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. 

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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.

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On this episode of the At The Corner podcast, Matthew is joined by Sarah O’Hanason, productivity coach who aids companies and workers work through burnout and cultural issues and Jeff Gibert, aka Spiderman, Author, speaker and consultant for brand and culture.  

Sarah speaks about Soul Productive and how it got started. Sarah shares how she herself found she was enjoying her previous role as Chief Marketing Officer but could feel burnout slowing creeping into her home life due to the stress of the decisions she was facing within the workplace. Sarah decided to start Soul Productive in order to help others who were also facing burnout, and to help companies help prevent burnout. Sarah achieves this by coaching, training, speaking and through system implementation with Jeff. 

Jeff shares how he is all about having a uniquely identifiable and memorable brand. Jeff talks about previously running a marketing agency where he had the motto if you’re going to do something make it distinctive. Jeff mentions how his superhero brand was actually an act of discovery as opposed to a deliberate decision. Jeff states that he is trying to take the skills he has and leverage them to make the world a better place whilst also encouraging others to recognise the gifts that they have so that they can also make the world a better place. 

Sarah and Jeff discuss how they operate quite differently but how they both help each other with system implementation. They also discuss how organisational health has changed since the pandemic. They mention how they have noticed that teams are now remote which can actually lead to higher levels of burnout. Jeff mentions how leaders define what the culture is and how it’s important for leaders to appropriately respond to remote teams. 

Sarah speaks about how workers now address burnout differently. Work no longer needs to be the centre focal of our lives, we used to work to live but now we are living to work. This shift is calling a new breed of leaders who will need to lead from the heart and acknowledge that it’s not a one way relationship. Teams are a dynamic organism of individuals who are bringing their purpose, passion and values and who don’t want to go to a workplace that is conflicting with these visions. 

Jeff states that the three lenses of leadership are: 

-       Responsibility

-       Burden

-       Privilege

Jeff and Sarah are working on empowering companies to give individualised management so that they can try and avoid micro-managing their teams. Right now leaders need to trust that their teams are doing the work remotely. 

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On this episode of the At The Corner podcast, Matthew is joined by Scott Ogle, CEO of TruLab, Inc., and the former CEO of Sagework. TruLab is a start-up which uses the blockchain to track lab samples in the clinical trial space, which helps companies streamline their clinical trial process, which is often archaic. This method gives pharma an opportunity to displace paper. 

Matthew asks about how Scott knew it was time to leave Sageworks and he says he feels like he’s at his best in small companies and that he had his most fun in when Sageworks was small. 

After Sageworks, Scott took just 3 months before he was back venture investing and only three months after that he started TruLab.

Scott explains that is vital to focus when you’re scaling. He recommends focusing on 3 main things because you can’t focus on everything. Not everyone will be the same but he focussed on revenue growth, recruiting and culture and customer service. 

Scott also gives some wonderful advice, saying you should start you day with the easy tasks so you can get used to doing things quickly and it gets you into the habit of getting things done. 

Scott also says he knew when Sagework turned into a scale-up as good things started happening which he had nothing to do with, whereas before everything went through him. As the company got bigger, communication became an issue as he was used to people being involved in everything and knowing everything. Another issue he highlights with the company growing is measuring the health of the organisation. He combatted this by having a 1 on 1 meeting with key employees from each department once a month. 

Finally, when asked what his number one fear is for 2022, it’s that there will be a Macro issue in the world which will impact business, creating lots of subsequent problems for him and forcing him to pivot.

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On this episode of the At The Corner Podcast, Matt is joined Gil Allouche, CEO and founder of Metadata. Gill begins by talking about how Metadata started as an experiment and when he spoke about it during his first market test, he found there was lots of interest in his product. He also talks about how he made the transition from being an engineer and working in product, to becoming a marketer 

Matt asks him about his choice to raise money, rather than to bootstrap as Gil explains he didn’t have a choice in the matter, but he would 100% recommend raising money. He also warns against spending too much time consulting. 

Gil tells us he always feels like he’s going out of his comfort zone with his business growing, but with the help of his amazing team and utilizing coaches, the business is growing healthily 

 With Metadata becoming fully remote, Matt asks about what some of this biggest challenges are as Gil explains that building trust, social interactions, and being able to judge the mood and the health of the staff is much harder. He also explains how he uses a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data to measure the health of the organization.

Coming towards the end of the podcast, Gil talks about how he has learnt the power of culture within a company, something which he would not have cared about some years ago, as well as talking about his plans for 2022, and when he believes the company will stop being a start-up.

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In this episode, podcast host Matthew Schmidt is joined by Amit Sharma, He is the co-founder and CEO of CData Software, a company specializing in interconnecting applications and data sources that power business operations. CData’s products are used in business intelligence, artificial intelligence, and integration applications.

In this episode, Amit shared his journey of starting CData and working with people who were interested in his concept but weren’t ready to invest.

He shared the philosophy of giving the company’s equity to the employees and explained the difference between running a business physically versus running a business remotely. He also talked about the evolution of business before and after COVID.

In this episode, podcast host Matthew Schmidt is joined by Brian Reale. He is the CEO and founder of ProcessMaker, a leading low-code process automation software company.

In this episode, Brian shared his journey of launching ProcessMaker. He shared the philosophy behind the company’s tagline “Make Every Second Count”

He shared how he did fundraising in the initial days and why he hired offshore employees back then and how it’s changed to remote working in a post-COVID world.

He also talked about the evolution of technologies and how it is impacting businesses and why hiring the right people is his biggest fear for 2022.