Ooni Co-founder and Co-CEO Darina Garland cut her teeth running creative programmes and festivals in the global education sector including leading a campaign that asked What School is For? Despite the talents of teachers too often she found that young people and staff were disillusioned by the school system and worryingly learning seemed disconnected from real life. During this time Darina learned first-hand about the importance of workplace purpose, culture and the need to fuel team member’s passions.
Now at the helm of Ooni, the world’s number one pizza oven company, Darina and team are growing their revenue, customer base and workforce at pace. Encouraging folks everywhere to 'Make Pizza’, Ooni products are setting the hearts and minds of their global customer base on fire, but none of this would be possible without an engaged and passionate team. During her talk Darina will share her perspective on how to prioritise people, passion and purpose… not to mention PIZZA!
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Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. It is true. There's gonna be pizza. We haven't made any, but you all can make some. So hi. I'm Dorina, and we're gonna look at what is work for passion, people, purpose, and pizza. So I was in the car with Christian, and we were talking about the Internet.
So we'd moved from London with the fastest Internet that was possible. And one of Christian's non negotiables when we moving to Scotland was that we had very fast Internet. And, of course, it didn't happen. We saw our dream house. It didn't have it had Internet that was kind of reminiscent of the early two thousands.
You remember it. And his his he compromised, and we got to the house, and we were just like, how the hell are going to upload videos? How are we going do our jobs? So we're chatting back and forth about this in the car on the way to nursery.
And we were interrupted by this little cockney voice. Are we human? Are we done, sir? I was like, what is going on? Turned around, and Oscarie, who's our eldest, who's now ten, who was just about four at the time, was singing. But he wasn't singing as normal.
He was singing like he saw on YouTube in our house. He was literally buffering. You've seen kids who didn't know how to touch books or were trying to, like, you know, flat screen touch screen things. He was doing that. I was like, oh my god. What is he doing?
He was fine with that, and that's how kids learn. Right? They learn from their conditions. So it really made us laugh, like, we bloody need to get Internet. We do have the fastest you can get now. Finally, Christian campaigned. He actually campaigned to our MP to get it.
So conditions. That's what I'm going to talk about. Yeah. So much to unpack in this slide. I was saying to somebody earlier, I don't know why, but there's quite a lot of pictures of me in the nineties, in my nineties clothes here. So sorry about that. I don't know why.
Massive to unpack. Let's start with a Scotland shell suit. That is mental. The reason I put this here was because I was trying to find a picture of myself as a teenager, and I couldn't, probably for the best, but I'm probably about eleven here.
And my mom started to get nervous. She was talking to me about what I should do with my life. So I was good at school, was kind of a generalist, and I didn't really know. I just loved hanging out with people. I liked school.
Wasn't worried about anything. Still probably not too worried about stuff, one of my skill sets. But, yeah, I was she said to me, what about standard life? And I was like, I don't know. There's a lot of banks in Edinburgh. So she was like, it might be a grad scheme or something.
And what the **** wasn't invented yet? But I did say, WTF, mom. You don't even know me. You can flounce off. Like, standard life. How rubbish does that sound? And I didn't want that. I didn't know what I did I wanted. But after after doing my fifth year hires, I realized you didn't need another year to get into uni.
Got what I needed. I went to work for a Leith Agency as an office junior, which was amazing. So I got to kind of hang around with people who were literally creative for a living. I was like, couldn't believe that was a job, that you could be creative, come up with ideas, and just sit there back and forth bantering together.
So I was running about, and one time, I had to go and hire a hamster. It was for a client pitch, and the client was Toyota, and they had this idea for a joy machine. I think it was a four by four. One of the ideas was that there was a hamster in sorry, that the car would be in a hamster wheel running about, so I had to get uptown in a taxi and try and persuade the local pet shop to rent me a hamster for the day.
Fun. Random. Also, Standard Life turned out to be one of our clients, and I ended up having to go up to Habitat again in a taxi to buy a new teapot because the client didn't like our teapot. So I did get to work with him in the end.
Fancy lot. So with getting on to my first business, it was called Sukla, and it was an education business. Christian and I, my husband, who I set up Uni with, worked in education, and it was really brilliant. My parents were both teachers. We spent a lot of time with incredibly passionate teachers, educators, NGOs, all sorts of organizations around the world.
But one of the things that stuck with me most was we met incredible teachers who were a bit broken by the system. What they said was things like they could teach their kids to pass the French exam, but they wouldn't be able to speak French in France or getting nodding from parents in the room.
Or they could teach the English teacher who was like, it's so disassociated from life. She literally was teaching the chapter of the book that was in the exam because she didn't feel like there was time for the whole book. And it was incredibly sad, so we part of what we did was run this project which looked at the purpose of school, and it was really interesting with loads of different schools and organizations involved.
Sukla, our business, we went on to focus actually mainly on education events. So I found ourselves going to innovation and education conferences and learning from the sage on the stage who was talking to to people in the audience and feeling like they were really good.
They were really inspiring, but there wasn't much that then happened afterwards because people would go back to their own context, and things didn't change on Monday morning. So we created an event called Opie, which was like, we didn't have a sponsor. We just wanted to do the best possible learning event we could do.
The first one was with one thousand two hundred people, and it was in Finland. At the time, Finland was the place with education and lots of great lessons from there. And we had all education stakeholders from parents to teachers to young people to learning businesses to EdTech to government, everyone you can think of.
And it was great. It was it was much more like a festival than a conference like we are today. There was beer. That helps. And then we we started to make it a bit smaller. So one of the events we went on to have was Opie Venice, and this one was just for education leaders.
And it was all about creating the perfect conditions for brilliant people who are already doing excellent things within the global education space to connect. And the very simple format that still runs today is that one third of it is preorganized sessions or workshops with great speakers or or facilitators.
Another session is unconference. So people come on the day, they sign up, and they run things together or by themselves, and people can just sign up to go to those sessions. And a third is completely social. So we're on a boat here on the Saturday night about to sing opera that we just learned that day in in Italian whilst being quite tipsy.
So it was wild. But, yeah, a lot of it is about setting the conditions for how those people can thrive, and as I said, what they will go on to do differently after the event. Anyway, a big part of Sutcla's work was in creative education and innovation and trying to explain to those within education, the stakeholders, teachers and young people essentially, how to problem solve because we think that creativity is problem solving.
And Christian, my husband up there, had a problem, and it wasn't me. It was he had good pizza, not great pizza, and that drove him mental. So we had our education business. We'd had our first little boy, Oskry, who you saw earlier, who was only one.
We had a bit more time because we were both working looking after Oskry. Christian's background is his parents he's from Finland. His parents ran businesses his whole life, including a supermarket with a bakery, so he really did have baking in his blood. And when he couldn't make good pizza, he was frustrated by that.
So he worked out quite quickly that in order to make great pizza, you need a high heat and a hot oven. So the things that were on the market at the time were one and a half thousand pounds sort of upwards, the traditional installations.
And we didn't we worked in education, so we didn't have the money or the space for something like that. So, yeah, being the practical Finn that he is, he went about inventing the first uni, which this these are some pictures from our Kickstarter that we did in twenty twelve.
Who's heard of Uni here? Okay. Acquisition team, get on to these people. It's good. People are starting to hear about it. So here we are now. We've got nine years in. I'm happy that people are starting to hear about Uni where we've always had incredibly high ambitions to be a global brand.
One way we could say that, but in other ways, we're really buoyed by the fact that when we do our brand tracking, not that many people around the world know about us. We've got a lot to do. We're in ninety countries. We I wrote on my notes that I've got two hundred and thirty eight staff, but this week, it's two hundred sorry, two hundred and thirty staff.
This it's two hundred and forty. We were less than forty with pre pandemic, so a lot of the growth has come in the last year, year and a half. We're definitely the biggest pizza oven brand in the world, and we definitely created a category.
So somebody said earlier, you can't have original original ideas, but that was one. Hopefully, we can keep on innovating. That's our our jam. As well as helping the world make pizza, make great pizza, we also set about trying to create an amazing organization, and I hope that we're getting there.
We really do focus on that a lot and trying to create the conditions for our team and our community to flourish. I think it's as simple as thinking it's important, you know, in creating those conditions because we spent a lot of time in schools as part of our work at Sukla, fascinating microcosms of society.
Right? How much can you tell by the way you're greeted on reception by somebody about the culture and the leadership of of a whole organization? Purpose. It's a lot of it's a big buzzword, and they say that millennials need purpose. First of all, please raise your hand if you're a millennial.
Okay. I'm probably about half the room. I happened to be a millennial just scraped in nineteen eighty one. Yeah. An elderly millennial or geriatric millennial, which I I don't love. But I will lean into my millennial tendencies and do a massive eye roll when it comes to thinking about millennials need purpose.
Like, who the hell doesn't need purpose? Honestly, just because we didn't have it before didn't mean that it's not something we we should have done. It's not just a special group that that demand it. I think that people spend about ninety thousand hours in their jobs over their lifetime, which is about ten years, a bit more than ten years.
So there's no wonder that people are prepared to take a job where there's purpose and there's purpose led from the outset. I'm gonna go to this another picture of me in the nineties. I told you it's a weird theme. Here I am at Mega Bowl, love.
And in the front, it's my brother, Connor. And behind me with the the balloon is Andrew, who is Connor's best friend. Connor is our CSO or chief sales officer now, and Andrew is our chief financial officer. Andrew was they said about him, if you cut him in half, he would read KPMG, who's in the audit team.
And Connor doesn't like people to know this, so I'm not gonna tell you, but he worked at Goldman Sachs before. He yeah. We've we've done this thing, saved a lot of bankers. Not going down on bankers in this talk, but I actually really do like them.
So we brought lots of people into the team who Connor, his story in his way in was like, we need someone to work in our sales team. But I wasn't a massive fan of salespeople. I hadn't met any, to be honest. And I was like, Uni sells itself.
We just need people who are authentic to tell the story. It's a simple product. And both Tricia and I were saying, oh, somebody like Connor would be amazing. And at that point, we were we were genuinely paying ourselves peanuts, and there was no way we could afford to to sort of cook someone from the city into Uni.
And three weeks later, I mentioned to Connor just sort of jokingly, oh, we were talking about getting someone for sales, we thought about you. And he just went, stop. Yes. I want to join. I don't I don't care about the money. And he really didn't, and it's paid off.
Hope, you know, he's got a job that he loves, and he's grown an amazingly authentic team because he's got kind of that that background in the corporate world. He really wants to get things done, and he also is so excited to have something he cares about in a values led company.
So we're very lucky. Emily talked a lot about connection and human connection. I'm so excited to be back here. I am and to be I mean, back with people. I'm an incredible people person. When it comes to connection, the community are kind of everything.
If you've got a a brand, word-of-mouth is is it. So we've always had a really strong community. This is something from the Facebook community talking about it's a master class in how the Internet should work. It's not always like that, but it's a really beautiful place.
People love geeking out over pizza and sharing their pictures and supporting each other. And for a long time, we found that our community literally did our support for us. I'm gonna show a tiny video, quick video of one of the things we do is have Monday huddles.
This video is from a few years ago. And what I love about it is that something happened. We'd set up a culture, but after a while, you have to just trust the team to run with it. So something happened that I didn't know about.
So every Monday, we did a Monday huddle where somebody would present five slides about their job, and Yuka took it upon himself to present slightly differently. Yes. What I loved about that was just it was a pretty miserable Monday morning, and I was just, like, looking around at people that in the team just laughing and supporting this pretty daft and vulnerable moment.
And I was just like, oh. And that level of support within our team has really, really been shining through during this pandemic. And, you know, in lots of ways, we're incredibly lucky. We're still managing to grow and to sell, but the team have had a hard time.
And knowing that there's individuals within the team rolling with the culture and hearing things like that's the top love for in our Net Promoter Score, employee Net Promoter Score is the culture and the people. It's exceptional, and I I would really encourage every business to lean into that and make sure that they focus on it.
Because people told us once you go from thirty to fifty people, that's when you lose your culture, or there's other barriers like a hundred to a hundred and And it hasn't happened because we're saying it's important, and we're gonna focus on it. So passion is probably my favorite of the Uni values, and we one way we deal with it is to give every single person in the team five hundred pounds a year to spend on a passion they've got.
Here's some of the examples. People have bought puppies, including me. It's the year of the puppy. Right? Oh my goodness. We've got people, Natalie, there going with their singing group to New Orleans. We've got somebody who spent it on an engagement ring. We've got surfboards and trips to the States and all sorts of amazing things.
And the point is it's not that much money, certainly not that much money for uni, but it has to be spent on something they want and something they're into because we really care about employing the whole human. The the words from Oscar Lee's little Cockney song at the beginning, it is like it's a human that we're we're working with, and some people have been super nice.
One of our other values is kindness, so they say, I'm into this charity. I want to donate my five hundred pounds to that. We're like, okay. Well, we'll donate to the charity, but then what are you gonna spend on yourself? What are you gonna how are you gonna make sure you've got work life balance?
And it's just the rewards are amazing because people are fired up, and we only want fired up employees who are passionate. So a very easy hack. This quote comes from the boss, the director of London School of Economics. In the past, jobs were about muscles.
Now they're about brains, but in the future, they're about the heart. Well, I love that, and I would say that the future is now. A room of brilliant, techy people, but we all know that it's the human part that is going to help us thrive.
You know, we've got brilliant robots, and we've got brilliant tech tech, but now is the time to focus on the passion and the heart. And it sounds soft, but I can assure you that Uni is doing well, and I think it's a lot to do with brilliant products and this.
Another fun story is when I went to Silicon Valley, I was lucky enough to go and meet amazing companies. Here I am in the house of the founder of Bebo. Quite cute. One of the nicest houses I've ever been to in real life, it was in Pacific Heights in in San Francisco.
Honestly, it was so beautiful. So there she is, Sochi Birch, and she's beside an adviser from Obama, and it was just a brilliant conversation. But I heard this all the time. In Silicon Valley, everyone will help you. You'll be beside someone in Starbucks in a coffee shop, and they'll be an executive at Netflix, and they'll say, I'm gonna help you. But people help you everywhere.
It's weird how it went I was like, that's Scotland. You know, I don't think that's unique. It might be a special thing there, but it's really not unique. And in my experience, anyone you reach out to, anyone that I've reached out to, which is a lot of people, if you admire people and you just want to authentically connect with them, they're like, amazing.
I'm gonna help you, or let's be friends. And that is one of the the cut campaigns we ran, actually. So making friends is kind of our whole jam. I'm pretty skeptical about influencers and paid for. I think it's my Scottishness that I was like, okay.
You can if you like uni, we'll give you an uni. See if you like it, then you can cover it. But I really I want to make sure it's always authentic. During the lockdown, we had this idea. Hannah, who's our events manager, headed this up, which was about thinking about people who we absolutely love, stars, celebrities, people of influence that we think are amazing, and just reaching out to them and saying, we love you.
Would you like a pizza oven? You're probably bored at home. And it was mad, the people that said yes. So we literally had no limits to how far we would go. Dolly Parton now has four unis. She asked for four. She was like, what a legend. Okay. Yes.
You can have them. Beyonce, yes to unis. Obama, my personal favorite, said yes. And so we obviously don't expect them to cover it in their Instagram, but having that campaign and lots of people did, actually. But, yeah, it was amazing. Here is one little clip of Bruce Willis receiving his uni.
Christian's very Finnish parents were impressed by that. They haven't been impressed so far, but that was the thing. They were like, okay. This is real. Mister Diehard has got a new name. We also gave a new name to the the both Jimmies, Kimmel and Fallon.
And then about a month ago, saw this come up on The Tonight Show, which we hadn't paid for. We didn't know what was gonna happen. And it was a ten minute segment where he was cooking with some other people, and we were like, oh my god.
Oh my god. And so everyone contacted us. So just that little gesture of going, oh, you're cool. We didn't even hear back. They were like, yeah. We'll take it. So yeah. And we've had lots of people buy them anyway, people around the world, which is very exciting.
Well, I don't usually monitor the Instagram account for Uni because we've got amazing people for that now. But once I did so this is back last summer. This came in. I was like, screen grab. Probably. I don't know if I'm allowed to show this, but delete.
I was like, okay. You can probably buy one. Funnily enough, we had every single person in uni, male or female, offer to take one to Jake Gyllenhaal. But we helped him out. And to be fair to him, he could have bought one, but it was quite hard to get them last summer, so we obliged.
However, disaster struck. So Jake Gyllenhaal received his uni. He was very happy. We heard from his agent. He was using it. And then we heard that he broke his stone, which does happen. But luckily, we've got a he was just moving his oven, and it smashed.
We've got a very generous nature and wanted to help replace it as we would with any customer. But when he sent in a picture, we got this. And I don't know if you can see that that's actually Jake Gyllenhaal right there. This is Hannah, who's in the audience, who is our amazing person that headed up this thing, was like, oh my god.
I've got a picture of Jake Jake Gyllenhaal's foot. Incredibly rigorous, which is one of our values. So well done, Hannah, and live in our values. I found this conversation on my WhatsApp, which made me laugh so much. So you broke it way too long.
That is what you want in your team, people who care. Such a random aside, but I just freaking love that story so much. Rigor. So about two weeks ago, I was actually here and got to go to TED, which is really fun and amazing to connect with people again.
Doesn't it feel mad that the world is opening up? And because I was at TED, it finished on a Friday, but our event Opie was happening. So that event I told you about in in Finland and then Venice now happens in Switzerland. And after two years of being closed, it was happening again.
And I was gonna be a day late for the event, which gave me FOMO, which is confirmed as a real thing by Emily earlier. I couldn't yeah. I felt odd, but I was so excited to go. And this is a picture I took from the bus for the final leg of going from Geneva to Champery where the event was.
That's not photoshopped. It's just amazing. And I was talking to my exec team on a Zoom call, and I just switched my camera on. Was like, oh, sorry. I've got to go. I've arrived. And as I arrived, I was, let's say, a day late, turned up at the chalet.
We were hosting about ninety people, these leaders from around the world, seventy or so who were known to the community, had been there before, been at Opie, and about thirty percent who are new. And I turned up, and I was faced with them all looking out towards the mountains and singing.
I was just blown away because I'd had to pause to buffer myself and go, oh my god. What has happened? This mad group of people reconnecting in such a picturesque, wonderful moment. And the song that they were singing was the killers, Am I Human or Human?
And I just stopped and was like, oh, blown away by this mad experience because they're all they're not singers. They were there learning together, being put out of their comfort zones, but connected in this crazy way. And I just thought, it's great because this is the first time I haven't done anything to run Opie.
In a way, I was involved as a founder of it, but I've had to move because Uni's taken up all my time, and I trust Claudia who runs it now so implicitly. And this amazing thing that happens sort of set the conditions, and you have this group, and it just is thriving.
So I guess the killer question is, are we human or are we dancer? What does that even mean? It's totally yes, Anne. Right? I think the things that I would love to instill are just to lean into looking after your humans and actually giving time to what people need.
I am an incredibly positive person, but at times during this last year and a half, I'm sure you've all felt like it's not been good. I've had to stop and teach myself. Actually, sometimes it's okay to just give people a space to complain and to be sad and to, you know, connect properly and to trust your team to get on with it and to, you know, set the conditions, but then let it flourish.
So what are you gonna do on Monday to make sure your passionate people have purpose and or pizza? Thank you.
