With his history of building companies and coaching founders Paul Meyers is now using is experience to benefit organisations by being on their Boards.
What’s your story?
I’ve spent 30+ years building digital businesses across Asia, founding six companies with three exits, including a NASDAQ IPO. I ran Telstra’s regional accelerator muru-D and helped build ADB Ventures, after previously holding senior roles at Vodafone, Dow Jones, MTV and Xerox. In 2019 I moved from building companies to coaching founders through Asia Founder Coaching. Sitting across the table from so many founders, I kept seeing how much boards shape outcomes. That pulled me toward governance myself. I now hold a number of board seats, and I’m building towards director roles at more mature and publicly traded companies globally.
What excites you most about your industry?
Boards fascinate me right now. Maturing companies face real decisions: Growth, compliance, succession, capital, culture and room dynamics matter as much as the strategy. I’ve sat on the founder’s side of that table for most of my career. Now I sit on the other side, and helping is the part that excites me. Watching a board make a hard call well, faster, with less noise, because I asked the right question at the right moment. One week that’s an accelerator founder pitching investors. The next it’s a board deciding whether to expand into a new market. Different rooms, same job.
What drives you in your career to push beyond what other people consider normal?
I’ve built and exited companies, including a NASDAQ IPO, and could have coasted on that. Instead, in my fifties I chose to stop building for myself and start helping others build, moving from operator to advisor to board director. Most people see thirty years of experience as a reason to slow down. I see it as something to share, one hard-won lesson at a time. What drives me is wanting both sides at once: to keep learning in rooms where I’m not the expert, and to use what I know to help the people in them.
What have been the most useful skills you have learnt and applied in your journey?
Over 30+ years, the technical skills I’ve learned personally and professionally have mostly expired. These seven personal ones haven’t, and I definitely wasn’t good at any of them when I started. They developed, slowly, through repetition and making plenty of mistakes along the way:
– Curiosity
– Asking better, more effective questions (yes, related to curiosity, but not the same thing)
– Listening deeply and attentively
– Talking less
– Empathy
– Learning to read the room
– Understanding cultural differences and nuances
None of them show up on my résumé. But all of them have helped me as a founder, coach, investor, director and Dad.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
Not advice from a person, from a book. The Enchiridion, Epictetus, first line: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions.”
This has been a hard one to learn (and to stay learned). Markets crash, investors say no, partners walk.
None of those are in my control. But I can control my reactions to them.
When I stay away from beating myself up over things out of my control, I am happier, less stressed and a far better friend, leader, parent.
Who inspires you?
Richard Feynman. Not the physics, I’m nowhere near his league, but the way curiosity moved him. He was a Nobel-winning physicist who also learned to play bongos well enough to perform publicly, and cracked safes for the fun of understanding how the locks worked. He treated every challenge as worth poking at, with no hierarchy of “serious” versus “hobby” pursuits. Curiosity plus breadth. I’ve tried to run my own career that way. Startups, coaching, boards, across many industries and verticals. They’re not ladders I’m climbing, they’re different rooms I want to understand. Feynman gave me permission to keep exploring rooms.
What have you learnt recently that blew you away?
I recently learned that researchers mapped the complete nervous system of an adult male fruit fly, all 166,700 neurons and 125 million connections, the most detailed brain map ever built at that scale.
Within days, online modders had dropped that map into completely unrelated environments, using it to play Minecraft, beat Doom, even trade Bitcoin. None of that was the intended use, the actual goal was neuroscience research.
What blew me away wasn’t only the science, but also how fast people repurposed something built for one field into a dozen other unplanned ones. That excites me and gives me hope.
If you had your time again, what would you do differently?
I wouldn’t have talked myself out of opportunities. There were many times I said no when I meant yes, decided I wasn’t qualified or good enough or simply didn’t ask. Didn’t apply. Didn’t put my hand up.
Looking back, most of those doors had openings. I talked myself out of walking through many of them, framing it as a decision when it was really fear of failure or rejection.
I learned eventually that life hands you plenty of no’s on its own. I didn’t need to manufacture extra ones for myself.
Say yes more than you say no.
How do you unwind?
Cooking is number 1. For years, I’ve enjoyed its mix of physical tasks, structure, creativity and multi-sense stimulation.
I’ve recently discovered the joys of lifting weights and I’m relearning guitar, after decades away from it. I’m not great at either but enjoy the discernible progress and calming effects of both.
I try to meditate regularly. When I do so, I can definitely feel the positive effects. But there’s a reason it’s called a practice.
Finally, when really stressed, I try to write haiku poems in my head. Working the 5-7-5 structure takes me out of my usual monkey brain dialogues.
What is a major mindset change, belief shift or ‘ah ha’ moment that you’ve experienced in relation to your career?
The Spotlight Effect.
It’s the common belief that people notice and judge our appearance, actions and mistakes far more than they actually do.
Our brains are naturally egocentric. We’re always focused on ourselves, so we often assume everyone else is focused on us as well, and that breeds doubt and anxiety.
Luckily, it’s not true! Everyone else is just as worried about themselves as you are.
As soon as I learned that the freer I became to act on what I actually felt, instead of what I imagined other people would think of me.
Everyone in business should read this book:
Shoe Dog. Phil Knight’s book about starting and building Nike.
He spent many years selling shoes out of the boot of his car, while struggling to support a family at home. His biggest setback – being dumped as Onitsuka’s American distributor – caused him to finally start his own company, which of course became Nike.
The book reminds us that great things take time to build, the road is never straight and that a strong personal vision, humility, perseverance and a talented, empowered team can produce a remarkable result over time
I recommend it to all my founders.
Shameless plug for your business or career:
Non-Executive and Advisory Board roles are where I’m putting most of my energy now. I’m actively looking to take on more, especially with mature and publicly traded companies, increasingly outside of SEAsia.
Additionally, I provide keynote speeches and teach courses and workshops, mostly on founder/executive resilience, market expansion and pitching, drawing on my experience of thirty plus years of building businesses across Asia and coaching/advising hundreds of founders through Asia Founder Coaching.
If you’re building a board, looking for a keynote, or running a program that could use a seasoned outside operator’s perspective, I’d genuinely like to talk.
How can people connect with you?
My preferred contacts points are:
Email: paul@asiafoundercoaching.com
WhatsApp: +6597456686
Website: www.asiafoundercoaching.com
LinkedIn also works, but the volume of messages there risk your getting lost: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmeyers/
Social Media Links?
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmeyers/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paul.meyers/
Medium: https://medium.com/@visionthing
Website: www.asiafoundercoaching.com
This interview is part of the CallumConnects series.