Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello Tim Harford here with a bonus episode of
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales. Today. I've got a story about someone I
Speaker 1: think everyone should know about, a trail blazing entrepreneur who
Speaker 1: changed the way we think about tech, redefined roles for
Speaker 1: working women, made many members of staff millionaires, and founded
Speaker 1: the first autism research charity in the UK. This episode
Speaker 1: is sponsored by Chase for Business, and joining me again
Speaker 1: is their CEO, Ben Walter, who also hosts the very
Speaker 1: excellent podcast The Unshakables. Ben, Welcome back to Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 1: How are you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm great, Thanks for having me, Tim, Although I'm very cold.
Speaker 2: I'm in New York City. It's about nine degrees fahrenheit,
Speaker 2: or for those of you across the pond, about minus twelve,
Speaker 2: so it's a bit chilly outside.
Speaker 1: There's ice on the nine fahrenheit. You know, Ben, I
Speaker 1: discovered just today that the the Celsia scale begins with
Speaker 1: the freezing point of water. I did not know that
Speaker 1: the fahrenheit scale zero is the freezing point of brine.
Speaker 1: You maybe knew that.
Speaker 2: I did not know that either. So it is at
Speaker 2: least based on something as opposed to haphazard, which is
Speaker 2: what it seems like for everything else in the imperial system.
Speaker 1: It is based on something. But anyway, look, we're digressing already,
Speaker 1: and we shouldn't. Last time we spoke, I told you
Speaker 1: about a nineteenth century Champagne baroness. This time we're going
Speaker 1: to leap forward in history. This is a twentieth century story.
Speaker 1: It's a very twentieth century story. I have to say,
Speaker 1: how how tech savvy are you? Ben?
Speaker 2: In absolute termors are a relative to my kids.
Speaker 1: We're all well behind the co relative to our kids.
Speaker 1: But you know, you know, you know which way up
Speaker 1: is in a computer.
Speaker 2: For a fifty something gentlemen, I think I do, okay.
Speaker 2: I mean we certainly. I work an tech forward business,
Speaker 2: so I keep up with the latest on most things.
Speaker 1: I mean I feel reasonably text having. Actually, you compared
Speaker 1: yourself to your kids. I compare myself to my parents.
Speaker 1: My mother was a computer hacker, and my dad worked
Speaker 1: in information technology his entire life.
Speaker 2: Wait, Tim, your mum was a hacker. You got to
Speaker 2: say a little more. You can't just let that hang there.
Speaker 1: I mean, I make it sound very dramatic. I mean
Speaker 1: she was just one of these great computer enthusiasts in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties we had. We had lots of these
Speaker 1: kind of classic nineteen eighties computers around the house, and
Speaker 1: she would take them apart and put them back together.
Speaker 1: And I think I can probably say this, I mean,
Speaker 1: she's long dead, no one's going to come for her.
Speaker 1: She would just strip off the copy protection on these
Speaker 1: computer games. So she would say, well, I'm not paying
Speaker 1: all this money to buy you a computer game. If
Speaker 1: I get the computer game, take off the copy protection,
Speaker 1: make a copy of the computer game, and then send
Speaker 1: the computer game back to the library, or give it
Speaker 1: back to your friend or whoever you borrowed it from.
Speaker 1: So yeah, she would. I mean, she wasn't like cracking
Speaker 1: into the Pentagon or anything like that, but even they,
Speaker 1: I think pale into insignificance. With the text saviness of
Speaker 1: the entrepreneur that I want to tell you about today,
Speaker 1: Steve Shirley, she really saw two huge gaps in the
Speaker 1: way people thought about the computer industry. And she and
Speaker 1: you may be wondering, Steve, as she will get to
Speaker 1: that she faced absolutely astonishing challenges during her life, right
Speaker 1: from the beginning of her life, and I think her
Speaker 1: story can teach us a lot about success and about
Speaker 1: resilience in the face of failure.
Speaker 2: So you ready to go, Yeah, I can't wait to
Speaker 2: hear about it.
Speaker 1: Before we get to her incredible story and your take
Speaker 1: on her experience. Here is the theme music. I'm Tim
Speaker 1: Harford and you're listening to cautionary Tales. Steve Shirley was
Speaker 1: born in nineteen thirty three, and she wasn't called Steve Shirley.
Speaker 1: She was called Vera Buchtal. She was born in Germany
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty three, which, okay, instantly a problem.
Speaker 2: Tough time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and she was Jewish, so her father was a
Speaker 1: judge in Dortmund. So first the Bokschial family moved to Vienna,
Speaker 1: and then shortly before the Second World War broke out,
Speaker 1: Vera's father decided they had to get their two daughters
Speaker 1: out of the Nazi sphere of influence. They were put
Speaker 1: on this train. This is one of the Kinder transport trains.
Speaker 1: So you've got a couple of thousand children on this
Speaker 1: train which went all the way from Vienna to Britain.
Speaker 1: So this was Vera. So Steve Shirley, age five, her
Speaker 1: older sister who was nine, and they were fostered in
Speaker 1: Shropshire in the northwest of England. Her parents actually survived
Speaker 1: the war, but the family didn't survive the trauma of
Speaker 1: this experience. So Steve later said that she felt she
Speaker 1: had been completely rejected and abandoned by her parents, And
Speaker 1: of course it was only later that she realized quite
Speaker 1: what they'd gone through and what a difficult decision they
Speaker 1: had made, the most loving thing any parent could have done.
Speaker 1: But that is the first few years of Steve Shirley's life.
Speaker 1: I mean, what a start.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what a difficult way to start your life. The
Speaker 2: trauma that it must cause at that age to not
Speaker 2: understand what it's all about and to be starting your
Speaker 2: life over, I can't imagine.
Speaker 1: It does defy imagination. She did reflect on this later,
Speaker 1: and one of the things she said was that she
Speaker 1: had this survivor's guilt and she felt that her life
Speaker 1: had been saved in this spectacular way, and that she
Speaker 1: then wanted to live a life that had been worth saving.
Speaker 1: So she really felt this need to justify her existence
Speaker 1: and her survival, and as we'll see, I think she
Speaker 1: really did.
Speaker 2: She sounds like a fascinating woman already, and she hasn't
Speaker 2: done anything yet.
Speaker 1: Buckle up because there's a lot to this story. So Steve,
Speaker 1: she was still Ververa at the time. Steve grew up
Speaker 1: in Shropshire. She loved she loved Shropshire. She found the
Speaker 1: town very welcoming of these immigrant children, refugee children. She
Speaker 1: did well at school, she learned fluent English, and she
Speaker 1: was really passionate about maths. And the problem was they
Speaker 1: didn't teach maths to girls, and so she had to
Speaker 1: fight for special permission to go to learn maths at
Speaker 1: the nearby boys' school. And the reaction of the boys
Speaker 1: was I think a preparation for the rest of her life.
Speaker 1: In fact, what did they do? Cat calling, whistling, heckling.
Speaker 1: The boys were not kind, but she wanted to learn maths.
Speaker 1: She powered through it. You'll see she powers through a
Speaker 1: lot of things. She became a British citizen at the
Speaker 1: age of eighteen, and she took the name at Stephanie Brook.
Speaker 1: And she decided not to go to university, even though
Speaker 1: she was clearly very bright. And do you want to
Speaker 1: guess why she didn't go to university.
Speaker 2: She couldn't afford it. I mean, sorry, I know that's
Speaker 2: a very American answer, But.
Speaker 1: That's a very American answer. I think she probably would
Speaker 1: would have been fine on that count. The issue was
Speaker 1: she wanted to study science, and there may have been
Speaker 1: some science courses available to women, but she could only
Speaker 1: find one. And do you want to guess what was
Speaker 1: the science that they let young women study. Any guesses nursing.
Speaker 1: It was botany, so the girls could study the pretty flowers. Anyway,
Speaker 1: she didn't want to study botany. She wanted to study
Speaker 1: maths or physics or something engineering. She didn't see any
Speaker 1: opportunity to do that, and so she just went straight
Speaker 1: to get a job and she got a job at
Speaker 1: the post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill.
Speaker 2: Where is Dollis Hill?
Speaker 1: Good question, it's just part of northwest London. But the
Speaker 1: post Office Research Station this is the male but they're
Speaker 1: also plugged into telecommunications, so they're doing this cutting edge
Speaker 1: research in computing. And she is operating basically as an assistant.
Speaker 1: She's doing maths, she's doing calculations. She also took a
Speaker 1: math degree in evening classes and she got a promotion
Speaker 1: and she started working on electronic computers.
Speaker 2: This is in the fifties term.
Speaker 1: This is in the late fifties. Computers are these huge, mechanical,
Speaker 1: very expensive constructions, but they are moving rapidly. They're clearly
Speaker 1: going to be very important.
Speaker 2: This is in the days of any AC in UNIVAC
Speaker 2: and all the big mainframes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And indeed some of the people at Dollis Hill
Speaker 1: were involved with Colossus, one of the very first computers.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, the computers were great, her colleagues were not great.
Speaker 1: She recorded being bullied, being harassed, being groped as a
Speaker 1: matter of course, obviously being paid less than the men
Speaker 1: to do the same job. On the plus side, not
Speaker 1: only did she like the computers, she found love there.
Speaker 1: So she met a physicist called Derek Shirley. So this
Speaker 1: is nineteen fifty nine. She is now Stephanie Shirley, and
Speaker 1: so she leaves the Post Office Research Center. She gets
Speaker 1: a job at a company called CDL.
Speaker 2: I've never heard of CDL. If you google it, I
Speaker 2: don't think any other you find anything relevant.
Speaker 1: Computer developments limited, as you can imagine, an awful lot
Speaker 1: of computer companies that existed in the nineteen fifties no
Speaker 1: longer exist. Yeah, it's a fairly small place. She was
Speaker 1: the chief programmer there. She loved the work, she loved
Speaker 1: the colleagues, but she realized that there was a glass
Speaker 1: ceiling there. So she quit after two years because she said,
Speaker 1: it was quite clear to me that I couldn't progress far.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so she was frustrated.
Speaker 1: She realizes she's basically not going to win playing the
Speaker 1: game by their rules, so she's going to have to
Speaker 1: make up her own rules. And she's now twenty nine
Speaker 1: years old and she decides to start her own business.
Speaker 2: Probably also unusual for a woman at the time.
Speaker 1: Especially a business in computing, which is what she wanted
Speaker 1: to do. So, I mean, you've worked with lots of entrepreneurs,
Speaker 1: support lots of businesses. What are the key ingredients for
Speaker 1: starting our business? Would you say?
Speaker 2: Obviously number one is an idea, So you haven't an
Speaker 2: idea of what you want to do and why you
Speaker 2: think there'll be product market fit for it. You need
Speaker 2: access to capital for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's got six pounds of capital.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you know, short, short on that front. And
Speaker 2: then you know the third things connections you know, leads
Speaker 2: to initial clients, initial employees, a network that can support
Speaker 2: the ecosystem you're trying to build.
Speaker 1: Well, she's got a new baby and a kitchen table.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that works as a substitute. You said,
Speaker 1: you need an idea. She's got a very good idea.
Speaker 1: So actually she's got two very good ideas. So idea
Speaker 1: number one. And this is really radical. So at the time,
Speaker 1: you know, this is now about nineteen sixty computers are big,
Speaker 1: but software is not really an industry. So software is
Speaker 1: a thing that you just get packaged along with your hardware.
Speaker 2: Sure, the hardware runs the software, and that's all it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's a it's a sort of a joint deal.
Speaker 1: But she realizes, well, hang on, there's a lot more
Speaker 1: that you can do with these computers if you write
Speaker 1: your own programs. And so she realizes that standalone software
Speaker 1: to run on these huge computers, that's going to be
Speaker 1: a thing. And so she basically sets up a software company.
Speaker 1: And think about it. This is now, it's about twenty
Speaker 1: years roughly twenty years before Bill Gates sets up Microsoft
Speaker 1: and becomes for a time the richest man in the world.
Speaker 1: So she is well ahead of that particular curve.
Speaker 2: I mean, it sounds like she's one of the mothers
Speaker 2: of the software industry.
Speaker 1: Really, absolutely, she is she has a second realization, which
Speaker 1: is that there are a lot of people like her. Well,
Speaker 1: there's nobody really like her, but there are a lot
Speaker 1: of smart women. A lot of those women are involved
Speaker 1: in the computer industry. It later became very male dominated,
Speaker 1: but lots of lots of women who are kind of around,
Speaker 1: who can code, but are basically being pushed into intellectually
Speaker 1: demanding but organizationally subservient roles. So they're smart, and they're
Speaker 1: being underpaid, and they're being undervalued, and if her experience
Speaker 1: is anything to go by, they're also being harassed and
Speaker 1: groped in the office. And so why doesn't she for
Speaker 1: this new company, why doesn't she tap into this underappreciated
Speaker 1: workforce of women programmers. So that that's what she did.
Speaker 1: She said, I had a gut feeling there was a
Speaker 1: programming industry of some kind waiting to be born, and
Speaker 1: I liked the idea of being in at its birth.
Speaker 2: Wow, I mean that is that is something else. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's quite an intellectual leap. It's easy to look back
Speaker 2: now and say it's obvious, but at the time I
Speaker 2: can imagine it wasn't at all to most people.
Speaker 1: No, absolutely, So she's got this. She's got this great
Speaker 1: idea for a product, which is software. She's got a
Speaker 1: great idea for how to make this product, which is
Speaker 1: to hire lots of frustrated women programmers. So there's a
Speaker 1: third leap that she takes, which is ben you ever
Speaker 1: heard of working from home?
Speaker 2: Yes, I confess I'm not much of a fan. I
Speaker 2: get nothing done at home. It's not for me. I
Speaker 2: know it's great for some people, but it's just it's
Speaker 2: not my bag.
Speaker 1: Well, Steve Shirley was a fan. Again, this is like
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine, nineteen sixty, so this is so far
Speaker 1: ahead of the curve. But she realizes that a lot
Speaker 1: of these women have the domestic responsibilities. So a lot
Speaker 1: of them are mothers like her. A lot of them
Speaker 1: our housewives, so they've got these domestic duties. But actually,
Speaker 1: to be a programmer at the time, you don't actually
Speaker 1: need the computer. You need a pencil and paper because
Speaker 1: code is not that big. So a lot of these
Speaker 1: women are writing code on their kitchen table. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you just need a telephone, pen and paper and away
Speaker 1: you go. So she calls her company freelance programmers, and
Speaker 1: how do you reckon?
Speaker 2: It?
Speaker 1: Goes in the first few months.
Speaker 2: I mean, first of all, it sounds like it was
Speaker 2: the world's first gig job. Yeh, first software company, almost
Speaker 2: first gig job. She really was ahead of her time.
Speaker 2: I mean, my guess is the hardest thing was probably selling.
Speaker 2: But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: No, you are not wrong. Selling was a huge problem.
Speaker 1: And you want to know why selling was a huge
Speaker 1: problem because all of the customers were getting these letters
Speaker 1: from this woman called Stephanie trying to sell them software,
Speaker 1: and they were like, okay, first of all, well software
Speaker 1: is not a thing, and second, we don't buy product
Speaker 1: from girls. Sure, And this is why we are calling
Speaker 1: her Steve Shirley because her husband rather brilliantly said why
Speaker 1: don't you just sign your letters Steve instead of Stephanie,
Speaker 1: And that's what she did, and the way she recalls
Speaker 1: she said, it seemed to me that things really picked
Speaker 1: up once I stopped signing myself Stephanie and started signing
Speaker 1: the letters Steve.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I can look it's looking back, it seems, you know, horrific.
Speaker 2: But even today, you see when people look at names,
Speaker 2: when they look at resumes, when they look at pitches,
Speaker 2: everybody has their own unconscious or conscious bias, and back then,
Speaker 2: the very conscious bias was this was for the world
Speaker 2: of men.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are experiments run by economists and another
Speaker 1: social scientists where they send out resumes and they just
Speaker 1: they swap the name on the top of the resume.
Speaker 1: So it's a distinctively male name, or a distinctively female name,
Speaker 1: or maybe a distinctively white name, or a name that's
Speaker 1: most commonly associated with people from an ethnic minority, an
Speaker 1: immigrant name, and you know, depressingly enough, it makes a
Speaker 1: huge difference. People are more likely to invite job applicants
Speaker 1: in for interviews if they appear to be white guys.
Speaker 1: So she saw all that and she worked around it.
Speaker 2: I find myself a bit torn because, you know, in
Speaker 2: today's world, we would say, you know, oh, that's a shame.
Speaker 2: She had to hide who she really was to be successful,
Speaker 2: and isn't that tragic, But back then there was no
Speaker 2: other way, and so I actually, you know, deep down,
Speaker 2: have a lot of respect for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Also, she didn't hide who she was for that
Speaker 1: long because she would of course the inviter in from
Speaker 1: eatings and then she'd show up wearing a fur coat.
Speaker 1: She thought the fur coat was important to could have
Speaker 1: maintained this idea that the company was doing well. And
Speaker 1: she said once once you're through the door, there's there's
Speaker 1: a moment of surprise. But then she very often would
Speaker 1: make the sale. There was one other little piece of
Speaker 1: deception she she adopted, which is that she would play
Speaker 1: she had a tape recording of you know, office sounds like,
Speaker 1: you know, typing and things like that phone's ringing, And
Speaker 1: so if she was on the phone to a potential client,
Speaker 1: she'd just be playing this tape recorder so that it
Speaker 1: drowned out the washing machine, the baby crying, and you
Speaker 1: had the typing and the telephone instead.
Speaker 2: It is clever. That's that's the that's the the modern
Speaker 2: version of that is the blurred out zoom background.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yes. So so yeah, she gets some clients and
Speaker 1: things go well. They work for the company that designs
Speaker 1: the supersonic airplane Concord. So this company programmed their black
Speaker 1: box flight recorder. They provided software for Rolls Royce, for
Speaker 1: British Rail, for NATO.
Speaker 2: So she's got big institutional clients.
Speaker 1: She's got great clients and that idea. You said, Ben,
Speaker 1: that the having the idea is important. She has proved
Speaker 1: that the idea works, there are difficult moments. So in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, the UK was hit by a pretty
Speaker 1: bad recession and really squeezed the company, and Steve was
Speaker 1: being squeezed on the home front as well. So her
Speaker 1: son had been born and it quickly became apparent that
Speaker 1: he was autistic and he needed an enormous amount of support.
Speaker 1: He has very complex needs and yeah, he'd sometimes be violent,
Speaker 1: and meanwhile Steve is trying to run this business which
Speaker 1: is running into a cash flow crisis. Things got very,
Speaker 1: very tough. Steve had a bit of a breakdown. She
Speaker 1: needed a lot of support, but then she bounced back
Speaker 1: from that and one of the things that she did
Speaker 1: was to set up a home for young people with
Speaker 1: autism with lots of support needs that not only her
Speaker 1: son Giles could live there, but other young people who
Speaker 1: had similar needs could also live there. So she's starting
Speaker 1: to take steps into the world of philanthropy as well.
Speaker 1: The other thing that's working is this plan to recruit women.
Speaker 1: So the first of the first three hundred employees two
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety seven are women, and she only has
Speaker 1: to change that. In nineteen seventy five, the UK government
Speaker 1: introduces the Sex Discrimination Act, generally designed to prevent hiring
Speaker 1: men in favor of women, but of course it applies equally,
Speaker 1: so at that point she has to let the men in.
Speaker 1: But by then the company is a huge success. The
Speaker 1: business model, this kind of hybrid working, the supplying of software,
Speaker 1: it's all going great. And yeah, so she takes that
Speaker 1: in her stride.
Speaker 2: Wow, I mean, she's resilient, if nothing else, but to
Speaker 2: be able to do all that, get through that tough
Speaker 2: time at home, that tough time at work, keep the
Speaker 2: company crowing, keep it going, change the business model fundamentally
Speaker 2: because of the laws. That's quite a journey.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible journey.
Speaker 2: Can I ask, I'm just curious what did she go
Speaker 2: by Steve socially as well? Or did she go by
Speaker 2: Stephanie socially?
Speaker 1: She went by Steve. So my wife met her well
Speaker 1: a few years ago. In fact, this is this is
Speaker 1: I came to hear of her because my wife met
Speaker 1: her and was hugely impressed by her. So this is
Speaker 1: why we're having this conversation at all. Ben. So, my
Speaker 1: wife's a portrait photographer. She makes these beautiful photographic portraits
Speaker 1: of the great and the good, and she heard about
Speaker 1: Steve Shirley at some photographic launch and she contacted Steve
Speaker 1: and said, I would love to come and meet you
Speaker 1: and make a portrait of you and hear your story.
Speaker 1: So this was about six or seven years ago. At
Speaker 1: this time, Steve was I think, you know, in her
Speaker 1: mid eighties, and she just said, this woman is incredible, incredible.
Speaker 1: She was at the time Dame Stephanie Shirley. And yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much the first thing she said to my ab
Speaker 1: what wife, was call me Steve.
Speaker 2: Wow. So what became of the company.
Speaker 1: So the company went public in nineteen ninety three?
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So at that point Steve was worth a couple
Speaker 1: one hundred million dollars. Seventy of her workers became millionaires.
Speaker 1: So all these early programmers who had been given equity,
Speaker 1: they all became millionaires. So this is all This is
Speaker 1: the kind of story you hear a lot about, you know,
Speaker 1: after the in Silicon Valley. But this is not Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: This is all happening in rural England in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. So she creates all these female millionaires and
Speaker 1: it is eventually bought by a larger software company. And
Speaker 1: she is left in the nineteen nineties with a fourune
Speaker 1: and also with a lot of grief because her son,
Speaker 1: Giles dies at the age of thirty five, leaving her
Speaker 1: and her husband absolutely bereft. She's got this loss, and
Speaker 1: she's got a lot of money, and that's then the
Speaker 1: next three decades of her life, which is trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to give it away. So yeah, she
Speaker 1: spends thirty five years making the money and then almost
Speaker 1: as much time giving it away. And she said she
Speaker 1: was determined not to leave some big foundation or trust fund.
Speaker 1: She wanted to give the money away while she could.
Speaker 2: It was sort of like Act three of her life.
Speaker 2: I mean, Act one was the resettlement to the UK.
Speaker 2: Act two was her building this company and raising a
Speaker 2: son despite the adversity, and then Act three was finding
Speaker 2: a way to take all that success and give back
Speaker 2: to the society that had heard support.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. She founded Oxford University's Internet Institute, for example. She
Speaker 1: gave the founding grant to that, but a lot of
Speaker 1: the money was given to autism charities, or rather was
Speaker 1: used to set up autism charities that just didn't exist
Speaker 1: and needed to exist. So a school, Priors Court School,
Speaker 1: this residential home that I mentioned. She also set up Autistica,
Speaker 1: which was a national autism research charity in the UK,
Speaker 1: and she also gave money to refugee charities reflecting her
Speaker 1: experience as a refugee, and became the UK's ambassador for philanthropy,
Speaker 1: and she wrote several books. So it's really an astonishing life.
Speaker 1: She had always said she wanted to live a life
Speaker 1: that had been worth saving and wow, I mean wow.
Speaker 1: And she died in August last year at the age
Speaker 1: of ninety one. So I don't know think looking back
Speaker 1: at all of those all of those achievements and all
Speaker 1: those obstacles overcome, I mean, what are your thoughts?
Speaker 2: I would say, first of all, the amount of grit
Speaker 2: when we meet with entrepreneurs who have gotten through this
Speaker 2: type of adversity, and although this is at a potentially
Speaker 2: at a different level tim than what we see typically,
Speaker 2: but still we see a few common traits. And one
Speaker 2: is they are rarely driven fundamentally by money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and she was never interested in money.
Speaker 2: I think that doesn't surprise me. The second is they
Speaker 2: have incredible passion for the underlying business that they're creating,
Speaker 2: whatever it is. And then third they have a mental
Speaker 2: resilience that just exceeds the norm. And I think it
Speaker 2: takes all three of those to be one of these
Speaker 2: stories of someone who is able to overcome this much hardship,
Speaker 2: this much adversity, and build something of real scale and value.
Speaker 1: I think that's absolutely right. And on the subject of money,
Speaker 1: she said, the money I have let go has brought
Speaker 1: me infinitely more joy than the money I've hung onto.
Speaker 1: There was another point that she made in interviews. She
Speaker 1: lived to the age of ninety one. We've just been
Speaker 1: talking about her for a few minutes, and you telescope
Speaker 1: everything into this short period of time, and it seems
Speaker 1: as though everything's happening at once, and of course at
Speaker 1: the time it's not necessarily like that. This overnight success
Speaker 1: that she had, in fact took thirty years. And she said,
Speaker 1: I've learned that progress generally comes from making a series
Speaker 1: of small steps rather than a giant leap. I've also
Speaker 1: learned it's fine to make mistakes. The trick is to
Speaker 1: make them only once and learn from them, which is
Speaker 1: a very cautionary tales lesson.
Speaker 2: What a fascinating woman and a fascinating story.
Speaker 1: There's more we could say, but I think we're out
Speaker 1: of time, So Ben Walter, it's been great talking to you.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining me on caution Retales.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me Tim, and thanks for sharing such
Speaker 2: a terrific story.
Speaker 1: This episode was sponsored by Chase for Business. I was
Speaker 1: joined by Ben Walter, the CEO of Chase for Business.
Speaker 1: His podcast is The Unshakables. Season three has just gone
Speaker 1: live and you can find it, of course, wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford,
Speaker 1: with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilley. It's produced
Speaker 1: by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and
Speaker 1: original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Bend A.
Speaker 2: Dafh Haffrey edited the scripts.
Speaker 1: It features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Genevieve Gaunt,
Speaker 1: Stella Harford, Messe Munroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The
Speaker 1: show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan,
Speaker 1: Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Tales is a production of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
Speaker 1: and review. It really does make a difference to us.
Speaker 1: And if you want to hear it, add free and
Speaker 1: receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only
Speaker 1: newsletter every month. Why not join the Cautionary Club. To
Speaker 1: sign up, head to patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club.
Speaker 1: That's Patreon, p A, T R, e o N dot
Speaker 1: com slash Cautionary Club