October 10th, 2019 Posted by tp33Blog
0 thoughts on “Climate Change: What’s Likely To Happen According To Scientists And How To Be Part of the Solution”
After speaking with two meteorology experts and a chemical engineer who specializes in carbon capture technologies, it’s clear we’re not doing enough to get in front of what’s becoming a climate disaster.
A number of credible scientific publications stated that climate change puts the well-being of people around the globe at risk. And yet, most of us are not aware of what’s potentially coming nor are we planning for it from a business and personal perspective.
I spoke with Rear Admiral David Titley, who spent 32 years as the Navy’s meteorologist/oceanographer, when he appeared on my podcast Unmessable. Titley was tasked with assessing and planning for security risks our country faced with regards to global warming.
One big concern he spent a lot of time analysing is rising sea levels. He expects levels to rise up to 3 to 6 feet by the year 2100, but by the time levels stabilize (several centuries from now), we could be looking at a 30 feet increase globally.
This means ultimately Orlando becomes the southernmost point of Florida. Baton Rouge is the southernmost point of Louisiana. Everyone in Harlem, New York is elated because they now have beachfront properties. And that’s just the beginning.
In another Unmessable podcast discussion, Dr. Marshall Shepherd, a distinguished professor and Director of Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, and former Nasa meteorologist, said “Many people don’t understand that the increases we’re going to see in the next 0 to 50 years (sea level rise, ice caps melting, flooding, droughts, agricultural belt shifts, diseases, etc.) are going to happen at an exponential rate. They’re not going to be linear increases. The more time we wait on action, the further along the exponentially increasing curve of crisis we go.”
Scientists say there is an inflection point where the climate scales tip, which is when we reach an average climate increase of 2 degrees celsius. That’s where the rate of climate change will get away from our abilities to reverse it. Today, we are seeing a 1.5 degrees celsius average climate increase, which means there is still some time to be proactive.
So I asked myself, what can regular people (like me) do to help slow down this train wreck? What business opportunities exist around being part of the solution? Here’s a place to start.
Clean air: It’s likely to be very valuable
Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, a chemical engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric pollution, believes CO2 carbon capture is a solution we should employ to reverse some of the damage that’s already been done.
“We have the capability to build synthetic forests that have the potential to remove some of the CO2 that is emitted into the atmosphere each year, ” Dr. Wilcox said. “Ideally, we avoid CO2 emissions to begin with, but we are not doing that at the scale required to meet our climate goals and so now we have to start pulling CO2 out of the air to avoid reaching a climate change tipping point.”
It sounds simple to pull CO2 from the air, but it’s not. Far from it. It’s a complex process that requires lots of engineering and funding. There are some businesses working on clever ways to do this, but we need way more innovation happening in this space and significant capital investments. It’s a great business opportunity that will predictably be in big demand.
Get involved with Congress and local government
Titley suggests to learn about climate change, we should all get involved locally, monitor the state of affairs, and become an advocate. There are short explanations from the AAAS where you can quickly develop a basic understanding of climate change. Then, if you don’t already know, find out who your representatives are locally and make your voice heard.
But when it comes to affecting change on a larger scale, it takes advocacy to organize slow-moving government agencies. Congress and local governments can create business grants and other incentives to fuel business opportunities at all levels to work toward achievable climate goals. Staying silent while the house burns isn’t an option any longer.
Be mindful of your own daily life choices
We can all take small steps to at least slow the effects of climate change, if not reverse it, but making simple choices like using LED bulbs in the home, reducing plastic consumption (especially one-time-use plastics), traveling less (or drive less when possible), using solar powered energy, and electric cars are effective strategies. Creating competitive, environment-friendly consumer options is one area where the market can help as long as it’s provided the right incentives.
Don’t buy real estate near the water
Although local governments are taking some measures, like New York’s effort to build flood surges (which are glorified sand bags) to avoid disasters like Hurricane Sandy, or the efforts of government officials in Miami to protect against a 3-foot water-level increase, Titley says it’s likely to be insufficient. If you are looking to set up shop for personal or business reasons, avoid high-risk areas for long-term investments.
World governments and industry responded quickly in the 1980s in an effort to undo years of ozone depletion. It worked. We can do it again.
September 5th, 2019 Posted by tp33Podcasts
0 thoughts on “Harvard Leadership Professor, Dr. Amy Edmondson, Dives Into What Makes Teams High-Performing”
Dr. Amy Edmondson is a seven-time author who got her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard, then went on to teach Leadership at Harvard Business School (for the past 23 years and counting) as the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, where she has tenure. In this episode, Amy discusses some of the groundbreaking principles she outlines in her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth and shares important pitfalls that eat away at having an empowering culture in the workplace.
Amy and Tanya talk about what leadership is, how people can gain access to it and what is absolutely mission critical for effective team collaboration and high-performing organizational cultures.
Tune in to get the full conversation and learn about:
Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.
Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017 and was honored with the Talent Award in 2017. She studies teaming, psychological safety, and leadership, and her articles have been published numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her books – Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and Extreme Teaming (Emerald, 2017) – explore teamwork in dynamic organizational environments. In Building the future: Big teaming for audacious innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), she examines the challenges and opportunities of teaming across industries to build smart cities. Her new book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley, 2018), offers a practical guide for organizations serious about success in the modern economy.
Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.
Amy Edmondson: I started out as an engineer and some of the projects that I was working on not surprisingly required lots of people to work together on teams to get things done, and lo and behold, it was not so easy.
Tanya: That’s Dr. Amy Edmondson, seven-time author who got her PhD in Organizational Behavior followed by a 23-year and counting teaching gig as the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard where she has tenure. Amy outlines groundbreaking principles in her book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth as well as giving brilliant TED talk which has been viewed by millions on leadership.
Amy Edmondson: As an engineer, you can think, well, there are right answers and wrong answers and it should just – the people part shouldn’t be a big determinant, right? Wrong. I found myself getting very interested in how people come together and particularly across boundaries of expertise and sometimes status and sometimes even organizations in the built environment where I was working. It’s often different organizations coming together. I got interested in these dynamics, and I got so interested that I went to work for a small consulting firm that helped organizations build good teams and including at the very top for strategy teams and so on. I was really hooked. I was really fascinated. I thought the work was really interesting, and the people were really interesting, and I just was learning so much.
After a while I realized, I’m kind of a fraud here. I don’t have any background in business. I don’t have any background in psychology. If I’m going to be – if I’m really going to be committed to this work, I probably should go back to school. I didn’t really know an awful lot about the different kinds of programs, but in my travels, I had met some people who said, “Oh, you got to do a PhD in Organizational Behavior. That’s what you need.” I said, “Oh, what’s that? Okay, sure.” I think at first, I was just being a little bit agreeable because I thought, there’s no way. There’s no way I’ll get in and on and on it goes, but I did.
Tanya: You went from engineer and what kind of engineer?
Amy Edmondson: I was a structural engineer so I was helping build things. Specially, usually, geodesic domes, but also, trusses and other things.
Tanya: What are geodesic domes? I’ve never heard that before.
Amy Edmondson: Oh, well. A geodesic dome, if you close your eyes and think about – if you’ve ever been to Montreal back in the – one of the more famous geodesic domes was built for the US pavilion in the World’s Fair back in the ‘60s. It’s still there today and now it’s – I think they call it Biodome.
Tanya: Yeah, the Biodome. I am from Montreal.
Amy Edmondson: Oh, oh, okay. It’s that beautiful structure, and its claim to fame is that it’s very, very efficient in terms of use of materials, and it’s incredibly strong. In fact, that building caught on fire in – I can’t remember exactly when, but the skin, the outer part of the structure, burned completely up, and then the dome was still there and still intact. Then they rebuilt it as this more museum facility. It’s an incredibly strong structure. It can withstand high winds and it can enclose a great deal of space without much material or time or cost really.
Tanya: Wow, I didn’t realize. I mean, in Montreal, especially – I remember going at the Biodome. Montreal is French. I remember going to the Biodome so many times when I was a kid.
Amy Edmondson: Wow, good.
Tanya: It was actually a very special thing. I had no idea that it had all these incredible structural attributes to it.
Amy Edmondson: Yeah, it’s very special. I worked for Buckminster Fuller who was the guy who invented the geodesic dome and who actually was one of the chief architects for that structure. He also had a younger architect working with him because he was in his late 70s at the time. I was not around or with him at that time, but as a kid I always loved the building also.
Tanya: Yeah. No, absolutely. Where did you grow up?
Amy Edmondson: I grew up in New York City.
Tanya: Oh, in New York City.
Amy Edmondson: Yeah.
Tanya: Oh, my god. Wow. It’s rare that [05:15]. I’ve been in New York City for 13 years. It’s rare that we meet a native New Yorker.
Amy Edmondson: It’s true. It’s true.
Tanya: Yeah, it’s a rare thing, but that’s amazing. You’ve been teaching at Harvard. You got your Organizational Behavior PhD. Then you began teaching afterwards immediate…
Amy Edmondson: Right. I joined the faculty in 1996. I finished my PhD and went on the market to look for a professorship job, an assistant professor job, and was lucky enough to get one. Lo and behold I’ve been there for 23 years ever since. I got promoted to associate professor then full professor with tenure, and I – I’ve been there a long time which sounds – to me, I’m astonished I could ever be in any job for that long, but it changes every year. It’s always different students, different courses, different – it’s been full of variety and learning.
Tanya: Which helps, and so what are some of your favorite courses that you really teach?
Amy Edmondson: I love teaching courses on teams and team work. Fundamentally, the overarching umbrella is leadership which is the force that allows us to swim upstream. It’s the force that allows us to do things that aren’t easy or that don’t come naturally. When I say us, I mean collectively as teams or institutions or organizations.
Tanya: Yeah. This is something that – we do a lot of work in – my day job is consulting and we specialize in leadership consulting.
Amy Edmondson: Oh, good.
Tanya: This is why I’m so interested in having this chat with you. When we’re working with our clients and not even just our clients, we see it everywhere, leadership is something that people want so desperately. They want to have access to, but it’s this elusive concept for many, right?
Amy Edmondson: Yes.
Tanya: I think Google has 1.2 billion definitions or…
Amy Edmondson: Wow.
Tanya: Just for that. It’s a huge topic, but yet everybody really wants to get access. What is, for you, leadership, and how do you see that?
Amy Edmondson: I’m interested in teams and teaming, and I’ll define teaming – I’m interested in these things not just in their own right, but because I think that’s how more and more of the work gets done today. Teaming means coordinating and communicating with people across boundaries of expertise and status and time. Sometimes distance, virtual teams, and being interdependent in getting something done. Some important work done. Everything I just said is incredibly unnatural. I mean, I don’t want to overstate the case, but it’s not enough to just say, ah yes, we need a team. We need to collaborate. It just doesn’t happen. Collaboration breaks down in a variety of ways. We misunderstand each other. We fail to get clear on the shared goal. We don’t understand each other’s language. We get into conflicts. I mean, there’s all sorts of human phenomena. Social psychological phenomena that make collaboration more challenging than it first appears.
To me, leadership is yes, elusive, but leadership is the force that helps us do it anyway. I think the fundamental job of leadership is to ensure a good process that we – if we’re in a team, making an important strategic decision for example. One voice at a time. We capture and dig into what we know. We go deeper. Good process and good climate, having the right culture or climate that makes it possible for people to speak up openly, to disagree actively, to solve problems together.
I think leadership is responsible for ensuring good process and creating a good climate for learning and problem solving, and neither one of those things happens automatically. They just don’t. We wish they did, right? We wish that oh – I just say, hey, let’s have a team. Let’s get something done and the rest will take care of itself. It doesn’t. One of my favorite definitions of leadership is the art of harnessing the efforts of others to achieve greatness. People have – and I think for the most part, really want to contribute. They want to contribute their ideas, their skills. They want to be part of something larger than themselves. It won’t happen if it’s just a free-for-all.
Tanya: Yeah, I know. Inherently, for sure people, every time whether it’s – whether I’m speaking with a waiter or an executive or an entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter. Across the board, when I say, what really lights you up? It’s contributing to something that’s bigger than themselves, always, no matter what it is. Whether it’s serving somebody at a restaurant and making their day better by perhaps some great food or it’s about having global impact through business. Having taken a deep look at leadership, what in your view is the current state of leadership?
Amy Edmondson: You mean in the world?
Tanya: Mm-hmm.
Amy Edmondson: This or both. It’s suboptimal. It’s funny because I talk a lot about a thing I call psychological safety which describes a climate where people do believe they can bring their full self to work. They can speak up with work-relevant ideas, questions, concerns, even mistakes. It hardly needs to be said, but it’s not the norm. In most organizations, I ask people all the time to think of a time when they held back on saying something that they believed could be important. They weren’t 100% sure they would have said it, but it could be important. It could have been an important question if it would help them do their job better. It could be an idea. It could be a concern, but they held back. Why, well, we all know this, because they’re sizing up the environment and saying, hmm, he or she wouldn’t like it if I said that. He or she usually refers to the boss or someone in a position of authority, hierarchy of some kind.
This is such a profoundly common – it’s not like people look at me cross-eyed when I ask them to think of a time. Everybody can think of one, and yet, let’s step back. We are in a knowledge era. We work in a knowledge intensive world where people’s ideas and observations may be absolutely mission critical for achieving our collective goals. If we look around in just the business world, most organizations don’t have the best possible culture to foster learning and innovation. If we look in the political sphere, it’s most certainly true that most of our political leaders are not modeling the kind of leadership that brings out the best in us as individuals, and us as societies.
Tanya: Yes. Politically speaking, that is a whole another paradigm of lacking in leadership. I don’t think that – I don’t remember a time that we’ve been more divided.
Amy Edmondson: No.
Tanya: Ever, ever. A lot of people talk about that, but from a business standpoint, it was interesting because I had the opportunity to speak with somebody that recently just left a company that they were serving for a long time. There was some leadership things that came up, some Me Too movement things that came up, and ultimately, that person, although it was not directly with them was held responsible for not taking action. What came up was – you mentioned this thing of power, the CEO level which is a real thing. This psychologically safe environment. Even though the person really thought that they were down-to-earth and approachable, the mere power position that is there causes a threat to people really speaking up especially for things about Me Too movement or [14:29] cultural issues of inequality. How can that be addressed?
Amy Edmondson: This is the part where I wish I had a magic wand which I don’t, and I like probably most social scientists am better at pointing out the gaps, the challenges that we face than in providing the ready solutions. I think it starts with observation, right? It starts with being willing to come forward and talk about these things. You cannot make progress if you aren’t willing to acknowledge that the current state is suboptimal. I think you said something very important which is most leaders, even the most well-intentioned leaders who don’t see themselves as intimidating or as unkind in any way, the power of the position is such that it changes everything.
The very observant leaders notice this and they’re surprised by it. You suddenly become CEO and you become aware that you’re not hearing things anymore. You’re in the CEO bubble as you put it. It’s a funny thing because you didn’t ask for it, but there it is. If you look around, and I’ve been in many organizations where I do look around, and what you see is, you see a lot of people a level below scrambling to protect the CEO from bad news, and they’re not really protecting. I mean, they’re protecting themselves. They don’t want to be the messenger. They think the messenger will get shot which of course a good leader will never shoot the messenger. A good leader will thank the messenger and then say, great. Now what can we do to help? How can we get on this?
Most organization leaders are not as self-aware and situationally aware as this hypothetical leader we’ve just described who becomes exquisitely aware of the bubble and then says, hmm, the bubble is dangerous. Not just for the organization, but even for me because I want to know. I met a CEO who said – came to speak to our class at Harvard and said, “My greatest fear as CEO…” While he’s CEO, he’s CEO of Eastman Chemical, says that people aren’t telling you the truth. He was very perceptive because he was aware – almost like it changes overnight. He was aware that the simple act of occupying this role is a risk factor.
Tanya: Yeah, absolutely. Now another shortcoming that we see quite often in the area of leadership is, authority is mistaken for leadership.
Amy Edmondson: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Authority is fundamentally about power and control, and leadership is fundamentally about empower and free up and learn. Another definition of leadership is it’s got a very strong relationship to making a better world. Making a better company, making a better world. You’re trying to get from here to there. You’re trying to produce change.
Tanya: Yeah. Almost like realizing a future or generating a future that was not meant to happen before your leadership or predictable to happen. Then having really thought about the sphere of leadership and then the sphere of management, how do you distinguish both? When do you employ one or the other because a lot of people have these two spheres collapse?
Amy Edmondson: Yes. I do, I think they’re both really important spheres, and as your question implies, not the same thing. You can think of management as getting work done through people. That you’re managing people to get various tasks done. Leadership just to play on words is the art of getting people done through work. More concretely, leadership is about change, leadership is about developing others, leadership is about thinking about the future, creating possible paths toward getting us there. I do think its primary role is the role of developing others. That means putting others in situations where they will grow and learn.
By the way, while they’re growing and learning, they’re getting the work done. It would be safer for me, and as a manager I’m tempted, to just make sure I’ve got the person who absolutely has this task down. Pat, okay, you’re going to do that one. I’m never going to promote you because you’re so good at that, but that wouldn’t be good either for you or for the organization’s future. I have to put myself in a position where I want to promote you to the next thing. Management is about the near-term. Management is about the today. Management is about getting things done. Leadership is about the future. It’s about meaning. It’s about bringing people along with you.
The forces of nature are always pushing us toward the managed and away from the leadership because the leadership – we don’t get the rewards of leadership until later. If I invest in developing others or thinking through scenario planning, down the road, that might have been a really good use of my time, but I don’t get that same satisfaction of just cranking through that to-do list.
Tanya: That’s a very interesting concept and it’s almost – you have to be quite disciplined to know where the big value lies. That’s so tempting to just knock off a few things on your to-do list and feel really good about it now but…
Amy Edmondson: Exactly.
Tanya: In the end really not have your eye on the long-term. What do you think is an access point for people to lead? Do you think that some people are born with it or is this a skill that can be developed?
Amy Edmondson: You have to realize I’m in the leadership training or leadership education business, so I sure hope it’s a skill that can be developed or else I’m not doing my job or I’m doing a silly job. Some of the most important leadership capabilities are self-awareness, asking good questions, listening, bringing together a team for a reason to do something new and important. I do think all of those skills can be taught, can be practiced, and must be.
Tanya: What’s the access point to actually being an effective leader?
Amy Edmondson: I think you just have to get out there and be…
Tanya: Learn on the job.
Amy Edmondson: Learn on the job, exactly. You can never learn it all in a classroom. You have to be out there and make mistakes and willing to take risks. I think the access point is really in a sense its purpose. It’s a sense of – because it’s a lot easier not to be a leader. I think you have to be committed to becoming a leader and being vulnerable. If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to be vulnerable. Things will not work out exactly as you wish all of the time.
Tanya: No. Wouldn’t that be great though?
Amy Edmondson: Yeah, wouldn’t it?
Tanya: Yes, that would. You wrote this incredible book called, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety which we talked about earlier. In the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. What role does psychological safety play in organizations, and how can companies or organizations make sure that people feel safe but not get into a comfort zone?
Amy Edmondson: You bet. The role of psychological safety is to – there’s been a lot of emphasis over the last few years on talent. Talent acquisition, get the best people. How do you find and hire really smart talented people? That makes a lot of sense, and it is not terribly effective if you hire the most talented people but then you don’t hear what’s in their heads. If you don’t know what they have to say. You need talent plus psychological safety to thrive and innovate in the knowledge economy. Psychological safety plays a critical role. It’s not the end in itself. It’s not even a driving force for effectiveness. It’s a moderator. It’s like the key that unlocks that talent. That says yes, I know you have it now. It’s what allows you to really express it and use it and confront difficult conversations and conflict and come out on the other side smarter and wiser rather than just bruised because we know this is what’s necessary.
I think the way organizations create a psychologically safe environment without falling into the comfort zone is by continually, first and foremost, bring the attention back to the purpose and the work. The purpose is the answer to the question of why we exist. Why it matters. We’re taking care of patients. We’re building great consumer products, whatever it is. We’re doing things that in some way, shape or form make the world a better place for some constituents. Continually emphasizing the why it matters because that’s energizing. As I said before, we all want to be a part of something that matters in the world. That’s larger than ourselves. We want to feel proud of what we do. We want to tell our family members and neighbors that we believe we do something that matters. We’re not just getting a paycheck.
You’re emphasizing the purpose, but also, it’s like psychological safety is one dimension that is necessary for a really vital workplace today, but the other is performance management or high standards or accountability. I go around and around in how I talk about this dimension of performance, right? I think if your goal, and of course it is, is to have people achieve the highest level of performance, then you need to be motivated. I think purpose helps a lot with that. Feedback and other kinds of rewards help as well, but what matters most I think is that there’s an enabling performance environment meaning you have access to coaching if you need it. You have access to the resources you need to do this kind of work. The equipment, the colleagues. You got to make sure you’ve put some basics in place. This is, to a certain extent, a management task. The right conditions have to be in place. It’s not enough to just say we expect excellence. We expect you to hit your targets, but then not provide what’s needed to make that realistic.
Tanya: The support, yeah.
Amy Edmondson: Exactly. The other dimension of psychological safety – I like to say, the comfort zone is where psychological safety is indeed high, but motivation isn’t. That’s the comfort zone, and the antidote to that is what we’ve been talking about which is the enabling performance environment and the motivating – and even ennobling goal and purpose.
Tanya: What led you to discover that it was really psychological safety that was the underbelly of what allowed leadership to happen on or occur on?
Amy Edmondson: I can put it this way. In some early studies, I found at least from the surface more or less identical entities, work groups, units within different organizations, teams that seem to have similarly well-structured [27:43] that we were just talking about. The structure, the resources, the enabling support to do the work, but they really differed in their outcomes. In studying them further, I found this palpable difference in what initially I was thinking of as openness which is a reasonably good term for it actually. People were – they’d say things like, in this team, I don’t have to have a work face. I was like, lovely, lovely sentence. We all know exactly what she means. I don’t have to have a work face like I walk through the door and then I put on my work face. I can be myself. Places where people say, my god, a lot of – like a healthcare setting. A lot of bad things can happen here. We need to be really speaking up and alert and telling each other. They make it clear that those kids of behaviors are not only okay, they’re mission critical. They’re expected.
Tanya: First of all, you did a phenomenal TED Talk or TEDx Talk.
Amy Edmondson: Oh, thank you.
Tanya: On this matter. You did a study in a hospital. Studied different teams and what you’re pointing to was each team – the teams that were the highest performing, funny enough had the most or did the most mistakes. That was something that would…
Amy Edmondson: It looked like they did the most mistakes. Ultimately, I realized, oh my god, we don’t know how many mistakes the others are making because they’re hiding them. That in many ways is the whole idea. Long ago, I always loved the idea of mistakes or something we have to learn from because otherwise you’re just sad. Mistakes are okay, right, because they have a silver lining. You get to learn. Then it was this blinding flash of the obvious where – oh, wait a minute, not everybody in every workplace can learn from mistakes because if they’re being hidden and pushed under the rug, then we’re not learning from them and then we’re doomed to repeat them.
Tanya: Yes. The example of a hospital for example which is mission critical on so many levels, I mean they’re managing our health, and in many cases our lives. I have three daughters, two of them are identical twin girls and they were born at 28 weeks. We were in the NICU for 180 days.
Amy Edmondson: Oh, my gosh, wow.
Tanya: Yeah, and I, up until then hadn’t really spent a lot of time in a hospital, and I had no idea of all it takes.
Amy Edmondson: Right, all the complexity.
Tanya: Yeah, yeah. I mean, forget the health thing. In an environment like that where if you admit a mistake, you can get a big lawsuit, and it could cost the hospital millions of dollars. That’s something that I know that I learned the hard way. The doctors weren’t necessarily willing to be completely open with us as to what they would think is the best course of action let’s say for our daughters because it involved a level of risk. Because of the concern of lawsuits and risk, I believe that we had to read between the line of what was being told to us to really get the best care for our daughters which is so counterintuitive and challenging.
Amy Edmondson: It’s much harder to read between the lines than to read the lines.
Tanya: Yes, exactly.
Amy Edmondson: You might read it wrong and then what happens.
Tanya: Totally, and then under – I remember in one instance, we were sitting in a conference room which you never have a conference meeting in a hospital. I thought, oh my god, they’re going to tell me my kid’s dying or something, but they were going to suggest a heart surgery, a PDA ligation. It was so interesting that – the not openness that you’re talking about. At least, from us, it was more like, here are all the risks then this is a standard procedure, and here’s the data. The data shows that it’s neither good or bad, and this is what it is. You make your choice. I’m like, okay well, this is my daughter and – actually, both of them. I’d really love some professional input here as to what we should do but it was like…
Amy Edmondson: I know, I know.
Tanya: That’s just like the patient-facing side. Internally, I imagine that there’s all this politics. What are your thoughts on when there is an actual cost of being open? How do you deal with that?
Amy Edmondson: In this particular setting, it’s very interesting because some pioneering work was done over the last decade or so. It’s actually shown that the long-term belief was, if we’re open in our patient-facing or customer-facing side, we’re opening ourselves up to risk like the risk of lawsuit. It turns out, and I don’t want to say this is wrong in all cases because it’s clearly not true. In general, the data now show us pretty loud and clear that that was misapprehension, right?
That in fact, it turns out that when people sue, more often than not, they sue because of the stonewalling, or they sue because the relationship is sour. They sue because they realize it’s the only way they can get the truth through the discovery process, right, and when. This is now really been studied and demonstrated. When hospitals and other organizations approach the patient, the patient’s family with honesty and clarity and seek to have a good, positive, honest relationship in talking about these challenging issues, lawsuits don’t go up, they go down.
It’s more often than not people were suing because the relationship just felt so wrong. When you have a good relationship, people understand especially with very high-risk patients and challenging conditions that doctors aren’t perfect. That often there isn’t a solution, and that everybody truly wants to do the right thing. Even when things go wrong because of human error, they know that wasn’t an intention, and we can grieve together. There’s a kind of willingness to be vulnerable that turns out to be less vulnerable than you’d think. They’re not opening themselves up.
Of course, there’s certainly are situations in the world where you don’t have the opportunity to be as open as you want to be. Maybe trade secrets or other things. Most of time you’re not fooling anybody when you’re hiding. They know there’s something hidden, and they’re going to poke around the corners, and try to figure out what it is, and then the trust isn’t there. Oftentimes, the learning isn’t there, and the innovation isn’t there, and so on.
Tanya: Speaking about trust and psychological safety, would you say involves a huge deal of trust?
Amy Edmondson: Yes. Trust is really – a lot of times people think of trust as well, I don’t trust him. Trust is really a decision. It’s a willingness to be vulnerable. The concept of trust is I am willing to trust you. I’m willing to assume you have the best intentions or that your skills are up to the task. I recognize that I cannot control you so I have to trust you. It’s a recognition that my micromanaging is not helping. I’m willing to see you as the kind of person who will do the right thing to the best of your ability. That’s a decision I have to make about you. When I make that decision, powerful things happen.
Tanya: Yes. We work with our clients very much about – we call it granting our trust or their trust to their team. It’s interesting. Like you said, when that happens, the space shifts. The context of the team now is operating from a different place, and powerful things do happen. Just for people that are in leadership positions or are leaders, what are some things that maybe people do unconsciously or consciously that remove the psychological safety for your team?
Amy Edmondson: Sure. I think probably the most important and common one is acting as if you’re right. The way I see it is the right way. If you see it differently, you’re seeing it the wrong way. The problem here is, that’s kind of the human condition.
Tanya: Yes, that’s a real problem.
Amy Edmondson: Right, a real problem. Some of the very spontaneous things we do, we’re going to be overconfident, we’re going to inadvertently shut other people down especially when they say something that we think is wrong-headed in some way. That we really have to train ourselves [37:48] mantra of I have a valid point of view, and I may be missing something. Our spontaneous experience is, I see reality. I see reality. Oh, you probably see reality too, and then I’m a little disappointed when you fail to see reality because you see it differently. If you can just every day or every hour of every day remind yourself yes, you have a valid point of view, and you may be missing something.
It’s a powerful frame because it leads you to be curious. Selfishly, I want to know what I’m missing. It’s going to make me better. It’s going to make us better. If I keep reminding myself I’m, by definition, necessarily missing something, I start asking questions. I start saying, what do you see? What other options could we consider? We just start to create the space where others can come forward and really contribute. That belief that right below the surface, awareness, belief that I’m right and I see reality is the source of many leadership problems.
Tanya: Yeah. That’s a real big one for people to get because like you said, it’s the distance between their point of view versus “the reality.” There’s no distance. When they see it is reality…
Amy Edmondson: It is reality itself, yes. It kills psychological safety because people are very good at perceiving and sizing up whether their voice is welcome. If you’re a know-it-all, let’s say, people quickly decide it’s just not worth it. First of all, I don’t want to disagree with you because that might come back to haunt me. Second of all, I don’t think you’re really listening anyway so why say what I’m thinking.
Tanya: What other ones do you see as common although that one is probably the source of everything?
Amy Edmondson: Yeah. Having a spontaneously negative response to bad news or an annoying question or an idea that seems wacky, just an overly quick response, that will never work. Again, it’s one of those things that just makes the little tiny interpersonal risks that the person just took seem less worthwhile and they won’t do it the next time.
Tanya: Yeah, so then a lot of self-reflection then.
Amy Edmondson: Yes.
Tanya: A lot of work because that is so counterintuitive, and it’s something that [40:34]. I have to work with that. I have to work on that myself big time. I have to work on that with my husband.
Amy Edmondson: Oh, yes.
Tanya: My colleagues, with my clients, and then when you get that out of the way, an authentic conversation can happen.
Amy Edmondson: Exactly.
Tanya: That’s where I think you’re pointing to with the magic happens. Where you can really get this out and create some amazing things. You wrote another book which was [41:03] about teaming. It’s Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. Having deeply studies this, what is that thing that makes teams high performing?
Amy Edmondson: For me, this book was trying to convey the recognition that organizations are always about teams and teaming. Individuals exist. They’re easy to point to. Here you are. You’re an expert in something, but organizations is a very fuzzy concept. Where are the boundaries? What is an organization? Teams are easier to point to and it turns out, in organizations, the work of any – most of the work that really matters is being done to a certain degree by teams and teaming. The difference between teams and teaming, teams are reasonably stable groups of people. Membership is clear. You know if you’re on that team or not. By the way, that means you tend to get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. You learn how to work well together.
What I was noticing in organizations across many industries is that more and more people are on multiple teams at once or they’re having to engage in quick teaming. You and I are coming together today to do this session, but then we both go back and we’re teaming with someone else tomorrow. We have to get good at this dynamic process of teaming if our organizations are going to thrive in a fast-paced, fast-changing environment. The thing I think that makes teams high performing is A, recognition of the need to learn. Teaming almost by its nature is about learning at the same time as doing. You’re not just executing. You’re paying attention to what new things are showing up. What are we learning about this task, this patient, this client? You’re learning as you go.
In the book, I talk about execution as learning. I want to be clear. Yes, I know you can’t just go off in the classroom and learn and then spend all that time just learning. You have to learn while doing. Execution becomes a kind of learning journey if it’s good where you’re sensitive to feedback. You’re curious about what others bring. Probably, the thing that makes teams high performing was that they are deeply mission focused. They know what matters. What they’re trying to get done. The people participating display deep respect for an interest in what others are doing and saying and they’re listening. They’re willing to pivot. They’re willing to be wrong. They’re willing to try something else.
Tanya: One of the things you said, teaming, for you the difference between a team, you know you’re a member or not, you know the structure, you get to know your colleagues very well. It’s a close team, but teaming you have to adapt yourself to work with different people, and maybe [44:32]. How do you see this dynamic of team shifting or not as more and more people begin to work remotely like remote teams?
Amy Edmondson: That’s a great question. I think over time the work is becoming more not less interdependent, and as you point out, more and more of us are working remotely or from a distance or with people who might be in an office, but we’re working with people in another office, another part of our company. Maybe even another country. What this means is we have to be even more aware and deliberate to team effectively, because it’s much easier to be in the same room. We can see each other’s facial expressions. We can speak in shorthand. It’s much easier to team up that way to really feel our interdependence and make progress when we’re together, but if we cannot be together, we just have to be much more explicit and thoughtful about process.
When I send you a quick email and you respond in a way that – that seems weird that you said that. I have to step back, read it more slowly, and maybe hop on the phone. Say look, let’s get to the bottom of this. Remember earlier on, I said, you got to have a good performance climate. You also have to have a good process. A good process becomes even more important when we are at a distance, and that’s the kind of process where we’re clear about where we’re trying to go. We have structured ways to ensure that different voices are being heard. We have structured ways to capture what’s being said. What’s being decided. We’re trying to work more transparently not less even though we’re at a distance.
Tanya: Yes. Those quick emails, without that, that background of relatedness [46:28] knowing where that person is coming from, so much can be misinterpreted.
Amy Edmondson: Yes, minefield.
Tanya: Yes. That’s very interesting. What is one of your personal examples of just somebody that exhibited some incredible leadership that you were just blown away with in your life?
Amy Edmondson: The person that comes to mind is Drew Faust who was the President of Harvard University for 11 years. Stepped down about a year ago and retired basically. Retired to become a university professor. She was an extraordinary leader and I had the good fortune to work under her. It wasn’t just watching from afar, but really seeing someone who is in a daily basis making a difference. An already great institution, Harvard University, but really making – committee to making it even better. A very, very clear – she was very clear and her speaking was just remarkably clear and cogent, but also uplifting and meaningful. When she spoke about our purpose and the things we were doing, one felt called on the better angels of our nature so that really mattered.
Equally important was quite profound self-awareness, I think it’s hard to know about that, but other awareness. Drew Faust was remarkably aware of who else was in the room. She was prepared. She knew enough about people’s backgrounds and demonstrated obvious respect for others by showing interest in what they brought and listening carefully and deeply to what they had to say, and would make tough decisions. Like okay, we’re going to go this way. It’s that combination of mission focused and respect and listening, and then the willingness to make the call that I think is very powerful. I’ve studied other great leaders, but this is one that I actually worked directly with in a variety of ways.
Tanya: You’re very lucky. She sounds like an incredible person, and having worked with her, I’m sure you learned a lot. What are you mostly focused on now, like working on?
Amy Edmondson: It’s really two things. One is the book, The Fearless Organization has unexpectedly gotten a lot of attention. I do find that I am spending some portion of my time helping the book get attention, right? Talking about it. Teaching and giving talks to spread the word about psychological safety per se. Then the other part is I’m really – it goes back to teaming. I’m really profoundly aware of the really big problems in our society. In organizations but also more broadly, will not be solved by any one organization or institution acting alone. More and more, the things we need to do related to climate, poverty, homelessness, you name it, require healthcare, require multisectoral collaboration, and that is darn hard. I’m not fixing it, but I am studying it in a variety of different settings.
Tanya: Oh, yeah. Like you said, the first step to fixing a problem is being aware of it
Amy Edmondson: That’s true.
Tanya: Understanding it, and once you have that visibility, the path forward becomes a little clearer hopefully. Yeah, I agree. We have some very big challenges ahead of us. One of my big concerns is, in what state am I going to leave the planet.
Amy Edmondson: Right, I know.
Tanya: I’ve met people that are considering not even having kids because they’re worried about that state. Yeah, we have a lot of work to do. The work that you do is beyond important and I’m a huge fan. Just thank you so much for your time and if anybody wants to get in touch, how do they reach you?
Amy Edmondson: If you go to hbs.edu, that’s the Harvard Business School website, and just do a quick search for faculty or Amy Edmondson. You’ll get right to my page.
Tanya: Okay, awesome. Amy, thank you so much for your time today. It was amazing to have you on.
Amy Edmondson: You are welcome and thank you so much for having me.
First-time founder and Harvard grad Carlos Reines, who was nominated by the World Economic Forum as Young Global Leader opens up about his tragic childhood accident and how that shaped his life-work today through RubiconMD — an eConsult platform that connects clinicians to top specialists. Now serving over 5,000 primary care physicians in 37 States, RubiconMD has saved over 2.5 Million days of patients waiting for specialist consults, which is almost 7,000 years.
Carlos talks about his struggles early-on when he launched RubiconMD and how, after many iterations, he designed a dialed-in hiring process to assemble a top tier team that not only has individuals with world-caliber credentials but that act as a team and feel connected to the mission of the company– democratizing and improving access to quality healthcare.
In this episode you will learn about:
Healthcare innovation
Leadership
Leadership Mistakes
Building a startup
Managing and scaling a team
Raising capital
Company Culture
Effective Feedback
About Carlos Reines:
Carlos is one of the cofounders at RubiconMD. The company was founded in 2013 with a driving vision of democratizing medical expertise so that providers can offer every patient the care they deserve.
Originally from Spain, he’s passionate about leveraging technology to drive change in healthcare.
Prior to RubiconMD, Carlos led a division at Telefonica, one of the largest telecom companies in the world. He began his career at Siemens Healthcare.
He earned Masters’ in both Bioengineering and Telecom Management in Madrid, and an MBA from Harvard.
Carlos: I think I always had an easy one because my dad’s name is Carlos as well. I don’t think they had to break that too much.
Tanya: That’s great, so they followed the wonderful Spanish tradition on naming.
Carlos: Yeah, absolutely.
Tanya: That’s Carlos Reines, Harvard grad and entrepreneur who raised $20 million for his startup RubiconMD, an eConsult platform that connects clinicians to top specialists. Now serving over 5,000 primary care physicians in 37 states in the US, RubiconMD has saved over 2.5 million days of patients waiting for specialist consults, which turns out to be almost 7,000 years.
Carlos: I grew up in Madrid. Actually, all my family is in Madrid. I was born and raised there, lived in the center of the city for the first few years, and then we went to the suburbs when I was about 5 or 6. I’ve really been in Madrid most of my life. When I was 22 is the first time that I went to study abroad. Through different work experiences and educational experiences, I’ve ended up spending time in the Netherlands, in Germany, and obviously, a lot of time in the US.
Tanya: If you were to describe yourself as a kid, how would you describe yourself?
Carlos: I was the only child, only nephew, only me, no cousins, for ten years. My mother is the oldest of six. On my dad’s side, his uncle never had children, so for about ten years, I was there by myself. I was getting a lot of love from the entire family.
Tanya: I can imagine.
Carlos: At the same time, I was dying to get some folks around. I wanted to have cousins. I wanted to have siblings. In Spain, there is a big tradition in Christmas that the Three Magic Kings will bring you games and toys, and when I was a kid and I would write my letter, I would never ask for any games or toys. I just wanted to have a brother or a sister. I wanted to have that for a long time. It never happened, so I grew up as an only child. At some point, my parents had friends that lived outside of Madrid, and their son moved to Madrid for college. He was about five years older than I am, and he went to live with us. For three years, all of us had – I had an older brother, and it was an awesome experience.
Tanya: I can imagine. After all that time, it must’ve felt great to have company.
Carlos: Absolutely.
Tanya: Something important happened when you were a child.
Carlos: When I was 8, I was playing on the street with other kids. We were playing with slingshots. It was just kids who are the street, and I was hiding behind the car. Unfortunately, somebody was incredibly accurate, and they hit me in the eye. That was actually a pretty severe accident that triggered three very complex surgeries. Probably over the span of two years, I lived half of the time either admitted to the hospital or sitting in an ophthalmologist office. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t play with other kids. I had to be incredibly diligent with my eye drops.
That was actually very tough. As an 8-year-old, all you want to do is to be outside and then play and not have to worry about anything, and I had to go through a lot of complications. Eventually, I had the surgery where the ophthalmologist said the best thing we can do is stabilize the eye, and this is something that you should reevaluate whether you can have more surgeries or there is any path forward maybe in 15 or 20 years as an adult. That was between age 8 and age 10, roughly.
Tanya: Wow! That’s brutal. How did that influence who you are today and shape your outlook on life?
Carlos: I think it influenced me in many ways. I wish I didn’t have that accident, but at the same time, I’m very grateful for all the things that I’ve learned out of that experience. I think mostly on – probably on three different levels. The first is what I do now was definitely influenced by what happened to me, right? I decided to become a healthcare technology entrepreneur, and I started RubiconMD. This is, obviously, years later. This is only a few years ago, but out of that experience, I grew the motivation to want to fix healthcare because I had experienced myself just of not having access to the right care at the right time. I knew that somebody had to fix it. Eventually, that’s where I gained the strength to go pursue this mission that I’m working on now, so one was in shaping what I wanted to do.
I think, two, I’m also really grateful for a lot of the strong relationships that I’ve been able to develop, very close with really everyone in my family, so at the time of the accident, I felt incredibly supported. There wasn’t a day where I was at the hospital and I didn’t have either my parents, my uncle, my aunt, someone sitting with me. I think that is reflected in now it’s 20 years later or 20 or 30 years later; I have incredibly strong relationships with them, with everyone in my family and also friendships. I remember when this happened, and I had to go back to school. I couldn’t go out and play outside. I had to stay in the classroom, and I had to use my drops. One of my friends at the time would stay with me every single break. Instead of going out to play soccer or whatnot, stayed indoors playing with me. He was the one putting the drops in my eyes. Again, almost 30 years later, he’s one of my best friends now. I think of a lot of those relationships really solidified, and those are really priceless.
Tanya: How did you handle the person, the child that caused the accident?
Carlos: I didn’t, really. This happened when I was 8. At 8 years old, you barely understand what’s going on, what’s happening. I don’t think I ever saw that kid ever again or spoke to him again. Not because I didn’t want to. It’s just the following two years I was, basically, at hospitals and doctors’ offices, and after that, we never had an opportunity to reconnect. I think one thing that’s interesting is that you really don’t understand what’s going on, and I think, for me, it was probably, I don’t know, maybe five years later or so when I was growing up, when I was going through adolescence that I started to realize that I had gone through a pretty serious accident and understand a little bit of the implications. It was probably more difficult in those years than it was originally. As a kid, I was just cruising through life.
Tanya: Yeah, I can imagine. Do you feel affected in any way by what happened to you today, or what is going on with your eye?
Carlos: No, not really. The good news is that we are born with two eyes, so despite having pretty limited or not really any useful vision in that left eye, I can do everything normally. It didn’t stop me from being able to drive, being able to play sports, or have a perfectly normal life. I don’t think it’s put any restrictions into anything that I do, but I do think that I’ve developed a lot of capabilities that I probably wouldn’t have developed if I didn’t go through this. I think a lot of that is pretty well reflected and really helpful as I’m going through the entrepreneurship journey, which is a brutal experience. A lot of the things that I learned at the time, being able to work through challenges, jump through hoops, or remove any hurdles that are put in your way, I think the perseverance that you need as an entrepreneur, I think I found a lot of that in having to figure out life going through a lot of the challenges as a kid.
Tanya: Yeah, I mean, that’s unquestionable that your accident was the training ground for your career. Not only as an entrepreneur, but in healthcare, you were firsthand affected by the problems that you’re actually trying to solve today. How did you get into your entrepreneurial journey?
Carlos: It really started in 2012. Up until that time or before that, I was in Madrid. I was working for Telefonica, which is one of the largest telecos in the world, and I actually had a really cool job. I was part of this corporate unit. It was called the Global Chief Technology Office, and we would do technology projects across all of 25 countries where the company operates. We would be standardized in best practices, technology guidelines, choosing solutions; that everybody rolls out the same technology and be more effective. I got to interact with, really, all the areas of the business.
Then a friend convinced me to apply to business school and to apply to schools in the US, and in 2012, I found myself packing and moving to Boston to start business school at Harvard. Going in, I knew I had – so before that, I had worked for Siemens and Telefonica, two massive companies. I thought this is the perfect transition to try something else, to go early stage. Why not, to start something myself? I really spent my first year in business school going to a lot of the entrepreneurship events in Cambridge. There are startup weekends and hackathons virtually every week.
By going to a lot of those, eventually, in March of 2013, I met my co-founder, Gil, at a Hacking Medicine event at MIT where he was pitching the idea. He was also inspired by personal experience where his grandmother had a brain tumor. She was from Barbados, and she had to travel to Boston for surgery and then for the postop care. He was also frustrated with the limitations of accessing care, and the two of us worked together through that weekend. We found that this is an idea that made a lot of sense. We were excited about that we could execute, and on top of that, we got along really well. We had very complimentary styles, and we decided to start a company together.
Tanya: Wow! That’s RubiconMD.
Carlos: That’s RubiconMD, yeah. Basically, what we do – so the two toughest problems in healthcare in the US – probably number one is, obviously, the fact healthcare is an incredibly expensive sector with almost 20% of the GDP spent in healthcare. That’s twice as much as any other advanced country of their healthcare expenditure relative to the GDP with it actually achieving better population health metrics, and then on top of that, you have about half of the country who really struggle with access to care. We quantified that more than 50% of the population in the US have real challenges accessing a specialist, and that’s real unfortunate. We decided to tackle a dual problem by letting primary care clinicians submit electronic consults to specialists, so whenever a PCP has a case that’s a bit more complex, what they do is they access our platform. They type up a brief description of other patients. They ask a question, and they send it to a specialty. We have a top specialist review and get back to them with their impressions and recommendations in a matter of hours, and that allows the primary care clinician to make a much more informed decision and diagnosis, treatment plan, and next steps for the patient.
Tanya: I mean, I think that, first of all, what you’re doing at RubiconMD is pretty amazing. I can’t tell you how many times I went to a pediatrician or a general practitioner and said what’s going on here? They send me to God knows who, and it takes time to get the appointment. You’re looking at months before you even get to loop back with the primary care physician. It’s frustrating, so that’s amazing. How many clinicians and primary care physicians do you serve?
Carlos: Oh, we must have probably about 5,000 clinicians across the country. We are present in 37 states working really with all flavors of primary care. One thing that’s fascinating is that you just share your experience. It was frustrating that you probably wasted time and money and things that were not really necessary, but one thing is that you could afford it. Even if it was painful, you had access to care. About 60% of what we do is safety-net populations, uninsured, undocumented, Medicaid patients that are looking at wait times measured probably in months if not years. One of the things that’s really fascinating of what we do is that we are bridging that access gap for the most underinsured populations who are now through their primary care clinician getting access to the expertise of some of the best specialists in the country, and that’s where we are executing on our mission of democratizing access to medical expertise.
Tanya: I love it. That’s amazing. How big is your team now?
Carlos: We are about 45 or 50 people, most of us headquartered in New York City. Then we have West Coast office in San Francisco, and we also have a few remote engineers based in Spain.
Tanya: Amazing, all the key locations. I just want to shift gears a little bit. In terms of what it took to actually begin the company – well, first, what do you do at Rubicon? What’s your job?
Carlos: As the president and co-founder, I oversee the delivery side of things, so I work very closely with the product team helping inform a lot of the road map and future decisions with the input that I get from the market. I work closely with the operations team; help them build for scale. I work closely with the implementation customer success teams, and they are supported by what we called user engagement. It’s, basically, we’ve taken the approach in a loop – all the learnings that traditional tech companies have in their growth hacking teams and adapted it to bring it to healthcare so that we could do rapid experimentation and learning around the things that work for clinician engagement with technology. Those are the teams that I oversee. I think, as a founder, I can’t get out of being on the road a lot of the time, so probably a good portion of my time is still dedicated to business development and checking in with our partners.
Tanya: Okay, yes, and aside your actual job, you have a bazillion other jobs. Your job is to just make the company successful, whatever it takes. When you start a company in the early days, it’s brutal. It takes a lot. What were the early days of RubiconMD like for you?
Carlos: Yeah, so the early days were actually really hard and, at the same time, really fun starting the business. I was my first year of business school when I met my co-founder March of 2013 over that weekend at a Hacking Medicine event at MIT, and then we followed up, did a second hackathon about a month later. It was called 3 Day Startup, and we won best pitch. Then we said, well, this actually has a lot of potential. I think there’s an opportunity to build a business here, so shortly after that, we incorporated the company. That summer, I moved to New York, and that’s when we worked on developing the first prototype. We found one clinician who wanted to give it a shot, someone who had trained with Gil’s brother or had trained Gil’s brother in Connecticut, and we recruited maybe three or four specialist. That’s all we had at the time, one PCP, and I think one cardiologist, one dermatologist, one orthopedic surgeon. Not more than that.
We built a prototype that I put together, a very simple MVP. It was just the front end. What the person would do is they would access the “platform,” platform in quotes. They would submit a consult. I would get that, and I would have to do everything manually. I would have to run those cases manually to the specialist. When I got their responses back, I had to go back and tweet the front end of the platform, so it was incredibly manual.
We did that for probably about 200 consults, and then we regroup with this primary care physician in Connecticut. He said something that was fascinating. He said, “Well, first of all, this is the most doctor-to-doctor communication I’ve had in ten years, and on top of that, I’m not only learning things, but I’m also able to improve care for my patients who would have otherwise not had the ability to go see a specialist and maybe would’ve had to end up in the ED. I’m actually not only doing better care, but I’m also generating big cost savings for the system.” That was for us the biggest validation. We had a clinician who was getting a lot of value clinically, and his patients were benefiting a ton. That’s when we decided to raise a little bit of capital and start building a team and to actually build a legit platform.
Tanya: What was one of the toughest moments professionally you had to deal with as a leader?
Carlos: I think the first year was brutal for me because I was still in business school. We applied to an incubator. They said we’ll take you guys if you drop out of school. I was already going back. I was already starting projects with classmates. I was really using every class to apply to the business. We decided that it made more sense for me to finish business school, but that also meant that I was doing two things at the same time, right? I was starting a business from the beginning, and I was going through my second year of business school, and that was brutal.
I remember days where I would go to class in the morning, and then I had to get in a car, drive to New York. We were meeting with investors or a potential customer, or we were talking about the product and then drive back. Many days I find myself – it was midnight. I was dead tired, and I had to do a lot of homework and reading for the next day so eventually managed to go through both. I still got a lot of value out of school. At the same time, we continued to grow the business, but it was brutal. I remember the last days where I was like I can’t take one more class, one more case, or I’m going to break.
Tanya: I can’t even imagine. That’s so crazy. At what point did you start to raise capital and really see your team grow?
Carlos: The first capital we raised was when we – before we launched that really early pilot, we had some basic cost that we had to face before we could start operating. Things like liability insurance and funds to pay the specialists and just the basic things. The first time was actually pretty interesting. We had met this person through a friend of ours, and he was the former CEO of a very large health plan. We connected with him, and we was initially just an advisor. He started to give us his take on how this could fit into healthcare. What are the things that we should have in place? Eventually became a little bit of a more formal advice. We were checking in with him regularly.
We asked him, what would be your advice? We’re at a point where we need to raise some capital. Do you recommend us to start by going to a fund, going to a few angels? What do you think? He offered himself. He said, “Well, if I was interested, would you guys take an investment from me?” It was very natural. Of course we would, right? He had been incredibly helpful already.
That’s how we found our first investor. It was very natural, and then a lot of angels piled up on top of it. He obviously brought the credibility.
Tanya: It was a strong signal.
Carlos: Exactly, then we had other investors who were maybe stronger in tech but having someone who’s such a healthcare expert, a physician, a manager, CEO to back our model, it was a strong signal. Probably the first half a million dollars we had raised was through super angels. Then we started working with some of these early stage health IT funds that invested. That was our seed round. Which from the first check ‘til we closed it, we probably kept it open for about a year. We were just raising capital as we were getting more traction, and eventually, it was about 1.3 million that we raised with a combination of angel funds and one strategic investor that joined the round at the end.
Tanya: At what point did you start thinking about RubiconMD’s culture?
Carlos: That probably happened after we did our Series A. Our Series A was about a year and a half after we had closed our seed round, and that was the first time that we went through multiple hires. Right up until that time, it had been the three founders at the beginning and super-early employees that were part of the founding team so a very small team. When we started to bring more people onboard, it’s when we realized that the culture was going to be incredibly important. We didn’t get it right the first time. I think through the first iterations of hires, we brought people who were really good but maybe weren’t the best cultural fit for what we wanted to – where we wanted evolve. I think, as we were growing the team and through some of these successes or failures in growing the team, we started to realize the importance that having a strong culture would have for the company. Where we are today, I think culture is incredibly central for us. We dedicate a lot of time, resources, and attention to it, and I think it’s one of the key assets of RubiconMD.
Tanya: Awesome, and what is RubiconMD’s culture?
Carlos: We define our value system human, agile, innovative, and collaborative. I think that’s a good characterization of what you would see across the board in the team. First of all, I think I told you my personal story, and I shared a little bit about my co-founder’s personal story for why we do this. When I look inside the RubiconMD team, almost everyone or everyone has a reason why they’re doing this, right? They could be doing something else that’s maybe more comfortable, or it has more perks, but they’re all here because they are incredibly mission driven. They want to change the world through their skillset. I think that’s number one characteristic, very, very strong mission in the team. Number two, we’ve been able to attract really talented individuals that thrive really well in the craziness of the startup journey, right? You need folks that are the – that can function autonomously and that want to be pushed really hard and can solve really hard problems and collaborate really well with each other, so I’m very proud of the talent that we’ve been able to bring onboard.
The third element of our culture is diversity. You would think that for a company that has to work really fast and that’s, basically, optimizing for having folks that are mission driven that you could expect that most of us would be the same or have the same backgrounds, and I think it’s quite the opposite. Some people refer to us as the UN of startups. We have so much variety in terms of countries of origin, backgrounds, races, gender. I think we’re about 60% female represented across the board, right? It’s not that we have just a very large marketing team with a lot of women in it. No, we have female representation across the entire company in leadership. Even at the board of the company we have female representation.
The beauty of this is that diversity has never been – we’ve never pushed for that. We’ve never even thought about or quotas or anything like that. It’s happened naturally. I think as we’ve been able to grow a more and more diverse culture, it also becomes a magnet for people who thrive in that environment, and that, in a way, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tanya: That’s amazing. I mean, the fact that it happened naturally and it wasn’t in response to what’s going on in the environment today in business, that’s amazing. What type of resources do you use to really keep yourself engaged and growing as a leader?
Carlos: I put a lot of attention to it. There are several things that I do. Number one, inside the company, I think it’s incredibly important to encourage a culture of feedback, open, transparent, honest 360 feedback. We have that in place, but I particularly push really hard folks in the team to be very candid. That’s the only way I can learn about my limitations and work on getting better, so that’s from the inside.
Tanya: How do they provide you feedback? Do you have a quarterly meeting or a survey that goes out? What’s the setup of that feedback loop?
Carlos: We have a lot of things in place. This culture is so important. Our head of people in culture spent a lot of time working on it. Twice a year we do employee reviews. Those are reviews by their manager, but in between those cycles, we have peer review sessions so that we can get feedback from a personal level to the organization and from everybody. It is a time consuming activity. It takes a lot of resources, but I think it’s incredibly worth it.
Then we encourage feedback, and we enable multiple talents to provide it. There are folks that will be very comfortable providing direct feedback to a person and identifying themselves as the authors of that feedback, and there are folks who are more comfortable just giving in a more anonymous way. What we do is we have each manager collect feedback from different sources, and they package it up, and then they deliver it to an employee. Where somebody is comfortable and wants to provide more one-to-one direct feedback, they’re welcomed and encouraged to do that. If people prefer to provide it in a way that’s a bit more anonymous because they don’t want to potentially harm a relationship, that’s also fine. All we want to do is the people – make sure that people have enough content for them to understand what are the areas where they can keep improving, and also, what are the areas where they are doing really well and that other people appreciate?
Tanya: Just curious, what was one of the pieces of feedback that you got that was impactful for you?
Carlos: I think, one of the pieces of feedback that I’ve received, it was very insightful is that there’s feedback on feedback, right? I spent a lot of time providing constructive feedback because I feel like I owe it to the employees. It’s my job to make sure that everyone here is getting better and better and learning new things every day. I have a very natural tendency to focus on the constructive feedback. Folks really appreciate to also learn what are the things that are working well? Not just to get the pat on the back but to be aware that, something they are doing, it’s actually very effective, and they need to keep doing it. That was a very important piece of feedback. That I should spend more time also on the positive feedback and reinforcing the things that are going well as much as I do on the constructive feedback, and what are the elements where folks need to work on to improve?
Tanya: Really, encouraging not just for what needs to be improved but also what’s working, which makes sense. When things are working, you don’t put as much thought. They just work.
Carlos: Right, and I think that’s a – that’s why I naturally go to how can we better? It’s that obsession with we keep growing, but I think it’s a very fair point to also recognize people when they do things well.
Tanya: Yeah, absolutely. What was your favorite or your most influential leadership or management book that you read recently?
Carlos: I’ve been reading a lot recently around hiring. Probably one of the most important and at the same time one of the most underrated functions at any company or qualities in many leaders is recruiting and talent management. I don’t understand why in many places HR remains a function that’s a little down or not properly respected. The most important asset for most of the companies and definitely for us is the human capital, the talent that we have onboard.
Tanya: Without a question, yeah.
Carlos: I’ve learned that a great employee who is mission driven, highly motivated, and whose performance is really high is incredibly valuable. I spent a lot of time reading about the topic either – in particular, two books that I found really helpful around improving the hiring processes and talent management. Those were Work Rules!. It’s a book by Laszlo Bock. He was the former head of people at Google. From that one, I took away – I guess one thing they did, it was fascinating, is that they mapped all hiring processes, and they understood the ratings that people had given. They map it out to how that correlates to the success of the hire in the job. After tens of thousands of hires, you start to see some interesting trends, so they have a pretty thoughtful framework for how to structure an interview. It’s very natural for us when we are interviewing someone to just go back to all right, this is the job description. I want to know what you did in the past, and then I’m going to make a decision on whether you’re a good fit for this job or not.
I think that’s short sided because that’s only one of the elements. I think in that book –we’ve tweaked it a bit, but our framework now is we look at a candidate. We want to understand what are their leadership styles? How would they fit with our culture? What’s their general cognitive ability? What’s their role-based knowledge for what they’ve done in the past, but also, what’s their role-based aptitude? What are the things that they’ve done in the past? Even if they weren’t exactly doing this job, how do they prepare them to do the work that we’re going to be asking them to do? We found that by having different categories and letting people focus on specific items of those we are being able to have a much more effective and less biased hiring process.
That was incredibly effective from that book, and then the other one that I also found very interesting is a book – I think it was called Who. It’s, again, a hiring method, and they take you through all the steps that you need to have in place before you go out and start searching for a candidate around properly defining the job and define what are the metrics for success?. Getting internal alignment in the team around what are the things that we’re going to be looking for as we start to bring candidates onboard? Really elevating the team’s ability to be better recruiters and better searchers of talent for the company.
Tanya: That’s super interesting so trying to solve the hiring problem, which is a huge one and at the basis of building a team, really.
Carlos: Absolutely.
Tanya: Awesome, so last question, what is next for RubiconMD?
Carlos: It’s been a little over 5 years since we started the business with about 5,000 clinicians using RubiconMD. When you look at the stats, they are very impressive. Primary care clinicians report that, when they use eConsults, 80% of the times they are able to significantly improve the patient’s care plan. Seventy percent of the times they are building capacity. They’re not just helping patients at one point in time. They’re learning things that they will use in future patient care, and they are avoiding more than half of the times unnecessary referrals, duplicate tests, unnecessary [36:20] cost. It’s been more than proven that this has a ton of impact on the quality of care delivered and the costs that are being taken away from the system and the patient experience. We’ve taken away more than two and a half million patient wait days. That’s time that would have stood in between the patient and the right care plan, particularly for the most underinsured population.
Tanya: Carlos, let me just make sure I understand that, 2.5 million wait days you said?
Carlos: Yeah, that’s correct.
Tanya: In other words, 2.5 million days that patients avoided waiting to go see an expert and get the care that they needed.
Carlos: Exactly.
Tanya: Wow!
Carlos: If they didn’t have eConsults, they would’ve had to wait all that time to get to the right care plan, if they ever were able to get to the right care plan, which in many places they can’t.
Tanya: Wow! That’s almost a lifetime or more.
Carlos: Yeah, the model is incredibly effective. It works really well. Five thousand clinicians is just scratching the surface. There are almost half a million primary care clinicians in the country, and this works really well. Healthcare is very fragmented, so incentives are not always aligned. As much as I would like to see all financial incentives be aligned towards improving outcomes, improving the patient experience, and reducing the cost of care, that’s not necessarily the case for a big portion of the system, but we’re working really hard to work through those challenges. We live in a world where five or ten years from now there shouldn’t be any primary care clinician in the country and why not eventually in the world who doesn’t use eConsults as part of their practice because these are incredibly beneficial for patient care.
Tanya: Yeah, I mean, it makes so much sense. How do people get in touch with you?
Carlos: Anyone who wants to get more info on RubiconMD can find us online at rubiconmd.com, and for anyone who wants to contact me directly and get anymore insights, carlos@rubiconmd.com is my email. Feel free to reach out, particularly if you are a mission driven individual who cares about improving access to care. I’d love to connect with you.
Tanya: Amazing, Carlos, thank you so much for spending the time and sharing your amazing personal story and what you’re doing with RubiconMD.
Carlos: Thanks so much for having me, Tanya. I really enjoyed it.
June 26th, 2019 Posted by tp33Podcasts
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Born in Bangalore, India, Eswar dedicated ninety-five percent of his time growing up playing cricket, and didn’t apply himself much to school. His parents, both English professors weren’t overly concerned because he did one thing consistently: read. Eswar was fascinated with military history books and read vivaciously about the topic. In many ways, military history played an influential part in how Eswar viewed leadership. Fast-forward to his college days, something triggered in Eswar when he came to the US to study and realized that he’d been given a tremendous opportunity to do something special with his life. During his Corporate America career, he got to launch some epic products including the Adobe PDF search function, which is probably still using his code today.
More impressive though, is his track record as an entrepreneur. His first company, m-Qube, where he led all the technology development and research was acquired by VeriSign for $275 Million and his second company, Quattro Wireless, was acquired by Apple for $275 Million. Once the deal was inked and Quattro Wireless officially joined the Apple conglomerate, Eswar directly reported to Steve Jobs for years before his illness progressed. Throughout his professional journey and particularly in working Steve Jobs, he learned a great deal and shared some key leadership insights on the Unmessable show.
In this episode you will learn about:
Working with Steve Jobs
Leadership: CTO versus CEO
Building a company
Exiting a company
Managing and scaling a team
Raising capital
Effective Communication
About Eswar Priyadarshan:
Prior to founding BotCentral (acquired by LivePerson), Eswar was Senior Director at Apple Inc., where he held product and engineering leadership positions on Apple iAd, iTunes Radio and Apple TV.
Eswar co-founded Quattro Wireless, which was acquired by Apple in 2010 for $275 million. He subsequently led the technical integration and transformation of the Quattro platform into the iAd platform.
Prior to Quattro, Eswar was the co-Founder and CTO of m-Qube, Inc. While at m-Qube, Eswar was the leader of all technology research and development. m-Qube was acquired by VeriSign for $250 million in April of 2006.
Prior to m-Qube, Eswar was VP Engineering at Open Market Inc. Before Open Market Eswar was the Technical Lead for Adobe Acrobat. Eswar held various engineering positions at Sun Microsystems prior to Adobe. Eswar holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Boston University.
Eswar: I was born in Bangalore, India back when it was a sleepy garden city, very different and exciting these days. As a kid, I probably spent 95% of my life playing cricket, went to a great school, St. Joseph’s Boys’ High School, and I was the fat kid in the class.
Tanya: That’s Eswar Priyadarshan, serial entrepreneur who sold two companies for a combined value north of a half a billion dollars, and one of his acquirers being Apple where Steve Jobs himself endorsed the deal.
Eswar: I grew up being teased and having a label attached to me, and it’s been a thing that’s been with me throughout my life. I guess in some ways has made me a little bit of an outsider inside. I never felt like I completely fit because of the way kids can be when you’re growing up.
Tanya: Very mean, yes, I remember.
Eswar: Yes, yeah, and then the other thing is, apparently, I was very easygoing, didn’t do very well grades-wise. Both my parents were English professors, and so the thing that my father kept saying about me to my mother was, “Don’t worry. He reads a lot. He’ll be okay.” From an early age, I just devoured everything. Somewhere early, early on, it’s going to sound strange but I started to read a lot of military history. I was very interested in history in general, military history, and that love continues to this day. In some ways there’s leadership – my leadership textbooks in some ways have been a lot from the military history side.
Tanya: Wow! That’s super interesting. Just out of curiosity, what subjects were you not great at in school? That totally shocked me, to be honest. I mean, I would think that you would be a total whiz.
Eswar: Yeah, I was bored.
Tanya: That’s it, yeah.
Eswar: I think that was it, and it actually kicked in when I came to the US and realized I had been gifted a golden opportunity to make something of myself. I switched overnight from being total slacker to being all As across the board. In some ways, I guess it’s good in that I feel like I have plenty of time to goof off. I’m very good at goofing off. I’ve had plenty of time to goof off. I’ve tried all varieties of extracurricular activities. It’s good, I think, in some ways to have been young and responsible when you’re young and irresponsible.
Tanya: You certainly made up for it. That’s for sure. You’ve had a significant corporate America career where you’ve launched incredible products. What are some of the most notable products that you built and brought to market?
Eswar: I’d say the biggest one is probably Adobe Acrobat on the web so Acrobat 1.0. I joined the team at Adobe for Acrobat 1.0, worked on search in Acrobat, so when you find something in a PDF file, you can think about me. That’s probably my code running there. Then I really kicked in for making sure that PDF integrated with the web browser and progressive download. Specific patent that I – it gives me goosebumps to this day is, when you download a PDF file and you notice how the text shimmers into – it’s almost like it draws once, and then it draws again. That was an example of some technology we put in to draw the characters the right width to start with and then to get the real font and to redraw them. It’s ways to make PDF work on slow network connections.
Tanya: I mean, that’s unbelievable. Everybody uses PDFs. I use it several times a day, Acrobat. That’s an amazing product to have worked on, and I’m sure you learned a ton. What is your gift or core skill that you really, really excel in?
Eswar: It is a skill and a dangerous thing in that I can listen to many, many points of view and bring perspectives together. It’s dangerous in that people could get spooked in the sense of did he take my idea or not? I’ve actually tried to work very hard to prevent – to provide credit to people wherever possible. I have gotten a lot of patents to my name, and if you look them up, you’ll find a lot of co-authors to every patent. I try very hard to distribute the credit because it does take a lot of people to pull together. Even the idea that I just talked about, a lot of technology, a lot of smart people have to come together.
I’m the person that can listen to a conversation from you and ten other people, and then move the ball forward based on things I’ve heard from different perspectives. An example of that would be I demonstrated the PDF file running in the Netscape Navigator window to the original Netscape team, Marc Andreessen and the original Netscape team when I worked at Adobe. Then I was asked the question how are we going to make this work in the real world? I pulled together a demo. I knew all about Photoshop plugins, so I said what Netscape needs to do, the browser needs to do is support plugins or extensions. It’s a case of me picking up something that we already did at Adobe and bringing it to bear to solve a problem for a small company at that time, Netscape, and moving the ball along. Absent me, would it have happened (probably)? Did I help make it go faster (probably)?
Tanya: That’s super interesting. It’s like Elon Musk where he takes – he goes deep on many different verticals, and then he knowledge transfers. He applies one concept to the next, and somehow, it works brilliantly.
Eswar: That’s very flattering, but yes, something like that.
Tanya: In working to corporate America to your transition to entrepreneurship, how did that happen? What was the prompt?
Eswar: The prompt was I was running our 250 person team at a public company called Open Market. We had a lot of dotcom customers. We were an ecommerce platform. The crash was happening all around, and I just could see that it was – in some ways, if there is – it was a time of great change, good or bad, just great change. I had been noodling with mobile as the next frontier for about a year at that same time. This was 2000, 2001. I thought why don’t I – I mean, I was getting well paid as a public company, but it was like let’s – it’s time to shed the old skin and get out of my comfort zone and see if I could start with a blank piece of paper in the mobile domain given that it was super early. You couldn’t even send a text message from a Sprint phone to an AT&T phone, for example, so it was nutty to even think that that could happen.
I thought, hey, come on. It’s time to get in. I always admired the people who get in – like the super early MS-DOS people or the super early UNIX people, you want to be in there on the ground floor, and stumble around and make mistakes, and be part of the journey of the overall ecosystem. Not just join later on. It was a combination of things, me wanting to get into mobile, me wanting to start with a blank sheet of paper and try my hands at being an entrepreneur, and then a VC firm general catalyst who is seeking almost like an entrepreneur and residence type person to help them with the mobile idea.
Tanya: The first company that you launched was m-Qube, correct?
Eswar: Yes.
Tanya: Okay, so can you talk a little bit about that?
Eswar: M-Qube at its peak was a content – we connected brands to the brand new mobile channel so brands for like Deal or No Deal, the TV voting. A TV show where you could vote on the suitcase or whatever it was started at 49 cents a vote. They bumped it up to 99 cents a vote, and we doubled the traffic. It’s crazy. We had a ton of content providers. It was back in the days of ringtones, so I’ll confess to that as well, ringtones, wallpapers, a ton of mobile content. A good 40% of Singular’s data revenue was going through our pipes. There were a few trusted aggregators in the market. We were called the aggregators, and we were one of them.
In many ways, we were a super-scalable billing platform because a lot of this content would be billed on your carrier bill. The one thing that we did that I’m particularly proud of was to this day, I believe, when you send money to the Red Cross, whatever, using text messaging, that was something we originated with Hurricane Katrina. It was so amazing to watch all the wireless operators in one day – I kid you not. In 24 hours, we lit up this program in the US and Canada where you could – yeah. It was just an idea. It started as an idea in the morning, a watercooler conversation. A lady in our marketing team was saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if people could send money using text messaging?” I knew someone on the carrier side in Verizon. I made a phone call, and before you know it, by that night we were on a conference call letting it all throughout North America.
Tanya: Wow! Do you have any idea how much money has been transacted using that software to date?
Eswar: I know the person who does. It’s called the Mobile Giving Foundation. There’s a ton of charities on that website, and I’m sure my friend, Jim Manus, knows the answer to that question. There’s a lot of money that’s gone through that platform. It’s a very viable – it’s a good thing.
Tanya: Oh, absolutely, the impact that you had by facilitating that ease to donate is unbelievable. Your entrepreneurial path has been really fascinating. You built m-Qube, which got acquired by Verisign for 275 million. Then your next venture, Quattro Wireless, got acquired by Apple for the same amount, separate company 275 million, which seems to be your real sweet spot. Then what was so fascinating about the Quattro deal was that – and really, a lifetime experience. Steve Jobs was directly involved in acquiring your company, and then once the deal was inked, you reported directly to Steve Jobs. When you were meeting with Steve pre-acquisition and going through the M&A process, what were you thinking? What was your mindset at that point?
Eswar: The interesting thing was I was – we were very confident that we knew what we were talking about with mobile advertising. That was the good part. We had met a lot of ad developers that needed revenue. We already thought of ourselves as a little Robin Hood. We would take money from the rich brands that wanted to advertise and run ads on all kinds of tiny little apps, including my neighbor’s Jewish day school app. That’s what we were there for.
I think we walked in with that perspective. Our first conversation with Scott Forstall I recall was we had a whole presentation and everything. Scott just looked at us and said, “Tell me what’s going on,” and we just shut down our PCs. We used PCs back then, pre-Mac. That’s a whole other story. We just talked about it. We talked about the app ecosystem. We talk about how brands wanted to get onboard and take advantage of this new channel.
I mean, I think I’m almost doing the same play again and again. You take brands. You take the mobile channel. As it grows up from SMS to apps, etc., etc., you just make it possible for that cool content to show up on your devices. It was a very open, free conversation all the way where we had not the main expertise but just the confidence that we were on the right track, and I think that really helped and starting the conversation with Steve. Of course, once you start talking to him, everything goes out the window because he had a unique perspective on just about everything.
Tanya: How did you prep for that meeting? How do you even get yourself in the mental state to walk in confidently? I mean, you might have a real handle on your product, which it sounds like you did. Is there anything else outside of just the know-how of your product that you did, that you practiced, that you – any exercises that you followed?
Eswar: They had a five-hour prep session, which was, with all apologies to those who prepped us, completely useless when it came to Steve because he went off in a completely different direction. It was actually the thing that I didn’t do that almost bit me in the first five minutes, which is I didn’t rehearse at nauseum running our ads on the bad Wi-Fi 3G environment in that infinitely one conference room that we were going to meet it, and so Steve wanted a demo. I sat next to him. I started working, showing him the demo, and just, honestly, I think my thumb was in the way because probably subconsciously I was trying to make up for the fact that the darn thing was so slow. Then Steve said something unpredictable about moving my thumb out of the way, and that’s where we began. I’m still alive. I kid you not.
Yeah, that’s how it goes, right? If I look back I say what was I thinking? Why didn’t I just obsess over every aspect of exactly that? I mean, it’s Steve Jobs. You should be rehearsing your demo and know exactly where to go, what to do, what to show, what to showcase. Go figure. Yeah, maybe it was – maybe we were just over prepared with all this other stuff, which is the basics.
Tanya: Yeah, that’s usually what happens. One of the things that – the saying goes build a company once and sell it. That’s lucky. You’ve done it twice and started several companies, so there’s something about your approach, about your touch, about your involvement that’s different. What has been at the source of your success?
Eswar: I have a very good sense, I guess, over time. It takes some time. Just as part of the ability to integrate different points of view is to understand what the buyer is looking for. Deep down inside, I know culturally, philosophically what the buyer be it a customer or an acquirer is interested in doing to advance their cause. I think that’s what I bring to the table that is different than, yeah, I guess just technology, or banking, or business skills. It’s just that innate feel for – even that LivePerson acquiring my last company, BotCentral, it’s the same thing. I just have a very good sense.
I guess I take the time. I take the time to understand what I’m dealing with, the people specifically, very, very specifically, the people. I don’t know if you are like this. When I visit a new company’s website like if I’m doing M&A or looking up a customer, I always go to the About page and look at the biographies of them. I can visualize their career, where they went to school, where they came from. That’s where my mind gravitates towards, the story. What is their story? How can I help make them fulfill or shape their story?
Tanya: When you start a company, do you have the exit in mind?
Eswar: No, I usually have a space in mind, like a big space, and some notion of wouldn’t it be cool if we pulled that off, like some version of a moon shot in that space. It’s got to be appropriately difficult, I guess. I don’t know how we’re going to get there. It really needs to feel like I don’t know how we’re going to get there. Then it’s fun.
Tanya: That’s amazing. Just to focus on Quattro Wireless for just a second, you had 120 employees at the time of its acquisition, right?
Eswar: Yeah.
Tanya: You got 30% of your company, which was between Boston and New York to move to California with you and their families.
Eswar: Yes.
Tanya: How on earth did you navigate that conversation?
Eswar: That was easy. It was Apple. It was Steve. Peter Oppenheimer, the CFO of Apple, came and visited us in our office. We kept it secret until Peter showed up and talked to everyone, and he was great. “I’m Peter Oppenheimer, CFO of Apple. I’m here to explain how Apple makes money, how you’ll fit into the ecosystem. Will you please come? It will be great if you guys could move to California.”
He said it was going to be 30 days from closing the deal. Will you please keep quiet about it? At least 10 of those 40 that I know of didn’t even tell their spouse for 30 days.
Tanya: Wow!
Eswar: Yeah, these are people who moved. It was a very exciting opportunity. I think everyone believed and to this day that this was some magical thing that had happened to us, and so we should just keep our mouth shut and do whatever needed to be done to get over the finish line.
Tanya: That’s amazing, and so you moved 40 families out. Was everybody of the 120 employees that you had at the time invited to move?
Eswar: There was a New York sales team. Our ad sales needs to be in Madison Avenue, New York City, so we didn’t press hard on that.
Tanya: Great, so the other thing that I wanted to know, you shifted between CTO and co-founder and CEO. That’s a shift in mindset. How did you approach that shift in mindset, and what were some specific experiences that you struggled with and learned from in your leadership approach?
Eswar: CTO, it turns out that you can provide a lot of cultural guidance without having the target on you. You can be the cultural visionary. It’s the co-founder in you is like – so Andy and I or Jeff Glass and I in those cases. When you’re CEO, you both are responsible for the culture as well as being the symbol of the company externally. There’s no break. You don’t get a break. As CTO, sometimes employees who are having trouble on the business side would come over and talk to me or the engineers would come and talk to me, and I could be the good guy. In some ways, it’s like you have to be both the good cop and the bad cop when you’re CEO. When you’re CTO, you can be the good cop and push it on to sales or CEO for all the unsavory things or the unpleasant thing that needs to be done to make a business grow fast, if that makes sense.
Tanya: It does. What was an example that you really struggled with that you realized that you had a lot of growing to do in your leadership approach?
Eswar: I’d say when we started to do this company called Tasteful, which was a healthy eating app. We brought on a bunch of folks who were from the healthy nutrition eating. Not tech people by any means. Folks you could consider almost as junior influencers in the social media world on our team. It is so important for them on a daily basis to feel like they’re connected to a good mission, and you have to spend a considerable amount of your time as a leader making sure that happens. I really admire leaders of consumer companies who can run the business by day and also spend time constantly reinforcing the values of the company and the mission of the company, and so that’s one area that I felt that I had to learn on the job and probably could do a lot more if I wanted to step back into that role.
Tanya: What were some of the ways that you enforced the values and the mission and the purpose of the organization in the everyday life?
Eswar: My natural way is to think that if I embody it in every conversation and how we talk to partners, etc., that things will take care of themselves. I found that I needed to be more overt in pulling together a mission statement, an exclusive mission statement, getting people to buy into it. Also, the hardest part was when having disagreements, when disagreements take place, using our mission and vision as a vehicle to inform how to adjudicate these disagreements to be – it always harkened back to this is what we’re all about. Therefore, we’re going to do X. Especially since I had some folks that had worked with me before, they knew me as the prior CTO type person, and then you have these new folks who wanted more of a visionary mission driven leader. I had to not just bridge different points of view but also my own transition from one role to another, but then stand true to what we are all agreeing we were all about.
Tanya: What was your process in crafting that mission and that culture that you wanted to really lead from?
Eswar: We brought in a consultant who spent some time with us as a leadership team to do it. Yes, I went off and did that. We wrote it down. We disseminated it. We got people to participate. Everyone seemed to be onboard, but I wonder if I could’ve been more decisive. Is there something else I could’ve done to take it up a notch beyond having it be a shared document?
Tanya: It’s interesting. People hire my company, my consulting company to do this, exactly this, and we work with huge companies. One of the things that we highly encourage our clients to do and something that I practiced in my own business, so built a business and exited it last year, is create a charter and what we stand for, who we are with our customers and with ourselves and pretty much every stakeholder. Be who we want to be being. We used that at the beginning of every all hands on meeting every week and read it together. It somehow brought us back to that moment, and not only that, we gave our employees an opportunity to acknowledge somebody on the team for whatever had happened the previous week that embodied what we strive for as a culture. People really felt empowered with that.
Eswar: Yeah, something like that. I think there was – the battle is won, as you know, in the trenches, in those moments, those decision moments. It’s not in the piece of paper or everyone’s standing around on Friday afternoon and toasting each other. It’s when you have to make those decisions. Yeah, so this is my continual self-evaluation process. What could I have done during those moments? I wonder sometimes if I was too interested in getting a consensus opinion versus just being myself and trusting that I was going to do the right thing.
Tanya: What’s the answer to that, if you have one?
Eswar: I believe I did too much consensus.
Tanya: That’s a common misconception that I see in leaders where, yes, getting buy-in from the team and having everybody aligned and rowing in one direction is so critical to the output, the performance, but at the same time, if you concede too much on the original vision, production or performance is diminished.
Eswar: Vision or timing, right. Like listen, guys. We should just give ourselves three months to get this done. Let’s just bang it out, and we have plenty of runway. These are the kinds of conversations that I know that I had in the back of my mind, but I was holding back because I wanted it to be the team’s process to do it. To this day, I don’t know if they were looking to me to just do it. We get along fine, so it’s all been reasonably good after that. It’s a thing that I ask myself about.
Tanya: I mean, that’s a really great inquiry. I mean, I’m you’re going to – I’m sure you already have plans for what’s next, but in your next venture, what would you do differently?
Eswar: If I were to do another venture, I’d try not to – I’d try to have it generate revenue by itself. I think that’s another very good way to build culture. I think the venture capital oriented approach which I have been the fortunate beneficiary of gives you capital, gives you air cover, gives you time to go off and think about building a team and mission and vision and all that, which is good, but there’s an alternate path. Maybe it’s the truer path, which is to see if you can build it strictly on the backs of people who are willing to pay for the stuff, and that may have a much cleaner forcing function as to who we are and what we’re all about than – it’s not a theory anymore. You have to decide who you’re bringing in and what they’re going to work on and what you’re all about, strictly driven by demand.
Tanya: Yes, it requires another level of discipline that, when you have plenty of capital funding the business, you can be a little bit lax on.
Eswar: Yeah, so what happened was we pivoted out of Tasteful and switched to BotCentral, and the money was running out. We ran in scarcity mode for a long time, and believe it or not, decisions were much simpler.
Tanya: Really?
Eswar: It was a small team, six of us. I mean, there was an existential threat, but it was not existential stress. It’s interesting. There’s no stress when you know what the – you can login and look at the bank account. You got to get off your butt and go close deals.
Tanya: Yeah, there’s a runway, and if you make it at the end of the runway, you’re going to fall on your face, yeah.
Eswar: Yeah, what are you stressed about? You just have to get out there. It’s not much to – that’s why if, yeah, there is another venture, it would be probably to try this other model.
Tanya: That’s very interesting. Being able to fund your business with nothing else but the pure sales that are coming into it is something to be – is very powerful. Coming from the venture capital space as well is not something that is done very much.
Eswar: Yes, so I admire two kinds of leaders a lot, those who can lead, who can – so Satya Nadella at Microsoft shifting their culture to a learning culture, that’s hugely admirable to me and then leaders who can build their company strictly from customer demand and revenues.
Tanya: Yes, so who in your life was by far the best mentor and leader, and what about their approach with you really resonated?
Eswar: A couple people for different aspects of personality, I guess. My college professor, who turned out to be my boss, a gentleman named Kwabena Akufo was actually a pastor at this point. He did a startup, sold it, and then has become the head of the Ghanaian church in the Boston area.
Tanya: What a change.
Eswar: Pretty cool guy.
Tanya: Yeah.
Eswar: Yeah, pretty cool guy. As a professor, he would always tell me the customer is always right when I would go and complain to him about a grade or whatever. Then I went to work for him as a summer student, and not surprisingly, he was the same person. I learned a lot about how to make sure you always have the distance, almost like a professional distance between the customer. You are delivering to a customer, and you are not the customer. Their expectations are the only thing that matters. You have to live up to their expectations. If they’re unhappy, you got to go deal with it, and there is no complaining about it. There is no one to blame except yourself, so that was a good mindset.
Years later, my CEO from m-Qube, Jeff Glass, who really taught me how to go raise money and close deals, he was the one who taught me it’s all trash until you see the cash so this idea that you have these great meetings, and then you’ll never hear from people again. You have to be on during the meeting, but when you walk out, don’t expect anything. You have to be properly dispassionate about the – given everything you have, try and get the best outcome possible, but it’s possible that these people will never call back for whatever reason. I think Jeff has been a good mentor for how to think about the fundraising process, how to go get – how to get deals done. Then my other partner at Quattro, Andy Miller, who was one of those people who could look at – who still to this day could look at any spreadsheet and tell you what this problem is, even when the numbers look good. He’s always thinking about the model.
What do we think we’re trying to do here? What are the numbers telling us about what we’re trying to do? There could be a lot of false positives, and so Andy is very good at that. It’s like these are aspects of my personality that I didn’t have necessarily to start with. You work with people long enough, and then you acquire some of those traits.
Tanya: It sounds like you had the unbelievable fortune of working with people that were able to teach you a great deal.
Eswar: Yes, anything meaningful is much bigger than, obviously, each one of us can do and so to the extent that you can really listen to everyone’s point of view but also just absorb what’s this – their strengths and to the extent that you can incorporate some of them into how you go about your day-to-day life. That’s very valuable.
Tanya: This is something that I always talk about with executives, transparency, and everybody falls differently depending on their experience and their company culture. What was your leadership style on being transparent with your employees?
Eswar: I’m the biggest blabbermouth in the world. I will talk to customers, partners, employees completely openly to the extent that I’ve been told to not show up. Don’t do that thing you do, but I just love what I do, right? It’s enthusiasm. I love telling the story, so yeah, if people can’t come along for the ride, then sorry. Yes, of course, there’s Apple secrecy. Yes, Apple taught me how to not bring up stuff that is secret. I’ve completely gone to that school for five years.
Outside of that, this is my own company. It’s a startup or whatever. I try to be as open as possible and teach to the extent that I can not just tell people what’s going on but try and explain the context for what’s going on.
Tanya: You would share your runway and all of the numbers and full transparency? Where did you draw the line?
Eswar: I don’t want to freak people out with precise bank account, but I can tell them how many months we had left given our current runway, etc. People have families and houses and all that. My job is to go make sure that they continue to have houses and all that. That is my job. Revealing that to them, all that does is freak them out, and that’s not their job. It’s my job. What I can is, hey, listen. This is important. We have this much time to go. We got this deal. We got to bring this deal in because it’ll buy us another couple of months, that kind of stuff.
Tanya: What were some of the things that you did when, let’s say, your companies weren’t doing so well that you used to boost morale or really infuse the company culture with a little energy?
Eswar: The energy, I think what I find is involving anyone in the company with customers is a great dose of energy. I think it’s a privilege for any company to have customers, especially if it’s a global customer base. I always tell people we’re a shitty little startup, and no one should care about us until they should start caring about us. I find the right group of anyone in the team reacts with the utmost rigor, energy when you can connect them with a customer use case, someone, a specific – an opportunity or whatever it might be. That’s always been my MO is to bring the team in and talk about what’s going on with different customers. Almost inevitably, I find that people are back at it and really don’t need that much rah, rahbeyond that.
Tanya: I love what you said about assume that nobody gives a shit about your company and about you until they do. A lot of people that I know begin with the premise that they’re important, and then they go out in the world. Then they hit the market, and the market doesn’t care. It’s like a cold bucket of water right in the face and a major wakeup call. It’s interesting. It switches the context upon which, really, you go out there, and you seek product-market fit.
Eswar: Yes, and especially in the Valley. I mean, the other thing I say when I go to a café with my team is we’re talking about X. There’s five other tables where they’re talking about X, and they’re six months ahead of us. We’re already in sixth place.
Tanya: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, run! Go make it happen. Yeah, that’s amazing. What are some of – if you take a look at some of the most important lessons that your parents gave you, what would those be?
Eswar: They taught me to be a citizen of the world. I am insatiably curious about everyone’s culture. If I could, I would flip this around and ask you all about you from exactly the way you did about me, and then I would go read up about all the places you said you were from. That’s one thing. Then the second is I still almost sometimes to an extent – I don’t think of myself as a pure engineer. You know when Steve Jobs said we stand at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts? I said, oh, shit, he exactly described it. That is who I think I am, and I think the liberal arts came from there. It’s that world view, liberal arts.
Then we grow up in a – we weren’t wealthy. I mean, they’re English teachers. As an open door, at home, we maintain to this day an open door policy of anyone is welcome, kids, dogs, whatever it might be. That atmosphere is what I picked up from them and, hopefully, will carry on to the next generation as well.
Tanya: Probably your love for reading came from them.
Eswar: Yes, absolutely.
Tanya: Which is a huge source of your learning and your mindset.
Eswar: Yes, it’s my constant sustenance through really pressing terms.
Tanya: What was one thing that you learned when you were working with Steve Jobs?
Eswar: I am actually pretty good at fashion as it turns out.
Tanya: Fashion?
Eswar: Fashion, you ask my wife. You ask my nieces. You ask my daughter. They’ll tell you it’s weird, but the guy is pretty good.
Tanya: Unexpected, very unexpected.
Eswar: Yes, I’m horrible. What I learned was to be brutal about, no, it makes you look like an X. He had this immediate visceral reaction to everything. For some strange reason, when it comes to something visual like fashion, I am – it’s something I picked up probably from being shredded by him a few times.
Tanya: He was actually commenting on the way you were dressing?
Eswar: Not dressing but the font you used in a presentation, everything, colors, fonts, pixel perfection, everything, and we were doing advertising. Obviously, Pixar was an ad company, so he actually knew quite a bit about advertising as it turns out, as we learned. There was a lot of cultural, visual stuff that he was constantly processing when looking at our work. He’d become trained – it’s like watching an art critic at work, and after a while, especially since he’s critiquing your art, you learn to look at it before you walk in. For example, iTunes Radio, the UI, I got to design it. Apple let me do that, and I survived the Apple human interface team’s review because I had gone through – I knew how to think about the stuff and how to throw out 99% of it and keep what’s left, very super simple. It’s a skill. Yeah, you’re asking, unexpected skill for a backhand Java developer type person. That’s what it is.
Tanya: Wow! Where do you think – in seeing Steve Jobs lead, where do you think he failed in something that you took note of and influenced your way of thinking about leadership?
Eswar: He was 100% convinced that every brand would pay a million dollars for the ads. That was the opening – actually, it was $10 million when it started off, and so he was not reading the market. The advertising market through Google and Facebook has become a lot more savvy about getting a return on investment. We came in at the beginning of that wave, and we mistimed our entry. For someone so aware and connected as him, I’m surprised. I mean, Eric Schmidt was on his board, etc., etc. This is something that he should have known was happening.
We were, as a scrappy startup, of course, all about an ROI. Then we go to Apple, and Apple’s like, no, screw it. They’ll pay anything. Trust us. We’re like, okay, it’s Steve Jobs, and he knows [44:15]. He had Pepsi and so Robert Iger at Disney. Of course, they’ll pay if he says they should pay, and they did pay because they’re not fools. They want to see return on investment.
Part of it is no matter how much of a market position you occupy, you cannot believe – it goes back to the shitty little startup story. Every new venture is in some ways that shitty little startup, right? You can’t assume you’re just going to walk in and win. You have to start. The fundamentals are the fundamentals, especially these days when it’s so competitive.
Tanya: Yes, and really, not to get egotistic and let that drive the show.
Eswar: Yeah, I think it felt – there was an element of ego driving it that I found myself having to defend with some ad buyers, and it was uncomfortable. It was a good lesson, which is you can’t just walk in and throw your weight around.
Tanya: It’s a powerful lesson to learn, especially when you’re at one of the largest companies in the world, most successful companies in the world.
Eswar: Yeah, we didn’t know. It’s working, so let’s follow the model.
Tanya: Yeah, that’s great. Then if you could rewind ten years and give yourself, specifically related to you one piece of advice, what would that be?
Eswar: Ten years, one piece of advice.
Tanya: Doing the math.
Eswar: Yeah, I’m doing the math out of my head. I would not tell myself – so ten years ago is when – around now is when we – I had my first Apple meeting. I would not try to go public with Quattro Wireless. I think the Apple deal was a good one. I think the advice I would give myself is I was engaged when Quattro was acquired by Apple, totally engaged in the game, but to a certain extent, I’d taken my eye off the ball in terms of are we building a super successful business from the ground up? I think you can never be – just because a big event happens to you, etc., etc., you can never take your eye off that ball, ever.
Tanya: Get comfortable.
Eswar: Never get comfortable, yeah. Only the Paranoid Survive is Andy Grove’s book title. It’s worth rereading that.
Tanya: You’re the second person that talks to me about that book in the last week.
Eswar: Great, he’s another amazing individual.
Tanya: Yeah, no, that’s great. Can you tell us what you’re working on now?
Eswar: Right now at LivePerson I am doing corporate development in M&A. LivePerson is an interesting position of conversational AI through Alexa messaging, etc. All these people around the world using WhatsApp, it’s become an interesting way for people to communicate through businesses, and the AI is good enough that it could pick up on intent, loosely worded intent. We actually are very strong in one use case for conversational AI, which is customer service. We are expanding to sales and marketing and a bunch of other use cases and also doing verticals like banking and health insurance and so forth. My job is to go seek partners, content, assets that we can bring to bear to expand our market presence, our portfolio. I’m the fox in the chicken coop I guess you could say, having been on the other side.
Tanya: You’re hunting.
Eswar: Yeah, I’m hunting now.
Tanya: You’re hunting, well, happy hunting. That sounds exciting.
Eswar: It’s fascinating. Now I’m starting to look at assets as companies. There’s just an asset, an entity. It’s a very different – and I’m working with the people who used to be checking me out. The bankers used to be checking us out, and so yeah, after a little while of doing this, I’ll be – I have no idea where I’ll end up on the spectrum of entrepreneur or acquirer.
Tanya: It’s interesting because you probably know all the hot buttons to press and questions to ask as an operator.
Eswar: The problem is I’ll never be a VC because I fall in love with every entrepreneur. That’s who I am. I’m an entrepreneur. If I see a fellow entrepreneur, I fall in love, and so I have to distance myself. It’s almost like a requirement. First you have to fall in love, and then you distance yourself. Then you can analyze it.
Tanya: You break up, get some distance, and then think about maybe getting back together.
Eswar: Yeah, something like that, yes, and it’s probably no fun on the other side. What? Is this person crazy or something, but how else? I have to get very enamored with the problem, the approach, the team, etc. because that’s how I operate from the other side. It’s very personal.
Tanya: That’s amazing. Just for the people listening, how can they get in touch with you if they want to get in touch with you?
Eswar: You could always find me on LinkedIn or on Twitter, @eswarpr.
Tanya: Awesome, well, thank you so much for being on the Unmessable show. Your career and your entrepreneurial journey is so unbelievably inspiring and just really grateful that you shared some of your key learnings about leadership with us today.
Eswar: Thank you, Tanya. It was a great conversation.
Tanya: Unmessable is recorded in the heart of New York City, and a special thanks to all the team involved in producing the show. Visit tanyaprive.com/unmessable to find a transcript of this episode, and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.
Born to a Greek father, but British mother, Anthemos had a pretty normal childhood, where his natural tendency was to be introverted, but with time, trained himself to be more extraverted. He loved to read or play video games, and despite his inclination to keep to himself, he had lots of friends. At 18 years old, however, something devastating happened. His mother passed away, after battling a long illness. As an only child, this rocked Anthemos to his core and took the following couple years to recover from the terrible loss. In this pivotal moment, something inside awakened where he developed a deep desire to use his life to make his mother proud.
Perhaps it was the realization that life is fragile and not something to take for granted or the grief from losing his mother that motivated him to venture into entrepreneurship– having nothing hold him back. After raising $90 Million for his startup, Zumper, which aims to make apartment renting as easy as booking a hotel, he shares in this episode the mindset and framework he used to break boundaries and push himself to accomplish what seemed impossible. Projected to help 70 Million renters this year alone to secure rental apartments, Zumper is positioned to be a true game-changer in a clunky, antiquated industry.
In this episode you will learn about:
Leadership
Leadership Mistakes
Building a company
Exiting a company
Managing and scaling a team
Raising capital
Company Culture
Effective Communication
About Anthemos Georgiades:
Anthemos Georgiades is the co-founder and CEO of Zumper, the largest startup in the rental industry, used by more than 26 million renters last year alone. As CEO, Anthemos has raised $90 million in venture capital from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Goodwater Capital, Breyer Capital and Foxhaven Asset Management, including a Series B round in Oct. 2016 when many start-ups were struggling. He has grown the Zumper team to 50 and counting and successfully completed the acquisition of apartment search platform PadMapper.
With a diverse background that includes consulting for Boston Consulting Group and serving as Economic Advisor and speechwriter in the 2010 British Election, Anthemos founded Zumper in 2012 after his own terrible rental experience. He discovered that the marketplace doesn’t work for renters, and the idea for Zumper was born with the goal of evening the playing field and increasing transparency in the marketplace.
Originally from London, he has an MBA from Harvard Business School, MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and BA from the University of Oxford. Anthemos lives in San Francisco, where Zumper is HQ’d, with his wife. He remains a huge Tottenham Hotspur fan, and wakes up painfully every Saturday morning to tune into the live English soccer games.
Anthemos: Yeah, so I like to throw people because I have a British accent but a very long Greek name.
Tanya: That’s Anthemos Georgiades, Harvard grad and former BCG consultant who raised 90 million from top tier venture capital funds to build Zumper, a platform that aims to make renting places as easy as booking hotels, now serving 70 million people annually.
Anthemos: Yeah, my name is Anthemos Georgiades. The Georgiades part is pretty common. The Anthemos is even in the Greek world pretty weird. It’s like a super old Greek saint that my father knew about and convinced my British mother to run with. It’s pretty weird. I have a lot of Anthemos handles on social media because there aren’t many of us, but it actually doesn’t mean anything. I think it’s derived from the world flower, which my friends give me a lot of banter about. Yeah, it’s a pretty unique name. I hated it growing up as a kid because I think you want to be named after all your friends, of course. I was annoyed I wasn’t called David, but now when we grow up and you’re a little older, I think it’s quite cool to have something unique.
Tanya: Oh, it’s super cool, very memorable. Is your father have any relationship to Greece or a Greek descent?
Anthemos: Yes, so my dad was born in Nicosia in Cyprus, and he is a concert pianist. He’s Cypriot Greek, Greek Cypriot and has traveled around Europe playing concerts his whole career, and then moved to London in his late 20s and met my mother in London back in the day.
Tanya: Wow! That must’ve been so amazing growing up with that name. By the way, I think we all hated our name when we were younger.
Anthemos: Yeah, it’s hard isn’t it?
Tanya: Yeah, absolutely. What kind of kid were you when you were young?
Anthemos: I was an only child. I’d say this hasn’t changed. I’m a huge introvert who’s taught themselves to be an extravert. I was always more happy on my own than I was with outside people. I always had lots of friends. I was a very happy kid. It’s a very normal family, but I was always more happy on my own, to be honest, reading or playing video games than I was doing anything else and so grew up happy.
I think my life changed when I was 18 when my mother had had – she’d been pretty sick during my teenage years and died when I was 18 just before I went to college. As an only child, it was – I mean, I know people who lost their parents when they were 5 or 6. I think losing your mother at 18 is still tragic, but obviously, I’m so glad I had 18 years with her. As an only child, it reduces your family from three to two. It’s a pretty seismic event in my life. Yeah, it really changed the rest of my life in terms of my ambitions and how you really want to do your parent proud after you lose them. I had a really happy childhood until that moment and then spent the next few years recovering at college and seeing what came next.
Tanya: Wow! That’s one of those moments that you go through, and you have a before you and an after you. What were some of the grounding decisions that you made about that event that you took forward?
Anthemos: Yeah, it’s an interesting time to talk about it. I think I just crossed the point I was saying to my wife the other day where I’ve lived more of my life without my other in my life than with. I just turned 37, and I lost her when I was 18. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. I wish I had a really smart – like you wake up the next day and the tragedy hits, and then you change your life forever. It’s, obviously, as anyone who’s dealt with grief, never that simple. You go through many phases. It takes you a while for it to really sink in. Then it really becomes quite challenging, and it’s very easy to slip into depression.
When I look back on it, I think the single biggest thing it changed is my ambition. I was like many of your audience and many of your guests a – I was a nerdy, smart kid. I worked super hard. I was never smart enough to get away with not working, but I was always high in my classes. I got into Oxford, and I was super excited to go to college. I think I went from being a kid who got away with stuff before to being – after I lost her, I think my ambition really kicked in. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I had this bizarre drive to make your parent proud. Even though they’re no longer there, you still feel like they’re watching, and you really want to make them proud.
I went from a kid who got through life because I get through it with some studying to being one who was fiercely driven and played with various ideas about what I wanted to do with a career, ended up, obviously, becoming an entrepreneur. I think that’s the switch from being just a kid to being a kid who really wants to change the world and try and do something really positive. That’s the single biggest change losing my mother had on my life.
Tanya: Wow! If there’s any change that it could have, that would be – that would make her proud, and I believe that she is listening.
Anthemos: I love to hear that.
Tanya: We probably just can’t see her. Why were you talking about this recently with your wife? What in your life now is this – why is it bringing it up?
Anthemos: Yeah, I turned 37 a few – a couple of months ago. On my birthday, I realized that just from simple back of the envelop math that, obviously, I was now over twice as old as I was when I lost her. I’d actually lived more years now without her, and I was reflecting to my wife on that on my birthday just because – I no longer think about the event as sad. I think about it as I was so lucky to have my mother who was a wonderful feminist, incredible woman, had a career, brought me up to be very well adjusted, well, hopefully, well adjusted. I look back on my relationship with my mother not with any sadness but with amazing joy, and I also have a son now. I have a kid who’s almost 2, and it’s impossible not to join the things together because you think about yourself as a parent and what you want to do. If you could marry the fact that I just figured out the math and also the fact that I have a very young child, yeah, it’s not a sad thought, but it really struck home.
I was talking to my wife about it. She has two amazing parents who are still with us, and she can’t understand it really when I tell her how life-changing the event was and for good reason as she’s never gone through it herself. It’s hard to explain to people. Yeah, for anyone who’s gone through it in their earlier life, it’s pretty life changing.
Tanya: No, it is, and what I’ve noticed is, usually a life-changing moment like that, there’s either a conscious or unconscious decision that’s made.
Anthemos: Totally.
Tanya: In your case, it seems like something activated where you were driven to really make your mother proud, make your life count, and make the best out of the time that you have.
Anthemos: It was super unconscious. I think you’re right. I’ve talked to people about this who’ve also lost people who they were very close to. I think when you’re more mature so when you’ve maybe gone to college or I don’t know, that you’re later in your life, I think people can make more mature decisions that are very conscious. I think when you’re a kid, even though 18 is not a kid, I was probably – I think I was still pretty immature. It was definitely unconscious. I had no idea how to deal with grief.
I wasn’t sitting around crying for years on end, but I definitely felt lonely. I definitely felt this new drive. I didn’t know where it came from. Now I look back on it. The two are completely linked, but at the time, it was totally unconscious. I think it was – to be honest, I think it was a way to deal with grief that you – maybe even selfishly that you put your mind onto something else. You tell yourself it’s to make your mother proud.
The thing is also it’s just a selfish way of dealing with grief that you can’t sit around all day thinking about it, so you find a new challenge. Yeah, I think entrepreneurship was not the obvious choice at the time. I think I was way too risk adverse having brought up – being brought up in the UK. All your friends want to be investment bankers, and that’s what you should do after college. I definitely didn’t imagine I’d be a CEO, but now I’ve meandered to that path. There’s no way back, and this is the kind of solution to that, I think.
Tanya: Once you start in the entrepreneurial space, it is so addicting.
Anthemos: Oh, it’s masochistically addicting. I mean, I’ve worked jobs before. I was at the Boston Consulting Group after college. I worked 20 hour days for 3 years. I’ve definitely worked jobs that probably have longer hours, but as you know, Tanya, the startup journey is absolutely addictive even if – the hours are last, but the emotional burden is higher because you think about it 24/7. It’s hard to see a way back. I think it’s pretty hard to imagine doing anything else after this.
Tanya: No, absolutely, so how did you even begin your entrepreneurial journey?
Anthemos: Yeah, I originally thought that politics was the way to address the things we’ve been talking about and find purpose in life. Politics are super interesting. I did a couple of stints in British politics, a very short, 6 to 12 month [10:10]. It wasn’t for me for various reasons at the time. Maybe one day but I continued to move away from that. Honestly, it was just like I wanted to solve a problem, so I never woke up and thought, cool, I’ll be a CEO. That sounds fun. I actually just stumbled on a problem of apartment renting.
I run a startup called Zumper. It’s an apartment rental app. We’re used by over 11 million visitors every month. We’re the largest startup in the US in apartment rentals, and the mission of the company is to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel.
Tanya: Yeah, which by the way, I’m so happy that you’re tackling this problem. I’ve been in New York City renting for the past 13 years, and it is such a pain in the ass.
Anthemos: It’s pretty bad.
Tanya: It’s paper heavy, very process heavy, and it’s amazing what you’re doing at Zumper.
Anthemos: No, thank you. I just wanted this for the same reason you mentioned. I had that experience in the UK. I actually moved to New York originally with BCG and had the experience in New York, had the same experience in grad school in Boston, and it was always one of those things where it was the – it’s the single biggest outgoing expense of your life as a renter. You spend a third of your income on the rent, and yet, the process is the worst. It’s not On Demand. It’s not as easy as booking an Airbnb or a hotel. It’s impossibly harder than booking an Uber.
I kept in my 20s just find the same problem every time I moved, and I moved around a lot. Then, at grad school in Boston, I was just like you know what? I always thought someone else would solve this problem, and no one solved it. I’m just going to have a go at it, and candidly, 6 years on did I ever think I’d be sitting here with a company of over 100 people having raised $90 million, of course not. I spent a summer trying something out, and it started to work. Then it snowballed, but honestly stumbled into it. I wanted to solve a problem. I didn’t want to necessarily run a tech startup. It just so happened that running a tech startup as a CEO was the way to solve the problem.
Tanya: You started it you said when you were in Boston at grad school?
Anthemos: Yes, that’s right.
Tanya: Awesome. This is a total sidebar. Everybody that I know that went to HBS, Harvard, they’re so discreet about it. What is it about going to Harvard that you just under the rug, don’t really – you’re more reserved with it?
Anthemos: I think that’s generous, Tanya. I’ve met a lot of people who have said the opposite where they’re like – I think there’s a joke about how do you know someone went to Harvard Business School? They’ll tell you in their introduction. I’ve actually met a lot of people before I went there who were the opposite. I don’t know. It’s a really good question. I mean, I’m based in San Francisco now. I don’t think San Francisco, or Silicon Valley, or the New York or other tech communities particularly care where you went to college. I think they value your brain and your work ethic [13:15].
Tanya: Contribution, yeah.
Anthemos: The same for me, I grew up in London and went to Oxford, and the UK is very elitist, though. It’s still a class-driven society. It really matters where you went to university, and it’s changing, just to be clear. It’s absolutely changing where Silicon Valley – I went on a holiday with my wife a week ago, and there’s four new joiners sitting around the corner from me at work. I couldn’t possibly tell you where they went to college or even if they went to college. Who cares? Anyway, long way of saying with HBS and the MBA, yeah, it’s just irrelevant. It was a great two years, but I want to be – just like you, I want to be judged on what I do in my life and how you help people and grow people’s careers, not brands on resumes.
Tanya: That’s amazing. You’re almost seven years into Zumper. What is your job at Zumper today?
Anthemos: Yeah, it’s really changed from having pretty much had every role at the company probably except CTO to now I’d say I do three things now, to oversimplify the role. One is fundraising and just general [14:29]. I’ve raised 90 million for the company. We have a lot in the bank.
Tanya: Amazing.
Anthemos: We may go and raise more money in the future, so that’s on me.
Tanya: You also have the who’s who of investors. It’s not like you just raised – I mean, you have some serious credible people behind you.
Anthemos: We love our investors. We have Kleiner Perkins, Goodwater Capital. We have Jim Breyer and Breyer Capital. We just brought in Axel Springer and Stereo Capital. Blackstone invested. They’re one of our clients.
Tanya: It’s amazing.
Anthemos: We’ve got great investors, and we have a great relationship with them. They’re super pushy, as they should be. Yeah, so continuing to maintain those relationships and then grow the next generation is the first job of any CEO in a tech back company, assuming you want to continue to raise venture capital. The second one is culture, so increasingly, I obsess on the culture. How do we define the right hires? How do we motivate them? How do we retain all our best people? Culture and how it matches our mission is super important to me, and I think, ultimately, culture is the reason people stay at companies, not compensation. The third one is strategic alignment so super unsexy, sounds really boring, but we’ve got to make sure that what we tell the board is what we tell the exec team, is what we tell the engineering team, is what we tell the interns, and that we do not build products that we throw away tomorrow because they were like a crazy crackpot CEO idea. I don’t need to be in every meeting to do this, but making sure we run a really tight quarterly planning process is actually a really big part of my job now. I work a lot with our CFO on that.
Tanya: How do you get the team to stay aligned because, so many CEOs that I speak with, that’s one of the hardest challenges?
Anthemos: Yeah, totally. I think absolute full transparency is the best way. Even though there were various risks of being wildly transparent with your team, can stuff slip out? Can an investor find – oh, I’m sorry, a competitor find out something you don’t want them to? Yeah, sometimes but the benefits of being full transparent and trusting your team with the information far outweigh, at least at the moment, the downside. We at Zumper run a closely planning process. Ultimately, everything rolls into our mission of making renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. That distills down into five OKRs, which are a – it’s a one key management tool that some companies use. You may use them, Tanya, objectives and key results that John Doerr at Kleiner had pioneered, and that every initiative we have has to roll up into one of these five key objectives. Otherwise, we can’t do it.
Then we plan out a quarterly basis. Every beginning of a quarter, we do a full team-wide analysis of every number in the business in the previous quarter. We plan out every initiative and project a number in the business for the subsequent quarter, and then every single week we do a 20 minute check-in every Monday for every person in the team on progress against those initiatives. That drives a lot of alignment because an engineer might go back to their desk and really think to themselves is what I’m building aligned with any of the things I just saw in this Monday presentation? If not, I should really probably speak to someone.
Tanya: That’s amazing. I love that incredible structure that you set up. When you say transparency really drives alignment, that is always interesting to me. Are you thinking more of transparency like super – I mean, super transparent, like Bridgewater and Associates transparent where you table the meetings? You score people, and you give live feedback, and there’s a rating system. It’s like that level of transparency? Where do you draw the line?
Anthemos: Yeah, great question and absolutely not at that level. It’s a really good one. We are absolutely transparent with pretty much every single number in the business. I’m talking about radical transparency on our performance. If we have a crappy month, people need to know about that, and as long as you’ve got the right leadership team and you believe in the CEO and the C-level and the board, it’s fine. Growth is spikey. It’s not a linear curve for any company and so showing down months important, and I think you want to hire a team that comes in on the first of the next month and is resilient. They’re going to keep grinding.
I love your question about Bridgewater and the other kind of transparency. I’ve read a lot about Bridgewater, and I had a couple of friends who worked there. I think that’s transparency to the point of being ineffective, and you could even call it rude. I don’t want to sound too conservative because I love it as an approach. It’s a radically different approach. I don’t know if I want my team – and maybe running a hedge fund is completely different to running a tech startup, but I don’t know if I want my team spending that much time writing up notes or reading narratives of meetings they weren’t in. I’m just not sure that’s the right use of our time. Maybe it’s a pioneering approach, and we’re just being lazy. We have so many things on fire as we grow very quickly that that just seems like – it seems like a crazy use of time. I understand the reason to do it.
To be honest, it just seems like social decorum breaks down. I know there’s a trend for radical candor in the Valley as well. I really respect how radically candid Bridgewater are to each other, but I don’t if you’re like that with anyone else in your life. I don’t think I’m radically candid with my wife or my son, and so for me, it’s an interesting experiment. It’s not the way I run my company, and fair play to them, they may be trying to achieve something different in a hedge fund to what I need to achieve in Silicon Valley. I think that it would be very hard to track the level of talent we have at Zumper if I use that approach. I think that there’s a very different expectation from the top talent in Silicon Valley about how they’d be treated.
Tanya: No, absolutely, I totally agree. You’re right. In a startup, it would completely I think change the dynamic. In terms of culture, you said that’s absolutely something that you obsess about. What’s the culture at Zumper?
Anthemos: It’s obviously, incredibly hard to define. We have cultural tenets that we talk to the team about. I’d say the people that – I’d say the general culture here is it feels like a siblinghood. Now, I’m saying this as an only child, as I mentioned before, but I suppose that it feels like having siblings where it’s – even though there’s hierarchy and people report to people, in a meeting, it’s completely flat. The intern can tell the CEO they’re wrong. I think it’s like a siblinghood where there’s a lot of self-deprecation. There’s a lot of banter and humor. Yet, in meetings, we disagree all the time, but there’s no assholes. No one’s yelling at anyone. We disagree often, but we solve disagreements with data.
I’d say the thing I love the most about our culture is you’ll see our CTO walk over to our intern on the biz op side and work on something for 20 minutes at her desk. You’ll see our head of sales talking to a junior product person to fix something. That kind of collaborative siblinghood extends to every facet of how we think about the company, how we hire, how we think about providing lunches and breakfasts to the team, how we think about new office space. We’ve seen loads of new offices for our office move this year, and we’ve absolutely rejected offices which wouldn’t support that cross-collaboration or even just to the extent of maybe not having people on two floors and making sure that we remain in an office that’s open plan, which gets increasingly difficult as your grow. It’s super important.
The biggest lever you have as a CEO to culture is hiring. Your culture can’t change the same as you grow. It will evolve. Hiring people that fit, at least an aspirational culture of what you’re trying to grow is the single biggest lever you have, so I’m very attuned to how we hire and where we find people.
Tanya: Hmm, that sounds incredible. As a leader, as the leader of Zumper and as a leader, what has been the toughest moment that you’ve dealt with in your life?
Anthemos: In my career at Zumper?
Tanya: Mm-hmm, I mean, it could be at Zumper. It could be anywhere. As a leader, what has been the toughest moment that you had to deal with in your career?
Anthemos: Yeah, [23:08]. It was definitely at Zumper. In my 20s, I was – I don’t think I really lead teams before. I’d had many teams at BCG, and in politics, I had a few people occasionally reporting to me. Candidly, it’s crazy sometimes. I’m talking about the CEO stuff. You come up with an idea, so you name yourself the CEO. Then suddenly, two years later, actually, you have to be a good leader. It’s no longer an idea. It’s about leadership.
I think the toughest stuff has always been morale in the difficult days. As in now, we’re pretty big. We make pretty good revenue. We make a lot of users. I think 70 million people will use Zumper this year. We’re happy with where we are but never happy enough, but in the early days where you have very low funding, no funding, and – I remember many occasions around morale where competitors came out with products that were what we were trying to build. People try and mine our contact list to steal our customers.
I always remember flights I took where some bad news came out just before I got on the flight back home from a conference. I always thought about how I talk to my team where you as the CEO have to be balanced, where you can’t freak out in front of your team because that’s infectious. At the same time, you have to be honest. I think if you brush every competitive threat away as nonsense, your team don’t believe in you.
Tanya: Yeah, it diminishes what you say.
Anthemos: Totally, and so there’s this impossible medium and I’m sure you felt it too as a CEO of companies where you have to be authentic to the rest but also incredibly bullish and remind the team of the vision and that none of these things change. I remember two or three competitors in our early years, none of whom exist anymore, would – they were always a couple of years before us when we launched. We were always the kids in the group, and it was hard in the first couple of years to catch up with them. Now we’ve surpassed them. It feels great, but it was difficult in the first two years to keep morale high while you were so small. I think that’s the hardest days when you’re money’s running out. Your team is looking around thinking is this going to work out? How you turn up to those meetings is hard, and there’s no secret sauce to it. It’s reading the room and finding the middle grounds, and it’s not easy.
Tanya: I could so relate to that. I’ve had to do that many, many times. Are there any exercises or things that you would do before you would have to go have those tough decisions or tough discussions?
Anthemos: I wish had a – it’s a really good question. I wish I had a clever answer here. I think some other guests will probably have a great answer about looking in the mirror and rehearsing it. I’m the opposite where I’m incredibly close to my team, my executive team. Of the seven people who report to me, five of them have been here for over four years now. I think, actually, they’re five years now. I know these people very well, and I spent a lot of time getting to know them early on because we really wanted to get our exec team together as early as possible. I’d say that just – I knew these human beings, and I knew how different the people in the room were.
Because I think I understood what motivated the room in the early days, there was no rehearsal. I think I understood the context of the room really well before I went in. I guess some people would say rehearse and nail the speech. I’m much more like wing the speech, but really know who’s in the room of your team. If you’ve hired correctly, you’re working with people that will be able to balance outside shocks or slowing in funding and the kind of things that you’ll ultimately solve. No, to be honest, I just built a team that I really trusted, and a lot of the early team who went through the hardest days with me are all here now still.
Tanya: That says so much about you and your leadership style. How have you evolved as your business has grown over the past seven years and your team has grown?
Anthemos: I mean, I have not nailed this yet, but I’m getting better at it. I think the hardest transition for a CEO as you go from having raised maybe $10 million to having raised nearly $100 million or a lot more is getting out of the weeds and becoming a different kind of CEO. I think startup CEO is, by hook or by crook, grow, raise money, get customers, prove product market fit, and you have to be involved in six or seven different roles in the first few years. I think it’s really hard to step back because every – you were very successful if you continue to raise money at those roles because they worked. It’s very hard to let that go and trust that by hiring a seasoned exec team that you pass it off. They’ll do it, and you focus on strategy and hiring and culture.
That’s really hard, and when I read my upward feedback from my team, consistently – and also, to be honest, my downward feedback from the board, consistently in the last year and a half, that is the single biggest negative piece of feedback or opportunity to work on is just get out. Get out of the weeds. Trust us. Yeah, they’ll be mistakes, but focus on higher, other things. I’m 60% of the way there, but I’m not fully across. I’m getting there, but it is really hard. It’s a growing up pain, and it’s a nice one to have. It’s really hard to let go and just trust that stuff will happen.
Tanya: Yeah, no, absolutely. That is a huge challenge, but it sounds like you’re on your way. If you could rewind ten years from now so ten years back, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Anthemos: Oh, man, girl, what a question. Probably, it’s going to be far harder than you possibly think.
Tanya: That’s a good piece of advice.
Anthemos: People tell you it’s hard, and you don’t listen. You just think, ahh, it’s hard for them because they didn’t execute brilliantly or something. I’m glad I didn’t go back and tell myself that advice. If I had, I don’t know if I would’ve done it. Now I’ve done it, and I think we’ve got through the hardest part. I mean, I’m so happy I did it. If I knew how hard the first three or four years were going to be, I probably would’ve done it, but I don’t know. I think my delusional optimism in the early days was amazing.
I think I’d go back and say it’s harder than you possibly think. It’s not as easy as TechCrunch and all these blog posts make it sound like. Surround yourself with amazing people inside and outside work to serve as a support network to you because your emotional state is going to go up and down 50 times a day for the next several years. You’ve got to have a support network inside the office and, equally if not more importantly, outside the office.
Tanya: How do you stay balanced?
Anthemos: Oh, I don’t do…
Tanya: Do you go work out, or do you – how do you keep it together because it can be brutal?
Anthemos: Yeah, it’s hard. It’s brutal. Definitely working with people that you love, which I’ve always luckily been able to do, where I literally cannot wait to come to work every morning to see these people because they’re so smart and talented but we’ve also become friends. That’s important but just finding the balance outside work. If you’re in a relationship, or you’re married, or you have a kid, I think it’s a – that’s one say to do it. I mean, you don’t do it for that reason, but just having a kid, for example, was an amazing reminder of what else there is in the world. I mean, I look forward to my weekends with my son more than anything in the world. Then, for people that aren’t in relationships, I mean, sports, like friendships, movies, literature, arts, they’re so important. You are so much better at your job if you have balance outside.
There are CEOs I know in Silicon Valley who work seven days a week for six, seven years, and I work super hard. I’m definitely on the higher working spectrum, but I can never work seven days a week for seven years, nor should I. You can’t see the 50,000 foot view if you’re working…
Tanya: No, you burn out.
Anthemos: You burn out and the companies don’t work out. I’ve seen these companies, and they don’t tend to work out. Anyone who says you can run a startup without working hard, there’s maybe 1% of really lucky people who have amazing product market fit [31:41]. I don’t think that’s true for 99% of startups. I think you have to work super hard. Saying that, that doesn’t preclude having dinner with your family, putting your kids to bed, seeing your kid on the weekend.
I don’t have a perfect formula. I’m definitely not a ten out of ten dad, for example. I try to be. I think just finding interests outside work is not just okay. It should be actively encouraged by any board members or any colleagues. It’s really important for your sanity.
Tanya: Yeah, no, absolutely. Space, actually, even just a walk in the park usually comes – it brings a lot of great ideas and a lot of things that you hadn’t resolved but you have a solution for now.
Anthemos: Yeah, how many times you come back from holiday and it just – everything feels less stressful, or you go to bed a little earlier, and you wake up, and you solved that little thing you were thinking about last night. You wake up, and the solution is so clear. That stuff’s real, and it’s stuff you’re told when you’re 20. You don’t really believe, but your brain is an amazing organ. It is doing a lot of things passively, and you’ve got to let it operate on focusing on something that is at work. In the background, it’s processing the work questions. It’s so important.
Tanya: Yeah, no, 100%. What’s next for Zumper?
Anthemos: Yeah, so right now, I think most people that know Zumper or our other brand, PadMapper, that we acquired a couple of years ago know us as a search engine for apartments. We’re by some distance I think the largest startup in terms of audience now in the US and as people just looking for apartments and sending messages to landlords to go and visit. Our vision is very much to be a booking engine for apartments. Not just helping renters send messages, but how can we actually represent landlords directly and use software to prequalify renters, and then have them walk into an open house, and pull out their phone and actually leave a deposit and book the apartment like they’d book a hotel? I think, in two or three years’ time, if Zumper is equally well known as a booking engine for apartments as it is a search engine, that would be our homerun and would be fulfilling the true north of the company. Everything in the next two years is focused on two things, continuing to grow our monthly audience of millions of users and moving as many of them as possible into transactions, not just into [34:12]. They’re the only two things we’re really focused on.
Tanya: That’s a really strategic thing to focus on. That’s amazing. How do people get in touch with you if they want to say hi?
Anthemos: Yeah, Twitter is normally the best place and just @anthemos on Twitter, and we’re pretty responsive. Zumper is just the app Zumper on Twitter as well. Follow me on LinkedIn. I usually reply to stuff, and yeah, love hearing from entrepreneurs or our users. It’s very motivating to us as well.
Tanya: Amazing, Anthemos, this has been brilliant, and I so thank you for the time that you’ve given us today.
Anthemos: Oh, thank you for having me, Tanya. I enjoyed it.
May 14th, 2019 Posted by tp33Podcasts
0 thoughts on “Julie Clark On Building A $23 Million In Revenue Company that Disney Turned Into $300 Million in 2 Years”
Former school teacher, Julie Clark hit the jackpot when she created enriching entertainment videos for her kids, in her basement. It turned out, other babies loved it too. Within five years, what was a fun side project grew into a $23 Million dollar generating business which had only five employees, that Disney acquired for $25 Million. Within a few years of selling to Disney, the company was producing close to $300
Serial entrepreneur and author, Will Herman founded and scaled five companies, two of which IPO’ed, for a combined shareholder value of $4 Billion. Along the way, he made a bunch of mistakes, but this one tool, in particular, helped him gain perspective and surface insights, real time, which enabled deep leadership growth. Although he naturally fell into this, he credits his long-time mentor/coach for much of his success as a leader, which stands at the foundation of building and exiting successful businesses. In this Unmessable episode, Will shares some key learnings he derived from his entrepreneurial journey, which might just help you along yours.
May 14th, 2019 Posted by tp33Podcasts
0 thoughts on “Ron Palmeri Practiced This One Strategic Exercise That Helped Him Be More Effective In Conversations”
Ron Palmeri, serial entrepreneur who turned to venture investing with a special twist, scored some lucky wins early on at Minor Ventures. The fund would incubate and build the businesses itself while Ron was actively involved from a strategy perspective. Included in some of the companies they launched was OpenDNS which was acquired by Cisco for $635 Million and Google Voice (previously Grand Central), which was acquired by Google. Shifting from the venture strategy side, Ron took his luck as an operator when he launched Layer, which was originally announced at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 and took home the winning prize. Through his experience as a venture investor and operator, Ron candidly shares key insights he learned on how mastering his own personality helped him move passed his leadership limitations and identifies an exercise he found particularly helpful to be more effective in conversations.
Dane Madsen grew up in a small farm town in Idaho, on the lower income side of the equation, but was trained to problem solve and fix things from a young age. His upbringing forced him to be nimble and creative in the solutions he brought forward and this core way of being was at the source of his ability to uncover a huge opportunity in the market when he built Yellowpages.com, which he later sold to what is known today as AT&T, for $100 Million. In this Unmessable episode, Dane shares his internal struggles as he built and sold his company, and more importantly what he learned from his fascinating journey.
Unmessable podcast explores what it takes to be a great leader via candid discussions with success business operators and renown thought leaders.
