Meditation and Methods
Atif Rafiq on how he drove customer and career innovation as an entrepreneur and executive at companies from Amazon to McDonald’s, and how he’s evolved his game as a leader to blend efficiency and empathy.
Episode Notes
Executive and entrepreneur Atif Rafiq suggests that, in his career, he’s often been at companies “too early.” For example, his foray into mobile applications actually pre-dated the iPhone. But is being ahead of your time ever really a bad thing? Atif certainly doesn’t think so—especially when it comes to rewriting the rules of leadership.
In his talk with Jesse, Atif reflects on his early roles as an executive at Audible (Amazon), as an entrepreneur at Covigna, and as the Chief Digital Officer at McDonald’s, a first-of-its-kind position for a Fortune 500 company. He describes the challenges of finding a balance between safety and profitability at MGM Resorts during the pandemic. And throughout the conversation, he reveals the most important things he’s learned about leadership (and the notions he’s left behind).
(4:23) How roles at Audible and Covigna taught Atif to ‘keep pivoting’ in new markets
(8:40) Focusing on the speed of learning at Amazon
(10:57) Helping McDonald’s reconnect with its heritage through new service models
(15:40) Why the role of the executive in problem solving is calibration
(19:09) Stewarding MGM Resorts through the pandemic
(20:53) It’s not just the decision: how you get there matters
(23:27) Authoring Re:Wire on LinkedIn to accelerate changes in how we lead
Guest Bio
Atif Rafiq is an executive, board member, social media influencer, and author. Atif has been part of the executive committee of 3 large cap global companies working directly for their CEOs and interacting with their boards on transformation and strategy. His C-suite roles at some of the world’s most recognized brands (McDonald’s, Volvo and MGM Resorts) followed a 15+ year career in Silicon Valley.
Helpful Links
The Re:Wire Newsletter, subscribed to by over 100,000
Future Forum Exec Spotlight: Moving away from command and control
One of Atif’s innovations: McDonald’s Rolls Out Table Service (from Business Insider)
+ Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Atif Rafiq: One of the most gratifying aspects is when people feel that they have a stamp on what we're doing. That starts with actually seeing people. People need to be seen and heard. It's very important. The workplace is just as emotional as any other space, and I think it's a different era now. We're all more attuned to the emotional aspect of the workplace and the people we work with and whether we work for them or with them, we're much more dialed in. That door is wide open now. But what I have found is that people are comfortable with a lot of different things. We have option A, B, and C on the table for a project. It's not really not about whether we went with option A, B, or C. It's about, did we listen or were they heard? Did they feel recognized in some way, shape or form in terms of their voice?
[00:00:51] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtric 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.
Today on the show, we've got quite a lineup. We've got the former GM of Amazon Kindle, the first ever Global Chief Digital Officer of McDonald's, the former CDO and CIO of Volvo cars, and a person who used to be the president of customers, commercial and growth at MGM. Oh yeah, that's right. This is all one person.
That's right. That person is Atif Rafiq. Atif is all those things I mentioned, but the reason I wanted to talk to him on the show isn't because of all those titles; it's because of the person behind those titles. I wanted to understand how can somebody operate successfully in so many different domains and industries? How can you apply what you learned from working at a place like Amazon to being at a place like Volvo? What things about a person stay constant over that kind of career journey? And what has he learned about himself along the way? Which can help all of us learn more about how we build and how we lead. As you'll hear, Atif has great answers for all these questions, and he has a really interesting take on personal growth and transformation, which he views through the lens of metamorphosis.
[00:02:14] Atif Rafiq: I think most of us are always metamorphosing, and I'm currently in the midst of it and I'm feeling pretty good about it. If you asked me a year ago, I'd be more confused, but basically where I am right now, where I'm headed is I've shifted from the C-suite executive back to being an entrepreneur. And my model is one where every 10 years is probably going to look a little different, and maybe that's a little strange or frightening for some people, and that's fine. Transitions are actually really hard, because there's a fear of giving up what you can hang onto, like the known commodities and you don't really know what you're changing that for. So to make it concrete when you're in the C-suite, you know what to expect. You have certain access, you have large teams, you have thousands of people working in your organization.
Those are all the known things. And they say, "No, now I'm going to break out on my own. I have my ideas. Maybe I'll write a book, I'll start a company," that kind of thing, but you don't really know what that's going to translate into concretely, and so it's getting comfortable with that transition and starting to lean into it. And whenever I jump into a thing, I think I'm going to be doing it forever, which is really odd, because it doesn't wind up being forever. It's just the level of intensity and concentration and commitment, if you will, to the thing is just super, super high. And over time, as you can see from my career, I have not been in positions for 30 years. I'm constantly evolving. I've always been a big dreamer, so I never really limited my dreams by a function of my circumstance.
[00:03:50] Jesse Purewal: In terms of career, you started out at Goldman. You did corp dev at AOL. And then from there you went to Audible, but this was some years before there was ubiquitous wifi and everybody had a smartphone and before we had on-demand business models. So by my read of it, you were at a minimum, intrigued; and at a maximum, precinct that jumping into an audio on-demand kind of business model at that stage of the technology economy was appealing to you. So talk about what you saw in a place like Audible in those early years that made you want to jump in and be part of that.
[00:04:23] Atif Rafiq: For me, I mean, I was trying to be a little systematic of saying, "Okay, I'm jumping from a known commodity," which is AOL, sort of the Facebook or TikTok of its time. "I want to go to a 30% company, so let me be systematic in thinking through spaces and what spaces have the most headroom." And that's how I arrived at Audible. Now, it turns out, I was wrong, because it was 10 years too early, and timing does matter. But what I loved in Audible was that this is a mobile application, essentially, because you're not going to sit at your desktop at that time and listen to things. It's probably for movement. You're on a treadmill or you're in your car, that kind of thing, and so I love this idea of content that's designed for mobile,
And at that time, it's pre-iPhone, and so they had to do the heavy lifting and they had to work directly with manufacturers of pre-iPhone mobile devices and work with their SDKs and there was no standard for it, and so they had to make an app work on so many different platforms from companies that don't even operate in that space anymore. And there was an interesting technology advancement there, but really the content of spoken word audio is what they called it that I thought was very expansive and interesting. So they just really had so many layers of mobile that they were working on, and so I have obviously zero regrets because it's like, "Wow." Being involved in that company so early was very cool.
[00:05:51] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. And you would go from there to found Covigna, which you built during the early 2000s. It would turn out to not be a really easy time to grow a business, but I'm sure it was also a time of great learning and maybe really salient to builders listening now who are trying to grow a business or engineer a pivot during yet another challenging economic moment. Maybe talk about that time in your career and what you learned about yourself as a leader, having to continually pivot the initial business models that you contemplated going in as a founder.
[00:06:22] Atif Rafiq: Yeah. I think my number one lesson is never stopped pivoting. The story of Covigna is essentially I'm moving out to the west coast, I'm interviewing at Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins for associate positions, and then there's an angel investor out there who's like, "Look, don't do that. Join these two other founders, these two Stanford PhDs. They're great technologists. And if you join them, I'll give you the first check and I'll get you other checks." And I was like, "Okay, this is not a hard decision. Yes, I will jump into entrepreneurship."
And so there are three of us. In fact, a fourth member joined. Started Covigna in 2000 and we raised the money on the idea of essentially a sentiment analysis engine based on NLP, and we would build this B2B product and sell it to brands to mine sentiment and chat rooms. So an idea that was probably five years early for its time, but that wasn't what drew up the pivot. It was basically the .com bubble going away, and so you needed to get very practical.
So imagine this, we have the capital, but the market is demanding something much more concrete, so we had to make a pivot and we shipped it to essentially a document workflow engine. It wasn't DocuSign. We picked the vertical, which is contracts, and we essentially built a contract management software company. And we got some success, signed up General Motors and Bank of America and things like that. But I do, upon reflection, obviously think that there was so many cool, interesting avenues we could have taken with that. Could we have become DocuSign? Could we have become a workflow engine like ServiceNow. I mean, these are all massive companies. Who knows? A lot of variables there, but the key reflection is two pivots, three pivots. That's nothing. Keep that pivot going until you have a massive pull from the marketplace that you can't keep up with.
[00:08:05] Jesse Purewal: I love how you're talking about the market and being kind of customer driven despite maybe what the initial hypotheses or dreams could have been. Let me ask you about Amazon for a moment. A lot of people I know at Amazon or who used to work there are very specific about the kinds of management and leadership lessons that they've learned. And I know you've written from time to time that you have a unique kind of expertise helping global companies think and act and operate like Amazon. What does that mean for you as a leader when you reflect on some of the learnings that you had in your time at Amazon?
[00:08:40] Atif Rafiq: Well, there are definitely aspects of the Amazon culture I connected with innately, meaning you're born with these things and then you find them in the wider culture and you're like, "Yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me." And then there's others that maybe are more foreign to you and you need to pick them up because you respect them, and then maybe there are some things that you just aren't willing to adapt to. So there's all three buckets.
The key thing is I love the idea of not knowing anything at all in the beginning and focusing on the speed and velocity of learning. And this is not something I'm inventing. I mean, if you look at the taglines of various Amazon executives in their social media profiles, you'll see words like "speed of learning." And it really is what distinguishes top leaders at Amazon from people who are not the top leaders, is that they know how to zero in by asking the right questions, and they can really, in a single conversation, drive a lot of solving up the puzzle of a lot of different pieces that weren't connected.
And a lot of thoughts are connected through curiosity and intense questioning, asking the right questions, synthesizing that information, getting this picture and clarity that would allow the team to then go take action. They really excel on that front. I really connected with that. I think I've been known for that, the C-suite of Fortune 500s just because of being innately like that, but then Amazon sharpened me. I would definitely give them credit for that, because if you don't step up, then you don't last.
[00:10:12] Jesse Purewal: Let's talk about that. Because after your time at Amazon, you became by some accounts, the first Chief Digital Officer in the Fortune 500 at McDonald's. If I was to reflect on a couple of your comments about being too early in a couple of career circumstances, like starting Covigna or being at Audible, I might think of becoming a Chief Digital Officer at a QSR at the time you went to be another one of those, you're there too early. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you were there at precisely the right time and because of the business velocity in QSR versus, say, in tech, it just requires more quarters and years to have something like that unfurl. But talk about how that opportunity came about and how you made it into this amazing Chief Digital Officer remit.
[00:10:57] Atif Rafiq: Yeah. The pure mechanics of it are you have a progressive, innovative CEO, Don Thompson. He was the global CEO of McDonald's at the time, and he knows that he wants an infusion at the very top, but from the outside. And it's got to be someone who's at either Google, Facebook or Amazon, so it's not a big list. And then you start going to the people in the general manager roles and those companies, and we just had that connection.
And so Don brought me in and gave me a lot of leash and I learned a ton through that about myself and about leadership and management. I would say it was a tough slog. I was, I think, the youngest person ever in the senior leadership in top 10 roles at McDonald's globally. A, B, I'm an outsider who hasn't come up through the company or QSR, and C, I'm from Silicon Valley, so I probably think even a little differently than more incumbent companies.
So it had all the recipe of oh my gosh, how is this going to work out? But when you focus on the customer, you focus on the North star and you can create currency with your ideas. People understand your ideas. You put them in simple terms, they connect with the heritage of the company. You can activate this north star and get momentum in your initiatives, and so I'm happy to say we did that and that got a lot of growth and real revenue and incremental revenue for them. It wasn't easy by any stretch to your earlier point. Was I a Guinea pig? Absolutely. If I came in four years later after there were already 50 CDOs, then I would probably be on the CEO path for Fortune 500. But in the beginning, people are like, "Oh, well this position won't exist even a year from now," but obviously it was the total opposite.
[00:12:41] Jesse Purewal: When you tell the story of driving digital transformation at one of the largest companies, one of the most channel led business models, one of the most storied brands, and perhaps one of the most hyper localized supply chains in the world. I love that you're starting with customer, because it maybe abstracts some of that complexity, but you still have to make choice as a leader of what's going to be job one? What's going to be job two? So how did you, when you stepped into that role, organize your thinking around the priorities and the metrics that you would measure success with?
[00:13:11] Atif Rafiq: Well, when it comes to transformation, which is essentially the work of revitalizing the growth of a company, I think the general lessons are number one, we are in a lot of ways reconnecting with the heritage of the company. So in the case of McDonald's, to me, within 30 days, I would tell people, "Hey, look, McDonald's is really about three things: taste, value, and convenience. I'm going to focus on the third one. Convenience." And we've been known for convenience because we invented things like the drive-thru, and we've kind of lost touch, and there's a new opportunity and it's going to look entirely different in five to 10 years.
So what if we invented two or three new ways to use McDonald's? At that time, let's say 2013, there were really only three ways. You could go through the drive through or you could walk in. If you walked in, you could stand in a line, give your order and get a tray and sit down, or you could wait for a paper bag and take it and go. We got $100 billion of revenue, not so bad for just three what I call service models. What if we invented two or three new service models? What could that mean for us? But it takes about a minute to share that, and it doesn't sound like someone coming out of Palo Alto talking about metaverse or something like that. It's very relatable, and it's very real and it's something we can all do together.
Then from there, you start saying, "Okay, well what could these service models be?" And the teams came up with table service, which is you go to the kiosk in the restaurant, it's a less stressful experience, and then you take a seat and then they bring the tray to you. That had never been done in QSR in terms of what's called table service. And so at least you begin to have the strategy become very concrete and then you could look at trialing some of this to see if the customers like it, if it's better for the business. So that's a general approach that I like to take, so working backwards from some pillars and you're breaking it down and you're really anchoring the company so you get beyond the buzzwords.
[00:15:12] Jesse Purewal: Talk about the challenges or roadblocks you've encountered as you've been an agent of change in your career, whether McDonald's or in your next role at Volvo or really anywhere else. I think a lot of people think about the technical hurdles or the customer challenges or market dynamics, but often I think you're deploying a lot of energy in service of driving alignment and creating a vision and painting a new path forward. But maybe just reflect for me on key roadblocks you've had to surmount.
[00:15:40] Atif Rafiq: Yeah, it's really at the intersection of culture and workflow, and they're actually the same thing. By the way, I didn't know this until recently. I wish I had known it 10 years ago, because people will go in and they'll talk about the culture and that's very common refrain, which is, oh, it's not an innovative culture and we're not open to new ideas or people play small ball, just scared of the unknowns, all that stuff. But you can't just have a slogan and say, "Oh, let's change our culture." It doesn't work that way. You actually need to change the workflows.
So just a quick example would be, let's say you're in a senior position and there's a team responsible for a thing. In more of a traditional culture, the role of the executive is to basically wait and see a fully baked plan and approve it or not approve it when the sausage is fully made. But in a more agile culture, just a culture where probably you're going to see a lot more innovation is where the executive and the team have a very different interaction. So they actually invest together in things like exploration.
So what I mean by that is before they have a plan based on some recommendations or opinions, they actually calibrate what do they need to understand? And they do that upfront. I call this upstream work. Amazon would say focus on inputs over outputs. I want to obsess over the inputs to understand the problem space and how are we thinking about it? Because if we get that right, we're going to get some good outputs. So to make it super real, do you have any of these meetings in your company? Do you have output meetings or input meetings? If you have a lot of output meetings and no input meetings, then you're not going to be able to problem solve and really get that speed going, and I think you're not going to have a high degree of innovation.
[00:17:21] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. It's also a wonderful reflection on growing people through autonomy and mastery and a sense of purpose and really making sure that people are given room to run and ensure that they feel they have support, that the leaders that they're working with, not that they're approvers or disapprovers, but that they're supporters.
[00:17:41] Atif Rafiq: Well, that's really the key because if you're Clay Christensen, rest in peace, you say the only way is autonomy for teams, but that book was written a long time ago and it doesn't happen. So why doesn't it happen is because 100% autonomy doesn't work. It's really about calibration where the role of the executive is calibration upstream at the input stage, downstream at the output stage. And within that you give a ton of autonomy. But if you can, for example, with a team, say, "Here are the points of where I will be involved," and it's really just about calibrating your thought process and make sure you haven't missed something, giving you some input. I will help shape the inputs here, but I trust you on the rest of it. Now you have a very healthy interaction model where everyone's fulfilling their role. And that's how you know, do you have those workflows in your company? Is that what's behind your meetings? You need to have more of that.
[00:18:33] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. Atif, you were president at MGM from May of 2019 I think until the early part of 2021. Obviously, that was a once in a career opportunity to lead a business and be part of leading a category that was just shell shocked by the effect of the pandemic and the need to build back. Can you talk about the vantage point you had as somebody who was literally in the room where it happened and what was required of you as a leader as the organization navigated everything from employee safety to the health of the business?
[00:19:09] Atif Rafiq: Yeah. I mean, it's very unprecedented, for sure. MGM Resorts and Las Vegas, they're kind of synonymous, because MGM Resorts is brands that are out there on the strip, like Bellagio and ARIA and so much more, they're responsible for could be 30% of employment in the state of Nevada. Something ridiculous. And Las Vegas historically runs on about 92% lower nineties occupancy.
So when COVID comes along and you literally shut down the strip for a couple months, and then you open it up and in the beginning, you're getting 40% occupancy. How do you modify the way you do business so that you can start to make money again? Because you cannot keep running the company the way you ran it at 92% occupancy, so that's one big thing. The second big thing is exactly what you said, the safety of employees and customers. You have to figure out what do you stand for? Because you don't want to be cavalier with these decisions in the sense that you want to support the economy. You want to give people something they can do as opposed to being quarantined in their homes, but you also need to be a responsible player in the pandemic, so it really comes down to day-to-day decisions and trade offs between these different variables.
[00:20:19] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. You've been a part of a number of such incredible organizations, such venerable brands. As you reflect on these different situations across technology, QSR, hospitality, automotive, and others. When you step back, what turns out to have created the most degree of happiness for people working in these companies? What do you observe that companies get right to keep the workplace a place where we can thrive as individuals, regardless of the vertical it's in, the geography it's in, and some of those other dimensions?
[00:20:53] Atif Rafiq: One of the most gratifying aspects of leading a team, whether the team is six people or 60,000, quite frankly. And by the way, you're never managing 60,000 people directly, maybe you're really touching 50 people or something like that. But one of the most gratifying aspects is when people feel that they have a stamp on what we're doing. That starts with actually seeing people. People need to be seen and heard. It's very important.
The workplace is just as emotional as any other space, and I think it's a different era now. We're all more attuned to the emotional aspect of the workplace and the people we work with and whether we work for them or with them, we're much more dialed in. That door is wide open now. But what I have found is that people are comfortable with a lot of different things. We can have option A, B, and C on the table for a project. It's really not about whether we went with option A, B, or C it's about, did we listen? Were they heard? Did they feel recognized in some way, shape, or form in terms of their voice? If that can feel like a real authentic thing that's happening, then people can get comfortable building a big SUV, a small SUV, or a medium size SUV. It's more about that people aspect.
[00:22:02] Jesse Purewal: What would you say is the thing that has surprised you most about what you've gotten to discover about your own leadership capabilities or your own sense of self as a leader?
[00:22:14] Atif Rafiq: I would say that it's really that soft side, because I didn't lean on that earlier in my career. It was all sort of the rational side. It was more about what's the right answer to the problem? What's the problem we're trying to solve? What's the logic behind that?
This other thing we've been talking about is just entirely different. It's how you got there and how people feel through the way in which we got there. That was a whole new world to me when I discovered that's actually a thing and it's part of leadership and something that makes it much easier for everybody to get to the outcomes. And some of that, obviously I had to learn the hard way, but I'm really glad that I went through that because when you can combine those two things, people understand rationally the direction and the reasons, but they also have an experience through that process where their voice was heard. That's really powerful.
[00:23:07] Jesse Purewal: I'd love to have you talk a little bit about your own thought leadership and your own reflections, your own content. You have a newsletter called Rewire about original ideas on leadership that's inspired by, as you put it, unique adventures in the corporate world, meditation and methods. Talk about the thesis of the content that you're creating to share with the world.
[00:23:27] Atif Rafiq: So Rewire is a newsletter on LinkedIn, and it's really a labor of love. There wasn't ever a master plan for here's where I focus. I do everything so I don't have a team or anything like that. And my main motivation is actually what I've heard from people is we have no idea what's actually happening in that little thing called the C-suite. And we love the fly on the wall experience, and so that's what I'm trying to bring out through Rewire is demystifying some of that and on things that'll be useful for people. So I try and identify topics where I think that make sense.
What I'm also trying to do is motivate the leaders themselves, because I want to accelerate the change in how leadership is conducted. And so I use these words intentionally around method and meditation because method sounds super rational as one layer of the human, is the rational brain. And then the meditation is more the emotional spiritual side, if you will, which is part of being a whole human.
And so if you're going to be at work, we're not asking you to check one part of being a human at the door and bring the other part of being a human into the room or the Zoom or whatever. And so I think there's a way to bring those two things together where it's a more human experience to perform, to have big ideas, to solve hard problems, to do teamwork, to be productive, to kick ass, win markets, get results. That's, to me, both about the method and the meditation, and so I look for topics in that zone.
[00:24:59] Jesse Purewal: Well, it's analogous to where you spoke earlier about the importance of inputs versus just looking at outputs, bringing in the more methodological pieces into the process as well as bringing that sort of sense of how does it all intuitively fit together versus just logically fit together? It's actually an interesting parallel, and I believe you've started a new organization or a new company. You want to tell us a little bit about what you're up to with Ritual?
[00:25:22] Atif Rafiq: Yeah, sure. I really love the last statement of yours. You said it better than I did, which is for example, if you have a workflow in a company which promotes collective thinking and intelligence, then obviously that's better for the company's performance, which is we can solve the puzzle better with having the right input. Okay, great. So rationally, we all understand that, but guess what? That's actually a better team experience as well, because we break down silos. We feel like we all have our stamp on the thing. It's not something that one person that was a lone wolf creative genius came down from the mountain and gave us the answer. That's a better human experience. We feel a stronger connection with each other through our work. And that's why I use the word meditation, because we can create stronger connection with each other through the work.
I mean, we're here for work, right? So we got to get the work done, but then we also actually like each other, we feel good about working with each other. This is absolutely the future of work. That's what we're trying to solve for. So some of my other north stars are a new book and then some of these workflows are elaborated on there, so that's one thing. And then I started a software company called Ritual, which essentially productizes some of this idea of going from strategy to action, but with a method where there's a way to handle exploration, there's a way to handle alignment, and there's a way to drive decision-making at high velocity and do it through collective thinking and teamwork.
[00:26:53] Jesse Purewal: Love it. Well, Atif, if you're game, I'd love to close this out today with a bit of a lightning round. You ready to go?
[00:27:00] Atif Rafiq: Yeah, let's do it.
[00:27:01] Jesse Purewal: What's a brand you can't imagine living without?
[00:27:04] Atif Rafiq: I would say Tumi because I'm a traveler and I need to lug my things around but do it with some style.
[00:27:11] Jesse Purewal: Well, hooking off of that, what's the most memorable place you've ever traveled to?
[00:27:15] Atif Rafiq: Probably the Arctic circle twice to test drive cars.
[00:27:20] Jesse Purewal: Oh wow. You got to give me more, too. You got to tell me that story. Give me some cliff notes there. That's awesome.
[00:27:25] Atif Rafiq: Well, it's Volvo and we want to make sure that these can perform under any conditions, and we do that by going to different destinations and actually test driving our new cars in these more challenging terrains, but nothing like a race car driver or anything like that. So yeah, I've been to the Arctic circle twice to test drive Volvos. Yeah.
[00:27:45] Jesse Purewal: We've touched upon it in different facets of the conversations, but how would you summarize what your secret sauce is? What's that mix of things that helps you do you?
[00:27:55] Atif Rafiq: Well, I'm a questioner personality, and so that, I think gives me an advantage in this era. Maybe if I was in a different era, they'd be like, "Oh man, this guy is really, really dumb. He doesn't have any answers. He only has questions." But in the world in which we live, I think it actually serves you well to come in with a blank canvas. Even though you have a lot of experience, experience is not a reason to reject input or to seek input.
So part of my secret sauce is basically I'm hungry for inputs, and I don't mind leading with that and suspending in mid-air my experience, my opinion, and then seeing if those inputs would modify that. I'm still very confident in my convictions and my ideas, it's just that I'm not under the impression that I need to lead with those things. And I'm very comfortable with that I'm coming across pretty dumb and uninformed in the beginning so I can get inputs and see if that might modify the picture a little bit.
[00:28:54] Jesse Purewal: Well, you'd strike me as a distinctively inspiring and wonderfully pragmatic leader, so no doubt that the people and teams and organizations you've had a hand in moving forward are better in many ways as a result. So Atif, thank you for joining me for the conversation today. It's been a pleasure. Be well.
[00:29:11] Atif Rafiq: Thank you so much, Jesse. It's been an absolute pleasure, and I really appreciate the opportunity.
[00:29:16] 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 Qualtric 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 Vayner Talent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hannah Park, and Yvonna Lynn provide publicity and promotional support. The show’s designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka 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.