Deep Dive with Hive — Nick Budden, CEO of Phase
Nick Budden, CEO of Phase
1. Short Introduction of yourself and your startup：
I’m a Canadian who came to Taiwan about ten years ago. It was a place I visited as a tourist while on an extended period of travel and fell in love with. I settled in after that tourist trip and just never left.
Our company is Phase — a powerful tool for professional UI/UX designers to create working designs, without code. You could call it a modern incarnation of Adobe Flash, or think of it as a no-code solution for professional UI/UX design.
It’s hard tech that we’ve been building for several years. We have 19 people working hard at it here in Taiwan, and we’re backed by some great VCs within Taiwan, in the US, and in Europe.
2. What inspired you to develop your idea into a startup?
Phase is all about “Creative Flow” — which is that feeling a designer gets when they’re really in the zone, and design just ‘flows’.
That’s a feeling that quite literally makes designers happy and made them fall in love with design in the first place.
We’re building Phase to help designers get into (and stay in) creative flow as much as possible. Existing tools pop them out of creative flow far too often, and designers today often spend more time writing specifications or doing handoff than they spend designing. We want to change that, and help designers get back to flow.
I think we’re extremely lucky in that we get to work on a project which purpose is (quite literally) to make people happy. If we succeed with Phase, we can put a tool in every designers’ hands that they can use to make themselves happier, almost every day of their long career.
3. What’s the biggest challenge you faced when starting a company and how did you overcome it?
Well, there’s a lot. You’ve got to figure out what you’re going to build, convince investors to get excited about it, and build a great team. This is all hard.
But what I’d say is a unique challenge to us is that the nature of the company we’re building doesn’t fit common startup patterns. For example, our product has long build-cycles of several years. Even the incumbent players, with all their cash and headcount in the hundreds of thousands, have underestimated the amount of time and effort required to build their products by a factor not of weeks or months, but of years.
So as a hard-tech company (but which often, people don’t realise is a hard-tech company) it can make it a bit harder to tell our story. Doing this as a B2B SaaS startup with most of our team in Taiwan, and our target market in the west (where we have a second office), also mixes things up for us.
On the one hand, building a company that goes against the grain of what people expect can be a very good thing. I love it, in a lot of ways. But in another sense, it makes it harder to tell your story quickly in a way that people would understand.
I don’t think this is our biggest challenge, but I think this is a unique challenge for us. Our biggest challenge, really, is simply that our tech is very challenging.
4. What is your dream and aspirations for the company going forward?
I want to build a product not only for UI/UX but a suite of web-based, collaborative products for a range of creative mediums. But I usually keep quiet about the size of that ambition, because people already think I’m too ambitious just going after UI/UX.
I’m saving talking about those ambitions publicly until after Phase is farther along. But we have a much larger vision than the one we’ve already shared.
5. Who is your role model, or Which public personalities have you been inspired by in your startup journey?
Ernest Shackleton for his determination, courage, and leadership.
Marcus Aurelius for the character of his leadership under circumstances wherein he could have easily gone the opposite direction (I gave my son the middle name Marcus).
E.D. Morel for his moral character and willingness to stand up for something he knew was right, even when it cost him.
Lincoln, and JFK for their leadership in hard times.
Donella Meadows and Russell Ackoff for their systems thinking, and Ackoff in particular for Idealized Design. Thomas Sowell for the clarity and depth of his thought, Richard Feynman likewise, same for E.O. Wilson. Don Norman for complexity in design. Larry Tesler for basic laws of design, you should look up “Tesler’s Law” if you’re a designer.
That’s off the top of my head…I’ve got a lot.
6. What keeps you awake at night?
My infant son.
7. What is your motivation that keeps you going every day?
I think the problem we’re trying to solve really matters, and if we succeed, we really can bring some more happiness into millions of designers’ lives, and I want to (though it’s a constant struggle) build a great workplace for our team members internally.
Between those two factors motivation is never really an issue.
8. What is your strategy when things don’t turn out the way you expect?
I keep a few structured journals. One of these is called “uncaught exceptions” and here I try to analyse why I was caught off guard. Below is the template for this journal:
1. What was my original reason for doing something? What did I know and what were my assumptions? What were my alternatives at the time?
2. How did reality work out relative to my original guess? What worked and what didn’t
3. Given the information that was available, should I have been able to predict what was going to happen?
4. Change What should I do differently? What did I fail to do? What did I miss? What must I learn? What must I stop doing?
Journaling on the above four questions helps me improve my thinking for the future. But at the end of the day, an over-analysis won’t be much help so journallng is the minor component. The major component is just to go back and try again.
9. What is the biggest difference you see from the start of your journey to where you are today?
That’s hard because a startup journey is the sum of a million small things, and never really punctuated by large/high-contrast changes.
I guess I’d say that I see the ecosystem here in Taiwan improving (thanks at least in part to Hive). I’ve been in Taiwan a long time, and the startup community has mostly been small and quiet for the majority of the time I’ve been here. Those winds are changing.
