168: Smarter, Faster, More Human: Fred Thompson on Designing the Future of Learning

Holly Owens (00:00.75)
Hello everyone and welcome to another fabulous episode of EdUp Learning and Development. My name is Holly Owens and I'm your host and I'm super excited today because I have Fred Thompson here. I'm gonna let him talk about himself. So Fred, welcome on into the show.

Fred Thompson (00:18.794)
Yeah, thanks for having me here, Holly. Really excited about today. It's always strange when you're prompted to talk about yourself a little bit. You never know quite where to start.

Holly Owens (00:25.946)
Yeah, yeah, so tell us your story. How'd you get into like thirst all the different things that you're doing? Give us a lowdown.

Fred Thompson (00:34.998)
Yeah, mean, it's always strange you look back as well and think, how do you get here? You're never quite sure. My background and history, and we're going back a couple of decades, which is worrying, isn't it? When we think about it, yeah, I know, when we think about it out loud. Software development has always been my thing. My background is I'm a programmer by nature and by trade, but ultimately that's where I started building out and sort of fell into L &D a little bit in terms of building out.

Holly Owens (00:39.322)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (00:44.142)
We're going way back. Yeah.

Fred Thompson (01:01.096)
Macromedia Flash courses and things in Authorware back in the day, this was before the Adobe sort of bought it. Then building into learning management systems, et cetera. And then just really branching from there and over time as we've progressed, it's been a case of, well, I'm not as good at the program as I once was or I like to think I was. Started bringing in people to help me around and about as the businesses kind of grew and said, okay, we've got more to do here.

And then as a result of that, we've sort of been done over two decades in the L &D space, really assisting businesses to put together learning, but using technology to effectively deliver that. anything training, anything sort of learning management system connected or learning platform connected, but we're talking about anything it connects to like API systems, external talking about the strategies around that. And yeah, we, we focus, we are primarily sort of

know, tech focused as a business, but with the background knowledge really of the space of knowing, well probably most things there are to know now in L &D really.

Holly Owens (02:12.698)
I mean, it's so nice to hear of a journey like you started out in history. A lot of us started in different places. I was a high school teacher and then you kind of found where your passion, where your niche was and then you just went for it because you're not just the founder of Thirst. If you haven't seen Thirst, you're probably not on LinkedIn a lot because their marketing is amazing. You've definitely seen Barry Post a lot of stuff out there. He's their marketing director and

If you haven't heard of Thirst, you need to go hear of Thirst now. You need to go out to their site. So being as that, you know, the journey has been one that's been of different opportunities, different things for you. When you think about the L &D space, what do you think are some of the greatest challenges for us and like how it currently is like with things happening with AI and all those things that are kind of impacting our industry?

Fred Thompson (03:08.639)
think it's kind of the same across many industries and not just L &D. And I think L &D has typically been a little bit historically behind in terms of just trying to make sure it moves forward. And I touched upon Macromedia Flash there, but I mean, we're still sort of using SCORM courses and things like that and the early standards and we didn't even move forward into the XAPI things really that well. So we've always been a little bit backward thinking as a sector.

Holly Owens (03:25.484)
Right.

Fred Thompson (03:34.344)
But with this new technologies that coming, we talk about AI loads, we've done quite a lot of that, but it's so fast moving. You can't quite, even if you're not thinking about L and D and you're just trying to keep up with the news, the latest sort of technology enhancements there, you can't really do that. I went to an Amazon web services conference where they would, I think the guys at Anthropic were there who were one of the AI providers. And they were talking about a new standard that they got. And they said, this...

this standard's actually changed since last time we presented it. And I think I went in, I don't know, it was like April and they said, we last presented it in February. Within like, what, 45 days it was completely different. So you roll that into what we're doing at L &D space and trying to keep up with that, it's mind boggling. I think though, in regards to that, the greatest challenges we have are around getting learning to the people and the places they are and how they want to interoperate with it. So.

Holly Owens (04:04.794)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (04:10.515)
my gosh. Yeah.

Fred Thompson (04:31.796)
You know, if you're using a lot of the AI tool in now, it's almost become a conversational kind of piece where you're not browsing the web for pages anymore. You're not going to find that learning content in the same way. It's either being surfaced to you or it's kind of answering direct questions or giving you guidance and personalized advice around that. So it's how do we restructure how training and learning is presented back to the learner in a way that kind of matches what

effectively this future of connected technologies look like. It's going to be fun, it's going to be rough I think for a while.

Holly Owens (05:06.084)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (05:10.65)
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. So tell us about thirst. What is thirst? What do you do? How do you help people in the L &D space? Tell us all about it. Tell us what you're up to.

Fred Thompson (05:23.827)
Yeah, no problem. When we built first, we sort of spotted the gap in the market for trying to use some of these technologies to start with. So we baked in personalization right from all the way through the product. So everything you do in there is surfacing the right latest information that's relevant to you. And we're sort of accounting for everything that you do. So every sort of interaction, like, comment, share, if you're a certain authors or certain content types, we're forming that opinion of what content and then that gets surfaced to you at the right point.

We also baked in skills completely from the ground up, which again, depending on whether you know your learning platforms or not, know, it tended to be an afterthought in a lot of the more kind of previous incarnations of learning platforms, tacked on at the end. We reversed that and said, we're going to start there, which meant we sort of was forward thinking from the get-go in terms of what the future of L &D looks like, the future of just business really on how it's going to train and hire people.

Holly Owens (06:02.485)
Yeah

Fred Thompson (06:19.411)
And then obviously we rolled that way from the AI side as well, which has made that we've put some really nice features and functionality in there as well. But one of our core messages really is just making a platform that you... We started off with a messaging which was a platform you want to use because we find a lot of learning platforms, you almost need a training program to use the platform. It's too difficult, you you couldn't quite... You've seen this. This is it.

Holly Owens (06:40.906)
Absolutely. Multiple training programs, like beginning, intermediate, advanced, and then advanced, advanced. Yeah.

Fred Thompson (06:47.579)
Yeah, and nothing felt intuitive either. You'd sort of go off in the administration area with somewhere else and it looked very different. And that was, we came at it completely fresh and said, okay, we're to build these latest technologies and tools in there. We're going to come from skills from the ground up. And we're also going to make it very usable. And then we also lay it in like a social learning piece as well. So there's a lot around task, knowledge sharing by default, everybody in first can actually create content and service it to their colleagues in the business as well.

So that means you're getting, especially for your sort of SME size of business, it's brilliant because you've got smaller L &D teams or sometimes non-existent teams. And it means that other people in the business can effectively still facilitate training with the organization, getting the right knowledge to the right people without it sort of being bottlenecked by, you know, a smaller team size or whatever that might be. So yeah, that's the other problems we're solving and solving them pretty nicely at the moment.

Holly Owens (07:44.251)
you I love it. Like I said, I love your marketing. I love what you're doing. you know, I think that one of the things that's come out of like AI is this more personalized learning experience instead of like just everybody does the same thing through the whole semester, the whole training or things like that. Like you're meeting people where they're at in terms like I wouldn't want to sit through a training where it talks about

instructional design theories and methodologies. I already know all that stuff. I want to sit through training where it's something that's instant application. I can instantly use it. So what do you think about the more personalizing experience and how is Thirst implementing that?

Fred Thompson (08:25.106)
I it's critical. I don't have to study percentages to handle, but there's some great studies which show about the effectiveness of personalized learning and how that impacts people's retention and ability to learn. I think it's funny, again, you started the podcast around the questions around how technology is shaping that. And I remember it was probably only four years ago or so where basically we couldn't quite, I think it was filtered.

Holly Owens (08:26.426)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (08:44.324)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (08:53.733)
company filtered, we're trying to actually sort of personalize the content and trying to establish and understand the content and map that to skill levels and certain types of skills. And they were having real challenges with that at that point, trying to make it work really, really well. And then obviously the AI side came into that and all of sudden it just sort of replaced that problem with just a solution straight away. Just, there you go, we can do that now, which is formidable. And when you then team up with the personalization side.

Holly Owens (09:09.954)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (09:16.856)
Love it.

Fred Thompson (09:20.911)
that automatic mapping of content, basically. If you can get that established level of skill level as well of that content, then it just changes it again. So yeah, personalized learning journey is that personalized journey through and we're taking into account, we're trying to take into account everything. So it can even be, you know, what content source it's coming from. If there's a certain author within your organization who you kind of follow or aspire to kind of look towards for a career pathway, that can also do that. But it's also factoring in.

the more basic elements like what skills you're seeking and things like that. All that combined, you get a lot more impact of the delivery of the training really.

Holly Owens (09:59.364)
Yeah, absolutely. And I was just thinking it back, like, remember how much time we would spend on doing things like descriptions and building out content now AI does it. Yes, and tagging content, it just literally shifted overnight. I love it though, because I feel like AI and some other tools have really allowed us to be instructional designers or L &D professionals and jump into the creative space now.

Fred Thompson (10:07.643)
Tagging, tagging content, yeah.

Holly Owens (10:28.942)
we get really caught up in some of the administrative tasks that take, they're very time consuming. They might be small tasks, but they become very time consuming. And I'm thinking of when you're building a coursing or you're building a workshop or something and you have to outline everything and then you have to design it and then you got to deploy it and all that stuff. But really, pieces of that have changed because of AI. And I feel like I can really sit in a creative space now.

and think about other things I could do during the live workshop that are going to impact the learner, engage them, or offer pieces of advice or scenarios during that training instead of worrying about that other stuff.

Fred Thompson (11:09.742)
Yeah, as part of the L &D Unleashed event that we were talking about before, yeah, we did, I trusted myself with a live demo of how to use AI as your co-pilot, which is always quite dangerous. It worked all right, actually, largely speaking. But what we were doing is we were just giving it information and using some of the sort of reasoning models that are there now and saying, can you kind of give me the job roles that...

Holly Owens (11:14.746)
Yeah, I was gonna ask about that.

Holly Owens (11:22.682)
Eugh!

Yeah.

Fred Thompson (11:38.257)
this business and we would name the business and give it some pointers to a website. And would go off and try and bring back the list of probably job roles and it would look at the job positions that are on its careers page and try to map them back. And then we extended that out and said, well, can you give me the skills of these job roles? Then can you give me the tiers of the job roles and how the tiers maps? And we basically built skills matrices and frameworks out of it by just pointing it to the direction of business information and sort of asking questions.

Holly Owens (11:50.895)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (12:05.008)
and then even took that further and said, okay, where's the skill gaps that we need? And also, can you give me some titles? Can you give me a strategy to teach that skill gap, to sort of close that gap? You know, we're not going as far as creating all the content here. Part of the talk as well was this doesn't replace, you know, Instructure Design or L &D kind of professionals. Human piece.

Holly Owens (12:15.002)
It's crazy.

Right.

Holly Owens (12:23.042)
Right, the human piece of it. Yeah, people are so nervous about that, Fred. They're so, they're like nervous to a point where it's like, it's really negatively impacting their view of the tool and how to use it.

Fred Thompson (12:37.296)
Yeah, almost a bit scared that it's going to replace their job so they're going to try and ignore it. Yeah, we know kind of the human connection in L &D is so important anyway, and there's a lot of that side of it that really still matters, but you can't simply replace that knowledge either. And we are sort of saying it's more of an accelerant. It's kind of like, it's what you talked about there, which is that kind of you get stuck in the mundane and the kind of administrative side, well, all of a sudden you can just clear a lot of that and actually really focus on where the added value is.

Holly Owens (12:39.276)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly Owens (12:59.034)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (13:04.112)
That's really exciting. I think it's going to be challenging to make sure everybody understands how to use it because it's a brand new skill, prompt engineering, et cetera. And then also having the businesses and organizations approve its use because there's data protection elements to that. But I think I've referenced this a few times. I think it's like when everybody was moving to the cloud, sort of whatever it was 10 years ago, and everyone was really scared of it and was like, we can't do it. you know, it's the problems with security and safety. And then

Holly Owens (13:26.776)
yeah.

Yes.

Fred Thompson (13:34.019)
We're just all there now and it sort of went away and I kind of feel that's where we're at. We're at that early stage, only a few years into this journey on that new tech side. I think in sort of fast forward another five years, it'll become so ubiquitous we never understood how we live without it. No.

Holly Owens (13:46.83)
We won't even notice, it's just gonna be there. Yeah, like it's just a part of everything that we do. Absolutely, I think that's 100 % going to happen. And whether people like it or not, like these technologies like the cloud and stuff, that's the norm. That becomes the norm for everything. That's what you should be using to save your stuff on. And my grandparents, they're in their mid-80s. They're like, where is this cloud?

And I'm like, it's not a cloud. It's not a cloud in the sky. It's out on a server somewhere. you know, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fred Thompson (14:18.643)
I do have sympathy though a little bit with, I'm certainly getting all that, I mean, as we all are, we don't go backwards, but I mean, we've lived through quite a generational kind of shift in terms of technology, but you kind of imagine, you know, our parents and what they've had to kind of come from, from almost not having, you know, televisions and microwaves would just be coming out as a thing that even existed and then just suddenly dealing with AI. The shift in their lifetime is incredible, isn't it, to try and understand.

Holly Owens (14:34.202)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (14:45.042)
It really is, but they have me so they're fine. mean, they have iPads, have smart TVs. Every time I go there, my grandfather has a list of technologies, things he wants to learn. So they're fine. They can operate better than some other people I know. But yeah, I really do have the empathy for the process.

Fred Thompson (14:48.729)
can help.

Holly Owens (15:03.982)
when I was growing up, the internet was just coming out and chat rooms were like the big thing. Like I remember we got our first computer, it was a gateway computer in the United States. If you know gateway, it's like you rent those computers and we just sat there, couldn't use the phone when you're on the internet. We've been through that stuff, which is really cool because I think it sets like the foundation of what we know, like kind of learning long division before you know short division. So it really gives you...

that perspective and like these kids nowadays these these these youngins as we say in the south they have no idea no idea what it was like to like not have a cell phone with you all the time like coming home when the streets street lights turn on they have no idea no conception whatsoever

Fred Thompson (15:52.619)
Yeah, I'm not gonna make a judgement wholly on your age, but I feel like we grew up at a very similar time, because these are my memories as well.

Holly Owens (15:56.538)
I think we did too. I think we did too, which is awesome.

Fred Thompson (16:02.677)
Yeah, it's good. There are always challenges. I think there's a certain element of retro as well that people are heading back towards that. I hear that latest Gen Z are actually seeking out kind of like landline phones again because they kind of want to get disconnected. So it's interesting because full circle.

Holly Owens (16:11.681)
I love their brain.

Yeah, I love their brains and the way that they think and the way they're changing the work culture as well. You know, having a conversation recently about like Gen Z, they're saying like Gen Z didn't want to work. Well, that's not the case. They work differently. So we're not used to, you know, working the nine to five, which is an archaic outdated process anyways. So it's really cool to tap into their brains and their minds and see how they're going to, they're going to change the game for sure.

Fred Thompson (16:45.164)
Yeah, I think so. mean, they are a different approach. They have a different approach, I think, to that they're almost more demanding of kind of excellence almost to some degree. It's kind of like that.

Holly Owens (16:58.124)
Right. Like the boundaries that we should have set and expectations we should have set, we didn't do. So they're doing it. Yeah.

Fred Thompson (17:04.969)
Yeah, little bit. we can't get it, you know, in the same way why we built first is because it's kind of like the market is, you wouldn't, couldn't put an old learning platform to the Gen Z audience because they just simply wouldn't accept it. would be like the more demanding of what the quality of everything that gets delivered to them, the quality of the businesses they interoperate with, you know, in terms of like the sustainability or the pledges or the kind of the B Corp elements, all these, these parts, they've got more.

demands and expectations on it, which I think is only a good thing realistically, so it drives everybody forward.

Holly Owens (17:35.642)
Absolutely. So what are you excited about for the future? Like the future of learning and development, like with all this AI stuff coming in, what are you excited about?

Fred Thompson (17:46.651)
So I'm trying to go over the same ground, but my thought is about what we can do faster and what we can understand that we either A, couldn't understand before or B took too long to understand. So a great example is the data analysis part of L and D. Historically, we talked about SCORM, SCORM 1.1 and 1.2, cetera, was all focused on, did you complete it?

Holly Owens (18:04.835)
glad you mentioned that.

Holly Owens (18:09.86)
you

Fred Thompson (18:13.865)
And if so, did you pass and maybe at a stretch, how long did it take? And we brought in, you know, so many other metrics that you could do with objectives and everything else, but it was almost too difficult to set up an interpret. And now you've got a scenario where you could track every single data point, you know, every kind of eyeball, click, movement, et cetera. And you can establish patterns and pathways and...

data points on that and that can inform the strategy. So, I mean, a really simple level and this is nowhere near as far as it is going and can go, but we are spotting gaps in content that's not available for certain skills that people are seeking in the business because we're using all the data points about what they're searching and what skills they have versus how many users we have. And we can map that back to saying, well, the content is not matching the requirements there.

Holly Owens (19:07.268)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (19:08.575)
that was even that sounding simplistic was relatively difficult to do previously because you had to have so much data and sort of transpose that. And now it's just in systems, it's in platforms to do that. And that's exciting to me is what else can we discover that we didn't discover? And I'm also a weird advocate sort of leaning away from the AI side a second. I'm a weird advocate of how marketing can be used really well.

Holly Owens (19:19.034)
It's right there all the time.

Holly Owens (19:32.43)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (19:36.472)
psychologically to kind of engage you on an L &D side as well. And we've talked about this before on one of the presentations I've previously done, but it was around you can build scarcity, you can do FOMO, you can do these elements that are really popular in things like social media. They really draw you in, they draw you back, you open up the app every day, you want to see what's happening. And they work across the board. It doesn't really matter that it's L &D, but I think we're just getting smarter with how to...

Holly Owens (19:38.732)
I love that. Yes.

Fred Thompson (20:03.224)
engage and build that kind of interaction with our learners that I don't think we had before. So these things are where I like how we're heading and where we're going to.

Holly Owens (20:12.218)
Yeah, me too. And I think that anybody that's thinking about getting an L &D or thinking about getting into marketing or whatever they're trying to do, you need to take a psychology course for sure. And kind of learn some of those tactics. Like I didn't realize how much psychology is an L &D and is a marketing. Like you said, the FOMO stuff and really getting deep into the psyche of like...

You know, why do people sit on TikTok like myself at bed and scroll for hours and hours a night? What's there? What's doing that that's like become an addiction? You know, just keep coming back.

Fred Thompson (20:44.695)
Yeah. I've got a really simple kind of example that kind of is a real world example, which shows how well this works and then how you can apply that to L &D, which is we always want to be kind of herd mentality as humans, that's kind of how we operate. there's the hotels who find it more successful if they want to save on the amount of laundry they're doing on the tower washing. They'll put a sign in the bedroom to say, know, to tell people to do that, but they would have more success.

Holly Owens (21:11.627)
Yes.

Fred Thompson (21:13.309)
if they were put a statistic on there that says, join your other fellow guests and 70 % of them reuse their towel or whatever the status. And basically it makes everybody else think, if everybody else is doing it, I'm doing it. And then suddenly you get better uptake of it. No, incredible, really simple. Just the messaging on the sign changes that behavior. If you apply that to L and D, you could have, you know, all right, there you go, the Disney covers it. We'll not go on Disney.

Holly Owens (21:21.135)
Yep.

Holly Owens (21:26.713)
right.

Holly Owens (21:34.66)
They do that at Disney, Fred. They do that at Disney. Yeah, they do that at... Yeah.

Fred Thompson (21:41.567)
We'll be branching off in Disney Conversations, we'll never come back. But the L &D side, mean, if you want your learners to do a certain course and then follow up with a second course, for instance, you can say, 70 % of the people who've completed this course go on to do this course, or take this skill next, or whatever. And just that simple nudge and wording can change the engagement and how they kind of appeal towards it, kind of just completely switches. So I love it, I think it's great. If we get really smarter with this, I think we can have much more engagement impact, which is...

Number one, challenge all day, every day in L &D, everyone you speak to.

Holly Owens (22:15.225)
Absolutely 100 % so there's a lot of people in our audience who are transitioning into different roles or we have a lot of transitioning teachers L &D professionals you've You've you've done tons of stuff You're you're successful in more ways than then I can say or words that I have for So for people who are listening What are like three pieces of advice you could give to them if they're maybe looking to be an entrepreneur? They may be looking to get L &D into L &D

What should they do?

Fred Thompson (22:46.879)
Great question. I'm going to start with saying the American attitude is always a little bit more embellished with the idea of shouting about your own kind of achievements and things. And I found it difficult enough to call myself an entrepreneur, nevermind a Syrian entrepreneur for quite a while. But that's the British way. We're kind of a bit more reserved in that respect. We should shout more. We definitely should. But yeah, we have done quite a while, done quite a bit. I tell you what my kind of

Holly Owens (22:56.922)
Yeah

Holly Owens (23:10.061)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (23:14.614)
kind of key things from the founder side, I think that were the most surprising. One is probably the risk of starting something that is even like your own business or even a jump to a different role is generally a lot lower than you think it is. And it feels scarier because there's a mortgage or money on the line. But a lot of people who doing this are generally the people who are very skilled and skilled already and know

Holly Owens (23:37.006)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (23:44.391)
the likeness of what their ability is and where they can apply it. And ultimately, if it doesn't work, in many cases, you can get back into another job or another role again quite fast in many cases because you're a skilled professional. So I found that there's not as many people who want to take the risk that I take to go and start the businesses I've done. But I think if you kind of frame it differently, I think it becomes less of a challenge to do so. think you can think, well,

Holly Owens (24:09.454)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (24:10.014)
Worst case, we can run this for three months, six months, and if it doesn't work, we go get that job again. We will be able to get a job. We're pretty confident of that. We've done so successfully so far. So removing that fear, I think is one. Really, really hard. And I get it because that's ultimately why you don't have everybody having their own company and doing it. And it wouldn't work if everybody did as well because there'd just be lots of companies with one person in them.

Holly Owens (24:15.779)
Right.

Holly Owens (24:20.376)
Yeah, huge fear there for people.

Fred Thompson (24:39.005)
But equally that's why I think he's a good stepping stone and that can apply even if you're not starting a company, you're just moving a job or whatever or you start a new career. I think it's a similar sort of thing. The risk, I don't think is as big as what you perceive it to be. Secondly, I would just probably say you have got to probably genuinely spend the time outside of your day to day, a little bit of extra time to explore and it can be anything. It can be take that course on Udemy or it can be...

Holly Owens (24:46.337)
Yeah.

Fred Thompson (25:07.241)
you know, just sign up to that event and go and attend it, or it can be read about a new project. I mean, you could just start some new software and start trying to use that. I think if you just explore it, you learn a lot more, a lot quicker about what's possible. And this is feedback into the AI conversation. You're not going to get there without actually just typing things in and seeing what it does in many regards. And then...

Holly Owens (25:18.158)
All

Fred Thompson (25:32.2)
Lastly, think on my experience has always been, and this is very kind of founder focused kind of knowledge, but just aim at trusting people and employing people or having people in your business who are better than you who can don't be afraid of being the worst one in the room, the guys who are and girls that you've got who can be better at it because as long as you get their incentives right and the reasons why they're doing it, the whole business and everything you're doing. And again, this is just me as a founder, but.

I wouldn't be afraid of the people who are smarter and I would trust the people and if you get everybody's direction kind of aligned you can achieve so much more with the right people. yeah, nice kind of tidbits I think of the founder experience I've had.

Holly Owens (26:13.358)
Yeah.

Yeah, that goes beyond founder mentality as well as like you eliminating the fear, making sure you're professionally developing or learning and exploring more researching. That's something that we should be doing naturally. And then, you know, hire people smarter than you and trust them to do the job. Like trust them and give them the tools and the support they need to do the job. So absolutely. Those are three very great pieces of advice.

Fred Thompson (26:30.822)
Yeah, it-

Fred Thompson (26:40.508)
Yeah, one of my first kind of realizations of this, again, this is going back probably 20 years or so, but was kind of our first employee that we had in the business. And I was used to being a freelance developer basically. So I was worked for hire. I was paid per hour, which always changes your mentality, by the way. I would advise a lot of people if they could work per hour for the money they work, it changes how you perceive your working time and you deliver things differently. It's very strange. But I went away on vacation and

Holly Owens (27:04.299)
Yeah. Yeah.

Fred Thompson (27:09.444)
And we were still developing pieces and shipping that to our customers and raising invoices and receiving money in. And I thought, hang on, this is fantastic. I'd only been used to knowing what I knew and what I could do. And then suddenly you trust the people and you can go away and say, well, I think it will deliver that. And you suddenly realize there's a lot more scope to do a lot more with, you know, by just, just kind of getting the right people in place. So that was one of my first realizations of it. And that helped me kind of perceive and take the risk because everything's a risk.

Realistically, but especially so when you're in hiring and business, there's a lot of people's lives on the line that you will look after and try and pay for. So yeah, I think that's always pushed me forward though to take the risk because you kind of know if you get the right people and kind of incentivize them right, then you can get some great, great work and enjoy it a more.

Holly Owens (27:39.203)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (27:55.47)
You're kind like a fortune teller as a founder. You can kind of see things in the future if you put the right pieces into place. Yeah.

Fred Thompson (28:02.384)
Yeah, think so. There's a little bit about I think everything is a risk sort of every decision you make. think nothing's a guarantee, but I think it's like that building block approach. If you kind of come at it with, that kind of makes sense and we'll do that and that makes sense. You'll look back in a few years and sort of everything will have been based upon not one decision. It'll be based upon the combination of the hundreds you've made. So you can't really get too concerned if one's wrong as long as you're doing kind of the right things generally.

Holly Owens (28:08.866)
Nothing's a guarantee. Death and taxes as we say in the United States.

Holly Owens (28:30.202)
You're heading in the right direction, Absolutely. Fred, we had so much fun. at the end of the episode now. Yeah, it does go really fast when you're having fun. So tell people where they can find you. We're obviously going to include everything in the show notes about thirst, about you, where to connect. So tell us where we can find you, what's the best way for people to connect with you or learn more about thirst.

Fred Thompson (28:37.425)
So fast.

Fred Thompson (28:54.001)
Yeah, no problem. Generally LinkedIn is always the place where we put a point somebody to know, isn't it? But so I'm on LinkedIn, Fred Thompson, you should be able to find me relatively simple URL, but we'll post it in the show notes. then first is first.io as well, if you want to find out more about the platform that we produce.

Holly Owens (29:02.884)
I thought... Yep.

Holly Owens (29:10.394)
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciated hearing your perspective. And I love the reference you made to the American culture about how we boast about our publish. I'm one of the more reserved ones. I don't boast about it. I feel very like weird when people say like, you're an influencer, you're this or you're that. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm just a person.

Fred Thompson (29:27.911)
I

Fred Thompson (29:32.871)
I love it, I just wish as a nation we would embrace it a little bit more, we're not too great at it over here.

Holly Owens (29:37.707)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we'll see what happens in the future. So thank you so much. And I can't wait for people to hear this episode.