People

Every company says its people are its greatest asset. Very few are organised as though that were true. Steve has tested the claim from an unusual number of angles — founding four companies, being first money into more than 350, and running one at national scale — and the pattern holds in all of them: having the right people, with the right experience, driven by a common purpose is how you power change.

The talk gets specific about a tension most leadership teams handle badly: balancing diverse perspectives against functional expertise. Hire only for expertise and you get a team that agrees too early. Hire only for perspective and nothing ships. Where that balance sits is a judgment call, and the session is about how to make it deliberately rather than by accident.

It closes on mentoring and on something Steve states plainly and rarely gets said from a stage: that relationships change you. Not that they are useful, or strategic — that the people you work closely with alter what you are capable of.