so my career sort of running a few different trajectories. So I've had sort of one career as like a tech entrepreneur and investor and then another career as an author speaker. And they're sort of interwoven but also different. And so I started my first tech company when I was in college. It was not very successful. Um, because I think, like, successful for something you started in 19. And then because of that, I developed a reputation in my city. I was living Washington, CIA. Some 100 stood digital marketing this back like those 11 tills and 12 on DSO. I got a job at a startup running marketing, even though I was like super young, Um, and through that I realized, like a couple things one is like I don't really like working for other people. It's like, you know, and then to is that you know, the time and marketing. There's a lot of problems around how to gather your data as a marketer and be able to talk about your success. And so I started track. Maybe there's a platform that helped brands figure out how they're performing across all their different digital channels. be able to build reports, graphs, power points based on that data on that company. Iran. For 6/2 years we raised $20 million in venture capital. It was like a wild ride like ups and downs, ups and downs. We worked in the world's biggest brands, like the MBA G Honda at now, Um, and you know, and then on the writer author side, I always have a lot of writing. I bring online column, and I always found was very cathartic for me and maybe, like five years ago now, yeah, I, like, started noticing this pattern where I was working with marketers in the world's biggest brands. Clearly people who are very creative when you talk about creativity of them, that sort of like clam up mitt. Oh, that's it's on me like I'm not that creative. I think that means you're frustrated because my view of creativity has been something that you can learn and get better at. And so I started researching creativity and reading more about it, and I got really fascinated by Sir admits we have about creativity and what we think creativity is versus the reality of what it is and so that sort of spiraled eventually into a book can. It is a team called the Creative Curve, which is a one part myth busting and one part how to guide about how to create ideas that take off.Yes, the book was originally going to be a book for marketers, but as I started working on it, I realized that it applied much more broadly to anyone that was attempting to create. And so the subtitle. The book is How to develop the right idea at the right time, which is really what creativity is all about. Because sometimes we mistake creativity for productivity, right? Productivity's creating something creative is creating the right thing at the right time, and that nuance is really important and whether that's in sort of the corporate world, whether that's entrepreneurship. But it's art, music, poetry, right, whatever it is. Creating a rented at the right time is the goal that people have, and it feels very, I think, like unattainable, unachievable. So what I did is I looked at this question from three different lenses. So the first lenses the academic lens, so tens of thousands of pages of pure be research. I interviewed many of this room leading academics, professors study creativity across all of the major sciences. I looked at the history of creativity. It was the second lens. So when you look at stories of Mozart and Steve Jobs And sometimes we confuse the sort of popular culture version of their stories of what actually happened. The third lens was interviewed 25 Living creative greats. These are Oscar winners, Tony Award winners, billionaires, Mission star shafts. You know, Grammy winners like a very eclectic mix of creative achievers, and I looked at what did they do to achieve their creative achievements? And so the first half the book is really dissecting this question off. What is creativity, really? And the second half of the book is saying Okay, if creativity is something that can be learned, how do you actually do it? And I use the stories from the interviews to tell that.

Yes. So the company has started. We merged with Skyward, which was a bigger company, has an 18 and is part of that. My role after the merger was to lead strategy for the combined companies. So when we emerged, we're about 50 55 people and in our private, their company. And, you know, there's this sort of question as you get larger. Uh, what strategic decisions do you make? And when you're really small, it's easy to pivot, and constant change as you get bigger would be much more attentional. So my role was really about figuring out what is that North Star vision And then how are we gonna get there? Are we gonna build that those functionalities? Are we gonna partner with other people to offer them or we gonna choir other companies to achieve that? And the challenges really are about how do you make the right decision? Because the costs of a wrong decision starts to go up. And how do you balance that with being fast and efficient because we're gonna get bogged down and you can start to be really, really slow at making decisions, which then that is actually sometimes more painful than making the wrong decision. And so the way that we handle that is really about being customer centric. So talking to our customers, interviewing customers, looking at customer data, we did a lot of segmentation work where we look at what customers were most successful with us, which was released, successful and used that as the primary input we made decisions about strategy is that reduced mistakes very considerably because ultimately you're trying to create something for the customer, not for this existential self.

so outside the company. It was typically people, if we were looking to partner with someone, to be to be someone like a business development or partnership role. If we're looking, acquire company, we're working on trying to put a deal together to give you CEO maybe CF on. And I think the thing that's really important with any with any of youse is happening a lot of clarity very quickly as to everyone's intentions, everyone's motivations. And so when you think like from an a perspective, it's really important to know where the very stakeholders involved, what are their motivations? What are their intentions? What do they want, what they need? And I found that being very up front very direct about those things was the most effective. It just in terms of getting clarity. And it's hard because people have different sort of negotiating dealmaking styles. And for some people, it's a lot about serve anchoring and then using that a starting place. And I just found that seemed to be more trouble than it's worth. So for me it was always about like we were looking at acquiring company, being very early on. Hey, here's from a range where way might be able to venture, put an offer. And if everything works, you know, up front of that range isn't gonna be something that's interesting to you. Let us know so we don't waste your time and that build a lot of trust. And you obviously, in any industry, you're gonna, you know, working it multiple times. So you wanna have long lasting relationships. And I think being upfront and earnest about your attention is really helpful, important there.