Business Athletes: Jack Jackson

Hello and welcome to Business Athletes everyone 👋 

Each week, we’ll explore the athlete-like habits behind a different business leader. In less than 5-minutes, we aim to provide you with practical tactics that you can quickly apply in your day-to-day.⚡️

In this edition of Business Athletes, we spoke with Jack Jackson, the co-founder of Recurse ML, a code generation startup based out of London, England.

Jack’s team is writing code that writes code, allowing developers to devote their time and hard work to problems that really matter instead of repetitive and mundane tasks.

Jack’s approach to business is less about rigid routines and more about creating an environment where his team have the freedom to explore ideas, fail fast, and learn even faster. From how he handles his mornings to his leadership philosophy, Jack embodies what it means to be a true business athlete.

⚡️ Hope you enjoy the read!

Pre-Game Preparation

A Simple Start

My mornings are simple: I wake up, skip breakfast, grab a coffee, and head to work. The coffee has to be good — I can only have one a day or I’ll be bouncing off the walls. I usually go for Blank Street Coffee, it’s on my route to the office, but my absolute favorite is Omotesando Koffee. I reserve that for the weekends though, as it’s a bit far to go just for a coffee. I’m particular about my coffee, I’m no connoisseur but it sets the tone for the day.

Gameplay

Day-to-Day Workflow

Our daily rhythm is a blend of structure and flexibility. We start with a morning sync where the whole team aligns on daily goals. We rank our days on a scale of one to four, where one is very bad and four is great. This allows us to set clear targets for success and not delude ourselves.

Having this focus ensures we don’t drift away from pushing core business objectives, as we tend to value creative deep thinking, which left unchecked can detract from speed of movement. 

Without these clear success criteria, we risk sinking a disproportionate amount of time into tasks which do not yield near-term benefit. If we consistently hit fours, we adjust what it means to reach that level of achievement, sometimes setting outrageously ambitious (bordering delusional) goals. When we do hit a four, it should be seen both as an indicator of incredible achievement, and a call to action to push ourselves even further.

Weekly Performance Rituals

Mondays usually kick off with sprint planning after a brief morning sync. In these meetings we set weekly goals, again on the scale of one to four. Daily goals should lead to the achievement of these broader objectives. At the start of each month we set goals, from which weekly goals are similarly derived.

Fridays for us are all about retrospectives and what we call “demos and demons” (D&D). There we showcase what we’ve built throughout the week, discuss any challenges faced, and what that means for our broader monthly (and quarterly) goals. The “demons” usually lead to tickets for bug fixes, or stories to explore particularly complex issues in further detail.

Creating Flow

Flow, for me, is about staying busy; balancing the need to “feel” busy, with doing what is actually productive for the business. This is where the daily, weekly, monthly, and even quarterly goals serve as a good benchmark. If I’m not busy, I get restless, and if I’m busy with tasks which do not push the business forward, I feel unproductive.

As a founder, you have to get your hands dirty with everything, so some tasks (like payroll), you just have to suck up as being part of the job. Fortunately, these aren’t particularly high frequency at our stage, so I typically do them in small batches during my commute to maximise my efficiency whilst I’m in office.

Maintaining Flow

I try to maintain flow by not setting a strict schedule outside of specific time slots for customer development calls, but my team prefers to work in a more structured environment.

To balance this, we have specific times for general technical or strategic discussions, usually during the morning, over lunch, and at the end of the day. Outside of this, your schedule is yours to manage. Whatever helps you achieve your goals and makes you feel your most productive is fair game.

Everyone has visibility on the availability of other team members, and can approach them during “office hours”, which are dedicated slots where you can discuss any challenges you’ve encountered with the relevant team member. This helps prevent us from interrupting the flow of another team member, allowing each of us to focus on pushing our daily goals. It’s about striking a balance between enabling creativity and maintaining productivity.

Lessons From The Field

3 Keys To Peak Performance

Leading people is always about authenticity and transparency. No one wants to follow someone onto the metaphorical battlefield if they don’t feel like they’d do the same for them. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and trust isn’t built overnight. As a founder I believe there are three key things which serve as the foundation of a productive work culture: formidability, trust, and brutal honesty.

• Formidability and trust are things that are built and proven over time. Consistently delivering on your goals demonstrates to your team that you are reliable, and sets a tone for them to do the same. When someone on the team has a particularly successful week, my first thought is to congratulate them. My mind then immediately goes to “what can I do better” to match this level of intensity and work output. Everyone on the team is highly self motivated. People have off weeks, and in these instances, you need to know the person well enough so you can provide the right support to get the best out of them. My co-founder, Armin, is exceptional at this.

• Trust is a tricky one, as everyone builds trust in different ways. For me, it is really important that the people I work with know that I will go to bat for them every single time. Something goes wrong, I take the hit. Something goes well, they get the glory. My job isn’t to get pats on the back from investors, clients, or even fellow team members. The team is and always will be my priority. Anyone who is crazy enough to join me on this journey just by default has my absolute trust and loyalty.

• Brutal honesty is something that takes time. Armin and I are both very direct people. Armin is full of incredibly insightful remarks, and during a particularly difficult period, he said something that will stick with me forever. “Emotions are temporary, but the respect has always been there”. Approaching our work with this mindset allows us to mentally spar, rip each other's hypothesis apart, all whilst having a smile on our faces. Ultimately, we both want what is best for the business, and any criticism we provide is always well received. We both know the levels we can respectively deliver to, and it would be a disservice to allow the other to underdeliver on their potential. I want to be better every day to live up to the opinion he has of me, and I hope he knows just how high regards I hold him in.

A Company Culture Must Be Unique

This culture isn’t for everyone though. One of the most important things for me is to be completely honest about our working styles and culture. This honesty allows us to attract people who are genuinely excited about the way we do things. It’s not just about hiring great talent; it’s about building a team that’s aligned in their values and motivated to tackle the same mission.

Diversity of thought is crucial to running a successful business, so we heavily index on those bold enough to say “no” when they see something they believe is wrong. Some of my favourite candidates we have interviewed have been the ones that are not afraid to point out everything they see wrong in our approach, and then suggest how they can contribute.

Winning As A Team

I have immense faith in my team. Even when I doubt myself, I never doubt them. It’s a genuine honour that they’ve entrusted to steering the ship, and irrespective of what happens externally, I refuse to let their hard work go to waste.

For me, the essence of being a business athlete is having that unwavering belief and loyalty to the people around you. It’s easy to say this, but actually doing it is much harder. Everyone can embody these attributes when it’s convenient and times are good, but when s**t hits the fan and the chips are down, that’s when you see who’s really in this for themselves and who truly believes in and cares about the people around them.

I see my job as protecting my team from all the noise, so they can focus on building towards our vision for the world—brick by brick, code snippet by code snippet.

Rest & Improvement

Constant Growth and Curiosity

For me, learning isn’t a task—it’s part of life. Every day, I make sure to carve out time to read or explore something new. We have weekly paper clubs as a team, where we explore topics from the latest and greatest research papers. Thinking about it, we should probably release our reading list at some point, you could probably build an entire lecture series on codegen off the back of it. Personally though, I like to read a lot on psychology, human behavior, and business strategy. This is because understanding and empowering people is at the core of everything I do. 

I believe that as a founder/CEO, your job is to be the voice of the customer in the room, always learning what drives them and how to align your team's efforts with those needs.

Knowledge is what keeps you agile. As a founder, you’re always doing JIT (just in time) style learning. Whatever the business needs at that moment, I up-skill in that area. The more I learn, the better I can lead my team and anticipate the challenges we face.

It’s a Marathon, not a Sprint

I think about rest differently than most people. There was a period in my 20’s where I didn’t take a single holiday for five years, but I didn’t burn out once because of two things: one, I genuinely love what I do, and two, I believe that stress comes from not taking action in areas you know you have influence over, rather than having “too much” to do.

To strike a balance, I make sure to prioritise rest on the weekends, where at least one day to detox from the world. During this time, I usually go for a run, grab a coffee, and spend time with my family. I have a niece and nephew. My niece is a bit older now so mostly does her own thing, but I love taking my nephew to football training on Saturday mornings. He’s a big football fan, so it’s not uncommon I receive texts from him in the middle of the day about his favourite team or a new card he packed in his favourite video game.

Of course, if there’s an emergency, I’m always tuned in, but I try to carve out some time for myself every week. If I don’t get that day off, it’s more likely that I’ll feel drained towards the end of the following week. A symptom that I need to take a day off to recharge my batteries.

The Business Athlete Mindset

Patience, Trust, and a Relentless Drive

For me, being a business athlete is about trusting the process and the people around you, and being trusted in return. 

You need patience because nothing happens overnight. Building something big takes time, and I believe patience is essential. People often overestimate what they can achieve in a year but underestimate what they can do in five.

But more than that, it’s about the unwavering belief in your team. Even on days when I doubt myself, I never doubt the people I work with. I refuse to let them down, and that’s what keeps me going.

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