Voice-over: This is Leaders in Finance, a podcast where we find out more about the people behind a successful career. We speak with the leaders of today and tomorrow to discuss their motivations, their organizations, and their personal lives. Why? Because the financial sector could use a little more honest conversation. We’d like to thank our partners for their ongoing support. They are Kayak, EY, Medirect, and Roland Berger. Your host is Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: Welcome, listeners, to a new episode of Leaders in Finance. I’m very, very happy you’re listening. And welcome to my guest today, Leda Glyptis. Thanks a lot for taking the time.
Leda: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Jeroen: Wonderful. And it’s hard to introduce you, actually, because apart from the fact that you hold a PhD from the London School of Economics, a school that I actually like a lot, you are called a fintech executive, a former banker, a keynote speaker, an advisor, a non-executive director, a visiting professor, and also the author of two books. I mean, I could hardly summarize all of this, but it’s all true, right?
Leda: It is all true. It is all true. I think when you hear your bio rattled out like that, the first thought I always have is, oh my God, I’m getting old, because the reality is that, of course, I’ve been working for 25 years now. So if you add it up, it is long enough to have actually had a couple of changes in your career. So as you say, I started off as an academic. I worked in pretty traditional banking for a while. I’ve worked on the fintech side. Simultaneously, I did a lot of writing, speaking, and started advising companies. In the last couple of years, I have worked exclusively as an advisor for companies of all sizes. And I continue. I continue writing because I quite like it. But yes, you could say that it’s what you get for being of a certain age and very impatient, always wanting to do the next thing and the next thing.
Jeroen: That’s great. Was there a moment in your career when you thought, I will really be a fintech entrepreneur…or a banker… Or was there always the idea I would do other things?
Leda: Very good question. I really wanted to be an academic, actually. I really wanted to be an academic until my early 20s. It never crossed my mind to be anything else. But the way the timings of finishing my PhD and scholarships and this and that worked out, I did a series of applications for an academic job and didn’t get one. And I don’t have a financial safety net. I don’t come from a family that could support me much beyond my university years. So I didn’t have the option to try again. So I found myself unable to pursue the dream and going, oh, what now? And actually having to find a new dream, find a new thing for the rest of my life. And to be honest with you, I’m a political scientist by background. I’m quite outspoken, creative, quite left-leaning. So the idea that I would enjoy being in finance was so counterintuitive. And I was absolutely disgusted with myself because I really enjoyed it. And I was very good at it, which went against everything I believed about myself. But even in my first few years in banking, and I’m sure that people who start their career feel that way always, I didn’t necessarily see a path. And there were moments when I wasn’t very happy in my job, which happens to everyone, that I didn’t even feel that I had a linear path, let alone multiple paths. So I think the first 10 years of my life or so, the choices I made were to avoid getting trapped rather than because of a grand plan. I look back, it’s worked out okay. But I would be lying if I said I’ve always wanted to become this fintech fusion technology specialist. Absolutely not. But it has worked out okay.
Jeroen: So what was it that made you actually start to like it? Do you recall?
Leda: I recall when I started to like it. And I recall the moment when it all started to make sense, and they were not the same moment. I really started to like it a few years in when I started working in change management. And I like fixing things. And I particularly like getting to the roots of things, getting to the causes of things. If you know and like the London School of Economics, you know it is actually the motto of the school. So working in change management was actually brilliant for me, because it allowed me to play to my strengths but also to be in pockets of the organization that wanted to change, usually because something had broken or a regulator had said so. But it meant that you stopped going against the grain when you wanted to make change happen. That’s when I started liking it.
A few years into that work, I started coming across what I can only call the learned helplessness of big financial service organizations, where people who managed teams of 30,000 would say to me, oh, I really want to do that, but can you help me out with resources? Because I don’t have people. And I’d be thinking, I’ve got six people in my team and you have 30,000. It was a very disappointing period in my career when I realized that leadership failures and a lack of courage hold back most of the work we need to be doing. But actually, when you work out that’s where things fall down, you’re much more effective at fixing them. Because up until you get to that moment in your career, you think it’s about the system, the knowledge, the plan. No, it’s not.
So I remember the moment when I started liking it. And I remember the moment when I really saw how it works. But that was also the moment when I momentarily stopped liking it because it was really disappointing. But then you bring the two together, and you re-energize yourself.
Jeroen: That’s great. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this. And then at some point in your career, you thought, I’m going to write a book. And you also write in this book that it is not easy writing a book, right?
Leda: No, it’s not. It’s not easy writing a book. So I started writing a blog for a magazine that used to be called Banking Technology and has now become FinTech Futures about nine years ago. I started writing for therapeutic purposes, usually at the end of a very frustrating day, trying to distill the frustrations into something universal and constructive. As you’ve probably figured out, I have a pathological positivity because I find that I drag myself down if I allow myself to get too depressed or pessimistic.
Anyone who works in a corporate environment has difficult days, and I would get home after one of those and start writing as a way of turning the frustrations into something useful and ideally actionable. A few years into that process, the editor of the magazine I wrote for said, It’s time now. It’s time to actually go deeper into those ideas and produce a book.
You know the phrase, There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women? Well, there is a very, very special place in heaven for women who will shout out another woman’s name in a room full of opportunity. And that’s exactly what she did for me. She reached out to Taylor & Francis, my publisher, and used her own connection to say, You should talk to this woman about publishing a book.
Of course, that made me write a proposal, something I wouldn’t have done otherwise, because you don’t want to let this person down. One thing led to another, and now I’m the author of two books, as you said. But writing a book is hard. It’s actually harder than writing anything else because, first of all, we are no longer in the habit of working with long-form complexity in our jobs. We do complicated projects, but we don’t actually have the discipline of building thoughts to that level of complexity where they all hold together.
The second thing is that no matter how good your keynotes are, no matter how good your blogs are, they are ephemeral. They are forgotten. They are always contextual. A book, however, is a physical artifact with a different kind of longevity. While it doesn’t have the same reach as an article that can be seen by 20,000 people instantly, it has a different kind of staying power. So you need to answer different questions, and you need to do it with a different kind of discipline. It’s very lonely—you spend a very long time silently alone with your thoughts.
Jeroen: I can imagine. I’d love to talk with you about your newest book, Beyond Resilience, which I think came out just a few weeks ago. But before we get into that, maybe a few words about your first book, Bankers Like Us, for those who haven’t read it—what was the core message?
Leda: The core idea of Bankers Like Us is that 20 years of failed technology transformations have taught us one thing: the problem is always people, never technology. The reason we fail is us. And we don’t fail because we’re deliberately obstructive in dramatic ways—it’s actually human weakness and habits getting in the way of our intentions.
We fail in very predictable and human ways. But because the failure is human, so are the solutions. It’s people like us who stand in the way of everything we want to achieve, but we are also the only ones who can fix it.
True to my very optimistic nature, the book is broken down into things that individuals at all levels of an organization can do differently, starting tomorrow—without leading a revolution. It works on an individual, team, and organizational level. Some of the actions can only be taken by the CEO, but others we can all implement to both move things forward and reduce the frustrations we carry, as if it were normal to feel that level of frustration at work all day, every day.
Jeroen: So, and then the second book, which I just referred to, you started writing that one. Was there a trigger event or something that made you say, this is the topic I want to write my second book about?
Leda: Yes, yes, there was. As I was writing my first book—what usually happens? I recently read in a novel that as a journalist, when you’re done researching a story, you stop taking notes. When you stop taking notes, sources speak because you already know the answers. There comes a moment in writing a book when you realize you’re done. Now you need to edit it, give it shape, but you’ve said what you wanted to say. And because my first book is very much aligned with my work as an advisor, my keynotes, and my articles, I thought, I don’t want to do this anymore. I know the answers now, I’m done. I’m going to put it aside and work on the other side of the question. And it’s that simple.
If 95% of startups and 70% of digital transformations in financial services fail, and we’ve been doing digital for over 20 years now, the success rate is small—but big enough for us to ask: what do they have in common? Thankfully, as I mention in the introduction of the book, my publisher walked me back from the brink and said, no, finish the first book first, then you can do this. But it was an interesting shift for me, because when I started writing, I didn’t already know the answer. I had some inklings, of course, but I couldn’t say I knew the answer. And there have been things in the book that surprised me. Some findings in my research even made me uncomfortable. As a practitioner, I thought, I don’t want to do that. I know it works, but I don’t like it. I don’t want to do this.
Jeroen: So when you refer to “they”—they have success—who are you talking about? Fintech businesses? Or does this also include banks and other financial institutions? Who is “they”?
Leda: That’s a very good question. The answer is that I interviewed a diverse group of people—65 individuals with varied backgrounds. It’s a mix of practitioners inside very large organizations, including some of the world’s biggest banks. I spoke with founders who succeeded, founders who failed, and founders who did both. I also included a couple of regulators for good measure.
The goal was to interview people at different stages of transformation or innovation in financial services—people who had been several years into their journey, allowing for real reflection. I wasn’t asking anyone, “Tell me the secret to your success.” Instead, I was gathering observations: what worked, what didn’t, and what changed when they tried again after failing the first time. Lessons from the first rodeo, so to speak.
Voice-over: You’re listening to Leaders in Finance with Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: Were all these people immediately willing to join you in these conversations, or did some refuse, ask to remain anonymous, or have other concerns?
Leda: The vast majority surprisingly said yes. Maybe I shouldn’t have been afraid.
Jeroen: You already knew them, right?
Leda: I did. And I think part of it was that they knew I was coming to the table with a certain ethos. They knew they could expect a degree of integrity, which helped. I didn’t have anyone outright refuse. A few said yes but had to involve corporate communications and legal teams. Most of those colleagues were constructive, but in some cases, responses were sanitized to the point of being useless. So I didn’t include those and didn’t count them in my final dataset.
I also had a small subset of interviewees who, during the conversations, asked to remain unnamed because of the topics we discussed. For example, one company is currently mid-litigation with its investors. They provided incredibly valuable insights on choosing investors poorly. I had to decide: do I include them anonymously and keep that rich content, or leave it out entirely? Similarly, some wanted to speak candidly about deep workforce cuts or retrenchment but preferred not to be named. I respected that. I made a conscious choice that what they had to say was too valuable to exclude. So, apart from a few people who wanted to be quoted but not named, I didn’t have anyone decline.
Jeroen: That tells us a lot about who approached them, probably. So if you look at the continuum between being a purely academic work and a purely anecdotal work, where are you on that continuum with this book?
Leda: I would say somewhere in the middle because you can’t fully get rid of your academic training. So I have applied some behaviors and methods that you wouldn’t if you weren’t a bit of a geek. For example, I kept a full research log and had a control group. But an academic piece of research would need a theoretical framework, which I don’t have. And it would probably argue that the number of interviews I’ve done has no statistical significance. So actually, I should go out there now and interview, I don’t know, 700 more people to see if these opinions hold up statistically. There was a bit of rigor in my research to ensure that I didn’t create bias in my answers. There’s definitely bias in the sample because I picked people I respected and whose opinions I wanted to know—that I readily admit. I tried to apply all of my academic training to remove bias in my research. But whenever you do anything that isn’t mathematically driven, there’s always bias. So I’m willing to own that there’s probably quite a bit of my own views in there, even when I thought I was being objective.
Jeroen: Right, yeah. No, it’s also what you describe in the preface. As a former banker myself and a semi-entrepreneur, a fintech entrepreneur, and now a full entrepreneur, obviously, it’s great to read, right? Because there’s a lot in there that’s also inspiring. When you read it, you think: hey, I’m doing this, or I’m not doing this, or actually, I’m on the right track. It feels hard, but apparently, that’s right. So maybe that word hard is a good segue into a topic I’d like to discuss with you. Because many, many times throughout the book, it comes back that it’s hard work. You literally use that word all the time, right? So tell me more, because I know a lot of people who are not entrepreneurs or who want to change things think, yeah, it’s easy, right? It’s the same as seeing your book behind you right now. It’s there, right? But it doesn’t feel like hard work went into it. But it did. So tell me more about how you know, how you feel, how people describe that—to get something done, hard work is needed.
Leda: I’m glad you hone in on that because I think there are several strands there. First of all, for those of us who’ve been in the industry long enough, I think we can all say that there was a moment when the fintech wave started becoming super popular when we fed the industry a major lie. We actually created this playground, cupcake, and balloon animals feeling around entrepreneurship. And I don’t think anyone did it intentionally, but there was a moment when a lot of corporates leaned in and started giving small amounts of resources for innovation theater and fintech showcases. There was a lot of cheap, free, stupid VC money—whichever way you want to put it. And suddenly, entrepreneurship seemed like a fantastically appealing and, if not easy, at least viable route. And that’s a lie. Entrepreneurship is extremely hard. Failure rates are off the charts high, even if you have money and support. And the reality is that building something brand new, something that has never existed before without a blueprint, is not for everyone. Even those who are actually talented in this kind of work find it difficult. It’s frustrating. It’s lonely. You never know: Am I halfway through? Am I a tenth of the way through? Am I even going in the right direction? Which way is up?
So I think it is absolutely imperative that we move away from that naïve view that entrepreneurship is great fun. I remember that anyone who did well at work was asked, about 10 years ago, Why are you not doing your own thing? What kind of question is that? Why don’t you ask me why I’m not a dentist? These things are not interchangeable. So I think we need to move away from this view that entrepreneurship is just something available to everyone. It’s not. It’s extremely difficult to do something brand new. It’s extremely difficult to have the discipline to know when to listen to advice, when not to, when to spend time, when not to, when to take money, when not to. It takes a particular skill set that isn’t interchangeable with being good at doing something similar in an established organization.
And one of the things that came out very, very strongly in the book—and anyone who picks it up can see it in the personal stories of the people featured—is that it’s not just hard work. It’s also hard on you as a person. It’s hard on your family relationships, your professional relationships, your sense of self-worth. It takes a lot out of you. And we don’t talk about this enough. It’s complex work, which makes it hard anyway. It has no user manuals, which makes it inaccessible to most people. And it takes an extremely high toll on you as a person. Hard doesn’t even come close to describing it.
And frankly, one of the things an early reviewer of the book said—and they found it surprising—was: You almost sound like you’re trying to put people off from this journey. And the answer is: I sort of am. Not to put people off, but to make them pause and ask themselves: Hey, is this for me? Or am I motivated by a romantic idea? Everyone has a novel in them. Everyone has a business in them. No, they don’t. This is extremely hard.
Jeroen: So what is actually the right motivation to succeed? Because there are so many reasons why you shouldn’t, because you need to deal with insecurity, a lot of insecurity, which you’re just describing. It’s hard work. I mean, all the things you just said. So what is the motivation you came across often that you think is the right one, or at least has a relatively high chance of succeeding?
Leda: Again, a brilliant question. I would say that the motivation the people I spoke to had in common was a desire to have an impact that was bigger than their paycheck.
Jeroen: Oh, it’s the purpose again?
Leda: 100%. And we always think of bankers as being cold, calculating capitalists. And I’m not saying that these people didn’t want to make money, but the language of impact comes up again and again. And a couple of the people I interviewed, in fact—I’m not going to give it all away—but there’s a Dutch entrepreneur in there who said, I am doing this because it’s not easier. Because I want to do something that isn’t just waiting for the next guy to pick it up. I want to do something that will have an impact, and the complexity is appealing. So that’s the motivation that actually keeps people going. But there are a couple of characteristics that people have in common that allow them to keep going. One is resilience. It takes a lot of resilience. The second, which is where the title of the book comes from, is the ability to do structured, disciplined, unsexy work for a sustained period of time. Resilience is not enough.
Jeroen: What I often call to my team: do these thousand shitty things.
Leda: Yes.
Jeroen: Just keep doing them. Is that what you mean?
Leda: I mean doing these thousand shitty things consistently over a long period of time. I think one of the takeaways of the book is that there are all these verticals of things you need to do. And one of the things I keep saying is, you don’t get to pick. You have to do them all. And if you say, well, that’s a bit hard, the answer is: told you so. I told you from the beginning that this is hard. Nobody said it was easy. I told you it was hard. Now I’m telling you what to do. That won’t make it easy. It’s just a checklist of hard things.
Jeroen: You’re making sure that a whole generation of potential entrepreneurs actually never start.
Leda: Well, I think the entrepreneurs will still start. But I do wonder whether reading this will protect a whole host of people who are not entrepreneurs. And it would be a very traumatic experience for them. Actually, not doing this but doing something semi-structured in an established company will have them at the peak of their creativity and happiness. And that’s okay. Actually, if you read the book and go, the entrepreneurial journey is not for me—doing change work inside a big corporate would suit me better—that is a fantastic win for me. For me and for the person making that realization.
Jeroen: We already spoke about the fact that, in my words, you get a lot of insecurity as an entrepreneur or as someone who wants to change things within organizations. Dealing with this insecurity is a very big part of being successful and keeping going. Then, at the same time, in your book, you talk a lot about control—trying to get control of the things you can control. Could you explain more? Because these two things also don’t seem to go together easily.
Leda: It’s contradictory on some level, isn’t it? Some of it is capturing the contradictory experiences of an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur. And some of those contradictions cannot actually fully be reconciled. You have to live in that gray zone.
That said, there are two things I want everyone to take away. The first thing is, when you’re doing new things for the first time, there’s a whole host of variables that are outside of your control. Accepting that is the first step to sanity. But not everything is outside your control. And one of the things I have seen entrepreneurs over the years do is say, well, we’re entrepreneurial, move fast and break things, not keeping an eye on runway, not keeping an eye on what the market is doing. Like, whoa, whoa, stop.
Building new things for the first time has a lot of variables that are outside your control. Everything that isn’t outside your control, though, should be in direct, immediate, and constant control. So you should have an eagle eye on your runway, on how you manage and spend your time—be intentional about it—on what the market around you is doing, on what the market around you is telling you.
We have seen so many entrepreneurs who have actually received early feedback from the market that their pricing is wrong or that their product-market fit isn’t right. And they choose to disregard it because they’re pursuing their dream. So when I say control what you can, I actually mean that there is a whole host of things—your risk registers and your scenario planning—all of these are in your control.
And they’re historically associated with high failure rates. The vast majority of things that cause failures in change work, startups, and building new things are actually things that are in our control, and we didn’t control them. So for the things that are in our control, there is no excuse. We have to be disciplined about them.
For the things that aren’t in our control, we need to have early warning systems. But one of the things that can be in our control is what you talked about right at the beginning—that insecurity, that vulnerability, that human side of the founding team or the entrepreneur.
What I see often is that self-awareness is one of the biggest superpowers that you can have—not just in life in general, but specifically in this business. Everyone has insecurities, everyone has vulnerabilities, everyone has things they’re not very good at. The people who succeed at this uncertain work are the people who are good at finding ways to control some of those variables, either by surrounding themselves with teams and co-founders who are good at the things they’re not, or by surrounding themselves with advisors who will catch them out, prevent them from making an unforced error, or help them bring a decision six months forward.
Can you control your own vulnerabilities, insecurities, and mistakes? Never fully. But have you done everything in your power to control what you can? My answer is that the vast majority of people have not. We actually leave a lot of things that could be in our control to fate, and that’s dangerous.
Jeroen: I’ve written so many notes, I don’t know where it was in the book, but a couple of times it comes back that you actually need to know yourself quite well, right? And you kind of said something along those lines already just a few minutes ago, but could you explain to me, is it really true that all the people you interviewed actually feel like they know themselves quite well? I mean, let’s say better than the average person in society?
Leda: Oh, nice question.
Jeroen: Or are they just, quote-unquote, maniacs, and they keep going, and they just don’t think, and they just keep going for some, you know, whatever reason? Maybe they’re insecure from their youth, or they’ve had an experience that makes them so motivated, or they want to prove themselves, or any other reason? Or do you actually think they know themselves well?
Leda: I think it’s a very thoughtful question. And look, as I say repeatedly in the book, there are life choices in there I don’t understand. There are people who are sitting on more wealth than I will ever imagine in my life, and they’re putting all of that money into the next thing. Are they maniacs? Absolutely. Like, who does that? There are life motivations that I will absolutely never understand in there. And I think that’s the other thing that is okay. I actually say it in a number of interviews. Why are you doing this? Why are you not sitting on a beach? And the question is unfathomable to you. It’s like, why would I? Well, because it’s a lot more fun sitting on a beach than working 14 hours a day. So there is that. Like, they are maniacs. They’re different, genetic, different makeup.
But I think the interesting thing is, as I reflect on your question, do they know themselves better than the average person? Perhaps. Do they know themselves full stop? It’s a journey. And that journey, you can see people reflecting on the arc of their journey—the moment when they gained confidence, the moment when they gained humility, the moment when they actually came up from an embarrassing failure and felt ready to go again. And I’m pretty sure that all of those things are true, but those people still have immense blind spots. And you’re only done learning when you’re dead. So the journey of an entrepreneur never stops teaching you. Like, if somebody goes, I’m a three-time founder. I’ve been doing this for 15 years. There’s nothing left to learn. You’re like, okay, I’ll get some popcorn because the next one will be spectacular.
They have definitely found themselves on journeys that force accelerated learning upon you more than if you shuffled down a more predictable path. In that sense, they probably have been forced into some more self-awareness. But then again, some people are not teachable. And there are many people that I did not include in the book because there is no self-reflection. So if every success is down to your genius and every failure is down to bad luck or the world conspiring against you, then there’s nothing useful for me to put in my book for you to apply to your journey—other than: there are some maniacs out there. Be careful.
Voice-over: You’re listening to Leaders in Finance with Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: Talking about feedback, you say it’s really important you keep asking your customers what they think about what you do. Do you have tips for people that are running businesses right now, or intrapreneurs as well, on how you can easily make sure that you keep doing this, but also that you actually do something with the data you get from your customers? So everything around feedback—I’d like to learn more about how to get feedback and how to actually use it in a useful way in my business.
Leda: Feedback, as I like the alliteration, it’s not always friendly, but it’s always your friend. So the first thing to think about feedback is you have to create a cadence of receiving it that is so regular that you don’t find yourself making a big production about consuming it. Now, that regularity, depending on the type of product you have, might be once every six months or it might be once every 20 minutes. It really depends on the product.
But because feedback can be emotionally hard to receive—I was with a friend who’s an entrepreneur last night, and he said to me, I have a difficult meeting tomorrow morning. I have to go tell my client that their baby is ugly. There is such an emotional attachment to what you do that if the feedback is, you’re great, then that’s fine. If the feedback is, have you thought about this? You have a blind spot there. You have overestimated the appeal of your product. It feels personal. And it is very common that there is either resistance to the source or resistance to the accuracy. And people are more likely to either ignore feedback or go out to validate it ad infinitum if they disagree with it.
So how can you create a cadence of feedback that is consistent enough that you have context for it at all times? Make your feedback cadence very regular. The second thing is to identify the areas where you need real-time feedback to be feeding into your decisions. So if you’re in the early stages of a product build, you need product-market fit, you need product-pricing fit, and you need a good sense of whether the two actually marry up nicely. Because we have seen a lot of ideas fail because the market for the thing was there, but not at the price point required.
There are some interesting use cases in the book about people who actually started building their operational capability to deliver their business and went early out into the market to work out what price point the market could take so that they didn’t build an organization that was too heavy for the product. Equally, there is another story in the book that says: we built a Ferrari for a market that wanted a bicycle. They didn’t mind the Ferrari, but they were only ever going to pay for a bicycle—and we could have built a bicycle.
So there is a type of feedback that you want super early on around the existential feedback: does anyone other than you want this thing built? Do they want it enough to pay for it? Do they want it in enough numbers and at a high enough price point to pay for your business? And then as you go through your journey, if you’re a service business, you need to have service quality agreements and that all the time, but also competitive landscape feedback. You will become obsolete. Somebody might be telling you, and you might not be listening. How do you make sure you’re listening? You make sure that that feedback is constant.
One of the founders I interviewed in the book said he has a series of advisors around him who help him avoid two unforced errors a year. He doesn’t need more than that because if he avoids two mistakes that he would have otherwise made, he’s ahead of himself. So it goes back to what we were saying earlier about your own personal blind spots. How do you protect yourself from the things you’re not very good at? And then how do you protect your organization from becoming egotistical? Because it’s very easy to be like, I have a vision, and I will stand on this hill with my flaming sword, and I will go against the odds and against the world. Very heroic, very misguided.
At all points, the market gives you feedback, and you need to hold the line. I mean, one of the entrepreneurs I interviewed said if we had listened to what the market wanted, we would never have had Spotify. Perhaps. But Spotify actually did listen to what the market wanted—about how they wanted to consume music and how people don’t like buying a full album when they only listen to one song. They actually did listen to what the market wanted. They just didn’t listen to how the market wanted to consume a particular thing and didn’t try to price Spotify the way they price your average CD.
So actually, I would argue that, yes, they did listen to the market, but they listened to what the market was saying. They didn’t listen out for what they wanted to hear. So feedback operates on two levels. Put yourself in a position where you’re constantly receiving feedback, and put yourself in a position where you’re forced to reflect on it. Because it’s very easy to go, no, no, no, that doesn’t apply to me. I’ve got a vision. I don’t need to listen to this. I’m going to do my thing, and I’m going to prove everyone wrong.
Jeroen: So you put a lot of different ingredients from your book together, right? You have resilience, you have people that really want to go for it, who are willing to go the extra mile, to do the hard work, disciplined. They need to surround themselves with people, get feedback. So these are all very important ingredients. Am I missing ingredients here? You also state in your book that you make sure you have people on the journey who actually become the camaraderie you talk about, right? You need people to share things, to share the highs and the lows on your journey. Am I missing crucial things here? I mean, obviously, we can say you should buy the book and read it yourself.
Leda: Yeah, buy the book.
Jeroen: Is there another important ingredient that I’m missing here?
Leda: I would say there are two more ingredients that are key. And I guess absolutely everyone should go buy the book. You are right that I do talk about the fact that there is no hard and fast pattern emerging around what type of team succeeds. Actually, you could have founders who don’t go all the way together. You have people who start on their own, teams that stick together. There isn’t one shape that works, but there is one shape that doesn’t work, and that’s alone. How you configure the team doesn’t matter, but there needs to be a team that shares the load for the journey because it is a pretty long journey.
I would say the two ingredients we haven’t touched on are—well, we touched on things like product-market fit, pricing, operating costs. These things are super important. Talent, the team—super important. I would throw two more things into the mix, which sound counterintuitive when talking about building new ventures. One is governance. Both too much of it and too little of it is a terrible, lethal mistake. But finding the right shape of governance that protects you and gives you the right skeleton for growth for your venture is an exercise you have to spend time on. If you’re an independent venture, that means getting the right investors in. The wrong investor can burn you really badly. If you’re a subsidiary owned by a parent company, it’s about how you manage that asymmetry. It has to be intentional. It has to be a job. It can’t just be done as an afterthought. And if you’re transforming your own business, you need to allow for the fact that headspace is currency, and you need to manage it. So the answer is very different depending on what you’re trying to transform, what you’re trying to build, but getting the governance right is absolutely key.
The second thing, as a sort of parting thought, is time. The concept of time came up again and again in interviews. Things like the right timing—are you too early? Are you late? How do you manage that? The idea that you can actually be early intentionally, and then it’s a strategic strength. How time plays into this is actually very powerful. But I’ll tell you the one thing that made me deeply uncomfortable in the interviews, yet came up with incredible consistency: the most important thing you need to do when building things that nobody built before is to be extremely intentional about how you spend your time. You need to be intentional about how you spend your time on the things that are important to what you’re building. We said right at the beginning that impact and a vision of what you’re trying to achieve are key. So spending time to make sure the choices you make align with that vision, that mission, that impact is important. Equally, spending time to check that the things you’re doing are not counterproductive.
I’ve got a mechanism for gathering feedback—am I listening to it? I’ve got a mechanism for getting advice—is it working? I’ve got a mechanism for market feedback—am I actually adjusting my product roadmap accordingly? That all sounds logical, right? I’m saying it, it makes sense to me, it makes sense to you. But when you talk to founders about how they do it, they talked about spending a year whiteboarding before actually building anything to make sure they held themselves to a higher standard regarding the kind of company they wanted to be, the kind of product they wanted to build. I spoke to two co-founders who, when they had no money and no customers, created the most extensive agreement I’ve ever seen on how they would make decisions when things were in play so that they could have a guiding light for themselves. A different entity, a fully owned subsidiary of a bigger company, spent almost a year working out what their unit economics needed to be before writing a single line of code so they could provide financial inclusion products and affordable lending meaningfully.
Now, when you’re working against the clock of either diminishing runway, having no money and spending your own savings, or working for a big company that spends a year making a decision and then wants you to build everything in five minutes, spending that time is a really hard decision. Time is the thing you feel you need to spend to prove that the thing is real so you can get to the next stage of evolution. And yet, spending that time intentionally and upfront on things that are foundational but don’t actually deliver demonstrable value in the medium term—it was uncomfortable for me to write it down. But I know it to be absolutely true because you see what happens when people don’t do it. And it is one of the most consistent thematic imperatives that come out of the book: be intentional about how you spend time because that determines your culture, allows your structure to develop differently, creates discipline around the things that matter, and drives your decision-making under fire.
Jeroen: Why does this feel so uncomfortable to you? Because it all sounds very, very right. It’s just extremely hard to do.
Leda: Exactly that. It sounds very right, but it’s extremely hard to do. And I have worked both for very big corporates and for startups. I’ll give you a small example of both. If you work for a corporate, when you’re trying to get a transformation program approved, you usually spend anywhere between one and three years aligning your stakeholders to say yes. When you get to yes, the clock starts running out on you because the time that the organization spent thinking about it was not time you spent working. You spent it getting smarter, but you had no engineers, no data scientists, no resources. But the organization doesn’t feel that way. Intellectually, it knows that; emotionally, it doesn’t. So if you’ve done this two, three, four times, you know that you need to start showing points on the scale immediately—actually faster than fast. If you sit back and think, Right, we’ve got the green light, let’s align on imperatives here, you might get your program killed before you even get off your seat.
Similarly, if you work with investors, they will love you in your first board meeting and tell you that you have plenty of time. By your second board meeting, they start getting nervous. They will start wanting proof points, wanting you to bring some money in sooner. Yes, we said we’re doing that. That’s the reality of the game. So it takes immense discipline and governance that helps you to be able to spend time when you feel you can’t afford it. The value of it will be huge, but it comes with risk and also goes against the grain of how we work. But that’s the whole point. We are talking here about doing things for the first time in a way that’s different from how they’ve been done before. That’s what it looks like.
Jeroen: There’s so much of what I read in the book, as well as what you’re telling me today, that I recognize. It’s just unbelievable how much I recognize. If I had been one of the people you interviewed, I definitely would have come up with a lot of the same things. And also, I mean, I said it before, but I highly enjoyed reading it. Especially because it gives a lot of energy when you read it, with all these little text boxes with nice quotes and stuff. Every time I get inspired, I get energy. And some things are indeed uncomfortable because you know you’re pretty bad at them, and you know they’re very important—especially the ones about time and freeing up headspace. I should do the real thinking instead of just acting and responding to things.
But my last question would be: I’m clearly someone in the target audience, but who should buy this book? For whom would it be especially interesting to read?
Leda: I actually think the book would be useful for anyone running a startup or a challenger or considering doing so—their board members and investors, but also decision-makers in large organizations because transformation is non-optional these days. We have dragged our legacy with us for so long and so far that even organizations reluctant to embrace transformation will have no choice, especially in the context we are discussing today in Europe, with some very interesting regulations hitting us all at the same time, right? We’re not going to be able to carry the legacy we’ve always had.
So anyone who needs to do new things for the first time, is contemplating that life, or is sitting on the board of a company that needs to do new things for the first time—I think there will be something useful in the book. Because even if you don’t agree with the findings, the questions will provide a greater degree of self-awareness. And as we said at the beginning, self-awareness seems to be one of the most valuable things a founder can take with them on this journey.
Jeroen: Wonderful. You’re such a great person to talk to. I highly enjoyed it. As I said, I highly enjoyed the book, but I also highly enjoyed this conversation. We will put the links to the book, to you, and to all the things you’ve written in the show notes so people can do further reading, listening, watching, etc.
Once again, Leda, thanks so much for taking the time to speak to Leaders in Finance, to speak to me. I very much enjoyed it. Thank you.
Leda: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
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