Welcome to the Jazz Shapers podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today for the final Jazz Shapers of the season, is James Hirst, Co-Founder and COO of Tyk, an API management platform on a mission to connect every system in the world. It’s not very ambitious is it? Having left law school and become a bar man, James’ head was turned by the arrival of something called – here it is, drum roll – world wide web – into the mainstream. Joining one of the UK’s earliest consumer internet service providers before launching his own stuff like building and hosting website and e-commerce platforms for hundreds of businesses, including major music festivals, James then met his future Co-Founder, Martin when they joined a digital consultancy on the same day. James and Martin later saw how most global internet traffic flows through APIs which basically allow different systems to chat to each other and share data but can be error-prone and a security risk. Tyk was launched in 2016 to secure, control and scale this critical infrastructure and now Tyk is the technological backbone of global banks, telecommunications companies and some of the worlds’ most iconic brands, powering everything from mobile apps and connected vehicles to streaming services, e-commerce operations and border security systems, so quite important stuff.
I am very happy to have you here.
James Hirst
Thank you, it’s great to be here.
Elliot Moss
I can’t call you Mr API but I am going to call you Mr API. What’s an API when it’s at home please?
James Hirst
Uh, well it’s an acronym, uh, Application Programming Interface, um, that’s not…
Elliot Moss
How many times have you been asked that?
James Hirst
Exactly and it’s not particularly illuminating. Effectively an API allows one computer system to talk to another computer system. And those systems could be anything. It could be, uh, the app on your phone, uh, wanting to get the latest weather information from the Met Office. That is done through an API so they are effectively an interface between two systems
Elliot Moss
And so phones, ATMs, 80%-90% of all traffic on the internet is, is related to APIs.
James Hirst
Absolutely, I think in today’s world pretty much everything we do that’s digitally is connected in some way. So whether it’s a fitness tracker, a mobile phone, a connected car, probably the thermostats; Smart thermostat in your home, it’s all API. Bonkers isn’t it.
Elliot Moss
It’s everything. When, when you were growing up in Reigate, did you imagine that this would be the thing you would be talking about?
James Hirst
Absolutely not, I wasn’t aware of what an API was.
Elliot Moss
It didn’t exist then.
James Hirst
No, no, didn’t really find out about the internet until, uh, yeah until I’d left home really.
Elliot Moss
Was the technology thing interesting to you as you were growing up?
James Hirst
Yeah, I, I, I liked computer gaming, didn’t really have the equipment for it. I had to learn how to optimise and upgrade what I had, uh, so I got a taste for computers that way, um, but I was never a programmer, maths never my strong suit so interest in the technology but always a little hampered technically in terms of implementing it.
Elliot Moss
Now we jump forward to this business called Tyk, um, it’s another one of those things, I say this quite often – I meet people that are building businesses which are absolutely fundamental James to, to the world around us and no one’s heard of them. Your business I think is in thirty four countries, you power all sorts of things around the world. Um, how did that happen?
James Hirst
Um, right place, right time and making the right connections with the right people I think. Um, I, I met my co-founder, uh, at a, a consultancy I was working at and we enjoyed working together. He was very much the creative technologist for the partnership, uh, I was more on the operational and business side and we ran really interesting programmes for people like the United Nations, uh, people like the NHS, helping people give up smoking using digital technology. Uh, and it turns out that, um, my co-founder, Martin, um, is a real technical creative and always has a side project and one of his side projects was to build a new technology platform and to do that he needed to build it with APIs and it wasn’t working because there was no tooling around him to help him build the product he wanted. So he built his own, he built his own, what’s called an API gateway and an API management platform on top of it for his own needs and open-sourced it, made it available for people to use for free on the web. And it turns out a lot of other people wanted the same thing and from there we turned it into a business.
Elliot Moss
And we’re going to get in to some of these things because there’s, there’s a lot to unpack there but, but briefly, am I correct in saying that your first employee was in Paraguay?
James Hirst
That is, uh, correct.
Elliot Moss
Capital city of Paraguay is? It’s like a, it’s like a general knowledge test, I can do that just before Christmas.
James Hirst
Uh.
Elliot Moss
Asunción. I think it is, I think it’s Asunción. I don’t know why I know that.
James Hirst
I’ve never been, never been to Paraguay.
Elliot Moss
Me neither, um, but first one in Paraguay which is basically a statement isn’t it, that says, doesn’t matter where you work, when you work at Tyk.
James Hirst
Absolutely, uh, and when we started Tyk we were both in London, both working for a, a consultancy in London. Um, we’d found this idea, we’d found this product that people wanted and were interested in building a business and over a, a few beers in a pub, uh, where some of the best ideas come from, we, we resolved that yeah, we should turn this into an actual business because people are taking the free software, uh, let’s turn this into something. The sticking point was that, uh, Martin and his wife had just had a baby and his wife is a Kiwi and they’d always said, we’re going to move to New Zealand when we have a baby. Uh, so that could have stopped us in our tracks but we said, no it’s okay, you can work remote, I’ll work in London. We’ll build a team in London and you just dial in. And this was obviously before Covid, before…
Elliot Moss
This was 2016 is that right?
James Hirst
Yeah that’s right and, and, well 2015 when we were having these conversations and at that point, uh, working remote was unusual but doable and, uh, then when we started to make our first hires we looked for someone with the right talent, the right skills. We looked in the community of people using our software and, and this guy was making great contributions. We interviewed him, we thought he was in Germany, turns out he was in Paraguay, he was just working for a German company from Paraguay. So we hired him and about the same time, my co-founder Martin moved to Auckland, New Zealand so we became a very distributed business very quickly.
Elliot Moss
James Hirst is my Business Shaper, he’s Co-Founder and COO of a business called Tyk, I really like the name. So three people, totally international from Paraguay to New Zealand to the UK and very early on, and again we, we, as you said, pre-Covid, pre the idea that people could work from wherever they work from at whatever time. You were embracing this kind of dispersed workforce. I mentioned radical responsibility, um, when I read about Tyk I am like, that sounds really cool and it sounds really enlightened. In your own words, explain what radical responsibility is and why it’s so central to Tyk?
James Hirst
So one of the challenges you find when you’re, you’re building a business where it’s so distributed, not just physically but on a time zone basis is how do you communicate, how do you make informed decisions. It’s possible to solve that quite easily through process because you can mandate that when we make a decision we involved al these time zones and within 24 hours you can get a decision made but in most instances, you are not in control of the time line. You can’t sit for 24 hours for the clock to go round, therefore you need to have, uh, a credo internally that says, people are empowered and supported to make decisions, to take autonomous decisions, um, and that that is, uh, a non-negotiable. Because if you have to run a problem up the line and then back down again to get an answer, you will fall behind. Um, and so to, to benefit from all the many advantages of being able to recruit people wherever they are and allow them to work wherever they are, this has to go hand in hand with it because the working practices that are, have evolved out of kind the, the factory floor or the, the office in a city, don’t translate to global distribution, they don’t translate to global, uh, time zones. So radical responsibility is at the core of it for us.
Elliot Moss
Which I love but that is kind of scary. I mean you need to hire people that are really driven, that can really be grown up, that love autonomy. I, I often over, over my working life of 30 years have talked to people as they move into more senior positions and I’ve talked about the blank piece of paper. A lot of people do not like that. But that is essentially what leadership is often about. How do you square that circle? Is it just about hiring people who could all be entrepreneurs?
James Hirst
Uh, it, it, you’re looking for people to join the team who are, um, who treasure autonomy and who, um, not just that they can cope with it but that they really prize the ability to manage, control and shape their own day.
Elliot Moss
And how do you know when you’re talking to someone that they are that person?
James Hirst
It’s really hard because most people will say that they do and very quickly you can find that people do not. Um, first of all you are looking for clues in the, the recruiting process. Not necessarily about their working life because often working life is dictated by the strictures of the organisation they’re in. But, you know, are, are people involved in external, uh, extracurricular activities? Are they a key part of organising a local five-a-side team? It’s those kind of clues and, and, that give you an indication as to whether someone might fit. I think the other thing is just to be, um, very open, transparent and upfront about what day-to-day actually means. It’s not the same as you’re doing now but you’re doing it from a desk at home or you’re doing from a desk by the beach. It is a change in the way that you, uh, make decisions, uh, it, it means that you can get great value from people who are perhaps, uh, overlooked in an office environment. But it also means that people who have really succeeded through the power of kind of oratory or being a personality or persuasion in a meeting room, they can absolutely flounder when put into a remote first business where no ones in the same time zone. Because, uh, their way of getting a decision made will be to pull together the people they trust, have a discussion, have a debate, strongest discussion in the room at the time wins and that’s how they get stuff done. To have to then translate that to working asynchronously having very carefully thought out and laid out written argument, yeah, folks who have been successful elsewhere can flounder. So at that point, a willingness to kind of bring people on and have those open conversations early on and if it’s not working out, have some open discussions.
Elliot Moss
How many people in the business today?
James Hirst
Uh, around 120 at the moment.
Elliot Moss
120, very independent, very driven souls who don’t depend on oratory skills. I’d be absolutely doomed. I wouldn’t last one minute. What a shame. Anyway, he doesn’t need me because he’s got some fabulous people. It’s James Hirst, he’s my Business Shaper, he’s the Co-Founder and COO of Tyk. He’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now we are going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites Business Founders to share their business insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip we hear from Tariq Ralph, Architect and Founder & CEO of Catalogue, a digital work hub aiming to give people a radically simpler way to coordinate work.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. It’s James Hirst here today as my Business Shaper, Co-Founder and COO of Tyk, an API management platform, that’s an Application Programming Interface. That’s what an API stands for, I’m sure you knew that and they are on a mission to connect every system in the world. You mentioned the words open source and, and many people will know what that means, many won’t. Just again, explain how that works and why Martin and you went, you know what, this is the right way to build this, this bit of kit?
James Hirst
So open source software is a movement that’s, um, kind of central to, to most of the modern web. It, it means that the software is made available to people to contribute to. To, to read the code themselves and the rights to the software don’t lie with the person who wrote it. They are open to the, the community to use it and depending on the licence that’s attached to that software it means you can take that software and use it for free within certain boundaries. Um, the big advantage for us was that when this idea came about there wasn’t any funding, there wasn’t a big business plan about how we’re going to take this out to the world. Actually what it, uh, came down to was making the software available to a community of people who would find it interesting and it then self-propagated. A few people grabbed hold of it and used it, found it useful, told their friends and more and more and more. And you get that rapid growth without having to do any advertising, no marketing, no spend, no investment. So it was a way to bootstrap interest in the product and build, initially a bootstrap business for the first few years, entirely out of open source software.
Elliot Moss
And I think I read somewhere that the open source thing keeps you honest. In other words, if it’s catching on it means there’s something in it and the, what’s called the product market fit is real versus kind of closing it down and trying stuff and not really knowing if the community of experts are digging it, are in to it?
James Hirst
Yeah, that, with open source software there’s no, there’s no sales pitch, there’s no power point presentation to try and convince someone to use it. People can open the software, inspect it. They can go through the code line by line and so it means they can also contribute to it. They can identify areas that can be improved. They can make those improvements themselves and share it with others in the community and we found it was a massive accelerator with the biggest enterprises out there so, um, banks and healthcare love open source software because there is no black box being installed into their, their business. They themselves, their own teams can go through the software, understand what it does, have control over it and not be worried about the, the motive of people funding it.
Elliot Moss
As, as you’re talking about this and the radical, um, responsibility and, you know, the way you said, you know, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re the person in the room that’s persuading and all that, that’s not going to be the skill set. You seem to value authenticity very, very highly whether it’s about the produce or whether it’s about the people. Is that right because it’s a very down to earth, James, very uncorporatey, un businessey kind of characteristic. I don’t mean that rudely to people that, you know, are great at business but there’s something incredibly grounded about the way you view the world.
James Hirst
Uh, thanks for saying that. I think the, um, the huge advantage with taking this approach for, for building a business out of an open source community, of giving people radical responsibility is, um, it makes life a lot easier. You’re not trying to put a front. You’re not trying to sell a concept that’s been created in another room. You are simply empowering the people who get value from it. Building the ecosystem around them so that they can take it forward themselves and, and I think bringing people into that, bringing people into a business that has that, um, not necessarily a purpose but has a vision for how a business should run is very empowering and it’s a great way of building momentum within a business.
Elliot Moss
James Hirst is my Business Shaper, Co-Founder and COO and we were talking about open source technology. We were talking about open source approach rather. We’re talking about radical responsibility and I mentioned that it, it’s a really cool philosophy. Sometimes you read about these companies in the Harvard Business Review and they say, this was the scariest company on earth. I remember that being written about a, an adage seen many, many years ago. If they were doing a case study on you it would be, this just is a new way of doing stuff. Have you always been like this? Has this always been a kind of feature of how you go about your life James, not just in work?
James Hirst
Um, I think on a, on a personal level, um, it is important to be, uh, to be genuine, open, transparent and, and I think that, uh, that is a value that I try to follow myself and I think that then, you know, if you’re building a, a, a business, if you’re building a company it’s always going to be to some extent, um, uh, a reflection, perhaps a mirror of yourself because you can’t build a small fast growing business with artifice. People won’t buy into it, people will not join with you, you know, the term, company, you know, we, we talk about a company and a company it is, it is a gathering of people with a common purpose if you go right back to the, the meaning of the word and, and that common purpose can’t be faked so I think allowing people to buy into that, giving them openness and transparency around what you are doing, what the performance is, how the business is, uh, performing, where it’s winning, where it’s failing. Um, that’s hugely powerful in terms of motivation and in terms of building loyalty with our team.
Elliot Moss
And it also, it’s complimentary to your view about jargon. I’ve read again about the fact you hate jargon in the industry and that’s probably for the same reason, there are sort of artifice around what it means and the real meaning is obfuscated and, and therefore you’re not clear what’s going on and you’re keeping people out, I suppose is a bit exclusive as well isn’t it. And, and what you do again if, if I was a big, uh, multi-national company, in simple word, what are you doing for me right now? If you were explaining to someone because I’m conscious I haven’t, I haven’t delved into the, the without, without, we don’t want to go too deep down the rabbit hole but just in simple terms, those APIs, you’re, you’re basically creating those for all sorts of companies to, to move data around in whichever way they need to do?
James Hirst
So when we’re working with a large global organisation, typically they’ll be delivering a product or a service to the people, uh, who are their customers and those customers might be consuming that service or product at the point of sale. We work with one of the US’s biggest retailers and supermarket chains. Every interaction their customer has at the point of scale, scanning vouchers, loyalty cards, making payment through the credit card, stock control, it’s all going through APIs. So it’s, it’s the real, um, it is the infrastructure that underpins the technology of their business. So we are fundamental to what they do and we allow them to, to change what they do quickly because making a change to the technology in thousands of supermarkets across the US, that’s a big undertaking. Rewiring all of that is hard and so if the APIs are secure, solid, stable and well formed, that job is made much easier and you can do it at scale, you can do it more quickly. So it’s a, it offers them an ability to innovate but it also gives them reassurance against hacking, against security risks and importantly, against loss of service. You know, the worst possible thing is labour day sales, your point of sale goes down. So those APIs have to be 100% rock solid. That’s where we come in.
Elliot Moss
Strong pipes. Final chat with my guest today, James Hirst and we’ve got some Manu Dibango for you as well, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
James is my Business Shaper, James Hirst, Co-Founder and COO of Tyk. Um, jumping back to the creation of this business with Martin, um, he lives in New Zealand, you live in the UK. What time do you normally talk?
James Hirst
Uh, depends on how summer times align but it’s early in the morning or late in the evening and so we are very aware of the different state of mind both of us will be in when we have to have a difficult conversation. One of us might be, uh, just enjoying a few coffees and full of energy, the other might be at the end of the day, a very long and gruelling day bringing a different energy to the conversation.
Elliot Moss
So almost ten years working together. What drew you together do you think? What was it you saw in each other?
James Hirst
Um, I think, I, I, had worked with a lot of very interesting people at this digital consultancy, focused on backgrounds across the board from psychology to design to sales and so on. Um, and working with Martin was really exciting because we had such complimentary skills but we also had a very aligned world view and that’s not always the case. Sometimes you find very complimentary skills but different world views, um, and, and so yeah, I enjoyed doing difficult projects and difficult things with Martin and so he ended up leaving that consultancy and working elsewhere but we stayed friends and when this opportunity came up it was a great moment to work together again.
Elliot Moss
And you trust each other obviously?
James Hirst
Absolutely yeah, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Is he similar to you in that sense of being grounded and kind of let the dog see the rabbit, please just tell me what’s going on.
James Hirst
Oh yeah absolutely. Yeah, yeah, we’re both to a fault, um, blunt about these things. Our board meetings are fantastic.
Elliot Moss
I can’t imagine. Um, the future of your business and of technology. We are in an incredible moment and I know people, um, use too many superlatives and they talk about unprecedented and all that and I try to avoid that but it’s impossible not to acknowledge that artificial intelligence is existential in many ways. Are you seeing that day-to-day in your business? Is it happening?
James Hirst
I, I think there’s, there’s two, um, two parallel things going on here which are really important. The first one is, today the capabilities of AI, LLMs, uh…
Elliot Moss
Large Language Models.
James Hirst
Absolutely, the, the, um, organisations are adopting, um, they en, they’re a great tooling to allow people to do more. They, they’re better than the kind of automation tools we’ve had in the past, they’ve gathered, um, excitement because you can drive more efficiency, one person can do more, uh, and they reduce a lot of labour and drudge that had to be done before which can now just be automated for you. And that’s fantastic and that is driving, happily for us, it’s driving more APIs, it’s driving more trans, uh, transfer of data from system to system. I think the parallel piece, the really interesting one, uh, and why it’s in the press so much and I don’t think it would have been before is, it’s the first time that creative endeavours, creative industries have been impacted by automation. Now the extent to which they have been impacted is startling, uh, but today I still feel we are, as with a lot of these, the big technological breakthroughs, we’re still many years away from this replacing the, the creative. But it’s the first time I think a lot of industries have seen, oh this could actually write an article for me, this can write a report for me in a way that before those roles were always insulated from automation. Um, so I think that’s getting the, the visibility but I, I’m not troubled by worries about existential threats from AI’s running away from us or…
Elliot Moss
No.
James Hirst
…but what I do see is drivers of huge efficiency and the potential for people to get really interesting work done because the less interesting stuff just gets automated away by an LLM for them.
Elliot Moss
We want it to go away because it’s almost Christmas. It’s a couple of weeks’ away and we want all that stuff to go away so we can focus on the good things and building interesting and exciting stuff. It’s been great talking to you, uh, James, I appreciate your time and wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Just before I let you go and do that though, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
James Hirst
I chose Lady, uh, by Ezra Collective, uh, when I was asked to do this I felt like a, maybe a little bit of a fraud because I’m not a huge music fan in terms of being able to talk knowledgeably.
Elliot Moss
You didn’t need to though.
James Hirst
No absolutely, absolutely.
Elliot Moss
No.
James Hirst
But I, I was reflecting on what, what has been important in music for me and I think it’s the, my late teens I suddenly discovered that you didn’t just have to listen to music on a CD or a tape deck at the time, but you could go to a rave, you could go to a club, you could go to a festival and the thing that still today really gets me excited about music is seeing hundreds and thousands of people dancing and just there for the moment and the experience. And I listen to a lot of electronica, I listen to a lot of DJ mixes, and I came to this track maybe eighteen months ago because it was included in a mix, in amongst a bunch of dance music and it just stood out, hunted it out and it’s been on the Spotify playlist since.
Elliot Moss
Here it is just for you, it’s Ezra Collective with Lady and it’s their version of course of the Fela Kuti classic.
That was Ezra Collective with Lady, the song choice of my Business Shaper today James Hirst. He talked about the notion of artifice, you cannot build a company based on it. You’ve got to have something real. And of course what follows is that common purpose cannot be faked. And I love the fact that inside of this business with common purpose is this philosophy and this treasuring of the magic word autonomy. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all have lots of autonomy lots of the time. Great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a wonderful Christmas, be well, be happy and I’ll see you in the New Year.
We hope you enjoyed that addition of Jazz Shapers, you’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search ‘Jazz Shapers’ in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.