Author to CEO and back again

It has taken seven years to write and it’s only 27,000 words long but I have finally finished the thirteenth book that will have my name on it. Assuming it gets funded on Unbound of course…

Unbound started as a book I wanted to write. Fed up with the traditional publishing industries failure to embrace technology, and as there was no platform that would allow me to access and capture data about my readers, I decided to do it myself. I would build a website, tell people about the book I wanted to write in a video and ask them for money. If enough people gave me money I would write the book, get it edited by an editor I had worked with on a previous book and send everyone a copy. Simple. I mentioned this to two friends, John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard (both writers themselves) in the pub and they responded by telling me that it was a great idea. But it shouldn’t only be me who publishes in this way. As the pints flowed we decided the three of us should build a platform that allows all authors to do this. A crowdfunding publisher that brought authors and readers together. I’ll admit that I wasn’t completely convinced. I just wanted to do my book. But I agreed just as long as my book was on the site when it launched.

Justin and John suggested I should be CEO. They were both busy working at QI and I was the only one who could commit to it full time. We launched Unbound in May 2011 with authors who had a bigger profile than me and my book slipped away as the daily realities of starting and running a company took hold.

Every now and then I would find myself on stages talking about being an entrepreneur to an audience wondering when I stopped being a ‘writer’, which was the only reason I’d been invited onto podiums or stages before. It had taken a long time to earn the epithet ‘writer’. Everyone who is one will know how it feels to be called one by someone else. You only become a writer or an author when you’ve published a book. Being called a writer or author is a curious mix of taking crack and being enveloped in your childhood comfort blanket. For those of us who have always wanted, known perhaps, they are writers being called one by someone other than yourself is a big moment. It’s when you really become one I suppose.

That’s the biggest single attraction of being published, actually. Being published puts the fact that you are a ‘writer’ beyond doubt. Someone else has told you you are ‘good enough’. You only have to be published once and you can keep the title forever. But it’s hard to be published. Being ‘good’ is not always enough. It can take a long time to make it.

But sometime over the last seven years I stopped being called a writer. And I stopped thinking of myself as one. My new badges were ‘CEO’, ‘co-founder’ and ‘entrepreneur’. Part of me enjoyed the status these new titles gave me, they gave a boost to a part of me I have always known existed but have tried to keep at bay, but deep down I felt it wasn’t me. I wanted to be a writer again. But the book I wanted to write wouldn’t come. It wasn’t writers block exactly. I realised it just needed more time.

When I started writing books I would come up with an idea for something to do and sell the idea to a publisher before I wrote about it. If I couldn’t sell that idea I would think of another one instead. But the last book I wrote, the best one I’ve done until now, was different. The Idle Traveller was about twenty years of living and travelling slowly that I lived for its own sake. I only wrote a book about what I’d learned long afterwards. It was the first time living the story happened before I sold the story. I told myself I was doing this again. Running a company was just research. I kept thinking about it in the background of board meetings, job interviews, presentations and funding rounds. I made notes and went back to the word file every now and then, but it still wouldn’t click. It need even more time. I had to live it more to find the story. Even if it took seven years. So I began to get used to the cloaks the words co-founder, CEO, and entrepreneur had become. I began to inhabit them instead.

Running a business did involve using lots of skills I had as a writer, however. For one thing being CEO of a start uprequires you to tell a lot of stories. Unbound is the greatest story I have ever told. To raise money you have to tell people the story of what your business will become, because you need money to invest in the things that will make that story come true. The story always has to be one step ahead of the reality. The difference is that the things you corral to bring the story to life are not words, but people.

Writers spend a lot of time alone. Thinking. In some ways they are dictators over their imagination but as they get better they realise they are dam-builders, guiding the flow of their thoughts into new places, instead. The writing I love best is like this post. I had no idea I was going to write this before I sat down. Isobel has taken our son Ted upstairs for his nap. It’s 9.25 in the morning and I’m sitting at our kitchen table. There are other things I am supposed to be doing but this is the only thing I can do. Write now. Here it is. Here it comes. From somewhere. From the last seven years I suppose. From inside me. But you can’t do this with a business. You can’t channel other people in the way you can with words inside your head. And you can’t assume everyone else is in the same place your head is in at the same moment. They have their own thoughts, ideas and perspectives. You have to leave your own mind and step out into their world. At first you try and bend the world to your will. I tried that approach for a while. I got very angry and stressed. I call it my ‘inner 18th century mill owner’ because it’s who I become when I’m tired and have forgotten what I’ve learned. It’s a knee-jerk response that is completely alien to me philosophically but we all fall into this way of thinking occasionally. It’s the same part of you that appears when you experience road rage. It erupts out of you without you knowing. It’s hard to control.

But over time I have learned to silence this part of me. It’s not really me actually. It’s a behaviour we all rely on because it makes us feel powerful and strong in situations where we feel weak and powerless. If you find yourself getting angry you have already lost whatever it was you were trying to win.

Over the last seven years I have tried to navigate the world of business and retain who I am but it has been difficult. It has pulled at the loose threads of who I think I am. The company was, and is, working though, which amazed no-one more than me. I have never doubted Unbound is ‘right’ and will ‘make it’ but I’ve doubted whether I would be the one to guide it on that journey frequently. Someone I work with said to me once that I was the ‘most confident person she has ever known’ and that really surprised me. I am like that part of the time. When I need to be. But no writer, no good one anyway, has conquered self doubt entirely and there have always been doubts within me. Not about the business. But about me. I began to worry that I had reached the edges of the perception I had of what I was capable of. Not just at work but in my life. As a father, husband, ex-husband even. It was a worry that constantly niggled me.

These thoughts emerged at a crucial time for the company. I was about to raise a lot more money. £2.7m to be precise. I began to get nervous. Was I capable of being what the business needed me to be? Did I want what being successful would mean for me personally? I felt stuck. Being the leader of something is hard in all kinds of ways but the worst moment is needing to appear strong when you feel uncertain. I moved out of the open plan office into an actual office in the back corner of the room. I had evolved running the company. I’ve learned it is one of the most severe self improvement processes you can ever put yourself through. All your weaknesses will be exposed. You have to face and grow through them. It’s not easy to do in public. Lots of people crack with stress but I think it’s the constant process of evolution as a person that you have to accept that pushes through. You have to look in all the dark corners of yourself. You have to be prepared for the unknown.

That was June 2016. I needed a lifeline. Then someone threw one to me.

I knew my biggest problem was not what I was capable of. My problem was what I believed I was capable of at the edges of my ability and personality. The life I lived had created me. I had defined my own perception of my potential reality. William Blake puts it much better than me. He called it your ‘mind forg’d manacles’. My problems were the barriers I had put up inside me.

The year before in June 2015 I went to the Do Lectures to tell a story. I met a man there, James Otter, who builds the most beautiful surfboards you have ever seen. When I first saw one it was in his hands and I couldn’t take my eyes off it as I introduced myself to him. He laughed and stroked the wood with me. I couldn’t believe anyone could build something so perfectly. I had never surfed myself, although that was something else absent in my life about who I wanted to be. The story I told at the Do Lectures was about physical objects, people and relationships you encounter in the world that are perfect for reasons you can’t explain. I had found a German word for them ‘Spielzeug’ that has a meaning we have no word for in English. Literally translated it means ‘play piece’. It is the German word for a toy. But it also means something you want to touch or hold that is perfect for reasons you can’t understand. James’s board had spielzeug. We hit it off for obvious reasons and Spielzeug was the title of the book I wanted to write that had indirectly led to me launching Unbound with Justin and John. After I did my talk everyone I spoke to at the Do Lectures asked me the same thing, ‘when are you going to write your book?’ I had come full circle. Running Unbound had led me back to spielzeug. It took seven years to get back to it but I realised then I was where I was always meant to be.

As well as being at the edge of my perception of what I was capable of in terms of running the company I had reached plenty of other edges of what I thought I was capable of in my life. One of the biggest is my inability to make things. I don’t own tools. Isobel does the DIY in our house. I break shelves from Ikea. I’m hopeless with my hands. I always have been. James told me that night at the Do Lectures I would only understand spielzeug if I made something with it myself. I had laughed hysterically. That was impossible, I said. He shook his head. It turned out that he didn’t just ‘make’ wooden surfboards. He ran weekly courses so you could go and build one yourself. It was possible to get him to make one for you but he would always try and persuade you to come and stay in Cornwall for a week to make it with your own hands. I shook my head and told him I could never build something as perfect as that.

A year later in June 2016 I remembered this conversation. I wondered if he was right. Could I build a board as beautiful as his and go beyond the preconception I had of what I was capable of? If I did might that show me how to get through the preconception I had of what I could do with the company?

I went to Cornwall. I built the board. It moved me profoundly. By the end I felt I had re-made myself. That winter I went on to successfully raise the money. I moved back into the main open plan office at Unbound.

I don’t really have a desk now. I go and sit wherever there is space. Earlier today Noelia, Unbound’s Head of Data Science and Astrophysics, offered me her desk at lunchtime because she thought it was crazy for the CEO to be ‘homeless’ in the office in this way. But I’m happier sitting wherever there is a gap.

The 27,000 word book I have written about all of this is called The Surfboard. It tells the story of the week I spent making the board, and the narrative of that journey is intertwined with the story of the path I have carved for myself while running this company. It is the story of a writer who became an accidental entrepreneur who had to become a writer again to continue to run his company.

I hope you’d like to read it. If you do, please pledge. The full story won’t be told without you.

https://unbound.com/books/the-surfboard

P.S — A few people have read it already. Including the philosopher, thinker and all round top man Roman Kryznaric who tweeted last week “I predict [The Surfboard] will become a classic like Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery” and you can’t get a better recommendation than that.