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In the Digital Workspace Works podcast;
We will cover the ever-strengthened digital workspace. Together and with the help of experts we will unpack this broad term - Digital Workspace.
The ecosystem that blends people, process and technology so that work can get done.
We will focus on the various moving disjointed pieces which need to work together in harmony to enable the user with seamless and highly effective end user experience.
Ryan Purvis 23:20:50
Hello and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines. The problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.
So welcome, Phil to the digital workspace works podcast, you want to tell them about yourself, please?
Phil Hobden 23:21:23
Yeah, hi, my name is Phil Hobden. I am a sales leader. And I guess, tech fanatic that's been working in the accounting and count tech FinTech space for around the last eight to nine years. But But ultimately, I've always been a massive fan of, of technology, and what it can do for businesses, and how it can transform industries.
Ryan Purvis 23:21:48
Fantastic. Fantastic. So as I mentioned that the standard question, what does the digital workspace mean to you?
Phil Hobden 23:21:55
It's a big question, right? Like, you know, what is the? Like, for me, I think the whole thing with digital, whichever way you look at it, right? Is it? For me, it's about agility. It's about the ability to do anything anywhere. Oh, God saw that film, isn't it? It's like anything, anywhere all at once. But it's exactly that right. Like, it gives it gives workforces the ability to be more agile, it gives IT companies a better ability to implement faster, it gives customers the ability to use your products easier. It's all of the things for me one go. So like, but the key piece for me is agility. Like I remember when I used to work on on a the banks and we had like Citrix and that was like that, that stop that digital work, right? It's it's a cloud container for what is a desktop product. Um, but as clunky as it was, and as horrific to us as it was the ability to pick up my laptop, go into a customer's house and talk them through their finances, their accounts, that was groundbreaking for the industry, it transformed, we didn't have to have customers come to us, we could go to them and still maintain that same level of security, right? So do look at kind of how that is now and where that where that's going to get to 5 10 years time is like the evolution of the digital workspace and, and digital technology in general, is genuinely fascinating. And some of the stuff that I've seen with AI, and implementations of that, especially my world around the sales piece is just like mind blowing.
Ryan Purvis 23:23:41
Yeah, and I've just left a meeting, we were discussing something very similar. Where the, because everything's got API's, your ability to tie things together, into a custom solution has just become so much more easy to do for anybody, not just a technical person. But you know, the the sort of low code, no code, evolution, or revolution, is allowing anybody who's got half an understanding of what they want to achieve, to go and play and deliver something it might be really mentioned to begin with. But it starts off, you know, the solution to a problem.
Phil Hobden 23:24:15
Well, I always I do a piece where I talk about our ecosystem and how the accounting tech ecosystem has grown. And I was related to Apple. And I like, if you remember the first iPhone, I don't know if you ever had that the first iPhone in 2007. It was crap, right? It was It barely made calls. It was on 2G or H as we call it. It it didn't have apps on it. It or third party apps, at least. It was it did a few things, but not very well. It looked great. It looked revolutionary. But in reality, it was a it was an MVP of a product. Now flash forward to the second iPhone 3G. And if I remember rightly, I think I do like Apple even gave you discounts for trading in your old iPhone, your first iPhone, because even they realized that it was limited. So you got money back for trade it for taking it back, right and upgrading. And that firt that that second iPhone, it had an app store, it had so much more you could do with it. And and that for me was the journey. That was the decision that made the iPhone, I think probably the ultimate convergence tool, right? It's a phone, it's a calculator. It's a spirit level. It's a podcast player. It's a music player. It's my email. It's my internet. It's my camera. It's everything. It's everything, right. It's now it's my wallet and where I store my tickets. I'm going going out tomorrow to a theme park my tickets on my phone, it's like it's all these things. But it was, it wasn't the phone, that was the game changer. It was the API and Apple saying, actually, if we allow other people to playing our sandpit, even a little bit, and even within that very Apple controlled way, we can make our products so much more essential. And that framework has fundamentally affected everything, since it's a, it's affected all forms of technology, right? Like, if you look at zero in my space, not my space zero in the space I work in, I should say, you know, like, like, Dave delivered an amazing piece of accounting software, but it was the apps and everything you could do around it that made it far more well rounded. And guess what, you can build all that. But when you're a small company, where do you put your resources, you want to put it on your core product. So that's what I put it, they put it in their core product, and they allowed other people to come up with great ideas. And if they liked them a lot, they bought them, like Siri, you know, that Siri wasn't invented was bought. Um, and that to me is that to me is that that API journey where like, anyone can build an app, Now, anyone can build a bit of technology, anyone can plug into something and take their data from it. And that's the, that's the real advancement in technology over the past 15 years. And I think that's what people people look at, like technology, like, like AI, they look at, like, like all these technologies that have that they say change the world. But for me, it's it's the it's API's, it's the ability to, to have that common interface where you can talk to people get data, develop against software, and develop against data and make something really special with it.
Ryan Purvis 23:27:39
Nice, all right. It's all right. To be honest, I've never actually looked at the zero interface, I can't really visualize what you're saying. But I've just switched from one provider to another provider, that would be a competitor to zero. And the one that I went with the one I'm changing to, I can already see they're the sort of evolution in difference. Because the one that was built before was obviously homegrown product. And the other one's been around a very long time, but they've got the budget to change things. So they've come up with a really nice, slick, modern thing. And I was just looking at the onboarding experience, I kind of had this expectation, when I signed up that I'd like to sign up and get username password. That was like a, a very rich, workflow. Like, as you answer all these questions, it starts to vet like putting together like you feel like it's putting together your solution for accounting. So that's how I got my actual interface by dashboard. It had all the stuff in that I was looking for. And I just thought that was such a slick experience. And that's, so that onboarding pieces become, and this is the Apple thing as well, the end to end thing, it was always like, the box was good, the packaging was good. The phone was good, it was nicely wrapped up, you felt like you're opening up presents, all that.
Phil Hobden 23:28:55
Honestly, I cannot tell you how much satisfaction not so much now, because it's not the such thing now. But like how much satisfaction pulling that like, like that box off of the top of the other box on the iPhone, it makes a little sound with the pulse. I like then you unwrap it, and then you've got all the bits that I'd like. Like it's, it's that fully realized journey. And that's what I love, like within tech is that, like, there is no better experience in life than an Apple than unboxing an Apple product, right? It's just other people have copied it and replicated it but an Apple product unboxing is just it feels like at least Apple evolved and I don't think Apple or the same company anymore by any stretch. But I think Apple evolved. It feels to me like almost as much time went into designing the box and the packaging as went into the actual product. Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. Right, like stuff like that is is so undervalued in terms of like when people think about that experience, but the first Yeah, probably the first 10 times I unboxed an iPhone I still got that same excitement. Not so much.
Ryan Purvis 23:30:13
Yeah, I mean yeah, I think I think now it's become a commodity too. Are you just you know, it's a human thing. You kind of get used to it so you stop caring. But do you still keep the boxes?
Phil Hobden 23:30:22
I do but for two reasons. One, I'm because I'm a big fan of reselling my tech. So I like either donate down so usually my daughter will get a car stuff or sell it back in general. If you sell it back in the box, you get more money for it as long as it's in good condition. But I do I do keep the boxes of my Apple products in the loft in a in a box of Apple products. Because just for that experience I just for that that thing where it's just a nice thing to keep. I kept recycling, it just feels wrong.
Ryan Purvis 23:30:59
And that's why I asked the question because it's the box is almost as pretty as the product. And you don't want to lose it. Like I feel, you know, I bought the snack and okay, I bought back in South Africa. So I wasn't gonna bring the box back with me. But I actually had emotional issues making because it was like, I liked the box. And, you know, it's just not a practical thing to bring back because it's because of the way it's packaged. And the way it's been built. You can't it's not space. Not you can't put stuff in there. Really. I mean, it's, you know.
Phil Hobden 23:31:32
You have to take the box apart to be able to use the box, but you don't want to take the box apart because that's part of the pocket like could it be thinner? Could it be more? Could it be less of an experience? Absolutely. Should it be absolutely not. And I did you see recently, like an original iPhone box and unwrapped, went for oh, God, I think it was like 20 or $30,000. I'm gonna have to google that now while we talk. Because like it like, but it's like, that's, that's a phenomenal original iPhone auction. There you go. For Oh, my God, it's actually more than I thought. First generation Apple iPhone sells at a US auction for 145,000. Wow. And that was the original four gigabyte model, which was quite rare, apparently originally bought for $600. Still, it's factory wrapping in exceptional condition.
Ryan Purvis 23:32:32
Wow. That's madness. Can't believe that
Phil Hobden 23:32:36
It's insane. Isn't it? Like for a phone, which nowadays would be almost impossible? Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Purvis 23:32:47
Paperweight? Yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's funny, in some respects, because he was chatting to. We were saying, you know, used to go through a stage where you had to upgrade every time the phone came up, because it had so much new stuff. Now it doesn't seem like every, like odds and evens are the odds life to evens. And because it's only incremental improvement, there's not there's not much really, majorly different. And the biggest thing that actually driving upgrade for me is battery. Um, find the battery is still a big problem. I mean, there's made huge improvements. And I'm quite interested to see when they when the next version of the AR headset comes out what that price is between two and a half grand but heavy watches. Yeah, well, a bit stupid theory. But the interesting thing for me actually is I've always had the watch without the 3g or 4g sim in it. So it's always been a dumb watch. In retrospect, it needs the phone to have connectivity. And I'm actually looking more and more of having the watch with the built in sim and using the phone lists. Because most of the stuff I do is a phone video of your phone call or essay or to get her to calendar invites calendar thing. I don't really want to keep using the phone. And I'm wondering like where are we in the sense that the watch is going to surpass, it's almost going to catch up in in it to an extent that you don't need a phone anymore, because it has a SIM card, it has your headphones connect to it, you can do your podcasts and listen to music and then on the watch. And then you just have the idea just have the headset.
Phil Hobden 23:34:22
It's an interesting, it's an interesting thought of actually my watch is a one that you can put a SIM card in, I've never actually bothered. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's a really interesting thought, I think, you know, the, but you're right about the battery. That's probably what drives me to upgrade as well. Um, I used to be, I used to get every iPhone every year, and I genuinely would buy everyone like, and I did that through probably to the iPhone seven or so. And then at that point, it did become far more incremental. And actually, as the software became easier to install on older phones, the need to upgrade the phone for me became less and now I've gone every other year, if the battery was better, if the the one thing that would drive, my next upgrade would be USB C is it's an interesting thing for me, because I hate having like most of my products will have a USB C. But then again, I look at my desk, I've got a Magic Mouse and a magic keyboard and both of them are lightning. So actually, if I did that, I then need to have two cables. And like the whole it's a fallacy that wireless charging is a thing right? Like like anytime like Apple were like, Oh, we're gonna get rid of all the ports. You just have wireless charging, I know Apple are a great fan of driving innovation and driving change, they took the headphone socket off of the off of the iPhone, right? That was, you know, that was a cool controversial at the time. So I could see Apple doing it. But I think the problem is, wireless charging isn't ubiquitous enough yet. Like I can't walk into a coffee shop. And every table has a wireless charging point on it. Yeah, can't walk into McDonald's, every table has a wireless charging point. If it did, it's same as electric cars. I think this fallacy in the UK of have no diesel or petrol cars from 2030 or, or whatever it is, is a lovely idea if we lived in South Africa, or somewhere where there was the potential to do it, but in the UK, I look on my street, there's parking on one side of my street, which is the other side of my house. So that's nice, you could charge a lamppost. But we've got three in our whole street, I've got a garage that doesn't fit a car, because the garage was built 70 years ago. So I've actually got no physical way of charging my car, in the same way that I would have no physical way of charging my phone. Now you put wireless charges on trains, and some trains do some newer, I think Elon lnd are trying to do, but you put wireless chargers on trains, and put them in coffee shops and places like that. And then it can potentially be a thing. But at the moment, it's it's a nice to have. But it couldn't be the only way of doing it in that, you know, electric cars are lovely, to a point. But I need one that goes more than 300 miles, and whose battery is going to not degrade after two years to the point where it's now doing 190 miles? Because I could do that in one trip.
Ryan Purvis 23:37:47
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you've touched on a few things there. I mean, I remember being in a Starbucks in new strand in London, and they had the wireless charging on the tables. And no matter what I did, and what angle I was at my phone never charged. So it, it was already like a friction experience. Yeah, for that. And I think wireless charging, like even in the cars of great like, like, a car we just bought down doesn't have it. And we used to have it. And I've noticed that like just that be able to put the phone in a certain position and know it's charging versus having to plug it in and know it's charging. It does work on your, your thing. So those are little things that the conveniences that you're suggesting, I think electric cars, I think that's gonna have the same problem. And we have a neighbor that parked her car in the middle of the area because she can't get her charging cable close enough to her car otherwise, and it disrupts everybody. And, you know, it's kind of all what's the benefit, then because you you might be saving some money on you're charging, but you've disrupted the whole traffic flow of the area. So you're using all your neighborly friends, because you disrupt everybody else. So I think there's always going to be, I guess my point is, is there's always going to be a trade off to these things. But yeah, so the thing,
Phil Hobden 23:39:12
It's gonna, it's gonna, it's got to, it's got to meet somewhere in the middle. It's like AI AI is a fantastic tool, and it is going to change the world. Genuinely, it's going to change every facet of the world. I use it more and more and more. Like yesterday, I wrote an article. And because I'm a little dyslexic, I sometimes struggle with just having everything written how I'd like it. So I put I put my article through chat GPD and I'm just like, Could you please just I always say please, I'm really polite. One day, the robots are going to come and kill us all. I want them to think Well, I was actually nice to me. I'll do it. I'll kill him last. But so I was I was I was like, could you get rewrite, ensure the grammar and English is correctness and it just polished it up a little bit. And that's fine. So I think I think a toll that is going to fundamentally change the world, but it's not gonna, it's not gonna take over it's not going to replace people. And anyone that thinks he does is probably the same type of people thought email was going to take away their job and you know, when the fax machines died, and you know that mobiles, were going to take away their jobs and it doesn't just the the workplace just evolves. It evolves digitally and you go on you learn those new skills and and as I get older, it's one of the things I'm conscious of, right. I know what my parents were like my parents were, you know, my dad could barely use his phone. I don't ever want to be that person while I'm sitting there going. I actually can't use that I'm now kind of my dad. Don't Don't be doing that. Yeah, that's a that's a scary thought. So I want to, I want to make sure that like, like, I think the way to the way to make sure you're not replaced by technology is to embrace it and keep up with it. I think that's really important.
Ryan Purvis 23:41:07
Yeah, the opposite, right. I mean, I actually allocated dinner personally two hours a week, just to looking at technology. Yeah. And not just for the sake of it, but you know, I've got a list of problems that I'm always trying to solve. And I'm looking what's out there. You know, because you'll have your tried and tested things you always go back to so you know, for me like WordPress is a good example that there's there's always a if you to build a website, or why did you build in WordPress, but you know, you've got Shopify, now you've got the other ones that aren't doing really good stuff as well. So you can't just default to WordPress every time. And I think it's the same with AI. This, there's so many AI's that are coming out that, you know, you've got to, you've got to spend time, and you were lucky in the sense that if you go look on LinkedIn, and you've searched AI, there'll be people doing the research for you saying, Here's the top five or the top 10, at this point that do these things. Or let's just go look at them. Do you know what they do? And to your point, so you become skilled up and not left behind? Because I think that's the biggest problem for a lot of people, they're gonna be listed so far behind, because they just aren't doing a little bit every day.
Phil Hobden 23:42:14
Yeah, yeah. And it is incremental gains, right? Like, I was always taught that. It's not about making 100% change every day, it's about making a 1% change every day, over the course of a year that 1% becomes exponential. But it's actually impossible to you can't you can't go into things thinking I'm going to fundamentally change everything I do all the time, what you what you have to do is think I'm gonna change a little bit every day, learn a little bit more, embrace a little bit more, try a little bit more. And that's where you get that kind of much more, right. And that's when I talk to my teams about it. It's, it's about like, you know, if we're doing 20 calls today, well, let's do 21. Tomorrow, let's call it like time, push it just that little bit more every day. Or let's, let's have a slightly better conversation. Let's whatever it is, I think that's that, for me is one of the key things, I think, I think the whole general tech space is the way it's evolved in the last 15 to 20 years. It's so fascinating. And, like, I can only imagine what if I was we were arranging is relevant. We were arranging a reunion for our high school. Right, like, okay, and it's been baffling I left in I left high school in 1992. So it's been a fair few years. Right? And we're starting to arrange a reunion. And I was just reflecting back on that time, even in 1992 You know, what technology what the world looked like? And you know, we were using analog video cameras we were using using there's no might have been car mobile phones, but yeah, it'd be bloody rich to have one. You know, there was advent of pagers, a technology that never really lost, right? Video editing was done analog, you'd, you'd literally copy from one type to another. And that would be how you'd make your your, your your master or cut it because yeah, oh cut or audio. Like, again, it was it was an analog process. There was no digital files. You did it on a tape. Yeah. In just touch. And then you look, then you kind of reflect back and go, Well, what was it like 31 years before that? And you go bloody, 31 years before that was was like the 50s 60s Yeah, and like, it was even more simpler technology. And you got to like, like, where we've come in, in such a short space of time is Unbeliev like computer games, I still occasionally play a retro Spectrum game on a computer every now and then because Spectrum was my jam. Growing up. I was a great spectrum fan, went onto the Commodore Amiga, and then went on to PCs. I like I still liked some of those games because I think back then you didn't have graphics to well, people what you had was stories. Yeah, you had, like playability. Like, it was something that kept you going kept your play fantastic stuff. So you go back every now and then you realize that some of those games were really bloody hard. But now you look at that game then and then you go and play the latest Call of Duty or you go and play. You know, the analog would be back in back when I was a kid. I used to spend a load of money on Operation Wolf in the Oh yeah. Yeah, like he had a garland it was a side scroller and and you'd shoot and the equivalent to that now is like a Call of Duty and you compare the graphics and they're, they're night and day, like, but that's only 30 years of evolution.
Ryan Purvis 23:45:57
Yeah, no, yeah, exactly what I was talking to in one of the episodes, like my kids, my son's five, my daughter's turning three. And, like, they will grow up in a world where voice activated assistants are normal at screen is the minimum smart lights and all that stuff, or just, they'll just they won't know any different. They weren't, you know, I mean, became my son's five. So don't expect him to know and use remote control completely yet. But, you know, by the time my daughter's five, we probably won't have remote controls. Because I except for the the aged population that that needs a remote control. But you know, I can control my TV. And it's an old TV, but I can use Alexa to turn it on and off. Which is, which is usually enough. And I saw a message on it this morning telling me that at this time of the day, the most used application is Netflix. So, you know, it's not far away from just saying booting the Netflix every morning. At this time. Yeah, because that's what we do. And then you know, if if the integration gets better, and then I think this is what Apple's always been so good is the end to end chain, they own it, the your experience is good, because the apps that they have worked well with the operating system that will work well the hardware. But if you can get to a point that like Netflix has integrated very nicely into an LG or Samsung TV to the point that the AI that's sitting on the TV can actually do the things without needing a lot of extra coding to put in, for example, that you could say, okay, every day, turn on Netflix at this to this, this episode of whatever it is, like I was watching this last night, just start again, please. You know, it doesn't, you don't have to go and click around and find the movie you're watching and press play. You just tell Alexa, hey, just do this thing. That's what that's what people grew up with, like it's and then that convenience factor is huge. In the same token, you look at what we're generating coders has done. Now, this guy's writing applications faster, which means you gave more and more functionality delivered that would have taken months without taking potentially weeks and hours and minutes in some cases. But it shouldn't be improving the quality of the code, you should be getting better quality applications out, which comes back to my point, in the beginning around, people are able to build their own solutions quicker to solve the problems without needing a lot of technical knowledge. And I think that's huge for for people's abilities to earn income without having to work a nine to five job for kids to educate themselves without having to go to an archaic school system. And all those sorts of things. And I think that's exciting. To see that evolve, though,
Phil Hobden 23:48:37
Don't get me started on the school system. I mean, that is, you know, we, we teach in schools, we teach algebra, but we don't teach people what a mortgage is, or what, uh, what alone is or what APR is, right? Like, we do all of this stuff. And then we expect them to leave school, go to university and survive. And it's just, it's insane. Like we teach, we teach religious education, but a very secular version of religious education, where we don't we kind of acknowledge that there's other stuff outside of Christianity, but we don't really focus on it. But yeah, we talked about the but it's, it's like, you have to do religious education. Well, I get that, but it should be religious and social education, and they should cover like, all religions, like, in the same way that you know, history has to cover all history, good and bad. You can't. You can't pick and choose which wars you want to, you know, it's like, the education system is broken. And then we ask people to prove how well how, what, how, yeah, how good they can memorize it by sitting in an exam for three hours. And if you fail, that exam will fundamentally your life is is different to where you want it. It's just rubbish. is like, it is absolutely rubbish. It doesn't set people up for success, you know, a doesn't set people. I when I interview people, yeah, look, if they've gone to university, that's great. Because it shows that you can apply yourself to get there. But I don't care what university you go to, might break the heart of all the people that spend their life trying to fight to get a good degree. I genuinely not that bothered about where the degree comes from. I want to know you as a person. You know, can you hold a conversation? Can you think on your feet? Can you you know, build rapport and stuff like that? That to me is worth much more than the knowing you went to Oxford or Cambridge.
Ryan Purvis 23:50:40
Yeah. And I think, to a large extent, going to go to the university. There's more about network than is about the actual education in some respect. Yeah, because you can learn all that stuff online without needing to ever go across the across the threshold, but then those metrics or those measures are also archaic. But talking about the demand models here, she wrote a her Master's took three years to write a thesis. And I showed her how I could just generate that for GDP. And she was literally, you know, like, shocked. But but, you know, you can't measure somebody now on writing a thesis over three years, because you can generate the stuff. Not all of it, of course, yeah, you can get, and you know, you can't is that everything has to change now, because because you can't say, and you've seen it already, where they're trying to have detectors to see if you've generated text, that doesn't matter. The point that it has to come in is that someone has to take something that has been now gift wrapped for them, apply their mind to it, and write it in a document clearly, because I think that's still a skill you need to have. But taking three years degree, may not be the right way to do it any more than that, maybe you need to compress it.
Phil Hobden 23:52:02
Yeah, in your right. Like, again, you know, what, what, what does education really mean? And to me, it's the you're showing, you've got the ability to apply yourself at a high level. But, you know, if everyone, I always think that, you know, when they changed the grading of GCSEs. And like they made A*, A's and A-stars and A**, and you're like, you're like, so what you're effective, everyone has an A, effectively devalued it. So they didn't have to create another level. If everyone has a degree, it effectively devalues a degree because the degree is no longer something that is special, like I did a degree in media studies, right? Wasted time, total waste of time, if I had my time, again, I wouldn't do it 100%. I didn't really learn anything I didn't come out of it with anything, didn't give me any opportunities whatsoever. It was a waste of time and money and got out of debt for it. We encourage people to get into debt to go to university to study a subject that isn't really relevant or important. And expect them to come out the back and spend the rest of their life paying off something on the hope of getting a better better job which invariably they don't get, yeah, we should be doing is encouraging people to go to university saying, look, there is a shortage of mathematicians, of tech people, of engineers. And if you want to go and do those subjects, we will pay your university fees for you, as long as you then go and get a job within and stay at that job for five years in that industry for five years or whatever. We should be supporting people to go and study things we actually need. Rather than enabling people to go and spend three years to learn cling on studies, or, you know, whatever rubbish degree that someone decided is worthwhile of three years of someone's time. It ultimately doesn't help you in the workforce. And some of the best people I know, in terms of the tech space didn't necessarily come like my friend is my friend is a tech guy. And when we were 15, we designed a game on the ZX Spectrum, we built a game on the ZX Spectrum as a boxing simulator called Denzel the heartland. Great. I think that's it.
Ryan Purvis 23:54:32
I will send you a game that you'll love if you if you're.
Phil Hobden 23:54:37
And we finished it, right. Like we finished it, we made it we sold it to a company and that company unfortunately went bust and, and it got it just disappeared into the ether of existence and never ever got released, which is a shame. But we did that. And now he he didn't go to university. He stayed doing that. And not many years. 10 years ago, eight years ago, he sold a company that he built from nothing for about 10 million, which was you know, pretty phenomenal. And probably, you know, timing wise, he probably could have done more. I went to university I came out and I went into working on a cross channel ferry clearing up people's vomit and serving drinks to be like, like, you know, it didn't help me. I found my way back into technology and into the tech space through chance and through sales because that was the side I was really good at but but you know if I'd have stuck with the coding thing and not disappeared off on a pipe dream, maybe we would have been on that company together and we would have sold it and we both would have made 10 million out of it. I don't know. You can't, but I do know that that you know, for where I am now the degree definitely didn't help me. I think we've got I've got I've taken us off a bit of a tangent, but it is relevant to the tech space, right like that thing where anyone the democracy, democratization of technology, through API's, where anyone can build something with data, you don't need to have form studies, you can learn to code online, you can use AI to help you to code. You know, this is the new world, we're moving into where, where it becomes a lot easier to do this. And therefore, if you embrace the technology, and you embrace the change, you don't need to worry about AI in technology taking your job, because you'll be using that to put yourself at the forefront of it.
Ryan Purvis 23:56:39
Yeah, hopefully. Right. So I've just pasted the link to the game I was talking about going to Toyota. It's called Boet Fighter, which is a very South African thing, so boet his brother. But if you grew up in Joburg, like I did, there's a certain part of town called fourways which is where all the say the tough guys hang out. And they're always up for the fight. And this is a good this is obviously a game built to mock that whole thing. But it's you can watch the YouTube clip is hilarious. But going back to a degree thing, so I, I went straight from school to university, I studied. I knew I wanted to be an engineer. But not really clear on on more than and I didn't have the drive, to be honest, at that point, but I went is that when I did my sort of assessments, there was a new degree, which was basically in engineering and computer science degree combined, called PRIT, which is an Afrikaans word deserve an acronym for not for cons, sort of what it was. But basically, you're doing all your engineering, subjects plus the it subjects as well. And I felt there's me out of that, after five years. But I went back seven years later to finish my finished a degree which was in mathematics, computer science and informatics. But the reason why I'm telling this story is when I left school, and I went to university, I ended up working for a company, writing code writing software, which we won awards for all the rest. So that's really where we are, you know, was really focused. So that's why the studying didn't happen so much. But when I went back to university and had a career ready, you know, I was 10 years down. So when I went back to study, I knew exactly what I needed to know. Or I had that that clarity of, I need to finish maths, maths is helping me I need to, you know, have computer science, mathematics already, there was easy stuff. But I think that's the problem with a lot of these things that people go to university because it becomes such a stereotypical thing that you do. And, yeah, we had people that have we've, since we've been the UK that have told us I'm doing a dancing degree, and I'm getting a 50 grand loan, to study dance. And you're like, but there's no, there's no career in unless you are really a good dancer, like, you know, you need to be a pro. And I don't think going to university to study dance is going to be the thing, like you should be going to like Juilliard or something like that, where they, you know, that sort of thing. And, and a status thing, a money making scheme.
Phil Hobden 23:59:05
It's people that go to university to do drama degrees. It's like, I've never got it, it's like you can act, or you can act. And the best way to show people you can act is to get involved in projects, get a show, reel together, send it to an agent, and get an agent, and they'll get you castings and everything else. If you're going to university to do degree to act. In reality, you're going to university, do a degree to drink alcohol, you know, experiment with drugs and everything else, right? Like I speak, I speak from experience. But you know, it's that thing where you're just like, you know, it's I went to university to try and get a career in the media. And it was like, if I'd have actually just carried on doing what I was doing, I would have got that career anyway, three years earlier, well, probably 10 years earlier, because I never actually got to it properly. And I would have made much more money doing it and I wouldn't have had debt and everything else. It's it's a weird thing. Um, I think we need to I think we need to refresh the education system to focus on to focus on where the world is and tech, it coding needs to take as much importance as some of the other subjects that we teach, right English and maths are fundamental they underpin everything. But in a modern world, is learning history or geography. Overly relevant is studying a language overly relevant is overly relevant to a point right, but only to a point or should we just double down and actually have have a whole kind of curriculum built around and technology, it coding because those are the skills of the future. Those are the skills that will really help people. Like get a career and really kind of be in pace with where the world's going. It's, I always think it's that thing where our education system is the dinosaurs looking up at the meteorite going, Oh, that's pretty, you know, oh, that looks really nice. That's looking really nice. And eventually the the meteorite hits and the dinosaurs will get wiped out. And they didn't realize that they were looking at a massive threat. That's where our education system is right? Like, like anyone that scared that they're going to lose their job to AI, or technology. Nine out of 10, like, great story from my mother in law, my mother in law wants to find me, because she was starting up an iPhone, she reset her iPhone. And you know, when you reset an iPhone, it comes up with all the different languages. Whenever vollkommen Hello, and she thought she was being hacked, she thought her phone had been hacked. Now that's no, like, I can take the mickey out of that. And I still do quite often, right. But ultimately, that's a misunderstanding of the technology and a fear of the technology. And whilst we have people that have a fear of the technology and a misunderstanding of the technology, then yeah, you absolutely will be at risk. Because you're fighting against it. Were like, you know, surface surface, don't surf into a wave, they surf across the wave. And then when it's right, they then go in front of the wave. And I think that's what we need to do within our education system is we need to stop fighting against the change, embrace it. Because otherwise, we're just going to have a system of people that are very good at subjects that aren't relevant in the modern world.
Ryan Purvis 00:02:41
No, you haven't been right. And I think the, I mean, I've experienced with previous people, you know, people that like just a simple things like you have apps now on your TV to watch something like Netflix, Amazon Prime Disney. And they're so used to having a set top box, and the concept that there's no set top box anymore, and we don't have normal TV, you know, and to me that's like, this is like, fundamental basic stuff. And they they struggle with how to find Netflix and how to find something on Netflix. Very simple. But, you know, from a work point of view, that's that's where we get into I mean, co pilot is coming out with Microsoft. Now, you know, that's going to be building a PowerPoint slides for you. So in theory, that's, that was someone's job for a long time. I mean, they were the managers of PowerPoint, monkeys.
Phil Hobden 00:03:28
Oh, my God, please. Anything that can build PowerPoint slides. For me, I've lost so many hours to building like, like, just just kill the one bit of AI I want on PowerPoint is to just bloody align something like a button, that automatically aligns everything in the middle. Because like, even with the line, even with the line, sometimes it still doesn't visually work for whatever reason, the logo might be slightly off center. So you're like, I get it. So I just want to button on PowerPoint that just says, put everything in a nice straight alignment, that'd be lovely. That would save me genuinely hours each year.
Ryan Purvis 00:04:03
No 100%. And, you know, for me, it's the, you know, I want to but I want to create five slides. This is where I want to, like I want to do this thing. So what I want to say, limited to five slides, use two pictures, at one process, diagram, whatever, like whatever it is, but the depth just had that generated, let me then tweak it after that. But I don't want to spend, like I had to draw my own picture sometimes gonna come find them online. All that stuff just takes time. So I'm looking forward to seeing how this all operates and comes out into fruition?
Phil Hobden 00:04:32
Yeah, it's I think it's gonna be fascinating, I think. I think we're, like, you know, again, the iPhone was probably a tipping point, the, the home computer was a tipping point. I think, you know, we're now at another tipping point, where the next five years will push us in a completely different direction. And that's a good thing. For me, it's a really good thing. Because, you know, again, like, when, when in the accounting space that I work in, when Receipt Bank came out, which is now called Dex received, fantastic app enables you to scan your receipts OCR technology goes into your bookkeeping software. Yeah, like the expense apps and stuff like that. OCR technology been around for a long time, but let's be honest, it was rubbish. It kind of worked, but kind of didn't. When text Receipt Bank came along, there were bookkeepers that were like, oh my god, is this gonna put me out of a job? And the answer because historically what people did is they took all their receipts to the bookkeeper in a box and just went pink. But actually, what it did was it didn't put people out of a job, it freed them up to do more valuable work for the firm. So rather than sitting there processing hundreds of receipts for a farmer that doesn't know how to use computer computer. Now they trained someone on a very simple app, they do it predominantly themselves. And at the end of it, you've saved that client, probably hundreds of pounds. But you've saved the business hundreds of pounds as well, because the value never equated to the cost.
Ryan Purvis 00:06:17
Yes, yes. And it's something we do a lot of a lot of the work we do is, what's the business case for doing this? Why is it important? What's the return? It's not always returning cash. But you know, it could be but it's the value is risk reduction is a productivity enhancement is that we add ESG. Now as well be finding that to become quite important to those decisions. And, you know, when you're doing it for a one, one person at a time thing, it doesn't normally have the value, because you're doing it for a couple of 100 Couple 1000 then those little things become big things. And that's gets back to your point about the sort of 1% improvement every day. It's the same thing, you can get that compounding effect.
Phil Hobden 00:06:57
Yeah. 100%.
Ryan Purvis 00:06:59
Great. So if you want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to get in contact?
Phil Hobden 00:07:03
Always, always on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably where I spend the majority of my life. So I hit me up on LinkedIn. And I'm just like fell hopped on LinkedIn, really simple. I don't think there's very many of me, but you can't miss me. I've got a big bald head and a gray beard. So you know, it's I stand out. But yeah, look, I'm always happy to chat Tech with people to listen to ideas and stuff like that, because it is something I'm super passionate about. So yeah, follow me on LinkedIn. I repost blogs that I do externally, around tech and sales and stuff like that. And I'm launching my own podcast called The Story of in October 2023, where I'm going to be talking to founders, product creators, authors, and people that are kind of really path paving and kind of blazing the trail in the accountancy in the accounting tech space and just diving into what their story is, what drove them to where they are and where they're going to get to in the future.
Ryan Purvis 00:08:01
Oh, great. Well, we should probably get on that as well. Because value would probably fall into some of that. So that's, that's, that's cool.
Phil Hobden 00:08:07
Happy days.
Ryan Purvis 00:08:09
Super, thanks very much for your time. Been great chatting.
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