Episode 38 · 10 May 2023 · 1:03:33

Oliver Yonchev: The Art of Possible and Creating a Culture of Success at Flight Story

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Intro and Al's fanboy moment
intro#intro #customer-insights #business
Introducing Oliver Yonchev
intro#guest-introduction #oliver-yonchev #marketing
From failed indie rocker to marketing mogul
interview#career-journey #music #marketing
People and culture at Flight Story
interview#people-and-culture #company-culture #flight-story
What a fulfilling employee experience looks like
interview#employee-experience #fulfillment #culture
The intentional approach to M&A and integration
interview#mergers-and-acquisitions #integration #strategy
Lesson 1: Finding great people
interview#hiring #talent-acquisition #recruitment
Lesson 2: Keeping great people
interview#retention #employee-retention #people-management
The cautionary tale of Nasty Gal's Sophia Amoruso
interview#nasty-gal #sophia-amoruso #cautionary-tale
Lesson 3: The power of diverse perspectives
interview#diversity #perspectives #inclusion
Hot takes on Gen Z vs. millennials
hot take#gen-z #millennials #workplace
Oliver's take on AI and the future
interview#ai #future #technology
Parting words of wisdom
interview#advice #wisdom #young-people
The Art of Possible
interview#art-of-possible #inspiration #closing

Show notes

The Art of Possible: Building a Culture of Success with Oliver Yonchev

Guest: Oliver Yonchev — CEO and co-founder of Flight Story (with Steven Bartlett), former Managing Director of Social Chain AG (a role he secured at just 26), where he helped build the company to 1,000+ employees, $750M in revenue, and operations across 21 locations.

Oliver Yonchev has worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet — Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, TikTok, Twitch, Disney, Uber — but his path to the top of the marketing world started somewhere unexpected: as a self-described "failed indie rocker."

In this episode, Oliver joins Al and Leanne to share his journey from music to marketing, his philosophy of "The Art of Possible," and how he's building a culture of intentionality, psychological safety, and relentless innovation at Flight Story. From the lessons of scaling Social Chain to the cautionary tale of Nasty Gal's Sophia Amoruso, Oliver gets refreshingly honest about what it really takes to build — and sustain — a high-performance culture.

Top 3 Takeaways

Culture is intentional or it's accidental. Oliver's fundamental belief is that culture — or the decisions we make about how we work — has to be built on purpose. You have a culture whether you design one or not; the question is whether it's the one you want.
Find people who are "misfits" in the best way. Oliver's conviction is that bringing together different experiences, backgrounds, and ways of thinking is the fastest route to innovation. The magic happens when you stop hiring in your own image.
Embrace the Art of Possible. The models and tools we have today are the worst they'll ever be. Oliver's philosophy is to lean into what's available now, experiment boldly, and learn from the misses as much as the hits.

Best Bits

On the "Art of Possible":

"I'm passionate about the art of possible." — Oliver

On what people really want from work:

"As people, we all have similar wants and needs. Generally speaking, we want a sense of security..." — Oliver

On the difference between good and world-class:

"In marketing, a really good videographer, the difference between good and the world's best might be..." — Oliver

On learning from failure:

"Nothing is wasted, even the most bizarre things." — Leanne, reflecting on Oliver's journey

Connect With Us

Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect

Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14

Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Full transcript

Expand full transcript

Al ElliottThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.

Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform. Every team Can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.

Al ElliottNice. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

Oliver YonchevUm, as you can tell, I'm passionate about the art of possible.

Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to the Truth, Lies and Workplace Culture Podcast, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, which is, if you weren't sure, the audio destination for business professionals.

Al ElliottOh, I messed that bit up. We're such losers.

Leanne ElliottMy name is Leanne. I am a loser, and I'm also a business psychologist.

Al ElliottMy name is Al. I am also a loser, and I'm a business owner.

Leanne ElliottAnd we are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace cultures.

Al ElliottSo today we are talking to— um, just, just before we introduce this guest, I want to say that I was fanboying like, like a bastard, um, and I was trying to be so cool. If you listen back to the, to the raw interview, which we will publish with, um, with the guest's permission shortly, um, listen back to the full interview, you'll hear me trying to play it down and trying to be cool, but I think it kind of came across that I was super starstruck.

Leanne ElliottI don't know, you sounded fairly cool. I could tell you were excited, but I think you You played it quite cool.

Al ElliottSo we are welcoming Oliver Yonchev onto the podcast. He's an entrepreneur, a speaker, the CEO of Flight Story, which is a company he co-founded with Stephen Bartlett. Prior to this, Oliver was a managing director of Social Chain AG, which was Stephen Bartlett's first agency. He built the company up from startup to one of the world's leading social media and e-commerce companies with more than 1,000 employees, $750 million in revenue, and operations in 21 Today we're talking to Oliver about his journey to success, his greatest learnings along the way, and his love for the art of possible, which is a key philosophy that underpins his current business, Flight Story. But before we meet Oliver, it's the news roundup time.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Yay!

Leanne ElliottHear the jingle.

Al ElliottSo this— I think if you remember from last week or a couple of weeks ago, we decided to change it from word of the week because we're running out of words to find.

Leanne ElliottWe'll come back to it when a new word appears.

Al ElliottYeah. And so we went to the truth or lie. And so I had a question which actually was echoed by someone we were recently on a podcast with.

Leanne ElliottWe were, we were on a podcast called Surf and Sales, also part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, a new member. So we thought we'd go say hi. So go check it out. But they asked some good questions, didn't they?

Al ElliottSome great questions. And one of the things that Richard asked was, how do you know when you do an engagement survey? So just, I'm sure you all know what engagement survey is, but basically it's an anonymous survey. of your, of your employees to find out how they feel about certain things. So how do you know that they're actually going to tell the truth on that? And if people don't tell the truth, let's say 1 or 2 disgruntled employees don't tell the truth, then is that not just going to mess it up, mess up the results for everyone? So I think that my co-host, my wife, the person sitting opposite me right now, has got a great answer to that. So Leah, what do you say to that?

Leanne ElliottIt is true. Data is only as good as what it shows you, isn't it? So it's, yeah, it's probably not gonna be very reliable.

Al ElliottIt's not gonna be very valid.

Leanne ElliottSo it is, it is tricky. Is— so is then the solution that you don't bother? No, there are lots of things that one can do, and we do with our, our clients here at Oblong. And I think the first one is to make sure you have that conversation with the leadership team and that kind of educational point of, are we investing in this? Do we really want to open this can of worms? Are we ready with humility and, you know, responsibility to take these answers on board and do something about them. Because if not, there's not really any point in doing it either. So, I think you need to get the buy-in at the highest level, as we said before, the board, the senior leadership team, everyone needs to be on board. The second thing, I think, again, it starts with the leadership team, is promising that confidentiality. So, any employee insights that we collect, we will always protect employees in terms of providing them with confidentiality and, and then Anonymity.

Al ElliottAnonymity.

Leanne ElliottThank you. Um, so yeah, so we'll, we'll promise this to, to employees, and we'll explain to them how that'll happen. We are a third party, we don't ask for any identifying information. If any information is given, majority of our surveys are quantitative, just gathering data. And the areas we do gather comments, And we will redact them to remove any identifying details. That can be from anything to, my boss is a bitch, to, you know, I like finishing work early because I can look after my 2 kids. Secondly, we can follow the science through. So, if people are dishonest or not as candid as we need them to be, we will see that in the results. We use a predictive model of employee engagement and culture. So, if people answering in one way, in the culture foundations, we should see that reflected in the employee behaviours and attitudes, or certain correlations with certain behaviours. So if we don't see that pattern follow through, then it may well suggest that we've got some, some inaccurate data there. And then we also follow that up, all of our surveys, with one-to-one interviews with selected staff to dive deeper into the context. Again, we don't share any of the transcripts, anything the individual said. We just share the high-level points of the collective group of employees that we spoke to. And I guess finally, you know, the argument could be, you know, if people are, if culture is that broken, and people are disengaged to the point where they don't believe any of this, the last thing that we'll try and do is make the point that, that this is it, this is the chance to make a change and make a difference. It's now or never. And if they still choose never, the chances are they're probably not gonna be in the organisation very long. Anyway, I think they're probably on their way to a new job. So that's what we do to try and reassure employees, try and make sure we collect as honest data as possible. And so far, in our experience, that seems to have provided the safeguards we need to make sure we've got data that is accurate and that we can do something with.

Al ElliottSo a couple of quick thoughts there. So first of all, what Liane's talking about is our proprietary— well, I say our, It's Leanne's who's come up with it.

Leanne ElliottIt's ours. You don't like— don't stop being so modest. You did some design work on that too.

Al ElliottUh, the proprietary engagement survey that we use, which is called the RX7, uh, if you're interested in that, by the way, just, uh, go, go into the show notes and you'll see there's an email. It is currently only open to private clients, but we're opening it publicly very, very shortly. So if you're interested in that and getting the waitlist, then you can see an email on there, or you can just email leanne@oblonghq.com. What else you got, Leah?

Leanne ElliottI came across a bit of a quirky, interesting story today, and I thought you'd like this one, Al. There is some research done by SkillsHub on the types of different online courses you can do, how that then translates to jobs that are being advertised, and found that there are a lot of high-paying jobs that you probably never knew existed. You can be a professional mermaid. Um, yep, a professional mermaid at some touristy seaside locations. You learn how to swim with a tail, you perform, you do water-based stage shows, you're a party entertainer for kids, and of course, all salaries depend on the job, but the estimate is that you could earn around £58,600 a year.

Al ElliottFantastic. What about if you lure fishing boats onto the rocks? Can you also then just take the associated Debris that comes off the ships.

Leanne ElliottI don't see why not.

Al ElliottYeah, well, there you go. There's your bonus. Flotsam and jetsam was the word I was looking for.

Leanne ElliottYeah, so there you go. If you— if that sounds a bit bubblegum for you, um, how about becoming a professional exorcist? An exorcist is someone who can drive out evil spirits, demons, devils from possessed people, places, and things. I would love to do an episode on paranormal psychology one day because it is just Funny. Um, but if you do want to be a professional exorcist, um, then you can earn around about £42,000 a year.

Al ElliottNice.

Leanne ElliottIt's not bad. It's not bad at all.

Al ElliottNo, no.

Leanne ElliottFor a job that's complete bullshit, it's not bad.

Al ElliottI'm sure there's a joke there. I'm sure if someone clever listening can, can think of a joke of driving out something.

Leanne ElliottI don't know. I think he ghosts his clients.

Al ElliottOh, very good, very good. Lol.

Leanne ElliottYeah, and if that— if that— if you, if you think, don't really fancy conning people out of their hard-earned cash, then how about be a taxidermist? You could, you know, stuff animals, keep people's pets with them for all eternity.

Al ElliottAnd hello to all you vegetarians and vegans listening. Do you know what? We used to have some of these from my— I think it was my granddad or my, my dad's uncle or something in our house. And when I was a kid, they scared the living shit out of me.

Leanne ElliottThere you go, there you go. You know, it's, it's— who knows what jobs will exist.

Al ElliottAnyway, Leah, shall we go and meet our wonderful guest?

Leanne ElliottYes. Today we are very excited to welcome to the podcast Oliver Yonchev. For a decade, Oliver has been at the forefront of digital marketing and transformation, helping to guide the management teams of many of the world's most successful companies. I'll name-call. You ready for this?

Al ElliottYeah.

Leanne ElliottAmazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, TikTok, Twitch, Disney, Uber, just to name a few. Oliver calls himself— and I've seen this in another interview— the byproduct of a holiday romance. His dad is Bulgarian, his mum is from the UK, so they spent a lot of time in Eastern European culture when they were kids and being told about this innate mental strength Toughness, tools that Oliver said that he has taken into the world of business. Interestingly, I thought he grew up wanting to be a footballer and played at a really high level in youth football, uh, but an operation at the start of the season in his school leaving year saw him take a different path into music.

Al ElliottNow, we've spent a bit of time in Bulgaria, and, um, apart from the crazy people we met, they are some of the nicest, most genuine people. But you can see that they are determined.

Leanne ElliottAbsolutely. And very entrepreneurial as well, from the people we met.

Al ElliottFun fact, when we stayed in Bulgaria, we stayed in a place near Plovdiv. The guy who owned the house, his mate came to pick him up to go to the pub, and he came in a helicopter. Yeah. And landed in the field next to him, picked him up, went out, had a few beers, came back, dropped him off, and off he went back home.

Leanne ElliottYeah. Crazy story.

Al ElliottCrazy Bulgarians. We probably genuinely have about 5 Bulgarian stories that are all a bit crazy. One including chicken hearts.

Leanne ElliottHi, Niko, by the way, if you're listening.

Al ElliottCan't imagine he would be. Maybe he's on helicopter.

Leanne ElliottAnyway, yeah, so Oliver decided to take a very different path into music. So let's hear a little bit more about that.

Oliver YonchevI'm, uh, I'm— I started my career as a failed indie rocker. So straight out of school, um, I joined— I did a music production course, formed a band with my brother and friends, and we went and pursued that for a few years. Um, we got a record deal, we did a few cool things, and then apparently artists and creatives have ego and fall out. My brother and the guitarist fell out. We had our album and then I lost orientation. I need to do something. So I went to university. I knew music and inadvertently I stumbled on marketing. So half of my course was related to comms marketing, half of it was everything from music law to music production, a real eclectic mix of things I learned. I found myself really liking marketing. As in understanding how people think, feel, how to influence, how business works.

Al ElliottIt's funny that Oliver seems to be both creative and disciplined in that, you know, you have to be disciplined to play football at that kind of level, to learn music. But then also the creativity comes out when he, you know, he's talking about starting a band, about being a musician, about marketing. I think there's lots of crossover between creative people who have got the discipline and people who are successful. He also admits that he's always had this sort of entrepreneurial itch. And we have something in common in that I have about 300 domains that I renew every year and have done for about 10 years. Oliver definitely beats me on that one.

Oliver YonchevI was the type of person that would buy domains. You know, I have a list and I'm not even exaggerating here. I probably spent thousands a year on renewing domain names of businesses that do not exist and probably never will. Idea, name, they exist in a graveyard on my reg123. But yeah, I kind of made the decision at some point to kind of start something. The first business that I launched was a light bulb business. That was purely on the basis— it was called GoLights, and the idea was that I would— I would find something I could import, I could create a margin from it, and I'd learn how to build a website and just learn the process. Um, and I still to this day in my storage have thousands of light bulbs that I shipped over from China and just have them boxed up. So if you ever need a light bulb, I'm your guy.

Al ElliottThis seems to be a trend. If anyone who's followed any kind of entrepreneur, entrepreneur's story, then there's always a story like this where you start off my company, Give Me Some Beer, was delivering beer in Leeds to late-night drinkers, like from 11 till 6 AM. Great idea? No, it was a shit idea because I went bankrupt at the end of that. But that, that then taught me how you start a business, how you do sort of marketing around that. Then I became a marketing consultant, and then I started the property business, which did well, etc., etc., etc. But by turning up and doing something every single day, still going out there and trying to find a new opportunity, often leads to these weird little meetings where you meet someone that kind of changes your life.

Oliver YonchevI stumbled upon a startup that was founded by Stephen Bartlett called Social Chain. He was doing a TED Talk about building a business yet knowing nothing about business. I felt like it spoke to me. I went and met the team there and started on a new journey of helping grow and build that company. And that was a bit of a rocket ship in marketing and advertising. We went through a series of significant milestones as a company. We took that international. I spent about almost 5 years in the US building the US entity for that business. Then Steven left. I left not long after, and we decided we'd do something new. That thing that was new was Flight Story. Flight Story was a business byproduct of, um, a lot of hindsight. What did we do well? What are we good at? What did we do not so well? Um, what would we do differently? And what's changed in the world? What opportunities exist right now that maybe didn't exist a few years ago? And that's where Flight Story was born.

Al ElliottWhat's interesting about Flight Story is that from what Oliver says and from what we looked on the website, they seem to be going for kind of a different type of business. They're not saying we are going to do your social media because you're a dropshipping company. They're going for like strategic consulting, for content, for media, for companies, disruptive brands like Web3 or biotech or maybe big financial institutions. They also seem to do, have this kind of like this data and tech stuff built in. They do cool things like something called FlightDeck, which is like this revolutionary attribution tool they've built in-house. I'm pretty sure that it's not open to the public yet. I think there's still a waitlist. But let's hear what FlightDeck actually does.

Oliver YonchevFlightDeck is our attribution model, and it looks at financial data and online factors and looking for leading and also lagging indicators of how online factors are affecting assets, being shares, crypto tokens. And it all started from a thesis that we had over a year ago around attributing our work. We were having to prove that our models initiatives were doing what they said they did. And it centers on a path of creating a product and a service that we call FlightDeck. And FlightDeck, in essence, the biggest challenge we've had in building FlightDeck was when you plug the internet into anything, you know, you can imagine making sense of these huge data models is a real problem to try and create clarity and make sense of the noise. So we spent a lot of time on sort of data integrity and stripping, stripping back our datasets actually. But we're in a place now where we're pretty comfortable. We've rolled it out with our first beta set of clients. And then beyond that, then we're going to expand that further. A good example would be, take Adidas as a public company, right? Online factors, if you look at their share price and the Kanye incident, If you were monitoring and using the sentiment around the conversation that surrounded Adidas, that would inform your corporate strategy and decision-making around how it's impacting your stock. That's just one example where you take a big online moment, and that's the extreme, and figure out how is this affecting our company's value. There's much more tangible examples when you do a trading announcement. You want to understand what online retail investor communities are saying about you. If I extrapolate now in investor relations, investor relations AI is going to come like a wave for investor relations. Bloomberg recently integrated OpenAI into their financial dataset. You can start to see how With these new language models, all you need to understand is what you're looking for. That's all you need to know. Like, what is it I'm looking for? And they'll figure it out.

Leanne ElliottI'll be honest, when I first heard about what the product was, I was, I was struggling to keep up. I'm not kind of down with the, the lingo, but that example makes perfect sense to me. And I'm quite familiar because it's kind of lots of people and culture type scandals, yeah, um, with, with, um, Adidas. So, um, so that makes all the sense to me. It sounds really, really cool. Really cool. But, you know, of course, again, I'm, I'm, I'm the people and culture. I know you're loving this, Al, kind of the marketing attribution side of it.

Al ElliottI agree. Uh-huh.

Leanne ElliottUm, but I want to know more about the people and culture. Oliver has been renowned for starting companies that are disruptive, youthful, innovative, game-changing. We don't even have time to talk about the slide, ball pit, fully stocked bar, and puppy park that are in their Manchester office. But what about flights?

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)story.

Leanne ElliottThere is one word that I think can sum up Oliver's approach to workplace culture, and it's one you've heard us use a lot before: intention.

Oliver YonchevThe foundation has just been really intentional. Um, my fundamental belief is the culture, or the decisions we make now, how we treat people, how we behave, that will affect the legacy in 10 years. And if I look back on previous business endeavors, when we've been either less intentional or less thoughtful about what the collective sum of all these decisions would mean, you end up with problems later down the line. So, for me personally, it was really important that when we started Flight Story, we were very intentional about our culture. And our culture stems from our mission. And our mission is we want to achieve great things in marketing and communication. That's our foundation. That then guides our decision-making. As anyone in business, if you're part of a team or you're an entrepreneur, you have real decision fatigue. Particularly when you gain traction or some success, it's actually the hardest thing to do is focus. For us, having that real clear view and intention over what we want to be in the world, the ambition, distilling that down into a set of principles and values, and then building a culture around those values. It's like an objective standard that means, you know, I don't have to think too much. We have characteristics that I think will lend themselves to people who get a lot of fulfillment in working with us, and that guides us. So I don't think it's an easy task. I think it just starts with being really intentional around culture. And culture's this probably fugazi thing we all talk about, and it's kind of a combination of top-down mission leadership, how you behave, act, what your intent, and then also grassroots of team. It's the collective sum of team and how people behave. So, our job has just been really intentional about our culture.

Leanne ElliottI have a feeling, Oliver, that when I make this book recommendation, you're gonna go, yeah, yeah, Leah, read that, come on now, keep up. But on the off chance you haven't, what you're saying there reminds me so much of, uh, John Amici. I know I talk about John all the time on the podcast, um, but he has the most incredible book on leadership called The Promises of Giants. And everything you've talked about there, and specifically, you know, the decisions that we make today is going to affect the legacy in 10 years. And the whole concept is around, like, as a leader, you are this giant, and every decision you make is going to have impact. Every move you make is going to have impact. So yeah, if you haven't, if you haven't read it, I'd recommend— I'll leave a link in the show notes for you, Oliver.

Al ElliottBut also, I think This is possibly more of a second-time founder thing. I think when you've already built something big, then you start to see the problems that you didn't. I'm not saying this was the same. This was the case with, um, with Oliver's first business, but you start to see cracks of when you start to build something from ground up and suddenly you look around and go, shit, there's 1,000 of us. So when you do start something a second time round, you sort of have that benefit of hindsight a little bit and you go, yeah, intentionality. We are intentionally going to build this thing and it's going to look like this.

Leanne ElliottAnd listening back to Oliver, I think my favourite thing about his approach is that, you know, people and culture is firmly part of long-term strategy. Um, you know, it's not a case of, well, we'll deal with that when we get to it, when we hit 15 people, when we hit 25 people, when we hit 70 people. He's planning for the future, and he has an aspiration for the culture of Flight Story.

Oliver YonchevFrom a culture standpoint, I would love us to be known for a place that gives everyone a very fulfilling experience, and fulfilment is very subjective. But I do think, as people, we all have similar wants and needs. Generally speaking, we want a sense of security and employment. We want this sense of forward motion, opportunity, and we want rewards and remuneration. And we probably want to have good experiences, whether that's learning, development, hedonistic experiences, camaraderie, however you want to describe it. So I would say we will win if 80% of the people that exist here say they had this really fulfilling experience at Flight Story. That would be a win for me.

Al ElliottNow what's interesting about what Oliver's doing— I don't know whether he did it with Social Chain, but what he's doing this time with Flight Story, he seems to be expanding through acquisition. Recently I think he bought another company, and so I asked him, is this actually your— is this the strategy you're following?

Oliver YonchevPart of our corporate strategy for Flight Store is M&A. So our view is most companies that go through, have M&A as part of their business strategy for growth, they don't spend enough time on integration. So what we've been over the last year being really thoughtful about defining that one set of values. We put a lot of thought in how to company— how to different teams with different legacy, with a different history integrate, and how do we then have a one-company narrative? We're very early on in that journey, so we haven't actually executed that as well as we can, but we're going through a phase right now where we're acquiring 2 businesses. So in April, we had another 100 team members across 3 different countries to FlightStore it. So what that means is over the So, over the last 3, 4 months, we've been really thoughtful about integration. We've been really thoughtful about, you know, how can we make these new teams feel reenergized? How can we ensure that their lives get better on day 1? The day 1 that they become part of Flight Story, their lives improve. So, we've made some commitments to those teams based on what we've heard and listened to. Because one of the things that really compelled me, having done— being part of M&A transactions in the past, is it's very much a one-sided dialogue. The acquiring party never really spends the time to understand the business and think about what happens thereafter. So we, in Fly story, this time around, we're very thoughtful about, well, we need to make the right decision, we need to take the right steps, and we need to be very intentional with how we bring teams Simple example in a practical way. Month 1, we learn about each other. We make sure teams are communicating. We operate under the same communication channels. We start to overcommunicate updates across the business. Month 2, we start to get a single view on things that are important, whether that's marketing metrics, whether that's new business metrics. Mm-hmm. Whether that's starting to get an understanding of client bases and where cross-collaboration across services can happen. And then month 3, we start to standardize some of those aspects. So what can we achieve? And then we set out another mandate for the next 3 months. And we try not to take on too much and achieve sort of 2 to 3 major things every month, distill it down into kind of these micro goals. And my vision, and we've spent a lot of time, is Within 6 months, you should be able to speak to anyone in our LA office and get basically the same answer. What is Flight Story? What do you do? Why do you exist? Who do you work with? And that's going to require a hell of a lot of work from every party involved, the companies that we're investing in, the people, the teams. And the only way we can achieve that is if we inspire. We're never going to dictate. You've got to inspire people along So, it starts, for me, it starts with transparency, it starts with clarity, a lot of internal communication, and then a big commitment to making this stuff happen.

Leanne ElliottThis is just best practice in action. And you know what, I think what's brilliant, if you're a regular listener, there's probably not much new information there in terms of how Oliver approaches culture and culture integration and culture change. But it's really showing that, that this is what is required at the highest level to really make sure that, that culture works for your business and works for your people and works for your customer and works for you as a leader. And it is about intention, it is about transparency, it is about overcommunication, it is about a big commitment to making this stuff happen. Um, I love it, love it, love it, love it. I mean, I'm not surprised, it's Oliver Yonchev, but you know, it's still, it's cool.

Al ElliottYeah. And I think what else is great is that he's quite— he's kind of open about things not necessarily being perfect straight away. Like he said that he's acquiring these businesses and he said there's, you know, there's going to be some struggles with that. I think that's just really good to be realistic. But what also is cool is that he kind of says that nothing is ever wasted. So his lessons in putting the band together and dealing with egos in his band, well, I bet that helps when you're dealing with M&A and you're dealing with a new senior leader who's coming in to potentially work under you. The idea of just being optimistic. And also this idea of the butterfly mind, I think, where you sort of flick from idea to idea, light bulbs to bands to marketing to football. And people from the outside might go, oh, you just can't, you can't settle for one thing. But actually, that's not the case. It's just you've got lots of different interests and every single thing you learn something from.

Oliver YonchevWhat I've probably come to reflect and learn is that When I started my journey, I was very fulfilled and happy. I've always been an optimistic person, always been a curious person, like to learn, like to try new things. And each of those experiences or life stages taught me something new. And I genuinely believe you steal a piece of all those experiences and they help form your identity and who you are. So my foundations in creative and music really gave me, I believe, some advantages when I went into a commercial environment. And then the exposure and experience I got in a large media owner then gave me advantages when I joined and started business. And then when I went into an agency. So for me, the dots, as disconnected as they may seem when you zoom out, they've all been sort of progressive Progressive steps of me learning some new things, learning about myself, um, and subsequently it's starting a new— starting a new chapter. It's probably— they feel like chapters when I break them down.

Leanne ElliottNothing, nothing is wasted, even the most bizarre things. Nothing is wasted. And I think what I love about what Oliver is saying here is that there's a psychological phenomenon called psychological capital, and it's a key part of maintaining our own personal well-being. And the kind of the elements of that are optimism Um, and self-efficacy, which is like confidence, um, in where you're kind of— what you're doing and what you're learning, um, hope for the future. And then all of this kind of helps build our resilience, and that kind of underpins our, our well-being. So I think it's no mistake, um, I mean, Oliver kind of talked about this kind of tough thinking from his Bulgarian heritage, but I actually think it is this— these kind of constructs of psychological capital that he's working on. You have to work to be optimistic. It's not a innate thing for any of us. And I think what's great as well is that, you know, Oliver explains it, it doesn't always have to be necessarily a direct application of, of that thing that you've learned. You know, each wrong turn, or each idea that's abandoned, or failed execution, lessons can be learned along the way and applied in the future.

Oliver YonchevThese are all learnings from being part of a large organization and doing some things right, but maybe doing some things wrong. saying, well, how would we do it differently this time? It's one of the reasons why second-time, third-time founders are much more attractive propositions to investors, because they've failed many times over and over again. One of our values actually is out-failing the competition. We've got this philosophy that we're quite comfortable out-failing everyone. So, we're always launching new initiatives, but that comes at a cost. Sometimes we lose a little bit of focus. Sometimes we, you know, lose some, you know, we get a little distracted, but we're working on that, working on putting some guardrails around what we're, what our common language is, what we're good at.

Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number 1 management podcast, that's us by the way, and the UK's number 1 marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?

Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioral science to help people do better at work.

Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to Wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)And 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good-looking.

Al ElliottAnd you're not gonna say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number 1 marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s—

Leanne Elliottthe HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

Al ElliottSeamless, seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)We've just done an episode on fake fandom. And how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff, and do some big things about how this affects the worlds of politics, business, and brands as well.

Leanne ElliottIt is, it's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)It can.

Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)I am.

Al ElliottGo and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

Leanne ElliottBut come back.

Al ElliottYeah, come back.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this. So come back.

Al ElliottI'll cut that out.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Keep that in.

Al ElliottSo the 3 main lessons here from Oliver's story, all around people. The first lesson here is finding great people. I asked him, I said, you've got some really smart people in your company, and you've obviously recruited people before who are really smart. How are you recruiting these amazing people?

Oliver YonchevI think foundationally, our thesis on the world is if we can have a very clear mission— and when we started, it wasn't clear. We actually, for the longest time, resisted calling ourselves a marketing and communications communication company. You know, for a good 6, 7 months, we were trying to discover, you know, what opportunities we would take advantage. So we didn't have all the answers, but we certainly understood the culture we wanted to create, a high-performing team that was highly rewarded and wanted to achieve great things. But when I think about our role is to amplify that and tell compelling stories. So whether that's about our work, we do a lot of content marketing. Through various members of the team. And I don't think there's any better advocacy tool than having your people, smart people, represent your ideas, your philosophies, your values, and do that at scale for attracting other smart people, right? So yeah, I can't say we have all the answers when we talk about bringing great people, but we do put a lot of focus in being quite transparent as an organization. We self-promote a lot, and in turn those 2 things help, I suppose, garner the attention of people that either share those ambitions, those values, and, and want to be part of that journey.

Leanne ElliottWhat an incredible soundbite, just what Oliver said. I don't think there's any better advocacy tool than having your people, smart people, represent your ideas, your philosophies, your values, And do that at scale for attracting other smart people.

Al ElliottShe's standing and applauding. Kind of relates to the idea of if you create a great product, then you're going to get— naturally, people are going to gravitate towards it. So Netflix, for example, were really, really clear on they wanted a fantastic product. So they created a manifesto. Which was to attract the best engineers. Now, you might not be making a new video streaming platform, but just by being really product-centric, that also then says we want to have this kind of product be the best, therefore, we want to have the best people. And that just attracts amazing people.

Oliver YonchevI don't know if you've read the Netflix culture document. It's folklore. Effectively, Netflix, I think it's almost a decade ago now, released their culture manifesto. Their foundational principle was that if they hire the best people, and bear in mind, Netflix is a tech and entertainment company, and they felt for them to gain advantage, they needed the best engineers. In engineering, most disciplines, there's a variable between 1 and 5 for between average to good or average to great. So, in, say, marketing, a really good videographer, the difference between good and the world's best might be a variable of 5. In engineering, the difference between average and the best might be 50x. We want to achieve great things. We will hire engineers that can give us potentially those 50x returns. But instead of hiring, we will pay them 50x return. Amazon were known for being a really high-reward, high-paying company, but in turn, they expected so much. Average was not accepted. They actually set in their manifesto that they would happily pay people to quit. This was quite capitalistic. You might say it's not a great culture, but what they derive their values from is their company mission. Their company mission was to transform the way we consume entertainment. That's a big lofty mission when you think of media, how it had existed for so long. For decades, media had kind of existed in one form. They wanted to— they wanted it, had a vision for it to exist in another form, which meant they had to take quite radical views on their culture and their people. And they wrote this, like, 150-page manifesto that was quite controversial, but again, a really good example of letting the company mission dictate how the culture forms.

Leanne ElliottSo, that is the first, the first lesson of People and Culture, how to find great people. The second lesson is keeping great people. So, Oliver believes that the key to keeping great people is to be intentional in how you build your workplace culture. He also thinks that even if it's not the best culture in the world, intention can still play a vital role in engaging some of the best talent in the market. He uses the example of Amazon to explain further.

Oliver YonchevAmazon is not known for having a good culture necessarily, right? Because there are ethical considerations, there are, there are many factors that go in. But what I do like about Amazon I do fundamentally really like their values. So, they have a lot of sort of quite unique folklore that exists within their culture, which is things like day one mentality. One of the world's largest companies and most successful companies tries to retain a day one mentality. And if you think of that as like a value, it shapes the way you behave and what you reward. And as a philosophy, it's actually really powerful. It means that you create a culture of experimentation, you try new things. All the things that typically, as a company gets more challenging as you get larger, they try and retain some of that. So, that's like one example. The other is they fundamentally believe that teams work better in smaller cohorts where you have influence. So, they have the pizza box rule. Where teams should be able to share 2 pizzas, right? Once a team gets bigger than that, it becomes ineffective. So, structurally, that changes how you think about hiring and depth of team and how companies interoperate and how teams work together when you have that kind of philosophy. The other is they ban PowerPoints. So, they reverse engineer a report. So, what do we want the outcome to be. Let's reverse engineer what the post-project report, and that's the business case you submit to get funding. So, there's philosophies that exist in an organization like Amazon that started very early, were very intentional, and that's now shaped how, and undoubtedly fueled a lot of their success. So, I won't say they're a shining example of what we, a typical example of great culture, But they're certainly very intentional and, and set systems around what they believe to be a high-performing culture.

Leanne ElliottOliver also shared the cautionary tale of Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso. What started as an eBay store, the fashion brand grew from £250,000 to £100 million in sales in just 6 years. But 4 years on, Sophia was gone. Nasty Gal filed for bankruptcy and was subsequently bought by boohoo.com for only £20 million. Million. Some say the demise was down to liquidity issues caused by the rapid growth, others that opening physical stores was a mistake. Oliver also cites culture as one of the reasons underpinning its path to bankruptcy.

Oliver YonchevEven had a podcast relatively recently, and I don't know if it's released yet, but I think it will be soon, with one of the founders of an online fashion brand called Nasty Gal. And the founder of that company was championed, and she coined a book or a phrase called Girlboss. And it was a bit of a movement in the US, and it transcended the globe. And it was really about empowering young women. And she's very transparent about the challenges she faced as a young woman and how that fueled her and some of the steps she took to building a business. What happened is that business became very tremendously successful quite quickly. When we say quick in entrepreneurship, we're talking like 5 to 10 years. We say quick, but she became successful over a short period of time. What she said is, off the back of this, her culture was demonized in the public. When the company started to fail, the company was demonized, really demonized for having this toxic culture. You had this celebrated entrepreneur that was demonized for how she treated her employees. And she will acknowledge, and she talks about the thing that she wasn't intentional. She doesn't believe that all the criticism was fair. She just said, we just didn't know what we were doing. We weren't thoughtful. The decisions we made weren't intentional. And as a consequence, the culture that formed, particularly when there are strains and Intentions in a business aren't always perfect. So, I think to go back to, like, the common thread, it's purely the word intention. They're very thoughtful about what they want to be, and then they enforce it. They're actually— they adhere and stick towards whatever those guiding principles are for that organization.

Leanne ElliottIntention, commitment, follow-through, enforcement. People and culture takes work. You have a culture whether you know it or not. That, that is not intentional, that just exists. But in terms of shaping a culture that's going to work for your business, enable its growth, better support your customers, and help your employees thrive, that takes careful consideration, a really clear plan, um, and, and this, this enforcement. And the only way to enforce is to measure it, to know what's going on. Yeah, love it. Oliver?

Al ElliottYeah, you've got such a great way of summarizing ideas very eloquently, but also easy to understand. So lesson number 3 is called Inspiring Great People. Now, inspiring great people comes back to great leadership, because leaders set examples either for collaboration or innovation or ways of working. They know that success is kind of like a team sport. So everyone's got to cooperate. We also know from research that creativity and innovation are always going to thrive in environments where there is diversity of both experience, thought, and every single type of diversity. This has been a key point of reflection for Oliver, and his advice is to embrace and champion diversity.

Oliver YonchevI reflect a lot on probably the difference of the makeup of the team here. I've got a renewed appreciation for bringing together teams of very different backgrounds. And backgrounds in the sense of career experiences. When we first launched FlightStory, we were very geared towards servicing the finance industry. And in doing so, we brought together a lot of consultants and people that had deep-rooted experience in those arenas. And we brought together people from our traditional background that were creative strategists. And what I inadvertently found is that people steal from each other. You know, the great qualities everyone leads in generally will lean into their strengths. But when you bring together different worlds, this sort of clash of experiences, you end up with something that's quite unique. And I started to realize that when we formed the teams and how we were thinking about who should join the business. I have this real conviction around bringing together different experiences and actually It means it's quite difficult to pull up a job spec for certain roles that don't exist. I'll give you a good example. We believe culture matters and community matters, so we're thinking about who's going to be our chief, who's going to be accountable for enforcing culture. And it sounds— those 2 words don't sound, you know, they stand juxtaposed to each other, enforcing culture, but someone who's going to be accountable and responsible for ensuring that we fundamentally as a team behave how we say we should. And we thought, you know, as part of that process, we probably need someone who has a sports psychology background, who's used to understanding how people think, who's used to shaping teams for optimal performance. So that's like one tangible example where we think When we think about org design and who we need in the organization, we're trying to think outside the box of who's going to complement the set of stakeholders and add value to who we have in the business. So, yeah, we think a lot about these things. We make some good decisions, we make some bad decisions, like anyone else. But what we fundamentally are is we're very intentional with these types of things.

Leanne ElliottOr somebody with a business psychology background, Oliver. Oliver, just saying.

Al ElliottYou want to go work for Oliver?

Leanne ElliottWell, no, but sports psychology is all well and good, but I can, you know, maybe look at organizational psychologists as well. You know, they're kind of, kind of their world. And if it is hard to, uh, pull up a job spec, that's called a job analysis, um, which also organizational psychologists such as myself are trained to do. Um, just a thought, Oliver. I'll leave that with you. Leave that with you. Um, but yeah, no, it is cool, isn't it? And I think What's interesting about when we, when we prep these episodes, there are some episodes where we have a very clear question to answer, like 4-Day Workweek, very clear questions we need to answer. So we kind of go in with a structure and, you know, we kind of fit, fit everything around it so we can answer these, these important questions. When we have founders on or individuals, we prep these in a way that just kind of sees where the episode takes us, what the themes are, what we're pulling out, then look at how we can structure it in a way that that perhaps provides a bit of a narrative with some lessons learned as well. And what was really interesting about this, we did exactly this with, with Oliver, and when we kind of came to the end and we were kind of putting the lessons together, or even just ordering kind of what was left into lessons, we had these 3 things: finding great people, keeping great people, inspiring great people. Um, and completely coincidentally, uh, that just happened to mirror our own culture framework here at Oblong. And I think it really just goes to show that culture is a science. People is a science. It has methodology, it has structure, um, it has intent. So yeah, it's even if you're skeptical and go, yeah, right, Leanne, whatever, you totally just engineered that in. I didn't, because that's actually just the science of people.

Al ElliottOne of the quickest ways to innovate and create something really cool or to grow is to not look at what your competitors are doing, but look at what someone in a totally different, um, like sphere is doing. So if you have If you, if you are, I don't know, a plumber, then maybe look and see what dry cleaners are doing. And it's interesting when you get business owners together from different walks of life, you tend to find some really interesting ideas that someone goes, I never would have thought of that in a million years. It's come from somewhere else. Quick aside, the structure of this format of this podcast right now, the format is kind of more like one of those murder sort of podcasts or more like Serial, the podcast.

Leanne ElliottMm-hmm.

Al ElliottUm, than if we would just look at all of our competitors, although we don't really seem competitors, but everyone else in the, um, in the sphere, they tend to do a linear interview.

Leanne ElliottYeah, true, true.

Al ElliottQuestion, answer, question, answer, question, answer. And we do more of the serial thing where we'll get some tape, we'll play it, and then we'll respond to it.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Yeah.

Al ElliottAnyway, so should we finish up with a couple of hot topic views? Yeah.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Is that what you call—

Leanne Elliottyou kids call them hot topic? Um, I don't know, I'm sure that's not what the kids Hot take.

Al ElliottThat's the word.

Leanne ElliottHot take.

Al ElliottIs it hot take? I think it's supposed to— when you, when you say something which is supposed to be like quite controversial, I think.

Leanne ElliottOkay. Okay. Maybe these are hot takes. Let us know, Gen Zs. Let us know if they are hot takes. That would have been a word of the week anyway. Um, so yeah, we couldn't have one of the most forward-thinking business and tech leaders on the show without getting his view on some of the hot topics at the moment. So first of all, our friends Gen Z. We heard a couple of episodes ago in our Gen panel, um, about what Gen Z want from the world of work and how Millennials are also keen to see the disruption of remote, hybrid, and flexible work stick. We also heard about how Gen X led the charge in tech and Boomers are now pioneering what it means to be a modern elder. Um, so, you know, we had to ask Oliver, do you see major differences in Gen Z?

Oliver YonchevThere's 2 trains of thought. If you ask a young person today, they will— and it's probably, this is not a new phenomenon, this is probably past generations— they would say the people before them are out of touch, right? And then if you ask any generation of who came after them, you'd probably say they're entitled, precious. I don't think these are new stories. We just have social media to amplify these stories. narratives on both ends, right? Look, I don't think fundamentally that the differences have changed vastly. What I would say, younger generations have made different choices, and I don't demonize those choices. I think when you start your career, you're usually optimistic, you haven't been beaten by the life stick, you've not maybe faced as much adversity as you do as you progress through your life and such. So I'd say there's a certain naivety to young teams that changes as you evolve and grow. That said, I think naivety, when applied correctly, can be a wonderful energizer in a business. So, for me, the perfect team dynamic is when you have an experienced head sat next to that young, ambitious, at the heart of kind of culture, next to each other, communicating, absorbing, learning from one another. They're wonderful team dynamics. I think there's a place for both. Not easy to do when you think about organizational design and, you know, the things you care about, I care about, to maybe a 19-year-old, maybe wildly different, right? So maybe it's an impossible task to serve everyone and you don't have to. But I do think there's a sweet spot if you can create environments and workplaces that people can start their careers in and be incredibly fulfilled and learn and develop, but also provide fulfillment for people that are more experienced, that are later on in the later stage of their career. But yeah, I think young people have maybe an evolved value set. I think they're a little more optimistic, a little more ideologically driven. I think you certainly, it's the old adage, you get a little more conservative with with age because you maybe have wisdom and experience that you've garnered over time. So there are undeniable differences, but I don't think these are new phenomenons at all. I think it's always existed.

Leanne ElliottA very fair, rounded view there, I think, calling on the aspects of the modern elder, uh, that Carrie so beautifully, um, explained to us a few episodes ago. Uh, my favorite bit though, um, yeah, these people haven't been beaten by the life stick yet. It's so true though, isn't it? I remember, you know, being, being younger And, and going into environments where, you know, I want to change things, like, oh, we could do this and we could do this, and somebody older going, yeah, we tried that, didn't work. Yeah, we tried that, didn't work. And it's really frustrating, but equally, you know, 6 years on, you're like, yeah, no, that didn't work. So, but yeah, I love it, love it, love it, love it.

Al ElliottSo talking revolutionary, I couldn't end a conversation with a company that deals with Web3 and emerging technologies without mentioning AI. As you know, I'm a big fan of AI. Uh, ChatGPT is cool, but AutoGPT. I don't know whether this, this comment's going to age well, but I think it's going to really change things, um, an awful lot. Let's find out in a year's time.

Leanne ElliottYou heard it here first.

Al ElliottWell, maybe not here first, Twitter. Um, but we wanted to ask what Oliver's take was on AI and the future.

Oliver YonchevI think AI is going to revolutionize every aspect of every profession over the next 20 years. I don't think it's going to be immediate. But I think it's comparable to the changes in society that happened because of the internet. If you think of the big meteoric legacy of digitization, it started with the internet. We became interconnected. Then the emergence of commerce was born. We were able to transact and sell things and exchange goods. Underpinning that, then we got better immersive experiences as hardware improved, bandwidth improved, internet speeds improved. We could have pictures and videos, which paved the way for social media. In parallel, you have mobile that's sort of underpinning and created apps. So you have these all the ecosystems that create new business models. And then you kind of end up where we are today, where there's all this emerging technology and this The way I view Web3 or the next evolution of the internet is the conflation of a number of things. I think it's the conflation of technologies built on the blockchain. Purists of Web3 would say our future is permissionless, decentralized, autonomous. It's quite utopic. It cuts out the middleman, it's fairer. That's a good thing. That narrative is no different to the people that evangelize for the internet. This idea of the internet was built on, we get access to information, there's no middleman, the media is less relevant, but they have the same moral evangelical narrative that exists. You have these factors, technologies that I believe are built from the blockchain. You then have immersive digital experiences. This is all the innovation that goes in AR, VR, gaming, just talking about this idea of the metaverse. People have this conflated view that the metaverse is Mark Zuckerberg's version, this clunky forced fun arena where we spend time together. Probably not that. My version of the metaverse is when our digital lives have equal merit to our physical lives. That's not It's not such a leap to say, how much time do we spend online? How much time do we spend consuming digital things? Is it a stretch to say that we will value things in our digital worlds equally as much as the real world? Possible, right? So you start to see that bridge of immersive digital experiences. The third reiteration adjacent to that is what everyone's talking about right now, AI. And AI is not new, right? But what is new is people the rate of exponential change and the rate of application of these large language models. And I have bias because we work in the creative arts. So seeing how transformative these technologies are to marketing is phenomenal. And like, even if you're a skeptic, this idea that you could be twice as efficient now in what you do, meaning you could spend half your time on things that matter, more than administrating, than executional tasks. That's quite compelling, right? That changes industry. Go a step further and say, can machines do it better than us? That can blow your mind. You might not even want to go that far, but ChatGPT-4 now— and take like a profession, I'll go abstract, law, right? ChatGPT-4, 90% of the time will pass the bar exam. That's today. And bearing in mind, these models are the worst they'll ever be. So, when you see something that AI has created or done and you go, wow, that's mind-blowing, just remember, that's the worst it's ever going to be. It's never going to be worse than that. And it's very impressive now, whether that's generative art, whether that's generative video, whether that's these large language models that can make sense of these wildly vast datasets. And then you think of how do all these things come together? Well, actually, we don't know. My favorite topic is the future because you can't prove me wrong today. Maybe I'm wrong in a year or two, but it is interesting and fun to speculate. And you can start to see how these emerging technologies can start to complement one another to create new possibilities, new futures, new opportunities. So yeah, as a business we are very much putting our stake in the future hat of saying, how do we leverage what's available to us today to help companies be better, faster, cheaper, more effective? But also having a view on what's coming next. How can we help companies prepare for this wave of innovation that will undoubtedly have winners and losers? So yeah, that's kind of a space that— and it starts from our standpoint of knowledge. We have to try and understand these things. We have to learn about them. And, um, it's a fun space to be in because it's wild right now.

Al ElliottI love the idea that things can— this is the worst they're going to be. I started using Midjourney, which does AI creation of images, uh, probably about 4 months ago. And now I'm using it. In fact, if you go on our new website, then you'll see that all of the images there are created on Midjourney, and they are like 10, 20, 30 times better, um, than when I first started using it. So yep, I love all All that, I'm 100% on board.

Leanne ElliottAnd, um, if, if we get it wrong, then we'll learn from it and it'll inform our present and our future, and we'll look back and go, nothing's ever wasted.

Al ElliottSo I think that there was a couple of parting words of wisdom.

Leanne ElliottThere are. I mean, we could have spoke to Oliver all day, but he is a very, very busy person. His insights, his energy, they're so inspiring. So before we go, let's have some parting words of wisdom from Oliver to you. First, to our younger listeners.

Oliver YonchevWhat I would like to say to young people, there are some undeniable truths that I think need to— we don't need to be ashamed of. Like, hard work, um, actually sets you up for success. What you work hard at is probably more consequential than hard work on its own. What you choose to spend your time doing, um, will pay dividends. So I think that matters equally as much. But yeah, I think young people have maybe an evolved value set. I think they're a little more optimistic, a little more ideologically driven. I think you certainly— it's the old adage, you get a little more conservative with age because you maybe have wisdom and experience that you've garnered over time. So there are undeniable differences, but I don't think these are new phenomena at all. I think it's always been like that.

Al ElliottSo that's the advice for young people. Anyone who's looking to go into entrepreneurialism, then Oliver also has some advice. I mean, if you're doing anything that is creative or new, then you're always gonna be lonely. You know, you look at anyone who's got 1,000, 2,000 followers on YouTube, there's guaranteed gonna be someone who's in the comments who's telling them how awful their videos are. There's gonna be risk, it's gonna be tough, but you just gotta love it because ultimately you'll getting up every morning and you're doing what you love and you're creating something new.

Oliver YonchevI consider myself very privileged and blessed to have the autonomy I do, to work with people that I like, that I learn from. I never get a— even in the hardest of times, I never get the oh no Mondays here. So, so for me, as much as I can— I say entrepreneurship can be When you're building a business, I think it's so important that you have— that's why I think co-founder and having a founding team, people that you can trust, that can empathize, even entrepreneurial networks and support systems where you can have objective voices. I think that's really important. But ultimately, in a business, when things go well, you get more credit than you deserve. When things go wrong, you know, you you're accountable. Both those 2 things exist, and that can be a lonely place. And business is difficult, right? 90% of businesses fail. If you know the odds, you probably wouldn't do it. But for me, motivation comes from a few things. It comes from, I enjoy what I do, I like the people I'm around, and it's something I've come to learn. I like building things with people that I admire and learn from. And then the last thing is Yeah, I don't get those, those knee-jerk reactions to Monday. So whatever, I still have that drive. I'll continue doing what I'm doing.

Al ElliottWe've just talked about AI. And so AI is potentially going to take— yes, it's going to take some of the lower-level jobs, like perhaps a web design, just a basic web design and that kind of thing. But instead of being scared, be fascinated. Think about the opportunities that are available to you.

Oliver YonchevThere will be a world in the not-too-distant future where I just know what I want. I want a website that looks like Al's website in the color green that does this, this, and this. Can you write me the code for that? How do I then use that code? Can you recommend what I do next? You just need to know what to ask. And if you do that, the generation, the generative art code, images, pictures, videos, these worlds are going to be created for us. I think it's fascinating. I've said I weighed across like a million different things there. Um, as you can tell, I'm passionate about the art of possible.

Leanne ElliottPassionate about the art of possible. I think that is the perfect way to end this episode.

Al ElliottI'm getting that on a t-shirt. I'm gonna go—

Leanne ElliottYeah, I want that on a t-shirt too.

Al ElliottYeah, we get that on a t-shirt with a little light bulb, just to— just as a nod to the very first business that Oliver started.

Leanne ElliottOh, oh, Oh, I just got warm and fuzzy.

Al ElliottDid you?

Leanne ElliottOh, that's so sweet.

Al ElliottWe'll get one, we'll get one printed up and send it to Oliver. I wish I hadn't recorded this now because now I'm gonna have to do it.

Leanne ElliottYeah, you are.

Al ElliottOkay, so just hopefully Oliver hasn't listened this far and I don't have to go and get a t-shirt designed. So next week we're diving more into the employer brand and specifically about building an inclusive brand that respects and celebrates diversity. We're gonna be joined by the absolutely incredible Sonia Thompson, from Inclusion Marketing. Go and have a look at her podcast, search for Inclusion Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. She's not only amazing, but she's also really knowledgeable and just has a way of being able to take that knowledge and just help you understand it really easily.

Leanne ElliottYeah, and she's also just an all-round awesome, nice, lovely person. Um, so yeah, definitely check that out. If you can't wait, check out Sonia Thompson's podcast, Inclusion Marketing. Thank you so much to our incredible guest Oliver Yonchev. It has been such, such a privilege and pleasure to have you on the show. If you'd like to hear more from Oliver or find out more about Flight Story, we will leave you all the links that you need in the show notes.

Al ElliottSo we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.