---
title: "I met Tom Noble at Waterloo station last Thursday."
url: https://sam-page.com/thinking/i-met-tom-noble-at-waterloo-station-last-thursday
date: 2026-10-16
author: Sam Page
type: Post or article
categories: [Founder life and leadership]
reading_time: 2 min
summary: "We looked like we were about to do some sort of odd exchange."
first_published: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A7516858780077371392
---

# I met Tom Noble at Waterloo station last Thursday.

We looked like we were about to do some sort of odd exchange.

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/i-met-tom-noble-at-waterloo-station-last-thursday-li1.webp)

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/i-met-tom-noble-at-waterloo-station-last-thursday-li2.webp)

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/i-met-tom-noble-at-waterloo-station-last-thursday-li3.webp)

Which we were. But it wasn't dodgy, and we didn't exchange on the platform.

I’d bought a crate of his Chateaunoble wine and offered to collect it. Mission complete!

Tom thought I lived in Kingston upon Hull, so he came to London as a midpoint. Then he found out it was Kingston upon Thames. Oups!

We had a good laugh about that.

We ended up sitting outside Gail’s with a glass of wine and a coffee. Obvs.

A questionable combination, but I can confirm:

The white wine is great. Really great!

And I now have another 11 bottles to drink at home!

It was a real pleasure to sit and chat with Tom.

We talked about building a following and building a business. Both equally difficult, for different reasons.

We also talked about where Tom wants to take the business, and I offered my thoughts on what he needs to do.

The next step? We’re going to model what it will take to get him there.

One thing we definitely agreed on: to get a business to work, you need the inside-the-box stuff to work as well as the outside-the-box stuff.

That wasn’t supposed to be a wine pun. But it works, so I’m going with it.

What would it take to get you to buy wine from a brand you’d never tasted?