Richard (Rich) Mulholland is the Founder of Missing Link, a leading presentation firm that helps business leaders create impactful and memorable presentations. With experience speaking in over 46 countries across six continents, he specializes in helping executives and speakers deliver compelling presentations that activate audiences and drive results. Besides Missing Link, Rich co-founded ventures like 21 Tanks, HumanWrit.es, and Too Many Robots, which offer fractional AI management services. He has authored several books, including the upcoming Relentless Relevance: Be a Threat To The Future Before the Future Threatens You.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:30] Rich Mulholland reveals the inspiration behind Relentless Relevance
- [5:52] The importance of relevance in business
- [9:36] Rich shares his experience of starting Missing Link
- [15:37] Why curiosity is crucial for business adaptability
- [17:38] The difference between AI, AGI, and ASI
- [22:25] The impact of brain-computer interfaces on human evolution
- [27:09] Rich discusses his new company, Too Many Robots
- [29:42] How to use podcasts to engage with relevant audiences
In this episode…
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence is reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace. As AI continues to evolve, many businesses struggle to keep up, risking obsolescence. How can companies adapt, stay relevant, and thrive in this era of AI-driven transformation?
Renowned keynote speaker, author, and entrepreneur Rich Mulholland explores how businesses can turn AI disruption into a competitive advantage. He shares his experience of feeling disconnected as his company matured, which sparked a bold re-evaluation of his strategies. Through captivating storytelling, Rich emphasizes the value of constant innovation and the willingness to challenge outdated practices. He encourages businesses to adopt a ‘red team’ mindset — proactively identifying weaknesses and using AI as a tool for growth and resilience.
Tune into this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Rich Mulholland, Founder of Missing Link, about staying relevant and thriving in the age of AI. Rich shares strategies for integrating AI into business models, fostering a culture of curiosity, and driving innovation within teams. He also highlights the importance of being proactive, encouraging businesses to disrupt themselves before external forces do.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Richard Mulholland LinkedIn | Website
- Missing Link
- Too Many Robots
- Relentless Relevance: Be a Threat To The Future Before the Future Threatens You by Richard Mulholland
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Johannesburg
Quotable Moments:
- “AI is a massive irrelevance accelerator; most people play defense, but we need to be the threat.”
- “Relevance is no longer a milestone on the path. It’s now the road that we travel.”
- “Curiosity is the God particle of relevance. You’ve got to be excited about proving the past version of yourself wrong.”
- “The march of progress has never been stopped by people saying, ‘We will not.’ They get trampled over.”
- “We are at the primary school level of human evolution; we’re supposed to be curators of the future of humanity.”
Action Steps:
- Embrace AI as a collaborative tool: Integrating AI into your business processes can enhance efficiency and free up time for more creative, strategic work. By viewing AI as an ally rather than a threat, companies can stay competitive and innovative.
- Foster a culture of curiosity and experimentation: Encouraging your team to explore new technologies and challenge existing methods keeps your business adaptable. This mindset helps organizations stay ahead of industry shifts and embrace continuous improvement.
- Adopt a ‘red team’ mindset: Regularly stress-testing your business model by identifying vulnerabilities can reveal hidden risks. This proactive approach ensures you stay prepared for future disruptions and refine your strategies accordingly.
- Prioritize storytelling in your messaging: Using compelling narratives in presentations and branding helps you engage audiences and make your message more memorable. Stories create emotional connections, making your content more impactful and persuasive.
- Be willing to disrupt your own business: Proactively innovating — even when things are going well — prevents complacency and keeps your company evolving. This self-disruption mindset makes you more resilient against external market changes.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about embracing relevance and thriving in the age of AI augmentation, which is here now. My guest today is Rich Mulholland. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:13
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:30
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of the show. And you know, if you’ve listened to this podcast before, every week we talk with smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. If you check out the archives, we’ve got, you know, Netflix, Grubhub, Redfin, Kinkos, Gusto, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes. Check them out in the archives. And before we get into this interview, this episode is brought to you by our company, Rise25 and Rise25. We help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping companies to run their podcast. We are the easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution.
And Rich, I know for you that relationships are critical. We were just talking beforehand about different people in our lives that have been having a big impact on us, and I’d love to ask about that during the podcast. And that’s what I love about having these conversations. I’ve interviewed you once before we get to reconnect again here today. And so that’s what I love doing, and I love helping our clients to do that as well. So if you’ve ever thought about podcasting for your business, you should do it. I know Rich, you love podcasting as well. If you have any questions, go to rise.com or email us at. [email protected].
All right let’s talk about Rich. So he is a keynote speaker, author, entrepreneur, self-described mischief maker. He’s the Founder of Missing Link, which is South Africa’s largest presentation firm and has co-founded multiple different ventures, including 21 Tanks and Human rights. And he’s delivered talks across dozens and dozens and dozens of different countries and different continents. His newest book is Relentless Relevance Be A Threat To The Future Before The Future Threatens You, which is coming out later this year in 2025, and also has three other books as well, which we talked about in the different podcasts. But rich, pleasure to have you here today and let’s talk about this new book. What inspired writing a book about AI today? I imagine you’re playing around with it in your various different businesses, but what was your spin on it? Why did you decide you needed to write a book on it? And I should point out that it’s not just about AI as well.
Rich Mulholland: 02:31
Yeah, I’ll say that AI is a character in the book. AI is a data point. AI’s AI is the dragon, right? It’s a force that is both an opportunity and a potential threat that faces us. Faces us. But there’s a bigger one. And the bigger threat. I don’t know, John. Do you ever do any of these word of the year exercises?
John Corcoran: 02:51
Yep. Yeah I have yeah. I did a three word of the year exercise for a number of different years. Chris Brogan popularized that idea of picking three words. I don’t know why it was three, but it was always three.
Rich Mulholland: 03:00
I love that, okay. Something to explore. So. So my word of the year last year was relevant. I turned 50 in 2024. I started my company when I was 22, and when I was 22, everything felt easy. And when I was, you know, 48, 49, everything fell hard. And I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand why. Why did I age out of confidence? Why was I feeling less confident at, as a way, more successful 48 year old than I was at 22? And it came down to the fact that I wasn’t sure if I was still relevant and I was struggling with that. I realized I was sitting in a coworking space in Cape Town that I had visited, and I was looking at a group of humans, and I was almost they were all young, and I was kind of judging them. And then I thought, oh, no, but it’s their time.
They’re who I was when I had the energy and the delusional self-belief and I thought, Oh, have I aged out of relevance? What do I have to say? And I started really wanting to explore this concept. And the more I explored it for myself, the more I explored it for my company. And. And I started flirting with the idea of writing a talk. And the guy reached out to me and he’d heard me do a video on the topic, and he invited me to do a talk on it. And I thought, well, you know, why not? And I started obsessing with it because I believe that relevance used to be a waypoint, used to be something we checked every now and then. Are we still relevant? You know, let’s just dial in and check our relevance. But first of all, we hadn’t really thought about what that meant. And second of all, the world has changed.
Relevance is no longer a milestone on the path. It’s now the road that we travel. And I don’t think businesses and humans, aging humans are nearly obsessed enough with the idea of their relevance. And once I understood that, and once I started obsessing over it, I think that we have an epidemic of irrelevance. And do you remember that film when you were younger? The never ending story? Yeah. And that whole thing, I think it was called the Nothing or whatever that was, was coming up on you and it was catching you. I was losing creativity. That’s how I feel about irrelevance. And I think this irrelevant dragon is traveling at a speed that we’ve never experienced before. And I don’t think we’re thinking about it nearly nearly strongly enough.
John Corcoran: 05:15
I couldn’t agree more. I talked to someone recently who’s a graphic designer, and I said, so are you playing around with all the different AI tools that are coming out? And they said, no. And I said, you’re not. Oh my gosh, like, you really need to be aware of what is coming up, what is changing, you know, because it’s going to really affect your industry. And that’s just one example. There’s lots of industries out there where, you know, there could be, you know, a, you know, there’s a huge amount of AI and other digital digital tools that really dramatically affect someone’s industry and maybe even make them irrelevant.
Rich Mulholland: 05:52
Yeah. So that’s what I am. It’s a massive irrelevance accelerator. Right. So it’s many, many things. And the problem is that most people are trying to play defense. The original talk, the first one I did, which seems like eons ago but was probably February last year, really, really focused on people defending things. So I’m a big board gamer. I’m very involved in the board game community. I’ve got over a thousand board games myself, and a lot of, you know, publishers are saying we will not publish a board game that uses AI generated art, and board game reviewers are saying, we will not review board games that are using AI generated art.
And it seems crazy to me because the march of progress has never been stopped by people saying, we will not write what they get, they get trampled over. And, you know, there’s one publisher who said we will never use any assets. I said, well, hold on a second. Do you use a spell checker? Do you use this grammar checker? Why would you not? Will you run your rule book through an AI just to make sure that it’s really, really clear and that you haven’t missed anything? Yeah, yeah, we’ll do that. Okay. That was a human’s job. And so we had this weird sense, and what I found is, are you familiar with the idea of blue team versus red team? I’m not talking about US politics. I’m talking about hacking.
John Corcoran: 07:12
Yes, I believe so. But explain it for those who don’t know.
Rich Mulholland: 07:16
Cool cool cool. So? So in hacking. One of our first clients in Missinglink years ago was a Tiger team. And a Tiger team is a group of humans that are hired to try and break into a bank’s security. So their job was to come in and they would try and break in. It was called the African Tiger Team Initiative, and they are the red team. And the red team’s job is to break in. And then when they break in, their job is to go to the blue team who’ve been trying to defend them. They’re the Secret Service, if you will, and they’ve got to tell the blue team how they manage to exploit the system. And then the blue team plugs that up, and then the red team tries again. Now the bottom line is the red team always wins. And that’s just history, right? There’s, you know, the Secret Service has to stop every bullet. But, you know, the hitman only has to, to, to do one.
And this is the mindset that we need to have. I realized very quickly that my business was missing a presentation company. We make PowerPoint decks essentially at its simplest form, we make PowerPoint decks and videos for a living, although we sell presentation strategy, and that’s a big part of what we do. And, you know, the secret sauce, ultimately, the product that goes to a client is a deck. Now, I can do all of these things. And my team was trying to defend against it. And my argument is we have to go on the offense. We’ve got to be the threat. So what we have to do is we have to turn around and say, well, okay, how can I put my existing business model out of business using the tools that we have today? And that’s the mindset that we have tried to embrace in our business. And it’s also the mindset I’m trying to embrace for myself. You know.
John Corcoran: 08:49
Sometimes it’s not always easy. I mean, even if you’ve bought into this vision, it’s sometimes hard to get all the members of the team to buy into that idea, too, right?
Rich Mulholland: 08:58
It’s impossible. It’s very, very hard to do that. Yeah. My first book is called legacy. You know, the basic hypothesis of the book is that in an established organization, innovation doesn’t happen when you start doing something new. It happens when you stop doing something old. And that’s very, very, very hard to do because we become, you know, we have a sunk cost. And that was the biggest single challenge that we had in our business.
John Corcoran: 09:22
Yeah. So, so, so you’re encouraging us to take this red team approach, which is trying to hack into the system, trying to break the system and to adopt it for your own company. Use it for your own company.
Rich Mulholland: 09:37
Yeah. I mean, a question I would ask myself if I was a business owner, the question to ask. I wrote a LinkedIn post and it said, why? I’m trying to put myself out of business and why you should too. And I basically would say if I were to start a business tomorrow competing with my own company, what would I do differently? What tools would I use to deliver the value that we’re doing in a different way? Now, ironically, this is exactly what I did when I started Missing Link in 1997. In 1997, when I started Missing link, all the guys were using these things. There used to be an edit suite called an avid, which was this big, you know, big rack mounted computer system with.
And it was super expensive, had its own custom keyboard and everything. And everyone was making, you know, custom videos on that, charging ten, $20,000 to do a corporate video. I walked in with a bunch of small Mac laptops, and I was like, well, we can make one of those. It takes a while to render, but we can make it for $1000- $2,000. And you know, when you’re 22, you don’t need much money. And so that’s what we did. And the videos were good. And they were, you know, we didn’t need the suites, but these other guys were trying to sweat the sweat of the asset. And I actually had a call from a CEO who years later tried to buy our company saying, you’re killing the industry. You’re being silly and you’re not. And I said, But I’m making lots of money. You don’t understand. Fast forward.