S 02 | Ep 45 The 1,000-Yard Stare: How Near-Death Rewrites Success

See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 45 The 1,000-Yard Stare: How Near-Death Rewrites Success.  

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I would love to have started in the Cybertruck.

We could have driven around the Cybertruck and had AI.

Yeah, well, you could tell us about it.

All right, so I'm going to click the record button.

I sort of did it already.

You see it right there?

Yeah.

Okay, so...

So are you valued over a billion before it gets rolling?

Is that right?

Our last round that was in 21 was a pre-money of$1.5 billion post like 1.2.

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Now, given the current state of the market, who knows what the valuation of the business is, but yeah.

We'll just say you're a unicorn without going into details.

Exactly.

Okay.

And then we'll probably start with a personal story a little bit, and then we'll dive into that.

Does that sound like a plan?

All right.

I'm going to hit clap, and then when I hit clap, that means we're started.

Perfect.

Welcome to Experience Focused Leaders.

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I'm delighted to bring to you the one, the only Ted Elliott.

Ted is a CEO of Capado since October 2018, leading DevOps platform, started in the Salesforce ecosystem and now is another unicorn.

He is a successful previous CEO of an exited company, JobScience, and he has one of the most interesting personal journeys

What can a human go through and build a CEO at the same time?

Ted, welcome to the pod.

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Thanks a lot.

Thanks for having me.

Well, Ted, we'll get to AI and how are you using AI both to transform your business, find major growth areas,

how to use it to run your own leadership self-improvement capabilities.

But I think what nobody has really been through that I know of is a major health crisis, both for yourself and your spouse.

While running this, you know, hyper growth promising company.

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Tell us that story so that, so the audience could understand the men behind the zoom.

Yeah.

So I think it's been about six years, but when I sold job science in 2018, you know,

I looked at my bank account.

I was like, oh my God, when are they coming to take it away from me?

This must be a mistake.

And I was kind of going out and having fun.

And I was like, life can't be like this.

It's way too easy.

And my wife came home after taking the kids to a Taylor Swift concert.

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It was her birthday.

It was Mother's Day.

And she said, geez, my back is really hurting.

And I said, can you tell me a little about what's going on?

And I typed into Google what she was describing.

And I said, I think you're having a heart attack.

She said, what?

I go, well, I just took all your symptoms and I typed them in Google.

And it says, these are the symptoms of a female having a heart attack.

So I said, I think before you collapse, we should probably get in the car and go to the hospital.

And so we were driving to the hospital and she started to look really bad.

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So I made sort of a split decision to pull into the fire station in Tiburon, California,

because I thought they could sort of stabilize her.

And she had a heart attack and she survived it.

And I remember coming home to explain to my two young daughters that their mom was in the hospital because she just had a heart

attack.

And my younger one said, I'm really worried about you, dad.

I was like, I'm fine.

Don't worry.

Well, dad, my friend's father just died last week because he got colon cancer and I'm concerned about you.

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And I'm like, I'm fine.

Don't worry about me.

And so for the next like three or four months um five months after that i just kept on getting a worse and worse

stomach ache um and i remember i went to go see the doctor and he said do you drink a lot and i said

well you know i sold my company i have a lot of free time on my hands um he goes well how much did

you just drink in the last three days i'm like why is it this special event up in the woods for this camp i'm

not allowed to talk about online

Um that alex jones follows all the time uh and uh and i think i think we can we can guess what that is

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those of us and they didn't know and i i think i probably drank you know a gallon and a half of bourbon while

i was making hamburgers with the chairman of mcdonald's and um and and so uh he's like well let's do a scan on your

liver and they came back and said you know you need to stop drinking like

And so I stopped drinking and I went to Spain to go talk to one of our board members.

And founders and I got sicker and sicker.

And then I went to Mardi Gras and I got sicker.

So I finally decided after that test for colon cancer, I'd been sitting by my toilet for eight months.

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I was going to take the test.

I took the test and I was convinced there was going to be no problems,

but I got a call pretty much like within two days of taking the test from my gastroenterologist saying,

we'd like you to come in for a colonoscopy like very quickly.

And I figured, Oh, it's a nothing burger.

Don't worry about it.

I didn't realize at the time they knew a lot more than I knew.

Right.

And I woke up from the colonoscopy and they said, you should get your affairs in order.

And I was like, what do you mean I should get my affairs in order?

And they said, well, you have a six and a half centimeter tumor and we don't know how far it's spread into your lymph

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nodes, but it does not look good.

And I was like, hold on.

I just sold my company.

I just got this job as CEO of a new company.

And we're up off the races.

Like this isn't, this isn't, this isn't happening.

Like, are you kidding me?

And, and so I, I think I've walked around for a day crying with my dog.

I would go for dog walks and just start crying.

And I was like, I can't believe this has happened.

My wife is sick.

I'm sick.

Are you freaking kidding me?

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And then I decided to go sailing, do a sailboat race.

And then my friend who had had cancer before said, because it was funny, I had two primary health care insurance policies.

And in the United States, unfortunately, that's a bad thing because they were both arguing who should pay for the CAT scan.

And my friend's like, why don't you just go to the ER and they'll give you a CAT scan?

And I was like, so I went and did the sailboat race, got off the boat, called my wife, and said,

can you take me to the emergency room?

She's like, what's wrong?

I'm like, I need to get a CAT scan.

I need to know how bad this is.

And I went to the ER and said, hey, they found a tumor in me, and I don't feel right.

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I need a CAT scan.

They're like, OK.

Instantaneously got the CAT scan.

And they came back and said, hey, good news, it hasn't spread, but you need to get a plan.

So I got to UCSF, MD Anderson, Sloan Kettering all in about eight days.

I called a guy we know in common whose wife is a biostatistician.

And I was like, hospitals to go to.

And then I did this little test where I would take a piece of Kleenex and I would go to the bathroom of each

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hospital and rub the Kleenex on the ground.

And it was dirty.

I was like, I don't care how great of a hospital this is.

I can't be treated here because I determined like the main way I was going to die was going to be infection.

Um and that if i could if people cared about their public bathrooms being clean they probably cared about the rest of the facility

being clean and uh and so i ended up getting treated md anderson but it was a very odd first board meeting or second

board meeting of ceo where um they're like okay well what's going on i'm like i got some good news and some bad news

right and they're like well like what's what's the what's the good news i'm like oh we just won this really big company can't

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name it on this call massive uh search engine company uh

They can pick anything.

They picked our software.

And they're like, well, what's the bad news?

I'm like, well, right now it's taking like six months to fully implement the product.

I might not be here for the implementation to be finished.

And they're like, why would you be here?

I'm like, well, I just got diagnosed with like stage three colorectal cancer and I might not make it.

And so I was like, I think we should probably hire a headhunter to start searching for a new CEO.

But I go, listen,

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I would rather be focused on growing this company than on something I have no control over.

Because I started to realize when you're sick that we control nothing.

We have control over absolutely nothing.

We can influence things, but we can't control anything.

And so I was like, I'm super motivated.

I'm more motivated to accomplish something right now than I've ever been in my life.

So I like to keep going.

And I did that.

And I had a great team around me.

That supported me and didn't tell me that i looked like i was dying when i was getting chemo and radiation and surgeries and all

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these things and so we just plugged through and honestly working allowed it to go by so quickly

That i can't even remember sick right all i remember is that when i was really sick and they would stick me with a needle

it didn't hurt it didn't hurt at all i was like hey you want to sit you want to cut off my arm if

that's what it's going to take to live go for it right um and the minute that they told me i was going to make

it and i was in good shape and things were looking great all of a sudden when they'd stick me with a needle it

freaking hurt again Right.

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And so I think that I like to say that I was at my healthiest mental state when I was at my sickest physical

state.

And it's a fight every day to get back to that sort of healthy mental state.

What I mean by healthy mental state is when we accept we don't control anything and we want to live our best life.

We tend to deprioritize pettiness and things that don't really matter.

And as we get well physically and we start using money as a measure of success, things start to get really petty.

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We go external.

We go immediately external, right?

We're like, you're doing what?

You're taking that couch that I wanted when our parents gave us certain things.

I'm going to have war of the worlds over something that doesn't matter.

And so my father ended up dying a couple of years later.

And I had an argument with him three days before he died about a family matter.

And he didn't die.

I went to London and I got a phone call while I was at lunch.

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Hey, your dad just fell down the street.

You need to come back to the United States.

And I realized my last conversation I had with him was about something that was petty.

Right.

And so all of a sudden I was like, oh, my God,

I've got to figure out some way to bring myself back to when I was sick and live life like everyday matters as opposed

to living life like material things matter.

Right.

And it's really, really hard because we are taught our entire life to measure things in dollars or euros or

Physical items or the number of items that you've collected dude when you're dying you can't be buried with any of that stuff so you

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start focusing on like what can I actually achieve how can I have an impact what can I influence and we don't control anything

so that's a game in itself but anyway so that's a little about the health thing and I think it's completely changed me as a person

but I have to keep going back to the well of being physically sick and I'll tell you you know they cut

A lot of parts of my body so i get to relive the feeling of being sick a lot um i'm in pain probably

like 40 percent of the week right well and and when i'm in pain i'm always like wow i'm still here god's just reminding

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me or whoever whoever's just reminding them i'm still here you know and yeah looking at pain as a reminder

Of being of being alive almost right now versus taking this for granted.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I can tell you when you're hovering over your body while they're operating on you for nine hours and you're looking at the room

from outside your body, which is a weird experience that I sort of think I had, but I'm not sure I had.

You know, you know, I'll tell you one horrible story.

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So my daughter, who at the time I think was eight or nine,

Comes into my bedroom the night before I'm supposed to go to surgery at MD Anderson crying.

And I'm like, what's wrong?

She said, I had a nightmare that our whole family died.

I'm like, oh my God.

So I'm driving her to school the next day before I'm going to get on an airplane to fly to Houston to have a nine

hour surgery.

And she looks over at me and she goes, dad, I got to be honest with you.

Everyone in our family didn't die in my dream.

Only you died.

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And I was like, fuck.

Sorry, you're going to have to explain that out.

Right.

And I was like, what do you mean?

Only I died.

And she goes, well, it turns out that the doctor cut out the wrong part of you in my nightmare and you died.

And I was like, well, good news.

I'm going to the head of colorectal surgery at the number one cancer center in the world.

And I'm pretty sure of all the things that are going to happen.

He's probably not to cut the wrong part out.

And she goes, thank God that means so much.

And I know I will see you in a week when I come back from this.

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And, uh, Um oh my God I was convinced from that point over that was last time I ever seen my daughter I remember them putting

this once you plant the negative thought it doesn't matter how much you did right in the future this is it that's how I'm

going to see my family I'm going down to the count

And I remember I'm on the journey and they're putting the needle in my arm to start the surgery.

And I wake up like eight hours later and I see the clock.

I'm like, did I make it?

And the guy's like, what do you mean?

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Did you make it?

I'm like, am I alive?

Or is this like the afterlife?

It's like you made it.

And I was like, oh, thank God she was wrong.

So, I mean, you have to be able to laugh about stuff like that.

Otherwise you cry.

And I probably like have a half dozen stories of that experience.

Where what I realize is men are very hesitant to talk about their poop.

Okay.

They're very hesitant to talk about their colon health.

And it turns out killing more of us at a younger age than ever before.

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I think I was 47 when I got it.

And it's really important that we get comfortable with stuff that's uncomfortable.

Maybe that's a lesson for life, not just for colons.

You have to get really comfortable with uncomfortable so that you don't end up not taking the test.

Right.

So I think that that would be,

A little sort of health history of Ted Elliott exposed the world, but boy, it's made my life.

It makes food taste better.

It makes looking up at the sky and seeing that it's blue taste better.

It makes talking to people better.

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I paid for it.

I'm going to use it.

What struck me, Ted, is you're able to talk about things fearlessly that normally would be

You know non-conventional or maybe you would only talk to someone after you had a few drinks in a very kind of uh relaxed

atmosphere i don't get to drink anymore and and you don't get to drink anymore but but in the process of talking about what

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struck me when we were you know catching up

A few weeks ago, just the zest that you have for life and for the future and innovating.

Because if somebody just heard that story...

I'm not sure they would guess that you would be like fired up to the wazoo about the latest ways to use AI to change

everything from your business to your personal life, that you've shifted the company location, that you're just doing all these things,

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like massive amount of change.

And you're embracing it and you're just loving it.

And maybe that's a classical entrepreneurial thing.

Trait that you've had in your previous company as well.

But I'm curious, but it strikes me that there's something that you're just, I got nothing to lose.

I've been through the worst.

I'm going to make the most of whatever is there.

Is that kind of, did I read that?

I think that there's a big piece of that.

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I call it denial is not just a river in Egypt.

And so part of the way I'm able to get through cancer and part of the way that I'm able to sort of get

through Uh pain that i have is to be in denial that anything is wrong you can just plug through and one of the easiest

ways to be in denial is to keep yourself so busy with stuff that's exciting that you're always learning my dad who i worked

with for 25 years said to me you know as long as you're learning you're growing like he was 80 years old when he

told me this and

And I was like, wow, that is a really interesting concept.

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As long as you're learning, you're growing.

And so to me, I look at AI and I look at business and I look at opportunity and I see it as a chance

to learn.

Like right now, we just hired 30 kids last week.

They've come in and were part of an intern program.

I just taught them a class on AI and I had each of them stand up for two minutes while I had a stopwatch

from sailing and it was counting down a minute countdown.

And tell me what they want to learn in the next six weeks.

And then we took that and we dropped into an AI model to build them a plan.

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And what I got to learn was what these 30 kids all want to accomplish this summer.

I dropped that into a notebook LM that turned into a video that I shared with the management team and said, okay,

here's what they've signed up for.

What is it we want from them?

Right.

And to me, that was this process of learning about people.

And I love being around young kids because they don't know what they can't do.

Yeah, one of the stories you brought up to me is that you had this difficult project,

and you gave it to either a new hire or an intern.

I don't remember now.

And, you know, they'd figure it out, and they would all get an intern or a new hire.

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They're like the most value-added...

Member on the team.

Tell us more about that.

Yeah.

So I was with some guys from Capgemini doing the Salesforce regatta and my computer fell into the water.

So I only had my cell phone and I got a call from one of our team members who said, you know, Ted,

you know, this thing you're doing where before you get angry with people, you go to AI and have it chill you out.

I'm like, yes, I'm doing that a lot.

And he goes, well, I'm about to fire this guy.

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And I went to ChatGPT, and I told him what was going on.

And he came back to me and told me that I should not fire him, and that this is how the conversation should go,

and here's how I should set expectations.

And he goes, it's really helpful.

I was like, I think that's a billion-dollar idea.

What if we could take that concept and create something where we upload your business plan, your V2Mom, and your LinkedIn profile,

And you could ask it questions as an executive coach,

and it would score how you're doing and suggest you how to deal with the issue.

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And it really came out of this experience I had with my CFO, who I've known for 30 years.

He was my fraternity brother, and I had asked him to do something, and he kept on giving me reasons not to do it,

and I kept on getting angrier and angrier, right?

And so finally, I went to AI, and I'm like, what should I do?

And he He goes, well, did you ever think about thanking for all the hard work he's doing before you get angry and suggesting,

don't we agree that this is what we really need to do?

And once I did that, he immediately fell in the line and did what I needed to do.

And he was thankful for me acknowledging him.

And all that took was having a little empathy, something I probably have a lack of.

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To be honest with you, you need an emotional crutch, but by leveraging AI, I mean,

I'll show you just a quick example of what this looks like.

It was funny because there's a guy named Gio Volante, who's a famous psychiatrist who helps golfers.

And I had him on a call a couple of weeks ago and I said, Oh, well, we built this app called billions.

Have you ever seen the TV show billions?

And he's like, yeah, based on me, I'm Steve Cohen's a psychiatrist that helped his hedge fund.

And I go, oh, wow, I should have done my research before I was talking to you.

But basically, what this is doing is telling me that I'm optimistic, I'm strategic thinking, but my intrinsic motivation is not super high.

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And I kept on asking it, what's wrong with my intrinsic motivation?

And it's like, well, you already have everything you need.

Well, what motivates me?

And it's like customer stories.

And I was like, why do customer stories motivate you?

Well, because Excited when people can tell you how something you contributed to changed their life.

That's what motivates you.

And and I was like, well, that that's pretty phenomenal.

And then I was like, OK, now this is the most fun part is, of course,

when you go to an AI and ask it constantly what's wrong with you, it thinks that you're really emotionally stable.

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That may be a bug in the program because I'm not sure I'm 98 percent emotionally stable.

You know, I handle stress pretty well.

Uh, my motivational profile, um, this doesn't really surprise me.

I'm not really fear driven anymore in my life.

Um, I don't really seek a ton of validation.

Most people would meet me or like, yeah, my wife saw this.

She's like, wow, that is really accurate.

Right.

And I tried to game it a little at one point by asking, let's, let's pause on that for a second, Ted,

because before we, like, we'll come back to the UA, but I think one of the questions that comes up.

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In the like founder communities of like exited founders that um actually we're probably a member of the post exit founders and other groups

like that the the

The question is, how were you the first time as a founder versus you are the second time as a founder?

And obviously here, you brought up this fear-driven motivation.

I think a lot of executives, a lot of society is kind of driven by fear or lack of something.

And they think if they reach that something, they'll finally be enough and happy and everything will be there.

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Guide me a little bit on where were you

You know, before the process and also like, what are you doing differently in this company than you did in job science?

Which by the way, job science was a great success.

We, we knew it from our success factors day.

So this, you're, you're no, you're, this is, this is very great outcome.

I'm sure Capata is.

I've done four businesses in my life.

One was a consulting firm with my dad.

The other one was a biopharmaceutical company focused on colon cancer that I did right out of law school with the youngest senior vice

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president from Schering Cloud, DuPont Merck, where I was too young to not know what I shouldn't do.

We ended up licensing some drugs from Pfizer that I had a great experience with, but I decided that I did not like tumors,

so I shifted to job science and now I'm doing this.

I'd say job science was really the first real company that I was in charge of that was driving it.

And some days I felt like I was sentenced to job science.

Like I couldn't leave.

I didn't have the option to be able to walk out the door.

I was responsible for making sure that the payroll got met.

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I was, I carried the burden of, of, uh, foundership, right?

And the burden is a big burden because sometimes you'll trap yourself as a founder into something that's not going to succeed,

but you feel obligated.

And I remember, I'll tell you a funny story about job science is that when we sold job science, the bullhorn,

I wrote a letter to,

Art Pappas because I thought he was really screwing up the business.

And my wife said, Hey, when the people we sold our last house to painted the front door from red to black,

did you send a letter about how they were effing up your house?

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And I, and I said, no, but this is my business.

This was my passion.

This was my baby.

She goes, no, my baby.

Yeah.

Financial transaction.

It was a business that you ran.

It's now behind you.

Do not send that letter.

And I put the letter in the shredder.

And instead I started studying what Art had done so well and how he wrote companies well and where he had discipline and what

he was able to do.

And I started using those as, I never told him this.

So maybe if he hears this podcast or someone does,

they can tell Art how Ted studied Art after the experience of selling the company to him.

But I studied that and I said, okay, how do I build Art's playbook for whatever I do next?

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And then in Capato where I'm,

Was hired to be the CEO.

I started off as an investor.

And then the guys asked, I joined the company.

I can leave whenever I want.

I'm not to Capato.

I'm here because I want to be here.

I'm doing things that I want to do.

And that is really powerful because you make different decisions.

When you feel like you're obligated to keep the ship working or keep it floating, you make

Decisions that are based on a fear.

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And a lot of those are whole decisions, right?

Short-term decisions, cheap decisions.

Oh, we shouldn't pay for this because that costs too much.

I mean, how many founders have you met who are cheaper than dentists?

A lot of them, right?

And it's like penny wise, pound foolish because you're playing with your money, your future, everything's on the line.

It's make or break, right?

Versus all of a sudden you've had that success.

Especially if you're running it in a cashflow neutral mode that it's because there's a real trade-off right if you're if you've got a big

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venture check and you know you may actually go the other extreme and spend it too quickly well i've done that yeah uh yeah

i've uh i spent seven million dollars a month for over a year and realized like hey we're about to be in deep doo-doo

uh and uh had to

Fire you know hundreds of people to keep the business alive and I would say that's about as painful as colon cancer um uh

because you're it's really lonely like when you're sick and dying everyone cares about you and showing compassion when you hear nobody you're you're

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the that nobody 160 people or 300 people or whatever it is you're the dickhead

And so I would say, yeah, totally different perspective.

I think really actually the combination of almost dying plus having some financial success and business success just changes your thousand yard stare.

Like you just have a different perspective.

You're like, okay, Where are we trying to go?

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I decided to go to a meetup two days ago in New Orleans and all these kids had their ideas, their pitching.

And I was like, what's your distribution strategy?

How are you going to generate$5 million of revenue in the next 12 months?

Or just trying to raise a million dollars from someone wealthy who will support our idea.

I go, you're dead already and you don't even realize it and you shouldn't even waste your time doing this unless you have a distribution

plan.

Like I didn't think that before.

Now I'm like, okay.

So second time founder thinks about distribution a lot more type of mode, but back to your leadership style.

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And I know you wanted to share with us the, this cool tool that you've built.

You like this fearlessness that's related maybe to having died this, the, to the not needing anything financially.

Yeah.

What is it enabling you to do that you wish everybody else did, right?

Like not everybody, you know, hopefully not everybody is going to have to go through colon cancer and, you know,

had to have had successful exit to get to the place where they're making these wise decisions that you're doing right now or the way

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you're approaching the business.

What would be your nugget that you would want people to walk away with?

Who are in the leadership position.

Yeah, live every day like it could be the last day and make decisions as if you weren't going to be here tomorrow.

And what I mean by that is let go of the fear,

let go of consequence and figure out what's the right thing to do.

Have a clear moral compass.

Don't lie, cheat or steal.

Have that clear moral compass.

Live with yourself, right?

Live with yourself the way you'd want to live

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And enjoy it and that doesn't mean every day is going to be perfect that means that doesn't mean you're not going to have

arguments with people that's going to happen but like at the end of the day are you pumped like I woke up this morning

right and I had my nephew is an intern here and he was in a meeting with three other people and talked to me

like a family member not like uh his CEO and I in front of the group said you have until Monday to finish this

project if you don't you're fired on Tuesday

Right.

And then I called him at 930 last night and said, I will help you do the project.

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But you can never speak to me in front of the group like that again,

because you're at this point in your career where you need to learn deference and respect.

And you can't if you're really smart, you can't be a wise ass because then everyone thinks you get away with that.

And once that happens, it's game over.

And and I was like, OK.

What am I trying to do here?

And I was like, I came out of it with a freaking brilliant idea, right?

And the kid worked on it at 1 a.m.

Last night.

And it was a really dumb idea.

It was like, hey, I just want you to build me an app for a Domino's tournament because we don't have cribbage boards and I

29:35 --> 30:06

need a cribbage board app done by Monday.

And he's like, I don't understand why I should be working on this because I came here to work on finance and this and that.

I go, because you're going to learn how to build a software application in two days.

Right.

And, and anyway, net of it is, it was a tough moment, but he got to learn.

I got to learn.

We were up until like 11 o'clock at night going back and forth on how to test the app.

I was showing him how to use it.

I woke up this morning.

It was like, wait, what if we could build an app where we only charge you for finding errors, not for the actual test.

30:07 --> 30:39

And we make it simple so that if you're building an app in a base 44 or lovable and

And you want to know that it's not breaking because you're a small business.

You can set up one of these tests just to run every night, and we only charge you if we find some breaks, right?

And that's like the creative arc, right?

Now, the main thing I have to do as CEO is hide 99% of those ideas from people.

We're all confused.

So they're not overwhelmed with all your ideas.

Because you're like a fountain, right?

Like you're talking to you, like even my head, like I don't need to respond to your ideas, right?

30:40 --> 31:10

But I was like, whoa, I could be doing this and that.

Call myself radiation.

A little of me and you'll feel warm.

A lot of me, you'll be dead.

And so a lot of it is like, hey, how do you give people space?

And how do you figure out how to spend most of your time listening?

And I talk to everyone all the time and give your managers the ability to manage their teams.

We adopted this tool called Bloom Growth.

Have you ever heard of Bloom Growth System?

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So I thought it was the dumbest idea when we first got it.

And it was for managing our management people.

Go around and say one good thing that happened personally and professionally since the last meeting a week ago right and then you have

a set of kpis you review and it's a task you're reviewing basically you're reviewing these lists of everything going wrong so you can

build a list of the stuff we want to talk about and then everyone gets to vote on the call as to what they

want to talk about and then working through the list but we only have an hour to work through the list so we're not

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going to get through the whole list but the productivity of the meeting goes through the roof and guess what i went from talking

80 of the time

To talking like 10 or 15% of the time.

Sounds a little bit like a white PO forum type of approach.

Yeah, but you're doing it and managing your team on a monthly basis, right?

And so a lot of what I'm having to learn at this next stage in my career is...

How to step back and think not just emotionally grab at everything now when you meet me at a trade show and i'm in pitch

32:14 --> 32:45

mode yeah but but show us this tool that you've built because i think that that's a little bit about that right like you

you're you're yeah like here what i'm doing is i'm going through and i'm asking questions um of the app like in this case

So I have these different coaches, a performance coach, a strategic advisor, an innovation coach.

In this case, I was asking for some communications help.

And so I asked it to help me write my weekly message to the company.

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And I dropped in my message and it helped me refine the message down to something people would understand.

And I will go back and be like, hey, am I speaking in an authentic manner?

Is this consistent with my business plan?

Is this consistent with my LinkedIn profile?

It's giving me feedback.

And then when I do this, it rescores my personality.

Because what I've been really focused on is my communication clarity has been like 65%.

I picked up three points this week.

But I'm constantly realizing that one in three people have no idea what I'm saying.

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And because if it says your communication clarity is 60%,

it means that 32% of the people probably are confused about what I'm yammering on about.

So how do I keep working on the way I'm communicating with people?

Because I'm super confident that what I'm saying is clear.

Right unfortunately it's not my confidence in my clarity is not as good as my clarity so how do i keep going back yeah

you think about that i'll give you i'll give you another example hopefully you're seeing my screens and showing my screen yeah yeah that's

beautiful yeah those folks that are on the on the watching this on the on the um audio only we're seeing a dashboard that basically

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ted has built to manage himself and continuously improve

One i gave this to every one of our employees and the duty of it i'm the only one who could see this and when

they use it they're the only ones who can see it because because i'm not afraid the machine's going to replace me and i

don't want them to be afraid the machines can replace them so this is a conversation they can have one-on-one i'm only sharing it

with you to you know provide color but i'll give you another example of a listening thing so have you ever done business in japan

yes Okay i have found it's really hard to get japanese folks to be really honest with me about what is going on in japan

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right yes so here i have this thing called gong and it's recording all the conversations the sales people are having with uh can

you see the screen with the economy it's recording all the calls that are going

On and i was like wow i can't read this this is useless to me so in in no cook lm i created a podcast

that i could and i'm not going to kick it off but a podcast i could talk to and i talked to 350 conversations

in japanese about what was going on in japan it was fascinating

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Um by listening to those calls it told me that we were selling to people who didn't have purchasing authority who were afraid to bring

this to their boss because they couldn't explain their boss and we changed our entire strategy in japan as a result and now it's

our fastest performing business unit right and that came from this ability to leverage ai to be a listening platform

Instead of a talking platform.

I had my friend over the other day for lunch who was the photographer for President Bush in the White House for eight years.

And we were talking about his business and I recorded our conversation and said, hey, I'm gonna come back to you with a plan.

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And I said, why don't you create the White House Photographers Association?

Where the only way you can get a White House photographer to take your picture is if you go through the White House Photographers

Association so you guys can all raise your rates and only do the type of work you want to do.

And this came from listening to a conversation we were having and then having AI translate that conversation

Into something you could understand.

And so I've really been hung up.

I'll stop sharing my screen, but I've been super hung up on this idea that I think what I'm saying is clear,

36:14 --> 36:44

but people around me are not clear on it.

And so my duty at this point in my career is to be like,

go back to the well and have AI tell me what is unclear and have it help me shape my ideas into something that people

can understand.

Because maybe my brain is racing

At a rate, maybe my fear is dying and it's running at a rate where it's spitting out ideas faster than people can absorb

them.

So how do I slow down the clock to be able to talk to people?

And I think that's a skill that every entrepreneur needs to figure out pretty quickly because we go to pitch people,

36:44 --> 37:19

they smile and act like they get what we're talking about,

but we are so down the rabbit hole in our idea that we lost them an hour ago, right?

If they gave us-It's beautiful you bring this up.

We basically are feeding now-

Um obviously the where there's a zoom transcript or whatever whatever other conversations in into predefined on-brand templates that create a um kind of a client

room experience where that's it could summarize the conversation but i think the the bigger value is to incorporate some of that and then

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Kind of bring it back to like, what are the, you know, three,

three most big themes that come out of that and how we can solve them, obviously,

but feeding that in and then providing it in a form factor that is really easy to understand for the person who was in the room.

But more importantly, Ted, I think what you're doing here is making it also easier for people who are not in the room to understand,

right?

Because that, that's the only way you can scale, right?

Because we could, uh,

That's where I think people don't spend enough cycles on, I think.

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It's one-on-one and follow-ups, but then how do you get that over to other folks so they're not overwhelmed with all the information,

but yet if they need something very particular, they can also find that.

That's tricky.

What's funny is we're helping out on Data360, which is a Salesforce initiative.

We have really technical people that come up with

Really technical solution that are like way down the rabbit hole.

And my COO came back to me and said, I was on a call with an RVP from Salesforce and I felt like he'd

38:30 --> 39:01

In a word of what we said.

Okay, can you send me over the Gong transcript of that call?

And can you send me what you think he was confused about?

So I took what he was confused about, made that the prompt.

I took the Gong call, put that in the system,

and then I put it into all the technical knowledge and all the technical calls we had had with our technical team.

And I said, make this understandable by a Salesforce leader.

And it ended up building a lovable website that said, if you're having trouble with your customers consuming

Data 360, we're going to unlock it for you.

39:01 --> 39:39

That was the message they want to hear.

It's created a two minute video that explained it.

And all of a sudden it was like unlocking all that knowledge.

Cause I think what happens is we are all in love with our own bullshit.

We're like a data person's in love with data salespersons in love with the deal.

Like, and the question is where are we missing each other by like a two percentage miss where we could just connect all of a sudden

that's where you get spark.

Well, and I want to kind of double-click for those of you that are not familiar with Skopato.

It's like, this is a very technical product, typically for very smart technical people, developed by smart technical people like Ted,

39:40 --> 40:11

who is not afraid of building his own tools and so on.

And so we see this pattern that the more complex and the more technical something is, the worse people communicate.

And increasingly, the world...

Is becoming more complex because we're overloaded with information, right?

As the cost of information is zero, right?

The complexity just explodes and people don't, you know, so the, the, the value is actually like Ted, you're a bit of a, you

40:11 --> 40:43

know, maybe for you, you're fixing your thing, but I think you're ahead of the time because you,

Fundamentally, the challenge is not going to be in creating more content.

The challenge is going to be in the audience really understanding what it is that you're doing, internalizing it,

driving behavioral change in themselves and in others as a result of that idea that you're doing

And then doing it over a period of time, not as a one-time thing, right?

Like it's sort of, it's got to have a length, right?

40:43 --> 41:13

Cause you're selling enterprise.

You're living.

Right.

I think though that the key to the whole formula, what makes us human is the spoken word.

I don't know how our brain is able to form it.

We don't know how it's able to form ideas.

I mean, I'm sure someone knows I don't, but it's like,

You and I having a conversation and jamming.

Have you ever seen a group jamming, like a bunch of musicians and they just start jamming together?

Well, trust a guy from New Orleans to tell us about that.

Yeah, well, when you get a bunch of guys jamming, that's where music gets created, right?

41:13 --> 41:44

Well, when you get a bunch of inventors or developers or marketing people together in a room and they jam about an idea,

I suspect they're only hearing 2% of the music the other person's playing.

But if you record the music...

Like I bet if you're a bass player, you're really focused on the bass.

Yeah, there's a little drum in there and there's a little guitar and it's helping you keep your mouth.

But you're totally jamming on your bass, right?

But when you all of a sudden hear the recording where you have the bass and the guitar and the singer and the drums

41:44 --> 42:14

and everyone, I bet every member of the band thinks they're the key to the band, okay?

They love their art.

They love their music.

They love what they're doing.

But when you all of a sudden hear Led Zeppelin pull some tune together with these guys who all came together,

that's the moment of magic, right?

So how can we all have our Led Zeppelin moment, our magic moment, right?

Reporting our conversations with each other

And going back to the tape and being like okay can you help me make sense of this because music it's pretty easy to understand

42:14 --> 42:46

there's a tempo there's a rhythm it's either good or not good as humans in the invention process it's really hard to understand when

we're all talking and everyone unfortunately

In the band called Work thinks they are Bono.

They think they're the lead singer.

They think they're driving the whole thing.

And so what if it turns out that the guy in the corner who only said one thing in the whole meeting said the most

valuable thing in the meeting that could drive the entire process forward?

How much are we missing that?

42:46 --> 43:17

And that's where I'm this big believer in recording

And interrogating it with AI to get to a better result.

I'll just show you a quick example.

So here, this is Capato's AI tool.

And what we've done is, this is a guy named Jonas Schwab, one of our interns, and he got to speak for two minutes.

And this is all he said in two minutes.

And then what we did is said, okay, Capato has a game plan for the year.

Can you go turn Jonas's two minutes of talk

43:18 --> 43:52

Into his 60 day intern plan of exactly what he has to master.

Right.

And then can you take this to his boss and see if his boss agrees,

if these are the most important things for him to master.

And this is coming off of him saying, Hey, I've been here for two days.

This is what they told me, or this is what I know.

Is this the right path for me?

Because what I've talked to people about a lot is have you ever gone on a road trip?

You're on a road trip.

Yeah.

Did you know the destination where you're trying to get?

Yeah.

Okay, how many people do you think get in cars and go on road trips where they don't have a destination?

43:56 --> 44:26

Very few.

Okay, so why do we come to work to a job and not have a map

And a plan and a destination where we're trying to get to.

And why don't we be honest about where we want to go?

Hey, I want to go to San Francisco.

I want to go to LA.

Okay.

Well, those are two different destinations.

Maybe this is the right company for you.

This is like a V2 mom type of approach to, and also like self-selection approach.

Yeah.

And then what I ended up doing is I haven't just done this with the interns.

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I've been going around the world and building data sets of each different office.

So here's Amsterdam.

And then I can go to Madrid and I can be like, okay,

is the team in Madrid trying to accomplish the same things as the team in New Orleans?

What's going on here?

What's going on?

Hey, here's my plan.

Where are we in alignment?

I actually created a V2 Mom app.

I haven't shown Salesforce this yet, where I write my V2 Mom, everyone else writes theirs,

and we have AI compare our V2 Moms to see how in alignment and not in alignment we are.

And what's fascinating, my CFO cares a lot about profitability.

44:58 --> 45:37

I care about growth.

Where is our conflict occurring?

Because we have a different set of priorities.

And so what we did is we ended up taking a tool that was built for writing PRDs.

It's really good at writing plans and applying it to your plan for you.

Right.

That's brilliant.

So you're basically using your, your, your, your products core thing to expand it.

I feel like one common thread, Ted, is that you're, you're in constant search of alignment between the intention and where you are.

45:38 --> 46:10

Or where other people are, and you're using AI to drive that alignment.

Am I capturing the theme across?

Yeah, because I think that basically the biggest problem we have is that people...

I passed the bar in California, and I remember when I was studying for the bar that they said most people fail the bar

because they don't read the question.

And they teach this methodology called the IRAC method.

It's issue, rule, analysis, conclusion.

And the biggest thing is, do we agree on the issue?

46:10 --> 46:41

So most people fail the bar because when they read the question, they're not trying to answer the question.

They're trying to answer the thing they memorized.

So when you're with people, do we agree on the issue we're trying to solve?

If we don't agree on the issue, it doesn't matter what the rule is.

It doesn't matter the analysis.

It doesn't matter the conclusion because we don't agree on the issue.

And I can't tell you how many times I've gotten management teams together

Where they all think what they're doing is what the company wants, but they don't agree on what is the company wants.

They never took the time to step back and be like, is this the issue we're trying to solve?

46:41 --> 47:14

And so a lot of times in meetings when I'm with the team members, I just ask the question like,

what are we here for?

What are we trying to solve?

And to me, that discipline of hyper focusing on the issue,

which I think AI really is helpful at helping us figure out because it states, well, this is what you said.

Is this what you mean?

No, that's not what I mean.

Okay, well, then why did you say this?

That's, remember, I was talking about my communication skill needing some work.

How many times people misinterpret what I'm saying because they are taking their own bias and applying it to what I'm saying,

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plus maybe I haven't been clear.

So, okay, got it.

So what you're saying is AI is helping you, one,

get clarity in your own head of what is the core issue and sort of a thought partner slash observer in getting there.

And then you're also using that as a way of validating if other people understand that version, right?

And you've trained your AI tool that you've built to know if you're communicating clearly about the issues.

Yeah, that's pretty much, you nailed it.

47:45 --> 48:19

Because I look at AI like I look at a backhoe.

It's a tool, a backhoe allows you to dig holes faster.

AI should allow me to do something I'm not good at better than I could ever do it before.

It'd like give me a superpower.

And this is counter to modern wisdom, by the way.

The wisdom is do whatever you're good at and double down on it.

And I think what you're saying is you identified, you know what you're good at.

You may still use AI to amplify that, but you're also finding gaps that are prohibiting you or your organization from achieving the potential,

48:20 --> 48:50

right?

And you're using what you're good at, creative problem solving with AI to solve for that gap, right?

Which is not, like, that's not the wisdom.

That's not conventional wisdom, right?

Conventional wisdom is focus on your strength.

And ignore your weaknesses and hire around your weaknesses.

Yeah, but maybe if you use AI to make sure you define what your actual weakness is.

There are weaknesses you think you have and there's weaknesses you actually have, right?

Right.

So how do you use the tool to validate where you truly have weakness?

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I mean, I know it's horrifying if you're an artist that anyone can now create art with AI.

But what I do is a lot of times I'll take conversation and say, draw me a picture of the conversation we just had.

And I'll be like, well, why is there clouds with rain over in the corner there?

What does that mean?

Oh, you had 30 minutes in the conversation.

You guys remember when you went dark, you know, this is what that's about.

And, and what is that doing?

It's taking someone who probably could never have been an artist and giving me a way to look at a problem so that I

can look at every angle.

Cause again, my pieces is like, cause it's another, it's another, once you take it in a different dimension,

49:24 --> 49:57

it almost creates another lens of defining what the right issue is or what

If you're ADHD, spastic like myself, I probably shouldn't use any of those words, but if you're completely out of control with your thoughts,

you constantly need to be entertained.

Learning is entertainment.

You need to be entertained.

Keep looking at problems with different angles to get to an answer to see if you're missing something and at the same time learn.

Taking those Japanese calls and feeding them into AI and doing a podcast where you talk to Japanese calls, who would do that?

49:58 --> 50:35

My answer is like who wouldn't try it um and the beauty you get when you've almost died and when you have enough stuff

is you don't care about putting your hand in the queezer anymore because you're not you're living in a simulation already i'm on borrowed

time man like i i just get to ride the light and at some point my card will get called and that will be

the end of that but as long as i live the life i want to live i'm game

You know, as we were reflecting, you know, from the beginning of the conversation, it's interesting you bring this up now.

There's this famous Gandhi quote, learn as if you'll live forever and live as if you'll die tomorrow.

50:35 --> 51:09

I'm sure you've heard of that.

Yeah.

And you've kind of gone into that.

I love that quote.

I use that as a...

Quote that we put on the on the grave of my grandfather who was a teacher and you know up until the very last

day of um his life was still learning english because we moved to from you know from ukraine to us and was still volunteering

to teaching people math and i just found that inspiration my dad i went to my dad's computer when i got to nashville yeah

51:10 --> 51:42

And he sent a letter to his best friend 30 minutes before he died.

He had a master's in quant.

I had sent him a spreadsheet and said, can you help me analyze this business problem I'm having?

It was the last document he opened up in his Google Docs.

And then he went to lunch not knowing that he was going to fall down on the street and die five minutes later.

I was like how marvelous is that to have lived your life to the last minute not knowing it's almost over and trying to solve

a problem like that is our greatest purpose in life is to be alive right so just to sort of full circle this that's

51:43 --> 52:14

the approach i think we need to be and it's a luxury let's be honest with you it is a luxury not an entitlement

to live this way

Because it is hard when you're trying to feed yourself, keep the lights on, do all these things.

It is very hard to be able to operate this way,

but you always get to control your time and what you decide to do.

And that's the, that would be my message to any founder or anyone listening to this podcast is like,

you get to decide how you're going to spend your time wisely, own it and make it yours.

52:14 --> 52:46

It belongs to no one except for you.

No matter what your station in life is, where you are, you get to be you.

And as long as that you can live with that, then you're living a full life.

Mic drop.

I don't think I could say anything else.

Ted, where can people follow your wisdom?

I post a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, probably too much.

But yeah, I appreciate it.

Dude, it was great running into you in Paris and yeah,

And I hope to not take five years again to see you again.

52:46 --> 53:25

It's been great.

And I think really inspiring, Ted.

So I hope I wish you a lot of health.

And I wish that you keep inspiring people around you, your family,

and all the folks that listen to this and other entrepreneurs to do great things, because I think that's the amplifier impact.

And again, I'll finish with what we started, right?

Like you're living that, you know, you're executing as if you live forever, but living as if you'll die tomorrow.

53:26 --> 54:00

And that's a beautiful modification of that Gandhi quote for an entrepreneur.

Because I think learning is great, obviously.

I think applied learning is a little better.

Yeah.

And so that's a super high compliment because if I was looking for how would I describe the challenge between being in the moment

and being out externally, getting external impact, not maybe outcomes, but like focusing on the impact, that's got to be what you've come upon.

54:00 --> 54:17

It's got to be the nugget worth all the rubies in the world.

So thank you so much for sharing.

That was us and being so open was your story.

I think we need more of that in this world.

Ed.

Thank you.

Please come back.

All right.

All right.

Thank you.