#165 - Benjamin Carew, CEO of Othership - On creating a revolution in productivity by controlling our work-environment

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give everyone of us the opportunity to deliver our best work by controlling our work environment. My guest is Benjamin Carew, Co-founder and CEO of Othership

Ben started his career as an engineer, working on electric and special vehicles for Ford, Ricardo and Nissan. He then led a team driving digital transformation at Ford, before moving to BP as a Digital Program lead.

Ben is passionate that the best commute is no commute. His ambition is to break down borders by making it possible for anyone to work from anywhere.

That’s how he started Othership. It’s is a membership for people who want to work the other way. It’s built around the belief in a new world of work that revolves around you. That adapts to your needs, and allows you to pursue the work you want to do, wherever you are. Where working for yourself doesn’t have to mean working by yourself. And where fulfilling work is a fundamental right, not a rare luxury.

Othership was founded to spark a global flo-working™ revolution. Inspiring people to adopt a new way of working controlled by them.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Ben to my podcast. We explore how the world has changed with regards to the way we work. We dig into the role of the workspace – and what important values it drives that we too often ignore. We discuss how critical it is (for creating traction) truly understand what users care about – and what drives their use case. And last but not least, we discuss Benjamin’s secrets to building a software business that people keep talking about.

Here are some of his quotes:

The way that we try to deliver value is to constantly seek for feedback and use our own service as well. So we live the life that we do. So we work from our spaces, if I'm not working from my spaces, then would I want to be paying that membership. If the answer is no, why am I not working from that space? Why am I not doing that phone calls from a space? Why am I not having a meeting from that space?

It’s just accepting that that's our place in this point is to take the pain away from building that relationship, building that connection, finding that right space.

It's just our responsibility day in day out to do that. And that's why we will do better than everyone else. Because our first point in is to just make sure that it does add value to you. And then I will worry about making money

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why often what customers buy from you is not at all what you instinctively think it is
2. That technically your product fits many people – but to thrive is to get really specific on their exact use case – and exceed expectations there
3. That to grow a position of advantage is to challenge your business by aiming to become your own best customer
4. That if your customers aren’t talking about you – ask them why. They’ll tell you.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Benjamin Carew
• Othership Website