On this episode of The At the Corner Podcast, Matthew Schmidt is joined by Kari Clarke. Kari is the Founder and CEO of Breakout, a start-up building strong culture for distribute teams. Kari shares how at Breakout they are building the global platform for distributed culture and how they like to consider themselves as facilitators of strategic fun. Kari explains how everyone at Breakout believes that fun serves a huge purpose within companies and helps to really connect people by making them feel engaged with their co-workers and enjoy their work environments. 

Kari speaks about how the first two products have really been about the virtual event space. Breakout also produces Breakout boxes, which are activity kits that help teams to lead their own events. Kari states that statistics have shown that when you have work friends you are three times more likely to say you love your company and twice as like to stay at the company, so it’s definitely a really important thing for companies to be thinking about. 

Kari talks about her motivation to start Breakout. Kari shares how she previously worked at Google where productivity was always high within the teams but building culture was always something she had struggled with. After speaking to other managers, she realized that a lot of people we’re struggling with the same problem and that is what inspired her to solve the problem, and start Breakout. 

Kari also shares her experience with Breakout growing at a rapid rate and feeling like things were going off the rails. Kari mentions how the company had just landed a bunch of really big deals but didn’t have the tech infrastructure built as much as they needed to in order to support them in a super sustainable way. Kari shares how she and her teams got out of this by really rolling up their sleeves and working super hard to make sure everything worked out in the end.  

Towards the end of the episode, Kari shares her best advice to those who are thinking about starting a new company. Kari states that you can learn a lot and do a lot of testing without spending very much money. Kari mentions how you should get out there as quickly as possible using tools like Bubble to throw together prototypes faster than before. Kari states that her best piece of advice is to put off building until you know what people want you to build. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe so you never miss a new episode, and leave a 5 star review as it helps us reach new audiences and grow as a podcast. Thanks for listening!

On this Episode of The At The Corner Podcast, Matthew Schmidt is joined by Drew Schiller, CEO of Validic, the leading digital health platform for personal health data. Schiller gives us an insight into his business and why he and his co-founder decided to create it. Schiller explains how he is highly interested in the future of healthcare and how it can be improved. Schmidt and Schiller discuss how the healthcare model today is reactive sick care whereas the future of healthcare is looking to be designed in a way that’s proactive by identifying what needs to happen before people need to seek medical help. 

Schiller states that Validic launched with the idea of using the data that is stored on our phones about the things we do in our everyday lives that impact our health and sharing it with our healthcare providers. Schmidt and Schiller also speak about the beauty behind the hood spot and the power in not knowing what you don’t know before starting a new business venture. Schiller states that if he knew then what he knows now about the industry, he probably wouldn’t have started it in the first place so he is grateful for the blind spots he and his co-founder had at the beginning of their business. 

Schiller shares his best advice to those starting a new business with regards to co-founders and encourages focusing on the business and start with people who have experience in the field and could be potential board members or investors. Schiller explains how when you sell these people on the vision they might share the same passions and want to join in. Schiller also states that, over time, you will start meeting the right people to be your partners. Schmidt and Schiller discuss healthy work environments and the importance of encouraging opinions from all employees and demonstrating positive reactions to criticism. Amongst other topics Schmidt and Schiller talk about include working remotely and Schiller shares how he took a survey of how many days his employees wanted to work in the office and remote during the week post COVID-19 which resulted in 96% of staff expressing how they wanted to be fully remote. Schmidt and Schiller converse about the challenges faced by businesses with working remote and also the benefits of listening to your staff and allowing freedom in the way they work.

On this episode of the At The Corner Podcast, host Matthew Schmidt is joined by Elliott Garms. Garms is the CEO and co-founder of humanpredictions.io, a start-up using data to help make recruiting engineers and designers easier. Garms shares how he and his business partner both have deep backgrounds in tech recruiting and they noticed how, in their opinions, LinkedIn started to decline in value. They wanted an internal tool for their boutique tech recruiting and consulting business so they created humanpredictions. Garms and his business partner created a database that focuses on dozens of communities online where tech folks and designers are sharing information and scanning through niche communities. They use these communities to build profiles using this public data. 

Garms speaks about the natural ebbs and flows of businesses and how he ensures things stay on track when everything begins to speed up and take off. Garms also talks about the challenges the business went through whilst working remote. Schmidt and Garms also discuss the importance of culture within every business and Garms shares how they manage culture within the organisation as they’re hiring people from all around the world. Garms shares how they have a HP Academy which allows different teams to lead sessions on what they’re doing.

Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review on the streaming platform of your choice!