how I got to where I am today s I'll just I'll go through the chronology of college thio this study after years Utah I did ah, lot of work as a research assistant helping a lot of my professors through their recruits structuring, um, studies, doing a lot of the grunt work around academic work for them. And then when I graduated, I moved to Los Angeles. I joined a boutique consultancy that helped large corporations with innovation. So we did a lot of corporate innovation stuff toe, help them systematically evaluate new opportunities and evaluate what the approach to tackling those opportunities should be. Should they build it internally on def, they decided to build it internally. What's the best way to do that on then? Um did that for a couple of years and then joined a company called Beachbody, which makes in home fitness videos like P 90 X and T 25 a bunch of stuff that is on TV commercials late at night and 2014 help them go from being 100% DVD company to a streaming company on DSO. Help them get their streaming service launched, and then I worked on eso. I worked on a lot of the strategy around how to stand up that service with the business models were going to be contributed to the actual building of the software and the technical. I didn't write the code, but I was part of the team that helped shaped what co got written, um, all the analytics around that stuff and then sort of transition once that was done. Thio research and development and product management. So I worked on what's called interactive Fitness. So for those of you are familiar with what Politan is, Pelton's a bike. It's got video, and as you do things on the bike, it shows up as a biometric feedback on. Do you get to sort of also gets, um, Cem signifiers and cues about other people that are in the class? And were you you sitting in relationship to them? So we were trying to be the Palatine of everything else on DSO I worked on that validated that hold roadmap got some of it built, which caught the attention of Apple. We got to get featured pretty prominently throughout Apple's sort of ecosystem in a lot of different ways. In 2016, which is, you know, a big career highlight for me and then, uh, left in 2018. And I've been a head of product for higher for early stage venture backed a consumer startups, consumer technology startups. So I've been doing that to Bootstrap or pay the bills while I bootstrapped my own startup. So So that's that's That's how I got to where I am today. The story behind that was that I was not. I was. I was a good student up until the end of high school and then, like I think, a lot of people who get a lot of independence early on at that age got into some trouble and in that trouble was sort of trying to figure out how to put my life back together and what I really wanted to dio what was important to me. And there was, ah, quote that I read called that said Entrepreneurship is the last bastion of refuge for criminals, and I was a criminal at that time, so that resonated with me, and so I decided to pit it from accounting. Thank God Thio entrepreneurship because I just really enjoyed breaking rules and I wanted a job that wasn't going to be dependent on, uh, convincing some interview manager or some boss that I belonged at that company. I wanted Thio be who I waas and create value and get rewarded for that. So, um, you know, I declared for entrepreneurship. Thio do that. So ah, lot of a lot of my, uh, sort of career has just been figuring out how Thio saying yes to things that I really had. No, no, no business saying yes to and then furiously figuring out how to do it very quickly on then, sort of through some sense of, like, some combination of dumb luck and also a lot of patients from the people who I said yes, Thio was able to hit on a couple of things that became sort of a repeatable process for me across all of these projects and stuff like that. So I think, you know, some of the biggest incidences that I've had to shaping my career path have been, um, you know, certainly certainly having some trouble earlier parts of my college career. Um, you know, and the other part was finding a really great first boss toe work for. I worked for a person who was a great executive in his prime, worked on a lot of really important projects as part of the Web. One Dato area or era Excuse me of the Internet and eso had a lot of craft. Ah, lot of trips that he knew how to do. And then he was also really good at transferring that craft to somebody who had no concept of that stuff. And so that I, ah, lot of my style now is sort of a refinement of me just copying and almost mimicking Exactly, um, what I saw him doing, Andi, that was that was huge. And so that apprenticeship, that kind of imprinting right out of college. You think you know everything? You It's not until later in your thirties that you realize you didn't know anything. You know that stuff is is hugely important. It's so finding a really great operator and a great boss who can important to you with a repeatable way of doing things and sort of a deep sense of the underlying principles that make those shortcuts or those ways of doing things were more times than not. It was hugely impactful for for my career. And then the other thing, which I didn't mention it early on, was that was a co founder, my co founder co. A founding member of the Foundry, which is a popular entrepreneurship program at the University of Utah. So in 2010 that didn't exist on me, and some of my other classmates, along with Dr Welker, the summer of 2010 decided to make it a thing on. It wasn't way. Thought it was just gonna be one summer. And then the university caught wind of it, and it's become a full program now. So that summer and that group of people that sort of eight that summer and then sort of the 18 months surrounding that summer were hugely impactful for me because it helped me understand that there's this huge gap between the person that we like to think that we are in a person, that we actually are, and so that I usually make a lot as a Z because I'm human. Um, this is part is part of being human. In general, I always have an idealize vision of who I am, and then if I actually kind of hold myself accountable. There's there's a usually fall far shorter than that, and my whole world and my brain is designed to sort of help me ignore that gap or not even have to think about that gap. Being at the foundry forces you to think about that gap, and what's really great about that is painful. Is uncomfortable is that is because you get to feel sometimes you feel bad. You feel bad that you're not the person that you think you are, um, on. There's a whole host of sort of pre program human responses to sort of that gap. But on the other side of that, what's helpful is is you now have a real sense of what the levers for making your life work are. And that's what I learned that at the foundry on that is translated has been the substrate for almost everything that's happened to me in my career, both good and bad. So, uh, that's really helpful

um So as I mentioned that, the what I dio is a, um so I'm gonna head a product. So I do mentorship backstage capital, which is an incubator here in Los Angeles for underrepresented, uh, folks founders who are addressing, uh, markets that tend to go overlooked by typically white male DCs and get capped as yeah, just in general, they tend to get overlooked. They're really great businesses. But because of the whole host of biases and structural racism, you know, they sort of get the short in the straw that z great about, um, my job there, not a job. It's just it's a volunteer position is that I get to work with founders who have a really great idea that is serving a really critical overlooked need and need just a little bit of that technical help. Thio put it together, and it's not technical in the sense that, like I'm going to write, I'm I'm gonna write code. It involves some of that, but most of it is technical in the sense of that. Doing math is technical, like you have a there's a formula. If you know what the formula is solving for X gets easy. A lot of these people don't know what the formula is, so I get to sort of bring a portion of the formula that I've been able to learn and refine. You're not only my experiences, but sort of in discussions with my peers who were also occupied. That position tend to help out a lot. So my real job is typically being what's called the product manager and a product manager is like being a general contractor in the digital space. So if you think about building a real physical building, what a general contractors do, well, general contractors pretty much understand most of the various aspects of all right, uh, of what goes into making a building riel. They under they understand blueprints. They understand how you know, electrical system should should not work. They understand plumbing. I understand framing they just pretty much everything. They're not going to do all of that job. All those jobs themselves. There are specialists that they work with and coordinate Thio. Make sure that those things get done at their appropriate stages. Um, within the constraints that are being set by the person who wants the building built right So, typically, the person who wants the building built in my world is called a stakeholder. And that's usually a collection of other executives, um, in the company. On In startups, it's mostly the CEO and the rest of the other co founders on DSO. A lot of my job is kind of falls into three buckets. One is working with stakeholders and the rest of the business to understand and prioritize. What are the most important things that we need to be working on, like one of the things we need to be building? What are things that we need to be fixing on, Where should be working on some smaller things to kind of clean up a little bit? Or should we go after this big effort that's going to be three months were sort of the cost. The trade offs now just the cost benefit analysis. And what's the trade offs of the this decision? There's a whole host of work around that, um, then once we made that decision and it goes into okay, we decided that we're gonna work on this lame. How do we understand it Enough that we're going to build something that's actually gonna work when we launch. It s there's a lot of stuff around problem discovery. A lot of stuff around, uh, ethnography or sort of observing people's behaviors in their natural context. So you get a sense of like what you're designing against creating the designs, coming up with a lot of different solutions, putting some of those asses very well functioning prototypes in front of those people to get some sort of early validation that you're on the right track and then then spending a bunch of sort of engineering cycles to build it for riel. And then the third part is ensuring that once that stuff has been built that it's actually generating the activity that the business desire. So are we getting more customers, or are our customers coming back to us more frequently? Are they using the product more frequent? They are they purchasing more stuff from us and then, you know, our third are they retaining? Are they sticking around for longer periods of time? A swell. So those kind of three buckets tend to be what I what I worked on. So I know I have to know a little bit of about everything in the business. I need to know about analytics. I need to know about code. I need to be able to read it. Need to be able to understand software architectures. So how do all the pieces sort of work together? E need to understand a lot about design. You need to understand a lot about human behavior, both for the customers but also for the team. So you work with other people, and those people have their own collections of biases and ways in which we tend to undermine ourselves. So you have to sort of help work through that. And then you you know, then also that the emotional intelligence to sort of work with a diverse set of people, including founders who aren't perfect people either. Eso So it's a lot. It's a lot of it's a lot. And then I have to know everything about business. So law marketing, uh, finance all that stuff. So it's It's a generalist position, and it's a lot of context switching, Uh and, uh, but it's a lot of fun, e. That that kind of overwhelm of stimulus works for people like me. So that's ah, my weekly work hours are, uh, my weekly work hours are very diverse there. Very long. I usually do 60 hour weeks on a minimum, so it's a it's a pretty, and then if you're gonna start up, you could be doing 100 hour weeks. Thieves with seven days a week, depending on you. Know whether or not you need to hit a deadline, because you need to be a market for a certain amount of time to get enough traction and have that traction. Be useful evidence when you want to go fundraising for your next round of fundraising. And so there's a lot that happens there. So, yeah, it's a lot about what my job is like.

major challenges. Um, and pain points and job, like being in product management is that you are, um, you you have to manage a lot of different personalities. It is, it's it's very much an informal leadership problem. Ah, lot of the people that you work with. So if you're if you're an individual contributor product manager, meaning that you've got a team of a handful of engineers, designers and maybe a quality assurance and an analyst, um, maybe a marketer that's attached to you. Um, that pot of people doesn't report to you. They have no reason like you can't use. You can't threaten to fire them if they don't do what you want to do. So you have to learn to get them to do things that they typically usually don't want to do or disagree with you want. So that requires a lot of, ah, lot of emotional intelligence and a lot of learning to invest in the relationships, Um, on a regular basis, going out to lunch with your colleagues, developing relationships, really, truly trying to get to understand them and appreciate them because you guys are gonna be in the trenches together, not because you want to influence them, um, or manipulate them. But you have to understand a little bit of an anticipate, some of things that they trip them up, make them get concerned or interpret things in a particular way that makes them sort of dig their heels a little bit. And so learning to kind of we've and be a little bit like water a little bit, Um, and be a bit of a chameleon is usually the biggest things that sort of managing the day to day. If you're, uh, if you go one level up, you you have that problem because you now are working across with other executives. So the engineering manager manages all the engineers design engineer design manager. So you have to deal with those personalities. You got to deal with the personalities of the people that you're reporting Thio, and you have to deal with the personalities of people that you report thio on DSO. It's a lot. It's a lot of people management. Frankly, at the end of the day, the basics, you know, we we tend to think in college. It's all about the skills and the knowledge that you have that stuff is like table stakes. When you get into the business world like it's assumed, you know that stuff, the things that really set people apart are your ability. Thio effectively get groups of people to do things, uh, as much as you can for the for the true benefit of the business. Um ah, lot of approaches that are effective and overcoming. Overcoming these things is is one and thus in time and really understand how people take, particularly with people who are going to be the most vocal in championing your ideas and the people who are going to be most antagonistic to your ideas, particularly the people who will be most antagonistic because those people typically have a lot of influence in an organization and our make or break us to what I what idea is kind of go forward or not? It's not always clear who those people are. So that's kind of the other sort of MBA version of this comment is, um, you know, influence and power is not always correlated. Thio title and seniority, at least in American companies. Andi, that that took me a long time to understand on appreciate it on then start to do something around. So that's that's something that's really helpful on a couple of really great books that have helped me is, um, is never split. The difference, uh, never split. The difference is about negotiations. It's from FBI negotiator, and he talks about how Thio work with people when when they definitely don't want to do what you want to dio negotiating with the hostage is not. It's not like you guys can come to some sort of middle ground. There's no middle ground in the hostage negotiation. You you have to either. You have, like the goal that that negotiation is that you have to bring somebody over to not kill whoever they you know, they've taken hostage. So that Z and how do you do that? And how do you kind of work with those people so under? That's an extreme example, but there is a lot that you learn from this extreme examples. They make it very easy to apply, uh, in less extreme examples like corporate politics. The other one is crucial conversations. It's very effective framework and methodology for having conversations when emotions are running high and it is Z systematic approach which I really appreciate. I like things that are systematic in their way. So it's a thing that you can repeat and use. Do you think you can practice? Um, it is very tactical, very insightful on this sort of thinking about what's going on and people when emotions are running high, how communication styles change, how you can pick up on these subtle cues, how you could be cognizant of your own emotions and then, uh, on then what to do about all that stuff. So you have a more effective sir about.it often, so almost all influence and power flows from other sources of influence and power. So a lot of times, the most companies, it's whoever has the best relationship with the CEO, um, and whoever is inside of that line as well. So you may have a co founder who would have very high seniority, you know? Second, you know, almost equivalent to have founder CEO. For those who don't really like each other, the CEO may actually, you know, hat like give mawr like, uh, influence to ahead of product or to a chief of staff or to a different executive, even though that person doesn't have that their titles, like Vice President or or something like that vice president can have mawr influence if they have the ear of the CEO than, uh, than somebody who has a C suite title. You see that a lot in companies that are about 1000 people, um, on a lot of that. How that works is is you know, it's an unfortunate thing is that, like some of these executives, just tell the CEO what they want to hear, not what the business really needs, Um, and it's really subtle. It's not like they're absolutely lying. It's They're really good at phrasing. Things that will land in the CEOs had to make them think in a particular way, um Thio and make it feel like and then make a decision that the CEO feels is their decision when really it's been influenced by this other thing because they were able to craft the language just right to sort of not lie but also not tell a full truth on DSO. That's sort of the nuances of how that works in practice.