0:00:01 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to a very special episode of the Experience-focused Leaders podcast with Dr. Timothy Chou. Timothy consults Fortune 500 companies and serves on the boards of public companies like Teradata. He was one of only three people to ever hold the title of President at a little company known as Oracle.
At Oracle, he led the cloud computing initiative and co-authored the first landmark book, “The End of Software”. On top of all these accomplishments, Dr. Chou has maintained a teaching career at Stanford University for 30-plus years now. And on the side, he founded a couple of startups: Pediatric Moonshot and Bevel Cloud. Dr. Chou, welcome to the pod!
0:00:54 - Timothy Chou
Well, thank you for having me, Alex! This is such a long list of accomplishments!
0:01:00 - Alex Shevelenko
I'm going to have to rethink what we do here. I mean, how do you balance such an interesting portfolio of initiatives? And I'm familiar with your Stanford class. You have everybody from Marc Benioff to the CTO of Amazon there. So you have the publicly listed CEOs coming in. You have your own portfolio of founding companies. I didn't mention it, but we got connected through The Alchemist Accelerator.
So guide us a little bit on how you do all this and yet find the time to mentor schmucks like myself who are trying to build our own businesses. And you are very generous with your time! Because I think that's how I envision myself: being very active throughout my career and still giving back. You're combining it all! Any advice for us, Timothy?
0:02:06 - Timothy Chou
Well, I think there's a skill we all improve on at all times, which is how do you compartmentalize? I learned this when I was on the staff of the guy who ran all of R&D and manufacturing for Tandem Computers. That was the first place I was employed, and he talked a lot about the idea of compartmentalization. Meaning, can you walk into a meeting for an hour, shut everything else out and focus on the thing that's in the compartment, in the meeting, or the moment? So I think it's the skill of being able to do that right. We all learn. Walk in and put your full attention on the thing that you want, and do that deliberately. Shut everything else out and choose to compartmentalize. Because I think it's the noise of everything else that makes things difficult.
0:03:29 - Alex Shevelenko
So it's building on the theme of noise. You have a pattern matching the cloud computing industry from its inception. And I'm pretty fortunate to have been at Salesforce and then later at SuccessFactors. I was a customer of yours. We bought Oracle Cloud Solutions at some point. I'd love to get your perspective on the volume of noise and of innovation in cloud computing. How do you break through all that? How do you see the pace: is it accelerating or decelerating with AI? Because there are very few people in the universe who could understand what's going on now and yet have the perspective of what happened during the inception of the industry.
0:04:23 - Timothy Chou
Yeah, maybe that question/comment has two kinds of directions to it. One is how do you cut through the noise? And I think the noise has just gone up over time for two reasons. One, we have so many new media that didn't even exist 10-20 years ago, whether that's a Slack channel or YouTube. When I started this, tech was just a backroom operation. I mean, who the hell cared about computers? And in the intervening, I've been at this now for almost 40 years. It's now front and center.
People are doing congressional hearings on artificial intelligence like it's part of the fabric of the conversation. It’s pretty much everywhere. So I think you take those two things together. And it is hard for any company to cut through any new idea. It forces you to think. How do you make the story simpler, more targeted, cleaner, and better? Because there's so much more out there in order to do this. I was there at the beginning, right when CIOs wanted to shake the cage that their computers were in.
0:06:02 - Alex Shevelenko
Right.
0:06:06 - Timothy Chou
But the inevitability of this model is based on economics. When I talk to the Stanford kids, I go, “You have to really think about the transitions that we make. They are really economically driven every step of the way.” The movement to microprocessors was an economic drive. The movement to, we'll call it, standardized databases, middleware, is all economically driven.
And in the end, the movement to delivering computing storage or applications as a service is economically driven. Meaning it's far lower cost to be able to do that, both for the builder of the software as well as for the purchaser of the software. We no longer need an entire team to manage security patches or whatever the hell. So the economic movement is afoot. It has been afoot, and it will continue to be afoot.
The thing on the horizon that I see is AI. I think it's too broad a term because sometimes you could just replace the word “software”, and it would have the same meaning. The software does cool stuff. But I think the real thing is this large language model world that has been created. The way I've started to think about it is that LLMs are morally equivalent to microprocessors. Not everybody's gonna be able to build them, they're pretty expensive to build. Will there be hundreds of them? I doubt it is right. So these things are gonna become valuable components to building something new. In the early days of cloud computing, none of us imagined where it would be 15 years later.
I will state that categorically. It's clear to me that the first day Apple introduced the iPhone, nobody could have imagined Uber. Well, maybe the Uber guys imagined Uber. So I don't think any of us can actually imagine what 15 years later is gonna mean in a “host LLM-enabled world”. But I do think that's where we are. We're all maybe in year one, year two or maybe in 15, 20-year journey, going into the future. And I think there's huge opportunities in this, about how you use this technology to change economics. Back to my comment about economics.
0:08:58 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, that's interesting. So let's go back to this. So if I unpack at least my thought process, it's typically three forces coming together that really drive the mega changes. It is economics, first and foremost. Then it is some sort of a technological shift, be it the cloud computing performance with the bandwidth combo or LLMs actually delivering the types of outcomes that work at a cost level that's affordable. And the third one would be some sort of a cultural shift.
And you brought up Uber. Like Uber was “me, economy, service”, the core part together was the phone. We're shifting towards more consumerization of our consumer services, like having a higher quality delivery service. In the first wave of SaaS that you led, I was fortunate to be just learning. It did feel like it was a significantly easier user experience. While it wasn't a breakthrough, there were improvements and that was another driver. It feels in the context of storytelling, kind of communications, and the level of noise.
At least there's a shift in my view from a seller-centric or producer-centric world to a buyer-centric universe. And if you think of LLMs, it empowers me to get the information that I need about a particular service. Whether I'm looking at a RELAYTO 200-page deck, I can instantly reimagine the book experience or some sort of an Intercom support ticket that addresses my needs.
So there are expectations of a consumer that I could self-serve myself at any time in a much more powerful way than I had been before, even in the enterprise context. What's your take on that? Do you agree with the structure that it's not just the economics alone? Maybe it’s the main driver, but it's a combo of economics, technology and some sort of a consumer behavior shift? Or what leads, right? I'm assuming you would say economics leads, right? But maybe there are different patterns in different industries.
0:11:36 - Timothy Chou
I think, in the end, products lead, but it's products that are enabled by a different economic. I see that you could not have done without the fundamentally big economic shift that occurred. I mean just, we'll stay with phones for a minute, I mean until Apple did this right, created a phone which we could all walk around with, which didn't cost a ton of money I mean obviously expensive, but not like super computer, expensive right. Came up with, as we all know, early on, a business model that helped the horizons of the world, you know, subsidize this. So we all went oh, my cost of entry is pretty low, right, without all of that access to a camera, access to GPS information all of that had to happen in a developer environment, which was simple. Right, before you could get an Uber, before you could imagine an Uber, you had to have a fundamental economically driven platform. It was you couldn't have invented Uber without iPhones. It was my contention. Right, it's a requisite to have an economic shift and I'm just using cell phones as an example of this to enable the creation of a product which is different and to your point.
Obviously, and this is the macro point which you know, 40 years ago the economics were so bad. There was only 300, 3,000, 3 million people in the world that had access to this technology. Today, right, it's in essence, you know the whole planet, but that's only because of economics. And now you have to imagine the future of what do you want the future to look like? And software? The beauty of software is we can turn imagination into a product. And the more it’s user experienced, more like Uber, Instagram, more like things that we live in our consumer world, the better off we are in the enterprise.
0:13:51 - Alex Shevelenko
Frankly, right, right but then, to support your point, the reason the Chat GPT drove through the roof in adoption is it was fundamentally free right. So the economics were subsidized for the consumers that allowed that.
0:14:08 - Timothy Chou
For the second, yeah, I was just making comments, it's the cascading of things that have enabled it. Right, if I did not have a mesh Wi-Fi network in my house, if I did not have reasonable internet connected here, if I did not have a laptop computer that didn't cost $10,000, right, if they did not have a cloud computing infrastructure that allowed them to train these things, you could never have gotten here. Right? It's kind of this. We're building on top of the fact that we have made these big economic shifts, you know, in hardware and software and communications, right, that enable successive, right you know, innovations to occur. Chat GPT could not have occurred 30 years ago, just couldn't. I mean the concepts existed. I mean you can go read about neural networks from the late 90s. It's all there, right?
0:15:11 - Alex Shevelenko
My mother was working on these types of system in the Soviet Union and key of the Ukraine Institute of Cybernetics right but it was theory, it was theory.
0:15:21 - Timothy Chou
Right, it's all theory. Yeah, you couldn't actualize it economically. So, the economics breeds the potential to go do. This is really the way I think about it, right.
0:15:33 - Alex Shevelenko
Great. So let's talk about and this is a really great way of framing it. And this brings us back to storytelling. So I wanna quote you from your last Stanford lecture where you give advice to a bunch of you know folks that are probably brighter like you know, if you this was a little bit more after I went to Stanford, but still very relevant to me become a master storyteller. Story is something so critical to letting people, when you try to communicate with them, get in their head. Story is how it gets there. So, and you also kind of captured several different types of stories, which I loved you kind of had.
There's three types of stories men against environment, men against other men or women against other women, obviously, to modernize it. And a human against himself or herself right, and I would probably argue then, like, if the environment is nature, that I would probably kind of add in. The fourth one per our discussion is now like human against the machine. It's sort of been an emerging up and coming trend, right, and we're all everybody's anxious about that. Right, like our machine's gonna take over as well. But tell us about how you're applying storytelling right In your class. What do you see? You have some amazing business storytellers come to that you work with. You've written a bunch of books. You've worked on businesses that support innovative storytelling, so I would love to hear what's your take on any innovations that you're seeing in storytelling. What's remaining the same and will never change and obviously the whole topic is important, right, but that will probably never change. But dive into that a little bit for us.
0:17:31 - Timothy Chou
Yeah, let me explain how I came to spend time in the world of storytelling. So there is a book written I don't know, probably eight, nine years ago, called the Challenger Sale. It's curious. It's obviously a sales book, but it's not one of those where you go. Oh, I was really successful. Let me tell you what I did. They actually went and interviewed a whole bunch of enterprise sales guys and tried to figure out why some were more productive than others. They ended up classing them into five big classes. What they discovered was the group that was 10 times more productive were the challengers. So what the hell is a challenger becomes a question. Right? Well, a challenger teaches insight.
I think these are two very interesting words Teachings and insight. So what the hell is insight? Okay, insight is and this is very prescriptive about what is insight Insight is the gap between where you are today and where you could be. That's the insight. Now it turns out Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs. If you go analyze their speeches, they are structurally identical. They oscillate between where we are today and where we could be. Okay, let's now take it down to something really concrete. Okay, most people know that I have a dream speech, so I'll distill it. I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their heart. Okay, now, take that. Let's get rid of the not part of the story. I have a dream that my children will be judged by the content of their heart. Yeah, Martin, I agree with you.
0:19:38 - Alex Shevelenko
No tension, why?
0:19:39 - Timothy Chou
are we hanging around? Yeah, no tension, no tension. Right Back to storytelling. So what did Martin really have to do? What he really had to do was sell you the not Right, explain to you why not. To judge his children by the color of their skin.
Okay, now let's bring this to our world of high tech. If you sit around with a group of salespeople, they'll all agree with you right away. I said how many times you've been in a meeting where you go in and you deliver your pitch deck and you walk out and everybody in the room is going yeah, right, yeah. You fist, bump your VP of sales or your CRO and you go we got this one Right. And then I go, what happens next? And most of the people who are honest will say we never hear from them. It's crickets. So you go. Well, why is that? Well, what's happened here is you have delivered the. My baby is beautiful speech. That's what I call it Right, right. And all they have done because we've all been taught to do this relate to whatever. Here's why I'm cheaper, better, faster. I'm going to keep repeating my cheaper, better, faster story, but the reality is all they're saying to you when they fist. They're saying great job, Alex, is they go? I agree you think your baby is beautiful. I agree with you Right the number one competitor to any venture and any new product is not some other company.
It's a status quo. It's why don't I just keep doing what I do today? And the biggest challenge, the challenge here has, is explaining to you why today, if you keep doing this, it will not work. You have to sell the not, so now let's bring it. You spent time at Salesforce. Let's bring it to the world of Salesforce. You remember what the first logo looked like?
0:21:52 - Alex Shevelenko
Absolutely no software. No software Right yeah.
0:21:57 - Timothy Chou
Well, of course we all know there's software in there. What was Mark really trying to say? What he was really trying to say is yeah, hey, the way you buy software today, up front license things that's stupid, that's wrong, right. The years it takes you to implement your software, that's wrong. The way you have to hire DBAs to go implement, that's wrong. Selling the not I mean, that's up front Right. No, yeah, software Was the key, right. Sandisk. I always like to use them. I've never met their founders, but if you look at the word sandisk, it means not disk. Most people know what sandisk sells is, you know, non-volatile memory.
0:22:48 - Alex Shevelenko
Get rid of occasional disk, right.
0:22:52 - Timothy Chou
So selling the not is the key, and this is where you tie directly to storytelling. So if you think about storytelling and you just quoted it, I said, look, there's only and I'm just quoting people who work in storytelling there are only three kinds of stories: man versus man, man versus nature, man versus himself. Watch Netflix tonight or Hulu or whatever, you'll see it over and over again. It's the same story Right Now, and you already touched on it. Why is that story interesting to all of us? Because there's a conflict in it. Without the conflict, right, little Red Riding Hood was, you know, walking down and got home and, you know, cook dinner, well, none of us would have repeated the story. Right, you had to have a big back, right. So that conflict is identical to the not meaning. You are telling a story where you are intentionally creating conflict between where you are today and where you could be, and why, today, staying with the status quo is not the right thing to do, and I think that's what's so hard. I mean it's hard for all of us.
I mean, I've been working on a new venture. We are calling this the pediatric moonshot, and one of the areas that we are working in is, in essence, how to build next generation AI applications in medicine. And we know one of the giant challenges in medicine is we cannot do it. We cannot do it in the same way. We built chat GPT, meaning we can't go centralize all the data, centralize the training, centralize the delivery which is chat GPT any of the work we've done today. Why not? Because the data is way as bigger. What about data privacy? And you want to deliver to the point of care? Now, listen, I just explained to you really quickly what we're trying to do today. To do AI for medicine, for medical imaging, is never going to work. Now, if we're right and I'd say we're right there'll be a group of people who will show up and go. You know, I agree with you. You must know the answer to the question of how do you do distributed learning, decentralized, federated learning. I don't even have to say anything.
0:25:32 - Alex Shevelenko
Basically, you have to out educate about the problem. This is what I'm hearing Exactly.
0:25:38 - Timothy Chou
And it's really interesting and tell it by the stories Tell it by the stories, yeah, well, and I think, the stories.
0:25:46 - Alex Shevelenko
So we've been, we've been playing around with this ourselves, right. Actually, by the way, I sat next to the guy who designed the no no no, the kind of the.
Buster's logo, whatever you want to call it, and so it's interesting. You know, maybe you could guide us on this where, like we and we at some point because we're building a successor to the PDF we even had it like no to PDF and we could have copied that Salesforce playbook and it was fun, but in reality we actually PDF as an input. For us, it was sort of a confusing Like it's and it's sort of. This challenge is like it sounds like it's not like that simple, like oh, just, we are the opposite of something. Right, you really need to still continue to pick stories and make them real and bring them to life and tell a story of a customer, maybe that your listener would resonate, and how that customer is having the problem. Right, it's not just some sort of abstract story, right, like when Michael, sorry, go ahead.
0:26:50 - Timothy Chou
I think I agree it's not simple to do this. I mean, I'm not trying to say it simple. In fact, it's oftentimes the most difficult. Because, back to culture, we've all been trained to do the elevator pitch. I'm not doing an elevator pitch in any conventional sense of the word, so I think it's practicing the fine art of right.
Who are you talking to? And why are you telling them that what they're doing today is never going to work? And what substantive justification do you have? Because you could just say, well, it is not gonna work. Okay, fine, but why is it not gonna work? How do I convince you that your path you're on is not going to work?
And I think the more you can figure out what that is, the more you can now encapsulate it, maybe one day into a logo, maybe one day into the name of a company. That's the ultimate distillation of this. But I think the pursuit of trying to understand yourself, as you're talking to, and who's listening right, right To this is the key to this. Is like and don't be afraid, I think, a lot of people, because they go. Well, you're offending the customer, you're telling them that they're stupid, which, in principle, back. You know, I have a young company, um-nitsa, and I was just coaching them on the same thing. So they just did a entire pitch at Gartner called why managing enterprise technology sucks Right. What's wrong with it? It it's. I think that's why it's hard, because you say You're calling somebody else's baby ugly.
Basically is fundamentally you are you are indeed, but if you're right and this happened, I heard about it secondhand, but in the audience, in this case the CIOs, many of them when they said well, is that true for you? Yeah, you, you have put words to my frustration Salesforce, you didn't need to find a whole lot of people to go. Do you really hate paying like a million dollars upfront and then paying 22% a year for support? Do you really hate how long it takes to? You know implement? You know CRM from Siebel? Do you hate it doesn't take a whole lot of time that a group not everybody, but a group of people will go? You're right, I agree with you. It sucks. The what we're doing today sucks, and therefore, if you're telling me all this, you must have an answer, right?
0:29:39 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, well, it's fascinating. We've gone on a journey at RELAYTO, and it sort of connects to the storytelling of really explaining to a communicator the person that has packaged something and then sends it over to why what they're doing is not taking into consideration the consumption experience of their audience, right? So we're talking about the same thing, right, presentations. You can think about presentation being delivered in person. If the person doesn't know how to tell a story in person, that there's all sorts of problems. But we live increasingly in the world where there's a lot of asynchronous communications, right, and the books are just as long as they've ever been, but our capacity to read long form content and digest it has declined in the sort of bombarded world that we live in. And so what we've noticed is that there's this really tragic disconnect, right, really brilliant people working of your level of brilliance, right, phds and et cetera right, are unfortunately not as versed in storytelling as you are, and so they put their hearts, their minds into producing some kind of content that needs to be successful, and for that to be successful, it needs to be distributed and communicated, and they put zero amount of time in thinking through or emoting to what would be the consumption experience of their audience. Right, sometimes you get lucky, right, and they're experts. Sometimes consumer tech is way more sophisticated about that than we would want it to be because it's selling us, you know, opioids for our minds and attention. But this feels like a tragedy, and particularly in the AI world they're like almost feels like, hey, if we can't help people digest complex information, we're gonna delegate that to machines and a few super humans that will gonna be running these machines and we'll just get dumber and dumber and dumber at processing this complexity and that feels really sad. So this is the challenge that we're doing you're trying to tackle, and I guess the part that we found I'm curious what your feedback is the only way you could really easily quickly breakthrough supports your theory.
You say, hey, here's your PDF. Now I'm gonna pretend like I'm receiving this PDF and I'm gonna try to read it, and then I show people oh well, this is my default browser in Adobe the way they have my PDF look so it shrinks. You know, from a full page it now looks like it's 60% of that and most people never click out. And if, by some reason, I see that it has like different pages, but I can't click into page 24 because there's no navigation. That's obvious in there. And if I am on page 24, I'm totally lost of the context of where I am because there's no other markers. And if I click in a video, I live at your PDF because I now go to YouTube where I'm gonna be delighted by the latest podcast episodes of experience, focus, leaders or whatever I'm interested in.
And so people get distracted and never complete these content unless they're incredibly motivated, unless they're just like off the charts, need to read it, in which case you know great, how often does that happen? So when we do that, people go oh, oh, yeah, I didn't never thought of it, but I just wonder, like what's it in our nature that we just care about outputs and not necessarily the audience, ability to process it right, ability to understand it, ability to take that understanding and act on it, and act on it now, while it's hot, versus hopefully act on it or remember it some other time. And this is just sophisticated marketers, sophisticated communicators are committing what seems like blunders left and right. So I'm curious, because you were advocating for storytelling have you seen progress in our ability to think through storytelling, communications, lending the messages, or are we kind of meandering forever and ever, because we're too me-centric and not enough audience-centric.
0:34:25 - Timothy Chou
I don't think anybody's made progress on storytelling.
0:34:29 - Alex Shevelenko
You know.
0:34:30 - Timothy Chou
Go look at anybody's website today I don't care who it is, and you know 99 out of 100, you're gonna see my baby is beautiful pitch. It's just. It's so counter cultural right To think this way that it's unique. Still I don't think most people we're all trained on it. What's your elevator pitch? Give me your three slide presentation. Believe me, most people's three slide presentations are my baby is beautiful speech. Nobody wants to leave.
0:35:04 - Alex Shevelenko
This is my baby is beautiful and I have a really smart team.
0:35:09 - Timothy Chou
Oh yeah, let's add that one, that's slide four, and we're just geniuses.
Yeah, we're not, according to our moms. Yeah, yeah, you know we won't spend our three slides making sure you understand how bad the problem is. We don't do that. It's just culturally not there and I think that's why it's hard. It's hard for people. It's not.
I go back, hire any CMO. You know what are they going to do they're going to. Their first question will be so what's the elevator pitch, Alex? What's the value prop? What's the value prop? You know and I think it just. I know, I mean, it's not. I've even seen it myself. It's not. You are so enamored with what you do that you are so eager to spend all your time talking about what you do, because what you do is cool, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it Right. So you want to talk about your baby. That's exactly what you want to do, and it's so hard to have the discipline to back off and try to figure out. Well, what's the story about? Why they should stop doing what they are doing today? I'm not going to tell you what you should do in the future. Remember I made the comment about Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King's real job was convincing you to not judge his kids by the color of their skin. That was the job. Selling the knot was the job.
0:36:47 - Alex Shevelenko
It wasn't like paving the way.
0:36:49 - Timothy Chou
We are the disruptor of this where that it's much more pre that to establish a sound footing for what the future could be, but by the way means you have to have some comprehension of what the challenges are today, out there, right, people you're trying to talk to. Who is that, what is the challenge they're facing? And how, with your insight, can you help them? To me, that's the key. If you get that. It's not easy I go back to this is not easy, it's not easy.
0:37:32 - Alex Shevelenko
And I'll give a shout out to our, to our friends at Salesforce so we're very fortunate to to be supporting them with RELAYTO and they it's just a pleasure to see how they think about storytelling at an organization with such a degree of complexity. So and this is this is public, so we're happy to share, so they, they can have a large partner ecosystem, and so they built something that's nonlinear storytelling device. We powered and help the you choose. Hey, first of all, what kind of a partner are you? Right? Because you have. You can be ISV or reseller, et cetera. Click one and then, great, you know who are you at that partner, your business leader? Are you marketing leader? Are you this great?
Next level, what's the problem that you have right and only, and then you get into one magic piece. Once you pick that, you're the, you've got the persona, you got the problem they care about. You drill into that. You could still look around and find other problems and other areas, but it sounds so obvious, sounds so remarkably obvious, and I know that we have great customers and you know other great verse very few. Start was that perspective in mind and create that level of experience. You know it's enabled. Now, right, like there's people like us.
There's other solutions for trying to go nonlinear in the storytelling, but to your point, it's hard, and even you know I'm it's easy to judge from a hype above. Like I, your baby is always harder to. To adapt to it like to, it takes deliberate intention to really walk the mile in the shoes of your customer. If they're high heels, they're high heels. If they're sneakers, they're sneakers. You have to really adjust to that. And it feels like people almost run, like run out of time for that step Right, whereas it's it should be the first step, right, it's like it's almost like you know how people go.
You know, put this presentation. I'm going to work all night on the presentation and then I'm going to show up in your class and I'm going to deliver this thing and I'm going to be totally tired. I never practiced the presentation, but hey, the slides are there, the slides are there. So then you go up up on these slides desperately. It feels like this is the case in some presentations, but more sadly, it's the case in actually more elaborate communications, right, whether it's a website or or decks and so on. Who are you seeing that's innovating in this area outside of Apple and maybe Salesforce, like my example? Who who is, who is you know where's the innovation happening in business? Or is it like, do we really need to look at other, other mediums, other parts of society where there is more openness to connecting to the audience?
0:40:40 - Timothy Chou
Well, I think you know my point of view is progressively what we think of as consumer, enterprise or intermingling, because we are the same humans that watch Netflix by day and, you know, sit in a vice president, or, by night, sit at a desk and as as a vice president and a bank. So, you know, I feel like the more we learn about how this is done, well, let's call it in Hollywood and adapt and learn some of these techniques. That's to all of our advantage, right? I mean story. You know I tell people, look, here's another basics of story. Stories have person place and time. They'll have person place and time.
You look at any of our, you know these customer reference stories. First of all, it's usually very vague. Who the hell the customer is? You know? Oh, a leading, whatever. Blah, blah, blah. Where did this happen? I don't know last year, yes, today.
And if you read them, they look like happy, happy, happy. They're like oh, I was walking down the street I discovered this cool technology is changed my life. Like what? What an exciting movie. You know what? As a boring movie. In fact, anybody sat on reference calls. They all know what the reference call looks like is the guy asked the question, or the woman asked a question. So what problems did you run into in making this decision? That's all the questions. The questions have nothing to do with oh, are you happy? It's like obvious that they're happy with the decision. So you know, if your story would not have make a good movie, or or even an episode, and you don't have a story, and I, I think we're not very good at this yet we don't have. We use words like persona. I agree, right, but you know that I think we do it more from a segmentation point of view, right, it's not a it's not a concrete person, right yeah.
It's not Alex or it's not Tim, right, and I think we could learn a lot of lessons from how they think about things. What's a good script that would make it on to Apple TV? I think those criteria are not a whole lot different than what we're talking about, right and the more story is like.
0:43:19 - Alex Shevelenko
The story is like let's, let's kind of rework it right, like so an interesting business story would be you know, put a woman in the jungle Right, have a tiger running after her, then she escapes the tiger, then there's a, you know, huge flood. She escapes the flood and then there is something else. She escapes that. So this, like you want to have this cascade of challenges and things you expected maybe, but things a lot of that you didn't expect, and just when you are about to to to have a successful escape, another dropdown right, and so that's that oscillation is what you're you're trying to discover. So it's not like problem solution, results thing, right, it's like problem solution, problem solution, problem solution, problem solution, big problem just when we thought everything was perfect and we went live, solution, and then, oh, okay, here's the, here's the actual outcomes at the end of the day, and that's like happily ever after, which we do want right, like to some degree, but what you're saying is that happily ever after. It's not credible at all If you don't have that oscillation.
0:44:37 - Timothy Chou
You're not. You know this is like going. We all know how most movies and if you go to the end and show the last five minutes, you go. That's the story. That's an interesting right.
The real question is what captures? I say this to be like oh look, the real challenge when you go explain, RELAYTO or anything to somebody is how much can they tell the story to someone else. It's the real challenge. It's the person not in the room when you were presenting the person not in the room. What are they saying to that person not in the room?
And so how do you program that, so to speak? Well, we all got programmed with little red writing hood and lots of stories so that we can tell the story of, you know, little red rock, any of these. And so that's really the story of squid game, right? Why can I tell you that story? Right, because they boiled it down and they communicate to me. So then I can go. Alex, let me tell you the story of squid game. Here's what it means, here's how it works. I can't, maybe I can't tell you all the detail, like who died in the first episode verse, second episode. I certainly can tell you why, what the squid game storyline is and you can repeat it to somebody and you can go oh wow, that sounds really kind of interesting. Maybe I'll go watch squid games. It's well, that's interesting.
0:46:09 - Alex Shevelenko
So so switching to business directions? Right like, so they're. We don't have as much time as let's say whatever is the Netflix, the first and greatest installment, right to to go deep into the narratives. So how do you combine the essence of the story? Was the richness? Right like because there's a time limit?
0:46:38 - Timothy Chou
right is there a trailer. You just described a trailer.
0:46:43 - Alex Shevelenko
You just described every idea needs a trailer is basically what you're saying is every idea needs a trailer.
0:46:49 - Timothy Chou
I've never sat down and talked to him, but I would guess that every movie that comes out, there's a tremendous amount of time spent on what the trailer is. And it's a trailer one minute or three minutes. You know how many. We all know Netflix pioneered this, you know. You flip through the, through the different shows, and they just automatically play a. I don't even think it's 32nd trailer, right? So trailers are the moral analog. They've had to figure this out. How do I get you in less than a minute to go?
0:47:25 - Alex Shevelenko
invested enough to go deeper.
0:47:27 - Timothy Chou
I'm going to hit. I'm going to hit the play button to use that whole analog. They spent a lot of time on that and I think that's just the same thing. Here is what, what's the trailer for? RELAYTO? What's the 30 seconds? But what's the one minute? Same thing. And, believe me, if the story is just, they go happily ever after into the sunset. We all go next. I mean, just go be a student of those. You see it all the time. There's a conflict. You see the conflict. You may not understand who the characters are exactly, but you see the conflict. You see partial resolution of conflict, enough that you go kind of kind of interesting. I wonder what their masters at it. They're the best at it of any of us, right?
0:48:19 - Alex Shevelenko
So let's talk about who is who. Who could be the hero of a, of a story in the technology world. I have a feeling that when people say who's the hero, they go I'm the hero, right, or my technology is the hero, and obviously that's kind of the natural default. You're more sophisticated people go well, no, you, the customer, you're the hero and you know there's maybe different types of customers, right, for example, we have a creator and the consumer. They're both, you know, heroes to some degree, that we're helping them, you know, for the creator to create the best work of their life, for consumer to dig into that difficult content and take something away from it and make it make it theirs.
And it took me a while to kind of get away with that. You know, little, little weird. We're just like a little, you know, robin to the, to the, to the super, super superman, batman, persona of the customer. But what's your take on that Like, do you do cuss to companies, get that Is or is it you, mostly here, I, you know our technology is the hero that saves the day, type of things. What's your pattern?
0:49:39 - Timothy Chou
Just back it up. Nobody's doing storytelling, Really nobody.
0:49:44 - Alex Shevelenko
So we're ready. We're ready like a couple steps ahead of the of the crowd in this.
0:49:49 - Timothy Chou
Nobody's doing it, nobody's. I mean, obviously I'm being excessive here, but you know I go. Everybody's been trained to do the one thing, which is come up with the tag line. This is another variation of this right. Come up with the customer journey. Come up with. You know, our, our, oh, our, you know what, what words we're going to buy on Google. It's all the same thing, which is, I'm trying to figure out how to tell you my baby's beautiful and my baby's beautiful has zero conflict in it, by the way. None, none whatsoever.
That's fascinating, and if there is no conflict, there is no story. Back to that there is none, there's no story. Nobody cares and nobody does what I'm talking about.
0:50:42 - Alex Shevelenko
Nobody, nobody like I mean. You interview some amazing business leaders. Do you find that they also default to the mean? I mean, I'd say Mark Benioff, right, Like you've, you've interviewed it.
0:50:55 - Timothy Chou
Well, Mark, obviously we, we used him as the example of what. But you know, and obviously I said Steve Jobs speeches look this way. But at the end of the day, you know it's a rare. I mean you mentioned Alchemist. I mean I sit down with, I mean I just sat down with a young company. He does not start the pitch out talking about what's broken today. He tells me about how, you know, he can improve restaurant. You know productivity and whatnot. I mean feature function, benefit. We all got taught this. This is so counterintuitive to me. It's so hard for people.
0:51:40 - Alex Shevelenko
And do you see that the the more complex the narrative, the more complex the problem, the more important the storytelling becomes. Or at some point you say, hey well, this is so complex, you only need the experts. And the technical experts don't need the quote. Unquote, bs right, they don't need the stories, they think they're the experts. So you give them the facts. You know, you've. You're obviously on the boards of companies. There's a very complex solution. So do you see any difference between the complexity level and the need for?
0:52:16 - Timothy Chou
storytelling. I think it's, you know. Just go back to the analogs. I mean, you know, are there complex movies with complex storylines? I mean, openheimer just used that in recent time. Fairly complex story, fairly complex storyline, right, frankly, much more complex than Barbie. Just use the other one, right? So are the techniques used in both identical? I don't think so. They're not. They're not identical, right. Different because they are different stories, one fairly simple, the other fairly complex. But are the techniques used by the movie maker, by the producer, by the script writer? I could venture to guess that some of those fundamental things we talked about conflict, ebb and flow, right?
0:53:13 - Alex Shevelenko
Contrast there's, there, there's contrast.
0:53:16 - Timothy Chou
You see, you go dissect those two movies and you will see it. We all know those. Act one, act two, act three this is classic playwriting. It has the same thing, right. Act one, you set up the characters. Act two, you set up the conflict. Act three, you resolve the conflict. Right, I never. You know, I got a lot of degrees and only took two liberal arts classes in my entire time, one history class and one English class. But I somewhat regret this because, like, there's a lot of really interesting things when you start to dissect this, yeah, how are the? Why are some stories better than others? We this is now we're getting much deeper into the question Some are better, obviously. Why, I don't know.
0:54:05 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I think, like speaking of science and liberal arts intersection, I mean, I think in a conscious of time, but I think this is a whole other topic because there's now increasingly more and more evidence, whether it's in behavioral science. Then there's the Stanford faculty that you know I've been delighted to have, like Jennifer Aker at the business school, who talks and writes and does research on storytelling and using humor and all these things that seem like very opposite of you know conventional business, you know focus, but they're actually providing evidence that this is what works. Right, like if you're laughing, you're more open to information. Right, if you're listening to a story, you're you're. The story takes you on a journey. Right, and you're you're. It's a.
It's a shortcut to how we were trained from you know, ions ago to communicate with our peers around the fire, and so this is fascinating connections of neuroscience, behavioral science, you know, evolutionary biology is all coming together.
So for anybody listening who comes from scientific, entrepreneurial or background, you know. Thank you so much, Timothy, for you know opening up this world, and I think somebody was your experience and your, your technical credentials to say that this, this is your spending so much time on storytelling, to focus that in some of your Stanford class and to spend this podcast was us diving into that. It's been a treat and a strong validation that it's a worthy cause to get this right for your career, for your company, for your personal life. And so storytelling rocks in business and in life is sort of the summary of this podcast, Timothy. Where can people find you? How can they be a resource to multiple projects that you have?
0:56:01 - Timothy Chou
So two things, just thanks for that. One, Obviously, I'm on LinkedIn and people are interested in reach out, connect. The other is, you know, I came out of retirement three years ago to launch what we call the pediatric moonshot, which is to reduce healthcare inequity, lower cost and improve patient outcomes for children locally, rurally and globally. And how are we going to do that? We're going to create privacy preserving, real time applications based on access to data in all 1 million healthcare machines in all 500 children's hospitals in the world. And, if they're interested in learning more, wwwpediatricmoonshotcom. We already have opened up a YouTube channel. We actually have a Spotify playlist. There's a series of podcasts by leading pediatric experts that we just are going to release like seven of these in the next couple of weeks. So, yeah, if you're interested, check in. Check on that. We at least. For me, it's my last great project.
0:57:21 - Alex Shevelenko
Amazing, Well, so inspiring to hear about this project, your previous projects and your lessons learned that you've shared not just with Stanford students, but with this whole audience here and experienced focus leaders. Thank you, Timothy.