From Startup to Powerhouse: Pia Frey's Blueprint for Global Success

00:00:10: Lottie Bazley Well, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. I’m Lottie Bazley, Internal Communications Manager at Staffbase, and I will be your host for today's episode. We are certainly not messing about when it comes to the inspire part of our name today. Joining us on this episode, we have the incredible Pia Frey.

00:00:32: Lottie Bazley Pia, we are so happy to have you on today. Thank you very much for taking the time. We have some great stories to cover today; your rise as an entrepreneur, the growth and struggles you've experienced along the way including imposter syndrome and firing family members. Before we begin, let's give our audience a bit of an introduction to who you are.

00:00:55: Pia Frey Hi, thanks for having me. I'm Pia. As you said, I'm founder of Opinary, and now working at Affinity, leading the marketing side.

00:01:07: Lottie Bazley Fabulous. Thank you so much for joining us today. We will get straight into it. Now, it is no joke when I say that you have had such an impressive career to date, including being named in Forbes 30 Under 30 in the European media. Could you tell us a bit more about your career path in your own words?

00:01:28: Pia Frey Sure. I come from journalism. I always identified as a writer and I think did every single internship of my teenage years in journalism from where I’ve started Opinary about 10 years ago in my mid-20s as a way for users to engage and communicate with newsrooms and express their opinions. I did that for the last 10 years and started asking myself if I can still call myself a journalist. I think I can't any longer,

00:02:02: Pia Frey but I'm trying to maintain some of the creative writing muscle by doing books on the side. Books is maybe bit of an exaggeration, it's flipbooks. Then we sold Opinary to a great company, Affinity, a US-Indian ad tech company which helped us grow into bigger markets and expand beyond what we've been doing for the last 10 years.

00:02:29: Pia Frey Within Affinity, I'm now leading the marketing side, which I found a bit of an exotic choice in the beginning since Opinary's marketing was tiny and now I'm operating this huge scale across 10 markets and 7 teams and lots of different businesses within Affinity — it's a group —but I found it to be very rewarding and fun.

00:02:51: Pia Frey That's what I'm doing today.

00:02:53: Lottie Bazley Fabulous. Thank you so much for that. I also studied journalism, and it's one of those ones where I feel like, now being in comms, I can just about say that my university degree is kind of related to my job, so we are kindred spirits there. Looking back at your career, would you say you have any kind of, I guess, sliding doors moments, any key turning points, or any key decisions that really helped shape your career?

00:03:23: Pia Frey That's such a good question.

00:03:24: Lottie Bazley Thank you.

00:03:26: Pia Frey I think these kinds of doors that you are going through — for me, at least — were mostly shaped by people that I happen to work with in different parts of my career that helped me look at things differently and take on opportunities that I had not think about before. One big part of this was my team back at Axel

00:03:52: Pia Frey Springer. I was doing this Axel Springer Academy journalism school, and while doing this, there were early-stage exploration and ideas together with my brother and co-founder about Opinary and how to establish a dialogue between users and publishers. I happened to have some bosses back at Axel Springer that were very explorative and open for discovery and innovation.

00:04:20: Pia Frey Anything that I presented to them back then, was far from presentable, I would say, in hindsight, but somehow this company environment, I think, was a big accelerator to what Opinary came to be later on. That's one part. I think I've never really considered myself a founder or entrepreneur. I was strongly identifying as a journalist.

00:04:52: Pia Frey I was good at writing and I thought that was about it, but then I happened to have conversations with my brother while he was at the Harvard Business School. Strongly infused by big-scale founding principles and visions

00:05:08: Lottie Bazley

00:05:09: Pia Frey that helped me open up this door in myself which I think I wouldn't have done otherwise. I will always be grateful for him to start these conversations, what can we do together? That's just a few. Then I think the latest door I got through was this acquisition by Affinity.

00:05:30: Pia Frey We've been thinking for about two years that it takes a strategic partner in order to grow beyond what we were doing back then. A strategic partner couldn't only be an investor, it wasn't capital. It was rather we need access to markets. Up to this point, we were always driven by big hustle spirit.

00:05:55: Pia Frey We came to understand that what gets you here not necessarily gets you there. This idea, “Okay, let's find a partner we can grow with,” was a nice idea but I didn't really expect that we could find a company that really understands the core principles. Also, the editorial drive of Opinary,

00:06:19: Lottie Bazley

00:06:20: Pia Frey together with the business impact that we are holding ourselves accountable for. We luckily found this partner and that opened up tons of new doors and new markets. I have never been operating with China or with India or with Southeast Asia before. It's not only a new door, it's a big world that we've been entering recently.

00:06:45: Lottie Bazley Sure. I think it's really important that you recognize that you need to partner with people that have other strengths. Opinary has its own strengths, but in order to take it to that next level, you need to actually take a step back, and say, “Hey, what are we not quite so good at?

00:07:00: Lottie Bazley What do we need to support with?” That's how you end up growing. You think about, “What is it that we could do better, and who can help us to achieve that?” Amazing. Now, you mentioned dialogue there in what you were just saying, and I think that leads nicely into this question, is how do you think some of these early experiences shaped your communication approaches?

00:07:24: Pia Frey Opinary’s foundations are questions. We address users with questions and articles. Sometimes when you read an article, there's a question somewhere midway, and you can position yourself on a scale between two extremes of this topic. Questions have always been a guiding force for any kind of communication. I’d rather position myself by asking questions than by giving a statement.

00:07:51: Pia Frey That's also why I find it much easier to to conduct interviews than to

00:07:56: Lottie Bazley be on the other side.

00:07:58: Pia Frey I was always passionate about questions and the different kinds of communication and conversations that you can unlock just by granular differences in how you frame a question. Within Opinary, we've always tried to stay very true to this belief in questions. I'm looking at a wall up there. It says, “Everything starts with a question,”

00:08:22: Pia Frey and I think that's really true. I think you have the best management conversations when you guide with questions, not with statements. It's a rather egalitarian approach to management also to lead by questions, but I found it quite productive and part of the principles of Opinary. Also, the first book I published was a generator of questions, an auto generator of random questions where you combine different parts of the question and it opens up completely different universes of discussions.

00:08:57: Pia Frey That's, I think, one of the big parts that shaped my communication. Trying to find the best question is also an ambition.

00:09:05: Lottie Bazley Sure. And absolutely no pressure on me then for the rest of the questions that I’m going to ask.

00:09:10: Pia Frey I won’t judge. I won’t judge.

00:09:12: Lottie Bazley Give me some grace. Thank you. Let's talk about Opinary then. This is the company that you founded in 2013 with your brother, Cornelius, at the age of 24, which you have since sold to Affinity, but we will come onto that shortly. At Opinary, you attracted some really big-name clients,

00:09:33: Lottie Bazley so people like The Guardian, Huffington Post, Toyota. It would be great if you could give our listeners maybe a little elevator pitch about what Opinary is and then talk a bit about what inspired you to start that company.

00:09:47: Pia Frey Especially for German audiences, there might be some familiarity with Opinary. When you, sometimes, read an article, we address you with a question and give you easy ways to answer with one click. The idea behind this is to open up or to turn journalism more into a two-way street than the one-way street it's been.

00:10:08: Pia Frey The idea here is that, for publishers, in order to build loyal audiences, you need to have a relationship with your audience. A relationship is rarely shaped by only one side communicating. Opinary opens up journalism to enable conversations within content, which gives publishers the benefit of better understanding their readers and audiences.

00:10:39: Pia Frey I found it appalling, when I was working in newsrooms, how little we knew about our readers. How little interest there was about our readers. Journalists are always curious, but there was much less curiosity in whom are we catering for. It gives better understanding about who readers are and it gives the opportunity to convert engaged audiences into subscriptions, newsletters, app downloads, signups, et cetera. Because once you activate someone, it's much easier to take them to this next step of the funnel.

00:11:07: Pia Frey One big part of what we're doing for publishers is to transfer this first-party data into publishers’ data management platforms. Sometimes, as a user, you are addressed with a follow-up question like, “Thank you for your answer. What's your gender? What's your age? What's your household net income?”

00:11:27: Pia Frey These data get channeled into publishers’ data management platforms in real-time, which enables them to cater more targeted advertising to them and to build more tailored products for them in their own subscription business.

00:11:44: Lottie Bazley That's a really interesting perspective and actually something that I completely agree with. I think, especially in my role in internal communications, I think that we are there to nurture the relationship between employees and the business. I guess it's a similar kind of thing at Opinary. It's that nurturing the relationship between the publishers and the readers.

00:12:06: Lottie Bazley I guess you were relatively young when you started this business. You started it with your brother, so there's that family aspect as well. Were there any initial challenges you faced when establishing Opinary? Countless. I can imagine. What were any ones that stand out to you, and how did you overcome those?

00:12:26: Pia Frey I think one benefit we had that I only got aware of in hindsight was that I was so young when we started this, I had no responsibility for anything beyond myself. That made it quite easy to take this step. I think one challenge that’s often underestimated by aspiring founders and existing founders, in general, is that vision is easy.

00:12:53: Pia Frey I'd say shaping an engaging, inspiring vision can be done. I think what's much harder is focus. Especially when you build a product and you see, “Wow, there are lots of opportunities and so much potential.” As long as you're not prepped with billions, you have to focus. Even if you have large capital to operate, it still requires focus to be successful.

00:13:22: Pia Frey That also means that you have to be smart when you make bold decisions. For example, we grew organically quite fast in Germany, operated with the biggest publishers here, Spiegel, BurdaForward, FAZ, et cetera. Then made a decision, “Okay, let's take it global.” That were some hustling years where I was opening up these new markets in the US and the UK particular, not powered by billions but just by a lot of hustling.

00:13:54: Lottie Bazley

00:13:55: Pia Frey Of course, we always had the benefit of being somewhere rooted in the publisher sphere, but still it affected our ability to focus quite a bit to operate multiple markets at a very early stage. The second part is it takes a lot of time to build something. It can be very encouraging to be successful in the early stages,

00:14:22: Pia Frey and then — it's not always fun to do something till the end.

00:14:27: Lottie Bazley

00:14:29: Pia Frey I think, after about five to six years, I faced the first periods where I just felt extremely tired of doing this. That's nothing that you feel good about as a founder because you're supposed to be always visionary and inspired and just motivating your team, et cetera. Navigating through this was another challenge, and I think it's an underestimated challenge for founders. It will never always be fun.

00:14:56: Pia Frey It will be hard. That sounds like, “Yes, it will be hard.” Sounds easy from the outside, but then when you're in this period, it is really hard to power through.

00:15:05: Lottie Bazley

00:15:07: Pia Frey These are just a few. I think another part was, of course, to build this fantastic portfolio of publishers. It just takes a lot of time

00:15:15: Pia Frey to

00:15:16: Pia Frey build these relationship, to build the trust. We're placed within the center of publishers’ articles. It looks like a native piece of a story, our widget. To get the trust from publishers to run polls automatically distributed into their content, that takes time. I think that's more of a time issue than a challenge in itself.

00:15:42: Pia Frey If you have the patience and if you truly understand your target audience, in our case these were publishers, then it can be done.

00:15:50: Lottie Bazley Super insightful. Thank you. There's a couple of key points, I guess, there, that you talked about is that trust, growth, and focus actually is something that I want to explore a little bit more. Is there anything that you found, when you start to lose focus, or you are recognizing that you are losing focus, is there anything that you do, in particular, to try and get you back on the right path?

00:16:13: Pia Frey Just a lot of thinking. I think that's one of the challenges in itself. I think as a C-level and founder, you just have a lot on your plate, but I sometimes felt grateful for all the traveling that I had to do in favor of growth.

00:16:30: Lottie Bazley

00:16:31: Pia Frey Because being on a long-distance flight gives you some time to think. I think you really need to space out sometimes, to think, to look at everything that is on your plate and on your company's plate from a distance in order to reshuffle your focus and to understand what is really important, what are the problems behind the problems we're facing?

00:16:57: Pia Frey That's making this time for thinking. That's a challenge in itself, but I think that helps a lot. Just think deeply.

00:17:05: Lottie Bazley Yeah. And I can see why that's really important as well. As a founder of business, you're probably thinking, “I should be doing stuff all the time.”

00:17:12: Pia Frey I just remembered a technique that I found in very tough periods. It's a bit quirky, but it works. It truly works. What I found myself doing, not really planning this, but I found myself doing this, is when I was riding my bike to work, often I was wearing headphones, and I was pretending to be on a phone call,

00:17:36: Pia Frey but the phone calls I was having where I pretended to be myself in five years, telling someone else about the period that I was in right now. Talking about the challenges or the crisis you're facing in retrospect immediately changes your perspective.

00:17:56: Lottie Bazley Yeah.

00:17:57: Pia Frey And that was very efficient to just change the perspective for the things that you're facing right now.

00:18:05: Lottie Bazley That's so cool. I'm definitely going to try that out next time I'm struggling with focus. Just chatting away to myself whilst I'm on my bike. Thank you so much for sharing those startup experiences. Obviously, a few ups and downs in there. As you mentioned earlier, a little over one year ago, you and your brother sold Opinary to Affinity to expand your global reach.

00:18:29: Lottie Bazley Before this move, you've been really, I find, refreshingly open about the challenges that you did face for several years. Growth being one thing, and I guess it's one thing to be communicating with a team during those exciting, growth, prosperous periods. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you communicated with your teams during those more tricky times.

00:18:54: Pia Frey I think what made these tricky times much easier was the fact that we always held, and keep holding a lot of pride in our product. You could walk into any bar in Germany and tell them about Opinary and no one will know the name, but when you show them, “It's this little thingy that you see in articles,” people will know, every single person knows this. That gives some pride, like, “This is us.”

00:19:22: Pia Frey We're powering every single question that you see on any given prestige publisher site, from FT to Times of London to NBCUniversal, that's us. That helped balancing some of the trickier periods. Within these trickier periods, I think it was particularly the period where we had made a decision that we want to find a strategic partner. Strategic partner means we will sell this company. Then it usually takes a year.

00:19:50: Pia Frey It took us just about a year to go from making this decision, making a serious decision, starting a process. Also, we communicated. We were always transparent to our team about the fact that we were looking for a strategic partner. Anyone who was able to sum things up was clear,

00:20:11: Pia Frey “Okay, this company is getting sold.” Of course, this brought a lot of uncertainty. I couldn't cover the uncertainty, because it was real. We were talking to all sorts of companies;

00:20:25: Lottie Bazley

00:20:25: Pia Frey European, American, Asian. Every of these partners meant a completely different future for us.

00:20:33: Lottie Bazley

00:20:35: Pia Frey Of course, the first question that people ask themselves is, “Am I keeping my job? Is this safe?” As much as I wanted to give people clarity and confidence, it's not always possible to give the people this confidence. Now we were lucky that we found a partner that didn't diminish the team, but they built the team. We've been hiring more than, I think, in any other period in our company history,

00:20:57: Pia Frey but that wasn't always clear. I think what helped

00:20:59: Pia Frey there

00:21:00: Pia Frey was being transparent, being open. I don't think that transparency in itself is a motivator, but I think the lack of transparency and the feeling that a management is holding back information increases the uncertainty, the feeling of the lack of trust.

00:21:16: Lottie Bazley

00:21:17: Pia Frey That was a big part — communicating openly and communicating a lot. When you need to focus on something big that you've never done before, it's not easy to communicate all the time, to be vocal about what we're doing right now. We've tried, and I think it helped a lot. I know of other transitions of that kind where companies lost way more people than we had.

00:21:41: Pia Frey Of course, some people think, “That's not for me,” and will leave, but these were just a small handful.

00:21:49: Lottie Bazley

00:21:50: Pia Frey Being transparent helps. That's it.

00:21:52: Lottie Bazley

00:21:53: Pia Frey I think there's something like balanced vulnerability.

00:21:58: Lottie Bazley

00:22:00: Pia Frey I don't believe in full vulnerability as a management advice.

00:22:06: Lottie Bazley

00:22:06: Pia Frey You shouldn't share all your emotions,

00:22:08: Lottie Bazley

00:22:09: Pia Frey but I think showing some of it also helps people to relate.

00:22:15: Lottie Bazley

00:22:16: Pia Frey It also gives people space to share their own feelings. When you have a very deep and loyal relationship to your job, you're not a robot operating, but you're a human with feelings. Making space for people to express themselves honestly is only possible when you express yourself a little bit.

00:22:37: Lottie Bazley

00:22:38: Pia Frey And that helped, too.

00:22:41: Lottie Bazley I'd really love to hear more about that vulnerability point because I completely agree with you, and I think, throughout COVID, we certainly saw a lot more vulnerability from leaders, and they became a bit more human, I guess. I find it really interesting that you say that there's maybe a line of where showing that vulnerability stops.

00:23:02: Lottie Bazley So when you did sell to Affinity, I know you took on this position where you had a boss for the first time in about 10 years. I'd love to hear a bit more about that, but also perhaps on that vulnerability point, what do you think makes a good boss or a good leader?

00:23:18: Lottie Bazley What are the qualities that you see in those people?

00:23:21: Pia Frey I think there are some obvious aspects to this. Of course, you need to be a good communicator, of course, you need to give clear guidance, et cetera. I think you really need to be interested in people and interested in people's growth,

00:23:38: Lottie Bazley

00:23:38: Pia Frey because your company or your team's growth will always be powered by people. People have to grow beyond their limits in order to power this growth. You cannot only be interested in your team's growth, you have to be interested in the people's growth, and you have to enable that. I think that requires some empathy, of course,

00:23:57: Pia Frey because you need to like people to be a good boss.

00:24:01: Lottie Bazley I've definitely met some that don't.

00:24:03: Pia Frey Then I also think an underestimated criteria for good bosses is you have to be able to truly trust your people, because if you don't, you will always want to do things yourself, and always doing it yourself will only get you that far.

00:24:21: Lottie Bazley

00:24:23: Pia Frey Then, of course, you have to be able to get people aligned behind a vision, and getting people aligned behind a vision means that it doesn't only require you to tell them clearly, “That's where we're going,” but you need to get them on board. To get them on board, you need to understand where’s everyone coming from?

00:24:41: Pia Frey What are the individual concerns? What are the questions that people are having? It always comes down to, I think you really have to like people, to do all the people work that comes with it. It’s so obvious. I think the image of a boss is still quite male.

00:25:05: Lottie Bazley

00:25:06: Pia Frey I think these empathetic qualities, and the way you're guiding, not necessarily by being a big authority, but by putting yourself in front of the people, also protecting your team

00:25:23: Pia Frey You

00:25:23: Pia Frey need to build the environment for growth.

00:25:26: Lottie Bazley

00:25:27: Pia Frey And that goes beyond authority.

00:25:29: Lottie Bazley Yeah. Absolutely. So your role now, you are CMO at Affinity. Of course, you've grown a lot since your time at Opinary. It was a much smaller business. You've grown heaps then. As a leader through that growth, how did you keep the Opinary culture alive through that change?

00:25:54: Pia Frey One more thing. You just asked about how it was to have a boss again. That’s a good question.

00:25:58: Lottie Bazley Oh, go on.

00:26:00: Pia Frey We went through this process of selling Opinary, which was intense, and it was clear that the management at Affinity was amazing. We had a very good, very trusted relationship from the start.

00:26:15: Lottie Bazley

00:26:17: Pia Frey It was clear that they want the right thing for Opinary, and we aligned on the vision of what this shared identity is supposed to be. Then I was completely shocked by finding myself in panic post-acquisition, taking on my new role and understanding, “Oh, now I have a boss again.”

00:26:40: Lottie Bazley

00:26:42: Pia Frey I love him, the CEO of Affinity is extremely — Lavin [Punjabi] is an extremely smart, curious, inspiring person. Still, I was in panic, I think because, for more than 10 years, I've been operating in my own teletubby land. It was just my world, and my comfort zone. I've built it, we've built it around our own measures and principles,

00:27:10: Pia Frey and no one was really — I mean, we had investors, of course, but no one was ever really checking on me.

00:27:16: Lottie Bazley

00:27:18: Pia Frey Just the fact that this was like someone is eligible to have an opinion about how I operate, that was just triggering some panic that I was not prepared for. It just took some time to get used to that. Now I feel very grateful for having someone not only on the side, but also in front of me.

00:27:42: Pia Frey It makes life much easier than being the last in line. I definitely had to get used to it. I also was much more able to empathize with how people were feeling when they start a job.

00:27:55: Lottie Bazley

00:27:57: Pia Frey It's a lot of discomfort. I didn't know this anymore.

00:28:00: Lottie Bazley

00:28:01: Pia Frey So it was healthy to have this experience again and to get accustomed to a new environment. Then on your second question, we were extremely privileged in the sense that Affinity and Opinary, first of all, had a culture that was not identical, of course,

00:28:22: Lottie Bazley

00:28:23: Pia Frey but I think carried by the same kinds of values and principles.

00:28:29: Lottie Bazley

00:28:29: Pia Frey On the first offsite we had as a shared team in Mumbai, I think in last October, there was an adapted set of values presented of Affinity, and four of these seven values were Opinary values. They’re directly taken from us. We are very lucky that Affinity or Lavin and his team have been taking quite a reciprocal approach to merging or to integrating Opinary

00:29:02: Lottie Bazley

00:29:02: Pia Frey instead of just taking what's valuable on an Excel sheet and throwing away the rest. I think the Opinary culture expanded quite a bit because it now spans more than 450 people, and before that, it was small nucleus of a great culture that spanned 30 people.

00:29:24: Lottie Bazley Yeah. Huge, huge growth. Something that actually stuck out to me that I've heard you say on another podcast is when you were talking about company culture. A lot of companies, smaller companies, especially, I think champion themselves for being families, and you are of the opinion that that isn't quite the case, or at least shouldn't be the case

00:29:45: Lottie Bazley as you can't fire your family members, although perhaps you and your brother could be an anomaly in this theory. What is your take on company culture and how should companies view that culture and the relationship they have with their employees?

00:30:02: Pia Frey Yeah, I think this labeling yourself as a family in itself is a lie, and of course, I think it can express some of the loyalty that you're feeling for your team, and the trust, and the bonds that are shaped within the team. But as you say, I think, as a company, we've been firing people.

00:30:25: Pia Frey You have to fire people sometimes, and you can't fire your cousin.

00:30:30: Lottie Bazley

00:30:30: Pia Frey So I think this self-labeling of a family gets sour as soon as tough decisions need to be made. Even though we're kind of a family business,

00:30:42: Lottie Bazley

00:30:43: Pia Frey we've tried to avoid this self-labeling.

00:30:47: Lottie Bazley

00:30:48: Pia Frey Still, I think what I've been seeing is that we build a strong muscle in showing appreciation for team members on an individual level and on a collective level. For example, there's a ritual of thank-you notes. Every week, there's an all-hands meeting that ends by people reading out individual thank-you notes that you can hand in anonymously.

00:31:10: Pia Frey “Thank you, Katya, for taking great ownership in our accounting problem last week,” this kind thing. I've seen that it has a great impact in how people feel seen and heard within the team. I've also seen that this deeper meaning that people have been building within this company that grew beyond a transactional job

00:31:39: Lottie Bazley

00:31:39: Pia Frey can make tough decisions harder sometimes. Sometimes people weren’t feeling like losing their job when they left the team, but like losing a close circle of trusted friends. Now, they stayed close and there is a big alumni network. I think there's even a Slack channel of people that used to work for us. When they sign on for the respective new jobs every morning, they greet themselves in their ex-Opinary slack channel. You can maintain it even beyond this job,

00:32:10: Pia Frey but I've also seen that some people found it harder to leave when there's such a deep bond being built that we've tried to never call a family.

00:32:20: Lottie Bazley That's a great point, and as you say, it's kind of those really tough decisions that make that kind of family vibe potentially awkward, and can really disrupt things. Then you start to lose trust, but at the end of the day, you have to run a business, you have important decisions to make.

00:32:39: Lottie Bazley Something else I heard you say, actually, on the topic of making important decisions. We recently produced an episode about imposter syndrome, and I've heard you talk about that before, and something that I am happy to admit that I have also struggled with at times. How do you deal with that when it comes to making those difficult decisions when you maybe don't feel like you are the right person or capable enough to do that sort of thing?

00:33:04: Pia Frey Oh, first of all, it's awful. It's an awful thing, and I was always thinking it goes away at some point. Early on in my career, I felt that's — it's not a syndrome. It's absolutely true that I'm lacking competence in some parts. I was thinking that this false feeling of incompetence and people might find out about it, it goes away, but it does not go away.

00:33:26: Pia Frey Then I'm sometimes talking to elderly people and they still have it. For women, in particular, I think there is a breaking point. It makes me hopeful. Which is women post-menopause think much less about how people think about them. They give a fuck. Not everyone, and sometimes it goes wrong ways, but not giving a fuck,

00:33:53: Pia Frey but I came to the conclusion that, until then, I just need to live with it.

00:33:57: Lottie Bazley

00:33:58: Pia Frey One other thing that I've learned about it is that it affects your communication, the confidence in which you communicate when you are

00:34:05: Lottie Bazley

00:34:05: Pia Frey deeply questioning yourself, and when you're constantly threatened by the fantasy people might find out about you being a scam. That's how I was feeling many times.

00:34:16: Lottie Bazley Yes. I’ve been there. I've been there.

00:34:19: Pia Frey One trick at least to not let it affect your communication is a ChatGPT bot that I've built I think like when ChatGPT came out, because when I was reading my emails, there were way too many signs of a lack of confidence that

00:34:40: Lottie Bazley

00:34:40: Pia Frey makes — When you communicate among women and like-minded people, that's fine, you can just ignore this, all these “I thinks” and “maybes.” It affects the communication when you speak to people that are less affected by this. I have this ChatGPT bot called the White Confident Male Boss.

00:35:06: Lottie Bazley Nice.

00:35:08: Pia Frey And whenever I'm emailing or messaging with certain types of people, mostly men, and I used it a lot in the course of our exit where we were dealing with lawyers and with bankers and with certain age-type personalities, quite a lot. I just paste my messages there and it turns it into message like it's coming from a white confident male boss.

00:35:31: Lottie Bazley

00:35:33: Pia Frey It bridges the gap of communication. It doesn't solve the imposter syndrome at all, of course.

00:35:39: Lottie Bazley

00:35:40: Pia Frey From a principle perspective, it's not great because the diversity of communication is a good thing. You are dissolving some of this diversity in how you communicate and how you express yourself. Still, it's very practical to not let it shine through too much. On the other side, I found it very healing to sometimes just speak about it

00:36:06: Lottie Bazley

00:36:08: Pia Frey with certain people. Of course, you have to be mindful with whom you share your self-doubts with, but it can help a lot to just be open about it. As soon as you do, you are not as haunted by it any longer.

00:36:22: Lottie Bazley That completely resonates with me. That is something that I do often if I think, “Oh, I'm having that imposter syndrome,” is to think about other really successful people who are also having imposter syndrome. It's like, “Wow, if you are having it's fine for me to have it,” but I will definitely do this

00:36:39: Lottie Bazley white male boss in chat GPT. That is a great tip. As we wind down, we've talked a bit about communication strategies and we of course know that they are crucial to businesses, but there is never that one size fits all. I'd be interested to hear if you have any top tips between communicating across different cultures, different areas of the globe.

00:37:08: Pia Frey So I've been learning a lot about this since I started operating quite a global team.

00:37:13: Lottie Bazley

00:37:15: Pia Frey One very trivial but recent instance was I was really proud to see that some of the journalistic skills in communicating in a way that makes it relevant for people, which is not always aligned with marketing and content as you come across on LinkedIn, for example. Full of garbage. Reducing the garbage and increasing the relevance has been very useful in my new role at Affinity.

00:37:52: Pia Frey But, what's relevant is very different from country to country, or what is seen as relevant. For example, we've created a newsletter for one of our business units for the US which was much more thought leadership-based than self-promotional. It performed amazingly well. Running the same in India and Southeast Asia didn't work at all. People were much less interested in reading long stuff, is what they told me, when we try to analyze why isn't it performing.

00:38:26: Pia Frey People are much more visual in the kind of communication. Also, when it comes to design, visual communication in Western countries is rather minimal. The more minimal you go, the more classy it feels. Eastern regions are much richer in the visual communication. None of it is better than the other.

00:38:56: Pia Frey You just have to be very adaptive to whom you're communicating with. These were some of the recent learnings I had to make.

00:39:04: Lottie Bazley

00:39:06: Pia Frey I've been reading this book Culture Map, which is a great read about the different psycho grams of various markets and countries and some of it was just not true for my current environment because, as I said, my new work environment, Affinity, is much more like what I’ve shaped as our culture with Opinary than I thought.

00:39:32: Pia Frey The way of direct versus indirect communication, the way you confront each other, the way you give feedback is much more aligned than I’d expected.

00:39:44: Lottie Bazley Cool. Thank you so much. Now there are so many more things that we could have spoken about today. In the UK, we have the phrase, “You have your fingers in many pies.” There's a nice visual for you there. One question that I'd like to get in selfishly before we have to wrap up is, if you were to start a new business today, what would that be?

00:40:09: Pia Frey So I know that digital publishers are and has been struggling for a long time. Building a sustainable business model backed on content is hard.

00:40:22: Lottie Bazley

00:40:23: Pia Frey Now I think the thinking goes much more into building business models around communities. After these failors of the new type of digital-only publishers BuzzFeed, Huffington Post is a different thing, but Vice, et cetera, Mike, I think there is more skepticism around digital publishing and the opportunities of making it truly big and successful.

00:40:51: Pia Frey And if I was starting from scratch today, I think I would give it a go and go into some niche publishing that I think can — there are great ways to make it successful and big. I think there are some promising examples. I would not necessarily go down the VC route. I think it's not necessarily a type of a 10X scale business, but I think there's so much room for good journalism out there.

00:41:22: Pia Frey And, I think I would try to move closer to where I was coming from as a journalist and build a business around that.

00:41:32: Lottie Bazley That's cool. As I said, as a fellow journalist, I am super excited by that idea.

00:41:38: Pia Frey Join my future team.

00:41:40: Lottie Bazley Well, if I wasn't recording this on Staffbase’s time, I would maybe say, “Hit me up one day.” But thank you so much for your time today. It's been really cool to talk to someone like you as a woman in tech myself, but I'm sure everyone listening today will be equally as impressed and inspired.

00:41:59: Pia Frey As always, after these kinds of interviews, I'm feeling like I was way too open.

00:42:03: Lottie Bazley Especially what you said about the vulnerability line as well.

00:42:09: Pia Frey Kudos to you as an interviewer.

00:42:13: Lottie Bazley Thank you. Pressure is off. Thank you all so much for listening or watching today. I am Lottie Bazley, and I hope you have enjoyed this episode of Aspire to Inspire. Please do join us again.