Justin Welsh, former SVP of Sales at PatientPop explains how he started in SaaS in 2009 as the second sales hire at Zocdoc. Justin used Sales Culture to grow a successful PatientPop team to 140 employees and 55 million in revenue.
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Justin Welsh | SVP Sales @ PatientPop
FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Please welcome former PatientPop SVP of sales, Justin Welsh.
Hey everyone, is this thing on. Great. Hey everyone. My name is Justin Welsh. I’m the former SVP of Sales at a Los Angeles based business called PatientPop. It’s an SMB SaaS company in the healthcare technology vertical. My talk today is the playbook to building a thriving sales culture. So you might be wondering who am I and why am I up here talking about sales culture? Well, let me give you a little bit of my background. I think it’ll become clear why Jason asked me to come up and talk about this very specific topic. I broke into SaaS in 2009 I was the second sales hire and the 10th overall hire at a New York City based SaaS business called Zocdoc. Some of you might be familiar with it.
Over the next five years I played in an individual contributor role. I was a local sales manager or regional manager. In the last year, I ended up working directly for the CEO doing special projects. I was really, really fortunate to watch that company grow from 10 people to 750 people over my time there. In January of 2015 I was hired by PatientPop as the VP of sales. When I was hired, I came in with one salesperson and zero dollars in recurring revenue and over the next four years grew the sales team to over 140 employees and 55 million in recurring revenue. Those are things that I am really proud of. But I think the very specific reason that I was asked to talk about this topic is the way that we scaled the business through sales. PatientPop, especially in the Los Angeles area, is known for having a unique, thriving fun, but also performance-based sales culture. Today I want to talk to you about how we built that and the eight step playbook that I use to really get a thriving sales culture up and running.
Culture is not perks and amenities……We’re not going to talk about ping pong. ….We’re not going to discuss booze, not going to talk about having booze on tap at the office or coffee on top of the office and we’re certainly not going to discuss dress code, mesh tank tops, T-shirts ….
But before I do, I want to talk about what culture is not, in my opinion. Culture is not perks and amenities. We won’t be talking about perks and amenities today during the playbook conversation. You won’t hear things about dogs. I’m not going to talk about dogs in today’s presentation. I love dogs. I have three of them, but I also like clean carpets and quiet client calls, so no talks about dogs today. We’re not going to talk about ping pong. I love a good game of ping pong. I know everyone likes ping pong, but I like quiet investor meetings. We’re not going to discuss booze, not going to talk about having booze on tap at the office or coffee on top of the office and we’re certainly not going to discuss dress code, mesh tank tops, T-shirts with swear words on them don’t translate very well over Zoom calls.
Now, obviously I’m not being serious, but the reason that I bring these four things up is because today when I coach early stage founders and emerging sales leaders on scaling their business, and I ask, “Can you tell me a little bit about your sales culture,” these are four things that come up very regularly. It surprises me because that is not my definition of culture. So today we’re going to talk about my very personal definition of culture. My definition of culture is the attitude and behavior that your team, exudes each day in pursuit of your company objectives, so that’s how we’re going to discuss culture. The context that we’re going to put around it today and the way that we create culture, which is you create culture by investing in your sales team with targeted specific plans to improve both their lives and their careers.
So that’s the playbook today and here’s the agenda. We’re going to start out talking about stuff everybody can do, even in the early stages. Things like hiring the right people and being clear and communicative. I heard Aaron Ross talking about nobody likes surprises. We’re going to talk a little bit about being clear and communicative with goals and objectives. We’re going to move into things like learning and development, L&D, building on great career pathing and getting that compensation right and I’ll give you a preview. I stole some of my comp from the guy who’s putting on this event, Jason. We’ll talk about some of the stuff that you do as you grow your team a little bit and then we’ll sort of wrap it up with some advanced stuff. Things like recognition, recognizing often. A surprise and delight program and having a feedback loop. So let’s dive in.
When I think about putting a thriving sales culture together, the most critical step is the first one, which is hiring the right sales people onto your team. It’s really difficult to get the rest of these steps right if you hire the wrong sales people and hiring really good salespeople is challenging, especially when you’re looking at both performance-based and the personality as how they fit into your organization. I have four steps that I usually do tactically to bring good salespeople into the organization. The first one is to make sure that, especially early on, my salespeople are aligned with my mission, vision, values.
I talked to founders about mission, vision, values. Most of them have them, some do not. I recommend you get them if you don’t have them. But often they also check a box, right? In mission, vision, values this is what we put down. We’re going to go find a really great salespeople. I like to think that I thrived at both Zocdoc and PatientPop because I come from a family of over 40 years of healthcare experience, so helping practices thrive, which is the mission of PatientPop was something very near and dear to me and part of the reason that I was able to build my career successfully there.
When I’m hiring salespeople, I take the mission, vision, values, whether it’s helping practices thrive, whether your values are speak up, work hard, tying those into interview questions. At least two to three of your interview questions on your very first interview should be aligned specifically with your mission, vision, values and what you’re looking to uncover is do they have a passion for your customer and do they have a passion for the challenge that you’re attempting to solve?
I would tell you that if they do, you are going to get more out of that salesperson than if they don’t. The second thing that I look and is really from my own personal mistake, is hiring and staying in what I call my velocity lane. My velocity lane, PatientPop’s SMB SaaS, eight units a month, $13,500 contract. I used to think that I could go into healthcare and pull a med device rep who was selling million dollar towers on a six-month sales cycle. They came from medicine, right? This should be an easy plug-and-play solution. But what I found is I was much more likely to get a plug-in-play solution by staying in my velocity lane.
If you’re an SMB SaaS business, I would recommend hiring SMB SaaS salespeople. If you’re an enterprise SaaS business, I would recommend sticking with enterprise. The mix and velocities becomes really different. And then two skills, I stole this shamelessly from Mark Roberge from HubSpot, sales acceleration formula, one of the most popular talks last year. I took two of his skills, curious and coachable, and those are the two skills I look for in my salespeople. Do they ask a lot of questions? Do they peel the onion back during the interview? Do they go second and third layer? If you give them an answer to their question in an interview, do they ask why or do they ask for clarification or they dig a little bit deeper? The sign of a curious salesperson can be annoying in training, will pay off later, I promise you that.
And then coachable. I talked to so many people and say, “Do you ask your salespeople to go through role-plays during your interview process?” No, we don’t. This is a great opportunity to see how coachable someone is. Give them a 90-second role-play. Here’s a little bit of context, 60 seconds feedback, another 90 seconds, second go around. In four minutes. You can see if someone took the feedback that you gave them in 60 seconds and applied it to the second role-play. If someone can prove in four minutes that they’re coachable, imagine what you can do with that person when you have them for 90 days or 180 days or 365 days. So that is step one in the most critical step.
Step two is a little bit about what Aaron was talking about, being clear and communicative. What exactly are my goals and expectations and what behaviors will you be monitoring? Quota $30,000 in recurring revenue every month. Great. What are the behaviors that you’ll be monitoring? Calls, emails, connect rate, demos, performs, wins, average contract value. Those things need to be spelled out very clearly. As Aaron said, “No one likes surprises,” and they should be spelled out in the interview process, not just when somebody comes in and sits down for their first day of training your recruiters or if you’re the CEO doing recruiting early on, need to know your quotas and the behaviors that you’ll be monitoring so that you can share them with the folks in the first part of the interview process.
After that, when they come in for training, they should be documented on the first day. Hey Dan, these are the quotas that we talked about during the interview process. These are the behaviors that we’re going to be monitoring on a regular basis. Make sure that you cover this and you understand it clearly. And then at the conclusion of training, you have those signed off, signed off by the rep and signed off by the manager. Sounds silly, but here’s what it helps you with. Three weeks later, Dan’s in his chair saying, “30,000? Thought it was 20,000 was my ramp quota. 80 calls? The recruiter told me I only had to make 55 calls every day. This isn’t what I signed up for.” By communicating clearly, by eliminating surprises, you’re able to get great salespeople who have clear direction in your organization.
Step three, and this is where it gets into really starting to build out the skillset of your sales team, is providing learning and development. Sounds very common. We want people to learn and grow in our sales orgs, of course, but there are three very specific things that you need to share with salespeople so they understand how to learn and grow. The first one is the how. How do I do my job? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked with emerging sales leaders and they say, “Hey, I’m really struggling. I can’t get my team to book enough outbound demos.” Okay, well what did you try? Well, I yelled at them, I said, do more outbound demos and pick up your activity and do more, more dials, right? But do they actually know how to do the job? And so I ask, “Well, what were they doing before this?” They were qualifying inbound leads. Do they know how to make outbound dials?
At PatientPop, we don’t graduate someone from a training program and give them to a manager who’s managing tenured reps, mid tier reps, brand new reps. They come on board and they get an onboarding coach, somebody who is specialized in teaching you the fundamental skills that you need to be successful in the first 90 days of your career. They give you the how of doing your job. The next one is the well. I know how to do my job, can I do it well? We give them an onboarding buddy. Now they have this dual headed management system. The onboarding buddy is somebody who is above quota in the same role, who can help them with objection handling, role-playing, call recording, demo scoring, so now they have the fundamental skills of the onboarding coach or manager and they have the realtime role-play in upleveling their skills with their onboarding buddy, so giving them the how and the well.
Some companies do that. The one that I see being missed is the third one most often, which is the why. This is where VP level engagement or C level engagement is absolutely critical. Yeah, I can do my job, and I can do it pretty well. Why am I doing it? Why am I making 80 dials today? Who depends on my performance? How does Sarah depend on it? How does my manager depend on it? How does my director depend on it? How does the company as a whole? How does my activity and behavior roll up to the ultimate company KPIs in the mission. At the graduation of every training class, I’ve always advocated for someone as a VP like myself or one of our C-suite members to come in and walk through the why. If they have the how, the well and the why you’re going to have a really loaded sales team. Go back one. There we go.
Step four, building out a great career path. As I think back to when I came out of school and went into the workforce, I remember thinking I got to be this associate territory rep. I was in med device for 36 months before I get a territory and then it’s like in the middle of nowhere. That was the old way. But now with the economy, with so many awesome jobs like SDR, BDR, LDR, AE, junior AE, you got a million different jobs that that folks can take. You have to keep them excited and staying in your organization. I do that through really segmented and specialized career path.
At PatientPop, came out, you’re an MDR, qualified inbound leads and not the real golden inbound leads, maybe those white paper downloads, those eBooks, those case studies. When you were good at that for four to six months, you got a slight salary increase, slight equity bump, little title bump, a little more responsibility. Those golden leads, those demo requests, right? You got good at that. You moved to outbound. Call the tougher customers first. Graduated to the better customers. You moved into closing roles and you moved up to closing roles to getting support and getting strategic partnerships. We segmented it out so there were about eight different stops in our career path and you can move to that career path, each stop in six months.
There were really two consistents. The consistent number one was each stop along the way came with additional things that people like. Bigger salary, slightly bigger, bigger commission, a little bit bigger equity, more responsibility and a little bit bigger title. People got really, really excited about that. The second consistency is that we made sure they were being trained for the next role while they were in their current role. A lot of you know, PatientPop, you might know PatientPop. I have a VP of inside sales, Kevin Dorsey, really well known inside sales leader. He brought this idea of bootcamp to our team. Bootcamp was every morning for one hour you trained for your next role. We bootcamped all the outbound SDRs and at the end of six months when they were ready to graduate, they had over 120 hours of practice for their closing role, so we’re able to immediately move them into a closing role and get wins. That was the consistency on our career path.
Step five, get the comp plan right. I like to shamelessly steal when possible if someone has created an incredible comp plan before me, that’s easy. There is no purpose in reinventing the wheel. And as I mentioned before, the guy who created the comp plan that I use is the guy who threw this event, Jason. I was a young VP in 2015 I was reading through SaaStr blog posts and thinking, what’s the right compensation plan and I came across the one that we rolled out at PatientPop, which is you pay back your base salary first. You make 60K, you’re doing 5K a month. You got to bring in 5K in recurring revenue before you can make a dime. But instead of paying at 2%, 4%, 8% when you cover your salary threshold, you can bump it up to the maximum 20, 25% on deals up on top of that.
The last but not least sort of caveat is taking customer and the churn into consideration. If you sign a customer on a monthly deal, you get paid small increments every month, sign them on a quarterly deal four times a year, get the customer on an upfront contract and get your cash coming in right up front. It helped bump customers into annual contracts and it helped people set great expectations so that customers didn’t churn. Here’s what this comp plan does. Top performers love it. They always cover their salary threshold. They get over it quickly and they’re up into the 20, 25% bucket. They’re making a really good commission. Bottom performers hate it. People who aren’t very good at the job don’t cover their salary threshold. And so what do they do? They walk out the door and that’s the way that I prefer it. To be candid, it’s a great compensation plan for top performers and it’s a great compensation plan for managers who have bottom performers.
Step six in my probably personal favorite step is recognizing often. I’m a big fan of long award cermonies, like an hour long in front of the entire company, making everybody watch the sales team go up and get their awards. I know that sounds really just kind of conceited, but I love it. I just love watching my salespeople get that one opportunity to stand up in front of the entire company and be awarded. I think the time that you put into that is well worth it. We have four things that we do. Daily mantra goals, which are daily team goals that we celebrate. I’ll walk you through those in a minute. Weekly and monthly leader boards emailed out. We worked with a company called Ambition, little plug for ambition. They do a great job at leader boards. Monthly contest that incentivize great behavior, high NPS, great customer scores, and quarterly awards, which is where I take the time to march the salespeople up in front of the company and see the smiles on their faces as they win awards.
Let me give you a look at our daily mantra goals. Daily mantra, I can still remember at 2,200 and two, 2,000 and two. We’re going to make 2200 dials as an SDR program today. We’re going to convert at 2%, we’re going to schedule 44 demos and we’re going to do that as a team. If we do it as a team, what’s the award? Toss 25 bucks in a bucket. It’s not that big of a deal, but at the end of the month, there’s a lot of money in there. We hit the target, we draw it out. Someone goes home, 500 bucks, richer. It’s small, it’s fun and it’s team-oriented. What happens at 5:15 when you’re at 43 demos, person’s putting their backpack on and walking out. They’re like,” Hey, daily mantra goal. Got one more. Let’s get back in the seat. Let’s hit that goal.” The team drives themselves. It’s awesome. It’s really fun the way they celebrate and ring the bell every time they hit their daily mantra goal at the end of the day.
Weekly and monthly leader boards, music, YouTube videos, quotas. I want to make sure that all the major metrics that I’m measuring are up and around and everybody can see them so that in this case DeMille’s face is plastered in front of the entire company knowing that he’s leading the team in their monthly contests. We’ve done everything from taking people down to the beach and give them 50 bucks in quarters to this young person on the left getting on a private plane, which is a really fun one that we run. Once a quarter, we put someone on a private plane and send him to Vegas for a couple of nights in a five-star hotel if they dominate all their other sales peers. It’s 2000 bucks, but it’s awesome. We get a tremendous amount of revenue from it. A lot of short-term bursts that we get through our contest program.
The last one that I absolutely love is our quarterly awards, as I mentioned. And not only do I get to feel proud giving them to salespeople, and not only do they get to feel proud going up in front of the company, but they share them all over social media. What does that do? Free recruiting, right? More recruits more. Hey, Jesse did 200% to quota. Michelle nailed her quoted again last month. Man, I want to nail quota. PatientPop looks like an awesome place to work, everyone’s celebrating. That’s our free recruiting. We get a ton of inbound through those social channels, which is really excellent.
Step seven, surprise and delight generously. I’ll give you my very quick story on this. When I was 28, I joined Zocdoc as an AE in the field and I didn’t make a lot of money and I lived on a couch in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I spent 400 bucks a month living on my friend’s couch. When I started to hit my quota as an individual contributor, I got enough money to live lavish. Got a 66 square foot bedroom in the East village. I got a single futon that was rock solid. I put it in the 66 square foot room and had a terrible night’s sleep every single solitary night.
When I walked in one morning, Cyrus Massoumi, who’s the CEO of Zocdoc, said, “Hey, you look terrible.” And I was like, “Thank you, that’s awesome.” And he said, “What’s going on with your life?” And I said, “I’m sleeping on this futon and it sucks.” And he said, “No, I can’t have that. I can’t. I can’t have a top salesperson sleeping on a futon, getting a terrible night’s sleep.” Walked back into his office, came out small little rectangle, handed it to me blank check. I was like, “Wow, this is awesome.” He said, go down to Sleepy’s on 13th and 2nd and get a single bed. Spend up to a thousand bucks and get a bed. I went and I bought a $498 single bed and I was like, “Whoa, this is the best thing that anyone has ever done for me in my entire life.”
There were a lot of things I loved about working at that company, but boy did I stay connected because of that gesture. Every night that I went to bed and got a good night’s sleep, every morning I woke up and felt awesome instead of feeling really crappy. I thought about that gesture. I stayed for five years working my butt off for that company, all for $498. I tell that story because I like to collect hobbies. Thank you, a round of applause, I’ll take that. I like to collect hobbies. I like to keep my eyes and my ears open. You got a friend or a rep who likes guitar. Some might like concerts. When they do something really exceptional or awesome I love finding a personal gift or relevant gift.
I write down reward generously. When I say generously, I mean personal tied to what they enjoy. I have a young man on my a sales operations team who wanted to do SQL data analysis. I’m not a data guy, so that might not be right. But I was just listening to him talk about it all the time, every day and bought him a course at General Assembly when he had an awesome quarter and man was he excited. Look for those opportunities to reward “generously.”
One other one, I like to talk about is office hours. Make sure that you’re available, especially in the early days. Make sure your VP door is open, your C-suite door is open. It doesn’t matter if it’s an SDR, AE, customer success, marketing, giving people visibility and access to the C-suite and the VP level is really important in the early stage. They want to feel connected, but you’re also going to learn a lot of really good stuff. Some of my best ideas that I repackaged as mine came from some of my SDRs and AEs. Just kidding. I didn’t do that. I always keep my door open and make sure that I’m collecting this knowledge from my team.
The last step is having a feedback loop. Do three things for having a feedback loop. We start by having an anonymous suggestion box. It’s not like a physical box, it’s an email, right? But what I talk about is having a solutions-oriented anonymous email. You’re not allowed to submit complaints. You cannot submit moaning and crying and complaining, just won’t get looked at and get deleted. Now you can submit challenges and propose solutions and it will get looked at by myself and my entire leadership team. A solutions-oriented, anonymous suggestion box.
Quarterly ENPS service. Every quarter we run an ENPS, employee net promoter score, by department. I was really happy to say that the sales ENPS was 54, meaning it was world-class. We run those every quarter. We look to see if there are trends and then we do sentiment analysis. What’s the positive sentiment, what’s the negative sentiment, how do I improve those things? Then the last one and my favorite one is a great idea that we started doing that Zocdoc and took right into PatientPop was a senate team. A senate team was an elected team by department. SDR, AE, a strategic reps, the peers elected one person to represent them. That person aggregated feedback because when you aggregate feedback as a peer, you’re going to get more feedback that you don’t get from the anonymous suggestion box. People are afraid, it’s not really anonymous, they don’t give you the real feedback. To appear peer-to-peer, they give great feedback. We take that team that senate team out once a quarter to dinner and they share all of the feedback in an aggregated way to my leadership team and we have two weeks to come back with proposed solutions.
Rather than hole ourselves up as an executive team or a leadership team and work on our solutions, we invite everyone from the senate to come in and work on those solutions with us. Being very open, being very transparent about the way that we solve our problems. That is step eight and the last step in my eight step playbook for building a thriving sales culture.
If you want to learn a little bit more about me and what I’m doing now, you can visit me on my website, theofficialjustin.com. You can email me it’s hello@theofficialjustin.com or you can follow me on Twitter at JustinSaaS. Thanks a lot.
Q&A
We’re doing Q&A? All right. We’re doing Q&A. I believe that a great question. I believe that the presentations will be answered by that young lady right there who’s pointing at herself. Will we be sending presentations out? I will need to double check on that. But we’re- Someone is motioning later we will be sending presentations out if I’m reading their sign language, correct. Yes. Sure. I think she’s going to bring you a microphone. Yep.
QUESTION: Curious how the Lemkin comp plan is scaled to enterprise or upmarket.
We don’t do a lot of upmarket at PatientPop. The highest upmarket that we went to was what we would call mid market, which was about a 3K ACB. We use a different compensation plan for that, but it’s scaled for SMB SaaS business. Yep.
QUESTION: You mentioned the importance of hiring in your velocity lane. How does that factor in for BDRs or MDRs?
Yeah, so I don’t usually stay in a velocity lane for BDRs or MDRs because most of the hiring that I do is actually fresh out of school. I’ve worked for two different companies over the last 10 years that have a pretty strong opinion on what type of SDRs and BDRs and we bring into our org and we generally bring fresh college grads, men and women into our organization because we find that, especially in the SMB side of the business, it’s not super complex so we can bring them in, get them trained up, and they don’t come in with any bad habits, right? Most of the BDRs that we do hire, someone who has a BDR experience, we hire in as an AE and train them to close our product.
QUESTION: As a sales leader, how do you manage expectations across the organization with product and other functions? Maybe the CFO and how that translates into how your team gets compensated as well as more strategic decisions where you actually have to push different products that may be harder to sell versus others, so I’d love to understand how you tackle that.
Yeah, sure thing. We have a direct line to both product and RevOps. Usually revenue operations, myself and my leadership team will meet on a quarterly basis or even more frequently with product and trying to understand from the communication standpoint what’s coming down the roadmap for us. For instance, we’ll roll out a solution. I can think of a particular software solution that we rolled out recently that we imagined would be difficult to sell. When we do that, we generally go to our sales team and we trial it with a specific type of experiment. I have found that trialing a new product with your top reps gives you false positives, so I’ll usually take a top rep, a middle rep, and someone who’s struggling a little bit, maybe two of each, to eliminate some of those false positives and negatives. Give it to them and compensate them extra should they be able to sell it. I never bake it into their compensation plan during a trial period. I’ll actually incentivize them with a little bit of extra dollars or extra spiff to go out and see if they can sell the product. I get most of my data and learnings from that and then I use that data and learnings to influence how I bake it into the comp plan moving forward. You’re welcome.
QUESTION: For your promotion plan, that’s really interesting. How do you switch between say the SMB and the mid market? How do you switch velocities? Do you first go SDR, enterprise SD or mid market SDO? Does the rep go SDRE and then they become the enterprise SDIR and then enterprise aide?
It’s a great question. I never am a fan of these very linear career progressions or it’s like you did well in this role, now you have to be in the next role and the next role is X. We have sort of different paths in our career. If you graduate from being an SDR and you want to move into supporting the mid-market team, which is like a top notch SDR doing really well, that’s a path for us. But we also have a path where you can move into an individual closing role. We also have a path where you can move into different parts of the business.
What I generally do is use the data, right? If someone comes to me and says, “I’m really interested in going and supporting our mid-market reps,” the first thing that I want to know is do they know how to do that? Have they proven effectively that they can do that before? Meaning when an inbound lead comes in and it’s a larger deal, have they qualified that? Have they done well? Have they been able to set up some larger deals that they came across? And if they’ve shown that they’ve been able to scratch the surface relatively effectively, we’ll put them into that path. But they might also come to us and say, “I’m a top performer and I want to close business.”
My goal as the VP is never to put someone as a puzzle piece into the puzzle. My question is to ask what they want to do and if they’re very effective and good at their job, my goal is to provide them with a path to get there, so that is really the foundation of how I make that decision.
QUESTION: When you’re starting to scale and you’re going … you’re about two million in ARR and you’ve got other services and stuff and you want to build your sales team, what have you found is the most effective cost efficient way to attract and recruit new BDRs and new AEs? Because it’s really hard to have a full-time person inside and it’s very expensive if you go the headhunter route.
Yeah. Early on I’m a big fan of network hires as I’m sure everybody is. When you come into PatientPop early on, when I think 2015, 2016 working in a WeWork in New York, I think about how we held people accountable. I talked about those quotas and behaviors. Part of the early behaviors that we measured at PatientPop was how many referral salespeople that you submitted per quarter. That was put on your docket early on as it was put on mine by the way, when I got hired in 2009 at Zocdoc. I had a quota of submitting 10 new salespeople to the company every quarter, so that’s how we did it very early was leveraging our network. When it came time to scale and when that no longer would scale up and we weren’t getting enough referrals, we went with in-house recruiting.
We found that in-house recruiting for us was able to be a better communicator with our different sales departments, truly understand our ideal candidate profile and work with our managers on a regular basis to grow and get better over time. It’s the same reason that I don’t use outsourced SDRs. I feel like there’s so much learning that happens on the inside when you have an in-house recruiting team. I’m a data guy. I like to collect that data, collect that learning, analyze it and learn more. We did go with that. We had a lot of really good success because in LA we’ve got Loyola Marymount, UCLA, USC, Pepperdine. We were often going to a school outing, school events and pulling young people from college campuses. Sure, yeah. Happy to do.
QUESTION: Can you share an experience where you didn’t perform well at a company or if you had a bad experience at a company. Don’t say the name, but why it was that way?
Yeah, I can. I had a short two-month stint at a company here in San Francisco in between a Zocdoc and PatientPop and I wasn’t aligned with their mission, vision, values. It was a larger technology company and I found that I am really excited by like zero dollar, like let’s get into we work together with really smart people and figure this stuff out. Like that’s my thing. When I walk into a company and they’re like, “Here’s the playbook, go run this playbook.” I just found that I don’t get really excited about that. And that wasn’t really communicated well to me at the time. And maybe it was my mistake for not digging in deeper and asking the right questions. It goes back to being aligned with mission, vision, values, I was not. Because of that, I’ve been relatively successful with things I’ve done. I failed.
Cool. Awesome. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.
