MASTERING COMPANY GROWTH with JOE SCHAEPPI, CEO & Co-Founder of Solsten

[Music] everything [Music] welcome welcome everybody to the deconstructor of fun past podcast we got a returning guest star Mr Joe shepi welcome back thanks Mishka and you are straight out of a board meeting is that correct uh yeah I I am so for the introductions for people who haven't listened to the podcast with you Joe shepi CEO of solston um he's in New York at the moment he just finished a very great board meeting I assume so and I would like to hear what is a good board meeting since that's something that you just did for a startup yeah um I mean I I it's such a on such a big question on on Pat and you know it changes with the the context of the board where you're moving

as a company and I think you know I get to see a lot of I mean you probably get to see a lot of startups too we're post series B now and what was a good board meeting when your pre-seed or seed is so different and I think you know it's really like once you get kind of past series B the Dynamics really they shift they change because you go from a lot of growth stage VCS and what happens is a lot of the times those VCS by the time you get to series B they've they've made their returns you know they can they can go back to their LPS and say hey look at soulston um look at look at where we started with them and look at them now and you know even in like bad markets like if you're a company that you're worried about getting marked down or things like that there's they're still happy and so you move into the world of well most of the time when when people are investing you at different stages they're thinking of well if I invest 5 million you know this has to exit for at least X if I invest 50 million then so

so the expectations that you're managing are very important and what what I tend to do is I look at each investor that that we have and what are their goals why are they here what do they care about um who are their LPS what does good look like for them and during the pandemic all of our board meetings were were online uh they were in Zoom calls I I personally think that you just cannot have a good board meeting in a zoom call um I don't think it works uh you need to be in person and a lot of the time so how we how we set this up is we spent time having dinner the evening before what that does it creates a lot of casual conversation around what's actually going on with the business what are your actual problems and then when you get into more of the formalities of of running what looks like a good board meeting um you're you're set up you're setting up your your investors to actually be helpful and I think there's I mean

there's multiple parts of this is you know it some some game companies or some companies we we work with uh don't have effective boards they don't have investors who can contribute or they could contribute at some point and in that case I think as a when you're when you're early like when you're still like series a and before I think you need to be focusing on the business and you need to be helping give your investors the information that they need so that they feel good and secure so that they can effectively communicate to their LPS I think that's number one and investors should be doing everything they can to empower those companies to get [ __ ] done um but then what happens is once once you get beyond that stage um you start to have investors that they're there's they see a lot and so think of like what is the information that they're uniquely poised to see and what do they have and so one of the questions that we ask our our board for example um like Redbirds on our board Galaxy or

their their board observers but they see a lot they see a lot of game companies alumni Ventures sees a lot I think they've invested in over a thousand game companies at this point so you know ask ask them hey what are you seeing in 2023 what is a really good board meeting look like to you because that's actually going to be different from ask that question it's going to be different for every single board member and say can you get an example of what you've been seeing has been working really well so we actually built our board deck off of what they said and then the ones that don't provide feedback that also gives you Insight on where they're coming from I mean this is this is like so simple but yet people don't follow it you have a perfect customer approach you're you're trying to understand not only your client but like not only your VC which is is it your client your partner but also the partners partners which is the lp so you're you know you spend a lot of time on figuring this out and and my question kind of like from this is

like how much effect do you have on your board and how much effect should a CEO post series a have effect on the board because essentially you're really working with this board yeah and and you sh and you should find a way to get to having a functioning board I think what's interesting is so one of one of our board observers who's uh one of the bigger funds that we have they came out of this saying like this was this was the best most productive board meeting we had all Year beautiful and so when when you look at that I think as a Founder you've set the railroad for how that that's going to go in your seed to series a so with soulston we didn't take any money from any investor where I said I can't have dinner with this person seven days in a row that was that was a literal criteria we turned down some bigger deals from investors where the the yeah the name was good the signal was good but

um I'll quote Christian segerstral he he told me this uh earlier in my career and he said kind of what it's like Joe is you get you're you're driving the bus and when you're in your seed stage and there's there's an investor who they want to go a completely different direction than you you're still driving the bus and there's only one other person on that bus and when you turn over to them and say something they still know that you're driving the car but then your series a happens your series B happens these these things and all of a sudden the bus is full and if you have a full bus with a lot of different people on that bus and they all have different ideas of what should happen with the company and you're driving the bus because as as the CEO and founder you're probably uh chairman of the board to at that point as well so it's it's that person's job is to construct and make sure board meetings are run very smoothly that's part of your role and so doing that what you have to consider is yeah I don't think you can do that well online because you

can't spark the the conversations you need to have and then being in person and making sure that you've architected that board well for your vision and that's what's important because at different stages of the company you might have to do different business things that drive the business forward but that's not always what's going to get you to the vision when the vision should be a multi-multi-billion dollar thing it's just if it's if your vision isn't big enough to run things that are in double to Triple digit billions it's too small and so that's your unique job as the CEO and the founder is to bring the company and the investors on that Journey towards something that that is an unimaginable outcome for for everyone and doing that you need to make sure you have people that want to go there with you so if you're not interviewing them early on I think that's number one you know making sure that can you could you have lunch with them could you have dinner with them seven days in a row and if you can't that person's gonna be on your bus and in two years from now

it's not going to go well and so that's I think the the the pre-work that needs to be done and really taking the long-term approach that's one thing solston has done and I can truly say that we we do have that uh you know after the board meeting we get together for for drinks for dinner um it's usually based on because there's a shared value a shared Vision so you know hey we want to be outside like there's not one person there who's like ah yeah I want to be like those are those are I interviewed for it's like yeah you know it's there's there's there's things that you know and that's that's maybe a shallow example but there's a lot of shared interests and shared Crossover with our our whole group and it's I mean it's a very Sultan approach like that's you know as above so below we help other companies understand their customer and their humans and their players in a way that you know at this point nothing can get as close as what soulston does for that you know when we were a startup we you have the vision and you're like yeah like there's maybe you know someone

people who could do this way better but you're getting there step by step by step and so I think that's that's one and then you know the second one is it goes back to uh I had a um talk with Mark Randolph the co-founder of Netflix and you know one of the things she said to me was you're gonna hit these different stages in the company and there's gonna be people that that don't work and there's gonna be people that those same people that don't work they worked really well when you were earlier in the company and it's the same it's the same with board it's the same with tax advisors it's the same with and it's also recognizing and having very open discussions with your board and hey you know what what parts do you think are going well right now um because now what happens is they're going to see themselves as a mirror and everybody has insecurities and issues and a lot of those are going to come up sometimes as you get to later stages because some of those you know really amazing people who helped you early on in your journey they're like whoa like who's on the board now and some of these people are very impressive especially as

you get to the bigger bigger money um and that's okay it's okay that you know you might not be able to show up the same way a certain board member you know used to um and then I think it's also um you know one of the things that we tend to do is we really we deeply align on on the topics uh the what are the key areas of of the business that we want to go on and we create a workshop after after each section so you know it's important that you're empowering those individuals who are now on your bus and hopefully have that shame same shared Vision to Workshop around those around those topics um and you know you could be in a situation in in the company where you're like we don't have a functional board yet we're not there there's ways where you can drive that board to level up so for example solston has a a a separate advisor uh group that's basically um uh c-suites at some of the biggest companies that that we all know um who have they really believe in our vision they believe in the journey and they're

different functional roles and you can bring some of these people in that's an incredible way to to kind of give give the the world of all you know investors and what they do and seeing um what's on the ground floor and how your customers interact with you uh and not always you know doing that with uh the best ones either you know the ones that maybe have struggled a little bit too I think you know being really transparent and what we try to do is on go to all the wherever all the worst [ __ ] is it's you know we want to highlight the positives and and create a story and a narrative that we know we're going to uh achieve and and what we're focusing on but at the same time I think it's really important to not just tell a positive story um we we don't we we make sure like hey here's this here's this part of the company that we're really concerned with right now and and I think what you'd find is um most investors want to hear that they want to know those those things

um and this goes back to trust too and you know it's what type of investor do you have part of the reason why we've turned some of those like we had some pretty nice offers early on um part of the reason why we turned some of those down is there's certain investors that will bet on a category and they'll literally just invest in every single company that's in your category well now how transparent can you be on your board you know so ask you have to really think about you know your to the level that you want to achieve or innovate um who are those who are those people and how transparent are you going to be and what you don't want is this this theater you don't want to create the theater the theater comes eventually as your company gets bigger and bigger and bigger I think it's series C Series D you still shouldn't be in the theater and a lot of series D and series C Founders they end up finding themselves all of a sudden in the theater because they had a Down Round or they had you know some some different type of equity that ended up and now all of a sudden interests are different and that's where

you as a Founder now you're spending way more time thinking about your investors and your board than you are thinking about your company I uh what What's really cool is what I've you know being able to because I don't see you often but I see you on a intervals and I talk to you on on a long enough intervals so I can see the evolution uh of of you as a person but also of course a solstice as a as a company and uh the uh the you've always been a very like uh deep thinker that's that's your advice but um but what I'm seeing is like the uh the level of professionalism is is like going towards an intimidating level and I love that it's like it's such a it's such an evolution that you can see in a person of course bashed in the same way is like when we first met from the point of like you know you had a cool idea and a cool thing and it was like everything was cool and you were fired up like any startup like any couple of a couple of couple of dudes trying to make it to to go into this like like like being above and and Beyond even the companies in

your own stage where you're thinking five steps ahead 12 steps ahead where you're really like like like I mean come on like understanding the LPS of different VCS and thinking about rounds d e uh probably IPOs all those things kind of like making sure that you're not gonna find trouble ahead by not thinking and not calculating your moves right now and and what I wanted to ask is like how much time are you spending now on on board meetings and board alignment like let's say board alignment uh compared to you know let's say seed and a series like how much has it escalated um you know it's it's I think it's in the right it's in the the it's in the right level um so part of I'm fortunate enough to one of one of my advisors um has this is maybe to get into that story so uh around um series B I I went to I went to M and I said uh I think I think I need a coach

um at this point you know because you you're the the founder you are that gets you to series a series a or if you don't raise your series a but the revenue that you're functionally able to you know do what you would need to do at that point it's it's such a different you know um professional version of yourself than the the version beyond that and I think I I benefit in a couple different areas one when I went to this individual to to say that um he goes I'm surprised you didn't ask me um I'm like what do you mean and a lot of this came from I just read this book um uh trillion dollar coach and it's it's uh Eric Schmidt um the founder of Google and a lot of these he's talking about yeah Bill Campbell and Bill Campbell you know with Steve Jobs coach he was Eric's coach he was on their boards he was chairman of the boards at Apple uh you know these kind of groups and um my my one of my advisors he's like yeah he's

like Bill was on my board like Bill's a really good friend so you know part of it is everyone thinks you can get everything from the internet like false a lot of what's on the Internet is horrible and you look at um how ancient cultures just you know how information worked well you had to go find the guru you had to find the the wise old person and when you found that person they orally disseminated knowledge to you and and they did that through storytelling and they did that by understanding your story and understanding their story and so this is like a person that I've been able to go to in these sort of scenarios and they know solston from the very beginning all the way through now and you know in the very beginning it's a very different situation it's yeah your your board needs to basically enable you but also know how to just get out of the way like a lot of the stuff founders need to do around the the and I know there's some investors that are probably going to listen to this and be like oh this guy you know because they made me talk to me but Manny was but and and and and and so

these are his words he goes you know if you look at angel to seed investors he literally like there's there's some of the worst because they're least they're the least professional and they'll sit there with Founders and go Dance For Me Just Dance you know they want you to do and they and what's interesting about the seed stage like if I look back to solston the dances each one wanted us to do was so completely different and so it's like it's like you want what you need to make yourself feel secure to make this investment based on what's there and I asked a tuomas who from inventure who they've got our seed round um they let our series a I really believed in us and I asked why did you why'd you invest in Bastion and I yeah I had to think back to it and he was like um I just believed in the two of you you know he said there's a lot of the all the financial stuff was there but and I said well what do you think makes a really good seed in series a investor and he's like what's so much about the founders early early on it's so much

about that and but you know and and so go in go in there but yeah sorry Michigan you're gonna no well see a lot of investors say that actually I want to I want to quote one one partner at a fund not a small one we uh who I talked to this week and we actually I don't know I somehow mentioned you like maybe I was saying like we have a podcast whatever maybe we're talking and he said this because you were talking about a lot of a lot of investor past he's like oh yeah yeah yeah we shouldn't have passed on them hahaha it's I know because I was like yep yeah yeah right right now like I mean we just got featured by by pitch book um like on kind of on a global yes I saw that you know and you know we just got featured as you know top you know not that these things mean a lot but you're like okay Fast Company top 25 you know work for innovate innovators and you you

look back then and another quote from a friend um his name's name is Naveen Jane um we we were talking early early on and I said like we're just not getting traction within with investors like it's just hard it's not happening and he said talk me through it Joe so I talked to him a little bit about about what we're doing what's happening and he's so funny he he turns to me and he goes well that's because you have a billion dollar company and I know because I've made a billion dollar company before and you know the guys the the guy's a billionaire and did his thing you know in the in the 90s in the.com bubble and now he has biome that's his you know his thing now um but he said when you're when how you know how big your actual Tam could be is when you tell your story very early on and certain VCS like most of them are just either gonna say no or even laugh um and when you have a very small part

of the market who's very intimate with with that market and they are like super like this is awesome this is something um I can't say all the names of angels angels who we had but if I think of like we had we had people that I highly respect and um we we got them as customers and I'd get off the call and it and they'd go hey can can I invest in this too and the the validation we had from that small percentage of people was I think that was really incredible a lot of the you know a lot of out of the seed to series a b c's that you look at companies that raise really easily or raise quickly um that's that's that's great I think it's a different mindset too it's like well what is you have to look into the actual fund and what have their exits been like in the past and what are they actually going towards like I knew that solston was going to take time so I knew

that we needed to get best investors that are willing to have a really long-term approach to things so when the seven year mark there's a saying like when seven years comes around you for that and for that investor their LPS start knocking on the door and saying hey you know depending on who those LPS are but how much how much as above so below how much autonomy does that LP have within their LP base and how much do they believe in that Vision in the long term and that's you know you guys want to be on the same on the same bus I think going to going to series B is where because you know to answer the question on time and time spent you I know we're like but you go from you should be really saying you know okay series A at that point your advisors should be in most cases way more helpful because you're so much more focused on product and proc product Market fit and unless unless the people on your board were

former Founders who have built products I'm sorry it's like it's like going to a dentist to get advice from you know on a on a text I don't know completely different type of surgery it's just not you're you're you need people who have been there who have been in the trenches but then when you get to scaling the business and growing it at scale that's where your the board that you hopefully have architected at that point is going to be really really good because they're going to be so much closer to the market today what's actually happening within the market what good looks like what good doesn't look like because that's where a lot of product Guru type ex-founders Big Exit type people when they when you're more at that point A lot of times some of the stuff will say we're like you'll be like yeah that was relevant in 2009 you know so it's it's I I use this example with one of one of our advisors he's amazing but I went to Bastion and I'm like the thing he just said is like what Baby Boomers in America say when they're like hey when I

went you know when I was your age I paid my way through college and it's like yeah that's when in a grocer cost you know it's the world we live in today how come competitive it is and what a lot of people don't realize like pretty much every company competes on a global scale now yes you know you used to compete within much smaller scales so yeah yeah no there's a there's a lot of things that that you said because I'm like you're five steps ahead of me already so so I was one of the things that you said um that um that inventors said the one was it almost from inventures yeah yeah well he said like he believed you and as a team and kind of going back to my you know even the podcast on on this one with a16z and other investors they always say that they invest into great Founders and I'm I've never seen the uh the sort of a thesis of what makes a great founder is it a gut feeling or a founding team and so everybody says it but what does it mean I mean it's like

in games does it mean that uh we worked at Blizzard or Riot that does that makes us a great Founders uh and and that's a and the other thing is like why a lot of companies passed so there's there's only two companies that have invested into after like having a conversation with them without any like even an idea on investment but they're asking like after the conversation or after using their product it's like can I invest and so Solstice is one of the other one of them and um and and the the the thing is like I had the same approach as any investor would be in that situation when I first met you guys at Rovio when you came in pitching I was like the first thing is like you're leaning back to the uh the previous like okay they got some kind of like a user research thing we got house full of user researchers I don't need some silly platform uh to do this nonsense it's like I'll just ask one of the uh the dudes or the ladies working in the uh in the in the research center or you know we run play test cloud and we do it but again like I try to actively like push away my preconceptions of everything and like

okay let's just have a conversation and then what I loved about especially your approach is because you tell a lot of like stories from the past and the and the insights that you've gotten and then you get to use the platform and kind of like giving it enough time and pushing away your preconceptions of of what you think is the world and how you've used them as you said a baby boomer it goes back to like five years ago if if like this is how games are done these are the tools that we use we don't need anything else sure but then you're stuck in something so I kind of like you know pushed it away let's let's just have an open mind I heard you guys look use the platform and and uh there was like a no-brainer and and it's kind of sad that I feel like I wouldn't blame the investors but I think especially a lot of the the pre-seed and Seed investors have just so many companies pitching to them that I don't even think they have enough time to really get to know platforms when at the same time they need to understand the games they're being pitched and so forth so

kind of like platforms for them was like oh it's not scalable it's not a VC case maybe an angel investment case that's a pre-preconceived notion that's uh that's you just push it away onto the next one is this one is this one is what is a good team where'd you guys work that okay this is a good team and moving on so so yeah kind of like my two thoughts two cents on that yeah I mean if you I'd encourage anybody to read unity's fundraising story from Day Zero to where they got to it's on there you can Google it and and you know I was talking with with David about uh unity and and it's like it's rough it's that's it's a rough story and the thing is you know what you hear as a platform um and you know we see ourselves more as an engine than a platform at this point it's because it's alive it's breathing it's like when people use our product to its potential it's like my mind's blown um I used to say when I was the head of ux at Big Fish games like sometimes you

have certain games and you have these like power users and they play the game in a way that you couldn't even imagine you're like you you developed the game you made the game and you're like whoa and most game developers are also Gamers and you know we say our products limited to two things your Tech stack and the imagination of your team and when you put those two things at a high level like some we basically work with every big name at this point you see some of the people that get a hold of it and they they see what they can do and how you're enhancing their creativity their imagination to do things they could never be able to do for their audience and you're just like holy [ __ ] this is this is incredible what's happening within this game and then you wish you could do that for for every other game but I think that that image imagination limitation is important and I think a lot of like you said a lot of seed and um series a and pre-seed investors you have to have a vision for your if it's a group you have to have a vision for your group and have you have to have a vision for yourself if you don't have a vision

for yourself as a VC you're a leaf in the Wind different companies are going to blow you around in different direction and most of all Trends are going to blow you around we hear this all the time we got this from alumni Adventures they're like all these people are coming to them now going like you guys are way behind on AI who are your AI companies who are and they're like solston you know like when when we were raising money and we were saying you know this is the this is the machine learning deep learning thing that we're developing you know and I try to stay away from the word AI because there still is no such thing as actual General artificial intelligence you know we're still using technology that was thought through 60 years ago but at the end of the day you know we can do it differently now because of computing power because of resources because of data at scale and if you look at that that vision that you have to have as as an individual and this is where I think like some investors bring up things like you know we have a thesis or something

like that like one of the most popular ones um I'm not going to name names but they came to us and they basically said oh we're just developing our thesis on that and this is when we had changed our name to solston and I'm like oh that's that's interesting yeah we're we've because they said they're gonna pass and they said well we don't have a thesis for it yet and I said well who are you developing the thesis off of and well this company called 12 traits which that was us um like that's interesting and you know and I think what's I mean there's in SAS there's been about 2 600 categories that have been created and it's a very different type of business when you create a category versus evolving a category Solstice creating actually multiple categories because it goes It goes beyond games too I mean we're we're literally advancing human understanding as a fundamental science like if you look at our patents and what's there and and going and approaching a scientific

problem like if you compare us to Delta DNA there's no IP that was sitting behind that when when Unity acquired that it's it's a platform um but if you look at the actual and this is how games in the whole industry looks at things very differently than for example the medical industry like where we're going through this process right now where we have like Cherry Tay in in Berlin as a partner uh tilting Point uh tempura University in Finland and we're using real games to do medical work and actual look at mental health because the medical industry has a massive engagement problem uh and games have we fixed the engagement problem we know how to do that in our industry and so you look at you know things things like this and how the medical industry looks at patents they're like oh my gosh like because those it's worth very different things and as the gaming industry matures as content becomes more and more important as we move towards an industry that's more and more competitive we've had the luxury of hey

you know what games are popular merge games you know what's cool dragons let's make merge dragons like you had that like a lot of where like people are getting bitter now is because when you took the whole ATT thing plus the openness of the market in like the 2010s to 2018s like it was just there was a lot of stuff that was right for the picking and it was like being a a good Surfer a lot of people we were in the right place at the right time and we were all there and things were good and now the rest of the world is like like there's there's a lot here and I think games are gonna be they're just gonna become play is going to become more and more ubiquitous that's just it's you know we talk like right now the companies we talked to we're in talks with like I don't know maybe 20 to 30 Fortune 500s that are like how do we integrate Soul stand into our into our reality into our experiences it's just and and there's what for you mentioned this for the game companies who are willing to burn down some of their old ways of

thinking about reality there are Financial opportunities right now for game companies that you can't even imagine they're so big because if you look at I mean learn talks with United Health right now United Health from a revenue perspective that's top 10 companies in the world not like like not not in a market like literally their their yearly revenue is larger than the entire Revenue we produce as an entire industry as as an entire gaming industry you know so if you look at the scale that's there and if you look at companies like this that are going how do we deepen our experiences how do we relate to patients better how do we understand people better it's pretty cool I think that you're absolutely like this is this is something like you know I've been two weeks now where I don't have to go to work every every afternoon where I don't go to work every day I can actually think about things and have a conversations with people not only in games industry but in the tech in general yeah the intersection between

apps and games is becoming you know a real thing like of course we see the signals of it where people who are leading Zynga and glue have went to match group and they're hiring now PMs and doing this but even talking to like I was talking to doordash for example and oh I'm like oh detailed I could let's just put it this way uh they are doing a lot of gamification things and they were as excited as we were as product managers in 2012 about integrating small things and how those Drive different conversion how they can change um human behavior um and just optimizing their apps in a very gamification manner but when I say 2012 I mean like the ideas that they have and the approach that they have is 2012 approach they're not approaching it from from the perspective where we are right now where we're going deeper than demographics we're truly trying to understand you know players traits and and and when we're truly pushing for a social experience and creation of a community rather than let's add a little

gimmick to increase conversion by two percent which at scale means like tens of millions and then I can go in and Hive five rest of my PMS that that uh I'm such a smart dude because I came up with this little trick so it's a it's a really fascinating and it's it's very very interesting to see this intersection becoming uh more visible and the other thing that is driving it is of course the economy not only the ATT but the economy where we can see that there's a significant drop and they not purchases when it comes to games but the drop in subscription is not as significant when we talk about the Netflix's and then and they you know the tinders and and whatnot services that people feel are much more mandatory because we felt before that the games are the ones that are not going to be touched by recession and they're Recession Proof maybe but it seems like the entertainment services that didn't exist in 2008 and 2009 those are really the recession-proof one where the last thing is going to go is your Netflix subscription so it's um it's it's

fascinating and that's why I'm like a firm believer and that's you know I told the uh the investor as well like I I like I'm like they're moving up not they're they're not moving away from games they're expanding to all the other ones this was just the tip of the spear and they're going to take the whole Spear and uh and that's where I was like yeah yeah they're probably right so so yeah yeah I think like the just just where this this industry's at and you look at the crossover of you know a lot of people in gaming and this is back I think back to opening Minds um and if you look at the data the more so the person has a master's degree a person has a PHD uh you kind of go through that they're more likely to be biased like that's that's what the data clearly shows so actually the more we learn and the more we're reinforced at something it's a perfect example is the way we did UA in the 2010s people were like I've seen people in the last two years get put into VP and marketing roles who think that they're gonna still do things that way and all of them are no longer

the VPS of marketing at the game companies that we worked with and they came in really stubborn you know this is how things go and I call it kind of like the BF Skinner effect so BF Skinner is a famous behavioral psychologist he invented behavioral psychology essentially and if you look at the world of of Freud and psychoanalytics that was a huge break huge scientific breakthrough and he probably had to fight tooth and nail to get there to to hey we're in the world of Behavioral psychology now well in the 1960s you know cognitive psychology really started taking off and if you fast forward to today we don't have behavioral psychologists we have cognitive behavioral psychologists and we got so good as an industry at working with behavioral data behavioral data this is really important it's people's behaviors people's behaviors your behaviors are not your psychology they're not your brain they're not your personality those things compel Behavior they're farther

upstream and that's why when we see results when we see efficacy in clinical studies no one's doing behavioral psychology anymore we're all doing cognitive behavioral psychology but BF Skinner till the day he died no matter how many studies how many clinical outcomes was still like this cognitive stuff is just [ __ ] it's it's only behavior and you know we still use like um you know behavioral therapy the one area where it's still really used is with phobias actually works works well with that like you don't need to go to the cognitive stuff if you don't want to but humans are pretty complex and our interaction of our brain and behavior they they come back and forth you know if you look at your your brain for every about you know one one connection going from your brain to your body there's about seven going from your body to your brain so feedback loop wise your body's talking to your brain sometimes a lot more than your brain is talking to your body but when your brain sends information to your body that's high powered information that's like you know so we're these things are in

communication and our behavior and our cognition go back and forth but that individual fought so hard for behavior that later on in his life he literally almost discredited himself for and people like this guy is nuts you know but he wasn't he was he paved a lot of paths and Technology moves so fast and the gaming industry moves so fast that there are people who are like they just crushed it with UA in 2017. like yeah they were the they were the masters of UA and just hitting dopamine every day and spending lots of cash and you know it's that's there was that era and and the brain was so positively reinforced that you know what one of the bets that soulston made that was com that was off it wasn't completely off but it was off we developed this product called frequency it's amazing product uh but we said hey it's all going to switch over to creative now you know our AI tags all the creatives it actually predicts based on the psychology of your audience what creatives resonate every time we use it with a customer we have multiple

customers that have Evergreen creatives that are like yep it's still our best creative that came out of came out of that but what was not there was any sort of mass adoption because people were still trying to figure out and like it's like that scene in um Zoolander like we're like it's in the computer and they're like hitting the computer they're still trying to like oh when is when is this gonna this ATT thing when it like when is oh Apple's gonna release their platform eventually and we can do it again and we got so comfortable with that and the reality is if you look at the last 100 years of advertising like understanding your customer and creating really cool ads off of them has always worked like the ROI of creatives like fifty percent of the ROI but I think what happens is like as an industry we go you know this is how we made games we we looked at the competitors game and hey they're in the top 10 and let's let's copy features there well there's a lot of reasons they're in the top ten it's like there's there's a glass ceiling that's there that it's it's self-reinforcing it does not mean it's

the best game you know 100 million new people every year are playing games now like that's a lot of people new people net new and so you go okay when these people go into the App Store and those top 10 games are there they don't know there's 800 000 games but they're going to download one of those probably so there is a self-fulfilling prophecy that's happening so discoverability is a huge problem and so people are turning to IP you know we work with games that use IP for example where we had a um a customer who said hey we know all about those those players because it was an IP game that was competitive their bigger game we know all about those players and we had both game companies as customers yeah this this this this and this and I'm like no that's not Their audience at all but I bet I know what you did so talking about consumer insights and the bubbles that people live in what they did is send out surveys to their player base and ask them hey do you play this competitor game it was the IP game do you play that game and they ask them a bunch of questions and I said well what if I told you that 95 of this

multi-multi-million person audience now never played a game in their life before they played this IP based game and the only reason they installed it was because of the IP that's it and you know this like wait what you were literally surveying less than five percent of the population and so when we look at like you know how what are ways that we're we're thinking about evolving and moving into the the companies that thought that way first like early early on in the pandemic and early when tracking went away they're the ones that are ahead right now and whether they understood that they needed to work with IP or develop themselves compelling art styles and themes and IPS that were interesting because it's either they both work but it has to be compelling enough to you know bring a person in and so just little ways of how do we think differently whether it's for VCS game developers Etc how do we open our mind to what is possible and it's it's a

skill it's a muscle I think that's what's important it's not something you can just go I'm open-minded no [ __ ] it's you have to actually practice it you have to practice in what possible worlds and you know here's a list of themes of Realms of possibility and these are all the ones that I don't believe in one of the best exercises you can do as I think as an investor or even as a Founder I do this is is one of the things that I think are just absolutely nuts that absolutely are impossible I'll give you an example with solston um one of the core Theses that we have is that play is the truest expression of self you know hey there's this 50 year old guy he's a pink haired orc female character in his game that's interesting why did he choose to be that when no one was looking you know there's a reason why why Facebook doesn't really know much about who you are they know what you do they know they know some of your interests and things like that but that's not who you are all those all those things change you know who you are your personality

your cognition those a lot of those things are are much more Baseline much more a part of I don't wake up tomorrow and I'm all of a sudden not an extrovert or not an introvert um there's a stability of Personality over time and there's a reason for that like if I met you on the street Mishka and all of a sudden I'm seeing a completely different person I can't be I have no object constancy then like how do how would a world even work if if we were that permeable and not changeable from so when we go back and you look at you know what are the things that that really stick and that really are are kind of constant you can start to to predict Downstream things and play is just incredible for that um I used to be an adventure based psychotherapist I don't know know if we talked about this too much but yeah the previous podcast yeah probably as a clinician I worked with people and one of my favorite activities was this canoeing activity you get like this couple there's typically a husband and a

wife in this sort of scenario and you tell the husband you're gonna canoe 45 degrees to the right and then 45 degrees to the left and end up at this point over here and then you tell the wife you're gonna go 45 degrees to the left so opposite direction and then 45 degrees to the right ending up at the same point neither have heard me tell them this you get in a canoe it's the tippiest canoe that you can find beautiful and you get the couple in there and then they start they start paddling and they're not allowed to talk verbally they can only non-verbally communicate the tipier the new canoe tippier the relationship usually and what you'd have with really bad relationships a lot of time they both end up in the water you know they're yelling we were supposed to go that way I know we were supposed to go that way they're yelling different directions and they forget that I'm there they forget that their therapist is just chilling in the background watching this unfold and what I'm getting to see is reality I'm getting to see what they're like at home I would never have seen that if we're all sitting on a couch in a room doing

classic cognitive behavioral therapy I'm getting to see authentic Behavior I step in and I say were you both where were you both supposed to end up and they both you know right there they yell same spot you know at that at that end there and then they look at me they look at each other they're confused and I'm like do you ever think in your marriage both of you have different ideas of how to get to the same spot but if you could communicate better it's just a straight line whoa okay and what we just achieved in therapy would have taken days and days and days of cognitive behavioral therapy on a couch I was doing I'm doing cognitive behavioral therapy in a play setting in an adventure setting games that's what we do it's games are played with rules that's it if you're a great game designer you know how to put rules around play like I love the example of tic-tac-toe like tic-tac-toe people like it's a stupid game I'm like is it get a good game designer on that game and you'll see things happen so like soulston would go hey you want to do tic-tac-toe for people in this city what's what's one of the top things we know about them oh they're soccer players okay they're motivated by status

all right well how do you change that game now okay well what if you put the tic-tac-toe on a wall and you have to kick the soccer ball onto the dots to actually say your X is your o's you get an X soccer ball you get an O soccer ball and the people that win it's a it's a gym maybe or something there's a big status Board of status right there like you're making money and that's an interesting game because now it involves skill air it's not as it's not just you know so it's like where I was going this with this whip play is you know we see it we see that play is a is a such a cool authentic predictor of personality of who you are and you combine that with classic psychological assessment so you're looking at the person's Baseline you know what what what do we know and construct validity so we're comparing those two things so we know we're measuring what we're intending to measure it's part of the reason why game companies get the results they do our measures are just so much more accurate

than anything anyone can do outside um and maybe to speak to that like you know Matt Matt stright who is he was the director of research at scopely um he used our product back in the day Matt's here now Lisa Welch she was the head of strategy at Activision she's at solsta now like a lot of the best in the business like Lisa and Matt were sitting next to each other and at least ask Matt could you go back to doing understanding audiences the way we used to at Activision at scope please and Matt Matt looked at her and he goes if I wanted to hate myself um you know and so back to like open-mindedness what I do is one of the areas that is incredibly interesting in terms of human psychology and human understanding are the eyes and if you look at most biometric data it's not very indicative of who we are like your cortisol levels or your heart

rate variability a lot of these things they're they're they're they change they change based on environment like I have this whoop thing here yeah I I canned it two years ago I stopped using it and then I'm I'm playing with a new bed set up so I'm kind of looking at hey based on that what's different but if I look at in in New York what this says versus when I'm at home New York's awful so so you know you're you're these things are not really good predictors of who you are they they change a lot my level of extraversion in New York is still the same as when I'm when I'm at home um that doesn't change but I looked you know you look at what meta's doing and you know where vr's going and and eye tracking like when your eye makes cicades for example um that's a good example of stress uh when people are stressed out your eye will skip more than it normally does um three cicades I think in about a second so our eyes are actually moving pretty quick we can't see it as human beings but that stuff that's that's bio bio mechanically happening in our bodies

well the eyes in many ways you know ancient wisdom the eyes are the windows to the soul our occipital lobe is back here it's about 30 of our brain it's the biggest part of our brain um that you know you you go through sort of your optic nerve you have your lgn all this is connected and if you look at what's happening in the eyes my grandpa was an eye doctor for tell you like 88 years old he did his whole career I said Joe like I can examine somebody's eyes and I can know so much about them just just with one examination he did this his whole life and so what are things that you know two years ago me who who is the who is the BF Skinner in me going oh you know um yeah play play is that play is where it's at and I go biometric stuff no way no all that sleep tracking stuff that's not going to get us any closer but I have to look at those things and go well what if it does what if it could um you know there was a uh one of the ex Tinder Founders goes I'm releasing a

mental health app that uh tracks mental health through phone usage and my preconceived things that I've learned throughout my whole career is like no way impossible no way I I have to step into his shoes and even though he wasn't a practitioner in his past like I was even though he maybe he's got something there and I have to open my mind to that and I have to play Devil's Advocate to my own self and I think that's what makes really good investors really good Founders and actually really good operators really good consumer insights managers really good CEOs of Studios Founders when you're willing to like you just said Mishka you have your time to think and I love this if quote you know it's like if you don't have 10 minutes to think you need 20. uh I literally carve out think time for myself and uh I had an employee comment this on this in the past it was kind of funny but my my think time in the winter is when I do my Nordic scheme I'm I love Nordic skiing

we do our vasilopa we do our all our races and stuff and they're like you're just skiing I'm like that's when my mind opens up that's when I'm yeah that's when I can think and blood flow to the frontal lobe and you know so I have to get by the way I say to that like I have the same thing so what I used to do is um like biking for me is it's kind of like skiing it's like a relatively low um how would I put it low technical you know like like it's just it's it's just cardio it's quite simple just to you go ahead it doesn't require you to to think too much as you're skiing or you're biking uh but but the the thinking that happens because it's so easy and doesn't require you're just focusing on your heart right and everything and sometimes listening to a podcast but I've noticed that now more and more I'm not listening to anything except my own mind yeah and just going through and sometimes you're like I'm gonna go a little bit further and so what I did is like when I didn't have enough time I actually used to used to commute on a bike and I noticed that in the summertime I was just much more

alert like much more happier because I had the time to think while I was going to work and think back and as I was coming back from work and that helped me to to kind of like close or open up you know the uh the mind and in the winter times it's not like you live in Minnesota it's the same thing as Helsinki literally the same looking place so so I put in I got a bike with spikes and I just blasted it once I went I loved it so much this whole thinking that I went once in a blizzard like my wife was like it's amazing listening to Goggins in the background so so before I went and my wife because I was just going through the goggin second book and and my wife was like were you insane like it's a blizzard you're not gonna go on your bike and my I was like yeah she's right and then my mind was like oh I'm being a [ __ ] she was right that was stupid but uh but I did go in a blizzard right I think

it's important like you know I look at um and as a Founder I think you need to and this is VCS too because you need to have conviction and things for the long run and I'm like if you haven't done hard things in your life like go to luck um yeah you know so I remember I I skied the vasel open and was this year it was minus 48 Fahrenheit which was minus 40 Celsius in Fahrenheit is the same so it was cold and no one showed up I had to sign a death waiver you know it's pretty long um and I remember going through that and finishing and everything after that whether it's running a business whether it's raising money it's but it's easy you know and when you've had those sort of hard experiences I think why it's why a lot of Founders who have big access or become successful I'm like look who's doing an Iron Man looks and it's it's almost like they have to do hard things

um but what I think it does do like there's this you know there's this research showing that you know people who survive the Holocaust for example they ended up all living into the late 90s and you know you can unpack what that might be but I don't think a lot would stress you out after that like not much like you wake up and you've seen those and it's not that we should be you know obviously you know creating Horrors but in our day-to-day life I actually think if I was there I'd be like [ __ ] yeah Mishka let's like go biking that blizzard because it's like even if it's stupid and even if you're you're still in Helsinki you're still in a place where you're not in Wilderness like I'm I'm a Wilderness first responder if you were like if we were four hours away from help and you're like Joe I'm gonna go off and do a little bike yeah exactly but but when you have like infrastructure and things around you like when you when you do Boston and minus 48 there's still there's still Medics there there's still a city that's right next to you there's infrastructure and it's like you can do that's part of

what Adventure therapy is about we have a list of all the different adventure activities and their risk profiles and the idea is how do you allow people to experience hard things in safe ways because what that does and this is a lot of what really good games can do too it activates your nervous system so your adrenaline your epinephrine epinephrine's like a neural lubricant it allows your brain to relate and move in ways that it couldn't before so if you want to rewire your brain think of like you know PTSD there's a lot of epinephrine in that event bad things happen your brain's like wired for that moment now because that's threatening your survival well you know what it works in the opposite direction too if you want to rewire something in a positive direction and you have epinephrine in your brain it's a much better environment and people go well can't we just inject people within that epinephrine no other just take them down it's it's and and it's why we this this kinesthetic metaphor these visceral moments of place of time of all these

things that are happening are so important for ingraining those memories ingraining those moments with behavior and so you know when someone says like I'm gonna go bike in the blizzard and I'm looking at they're in Helsinki they're fit um they're they're well geared up you know we have the same in the nordics and Minnesota you know no no bad weather only bad gear and but it I'm looking after this profile it's actually pretty low but it's an incredible opportunity to do something hard where maybe there is a little bit of adrenaline and it's a brilliant moment to if you want to change how you think that's the moment that you're going to change how you think yeah and and when you have the right mindset even like again like as you said there's nothing to it it was all right I was the only one outside but and then your mind is saying like because you know the bike doesn't move very well and it was yeah and you're like how come it's taking so long same path I've gone through three years in a row yeah but and then you want to quit and then and then because of you know the daily goggins's that I was listening I was like great I got the uh quit sound

in my in my head now I need to keep going so so it's kind of like great to get that because you don't like oftentimes you look we don't get the quit sound like I mean um we don't yeah just it has to be really hard before your mind is like what do you do like let's just let's leave the bike here let's take a bus like what are we going yeah I think you know that's where you look at like well what's the the psychology okay you're setting up your founder base like in your your thinking way ahead of time and I was when um we we back in the day when we were working with scopely um Henry lowenfels uh yeah Henry is amazing um I didn't know the guy but I walk in the room and Henry's like are you a wrestler and yeah because Henry Henry wrestled in in University and I was like yeah now he just yeah he's like yeah exactly and then he's like you look like a skier too are you from Minnesota because he's starting up connecting dots and he's like do you know do you know the any mention of family name

um and I'm like yeah my dad mentors their their son and he goes oh that's my cousin so it was like this is this happens all within like 30 seconds um never met Henry Henry before but we we have talked about wrestling and and wrestling is a thing where if I I started doing was five years old um it's a thing where you know pushing your mental limit every time you have a match you're at your mental limit because it's two people physically trying their hardest at their ability and skill level to overcome another human yeah it's very important it's it's yeah submit it's you're you're submitting that person and it's different than like um you know Jiu Jitsu or I did quite a bit of Jiu Jitsu when I was in university um where it's like somebody can be very technically skilled and you know um they like they got you they got you in that you know and and then you go roll again and then you got them and it's it's almost more like a little bit of a rap party that happens

we're like wrestling when someone wins or or pins you they just submitted you it's there's this like deep human and you're doing everything you can to make that not happen you know and you have to you have to walk out of that as a five-year-old kid understand that you know that that's the psychology of that and that's why like hard things you know it's I know if there's the hard thing about hard things book and but it's it's I think it's important and you know the only thing I would have said when if I saw you in a blizzard with a bike I just like Mishka like we're in Finland we Nordic ski here like okay let's go get some skis at least get a fat bike like these these are these are built for well like well like when it's when it's snowing a ton here I'll go out and and I'll get on my skis and and I'll see this all these like fat bikes now with the spikes and I'll see I'll see people on the Nordic Trails you know like they're going and sometimes they'll even hook up electric [ __ ] to it I mean you're still just cruising past them I'm like hey like

we've been doing this for a thousand years there's a reason probably why we yeah it's a it's a technical so I do have to say like I've I've also done a lot of like Jitsu but I I trans you know I moved more towards submission wrestling which is exactly like the same thing but without the uh without the pajama which makes it a little bit faster yeah but but it's well you can go singlet you can go shirtless as well it's like the type of a thing because it was good when I was traveling for work I could go to any gym like Jiu Jitsu gym uh and just shorts you know you could have a T-shirt and they'll be fine if you don't because it's like it's let's wrestle it's kind of like that but the submission is is uh it's so Primal and the best thing about the grappling is like you get that you can go 100 because you're not hitting anybody so that allows you to to give you everything and then when somebody submits you and and let's say technically you're on the same level it's quite um it's it's you know every

time like people are so nice and they're so respectful towards each other after those and like those are you know it's like it's so Primal and so real and there's nothing to it it's just like same weight same same um same experience level and just go 100 on each other so it's uh absolutely absolutely I think camaraderie yeah there's there's research out there that shows that young children who engage in ruffle rough rough and tumble play more than ones that do not are least less likely to be incarcerated as adults less likely to be aggressive less likely to have yeah amygdala activation and if you translate that to like first person shooter games like we see a lot of the back end data and people like I'll get this this is a popular ask like Joe but aren't violent video games bad for people no it's actually the opposite like you see people that like especially young young men who play more violent video games actually tend to if we look at like traits like

altruism for example um where we look at traits like empathy within our dashboard tools like you can see those some of those traits especially in young young men getting developed that muscle is getting getting developed and and what happens if you think of like the world if you've never experienced Rough and Tumble play or aggression or things like that if you look at an animal who's been startled or surprised um fear is the scariest thing the the scariest person is an afraid person who doesn't really know what what violence is or and it's not saying to be violent but it's like games actually act as a fake simulator in in many ways for those sort of things to come out you'll get Mike Tyson today this guy's the calmest person in the room like also a lot of weed you know but you know if you think of of there's no one that's probably that threatening to him yeah so his threat his threat response threshold is so high for that guy to have a threat response it's because of who he is and

what he's been through where for people if you've never experienced hard things if you've never experienced Rough and Tumble play as a kid and somebody like nudges you you might have a threat resp person who might have a threat response to that and so I mean the only thing with um violent video games and in the bodies of research that I've I've gone through is there was a study where they had kids um with first person shooter games um shoot compared to police officers and they did more accurately shoot than the police officers that were a part of part of the study so yes games do train um cognitive things they train physiological things they train behavioral things like games are powerful play is a powerful teacher but if you look at um you know a lot of the the people that go out and do crazy stuff it's like they probably could have been very benefited by Rough and Tumble play or you know playing some some more some games that you know might be a little bit more aggressive or things like that yeah

or play hockey yeah I want to not switch gears but talk a little bit about something that you mentioned like briefly which was uh um the uh the reward that you got us as top 100 place to work for uh like top what was it 100 top 100 Tech uh or so yeah so it's Fast Company it's the top hundred places to work for for as an innovator yeah exactly so that's that's a really impressive and well I wanted to ask kind of like a question for for folks you know for the few thousand people who have listened to us talk over the years but like can you walk me through just you know what's the path has been from 12 traits to solston and and and um and you know how did you achieve that like how did you like becoming like top 100 plays to work for an innovator yeah I think it comes back to the very very beginning um I think your job one of your jobs as a Founder uh and whether you're you stay

the CEO or not that's fine but setting down really and really deeply thinking about your values and the values of your company and there needs to be a Venn diagram of the two your values should not be your company's values but there needs to be a crossover between those so one of the things exercises that I often do and I have um I have team leads do this and because because it's not just about the the culture that is the company every single team within your company as you grow should have its own brand feel and culture like what does it mean to be at soulston engineering what does it mean to be at soulston design like there should be visceral feelings that you get when you hear soulston design there should be visceral feelings I know most people who are hearing this don't have that visceral feel doing yet but we have to think that way what are we creating so what I'll tell in place to do so on a personal level think about the five most

impactful happy events in your life and write down the three values that were present during those during those moments now do that for all of those Circle the ones that were most in common across like the top five events those are values that are very important to you now look at the top two to three most unpleasant worst moments in your life and write down the things that that came up for you you know whether it was neglect or there was violence or whatever they were now inverse that what's the opposite of that those are values that are also really important to you because you know there's this this kind of hedonic version of of Happiness which is um you take pleasure minus pain equals happiness well that sort of it's how for a lot of people because most people are hedonic most people aren't you know Buddhists in a tower and so we have to look at at forming that as a company as a breathing organism and when you're a

startup you're like a five-year-old and then we're like where's series B we're maybe a teenager our level of self-awareness of who we are is reflective of the environment we're in the people around us so what we do is we do this as I have individuals that do this and then we do this as a team so we say you know here's and we use the same value assessment we use for players at solston so you know it's it's it's literally the top values that we've statistically seen show up over and over again that are generalizable like you might have a unique value to you and that's okay that's cool but it's generally it might not be relatable to the rest of the world like if we looked at Goggins values they're probably pretty pretty unique um and and that should be the case for you like develop you but we do this with the company and we say you know what are the top three moments you've had at solston what are the top three worst moments you've had at Solstice and let's and let's get those values out there so I want to know that as a company what what our values are and where we're at and I want to know that as individuals

um in terms of their the leads the different team leads because I want to say what are the values that are needed to be really really good at soulston engineering or really really good at soulston design and those two they should have some unique value if they're if I'm really seeing the managers really think through this stuff and then we're coming together as a company and saying what that is well we've done that over the last five years and it has changed the environment changes the people change um where you're located can change and grow and shift and it needs to be a conversation between you as a founder and your vision because you're going to understand values that are going to allow you to get to your vision that the team is not supposed to know and what I mean by that is they don't know because they're not you if they were you they would be your competitor they would be out pursuing the same exact Vision in your position and sometimes that does happen um and and the different values can get to different outcomes for the vision like I'm sure Lyft and Uber have very different values but they both achieve

different outcomes within that same vision space so we do that and I make that a part of and it's it happens like once a year that we do this and we reevaluate it and we refine it and what's cool about it too is if you do it early the values that are most important like you'll see themes you're like wow this one's been there five years in a row then you start to understand what core values are to achieve the vision you need to achieve well what does this help with this helps with hiring this helps with firing like these are things you're both you're like you gotta talk about as Founders like right now if you look at most companies about 20 to 30 percent of the the staff are getting cut uh if look at if we look at a lot of a lot of companies out there it's in the past Twitter Twitter is 80 percent so so and this is startups included and there's a lot of investors going out there with companies that are not doing this and saying why why are you different why is you know because you got to have a really good growth reason

um to be different so that values part is so important because what that does is um you know we we just we've had some scenarios for example where you're going to miss higher you're going to fundamentally Miss higher like I talked to the woman who ran a lot of the HR efforts for when when Microsoft scaled from one to forty thousand people and what she told me was their best hiring managers like the top 25 of hiring managers um about 60 of their hires ended up not being successful at Microsoft so look at the stats hiring is hard and so how do you mitigate that well one of the things you can do is really focus on on values and you know what you're going to mishire sometimes and realize you are missing a value because there's there's an incredible amount of people out there who can um one of my human factors professors at the University of Wisconsin amazing amazing person but he'd been in

um human factors all the way back through World War II like he did submarines and looked at like different military equipment and all this stuff but he said one of the things you realize spending your whole career in human factors is that the dumbest people on Earth will mess things up in the most brilliant ways that the smartest people you've ever met in your life will never even think about there's a quote from a engineer who does trash cans at Yosemite they said if you actually do a Venn diagram of the dumbest people that visit the park versus the smartest Bears there's a crossover in difficulty of opening up trash can that's actually very difficult to solve um so so you're never going to account for anything be easy on yourself that's one of the things that we do is focus on on our values and seeing them as a living breathing organism so there's that side of it can I understand about about the the values part so that's that's interesting so

um are you are you hiring against so okay let me just take a step back the way we we formed this this hiring uh issue which is the most dangerous thing for a startup uh and and for for scale-ups as well is is the uh the Miss hires not only is it that that you're spending a lot of direct resources on hiring somebody or you might be paying recruiter you know you're you're uh you're you're paying the person who's joining but also there's a lot of indirect with the whole team going through the interviews processes then that would that person join you're going to spend time on onboarding there's directed costs with the with the it's but there's indirect cost as you're integrating this person if that doesn't work then you have to go all the way back and advertise the position again and get again the recruiters involved and again doing everything and and if there has been a really bad like a misfit or or you know the the separation sometimes the separation is very nice where both parties say like actually this wasn't the type of a job that I wanted yeah actually you don't really fit and we just shake hands and say like

all the best to you it was great that we gave it a try maybe sometimes in the future that can happen but they can happen also that that it's such a you know poor cultural fit that there's going to be problems inside the company and those are again intangible damage that is being done so there's a lot of direct indirect cultural damage that can be happening through wrong hires uh and and that's why uh it's it's imperative to to get your hiring process right so I'm kind of leading to it to a point what we did is of course we had values that's a that's an important part and they were evolving them but we didn't use company values for hiring that much the company values was more like how do we work like what are the guard rails to get to the mission of the company but what we used in in hiring and what I especially like really started going into is virtues so kind of looking that that you're you're getting a certain type of people that share the same type of Virtues and and I wrote down kind of clearly explain different virtues that

I'm that we're going against and my interview which was always the last one as the as the CEO interview was purely focused on the virtues and it was kind of fun because people didn't expect that I would be asking them type of a question and I had a list that you know I just opened up here it's like I would talk to them like very simple things I would be asking them about like hey like talk to me about the biggest accomplishments in your career and I'm not looking for them to tell me about something magical that they accomplished that's nice all I'm and I have like notes for myself what am I looking for how many times the person says we versus I and because I'm looking for a virtue that's called humility we don't want people that are too arrogant where they don't want to listen to others but we also don't want people who are very Meek where they're afraid to bring on their opinion and I'll be I'll be talking about them how did you handle your failure of that learning like like what did they take out how and and and there were things where I was was kind of probing of like for example how well do they understand themselves you know kind of like uh you know what are the greatest weaknesses uh what would you

change about or what would somebody else say about you so I had like multiple different questions that I would pick up from from those categories and then um and and yeah like we we focused on virtue so my question for you is like like is virtues and values are those two different things or are you hiring against company values like how do you approach that yeah and so so this and this is maybe to to answer that question properly part of why hiring is so hard so I heard this from uh uh General partner at a big find and he said you know Founders need to be doing interviews all the way up until you're about 300 people it's like your your team's gonna not like that but it's important um so here's here's the reality and here's part of why soulston exists because I mean we are fundamentally exploring and and understanding what human nature is we're adventuring in to the abyss of what is human nature and we already are scientifically Way Beyond any medical or university system in terms of what we do at solstan and so part of the problem

with Founders doing that people like like you and I and I do this too because it's one more data point but a people are poor observers of their own cognition B we are poor observers of other people's cognition especially in Zoom settings and see uh impression management is never at an all-time high then in an interview process so if you look at back to Clinical Psychology people like who are cluster bees borderline personality disorder narcissistic personality disorder who these these individuals um often you know they're the first to call another person a narcissist or something like that they're big projectors but they're um you know we can we can know people in the media who who talk like this and act like this but they are some of the best people at interviewing some of the best and so when I ask a question like I'm looking for humility as a virtue um a virtue versus a value virtues are much more evolved values their their

values with a vision is how I like to think of what a virtue is and so most people if you interview for virtues most people don't have virtues values so values are one of those things that are interesting psychologically because they are not pre-installed so your personality there's many aspects of your personality like your nose you have Grandpa's nose you know you have grandpa's eyes or Grandma's eyes like there's aspects of your personality that are pre-packaged pre-installed and a lot of who we become as an adult is how we choose how to express our cool amalgamation of traits you're really The Shepherd of your genetics you're not your mom you're not your dad if you actually look at your genes you're your great great grandpa you're your great great grandma you're you're all these things together and your job is to Shepherd that and your job is it's the classic story of like the one son was an alcoholic the one son never drank and both of them were asked why and both of them said because Dad was an alcoholic you know it's it's two different

outcomes maybe the same behavior maybe the same personality traits but different choices in terms of expression and so when when we look at that you know for us this is something that we did a really good job of and this is like the humanity of a company we did a really good job of this in our first 15 hires so I sent out psychological assessments and I looked at assessment data and what is the thing is so a lot of what soulston does is you know you say oh we're going to develop a survey we're going to develop a questionnaire you know a question like hey tell me about your past achievements and you could do that in a questionnaire and have people write that out and then you could use a NLP model to just look at you know things like we or this or that and you can actually use that model to track against employee success kpis that you track internally to so you could fundamentally over time create actual model that could help predict that just based on that question you could get a score from that

um the problem is is a lot of assessment questions um a lot of survey questions or interview questions are not assessing so a good example is like if I ask you you know on a scale of one to ten how happier are you as a person yeah you know I'm like an eight maybe or seven depends on the day it depends on the day so a that question has really bad reliability so we're gonna get different questions have different answers every single day but actually if we look at the construct that that question measures and I've looked at the construct that question measures it doesn't measure happiness at all not even a little bit it does slightly measure Indulgence slightly so there's you know above a flip of a coin people that are more indulgent tend to be more likely to say they're happier most days but there's way better assessment questions for measuring Indulgence so you need to work with a company like soulston um or there's like um you know there's like Pi metrics and some HR hiring groups out there that there the thing is is they're just the accuracy of what

they measure we don't offer a hiring product yet that will happen in the future um and we do we have where let's well I'm Gonna Leave This on the DL but like we because of what we do at soulston and because we're we're measuring what it means to be human and we're measuring that at high at scale at high level high levels of accuracy um we're able to actually see some of those things so we did a really good job of that in the first 15 employees then we started to scale and this is where I'm not scalable because I was the one person who could deploy these assessments and read them yeah and go oh we need our own internal one that just scores all this stuff that's where I was mentioned like a model and then you have the right assessment questions so you know what what is the right of question that assesses that well you need to hire a psychometrician who can look at things like construct validity reliability all this kind of stuff and so as Founders sometimes we ask questions like that and actually we're getting um maybe we're measuring impression management because people can manage their impression on an interview they can't manage their impression over

time playing a game it's the same reason like borderlines narcissists people get in relationships with them they're like the first three months were amazing it was so good and then six you know fourth month that month you can't keep up a show forever and that's back to WHY games you know so one of the things we would love to do in the future is actually partner with some of our customers and use their games as hiring apps because the masks go away like who you choose to be when you play is very different now once the person knows that it's being used for a hiring scenario yeah of course try to modulate behavior but I'll give you an example like we used to work with one of the major league baseball teams uh at my office when I was doing neuropsych assessments and um pitchers in the major leagues if they want to get Adderall they have to do neuropsych assessment it's it's a performance enhancing enhancing drug helps them Focus so there's a lot of pitchers that want to get Adderall make sense of course I think I might have ADHD I could you know there's a lot of people that might think that well you need to get an assessment they'd come in

and they'd literally try to bake you know trick what's there and the thing is the way really good clinical grade assessments are built that's there's no human being who can who can get through that in a biased way and a lot of the questions that are asked a lot of the items that actually measure certain things they have no idea and so you got into that a little bit like you're not just asking the person like would you commit you know consider yourself to have humility or not like you're a layer below that which is a much better question to look for we versus I like you know and we have instincts around those things but at the same time if they're smart and they're especially you know conniving they also know what's behind that and then they can modulate behavior and then that goes back to the Microsoft data on the best hiring managers who ask the best types of questions still ended up making 60 of hires no matter like what the heck so one I would say you know what we're getting back to Red Bull does a really good job of it as a company if you apply at Red Bull you're getting an assessment

and you can see your Red Bull profile you get to see what's there like you know Amazon does a really good job of a company with their leadership principles like if you're off on one of those and that's where you know because values you have to form you have to forge they come from society they come from Reading they come from interactions with your day-to-day life and and if we look at who Humanity was you know pre-ten Commandments like the Ten Commandments literally one of you know thou shall not kill that literally had to be said why did it have to be said because people thought that that was okay back then like if you think we're not living in a better world today like read history read history but it's like so now we live in a better world we need new values for the world we live in a day and virtues virtues are awesome but you know we hear about virtue signaling and things like that and yeah and I think with virtues because virtues need a vision you need a vision for The Virtue and so values I think are there you know if you look at values and principles

like for for you as a person you should you should seek a life of virtue I mean that's very Marcus Aurelius um and he would add to that in accordance with nature that would be his quote but you know the stoics but if you look at first you need values to kind of get to principles so if you don't if you don't start with values as a baseline you're gonna have a really hard time with principles and once you get those principles like I mentioned earlier these are the values that we continue to see show up after the past five years even as the economy changes as the market changes even as solstan changes okay yeah and then from what are those what are those example values that you have like can you can you kind of walk through those um you know one one of them is humility yeah and and humility tied to work ethic and so what you end up doing is so same the Greek humility and hunger yeah yeah we one of our early ones was um humble and hungry yeah so but we changed that one as we started to scale

an actual The Humble part stayed the the hungry part fell away a little bit more because sometimes you need people as you scale and as you grow who they're just really good solid bedrocks you don't need you know it's it's you go early on especially the more scientific problem you're solving you go you need you know rock stars and how and there's a transition to bed rocks yeah and and and I agree like like and the the reason for startups to for going for hungry and hungry mean like a person has a work ethic and a lot of my questions were really about the past of the person I'm looking for like were you doing some sports and you just you really tried to do you're trying to become better at something you're not you know incentivized for example financially whether that's Sports whether that's art where whether that's uh um programming like we had people who were just you know talk to me how you got got into this and they're like well I'm self-taught artists and I know that they pass away the test and to me that

shows that they're hungry they're willing to push and learn a new craft that arguably is is totally as good as anybody's because they passed the other the test phase and and and so so that's important but you you said the right thing is like in the beginning hunger is important because you're looking for anybody who joins a startup phase or that early phase like 30 people less maybe even 50 people unless that to wear multiple hats to have a strong work ethic and as you scale you need people who are mentoring who who are who have been hunger hungry before their lives have changed they're now more getting you know uh their fulfillment for helping others that's not you know the most hungriest thing where you're becoming the best but but you need those as you scale exactly and what I would say is because like what a lot of people want in these like when they listen to podcasts like this like what's a nugget that I can take and apply to my company and every culture like we have um about 25 different nationalities represented at Solstice um so you have a lot of different

cultures a lot of different means of communication um I had one of our ml people and one of our Engineers they were just the three of us talking about this they got off the same call they all said the exact same things they all agreed on the same things then they went off into different things and it's language is so limited especially when the language that you're speaking in business might be your second language which was which is largely the case in this example but if you look at like what are the values that you know for example soulston values and we've got solston engineering one of the values that has stayed true because we actually measure the people that end up leaving or having to be let go and the people that end up seeing and staying and thriving we measure values of the individuals too and we see which ones are present within different groups straightforwardness is consistently high on our engineering team as people that thrive here so I see someone with low levels of straightforwardness going through the hiring process you're not going to be happy at Solstice and and having low levels of straightforwardness is not bad thing there's actually companies out there where that personality trait is probably very very

good for that person and they're going to be much happier there so we're also saving them from from that but as a startup you're learning about yourself so these things are not always like obvious but other parts of soulston straightforwardness is not as important as it is at soulston engineering so you know and if you in an interview process if I'm interviewing the person for and they listen to this podcast they go oh yeah I'm going to be much more straightforward there's a like there's an automaticness to somebody who has that as a trait that's very different and if we're looking at assessment I've assessed so many people in my career that I'm a poor Observer of human cognition and all humans are poor observers as human human cognition and because I know that about myself I am a better Observer of human cognition than most people because I've done it as a career but I also know my my faults and flaws and limitations as a human being and so my default is to go to well let's look at the Adaptive assessment that's that stuff that we

have let's look at their straightforwardness there and what I usually do I interview and I interview for these things and I look at those those traits and I see where was I versus where was the assessment and if I'm far apart from the assessment I might know then the questions I was asking was flawed I might know then that that person's really good at impression management I was I was tricked um and you know it's it's I think I always say this to people like I was uh when I when I first became a therapist my um Mentor she asked me you know what's one of the populations that you're not interested in seeing at all and I said addicts like drug addicts my next day every patient was a drug addict and I saw a lot of a lot of um heroin addicts um you know people that were going through their Journey on drugs like Suboxone and Subutex trying to you know wean off these sort of opiates and if you think you're good at lying you've never met an addict they are some of the

best of the best of the best so I do have that lie detector that after after because I've seen like around I think 2 000 patients but it's like like after seeing that and so I can see impression management but I also have to know that I can be tricked too um and so I just I think people put too much confidence sometimes on their their selves and their own questioning and like ask yourself hey as a hiring manager as a CEO as a founder you know what if one person here can tell me every hire they made was great well you should you should you should be talking not me you should be here it's so we need these these kind of different views of of measurement um so I think I think that's just such a foundational part of it and then doing things within your company that reinforce those values so like for example top performers at Solstice like one of the values that that we have is

experiences and that you know that might sound like that's not a normal value to have but we help companies create the next level of experiences we help companies exceed their experiential expectations of their customers go Way Beyond what you actually know and where you need to go and as an innovator that's part of your job actually is understand where is the market going and meet them there not where is the market and create what's already been made for them which a lot of game developers go oh they have good features they're working no you're creating what's already in the market you need to meet them where they're going that's your job so at soulston we go hey here's the values of your audience here's the personality of your audience what could we make for them that's going to meet those that no one else is doing and that's how Solstice helped create some of these like games that go on like hey we launched in two weeks we already have 20 million daily active users it's like yeah they met the experiential expectations or exceeded them that no one else was meeting that's why people went over there and so we look at employees the same way and say well what

are the what are the values that are there and what activities can we kind of bring together it's like top performers at solstum because one of the things that we wanted to architect the company around was a performance culture and that's not good for every company but it is good for soulston if you look at what we're trying to achieve scientific Feats that's not really done through like a lot of game companies can work off of flat cultures if they have the right country Dynamics and the right cultural dynamics that are in the company they can work off of that because it's such a creative process where when you have a really rigorous scientific process that you need to drive forward hey we're not you know like bash and I will say to the team like this is the NHL um this is the you know this is the show we're in the big leads and it's okay if you get you know you have to go to some farm league or something like that well if you come back a year from now and you re-interview and you're amazing we'll take you back in a second it's it's a lot of times it has nothing to do with the person when we need to move on from a person the majority of the time it's

like they weren't that best person like if you're sitting there going hey you're Henry Ford and you're like I got it we have to build a combustion engine and he's like you guys got six months and every engineer is like that's impossible like we have to face those sort of problems at soulston and so you know looking at that performance culture and then what is the psychology of somebody who thrives and loves that type of environment it's so different than some other fascinating point that you're you're putting in is performance culture and it's almost um so I had a like people who are listening to this most likely listen to the previous podcast that launched before this was with Joseph Kim and him kind of like being very much building a performance culture at Leela games and getting tremendous amount of pushback for building uh perform like culture no no but okay so people are saying like like you're doing it the wrong way because you're expecting

people to have like work-life balance is really important these soft values are really important and he's not saying that they're not he's just saying like that is 100 correct for your company uh whatever corporation that is scaled up or another startup but for my company performance is above everything and we're here to work hard and we're here to achieve something that others haven't done before and we expect that type of a thing and and and the fascinating conversation there was he was getting from outside and very aggressive pushback where people were completely masters from no from other people from other companies that were reading his uh decks or listening to his interviews and saying that he's running the company in the wrong way and he's he would get emails from or messages from Executives of HR from from corporations that's the same that's the same thing as um you know some obese person sitting on the couch yelling at the footballer that oh man like I can't believe you missed that kick like yeah it's it's like

people who are I mean we have the same in anthropology and armchair anthropologists it's like at the end of the day like it's your company yeah like you you and that goes back to what we first talked about there's no forced labor there's no forced labor it's a job you can be here or you cannot like like how what kind of environment do you want to be at and you can choose different companies yeah I think that's where you know things have been so employee friendly for a really long time um I've been laid off before it's you know it should should happens um and you know I think what what happened was this world of Google and Facebook and not working and that's people's first job and that's all of a sudden their expectations what what happened was a lot of the environments people ended up early on in their careers I think over the past five years or so even just working from home it's it's and which is not psychologically healthy by the way um and we're gonna go there we're gonna

go to work from work from home talks happy to happy to um this one first uh you know and and so at the end of the day it's like hey if you're you know Wayne Gretzky if you're Jerry Rice if you're if you're at that level I mean let's let's just let's just face this reality and I think this is the if you look at raising a seed round just raising a scene round out of all the companies that get started in a year point five percent raise a seat around 0.5 about like you're already you you did something sure there's people that you know Daddy is this or the connections are there but most of those Founders and I forget that's actual statistic is but it's the majority of those people I do know this are first-time Founders and if you look at the the data you already just achieved getting hit by lightning basically and then go to series a that's

like about I think it's something like 25 to 50 depending on the year that you look at of those seed rounds go to series a so you're looking at another class of just Slaughter and then you go to series B and it's like only about 50 of series a companies actually make it to that stage um and so statistically speaking and this is one of the things where Founders have to get careful because you can actually have interesting positive biases now at that point because you made it through the eye of a needle you actually uh if you've gotten to a series B state are more likely in life to have been hit by lightning but we know that that's not actually true we know that you knew something that other people didn't know you saw something that other people didn't see and you're steering a ship towards a reality that doesn't exist yet and you know Above All Else what type of crew you need on that Journey like in the 1800s and you're like hey I'm gonna sail across the ocean no one was going to the The Commodores or the captains of the ship going like

you need more of these types of people for this type of voyage and if you talk to those people back then where it was life and death and so what I often say like my my human factors back to Michael Smith again Professor he said when you think of ux because I had to think of it this way because when they did like interfaces for submarines in World War II when you think of ux think of it in terms of life and death sometimes if the problem that you're solving has high impact on the product and it's likely to be irreversible like if we draw a chart here and it's in that upper right hand corner of high impact irreversible think of that as if the person clicks the wrong button they'll die I know that's it's an extreme way of thinking but now and I've asked this to you know some of if some people on the ux team are watching this they're going to be laughing because it totally changes the way you think about ux though because you're like I'm like hey would you still be making that change it's the product if that I need to do some research now I need to it's like yeah and so if you think of your team and your company and

you're making a lot of these like really hard decisions on like who to put there is it is this is this decision reversible or not um and is it how high impact it is so what we'll do for example like as a startup you're not always in an advantageous position you can't compete on Capital with the big guys you just can't you can compete on Equity but you that's part of why I think early on you need people that are really hungry and people that understand Equity like we hired employees that are like I don't want salary I want Equity because I believe in soulston so much I'm like hello perfect you know it's it's because they under and actually some of those employees because we have had some Financial outcomes so far they were we let some people take a little bit out the first thing they come back and it's like how do I get more Equity you know I just made more than I would have made in my entire career you know it's it's there's there's incredible outcomes that can happen from you know those moments

and we're fortunate as a startup to be out of you don't have enough success to have gotten to that point but having good investors that allow you to take secondaries to which allow you to have the uh the uh the Comfort to push continue pushing the pedal yep that's that's an important part it's like it's like I've had Dia the Israeli you know investor the Gigi Levy Vice like you said like that was the key for for for the Israeli companies not to sell so early is by allowing them to take secondaries and lo and behold they have multiple multi-billion dollar corporations just filled uh it's just of course that's so that and that's I mean not to I'll definitely want to finish this statement but there are there are investors that especially seed in series a that don't like their Founders taking secondaries or like bigger secondaries and so that's where you have misaligned values and you see more of the later stage the strategics that are series B and Beyond they it's like that's just common sense to them like we we're

actually approached and said hey we think you guys need to do this you know so it was like it was it was a part of it was an open part of conversation um but if we wouldn't have picked Things based on values and things from the start I don't think I don't think we'd have got there but if you look at you know the like the Joseph Kim example because at the end of the day like he he knows where the ship needs to go and so when we talk about you know early stage VCS and going you know it was the right founder I'm looping back to that a little bit but there was a study done on the psychology of Founders and Founders that actually went on to create multi-billion dollar companies and there's only one trait that they had in common and it was basically um a lack of care for whatever other people think and it's important to not mistake that with empathy or altruism um you can be altruistic you can be empathetic you can be but being able to not care what the opinions of others are um take them to account absolutely like do not be narcissistic like every

negative thing that is said about soulston I read through it I actually have two psychologists that if something negative is said about soulston or myself or my founder we all review it together and you know I'm always open to what if if I'm a part of that equation I'm like cool you know because how do I shift and evolve and grow if I'm not a part of that equation but I think so it's being open to that but at the same time you and this is where back to that's where I like values to principles to virtues you should have virtues as a Founder like and as an investor too and if you don't you need to work on it you need to think about it you need to take time and I already mentioned an exercise earlier that can get you to values so values to principles principles are easy what are the ones that have stayed consistent over time and then principles to virtues well now you need to attach a vision to your principles and the thing the the thing is is it once you do that as a founder you're unshakable you are if you do that well and if you integrate that you are unshakable because all those people that say all

those things I know like if if let's just take like a place where I'm really comfortable like I'm a Wilderness first responder I'm an adventure therapist if somebody on the sideline starts telling me how to help a client that has depression I'm unshakable I have one of the first things you have to do when you're in in grad school um as a clinician is actually perform and write out a professional identity like who is that what's the philosophical underpinnings of that identity I encourage employees to do this I encourage people other Founders to do this because they're like yeah I'm like what's your professional identity what is that and that should change as you grow you're going to have to be a different person at different stages but your identity in real life that should be you that's you know that's who you are with your family that's who you are with your kids but most people we're human beings most people who we are around our family that's not who you should be with your employees we know people who like their their work personality is their home personality

like people who are Workaholics and or like you're friends with that person and they became a founder and you meet them like two years later and you're like Dodge boring you know like they become they take on their work personality like we need to we need to form a professional identity and as a part of that you need to understand what are your principles and therefore what are your I mean Ray dalio has a good book on principles but virtues if you want to know virtues that's Marcus Aurelius that's Epictetus that's the stoics that's you know Buddha Siddhartha talks about this kind of stuff in his own way the you know there of all all the kind of ancient Hindu texts there's a lot of stuff in there that's really valuable when it comes to Virtue formation but if you have that you're unshakable so like Joseph you know the fact that you know that means he's humble enough to be open enough to communicate that he's questioned that too because if he's brought it up like I've never questioned that ever ever ever ever like that performance the [ __ ] has Bastion and that's a that's a

a thing I'd say it's a principle it's not a virtue for us but it's a principle the performance culture aspect because you know what there could be a reality in the future where actually that's not what Solstice needs to be it's what it's what we need to be right now though it's it's what we have to be and we have to be almost ruthless at at doing that and you know what's so cool is like I mean I mentioned Lisa Welch and Matt stripe for example like these are people who could work anywhere not just in the gaming industry but kind of like anywhere like they're they're top top and Lisa we're you know we're just in New York and just like this is my heart Spike Mission and the more I'm here she's like I just love it here I just love it that's how I know I architected the Right culture for the right people if Lisa would have came in um and someone like that who's that that level of capability and that sort of Powerhouse in the industry when it comes to Consumer insight and we're having

some crossover uh where things are not as as they should be that I might be thinking well do we need to tone down a certain part in that part of company do we need to tune up a different part because it's almost you have to you know match the reality to the ship you're selling and I like this it's you know not an exact science but if you look at like IQ for example or um values or principles if a person's deviating by about 15 percent they're probably going to fail at your company um both plus or minus so like there's some research showing that if if a person's IQ is 15 points higher than the average or 15 points lower than the average they're likely to fail at your company I think like you're never going to get someone who has 100 of your values but if they're at 90 we're probably going to be successful if they're at 45 no and so you know for Founders out there who wake up and you know definitely like you need to um what's that uh

Musashi quote I'm probably gonna butcher it but it's like yeah it's like consider consider the world deeply oh I'm gonna I'm gonna look it up because it's a good one but it's it pertains exactly like as a Founder how you should consider yourself and what of yourself you should take seriously and you should be what makes you unshakable is aligning yourself with with those ultimately if you have principles you're good to go I'm curious so I was I was uh another podcast that we did and this was actually with Jen and and we're talking a lot about diversity and of course she's she's coming from California where the companies have uh are a little bit of a you know very Progressive and then have their own uh approach uh nothing bad in it there's just how they operate she was saying one thing that kind of sticked into my mind you need to treat people how they want to be treated what do you think about that oh man um so this here's the um I'll just drop the Musashi yeah quote quick

because I looked it up um but it's like it's you know think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world and that's probably a good segue to that that question and I think when when you look at the United States as a whole there's a really good good book out there called James by James counselor called the geography of nowhere and what it's about is how the United States was architected so you could be in Florida or Washington and feel like you're in the same place but ultimately if you look at a culture map of the United States there's there's significantly different culture zones and cultural Reasons I'm from Minnesota I actually feel it the second I Pass Duluth I'm in a Nordic culture all of a sudden I'm not in a Germanic culture anymore and it's a American Germanic culture that was that kind of formed the lower parts of Minnesota which is a lot of the Midwest like the midwestern culture but when you get up north it's like oh and I'm back in Sweden like just saw how people behave how people act Etc and so because we all speak the same language a

lot of people from and Lisa's from California we're actually talking about this where a lot of Californians don't think they have accents you know from California yeah but a lot of when you're from New York or from California it's very easy to have the bias that you are the center of the world and it's like have you been to Minneapolis before have you been to Berlin before and so you know when when I get that question um you know we I've gotten that question in interviews for example like I was just interviewed by four x how does soulston think about diversity or you know they're they're getting at something it's always from a California most of the time and my my first question back is back to you know treating people how they want to be treated I think there's two parts that one it's understanding people first how they view the world and so what I'll ask and I ask the star employees you know what does diversity mean to you you know what's fascinating back to

um thinking through your values and thinking through your principles and thinking through your future virtues the majority of people who have asked me that not all of them but the majority of people have asked me that question actually have never even thought about that so what I get is 50 different answers diversity for me means skin color yeah oh okay diversity University you know and so here like I'll give you an example from from a interview we're running and I asked us from California and what does diversity mean to you and he he said well he's like you know what I I was kind of you know you guys don't have any um African people on your team that was his response uh people with you know and I I'm like what you know and and said actually we we do we have people that were born in Africa who are from Africa and he goes well I looked at your LinkedIn you don't don't have any and I'm I'm like what do you mean by that

and I'm like this we got this younger guy on our team is amazing he's Tunisian for example yeah and it's Africa that is Africa but California perspective world you know and at least he said well what I mean is you don't have any black people and that's you know Blackness versus whiteness for example is a very American construct um you can go to a lot of other parts of the world where that's not a construct that exists America's you know 400 million people about well the world is eight billion people and we have people from 25 different countries from all over this beautiful world and I think what's important is understanding at your company at your team at your place what's the perspective so if you've chosen to operate a remote company one of the challenges is going to be that you're going to have a lot of different perspectives of diversity I you know I've gotten other people who have been like this is seriously insane how cool solson is when it comes to diversity I've never worked at a company where

there's this few people from so many different cultures and ethnicities who speak so many different languages which also presents a lot of challenges by the way yes you know you look at Napoleon for example one of the the reasons why I was able to win a lot of Wars is he didn't work with mercenaries he made it so that every single person in the Napoleonic Army had to be fluent in French and he himself French was his second language he was course in French and you look at and part of the Maneuvers that Napoleon was able to pull off on land was because like language when we speak a certain language we have also there's a shared cultural meeting of what certain words mean and so it's almost like the Tower of Babel that you have to play against too and for us we recognize that you know what types of diversity are important for your company and as you grow as you get bigger you know you're going to have to think about ESG principles you're gonna have to think about this but I I would encourage startups um when when you look at your team and what you're trying to accomplish solstum

we've always just focused on hiring the best possible person for the job to be done and you know there was the result of that is you're often going to be subject to certain regions and certain universities so let's take psychometrics as an example um Cambridge Carnegie Mellon University of Minnesota so those three Universities at University of Wisconsin There's a couple other good ones too that I'm missing out but by and large where you're going to get the best people that's the schools that they went to so you're now subject to their intake of you know people well who are the people in the beginning who are interested in psychometrics like so now you're now you're kind of subject to that so from a population perspective that's the population you're you're working with and when you're building a startup it's so hard anyway that you need every Force going in your direction so we've actually we've had for the last three years ESG audits not on our company I'm

we're slowly moving Sultan towards becoming a benefits Corporation but we're not going to be a b Corp yet we're too small still you're too small Patagonia just didn't say we're a b Corp like as you get bigger and bigger and bigger you know there's Mishka you were talking about this with me with uh was it Charlie Munger who said you know the CEO at Coca-Cola like maybe you should maybe you should say it but um uh no yeah it was I think it was um they were so the the topic that we're discussing was the role of a of a leader of a CEO uh to in the success of the company and that was asked from Charlie Munger is like how much do they invest into the leader of the company versus the company itself the business itself and he made an example of Coca-Cola CEO in the 80s being mentally challenged uh like he also like medically mentally challenged nevertheless the business was so strong the moats were so strong the

brand was so strong the just like everything that Coca-Cola it's a logistics production company was so strong that even a poor leader wasn't able to shake the business and he would just say making a case like we haven't as Berkshire Hathaway the best investment company and the best investors in the world they haven't found the secret source of putting the Right leader on top of the company hence they invest into the right business so that was there yes so that's a perfect example um so when we talk about diversity what's important to understand is well what do we mean as diversity as a culture and what do I we what does diversity also mean outside of our culture like we're One race we're the human race yeah you look at your G your genes we're all I'm one of those I'm one of those you know uh the north the nordics we have a lot more than Neanderthal genes up here um but if you you know if you look at

our species you know that's that's what we are and what we have to understand is well what does that mean across your realm of operation so if you're if you're a distributed company you have 3 000 people working around the world we we literally I literally said this in front of our whole team in a q a as what is what does diversity mean to you and we want to listen to that we want to hear it it's important that people are able to explain those things and say what they are and then if someone asks you know my version of diversity says this and we don't have this it's important that they also understand the perspective of building a company you know where we're mostly based in Berlin still and so you're also subject to the population you're in like so if you're an American and you're like hey um you know we we really want to focus on diversity and inclusion and that's the American version of that which means X percent of um people are ethnically African American X percent of people that are Mesoamerican expert et cetera well like there's not like it's less than one

percent of the population in Germany that's mezzo from Mexican origin or from uh African origins in a lot of the case and if they are of African origin they're usually from northern northern Africa and so you're you're kind of subject to the population that you're in and what's important I think as a Founder is being able to open up these issues and discuss them because they're important they're important to to people on the team and if they're important to people on your team as you grow and scale you know understanding back to your values you know what's what's there and what I can say is you know soulston when it comes to cultural diversity and cognitive diversity um which we need because we're we're innovating a science the science of human understanding so that's actually those are things that Solstice needs as ingredients for our journey towards our vision there's other companies where that's not maybe as as important to them um so for us that's really important um you know you're gonna if you come to salsa you're gonna come to one of the

most culturally diverse places and in America oftentimes we we mistake um ethnic diversity for cultural diversity where you can have a whole team of Americans that are literally culturally the exact same think the same ways about the same things but yeah but look very different because because America was built to be a machine The Melting Pot to become American like when people go to America they're like I'm America now and it's one of the few countries in the world where you actually can do that you can be only anywhere yeah yeah you can become an American you can't you can't become German yeah if you ask a German or you know someone grew up in Germany who's not from there they're like and and I you know that's that's if we look at anthropology and culture there's that's a whole thing to unpack you need a panel of anthropologists to talk about it but so I think there's there's that piece that you know when when we come to diversity and conclusion as you get bigger as you become a Coca-Cola as you

become a Google then you have a responsibility to go Upstream so for example I do mentorship with um the Masters in HCI and design program at the University of Washington it's one of the best schools out there for HCI InDesign I do mentorship for a lot of the young kids that are there also for the University of Wisconsin um and I've done some stuff with the University of Minnesota is there self-interest yes these are programs that we need people from but what I can do is I can go upstream and I can help Mentor people from different backgrounds who normally would have never ended up in these sort of categories and I can help Empower that well we're still a relatively small company well hey Google hey hey Coca-Cola and they are I think a lot of bigger companies are making big strides in this direction but one of the challenges with employees is helping them understand not just across diversity and inclusion but across every single ESG marker as well as operational marker startups are not Fortune 500s

startups are in a totally volatile environment and even in the United States like a lot of employee protection laws don't apply to businesses that are less than 15 people you don't have the resources and and things that these big companies do to have these initiatives so what's what's important is I think as a founder if if you want to actually have a big impact on all of the different ideas of diversity if you want to have an impact on that the best thing you can do is become financially successful and scale your company and to do that that might require on focusing on one specific University and with that like hey the best you know I've heard there's um that Israeli program for example that uh you know um the military program for data scientists that yeah the anti-virus for security unit that was the one like I know I know startups in New York in Europe who have strictly when they were

early stage only hired out of that program because the people that come out of that program tend to the best whole other level than people that didn't um and you know take for one of my really good friends we started the company he had a masters and data science a master's in mathematics from UC San Diego really good school um he did work to build algorithms at the Salesforce Tower um at solston unfortunately couldn't cut it not even close on the data science side great person loved the guy but skill wise and you you're you know you're as a Founder you're you're five steps away from failure you're you're in a fragile ship you need to build every Force to go with you and if you want to actually have an impact on some of these topics grow and become big and be mindful of them like that's why we do an ESG audit I'm aware of of where we're at in terms of leadership ratios all these sort of things and I mean I think what maybe accounts for that so we we did an

enps thing we try to do it every quarter um ours is like 77 or something like that you know that's like Beyond best in class so there's always just like video you know when we develop games someone goes in the App Store and leaves a bad review and the worst thing you can do is start changing your game based on that one bad review and yeah or or five bad reviews and you know that's part as solston we can actually know now like hey that's a part of persona 6 in your game they don't even spend money they're not contributing a community they're actually toxic to the community um stay in your course and focusing on what you need to do and those values what I love about values and psychological assessment if you read the literature on it it's one of the best ways to reduce cultural bias or reduce your own biases whether you're from California or whether you're from Hong Kong or whether you're from Tunisia we all have different biases and we're all going to bring those into our reality and what's what I always emphasize is is just

communication and developing empathy as a muscle people a lot of times people who talk about empathy are oftentimes that people have the least amount of empathy who are seeking people to respond to their toxic behaviors but empathy has a muscle is literally going hey I'm going to put myself in like that person's shoes because we're remote oh yeah that would be really tricky as an engineer and when you develop those communication you know what's what's the goal what's what's the goal of this and let's get to that you know what Joe we've talked about empathy as a muscle cultural and cognitive diversity board meetings becoming a top place for innovators getting tricked in an interview getting no from investors and finding your virtues this has been a fantastic podcast I know you need to go because you don't want to reserve more time and I need to go we could probably go for four more hours so we need to get back to it like I did we we had no plans for this podcast because we knew it's just going to be all over the place

fantastic talking to you what a pleasure and I love seeing you evolving like I can't I can't say enough how much it's uh it's a pleasure to meet you at these you know three to six month intervals talk to you and be like Joe is on another level again and um it's uh it's a it's just fantastic thing so keep evolving um I'm I'm excited to talk to you again in uh you know you know next three months in the next quarter next two quarters because you'll be different in slush for example let's see it's always like you know there's the the person that you are and then with the company and evolving it's you know I think often who who do we need to become to achieve you know certain things that we want to achieve and you might have to wrestle with those and it goes back to the professional identity stuff if you if you form a philosophy of that and a thesis on it and then you are willing to be wrong maybe as a good closing quote I I think it encapsulate a lot of what we talk about it's from Jeff Bezos

um and what I appreciate about it is he said early on in the company a lot of people that said you know they felt like the culture was changing and they ended up hiring a lot of people and he's like wait a second what is this thing where everyone thinks you have to be right here so they dug into it like what's going on and what happened was a lot of Junior people that were coming in were like all of our executives are right all the time so we need to be right all the time yeah and what he realized was actually going on he's like the reason why they're right so often is because they out of everyone here were the most willing to be wrong and I think to if we encapsulate this whether you're a Founder whether you're a VC whether you're if you are willing to be wrong you're going to learn faster than everyone else and I'm that's I've always been willing to be wrong so beautiful cool thank you so much Joe this was the longest podcast episode ever on deconstructive fun and um for those who who got through it shout out to Joe and we didn't talk about solston at all just go solston dot

Io Io exactly it's not com sultan.io it's in a fantastic platform and if you're not using it you're just um you're just handicapped so on that note goodbye everybody see ya