…Make sure you’re solving a real problem for people or business. It’s easy to drink your own Kool Aid and convince investors to back your idea, but the consideration that should come before this is ‘is it worth my time?’ A brutal sense of self-knowledge is critical…
We had the pleasure of interviewing Nick Lynes. Nick is Co-CEO and Co-Founder at Flawless, a filmmaking technology platform that allows filmmakers to deliver cinematic-quality films, faster. Nick is a delivery focussed, commercial technologist with over 20 years experience in the e-commerce space. Previously a director at a FTSE 100 company, he developed and led APAC for a leading e-commerce operator, with revenues in excess of $1 billion.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I’ve had a diverse career spanning over 20 years, mostly in the e-commerce and tech space. I’ve always been delivery-focused and commercially driven, and I had the opportunity to lead some major projects, including developing and heading APAC for a large e-commerce operator with revenues of over $1 billion. That experience gave me a strong foundation in scaling operations and dealing with complex challenges across different markets, international law, and regulatory frameworks.
But my journey into Flawless was quite a departure from that. I’ve been a lifelong film fan, and deep down I’ve always felt more like a creative than a typical “business leader.” I met my co-founder, Scott Mann, through a film script that I’d written. In that meeting, Scott showed me a demo of the first visual translation using AI, and it was a real eye-opener for me. I realised that GenAI could fundamentally transform the creative industries and on a global scale.
From that point, I was hooked. I’m naturally drawn to risky, ambitious projects, so the idea of building Flawless — with the potential to change how films are made and distributed — was incredibly exciting. I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge, and I believe that sometimes you just need to commit fully to success, no matter how impossible the project may seem. Ultimately, what have any of us really got to lose? Our health, wealth and happiness is the answer, so I suppose quite a lot! But I don’t think that way. That’s worked to my benefit and deficit in almost equal proportions over my life.
Now, with the AI-based tools we’ve developed at Flawless, like TrueSync and DeepEditor, we’re helping filmmakers create without compromise. It’s been a rewarding journey, and although we face some technical and ethical challenges, I’m convinced that AI will ultimately enhance creativity rather than replace it. In fact, we’ll need more creators than ever before.
TrueSync Translation: how we made this — https://f.io/X9N8HlBx
DeepEditor — https://f.io/_3l6-Cwb
What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?
The “Aha Moment” for Flawless came during the production of Heist, a film my co-founder Scott Mann directed. He was frustrated by how the dubbing for international markets diluted the performances of his actors, including Robert De Niro. It was a classic case of creative compromise — the dubbed versions didn’t carry the same emotional weight as the original. Scott knew there had to be a better way, so he began searching for a solution that would allow filmmakers to preserve the integrity of performances across different languages.
Around that time, he came across a groundbreaking research paper on AI and facial mapping, and the pieces clicked into place. Together, we decided to create Flawless to develop technology that could address these problems. That moment sparked the journey to build DeepEditor, TrueSync and a new generation of AI tools that now allow filmmakers to maintain their creative vision and improve efficiency in post-production without compromising quality.
Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?
My mum and dad are my biggest inspirations. My dad died seventeen years ago but he inspired me as a great example of an honest, down to earth and hardworking businessman who maintained his strength of character under the most extreme conditions. My mum is a beacon of creativity, kindness and strength. She’s the reason I never really went too far off the rails, something that could easily have happened given my type of personality. Any success I have experienced is a direct by-product of her love and patience and my dad’s inspirational strength of character.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Excellence across the board is what springs to mind. We have genuine world leaders in science, film and technology who have collaborated over a first of its kind product. When you develop professional filmmaking software that enables editable outputs of beyond state-of-the-art GenAI science, survival is sustainably uncertain. This team have lived on that edge and have now delivered what was, in retrospect, a project that was as close to impossible as possible gets. The admiration I have for this team and particularly my co-founder is unending.
I remember sitting in one of our early leadership gatherings when the full avengers team had assembled. Scott and I watched in awe as a group of eleven global experts in film, tech and GenAI science gently course-corrected each other towards the overarching product and platform design. Something that could only have been done with an amazing culture of professional respect but also brutal honesty. An emulsification of the best aspects of their individual community cultures.
What makes Flawless stand out is our focus on empowering filmmakers without sacrificing their artistic integrity. We’ve developed tools that not only improve efficiency in post-production but also enhance creative control. The launch of DeepEditor is a prime example — it gives filmmakers the power to adjust performances and dialogue after filming has wrapped, which is something that was nearly impossible without costly reshoots in the past.
A great story to illustrate this is our work on the action film Fall. We were able to use DeepEditor to modify explicit language in the film, allowing it to meet PG13 standards without reshooting any scenes. This change saved the production around $1 million in costs and made the film accessible to a much wider audience. It’s a perfect example of how our technology can save time and money while elevating the creative process.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Our translation product will change the viewing habits of billions of people across the globe. Story is human but language is regional and now audiences can watch beautiful stories from all over the world. Stories that also proxy as enjoyable cultural educational experiences.
I have many plans of how to bring goodness into the world through personal projects, but I’d prefer to just do that, rather than talk about it. I’ll be doing more of that in 2025.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Resilience is the single biggest factor in success when delivering a truly innovative product to market. Bringing something into existence means there’s friction externally from what exists and internally from what doesn’t. Everyone wants to help when you don’t need help, and very few want to help when you do. Breaking that dynamic is a soul-testing exercise where you question your sanity for persisting daily, year in year out.
Creativity in the form of creative problem solving. Building a business is a multi-year problem solving puzzle. Creative problems solving is of equal potency to any visual art but it’s less understood because its power coalesces invisibly within products and the creative contribution comes from many on the journey to realisation. Amazing technical architecture, marketing, fundraising, and science discovery represent creativity at its finest if delivered elegantly.
Without authenticity there’s no fundamental soul and consequently no real culture. Without culture there’s no real collaboration and without collaboration the sum of the individual departments adds up to less than the whole.
Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?
I’ve never really been given much advice, or it’s possible I just don’t hear it. I’ve always done the things that interest me, regardless of the risk and of what people are thinking. I’m more scared of regret than failure and I can see how that dynamic has played throughout my life.
All my personal growth has come from pain not pleasure, so mistakes aren’t a problem as long as you never give up.
Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?
I remember losing everything at the age of 40 and being seriously in debt. From self-employment, I went back to the workplace, learned more, and started to save. The money that I saved while working in Southeast Asia provided my half of the seed investment in Flawless.
There is no life hack or business hack. The hardest part is the decades of learning and painful mistake making that you go through to earn the knowledge to deliver a project like Flawless. The years of foregoing enjoying the fruits of your labour and of sacrificing today for the benefit of tomorrow.
People want to know what you have learned, but don’t necessarily want to know how you learned it. However, how you earn the experience and what it turns you into are more important than the knowledge itself.
Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?
Finding out what I’m capable of has been a ghoulish curiosity to me all my life. Who in their right mind goes to these lengths to sacrifice health, wealth, and happiness, year in year out, to prove they can deliver a project like Flawless? Uncertainty around knowing my true capabilities is the answer — at least in the beginning.
Oddly enough though, when you embark on a journey like this it tends to fully answer those questions and that can be the biggest reward of all. A massive undertaking will strip you back to the truth about yourself. You learn your value, good or bad, so be prepared for that, because nobody is great at everything.
The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?
If it’s extremely hard, the emotional calluses created can both protect you from the perpetual challenges, failures and setbacks, as well as stop you from enjoying the joys, thrills and celebrations. If you’re in it for the joys and celebrations, it’s probably going to be a disappointment in that respect. Any meaningful milestone is usually so hard-earned that by the time it actually arrives, the joy is long gone.
This might sound depressing but it’s not. The reward is deferred to a time when you can reflect on the mountain that’s been climbed and the person you had to become to climb it. That is a warmth that lasts a lifetime.
Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks for your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?
It really depends on the type of business, and what you’re trying to build. For us at Flawless, we deliberately bypassed traditional venture capital because we made the deliberate decision to avoid the constraints it would bring, which allowed us to focus on the long-term vision of transforming the film industry.
AI’s potential impact is limited to the speed at which meaningful products using ethical data can deliver highly scalable change, and the current VC investment thesis doesn’t prioritise this. Investing in solid foundations like ethical data and professional film editing tools as our first products took many years to develop, and required significant funding.
We knew our approach would produce the best platform to enable uninterrupted year-on-year scaling revenue, multi-year competitive protections and the industry workflow integrations to enable the deployment of subsequent products, but this approach is not for everyone. Raising privately means you can’t really miss visible momentum in any quarter, or the well will likely dry up — and if that happens, it’s all over. Because we took this route, it would be many years before our profile would look appealing to the institutional investor community again.
We raised $75 million through a constant four-year fundraising effort via individual investors and family offices, and we diverted a fair distance from the investment thesis set by all the institutional investors. This allowed us to stay true to our long-term vision and build scalable tech that would not be quickly replicated. If you can build it quick, so can others, so we didn’t want to circle the drain in commoditised marketplaces searching for USPs.
Eventually, we needed to mirror the investment profile requirements set by the big strategics and venture capitalists, as there’s only so far you can go with ultra-high net worth and family office investors — and for clarity to prospective future founders, $75m is not a standard privately raised seed round size.
If a young founder were asking for my advice, I’d say there are a few things they should consider:
What’s your long-term vision? If you need time to develop something truly groundbreaking, enterprise compatible and ethical, as we did, you might want to avoid the pressures that come with VC expectations. Bootstrapping or raising funds from individual investors who share your vision can give you more control but trust me: it always takes longer and consequently costs more, so patience can wear thin. The end result, if successful, is significantly increased value, but that level of risk is not what most VCs are looking for.
How quickly do you need to scale? If your market demands fast growth or you have a short window to capitalise on an opportunity, then venture capital might be the right path. But be prepared to give up some control and face pressure to scale quickly and potentially at the cost of your vision. Of course, that might be the best strategy if you’re worried about fast followers or if you don’t have the option to raise elsewhere.
Are you comfortable with investor expectations? With VCs, there’s often an expectation of fast returns, whereas family offices or private investors may be more patient if they believe in your long-term goals. Probably because behind family offies and ultra-high net worth individuals are people who created businesses themselves, unlike almost any venture capitalist, who have never run businesses themselves. They’re generally more prepared to wait for the bigger returns over longer periods of time which makes them perfect investors for strategic longevity. However, be careful as there’s a limit to everyone’s patience.
Ultimately, the choice depends on the type of company you want to build. If safe and massive long term equity value, innovation and staying true to your vision are your top priorities, taking a more unorthodox approach to fundraising — as we did — might serve you better in the long run. However, the risk this funding route entails is also just as likely to kill you as anything else.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
1 . Hire a talented team and foster strong relationships
It’s not enough to just find the right people — create an environment where collaboration thrives. Encourage open communication and lead by example. A cohesive team that works well together will be more resilient and innovative, helping your company navigate challenges and seize opportunities.
2 . Culture eats strategy for breakfast (Peter Drucker)
In my experience, an amazing group working in concert, driven by a common vision, where you get out of the way as much as possible is the best route to success. We can’t all start out with world leaders in their field like we did at Flawless, so other journeys will be different — and I can imagine a level of micromanagement in the beginning might work best for some businesses. There are no hard and fast rules.
3 . Sticking to the vision is key
Too many people get distracted by the nearest shiny objects. How you get where you’re going is often an iterative learning curve and the route is almost always different from what you had originally imagined — but ideally, the destination should not be changing.
4 . Honesty is an absolute must
It’s hard enough even when everyone’s being honest, but it’s impossible if politics, over politeness or dishonesty begins to take hold.
5 . Make sure you’re solving a real problem for people or business.
It’s easy to drink your own Kool Aid and convince investors to back your idea, but the consideration that should come before this is ‘is it worth my time?’ A brutal sense of self-knowledge is critical.
What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
One mistake every founder makes is starting the business in the first place.
Joking aside, everyone underestimates the mental and physical toll that embarking on a years-long endeavour of bringing an idea into the world takes on you.
My specific opinion based on my own experience is likely worthless to the readers given the range of possible scenarios anyone might face. Instead, I’ll give a few statements that are all true.
You might start too early and fail, or you might start too late and fail — failing is the learning curve that leads to success.
Once you jump out of the plane without a parachute, you work out pretty quickly how to build a parachute.
Give things a go, and have no regrets — we’ll all be dead in 100 years, and nobody will remember any of this anyway.
Startup founders often work extremely long hours and it’s easy to burn the candle at both ends. What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?
Don’t start a start-up if you really care about that.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
How hard would it be to give everyone in society the best mental and physical healthcare?
What about a school system that identified and amplified a wide range of human aptitudes and allowed more people to realise their full potential?
We are blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Jensen Huang for sure, he’s a pirate. The way he describes his early Nvidia experience is similar to our own recent experiences at Flawless: we built what we thought was right, not what everyone wanted us to build. I’d love to discuss that with him, and maybe even a partnership of some kind.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
We are on LinkedIn, Instagram, and our website is www.flawlessai.com
Nick Lynes of Flawless On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.