A Written Adaptation of Our Interview With Rui Quinta
On Becoming a (More) Conscious Entrepreneur
Hi there,
In the last newsletter, I shared with you our audio interview with the lovely Rui Quinta, co-founder of With Company and Toyno Studio, as well as some context about his profile and our conversation.
What follows is an adaption of the same interview, for those of you who privilege the written format :)
Enjoy and let me know how you find this format!
Warmly,
Carlota
Interview
Rui Quinta, a precocious pine nut seller, came of age as a self-proclaimed typefreak and graphic designer. In more recent years, as he discovered the post-it-world of designing thinking, Rui’s interests seemed to shift towards systems thinking and a more conscious way of doing business. He is the founder of Toyno, a space and experience design studio, and With Company, an award-winning transformative design consultancy. In 2013, Rui co-founded Peixaria Centenária, a fish shop that artfully rewrote the narrative of his family business tradition for younger generations that is no longer in business. We conversed with Rui to learn more about his story of becoming and his approach to business.
It seems that your interest in entrepreneurship started early in your life, as you ventured into a street pine-nut-selling business. Where would you trace back the roots of your interest in entrepreneurship?
Ha! Where is that? I think the roots come from the influence of my family. My grandparents had companies. My parents always had their own business. It’s part of the family’s story. I think you get inspiration from that because you see the example and then maybe you want to replicate it, even if it's not something you do consciously.
I remember having a lot of conversations with my cousin when I was really young about how we should open a home appliances store or a restaurant. And yes, I had pine trees where I lived with my parents for a long time and we would catch pine nuts and go to the side of the road and try to sell them, which looking back was a ridiculous idea. I think we didn’t succeed. But it was fun. We were just playing.
In high school, you pursued art studies. And later, you elected Design as a Bachelor at IADE University in Lisbon. Was your interest in the arts and creativity in any way in conversation with your interest in entrepreneurship?
If I had to pick a word, I would probably pick the word play. What I feel today is that some of the most important decisions I took in my life were not that conscious. I was not thinking and evaluating too much. I think it was just a feeling that maybe I should just go this way, you know?
Today, I feel that I lived a lot. I feel that I interacted with the world with feelings, with laughter, with hugs, with closeness and proximity to other people and to my family, to my friends. I just wanted to play, to be honest. I wanted to play, play music, discover new things. And yes, when I had to choose in high school, for example, I probably just said: okay, I think I’m just going to arts because I had the intuition that maybe I would be freer.
And do you think you kept that sense of play throughout your life? It seems to be a theme that is very present in your work.
Yeah, I think I kept it. It's something that I see myself a lot of times saying to my teams: just feel free, explore, don't feel constrained in this particular moment.
I started studying a lot about creativity and reading a lot about how to have ideas. And one of my learnings was that, when you are in a particular process, when you are designing something, when you are thinking about something, there should be moments when you feel at ease to create and explore and make mistakes and to go to unexpected places. I still try to bring that aspect of play to my work.
At the age of twenty-four, you started your first, official, business that evolved from a sort of collective of freelancers. Tell me more about this.
Yeah, I was studying at the time and working for a small design company. I felt I could do things differently. So I rented a space in Santos (Lisbon), and asked some other friends to join me. I’ll share the name with you because it's so ridiculous and fun: Threelancers, since we were three people.
We got together often and started finding some freelance projects designing spaces, designing brands, designing magazines. And we invited other people to join us for some projects too. And that thing actually became a company one or two years after we set it up.
Did you always know you wanted to start your own business?
I had this feeling that I would end up owning a design company. I think I knew that. I just wanted to have experience and learn from others before that happened. So actually it happened at the same time—I was working and designing my own company.
I guess I was in denial for some time. At some point, I thought I wanted to work for big design companies. But it simply didn't work. I felt constrained. I didn’t want to just design behind a screen. I wanted to interact with clients. I needed more space to create and to make mistakes. It did work better for me in smaller companies where I had more autonomy. But, yeah, I had this feeling that I was a starter.
On LinkedIn, you confessed to being critical of the promotion of “superheroes” in our society. What do you mean by this?
I really don’t like the idea of a superhero. I really don’t identify myself with that. I’m really critical of unicorns. I’m really critical of monopolies. I’m really critical about always taking the best examples as the examples you should follow. It creates a lot of stress and anxiety in everybody. I don’t think it’s helpful. It just puts pressure on you to be something when only 0.001% of people will get there.
You shared publicly that part of the decision to close Peixaria Centenária, the fish shop, was due to the awareness of its negative impact on the environment. Can you talk a bit more about this?
Yes. That was one of the reasons why we closed. My wife, who was a partner at the fish shop, and I had a lot of conversations about that throughout the years, about participating in that.
Another argument, that I’m still discovering if it’s true, is connected to the idea of degrowth. Having studied and talked about degrowth, I think it’s okay to close things as an entrepreneur. Whether that’s because you are getting tired, or exhausted. It’s okay to go against what people expect from you as a business person. They expect you to sell things. They expect you to make a lot of money. It's in the books. And for me, it's also interesting to look back now, after almost two years of closing the fish shop, and recognize that maybe, maybe there was too much going on. Maybe I was not doing the right thing.
How do you sit with the theme of environmental and social awareness in your other companies?
At my other companies, social and environmental impact is always a point of discussion. There’s this sentence that we use sometimes in our teams: what we care for is everyone's business. And maybe it sounds a bit pedantic. But look at the conversation that we are having now: we’re talking about impact, we’re talking about the climate. And I think all of these things are here. And it seemed that maybe some of these topics were confined to some people in the last years. But now they are everywhere. It's impossible not to be concerned. It's a systemic conversation. It's a never-ending conversation.
So what we do is that we have a lot of incredible people working with us. And this is what I feel every day. People who have personal concerns about these topics. And we give these people the space and the ability to manifest themselves in these projects for these big clients. We tell them: This is what you believe in? Just take it!
It’s like we are in the system, but we are trying to change the system by being there. These clients are also coming to us because they recognize that we are coming from somewhere else. We are not coming from the type of company and the type of consultancy that hires people from the same universities, with the same background, thinking about the same things. We have a good mix of people that think about business, that think about design, that think about ecology, that think about transformation. And I think that’s really beautiful to watch. It’s interesting to see us influencing these big companies to become better companies because they will have no alternative. If you think about it, they don’t have an alternative. They really have to change.
Last question. If you could speak across time now, what words of wisdom or advice would you share with your twenty-year-old self?
If I was in my twenties… I think I explored so many things. I had so much fun. I met so many incredible people. I took risks. And I think that in the end, it’s really interesting that in the middle of all these things, I found a criteria: using the heart as a mechanism of thinking. This is something I identify myself with as an entrepreneur, which is that I have to relate to the things that I do. I cannot start a business for the sole reason of making money. I don’t know how to do that. I’m not an entrepreneur who knows how to do that. To be honest, I would still use my heart as a way of making decisions.
To learn more about Rui’s work visit his LinkedIn profile.
To listen to our full audio interview with Rui click here.