Immersion and immediacy: Ben Dawson’s unique approach to business
Meet the Speakers: Ben Dawson, panellist
By Richard Holley
It is entirely possible that no introduction to Ben Dawson could possibly do him justice.
He has had many careers. In the old-fashioned sense, he has perhaps never had a career. His sense of purpose informs a relentless creative pursuit: the pursuit of experiences.
At DigiFest, Ben will be part of a panel talk, titled Navigating The Startup Journey. Ahead of this, we caught up with Ben in his secluded wood cabin (no, really) on the Sussex/Kent border for a conversation that took in choral singing, rave culture, VR headsets and dinosaurs…
Ben Dawson seems at heart, a people person. Over the years, Ben has masterminded ambitious startups that could only develop in an ecosystem that exists on a personal level “You don’t want to get to the point where you walk into an office, look over and think, ‘who are those people!?’ I don't know what they do. What do they do?” he states. Speaking to Ben, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s never surrendered to office drudgery of any type.
Growing up in a household of classical music professionals, Ben was initially headed for a rarefied life as a classical singer. Trained in opera and choral singing, Ben’s gift for classical music was in competition with another passion. That passion was dance music.
The man who admits he ‘once fell asleep on stage at the Sydney Opera House’ whilst on tour as a chorister at King’s College Cambridge eventually quit Trinity Music College to fully immerse himself in rave culture. “I'd arrived at my college halls fully prepared for that world, and then had been introduced to raving. And eventually the raving won out.”
Ben followed the rave scene on a journey that took him around the country with his own custom-built sound system. Diving into a world of dance music, Ben quickly became a DJ, gig promoter, sound system heavyweight, artist and record label manager and more. His career was one of continual reinvention, driven by a relentless pursuit of the ultimate experience.
From record label management, Ben naturally moved into building web technologies to support music. This process created the first ‘content management system’ for bands. “Eventually we were managing something like 50,000 bands” he notes, with trademark casualness. Ben’s perfectionist pursuit of the ultimate experience led him to want more:
“I really wanted a shiny product, in the midst of what I saw as a step-down in terms of the digital product. It was a User Experience point of view. I'd gone from working on vinyl releases, CD releases, where I had the cover art, the track listing, a place for the band to exist... It's so important.”
Using games technology, Ben built a ‘digital storefront’, which could house music releases. “These records had a sleeve that could come to life. You would click on the cover, it would come to the foreground, the cover would open, and then the band could tell their story through the real estate that they had within that release.”
From there, Ben worked tirelessly for a decade crafting an immersive music world, using cutting-edge digital technologies.
There were rollercoaster highs (building a virtual album world for The Who’s 50th anniversary; being the first in the country to use and demonstrate Oculus’ Development Kit 2, and being part of a start up that went on to acquire Napster), to abysmal lows (losing a multi-million-dollar business deal to a rogue email; having an immersive music empire shut down by Covid-19).
What’s striking about Ben’s career to date is his ability not only to dust himself off and get back on with things, but to take the opportunity to do something newer, bigger, better.
Ben’s current project is very much under wraps. Let’s just say it combines the physical and the virtual. It’s music as you’ve never experienced it. Think augmented reality, and then some.
It is apparent that pushing the available technology to its absolute limits is essential to Ben’s his vision. Not only this, it has been a recurring theme throughout his career. The theme plays out through valve sound systems and vinyl records, in VR headsets and blockchain technologies:
“Ultimately, you’re using the technology at your disposal to create an experience. Whether that’s in the physical realm or in the digital realm, it’s all an experience.”
Discussing how working life has evolved in recent years, he explains “It's much healthier to be where you want to be geographically. There are different life stages that we as wider society need to be maximising. When you’re young, free and single, you want to be there in the big cities with all sorts of influences and exposures. But as one gets a bit older, life’s priorities change, and we need to create the infrastructure in all of these towns and cities to support people embracing those different life stages”. This, of course, is where DigiFest comes in...
Promoting digital communities across the southeast will drive economic growth and build a more resilient, productive industry. Ben is keen to point out that there are real benefits to employers as well as employees in relocating to the coast:
“In London, there are increased staffing costs, but also the increased competition… they’ll be in a bar with a recruiter that's offering them more money, whereas in Hastings, people are trying to create their life.”
Locating away from the big smoke meant that Ben and his team could work creatively, without the fear of staff and ideas being preyed upon by rival businesses: “I think it helps on all fronts that we were slightly isolated from the rest of the teams. We could prototype the future”.
The ease with which Ben uses phrases such as ‘prototype the future’ suggests a certain level of confidence, but also someone who never suffers a lack of imagination. This poses the question of what advice he’d give people who perhaps don’t feel quite so confident in their creative powers…
“I don't think, I don't think it takes incredible imagination. I mean, ultimately, at each one of my life stages and junctures, I've tried to create a business around me that supports the thing that I'm most passionate about at that point in my life”. If this seems obvious, he distils it further: “I think the first thing to do probably is… be passionate about something…and turn that into a business”.
Embracing the digital world has been key to Ben’s creative startups. Does it therefore follow that there has never been a better time to be a creative?
“It's so much easier in the digital world than the physical realm just in terms of communicating. Also, in terms of sort of reframing or reinterpreting things, it's a lot more instantaneous. I love cross-disciplinary teams. As soon as you've got people coming together with different ways to attack the same problem, that's where magic happens”.
Flexibility, instantaneous ideas, making magic. Scale is important, too:
“Dinosaurs were within a stable world and scaled their bodies up to huge sizes. When conditions changed, those big-bodied creatures died out, and it left the mammals. In the same way, the sector we were in, it was kind of small. We're small organisms but work as a group. And I think that we've got to start to see business in the same way: that the last era was about big businesses scaling up to huge opportunities, and the next one is about kind of smaller entities, which are way more efficient”.
Having failed to provide a succinct introduction to Ben’s work, it’s a pleasant surprise that our conversation leads towards a conclusion of sorts. Once you’ve found your passion, embracing the digital sector and building your community is the way forward. As Ben puts it “if you feel like you're here to do something in some kind of way, you've just got to keep your eye on where you're going”.
Catch Ben Dawson at DigiFest’s Navigating the Startup Journey panel session on Thursday 10th October at the Kings Centre, Eastbourne - book your tickets here.
