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IN CONFIDENCE

TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW

FILE NUMBER:Interviewee: James Chin Moody (JM)Interviewers: Vicki McDonald (VM)

Ray Weekes (RW)

GAME CHANGERS

Interview conducted at the State Library of Queensland, Stanley Place, South Bankon 13 October 2016.

STATE LIBRARY OF QUEENSLAND

1. VM Good evening everyone. My name is Vicki McDonald and it's my great

privilege to be the State Librarian CEO of this fantastic library. I'd like to

begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land and pay respects

to the ancestors who came before them. The location of State Library is, of

course, on Kurilpa Point which is historically a significant meeting, gathering

and sharing place for Aboriginal people and we proudly continue that tradition

today. I acknowledge and welcome our speaker for tonight, James Chin

Moody, co-founder and CEO of Sendle, Ray Weekes, chairman of The CEO

Institute, Robert Bryan AM 2009, 2009, sorry, inductee of the Queensland

Business Leaders Hall of Fame, members of the Library Board, the

Queensland Library Foundation and the Business Leaders Hall of Fame

governing committee and, of course, our generous donors and partners,

Crowe Howarth, Channel Seven, Logan City Council, Morgans, NAB and

RACQ. So thank you all for joining us tonight for another highly anticipated

Game Changers conversation session. This event series is designed to bring

innovative leaders from business, technology and creative industries to share

their insights with us. It is a rare platform enabling Queensland's leading

game changers in business to share their pathways to success and some of

their battles and triumphs along the way. Game Changers is a Queensland

Business Leaders Hall of Fame initiative. Established in 2009 the by the

State Library, the Queensland Library Foundation and the QUT Business

School, the Hall of Fame is focused on celebrating, recording and retelling

stories of Queensland's outstanding business leaders and their many

contributions to the development of our State. Each year, six Queensland

businesses are inducted into the Hall of Fame. The 2016 induction dinner

which was held in July saw six iconic enterprises and innovative

entrepreneurs inducted into the Hall of Fame. I had the opportunity to attend

the dinner prior to commencing here as State Librarian and it was a fantastic

event and I recommend it to you for next year. The 2016 inductees are Sir

Manuel Hornibrook for his distinguished contributions to Australia's

construction industry, Rod Wylie in recognition of his significant contributions

to the public accounting profession and Queensland's economy, Margaret

Mittelheuser for her groundbreaking achievements as Australia's first female

stockbroker, North Australian Pastoral Company Pty Ltd recognising 140

years as an innovative cattle breeder, beef producer and leader in landcare

practices, Mincom in recognition of its pioneering contribution to

Queensland's information technology industry and Suncorp Group for its

important and sustained contribution to the Queensland economy. For more

information on the inductees or to view the digital stories make sure that you

explore the Hall of Fame space which is located on level 4 in our John Oxley

Library or you can go online to the Hall of Fame website at

hallorfame.slq.qld.gov.au. As I said earlier, Game Changers provides a rare

platform for innovative leaders to share their insights, pathways to success

and some of the battles and triumphs that they experience along the way.

Their stories will not only fill you with inspiration and knowledge to incorporate

into your professional endeavours, but will help shape Queensland's

economic and commercial development and the social fabric of our State.

Tonight, we're lucky enough to hear from the co-founder and CEO of Sendle

James Chin Moody. We encourage you to our live stream viewers to tweet

your questions and use the hashtag QBLHOF. Similarly, audience members

with questions feel free to tweet your questions or hold onto them until the Q

and A session. Ray and James will address as many questions as possible

at the end of the conversation. I would now like to welcome Ray Weekes to

the stage to produce James and begin tonight's discussion, so Ray

(clapping).

2. RW Thanks Vicki, and welcome to our third Game Changers event this year. You

know, I was saying to James earlier as I was driving in tonight, I was thinking

about a time in 2002, 14 years ago when I was announcing at a QUT

outstanding alumni awards breakfast that QUT Alumni Young Achiever Award

14 years ago and as I was letting that audience know why James Moody was

the award winner, I remember so clearly the hairs standing up on the back of

my neck, the back of my head with amazement at what this 26 year old had

achieved within three years after graduation. I was completely blown away

with James' achievements in the international space industry. He was a

leading member of the team that built Australia's first satellite in over 30

years. He had made major contributions to the international environment

debate through his work with the United Nations and various international

advisory boards and committees and commissions as well. It was an

incredible statement of major awards, achievements, community support at

the age of 26. I should say that James, he asked me not to say this, but I'm

going to say this. I should say that James achieved the highest academic

result ever obtained by an engineering graduate at QUT in its 30 years of

existence and the person he beat in achieving this great academic result is

here with us tonight and that's his father and professor, that's his father and

professor in electrical engineering at QUT Miles Moody, so welcome Miles as

well (clapping) and welcome Lyn too. Thanks for being with us tonight. Now

at the ripe old age of 40, and by the way he's celebrated his birthday

yesterday, so happy birthday (clapping). He at the ripe old age of 40 has

really continued to make a remarkable impact in all his endeavours. He has

continued the strong family tradition of mixing engineering, entrepreneurship

and humanity for the community. While I'm just in this vein for a minute and

I'll get off this very shortly, can I say apart from this that James plays five

musical instruments and he speaks five languages. Some better than others,

but he still speaks five languages. James Chin Moody is a co-founder as

Vicki said and CEO of Sendle that makes parcel deliveries simple, reliable

and affordable. It simplifies logistics and it modernises postal services and in

the interests of full disclosure let me tell you I'm an investor in Sendle and a

very happy investor in Sendle. James has held various roles including

Executive Director of development at CSIRO and Australian Commissioner

for UNESCO. He's a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future

Council and Technology, Values and Policy and was a panellist on the ABC

TV program The New Inventors. James has a PhD in Innovation from ANU

and is a co-author of The Sixth Wave How to Succeed in a Resource-Limited

World and the book is available for sale by the way after this session and

James agreed, has agreed to be available also to sign those books. So

please welcome a globally recognised leader in innovation and sustainability,

a true game changer, James Moody (clapping). I should say that James was

asked to bring me a T-shirt, an Sendle T-shirt, but he didn't have one.

James, you've had an incredibly wide-ranging career to date and I just want

you to give us a brief overview of your journey and also how this has led you

to the work you're doing with Sendle today. Maybe just start by telling us

about how your childhood shaped you and what were you like as a child.

Then we'll get some confirmation over here.

3. JM Yeah, look, a good question Ray. Look, I think you could probably read into

the background that I was a complete and utter nerd throughout my entire

childhood. I was always, so I think my childhood, I was very fortunate. I had

a wonderful childhood. I pretty much knew from the very beginning that I was

going to be an engineer. I think I've never not known that I was going to be

an engineer, mainly because I love to build stuff and I love science and

technology. I was very fortunate to grow up in a family where I think we had

one of the first computers that got brought home probably on the holidays

from QUT because that's where my dad worked, so I got to play those in early

days. I got to really have, but on the other side my mother was very creative

and we would always be building things and writing books and playing games

and stuff like that as well. So I think being able to bring together the creative

side as well as the very analytical side in the engineering side was pretty

much something that I got to do as a young child and probably it's something

that I'd like to continue to do and I think trying to marry, you know, you might

say the people and the technology pieced together has been, you know,

something that I've always tried to do. So that's probably trying to sum me

up.

4. RW Yeah, sure. Just take us through some of the highlights of your journey to

date.

5. JM Probably one highlight was, so yeah, wanted to be an engineer. Got the

space bug. I watched Star Wars far so many times as a child and when I was

17 I read about through another program that I was in, I read about this

program to basically go and do cosmonaut training in Russia and

interestingly, if you think about it this was, I think it was 1993 or '94. Russia

had just opened up and the French space program had, had basically found a

way of taking some French citizens to do cosmonaut training in Russia as a

goodwill program between France and Russia and at the same time I think

the Russian space program just needed a lot of money because they were

running out of money like anything and they put out this invitation and said

would anybody else like to come? And I think no one else in the world was

crazy enough to actually say, you know, yeah, I'll do it as well. It was a lot of

money to do it, but as a 17 year old it was like you know what, cosmonaut

training sounds pretty fun and so I was very fortunate I fundraised, didn't I? I

fundraised and I got sponsors and all this sort of stuff. We didn't have that

much money ourselves and basically got to do it and I was very fortunate I

had parents who would let a 17 year old disappear into Russia back in 1994

and in fact, I think I managed to get one phone call out to say I'd arrived, but I

think at that point, you know, I think I learned a couple of things. One was,

well, one I was really passionate about space. You know, I got to do in the, I

think it was three weeks that I was there we got to, you know, do missions on

the Mir simulator and, you know, I was hanging out with Bonnie Dunbar and

Norm Thagard who was, who are American astronauts. Like, we were all

staying at Star City, you know, in the same place and Russian cosmonauts

coming back. Anyway, so I learnt about a passion which was really great. I

also learnt in some ways, you know, not to be afraid. You know, I think I,

there's a certain thing I call strategic naivety. Sometimes it is good to, to not

know what you're really facing, but you know Russia at the time was a pretty

interesting place. I remember Star City had run out of milk, you know, so

we're having porridge with butter. You know, all this sort of stuff. Right. It

was a really interesting place to go at the time and, but I basically learnt a

little bit of fearlessness I think at that point.

6. RW So with this book The Sixth Wave and let's just talk for a moment about

TuShare and moving from closing that down into the Sendle business and

also as part of that talk about your urge, where this urge to innovate, to build

a business and take risks come from at such an early stage?

7. JM Yeah. I think, so I went from the space thing. I was fortunate enough to get a

job as a systems engineer for Australia's first satellite in 30 years. Built that,

launched it which was great. At that point, my career took an interesting turn.

I was headhunted by CSIRO to go and, I always had this hobby, at the time it

was more of a hobby around sustainability around the environment and I did a

lot of tree planting at university. We had sort of things and through that was, I

think anybody who does a lot of stuff in space realises that we're just on one

spaceship, right. We've got this tiny little thing called the atmosphere on that

spaceship and, you know, it's pretty precious and you'll find the same sort of

philosophy in a lot of folk who are a bit space crazy. But interesting, so that

there was all this space and environment sort of mix and I was headhunted by

CSIRO to go and work for their land and water division. The division was

taking satellite data and turning it into environmental intelligence. I did

business development for that, so I wasn't actually an engineer at that point. I

was actually going into the business world. I did that for about seven years,

eventually looking after business development for all of CSIRO and at that

point, it was a really great sort of experience around, yeah, creating lots of

new ideas, but in 2012 I had this realisation, I guess, that I wanted to go back

to building. I want to go back and build something and the thing I decided to

build, we had two young, two young children at the time and if anybody who's

got children realises that one thing that happens to you the moment you have

a child is your net assets by weight pretty much doubles overnight, right. You

end up with all this stuff, right, and we worked out that, and then you use that

stuff for maybe six months or a year and then that stuff is no longer useful to

you. And so we actually started out, you know, Sendle, what you see now as

a business didn't start as a logistics company. It actually started out as

something completely different. It started out as a peer-to-peer giving

network. It was called TuShare and what we realised was there's actually

100 billion things that gets sold brand new every year that are not going to

see their full life span with the original owner. Right, your kids' clothes and

your, you know, your golf clubs and your, whatever it might be, all these

things, sports equipment, the upgradables, stuff like that. So we created a

network called TuShare which helped people to give this stuff to each other.

In the space of about a year we had about 50,000 people on this network that

were all giving items to one another and that was great. We were saving a lot

of stuff from landfill, but the hard part was, and this is what got really

interesting, and I think in business you're very fortunate if you can find a really

good problem to solve. The hard part of that entire giving network was

getting the items from one person to another. So we started to try to say how

are we going to solve this problem of getting items from one, a person who

has it to someone who needs it? So what do you need? You need to satisfy

three things. You need one, it's got to be door-to-door because giving, if

you're not picking it up from somebody they're not going to give again. Right,

if they're lining up at a post office to send a package it's just too hard. It had

to be door-to-door. It had to be low order quantities. Right. We had to be

able to pick up one thing at a time and it had to be cheap. You know, we

knew it had to be under 10 bucks and so basically what we did is we built a

logistics network. We built a logistics network and we found all this idle

capacity and idle infrastructure, and we can go into this if you want later...

8. RW So you're using an existing infrastructure far more efficiently, weren't you?

9. JM We found that there's, basically there's two types of logistics in Australia.

Right. On one side, you've got the post office and that's great. You know,

you can send one thing at a time, but you have to line up to do it and believe

me it is not cheap. On the other side, you've got this really interesting set of

infrastructure that big business uses every day, right. It's the Tolls and the,

you know, it's all the Ecom infrastructure. The cool thing is it's really actually

very affordable, right, but the thing is it doesn't, and it will pick up from your

house, but it doesn't like smaller quantities and what we found a way of doing

is taking that infrastructure, all the idle assets of that infrastructure because

you know it's delivering lots of stuff into neighbourhoods, but those trucks are

going back empty. So we went and said if we can fill those trucks can we get

decent rates and we got to the point where I can, our business can now send

25 kilograms anywhere in Brisbane for $9.75 door-to-door.

10. RW Verses Australia Post or what?

11. JM $10, it depends on the volume.

12. RW Yeah, of course. Sure.

13. JM A good example, like, if you want to send 10 kilograms from here to Perth,

right, Australia Post that's $44. We can send it for 18. Right. If you want to

send something to Broome, 25 kilograms $125. So we found that there was

this really interesting thing where we could actually tap into existing

infrastructure and make it available. Then in 2014 something really

fascinating came along. People started to hack the giving network to send

parcels. Right. It's like if I, and this is, and this is really fascinating, right. It

was actually starting to interrupt the giving network because people would

stick things on there saying, you know, for Louise. Like, that's not the idea of

a giving network and it just so happened that somebody wanted to send a

parcel that they'd, you know, to their friend or mother or whatever, Louise

over the other side of Australia...

14. RW So you shut down TuShare.

15. JM So we realised that actually the problem we were solving was not giving and

in fact the better problem to solve...

16. RW Logistics.

17. JM Let's help every giving network. Let's help every small business. Let's help

every retailer who wanted to send parcels and in fact small business logistics

was a vastly under-served market in Australia.

18. RW James, I want to explore one thing which is the way you shut down TuShare.

I think everyone should understand this because it was the way you closed

TuShare. You said 50,000 customers effectively or 50,000 individuals who

used the service. You had their names, addresses, major database. What

you said was we're not going to use that. We're going, that's gone. That

asset, no, forget that because you said we've got to go gracefully. If you

need to shut down your business do it with care, authenticity and grace. Just

explain what, your thinking. I mean, how, give us the values that really came

from it.

19. JM I think it's interesting. I mean, we did end up shutting down TuShare. I

learned a big lesson from that which was firstly, we tried to run both

businesses for a while at the same time and I learned a really big lesson is

that you cannot run two businesses at once, particularly not with the same

team and, you know, you end up, you end up, I think there's, what's the

saying? If you try to catch two rabbits, you never catch either. Right. You

know, it was definitely we found that you can't, we couldn't do the giving

marketplace and the logistics business together, but we tried for six months

and I learned a very big lesson around focus at that point. We can talk about

that if you like, but, so we came to this realisation at the end of 2015, so it's

only, gosh, was that really then? Amazing.

20. RW One and a-half, one and a-half years ago. Two years ago, yeah.

21. JM Not even that, yeah.

22. RW It was May 2015 really.

23. JM Yeah. It means we basically started to, that's when we started Sendle...

24. RW Yeah.

25. JM ...in the middle of last year.

26. RW Yeah.

27. JM But we came to this realisation we wanted to just shut it down. We wanted to

before Christmas because we wanted to start the next year fresh, but we said

if we're going to do this we have to do it the right way because there was, you

know, there was a lot of love. It was actually a really hard, I poured three

years in this business. My team had, we had, we had a whole community

built around this. So at that point we said you know what, if you're going to do

something be authentic, be upfront. We wrote to everybody, but more

interestingly we actually had a whole lot of people who came up to us and

said hey, can I buy your database, hey, can I do this sort of thing? And we

made a very clear thing you know what, people's information is not for sale,

right.

28. RW So come back to focus James for a moment. We'll cover that now. What

would be the one piece of advice you would give everyone in the room? One

piece of advice and talk about success coming down to focus.

29. JM For me there's an interesting thing. Like, you probably heard my background,

I did a lot of stuff, right. The older I get the more I realise that it's actually not

what you say yes to that counts, it's learning what to say no to that counts.

The hardest piece, you know, if you're lucky you have lots of opportunity in

front of you. Right. As a business, we've found a way of doing door-to-door

delivery cheaper than the post office, right. That's a pretty cool combination.

We've been growing at 20% a month for the last 15 months, right. It just

keeps growing, but that means you get lots of opportunity in front of you, but

the hard part is what are you going to say no to? And sometimes you have to

say no to things that you, you know, that are really hard to say no to, but if

you don't actually work out how to, to say no to, what are the mechanisms,

and if you're the sort of person that I am that I actually want to do everything,

you know, it becomes really hard to. So my biggest piece of advice is that

yeah, how do you, how do you focus on the stuff that really matters? It's and

it's interesting it's a journey, I think.

30. RW So tell us coming out of this executive role with CSIRO and it's a major

executive role at that point, a very senior role and then moving into your own

business. Now, tell us about that leap of faith.

31. JM So, you know, it's interesting. It's very different. So CSIRO, you know, had

6000 people. I had a $500 million revenue target each year. You know, it

was a very, as you say, it was an executive type role. The thing I found,

though, is that, you know, when you do have a legacy of, you know, it's all

about speed. It's all about the speed at which you can operate. On one side

in a big company you have so much, you know, you can do strategy and you

can do stuff and things happen. Right, you've got amazing levers to pull.

You can do a whole lot of incredible things. In the other side, there's this real

factor about speed. It takes a long time to actually turn the ship and jumping

from a large company to a startup has been a really interesting journey

because you know what, in a startup you've got the complete opposite.

You've got no assets. You've got nothing, right, but what you do have, the

one thing you do have is speed and I think the interesting thing I've learnt in

the world at the moment I think there is a premium going very much from size

to speed. I think it's the, there's a saying that's starting to come out. You

know, it used to be that the big eat the small. Now it's the fast that eat the

slow. Right. And what's happening is that, you know, so take for example

what we're doing now with Sendle, right. We have one competitor. It's called

Australia Post, right. The thing is we can move so much faster, right. We

can, and it's all about software. You know, we can create, we can deliver a

package anywhere in Australia and can do it cheaper, but you know what, I

don't have to own any trucks. Right. We're tapping into existing infrastructure

that's already there. I can scale, you know, at a particularly, you know, at this

amazing rate because of this power of software and so I think the, you know,

there's an interesting thing about big companies and small companies, but

also non-software companies and software companies and there's a saying

on this World Economic Forum Council that I'm on that we have which is that

there's, there's only two types of companies. There are those that know their

software companies and there are those that don't know their software

companies yet because basically what's happening at the moment is if you

want to be, if you want to get on to that speed thing and, you know, really

move...

32. RW Agility.

33. JM Agility, yep, you know, be lean or whatever the sort of catchphrase might be,

it's actually about understanding the power that we're starting to get, the scale

that you can get that you could never get before by being a software

company.

34. RW So Sendle's grown rapidly since its inception in 2014. You've had times 40%

growth month to month. You've said that Sendle is bringing the postal

industry into the 21st century. Just describe what you mean by this and what

are the, maybe what are the key differentiators of Sendle.

35. JM I think the first thing, you know, we did, and this is another interesting thing is.

You know, it used to be that you could have a business that was sort of 80%

good to everyone. Right. That used to be the sort of business model. If you

want to grow your business, do more, give more options, you know, more,

more, more, more, but you end up being sort of okay to everyone. You know,

we used to have five TV channels that were sort of 80% good to everyone,

right. You know, all that sort of thing. What's happening is that's all flipped

around. Now, instead of being 80% good to 100% of the market you have to

be 100% good, even if it's to like 20% of the market, right, because if you're

not 100% good to that particular slice of the market, somebody's going to

come along who is and there's, the companies that are winning at the

moment are the ones who understand that that actually, there's this big trade

off going on now between actually the size of market and how good your

solution can be. So you take Uber for example. Right. They know this.

They know that it's not about creating millions of choices. Right. If you want

a baby seat you can't get it in Uber, right. They've taken that choice away

because they know that more choice means more friction, right, more

confusion, more options, more stuff. So instead let's reduce the choice. We

will reduce our market, but it becomes the 100% solution. So what we did

when we were sort of reconstructing Sendle out of the stuff we built for

TuShare it was the same thing. We said you know what, what's the market,

what's the really important market here? It's actually small business. Small

business in Australia gets a really rough deal. They're too small for the big

carriers and they're, so they're basically forced to line up at the post office,

right, and it so happens that anyone else can use Sendle if they want to, but it

was small business that we said let's build this because we also knew that

small business is awesome, right. We've got so many customers now who,

you know, stay at home mums and dads, you know, folk who have got a little

shop that have, you know, one of our customers sells bike parts in her shop

and then at night she sells them online. Fantastic, which keeps the shop

open. You know, we, so we basically said let's focus on this industry at this

part of the market because it's great and it's thriving and then let's work out

exactly what it is that small business needs and generally it means reducing

stuff. Right. We're going to, what do small business want? Small business

doesn't want price uncertainty. It wants to know how much this thing is going

to cost, so we said let's just have five price points, right. Our competitor has

5200 price points. I've done the map. It's like, it's huge, right. You can line

up, you can go and send a parcel you have no idea how much that's going to

cost it's that certainty. We said you know what, part of our philosophy is, you

know, we wanted to, we wanted to level the playing field not just between

small business and big business but, you know, anywhere in Australia. So

we said let's make it all national rates. So it's the same amount of money if

you're sending from Brisbane to Perth as if you're sending from Armidale to

Perth or Geelong to Perth or Hobart to Perth or Launceston to Perth.

36. RW I want to start talking about you now. We'll just get to you.

37. JM Yeah.

38. RW Can we do that?

39. JM Yeah, yeah, yeah.

40. RW I want to just ask you're not like many entrepreneurs, are you, because

entrepreneurs can be defined as introverts who feel comfortable in their own

creative spaces. How do you see yourself in relation to that definition?

41. JM I don't know. I'm just weird. I'm not sure that I'm, you know, if you say the

definition of introvert and extrovert is where do you get your energy from? I

get energy from people, but I also quite like my own time, which is, which is

fascinating. So I'm not sure where I fit on that spectrum. For me the, I'd

probably rephrase it as, you know, the best, for me the best entrepreneurs

that I meet, all these entrepreneurs. It's like all these words. That are the

ones who are really focused on solving a problem and can build a team to

help.

42. RW And prepared to take a risk.

43. JM And take some risk...

44. RW Right.

45. JM ...and build that team to build, to solve that problem.

46. RW Okay. Now, looking back, what do you know about yourself now in this

remarkable journey you've had to date? What do you know about yourself

now that you didn't know then? Go back. What have you discovered about

yourself as part of this journey to where you are today? What's the mind set?

47. JM Yeah, I'd, you know, we're always, I'm always discovering stuff about myself.

You know, I look back at James 15 years ago and think gosh, he tried to do

too much stuff and probably let people down because he was trying to do too

many things and all that sort of stuff. Like, I, I think I, it's interesting. As a

company, we have a set of values by which we recruit and in some ways, and

these values, you know, and every single person goes through this filter

because I think it's about people first and then skills. Humble, honest, happy,

hungry and high achieving. Right.

48. RW Energetic.

49. JM Sorry?

50. RW Is sixth energetic I can or...

51. JM Well, no, not, it's only happy...

52. RW It's all part of our...

53. JM Happy is a positive mind set, but humble, honest, happy, hungry and smart

really if you go down, but the interesting thing it's always got to be in that

order because there's a lot of smart people, but you need people who are

more humble than smart so they can work together. There's a lot of hungry

people. Like, you know, motivated and ambitious and so on, but they need to

be more honest than they're hungry.

54. RW So how do you keep them hungry because Steve Jobs used to talk about stay

hungry.

55. JM Well...

56. RW How do you keep them hungry? Just give us the relationship between again

business and creativity as well as part of the...

57. JM Well, I think for me they cascade, right. So the reason why those values for

us are really important as a business is that if you, if you get people who are

humble and, you know, can know themselves and, you know, and be, you

know, can take feedback well and so on, then they become more honest,

honest with themselves, honest with others. That I think is actually what

creates a positive workforce, right. I mean, there's natural settings that we

have as well, but actually, if you created a workforce where there's

transparency and openness and honesty, right, you can actually have a really

positive workforce. Being positive and looking on the bright side is actually

the foundation for hunger and being motivated and that I think is the

foundation for being high achieving and it's interesting the flip side, so getting

back to, you know, what I know about myself, right, the flip side of those

things, right, for me are the big derailers of a business, you know, ego,

dishonesty, negativity, laziness.

58. RW Distrust.

59. JM Right. Those things all start to filter in and for me, you know, I've actually

learnt that the people I want to be around are the ones who are on the

positive side, you know, and not on the negative side and, and so I think

there's a, and also things that I, you know, constantly try to make sure that I'm

trying to also do. So for me that's probably the deepest learning, you know,

what are the secrets of adulthood, you know, do less. Less is more.

Surround yourself with people who have the values that you aspire to have

yourself.

60. RW So if I asked your team members about you, what would they say about you?

What would they say about your leadership style?

61. JM I like, I don't know what they'd say. I mean, you know, I'd hope they say that

they enjoy working with me is probably the first thing. You know, I enjoy

working with them. I think we all have a great time. I'm really fortunate, I've

got this awesome team. Hopefully they'd, you know, we keep each other, you

know, basically our interview processes start, you know, with effectively

cultural, you know, are they humble, honest, happy, hungry and smart, those

sorts of things and we, you know, we really hold ourselves to that, so I can

pretty much describe all of my team members the same way, you know, in

trying to live those values. I think the, you know, my style, it's a hard thing.

Again...

62. RW How has your leadership style differed from say CSIRO to Sendle? You've

obviously adjusted your leadership approach.

63. JM You know, I like the Jim Collins. I don't know who he has...

64. RW Good to Great.

65. JM ...Good to Great, the, you know, humble determination. For me that's sort of

not really me, it's us as a company. That's what you want to be. If you look

at our communications and what we're trying to do it is actually trying to say,

you know what, we are determined, we're going to solve this problem, we're

going to fix it.

66. RW Get the egos out of the way.

67. JM Get the egos out of the way.

68. RW Show the humility.

69. JM It's all, you know, our success...

70. RW Fierce resolve, isn't it?

71. JM Well, it's also about, you know, your purpose as a business, you know.

72. RW Yep.

73. JM Our purpose is to help small business thrive through the delivery that's

simple, reliable and affordable, right. You can ask every member of the

company that's pretty, they will give you the same answer, I hope, but, you

know, our success is their, is our customer's success, right. We have defined

our success based on when our customer actually, and we measure

everything. You know, how many parcel kilometres, you know, have we

done? Because we're also carbon neutral. How much time are we saving

our customers? How much small business ecommerce have we facilitated?

Right, and you can actually measure yourself in the impact that you're making

as opposed to, you know, it's not about revenue, it's about those measures

that become the really powerful ones.

74. RW So what kind of risk taker are you? What's, describe your appetite for risk.

75. JM It's funny. I like, I learned a lot from Megan Clark who was the, my former

boss at CSIRO, so, and she had a great way of thinking about business and

risk, you know, which I sort of bring into the Sendle way and it's basically you,

it's upside and downside. Think about everything in terms of upsides and

downsides. So one side what are the upsides for your business? Right.

These are the big bets that you're making to make you really grow, right.

They're great, but if you are not doing those, also mindful of your downsides,

then you can be in a lot of trouble. So we actually try to keep our, our head

space around, you know, here are the three big upsides that are coming, but

also here are the three big downsides, right. These are the three things that

could torpedo our business. What you want to do and actually the best way

of taking risk is if you've got your hand on the downsides, right. If you really,

you know, because you used to say your paw. You've got your paw down on

the downsides, right, and make sure you've covered them off, you know, and

in CSIRO it was like let's make sure that nobody is ever going to get killed,

you know. You know, it's like occupational health and safety. It's some of

these really important things. Like, let's get, you know, for us it's team

engagement. Right. It's one of the most important things that we want to

have a team that really loves doing what they want. You know, get your hand

on those downsides, make sure you're managing them. That frees you up to

really think about your upsides and I think that again the risk taking, so I don't

know where that puts you in risk taking. On one level, it makes you very risk

adverse because you're trying to say I want to get my paw down on those

downsides because that actually allows me to take bigger risk on the upside

and it frees my mental space to go and actually take, you know, make some

really big bets knowing that I'm actually not betting the company.

76. RW So what drives you? Is there a central purpose or burning desire? What

drives you?

77. JM Drives me?

78. RW Yeah, drives you.

79. JM As an individual?

80. RW As an individual, yeah.

81. JM For me I love solving problems. You know, that's my, you know, I think it's

really fortunate and if anyone ever is thinking of starting a company, the best

thing you can do is to really find an awesome problem to solve. You know,

particularly one that's super painful for someone. Like, really this was the

fundamental decision that we made around TuShare verses Sendle, which of

these two businesses do we want to focus on? We realised that actually the

problem that Sendle was solving was more painful than the problem was

TuShare was solving. Like, it's painful to have something on a shelf and then

see it go to landfill, but it wasn't nearly as painful as lining up at that post

office, right, and I can tell from everyone nodding that you all agree, right. It

was...

82. RW That's right.

83. JM It was really a fascinating thing where you just realise that the problem was

better. So the quality of the problem is one of the most important things and

again for me, that alone is very much with my nature is try to, I like being an

engineer. You know, what's the difference, you know, engineers are there to

solve problems, right. It's a big difference between, you know, like in science

we talk about those two types of science. There's curiosity led, right, which is

more the scientific, the normal science sort of world where you're trying to say

hey, I really want to under how shoelaces work, you know, and that turns into

super string theory, you know, which it sort of did, right, and then there's the

other side which is I want to solve problems which I call mission directed

research which is the more CSIRO one. Here's there's this awesome

problem, awesome problem, how do I find solutions? What's the knowledge I

need to solve that problem? For me, I'm the mission directed part of the

world to the engineering part of the world which is fine and those good

problems. I'm just very fortunate that I found some problems to solve and we

found a really good one to solve right now.

84. RW Let me come back to Sendle for a minute because you've had this

remarkable growth to date and it's just accelerate. You also, your growth

strategy. Let's just talk about that for a minute. Are you looking at adding

other products? Are you looking at, what are you, what's your thinking in the

next three years?

85. JM I think, it's interesting. Again, I've learned a lot on this journey. The way

we're structuring businesses these days is quite different, I think, to previous

ones and probably to answer that question I'll just give you my mental model

of what a software company or indeed again I think all companies are sort of

turning into this at the moment, what companies are starting to look like and

in the old days it used to be product market fit, right. It used to be that. You

know, here's my product, here's my market, let's try to get them to fit.

Interestingly I think we've realised, and there's this great book that I can fully

recommend to anyone. It's like the startup bible.

86. RW It's not The Sixth Wave, is it?

87. JM No, that's a terrible book. I wouldn't read that one. It's too old. But it's called

Traction. It's by Weinberg who's the DuckDuckGo guy. He's one of the

founders and what he did that I think is really good is he, he sort of, you know,

rather than just product market fit he made this really good point that you, let's

start really focusing on what he calls traction channels, the way in which

products get to market and the cool thing about this book is they basically go

and they divide it and they work out there's 19 traction channels that exist,

only 19, right, and those traction channels are things, you know, there used to

be few and what's happening now is we're getting lots of, lots more. So, you

know, it used to be, you know, television advertising and, you know, all this

sort of thing, you know, or, you know, events or social, you know, or, you

know, community, whatever might be. What's happening now we've got

search engine optimisation and we've got social marketing and content

marketing and all these different things, right. You've got all enabled by

digital. So if you take it traction stuff is as important to your business as the

product stuff, you start rethinking of your business as product, traction

channel, market and the reason why that's important is because if you start

the business that way you realise that generally businesses do too much.

Right. If you really dig it out, right, and again I'm totally guilty of this, right.

Most entrepreneurs, particularly startup entrepreneurs I talk to, they end up

not having, you know, the dream which is one product, one really good

traction channel and one market. They end up having like three products

because they're solving three problems, right. They end up having their

market is huge. They say our market is women, right. It's not one market,

right, there's seven markets or whatever there. Right. So three products to

seven markets and then, and again I look at what we did with TuShare in the

early days. We had seven traction channels. I was doing a bit of blogging

and we were doing some PR and we were doing some viral and we were

doing some, you know, search engine optimisation. Right. We were pursuing

all these, so you end up with your business, your framework is like you know

what, it's three by seven, by seven, right, which is like 147, right. You've got

these, that's a, that's a huge matrix of things to get right and even if

something starts to work, you don't actually know which one it is. Which of

those 147 combinations are the one that really works? So really the whole

goal is to strip back, right. You know, with Sendle we have one product, right.

It's a parcel from A to B under 25 kilograms, full stop, right, by road. Right,

we have one product, we have one market. Small business. That's all, that is

the only people we talk to, right, and we currently explore three traction

channels, right, and then because we're doing it that way, we start to

understand which ones of these work and which ones don't, right, and you

can start to iterate. Funnily enough, you know, everyone talks about lean and

iterating the product really quickly, but the thing about traction is you want to

be doing that. You can engineer this stuff in the middle as much as you can

the product.

88. RW So James, are there other product offerings?

89. JM So at the moment we're playing with traction. We're not putting in new

products at the moment.

90. RW Not putting any other product offerings. So let me ask a question then, what's

next for you off Sendle? Do you want to talk about your exit strategy or not at

this stage?

91. JM I mean, for me there's a, I mean, when I sat down with my wife and we said

I'm going to be on the startup journey, you know, everyone you talk to, if

you're going to build something worthwhile and lasting, you know, our vision

is like from anyone to anyone with a minimum of one. Right, that minimum

one is really important because if you don't have that you end up just

becoming like any other big business courier and you say these guys are

bigger, you know, we'll go there, but, you know, you don't have any

differentiation. To do that, like, and we don't think that's just in Australia. We

think anyone in the world to anyone in the world with a minimum of one, that's

going to take 10 years, right, and yeah, it's far better to just work out how to

solve this problem than frankly to start, you know, thinking too much around

the other stuff. Just keep solving that problem and the cool thing is we know

that the more of that problem we solve, the more time we save as small

business, the more money, we worked out recently we're saving small

business an average 41% compared to lining up at the post office. Right. So

we're saving them time, we're saving them money. We've done 300 million

parcel kilometres of carbon neutral delivery. Right. We're the only 100%

carbon neutral delivery service in Australia and that's equivalent to sending a

parcel to the moon and back 260 times, right, which, you know, again, that's

one of our big measures. Right. And we, I know. I'm still a nerd, and, and

we facilitated over $100 million worth of ecommerce for small business.

92. RW I was just going to say we're going to come to the audience in about two

minutes for any questions, so please if you have a question just raise your

hand and we'll get a microphone to you. You made some bold predictions

about innovation and we're not going to probably explore with the limited time

we now have, but The Sixth Wave, How to Succeed in a Resource-Limited

World, can we expect a seventh wave of innovation?

93. JM Eventually.

94. RW How do you see it?

95. JM So The Sixth Wave actually, so when I was at CSIRO and I ran, did business

development, one of the things I realised was that CSIRO as an organisation

had, every scientist had their own view of the future. It was great, alright.

You wouldn't be a scientist if you didn't sort of have an idea of where the

future is going. As an organisation, CSIRO did not have one coherent view of

the future and so one of the things I managed to do while I was there, I sort of

pulled aside some resources as you do as an executive and I started a thing

called CSIRO Futures which was trying to become the futures unit of CSIRO.

96. RW And scenario building.

97. JM And doing all the scenario planning and trying to, we did what were called

mega trends which is where are all these views of scientists clustering and so

on. That was, so I got very much into the future space with that. The other

thing is when I did my PhD in innovation theory, there was this really cool sort

of set of, what do they call it? Maybe just a theory, right, but it was called

Kondratieff waves. There was this Russian economist called Nikolai

Kondratieff and he was really cool. He ended up in the Gulag, the poor man,

which I generally, a lot of these early innovation theorists didn't end up very

well, but, I don't know why. I think they were seen as, anyway. But the

interesting thing is that what he identified was that the tide of progress is not

linear. We don't just improve a little bit every year. What happens actually

from a technological change perspective is that you get these waves of

innovation and those waves are generally about 35 years, somewhere

between, they start off at 50. They're now around 35 years and what

happens at the beginning you get lots of change, like lots of disruption going

on, lots of new business models being formed, lots of new companies being

formed. Towards the middle of a wave, you get what they call dominant

designs emerge. So these are things like, you know, AC power Microsoft

Windows, right, mass consolidation, and at the end of a wave, you get a

global depression which is never fun for anyone, right. The interesting thing

is, and this is the reason why you sort of put these two things together, is I

realised, you know, the GFC, there's a lot of evidence that's supporting the

fact that the GFC was the end of the fifth wave innovation, the beginning of

the sixth and that it was that transition point from one to another and so, and

it's probably the reason why if you think about it, you know, the naughties,

right, the 2000s, that was, there were no new businesses really being created

or not visible ones, right. You know, it's still all Amazon and Microsoft and,

you know, the GEs and so on. What's happened in the last five years, right?

We now have the biggest personal mobility company in the world that doesn't

own any taxis. We have the biggest hotel chain in the world some from

nowhere, AB, you know, that was Uber. Biggest hotel chain in the world

doesn't own any hotels. It's the Airbnb. The biggest, you know, re-seller,

retailer in the world, you know, doesn't, Alibaba, right, doesn't own any stock.

All these interesting things are happening and that for me is the beginning, it's

part of, you know, some of these themes that we explored in the book, like

digital natural convergence, you know, sell...

98. RW What about...

99. JM Sell services, not products. So there are all those sorts of things that are

happening.

100. RW What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence, DIG machine learning and so

on? How do you feel about that, the impact on humanity intellectually and so

on?

101. JM Scared as hell. No. No. That's a bit flippant. I mean, the interesting thing is

we, so on, in this World Economic Forum Council there's a whole another

thing we could nerd out about for this. What, what's happening, so what, how

would you characterise some of this stuff that's happening right now? There's

different ways. One thing that's happening is that the industrial revolution, so

about the first four waves of innovation, what we did as humans is we were

basically leveraging human strength. Okay. Let's think about it that way.

Before you needed, you know, it was all about effectively taking muscle and

making it better, or automating it, or, you know. So you'd say I need one

person to make a chair, you know, let's try to start making a machine now. I

need one person who can make four chairs or milling or whatever. It was all

about leveraging human strength. What happened in the fifth wave

innovation which is the information technology wave is we started doing

something different. We started to leverage human intellect, right. We're

already starting to, you know, so if you think about it, I mean, some of that

leveraging started early. We're in a library at the moment. That was the first

time when we started to leverage human intellect. We started to outsource

our memories a little bit to books and other things like that. It's probably

arguably the greatest advancement that humanity had, but really the last

wave, the fifth wave was really about saying okay, let's find ways of

leveraging human intellect much better. The sixth wave, one of the big

things, and this is AI, it's sort of getting to that end point of what does it mean

when we start leveraging human intellect even further?

102. RW Thanks, James. We'll move to the audience. Questions, please. Any

questions? Put your hand up and we have a microphone there. Right here.

Thank you. James, just while we're waiting for the microphone there, the, if I

don't ask this question I'm going to get hammered. What do you think

distinguishes successful entrepreneurs? What do you think distinguishes?

103. JM I think we covered a couple of things. You know, finding a good problem, you

know, knowing when to, when to pivot and when not to pivot, if that makes

sense. Like, it's a, so that's a hard thing, right. When do you stay true to the

original idea and when do you do like we did is we actually changed ideas.

You know what I mean. Like that's, that's difficult. So you're probably making

some of those calls, but at the end of the day I think what makes a successful

entrepreneur probably is the same thing that makes a successful business

leader or whatever. I think, you know, humble determination. If you can do

that that's a...

104. RW But one of the toughest transitions for entrepreneurs is letting go, handing

over control to your people. How are you going on that score?

105. JM I work on it every day. Look, I think it is hard. I mean, you start, for me the

entrepreneur, you know, the startup journey, I've seen a great analogy, you

know, in a large business the metaphor is you're on a hamster wheel, right.

The same thing every day. If you're not careful the startup journey, you're

pushing a rock up a hill. Right. Which one of those do you want to be on,

right, because both can be hard and both can be, you know, whatever it might

be, but for me, you know, the startup journey, that pushing that rock up a hill,

it is, it is you start off and you're the only one, right. In some ways, I think of it

like you're wearing every hat. You're the CTO, you're the CFO, you're the

CMO. You're the CEO, right, and your journey is basically going down that

thing and trying to work out how do I get resources to take hats off and give

those hats to other people and, in fact, you're successful when you start to

take off, you know, I'm very fortunate I found a wonderful co-founder or two

wonderful co-founders, one to whom I can give the CTO hat and one to who I

can give the CMO hat. That's the chief marketing officer, chief technology

officer and I trust them, you know, to the end of the world, and that for me,

you know, is...

106. RW That's good. That's good. Thank you.

107. XX So earlier on you spoke a lot about speed and about it's either the fast ones

are consuming the slow ones. So with big businesses and particularly old

businesses who have, you know, decades, if not centuries of political

hierarchy, how do they pick up the pace and keep up with the pups and how,

what happens if they don't?

108. JM Yeah, great question because it's like, you know, there's a whole consulting

industry now that's been built around agile and all that sort of stuff, how do

you think this, look, it's really hard because you've got so much inertia in

some of these large companies and I think that you, there's a couple of ways

you do it. You either, you try to, you create burning platforms like IBM did.

You know, you completely change your business model. You know, IBM

went from a product company to a service company and they got a lot more

agile that way. You have a leader who's probably, I see this happening with

NRMA at the moment. You know, somebody who's come in from digital

making some really tough calls, getting rid of lots of things to get focused.

109. RW You should say your cornerstone investor.

110. JM That was, I know about them because they were, they were one of our

investors.

111. RW Yeah.

112. JM And they're doing a great job basically trying to say you know what, we were

doing everything, now we're going to do less. That's one way of trying to take

a company. But yeah, I feel, you know, again now that I've seen it from this

side, right, where we release, you might not see it, but like literally probably

twice a week we are releasing a new product or a new thing into the system.

Some companies, even software companies do that on a monthly, quarterly

basis, right, where they have the least trains and, whatever might be. We're

doing it twice a week. You know, that, try to build that from a company where

you've got all this legacy is really, really hard. Again, it doesn't mean you

can't aim for it, though, and that's probably where you then start to say okay,

how do I rethink the company? But generally, you need, you want some sort

of external shock or you want some sort of, you know, different operating

model to do it.

113. RW A question here. Thank you.

114. XX A quick question. You mentioned earlier you were using three traction

channels. Which were they and why did you knock the other ones back?

115. JM Yeah, great question. So we, we, the first traction channel that we used,

believe it or not it's called viral. We like it because it scales. Another way of

calling it is word of mouth and we sort of said from the very early days you

know what, how do you reach small business? Right. Small business talks to

small business so we need to create a remarkable service. That meant, you

know, again, you make that choice. You have to dig into it, right. You know,

that means we have to, we track every parcel. We had to have the best

support in the business because otherwise people won't talk about it. You

know, let's tell stories about our customers because people like telling stories.

You know, let's not tell our stories about yourselves, let's talk about

somebody who's making dog pyjamas or selling toilet paper or whatever it

might be, you know, around that space. So viral is our first one. Partnership

was our second one. It's great to see NAB is a sponsor here. They're a

partner for us. NAB is giving their business customers, their small business

customers free Sendle premium which we normally charge $120 a year for.

Great. You know, it's a great, it's good for NAB, it's good for us. We're not

giving it to any other banks. That's the sort of partnership that we have and

then the third channel that we chose was PR just because we knew we had a

good story to tell.

116. RW You've done that well.

117. JM And we, that's, and the interesting thing about the traction space is to say it's

better to be a samurai at a couple of channels than it is to be sort of mediocre

at, you know, lots of them.

118. RW Thanks, James. There's a question here. Thanks. I should look across here

as well. Any questions over here? Good, thank you. Up the back there after

that. Yes, sir.

119. XX Yeah. So I don't think you touched on at all that your funding to get the start

that you needed, self-funded. You've got a couple of investors that you

mentioned. Did you start, get investors and continued with that extra

funding? Did you get to a funding point and then go okay, we've got enough,

let's...

120. JM Yeah. It's, look, it's a great question. The metaphor I have, and again I didn't

know any of this stuff when I started, but I had some good advisors which was

great. The metaphor I have for a startup funding journey is a little bit like

sailing and what I mean by that is you start off and you're in a little rowboat.

You're probably by yourself and what you're trying to do is you're trying to get

to the next waypoint. Right. And these waypoints, and I had a great adviser

who talked, you know, the way they call it in the investment space is value

creation milestone, right, and this adviser that we had basically said start

thinking about your business that you're creating as a series of value creation

milestones, right, and at each milestone it's like that waypoint and that's

where you can maybe upgrade the boat or get more people on the boat, you

know, because you start off and your baling and, you know, you're navigating

and you're rowing and you're doing all these sorts of things. You might get to

the next milestone and you can say okay, now, I want somebody to row and

somebody to, you know, lookout for sharks, whatever it might be, and so for

me the, so really what you want to think about as a business is okay, you

know, Sendle start off self-funded. My wife and I put quite a bit of money in it

to get us to what they call minimum viable product, to get us to angel. That

was the first value creation milestone. Then you get to the next one which is

your seed around. Generally until, you know, angle to seed means you're just

trying to go from a basic idea and something you can demonstrate to an

actual business where you've got some revenue. Seed to series A is showing

you can get repeat business, right, you know, and that you've got low values

are churn and people love your product and you've got growth rates of X and

you've, you know, so it's really about understanding what is, what are these

milestones of the business you're trying to create and then interestingly from

there, you've basically aligned your business plan and your capital plan

because you're saying to get from here, this waypoint to this waypoint will

cost me $400,000, right. Now, that's what you're actually raising for. I'm not

raising the value of the business here. I'm actually raising $400,000 to get

me to here.

121. RW We should say too that Sendle raised, you raised $5 million in August this

year.

122. JM Yes.

123. RW You're talking about expanding Sendle's features, scaling its customer

support capacity and so on. So it's a very clear direction for the funding that

you've raised, but it's a massive success story with your funding to date.

124. JM And I learned a lot in that process. So we just completed our series A in

August...

125. RW Yep.

126. JM ...and again, you know, I learned that, so again and that's not about, that's to

get us from this milestone where we're currently at to that one and what's

interesting is the more down that path you go, you know, your boat, yes, your

boat gets upgraded which is great, but of course the waters get choppier.

You know, the expectations get higher.

127. RW But listen, you haven't got any Corinthian columns, have you?

128. JM No.

129. RW Are you sure you're? Not investing in that? There's a, the back of the room

there, please. A question up there. Thanks. There's one final question after

this one. Does anyone want to raise their hand just here.

130. JM He's had his hand up the back.

131. RW Sorry.

132. JM Yep.

133. RW Over there. Okay. That will, do you want to expand this by five minutes?

Can we do that? You're okay, Vicki?

134. XX Yeah. I just had a question about finding your right team and surrounding

yourself around aspiring people. How do you find people who are the values

that you have, honest, humble and also positive? I just want to know how, do

you know if your team are having the same values and following the same

values that you do and also the next question I had is what was your biggest

failure through your success journey?

135. JM Yep.

136. XX Thank you.

137. JM So I think, you know, in terms of finding you just keep looking. You know,

we've got a, we've got 17 people who do customer support. For example,

we've interviewed 400 people to get to them. Right. You just keep looking

and you keep looking because some of that stuff you can't get through paper.

Most of the other folk, you know, you get recommendations and so on. We,

we're very picky. In fact, the most interesting thing is you then talk to the

team and one of the feedback, you know, when you have it is let's not lower

that bar. Like, once you're through the bar, like, everybody wants to keep the

bar high. It's really, it's really interesting so I think there's, there's, and that's

actually, you know, I talked about myself and probably getting into your

question around failure, again our biggest risk is we do too many things and

don't do them really well and one of the mechanisms we use as a team, so

one way is getting clarity around the business. Like, okay, this, we're only

going to do these number of traction channels, only, you know what I mean.

Like, for example, events, not a Sendle traction channel. I normally say no to

thing. That's only because I've known Ray for so long and I think this is great

that we say yes to this, right. It's not a traction channel. We don't do it, so we

get to say no to things really simply. Right. But the other thing we do is we

actually have this rule in the company. We call it hell yeah and interestingly

there's sort of three, it's interesting. There's lots of decisions. You're making

decisions all the time. Everybody is making decisions all the time. What am I

going to eat for lunch? What am I going to wear today? Blah, blah, blah.

Right. For most decisions, you know what, the answer doesn't matter, right.

We call them, they're the little decisions, right. We're, as long as you're 80%

right you're going to be okay.

138. RW So they're the question decisions, right?

139. JM And for those decisions it's okay to be yes or no, right. Yes, no, yes, no, yes,

yes, yes, no, no, no, whatever it might be, but then you've got some big

decisions, right, and generally my definition of these things because again I'm

still a nerd and think about these things, it's the decisions that it's hard to

reverse, right. The decisions that are hard to reverse for life or business or

whatever might be. You know, who are you going to marry? Who's, what

member of the team is going to be, you know, who's going to come into your

business? What market are you going to focus on? Who are you going to let

invest in your company? Right. All those sorts of things. They're very much

one-way decisions. Right. Once you've decided you want to focus on small

business it's very hard to say you know what, we're going to change our mind,

we're going to focus on large business. No, you've got to stick with that.

140. RW That's crazy.

141. JM And so for those big decisions, you know, the one-way decisions we actually

think there's three answers to every question. There's yes, there's no and

there's hell yeah, right, and interestingly for the big decisions if it's only a yes,

right, that's a no. Right. Do you want to marry me? Yes. No, it's got to be

hell yeah. Right. And it really, and we actually have a process of like literally

for the big things. If anybody says this is a hell yeah decision it's immediately

a hell yeah decision so immediately elevated. Just if any member of the team

thinks it's a hell yeah decision. For recruiting, every single recruit has to be a

hell yeah. Right. And around the people and for everyone who's interviewed

that person, right, and we keep talking until it's hell yeah. So you can actually

do that stuff and that's getting, you know, working out what the big decisions

are verses those little decisions and creating an extra level of diligence

around them can make a difference.

142. RW James, we've got two more questions to ask. There's one right here, thank

you.

143. JM And we have the guy at the back too.

144. RW And the guy at the back too. You've been putting up your hand for a while, so

we'll get to you as well.

145. XX James, congratulations on your success with Sendle. You mentioned that the

business is carbon neutral. I'm just interested in how important that is for

your customers verses say price or speed, you know, that sort of thing and

also just a general comment on, say, environmental awareness in Australia

generally.

146. JM So it's interesting. We, we, we were carbon neutral from day one because we

came from the giving network where we said you know what, we are here to

stop stuff going into landfill and it doesn't make sense if you're stopping stuff

going to landfill, yet you're emitting all this carbon dioxide in return. So we

actually just built it in. The cool thing was as we started to scale the business,

we also realised we had enough margin to play with to basically say you know

what, we're going to be carbon neutral for every single delivery. In fact, we're

more than carbon neutral because coming from the environment industry, I

know the environment industry can be the harsh critics of other members of

the environment industry, so we actually offset every package as if it's going

from Brisbane to Perth, right. Even if it's going from Brisbane to Brisbane it's

going from Brisbane to Perth as far as we're concerned, so we're way over.

Now, interestingly to your point about environmental awareness, we often

don't start with that because most people when they think about carbon offset

they think oh, it's going to be a premium expensive service. We generally just

sort of say you know what, you come to us because it's cheaper and more

convenient and then we say oh, by the way, do you know you've now got a

carbon neutral delivery? Your business is doing carbon neutral delivery

service and here's a logo you can stick on your website if you really want to

and it's amazing, everybody, you know, like, so many people, that's a great

response. We started it and said hey, Sendle Australia is only 100% carbon

neutral delivery service and 10% of Australian carbon emissions are transport

and logistics and this is actually a really important thing, right, we'd probably

end up, you know, turning, well, not turning folk off, but we would send the

wrong message about what the business is, which is about convenience and

price as much it is about that side of things.

147. RW Thanks, James. There's one more question. Right here, thank you. Now,

we'll wrap it up after this question. Thanks for that.

148. XX Hi James. I just wanted to know your views on the drone technology and pun

intended, will it take off?

149. JM Good question. Look, I think for, we, in parcels, right, so there's drones for

whole lots of things, surveillance and so on, so I'll just narrow it down to drone

for delivery. I actually think there's two things. In delivery you get, you've got

two choices. You've got cheap or you've got fast. Right. We're in the cheap

space. I'm not trying to do overnight or whatever it might be. For things you

want fast, that's like food and legal documents and livers, right, those sorts of

things, drones are going to be great, right. Fast and expensive. For slow,

weirdly enough we're going to have automated things, but they're probably

not going to be flying. They're probably just going to go along the road like

everything else and they're called motos or, I don't know, but they'll work out

words, but you know, they've already (unintelligible – (ui)) some other sort of

little things like that. So there will be, you know, this industry just like the AI

question earlier, we're about to see over the next five to 10 years mass, you

know, mass automation of a lot of stuff. We're already starting to see in

driverless cars. It's going to start off with driverless freight absolutely first. It's

not going to be the local stuff, it's going to be the long haul stuff going

between cities where you'll have all these driverless trucks on the road, you

know, easily within five years. They'll be, they'll be shipping stuff long haul

and then it will be interesting to see how it starts to progress. In our industry,

though, it's going to be on the road, it won't be flying.

150. RW Please thanks James Chin Moody (clapping).

151. VM So thank you James and thank you Ray for the very interesting conversation

and sharing your insights and learnings and I think the things that I've taken

away is passion, being a bit crazy and having a problem that's going to lead

to, you know, solving a big problem that then leads to success. As Ray

mentioned earlier, we've got James' book The Sixth Wave How to Succeed in

a Resource-Limited World available tonight on-site in our pop-up library

outside on the Queensland terrace and as Ray mentioned, James is happy to

sign that for you. For those of you who would like to re-visit the conversation

or share it with friends or colleagues the web's cast and the transcript will be

available on our State Library of Queensland website within the next week or

so. Also, if we've got some entrepreneurs or startups sitting in the audience

with a big idea that they would like to turn into a success story, I suggest you

have a look at our business studio. We will give you some information on the

business studio on your State Library of Queensland website as well. So

once again, I'd like to thank you all for being here tonight and supporting

Game Changers and the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame and I

invite you to come along to our final Game Changers conversation in 2016

which will be on the 3rd of November where Ray will be speaking with Kim

McCosker, author and entrepreneur and best known for her international

best-selling book 4 Ingredients, so the cookbook I'm sure you're all familiar

with. So that's Kim McCosker on the 3rd of November. So please now join us

on the Queensland Terrace for refreshments supported by our generous

sponsors Clovelly Estate and Newstead Brewing Company and I encourage

you to take the time to get to know each other and find out a little bit more

about it each other and you never know where those connections might lead.

So once again thank you Ray and James. Thank you (clapping).