Guest: Rania Succar, CEO of Intuit Mailchimp
Ten years out of college, and with two advanced degrees under her belt, Rania Succar knew she wanted to be an operator. Taking a job at Google taught her a lot, but she chafed under the limitations imposed on her control and personal impact. At Intuit, she finally found what she had been searching for: “We really do have a structure that's set up to give you massive amounts of accountability and responsibility.” For seven years, Rania worked across the Quickbooks team before becoming the CEO of Mailchimp in August 2022. And along the way, she also discovered the “beauty” in jointly owning some functions with her teammates: “It can actually be brilliant.”
In this episode, Rania and Joubin discuss immigrant culture, boundless energy, the search for meaning, the illusion of control, getting back to equilibrium, registering your ambition, “Mailkimp,” prioritizing family, sleep experiments, passing the baton, finding problem-solvers, and meetings that give you energy.
In this episode, we cover:
- The importance of family to Syrians, Persians, and immigrants (00:43)
- Navigating two cultures at the dinner table, and Rania’s entrepreneurial father (04:48)
- The arc of her career, and figuring out where she wanted to put her energy (08:59)
- What motivates & energizes her, and what takes energy away (14:28)
- The need to own things end to end, and the beauty of sharing the controls (18:32)
- What Rania has learned over seven years at Intuit, and how she pushes to do more (24:32)
- Mailchimp’s “genius” sponsorship of Serial, and preserving its scrappy culture (30:46)
- How Rania allocates her time every week, and finding “30% more efficiency” (34:13)
- Learning about the importance of sleep “the hard way” (38:45)
- Getting through the early months of COVID and being authentic with her team (43:30)
- Learning from leaders like Intuit’s Bill Campbell and Scott Cook, and defining the “next chapter of exceptional” (46:51)
- How a visual impairment became a source of strength (52:54)
- Setting priorities and being a prisoner of one’s calendar (57:16)
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