“Great!” Richard replied. “My assistant will sort out the details.”
Richard was the founder & CEO of a multi-billion-dollar software company in Australia. The year was 2016. I was 24 years old and just starting my new business, CodeMakers.
I'd actually met Richard back in my university days when I was a starry-eyed 19-year-old with my fledgling tech startup, 99dresses. As a scholarship recipient, I was invited to one of the university's fancy award dinners along with their prominent alumni and supporters. Richard and I had been seated next to each other at a table with several other guests. He was around my dad's age. I had no idea who he was or what he did, but he seemed quite smart and lovely. We talked about various things together, then went our separate ways at the end of the night.
Five years later, I received an email from him. The message was attached to a media article about CodeMakers.
Nikki,
I hope this email address on LinkedIn still finds you.
I don't know if you remember me. I probably did not leave that much of an impression, but I did meet you some years ago at one award bake off or another, and was impressed with your entrepreneurship and flair. Your intellect shines through, your presence is powerful, and you have that icon air about you.
I am sorry to read about 99dresses. I thought it was a great idea. Regardless, I'm impressed by the way you talk about failure. I have, deep in my distant past, several non-fatal business failures that have informed my current (apparent) success.
I am very interested in engaging our next generation of software entrepreneurs and found your comments both important and a point of alignment. Personally, and through [my company], we are sponsoring a number of activities. [...] I/we want to do more...
Females, in particular, are excluded (or select themselves out) mainly by social factors from an early age. These pre-set social biases are very hard to defeat, as they are all but invisible. We all need to work hard, probably from early primary school, to offset such biases. We certainly need people like you to lead. I can't really provide the right setting for this myself, but I/we can provide resources, impetus and connections.
If there is any interest, I and [my company] would love to work with you, include you, sponsor relevant activities, or do anything to assist. Let me know if this is interesting.
I am sure you have many offers of mentorship, and I don't want to overreach, but if you ever want a sounding board (time permitting, I imagine for both of us), I am happy to provide one.
In case this is all too much or not of interest, I completely understand. I am still proud to have you as an Australian entrepreneur — I hope to see you learn, grow and excel now and in the future.
Regards,
Richard
I replied, of course. It was lovely to hear from him after so many years.
And that's how I found myself in his office in 2016. We talked for a while, then he gestured me over to his desk.
“You know, I wasn't always like this. I used to be a musician, back in the day.” He showed me a picture of a younger Richard. After taking it in, I glanced out the office window to the vast open-plan area of desks with people busily collaborating with each other and working on his vision.
Richard directed my attention back to a graph on his desk. He traced his finger across many years of slow and steady growth. Then he tapped it at a steep inflection point — the moment everything changed and his company began making quantum leaps. It was an incline so steep that venture capitalists would've scrambled to get a seat on board that rocket ship.
With his finger still tapping on the inflection point, he looked me in the eyes and said, “This point right here represents the moment I learned how to think. I mean, really think.”
He told me about a course he did in New Zealand — A Black Belt In Thinking. He told me it changed everything for him. It changed the way his mind worked. It changed the way he approached problems. He became an epistemic engineer, mapping complex systems using boolean functions, identifying points of failure with incredible clarity. He could use logic to identify small fixes that had huge flow-on effects. He could view problems as symptoms and trace them all the way back to their root cause.
It changed his company and it changed his life. It changed mine, too.
“Nikki,” he said, “I'm sending some members of my team to this ten-day bootcamp in New Zealand so they can learn the same thinking processes that I did. It's going to be intense — wake up at 6 a.m., go to bed at midnight, and train your mind in between. The bootcamp is in two weeks. I'd like to send you, too. I'll pay for the whole thing, of course. Flights, accommodation, food — all taken care of. Do you want to go?”
I was a bit surprised. That wasn't what I was expecting, but of course I said yes. When a smart, forward-thinking billionaire offers to send you on a $12,000 learning adventure, you'd be silly to refuse.
“Can I ask why?” I said after I'd accepted his offer. “Why me?”
“Because I have a feeling you're going to change things. I see something in you. You're going to make an impact.”
It was fascinating how his mind worked. He just saw things with such eerie clarity. I sometimes wished I had that foresight when I looked into a mirror and saw a lost 24-year-old staring back at me.