Choosing the Whetstone path. Sharpening your creativity with Zoe Scaman.

We never planned to launch a tech startup. But when my partner Pip and I were laid off within three weeks of each other, we needed to back ourselves. It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned more in the last three years than in the first decade of my career.

Up until that point, my career had been pretty well mapped out. I started in Sydney media agencies learning the industry and then landed a job at a creative agency in San Francisco, which almost inevitably led to jobs in the tech sector at Twitter and then Shopify. Pip’s journey was very similar, but substitute tech for creative agency land and a Web3 company (remember those?).

COVID hit and we decided to move back to Australia - Noosa in fact - and we were able to work our roles remotely from there for a while. Then, in mid-2022, the music stopped very suddenly for us both and we had some choices to make.

We began consulting remotely from Noosa and started using in earnest some of the new AI tools which were emerging on the market at the time. It all felt like a kind of magic, but too often we were finding that the end result was generic and disappointing and we knew there had to be more they could do for us.

So we taught ourselves to code so we could engineer them to be fit for the work we were doing and give us the output we were looking for. We presented the first MVP version at a conference in Sydney just to demonstrate the potential - what we didn’t expect was people’s immediate reaction in asking how they could buy it, invest in the company or partner with us there and then.

We left that room with 50 people willing to pay to beta test a product that didn't yet exist but the knowledge we were really onto something. We brought in Kieran, our technical co-founder, and gave him four weeks to build it properly. No pressure!

That's how Springboards started. Not with a vision statement or a pitch deck, but with redundancy, curiosity and a deadline we'd created for ourselves before we were ready for one.

I tell that story because everything I've learned about collaboration, ambition and what it actually takes to build something came from the particular kind feeling that we were really onto something and the energy that is generated when you’re feeling inspired.

Taking off the mask

Corporate America is fairly performative. It can be fast paced and invigorating, but there’s always a lot of internal politics to navigate and egos to stroke. I learned quite quickly I needed a work version of myself to help navigate that environment.  

But when your co-founder is also your life partner, there's no work version of you to present. No polished front, no selective disclosure. Pip has seen every version of my thinking including the terrible ideas, the half-formed ones and the ones I was confident about at 11pm that I quietly abandoned by morning.

That's confronting at first because there’s nothing to hide behind - you’re totally exposed. It's the things that make you more creative. You can diverge and converge in a really natural and safe way that feels intuitive to the vision.

We can challenge each other without ego in the way. We can say "that's not working" without it requiring a meeting. And when the great ideas do spring forth it also means there is no friction or ego to manage, we trust each other wholeheartedly to just run hard at it.

We can also, genuinely, call it when one of us is being the problem rather than solving it.

External perspective

That last one is harder than it sounds, both professionally and personally. Knowing when to step back, when your idea isn't the right one, when you're blocking rather than building and being able to do that without taking it personally is probably the most important skill we've developed.

What makes it work is having a third co-founder who has nothing to do with our relationship. Kieran is the person we can go to when Pip and I have genuinely opposing views. He's measured, external to our dynamic, and willing to pressure-test the thinking without the noise of two people who also happen to share a mortgage and daycare pickups.

Every partnership needs a version of that: someone who sits outside the gravity of the relationship and can give trusted guidance or bring the temperature down.

Balance is about being realistic

The other thing I've stopped pretending about is boundaries.

Our worlds are completely intertwined - an early-stage startup, two young kids, constant decision-making - some weeks "switching off" is a fiction. What we've found works better than strict separation is integration: being genuinely aligned on what matters, having honest conversations about what needs doing and who's best placed to do it and recognising when the conversation needs to stop because it's not useful anymore.

Our potential is far greater than we typically give ourselves credit for and you can’t have everything at once. Both of those things are true at the same time and sitting with that tension honestly is part of what building something real requires.

We invested everything into this. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision, there was no big  upfront conversation about what happens if this fails or if we’re willing to back each other - that was something we both knew coming into this, and still do.

It’s important to have that psychological safety to know this one, very important, part of your lives won’t bring down the other more important part - that creates the freedom to make bold decisions day to day.

Taking your place at the table and building better

Building in AI has meant spending time in a lot of rooms where I'm the only woman at the table. What's shifted for me isn't volume or presence in any performed sense, it's conviction. When you believe in what you're building and you know it matters, you stop needing permission to be in the conversation.

We've also been deliberate about the company we're creating: around 70% of our leadership team are women and most senior roles are held by women. In a space where AI tools are being built to influence how people think and create, who's in the room when those decisions get made is not a secondary consideration - it's the work.

International Women's Day tends to celebrate the moment of stepping forward. What gets less attention is the architecture underneath - the trust, the honesty, the people who will still be there if it goes sideways.

That trust removes more friction than any strategy document I've ever written - although to be clear, we do now have a very robust plan and roadmap as well as a fantastic team driving things forward with us.

The village matters, the honest conversations matter and the willingness to be genuinely okay with all versions of the outcome is what makes the bravery possible in the first place.

What I have very much realised is startups are like children - you can read all the books and guides on what to do and what to expect, but the only way to actually make them thrive is to be guided by what’s in front of you, trust your gut instinct and your own expertise in what you’re building.

Ultimately, you’ve got to run your own race the best way you see fit and lean into the support around you.

How do you define creativity?

It sounds overly simple, but expression at its purest. The way only you see the world and the weird way in which you decide to express that. That can be in music or art or math or a silly little pitch deck or in the song you make up to sing to your dog.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

Neither - that gives it way too much power. Practically speaking, at a systems level, AI is going to raise the floor, but it's also going to lower the ceiling. I saw Chris Anderson from Wired do a talk in the early days of Maker culture mania. He likened the era to early internetting and Geocities. There's going to be a lot of shit until it gets really good. And then it's going to get intrusively spectacular. And then it's going to be frictionlessly and technically excellent that we don't notice it. When AI is no longer THE thing, I look forward to what things we can actually do with AI.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with?

Anything Hunter S. Thompson. That level of chaos and "wrongness" is impossible to be predictable.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

I don't know the weirdest place I've ever gotten an idea, but I'm keeping my weirdest billion-dollar idea a secret for now!

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Mine's incredibly practical right now. I think it's valuable for pressure testing brand frameworks, especially for quite specialty audiences in complex fields. It's never the answer, but it's enough of a starting point, I can fumble my way through it.

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Super Bowl. The greatest day in the calendar for Advertising. It's an embarrassment of riches, promotional excess and big bets. It’s glorious.

My second favourite thing after the great Football Advertising Party is reading and writing all about it. The hot takes. The bold claims. The annual flurry of loosely qualified assertions about how the landscape has forever changed. We in advertising never waste a good opportunity to declare a turning point. Naturally, we gorged ourselves. And although I might just be getting a bit older, both Caro and I couldn’t help but notice this one felt a little less sparkly.

Back on home soil, Caro was watching with equal parts ad-nerd enthusiasm and Patriots-induced heartbreak. Her read was immediate: the game felt a bit flat. And so did some of the ads. The sparkle was missing.

Not all of it, of course. There were proper bright spots.

Liquid IV leaning into a hydration truth most of us have quietly validated with a sideways glance. I suspect very few AI tools would confidently surface that particular insight if prompted. Kellogg’s William Shat Raisin Bran fibre reveal. Annoying, until it clicked. Then genuinely smart. Novartis weaving tight ends into preventative screening with surprising elegance.

Bathroom humour. Fibre jokes. Locker room puns. Juvenile? Slightly. Human? Completely. And maybe that is the point. Because the human bits cut through.

But let's talk about the very well-paid elephant in the room. Celebrities.

This reached a fever pitch last year and although their inclusion is down from 68% of all ads to 62%, it’s clear brands are still hedging risk and distinctive efforts with these folk. There’s nuance here. We can probably expect the number to keep falling. Others have addressed the issue more comprehensively. But the rule I was taught (and still try to stick to) is simple: fame is a byproduct, not a strategy.

Caro put it more bluntly: “if the idea only works because the celebrity is famous, it’s not an idea. It’s insurance.”

Insurance isn’t inherently bad. Insurance can feel safe. But safe rarely makes history.

And speaking of safe… Let’s talk about the other buzzword of the night, besides “field goal.” AI.

Interestingly, there may not have been a huge amount of AI used in the ads themselves (beyond Svedka, who at least admitted it). But there were certainly a lot of ads for AI. If Caro’s tracking is correct, we saw:

Anthropic: their first ever Super Bowl spot, clearly differentiating itself in the LLM race.
OpenAI: a 60 national Codex spot, plus regional ads showcasing small businesses leveraging ChatGPT.
Google Gemini.
Microsoft Copilot.
Amazon (Ring and Alexa. Framed as helpful, but among Caro’s watch party crowd, more than a few felt “creepy”).
Genspark, which sparked a different kind of room reaction: “Is this taking my job?”
Salesforce promoting Slack AI.
ai.com, which left many wondering what, exactly, it does.

From our vantage point at a scrappy AI company from Down Under, it was fascinating to watch the category openly confront itself on the biggest stage in culture. It is a competition, after all. And although many in our space are still learning how to “Super Bowl” (present company included), the open confrontation across tech and beyond was refreshing.

At the risk of alienating the EBI crowd, acknowledging your competition doesn’t simply donate attention to the category leader. Positioning still matters.

While I admired the spirit of Anthropic’s work, it reminded us of something Reed Hastings once said about Netflix: “No advertising coming to Netflix. Period.” Less than two years later, that position shifted. As the major players in AI fight to become the homepage of the internet, there are probably lessons to be learned from the streaming wars.

So yes. A few observations. A few trends. A few stats. But so what? Risk is so what.

Risk underpins every great Super Bowl ad in history. Every great campaign. The work we still talk about didn’t come from playing it safe. It came from someone taking a calculated leap. This year, outside of a few friendly swipes, felt more than a bit cautious. One of the more frustrating paradigms in Advertising is the idea of maths versus magic (as though we have to choose between data and creativity). Realistically, you need both. It’s a false dichotomy.

Magic i.e. creativity is, fortunately, much more difficult to train a language model on. It’s an innately human pursuit that the machines we’re currently enamoured by aren’t very good at on their own. They recognise patterns and desperately avoid risk. There is an answer to this, or at the very least, a wealth of inspiration.

If you want to see something risky, have a look at our Super Bowl spot. Apologies, experiment (for many reasons, most of which are legal). And if you have an appetite for risky work, please reach out - so do we.

We’ve built something that inspires you to find the risks worth taking.

The kind we both kept wishing we’d seen more of this year.