Didier Elzinga: What survives AI

We're not that far away from AI being better at that than the managers and leaders are. That doesn't mean that managers and leaders don't have a job. It just means that they need to be focusing on other things and they can probably support people in different ways. So what is the context layer that needs to exist to allow those managers to be superstars? That's what we've done. What's like one thing you've been testing out that's right at the outside of the boundaries of imagination? I love that you use the word imagination. It's something that I've found myself saying a lot, which is because I think we're on this exponential curve. Because it's on an exponential curve, somebody that might only be a week or a month ahead of you is 10 times further ahead. And that's really hard for us to get our head brains around. What I've been playing around with for myself is how far can you take agents when they largely just bootstrap themselves? There was a point we were talking about growth and I was talking about wanting people to grow. And somebody said, well, not everybody wants to grow in their role. About a year, a year and a half later, I went, actually I was wrong. No, no. You can't be a growth place. So you actually have to be honest about what you are. If you're trying to meet everybody's needs, you meet none. If you're going to build anything in jarring, it has to outlive you. And actually made it into this painted picture that we wrote a culture app. I think my successor, successor, has just joined the company. And it was just getting me to start thinking about, like at some point, I'm then hand over what does that look like. My guest today is Didier Elsinger, a man who has spent the last 15 years building culture app into a unicorn software company that's revolutionised the way organizations think about employee engagement. Earlier this year, he handed the CEO a role to his CEO, O'Caro, and stepped back onto the board. He's now spending three days a week going as deep as he can on AI. And his observation after a few months of that is he actually just doesn't know how anyone with a full-time job can keep up. So also led him to some intriguing perspectives on the future of work. Now, I reckon these discussions are actually somewhat meta because the reality is that the company he co-founded is in the maelstrom of these questions themselves. It's a large SaaS company with 7,000 customers forced into its own transformation in the face of the AI revolution. I hope you enjoy this foray into the mind of a man who spent 15 years thinking about culture and organisations over to Didier. Didier, it's so lovely to have you on wildtarts and crazily, I think the very first time that we found you on wildtarts, which is insane. You were at the helm of culture amp for 15 odd years. The decision to step back a CEO, talk me through what was behind that call and how you made up. Yeah, I mean, I said it in the post when I announced that it is. I think it's a difficult thing for any founder to go through because you're like in some way to some part of you that goes when I'm no longer the CEO I'm dead. Like that's my identity. I had actually gone through like in my own personal work, people asked you know what's the questions that you're grappling with, what's the deep work that you're doing. And one of the questions I've been asking myself for the last year, maybe a year and a half is how do I disentangle my own personal identity from the identity of the company that I founded. Because for me, they're synonymous. And it was doubly so because I was a CEO in my previous company too. So I've been a CEO for five years at rising some pictures and then founded culture amp and so on. So I've been a CEO for 20 years. So who am I when I'm no longer the CEO, I'm still trying to figure that out. So that process of thinking about it, trying to figure out, you know, when's the right time. It's like little seeds, I think. Several years before, probably four or five years ago, I was at a Morgan Stanley conference. And I had the benefit of hearing Jim Donahoe, Bill McDermott and Brad Smith. So Jim Donahoe at the time was the CEO of ServiceNow and then he went on to run Nike. Bill McDermott was then the CEO of SAP and he went on to run ServiceNow and Brad Smith was the, had been the CEO into it. And they were all the third or the fourth or the fifth CEOs in those companies. And so it was actually really interesting to look at it because I remember thinking, I can't conceive of a world when I'm no longer the CEO. But then you see these incredible leaders who've inherited from somebody else and you realize them talking about legacy. But if you're going to build anything in jureen, it has to outlive you. And so it's really interesting and it actually made it into this painted picture that we wrote a culture amp where I had a line where I was talking about the future. And I said, you know, I think my success as successor has just joined the company. And it was just getting me to start thinking about like at some point I'm going to hand over what does that look like. It's beautiful. I mean, we were both in San Francisco a few weeks ago. And I think we got into a conversation about what is permanence in this world. This sort of huge juxtaposition, I think we've got right now, which is that AI and the technological revolution behind AI is changing. Faster than we have like arguably the psychology to be able to internalize. But at the same time, you mentioned sort of legacy and outliving, you know, a company outliving an individual. And some of the best companies in the world have done that many times over. I'd love your perspective on how you think about permanence and how like your association with culture amp has changed as a result of that. Oh, such a deep question. I think one of my strengths, but also one of my, the things that causes me challenge as well, is a defining characteristic as I never give up. So I think back to, you know, when I was a kid, I used to play tennis. And I was good enough to play good people and bad enough to lose. So I would just be stubborn enough to basically get in one grade above what I was probably skilled enough to play. Because I was just that much more stubborn. And so that's good because I think when you're doing a startup, you have no right to exist. Like if you're not willing to, you know, just go a bit beyond what the world is telling you is right. You just won't, you won't go anywhere. Delusion is helpful. Delusion is absolutely helpful. But there is also a point where you're like, well, you know, what am I doing this for? Who am I doing this for? And I had the fortune I had an executive coach who was Steve Jobs's executive coach. Wow. I'd always struggled. I've had a few coaches, but I found them a bit too reflective. So they're just passive in a way. And I'm very good on my feet. And so what would happen is they'd ask me a question about something. And then I'd answer it. And then they'd let me get away. I'm like, no, no, no, no, you've got to push me harder than that because I didn't actually, I said enough to not have to answer the question properly. Maybe better. I'm bullshitting you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But one of the questions that we used to keep coming back to is what am I trying to prove to him? I think part of what made this a good time to step down to CEO and take on the exact chair role is I'm still working two days working. Culture. It allows me to be there to focus and support, obviously to support Cara and help her. She's the first time CEO. She's incredible. She's been in the company for a year. And so I got to know her new watch. She was capable of and I'm really excited to have her in the role work with Chris on the product, but more than anything allows me to go deep on AI. Because I think we are in this window right now where the world's changing at an exponential rate. And I didn't realize it until after I stepped out, but having stepped out and then starting to spend three days a week, just reading, coding, listening, talking, learning. I don't know how anybody who's got a full time job can keep up with what is going on. And so I couldn't have picked a better time because the problems that I'm fascinated by even the problems that culture set out to exist to create a better water work. I deeply, deeply impacted by what's happening on an AI and by being the exact chair, I can actually do more of that than I could as the CEO, which is also a humbling thought. Yeah, and there's so much I want to pick up there in particular like what is the what is culture and point of view on AI both for its own platform, but also like all of these societal changes that we're seeing, which I know you'll have opinions on. Before we move on though, I do want to kind of get a little bit underneath some of the things that you talked about just now. You talked about not giving up. And I'm intrigued by this language. Can you talk to me a little bit about your decision to do that rather than the kind of, you know, some people would say, get out for you and the company. It's the best move. Talk to me a bit about that. I mean, every situation is different. And so I think, and I know people that have gone through this journey in different ways. So I think for some people, they realize that they're done and it's actually better for everybody just to leave. There's no doubt that being a founder and having been the CEO or on the way, you have a whole bunch of context and knowledge that's useful to the company. The question is, can you make that available without making impossible for the new CEO to do their job? And so that's always the perennial test. And it would potentially be different if we had gone and brought in a CEO from outside. And why didn't you do that? It's a fraught situation for any company to try and figure out. I think if you look at most of the best organizations, you bring in an external CEO when you need to change things massively. You use an internal CEO when you want to continue to build. It doesn't mean that the new CEO is not going to change things like a new CEO will do things differently and that's the remit the car has that's the remit that any CEO has is to do it differently than the way the CEO did it before. And in many ways, if I can just do a little jump to the side. One of the things that has really resonated with me through the journey is this concept of spiral dynamics. And so it gets a little woo-woo if you go into the deep detail because it talks about societies and individuals and communities and all sorts of stuff. But in a sense, you have this thing of going from an individualistic to a collectivist type mental model. And to get to the next layer of performance or outcome, you kind of have to go whatever got you here won't get you to the next one. It's that concept. So there's a kind of red energy, which is very individual, very competitive. You don't win at the top level without deep, deep competitiveness. And I'm actually a very competitive person. But once you build a really competitive culture, you can't achieve the next level without unlocking a sense of the team, the team being above anyone individual. But once you get to that, you can't get to the next level without going back towards the individual. And there's a sort of balance that goes, when you're bringing in a new leader, you're bringing in somebody who is deliberately different to the previous CEO. So like, Karo is more impatient than me and should be happy for me to say that. You know, I don't necessarily know. She's more driven, but she's very driven and like she's gonna gonna bring in energy that I'm really excited to have so This concept of Being able to build on what we have being out of move faster like you bring someone you win you lose six months For that person to understand the business to where you're going etc We were able to make this change because we already had that relationship and so then for me I'm being very trying to be very thoughtful about where I'm engaged and where I'm involved So I spoke to a lot of people I spoke to Robin Denholm I spoke to Allison Allison Deans a bunch of people They've seen these journeys before and they gave me a lot of advice there where you have to create space But then you also want to make sure that you're available when they need you can you share anything about You know what you've chosen to do differently with the sort of board structure how those conversations take place Hmm, so I think it's interesting when you think about I don't really like the word governance But if you think about the word governance models You know in the UK model it's it's very common and preferred to have an independent chair and the CEO In the US it's usually the CEO as the chair and That has the benefit that you can theoretically move faster and so on and so as a founder like that's the role that I played for 15 years But we had our first board meeting where Carol was the CEO and I was just the chair and it's so much easier being just the chair Because then your job to your point is to create the space for for CEO and for management and One of one of the people that I spoke to gave me some great advice it like you know your job as a board is to help frame problems in a way that management can answer And oftentimes on boards that I'm not necessarily commenting on my own here, but It can just end up people providing opinions Boards are there to do work Boards are there to help the companies be successful to look after the shareholders interests to try and set a longer term vision and hold management and leadership accountable to that so I actually think if you get it right Having a strong chair and a strong CEO is the best possible combination because the strong chair helps the board create the necessary conditions for the CEO There's so much I want to move to one of them is actually Stepping back a moment thinking about 15 years of CEO So there's not that many people in the Australian ecosystem Who have done as many years running one company and right from the start to many hundreds of millions as you have done at Culture amp I'd love to get a little bit of a sense of like if you can cast your mind back to the early days of being you know Found a CEO of culture amp that were four of you co-founders, you know building from the ground up Then thinking about how you spent your time and what preoccupations you may have had as you know as a founder and as a CEO Do you have and then how that may have changed as the company scaled and as time moved on and new challenges emerged and all that sort of thing Can you make any reflections for the founders in the audience who about Things you've learned with the power of retrospect about you know what you were worried about what you should have been worried about and how you spend your time Yeah, I mean you always look back and go I would have done things differently And I think one of the challenges as a CEO Once you get past that very early stage So in the early stage when you're like pre-product market fear or like early stage revenue Everything's like a fire fight every day something new you know exactly what you need to do because it's screaming at you And you know whether you did it right because it's either done or it's not done but as you get to a certain level of scale so Jason Lemkin wrote this great post where years ago where he said Growing scaling a business from one to ten million dollars in revenue is really really hard and you'll almost die twice doing it But don't worry the cavalry's coming and his point is that the company Is growing so quickly that the needs just outpace what the company can do but you start to bring in leaders And he said it's really really hard But you've already done the impossible so getting from zero to one is impossible getting from one to ten is just really really hard So the zero to one you kind of know what to do one to ten as a CEO on any given day Ideally you don't have to do anything like you've got a team So most of the things that are needed by the business can be done by somebody There's bored stuff and so on there's a few things that are specifically yours But you don't have to do anything on a given day And you won't know whether you spent your time on the right things for weeks, months, quarters or even possibly years And so that's actually a hard thing How do you evaluate your time and attention and a quote and phrase that I keep coming back to as I think it's a Buddhist phrase Which is you are what you pay attention to And so how do I as a leader and I used to every year I would stop and I would go to the board And I'd say would what's the version of did you that we need next year as CEO that's different to the version we had last year And it was just that meta conversation of trying to understand how do I need to shift to my attention I don't think I always got it right But it's about being you know, in tenful and where do I need to spend my time I think If I look back it's a strength of mine, but it's also a weakness that I'm interested in every part of the business So I did customer success. I've done sales I've written some poor code You know, I've been involved in all the bits and I love all of it. So like in Slack. I was in everything reading lots Engaging lots of things and I took that almost as a moment of pride and The challenge with that is it's very easy to get Distracted by all the little things and not step back and kind of go What's the one thing that I need to be thinking about that nobody else can and There's a buckminster fuller quote that I really love which is he was talking about life purpose But I think it's true as a CEO too Which is what is something that needs doing that I know something about that if I don't do it probably won't happen And it's that last piece that's the bit that you're looking for like you get so many swings like where are you going to place those swings and And be more intentful and thoughtful. I mean that's super interesting isn't it because there is this Assumption that like a highly present CEO like has benefits from a culture standpoint you'll have many opinions I'm sure on that because of the nature of what culture amp does but also this sense of like I think Some startup wisdom is that there are all sorts of like Small but important canaries in the mind shaft about what isn't working within a company and you have to be You know finger on the pulse about the company you cannot always rely on the reports of senior leaders that they in themselves even fully understand what's happening down Right down at the at the bottom level so both from a kind of culture and relationship building and who you are and building Out your persona to your employees But also, you know to pick up things that may not be otherwise reported back to you either through you know Someone missing it or because they didn't say it themselves or they didn't think it was important But you recognize it it was like that balancing Balancing that desire for like ingratiation in the company Versus the capacity to step back. How did you did you ever nail that and and if so how? I don't know if I ever nailed it, but I did observe interesting things happen where I think CEOs and senior executives are Sort of escape valves like the the company or the system should broadly be good at dealing with stuff and Just in our chief People off a say he has a great phrase where it's like as a senior executive you only get the 51 49 calls If it was a 90 10 call it should have been made further down the org you get the difficult ones It's hard to know so they come to you But I can think of several situations in the life of culture amp where a customer who's frustrated with something has reached out to me on LinkedIn And I almost always respond almost straight away and talk to them And in a couple of situations I'd go back to the team and say hey, there's this frustration And what sometimes the people on the team would go well that you know, this is a tiny customer. It's a failure that They've gone to the CEO And I'm like no, it's a failure that it was easier for them to get to the CEO than it was for them to get through our systems And it's not because somebody was doing the wrong thing It's not because somebody wasn't talented or skilled. It's just that It's so easy to ship the org chart and to focus on all our own problems and forget about where the customer is in there And so I think that's actually a really important role of a leader But if you're the way customers get to that is a failure case that needs to be fixed like it's a canary But you shouldn't be proud of it. Yes, and so that was the kind of that's the tension there I'd like to also unpack a bit what it was like leading a company like culture amp Which has such a strong point of view on culture by definition like you're there Prostitizing a version of what a better world of work looks like. Yes That's got to put a pressure on a senior leadership team on a CEO to represent that For customers, but also for the team. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like leading Culture amp with that strong point of view. Yeah, I mean it's both Very difficult and also a long learning curve for us And I think this is true for any mission-oriented organization Where one of the things we realize and it took us a while to realize it Is that when you're a mission-oriented organization you can over rotate to people's um belief in the mission And so I think at points in the journey We were hiring people more on how much do they believe in creating a better world of work rather than What are the signals that tell us that this person is going to be world class at whatever it is that we need And that's not going to create the environment where you win Or even where you deliver on the culture promise that you have Because sometimes people that are drawn to that mission are drawn there for their own Gallengers and issues and a phrase that somebody gave me you end up picking up a lot of corporate refugees People that are like coming to you because they're running away from what they're and they're not actually running to you They're just running away from something and you just have to be careful about that And so I think over time we've got a lot better at being clearer about is who we are as an org This is what our culture is like this is the good stuff and the bad stuff is what we need and expect from you And we've talked a whole bunch of people you're the person who we think is going to be the greatest opportunity to be successful here What I hope that we have done well and will continue to do is keep betting on potential because you're not just betting on what's the person going to be like on day one. And so like one of the lines I used to give my leaders is when we're considering an internal promotion versus an external hire, so you asked me at the start about going and getting a CEO from outside or having a CEO and I would say I would use the six month lens. So don't compare the internal person to the external person because you're always going to get someone externally who's got more experience, you got to ask yourself, what's that internal person likely to be six months from now if we give them the raw? Because it's going to take that new person six months to get up to speed and be effective and that also helps you anchor to people that are on a fast trajectory. You want to find those people internally where if you give them another six months, you're like, actually, I reckon they might be better than the field, put those people in the role. Yeah, that's super interesting. I mean, I think there's also something here which is you have grown culture amp through huge societal change around how we think about what work is. We've talked previously about this notion of like bring your whole self to work. Like we grew companies with orientations around people through a period that we now, you know, like it's disparagingly referred to as a sort of woke era. I'm really interested in like your perspective, if you're willing to go there, like on what bringing your whole self to work looks like, how maybe culture amp, both for its customers and for itself is like added nuance to that notion and to what work is to people in a safe, bounded way. So much to unpack, segueing from the previous conversation, one of the things that I realized earlier on, so there was a point we were talking about growth and I was talking about wanting people to grow. And I remember having a conversation, I don't have a big we were at the time, maybe two, three hundred people. We want to be a place where people can grow. We want to optimize for that. We want to hire people and somebody said, well, not everybody wants to grow in their role. Like for various outside reasons, maybe you've, you know, you've just had young children or whatever it is. There's reasons why for the next 12 months, you might not want to push yourself to grow at work at breakneck speed. And I remember at the time thinking, yeah, they're right. Like we should be inclusive. We should be open. So not everybody's going to need to grow. You can't be that. You can't be a growth place and make it available. Like if you're a scale up or a startup and you are backing yourself that you're going to hire people that maybe don't have the rock star CV, but they're going to grow like hell, then everybody has to be growing like hell. Yeah. You can't save this one from others. So I do think it is, you know, if you're trying to meet everybody's needs, you meet none. And so that becomes challenge too when you start to think about all the other stuff. So we talk about work and I find it so funny when people, it's become a pejorative term. And it literally just means to be aware. Like how can that be the pejorative thing to be aware where you weren't aware before? And the benefit of having some incredible people, a culture amp who I've learnt a ton from, Stephen Huang, who was our first head of diversity or revenge. Like just incredible people. And Orbs put me on to, she gave me Dr. Ibrahim Kendi's book, How to Be Anti-Raisist. And that really affected how I think because he makes the argument that rather than thinking that as you are or you aren't, you look at it and go, are the actions that you're pursuing, either perpetuating or dismantling a unfair situation. And so that's been a useful lens for me to sit down and think about when we're doing stuff, are we doing things that are making the world better, more equal, you know, all of those things? Or are we perpetuating all of the systemic issues that exist? And you can't fix everything. And at times I think we've tried too hard to do that. And I think it's hurt us in ways. But I would look back over what we've done a culture amp and I would feel, I do feel and I know from some of the people I've spoken to that we have been and I think we'll continue to be a company that when someone needs you the most, we're there in a way that most companies won't be. But that's different to having the world's best set of policies, the most generous employee profit policies. And I can tell you every employee engagement survey we ran, somebody would go, I can't believe we don't have this policy. This is ridiculous. We're not looking after that. And I'm like, you can't meet all of those needs. No. And to your point earlier, I think there's sort of some people have an interpretation of this sort of area of being great to people, being fabulous to employees, treating people as they come, recognizing we are all human and thinking that that's a sort of opening for workplaces as extensions of therapy, which is also unhealthy both for them and for their peers and for, frankly, building a growth stage company and finding the balance around that. I've observed from the outside culture amp play in that space openly, have a point of view, but, you know, adapt over time as you've sort of learnt what's worked for you and what hasn't. Was there any hard one lesson in there? Yeah, I mean, I've reflected a lot on this as a CEO and as a founder. And I want to come back to vulnerability in a sex. And if I don't remember it, let's go back to vulnerability. But, you know, I think coming through COVID and a lot of the stuff that was going on in the US, there was a need for organizations to talk to their people. And the backlash against that was the concept of the, I think, incorrectly titled mission or an oriented organization where people said, no politics at work, we're only going to talk about our mission, you know, it was a backlash against this need to go and talk to people about all sorts of things that was going on in life. And I think the challenges both ends of those spectrum are bad. It's incredibly privileged to say, we're just not going to talk about all of these topics because they're not relevant to what the organization's doing if, for half of your workforce, that's their daily reality. So I don't think you can just say, we don't talk about politics or we don't talk about any of this stuff at work. On the other side, if you say, any time anybody has something that is important to them, leadership should spend the time to talk about them, to say that they've created space for them, to hold space for them. You literally will have. Have corporate comms on them? Yeah, you will never get anything done because you are doing it. And I do remember thinking at a moment, going, I'm doing this literally every other week. Yeah. I'm having to write a note to the company to hold space for a portion of the workforce. And you start asking yourself, am I even the right person to do that? What entitles me to do that? There's a little bit where people want to know that their leaders care and you actually have to care if you're going to tell them that you care. So you've got to show that and make that not just performative. But I'm commenting on US political issues. I don't vote in America. I'm not a US citizen. I just have a lot of people that work there. So what's the right way for me to engage with that? I struggled with that a lot. Yeah, it doesn't seem to me that any organizations completely forget that one out either. And it's only gotten harder, not easier since the last couple of years. So let's talk a little bit about vulnerability then. What's always struck me about you, DDA, is that you're deeply self-reflective. You've alluded to a couple of the things you're. Some of the practices you've already quoted from Buddhist literature and many other leadership principles. You're very thoughtful about who you are as a leader. And also you've talked a bit about this challenge of running a culture-based organization openly. I'm really interested in what you think the kind of healthy balance of that self-reflection and the openness you have around these topics, what your role is, who you are, and the unhealthy part of that. Yeah. So our first core value is have the courage to be vulnerable. That's like deep in the DNA of the organization. Right there. Right there. Because I'm going to step back and talk about through what lens do you measure the success of the culture. In an organizational context, like culture transmission is to create a better world of work. And what we're trying to do is help organizations create cultures that help them achieve their mission. And their mission is not necessarily save the world. Their mission is to be a successful company, to win in a space that they're choosing. And winning doesn't just mean money, winning means being the best in the world at something and doing it at a really high level. And I think that's the first place where sometimes people get unstuck, where they feel like they're choosing between one or the other. And they're like either you're committed to culture or your performance are intended. And we've actually just done a whole bunch of research that we're showing with performance culture quadrant where we have this two access. So we've got like the engaged organization, which is like how much do you care about the organization and your role and your craft and what you do. And then the performance culture to what extent is the company being successful, to what extent is the culture achieving at a really, really high level. And you want to be top of the quadrant. You want to be on both sides of those. You want those two things to come together. And so there's a subtle piece there where when we do a lot of our research, because we're coming from that mission or intated side, because we're coming from that mission or intated side, what people are looking for us to do is provide the research that shows why investing in culture is a good idea. And we do. And there's some fascinating findings like we found that implementing a structured performance review process makes zero difference to the experience of men. But it eradicates the historical gap for women on a whole range of topics like that my role is evaluated fairly that we're a high performing organization, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So huge value in doing that from a moral point of view. But actually what we want to do and what we strive to do is suddenly different. What we want to do is we want to go, if you look at the culture of the organizations that succeed at the highest level, these are the sorts of patterns that work. There is no one perfect culture. So we're not going to come out and say, this is the culture blueprint that makes a successful company. But what we can do is we can show you the cultural underpinnings and the research that shows, if you're highly engaged but not performing, how you make that jump. If you're an organization that achieves at a high level but is burning people out and it's actually a fear-based environment, how do you make that jump where you go back to connecting with the culture that allows you to play and do all those other things? So we're about helping people do that, but we're always navigating to that top star, which is performance. And so that's the tension for every company. So we come back to vulnerability. Vulnerability is the heart of learning. It's the heart of innovation, of courage, of all of those things. And I think in a complex environment, you need it. But there's a line in one of Brunei Brown's books which really resonated with me where she said, "Vonurability without boundaries is not vulnerability, it's manipulation." Wow. And so for me, that's the line that you have to learn. Vulnerability is there to support the people. If you're a leader and you're showing vulnerability, you're doing it to support your people. You're doing it to show them that you're human. You're doing it to show them that you care. You're doing it to show them that there is more to life than work. Like one of the lines that I've used a lot is we borrow our time at work from people or things that are more important than the work is. But I say that as a workaholic who is dedicated to winning at the highest level. And you have to have both. What I'm going to say is that the full over is when you're using that exposure to try and manipulate the other person or you're trying to go, "Don't give me a hard time, can't you see that I'm hurting here?" Or whatever it is. And so that line goes through my mind a lot in terms of how we manage it. And it's made that much harder when things are online. Yeah, I can imagine. Well, actually say a bit more about that. Why harder online? Well, I was talking about a head of comms about this actually. And she made this really great comment too, where she was saying, "You and I face to face, there's so many more dimensions of bandwidth, where I read that differently and I'll react to it differently. But I remember this cartoon where it's like somebody says, "Oh, come to bed." And he says, "I can't. Somebody said something wrong on the internet." Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And so there's just like, you see something said, but you're not responding to a human, you're just responding to this thing. And we see it constantly. Like the rage-baiting, the overly emotional response, they're just, you know, flaming each other online only, it isn't conducive necessarily to great relationship skills. And so that's a challenge in organizations, like how we keep our slack conversations civil and so on. But if we go back up another level, you and I were talking about this earlier, I think this comes from therapy. I'm not sure where it comes from, but the idea really resonates with me is, you want to share scars, not wounds. And so the way I internalize that as a leader is, if it's still a wound and you're still hurting about it, chances are you're actually probably not going to share it in an effective way for the team or for the other people, because it's still raw. Once you've kind of processed it, made sense with it, extracted the lesson, it can be really valuable to go, "Hey, let me tell you about how I screwed that up and how I was feeling and why that was difficult for me, but I'm doing it from a somewhat centered place." And so that's actually been a line that I've used in my own head a lot when I'm feeling an emotional reaction. It's like, "What am I sharing here? Am I sharing a scar or am I sharing a wound?" It strikes me, and I've heard this in some of your research, actually. I think you've done quite a lot of research on authenticity and the importance of authenticity and leadership, which is like, you know, anyone can say or put out a perfectly worded statement certainly now with AI, like definitely possible to do that at scale. But people pick up pretty quickly, whether there's an authenticity behind that. And it seems to me that the last five to ten years of kind of corporate reckoning has been around this notion of vulnerability, but not always in the format where like the person expressing vulnerability is doing so with authenticity. Or as you say earlier, like Renee Brown saying, "It can be manipulation. It can have kind of an emotional undertow that doesn't carry the honesty that people are actually seeking out of that." Can you share a bit about what you've learnt through culture amps, experience with customers around the importance of authenticity? There's two different parts of communicating, and authenticity works at two different levels. So I think one is, you know, I used to work in Hollywood, so I'm a big believer in fan of storytelling. And I think as a leader, a big part of your job is to be a storyteller. And so part of storytelling is to make the other person feel. And you want to connect somehow emotionally with the audience, and that audience might be your employees, it might be your customers, it might be the world at large. And that is a skill. And you see it in musicians, you see it in actors and everything. The other part of authenticity as a leader that I think is really important and probably under looked is, and there is a framework that I learnt from my wife, Grado, with four C's. And I can't remember what all the C's are. I think it's clarity, something else, but one of them is consistency. And so the reason why I think authenticity is so important for leaders is because it helps people know how you're going to show up. Because a powerful culture is what happens when you're not in the room. It's when somebody goes, oh, I'm going to make this difficult decision. Like I'm going to walk, you know, I'm going to put this customer at risk or I'm going to spend the company's money or I'm going to do something that somebody else would look at and go, that's risky for you to do that. Because I know that this is in line with the values of the organization. And I've seen the leader act and show out authenticity so I know what to expect of them. And I actually, a member years ago talking to a guy who told, and I won't tell the whole story, but he had this moment where he basically had to walk away from an important customer that this person had and he went to his boss and basically said, I had to do this. And he was sort of not sure which way it was going to go. And the leader just looked at him and said, yep, you did the right thing and thought nothing on it. And he said, in that moment, he had him for life because he now knew how he was going to show up in those moments. So for me, that's what's important about authenticity is your helping people understand how you're likely to show up because if it's authentic, it's true. It's going to consist. It's going to persist. Let's go one level deeper on this sort of role of, you mentioned earlier online only and also this sort of authenticity as a leader. I'd love your reflections on Mark Zuckerberg recently kind of came out saying that he was contemplating, I think, building an AI avatar of himself as a leader that people in the organization could interact with, what do you make of it? I think we're going to see more of it. I mean, this is actually one of the areas of research for me right now. Like I'm deeply curious about what is the role of the human in the world of work when we have more and more AI. Like one of the things I thought was kind of funny as I was stepping out, part of me is like, oh, you know, maybe I want to have the experience of running a bigger company than Kochamp. And you know, at our largest, we're, you know, a thousand people. And then I had this other thought and I'm like, actually going into the future, there may actually not be any point knowing how to run a company that's that much larger than a thousand people. I may have actually already had the experience that's going to cover 90% of the companies we're going to build into the world because I think companies are going to be smaller because that's what AI makes possible. But those ones are going to be more leveraged. So what is the role of a human in an AI world? How do AI and humans work together? What's the role of AI in amplifying humans, et cetera? And the shift that I think we're going through at the moment, and once again, something that I'm passionate about and I'm really enjoying learning about in my non-Kochamp days, is so much of AI is almost individual now. Like what an individual can do with Claude or Chatchapet, or it is incredible. But not enough of it as multiplayer. So not enough of it is how we're working together. And so I've actually some of the stuff I've been building on my own is like, rather than thinking about it as your assistant, thinking about it as the team member you always wish you had. That's in every chat going, how do I make this chat a better chat? How do I put the spotlight on the person who hasn't had a chance to speak? How do I bring it back to the person who should be involved here? So I think we're going to see more and more of how do you amplify an individual? Of course CEOs are going to try and figure out how to do this. It is interesting though, isn't it? I mean, there's something there about, we are in this sort of very early phase where we're thinking about AI agents, as you say, kind of like individuals. Like our frame of reference is, I'm a person with a given job, a scope of work. How do I get an AI agent to help pick up parts of my scope of work? Which in one sense also just treats like an AI, which could be in many different formats as an individual, rather than like, actually I'm choosing to have the AI think in a multi-dimensional way that's actually very hard for any given individual to. Like, it'll be interesting to see in like 10 years' time, whether or not the agents we build, actually don't look at all like what a human version of a computer could be. I love that you said 10 years. I mean, wherever we say 10 years, we probably mean 10 months. That's right. Because the world is moving so fast, but you're 100% right. I keep flip-flopping on this because the prevailing model at the moment for people of the building-agent workflows is largely to say, let's think of agents or swarms of agents as jobs. And you know, there's this great open source project called Paperclip, which is to run a zero-employee company where all these agents play the role. So there's a CEO, and a CTO, and an engineer, and a marketer, and they talk to each other, and they do stuff. And firstly, I'm not interested in building a zero-employee company. I'm interested in what does it look like to have 100 employees and a thousand agents. But secondly, I am very interested in, do you make them jobs? Are they jobs to be done? Are they some alchroms of humans? Are they something else? And I keep flip-flopping and trying to figure out how to make that work, and I'm building some things to play that out in my mind. And I think it will change a lot. over the next 10 months, because at one end, people have got agents as essentially just like little snippets. Do this and create a presentation. That's not very interesting. What we're talking about is the long running memory context to where thing that we can start to converse with and interact with. So yeah, that's the watch the space. And that's why I'm actually excited to be an exec chair rather than a CEO right now. Totally. It feels to me like there's two dimensions here. We're constrained both by capability, like these tools, as you said in 10 months' time, like what is possible with these tools will completely shift, but also by own imagination of how to use them. I love that you use the word imagination and it's something that I've found myself saying a lot, which is because I think we're on this exponential curve. And so particularly encoding, but also in long running agents in general, there was a step change between November and February. So people were doing things middle of last year, and they kind of worked, kind of didn't. And then suddenly stuff just started working at a level that is mind blowing. And so because it's an exponential curve, somebody that might only be a week or a month ahead of you is 10 times further ahead. And their one part is the tyranny of, or the information asymmetry. They just know stuff that you don't know. But I think the bigger problem is the imagination asymmetry. Because they're already there, they're now thinking about things that you're not even putting it to. So what I've been playing around with for myself is, how far can you take agents when they largely just bootstrap themselves? You know, what happens when you give them fairly basic tools? And this is like the OpenClaw Hermes agent type world. And rather than trying to overspecify stuff, you just keep redirecting them to update themselves to get better at it. And it's amazing. It's scary. What's your favorite prompt in doing that? Because you mentioned this challenge around, like you don't want to overspecify, because by definition, you're then constraining the outcome. And you may not know what the best version of that outcome is that you could collectively come to. Have you learnt anything about the best prompting version of the redirection without the over constraint? So I think the trick to do this is, you've got to move from single-shot prompts to long-running agents. And the skills model has kind of unlocked this, because what you're doing is you're kind of creating repeatable ways of doing stuff. And so an agent can still be just written as a series of prompts. But you start with the simplest possible version. So you go, oh, I'll give you an example. So in the thing that I built for myself, I have this concept of a librarian. So the librarian basically looks at everything else and makes it better. So to start with, it's just simply two lines. Like you are a librarian. This is what you do. But then you tell it to bootstrap itself. So every time it runs across and does stuff, it compiles what it learned into a bunch of lessons. And then it reads those lessons. And then it rewrites its own prompt. So the trick is to get it to write itself and watch what happens. And it's actually really, really fascinating. It's both incredibly bright and incredibly stupid at the same time. But it is mind-blowing. And then the imagination starts to open up. And you're like, what if you could do this? What if you could do that? And I think the most useful thing that it's helped me understand is that the usual answer to most problems is just to go meta and go back to the AI itself. So rather than trying to overspecify it, go back to it and go, oh, why did you do that? Extract for me the lessons of that. And then let me interact with those. Yeah, interesting. Which you mentioned earlier, it's almost impossible to have the space for exploration and the going up the imagination curve. You use your way of conceiving it while also running a thousand person organization with all the pressures that caught Trump. Even running a 20 person organization. Like-- Yeah. So actually, let's blend those things together. So we can't be having a conversation about culture imp in this day, in this exact moment without referencing the sort of SaaS apocalypse as it's been termed. I guess first question for you is, like, are you glad culture imps not public at this moment? Yes, 100%. But I think what's happened, the private markets are not immune either. So whatever happens in the public markets will ghost the private market too. You're just-- Especially for large companies that are held to comprables and-- Exactly. It's a really hard world for any company north of 50 million in revenue. In fact, it's any company with revenue. Unless you're an AI company growing at 3,000%. It's a really, really hard place to be. And what's shifted is 15 years ago no one gave SaaS the multiples they had. Because they were like, oh, I don't really understand the model. And then, sort of, probably 10 years ago to five years ago, people said, oh, this is a beautiful business model. Because it's a monotonic revenue curve. People have got positive net revenue retention. So even if they don't add new sales, the business is going to continue to grow. But then you add new sales on top of that. So I've got a pretty confident that this is going to grow at 20, 30, 40% for decades. That's really valuable. And so it got value accordingly. So it had a long terminal value. As AI came in and everybody started going, maybe that terminal value is 0. And so then they changed to the models. And so then all the valuations came down. And at the same time growth got lower. So everyone's like, well, maybe they're not going to grow at 20%, maybe they're going to grow at 10%. And we value companies that grow at 10% in a different way. So all the multiples have come down. So there's a lot of reckoning going on. Underneath those businesses, still great businesses. They're generating large amounts of revenue, most of them are generating cash. And so maybe say a little bit about that to the extent that you can. What is culture amps AI play? It's easy to think about starting a company from scratch. Is the mental model for you at Culture Amp? Imagine we were in a thousand person organization with hundreds of thousands of customer relationships. And we cared about making a better world of work. Do you-- is the mental model like what would we build if we were starting from scratch? Or like, how do you think about both the pros and cons of having this huge business that's been around for 15 years with all these customer relationships and legacy tech and legacy of ways of operating? You definitely have to disrupt yourself. So you do at some level have to sort of create an opportunity to look back at yourself, create a small group and say, reconsieve what this could be. But you also want to take advantage of what you have because you're not a five person startup. You can't just vibe code the backend. We have a huge amount of privacy and legal stuff that we need to do for all of our customers that we've spent a lot of time figuring out how to do well. So we've got to preserve all of that too. One of my board members has a good model, I think, for AI companies where I said, there's three dimensions of value. There's data, which is the one that most people think about what proprietary data do you have that other people don't? And we've got-- Why will your model be better because of access to you? Most people aren't building their own models. Or if you're building your own model, you're actually largely doing it for cost reasons. You're doing it because you don't want to be spending 4.7 tokens. Token, yeah. Token. So you want to be using your own models way cheaper. But the data that you have is a context layer that you can bring to bear that other people don't have. So Coltramp has over a decade worth of data that we can bring to bear in the organizational work context, which is super value. So you've got data. Distribution is another one. Just because you can build a cool AI tool, you have to still get it into the hands of everybody. So incumbents actually have distribution. And then the last one is design. So what is the way you interact? So granola for me is the canonical example here. Does granola do better transcriptions? Anyone else know? Their summarization's pretty cool. But the thing that they absolutely nailed was the interaction pattern. Hey, great. And so as an incumbent, those three things are things that you can be better at than a standard. Startup. The thing the startup has you don't have is the imagination. And so it's actually one of the things when I'm talking to industries and to different organizations. There's a whole thing of people going, don't do AI transformation without a clear business case. Not when you're going to change, all that stuff. I'm like, honestly, I think you've got to be in there and doing stuff. Because if you've never used the technology, you've got no idea what's possible. You can't write a business case for a language. In a language, you don't understand. And so for most organizations, they should just be doing stuff. And that's where the imagination comes from. So for Culture Amp, we obviously have a very strong sophisticated, complex workflow tool for managing employee listening, for performance management for all of those things. We'll continue to develop that. And we can now develop it faster and better than we ever have before. And I think it is a great time to be building product. Like product feels magical again. It didn't feel magical three or four years ago. But the opportunity on top of that and the next-- next way of that is what we call the Cultural OS, which is you think about in all those interactions, in all those patterns. There is a context layer that can be brought to bear. So over the last year, we built our own sophisticated coaching platform that sits in Culture Amp. And so when you close an engagement survey, it helps you understand it. It helps you figure out what to do. It helps you write emails to your team. It helps you get to action and navigate your journey on that. When you close a performance review, it helps you write the performance review. It helps you get better at giving feedback. But the next opportunity is to connect all of those things and to actually move it from being something that's kind of reactive, if you will. Hey, employee engagement surveys close. Can I help you with it? To being proactive. Because if you think about what's going to happen or what's already happening is every person who's an IC today is basically going to become a manager. Of agents. Exactly. And that's going to mean they're going to be context switching. They're going to have to be prioritizing. They're going to have to grapple with and build a bunch of skills that they haven't had to have before. So we see a huge opportunity to meet them where they're out and take them on that journey. And then every manager has to become a 10x manager, because there's going to be less of them. Almost all organizations are flattening. And if you think about productivity, if your span of control is roughly 5 to 1, if you can move that span of control to 10 to 1, because you can now use AI if you look at the Jack Dorsey [BLANK_AUDIO] concept of being the context layer, like a large amount of leadership and management is basically information-rounding. That's what we've built. Very few people are in a position the way that you are DDA with the 15 years of seeing lots of different organizations. Like how many customers does CultureMHab right now? Just under 7000. 7000 right. Like all over the world every type of customer. What's your prediction on the shape of organizations in the coming months, even years, in an AI-enabled world? So a great question. The question that everybody's worried about. The challenge for all of us is none of us quite know how fast this is going to happen or how it's going to play out and the faster it happens, the harder it's going to be. So there was two people at Davos, two of the AI people. I think there's some of Google and Microsoft and they got us this question of when do we think we're going to hit AI? One person said two years, the other person said five and then they what they both agreed on was that it would be better for humanity if it was five than if it was two because we're just not ready for it to happen in two. We don't know. So I'm worried about what's going to happen over the next couple of years. I think it's going to be bumpy because I do think it's going to be a huge dislocation because what AI is going to make possible is a flattening of organizations and we're seeing it now. And the big challenge for organizations is that with all the economic pressure that they have, they're going to need to get smaller and they will get smaller. And AI will mean that they can do with six people what they used to need 10 for. But you also have to be thinking about how does AI unlock the value in the people we have? Because that's the only enduring advantage is not how do you get smaller, but how do you do more with the people you have and how do you enable those people to achieve things they couldn't achieve before. That's the reckoning leaders are all going to have to deal with. And I'm interested actually, you know, for customers of yours, let's say that have had organizations, let's say they're currently 500 people and actually over the medium term, they're going to get down to one of these like one to 200 person organizations achieving the same amount or more. Is it fair to say do you think that actually the smart ones are trying to capture context and the way that people make decisions so that they can do a better job of building the agent? Like is that it sounds cynical, but it's actually like that the best play for an organization thinking about its future? I mean, you raise two really good questions. One is, and I think this is the hardest thing for leaders and organizations to do right now is that you have to sit down with your people and figure out how to co-create what this future of work looks like in an AI enabled world. Knowing that, that new world will probably need less of the people that they have. How do you ask someone to participate in that? A lot of organizations are not saying that openly, but doing exactly that. People are still coming at it in the old school way. They're like, let's sit down and process map everything that people do and then create essentially a deterministic system that, well, you know, do that. That won't last long. And so it's going to have to be a process of how do we co-create with AI and humans a system that can work two years from now? Not how do we do what we were doing a year ago? And the challenge that we're seeing when we talk to all these organizations is if you go to people, most people will only say, okay, I need AI to help me get this little bit from here to here. The best stuff's going to be zooming right out and redesigning the whole value chain inside the org. And so that's what orgs are doing. It's just keep coming back to organizations having to think about they are probably going to be taking people out of organizations, which is hard and it's going to be really bad from a societal point of view. I'm like quite worried about what this will do at a societal level for the next little while. If you're a 500 person company and you could run it with 200 people, your perfect world is probably to be a 300 person company doing twice what you were doing before. Whereas most people are going to get to the 200. And I think that's the challenge we're going to have to walk. Well, I'm also interested though, because I mean with 7,000 customers, you must be saying a huge spectrum in AI adoption, right? So we live in the world where everyone's like on the latest models, experimenting with the latest tools, the week they drop. That is not the common experience of most organizations worldwide. There's a lot of fear that drives that. There's a lot of inertia. There's a lot of lack of access or lack of understanding even of what the tools enable. A lack of imagination to use the language we were using earlier. What's your prediction actually on this speed of change? Because my sense is it's going to go really, really, it's going to go like wildfire through our world because of that kind of access and imagination. But it's going to be much slower and arguably more tricky for large scale enterprises that are just not seeing this change come. You agree? Yes, I agree. I mean, there's the full spectrum. It'll spread out and the way to think about it, we're on an exponential curve. So once again, people only have to be a little bit further ahead to get way more value. But I think when you're on an exponential, the bit that you keep coming back to is that things are fundamentally different in a short period of time. But this idea that coding fundamentally changed between say November and February. The models that we're using today were largely written by the models themselves. That wasn't true 12 months ago. That's a fundamental shift in what's happening. So I think it's going to go faster than people think. So the other day, I saw something that I had yet to see. I'm interested whether or not I was just head under a rock. I saw someone in a global business have the win the title of Chief People and Agent Officer. I had never seen the job title written as such. And it's so curious to me that it was clearly an intentional decision to signal that I'm not saying agents are the same as people or know that they have the same value to me as an individual. I might think quite differently about how I quote, manage those people and support them or support those two different entities. But this idea of to think of Justin in your own organization at Culture Amp having agents as part of his role type and what should we be thinking about for that? Do you think that's just the future of all organizations that we're just going to see? We're going to see people be responsible. Your core customer has always been the Chief People Officer in some senses. What are you seeing in that universe? So I love that you ask that question. I think part of it is what we're talking about earlier, which is people are just like agents are kind of like people. So let's put them together. There is a big question going on in terms of who's driving this transformation and who's helping organizations. And I think there's a pretty good argument that Chief People Officers is if they're prepared, have as good a shot at that as anybody and absolutely need to be part of the conversation. And so that's part of what we're talking about when we go out to CPS and we go, who's driving your AR transformation? And they're often like either no one or maybe the head of IT or maybe the head of engineering. And we're like, well, they have a really important role to play, but so do you, because this is ultimately a people problem. We're not even a people problem. This is a people opportunity where I think that the mistake is just to think about it. It's like cool. Now it's HR's job to manage a whole bunch of agents because that reduces HR back to what it was before. The bigger opportunity and we think about this concept of a context layer. And so for anyone who's listening doesn't know what that is. Like AR is a super powerful, but they're best when like even though they're trained on all of this information to make them useful, you kind of have to help them understand what's the relevant information for the problem you have right now. Yeah. And a lot of the power is in taking a very powerful frontier model and then giving it the right context. Yep. And so in an organization, what's interesting now is we have the ability with our AI systems to be able to first of all update, synthesize and understand that. So if you think about the values of an organization, if you think about the performance culture that organization has, up until that's been largely implicit and probably not done everywhere. So the culture isn't consistent. The alignment to strategy isn't consistent. What we can do now with what we're talking about was a concept of a culture OS is we can start to identify that. And so the head of people's job goes from being a reactive firefighter to being somebody going, this is almost a steward of this is what our performance culture is. And this is how we want the agentic systems to be imbued by the culture that we have at this organization. And that's a reflexive conversation. It's not them writing something once. It's them working with something like the cultural OS to go, what is our culture? Not just what we want it to be. What actually is it? How do we shift it in the places we need to? Where are the leaders we need to help? How do we drive this? Yeah. And then how do we step back and look at it as a whole and go, oh, this is what's going on in our culture right now. Same thing for strategic drift. It's like fascinating time. It's actually a lot of fun to run companies over the next few years. Totally. And I think there's also something there about what is the data that you're picking up. Because traditionally, culture amp has been like surveys. Like started out with surveys. You've experimented with lots of different models about pulse surveys and structured surveys and how all of that is done. But it's largely been based on the presumption that at large enough scale asking people their experience of work has value in a world where it's not all people anyway, but also where actually the content, the context that matters lies in the format of slight conversations or the way that poor requests are reviewed by others, including other agents. And like the kind of the data layer to inform what is the culture and what is it, what's working into use your language, you know, where do we need to grow into? So maybe this is a part of the culture that's perfectly matching, perfectly aligned with what we say our culture is. And then we've realized, well, that's recursive when we need to grow. So I want to be more attention in that culture model. You know, I'm really interested in like what data do you imagine again, to not the 10 years, but 10 months version for culture amp, what like what data layer are you going to be bringing in? This is a question as old as time. Like ever since I started culture amp, everyone's like, ah, surveys are dead. You know, and the thing is we didn't create a survey company. And I don't consider us a survey company. Surveys are an active way of listening. Passive listening is super powerful, but it also comes with its own challenges, not least of which the privacy element. Like how, you know, everybody goes, well, all this stuff happens in Slack. It's sort of does and it sort of does. and do people show up differently if they believe that this is being watched and interpreted and then who owns the summaries and all that. So those are all sorts of interesting questions. But the future is absolutely both. And the two work hand in hand. So on the one hand, you use active listening like culture amp to periodically go, let's go get a snapshot how everyone feels because it's actually a very efficient way of capturing a very high signal knowledge. And now with agents, we can actually take that to a whole another level too, where it maybe use a survey first and then off the back of it, we want a deep dive with something, you can actually go do a much deeper dive. And so something we support in the platform is 360s. And if you think about the way 360s used to be done, they were only done for execs and you'd have a psychologist that would go and interview all of the people, some peers and ups and downs and so on. And then they would write a detailed report and then they would sit down with the person and they would go through that report with them. We can do all of that with an agent now. So an agent can go and interview people, doesn't just have to be a question. So we can get really good active listening. Yeah. And then we can say, okay, cool, here's our picture. Now let's use passive picture to track for drift and to see things that might happen and to follow along, figure that out. Or you do it the reverse way and you go, you use passive listening to identify something and then you go, oh, something looks like it's going on here. Let's grab a group of people and go find an active listening on this so that we can bring that to bear as well. So the future is going to be both. Super interesting. It's pretty obvious to anyone listening to this, how reflective you are as a leader, both about yourself and what role you play. You've also experimented over the years with lots of different ways of spending your time. I'd love if you're willing to share a little about some of the practices you've experimented with over the years that you think listeners might also get something out of, particularly probably for founders, but not exclusively for them. Yeah, so I think as a founder and as an executive CEO, one of the first things is just realizing that often the very things that have driven you to be successful are the things that are making you unhappy. So you know, that's strive whether it's perfectionism. I don't actually think I'm a perfectionist, but that deep competitiveness, all of those things, why are you successful? They're also why you have that restlessness, why you don't feel connected. And so it's coming back into which of those bits serve me, which of those bits don't, who is it that I want to be on the other side? But if I think about actual practical things that I've done, that I've got a lot of value out of, I think breathwork as a spectrum has been super valuable. So I went down the rabbit hole of of cold plungers, which I know a lot of people have. And I actually do it because I really enjoy it, like whether it's there's physical benefits or not, I don't, doesn't actually bother me. I do it because it changes the way I feel. And so I can go do a, you know, two minute or three minute plunge in six degree cold water. And I come out of it with a mindset that I find really valuable. But the reason I think it works is it's basically all about breath. So you get in and then you're super, super cold. And so you have to get your breath under control. And so I use a 478 breathing. And it's the process of getting, you know, having a stress response, invoking the breath control, using the breath control, getting my mental model to where I want it. And that itself has been super powerful. And so I've now gone down the rabbit hole and I do breathwork two, three times a week, and learning all sorts of different modes. And, you know, if you've ever done any meditation, there's always this thing like you can always come back to your breath, you know, no matter what's going on in the world, no matter where you are, the breath is always there. Such a powerful tool. And I look this from my, from my wife Greta, the simplest version of this is if you make your out breath longer than you're in breath, it invokes the power sympathetic nervous system, which puts you into the away from the flight flight model. And so just that simple model of make your out breath longer is probably the most useful thing I've ever learned. And maybe to be super tactical, like, do you intentionally do it before stressful meetings? Like, is that how you think about it? Is it more like I do it enough times during the week that it becomes more, you know, habitual for me as a mode? It's less about, I mean, I do occasionally use it, like I'm feeling stressful. I want to do this thing. I mean, do you do it before you came onto the wildtards podcast? I've done enough podcast now that I don't do it. But it's more, someone once said to me, you meditate, you meditate so you're ready for the worst day of your life. You don't meditate on the day. And so it's actually the practice. And that that's why I like, you know, doing the cold plan, getting my breath under control is teaching me and my body that when I have that's just one that I can manage it. So that when I'm stressed, I'm like, it's okay, I can, I know how to manage this and I can, I can deal with it. And what interestingly, what I found was that when I was doing some of the breath work after stepping out of the CEO role is I actually felt quite emotionally unstable. Like, and I realized that was just me unblocking some stuff that I, you know, as any founder or CEO is listening, probably feels as like, you just push everything right down. Like I don't have time for that. I'm not interacting with that. I'm just going to keep going. And so I had that moment to be able to kind of go, well, if not now, when? And so it was actually interesting in that way too. It's about sort of connecting back to the more human version of yourself. Okay. Did he a final question? What's something you've changed your mind about? I think is this is a lesson I've had to, I'm still learning. I'm very motivated by potential and seeing the potential of what I think people could be. It's not necessarily that I've changed my mind, but what I've realized is that as a CEO, I wasn't serving the organization as the CEO by constantly trying to get people over the line. And what I mean by that is that I'll see somebody who's not quite where we need them to be. And I think I can help them. I can help them get to the level of performance that we need or we require. And I'm a big sports fan. And one of the things I'm always fascinated by is you see the top level coaches. They don't have the time to do that. They see someone's potential, but they're like either you perform, and then I'll give you more minutes, or you don't perform, and then I'm not giving it to you. And I've had to learn the hard way to be more like that, to be able to. So the conditions don't intervene. And it's up to them to get to the line. And if they can get over the line, then Didier can go help that person try and get to the line. But the CEO can't. The CEO has to basically spend all of their time on people that are over the line and helping them be successful. It's, yes, that's not, I didn't change my mind on it, but it's the thing that I've had to constantly fight myself on. Thank you. Thank you. There's a fun. It was really fun. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Wild Hearts. If you want to learn more from other ambitious people building, designing, and creating the world that we all want to live in, then please hit the subscribe and follow button. This podcast is a Labour of Love from the Blackbird Team and Day 1. The show is produced by Camilla Herring from Blackbird. Our marketing genius is Laura Coford and our editors are from Day 1, Andy Jones, Sanjay Chabarria and Georgia Cadillan. Thank you all so much for listening and I'll see you all next week.