235: Jamie Pride

Jamie Pride is a serial entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist and author on a mission to help shift the needle on startup culture. Find him on instagram @jamiepride  

We’ve all heard the Cinderella story - two people create an iPhone app, sell their business to Google for $20M after 18 months and now everyone’s taking baths in Lambos and Bitcoin taking Uber Jets to Burning Man.  

However that’s not the real story.  

92% of startups fail.  

And Jamie has a very real and personal experience of failure.  

Jamie was formerly a partner at consulting firm Deloitte, and then the CEO of realestate.com.au.  

He rode a rocket ship of success to the stars, founding more than six technology start ups, raising over $16M in funding and even listing his HR startup Refined on the ASX in 2015. 

Refined listed and went through the roof, within 30 weeks the stock shot up to a Market Capitalisation of over $200M, and overnight dropped to $20. 

He had investors who’d poured millions of dollars into his business turning up to his house in anger, and he even had to deal with death threats. 

Jamie self-medicated and his health plummeted before he hit a dangerous rock-bottom both mentally and physically which he goes into in this conversation. 

Now on a path of recovery, Jamie is committed to preventing other start-up founders from going through what he went through, by helping them not only understand the astronomical odds stacked against them - but also to help founders build resilience, so that they can fail, and then learn from that failure, then fail again and again until finally they succeed. 

He’s written a brilliant book on the matter - it’s called Unicorn Tears which is out now, and it focuses on mental health and resilience in the start up scene. It’s well worth a read if you’re an independent business person, there’s a lot of valuable content in there, I certainly resonated with the attribution of your product’s success to your self-worth - which he and I discuss in this show.  

We may not all be coders or tech start up geniuses - but all of us have ambitions and goals, and all of us can learn from Jamie’s story.  

He has a particularly excellent philosophy when it comes to mornings and about the use of his phone - I certainly have changed my game since I spoke with him, I hope that what he says can resonate with you too.  

Enjoy this conversation with Jamie Pride.

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