Debtset – Bailiff-Sheriff Aust MEMBER Login
We Are Hunted creator tells it like it really is
SUBSCRIBER EXTRA /
‘The life of a startup is all about depression and agony and failure and then incredible happiness and joy and accomplishment. We can’t live life in a straight line, we need the rollercoaster of expression.’ – Stephen Phillips
WHEN Stephen Phillips walked onto the Creative3 stage for a question and answer session with Creative Enterprise Australia chairman Michael Smellie, there was a brief and revealing exchange.
In an effort to explain how influential Mr Phillips had become in the music world since selling music discovery platform We Are Hunted to Twitter in November 2012, Mr Smellie – himself a music industry expert with leadership roles at Sony BMG, Bertelsmann and the Australian Film Television and Radio School – used the analogy that Mr Phillips would soon be “walking the red carpets of the world”.
“No, I don’t walk the red carpet,” Mr Phillips assured delegates. 
As the Q&A on the evolution of entrepreneurship unfolded over the next 30 minutes, it became increasingly clear that Stephen Phillips is not motivated by the trappings of success that must follow when a start-up is sold to one of the world’s biggest social media empires.
Twitter’s debut on the New York Stock Exchange on November 7 last year valued the company at more than $25 billion.
Twitter’s acquisition of We Are Hunted – which provides the foundation technology for Twitter #music – means that Mr Phillips and his co-founders Richard Slatter and Michael Doherty are now part of that sphere of influence.
As with many start-up success stories, its new-found influence has come off the back of a long journey of failure, stagnation, hard-won gains and a single-minded determination that has seen Stephen Phillips evolve through inevitable highs and lows.
“The life of a start-up is all about depression and agony and failure and then incredible happiness and joy and accomplishment,” Mr Phillips said. “We can’t live life in a straight line, we need the rollercoaster of expression.
“As creative people we have to go and look on the very edges of what’s legal and what people condone and then go there. That’s where we live. Ignore rules, read them and then throw them away.
“Whatever the convention is, that’s what everybody else is doing and that’s not creative and that’s not original. If you’re not original and not taking risks then people won’t notice what you do, and to me, that’s what it’s all about,” he said.
Mr Phillips’ style is authentic and no-nonsense and the story of his journey to the heart of the tech world in Silicon Valley went down well with the mix of Creative3 delegates who witnessed the Q&A session. Many told organisers of Creative3 his session was a highlight of their experience.
“I’m a bit of a believer in the predestination of these things, in that people arrive where they’re supposed to be at the time they’re supposed to be there. I don’t believe the friendships and connections I made in the last five years are by accident,” he said.
“We didn’t invent the idea [for We Are Hunted], it happened from a collaboration where peers and friends came together and created this thing and then the world said ‘we love this’, so I knew that it was real. Once we found that thing, I knew that it was enormously valuable because the world told me that it was.
“It’s a massive relief to find a purpose when you’re a small company. When you find that, it then becomes an execution thing where your responsibility is to make sure you can capitalise on it,” Mr Phillips said.
Having achieved an exit for We Are Hunted Mr Phillips said he was happy to take stock and watch Twitter evolve from the inside.
“I’m genuinely curious about what happens to Twitter as a cultural phenomenon,” he said.
“The coolest part of Twitter is that its audience is addicted to it. All those celebrities you see come and visit there, it’s not staged, they’re not inviting them, they just want to come and be part of that once-in-a-generation feeling. And it is a special feeling.
“I appreciate that I’m incredibly lucky to see it from the inside and as a creative person, I desire an audience for what I do. Twitter gives me an incredible audience.
“You’re never left without knowing what’s going down as you have the chance to launch things to half a billion people and I love it! I’m addicted to shipping and launching things,” Mr Phillips said.
An addiction which will surely keep Phillips riding that rollercoaster of expression with every new product he develops and launches.
Stephen Phillips returned to his home city of Brisbane in November where took part in a Creative3 pop-up event with 20 residents at QUT Creative Enterprise Australia. The pop-up events are designed to connect local start-ups with global creative entrepreneurs who’ve found success in scaling their businesses.
Creative Enterprise Australia will roll out more ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ pop-up events for the growing Brisbane start-up community in 2014.
ends
This article has been adapted from a report by Jess Daly who was at Creative3 as a media advisor to QUT Creative Enterprise Australia. The author compiled the report from Stephen Phillips’s remarks on stage and during a one-on-one interview ‘on an outside stairwell where we chat in the sunshine about the perfect storm that led to the creation of We Are Hunted’. The original article appeared in the QUT Creative Enterprise e-newsletter.
