Revolutionizing Leadership Development with AI with James Cross, Tenor

[00:00:00] Before we move to the next thing, I have a funny story. Are you ready, Ryan? There is no doubt that I am always ready to hear one of your stories. Always. The first time I managed HR, I had no idea about compliance. None. I had a friend come out and audit what I had done. And I was pretty well set up, but I missed the memo on compliance posters. Yep. Back then, HR posted safety and compliance posters in the record. I laughed, of course,

[00:00:30] and said, who cares about posters? She said, your city, your state, and most importantly, the federal government cares about those posters. HR friends, you know the drill. It's endless admin tasks and compliance headaches, trying to make time for what really matters, your people. Bamboo HR takes the stress out of HR, so you can focus on what you do best. We get it. HR is hard, but Bamboo

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[00:01:21] The second one was a very different school. It was in the city center of Sheffield in a more kind of traditional middle class area, but still with a very mixed population of students. So we had a very, maybe half of the school was very, very kind of middle class. Parents were like doctors, lawyers, teachers. Other half of the school, we had some kind of large populations of Pakistani kids, Somalian kids in Sheffield. And so with this kind of real melting pot of different types of kids,

[00:01:45] all in one school. Hey, this is William Tincup and Ryan Leary. You are listening, hopefully watching, Inside the CCWeed Podcast. We got James on today. James is originally from the UK, but he lives in San Francisco and has for close to a decade now. James, would you do us a favor and

[00:02:12] introduce yourself? Yep. Hey guys, excited to be with you today and to have a chat with you both. My name is James Cross. As William said, originally from the UK, moved to the US back in 2017 and have lived here in San Francisco, which I now call home and have a long history of experience in the learning and online development space. And really just the thing that drives me is using technology to enhance people's potential and unlock potential. And that's really been kind of the theme of my

[00:02:40] career. And so that's what I'm working on today. So excited to chat. Yeah. You go all the way back to e-learning? Absolutely. The old days of like LMSs and Adobe Captivate and all of that good stuff. Okay. Yep. Yeah. So CLOs, you got, you got all the baggage. Great. He was selling Britannica and cycle pieces. Yeah, a hundred percent. He's just learning through and through. True. So tell us about your current company. What do you have going on there?

[00:03:10] So today I'm co-founder of an early stage, seed stage startup called Tenor, T-E-N-O-R. And we're an AI platform for leadership development. And we're aiming to use AI to make every manager more effective at large companies through voice simulations, through AI coaching, and a bunch of other different pieces we're building on the roadmap right now. A super exciting time. And it's good to be back to kind of building early stage. It's a fascinating space for me. I think we see so many startups today in this space. How

[00:03:38] do you, how, and I know we're going to get into your story. And I think this kind of maybe plays into it. How are you, how do you get into this space now today and be different than the others? Yeah. Yeah. Really good question. That's a great question. Yeah. I think talking about the learning space today, I think as we think about AI, everybody agrees that the whole space is going to be completely disrupted and completely kind of changed and transformed. Right.

[00:04:05] I personally don't think that looks like just building more monolithic LMSs with AI baked in. Right. When we thought about this, we thought it looks much more like very specific kind of vertical use cases for very specific parts of the workforce, whether it's like frontline workers, managers, sales folks. And that's why we decided to really, really focus and focus on how we could make managers better. And like one thing I love about this space right now is that the technology

[00:04:31] is so new. It's really a level playing field. So you've got lots of startups like us that are innovating and moving quickly. Then you've got some kind of incumbent kind of larger providers that are also playing with the technology, but we're all really at the same kind of level playing field. I think we've got the same technologies to build with. Sometimes we're actually able to move a little faster than some of the bigger players in the space. And so that's what makes it kind of really exciting and probably more exciting than any other kind of technology transformation inflection point that we've seen.

[00:05:00] Well, the last one that I remember was LMSs kind of moving from compliance and doing all of that stuff and syndicating content or making their own content to micro content. And that was a big, in that space for those people, the training and development, that was a big shift because, you know, that it was usually the classroom. We're going to watch a video and then we're

[00:05:26] going to do this, take a test, all that stuff. And like, no, we need three minute videos because people aren't, they don't have time for that. They're, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so that shift, I mean, we lost some people in that shift because they knew how to do this one thing. And, uh, the, the, uh, I remember being at a couple of ATDs and, uh, people were still trying

[00:05:50] to wrestle with the idea of I need to get this longer form content, but the audience has shifted and they won't consume the longer form content. And so now I see, okay, throw all that out the window. So now where does AI play? And, and again, what does the audience need? You know, from a learning perspective, you're talking about managers, the leaders, what do they need? When do they need it?

[00:06:16] How do they need it? And I don't have a good, I don't have an answer for any of that. I just, I remember that, that chasm being pretty difficult for the training and development world. And like one thing I love about AI that's kind of just unique to this inflection point is like, there are things that we know work really well, but just don't scale. So things like one-to-one coaching for executives, which very few people are able to get because it's expensive. It's intensive things like role plays, which we know are effective when they're done well, but they're often a one-off

[00:06:45] experience. It's just done in a really awkward way with your peers as part of a workshop, maybe kind of personalized nudges and just having like, I, one example is I used to have like an amazing HR VP who was like a true partner to me. He knew me, he knew my development as a leader. He knew my skills, he knew my team, he knew the business, and he was able to just be a true partner and guide to me. And it's rare in your career you have one of those people. And I think there are opportunities to bring that kind of support to every manager and everybody at the company.

[00:07:14] So that's the thing I love about AI. It just takes the stuff that we know works really well and just suddenly makes it available to everybody at like zero marginal cost, which I kind of... So James, let's, let's learn a little bit about you. People that listen to this show and watch the show, they're, they're aspiring to be doing what you're doing or kind of clamp, climbing along their career similar to, or in a way that you have. So take us back a little bit.

[00:07:40] What was the, what was the big dream that you, that you wanted coming out of school? Definitely. So I think coming out of school and throughout my whole childhood, I always wanted to be a teacher. I love the idea that you could make an intervention or be part of somebody's life in a way that kind of changes their life from that point onwards. And I was always kind of in love with that idea. So when I left school, I went to study music. So I went and did a classical music degree because I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was very musical, played piano, was really

[00:08:08] into like electronic music production and decided to kind of go do something that I loved and figure out the rest later. And I remember like people telling me at the time that was a mistake. I remember my geography teacher said to me, Hey, you're like, you're never going to be Elton John. So there's no point in going to study music. You should go study. Just kill the dream. Geez. Yep. I want to be joined. I don't want to be Elton John. I want to. Yeah. At Ryan, they, they call college in the UK, they call it university.

[00:08:37] They call it university. I know, but he's in the States. He's in San Francisco. So we can use that. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. I'm like an awkward mix of British and American. Yeah. Seven years is long enough to become a citizen. So we're going to claim it. I became a citizen two months back. So I officially, I was able to vote this year. So that felt good to be officially be a citizen. Congratulations. So it is officially college. There we go. I'm just kidding. Hey, I need to, I need to go back before we go back to the, uh, back.

[00:09:06] Cause I want to explore classical music with you for just a second. But before I do that, how y'all, how you at Tenor look at skills? Cause so much of leadership and managers and things like that, the skills are, they're moving so fast. They're decaying fast. What's your take on kind of skills and learning? What's your, what's your bit there?

[00:09:33] Yeah. Really good question. I think obviously there's so much noise about skills right now, and it seems to be, it's been like a hot topic for a few years. One thing I've seen is lots of companies investing really heavily in skills infrastructure because they know it's something they should be investing in. So they'll spend a lot of money on taxonomies and infrastructure. What I haven't seen so much aside from things like talent marketplaces is the application of those skills in the real world and like the real world impact of those investments. So one thing we

[00:10:00] think a lot about at Tenor is how can we kind of take, take skills that we know managers need to be gaining and actually give them opportunities to practice and build those in the real world using AI to do that. So we think a lot, a lot about that last mile and connecting that skills infrastructure companies have invested into actual real world impact and helping people in their kind of day-to-day world. Thank you because I was so dark. I've been so dark on skills because I just, I see it as another

[00:10:27] competency model kind of wave of like, we're going to get really, really hot. We're going to hire, fire, promote. Everything's going to be based on a competency model only to find out that like three people in the world use competency models in that way. And I saw when the skills wave kind of came, I'm like, I've seen this shit before. I don't need to see this again, but I really, really like what you're doing in terms of that last mile and, and putting people in the scenarios and

[00:10:57] situations and all that other stuff to then learn the skill that they actually need to learn. And yeah, thank you because it gives me hope that people will actually use it. Do I like a little bit more to be a bit more specific there? So when we work, so we probably work with large companies who have leadership development teams and they've usually got kind of leadership and manager skills frameworks and things they want their managers to be good at. We're able to like ingest that into our platform. And then when managers go through our voice

[00:11:24] simulations and actually go through our management simulations, we can score them across those skills based on how they actually showed up in that moment and how they're developing the skills over time. It's connecting the great work that companies have done around skills taxonomies and actually making it real and solving for that like last mile of skill development. I'm glad I asked that question. Ryan, I'm sorry. I interrupted the bit, but we were coming back through university. We're talking classical music. Yeah, dude. That's not my genre. I have zero musical bones.

[00:11:53] Yeah, me too, Ryan. Hey, this is William Tincup, and I'd like to talk to you a little bit about Practitioner Corner Podcast. It's a wonderful podcast about the journey, the paths of how practitioners, both HR and TA, kind of go from high school, college, all the way to where they are right now. Some of the things that they've learned, how they've been successful, people that thrive around them, etc.

[00:12:18] It's a fun podcast. You'll love it. You'll learn from it. Subscribe to it. Thanks. I got other artistic bones, not music. Why classical? I mean, you could have done any genre, I'm sure, but what attracted you to classical music? Yeah, definitely. So what I was interested in back then and now, it wasn't kind of just straightforward classical music so much. It was like early 20th century experimental music where

[00:12:47] you had people like John Cage who were taking classical music and just rethinking it and having new approaches and asking lots of questions about why do we do this, why do we do that, and how can we innovate? Not quite Philip Glass. Philip Glass too, minimalism. I used to do a lot of minimalism as well. Yeah. Dude, I love, that's because I love modern art.

[00:13:10] So, like, I can dig that because he's just, he's on his own, he's on his own venture, his own plane, and he's trying different things. Brian, have you ever heard of Philip Glass? I have not. So think, like, post-modern art in music, and it is totally, like, it's not... I'll have to look him up.

[00:13:34] He's been on a lot of music, kind of movie theme tunes and movie soundtracks. So you've likely heard him. I've probably, yeah, I've likely heard it. 100%. So question around something you just said. So when you're saying that they've, I forget the person you mentioned, but they took the late 1920s and they kind of put their own spin on it and, you know,

[00:13:58] and kind of played with that a bit. Since this is your background, I gotta ask this question. And you were into electronic music. Is this the same as a DJ today taking something from the 80s and 70s and putting their own spin on it? I understand. Yeah. It's like, one thing, so it's John Cage that I used to love, and he used to do things like, he'd take a grand piano and he, you know, at the back of a piano you've got kind of the strings

[00:14:25] and the hammers hit the strings. So he'd actually go and put objects in the strings. He'd put screws in there. He'd put kind of erasers between the strings. And so you took this as this, the instrument, and suddenly it sounded completely different. And he also loved the idea of chants as well. So every time you do that, when you play his piece, it's going to sound completely different because the piano is a little different. The strings are a little different. The objects you place are in different places. So he loved that idea that the thing that you're, his pieces sound different every time. Yeah. I kind of love that.

[00:14:54] It becomes experiential art. So you go and experience it. So if you're in Sydney and you experience it there, and then you go to London and it's completely different. He's doing the same song. It's just, it's a new experience. It's a different experience, which again, some of the audience is going to love that because they got something totally unique to them at that particular moment. And some people

[00:15:23] like, they like hearing, you know, Bach and that they want to hear it the way that it was constructed. Yeah. I, I, so I used to be into John Cage, Charles Ives, but I love like modern jazz as well. Like Hobie Hancock, Miles Davis used to play. After university, you're everyone, your friends, family are all telling you that you failed,

[00:15:48] got a degree in nothing. You'll never make it, et cetera. Okay. So what did you do? What was your, after music or after, at least after university, what'd you do now? Yes. My, my, my plan from when I was a kid to go do teacher training. So in the UK, it's a little different where you do a degree for three years and then you go do a year of teacher training after that and get your teaching certification, usually in the subject that you did your degree in. Sounds actually, sounds better than what we do.

[00:16:16] So I went to become a music teacher and so I did a year of teacher training. I did two, two like placements as part of that. One was in a city school in a small town in the North of England called Barnsley, like former industrial town, former Cole Manning town, very high on employment, very kind of low levels of generational ambition in the kids. And that was like, this is a complete eye opener to, to be around in that sort of environment for the first time.

[00:16:42] And also just to see the value that education and like really good teaching can have in those environments and raising aspirations and showing people what's possible in a way they might not see at home. So that, that was, that was like a really cool life experience for me to, to be in that environment. What was the second one? The second one was a very different school. It was in the city center of Sheffield in a more kind of traditional middle-class area, but still with a very mixed population of students. So we, we had a very, maybe half of the school was very, very kind of middle-class parents were like doctors, lawyers,

[00:17:11] teachers, other half of the school. We had some kind of large populations of Pakistani kids, Somalian kids in Sheffield. And so it was this kind of real melting pot of different types of kids all in one school, just because of the way that the catchment area of that school kind of shook out. So that, that was a fascinating life experience as well. Yeah. And music, music's taught a little different in the UK than it's in the US. So back when I was teaching music was a compulsory subject and most kids would have an hour of music once per week up until the age of 14. And so I had these

[00:17:40] like mixed classes of 30, 35 kids had to teach them music. And with a, with a school population that mixed, that was like a really, really kind of interesting experience. And you just have to find the common threads and make sure you're delivering lessons that really speak to different folks with different backgrounds and different musical experience. Some people want to be there. Some kids want to be there and some kids would rather not care less. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think how, yeah, go ahead. No, go, go for it. Finish your thought.

[00:18:10] As I think about just the, the through line from teaching to what I do today and my career since then, I think as a teacher, especially in like an inner center of high school, you're picking up survival skills that are just so useful in the rest of your life. It's like, how do you keep a group of people engaged? How do you explain something in a way that resonates with people in the room who have like mixed opinions and different levels of understanding? Yeah. How do you think about like developing people and progress over time? How do you coach people? And I come back to that very often, like the experiences

[00:18:39] I've had since then in the corporate and startup and technology world, like so much stuff I picked up in the classroom. It's just been so helpful there. I don't think I could ever survive in a classroom. Like I just, I couldn't do it. My wife is a teacher, James. Well, no, as a teacher, as a teacher, I barely survived. But as a teacher, I couldn't, my wife is a teacher. I don't know how, God bless you all for doing that. And Ryan, it's no different at the undergraduate and graduate level. Like I did

[00:19:07] when I was in Arizona, I taught undergraduate students, 50 kids in a room. And if I could get five, five that actually cared about the topic, really did care about the topic, that was a win. Yeah. So anyhow, I interrupted. So James, how long did the teaching expedition last before you ventured out and started into the world of corporate? Yeah. So I taught for, so I did my teacher training and I taught for three years as like a full-time teacher.

[00:19:37] And the connection point for me was like, I qualified to teach in 2005, 2006. And that was around the time that like online video, YouTube, broadband internet was really starting to take off. Yeah. Music is one of those classroom topics where like video works really well. You can record students playing, you can then watch it back with them, upload it online. So I was using a lot of video in my classroom and innovating with that. And I realized back then I could see the power and potential of

[00:20:02] video for learning, but saw that it wasn't like widely distributed yet. It was difficult for teachers to use. The infrastructure wasn't there. Like you couldn't really use public sites like YouTube for content with students. You needed it to be secure, integrated with the school systems. So I started doing like a lot of writing, a lot of thinking about how to use video effectively in the classroom. And then started kind of consulting with other schools to help them use video. So, and then I actually, so that there was that kind of educational technology piece that brought

[00:20:29] me out of teaching. And at the time there was a program, a UK government program called building schools for the future. And the government back then was trying to rebuild every school in the country physically. And they were kind of giving the new buildings, refurbishing buildings, but also they were putting millions of pounds into technology investments for schools. And there was a national strategy for trying to use technology to level up education. So I became a consultant on that project, working with school districts to help them think about like, how do you, how do you use video?

[00:20:56] How do you use online learning? How do you use LMSs? How do you use things like iPads, which were taking off at that time and did a bunch of work there, but still kept thinking about video. I was so passionate about using video for learning and came across a, what at the time was a little open source platform called MediaCore out of British Columbia, Vancouver Island. And this was an open source platform that essentially let anybody create their own kind of open source YouTube that they could

[00:21:23] host themselves on cloud infrastructure and then securely deliver video. So I got to know Stuart, the founder of the consultancy that built that. He was thinking about like turning that into a vertical SaaS company. And he was thinking about education, healthcare, a few different areas where that could be useful. And here I was like an educator in the UK using his software with my kids and also helping other schools use his software. So I got to know the team over in Canada and they decided

[00:21:49] to go raise some seed funding. And I was one of the founding team members of MediaCore, the kind of the SaaS version of that. Soon after then moved to Canada to go be part of that team. And that was really, it was that through line of like video for learning that really took me from the classroom to working in a startup. I want to take a break real quick, just to let you know about a new show we've just added to the network.

[00:22:12] Up Next at Work, hosted by Gene and Kate Akil of the Devon Group. Fantastic show. If you're looking for something that pushes the norm, pushes the boundaries, has some really spirited conversations, Google Up Next at Work, Gene and Kate Akil from the Devon Group. I love that. Did, was, ASU GSV, was that around where they talked about EdTech?

[00:22:42] I don't know, it was an EdTech conference. Was that around at the time? Absolutely, yeah. I've been to ASU GSV a couple of times. Another conference like Educause and a few others. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so when you moved to Canada, you're part of the, I mean, you said you moved to Canada. So you moved to Canada, you're part of the founding team. What do you learn from that experience? So one thing I learned a lot from that first startup experience was just the importance of focus.

[00:23:09] So I think when you've got a great technology, a great product, a great platform, it can be a lot of things to a lot of people. And originally, we could see the power. We were trying to sell it to K-12 schools, K-12 districts. We're trying to sell it to higher education institutions, corporates, big companies, small companies. We were trying to just get this platform out there for everybody. And that wasn't going so well. Like the people that used it loved it. But we got to a point where we were like, hey, we have to really focus on one type of customer. And just to, because we're a small team, we need to really focus.

[00:23:39] And it was in the moment where we saw in higher education that video was really taking off. Like universities were installing lecture capture systems where they'd have cameras that automatically recorded every class and every seminar. We saw universities wanting to deliver video experiences to their students through LMSs like Instructors Canvas and Blackboard. And we also saw that they just didn't have the infrastructure to do that today because the infrastructure for video is still kind of novel and new.

[00:24:03] So we focused the company purely on like large universities with big media collections that knew they had to deliver video experiences for their students. And that was the best decision we ever made for the company was like having that, having that focus, I think, just focusing down. How do you approach pivoting? We've talked about this a lot on other shows. And I think it's extremely important, especially for the audience to understand when you're starting something or you're scaling something and it's not working or you see something change.

[00:24:33] How do you recognize that? And how do you handle the pivot? Yeah, good question. Like the first time around, we didn't handle the pivot very well. Like early on, we did it too late. So we'd raised some seed funding and we were at the point where we started to think about raising our Series A. Started to talk to some investors and realized that like we weren't in good shape to raise our Series A. Like our revenue was doing okay, but our growth wasn't great. And also like we, I think by the time you raise Series A, you have to be at a point where like, you know, the inputs and outputs.

[00:25:02] You know your customer, you know which channels work, you know who you're selling to, you know, which questions you ask them when you call them on the phone. And you just want like using the Series A money to kind of pour fuel on that fire in terms of what you know working. And we weren't there. And so we, I think that's what really, like we were like, hey, we can't raise a Series A. The company's going to die unless we change something. So we had to just, we were like, what do our best customers look like? Let's pick a couple of those. And it turned out they were universities. Like let's go find more of those and let's focus on only those types of customers.

[00:25:32] And did a bunch of like ideal customer profile kind of work there. So for us, like back then it was kind of forced on us. It's terrifying because you're shutting doors, especially at startup phase. You need the money. So you'll say yes to anything really. Like almost anything. Somebody comes along, can you? Hell yeah, we can. And the thing is, is at one point that you're describing, you have to shut doors.

[00:26:03] And investors typically, that is not their, that's not what they want. They want that TAM, Total Available Market, to be as big as possible. So they want you to be in large universities, smaller universities, corporate. They want you to be everywhere because the TAM is a bigger number. And that's often the worst advice you can give a startup. So what'd you do after that? What was your next career move? Yeah, definitely. So we, that company went well.

[00:26:32] We ended up like powering video learning for lots of big US universities. So like Yale, Stanford, Columbia, we powered into when the media management delivery. So that was great fun. And then we did raise a series A back in early 2015. And then, then we got an email from a little company called Workday, which I honestly, like I knew a lot about the learning space, didn't know much about the HR space. I'd heard of Workday as like a public company, but they called to say they wanted to come visit us in Victoria, BC, like a little island we were on.

[00:27:01] And they came up and it turned out Workday was looking to build an LMS as part of the HR suite and really wanted video to be at the center of that. Like the shift you mentioned before, William, around compliance content to short form video. Wanted to kind of build a platform that was great at that. And for us, like we, we, great culture fit with the folks there. And we, we just like, we, we believe so passionately about our technology. The idea of taking what we were doing and bringing it to like the size of Workday's customer base was, was huge for us.

[00:27:31] So that acquisition went forward and then our team went and joined Workday in August, 2015. And, and, and today, like the little Victoria, BC office that had 20 of us back then when we were acquired now has a couple hundred people for Workday. So it's good to see that team grow. And the office is still there. Yep. Different physical location now. It's expanded. Yeah. The Victoria, BC office is like a development office of Workday along with Vancouver. And like the majority of our little 20% team are still there. It's awesome.

[00:28:01] That's so, so Workday gives you a call and you're in this little office. Do you clean it, prep it? What do you do? Do you like, oh my God, guys, Workday's coming. Do you clean it up? Put some balloons in there, some flowers. Or do you just come as we are? We were just kind of come as we are. We had like a super nice little office. Our CEO's partner at the time was an interior designer and she designed her office. So we had like a really nice space, a little office in Victoria.

[00:28:30] But those guys come to visit and we, we just, I don't know, we just felt like an immediate cultural flip with those guys. So it just felt like a really fit for us. They make wonderful acquisitions. Like their corp dev team and the people on that side of the business, they know what they want. They go out and they go and select people, both the tech and the team really, really well. Probably better than anybody in the industry. Why did you leave?

[00:28:59] So I was at Workday for close to nine years in total. I like, honestly, when I joined, I thought I was going to be there. I thought I was a startup guy. I thought I was going to be there for like 18 months and then leave. But I think when I joined, I was maybe employee number 5,500 or something. When I like Workday now, it's like 18,000 people. And during that time, like I felt like every 12 to 18 months when a company is growing that fast and building new products, it's kind of like if you're ambitious and intellectually

[00:29:26] curious, you can have a new job every 18 months and jump into a cool new project. So that's what kind of kept me around for so long. Yeah. And then I can see that. I can see that. Yeah. Had a great time there. And then just increasingly, the itch was just getting stronger and stronger to get back to building. So I kind of, I was missing the startup days a little bit. And I took a sabbatical from Workday to do a little bit of travel and just kind of get some headspace and think about what was next. And increasingly, it was just getting me into to get back to the startup space and get back

[00:29:55] to building a small team and building a company. So it was just kind of feeling like it was the natural time to make that jump. Well, what was different about this time versus the first time? So you've built, you've been acquired. Now you're here, you're ready, you're building again. What lessons did you learn the first time that you were able to leapfrog over? That's a good question. Yep. One of the big ones is, like I said before, just focus from day one. Yeah. So not trying to be all things to all people, even if your technology is really powerful and you have a big impact, just like focusing.

[00:30:25] Also, I think the importance of just building a great team, like we did this back at Media Core and just the idea of the first hires you make, just being super intentional about culture, about making sure you have the right folks on the team because they're the genesis for everything that comes after that. And also just learned a lot, I think, back at Media Core about how you position and frame things to the market and how you talk about your product and how you talk about the value and articulate that. I think like the first time around, you learn so much, but it takes a long time and you make

[00:30:55] so many mistakes along the way. And the second time around, you can kind of leapfrog a little bit of that. But I will say things have changed a little since like we were acquired in 2015. We were building the company from like 2013 to 15. A lot of the playbook has changed since then. So it's been fun for me to take what worked back then and also just kind of update my knowledge and learn about what's changed. What's similar to Ryan's question, but it's more on the Workday side. What did you take away from Workday?

[00:31:21] The experience that helps you now, building what you're building. What is that? Yeah, I think a lot of the culture of Workday, we've kind of borrowed it to the new company. So when we look at our core values as a really small company, they mirror lots of Workday's core values around customers and employees first, doing right by customers, building. I remember David O'Neill used to talk about early in the early days, nice guys kicking ass.

[00:31:49] That we're going to kick ass and build a business that does really well, but we're going to do it in a good way as good people. I kind of love that idea. That's one of the main things. And also when Workday built products, we always did it in lockstep with customers. We'd have advisory councils. We'd have design partner groups. We'd really take customer feedback in as we built the products. And that's something we kind of learned as well. And the other thing is just Workday is like a marketing machine.

[00:32:16] From day one, in terms of how they built the brand, how their products are perceived, how it's marketed. I just learned so much about that as well during the time there. I want to go back to the hiring conversation real quick. So how do you approach that first hire? Let's say the first two or three hires. You said hire for intention and hire for culture, but how do you actually approach it? How do you find these people? You're not just going to LinkedIn.

[00:32:45] Is this a network? Is this introductions or these people that you're watching in industry and handpicking? Yeah. So our first hires were a couple of engineers and they came purely through networks. It was kind of friends of friends, people who could vouch for them. And they've worked out super well. We've ended up being quite a distributed team right now. We kind of didn't intend that, but we just found amazing people who are in different places and have been able to bring them on board and build an asynchronous culture.

[00:33:12] But for those first hires, it was just opportunistically network introductions. And that's worked out. I'm good at strategy and ideas. So I need people around me who are good at execution and keeping the trains running on time and really just driving execution and who are kind of good at planning and super organized. I find I pay really well with those sorts of people generally. Ryan, who do you need to have around you? That's a good question. I need creative people around me. No, I'm kidding. I feel like I know where this conversation is going, James. No, no, no.

[00:33:41] And he's going to say, see, I can't do any work. I'm just going to do good ideas. And that's it. That's what's going to happen. So thank you. I appreciate it. No, no. The idea is only as good as the execution. So you can have great ideas. But if you don't have the execution, either yourself or the team around you, who cares about the idea? It's a tree in the forest that fell. Because I've never actually thought about that. Like, who do I need to have around me?

[00:34:11] I think I like, for me, I need people that I can go on thought experiments with. That I could run an idea into and then just work it through. And then go away and I can do whatever. But I need that, I think. I think that's why you use ChatGPT so much now. We're friends. We've got to have an unhealthy relationship, me and my friend. Fair enough.

[00:34:41] Fair enough. So one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, we have a friend that does have a coaching platform in New York. It's called Pilot, Pilot.coach. But the bit is, he's not looking at the leaders per se. He's looking at the emerging leaders. So who's next? And I'm fascinated with that. And I'm fascinated with that because it's that succession without saying succession.

[00:35:07] Because succession sounds like a bad word for some folks. So with Tenor, you're looking at leaders, managers. Are you going to, do you believe it'll go all the way down to employees? Do you feel like it's just going to go all across with the organization and you're starting out of place? Yeah. I think we, so we know that role plays are valuable for everybody and role plays are the, really what our, what our first product does today. I don't know.

[00:35:37] We, so part of it is just focus. We, we're trying not to be all things to all people, but we do see the value. Right. Like, I think I had this opportunity to report to some like amazing mentors during my time at work day, especially when I was like leading organizations. When you've got a manager who's like seasoned and they've seen it all before. So like anything I saw that I was like, what, how do I deal with this? So my manager at the time had seen everything before and a million times he could just kind of tell me.

[00:36:01] And he was able to do that because he, he, he's just been a manager for a long time and had got the reps in and had seen it all before. And I think with things like AI role plays, I think we can start to accelerate that process for earlier career leaders where they can work with AI characters and they can have performance conversations and deal with difficult characters and kind of get the reps in, in a way that's like safe and secure and, uh, and simulated. So we, we, we see AI maybe just being an accelerant to help people get further in their careers faster. Yeah. I love the idea.

[00:36:30] This is, this is the part of AI and, and learning that fascinates me. So James, we've, we've been down your whole career, right? I'm sure we can talk for, for days on this final question on, on my side. You've, you experienced a long career. You've been through startups in the corporate back into now building another, another startup, but you don't get there by accident, right?

[00:37:00] Right. So you've been through school, you were told why music, all of that. You, you've experienced all of this now. What do you tell your younger self? If you could go back and tell your younger self, what's the advice you give that person? Great question. Yeah. It's probably just, sometimes it's okay to just kind of, to not know. And sometimes when you see a promising thread, just pull on it and see where it goes. Uh, for me, that thread happened to be like video learning just because that was, that was taking off around the time I was starting my career.

[00:37:29] But I think it's just like be opportunistic when a thread comes up that you think could be interesting and something pulls you towards it. Just pull on that thread and lean into it and see where it goes. I love that. That's just great advice. The last thing for, for me, and this has been wonderful, James, the world of kind of, I've told people this and first of all, it's probably a lie. So I'll just own that.

[00:37:51] But during a recession, the things that usually don't get cut are payroll technology, benefits technology, and anything related to high potentials or high performers. So they're not going to cut off their nose and bite their face. And those other technologies kind of make the business run, even if they have less employees. Do you see, do you see the same thing in the folks that you're dealing with that they need that learning?

[00:38:20] They need it in the way that you're delivering it. And even if, even if there's a recession or whatever, they still need to invest in what's next and the, in the people that are leading the company and the people that are kind of at that next. Yeah. Good question. Maybe two answers to that. They're a little different.

[00:38:38] The first is, I think, so I spend every day speaking with leadership development leaders at large companies, and they're so focused on building their leadership bench, making sure that they've good pipeline, good leaders in place, good succession planning. And they're looking to heavily invest there to make sure that that's the case. Also, I think you talked about things getting curt and when times get a little tough. I think one of the best things about AI is it can really be a false multiplier for like small L&D teams or small leadership element teams.

[00:39:07] You look at even large companies and look at the leadership development team or manager effectiveness team specifically. It's usually going to be like three, max five people in that team who are looking to help every manager across the company. And I think AI really helps those small teams as a false multiplier and helps them like help people at scale. Also, sometimes we'll meet companies where they've just got to the point in their life cycle where they're starting to invest in leadership development. And they'll have one person and not one person's like, hey, it's just me. I need to help every manager across the company.

[00:39:37] I've got a couple hundred managers and they're going to have to use technology to do that. So I think AI just lets us be a false multiplier in new ways. Drops mic, walks off stage. That is so genius. Clone yourself. Oh, you can't do that? All right, AI. James, this has been wonderful. Thank you for carving out time for us. I know Ryan and I learned a lot. I know the audience will love this as well. So we appreciate you. Just thanks for being here.