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The chat with Brent was so full of wisdom and best practices, useful for people at any stage in their career, but particularly for those at the start of their career.

Something that really stood out from our conversation was how Brent emphasised how his early career success came down to starting at a place where he was paid to learn. This as well as the following, were some of the key take aways:

• Centred work around his passions and remains exciting
• Early stage learning as much as possible
• Knowing when is the right time to launch (not too early or too late)
• Choosing the right co-founder (Martha was smart, analytical and a talent magnet) and build the right team

We also spoke about building teams and hiring the right people, and how this can impact the success of the whole company. He suggests hiring people with strengths which make up for your weaknesses, and building a Culture of people who; *love* working together, love the mission and love having fun together doing so. I couldn’t agree more with these statements.

When I asked him how to accomplish the exponential growth he experienced and if he had any lessons for scaling, he told me the following:

1. Focus on building/acquiring the backbone technology
2. Focus on the finance system which is where critical runway lies
3. Figure out what talent you want/need to hire (don’t just hire the “sexy” front-facing talent - needed to focus on the finance system which is where critical runway lies put some of your best people on the most boring projects and then put them back on their fun projects)

When discussing how he survived the dotcom bust, when the lastminute.com share price went down by 95%, Brent highlighted how his team got through this:

• focused the entire team on the customers
• Keeping team morale up (most challenging and most important)
• not getting distracted by headlines of doom
• Knowing what to measure (KPIs) to indicate where to double down

Brent co-founded Founders forum, an organic community for entrepreneurs. Brent saw this real need to mix the next generation with breakthrough ideas to inject that energy by mixing them with the established CEOs.

We also touched on how essential diversity of the team is. I have been so blessed to work with people from so many background and know how important this is for a company.  To help promote this further, Brent has been involved in initiatives including:

• Male Champion of Change - very data driven approach and learning from other CEOs and what they have done and passing that along
• Co-founded AccelearateHER to help the pipeline of women talent and build a community to succeed and connect them with men

If you haven’t listened to the full episode yet, it’s really worth the listen and has so much valuable content within it. I really recommend it!

Let me know your thoughts. Id love to hear from you!

Ann