Dan Holloway, founder of Rogue Interrobang
Dan Holloway is CEO of Rogue Interrobang, a spinout from Oxford University’s Humanities Division that helps individuals and organizations use creativity to solve wicked problems. Rogue Interrobang produces a creative living range of tools, including the award-winning card game Mycelium. Dan studied Theology and Philosophy at the University of Oxford, during which is looked at early modern ways of thinking around creativity and subjectivity. This forms the basis of much of Rogue Interrobang’s work.
As a disabled entrepreneur, Dan is passionate about accessibility. He has spent 2 decades campaigning and consulting on inclusion in the financial services, publishing, innovation, and other sectors, and is co-director of WhatWeNeed.Support, a community interest company that works with lived experience communities. He also researches disability, technology, narrative and exclusion; and his most recent paper, The Wheelchair and the Whale, published in the Journal of Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies, examines the way that narratives surrounding better futures can inadvertently exclude disabled people from public life.
Where’s the “it’s complicated” button? In short(ish), like many disabled people, I have been unable to find a way to do the things I am passionate about and good at within the system. I had a breakdown at the end of my doctorate, and my CV looks like a dog’s breakfast.
I also have a pathological hatred of fixed rules that make no sense to me. Many of them have frustrated me to the point of tears and sometimes beyond, I know that I have been most of my line managers’ worst nightmare! But it crystallised when I began to get frustrated after winning my second creative thinking world title. I thought, “creativity’s meant to be the most important skill in the modern world. I have medals that say I’m not just really good at it, but by some measure, the best. But no one seems to want to pay me for that skill.” Then I thought, “Hang on, if I’m really that creative I should be able to find a way to make a living out of it.”
And here we are!
Being a one person swiss army knife. But also, before I founded Rogue Interrobang I spent many years as emcee of a poetry performance group called The New Libertines. I always gave my bio as “rabble rouser in chief.” I think that sums up what I think I should be doing as an entrepreneur. Because one thing you learn very quickly, which can be a very disheartening lesson if you don’t absorb it, is that if there’s something you’re really passionate about doing that no one else is doing right now, then no one is going to bang the drum for you. You have to stir the pot, or you’ll sink, and the solution to the problem you’re so passionate about will sink with you.
I have always had a really strange relationship with self belief. On the one hand I know I’m good at some things. And really, really good at a few others, but I’ve also spent decades being ridiculed or ignored for most of my ideas. Poor mental health and being an undiagnosed ADHD kid at school meant I was bullied by my peers and punished by my teachers for not fitting in. All that makes it really tough to keep believing you have something worth saying. But if you do get through it, it can leave a real toughness. My teachers told me not to be so stupid as to apply to Oxford. I ignored them, applied anyway, and got in. That sums things up. But the specific moment that changed everything was winning the Humanities Innovation Challenge in 2017. I knew the idea for a creative thinking tool was good. That validation made me realise it was worth developing.
1 Communication. Because an idea is worth nothing if no one acts on it. And most ideas that have the potential to change the world will be new and strange. As an entrepreneur it’s your job to get people to act on them.
2 Being able to be brutally honest with yourself. You will be really good at some things (but be used to being told to underplay that). And you will be shockingly bad at others (but surrounded by people who want to be encouraging). If you don’t very quickly get a handle on knowing when you are right and when you need help it will leave you really exposed.
3 When it comes to any piece of advice, there’s something incredibly valuable you can learn from between 1 and 99% of it. Having a critical filter that allows you to identify and synthesise that fraction and cut the rest will give you the edge over people who uncritically accept or reject every bit of it.
2 Being able to be brutally honest with yourself. You will be really good at some things (but be used to being told to underplay that). And you will be shockingly bad at others (but surrounded by people who want to be encouraging). If you don’t very quickly get a handle on knowing when you are right and when you need help it will leave you really exposed.
3 When it comes to any piece of advice, there’s something incredibly valuable you can learn from between 1 and 99% of it. Having a critical filter that allows you to identify and synthesise that fraction and cut the rest will give you the edge over people who uncritically accept or reject every bit of it.
Getting to express myself fully and not having to hide who I am, or what I want to achieve. That outlet means I can do my day job without it feeling overwhelming and soul destroying because not only is there a time and place where I have complete creative agency to let loose with my ideas, but the fact I can do so in the setting of a business gives me at least some hope of a way out and finally making the best use of my skills, something that simply pursuing a hobby can’t offer.
I’m inspired by so many people in so many settings and over so many times. Martha Nussbaum and Carl Sagan both taught me something about the communication of ideas and the fact you could have a thought with the potential to transform the world. But my greatest inspirations have always been from the worlds of the arts and extreme sport. I love the confessional and the fearless aspects of both. As an ultra runner, Jasmin Paris is a huge inspiration. She has quietly gone about rewriting history. Spanning extreme sport and art, Philippe Petit, who wire walked between the Twin Towers, stands out as someone who imagined and then made real something truly outside the bounds of what anyone would have thought possible.
And so many people in the arts, many of whom I’ve had the thrill of working with, like photographer Veronika von Volkova and artist/writer/burlesque artist Katelan Foisy, the poet Adelle Stripe. It’s always the combination of the confessional, the aesthetic, and the transformative. Right now, I’m drawing a huge amount on Alexander McQueen. That two word epithet, “savage beauty”, the title of the tribute show at the Met, sums up my approach to so many things.
And so many people in the arts, many of whom I’ve had the thrill of working with, like photographer Veronika von Volkova and artist/writer/burlesque artist Katelan Foisy, the poet Adelle Stripe. It’s always the combination of the confessional, the aesthetic, and the transformative. Right now, I’m drawing a huge amount on Alexander McQueen. That two word epithet, “savage beauty”, the title of the tribute show at the Met, sums up my approach to so many things.
Ha! I’d put them all in a room and just listen. But if I had 5 minutes to ask Alexander McQueen something it would address a fundamental problem I wrestle with: “How do you handle the fact that the people who most understand and are changed by your work don’t buy it; and the people who buy your products don’t really understand what you’re trying to say?” When you’re an entrepreneur in a field where art and commerce are often in conflict, this is a battle that feels like it tears you apart. I think it tore him apart. But he walked the line better than most. I’d love to know the stories he told himself and the techniques he used to do that.
Getting my perspective wrong, I think, which comes from being really close to the work I’m doing. People have limited attention, and they may never have thought about the problem you’re solving, even if it turns out to be really important. So you have to tell them the right stories. But you also have to grab their attention. You have to be like the white rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and do something so strange, unusual, and provocative they just have to follow you out of curiosity, and once you’ve got them curious you tell them the story.
Also, as a neurdodivergent founder, I spent too long trying to do things by conventional rules. Conventional rules are set up for people whose brains aren’t wired like mine. I needed to find ways that worked for me. That would segue into a key bit of advice, which is that business is new to many of us and will feel very strange. Get to know how it ticks and its internal logic to help with that.
The advantage of not being a science or tech startup is I don’t need a lot of expensive equipment or facilities. The disadvantage is that I do need something, but only a small amount, which investors aren’t really interested in. So I was very lucky that winning the Innovation Challenge came with a small amount of funding so that I could pay a really good artist and get an initial stock run.
I spent a lot of time in the 2010s just sitting in The Albion Beatnik Bookstore, drinking coffee, reading, writing, watching everyone who came in, listening, finding out what motivated them, what interested them, ending up in some really weird but utterly invaluable conversations with most of them. The shop’s no longer there but the idea is sound. Find a place where your audience hang out. Find out what makes them tick.
Are there any Business or Entrepreneurship Related Courses that you would recommend?
Initiatives from the Entrepreneurship Centre at Said Business School gave me a grounding in how to create a business plan but more importantly introduced me to many great mentors in the creative space, and obviously Oxford University Innovation have been wonderful!
Being an entrepreneur is hard. Really hard. It will turn you inside out. The people you thought would support you through thick and thin will start edging out of the door when they see you coming. For that degree of discomfort and distress you need to try to knock the world off its axis. Not necessarily in a big arena but in a big way. If you want to make an incremental change or a tweak or to be the third person to do something because you can see a way to do it slightly better, don’t even start. Wait till you get an idea that stops you in its tracks so hard you forget to breathe.
You can keep up to date with Dan and Rogue Interrobang on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also get in touch with Dan by emailing him at dan@rogueinterrobang.com.
