Chris Bradle — The courage to be yourself

Chris Bralde, VP of product, Aiwyn

Chris Bradle, Vice President of Product for Aiwyn, a start-up in Charlotte NC that helps accounting firms automate their particles and become more profitable, talks with Tom about long distance running, being yourself in business, and how differentiation comes from authenticity.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Tom: How do you know if your business is ready to take on investment? What does long distance running teach us about running a business? Is professionalism always a good thing? These are some of the questions we asked Chris Bradle, veteran designer, founder, executive advisor, and author of multiple successful exits in technology and wellness businesses.

[00:00:19] Tom: Chris went to school, determined to be a designer and to run competitively. His journey has not always ended up where he thought it would. You can hear some of his surprising lessons on this episode of the Fortunes Path podcast.

[00:00:43] Tom: Chris,

[00:00:43] Tom: it is so good to have you here. Thank you for

[00:00:45] Tom: coming. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. No, it's awesome. So you're an avid runner. You've been an athlete most of your life. Yes, absolutely. What have you learned about performance and getting better from running?

[00:00:58] Chris: Yeah, that's a huge question.

[00:01:01] Chris: I love it. You go right big. I think that I've, it's taken many years, I think to figure out what have I learned? Or looking back, what kind of impact did did running have? And it was, I would say that it's that. There was an in an enduring quality, right it's called endurance sports, I think, for a reason. Yeah. But there's this enduring quality over staying in it. And learning that little by little, every decision you make, every workout you do, every race you run.

[00:01:36] Chris: You started out with an idea that you wanted to go somewhere.

[00:01:40] Chris: You wanted to achieve something. And in order to do that, it might take a long time. So it's not something that you'd set out and say I wanna run a fast mile. I wanna run a great marathon. You don't get to do these things. Or you never get there if it's just a one and done.

[00:02:02] Chris: I trained for a season. I had a season boy, that was hard. My time was okay. I'll be done now. It was more like, that's interesting. I want to go faster. What would it take to go faster? So it was, I think what I've learned this is breaking down a lot of pieces, right?

[00:02:21] Chris: Is that, There's always this, oh, that was great, that was interesting. Or that was terrible, right? Like, how can I get better? Or how can I go faster? So I don't wanna have, I don't wanna leave, like on that note, right? That was not the best races I've ever run, best workouts I've ever had. Best season, best year.

[00:02:40] Chris: I wanna improve, I want to get better. In my mind, it's always been that there's this constant allure to to really push and find ways to improve, get better correct things you maybe make mistakes in and find ways to improve.

[00:02:55] Tom: You don't,, I don't run my wife's runner. It seems to me that you don't really know what you're capable of in distance running until you absolutely break.

[00:03:05] Tom: Until you, you completely wipe out and you're like, okay, that's as far as I can go. Yeah. Yeah. I think that there it's just like the measure of success is when you get to the point to where all you can do is fail. It's and I think businesses go through that cycle all the time of, we don't really know how big we can get until we destroy ourselves.

[00:03:25] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point.

[00:03:26] Tom: Yeah. Anyway, so you've also been an entrepreneur, you've started multiple businesses. Talk to me about how that drive to get better has influenced you also as an entrepreneur.

[00:03:39] Chris: Yeah. I think at first I didn't see it. I treated my running life my work life different. Or separate. But I think what I've seen over the years is that As much time as and energy I would put into training and running. I started realizing that there's similar practices that would, you attribute to your work. You have an absolute discipline of what you wanna do, but you also started out with an idea of what you wanted, where you wanted to go.

[00:04:11] Chris: Not necessarily what kind of Hey, I wanna achieve a great time. Or I want to, fill in the blank with work. But you would say I know where I want to go. And I think that's really a determining factor because if you look at it, it's a letdown. If you say I wanna run a sub three hour marathon.

[00:04:31] Chris: That's great. What if you don't? Does that mean that every race up and tell them was a complete failure? . So time-based goals were like, that says I want a specific thing by a specific time. Yeah. Whereas if you look at this is more like a journey and this is what I wanna become in the process, it's really hard cuz we don't start thinking like that. We think about what we want and I want to get that. Instead. You think about where do I want to go? And it starts to change the game, because then you realize, boy, there's gonna be a lot of things that are ups and downs.

[00:05:03] Chris: It's kinda if I think training for a marathon trained sometimes for 20 weeks, get ready for some amazing event, travel to a place. And have a disaster of an experience. . That's a half a year. It's a lot of time to invest into things, but if it was all about, an event that produced a time, then that's a huge letdown.

[00:05:23] Chris: Yeah. But if I, but if you look at that and say, no, this is just another stage in the journey still going where I wanna go. This just happened to be an un an unpleasing situation.

[00:05:34] Tom: Yeah.

[00:05:34] Tom: It was. My dad's an entrepreneur and he used to talk about how he could never tell at the end of a pitch how well it went.

[00:05:42] Tom: He said he would be like, we thought we completely bombed that one. And they became a major client. Other ones we thought we crushed, never heard from 'em again. I think it's the temptation is to judge our own work and that actually our work, our opinion of our work in many ways is irrelevant. The market judges our work.

[00:06:03] Chris: Yeah, for sure. And I think with what you're talking about too, there's I feel like we had adopted back in my agency . We had adopted the same thing. It's oh, we totally crushed that pitch. . You have, you never got the work, right? . You felt good about what you did.

[00:06:17] Chris: You were trying really hard. And I think inside of that, maybe as a little bit of where it goes, we try so hard to be impressive, to do a great pitch. We did a great pitch. We feel good about it. But you missed the point. Yeah. You go in, you think we're half prepared. I don't know what we're doing here.

[00:06:36] Chris: We don't belong in this room, that we'll never get this work and you win. . There's something about that where it's almost there's a an expectation that generates on the first version, which is, we poured all this in, therefore we should get the outcome. And then the other side is we're just being ourselves right here.

[00:06:57] Chris: And maybe we don't belong in the room, but we're being authentic. About what we're, about, what we're showing. And you win.

[00:07:04] Tom: Do you think so there's a, we've already covered a lot of stuff I'd like to dig into more. Excuse me. One of them is so you talked about that journey an entrepreneur is on of trying to get to a destination.

[00:07:18] Tom: What if the market has no interest in the destination you want to get to? So the, I would say so Fortunes Path, there's a couple of things we wanna do that I'm not quite sure the market's that interested in. One of them is I want the people who work in Fortunes Path to have fun. And if we're having fun, that should project out, that we're fun to work with.

[00:07:38] Tom: And the second thing is I wanna promote virtue in the world. And you don't, virtue doesn't turn into money. So I'm not sure if the market actually has an interest in virtue, but the idea of dropping that from the business just feels like, what's the point? Why would we even bother? And but trying to communicate that to a market about what you're about is is a real challenge.

[00:08:07] Tom: So yeah, you were talking earlier about how how HealthStream and Nurse Grid is trying to differentiate itself. What are you, what process are you going through to be able to do that in a way where that differentiation doesn't feel fake?

[00:08:23] Tom: Yeah. I think you

[00:08:24] Chris: just nailed it, right? Is they a person, whether it's a decision maker or whether it's the general market .

[00:08:31] Chris: They can tell the difference between authenticity and fake. So if I think about, what are we about, what's our purpose is when somebody's sitting at the table, and let's go back to the pitching example. You can pitch the most amazing work. And that's some of the epiphanies, right?

[00:08:50] Chris: There's so many people pitching great ideas, great work. What's the difference? And then you could look at somebody and say, yeah, but that was a great pitch that we saw from this company. But I didn't feel it. Couldn't tell, where they were coming from. This pitch over here was authentic.

[00:09:09] Chris: Can tell, like they're almost, they're getting emotional about it because they believe in it. Yeah. And I think therein lies the biggest difference is what is the kind of the ethos inside the things that we talk about. . And what do we set out for? I set out because I wanna make a lot of money.

[00:09:23] Chris: Great. So does everybody else. And how are you gonna be any different? That in their end is the difference too between, what you're pursuing that is an outcome. And it's not something you can actually. Get you can't put your hands on it and grab it.

[00:09:40] Chris: It's an outcome. So then you think about that and you say no. If you're on a journey and you believe in it, to your absolute core it becomes seen. And then it's a question of why wouldn't we work with this group? They believe in what they're doing so much. Yeah. We want them around us because we want that as well.

[00:10:01] Chris: Yeah.

[00:10:01] Tom: It's fascinating. So it reminds me of the famous Simon Sinek presentation about people don't by what you do, they by why you do it. And that to me, contradicts with the idea of the work to be done theory, uhhuh that when we buy a product, we're expecting it to do a job. I don't really care why about the job.

[00:10:23] Tom: What I care about is the outcome. What job does it do? But I do think that I'm not, this is a question I don't know, is vulnerability and auth and authenticity is vulnerability in a business setting. Positive or negative? I think if we, if one of us was a woman, I think we would've a different point of view.

[00:10:43] Tom: Cuz in one of the things that women will talk about in executive situations is if I, am emotional or if I do something that appears to be vulnerable, people think I'm losing control. They think I'm irrational or I'm untrustworthy or unprofessional or whatever. Whereas if I tear up in a meeting, people are like, oh, that's so nice.

[00:11:09] Tom: Some people. So I think it, it's, I can only address this question from the point of view of a man. I don't honestly know if, is that a, is it an asset to be genuine or vulnerable?

[00:11:25] Chris: I think first another huge question. Appreciate that. Look I love it because I think one of the things that's missing, and I can speak this from a point of view of a man, right is that I think one of the things that is truly missing is the feeling that you could be vulnerable. . No. Tearing up at a meeting, a guy, come on. What you but what if, your belief is so great and you're so passionate about what you're doing, that comes out. Also, what if things just aren't right? What if it's not going well? What if you, what if you're trying to bring a hundred percent of who you are plus into what you're doing, but you're inhibited. You have things going on in your life that are like, that. Just, you can't just put that in a box.

[00:12:14] Chris: Yeah. And but it also says, you have to come in and you still wanna do the job you're doing. . But I think in order to really establish. I think a great trust inside your team. People have to know you and they have to know what's happening in your world to the degree that you're willing to share it.

[00:12:34] Chris: But do I come back to authenticity? Do I really know you? It's a great question. Or am I just part of the game? Yeah. And the question is, we wanna have people that we really get to know and encourage to be like a hundred percent of who they are right here in the middle of what we do.

[00:12:55] Chris: Because if we don't do that, then you just have a function. And maybe I'm being a little aggressive here. With that statement. But I think that when you truly know people and you know what they're doing, they will do their best work. This,

[00:13:10] Chris: so this, to go back to the sport analogy this thinks about, makes me think about training partners.

[00:13:17] Chris: Yeah. Again I've never done. Endurance sports, but the idea of, okay, there's shared pain. So my two sons ran cross country together and it was one of the most rewarding experiences they had in high school. Partially, I think because it's the shared pain of running uphill in when you're cold and you're 17 years old isn't fun.

[00:13:43] Chris: But the camaraderie that comes out of that is a lot of fun. They loved that shared pain. And I think that you can't do that. You can't have that experience in an environment where you don't trust anybody around

[00:14:01] Chris: you. I think about when you let's go back to the marathoning.

[00:14:07] Chris: Yeah. When you start out in a marathon, you usually are coming to the event by yourself. And then you're running with maybe 30,000 of your closest friends you're about to meet. That's right. And I have found that the number one thing you naturally gravitate to is looking for people like you.

[00:14:24] Chris: And you're hoping that you just, you, you lock in pace wise with a person who is looking to go the speed you're going for, the duration you're going, and in some place along the way, you trade stories. The best you can. Sure. And, tell, you can't talk anymore, but you have this kind of, this bond that kind of gets formed inside of there.

[00:14:49] Chris: But you start to realize that you get to know them a little bit and so if they speed up a little bit, maybe they've run a hundred more marathons than you or whatever. They speed up a little bit. You can follow their cue. They know how to get where you are trying to go. But you still have to trust yourself at the same time.

[00:15:10] Chris: Now I think that when when we're in a work setting, we also have to look at it and say I have to know that I can trust and have a lot of trust over the people that I work with. Now. I don't need to know their, I don't need to know everything that's going on in their life as much as I won't probably share everything that's going on in my life.

[00:15:30] Chris: But there's this known transparency, right? Where I know that we're trying to do hard things. But I can tell if somebody's wildly overworking and I know it's not healthy. Yeah. And you gotta tell them, Hey, it's unhealthy. Go have some time with your family. Yeah.

[00:15:45] Chris: It's what you should be doing, right? Don't need a person who can just grind and grind. A machine could do that. I wanna know that we have real authentic. People who can come in and go look, just bring a hundred percent of or more or whatever that you can bring to the table for this period of time, but don't burn out.

[00:16:04] Chris: This is a long journey. Right?

[00:16:06] Tom: It's funny, I was in a startup situation, although they denied that they were a startup and there was a woman there who had taken on a culture HR ish role with startups. So it's all the roles are undefined, right? And she put a muffin on my desk and was, she wrote something on it to the effect of slow down.

[00:16:34] Tom: And I ended up getting fired, so she was probably right. But I remember at the time I was like, I don't have time for that. And the group was, it was a big open work area and all, it was a bunch of kids and all the kids were over and one area getting training and I was at my desk and I had my little muffin there to slow down.

[00:16:55] Tom: And I was like, I got things I gotta do, and it was yeah I have no idea if I so much of our work is relationships. When you go down a list and you think about not everybody can be here anymore for whatever reason. Not everybody can be here anymore.

[00:17:19] Tom: Those decisions are not rational. You don't sit down. You're not looking it can't be like we've got our squad. We know the best times. We know how we want us to win the meets. We gotta spread out our talent. That can be a pretty rational decision. But you still make decisions based on things like, who do I like?

[00:17:40] Tom: And when I, what I think about that experience is that I never emotionally connected with my boss. And and I was expensive. And so anyway, I'm not sure why I went down this rabbit hole, but it's, we were talking about trust and it's tough. I feel like professionalism in a lot of ways is putting on a mask.

[00:18:10] Tom: One of the things I love about professionalism, and I do think it, it is an amazing invention of human beings professionalism, right? Is that there's a show, it doesn't have the complexity of. Normal human relations, it's much more predictable. And then there's the occasional, oh, you anticipated my need.

[00:18:33] Tom: Now I'm totally delighted because I didn't even have to verbalize something. I didn't even know I wanted this. And, I wanted a chocolate on my pillow. I had no idea I wanted a chocolate on my pillow until I saw it there. This is wonderful.

[00:18:48] Chris: I think with what you just with what you just described I feel is maybe one of the most unfortunate things about sometimes the way the business world works is if. It is really as a world of masks. Then it says what character would you like me to be today? Yeah. And the hardest part is then you say if that's what you're looking for, and I buy into that game, I'm not gonna be who I am.

[00:19:14] Chris: I'm gonna be who you want me to be. So that I can have this role and I can do this work. In essence though, and maybe that would be a thing that would work out. No. Yeah. We really want you to be like this character. I think the answer is no, you don't. You want me to be me, that's why you hired me.

[00:19:32] Chris: Or that's why I'm doing, you hired our company, you hire. You bought our product. You're doing that because, not because it changed to be what you want it to be. It's because you looked at that individual and said, I can see something there. That is something we need. Yeah.

[00:19:51] Chris: Something we don't have. And I think it, but there is a natural tendency, right? I've been down these roads before. You try to look for, A certain genre, right? That I think, especially building an agency, I want people that look like this portfolios look like X, right?

[00:20:08] Chris: But you but things change all of a sudden, when you say I'm not really looking for that. I'm looking for people who think, they're not what exactly. You can't pick 'em out of a crowd. You just see something different in them. Because they're being who they are. Yeah.

[00:20:25] Chris: And so they're in lies. The, this thought and go back to the vulnerability part. It's not all about being emotional. It's about looking at something going when you walk through the door, and no matter if you're making a pitch or if you're taking a role, are you Yeah.

[00:20:41] Chris: Is the question. And, but then you also have to ask, do you know who you are? Or are you just walking through the door going, what do you want me to be today? Yeah. Tell me who you need and I'll be that Please keep me around as long as you can. Yeah. Because I wanna live up to what you want from me.

[00:20:57] Chris: And I, it's come back to, it's the same journey as saying, I wanna run that time in this race. You're chasing something or you're trying to do something where it's almost like you're chasing the wrong goal. And really if I think about the way the journey has gone, at least the parts that I could say become the most enjoyable is when Yeah.

[00:21:17] Chris: How comes things change. Things happen. Maybe it's a bit of a detour in your journey and you're like that's really unfortunate that's happening. But the question is, but do you know who you are? And were you, during that mix, did you give a hundred percent of who you are? Regardless of the outcome, regardless of the decision.

[00:21:35] Tom: That's fascinating. So I have children in their twenties. I know you have an 18 year old daughter, 14 year old son, right? And there's this paralysis in your early twenties of what do you want to do? I have no idea who I am first, so how can I possibly know what it is that I want to do?

[00:21:53] Tom: I want to hang out with my friends. I want have a, I want to have a somebody who loves me. But the, that it takes such a long time to discover. Yeah,

[00:22:06] Chris: for sure. Who you are. Yeah. When you start out this you're hitting like a hot button topic. You didn't No, go ahead. Go ahead.

[00:22:14] Chris: So look, I think we're asking the wrong questions. And look, I fell for it, right? So when I was younger, I said I wanna, I want to major in design. I'm gonna run in college. Was, I something just came over me and was like, this is what I'm gonna do. This is who I'm gonna be when we can't expect that.

[00:22:33] Chris: Out of everybody to say, cuz you could say, what do you wanna do? I knew what I wanted to do. No idea who I was. Like I'm still figuring that out. Didn't realize it at that point. And I think we're asking the big question, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

[00:22:49] Chris: That's, but it's an easy question to ask cuz you like, look and say, oh, a doctor, an astronaut. A thing. But I said I wanna be a designer. And I was really super excited about love the arts, knew it was creative, but then, if you don't answer the first question which is fundamental about who am I, then Great. Next thing you know, you find yourself you're building an agency. You've already hit what you felt is these early stage pinnacles in your career. You feel like, you've done all these things, but it's empty. Yeah. And then you said that was, Not exactly what I was thinking was gonna happen.

[00:23:27] Chris: And it's not because you didn't succeed, it's because when you got there, it wasn't what you expected. It's like crossing the line a major race. And you go, wow, this is really a little anti climactic. Yeah. And you're like, not exactly what I was thinking was gonna happen. I, I know. But the, but then you come back to your identity and your purpose. Yeah. Did you know that you were on a journey? Or did you think you were just gonna build this thing and make a bunch of money? Wow. Everybody's gonna celebrate you. Isn't that right? Yeah. It's different. So you go back to the question.

[00:24:02] Chris: We ask kids, we'd ask an 18 year old, what do you wanna be? If you know what you want to be, we can find a major and then you can figure out where you're gonna go. And this whole plan starts to work. It's like handing them a script. Yeah. And going read from the script. See how your character fits into the script.

[00:24:19] Chris: It's actually needs to be the opposite. Where it's Yeah. What character are you? Yeah. And now what part, what role will you play is a different question. It's not, it doesn't come off a script. It's totally off script.

[00:24:33] Tom: Yeah. Really interesting. Makes me think about I've been kicking around this idea recently that stories are really in insufficient, that we tend to try to explain the things around us by layering a story on top of them.

[00:24:52] Tom: And those stories are always wrong. Because the complexity of what's actually happening is beyond our comprehension. And so the best we can do is try to, Put order on it by giving it a narrative. And I'm using narrative very broadly. Science could be considered a narrative. And that the the pheno, there's always elements of the phenomenon that fall outside the range of that narrative.

[00:25:23] Tom: So we're trying to like oversimplify our reality by putting it into stories. So your point about rather than I'm gonna hand you a script and you're gonna follow this script and you're gonna get the outcome, the script predicts that's, I don't think that's ever worked for anybody, ever, at least emotionally.

[00:25:45] Tom: You, you could, I can franchises apparently have extremely detailed some franchises notes about like how to make this happen. Cuz they're like, if you follow this script, you will get the outcome that we promise you with this franchise. I have no idea if it's gonna make you happy. No, no idea if it will satisfy why you bought

[00:26:07] Chris: a franchise.

[00:26:07] Chris: Yeah. Go back to again, it could be very empty and then what if you're not a great operator?

[00:26:13] Tom: You don't even want to be an operator.

[00:26:15] Chris: Yeah. Oh, I had no idea it was gonna have to go in every day. Yes. You bought a franchise, it's like a business, right? That's right. So did you think it was gonna run itself, itself cuz you have an operating model.

[00:26:25] Chris: And it like, I think that there go back to what you're saying too about stories. Yeah. I think sometimes we try to associate what we're going through and what we're feeling, which we're experiencing a story. Or sometimes help connect using the story to connect someone else in some way, shape or form to what we're experiencing. Something we see. Cuz like you and I would see something very differently. It's just to be expected, but somehow through story it could be connected, right? Yes. Whether I tell you a story about a marathon, or you were to tell me a different story.

[00:27:05] Chris: Yeah. That's how we, that's how we actually share and try to make a, I don't know, let's say a common ground or a common understanding. Yeah. So I think about that a lot. I don't wanna throw

[00:27:18] Tom: stories out. I, because it, like you had an agency Yeah. Creative agency for a while. Talk to me a little bit about how storytelling fit into how you guys would sell.

[00:27:33] Chris: I don't think I saw the purpose of it. Or too much of it at the beginning. Come back to again, it was, I was functional, right? I'm a good designer. We're gonna be like a premier design shop. Very boutique. Very like award-winning.

[00:27:51] Chris: I picked all these, I didn't make these things up. Sure. They were instilled early. I wanna do award-winning work for these purposes. But over time, this, the story started to emerge where it was, we're here to generate and leave make memorable experiences, make an impact in the world.

[00:28:09] Chris: Through your brand, you your company. If you've made a great impact and we, there's something memorable about it. Then we've done our job. So then you start to realize that, I think one of the realizations I came to is you can do any work, right? If you're good, you could take work from anybody, right?

[00:28:28] Chris: And take on any project and learn an industry, you could but the things you became, you were really passionate about that work was natural. Yeah. And it flowed. That's when I realized that the more of who you are, your story does come into play. Because if I go back to one of the realizations, if you think about it as an agency you.

[00:28:53] Chris: Whether it was a physical portfolio site, they all kinda look alike. Yes. It was a real big epiphany to me when I was like, we made the best. It was a hardcover book, bound book. We were giving that out. We, I was so proud of that, that, we actually created a book of our work.

[00:29:09] Chris: Yeah. Everybody else has the same book. How disappointing is that where you're thinking, wow, we're doing some amazing, and you look at other people's work, it's so have they, how do you know the difference? It really, as I think about it, that's where it starts to come into play.

[00:29:23] Chris: Yeah. You won't, if you look at the work, you, it's really hard to distinguish the difference between A, B, C, or D. But if you look at it and you say but what's behind it? And behind all of that, and I don't care if it's a physical, like a tech product, a physical product, an agency, there's people behind it.

[00:29:41] Chris: Yeah. And I used to say this all the time, what, especially in our in our startup was behind this product is people and the people that you, that are building this product, We study this, we live it, like everything that's happening in this industry, we embody it. It's part of what we have experienced through our lives, and we're just bringing it into our product.

[00:30:02] Chris: Yeah. We had an edge because of that. It's a very different thing than if you show up at a running show. And a trade show wearing a suit. Nobody's wearing a suit. That's right. Quickly, you're like you're selling software. That was the problem. You were selling software.

[00:30:16] Chris: Software, versus you were living out who you were. Yeah. It was, and it's very at that point to say, oh yeah, these guys are the real thing. That's really interesting.

[00:30:28] Tom: It's a little bit like part of what we're like, part of what we're doing is making friends. I don't think inaccurate to say that sales is at least partially making friends where you're trying to connect with somebody and you just, Hey, let's just talk what's going on in your life.

[00:30:46] Tom: See if there's anything we can do to help. Yeah. And be honest with you, if there isn't. Try to direct you to someplace. If we know somebody who can help you, we can't direct you to them. I think that's yeah, that's a virtuous process. That's a, that is a love founded

[00:31:01] Chris: process. Yeah. It's a big, it's a big difference between I'm selling or I'm building relationships. I'm getting to know people. So if you're selling, it's transactional. You're just looking to get something, do it, do work. Or win a customer and move on. Yeah. That's traditional selling. Yeah. But if you think about the things you're doing, you're building these long-term, just founded relationships.

[00:31:27] Chris: Even if the customer stops working with you you still have the relationship. Now, it's unfortunate for your business because you're no longer a customer. But was that what you were in it for in the big picture, or were they becoming, people that you really, you walked through a journey with?

[00:31:44] Chris: And that's a little bit contentious. It's hard because as every business, of course, we wanna have as many customers as we possibly can. We wanna make as much revenue as possibly, of course, right? That's why you launch businesses, to build a business, to build a company.

[00:31:58] Chris: But if in the mix, if everything stays transactional then, it's kinda like a machine, right? Yeah. It doesn't have a relationship with anybody. And so you would say what's the, when somebody leaves, they won't have any emotion or feeling over. It's the same thing as building like a culture inside of a company.

[00:32:15] Chris: Yeah. If everything is transactional, then you, people, like I've heard before, they would say, people turn off one screen, turn on another. That's all it is. So they can seamlessly move from role to roll with no connection whatsoever. Yeah. But when something when something different is there, relationships have been forged, that creates culture, whether it's with your internal team, whether it's with, your customers, there's a culture.

[00:32:40] Chris: Then if you're not working together it's hard. Yeah.

[00:32:45] Tom: Yeah, it's, that's interesting. It's Peter Thiel has a line, he's not one of my favorites, but he's said some very interesting things. One of the things he says is no company has a culture. Every company is a culture. Yeah. And I totally believe it that and I also think it's not possible to hide that.

[00:33:07] Tom: There's so only so much kind of smoke and mirrors that were ultimately the truthful out in. So that experience you have of creating the business and how you work with the people inside leaks out, and your customers eventually detect if things are going well, if they're not going so well.

[00:33:35] Tom: Yeah for sure. I think it's same thing as like when you're raising children, if there's tension in the marriage, I. The kids aren't totally blind to it, they don't know the details, but they have some sense about what's going on. I think

[00:33:50] Chris: we'll come back to one of the things you said before, if you think if everything is a character based yeah.

[00:33:57] Chris: A mask, if you will. At some point you'll forget to put the mask on, right? Yeah. You get unprofessional accidentally, right? Something pops out and you're like and then you realize that was the authenticity that came out. Yeah. Because that's just naturally where you are, who you are.

[00:34:13] Chris: It could be that it's not a very great moment. But we all have emotions, right? Whether you're upset, you're angry, you're under a lot of stress sometimes to do things. Probably faster than the market want, will accept things to get done. It creates a lot of, tension and stress.

[00:34:30] Chris: Yeah. That will deter you Now it's hard to avoid. But it will also take you off your game at some point if you're playing character.

[00:34:39] Tom: So let's talk a little bit about the agencies that you've had in the past. What's your opinion about taking outside investment when you're starting a venture?

[00:34:50] Tom: Do you do you think it's positive? You know what, just talk to me generally about your point of view on outside money when you're starting a venture.

[00:34:58] Chris: Yeah, I think it really has a lot to do with with what you're, I guess I would say it's, What's, what stage are you in? Can you afford, where can you afford to go for a period of time and slowly chip away at finding, proving that first bit of thesis, getting some proof of concept.

[00:35:19] Chris: Are you okay with doing that? Over a longer period of time. If the answer is yes, then do it. And don't take outside investment, but you have to be scrappy. You also have to have a bunch of, different, you have to have a variety of talents in order to do that.

[00:35:36] Chris: It's pretty difficult. But like, when you take outside money we joked about it a little bit, so when you take outside money, the clock starts. Oh yeah. And and that's where you'd say, yeah. But it's an accelerant as well. So if I look back at our journey through Tech startup, I think that it was, yeah.

[00:35:56] Chris: First, yeah. If you didn't have the money, things couldn't have gone in the direction they were going. But it was not about, it wasn't all about the money. Yes. The money funded the business and made the business work. But we were develop, we were developing relationships, we were getting open doors to people who are not just putting money in, but they were also providing talent.

[00:36:16] Chris: They were doing other things that were helping us. Cuz sometimes I think we come to a realization when you start a company, you just, there's so many things you don't know. Yes. And and you might think, oh, I've done this before. Exactly. It will have similar challenges. But you'll run into so many things you don't know and you need people, there's, whether you like it or you're gonna need advisors around you.

[00:36:41] Chris: That have been down roads before. Like some of the best advisors I've ever heard. I was sitting at a lunch one time, we're talking about potential for an exit with another company. And companies that was, they were pursuing a pretty big round and the guy sitting across the table said I've seen this movie before. I think what you want is an exit. Yeah. That's wisdom. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know in, in that case, I didn't know the gentleman very well but I think he was imparting wisdom was like, I've seen this with these characters running just like you.

[00:37:20] Chris: Here's really what you're looking for. We need people like that around us, whether it came from money or it came from connections, we absolutely have to do it. But if I go back to the root of your question, yeah. I, I don't know. I'm a believer now I've seen enough things that I have this big belief in AB testing, test your hypothesis.

[00:37:39] Chris: Get some proof. You don't wanna fund discovery, right? Nobody does. So even as, even if you're in a large corporation Yeah. Funding discovery is really hard. Yeah. What you need. Get it. I don't, I wouldn't blame a company. Why would you dump, countless amounts of resources on discovery.

[00:37:58] Chris: Discovery is a process where you have to get to validation. To be able to say, yes, this is enough. And now I put some money in it. So if we go back to even the startup, there was a discovery process that happened very slow. Yeah. But the first question you're asked what kind of proof do you have? Yeah. And at that point, now it makes sense, right? And now the question is, do you wanna take money or do you want to continue to take, chip away. You always have to know what you're gonna use the money for. That's kinda thing.

[00:38:33] Chris: You don't typically

[00:38:34] Tom: end up using the money for that stuff, but you think you're gonna use

[00:38:36] Chris: it for that? No, and I think sometimes. Now this is if I look back, I would say with our story with I think stories of other, let's say Series A, series B startups that I've worked for since it would probably have been better not to have the volume of money. You because inside, sometimes inside this constrained inside the constraints you discover what you're really capable of. Yeah. What the business can truly do. If you put too much money in the system, then it's like the constraints are gone and then all of a sudden I, I don't, I, I don't know how to describe it, but it's almost you need the constraints in order to put the pressure in the business to pressure test it to the point that it can actually get to.

[00:39:25] Chris: What you think is true scale. True scale. You're not gonna scale just cause you gave me, a million dollars, I can spend the money, but Right. It doesn't mean that this is, this product's ready to scale or the market's ready for it. I, that's

[00:39:37] Tom: interesting. I feel like sometimes the money can create the problem problems of a large business inside what is a small, immature business.

[00:39:48] Tom: And so it's that problem of like analysis paralysis and wasting money because you have money to waste. You feel the pain in a small business when something is wasted, and it can be like, oh my God, I can't believe we spent that thousand dollars. That was so stupid. Whereas just I've got another million dollars behind that.

[00:40:10] Tom: And What's a thousand dollars? It's nothing. Your perspective's totally

[00:40:15] Chris: changed. Yeah. It's the same as saying, okay, we, we raised 20 million. Yeah, you can spend 20 million pretty quick too. Yes. You just hire a couple hundred people. Over hire, over index.

[00:40:26] Chris: Within something that is just a little too early, but if we get the right people then all the systems will work. But you don't know how the systems work. So why do you need so many people? But the money on the other hand, Has to get to work. Yeah. The expect that, that's the other kind of, there's a tension like take, so understanding when you take money the expectation is it's an accelerant. Yeah. But the question is, are you ready to accelerate? So let that be the degree almost of your decision making is, if we accelerated with this thing is, are the doors on the bus yet so good about getting people on the bus?

[00:41:06] Chris: You're really attached. But you're gonna now push the gas and you're stuff's gonna start flying off this, right? Yeah. Or is it, no, this is pretty solid, pretty tested. We can repeat this over and over again. And we did it with a very scrappy, tight group or tight team. Or in our part-time, whatever.

[00:41:22] Chris: But you figured some things out. So when you do push the accelerator, you'll push it to the degree of the capital you raise. But, at that point it is an accelerant. It's not going to cause more pain. Now, at the same time, you can't predict everything.

[00:41:40] Chris: You can't systematize everything right out of the gates. The thing you create today, you're gonna change in a year. But that's the way I would always think about it.

[00:41:49] Tom: Interesting. This makes me think about product management. So talk to me a little bit about you said you went to school as a designer, you've been an athlete and you've also been, how did you get involved in a product management and how do you think about what that is?

[00:42:06] Tom: What function it performs?

[00:42:08] Chris: Yeah, I love that question. I know that I would say I started off in my, saying I, I was I wanted to pursue the arts. Graphic design is what my degree was in. But if I think back to what I was really taught it was to solve problems.

[00:42:24] Chris: So it just happened to be that I solved problems visually, for a period of time. But then I realized that what we were getting was critical thinking skills that would give us the ability to solve problems visually, to solve problems in the middle of a marathon. And challenges that you would experience?

[00:42:42] Chris: Or to look at anything you're always looking into something to say where, what are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to do? What's the problem that exists? And then what is the, what's the approach, to the solution. I think that those things, they were like, they almost felt natural.

[00:43:02] Chris: To the point that I know that I didn't know I was doing product management. Yeah. So building a startup I'm just thinking we're building a product and we're going as fast as we possibly can, and you're, you do, you do a whole bunch of different jobs. You learn a bunch of different stuff in the process.

[00:43:20] Chris: But knowing that I think knowing that product management was like a formal process didn't come until post acquisition. Where you, that's where you have your moment where it's choose a lane. And then you realize wow, this is, we're entering, we're coming out of startup land and we're now going to a corporate setting.

[00:43:41] Chris: And they wanna know, are you in the design team? Are you in the product team? Yeah. Are you a gm sales? Where do you belong? So I think, candidly, I was asked that question and I said I think product sounds about right. Yeah. And then I know this is like embarrassing moments for me.

[00:44:02] Chris: But I had to go research it Sure. Because I was No, we're all self-taught. Yeah. I'm thinking, I'm entering product management. I'm pretty sure I know what this is. That's right. And then but you're so used to just getting stuff done. Yeah. That you've created your own system of doing it, doing product management the whole time.

[00:44:22] Chris: Now, was it pretty? No. It was not, it wasn't some work of art that you would say, oh, you could put 15, team of 15 people on this now doing this. So I think that was the starting point. And then coming into a company, you're acquired, there's a lot of expectations now.

[00:44:40] Chris: There's newfound expectations. It's like getting another major investment, right? So you start a new journey where. All of a sudden you gotta get a lot of stuff done at breakneck speed. You cannot work inside of a very traditional system. You have to work, you have to work as fast as you can, and you do need some predictability.

[00:44:58] Chris: But I, that, that's the way that I started in product management. Yeah. I did find that predictability becomes it trumps out a lot of things because you could have a million ideas and the part I loved about product management, I kinda the the principles of it from the back out.

[00:45:19] Chris: Because I was so used to being so close to engineering. Yeah. So close to the ground. And on design, it was more like, that was just like product management equals execution. Technically. In the strategy part, you were always dissecting it on the fly. When you get into the formalities of it, then it became more of I have to understand.

[00:45:40] Chris: What happens to get stuff through the machine. So if I can't, if I can't take the ideas and actually bring anything to life I'm not much of a product manager. So we wouldn't even call that very successful. But you have to give back and understand, what does this, this machine work, like how does it work?

[00:45:58] Chris: How does it work? And then if I say, look, we're gonna, we're gonna dream something up out here. I have an idea by the time that we're done figuring out what it is. We can then dissect it down and start to create and go, okay, this is a poc that's an mvp. Yeah. And I can give you a rough idea like that.

[00:46:18] Chris: That's interesting. Like just in your head, because you've been so much time inside of engineering, inside of design, you could say I could suspect, unless we go too far, POC is a quarter. So you,

[00:46:28] Tom: you, I came at this from the strategy standpoint. Yeah. So it sounds like we came at the discipline from two different angles.

[00:46:35] Tom: That you did it from the, say, I understand design, I understand engineering. I understand as you say, the execution part of it. And and then eventually you brought yourself over to more the theory of we have to have some hypothesis about what we're building, why we think, what market we're gonna

[00:46:53] Chris: have to Cetera.

[00:46:54] Chris: You come back to that, like the strategy in my head was all on the, it was, I would say on the fly. I know that's not great terminology. It's all right. But in my head it was all happening. Yeah, just verbalizing it and putting a framework around it to say, oh, that's, this is, we've always said, this is the problem we're solving.

[00:47:11] Chris: But as you articulated out, I have found in the time is. Execution's great, right? You do have to be able to get something done. If that part of the machine doesn't work, it doesn't matter what you dream up. Yeah. At all. But it goes both ways. Yeah. But if at the same time, if this machines just working and it's looking for stuff to do, then what feature we're gonna build next, I dunno.

[00:47:32] Chris: Put a feature in the factory, right? Just zip it through. But if you come back out to what is the market need? What problem are we solving? That is when another big change for me happened is when all of a sudden you're like, okay, we put some, some real skin on, structure to what that is.

[00:47:49] Chris: Instead of it just being like, oh no, I know where we're going. Let's go get it and let's go build it. Very scrappy mindset. Let's set the path. Let's now talk about strategy. Yeah. Let's talk about where we want to go on the journey. Here's all the things, like we could do a million things, right?

[00:48:05] Chris: But now we have a, we'd have. It's called like a backbone. We understand where we're going and what we're doing. Now everything we do, you can then boil back and go, does it fulfill the strategy or is this gonna take us off course?

[00:48:19] Tom: Yeah. I think that we have so many episode. To go back to the analogy of the 20 year old, one of the things that's so stressful about being 20 years old is the world's your oyster.

[00:48:30] Tom: You could do anything. And it's very hard to make choices when there's an infinite amount of choice. So same thing in developing a product is if you don't have some focus, if you don't have something you're trying to figure out you can be paralyzed by choice. Yeah. And so much software is terrible because it does too much and it doesn't do anything very well.

[00:48:55] Tom: But I did want to ask you about how you measure the performance of product managers. So you have people in product who report to you. How do you, how can you tell if they're doing a good job?

[00:49:07] Chris: Oh, another great question. I think a lot of it comes down to comes down to the level of the product manager and what their roles and responsibility is.

[00:49:19] Chris: If I still look at it as if we're thinking about the fundamentals of product management. I'm gonna ask the same question. Do you know where you're going? Do you and this is, do you own the strategy? Have you taken ownership, I don't care what level you're at, do you own it?

[00:49:35] Chris: Or do you think it was given to you? So which, so I'm always looking for that level of investment in true ownership of where we're going. Do you believe in it or are you just carrying out orders? So first is inside of like the total adoption of what's going on.

[00:49:54] Chris: So where are we going? Then you ha you have to look at it and say, Can you get work done? Yeah. Had you have the influence as a product manager, have you developed the relationships inside the team? That's why I come back to relationships. Have you created the relationships now that give you the ability to move work through the system?

[00:50:15] Chris: And I don't mean just engineering and design, what about customer success? What about sales? What about your key stakeholders? Have you had, do you have the ability to really influence this whole process so that you can carry out the strategy? So there's a couple different aspects to it.

[00:50:32] Chris: It's really interesting. It's about a strategy first. But then again, can you execute? Is it getting executed? You're not, as a product manager, you can't control the speed of the engineering team. But. You can also make decisions where you can slice the product up into different ways or different angles to see if you can still move the work along.

[00:50:54] Chris: So it has to be that the product manager has got critical thinking skills where they can look at things they can look at things objectively. They can understand the challenges that are sitting in front of them and react accordingly. Yeah. And ultimately, you're gonna, you're gonna de deliver on what you said you're gonna deliver on, and you're gonna do the best to do it within a period of time, but you can't measure somebody.

[00:51:18] Chris: This is the part though. You also can't measure them on success or failure. That's okay. And that if you measure somebody on success or failure, say what happens when we fail? Oh that's yeah. But failure's Okay. Is it? That's right. But then, and go back. So let's go back into the into the running world. You training, you, training, you train. You get out there, you say, okay, 20 some weeks in, big investment, big travel, go and do the race, you implode. Are you a failure? You had a bad race. You had a bad race, you had a bad day. But did you walk across the finish line?

[00:51:55] Chris: Did you crawl across the finish line? How did you get there? Yeah. You still got there. So I think about when, with product managers, we just have to be very much in a state where we empower our product manager to do the things that they need to be able to do. Of course with guidance and following the strategy to go do the things.

[00:52:18] Chris: But we're gonna win and lose. Yeah.

[00:52:21] Tom: It's a it's I feel like getting smarter is actually more important than growing revenue because I can grow revenue in a bad business.

[00:52:35] Chris: Yeah. Sure. And that's a metric though. If you do look at it Sure. You say, okay, let's go back to the metric side.

[00:52:39] Chris: Can I measure the team specifically on did you, Del, you took the investment, did you create the feature? Did the feature deliver on the PROMIS and create X revenue? We could hold to that for sure. But what happens when we take all the signals that look right.

[00:52:55] Chris: To the best of our ability. We run it through the system. It doesn't work so, Yeah, that was, that

[00:53:02] Tom: kind of brings me, I wanna bring us home by getting a little philosophical. I have a idea I'd like to get your opinion on, which is and I'll phrase the idea in the form of a question, is it possible to manage your life like a product?

[00:53:21] Chris: Probably. But you have to abstract it quite a bit. It's a bit challenging because you'd say really, it, it's the, it becomes the other way around. You learn a lot about what you do in product management and you realize you are just navigating life.

[00:53:42] Chris: That's why I think it's easy to make a parallel to running. Or something like that. Cause you can say running is just a series of AB tests, right? And every once in a while you'll have this great spike in win and it looks like, wow. Overnight success. You're like, yeah, I trained for that 13 years.

[00:53:55] Chris: Yeah. So it just happened to happen this day. That's, that is the similar scenario, right? Of business. But if you think about there's a lot of things that you can, I can think, you can look at it from product management and say, yeah, life could be like that, but also a little bit more challenging.

[00:54:18] Chris: It's hard to ab test who I should marry. For sure. No, but there's things, but there's things you can approach appreciate out of that too, which is I just know ever had that before where it's just I just know that this is what we're supposed to be doing.

[00:54:34] Chris: Where's the data? I don't have any data. It's, I'm moving on. A gut feel and product management, that's a, yeah. You kinda, you frown on that a little bit, right? That's a little bit of the art. That goes with the science. So I don't know, I, I don't know that you can manage your life like a product, right?

[00:54:54] Chris: I don't know what that really works.

[00:54:55] Tom: Yeah. I th I think of product management as a discipline, like laws of discipline or accounting, and I can apply those disciplines to, the problem of my life. And think about first principles. What is it that I want out of this?

[00:55:21] Tom: One of the things that I think is so inadequate in many ways about business, which is, which I is a fascinating pursuit. It's, and it's incredible what we can achieve as a society by through organizations that are businesses, right? But what's inadequate in many ways is that they're continually forward looking and life is not forward looking.

[00:55:46] Tom: Life is now. It's, there is no other, there is no future. There is nothing ahead of us. There's nothing behind this. It's like we're we are in this moment of now, which never changes, which, is all there is. Thinking about my life as a problem where I'm trying to get to a destination in many ways I think it's counterproductive to actually living, I've written books from the point of view. I've written a book from the point of view of a dog. And what I learned from observing this animal is that she has no past or future, as far as I can tell. There's there are no stories in her life.

[00:56:35] Tom: And so she's present. There isn't anything separating her from experience and so the idea of for me, managing my life like a product, it's helpful to apply that discipline of I have customers. There's, I'm a customer of my life. My wife is a customer of my life. How am I getting input from those stakeholders?

[00:56:58] Tom: What is it that I'm trying to achieve? So to go back to that, you were talking about giving the script to the 20 year old and saying, if you follow the script are you open to the data that comes in about this is working, this isn't working. I am gonna try new things. There are lots of things I can ab test in my life.

[00:57:19] Tom: And then there's also focus. I think it's a wonderful thing in business and in a product to have focus. And I also think there's so much that we gain from studying something. As you learn about something, you understand, or I'll speak for myself as I learn about something, I understand how ignorant I am, and that ignorance opens me up to more experience and to learn more.

[00:57:51] Tom: Anyway, I went all over the place with that.

[00:57:52] Chris: Yeah. I look, I think so you kind you sparked at this, what I think is one of the things that've spent a lot of time around recently in the past, past couple of years for sure, is sometimes we're doing things like that are super challenging, right?

[00:58:13] Chris: And sometimes life goes the way that we're expecting it to go. Sometimes it takes a while detour and things will change. Now we can set out with the greatest plan. I could say I wanna break three hours in the marathon again Boston, right? Okay, what if the circumstances aren't working in my favor?

[00:58:34] Chris: What if running actually has to take a side for a couple of years? What? So when you get into that, you said inside of that, you have to start thinking differently. It has to almost be the same. Same question. If you ask folks on my team, what I would say is we can only do, if you think about if you make 1% per day a progress, what was it?

[00:58:59] Chris: Because you're gonna, we're gonna have great days. We're gonna have awful days. Awful weeks. Sometimes an awful month. Sometimes it'll be a really challenging year. The question I think we have to keep on looking at though, is like you get today to work with. Did I make one?

[00:59:14] Chris: Can I look at the end of my day and go I made a little bit of difference today. Just 1%, one degree. And I know that's not original or anything like that, but I've really starting to feel like that ear therein lies the biggest, I would say. It's almost like the relief. You can go to bed, you can sleep well at night, knowing that you gave what you got.

[00:59:36] Chris: It might not have been the easiest day. You might have been pretty, pretty challenging day or awful even. But I gave it what I got. I gave it everything I had. Can you answer the question? Can you say that you did? When you wake up, you knowm, I'm 1% closer. Whether it was work, whether it was life, whether it was with your athletic pursuits, I gave what I could give today.

[00:59:57] Chris: Now it's maybe not what I could, was able to give 10 years ago, five years ago, even a year ago. It's different. But did you give it everything you had? And did you throw everything that you believe into it? I love that.

[01:00:10] Tom: That's a great note to end on. Chris, thank you so much for coming. This was a lot of fun.

[01:00:14] Tom: Yeah, thanks. Look forward to talking again.

[01:00:16] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, Tom.

[01:00:30] Tom: The Fortunes Path podcast is a production of Fortunes Path where we work with technology companies to build products for power monopoly profits. You can watch old episodes of the Fortunes Path podcast and learn more about us@fortunespath.com. Special thanks to Chris Bradley for being our guest, using an editing of the Fortunes Path podcast or by my son Ted Noser.

[01:00:51] Tom: And I'm Tom Noser. Thanks for listening, and I hope we meet along Fortunes path.