Steward of Story

 

Peloton’s Jessica Kleiman reflects on her career and life experiences as a storyteller, and shares her perspective on the value of authenticity in corporate communications and community stewardship.

 

Episode Notes

(4:32) Reflections on having a mother who was an executive; the pros and cons 

(8:11) What media companies were like two decades ago, versus what they’re like now

(13:59) Bringing together a passion for content with deep acumen in PR and comms at Peloton

(18:26) How Peleton led out as a category creator

(20:40) The power of community and how it can be amplified authentically

(24:29) Advice for PR pros on communicating with humanity & empathy

(32:48) How Jessica wrote a book as a working mom; advice for any aspiring author with too little time

Jessica Kleiman is a PR & comms veteran, a published author, and a principal contributor to one of the greatest brand stories of the new millennium.

In her talk with Jesse, Jessica takes us on her journey from 90s media rooms to directing communications at Peloton, where she helped blend content with technology to turn living rooms around the globe into supercharged exercise studios and cherished virtual meeting places. She describes how, throughout her career, she leveraged a background in literature and love of story to bring an editor’s eye and human openness to the oft-sanitized world of PR, and how she managed to write her first book in the months after becoming a mother. 

Increasingly, the stories a brand tells are an integral part of how people experience a brand—Jessica’s advice is invaluable for any builder seeking to build a passionate following with authentic and empathetic content.

Guest Bio

Jessica Kleiman is Senior Vice President, Global Communications at Peloton, the leading interactive fitness platform, where she oversees the brand’s public relations, corporate communications, internal communications and social media initiatives. 

Before Peloton, she spent two years leading consumer communications at Instagram and over a decade at Hearst Magazines, where she managed PR efforts for 20 U.S. media brands. Jessica also led PR and IR for The Knot, Inc., the nation’s leading wedding website and media company, and helped take the company public. 

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+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Jessica Kleiman: Everybody now says we're the Peloton of X. There was no reference point. That makes it a lot more difficult for people to understand what you're trying to do when you're just completely disrupting an industry that hadn't been disrupted or updated in quite some time. Now of course, we're the category creator, but lots of people have come out of the woodwork to launch connected fitness brands. So, you can't fall asleep at the wheel. That's why we continue to keep innovating and pushing ourselves. You cannot rest on your laurels.

[00:00:42] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics studios, this is Breakthrough Builders. A series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences.

I'm Jesse Purewal, head of brand at Qualtrics. Builder, coach, storyteller, and your host. One of the things I believe with great conviction is that we're breaking ground on a new way for content and community to be imagined, created, and sustained.

Whether it's Spotify resetting the bar for audio storytelling through astounding original series, or Salesforce standing up Salesforce+ to deliver Dreamforce to 175,000 people, there's a massive acceleration afoot in both consumer and B2B to create incredible content experiences that are modern, relevant, and personalized.

That's why I wanted to talk with today's guest, Jessica Kleiman. Jessica is an incredible brand builder and natural born storyteller. She's also the SVP of global communications at Peloton where she and her team are continuing to blur the lines between fitness and entertainment in vibrant and distinctive ways by creating practical, inspiring content and curating authentic communities around it. Jessica and I got started talking about the virtual writing community within Peloton itself.

[00:02:01] Speaker 3: I'm right here with you, Peloton.

[00:02:03] Speaker 4: Come on, let's get this.

[00:02:06] Speaker 5: You're on fire, come on.

[00:02:07] Speaker 7: Don't hold back on me, Peloton.

[00:02:10] Speaker 8: Let's go. Nothing can stop me.

[00:02:14] Jessica Kleiman: I would say there are probably 10 people on my team alone whom I hired during the pandemic and I have never met in person. And there are rock stars.

[00:02:23] Jesse Purewal: Does your team do rides or runs together?

[00:02:29] Jessica Kleiman: Yes. We used to do them in the actual studio when the studio still allowed attendees. But yeah, absolutely. And we have a global team, so it makes sense to do them virtually. We just instituted for the whole marketing team a Wednesday morning field day where you get a choice of three or four different classes that you can take.

So yeah, it's definitely an ingrained part of our culture. Though you don't have to be in shape or even a Peloton member to work at the company. I think most people find that they end up being a member.

[00:02:57] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. You're certainly a brand for all and a lot of inspiring stuff happening there. So, let me get into this with you, Jessica. You've put together a beautiful and impactful career so far. There's undoubtedly been some interesting inflection points and some key decisions and some great learning along the way. So, maybe start at the start. Where'd you grow up and what was family life like in the early years?

[00:03:17] Jessica Kleiman: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me, Jesse. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, about 20 miles outside of Manhattan. And I have a lot of siblings, an older sister and brother. I have a younger half brother and I have three much older stepbrothers. And my parents both divorced and remarried within a few years when I was young. And so really I have this wonderful extended family.

And I was a bit of a latchkey child. My mother went back to work full time. My mother's incredible and creative and she's had a lot of different careers. But at the time when I was a child, she actually worked in magazines. She was a promotion director for a group of computing magazines back in the '80s. And so I don't know if that at all informed my career ending up at Hurst for 12 years, but I certainly was impacted by the fact that she was a high powered executive and I had a lot of independence growing up and worked from a young age and so that's what helped for me.

[00:04:23] Jesse Purewal: Talk about the importance in particular of having a mother who had an executive job, a leadership role, what impressions that had on you as a young person.

[00:04:32] Jessica Kleiman: It's interesting because growing up with a lot of kids whose moms were homemakers and who were home for them after school and we're a little bit more accessible, I was jealous. When I look back now and I have my own daughter who has, I don't know how high powered, but certainly an executive for a mother, I think there are pros and cons to it.

I do look back and think, "Gee, I wish my mom had been around more." She wasn't the person to make my Halloween costume and things like that. But at the same time, I think I learned so much watching her that has helped me in my own career and my own confidence. And that is invaluable. Still to this day, she is an in-house career coach. She actually spent part of her career working in outplacement. So she coached executives for many years and I'm a beneficiary of that.

[00:05:28] Jesse Purewal: And I think when you were younger, you had the aspiration to be a writer and work more closely to journalism than to PR. But tell me that story, how it was that you got to focus on PR when maybe you thought you would be going through a different door.

[00:05:41] Jessica Kleiman: Yeah, absolutely. So, I was always a magazine junkie. I read every teen magazine that was out there at the time. Probably almost all of them are now defunct. And my mother oddly subscribed to Women's Wear Daily, which is still very much the trade Bible for the fashion industry. And they had a column in there called Memo Pad and it was all about what was happening in fashion and luxury magazines. And to me, these magazine editors were celebrities. So, when I went to school, I went to the University of Michigan. My intention was to major in journalism and the year I got in, they eliminated the undergrad journalism major. So I majored in communication, almost by default, with a minor in English. My designs were to graduate and land a job as an editorial assistant at one of the big magazine houses in New York.

And I didn't find one. And so I had a couple of internships during college in PR, media relations, one at a small agency in New Jersey that worked with government and academic clients and another one at capital records, which was a big record company at the time.

And so I had a little bit of experience in that. So I thought, well, what if I can get a job doing PR for magazines, meet lots of editors and then switch back over to the editorial side? So, I researched agencies that represented magazine and media brands, and I landed a job at one called the Rosen Group. Very small agency. And I ended up really enjoying PR and continuing to freelance right on the side for magazines. So, it was the best of both worlds. So, I fell into it in a lot of ways. And I think you have to be open to what comes your way because undoubtedly it will be a windy road.

[00:07:37] Jesse Purewal: An openness to new experiences is something I think is incredibly important. Uncertainty in our career paths is a feature. It's not a bug. Another trait of successful builders early in their careers is what I like to call confusion tolerance. The ability to withstand ambiguity and change as it's happening in your company, your industry, and your career. Jessica looks back fondly on what it was like to join a media company two decades ago as the internet revolution was bringing about massive change among newspaper and magazine publishers.

[00:08:11] Jessica Kleiman: I remember at my first office, we shared, all four or five of us, shared one free email account. And we would get the email and then yell over the cubicle, "Hey Dan, this one's for you."

So the nice thing about that, Jesse, is that if a journalist called you after five or six o'clock on a Friday, they had to wait until Monday for you to get back to them. There was no 24 hour news cycle. There were no cable news channels. There were no real blogs and online sites.

The media landscape has changed and evolved. Obviously, I worked for a long time in print magazines and it was the heyday when cosmopolitan was like a phone book every month and probably paid my salary for over a decade. That has obviously changed a lot. And it makes me very sad that magazines have been shuttered or have cut their staff, or there's no fact checking anymore. Because I think there are a lot of really smart, talented journalists who aren't able to do maybe what they did back in the day. But at the same time, there's been a proliferation of online outlets and forms of media that enable you to have multiple channels to share content and that to me is really exciting.

So, I think that there's been a convergence over the years where it's not just PR, media relations anymore, but it's actually more holistic across social media, corp comms, crisis management, PR, marketing, and that's, I think, very invigorating and I personally enjoy that.

[00:09:48] Jesse Purewal: At what point did you realize that actually staying in PR and comms was going to be the path? Like how often did you look over and say, "Oh, well maybe this is the quarter or this is the month that I go back to the editorial side"?

[00:10:04] Jessica Kleiman: Yeah. I would say that because I was able to continue my passion projects on the side, freelancing for a lot of magazines, newspapers, and online outlets. I wrote a book about a decade ago. That was a big goal of mine. Frankly, I get to do so much writing and editing in my job, I don't think there was one pivotal moment, Jesse, where I said, "Okay, oh gee, I'm going to throw in the towel on this dream of mine."

I think it was more that I felt fulfilled. I was able to continue to write and ideate and be creative and I was able to parlay some of those skills and talents into what I was doing. Particularly since I've always worked at content driven companies. Some people say, if you're good at PR or comms, you can promote anything. That may be true.

For me, I have to be promoting something that I believe in and I love content in whatever form. Whether it's print or online or I worked at Instagram where it was a content driven company and Peloton as well is a content driven company. We're a media company. So, that kept me learning and growing and excited. One other thing I will say is I believe that a good communications professional should just as easily be able to shift over into journalism. Either as a television producer or a writer. You have to have really strong writing, editing, and storytelling skills. You have to understand how a story resonates with an audience, how it fits into a trend, how it would be interesting. Just like if you were a journalist writing the story on the other end. So, I always look for people, when I hire, who have that skillset.

[00:11:56] Jesse Purewal: And Jessica, talk about why content driven companies resonate with you or have resonated with you. Is it because at your heart, you're a storyteller? Is it because you really just love to be part of a narrative and drive change? What is it that sticks with you about that?

[00:12:14] Jessica Kleiman: I don't know if it's anything I've ever really pontificated over, but I do think it comes from that love of story. An example is when I interviewed at Peloton, there had been no stories about how Peloton is a streaming media company or the next television network. We have a cast of talent. They have daily live television shows. They have to be able to break the fourth wall and be really world class fitness coaches, but also create a story.

[00:12:47] Speaker 7: I'm Suzy Chan and I'm your new Peloton tread instructor. For those people that want to start running and are not sure if it's for them, I say, just give it a go and have a little bit of belief that you can get to the end of that very first run.

[00:12:59] Jessica Kleiman: I thought that was under-leveraged as a thread for Peloton. And sure enough, it took over three years.

[00:13:08] Speaker 5: We're just leveling up a little bit.

[00:13:12] Jessica Kleiman: The Hollywood reporter just wrote a huge piece on how Peloton is the Netflix of fitness. That was something that I talked about in my interview process and I'm really proud that came to fruition.

[00:13:23] Speaker 3: They can't stop you. They can't break you.

[00:13:27] Speaker 4: Three, two, one. Awesome job, Peloton.

[00:13:34] Jesse Purewal: Jessica brought together her passion for content with her deep acumen in PR and comms to help tell the story of Peloton as a media company, the vision she'd had when she left Instagram to join Peloton in 2018. But she didn't join just because she saw a way to recast and broaden the company's narrative in the public domain. She explains.

[00:13:59] Jessica Kleiman: One of the things that I love is working for and with entrepreneurs. I am not an entrepreneur. I don't have the gene. I think it is a gene. You have to have a high tolerance for risk. And I think you to believe wholeheartedly in your vision and have self visualization that your idea is going to make it, because so many don't. And that is one thing that I admire so much about John Foley and his co-founders at Peloton.

When I was interviewing, he said to me, "We should be getting a story a day." As he likes to tell it, I looked at him like he had three heads, which I can't believe he still hired me, but thankful that he did. And sure enough, I had to eat my hat on that one because there are so many interesting stories to be told.

I think that our founders have such an out-sized vision and everybody really believes and gets on board with it and there's a lot of positivity in our culture and comradery and collaboration. So, I think that really fuels our desire to win, but in a healthy competition way. Just like Peloton is about healthy competition and community and I think that that drives a lot of what we do at the company. We are not just an exercise equipment company and I never saw it that way. There are people who probably still do, but I think sky's the limit on really where Peloton can go. Particularly with the impact we know we have on our global community.

[00:15:37] Jesse Purewal: And your ability as a company and as a brand to pervasively innovate, but do it at a pace that doesn't feel like it's breakneck, as [inaudible] became more mainstream and now we're seeing more from apparel. There's a sense that the company's being disciplined about its investment portfolio and where the brand can stretch. It feels like there's a lot of intentionality around the moves that you're making.

[00:16:01] Jessica Kleiman: There absolutely is intentionality. I will tell you, Jesse, that even though we are 10 years into this journey and we're a public company, there is still very much that desire to move quickly and innovate and do as much as we can. And we are really trying super hard to be more disciplined and to ruthlessly prioritize so that we can do fewer and better and bigger things.

And that I think will set us up for success. We could do things the way, but that is not Peloton. Part of why John got so many no's when he was shopping the idea to VCs at the beginning was because they were like, "You're crazy. You're going to build the hardware and the software and you're going to have your own retail stores and you're going to deliver the stuff? Why do that when you can just buy an off the shelf tablet?"

But there was a reason behind that and it has come to serve us well because we control every part of the process. So, when there are problems, they're are your problems to solve, but you're also not relying on others to do the work for you. And so I would say that launching in new markets is a lengthier process than if we were to license the brand or sell in other retailers. But we want to do it the right way. And that might take a little bit longer, but that's okay.

[00:17:28] Jesse Purewal: And you're creating a category. I can remember John's conversations in various interviews where he would reflect on the experience of coming out to Silicon Valley and be told something to the effect of, "John, there are two types of bikes in the world, mountain and road." And even the idea of soul cycle, doing the thing in person at a studio, was a little bit foreign to Sandhill Road investors at that time.

So, you had that frame of reference shift. You had the vertical integration frame of reference shift, the content piece, the Hollywood piece, Netflix like you're talking about. All of these would be transformations from, "It doesn't exist today" to "It exists today and all under the banner of the same brand, the same experience." You don't really get that many chances as a pro in comms or anything else to be part of a company that's really inventing and creating and then humbly leading, I would say, a category.

[00:18:26] Jessica Kleiman: Absolutely. When you are disrupting, and that's an overused word, but when you're disrupting a category, when John was going down Sandhill Road trying to get funding, there was no pattern. There was no model for this. Everybody now says, "We're the Peloton of X." There was no reference point. If they don't see the data and understand a comparison or a pattern, that makes it a lot more difficult for people to understand what you're trying to do when you're just completely disrupting an industry that hadn't been disrupted or updated in quite some time.

Now of course, we're the category creator. But lots of people have come out of the woodwork to launch connected fitness brands. You can't fall asleep at the wheel. That's why we continue to keep innovating and pushing ourselves. You cannot rest on your laurels. You can't have too much pride or hubris because someone will come along behind you and come up with a great idea.

We feel like we've had a big head start and we feel like we have the right talent in place to continue to innovate. And when they came calling, I really wasn't looking for a new job. I had turned down lots of overtures while I was at Instagram. I really felt like that was my dream job. But I was intrigued the more I learned about the company, the more I realized that sat at the intersection of tech, media, and fitness. And those were all things that I was interested in and had experience in.

And I looked at the community. I looked at the Facebook group, which now is over 400,000 people, but back then it was much smaller, and how people were talking about the brand. And it was fascinating to me. Instagram is a pretty robust community of people with shared passions and interests who can connect virtually. So, there's that parallel. But I have never seen people who were such proselytizers for a brand before and who had developed relationships with people through the platform and knew the instructors personally. It was really interesting to me.

[00:20:40] Jesse Purewal: To me, the community is absolutely the most powerful part of it. I was sitting with my wife, preparing a little bit for this interview and she said, "You know, my Facebook Peloton moms group has almost 90,000 people in it." And she said probably 98% of the posts have a three letter start. "NPR." Not Peloton related. 90,000 people in that group, and presumably if not hundreds of thousands more in different groups all around the world, have used this community that Peloton has helped to curate as the launching pad for experiences with one another, for trusted relationships with one another, for bonding, for help, particularly over the last 18 to 20 months as we've gone through one of the craziest times in world history.

And I think that's so incredibly powerful. And what I love as a brand person on the outside looking in is I see nothing but authenticity fueling that.

[00:21:40] Jessica Kleiman: I'll tell you why I think it is that way. A couple of reasons. One is the community was almost a happy accident. So, I don't know that our co-founders built the brand with an eye on creating this passionate community, but because of how they built the brand, it sprung up organically and we realized how special that was.

And to your point, Jesse, if we started marketing to our members in a way that didn't feel authentic, we would hear about it instantaneously and we would turn them off and that is the last thing we want to do and we really believe in a members first philosophy. And that is one of our core values, put members first. That's our number one core value and we really do live by it. I think the authenticity is really critical to keeping that community passionate. I always joke that our members sell more bikes and treads than our sales people, and I think we have the best sales people in the business.

So, you cannot buy that kind of brand loyalty and we cherish it and we don't want to do anything to ruin it. The nice thing about being a technology company at our core, we can iterate and we can adapt and we can respond to our members' needs. So, the high five feature which you have on the bike and the tread, if you want to high five, you click a little hand and you can virtually say hi to someone whether you know them them or not. That came from our members. We have feature Fridays where the Facebook group and other members can pitch ideas and a lot of those do see the light of day, which is pretty amazing. I don't know how many companies can say that they truly launch features and products based on feedback from their members. But that's really ingrained in our R and D process,

[00:23:37] Jesse Purewal: Launching products and features based on feedback and sentiment. It's critical to reshaping and innovating the experience you're serving up to customers. If you want to grow a platform company like Peloton that's in the experience business, you've got to have deep empathy. But not just for customers, for all your audiences. Jessica and I talked about the topic of empathy in a communications context.

And I want to ask you about empathy in a comms framework. So, you're part of a team, you're leading a team that's the voice to the market of Peloton. It's a lot of responsibility. It's very human to human stuff. I imagine quite a bit of it is about empathy and relatability and connection. Can you talk about that dimension of the communications role and how you'd advise people who are comms pros or aspiring comms pros to keep empathy front and center?

[00:24:29] Jessica Kleiman: :Yeah, there's a lot of humanity in what comms professionals do, particularly when it comes to having to communicate about difficult things. And one of the bits of advice that I've always given to my team throughout my whole career is read something aloud and ask yourself the question, "Does this sound like something a real human being would say?" For example, you've seen press releases where the quote is an off the shelf quote that some corp comms person plugged in and you're like, "That CEO probably didn't say that."

Or you have a briefing document for an executive to do an interview or a speaking engagement and they're using stilted, highfalutin language that you would never say at a cocktail party or in a conversation. So, I think that part of the empathy and humanity comes from being real. So, that's a guiding principle for me as a communications professional. And I think it gets you through the hard days and I think it fosters trust.

It fosters trust with your consumers, with your audience and even with the media, with whom comms professionals don't always have a copacetic relationship.

[00:25:48] Jesse Purewal: Talk to me about the multidimensionality of the communications role. As somebody is marketing, this is the most fascinating dimension of it. That on one hand, you've got a chief executive officer, others in the leadership team who's voice you're stewarding and partnering with to get that out into the world. You're managing a team accountable to dozens of different types of people and in different ways for getting the point of view of the company and of the brand out into the world. Just talk about how you think about that, how you prioritize that.

[00:26:21] Jessica Kleiman: Certainly. We have to think about all different stakeholders. We have our team members, I oversee internal communications. I think those people are your first line of defense. They're your best advocates. If they don't believe in what you're doing or understand it, then it's hard to get people outside the company to. We have our members who are very passionate and very open with sharing their opinions, both positive and negative, about what we're doing. We have investors and shareholders and media and we have leads. There are tons of different stakeholders.

I think it's a great exercise to think about all the different audiences and partners that you have to deal with as a communications pro and how you shape the message and work with all of those different people. So, I do think, Jesse, that the most successful way for a comms team to work or for a company to view a comms team is to see them as a partner and not as a service org.

Often PR or corp comms or internal comms is an afterthought. A lot of times, I remember back in my days in magazines and not everyone did this, but a lot of times the marketing and advertising teams would sell a program or a campaign to a big advertiser for a lot of money. And then they'd come to my team and they'd say, "Okay. Here you go. Here's this fully baked advertorial on X, Y, Z. We promised we'd get press on it."

And I would say, "No, Uh-uh [negative], that's not how this works. You have to come to us ahead of time before you sell the program and say, 'Do you think this would resonate?' Or get our input on maybe we can tweak this and that, and we can help you. And you also can't ever guarantee press."

So, that, I think, is an ongoing frustration for comms pros. Is just pull them in at the end, pull them in when a crisis happens and they'll clean up the mess. But if you bring us in early and you give us a seat at able, I think it's much more collaborative and will have more successful results.

[00:28:29] Jesse Purewal: What is it like getting to do that as a leader in communications in a public company in particular? Where you're accountable to the streets and you're accountable to the public domain in a way that maybe if you're in a business unit like you were in Instagram within Facebook, which is publicly traded, or say Peloton in the pre-IPO days, maybe the risks and the accountabilities look different. How would you handicap the differences between owning comms in a public company environment, especially US based publicly traded company environment, versus maybe some of the other types of organizations you've gotten to sit with?

[00:29:07] Jessica Kleiman: So, I've worked at a number of different types of companies. Hurst is privately held, still family owned. But in many ways, they run themselves like a public company though, which is interesting. I worked at a smaller media and design shop that was owned by a serial entrepreneur, and that was privately held.

And then Peloton is actually the second company I've taken public during my career. The first one very early on, theknot.com, or The Knot, which if anyone's ever planned a wedding, you're probably familiar with it. And so there's definitely a distinction. There's legal and compliance issues that you have to adhere to. You can't necessarily share information as freely as you once did, particularly as a small startup. I know that's a constant point of frustration for our leaders, because they were so used to sharing everything with everyone and you have to adapt and make sure that people understand that it's really to protect them as shareholders, to make sure that they don't say something they shouldn't.

So, the balance there is that you don't want to lose the essence or DNA of the brand that made it special as a startup because you're all of a sudden a publicly held company. You don't want to all of a sudden be a corporate place that doesn't feel like what you joined. We work really hard at Peloton to try to maintain the culture that's been ingrained in the brand since the beginning, which is open, collaborative, positive, and innovative.

[00:30:43] Jesse Purewal: Jessica, they have those books like Everything That I Didn't Learn at HBS, or the What They Don't Teach You. What is the Jessica Kleiman view of what they don't teach you? If you're giving advice to someone who's, let's call it four to five years into their career in communications or IR or AR and they're looking at the kinds of roles that you've gotten to hold in your career, what's the advice that they wouldn't get from somewhere else that they ought to hear from you?

[00:31:15] Jessica Kleiman: I will say that comms in particular is something that you really learn on the job. And that's not to say that there aren't phenomenal programs in PR and communications at schools across the country and other markets. But I really think that's so much of it. You learn as you go. You can read a million case studies. But once the situation arises, you have to figure out how to approach it.

I really think that comms is a critical function. I have long said, "Well, it's not a revenue producing department. Maybe it indirectly impacts revenue, but we don't have the same kind of P and L that a sales org or others do." And my current boss, who's an incredible leader, Dara Treseder, said to me recently, "I don't want to hear you say that again, because that's not actually true. You are a revenue producing department and you do have an impact directly on the bottom line."

And I really appreciated that she called me out on that because so much of what we do is to help build brand awareness and reputation and look at the narrative that we want to build for the company, not just now but for the future. So, people who are considering going into the field should really see themselves as a critical player on the business team of any brand.

[00:32:43] Jesse Purewal: What do you personally believe has been your biggest professional breakthrough?

[00:32:48] Jessica Kleiman: I have to say, coming out with a book. That was really a big goal for me and the other big breakthrough accomplishment is being a working mom. I actually got the book deal, I think I was pregnant when I learned that a publisher had bought the book. And then I had to write it during my maternity leave with my daughter. While she napped, I wrote, and it worked really well and I was able to turn it out. But that was a huge accomplishment, being in a Barnes and Noble and seeing a book with my name on the cover. People still comment that they read the book, which is super exciting.

[00:33:24] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. What did you learn about yourself when you went through the writing process? Either in terms of your habits or your style or your talents?

[00:33:32] Jessica Kleiman: This is a piece of advice that I got from the longtime editor and chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, a woman named Kate white, who miraculously managed to publish a mystery thriller every single year, bestseller every year, while she was running one of the biggest magazine brands in the world with two kids. I don't know how she did it.

I sat in an interview with her where someone asked her, "How do you do it?" And she said, "I wake up and I say, I'm going to write for 15 minutes." That's a really manageable bite size amount of time that anybody can do something for 15 minutes. And she said, "Inevitably, I'll end up writing for an hour or sometimes an hour and a half or more on the weekends." But because in my head, I'm just focused on getting 15 minutes in, I can do it. And I thought that was a really good philosophy. If we tackle things in bite sized pieces, it's a lot easier to get them done. If you think of things in smaller accomplishments, it can add up to a big accomplishment.

[00:34:38] Jesse Purewal: Jessica, earlier in the interview, you identify yourself as a bit of a planner, somebody who has stayed the course in communications, but I want to ask you, what is something that you have changed your mind on in life? It could be career, or it could be elsewhere. But what's something that you once believed and then either through persuasion or life experience or a combination of the two, it turns out you changed your mind on?

[00:35:04] Jessica Kleiman: One of the phrases that I would say often growing up was, "If it's meant to be it'll happen." And as I've gotten older, I don't necessarily think that accounts for taking the initiative to make something happen. It's a little bit too passive, and thinking that something's just going to happen to you versus you making moves or decisions to help impact the outcome of something. And so that's one that I now question.

[00:35:38] Jesse Purewal: Jessica, thank you so much for the candor today. I love the journey that we got to go on here in this dialogue. So, I wish you and the family all the best as we look here towards the start of the close of the year and with everything going on in the world. So, be well, be safe and look forward to seeing you again soon.

[00:35:56] Jessica Kleiman: Thanks so much for having me, Jesse. It was a great conversation and I hope to see you in person one of these days soon.

[00:36:03] Jesse Purewal: No doubt, no doubt. Be well.

[00:36:04] Jessica Kleiman: Thank you.

[00:36:04] Speaker 5: We love you, Peloton.

[00:36:13] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review and tell a friend about the show. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, the folks from StudioPod Media in San Francisco, and Vayner Talent in New York.

From StudioPod Media, our executive producer is Katie Sunku Wood, producer is Sterling Shore, editing and music is by Ryan Crowther, and our show coordinator is Kela Sowell. From Vayner Talent, publicity and promotion support come from Samantha Heapps, Hannah Park, Lindsay Blum, and Yvanna Lynn.

The shows designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Our website's by Gregory Hedon, and photography is by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 5Jesse Purewalwriting advice, public relations, jessica kleiman, brand experience, brand storytelling, building communities, content-driven brands, creating a category, peloton, corporate communications, internal communications