Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Jeff Kofman, the Emmy-winning reporter and founder of Trint, the automated speech to text technology. Fascinated by the news as a child, reading three daily papers it says here, and refusing to go to be before he’d watched the national news at 11pm, Jeff’s passion led him to spend more than three decades as a reporter, foreign correspondent and war correspondent for major news networks, reporting on some of the biggest stories of that time, including the Iraq war, the Arab Spring, Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill and the Chile mine rescue, just to mention a few. His change of career happened by surprise, sparked by a long held frustration, how could journalists in the 21st century still be having to manually transcribe interviews, speeches and conferences in the way that they did in the 1970s. After a chance meeting with some developers working in speech to text, Jeff saw an opportunity to use AI and software to, as he says, “liberate us to do the interesting stuff.” Founded in 2014, Trint can convert video, audio and speech to text in more than 40 languages with editing and collaboration support and it’s trusted by leaders in news and media, and many other industries right across the world. It’s really nice to have you here, Jeff.
Jeffrey Kofman
Absolutely. Well, a pleasure first of all and thank you. I like, this is an interesting spin, jazz and entrepreneurship, let’s see how we can weave the two together but yeah, I still think of myself as a journalist you know I’m on the tech side, the innovation side of journalism but I, I sort of bristle when people say “former journalist”, “ex-journalist”, you know I didn’t plan, as you noted, to be a tech entrepreneur, an inventor or founder but hey, life’s more fun when you surprise yourself you know, I think it’s always interesting you know in your twenties when you come up with these roadmaps and you hear kids doing this and “well, when I’m, by the time I’m 25, this, by the time I’m 30, that”, and of course no one’s life unfolds that way. I’m very proud of the fact that I did not plan this, even a year before I started it, if you’d said I’ll give you favourable odds that you’re going to run a tech company, I would have said “sure” you know, there’s no way I am going to do this. I have no experience as a founder or as an inventor, I can’t you know, I couldn’t read a spreadsheet – still struggle – and had never managed anyone. In fact I didn’t even know what a 360 was because when you work for ABC News, CBS News as I did for so many years, you’re on talent contracts, they don’t give you performance reviews, they either renew you or watch you go so all of this was such a steep learning curve but I had a good idea and I’d lived the problem and it turns out that a lot of the best innovation comes from people who have lived the problem and understand what the solution needs to look like.
Elliot Moss
I remember years ago wanting to be a journalist, Jeff and I, like you, was a voracious consumer of news when I was little and I used to have a very small, for those people who are too young to know, a small radio that you could put in next to your bed, a little transistor radio, right, and it was a present from my parents when I was seven and I used to listen to late night radio, that was my thing, here I am, I’ve always, always loved working in this particular medium. And I remember then about 18, 19 being asked whether I wanted to be a journalist or not and I said I wasn’t sure and the answer from the journalist was, “well then you don’t want to be a journalist because if you want to be a journalist, you’d want to be on in the place in Iraq at the moment, you’d want to be with the miners in Chile, you'd want to be in the field.” What was the beginning of that journey for you? What was that buzz about? Why were you compelled to put yourself in places where news was happening?
Jeffrey Kofman
You know, it’s an interesting question. I knew at a crazy early age that I wanted to be a journalist. I don’t know whether I was 13, 14, 15 but an intense curiosity about the world.
Elliot Moss
From where? Why?
Jeffrey Kofman
I suppose I grew up in a pretty, you know my parents were pretty worldly and I was exposed to ideas and to politicians and to, I’m not really sure to be honest but I just was interested in the world, I’ve always had an itch for adventure, I love creativity and I have a kind of, even to this day, a kind of naïve belief that if people are well informed they can make more informed decisions and have more informed opinions and that is kind of a guiding principle I think for me as a journalist that I don’t want to tell you what to think but I want to give you enough information that you can come to a more informed decision and I think that candidly, one of the problems we have in society today with the polarisation and in the US, the UK, in Europe and other places, is that we’re not doing that, journalism has been reduced to you know black and white binary reports and you know when I started in Canada, in Toronto in TV news in the 1980s, I think my reports were two to three minutes, by the time I left ABC News as London correspondent, they were asking us to do pieces in a minute 10. I’m sorry, no matter how brilliant you are, how good a writer you are, you cannot get nuance into a minute 10 of TV or radio, it’s just not enough time and so it becomes a kind of, you know, “he said white, she said black, you decide” and life isn’t like that and I think that those shades of grey are really what made journalism interesting.
Elliot Moss
When, and I haven’t interviewed many journalists here and of course the challenge of interviewing a journalist is that normally they are doing the asking and they’re trying to find out, as you said, the information, trying to find out the nuances and so on and so forth. I’m really interested and you’ve sort of asked the question around the journalism piece and what buzzes you but you had to sacrifice some of that for spreadsheets and for people management and for the pursuit of a piece of kit that works. You’re now doing less of what you did when you started in your career. Does that bother you or do you like the difference?
Jeffrey Kofman
You know, people ask me that all the time.
Elliot Moss
That’s a shame. I thought I’d be asking…
Jeffrey Kofman
Do you, maybe, here you go, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Darn, you know, see…
Jeffrey Kofman
You never want to ask a question, but I do get asked constantly, “Do you miss it?”
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
Jeffrey Kofman
There are a couple of answers to that. One is 33 years is a good run and the upside of being a foreign correspondent of, for one of the, you know, one of the great networks, ABC News is that I had a front row seat on so many interesting stories and I covered Latin America for ten years and the great thing I loved about Latin America, not only is it a fascinating place, it’s underreported and so I came up with stories, I was based in Miami but I would go down three, four times a year for a couple of weeks and do a series of stories for Good Morning America, the World News, the flagship or Nightline, the late night programme and I’d come back with six or eight stories and put them together and the sense of satisfaction of telling a story that no one else is telling or going down when no one else is there, to Latin America was just so gratifying. The other side of it though is that when you’re at that level in network news, particularly in the very competitive US market, they own you and you’re sitting at a dinner with friends, your phone rings, something’s happened somewhere, there’s a flight at this, you need to go now, I mean literally you’re carrying your passport to dinner, to theatre and you have no ownership of your life, I mean that’s, you get paid well in part because you are, you are available and you can say no once in a while but you’ve gotta play that card very carefully and there is a sense of fatigue that that brings on, I mean it’s exciting but it’s also physically very incredibly demanding, you know to fly very far, land and have to work…
Elliot Moss
And I hear all that but I also hear in you, and I just, just you know reading about you and knowing that you’re a very keen cyclist and that you, you know you’re a full on 250% guy, you’re not a 100%...
Jeffrey Kofman
Totally, and that…
Elliot Moss
…but just to ask you the question, the intensity though of you as a human is evident in three and a half seconds and just looking at the background and looking at all these things, there aren’t many people that can do what you’ve done, and that is the truth but is there still the same level of intensity in your life even though you own your availability?
Jeffrey Kofman
Completely, completely. I think that, as I said earlier, the fun thing about surprising yourself and taking a 180 degree turn in your career is that it’s a new challenge, I love challenges, I mean sometimes they’re exhausting and sometimes they’re overwhelming.
Elliot Moss
But you’re a challenge junky.
Jeffrey Kofman
But I am a challenge guy.
Elliot Moss
You’re a challenge junky, I was going further.
Jeffrey Kofman
I know, I say to, I say to my, my, I have a hundred employees and I kind of, you know I say to them, my view of life is that I want an interesting life, not an easy life and if you want an interesting life, you’ve got to be resilient, you’ve got to be driven, you’ve got to find what’s good and try to make it better, not sort of bellyache about what’s not good and I think it’s a, that’s a challenge with some millennials and Gen Z’ers, they, they haven’t really been tested for resilience and journalism absolutely does. I would say this about journalism, to sort of segue away from your question, I didn’t realise until I started Trint how entrepreneurial my career had been because a good journalist sells stories to the desk, I think a lazy journalist waits to be assigned but my view was always if I don’t want to do stories I don’t want to do, I should be busy and I should be busy doing things that I’m interested in, so I was constantly working up story pitches and that’s an expected behaviour by the way, I wasn’t the only one doing that but the successful journalists in my mind are the ones who are always on stories they’re pitching unless there’s a major breaking event where they can really add value and I was really good at that it turns out and that helped me understand how to, how to hustle as a tech entrepreneur and founder, I mean you know the first clients for Trint, and when we went to Enterprise in 2018 with The New York Times, The Washington Post and Associated Press, I mean there aren’t bigger fish in the pond and I was able to land them because of my experience, because of my connections and it gave us immense credibility to have three of the biggest logos, as they say, a term I had never by the way heard until I got into the…
Elliot Moss
Oh logo power.
Jeffrey Kofman
Yeah, logo power, is that what you marketers say?
Elliot Moss
Such fun just saying it. Well, I wouldn’t know but apparently. I’m sure someone says it.
Jeffrey Kofman
Yeah, but it’s true and so all of that hustle, I actually, you’re right, there’s a drive. Listen, you need to be resilient in American TV in particular, it is Hollywood with a hand mic, it is brutally competitive, they don’t stab you in the back they just poke your eyes out, you know, it is about owning a great story which comes with the rewards of you know having access, of having a fascinating challenge but also, let’s be craven here, it’s about profile, it’s about remuneration and in America, it’s also about celebrity which is a commodity of its own and so, you know, to survive, I used to call it “icing my emotions”, the kind of dirty pool that was played colleagues and bosses was just, if you read it in a novel, you’d say “that doesn’t happen”, it does and it did and the way I survived it was to learn to not take it personally and to just go “okay, that happened, I can’t control it”, kind of like a flight delay, what’s the point of getting upset, you can’t control it.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from my guest, Jeff Kofman, he’ll be back in a couple of minutes with all of his insight, his wisdom and that great voice, I just like your voice as well Jeff, I thought I’d say that for the record. We’ll be back in a couple of minutes, don’t go anywhere.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Jeff Kofman, the Emmy-winning reporter and founder of Trint, the automated speech to text technology. One of the big things I think that’s different, Jeff and you’ve said you lean into, to use the common parlance today, you like the idea of change, you like the idea of surprise and a lot of the skills that you develop, the entrepreneurial skills, are utterly transferrable and I buy that and the intensity and all that is great. The people management side is a different, very different thing I think but you can tell me otherwise if you disagree, from the world of journalism where it’s you and maybe one or two people in the crew, maybe, I know you can tell me the numbers are wrong, and then you go to managing a hundred people. How have you adjusted to the differences in personalities, the lack of singular focus that you get when you’re in the Colombian jungle and you’re there versus this ongoing desire and need in business to innovate and to deliver projects on time? It’s different, isn’t it?
Jeffrey Kofman
So that’s a good question and nobody’s ever asked me that, and it’s a really interesting question because it’s been a journey and I, I think like any, anyone building a company or any journey, you make mistakes and learn so, I think I alluded to the kind of toxicity of the newsrooms I worked in and I honestly said early on in this company when I built Trint, I want to be the boss I wish I had but never had and do you know what, I was naïve and I was wrong. I understand that now, I over indexed empathy and it created a culture of entitlement and a lack of rigour that I had to struggle to rectify. You’ve got to be tough with employees, you’ve got to be fair and transparent but you have to set expectations and goals and you’ve got to hold people accountable to them, you’ve got to empower them to deliver. I understand all of that but I think that I’m candidly less empathetic now than I was six or seven years ago when I was still recovering from the trauma of bosses and colleagues who were just out for themselves and who would look you in the eye and say “the sky is green, honestly, you know, look” and they would just lie to you, constantly, and I was so scarred by that, I thought I want to be decent, transparent, inclusive, empowering and I still want to be all those things, to be clear, I’m not suggesting those aren’t good aspirations but along with that is accountability and clear objectives and not tolerating people who aren’t pulling their weight, people who are coasting, people who are underperforming or people who are under skilled in the areas you need and I think that’s been a journey, it’s been really difficult for me as someone who’d never managed, never taken courses. What you do is, you in any business, you hire people against your weaknesses and so I’ve had some really good people managers, that’s the parlance for human resources, and some good colleagues who’ve helped me navigate this but what I find is that the best way to get the best out of people is to be very clear, to align on expectations and it’s not a top-down discussion, it’s a collaborative discussion, in fact it should come from them up, you know what do you think your objectives should be, you know here’s what the company’s objectives are, how can your role help us achieve these? And I think that that does work but then it’s let’s talk about where, you know how we measure success and let’s talk about how you’re doing and let’s be clear when you feel that things aren’t delivering to that level, why, and is there you know, is there something we need to do differently?
Elliot Moss
And that all makes, that all makes sense, I totally understand that.
Jeffrey Kofman
That’s been a lesson, that is not intuitive.
Elliot Moss
And I can hear that. Have you, again, when you’re in the field, when you’re in the heat of the battle, literally, but you’re reporting and you’re trying to retain a sense of what’s going on, what’s really happening, there’s a very different necessity to make decisive calls very quickly. When you’re in a different heat of the battle, which is called a hundred people, all constantly iterating and developing new projects and killing old projects, the necessity for speed is slightly different. Have you struggled with that?
Jeffrey Kofman
You know, I don’t if it is, I think in today’s fastmoving innovation economy, you’ve got to…
Elliot Moss
You say it’s just the same.
Jeffrey Kofman
…you’ve got to be fast. I think what you don’t want to do is be kneejerk, you want to be thoughtful and reflective but you know, I give a talk called ‘From the frontlines of Libya to the trenches of tech’, how being a war correspondent unwittingly shaped me to be a leader and I genuinely believe that. You know, let me give you a story because it’s, I think it’s a pretty good story. When I was in Haiti in 2004, there was a revolution that is now a footnote to history but there was a President named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti is the poorest place in the Western hemisphere and maybe the saddest place I’ve ever reported from, just devastatingly poor, and there was a revolution and I’d interviewed Aristide in the Presidential Palace in Port au Prince and was asked to go back a few days later for another interview. We knew that the revolution was closing in on the capital and I went from our hotel, there aren’t that many hotels you want to stay in in Port au Prince, but in Petion-Ville which is a nicer area, down the hill to the French colonial Presidential Palace, surrounded by these massive wrought iron gates, went up to the gate we’d gone through a few days earlier, it was padlocked with a huge chain and the guard there was a kid and he said, “No, no, you can’t enter” and I speak French and I said, “No, I’m sorry, we have an interview with the President, we’re American TV, we, please let us in.”
Elliot Moss
“Do you know who we are?”
Jeffrey Kofman
That’s it, well I didn’t quite say that but I was thinking what’s this guy doing, you know, Aristide’s waiting for us and he just wasn’t going to budge and I looked at the padlock and I thought this is weird and I should say that the palace was surrounded by huge concrete barriers so that the gates couldn’t be rammed, the whole perimeter and you could only get in through a chicane, through a zig-zag, to get actually up to the wrought iron gates. So I was with a producer, a cameraman, a security guy, an ex-SAS guy, which we always travel with in these war, in war zones and a driver and we said “okay, let’s go round to the service entrance and try to get in the back door” because we didn’t understand that there had been a coup overnight and Aristide had been taken out of the country in his pyjamas to, I think it was Suriname. We went to the back, the service entrance to the Palace and the guards looked at us and they put their guns in the window and said “Get out of here” and okay, and I got on my satellite phone and called New York and I said “I don’t think we’re get this interview, I’m not sure what’s going on but something’s happened” and we turned around to go through the chicane to get out and there was gunfire and there was only one way to go, we couldn’t sort of, and I don’t think they were shooting at us to be clear but we didn’t know where it was coming from and it was close enough that you could hear it, and I panicked and it was not my finest moment, I panicked and I’m not sure what I said but it wasn’t very becoming and I remember in the front seat, our security guy turned around and he said, “Shut up, you’re not helping” and I realised at that moment what he meant, we were in a, in a really perilous situation, my histrionics, slightly embarrassing in retrospect but it was real, were not helping us focus on a solution and I was the correspondent here so, you know the senior person in the team and I was displaying a complete lack of leadership and I thought, you idiot, why did you do that, you can never, ever do that again and it was a lesson I took to Trint when I built the company, when we’ve gone through crises, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, we were at Silicon Valley Bank and people said, “Why aren’t you panicking?” and I said, “How’s it going to help?” you know, “What’s it going to do?” and so it’s incredible how much those kind of experiences genuinely inform my day to day behaviour.
Elliot Moss
Yeah. You know a lot, Jeff and you think quickly and that’s what journalists have to do and you are able to articulate yourself. All those things are very positive when you are a top journalist. Kind of tough when someone sitting in front of you isn’t going to be as knowledgeable as you, generally isn’t going to have your intensity, isn’t going to have your standards, how do you manage to navigate that sense of, I imagine, I don’t mean ongoing disappointment but I’m going to use that phrase, that sense that people will look at you and go, “Jeez, this guy is kind of a bit of a one-off” because I see that that is obviously the super skill and one of your super powers in that you genuinely as a journalist, you have to interpret the world, in the world of business that’s difficult if other people aren’t kind of quite as fast and aren’t with you.
Jeffrey Kofman
So, first of all, I think people who join the company meet me and they either buy into my world view in some form, it’s not that I force it on them but…
Elliot Moss
No.
Jeffrey Kofman
…but you know as I say, I wear my personality on my sleeve.
Elliot Moss
What you see is what you get with Jeff, I imagine.
Jeffrey Kofman
And so, you know I think a lot of people who join the company like the fact that I’m passionate, that I’m authentic, that I’m comfortable admitting my own mistakes and they like the kind of atmosphere that creates. You know, I think it’s part of that journey being a boss, you know I, I’m not their dad you know, I’m not, you’ve got accept that people are different and I think, I think one of the first things that I was taught was how to read people’s different personalities and that you as a better boss, and this is true in life but particularly as a boss have to behave differently with different people to get the same outcome, you know you may be an introvert who takes criticism as a personal assault and the person next to you may be very resilient. I talk to you differently because I need things done and I want you to feel empowered to do them.
Elliot Moss
Very different, that’s not a skill that a journalist needs, at all. The journalist looks at the story and says what is the story and reports on the story.
Jeffrey Kofman
I would disagree. I think that as a journalist, when I’m doing an interview, I want to position you as a guest in a way that allows you to feel comfortable to be honest and open. We used to call TV the two tonne pencil, you know you come in, you’d come in with the big camera, the lights, the sound man, you know, I mean in the early days of my career, it was really daunting and more than a few times, you’d go into a you know a modest home, people who’ve never been on TV and they’re just overwhelmed, we’ve rearranged the furniture, we’ve unplugged the refrigerator because it hummed and they’re going, and so you’ve got to find a way to relax them, I think the fact that I’m curious and I like people is a pretty good quality for a journalist, it’s probably a pretty good quality for life in general, but so I do think that as a journalist you don’t treat all people the same because people aren’t and I think the idea is to ask questions that allow people to tell their story and so I’m very, very scrupulous as a journalist about not putting words in people’s mouths, it’s not “Did you like the toast?”, it was “How was the toast?” because if I tell you, you know, you may be able to say it was terrible, it was burnt, but someone who is intimidated by me, if I say, “Did you like it?”, they may feel obliged to say yes when they don’t believe that and I think that there’s an integrity issue about how you frame a question and I think that’s true with interviews for journalists and it’s true when you’re dealing with employees.
Elliot Moss
The journalist gave a very good answer. That’s pretty good. Final chat coming up with my friend, my new friend here…
Jeffrey Kofman
I’m honoured, I’ve been elevated.
Elliot Moss
You’ve been elevated. Jeff Kofman, my journalist and entrepreneur guest today here on Jazz Shapers, he’s coming back and that’s all happening in just a moment.
Jeff Kofman’s my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. A lot of what I’ve seen you talk about and what I’ve read about is around the future of journalism and where it goes and where technology fuses with that. If there were two or three things that you would want Trint to be in the next three to five years and the way that people talked about Trint, what would you say those were?
Jeffrey Kofman
Well I think it, like innovator, you want to be an essential tool, you want to be a must have, not a nice to have. I think that the future of technologies like Trint is that they need to solve a series of problems to create a seamless work flow. I think one of the biggest problems with innovation right now is when you have to go from one tab in your browser to another to finish the journey and so our focus right now is integrating with what they call CMS’s, content management systems and MAMs, media asset managers, those are the engines of any news organisation and they’re the engines of any content organisation even if it’s a marketing firm, even the big city and Wall Street firms would have some form of that. You want a seamless integration from how you collect the video or audio to how you navigate through with Trint by transcribing and searching and translating it in multiple languages all simultaneously and collaborating and then how it integrates into the, into the products that will ultimately help you disseminate it, whether it’s a video editing platform like Adobe Premiere Pro or into the MAM and these are not easy things, they’re expensive, they’re difficult, they’re kind of you know, they’re not the sexy part of innovation but those kind of integrations are really essential. You know, I look at, I’m a cyclist, I have way too many cycling apps, it drives me crazy.
Elliot Moss
I thought you were going to say “I have way too many cycles”.
Jeffrey Kofman
Well, I have a lot of bikes too.
Elliot Moss
I imagine you’ve got, I’m just going to guess here, I don’t know, seven?
Jeffrey Kofman
Err, I had six, I just sold one and I’m really regretting selling it.
Elliot Moss
Not bad. So, really what you, you’ve got five but you could easily have seven.
Jeffrey Kofman
Yeah. I would happily have a sixth but I use them a lot so, so you know, they’re not toys.
Elliot Moss
Okay, so, cost per use is fine.
Jeffrey Kofman
Cost per use is fine.
Elliot Moss
Okay, good, I’m pleased about that. I’m happy I’ve established that.
Jeffrey Kofman
But I think that you know in cycling I use Strava, I use Ride with GPS, I use Training Peaks, I think I’m missing a couple, oh I use…
Elliot Moss
But a lot and that’s your point.
Jeffrey Kofman
…the Wahoo and it drives me crazy.
Elliot Moss
It’s crazy. Crazy.
Jeffrey Kofman
You know, they talk to each other but not very well, it’s really bad for the user, it’s maybe good for them because you have to subscribe to each one. That’s not the future.
Elliot Moss
So the integration is the future and for you, just before I ask you your song choice, just one thing, do you, and I think the answer, my feeling is that you do and I know I’m not framing the well in terms of journalistic…
Jeffrey Kofman
Do you want me to help you?
Elliot Moss
You could definitely help. Is there something about you that quite likes that detail, that granularity that appeals to you as a human?
Jeffrey Kofman
I get excited solving problems. I think it’s really interesting to be on the cutting edge of innovation and look and say, “Oh, that wasn’t even possible two years ago.” I was in New York last week meeting some of the biggest news organisations in America and they were presenting, “we would like this”, “we would like that” and some of what they asked, we can do but wasn’t possible even two years ago, this is how quickly innovation is evolving and I find it really exciting to be able to say “yeah, let’s talk to our product engineering team and see how big that is.” Of course, you don’t want to just do it because they want it, there has to be a business case and we talk in tech around t-shirt sizes, is that a big t-shirt, an extra-large t-shirt, because if it’s a small t-shirt, that means we can do it in a couple of days and just make the client happy so, I love that, you know I think that part of is really fun, the innovation side and I don’t think people realise how creative innovation is, it’s not the creativity of crafting a story but you get to think out of the box all the time and that’s really, really rewarding.
Elliot Moss
Good luck making those big t-shirts, have lots of fun. The little ones, easy-peasy but the big ones sound like they’re the challenge.
Jeffrey Kofman
That requires a lot of engineers, product managers and a lot of time so you, you select your big t-shirts carefully.
Elliot Moss
Carefully. Just before I let you go and it’s been great chatting to you, Jeff, what’s your song choice, why have you chosen it?
Jeffrey Kofman
So, you know I’m from Toronto, grew up in Canada, I haven’t lived in Canada since 1997 but I’m still Canadian, lived in the US for a long time and lived in the UK for a long time, one of the sort of jazz shapers for me was Oscar Peterson, who I think might be familiar to a lot of the people listening, he’s not just sort of lost in history to Canadians, he grew up in Montreal and died in Toronto I think in 2006. He left 200 recordings, won 8 Grammys and his fingers were magic, I mean it’s incredible to listen to his work. Night Train was released in the early 2000s I think it is and it is one of his masterpieces and when I think of jazz, I think of Oscar Peterson, I think of this guy from Montreal. His dad was a porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway and here’s Oscar Peterson in Montreal a hundred years ago now, on the keyboards, making his way into the American jazz scene, as one of the greats. Night Train is one of his gifts to us.
Elliot Moss
Oscar Peterson with Night Train, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Jeff Kofman. His mission as a journalist was simple, if people are well informed then they can make informed decisions, and that was what really drove him and does indeed drive him as a journalist. “A good journalist sells their story to the desk and doesn’t wait to be instructed”, what a great way of thinking about entrepreneurism in general, as well as specifically through the lens of a journalist. And finally, another transferrable skill, the art of treating everyone that you meet differently, whether you’re interviewing them or whether they work for you. Really good stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.