Hello world. We are NGL.

18 months ago, I gave myself 2 years to find my next business venture. If you know me, you’ll understand it took a lot to give myself that much time. Surely I could find it faster than that!?

But, of course, timing is a major driver in business as it is in life. I needed to allocate sufficient time to explore actively and widely - making myself alive to possibility - while also waiting for the next thing to present itself. The first thing is in my control. The second is not.

The overachiever in me is pleased to report that it took me a year to find it! The strategist in me is grateful that I started searching when agentic AI was being born. 

Back in September ‘23, I had just returned from a sabbatical where I focussed on family time and on studying generative AI. After committing to this 2-year period of searching for my next commercial venture, I started exploring widely - I ran a programme for entrepreneurs, I put together a boutique private equity offering, supported the CEO of a large international company on issues of strategy and innovation, built an AI assistant that could see and talk, built an AI group collaboration app, and helped commercialise our family farm. 

Breaking my leg (badly!) during this time was strangely supportive of the task at hand. There’s nothing like spending 3 months in bed to focus the mind, and then 2 hours of daily rehab to rediscover the value of discipline. I digress.

Then one day in September last year I heard chatter on Twitter (X) about this new “audio overview” feature that Google Notebook’s team had just launched. 

It blew me away.

If you haven’t seen it, you have to try it. 

After uploading any document, presentation or link to a website, it generates an audio podcast that helps you quickly understand the subject matter through a casual, editorialised, highly engaging 2-person conversation. 

It feels like magic. And it sounds like real people. But, of course, it isn’t either. 

It is a very clever implementation of generative AI with the latest voice models from Google’s Deep Mind that no one else has access to.

My first thought was that I had seen the future of education.

But after a few days, I realised that wasn’t quite right. I hadn’t seen the future. This is how learning has always been. 

We learn best by listening to others. And all the better when those people know enough about us to make the learning personal. Even better if we can talk back and have a conversation with them!

This is the domain of great teaching and 1-1 tutoring - the gold standard for any learner who can afford it. We’ve known this since forever, and understood it through research since the 1980s (see Bloom’s 2 sigma problem). While we’ve made progress in using technology to close the gap between the efficacy of group and 1-1 instruction, a meaningful gap still exists today.

Last September, NotebookLM didn’t show me the future of education. It showed me how ancient learning can be scaled in a digital, AI-enabled world; how these technologies could deliver smarter, faster, even more human online education experiences.

I’ve written a separate post titled “Scaling ancient learning in an AI-enabled world”. It deals with the more technical nuances and theoretical underpinnings of using these technologies for anyone who wants to go deeper. 

Bottom line: This technology - when it’s well integrated - doubles learning gain. It makes learning more personal; it makes it faster. This has major implications for teaching and learning, similar to the impact streaming video and broadband had 15 years ago that led to the validation and proliferation of current generation online courses as we know them today.

And now, the next generation of learning is coming. 

All of this to say that 6 months ago I found my next business venture. I’m back in EdTech. I’m all in!

I have an incredible team.

As we’ve navigated the last 6 months, I’m increasingly aware that something is different in building teams today. In just 180 days, our team of 7 people have worked with a range of generative AI tools, agentic AIs and esteemed faculty at world leading Universities to build online courses that feature AI tutors and copilots that, in our most recent presentations, achieved an NPS of 94.

That’s a long sentence. My takeaway: great people + generative and agentic AI = new levels of productivity. 

The way we’re building our team is not different from the way we’re building the next generation of education. We’re combining people + AI to achieve outsized results. 

As always, it starts with great people.

Hagen Rode and I partnered at university, where we came first in all our tech projects. We've also worked together on previous ventures. He now leads all technology at NGL.

Robyn Costa was part of the founding team at GetSmarter and we’ve been working together for almost 20 years. Robyn runs Strategic Projects and fills in all the important gaps. Always.

Sammy-Jane Every led 150 people building current gen online courses for the world’s leading Universities. She works with me on strategy and runs our product and commercials.

Ester van der Walt’s exceptional mind is the reason we have been able to marry pedagogy and gen AI technology to create AI tutoring experiences that yield an NPS of 94. Just exceptional.

Jannah Ruthven leads Design. Her rare full stack combination of marketing smarts, copywriting, design and operational management means there is little we do that she doesn’t touch. And make beautiful.

Stella Pickard is my Executive Assistant and without whom I wouldn’t be able to operate across so many different parts of my life. She makes everything better. She is also a lawyer and tech entrepreneur.

And while we leverage generative and agentic AI a ton - just to be clear, we are hiring.

We have a small group of amazing investors who are close to home for me: Graham and Mandy Paddock, Rob Paddock and Samer Salty - people whose views and support I value deeply.

What we’re doing wouldn’t be possible without leading thinkers from global institutions. From leading Universities to publishers and corporates, we’re working with people who are bold and passionate about their work in education. They care about innovation; and they care about doing it responsibly. They want a hand in shaping tomorrow. It is such a privilege to work with them.

We’re on a mission to inspire the use of gen AI and voice models in the next generation of online courses. This is why we call ourselves Next Gen Learning (NGL).

We are what we do. 

Watch this space.

More at www.nxgl.ai

Executive Assistant to Sam Paddock

Location: Cape Town, South Africa.

Overview:

I am seeking a service-oriented, highly organised Executive Assistant to support me, my Family Office and my family. This role demands a proactive approach to managing a wide range of responsibilities, from project, property and office management to personal and family logistics. The ideal candidate will give me confidence that they will get ahead of me, develop a reputation for exceptional service to me and my small Family Office team, and seamlessly integrate into our personal and professional lives. Discretion and confidentiality are paramount. 

Key Responsibilities:

• Project and Team Coordination: Participate in project management and team coordination through various communication platforms, ensuring smooth day-to-day operations across different facets of my professional and personal life.

• Meeting and Diary Management: Oversee daily, weekly, quarterly and annual meeting rhythms. Schedule meetings, manage diaries, and oversee the organisation of family and business events, highlighting important dates and arranging gifts.

• Office Management: Maintain my home office and help me prepare for monthly operating and finance meetings with a variety of stakeholders on different projects.

• Financial Management: Oversee budgeting, reporting, payments, and liaise with financial management services, ensuring accuracy in transaction allocations and payroll.

• Property Management: Oversee the day-to-day operations of the family’s primary residence, coordinating with contractors and service providers for maintenance and upkeep. Provide support to the family’s General Management team at our family estate, Drakenskloof.

• Family Administration: Manage household staff, philanthropy, insurance, medical, vehicles, pets, and other family functions.

• Travel and Logistics: Plan and book travel arrangements, including flights, accommodation, visas, and other logistics.

Skills and Qualifications:

• Strong communication skills and the capacity to work independently and as part of a team.

• Exceptional organisational and time-management skills with the ability to prioritise tasks in support of multiple project priorities.

• Proven experience as an Administrative or Executive Assistant or in a similar role with a comprehensive understanding of project, property and office management, personal support tasks, and financial management.

• Discretion and confidentiality are paramount.

• Proficiency in office software, including word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software, as well as the ability to quickly learn new tools and software.

• Flexible and adaptable, with the willingness to take on tasks as needed to support the family and business.

• Undergraduate degree is an advantage.

• Valid driver’s license and personal transportation.

To Apply:

Please send your resume and a cover letter detailing your experience and why you believe you would be a good fit for this role to sam@paddocks.io.

Break my leg; fortify my foundations

12 days ago I broke my left tibia and fibula while playing Padel. It was brutal. I feel like I’ve lived a year in a week. Now, post surgery and as I emerge from a pain-medication induced fog, I begin the 6-month rehabilitation process and I’m energised to do it well. The following comprises excerpts from my journal in blog post format.

The irony is that I have felt so strong this year.

Kicking off shortly after the new year, I had a near perfect record of daily breathing and mobility exercises. It’s just 15 minutes each morning - 7 minutes of breathing and 8 minutes of mobility - but I have found this practice to be a source of calm and strength each day. Coupled with daily writing, a clear personal plan for the year, and several high quality alignment discussions with the people who work with me, I have felt strong and purposeful.

One of the lenses I take to my life is that of my “rhythms”. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual rhythms. I love a rhythm!

Keri and I recently started a monthly “Padel and dinner” with our close friends, Robs and Dan. It has been fun. But they also white washed us last month, which meant that this next match was always going to be important. 

And so as last Tuesday evening’s match began, we came out of the blocks firing! Keri was playing exceptionally well. We quickly went 5-1 up. They clawed back to 5-3. And now Keri was serving for the set. At 30 all, I knew the next point mattered a lot. After a good service, Dan lobbed me and I stepped back to take the volley. I remember falling back on a peculiar footing and suddenly hearing what someone at the Padel club later described as “the sound of a gun shot”. 

I knew instantly that I had broken my leg and went down on the ground. I could see the different levels between my mid and lower left shin. This was bad.

But there was no immediate pain. Shock is an amazing thing.

One of the people at the club was a trauma medic and helped put a small splint on my leg. The pain was now unbearable, but the small splint gave me confidence to hold the two pieces of my leg together. Several large men hoisted me up under my arms while I did my best to minimise movement at the break site. We got into a car and drove to the local hospital’s Emergency Room. Every bump in the road was cause for a primal scream.

Sometime early the next morning I wrote:

I broke my lower left leg in both bones while playing Padel. I came down twisted on my left foot and heard a clear crack.

I knew it was broken clean through. I couldn’t move my shin without lifting the whole foot and shin all together.

There was no pain at the start. And then every move brought all the pain in the world.

Keri, Dan, Robs and others at Padel were so helpful. I got in a car.

The doctor took X-rays. That was sore.

Then the doctor said they need to snap back the knee. They would give me Ketamine for this.

They gave me the Ketamine. It was a wild wild trip. I felt some of the pain. But I felt I was going on a journey outside of myself flying through the air with oranges and reds as the prominent colours. And Dragons. It’s like I was one with and inside of so many things, and it was beautiful.

Now I am in the wards for sleep. They gave me more pain meds. And more sleeping pills.

Next pain meds are at 6.30am. I can feel I am going to need them.

As I wobble my leg, it feels like it is in two parts. I’ve never felt this before. Legs are always solid. My left leg is not solid.

It sounds like the operation will only happen on Thursday, which is my kids’ birthday. And tomorrow will be about CT Scan to look for ankle issues. 

Here is my x-ray post break. You can see my hands and wedding ring clearly in the x-ray because there was no chance I was going to let it go! Next to it is a picture of me before surgery with a clay figurine my kids (and Nana!) had made for me - it’s me playing Padel with a cast on my leg!

I think there are going to be many challenging periods to this recovery, but the most challenging part to date was being told the day after the break that my operation would only take place the following morning.

As I sat with the feeling that I needed to get through the next 17 hours, I reflected on a difficult truth in my life: I tend to value speed over smart.

I knew that statistically I had a better chance of a successful surgical procedure the next morning with a well rested surgeon and clean operating room, but I still pushed hard to have surgery at the end of the day so that I could close the pain and the uncertainty. In the end, the decision was made for me. And I was deeply reflective about this tension between speed and smart. Sometimes the smart thing to do is to go fast. But in this case the smart thing was to wait, tolerate the pain and have surgery the next morning.

Here are x-rays post surgery, showing the intramedullary nail and screws. They made me feel like I was “back together” again.

I feel like the world is telling me “Slow and steady, Sam”. I am listening.

I feel like I need to accept more pain in my life. It’s part of life. It’s an important source of growth. And yet I avoid it so easily. Not anymore.

I am fortunate to be a very positive person. The pain, the uncertainty, the immobility has been tough at times. And while I haven’t battled to find the positives, it has been tempting to wonder “If I just didn’t go for that shot then I wouldn’t be in this position”. A sliding doors moment.

It’s a useless line of logic. But I think it must be a common lament for anyone who has suffered misfortune. “If only I hadn’t…”

A few days ago I did a simple exercise of inverting the responsibility to be mine by writing “I chose to break my leg so that I could…” I know that might sound daft. And although this injury has had me reflect on spirituality a fair amount, I didn’t do the exercise because I believed it to be true but rather as a way to explore myself in this challenging time. I wrote:

I chose to break my leg so that I could:

• Slow down 

• Have long conversations with people who are important in my life 

• Truly depend on others for survival

• Appreciate others looking after me 

• Have my kids serve me breakfast

• Really appreciate my wife’s talent in cooking and my love for food

• See where the pressure points are in relationships between people who are close to me (they come out in crisis!)

• Pause on all the petty shit

• Stop drinking wine for a while

• Experience a Ketamine trip (fortunately, my trip was good)

• Think about God 

• Open up 70% of my daily diary 

• Experience real pain

• Do something (rehab) really well that can only be done slowly and steadily.

There were a few more playful things that have come to me since then:

• Have a pizza picnic with my family in my bedroom for dinner

• Watch my daughter genuinely care for me

• Have clear parental roles at home (Keri is now looking after 3 children as the sole parent!)

• Appreciate a simple change in weather (I felt joy when it rained last week)

• Have my dogs sleep in my bedroom (they didn’t before the accident)

In “Man’s search for Meaning”, Victor Frankl defined logotherapy as the process through which we find meaning, often through suffering. 12 days post my accident, I am clear on my meaning from this time: to fortify my foundations for the next 20 years - quite literally, a titanium nail and screws in my left tibia, and then as a guiding principle for how I live my life. The application of this principle is beyond the scope of this public blog. As I explore its implications, I feel clear and energised.

It turns out that there is no irony in breaking my leg after starting the year so strong. This is my path.

Now, to do a slow and steady recovery well. 

8 - 12 weeks without any pressure on my left leg is a long time! I went on a family sabbatical last year to Deia, Mallorca. We were there for 4 months, and I find it almost incomprehensible to think that I won’t be able to put weight on my left leg for this same period of time. A “sabbatical from walking” if you will! But this is what foundational change feels like - incomprehensible until I’ve done the work to incorporate it into my life.

I am grateful for the people who have held me in their thoughts and made an outsized effort to support. I am grateful for modern medical technology and Dr Workman’s surgical skill. I am grateful for pain meds and anti-inflammatories. I am grateful for a positive, purposeful, productive mindset that can steer me through this time and leave me stronger.

Introducing Drakenskloof by Kerala

Friends! We have news.

This last year has been a journey of renewal at Kerala.

A little over 12 months ago, we made the decision to start sharing Kerala with guests beyond our immediate family and friends. As our understanding of high-end hospitality has grown, so too has our excitement for and expectations of what Kerala can be.

Names are important. To overcome the challenge of borrowing a name like "Kerala", and in pursuit of capturing and communicating our distinct experience, what you’ve come to know as Kerala will now be known as Drakenskloof.

While the familiar mandala remains part of our logo, Drakenskloof, translated as "Dragon's Valley", is now the primary brand for our property. Towering folded mountains, the vibrant reds and greens of the Cape Floral Kingdom, and the property's many contrasts (untamed luxury, hot and cold water sources, and more) all feed into this new identity of our Dragon's Valley.

An exclusive-use mountain sanctuary, nestled in the Cape Floral Kingdom and wrapped in high service excellence, we promise to continue to be a space that is all about connection. With inside and outside. With yourself. With each other.

Start Up in Lock Down: the story of JEFF so far

Musings on people, strategy and growth in building a fitness business with a work-from-home team

The 13th of March, 2020, was a particularly hard day at JEFF.

News of the Coronavirus had gripped us all. After a record prior sales month, the beginning of the pandemic saw our revenues literally fall off a cliff. We cancelled our lease, moved to WFH, and retrenched several roles. Telling people they had lost their jobs over Zoom will remain one of my professional lows, forever.

That evening Johno, my business partner, drove home and fell to his knees in his driveway. After a gruelling year of building a largely gym-based digital coaching business he thought we were finally done. So many business owners were in the same position. But his wife, Julie, had a different view. She came outside, told him to dust himself off and get back in the game.

Over the prior 6 months Johno had worked closely with Didi, our fellow business partner, and a broad range of rockstars at JEFF HQ, to codify and grow a 1-on-1 fitness coaching business. We were trying to figure out how to digitise what personal trainers do, add nutrition support for optimal results and get it to scale. I had played a supportive role while funding the business in its early stage.

While our purpose was clear: help people change their lives through daily fitness; our future was now anything but clear.

We were down to 13 team members and our product, 1-1 digital fitness coaching, felt like it had no future. We had already been battling with the economics of acquiring customers in a highly competitive space, serving them to achieve dependable results, and all the while trying to generate sufficient margin to sustain a small business. Maybe the coronavirus had just sped up our demise?

We dug in, with an uncompromising focus on how best to serve our customer in this crazy time.

Two weeks later we launched live daily workouts in Facebook for free. A collaboration with Discovery Vitality saw this grow to hundreds and then thousands of people joining us live each day. And then 27,000 people joined us for SA’s Biggest Workout on the 13th of April. A week after that we launched a new product, JEFF Life, for just R200 per month, giving people access to what is now 50 live workouts a week and a library of thousands of inspiring, energising, motivating 30-minute workouts. Our tagline became “JEFF is the new gym”. People made bumper stickers and put them on their cars. Social media blew up in support of what we were doing. We spiked to 20,000 active users a day on social media. A new product - part freemium, part paid - had been born. And new life had been blown into our team.

Little did we know back then how important complimentary, interlocking products were going to be in order to sustaining a digital fitness business. But more on that in our evolving strategy below.

First, the human stuff.

Human performance precedes operating performance, which precedes financial performance. Wise words from Mark Lamberti, who I am fortunate to count as one of my mentors.

Human performance during Covid is a challenge for all business leaders. In reflecting on the last year at JEFF, I’m thoughtful on human performance during Covid and specifically in the context of a startup.

In talking with other business leaders in this time, it became clear that many well established businesses initially found it easy to trade on many years of relationships with their team members. Zoom wasn’t nearly as fatiguing when you had known the person on the other side of your screen for a few years. But for anyone starting up during Covid, we were recruiting people over Zoom and only had the benefit of meeting them in person many months later, if at all. To deal with this dynamic, we held what we called “Daily Alignment” with everyone in the company in attendance at 9:30am every day. This gave us the chance to feel connected to everyone else, checkin on our emotional states, and do our best to catch the seeds of misalignment early. It worked well. But as time went on it became a heavy 30-minute tax we paid every day. As lockdown levels decreased, we moved it from a daily rhythm to a weekly rhythm. It still serves us well today to run a bi-weekly team alignment meetings in what is still a WFH organisation.

Hiring in from known networks really helped counterbalance what was otherwise a very new, very unfamiliar team. We have grown from 13 to 80+ people in 9 months. And we’ve had the privilege of previous colleagues, friends, university mates and customers join our incredible team. Hiring key roles warm has been crucial to operating hot.

And at times we have overheated. One of the big changes arising from working at the office to working from home, which has been in play ever since we could take digital devices home and, more recently accelerated even further by Covid, is that the locus of responsibility for how work gets done has shifted from the company towards the individual. I have seen many team members battle with this at different times in their tenure at JEFF. Fast-paced, high-intensity environments get us to burnout faster. And combined with a high-trust, purpose-driven environment, it also gets us to huge leaps in developing our personal ability to manage how we get work done. We work with a very resilient team at JEFF.

The virtual meeting world is much colder than the warm in-person world. To combat this, we tried to add as much “connection” to our virtual meetings as possible. In our daily stand ups (DSU), the person who gives their updates first nominates the next person to go, and so on. This seemingly small act has the benefit of making people feel much more connected to each other, in a different configuration every day, because they feel a degree of recognition from and connection with the person who nominated them to go next. It may be surprising to hear someone thank the person who asks them to go next, but in a colder digital work, the smallest hint of warmth goes a long way. In looking for leverage in building teams over Zoom, this is one of those “small and big” things.

For a decade now I have been asking my direct reports the same question in checking in to meetings:

• Are you stretched or stressed?

• Is there anything else you want to share with the the team to help us understand where you’re at?

It turns out this is more important than ever before in hosting team meetings. I don’t ask it all the time. But when it feels like we need a dose of connection, it’s a great way to start a large meeting to improve the sense of connection and do better work together. Human performance first. Always.

Having a purpose of changing lives through daily fitness, which is not only inspiring but also has an immediate feedback loop, has helped us bring 110% of ourselves to work every day. It’s not surprising that some fitness brands become almost cult-like movements - there really is a fundamental impact on one’s daily wellbeing when we exercise and eat well, and some people really want to share their joy with fervor. With social media as public as it is, this customer sentiment makes it hugely rewarding for people in a business like ours. We are fortunate to be building a startup with such an immediately positive feedback loop.

We have undergone major changes to the way we operate. And more recently we’ve been thoughtful on the strategy that underpins our operations.

It turned out that running live daily workouts was a great way for people to be inspired by others and get them to dip their toes into fitness. And when they became more serious about their fitness journeys, they started signing up for our 1-1 coaching service. We had created a funnel of products, and our revenue began to climb. Importantly, we had learnt the value of an integrated product set to serve a customer that has a fundamentally transient relationship with their fitness journey. People go into and out of fitness for a variety of reasons. We might wake up one day with low energy, see an unflattering picture of ourselves or be inspired by someone else’s recent fitness achievements. And the minute we get sick, injured or experience a setback, we may opt out of our fitness commitments. It’s no wonder that fitness businesses - and even more so digital fitness businesses with easy-in, easy-out dynamics - battle to establish good economics.

Despite our rocket-like growth post launching live daily workouts at the beginning of lockdown, we continued to battle with our economics. Our costs grew faster than our revenue, despite achieving 8 X revenue growth in the months that followed. We needed to make some fundamental changes if we were going to harness this new post covid customer behaviour to grow profitably.

Towards the end of 2020 I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Kent Bennett of Bessemer Venture Partners. We were considering VC funding to give us runway to figure out our economics. After several calls Kent gave me some guidance that has become seminal to building a stronger business. He cautioned against getting addicted to paid media as a way to grow and instead challenged us to focus on optimising for our “resting growth rate”. Basically you remove any growth from paid media and you have your resting growth rate. And he said the best thing we could do to get our resting growth rate up was work on our product instead of focussing on our marketing. Good God, was he so right!

Offering a variety of integrated products to meet the customer at their points of need on their transient fitness journeys has become a central thesis at JEFF. And being a digital-first business makes this infinitely more possible to do than would be the case for traditional physical-first fitness companies.

In addition to our live daily workouts product and 1-1 coaching service, we have recently launched 21-day and 45-day challenges, giving people shorter, fixed-length programs to commit to to make meaningful progress in their health and fitness journeys. The community has responded enthusiastically as they are now offered another way to extend their fitness journeys. At JEFF, we are quickly becoming product development machines as we strive to follow the advice of an industry legend who told us to “touch them every day, and don’t let them get bored!” We are really just getting started with our product set.

For the last 12 months, the consistent theme at JEFF has been our “race to profitability”. By November last year, we had made little progress towards achieving it. And in March of 2021, we set ourselves 5 company priorities that, come hell or high water, we would achieve. The anchoring priority was to achieve “profitable revenue growth”.

As we reflect back on the past quarter, we have finally done it. Instead of funding the business on a monthly basis, we have generated positive free cash flows for several months in a row.

I am so proud.

Proud of our team and our ability to go from a deeply uncertain future accompanied by eye-watering monthly funding requirements, to a profitable business, underpinned by a strong strategy, with a clear future where we are on track to do between R50m and R100m in revenue this year serving 10,000+ customers from 43 countries around the world.

Here are a few more highlights through the lens of numbers:

• We have a community of 100,000+ people across our social media platforms;

• We’ve raised R1.5 million + for charitable causes close to our community’s heart;

• 64%+ of our customers exercise with us every week;

• Our NPS across all products sits at 83;

• Our community has lost 32,000 kg over the past year as they have started exercising and eating well;

Here is where we serve customers today, with a focus on SA and the UK:

The truth is that while the numbers and visuals above do a good job of describing our impact at scale, they do very little to describe the meaningful impact for the individual.

For that reason, we focus heavily on what we call “JEFF stories”. They are stories from our customers about the non-scale victories in their lives. The way that daily exercise and improved nutrition has impacted their broader health, their closest relationships and their relationship with themselves. We’re a deeply emotional team at JEFF. Tears flow freely in DSUs - sometimes because of the strain of the high-growth business, and more often because we are deeply moved by one of thousands of customer stories of overcoming challenge by putting their health and fitness first again.

The real heroes of the JEFF story so far are our customers. In fact, we rarely refer to them as customers. They are our community. They are our heroes. And we are proud to play a role in their stories.

And now, giving our purpose driven work and our healthy economics, it really feels like we’re just getting started.

Onwards!