The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

In this week's episode of The Diary of a CEO, I chat to Dame Stephanie Shirley also known as "Steve".At the age of 5, Steve fled from Nazi persecution in her hometown of Dortmund and arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport, luckily escaping the...

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I really don't know where to start. Do you know what? I genuinely believe the story you're going to hear today, if you choose to listen, might just be one of the most mind-blowing, remarkable business stories that I think I'll probably ever get to tell. My guest today is nothing short of astonishing. And you know, when I do these intros, of course, my job is to market this podcast so that you listen. But I think this is more me begging you to listen because in all my years in business, I've not heard a story quite like this. Today's guest is Dame Stephanie Shirley. She fled a Nazi regime at five years old and came to the UK with absolutely no family. No friends, no parents, no nothing. And one might expect

someone in that circumstance to fall by the wayside. But Stephanie had other plans. With just six pounds in her pocket, she founded a female-first software company, which was ahead of its time in almost every respect. It allowed its 90% female workforce to work flexibly from home. It pioneered software that would change the world. And all of this in a male-dominated world that was the 1960s. Stephanie's company became a multi-billion dollar company. I'm not sure if you're hearing me, a multi-billion dollar company, right? And she founded this company in the 1960s when women weren't even allowed to establish a company without their husband's signature. The company is a software company, again, a heavily male-dominated industry,

and it was sold for 2.3 billion pounds. She might just be the most successful female entrepreneur this country has ever seen. And she's now 86 years old. So I traveled across the country to go and meet her at her home in Henley, to sit down with her and uncover her truth, to peer into her diary, and to ask her the things that we all want to know. Wow. Without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO.

I hope nobody is listening. But if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Dame Stephanie Shirley, I think the first question I have to ask you because of a few things that I read online is, what do you want to be called today? Well, I'm always called Dame Stephanie if you're prepared to do a bow or curtsy if you're a girl. But if you're not prepared to do that, then you just call me Steve. Steve. And I've been called Steve for many, many years simply because Stephanie didn't get any appointments when I wrote letters under the name of Stephanie.

Nobody wanted to see me. Because I date from the days when women were not expected to do serious things, perhaps run a little cat shop or something like that. But in the 50s and 60s, women were not expected to run a financial services company or a software house or anything. Really what I call serious business. Your story is is tremendous and it goes back you know a long way so I I didn't know where the best place to start would be and typically with with with the guests that we have on this podcast I kind of have

an idea of where the most relevant or pertinent place to start is but with you I wanted you to tell me where where your story should start and what the sort of most to start is. But with you, I wanted you to tell me where your story should start, and what the sort of most relevant beginning is. Well, the film that's being made of my book is focused very much on the years in business, and there were 40 of those. But especially in the early days, it was predominantly female oriented. It was a policy to use female. It was one of the earliest high-tech companies set up in 1962. And then if we talk about, you know, if we think about what motivates me

to work in the way that I do, because work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else. I love my work, and I think you do as well. And it's simply that that workaholism, and I know it's not fashionable to talk about that any of these days, but really it dates from my traumatic childhood, and that has motivated me because my life was saved from the Holocaust, really motivated me today, as it was 70, 80 years ago, to make sure that mine was a life that was worth saving. So the Kindertransport,

which was the rescue mission that brought me out of Nazi Europe, is still current as far as I'm concerned, because it's what drives me. What can I do today? What is it that I can offer at my age with my skills to make the world a better place? And was that the reason why? Because, again, a lot of the things I'm going to say are incredibly naive, right, for obvious reasons, because I was

born in 92 um and going back to the very start of your entrepreneurial endeavors was the reason you started your business because of that because you felt that you needed to do something with your life that because it was saved or was it because you saw a problem in the world that you felt you could solve? It was very much a feminist issue that I'd been patronized as a Jew. And I was not going to be patronized as a woman. And at that time, women were not allowed legally to do certain things. You couldn't work on the stock exchange. You couldn't take out a higher purchase agreement. You couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane.

And I couldn't even open the company's bank account without getting my husband's signature. You needed mail authorization. So women were very much second-class citizens. And I began to get very fed up with that and was really battling for equal pay and opportunities and fighting to be allowed to do what I wanted to do. So that was the original motivation. It was very much for women. It was a social business. I did not go into business to make money.

I went into business to offer opportunities for women. And why you, though? Why not me? I mean, that's the classic question, Stephen. The reason I asked that question is i'm like so many people were exist existed in that same environment of of you know gender oppression shall i say i'm trying to understand why it was you that took on that fight and why you felt you had the confidence to take on because maybe it is something to do with with the kinder

transport story um because there's a high proportion of British companies, at least something like 7%, are founded by immigrants. And you think, why should that be? And it's partly because we're subject to discrimination, perhaps, partly because we can bring something from one country to another with a higher possibility of success, but also I think because we've become very cussed, driven people. And if somebody says no, the more they say no, the more I want to do it.

And I read that you were adopted from your... Fostered. Fostered from your biological parents. What role did that, do you think that event played in your later life and also your entrepreneurial journey? Well, in my later life, the Holocaust is slipping from human memory. So in the last few years, I've tried to do more about talking on National Holocaust Memorial Day and things like that.

But I'm not Jewish in culture. I've lost anything that ever was Jewish in my family. And I'm really the child of my foster parents in all but birth. And so I'm pretty traditionally English. I'm a patriot. I really love this country with a passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can feel. And that is a driver for me. And in those early days, it almost boggles my mind, you know, because in my industry, in the technology industry, in the social media industry, there's still conversations around how hard it is for women to break through. I mean, if you look at the boards of the big sort of tech technology firms, it's still completely dominated by men. So it boggles my mind how hard it must have been. It was a very young industry. I mean, I think it was a virgin territory. So that in the early days,

women during the war, for example, World War II, were working in the encoding at Bletchley Park, which was the pre-runner of software as I know it. And it was a very vibrant industry. The excitement would look banal to you. We got excited because we got a photocopier, a photocopier, and it printed white on black. Everything was so different, and software was given away free with the hardware. So the idea of writing software and

then selling it was quite alien so we were breaking new ground and that really drove us what was the outside impression of um of you as a as a female people laughed They really did. They laughed at my crusade for women. They laughed at the idea of selling software. It's free. Can you sell air? And in a way that, again, I'm a very proud person and I didn't want to be ridiculed. And when things got really tough where somebody else might have given up,

I knew that my success opened the door for a lot of other women. And within a few years, we got 300 staff, 297 of whom were women. You know, it was very much a crusade. And that lasted until 1975 when equal opportunities legislation came in in this country and it was not legal to have a pro-female policy so my woman's company had to let the men in and you started with i read six pounds yes but i it was financed by my own labor you know for years I didn't draw even expenses um so it was a very slow burn it's almost uh hard to fathom how because of the entrepreneurial world that I've grown up into where you raise millions and millions of pounds

and you know you before you've got a profit or really a product that fits the market and you inflate the team and then the hope is to sell it within three years or something yeah no no no i definitely wanted to build and not a corporation but i wanted to build this culture the sort of um organization that i wanted to work in that i wanted to live in that i thought was right for people in a holistic way. And what do you think of the world of work today? Well, I'm surprised it hasn't changed more because some of the things that I was doing about job shares, about co-ownership, about paying people with a cafeteria of benefits, about real opportunities, about team working. These things are still being talked about. And I was doing it 50 years ago.

So in a way, I'm disappointed that it hasn't moved faster, but it's moving in the right direction, at least. And so what happened to your business then? You started that business and then was it 20 years from when you founded the business to when it sold or was acquired? No, it was 45 years before it sold. 45 years. It's a long history. So it's quite different.

I mean, it employed 8,500 people when it was acquired, a quarter owned by the staff so i was doing lots of things in an entrepreneurial way like getting it into share ownership getting share ownership embedded into the organization and that really underlined the sort of rather collegiate way of working that we always had because with our female start we worked as teams we worked multitasking we worked we we liked each other we may not have been in the same office because we all worked from home but we liked each other we were friends it was a team we were going to do it you work from home yes all of us i've still worked from home it's really uh this is

becoming popular now yeah the model of remote working. But, I mean, that's what IT allows you to do. We had in our application forms, which were fairly traditional, but we actually asked, do you have access to a telephone? Not do you have a telephone, do you have access? It was a different world. But the skills that we used were intellectual skills, coding skills, pattern recognition skills, and people skills.

And did you teach yourself to code? Yes, it was before the days of coding books. It's really, really fascinating. It's almost, it's... It's only one generation back. We forget everything that was revolutionary in my time, you take for granted. What you're doing now will be thought of as quite naive in 50 years' time.

Sure, and it's really fascinating because of the industry. And it's such a male, you know, Silicon Valley, if you go to Silicon Valley, it's such a male-dominated place typically. And technology as a pursuit is so male-dominated. So the prospect or the thought of being able to create a company worth, what, billions from that era, which was... We finished up at $2.8 million. Blimey, it's a lot of money. What do you do with that much money like i mean

you know i'm glad you asked that no i mean like so this is normally a question i i come to a bit later on but what has been the impact of financial uh not even financially that much financial um wealth on you in terms of happiness and possibilities? I don't think wealth in any way is correlated with happiness. What it gives you that is pleasant is choice, choice of how to live. And I think I've kept my feet on the ground because a lot of wealthy people start living at a different level and are still worried about money because can they afford a bigger yacht or whatever it is. To me, my feet was kept on the ground because our only child was learning disabled.

And so there were a lot of things we couldn't do if we were going to have a family life with him. And it was quite clear that that's what both of us wanted but um forgotten your question i said just about wealth and and what what that enables for you in terms of happiness and possibilities and you know because so many people including me when i was um broke growing up um just almost fantasized about the day that I would get money. What would you do with it? I mean, if you'd asked me when I was 16 or 18, I would have said I would have bought a Lamborghini, a big house.

And then I would have been exponentially just happy all the time, like a permanent smile. But it doesn't work that way at all. It doesn't work that way, no. But I'm one. What it has given me is a lifestyle that suits me in retirement, because I did retire at 60, in that I now enjoy learning to give my money away wisely.

So I've turned into an ardent philanthropist. I really enjoy it. That's what I do. I try and do it as a venture philanthropist, really thinking about projects, thinking about things and starting in an entrepreneurial way, three charities and taking them again to sustainability. Now, the first charity took me 17 years to get financially and managerially independent of me. The second one, I am a learning person, only took me five years.

The third one, only two years. But, you know, it's like running a business, except that the metrics are different. And what were some of the lessons that you would impart to young women that are trying to make it in their own sort of endeavours or careers or as entrepreneurs today that you learned through your journey that you think are still sort of relevant today obviously i know that the story of you you know saying your name was steve um so that people i

think we all have to dissemble a little bit sure and put the best foot forward and any way of getting through the door is important so if my name my name if I'm Shirley, and it's 2020 as it is today, what advice would you give to me as a female entrepreneur who's setting off on my journey to make it in this world? It's much the same as the advice I would give to any young man, to you as Stephen, and that is to get into an area that you really enjoy, get trained in it so that you are up to speed, get retrained so you're really at the leading edge and know what the sector is all about, and then just take a risk. I think a lot of people

just are not prepared to take that risk. And it is a risk. Most new companies fail. Most new projects fail. But you can always start another one. People don't like risk, though, do they? I do. I have a very low boredom threshold, and I like to, I mean, I sometimes say when people are thinking about jobs, to apply for something that is so risky that you have that frisson of fear about it. That's the one to go for.

Why is that? Because you'll never get bored. You know it's going to stretch you. And you're going to let, I guess it's a growth opportunity. Yes. It's terrifying to some degree is there um why do you think that the world hasn't changed fast enough and because it's it's so fascinating for me to hear that a lot of the things that you espoused back back then remote working flexible working shared ownership of corporations corporations, and even giving your personal wealth to your team.

These are concepts which we're, as employers, just kind of wrestling with and getting to terms with today. Maybe every generation does that because people are intrinsically selfish. And I think today's culture is very much me, me, me. So anyone that goes outside that is really treading on not virgin ground, well-trodden ground, but nobody really knows what happens. And your book, I was very, very fascinated about it, particularly because...

Did you find it honest? Everything that you've done, I found honest. I was literally watching your TED Talk in the car on the way here as well which was fascinating as well the book is fascinating to me um for a number of reasons the main reason is because I'm in the process of writing a book how are you tackling it uh so I took myself to a jungle in Indonesia on my own because it's it feels like it would be impossible to write a book whilst I'm running the business because it's just constant. So I took myself to a jungle in Indonesia and I sat by the lake for about two weeks. And I made good progress there with a clear head over New Year's and Christmas when no one would really be bothering me anyway.

You physically wrote yourself. Physically wrote it. I'm about 40%. No, I dictated. Okay. I'm about 40 percent in when you wrote this book were there things that you found out about yourself in hindsight or dots that you connected because you wrote the book yes there certainly were and then the whole concept of

of letting go letting go of the rancor of my childhood to start each day afresh. The whole concept of letting go of the company once I'd lost control of it, you know, at the time I found it extremely difficult. Tell me about that. Well, I'd always been the boss. I'd made it, I'd created it, and I was the boss. I'd made it, I'd created it, and I was the boss. And gradually, through co-ownership and acquisitions, my share of the company dropped. For one time, it was 95% or something, and then we dropped and I finished up with 5%. But when it dropped below the majority shareholder,

I was still the major shareholder, but not a majority shareholder. I was still the major shareholder but not a majority shareholder. People's attitude changed. There were professional managers running it now. They're the ones whose views were taken into account. And I found that a bit like, I think I mentioned it in the book, King Lear who, once he gives his kingdom away, sorry, this is Shakespeare, maybe you don't know. No.

Lucy. You know, once you've lost control of something, you can't necessarily get it back. That's really, I think, relevant to every entrepreneur, especially entrepreneurs these days who raise a lot of investment very quickly and find themselves at the mercy of venture capitalists and those kinds of things um well you see while you've got 51 you're not vulnerable to that at all you don't have to

but once you've lost that then other people's decisions and we floated at a time where i wouldn't have floated but but that was pressure from investors and stakeholders they obviously wanted to capitalise. When you look back over your professional business career, what are the things that you wish you did differently? And I ask this question because I think it's going to help me. This is a very selfish thing. I think in many respects at the start of my professional business career,

and there's a lot of lessons that I'm learning, which I wish I didn't have to learn without being big-headed i really don't regret much i made a lot of mistakes um but i don't regret things because whatever i do i do to the best of my ability i get myself. I spend enough time on it. And so I can't do more than my best. And if it doesn't succeed, it doesn't worry me. I don't look back and say, oh, if only I'd done this. There were some very classic mistakes that I made because I thought I knew better,

and that was to replicate our success in the UK, first of all in Scandinavia, then in Benelux, and thirdly in the States. And none of those really took off. They were more trouble than they were worth. But what did take off was India. And we started off, well, I started off writing theoretical papers about exporting software to India because there was a workforce there in short supply. And eventually we had half our people in India,

and they were very highly skilled. So you never quite know what you've got to be opportunistic about things. So we tried that, it doesn't work. I'm a scientist. If something works, I do more of it. If something doesn't work, I do something else. I still am trying to put my finger on where this level of confidence and conviction came from,

because from what I know about the past it it would have been so tremendously difficult for a um for a black entrepreneur for um a woman entrepreneur um to to go out an industry which was dominated by typically by white men and and and i'm really trying to understand where the confidence, where the conviction came from. I don't think it was confidence. I think it was just sheer guts. Guts.

I was not confident I would be petrified going into some of the presentations that I was doing. I would be physically sick sometimes. But what I had was determination and resilience that you know if somebody knocks me down i pick myself up pressure myself down and put a smile on my face and go ahead maybe that's the immigrant thing well i think it's a characteristic of entrepreneurs that people remember us for our successes but actually what epitomizes the entrepreneurial drive is our ability to cope with failure.

What's the most worthwhile thing that you think you've done over the last 70 years? The most worthwhile? Probably taking the company into co-ownership. Right. You made a lot of people very wealthy. Yes, I also acted as a role model, not only for women, but also for co-ownership, a lot of people. I read somewhere that you made 70 people millionaires.

Yes, I'm proud of that as well. It's pretty staggering. Puts a lot of pressure on me with my team. But I do think that if you share the team, you've got a smaller proportion of a larger cake, which is how people explained it to me, because I was sort of quite, I didn't really want to let it go.

And your philanthropic endeavours these days, which one are you most proud of? It's probably a tricky question to answer, but is there one particular philanthropic endeavour that you've created or funded that you think that's the thing that i'm most proud of well i've taken three charities in the autism field um to sustainability one of them cost me most in in human terms one of them cost me most 30 million in in sheer five years of my life. But the most strategic one is the last one,

and it shows, I think, that I'm learning because it's a research charity. The one you might be interested in, though, is I co-founded the Oxford Internet Institute, which that was in the year 2000. It actually opened in 2001. And that concentrates not on the technology of the internet, but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues of the internet. And I'm very proud of that, actually, because it's a way in which I've been able to contribute to the sector long, long after I was

technically competent. And even that's somewhat ahead of its time. Yeah, I think so. Because, you know, even, you know, even 2020 we're in now, which is almost 20 years later, and the ethical implications and the social... We're just starting to nibble at them. Yeah. You talked about the autism charities that you've supported and created.

I understand that you had a son. Yes. And that's really the... Oh, that's the motivator. The motivator, right. Yeah. How did that change your life? Oh, phenomenally.

My life has gone in a completely different direction. I spend my time now with schools and support services and learning disabled people and academe and so on, quite, quite different to how I might have imagined. I could see me when I was a child, I would have liked to have been an academic. I've never went to college. You haven't either, I think. No.

No. Maybe college sort of knocks some of the spark out of people. I'm not sure. It would appear that way to some degree. I don't mean to be offensive to anybody but i but i typically think that learning is i mean learning in that context is incredibly good for um information but maybe not so good for creativity because you're you know i we would i mean nobody really knows where innovation comes from but i'm sure um the universities don't encourage innovation they encourage

rigidity they encourage um perfectionism and i i would think that if you're taught how to think to that's that's a bit of an issue we were saying that in my business in any way our naivety is responsible for um our best work or our best ideas so not knowing how it was supposed to be done gave birth to things that were considered special and i when i when i think about innovators that are exist in the world like elon musk and others um it's actually their naivety elon musk talks a lot about how when he started the first his first electric car everybody told him that you couldn't make fast electric cars affordable because they couldn't make electric cars full stop yeah and and those that were incredibly expensive couldn't go

far and went fast and went sexy and so he broke it down to these fundamentals he rejected convention and thought well if you buy the metal on the metal exchange, and these kind of like, yeah, you can build a new, and that requires some level of naivety, or, you know, the same sort of guts, I guess, that you've described. Because I didn't have first class education, nobody told me what one wasn't supposed to do in business. So I just went ahead and did it. Yeah, that's's true and that's that same naivety which there must be quite a fine line between being a genius

and an idiot do you know what I mean I guess that's how it ends I guess that's how people decide I'm really curious you know you've got a retrospective clarity on business

and life and what matters that I haven't got but do you read business books I do and I'm naturally curious yeah so I'm I'm really intrigued as to what you think I might not know because it's an unknown unknown to me of course so well you've got a big smile on your face and I wonder whether you yet know the sort of tragedies that are going to hit you when you're responsible for a lot of staff. You have a death, you have an illness, you have breakaway groups,

you have all sorts of things that are really hurtful to you as an individual. And have you gone through that sort of experience yet? I haven't. Well, long may it be in the future, but I'm sure that is... What do I need to know about those experiences and how to that you are resilient that you know you you don't have to go down under that that um there are ways you know if you can't go through something you can go under it or around it or over it or go elsewhere i mean you know if if um business doesn't take off there are other things that you can do and that gives you the confidence

to sort of face what's the worst that can happen i can deal with this and resilience i guess is built like muscle in the gym by repeat uh survival i guess of yes but it's also basic character, I think, that, you know, you've got to have good health and energy. I learnt to be healthily selfish after a bit, to actually look after my own well-being and not just health, but probably mental health in that not to let things get me down because I find business very tough. It's nice looking back on it, you know, and everybody's patsy on the back and says, how terrific.

Other people did it, but what did I do? I'm a leader, not a real manager. And you talk about being selfish there. What does that look like practically? Learning to say no, because you get a lot of demands on you, and just learning to say no. because you get a lot of demands on you. Just learning to say no. Spending time on yourself. Spending care and attention, giving care and attention

to your family and your nearest and dearest, rather than just everything to the business. One of the things that you mentioned earlier was about tragedy and about death and those things. You you asked if they had stripped like struck struck me yet i think i'm somewhat haunted by this idea that someday one of my parents is gonna um is gonna it's gonna pass away and i will suddenly realize in that moment that i misprioritized what was important because i know that i'm giving everything to my business now and it's fine if it just turns out to be a part of your life but if for whatever reason it

then becomes a whole part of your life then you do self-think my goodness I didn't spend enough time with my parents I wish I'd done this or had more children or whatever and do you think those things do you think you wish you'd spent more time with your parents or your certain family members that aren't around anymore? I don't think any parent is happy with how they've brought up their children. In my case, it's just one child. But there are decisions that I took that I would take again in the similar circumstances. But I think it's worth contemplating some of those issues

and you do know that your parents are going to die and the chances are they will die before you and to actually think what's the worst that can happen supposing you had a phone call now of a death how would you react? And if you can face that then you may change the way your life goes, or you may be even more determined to continue on the path that you're doing. I mean, I love what I do.

And I think, especially at 86, I'm so lucky to have something to get up for each morning. But other people don't want to live like I do. So it's a very personal choice. The next point in my diary this week is about the podcast sponsor, which is Boost by Facebook. They are a dedicated one-stop shop for entrepreneurs, for CEOs, for small businesses, job seekers, and anybody with ambition

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obsessed and I think I'm probably not the most social person. And I think if people really understood the true extent of like my personal obsession with what I'm doing in my business, they would probably describe it as an illness. But some of it may come from you, but some of it is the demands of the business. I mean, I used to feel that the business had so many demands on me.

I was absolutely crouched under this heavy load that I was carrying. And was absolutely, you know, crouched under this heavy load that I was carrying. And then a few years later, you learn to delegate a bit more, things have gone, you had a couple of good things happen, and it all starts to be much more fun. And then something else happens, you know, you've got a breakaway group. And I mentioned that because I found that very debilitating. What was that? A group of staff who, knowing the business plans of my business, decided to break away and progress it without the overheads

and the baggage of the past. So they started off with a fresh piece of paper. And so I lost a lot of staff. I lost certain contracts were put at risk. And I found that pretty depressing. But again, you learn to deal with it. And it's just the way the business goes. I'm surprised that you're writing a book yet, because I would have thought it was so early on,

or is this just chapters one and two? It's not actually heavily about my business story. The book is, in essence, talking more about the journey from being 12 years old and being this broke kid that wanted to get successful and wealthy and whatever else because my family were bankrupt and we didn't have any money ever to going on that journey of believing that I would become super happy if I just managed to achieve these things I wrote in my diary which was I wanted to be a millionaire before I was 25 you set that as an actual target so I can show you the piece of paper it says four goals before I'm 25 and i wrote this

when i was 18 i want to be a millionaire i want a range over to be my first car didn't have a driving license never driven in my life i wanted to have a girlfriend a long-term girlfriend because again my the toxic relationship between my parents made me despise relationships and the last thing was i wanted to work on my body image because i was incredibly skinny and short um and so it's just really the journey from there to getting to so it's more about confidence and growing growing up and just realizing that everything I thought was really wrong and and also having the self-awareness to suddenly realize why I wrote that I wanted a million quid in a fast car and how wrong I was upon getting those things we would still like to have some of those things. I mean, but for different reasons, right?

For much more intrinsically motivated reasons. Before it was because... That's what everything... I thought maybe Jasmine in school would date me if I had a range. And the reason I'm writing it while I'm young is because I think that empowers the message a little bit more being able to say that when I'm 26 or 27 two other 26 and 27 year olds is much more powerful than I think in that moment so it was not the perfect timing and it's not that book it's not this book no um it's just

a message really to to younger audiences about um understanding so the fact that it's about business is almost incidental to your growth pattern completely yeah so you wouldn't market it as a business i wouldn't say it was a business book no and i don't think the publisher would say that either it's more about inspiration inspiration from like a young life yeah and um you'd i that's why i said i know i don't know everything now i know this because and the reason i know i don't know everything is because i thought i knew everything when i was like 25 and then 24 and 23 and you and you change so drastically that's why i find it i was so keen to come here and meet you because the wisdom you have is is would be i mean there's

nothing i could do to pay for such wisdom but i mean this is one way of trying to get some of it it's you know coming here and asking you questions so yeah on that point of family it's um it's something that i think a lot about um i also i also understand the importance of really being mission orientated because where am i trying to get to what sort of a person am i trying to be exactly because i mean that's what keeps you going for 30 40 years i'm guessing right having that genuine purpose behind what you're doing i'm always sorry for people who don't have a purpose my purpose has changed several times in my life but i've've always had a purpose, building up the company. And what were your purposes across the years?

How did they change? I think, like you, first of all, I wanted to get out of poverty. And it was clear, presumably from what people told me, that learning and education was the best way out of poverty. So I was very keen to do well at school. I was very keen to go to university, which I didn't manage. And that was a dream that was put on hold. Now I've got honorary degrees in Cambridge and goodness knows what.

But they don't really give me a lot of pleasure because life has moved on. What I want now is a role in the philanthropic field, the feeling that I have made the world a better place. And that is pretty strong. There's always things that you can do, always ways in which you can cut costs by 10%. Always. And when you get out of bed these days,

what's your typical day like now? Quite a lot of time spent at this desk because I find going out, I don't travel a great deal now. Went to Europe once last year, I think. But I try and pace myself so that I do the things that I want to do and don't get stuck with a lot of charge. So, you know, I have people that do my accounts and people who do my look after the house for me. And I have a very easy life, except when I'm sitting usually alone at my desk,

which is where innovation comes from. I'm sure it's a solitary activity. Everything else is teamwork, but the innovation comes from one individual, one spark, and you capture it. So true. Very true. Consensus doesn't really come up with, doesn't produce innovation, does it?

And yet all the time we're teaching young people to work as teams because you need these complementary skills to do most things. It's almost quite, yes, it's against the professional narrative for one person to come up with the idea and tell the others what the idea is i've found in my own organization that working in really small teams so i might have an idea and then pulling together like three or four people to develop to develop it at pace if we

go to 15 people 20 people you know nothing happens what i found very disappointing was i i went into software because i really do find it fascinating. And in the early days, you needed mathematics to do it as well, which is totally and utterly absorbing once you get lost in the mathematical algorithms. Technology was what I wanted to do. And you start off one person, two persons, five persons. And very, very quickly, you're having to delegate the bit that you really love, the software.

And I got landed with the tax, the human resources, the financing, the dealing with HR issues. I mean, that happened so quickly. And that's a shame because the motivation then has to come from something else. And that happens in a lot of businesses. I think it's pretty much happened in mine. Good thing it must do. Where the founder probably has a very unique skill, and then in order to not be a bottleneck to the growth of the business,

they have to move out of the way and delegate to other people. Something I definitely struggled with, delegation. And I mean, at the scale you were at with 8,000 people. So you start to be like a corporate person. You know, you're learning to discuss the quarterly results and it's such a bore. And what do you think of entrepreneurship these days? Because in our culture now, it's like a bore and what do you think of entrepreneurship these days because in our in

our culture now it's like this somewhat rock star career choice where it's over like tremendously glamorized and people don't talk a lot about the the cost whether that's an emotional or mental health or you know physical costs whatever it might be people don't talk enough about that and part of the reason i started this podcast was because I wanted to shine a bit of a light on the non-glamorous. But you see, who is going to let you publicise the failures? You know, we might glance and comment about various failures that we've had,

but by instinct, we're always promoting not only today's success, but what do you want to do tomorrow and the day after? Was there ever a moment when you were stuck building your business where you thought that you were finished? Yes, yes. And I can remember sitting in our living room, actually rocking with some sort of fear of what am I going to do?

What can I do? What can I do? Because something had happened? If it's a recession and I was going out of business, basically, I'd got to the stage of selling personal items to get money to keep us going. So that's part of the cost as far as I was concerned. And you will have comparable costs in different ways.

Was there ever a moment where you wished you could trade your entrepreneurial, obsessive, rocking-in-your-chair life for a more blissful ignorance of being... There's a lot to be said for ignorance. Do you know what I mean? Yes. If you didn't even know

about the entrepreneurial lifestyle and you could just you know come to work at nine and leave at five and then no i i have this very low boredom threshold it would really be awful i remember at one stage i had a beast of a boss actually um and he he gave me tasks that I didn't like, and basically I wasn't trained or competent to do so. And so I was time watching. I got to get through from nine to, desperately trying. And life was so, the black dog was sort of hanging around you. I don't want that.

And what age was that? How old were you then? 30. 30. No, I had my child then earlier than that mid-20s mid-20s what would you say to somebody that's in a job now that that they despise because they've got a boss get out get out get out well what if they say to you, they say, you know, but I've got a mortgage to pay and I've got this. So you've got a mortgage to pay. And they say, so I feel like I can't leave because my mortgage and I've got this kid to pay for and my car. Yeah, I mean, there obviously are situations where it's very difficult to make a career change. But I think the younger you are and the fewer

responsibilities you have, the easier it is to make a free choice for you that's right for you now. Now, you may look back in 10 years time and say, I wish I'd thought of something else. But you do have a free choice. Even in the context of all those sort of practical obligations, you think you have to get out. You have to find a way out. You have to not give up the fight of finding a way out. Well, you mustn't give up the fight, must you? Otherwise you really are finished. I just find that topic very interesting

because a lot of people that message me will say, I'm miserable, but... It's worth it because look at my nice car, my nice home. But I'm almost pinned down because of all these obligations, all these responsibilities. A lot of wealthy people still get pinned down by changing a lifestyle to a level where, again, they're having to think about, spend time with their finance people.

We've just taken a little tour through your lovely home here, and it's just filled with such beautiful art. And typically, when you think about software and technology and those things you don't think those people are so into art and that was quite surprising to me because i don't know what i was expecting but um do you understand the i guess the naive assumption i made there was that? Well, art is patterns and different senses. You've got sight and smell and hearing. My husband's more keen on music, and I like music, but, I mean, he's the one that really knows about it.

But I feel as if I'm hungry if I don't see good art, and I like the contemporary work. I also liked op art. Maybe I got into the contemporary art through op art, which is this sort of cubist. Did your love for art manifest itself at all in your professional life? I don't think so, really. I used to put works of art into the into the business i don't

think other people appreciated them very much but i thought it gave a different dimension to the business i read i read that you've donated all of your art to um paintings in hospitals in hospitals yeah incredibly generous well it we were talking about how difficult it is to do if you have responsibilities. It's very much easier. Our son is dead. There's nothing, you know, what else would I do with the money? Could leave it to the ISPCA, but I'd much rather spend it

in like a venture philanthropist and really thinking what that needs doing. And I could make that into that. And what are you planning to do with your wealth when you go outside of that? It all goes to charity. Charity. Yeah.

And that also gives it quite a nice atmosphere because people are very sycophantic with people who are known to be wealthy. And it's quite clear. Everybody knows it's going to charity. It's going to the research charity. And it's decided. It's a pretty interesting phenomenon that, you know,

philanthropy tends to take place later in people's lives. Do you think that's the correct way round? Even for someone like me, I try and, you know, I remember one day I asked myself, I said, if I could have over the last five years of building my business, maybe saved five people's lives, would that have been a more worthwhile pursuit than building? And what did you decide?

I decided that because I poured into myself, I will have more to pour out for others later, if that makes sense. Most people in your position do make that type of decision that they're saying, I'm going to spend a portion of my life, part of your whole being, and that you're always thinking in terms of, what is that person doing in the street? Why are they not in a hostel? Why is he not in work? You start really thinking all the time, well, I could make that little one happen, not just make a lot of money. then and on your book a little birdie told me that this was being made into a movie indeed yes um it's only taken everything in business takes a long time it's only taken what six years to get to this stage we thought they were going to start

actual filming this year but i don't think they will i think it's going to be 2021 but it's such fun to think of it being going through another artistic process really it's uh it's my it must be mind-boggling for you as a an entrepreneur to know that your life is going to be made into a movie wouldn It would be lovely, wouldn't it? Yes. Looking forward to it. I keep saying, though, get it soon. I want to see it happen. I want to. And you know who it's being produced by? Yes, we have Damien Jones as the producer. And he did Lady in the Van.

And he did The Iron Lady. So I'm in good company. That's incredible. Really, really really really incredible i can't if you know knowing your story as i know it it will make it such a brilliant i hope it will yeah i think some of it is social history as well because with the emphasis on um the years the early years in business when there was this 100 female companies i'm struggling to make a mark in the world it's almost like the suffragettes of entrepreneurship in some yeah in some respect what can we do as employers to correct the social sort of injustices as as they relate to gender inequality and such

today what more what more should we be doing we've seen the rise in this Me Too movement, which has shot a lot. Yes, it's made quite a difference. It's made quite a difference because people are now aware that women are coming forward and other minorities because women behave as a minority or have been, but they're now coming forward when things are not acceptable and people are listening to them. But we still have a long way to go.

I think the businesses also are learning that it's not just the bottom line, that it's not the only metric that matters, but that they need, their branding depends on how people view them, their employment practices, their corporate social responsibility, the way in which they source their materials. These are things that customers are interested in. And so it does go to the bottom line. And that is a big change. Now you do your social marketing and branding. It's very equivalent to some of the charitable work. and as you say that the world is um i've seen the world changing even in my lifetime because once upon a time corporations were like

black boxes and you couldn't see inside all you saw was what they produced now we have to be all transparent yeah because i mean social media has played a huge role in that because all of your employees have access access to the Internet and they can say whatever. They can post a photo of whatever's happening. They can write a testimonial about you online. So internal company culture has now become brand. As you say, brand is the bottom line. Say you had a dinner party in this room here and you could, there's two.

So we occupied two seats at this table, and there was four other seats, and you could invite anybody from history, dead or alive, anybody you want. Who would you invite and why? Four seats. And also, what are we going to eat? Oh, I don't know anything about food. I'd invite Michelle Obama. I think she's a very interesting woman who would probably make a good

dinner party guest. Nelson Mandela, because I think the way in which his level of forgiveness is just so wonderful. And I've read two of his books now. The third one, Winston Churchill, has to be. One more I'm going to need. Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa.

Again, it's these inspirational people. You get inspiration from other people. And Mother Teresa's ability to love is so all-embracing that I would like to experience it. There's two things. I'm really surprised your husband didn't get an invite, which I think he might be. He's very antisocial. And the last one was just a point about forgiveness

and why is forgiveness important? Well, the title of my book, Let It Go, is something to do with, it's a Buddhist principle of let it go. Don't let the rancor of the past spoil the present. Don't hang on to things when you can give them away. And forgiveness is one of those things that if you can genuinely forgive somebody for how they've hurt you or whatever it is the world all the pain goes amazing thank you so much it's been a great pleasure dame stephanie shirley for for the time today it feels like a tremendous honor to get to meet you and talk to you thank you and um i am incredibly excited about your movie coming out which i think is just the most incredible thing ever i think it's probably somewhere inside every entrepreneur's mind a dream to have such a thing created about

them so um but i think it's in this case definitely um deserving and um yeah it's it's i i feel indebted to you for allowing me to come here and speak to you. That's lovely. I'm very nicely said. And Let It Go, your book, My Extraordinary Story, from refugee to entrepreneur to philanthropist. Everybody can get everywhere and I highly recommend that they do. So thank you. Thank you so much. Pleasure.

Thank you.