strong, like team leader which was probably where I was at BCG and then being a manager of – lets say 10/20 people, I kind of skipped and then went to being a leader of like a multi-100 person organisation and I’m actually more comfortable I think, in that zone. You know, the bit about getting my hands dirty is probably me as an individual contributor or team leader figuring out really tough problems that are really core and critical to the company’s success but then where I like to go next after that is thinking about all design, thinking about who’s the right talent in the right roles, thinking about what's support infrastructure do you put around them to be really successful, thinking about mid-term strategy and connecting the dots to make sure its really clear how everyone contributes to it. Those things are actually more comfortable for me.

Jenelle: Okay. I think it was around 2016, maybe 2017 when you decided to step out of your operational role or your full time operational role of The Iconic. I know that you still play an advisory role to The Iconic. Tell me about how you made that decision, why you made that decision, especially since the business seemed to be going from strength to strength. So there’s a way that you could have kept righting, why step off then and how did you reach that conclusion.

Adam: So there was a forcing function actually which is really helpful cos I’m not sure I would have thought about it for maybe a couple of years later. The Iconic is wholly owned by a parent investment portfolio and that investment portfolio owns several similar e-commerce businesses around the world and was intending to list on the stock exchange in Europe about two or three years from the time we’re talking about, late 2016. It was a conversation with me as to, you know, “we’re thinking about listing the parent vehicle several years down the track, so we want to talk about the next five years and want to talk about what your plan is”. Patrick was in a CEO role and I was in a MD role and we were really building the business together. Patrick was then moving into the CEO role of the parent investment portfolio and so the question was put to me “what do you want to do. Do you want to now assume the CEO role similarly yourself and if so, lets talk about a long time horizon here because, you know, we want to shore up the team over the public listing” which is an obviously very natural question and it sort of caused me to think about what did I want to do and you know, what did I want the next five or ten years of my career to look like. I felt extraordinarily lucky to have had the experience at that age, of building a … at that point, 800 person technology company …

Jenelle: So you would have been about, what 33/32.

Adam: I was 34 at the time. You know, back to your initial question about my philosophy roots, I’d always thought about systems of society in different ways to influence them and rather than being in one area, being retail for multiple decades, I thought what a great opportunity to take this experience and to attack a different system of society that I really cared about. You know, thinking about the five year horizon was the forcing function that helped me decide, you know what, I think I want to build something new.

Jenelle: Attack a new system of society … love it. So let’s now bridge then now to the next business and I know that there was a process to get there. So at the risk of being corny, how did you hatch the idea of Hatch.

Adam: It was a process [laugh]. It was about a two year timeframe from working full time in The Iconic to full time on Hatch and no longer operational in The Iconic. The process was interesting. So I first identified my co-founder which is an old friend. Chaz was one of the original co-founders of Zip and had built a number of businesses himself and we’d always talked about building a business together that was more impact driven and then we started brainstorming but really it came together when we took time out, of like day to day life and we went trekking in the Himalayas for a month. It sounds totally clique …

Jenelle: It was either going to be that or an ashram in India [laugh].

Adam: … [laugh] every time I share this story I get like really embarrassed of just looking like that …

Jenelle: No its fantastic.

Adam: … clique on a piece of paper but we did a three week trek around this mountain called Manaslu which is the 8th highest mountain in the world, its quite close to the border of Tibet, on the Nepal side and it was just the most, you know, incredible experience and we asked ourselves one question at the start of this trek and that question was “what do we want society to look like 100 years from now” and its funny because before … before we started the trek, like a good management … ex management consultant, I had a very structural plan for how we were going to use those three weeks to end up with a business idea that we then wanted to pursue, you know, first three days of this, next three days that and a wise person in Silicon Valley where I was just before I flew to Kathmandu said to me “hey you’ve got to forget all that structure and you’ve just got to start with a simple question of like what do you want the future to look like and to see where it goes”. So for the first week, we didn’t even really talk about that question directly. We just shared life experiences with each other, like what did we learn from the last few jobs we had, from our relationships, from our travels, you know, what were the formative experiences that shaped our belief systems and then we started getting like a really good understanding of shared values and beliefs and then the second week we started just naturally talking about what we thought was broken that needs to be fixed and how we might have an influence on it and there was this moment, I want to say …

Jenelle: I doubt there was a long list of things though!

Adam: … there were a few things, yeah yeah. So we talked a lot about news and information, I think that’s still a problem that needs to be solved. Still one I think about a lot. We talked a lot about the education system which is quite close to Hatch so we kind of come up against it quite regularly. We talked a lot about the health system and particularly health data. What else! We talked a bit about food and how you can help people afford good quality meals that otherwise might be eating quite poorly today and we did explore a number of these models to a certain extent.

Jenelle: It feels like you worked through the sustainable development goals, all 17 of them [laugh]

Adam: … [laugh] and the time we spent in Silicon Valley was actually playing out some of these things and meeting companies in the space and seeing what was going on but you know, about two and a half weeks into the trek in the Himalayas, there was this moment … we had all these ideas that we were talking about … there was this moment where I basically grabbed Chaz by the shoulders and like kind of held him close to the edge of the cliff … not too dangerous but enough that he was sort of caught off guard and said “you know, if you had to decide right now, like which idea do you want to do”. He said “hatch” and I said “me too” and that was the moment that we decided.

Jenelle: And Hatch being the focus on the student experience. Was that the express intent of it, of Hatch at the time. Tell me how you articulated what Hatch was then.

Adam: Sure yeah. Its about how people find work that’s a good fit for them and really like, our grand vision of the change we want to have on a 50 year scale is to change how employment marketplaces operate and I don’t think employment marketplaces have changed since the Industrial Era fundamentally, in terms of their fundamental dynamics. You know the way that someone finds themselves or like how someone finds themselves in a job today is still mostly based on their family and socio-economic education background and what set of opportunities their background presents and governs for them and that’s just not … that’s not how our economy or our society works anymore. Like we’re not in the Industrial Era. You don’t have to sort of stick to one track of work. There’s opportunity to move into all sorts of different new types of work that might be a better fit for you compared to where your family may have been before you.

Jenelle: Why did that matter to you.

Adam: Yeah, look I mean the answer to this question, we might be getting a little bit deep now but hey, that’s what your questions are for Jenelle. So I’m quite interested in the idea of identity and meaning. Yeah, this is going to be my cynical view. We walk around life a lot of time on autopilot. You know, we’re sort of doing the things that we think we ought to be doing, whether that be the job that we are in, whether that be the people we spend time, the places we go, the things we say. I think a lot of the time, its on autopilot and I think if we really think about where a sense of someone’s identity comes from and where meaning is genuinely derived from, its less about how we, like how we consume things around us, like what we buy and how much money we make and what social status we have and who we are in the eyes of people that we want to impress. It’s less about those things. Its actually more about what we contribute back. Like what is it that we fundamentally care about that we want to identify with and that we want to make a contribution towards and those things don’t have to be big, it could be small. It could just be your family. That’s the thing that you care most about more than anything else and you want to make really great contribution towards it. It could be anything. It could be a cause you care about, it could be a job, it could be a relationship and so I’m really interested in how you help people identify those things. Like where does meaning come from so that you can actually turn off autopilot and move away from just doing the things you feel like you ought to be doing and move towards doing the things that bring you genuine joy and make you feel alive and genuine meaning and I think if we can help more people achieve that, what will actually happen at a macro level, is a more values led society. Like I said a group of people and communities who are living life according to their values and making really great choices in alignment to them. That’s actually what I care about, most fundamentally.

Jenelle: You’re right, that was very deep.

Adam: [laugh].

Jenelle: And what is it about students, you know, you sort of focussed on that target group at the time. What is it that they represent specifically in this next generation and to business.

Adam: Yeah yeah … well look, the question that we’re trying … trying to work on at Hatch, is this question we all ask ourselves all the way through life which is “what should I be doing for work”. Like am I doing the right thing right now. Is this what I should be doing. What else is out there. What might be a good fit for me and ultimately we want to help people answer that question by connecting them to opportunities that are really good fit for them in ways that break down some of the structural barriers that exist around them today. Maybe they didn’t have the right education path on paper. Maybe they came from a different professional background. Maybe they’re a woman in a world that’s very male dominated. Like we want to break down those barriers so that anyone can access an opportunity that is a good fit for them. I guess our thinking is that those barriers are most sensitive at the start of someone’s career. Its almost like a sliding doors effect. Like the first few steps you take, you know, your first one or two jobs probably are not the same as the job you’re going to be in in fifteen years from now, but they are putting you on a path that leads somewhere and so we feel that by having an impact on your starting point, we’re maximising almost like in a compound fashion, the impact on your whole career arc. So that’s why we started with students. We also feel that it’s just this, you know, very anxious time of life. Like we can all relate to when we were young and starting out and trying to figure out, like what's the right first move …

Jenelle: Absolutely!

Adam: … you know, how do I not make a mistake. I don’t know what's, you know, what's out there and what's good for me and so it’s a very human problem that still exists today that we think, you know, its possible to do a better job in helping young people navigate employment marketplaces.

Jenelle: Yes its interesting, I mean the number of times I’ve said or my colleagues have said and we’re, you know, not at the early end of the career spectrum by any stretch of the imagination but we will still say “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up”. You know, the question comes up all the time.

Adam: Yeah, which is natural. Like the way I think about careers is they’re pursuits. They’re not … they’re not static. They’re not in states. Its not like you find your dream job and then you’re done forever. Like every experience you have you learn more about yourself and that leads you to shifting your goalposts on what might be the right thing next and then you pursue that thing until its no longer relevant and then you pursue the next thing. We want to help people navigate that relationship in the starting point of their career.

Jenelle: The other thing that I find super interesting about the business model that you have there is when we talk about what people need in this world, that we find ourselves in now and relevance with the amount of changes going on, we talk about a capability around learning agility and I’ve often wondered, you know, can you teach someone learning agility, they’re either about to do that or they’re not, I’m not sure. Can you teach people curiosity. I’m not sure, like if you think about the definition of learning agility, which is sort of the ability to be in a novel situation, you don’t know the answers to it but you are able to draw on the right lessons from the past to be able to apply in a completely new situation and I think about your business and you’re putting people in new situations all the time. Underlying that model seems to be a learning agility capability build.

Adam: Yeah, I think I instinctively learnt the importance of learning agility through my time in consulting, to be honest, in professional services because it’s a world where you’re thrown into different domains and you have to become an expert in those domains quite quickly. Seeing that first hand, doing it myself, seeing other people who are high performers and how quickly they upskilled or they learnt a totally new area. It was influential to me but I think in terms of the theme of how important is learning agility and can you teach it or can you not, I think this might be over simplifying things, but I think …

Jenelle: It works for me! Go!

Adam: Okay … so when we think about who’s good for what job, I think there are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought. One school of thought is you can rank someone on a scale of very intelligent and capable to not. Like some people are just intrinsically better than others. The other school of thought is it’s about fit. Like, not one person is intrinsically better than another person, its just that people are suited to different environments. Traditionally the world of work has sort of adopted the first school of thought and the best example of that is an IQ assessment.

Jenelle: Yes.

Adam: An IQ assessment treats people in a very narrow definition of intelligence and tries to stack rank them within that one narrow float and a lot of hiring to date has actually adopted that school of thought. Okay, we’ve got a lot of people playing, lets just see who’s smarter than others and that’s how we’ll play it. I think our world view is more aligned to the second which is … its about fit. You know, its not about intrinsic intelligence. It’s about fit and so learning agility shows up when you put someone in an environment that unlocks them, you know, maybe a particular person might not be really suited to an analytical environment and it freaks them out and it shuts them down and it doesn’t give them the permission to play and so a manager might look and them and say “well they’ve got no learning agility because they haven’t taken the initiative to go and learn how to do sequel queries or you know, whatever the thing might be but if you put the same person in a totally different environment maybe its more creative, maybe its more abstract, maybe its working with people then all of a sudden, they come alive, they feel more permission to play, they have more intrinsic motivation, they have more drive and then the same manager might look at them and say “oh wow, that’s a high performer with learning agility” and I saw that first hand at The Iconic when there were a couple of key people who I shifted from one team to another. There’s this one guy who I’m thinking of who worked in a very operational role, didn’t suit him at all. He struggled. We moved him into an analytical role, he very quickly became probably the highest performer in the company and had this huge outsized impact on the company’s top level strategy within a couple of months, like simply jump by putting him in the right environment and I think that’s something we need to think about. You know, when we think about the future of work that these environments are shifting quickly. You know, what an accounting firm, what a … I don’t know, what a resource company used to look like 20 years ago doesn’t look remotely the same anymore and we have to think a little bit about who fits where.

Jenelle: Okay. So we’ve talked about Hatch and where you were … the initial intention of Hatch. Now, think about The Iconic. The risk of distilling it down in a real simplistic way. You had a vision, came down to flawless execution, done at pace.

Adam: It certainly wasn’t flawless but [laugh and overtalking]

Jenelle: But that’s what you want … you were aspiring to do flawless execution done quickly, right. You had to move fast. With Hatch, you had a vision, you started to follow a cycle of voting testing, you build an MVP (minimum viable product) but then a totally different kind of disruptor came along, it wasn’t like other incumbent players or anything, it was called a global pandemic, it was called covid19. What happened then. What was that experience. What did you do.

Adam: Yeah. So it was definitely a big moment for Hatch. You know, we’re still the really young company. Like early March last year, we’d been running beta for about two years. We were just about the launch the product publicly. The product was a marketplace to place the University students into teams on a contingent basis and make it really easy for a lot of employers to use it and, you know, we had just doubled the team in preparation for launching publicly and then covid struck and so we sort of sat … we sat down and we thought to ourselves “okay, like how … you know, we’re a start-up on a runway, like how do we handle this, no one is going to be hiring interns and graduates this year, people are going to be trying to save their dollars and they will be very cautious. We shouldn’t be launching the business, you know, what do we do and …

Jenelle: Must have been a scary time, right.

Adam: Yeah.

Jenelle: Were you scared?

Adam: It was scary. I think, like Chaz and I, we had … I think our approach to those kinds of moments is like we can figure it out and probably more optimistic than pessimistic which isn’t always good. They say pessimistic founders are the long lasting ones because you’re more paranoid, I’ve lasted so far but you know, the typical wisdom in the moment of a crisis for a start-up is cut half your team, cut all of your costs and bunker down. You know, that’s the … that’s what most people advise. I was really lucky that the day that we decided to shut down the office, I had a coffee catchup with one of our advisors, Alison Deans, and she’s just phenomenal, really smart tech leader and she said to me “you know what, there’s really only one thing you need to do, you need to call up ten of your closest customers and just understand what’s going on for them and where you can help”. So the next day I did that. I called ten of our customers and by the fifth call, it became really clear where there was going to be a big problem for our customers and what we could do about it and the problem was labour dislocation and so you know, we had in our hands this technology that matches people to jobs, not necessarily based on their CV but based on genuine fit which is their underlying strengths and skills. So we said, “okay its pretty clear what we need to do here. We need to spin up a totally new product to help rapidly redeploy thousands of people from covid impacted industries into new areas of work” and these aren’t students, these are pilots that have been flying planes for 20 years, they’re hotel managers, they’re travel agents and everyone in-between. Like you know, I wasn’t sure if … it was a big bet. It was like “should we really do this” and so I basically wrote a short article, I put it up on LinkedIn and I said “if a thousand say they need this within the next 48 hours, we’ll do it and we’ll build it within a week”.

Jenelle: Did you think “I have no idea whether we can do it in a week” or were you convinced you could.

Adam: I was pretty convinced … I probably could have done a better job of consulting with our team. I definitely had a couple of confronting conversations the next day but you know, I wanted to act swift. Like I think in those moments, you’ve got to act decisively and I think if I did it again, I would have consulted a few people earlier but I probably still would have come to the same position.

Jenelle: So you posted your LinkedIn article.

Adam: Yeah, thousands of people said “please build this”. Five days later, we had it live and you know, the initial version was very hacky, you know, it was mostly …

Jenelle: Very “hatchy” [laugh].

Adam: … very hatchy, yeah, it was a landing page with, you know, the product was kind of behind the scenes but then, as more and more companies use it to redeploy workers, we then made the product more and more mature over the coming months, made it more and more automated and ultimately redeployed thousands of people into jobs that otherwise wouldn’t have found a job that quickly and had mortgages and had families and you know, had anxiety over being stood down. This was before JobKeeper was implemented so …

Jenelle: I remember seeing a hashtag, I think you had “step up …

Adam: Yeah, step up for sit down.

Jenelle: Yeah.

Adam: Exactly and I mean the stories are incredible, you know and the thing that I loved about it was hearing from the workers that we redeployed of “I didn’t think I could do something totally unrelated to my career but I can, you know, I’ve been a retail worker for the past ten years, I’m not working in logistics or I’m working in customers operations, you know, there’s commonalities in terms of the transferrable strengths but it’s a different industry, it’s a different job, it’s a different everything, it feels really different and I’m loving it and I’m good at it”, you know. Those stories are incredible.

Jenelle: So its another case study really. Like you’ve sort of gone in for another case study around the student experience, now you’ve got a case study around dislocated workers but all under … all on the same premise of matching transferrable skills to opportunities.

Adam: Exactly, exactly right. The other thing that it did for me personally was I think it made me realise that I’d been holding onto, like some sacred cows of our business model too tightly …

Jenelle: Like what?

Adam: … well for example, the business model before we launched that covid initiative was a contingent workforce model and I was really attached to scaling out the contingent workforce model because there’s some benefits in the feedback loop we get of in-role performance data that helps our matching algorithm that’s gets faster and faster and I was really attached to that but the reality is its much … its harder and slower to scale out a contingency workforce model because there’s just more stakeholders that need to be involved in the approval process. It’s a more complex thing to onboard into an organisation and by letting go of that model, Hatch started scaling a lot faster and so I think I realised, possibly because its an impact and mission led journey for me with Hatch, that I was a little bit too personally close to some of the elements of it that actually we needed to be somewhat looser with in terms of experimenting and finding what worked and that was really important lesson that basically led us to post-covid, well not really post-covid but you know, I guess six months later, iterating our core business model out of students and into young professionals and not focussing on contingent workforce but focussing on a employment marketplace that intelligently matches the two sides together.

Jenelle: Its interesting listening to you talk about you confronting your own sacred cows on this because at a macro level, you do that with everybody else, right. You challenge the status quo, you’re like “hang on, why wouldn’t you challenge that thinking” and its … I don’t know, for me, its quite nice to see that you still have it within yourself as well. Like even with people who are built that way to challenge your thinking, the fact that you’ve got some … you had some fixed things of your own that you had to face is quite interesting.

Adam: Yeah.

Jenelle: I don’t know if you know the book called “Future Shock”. Alvin Toffler wrote it in 1971. A book I reckon which is way ahead of its time but in that he wrote “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn” and so I’m interested in what you might have learnt with your experience at The Iconic, that you had to kind of unlearn and relearn as you set up the second business at Hatch.

Adam: Yeah yeah I mean I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. You know, there’s this stat that I love to quote that in the 1980s the half life of a professional skill was like 35 years and today its about 5 years and falling and you know, so this old idea of we learn about your tricks at University or some other education experience, that bag of tricks lasts us for 40 years and then we retire is just not true anymore and there’s a scary implication of we need to constantly be learning. You can’t sort of sit on your laurels but there’s also an optimistic implication of this chance for reinvention all the way through our life. We don’t have to stick to the thing we’re doing right now. We can discover new horizons. So yeah, I think, I mean your comment before about, like you know, I’m very willing to challenge the macro of sacred cows but I still hold them internally I think [laugh] is astute Jenelle and [laugh] and there have been things I’ve learnt at The Iconic that I just assumed translated into Hatch that I have had to unlearn. Some of them are tactical or technological. So an example of that would be the “go to market” model. So The Iconic’s “go to market” model is really based on digital marketing. You know, it’s a B2C growth model where you build a really great inventory that you can market through a series of search careers on Google and ads retargeting social ads, display ads and that’s what brings in your traffic. A lot of The Iconic’s traffic comes off search, you know, Google search and that’s how you go to market and so I think my assumption with Hatch was “oh I don’t want to build a sales team, who needs a sales team, like that feels like a lot … that feels old world and like traditional and conventional, like we’re going to do this digital” and it just … it didn’t make sense for the model, because you know, it’s a brand new model. Back to the point about familiarity bridges, it’s a model that no one is familiar and simply by slapping a digital ad in front of you isn’t therefore going to convince you of it, whereas you’ve been shopping Nike shoes for years and years so its pretty clear what we’re selling when we put an ad for Nike shoes in front of you. With Hatch, there’s a level of education that’s required, there’s a level of trust that needs to be built and also the relationship we have with the customer is much more of a high touch relationship where we help them try Hatch, onboard it, get the best out of it. So that was a big thing I had to unlearn was this bias, almost this dogma towards “I’m only going to do things in a new digital way as opposed to embracing some old school tactics that actually work really well like sales outreach”. Yeah, I mean that’s probably the biggest example that comes to mind.

Jenelle: So, I’ve got so many questions that I want to ask and I’m so conscious of time so I’m going to be selective on these. One of the things I find really striking about you is that you … I think you’re incredibly humble, I think you’re constantly curious but I also feel you have to have some serious confidence and swagger about you to think that you can revolutionise the e-commerce, you know, business in Australia, that you can take on the big end of town, that you can rethink the future of work and I’m trying to reconcile this sort of humility with this hutzpah and I’m … where does that come from.

Adam: Its not a very incisive question. You know, I think I probably see the two things, like humility and hutzpah as two sides of the same coin.

Jenelle: Okay.

Adam: I think if you assume that you have the right answer off the bat and that you know how the world should work immediately, then what you’ll often find is that you’re wrong because you’re not listening to new information, new data and that you very quickly become frustrated and cornered. I think if you maintain a level of humanity of “I have a hypothesis but I don’t know if I’m right or wrong and my process, you know, the process is listening to people, listening to feedback, experimenting, seeing what's works, like I know my process is going to get me there” then you can be confident that if something doesn’t work, its okay, like you’ll learn from it and then you’ll move onto the next attempt. So its funny in some ways, if I just thought of become introspective. I think my confidence comes from this deep seated belief that, like I don’t need to have the right answer all the time, like in fact it would be almost dogmatic or like arrogant of me to think that I do. What I actually need to do is just put things out there and see what works and learns from them and bring together a really smart group of people with different backgrounds, different perspectives to holistically solve a problem.

Jenelle: And I come back to that word “liberation” again. There’s something very liberating about not feeling like you have to have the answers and feeling very comfortable and confident with the questions and the elements of bringing together the right talent to solve the biggest problems and problems that matter.

Adam: Yeah, I think … I think it is liberating in the sense that I don’t feel that my success or my failure is tied to the success of this move in front of me that I’m making right now. You know, if this thing, you know, whether it be, whatever it is, a product feature we’re putting out or an idea we’re testing, if it doesn’t work that’s fine, like I don’t take it personally.

Jenelle: Why not!

Adam: Because I’m comfortable that its success or failure is separate to mine. That its not tied to me individually. That its just an idea and we see if it works and we learn from it and that’s just, I don’t know, the way I operate. I think though if we’re really going to get on the “therapy couch” [laugh], I think what is limiting for me is that I and I think a lot of entrepreneurs have this, I have a very high bar for myself on what I expect to achieve in my life. Like I take this idealistic eye to the world and I see all the problems and I take responsibility for solving a bunch of them and if I don’t solve them, then I feel like a failure basically. In the end, you know, if I don’t …

Jenelle: How do you manage that because they’re not small problems that you decide to take on so … and I don’t imagine that you, I mean, we still have world hunger and stuff so when you fall short of reaching that aspiration, what do you … how do you take care of yourself. What happens for you?

Adam: Yeah and don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I think, you know, I individually need to go out and solve world hunger and … that would be a special form of delusion [laugh]. I’m more trying to sort of share my psyche around where my drive comes from which is a drive to … to not just participate in a world that’s not changing but to be a influence on a world that’s improving. But you’re right. Like invariably, I can only, you know do so much in my life and there’s always going to be a sense of “I could have done more” and what that gap looks like. I don’t think it’s a healthy thing. You know, like its funny. Someone asked me, like four years ago, Adam like, you’ve got so much energy and drive, like where does your motivation come from and I thought of it like, the question took me off guard and I thought it was a strange question, I was like “well isn’t everyone motivated” …

Jenelle: I still have it on my list of questions, so I’ll just [laugh].

Adam: [laugh] and then I started doing a bit of therapy, like three years ago and honestly I think everybody should.

Jenelle: Yeah I agree.

Adam: … its like, you know we all go the gym and like, try and stay healthy with our bodies. You know therapy is just the most useful thing I’ve done in the last three years, both personally and professionally I reckon. I can’t overstate its value and there were all these blind spots I had about myself and my back story and, you know, like my behaviours I’d inherited and my drivers that I just wasn’t really aware of that I’ve become more aware of and like one of them is that I’m not, you know, you know, we should all feel like we are enough, right now. Like I don’t feel like I’m enough. Like I feel like I’m not enough until I achieve these things that I want to achieve in my life and I think that’s a really unhealthy state to be in and somehow I need to deal with that and reconcile it.

Jenelle: It’s the strength overuse is your Achilles heel, you know, your drive to think that you’re not enough is what makes you do amazing things in the world but you have to be kind to yourself and you know, as your therapist over this last hour, you are enough Adam, you are plenty enough [laugh].

Adam: [laugh].

Jenelle: Now lets just step back off the therapy couch for a minute. You know when I think about back in the Hatch days when you had to go about convincing people of where Australia was going to be in five years time and you had to set that vision of you know, this is what’s happening. We’re a decade on now from then, it was 2011 then and we had that sort of vision. Now its 2021, if you needed to convince us of where Australia is going to be in five years, what would you say.

Adam: Oh that is such a great … such a great question. You know, I think there’s … there is silver lining coming out of covid. You know there’s that famous, I think it was a Winston Churchill quote of “don’t waste a good crisis” and I think there … what for us has been a lot of pain and a lot difficulty through covid, I think it will ultimately act as a catalyst for some things that need to change about our economy and I think ultimately business leaders, like you know, like corporate CEOs are the ones that will find themselves driven by a fresh set of incentives in how they think about what success is and so just to point to a couple of tangible things. I think so far we’ve had lip service towards sustainability. You know its been a little bit “we should do it because it looks good in an annual report and it’s good for attracting talent and you know, its what everyone else is doing”. I think coming out of covid, there’s actually going to be some more substance and gravity behind the urgency and the need for a more sustainable world and I can break down a number of ways. There’s environmental sustainability. There’s mental health. There’s the attention economy. I think there’s a much more awareness now over how much time is spent on social media …

Jenelle: Going back to your news and information piece eh …

Adam: Absolutely but you know, what does a sustainable society look like has become a little bit in focus for us now, diversity inclusion, like finally in Australia we’re starting to move from lip service into genuine agitation in that space. So I think that’s probably, you know, if we look forward five years, the organisations that are going to be successful, the communities that are going to be successful, the governments that are going to be successful are the ones that actually embrace a sustainable future in a wholehearted authentic way rather than lip service. I think that’s a really big one. I think the other thing that we will see five years from now, just coming back to the point on education, is that a lot less weight will be put on traditional formats of education and there’ll be a lot more acceptance of alternative formats, bootcamps, online courses, different ways to learn and I think that will lead to a lot more mobility and fluidity in how people can navigate their careers and how they can start again and try new things and chase different opportunities. I think that will be a really big change, you know, five years from now and then the last thing I would say is that, you know, whether we like it or not we are hurtling towards a digital economy. You know, if we thought we were there now, there’s a lot more to go and so, you know, five years from now, the majority of organisations will look like, how technology companies look today in terms of what skills they have, they ways the go to market, the way that the collaborate, they way they ideate and create new products and services and so I think that is a macro change that no one will escape and you sort of need to get on or you’re going to get left behind.

Jenelle: There’s a bit of a virtuous loop here because I think technology has a massive role to play, digital organisations and tech companies in the achievement of educational reforms, sustainability so maybe there’s an accelerant in there with all those things converging.

Adam: Yeah, I agree.

The last three … three fast questions on change to finish the podcast

Jenelle: Adam, I know I can talk to you all day long but I’m going to finish up this conversation with a fast three, more on the light hearted end of the conversation.

Adam: I think we need it [laugh].

Jenelle: [laugh], tell me what are you reading, watching or listening to right now.

Adam: What am I reading, watching or … let’s see …

Jenelle: Or listening to.

Adam: … yeah …

Jenelle: Probably working your way through My Change Happens Podcasts, is that what you were going to say.

Adam: That’s exactly what I was going to say [laugh]. I just started reading a book, actually my Mum gave me for Christmas, a Paulo Coelho book called “Hippie” which sort of like describes his own life but he turns it into like a fictional story a little bit and it just talks about like wanderlust and travel and the importance of it and I don’t know why, maybe because we haven’t been able to travel. Its such an important activity that gets you outside your bubble.

Jenelle: What is your superpower. It can be something that’s additive to the world or it can be a useless party trick.

Adam: [laugh], I’ll give you one of each.

Jenelle: Okay.

Adam: [laugh] so additive to the world, I think I’m good at connecting the micro and the macro, like I can see a macro opportunity but then what needs to happen at the micro to pull it off. Party trick – I used to be a radio host when I was younger …

Jenelle: Well well!

Adam: That’s a trick that I hope to bring back at some point.

Jenelle: I’d like to … I’m looking forward to seeing how you infuse that into your next gig or even within Hatch and if you were going to put a quote up on a billboard, what would it be.

Adam: I think it would be the Steve Jobs sentiment that I love and I don’t know the exact quote so I’m paraphrasing but the sentiment is “the world is built by people no smarter than you and I”. Like we can be part of the future, we can create it, we don’t have to wait for someone who has more imagined authority or power to do it for us.

Jenelle: Wow, that … and I can tell that’s absolutely driven the way that you’ve operated. Thank you so much for your time today, I loved having you here with me in the room. So many things, I’ve got scribbles all over my paper as you can see but you know, your philosopher roots are permeated through everything you’ve said and done. I love the way you look at the world with a critical eye. I love the way that you challenge the status quo, I love the way you’re willing to ask the big questions that will lead up to a better society, kinder humans that take care of each other. The importance of painting the vision and telling the story. The familiarity bridge is something that I wrote down because, you know, I interviewed Elizabeth Broderick and one of the things that she said was “one of the big levers for driving change is to create the bridges of understanding between two worlds and when you create those bridges, you can make change happen”. I think that’s kind of what you’ve done as well, with bringing people along on the journey. The exploration of identity and meaning and where we draw meaning from. Your proximity to your clients and understanding what matters and what was going to make the difference for them. A clear recognition of paradigms that need to shift in our societies and our business models and I guess the challenge we need to come out of autopilot and really be conscious and thoughtful and intentional around what we are doing. I certainly feel like rising to the challenge. Thanks for leading the way. You are enough, you are plenty enough Adam, thanks so much for your time.

Adam: Thanks Jenelle, really appreciate it.

The ‘Change Happens Podcast’ from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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