The Asia Tech Podcast welcomed Luke Watson, the CEO and co-Founder of Home Live and Honed Digital. Honed Digital is a Sydney based digital agency that creates world-class digital strategies, then builds them into world-class products. Honed Digital was really founded to do the research and development that could come up with viable business ideas and then employ the capital that was gained from Honed to fund them. That was partially the genesis of Home Live. Home Live is building a platform for residential property discovery that allows agents to stream live viewings of homes from anywhere to anywhere. I think you will be able to tell right from the start that this was a great and fun conversation. Luke and I share an obsession for technology and how it can be transformational. Luke is a true entrepreneur and while he started going to university, he dropped out because the lure of entrepreneurship was too strong and took an opportunity to move to Silicon Valley. He had already worked as a software engineer for a few years and had proven that he could tackle the job market. He also grew up in a family in which Mom and Dad both ran their own companies. While his family did not push him to leave university, they also did not discourage him from leaving. Luke noted that in his family the idea was NOT to go find a job but to find an idea. Luke’s experience in Silicon Valley was great and worked on how to take the social graph and move it online. While all of that seems normal and straightforward today, when Luke was in California Twitter was still a tiny company and the market was still trying to figure a lot of this stuff out. While it was a super experience, there were a lot of externalities that made building any company back then more difficult, not the least of which was the Global Financial Crisis. A lot of companies simply got wiped out. Luke has learned a lot along the way. An interesting thing he noted was that one of his earliest advisors once told him, “You are not a startup Founder. You are the CEO of an early-stage company and you should act like one.” We both agreed that this was great advice and that an important aspect of this was to build financial discipline into the DNA of your company. I noted that I thought that there should be mandatory classes in high school to teach financial discipline. Simple concepts like understanding compound interest should be learned, by definition, as early in life as possible for maximum impact. There simply is not enough financial discipline in the startup world for sure. This translated directly into how Honed Digital invested some of its own money into Home Live and hence how the aforementioned financial discipline was built in from day one. Some people believe that the culture of a company is built in its first 90 days and Luke thinks that has been true for Home Live, particularly when it comes to financial discipline. Suffice it to say that this conversation went longer than most because Luke was so filled with insights I simply did not want to let him go. Listen to the entire episode and if you like that, check out the other episodes of the Asia Tech Podcast as well as one of my other shows at AsiaInsurtechPodcast.com. This podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.