Katelyn Bourgoin is a marketer by trade and founder by choice. She is CEO and Lead Trainer of Customer Camp, where she helps teams make smarter marketing decisions with buyer psychology. A marketing powerhouse, Katelyn has been nicknamed “The Customer Whisperer,” and called an “influential entrepreneur” by Forbes; she is also one of the Top 20 Wonder Women of SaaS Marketing and Growth. In this episode of Unlearn, she and Barry O’Reilly discuss her customer discovery journey and where she found breakthroughs where others have struggled. Effective Customer Discovery After a brief, failed venture into making a tech company, Katelyn discovered something about customer discovery she previously misunderstood. She knew the importance of understanding and targeting your audience, but was left stumped when she did things as she was supposed to and achieved poor results. She underestimated the true value of market research, and tried selling a solution at the start, instead of starting with the customers’ needs and working backwards to the solution. Job to be Done (JTBD) Your ideal customer profile shouldn’t be based solely on demographics, but on the job your customers need your product or service to help them perform. Katelyn learned the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) philosophy at a webinar by Forget the Funnel and it has influenced her approach to marketing ever since. Essentially, JTBD posits that people hire products and services to help them get a job done. They will continue to use that product for as long as it fulfills their needs and circumstances, and helps them move closer to where and who they want to be. “People don’t buy products and services willy-nilly,” Katelyn explains. “...We actually have a job we’re trying to get done.” Once that solution stops working, they will find a new one. The Buyer Journey Interview Integrating JTBD into buyer journey interviews -also called switch interviews - is the next step in elevating your market research. Katelyn’s mentor Bob Moesta was the one to make this discovery, and it happened by accident. Due to his dyslexia, Bob would draw a timeline of his clients’ stories instead of jotting down notes since this visual method was more effective for him. While drawing these images, it hit him like a brick: customer researchers were doing interviews all wrong. They had a siloed approach to solving customer problems, focusing on a specific issue under specific circumstances rather than getting the full picture of what led a customer to them in the first place. Who Are Your True Competitors? Katelyn talks about April Dunford’s exercise to understand who your real competitors are, and what the real job to be done is. If your product didn’t exist, what alternative solutions would people use? What are they using right now, if not your direct competitor’s products? Getting into the layers of who your real competition is and deeply understanding the job being done helps you see your solution in an innovative way, Katelyn shares. ConvertKit is one company that is successful at this: they don’t see themselves as email marketing software, but as a platform that helps creators make a living creating. Their concierge service and their recent sponsor network program demonstrate their mission, and sets them apart from other email service providers. Looking Ahead In following her dream scenario of building a scalable business that doesn’t require too much of her time, Katelyn is building out her newsletter, Why We Buy, into a media company. She has halted her consulting work to focus on this new venture, which she is doing with an amazing team of contractors as opposed to individual employees. Read full show notes at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources Katelyn Bourgoin on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter Customer Camp

Shawn Flynn started his career in Beijing, China, by founding, scaling, and successfully exiting a company. He is now the Principal of a premier middle market investment bank specializing in mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, financial restructuring, and valuation. In this episode of Unlearn, he and Barry O’Reilly talk about acquisitions and exiting.  Intro to investment banking Unlike most people in the profession, Shawn did not have an undergrad economics degree, MBA, or a jam-packed resume. He was overseas for roughly 8 years after graduating from college with a mechanical engineering degree, seizing the opportunity to travel to Costa Rica, China, Europe, and back to China, where he started a few companies. One of them did well, and the others were learning experiences. After returning to the States in 2013, he got a job as an account executive for a company that unfortunately folded, but through that experience, he was able to meet and network with many angel investors and one group who eventually took him under their wing. He became the investment director for the second oldest angel group in Silicon Valley. Debunking misconceptions The real work in investment banking is client-facing - keeping conversations and engagement going, making people feel comfortable, and asking the necessary questions so there’s no skeletons in the closet about the company. “The people skill is so huge in this line of work and I had no idea going into it,” Shawn confesses. “I thought if you were good at Excel, you’re a good investment banker, but in reality anyone can do that. The real skill is finding the deals, being able to build that rapport and keep everyone engaged through the entire process.” Open door policies When planning an exit, you actually want employees to not have heard from you or contact you with urgent news in months. That’s a sign that things can and are operating smoothly without you - exactly what you need when exiting. Everyone knows their KPIs, the systems they’re running and how to get there, and what they’re doing every quarter. You want the people at the top to be able to go for vacation any time they want and not have the company destroy itself. Time is of the essence Time kills all deals, Barry says. At Nobody Studios, they value getting things done in a timely fashion. The number one deal killer is time. Stall too long, and you are very likely to lose the deal altogether. Anything can happen, Shawn comments, so when you’re in the marketing phase, the prime time for closing a deal is while all parties, (the buyer and the seller) are still excited. An emotional process Having an outside advisor during the selling process is invaluable because they prepare you for everything - and preparation is something you will need, as exiting tends to be quite emotional. Building a company can consume much of your life, and letting go can get complicated, even when selling has been the plan all along. When potential acquirers come asking questions and trying to understand some of the decisions you’ve made, it’s easy to feel like they’re attacking you. Then, when it’s time to go out to market and you get no response after a few days, it’s disheartening. Looking forward Shawn is looking forward to resuming in-person events, like the half-day summit he held recently. He’s also excited about collaborating with foreign companies interested in setting up operations in the US. “People have had all these dreams built up for the last 2 years, and now they’re sharing them with the world and saying ‘I gotta catch up on 2 years of stuff, let’s move fast,’” he adds. Please visit BarryO'Reilly.com for full show notes. Resources  Shawn Flynn at Twitter | LinkedIn The Silicon Valley Podcast

Kaspar von Grünberg has extensive experience running software companies. His current role is founder and CEO of Humanitec, a product that enables companies to build internal developer platforms using their Platform Orchestrator. It enables platform engineers to build golden paths that developers love and standardizes app and infra configs by design. In this episode of Unlearn, he and Barry O’Reilly discuss becoming world class. Becoming World Class  “I'm telling everybody who works with me: you don't have to be world class today, but you have to know, ‘What is my relative position to elite status?’" Kaspar believes that everyone can fulfill their highest potential, and that a leader’s job is to facilitate this. His father’s early advice about choosing the right advisors directly influenced his approach to leadership. He tells Barry, "There is a lot you have to learn and you have to learn that really fast." As such, having the right mentors is crucial. Finding Problem-Mentor Fit Mentorship is a powerful way to bolster your company’s growth, Kaspar and Barry agree. Kaspar’s experience over the years has shown that there’s a correlation between professional maturity and effective problem-solving skills. He also observed that senior and junior personnel approach problem solving differently: senior staff members usually start inquiry with basic questions before delving deeper to find answers to urgent problems. This is the model he wants all his employees to adopt, and mentorship is an effective way to make this happen. That’s why he looks for humility and coachability when hiring new talent. Why Internal Developer Platforms Are the Future Kaspar goes on explaining why he is so passionate about platform engineering and enabling engineering organizations to build Internal Developer Platforms. Kaspar’s experience in building software teams from the ground up several times ultimately made him understand that many of the industry challenges had psychological underpinnings. Some of these included monopolizing key projects and domains, which left businesses without knowledge when personnel left, along with concerns with abstraction. His observations were guided by the following questions:  How can you reduce cognitive load so that developers can actually focus on the business logic?  How can you design systems that drive standardization by design? Convincing Teams of the Value of Standardization Kaspar points out that the fear of standardization and abstraction is too often the underlying fear of being “optimized away.” He points out that this is ultimately a job of culture and communication to take this fear away. “If you don't believe that doing something faster will yield 10% more, then you don't believe in personal growth and in growth of your company,” Kaspar argues. Similarly, he believes leaders should unlearn ideas about abstraction. “Intelligent opaque abstraction that doesn't go at the expense of context, is actually a good thing for your career,” he points out. This applies to software as it applies to anything else we do. Yet if you standardize and abstract you can never do so at the expense of context. Looking forward Kaspar thinks platform engineering is here to stay. Every team with more than 50 developers will have a platform team by 2025. Humanitec’s Platform Orchestrator will be at the core of the Internal Developer Platforms built by these teams. His ongoing passion is the platform engineering community. “Every single day I have people reaching out and contributing and sharing ideas,” he says. “I hope that is something that continues in the end.” Read full show notes at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources  Kaspar von Grünberg at Twitter | LinkedIn Humanitec

On this episode of the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O'Reilly chats with Brian Elliott, Senior Vice President at Slack and Executive Leader of the Future Forum, who also served as an Executive Product Leader at Google. Having observed Brian’s work, Barry says, “I was constantly inspired by the work Brian and his team were doing in the Future Forum, researching challenges about the future of work.” Brian and his co-authors, Sheela Subramanian and Helen Kupp, have encapsulated the findings of the forum - as well as the lessons they learned through their own experiences - in their new book, How the Future Works. From Arrogance to Transparency Brian discusses how his perception of management evolved as his career developed. "I learned a phrase early in my profession that states ‘Seldom wrong, never in doubt’... a sort of arrogance," he recalls. He rejected his initial arrogance in the wake of Maria De Leon’s advice and observation, and realized that the greatest way to foster camaraderie and a sense of common purpose is to be open about the company's future, aspirations, and financial path. “Transparency actually creates trust,” Barry comments, “...it helps people gain clarity of what is actually happening.” Being the one with all the answers is not conducive to a healthy workplace culture, both men agree.  The Future Forum Brian joined Slack five years ago and was immediately intrigued by the company's research team, which later became the driving force behind the Future Forum. The research-based consortium focuses on creating a better future of work that is flexible, inclusive and connected through quarterly employee experience surveys and executive working groups. Since the issues are multidisciplinary, they survey 10,000 knowledge workers from all around the world. Leaders from multiple sectors are encouraged to experiment with these solutions to champion global change. Debunking the Myths Brian debunks five major myths about the workplace, using research from his book, How the Future Works. These include:  Return-to-Office Mandates: Top-down policies for returning to the office are a one-size-fits-all approach that ignores that each team may have a different rhythm. Brainstorming: The whiteboard is an antiquated method of brainstorming based on groupthink. The true danger of this strategy is that it excludes under-represented groups: the person wielding the pen, usually a member of the dominant age group, culture or gender, has the power to add or eliminate ideas as they see fit. Work Flexibility: He advocates for a shift away from the traditional 9-5 workday in favor of shorter, more efficient blocks of collaboration time when teams are available for meetings and real-time responses to one another. Asynchronous development: Brian debunks the assumption that meetings are where fresh ideas should be presented. Instead, managers should allow their teams to think and develop asynchronously. Classic Leadership Perspectives: If managers want to retain their high-performing personnel, they should veer away from the belief that leaders should shield their teams from difficult decisions. Looking Ahead Brian is eager to discover more about the untapped potential of new trends such as asynchronous work models and scheduled flexibility. He's also interested in discovering strategies to safeguard a team's psychological safety by providing and encouraging skills training for frontline leaders. He's also intrigued by the concept of professional flexibility for deskless workers. Go to BarryO'Reilly.com for full show notes. Resources  Brian Elliott on LinkedIn | Twitter  How the Future Works by Brian Elliott, Sheela Subramanian and Helen Kupp Future Forum

Cecelia Myers is the VP of Digital at CDW, where she leads their product management, design, demand generation, customer integration, and merchandising teams. She has a deep breadth of experience from a variety of high-profile startups and tech companies and uses that to create a culture of empowerment and openness at CDW. She is a builder of new experiences and business models from co-founding a startup to the Fortune 500, a design thinker, a survivor of lymphoma, and a voracious reader. She joins Barry O’Reilly today, to talk about how you need to bring yourself to your organization to create the kind of culture you want to build.  Following Interests and Opportunities where they Lead Cecelia left university with one of those “never land a job” majors – but she didn’t have that problem, becoming a personal archivist at a startup that managed documents for high net-worth people. This company didn’t survive the 2008 crash, but Cecelia was invited by the VC foundry that had funded the company to join them. There, she co-founded CakeStyle, leading and working in every aspect of the business. Intimate Understanding of the Problem Do you understand the problem you’re trying to solve? People often think they know, Cecelia notes, but unless you’re digging deep into the heart of things, it’s a hard thing to understand. Intimate knowledge of what is really happening at a company is hard to replace with any kind of experience or education. There’s something energizing about connecting at a visceral level to what you’re doing – it can be really fun! Unlearning Old Skills Moving into a company like Groupon, which was so new and so technology-driven was a culture shock. Politics, senior leadership, red tape – it meant having to convince finance departments and leadership that ideas were worth trying. For someone used to having control of the vision, having to work with so many other heavily involved people was a challenge, but ultimately a chance to exercise that skill of digging in deep to the business and influencing others. It was a whole new scope of managing people and leading teams. You’re not Scaling Yourself Cecelia would advise new leaders and product managers to focus on empowering teams to do the work. Leaders need to hire the right people, give them the vision, and support them in accomplishing it. They should ONLY be focusing on that, not scaling or promoting themselves. Cecelia notes that her education and passion for reading has been extremely valuable in learning to create those kinds of environments. Reading shows you a lot of different ways of communicating. Her most important tip? Start with the end and make the most important point at the beginning. Leading by Example Barry asks Cecelia what skills she has had to develop, working for a huge organization like CDW. When you don’t know everyone that you’re working with and responsible for, you have to find new ways to communicate with them. She emphasizes the importance of sharing yourself and being yourself to be more available and approachable when people need you. The key message to communicate is that we’re not really different people - we just have different roles in the business. You need to convey that it’s okay to bring yourself to work.  Looking forward Cecelia is looking forward to watching CDW evolve and go to market as a technology first, and how cool it would be to see a commercial featuring the products they are building. Seeing a company grow into being a market leader, and a place that attracts talent is inspiring. “It’s one of those gems that people don’t really know about.” Go to Barry O'Reilly for full show notes. Resources Cecelia Myers on the web | LinkedIn CDW

In this episode, Barry O'Reilly talks with James Sommerville, co-founder of ATTIK, the former Vice President of Global Design for The Coca-Cola Company and today founder of KnownUnknown, an emerging Web3.0 decentralized design community.  Sommerville talks about his entrepreneurial journey, from his early job as a street artist to co-founding ATTIK, a design studio with Simon Needham, and then becoming the Vice President of Global Design for Coca-Cola. He explains his thoughts on design, brand storytelling and existing labor structures in corporations and agencies, as well as the possibility for future advancements and new ways of working. He also discusses how these beliefs contributed to founding KnownUnknown. The Long and Winding Road James recounts his adolescent years in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK, in the midst of the collapse of the city's industrial peak. He believes that this experience led him to question society. "What led us here?” he asked. “What were the mistakes made? Maybe we need to learn what are the things we're going to do differently." His inquiring mind, and witnessing with his father's entrepreneurial spirit - he saw how much freedom his father had over his own life outside of the constraints of a regular job - strongly inspired his thoughts on business. As a result, his road to KnownUnknown was filled with entrepreneurial endeavors, but his motivation has always been "that sense of being able to do something and make people smile." Put Yourself Out There  Putting yourself out there is the first step to success, James tells listeners. He describes his eventual employment with Coca-Cola as an unexpected reward that many people erroneously believed was an overnight success. However, ATTIK had been in existence for 20 years before Coca-Cola contacted them. He believes that their strategy of "putting [themselves] out there, putting [their] signal into the world," as Barry puts it, was the catalyst that led to such an exciting opportunity. This strategy yielded favorable results as one of their digital design publications, Noise, soon caught the attention of Coca-Cola. James remarks, "There's something to be said about if you put your work into the world and people find it in the most unexpected and surprising ways... hold on to your authentic self, put your heart and soul into these things." Work Within Constraints “Working under constraints is one of my favorite aspects of great innovation," James tells Barry. James admits he had to overcome some initial teething challenges, transitioning from operating independently at ATTIK to working for a major global brand. He quickly discovered that the need to stay true “the Coca-Cola way" but innovate how people worked in sharing the brand with the world. In order to thrive within these new boundaries, James had to unlearn ATTIK's original mantra of thinking, looking, and acting big to "think small, act small, move like a small start-up." Redefining the New Creative Economy  James’ reflections on the traditional design agency structure and newly available technologies led him to develop the KnownUnknown platform model - a new work environment in which gas community at the heart of the model, and regardless of geographic location, selecting the very best talents who tomorrow will have the freedom to choose their own hours and projects, free of the usual bureaucratic red tape.  Looking Ahead  "I'm really excited for the next decade," James adds, as he prepares to “tiptoe" into the world of NFTs while experimenting with brand storytelling within metaverse and testing Web3 boundaries. He's particularly excited about the expanded opportunities for brand and talent collaborations, where current and future designers, as well as centralized brands, can explore new developments. Read full show notes at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources James Sommerville: Twitter| Facebook| LINKEDIN| Instagram Known Unknown

Alison McCauley, author of Unblocked, is the Chief Advocacy Officer of Unfinished an organization focused on strengthening civic life in the digital age. She is a sought-after keynote speaker at conferences over the world and her LinkedIn Learning course about how the blockchain will change business has been taken by over 70,000 students. Alison joins Barry O’Reilly in this week's show to talk about the potential of blockchain technology for our digital lives. The Moment of Revelation Most of us have moments when a new idea lands like a bolt of lightning and seems to change everything. Alison had been working in emerging technology for decades when she came across the idea of blockchains, and what they could mean for people and organizations. She immediately set out to generate the key questions that would help her learn exactly what experts and experimenters in the space were trying to discover. Keeping up with Exponential Growth There is more happening, every day, in the evolution and development of blockchain technology than anyone can keep up with. Even young, energetic technologists without many outside commitments are working 17 hours a day and unable to stay on top of what is happening in their small sliver of the space. Alison shares about how learning circles in different areas create a structure for learning and sharing information that makes it possible to progress. She predicts that success is going to go to the people who can most quickly and effectively absorb and synthesize information.  The Messy Middle Not everyone involved in emerging technologies has excellent intentions - there are nefarious actors, and even the best-intentioned projects can go off the rails. Alison makes the point that you can learn from every project, even those that go wrong, and one of the challenges is to be cautious while still being open to the learning. “If you're able to hold a healthy skepticism and an open mind in the same space… you have the most intense opportunity for learning.”  Skin in the Game To really learn in this space, you should have skin in the game. She recommends putting skin in the game–making a small investment for the sake of learning and understanding the theories and processes involved - that kind of practical education is much richer than other types of learning, like reading an article. This isn’t financial or investment advice, but you can experiment and gain practical knowledge by getting involved through small investment in cryptocurrency, or bidding on an NFT. Experimentation While the ultimate uses of blockchain technology are just starting to be discovered, communities are already using it to change the way people collaborate and work together. “If you’re not experimenting with it now in some kind of applied way, I think you’ll be very blindsided in three to five years,” Alison warns. Barry shares the example of Nobody Studios which is crowdfunding equity, something equally new and unfamiliar, and you can extrapolate it further and look at how people are using DAOs to change the way people can contribute and how they are compensated for doing so. A Sense of Belonging As DAOs are being developed, communities are being formed as well. The rewards of participation aren’t only financial, and Alison shares the story of a highly paid lawyer who volunteered his time on some contracts for a DAO. He told Alison that he valued what the organization was doing and realized “I can make a contribution here. I can help.” It was the ability to contribute that drove his desire to do so. This is how many people are starting to prioritize their time and effort. Go to Barry O'Reilly for full show notes. Resources Alison McCauley on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter Unblocked: How Blockchain will Change your Business (and What to Do About it) Unblocked Future

Bill Higgins is Director of Watson Research and Development at IBM. He leads the integrated research and development team responsible for evolving the foundational IBM AI technologies powering their main products and systems. He’s especially interested in the intersection of culture in tech as it relates to increasing diverse representation and technical leadership. Bill joins Barry O’Reilly in this week’s show to discuss what is needed to innovate at scale.  Bill’s Start Bill shares how he started in DevOps and made his way to becoming a leader in software engineering. He had always worked on software products, but after a certain point, he became disenchanted with the process of building the products, especially as it related to the methods and tools involved. He thought it could be much better than it was. In the early 2010s, he became enamored with the DevOps movement and sought to drive a DevOps culture at IBM; he was quite successful at this. His team was one of the first to be sent to the IBM design camp for product teams. He describes the experience and how it impacted his career. Deterministic vs. Probabilistic Barry recalls how Bill shaped his perception of AI. “I still remember… being blown away by the clarity of how [Bill’s colleagues] could talk about it. I got smarter just listening to them, and so many of the notions I had of what AI could do were blown away very quickly,” Barry says. Bill responds that he realized that the field of AI is a very different paradigm from traditional programming; the latter is largely about methodically defining a set of rules to create a deterministic program. AI is the opposite, by contrast; using the example of machine learning, Bill describes how AI is probabilistic by nature. AI Through the Years Bill and Barry explore the history and development of AI, and IBM’s role in both. “There was this really famous conference at Dartmouth University in 1956 with some of the legends of the industry… that established AI as a field of study. They adopted the term artificial intelligence as opposed to one of the competing terms like cybernetics,” Bill remarks. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the fundamental parts of modern AI technology - neural networks, the concept of machine learning, natural language, and speech processing - broke through, but the industry would still be considered a field of research not fit for real enterprise use up until circa 2011. Teamwork Makes the AI Work To achieve something great with AI, you must have equally great AI algorithms made by people waist-deep in machine learning, Bill explains. They must understand the whole lifecycle of machine learning, make their algorithms available via understandable developer APIs, and run it at an internet scale. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is primarily investing millions of dollars in hiring scholars with degrees in machine learning from reputable institutions. You need both machine learning people to create the algorithm, but you also need the software developers to create the APIs and internet scale architectures. Building Great AI Innovators face two hard problems when creating foundational AI components, Bill tells Barry. “The first one is that fusion, that synthesis of really excellent machine learning, algorithm creation and excellent software development for both creating the APIs but also creating the internet scale architectures… Number two is how do you create an innovation pipeline.” IBM’s experience has been that innovation is difficult to commercialize quickly and at scale. They found that a modular architecture helps them to add new components more readily. Extensibility is another key principle. He and Barry agree that good collaboration and composability are two additional major aspects of a good innovation pipeline. Find full show notes a Barry O'Reilly. Resources Bill Higgins on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter IBM.com

Aaron Frank is Adjunct Faculty at Singularity University, where he routinely advises large companies, startups, and governments on trends related to augmented and virtual reality and the use of virtual environments. Organizations like Twitter and FC Barcelona have benefited from his services. He is a researcher and writer whose articles have appeared in Vice, Wired, Forbes and VentureBeat. Aaron joins Barry O'Reilly in this week’s show to define the metaverse, and how to leverage it in your own business. The First Foray Aaron talks about his thoughts when he first encountered immersive virtual reality headsets. He was tasked with doing an impromptu presentation for foreign investors and unfortunately didn’t execute it well. When he put on the VR headset, he thought about recreating the environment of the presentation as a sort of “public speaking simulator.” He went on to build a very basic version of it and was surprised by how true-to-life it felt. That was when he realized that VR wasn’t just for gaming. “This [was] a new way for people to experience anything,” he shares. “[It] can replicate almost any experience.” [Listen from 2:19] Behind the Scenes of AR and VR The internet of the future will be immersive. Barry asks Aaron to describe his experience diving into the metaverse. “It’s important to make a distinction between augmented and virtual reality technologies,” Aaron says, “because those terms typically refer to the kinds of interfaces [necessary for each.]” An interface is a way of engaging with the digital environment, similar to how we use a mouse and a keyboard to operate our computers the way we want to. Aaron predicts that in the near future, however, we won’t need a mouse and keyboard; we’ll be using VR headsets and our arms. [Listen from 8:06] Manipulating the Metaverse The metaverse allows you to manipulate physical space in a virtual environment and mimic social behavior to recreate real-life experiences. People are using the metaverse to train employees, Barry shares. They are put to the test in stressful situations to observe how well they respond as a team; from speaking individually to escape rooms that require cooperation and serve as a fun activity. Advancements in the metaverse are happening so quickly, he adds. “It doesn’t have to be this ‘ready player one’ experience where you put on the headset and can’t tell whether you’re in the real world or not,” Barry comments. “It can just be blocky characters.” [Listen from 17:59] Why Game Engines are Serious Business Aaron is not advocating for a future immersed in VR. “It’s worth remembering that these are valuable tools, and it’s worth understanding what they are used for… they’re not meant to - and should not be used to - replace physical reality in any way,” he affirms. He debunks some misconceptions about the metaverse and proposes a new way of thinking about it. The metaverse is being built by game developers using game engines, but the term game is misleading; game engines are software tools that developers use to build on virtual environments. [Listen from 24:33] The Truth About Gaming There’s a lot more to gaming than meets the eye, Barry points out. People don’t really know how much thought goes into things like simulation, incentive design, teaching people new skills, and leveling them up on their journey to mastery. “[In] any game you join, the experience is all about building skills,” he says. He talks about the skills that games teach you, like rapid experimentation, risk taking, and teamwork. “[Rather than] meaning fun and childish play, games are about coordination, incentive design and skills development.” He and Aaron explore the concept of safe-to-fail environments. [Listen from 31:17] Read full show notes at Barry O'Reilly. Resources Aaron Frank on the Web | LinkedIn

Ja-Naé Duane is CEO of the Revolution Factory and the bestselling author of The Startup Equation. Her mission is to make life better for one billion people. An award-winning innovator and expert on global systems, Ja-Naé helps corporations identify trends, using emerging technology such as AI and blockchain, that will help them pave the way for the future through futures forecasting and complex system building. She also loves singing opera. Currently, she is a PhD candidate focusing her research on the future of information systems as well as a research fellow at the Center of Information Systems Research at MIT. Ja-Naé joins Barry O’Reilly in this week’s show to talk about designing Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO).  Everything is Interconnected John Newton’s philosophy that everything is interconnected, is one that Ja-Naé lives by. We build on everything we learn, she tells Barry. The same is true in a company: its founding principles are connected to how those tenets are manifested in interactions with customers. “All of these things - much like nature - is very much an ecosystem,” she points out. Survival depends on the dependencies and interdependencies within the ecosystem. Likewise, the systems of the future will be enabled by interconnected technology, and we have to be ready. [Listen from 2:15]  DAO Principles Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) is one of the cornerstones of Web 3.0, and as Barry puts it, “the future of how the international world could become programmable.” In a DAO, business is conducted via programmable principles and smart contracts. Ja-Naé remarks that every member of a DAO has voting rights based on their level of contribution, unlike the traditional system where only a select few dictate how the organization is run; this can really move the organization forward. “With the democratization of information that comes along with that, we are seeing these pockets of erosion around centralized models,” she continues. [Listen from 4:25] Creating Value Together DAOs transform the role of the customer from just buyer into co-creator. Ja-Naé comments, “How do we also bring customers in to co-create and really capture value with them, so that they're building not only because they like our product or they like our service, but they're aligned with the mission of where this company is headed?” It’s a massive shift in customer behavior that’s ripe for exploration and innovation, she and Barry agree. The workforce of the future - the ‘liquid workforce’ - will be one where you contribute to several companies, and you’ll be judged on credibility and your last job, Ja-Naé says. [Listen from 17:50]   How to Start Barry asks Ja-Naé to share some tips to help people get started exploring the world of Web 3.0. Try to understand blockchain and how it’s changing the world first, she urges listeners. Learn about digital twins, virtual reality and virtual worlds, as well as the metaverse. The next step is to understand crypto and NFTs; putting some ‘skin in the game’ by making a small crypto investment is a good way to learn, she comments. She gives suggestions of DAO protocols listeners can explore to learn more, including her own DAO resource. [Listen from 32:50] Visit Barry O'Reilly for full show notes.   Resources Ja-Naé Duane on LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook DAO Board How to Build a DAO Revolution Factory The Startup Equation