Mark Little has the experience of working both as a journalist and for a social media giant. He used this experience to come up with his first success story Storyful, a social news agency. Now, he is doing it again with Kinzen. Little and Kinzen’s co-founder, Áine Kerr, want to tackle the information crisis which has spread across the Internet with ‘algatorials.’

Little also says that Kinzen could be used anywhere recommendations are made to a customer, meaning entertainment subscriptions could also be on the horizon.

He spoke to The Currency about how naïve he was the first time around when pitching Storyful to investors and what was different when seeking funding for Kinzen, what he learned from Twitter and the difference between being a manager and a leader.

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Sean Keyes (SK): Welcome to The Currency podcast. My name is Sean Keyes and I’m the finance correspondent with The Currency. I’m here today with Mark Little. Mark is the founder and CEO of Kinzen.

Hello, Mark.

Mark Little (ML): Hi, Sean. How are you doing?

SK: Mark used to be best known as a television journalist, but he’s now in his second act as a media entrepreneur. He started out in print journalism and moved to RTÉ where was a foreign correspondent and later presenter of Prime Time. In 2009, he quit RTÉ to found Storyful, which is a social news agency, later sold that one to News International in 2013. After that, he moved to Twitter Dublin, where he served as the company’s managing director of the Dublin office, which would be the European headquarters.

And in 2017, he left Twitter to give entrepreneurship another try when he founded Kinzen. It’s Kinzen that we’re here to discuss.

“With every start-up, just fall in love with the problem before you do anything.”

Mark Little

ML: That’s right, I’m the co-founder as well with Áine Kerr. We’re the dream team.

SK: So, tell me about Kinzen. I know roughly the scope of the problem that you’re working on. But just more specifically, who’s the target audience? And tell me a bit more about the problem that you’re trying to solve.

ML: I’ll start with the problem. With every start-up, just fall in love with the problem before you do anything. Myself and Áine, she had worked at Facebook, I’d worked at Twitter and we both realised that this fundamental problem that we tried to solve with Storyful was still there. It got worse every day. We all are just overwhelmed by the information in our news feeds. It’s just exponential growth. You wake up in the morning and it’s just more to contend with.

Our vision was to solve the overwhelming problem that we face, which is that citizens just don’t have trust in their news feeds. So that was the mission statement from the very beginning. We initially thought about how we could build a way for ordinary citizens themselves to filter out the bad stuff and promote the good stuff. We built an app. We had some incredible learnings from that. People didn’t want another news app, but the underlying technology, the artificial intelligence that we were building to try and help people moderate content was a big interest to publishers and to platforms.

“The very top where the fire is burning brightest and most fiercely at the moment is the big technology companies, who are starting to have to think about how they protect their users.”

Mark Little

So, we went from being a business which was a B2C company to being essentially an enterprise software company. So, we’re building the software, the algorithms, that are helping moderators make much better choices. Whether they’re working for a big content platform or they’re working for some online community. But the vision, the mission, the problem stays the same. The end product is hopefully helping citizens trust what they see when they turn on their phones in the morning or when they get onto their laptops. That’s a very big problem to solve. But essentially, the business model is a very traditional enterprise software model.

SK: You can talk about platforms, communities, publishers. What sort of scale of the company are we talking about? Because obviously online, everything blurs into each other, The community’s a different size. Would you be working more with the publisher end or at the giant social media end?

ML: It starts with a sweet spot where you’re thinking about building out a model. You’re thinking, what’s the first market I can go into, where’s the burning fire, the need for this company right now? And it just happened that a former colleague of mine working for a big content platform came along and said: “You’re building cool technology. Would it have an application for us?” This person was working for a big content platform, starting from scratch, trying to make sure that they’re not promoting misinformation, disinformation, toxic content. That was the start.

The very top where the fire is burning brightest and most fiercely at the moment is the big technology companies, who are starting to have to think about how they protect their users. But if you think about this problem going forward, we’re starting to see over the past, particularly eight months with Covid, and as we approach the vaccinations that will come – we’re starting to see this toxic, harmful content creep out from the big platforms we all know about into any online community where conversations are happening. Could be a gaming platform, could be an online marketplace.

“It’s really to elevate the skill of the editor with the kind of technology that we wouldn’t have had access to when we set up Storyful 10 years ago.”

Mark Little

Think about this, all online commerce itself has conversations going on. So what we’re starting to see is, the people who are weaponising social media – we kind of saw them with Storyful and I know about them from my days of Twitter – are starting to realise that they can spread this, in some cases politically motivated disinformation, and in some cases just ideological, to every place on the Internet where people gather to talk and where trust is important. So, yes, we’re starting at the big content platforms who have a big problem to solve – but increasingly starting to realise that there are other people, whether it be fitness activities… Yoga, would you believe, has been a host community for disinformation for the QAnon movement.

So, again, the size of the problem, even for myself and Áine, who have been steeped in this for maybe 10 years, really took our breath away when we started looking at the potential market for what we were building. But at the core of it, always, is the editor.

So, we’re just trying to work out ways, not technology for technology’s sake. There’s no fully automated solution here. It’s really to elevate the skill of the editor with the kind of technology that we wouldn’t have had access to when we set up Storyful 10 years ago.

SK: I’d like to talk about the technology and the interface of artificial intelligence and editors in a moment, but just to stick with that point of your customers and your target market.

It is something like companies or entities that are hosting conversations and you’re trying to elevate the quality of the conversations on, whether it’s huge communities like Twitter, small communities like a specialised interest forum. And you are helping those companies elevate the quality of the discourse on their platforms. Is that roughly right?

“We’re seeing as we come closer to a successful vaccine being launched, campaigns of deception attempting to undermine scientific evidence behind vaccines. And that is happening in places on the Internet you would never imagine.”

Mark Little

ML: The first most important thing is to make sure they’re not recommending false content or content that’s being weaponised in some form. For example, the QAnon movement, exported from the United States, we start seeing turning up in Peloton. We started to see through our research of the far-right in Europe, certain online databases owned by big companies being used to host death threats against journalists. What we’re trying first and foremost to do is create an awareness on the part of these big companies, or even those marketplaces, that you are being manipulated. Your users are at risk.

So, let’s first of all find a way not to promote the bad stuff. But as we move forward, we’re also underlying algorithms and recommendation systems. So, for example, my music, my TV, my movies are recommended to me. And it all feels very natural. But actually, what it is is recommendation systems that are built on algorithms that, right now, don’t recognise quality. They’re generally there to make you more addicted to the product. To make you more emotional.

“We see a vision of an Internet in which we have these recommender systems that reward us for seeking out good content as opposed to getting us addicted on whatever content is lying around.”

Mark Little

And so, long term, our mission would be to work with some of these platforms, these communities. So, anybody with a recommender system where they’re saying, “hey, you might like this”, we want to make sure that there’s quality built into those recommender systems. But first and foremost, the problem we’re solving is disinformation. So, for example, we’re seeing as we come closer to a successful vaccine being launched, campaigns of deception attempting to undermine scientific evidence behind vaccines. And that is happening in places on the Internet you would never imagine.

As I say, the yoga community is a case in point where QAnon was coming in. And spreading three innocuous words, “Save The Children”, in these wellness communities, which was actually their dog whistle as we would call it, to promote their theories in a community dedicated to people feeling good about themselves. So, it is quite amazing, the corners of the Internet that have this problem. And that’s the first thing we’re doing. But I think long-term, we see a vision of an Internet in which we have these recommender systems that reward us for seeking out good content as opposed to getting us addicted on whatever contents lying around.

SK: I saw actually Spotify is taking a step in that direction, aren’t they? There’s is not just solely a machine learning algorithm. It is a machine learning algorithm in combination with sort of a tastemaker, old-fashioned ANR person, who feeds their recommendations. So, is that the sort of model you’re trying to move towards?

ML: Yeah, we were inspired by Daniel Ek, the chief executive of Spotify. He talks about an “algatorial”. So, talking about the idea that the machines may actually help streamline the amount of content you have to see in your feeds every day. But there’s also an editor, or in the case of Spotify, someone who knows their music, recommending something to you. Engineering the serendipity. You know that famous moment when you hear an American podcast and they go, ‘huh…’ You know, something you didn’t expect in your feed. And I find that element of it to be super exciting.

“This is like 2008 with the financial system. We’ve had these algorithms that power an advertising system, the recommendation systems, are in a state of collapse.”

Mark Little

For all the talk of the platforms failing their communities, there are certain platforms that are starting from scratch and saying, ‘how can we engineer that creative moment of connection with the piece of music or an idea? Or in the case of Twitter, and again, I declare my interest here, I used to work for them, I’m a big believer their values are different to others, putting a label to say: “Hey, this is disputed or did you really read that article before you want to share it?”

There are so many ways that technology can play the role of spark of genius or spark of creativity, while at the same time, cutting out a lot of the noise that you don’t want to hear. I would compare it to one of the apps I have on my phone to help me sleep better, eat better, exercise better. They’re essentially constrained choices. They’re giving you an ability to control your life every day, and that, I think, is the great division right now on the Internet between companies that want to reward your best intention and companies that want to hijack your attention in a very unconscious way.

I think in the years to come, as we sort of see the next stage of the Internet, where I think there’s been a backlash against the way in which our privacy and our data is being abused, people taking a bit more control of their online lives. And people like Daniel Ek or Jack Dorsey deciding: “Hey, we want to reward that need for control.”

SK: And the companies that reward that need to do it the right way, i.e. your customers in turn getting rewarded by their customers. So, the reputation of a high-quality platform.

ML: You have to elevate really, and the currency of this new realm is trust. The notion the basis of trust is essentially that I’ve got your back, I’m watching out for you. I know that you’re in control of this environment, but I want to give you something that would make you think.

I think as we try to move into a new model where, at the moment, this programmatic advertising model in which the Internet is currently based is collapsing.

This is like 2008 with the financial system. We’ve had these algorithms that power an advertising system, the recommendation systems, are in a state of collapse. The platforms that will survive and thrive are the ones that are trying to trade into a higher value currency, and that is trust. And that’s why a service like ours that, to be honest, two or three years ago would have been seen as a peripheral concern is now central to everything, because if you can’t have that trust in the community, then you’re not going to persuade people to part with a subscription payment or trade up.

“It’s the public service bit that I worry about. Journalism is also a public utility – our shared facts. If we do not have the facts that we gather around as a community, we have no society.”

Mark Little

SK: I mean, trust is great and it’s good to get The New York Times or The Currency and know that you’re getting a fair and honest interpretation of events. But I suppose what people also find appealing is excitement, a bit of titillation. And that’s why, isn’t it, the media has sort of segmented in this way between the subscription trusted sources and un-paywalled, untrustworthy and often duplicitous sources of information? There’s a great piece called “The Truth is Paywalled, But The Lies Are Free“. It’s about this idea of the segmentation of the media market into trusted but expensive or free but worse than untrustworthy and maybe with a hidden agenda. How do you get around that problem that it’s not just a question of trust – that people, in a certain sense, enjoy QAnon and enjoy the lies. They get something from it that they’re not getting from The Economist.

ML: Listen, I think it’s time for us to think about news and information in two separate categories. One is the personal service it gives us that we’re willing to pay for. We’re willing to have The Currency subscription as I do, and everybody should, we’re willing to pay for the quality that gives us some sense of advantage or knowledge that’s useful to us in terms of our place, our profession, our passion, and we’re willing to pay for that. But if that’s all journalism is, it fails.

My worry is that, and it’s so fantastic to see sustainable business models coming in for journalism in this country. The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, and their new owners, The Currency. Thriving personal services for people who trade or who need information. It’s the public service bit that I worry about. So, journalism is also a public utility. Our shared facts, if we do not have the facts that we gather around as a community, we have no society.

We talk about public service media and we always just think RTÉ. I think we’ve got to broaden our definition of public service media, and that is anybody providing for free information that is essential to the working of a society. So, for example, the weather, the basic component. The Late Late Toy Show. Or, in some cases critical to our health, information about Covid, about mask-wearing, about the vaccinations.

I’m very happy to see this wave of innovation to support subscription journalism. But in solving the business model failure of the last generation, we’ve got to make sure journalism stays relevant in our public square. And I think people will constantly need entertainment. We’ll want that. We want to have a certain amount of information in our lives that just comes to us sort of almost passively. But I think there is always going to be demand for people to know that they have enough facts to make good decisions as good citizens. And that’s not about feeding them broccoli. That’s just about making the right thing really easy.

Mark Little: “There is always going to be demand for people to know that they have enough facts to make good decisions as good citizens.” Photo: Bryan Meade.

So, I get up in the morning. I know that I’m going to get information on the Dart service, if it’s running, if I’m going to commute to the city, but I’m also going to make sure that I have the information to protect my kids. And that is, for me, the battle that we fight, where we are.

Therefore, I would widen public service information to include the big content platforms. Also, potentially, influencers, people who’ve got big command, big followings online on a place like Tik Tok or Instagram. We have to be thinking of those people as being carriers of public information as well. So, yeah, that distinction helps. Great to see journalism as a personal service, but we also need to be fighting for that place, that public square, and make sure that it is supplying facts that we can gather around. All the statistics tell us where there’s a public service media organisation we have less polarisation. The BBC, RTÉ, and maybe if we broaden out that definition of public service media, that feels like a generational call to action for people who are caring about this information.

SK: For the high-quality sources, we talked about The Currency and The New York Times and so on. They’re all expensive and they’re expensive because the work of journalism is expensive. And it seems like with your… what did the Spotify man call it?

ML: Algatorial.

SK: Algatorial model, where you combine journalism with AI, you’re trying to figure out a more efficient, more scalable way to sort of deliver this. And maybe if you crack that part, you can make it more affordable. You can widen the circle of people who use it.

And so, you had Daniel Ek and Spotify as one example. I looked up another, which was just at the end of the Obama administration. The defence secretary announced what he called the centaur strategy. And the centaur strategy is apparently US intelligence agents are now going to work hand-in-hand with AI and that’s how they’re going to take on their adversaries. So, it’s something around this combination of human skill and human judgment with AI.

Can you tell us a bit more about the nitty-gritty details of how your system works, how people are paired with machines in this way in an editorial sense?

ML: Yes. There’s a horrible amount of clichés and words going around that that will sound awful. Even algatorial itself, hands up I’ll say that. In many ways, you only ever define and find words for something that happens in retrospect. So right now, what we like to think about is public service algorithms. Now, these would be essentially algorithms that reward editors.

“In machine learning, one of the biggest problems we have is what they call ‘garbage in, garbage out’.”

Mark Little

So, in our case, I’ll give you an example. We have a set of editors working for us who are out there looking for tell-tale signs that signify disinformation. Something that’s untrue, that is a specific example of being part of a bigger narrative like QAnon and we’re tagging that. We’re carrying a piece of data that says, “that’s why it’s wrong”. We put it in the system. The database that builds out of that starts to help us find things quicker. It starts to be training data for machine learning models which are notoriously bad if they’re not programmed correctly.

So, there are editors all the way through. In our case, we’re protecting people from information we know to be part of a campaign of disinformation. But if you think about the positive aspect of this, it could be that we start connecting people who care about music in the case of the Spotify recommendation engine, it’s finding people just like you who care about music, cared about this piece of music.

So that’s where the beauty of it comes in, the serendipity in the machine. But always, the most important thing is it’s not fully automated. It’s got an editor in there. In the old days, the nine o’clock news, which I used to work on, had an editor who decided what the nation saw. There was no feedback, really. We didn’t really care at the end of the day, except what the ratings were. But today with these algorithms, it’s a similar editorial function, but it’s constantly getting feedback from the communities, from the people who care about what they’re reading.

SK: So, Mark, the algorithms sort of amplify the editor’s judgment. And the editor, in turn, trains the algorithm, makes it more efficient. In time, do you need the editor? Does the algorithm get so good at what it’s doing that it doesn’t require human input and it can spot this information?

ML: It’s a great question. There’s a great researcher, who worked for Microsoft, said even if we could fully automate systems, we shouldn’t. Because in our system an editor makes the choice at the beginning and at the very end, the machine pops out a recommendation. And there’s an editor there at the end to say yes or no. In machine learning, one of the biggest problems we have is what they call “garbage in, garbage out”.

“I learned from the first time with Storyful to never get too excited about a big victory and never get too despondent about a moment where you’re failing, but just always have that middle ground.”

Mark Little

You put in the wrong data. It could be full of bias. For example, you could put in crime statistics from a city that reinforce racial prejudice. So, there always should be an editor at every point in this process.

Where it gets really exciting is when you start to see individual citizens getting the choice. So, for example, you take a route to the airport. There are thousands of ways I can get from this studio to Dublin airport, but the machine will offer four or five and then learn from me what I want. Do I want the scenic route, the quick route, the one with the toll? So, the really exciting part of this new age, where we will have these editorial algorithms, is when citizens themselves, in their online experience, are getting choices, are being prompted to say you have a choice now, which way do you want to go? And that data becomes almost more important than the editor’s choice. So, the big danger in all this is that we’ll send people down these rabbit holes and that’s where the balance comes in. That everybody should share certain facts and then customise the experience to suit their best intentions.

“Whatever you have on the whiteboard on day one before you go for your first raise or your customer pitch is going to change and you’ve got to be able to be led by the customer rather than be sort of jumping around and changing your strategy.”

Mark Little

SK: When you started out with Kinzen a couple of years ago, you had a slightly different vision for the company and you’ve pivoted since then. A lot of great companies have pivoted, Slack and YouTube and others. So, there’s no shame in it. But it’s a euphemism and it sounds like a difficult thing to do. Sounds like personally difficult and operationally difficult. What’s it like to completely change direction?

ML: I think for myself and Áine a lot of this is muscle memory. You’re in a situation where I learned from the first time with Storyful to never get too excited about a big victory and never get too despondent about a moment where you’re failing, but just always have that middle ground. And for us, I quote very few tycoons, I don’t particularly like ripping off people’s quotes, but Jeff Bezos said it well when he said: “Be stubborn on your vision, but agile on the detail.”

So, for myself and Áine, the vision we have today was exactly the vision we had day one of Kinzen. We started out with the most difficult problem, trying to give citizens the controls and realised that just wasn’t going to work, not at this stage at least. So, we focused on the technology part of it. It wasn’t really a difficult choice when we started to get customers. I think that’s the second thing we learned with Storyful and now Kinzen is to find out what’s the problem for the customer and build your solution around that.

Co-founder of Kinzen Mark Little. Photo: Bryan Meade

And as you learn more about the customer’s needs, your product has to respond. So, whatever you have on the whiteboard on day one before you go for your first raise or your customer pitch is going to change and you’ve got to be able to be led by the customer rather than sort of jumping around and changing your strategy. It never felt that difficult because constantly we were led by customers who said, ‘that’s interesting. Can you make it do that?’ When you’re doing that kind of change and that kind of evolution, it feels less insecure, perhaps, than people from the outside think.

SK: Not long ago, you pitched to some VCs, I think in Denmark, and you came away with €1.6 million. Early-stage companies, when you’re pitching to a VC, the company is by its nature loss-making and you’re pitching some imagined future, some imagined business model. You’re saying in five-years-time you’re going to make your money back because I’m going to build this thing over here, this business model, and it’s going to be worth some large multiple of what you paid me.

So, what did you tell them your business model would be in five year’s-time?

ML: Yeah, we were basically saying there is a problem. There’s an information crisis. We need editorial solutions to solve it. In five year’s- time, we will be that engine.

SK: And companies will pay for it.

ML: Yeah, the big thing was it was primarily going to be the big platforms, the publishers and then these other online communities. But I have to say, one thing I learned from my very first pitch with Storyful, I was so naïve. I went into this particular Irish investor who I’m still friends with, and he sort of asked me: “Well, what are your revenues in five years’ time?”

“In a moment of international dislocation, we had an advantage that many start-ups don’t have. We had the scars.”

Mark Little

And I was looking at him, looking at me. And I’m like, but that’s fiction. I don’t know what’s going to happen in six-months’ time. And I sort of realised that it was bullshit, but he knew that it was bullshit. And I knew that he knew that I knew that it was bullshit. And he said to me: “I’m not looking for you to give me all the answers. I just need to know that you’ve asked yourself all the questions about who is your competition, what size is the marketplace, where are you going to be in two years’ time, one year’s time, six month’s time.”

And so this time around, it was Covid, remember when we were out there raising at the beginning of the year and we thought we were coasting toward a nice, easy seed round. And then suddenly it all hit and we realised that investors were out there, were asking questions that perhaps they wouldn’t have asked in a more stable time. They were taking longer. They were waiting for the next shoe to fall in the commercial sense.

We just raised this money and the headline will be out there and it will make it seem like it’s easy. It’s not. I have to say, if myself and Áine had not been second-time entrepreneurs, I’m not sure we would have got the result. That’s not to reflect on the faith of the people who invested in us. A great Danish media accelerator, great Irish BVP. I think they just took longer and they trusted us. And that’s what it came down to. In a moment of international dislocation, we had an advantage that many start-ups don’t have. We had the scars. We knew that this was about constructing potential solutions and asking all the questions.

Yesterday I was reading Brian Caufield, who was talking about how difficult the environment is for start-ups right now. And I think he’s absolutely right. I have to say, it’s tough. Like I’ve got turned down by way more many people than have given me money on this one and then Storyful.

And again, it’s a tough environment. So sometimes, we come out, make these announcements. It all looks so easy. But what it didn’t reflect was the level of trust you’ve got to build with people who write big cheques, but also are extremely tough in impressing upon the entrepreneur that they want to know how they worked out their models. They want to have faith in their judgment. And most of all, they want to be resilient when things go wrong.

“A manager walks into a room and everybody knows that person knows what they’re doing. A leader walks into a room and everybody walks out going, I know what I’m doing.”

Mark Little

So thankfully, we got people that we know now after the trust they’ve given us, after this sort of international dislocation, that we got the right people and hopefully they know they got the right people in Áine and myself and our team.

SK: You described being grilled when you started Storyful coming out of RTÉ, a TV journalist into the world of VC. That transition…

ML: Brutal.

SK: This time around, you went into Twitter, which is a different type of job. You were sort of an upper manager at a huge company. And it was a very particular type of company. It was one of the world’s biggest social media firms. And so, I’m just curious as to what did Twitter spark in you or what did it give you and why did you found Kinzen after Twitter?

ML: So, I was really busting my ass at Storyful to be a good manager because I was a journalist. And journalists are generally erratic. They don’t pay a lot of attention to detail. They’re not always on time. We’re not consistent sometimes with our judgments. And I think I took a lot of the journalists into Storyful, which was a rock-and-roll rollercoaster ride. But at the end of it all, I became a much better manager. I had good mentors, people like Ray Nolan, people I worked with who were saying, listen, you’ve got to be stable, more consistent.

So at the end of Storyful, I really wanted to go into a big company and I really wanted to hold a high executive position because I thought I was ready to be a manager. To be a good corporate citizen, to fight for the company, to lead a team. And in Twitter, I realised the difference between a manager and a leader. A manager walks into a room and everybody knows that person knows what they’re doing. A leader walks into a room and everybody walks out going, “I know what I’m doing”. So, leaders decentralise power. And in Twitter, what I learned was I was managing a team of over 200 people, doing 20 different jobs. I had to get up every Friday, and this was at a time when Twitter was doing very badly financially, and make people consistently believe in the vision of the company, even if things were going to go to shit.

“I said I’m so excited to be here taking on this challenge. And he took me aside and he said, you can’t be excited every week. You got to come up with a consistent message that is realistic if you’re going to maintain trust and faith here.”

Mark Little

And I learned out of that a certain quality of consistency, resilience and how that can be infectious if a leader is curious and empathetic and it was just learning more emotional intelligence. So this time around, with Kinzen, and my team may not share this faith, but I feel like a much better leader this time around, whereas the first time was trying to be a good manager, make people feel like, you know, I had it together.

Now I care less about that and care more about the idea that everybody in the company feels like they have a hand on the lever and they know what the vision is and they’ll survive because they have that clarity. And I learned that from Twitter, which, to be honest, was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. Very short, but it was super exciting to me to be scared silly on the first day I walked in, to be honest.

SK: There’s a lot of learning in life, isn’t there?

ML: There’s a guy who took me aside, Barry Collins, if he’s listening. I sent him my first tee-time, which is the speech to the staff, and I said I’m so excited to be here taking on this challenge. And he took me aside and he said, you can’t be excited every week. You got to come up with a consistent message that is realistic if you’re going to maintain trust and faith here, and that forced me to sit back down again and think about that a lot.

And I’ve never forgotten that advice. And I think that for me, when I was joining Twitter, they give you a choice of mantras from the company, that you want to put on your laptop. And mine was something like…

SK: They give you a choice of four.

ML: It’s that kind of company, right? Silicon Valley. And you get to love it after a while. So, mine was like Communicate Fearlessly to Build Trust. And it was on my laptop. At the end, I took it off and I’m like, no, no, no. For a good leader, it’s communicating consistently that builds trust. And that’s what I learned from people that are smarter than me in Twitter.

I’m very, very glad of that experience. But at the same time, ironically, when I learned that lesson, I thought, God, I’ve got to get out and do this again.

I don’t want to stay in a corporation. I actually want to get out there and build something from scratch with this new awareness that I have as a better leader. And so that was kind of a reason for Kinzen as well as wanting to solve that bigger problem.

SK: Mark Little, that’s a good place to leave it.

ML: Sean, thanks a million.

SK: Thank you.

Mark Little co-founded Kinzen with journalist and entrepreneur Áine Kerr. Photo: Bryan Meade

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