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Insights on the Future of Work with Dan Bladen
6 Plays3 years ago
Confused about the future of work? So are we. Until we talked with a founder who has advice on how entrepreneurs can bring their startups up to speed. Join us in today's conversation with Dan Bladen, Co-Founder & CEO of Kadence, and investor Kat Kennedy of Kickstart (a VC firm for startups in Utah, Colorado, and the Mountain West) as we bring you both sides of a Perfect Pitch. In this episode, we'll talk about:
- Dan's pandemic pivot from Chargifi to Kadence
- Kat's advice on how a founder can know whether they should "hang the towel" or pivot
- Details on Kadence's fundraising announcement
- What Kat and Dan anticipate for the future of work
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Future of Work and Cadence
00:00:00
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Confused about the future of work?
00:00:02
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So were we.
00:00:03
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Until we talked with a founder who has advice for how entrepreneurs can bring their startups up to speed.
00:00:08
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Join us in today's conversation with Dan Bladen, co-founder and CEO of Cadence, and investor Kat Kennedy, as we bring you both sides of A Perfect Pitch.
00:00:27
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Perfect Pitch is a podcast from Kickstart that reveals the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
00:00:36
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I'm your host, Karen Zellmuck, and I'm excited to introduce you to today's guests.
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Dan, you graduated with honors from London's St.
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Miletus College.
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You earned your BA in Theological Studies.
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And before Cadence, you were the vice chair in the leadership committee of Air Fuel Alliance, where you worked to rethink the way we use power in the mobile age, which is fascinating.
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And you enjoy skiing, reading theology, and running after your three small children, which I think is an amazing, an amazing pastime.
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And then what else should we know about you?
00:01:08
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Well, since moving to California, I've got really into California wine and California beer.
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So that's probably something I shouldn't talk in too much detail about.
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Oh no, you can talk about wine.
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This is a safe space for wine.
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And Kat, it's of course great to have you back on the show.
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And this is your first time as our investor expert.
00:01:27
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We've had you on the show before, which was amazing.
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We have an entire introductory episode with Kat.
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So check that out.
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And then we'll link to her bio in our show notes.
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You're still kind of new to our listeners.
00:01:38
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What's a fun fact that we should know about you?
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So I'm colorblind.
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It's actually quite hilarious because earlier in my career, I did front-end development and a little bit of product design.
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And I got hired at a company and it wasn't until about six months in where I had apparently made quite a strange color choice.
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Wow.
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Then I revealed to them that I am colorblind.
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And they're like, and you do design?
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And I was like, I mean, I passed for six months without you knowing that I was colorblind.
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But just yesterday, I had on a skirt and I was sitting in a meeting.
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And I looked down and I realized what for years I have believed to be a brown skirt is green.
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Oh my God.
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So I, I stopped the meeting and I was like, everyone, what color is my skirt?
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And they were like, it's green.
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Why?
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And I was like, I thought it was brown.
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And only about 70% of the meeting knew that I was colorblind.
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So they just thought I was kind of quirky.
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So yeah, that's what you know about me is I will interrupt a meeting on a whim and that I am also colorblind.
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At least your design was probably accessible design.
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Exactly.
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Yeah.
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I built an accessibility design.
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When you've got me on a project, it's really handy.
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That's amazing.
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I speaking of vision issues, I growing up, I saw double all the time.
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I was always running into things.
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I still run into things going up the stairs.
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My mom would be like, she'd hear a thump and she'd be like, Oh, Karen guessed the wrong stair again.
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That's so sad.
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Just like little Karen, like... Oh, shoot.
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Yeah, vision.
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It's important.
Transition from Chargify to Cadence
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So Dan, tell us about Cadence because it used to actually be Chargify.
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How did you go from Chargify to Cadence?
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So in 2013, my wife and I went traveling around the world for six months from South America to India.
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And we spent a ton of time in coffee shops and restaurants in kind of the weirdest places in the world.
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We'd jump into a Starbucks and we'd treat it as our little Western embassy to escape the chaos that was going on.
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And we realized quite quickly that we weren't really going in for coffee.
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I was going in for Wi-Fi and for power to recharge and connect with friends and family back home.
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And when I got back from traveling, I was finishing off a degree that I was doing.
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And I had this idea about combining beer mats.
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If you've been in a bar, you know what a beer mat is, you put your drink on it, etc.
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I was like, can we combine wireless charging pads, which were only in one Nokia phone at the time?
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Can you combine them with advertising and put your phone on a
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Budweiser wireless charging mat or something.
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And that kind of kickstarted this idea that became Chargify, which is essentially to do for power what Wi-Fi had done for connectivity and to try and build this global network of wireless charging devices.
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Founded that, as mentioned, in the summer of 2013 and ran that through to the summer of 2020 when our world completely changed.
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We'd raised about $17.5 million for Chargify.
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We had customers in 21 countries.
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But yeah, our world changed when the pandemic struck.
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It's such an interesting pivot because yeah, you were Chargify, you were really changing the game on wireless charging, but now you're changing the game on the way people work, which is quite a pivot.
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So I'd love to know how did you get your board free to that pivot?
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What conversations did you have to have?
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There's a lot of learning here.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, I've learned probably more this year than I have done in the last eight, nine years of running Chargify.
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Our wireless charges were being installed in offices like Okta and Accenture and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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We had a pilot going with Uber.
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You put your phone on a wireless charger and the ChargerFi software that was running on it would recognize you and check you into that hot desk or recognize you and check you into that meeting room and auto magically launch the Zoom call so that you don't need to touch anything.
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You can just have all that setup time kind of happen.
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And so when the pandemic struck, we had one customer cancel a thousand order, for example, very early on.
00:06:06
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So we were hardware-enabled SaaS, essentially, where we had real costs, real tangible hardware that we needed to deploy and buy months ahead of time.
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And we were essentially left in the lurch.
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And in the spring of 2020, people were talking about returning to the office in September 2020.
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So nobody really knew how long this would last.
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But we knew that we had to change.
Cadence's Role in Hybrid Work Solutions
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We were speaking with one customer in New York, a Fortune 50 company.
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And they said to us, Hey, Chargify, this isn't like May 2020.
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We're never going to use our offices in the same way again.
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We're going to go from 3 buildings to 1 building.
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And we're going to reduce our desks in Manhattan by 49%.
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You've got wireless chargers or about to have wireless chargers on all of our desks.
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So essentially, you've got this network map of our desks and our workplace.
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Can we use this to manage our hybrid workplace?
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And to tell you the truth, I wasn't particularly interested in building desk booking software for the next 10 years and pivoting almost a decade's worth of a deeper tech IoT play into a desk booking app that just didn't seem that interesting.
00:07:18
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But what we were all fascinated with as a team were all the different moving parts, what we call the coordination layer of hybrid work, which is who should be where, when should they be there, who should they be there with, what should they be working on, all these moving parts of work that
00:07:38
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were shook up and thrown in the air when the pandemic struck and everybody's kind of been trying to put them back together in a new order for this new era.
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One board member said, this isn't a pivot.
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This is an acceleration into an adjacency.
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And another board member said, it's a pivot, pivot hard and go now.
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That was when we made the pivot.
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And really, we made it in the summer of 2020, going from a deep tech IoT play into a B2B SaaS play.
00:08:08
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We're going to have to put an image of what that charger looks like because it is so cool.
00:08:14
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But I love that you talked about like, Hey, I wasn't actually particularly interested in it, but I found a component of that I was.
00:08:20
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I would love to hear what you had to do to align your team to this pivot.
00:08:24
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You mentioned a few things, but I'd love to go a little deeper on what you had to do to align them to this new vision after the hard work that I've already done and then where you went from there.
00:08:34
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As a management team, we've actually... It's this funny joke we have internally that if you join Cadence, you basically get married and have kids.
00:08:41
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And that seems to be happening across our team.
00:08:43
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We've actually had two marriages, one this month, one last month.
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We've got two more folks going off on maternity shortly.
00:08:50
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And so we're all trying to figure out how do we flourish at home and how do we flourish at work?
00:08:58
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One of the questions that we've always asked in interviews when people are coming on is, hey, you're in the late stages of your career, you've just retired and you're looking back on your career.
00:09:10
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What are you proud of?
00:09:11
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What have you achieved?
00:09:13
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It's trying to eke out the... I think Bezos calls it the regret minimalization program.
00:09:20
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Is this person wanting to leave everything on the field and invest everything in doing the best work of their career here or not?
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Or are they just coming in to pick up a paycheck?
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And so we as a team are like really, really aligned to the purity and the flow state of doing great work.
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And we also feel like that personally as well.
00:09:44
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We just want to win in every area of life and flourish in every area of life we possibly can.
00:09:49
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And that all sounds very benevolent.
00:09:51
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That's really nice, Dan, kudos, etc.
00:09:54
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But I think the interesting thing that Cadence slash Chargify was that we were really ahead with Chargify and wireless charging.
00:10:02
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There was one phone, there was a Nokia Lumia in 2013 that had wireless charging.
00:10:08
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And it wasn't until the fall of September 2017, when the iPhone came out, maybe it was in 2018 now,
00:10:15
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The iPhone came out with wireless charging.
00:10:17
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So we were like five years before the iPhone had wireless charging.
00:10:20
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And to be quite honest, I still believe that the Chargify business will work.
00:10:27
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It just has never had its must-have moment.
00:10:31
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It was always a vitamin, if you've heard the analogy of are you selling a painkiller or a vitamin.
00:10:36
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It was always a vitamin.
00:10:37
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It was a nice to have.
00:10:38
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It was a we're doing a building refresh.
00:10:40
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We need to upgrade our spaces.
00:10:42
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We might throw some wireless charging in because that's a cool new thing.
00:10:46
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And so as a team, we were like really desperate for meaningful traction.
00:10:50
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And so the total addressable market for...
00:10:54
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hybrid working and the coordination of hybrid is just absolutely colossal.
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And we launched V1 of the product late December 2020.
00:11:04
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We had our first sale in late February 2021.
00:11:09
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And now we're over 300 customers on the product.
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And so as a team, not only were we like...
00:11:15
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zeitgeist aligned to flourishing in every area of life, we were also really hungry for commercial traction.
00:11:26
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I love that you highlighted that everyone on your team, but also just in the world, they're really trying to figure out how do you be successful at work and at home.
00:11:34
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There's so much application for the work that you are doing.
00:11:37
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I want to get into that and the future of work.
00:11:39
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But first, Kat, we've talked on the show before about sometimes entrepreneurs need to hang up the towel.
00:11:45
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They need to know when to do that.
00:11:47
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How does a founder know what path to take?
00:11:49
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Hang the towel up or pivoting?
00:11:52
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Well, first, I just want to rewind to the first moment where I met Dan.
00:11:57
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I actually hadn't officially started at Kickstart yet, but work feeds me.
00:12:02
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And so I begged the partnership to let me come in to start to get a feel for the work.
00:12:08
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And given the nature of the buyer for Cadence and just the type of sale that it is, it was a really nice fit for me to hear about it, just given my background.
Navigating Startup Challenges with Kat Kennedy
00:12:22
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As Dan left, I turned to Sid, who is one of our senior associates at Kickstarter.
00:12:28
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And I said, I love Dan.
00:12:30
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I love Cadence.
00:12:31
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We have to do this deal.
00:12:34
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And why was there just an effusive...
00:12:38
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energy and excitement around Cadence and around what Dan was doing.
00:12:42
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First, you hear it in everything that he has said up until this moment.
00:12:46
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A resilient founder, high integrity, knows how to build a team, knows how to retain a team, knows how to recruit a team.
00:12:54
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Those are essential elements in a founder and in the team that surrounds the founder that you look for at all stages, but especially in the early stage.
00:13:06
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And why?
00:13:06
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Why is the founder even more critical at early stage?
00:13:11
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It's because things are going to evolve.
00:13:13
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You're going to have those moments where you have to decide, is this idea going to work?
00:13:20
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Do we actually have product market fit?
00:13:23
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Do we need to adjust it, evolve it in order to find that?
00:13:27
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Or is it just not going to get the type of return that we need?
00:13:31
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And maybe we should wind it down.
00:13:33
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And I think those moments aren't binary.
00:13:37
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It's not a moment of, hey, this idea doesn't work.
00:13:41
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Therefore, the business is dead.
00:13:45
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it can be all shades of gray in between there.
00:13:50
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And I think the intellectual honesty of sitting down and asking yourself those questions of where are we within the gray?
00:13:58
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Is it a slight alignment?
00:14:00
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Is it a hard pivot?
00:14:02
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Is it we just don't have the team or a market opportunity in front of us?
00:14:06
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I think that is what is most important.
00:14:08
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I don't think it's a binary.
00:14:09
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Hey, our original idea is the be all end all.
00:14:14
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versus if it's not, we have to shut it down.
00:14:17
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I think it's pivots and evolutions and learnings that happen.
00:14:21
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And what I heard is Dan articulated his pivot story from Chargify to Cadence.
00:14:28
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Within that was years of learning around how organizations work, how people interact with their offices, how people interact with each other.
00:14:39
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And so that founder market fit, founder opportunity fit, which we always talk about on this podcast and in general at Kickstart...
00:14:50
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That means exactly what you've heard from Dan.
00:14:54
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They understand the opportunity in front of them, both in the solution that they're bringing to the table, but who they're bringing that solution to.
00:15:04
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So if you're a founder who's in those moments, I think it's understanding the world is not binary, understanding that there's a lot of nuance and all of your learnings to date are going to be what help you understand where you are within that nuance.
00:15:21
Speaker
I love that you shared that it's not binary because I think being a startup founder in those early stages, it can be so demanding that it's easier to think of the world as binary.
00:15:30
Speaker
That in some ways feels a lot safer to be like, it does or it doesn't work.
00:15:34
Speaker
But as a startup founder, I love that you pointed out you're signing up for a lot of gray area.
00:15:38
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And Dan, you really danced in that gray area.
00:15:41
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And it's really fascinating to see what you accomplished with that.
00:15:44
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And you've gotten some new capital.
Optimizing Work Schedules and Collaboration
00:15:46
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What will that new capital accomplish for you?
00:15:49
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So yes, super excited to have Kat and the team come in alongside some other amazing investors for this round.
00:15:56
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So we really think we've got an opportunity to become the category-defining brand for the hybrid age.
00:16:02
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Essentially, we find ourselves in quite a competitive market, but it's flooded with companies that have built desk booking and room booking solutions and are trying to make their solutions fit for a hybrid schedule.
00:16:15
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And so what we're really excited about is building out tools that can help people discover their rhythm for work.
00:16:23
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We've grown very quickly to about 300 companies.
00:16:27
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It really spans.
00:16:28
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We've got governments on board, but we've also got crypto companies on board.
00:16:34
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About 90% of organizations are going to a form of hybrid working.
00:16:38
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And what's super interesting about this opportunity is that hybrid looks different, not just in every company, not just in every office in every company, but also in every team and every individual.
00:16:51
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My version of hybrid looks slightly different to Jamie and our CTO's version of hybrid.
00:16:55
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And we're in the same management team.
00:16:58
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So what we're really, really excited about is building out tools that can help people optimize what we refer to as their cadence.
00:17:06
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And cadences are essentially people plotting their schedules or their flight plans of when they're going to be in the office, where they're going to be, and then trying to align that with who is best for them to be with in those moments.
00:17:20
Speaker
And so imagine a little bit like if I was to drive from the Bay Area to see you guys in Salt Lake City today, 15 years ago, I would have slapped the TomTom on the windshield and it would have told me how to get there, but it would have been void of context.
00:17:33
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It would have not shown me that there was snow up ahead or there were police up ahead and I needed to watch my speed or whatever.
00:17:40
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Whereas now, you and I would load Google Maps or what have you, and it would tell us and give us as much context as possible to get the best
00:17:49
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route the best path for that journey.
00:17:52
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The same is going to be true of and is already true in some part and will become richer and richer of cadence.
00:17:58
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And so you come onto the product, you plot your cadence into the product, you can book desks, meeting rooms, but most importantly, you can discover where your colleagues are going to be and you can start to evolve and adapt
00:18:11
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It not just orientates around, am I booking a sit-stand desk?
00:18:14
Speaker
Am I booking a meeting room?
00:18:16
Speaker
Am I booking a room with a view?
00:18:18
Speaker
It's actually, I'm working on this project in Asana with these three people.
00:18:24
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And Cadence might have told me that those three people are going in tomorrow.
00:18:28
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Why don't you move your Cadence from Thursday to Wednesday so that you can go in with those people, for example?
00:18:35
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The same might be true on the other side of things.
00:18:38
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Those three people might have cancelled their booking for tomorrow.
00:18:41
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So Cadence might update you and say, Hey, Dan, those three people have cancelled.
00:18:45
Speaker
Why don't you stay remote today?
00:18:47
Speaker
And we've just been included and played a key role in two of our largest customers' ESG reports as they've been looking at the environmental impacts of hybrids.
Importance of Hybrid Work Strategies
00:18:56
Speaker
I think one of the big meta themes that's happening in the world right now is this push to optimization and this push to getting more out of what we have.
00:19:07
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And I think that is going to be true of not just teams, but spaces as well.
00:19:13
Speaker
One of our customers has just reduced their real estate by 68%.
00:19:16
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So that's their second largest cost being reduced by 68%.
00:19:23
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And then their first largest cost, their people, they're now coming into the office 25% more regularly than they were
00:19:31
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before.
00:19:31
Speaker
So they've got a 25% increase on how many people are coming to the office regularly.
00:19:35
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So there's this optimization play.
00:19:37
Speaker
And so the investment is helping us to build more intelligent features like that, as well as the obvious expanding our sales and marketing reach as well.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:46
Speaker
And Kat, how did your experience at DeGreed, which from the get-go was a fully remote company, how did your experience impact your perspective on Cadence?
00:19:57
Speaker
First, just the...
00:20:00
Speaker
realities of what is necessary behind working either in a fully remote or a hybrid environment.
00:20:07
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At the heart of that is human connection.
00:20:11
Speaker
If you're fully remote, it only works if you know who's on the other side of that Slack message.
00:20:16
Speaker
I have a tendency to be quite terse in Slack.
00:20:20
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And if you had only met me via Slack, you would find me to be a very different human being than I am when I'm in person, right?
00:20:27
Speaker
Your impression of me.
00:20:27
Speaker
A person who's like, what color is my skirt?
00:20:30
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Exactly.
00:20:32
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My early learnings from degree drove home the reality of working together and working well together, especially requires a deep appreciation for humanity and everything that it means to be humans together.
00:20:48
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The organizations that we sold into ran the gamut from SMB Plus to the largest enterprises across the globe.
00:20:58
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So whether it was 5000 people or 700,000 people, how those people get to know and work and connect with each other is ultimately what determines the product.
00:21:12
Speaker
I was lucky to be in conversations with the most complex global organizations in the world as the pandemic happened.
00:21:21
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And as they decided what they were going to do, very few of them had a remote policy at all, let alone a hybrid policy as things started to come back.
00:21:32
Speaker
And I had endless discussions with these complex, sophisticated, exceptional organizations.
00:21:41
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And none of them had a strategy, let alone a solution that would bring them a strategy.
00:21:48
Speaker
And so as Dan sat down and articulated...
00:21:51
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not just the vision, but the execution they had done to date.
00:21:57
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I heard every single one of those companies articulating their problem to me.
00:22:02
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And I saw the meeting in which Dan is pitching these organizations and bringing them immense relief.
00:22:08
Speaker
Because not only is it a technical tool, but the thought leadership and strategic guidance that Cadence brings alongside that solution is quite magical.
00:22:19
Speaker
Technology in and of itself is rarely the answer.
00:22:23
Speaker
It's technology plus strategy and thought leadership that can enact change.
00:22:27
Speaker
And that's what I see in Dan and his strategy and in the entire team who I've been lucky to meet.
00:22:33
Speaker
And we honestly believe that companies will die if they don't get hybrid, right?
00:22:39
Speaker
Hybrid is the operating system.
00:22:42
Speaker
Whether they know that or not, it's not facilities management.
00:22:46
Speaker
It's not how many square footage are you managing.
00:22:49
Speaker
It is the lifeblood.
00:22:51
Speaker
It is the OS of a company.
00:22:53
Speaker
And we just think that there's this...
00:22:56
Speaker
We call it virtual distance, affinity distance, operational distance and physical distance that happens if you don't get hybrid right.
00:23:03
Speaker
And they contribute to retention issues and inefficiencies like wasted commutes or coming into the office when folks I thought were going to be there aren't there.
00:23:13
Speaker
And if that happens, you're paying more on office space than your competitors are, who are then putting that back into R&D.
00:23:19
Speaker
You're then not performing, you get a discontent.
00:23:22
Speaker
So there's like this domino effect of not getting hybrid right, which is going to be what the bookstores would have felt in the early 2000s when Amazon started eating their lunch.
00:23:31
Speaker
I honestly think that companies that don't get hybrid right just won't survive.
00:23:35
Speaker
And so we feel pretty passionately about that, as you can tell.
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:40
Speaker
So in addition to using Cadence, which everyone should do, Cadence is offering a discount for all our listeners, which is really amazing.
00:23:48
Speaker
So to take advantage of that, just email Dan at dan at cadence.co.
00:23:54
Speaker
That's D-A-N at K-A-D-E-N-C-E.co.
00:24:00
Speaker
And mention this podcast, Perfect Pitch.
00:24:03
Speaker
But in addition to using Cadence, what strategic guidance can you give founders who are setting up their hybrid strategies for work?
00:24:10
Speaker
Can you give them any tips?
00:24:13
Speaker
So I mentioned earlier, I think there's this macro drive towards efficiency right now.
00:24:17
Speaker
And we've got a great company.
00:24:19
Speaker
There's a customer here in the Valley called Mist and Labs.
00:24:21
Speaker
They're a crypto company.
00:24:22
Speaker
They were all remote until January this year.
00:24:25
Speaker
I met with the founder.
00:24:27
Speaker
I said, Hey, how's it going?
00:24:28
Speaker
What are you doing?
00:24:29
Speaker
How's your new year going?
00:24:30
Speaker
He said, It's really great.
00:24:30
Speaker
We're back in the office.
00:24:32
Speaker
I said, oh, interesting.
00:24:33
Speaker
Why are you back in the office?
00:24:34
Speaker
He said, oh, we're making decisions faster.
00:24:37
Speaker
I said, oh, that's really interesting.
00:24:38
Speaker
You're in every day.
00:24:39
Speaker
No, we're not in every day.
00:24:41
Speaker
We're in two, three days a week.
00:24:42
Speaker
We're coming for whiteboarding, for team time, etc.
00:24:46
Speaker
But it's quite challenging.
00:24:47
Speaker
We've got about half the desks, as we do have many people.
00:24:50
Speaker
And I said, oh, really interesting.
00:24:52
Speaker
You should use our tool.
00:24:53
Speaker
And they signed up 24 hours later.
00:24:56
Speaker
So it's knowing what season of work you're in and being able to...
00:25:01
Speaker
choose the right tools for the job that needs to be done.
00:25:06
Speaker
Someone once said, we shape our tools and then our tools will shape us.
00:25:10
Speaker
I think the future of work is going to look awfully like an operating system on a computer to work.
00:25:16
Speaker
Right now, we're recording this on Zoom and
00:25:19
Speaker
The graphics processor is being sent.
00:25:21
Speaker
The video by the operating system and chat on the side and email and Slack messages that we're all trying to ignore on the right hand side are coming through and the CPU is doing that.
00:25:32
Speaker
And so the operating system is sending the right tasks or certain tasks to the right places to get the best outcomes.
00:25:37
Speaker
And we think that should be true of work as well.
00:25:41
Speaker
So we've built this little pyramid that I'd be happy to share with anybody that wanted to get in touch.
00:25:46
Speaker
And the pyramid basically thinks about why am I working?
00:25:50
Speaker
So that's the bottom layer of the pyramid.
00:25:52
Speaker
Why am I working?
00:25:53
Speaker
That's your mission, your vision, your values.
00:25:56
Speaker
The next layer on top of that is what am I working on?
00:26:00
Speaker
That's your OKRs, your tasks.
00:26:02
Speaker
So why am I working?
00:26:04
Speaker
The next building block is what am I working on?
00:26:06
Speaker
And then there's this how layer.
00:26:08
Speaker
We call this the toolkit layer where you've got Slack and Zoom and Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, etc.
00:26:13
Speaker
These are the tools of the trade.
00:26:16
Speaker
It's the HR teams that Kat knows super well that are now becoming the purveyors of the toolkit.
00:26:22
Speaker
Their job is to give the people, the employees, all that they need to do their best work.
00:26:27
Speaker
So why am I working?
00:26:28
Speaker
What am I working on?
00:26:29
Speaker
How am I going to do that work?
00:26:31
Speaker
And then when, where, and who.
00:26:32
Speaker
That's the coordination layer of figuring out when you should be, where, and a bit like the operating systems.
00:26:38
Speaker
So what we say to companies is if you've got heads-up time or you've got a start of a new project, you've got a sales team kickoff, you're trying to land that account, you're building a new website, you've got something that requires creativity, come into the office.
00:26:53
Speaker
There's data now that's showing that if you do those types of meetings face to face, you're going to increase innovation by 15%.
00:26:59
Speaker
The same is true once you know what you're doing, once you've got your task, once you know what you can crack on with.
00:27:08
Speaker
You can do that remote if you're able to.
00:27:09
Speaker
Some people can't if they don't have space remotely and that's fine.
00:27:13
Speaker
But for a number of people, they're going to be able to do that.
00:27:15
Speaker
And so
00:27:16
Speaker
heads up, come on into physical space, get the meta energy off of each other, feed off of that.
00:27:22
Speaker
That will be a competitive advantage for you.
00:27:24
Speaker
But when you've got your to-do lists, crack on, do that at home, do that remotely.
00:27:29
Speaker
If you offer remote as part of your hybrid strategy, then you can also decrease resignations by up to 35%.
00:27:36
Speaker
So regardless of what all the newspapers are spilling ink on, whether it's all remote, whether it's in person or whatever, the truth is...
00:27:45
Speaker
And we're seeing it is that there is this very, very large gray area.
00:27:50
Speaker
And that's where we're encouraging people to discover their cadence.
00:27:54
Speaker
The gray area is messy and requires facilitation.
Complexity of Hybrid Work's Gray Areas
00:28:01
Speaker
Recently, I guess recently, past three years, time is non-existent now since we've been through the pandemic.
00:28:08
Speaker
Dan cited it that we see the press and the news and analysts trying to decide, is it everyone's going to go back in the office?
00:28:19
Speaker
or everyone's going to be remote, which is binary.
00:28:23
Speaker
And that's not the reality that we live in.
00:28:25
Speaker
But why do they do that?
00:28:26
Speaker
It's not because they're not logical or well-intentioned human beings.
00:28:30
Speaker
It's because the nuance in the gray area is hard and it requires facilitation.
00:28:36
Speaker
And that's where Caden steps in is facilitation of that gray area.
00:28:40
Speaker
Because the polarities very rarely work.
00:28:44
Speaker
That's not reality.
00:28:46
Speaker
Instead, we have to find a way to operate within the gray.
00:28:50
Speaker
And that's why I'm so excited about cadence is because life is gray.
00:28:54
Speaker
Life is hybrid.
00:28:56
Speaker
There's days where we need to be home with our kids.
00:28:59
Speaker
Today's a snow day here in Utah.
00:29:01
Speaker
I plan to be in the office.
00:29:02
Speaker
Guess what?
00:29:03
Speaker
Last minute, not there.
00:29:04
Speaker
I had to move some things around.
00:29:06
Speaker
With cadence in play, everyone who was going to go to the office because I was there now knows I'm not.
00:29:14
Speaker
Cadence accounts for the reality of life.
00:29:17
Speaker
And it provides a technical layer on top of that, which then can facilitate consumption of that very complex nature of life, which is what these organizations crave.
00:29:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:32
Speaker
And Dan, you're not getting any other thoughts to add to that.
00:29:35
Speaker
I think this is all about shared intuition.
00:29:38
Speaker
How can you create shared intuition across a team?
00:29:42
Speaker
And then is there a way to map that into tech that enables you to outperform competitors?
00:29:48
Speaker
When was the last time a quarterback threw a ball and the players didn't know exactly where they needed to be or maybe...
00:29:54
Speaker
My team, it happens more regularly than not.
00:29:56
Speaker
But I think this is part of the play of optimization performance is that you've got a quarter of a million dollar employees.
00:30:03
Speaker
You've got six-figure salary, knowledge worker employees that are haphazardly navigating hybrid.
00:30:11
Speaker
And that doesn't happen in any other arena of life.
00:30:15
Speaker
But it's happening in our nine to five or whatever it is these days for knowledge workers.
00:30:20
Speaker
And so the 2010s are all about on demand, right?
00:30:23
Speaker
I want my food.
00:30:24
Speaker
I want my entertainment.
00:30:26
Speaker
I want it on demand.
00:30:27
Speaker
I think the 2020s, now that we're kind of properly hopefully getting into what we would hope the 2020s might be, I think it's a move from on demand to orchestration.
00:30:37
Speaker
It's the things that you want when you want it in the way you wanted it, even if you didn't actually know you wanted it, right?
00:30:46
Speaker
I would like my house to be heated because it's snowing, but I don't want it to be heated because
00:30:53
Speaker
if I'm not going to be there.
00:30:55
Speaker
It's that kind of shared intuition that I think the world is moving towards.
00:30:59
Speaker
And we're seeing that as well with stuff like TTP3 happening right now.
00:31:03
Speaker
I think the intuition part is the big piece to crack to add real, real value.
00:31:09
Speaker
That's fascinating.
00:31:10
Speaker
Kat, what other trends are you noticing in other companies?
00:31:14
Speaker
What the pandemic did for all of us is forced us to embrace the reality that we're human, that we can't cleanly separate our lives from who we are at home, who we are with friends, who we are at work, that instead those things are intertwined, that it's not a work-life balance.
00:31:34
Speaker
It's a work-life blender.
00:31:36
Speaker
that organizations have a part to play in accounting for that blender.
00:31:43
Speaker
That they no longer have the privilege to just assume that employees, as they interact with them, they're only interacting with the work side of that employee.
00:31:57
Speaker
As we led individuals through the pandemic, no matter the size of your organization, if you were a people manager, those one-on-one conversations were not, how's your work coming along?
00:32:11
Speaker
Those one-on-one conversations were, how are you?
00:32:14
Speaker
How's your family?
00:32:16
Speaker
Do you have any loved ones who are in danger?
00:32:18
Speaker
What can we do for you?
00:32:19
Speaker
Are you stuck in a location where we need to get you out?
00:32:24
Speaker
it forced organizations to account for humanity.
00:32:28
Speaker
And we survived that moment.
00:32:34
Speaker
through the very nature of accounting for humanity.
00:32:39
Speaker
And across the board, I think we saw organizations wake up and appreciate that that was something very necessary to empower the individuals and their organizations to create the outputs that are needed for that beautiful, beautiful bottom line, right?
00:32:56
Speaker
That those things are so ingrained and intertwined.
00:33:00
Speaker
But doing that is hard.
00:33:02
Speaker
That's hard to do at small scale.
00:33:04
Speaker
It's exponentially harder to do within the enterprise, but the need remains the same.
00:33:11
Speaker
So how do we empower organizations to account for humanity, to account for the entirety of a human being?
00:33:19
Speaker
We have to bring visibility into it.
00:33:22
Speaker
We have to bring visibility about what it means for that individual to be human, the different parts of the life that they are accounting for, and the moments that we can plug in for them to do their most productive and exciting work.
00:33:38
Speaker
Because research has shown, and McKinsey is my favorite when it comes to future of work research,
00:33:44
Speaker
They say like, if I have passion, if I am fulfilled at work, great things happen.
00:33:51
Speaker
That if you do the employee engagement surveys and everyone is feeling empowered, that tracks right to how well that organization is performing.
00:34:03
Speaker
As we look to the future of what work means and how do we create better organizations and more effective and efficient organizations, we have to account for humanity.
00:34:17
Speaker
We cannot do that simply by being empathetic and one-on-ones.
00:34:20
Speaker
It has to be data-driven and it has to be action-driven on top of it.
00:34:26
Speaker
Some people might be thinking, oh, that sounds fluffy.
00:34:28
Speaker
It's just not fluffy.
00:34:30
Speaker
It saves so many cycles.
00:34:32
Speaker
So a live example would be in my profile on Cadence, it says I'm a family guy, which means that some days up to 8.30am in the morning, I might be doing the school drop.
00:34:43
Speaker
So please don't get gnarly with me if I'm not responding synchronously in Slack.
00:34:49
Speaker
It's kind of like a cue.
00:34:50
Speaker
We had it
00:34:51
Speaker
It's when somebody's family member dies.
00:34:54
Speaker
Where is person X?
00:34:56
Speaker
And if you have the context, which I think Cadence provides, then it just saves you so many CPU cycles of wasting time on needless things.
00:35:05
Speaker
So all of this comes back to alignment.
00:35:08
Speaker
Yeah, I love alignment and you said optimization.
00:35:12
Speaker
And Kat, I love the research you were citing.
00:35:14
Speaker
There's also that study done by Google Project Aristotle where they talk about the psychological safety needed at work.
00:35:20
Speaker
And I think having visibility into how you like to work and when you'll be working, whether it is knowing that you're accounting for you as an entire person helps create that psychological safety, which is a number one driving factor for the success of companies.
00:35:35
Speaker
It's also so critical we talk about diversity and equality and making sure that organizations map to the population.
Empowering Diverse Workforces
00:35:43
Speaker
We see women drop out of the workforce at an alarming rate as they grow their families.
00:35:50
Speaker
My gosh, isn't it like 35% or more?
00:35:54
Speaker
It's alarming.
00:35:55
Speaker
And as you dig into why, it's because the nature in which they work and the moments where they can be productive change.
00:36:03
Speaker
And that's true until we see the burden of management of families become more equal across the partnerships.
00:36:13
Speaker
We have to account for the reality that it can't be butts in seats nine to five, that there will be moments where we are more productive.
00:36:22
Speaker
And as we create and orchestrate that capability, I am excited because it creates an opportunity for women and others who may have dropped out of the workforce because they did not have the ability to do their best work in the manner in which it was available to them.
00:36:43
Speaker
The cadence, now they do.
00:36:45
Speaker
Because I can do school drop-off.
00:36:47
Speaker
My team is aware.
00:36:49
Speaker
They know that I have soccer practice coming up at 4.
00:36:53
Speaker
And they also know that my best work happens from 7 to 9.
00:36:58
Speaker
Right?
00:36:59
Speaker
As that becomes data-driven, and it can be orchestrated and plugged into the broader network of an organization, magic happens.
00:37:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:08
Speaker
And I am no longer in a position where I feel like I have to make a sacrifice.
00:37:14
Speaker
It is either my children or my career.
00:37:18
Speaker
Instead, we blend them in a way that is natural and unique to every individual.
00:37:24
Speaker
So I don't mean to cite women in the workforce as the only example in which that matters.
00:37:30
Speaker
No, it matters individually for everyone because everyone's cadence looks very different.
00:37:37
Speaker
The beauty will come as we orchestrate the cadences of individuals in a manner that's
00:37:44
Speaker
beneficial to the organization at large.
00:37:47
Speaker
The platform for work has changed from the office.
00:37:51
Speaker
The office is now part of that toolkit layer, that place that can help you do your best work.
00:37:55
Speaker
It's no longer the platform.
00:37:57
Speaker
The platform is time.
00:37:59
Speaker
So this is about how you arrange your working week.
00:38:02
Speaker
Going back to the football analogy, right?
00:38:04
Speaker
You don't let your quarterback do the kick, right?
00:38:07
Speaker
You put on a specialist in the same way cat works best seven to nine.
00:38:13
Speaker
that should be encouraged in some way because that's when she's going to be performing at 100% rather than the other way around.
00:38:19
Speaker
So the trick is, is there a way to do that where actually humans flourish as well?
00:38:26
Speaker
And I think if you do hybrid well, it can.
Aligning Work with Life
00:38:30
Speaker
Dan, as we have everybody on this podcast, we like to ask everyone the same question.
00:38:33
Speaker
And that is, what's an effective practice you've implemented in your work or personal life that you think has had a great impact on your success?
00:38:42
Speaker
The single most important thing changes regarding what season we're in.
00:38:49
Speaker
I think there are areas in which when you're fundraising, it's absolutely fine and okay to be stretching, being stretched.
00:39:00
Speaker
to every limit, right?
00:39:02
Speaker
Whether that's hours of the day, whether that is shutting other parts of your life off if you have to, you know, there are seasons of wartime and there are seasons of peacetime.
00:39:12
Speaker
I think one of the tricks to longevity is knowing when you're in a season of peacetime and trying not to turn it into a wartime season if it's not the right season.
00:39:21
Speaker
I think other things kind of practically, we're really good at cadence at having weekends.
00:39:28
Speaker
we're really good at it in terms of Slack is pretty much dead on Saturdays and it's very much dead on Sundays.
00:39:35
Speaker
And so I try and not work at all on Sundays.
00:39:38
Speaker
I'll be checking in and preparing for the week once the kids are in bed on Sunday nights.
00:39:42
Speaker
But
00:39:44
Speaker
Kat sent me a book recently, The Practice of Groundedness.
00:39:47
Speaker
And one of the really great things that stuck out for me was the example of an athlete that instead of taking his strength reps to the extreme and to failure, which is what people tell you to do when you're training, this guy decided to take himself to 85%, 90% every day and then give himself some breathing room.
00:40:07
Speaker
But the difference it made was that he could train every day.
00:40:10
Speaker
Whereas his competitors went to 100% and failed and they could only train three or four times a week.
00:40:15
Speaker
And so these subtle different things, as I think we move seasons from a seasons of excess to now a season of optimization and longevity, I think things like Sabbath are going to become increasingly in vogue as people look to do things over the long term.
00:40:32
Speaker
I love that.
00:40:33
Speaker
Kat, any thoughts on that?
00:40:36
Speaker
I was nodding my head right along, just cheering visually.
00:40:40
Speaker
But I agree that life in general is a marathon, not a sprint.
00:40:48
Speaker
And especially life in a venture-backed startup or a family or anything.
00:40:55
Speaker
You have to find a way to maintain energy and peak performance over the long run.
00:41:03
Speaker
I'm lucky to be coached by Brad Stolberg.
00:41:05
Speaker
And the center of the work that we do together is that how do we maintain excellence through the entirety of our life without exhausting ourselves?
00:41:19
Speaker
And it comes down to...
00:41:22
Speaker
understanding what season you're in, understanding what the moment requires of you, but also what your life requires of you and how those two things need to meet each other.
00:41:35
Speaker
Because if you are repeatedly exhausting yourself, you will injure yourself to the point where you can no longer compete.
00:41:42
Speaker
And that is true both in athletics and it is also true in work.
00:41:46
Speaker
And I think it's true in relationships as well.
00:41:49
Speaker
You have to know yourself and your capacity and how to blend everything together for the sake of longevity.
00:41:59
Speaker
Because excellence happens most often in longevity.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:05
Speaker
And recovery is so hard.
00:42:07
Speaker
So hard.
00:42:08
Speaker
It's so hard in hustle culture.
00:42:10
Speaker
Everybody on Twitter is telling you to work all hours every day, which sometimes it's absolutely right to do.
00:42:16
Speaker
But having that long term mindset is what sets you apart, I think.
00:42:20
Speaker
Thank you so much for that insight.
00:42:21
Speaker
Dan, thank you for being our guest on this podcast today for all that you've offered and all the wisdom and guidance as we entered the future of work.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:42:30
Speaker
It's been a fascinating conversation.
00:42:31
Speaker
I really appreciate it.
00:42:32
Speaker
Dan and Kat, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:42:35
Speaker
Thank you.
00:42:36
Speaker
Great to have you guys and great to be partnering with you.
00:42:39
Speaker
And of course, thank you for listening as we dive deep into what it takes to create the perfect pitch.
00:42:44
Speaker
If you want to learn more about our investor, Kat Kennedy from Kickstart or our CEO, Dan Bladen from Cadence, we'll have a link to the company and a longer bio in our show notes at kickstartfund.com.
00:42:54
Speaker
You can listen to more episodes of Perfect Pitch wherever you listen to your podcast.
00:42:58
Speaker
And if you like what you're learning, leave us a reviewer rating.
00:43:00
Speaker
We'll be back next time with more insights from entrepreneurs and the investors who funded them.
00:43:04
Speaker
So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a thing.
00:43:09
Speaker
I didn't find out not to, I do want to talk about Cadence.
00:43:13
Speaker
Like, I didn't know until I was prom dress shopping.
00:43:17
Speaker
And I said, I just really love the maroon dress.
00:43:20
Speaker
And my mom was like, what maroon dress?
00:43:22
Speaker
There was no maroon dress.
00:43:25
Speaker
And I was like, the maroon dress.
00:43:27
Speaker
No, it was an emerald green.
00:43:30
Speaker
So anyways, let's talk future of work and Cadence.