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 I’m very pleased to say is Jeremy King, Founder and Chair, lofty title, of Attest, a consumer research platform helping brands better understand their target customers, and he’s the Founder of Ocean Orchestra, whose mission it is to save the oceans using software. Obsessed since he was a child with marine life, Jeremy studied Science at Edinburgh, focussing on mathematical modelling of animal behaviour, genetics and ecology. Working with McKinsey where he supported companies over 25 countries, he was also lucky enough to receive the gift of an MBA at Harvard and a little bit more, which we’ll go into as well. Very often he saw the same problem at McKinsey, businesses though rich with internal data and though understanding their existing customers, were struggling to understand those customers they didn’t yet have, the ones they wished they knew. In 2015, Jeremy founded Attest with the goal of simplifying consumer data and it now works with more than 700 companies across the globe. And very recently, hot off the press, Jeremy has only gone and founded another brilliant business, Ocean Orchestra is the name of his new venture and it is all about creating software to save the oceans.
Jeremy King
Delighted to be here and thank you for having me.
Elliot Moss
It’s an absolute pleasure. You’re a scientist. I read all about you and having studied the Arts, I’m always deeply envious and always feel slightly stupid when I go “what’s all that about” but actually, under the bonnet it’s all about finding out what the truth is, right.
Jeremy King
Yeah, it’s all about empiricism so, I was trained as a scientist to follow every hypothesis, find evidence, discover what the truth is, if you discover failure, publish that and let others know, if you discover success, do something about that, build more and go again but using data to make decisions, using statistics to figure out whether what you’re finding is true or just a variant of wrong or random and then telling other people about it and trying to build great academy and knowledge together, that’s what science is all about and that’s what I try to bring to the business world too from time to time.
Elliot Moss
How little were you, he says with a humble little twist at the end there, how little were you when you realised that you are, at your essence, at your core, a scientist?
Jeremy King
Well, when I was kid, whenever people would give me blank sheets of paper, I’d always draw pictures of fish or underwater worlds, octopus, deep sea thermal vents, deep sea vehicles like Alvin the submersible, my favourite t-shirt was of Alvin, a underwater submersible that goes to great depths, it’s based at the Woods Hole Institute in the US and that was a very geeky choice of t-shirt to be your favourite one as a kid. My grandparents are from Chicago and they every birthday would give me the choice to pick a book from the Readers Digest catalogue and I’d always choose books about marine worlds which had loads of photos and were large and therefore incredibly expensive, I think they were quite unhappy but I think it’s innate, is the scientific word for it, it’s always been in there, it’s something in me that just loves oceans, underwater worlds, science, discovery, learning more and I remember the film, I think it’s called Short Circuit with Johhny 5, this fundamentally evil robot that escapes from a NASA lab to wreak havoc upon the world but it gets hit by lightning and is rewired for good and it goes around seeking input and just trying to learn and constantly understand things. I feel sometimes like I’m Johnny 5 the robot just trying to seek input and understand and learn more and then share it however I can, so I think it’s always been in there somehow.
Elliot Moss
And working therefore, doing the Degree, Biology Degree, you loved it I imagine.
Jeremy King
It was so much fun. There were bits I loved learning about ecosystems, complex worlds, how they fit together, evolution, these sort of big long term forces and how they are manifested in the short term. There are bits I didn’t like as much, learning about forestry management was super fun for a short time and I’m glad that module only lasted three months, thank you so much and great respect to all those people but the point was to gain a rounded experience of what happens in the world of biology but there were specific bits that really lit my fires and then trying to apply that understanding of complex ecosystems and how these long and short term forces interact that ended up being quite useful in the business world, but picking up all those things at Uni was fun. Some of the weirdest moments were when we had exams where you had to identify or guess fundamentally what an animal was just from one tooth or one bone, walking around these labs for hours trying to reverse engineer your understanding of, of physiology of animals from tiny little data points, that was really fun. The best bit was at one stage you walk round a corner, there’s a giant skull with two huge tusks coming out that looked like teeth and looked sort of giant grinding plates, you’re like “that’s a walrus”, then are like “welcome to your five minute coffee break, have a break” and you’re like “walrus, thanks”, four minutes 49 seconds and counting to have a little rest, you’re like “that’s very nice.” So I enjoyed it.
Elliot Moss
The movement from a science degree into McKinsey, I meet lots of people and there’s a big spectrum Jeremy and everyone’s on the spectrum but this particular spectrum I’m talking about is the coming straight out of school and they’ve been doing things since they were zero and then built businesses and then you get the other side, MBAs, Harvard, MIT, entrepreneurial courses, McKinsey, you’re definitely over on this vector, this part of our, of our thing. What was it that you brought to McKinsey? Before I ask you what McKinsey did to you.
Jeremy King
Well a lot of people at McKinsey come from Oxbridge PPE backgrounds, which is wonderful but I’m a real believer in diversity of thought and maybe I got lucky because I was in a moment where McKinsey happened to believe in that too. So, I remember a specific moment, it was either in the interview process or in the early days at McKinsey where someone said “what on earth are you going to do with a biology degree at McKinsey?” and I said something like my understanding is what you do at McKinsey is you take large, complex data sets and you analyse them to the nth degree, you take on existential problems that potentially have no solution, things that you can’t solve by yourself and you have to present this in a very simple way that allows people to understand but it must be fully supported by huge amounts of work behind it. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years in my Biology Degree. We call the first thing the, you call it an executive summary, I call that an abstract. You call it being data driven and fact based, I call it having methods and using stats. This is what I’ve been doing the whole time so, if anything, I’m in Year 4. No apologies for that and maybe having a different version of looking at things, where you can understand how these complex systems shape together and fit and evolve the world around us, I call that evolution, you call that strategy. So, maybe I’ve been doing this all along and maybe that’s why I’m here, and that somehow worked.
Elliot Moss
Somehow, they must have looked, their jaws must have dropped. I mean, there must been quiet, there must have been a moment when the went “I think we should be offering him a job right now”, that’s a brilliant answer because it’s true.
Jeremy King
Well…
Elliot Moss
And original.
Jeremy King
I think it’s also a little bit offensive, which was a risk but maybe it’s a good thing.
Elliot Moss
Was it? And were you intentionally being offensive?
Jeremy King
Maybe more distinctive than offensive. I was definitely being intentionally distinctive because interviewing to join and then effectively finding a way to, to qualify to stay at McKinsey for you know each cycle of up or out and each qualification into the next phase, they’re constantly trying to get rid of people and put you through what I would call evolutionary selective pressures, trying to select out of the population people who won’t survive the next phases or aren’t the right fit so, I think by being distinctive and finding a way to stand out, you’re potentially showing what you can add to the equation that is new and different and are they looking for new and different? Hopefully, yes because that’s the only thing I’ve got to offer. But maybe I was lucky that the time that this happened, it was a fit.
Elliot Moss
I mean, it’s nice to say you were lucky, I thin it’s a bit more than that. But there’s something about being in flow, when people do what they want to do and we’re going to be talking later about Ocean Orchestra, when they’re really in, in the zone, life is just happening. Was it an effort for you to be intentionally distinctive or do you think that is who you are?
Jeremy King
I think there was a time where I believe that if you just do the right thing and do good work all the time, it will somehow passively be noticed and a number of times in my career/life, it’s been shown to me by other people that you need to do more than that, you need to promote it somehow. I remember a particular moment where I was writing my, this is really boring but it you know brings the point to life, I was writing my business school application essays, which are incredibly dry and self-serving questions, they are basically, the question is how amazing are you and you have to write all this stuff.
Elliot Moss
On a scale of 1 to 10, Jeremy, how amazing are you? Is it a 10? It is funnily enough, how did you know?
Jeremy King
It’s so painful though because I’ve got two American parents but I grew up in the UK so, particularly as a British person with my British hat on, this is…
Elliot Moss
Cringey.
Jeremy King
…painful and cringe. Yeah. For sure. At the same time I showed these essays to some people who’d been to business schools and they were like you are up against people in other countries who are going to be just tooting their own horn like a gridlocked city with, you know, 50 million people in it, like “you need to make these essays 100% more awesome because you are up against people who are going to be awesoming themselves the whole time so, remove your shame, remove your cringe and go for it, otherwise you’re not even competing on a level playing field, like put yourself at parity” and that type of advice maybe causes one to think about when is it worth being actively distinctive or somewhat more self-promoting in order to just generate the yield that you can, otherwise you are diminishing your returns. It was a weird thing to learn but I guess this is what learning is all about.
Elliot Moss
Toot your own horn. You heard it here first with Jeremy, my Business Shaper, he’s the Founder of Attest and also the Founder of Ocean Orchestra. Much more coming up from my Business Shaper today, Jeremy King, 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 favourite podcast platform. My guest today is the incredibly engaging and no platitude zone Jeremy King, Founder and Chair of Attest and the Founder of Ocean Orchestra, what a great name. Attest is a consumer research platform helping brands better understand their target customers and Ocean Orchestra is the software business that’s going to save the oceans, of course it is, that’s just a small problem. The McKinsey thing, just to, I just want to lock this one down. So yes, we talk about, I mean an amazing way of explaining what you were going to bring to McKinsey and brilliant point about tooting your horn and all that. McKinsey is known to be an evidence based, data driven place, it’s known to have very strong points of view derived from data. In the middle of all this Jeremy and of course Attest is a data business as well, is the thing called ambiguity, is the thing called interpretation. How did you navigate through the ‘this is the answer’ versus ‘this might be the answer’ because I, it, I get the sense that you will grapple with that as an empiricist, you want to know there the truth but there’s also I think a desire to, to leap and to have creative solutions to those data points, quite difficult to do that when you say you’re an empiricist.
Jeremy King
Yeah I think I, I got two unusual experiences from working at McKinsey so, one, McKinsey, at least the version of McKinsey when I was there, you’re thrust into these series of extremely unusual situations, you arrive in a foreign country with a team of people you’ve never met before who have also come from a bunch of different places to work on a problem that a business cannot solve by themselves, that’s why you’re there, and somehow the answer is a bunch of kids with laptops and positive attitude and an ability to crunch loads of data and maybe see a different version of the truth or challenge some assumptions to create a different outcome and going through those many different situations and being in those many different rooms, that was a wonderful experience but to your point, second, I discovered that often you are missing information and finding a way to create or discover or generate evidence where there was none, was very complicated and you don’t have long to do it, the projects are generally six weeks to three months long so, a thing that takes a few months to start isn’t going to be useful to you. So, one of my mantras is create choices to makes choices. If you can generate a better range of choices, put more evidence behind those choices in order to improve decision quality and make a better choice, generating or finding more data to put behind it is fundamental to creating a better outcome overall.
Elliot Moss
But the point about choice is important so in other words one of the big learnings is there is not one answer.
Jeremy King
Never.
Elliot Moss
Ever.
Jeremy King
No.
Elliot Moss
Doesn’t matter how strong the data is. Doesn’t matter because I work with McKinsey people and McKinsey people say “that is the answer based on the data”, you go “no, that is an answer based on the data” and that’s what you found liberating for your own, your own thinking.
Jeremy King
Yes, I, you can, I think you can never say definitively this is the answer. You can say, “based on the information available and with a spectrum of outcomes and opinions, here is three different versions that can make sense and here’s the one that can actually work based on everything that we’ve seen” but I think all you’re doing is taking a series of normal distributions, laying them over each other and figuring out which one has the highest overall percentage yields and is also palatable and achievable. Put all those things together, you have a range of choices and inputs and you’re putting it to work for a problem that had no solution and suddenly a range emerges and a leader, leading candidate, is evident. Saying that’s the best and only choice I think is fundamentally not true.
Elliot Moss
And what about gut? And then, and how that’s led you?
Jeremy King
Yeah, I laugh because gut doesn’t have a place in science, but it really does in business and I was surprised when I first got into the business world that I sort of assumed outside in that the business world would be full of all these people like scientists in labs, generating information, torturing it using a system of techniques, generating that abstract or executive summary and out emerges a new, statistically, significantly confident decision that is what we’re going to do next. What I found instead was all over the place, a lot of gut feel, in the absence of data or the ability to generate new data, gut feel plays a major factor. HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) major factor. Status quo bias, subjective bias, group thing, core confirmation bias, all of these human biases play a much larger role in business than I ever thought possible and as a scientist, I was horrified, disgusted, amazed, fascinated, all of those things, all at the same time and it was fun to try to figure out a way to live in that world having been trained for a completely different environment and universe. So taking the laws of physics from science and try to apply them to the laws of philosophy from business and how businesses think and work and how real humans work together, that was a real learning for me, particularly in the early years because it was very unusual and unlike how I’d worked before and that was frankly a massive surprise to me.
Elliot Moss
So you, you saw this opportunity to say hold on a minute, these people, these, these, these, this species called human species, it’s sort of making funny decisions not based on very much data, wouldn’t it be good if we could get quick, reliable data from the people called consumers who might buy our products and then use it to help them buy our products.
Jeremy King
I did think that.
Elliot Moss
You did think that.
Jeremy King
I believed that very much.
Elliot Moss
And you did something about it.
Jeremy King
Yeah, so, I remember a specific incident. One of my first day at McKinsey was in San Paolo, Brazil and part of the thing we were working on was how to launch a European financial services business into Latin America because something, something, something bricks, something, something, something emerging markets growth and I found myself as a British sounding kid with American parents and a biology degree trying to figure out what makes wealthy Argentinians change their life insurance provider and no one knew what on earth influences or causes these wealthy people in Latin America to change. Do they trust European over local? What are the factors that caused them to move their accounts or their business? What are their risks and opportunities? Who should be the face of this? What should they say? No one knew the answer to these things but yet, this is the crux of exactly what will cause this initiative to succeed or fail and I thought there must be a way to somehow interview or understand these people at scale very quickly because as a scientist, that’s the first thing you go out and do but it was impossible, you could commission a market research project but it would take a few months to start and a few months to happen and a few months to tabulate and then you get it six months from now which, for me, was…
Elliot Moss
Too long.
Jeremy King
…five and a half months too late.
Elliot Moss
And so the shortcut was?
Jeremy King
Well, at the time there was no shortcut.
Elliot Moss
So what did you build? What, what, in a nutshell, what was Attest the answer to?
Jeremy King
So, Attest is the answer to two things. One, everyone in every B2C business in particular wants to know more about their target customers, the customers you wish you knew but you can’t reach naturally, the ones that don’t buy your products, they’re not in your marketing database, they don’t give you feedback because they’ve never bought your product before. These are the ones that will determine whether your new product, your business, your marketing campaign, your revenue growth succeeds or dies. Customers make those choices for you, not you yourself, it’s the customers that choose. That’s what matters most. So understanding those customers determines whether you live or die but for some reason it’s very difficult to do that and the reason it’s difficult is because it’s extremely complicated, it’s expensive, it’s labour intensive, it’s like running a restaurant. We all think we have an opinion on how it should work but we all know that that often fails very quickly and that restaurants are actually a terrible business and no one knows how it works and very few people know how to do it very well. So the crux of it is everyone wants this thing and it’s incredibly valuable because it dictates whether you win or lose but for some reason everyone’s just given up on the idea that you can actually do something about this and I thought there must be a better way, if only you can make something that’s simple enough that everyone can use it and that is high quality enough that is actually valuable, shorten the lead in time, shorten the cycle time so that you can do this whenever you want to and with no training, this would be something that everyone would use all the time because everyone’s always wanted it. The demand’s always been there, it just hasn’t had a home. If you can give it a home, here’s a very valuable business that should exist but doesn’t and the reason it doesn’t exist is because it’s incredibly hard to build the product, to do the marketing and it would basically be a giant redesign in an incredibly large industry. Then comes the company building story so, the investor type logic is market research at the time was a $90 billion annual industry, now that’s over $135 billion that really only serves expert buyers in large companies. So, large companies have large teams of excellent, highly trained researchers who do a wonderful job of procuring research from third party providers and then disseminating that into the business for a very small number of finite projects. When the way it should work in my opinion is that everyone in every B2C business wants to be more customer centric and data driven, they’re just limited by how the existing industry works. If only there was a way that everyone could this all the time and doesn’t need any training because someone made it easy. So that’s the product I’d set out to build and taking what we look at as a fifteen step journey between I need to know something and I’m doing something about it, sort of a question mark and an exclamation mark, and compressing that down into one journey that looks like one action and making it look so easy that you can just start with no training and it is your job and you can do it and let’s go for it and let’s find out, is the mantra as opposed to it’s hard and we’re going to make it even harder for you, which is how it used to be. That was the dawn of Attest and that’s still what we do today, trying to take a very large market and expand it to capture all the demand that has always been there but never had a home before, that’s what Attest is all about.
Elliot Moss
And it’s been going pretty much ten years and working with some of the biggest companies in the world, not bad at all. Stay with me for my final chat with Jeremy King where we’ll also be talking about Ocean Orchestra and we’ve got some music from Michael Kiwanuka, that’s in just a moment.
Jeremy King is my excellent and super intelligent Business Shaper and also someone who has, well you keep doing stuff. Just moving before, before I have to say goodbye to you to, I want to go back to this kid who drew stuff, who drew you know life underwater, the incredible blue, beautiful oceans that live around us. Here you are now, you’re creating a business which is about saving those very places, what does it feel like to be deep in your passion? Actually your passion rather than having the passion on the side because it, this is central to your life and now you’re creating a business which is hopefully going to ensure that these oceans are around for many hundreds and millions of years.
Jeremy King
You’re almost making me cry. Well I’ve always enjoyed doing work, people often say work is not work if you enjoy it but latching on, doing work that you believe in and that you care about to also affect a thing that you’ve cared about for your entire life, maybe as an innate thing that’s always been there, combining those two forces is something that I couldn’t resist and that’s why I chose to start a second business, focussed on oceans. In a nutshell, more than 70% of our planet is oceans, 50% of the surface of the Earth is the high seas, that’s legal ownership or non-ownership in this case of the world’s largest asset that has not existed for hundreds of years. So when we say ‘climate change’ or ‘sustainability’ or ‘save the planet’, what really mean is ‘oceans’. Climate equals oceans. 71% of the world is oceans, therefore when we say ‘climate’ 29% of it is terrestrial, 71% of it is oceans. So if we want to work on sustainability, we should in my view, spend more time working on oceans, invest more in oceans. Oceans have a much more complex ownership or responsibility problem, no one owns the oceans so someone must do something about this and I personally enjoy taking on hard challenges, I like the idea that no one owns oceans, I like the idea that it’s actually very difficult to build companies that, or organisations, that can effect large and global forces and putting the two things together, a passion for technology and business and a personal love for marine and ocean environments and trying to do something about it is beyond enjoyable.
Elliot Moss
And to ask you the question you asked of the people that were potentially buying the data, what’s the, what’s the top of the To Do list on the sticky thing on the kitchen’s fridge? What is actually, what’s the first thing you need to do? What does it need to solve?
Jeremy King
Well I’m taking some of the bits from early days Attest of understanding where is the crux of the intersection between what is possible and what the world actually wants to exist. In the case of Ocean Orchestra, this is helping thousands of things that can help improve things for the ocean reach far greater scale far faster. It also includes building some products that should exist but don’t to fill crucial gaps in how oceans and industries, the blue economy, sectors of the blue economy, and the very complex series of ecosystems and underwater worlds collide to create businesses and the intersection of how we can improve oceans and ocean business and what can actually work in the world. So what I’m doing right now is I’m out speaking to a bunch of companies about if someone came to you with a whole bunch of ideas that are great for your business that also happen to be very good for oceans, what does that magic look like to you? What would you do with it? What should I prioritise to grab your attention and make it make sense to you? Tell me how you would articulate this to me and then this helps me hold up a mirror and just play it back the same way. It also helps inform not my version of product that I would build, the same happened at Attest, I’m the last person that should be giving input on how should the product work, what does it need to do? I’m not a customer, I’m not a buyer, I’m not an influencer, I’m not on the other side of the table looking back, so I actually don’t know what the right answer is, so I’m going out to discover that right answer and then build the right thing that influences people and it causes scale at global change based on what everyone else says should happen. So that’s what I’m in the middle of doing right now and there is an intersection point where there are things that can very significantly change how oceans work and the health of oceans in many different direction, in many different spectrums that are also very good for business, very good for the world and good for humanity. Aligning those two forces and helping scale of things that matter most, that can actually change outcomes for oceans and for people and harness those two forces and put them together, that’s what I’m trying to do. So, applying the world of tech to a personal love for oceans, that’s Ocean Orchestra.
Elliot Moss
Jeremy, good luck with everything. May the force be with you, it’s a big job and I really hope that you can crack it.
Jeremy King
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Jeremy King
So I’ve chosen Man with a Movie Camera by The Cinematic Orchestra and I’ve chosen this, I think I first heard it on John Peel, discovering music via John Peel and imagining John Peel in a radio studio, with, surrounded by thousands of recordings and choosing which ones to play, absolutely amazing and I used to play in orchestras and string quartets and things like that, I was a cellist, I retired to, when I went to Uni to just focus on sports instead but it was this particular song that opened my eyes to how classical music and the structures I’d learned in classical music could also be applied to more jazz styles and more electronic styles and it started to, in my mind, enlighten me to how these different musical styles interact. So you could say this is jazz, you could say it’s like some version of Trip Hop, I think it was released on Ninja Tune record label which is definitely more breakbeat, it has classical instruments but played in a jazz style, it has this incredibly strange intro for over a minute, so bear with it please, and then out pops this amazing series of moments of harmony that are driven by sort of classical music standards but definitely with jazz influences and I just love everything about it. It’s surprising, it’s weird, it combines many different factors but fundamentally, it’s also beautiful.
Elliot Moss
That was Man with a Movie Camera from The Cinematic Orchestra, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Jeremy King. He talked about the need to toot your own horn, you’ve got to promote it, however good you are, your work won’t necessarily do its own talking. He talked about the importance of diversity of thought, fundamental to his own philosophy of how life and business should work. “Create choices to make choices”, that’s the purpose of data, there is no such thing as the single only correct answer but you need to have data in order to inform how you might make the right choice. And finally, Ocean Orchestra, an incredible culmination of his life’s work and his life’s passion around saving oceans and using technology to do so. Absolutely brilliant 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.