Finding Balance, Seeking Truth
David Sandstrom on how he’s building the Klarna brand to embody and express a next-generation financial services experience that is boldly different, deeply resonant, and – above all – anchored in human truth.
Episode Notes
David Sandstrom has a really interesting way of thinking about brand. In terms of driving awareness and growth, he's clear about what he thinks brand can do—and what it can't do. In his talk with Jesse, David discusses how finding friction and identifying an enemy can help teams differentiate and deliver value in a space with lots of companies, but with very few true brands; why it's important to find creative ways to message your product so you don't bore your audience and add to the noise; why it's important, but sometimes really hard for marketing leaders to be customer driven, rather than CEO or boss driven; and the importance of discovering and acting on truth in marketing.
Guest Bio
David Sandstrom currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Klarna and is a member of the executive management team. Sandstrom joined Klarna in 2017 where he led the fintech company to an extensive brand transformation, from one of many financial institutions to a rethinking lifestyle brand.
During his time at Klarna, he has overseen several pioneering marketing campaigns that have attracted great attention internationally, working with high profile celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Snoop Dogg. Sandstrom was behind Klarna's 2021 Super Bowl Advertisement starring Maya Rudolph that was an immediate hit with the public and garnered over 13 million views on YouTube. Prior to joining Klarna, Sandstrom was the CEO of one of Sweden's foremost advertising agencies.
Helpful Links
David believes: ‘Virtual shopping’ can take over retail
David on The CMO Podcast
+ Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] David Sandstrom: One thing that is really important to me is the truth. In order to solve something for a consumer or a customer or for yourself, you need to be extremely honest. Once you've uncovered the naked truth about things, even if the truth is that the product sucks or the feature sucks. Once you've uncovered the truth, how dirty it might be, that is when you can align teams and visions and missions.
[00:00:37] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders. A series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences.
Hey, builders. Today I'm talking with David Sandstrom, the Chief Marketing Officer at the FinTech Company, Klarna. In nearly six years at Klarna, David's led the company along a growth path that's pretty different from the well-heeled ones that you usually see taken in banking and financial services. Basically what he and his team have done is they've built an accessible and simple and really emotionally resonant consumer brand, and he's tried to get people to be curious about Klarna and to feel something about Klarna. So they get interested in getting into the product and trying out the product.
David's got a really interesting way of thinking about brand. He's clear about what he thinks brand can do and what it can't do. And it all derives from what I think is David's defining characteristic, which is this incredible sense of balance in the way that his mind works. You'll get more of what I mean when you hear the conversation.
David and I also talk about how finding friction and identifying an enemy can help teams differentiate and deliver value in a space with lots of companies, but with very few true brands. Why it's important to find creative ways to message your product so you don't bore your audience and add to the noise. Why it's important, but sometimes really hard for marketing leaders to be consumer driven or customer driven, rather than CEO or boss driven. The importance of discovering and acting on truth in marketing. David's also got a really cool take in the lightning round at the end on the people whose work he really admires. So stay tuned for that and enjoy the whole conversation.
David, joined me from his home in Stockholm, Sweden. And we started out the chat with him talking to me a bit about his upbringing, a blend of what he calls the Key West hippie rock and roll lifestyle and the German engineering structure. Enjoy, David Sandstrom.
[00:02:42] David Sandstrom: My dad is a musician. He moved to Key West in the early 1980s. He went there to play music, met my mom. My mom was from a fairly strict family in Germany and even today, I think I bring a fair amount of German structure with some kind of Key West rock and roll lifestyle to the table. I think that's a strength. If you also look at the journey that Klarna has made in the last couple of years, I would see the secret source of the success is very much in combining things that have ... it's almost like the Lambada, the forbidden dance. How do you combine beautiful design with hardcore tech banking? No one had done that before. And I do think only fully being a Key West rock and roll hipster is slightly boring. Only being a German engineer is for obvious reasons, quite boring. But the combination, that is something. I do think that that kind of art and science, high-tech, high touch kind of thinking, I think there is something to that.
[00:03:45] Jesse Purewal: I love the turn of phrase around forbidden combinations, even if I only took it to unexpected. Because actually as a marketer, it allows you to put a provocation out there for yourself or for a team or an agency partner you might be working with. One of my favorite questions to ask people interviewing for brand roles is something to the effect of, "So imagine that W Hotels came out with a car. What would that car look like?"
[00:04:10] David Sandstrom: Exactly.
[00:04:11] Jesse Purewal: And I do it as an abstraction. But it sounds like you're taking it all the way to building a business and building a brand.
[00:04:18] David Sandstrom: I mean, that is in many ways how we started the brand in Germany. I come from a business that historically is very stiff, very boring, very rational, very male. So one of the ... at that time at least, hypothetical questions we asked us was like, okay, if LVMH or it's Gucci more specifically, if they would launch a tech company, how would that look and feel? I mean, people keep asking me that, oh, Apple is now launching the Apple card a couple of years ago. Or Apple announced I think a couple of months ago that they're going into the buy now, pay later space. How do you feel about that? Is that going to ruin Klarna? Is that the end of Klarna?
And I'm like, "No, it's the best thing that's ever happened." The masters of branding are moving into my industry and maybe I'm going to learn something. Maybe they're going to fail. Maybe they're going to elevate the industry. Maybe they're going to insert a huge proportion of trust, whatever happens. But seeing that, okay, what happens when Apple adds an Apple card? I remember the launch of that, that was spectacular. We've seen every single bank for the last 20years launch a credit card and everything has been received with a shrug of shoulders or a yawn within a nothing.
[00:05:35] Jesse Purewal: It's true. Yeah. Even Apple card, when that first came out, it was very much like, "Whoa." Like the PR machine was actually ahead of the business by enough that you were like, okay, maybe I'm missing something. Then after a few quarters, it was like, okay, they're here, but what's the provocation? Are they just sort of experimenting?
[00:05:54] David Sandstrom: Exactly. So I mean, I'm all for that. Unfortunately, and I'm not sure if that is maybe a sign of our times. But unfortunately, friction, provocation, juxtapositions, the extremes have been
privileged in media in recent years. I think the same thing goes for brands. The middle way isn't really something that's interesting enough to make the headlines. I do think almost on an individual level, on a brand level, on a category level, you have to almost actively seek that kind of friction.
We have been, as Klarna, as well. I've always been intrigued by politics and how politicians communicate, how parties communicate. One of the absolute basic fundaments of a party is you have to articulate who your enemy is. That's the thing. Who's the enemy? Is it high taxes? Is it immigration? It can be whatever. But who's the enemy? And then you find that friction. I do think the same thing holds true for brands, as well. You have to find that common enemy and find that friction.
[00:07:06] Jesse Purewal: What's also interesting about that take is the idea of focus on who you are seeking to delight and who are you building a brand franchise and an experience for. I can remember a number of years ago having a conversation with the Oakley CEO, and it was an interview as part of a discovery that we were doing for some work on the journey of that brand here in the US. We asked him to share a couple perspectives that he had. One of the things he said was, I think it's as important that we have some people out there that actually hate us or at least dislike us than people who love us.
When you first hear those words, it's a little bit like, "Whoa, that's a little jarring." But then the more you think about it, you're sort of, oh wow, that's actually giving a lot of permission to a lot of people across a global organization to make certain choices and understand trade-offs and take directions that maybe they wouldn't have ordinarily considered in a world where you could just try to be everything to everybody.
[00:08:07] David Sandstrom: Yeah, I mean the Oakley turnaround is fantastic. Oakley was going down. Oakley is a fantastic brand nowadays. The turnaround the last couple of years from a brand perspective at least, is spectacular in my opinion. But I do think there's a lot of value to that statement. Who do you become as a customer of this brand?
Usually I ask myself the question, okay, if someone wears a Klarna shirt ... we don't have that, but theoretically. If I see someone in a Klarna t-shirt downtown,who would that be? Who is our biggest fan? And who would never ever wear that t-shirt? And who would wear a PayPal t-shirt over a Klarna t-shirt? And why would they do that? To me, that has been a very, very important question throughout the years. Who do you become if you are a Klarna customer? Because I do think the brands you use ... I mean, I'm not a huge believer in this brand love and complete brand devotion and loyalty, I'm not a big believer in that. But I do think that the brands that you use, the brands you buy, they define you. And that is an important part of who do you become if you become a Klarna user? What does that say about you?
[00:09:16] Jesse Purewal: So what do you believe about the role of brands in driving relevance and distinction in a world where users are a swipe or a click away from moving to a potentially strong alternative or at least an alternative?
[00:09:31] David Sandstrom: I mean, brand is obviously extremely important. We've invested very, very much into the brand, and I actually think when I talk about my category, usually I say there have been a lot of companies, but very few brands. I do think to some extent American Express is obviously a fantastic brand. Like they've been for many, many years, one of the brands. I would probably say that PayPal is a brand, as well, although it's fairly rational. I'm not sure, they have those values. But there are thousands, tens of thousands of FinTech or financial companies. There are very, very few brands.
But one thing, I mean I've been at an agency for a very long time and I do think the definition that agencies have over brands, I don't think they hold true anymore. I was convinced back then, I've probably changed my point of view. But to me, if I'm being very honest, the activities we're doing around the brand nowadays, they are very, very important to employees. They're very important to potential employees, those kind of initiatives, to investors, to the general opinion. But when we do big brand initiatives, they don't directly affect our top line or our bottom line. We don't see the change. It is really something else. Does that make sense?
I see the pride increasing internally. I see a lot of merchants and retailers and partners reaching out saying, "Hey, this was fantastic." Do I see consumers changing their behavior based on that? No, none whatsoever, to be honest. So the thing that I've really tried to infuse into my teams is what we can do with marketing and with brand is get people to try the product. Because the best way to build a brand is to do that through the product. If people use Klarna or if I would work at Tesla, if people drive the Tesla, that's the brand though. You don't do brand building campaigns or brand building marketing and build some kind of theoretical brand. Utilizing and using the product, that is what drives the brand forward and builds the brand.
So what we do at Klarna when it comes to marketing and brand building is, we get people to try Klarna. Everything is tuned and is centered around try. And it's almost not even trying Klarna, it's increasing the probability of trying Klarna. So basically people hit the checkout of merchants and retailers and brands, they will see the Visa logo, the MasterCard logo, the Amex logo, the PayPal logo, and the Klarna logo. The only thing I can do with the brand and investing in the brand is increasing the probability of people clicking the Klarna badge instead of the Amex badge. That's the thing. So to me, it's like everything we do, we obviously try to build a symbol and a guarantee of a superior experience. But I've been so humbled in the last five years when it comes to brand building. The best brand building is people using the product and liking the product.
[00:12:27] Jesse Purewal: Well, but I think your audience point referring as you did to investors and employees and stakeholders outside the commercial revenue generation in the current period, ie, customers is actually massively important. We see that in my conversations with my CMO or my Head of Comms, even our CEO. There's a passion for trying to see around the corner, even in a world where by rights we could decide to be data driven and just declare that brand has no impact on revenue.
Part of the reason we invest in brand at Qualtrics is because we believe that the longer term consistency in storytelling that we do with the analyst community and the longer term persistence that we have, sharing that story with CHROs and heads of CX or CEOs of smaller companies. It turns out it takes 8, 10, 12 reps, people hearing the story, people really deeply understanding, well, how do you run your business as an experience? Tell me what that means.
I can imagine you have a similar challenge, particularly in a world where I'm looking at those venerable logos of Visa or of MasterCard or PayPal and of Klarna. It's like, how does one earn his or her key in that kind of world where the brands have earned trust or at least distinction over decades? And then factored their business models to become monopolies or duopolies or close in their space. That's a really hard challenge. Even if you bring the very best of Key West and the very best of Northern Germany to the heart and mind of solving the problem.
[00:13:54] David Sandstrom: That is where I think we've excelled from a brand perspective and we've been able to, due to us being a startup, to adapt and try out and experiment with new kind of methods when it comes to this. Remember, we started this venture five years ago of really repositioning the brand, being very early and on TikTok being very early with using influencers. Those things sound fairly mundane and basic today. But back then, they weren't.
So really experimenting with, what is a modern way of building trust and building brand? That is the important thing. Because what's also interesting nowadays, I think five or six or seven years ago, access to data was a scarcity, having good growth hackers and growth marketeers was a scarcity. Being able to optimize the third party platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google was something almost exotic and new.
Nowadays, if we're being honest, every one of our competitors has fantastic data access. Every one of them has probably the best agencies in the world when it comes to optimization. The effect I can have on my business by optimizing that it's on a zero point something percentage. There are no leaps to be made within this. But the leaps I can make with something that is still fairly undefinable, such as brand and experiences and emotions and doing something completely different. You cannot really measure how or at least foresee how that is going to work. That, to me, is the big moat nowadays. That, to me, makes a difference.
If I push my teams as hard as humanly possible, they're going to optimize our Instagram advertising with 0.8% maybe. Yeah, it's good. We're going to save some money, we're going to acquire new users, we're going to grow our footprint and our market share. Is it going to make a huge difference? No. The huge difference, the big kicker comes from something else. That to me is still really intriguing.
[00:15:54] Jesse Purewal: The typical FinTech brand or financial services brand, even today if it's modern, it looks still a little bit more like the emphasis in the photography is on a hand swiping a card. Or clearly there's a square terminal in play as opposed to an old school card reader. It's sort of like people have taken this half step forward into modernity in photography and imagery and in copy and in just the presentation of the brand experience. Where Klarna, I have a different view where there's some boldness and some audacity even, to the types of photography I see. There's quite literally human faces, people actually interacting with services or with products or with one another.
Maybe you'd say, well that was pretty straightforward for me to imagine, given my cognitive makeup. But to actually go make that happen in a world where you have to drive alignment and you have to drive processes and workflows and work with the product org and the web team and others to put stuff out in the world. How do you condition Klarna's organization to go, "Yeah, we have to move in this more human direction." Then what do you think about where the brand is? And where would you like to continue to take that humanity?
[00:17:13] David Sandstrom: I think you bring up a really interesting point, and if I start with the last question, the second question. I think that the financial industry, as a whole, it's an extremely rational industry. Which means that in all fairness, we have very, very boring products. We think that the way to sell those products is to show the products, explain the products. But the thing is, explaining it, it won't help. It's as if you're in a huge argument with your wife or with your husband. If the other party does not want to recognize the issue or the conversation, explaining things more and being more rational and being more clear, it does not help.
So what I think we've done at Klarna is really to adopt a modern way of communicating and saying that, hey, maybe the perfect way to build a preference and awareness and understanding isn't by explaining things. But maybe that's about being highly emotional. When it comes to these kind of products, maybe there's a different path into the brain, so the viewer or the listener or whatever it is. So in many ways, I do think that our competitors, at least, they've taken the old banking folders and they've digitized them and they've done some storytelling around them. But if people don't want to listen, explaining it even further is not the way. You need a different angle. I tried for three years to explain our products, no one listened. Then I used Snoop Dogg to explain it in 30 seconds and everyone listened.
[00:18:53] Snoop Dogg: Knowing that I could pay for all of this later makes me so relaxed.
[00:19:08] David Sandstrom: He didn't even do a good job in explaining it. He was just very funny, very visual and came in from an angle that was like, "Okay, I'm going to give you 30 seconds." That's one thing where I think that we're really like, how do we get the Venn diagrams of what I want to say and what people want to hear to overlap? I don't think our competitors have done a really good job with that. That's one thing. The second thing is, I have the benefit of having a CEO and a founder who truly understands this. I do think I'm in a very favorable position where I can actually optimize my marketing for the consumer, rather than for him. I can optimize my marketing for what people want to hear, rather than for me keeping my job.
I'm not saying that lightly because I used to run one of the biggest agencies here in Europe. I know how this works. People optimize for not losing their jobs. People optimize for their management team thinking that the campaign or the marketing or the messaging is fantastic, rather than the consumer. I don't blame them. That is rough. Sometimes, maybe I'm going on a rant, but sometimes I get the question, "How do you sell this to your management team?" I'm like, "I would never accept the job where I have to justify my work all the time and sell what I'm doing." Either I have a management team that says, "Okay, we believe in this." Or I'm out. I can't picture myself in a role where I would have to ... every single time I want to do something spectacular or different, selling that to my team. I don't do that. So I'm in a very favorable and luxurious position of having a management team that truly believes in communication, storytelling, marketing. That the way to get people excited about boring products might not be explaining them even further. But might be having Snoop Dogg explaining them.
[00:21:07] Jesse Purewal: Obviously you are in a category where the pace of change is not something to be taken lightly. So expectations and capabilities that talented people have when they come into Klarna might look like one thing on day one and might look like another thing by day 90 or day 120. How often do you find that you have to revisit questions of roles and team structure and operating models to keep your teams working on the highest impact things? And also engineering kind of an agile organization that's always learning?
[00:21:44] David Sandstrom: Yeah, I mean, we're wrestling that on the daily basis because I'm probably in the camp where I think we change too often and too much. But that is because we constantly optimize for what we need to do, how the market's changing. I still think that in many ways we're still a startup. We're a big startup, we have 150 million consumers, we're influential. But still, we need to be agile in how we approach the market, how we build our products. Because that's the name of the game.
That is, in some cases, actually, when it comes to recruitment for example, it's made it quite hard for me. Because recruitment cycles, especially in Europe, are like, I signed someone, they usually start about two to four months later and I know that there's a 50, 50 chance that the role I'm recruiting him to that it's something else. In two to four months, it's going to be something else.
So the way in which we recruit people is really, it sounds cheesy and it sounds like things that have been said before. But for [inaudible] **it really holds true, like we recruit fantastic people. We do not fill roles in our search ads and our job listings. We've really adapted them to the fact that, hey, you're joining a company that's on a mission, things are going to change at the rapid pace. We do not assign you to any roles so that people are easily movable and adaptable to change. At my previous job, people would be like, "Okay, I want to be the head of social in the Nordics." But what if we decide in two months that we don't need social in the Nordics? We want to do something else. Like you are a marketeer, currently you work on this stuff. But in two weeks we might not need that stuff, you're going to do something else. So it's everything from how we recruit to how we organize to how we actually set people's titles.
[00:23:30] Jesse Purewal: I know you are not a big fan of leadership dogma or digesting other people's success attributes and trying to make them your own. But if I were to pick up a book on David Sandstrom's Leadership Ethos or Leadership Principles, what kinds of things might I read about in there?
[00:23:48] David Sandstrom: One thing that is really important to me is the truth. In order to solve something for a consumer or a customer or for yourself, you need to be extremely honest. What is the truth here? Once you've uncoveredthe naked truth about things. Even if the truth is that the product sucks or the feature sucks, a lot of my leadership is really together with the teams and together with people around me, understanding the truth.
That is why I also like ... data is one of those things where it's like, I don't know, I'm not a huge Jeff Bezos fan, but I do think he brings up a couple of good points. One of them is that if he's presented with hard data and anecdotal evidence, he's biased towards the anecdotal evidence. Because there's somethingto that. The data is not always the truth. So drilling into that, we're very good at, instead of looking at big averages, we drill into line item data or specific user IDs. Uncovering the truth because once you've uncovered the truth, how dirty it might be. That is when you can align teams on visions and missions and stuff like that.
So from a leadership perspective, truth is important to me. I've also always had a principle of being able to look myself in the mirror at the end of the day. What you think about me is important to some extent. But the unfortunate thing is I will have to live with myself until the last minute and I want to be able to live with myself. So as you know, a lot of tech companies are going through financial headwinds, whatever you want to call it. But we're entering 2023, it's going to be the rough year on many of us. Which means that we, as leaders, have to make a couple of rough decisions. Both organizationally, financially, you name it. But with that said, I want to be able to look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say, "Hey, that was rough, but I like the person I'm seeing."
[00:25:42] Jesse Purewal: On the truth piece, what would you say is true about either your leadership style or your approach or your way of thinking, that simultaneously acknowledges that there might not be one objective truth? But that getting the number of people that have to view the problem in a common way is achievable. In other words, people could say, "Well, I see that it's pink." And some will go, "No, no, no. It's blue." The other person, "Well, I think it's actually kind of a shade of green." They might all be right in their own way, but as a leader it seems you might have an accountability to say, "Let's stop talking about color. What's the shape of the object?" In some ways, either reframe the conversation or ask a new question. How do you do that in a way that puts truth on the table as something that teams can then go act in pursuit of?
[00:26:31] David Sandstrom: I mean, that's a rough question. But I do think there are different leadership styles across the globe. There's a huge difference in leadership style between European companies, especially Northern European companies and US companies. We usually talk about crocodile leadership and elephant leadership. The crocodile has very small ears and a huge mouth. And the elephant has a very small mouth and two huge ears. I think I'm more of an elephant. When it comes to these meetings, I do think I'm very good at listening rather than talking. I'm very good at understanding different perspectives. I think that's one of the benefits with having been at an agency, having lived in many countries. I can hear an engineer out with my German engineering background, I can hear our art directors out.
Obviously at the end of the day, someone has to become the crocodile and call the shots. But I do think the way in which we work with cross-functional teams and a fairly European leadership than actually a sense to different perspectives is more of an elephant. Big ears, small mouth. That is a huge benefit. Then maybe this is a crazy thing, but when I joined Klarna, I was very strict on having the small meetings with few people in the meetings. And short meetings because I was like, "Hey, let's get this over with. Everyone who doesn't contribute, I'll leave them outside the meeting because it's wasting people's time."
Nowadays, I'm like, what does it matter if we spend two hours, 40 or 50 people listening in on the conversation and actually aligning? Even if you don't contribute, hearing the conversation upfront. Because after those two hours, some might feel that's wasted. But many meetings at Klarna in the beginning of a project, are two, three hours, 40, 50, 60 people listening in on the conversation, aligning on what's important, what isn't important, what's the shape. As you said, what's the shape? What's the color of this thing? Then you save so much time down the line. Instead of having this small team aligning or disagreeing on something, then trusting that that is going to cascade. So it's also in the process of how we work, we overinvest. And probably in some people's eyes, waste time in the beginning of projects and processes, whilst we make up for that tenfold down the line, in my opinion.
[00:28:48] Jesse Purewal: Let me ask you ... and you did reference some of theheadwinds that those of us in or close to tech are contending with. But let me goglass half full for a second, as you look to 2023 and think about the time that you've spent over the past couple of quarters making decisions in new ways or getting ready to refactor the team in interesting ways or focus on, say, a smaller number of things you might be doing better. How are you thinking about 2023? And what's got you fired up and excited about a moment that you know is goingto carry with it some stress and some challenge along the way?
[00:29:22] David Sandstrom: One thing would be, we had the luxury of havingvery strong financing in the last couple of years. We have had the luxury of having both funding, but also a share price that is very high. Which basically ledto us making loads of very, very interesting acquisitions. Acquisitions in all fairness, that we wouldn't have been able to make today or wouldn't do today because it would be financially unsound.
But in the last two years, we've bought companies in our price comparison search companies, shoppable video companies, live shopping companies, influencer companies. I would say we've bought five to seven companies that are extremely interesting in a time where we could. So moving into 2023, we are going to leverage those things we did in good times during 2023. I really look forward to that because the features we're bringing to the market are going to compete with the big, big tech companies out there in the world. I'm extremely excited about that. I do think in the same way that we once upon a time revolutionize the way that people paid online, I do think there is room to change the way that people actually shop for things. Online shopping is still underdeveloped. It's boring, it's not emotional enough. So fingers crossed that pays off next year.
[00:30:42] Jesse Purewal: I'd love to move to a quick lightning round, just a series of some real brief questions that I'd love to get your take on.
[00:30:49] David Sandstrom: Yeah, sure.
[00:30:51] Jesse Purewal: All right. Give me a brand that's not Klarna, that youcan't imagine living without.
[00:30:57] David Sandstrom: Unfortunately, I'll have to say Apple, Air Pod specifically. But I do think they're just too profound in my life.
[00:31:05] Jesse Purewal: Go a layer deeper for me though, has you ... if I'm taking that Key West hippie sensitivity and that mindset around German engineering, give me a sense of how Apple maybe clicks on both sides of your brain.
[00:31:18] David Sandstrom: I mean, I just think they're the perfect culmination of that. They have taken the best components and engineering in the world, probably. Maybe they've just told me that story, but I'm a true believer of that. And combined it with design that is fantastic. And I don't think anyone else has done that. I presume there are Chinese, South Korean brands that are superior from a tech perspective. I do think there are startups that are superior from a design perspective. But that combination of everything from the unboxing experience, to the actual onboarding, to the utilization use of the product, it's something else.
[00:31:58] Jesse Purewal: You mentioned trying to relentlessly optimize your sleep, your exercise regimen. What's your go-to exercise regimen these days that's helping you keep a healthy and fit lifestyle?
[00:32:09] David Sandstrom: Yeah, I think I'm fairly boring there. But basic strength training. I mean, it's interesting to see because we follow so many fashion trends, as well. Nineties trends are coming back with a vengeance right now. But I do think with a lot of things, with food, with training, with spending.I think we're going to see a year of back to basics going forward. I'm not sure that these electric shock training in a yoga, hot yoga room is going to be the thing. I think basic dead lifts are going to have a comeback next year.
[00:32:41] Jesse Purewal: Who is someone whose work you deeply admire? I mean, this can be a writer, an artist, a builder, colleague, a mentor. Anybody whose work who's out in the world that you take something from.
[00:32:50] David Sandstrom: One thing I've actually studied fairly closely is how top chefs work. Because to me, it is in many ways the perfect combination between process, grit and creativity. Running a three star restaurant as a chef, you do the same dishes over and over again, nine hours a day for ... I don't know, three to four months before they change the menu, whatever it is. So you need the process. Like, I'm not saying I can make one three star restaurant dish, but maybe I could. But could I make a thousand the same way all the time? Likethat to me is so inspiring. Then adding the creativity on top of that.
In many ways, I mean the Netflix documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, you've probably seen it. If you haven't, you should watch it. That to me sometimes reminds me of just the world class creative director becoming better every single day. He does his freaking sound on sushi, he's done it 10,000 times. How does he find the motivation? I do think in many things, marketing related, that holds true. How do you write that newsletter for the 8000th time with the same passion and energy and obviously automation connected to that. But still top chefs is something I've always admired.
[00:34:09] Jesse Purewal: David Sandstrom, thank you. I'm grateful for the time and the conversation and perspective. Be well and best wishes for the holiday season and heading into 2023 here. So appreciate the time.
[00:34:20] David Sandstrom: Thank you for having me.
[00:34:22] 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 Studio's 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 StudioPod 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 in promotional support. The show's 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.”