Or: how a chauffeur, a BlackBerry, and a £6 card with glitter on it convinced me to build Wishd
A couple of years ago I was in the back of an Emirates chauffeur car on the way to the airport, doing what I always do in the back of chauffeur cars: pretending to work while actually staring out of the window.
The driver and I got talking. He'd spent years driving a particular category of passenger around. The very wealthy, the very successful, the people whose names you'd recognise. Hundreds of them, over years, all making conversation in the back of his car. Which means that on the specific question of how successful people think, his sample size is enormous and mine is one. Me.
And he said something I've not been able to shake since.
"The difference," he said, "is that they never ask what if it doesn't work. They ask how can I make it work."
Same sentence, roughly. Same number of words. Completely different life.
I have an MBA. I've spent my career in institutional real estate, where the entire job is professionally asking "what if it doesn't work". We call it underwriting, and we charge a lot for it. And here was a man with a steering wheel and no slide deck explaining that I'd been running the wrong question for twenty years.
Let me take you back to 2006.
BlackBerry, then Research In Motion, then the undisputed king of the smartphone, came to my MBA class to do the thing big companies do when they want to feel innovative. They asked a room full of students to pitch them ideas.
I put my hand up. I said: nobody actually enjoys typing on a keyboard. Not really. What people want is to talk to their phone. You should go and buy a company called Nuance Communications, who do speech recognition, and build your entire future around voice.
They laughed.
Not cruelly. Politely. The way you laugh at a child who has suggested the family car should be able to fly. The keyboard was BlackBerry. The keyboard was the moat, the brand, the tactile little clatter that made you feel important in an airport lounge.
Here's the scoreboard.
Nuance's speech recognition went on to power Siri. In 2021, Microsoft bought Nuance for $19.7 billion, its second-largest acquisition ever after LinkedIn.
BlackBerry does not make phones any more.
I'm not bitter. I'm fine. I'm completely fine.
In 2000, two men walked into Blockbuster's Dallas headquarters. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph offered Blockbuster's CEO John Antioco 49% of Netflix for $50 million.
Antioco dismissed Netflix as a niche business and remarked that the dot-com hysteria was completely overblown. Randolph's version is that they were laughed out of the room.
Blockbuster once had 9,000 stores. It is now down to one.
The thing people get wrong about this story is that they think it's about technology. It isn't. Blockbuster had more money, more customers, better brand recognition, and, crucially, the actual ability to build Netflix themselves at any point. What they didn't have was the question. They asked "what if it doesn't work". Two men in a room in Dallas had already spent three years asking "how can we make it work", and by then it was too late for anyone to catch them.
We have our own Blockbuster. We just don't like to say it out loud.
For about a century, if you wanted to mark an occasion in this country, you drove to a shop, stood in an aisle, and rented a stranger's feelings for £6. Hallmark built an empire on the fact that most of us can't write.
Then Moonpig turned up in 2000 and said: what if the card had your face on it, and you didn't have to leave the house?
Moonpig is now on the London Stock Exchange, a constituent of the FTSE 250, with revenue of £373 million. Which is a lot of money for an industry that, broadly speaking, involves posting paper.
And yet. Here's the bit nobody has fixed.
I'd like to state this plainly.
I find the greeting card offensive.
Not morally. Economically. You pay six pounds for a piece of folded cardboard on which a professional has written a sentiment you don't agree with, in a font you didn't choose, decorated with glitter. You sign your name at the bottom, your one creative contribution, and hand it over. It is read for approximately eleven seconds. It sits on a mantelpiece for a fortnight, gathering the specific type of dust that only birthday cards attract, and then it goes in the bin.
We buy around 2 billion greeting cards a year in the UK. The average Brit buys 31 of them. And the glitter and metallic foil that make them look nice are precisely what stops them being recycled. A single glittery card can contaminate an entire load of paper recycling.
So: six pounds, eleven seconds, landfill.
Now multiply it.
Ten people who love the same person each spend six pounds. Sixty pounds is spent. The person receives sixty pounds of cardboard, reads it for a few minutes, and throws it away. Nothing was pooled. Nothing was kept. The money didn't go anywhere except into a card shop's till.
That's the bit I couldn't stop thinking about. Not that the card is wasteful, though it is. That the collective act of celebrating someone produces nothing for them. Ten people all did a kind thing, in the same week, for the same person, and between them they generated a bin bag.
There is a better version of this. There has been a better version of this available for about fifteen years. Nobody built it properly, because everyone kept asking what if it doesn't work.
Everyone is currently very worried about AI, and they're right to be. I don't know what work looks like in ten years. Neither do you. Neither, I'd gently suggest, do the people being paid a great deal of money to tell you they do.
Jeff Bezos has the only useful framing I've found. He says people always ask him what's going to change in the next ten years, and almost nobody asks him what's not going to change. Because that's where you build. You can't build a strategy on a moving target, but you can build one on a certainty.
So here is my certainty, and it is the whole thesis of the company.
People will still want to celebrate each other.
Whatever happens to work, to money, to the entire category of "jobs", there will still be birthdays. There will still be weddings, new babies, leaving dos, the friend who finally got the thing they'd been trying for. Humans have marked occasions for every one of the roughly 300,000 years we've been human, through plague, famine, war and the invention of the office Christmas party. An AI is not going to take that from us. If anything, the more automated everything else gets, the more the human bits matter.
The occasion is guaranteed. Only the wrapping changes.
My wife got there before I did. She watched our daughter unwrap a pile of well-meant things she'd never use, and asked why everyone couldn't just pool it instead, and why giving money always had to feel so impersonal. I've spent the time since building an answer to a question she'd already asked.
Wishd is group gifting that works the way you'd actually want it to.
Everyone who cares about the person chips in. A fiver, fifty quid, whatever they've got. Everyone adds a reel and a message, the thing they'd have written badly in a card. It comes together into one reveal the recipient actually opens and actually keeps. And instead of sixty pounds of cardboard, they get the sixty pounds.
No aisle. No glitter. No landfill. No stranger's words in a font you didn't pick.
Will it work? I genuinely don't know. That's not my question any more.
My question is how I make it work, and I've got a chauffeur in Dubai to thank for that.