Not My First Rodeo: Alfie Pearce-Higgins with Jenny Fielding
Alfie Pearce-Higgins, co-founder and CEO of Rodeo, chats with Jenny Fielding, General Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 116: Not My First Rodeo.
In episode 116 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Alfie Pearce-Higgins, co-founder and CEO of Rodeo — an AI-powered careers platform helping people understand the job market, build personalized career plans, and find the right opportunities. Alfie shares how watching startups outperform years of institutional work in developing countries convinced him that the right people, tools, and capital could change everything — a conviction that led him back to the UK to fix one of the most broken markets he’d seen: the job search. He explains how the collapse of the traditional job application market, driven by zero-click application on one side and AI screening tools on the other, created a Akerlof-style market failure that Rodeo is purpose-built to solve.
In this episode, you will hear:
How synthetic applicants and fake job posts are breaking the job application market.
Rodeo’s voice-first onboarding approach to building rich, personalized career profiles.
Combining AI efficiency with human advisors for the most powerful careers solution.
How AI is making parental and school career advice dangerously out of date.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
Transcript:
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:32 Jenny: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Venture Everywhere. This week, we’re very excited to talk to Alfie Pearce-Higgins, who’s the co-founder and CEO of a London-based company called Rodeo, which you’re going to hear all about.
00:00:44 Jenny: Because it’s a startup building the tools that help job applicants plan their careers. This couldn’t be the most opportune moment to talk about this. So I’m really excited. Because everything that’s going on in the world of AI, when it comes to job opportunities and preparing professionals, it’s a very important time. Welcome to the show.
00:01:03 Alfie: Hi. Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.
00:01:06 Jenny: Awesome. I’d love to start a little bit at the beginning because you, like me, started in a very different place. I worked at J.P. Morgan, seems like you worked at Barclays. So I’d love to hear a little bit of the journey of going from finance and big company to starting your own startup.
00:01:23 Alfie: I’ve definitely had, what you’d call a nonlinear career, which is an interesting start for someone trying to build advice tools for other people. I studied economics and maths, and the natural place to go was going into the city and do some finance.
00:01:35 Alfie: I did a bit of M&A and then ended up trading credit default swaps back in the post-financial crisis days, which was quite fun. I think I’d do the same again.
00:01:55 Alfie: I always recommend to young people, big companies are great places to get training, to understand the world of work and to get that platform. But it didn’t take me that long to realize it wasn’t something I wanted to do for 30, 40 years.
00:01:53 Alfie: So I then left and went into international development and spent the next five years in Nigeria and then Nepal implementing economic reform projects. Trying to help privatize Nigerian electricity companies, trying to support investment into agriculture and tourism in Nepal after the earthquakes there.
00:02:11 Alfie: I enjoyed it, but I didn’t realize that… there were frustrations working for big donors. I love the work environment, but not necessarily the structure of the industry.
00:02:21 Jenny: Were you living in these places or you were just traveling?
00:02:24 Alfie: I was in Nigeria for two and a half years and then Nepal for about the same. And then lots of travel to various other parts of sub-Saharan Africa along the way.
00:02:31 Alfie: And I really enjoyed the environment. So I then very fortuitously got an opportunity to join SafeBoda, which was an early stage company in East Africa doing motorized taxis.
00:02:41 Alfie: Uber on two wheels is the easiest way for the European or American audience to understand it. And that was amazing. We were training drivers, we were giving them helmets, generally for the first time. And then we were helping to improve driving standards.
00:02:53 Jenny: And so interesting because you were working on the other side of that, which I imagine was slow and institutional. And then all of a sudden you’re like on the ground with the drivers. You’re actually seeing things happen from a consumer point of view every day, I imagine.
00:03:07 Alfie: There’s a marked contrast between what startups can achieve in developing countries versus some of the very slow institutional top-down structures. We’re all amazed and impressed by what startups can do in the UK or the US.
00:03:19 Alfie: That’s nothing in terms of the power that can be achieved by the right people with the right tools and a bit of capital in developing countries. Be that in healthcare, be that in education or consumer services.
00:03:28 Alfie: I was blown away by how powerful that can be. I certainly think that I achieved more with SafeBoda in three years than any of the development projects that I’d seen.
00:03:37 Jenny: Incredible. Incredible. So then what gives you the confidence or idea to start your own company?
00:03:42 Alfie: Well, lots of things that turned out not to be true. And we’ve come a long journey since then. So, the thesis with which one starts a company is often not the same thesis that one ends up building around.
00:03:52 Alfie: We started building tools for gig economy workers in the UK. Interesting. I saw how in developing countries, the economy can be very powerful because, in fact, you’re taking even more informal labor and adding more structure to it. Whereas in developed countries, it’s often perceived as taking structured jobs and removing security and making them less secure and more flexible.
00:04:11 Alfie: So I was amazed coming back to the UK by some of the challenges in the gig economy in the UK. I teamed up with an old friend who is ex-delivery. We started building tools for gig workers in the UK to understand and optimize their earnings.
00:04:24 Alfie: We had some success with that. We built a tool that took a lot of traction. There were real challenges around the data. To cut a long story short, the platforms didn’t see data the same way we did and were very aggressive about us helping drivers to understand their data.
00:04:38 Alfie: I think similar stories have played out in the US. It’s a longer story there. But we’ve then adapted that. But what we’ve stayed true on is that our aim is always to build tools that help workers navigate the world of work.
00:04:50 Alfie: What that’s evolved into is AI-powered careers advice to help people understand what the job market looks like, understand what their strengths are, how they can best fit into the job market and build a career plan.
00:005:01 Alfie: And then take it from there into finding live opportunities for training, for learning, for earning, for accommodation of all of that, And helping them secure those opportunities.
00:05:10 Alfie: Any of us who have had any engagement with the job market in the last couple of years will realize it’s changing extremely fast. What jobs are out there is changing. What skills are needed for them, what the jobs are called, how to apply for them.
00:05:21 Alfie: There is a speed of transition going on in the labor market that I think is unprecedented. And unfortunately, the people who are bearing the brunt of this are younger people entering the workforce for the first time. That’s very much part of our mission is to help younger people understand and enter the world of work.
00:05:37 Jenny: I would imagine also mid-career people that are getting caught in the transformation that’s happening. They grew up under one paradigm. And now, the way you get a job, the way that you approach a job search probably changed from when they enter the workforce. So I imagine that’s a big opportunity as well.
00:05:56 Alfie: Absolutely. I think looking for a job, planning a career, these have gone from occasional things that we will do to an ongoing, evolving question.
00:06:04 Alfie: We haven’t seen entire job categories destroyed or removed in the way some people have predicted. So I don’t think there are a whole bunch of mid-career people who suddenly wake up one morning and find that industry is no longer there.
00:06:14 Alfie: That may happen. Who knows? So I think a lot of people are seeing their jobs evolve. And the smart ones are realizing that if they want to progress or if they want to take their career forward, they’re going to adapt what their skill set is or how they’re going about it or where they’re specializing.
00:06:28 Alfie: This spans across the whole of careers, but I think it’s felt most acutely at the early stage of phase.
00:06:34 Jenny: So can you just talk more specifically what was broken about traditional job boards that you guys sought to transform and rodeo? As investors, we’ve seen so many iterations of this over the years. And so I’d love to kind of get your perspective on what you were really focused on.
00:06:52 Alfie: There are two things we should reference. One is job boards and the other is careers advice. Job boards are definitely broken. The model of a job board has always been someone turns up, searches for something, whether that used to be in the back of a newspaper or on a website or an app or with an agent. And then they try and identify the right roles.
00:07:10 Alfie: It’s broken a number of different ways. Job boards are typically optimized for volume. And that’s been same the metric. If you put up a job, you want to get enough applicants. And then you kind of assume that there are enough applicants, somewhere in there will be the right applicant. And we’ve seen that.
00:07:24 Alfie: The first job I applied for was, I think, in a supermarket stacking shelves. And at that point, it was a form. I had to stop in at the supermarket, pick up a form, fill it in and take it back in order to be able to spend my Saturdays stacking shelves.
00:07:36 Jenny: I did that as a waitress. I walked in and I was like, “Hey, are you guys hiring?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And then they went behind the counter and they handed me a form. I mean, this was a long time ago, but that was wild.
00:07:46 Alfie: Exactly the same. And then the… next would be banking internships. And that was online. But I remember each of them taking about half a day because I had to write a creative essay about why J.P. Morgan was so close to my heart. You had to write out these answers and it took a while.
00:08:01 Alfie: And then you fast forward a bit and then you got one click, apply. Then you got your LinkedIn one click apply. Indeed did something similar. We’re now in a world where there’s zero click apply. You don’t even need to apply now. You can have an agent apply for all these jobs in your sleep.
00:08:13 Alfie: You can apply for a thousand jobs by next week without lifting a finger. Now, the reality is that in some ways, a rational approach on the applicant side, it’s a numbers game.
00:08:21 Alfie: What we’ve seen then on the business side is that they’ve deployed a whole bunch of AI screening tools because no one can conceivably sort through a thousand CVS between now and next week.
00:08:31 Alfie: It’s a really interesting case of market failure that both sides of the job application market have behaved rationally in adopting AI. And the combined result has been a complete breakdown of the actual mechanism.
00:08:42 Alfie: I remember studying Akerlof’s lemons and the second hand car markets and how asymmetric information causes market collapse in that sense. There’s lots of parallels with what’s happened on the job market.
00:08:53 Alfie: If someone applies, you’ve got no idea what they’re serious. You maybe don’t even know they’re a real person. And as an applicant, you don’t know whether it’s worth putting effort into applying for this job because you don’t know whether your CV is going to be read by a human being, how serious they are on their side.
00:09:08 Alfie: So I think there’s been a definite breakdown there. And ironically, to your point, we might be going back to a world where you stop in the cafe and ask for a job. I’ve heard people talking about going back to handwritten applications, because if someone sends you a handwritten application, you know that they’re real, they’re serious.
00:09:22 Alfie: We’ve seen a lot of job fairs because it’s much easier to do that early stage of applications if someone’s in front of you. That’s kind of on the job market side.
00:09:30 Jenny: It’s like I hadn’t really thought about that, but everyone’s creating synthetic users. So I imagine there’s synthetic applicants that these people have to deal with all over the place.
00:09:39 Alfie: Absolutely. And synthetic jobs. There’s a lot of fake jobs that are either swiping data or just collecting CVs. It’s a real mess. That’s connected to what we’re doing. We haven’t set up just to try and solve that problem. And there are bits that we can’t solve.
00:09:52 Alfie: In the other side is the careers advice. I don’t know who gave you careers advice, but this has always been a slightly messy market for how people get that advice. Parents still rank highest as a source of careers advice.
00:10:03 Alfie: That’s a challenge because… it’s always been out of date. What your teacher or your parents say to you is probably always got like a 20-year time lag. That’s always been an issue.
00:10:11 Alfie: Now it’s a serious issue because 10-year-old information about the job market is worse and useless when it comes to advising someone entering the job market today. So what the market people are advising on bears no resemblance to what their children are actually going to be entering into.
00:10:26 Alfie: People get careers advice from social media. That’s become a common source. It’s mostly about highly aspirational, get-rich-quick, not particularly reliable advice, but it can be quite useful in some cases.
00:10:36 Alfie: And then obviously people go to ChatGPT, off-the-shelf AI tools that we see in the data, are now cited as one of the most common sources for careers advice. And that can be really powerful.
00:10:46 Alfie: I’m sure that many of your listeners have probably experimented with giving Claude a copy of their CV. They are really powerful tools for brainstorming, for ingesting this information, but they come with quite big risks.
00:10:58 Alfie: One of the ones that we’ve seen mostly is sick fantasy. I’m sure that if I put my CV into ChatGPT, it’ll tell me that I should absolutely be a FTSE 100 CEO in five years and do I want him to make me a step-by-step route to getting there? Which is lovely to hear, but can be quite damaging.
00:11:14 Alfie: And those are not very good with structured data. Getting an AI tool to do a job search for you often will result in unreliable information and there’s no safeguarding, if you’re talking about young people who engage with this to make quite consequential decisions for their lives.
00:11:28 Alfie: So AI is already playing a big role in this. Our aim is to build the responsible tooling around that, which means being able to enable, to turn it into a properly useful tool for people to understand, build up a rich picture of who they are, what they need to do right now, what their current situation is, what their long-term ambitions are, how this could be mapped into their local job market – because a lot of this is contextual and local – and then turn it into an actual plan and help support them through putting that in place.
00:11:52 Jenny: I love the part about career advice. In my generation, the people that I asked were my friend’s parents. I was going to law school and my best friend’s father was a lawyer. My parents weren’t lawyers.
00:12:04 Jenny: And so I asked him. There we are in like, his Hampton’s house. He was like a partner at some big firm. I was like, Steve, what’s the advice you would give? Because like I think I was going into law school, so I was like 20.
00:12:14 Jenny: And he was like, well, Jenny, I think you should join a members club, a private club, and you’re going to get a lot of business there. And I was like… 20 years old. And I was a woman. I feel like a lot of those members clubs of that generation were these old guys and whatnot.
00:12:27 Jenny: I just like… remember looking at him and being like, “Wow, that seems a little out of touch.” But like that was literally the advice that I got.
00:12:35 Alfie: Absolutely. I’ve had so many experiences of going into a degree and then being like, how come this isn’t what I thought it was going to be? Because that’s what it was like 20 years ago while I was being told about that world. It’s always been a problem. But the speed of change of AI has just radically exacerbated that.
00:12:50 Jenny: So you mentioned this idea of agents. And just for anyone who’s not fully caught up, how do you see the agent on behalf of the person looking for a new career, looking for a new job?
00:13:02 Jenny: In the future, how do you see that actually playing out? I’m really interested. We obviously hear a lot of talk about it. There’ll be agents out there running around, looking for jobs. How do you actually see it benefiting individuals?
00:13:13 Alfie: In the first instance, it’s about helping people to understand themselves, the job market, the intersection of those two points and make a plan. In the longer term, there are a lot of open questions.
00:13:22 Alfie: It’s interesting to think about how human agents work in, say, the creative industries. If you’re an actor or musician, you will have an agent. Or maybe if you’re a writer.
00:13:30 Alfie: And that agent will know you quite well, go out into the market and source opportunities on your behalf and then bring them to you and say, Jenny, there’s a new film next year. Do you want to do four months’ work in Hawaii playing this? Here’s a script.
00:13:44 Alfie: So, you’ve got this idea of human agents in some sense. I think there’s a world in which we professionally have that type of structure. Whereby rather than us ourselves trawling through LinkedIn or Indeed or any of these job boards and trying to identify opportunities, we are represented by an agent who understands a great deal about us and we share information.
00:14:05 Alfie: We update that over and over and it iterates and it learns us better and better and then goes out and represents us. I think that’s particularly the case in areas of work which could become more freelance-dominated.
00:14:15 Alfie: One of the questions that we’re really interested in is what AI does to the employment versus self-employment balance. We’re already seeing some indications that that could be… there could be a bit of a tipping towards more self-employment because in some ways, AI makes it much easier to manage freelancers.
00:14:32 Alfie: In the UK, we’ve also got challenges around cost of employment going up and up, which has always been a sort of nudge towards the use of self-employed workers. So I think there… there are really open questions around what the medium to longer term structure of the labor market looks like.
00:14:47 Alfie: When people talk about labor market, they talk about both the market for work and the market for matching. On the matching side, I think, sourcing applicants is way more common than in the past now and there’s been a lot of tooling built around that.
00:14:59 Alfie: We don’t profess to have a clear view on what that’s going to look like in the longer term, but I think the idea of a personal creation that understands you and helps you frame your thoughts, understand your local job market, and identify the best opportunities for you to learn new skills, apply for work, and get the job and career that you want is very much in keeping with what people need right now.
00:15:21 Jenny: Let’s talk a little bit about that idea. You guys focus on personalization. You can’t train agents or think about getting great recommendations without it being personalized. So can you talk about some of the signals and architecture that you’re using to really understand the user and their context and really what they’re looking for?
00:15:39 Alfie: The personalization is all about understanding the user. And we’ve iterated a bit on how to do that. Most of us, if we’re asked a question, what do you want to do with your life and given a blank piece of paper, we struggle.
00:15:49 Alfie: And the reason why human beings are good at this stuff is because they’re good at encouraging us to open up. The prompts, the nudges, the encouragement to reveal more information and to share and to frame your thoughts.
00:16:00 Alfie: We found that voice calls are just by far the best way of getting the early information out of people and building the starting point of a profile. So our onboarding is quite heavily structured around voice calls. We still use CVs as well, because it’s useful to get that information early on for people. But voice calls are generally a very good way of understanding more about someone’s situation.
00:16:18 Alfie: And then after that, there’s always the opportunity to go back to that and add more context. But it’s also intuitive. A user will come to us, they’ll upload a CV if they have one. They’ll chat to their personal career agent in a voice call. They will then be presented with this starting point of a career plan.
00:16:35 Alfie: They will give feedback on things they like, things they don’t like. We’ll start sharing opportunities that we think might be a good match. They will give feedback on them and we’ll improve it over time.
00:16:45 Alfie: Their situation may change. They may suddenly decide they want to go in a different direction. And this can all be incorporated into it. And that’s what AI is really good at, is piecing together this information into where a human careers advisor often struggles. Because remembering what happened in the last meeting, keeping notes, updating it all when you’ve got 30 different people you’re speaking to today, it’s super tough.
00:17:05 Alfie: The personalization is a question of gathering early information in a way that makes the user comfortable and encourages them to open up and frame their thoughts, and then constantly improving and adding to that to build a rich picture of the person that you’re trying to help.
00:17:18 Jenny: Just out of curiosity, are candidates recording their calls and then feeding that information to their coaches? The best way to get feedback is to be on a call with someone. You can’t usually be on a call with someone who’s in an interview, but if that was recorded… Sometimes it’s recorded by the employer and shared, and sometimes you’re using your Granola or whatever. That could be interesting.
00:17:39 Alfie: At the moment, people are generally using us as an alternative to... They may be using a career service on the side. And then we’re hoping to work or we’re scoping out opportunities to work directly with career services.
00:17:49 Alfie: I can tell you more about where we see the hybrid approach. But no, we haven’t encountered people sort of recording one meeting and feeding that back in. But it’d be a great way of testing.
00:17:57 Jenny: Yeah! Again, everyone needs to opt in. But you know, everything is getting so transparent now. It’s like, everyone assumes in our meetings as VCs that that meeting is being recorded on both sides.
00:18:09 Jenny: And so oftentimes those meeting notes are just shared amongst the parties. And that a year ago, if you would have told people that that was happening, people would have freaked out and be like, no, I just want to have an intimate conversation. And now it’s just normal.
00:18:22 Alfie: Give it a year or two and AI-powered glasses will mean that every conversation you have in person is also recorded and filmed. Our goalposts definitely moved on that in terms of what people assume is recording.
00:18:33 Jenny: So do you think that the traditional CV and traditional way is just dying? Or this is a subset of people that are taking things to the next level? I mean, I notice when we’ve had job roles, people don’t even really offer to send a CV. They just like send their LinkedIn and maybe a little paragraph. And obviously, if you ask for it, they’ll do it. But I feel like it’s really changing.
00:18:54 Alfie: Yeah. It’ll vary a lot sector to sector. LinkedIn is great for some sectors. It doesn’t work for others. I think there’ll be more sector-specific tools for different areas of expertise.
00:19:05 Alfie: The truth is, I think, the CV is evolving. People are always lying on their CVs. They’ve always exaggerated stuff. I’m sure that’s happening in the US. But certainly, the UK has had its fair share of political scandals, where it turns out someone was quite liberal with the truth when it came to what their professional record says.
00:19:21 Alfie: So that’s nothing new. I think any good hiring process only ever seen a CV as a very small part of the bigger picture. Anyone who’s hired based purely on CVs is probably not going to get the results they wanted.
00:19:32 Alfie: The two major things that have changed is that it used to be that a well-written, tailored CV… a real sign of seriousness for an applicant. That’s no longer the case.
00:19:41 Alfie: The most beautiful CV that speaks directly to the job that you’ve advertised and looks lovely, and it could have been generated in two seconds passing. So that’s no longer a good signal of seriousness.
00:19:53 Alfie: And then the other side is that CVs have stopped being written for human beings. Applicants have had to adapt what they’re doing, because it may well be that these CVs are getting screened by some sort of AI feature, whether that’s in an ATS, whether that’s separately.
00:20:07 Jenny: Can you give us an example of that? What’s a tweak that a candidate would make to their CV because they realize a person isn’t looking at it?
00:20:15 Alfie: Reflecting back the exact language of the job description, which means it doesn’t always read that naturally. And I’m very skeptical about that. I think there are lots of people promising candidate screening tools. The risk with AI that we mistake precision and accuracy. You can put 100 CVs into your AI screening tool, and it will tell you that I’ve scored 64.2%.
00:20:34 Alfie: Now, that sounds really precise. Could just be very randomized. Put the same information again and see how much variance there is in results. And it may well be that you rank 10 candidates using your whatever AI screening tool you’ve been pitched by some company. And they come up with different ranks. That’s a pretty big drawback.
00:20:52 Alfie: The second is that they completely overlook non-traditional candidates, which I think is an issue in terms of bias, fairness, and also just not good sense. Mostly applied for jobs that I haven’t been properly qualified for, but have managed to, at some point, convince someone that the skills that I do have offset the things that I’m missing.
00:21:12 Alfie: They may well have regretted it. But the good hiring processes always have that subjective, qualitative approach and are willing to accept that maybe what they thought they were looking for isn’t actually what they need and be persuaded of that. If you automate a lot of the hiring process on the employer’s side, you lose that flexibility.
00:21:30 Jenny: So really, the way to stand out is not in that first round of screening. You want to basically mimic what the job description is. And then the place that you stand out is potentially in the interview or the next rounds.
00:21:42 Alfie: If there is that sort of objective hurdle that you need to get through early on, then yes. I think one of the things that worries me, and this applies less to the world we’re looking at, more to the sort of white-collar mid-career, is it feels to me like there’s been a bit of a return to nepotism.
00:21:56 Alfie: Because the application market is broken in many of the ways that we’ve discussed, the easiest result is, well, look, I know so-and-so who’s recommended so-and-so, or so-and-so has got a connection into the company, or whatever it happens to be.
00:22:09 Alfie: And LinkedIn kind of makes it a lot easier because you can look at connections. And you end up hiring people through warm introductions. That’s something like the VC world has always been, if I could say, a little bit guilty of. The way money is allocated, the way people raise money, the way people get injections, has always been quite warm introduction-driven.
00:22:27 Alfie: And there’s some logic to aspects of that. But I think it’ll be a sad sign if that becomes more widespread in the jobs market, because it’s not marriage granting. It’s about connection that favors some people over others.
00:23:38 Jenny: Right. So getting back to Rodeo, you guys have had some iterations, and I’d love to just hear a little bit more of where you are today and how you’re thinking about the future of the company.
00:22:48 Alfie: Today we’ve got a product and a whole bunch of users using it to do everything from plan their careers to find opportunities to apply for, to supporting them with their applications. It’s a free tool.
00:22:58 Alfie: It’s really important to us. We’re getting a lot of good validation. I love talking to people who are using the product. I love getting negative feedback. I love getting positive feedback. That’s working well.
00:23:06 Alfie: Ultimately, we see this ideally as working in partnership with traditional career services. There’s a risk of a sort of either or debate between human careers advisors and AI. We’re very strongly of the belief the most powerful solution to ensuring everyone gets the advice and support they need is for a hybrid approach.
00:23:27 Alfie: There’s some people who will prefer to lean more on an AI solution. And this is particularly true because setting up a careers appointment in two weeks time when you’re trying to juggle two jobs that you’re working and family commitments, everything, can be really difficult. AI is amazingly convenient, can enable people to fit it around their lives a lot more easily and has some super powerful aspects to it.
00:23:49 Alfie: But ideally, it can also be combined with human career support so that other people who need the human support most can get access to that. So that there could be safeguards in place, things can be escalated if they need to.
00:24:00 Alfie: Or the AI can be used for something AI’s really good like speedy onboarding via an agent voice call or skills mapping from CVs, job database searches. And then the humans can be used for other aspects that they’re really good at like some of the empathy and support and sense checking. I think there’s a lot of opportunity.
00:24:18 Alfie: So we’re talking to everything from the government through to career services, colleges and schools and further education colleges and charities that work in this area.
00:24:27 Alfie: So the whole ecosystem of traditional career support, which we think is and will remain super valuable. We hope that we can turbo charge it and augment its impact and scale because there is this massive problem that… unemployment is high in the UK and a lot of people have dropped out of the labour market.
00:24:43 Alfie: I’m ultimately an optimist. I think AI is a productivity enhancement. It should make society richer, but the transition is going to be highly disruptive and could be very painful. Giving people support and advice to help them through that transition is going to be super vital.
00:25:00 Jenny: I mean, you’ve mentioned the word impact a couple of times. So what does success look like for you and Rodeo?
00:25:06 Alfie: Our mission is to ensure that all young people have the advice and support they need to help them find the right career path. Now, there are a whole range of different metrics that. But that’s a mission and success will be judged by how many people we’re able to help through that process.
00:25:19 Jenny: Love it. All right. We’re going to just move to the speed round. So just quick, one sentence answers. Book, newsletter, podcast, some media that you’re enjoying right now?
00:25:28 Alfie: I’m currently reading Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter. She is a professor of psychology and philosophy somewhere on the West Coast, Her work spans everything from childhood development through to AI and cognitive models.
00:25:41 Alfie: I just think that if we’re going to understand what artificial intelligence is, then the starting point and crucial bit needs to be to understand what human intelligence is. And the best place to start back is to understand how babies and children develop and like how we develop human intelligence.
00:25:54 Alfie: Probably also helps that I’ve got a small daughter and so I spend most of my time trying to like understand her. Try and be a vaguely good parent in terms of supporting her.
00:26:02 Alfie: And then I spend a lot of my work life trying to understand what AI is doing, how it works, how it’s going to change society. And so I think her work is this really great intersection of those two areas of understanding like what intelligence is and how it develops, both in a human and artificial sense.
00:26:18 Jenny: Love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?
00:26:22 Alfie: I mean, I’ve been lucky enough to live in a few places. I really enjoyed my time in East Africa. I mean, I was in Uganda, but across Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda. And so given the chance, I would love to go back there at some point in my life, probably not just yet. But the scenery, the outdoors, exploration and activities were just amazing.
00:26:38 Jenny: I love it. Favorite productivity hack?
00:26:41 Alfie: I find handwritten to-do lists are just so much better than anything else. Having a notepad and writing down each morning what I’ve got to do, physically crossing stuff off.
00:26:50 Alfie: I’ve tried over the years any number of tracking tools or perhaps Linear tickets or any of those other tools. But I just want to be able to write everything down in bullet points in a… on pen and paper and then cross it off when I’ve done it.
00:27:03 Jenny: That’s great. And then where can listeners find you?
00:27:05 Alfie: We’ve talked about LinkedIn. It’s not my natural environment. I’m as critical as probably many other people are of that environment, but it’s functional. So either that or, I don’t know, Strava.
00:27:15 Jenny: LinkedIn or Strava? First time answer on that one.
00:27:18 Alfie: Depends what you want to ask me.
00:27:20 Jenny: There you go. All right. Well, this was a real pleasure, Alfie. Thanks so much for taking the time. And we are excited about Rodeo and all those lives that you’re going to be impacting. So thanks for joining.
00:27:30 Alfie: Great. Lovely to talk. Thanks, Jenny.
00:27:34 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.