"The Son"
This is the second of my interviews from the Cannes Creativity festival. In this one - which was recorded in front of alive audience - I talked to Thomas Benski, the founder of Pulse Films, an award winning modern-day content studio, which two years ago was bought by Vice. Thomas is charming and charismatic. He is relentlessly energized and filled with original ideas. He is engaged. Interesting. And Interested.
Takeaways
- A willingness to follow your instincts
- Taking responsibility for coming up with solutions
- Relentless determination
- A clear and compelling vision
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 62: "The Son" Thomas Benski
I’m Charles Day and this is Fearless!!
This is the second of my interviews from the Cannes Creativity festival. In this one - which was recorded in front of alive audience - I talked to Thomas Benski, the founder of Pulse Films, an award winning modern-day content studio, which two years ago was bought by Vice.
Thomas is charming and charismatic. He is relentlessly energized and filled with original ideas. He is engaged. Interesting. And Interested.
He is driven in large part by what happened to his family when he was growing up.
So this episode is called, “The Son”
“I'm a big believer that in our businesses the way you behave or the way you become comes from places that are probably from your childhood or insecurities or fears or trauma, to be frank. That you then use to overcome, and if you overcome it that's the thing that kind of fuels you to go further. So that was definitely a key part of my journey.”Creativity depends on risk and uncertainty. How is it possible then that something so fragile as a human being can be capable of harnessing its immense power and turning it towards building a better tomorrow?
We are the most fragile of species in so many ways. Guided by anxiety, influenced in ways seen and unseen by fear and sometimes stopped in our tracks by trauma. Events and circumstances buried so deep that they are hidden even from our own consciousness.
These instincts have served our species well. Ensuring that we have survived for over 200,000 years. Two thousand centuries of fear. That’s a lot of DNA hard-wiring.
And yet every day, the best leaders step past those aspects of being a human being and make courageous decisions in the interest of a future they can see only in their hopes and dreams.
Taking a few moments every now and then for ourselves, and acknowledging our own journey and the bravery that sometimes it takes to show up as a “fearless leader” is not an act of vanity or ego. It is an act of kindness and honesty to who we are and who we want to be.
Leadership starts with ourselves. And an acknowledgement that we are human in so many ways.
Here’s Thomas Benski.
Charles:
Thomas, welcome to Fearless. Thanks for being here this week.
Thomas Benski:
Thanks for having me.
Charles:
We are up here in this beautiful villa in Cannes. I want to start with my usual first question. When did creativity first show up in your life? What's the first memory you have of something being creative?
Thomas Benski:
I think I was a bit of a late bloomer because I didn't think that a creative vocation was possible for me. So I would say I was always creative as a kid, and I think always surrounded by graffiti or street culture or skateboarding or whatever, but I feel like I really kind of clocked into it when I went to art school in London, at Goldsmith. And it was a kind of weird love/hate relationship and I think it defined my position on creativity quite a lot.
I went to this college called Goldsmith, and for people that don't know, it's a place where some of the most amazing kind of young British artists came out of and so on. But I went there ten years later. And what was quite interesting is when you try to, I guess, bottle creativity and I think what I saw is a generation of artists that actually wanted to aspire to be like everyone else, basically. And, therefore, they were told to create discourse rather than craft. And for me in creativity, the idea and the execution the idea is much more important than the discourse surrounding it. To me, that was when I started to kind of have a real point of view around creativity. And I think I was surrounded by kind of incredible people from a theoretical side, craft side and so on. And it really helped me kind of understand what creativity meant to me. And I think that's what I took with me moving forward.
Charles:
What made you want to go to art school? What was the inspiration?
Thomas Benski:
Sadly, I wish I could say that it was ... I didn't get accepted to art school first. I was not a great kid, I must confess. I did all the bad stuff very young and it was the only college that would accept me. And they accept me in a course called Social Policy and Economics which for the first six months, I actually didn't know what it meant. I didn't speak very good English. So they got me in this course and then I met, and it was coincidentally a great art college and I managed to kind of pivot and embrace more artistic kind of academic journey there.
So yeah, it wasn't a vocation it was just the location. I was in London. I remember, it's quite a funny story. You can cut it off on the podcast. It's boring, but I was quite independent as a kid. And I think in England, when you apply to universities there is process of applying and I had very bad grades and the only three universities I knew were Oxford, Cambridge and London School of Economics, basically, which I was very naïve to apply to. Obviously, did not get in. And went through this process they called clearing. And I remember, end of August they picked up the phone and called me and said, look. Goldsmith, they pitch you on their university. The only question I asked is where is it and they said, London and I said, I'll take it. And I didn't even know what the course was.
So there wasn't a big aspiration and so on. But I think it was part of that for me. I was really independent and very fearless as a kid, actually. Because of the stuff that happened to my dad and so on, I feel I was conditioned to take a lot of big, big risks at a very young age. And I think that brought me towards creativity, actually. And actually, vocational creativity embraced that fearless. So I think that's really where they're connected.
Charles:
What happened to your dad?
Thomas Benski:
Well, my dad was a successful businessman, and when we were fifteen he made some poor decision and lost pretty much everything. And it was at key moment in life, like it was late nineties where a generation got left behind when the kind of dot com arrived and so on. And I was living in Milan, which is a very materialistic, safe city and the fact that all the security of my live was removed at the age of fifteen just made me feel, shit, like I have to take care of all of this. And I have to take care of my family, and so on. Which I what I do. I support all of them and so on, and that became an enormous driver in my life. The need to make money and to survive.
And it's funny, because you wouldn't pick a creative industry as a place to make money, but that's what I think I was made to do. And I think I understand very well the cross-over between art and commerce and understanding how to navigate that line, and be able to scale a real business around that, and I think that was all instinctive. I didn't go to school. I didn't learn it. I just kind of, I think, understood the empathy of what a creator or an artist have to do. And actually I was able to organize around that, basically.
But I think a lot of it, for me, a lot of people ask me because I'm quite young, I guess I built a business quite young. And a lot of people ask me, what's the drive? And I say when your parents can't pay rent and you can't pay rent, believe me, you're going to work fucking hard and ensure that you can do it.
So for me, and I think we were having this conversation before. A lot of it comes from other places in your life. I'm a big believer that in our businesses the way you behave or the way you become comes from places that are probably from your childhood or insecurities or fears or trauma, to be frank. That you then use to overcome, and if you overcome it that's the thing that kind of fuels you to go further. So that was definitely a key part of my journey.
Charles:
So at fifteen, you went from being the child to the adult essentially?
Thomas Benski:
Correct.
Charles:
Almost overnight.
Thomas Benski:
Yeah.
Charles:
And how old were you when you decided to start your own business?
Thomas Benski:
Twenty-four.
Charles:
So nine years later, you said the way I'm going to take care of all of these people, who should be taking care of me, is to start my own business. Did you look at that as this is incredibly risky? What was your mindset?
Thomas Benski:
Not at all. I think the funny thing is, to your point where you were just explaining about how people see fear. I was extremely excited actually. I left home, I was sixteen so I got expelled from school and then I went to London afterwards at seventeen. And I went by myself. Didn't know anything. And it was amazing, I worked at a hotel with Nigerian and Polish busboys and it taught me so much more about life. And I was really grateful to just be able to do that, and I think the idea of being able to slowly but surely be able to provide for my family I think was an enormous driver, and I think I was really lucky to find, early on, my vocation.
So what I do ultimately is I'm a producer, and I use that in the broadest sense. I create an environment for creativity to really happen, whether that's a movie or television series or campaign for brand, or a company, in fact. Like I produced a company. And I think in the business of creativity, I think you have to have both. You have to understand how to create a flexible, adaptable, stimulating environment, but also some rigor. And I think all of that for me just came instinctively looking, at a very young age, how people were doing it and being able to, I guess, create something from the gut rather than the historical thing.
And I said a funny story because I worked very young, and I think I was in situations that maybe a kid of my age shouldn't be at professionally. So the first two bosses I had were the worst. So everyone says, oh, I had this great mentor and I did not. So I had alcoholics, fraudulent liars, incapable businessmen. But the amazing thing is as a seventeen year old, because they were so bad, they allowed me to see the business in a very objective sense.
So very early on, I had a very broad scope of what the media industry looked like, and I was able to kind of just start to formulate a bit of an idea about what company I would like to build, and what's important in a company, and I saw incredible companies really not necessarily rise to their potential because of simple things like culture, or rigor, or back office. Like everyone in the creative businesses think to create a very creative business, it has to be chaotic or free and so on and I disagree, actually. I think that the more buttoned up you are as a business, the more conscientious risk you can take and those risks are taken intentionally. And I really believe in intention more than anything. Point of view, intention and taste are the things that I think drive me as a person and I feel like those things are things that I just learned by observing other people, and so on.
In our media business, for instance. The first company I worked at they were ... I can't say the name of the company because it's someone that's still in the industry. But the name of it gave it away, but it was a company that was full of incredible people that went on to do amazing things. But the permissiveness as far as the culture and the abuse of substances or drinks and so on was beyond belief.
So when I set up my company, people made fun of me but we were young and we were supposed to be edgy and cool but I was a total nightmare. I said you are at the office by nine-thirty every day. I do not care what you do overnight, like if you want to go to bed at six o'clock, but at nine-thirty in the office you are functional and you are in the office every day. If you are not, don't bother coming back and you finish at six-thirty. And I don't believe in the looseness of those things.
And I think it really helped us because I think young people that were put together developed a sense of duty and rigor that I think showed in the work that we've done together. So I guess like I learned from all of those mistakes and people that I think were very permissive as leaders which I didn't relate to.
Charles:
What made you decide you wanted to start your own business because that's not a small leap?
Thomas Benski:
No, but again, it felt very organic. Like I really remember my late teens and twenties. Everything just kind of ... there wasn't even a question. It wasn't like a big or Eureka moment where we're going to plot and do this. I wanted to set up this company since I was nineteen. The premise of my company is very simple. It's three core values. I wanted to be a talent destination. I'm a huge believer that in our businesses, talent kind of prevails no matter where distribution, disruption goes. So talent in the broadest sense, and I don't just mean directors in my business...
Thomas Benski:
Goals and I want talent in a broader sense and I don't just mean directors in my business. I also mean staff and I mean executives and so on. So I wanted it to be a place where people wanted to work and I think that meant having a modern approach to that. Transparent, collaborative and very much value at creative. That was one principle.
The second one was multidisciplinary. So I believe as constant creators today it is our duty or it is exciting to tell stories or create content across multiple of genres. Something that was extremely controversial. Right now it feels very normal but at the time in London it was like, “What you trying to do movies and advertising and entertainment with like brands? You are crazy. And 24 hours old this is a total disaster. Do not do this. This is stupid.” But for me it was very obvious. It was very rational and quite clear the vision of the company that we've had 12 years ago is still the vision of today and I think we've been executing that plan rather than pivoting or being scared or fearful of anything. The last component, the third component of what we are is we're a global business. I'm a globalist by nature and I don't look at the world in UK/US term. I look at it as one market. It's one world and we are a real business and I'm not afraid of that. I wanted to create an enterprise. I was not interested in building a lifestyle business.
So those were the three key principles and they were clear and that's what I set out to do It took me a while because we started with no money. No reputation. No big talent and that was the challenge at being 24 is we had zero runway. We had to create the runway from the ground up but looking back, the whole business it was built from the ground up with zero help and that's something that I think gives you a lot of confidence when it comes to kind of challenges and so on because you've gone through those challenges again, and I think you can look deep and find a way to solve the problem and it doesn't ... You understand that there isn't a formula. There is hard work and I think there is observation, curiosity. Those key primal components are the things that kind of drove our company to begin with.
Charles:
Do you have a romantic view about what it was going to look like to own your own business?
Thomas Benski:
Totally. I'm obsessed with film history. I want to build united artists for the twenty-first century. A place, a modern day studio. That's what I set out to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I claim ... I want to do and I know what it looks like. Now I just enjoy the journey of trying to find the precise ways of doing it basically so.
Charles:
What are the elements for the modern day studio?
Thomas Benski:
I think those things ... I think a talent destination. I think a relationship with talent that is more honest. A relationship to the work that is more honest and I don't mean honest in an earnest way. I just mean knowing what the work stands for and chasing things that the creator will notice is actually adapted to do so. That was one thing. I believe multidisciplinary where you are adaptable to disruption of distribution, finance, creative processes, production processes. So the fact that we are more holistic means that we are much more capable of responding to opportunities in the marketplace. Not the challenges actually. Meaning the opportunities which are enormous right now. In my world like Apple, Facebook and Amazon together is $30 billion dollar content in just a year. That's just an enormous transformation of business and they need talent and they need execution at a high level and I think that's where the opportunity is.
The last thing for me as I said it was a well run business. So it was very important to me to run the business properly. So the business end of the company has always been something I'm extremely interested in. It's not necessarily my thing but I think maybe instinctively aware that I need to surround myself with people that were complementary to me and not just a bunch of creative. Someone that actually my business partners, advisors, investors were people that were going to bring some of that rigor and skill set that helped build the business to what it was so.
Charles:
So you talked about being a talent destination. Right? You talked about being multidisciplinary. Do you bring talent in who are not multidisciplinary?
Thomas Benski:
Absolutely. I think for us it's more ... I see us as an enabler like what I can do is I have a very powerful engine that can create extremely high end content and we pride ourselves the fact that we can be a $20,000 music video or 10 hour series for HBO and I don't have a preference of that. Oh if it's a moving I like it and if it's advertise ... I love the idea of creating content that touches an audience, enriches an audience and being very smart about how you create it, you write it, you produce it and you distribute it. That's what I'm interested in. I think I'm good at I guess.
Charles:
What's the biggest struggle when you're trying to attract new talent? What's the story you have to tell them?
Thomas Benski:
Fear. Fucking up and I think this market is so confusing and I think I see this not just with talent I'm sure agencies and brands. I think everyone is very tentative right now. I think it's not a tough moment I think, but I think it's a moment that is confusing and it's complex and I think a lot of it is about creating a safe and secure environment for talent to be at their best. I find it easier for more established talent to gravitate towards us than more younger talent that still are sometimes aspiring to what the previous generation did as opposed to understand that actually the strongest thing you can do is carve your own path and become your own version rather than be like Spike Jones or David Fincher or people like this that I think all of that young generation are aspiring to be.
Charles:
So you have an easier time attracting experience talent?
Thomas Benski:
Yeah, people that have actually gone through the motions and understand that actually are transparent, creative and resourceful studio setup is extremely advantageous for that artist because that's what they need more than anything. They don't need [inaudible 00:22:14]. They don't need people to just tell them how great they are. People that are self-aware and motivated, they just need people to enable them, and I think that's what we can do at scale across all those genres and as you said we can win the Can Film Festival or win a Gold Lion or the MVAs and I think we feel comfortable at that level. Talent, I think, respects that. I just think a lot of it they are also figuring out what desk space is in the industry right now.
Charles:
Each of those segments are specific destinations in and of themselves and require specific kinds of content and output. How do you manage that in your own head? How do you look across that portfolio of opportunities and responsibilities and figure out where you need to be paying your attention?
Thomas Benski:
I think constant integration. I feel like I'm very tough on myself. I feel I really, really expect a lot and I think that's sometimes my weakness as a manager perhaps is I expect everyone else to be at that level and a level of dedication and so I think I'm just very present in understanding what it is and it's a bit of an escape for me. This bit is easier than all the bits of my life like being emotional in personal situations. It's probably more tricky than actually being able to handle 300 projects a year with other people's emotion and that's I think is what makes us a good destination. We're extremely apathetic to what it means to live through this kind of true creativity. Making stuff is not easy. Making great stuff is really difficult and I think it's not a process. You can't repeat it. You actually have to every time create it and I think being empathetic about what that means kind of put us in a better stand where we are able to be quite again honest towards the process.
Charles:
What do you think are tough about making great work and what gets in the way of that more often than not?
Thomas Benski:
I think of the ship I think for me the idea of having a real idea and being able to connect that idea in the smallest way to the audience. What I mean by that is not being overly indulgent or actually I would say is about fitting the idea to the correct process including production and distribution where if you want to make some ... I make things that are extremely outhouse indulgent and so on but make it at a price and within a modern way you can still be successful with that work. I think what's difficult is when people kind of create a wrong set of expectations for themselves and other people.
The world I live in is an expensive world like making a moving. People talk about, "Oh, $2 million dollar is a low budget.” I don't know where I come from $2 million is a shit of money, so I think understanding and being respectful of the process and what it takes is important, but having singularity and I think for me that's the most joyful moment is when someone has a really clear idea and they just need your help to get it to the right place and make it better or make it cheaper or make it in a way or make it bigger. I feel the exciting thing right now is I think we, as content creators, we are being extremely stimulated to being ambitious. If you see where, especially in television which is an area I'm particularly excited about, you can really take big swings at telling ambitious, novel-like stories on a big scale with big budget with incredible creators and so on, which that didn't exist ten years ago.
So I think it's about fitting the idea to the process and being aware of what that looks like and being self-aware I fell is an extremely important quality for both producers and talent to just understand who they are including their quirks. I have no problem with difficult people, unusual people and so on as long as we are aware of it, as long as there is a certain level around it I think you can navigate to that and I'm okay to be very as I say empathetic and having to tolerate behaviors that maybe other industries would not be able to do it.
I quite like the fact that we are a bunch of troubadours that kind of start an idea on a piece of paper and then it becomes this huge thing that people pay money to go and see, so I like that kind of romantic view of all of this and so on. I think you have to be prepared to do that and if you try to put it in a box and replicate it all the time I think you fail. You can do it a couple of times but you fail. We've seen Disney do this and Star Wars this an amazing franchise just took a massive beating right now because I think they cranked it too much. I think you just have to be respectful. There is magic in what we do, I believe, and I think it's not only magic. It's tenacity and hard work, but I think magic is still a part of it. So embracing that and accepting the unusualness of it could be as important.
Charles:
You talked about the fact that ... I should put this differently. You have a very, very clear articulation about what success looks like. You have a very clear articulation about the values of the business and the behavior of the business. You also said that you're really hard on yourself. How does that manifest? What are you dealing with when you feel like you're not meeting your own standards?
Thomas Benski:
I think it's with scale it comes out more. When your kind of just cranking and you start a mole then everyone is in it to get there. I think that demand and that kind of space is tolerated somehow. I think at scale what I've seen and I've noticed is to sustain that pace of growth gets tiring and I think when you start to build management layers and leadership layers and so on, you cannot expect to crank at the speed and you have to understand that it's important to ... it's important to articulate things in a way that actually are effective. I'm sometimes ... I don't care about how we get there. It's getting there and I think that's fine at a growth faze and I think that's why I've always been more attracted in building things because it doesn't matter as long as the thing works. Where at scale it does actually matter how you say it and how you engage and being able to make sure the values of the company are not just communicated but lived through and that you actually can replicate that at scale because I'm not going to be able to be there all the time and so on.
Charles:
Do you hold people to account when they don't ... when they stray away from the values?
Thomas Benski:
Try to. I think we have this kind of pivotal point where we are now a global business. We are not there all the time. We constantly look at the structure and kind of organism of the company. I'm a big believer that a company is an evolutionary thing and I knew very clearly what the vision was but the mission to get there was something I think we kind of reiterate all of the time and pivot and change and so on. I think ... Yeah, I guess that's how I see it.
Charles:
Tell us about the decision to sell the company to VICE. Why did you decide to sell to anybody and then let's talk about why you decided to sell to VICE?
Thomas Benski:
So I would be honest and I think we always ... People say I didn't expect to sell but I think we wanted to build an enterprise, therefore, the enterprise value and share all the value was actually an important component of it rather than necessarily a lot of businesses I complete with are kind of more lifestyle business where the assets are not very strong. It's just good businesses that have a steady growth, and so I wanted to build something a bit more explosive, which would kind of drive you towards private equity funding, angel funding, therefore exit, therefore kind of realization of value.
So very early on we build a business to scale and three years in we started to be approached to be acquired, which was I generally didn't know what exit meant. Exit was not part of my vocabulary and I think it made me realize at that pivotal point that A: The value of capital. Secondly was my business group because I had to negotiate with the most sophisticated media people. There's 27. No advisors. No corporate financier or anything and I had to explain to them why we were great, what I would do with money and where we're going basically.
That was 18 months of business school to me. I had to really build a business plan. If you look at it today the business plan is kind of what we're trying to do right now. We do a lot more naïve statements and unrealistic number expectations in there, but I guess that's the reality of most business plans.
So the idea of selling was always kind of always baiting once we did a first fund raise and I was extremely lucky. I had two fundraisers. One with a gentleman called Harry Solomon, Sir Harry Solomon who became my mentor and another one with a gentleman called Ronnie Cowan, Sir Ronald Cowan and they kind of really galvanized this thing big and kind of built a real business and the conversation advise was actually kind of organic. I always wanted to sell ... I always thought I was going to sell to them for some bizarre reason and because I identified with the disruption that they were trying to create, I was aware of the challenges and opportunities but I think I always admired the business that kind of went into an industry and completely transformed how that industry felt, and I think it was a very stimulating conversation as opposed to some of the other conversation where they would acquire business like us and effective yield going in, spent three years and live.
I think there was something again romantic and idealistic about what we could do together and there still is. I think VISE is a fascinating business and I feel that I get more excited about the potential of that even though the rea-
Thomas Benski:
I get more excited about the potential of that, even though the risk is probably much higher because I actually like the bigger picture. I'm not driven by money, necessarily. For me, money is extremely important to give me choices, both personally and as a company, but what I'm excited is impact. I think Vice is lived in that and that was sexy and attracting to me, selling to in the trend of Shine that is consolidated.
I am one of 15 people that fight. I didn't identify with that. But funny enough, as I've gone through the acquisition, the funny thing is there are ... it's interesting how the two ... because maybe some of the other groups are more sophisticated MNA players. So in terms of integration, in terms of dadada, there could have been some learnings there. So for me, the thing with Vice was always about progressing me as a person and us as a team, and giving us a bigger stage and so on. I'm all about that. I feel very grateful and lucky to have this life and meeting credible people. I think anything we enhance that will be more attractive than a paycheck.
Even on the first round, Harry, my first investor, offered me half of the valuation that a private equity fund gave me. It was like, but he said, "I don't know your business, but I know about business and I believe in you." That was enough and he was the right guy and the perfect choice. I'm a big believer in creative businesses. Where the money comes from is so important. Who your investors are or your owners, is so capital to build the right business. Instinctively, we were lucky to align with people that had a respectful and supportive mentality of us, and taught us things that were so crucial along the way. Simple things like, do the right things, treat people the way you want to be treated, don't build into a big business.
These are people that build multi billion dollar companies, 35 thousand employees and so on. I think just those [inaudible] lessons for young entrepreneur that's quite alone in that journey, having someone that just goes, "It's going to be okay. You're doing the right thing. You're going to be fine." For me, was so much more important than maybe more explosive but bullshit kind of conversation and so on. Then, when you don't deliver, they kind of pivot or they leave or whatever. It was just very helpful for me to have people that were trusting in me and I think that built a lot of confidence and so on and prepare us to then take a bigger swing when device conversation came.
Charles:
A lot of people have an emotional difficulty selling their own business. They worry about whether they're going to lose their own relevance. Was that part of your decision making process?
Thomas Benski:
I realized I sold it a year later. My father-in-law, who's a very successful entrepreneur, kept telling me, he said, "You sold your business." It is, and I think it was just a new chapter. I think, once I understood that, I actually got really excited about the prospect of that it could be like. I think it's an incredible moment to be part of a bigger group. I'm actually really lucky to be inside a place where the conversations are bigger and so on. I think this is a tricky time for midsize companies to be independent right now just because you have a lot of pressures, the money is... you have the size of an infrastructure but maybe not necessarily the scale to be able to capture those big opportunities.
So the fact that we did a kind of high growth group, I think just kind of gives us the chance to think long term and transformative rather than conservative. I do think, right now, it's a time to take a position, whatever that is, and be very clear about the proposition. I think the status quo thing is going to get extremely difficult. I think you need to provide value add to whoever your customer is, whether it's talent, agency or brand or bio, what is it with investors. I think it's kind of channeling that perspective on this right now.
Charles:
What do you think the future of content is? What's going to win in the next couple of years?
Thomas Benski:
Couple of years or ten years?
Charles:
Both.
Thomas Benski:
I think couple of years, I think we're going to continue to see a transition toward episodic high end global distribution based stuff. I think we're going to see a huge increase in international content, which I'm super excited about. I think one of the amazing things of Netflix, Apple, Facebook, straightaway something can get global. A Syria [inaudible], an Israeli Syria, which five years ago would have just not landed anywhere, suddenly becomes the talk of the town and feels exciting, feels unusual. It's not a revolutionary idea, but just the fact that it's set in somewhere different brings an exoticism that I think will allow us to do that.
I think, if you look at all of those platforms, deposition is global first. I think that's going to change a little bit, the power dynamic, because I believe that the studios are not best position to embrace that, just because I think they've been relying on a domestic market much more. So I feel like you're going to see a lot more kind of international creators kind of coming to the big stage.
I would love to see a transformation in advertising where content is additive and it's not interruptive. I really feel strongly about that and I feel it takes a few brave moves to unlock the opportunity. When we talk about branded entertainment, and I hate the word, but I love the intention. If it's entertainment, it has to compete with entertainment. It can't compete with advertising and I think that's something that I hope we're going to see where I think brands start to bring value to their customers in every sense possible. Could be the product, could be content, or actually should be product, should be content, and it should feel additive to your life. I think, right now, too many things feel disruptive in your life. I feel, in advertising, I really hope to see an evolution there.
Charles:
In ten years?
Thomas Benski:
Actually, to be honest, I would probably say that my two year prediction is probably going to take ten years...
Charles:
Take ten years.
Thomas Benski:
Because I think we all kind of describe change much faster than it is. This conversation, since I set up the business, this has been... what are we talking about here? Has been the conversation. I feel like we're just going to accelerate toward it. So actually, I think it will probably take a few years to do that. I think it's going to consolidate. I think there's going to be... I'm not meaning to look to the future, but you see the mega deals that are going on. I think that's going to have an effect on how and who is able to produce content for whom and so on. So I think it's going to be an exciting few years as a creator or as a seller. I believe that the fight is going to kind of polarize. It's going to be either talent creator led or a multi billion dollar competition and so on. I feel like the middle ground is going to suffer a little bit.
Charles:
Alright, two last questions for you. First is, how do you lead? What have you learned about how you lead?
Thomas Benski:
By example, I think. I think I try to be a good person and I think to be very human in how I relate to people. That includes, I am quite demanding. I have extremely high standards when it comes to creative and I'm not afraid to say it. I think I've never been afraid to say what I believe in and I think people feel that and I think it is infectious that people can rise up to those challenges. I actually think people like to be led and be told, let's go here and push and so on. With the right people, and I think that's the big thing is to find the people that can have ideas to the same values as you do.
Charles:
I lied to you. I had three last questions. Here's the second to the last one. What do you mean by creativity? What is creativity to you?
Thomas Benski:
I would say two answers. Professionally, it's storytelling for me. Creativity equals the ability... I mean that in a broader sense. On a personal level, I think it's just humanity and the idea of connecting with a feeling or an idea. I think that they apply to one another, but I feel like creativity, not applied to my business, is a kind of much warmer kind of quite exciting thing about being a human being isn't it? Is like, the ability to just connect with a thought. I think, on the work basis, it's much more about telling stories that people care about.
Charles:
Last question. What are you afraid of?
Thomas Benski:
Failure. Someone's going to take it all away. It's funny, my previous investor, Harry Solomon, who's a very, very successful wealthy man. I think it's that immigrant mentality. I feel always someone's going to tap their shoulder and say, " Okay, it's all over," which is what happened to my dad, by the way. We thought we were very safe and so on. Then, everything got pulled under the rug and it's funny, there's absolutely no reason for me to feel that. No rush, my wife is very secure, I'm really secure, everyone's good, but I'm still terrified of that.
I think that drives me and I think that kind of pushes me further. I'm afraid of not living up to the potential that I see. I feel like that's also another big driver. I get frustrated for not being able to kind of fully do it, not because of an ego thing because actually I really care and I want to kind of share it with audiences or my team and so on, rather than, it's not like a legal thing I want to be on top of. I just really want to execute something big and have an impact and have a little footnote in the history books.
Charles:
So I wrap every episode with three themes that I've heard, that I think contribute to your success. So let me throw these at you and you can tell me whether they resonate with you. One is, I think, a willingness to follow your instincts, which you seem to have done almost from birth, and clearly I think has driven your success. Two is, taking responsibility for the situation and being willing to be the person out front who says, we're going to fix this and I'm going to show you how. Then I think the third is tenacity, that you just are relentless in your determination to create this thing that you so clearly have a vision for. Actually, the fourth one would be that you have such a clear vision and an articulation of it and I think that's incredibly powerful too. Do those resonate?
Thomas Benski:
Yeah. I think tenacity for sure. Yeah, I think they do. I think that yeah, those are good summary. That's why you're great at your job.
Charles:
So thank you so much for joining me on this. This has been amazing.
Thomas Benski:
I hope it was helpful, yeah.
