Hugo Scott-Gall: Welcome to SuiteTalk, an Active Share series that taps into the minds of top business leaders. I’m your host, Hugo Scott-Gall. Today, I’m delighted to welcome Adrian Blair to SuiteTalk. Adrian is the CEO of Trustpilot the largest independent customer feedback platform in the world, with more than 300 million customer reviews. Adrian has held a number of senior executive roles throughout his career, including global COO at Just Eat, CEO at Dext, and chief business officer at Cera. We are lucky to have him on to discuss how he’s become the successful business leader he is today. Adrian, thank you very much for joining me, and welcome to the show.

Adrian Blair: Thanks, Hugo. Delighted to be with you.

Hugo Scott-Gall: So, I’d like to start…not quite at the beginning, but fair near the beginning. What led you to Trustpilot, what attracted you to Trustpilot, what is it in the business model’s growth potential that made you leave what you were doing before? And you’ve had a number of impressive roles, as I highlighted in the intro.

Adrian Blair: Yeah, indeed. So, on a personal level, in terms of the match with what I’ve done before, Trustpilot is an interesting blend of a kind of two-sided platform with network effects and a software-as-a-service business model, and what I mean by that is we’re a platform where, as you say, we’re the world’s largest independent customer feedback platform. So, people leave reviews of companies who they’ve had an experience with, and companies come on and engage with the platform because they’re interested in that feedback, so it’s a classic two-sided digital platform.

The way we monetize Trustpilot, the way our business model, is that we charge—typically—an annual subscription to businesses, so we’re not an advertising business, we’re a subscription software-as-a-service kind of business model. Now, in terms of my own prior experience, as you mentioned, I’ve been chief operating officer globally for Just Eat for seven years, which is obviously a two-sided platform, and I had also run a SaaS business in the fintech accounting space, Dext, which we sold to HG Capital in 2021, which is a pure SaaS business model, so I’ve done both of those things, and to be honest, I wouldn’t want to be doing this role without having experience of both two-sided network effects and SaaS.

But the particular attraction of Trustpilot as a business, to me, is all about the purpose and the mission of the business. Our goal is to be the universal symbol of trust. I think in the age of AI, trust is becoming more and more central, more and more important. Trustpilot has a really unique culture, really unique way of going about it, and so, I just have this huge belief that we’re doing something important and good in the world, and we’re keen to do it at greater and greater scale. It’s also, of course, a massive commercial opportunity, so, as a business person, I’m interested in it from that perspective as well.

Hugo Scott-Gall: So, that kind of leads me on to my next question, which is quite, I think, a philosophical one, which is how big is the addressable market for trust? And I’m very interested in the notion of trust. In the digital technology-powered age, is trust more valuable, more scarce? Is there less trust in society, so the need for trust-driven solutions is bigger? I think the answer, from what I know, is probably yes, I think you’re going to say yes, but I’m very interested in how you think about the total marketplace for trust.

Adrian Blair: Yes, indeed. So, when we talk about the market for trust, I think one thing just to be very clear about up front is we are not in the business, we don’t see ourselves as being in the business, of buying and selling trust. If you think about trust and what it is, it’s quite a nuance. It is a mix of heart and head. It’s something that you build and earn. You don’t buy it and sell it. It can’t be traded. I often say to the team internally if a sentence contains the word “trust,” try substituting the word “love” and see if it still sounds right. You obviously can’t buy love.

So, we don’t see ourselves as in the business of selling trust. What we are doing is we’re helping businesses to more deeply understand trust and to engage with trust and build trust, earn the trust of their customers, so we provide a platform that is very effective at enabling companies to do that. Now, how large is the addressable markets of that? Well, if I say to a typical CEO, “How important is trust to your business?”, they typically say, “Well, actually, not only is it important, it’s actually the most important thing. Without trust, no one will buy our products, no one will want to work for us, no one will want to invest in our company.”

And then, I say, “Well, how richly, how deeply do you understand it?” They start to look a bit shifty and uncertain at that point because they might understand their financials incredibly well because they’ve got a CFO and a whole department in their business devoted to it, but how well do they understand trust? Typically, not very well at all. So, how large is the addressable market for that? I would say it’s relevant to almost every business on the planet.

Hugo Scott-Gall: It seems what you do is a very good example of kind of what technology was meant to do. It’s price discovery, or it’s informational asymmetry resolution, or something that’s really important. It’s a bit like advertising 75 years ago. You know it’s helpful, but you’ve no idea, the famous “50% is good, but I don’t know which.” This is resolving these big informational asymmetries. Customers may really trust a company, but the company doesn’t know if they do, and it doesn’t know why. It seems to me that resolving that—as you just said, how many companies would love to know A) How trusted, and B) Why that’s trusted and how that’s changed?

Adrian Blair: Indeed, and also, if they are trusted, they’d like to be able to shout about it and tell people that in a very credible way, because what frustrates a lot of people in companies is they might be providing you great service, and they’ll measure internally, they’ll have some little NPS tool that’s measuring interactions, and they’ll see that people are happy, but you’ll never see a company putting on a billboard “Our NPS is 80%” because no one will believe them. Nobody knows what that is, and everyone would say that they’re good, but how do you know it’s true?

One thing that Trustpilot enables is a way to credibly communicate to the outside world that you’re very good at what you do, so people get a Trustpilot score, and if it’s a good Trustpilot score, they typically want to shout about it, so you see it in TV ads, you see it in billboard ads, and digital advertising, and all the rest.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Have you done research on high-trust societies, low-trust societies, the differences? Because there are some places still in the world where—I’m thinking domestic flights in New Zealand—I’m not sure if you have security, or maybe you don’t even have security, whereas think about the U.S. before 9/11, you didn’t have internal security on flying, and now you do.

So, have you thought about how societies are high-trust and low-trust, what drives that, and how that’s changing, and with the polarization—and you read politics, philosophy, and economics for your degree—polarization of politics—is that leading overall to just falling levels of trust in societies? And that’s not just a kind of broad philosophical question, it’s just very relevant for you and your addressable market.

Adrian Blair: Yeah, indeed. So, you’re absolutely right. We see declining trust in all kinds of institutions across different societies. There remains, of course, a massive gap between high-trust societies/low-trust societies. I happened to grow up in sub-Saharan Africa, in a small country called Lesotho, which I would say is a very low-trust society, so I have a kind of visceral experience of what that feels like, but interestingly, Trustpilot emerged out of Denmark, which is arguably the ultimate high-trust society, and yet, they felt the need—our founder, Peter Muhlmann, is Danish, from Copenhagen, our company’s actually headquartered in Copenhagen, and even in that very high-trust society, they felt the need for a tool like Trustpilot that helps people understand and engage with trust more deeply.

So, I think as it pertains to us, we see trust being something that is really problematic out there in the world, lots of institutions are seeing trust erode, technology, in some ways, is making it easier for people to fake trust, so having this trusted place, building what we call the universal symbol of trust, and using technology, using AI to do that more effectively than ever, and to do it at greater scale than ever, I think is just becoming increasingly important over time.

Hugo Scott-Gall: So, I guess tribes have always been built on a number of things, probably some degree of homogeneity, similarity, and maybe some sort of filtering around skills, but certainly, trust sits in the middle of most tribes, I would argue.

Adrian Blair: That’s right. There’s a phrase—you probably read Sapiens—I can’t pronounce his name right, but Yuval Harari—

Hugo Scott-Gall: Harari, yeah.

Adrian Blair: Yes, and there’s a phrase in that book where he says, “Without trust, society collapses,” and I think that is totally true. There’s an old Chinese saying, I think, which is that you’ve got three things: Food, weapons, and trust. Which two would you sacrifice? The answer is food and weapons, but trust is the one that you’ve just got to hold onto. If you think of Britain during the Blitz, there wasn’t enough food to go around, but you had trust, and that meant that you could have a rationing system that actually worked and people could get through it, so trust is ultimately at the center of everything, and it’s that hidden ingredient without which no business can be successful.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Can we talk a bit about scaling and growth? So, you were a COO at Just Eat, which is a business that scaled and grew. When you look at your business now, do you want to scale and grow? It’s an obvious question—the answer is yes—but how do you do that? How do you think about the limits on growth? What’s too much growth? If you don’t grow, you’re not moving, then you die, so you’ve got to grow and you’ve got to scale, but these are easy things to say. Every podcast talking about VC investing says scaling, scaling, scaling, but easier said than done, I would imagine.

Adrian Blair: Indeed, and I think the right answer to this question depends on the industry that you’re in, the competitive dynamics. It depends on network effects and how those work. So, in the case of Just Eats, the right answer in that business was to throw a lot of capital at it and to establish No. 1 positions in each country where we operated as quickly as possible, and the reason for that was there was a very clear—first of all, it was an incredibly competitive sector in the early days.

I joined Just Eat in 2011. There were hundreds of businesses around the world with exactly the same business model getting funded from VCs, all trying to do exactly the same thing. There was a huge gap in the economics between being the No. 1 player and being the No. 2 player. So, what happens in a situation like that? Well, everyone is in a desperate scramble to become the No. 1, and it’s like a knife fight. Whoever emerges as No. 1 is just gonna get better economics and that position will sustain itself, so it’s like a knife fight in dozens of countries around the world with all these people desperately trying to be No. 1.

Now, we were successful in 12 out of our 13 markets at establishing the No. 1 position, and it was on that basis that we could ultimately grow, become profitable, get into the FTSE 100, and all that kind of thing. So, in that case, that was definitely the right position to go for growth almost at all costs, and to do it very, very quickly, and put huge pressure on ourselves to get there. If I contrast that with Trustpilot, we’re in a very, very different position.

So, we, I think, are in a space where we can have more patience, where growth grows—we depend a lot on the reputation of the brand and on Trustpilot being known and recognized, and that’s something that builds gradually. We don’t have a business model that lends itself to massive consumer marketing campaigns of the kind that we would have done at Just Eat, let’s say. It emerges more from B2B adoption, and as more businesses invite their customers to write reviews and include us in their advertising, the brand gradually becomes better known.

So, in the UK, now we’re known by 9 out of 10 adults in the UK. We get globally more than 70 million people a month using our product, and those numbers are increasing all the time. But it’s more of a gradual snowball kind of effect—kind of growth—rather than this blitz-scaling approach that is appropriate here, and it’s not the same kind of competitive context, so there is only one business in the world that I’m aware of that’s aiming to be the universal symbol of trust, and that’s Trustpilot, so we’re not in the space where there are 100 other companies all trying to do the same thing like there was in food delivery.

Hugo Scott-Gall: So, your constraints on growth are not so much capital—this is not capital-intensive growth—it’s more the network effect and it’s more awareness because your B2B is—it’s awareness, discovery, onboarding. Is that a good summary?

Adrian Blair: That’s right, and it’s growing B2B adoption. So, B2B SaaS, particularly at the enterprise end, which is our largest segment, isn’t a kind of blitz-scaling kind of model, typically. Businesses need to understand your tool, they need to adopt it, sell cycles tend to take a few months, so it’s the kind of thing that, by its nature, builds over time.

So, healthy, but not the kind of blitz-scaling growth rates that we used to see in food delivery, where I remember giving someone a hard time because their country only grew by 80% year on year and we thought it should have been growing by 150%, and in that world, 80% was not an acceptable result.

Hugo Scott-Gall: And people—how much human capital is a constraint on growth? How many people do you need? Do you have enough people?

Adrian Blair: We have about 1,000 people globally. We are hiring, so we’ve got open positions across all kinds of different things. We are finding that AI is enabling us to do more and more with the great talent that we’ve got, so head count is not growing anywhere near as fast as the top line of our business, and that means that we’re delivering operating leverage over time as we grow.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah, I was going to ask you about AI threat, opportunities—probably a bit of both. I guess the fake reviews—AI helps you on those, but as you just said, AI should mean your revenue ahead growth accelerates versus history.

Adrian Blair: Well, look, we definitely see it much more on the opportunity side. First of all, as you say, in terms of detecting fake reviews—so, every day, we get around 200,000 new reviews submitted to Trustpilot, and we have to make a call, overwhelmingly using technology, about whether those reviews are genuine, and we’ve found that, with the capability of AI, we’re now doing a better job of that than we’ve ever been able to in the past, and obviously, we’re getting better and better at that all the time.

So, in that sense, AI is a particular opportunity for Trustpilot, but we also, of course, see applications of AI throughout in terms of how we actually run the business, and we’re having a lot of fun with that, experimenting with different use cases. Every employee at Trustpilot has access to Gemini, integration to our Google Workspace, and every day, we’re finding new ways to deploy and use it.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Have you so far been overwhelmed/underwhelmed by AI’s capability, accessibility, what it can do for you?

Adrian Blair: I’ve been really impressed recently by the capability of the cutting-edge models, in the Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT 03. If you actually get into what these tools can do for you—I’ll give you a little example. I was visiting a customer recently, and, as part of my research ahead of the meeting, I opened their annual report—this is AO World, a white goods delivery company in the UK, and a phenomenally successful, customer-focused business—and I opened their annual report. The first line, pretty much, of their annual report referenced Trustpilot, and it referenced their Trustpilot reviews and how their customers were.

And I thought, “Great, I wonder how many other public companies are doing the same, referencing their Trustpilot reviews in their annual report?” Now, in the old world, I would probably have asked some analyst to go and download all the annual reports, and read them, and find mentions of Trustpilot, and I used Gemini to do this, and just put in a prompt about “Please check out all the annual reports, look out for quotes mentioning Trustpilot,” and it turns out there are more than a dozen listed businesses in the UK where they’re including their Trustpilot reviews in their annual report, and of course, Gemini finds that in a couple of minutes. I’m really impressed at how much these tools have improved just in the last 12-18 months.

Hugo Scott-Gall: That’s interesting, because obviously, that is a very real debate, I think across the economy, but certainly within the investment industry—how useful are these tools? And there’s certainly a reasonably well-populated school of thought that there’s been a massive overinvestment and it’s gonna be a bit of a dud, it actually really can’t do that much, so it’s interesting—

Adrian Blair: Well, look, I can’t speak for how many billions the hyperscalers are choosing to put in, but the way I look at it is—put it this way. This is the worst they will ever be. In 12 months’ time, whatever they are today, they’re going to be way better. When you look at what’s going on with chips and all the roadmap—NVIDIA, TSMC, et al—have of how chips are gonna get better, it’s extraordinary, the improvement that we’re going to see in chips and the capabilities there.

So, I think every element of the stack, you’re just seeing very rapid pace of improvement from all of that investment that’s gone in. I’ve worked in tech my whole career for the last quarter of a century, and this is probably the most exciting time of that whole—a lot of exciting things have happened in that time, but this is the most exciting. It’s the real thing.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah. Well, absolutely, that’s super interesting to hear. So, can I pivot a bit towards leadership? So, I’m always interested in how people make decisions because being a CEO, being a leader of a business, is lonely and very visible, and your decisions really matter. How do you take decisions? Are you a walk in the woods, sleep on it, or actually very quick, decisive? Do you bounce ideas off a number of different people? Do you go to people either inside the company or maybe outside? How do you do it, and when you reflect on it, are you happy with how you do it? How would you change it?

Adrian Blair: A few thoughts. So, personally, I’m on the very quick and decisive end of the spectrum almost to a fault, and I’ve had people say to me over the years, “Did you have to do that today? Couldn’t you have waited until tomorrow, maybe, and either reflected a bit more?” or whatever, so that’s something—a bit of self-awareness—I sometimes have to check that and say, “Okay, you’ve decided, but maybe just wait a day and see if it still makes sense tomorrow.”

But, look, I’m a big believer in involving the right people. You obviously can’t run a company as a democracy, although we have a bit of fun with that at Trustpilot. On some decisions, we like to throw it open to the whole business and say, “What do you guys think?” But when it’s some important business decision, you want to make sure that you’re involving in that decision whoever knows the most, and it’s often an executive team member, it’s not necessarily an executive team member, but whoever the expert is on that thing in your business, you’ve got to make sure you’re involving them, you’re listening to them.

I think this concept of psychological safety is important, where one of the occupational hazards of being CEO is as you get more senior people, human nature, are less and less likely to just tell you what they really think because they’re worried what you might think of them or what you might do with the information or whatever, so part of what you’ve got to create as CEO is a culture where there’s enough psychological safety that people can tell you your idea is rubbish and they don’t like the way you’ve done something. It’s very important that people can have that kind of honesty.

So, I think you’ve got to have candid, robust debate. I like to float ideas around that might not be good ideas and just see what people make of them, so I’ll say, “Well, what about doing it this way?” Doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea, but I like to kick it around and see where the debate goes. But there are some decisions that only—I actually prefer most decisions not to be taken by me. It really doesn’t scale that the CEO is taking all the decisions. So, one thing that we clarify within our executive team on our agendas is who is leading the topic and who is the decision maker on the topic, and sometimes that’s me, but most of the time, that’s a member of the exec team, and that leads to them then really taking responsibility for that decision. So, I don’t want personally to be taking most of the decisions in the business, but when it is my decision, that’s very much my style. I involve the right people, psychological safety, kick around ideas, explore lots of different options, and then I’ll make a call very quickly, and on a good day, if I’m being self-aware, I’ll say, “Hang on a minute, just maybe wait a day and still see if you think you’re right tomorrow.”

Hugo Scott-Gall: And is that because that’s just how you are, how you’re born, you like getting stuff done? Because there’s a little bit of a sugar rush in taking decisions. “We did something today, decided something, this feels good.” So, it’s interesting what you say about the self-awareness making you think you should slow down rather than speed up. Do you think that’s just a little bit of how you are, just how you’re made, how you’re wired, or do you think it’s actually more underpinning of actually what you believe, that actually, procrastination, “analysis leads to paralysis” kind of thing? So, do you actually think it’s better as the leader just to get stuff done and move?

Adrian Blair: I think it’s both of those things, but kind of in that sequence. I think, yes, I’m a person who’s naturally impatient, low boredom threshold, all those kinds of things. That meant that I felt very at home in the tech industry, where things move fast and change fast. I couldn’t work in real estate, where you’re working on a project for 10 years and your decisions play out over such a long period of time. In tech, there isn’t much faster pace, and you tend to see that companies that move too slowly get killed, so you’ve got to be more like the agile, the heartbeat of a mouse, not the heartbeat of an elephant kind of thing, so, just get things done faster.

And I think growing up in a business like Just Eat, where, like I said, it was like a knife fight and the loser got killed, you’re very, very motivated to get things done quickly. So, I think it does emerge from that sort of thing, but typically, certainly decisions that a CEO makes, it is typically more important to make the right decision than to make the quick decision. If it’s something very important, whether it got decided on Tuesday or Friday isn’t ultimately the most important thing, it’s was it the right call.

But what you certainly don’t want in the CEO—and I’ve seen this up close sometimes—is where you demand more and more data because you can’t make a decision. You’ve got 80% of the data, but you wait six months to get to 90% of the data, and it’s like, really, that was probably a total waste of time. So, that’s a trap that I think some CEOs fall into, but I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Do you think it’s possible—I think your answer is going to be yes—you can thread a needle between accountability, psychological safety, proper constructive feedback, and genuine performance management?

Adrian Blair: Yeah. Of course, all of those things are wrapped up. My favorite book on these kinds of concepts that links them up nicely, I think, is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. I don’t know if you’ve read that one, but appropriately for Trustpilot, the foundation of it all is trust because without trust, then you haven’t got the psychological safety that leads to honest debate, and it’s only when people are having honest debate, and getting the options out in the open, and feeling free to express themselves that you get actually commitment to the outcome to what you’ve agreed, and then it’s only if there’s real commitment that you get the attention to results that’s needed and the accountability that goes with that.

So, yes, it does all logically fit together, but it starts with trust, and the ability to actually have a robust debate, and people feeling like their perspectives have been truly heard.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Have you got better at assessing people?

Adrian Blair: Oh, sure, yeah. I think that’s a muscle that you’ve got to build as you go through your career. At the very beginning of your career, your successes—a lot of it is determined by your genetics, energy, academics, whatever. Then, you grow in experience and you learn from that experience, and that starts to shape how well you’re doing, and then you make career choices about which companies to join, and that starts to shape how well you’re doing. But then, you realize that actually, particularly as you get more senior, a huge part of how successful you are is really just your people decisions, it’s your people choices. Who did you decide to promote, who did you decide to hire, who did you decide to fire?

And how well you’ve done those things becomes a huge determinant of how successful you are in these roles. So, to some degree, if your judgment isn’t improving on that stuff over time, it really limits you in your career and how far you’ve got to scale. As with anything, the more of it you do in the real world, if you reflect on it appropriately, you’re very candid with yourself about where you’ve got things wrong and where you’ve got things right, you grow the muscle, you get better judgments at it over time.

Hugo Scott-Gall: And are you pretty open and transparent with people? Because some people-related decisions are quite straightforward—meaningful underperformer or meaningful outperformer—but when it’s fine lines and you need to choose one out of four people who are all very, very close to each other… In my very simple example, you choose one, and you don’t choose the other three. How do you manage the other three when it’s a close-run thing?

Adrian Blair: Well, at this level, it usually isn’t there were three and you chose one of the three. So, what do I mean by that? Well, as CEO, you’re managing C-level folks. It’s quite rare that, if you’re looking at succession into a C-level position, that there are three credible successors within that person’s function. Good job if the person has been successful in that way and has three potential successors—then, great job—but that usually isn’t the case. You’ve usually got one clear internal candidate, and the judgment call is more between do we go for the internal candidate or do we look outside.

So, at Trustpilot, I had that call to make, for example, with our chief trust officer. When I arrived, we had someone in that role who’d decided to move on, and we had an internal candidate, and I had to make the call about internal versus external, and I made the call to promote Joshi into that role, who’s doing extremely well in that position today, and that was one of those classic judgments about inside versus outside and thinking, actually, we’ve got a great person internal.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Are you a worrier, or do you sleep well?

Adrian Blair: I think I compartmentalize well. The only exception for that personally has been—as you mentioned at the beginning, I spent a while as chief business officer at a business called Cera. Cera is the, I think, second largest provider of social care in the UK, as well as being a technology business that develops technology.

Now, in that position, I was directly responsible for around 7,000 people who were giving care to the elderly and vulnerable in their homes across the UK. I found that very hard to deal with on a personal level because you have direct responsibility for life-and-death situations where you’re being regulated and, on any given day, some amazing good things will happen, and some bad things will happen as well, and I found that very hard on a personal level, just dealing with literal life-or-death consequences.

I’ve been left with a massive respect to people who live that day in, day out throughout the healthcare industry, but I realize that’s not the kind of thing that I’m cut out to do, whereas, in these digital businesses, like all the others I’ve worked in—Spotify, Google, Trustpilot, Just Eat—it’s a very different thing. Yes, of course you have problems and challenges, but they’re ultimately operational, financial, business challenges, and those typically don’t cause me to lose sleep.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Well, Adrian, I want to say thank you very much for coming on the show, thank you very much for being very open. I find these conversations with successful CEOs really interesting…how people make decisions, what they do, what they don’t do, how do they wrestle with these things, and you gave us some great answers there, so, thank you for that, and thanks for coming on the show. It’s been great.

Adrian Blair: Thank you very much! I’ve enjoyed the conversation. Great questions. Thank you.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah, of course. I’ll have to see what the reviews are like. That’s a joke. Thank you for listening to today’s episode of SuiteTalk. If you found the discussion inspiring and informative, be sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us bring you more engaging content and connect with top business leaders. Follow us on social media and visit our website for more episodes and content. Until next time, keep exploring, keep learning, and keep leading. This is Hugo Scott-Gall signing off from SuiteTalk.

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