I mean, goodness, how did you survive then? How did you end up making a living? Was it with what you do now or did you go elsewhere first?

No, well, I mean, suddenly the education phase is over.

and one is expected to somehow earn some sort of living, but how in a month of Sundays is this to be achieved solely as a composer? Things started well.

I'd won several prizes while at the Academy, and I secured an interview with Chester Music, and I went up to London with my best suit on, and Rodman Boyle asked me, do you go up to town to see the London Sinfonietta? Do you see Oliver Newsome? Are you in with the crowd? And I didn't like that.

I answered honestly and said, actually, I've just got married and I love Oxford and I brew home brewed beer and I walk dogs.

And so I could hear him putting a cross on the application form.

Oh, dear.

yes and

And I believe that's part of it.

Yeah.

Can I add in there, Gary? It was a bit like, I suppose, if you want to take it into a corporate world, a CEO and a COO type of role.

Ash will make quick decisions.

Luckily, my style is a reflective style.

And what that did was gave me and him a a couple of days to sort of to think about these things and sometimes before I even said well I'm not quite sure Ash this might not be a great idea he came back and said no no no that's not a good idea I've had to think about it we won't do that so this sort of cooling off period and how we worked was I know, very much like an accelerator and a brake.

You know, when we got to a corner, I dabbed the brakes a little bit and we get round it.

I mean, did you start to find out that you're developing other skills? Did you start to find out how we could work together more efficiently or better? I'm just wondering how that relationship went on as you started to gain traction and become, you know, a little bit more successful.

So from all of that, experience and what you've done in the industry, what have you seen that separate startups that become real infrastructure in whatever it is that they're doing from those that remain interesting products, but maybe never really scale the way they intended to?

Yeah, I think it's a good framing device, Justin.

Just as an aside, FIFA dropped its transfer market report for 2025, $13.08 billion in transfer fees for the calendar year 2025.

So massive, massive business.

To your question, I think the main thing between a product and service and infrastructure is what I saw building the transfer matching system for FIFA infrastructure is something that everyone needs to use, and it has the effect of coordinating and forcing collaboration from stakeholders that wouldn't normally want to or need to collaborate.

And that's infrastructure.

The difference between, so in the context of TMS, everyone has to use it.

When you were building FIFA's transfer matching system, what other entrepreneurial lessons did you learn about selling change to powerful incumbents that are maybe used to doing things a certain way already?