#95 – How do you think about Growth? (Rachel Sanders & Ben Grynol)

In this episode, Rachel Sanders, CEO of Rootine, chatted with Levels’ Head of Growth, Ben Grynol, to dig into our philosophy on growth and how we think about it as a function within our growing company. Ben talked about how he came to be at Levels, how the team hires people with a builder’s mindset and the significance of experimentation at a startup.

02:53 – The stages of growth

Building a startup from early-stage through acquisition and then through a merger gave Ben real-life experience learning how to help a scrappy startup grow.

Prior to Levels was part of a startup based out of Canada, an on-demand food delivery platform, and worked with the team for five years. We went through many different phases of growth. We went zero to one, one to 10, and we went all the way to the point where we were acquired by a publicly traded company, ended up going through a merger with another publicly traded company once we were part of a subsidiary of this other publicly traded company. And so yeah, saw a lot of different phases of growth and what it looks like and feels like to work off of cardboard boxes and all the fun stuff that you do, get chairs off Craigslist, trying to be scrappy, all the way up to the point where you’ve got significant capital that needs to be allocated against we’ll call it growth initiatives or company initiatives.

04:19 – Becoming obsessed with a global problem

Levels was an opportunity for Ben to jump back into problem-solving mode and see a new startup through the various stages of growth.

So it’s a very, very cool opportunity. We ended up scaling to, we were around 2500 employees when I moved on, which was June of ‘20, gosh, my years are mixed up. But some year, a number of years ago, ended up moving on, took some time off and was only interested in working on a problem that had a global lens on it. It had to be something that I was obsessed with, just became obsessed with the problem space, trying to solve a really meaty problem. One of my friends that I grew up with ended up making an intro to Sam. He was in the seed round and at the time, Levels was looking for somebody to lead growth. So we started having conversations that went through the process. And I guess it was end of December, I think December 31st, Josh and I had a conversation and a couple days later, post New Year’s, I was working with the teams, which was beginning of January of ’21. So it’s been really fun to be back in this phase of zero to one and trying to find product market fit, shoveling dirt, doing all the scrappy things that you do at all phases of the company.

09:30 – Having a builder’s mindset

Startup experience is great but having a builder’s mindset is what sets new hires up for success when coming to working at Levels.

Levels is made up of a ton of people who have built something before. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s not, oh, somebody built a company that like Taylor Sittler, who recently joined us. He’s head of research. He is the one of the co-founders of Color Genomics, like massive company, very, very cool and very fortunate that we have the opportunity to work with him. So he’s built, again, a very sizable company. The other side of it is if people have built side businesses, selling stickers through Craigslist, that’s also a way of building. So, there’s not necessarily some heuristic that’s like, you have to have built something of this size, but what that is does somebody have a builder’s mindset and a builder’s muscle, if they do, then they default into this idea of doing the dirt, digging, running the experiments and understanding that, I can’t remember who said this recently. It was some podcast. It might have been on Harry Stebbings podcast, but talking about growth is everyone’s job. And it really is. Growth is everyone’s job because everyone is contributing to the north star metric of the company in whatever function they work in. And then it’s building against that. So it’s having that founder’s mindset.

12:27 – Come up with a plan

Figuring out the path to growth is as simple as executing against a plan and continuing to communicate with stakeholders as you complete each step.

Come up with a plan. Communicate the plan. Check off the boxes of the tactics that you’ve laid out in the plan. Get feedback from everyone. Close a loop as you check off those tactics. Communicate that and then start fresh once you’ve checked off all the tactics. So the tactics become these line items. And so the question of, ‘What do you do?’ It is have some plan and it doesn’t need to be, ‘Here’s a five year vision of where growth is going,’ and it doesn’t need to be, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do in one week.’ There’s an in-between. But being able to communicate that saying, ‘This is my understanding of where we are now. Here’s some things that I see that we’re doing well. And here’s some areas where we’ve got some gaps.’

13:50 – Hiring to fill substantial gaps

Measuring the work to be done against what’s already in progress revealed where Levels needed to bring on another team member.

If we think there’s enough substance here to resource an entire role against this pillar, and this is what we did. There are four pillars of growth for Levels, which is content, community partnerships and members. Three of the pillars had something happening. The one that didn’t was community. That’s the example of, ‘Hey, here’s a gap that we have.’ We’re going to start doing a bunch of work as a company and just keep experimenting, keep digging dirt, keep trying to uncover if there’s something to this. If there is, it becomes almost like the option. ‘I’m going to exercise the option.’ Let’s double down and let’s bring somebody on, which we recently did to lead community.

16:26 – Iterate as you grow

Identify how big of an impact a project has on your business and iterate on it as much as possible before hiring someone to take it on full-time.

The key is to not trick oneself into thinking that there’s more substance to something than there is. It’s being able to not just identify that there is a gap, but it’s, ‘How big of a lever is this gap?’ If it’s an actual lever of the company in some way, shape or form — in our case, community is a meaningful part of what we’re doing, and we have to continue to build on it as same with you, what you’re doing with Apex. That has to do with community — if it is something that is substantial enough, you go, ‘Cool. We have to resource against this.’ But everything becomes iterative. The key is to build it out in a scrappy way and know that you are doing a poor job because you’re not trying to perfect it going, ‘Wow, what would happen if we actually, instead of spending three hours a week on this thing, somebody was spending their entire focus was this one area, what would happen?’

20:24 – Starting a new experiment

Ben followed the values at Levels around experimentation, iteration and open communication when he first began recording the podcast.

So the way that worked out was the podcast was an experiment. It’s actually hilarious, because it’s exactly what we’ve talked about so far and how it has evolved against resourcing against it. I think it was the second week of working with Levels. It might have been like one week in, whatever it is, six business days in. The whole time I kept asking myself, I’m like, ‘I can’t figure out why we’re not recording as an experiment.’ I think it said that to Josh. So put time on the calendar to record. I said, ‘We’re going to test this and let’s just see what happens.’ We did it. It was like, ‘Hey, that was kind of fun.’ And that’s episode one. That was the first one we ever recorded. Well, this is again an option. We can exercise the option or we can declare project debt. There’s no risk to doing this because we weren’t recording and releasing. We were just recording to get the reps in. It’s no different than saying like I’m going to run versus lacing up your shoes and just going for the run. It can be a minute. You still ran. You don’t need to do 26 miles. No one’s stopping you. So we started getting reps, and we made a commitment to record every single week until we are ready to release.

30:56 – Making the most of your time

Time can slip away and with only so many hours in a day, Ben emphasizes the need to let go of project debt to prioritize more experiments.

Thinking about the way that time is allocated is a matter of being honest and diligent about project debt. It’s really exciting to get involved in a lot of things, but it’s a lot harder to retire or to declare something project debt that might be successful. The problem is if you don’t declare project debt on something, then how do you open up the opportunity to do the next podcast, the next name some silly initiative that starts out as some, ‘Hey, this would be fun to do,’ and ends up turning into something? Knowing that a great batting average is 300, three out of 10. So if you can hit anywhere near that, where you’re like, ‘Okay, at least seven of the things that get tried should fail.’ And you don’t want them to be big bets that are failing because that gets a lot harder. You don’t want fire phone or anything like that as far as large, large failures, but you want to make sure that you’re trying lots of things.

37:37 – Using tools to support behavior

Software is only useful when it has a clear purpose and supports existing team behaviors.

If the behaviors not there, like, oh, I’m going to let these reminders stack up. Oh my inbox is going to get flooded. Like that doesn’t help either. So when asking about what tools do we use, it’s more, how do we use a tooling and then what behaviors do we follow through it, so the other tool that we use as a team and we don’t have any specific tools that would be isolated to a function like growth uses this for productivity, but engineering doesn’t we have four things that we use email loom threads is our internal comms platform. That’s like slack meets email. And would I say email loom threads notion. Those are the platforms.

41:34 – Hiring a generalist who can experiment

Ben emphasized how important it is to find team members with the right mindset, who want to dive in and get the work done, regardless of their specialty.

The most important roles when building an early foundation is the idea of being a generalist who can experiment. And that if you find somebody, it doesn’t mean like you might find somebody who’s more scientists than artists or more artists than scientists. And neither is necessarily better worse. Sometimes you hear like people give very prescriptive advice. They’ll be like, Rachel, get somebody who’s really good with data or get somebody who’s really creative. Like that’s less important than the idea of just let’s push side values aligned. Like that becomes this box. It’s like a binary non-starter. It is like yes or no, but values a line. And then all you really want is somebody who sees a pile of dirt and sees a bunch of shovels. And doesn’t even ask you like, Hey, is it cool if I pick up a shovel, they just like all of a sudden start shoveling dirt. And you’re like sweet. That person is like trying to do things. And when the pile is done, they start looking for the next whole to dig and working with a team. And so the idea of like experimenting, trying to find the next thing that becomes some growth unlock or some company unlock that’s, doubtlessly one of the most important roles.

Rachel Sanders (00:06):

Are you okay to try things that might not work? I want to experiment, but I want every single one of my experiments to be perfect and actually work is very different than, yes, I’m going to experiment. I’m okay with the three out of 10 batting average, because that means we innovating. We’re trying, we’re figuring out what works and what doesn’t. And we’re creating a place where we can really scale things at work and understand across the board where we should be spending our time and resources.

Ben Grynol (00:39):

I’m Ben Grynol part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level.

Ben Grynol (01:04):

Often we get emails. We get messages from people in our network saying, Hey, I’d love to pick your brain about something for 10 minutes, for five minutes, for 15 minutes. And in many cases, we end up working through these things asynchronously, but when Rachel Sanders CEO Rootine close friend of Levels and someone whom is very close in the space that we work in, it was a no brainer when Rachel said, Hey, I’d love to learn more about the way that Levels thinks about growth. We’re thinking about growth more and more as a team and thinking through what that might look like if we were to bring on more team members to work in the function of growth. And so in this conversation, the tables were return, Rachel was the interviewer. And I was the interviewee who was very fun to dig in and to chat about growth philosophy and the way that we think about building out teams and the way that we think about growth as a function, here’s where we kick things off.

Rachel Sanders (01:57):

Thanks so much for spending some time. I’m excited to chat and hear more about all of your experience, but really we’re starting to think about scaling the growth team at Rootine. We know you guys well, super impressed with the growth that you guys have done, and obviously a culture of rapid innovation and scaling. So really excited to hear kind of how you came to be at Levels and how you’ve thought about growing the team and kind of what you guys do day to day?

Ben Grynol (02:32):

Yeah, I guess let’s start with the, let’s start… We’ll do a very quick, fast forward to coming to Levels, and then we can focus on the way we think about growth and any questions as they might relate to Rootine, if that’s helpful.

Rachel Sanders (02:45):

Yeah, that’s definitely helpful. I mean, the growth team starts with head of growth. So excited to hear a little bit more about you coming to Levels.

Ben Grynol (02:53):

Prior to Levels was part of startup based out of Canada and on demand food delivery platform and worked with the team for five years, we went through many different phases of growth. We went zero to one, one to 10, and we went all the way to the point where we were acquired by a publicly traded company, ended up going through a merger with another publicly traded company. Once we were part of a subsidiary of this other publicly trade company. And so yeah, saw a lot of different phases of growth and what it looks like and feels like to work off of cardboard boxes and all the fun stuff that you do get cares off Craigslist, trying to be scrappy all the way up to the point where you’ve got significant capital that needs to be allocated against we’ll call it growth initiatives or company initiatives.

Ben Grynol (03:40):

And so, yeah, being part of this team really gave a lens on what it’s like to go through that phase of being in the scrappy, shoveling dirt phase, all the way up to, Hey, we have to be a little bit more buttoned up because we are now publicly traded and information can’t fly around as loosely or liberally as it did previously, not necessarily within the company, but also to anybody within your network where people might say, Hey, how’s it going?

Ben Grynol (04:06):

And you can’t discuss things as openly because of things like insider trading or anything that might be a byproduct of having an insider lens on what it’s like to work with that company. So it’s a very, very cool opportunity. We ended up scaling to, we were around 25 ish hundred employees when I moved on, which was June of 20, gosh, my years are mixed up, but some year, a number of years ago ended up moving on, took some time off and was only interested in working on a problem that had a global lens on it. And it had to be something that I was obsessed with. Like just became obsessed with the problem space, trying to solve a really meaty problem. And one of my friends that I grew up with ended up making an intro to Sam. He was in the seed round and at the time Levels was looking for somebody to lead growth.

Ben Grynol (05:03):

And so we started having conversations that went through the process. And I guess it was end of December, I think December 31st, Josh and I had a conversation and a couple days later post new year’s. I was working with the teams, which was beginning of January of ’21. So it’s been really fun to be back in this phase of zero to one and trying to find product market fit, shoveling dirt, doing all the scrappy things that you do at all phases of the company. So yeah, as far as the way we’re looking at growth, it is growth has a very wide lens in any company. There’s a lot of ground in a wide scope because it’s as wide as any company will wants it to be. So we’ll stop there, but that’s some context of, I guess, how I joined the team.

Rachel Sanders (05:52):

Awesome. Yeah, it sounds like through warm intros, which a lot of these kind of roles happen, but it also sounds like you had just great experience as a former kind of founder startup operator. How did that really play a role in the team’s decision and how does it play a role in your day to day today?

Ben Grynol (06:10):

The latter is an easy question to answer, how it plays a role in day to day because it is the outlook on thinking it is the lens on the necessary steps that need to come into play. Like sometimes you can use an Elonism, which is taking it from engineering is the worst thing an engineer can do is optimize something that shouldn’t be there in the first place. And I think that’s analogous to the way you can think about any role in a startup where if you’re working on something that’s too far downstream, like, Hey, let’s make sure that whatever it is, there’s something that you would want, like, let’s make sure our documentation is ready for when we become a publicly traded company in 10 years, it’s like, that’s probably a little far downstream. And the other side of it is working on, you can do a lot of dirt digging in the early stages and it can be you’re digging the wrong holes in the wrong places, but you just have to dig a lot of them.

Ben Grynol (07:01):

So that’s the latter question’s really easy to answer is that having that lens on knowing when to flex between the 10,000 foot view of macro thinking of strategically and from a vision standpoint, where do we need to head and seeing around the corner six months, 12 months in advance, like this is likely what’s coming down the road and then building against that, but then getting so deep in the weeds that you’re building out the infrastructure needed to do the job higher against it, or resource against it internally. And then you keep scaling, you scale your time. You scale your time through bringing on new team members through utilizing existing team members who can jump in and be, we call it a DRI or a directly responsible individual to take some of the dirt digging off of a person’s hands. And then working, we work with a ton of EAs that are very, very helpful in helping us to scale our time.

Ben Grynol (07:51):

So we’re not doing the transactional work of dirt digging. We’re doing the, we’ll call it work that requires more context or discretion like context about the company or discretion as far as decision making goes. And it doesn’t mean that the decisions are necessarily heavy in weight, but something where you might need to make a decision and move through it. So everything in the past, as far as having been part of different startups, built different startups and that experience compounds, but every startups in new experience, right? So every time you’re part of a new team, it’s like starting fresh again, but you’ve got some foundation of a bunch of things that you’ve tried and might not have worked. And it doesn’t mean they won’t work at the next whatever initiative you’re working on. It’s more a matter of busy and updating, if you want to call it that you’re using your priors and continuing to update them as you get new information. So the ladder is really easy to answer. The first question you had, which I apologize, I’ve now forgotten what it was.

Rachel Sanders (08:53):

How did you end up you being a former founder play a role and kind of how the team was thinking about bringing on ahead of growth?

Ben Grynol (09:00):

Yeah. So with the last company to frame it, I wasn’t a founder of that company was part of the early team. So we are around the same size as Levels when I joined a little bit bigger than that, but around the same size, so still quite early, but had founded some other companies. And so I think it probably, I don’t know, we’ve never really had this conversation, but I think just through some of the conversations we’ve had as a team about the way we think through team growth is Levels is made up of a ton of people who have built something before. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s not, oh, somebody built a company that like Taylor Sittler, who recently joined us he’s head of research. He was one of the, or he is the one of the co-founders of color genomics, like massive company, very, very cool and very fortunate that we have the opportunity to work with him.

Ben Grynol (09:55):

So he’s built again a very sizable company. And the other side of it is if people have built side businesses, selling stickers through Craigslist, like that’s also a way of building. And so there’s not necessarily some heuristic that’s like, you have to have built something of this size, but what that is does somebody have a builder’s mindset and a builder’s muscle, if they do, then they default into this idea of doing the dirt, digging, running the experiments and understanding that I can’t remember who said this recently, it was some podcast. It might have been on Harry Stebbings podcast, but talking about growth is everyone’s job. And it really is like growth is everyone’s job because everyone is contributing to the north star metric of the company in whatever function they work in. And then it’s building against that.

Ben Grynol (10:48):

So it’s having that founder’s mindset. So I think that’s probably something we default to is when we meet builders, we’ve got, I think four, it might be four right now, but four people that are former YC founders that are part of the team. And that sort of gives that lens on how many people that are builders are attracted to wanting to work with other builders. So it’s one of those things. It’s not a requirement, but it sure helps as far as giving that lens or the reassurance like, oh, this person can go and do.

Rachel Sanders (11:27):

Yeah. And as you think about building a culture of experimentation and curiosity, and that dirt digging, as you mentioned, having that kind of flex muscle before and the ability to do it and the context around when to do it and when not to do it is super important as you think about, I think building out any part of your team, but it’s specifically on the growth side. I definitely see that being important. So let’s jump back to you start at Levels early January 2021. What do you do? What’s your first, how do you think about kind of building out that department, building like the resources that you need, building out a team, building out tools, what are your kind of first steps?

Ben Grynol (12:05):

So aside from the natural path of downloading everything, getting enough context on what is going on, this holds true, it’s not necessarily what was done then it’s, I think this applies to any function at any company and any role at any level is come up with a plan, communicate the plan, check off the boxes of the tactics that you’ve laid out in the plan. Like get feedback from everyone, close a loop as you check off those tactics, like communicate that and then start fresh once you’ve check off all the tactics, right? So the tactics become these line items. And so the question of what do you do? It is have some plan and it doesn’t need to be, here’s a five year vision of where growth is going and it doesn’t need to be a, here’s what I’m going to do in one week. There’s an in between.

Ben Grynol (13:03):

But being able to communicate that saying, this is my understanding of where we are now. Here’s some things that I see that we’re doing well. And here’s some areas where we’ve got some gaps. I think the best use of time is to build against the gaps, right? This, again, I’m loosely articulating a plan, but here are some of the gaps. Here are some of the ways that we should backfill the gaps with tactics. I’m going to do all the work like to check off these tactics. And if we think that there’s enough, like some of the tactics could be experiments. It could be, doesn’t matter calls with members or users. If we think there’s enough substance here to resource an entire role against this pillar, this pillar is the one that, and this is what we did is there are four pillars of growth for Levels, which is content, community partnerships and members, three of the pillars had something happening, like something, the one that didn’t was community.

Ben Grynol (14:03):

And so that’s like the example of, Hey, here’s a gap that we have. We’re going to start doing a bunch of work as a company and just keep experimenting, keep digging dirt, keep trying to uncover if there’s something to this. And if there is, it becomes almost like the option, right? Like option. I’m going to exercise the option. Let’s double down and let’s bring somebody on which we recently did to lead community. So a year after doing a lot of these experiments over the course of a year, and it doesn’t mean that, that time horizon is how long is needed to uncover the insight, whether or not you should bring someone on, you learn pretty quickly whether or not the gaps are arbitrary or whether they’re meaningful and substantial to what you think might be an inflection point in growth or in an area of a company. So having that plan, here’s what we’re going to do.

Ben Grynol (14:52):

And then there can be other tactics in the other buckets, but the priority becomes lower or it becomes cool. There’s already somebody overseeing that pillar we’ll work together to ramp things up in the area. But the idea is, it’s almost like the engineering mindset of CICD, right? Where continuous improve and continuous deployment, where you’re always trying to iterate and improve and deploy against what you’ve laid out as your plan. So, yeah, that’s really, the starting point is coming up with a plan, communicating the plan, executing on the plan, checking off those tactics, closing the loop as you execute, and then just saying, Hey, the plan’s done.

Ben Grynol (15:28):

I’m going to like start a new one. Nobody disagrees with following through on anything and closing the loop like nobody ever says, Hey, that’s like a really bad idea to like, not like, if you just let it be and people can assume that the plan is executed. Like that’s a good idea. Everyone always agrees. It’s much better just to know like, Hey, your box was delivered. I mean, it’s the reason why we get email notifications from Amazon saying your package was delivered. They’re just closing loop. Even though it’s already at your door, they see it. You’re like, oh, that was nice.

Rachel Sanders (16:01):

Yeah, definitely. And it sounds like how you guys have thought about bringing on additional team members as you really, you dig in, you make sure there’s a need that there’s a pain that there’s enough kind of job there for it to bring on a full roll. And then you have a really clear understanding of who this person needs to be, what they need to be doing on a day to day basis and can bring them in to get them to start executing quickly. Is that fair?

Ben Grynol (16:24):

It’s exactly it. And the key is to not trick oneself, into thinking that there’s more substance to something than there is. So it’s being able to not just identify that there is a gap and say, because you could identify a gap, but it’s how big of a lever is this gap, right? So if it’s an actual lever of the company in some way, shape or form in our case, community is a meaningful part of what we’re doing. And we have to continue to build on it as same with you, what you’re doing with apex like that has to do with community. And if it is something that is substantial enough, you go cool. We have to resource against this, but everything becomes iterative. And so the key is to build it out in a scrappy way and know that you are doing a poor job because you’re not trying to perfect it going, wow, what would happen if we actually like, instead of spending three hours a week on this thing, somebody was spending their entire focus was this one area, what would happen?

Ben Grynol (17:24):

And you uncover some, it’s really easy to be exploratory and say, this would be a cool thing, but you don’t even start it because it’s so like, Apex, hypothetically, if we wanted to do Apex today, it’s like one of those things where you’re not like, yeah, I’m going to spend an hour next week doing Apex. You’re like, that’s an entire program that takes so much work and effort across many people’s time that you can’t, you can’t just sort of do that. But what you can do for an experiment to say, you know what would be really cool is like, what would happen if we said, Hey, there’s eat lunch with Dr.Casey Means . It’s like a community initiative. And like, it’s free for anyone to come. Here’s a link just to see what happens. Like that’s a very low risk, easy to execute experiment. It may be, don’t get a ton of insight, but maybe what the insight is wow.

Ben Grynol (18:12):

People tend to want to like have lunch together with somebody else who knows about Metabolic health. I don’t know. I’m just like making things up, but that then you sort of like put that into your tool kit for future. And you’re like, what would that look like if we scaled it? You do all of these things. It’s so easy to go down the path of getting wrapped up in low value experiments that are really easy to execute or not starting high value ones like Apex, because it’s just so heavy that you’re like, yeah, yeah, we’ll do that. We’ll do that. But I know it’s going to take too much time or the worst is like half doing it where you undertake immediate experiment, but it’s so big that it just sort sits there instead of declaring it project debt, it gets punted. And it’s just occupying like real estate in the mind of saying like, yeah, we’ll get to it. It’s easier just to declare it project debt.

Rachel Sanders (19:03):

Yeah. No, definitely. And we, I mean, community is one of our key initiatives here too. And we’ve hired around that specifically. We did some early experiments, as you mentioned, and saw what it could be, or at least kind of some of the higher ups were like this needs, we need a role. We need someone to think about this day in, day out. We need someone to think about what experiments we need to take the insights. We need to kind of make this a bigger piece of what we’re doing. And it’s hard for, if you’re thinking about things across the entire company to really narrow your focus on that one specific piece, if you want it to be such a big perfect component of the business, it’s very, it makes a ton of sense in kind of how we think about it as well as you’ve kind of scaled. I know you guys have a team member that has helped you with the podcast initiatives, is that undergrowth as well?

Ben Grynol (19:51):

Yeah, correct. Yeah.

Rachel Sanders (19:52):

Yeah. So as you of kind of thought about bringing on those various growth team members, what are the skills that you’re really looking for beyond the kind of experience around the specific roles, like how are you thinking about the value hiring versus kind of what are the characteristics that you really, really care about or have seen people thrive at Levels?

Ben Grynol (20:11):

Yeah. So why don’t we dig into there’s a couple parts of the question. So why don’t we dig into that example of how Tony came on board and what do we look for in general in candidates? I think there’s, we always default to generalists because we’re at the foundational phase of building, but you still need people with specialized skill sets. So Tony is very much a generalist when it comes to multimedia production, but he’s a specialist in an area like some area of growth, he’s a specialist. So the way that worked out was the podcast was an experiment. Like it’s actually hilarious, because it’s exactly what we’ve talked about so far and how it has evolved against like resourcing against it. So I think it was the second week, I think it was like, yeah, it was the second week of working with Levels. It might have been like one week in, whatever it is, like six business days in.

Ben Grynol (21:08):

And the whole time I kept asking myself, I’m like, I can’t figure out why we’re not recording as an experiment. I think it said that to Josh. And so put time on the calendar to record, I said, we’re going to test this and let’s just see what happens. We did it. And it was like, Hey, that was kind of fun. And that’s episode one, that was the first one we ever recorded. And we, well, this is again an option. Like we can exercise the option or we can declare project debt. Like there’s no risk to doing this because we weren’t recording and releasing. We were just recording to get the reps in. It’s no different than saying like I’m going to run versus lacing up your shoes and just going for the run. Like it can be a minute, you still ran. It was a, you don’t need to do 26 miles.

Ben Grynol (21:52):

Like no one’s stopping you. So we started getting reps and we made a commitment to record every single week until we are ready to release. And we didn’t have a target date that we were aiming for. And we weren’t being too precious about like, oh now is the time we just sort of knew that we had to figure some things out and it might have only taken, let’s say four or five times the recording where we’re like, this feels like there’s something here to build upon the team was in, like we would just distribute these internally for the team unedited. Or maybe I can’t remember if we were editing them or not, but we decided, we said, cool, we’re going to get, I think we said, let’s get eight in the can. Like, let’s get enough that we have a foundation and we’ll launch with that.

Ben Grynol (22:42):

And here’s the launch date. Like everyone’s on board. Why not? And we’ll just keep going. And from that, I think probably midway call it like mid-February early March. We laid out a podcast strategy of how we would approach audio and we’ve executed against it in its entirety. As far as it feeling very much like an inside look at the company. And there’s a lot of people involved and you get to know the different team members and there is really, isn’t a lens on like, this is only about metabolic health or this is only about company building it’s about everything because that’s what a company is, it’s a bunch of weirdos that come together and have an overly optimistic vision that they can make an impact in the world. And so we’re like, let’s just make the podcast feel like that. So we did that.

Ben Grynol (23:25):

And the early days of the podcast, the first, I don’t know, 20 episodes were all like I did all the editing on them, the production, all of that. And I was like, okay, this is no longer, and the other goal was there was blocked off time. So I said, the podcast can’t take between scheduling, recording, editing, uploading production. I’m not allowed to work more than two hours a week on this thing. One hour is recording. So that gives one hour to do all the other stuff. And like production takes some time. Scheduling takes time thinking through like the ideas for episodes takes time. And so it became this thing where the constraint of time was what you’re building against. Because if you give yourself unlimited time, then it’s just like, it could go on forever. It’s Parkinson’s law. Like you could, oh, I’ll give myself a week to do this episode. It’s like that’s inefficient. So we ended up doing that and it was pretty clear where we had to bring somebody on board.

Ben Grynol (24:34):

We punted it. We started talking about it in June, because I was like, Hey, I got to get these two hours a week off my plate. Like I enjoy doing it, but it’s occupying real estate in my mind. I got to get this off the plate. And so then we kept punting it and punting it. And the role became so painful because in August, Sam suggested, Hey, why don’t we go to two a week? I was like, I’m purposely recording eight episodes and getting them in the can. So I don’t have to record for like six more weeks. And not me recording, scheduling because Casey was doing some and Haney and Miss would do some, but like I’m trying to get a backlog. So I don’t have to think about this for six weeks at a time like that everyone thought we would record a week over week.

Ben Grynol (25:16):

It would be like, we’ll do six in a week and a half. And then that was it. And I wouldn’t touch it. So that was trying to scale my own time. And then I was like two a week. I’m like, this is going to kill backlog and it’s going to be a distraction. And so then finally we decided to reopen this rule for this idea of an audio producer. And we had this guy, Tony Millio that we were working with for a year, as a contractor on video work and some photo work and a bunch of production work. And so I ended up talking to him and said, Hey man, we don’t have any rules for cinematography or editing, but we need a podcast producer. Is it something you want to do? And he is like, I can’t do it. I’ve never edited audio ever. I’ve never made a podcast.

Ben Grynol (26:03):

I’m like, what are you talking about? That’s all you do all day is you edit audio with visuals behind it. That is what is a movie. And he’s like, I guess you’re right. And I’m like, there’s nothing different about narrative, about storylines. It’s the same thing. I’m like, I’m a hundred percent sure you got this. So we ended up bringing him on board and he’s been just incredible at helping to scale the podcast because all of the work that goes into it and getting better at scaling production time where we found ways so that he’s no longer working on it. And we work with the EAs to upload the audio and put in the intros and prep it for production. Do all the uploading to anchor for distribution paste in all the descriptions that are written, all the titles, all these things that just take so much added time.

Ben Grynol (26:51):

And so we’ve got with multimedia alone, we’ve got nine people working in that one function of growth. They’re all outsourced nine people because it’s not possible to have one person execute against the amount of content that we’re putting out. But from the outside it looks like, wow, this Tony guy is just crushing, which he is. But that is how the evolution of identifying an opportunity, digging dirt against it, using the option saying, cool, I’m going to exercise this option, finding somebody to fill the role and going, how do we scale this without bringing more people on board? And so that’s the evolution of, we look for generalists. We look for people that can dig dirt. We look for people that can do all of these things, but it’s really a matter of finding the people who can be a specialist in that one area so that they can help to scale the initiative.

Ben Grynol (27:47):

And what’s happened is now it’s become this really cool. Like we’re very grateful to have the reception that’s taken place from the podcast where people are like, wow, I want to work with the team because I heard this thing about inbox zero, like some absurd thing. And you’re like, we literally just make this stuff up. Like this is just silly stuff. It opens up the door to the company in an accessible way, in a genuine way. And it seems to resonate with people. So it’s been this thing that we did for, we did it for community to begin with. That was the first thing is we want our members to feel a part of what we’re building.

Ben Grynol (28:25):

And it’s grown into this a bit of we’ll call a bit of a movement where just like founders and people that want to work with the team and all these, like all these byproducts, we didn’t plan on it being a recruiting tool. But like you couldn’t pay a recruiter to create the value that this has created. And the most important thing is people have fun with it. Like the whole team has fun because there’s not really any boundaries. Like you just do whatever you want with it. And that’s also the most important thing of any like startup is like, are you having fun every day? Because if you are, you don’t work. If it feels like work, there’s probably something off.

Rachel Sanders (29:01):

Yeah, no, I love it. I think the podcast you guys have put together is fun. It’s really informative, but it’s also such a great lens into, for other founders seeing how you guys are thinking about it. But I can imagine for candidates too, they get to know you before they even talk to you. So it’s probably deeper conversations from the start, which I can imagine is such an interesting piece. And as you think about kind of scaling consumer brands or brands in general, it’s a multimedia approach. Now people want audio, they want video content. They want all the different types of media and content and getting access to expertise and education and resources in a wide variety of ways. And we’ve done that more on the expert series through our community, not as scaled as you guys have yet, but we’ve done something similar.

Rachel Sanders (29:47):

We’ve recorded a bunch of episodes. We’ve brought people on more of the experts and kind of health wellness on the innovation and clinical side and we’ll have it up. We’re transcribing it now. And it’s been very interesting. I talk to people all day, and to be able to record it and have other people have access to it. It’s also been a really fun team building tool for us as well, similarly where we’re just bringing in all of these great people and the team has access to them because we’re recording it because they can play it back. So I think that’s such a great example of the experimentation and then how you scale it from there. It sounds like you guys are doing, obviously, your four pillars of growth, you’re doing a lot. How do you think about spending your time and making sure it’s scalable? Because there’s only so many hours in the day in the week. How are you thinking about that time allocation yourself?

Ben Grynol (30:37):

Again, it’s back to the idea that the surface area is broad. It’s also, I think the surface area of growth in any company is as broad as you want it to be. Where if you, and growth can mean so many different things, depending on the type of company and the category, and we could get into a long-winded discussion about that. But thinking about the way that time is allocated is a matter of being honest and diligent about project debt. It’s really exciting to get involved in a lot of things, but it’s a lot harder to retire or to declare something project debt that might be successful. Right. But the problem is like if you don’t declare project debt on something, then how do you open up the opportunity to do the next like podcast, the next like name some like silly initiative that starts out as some like, Hey, this would be fun to do.

Ben Grynol (31:34):

And ends up turning into something, knowing that a great batting average is 300 like three out of 10. So if you can hit anywhere near that, where you’re like, okay, at least seven of the things that get tried should fail. And you don’t want them to be big bets that are failing because that gets a lot harder. You don’t want fire phone or anything like that as far as large, large failures, but you want to make sure that you’re trying lots of things. And so when you think about allocating time, it always is this something that’s working? How do I scale it? How do I scale my time involved in it so that I don’t have to do the day to day on this because you’ve done, let’s say it doesn’t matter the number of hours, but it could be 10 hours. It could be a hundred hours you’ve spent on some project and you go, cool.

Ben Grynol (32:24):

I don’t want to spend one more hour on this because have to open up brain space to work on some other thing. But it’s still like pretty beneficial. So an example is the mission patches, like we did the Coke challenge and we’ve got all these different team ones and we’re doing ones right now for other initiatives that are underway. But the first patches, again, it was one of those like, cool, I’ll figure it out, spend some time on it, document it, get enough of a process, get enough, like infrastructure established that it can be a pretty clear handoff. And it wasn’t quite an EA handoff because there’s still discretion involved in decision making. Like something comes back as far as a design or a like you’re communicating feedback. It’s something that’s recurring. So it’s not that easy just to hand off and say, okay, cool exercise some discretion and just like make this thing happen.

Ben Grynol (33:16):

So we’ve got Jesse on our team is the DRI for mission patches like that is, and it ties into community. It ties into company. It ties into all these things and it’s not necessarily like a massive growth lever or anything, but it’s just like a meaningful touch point ends up creating some UGC out of it too. Like people end up posting about them.

Rachel Sanders (33:34):

I’ve seen them.

Ben Grynol (33:35):

A lot of cool things, but doing that and trying to scale that is just like, okay, I can’t allocate any brain space to doing anything other than saying the colors look cool on that thing. Like something super subjective. And just knowing that somebody’s trusted and they’re going to see the thing through, that’s the idea of allocating time then scaling it. So being able every week, like to your question of like, how do I think about time every week is like, how do you do all these little things trying to get three out of 10 of them to work?

Ben Grynol (34:06):

Like, ideally everyone wants a bat 10 out of 10, like that’s not realistic, but if you can get the, whatever it is, the Ted Williams batting average of 344, I can’t, I don’t know what it was, but like that’s a pretty darn good batting average. And if you can aim to do that and you’re allocating your time against things like that, then you’re doing okay. And the key is when undertaking some things can’t be experiments. Some things are just projects that need to get ramped up. A good one right now is that I was thinking about this morning was the next iteration of the website. Like, Hey, there’s some documenting, we’re going to do this. What are all the things? How can I get this going? A turn of this going, like, everyone’s going to have input across the company. How can we do this in a fast enough way to get it established, but to actually do this, not a refresh to actually rebuild a site and manage that as a project.

Ben Grynol (35:04):

I’m like, it’s going to be a lot of hours per week. I don’t think I have those hours because it’s going to take away from it other experimentation, like other podcasts, right? Other things that fall into that bucket. And that’s the most important thing in addition to thinking about the, like back to the beginning of the conversation, seeing six to 12 months around the corner and executing against this macro plan end and end. So you’re trying to like, yeah, you’re really trying to balance between being in the weeds when necessary and jumping out and knowing when like that’s the key. So thinking about time allocation every week is like, what is a good use of my time in the weeds and where, what can I get off my plate?

Ben Grynol (35:45):

What can be scaled to Athena is the EA team that we work with, what can be scaled to hat tip to Vanessa, because she is very great and work very closely with her on the team. So yeah, that’s a way of thinking about time every week and just saying like how, I guess the other like nerdy thing about it is always trying to think in like 15 minute blocks, I always think sort of like what can I do in 15 minutes? And four hours of work is just 16, 15 minute blocks. Like that’s sort of the way, that’s a way I think about it. I’m like, cool. Otherwise it becomes like endless or boundless as far as like how time can slip away very quickly.

Rachel Sanders (36:26):

Yeah, definitely. And you guys, it sounds like you use EAs really effectively, which I love something we need to look into a little bit further at Rootine. I know you guys document on notion you use loom any other productivity tools that either the growth team uses or you guys use as Levels that are really of note and help you kind of scale your time and the team’s time?

Ben Grynol (36:46):

There’s tooling and there’s behavior. So like the tooling can enable behavior so that you don’t have to think about things, but you still need to follow through on the behavior. So like a good example is superhuman is very good tooling that we use. Most of the team uses it and we use email only for external comms. We don’t use it for internal comms at all. And you can set a ton of reminders, like that’s really effective tooling. So you don’t have to remember like follow up with Rachel about like to say thank you for the podcast. And that’s like a literal example I have now you know, I have a reminder set to say like, thanks for recording this after we do. Right. Because-

Rachel Sanders (37:25):

We use it too super human’s great.

Ben Grynol (37:27):

Yeah, because it makes it so I don’t have to remember to do that. It’s just like, that’s a probe, but if the behaviors not there, like, oh, I’m going to let these reminders stack up. Oh my inbox is going to get flooded. Like that doesn’t help either. So when asking about what tools do we use, it’s more, how do we use a tooling and then what behaviors do we follow through it, so the other tool that we use as a team and we don’t have any specific tools that would be isolated to a function like growth uses this for productivity, but engineering doesn’t we have four things that we use email loom threads is our internal comms platform. That’s like slack meets email. And would I say email loom threads notion. Those are the platforms. And so we limit it because often we get asked like, cool, why don’t you just open up?

Ben Grynol (38:19):

Like, why don’t you use rewatch and why don’t you use slack? And why don’t you use whatever? Well, the cognitive overload that comes with managing notifications and trying to search for information and decisions in all these different places and not having somewhat of a boundary around the way you use them. Like, no, we don’t do that. We don’t make decisions in the comments on a loom. We don’t do that because that’s not easy for other… It’s not visible to the team. It’s not easy to search and triage in the future. Having some constraints, like that’s really helpful, but using the tools in an effective way. So superhuman reminders, you can do the same on threads notions. Really good for that too. Where you set the reminder in a document to follow up with the action item, like that’s back to the, have a plan, communicate the plan, close the loop once you’ve finish the tactics.

Ben Grynol (39:13):

Like just setting a reminder in your notion doc, it could be a doc for the whole team, or it could be some project that you’re working on independently. It’s just like a reminder to yourself to like follow up on this action item, close the loop. It’s like, you never have to think about this stuff again. And you go, that’s how the 15 minute blocks come is you just, you’re never thinking like, oh, what should I be working on? You just know you’ve got like your stuff laid out in front of you, and it becomes ridiculous to say, but you’re you just become like a human algorithm of checking off boxes. And you’re like, I mean, you become a robot at that point, right? Because you’re not actually thinking about what you’re doing. You’re just doing what you told yourself you were going to do.

Ben Grynol (39:51):

So you outsource all of your own decision making of what you should be working on and you just do it because you’re like I decided at one point in the past, I don’t know when that this was important and everyone agreed, this was important. So I’m not going to decide whether or not this is important. I’m just going to do this thing that we all said is cool. And then I’ll let everyone know when it’s done and I’ll go and I’ll do real thinking, which is like making the plan again. Once all these things are checked off.

Rachel Sanders (40:16):

Yeah. I mean creating that I have a task list, but like creating that task, like task list, calendaring it and making it. So in the times when your brain’s just not functioning or you’re jumping from one task to another, like you know exactly what you need to do, it’s so important. And then also allocating the time for let’s spend two hours or three hours get into kind of deep work, get into a flow and really think about this having time for both of that is so critical regardless of what your role really is. This has been super helpful. I guess the, I know we’re running up close to the hour, but is there anything that we haven’t talked about or any advice that you would give as you think about kind of scaling a growth team or things that we should be thinking about at Rootine?

Ben Grynol (40:59):

When thinking again, every team has to do what is right given their category. So given that we are in somewhat analogous spaces, as far as it’s not like Rootine is some enterprise company. So it’s like the outlook on growth is going to be, or it’s not like Rootine, some SaaS platform for consumer that you’re like, well, the play is a little bit different. Every company, every category is definitely going to have a different approach to growth because there are different things that you’re trying to grow against different north star metrics, different things that are important for the long term outcome of a company. But the most important roles when building an early foundation is the idea of being a generalist who can experiment. And that if you find somebody, it doesn’t mean like you might find somebody who’s more scientists than artists or more artists than scientists.

Ben Grynol (41:52):

And neither is necessarily better worse. Sometimes you hear like people give very prescriptive advice. They’ll be like, Rachel, get somebody who’s really good with data or get somebody who’s really creative. Like that’s less important than the idea of just let’s push side values aligned. Like that becomes this box. It’s like a binary non-starter. It is like yes or no, but values a line. And then all you really want is somebody who sees a pile of dirt and sees a bunch of shovels. And doesn’t even ask you like, Hey, is it cool if I pick up a shovel, they just like all of a sudden start shoveling dirt. And you’re like sweet. That person is like trying to do things. And when the pile is done, they start looking for the next whole to dig and working with a team. And so the idea of like experimenting, trying to find the next thing that becomes some growth unlock or some company unlock that’s, doubtlessly one of the most important roles where it gets really challenging to say that’s the only case is that’s somewhat of a mindset.

Ben Grynol (42:58):

There will be times where you have certain things that are working well and you know you need to double down on it. And so you’re trying to contain the skillset. You still want a generalist, but the community is a good example where we decided to double down, it’s specialized in that part of the function of growth it’s contained in scope. Like we know that it’s not like Sissy who came on board in his leading community. She won’t just have to start working on the podcast. Like it’s not, I mean maybe one day as far as like production, but the idea is she’s a generalist in that specialized area.

Ben Grynol (43:38):

And so having people that can still have the lens of experimentation, like she’ll go and build community experiment a ton with it. And that mindset of experimentation, like that’s really the best role to look for is someone who is willing to experiment, can undertake the experiments, can come up with them, can measure them and it doesn’t need mean you need to be perfect at all of it. Because everyone’s going to have different skills where they’re like deeper on the artist side or data scientist side. And sometimes you’re just sort of like a neither and you’re like, you can sort of do both, but neither well.

Rachel Sanders (44:15):

Yeah. But the experimentation and beyond that, thinking about like being okay if it fails that like three out of 10 mindset and in my mind, if you’re hitting 10 out of 10, we need to be experimenting more because in startup land, like hitting 10 out of 10, it shouldn’t be possible. We need to be kind of innovating or trying more than that. So it’s experimentation and which I love that advice. It’s also kind of, are you okay to try things that might not work. Which is a part of experimentation, but some people, there’s different spectrum of that. Yeah. I want to experiment, but I want every single one of my experiments to be perfect and actually work is very different than yes. I’m going to experiment. I’m okay with the three out of 10 batting average, because that means we’re innovating. We’re trying, we’re figuring out what works and what doesn’t. And we’re creating a place where we can really scale things that work and understand across the board where we should be spending our time and resources.

Ben Grynol (45:10):

Totally. Yeah. Part of it is not, the mindset of experimentation is also something to go. Like maybe it’s a little silly to even go this deep on it, but it’s just because a person undertakes an experiment doesn’t actually mean it’s the right approach because you can over design an experiment, which means you’re not actually being scrappy. So it’s like the willingness to say, Hey, this thing is good enough as an experiment and understanding the risk associated with it. Like what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen. It’s like probably nothing. And then it sounds cliche to say, but not just the idea of being okay with a failure, like yeah, well you got to be okay with it. It’s like being truly comfortable being like, yeah, I don’t care. Like that thing didn’t work. Who cares? Like that happens all the time.

Ben Grynol (46:02):

Like that’s the way the world works is being unphased. Like almost being just so pragmatic. That’s like, no, we got to do this. Like who cares? But I think sometimes if teams have an outlook of like, oh, that thing didn’t work, we don’t trust. Like you’re going to it again. Right? Those are bad conditions to be in because the mindset becomes, or we’re pretty risk adverse as far as like wanting to do it again. That’s what human behavior will manifest as. But the person who doesn’t experiment tries something and it fails. And isn’t like, I’m so proud I failed is just like, I don’t, who cares, like literally who care. Like I’m glad that we’re trying. I’m glad we’re trying.

Rachel Sanders (46:43):

Yeah. Just able to measure and understand, get the insight. There’s always learnings in everything you do, there’s always learnings, whether it’s good or bad or whatever, but understand. Okay. What’s the key takeaway and then let’s move to the next thing. And I think, I mean, it goes back to kind of how you guys are thinking about like you bring on builders, you bring on founders, it’s a muscle that it takes time. It’s hard mentally to fail for some people. So if you to get in that mindset of, let’s try, let’s test this, once you’re there, it’s easy to continue to stay there, but for some it’s harder to get there. So the kind of, as you think about hiring, as you think about building out the team, the leadership team, especially as you mentioned, like creating that culture where you can take risks and you can just get the takeaway and move on and it comes from the top is I imagine super important as well.

Ben Grynol (47:32):

Yeah. You have to be unphased by it. That’s the thing is I think that there are instances where if we look at to ourselves and we feel like we are being judged by others internally probably more important, like happens more internally than externally, because externally it’s like, no one would know, but if we think we’re being judged by peers, like, oh, they think I didn’t do that thing very well. People think I’m not that good at what I do. People think I won’t be able to do it again. It just becomes this like cycle of self-doubt. And it’s just a terrible mindset to be in. Because you can’t have an open and liberal mind to just sort of think freely about the things that you’re working on. And then all of the transactional work that we are talking about before where these like things where you’re just like, I’m doing a line item and this is what I’m doing.

Ben Grynol (48:24):

Like you’re not even thinking it’s like, you can’t even execute those because your mind is always being pulled in like, oh my gosh, everybody thought that idea I had to do Apex optimizers was so silly. And like you just get into this, this cycle of negative self-talk and it doesn’t mean you think you’re great. Like, oh, I think I’m great. And untouchable is the opposite where you’re like, no, like it doesn’t matter. It’s like there’s the risk is zero.

Ben Grynol (48:53):

Like there’s no bruise to an ego. It doesn’t matter whether or not people think I am good or not good because I think about it in a neutral way. Like you just sort have this mindset where it’s like, it’s not that you’re overly confident. It’s the opposite. You’re like, it doesn’t matter. I’m trying the next thing. And you just sort of like strip away all of these things that you manifest these ideas in yourself and you go, the only thing I’m trying to do is make progress for the company, and do it as a team and all work together on it. And as soon as you get to that point, then it’s, that’s how companies are built.

Rachel Sanders (49:33):

Yeah, exactly. Is there anything I know you guys have a great culture of innovation, experimentation. Is there anything like one or two things that you would point to as you kind of thought about building out the culture that has really helped build that kind of sense of experimentation and innovation beyond kind of what we’ve just chatted about?

Ben Grynol (49:50):

This is going to sound so ridiculous and so meta, but we keep telling ourselves how important it is to build culture. And so then we do all these things that we try to build culture and it sounds counterintuitive to be like, well, if you try to manufacture a culture, then it’s not really a culture, but we try to create the conditions for people to have an open and honest and respectful culture, very values driven in that respect. But Sam had talked to a lot of different founders early on. I think one of them was Patrick Collison and he had talked to even Mark Randolph. He had talked to about this as well said, if you could go back and do one thing differently, what would you do? And the idea was, we’d focus on culture earlier than we did and not enough companies spend time doing this.

Ben Grynol (50:48):

And so go build culture, pay attention to it, try really hard to create the conditions for it. And so that’s something that we’ve done where we put time into creating these productivity videos that help people get more familiar with notion. We’ve created these videos that talk about the concepts of memos over meetings, like trying to not trying to pontificate and say, here is the way it is. This is our prescriptive culture, but saying like this matters to us and like, we’re going to continue to have conversations and it’s not two people telling other people top down, like here’s the way it is.

Ben Grynol (51:28):

We’re all going to participate in these conversations and we’re going to do through the podcast and you are welcome to host. And so then people know like, Hey, we’re all building this thing together. It’s not just sort of like this dictatorship of, we have to be nice to each other because I’m telling you, we do, like, that’s not culture. Culture is when people feel the ability to experiment, feel the ability to make change, feel the ability, and feel bought into building the culture for the next group of people that come in. So it’s something that the question of, how have we thought about building culture? It’s that we try-

Rachel Sanders (52:04):

You think about it.

Ben Grynol (52:05):

Yeah, really, really hard. And we talk about it a lot, probably too much sometimes. But when we think we’re talking too much, everyone we’ve talked to is like, you’re still not thinking about it enough.

Rachel Sanders (52:16):

Yeah. I mean, when it comes down to successful companies, it’s all about the team and the people behind it. And so if your culture, isn’t just kind of manifested, you have to create it. You need to have the boundaries around it and thinking about it early. I mean, I agree. I don’t think we’re still like quite early and I would’ve thought about it more on like day one, first employee, even like culture for myself and my co-founder, we’re doing a lot more now, but I couldn’t agree more.

Rachel Sanders (52:43):

And it’s about people and creating an environment people want to be and work and you retain employees. You give them more ability to make an impact, more ability to make change. They feel better and the whole business thrives because of it. So that’s such good advice and something I tell other founders is they think about it too. And you guys are farther along than I am. And I still say like, day one, like, think about it. How do you want to think about this? What do you want to do? What are some things to try? And again, not everything works, not everything creates like exactly what you want, but you can test and try it out along the way. And as long as you’re thinking about it and paying attention to it, you’ll ultimately likely come out with a better culture than not.