Episode Transcript
Tracy Young: Hi, welcome to Path to Growth. I'm Tracy Young, co founder and CEO of TigerEye. Today, we are joined by Robin Daniels. Chief Business and Product Officer at Zensai to discuss all things growth. Robin is based in Paradise over in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is an experienced executive specializing in growth, grow to market, product and leadership.
Robin has held executive roles in high growth companies such as Matterport, WeWork, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, Veritas and Vera. He's also an avid runner and movie enthusiast. Robin, welcome.
Robin Daniels: Thanks, Tracy. It's funny how the grass is always green. I'm like, when you said that you're in California, I'm like, I really miss California.
Good to see you.
Tracy Young: Robin, you wrote an incredibly moving piece recently about your father's passing, and I'm sorry he's no longer in your life. But it was a beautiful piece that reflected on the lessons he's brought you about saying yes to life. Will you tell us more about your father, what he taught you and what inspired you to share the story?
Robin Daniels: Yeah, I think there are moments in life where you get clarity. And that was one of those moments for me. As I wrote in that piece, it's something I've been thinking about, it's actually funny. I wrote this piece probably nearly a year ago, honestly, and it took me a while to find the right tone and the right lessons in there.
And also honestly, just having the courage to, to publish it. And as I write about a lot of my growth has come from, I think, painful situations. Those are the moments, usually, I think. And this was one of those moments. And basically my parents got divorced when I was a little kid. And I ended up living mostly with my mom and my two brothers.
And then my mom had a nervous breakdown when she was having a discussion with us three kids. And so I didn't really spend much time with my dad. And so I was raised, I would say, on the streets of Copenhagen. And it doesn't sound very rough because Copenhagen is a very nice, but it was a fairly rough childhood.
And my two brothers, my dad was like this tertiary figure in and out of my life. I've seen it every now and then, but honestly, not very often. And the thing about my dad, He never really had, if I'm completely brutally honest, he never had much success in life. He always seemed like somebody who'd given up on life in many ways, where never found the love that he wanted to.
He never had the success in his work that he really wanted to as well. Always struggling. And in some ways, as you probably know as well, maybe from your life, but sometimes those are the best role models because it gives you clarity on what you don't want your life to become. And so he And so it's funny, he was a macrobiotic, and I actually was raised macrobiotic for the first couple of years of my life, until I think it was about seven or so.
And even though he was a health nut in what he ate, he was also a lifelong smoker, which is just always blew my mind. And he would smoke like 40 to 60 cigarettes a day, it was very unhealthy. So the food he was eating was always very devoid of any kind of flavor or excitement or anything.
And then the fact he was poisoning his body with, cigarettes was, I think, a symptom now that I'm a little older and I think, read the tea leaves a little bit. which is somebody who doesn't really have the passion or fire to go change, change your life. But anyways, we didn't spend much time.
As I got older, I started spending a little bit more time with my dad as I had more authority over my life and time to go see him. So I would see him more, but never really much. I was living in in England at the time, just for a few years. And I got the call from my brother saying, Hey, Dad has been taken to the hospital.
They've discovered he has cancer. At stage 4, it's spreading very fast. We don't know how long yet, so you should probably come if you want to see him. So I remember going there, and they said, my brother said to me, just prepare yourself that when you walk in and see him, it's a shocking sight. Cause he's just basically, he's all, he's lost so much weight.
So I'm like, okay, so I fly from England to Copenhagen and I go into the hospital and I stepped in the hospital room and it was, it literally took my breath away when I saw him because. It was basically like seeing a concentration camp victim. What I've seen in the movie Schindler's List or something like that.
It was so thin. There's nothing left of him there. And he was only 61 at the time. And it was clear to me that he didn't really have the will to fight this back. And maybe he could, maybe it was just too late. And so all he did at the end was just have me bring him snacks, Burger King and candy and all this stuff that he deprives himself of his life.
His world has become so small. His universe of what he consumed, the universe of where he went, the universe of how he thought, has become so small. And it ended up that he ended up dying just a few months later. And it was, it went super quick. And the takeaway that I basically had from his life was that I never wanted that to be me.
As harsh as that sounds, I don't mean that in a kind of an asshole way, because I don't have any animosity to him, but I never want that to be me. I never want to get to the end of my life and not have the passion, the fire, or the courage to live the way that I want. And so the lesson I took away is that I should never get complacent, I should never get to a point in my life where I'm afraid to Do things and I see it all the time and I don't know if you do as well, but I see it all the time in my friends and even family where their world becomes smaller and smaller.
They only go to the same places all the time. Their vacations are always the same place. And so I'm like, where's the fire to challenge yourself, to try something new, to expand your horizon. And so basically, after he passed away, my brother and I, we said, Never again. We didn't ever want this to be ours.
So we said, let's do the opposite of what we basically have taken away from his life. Let's do a yes to life tour. So we did a road trip across America where we drove across, we took in all the experiences. We only drove on small roads, not highways. So we would go through places you'd never normally go to.
I'm just like, talk to people, experience people. And try things that we've never normally would try. And it was such a great experience of just reminding ourselves of how wonderful the world really is. If you have the courage and the audacity, I think to go for it. And it's been a key part of my life.
I would say ever since that, that this idea of saying yes, life, it's why I've, if you look at my resume, you mentioned it earlier, sometimes I've stayed in a place a little bit. And then sometimes I've jumped very quickly because I'm like a very much following. what my heart tells me in some ways.
And that doesn't mean it always works out, because I think part of saying yes to life is having the courage to put yourself out there, even sometimes if it doesn't work out, and it was a very long story, but it's yeah, thanks. Thank you for asking. It's it's something that's, it's been my guiding philosophy.
I don't know if you've had any moments like that yourself.
Tracy Young: Yeah. I think there's a balance to everything in life and it's obviously, horrific to not have your father in your life as children and to have a mother who's dealing with, medical issues and yet it's like this very bad thing.
And your father lives the consequences of not taking care of himself. And he died so young and for you and your brother to, you Look at that and have this very positive thing that becomes your life's motto of saying yes to life and that not only is there a good side to every bad thing, but as you said, it's inspiration comes in many forms including, the modeling of what you do not want for your own life.
So thank you so much for sharing that with us.
Robin Daniels: Don't you think that the big changes in your life I've always found. Have come through deep, emotional, wanting to change. Like you can read as many books about it. Listen to great podcasts, get inspiration from inspiring speakers, but there has to be an emotion within you.
I find I know I have all the knowledge, Tracy, about what it takes to be live the healthiest life in the world, right? Where I should eat and how much I should exercise and blah, blah, blah. And I don't act on it very often, right? Until you feel that. Some something that has to be, and I think an emotional urgency or pain or something.
I think forces you in that direction. So after you go, screw it, I never want, same with the, when I look back on my career, I've had some horrible bosses in my time, horrible managers, and I'm grateful for them because it gives me the clarity about both of how I want to lead, but also the kind of culture that I appreciate being part of, right?
Tracy Young: A blueprint for what not to do.
Robin Daniels: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Tracy Young: That's the funny thing about Revelations is it hits you like a ton of breaks, literally smack in the face where you're just stunned afterwards and you're like, I need to do something about this. Let's talk about Zensai. Tell me what does Zensai do?
Robin Daniels: So we are a company that's focused on really empowering people who work in companies to be the best that they can be every single day. That's where the name comes from. So we changed the name of the company fairly recently from LMS 365 to SenSci. And it's this combination of the idea of perpetual learning and calm, towards a goal, like being sen.
Sci is the Italian root word for knowledge. But basically the core thesis is, if I think, if you think about your life, certainly true of mine. I think it's true of most people. I am where I am today. 100 percent because so many people have invested in me, giving me the right skills or knowledge or nudges along the way.
Sometimes supportive and sometimes, but not supportive with, asshole bosses and so on, but I am where I am today because of the sum of these experiences here, but really because so many people have invested in me and I'm sure it's just probably the same of you and so many people, and we want to be the platform that basically gets people to be the best that they can be every single day in a few different ways.
That comes from. Being surrounded by people who believe in you and push you in the right direction. It's having clarity of what it is you need to achieve, and it's having this continuous growth and learning mindset. And so ultimately, Sensai is the platform that delivers some of this. We're basically a Human success platform focused on continuous learning, performance management, and employee engagement.
And the reason why these come together so beautifully is because when you have an employee who's performing really well, crushing their goals, and they're also deeply engaged in the work, and you've probably worked with them before, where they show up with passion and energy and conviction, they're just a net positive for everybody around them.
And that person also has a growth mindset of continuous learning. Those are the best employees you can find. They just make everybody around them better. And the reason we're so passionate about this, or I'm so passionate about this is because when I look at all the data that's out there, I just saw something from Gallup, I think it's about two weeks ago, that said that now 70 percent of people are disengaged at work.
And that's gone up, it's not going down. And if you look at the underlying reasons why, because they feel stuck. They don't feel like they're growing, they don't feel like there's a career path for them, and so on. And all those things actually are very individual. I think sometimes you want a bigger salary because you want more money.
That's okay. Sometimes you want to learn something new so you can take on a different part of the business. That's great. Sometimes you want a different title. Sometimes you want to have more work life balance, whatever it is that you're chasing, we basically says, can we create a platform? that unlocks the potential of every person so they can be the best they can be, but it's not for altruistic reasons because the data also supports that companies who have figured this out, even though it's very few companies, those companies see, Much better ideas coming out of those employees.
They feel more engaged. They feel a sense of belonging. There, there's an openness and transparency and trust that I can contribute my ideas to this company to make it better. And those companies who figured that out, they see much higher increases in profitability and in growth. I care about the human side, but it is also, of course, if it's not, because you can't have one without the other.
The point is, I think for so long, we as companies, or we as society, we'd have to take collective responsibility. I've been chasing growth. and profits come what may. And of course, you can't have a business be around unless they're profitable and growing. And so it's super important. But to me, that's an outcome of you creating an environment where people can be the best they can be every day and feel like they're contributing.
They're working hard. They're part of a group of people who are doing something special together, whatever that is contributing, but also learning at the same time. That's what adds up to you feeling motivated every single day. Think about how many books are written about motivation and all and purpose and all this.
And they're great. I read them all the time. I actually think you can net it out to a couple of things. One is, are you giving people the clarity on what it is that these people are fighting for every day? And it's very hard to be happy or successful if you don't have clarity on what you're going towards, if you don't have clarity on the goal.
So that's number one. And number two is. Those people need to feel like they're making a difference towards that goal. So am I, do I have clarity on what I am trying to achieve? And am I actually contributing to that success? Because all a company really is, all an organization is a collection of people trying to solve challenges.
Sometimes those challenges are small. All day to day mundane things and sometimes they're big challenges, existential things you might. And unless you can get the best out of those people, get them to work well together, connect with each other on a very human level, those people are not going to do the best work of life.
Those 70 percent of people who are disengaged, are they showing up every day doing the best work of their life? I don't have the data to say yes or no, but I doubt it. Probably
Tracy Young: not. Yeah.
Robin Daniels: Probably not. Probably not.
Tracy Young: Gosh, that is a sad statistic that 70 percent of the workforce is just going through the motions of work and actually probably hating their jobs and they bring that home and into their communities and it's massively damaging.
I'm glad you guys do what you guys do. Can you share with us how Zen Psy uses AI and maybe your perspective on how you envision AI transforming the HR space in the next five years?
Robin Daniels: Yeah so the way I think about it, because as you said, I also lead the product team here. Most of my career has been more in the go to market.
So I lead the product team, which is great because I think with modern tech platforms, it's very hard to separate go to market from the product itself. I think they have to be super interlinked. So we basically, as I said, we do these three things. We provide a learning platform so employees can continuously learn new skills all the time.
When I was working at LinkedIn, for example, there's a stat that always blew my mind at SAC. Cause LinkedIn also has a learning product. They do LinkedIn learning. Very great product. And we're partnering with them on this. The stats said that within five years. 90 percent of all the skills and knowledge that you have are outdated, not irrelevant, but outdated.
And think about that. Whether you're in accounting, in marketing, in sales yeah, skills progress. Even the way we did marketing five years ago is different than the way we do it now. So continuous learning has to be a part of it. And so that's part of our plan. And the way we think about AI when it comes to continuous learning, how do we basically get people to learn the right thing at the right moment so they can continuously uplevel their skills? I've worked in so many jobs where. I've had access to learning content and learning platforms. I never used them because it was always this extra thing. And our thesis is learning has to be in the flow of when you need it the most. So for example, if we can see that you're behind on your performance or head, or if you're disengaged on something, or you're struggling with something, we should be able to insert.
Learning moments for you at that time. So for example, if you tell me in a team's chat with me, for example, Hey, I'm about to give a public presentation in two weeks. I'm a little nervous about it. We should be able to figure that out with AI. So here's a 20 minute learning course on how to be a great public speaker should be inserted right there and there.
And so AI can help nudge you in the right direction. I don't think it will provide the motivation for it, but it can help point you in the right direction and say, here's some ideas, or for example, If you want to get on a path to be a CMO one day what are the skills I need to have? What courses should I take?
And who are the companies should I be connecting with who might have some of those skills? Let's say I'm five years out of college and I'm on the path, but it's going to take me 15, 20 years to get there. Can we accelerate that by giving you the right knowledge skills and so on? Again, it's not going to mean that the journey is easy, but at least we can point in there.
And AI is perfectly suitable for that because the more we know about you and what you want to do. We can point in the right. So if we have, for example, in our product, the ability that somebody can go into in a prompt and say, what does the career look like for to become a customer success leader one day.
Here's a skill she needs to take. Here's who you should connect with. Here's the goal she should probably have. And here's the course she should take. So that's the learning side. Super important. Then we also have a performance management product. And the way we use AI there is you put in their goals, you put in your team's goals, and you put in the company goals, and then you can track all the time, how you're progressing towards those goals.
AI is really great to come in and then see. course, help you course track again, connecting with learning. If you're behind on some goals, maybe you need to take these courses. If you're ahead on some goals, maybe you've set the wrong targets and we can recommend new goals for you or different goals and so on.
And we can just help summarize. And of course, then as a company, you can start seeing across the whole company, which departments are reaching their goals more, which ones are not, and how is that actually correlating maybe to the skillset, motivations, and so on. Tenure, all kinds of different things.
So it becomes really interesting to get much more deeper insights into how you optimize an organization. And then finally, we had this idea of what we call a weekly check in. And the idea is, there's so many platforms out there who do these big engagement surveys, pulse surveys every six months, every year.
And so they're super, and I've used many of them in my past, but they're good for like high level data, but they don't give you the sense of connection with your employer. So we have this concept of a check in you do every week, and it's meant to take literally a few minutes where we asked you four simple questions on a scale of one to 10, how are you feeling?
What did you achieve this week? What's blocking you this week? What blockers do you have? And who do you want to high five? And the reason for those four questions is number one it gives you a quick pulse check on list, like what's happening. I can see all my team instantly how they doing. And instead of me waiting to find out, Oh, somebody's ready to quit, quiet, quit, or they're angry or upset.
I can instantly go in and address an issue. It has made me much better as a manager because I can see the issues. So it brings you much closer to the person. And instead of somebody not reaching a let's say completing a project well, and I find out six months later, I can be like, Oh, I see you're struggling.
It becomes, I can become much more of a servant leader. Like, how can I help you? What's stopping you? What can I do for you? How can I help unblock this thing? It becomes a much better conversation. Number two is for the team itself. They start, you start seeing this correlation around the team was working really well together and they collaborating, communicating, and we're hitting our goals and so on.
You can start connecting people across different teams who have. Maybe working on similar things or similar skill sets and so on, which I think is super interesting. But the main thing actually I think it does now that for our customers who use it and even for us, provides a steep sense of belonging, which I think is something that it's very hard to measure.
In that economic output. But my God, when you have it the sense of you being part of something bigger, and they feel like people care about it. So when you see the first, we're about 200 people in the company, just over the first week, we started putting this into practice in our own company. It's about nearly a year ago.
200 people, we saw nearly 2000 high fives going across from different team members to each other. And it's just like people we never would have thought would have worked together, but they're like high five because they're working together on projects. Hey, thank you, Thomas, for helping me there. Thank you, Susan, for helping with this project.
It's just it suddenly feels like you matter. We care about you. There's a sense because I'm sure you've probably read all the artists as a loneliness epidemic. There's a sense of isolation. This brings people closer together, even in a world where we're Our team is spread out over seven different countries.
We're a small team and we only have a few offices. Most people just work from home. So this sense of feeling together, even when you're not, I think it's invaluable. And to me, that's the main thing of I can see people feel like, wow, people care about me. I matter. They, I belong here.
Tracy Young: It's really cool that you guys get to dog, your entire company gets to dog food your own software, which is very powerful.
So the HR space is highly crowded with legacy incumbents and what feels like a million startups. And you talked a lot about earlier about how marketing has changed in the last five years. Like what marketing strategies are your favorite and most effective for Sensai? That's a great question.
Everything of course costs money and everything has trade offs, but what are your favorites?
Robin Daniels: I actually don't think it has to cost that much money. That's the one I'll tell you. So I love the idea of either disrupting a category or creating a category. And I've done that through my whole career with Salesforce, with Box, with WeWork, creating the coworking space, even with Matterport.
I think it's super fun. Let me share a couple of different strands of thought with you. I think you can win a market at four different levels. You can win at the feature level, the product level, the category level, or the movement level. And the reason why you want to move up is because loyalty is much higher at the top.
And so is the revenue potential, the growth potential. You can create a very successful business. By competing on features, but it's very hard to create a super brand that way. And it's very hard to create love for your company. And the moment, honestly, something better comes along. If you've only convinced people that you have a better mousetrap than somebody else, they'll switch to something else.
Once you move up to, especially the category and the movement level, that's when people feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. They've fallen into a vision and some of the companies that we probably love. Certainly I do. Patagonia and Apple and Salesforce and so on. They've created something a little bigger.
Airbnb is a great example of this. And it takes time. You can't just overnight create, move up to win a category. Or when you do that over years or even decades. So I think, you want to move up. So you want to be able to say you have to first, the best of the only something at the feature level, then also at the product level, then ultimately at the category.
And then ultimately at the movement and you want to move up because again, it creates much bigger opportunity for you the way you get there. So ultimately how you get customers, you can really, if you simplify, get customers in three different ways, you can either pay for people's attention, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn ads, and you can hope that they can, you connect with the right people at the right time and they click and they go through.
The most data driven model is probably digital purchasing or digital marketing. It works fast, but if you can, you're also going to get a lot of not very good quality through there. It's my experience with all these companies I've worked for, but it works fast and you have to do it and you have to play that game and it can be very expensive and you're going to get some good results, but it's a constant game of optimization.
Number two, you can get customers by putting out stories that are so interesting that. People raise their hand and go, this is interesting. I want to go learn more. I want to, I read this article. I heard this podcast. I saw this Tik TOK video. I want to go find out more about this company. Of course, they're going to be much higher quality, but it's a hard one to break through because the trick here is you have to put out really interesting things, not just slightly better, slightly different, mediocre stuff.
You have to have an edge point of view. You have to have courage in what the stories you put out there, because we're so saturated with noise. That if it's not interesting, it's never going to break through. So I'm very optimistic. I think we're living through this golden age of storytelling. There's so many great ways for you to tell the story of who you are and what you do and what you stand for.
And TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, podcast videos. But the downside of this golden age is there's so much noise. So you have to really have the courage and conviction to stand for something, even if it means not being liked by everyone. I think, and then so much, I see out there so bland where you're like, no, nobody cares.
So that's number two. If you, and that one doesn't have to cost a lot of money. It could be your team, your executives putting out content on TikTok or LinkedIn or whatever it is. It takes time though, so the problem is it's not as data driven and it takes longer. Here, digital, like if you tell the team we need 100 leads by end of next week, the only way you can do it, guaranteed, is digital.
Can't do it by putting out, so you don't know if it's going to work as effectively, right? Because the story has to be true. But once you've hit something and you've hit that side guy, so you're breaking through, my God, the quality is so high. There's no way you can do it. You can get customers is the, what I would call community based marketing.
Where you're basically showing up for the community in small ways that get them to be your super fans what they buy into what you do, meaning do a lunch with someone, do a dinner, maybe a group dinner. Maybe you go speak to 20 of your customers in a little round table in Topeka, Ohio or something.
So you do these non, scalable things, but in my experience, again, from Salesforce, LinkedIn, we work, best customers we always had. But the ones that came through this way, but it's non scalable. It takes longer. And but showing up there means that these customers become the most loyal, the end up spending the most money with you because they truly bought into your bigger vision.
They haven't just seen 10 words on a digital ad and clicked on it. Thought you could stick it. They really believe they're part of your family. Now they will go to bat for you when things are good, but also when, of course, things even are not so good. The reason. Apple comes up with a lot of products.
Not all of them are great, but I stick with them because, I'm so bought into it. It's a part of my life. I can't imagine a life without them. So a good marketing strategy because they work in different timelines and that the community one is the one that takes the longest. You have to do all three.
You then as a company have to decide which one are we going to invest more in and how do we dial one up or, but I see so many companies only investing in digital and then they're like, ah, we really want to create a super brand, but we don't know how you're only investing in transactional buying and then others, if you're only investing in.
These really high leverage things, then it's going to take a long time. Your investors are probably not be patient enough to wait five years for you to see a return because some of these things take longer, right? For you to break through and create them. I remember when I was at Salesforce in the early days, we joined in 2007, we did something called the customer success tour.
And I would travel, I think we did a hundred shows in a year, travel around to these, every little city, even like the smallest cities that you normally wouldn't go to, but this was the conviction we had. We wanted to create these advantages. We would show up, I would, I remember going to small rooms with 20 people talking about cloud computing and our CRM platform and that's how you start creating, but it was a huge tax to do that, the manpower you need and the time and commitment and so on.
Again, non scalable things, but. I think one of the reasons why Salesforce is where they've done that for a long time now. And it started, of course, with the top Mark Benioff, but always getting in front of customers, not taking them for granted. So hopefully that's a long answer to your question.
Tracy Young: It does answer my question really well. Thank you so much. I get to talk to founders and executives from mostly Silicon Valley. It's very rare for me to talk to a leader from Denmark. My stereotypical view of Denmark is the land of Vikings, the descendants of Ragnar and home of Legos.
I have young kids in the family, so lots of Legos in the family. You've worked for very famous Silicon Valley companies. You've lived here for 20 years. Now you're back in Europe. Tell us about, the pros and cons of a startup in the EU, or maybe, make it more specific startup in Denmark versus Silicon Valley.
Robin Daniels: Yeah, it's a great question. So You, as you probably can tell from the way I speak and the way I talk about things. My, most of my working career has been in the U S and so I feel very American in the way I think about work and growth, but I think a lot of my values are very Nordic and Danish and so on.
So it's like this. I feel like I can get along and fit in anywhere, but I don't know if I belong anywhere either. I lived 20 years. I always loved it. And it felt like at home, but I also. Felt like a little bit of an outsider. And now being back in Denmark for three years, I feel the same, honestly, a little bit as well.
Cause many people just think I'm American. I'm an American last name. I sound American, all that stuff. So it's weird. But what I've noticed, so I, before I joined Sensai last year, I was doing advisory work for CEOs all across the world. But a lot of them here in Europe, mostly in Europe, time zone and so on. And the community has really changed. I moved from Denmark to Silicon Valley in 2000. So I felt like. It was so unambitious here. There was no like real startups. I'm a nerd. I love technology. I wanted to be with all the other nerds of the world, but there wasn't really a startup scene there. And the ambition level was so low.
I think that's radically changed in the last 10 years in Denmark and certainly in the rest of Europe. You see it in Berlin and London where I had lots of clients that I would work with, Stockholm and so on. So you have founders now who are daring to think differently, daring to be brave. The thing I've noticed though is that, Sean, this is where I really push a lot, is that there's so much great technology coming out of Europe, really thoughtful, built, and truly game changing, yet the go to market is very immature.
It's nearly too humble, too too scared in some way. I don't know what the right way, but it's like, we built this great thing. Let's go see if anybody wants it. And the U S is exactly the opposite of my experience. Like a lot of stuff coming out of let's just take Silicon box. We both have that as a reference for a lot of it was just okay.
Honestly, like a little bit haphazard, a little bit move fast and break things and all that kind of stuff. But the go to market, like just the best thing in the world is going to go change your life and we're going to change the world and so on. And I think if you can. Combine those two DNAs a little bit.
It'd be really, so I think, and I don't think that the European companies should become exactly like the US companies. It's not what I'm saying, but have a little bit more courage and go to market and storytelling. Be proud of what you've built. You've built something amazing. Stand by, you can build the greatest thing in the world, but if nobody knows it exists, it's never going to take off.
So of course, sales, marketing, go to market is a key part of that. And I think there's a level of this, We all have to fit in. We're a little bit conservative, and and in the U. S. here, the high is that the way I think about it is in the U. S. the highs, the optimism and the courage to take something to market is incredibly high.
And sometimes it's also really low. Let's be honest about that, but it can be really high. And in Europe, it's never as high and it's never as low. And so I'm very optimistic about that. The ecosystem here, the companies that I meet are really great, but they want to look at their messaging or their marketing or their, the way they think about sales.
It's just. Is it cultural? Is it just a difference in culture?
Tracy Young: I think it's very
Robin Daniels: cultural. It's very cultural. You don't want to stand out from the pack. You don't want to brag about yourself. There's not really a, a lot of the U. S. is yeah, look how great I am, in some ways.
And that can also has its downsides, don't get me wrong, right? But when you're out there, you have to market your company. You have to talk about yourself, at some point you have to figure out the right way to do it. But. I again, like I see some of those, these companies and I'm like, unless you figure that out, you're going to crash and burn.
It's just the truth because investors nowadays, they want you to get out there. And so there's a little bit of friction, I would say in that a lot of, uh, form investors, the Sequoias and index and Excel and Atomicals and so on. They're coming into the market and they're aggressive and they see the technology, they meet these founders and the founders are.
Pretty visionary and aggressive. But then the teams around them sometimes, I think are a little too calm, conservative around like having the boldness to put out, Oh what if. Somebody doesn't like it. Yeah. So what? Who cares? That's the price of being a grownup and putting out something that you're proud of.
But I think there's a little bit of that little bit rocking the boat. It has changed. That's what I'm saying. So 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and I grew wildly different. And even in the last It's 10 years, it's changing pre wrap. So I'm hopeful that'll change, but we needed to change because there is a lot of good stuff coming out of here.
That's for sure.
Tracy Young: I totally agree. That's what I've seen with European startups and American startups. We, in Silicon Valley, especially we were so guilty of every startup I talked to, everyone is changing the world. And it's wow, I'm so lucky. To talk to the startup that's gonna revolutionize the world.
And the next 10, same thing. It's do you not see all the buns yet?
Robin Daniels: Yeah, I take full responsibility. But it's, I'm also proud of it because of that. We got, you get people excited and you want to carry that excitement forward. How are you thinking about it? How
Tracy Young: do I do it?
Robin Daniels: Yeah. Like, how do you get people excited?
Tracy Young: I just want to build cool stuff with cool people that solves real problems, right? I think I'm much more realistic about our actual impact on the world. And we make people more productive. That's the business I'm in.
Robin Daniels: It's a beautiful thing.
Tracy Young: You talked earlier about how all of us have had influence in our lives and people who have helped us along the way.
None of us would be here without those people. Tell us about one person who's helped you become the leader you are today.
Robin Daniels: It really started with a woman named Elise Zimmerman when I first moved to the U. S. She was the VP of marketing and, I moved over there without a job, without any place to live, never been.
And I applied to every job I could find on Craigslist and ended up getting a job. It's very exciting. As a programmer, web programmer for a small startup in Los Gatos. And I worked for The VP of marketing was Elise Zimmerman and I was okay at this programming stuff, if I'm honest, I don't think I was great at it, but I had conviction energy and I, it was cheap, but she could see something that she saw that the way I interacted with the product team, the marketing team, the sales team, even she's you're really good at like connecting the dots around a lot of this stuff.
You should be in product marketing. I have no idea what product marketing is. What is that? And so she talked me through it, took me under her wing and kind of pushed me in that direction. And I always credit her with seeing something in me that put me on the path that has put me on where I am today.
I ended up taking a career in marketing versus technology, which I don't know if would have been as successful because I'm not as good at it. I think maybe but she was the, I think the first one. Who really unlocked my potential. I was 21 when I joined this company, right? So it was a young nobody, but she saw that potential.
And I think, so I've always taken that on myself. Like I want to do the same for everybody else around me. So that's one, I think, person a long time ago. And then I think the most recent one, I worked for somebody named Whitney Bauk. She was the. CMO of word box. And I was the head of enterprise marketing.
She was also a phenomenally, she had gave me the confidence and the trust because I was coming off through the ranks of leadership. I'd had a good run at Salesforce that had I think made my. My name a little bit. And then I went to box. I remember talking to Aaron Levy and Whitney and they're like, whatever you did at Salesforce, come do it for us.
We need that. I was running product marketing over there for one of their most successful products. And so I went there, but just like the way she inspired and led and gave me to trust and confidence, like he got this Robin, you, I, instead of micromanaging me, she like saw what I was good at.
She's I'm good at communication. I'm good at inspiring people. I'm good at, working with sales, with customers and so on. Honestly, put me on the road a lot to go speak in front of. People who were way more senior than me, CEOs and CIOs, because she's this is what you're really great at.
And I trust you can go do it and represent the company. And it was just great to have a leader who sees your skills, what you're good at, and doesn't try to fix the things you're not as good at, and just invest in that and unlocks that potential. So she was phenomenal.
She, I always credit her with like really seeing a lot of that in me as well. And I think getting me to be The leader, cause that's when I really, I led beforehand, a little bit, but I really grew the team. We got to an IPO and all that stuff. But I think if Salesforce was the catalyst, Box was the unlock in some ways for my life and career.
And that was a lot due to her.
Tracy Young: Yeah, it's the power of belief certainly the people who have been most impactful in my life. They believed me in a time I didn't even believe in myself and it's incredibly powerful. My last question for you is, What advice would you give people early on in their career?
What should they be doing more or less of?
Robin Daniels: It's funny. I just wrote about this. I don't know if you saw my post about the advice I would give to my younger self. I think basically, if I had to think back, let me try to take a different approach to it because it's very much on my mind these days.
process of writing my son's graduation speech because he just graduated from high school and I'm a little emotional about it because he's about to go off to college. He's going to Madison, by the way, which is very exciting and I, and we have a big party for him on Saturday and I want to give a little speech.
It's a very Danish thing to do. Give a little speech, at this point and I'm writing it. And and I think basically the advice I would give is that there's two things that you can control a hundred percent. It doesn't mean it's easy but you can do this it, it changes your life is the way you show up every day, passion, energy, excitement, conviction, it's a force multiplied spreads to everybody around you.
Everybody wants to be around those people who just lifts everybody up. And so your energy really matters. And you can control this. Again, I don't think it's easy always, depending on what's happening in your life, or what's happening in the world. It doesn't mean it's easy, but it doesn't change the fact that you can control this, I think, with the mindset and the mental resilience that you build up.
And the second thing, especially when you take your first job, is the initiative that you take. You're not expected to know everything. You're pretty young and straight out of school and you're starting out your career. But if you only do what's expected of you and you stay in that box, it's very hard to break through.
Find things that are not happening. Go talk to people, learn from people, find the spots where you see things are broken. And if you can't try to fix them, those are the people who always end up rising to the top. So it's energy and initiative. Those are the two key unlocks for somebody who's just starting out.
Cause you don't really have anything else. Honestly, you don't have the resume. You don't really have the experience yet to do anything else, but those two are two things people can't take from you.
Tracy Young: And there are also two things that as leaders, let's face it, it's two things we can't teach. Either they have it or they don't.
Robin Daniels: It's true. It's true. It's very true. Yeah, it's very true.
Tracy Young: I think that is excellent advice. I could talk to you for another two hours, but I know you are busy. So thank you so much for letting me interview you. I've really enjoyed this conversation, Robin.
Robin Daniels: Thank you, Tracy. Thanks for asking really thoughtful, deep questions.
Thank you. I enjoyed it.
