April 10, 2024 • 28 mins
Varun Puri, CEO and Co-Founder of Yoodli, sits down with Ryan to walk through his career, discuss his perspective on speech coaching with AI, leadership, startups, and talk about his approach to hiring and being hired.
Try Yoodli for yourself: Yoodli | Free Communication Coach
Connect with Varun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/varun-puri001/
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(00:03):
Welcome to the Good Fit Careers podcast,
where we explore perspectives on work that fits.
I'm Ryan Dickerson, your host.
Today's guest is Varun Puri.
Varun is the CEO and co-founder of Yoodli.
Yoodli is an AI-powered communication coaching platform
that helps people improve their interview, conversation,
and public speaking skills.
(00:23):
Yoodli is used by groups like Toastmasters, Korn Ferry,
and Google.
Varun has had a fascinating career.
Early on, he ran special projects
for Sergey Brin at Google, then spent four years working at X,
then offshoot of Google focused on moonshot projects.
In 2021, Varun started Yoodli.
Varun, thank you for being here.
(00:44):
Thank you.
Thank you.
I am pumped to be here, Ryan.
So to start, would you tell us a little bit
about how you see your company and what your role is as CEO?
My dream with Yoodli is how do we help billions of people
speak with confidence?
I hope we can do that relatively quickly.
I think AI might be the solution, but I'm not sure.
(01:05):
My role is first and foremost ensuring
our team is aligned on that vision at all times
and then hiring the best team possible.
If I do a really good job there, I
think the rest figures itself out.
And thinking about how you got here and how you came to be,
can you give us a little sense of the beginning,
what you were like as a kid, and what you wanted
to be when you grew up?
(01:25):
Oh, wow, that's loaded.
Well, I grew up in India.
I was a nerdy chess-playing kid studying science and math.
My goal was to be either captain of the Indian cricket team
or prime minister of India, miserably failed at both,
did not see myself working in tech,
moved to the US for college, worked
at Google for a little while, and then ended up at Yoodli.
(01:49):
One thing I will say is a lot of my motivation behind Yoodli
is to do something back home in India.
And I'm hoping with this platform we can empower many
folks like me a few years ago who
didn't learn public speaking or didn't play the game as much
with communication skills.
What was school like for you?
What was the early life into education and then
your university experience like?
(02:11):
Awkward, as it is for any teenager.
I was figuring out what I want to study.
I ended up doing science and math.
I wasn't great at it.
One of the things that was interesting about school
in India was there are not as many opportunities
as kids might get in the US.
I tried to gravitate to whatever I could find.
For me, it was chess growing up.
(02:34):
I wish I had exposure to more things.
I've seen folks in the US go for mock trial and debate
and then go for varsity camp and then swimming class.
There wasn't enough of that.
So I was playing lots of chess.
I was studying hard, playing cricket,
just being an ordinary guy.
Nice, right on.
And so you eventually landed at Google.
Would you walk us through what the experience
(02:54):
was like getting hired there
and what that first job was like?
Yeah, so I did a summer internship
my junior year of college.
Google has these early grad rotational programs
where they get college kids.
They put you in fun housing
and give you this incredible opportunity
to interact with some very smart people.
I done the internship on the Android team.
(03:15):
And then through the internship,
I converted to a full-time role.
Obviously, Google was dream company.
For me, it was particularly important
because I needed a company that could sponsor my visa.
Family back home was proud of me.
The internship interview was relatively rigorous.
Converting from the internship to full-time
was just based on how the summer went.
(03:35):
Interesting, right on.
And thinking about the first job,
what was that actually like?
It was pretty unconventional.
I came into this rotational marketing program
where you spend a year across different teams
and explore different parts of Google.
Very early on, I ended up getting tapped by Sergey Brin,
who is one of the founders of Google,
(03:55):
to be his fixer.
So it wasn't assistant, it wasn't chief of staff.
It was to do Sergey projects.
Incredible opportunity right out of college.
I was the only person at the company working with him.
It was fun.
There was incredible learning,
lots of exposure into how Alphabet,
which is Google's mother company, works.
(04:15):
And as a first job out of college,
I think I just learned the importance of the soft skills
and relationship building.
Sergey took a bet on me,
not because I had all the answers
or not because I'm super smart,
just because I'm,
'cause like Sergey, I'm young, naive, and indestructible.
Take a bet on me, I'll try a bunch of things.
And as I build Udly,
I'm trying to maintain that kind of culture.
(04:37):
- How exciting.
And what a rare opportunity.
What did it feel like when Sergey said,
"Hey, do you want to be the only person
"that's gonna work with me on this kind of thing?"
- Oh, mortified.
Sergey and Larry at Google are demigods.
I was obviously extremely nervous going into this.
It was an experiment.
Sergey was figuring out whether he wants to roll,
(04:58):
what the roll would look like.
It was meant to be a couple of weeks long,
then a couple of months long.
There was very little structure.
So a lot of what I went through was,
I'm just gonna show up and try my best.
The job could have been done
by some smart White House chief of staff
or McKinsey director.
Sergey likely hired someone young
(05:18):
to just show up with a smile.
And he's probably not taking a bet on me for my experience.
It's my willingness to go try things.
So I try to embrace that as much as possible.
- Did it ever get comfortable?
- No.
- No, not at all.
- I think there are so many parts to it.
The Sergey role was incredible
in that I got to meet a lot of my role models
(05:39):
and people I read about in the news.
But no two days were similar.
Every week I would give the Alphabet leadership team
my state of the union of what's going on
across other parts of Alphabet.
But in that vein, I'd be working with CEOs
and chiefs of staffs,
everyone who has a different incentive,
different background, a different week at work
(06:01):
given the macroeconomic climate.
And I was always a messenger between all of these folks.
So it was definitely a tricky situation to navigate,
but a lot of fun and a super opportunity.
- How exciting.
And I'm assuming you worked a cool 35, 40 hours a week
good work-life balance.
- I wasn't working a gazillion hours a week.
I was working hard, but I would work in absent flows.
(06:25):
When a Sergey project came up, I'd be working really hard.
When not, I'd be doing other fun projects.
- Interesting.
And when you move to X, and X isn't Twitter,
X is the moonshot factory.
Tell us a little bit about what X is
and what it was like to move over.
- Google X is Alphabet's R&D arm.
They work self-driving car, robots, drones,
(06:48):
laser-based internet.
I was on a project where we tried to use invisible lasers
to bring internet to rural places in the world.
X is a playground for scientists and PhDs and dreamers.
The idea behind X is can we use technology to 100 X,
not just make a 10% improvement in what's happening.
So it's an audacious place where failure is celebrated
(07:10):
and people come because they believe
they're doing good in the world.
It was just an incredible learning opportunity for me.
- That's awesome.
And how did your job evolve over those four years
that you were there?
- At X, we were working on this project
to bring internet to unconnected places.
And my dream was can we help folks in India
(07:30):
where the economics of running fiber cables
don't make sense, right?
If we can shoot a laser across a water body
where a government is not gonna get internet,
we could help a lot of people.
So I joined them as a product manager
who was one of the early hires.
So I scaled with the team.
I started by doing the compliance work
and getting us water certified.
If one of our laser boxes drops in water
(07:52):
to figuring out customs and immigration
and import of these laser boxes,
to figuring out the geospatial analysis
of where we would place these laser boxes,
what kind of weather conditions they'd work in,
what our countries would be after India.
So I did a little bit of everything.
And it was a really fun rollercoaster
to see a project go from zero to a hundred, quite literally.
(08:13):
- That's wild.
Okay, so you're four years in at X.
You're not necessarily the prime minister of India quite yet
nor are you the captain of the cricket team.
What was your kind of view on where you wanted to be
and where you wanted to go from there?
- A lot of this is tied to my immigrant identity.
I'm not a US passport holder.
(08:33):
It's hard for a non-citizen to do something
that isn't as structured,
just given the way visa restrictions work.
My approach was very much,
I've had these incredible opportunities at Google and at X.
I've worked with absolute role models.
I really want to build my own thing
and I want to give it my best shot.
And when I was at Google,
(08:54):
I saw this communication problem firsthand.
Even the smartest engineers,
people with the most PhDs I could imagine,
would struggle to speak with confidence
and would miss out on opportunities.
And I'd seen this across my life.
So it's a problem I'm passionate about.
I said I've had a super opportunity.
Shame on me if I don't take some bets.
(09:14):
So that's what got me to leave and start UGLI.
- Was there a moment when you decided,
okay, I need to leave this super cool environment
where failure is embraced, I get to work on the future,
essentially shaping how humanity moves forward
and say, okay, I'm gonna start my own thing.
- I don't know if it was a moment,
but I was doing the whole digital nomad thing during COVID.
And I was at dinner with some friends
(09:35):
and we were talking about this problem.
I was like, this problem just means so much to me.
I got to shoot my shot.
And that's what facilitated it.
But in terms of decision-making process from saying,
I want to start this company to leaving was fast.
Some would say way too fast.
I could have put in a little bit more thought.
- That's all right.
So you're CEO now.
(09:57):
It looks like he got roughly 70 or so employees.
At this point, what does your work mean to you?
- Let me first say, we don't have 70 employees.
We're a much smaller company,
but we look a lot bigger than we are.
No, no, no, because if you go to LinkedIn or Google
and you search for us,
we've got folks helping us around the world.
We've got ambassadors and people who are advisors to us.
And it's amazing to see.
(10:19):
I mean, to me, I'm living my dream, right?
The day-to-day sucks and a customer will turn
and an investor will ask for a report.
And I don't know if we'll run out of money,
but heck, I think if we crack this,
we can help so many people out.
And I'm passing my mirror test, right?
When I look in the mirror, I'm like,
like you're trying your best.
It may not work, but that's pretty cool,
despite how lonely and frustrating
(10:40):
and isolating this experience is.
- Yeah, that's so exciting.
What does it feel like to be a CEO?
- I don't know.
CEO sounds a lot more fancy than it is.
We're a tiny company, there are like 13 of us.
I'm just one of the people on the team doing sales.
I don't think the title means much to me
and I don't think about leadership as strategically.
Maybe I will one day if we have hundreds of employees.
(11:03):
But I'm just a guy on a team,
gonna recruit people and get them excited about this idea.
- Sure, right on.
So you left X, you with a patched together business plan,
were able to establish funding.
What was it like to actually get people to invest in you
and get the baseline funding to build this thing?
- Hard, but I think the thing I realized at Google as well
(11:26):
is like nobody has the answers.
Like everyone's figuring it out.
And the fact that right out of college
I was doing this cool role, working with some senior people
meant that people just wanna bet on other people
who have some potential.
So during the fundraise, my story to folks wasn't,
here's my business plan
and here's how we'll get to a $10 billion company.
It was, look, two out of three people in the world
(11:47):
are afraid of public speaking.
We've all practiced speeches in front of a mirror, a camera.
I've been in front of my bathroom mirror way too long.
Everyone in this room has experienced it
and knows 10 people who struggle with it.
It's big enough.
I don't know how I'm gonna solve it.
Here's an idea, but let's go solve it together.
And I'm really passionate about it.
And a lot of people are like,
(12:08):
well, you don't have this mapped out
and who's your target customer and where will you start?
But in the earliest days, the folks who took a bet on me
were like, yeah, is the market big enough?
It's a problem big enough.
You know a thing or two about it
and we think you'll figure it out.
- Yeah, what a wild ride.
So now you are at a point where Yoodli is used
by some of the world's most prominent companies,
Toastmasters, Korn Ferry.
(12:29):
What was it like building those partnerships
that couldn't have been easy?
- It was definitely hard, but it had the same essence to it,
which was when I was talking to Toastmasters,
it's look, y'all are trying to bring speech coaching
to hundreds of thousands and millions of folks worldwide.
I'm trying to build technology
that does the exact same thing.
I don't want to compete.
(12:50):
If we join forces, we can help a lot more people together.
What can we do to work together?
And I think Toastmasters approach was,
yeah, that makes sense.
And then we built a version of Yoodli for Toastmasters.
And it's the same thing with Korn Ferry.
They're helping 96% of the SNP
and hundreds of thousands of leaders
(13:11):
communicate with confidence and lead with charisma.
They are very much looking for partners to collaborate with.
- How interesting.
So thinking about the job today,
let's say there's someone out there
who wants to follow in your footsteps
and has a brilliant idea or even a half brilliant idea
that they want to make into something real.
Can you teach us a little bit about
(13:32):
one of the most useful or high impact parts
of the job that you do today, however you see it?
- I don't know if I have a template,
but a couple pieces of advice that I strongly believe.
One, don't overthink it.
Either you're going to start a company or you're not.
I hear from many people, well, I kind of have this idea,
but I'm going to de-risk it in these 15 ways
and I'll talk to 10 customers,
then I'll take a leap of faith.
(13:53):
The moment you're doing that, you're not going to jump ship.
If you're passionate, you either do it or you don't.
That's one.
The second is armchair advice means nothing.
I'm working on this AI speech coach.
Everyone will give me advice.
Varun said this is sales teams.
There are university students who need this.
Well, you should talk to my cousin
who's a speech language pathologist.
There was this general manager at Microsoft.
(14:14):
It doesn't matter.
Like if you're building something,
you've just got to follow your gut
and try a bunch of things.
Advice is the cheapest thing in the world.
And then the third is there's so much noise out there.
One of the things I learned at Udly
as I was building this platform
is I took advice from everyone.
Like what should we build?
What is your use case?
How do we make it better?
And when came time to pay, everyone disappeared.
(14:35):
And one of the most important learnings for me has been
whose advice do you follow?
Like get people to put their money where their mouth is
and then follow up with them.
And I wish I knew that sooner
'cause I spent so much time just running around in circles.
Valuable lessons learned.
We'll get back to the conversation shortly,
(14:55):
but I wanted to tell you about
how I can help you find your fit.
I offer one-on-one career coaching services
for experienced professionals
who are preparing to find and land their next role.
If you're a director, vice-president,
or a C-suite executive,
and you're ready to explore new opportunities,
please go to goodfitcareers.com
to apply for a free consultation.
(15:16):
I also occasionally send a newsletter,
which includes stories from professionals
who have found their fit,
strategies and insights that might be helpful
in your job search,
and content that I found particularly useful
or interesting.
If you'd like to learn more,
check out goodfitcareers.com and follow me on LinkedIn.
Now, back to the conversation.
So at any point in your career,
(15:38):
you've still got many years to go,
but is there a favorite project or a problem
that you got to solve,
whether it was at Google or X or now at Udilee?
- I mean, the Udilee one hands down,
I'm beyond passionate about it.
It is driving me nuts.
For us, we are fighting with behavior change.
The best way to improve your communication skills
(15:59):
is to record yourself and watch yourself and cringe
and do that five times, simple.
AI, no AI, human, no human.
People hate practicing.
People hate the sound of their voice.
People don't have time.
They hate watching themselves back even more.
How do I create an ecosystem
that normalizes this behavior and makes it fun?
I don't know.
I'm trying a bunch of things in that vein,
(16:20):
but building tech to fight friction and behavior change
is so wicked hard, but also really fun.
- I got to say, as a user of Udilee,
as one of the people who uses this in my work
with all of my clients,
you have helped me get more comfortable being on camera
and seeing myself.
And now I am helping other people do that.
(16:40):
And part of it is just your persistence, man.
I mean, you are just like, there is no stopping you,
but part of it is also that it really works,
that the platform has been hugely helpful for me.
And one of my guests from just yesterday,
he was talking about how important Udilee is for him
on landing his last couple of jobs.
It's like an essential component.
So if it brings you any comfort or solace,
(17:01):
like this has made a huge difference in my life,
my clients' lives.
So thank you.
- Thank you.
- When you're thinking about the function of a CEO,
I know that you don't necessarily think of yourself
as a CEO, how do you believe the world perceives CEOs
and founders?
- In an extremely fantasized, glamorized way.
From the outside, what we are doing is so flashy, right?
(17:25):
I'm in a media outlet and there's some LinkedIn posts
that's gone viral and we make some partnership announcement.
It's just not true.
Any CEO will tell you it's hard on the inside
and they are struggling and it's lonely
and there are a thousand things that are not working
and maybe two that are working.
I think from the outside, we over index
(17:45):
on just how well a company is doing
or how a founder or CEO is doing.
My biggest takeaway is don't just take noise you read
on LinkedIn or in the news at face value.
That's just never the story.
It's everybody's playing a game as are we
and it doesn't mean much.
- Hmm, fascinating.
So when you're thinking about the moments
(18:07):
that keep you in the game and keep you pushing forward,
have there been any instances where,
of course, things have been challenging.
You've had your highs and your lows,
but are there moments when you feel like,
this is why I'm doing this?
- 100%.
Every day I'll get some face punch.
The thing that gets me most excited is,
I wanna build a mass market consumer product.
(18:28):
I want to help kids in India speak with confidence
and land their dream jobs.
And every day I'll speak to some user,
who's like, Varuna had a stroke when I was 11
and I couldn't speak and this was my biggest insecurity.
Now I can practice in private with AI, thank you.
Or someone who's like, I landed my dream job
because of your tool.
Like, what can I do to help?
(18:49):
That's just so empowering.
We're not making much money or any money from those users,
but getting messages like those, it's so worth it.
And I wanna do this for a long time.
- It's beautiful.
When you're thinking about giving your first TED Talk,
I mean, just thinking about what you've accomplished, right?
(19:09):
Like you've got to work for Sergey Brin,
you got to work at X, right?
Now you're the founder and CEO of a company
that's changing thousands of people's lives.
Then you get to give a TED Talk.
What was that process like?
- It was cool and bucket listy for sure.
But also a way for me to dog food my own product.
It was like, look, we already have
most major TED organizations across the world
(19:31):
use usually with their clients for speech coaching.
I was like, it would be cool if I gave a talk
trained by AI.
So that was really the goal behind it.
It was really fun.
I thought my talk was okay.
I know means the best talk in the world.
It was also like a great marketing tactic.
I won't lie.
You know, when you tell people,
oh, I gave my TED Talk having been coached by Ugly.
(19:51):
There's a lot of external validation and noise
around giving a TED Talk.
There are tens of thousands of TED events going on.
If you know the right organizer to contact,
there are ways around it.
So yes, it's cool.
But also this is one of those like noise question mark
pieces that I'll be blunt about.
- Sure, makes a lot of sense.
Switching gears over into hiring.
(20:13):
Can you tell us a little bit about how you approach hiring
for your team now that you're in that phase?
- 100% culture.
Is this person passionate about our mission
and will they give me a hug through the hardest times?
Just, oh, brain, I've now made so many mistakes with hiring
that we believe this.
Things that I think we do well is
whenever we bring someone on, we do an experiment.
(20:35):
We're like, come for a month.
We'll obviously compensate you for that month.
You get to know us, we get to know you.
Let's figure out if this is the right fit.
And then we just see how we do.
And if it's not the right fit,
it's an experiment that didn't work.
But I think our superpower at Udly
is just building for culture.
We have a team that we went back 100 out of 100 times.
And I think if anyone's gonna crack this,
(20:56):
it's the folks on our team
because they care about the problem so deeply.
- Interesting.
So if there's someone out there
who has a small organization now
or is looking to hire their first couple of employees,
are there any whoopsies or mistakes
that you made along the way
that you would advise them to avoid?
- Hiring for experience, hiring the smooth talker.
Like one of the things I do during an interview
(21:17):
is someone's like, oh my God, Varun, I love Udly.
It's such a great idea, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, oh, and they're like, I've been using it.
I'm like, really? Share your screen.
Show me how you use it.
And then they'll open their Udly library
and they'll have one testing, one, two, three speech.
I was like, but I thought you loved the tool.
What happened?
It is so easy to find BS
and find someone who means what they're saying.
Varun, I love Udly.
I'm like, are you using it on this call?
(21:38):
No, but you know, my dog got COVID,
my audio settings, this and that.
I'm like, well, if you love it,
like there are simple ways to find out.
So my approach is like actions mean
million more than like some words
and earlier I'd be swayed by smooth talking.
I think now my readout for that has gotten a lot better.
- Okay, so we can sniff out the BS.
(22:00):
What actually encourages you to take a chance on someone?
- Actions, someone who will be like,
hey Varun, I'm really excited about joining.
I'd be like, great, I'm trying to sell to these 50 companies
what you do and in three hours,
they send me a report of 50 people they called
and how many cold calls they took.
Or they'll create their own email address
(22:21):
and reach out to 50 people saying, hi, I'm Charles.
I'm the head of sales at Udly.
I'm like, amazing.
That shows in intention as opposed to someone
who comes up with a project plan
and tells me what they might do
and how they might think about it.
Anyone who was biased by action is a winner for me.
And obviously this is all beyond culture.
Like being a good person who cares about the problem
(22:43):
comes first.
- So thinking about the future and where we're all headed,
nobody knows what happens next,
but is there anything specific that you're excited about
for the future more broadly?
- Yeah, I mean, we are living in the middle
of this massive AI inflection point.
I say this often, but I think we are moving to a world
where AI will be at our fingertips at all times.
(23:06):
I'm in the middle of a McKinsey interview.
I will be able to tell you within a second
how many ping pong balls fit in a 747.
I'm a car salesman and I'm trying to sell you my Ford.
And within microseconds,
I'll be able to tell you buying purchase history
and give you all of the right information
as to why you should get the car.
I think we are moving to a world
where soft skills are all the more important.
(23:28):
How you communicate and how you build empathy with someone
is infinitely more valuable in a world
in which real-time information is going to be commoditized.
And that's why I'm most excited to work on Udly long-term.
- I feel like 2030 might be a little too far to predict,
but in the next couple of years,
where do you see your company actually going?
(23:48):
- Exactly in that vein.
Udly to me is my private personalized speech coach,
buddy, spouse by my side at all times.
I'm on a date, Udly pokes me saying,
"Varon, stop talking about yourself, ask her question."
I'm in a board meeting, Udly pokes me under the table saying,
"Varon, get away from your revenue slide."
Right, I'm Thanksgiving dinner, I'm a little tipsy,
(24:09):
Udly's like, "Varon, you got to stop on this joke right now."
It helps me improve in the moment
in a way that doesn't embarrass me and makes me look good.
- Do you think that Udly is going to be a physical device
beyond just software?
- Maybe, I don't know, but possibly.
As long as it's ethical and it's truly private
(24:29):
and it helps people, right?
Like there's a world in which we realize
this whole AI thing is not working
and the only way to help someone
is to connect them with a human coach.
Great, we'll build that.
Or the only way to help someone is to build this mirror
that sits in front of their face at all times as they walk.
Great, we'll build that.
I don't know what the actual solution is,
but we'll keep trying.
(24:50):
- Sure, makes a lot of sense.
When you're thinking about the folks out there
who are listening to you and what you might want to share
for people who are just on the edge
of committing to building that company
or pursuing whatever that passion is,
is there anything that you'd share with them?
- Build it.
Stop setting up one-on-ones with potential investors
(25:10):
and other founders asking them for their experience
and their two cents.
Like either you do it or you don't.
And I truly, truly believe this
'cause I speak to so many founders who ping me saying,
"Varan, can you tell me about a journey where you quit
and what did you do?
How did you think about that next promotion
you were gonna get?"
Nobody has an answer.
Like you've got to know in your core.
- So as we close here,
(25:31):
when you think back at a young Varun
with all of your hopes and aspirations
and you look at yourself in the mirror
like we talked about before,
I can't imagine this is what you thought it was gonna be,
but do you feel like your younger self would be proud
and like, is this it?
- I mean, I hope I'm still young,
trying my best to make the most of my 20s.
(25:53):
No, I think I'm just getting started.
There's so much to do.
I mean, we've not even scratched the surface.
We raised some money and made some noise
and signed some partnerships,
but we haven't helped billions of people yet.
We've built some cool technology that people talk about.
I think, yeah, like young me will say that's kind of cool
and you've checked some things off the bucket list,
but you have such a long way to go.
(26:14):
And I truly believe that.
Like this is like version one
of hopefully me and the company.
- How exciting.
Do you have any closing thoughts that our audience out here
are people who are really trying to find their way
or just curious about your work?
Is there anything that you'd like to share
that they might not know about?
- Most importantly, I'm a founder.
I have to make a sales pitch, sign up at Ugly,
(26:35):
Grammarly for Speech, Duolingo for Speech,
AI-powered speech coach at www.yoodli.ai.
My second overarching takeaway, and this is more serious,
is don't overthink it.
I think I fell into that trap.
Everyone falls into the trap.
When I do this, then I'll do that.
When I get this great idea, then three things will happen.
And let me just get that promotion.
(26:57):
And then, you know, if you're excited about something,
just jump off the cliff, make a mistake.
Like you can always bounce back.
And maybe this is very naive and very privileged to say,
like there are mortgages and kids and many things
in the works, but I truly believe
that's just what makes life more fun.
Like trusting your gut and not overthinking things.
(27:18):
- Brilliant, I love it.
What a beautiful way to close.
Faron, thank you so much for being on the show
and sharing your perspective.
- Of course, listen, Ryan, thanks so much for having me.
- Our next episode is with Chad Connally,
Senior Conversation Designer on the Alexa team at Amazon.
- Somewhere along that journey,
I just learned to embrace that difference
and kind of lean into it and do what I do
(27:41):
and do what I wanted to do, which is still true to this day.
- If you enjoyed this episode,
make sure to subscribe for new episodes,
leave a review and tell a friend.
Good Fit Careers is hosted by me, Ryan Dickerson,
and is produced and edited by Melo-Vox Productions.
Marketing is by Storyangled,
and our theme music is by Surftronica
(28:01):
with additional music from Andrew Espronceda.
I'd like to express my gratitude to all of our guests
for sharing their time, stories, and perspectives with us.
And finally, thank you to all of our listeners.
If you have any recommendations on future guests,
questions, or comments,
please send us an email at hello@goodfitcareers.com.
(upbeat music)
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(00:03):
Welcome to the Good Fit Careers podcast,
where we explore perspectives on work that fits.
I'm Ryan Dickerson, your host.
Today's guest is Varun Puri.
Varun is the CEO and co-founder of Yoodli.
Yoodli is an AI-powered communication coaching platform
that helps people improve their interview, conversation,
and public speaking skills.
(00:23):
Yoodli is used by groups like Toastmasters, Korn Ferry,
and Google.
Varun has had a fascinating career.
Early on, he ran special projects
for Sergey Brin at Google, then spent four years working at X,
then offshoot of Google focused on moonshot projects.
In 2021, Varun started Yoodli.
Varun, thank you for being here.
(00:44):
Thank you.
Thank you.
I am pumped to be here, Ryan.
So to start, would you tell us a little bit
about how you see your company and what your role is as CEO?
My dream with Yoodli is how do we help billions of people
speak with confidence?
I hope we can do that relatively quickly.
I think AI might be the solution, but I'm not sure.
(01:05):
My role is first and foremost ensuring
our team is aligned on that vision at all times
and then hiring the best team possible.
If I do a really good job there, I
think the rest figures itself out.
And thinking about how you got here and how you came to be,
can you give us a little sense of the beginning,
what you were like as a kid, and what you wanted
to be when you grew up?
(01:25):
Oh, wow, that's loaded.
Well, I grew up in India.
I was a nerdy chess-playing kid studying science and math.
My goal was to be either captain of the Indian cricket team
or prime minister of India, miserably failed at both,
did not see myself working in tech,
moved to the US for college, worked
at Google for a little while, and then ended up at Yoodli.
(01:49):
One thing I will say is a lot of my motivation behind Yoodli
is to do something back home in India.
And I'm hoping with this platform we can empower many
folks like me a few years ago who
didn't learn public speaking or didn't play the game as much
with communication skills.
What was school like for you?
What was the early life into education and then
your university experience like?
(02:11):
Awkward, as it is for any teenager.
I was figuring out what I want to study.
I ended up doing science and math.
I wasn't great at it.
One of the things that was interesting about school
in India was there are not as many opportunities
as kids might get in the US.
I tried to gravitate to whatever I could find.
For me, it was chess growing up.
(02:34):
I wish I had exposure to more things.
I've seen folks in the US go for mock trial and debate
and then go for varsity camp and then swimming class.
There wasn't enough of that.
So I was playing lots of chess.
I was studying hard, playing cricket,
just being an ordinary guy.
Nice, right on.
And so you eventually landed at Google.
Would you walk us through what the experience
(02:54):
was like getting hired there
and what that first job was like?
Yeah, so I did a summer internship
my junior year of college.
Google has these early grad rotational programs
where they get college kids.
They put you in fun housing
and give you this incredible opportunity
to interact with some very smart people.
I done the internship on the Android team.
(03:15):
And then through the internship,
I converted to a full-time role.
Obviously, Google was dream company.
For me, it was particularly important
because I needed a company that could sponsor my visa.
Family back home was proud of me.
The internship interview was relatively rigorous.
Converting from the internship to full-time
was just based on how the summer went.
(03:35):
Interesting, right on.
And thinking about the first job,
what was that actually like?
It was pretty unconventional.
I came into this rotational marketing program
where you spend a year across different teams
and explore different parts of Google.
Very early on, I ended up getting tapped by Sergey Brin,
who is one of the founders of Google,
(03:55):
to be his fixer.
So it wasn't assistant, it wasn't chief of staff.
It was to do Sergey projects.
Incredible opportunity right out of college.
I was the only person at the company working with him.
It was fun.
There was incredible learning,
lots of exposure into how Alphabet,
which is Google's mother company, works.
(04:15):
And as a first job out of college,
I think I just learned the importance of the soft skills
and relationship building.
Sergey took a bet on me,
not because I had all the answers
or not because I'm super smart,
just because I'm,
'cause like Sergey, I'm young, naive, and indestructible.
Take a bet on me, I'll try a bunch of things.
And as I build Udly,
I'm trying to maintain that kind of culture.
(04:37):
- How exciting.
And what a rare opportunity.
What did it feel like when Sergey said,
"Hey, do you want to be the only person
"that's gonna work with me on this kind of thing?"
- Oh, mortified.
Sergey and Larry at Google are demigods.
I was obviously extremely nervous going into this.
It was an experiment.
Sergey was figuring out whether he wants to roll,
(04:58):
what the roll would look like.
It was meant to be a couple of weeks long,
then a couple of months long.
There was very little structure.
So a lot of what I went through was,
I'm just gonna show up and try my best.
The job could have been done
by some smart White House chief of staff
or McKinsey director.
Sergey likely hired someone young
(05:18):
to just show up with a smile.
And he's probably not taking a bet on me for my experience.
It's my willingness to go try things.
So I try to embrace that as much as possible.
- Did it ever get comfortable?
- No.
- No, not at all.
- I think there are so many parts to it.
The Sergey role was incredible
in that I got to meet a lot of my role models
(05:39):
and people I read about in the news.
But no two days were similar.
Every week I would give the Alphabet leadership team
my state of the union of what's going on
across other parts of Alphabet.
But in that vein, I'd be working with CEOs
and chiefs of staffs,
everyone who has a different incentive,
different background, a different week at work
(06:01):
given the macroeconomic climate.
And I was always a messenger between all of these folks.
So it was definitely a tricky situation to navigate,
but a lot of fun and a super opportunity.
- How exciting.
And I'm assuming you worked a cool 35, 40 hours a week
good work-life balance.
- I wasn't working a gazillion hours a week.
I was working hard, but I would work in absent flows.
(06:25):
When a Sergey project came up, I'd be working really hard.
When not, I'd be doing other fun projects.
- Interesting.
And when you move to X, and X isn't Twitter,
X is the moonshot factory.
Tell us a little bit about what X is
and what it was like to move over.
- Google X is Alphabet's R&D arm.
They work self-driving car, robots, drones,
(06:48):
laser-based internet.
I was on a project where we tried to use invisible lasers
to bring internet to rural places in the world.
X is a playground for scientists and PhDs and dreamers.
The idea behind X is can we use technology to 100 X,
not just make a 10% improvement in what's happening.
So it's an audacious place where failure is celebrated
(07:10):
and people come because they believe
they're doing good in the world.
It was just an incredible learning opportunity for me.
- That's awesome.
And how did your job evolve over those four years
that you were there?
- At X, we were working on this project
to bring internet to unconnected places.
And my dream was can we help folks in India
(07:30):
where the economics of running fiber cables
don't make sense, right?
If we can shoot a laser across a water body
where a government is not gonna get internet,
we could help a lot of people.
So I joined them as a product manager
who was one of the early hires.
So I scaled with the team.
I started by doing the compliance work
and getting us water certified.
If one of our laser boxes drops in water
(07:52):
to figuring out customs and immigration
and import of these laser boxes,
to figuring out the geospatial analysis
of where we would place these laser boxes,
what kind of weather conditions they'd work in,
what our countries would be after India.
So I did a little bit of everything.
And it was a really fun rollercoaster
to see a project go from zero to a hundred, quite literally.
(08:13):
- That's wild.
Okay, so you're four years in at X.
You're not necessarily the prime minister of India quite yet
nor are you the captain of the cricket team.
What was your kind of view on where you wanted to be
and where you wanted to go from there?
- A lot of this is tied to my immigrant identity.
I'm not a US passport holder.
(08:33):
It's hard for a non-citizen to do something
that isn't as structured,
just given the way visa restrictions work.
My approach was very much,
I've had these incredible opportunities at Google and at X.
I've worked with absolute role models.
I really want to build my own thing
and I want to give it my best shot.
And when I was at Google,
(08:54):
I saw this communication problem firsthand.
Even the smartest engineers,
people with the most PhDs I could imagine,
would struggle to speak with confidence
and would miss out on opportunities.
And I'd seen this across my life.
So it's a problem I'm passionate about.
I said I've had a super opportunity.
Shame on me if I don't take some bets.
(09:14):
So that's what got me to leave and start UGLI.
- Was there a moment when you decided,
okay, I need to leave this super cool environment
where failure is embraced, I get to work on the future,
essentially shaping how humanity moves forward
and say, okay, I'm gonna start my own thing.
- I don't know if it was a moment,
but I was doing the whole digital nomad thing during COVID.
And I was at dinner with some friends
(09:35):
and we were talking about this problem.
I was like, this problem just means so much to me.
I got to shoot my shot.
And that's what facilitated it.
But in terms of decision-making process from saying,
I want to start this company to leaving was fast.
Some would say way too fast.
I could have put in a little bit more thought.
- That's all right.
So you're CEO now.
(09:57):
It looks like he got roughly 70 or so employees.
At this point, what does your work mean to you?
- Let me first say, we don't have 70 employees.
We're a much smaller company,
but we look a lot bigger than we are.
No, no, no, because if you go to LinkedIn or Google
and you search for us,
we've got folks helping us around the world.
We've got ambassadors and people who are advisors to us.
And it's amazing to see.
(10:19):
I mean, to me, I'm living my dream, right?
The day-to-day sucks and a customer will turn
and an investor will ask for a report.
And I don't know if we'll run out of money,
but heck, I think if we crack this,
we can help so many people out.
And I'm passing my mirror test, right?
When I look in the mirror, I'm like,
like you're trying your best.
It may not work, but that's pretty cool,
despite how lonely and frustrating
(10:40):
and isolating this experience is.
- Yeah, that's so exciting.
What does it feel like to be a CEO?
- I don't know.
CEO sounds a lot more fancy than it is.
We're a tiny company, there are like 13 of us.
I'm just one of the people on the team doing sales.
I don't think the title means much to me
and I don't think about leadership as strategically.
Maybe I will one day if we have hundreds of employees.
(11:03):
But I'm just a guy on a team,
gonna recruit people and get them excited about this idea.
- Sure, right on.
So you left X, you with a patched together business plan,
were able to establish funding.
What was it like to actually get people to invest in you
and get the baseline funding to build this thing?
- Hard, but I think the thing I realized at Google as well
(11:26):
is like nobody has the answers.
Like everyone's figuring it out.
And the fact that right out of college
I was doing this cool role, working with some senior people
meant that people just wanna bet on other people
who have some potential.
So during the fundraise, my story to folks wasn't,
here's my business plan
and here's how we'll get to a $10 billion company.
It was, look, two out of three people in the world
(11:47):
are afraid of public speaking.
We've all practiced speeches in front of a mirror, a camera.
I've been in front of my bathroom mirror way too long.
Everyone in this room has experienced it
and knows 10 people who struggle with it.
It's big enough.
I don't know how I'm gonna solve it.
Here's an idea, but let's go solve it together.
And I'm really passionate about it.
And a lot of people are like,
(12:08):
well, you don't have this mapped out
and who's your target customer and where will you start?
But in the earliest days, the folks who took a bet on me
were like, yeah, is the market big enough?
It's a problem big enough.
You know a thing or two about it
and we think you'll figure it out.
- Yeah, what a wild ride.
So now you are at a point where Yoodli is used
by some of the world's most prominent companies,
Toastmasters, Korn Ferry.
(12:29):
What was it like building those partnerships
that couldn't have been easy?
- It was definitely hard, but it had the same essence to it,
which was when I was talking to Toastmasters,
it's look, y'all are trying to bring speech coaching
to hundreds of thousands and millions of folks worldwide.
I'm trying to build technology
that does the exact same thing.
I don't want to compete.
(12:50):
If we join forces, we can help a lot more people together.
What can we do to work together?
And I think Toastmasters approach was,
yeah, that makes sense.
And then we built a version of Yoodli for Toastmasters.
And it's the same thing with Korn Ferry.
They're helping 96% of the SNP
and hundreds of thousands of leaders
(13:11):
communicate with confidence and lead with charisma.
They are very much looking for partners to collaborate with.
- How interesting.
So thinking about the job today,
let's say there's someone out there
who wants to follow in your footsteps
and has a brilliant idea or even a half brilliant idea
that they want to make into something real.
Can you teach us a little bit about
(13:32):
one of the most useful or high impact parts
of the job that you do today, however you see it?
- I don't know if I have a template,
but a couple pieces of advice that I strongly believe.
One, don't overthink it.
Either you're going to start a company or you're not.
I hear from many people, well, I kind of have this idea,
but I'm going to de-risk it in these 15 ways
and I'll talk to 10 customers,
then I'll take a leap of faith.
(13:53):
The moment you're doing that, you're not going to jump ship.
If you're passionate, you either do it or you don't.
That's one.
The second is armchair advice means nothing.
I'm working on this AI speech coach.
Everyone will give me advice.
Varun said this is sales teams.
There are university students who need this.
Well, you should talk to my cousin
who's a speech language pathologist.
There was this general manager at Microsoft.
(14:14):
It doesn't matter.
Like if you're building something,
you've just got to follow your gut
and try a bunch of things.
Advice is the cheapest thing in the world.
And then the third is there's so much noise out there.
One of the things I learned at Udly
as I was building this platform
is I took advice from everyone.
Like what should we build?
What is your use case?
How do we make it better?
And when came time to pay, everyone disappeared.
(14:35):
And one of the most important learnings for me has been
whose advice do you follow?
Like get people to put their money where their mouth is
and then follow up with them.
And I wish I knew that sooner
'cause I spent so much time just running around in circles.
Valuable lessons learned.
We'll get back to the conversation shortly,
(14:55):
but I wanted to tell you about
how I can help you find your fit.
I offer one-on-one career coaching services
for experienced professionals
who are preparing to find and land their next role.
If you're a director, vice-president,
or a C-suite executive,
and you're ready to explore new opportunities,
please go to goodfitcareers.com
to apply for a free consultation.
(15:16):
I also occasionally send a newsletter,
which includes stories from professionals
who have found their fit,
strategies and insights that might be helpful
in your job search,
and content that I found particularly useful
or interesting.
If you'd like to learn more,
check out goodfitcareers.com and follow me on LinkedIn.
Now, back to the conversation.
So at any point in your career,
(15:38):
you've still got many years to go,
but is there a favorite project or a problem
that you got to solve,
whether it was at Google or X or now at Udilee?
- I mean, the Udilee one hands down,
I'm beyond passionate about it.
It is driving me nuts.
For us, we are fighting with behavior change.
The best way to improve your communication skills
(15:59):
is to record yourself and watch yourself and cringe
and do that five times, simple.
AI, no AI, human, no human.
People hate practicing.
People hate the sound of their voice.
People don't have time.
They hate watching themselves back even more.
How do I create an ecosystem
that normalizes this behavior and makes it fun?
I don't know.
I'm trying a bunch of things in that vein,
(16:20):
but building tech to fight friction and behavior change
is so wicked hard, but also really fun.
- I got to say, as a user of Udilee,
as one of the people who uses this in my work
with all of my clients,
you have helped me get more comfortable being on camera
and seeing myself.
And now I am helping other people do that.
(16:40):
And part of it is just your persistence, man.
I mean, you are just like, there is no stopping you,
but part of it is also that it really works,
that the platform has been hugely helpful for me.
And one of my guests from just yesterday,
he was talking about how important Udilee is for him
on landing his last couple of jobs.
It's like an essential component.
So if it brings you any comfort or solace,
(17:01):
like this has made a huge difference in my life,
my clients' lives.
So thank you.
- Thank you.
- When you're thinking about the function of a CEO,
I know that you don't necessarily think of yourself
as a CEO, how do you believe the world perceives CEOs
and founders?
- In an extremely fantasized, glamorized way.
From the outside, what we are doing is so flashy, right?
(17:25):
I'm in a media outlet and there's some LinkedIn posts
that's gone viral and we make some partnership announcement.
It's just not true.
Any CEO will tell you it's hard on the inside
and they are struggling and it's lonely
and there are a thousand things that are not working
and maybe two that are working.
I think from the outside, we over index
(17:45):
on just how well a company is doing
or how a founder or CEO is doing.
My biggest takeaway is don't just take noise you read
on LinkedIn or in the news at face value.
That's just never the story.
It's everybody's playing a game as are we
and it doesn't mean much.
- Hmm, fascinating.
So when you're thinking about the moments
(18:07):
that keep you in the game and keep you pushing forward,
have there been any instances where,
of course, things have been challenging.
You've had your highs and your lows,
but are there moments when you feel like,
this is why I'm doing this?
- 100%.
Every day I'll get some face punch.
The thing that gets me most excited is,
I wanna build a mass market consumer product.
(18:28):
I want to help kids in India speak with confidence
and land their dream jobs.
And every day I'll speak to some user,
who's like, Varuna had a stroke when I was 11
and I couldn't speak and this was my biggest insecurity.
Now I can practice in private with AI, thank you.
Or someone who's like, I landed my dream job
because of your tool.
Like, what can I do to help?
(18:49):
That's just so empowering.
We're not making much money or any money from those users,
but getting messages like those, it's so worth it.
And I wanna do this for a long time.
- It's beautiful.
When you're thinking about giving your first TED Talk,
I mean, just thinking about what you've accomplished, right?
(19:09):
Like you've got to work for Sergey Brin,
you got to work at X, right?
Now you're the founder and CEO of a company
that's changing thousands of people's lives.
Then you get to give a TED Talk.
What was that process like?
- It was cool and bucket listy for sure.
But also a way for me to dog food my own product.
It was like, look, we already have
most major TED organizations across the world
(19:31):
use usually with their clients for speech coaching.
I was like, it would be cool if I gave a talk
trained by AI.
So that was really the goal behind it.
It was really fun.
I thought my talk was okay.
I know means the best talk in the world.
It was also like a great marketing tactic.
I won't lie.
You know, when you tell people,
oh, I gave my TED Talk having been coached by Ugly.
(19:51):
There's a lot of external validation and noise
around giving a TED Talk.
There are tens of thousands of TED events going on.
If you know the right organizer to contact,
there are ways around it.
So yes, it's cool.
But also this is one of those like noise question mark
pieces that I'll be blunt about.
- Sure, makes a lot of sense.
Switching gears over into hiring.
(20:13):
Can you tell us a little bit about how you approach hiring
for your team now that you're in that phase?
- 100% culture.
Is this person passionate about our mission
and will they give me a hug through the hardest times?
Just, oh, brain, I've now made so many mistakes with hiring
that we believe this.
Things that I think we do well is
whenever we bring someone on, we do an experiment.
(20:35):
We're like, come for a month.
We'll obviously compensate you for that month.
You get to know us, we get to know you.
Let's figure out if this is the right fit.
And then we just see how we do.
And if it's not the right fit,
it's an experiment that didn't work.
But I think our superpower at Udly
is just building for culture.
We have a team that we went back 100 out of 100 times.
And I think if anyone's gonna crack this,
(20:56):
it's the folks on our team
because they care about the problem so deeply.
- Interesting.
So if there's someone out there
who has a small organization now
or is looking to hire their first couple of employees,
are there any whoopsies or mistakes
that you made along the way
that you would advise them to avoid?
- Hiring for experience, hiring the smooth talker.
Like one of the things I do during an interview
(21:17):
is someone's like, oh my God, Varun, I love Udly.
It's such a great idea, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, oh, and they're like, I've been using it.
I'm like, really? Share your screen.
Show me how you use it.
And then they'll open their Udly library
and they'll have one testing, one, two, three speech.
I was like, but I thought you loved the tool.
What happened?
It is so easy to find BS
and find someone who means what they're saying.
Varun, I love Udly.
I'm like, are you using it on this call?
(21:38):
No, but you know, my dog got COVID,
my audio settings, this and that.
I'm like, well, if you love it,
like there are simple ways to find out.
So my approach is like actions mean
million more than like some words
and earlier I'd be swayed by smooth talking.
I think now my readout for that has gotten a lot better.
- Okay, so we can sniff out the BS.
(22:00):
What actually encourages you to take a chance on someone?
- Actions, someone who will be like,
hey Varun, I'm really excited about joining.
I'd be like, great, I'm trying to sell to these 50 companies
what you do and in three hours,
they send me a report of 50 people they called
and how many cold calls they took.
Or they'll create their own email address
(22:21):
and reach out to 50 people saying, hi, I'm Charles.
I'm the head of sales at Udly.
I'm like, amazing.
That shows in intention as opposed to someone
who comes up with a project plan
and tells me what they might do
and how they might think about it.
Anyone who was biased by action is a winner for me.
And obviously this is all beyond culture.
Like being a good person who cares about the problem
(22:43):
comes first.
- So thinking about the future and where we're all headed,
nobody knows what happens next,
but is there anything specific that you're excited about
for the future more broadly?
- Yeah, I mean, we are living in the middle
of this massive AI inflection point.
I say this often, but I think we are moving to a world
where AI will be at our fingertips at all times.
(23:06):
I'm in the middle of a McKinsey interview.
I will be able to tell you within a second
how many ping pong balls fit in a 747.
I'm a car salesman and I'm trying to sell you my Ford.
And within microseconds,
I'll be able to tell you buying purchase history
and give you all of the right information
as to why you should get the car.
I think we are moving to a world
where soft skills are all the more important.
(23:28):
How you communicate and how you build empathy with someone
is infinitely more valuable in a world
in which real-time information is going to be commoditized.
And that's why I'm most excited to work on Udly long-term.
- I feel like 2030 might be a little too far to predict,
but in the next couple of years,
where do you see your company actually going?
(23:48):
- Exactly in that vein.
Udly to me is my private personalized speech coach,
buddy, spouse by my side at all times.
I'm on a date, Udly pokes me saying,
"Varon, stop talking about yourself, ask her question."
I'm in a board meeting, Udly pokes me under the table saying,
"Varon, get away from your revenue slide."
Right, I'm Thanksgiving dinner, I'm a little tipsy,
(24:09):
Udly's like, "Varon, you got to stop on this joke right now."
It helps me improve in the moment
in a way that doesn't embarrass me and makes me look good.
- Do you think that Udly is going to be a physical device
beyond just software?
- Maybe, I don't know, but possibly.
As long as it's ethical and it's truly private
(24:29):
and it helps people, right?
Like there's a world in which we realize
this whole AI thing is not working
and the only way to help someone
is to connect them with a human coach.
Great, we'll build that.
Or the only way to help someone is to build this mirror
that sits in front of their face at all times as they walk.
Great, we'll build that.
I don't know what the actual solution is,
but we'll keep trying.
(24:50):
- Sure, makes a lot of sense.
When you're thinking about the folks out there
who are listening to you and what you might want to share
for people who are just on the edge
of committing to building that company
or pursuing whatever that passion is,
is there anything that you'd share with them?
- Build it.
Stop setting up one-on-ones with potential investors
(25:10):
and other founders asking them for their experience
and their two cents.
Like either you do it or you don't.
And I truly, truly believe this
'cause I speak to so many founders who ping me saying,
"Varan, can you tell me about a journey where you quit
and what did you do?
How did you think about that next promotion
you were gonna get?"
Nobody has an answer.
Like you've got to know in your core.
- So as we close here,
(25:31):
when you think back at a young Varun
with all of your hopes and aspirations
and you look at yourself in the mirror
like we talked about before,
I can't imagine this is what you thought it was gonna be,
but do you feel like your younger self would be proud
and like, is this it?
- I mean, I hope I'm still young,
trying my best to make the most of my 20s.
(25:53):
No, I think I'm just getting started.
There's so much to do.
I mean, we've not even scratched the surface.
We raised some money and made some noise
and signed some partnerships,
but we haven't helped billions of people yet.
We've built some cool technology that people talk about.
I think, yeah, like young me will say that's kind of cool
and you've checked some things off the bucket list,
but you have such a long way to go.
(26:14):
And I truly believe that.
Like this is like version one
of hopefully me and the company.
- How exciting.
Do you have any closing thoughts that our audience out here
are people who are really trying to find their way
or just curious about your work?
Is there anything that you'd like to share
that they might not know about?
- Most importantly, I'm a founder.
I have to make a sales pitch, sign up at Ugly,
(26:35):
Grammarly for Speech, Duolingo for Speech,
AI-powered speech coach at www.yoodli.ai.
My second overarching takeaway, and this is more serious,
is don't overthink it.
I think I fell into that trap.
Everyone falls into the trap.
When I do this, then I'll do that.
When I get this great idea, then three things will happen.
And let me just get that promotion.
(26:57):
And then, you know, if you're excited about something,
just jump off the cliff, make a mistake.
Like you can always bounce back.
And maybe this is very naive and very privileged to say,
like there are mortgages and kids and many things
in the works, but I truly believe
that's just what makes life more fun.
Like trusting your gut and not overthinking things.
(27:18):
- Brilliant, I love it.
What a beautiful way to close.
Faron, thank you so much for being on the show
and sharing your perspective.
- Of course, listen, Ryan, thanks so much for having me.
- Our next episode is with Chad Connally,
Senior Conversation Designer on the Alexa team at Amazon.
- Somewhere along that journey,
I just learned to embrace that difference
and kind of lean into it and do what I do
(27:41):
and do what I wanted to do, which is still true to this day.
- If you enjoyed this episode,
make sure to subscribe for new episodes,
leave a review and tell a friend.
Good Fit Careers is hosted by me, Ryan Dickerson,
and is produced and edited by Melo-Vox Productions.
Marketing is by Storyangled,
and our theme music is by Surftronica
(28:01):
with additional music from Andrew Espronceda.
I'd like to express my gratitude to all of our guests
for sharing their time, stories, and perspectives with us.
And finally, thank you to all of our listeners.
If you have any recommendations on future guests,
questions, or comments,
please send us an email at hello@goodfitcareers.com.
(upbeat music)
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