Episode 1:
The (Virtual) Money Man

John: Welcome to Korn Ferry’s Goliath meet David podcast. I’m your host John Palumbo and I’m here with my co-host Cynthia Stuckey from Korn Ferry. Hi Cynthia.

Cynthia: Hi John.

John: Now we created this podcast for all you executives out there, especially those Goliaths, those of you from big enterprise companies who are interested in learning how those Davids, those leaner, more nimble start-ups and their founders operate, since they’ve found ways to do things like just create cultures that we all admire, even convey their missions across the organization and beyond, get closer to their customers and even foster an entrepreneurial spirit.

I mean there’s just a lot to admire and learn from these Davids, which is probably why there is so much information out there.

But the thing is about that information that you find, those books, those articles, those blogs, is they tend to bombard you with bullet points or headlines about what you can do to, quote, unquote, act like a start-up.

And while that’s all well and good, we wanted to do things a little bit differently. We wanted to speak directly to start-up founders and executives and ask them the questions that Goliaths really care about. In fact a lot of the questions that we’re going to be asking we submitted to us by Goliaths. So you’re going to get the information that you really want.

So today, for this episode, our David is Dave Balter, so he really is a David. Hi Dave, thanks for being here.

Dave: Hi John. Hi Cynthia. Thanks for having me.

John: Now Dave is a managing partner at Flipside Crypto, be sure to visit https://flipsidecrypto.com, and a venture partner at Boston Seed Capital. He was also the founder and CEO of companies such as Smarter and BzzAgent, and what we’re going to do is Cynthia and I are going to ask Dave a bunch of questions about his company’s best practices and strategies across all different areas that Goliaths are really interested in learning.

Okay, so let’s get started. So David, I think a good way for you to kick things off would be for you to tell us a bit about your company and your background.

Dave: Sure. So I currently run a company called Flipside Crypto. We are in the business of helping evaluate cryptocurrency projects. So we use data from open blockchain repositories and open source code repositories, and we create rating models for crypto assets.

Previous to that I ran a company called Smarter, which was a machine learning skills assessment business, and we sold that in 2014 to Pluralsight, and before that I ran a company for about a decade called BzzAgent, which was a social media marketing business, primordial social marketing business as we like to call it. We sold that in 2010 to Tesco.

John: And I think it’s always inspiring and interesting to learn how start-ups were started. So maybe you could tell us, how did you come up with the idea for your current company, and maybe even some of the others that you started, if you want to discuss those?

Dave: Yeah, so I’ll walk through them really quick. The thing I always start with is I consider it almost an issue where it’s hard to explain to others. I see an idea. I can’t shake it in a way. It’s almost like there’s worldly dissonance happening. Everyone I talk to, I hear something that reminds me of that idea. I’m like out walking around and it’s in my ear, it’s like a buzzing noise, and I can’t get rid of it.

And so what I often tell people is, I don’t know if that’s, either I’ve honed in on something or it’s unique to me, but what I tell people is if they’re interested in an idea, to become highly conscious of the things they can’t shake.

Sometimes people get uncomfortable with trying to start something new, and they’ll not be able to shake something but they’ll figure out a way to get rid of it. Let it flow in. Maybe you need some of that dissonance.

So that always happens to me in all my companies, but I’ll sort of go back to front. BzzAgent I had like a total light bulb moment one day where I was like jeez, if we could get real people to talk about products and services, I had some direct marketing experience, I literally did a web search for URLs that sounded buzzy, and the only oneu available was BzzAgent.

And then everything started falling into place. I had a guy, I said “BzzAgent”, and he said “oh my god”, and he gave me a logo. He’s like “I’ve been waiting 10 years to use this logo”, and that was our logo, like everything just happened.

So that one was just organic and started to roll. I will say in the middle of that one my family held an intervention and tried to get me to stop building my company. So maybe it wasn’t that easy.

John: Conversation for another day.

Dave: Yeah that’s another day. Anyway. Smarter came out of frustration. I would be interviewing candidates for roles I couldn’t speak to, so the one that really triggered me was I was interviewing a data science candidate, and they’re telling me about R and algorithms, and I’m like, I don’t even know what to ask you, like I can talk to you about being a person but can you just tell me if you’re good? And they’d all say things like “exceptional at x, y and z”. And I needed a way to prove it, and so I began building a tool. This was one of those, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Every résumé I saw I’m like, what do you mean you’re exceptional at Excel? I don’t know what that means, help me, and so we started building technology to solve that problem.

Flipside was probably the most organic. We were actually running a different start-up, a start-up in the memorial space, the death space of all industries, and began trading crypto on the side, knew someone who had an algorithm to help us trade better.

We brought him in and we began trading at night, and the trigger for me was the head of product at Milestone one night, sort of knocked on the conference window and said “can I come in”, and we’re in there like trading crypto, “yeah, come on in”.

And he said “you know, you guys, it feels like you’ve joined a different tribe”, and we’re like, what? What are you talking about? He left, and then we looked at each other and we’re like, oh gosh, we’ve got a problem here, and we eventually wound down that company and began building this one.

So that dissonance was like, it was happening to us and we couldn't control it, and we just took advantage of it and ran with it.

John: So let’s talk about culture. Now, a lot of the Goliaths that are listening to this know that it can be easy to let culture slip as a company gets bigger and bigger and bigger. In fact if you have multiple locations, each one sometimes takes on its own culture, and sometimes no culture ends up being the culture, because no one is communicating or nurturing it, so employees end up basically creating their own.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about what culture means to you, and your company’s culture and how you cultivate and maintain it at your company. Dave: Yeah. So this has definitely been an evolution for me. Early in my career culture was driven largely by a theme that I’d realised early, it’s called sponge and stone, I realised early in my career that I was definitely not the smartest person in the room.

I’d walk into a room of an executive or what I considered a great CEO, and I’d be like, they’re a scientist or they’re brilliant. Everyone look up to Mark Zuckerberg or somebody, Warren Buffett, like oh my gosh, I’m not that, okay.

So came this philosophy of sponge and stone, which is you can sponge anything and that comes from reading everything you can about a subject, talking to all the experts, like finding mentors, and pretty quickly, if you sponge well enough, you become the expert okay.

So in the case of a word of mouth company, like I didn’t know anything, I read Malcom Gladwell’s books and then met Seth Godin and I did all these things, and suddenly people were like, oh you know more about word of mouth than anybody, and I’m like, all I did is sponge it. So that was one.

And then two was stone, which is because I wasn’t the smartest person in the room, the only way to succeed was to work harder than everybody else. So I would just work circles around everybody. I would be doing as much as possible at all times, and so that culture became evident in the people I’d hire, and the people who succeeded were the people who didn’t.

Now that had a lot of benefits, because our teams tended to become experts really quick and work incredibly hard. The downside, as you can imagine, is you can burn out pretty quickly on stuff like that, especially on the stone side. You just become relentless about just working.

So that’s evolved and I still stand by sponge and stone, like even in this space. I’m not the smartest person in cryptocurrency by far, but I know how to apply what I know incredibly well.

Cynthia: So Dave, what would be some of those recommendations, things other companies could do then to create and foster a start-up culture like you’re describing?

Dave: So what happened as we were growing BzzAgent is the sponge and stone thing worked for, let’s call it two years, and then it got hard to maintain an energy and a culture that felt like a start-up. We were going past 30, 40, 50 people.

And so I started doing things to try and bring in more what I consider creative energy in the business. One thing we did was we brought an artist in residence in, this guy Seth Minkin who was a painter, I went to college with him and saw him at Tufts [university], he got his master’s, thought he was amazing, and so hey, come paint in our office.

And it began literally like he would find an open desk and he would just like be painting a painting while everyone else was doing their work, and that would create this whole cultural dissonance and like, hey, creativity’s cool within the workplace, and then some days people would like randomly start painting with him that we always found fun, and that was really cool.

So we did that for about a decade, it got bigger and bigger and he then had this whole like central platform, and he was up there painting almost on show all day. So that was one.

The other was to open the doors to a comfortableness to ask the unaskable questions. We found over time companies begin to insulate in a way, and employees, I’d walk in the office and I could see like some employees, like oh my god, like oh I better do something, look busy, because Dave’s here, and I’m like, what, you know, or people would get awkward in a conversation with me.

So I had a thing called anonymous questions, which is you can write an anonymous question, put it in a box, and I will get up in front of the company and I will pull random questions and ask them, and I will answer them.

And that was interesting. There was a lot that was like; why doesn’t our 401k have a match like x, and I’d answer it. Hey, here’s the reality, this why we do x, and there’d be a debate. There were also ones like why do the forks only have three prongs instead of four in the kitchen.

But that became evident of the culture. Everyone, like you guys, everyone would laugh about it and it was funny etc. But it got pretty deep. What do you think about in-office relationships? Ooh, okay, let’s talk about this. Is there something we should be talking about?

So you’ve got to do things to try to bring the spirit back into the company, and I think every org as it grows has to be attuned to what are the things that you really need and are missing, if it’s creativity, if it’s openness, and you try to bring something in to bring that back.

Cynthia: That’s great advice Dave. And as I think about the suggestions, tell me a little bit about how you plan to maintain as you grow bigger in your current business, especially with all the customer needs and market pressure shifts.

Dave: So the culture right now is evident by just us trying to get, we’re so overwhelmed with everything we’re doing, we’re almost running ahead of the culture, and that becomes the culture. Like everybody gets each other and tries to solve …

My co-founder, which I love, came up with this thing; we’re all clients for each other, and I really like that, like it’s not like you do x or you do y and we’re just going to do it, but like oh, I need help doing x. I’m your client. Like you’re my client, like okay, we’re going to work together. And that’s how we work.

Now, over time, we know that will start to tear apart. New people come in the company, ways of behaving, and so what we actually have done here, and we’ve learned this over many companies, is early on we began thinking about, what are our values as a company? People talk about values a lot of the time.

And we did the classic thing. Okay, let’s write them down. Hey, what do you think? Oh, we set out to achieve, or whatever the words are.

What we did instead was we said, okay, everybody has their own style guide. So let’s do this. Let’s have everybody write out their style guide. What are you to work with? “So, I never like to work in the mornings, or I tend to be grumpy when you talk about numbers, or anything, like I’m a dog lover. Who am I?”

And so everyone wrote their personal style guide. We put it into a master doc and then every few months we’d go through the style guide with each other, a little bit, like hey, what’s happening here? Oh, you’re like this, you’re like this, and it started to form who we were as a company, like we literally came out of it, all of a sudden these words popped up across all of us, and now we had this set of words.

Now, from that we begin building. We now have all oddly agreed on everything we are, and now every time we see ourselves behaving in a way that doesn’t exist within that, we have a discussion and we think about what is it we need to be doing to continue to adapt to it.

So I always like to begin with; culture comes from the people. Build the style guide, let the people build the guide, your values will come from it and then pay attention to what might be happening when you’re getting away from it.

Cynthia: Great, thank you for that. Great advice. Let’s talk a little bit about mission. We’ve learned a lot that big firms have missions, but nearly or almost many of the CEOs haven't been the ones that created it, and it’s simply because they’re just long-standing firms and they’ve outlived their original founders.

So the mission is often one the CEO’s inherited, and this legacy mission, often they are the ones that need to be able to communicate this corporate mission effectively with modern channels, and be able to communicate directly to corporate employees.

Unfortunately what we’ve found though is many of the surveys show that executives of these big firms find that many of them think their companies lack this cohesive vision for the future. In other words CEOs are just not really doing a great job at communicating the firm’s vision and mission.

And then there are the Davids right. Studies show that start-ups like yourself and others flourish, and they have founders and CEOs who are very mission driven, can rally the workforce to join that vison.

With that in mind, how do you go about rallying the troops, whether it’s in your current business or one of the many that you started up, and how do you create this dedication to the passion and mission for yourself and your employees?

Dave: Yeah, mission’s a tough thing and I say that with truth, because maybe there’s two types of missions in businesses I find. There are the ones where you aren't really sure what you’re trying to do and you create a mission in order to almost get people to try to rally around something.

And then there’s the mission that is like so obvious because everyone just showed up to solve this problem. The mission is almost, you’re being pulled by it. So the net is, like in the first case, like I’ve had companies where, the one in the memorial space for example, we were trying to figure out how better to memorialise the deceased, and we kind of liked the idea but we couldn’t rally around anything specific.

And so we like came up with a mission, then we found like every few months it just sort of, like oh yeah, hey what are we trying to do? Oh yeah, okay, yeah, we’re trying to do that, okay, and it felt like this thing we were like grasping at.

In this business today, Flipside Crypto, we were so frustrated that you couldn’t understand crypto, like I don’t even understand these things and I’m in the industry and you guys are talking about cryptocurrency, like price, what is this thing?

Okay, we are so driven by that, the mission was obvious. We want to demystify and characterize cryptocurrencies for the world, like period, and we don’t even have to like think about that. That just is happening to us every day.

And so I would say the latter one’s easy. If you’re pulled by it, everybody you hire is there because, and when you talk to them, either they’re obsessed about that same thing or they don’t belong in your company.

It’s the former one that’s really dangerous, because if you can’t figure out what you’re all obsessed about, your mission just becomes a set of words that you’re trying to adhere to, but it’s like glue that’s no longer sticky.

So I haven’t figured out how to solve the first one. I don’t know if it’s change the business pivot, hire different people, but you’ve got to be really careful if that’s the way your company is running, where that mission keeps [friggering] and falling apart.

Cynthia: So with that in mind, if you think about those different kinds of missions and purpose, how do you go about keeping people committed to it during turbulent times, and how has that benefited your performance?

Dave: Yeah so that’s a great one, because every company, even if the mission’s strong, goes through ups and downs. That’s just part of how businesses work. So I’ll give you an example. At Smarter we actually changed the focus of the business. We had the scoring methodology and we would at times try to apply it to recruiting.

Oh, if you could just know that this person was exceptional, rated higher than everybody else at Python, versus this person, and then at times we would apply it to education. Okay, you’re trying to figure out what courses do I need to learn and so, ooh, I could take this little test and I could figure out where I am in my learning journey, okay.

We kept going back and forth, and you can imagine what that does to a mission. Is our mission service educators? Is it the service recruiters? What are we? And that was baffling. I mean the teams, we would have like all-out debates in company meetings, where they’d be like, but last month we were doing this, and you’d be like, oh well we just signed x so now we’re going to do this okay.

That was I think, looking back, where I could make it into a, oh that’s a natural, beautiful thing, like how businesses evolve. The truth is, in the moment it was probably one of the most painful things we’d been through, like we got lost all the time.

And so the thing we did to try to solve it was every time we would have this evolution, we’d sit down and talk about the why, and try to rally around that. I feel like you only have a half a dozen chances to do that in certain periods of time before people stop believing why you’re changing, and so what I’d learned post doing that was your business will evolve. You need to create and sustain a mission that can evolve with the business.

So in this business, to demystify and characterise the world’s cryptocurrencies, that can be applied in lots of ways. It’s big enough that we could be selling it to projects or selling it to investors. That’s what you need to stand by so you can continue to exist outside of that.

Cynthia: You struck something about needing to evolve the mission over time, and the fact that you only have a couple of chances to do this. Did you see it changing your people’s productivity, their engagement, retention?

Dave: Yes. So the easy answer is; when the mission is unclear and people aren't sure what they’re doing, they will begin to exhibit that in ways where they’re sort of, it’s almost like a, I consider it the softening. They’re still working hard, but their energy and their application of it becomes squishy, and I now can hear it happen.

There’s almost this like, you can hear the air coming out of the room, and I’ll hear it from, employees will say things like “I was working on this thing and I was just trying to think about, is this the right thing for me to be working on”, and you’re going, is that a role thing or is that, wait a second, I think that’s a mission. Do you mean right thing because you’re not sure why it’s helping the company? Yeah I think, yeah, how does this apply? Okay we’ve got a mission problem.

And so I constantly now listen for these little things or I’ll see someone, like this week a guy showed up, I call him the Labrador because he’s so happy all the time, he’s so like happy-go-lucky, he was kind of bummed out one morning. I’m like, what’s with this guy?

And so I pulled him in at the end of the day. I’m like, what’s happening? Like, you alright? Like, oh I had a late night, I got in late on the plane, and I start digging a bit, and he’s like yeah, I think I’m doing this content stuff, but I don’t understand the business right now.

And that is like a strike-down, like lightning bolt is in the business, like hey, this week we probably need to get everyone together and be like, what are we doing? We all still we’re applying it the right way. Your ears have to be attuned to that to slow that down, pull it out of people, because they won't say it right away. You’ve got to talk to them about it, and when you start hearing that, you get everybody in and you say “hey, let’s talk about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

John: Yeah and that’s great advice. I’m wondering; what advice would you give to a CEO to help her or him better communicate their mission and create that dedication, that passion among employees?

Dave: Yeah, so constantly reiterate it. It’s your job to bring that up. So I often bring it up in meetings, like hey, that fits with our mission, or put it on a little, it doesn't have to be beautiful or anything; put it on the wall behind you behind you, like give them a reminders, and people often see the symbol in the thing they’re doing.

You don’t have to like push it in their face. Oh it’s on the wall and yeah, why I’m doing this, they look up, they see it, hey, hey, that’s right, that’s why I’m doing this.

I think find examples that support the mission and call them out. So in a company meeting, hey, x did a great job building this part of the business, and hey, you know, that just gets us one step closer to fulfilling the mission, and it’s like the breadcrumbs need to keep being placed and eventually people start saying it to each other.

John: So let’s shift gears and talk a little bit about collaboration in partnership. So we all know that collaborating, partnering with outside firms can benefit in a lot of ways. I mean it can help us get things done more quickly and it allows us to outsource some responsibilities, which can end up being cost efficient for the company and so on.

Now a lot of Goliaths sometimes hesitate when it comes to collaborating or partnering with outside companies. I mean I think their hesitation might stem from, it might be confidentiality, maybe just because they have a hard time relinquishing control, they might not want to trust the other company or they don’t trust that the other company could even do as good of a job as them.

How does your company approach collaborating and partnering with outside companies, when and why do you do it, and are you ever hesitant like those Goliaths, and how do you overcome that hesitation? So, multi-pronged question.

Dave: So look, no company is a silo. Let’s begin with that. Companies succeed by building relationships inside and out, you know, themselves, employees, out to the places in the market where they need to create whatever value they’re going to create. So, you can’t run a business without that touching other companies, so let’s start there.

The first layer I always come to in this, external companies, is competition, and I have a big belief that your competitors are probably in some ways your best friends, and in some ways your enemies, that classic frenemy concept, but you should never, ever exclude building a relationship with a competitor early in your business, and this is super important.

People in my companies now know like, oh we see there’s another rating agency in cryptocurrencies that we know of, and I just reached out to the guy a month ago and was like, hey, you guys are building x, we should get together. That person was super fr-, yeah, let’s get, wow, okay, that’s amazing you’d reach out. Get together, turns out we have some similar visions, different visions, but you know what? We’re now in sort of cahoots on how does the industry evolve and build? If I have an issue I can now call him and say “hey, hey, what’s going on here”, or etc.

So I always build those relationships and there’s always rising tides, but beyond that every business is going to evolve and that competitor may become your acquirer at some point. You may acquire them. Who knows? But start there okay.

Second to that is you have to determine what you’re trying to do in your company. In our company we’re trying to distribute our rating system, and so as an example I reached out to the Street and StockTwits and MarketWatch, and began building the relationship with them.

Now there’s the type of person who would call them and say “I don’t want to tell you really what we’re doing, because maybe you’ll copy it”, or “jeez, you know, everything I’m going to tell you I need to lock up in some crazy NDA before I get anywhere”. I always find those, like those are patterns of resistance. I always start with, look, we’re about executing, so I’m going to tell you what we’re doing. If you can do it better than us, knock yourself out, but I don’t think you can, because we’re going to execute, so I’m going to tell you, here’s what we’re doing, we’d like to do it together, let’s open doors.

At some point you’re right, maybe we need an NDA or maybe we need to do x, but in the meantime let’s share this idea so broadly and widely it can actually breathe life into other organizations.

And so like I’ve had a bunch of people show up and say like “hey, would you ever consider investing in my company?”. Maybe, I don’t know. “Can you sign an NDA?”. Like you’ve basically just put five hurdles in front of anything I’d ever do. You’ve got to let it out. If you’re good at what you do, you’re going to do it better than anyone. So go have that conversation.

Cynthia: So I’d like to change the area and talk a little bit about how some Goliaths are facing this challenge, Dave, or perceived distance. In other words, teams or groups of people that ultimately are responsible for managing the customer input can become really distant from the customer.

Product management or marketing functions might work through the sales, who’s really the frontline talking to the customer day in and day out, so they’re hearing directly from the customer, but maybe the marketing or management group isn't, so they feel somewhat removed.

On the flipside we hear stories about Davids, organizations like yours, you started where they, stayed really close to the customer and their audience. Can you tell us a little bit about how your company or any of the companies you’ve developed, or your team members stay close to the customer and get that feedback first hand, and why is it so important? How’s it impacting your business?

Dave: Yeah, I mean look, companies at our stage in the start-up phase, you constantly hear about minimum [buyable] product and customer led journeys, and we die if we don’t find a problem a customer actually has and do something about it.

So a couple of things for us. One is we look for people who will not only want to talk to the customer, but will not silo that from the rest of the organization.

I’ll give you an example here. We had hired a product designer here, and the first thing we noticed was he wasn’t even really talking to customers. He was like building stuff, and what do you think of this? And we’re like, okay, I like it, but what does the cus-, oh cust-, yeah, I’ll mention it to the customer.

So we eventually were like, why don’t you go talk to some customers? Great, can you introduce me to some people that went out, and I remember saying to him “hey, are you doing these customer calls with this stuff”, and he was like, “yeah, yeah, I’m doing them”, and I’m like “well can I see them now”, and he’s like “no, no, I’m going to do them and I’ll give you some feedback later”.

And right there I was like, this guy’s going to get fired like right away. He lasted about 45 days okay, and I remember that moment because I’m like, I really liked him, he was so talented, but you were trying to hold back from the company what the customer, he should be, like every single person in this company wants to sit on these calls, like come on in, like listen in right, because you have to get everybody behind hearing what’s actually happening.

John: We’ve all heard this Henry Ford quote, “if I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”, and there’s a lot of start-ups out there subscribing to that sentiment, and believe that customer input can sometimes be limiting, and there’s dangers of listening to customers too closely, like the tendency to only make incremental rather than really bold improvements, and that would leave the field open for competitors. What’s your stance on that?

Dave: So this is really important. So ran a company called BzzAgent for 10 years. The first couple of years we had the idea, I sort of got into the vision, like what if we could get real people to try price and services, share them with others, this is in a pre-social age, and then we had a way to sort of capture that data. That was the idea.

And so a couple of things happened along the way. One was we would go into, what we would typically do is go into a company that we wanted to pitch and we’d open with; so have you ever recommended a product to somebody else, and the person would say “oh yeah, this pair of shoes, I always tell people”.

Have you ever taken a recommendation from someone else? Yeah, yeah, and then we’d say “what we do is we build scalable channels do that”, okay.

Early on, it took about a year for people to agree to that. It seems obvious now, like why wouldn't you want people to do that, but back then we were thrown out of ad agencies, like I will never forget, I won't say the name, but one in Boston who literally after 10 minutes was like, no one wants to buy this, get out of here, and they sort of like shoved us out.

Now, that was what I consider sort of like a rifle shot. We believed so much that the world was going to change, we just kept doing it.

I’ve had other businesses where we’d sort of like get close to the customer, we’d keep trying and we’re hammering on this idea, and you can hear it’s not, I don’t like your idea or I don’t believe in it. It’s; I’m not really sure that’s my problem, right, and they don’t say it that obviously, but like you keep saying that’s my problem, and it’s not my problem.

And so we recommend like often it’s like your ears have to be attuned to like, you can almost see it in people’s faces, like they’d kind of lighten up when it’s really interesting to them and they can say “oh that sounds really interesting”, where you can like see it in their face, hear it in their voice, maybe that’s interesting, I’ll call you later.

So just be, you’ve got to have your ears tuned to like, is this really solving pain? Does this person really need this? If you’ve got something magical that’s going to change the world, do that rifle shot, stick with it, overcome every objection, but for the most part you’ve got to really listen in on the like, when do people really have a pain that you can solve?

John: So Dave, one of the things I think everyone admires about smaller, leaner, faster moving start-ups is the entrepreneurial spirit that everyone seems to have. Of course a lot of larger companies, they want to instil that spirit in their employees as well.

So, what advice would you give to leadership at a big corporate company that wants to facilitate an entrepreneurial culture?

Dave: Right, so there’s two types and I’ve spent some days in quite large organizations, so I find I tend to do better, I will tell you, in like rider the rodeo, smaller type organizations, but in big companies I’ve seen this and I think there’s two types.

There’s the type that says, we have a working business and we need to build an entrepreneurial sort of on the edge group, and we’re going to call it the innovation sector, the entrepreneurship part of the business, and we’re going to let it touch the rest of the company in certain ways, and it’s almost like they want it to be like a parasite.

Literally like that’s how it’s been talked about in some of the companies, like yeah, people will like, they’ll be able to like ask them questions and work on projects with them, and it’ll slowly like feed into the business and it’ll become more entrepreneurial.

That can work, but the osmosis between the two needs to be pretty open. You need to like let these two merge directly. It can be hard for a, I always find in those types of organizational constructs, like that small group feels like they’re siloed off and they’re trying to beat their head against the rest of the organization’s resistance, and that can be really tough to do.

John: You know it’s funny; a lot of organizations even put them in a different building.

Dave: They do. That’s right. And we had fun, I’m not going to name the company, but like okay, we’re going to do this, but we have IP in the core business and so we’re going to need to build a wall and a key locked door between the two.

So I’m like, wait, wait, how, like, but, so you have to like get into the innovation area you have to like punch in your number and give your bi-, what are you talking about? I was like, we shouldn’t even do this.

John: It’s like entrepreneurial spirit is behind that door.

Dave: Exactly. Like you can go like look in the window. It’s like oh, they’re in there. They’re in there doing that. Okay.

The other, which is a lot harder, is really organizational change to be more entrepreneurial, and the ways I’ve seen this work effectively has been, it’s always top down. Like if the CEO or the leadership team is talking entrepreneurially but all their behaviours are far removed from that, then it’s never going to happen.

It has to be top down and they have to be constantly advocating, pulling out the team that this woman built this new thing, she got around all the tough inner workings of this business, built this thing up and then it’s changed the company with this new product, like it has to constantly put that on a pedestal, and people have to see the leadership and the company constantly bringing the innovation and entrepreneurial elements to the forefront and advocating on their behalf.

So that takes true spirit of leadership and companies that are billions in revenue. The installation of that is very difficult at times, just because they have a machinery of working, but it’s a constant reminder that that’s how you get ahead. It’s almost like riding a bike. You have to constantly pedal and pedal that entrepreneurial mission if you’re going to keep that alive in bigger companies.

John: Well Dave, this was great. Thank you so much for all the time, all the inspiration, for being one of our Davids.

Dave: No problem.

John: You probably didn’t have a problem with that. We really appreciate it.

Cynthia: That was incredible Dave. The lessons you shared across the businesses you built have been invaluable, and especially as you’ve evolved some of your thinking or can build upon the experiences, really helpful.

Dave: Awesome. Well you guys, these are great questions. I love talking about this stuff, and I think at the highest level the workforce is continuing to evolve, companies are continuing to change, and keeping an eye on the things and thinking about things as they’re changing, that’s like, you’ve got to do it if you’re going to succeed in today’s workforce.

So I loved the questions, so thank you for having me.

John: Thank you Dave. And for everyone listening, we hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for us, and you’re able to take some of the advice and the strategies and approaches that Dave discussed, and apply them to your company or your business.

Thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it.