I’m Craig, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Hadean, a deep-tech distributed computing company based in London, UK. I have over 25 successful years grounded in building and transforming technology-focused businesses and accelerating growth, and have been at the forefront of establishing Hadean’s strategic direction and team growth since early 2017.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur? 

To hire people smarter than me.

What’s the single most important decision that you made, that contributed to your business? 

Hadean is a deep tech company; the challenge with deep tech is proving that you have something concrete and mould-breaking and that it isn’t just a theory. In the early days of HadeanOS, I decided to leverage our technology to build Aether Engine - a real-time simulation platform that now acts as the cardinal application on top of our cloud-first OS. We did this to show the power, scale, and benefits of building on our tech. The benefits of doing so were two-fold. Firstly, it gave us real-world proof points for engaging in the gaming and life sciences sectors, providing the traction we needed to obtain funding; it also gave us practical and business-critical insights about our product that enabled us to initiate changes in our roadmap for the better.

What would be your top marketing tip, to grow a business that remains relevant and ensures customer engagement and success? 

The ability to truly understand your target customers, their challenge with their own ‘jobs to be done’ and be able to clearly communicate how your product can change their lives for the better. If you make sure you are adding value and they’re happy, the rest of your business will fall into place. Listen to your customers and build an authentic brand around their experience of using your product, then make sure you are telling that story to the world.

What are your thoughts on failure? 

Failure is part and parcel to learning and getting better. Failures are inevitable in start-ups because they’re the backbone of innovation and the search for a sustainable and successful business model. The most important factor is to make sure you mitigate the downside when making your decisions, so the risk/reward ratio is always in balance. The key is always to fail fast and iterate. I repeat this to my team all the time because it’s incredibly important: test, learn, and get better.

Do you have a morning routine or ritual to get your day started on the right foot? 

I am an early riser by nature, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learnt I do my best work early in the day. I typically get up around 5.30 am, grab a quick coffee, and read before hitting the gym. I like to read and listen to podcasts related to my work or business before going online. I avoid most communication, including email/slack/news, until after the gym. This routine brings clarity and focus for the rest of the day. During breakfast, I catch the news, scan my mail before reviewing my plans for the day, and then get going. I tend to batch my work into matching activities, i.e., meeting days vs. ‘working on the business’ days. I find that batching my time with similar activities is the most effective way to be productive.

How important is company culture, and what is your top tip to get it right? 

Culture is a seed that you plant, shape, and nurture; you have to let it develop and grow over time. Culture isn’t a set of trendy statements you pin on the wall. Culture is what you do together as a company – the good and the bad, and everything in between. It’s the battles you fight and the failures you overcome on your journey, the victories and laughs you have together over time as a group of people, the trust that develops as a result of winning and losing together – this is how culture is created. Of course, as a CEO, you have to help set boundaries and standards for the values that evolve as you grow. But, that’s the job of the CEO – to find and shape the ‘best of everyone’ so ‘this is how we do things here’ becomes your culture.

What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves? 

Are the assumptions and plans I have for my business still valid – i.e., is this a game I can play, win, and is it worth winning? Making sure you take time to stop and evaluate what you are doing and how impactful you will be if you’re successful– what does winning look like?

How do you believe the evolution of tech will affect your industry over the next 10 years? 

With the proliferation of edge and the Internet of Things, as well as the increasing adoption of AI and neural nets, business and scientific problems are rapidly shifting away from fast transactions and high-throughput but slow batch-processing, to applications that live and die on high-velocity intelligence and insight. Because of this rapid and constant change, we will see smarter devices and services that will make tech and man-to-machine interfaces significantly more advanced. Accessing and using information, data, services, and products should help make life easier and more productive, both personally and professionally. Take meetings for example, AR will make virtual meetings more engaging and interactive, and AI can reduce time spent on activities such as note-taking and scheduling. The Hadean platform is designed to address the core technological challenge of modern business and science - the programming of distributed systems to solve large and complex problems in real-time.

Any moments where you thought you’ve bitten off more than you can chew? 

At GDC in 2019, we decided to break the world record for the largest number of players in a single MMO game with CCP, the makers of Eve Online. We had just closed $10M of funding, and had considerable positive momentum, but no one thought we could do it, and we had no background in gaming. Despite this, we believed in ourselves, and we knew our technology was perfect for their use case. When the event kicked off, we had a slight glitch, and the game crashed, and as CEO, being live on stage at the biggest gaming event of the year with 10K players online trying to access the game, it felt like a pretty lonely place to be! We were quickly able to reboot and start again and went on to complete a mind-blowing 14k players in the game with people from 123 different countries and smash it! But for 30 mins I was stood there thinking, this wasn’t such a good idea!

How did you conquer those moments of doubt that so often affect entrepreneurs or stop many with great ideas – what pushes you through? 

Moments of doubt tend to be strongest during a crisis. During tough times, always keep an eye on the future and your ultimate destination – your reason for being and the big your idea that got your business off the ground in the first place. It can be too easy to get caught up in the day to day issues and short-term thinking. I always ask myself, “Are the challenges I face of my own making and within my control or external and out of my sphere of influence.”

This is a crucial differentiation and one that guides how I react and address each challenge. Doubt can paralyse you, not responding and not taking action is the worst thing you can do. Covid-19 is a prime example of an external event that is impacting every business across the world; it is not a problem of our making or within our control. You can also use tough times as an opportunity to implement strategies that can be beneficial in the long term. For Hadean, we recently pivoted the prioritisation of our roadmap, and in doing so, we began focusing on contagion simulation – a relevant and timely pivot in the day and age that we are living. By repositioning and rethinking our product and business strategy, we were able to secure a 12-month contract with the Francis Crick Institute, one of the world’s leading Life Sciences institutions, to support them in their fight against Covid-19. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take some time to journal and write things down, it is important to get stuff out of your head, so you are thinking clearly until you feel in control. From there, you can plan and push on.