Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future podcast welcomes Steve O’Hear, is best known for his tenure with Techcrunch as one of the UK’s biggest tech journalists, and is now the VP of Strategy at home-delivery brand Zapp.
Prior to Zapp, Steve spent over 15 years as a technology and business journalist, including reporting for TechCrunch, covering European startups and venture capital.
Speaking on how journalism has evolved over the last 10 years, he tells host Jimmy: “I think the biggest change is that the business of media has been heavily disrupted by the internet. Everybody expects their news to be free, which has distorted the amount of resources that go into news reporting, and investigative journalism.
“It makes it much harder as journalists have less time to work on each individual story, which changes the depth of coverage and the type of coverage that’s produced.”
Drawing from his time at TechCrunch, Steve talks about luck and good timing, and how he uniquely approached pitches about new tech startups” “I was lucky enough to be one of the first journalists to write about a new company. Some of those have gone on to become household names, such as Transferwise, Deliveroo, and Monzo.
“At the time, I never thought of myself as the hitmaker, it wasn’t about holding myself to the credit of their success. What I always tried to do was figure out, is the problem they’re trying to solve, a problem that actually exists? Is the problem big enough, that should they become successful, the company itself would become a meaningful company? Did I get a sense that the founders were one of, if not the best people to potentially solve that problem? That was my way of analyzing an initial pitch around a brand-new company, or a new industry that hadn’t yet been disrupted.”
With a varied career, including building a startup, working in journalism, and now joining a rapidly scaling company, Steve was asked if he were 22 in 2022, what sectors would take his interest: “Based on my experience, if I was 22 in 2022, I would definitely be attracted towards tech, and industries that are more open to different ways of working, and allow people to develop their soft skills.
“If I could tell myself anything, it would be that soft skills around communication, analysis, challenging assumptions, and asking the right questions, can get you a hell of a long way.”
Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future is available on Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, and all major podcast platforms.
