Chris Hare
speaker
922 appearances
17 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Chris Hare’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
yeah that's a great question look we've honestly had hundreds of thousands of challenges and they can really span from existential through to incidental so existential for example was just identifying our purpose what are we we're not quite a grassroots organization we put these races together we raised quite a bit of Are we in a grassroots NGO? Are we an events provider?
Are we an anti-slavery charity? Just figuring that out in the early days was really tough. We've had other stuff since. For example, we had one event that was literally received a threat from ISIS at the peak of the ISIS terror wave in the 2010s. And we had to make a spot decision whether to cancel our event or to continue it.
So you have these sort of momentary hurdles and you have the existential ones. The way I always think about it is like climbing a mountain. When you climb a mountain, and let's say it's a totally novel new mountain that hasn't really been climbed before, you identify an approach from where the perspective that you have, you'll of course miss things.
And then you attempt to summit or wherever you attempt an approach. And often there are obstacles and maybe you get about halfway and then there's an ice field and... It's insurpassable, and so you turn around and you reevaluate your approach. But fundamentally, the goal is the same, which is to summit that mountain.
And sometimes you get really close, and you're so close that it's very tempting to carry on. But again, there's some kind of threat, a big crevasse or whatever, that just isn't worth the risk. And of course, if you're very lucky and if you're very good at it, you do summit the mountain.
But as any mountaineer will tell you, when you get to the top of a peak, what's the first thing you see another peak that you want to find? There's this sort of aspect to a charity where I would describe, for example, an ISIS threat to a group of students in a particular city trying to fight slavery.
as a similar situation to a crevasse on that mountain analogy versus what is the actual mountain we're climbing is more existential and more akin to what is the 24-hour race what's its role in the world if that makes sense i really like the analogy used is actually quite philosophical it reminds me of a chinese saying
Yeah, let me expand a little bit on that analogy by going into the realm of the absurd. So in 2011, I took a gap year after graduating high school. And while all my friends were heading on trips to Phuket and various destinations in Asia. I got on a train and then a plane and arrived in the capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, where I met a team of 14 in total seasoned explorers.
And then we went all the way out to the west of Mongolia and we began to attempt to walk across the Gobi desert. And I was young. I think I just hadn't turned 18 yet. I was 17. And as we began this journey, the Gobi desert itself, sometimes for whatever reason back then, the GPS signal wouldn't work. Now navigation was a little bit
more simple in the early days because you basically had a series of mountains to your north and you had a series of mountains to your south. The sun rose and you just followed the sun and you kept the mountains between, you'd more or less be on track.
But as that mountain range, the Altai mountains subsided into the flatness of the Gobi, you know, we struggle with navigation to the point where we'd have to double check where we thought we were with stars. And what I think is interesting about cellular navigation, this millennia-long way of getting around the world, is you follow stars, but you never really expect to set foot on them.
So you can follow the north star, which is the one everyone talks about, or you can navigate by it, and it can guide you to incredible destinations. It can get you to exactly where you want to be at various points of your journey. But by following this thing, you're not going to ever reach it. And I think in some way, good goals are like that.
Good goals guide your day-to-day decision-making, whether they're immediate, random threats to whatever it is you're building or doing in your personal life or in your business life, or totally big decisions to make. You can always refer to your so-called North Star or whatever star it is that you navigate by. I think about that analogy a lot. What's a goal worth pursuing?
were you to spend your whole life pursuing it and you were to never reach it and you're in your old frail years you could still say to yourself that was a hell of a shot and it was totally worth it You know, what are goals that are so important that failure is expected and not a disappointment because the goal itself is just too important for that.
And that just, that was a thought process I had back on the Adobe expedition some time ago.
Okay. So in short, I worked, I studied at Harvard from having graduated in Hong Kong, took a gap year, in that gap year applied to uni, ended up going to Harvard and a year and a half into that degree, I dropped out. I did what's called an indefinite leave of absence. So you don't lose your seat at the university, but you're basically allowed to take as much time as you want at the university.
And in that time, I transitioned from being a charity founder to a software founder. And I have a lot of thoughts about the evolution of software since I started working in the industry in 2014 till today. As a matter of fact, my background, I started at Harvard studying a very generically named field, East Asian Studies.
mainly focused on China, and in particular, Ming Dynasty Chinese history onwards. And I transitioned to the field of computational neuroscience, which is eventually where I got my degree. So I was always attracted to the field of technology. And anyone who was alive in 2013 or 2014 could see it was really early days for adopting and deploying technology into various industries.
So I made that transition. That being said, everything, every success I've had, and for that matter, every failure I've had while working in the full profit technology and software sector, I can basically trace to an analogy from an expedition that I've partaken on. So
Talking about, for example, team building, there's an expression that I first heard when I was rowing in high school, at boarding school, which was the first boat is only as fast as the second boat. And I think what was meant, I was on the second boat, by the way, I wasn't on the first.
Showing 1–20 of 922 · page 1 of 47
Next →