In this episode, Joel and Chad chat with Gareth Marlow, executive coach at EQ Systems, who helps startups avoid burning cash on solutions no one asked for. They cover everything from Cambridge vs. Oxford (the real battle: who cares less) to their favorite sci-fi flicks. Gareth talks scaling companies, finding product-market fit, and the rookie mistake of not talking to customers.
THE IMPORTANT STUFF: They dive into the challenges of expanding between the UK and US—spoiler: cultural differences exist! Gareth wraps up with insights on tech's fast pace and how AI and low-code might democratize the future, or at least not turn us all into jobless zombies.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Joel (00:24.336)
OHHHH
What's up boys and girls. It is your favorite guilty pleasure aka the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always. Chad. So washes riding shotgun as we welcome Gareth Marlowe, executive coach and consultant at EQ systems. Gareth welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.
Gareth Marlow (00:41.207)
Hello?
Gareth Marlow (00:48.088)
Thank you, I'm suitably scared. Nice to be here.
Chad (00:49.951)
All the way from Cambridge.
Joel (00:51.63)
You wouldn't know it from the accent that you're suitably scared.
Gareth Marlow (00:53.71)
No.
Chad (00:54.655)
And you're wearing a jumper. From my understanding, just a couple of weeks ago, it was pretty damn hot. It was like 30 degrees around there. Wow!
Gareth Marlow (01:02.158)
34 degrees in Cambridge last week, which was on the hot side. I was in Denmark at the time. Yeah.
Joel (01:06.928)
For our American listeners, that's really hot, 30 degrees. That's not freezing temps in the UK.
Chad (01:09.95)
Yeah.
You're in the 90s, kids. Over 100, yeah, over 100, yeah.
Gareth Marlow (01:12.382)
That's three figures, it? heading for three figures. Yeah, but this week, no, yeah, it's this week it's not. British, it's British summer, it's rainy, it's grey, it's cold, it's the jump is on.
Joel (01:16.322)
Yeah, so Gareth, lot of our listeners.
Chad (01:25.63)
Ha ha!
Joel (01:29.552)
Way to depress all of us, Gareth. So a lot of our listeners won't know who you are. Give us a little bit about what makes Gareth tick and then we'll get into the nitty gritty of the business stuff.
Gareth Marlow (01:31.788)
Absolutely.
Gareth Marlow (01:39.53)
Cool. Okay. I'm, my wife calls me a half geek. So background is IT tech and IT ops and noodling around with geeky things. Got a degree in engineering, but these days I work on the people side. So I help organizations, yeah, scale technology companies scale and helping them think about the people side and the organization side. Living Cambridge in the UK, the old one, with my wife, I have four kids, two of whom are
through university and into the adult world, two of whom are still at high school. And that's probably most of my time when I have a little bit of extra time, a bit of sci -fi, a bit of electronic music, you know, in the background, but mainly I'm a dad and running my consultancy.
Joel (02:17.722)
What's, what's, what's, Cambridge versus Oxford. Talk to me about the rivalry, how they're different as an American. I know both of them, but can't tell you much about either one.
Chad (02:28.984)
They're located in different areas, Cheeseman. I don't know if you know that or not.
Gareth Marlow (02:31.246)
That's right. What's the difference? Like 120 miles. That's something like that. Oxford, quite a big industrial city has an industrial base, maybe, I don't know, 200 plus thousand people. Cambridge, considerably smaller was when I first came here 35 years ago, it was a university in a marketplace. It's a little bit bigger now, but let's say 130 ,000 people. So a bit smaller.
Joel (02:31.78)
But it's a small country.
Joel (02:57.572)
but that the college the colleges more than the towns
Gareth Marlow (03:00.878)
Yes, the colleges more than the towns. So Oxford was there first. Cambridge was formed by a group of renegades in Oxford who decided in the late 13th century that they didn't like being beaten up by the local peasants. So they fled into the swamp of East Anglia, which is where I am now, and set up a rival secondary institution. The way that they're both structured is the same. There's this very strange collegiate system. There's 30 odd colleges at each. You pick a college.
Joel (03:02.287)
Differences
Gareth Marlow (03:29.698)
colleges kind of like Hogwarts. You go there, you eat there, you live there. And then the rest of it is like bolted onto the back of that is this world -class research institution. you know, and in both of those cases, it's like, you know, very long distinguished, you know, in the fields, Nobel Prize winners, great authors, those kinds of things, and seem to have served a good job producing prime ministers for the United Kingdom as well. So a whole bunch of them have been to either Oxford.
Joel (03:57.048)
And who usually wins the football game every season?
Gareth Marlow (04:00.89)
there's well the really important fight is the is the rowing is the is the the boat race on the river tensed right that Well, you know, I have clients in oxford. So i'm going to be diplomatic here Obviously i'm cheering the light blue But I don't know what the stats are. I think it's probably fairly fairly even but it's a good race. It's a race
Chad (04:06.028)
Hey. That's it. Huh? Yeah? Yeah?
Joel (04:06.134)
rowing. Now we're getting down to the nitty gritty. Okay, who's got the better rowing team?
Joel (04:16.356)
Boooo
Chad (04:18.717)
Yeah.
Joel (04:23.77)
How diplomatic of you, Fairly Even.
Gareth Marlow (04:26.612)
Fairly even as they say it's you know, coxswain and cambridge must be the best in the world at roehring because it's the same two teams in the final every year. And yeah, that's that's how that that's how that thing gets resolved. But yeah, yeah.
Chad (04:35.102)
Hahaha
Joel (04:39.696)
Fair enough.
Chad (04:39.935)
Okay, Sci -Fi geek, what's your favorite Sci -Fi movie?
Gareth Marlow (04:46.99)
You can't see it very well, maybe, but there is a poster on the wall of 2001 and Space Odyssey. when I was a kid, it wasn't really out on the cinema at that point. I was just a little bit too young for that, but my parents had the record. And so for five years, I had the soundtrack album and that was it, the soundtrack album in the book.
Chad (04:52.2)
Mm
Gareth Marlow (05:06.51)
And then eventually VCRs came along and it was broadcast on the TV. And then I watched it when I was a older. Sorry. I watched it when I was a bit older, but ever since I've, you know, fell in love with that movie when I was 13 and it's still my favorite movie. And every time I get a chance to go see it, I go see it.
Joel (05:09.504)
soundtrack.
Chad (05:22.953)
Joel, real quick, what's yours? Favorite sci -fi.
Joel (05:25.776)
Favorite sci -fi. mean, I'd have to, if we're talking about what impacted us as children, mean, Star Wars, changed my life as much as anything else. I wanted to be Luke Skywalker for a good 24 months. So, I mean, there are better ones for sure, but if we're looking at impact on my life, Star Wars was amazing. I was six or seven years old when that came out and it was brilliant. Chad, what's yours?
Chad (05:38.003)
yeah. Yeah.
Chad (05:45.119)
Yeah.
Chad (05:49.159)
Yes. It was brilliant. I'm going to go with Blade Runner. I'm going go with Blade Runner. mean, Harrison Ford. I mean, that was kind of like a dirty version of Star Wars, let's say. So kind of a different framing, but same kind of thing. Very futuristic, very, very sci -fi. But we met Gareth. Yeah, come on. Yes.
Gareth Marlow (05:53.538)
Okay.
Joel (06:07.012)
Yeah. We're old. We're old basically is what we're saying. We're all old guys.
Gareth Marlow (06:11.832)
We're all old. I've also got to say on the Star Wars point, it is a closely contested thing, but these two kids on the shelf behind me, one's called Booth and the other is called Ellie, which was close enough to Leia to get past the thing. So my two oldest children are effectively Luke and Leia. just, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, proper hardcore next level.
Chad (06:25.481)
Nice.
Hahaha
Joel (06:29.434)
That is some nerdy shit. is nerdy shit.
Chad (06:33.481)
Well, I'm going to say that you're more than half geek, Gareth. Gareth, met, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna throw this out there for everybody. We met at the House of Commons. That's right, as we were having dinner with Lord Way. And we started talking about startups. And Joel and I, we advise startups here in the HR tech space.
Gareth Marlow (06:37.47)
You
Gareth Marlow (06:45.026)
We did.
Chad (06:57.867)
and you started talking about some of the startups that you actually deal with in many different industries. And I thought, hey, what the hell? Let's start to talk a little bit about the industries, talk about startups, and talk about the differences because you not only have startups in the UK, but in different countries in Europe throughout the years and then also in the US. And I thought it'd be interesting. So why the hell not? So right out of the gate, talk a little bit about your history.
how you got into this and then we'll start bleeding into today.
Gareth Marlow (07:28.494)
Okay. Okay, cool. Well, yeah, like I say, it sort of started off in this very techie path engineering background. My degree was chemical engineering, but when I graduated, the internet had just arrived. So it was like that changed everything. I don't want to go and build all refineries now. I want to go and build this stuff. So 10 years running operations and IT for various different companies around here.
And then I got head -hunted and started to work for a privately held bootstrap company in Cambridge called Redgate. Redgate make tools for people who build software. So it's very matter. Tools for software engineers, tools for database administrators. And I went in there to run the IT team. And I left eight years later as chief operating officer. So somewhere in the time over there, I moved over to the dark side of commercial and organization and people and teams and those kinds of things.
And what it turned out was the case was, I'm still a geeky systems guy, but now I'm mostly interested in geeky systems that are people coming together working effectively in organizations. And they are still systems like any other systems, except the systems are made out of meat, and the meat has feelings. And so, you know, that's what makes working with people and working with organizations really super interesting is that it is a kind of a systems problem and an engineering problem, but it's also a people problem and a psychology problem. So,
Did my time with Reggae, left there, decided I wanted to do something different, thought, okay, what do I like doing? Working with people, working with teams, helping organizations to scale, helping people build great product and take it to market. That's my idea of Funday. So I cross -trained into executive coaching. And over the last eight years, I've been working with the leaders of those kinds of organizations who are trying to scale them up, coaching those leaders, working with those teams, helping them to develop a strategy, become more customer centric, you know, all that good stuff that we've
Chad (09:01.918)
Mm.
Gareth Marlow (09:25.346)
we've learned along the way. So that's kind of how I got here.
Joel (09:29.828)
When do you usually come in?
Chad (09:30.089)
So that's how you got here.
Joel (09:34.04)
Is it, I get a seed, is it series A, in the garage? When do you typically come into play?
Chad (09:34.495)
early stage.
Gareth Marlow (09:41.71)
There's a point of inflection around product market fit. And when organizations are getting close to that point, then suddenly the markets start, you know, if that's getting right, suddenly the market starts pulling as opposed to the organization pushing, right? And there are various definitions for product market fit, but one of them is, you know, your constraint is how quickly you can hire sales and marketing. So, you know, this is the point at which your organization is going to change radically because you're scaling the hell out of it.
Chad (09:49.204)
Mm
Chad (09:57.351)
Mm
Chad (10:04.446)
Mm -hmm.
Gareth Marlow (10:10.958)
And a lot of stuff that has gotten you to here won't get you to there. And particularly this is first time through for founders and entrepreneurs. you haven't learned those lessons the hard way on somebody else's dime and the problems start emerging, the systems start emerging, people get confused, people get frustrated, people get misaligned. The organization gets less effective and often that's the point that somebody drops me an email or says, can we get on the call? And our conversation starts.
So it's PMF that would typically in VC backed will be series A. And I do work with earlier stage stuff and I absolutely enjoy the larger scale up, know, multiple products enterprise scale up journey as well. I like my organizations to be human sized. So I don't have a client that's bigger than about 500 employees because bigger than that, it's just a different game. And it's not one that I particularly enjoy being in that world. But that thing where, you know, we're trying to scale the crap out of this.
Chad (11:02.92)
Yeah.
Gareth Marlow (11:06.146)
thing as quickly as we possibly can because it's kind of working and then maybe it's not working so let's get it working again that's where I come in and play.
Chad (11:15.071)
Well, if they have 500 people, it better be working. That's all I gotta say.
Gareth Marlow (11:17.678)
Yeah. Well, the union is just a different set of problems, right? Because by 500 people, it's like, we've got this big thing and it's got a lot of momentum, but maybe a bunch of our product lines are getting mature. Maybe our markets are moving on. Maybe it's like, okay, how do we do the next thing? How do we bring the next product out? How do we go into a new territory? It's like, how do we access that next chunk of growth? you know, certainly a lot of stuff has to have worked to get you to 500, but to get you past 500,
maybe some different stuff needs to start kicking in.
Chad (11:49.907)
Let's talk a little bit about product market fit. So, I mean, I don't know how many companies or startup founders have come to myself and Joel and also on Firing Squad. And they've created solutions for problems that don't exist because they're not from this industry and or the problem might exist, but it's not enough for somebody to spend money on, which is a problem, right? So how often do you see that in other industries?
Gareth Marlow (12:19.656)
so much. mean, so much. I think, I think certainly, no, no. And I would say it's an even bigger problem in our local specialism around here in Cambridge is deep tech, right? So a lot of that is you've got some early stage research that's, that's kind of maybe looking for a problem to go solve, right? I've got a solution in search of a problem, which is absolutely the wrong way around, right? And
Chad (12:20.787)
Yeah? Okay. It's not just us, Joel. It's not just us.
Joel (12:23.888)
It's not just us,
Chad (12:40.563)
Mm
Gareth Marlow (12:45.816)
The other thing is you've got people who are in love with the solution and in love with the technology, but they're not in love with the problem. They don't know the problem. They don't know the customers. They don't have those kinds of things. Right. So some of the time, you know, it's about helping them get to that customer orientation and get to like understand it's like, it's not about you at this stage. It's about them and about, you know, their world, their pain, what they're trying to achieve, what's making that hard, what gains you can unlock for them. Then it's about your solution. But in the meantime, yeah.
so much so much okay so we built this thing and we've run out of money and we can't sell it and it's like okay right so what customer conversations have you had with me
Chad (13:25.201)
And why do you think that is? Why do you think you can't sell it? More than likely because it's not a real solution to a problem that anybody gives a shit about. Now, most of the founders that we talk to, they feel like they had a problem coming in. Let's say, for instance, it might've been the application process or it might've been, you know, experience. might, are a ton of different things, right?
Gareth Marlow (13:43.33)
Mm -hmm.
Chad (13:51.891)
but there are much larger problems, at least in the eyes of HR and talent acquisition, or talent management, then they understand, which means they didn't do the due diligence. They didn't do the talking like you said. They didn't do enough research.
Gareth Marlow (14:01.538)
Yeah. Yeah.
Gareth Marlow (14:09.902)
And oftentimes when things are not working the way that we want, if we've got a struggling moment as a client who's maybe in search of a solution, it's maybe as a systemic problem. So it's not just about a little bit of band -aid or something over here to make this bit of the process slightly better. Maybe it's like holistically end to end, we need to rethink our approach over here. So again, you see this.
Chad (14:26.573)
huh. Yeah.
Chad (14:31.998)
Yeah.
Gareth Marlow (14:33.486)
naive. And I don't mean that in a judgmental way. I just mean that in a sort of innocent way, you see this in a instant approach, somebody come along and having a bright idea and saying, Hey, I can make that thing more efficient. And I can prove that, you know, you're going to be 20 % faster or, you know, 50 % more accurate or something like that, if you adopt our stuff. And yet, because they don't really understand what's going on systemically, customer side, they don't understand that it's like, okay, well, that person, even if that value was possible to achieve, they're not just gonna
change their workflow, drop their approach, retool their approach, retrain their people just to use your tech. you know, and yeah, the ones who get it right are the ones who realize that quickly enough before they run out of money and get into the problem space a lot more. That's a risky step to take, right? Because what if I choose some ground that's not fertile? What if I choose some ground that hasn't, there isn't a viable solution in there?
Joel (15:09.422)
Mm -hmm.
Joel (15:31.407)
Eh.
Gareth Marlow (15:31.5)
And that is part of the luck of the game, but but you've got to start from the problem space
Joel (15:36.932)
Yep. And speaking of fertile ground, you're in a really unique position that you help both UK and American companies. And we talk on the European show all the time about when someone gets money in Europe, they want to come to America. So I'm curious about your take on what you advise companies that want to grow in America and also for American companies, what advice do you give them when they want to start setting up shop in Europe?
Gareth Marlow (16:00.878)
It's quite interesting. One of my clients has just been acquired and they've been acquired by, I won't be specific about which one it is or which base they're in, but the entity that's acquired them is 15 times their size and has no European footprint. So the US entity has basically said, we want to buy that thing, not for the IP and an AcroHi, and we want to buy that thing because there is a...
established thing with momentum that's already plugged into the space that has the relationships to the channels, the market. Yeah, exactly. And, we'll, we'll, we'll expand in that way through acquisition and that, you know, so much &A destroys value, right? But in this case, Mike, I've got some good feeling about this because the way that they're thinking about the integration is, is two way. It's not like where the big guys, you know, we're going to absorb you into the collective. It's like, it looks like it's just going to be a
a truly, you know, these things together in a way that doesn't destroy, destroy value. But, you know, that's one approach there to sort of take. the other direction, again, I've got a little bit of experience with the business that I was the last, my last executive role is that we, you know, we established footholds in North America and a presence in North America. And all of our operations were based out of the UK for the first, I don't know, eight years.
And we had sales teams who were, you know, working afternoon, evening hours to be able to cover the West and the East Coast, making outbound calls from the UK. We eventually reopened an office in Pasadena and got a foothold there. And that was a different approach because that wasn't through acquisition. was genuinely, it was one individual who was for family reasons, keen to return to the West Coast. So it was like, okay, he knows the company, he's got the relationships, you know, he's got the capability.
Chad (17:35.273)
Mm
Gareth Marlow (17:54.828)
We can build something around him. And he was joined by another of our colleagues who was keen to go and do the XPAP thing on the West Coast for a bit. And so the two of them were that, you know, that was patients zero or zero and one as it were on the West Coast. They settled in Pasadena. They, you know, opened an office there and build out things from there. And that company has now got bases in Pasadena, in Austin, in Singapore and Australia and in Germany.
And in each one of those cases, it's just basically put some bodies on the ground, got them to build out a base, build out something with momentum and impetus and grow it from there, which is a bit more of an organic approach, but work very effectively.
Chad (18:26.931)
Okay.
Chad (18:38.737)
It's interesting, Gareth, because we've seen different strategies. Let's say, for instance, within Europe and then also, let's say, for instance, like Monster .com, big US presence at one time, right? And then they tried to go into Europe and they tried to go into Asia. And what they did was they literally took the same brand, the same model, and they tried to replicate it everywhere and it failed miserably. And we're seeing those types of things. We also work with
Gareth Marlow (18:50.979)
Mm
Chad (19:06.591)
an organization called House of HR, they're out of Belgium. They have about 50 different companies underneath that House of HR umbrella. They keep those brands. They have 53 plus different brands because they understand the brands are a part of the culture and that the people, the people are a big part of that, right? So if you give a founder
Gareth Marlow (19:11.043)
Mm
Gareth Marlow (19:26.638)
percent.
Chad (19:33.055)
a bunch of money and then you rip the name off of their kid and you put your name on it, more than likely that founder's not gonna stay around very long. So can you talk about some of those different dynamics? Because as dumb Americans, we come over and we try to slap the red, white, and blue over everything, right? And for some reason, don't know why, it just doesn't seem to work. yeah, can you talk about that whole dynamic from the US coming over, same model, and then also the other way around?
Joel (19:49.082)
Mm -hmm.
Gareth Marlow (19:53.944)
doesn't work.
Chad (20:02.207)
Europe coming over to the US.
Gareth Marlow (20:04.81)
Right. So yeah, I mean, like you said to say one size does not fit all. And again, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's not you really, isn't it? It's like, we've, we've got something that we've optimized. We understand really well and works really well over here. So, you know, simply this is a case of clone what we've got, deploy it in these different places and we're good and maybe localized. Well, logically.
Chad (20:25.823)
But it makes sense though, right? It's like scale, model, the model works. We want to scale. The best way to scale is to do what we know, to use the tech that we already have. So I totally get that. But in your experience, what have you seen?
Gareth Marlow (20:35.383)
Right.
Gareth Marlow (20:39.726)
So, you know, the way that people buy is very different. And you can't infer that just by going, okay, well, they're Anglophone. So therefore they're going to operate in the same way, right? You know, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, United States, you know, four territories separated by the same language, you know, and it's easy for you to go, okay, well, we speak the same language. So therefore it's, you know, it's just replicable.
Chad (20:46.663)
Mm.
Chad (20:53.311)
Yeah.
Gareth Marlow (21:09.162)
It's not, it's not, you know, the way that you communicate the language that resonates, all of those things are very culturally variable. And so, you know, we found going the other way, the same was true. You know, let me give you an example. The software company that I used to work for was building tools around Microsoft's cloud platform and continues to build tools around Microsoft's cloud platform. Now I'm British.
And so that's Microsoft Azure. Okay, it's Microsoft Azure. over several years working there, that was drummed down at me and I started saying the word Azure, right? And so it's Microsoft Azure. Now that's a trivial example, but it's one I think which sort of shows that on the face of it, you just go, well, it's the same language and it's whatever. In reality, it's like, no, if I start saying Microsoft Azure to an American, what the hell are you talking about?
Joel (21:48.25)
Mm
Joel (22:05.39)
Yeah. I think, I think Europeans discount. If you, if you spell favorite with OU instead of O and you're going into America, like I'm serious. Americans look at that and go, God, European company. Like I got a different time zone. So I mean, these little things matter. you do, you deal with teams, you deal with the product, the branding side of it the organization. Where is.
Chad (22:13.588)
Ha
Chad (22:18.831)
No, not one of them. Jesus.
Gareth Marlow (22:19.469)
Right.
Gareth Marlow (22:22.978)
Yeah. They do.
Joel (22:32.612)
Where do most companies trip up? Is it the team building? Is it the product doesn't quite sync with a different country? Where do most companies fall down?
Gareth Marlow (22:41.08)
So I would say it's more about go to market and less about the product itself. mean, it's unlikely. I haven't seen many situations where we just need a different implementation of the same value proposition for this territory beyond localization, right? It's like broadly and certainly in terms of the places that I've played, you know, it's basically being the same product into those different markets. But the go to market, absolutely. The funnel, the way that you market, the way that you sell.
you know, is really different. The language is different. The energy is different. It's, you know, there is a strong European, strong British aversion to being sold to in a way that, you know, is not the case in not the case in the United States. There is a cynicism around sincere customer service. You know, like, you know, Europeans are like, OK, this service being friendly to me, you know, you know, whereas I think
Chad (23:21.843)
Yes.
Joel (23:24.08)
That's huge. Yeah.
Chad (23:27.117)
yeah.
Chad (23:33.376)
huh.
Gareth Marlow (23:39.532)
you know, that's not the case in America, right? It's like, no, I'm just a... So, you know, you see those differences in those kinds of places. And you mentioned the team as well. I mean, I've got an interesting situation at the moment where I'm coaching leadership team of a company with an American CEO and European team, mainly British and Polish European team. And just kind of communication styles.
Chad (23:42.195)
Ha
Gareth Marlow (24:07.064)
harshness, directness of communication, they are different. you know, what that's led is that on that team and in all international teams, you end up with these things evolving over time and people getting familiar with each other as individuals. And, you know, that's that's just Gareth. He's being British and diplomatic. That's just gone. He's been brash and American, right? It's not like he's an asshole and, you know, he's a pushover. It's like, yeah, OK, these guys are different. But initially, when those teams are coming together, there is a shock.
Chad (24:25.384)
Hehehehehe
Gareth Marlow (24:37.08)
there's a shock as those teams perform. It's like, holy crap, you know, that was distressingly direct or like, why wouldn't you get to the point and say what you mean? You know, that's, you see all of those kinds of things going on when you've got those, you know, international multinational teams also selling into different markets, you know.
Joel (24:54.554)
Yeah.
Chad (24:57.081)
I don't know that there's a more direct culture than the Dutch. And they just say, well, I'm Dutch, right? And again, Americans, whether you're on the East Coast, much more direct than the West Coast, definitely more direct than the South, there's so many different kind of like personas in the US. But the Dutch, for the most part, I think they're probably the most direct.
Gareth Marlow (25:01.111)
Right.
Joel (25:06.8)
Mm
Joel (25:14.564)
Yeah.
Chad (25:20.863)
business people I've ever, or just people. Let's not say business people, just people that I've ever worked with. And they're really close to you guys, right? So this isn't new. This isn't something that's new for you guys. So why is it new when you get an American who's very direct? Because I guarantee you, they're not as direct as that Dutchman that you've worked with.
Gareth Marlow (25:41.088)
No, we sort of, guess, I mean, this is me, choked and hit, right? I guess we're kind of lulled into a false sense of security over their language, right? If somebody's coming to me with a strong Dutch accent or a strong German accent, I might be like expecting a certain sort of low indexing on the humor, low indexing on the sarcasm, not a lot, just.
Chad (25:46.653)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Chad (25:51.561)
Gotcha.
Mm.
Chad (26:07.795)
Like German, yeah.
Gareth Marlow (26:09.526)
straight communication, but like that's fine. Whereas, you know, if I'm having a jovial conversation with a couple of American gentlemen, and then one of them suddenly starts tearing me a new one, then, you know, I'm like, okay, what's going on here? What's going on here? Maybe initially, when it's like, no, it's just in, he's just in work mode for the next five minutes and sharing his thoughts.
Joel (26:32.727)
And
Chad (26:33.023)
So what are red alerts to you for any startup that wants to work with you? you start to have that kind of like that first session, the first 15 minutes or what have you, what are some of those bad signals that they start putting off right out of the gate where you're like, okay, I need to stay at RM's line.
Gareth Marlow (26:49.198)
A real, okay, so lack of self -awareness. So, you you get this arrogance thing coming in, which is like, okay, this isn't working. Can we bring you in to go and fix them? And then you're there just going, well, you know, what's your role? How are you contributing towards, you know, this, that, that's a wuga, wuga. That's a, that's a big warning sign. So yeah, lack of self -awareness.
speaking to, speaking to multiple people and multiple people all having the same diagnosis of the situation, but a common set of elephants in the room. It's like, yeah, we never took, we all know this stuff, but we're all silently navigating our way around it. You know, if an organization comes and says, look, we've got these issues, but we find it hard to work through it and talk about it, then happy days. I can help them. I can facilitate that conversation. If it's like, we've got all of these taboo issues.
Chad (27:24.169)
Mm
Gareth Marlow (27:43.874)
But we're not allowed to talk about the taboo issues. We need you to help us navigate around the fact that there are these taboo issues that we can't discuss. It's like, what are you doing? No, you know, no, I can't. The problem is those things that are those elephants in the room, that's what you need to go tackle. So those are the, yeah, sorry.
Joel (28:01.572)
Differences in.
Conferences and go to market we talked about. I'm curious about the fundraising side. You've obviously helped European companies raise money in America and vice versa. What kind of tips would you give a company looking to raise money in a different country and the nuances that they're in? What kind of differences should they make in their pitch? What tips would you give?
Gareth Marlow (28:25.538)
I mean, my tips would be work with people super local, right? It's as simple as that. Like wherever you're trying to raise, work with the people over, got the relationships and B can give you the guidance to help finesse that. So rather than me helping them to develop their own playbook that they're to be able to adapt to each of the approaches, like, don't, don't essentially try to build up that knowledge yourself. Go work with the people who do this day in day out in that space, in that territory, and just be hungry for the guidance that you're going to get from them.
Joel (28:52.196)
Yeah. And, and are you seeing more American companies investing in Europe and more European investors trying to get a piece of, of American companies? know in our space you've worked with this way global. So you probably have some, know, some real life examples of how that works.
Gareth Marlow (29:11.574)
Yeah, I mean, I certainly much more experience of the European companies looking for American investment and fairly, fairly typically is driven by market as much by market need. It's like, OK, we need to we want to expand geographically is is one thing. So therefore we're going to look for, you know, investments coming out of there. And then the other thing is potentially scale. I mean, we do seem to have we do seem to find it difficult to
create and scale things all past Unicorn on a very regular basis in the UK. It's interesting. And I find it slightly sort of patriotically disappointing a little bit that we don't grow as much as I think that we can to its maximum top scale potential through lack of...
Chad (30:00.411)
Mm -hmm.
Gareth Marlow (30:02.84)
I want to say ambition, ambition and investment, you know, and that in order to be able to grow past a certain point, we need to either access finance or we need to access, you know, move towards acquisition from a, from a US based entity. If we want to break through that, six to seven figures, you know, threshold that seems to be a bit of a sticking point. I mean, we, you know, we produce some, we produce some good big companies here out of Cambridge and technology, but,
Chad (30:22.899)
Yeah, what were?
Gareth Marlow (30:30.264)
there's a whole bunch more that have been acquired and then gone on to grow further. And you're just kind of thinking, all right, what was the thing that was constraining that growth and could we have done it ourselves? And in some cases, I kind of think, yeah, we should, we could.
Chad (30:43.395)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we're in the age of the GPU and generative AI, so tech is moving much faster than it was. And we're starting to see companies, instead of going toward trying to build a full platform, because that takes a hell of a lot of long time, they're just trying to build a robust set of features and trying to get that sold. Are you seeing that in other industries as well? And do you think that will change?
especially with the pace and the velocity of tech.
Gareth Marlow (31:15.33)
I mean, I think it has to, right? Because there's such powerful disruptive capabilities that are just introducing such step changes of capability that, you you're just going to get out and compete it on the basis of speed, if nothing else. you know, people have got to make that hop over. Can you quickly build something of value, of sustainable value by quickly assembling stuff? I guess my exposure to that is more limited. So,
Chad (31:20.029)
Mm
Gareth Marlow (31:45.038)
Yeah, it's been great to see the ability to rapidly prototype and explore PMF and those kinds of things by a combination of local tooling and the capabilities that are coming from a fast integration with LLMs or other structured data sources. And yeah, okay, so here's an example. working with a company this morning, physically in Cambridge out on my bike. So called to this company this morning and they're in manufacturing and they've got an approach to
help car manufacturers use less material when they're producing stamped components. Okay, so they can save 20 to 30 percentage points. obviously cars are lot cheaper to build, carbon footprint of your car is massively lower if you adopt that approach. Now, what they have is some really super smart, call it algorithmic approach that's come out of the engineering department that figures out how you can optimally make these parts. And that's their secret source.
what they're exploring at the moment, and then kind of a consultancy play at the moment, working with these big car manufacturers in Detroit and other places in Europe. But what they're seeing at the moment is, okay, there's a software play here. you know, like we're using software tools internally, but there was a self -service software play that design engineers at car manufacturers can use our approach to optimize their part design, right? So it's a software play. The fact that we could go in and have a conversation and say, there is a...
there is potentially a software play. We can assemble a workflow using local tools and integrate that into some of your heavy lifting secret source, Python backend really, really quickly. And that's going to be the fastest way that we can validate whether or not there's something over here. And that's amazing, right? That's like, I'm not going to go and build a software team. I mean, it certainly wouldn't scale. It certainly wouldn't be robust. It wouldn't be secure. It wouldn't be all of those. wouldn't be a big...
good platform, but as the first way of just going, is there a product opportunity here? Is there a viable market over here? They're going to be in that space in a couple of months as a consequence of this kind of step change that's coming from this new technology. And it's really super exciting.
Gareth Marlow (34:01.228)
If you kind of think about like the democratizing waves, the stuff that we had, right? You know, we had, you know, start of my career, start of our careers, I guess we had the internet, we suddenly had the ability to have a shopfront that was on available to the world and our ability to transact all over the world. And that changed everything, you know, and we've had these various different waves of things like cloud computing that have helped us to go faster and just be more effective. And here we are on the cusp of
Chad (34:05.601)
yeah.
Gareth Marlow (34:27.424)
of another one, both with the AI technology and our ability to just quickly implement very powerful transformations in the tech and then low code. And we can do, implement a really nice high quality UX workflow without anything more than the kind of skills that we would need to drive PowerPoint or Excel. That is cool.
Chad (34:48.926)
Yes.
Joel (34:50.78)
And talk about cool. That's Gareth Marlow, everybody. He's the executive coach and consultant at EQ Systems. Gareth, for our listeners that want to connect with you or learn more, where should they go?
Gareth Marlow (35:02.03)
Best place search Gareth Marlowe on LinkedIn. That's going to be the best place to find me. I'm also at EQ systems .io on the internet.
Joel (35:09.498)
Love it. And he's off to his X -wing fighter, taking off to the Death Star.
Chad (35:12.133)
on the internet. I'm glad you said that. Gareth, thanks so much my friend and you know, hopefully we'll see you again at the House of Commons. No promises if they'll let us in or not.
Gareth Marlow (35:20.628)
Absolutely. Absolutely, they're gonna let us in. They're gonna let us in for our night hoods.
Joel (35:22.672)
They're not letting us back in. They're not letting us back in. Chad, that's another one in the can. We out.
Chad (35:30.548)
We out!
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