Simon (00:00.846)
Welcome to the SEMO Marketing Podcast. I am back once again. It is the first podcast of 2025. And very quickly, a little bit about us. If you need to know who SEMO is, www.semo.com, C-E-M-O-H. We basically do fractional marketing people. So if you need one of those in your business, come and talk to us. You can come and find me on LinkedIn. Come send me an email, simon.semo.com.

And if you like this podcast, please go and give us a nice rating on Spotify or iTunes and say something nice about us because, you know, that's what we're all about, saying nice things about people. But with all that out of the way, I am extremely lucky to have someone I've known for a very long time and I've tried to get on this podcast for a number of months. And I wanna stress not through any fault of her own, it's just our ineptitude at organising it.

She's down in you're down in Sydney aren't you? The absolutely fantastic Taryn Williams, so welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Taryn (00:59.031)
I am, yes.

Taryn (01:06.115)
Thank you for having me. I'm good, I'm good. First, well, technically first day back in the office. So catch me while I'm free.

Simon (01:12.334)
Right, good day. Well, it's good day to have Friday is the first day back in the office before you have the weekend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, nice timing. Look, you're a multi-talented, multi-faceted leader of business. I'm not gonna blow too much smoke up your ass because I'm sure you get enough of that as it is. But give us the kind, if we were gonna do like a film trailer.

a two minute film trailer of your past, what would be the highlights? What bits are exploding? What's the funny gag reel? What's the two minute highlights of your illustrious career so far?

Taryn (01:46.2)
cool.

Taryn (02:00.567)
that. Actually someone just sent me an AI prompt, I'll tag you in it on LinkedIn, where you put this AI prompt in to chat GPT or Claude and it gives you a visual depiction of your life and it was quite, it's far more glamorous based on what chat GPT knows about me. There's definitely not enough, you know, like there's not enough tiers, there's not enough Excel spreadsheets for that to be an accurate description. looks at a high level.

Simon (02:17.976)
Jesus.

Simon (02:28.014)
Is it, sorry, is that the highlights of your life? Tears and Excel spreadsheets.

Taryn (02:32.463)
Excel spreadsheets. Yeah, yeah shareholder, shareholder agreements, Excel spreadsheets. Look, it's, I guess my life is pretty interesting in that I traverse sort of a traditional, my first business Wink Models, which is a traditional modeling agency, which is actually in a period of, I would say upheaval and innovation at the moment.

Simon (02:39.015)
yeah.

Taryn (02:57.583)
with Gen.ai and some of our clients starting to work in that space, which I find really interesting. And then I went on to the Right Fit, which is a two-sided marketplace for creative talent, matching brands with all kinds of different creative talent. And the Influencers Agency, and I sold both of those businesses nearly 19 months ago now. And then Hashgifted, which is a platform that connects brands and...

different types of creators, influencers, content creators, UGC creators in purely contra-only exchanges. Then I have Notable, the Speakers Bureau, and I'm just about to launch another business. I know I'm crazy. Which helps brands and creators, celebrities, talent connect for...

creators to able to take an equity position in brands, essentially become shareholders, investors in the brand, help them scale. So all of my business interests have some degree of commercial similarities in that they're based around talent, creators, social.

advertising media, but lots of little nuances and I think that the key difference being different business models behind them also. A traditional full service agency, a marketplace, a SaaS business, back to almost a traditional agency.

Simon (04:21.538)
Yeah, well, look, there's about thousand questions I have for you out of those two minute highlights. So my first one would be, and a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners are probably struggling with the same thing. You have run multiple businesses at the same time. And whilst they're all aligned,

Taryn (04:27.279)
Thank

Simon (04:43.886)
I would assume that some of them have different client bases, different staffing requirements, et cetera, et cetera. How do you do that? Do you own them all 100 % or are you doing that with partnerships or what's been, and then, so the two part question, number one, how do you do it? And then number two, how do you then deal with the thought in the back of your head that you're not giving those businesses 100 % of your time?

Taryn (05:12.513)
Yeah, it's really hard and there's definitely an opportunity cost too of being split across multiple projects. So Wink I own 100%. The Right Fit I had venture capital investors as well as some strategic investors, Havas and some international holding groups that invested in the business. And then the other two businesses I own outright as well. I will raise capital for one of those.

in the sort of coming six to 12 months. So look, it's really hard, is the short answer. There is no silver bullet. Like it's for probably the last 10 years, I've worked 12 to 16 hours a day, six to seven days a week. There is no, yeah, sort of fast solution to that.

Simon (05:57.42)
Yeah.

Taryn (06:03.791)
I stepped out of the Wink business day to day about eight years ago and I have a fantastic team in that business. That business is a little bit easier because it is a traditional agency business. I built a big product that manages.

Simon (06:14.318)
Yeah.

Taryn (06:17.431)
all of the end-to-end onboarding, calendar management, payroll integration, a custom booking system for that business, which gives me a lot of visibility, a lot of data, sort of removes a lot of the opportunity for human error and key man dependence in that business and allowed it to scale without my involvement. that business, Tuckedwood, operates really well without me. I think tech businesses are much harder.

beast, fast growth, high growth tech companies require a very, different skill set and a very different team. And that, you know, that involves engineers, it involves product managers, data analysts, you know, it's a very different build, which is really hard. It's really hard finding the right people for those roles. They're expensive. And then you're sort of juggling.

Simon (06:55.693)
Mm.

Taryn (07:06.607)
getting the sales and marketing function of that business to communicate and work with the product and engineering side of that business is sort of where the friction I find always comes. And then yes, it's about looking at where are there market opportunities that I can start.

and scale businesses and can I bring in the right executional and operational people from a day to day basis to make that happen? Because I have a, I always say have a very narrow deep skill set and I'm very good at zero to two years in a business. And then, you know, it requires sort of an operational team that are much more interested in systems processes that, you know, where I sort of maybe lose my interest a little bit.

And so I think I recognise now where my strengths and weaknesses are as a founder, as an entrepreneur and as a leader. And I'm much more inclined to bring in COOs, CEOs, head of product, those sort of roles earlier in the journey, even though they can be very expensive hires, the likelihood of the success of the company sort of far outweighs the cost.

Simon (08:09.656)
Mm.

Simon (08:17.422)
Mm.

There's a couple of things there that you've said that I think I've learned sort of, especially in the last couple of years is that, know, businesses that have a very sort of narrow focus, I think tend to do better. So businesses that come to the party with, hey, we do this one thing and we do this one thing really well. So you kind of mentioned the modeling agency, it's a traditional modeling agency, it's not going outside of its lane. That's what that thing does and it does it really well. And I would imagine things like, you know,

Taryn (08:38.223)
Thank

Simon (08:49.61)
and gifted and all those kind of things. going, we do this one thing and we're gonna do it really well. We're not gonna try and be all things to all people. Is that sort of in your head when you're thinking about these ideas?

Taryn (09:03.735)
Yeah, definitely. And I think with the right fit, I went far too broad too quickly. Like it was a marketplace for creative talent. And we should have started with just potentially a marketplace for actors or marketplace for actors and models. But we were, you built a marketplace for photographers, models, actors, influencers, stylists, social media, you know, the whole nine yards. And that taught me a lot about one, the cost to acquire a customer effectively on both sides of that marketplace.

Simon (09:08.803)
Yeah.

Taryn (09:32.524)
when there was geographic dependencies as well. So yes, I think it taught me a lot about getting really clear on your value proposition and what part of a puzzle you're solving for a customer.

think getting cut through is very, difficult in this landscape. Capturing attention of a busy, most of my businesses speak to CEOs, marketers, capturing that attention of those people is really, really challenging. So I think the simpler and cleaner you can make that value proposition and piece of the puzzle that you're solving for them, I think the better.

Simon (10:08.142)
The other thing I've learned in the last couple of years as well is about when you, I mean obviously you've got that, what I've called many times entrepreneurial ADD where you're just going, hey there's a good idea, let's do this and let's just, know, like Homer Simpson where he's like, you're thinking of something else and he's, know, the monkey's bashing the cymbals next to you. Yeah, anyway, that kind of thing where you're completely distracted with another good idea.

Taryn (10:21.485)
Shiny thing, shiny thing.

Taryn (10:29.807)
Please.

Simon (10:34.198)
no, it's where he chases after a poodle, doesn't it? Down the road, that's where he goes, yeah. But my point is, is one of the things that I've sort of found is that if I try and split my time, and this is just me, but if I try and split my time across two companies and two organisations, I tend to do both of them badly. One thing we've kind of realised, and by way, I mean me and my business partner, is that...

Taryn (10:37.194)
I'm sorry.

Simon (11:00.59)
If we go and create another entity that does something very specific, we're now trying to do that in partnership with somebody we trust and giving them straight away ownership, share ownership, leadership, putting them in a leadership role. And then our job is to then support them.

Our job is business development, growth, marketing, the things that we know we're good at, operational, streamlining things, and then leaving it to them to run the business with just us being that kind of support network to make it easier for them.

Taryn (11:32.111)
you

Simon (11:44.366)
And again, there's no right answer to these things, but that's just the way that I found if I could do five companies each with a strong owner leader in that we could just support that for me, I find a lot easier.

Taryn (11:59.373)
Yeah, and finding those people that have the risk appetite, the skill set and the desire to run and own something is really challenging because I think everyone has maybe quite a blissfully naive idea of what running effectively most of these businesses start as a startup, despite how much sort of resource you might wrap around them, it does require like a lot of grit and tenacity.

Simon (12:04.161)
is hard.

Simon (12:28.59)
Mm.

Taryn (12:29.005)
I think probably something that I realized over the last 12 months in trying to do that model of bringing

business partners into a project and a CEO very early into a project, can, it definitely can succeed. It's never going to succeed at the rate and pace of a founder led business. And I think that that's just a, you can't replace founder energy. And I think that comes from both the, usually the deep domain expertise that a founder brings to a business. And that being across all of the elements in a startup requires

Simon (12:49.453)
Yeah.

Taryn (13:07.215)
you to be able to go from 30,000 foot to three foot really, really quickly and to be able to work between is quite a rare skill set. So yeah, I think it can work and I think my learning is it just doesn't happen as quickly as you might like.

Simon (13:16.993)
Yeah.

Taryn (13:22.893)
I'm certainly maybe not the most patient person. So it's been a learning experience for me as to, yeah, I guess that opportunity cost of going, I could go all into one project 150 % because that's the only way I know how to do things and potentially get to scale more quickly or I can sort of work across a diversified portfolio of things and accept that they're gonna take a little bit longer to get there.

Simon (13:29.826)
Yeah.

Simon (13:38.103)
Yeah.

Simon (13:45.004)
Yeah.

Simon (13:49.166)
Talk to me about influences as being part of your life. I guess models, right at the start, models are influences. That's kind of what they originally were. I think some of the...

some of the original influences that you know, we might look back in when I was growing up all those years ago in the 80s and the 90s, know, were largely models or, you know, pop stars or things like that. I mean, obviously that shifted massively in the past five, 10 years. What's the state of play? And well, come and talk about AI in a minute because AI is think it's its own conversation, but.

Taryn (14:20.279)
Yeah.

Simon (14:36.003)
Is it still a brand still using is influence a strategy still a valid strategy and how's it sort of changed in the last few years?

Taryn (14:47.844)
Yeah.

Definitely, it's still a very valid strategy and brands are definitely increasing their spend in that space. And I think it comes down to a few things. think the nuances within that have changed a lot. So it's sort of shifted away from the vanity metrics of people with a very high number of followers. We then moved into people who were very influential within particular niches and had a voice of authority in that particular space. So whether it was naturopaths or very niche mummy influencers,

are in a particular field or whatever it might be. And so I think, you know, we've continued to see that shift. We've continued to see brands get more and more savvy around the measures that matter. So being able to think about.

Am I using this person for sort of a brand halo effect? You know, am I associating with them because they are a person of profile or am I looking for conversions or am I looking for content? You know, those can all form a part and should form a part of a good influencer strategy and that you're probably not going to get all of those things from one person. You would build sort of a diversified portfolio of people who are really good at UGC, really have a fantastically engaged audience and drive conversions and then

and people who are sort of getting you that top of funnel reach and more positive brand sentiment. So I think, you we started to see more of an education in that space, which is great because you're seeing campaigns that have better success and, you know, drive conversions and also feel more authentic to a customer.

Taryn (16:20.079)
potential customers. I think definitely that's the been a really positive shift. think probably with the uncertainties around the platforms at the moment, it's going to be really interesting to see what happens. You know, I think if we do see TikTok banned, that's going to you know, cause a lot of uncertainty for brands around how they execute. I think, know, with TikTok shock was obviously wildly popular in other

Simon (16:31.395)
Yeah.

Taryn (16:45.791)
I think Australian brands are really looking forward to how that might translate for conversions here. So TBC, whether or not we're going to get that. I think it's also made.

creators much more conscious about how they build and where they build their audiences. Because as you can imagine, there's a huge fear out there in the creator world at the moment of people who have built an audience of 2 million, 3 million followers on TikTok that now they don't own. And so there's platforms like Substack and Discord, where you can actually own that first party data, you own the relationship with your followers and you can move them to different platforms.

And I think probably the last piece is just that we're starting to see brands really think more casively about longer term.

deeper relationships with creators. It's really popular in the US now to bring influencers, creators, celebrities on board as advisors to a company and building them out as part of your creative team and creative suite because they deeply understand the customer base and they understand best practices on platforms. So it allows them to sort of deliver much more value than...

just engaging them on a transactional campaign by campaign basis, actually working in a deeper, more meaningful way with those people over a longer term basis as both influencers and as both advisors, board members, fractional experts in the company. So I think we'll start to see more of a shift to that as well as it allows creators and influencers to really deeply understand the brand, the brand narrative.

Taryn (18:24.503)
their tone of voice guidelines and be able to proactively work with them in driving success whether you know across a much broader range of things you know whether that's conversions newsletter signups creative direction brand repositioning sort of much more meaningful ritual relationship.

Simon (18:45.425)
One of the areas that I get be interesting to see whether you...

you think this is a growth area and I know this is gonna sound incredibly selfish as a member of Generation X, but I feel there's a growth opportunity in that Gen X influencer because they are in an age group now where a lot of them, not me, but a lot of them, the kids are left home, they have high disposable incomes, they wanna spend that incomes on things that they were doing when they were in their 20s. you know, like I've got a group of people that are going to some sort of,

first time a daytime clubbing event in Brisbane next weekend or something like that. We're going to listen to all the music that we were listening to in the 90s and the early 2000s, but we're doing it and then it finishes at nine o'clock. So we can all be in bed by 10 o'clock. So, but I find the...

Taryn (19:24.419)
yet.

Simon (19:41.868)
Two things is that there's this kind of gradual rise of Gen X influencers and that's been very prevalent, I think on TikTok. Because I spend a lot of time on TikTok. I really enjoy the platform. It's an educational platform. But I see a lot of TikTok influencers in that Gen X space now. And I also think your point about people moving to platforms where they can control the...

They control the narrative and the data. So Discord is obviously, Discord has had huge growth in the last few years. But even WhatsApp, WhatsApp groups now are...

just blowing up. mean, again, I'm in one where there's maybe 70, 80 people in, and if there's an event on in a particular city, there's certain people within that group who are influencing the rest of the group to go to those events. Now that's all been done in a completely closed, closed system. How do brands tap into that? there's brands that don't even know those influences exist.

Taryn (20:47.151)
I love that you mentioned that because I think people have a really contrived idea when they think about influences. think like...

Simon (20:52.59)
Thanks.

Taryn (20:52.939)
someone on TikTok or Instagram who has a high social following or YouTube, you know, and I think it's so much more than that. There's so many like, you know, Pinterest is the second largest referrer of search traffic after Google. Like there's so many other platforms, WhatsApp, WeChat that you can be thinking of if you're thinking strategically. I'm a big fan of Reddit and Reddit influencers are so powerful and Reddit hijacking of threats is so powerful, especially in like the B2B space. Like if you're looking

Simon (21:06.348)
Yeah.

Taryn (21:22.873)
for platform recommendations of a SAS tool or there is Reddit forums completely dedicated to this kind of space and the ability to have influential Reddit people talking about your product or service in those right space, right time can really move the meter. So I think thinking more holistically and more broadly about where your brand can show up and what's relevant.

Simon (21:34.796)
Yeah.

Simon (21:43.458)
Mm.

Taryn (21:50.799)
for, I think when you carve influencer marketing out to a couple of like, who is the person that can really drive a meaningful conversation about your brand? And then where is the right place for your brand to show up? And that's often, I think a lot of people, especially when they think about B2B brands, they're like, oh, well, it can only be LinkedIn. There's a very limited number of places in certain publications or whatever.

Simon (22:04.288)
Mm.

Taryn (22:14.959)
And I always try to get them to step back and say, like, at the end of the day, the people that you're trying to influence, whether they're CEOs, CROs, CTOs, they're still people at the end of the day. And so they're still consuming content in other places. So where is a relevant way? It might be networking clubs, it might be WhatsApp groups, as you said, you know, it might be podcasts. you know, I think the US election was a massive example of how influential podcasts were and shifting a narrative around.

Simon (22:25.955)
Mm.

Simon (22:39.18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Taryn (22:40.397)
So I think when you think about that, it's an incredibly powerful way for brands to go, okay, well, yes, what is the content that is consumed by and on what platforms by the people that I'm trying to influence?

Simon (22:53.111)
And I think, again, be interested in your opinion on this, but I think you mentioned their networking clubs. I think there seems to me to be a growth, certainly as we sort of exited COVID and certainly in the last two years of people going, hey, I wanna network again, face to face with people that I have, know, or have something in common and all those kinds of things. But I want it to be good. And I think before COVID there was this,

just, you you'd rock up to a drinks and it was just boring as bat shit and the speaker was boring and it was all like, you never really actually got to meet anybody because you went in and someone said hello to you and then you got stuck talking to them for the next two hours. But I think people want that, that human connection again. And they go, I want to go to a lunch, but I want it to be interesting. I want it to be really engaging or fun. And I want to, you know, and then I want to meet everyone in the room as well. Do you see, you see more of that happening?

Taryn (23:51.735)
Yeah, and actually it's funny that you mentioned that. So Chris Wirachina, one of the co-founders of Pedestrian and I host this quarterly, it's called the Season Opener Quarterly Get Together, basically designed exactly for that. We've done it for nearly probably seven, eight years now. But essentially it's a highly curated opportunity to get people in a room together that across media, arts, entertainment, tech, startups.

in a room, 30 to 40 people, highly curated experience, no sponsors, a guest speaker. And we've tried to build it in a way that we can guarantee for the people that come and come on that night that they're going to meet really interesting people. They're going to learn something and they're going to leave without feeling like they've been sold to. And it came out of both Chris and I's need and desire to have those experiences ourselves. And you get invited to a multitude of different sort of

branded events and not saying that know branded events are in any way bad, but it definitely limits the organicness of how an evening can run and unfold and there is such a need and such a desire for humans to connect and connect with people in a meaningful way that feels deep and engaging and authentic in a short period of time, you know.

Simon (25:12.994)
Yeah. Yeah.

Taryn (25:14.447)
So yes, I definitely think that the rise of, and I think especially before we get into the big deep hole of AI, especially as we start to see more and more gen AI content, people like losing trust in what they see online. I think the value of human connections and experiences is only going to rise over the next three to five years.

Simon (25:35.95)
I've been running a lunch, quarterly lunch. It's now three times a year for the past three years as well. We've got our next one coming up for International Women's Day on March the 8th.

And one of the things I did at the end of it, and I started, just because I'm a nerd like this, was doing a quiz, doing a team quiz at the end of every session. So sort of about quarter past two to three o'clock, we do a table quiz. There's 20 questions, and the winning table wins nothing other than the recognition that they've won. What we found with that is that the tables were then made up of people that, all the teams were made up of people that didn't know each other.

Taryn (26:06.328)
Yeah.

Taryn (26:11.715)
Yeah.

Simon (26:21.328)
they were all then arguing about the answers to the questions and things like that and it was really engaging. And there's been some events where we, for the table winner, we got them, I went to the local metal shop and got them little medals to hang around their necks. And...

Taryn (26:37.487)
that.

Simon (26:38.414)
At the end of the event, we're talking about corporate people here, all in, you know, shirts and suits and things like this. And they're all taking a team photo with their medals onto post on LinkedIn. like these medals may cost me five bucks to make, you know what I mean? But it was all of a sudden, it was that sort of, it was engaging and it was fun and it was, people were being stupid and everyone was shouting at each and swearing at each other. And all of a sudden this was like, yeah, this is not a normal networking event. This is absolute anarchy.

Taryn (26:53.028)
Yes.

Taryn (27:06.479)
Yeah.

Simon (27:09.407)
But that's what stands it apart from everything else. And people know what they're getting. They know that by the time I'm doing the quiz at 2.15, I'm probably gonna be pissed as well. So I'm gonna be swearing a bit and it's gonna be, you know. So I think if.

Taryn (27:12.503)
Yeah, yeah, she had experience.

Taryn (27:22.04)
you

Taryn (27:25.581)
Yeah, yeah, this dowry is...

Simon (27:28.512)
If people wanna create that brand, I mean you say branded events, sometimes they have a bad name, but I think if your brand is there to go, hey, I'm here to help you guys have a good time or meet some new people, I think people are gonna, I wanna be part of that. I think that's something genuinely people want.

Taryn (27:44.388)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, look, you see a lot of brands doing it really, really well too, you know, where they ask like taking a step back and going instead of just having the big launch party or the, you know, the big launch event, how can we create really amazing, meaningful experiences that people are going that are not necessarily just targeting influencers either and getting, you know, a bunch of media and whatever in the room actually getting really targeted and thinking about who are our target customer that we want to take on this experience. Like I think the, I think it was Land Rover did the takeover.

at Hamilton Island, Heyman Island for, and you know, that was a really great example of creating a three or four day beautiful boutique experience, taking up some high net worth, some media, some influences and creating something that really got cut through as opposed to having just another launch party. So I think doing things like that where you're considered in the narrative that you're trying to weave about the brand and that you are

Simon (28:21.42)
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Taryn (28:46.681)
part of the conversation, but not the whole conversation.

Simon (28:49.816)
Yeah.

Let's talk about AI just because I'm cognizant of time here, but you've obviously been playing around with AI a lot. I think anyone who with half a marketing brain has been playing around with AI and should be playing around with AI. My partner who's a lawyer has been playing around with software and she's sort of saying, hey, this is helping me do 10 times the amount of work on any given contract or whatever using a tool that

helps her construct contracts that would normally take her hours and hours to do. Two part question, where do you see it going? That's question number one. And the second part of question is, what have you been playing around with that you've just gone, fucking hell, that's amazing.

Taryn (29:32.015)
Mm-hmm.

Taryn (29:41.037)
Yeah, okay, so I think that we are going to see a couple of big problems. Like my main concerns, so I've been on the deep dive of AI for probably about two years now, started with reading a lot from sort of Mo Gadat and people that were maybe a little bit more skeptical or concerned about Tristan Harris and people like that.

of what, you know, especially some of these advances in gen AI could look like. So I probably started as a little bit more of a skeptic than I did, or having, you know, broader concerns than I've probably got to now. I think that we are going to have some concerns about how, especially the generation coming after us, don't maybe have the critical thinking or the...

the understanding of validating information and content. And that really worries me. Just when we start to see more and more content that is fake content, fake news, how we are going to restore any sort of trust in democracy, how we're going to have a functioning society, how we're

just have more and more polarization on both ends of the scale. So more broadly at a macro level, that's the sort of stuff that really worries me. I think from a practical day to day level, I think everyone in whatever industry you're in, you really need to get across how AI is going to impact your personal and professional life.

I think there's so many opportunities. It is moving so, so quickly. I dedicate Sunday afternoon, three hours to sit down and get on top of all of my A's.

Taryn (31:36.175)
tools that have come out that week, the new agents, reading articles, blah, blah, because it is just moving at such an exponential rate. And I try and remind myself that this is how our parents must have felt when the internet came out and they're like, my God, what do you mean? You can bank online like, Jesus Christ, like, you what does this mean for all of us? And instead of being fearful of it, just embracing that, you know, there's going to be parts of it that are going to be really, really useful. And I hope that it's going to be jobs accretive, not destructive.

So I've been trying to get into a lot of the generative AI platforms, Runway, some of these platforms that are making, and make it, Sora, making really quick advancements in the space. It is truly terrifying how much they've changed in the last six months, eight months. I have no doubt that.

brands will start to use these platforms for a lot of their content creation. My broader concern with that is how is that going to impact the social platforms? How is it going to impact how we consume content as consumers, as human beings, which I don't think anyone has an answer for yet. And

I'm a deep lover of Claude, of ChatGPT, of perplexity. It's just radically transformed how I do my job. Instead of having to wait and be reliant on a data analyst, for example, to pull some analysis for me, I can get a whole bunch of unstructured data, just data dump exports from my team, and I can go and use ChatGPT to query that data. I don't need to spend time.

categorizing it, sorting it, putting in this is the customer IDs, this is sign update, whatever it might be. And I can ask ChatGPT, for example, to find the correlations in that data, to do a cohort analysis for me, to come back to me with things that I wouldn't even think of to question that data. I'm using, yeah, ChatGPT and Claude, you know, are now an essential part of my day. can't fa-

Simon (33:27.854)
Yeah.

Taryn (33:43.811)
Yeah, I do think that it makes, it's going to make people who use these tools much more effective, much free, it frees my time up to spend more time on creative ideation that I don't think sort of ChatGPT is necessarily there yet. Then it does in doing sort of practical, you know, very rote.

repeat tasks that are less of a value add. And it allows us to, especially in the startups, to just move far more quickly. Especially things like code completion tools, QA tools, you know, it just allows us to deploy far more code than we could have at scale.

Simon (34:23.822)
Well, yeah my business partner in terms of writing code has sort of said he's now it's it's like having another developer working with him in terms of know the volume that he can get done so Is there anything that sort of I? Mean if if you were gonna say to everybody hey go and check this tool out. What's what's the what's perhaps your your favorite your favorite?

Taryn (34:34.99)
Yeah.

Simon (34:46.676)
AI tool that you've seen, even if it's not, even if it's very sort of niche or even if it's not quite where it should be, you know, what sort of.

Taryn (34:52.833)
Yeah, I think Runway is pretty amazing. Like just the fact that you can create pretty impressive video content with zero, like you don't need to have any sort of coding engineering background. know, back in the probably if you started playing with Sora, like you could make some pretty basic stuff there, but Runway is pretty damn incredible in very limited prompts that you need. You don't need to be a prompt engineer. You don't need to have a deep understanding of.

Simon (34:57.057)
Okay.

Simon (35:20.738)
Yeah.

Taryn (35:22.351)
to be able to create something really, really impressive. So yeah, I've been thoroughly enjoying playing with that. I've also thoroughly been enjoying making AI twins of myself. There's a whole bunch of tools out there that you can do that with.

Simon (35:25.838)
Hmm.

Simon (35:35.464)
I guess I've seen an AI twin of you on the...

Taryn (35:36.687)
Yeah, you've probably seen it. And just that they're getting so bloody good, you know, it's, it is mildly terrifying. It does make me think a lot about deep fakes and you know, where does that end? And I was actually talking to someone recently who's an expert in this space who was saying you absolutely must have like a family safe word. Like you must have something that if you are calling and speaking to your parents, there is a word that is used before any sort of, yeah, which, you know, I was like, well, I really probably need to do that with my family and probably with your team as well.

Simon (35:41.848)
Yeah.

Simon (35:46.488)
Yeah.

Taryn (36:06.641)
because we are getting to that point where it's so easy to, from a three second clip, recreate voice, create very plausible video content.

Simon (36:13.315)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Simon (36:19.094)
And that's such a great idea. that's the first time I've heard that. And I think if people only take one thing away from this conversation, that idea of a family safe word for, you know, and someone with a, you know, I've got a six year old and almost nine year old and...

Taryn (36:29.986)
on the site.

Simon (36:38.702)
I can't imagine the technology that they're gonna be exposed to in five, six years. It's...

Taryn (36:46.223)
Yeah, I think it fundamentally changes what we need to be teaching in schools or even the relevance of the current education system.

Simon (36:53.486)
Mm.

Simon (36:58.528)
I often have arguments about whether we need to teach kids to write. I mean, I'm sitting here writing notes about what we're talking about, but I haven't written notes in a meeting for six months. I use a note taker, use granola largely, but all of a sudden I've seen...

Taryn (37:02.478)
Yeah.

Taryn (37:12.183)
Yeah, it might take you five lives.

Yeah.

Simon (37:21.902)
We do all of our meetings on Google Meet and now Google Meet have implemented their own internal one and so I'm just clicking a button and it's doing it all for me, which is fantastic. I still, I'll tell you what, and you might be able to help me here, I still can't find...

Taryn (37:27.535)
Yeah. Action items. Yeah. Tick, tick.

Simon (37:40.302)
a solution for a note taker for a person, a face-to-face meeting, where I can just leave my phone on the table and the phone picks up the different voices and transcribes it and sends it to me later on and identifies the different people talking.

Taryn (38:00.971)
No, the only one I know of, I don't know what it's called, but it's a physical device, a, it's a spoon, yeah, which I've seen a few people use. I don't know how effective it is. I haven't been using it. Yes, I only use it, mine, for online meets. And it does make you realize afterwards, doesn't it? The number of times I slack myself in, when I'm in face-to-face meetings, little reminders of like, must do this, must do that, because otherwise I'll forget. So yes, it does make you realize how much more effective.

Simon (38:06.252)
Right.

Simon (38:25.922)
Yeah, I think that would be a massive opportunity, something that I could, that uses your phone microphone and just picks up all that conversation and then sends that to you later on. Because I'm still sitting with a client asking them what they need and still having to write down notes and like, okay, we should have, maybe we should have done this on Google Meet and then I could have got someone to make these notes for me, but.

Taryn (38:45.901)
Yeah, well, that.

Taryn (38:51.587)
Yeah.

Simon (38:52.713)
Look, last question, just because again, I'm conscious of time. And this might be a bit of a prickly question, feel free not to answer this. What have you missed out on? What have you missed out on because I see you working all the time and I'll be the first to put my hand up, I simply do not have the dedication of someone like, I cannot.

I cannot work to that level and I sometimes kick myself but I see my brother work to that level. My brother has sort of worked 16 hour days for most of his life and just driven, driven, driven. I do not have that dedication. If you could go back, would you do something different? What have you feel that you've not got from everything you've achieved?

Taryn (39:38.725)
my god, yeah, totally. you know, I often say like sometimes your only purpose in life is to serve as like a warning sign to others because I think sometimes I'm like, you see, like, Jesus, it's not easy, you know, and I was just saying to someone the other day, I think the visual representation of my life on

Simon (39:47.566)
Yeah, that's a very good motivational quote that sometimes, yeah.

Taryn (40:04.367)
Instagram and TikTok is very different to when I blog and write. It's, you know, I think a lot more real about sort of the struggles and the challenges and I don't know quite yet how to make those two align. But oh my God, I've had to give up so many things. I mean, it's been the absolute destroyer of a number of my personal relationships. Absolutely. I've done a lot of time away from my family, both because of work and then traveling because of work. So being in different states and countries to them.

don't have children, I'm 39, so it's something I probably need to think about if I'm gonna tackle that, but I simply have not had the capacity to be able to do that. So it comes with a huge number of personal sacrifices. And I think on reflection, I think there's probably a naivety to how long something's gonna take to build and how all-consuming can be, definitely how long the process of selling the

Simon (40:54.701)
Yeah.

Taryn (41:00.687)
the Influencers Agency was gonna take, and how all consuming that is as well from a time and emotional capacity perspective. yeah, I mean, think you have to be really, and one of the reasons that I'm sort of taking this, not doing very well, but sort of three months, four months sabbatical, it was supposed to be a 12 month sabbatical, but I've kind of really failed at that. But sabbatical is to really deeply question, I?

Do I want to and do I have the capacity and desire to go all in on something again? Knowing the opportunity costs, knowing that it will mean the impact on my health, my relationships, having to make a very conscious decision that that will be, okay, well, that means you're not gonna have children, it means. So yeah, it's an incredibly, can be a very lonely journey and a very, very taxing journey.

And it's why a number of people come to me and say like, I'm going to start a business. And I'm like, do you really, or do you want to be, there is absolutely no shame in being an entrepreneur. Like do it within an organization, do it within your PWC or your West pack where you can lead an idea. You can build out a great team, but you get four weeks annual leave and you get sick leave. And you know, that's really something to be said for that. So the over glamorization of the startup world.

Simon (42:09.538)
And you can, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and I feel to me, the age of my kids at six and nine was, to me it was important to make sure when they're with me, which is sort of week on week off, that I'm dropping them at school, I'm picking them up from school, I'm watching all their sports stuff and I'm coaching their football teams and all those kind of things. I go, the...

The sacrifice then for me is that I can't be as present at work as I would potentially like to. I can't go to as many meetings. I can't have as many conversations with prospects and clients and take on those opportunities. it's funny, you kind of see, I look at it the other way around, because I look at my brother, I look at what you've achieved and I go, I could have done that.

If I, know, do you know what I mean? It's, everyone I think has to sacrifice something, you know, for success. And first of all, you need to define what that success is. And it changes different times of your life and things like that. But everybody has to sacrifice something somewhere.

Taryn (43:14.979)
Yeah. Yeah.

Taryn (43:26.649)
Totally. And when is enough enough as well? know, my mentor is frequently like, you know, why, why, why roll the dice again? You know, and why not? And, you know, I think a lot of it is taking stock and actually reflecting on, I'm really good at commercial success. I know how to do that. Like, just work harder, you know, do more, apply more time, energy resources, you know, things go up into the right. A lot of other things in life don't work that way.

Simon (43:33.229)
Yeah?

Taryn (43:54.189)
your relationship with your children, you're building a relationship with a partner, your health doesn't necessarily correlate, the time energy investment is not necessarily gonna be up and give you the result that you want. So it's a lot scarier to go and bite off those things that you're maybe not naturally as good at or that you don't have as much control over the outcome.

So I definitely think I've got a personal resistance to like, I'll just do another startup instead of like actually, you know, going and dating or things that I suck at.

Simon (44:14.784)
I.

Simon (44:23.714)
But then, but then I would also say, and this would be my advice to you since we're now turning into a, you know, a DNM here. but.

Taryn (44:29.859)
therapy session.

Simon (44:32.778)
I talked to my parents of visiting me from the UK at the moment. My father talks to my brother who's younger than me, three years younger than me. And my brother still works all the time. He's traveling a lot. He was in the Middle East two weeks ago. He's pretty much all over the world, right? And he's putting together these big, he's in resource exploration. know, he owns his own company and all those kinds of things. And my dad's kind of had those conversations with him in the past that why don't you step back from it? It's like, you know, what's enough? How much, you know, how

how hard you need to keep pushing this. You don't need any more money. You've got, you know, you could retire tomorrow and be fine. And I think, my brother says something that I think probably holds true with you is that he turns around and said, I really enjoy doing this. And I don't think you should be ashamed to sit there and say, I enjoy this. This is what.

I get motivated in, I like starting businesses, I like that first two years, I wanna keep doing that and not feel that you have to apologise that I'm gonna go and start another business. Just sit there and say, that is what drives me on a day to day basis.

Taryn (45:38.701)
Yeah, I think there's definitely a natural sort of personality trait of the seeing ideas, seeing opportunities, and then just not being able to squash that desire to go and try and solve them. Like the bottom drawer of ideas that I constantly say like, if only execution wasn't the problem, if only was just, know, ideation was the hard part. yeah, I think you're right in that, that I think some people just, it's the way we're wired. It's just whether or not that ends up with a holistic, happy, healthy life at the end.

Simon (46:03.202)
Yeah. Yeah.

Taryn (46:08.047)
is the million dollar question.

Simon (46:08.238)
True, true, true. There was a great quote I heard on a Tim Ferriss podcast when I used to listen to Tim Ferriss years and years ago and I never remember who the quote was from because it was one from his guest and he said, the best way to be successful and rich and have everything you want is to have one really, really good idea and then never ever have another one. And I'm like, so true. Thank you very much. Thank you for being on the show.

Taryn (46:29.767)
So true, so true. Yes, yes. Quit while you're ahead.

Taryn (46:37.006)
Thank you for having me.

Simon (46:37.28)
Where can people, if people want to talk to you and annoy you or they want your help or whatever, where's the best place for them to come and find you?

Taryn (46:41.327)
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn. It's just Taryn Williams. You can contact me via my website as well, which is tarynwilliams.com.au or on any of the social platforms. So yeah, Insta, TikTok, all the usual places.

Simon (47:00.672)
Awesome, thank you very much for today. Now we've done this once, we'll have to this again. And maybe we should do this, because I wanna find a little group of people where we can talk shit about brands. Because I'm sure, and I'm sure you've got an opinion about things like Jaguar and all those kind of brands that doing all these kind of things that you sit there and just look at them and go, Jesus, is that, you know?

Taryn (47:06.105)
Correct.

Taryn (47:18.509)
Yeah.

Simon (47:26.862)
Anyway, thank you very much for today. Lovely to see you again. I'll talk to you soon, yeah?

Taryn (47:28.577)
Thank you. Such a pleasure.