Ep. #7, SaaS Before It Was Cool with Steve Oriola

Christine Spang: Welcome to Platform Builders, the absolute best podcast out there to learn from the titans who build the tools you use every day. I'm Christine Spang from Nylas.

Isaac Nassimi: And I'm Isaac, the Head of Product here at Nylas.

Christine: And today we have with us Steve Oriola, currently CEO at Unbounce, the absolute best place to go to be able to build marketing landing pages that help you convert better as well as a whole suite of other tools.

And Steve brings to us also just a whole wealth of experience from a lot of different companies that are super exciting to me and Isaac as sort of historians of the CRM space.

Steve was a CEO for a time at Pipedrive in the past and also at Act!, and I believe that Unbounce also recently acquired a CRM and has a CRM as a part of its software suite.

And so I'm really looking forward to hearing a lot about Steve illuminating this space for us and just sharing with us the decades of experience that he has in the industry. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Oriola: Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here. I've encountered Nylas multiple times in the past, so just really thrilled to be talking to you guys.

Christine: Awesome, well, we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.

Maybe a good way to kick things off would be to just share a little bit about how the CRM space has changed throughout the decades.

I think it's super cool that, you know, you've led different organizations at various different times, including organizations that have been around for a really long time.

So how have things kind of changed over the past 10-plus years?

Steve: Yeah, I was going to go further back than that.

Christine: Okay, yeah, yeah, take us as far back as you can go.

Steve: I was going to go back to the early 2000s, you know? When SaaS was getting started because I was there for that.

I was at Constant Contact in 2001, you know, was there for 10 years, so that, I was close to CRM. We weren't a CRM business, but it was certainly important for us so we kept an eye on it.

I kept an eye on it and you know, at that time, SaaS was beginning, Salesforce was just getting started.

But CRM was sort of in the realm of big, big, big projects that, you know, had very high likelihood of not being successful, you know, after a year and a half and millions of dollars.

And we were coming out of that into SaaS, right? SaaS solutions that were much easier to implement and set up and get started.

But still had similar sort of requirements, you know, if you're going to be the system of record, it was the term we threw around a lot, still do, kind of, if you're going to be the system of record, you have to be you know, in the middle of everything and connected to everything, you know?

So Salesforce solved some of the problem, not all of it, but very quickly got busy in solving all of it. And, you know, I feel like Salesforce just drifted up market.

It did start as a sort of a small business focus, but very quickly, you know, drifted up market as they solved you know, increasingly complex problems.

And it seemed like around 2010, you saw this second wave of CRMs. I definitely put Pipedrive in that category.

I would put Insightly into that category. And we acquired Insightly last year, so I'll talk about that.

SugarCRM, I mean, there's a whole range. I actually don't know the founding of SugarCRM, but I think like 2010 really all the way through 2020, you saw a lot of that.

And that's when I joined Pipedrive was sort of as they were getting traction, you know? They had just finished a year where they got to about 12,000 paying customers.

So it was moving along and I think Salesforce had ceded a lot of the small, not so much mid-market.

You run into them dealing with small business and CRM, but they're most effective, you know, at the enterprise level and I would say mid-market.

So I would say that brings us up to today. You know, not all of those new entrants starting in the 2010s were successful. Some were more than others.

You know, we've now got an asset that came through that and was an attractive combination for us.

Christine: Were there any, like, particular technology advances or jumps that kind of like influenced the capabilities of, you know, essentially like what became the standard for these CRMs throughout the years?

Like, what was kind of the drivers of the evolution? Was it changes in the market?

Were there sort of technology advances that helped? How did that influence the evolution of these tools?

Steve: Yeah.

I think the ability to turn an application like that into a platform, I think that evolved and matured pretty quickly. With platforms as a service, the evolution of APIs and sort of standardization around that. I think all of these things made it a little more straightforward and easier over time to actually build these platforms.

So that certainly changed and helped a lot. And I think that, you know, ecosystems had evolved and I think people generally understood ecosystems when, by 2015, I joined Pipedrive and one of the first things that we started planning was how are we going to turn this into an ecosystem and a platform?

Because up to that point, they hadn't. And now they've done a very good job of that. You know, they have an ecosystem of developers and such.

So I think that was definitely an enabling technology advancement that helped a lot, right? So, you know, now everybody wants to be a platform, but I think CRMs are unique in that you're trying to turn them into, you know, a system of record.

I think the advancements right now around just foundational data management, which kind of leads you into a customer data platform conversation and certainly AI and various forms of AI, which I can talk about, that we're very interested in right now.

So I think it was the ability to build it into a platform was certainly, you know, a very big part of it. As well, you know, the proliferation of point solutions to do specific things, especially in the area of sales technologies and sales acceleration, right?

I think the proliferation there was facilitated by CRMs that were open platforms. You know, it sort of enabled a lot of those companies to emerge and partner with CRMs you know, enter their programs and integrate.

And those are sort of, you know, those added value to the CRMs, right? And now, you know, when we look at that dynamic, yeah, I want to add value and make it easier to plug the next big sales tech, sales acceleration tool into our CRM.

But now what I really want is the data, right? Because I want to unify a robust customer profile that has identity resolved you know, from all the different data sources where there's customer information, but also gives me an ability to activate that data back out, you know, through those same channels, through your own channels.

That's, I think, what's the most interesting right now in that sort of proliferation of an ecosystem is what sort of data are you going to end up with and that's where we're at now. Long answer to a short question.

Isaac: I think it's a great answer, actually. And I think there's a statement in there that's really interesting that you need that data in order to be able to do some of these new things, right?

You need access to it. And you know, what it's kind of reminding me of is like the 2014 home automation craze, right?

Which I don't know how many iterations have we had of that, where you had like a smart light switch and you had the smart toaster and you had the smart whatever, and everyone, the problem was that everyone wanted to be the hub because the hub where the other devices plug into, that's where you get to do the really magical stuff.

And when everyone's a hub, no one's a hub. The end point of that ended up becoming that like Apple integrated and Google integrated into like the core OS level, their own hubs that everyone else had to plug into.

With things like CRMs, I don't know if that's on the menu. And what we've been toying with at Nylas is that everyone is eventually going to try and become a CRM, right? In the current world because everyone needs access to that core data.

What do you think the end game is there? Where do you think that leads to, if everyone's trying to get access to this core data and be your CRM?

Steve: You know, I think it's fine if everybody becomes a CRM, that's fine as long as all the data is synchronized and rationalized, you know?

That's fine. You know, at some point that just becomes a data warehouse. So maybe everybody doesn't become a CRM.

Maybe everybody at their core is either, you know, plugged into a data warehouse or is building their solution native to, you know, a variety of data warehouses so that it could just plug in and run with the data warehouse at its core.

So I'm not sure it's everyone becoming a CRM, but you know, if you break down the term, it's customer relationship management.

And I think what you have to think about that as sort of a, it's a village of solutions, right? Can any one solution ever be the entire solution for managing your relationship with your customers, managing their journey through your company?

I think that takes a variety of solutions, but one thing has to be at the center of it and be the platform for it. So yeah, I mean it's interesting.

It's a provocative statement, right? That everything needs to become a CRM. I'm not sure, right?

Isaac: You very quickly upon coming into Unbounce made the decision to acquire Insightly, right? Within a matter of like six months or so in my research. Is that right?

Steve: The conversation started probably two and a half months in.

Isaac: Okay, wow.

Steve: You know, went on for a month and yeah, that wasn't the most consequential decision I had made, though. So yeah, I had to do a lot really quickly.

And it sort of comes with the territory of being asked to take over hundreds of people. So you have to, you know, move pretty quickly.

Isaac: How were you able to get that much understanding of, like, the fabric of the business and the future-facing strategy and get that much confidence and conviction so quickly?

Steve: Well, you know, you like to think that these things are all based on a well-vetted strategy, right? You would never go buy a company if it wasn't perfectly in line with the strategy you had.

We're private equity owned as many, many tech companies are now, probably more than in the past. And it's opportunistic, you know?

If you think about the way the capital works in a private equity environment, you know, you're much more likely to acquire and integrate than you are to say, "Hey, give us $10 million more so we can ramp up R&D and go build this thing."

You know, there's execution risk in that. It's not fast enough. They don't have 15-year horizons. Their horizons are shorter, so they want to add value as fast as they can.

And sometimes that value comes through acquisition and integration. And you know, my first pass at it was like, jeez, I'm not sure we want to do that.

You know, and that was just my gut at the time, market, my experience. And then my second pass at it was like a week and a half later.

And in between that time I, you know, I was thinking about some of the shortcomings of Unbalanced in terms of, you know, what sort of whole solution could we get to and what do we feel like is missing?

And what was missing was, you know, we had turned the landing page platform really into an optimization platform.

You know, we, I say we, even though I wasn't there for it, around 2016, hired a data scientist.

That turned into a data science and data engineering team that built an AB testing solution as part of the landing page platform, and then built a traffic management system so that you could manage traffic to a variety of landing pages based on performance and testing.

And those algorithms worked very effectively and people were seeing much higher conversion rates because of it.

But what we were optimizing on was the conversion from the landing page, not how much money people actually, did they close, you know?

Great, we did our job of giving you leads, but we can't optimize further up the funnel unless we understand close rate, average contract value, maybe even lifetime value, you know?

How long do they stay around? I mean, it would take a while to figure that out, but not too long.

And I felt like that was the challenge for us, to be a marketing solution that added maximum value.

And you know, a week and a half in I was thinking, well, you know, a CRM has that and probably then some, so on that level, it was interesting.

Insightly had also built a marketing automation platform and I saw that as, you know, a great integration point for a landing page solution.

Generally, marketing automations platforms have landing page solutions. Theirs had a landing page solution, you know? But pretty unsophisticated.

It was in line with, I would say, the playbook of private equity and certainly the playbook of this firm, which was to, you know, add value in that way so we could be a bigger company. And we are, you know?

You know, over 20,000 customers, you know, the combination created, you know, an exciting scale that helps us sell.

We're a much larger company where I would say there are lots of CRMs in the market, there's lots of SaaS software companies and we're at a scale that gives us some advantages there.

So scale was part of it too. And how did we make that decision that quickly? Yeah, that was the original question. The opportunity presented itself. That's how.

Sometimes you know what you need to do in a business and the opportunity's there and sure, you know, maybe you feel like, hey, my strategy's not baked enough for me to really make this decision, so I'm going to go bake my strategy.

But that deal's then gone and there might not be one like it for another year and a half. And so sometimes you just can't, you know, you can't take that time.

So we did a fair amount of research, you know, I was reading all weekend for weeks. You know, I had my team looking at it and, you know, we made the best decision we could and we're pretty happy with it.

Christine: I think it's a very quintessential example of how in business, you can't make decisions necessarily with all of the information. You got to.

Steve: Yeah.

Christine: Take advantage of timing, 80% research and just kind of like the gut feeling, which kind of encapsulates all of that sort of side information and make the best calls you can and keep things moving because speed is also a really important thing in terms of building a successful business.

Steve: Yeah.

Christine: One thing that kind of like is coming up for me as you're talking about kind of these different businesses, all kind of like in and around this kind of CRM space over the past number of years is that it seems like there's like a few kind of themes.

One is that like you tend to start with solving some particular pain point and maybe perhaps growing from that pain point.

So you attract kind of an initial set of users that have that problem that you can solve really well, better for them than perhaps any other solution, and tend to kind of expand those capabilities over time.

And then like every solution ends up addressing some kind of different part of the market I think because of that, because like of where you started from, how you expand and just sort of like the capabilities you choose to bake in versus, you know, potentially partnering or working with other companies.

I think every piece of software that people use in running their businesses is part of kind of like a larger tech stack.

And I'm curious if you have examples from companies that you've led around just like how that starting point has influenced the focus on who are the customers that you're going after, and then also like what do you choose to kind of bake in?

Like you mentioned before that like over time, it makes sense to have integration points so that if you are going to be kind of the system of record or kind of move towards being a system of record, there's some capabilities that potentially you want to have an innovative ecosystem or ability for other people to kind of plug into that and make use of it.

But I think there's like a lot of different pieces of this kind of like product strategy and navigation that I'd love to hear a bit more about.

Steve: Yeah, there's multiple questions in there, but well said, there's a lot I can run with on that.

These are all different experiences I've had, you know, and Constant Contact, long time ago but probably most of my lessons came from that.

And you know, I got there like three weeks after they had launched the first solution, SaaS email marketing.

And I remember, you know, a friend of mine calling me and saying, "Hey, you know, I'd heard about that company, it's cool that you're there."

And he was a, you know, marketing consultant and he's like, "Yeah, you know, I'm setting people up on email marketing all the time."

I was like, "What's it cost? I mean, how does that work?" He said, "Oh, you know, about a $2,500 startup fee."

Well, and these are small businesses. And he's like, "Well, how are you guys priced?" I said, "$10 a month."

You know, he like fell off his chair. But it was very disruptive and it worked and it started to really accelerate.

Not the first year I was there. I mean, it was like two down rounds of funding, we're barely staying alive.

And then like year three it just took off like a rocket and then it very quickly became is this all we're going to do, right?

There was a lot of pressure, pressure from the board. Yeah, you got to do more, right? You should broaden out into different things.

And that's where all of these things get tricky. I think the strength of that company for the time that I was there is the CEO really resisted that and kept us pretty close to our knitting and very focused.

But you know, I felt like when we did start to broaden out and try to do other things, you know, we were very careful to make sure that we were targeting the same customer, right?

That was sort of the rule. And I think that was right.

And I still think that's right, but I also think that, you know, the success or failure is kind of that decision, like how far afield do you want to get from what you do, right? And everyone would tell you not very.

You know, same customer with very adjacent things. And I think that still holds, you know?

I think that it's easy to start building and expanding and say, "Hey, it's okay if this new functionality takes us into that market with a whole different set of competitors." And that's folly, right? You don't want to do that by accident, right?

So your product strategy has to be very, very focused on where you are, who you're serving, and what problem you're solving and are you solving additional problems for the same customer? That is the most ideal way to move forward from a product strategy perspective.

That said, you know, if you're the CEO of a company, venture, private equity backed, doesn't matter, you're going to get a lot of pressure to create future market opportunity, right?

Because even if you don't exploit it, it's part of the narrative for the next buyer. You know, certainly in a PE world, right?

So that's the real challenge of running these companies is you know, often, you know, your board has a certain sort of perspective about how the things should evolve and you know, it's probably faster than you can realistically do. And sometimes it can be, you know, not specific enough.

And it's really my job and my team's job to go back and say yes, and, you know, in this way and really be the entity that is most faithful to the customer that you have and the market that you're in because it's really difficult to go into different markets and serve different customers.

And it's very tempting and it's just, it's a mistake.

Christine: I love that summary of just like how to think about expanding the value we have in terms of product strategy.

Same customer, different problem rather than different customer, same problem or different customer, different problem.

Steve: Yeah.

Christine: I feel like one of the things that people underestimate a lot, and I've heard this as well, just like, you know, even from people at Nylas at various times of like, why don't we go do X?

And when like the X is like a totally different type of customer, people don't necessarily realize that like, oh, you know, that has implications for support, sales, product, all this sort of stuff that revolves around th e actual thing that you're shipping and that's like kind of the DNA of the company.

And that's difficult to change and it's also, it is not a lot of overlap. You're essentially like adding another company into your company.

Steve: Yeah, and what happens too is the different people in the company and the different parts of the business, you know, when you start talking about, hey, we're going to make a move and a shift and we're going to build this and go there, they see like their 10% of it.

Christine: Totally.

Steve: Nobody sees the whole thing. It's my job, it's your job to see the whole thing, you know?

Because people will say, "Oh, we could do that." You know, 'cause they're seeing their 10%. But when you look at 100% of it you're like, wait a minute, first of all, that's going to slow us all down, you know, significantly.

It'll take us a year and a half, you know, we'll impair performance until we get there and you know, and then all the other problems we just described. So yeah, I totally get that.

Isaac: I think when you're working on a startup, you collect a bunch of optimists in general, people who look at the mountain in the distance, they're like, "It's not that high, come on."

And I think that the thing that they don't realize is that there's a million things that they don't know.

Steve: Yeah.

Isaac: And halfway up the mountain, they're going to actually realize how hard it is, you know?

So what I've learned personally is when someone uses the word just, you have to be very careful. Like, oh, let's just, let's just do blank.

Steve: Yeah.

Isaac: Because they are rationalizing it in the sentence.

Steve: Yep, but then you make decisions. So some of these things, you know, they bubble up, everybody sees their own 10%, but you sort of see the whole thing and you know, after deliberation you're like, "Okay, yeah, I see the whole thing and this is possible. Let's ratchet down, way down on scope to iteration one," right?

And this is written into our company values now. Yeah, you got to take very, very incremental steps into these things, you know?

And be prepared to pivot quickly and stop something, you know? So it's not all sort of beating back the ideas.

I think it's vetting them, certainly, and hopefully training the organization to, you know, come up with better ideas, you know?

And you don't want them dismissing things out of hand. But you know, hopefully over time people sort of get it.

Like, none of these things are easy. We need to stick close to the customer, tight adjacencies. But when you do act and move forward, be brutal about scope. You know, I never let an engineering team go off for more than 90 days without delivering some value, right? Year-long projects fail, always.

Christine: Focus is so important, and getting to a point where you can validate what you've done.

I have a bunch of questions and curiosities about your experience with joining companies as a CEO where you weren't the founder.

And I think that like, you know, I haven't been running as CEO, but I've been building Nylas for 10-plus years at this point and I've seen a lot of friends, you know, some have like left and hired someone in.

There is often a stage where people go out and like hire in an external CEO for a lot of important reasons.

And I'd love to hear just from your perspective, like one, what is like an exciting opportunity for you in terms of like a business that you're excited to join?

You've done this a bunch of different times.

Steve: Yeah, I mean my work's exciting, so I like doing my work.

The exciting part of my work is the people. It's the most challenging part. But for me, I enjoy it. You know, I just love people.

Christine: So it's the team that you meet along the way.

Steve: That's part of it. You know, this one, you know, I saw a lot of low-hanging fruit, things I knew that could be done better.

So I think it's a balance of that, you know, versus, you know, the P&L, what am I seeing in the finances? Like, where is this company at?

And in the current opportunity I saw a very profitable company that could make a variety of changes that would impact performance.

And there were things that I knew how to do, could see easily. So if things are more complex and I don't understand them, it's less appealing, you know?

Or if I don't see a very clear path to making some pretty low-cost, near-term changes.

And that's what I saw in this one, was some pretty low-cost, near-term changes that I could make, I saw it.

And that the owner, private equity firm also, you know, fed me a handful of things and I did my own research and came back and that's what got me excited, you know?

And in the category I know, and I think the category has still got, it's certainly crowded, but it's changing and evolving quickly.

Certainly AI is, you know, making it change and evolve quickly as well. So yeah, like the category, understood it, understood the business.

Same with the CRM at, you know, Insightly. I think I was able to accelerate that decision because I understood it.

So yeah, I'm just a guy sticking to his knitting, so I'd be much less effective in a business I didn't understand right out of the chute.

So that's, I think that's how I was able to move as quickly as I did.

Christine: Is there any advice that you'd give to people who are looking to hire someone like you, to make that a successful transition?

Steve: Yeah, I think the part I didn't touch on is culture and you know, how to deal with that, right, quickly.

And that honestly, I wouldn't say I was on my own, you know? The private equity firm had some assessment of the culture, but it was really mine to get in and figure out.

And I think there, you know, a role like mine coming in, and this may just be me, others would tell you other, a different path, but I treaded lightly for a couple months, I would say. And started treading less lightly and had more of an opinion.

But I think you have to be really humble in these scenarios. I mean, this was a business that had been successful, was still successful. The private equity firm wanted it to be more successful. You know, I was hired for a reason.

But I think you have to come into situations like that and be humble and say, "Look, this culture is the way it is for a reason." And you got to find the good in it and then start finding what you want to change and eliminate and you need to find people in the company who can have that conversation with you in a pretty dispassionate way.

And I was able to find people like that. A couple of people who were long tenured really understood it.

A couple of people who weren't that long tenured, were a few years in, 'cause they had a very different perspective.

And that process took like six months before I was in front of the company saying, "These are the new company values."

But that was really, really important because I needed to get in front of the company and say, "This is what I see and this is what needs to change. This is what's good, keep doing it, but we got to change this."

And why, why do we have to change it? What's it going to lead to? And what was wrong with some of the other values we had?

And that last part, I didn't do in front of the whole company. I did, you know, along the way in smaller groups.

And what was complicating that was we were acquiring Insightly at the same time.

So we did an acquisition of Insightly and I had to very quickly get to some of the lead people at Insightly and say, "These are the new values that I've designed mostly for the folks that were working for me before."

And I got a great response from Insightly. We presented it, I got a great response from Unbounce. And then we started merging the company.

Not a great response from everyone. There was a small group that objected to some of the things that were gone and that just dissipated over time.

I indulged people, I engaged 'em in conversation. I didn't change the values. I felt like we had been very inclusive in the process, so didn't need to change them.

But that is a soft thing that your private equity firm's never going to tell you to do. But if you don't do it, you can't make it your own.

And I think as the CEO, you kind of got to make it your own. If you grow up in it, that's a huge advantage. Like, you don't have to go learn the culture, but you may want to change it because the absolute truth is everywhere I've been, the character of the CEO flows down and becomes the culture. It's inevitable.

It's like parenting, right? If you want your kid to be academic, you need to be academic. If you want your kid to be patient, they need to see you being patient.

And that's just how it works. So the company becomes you and you need to be very intentional about that.

Isaac: First of all, I think it's incredible on a lot of levels. Number one, because the first thing I heard there was that you said you sat down and you listened before acting and obvious sign of intelligence, huge sign of intelligence.

But also what I heard implicitly from that is that you don't take the same culture and the same values to every company. You form them, you know, bespoke or based off of the particulars of the company.

Steve: Yeah, let me amend that a little bit.

I think you have to accept who you are and what you are and make sure that the values aren't what you'd like to be. You know, they might be aspirational for the company, but they can't be aspirational for you personally because you are going to be where people look when they want to understand if we're living the culture. They're going to look at you first 'cause you're the CEO of the company.

So make sure you don't set aspirational values for yourself. It's fine if they're aspirational for the company.

I don't think what I'm saying is you have to design values that are pretty close to what the company already is. That, I didn't do.

I would say some of the Unbounce values were retained. Some of the values that ended up in there were 180 degrees from some of the values that existed that I saw, that I thought were problematic.

And those were the ones that 10, 15% of the workforce, you know, were upset about.

Isaac: Well, I think if everyone is happy about something you're doing, if everyone is, then it's not extreme enough.

Steve: Yeah.

Isaac: You shouldn't have unanimous approval.

Would you feel comfortable sharing some of those examples of those values or those changes?

Steve: Sure, there's one called, you know, I think we call it accelerated decision making.

And at the crux of it really is the concept of agree and commit, disagree and commit, assuming you're familiar with it.

You know, always engage, engage a group in open debate, be bold, you know, we wrote that in there.

You'd be bold during the open debate, set a deadline and the most senior person has to bring us to a decision. And a decision gets made.

And if you disagreed with the decision during the debate, when you leave that room, no one else in the company should know you disagreed. You're so committed to it, right?

That's a big, important one. And that's happening. And that was, there was zero of that that I felt when I walked in the door. So there's a lot of debate after decision.

There was a lot of debate after decision and during development or preparation, and people were still arguing about the decision and that just needed to stop.

Isaac: I think that's great. Those can become a huge, self-fulfilling prophecy. If, you know, people are standing on the sidelines with their arms crossing, this isn't going to work. Like, yeah, it's not going to work.

Steve: There was a lot of that. And then the other one was, you know, bias for action and nested in that is three or four small, failed iterations are way more valuable than another three months of research and analysis and testing. And that's where we also discuss--

Look, 70% confidence is enough to move forward in a small iteration. That other 30% is so expensive, right? Let's just try it and fail, learn from that, try again. So bias for action is all about moving forward, moving forward iteratively, you know? And getting close enough with enough confidence to go try it.

And that was really important 'cause the organization was really stuck and our velocity has increased a lot because of that.

Isaac: I believe that, here's my question though. You set these values forward and you get on an all-hands and you put 'em on a PowerPoint or a Google slide or whatever, and you say, "These are our values now."

That's not enough to drive them home. How do you actually drive them home in reality? How do you operationalize those values?

Steve: Yeah, when managers do reviews, is it values checklist and you're rated on your adherence to the values.

That's not in compensation, but it's a way to make the point and it's effective. And then we have all-hands meetings almost once every two months.

So I think we have six or seven a year, and then we have a big, giant kickoff and all of that. And in every one of those we pick two or three people who are living the values and we present that.

And so we just keep reinforcing what it means to adhere to those values. And I think that helps because it, look, you know, you print 'em, put 'em on the wall, there's no wall anymore, everybody's virtual, and then you never talk about them again.

I've seen that in my career, for sure. But I've also seen, you know, real adherence to values and being very purposeful about them and intentional.

Isaac: Fantastic. I wish we had a virtual wall that we could print out stuff and put on. That'd be fun.

So you actually, like a really consistent track record of I would say exhibiting those types of values.

There's a quote from you which I really like, "My leadership style is very inclusive. I want to surround myself with experts and let them be great at what they do. And when the rubber meets the road, we make the calls."

Right, that bias towards action. There's something in there, though, which is I want to surround myself with experts. You said before that you wanted to talk to like dispassionate people.

And what I'm getting from this is that you have a probably pretty unique and very sharp way of identifying someone who you would consider an expert. How do you do that?

Steve: Yeah, I mean there's sort of the Spidey sense, right?

You sit down and talk to someone about what they do and you could just see it in them, you know, there's an ease of conversation, you could see it in their eyes. They know what they're talking about and they're confident in what they're talking about. And then there's people who are really skilled at seeming confident and they don't really know what they're talking about.

Sometimes they can slip by you, you've got to watch for that. But if you don't have domain expertise, that can be a challenge.

So, but there's other ways to vet that with people who do have domain expertise. But for the most part, you can kind of see it Spidey sense. I try not to trust that too much, but it is valuable.

I didn't have a very straight line to general management. You know, I've done a variety of things. I've been in marketing, I've sold, you know, partnerships and I've run product, right?

So from a diversity perspective of experience, I kind of know a little bit about a lot of things and that, with my experience and just sort of reading demeanor and style, although I don't think style is the most important criteria, but it's not nothing.

It is, does have some level of importance. I think I have, you know, a good batting average. I make mistakes too and hire the wrong people, you know?

That happens. But I think for the most part, I hire more good people than bad, so.

Isaac: I love the Spidey sense. I'm stealing it, I'm using it.

Steve: Okay.

Isaac: It's definitely a factor, for sure. Before we run out of time, I want us to jump into picks and for anyone who's listening, every week, we all choose something that is fun, that's exciting to us, that we're excited about.

It can be anything. It doesn't have to be business related. It can be a piece of media or, you know, Spang's new stove or something like that and share it with the squad.

Spang, do you have any picks this week?

Christine: Yeah, so I'm trying to set the record for always having a really weird pick and I'm a little sad that I don't have the object that I wanted to share today, but there's a story behind it.

So the pick that I'm sharing this week is a vegetable called the kohlrabi, that's K-O-H-L-R-A-B-I.

And imagine like a beet, it's got like these really long leaves and then it's sort of circular, but it's maybe a little more round than a beet. And it's not red, it's green.

And this vegetable is you peel it, you take all the peel and then you can cut it up and it kind of tastes like maybe like a really mild apple.

It's super crunchy and it's not like super sweet, but has a very subtle flavor and it's really amazing in salads.

And I find that you can basically only find this at farmer's markets and Berkeley Bowl if you're in the Bay. Berkeley Bowl is basically a farmer's market that's a grocery store.

But I grew up, my grandma grew these in her garden. She had like a really big garden and I grew up eating them and it's just like amazing whenever I run into them.

And they had them at my local farmer's market a few weeks ago and then this week, they didn't have them.

So I couldn't bring my kohlrabi but I wanted you all to know there's this amazing vegetable out there and you should go find one and put one in your salad.

Isaac: I definitely will, I will be keeping an eye out for that. I had never heard of this before. It's like a German turnip apparently on the Googling.

Christine: Delicious.

Isaac: Steve, do you have a pick?

Steve: Yeah, not as interesting though. That was pretty interesting.

Yeah, mine's kind of boring. I started using Chat GPT Pro and 4.5 and I think it's the research version and you know, I know that I'm interested in something when I'm spending hours on it and you know, up late, rabbit holing.

It's really helped me a lot. I think ChatGPT's output I end up rewriting, you know, depending on the context, almost always.

But I got really ambitious with it and sort of designed a whole board meeting.

Isaac: Wow. Did you tell them that you used it?

Steve: No, I forgot to, I was going to though because I didn't want to back. I don't, you know, and I've said to everybody in the company, "Start using it and don't hide it." You know, there's no reason to.

You know, if I start seeing bad copy in ads, I'll tell you, but no, I wasn't afraid to tell them. I was going to, and for some reason I just forgot. But it, I had to rewrite a lot, obviously.

But for me, the research version helps me, helps me research and helps me organize and sort of takes me down paths that I wouldn't otherwise go down.

So I've just found a, you know, a new sort of super value to ChatGPT, you know? Pretty exciting for me.

Isaac: That's awesome. Yeah, there's a new use case every day, really. My pick this week is I've actually been dying to share this, is something called nano-hydroxyapatite.

And I'm not anti-fluoride by any means. I'm pretty pro-fluoride, but there's a lot of downsides to it.

T here's like possible like hormonal effects and things like that and if you drink too much of it, everything starts tasting like soap. There's all kinds of stuff with fluoride and it's pretty effective.

But nano-hydroxyapatite is more effective than fluoride at re-mineralization, most likely, big thumbs up to that.

It is a more effective whitener than most of the whitener on the market that you would get in your toothpaste or whatnot.

And this isn't like some experimental thing. It's been the standard in like Japan and some countries in Europe for like 40 years.

We just have never heard of it in the US, apparently, because we learned fluoride in school. And that's the thing. And we're all about the fluoride.

I'd really recommend trying out, like David's toothpaste has it. They're like, they're the correct nanoparticle size and all of that. I guarantee if you use it for like two days, you'll be a convert and you'll switch for life.

It like, the effect is very quick as far as like the feeling of your teeth.

Steve: Nano-hydroxyapatite?

Isaac: Yes, A-P-A-T-I-T-E.

Christine: I have to check that out. My dentist makes me use the toothpaste that has like the extra strength fluoride in it to prevent tooth decay, so.

Isaac: You got to run a single blind study so he, you switch and don't tell him.

Christine: Okay, n of one and I won't tell him, I just won't. I'll just stop using the old stuff.

Isaac: Great.

Christine: It's kind of annoying because you can't buy it off the shelf, you know, you have to like get it from the dentist.

Isaac: Do you have prescription fluoride?

Christine: Yeah.

Isaac: That's pretty crazy.

Christine: But I've only ever had one cavity in my life.

Isaac: Wow, that's pretty good.

Steve: That's pretty amazing, actually.

Christine: Anyway.

Isaac: Alright guys, we're at time. Thank you so much, Steve, for joining. Pleasure to have you as a guest. Please come back anytime.

Steve: Yeah, this was fun. You guys do a fun podcast. Happy to come back.

Isaac: Thanks a lot, Steve.