Relevant Reflections

 

Jesse sits down with TJ Bonaventura of StudioPod Media to reflect on his role as a brand builder, key themes from Breakthrough Builders, and what's in store for 2022. Jesse also faces a lightning round of questions from the production team!

 

Episode Notes

During this 40th episode of Breakthrough Builders, host Jesse Purewal reflects on the 39 episodes produced thus far. It’s part year-in-review, part host-tells-all as he sits down with Studio Pod Media’s TJ Bonaventura and the team behind the show for an enlightening conversation about storytelling with empathy, favorite moments with guests, and everything in between (there’s even some hockey talk).   

(0:57) Describing the show’s origins and evolution

(8:45) Jesse identifies four main themes of the show so far w/ episode reflections

(15:14) The importance of empathy: why we all need to be continuously understood, and re-understood

(17:08) Looking ahead to 2022

(17:57) Favorite pods, the Dream Guest, & more: Jesse answers a lightning round of questions from the Breakthrough Builders team

Referenced Episodes

+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] TJ Bonaventura: Hey builders. It's TJ Bonaventura, co-founder of StudioPod Media in San Francisco. We've been thrilled to work with Jesse and the team at Qualtrics Studios on the production of Breakthrough Builders. This is the 40th episode of the show. And if you've been listening along to Jesse's conversations with creators of amazing products, brands, and experiences, thanks for tuning in.

Like many of our guest endeavors, the show has been moving at a breakneck pace since the first episode launched in November, 2020. So we may have missed our one-year anniversary, but the holidays afforded us another chance to slow down and reflect a little bit on how we got here and where it's going.

In this episode, Jesse and I sit down to talk a little bit about the show itself, how it started, and how it's come together. Jesse describes the show's origins. We examined some of the key themes that have emerged from conversations with guests. And we turned the tables on Jesse during a 360 degree lightning round with the Breakthrough Builders production team. We hope you enjoy it. Without further ado here's your host, Jesse Purewal.

[00:00:57] Jesse Purewal: The first role I was in at Qualtrics was actually a role called the Chief Industry Advisor for our high tech and telecom business. And so the initial instantiation of the podcast was let's put technology leaders, technology builders on stage around the way that they build and the way that they create product experiences, brand experiences, customer experiences in the way that they innovate, in the way they create organizations and teams and companies.

And as I stepped into the head of brand role at Qualtrics, we had an opportunity, maybe even an obligation to just make it broad about builders more broadly, and celebrate the people that our brand at Qualtrics is for. I mean, we talk about being for breakthroughs as part of our brand DNA. And there's a line in our manifesto that explicitly reads we're for breakthrough experiences and those who are bold enough to chase them.

And so when I thought about the invitation that our brand gives me in this role to think about, okay, head of brand, how am I stewarding that, as well as all the great stories out there that are yearning to be told in tech and in every industry, thought this is just really something that I want to have a hand in.

[00:02:06] TJ Bonaventura: You come into every interview with an earnest and curious mindset. Is that something, and taking it back to a question that you always ask your guests, is that something that we would have found an 11-year-old Jesse doing? Were you always that, or did you teach yourself to become that over the years?

[00:02:22] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. I have always had a fascination with other people's stories. I mean, I can remember being younger and wanting to know when I visited at a friend's house, like how did they set up their room? What toys did they have? What did they do? Was their bedroom upstairs or downstairs? What was their relationship with their siblings like? And I wasn't like explicitly going through this checklist, but I found myself having those kinds of curiosities as I would build friendships.

And it's just always been that way. I don't have a thought on exactly why that is, but I've always wanted to understand what's somebody's backstory, what's shaped who they've become, and what can I learn from that?

[00:02:58] TJ Bonaventura: I love that. It's almost like you're always paying attention, always looking to find more about why someone made the decision they did, which feeds into Breakthrough Builders perfectly. Now, would you consider yourself a builder yourself?

[00:03:10] Jesse Purewal: I have probably on the show a couple times asked people whether they are entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial. And the reason for that is that was a moment of discovery I had. I got to Berkeley for business school and I was pretty sure I wanted to start a company. I wanted to start something that would be like the next Team in Training. I'd been really inspired by the athletic and fundraising and community experiences I'd had with Team in Training and similar organizations like Pallotta TeamWorks back in the day with the early AIDS rides. I thought, "That's a great spot." But there's so much more opportunity to go build organizations that have impact like that.

And when I got to school at Haas, at Berkeley, I kind of realized I'm an entrepreneurial person, but I'm not necessarily an entrepreneur. And that was a really important learning because it made me realize that I wanted to be part of burgeoning high growth, exciting, important organizations, but that didn't necessarily have the courage or the capital to put everything on the line.

[00:04:06] TJ Bonaventura: For me, that speaks to being an entrepreneur. And I think that's one thing that's very unique about what we do here at Breakthrough Builders, is understanding you don't have to mortgage your future. You can be risk averse, but still create inadvertent boundary breaking.

So I want to talk about that inadvertent boundary breaking and how that ties into the overall theme of Breakthrough Builders, and what you're hoping that if there is somebody like yourself who wants to take that next step in their career or wants to do something, but within constrained or risk averseness, if you will, how does that tie into the overall theme of the show of what you're trying to produce?

[00:04:40] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. I think that there's a lot of vocabulary out there, like disrupt or push the status quo or reduce tolerance for what we do today. And I think all of those things come from exactly the right place. But you have to follow that up with action. And I think sometimes it's true that somebody sets out to completely disrupt the way things are done, whether that was what Benioff architected with cloud computing or what the founders of Google saw as an opportunity to organize the world's information. Like these kind of huge moves that upended the way that it was and made it the way that it is.

99% of the way that innovation and change happens though is not necessarily monumental. It's more incremental. So you have to come to the table with this thought of what am I going to do a little bit better or a little bit different than I did before? How am I going to go get feedback on how to change myself a little bit each day, a little bit each month, with each new role or each new job? And I think that intentionality around just being a little better every day, working a little harder than you did the day before, you look back and you're like, "Oh gosh, I've really climbed quite a summit here."

So it might not be that it's inadvertent as much as that it's just, you're not looking at it and going like, "All right, I got to go slay the dragon." It's more just like, "I got to get through today and make it my best day." And if you do that over enough days, things are going to work out.

[00:06:02] TJ Bonaventura: Shavings make a pile. Right? I love that. I think oftentimes, especially with podcasting, there's this misconception that people or these individuals, the Joe Rogans, the Tim Ferris' can just like show up and just do an interview. And I don't think that's necessarily true. So I want you to go and do a little bit of the prep that you try to do before each episode, just to kind of peel back the onion, what happens prior to hitting record?

[00:06:30] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. So for each guest, there's some point of origin for why I believe that person would be a really strong guest on the show. It's either because of the personal career journey they've had, the perspective that they've shared out in the public domain on some topic. Maybe it's a book that they've written. Maybe it's their tenure at an organization. I mean, I think about Gurdeep Pall, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft 30 years there, it was one of the people who invented TCP/IP as a protocol. He was like one of the forefathers of the modern internet. That's a pretty interesting story. Like definitely qualifies as a Breakthrough Builder.

Similarly, Sean Taylor, the British author, who's written dozens of different children's books and received all kinds of interesting awards for them, turns out to have this incredible backstory about courage that he had to develop as a youth to find his voice as a writer.

And so there's always like a hook. And then we want to add something new to the public record on who they are and tell their story and maybe a way they haven't gotten a chance to tell before.

I think that was important in a case like Jenny Fleiss. I mean, Jenny Fleiss, you can read and see all kinds of stuff on the internet about. But when Jenny and I got into a conversation about how she brings her whole family and her daughter in particular into the context of what she's trying to accomplish as a builder in her career, that's not a conversation that she gotten to have publicly before. And so we're unlocking new things all the time, again, because I'm trying to think of her, not as the co-founder Rent the Runway, but as an investor and a mom and a doer.

[00:08:02] Jenny Fleiss: One day, my daughter was learning about Jane Goodall at school. And I bought a book. Then we started reading it at night and she became fascinated. And she started looking at her website. And I said, "Oh, sometimes she speaks at different events in schools." She said, "Would she ever speak at my school?" And I was like, "Email her." And we did. And she didn't come speak at the school, but it was like, there's no bar. I called, emailed Diane von Furstenberg to start Rent the Runway. It's like, why not? It's like, you never know until you've tried.

[00:08:28] TJ Bonaventura: When it comes to podcasting, there's often a challenge of you can go so many different ways with where the conversation could potentially go. I think what you and the team here have done such a good job of is making sure you stay core to the themes of the show. So I want to talk about some of these themes that you and the team try to focus on.

[00:08:45] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. I think one of the primary themes that cuts across a lot of our guests is building with purpose. And it goes all the way back to episode one with Robert Chatwani, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Atlassian.

[00:08:58] Robert Chatwani: Companies and cultures change. But that didn't mean that I had to change. Any leader, whether you are a CMO or a CEO or a first time manager, you cannot craft a culture or be successful, authentically successful in an environment that has a set of values that's fundamentally different than his or her values.

[00:09:21] Jesse Purewal: It was a very candid reflection on his part about how to make career decisions in line with your values and your beliefs. It sounds like a head nodding thing, but one of the things that Robert shared on that show publicly for the first time was the reckoning around his difficult decision to exit eBay, to go find something else when eBay's strategic direction was going one way and his values and his purpose were pulling him a different direction. And when he chose Atlassian, it was, as he said, the first time he made a career decision based primarily on people and team and organizational ethos versus like, well, what are we building and what kind of product are we creating here? And he's like, "I'll never look back." Right?

And so purpose continues to be a theme that keeps coming up, especially now, when we're in this place of the great, whatever, great retrenchment, great resignation, great reshuffling, whatever R word you want to use when employees are really holding the cards. It should be a chance to sit down and say like, "What do you want to do and what's important to you in this society and in this structure that we have?"

I think another thing in addition to building with purpose is challenging the status quo, even when the path forward isn't clear. We talked with Sheila Vashee, who is now an investor, but was marketing employee number two at Dropbox. And she wanted to bring the energy and the love and the emotional connection of consumer brand that she'd been at places like Apple into B2B. And you look at Dropbox now and you're like, "Well, of course they have some of that consumer love." But at the time, it wasn't obvious how then a file sharing platform was going to develop an emotional connection. And so that path forward was definitely not clear. And she was relentless about pushing the status quo.

We continue to see that with a lot of guests. I think number three would be stressing over continuous improvement, not trying to push always to perfection. Jeetu Patel talked about this at Cisco with sequential product releases in the enterprise.

[00:11:24] Jeetu Patel: Most customers don't expect perfection. What they expect is someone who's willing to go out and constantly improve and is listening to them. I think most people will give you more of a shot than you think they will. Progress is a far more enticing characteristic than just the absolute leadership position to be in. Playbook doesn't really apply. And you just have to make sure that if you're doing the right thing by customers and innovating well, most things tend to fall in place.

[00:11:50] Jesse Purewal: Alex Hood at Asana talked about product led growth in that highly iterative way. And Scott Belsky reflected on building Behance and then the Creative Cloud Team at Adobe kind of one step, one release, one A/B test, one learning cycle at a time.

And then number four is proactive listening and not being afraid to acknowledge what you don't know. I love the story that my friend, Lakshmi Shenoy, who's now the CEO of Embark Collective in Tampa told me when she left 1871 Chicago to move to Florida and start an entrepreneurial community there. Rather than come in and say, "Here's the strategy. Here I come from the big Midwestern town," she actually sat down at the Starbucks in downtown Tampa with 75 or 80 different people and just said, "What's going on here? Like what's the energy? What's the challenge? Where are we at?" And started to deeply understand and empathize with that community before becoming a leader within it.

So I think about purpose. I think about challenging the status quo with an unclear path. I think obsessing over a continuous improvement and proactively listening with a deep empathy as being a lot of the kinds of themes we've heard a lot.

[00:12:59] TJ Bonaventura: Talk about some guests that have surprised you, maybe one that was just kind of just like, "Wow, that was an incredible interview and an incredible person that really caught me off guard."

[00:13:07] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. I think the theme that ties together guests that turn out to be a little surprising, it's less like massively revelatory stuff and more when a guest turns out to be willing to put their vulnerability on display in a way that is relatable.

And I think about being here in the studio and interviewing Brad Balukjian, who is a writer and a professor, and one of his books is called The Wax Pack where he tells the story of taking a wax pack of 1986 tops baseball cards, looking at all the players in it, and ultimately going on a cross country road trip to go meet and have a conversation with all of these players to discover life after baseball.

And he reflects a little bit in the book and then even more deeply in our dialogue on the show about his own struggles with OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, and the way that he had to take very particular measures as he approached conversations that he felt like could potentially go badly with Garry Peters, for example, in Houston, around the choices that that player made in his personal life.

Or even someone like Rob LoCascio, the CEO of LivePerson when we asked him about the future of work. Rather than saying like, "Well, it's going to be this many days a week and this many ... " he was like, 'Oh, everything's going to distribute autonomous organizations. And by the way, it's a waste of time to go to college." And like, "Whoa." It was like, "Whether you agree with this statement or not, it's like, he was just putting himself on sort of full display in terms of what he believed and why he believed it.

I think that's the kind of stuff that makes people want to listen. It doesn't sound like some other content stream you can grab somewhere else. Like here's a person saying what they think, giving their personal truth, tying it into why it's relatable and important for the audience. It's just surprised me how people are willing to do that and to go there, kind of put themselves out for our audience like that.

[00:14:56] TJ Bonaventura: That leads me to a word that I find is brought up quite a bit when you're speaking with your guests or having these conversation, and that's empathy. Was that always something that you thought yourself as a host would bring up from your core or is that just who you are individually? Like, why is that part of Breakthrough Builders?

[00:15:14] Jesse Purewal: If there's something that's an under abundance of in society these days it's listening well. I think we have gotten really used to taking in a lot of noise, a lot of digital exhaust, a lot of stress. A lot is upon many of us, like all over the world today. And it can be really challenging to just carve out the time to say, "Well, what do you think? What do you believe and why?"

It's not about compromise. It's not about getting people to change their minds. It's about really understanding who a whole person is. Nobody should be characterized by somebody that they voted for. They shouldn't be characterized by the color or the pigmentation they happen to carry. They shouldn't be characterized by some decision they made when they were 14. They need to constantly be understood and kind of re-understood.

And if I think about the most powerful experiences I've had as a human being, they've been those late night conversations you have in college or those road trip dialogues you have when it's you and a friend or you and your family. And you're sitting there and you've got yourselves, and you're really deeply enmeshed in some meaningful dialogue about something. And you're learning something about a person.

So I just, I think we're missing it as a foundation for a lot of what we could be accomplishing as a society. And second, I just, like I said, with the story at the top, that reflection I have from when I was younger and just wanting to understand people's back stories, I just find a lot of utility and enjoyment in the answer. Like regardless of what it is, it just takes me to a place of wanting to understand more and more, because it's kind of like going through a mental fun house. Like I just keep opening new doors and keep finding new games.

[00:16:59] TJ Bonaventura: We're coming up to the close of the year here. What's the goals? What's the plan for Breakthrough Builders going into 2022 in the next batch of episodes that you're hoping to come out with?

[00:17:08] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. We are pulling Breakthrough Builders under the umbrella of unexpanded Qualtrics Studios next year. And so what that means is Breakthrough Builders as one of our key audio and potentially emerging kind of video formats for storytelling will help continue to tell the story of our brand and experiences and breakthroughs in experiences. And we'll continue to bring in guests from all kinds of walks of life just like we have.

I mean, of course I have personal dream guests, but it's a little bit less about me and more how are we using this to send a clear signal to people about what we believe at Qualtrics and just put worthy, compelling, entertaining, relevant content out into the world. And as I look at what we're doing in '22 and beyond, Breakthrough Builders will be a big part of that.

[00:17:57] TJ Bonaventura: All right, Jesse. As you always close out your show, we're going to bring in a little bit of lightning around for you here. So we're going to surprise you. I'm going to lead it off. And then we're going to bring the team behind Breakthrough Builders to ask to you some questions. Hopefully they catch you a little bit off guard. We know you like to prepare, but we got to throw you a little curve ball here.

[00:18:16] Jesse Purewal: Let's do it. I can hit curve balls.

[00:18:17] TJ Bonaventura: Okay, let's go. Now what's one brand or favorite brand you cannot live without right now?

[00:18:23] Jesse Purewal: I'm going to go with Shinola, Detroit watch brand that is now really kind of becoming a lifestyle brand. Not being able to imagine living without might be a slightly high bar, but now that I've got it in my life, I'm the owner of two Shinola watches, and it's my go-to gift.

[00:18:38] TJ Bonaventura: If there's a builder out there that wants to start a podcast, what advice would you give them?

[00:18:43] Jesse Purewal: I think the first thing is, be clear on the story that the pod is going to tell through the voices of either the hosts, or if it's a guest podcasts, the guests that will come on. I think everything else flows from there. People will want to get involved with it if they get the story and it resonates with them and maybe their purpose. People will want to get involved if they see the value in what you're doing.

[00:19:08] TJ Bonaventura: All right. Now, we're going to pass it over to Sterling who's the producer from the StudioPod side of things who wants to ask you a couple questions?

[00:19:13] Sterling Shore: Okay. First question. This one, I'm really excited about. What's something listeners of the show would be surprised to learn about you?

[00:19:21] Jesse Purewal: That my first job was as a teen model.

[00:19:25] Sterling Shore: Wow. Okay. I was not expecting that. That's awesome. Okay. What's one thing that a lot or even a majority of people believe that you think is wrong?

[00:19:35] Jesse Purewal: I am shocked that we are still living in a world where resumes are the way that people apply to jobs and try to explain who they are. I believe that resumes are a thing of the past. Like chalk resumes up there with mainframes. Resumes are dead.

[00:19:51] Sterling Shore: I completely concur with that. I'm going to pass it on to our writer, Todd. Take it away, Todd.

[00:19:58] Todd Bagnull: Jesse, you and I both share a love of hockey. I know you follow the NHL pretty closely. What are some of the experience gaps for fans and/or players that you'd point out as being in need of the league's attention?

[00:20:13] Jesse Purewal: I think the big thing honestly, would be the shootout. I think the shootout is a dilution of everything that the NHL is about. I would rather see ties, and I think many players would rather see ties. I think goalies would rather not have to live with shootouts.

[00:20:30] Todd Bagnull: I couldn't agree more as a fan of a team that's been known to put a little pressure on the goalies that suit up for it. What's your favorite hockey memory?

[00:20:39] Jesse Purewal: I go back to the Saturday night in early June of 2002, game three of the Stanley Cup finals against the Carolina Hurricanes, triple overtime, where Igor Larionov had that gnarly backhander over Arturs Irbe to win game three and take a two one lead in that series that they would eventually win in five games.

The reason that memory is so ingrained in me is because it was the last day of the California AIDS ride. And I had just done seven days of riding my bike from Fort Mason in San Francisco down to Sun Park in Santa Monica. And one of the guys I did the ride with was somebody I grew up playing hockey with in the Little Caesars league in Michigan. And so it was kind of an adventure to be able to catch some of the games as we were doing the AIDS ride and then see that goal. Oh, such a good memory.

[00:21:28] Todd Bagnull: That's great. I think we have Chelsea on. Chelsea Hunersen is our head of social and she's going to take it from here.

[00:21:34] Chelsea Hunerse: Awesome. Thanks Todd. Hey Jesse. What is your favorite podcast and what are some other podcasts that have influenced this podcast?

[00:21:44] Jesse Purewal: I think my favorite podcast is still Armchair Expert with Dax and Monica. I think just the way that the two of them wear their vulnerability very much on their sleeves and use their life stories as organizing principles for driving relatable conversations with really well-known guests is pretty cool. And I just think it's really neat to see one of the top performing podcasts in the world essentially produced by three or four people much like this one. It gives me the right level of ambition for where we take Breakthrough Builders.

I think the influence on our podcast is aspirationally a combination of the relatability that Dax and Monica bring in that show with the sort of storytelling and sequential narrative arc that Guy Raz brings to how I built this with some of the, at least a lightweight version of the intellectual jujitsu that Sam Harris brings to making sense. Like, try to think about it as approachability of Dax meets chronology of Guy Raz meets try to be half as smart as Sam Harris, and take all that together with a little bit of the Qualtrics mojo and we have something.

[00:22:53] Chelsea Hunerse: All right. Thank you. I'm going to pass on to Frenchy who is our designer.

[00:22:59] Frenchy: Hi Jesse. What's your ultimate measurement of success in life?

[00:23:04] Jesse Purewal: For me, it's like, are the people around me feeling like they are doing the stuff that want to do? And that starts with my family and my kids. Are they happy, and they're doing the things that they want to be doing, and wouldn't rather be somewhere else, all the way to the people that I work with. So it's maybe a cliche thing to say, but just degree of happiness of the people that are around me.

[00:23:26] Frenchy: Thank you for the answer. I'm going to pass the mic to Katie who's the show's executive producer.

[00:23:31] Katie: Thanks Frenchy. And Jesse, you mentioned your kids. And I know you have two seven-year-old twins. So my first question is how does being a father influence your perspective on being a builder?

[00:23:44] Jesse Purewal: Yeah, it definitely has helped me appreciate the value of one day at a time, both in terms of the degree to which building a family can take some real investment, but also the degree to which things change so much on any given day. You realize how much is outside your control. Even if someone who's like literally spawned from your DNA is a different person that you're constantly getting to know and empathize with and learn from.

So I think it's like at what point do I start to re-characterize myself from I'm the builder to I'm the influencer. And already at seven, I can see that I'm much more the influencer than I am necessarily the prime mover, which is both relieving and also a little bit scary.

[00:24:28] Katie: Nice. And then just to bring it back to podcasting, to close it out, if you could have any guest on Breakthrough Builders, who would it be?

[00:24:36] Jesse Purewal: I think Steve Yzerman would be the dream guest. There's no such thing as a perfect human, but there are people that come close. And he was a Red Wing his whole career, which is 22 years. And he's still the longest tenured captain of any professional sports team anywhere in the world, which is pretty remarkable. And then he went on to become the general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning, built that team into what is now the best team in the NHL and is now the general manager in Detroit, trying to do some breakthrough building in Southeast Michigan, not as a player, but as a GM.

He's a humble person. He is a father of three, very clearly values oriented kind of individual. And I would just love to know like how you can rediscover a second career as a builder, after building a franchise once as a player and as a captain of an iconic team, an iconic brand, and then go do it as a general manager a generation later. Just pretty cool stuff.

[00:25:35] TJ Bonaventura: Well, Jesse, I'm glad we got the team involved. There's a lot of people that make this show happen behind the scenes. I want to say thank you for taking the time and giving everybody this look under the hood of what happens between your ears and the rest of the team's ears for Breakthrough Builders. So with that, I'll finish it off how you typically end it and say namaste to you and appreciate it.

[00:25:54] Jesse Purewal: Well, thanks to you and to Julie and the squad here for all that you're doing to grow with us and build alongside of us. It's so greatly appreciated.

[00:26:03] TJ Bonaventura: Welcome. We're happy to be part of this Breakthrough Builders family.

[00:26:06] 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, Hanna Park, Lindsay Blum, and Ivanna Lin. The show's 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 Purewalbrand experience, product experience, experience economy, great resignation, advice for entrepreneurs, breakthroughs, employee experience, customer experience, experience management