Changing the Face of Business

 

Rachel Tipograph, Founder & CEO of MikMak, on the important intersections between media, advertisement, and eCommerce, and on how she's changing the face of business by investing in diverse founders and hiring diverse teams.

 

Episode Notes

Rachel Tipograph implores aspiring founders to: “Know what your superpower is, and how you can align it to a problem you want to solve.” It’s a playbook she’s lived out—as she leaned on her own particular brand of fearlessness to embrace ‘crazy’ marketing ideas as Gap’s youngest-ever Global Digital Director; to found MikMak to help businesses e-commerce-enable all their digital channels; and to use her influence as an investor to champion diversity, equity and inclusion at the founder and executive levels.

In her talk with Jesse, Rachel reflects on her early years as a student, intern, and self-identified member of the ‘digerati’. She describes how being born into a family of small-business owners spawned an entrepreneurial spirit, but also deep reflections on the inequities that have historically accompanied lines of succession. She identifies the forward-thinking insights that led to the founding of MikMak. She outlines the criteria that guide her personal investments. And she leaves us with a look at the future of media, commerce, and the workplace experience.

(2:59) From NYU, to saying goodbye to Hollywood internships

(6:07) Digital Directing at Gap: Sans-scrutiny, try crazy things

(10:40) When not everyone had a voice in the family business

(13:35) Not a female founder. A founder.

(17:11) Diversity at MikMak: the progress and the challenges

(19:04) The deepening intersection of media and commerce

(24:54) The future of of the workplace experience

Guest Bio

Rachel Tipograph is the Founder and CEO of MikMak, a global eCommerce enablement and analytics platform for multichannel brands. MikMak has earned recognition for its workplace culture and DE&I efforts as a “Fastest Growing Company in America” and “Best Place to Work” by Inc Magazine, “#10 Startup in the United States” by LinkedIn, “Breakthrough Brand” by Interbrand and “Nineteen Technologies Underpin AI And Analytics For Retail” by Forrester.

Rachel has also been recognized as a thought leader by leading media publications including Forbes (“30 under 30 Who Are Changing The World”), Fast Company ("The Most Creative People in Business") AdAge ("The Most Creative People of The Year"), Adweek ("The Young Influentials Shaping Business and Culture") and many more.

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Rachel Tipograph: When I'm using my own money right now, I've made a promise to myself. Which is if I'm going to take money out of my personal bank account, I want to do it with a fund that shares my mission. Which is, I believe to create change in this world, it does require my money. Call me a capitalist, I am. And in order to change the face of business, we just need to put money in the hands of diverse founders. I've turned away from investing in funds that I know would be incredible returns for me. But instead I choose to support these funds that share my mission.

[00:00:51] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders. A series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas, feel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences.

Hey, it's Jesse. So Rachel Tipograph is a female founder. But she wants you to call her a founder because she wants to normalize the fact that people of every gender and every background can be and are founders. Fully 60% of employees at her company, MikMak, identify as non-white. But she doesn't want you to congratulate her because she's focused on improving diversity at MikMak's most senior levels.

Rachel grew up in New York and came from a lineage of entrepreneurs. Her great grandfather, Henry Modell was chairman of Modell's Sporting Goods in New York and both her parents were small business owners. From an early age, Rachel understood that business was all about people. But she also noticed that it wasn't inclusive of all people. She looked on as her great-grandmother was excluded from the family business and watched as her mom endured a terrible work experience on Wall Street in the 1980s. That would set the stage for her and emphasis on diversity and inclusion in her work as an entrepreneur and as an investor. The acumen that Rachel earned in her childhood, in college at NYU and from her experiences building digital businesses in irreverent yet practical ways early in her career, helped her set up to be a pioneering leader in eCommerce, who's shaking up this status quo for good. Rachel started her career working in entertainment and quickly learned that it wasn't as glamorous as some might think.

Rachel, by my count, you had no fewer than nine internships, I think, during the time you were in school at NYU. And we're talking Saturday Night Live, we're talking Showtime, Miramax, writing, marketing, creative services, seemingly everything. Take me back to that kaleidoscope of experiences, if you will, early in your career. What do you remember learning about the world and about yourself?

[00:02:59] Rachel Tipograph: I went to NYU and NYU is a very pre-professional place. Like if you want to have your typical collegiate experience, you'll go to Michigan, Penn State, et cetera. And in some ways I kind of missed out on that. But I wanted to go to NYU because honestly, I wanted to work. Because I knew I wanted to build a company one day. I was at NYU between 2005 and 2009. And at the time I thought I was going to become a Hollywood agent post school because I loved to schmooze and hustle. But what I quickly learned from all of my experiences, just working in entertainment business as an intern, is that the more glamorous the industry is, the less money you make. And once I understood that you make like $300 a week working in the mail room of CAA, I was like, "No, no, no, I'm not going to take this path."

The other thing that I learned is that it's a very old school culture. And even if you're a star talent, you got to start in the mail room. Then you got to do your time working someone's desk as an assistant. And it's just like a thousand steps you have to take before you actually can be a partner and start actually making real money. And that just doesn't vibe for a personality like me. I'm always trying to invent my own path. And so it just made me quickly identify like culturally, that's not the industry I want to go into. However, I have so much gratitude for being able to play in media at that time, because that's when my whole thesis started to come to life. Which is, I believe that whatever happens in media will soon happen to commerce.

That thesis has continued to play out and allowed me to build the way for MikMak. If you think about what happened to media post 2009, media became highly decentralized. All these media companies started to care less about their own and operated channels and started to care more about monetizing traffic in places like Facebook. And my belief was that, that would soon happen to commerce. Meaning commerce would leave the walls of Amazon, Target, Walmart and start to infiltrate these more distributed channels like social.

Today, I still think the same thing is going to play out. The different sort of paradigm shift is really around web three. Web three is first hitting media. When you think about NFT and how companies are going to be built by everyone being a co-owner, that's all happening in media first. But it's going to have major implications on commerce.

[00:05:30] Jesse Purewal: Nowadays it's de rigueur to talk about commerce happening on social. The idea of not being able to find a shoppable experience on Instagram would probably be a little weird. You were at the forefront of this a decade or so ago, in digital strategy and social, when you spent time as a builder at an agency and then at Gap. What do you recall from your experiences standing up commerce in a digital and social kind of context? And what was it like to do it when there was no expectation and no template?

[00:06:07] Rachel Tipograph: I love doing things that no one's paying attention to because you can get your hands real dirty and make it your own. And essentially, 2009 through 2014, with the time when I was really a practitioner in the space, working agency side, and then at Gap. And essentially, social media, digital marketing, performance marketing, eCommerce, it was literally either relegated to the youngest person in the company or an executive that they wanted to push out. Like it was like a graveyard for talent.

And so when you take someone like me, who wants no boss and wants to wreak havoc and create change in the industry, it's actually perfect when there's no oversight. And as a result, I did some pretty crazy things. One of the big things that continues to exist at the company that I helped lead while I was there was, we created this essentially program called Style By, and he whole premise was, no one wears Gap head to toe. Like you wear Gap with other things in your wardrobe. Yet from an advertising standpoint, we were always pushing imagery where Gap was head to toe. So we sent out products to influencers, this is 2011. Influencers were not even a real thing then. And we told them to style it however they want, photograph however they want, say whatever they want. The only requirement is you got to put this piece of JavaScript code on your site, which was The Gap checkout cart.

Because my belief was, people want to transact in this places where they spend time. So if you're engaging with something navy, you don't want to go from something navy all the way to Gaps website, because at the time you probably thought Gap was lame. And that program literally became the customer acquisition engine for millennials, for the brand. And the time that I was there, we knocked a decade off the average customer. When I joined, it was a 45 year old woman. By the time that I left, it was a 35 year old woman. And a lot of it had to do with Style By. But if senior executives were paying attention to what I was doing at the time, there's no way that something like that would've gotten off the ground. So I love playing in industries in the early days when no one's paying attention.

[00:08:19] Jesse Purewal: That's such a neat construct to think about. And I'm also intrigued by how you're talking about senior executives or leaders not necessarily paying attention to the ostensible white space or the, what comes next. For people who are more senior in organizations and who know that the next wave of growth in their companies is going to come from some product or some service or experience that doesn't exist today. Like they intuitively know that something has to change, but they don't really know how to think about moving away from the cash cow business or moving away from the legacy tam. Like how do you counsel those kinds of leaders to unlock their thinking?

[00:08:59] Rachel Tipograph: Well, there needs to be a culture that allows failing. Because if the executives are allowed to fail, if they're not being tied to traditional P&L metrics, then they will totally go and experiment. But if they're comped, they're comp plans are based on achieving revenue goals or renewals, they're not going to go innovate because it's not a tried and true method. Or it's not built for scale yet.

And so someone in the leadership organization needs to free the senior leaders from some of these traditional metrics, so they can go out and fail. And I can speak to companies that I think have built a culture that allows that to do that. And I work with consumer product companies all day long and one of my earliest customers was L'Oreal, remain to be a customer. And L'Oreal was an organization that recognized this early on and said, "We got to experiment with startups. We have no fricking idea if it's going to work. But we're not going to hold this group of employees accountable to traditional metrics." Instead, maybe the KPI is, how many pilots you got off the ground of the year. But it really goes back to that.

[00:10:15] Jesse Purewal: I want to ask you, when did you start to understand that there was maybe some unevenness in the diversity or inclusion aspect of business, of organizations? Like if you look back now as somebody who has become an investor in quite literally and figuratively making the world more inclusive, what kind of clues did you have early on that maybe there were some experienced gaps for people around the world?

[00:10:40] Rachel Tipograph: Well, very early, my great-grandfather was a gentleman named Henry Modell. And if you're from New York, you're probably familiar with Modell's Sporting Goods. And so he had two children, Bill and Doris. Doris is my grandmother, who's 97 and still alive. And it was made very clear to Doris that she would never be running Modell's. And so my grandmother essentially grew up as a housewife while her brother Bill ran the company. And immediately it became quite clear that not all people were initially made equal when it came to business. So for the pure fact that my grandmother was born a woman, she wasn't given the opportunity to run the business. So that was very clear to me from the moment that I could comprehend English, because that's a big part of my family story.

[00:11:33] Jesse Purewal: And so where did you, in a sense, realize you could break the cycle?

[00:11:38] Rachel Tipograph: My grandmother's 97, by the time that I entered the workforce, probably 70 years passed. So it took a few generations of cycles to create an opportunity for someone like me. And what I mean by that is, not only am I female, but I also identify as gay. So if I was born potentially 40 years earlier, I who I am in the business world might not have been able to exist. So have a lot of gratitude for the generations that came before me.

And even look at my mother. My mother is she'll hate that I'm saying this out loud, but close to 65. And she started her career at Citibank. And as a woman in the early eighties at Citibank, it was an awful experience. Women of my mother's age, they have a lot of wounds of what it took to work in corporate America or in business at large during that time. So when I decided to start a company and I told both of my parents who were small business owners, what I was about to do. They were tremendously supportive, they were the first checks into my company. But I saw it as a privilege. I really see company building today as a privilege. And if you're given the opportunity, in many ways, you have, I think, a civil obligation to your employees to create a community that you believe is how the world should be reflected.

[00:13:15] Jesse Purewal: And what has been your own experience, Rachel, of some of the obstacles or some of the challenges you've had to surmount in getting to that. Give us a lay of the land around what it's like from the founder's chair, from the CEO's chair in terms of having to contend with maybe the current state version of some of these realities around diversity and inclusion.

[00:13:35] Rachel Tipograph: Yeah, I can speak to it from a few angles. I really try not to think of myself any other way than I'm a founder. It actually irritates me when people say, "And Rachel's an amazing female founder." Like why can't I just be a founder? And that's how I see myself. And I say this because I have no evidence. But what I can tell you is that MikMak's underlying business metrics are in the top 0.5% of all company. And we're just absolutely best in class. Yet, whenever I've had to raise money, historically, it's been a struggle. But I know that if there was a different face to my company, you would've seen those headlines. I just believe it in my core because I can't come up with any other reason why I know that my metrics are in the top 0.5%, yet I see peers that have subpar companies to mine have these crazy things happen to them. I'm not a white guy that went to Stanford.

[00:14:36] Speaker 3: Every one of us has a mother, a grandmother, a sister, ourselves, a daughter, a niece who is or has experienced this. Those women who have worked hard, who have worked with passion and not been paid their value. And often are paid differently than their male counterparts.

[00:14:57] Rachel Tipograph: It just is what it is. And I have to operate within the world that I exist in.

[00:15:00] Jesse Purewal: So tell me a little bit, Rachel, about what you have going in the investment world right now. Talk to me about Cleo Capital and Harlem Capital and the particular thesis that each one of them has around investing in diverse founders, in minority founders.

[00:15:15] Rachel Tipograph: Yeah. So I would say one of the things that has happened to me as I scale MikMak is I just have less time. And to be an active early stage investor, like you need a lot of time to essentially build a pipeline of deals and then invest in whatever, 10 a year and maybe one of them pans out. And I just don't have time to build that pipeline anymore.

So from my strategy standpoint now, instead of investing in companies, I choose to invest in funds and be an LP. And when I'm using my own money right now, I've made a promise to myself. Which is, if I'm going to take money out of my personal bank account, I want to do it with a fund that shares my mission. Which is I believe to create change in this world, it does require money, call me a capitalist, I am. And in order to change the face of business, we just need to put money in the hands of diverse founders. Both Harlem Capital and Cleo Capital share that mission. And I've been given opportunities to invest in plenty of other funds that have amazing returns, but they don't have that mission.

I do scrutinize people when they come to me and I ask them about their approach to DEI and do you have a deal quota around that, et cetera. And if they to tell me no, or they just give me lip service, like I've turned away from investing in funds that I know would be incredible returns for me. But instead I choose to support these funds that share my mission.

[00:16:44] Jesse Purewal: What I'm guessing is happening here is that all of the findings that researchers have discovered over the course of decades around the linkage between a more diverse team and potential and performance, probably are holding true. And there's some lessons that even if someone is listening to this and they're not an investor, but they're just building a team or building a company. They could really stand to benefit from your perspective on.

[00:17:11] Rachel Tipograph: Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, I have the other side of it, which is at my own company. At MikMak, 40% of the company identifies as not white, 60% is women, 20% is LGBTQ. But if I'm to be very transparent, which I am, so much of the diversity exists at the mid and junior levels. And so I have been making a huge effort to essentially bring that level of diversity to the VP and above.

And what's really challenging, I'm sure a lot of people are listening that are dealing with this is like, it goes back to my earlier comments about just generations before. Well, if the talent pool wasn't given the opportunity 20 years ago, then those people don't exist right now at that most senior level. It's our job to change that. But part of it right now, in order to ensure that you have a really diverse makeup of company is like, you have to up skill certain talent. Especially in enterprise software, like that level of diversity didn't exist for the last few decades. You have to just be committed to it and you have to be transparent with your board around what this means and the rest of your management team. But like that's how you create change.

[00:18:25] Jesse Purewal: I want to return to a phrase that you used a little earlier in the conversation, a guiding thesis that it sounds like you've used. That what happens in media will happen in commerce. I think of media, essentially as an experience. And maybe I'm biased as a consumer sort of user of media. But if media is the thing to watch, to understand where commerce is going. What does that mean out the experience of eCommerce and where you believe it can go? And maybe the things that MikMak will do and other kinds of platforms like it to usher in the next five, 10 years of what experiences in e-com look like.

[00:19:04] Rachel Tipograph: Yeah. So I continue to believe that commerce is going to be highly distributed. And it's going to show up in more places where media shows up today. I'm very bullish on OTT and commerce. It's the power of television with the targeting of direct response advertising. I'm very bullish that voice and commerce will continue to grow, it's still super for early days and I just don't think it's showing up right now in the right places. And what I mean by that is I actually think one of the most underutilized channels right now in commerce is Apple CarPlay. I do think you're going to see some transformations happen there.

I do think that commerce will eventually move to web three. I can't tell you what that's going to look like, it is total early days. It's what social was in 2008. But it will be there. So wherever media plays, wherever consumers spend enormous amounts of time, conversion will move there too.

Now, the other big thing that's happening right before all of our eyes is that the retailers themselves are going to become extremely powerful media platforms. And the big sort of industry headlines that people will start to read more and more about is the disruption that's about to happen in the overall advertising ecosystem because retailers are starting to build out their own DSPs. Meaning trade decks, new big competitor is not Google. It's going to be Target, it's going to be Walmart, it's going to be Amazon. And by these retailers essentially bringing all of their first party data out of their owned and operated channels to every other type of media channel, it's going to be completely disrupted to the entire ecosystem.

So I think media and commerce are becoming one and the same. And especially if you just look at the retailers P&L like advertising is very profitable. It is way more profitable than selling shampoo online. You're going to see a lot of things happen there.

[00:21:06] Jesse Purewal: So what do I have to look forward to? If we look at the intersection of commerce becoming more of an experience, or like media. Web three playing a role, the maturation in a good way, in a modern way of the Targets of the world. How might my experience as a shopper, as a consumer, how does that start to shift?

[00:21:27] Rachel Tipograph: I mean, everything I just described in many ways, it's not about the consumer. It's about how companies are trying to make money and arbitrage each other. There's a headwind that makes it actually difficult. So we have two things happening, which is the rising power of retail media. But it's also happening against the backdrop of the cookie list internet and changes in iOS 14. And just data privacy, at large. I say this because regulators are not for more targeted experiences, they're actually not for it. And the big platforms don't want to play nice with each other, because they're each trying to monetize their own traffic.

And so for a consumer, this dream that we have, which is, "Hey, I can seamlessly go from one channel to another. And my basket follows me. I could walk into a physical store and the basket that I started online can also be there." All of those things are technically possible, but corporations and regulators are actually preventing us from living that out. And so it's just this really interesting moment in time where technically we can actually do so much more together, but we're not playing nice together.

[00:22:41] Jesse Purewal: And the last question I'd asked you about that is, is that okay? Like, just because we want to have a perfect experience, doesn't mean we need it. And the trade offs required to get it in terms of what I might have to give up around personal information, et cetera. Just might not be worth it for the majority of people. And in the end in a democratic society, regulators tend to glean to what the majority wants.

So maybe there's sort of a fundamental resetting or reframing of expectations that we should have, that the future state isn't this like every wall is permeable and I can just float. And I don't even notice things like transaction friction and payment friction. Like maybe it's okay to have to still do a little of the work and be more conscious rather than subconscious in how I go through my life in retail.

[00:23:31] Rachel Tipograph: Yeah. I have found that this actually often becomes a generational conversation. When I went to college, we had Facebook, it was 2005. So for my peers, we think data privacy can't happen. All of our data is on the internet, it's been sold to everyone we know. And so we're just like, "Whatever, like, this is what happened. We agreed to this in 2005 and here we are today." Baby boomers, they hate that their data was sold. And then gen Z is like, they know have the right to speak up to a company and say, "You can't sell my data." So for me as a millennial, I'm like, I actually want a more personalized internet because all my data is already out there. Other people feel differently.

[00:24:19] Jesse Purewal: Let me ask you your perspective as a CEO, as a founder, on where we're going as a society with the future of the work experience, the workplace experience. And I don't mean it in a physical place and not as much as well, how many days a week in the office, et cetera. But just at the highest level as you look to constitute your team at MikMak, and as you look at the kinds of funds you invest in and what they're doing. What do you believe is the right path forward for how we should think about the experience of work and the place that work holds in our lives?

[00:24:54] Rachel Tipograph: One of my mentors, people I admire is this woman Indra Nooyi, he who was the former CEO and Chairwoman of PepsiCo, now she's on the board of Amazon. And I had the privilege of interviewing her a few months ago and she writes this in her book that just came out. So I'm going to sort of paraphrase her, white collar workers, people who get to have tech jobs like you and I, we want flexibility. Blue collar workers today, they're not really given that flexibility. Like time is a very restricted thing. And so I say all this, because anyone who's working at a tech company today, their expectation is that they have complete flexibility. But then they also have crazy demands, which is, I want to be able to work from wherever I want, but I need Slack to feel like a community. I want to be able to work from wherever I want, but hey, when we're hosting a company offsite, I'm actually not really comfortable coming anymore because I have a kid who's in preschool or whatever it might be.

And so I think the future of work is like trying to just literally do the best for the majority, knowing that you're probably not going to make 20% of your employees happy because it's just impossible. And what I think people want is they want flexibility over their own time, they want to feel like they're part of a community, they want their full bonus. But they also want their company to always do the right thing, which could actually not lead to the full bonus. And so I think the big thing today is just transparency. Is explaining to your team like guys, if we make this decision as a business, because we all feel it's the right thing, we're not going to end up hitting our goal this quarter. I'm okay with it, but are you okay with it? And kind of put them back in their place of being an owner and making them understand that there are trade offs in life.

[00:26:43] Jesse Purewal: And what are some specific moves or innovations you've seen in employee experience or talent value proposition at either the companies you invest in and advise? Or that you've implemented at MikMak that you think are pretty good demonstrations of where we need to head.

[00:26:59] Rachel Tipograph: I'll talk about a few of the things that I think at MikMak which might sound small, but it's crazy like how impactful they are on employees. And literally when people come work to us, they tell us it's one of the reasons why. There are a bunch of videos of like me doing town halls at the company. And they see how transparent we are. Like how we talk about finances, how we talk about the decisions that we make. People are not left in the darkness. That level of transparency and honesty goes so far for employees.

The second thing is, we don't have sick days at MikMak, we call it health days. And it's a no questions asked thing where employee can just wake up and say, "I need a health day." It could be mental health, it doesn't have to be that you're physically unwell. Something could be going on in your family. But we can't ever ask you why, it's like, you just go take your health day because we understand like shit happens in your life that's out of control or can interfere with work and we need you to be in a good mental place.

There's this other thing that happens at MikMak that it's just crazy to me, like how impactful it is for employees, especially we hear new employees. One of our Slack channels is called Ins and Outs. And the initial idea was we never had like a front desk person. And so we had this channel even in the physical world. Where people would announce if they had a friend coming to the office or whatever, if they had to leave. At MikMak, all day long, people are announcing things in the Ins and Outs channel, we're totally virtual. So I got to go to dentist. My kid just got a fever, I got to go pick them up. I had a rough day, I'm going to end at 3:00. All of this is publicized in the company Ins and Outs channel, and employees tell me how powerful that is because they feel safe to manage their own time. It's these small things that actually make such a huge psychological impact.

[00:28:50] Jesse Purewal: I love how you're normalizing the behavior of just taking care of yourself and doing the right thing for the whole person. And putting it on full display, that's so cool. Thank you for sharing that. So Rachel, you are the co-host along with Sarah Hofstetter of a wonderful podcast called BRAVE COMMERCE. Tell me about the thesis for the show and what you're up to with it.

[00:29:13] Rachel Tipograph: When the pandemic struck, as a marketer, especially in the B2B space, so much of building MikMak's brand awareness was me doing speaking engagements at conferences. And when that whole world changed, I was like, "Okay, how can I make sure that our voice continues to be amplified in a world that's probably going to remain virtual? And how can we connect with our key customers, our prospects, et cetera?" So that was kind of my objective.

And then the second thing was, I know my superpower. One of my superpowers is public speaking. And so I was like me doing a podcast makes a lot of sense. Like I speak better than I write. So some people are great blog writers, so they have a huge following in medium. That's just not who I am.

The third part of this was I'm a solo founder. And I knew I could create a podcast by myself, but I didn't want to. I wanted to do this with someone that I love, who also has a similar view on business with similar customers. Because I actually believe one plus one equals three. So I reached out to my friend, Sarah, who just had started at a company called Profitero, that is a sort of a product adjacency to MikMak. So, we do similar things, but different. And I told her this idea, and I was like, "Will you do this with me?" She's like, "Of course."

And we had actually never worked formally together, we're just friends from the industry. And what we luckily learned is that we work super well together. And it's just been this awesome thing to build with her. It's done wonders for both of our businesses and the community. And so the whole premise of the podcast is we make people feel like rock stars. We interview them and we have their thought leadership out in the world. And we learn a lot because it's actually one of the ways that I can stay super connected to the ecosystem. Because every day I get to like interview people and hear their pain points.

[00:31:03] Jesse Purewal: I want to close, Rachel, by moving us into a lightning round, just a first thought on some of these questions. Is that cool?

[00:31:09] Rachel Tipograph: Yes, please.

[00:31:11] Jesse Purewal: All right, let's do it. What is a book that you like to recommend to people?

[00:31:15] Rachel Tipograph: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

[00:31:17] Jesse Purewal: Okay. And why? What's special about that book or those lessons?

[00:31:21] Rachel Tipograph: Because what I've realized in building MikMak is our ability to win. It's actually like less to do with product. It's our ability to work together as a unified team. And we're humans, right? And humans are dysfunctional. That's the hardest part of building companies is like getting people to work well together. And this book really provides you with a framework on how to unify people.

[00:31:45] Jesse Purewal: What are three words, Rachel, that your closest colleagues would use to describe you?

[00:31:52] Rachel Tipograph: Charismatic, electric and generous.

[00:31:56] Jesse Purewal: And who is an entrepreneur or builder that you personally look up to?

[00:32:01] Rachel Tipograph: I brought her up, but Indra Nooyi. I've admired her my entire life, as long as I've known her. And Indra showed me that being a business leader is like being a government leader. You have that level of responsibility to your people.

[00:32:17] Jesse Purewal: And how do you describe your secret sauce, Rachel? You mentioned having a superpower of public speaking, but I think your secret sauce probably has a couple more ingredients in it than that. What's that special blend of stuff that makes you do you?

[00:32:30] Rachel Tipograph: I'm not scared. And what I mean by that is, I understand that the worst that happens is I fail. That doesn't scare me. And as a result, that allows me to do crazy things because I'm not scared.

[00:32:43] Jesse Purewal: I love that. Well, Rachel, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your candor and your perspective and your stories today. So appreciate your time and your energy and have a great rest of the week.

[00:32:55] Rachel Tipograph: Thanks for having me.

[00:33:05] 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. 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, and our head of social media, Chelsea Hunersen. From studio pod media in San Francisco, our show coordinator is Nicole Genova. Editing and music are by producer Sterling Shore and executive producer, Katie Sunku Wood, with sound engineering by Ryan Crowther. At VaynerTalent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hannah Park and Ivana Lynn provide publicity and promotional support. The shows designers are Baron Santiago and Vinsuka Chindavijak. Our website is by Gregory Hedon. Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

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