📺 [rapidMATION Live] Fireside chat with Anders Jensen, an Automation Teacher & YouTuber

Transcript

Shaun Leisegang:

Hey everyone. Today, I’m extremely excited to welcome Anders Jensen to the show. Anders is currently a YouTuber, instructor and automation teacher, and he’s doing some really amazing things in the automation community. So Anders, welcome to the show.

Anders Jensen:

Thank you, Shaun. Nice being here.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Great to have you. And thanks for joining us from Denmark this morning. What’s happening in Denmark today? It’s pretty early that side. Isn’t it?

Anders Jensen:

It’s 9:00. I sit in my basement. As you said, I just started up my company. So I’m sitting here in this basement and trying to get the company going.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, brilliant. It’s the epitome of a startup community, right? In your basement getting things going, but it looks really good. So it’s really cool.

Anders Jensen:

Thank you. But then it’s nice to have virtual meetings with people from all over the world, like you in Australia and yeah. India, USA. And I think I have meetings like in all, not out continents, but a lot of continents the past two weeks and this week. So that’s nice.

Shaun Leisegang:

Brilliant, mate. Listen, I know that we’re going to talk a lot about kind of your current journey, but just before we kind of get to that, let’s take the viewers and the listeners on a bit of a journey about you and kind of where you’ve come from. So I know in the very early days of, I guess, your career, you started off as a professional online poker player which I found really interesting. So let’s start there. Tell us a little bit about how you became to be a professional online poker player, what you loved about it? Let’s get started with that.

Anders Jensen:

Sure. I was a professional poker player for more than 15 years. That is I have, we had an office, we were plus 10 poker players, online poker players sitting next to each other in an office like you would do in your automation office. And then we helped each other and we played separately. And we were 10 or whatever number we were at the CU point. We were 10 separate units. So we didn’t share economy. We didn’t help each other. But we sat there to have a professional network. And then I played online poker and I quickly discovered that the more tables I could play, the more I could earn per hour. And to help me with that, I discovered automation. And at that point it was scripting. I found a really easy language to learn from me as a non-programmer.

Anders Jensen:

That was AutoHotkey at that point. It wasn’t, it is not really good. And today it’s outdated, but back then it was great. I could do some simple or data science like data science work where I could extract emails and get my data mind hands into databases. I can arrange the tables around the screen. So simple tasks that might have helped me playing not 20 or 21 tables, but 22 or 23 tables. It might not sound a lot, but imagine that you can raise your hourly wage with 10%. And it’s quite a lot if that happens every hour, every week, every month, every year. So that helped me a lot. Of course, it was, not of course, but it was unstable. So once in a while it misclicked and then it cost me some money. And so that was not a nice part of it, but that was the risk that was built in.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

That was my way in. And then I…. The poker world got overtaken by bot. That is like algorithms that can play poker perfectly. And they weren’t necessarily beating me, but they beat the opposition. Or instead of a casual player, I suddenly had a winning player or player as good as myself, or maybe just a little bit less good. And then the hourly dropped. So I figured I could do some, I should do something else. And then I took a decision and took an education at university at the age of, I think, 36, 37-years-old.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

And because I had this scripting thing going for me in the poker career, I discovered RPA. I actually did it while play poker. That was something called win automation. It doesn’t exist today, but it was a good tool. It was better than AutoHotkey to some tasks for sure. And then yeah, I found the UiPath Academy and transitioned from economy to automation.

Shaun Leisegang:

Amazing. What an amazing story. And I guess going back to the poker playing, it was such a unique use of automation technology just to give you that little edge. And again, it’s like in any professional sports, people are just looking for that little edge and it’s great to see how automation was giving you that in your professional poker playing career.

Anders Jensen:

Sure. And when I say 10%, it was 10% grasp, but then yeah, there were the misclicks. You can deduct like 3% and then there was some, the development time. So maybe it was just 1%, 2% or 3% it gave me, but it was, it’s still a lot in a competitive sport, which online poker is.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, absolutely. And what a great story. So then you finish your poker playing, and then you decided, okay, I’m losing that edge just purely because there’s a lot of bots and you don’t have that human elements on the other side, as you said. And you headed off to university and back to school and you’d stumbled across the UiPath Academy. Now because you had that background, I can imagine when you came across UiPath specifically, it was just such a natural fit for you to investigate a bit more and see what UiPath could do for you.

Anders Jensen:

Yeah. And I just took the academy. I took some of the certification and just went through the courses and trying to educate myself there because I could see a lot of potential. Of course, I didn’t know anything about the industry at that point, but I could see, I automated some of my own task. That’s how you usually learn the fastest. That’s automating your personal stuff at home and building things.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

And I can see that potential. And then I just, I need to get into that industry that is the future or at least a part of the future.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Absolutely right. What an exciting journey. So then you got through school and then I understand you went on to work for kind of different RPA or technology companies. You landed up as an RPA leader at a company. Tell us a bit about that. What types of technologies did you use? What kind of customers did you get involved with?

Anders Jensen:

Maybe we could rewind a bit because when I took all these courses, I wanted to get a job as you said. And I did get a job. But before that, I actually, I wrote, I think it was 26 or 28 applications to, and that was just associate jobs like a student job. I couldn’t get any job because of my background. I think it was, I don’t think I’m that bad in writing applications, but I couldn’t get a job. So that was a problem because as with every job, it’s very important that you get some experience and I couldn’t get in it anywhere. So that was a big problem for me. And then I figured that if I made some content like a portfolio I could on YouTube or at that point it was, but then I might be able show off what I did.

Anders Jensen:

But then before I actually got that started, I got a nice job at a really nice place where I got paired up with a really skilled developer that has worked at one of the largest banks in Denmark where he was the lead of their RPA program there. So he thought me a lot. We still have the contact and yeah. And so that was my way in. And then I could take on the job and get my experience, but it was a hard way in, and imagine that a lot of your viewers might have the similar problem in getting into just the entry level job. And so yeah, what I can recommend is creating a portfolio. Whether that is YouTube, generally, it doesn’t have to be, but maybe a podcast like yourself. I’m sure you get a lot of people writing you because you are known in the community or maybe just a written blog being active on LinkedIn, something that can show off your content to potential employers that will certain help you a lot. And that helped me a lot.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Such good advice.

Anders Jensen:

That was…

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

And that was not related to your question, but it just felt like we had to have that with us. But your question was what technology I used, right?

Shaun Leisegang:

Absolutely.

Anders Jensen:

Sure. And then he, like the developer that where I got in, he taught me a lot. And we mainly, or exclusively used UiPath and then a small open source tool called Open RPA, which is a nice person that, a genius that develops his own RPA tool. And we used UiPath and the company, they provided the RPA as a service, which make a ton of sense because so we did all, or we ran all the processes at our service. And that way, you can utilize the licenses, which is quite a bit when you talk about the big RPA tools.

Anders Jensen:

So utilizing licenses and that made us, we primarily worked or they actually still do in that company. It’s a really nice company. They work for municipalities like government, a lot of those things where they cannot copy, but they can make, they created one benchmark RPA process. And then they can easily go to the next municipality and tweak it a bit. And if it worked in the first place, they will talk about it. And that was the business model, which taught me a lot.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

Just working with customers and I didn’t have, I have a little bit of contact, but back then it was just development.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, mate. What a beautiful story. So again, I think you had some really good kind of hints and tips for the listeners and viewers. And I think the thing is we interview heaps of people all the time, but if you can have something where you can show what you’ve done or real world example, it really helps. I think that’s really good. And it’s great that kind of led to you getting a good job and then getting into the industry, getting a good mentor. Mentor is always another great place that I recommend to people that everyone needs a mentor in life. Someone that can help them out, that can guide them along the journey. So really great to see how that’s played out in your career. So but then you are in this company rights and if we come back to where you are today, you’ve decided to move into being a YouTube, and instructor, and an automation teacher. So how did that come about? How did you decide to break away from this company and start up your own gig?

Anders Jensen:

As I briefly mentioned, I created a YouTube channel where I wanted to make a portfolio, the first video, and then I got a job. So I actually created an and I got a job, but I continued to create these videos just around daily problems in UiPath, either something that I need to remind myself of or something that I wanted to educate other people in my network about. And those were really bad I tell you. The quality of them I think I got like 20 views or something. They’re still there. I kept it at my channel just to, because I wanted to document a journey so you can still find them there.

Anders Jensen:

And then, so they were really bad. And then I just continued to, I thought it was a great medium YouTube and I continued to improve the quality of my videos. I made the sound better. I made the video better. I made, yeah, everything better. And maybe I also the content. So I figured out what people want to know. And then I could tailor the content a bit more around that instead of just creating randomly content, like at the top of my head content.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

And then people, they started to see it and then it started to grow. And I can see that I could add money on it, not a lot, but maybe around, at that point I could see it from $100, $200 all the way up to when I quit my job it was like $1,100. So still you could, you cannot make a living on $1,100 in Denmark. I think it’s around, we have the same prices as in Australia. So you cannot make a living out of $1,100 and it was way less than I earned as an RPA developer, but it was also the added benefit that I got a lot of consulting jobs through my YouTube channel. People see a UiPath problem, or Power Automate problem or whatever problem I solve. And they see they search for it and they see, he can solve it. And then they contact me and want to get that problem solved.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

So that is another benefit of creating your portfolio. People can see what you can do and they can contact you. And of course, as you grow, you’ll get more and more mails from people that wants to hire you. So then I figured that let’s quit my job and go solo. So two legs creating content on YouTube and doing RPA consulting, which is actually two things that drags in the opposite direction. I don’t think it’s sustainable. If I want to grow my business, it’s definitely not the way to go. But as you know, we need the money for housing, food and everything. So you need to do something that can earn your money short term while and still your strategy is to grow your company long term. But yeah, I need some sort of some money to live off. So that’s why I do it like that. And in the long run consulting will go away, I think.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Brilliant. And I love the kind of the slants you’ve taken on it because you’ve decided to document and share your whole journey of starting up your company. So tell us about bit about that. What made you decide you wanted to do that?

Anders Jensen:

I think it was the easiest thing to do, and I could see it was interesting to people. They can know how much I earn, they can, I can share the stories from this page and Instagram or whatever medium I choose to share that day. Then I can, you can tell, that can tell them everything without almost no secrets. Of course, there are some things with working with clients that they see, they say, Anders, you cannot share this. But generally speaking, I try to and only say yes to jobs where I can actually share what I earn and sorry, the contract, the task, and say, and everything, because that makes great content and the great content that is like a snowball effect because then more people will see what I do and I’ll get some, another consulting job because of that content. And then yeah, you can have this snowball effect. So I figured that it was easy and it was nice. It made my content more interesting to people.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Right. Absolutely. I’ve been following your journey and I love it. There’s a few kind of personal finance, podcasters and YouTubers that I follow and they do very similar and it’s just awesome to be able to see behind the scenes, because I imagine some of your days are hard. You’re investing time and things. Maybe it’s not giving you the return that you’re looking for, but people really get vested in your journey and following you and wanting you to succeed. So yeah, I’ve certainly enjoyed it and I’m sure there’s many other people out there that have enjoyed it too.

Anders Jensen:

And there’s actually one more thing to it. There’s also the feedback that I get from the audience. I do a lot of things and running a business is not my, you can say that I ran my own business for 15 years plus as a poker player. But I do a lot of things. I have a lot of bad habits. I do things suboptimal that I can definitely improve and sharing all the decisions and all the things that I go through. I got a lot of help. I don’t always agree. But a lot of times I can just fix a bad habit by just reading the comments or people contact me directly. Or like speaking to you, this podcast you might not be directly profitable for me because I could create some video instead that will get viewed and all that.

Anders Jensen:

But it gives me a lot of other things. It gives me feedback from Australia. It also, it grows the community, which I benefit of the more podcast, the more YouTube shows that’s good for me because then the community grow as, and will be a place where people can actually get knowledge that can find your podcast shown and they can listen to that to learn things. And then they suddenly know that the RPA community is a place where you can learn from. And that is actually quite different through a lot of other communities I think. I think it’s you can learn a lot and you can engage a lot. You can network a lot in the RPA community. So I benefit a lot from that as well. Even though it’s not directly profitable.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, absolutely right. And funny, and that’s the reason why we started the Automation Alliance podcast is to kind of interview interesting people like yourself so that the community can benefit from knowing about everything else that’s happening around them. And I know that it will reap massive benefits for you. So thank you once again for having a chat with us. Right?

Anders Jensen:

And I’m saying, thank you.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, absolutely. And there something like these social media channels that you’re pushing your content out through, tell us a bit about which ones you decided to focus on.

Anders Jensen:

I think it makes most sense to focus on YouTube because that’s where my biggest audiences are at the moment. I have like 22,000 followers, which may not sound like a lot, but it’s quite a lot because it’s a niche audience. So everyone watching my videos, those ones are probably RPA developers or business people in the industry. So it’s a highly specialized audience I would say. And so I’m on YouTube and then on LinkedIn, and then I’m blogging a bit on Instagram stories. It’s not that big yet, but it’s nice to still have the contact and again, the feedback from the audience and actually, yeah. Getting that and being in touch with people otherwise, it can be quite lonely to sit in a basement eight hours a day. So, yeah, trying to network and still get the input from the outside world is very important to me.

Anders Jensen:

And to answer a question YouTube and LinkedIn, those ones will probably be my main channels where and I don’t earn anything on LinkedIn. And so it’s YouTube. And another thing to add is that I don’t, so most of my views and that is the paid views on YouTube, which each view is that comes through searches. 90% of my views come through searches, 10% comes through people saying, we know Anders. We want to watch this video or through a link if say that there’s a link in the podcast or something. And then also means that people search for a problem, like how to use orchestrate on UiPath. Then they I’m in the tub of the searches, they click my video, watch it, and then they’re gone right after.

Anders Jensen:

And it also means that I need to optimize through searches and the content itself and not so much and posting links on LinkedIn or doing all these things because I don’t get a lot of views through that. So that’s part of the common strategy, or it should be. I think I spend a little bit too long on social media, but that’s another story that’s also to be in contact with the world. But so being actually on YouTube should, and is my main priority, I would say.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, brilliant. And such, again, such great insights you’ve shared because I’m sure there’s many people that might listen to this or, or watch it and they want to know like how do they go part of the journey and where should they start? Where should they focus? So I think that’s been brilliant to share. But now…

Anders Jensen:

And I think… Sorry. Shaun, if you’re saying that where to start, I think the best way is just to get started as with everything else. My videos were really bad in from the sound perspective, the video. And just get started, you will improve and believe me, you will learn a lot instead of just making the perfect product and then go into market. It will take you a lot of years to reach that point. So that’ll be my advice just to get started with creating the content that you want.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, absolutely right. Absolutely. And tell me something. Obviously, there’s lots of things that you can talk about and create content around. How do you decide, I know you do a little bit of view UiPath and Power Automate. There’s many different things you cover on your channel. How do you just decide what to prioritize and what things you’re going to actually publish out for the audience?

Anders Jensen:

From an early start, do you mean how much I share from my company or do you just mean how I find my topics in general?

Shaun Leisegang:

How you find your topics and how you decide, hey, I might do automation anyway today or I might do something else?

Anders Jensen:

First of all, I didn’t want to be like a one trick pony, like a person that could only do one tool because that has a build in danger. And then let’s say that I chose UiPath, which I think 50%, 60% of my content is UiPath and then yeah, UiPath most value professional. So that might have been the most obvious decision to take, but that will also make me a one trick pony, meaning that I can only do UiPath content. And if I want to do collaborations with brands, I have some brands like PixieBrix or so that I’m sponsored by them. So I need to mention, but no. So they contacted me and said, can you do some educational stuff for us and then show our product to your audience and then you can earn some money?

Anders Jensen:

But imagine that I only made UiPath content it would be a lot harder for companies contenting me and seeing their product at my site because it was such a specific channel. So it’s a tech decision that I wanted to make a variety of tools. And also, because I’m curious. I love to see, yeah, as you say, automation anywhere, Power Automated, the open source tool like Robocop open up here. And so a lot of work I charged auto hotkey because I wanted to do a revival at my poker. And that is actually my most viewed video is that’s 12 minutes of auto hotkey with terrible sound, but apparent there’s a lot of Minecraft doesn’t and the likes that find this video. And I think it got like, that’s my most viewed video and the video that earned me the most. So that’s really funny.

Shaun Leisegang:

Amazing. And my next question is actually going to be what has been your most successful piece of content, but it’s been auto key purely because of kind some of the that’s funny, right?

Anders Jensen:

It’s an awful video. And then there’s also, I think UiPath and Power Automate those ones on top. That’s too big tools. But if we can actually separate those, because UiPath is quite big in India, whereas Power Automate is big in US, Europe, Australia, I could imagine.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

And there’s actually YouTube pay you money to the ads that they can put on their videos. And showing an ad in India where the buying power is less than for example, Australia, that means that they can charge less from the companies that put the ads on. And that also means that because YouTube share 50% around what they get that they give to me. And that also means that if my video gets views in India, relative to Australia, I earn around 30 times less.

Anders Jensen:

And that’s another decision where, so you can see that if Power Automate is probably in Australia and you are part of probably in India, I could make more money going with the Power Automate because that will be targeted to people with more buying power. But I chose not to at least for the moment, because I’m just familiar with UiPath. It’s so easy for me to make good content there and the next producer. And so that is easy, but it’s also something that you can think of that where is my content getting seen? And could I optimize through audiences with a bigger buying power?

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Amazing. And what we’ll do is we’ll drop in the show notes, we’ll drop in some of those channels, just in case people want to come check out a YouTube channel and that type of thing they can link up with you and obviously follow you on LinkedIn. I know you’ve started discord very recently as well. How’s discord kind of how’s that all going?

Anders Jensen:

I wanted a community where I could set the rules, maybe set the rules a bit instead of making a community on LinkedIn, Facebook, or where the companies they have your audience or your data. I want a place where we could just set the rules as I wanted. And that is just, everyone can join for free and people can help each other. And we can kick out the people that are spamming on and stuff like that. But the discord is actually self-driven. I try to make one answer at least to an RPA problem. And let’s mention what discord is. This discord is something like Teams or Slack if you know that. It’s a social media where people can join and they can join my channel, or if Shaun here makes a channel, your viewer could join his channel.

Anders Jensen:

And then we can talk about specific topic like the channel’s topic and the topic of my channel is RPA. And so we discuss RPA like solve problems through all variety of tools. So we have a lot of developers. We are 1600 now, but we solve the problems. And then we just network and talk about our careers and maybe just talk about what we ate for dinner or just an off topic chat like you know from communities where you suddenly you feel like you know each other. And we do that. And it also has the benefit that I get closer to my audience again, because creating, going back to creating the technical content where people only search for my content and then back on this makes me closer to the RPA developers that I’m creating content to. So that is also a huge benefit for me, I will say. So I don’t earn any money at discord. It costs me money to have it, but I think the engagement is really nice.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Brilliant. And discord has become really popular. There’s many communities that I’m a part of. So yeah, I hope that it gets really big for you. And it’s a great way as you say, to connect your audience so awesome. But now, Anders, I know that your business is already growing. I understand you brought someone else onto the business, is that correct?

Anders Jensen:

Yeah. On Tuesday I got a new colleague joining in. You could say that was as a bold decision because I only earned I think it was around $5,000, $6,000 last month. But now I’m hiring another person and she’s starting on Tuesday.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

Are you fishing for something else?

Shaun Leisegang:

No. All good.

Anders Jensen:

So related to the story I had my wife, we took an active decision of going all in this together. She is in the RPA industry as well on a manager level. And so she’s good at all the things that I’m not good at like handling the administration, making sure that the things are getting done, and getting done in the right order, and getting done to time, or maybe two days before they need to be done. I’m good. And I’m really creative and technical, but I’m not good at handling all this administration. And it annoys me a lot to look at the outlook here behind me, the inbox. And so talking to people, not talking to people, but making arrangement with people and making sure that everything is okay, that really annoys and I’m really bad at it.

Anders Jensen:

So yeah, we made a decision that she would join the company and we will see how it goes to be honest. The expected income for the next couple of months really are not good, but that’s okay. We can see the company can join and is also another thing that we will have it better in our family. We’ll have more time together, more time to our son. We can take days off if we want, we are not dependent on a bus or a company telling us what to do. We can do exactly the things we do. So it’s a bit of a journey, I would say.

Anders Jensen:

Imagine that you and your family took one year out of the calendar and travel around the world. This is, you can say, this is our travel around the world doing this. So starting the company, that will be really nice. And I’m looking forward to Tuesday. It’s Thursday, today. So in four days we are together.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

That will be nice. But we are not sitting here down in this basement. She’ll have a nice office up in our house and I’ll be sitting yet because working that closely together and still be married and all that, that will be too much, I think.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Listen, it’s exciting that the business is growing and we are wishing you both all the best success in the coming months.

Anders Jensen:

Thank you.

Shaun Leisegang:

So that’s a really… So obviously having a small business, the main thing is time. There’s so many things I imagine you might want to do, but you need to pick and choose where you’re going to spend the most time. So how do you decide that? How do you decide kind of which topics or things, or maybe been doing an interview with me? How do you decide where you’re going to spend your time?

Anders Jensen:

Randomly. And that’s where, no, not completely randomly. But definite not, I don’t pro out the best way. And that’s actually, again, a thing that my wife can help me with finding out which thing we should focus on and going directly after those. So not so much taking I can present her for the 10 things that I want to focus on in the company. And she’s really good at taking the most important, making sure that we are doing that one. And then we can take the next one or maybe doing the three most important and then none. So I think a bit too randomly, I would say that it has been two first months and that’s just the nature of it. I’m not good at that. So, yeah. And actually, I shared a bit of that in the post on LinkedIn and people have been a tremendous help to me that they all wanted to give me feedback and help me and, yeah. With the things that I’m not good at. So that has been really nice.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Brilliant. And now if we look a little bit into the future, where would you see, where would you hope you would be maybe six months, a year from now? What’s some of the goals or dreams that you have for the business?

Anders Jensen:

I haven’t written it out, but I think we will do it next week. But I think in six months, like after summer, I will say 100,000 followers on YouTube. Even though you, it’s not a measurement of profit or anything, but that will be like the channel size that I think we can have and we should have. And then earning, if we are not earning money in half a year and then a year, then it’s really critical. I would say, when I say earning money, earning money at a level where we can afford things and not be, of course, we have savings. So we are not going to the street, but we are not afraid.

Anders Jensen:

We know there’s a risk in this and we know that there’s a risk of failure and we are not afraid to go back to our jobs in one year if it doesn’t work out. We don’t think so. We do this because we think it’s profitable both in terms of money and in terms of our times. We spend our times a little bit better that it makes the two of us happier. But, yeah, we know that there’s a risk of failure and that’s also something that I share in the content.

Anders Jensen:

And it’s nice to talk about that. And it’s not, imagine that we opened say, for example, a clothing store, then we would need to buy, we need to rent the house that they’re in and the shop. And we need to have stock. That’s also cost a lot of money. Here the only cost for us that is our salary, that we are not getting paid in our job because we quit our job. So that makes it a bit easier. Of course, that’s a lot of money to IT salaries, but it’s still something that we will definitely do and something that we believe in. So it’s not like just randomly that we think that this let’s see if it works. Of course, we think it works and, yeah. In the long run.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Brilliant, mate. We’re wishing you nothing but success on the journey.

Anders Jensen:

Thank you, Shaun.

Shaun Leisegang:

And we’ll be following you along and we’ll be cheering you on. So I encourage all the listeners and the viewers to have a look at some of your content, subscribe to the YouTube channel. Definitely jump on your website, have a chat to you that way. But just before we say goodbye today, we normally handle kind of finish off with what we call the hot seat. Right?

Anders Jensen:

Uh-huh (affirmative).

Shaun Leisegang:

So the hot seat is where we fire off some very quick questions, just so the audience can get you and get to know you a little bit better as well. So the first question I have for you, Anders, is what did you want to be when you grew up?

Anders Jensen:

When I grew up?

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

That was a great question. I think I wanted to be a programmer, to be honest. My father…

Shaun Leisegang:

Awesome.

Anders Jensen:

Yeah. My father was a programmer or he was a database administrator. So we grew up with computers all the way from, yeah. As long as I can imagine, we had these old school computers. We had a room full of computers and a mess, but that was a really nice, as you can imagine, as a kid, it was a really nice room to be in with your dad and you could sit and play some really simple games. And he was working and you just sat there and just… So that was something that I could see was really interesting. But I actually never learned to code, even though he tried to convince me that I should, but it was not like that he forced me anything.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

So it was actually, so there was way later in the career, like bit of scripting at the poker career. And then, yeah. I taught myself to code at least at some level or later on. So that was, yeah, programmer. That was the answer to your question.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Brilliant. So next question is, what is something on your bucket list that you have already done?

Anders Jensen:

That is going solo, like quitting my job. I would say that was a big dream. And that was something that I think that I would regret in 10 years if I didn’t try it or, yeah, pursue that dream.

Shaun Leisegang:

Brilliant. And let’s ask the opposite of that. So what is something on your bucket list that you haven’t done just yet?

Anders Jensen:

Interview Daniel Dines, the CEO of UiPath

Shaun Leisegang:

That is brilliant.

Anders Jensen:

Have you interviewed him in your podcast, Shaun?

Shaun Leisegang:

So I’ve not interviewed Daniel. I interviewed Guy Kirkwood many times. Guy was the chief evangelist for UiPath. He’s moved on. He’s actually, he’s followed an interesting journey and he’s doing some pretty advanced farming in the UK, but I have met Daniel Dines and I met him at UiPath forward two or three years ago. And I’ve actually got a photo with him. So we were having a beer in a pub and he popped up behind us and he came and sat down and he had a beer with us. So, yeah. Great guy. I look forward to hearing you interview him because he’s already really nice guy.

Anders Jensen:

Nice. Thank you, Shaun. And if I mention it like 10 times, maybe he will hear it one day and then he will consider it.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe send him an email, ping him on LinkedIn. See what he has to say, right?

Anders Jensen:

Yeah.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. All right. Two final questions. Are you reading anything at the moment? Do you have a good book that you would recommend people read? What’s been on your reading list?

Anders Jensen:

I read a lot, Shaun. And I try to read like, is it called crime? So fiction, but crime. And I can’t really recommend you one because I forget them as soon, the minute after I read them, I forget. I read them every night just to think of something else. Otherwise, it can be quite, you think about the company and how you can do that better. And then there’s my family, my son comes home, it’s him. And then it’s just to completely think of something else. I read these fiction, the crime fiction books, which is highly entertaining. But it’s not something that gets, it doesn’t get stuck. So it’s like seeing television and then relaxing. So I cannot really recommend you a good book in that way, because, and most of them are Danish books and which you might not have in Australia still.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah.

Anders Jensen:

So no, I cannot do that. But I read a lot.

Shaun Leisegang:

Brilliant. Okay. Good. And final question, Anders. How do you want to be remembered?

Anders Jensen:

I think as someone who helped people and someone that is transparent. I think that’s the two values that I’ll be remembered from, but that’s at the community. I think if you’re asking family wise or the newer relation, then just a nice guy that is full of integrity. I will say that will be the main values there.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, of course.

Anders Jensen:

And you can, that’s of course, also important to be in the community. But, yeah. Helpful and transparent in community, I will say.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah, mate. Let me tell you. You’re doing a great job at all of that because what you’re doing in the community is amazing. I know many people are finding great value in it. I really appreciate you taking the time just to share a bit with the listeners and the viewers today. So yeah, as I said, we wishing you nothing but success in your journey. We look forward to following you. And hey, maybe in a year’s time from now, we’ll do another one of these. And we’ll talk about the time that you interviewed Daniel Dines.

Anders Jensen:

Sure. Thanks for having me here, Shaun. It’s really appreciated.

Shaun Leisegang:

Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Anders. And we’ll speak to you soon.

Anders Jensen:

See you.

Shaun Leisegang:

Bye-bye.