Authentic Leadership

The San Francisco Business Times selected you as one of the San Francisco Bay Area's most admired CEOs, incredible honor. Can you share with us a piece of leadership wisdom that you would like to pass on to the next generation of leaders?

Yes. All these awards are an incredible honor, and it makes me proud because what allows me to shine and maybe be recognized is really the work that's being done at the company by everyone, some of those also leaders in the company, but a lot of people behind the scenes that are getting things done. I think that my greatest asset as a leader is my genuine authenticity to our employees. I hear all the time from employees that I can get up, I can talk about a big change. Even when it was COVID, we would get up and we would just say, you know what, as hard for us as it is you, we're in this together. But we never tried to sugarcoat the reality of it.
I think that authentic leadership is underestimated. I think employees see through a facade and I think when you can just be real and sometimes tell them honestly, even if it isn't always the cool thing to do. I think--

They're not a rosy picture.

Exactly. So that is one. And number two, I am just all about communication, whether it is communicating and over communicating strategy, whether it is talking about decisions we're making, why we're making those decisions, why the impact. And then the third is celebrating the successes that we have. We've been known to celebrate failures. We have a little bit of a--

Why do you celebrate the failures?

Well, you celebrate the failures, because at the end of the day, if you fail in something, you have an answer. Answers allow you to take next steps. I could, probably, over the course of the last 14 years, there probably are as many times that having an outcome of an experiment land in the way that we wished it wouldn't have actually required us then to go to plan B and say, well, we already have the plan, and this is the direction you're going, you make a decision and you go do it.

That's a good point. That's a really good point.

Yeah. Those are the things that I think are really important. Obviously, as leaders, you've got to be able to make the tough decisions. I'm a pretty decisive leader. I'm comfortable taking risk. Everything we do in our business requires people to be comfortable with a lot of ambiguity. You can't analyze for everything forever when you're an emerging growth company that's got to get new products to market and drive growth and get them covered and build the evidence and get it published. There's so many aspects of this. It's like a package.