Adrian Blair: CEO of Trustpilot

Our company's actually headquartered in Copenhagen. And you know, even in that very high trust society, they felt the need for a tool like Trust Pilot that helps people understand and engage with trust more deeply. So I think as it pertains to us, we see trust being something that is really problematic out there in the world.

Thanks, Higo. Delighted to be with you.

Yeah, indeed. So on a personal level in terms of the match with what I'd done before, Trustpilot is an interesting blend of a kind of two-sided platform with network effects and a software as a service business model. And what I mean by that is we're a platform where, as you say, we're the world's largest independent customer feedback platform. So people leave reviews of companies who they've had an experience with and companies come on and engage with the platform because they're interested in that feedback. So it's a classic sort of two-sided digital platform. But the way we monetize Trust Pilot, the way our business model is, is that we charge typically an annual subscription to businesses. So we're not an advertising business, we're a subscription software as a service kind of business model. Now in terms of my own prior experience, as you mentioned, I'd been chief operating officer globally for Just Eat for seven years, which is obviously a two-sided platform, and I had also run a SaaS business in the fintech accounting space, Dexed, which we sold to HG Capital in 2021, which is a pure SaaS business model. So I'd done both of those things and I, to be honest, I wouldn't want to be doing this role without having experience of both two-sided network effect and SaaS. But the particular attraction of Trust Pilot as a business to me is all about the purpose and the mission of the business. You know, our goal is to be the universal symbol of trust. I think in the age of AI, trust is becoming more and more central, more and more important. Trust Pilot has a really unique culture, a really unique way of going about it. And so I just have this huge belief that we're doing something important and good in the world and we are keen to do it at greater and greater scale. It's also, of course, a massive commercial opportunity. So as a business person, I'm interested in it from that perspective as well.

Yes indeed. So when we talk about the market for trust, I think one thing just to be very clear about upfront is we are not in the business, we don't see ourselves as being in the business of buying and selling trust. If you think about trust and what it is, it's quite nuanced. It is a mix of heart and head. It's something that you build and earn. You don't buy it and sell it. It can't be traded. I often say to the team internally, if a sentence contains the word trust, try substituting the word love and see if it still sounds right. You obviously can't buy love. So, we don't see ourselves in business selling trust. What we are doing is we're helping businesses to more deeply understand trust and to engage with trust and build trust, earn the trust of their customers. So we provide a platform that is very effective at enabling companies to do that. Now how large is the addressable market for that? Well, if I say to a typical CEO, how important is trust to your business? They typically say, well actually not only is it important, it's actually the most important thing. You know, without trust, no one will buy our products, no one will want to work for us, no one will want to invest in our company. And then I say, well, how richly, how deeply do you understand it? They start to look a bit shifty and uncertain at that point because, you know, they might understand their financials incredibly well because they've got a CFO and a whole department in their business devoted to it. But how well do they understand trust? Typically, not very well at all. So, how large is the addressable market for that? I would say it's relevant to almost every business on the planet. It seems what you do is a very good example of what technology was meant to do, right? It's price discovery or it's informational asymmetry resolution or something that's really important. It's a bit like, you know, advertising 75 years ago, you know, is helpful, but you have no idea. Like the famous, you know, 50% is good, but I don't know which. This is resolving these big information asymmetries. Customers may really trust a company, but the company doesn't know if they do, and it doesn't know why. So, it seems to me that resolving that, as you just said, how many companies would love to know a how trusted and b why they're trusted and how that's changed. Indeed. And they'd also, if they are trusted, they'd like to be able to shout about it and tell people that in a very credible way. Because what frustrates a lot of people in companies is they might be providing a great service and they'll measure internally. They'll have some little NPS tool that's measuring interactions and they'll see that people are happy. But you'll never see a company putting on a billboard, 'Our NPS is 80%.' Because no one will believe them. Nobody knows what that is. And you know, everyone would say that they're good, but how do you know it's true? One thing that Trust Pilot enables is a way to credibly communicate to the outside world that you're very good at what you do. So people get a Trust Pilot score and if it's a good Trust Pilot score they typically want to shout about it. So you see it in TV ads, you see it in billboard ads and digital advertising and all the rest.

Yeah, indeed. So you're absolutely right. I mean we see declining trust in all kinds of institutions and across different societies. There remains, of course, a massive gap between high trust societies and low trust societies. I happen to have grown up in sub-Saharan Africa in a small country called Nutu which I would say is a very low trust society. So I have a kind of visceral experience of what that feels like. But interestingly, Trust Pilot emerged out of Denmark which is arguably the ultimate high trust society and yet they felt the need. Our founder Peter Mullman is Danish from Copenhagen. Our company's actually headquartered in Copenhagen and you know even in that very high trust society they felt the need for a tool like Trust Pilot that helps people understand and engage with trust more deeply. So I think as it pertains to us, we see trust being something that is really problematic out there in the world. You know lots of institutions are seeing trust erode. Technology in some ways is making it easier for people to fake trust. So having this trusted place building what we call the universal symbol of trust and using technology using AI to do that more effectively than ever and to do it at greater scale than ever I think is just becoming increasingly important over time. So I guess tribes have always been built on a number of things. Probably some degree of homogeneity, similarity and maybe some sort of filtering around skills, but certainly trust sits at the center of most tribes' dialogue.

Indeed. And I think the right answer to this question depends on the industry that you're in, the competitive dynamics. It depends on network effects and how those work. So in the case of Just Eat, the right answer in that business was to throw a lot of capital at it and to establish number one positions in each country where we operated as quickly as possible and the reason for that was there was a very clear first of all it was incredibly competitive sector in the early days. You know, I joined Just Eat early 2011, there were hundreds of businesses around the world with exactly the same business model getting funded from VC all trying to do exactly the same thing. There was a huge gap in the economics between being the number one player and being the number two player. So what happens in a situation like that? Well, everyone is in a desperate scramble to become the number one. And it's like a knife fight. You know, whoever emerges as number one is just going to get much better economics and that position will sustain itself. So it's like a knife fight in dozens of countries around the world with all these people desperately trying to be number one. Now we were successful in 12 out of our 13 markets at establishing the number one position and it was on that basis that we could ultimately grow and become profitable and get into the FTSE and all that kind of thing. So in that case that was definitely the right kind of position to go for growth almost at all costs and to do it very very quickly and put huge pressure on ourselves to get there. If I contrast that with Trust Pilot, we're in a very very different position. So we I think are in a space where we can have more patience, where growth kind of grows. We depend a lot on the reputation of the brand, on Trust Pilot being known and recognized and that's something that builds gradually. We don't have a business model that lends itself to massive consumer marketing campaigns of the kind that we would have done at Just Eat let's say. It emerges more from B2B adoption and as more businesses invite their customers to write reviews and include us in their advertising the brand gradually becomes better known. So in the UK now we're known by nine out of 10 adults in the UK. We get globally more than 70 million people a month are using our product and those numbers are increasing all the time but it's more of a gradual snowball effect kind of growth rather than this blitz scaling approach that is appropriate here and it's not the same kind of competitive context. So there is only one business in the world that I'm aware of that's aiming to be the universal symbol of trust and that's Trust Pilot. So we're not in a space where there are 100 other companies all trying to do the same thing like there was in food delivery.

That's right. And it's growing B2B adoption. So B2B SaaS particularly at the enterprise end which is our largest segment isn't a kind of blitz scaling kind of model typically. You know, businesses need to understand your tool, they need to adopt it, sales cycles tend to take a few months, so it's the kind of thing that by its nature sort of builds over time, so healthy but not the kind of blitz scaling growth rates that we used to see in food delivery where I remember giving someone a hard time because their country only grew by 80% year on year and we thought it should have been growing by 150% and in that world 80% was not an acceptable result. We have about a thousand people globally. We are hiring so we've got open positions across all kinds of different things. We are finding that AI is enabling us to do more and more with the great talent that we've got. So, headcount is not growing anywhere near as fast as the top line of our business, and that means that we're delivering operating leverage over time as we grow.

Well, look, we definitely see it much more on the opportunity side. I mean, first of all, as you say, in terms of detecting fake reviews. So, every day we get around 200,000 new reviews submitted to Trust Pilot and we have to make a call using technology, overwhelmingly using technology about whether those reviews are genuine. And we found that, you know, with the capability of AI, we're now doing a better job of that than we've ever been able to in the past. And obviously, we're getting better and better at that all the time. So in that sense, AI is a particular opportunity for Trust Pilot. But we also of course see applications of AI throughout in terms of how we actually run the business and we're having a lot of fun with that, experimenting with different use cases. Every employee at Trust Pilot has access to Gemini integrated into our Google workspace and you know every day we're sort of finding new ways to deploy and use it.

I've been really impressed recently by the capability of the cutting edge models, you know, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-3. I mean, if you actually get into what these tools can do for you, I'll give you a little example. I was visiting a customer recently and as part of my sort of research ahead of the meeting, I opened their annual report. This is AO World, the white goods delivery company in the UK. You know, phenomenally successful customer focused business. And I opened their annual report. The first line pretty much of their annual report referenced Trust Pilot and it referenced their Trust Pilot reviews and how their customers were. And I thought great, you know, I wonder how many other public companies are doing the same are referencing their Trust Pilot reviews in their annual reports. Now in old world I would probably have asked some analyst to go and download all the annual reports and read them and find mentions of Trust Pilot. I used Gemini to do this and just put in a prompt about please check out all the annual reports, look out for quotes mentioning Trust Pilot and it turns out there are more than a dozen listed businesses in the UK where they are including their Trust Pilot reviews in their annual reports. And of course, Gemini finds that in a couple of minutes. I'm just really impressed at how much these tools have improved just in the last sort of 12, 18 months. That's interesting. That's interesting because obviously that is a very real debate I think across the economy, but certainly within the investment industry like how useful are these tools and there's certainly a reasonably well populated school of thought is that there's been a massive overinvestment and it's going to be a bit of a dud really can't do that much. So it's interesting why you have... Well, look, I mean I can't speak for how much the hyperscalers are choosing how many billions they're choosing to put in, but I mean the way I look at it is put it this way: this is the worst they will ever be, right? They're in 12 months time they're going to be way better than whatever they are today. They're going to be way better when you look at what's going on with chips and all the roadmap that Nvidia, TSMC now have of how chips are going to get better, I mean it's extraordinary the improvement that we're going to see in chips and the capabilities there. So I think every element of the stack you're just seeing very rapid pace of improvement from all of that investment that's gone in. I've worked in tech my whole career for the last quarter of a century and this is probably the most exciting time of that whole you know a lot of exciting things have happened in that time but this is the most exciting. It's the real thing.

So, a few thoughts. So personally I'm on the very quick and decisive end of the spectrum almost to a fault and you know I have people say I've had people say to me over the years did you have to do that today like couldn't you have waited till like tomorrow maybe and you know reflected a bit more or whatever. So, that's something, you know, a bit of self-awareness. I sometimes have to check that and say, 'Okay, you've decided, but maybe just wait a day and see if it still makes sense. See if it still makes sense tomorrow.' But look, I'm a big believer in involving the right people. You know, you obviously can't run a company as a democracy, although we have a bit of fun with that at Trust Pilot on some decisions. We like to sort of throw it open to the whole business and say, 'What do you guys think?' But, you know, when it's some important business decision, you want to make sure that you're involving in that decision whoever knows the most. And it's often an executive team member. It's not necessarily an executive team member, but whoever the expert is on that thing in your business. You've got to make sure you're involving them. You're listening to them. I think this concept of psychological safety is important where one of the occupational hazards of being CEO is as you get more senior people human nature are less and less likely to just tell you what they really think because they're worried you know what you might think of them or what you might do with the information or whatever. So part of what you've got to create as CEO is a culture where there's enough psychological safety that people can tell you your idea was rubbish and they don't like the way you've done something. It's very important that people can have that kind of honesty. So I think you've got to have candid robust debate. I like to float ideas around that might not be good ideas and just see what people make of them. So you know I'll say well what about doing it this way? That doesn't mean I think it's a good idea, but I like to kick it around and see where the debate goes. But there are some decisions that only, you know, I actually prefer most decisions not to be taken by me. I mean, it really doesn't scale that the CEO is taking all the decisions. So one thing that we clarify within our executive team on our agendas is you know who is leading the topic and who is the decision maker on the topic and sometimes that's me but most of the time that's a member of the exec and that leads to them then you know really taking responsibility for that decision. So I I don't want personally to be taking most of the decisions in the business but when it is my decision that's very much my style. I involve the right people, psychological safety, kick around ideas, explore suggestion options, and then I'll make a call very quickly. And if I'm on a good day, if I'm being self-aware, I'll say, 'Hang on a minute. Just maybe wait a day and see if you still think you're right tomorrow.'

I think it's both of those things, but kind of in that sequence. I think yes, I'm a person who's naturally impatient, low boredom threshold, all those kinds of things. That meant that I felt very at home in the tech industry where things move fast and change fast. You know, I couldn't work in real estate where you're working on a project for 10 years and your decisions play out over such a long period of time. In tech, you know, there is a much faster pace and you tend to see that companies that move too slowly get killed. So, you've got to be more like the agile, you know, the heartbeat of a mouse, not the heartbeat of an elephant kind of thing. So, just get things done faster. And I think, you know, my sort of growing up in a business like Just Eat where, as I say, it was like a knife fight and the loser got killed, you know, you're very very motivated to get things done quickly. So I think it does kind of emerge from that sort of thing. But typically certainly decisions that the CEO makes, it is typically more important to make the right decision than to make the quick decision. If it's something very important, whether it got decided on Tuesday or Friday isn't ultimately the most important thing. It's was it the right call? But what you certainly don't want in a CEO, and I've seen this up close sometimes, is where you demand more and more data because you can't make a decision. You've got 80% of the data, but you wait 6 months to get to 90% of the data and it's like really that was probably a total waste of time. So that's a trap that I think some CEOs fall into, but I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Yeah. I mean, of course, all of those things are wrapped up. I mean, my favorite book on these kinds of concepts that links them up nicely, I think, is 'The Five Dysfunctions of a Team' by Patrick Lencioni. I don't know if you've read that one, but appropriately for Trust Pilot, the foundation of it all is trust. Because without trust then you haven't got the psychological safety that leads to kind of honest debate. And it's only when people are having honest debates and getting the options out in the open and feeling free to express themselves that you get actually commitment to the outcome to what you've agreed and then it's only if there's real commitment that you get the kind of attention to results that's needed and the accountability that goes with that. So yes, it does all sort of logically fit together, but it starts with trust and the ability to actually have a robust debate and people feeling like their perspectives have been truly heard.

Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a muscle that you've got to build as you go through your career. You know, I think at the very beginning of your career, your success is a lot of it is determined by your genetics, energy, academics, whatever. Then you grow in experience and you learn from that experience and that starts to shape how well you're doing. And then you make career choices about which companies to join and that starts to shape how well you're doing. But then you realize that actually a huge part of particularly as you get more senior, a huge part of how successful you are is really just your people decisions. It's your people choices. You know, who did you decide to promote? Who did you decide to hire? Who did you decide to fire? And how well you've done those things becomes a huge determinant of how successful you are in these roles. So to some degree, if your judgment isn't improving on that stuff over time, it really limits you in your career and how far you've got to scale. As with anything, the more of it you do in the real world, if you sort of reflect on it appropriately, you're very candid with yourself about where you've got things wrong, where you've got things right, you grow the muscle, you get better judgments at it over time.

Well, at this level, it usually isn't. There were three and you chose one of the three. So, what do I mean by that? Well, as CEO you're managing C-suite folks, it's quite rare that if you're looking at succession into a C-level position that there are three credible successes within that person's function. I mean, good job. If the person has been successful in that way and has three potential successes, then great job. But that usually isn't the case. You've usually got one sort of clear internal candidate and the judgment call is more between do we go for the internal candidate or do we look outside. So, you know, at Trust Pilot, I had that call to make, for example, with our chief trust officer. When I arrived, we had someone in that role who decided to move on and we had an internal candidate. And, you know, I had to make the call about internal versus external. And I made the call to promote a new Joshy into that role who's doing extremely well in that position today. And that was one of those classic judgments about, you know, inside versus outside and thinking actually we've got a great person internal.

I think I compartmentalize. Well, the only exception for that personally has been, as you mentioned at the beginning, I spent a while as chief business officer at a business called Sarah. Sarah is the second largest provider of social care in the UK as well as being a technology business that develops technology. Now in that position I was directly responsible for around 7,000 people who were giving care to the elderly and vulnerable in their homes across the UK. I found that very hard to deal with on a personal level because you have direct responsibility for life and death situations where you know you're being regulated and on any given day some amazing good things will happen and some bad things will happen as well. And I found that very hard on a personal level just dealing with literal sort of life or death consequences. I've been left with, you know, massive respect to people who live that day in day out, you know, throughout the healthcare industry. But I realized like that's not the kind of thing that I'm sort of cut out to do. Whereas in these digital businesses like, you know, all the others I've worked in, Spotify, Google, Trust Pilot, Just Eat, it's a very different thing. You know, it's like, yes, of course, you have problems and challenges, but they're ultimately operational, financial, business challenges, and those typically don't cause me to lose sleep.

Thank you very much. No, I've enjoyed the conversation. Great questions. Thank you.