That was the first time I sort of felt like what redundancy or downsizing has sort of
It turned out to be a really good thing.
That led me eventually to being able to join the world of starting startups.
And then one thing I think that has been a really interesting and quite successful experiment,
having a day of the week Fridays at the moment where we've all agreed as a company not to
do meetings at all.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review, and welcome
to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything in between.
And along the way, we're hoping to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Tim Fung, the founder and chief executive of Airtasker.
Hi, Tim. How are you?
Hi, Sally. Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for coming into our very black studio.
But hey ho, what can we do?
Yeah, it feels like a very special place.
Now, Tim, you're the CEO of Airtasker, which is a digital marketplace that enables us to
outsource all sorts of errands and chores.
Last year, you recorded revenues of 44 million as we hired people ad infinitum to help us
with everything from moving house to picking up stuff we've bought and hosting games for
It's a pretty wide range of activities you have going on your platform.
Yeah, so we talk about Airtasker as actually being infinitely horizontal.
So we don't sort of specialise in a vertical like cleaning or a vertical like gardening.
It's really whatever customers need.
We're a place where you can express that need and post a task.
And then people in your community, they can help you out to do those jobs.
Let's get started.
As advertised, we've only got 15 minutes.
The clock starts now.
So my first question, Tim, is about your morning routine.
What time do you get up?
Well, it's changed a lot recently because I've just had a young baby.
So now it's wait for the crying to start.
Jump out of bed, get a bottle and feed the baby.
If I have the opportunity after that, I go for a run across the road in the park, feed
the dog, walk the dog and then head into the office.
Wow. And what time does the crying start?
It's as early as sort of 430.
But, you know, we must say we've been really, really lucky.
And often it's, you know, seven o'clock that I can sleep into before that starts.
OK. And how many days a week do you reckon you get a bit of exercise and running in
between the baby crying and work?
So it used to be five days a week.
I'd say now it's come down to probably two or three days a week that I can do that.
And I do find that I'm much more energised and motivated for the day if I can get the
exercise in. At the same time, you know, running a business and then also having a
kid at home, you really treasure those moments being at home with the baby.
So got to appreciate those two.
So are you a breakfast person?
I am a no breakfast and no lunch person at the moment.
And I try to charge through and do the fasting until dinner.
Wow. How long have you been doing that for?
On and off, but probably about two or three years.
And do you find that that increases your concentration or do you just get hangry?
I don't tend to get hangry.
I do find that actually if I do have a little bit of a nibble during the day, that
actually makes me a lot more hungry later on in the day.
So I think if you do get used to intermittent fasting and not eating, you know, breakfast
and lunch, you're actually not that hungry for dinner either.
So I don't do intermittent fasting on the weekends, for example.
And if you do have lunch, you end up wanting to eat more for dinner.
So I think it's quite an interesting thing.
If you don't eat breakfast and lunch, you also don't end up eating that many calories
for dinner either.
Hmm. Maybe I'll try it.
Maybe I won't. I'll see how I go.
Definitely take some, you know, getting used to at the beginning for sure.
Okay. The second question that we ask all our guests, tell me about a pivotal moment
in your career that shaped you as a leader or somehow changed the trajectory of your
Sure. So I think it's really interesting because we're, you know, somewhat going through
a pretty big macro shift in the economy right now.
And when I started my career, it was actually at Macquarie Bank.
And, you know, we were in the real estate investment banking team.
And in 2004 to sort of 2008, it was like this insane run of success.
And then you joined the real world.
Well, then in 2009, you know, that sort of all corrected.
And, you know, I always laugh because I think for the first time, the pie chart of our
profit contribution to the bank was actually counterclockwise instead of sort of
clockwise. So that was definitely interesting.
And so, you know, there were huge restructures and that was the first time I sort of felt
like what redundancy or downsizing sort of felt like.
It turned out to be a really good thing for me.
I was still young at the time.
I went and pursued another career, which is working at a fashion modeling agency called
Chic Management. So I got to learn from a incredible mentor, Ursula Hufnagel, who was
the owner of Chic Management.
I got to try some a new career.
And that led me eventually to being able to join the world of starting startups with a
telco startup, Amazim, which we started at the back of the modeling agency.
So that was definitely an interesting sort of six months of my life.
So you really attribute the whole journey about on the startups to be made redundant
from Macquarie. Yeah, I think the shakeups are definitely
like a great opportunity to try new things and create opportunity for yourself.
So as much as it's a bit of a cliche, I do think that these downswings are really when
businesses are made or when careers are, you know, change and pivot.
Yes. Never, as they say, waste a crisis, but also never waste a personal crisis.
Yeah. OK. My next question is short, sharp and sweet.
But one of my favorites.
What's the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
I think the biggest thing would be like to be able to have a mindset of curiosity versus
a mindset of judgment.
And one of the things I think about a lot is when you're making assumptions about things,
you know, you're coming with a judgmental mindset.
What would you have to know to be true in order for your assumption to not just be an
assumption and to actually be the truth?
So do you ask yourself that constantly when you're making decisions?
I definitely try to stop and pause when I think that I'm incidentally making assumptions
about, you know, whether a business case might be the right thing to do or whether somebody
is saying something like, oh, this colleague of mine, you know, they only want to do this
thing because they're trying to advance their career.
Well, I think maybe it's like time to pause and go, hmm, if that assumption, you know,
is actually a fact, what would I have to know to be true to validate that assumption?
I think it's a good way of stopping yourself from just biasing and making assumptions about
stuff that might not be true.
What I find interesting about that is the possibility that you have learned that you
have certain biases and you tend to be judgmental about certain things more so than others.
Have you found that in your own behavior by just sort of self-analyzing that?
I mean, I think one thing that is common amongst entrepreneurs is to have an optimism bias.
And I think that that is a good thing to have.
But there are certainly occasions where it's good to know and be objective about whether
you are biasing in that direction or whether it's just fact.
Any other biases that you'd point to that you've noticed in yourself?
I think one that is a subset of being optimistic is also to make assumptions about people's
intentions, being aligned with your own intentions.
And so one of the things that I find is, you know, when I meet someone, I'm always like,
oh, awesome, like they definitely want what I want.
And to make assumptions about that and to be very positive and optimistic about those things.
And that is factually not the case in all scenarios.
So I think it is good to stop and pause and to go, hmm, I wonder what their incentives
are versus my incentives.
And how might that influence the things that they want and the decisions they're making
versus the ones that I'm making or that I'm making on behalf of our company and our people.
So, Tim, on that note, we're going to take a short break.
When we come back, we're going to open the chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.
I'm here with Tim Fung, the Chief Executive of Airtasker.
Now, Tim, in front of you is what we call the Chatterbox.
As you'll see, it's this beautiful brown shiny box inside which
are 20 or so questions folded up on pieces of paper.
I would like you to have a little bit of a fish around the Chatterbox,
pick out a question, actually pick out three or four questions,
which I will then, of course, ask you to answer.
Please go fishing.
Okay, Tim, tell me about a time where you failed at something.
How did you recover and what did you learn?
Look, I think along the way, one of the things that was very difficult for Airtasker was
raising capital in big licks.
So what size capital raisings are we talking about?
Sort of 40, 50 million dollars.
So on the chunkier end.
Yeah, one of the things I think was very, very difficult for us was
we were predominantly Australian focused, but needing to raise money from, you know,
American or Asian hedge funds.
And this was back in 2019.
That was super hard for us.
So definitely a failure at the time.
And it meant that we had to pivot from basically burning something like
two and a half million dollars a month to figuring out a way to get profitable very, very fast.
So there's definitely a failure in terms of being able to raise that round of funding.
But I think it brought around a good lesson and made us stronger.
And the lesson being you've got to live within your means as a business.
I think it's tough medicine to have to take to move from, you know, a very generous
environment where the cost of capital is cheap and it's really easy to spend lots of money
What's really hard is actually having to say no to a lot of things.
And in the case of where we were having to actually like scale back some of the things
and get profitable, it's very sobering.
I think one thing that a lot of, you know, certainly small business owners and founders
would tell you is at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs is cashflow because the main thing
is that you want to be in the game so that you can keep playing the game tomorrow.
And that's the one thing that, you know, is often the downfall.
It means you can't play the game tomorrow.
I fortunately had an incredible team around me.
I remember, you know, pulling them into a room and kind of like, okay, this is where
And we ended up getting the company profitable from sort of burning two and a half million
dollars a month to profitable in about nine months.
It's pretty good going.
It was a good outcome in the end.
That is a really good outcome.
How do you create a positive culture in your company?
I think culture is a really, really tricky word to sort of, you know, put definitions
around it, but I think the one thing you can definitely do is lead by example and be
consistent in the principles by which you lead by.
Certainly at the beginning of a company, you know, there's no artifacts that have
been created yet.
There are no sort of values written down.
There are no principles written down.
There's very, very little context.
And so I think all you can do is sort of lead by example and bring people around you
that they want to also live by those same values and principles.
So what examples do you set as a leader?
I think everything that you do, you know, is an example that you're, that you're
setting in, you know, whether that's doing things that are consistent with the mission
of the company, whether that's ways of working.
One of the things that Airtasker that we like to do is we like to articulate things
very, very clearly.
So for example, we moved away from, you know, using a lot of slide decks and moving
towards like written long form documents, because we found that it was a more strenuous
way of making sure that you're articulating a position and you're able to have like
really rigorous and robust debate versus say a slide deck where you can sort of present
a picture and influence people to go in a certain direction.
Even, even when it may not be the objectively the right thing to do and whether it's
things like in-person working.
And, you know, I think that's a, that's a great example at the moment.
You know, there's some companies that are very intentionally hybrid, others that are
sort of hybrid because we haven't figured out a way of doing it yet.
And hybrid is the polite way of looking at that.
And we're probably more in the second camp than we are in the first to be, you know,
totally transparent.
So I think, you know, presenting yourself and showing up and being accountable to in-person
norms that you set yourself would be another example.
So how many days are you in the office?
I'm in three days a week.
So Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
And I think that's worked out really, really well for us.
And do you find that your staff are doing the same thing?
Are they also twats?
I don't know if twats is the, I'm not actually familiar with the term twats.
It refers to people who work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Well, I can genuinely say that we haven't used that term internally, but Tuesdays and
Thursdays are definitely days where we try and get everyone in together as a group.
And then one thing I think that has been a really interesting and I would say quite
successful experiment has been having a day of the week Fridays at the moment, which we
call airtime, where we've all agreed as a company not to do meetings at all.
And really what I think is powerful about that is, you know, everybody wants to have
time to do individual contributor work, but it doesn't make sense if everyone's doing
it on a different day of the week because then other people are hitting you up and
emailing you and texting you or slacking you.
And so what we agreed is we're all going to do it on the same day.
So there's a day where basically our slacks pretty quiet, our texting is pretty quiet,
but it's that time where you can do research or, you know, individual contributor work.
So deep work as they say.
Yeah. Good point.
Okay, Tim, have another forage.
When you fly interstate, what time morning or evening flights do you generally take?
So the most recent one I did was I did the all-dayer down in Melbourne.
I think the earliest flight you can take is actually, you know, to be on the plane at
6am flight, which actually kind of sounds okay.
But then when you kind of like reverse engineer it, you need to be at the airport at sort of
like 4.45 or 5. And then you've got to park or get transferred to the airport.
And it ends up being something like you need to leave the house at 4am.
And I'm kind of like, oh, that's kind of like just going the night before because I'd consider
4am to kind of still be the night before. So that one's very, very painful.
And I definitely try to avoid that, but I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment because
equally on the other side of that, you get on the 6am flight, you're not off the plane
until sort of 7.45 and you're not into the Melbourne city until sort of 9.30.
You know, if you go any later than that, you basically lose half the day.
So I think air travel, it is convenient.
They've done a great job of making it really, really slick.
It still seems to take something like five hours to get door to door.
So at the end of the day, do you compound your punishment by getting a late flight back?
You want to use that day and be down there till 6pm or so when meetings typically finish.
But again, 6pm, get to the airport, you know, 7.30,
flight at 8.30, don't get home till sort of 10pm at night.
So that's pretty painful.
I would say the one thing is that, you know, having a kid at home has definitely sort of
reshaped some of those priorities a little bit though.
You know, you don't really want to miss out on another bath time or another day to be away.
And so trying to sort of navigate through that is pretty interesting.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Now that's the end of the Chatterbox section.
And I'm going to ask you one last question, which we ask all our guests.
And that is, if you had a year off, unencumbered, you could do it if you liked, what would it be?
Well, I think now that I have a baby at home, I'd have to say spending time with the baby.
But I would say selfishly, I've definitely
fantasised about doing some mountaineering in a, you know, remote place, you know,
in say Alaska and doing mountaineering and climbing.
It'd be pretty amazing to be able to experience and, you know,
see some of those wonders of the earth from high up.
Wow. So you're talking about a year of mountaineering.
I think that'd be pretty cool.
And would your wife go with you?
Yeah, she's really into, you know, a lot of the hobbies that I'm into as well.
And just to underscore, we're complete rookie hobbyists,
who are amateurs who know absolutely nothing about this craft.
And so it probably would take you a year to learn the skills and to actually be good at it
before you actually go and do some of this stuff.
And maybe the baby could wait down the bottom for you
and you could come back and visit it every now and then.
Well, in a few years time, she's probably going to be running faster than us.
Running, climbing and doing all these things faster than us.
So yeah, maybe it's something we can do together.
Excellent. Well, I wish you well on your year of mountaineering.
And that's our 15 minutes up. Thanks so much for chatting to us.
I've really loved hearing about how you stop and pause
and test your assumptions before you make a decision.
You never waste a crisis, whether it's a personal or an external one.
I love the fact that you don't have meetings on a Friday.
I somehow wish that I could do that.
And congratulations on the baby.
Hope it all goes well.
And thank you once again for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thanks for having me.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton.
It was produced and edited by Lap Fan.
The theme is by Alex Gow and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.