Inside Outside Innovation

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Christian Busch, author of the new book, The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Good Luck. Christian and I talk about how you can expand your surface area of luck and flex your serendipity muscles, both as an individual and an organization. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption each week. We'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Dr. Christian Busch. He is the author of the new book, The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Good Luck.Christian Busch: Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Brian. Brian Ardinger: Christian, I am so excited to have you on the show for a number of different reasons. We can get into the details in a minute, but to give our audience a little bit of background about who you are and that. You teach entrepreneurship innovation and leadership at New York University and the London School of Economics; you direct the Center for Global Affairs and Global Economy Program. I think you've co-directed the London School of Economics Innovation and Co-creation Lab, and you've been in this space of innovation and entrepreneurship for a while. So, I'm excited to have you on board. And I think I'll start off by talking about how we actually met. You have a book out called The Serendipity Mindset and you have a new article that just came out in Harvard Business Review about how do you create your own career luck? And I was fascinated. I was reading through the article. I said, Oh, this is a perfect person to talk to, to have on the show and talk about this idea of how do you create luck?  You know, we talk about invention and creation of new innovations and that. And so many times you hear people talk about, well, it was just luck. And so, I want to get your take on what got you interested in researching and studying the art and science of good luck. Christian Busch: Yeah, that's a great question because I've had an experience early on in life, a car crash that made me realize how quickly life can be over. And so, its instilled kind of urgency and search for meaning. And, you know, I started reading this Victor Frankel book around man's search for meaning and really dove deep into what is meaningful to me. I realized that what I enjoy the most is connecting people, connecting ideas, seeing how dots connect. And so, over the last years I've been part of building communities, companies, and then doing a lot of research on what makes companies successful, not successful. What makes individuals successful purpose-driven or not successful, purpose-driven. And one of the things that I found fascinating is when I looked at that kind of whole spectrum, the most joyful, you know, successful people seem to have something in common, which was that they all somehow intuitively cultivated serendipity. They intuitively saw something the unexpected, whenever it happens, they connect dots. They somehow create their own smart luck. And you know, these kinds of people where people around them would say, well, they're just a bit luckier than others. Since I got really fascinated by this question. And I delve deeper into the signs of it, but also then inspiring stories and try to identify what is the science base pattern behind this and how can we make it happen by exercises and other things.Brian Ardinger: So how would you define the difference between blind luck versus smart luck? Christian Busch: Yeah, it's really, I mean, if you look at the blind, like this kind of being born into a loving family, or, you know, things that just happen to you without you doing anything versus the kind of smart luck, which is really the active luck, which is about saying it's not just something that happens to us, but it's a process of seeing something and doing something with it.So for example, you know, picture this quintessential situation of you're in a coffee shop. And if you have erratic hand movements, as I do, you might spill a coffee more often than not. And you know, you spill that coffee. And there's this person next to you and you sense, there's a kind of connection, you know, you just feel, Oh, this could be interesting. And you know, you now have two options, right? Option number one is, you're just saying, I'm so sorry. Here's a napkin. And that's it. You leave it at that option. Option number two is you strike a conversation. You see some potential overlaps and it might grow into a potential love relationship or become a cofounder, whatever it is.And then obviously this really bad feeling when you had option number one happen. You walk outside, you're like, ah, I should have talked with this person. Right. And so that is serendipity missed, and that is smart luck missed. So, what we're seeing here is that it's really about what is our proactive decision that we make in the moment when the serendipitous or when that kind of unexpectedness happens. And so, in a way, serendipity is all about making accidents more meaningful, but also making more meaningful accidents happen. I think in the business context, I guess you have a lot of people also who are running businesses in the audience. And so, one of my favorite examples is a company in China.  They produce washing machines and other white goods. And, you know, they had farmers call them up and saying, Hey, look. We're trying to wash our potatoes and it always breaks down this machine whenever we try to wash out potatoes and what would we usually do when something unexpected like this happens, we would say, well, look, this is a washing machine for clothes. Don't wash your potatoes in the washing machine. Right. But you know, they did the opposite. They said, you know what? This is unexpected, but there's a lot of farmers in China who might have the same problem, but actually they want to have their potatoes washed. So, they added the dirt filter and made it a potato washing machine. The point here is that when they look back now, they're Oh, it was just lucky that we learned from farmers X, Y, Z. Yeah, but you work for it. You did something about it. You saw something in the unexpected. And that's the same with everything from Viagra to how we met the love of our lives, all these different things. They were practice decisions rather than just happening to us. We had to do something about it. Brian Ardinger:  Let's talk a little bit about that. In the article that you wrote in Harvard Business Review, you talk a little bit about how you can expand that surface area of luck. And you talk about specific practices that people can do as far as one of them being setting hooks. So maybe let's talk a little bit about what does it mean to set a hook for serendipity. Christian Busch: Yeah, that's one of my favorites. So essentially, it's something that I've...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that helps innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is George Brooks. George is the founder of Crema, which is a digital product agency based out of Kansas City. So right here in the Midwest, welcome to the show. George Brooks: Thanks, Brian. Its's good to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well I'm excited to have you on. A couple of reasons. One, you are also a podcast host like me. Your podcast is called Option Five. You talk a lot about product development and that, close to the core of all the stuff that we talk about here at Inside Outside Innovation, when it comes to what does it take to work and live in this new world of change and disruption.George Brooks: Yeah. Thank you very much. I'm excited. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about Crema. How'd you go about forming this company and tell us a little bit about what you do. George Brooks: My background is in design. So, I started as a design agency first, and really that was as a freelance designer going out on my own. And we talk about when sometimes entrepreneurship innovation happens because you have this dream and this vision, and sometimes you're just pushed off a cliff and you have to figure it out as you fall down. And mine was being pushed off a cliff. My oldest daughter was in the hospital for the first seven months of her life and I couldn't be at work. I couldn't be at the agency that I was at. I needed to be there. She was super critical. And so, I left that job and started freelance design about 10 years ago. Well, actually gosh, 12 years ago now. And the story used to be 10 years, right? Time has passed. Brian Ardinger: And Coronavirus adds another three years for this last six months. George Brooks: I know. So true. So, I started freelance designing. I don't have any business background. So about two years into that, my best friend and I had always dreamed about doing a business together. And I said, I think I accidentally started a business. And it looks like this agency work, doing a lot of design work for other agencies, and for developers and entrepreneurs. Can you make sure that I'm actually paying my taxes and doing all the things that I should be doing? And so, he was finishing up his MBA and so Dan and I joined together about 10 years ago and Crema is about 10 and a half years old.What we do today has changed since the beginning. We're now a full-service digital product agency. So, we do everything from user experience, design and consulting, strategic direction workshops, coaching, agile process training, all the way through. I have almost 40 full time employees now and focusing on actually providing full-stack product teams. So, design development, test engineering, product management, and we deploy those now, used to be a lot of startups and early stage companies. Almost all the work that we do now is with large enterprise innovation teams around the world. A lot of fun. Brian Ardinger : Well, we seem to have a very similar background, 8 or 10, 12 years ago I started in the startup world and started the Nmotion startup accelerator and starting early stage teams, helping them get up and going and that, but starting these things in the Midwest is a little bit different. So, I want to talk a little bit about what has the evolution been like and what have you seen starting and building companies here in the Midwest, especially like 10 years ago versus what it's like now.George Brooks: When I first was freelancing and going to the first startup weekend that took place in Kansas City. And I had no idea what to expect. I think I probably overdressed. I looked way too fancy for what kind of event. I had no idea. My wife didn't know that I was literally going to disappear for three solid days. And that was kind of back in the day when you tried to build a full stack of product in three days, right? It wasn't about putting together a pitch or a deck or something. It was like, we're going to build this thing. So, you just pulled all-nighters to make it happen. And I think during those days, it was that new wave of creative thinkers and entrepreneurs, at least coming through Kansas City specifically. It felt like the next wave since the early nineties, when the Sprints of the world and the Cerners of the world started here in Kansas City. These large enterprises, and there really have been a gap where you saw new innovative companies coming up. So, ours was spurred on by Google showing up and we got to win the Google fiber contract. And that was a big deal at the time. What are we going to do with gigabit internet? And then really what I think we saw as a quick rise, lots of activity, lots of moving around and trying to put on events and then kind of a dialing down to where you saw people...it got weeded out pretty quickly that the chaff fell through, If you will, to figure out where are the people that are going to sustain doing this work. Who's going to stick around. Who's going to actually survive the hard work it takes to start companies and sustain innovation. And I think that's where we're on that next wave of really the companies that have stuck. Even the new companies that are starting now, now have an infrastructure of enough great of companies that have been through it the last 10 years to say, here's what it actually takes. It's not all fun and games. Let's actually get to work. And I think that's what I've seen, at least in the environment. For Crema, it's about iteration. It's about refinement. And so, we've had to iterate on ourselves and experiment with new ideas and offer our services in a different way and use different language. And UX was like this super-hot, nobody had heard of term. There were two letters that shouldn't be next to each other. And it got us work in the beginning that doesn't get us work anymore. Right. Everyone does UX. So, we have to innovate and continue to iterate to stay relevant. Brian Ardinger: I think the other dynamic that seems to be similar to what I've experienced and seen around the country as well is there was a lot of buzz around startups was how do these companies move so fast and create something from nothing? And that's how I got pulled into the corporate innovation front is because bigger companies were coming to me and asking those same kinds of questions. It sounds like you have a similar type of ride from the standpoint of you were building and iterating and getting things up and going and old established companies were craving that ability to do that. So, talk me through that transition from working with startups or building brand new products, and then moving towards a more established organization. George Brooks: One of our clients...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is the author of the new book, The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food.  Vaughn and I talk about his well-researched account of how some of the world's top chefs and their teams approach culinary innovation and what it means for innovation teams of all kinds. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics,  and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest today. We are talking to Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London, School of Management, previously worked at Google in California has a Harvard PhD and he's author of a new book called The Uncertainty Mindset:  Innovation insights from the frontiers of food. Welcome to the show, Vaughn.Vaughn Tan: Fantastic. Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to talk about this topic of innovation in the culinary space. Restaurants have been around forever. And when you think of innovation, you don't always think restaurants and culinary space. And so I wanted to dig into this particular topic. Maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about your eclectic background. Vaughn Tan: Absolutely. I'm from Singapore originally. And so I guess it's kind of like a trope that if you're a Singaporean, you have an unhealthy interest in food.  This is more or less true. That kind of only started to show up in my research a little bit later. I think where I got interested in the questions I'm asking in the book, it actually started when I was working at Google. When I was there, one of the most interesting things that I noticed, I was there for about three years, was that the really interesting groups that came up with really innovative ideas we're the ones that weren't sort of organized the way management, conventional wisdom, would say you should organize the innovation group. They were the ones that bubbled up from the ground up. People found each other. The goals were kind of like amorphis and  shifting a lot. The themes that eventually showed up in the book.I first noticed in an inchoate way, when I was working at Google.  When I went back to get my PhD, I was interested in finding out more about how organizations could do something like what I saw at Google. Create this environment in which people and teams could self create projects that resulted in innovation. And when I was doing the research, everyone who tries to do like a research project for a PhD, you have to chose your setting. You have to choose the site that you will go look at trying to understand more about the phenomenon that you're interested in. A lot of people who study innovation, will study things like a microchip foundary or something like that.I just sort of, I thought initially, maybe I should try something, which is a little bit weird. What I always tell people is there's tons of reasons why restaurants and food R & D are good place to study innovation. The biggest one is that if you study food R & D the cycle time for innovation is very short.So as a researcher, what you see is you see many, many cycles that you can start to see patterns across all those cycles. But actually the true reason, which is not less good, it's just also a good reason for it is that it's just much more fun. You know, studying chefs, being in restaurants, being in a kitchen where they're coming up with new ideas and food and constantly failing is just more fun than watching people code all the time and looked at both. So I can say that. And it's not to say that programming or hardware design is less interesting. It's just less fun to me. That's why I did it. My personal background is connected to why I decided to do this. Because I think it's an inherently interested in food and interested in how it gets made. I would not have thought about doing it in this way. But a lot of the reasons why I'm looking at food are actually the same reasons that initially drove me to do a PhD in the first place. And they were the same things I saw when I was working at Google. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about some of the examples and how you went about learning some of this stuff. So you've worked with some of the world's top chefs and their teams and looked at how they approached innovation. Did they look at it as innovation, the stuff that they were doing, or tell us a little bit about that. Vaughn Tan: I think they absolutely thought of it as innovation, or at least they thought about it as trying to come up with new things. And I think most of them, even though they would not maybe have used the same words as I'm using, they would have thought of it as trying to come up with a new approach, either at the level of the dish, trying to come up with the new dish or in some cases in new idea of what service should be like the entire experience of going into a restaurant. Some of these teams were interested in new ways of cooking. Some of them were interested in developing new materials in the sense of new ingredients. They were always thinking about it as innovation and thinking about innovation as something that could happen at several different levels that can be combined of course, but they were always thinking of what they were working on as trying to come up with new things.Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about the book itself. It's called the Uncertainty Mindset. How does that come into play this idea of uncertainty in the innovation process and what did you learn? Vaughn Tan: I think the big takeaway point that I want everyone to come away from the book with is that innovation is often thought of as something which companies must do in order to survive and thrive and all that other stuff. Everybody knows it. But the thing which is also true about innovation, which people sort of conveniently forget all the time, is that if you are truly going to make something which is brand new, you have no idea what that is at the beginning. Not a precise idea anyway. And you also don't have a clear idea of how you're going to get there. Innovation as a process and as an outcome is probably the only kind of activity that we do in a corporate context that is unavoidably and inevitably inherently and uncertain activity. That's sort of the big framing for the book, which is if you're trying to do something inherently uncertain, the way you think about how you do things, what the constraints on your actions are, what the resources are that are available to you. Even what you're trying to do in the first place, like at a very fundamental level. All those things have to be appropriate for something which is uncertain and that's where the uncertainty mindset comes in. So the uncertainty mindset is basi...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Pam Marmon. Pam is the CEO of Marmon Consulting and author of the new book, No One's Listening and it's Your Fault: Get Your Message Heard During Organizational Transformations. Pam and Brian discuss operational and organizational change, why change isn't hard, and what people are doing to adapt in this very fast paced change that we're experiencing now. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Pam Marmon. She is CEO of Marmon consulting, which focuses on change management and the author of the new book No One's Listening and It's Your Fault - Get your message heard during organizational transformations. Welcome to the show, Pam. Pam Marmon: Thank you for having me, Brian. Brian Ardinger: Well, let's get into it. One of the things I read in your book is 70% of organizational change efforts fail. Can you unpack that? Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, a lot of research has been done on the change management front and why large initiatives fail and based on the research, when organizations and when leaders don't apply proper change management up to 70% of those efforts fail. And this is where change management as a discipline has really flourished to help leaders understand what is the role of the executive, of the leader, of the people, the managers, and then how do you weave these communication messages or the behaviors and the mindsets that have to shift within the organization so that you can have a successful outcome.Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about the book and how you got to the place where you wanted to compile all this information and help people figure out this process. Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, I started writing the book actually last May of 2019. But prior to that, I was working with leaders and I came to realize that a lot of my leaders we're afraid of change. There was just a sense of fear associated with change, whether it's fear of failure or just behaviors, or resistance that they may encounter within their organizations. And having done change management for the last decade, I felt like I was on the other side, looking in into their organizations and knowing that if they did the right things at the right time, that they wouldn't experience this resistance or nearly to the level that 70% of organization experience. And so, I wanted to help leaders not be afraid of change, and I wanted them to be confident when they step into the roles of leading organizations through change and the most effective way to get your message heard is through writing a book. And so, I wrote the book in a way that, and easy for leaders to understand, to read. There's a model that I share in the book LESS. I walked each leader through the process of leading transformation and having the right mindset as you listen first, so that you can engage your team later. The things Brian Ardinger: One of the things, I liked about the book is you really do set the stage of having to have that kind of mindset shift. A lot of people, when they hear the word change, they automatically think hard and difficult. And I don't want to go through this, but you twist it on its head and say that change isn't hard if you approach it in the right way and have the right mindset. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, with the proper process, change is not hard, and it does sound radical to say it out loud. But when the process that I talk about is being able to listen first. So, within your organization, as a leader, you need to be able to align to the vision. You need to be able to understand what your peers at the executive level are doing, and you need to be able to create a story that aligns well. And part of that listening is the readiness assessment. You need to understand if your organization is ready for this change and also to stage the change. So maybe there are multiple changes happening at the same time, and you have to be mindful of the resources and the people impacted. The second part is engage. And so, part of the process I talked about your ability as a leader to engage the right people at the executive level, the managers, the change champions that you identify in your organization, and then you can actually speak. And when you do speak, you need to understand the channels, the proper messages that have to be shared, the timing of those messages, how they're going to be received by people. What's that cohesive story and that experience you want to shape for the individual that's experiencing that change. And then the last part is measure. It's our ability to solve and that's through measuring and being able to create the dashboards and the metrics so that we can evaluate is this successful. And what is success for this particular change as we look at the behaviors and the mindsets of the people that we're shifting. And how can we measure that against the project outcomes, which is really where we measure success. Brian Ardinger: Everybody right now is experiencing massive change with the coronavirus and recession and all the other things that are hitting companies all at once. Having a more proactive approach and measured approach to change know, listening and putting all the ducks in a row would be an important process. How do you do that when the pace of change is accelerating so much, that what you thought was going to happen is not the current case. And you've got to execute quickly. Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, the environment that we are certainly as different than under normal circumstances, when we plan change and we have the time and the opportunity to stage things and think them through and stretch them out long. Currently, what we're seeing is the urgency of change to happen. And so, there's a lot more reaction and reactive leadership that's happening and also the need for stronger and more frequent communications that have to come out from the leaders. We're seeing a lot more communications that are more human in the nature of how they're delivered because we're seeing leaders empathize with people and whether their customers. And so, the volume of communications that we're seeing is greater. And also the ability of leaders to kind of shift that mindset and say, I know we may have planned to do this then, you know, in three, four, five years, but here we are now and we are forced to change and we don't have another option. We have to learn to adapt. We have to have grace for one another, as we're learning through this journey and we have to test and shift as we move along because some of our assumptions will be broken and we may have to redo what we thought was the right way to do something and think outside...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Shapiro. Steve is the author of a new book called Invisible Solutions. He spent a number of decades speaking and writing and working with corporations all around the idea of innovation. And how companies can reframe and relook at problems to get better results. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services, that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Stephen Shapiro. Stephen is a innovation instigator, hall of fame speaker, author of six books including the most recent one that I wanted to have him on the show to talk about called Invisible Solutions. So Stephen, welcome to show. Stephen Shapiro: Hey Brian. Great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Actually, we got connected, I was interviewing Thomas Wedellsborg a few weeks ago about his new book, and we serendipitously started talking about an example that you talk about all the time. This idea of how do you reframe problems. And we want to start there and give a little bit of background on how you got into this innovation space. Stephen Shapiro: Sure. So, I started off life and I guess I still am a bit of a nerd. I loved math and physics and all that stuff. Growing up, I was in the math club, went to college, majored as an engineer, left university, went to work for Accenture, and I was doing a lot of engineering work. And in fact, in the early nineties, I was actually involved with something called Business Process Reengineering, which was basically efficiency work. We would optimize businesses. And one day discovered that the more we optimize the company's processes, the more they would downsize the workforce. And I had just had this existential meltdown in. And took a leave of absence, reinvented myself. And in 1995, 1996 timeframe, I decided to focus on growth and innovation. Wasn't a hot topic that far back, but that's what I put my hat on and I've been loving it ever since. That's all I've been doing for 25 years.Brian Ardinger: You've had the great opportunity to see the evolution of innovation specifically in a corporate environment and how companies look at innovation, how they treat it, how they execute on it. What are some of the things that you are seeing that people are getting wrong about innovation? Stephen Shapiro: Well, it's been interesting, like you said, having been in for 25 years, I've seen the evolution. It started off as basically R & D. And then it started sort of in the early 2000s, 2003, 2004, it started to gain some traction in terms of it being a companywide, an enterprise wide endeavor, rather than just sort of this little group. But I think the thing which I've seen most organizations get wrong is they collapse innovation with creativity. And they believe that quantity of ideas will drive value for the organization. And from my experience, you might get there eventually, but it's an extremely expensive and slow way to go about it. So that to me is the biggest mistake is a focus on ideas and quantity rather than focus on questions, opportunities, and solutions that drive the greatest level of value. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that's an interesting topic because you talk to corporations that are spinning up innovation labs, and they're putting maybe 5 or 10 ideas in a year, hoping that one of those five or 10 will end up being Uber or whatever the next thing is. And not realizing that like the startup ecosystem alone is putting out thousands of these types of ideas and Uber or Twitter or whatever it comes out of those thousands of ideas. And it's very hard for any one organization to have that lead flow or deal flow in such a way to have enough of that throughput really to make that happen. If it's not about ideas or if it's not just about ideas, you know, you have to have the idea and you execute on it. What are some of the things that corporations should be thinking about when they start about thinking about innovation? Stephen Shapiro: It comes down to, instead of focusing on the solution, it's focusing on the question. And the thing that I found is paradoxically, the more we try to focus on the end game, the goal, the, the solution, the less likely we are to find good ones. And so what I always tell my clients to do is anytime they're chasing ideas, chasing opportunities, just push the pause button for a moment. Just say, what are we really trying to achieve here? What's the problem we're trying to solve. What's the opportunity that we're trying to take advantage of. And is there a better way to ask the question that will get us a completely different result? Sometimes it's that simple, but it's recognizing that having the answers isn't the answer. It really is about the question. The problem, I think a lot of times as leaders feel like they have to have the answers and I think that's actually not good leadership. A good leader is somebody who asks questions, which gets the rest of the organization to ask better questions. And when you have an organization, that's actually thinking about it from the perspective of what creates the greatest value. And is there a different way we can do it. We now get more much greater throughput than we would otherwise. Brian Ardinger: And that whole fear of failure. It makes sense from the standpoint of corporations and organizations that have figured out a business model that works, you know, the idea of killing that business model or failing at that business model is quite scary. But yet if you're going to create something new that is uncertain, and unknowable have to go through some failures to figure out that and navigate that particular process. Stephen Shapiro: Yeah. And here's an interesting, I just want to build on something you said earlier, is I'm not sure that large corporations should be doing a lot of radical innovation. Because if you think about the way markets work, I mean, we will talk about an Uber or Lyft as sort of this breakthrough innovation, but the reality is if you think about the number of companies, small startup companies that are trying new business models and new technologies and fail. The success rate is extremely small. So, to assume that a company is going to have a high likelihood of success is a high level of egotism in some respects. If you focus on what the real opportunity is, then you can put a separation between the opportunity and the solution. And it doesn't mean you as an organization need to find the solution. It doesn't even mean you need to invest in developing it. You could use open innovation and crowdsourcing to buy a solution elsewhere. You could do tech scouting. You could partner, you could buy another company, you can license technology from another company. But when you put that pause between the opportunity, question, challenge, whatever you want to call it and the solution, ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder sits down with the creator of Pictionary, Rob Angel. Rob is a speaker, author, and entrepreneur and author of the new book Game Changer: The story of Pictionary and how I turned a simple idea into the bestselling board game in the world. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Rob Angel. Rob is the creator of Pictionary. Welcome to the show, Rob, Rob Angel: Thank you for having me, Brian. Appreciate it. Brian Ardinger: You've got a new book out called Game Changer: The story of Pictionary and how I turned a simple idea into the bestselling board game in the world. I wanted to get some insights into what it was like to create something from scratch and something that's well known throughout the world. Let's start at the early stages of your entrepreneurial journey and how you took paper and pencil and created a million-dollar business. Tell us a story of how you became the creator Pictionary. Rob Angel: It's a long story, but the ultimate was that I was always open looking for ideas. I was always an entrepreneur and just waiting for my opportunity. And that came in the form of one evening. My roommate said, you guys want to play a game. We said, sure. Why wouldn't I want to play a game? And he called it charades on paper. We just sketch words out of the dictionary to each other. I'm 22, just recently graduated from college. 22 years old. And we started playing and I stay up all night for several nights in a row. And at this point, I'm thinking this would make a good board game. And that was the genesis. That was my first shot with picture. And I didn't start working on it for another two years, but that was the genesis. Brian Ardinger: Have you always been entrepreneurial minded or was this something this was a stroke of genius, stroke of luck that pulled things together, that you decided to start a business around Rob Angel: A little bit of both. Most things are a lot of hard work, but I've always had the mindset that I was going to work for myself. My father got fired when I was 19. And I thought if this executive, who I looked up to, my father is my role model could get fired. I wasn't going to let anybody have control over my future. And so, at that point, 19 years old, I said, okay, I'm going to do my own thing. And that kind of put me on this path of being an entrepreneur and to take care of myself. Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about starting a board game, if you've never been in the game business, or I guess any business, if you've never been in that industry and that before. How did you go about thinking, well, there's something here and how can I incrementally such that I can create a business around it?Rob Angel: Yeah, I think that's exactly the point. I mean, how many times have any of us had this wonderful idea for something? You get it? You ever walked out of a shower and thought Oh my God, here's my million-dollar idea that never got started. I think a lot of times that's because we overthink the process. Overthinking all the different steps to get there. And that's what happened to me. Is that I started thinking of all the steps necessary to put picture in the store shelf. I mean, physically, I could, I could visualize that, but I couldn't get started because I couldn't think straight if you will, over-thought all the steps. So, I broke it down to its first easiest step. And for me, I think for a lot of us, that's easy to digest. Digesting business plans and marketing plans and all these other things that I knew, nothing about, was too much. So, breaking it down. I said, okay, what's that step? And it's making the word list. And for me, that was pretty simple because everything I needed was right there. You know, I didn't have to overthink it again, that a paper, a pencil, and a dictionary. Went in the backyard. And I started writing down the word list. The first word I came to was aardvark. I wrote down the word aardvark, and that was my first Pictionary word, but that's how it got started. And so when you're thinking of ideas and you're thinking of things, it's not necessary to have everything in place. I didn't. Just know that it's easy to get started. Write down a word, get a Go Daddy domain name, whatever it takes, just to take that first step. And then just get excited about that first step. And that's when it gets started. Brian Ardinger: So, you're excited after the first step, you start moving the ball down the path, so to speak. No business gets off the ground without hitting some obstacles. Tell us about the first time you hit an obstacle and decided to keep going through it, even though it was challenging, Rob Angel: There's always obstacles. And as I say, it wouldn't be any fun if there were no obstacles, because it just makes you tougher. It made me tough. First obstacle was to find partners for me. I started working on the game and I had somebody join me, the business side, business end, and he quit. And so, I'm back to square one and we all know our limitations. We have to acknowledge. And I had to acknowledge the fact that I didn't want to run a business. And so, when this gentleman that I thought was going to be the guy quit, I had to find somebody else. But what I found was that I found somebody that was aligned with my vision. I mean, when you're talking, you know partners, and you're talking about business, not just finding somebody that could cross the T and dot the Is and somebody that shares your passion and your vision, and that's what I've found in my partner and that set me on the path. Kept me on the path.  Shall we say.Brian Ardinger: So how did you go about finding a partner? Did you actively start going out, looking for somebody to help co-found this with you? Or was it serendipitous or talk us through that step? Rob Angel: I think everything is serendipitous, we chalk it up. You chalk it up to, Oh, you know, I found the right guy and I found it. But I think serendipity has a lot to do with everything. Actually, the gentleman who quit did a play test and his friend showed up, and when I met him, it was like, Oh my goodness, it's almost a visceral reaction. I knew in my gut that he was the right guy. I mean, you know, people know when the right thing is happening. You kind of get, you know, break out a little sweat maybe or your heart rate races.  Has that ever happened? Of course, that's happened. Because you know what is in front of you. What is transpiring is the right thing. And that's what happened when I met Terry my business partner. Brian Ardinger: Can you talk about some of the...

Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi are co-founders of the incubator, Her Product Lab.  Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Monica and Lina about opportunities and barriers for women in the product development space and Her Product Lab's new seven-week incubator program designed to help women launch and grow new product initiatives.  Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, we have two amazing guests today, Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi. They are cofounders of a new project and a new venture called Her Product Lab. Welcome to the show. Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you so much, Brian. We're so excited to be here. Lina Bedi: Very exciting.Brian Ardinger: Monica, you and I met a couple of years ago. I had a chance to come up to Milwaukee for the Fall Xperiment conference last year and do some podcasts there. And I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about this new venture that you spun up. And some of the changes that you've seen over the last several months in spinning up this particular project. I know we actually had this conversation pre COVID, but we wanted to postpone it because a lot of things have changed. So, tell us about what Her Product Lab is, and then we'll go into how it came to be. Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you for that intro. In my day job, I was organizing events for product managers. And I was in the New York office, we have a New York office and a Milwaukee office, and in the New York office there's a lot of conversation about how there really isn't a community for women in product. You see a big presence out on the West coast, Advancing Women in Product. They have done a phenomenal job of really elevating women, their career, getting them into the mid-level and leadership roles out there. And we weren't seeing so much of that even in New York City and looking into other cities like Chicago, DC, Atlanta.Our goal, when we had started out late last year, is let's have these summits. We'll bring women together. We'll have women on the stage talking about their careers. How did they move into the director roles, how to build better products? It was really incredible because only in two or three weeks’ time, after coming up with this concept and connecting with Lina, who's also very interested in this. We had a website, tickets were live. We had something like 20 presenters right off the bat. And it was one of the easiest events I ever put together because there was so much excitement around it. So, the date of our first summit, March 26th, New York City, same week as lock down. I actually did this really somber activity where I walked over to where our venue is. I live not too far from there. And everything's just boarded up, no people on the street in another universe, there would be 200 people in this room, and we'd all be super engaged and talking about product development. So, it was a really crazy experience for us.But I think the other thing that we saw was that nobody was asking for a refund. Everyone wanted to know when the date was going to be changed. We had this really loyal community that wanted to be part of this. And so we were trying to think of, well, how do we keep everyone engaged without being able to have in person events. And so, we started with some of the virtual events and that led us to think of this concept of a virtual incubator, which by the way, I'll just add one thing. We wanted to do an incubator as part of our two-year roadmap. We're thinking like 2022, we'll have an incubator. It will be really cool. And it will be New York based. And now it's just virtual and global, which we're really excited about. Brian Ardinger: It seems that coronavirus has definitely accelerated a lot of the disruption that we were already seeing in the marketplace. And this is just a perfect example of that. So, Lina, maybe can tell us about yourself and how you got involved in this project. Lina Bedi: I was introduced to Monica through a mutual friend, and we were talking about, you know, women supporting other women. And how far women can get when they're lifted. And when we think about product management, we were looking at the overall job market growth and product management and product management was and is booming.So, the overall job market in the past two years increased by around 6% and product management is five times that amount. And then when we dug into the data even more, we see that the majority, of women are in entry level positions. And so, our goal was to really create a network community where we can give women access to senior leaders and help mentor them.You know, these are a lot of the things that help propel my career forward and it’s a way of paying that forward. And, you know, that was the goal. And even though what we're doing now has shifted because of COVID, that goal still remains the same. Those overarching themes of what we're trying to achieve by connecting women to these leadership roles and giving access to training. Those are still the big umbrella that we're operating within. Brian Ardinger: One of the things that's interesting about her product lab, slightly different than a lot of the other incubators or accelerators out there. It seems to be focused, not just on starting a company, so to speak, but it's really about launching a product and maybe that early stage that it turns into a startup. Can you talk about why you decided to start with that emphasis? Monica Rozenfeld: When we have a community of product managers, they're already thinking about product ideas all of the time. And they're not necessarily looking to be entrepreneurs, start a company, hires a team, go through the whole process of all that it takes to actually launch a company. But maybe they have a concept that they either want to turn into a side hustle that they want to even pitch to their current employer. And that's very common if you're working in, for example, I work in FinTech. Maybe you have a concept that you think would be really great in that space and you can sell it to your own leadership even. So, it's a very different model. We've talked to so many women in our community who have an idea, and I'm sure as you know Brian, a lot of people sit on ideas for a very long time and sometimes you just need that nudge of a next step.And so, our goal is really to help connect them with mentors. One-on-one. Bring in coaches each week that can help them in each stage of the process. So, by the end, they have the option of what they want to do next. None of them have to quit their day jobs. We've created this to be around their full-time schedule. And after seven weeks they might say, Hey, I really want to pitch this to a VC and turn this into a startup. I really see the vision for it. A...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jorge Arango. He's an information architect and author of the book, Living in Information. Jorge and Brian Ardinger talk about how Jorge's background and traditional architecture has affected his insights and approach to digital design. They talk about some of the trends in information architecture, and how digital environments are changing the way we work and live.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jorge Arango. He is the strategic designer and information architect and author of the book called Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places.  Welcome to the show Jorge.Jorge Arango: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about your book, but more importantly, to talk about this whole world of information architecture. If my research is correct, you started your career in traditional architecture. And so I'd like to maybe start there and talk about how did you go from the world of physical architecture to the world of digital design?Jorge Arango: Yeah, that's right. So, I studied architecture as in the design of buildings and it's been a while now. I'm part of a generation of folks who came into the workforce at a very interesting time in history when the worldwide web was coming into focus. It was becoming a thing. And when I saw the web, I essentially left my career in architecture to start a web design studio, because it seemed to me at the time that this was a new medium that would change the world. We didn't know yet, in what ways it would change the world, but it was pretty clear that it was going to be huge.Brian Ardinger: To give the audience of understanding of what is information architecture and how does that differ then UX design or creative and that? Jorge Arango: Yeah, there is some overlap there in that information, architects help create the experiences that people have when they interact with software. But it's in no ways constrained by the design of software. So, information architecture is focused on helping make information easier to find and understand. So, think of something like an online store where you maybe are offering your customers, a large catalog of goods.There are going to be ways for you to structure that information so that your customers can find what they're looking for. And so that they can do things like compare products to other products or find related products and establishing those relationships, figuring out what distinctions to enable is a big part of what information architects do.A lot of people who are involved with the design of software-based experiences, think of design as concerned with the way that things look and how they function. And that is certainly an important component of it. But information architects are concerned with the underlying structures that inform those things. That includes things like categories, navigation systems, the way that search engine search functionality, and such a system is structured and organized. Those are all within the area of concern for information architects.Brian Ardinger: I can see now where traditional architecture can have a major influence in how you develop digital environments. How do you think you're learning in the physical world has influenced your digital design capabilities? Jorge Arango: That's one of the reasons that I actually jumped on the web back in the mid-nineties. It was pretty clear to me that there was a direct relationship between the stuff that I'd been studying in architecture school and what was needed for this new medium.The main things that I often talk about are a concern for structure. A building is not just a collection of forms and spaces. It is also a series of systems that are structural systems, right? Like, and you can think in traditional architecture terms or building architecture terms, you can think of the columns and beams and other physical structural elements that hold the building up and allow it to resist the forces like gravity.It was pretty clear to me that there were structural aspects to the web experience even fairly early on. And the other one, which I've already touched on, was the fact that these are systems. They're never freestanding elements. And when you're designing the user interface to a software-based product or service, the stuff that you see on the screen, isn't all there is to it. Oftentimes these things form part of and relate to other component. That's very much within the area of concern for building architects as well. You have to be mindful of all of the systems that make up a building when you're designing such a thing. Brian Ardinger: Well, I imagine as you're building out more and more digital products and more and more people are becoming used to that, it was different back when you're just developing a website and that was a place people went typically.  But now digital is involved with virtually everything. Your phone's in your pocket and your hand. Smart technologies, IOT, things along those lines are giving you data and giving you access to things that changed the physical world, as well as the digital world. How do you go about approaching a new project to start mapping out how these systems and structures interact? Jorge Arango: Again, there's a learning there from design of buildings. So, when you're designing a building, one of the first things that you want to do is understand what is called the program. Let's say that you've been hired to work on the design of something like a dance studio. When designing a building to serve the functions of a dance studio, there are going to be certain functions that that environment is going to have to be able to accommodate. And those functions call for different types of spaces. For example, in a dance studio, you're going to want rooms for people's bodies to be able to make a series of movements. And that dictates the form of those spaces. You're also going to want. Other types of rooms that enable people to change in and out of their street clothes so that they can get into clothes that they're more comfortable performing dance moves with. And there's a whole host of other functions that such a building must accommodate. And architects oftentimes start by thinking about the program that a building must accommodate and what types of spaces are going to have to be a part of that and how those spaces relate to each other. And the same is true for people who are designing software-based experiences. I find that one of the things most missing in our disciplines these days is taking a step back from how things will look and function and really thinki...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest, the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Henrik Werdelin. He is an entrepreneur, author, he is best known for co-founding Bark and BarkBox. He also started the venture studio Prehype and he's author of a new book called The Acorn Method: How companies get growing again. Henrik, welcome to the show. Henrik Werdelin: Thank you. Brian Ardinger: Was that not a good enough intro for you? Henrik Werdelin: Perfect. No, no, no. I appreciate it very much. I am just hot in New York. It's a very humid here. And so, I get all aware with you being able to see yourself.Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you, because we could go 30 minutes of your introduction to the things that you've done and that. And. One of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on the show is because you epitomize the insideoutside.io world of both startups and corporate innovation.You're a builder, a maker, a doer, investor. So, we could take this conversation in a lot of different ways and we'll see where it goes. As people come into the live show, feel free to put your questions in the Q and A we'll try to get to that as well. I thought where we could start off is how did your founder journey start? How did you get going as an entrepreneur? And how did that lead you to the path you are at today? And then we'll get into the book and some other things. Henrik Werdelin: I mean, I don't think I've ever seen myself as a founder. I think, you know, it's a relatively new term, this idea of identifying yourself as an entrepreneur. And when I went to primary school, I was the idiot that started the school magazine. I was the one that says, Hey, we should have a radio station and so I've always just found that it was relatively easy to just do things, I guess. Like it started all the way back in the like eight or nine and just stuff like that.I thought I wanted it to be a journalist. And then I ended up working for MTV back in the late nineties. And I was lucky enough to stumble into what later became a product role. I had the fortune / stupidity of bringing into the studio of MTV and transmit an hour live for some show that I thought was good. And luckily the people there thought it was good too. So instead of getting sued or fired, I ended up getting promoted. And so, for a good eight years or so, I got to fly around on MTVs dime and build products, you know, ranging from SpongeBob to Teddy bears to making computer games. And so that is where I always felt where the whole thing started, I guess. Then after that I started a few startups, some that were successful and we sold, and some that was less successful in that we talk less about, but I never kind of like necessarily see myself as a founder of something.  I've always seen myself as somebody who gets intrigued about problems and try to find a way to solve those problems in a scalable way.Brian Ardinger: And that's an interesting point because I think a lot of founders or people who want to be founders, they approach it from the solution side rather than the problem side first. Yeah, I want to be a founder because Bitcoin's hot right now. So, I'm going to start a Bitcoin startup. Something along those lines versus really trying to dig into what's of interest to you, where are the problems that you can solve and then back your way into solutions and that around that.You've got a new book out called The Acorn Method that journeys or chronicles this methodology that you've been using to help corporations and other folks spin up new ventures by themselves. So maybe talk a little bit about Prehype and then talk about how the book came about, and then we'll go from there.Henrik Werdelin: I was fortunate enough to be part of a company that we started that ended up selling into Facebook. And I think after that, I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I think as people who have done entrepreneurial endeavors will sympathize with, you have this interesting kind of point after that you leave your startup for whatever reason.And that is that everybody's pushing you on what do you want to do next? Like, do you want to go to corporate? Do you want to be an investor? Do you want to do a start up again? And I think the reality is often you just don't know, and you're just tired. You probably often don't want to do anything remotely associated what you did before, because you're very tired of that. And so, I kind of felt there was a need for this halfway house for second time founders that didn't really know what to do with their life. And I couldn't really call it that. So I packaged it up as Prehype and that became a network of entrepreneurs and residents that are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives and to not sound like we're in self-realization mode, we package it up a little bit nicer.And so, on the top of that, we've built an Institute where we teach entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurial classes, and we teach at universities like Stanford. And then we have our own incubation units where we managed to build a number of relatively successful startups. Bark being one of them, but Managed by Q and Roman, other companies that come out from our building.And then thirdly, we had a consultant arm that helped corporations build the incubation programs. And those three things allowed all us misfits to figure out where in those kind of buckets we would like to play, but also to generate a little bit of cashflow while we were figuring it out. Brian Ardinger: It sounds like it was scratch your own itch and the scratch the itch were the folks that you had around you that were in the same mode of like, what do we build next? How do we do this? Did you have a methodology or a thought process around how you're going to do this? Or did you just kind of experiment with different things? Threw it out there to see if it would work? Henrik Werdelin: I think both. Right. You know, I think it used two words that I love a lot, which is experimentation and methodology. Right. I do think that we as entrepreneurs. Need to become better at building from scratch in the way that we become better is not necessarily always to kind of like have a higher chance of success. It's also, how can we become better of stopping things that do not work? I take great inspiration in my wife as a scientist who look at experimentation as a problem she's trying to solve. And then she architects a way to try to solve it and experiment. And then either it is viable or is not viable. And if data doesn't suggest her, that is viable, then it is just not like, you can't pitch a great experiment in the scientifi...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside innovation, we sit down with Minnie Ingersoll. She's a partner at TenOneTen Ventures. We talk about her long time Silicon Valley product experience with Google, how she moved over into the startup realm building a company called Shift and is now on the other side of the table as a venture capitalist. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption each week. We'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation.Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. With me in the studio today is Minnie Ingersoll. She is a partner at TenOneTen Ventures, which is a seed stage fund out of LA. She's a long time Silicon Valley product leader and operations executive, work with Google for a number of years. Also had run as a startup founder, as she co-founded the company Shift. So welcome to the show Minnie.Minnie Ingersoll: Thanks so much, Brian.  Good to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you on the show because we could probably spend about five or six episodes going through your career, both from the Google side, all the way to the startup side. And then finally now where you're at here on the corporate venture side. So, I know a lot of your insights will be helpful for our audience. Let's start with how you got into tech. Minnie Ingersoll: Yeah, sure. So, I studied computer science at Stanford, which is like a very classic career path to getting into tech. But I just have always felt that there's a lot of things that aren't going extremely well in our world today. Not just related to our current pandemic, but that innovation is one of the huge, bright spots of our country. And just personally, I've always liked to be, I don't know whether you want to call it like the life of the party or like where things are really happening, and tech was always just that spot where there was a lot of innovation going on.  Studied computer science and then joined Google in 2002 when it was 500 people. And that really got me even more in meshed in everything Silicon Valley. Brian Ardinger: And you stayed there a number of years. What kind of projects did you get to work on? Minnie Ingersoll: Yeah, so I was a product manager, the whole time I was there, and I started when it was 500 people. I left when it was 60,000 people. So it was varied, but a lot of the time that I was there, I was working on access projects. So getting more people online, faster speeds, lower prices. Everything from domestically, looking at Muni WIFI to internationally looking at societies where they're trying to suppressed access to information. Brian Ardinger: Were you ever involved with the Google Fiber stuff in Kansas City? Minnie Ingersoll: Yes. Definitely. Flew out to Kansas City, actually drove a minivan around the Midwest for a while, looking at different places. And interesting when you're deploying Muni WIFI and you come from a tech background, Google fiber was less about signal propagation, but you know, you're thinking about the technical aspects, but you realize it's really about government relationships and navigating the public sphere. A lot of interesting lessons there.Brian Ardinger: I'm sure it was very interesting case study in a lot of different ways. And it changed the forefront of what was going on here in the Midwest. Put a spotlight on some of that new tech that could be done outside of the Valley, too. So, you were at Google for about 12 years or so, and then you decided, Hey, I'm going to jump into the startup scene. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what made you make the jump and tell us what the company you built. Minnie Ingersoll: Google was amazing, but I left in 2013, I was on maternity leave actually. And that sort of helped incubate my startup, which is an online marketplace for used cars. So, if you, I have a car you want to sell, it turns out most people are very bad at selling their car. And we probably could have built a whole business just on pricing used cars. It turns out it's an interesting data challenge because we have all this data about what's selling on Craigslist. What's selling at auction, what dealers are selling for. And yet, you know, you've got something like Kelly Blue Book, which is fundamentally static source of information. And you've got used car dealerships that are not transparent in their pricing. And you might walk into a used car dealership and get different price than I walk in and get for the same car. So, we felt like there was a real interesting opportunity to do something. I mean, you could kind of say it was like, a used car dealership, but Google DNA, right?  Like a lot of the lessons that we learned at Google, I had two co-founders. We all had worked at Google previously, so that's how we knew each other. And we tried to apply a lot of the lessons there to disruptive the used car industry. Brian Ardinger: And through that particular process, I know you grew very fast, so you had to hire a lot of people. And so, tell us a little bit about what it's like to go from nothing to something in a very short amount of time.Minnie Ingersoll: You know, like your pants are on fire constantly. That was kind of the feeling. I then had a tiny baby and we hired 200 people in probably our first 18 months or two years. And I think doing anything well requires a lot of time. Unfortunately, there's no shortcuts to anything. So, you just need to decide. Where you are going to put your time? And I think we decided that we would hire really good people. And so that was probably a third of my time or something. Like I just spent a ton of time on hiring, because that was the only way to really scale.Brian Ardinger: Are there any particular things that you would recommend to founders or in that position to find the best talent? Minnie Ingersoll: The best thing for sourcing is probably being really, really clear on who you want to hire. And so, the more you can come up with what attributes are going to make someone successful and take those attributes of what success looks like, and maybe turn those into certain personas. And then you could say, you know, I think someone who has previously scaled a startup would be successful here, or I'm looking for a CFO and I want them to come out of the FPNA and a direction or out of the accounting background. But being really clear on what those personas are, then allow you to target the right people. And when you meet them, know who the right people are and not have the swirl that comes afterwards. So just putting a lot of time in upfront. Brian Ardinger: So now you're in a totally different world. You've jumped onto the other side of the table, so to speak. You're at TenOneTen Ventures. So, you've moved from the startup side to now investing i...