323: How a Tech Entrepreneur Used Product Thinking to Reinvent Venture Capital with SC Moatti, Founder of Mighty Capital
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So now we're seeing the impact of product as like this really disruptive force where, you know, bringing technology and innovation at scale. It's not about AI. It's not about crypto. It's not about, you know, quantum. It's about how you turn that into business value. We're really seeing product as the, you know, the most important function in business right now.

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're listening. Welcome to AI and the Future of Work, episode 323. I'm your host, Dan Turchin, CEO of PeopleRain, the AI platform for IT and HR employee service.

Our community is growing. Thank you, as always, for listening. If you like what we do, click on the link in the show notes to join our newsletter. You have a chance to interact with the community. And we share some tips and clips that don't always make it into the final show.

And also, of course, if you like what we do, please do us a favor. Tell a friend, give us a like and a rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you leave a comment, I may share it in an upcoming episode like this one from Olivia in Atlanta, who's in tech public relations and listens while working out on her Peloton.

Olivia's favorite episode is that excellent discussion from way back in season one with Charlene Lee, bestselling author of The Disruption Mindset, good friend about leading in the era of AI. Of course, we'll post a link to that one. We learn from AI thought leaders weekly on this show. Of course, the added bonus, you get one AI fun fact each week. Today's fun fact.

Joe Procopio writes in Inc. Online that AI is the death of traditional product management. He argues that if you were a product person sitting in front of JIRA and Confluence and spreadsheets all day, then if you haven't yet been fired, you probably will be soon. The next wave of innovation will come from combining the spirit of entrepreneurship with knowing what people want and how to bring it to them.

that actually will create an opportunity for truly great product people. In a world where AI produces the same product, built on the same code, for the same target market over and over again, we need people who come in and innovate our way out of that death loop. In that world, real product people are even more critical than real software developers,

That's Joe speaking my commentary. Storytelling is a timeless art. It's critical for product innovation because it's how humans find meaning and purpose. Those traits transcend LLMs and really all other types of AI.

Invest in what makes you human and cultivate skills like critical thinking and empathy, and you'll always be valued, whether you're a product manager or in any other role. Of course, we will link to that article in today's show notes. Now shifting to this week's very special conversation.

Today's guest is one of the most dynamic, accomplished, driven people I've ever met. Even by Silicon Valley standards, SC Mawadi is a force of nature. She's a successful venture capitalist who founded Mighty Capital, which invested in PeopleRain. She's also the founder of Products That Count, the global organization for product leaders. SC is a sought-after keynote speaker, a lecturer at Columbia and Stanford Business Schools, and author of the award-winning book, Mobilize.

SE was an instrumental product leader in the early days of mobile at companies like Electronic Arts, Nokia Labs and Facebook.

I'm proud to call SC an investor, a mentor, and most important, a friend. Without further ado, SC, it really is my pleasure to welcome you to AI and the Future of Work. Let's get started by having you share a bit more about that illustrious background and how you got into the space. Hey, Dan. Thank you so much for having me. And it's like a...

such a treat to be able to spend some time with you. You're a busy CEO. You have important customers. You're building an AI product in a revolutionary field. And we're spending an hour together. So I'm going to make the most of it. How's that? I love the sound of that. I would say the same thing back to you. I appreciate you making time for me.

Of course, yes. So my background, I'm going to make it really quick. I was born and raised in Paris, in France, and studied electrical engineering there.

And then I was very much into technology and there was just one place to be, which is Silicon Valley. And so right after my graduation as an electrical engineer, I moved to get my MBA at Stanford. It really changed my life. I became an entrepreneur, a tech entrepreneur, which is what I did for the first decade of my career.

really early in cloud, mobile, like you mentioned, social. I was at Meta in the relatively early days. And then the last 10 years, I've been an investor. I started angel investing in my friends, local entrepreneurs and product managers in Silicon Valley, and then started Mighty Capital seven years ago.

which has been the hardest thing I've done in my life. And I know it's a little bit of a contrarian view to say VCs work hard because you see many of them on their yachts or what have you. But to be able to make a name for yourself, helping entrepreneurs who are so demanding because they are doing something so difficult,

is really a lot of exciting work and it kind of just stays with you over and over again. So very happy to be in this place. We've had a lot of venture capitalists on this podcast and you just said the thing that everyone thinks about but nobody says out loud, which is how hard the business is. Just shed some light on that. Of all the amazing things you've accomplished, why did you make that comment that it's the hardest thing you've ever done?

Well, I will tell you the first thing that comes to mind is the mindset, right? The job of an investor is to protect and make money. And it's a misconception to think VC wants this, that, and the other. They're actually really simple. Make me money and I'll be happy.

What it means is that we're in the business of managing risk, which means that most of the time we say no to people who are all working hard to change the world. And to give you a sense, and that's also going to say how special People Reign is, we get 9,000 entrepreneurs every year coming to Mighty Capital saying, I need money to scale my business.

And we end up meeting in person with maybe five, six hundred of them and investing in five or six of them. And I know that from the outside, it's always unpleasant to get a rejection. But I also will say it from the inside, having to say no because of risk, it's really hard. It's a lot of work and it's exhausting.

That's one aspect which is maybe more psychological aspect of mindset. The second thing is the work itself, the day to day work itself as you mature as an investor is really demanding because you're constantly switching context. So when you and I first met, we were in the mode of deciding whether we were gonna underwrite you. So there's a lot of that due diligence and risk management.

Once we do that, we completely flip and say, now our money is in there. We got to do everything we can to make you successful. And so it's trying to brainstorm without obviously being a backseat driver on what is going to help an early stage company. And then you imagine three years down the road, you're going to be in a completely different stage. People are going to have many offices, dozens of clients, maybe hundreds, depending on the rapidity of your growth.

Then we'll be asking ourselves the question of, okay, who could buy this company or maybe is this company going to go public? What kind of support can I offer at this stage?

So that's over time. Now, you imagine we have a portfolio and like Monday morning, I'm talking to you, Dan, about growing and exciting challenges. Monday afternoon, I'm talking to an entrepreneur who's going through an exit and it's like I'm switching context. And then Tuesday morning, I'm talking to five entrepreneurs who are pitching. And then I'm talking Tuesday afternoon to my own investors who demand accountability. And the level of context switching is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

And so that's what makes the job, I think, difficult in a surprising way. What endeared me to Mighty Capital from the earliest days when you and Jennifer and I met is that you run Mighty Capital like it's a product company. Everything was systematized and automated. And in an era when the numbers are not in our favor as entrepreneurs, so you do get comfortable with rejection and being ghosted, it didn't happen.

And obviously, this is a healthy relationship. We decided to partner and that was wonderful. But I was so impressed that what it meant to bring a product person's rigorous discipline to a venture capital firm. Maybe I would love for the audience to get to know how you think about building mighty capital that maybe is different from what everyone has come to think they know about venture capital. So coming from tech, I thought

I better have something unique, right? Because every tech product, people are being one of the best ones, right? Every tech product is totally unique and it has this feature or it has that element that is making it completely unique in the market. As a venture capitalist, your product is money. So the biggest question is like, why would I go there when I have a commodity product?

So our first thing was, can Mighty Capital create something unique out of something that's a commodity, which is why we would not be in business without products that count, that massive community of half a million people. And we'll talk about how that's valuable to our portfolio. But essentially, it's saying, like, let's try to change the color of that money, make it brighter and more interesting.

So that's kind of how we started Mighty Capital. And then we realized what you're saying, which is as we were doing product discovery, understanding the needs of our clients, entrepreneurs, we asked, what are the number one or two things you expect from your venture capitalist? And the answer is, the number one answer was take meetings on time. And the second was

follow up after a meeting. Like, yeah, we can do that too. But, you know, if you think about it, we started with the expectation that we had to deliver like right up there. And we found out that the average bar was actually like so low.

Which means, you know, it gave us a lot of confidence in this market, like looking at venture capital as a product that we could not just carve out a spot, but essentially create a dominant position in a market that is so broken and so ready for disruption. And so...

To give you a bit of insights into where Mighty Capital is at today, we're a seven-year-old company. And in venture terms, seven is just one-year-old tech. It's kind of the reverse dog years or whatever you call it. Seven years old is like baby step.

And so we've played a game that's very much like a David versus Goliath game, right? Like, how can we beat David and win a few deals and, you know, kind of put the big old dinosaurs to shame? And now that we've been very successful at it, we're looking a little bit more like a little bit more like a Goliath. We're still a tiny, tiny one.

but we have to be a much better looking Goliath, right? So it's applying that product thinking to it. And so what does a better looking Goliath comes in? It comes into what makes a great product, right? And you're put at the beginning, PMs, product management is dead, long-lived product management. It's exactly that, right? The fundamentals of what makes a great product are still the same, right? It's like understanding a customer need that's unmet,

And then applying a growth mindset to it of constant learning and constant iteration and experimentation. And then once you find them something that works, do more of it, right? So doing this at scale so that you don't stay small. So we're applying that to ourselves, but we're also really investing in companies that do exactly that, like here is like PeopleRain. Your diligence process is...

legendary and how thorough it is. And when I was on the other side of it and we decided to partner, I learned a lot from you and from the team about what goes on as part of that process during the vetting. Maybe if you wouldn't mind sharing with the audience a few of the secrets and what you look for in kind of transcending companies.

I hope that's, and I know with you it's said in a good way. Due diligence is essentially our job. It's doing that discovery. And we ask ourselves three questions.

about the team. Is it a high performing team? We have to have the highest level of conviction in the team. And you and I share that because the business you're building is a people business, right? People reign. I mean, the name is just like sums it all. Without that, there's nothing. Number two is the traction. There's a lot of ways to raise money.

And venture capital is the most expensive one of them. So it means that if you're going to be an entrepreneur that decides they want to raise venture capital, you have to be incredibly ambitious so that you can pay back essentially the price you pay for that investment and make money for yourself, your employees, your investors. And then number three is the terms.

We, you know, when we enter, when we make an investment, we enter into generally a 10-year relationship. That's way longer than any marriage. And so it has to be based on fairness. It cannot be, you know, like a tit-for-tat type mentality. So we look at those three criteria. And most of the time, what happens is when you have a great team, right, that's the non-negotiable.

you either have amazing traction and then a really high valuation or the opposite, right? So the trade-off, if you think of it as a triangle, right? Again, like product thinking is kind of like this, right? You get two out of three

And then there are rare occasions where you kind of get a really great triangle. That's essentially what we're looking for, right? That balance. Once we find that triangle, then we ask ourselves, can we be like the best champion, like the best investor that entrepreneur is ever going to get?

It doesn't mean that the nicest, it means the one that is going to help you the most, as in stretch you, make you the most successful while respecting why you do what you do. And we work with serial entrepreneurs. They're so clear, like you are, right? So clear on how they want to change the world. That's how we think of due diligence. And I certainly mean it as a compliment because I really did feel like I got stronger as an entrepreneur.

getting to know your team and your philosophy and meeting other portfolio companies. And this is not an advertisement, by the way, from ID Capital. You did not ask me to say any of this. But in fact, that transcended when we decided to partner because from day minus one, you were the first one to say, hey, we also have this community of a half a million product leaders. Let's talk about some of the ways that that could benefit

people reign and i know from knowing you as a person that another hundred percent of sc's energy and and passion and commitment goes into building that community maybe talk about the founding vision for products account what it is of course but the founding vision and and uh and how organizations like people rain can can leverage it yes yes for sure um

With product second, you have to go back like 10 years in the product management history where it was very much an emerging profession and function. And a lot of times the discussions were, wow, we're the quote-unquote good citizens of larger organizations. We try to do what's right. We try to bring innovation at scale. We don't really have

control right because we were peers to engineers designers marketers sales people so we really have to lead by influence and there was no degree there was no really set of best practices and so price account started exactly that way it's like we were a number of product managers product leaders in silicon valley saying let's you know collaborate let's share best practices

And that's essentially what Product Second was at the beginning. And I remember because I was still at Meta when I started the organization, and then I was really excited about it. But you have to picture, like it was dinners, meetups, a few interviews on a podcast show that had very limited reach. And I left Facebook to do that and do some other things. And people were looking at me like,

You left an amazing place to do what? Anyways, products that count was on fairly slow growth the first few years.

where we expanded the community. It's incorporated as a nonprofit by design because I didn't want it to be about making money. I wanted it to be about helping everyone build great products. It's very mission driven. It's very giving back and being generous, all of us in product being generous with our time and our expertise. And then really it took off shortly before and then during COVID. Because all of a sudden,

All the companies that were going through digital transformations had this wake-up call like, I need to transform digitally, otherwise I will die. And they all created product teams. And they all hired product leaders. And all of a sudden, they saw their digital transformation accelerate, succeed, be more exciting. And from there...

products had such a strong importance on the key KPI of organizations. The role of product has now reached the C-suite. And so the research that ProductSecCamp produces shows that in 2020, 3% of the Fortune 1000 had a chief product officer. And that number is 304. And now that number is 40% in 2024. So it's like 10X in about three years.

And in the last two years, we started researching what happens to these chief product officers. And it turns out they get promoted to president and CEO faster than any other role in the C-suite. So we asked ourselves, why is that? We looked at public market data and we found out that companies that are product-led or have a chief product officer, they outperform their peers.

And it's also true in the Mighty Capital portfolio. So now we're seeing the impact of product as like this really disruptive force where, you know, bringing technology and innovation at scale. It's not about AI. It's not about crypto. It's not about, you know, quantum. It's about how you turn that into business value. We're really seeing product as the most important function in business right now.

So over the three decades or so that both you and I have been in kind of tech product circles, I'd say we've seen, to your point, to the data, the rise of the importance of product management. And now, like I alluded to in the opener,

A lot of product managers are feeling destabilized, victims of our own success, perhaps, that the tools of our creation may be rising up. Not to over-dramatize it, but I got to ask you, what is the community thinking about the role of the product manager in an AI-first world?

You're 100% correct and it's not dramatic. It's absolutely true. There's a huge amount of angst in the product community. Now, let's be clear. The product management function is not going away. It's just being reinvented yet again. The question is how, right? And so product people are hypersensitive to innovation. They're already thinking, I want to be on the other side of that discovery process. I want to know the answer.

So there's a couple of things that I can share based on observations from the community, based on my own experience. First of all, if you're relatively early in your career,

My recommendation is, and you want to build a career in product, my recommendation is study some hard science. It doesn't have to be engineering. It can be like finance or economics, but something that's measurable. Because early in your career as a product manager or also as an entrepreneur, you want to demonstrate very easy-to-measure outcomes. I improved growth by X. I drove engagement by Y. I reduced cost by Z. And then plan every...

you know, maybe three to five years to reinvent yourself. So right now we're in the AI phase. We have to reinvent ourselves. So let me give you an example from the previous era. Right. But you take Google as a good example. Before Google, a lot of folks were graduating from high school, college, and they were going to become librarian, which means they were going to perform the work of searching for knowledge.

They would master which book was on which shelf, and that was an important role.

And then Google came and sort of replaced that role. But the people who had the same sort of potential in their life, now they're no longer librarians. They become digital marketers because the tool that is the tool of their generation is Google and not the search product. The search product is something everybody uses, but the digital marketing product that is the industry they created.

And so if you kind of do the parallel with AI, you're looking at open AI and you say, oh, it's going to take over the job of a junior PM. Well, probably, but it doesn't mean that there's not going to be junior PMs anymore. They're just going to do a completely different kind of job, which is use whatever new tool the industry is going to be creating. So the point being, if you're a junior PM now, you have to use

AI-enabled tools. PeopleRain being one of them, of course, but there's a lot of really great tools. And you have to become a master of the tool of your generation so that you can progress in your career. So I think that's a lot of what's happening at the ground level with PMs. At the executive level, there's definitely a reaction to these signals where we're seeing a lot of chief product officers, VP products, allocate

massive budgets to upskilling, to really focusing on their people.

to make them kind of go through the transition. So pioneering companies started doing that in 2024, including Walmart and Ford, who are really embracing those transformations. I think in 2025, there's going to be even more of an adoption because we're going to go from market leader, right? I want to be at the tip of the spear to now market follower. Like if I don't do it, I'm not going to survive, right? So it's going to go from carrot to stick.

A while back, we had this great conversation on this podcast with a mutual friend of ours, Denise Hemke, a great product leader. And we spent most of the episode talking about the humanness that goes into building great products, that it's so much more than Jira stories and a backlog and release management. Like, no, that's really not what product people do.

So now faced with this, I'll put in air quotes, threat, more of an opportunity, I think, from AI, what's the coaching that you give to maybe early in their career or even mature in their career product leaders who are wondering how they coexist or how they may even get better by partnering with AI?

Yes, yes. That's the key. We talked about how product is becoming a function that moves like financial performance and top-level KPIs. And so when you look at those top-level KPIs, there's really just like three things you can do. You can increase revenue.

decrease costs and improve productivity, right? That's like at a high level. And so for any PM, what I would say is look at the technology of AI as like, how is that going to decrease costs? How is that going to improve productivity? How is that going to drive more revenue? Now, break down those problems like the decreased costs tends to be

very incremental. I'll take the example of, say, like Pixar, for example, which I think is a prime candidate for disruption by AI, right? So Pixar has a bunch of graphic designers, and they're going to start using an AI product to animate their characters much faster.

The truth is that's a relatively incremental problem because there's already a lot of these tools that speed that up. Plus, honestly, Adobe may not yet have these features, but they will, and they already own that territory. And that's true for most of those cost optimization problems because the previous software eras have sort of taken care of those simple problems.

What AI can take care of is the bigger problem of productivity. So in the example of Pixar, it would be the job of a producer orchestrating the different functions like an engineer and a QA and a designer and so on to produce a game or a movie. That is really difficult to do for the previous era of software, but it's a problem that can be solved with what we call today agentic AI. It's really a complex problem.

So as a PM, this is the type of problems you want to really focus on because that's something only AI can solve.

And then lastly, there's another type of problem, which is the revenue problem. In the case of Pixar, it would be something like right now, the movie business model is I go buy a ticket or I get a subscription for streaming and I'm given content. But in fact, like ISE, I love Brad Pitt and I love Marilyn Monroe and I have 10 minutes and I want a happy ending. Give me my movie, right? So all of a sudden, it's a totally different business model.

And I just made that up. I don't know if that's actually relevant. But some product people will tackle these types of business model transformation. I think we're not seeing that yet, but those will be coming. And so as a PM, I would focus on the productivity and the revenue problems, less so on the cost ones. One of the biggest differences of taking product to market in an AI-first world is that whereas before, software was deterministic.

And the role of the product manager was you could build a feature, a UX, a widget, whatever it is, and know exactly what it was going to do every time. And now in AI, we're writing software that writes software. It makes decisions that might have unintended consequences. So we talk a lot in this podcast about the ethics or how to practice responsible AI.

How should product people think about maybe the unintended consequences? Because as we all know, these systems don't always go down the happy path. Is the product person, the one who gives birth to the product, responsible for maybe some of the downstream impact that the products that are making these automated decisions could have? That's awesome. Awesome insights. Then the number one topic of conversation with the C-level audience is exactly that.

because they're frontline, right? If something goes wrong, it's their head, ethics, trust. And the theme that's coming up, I will say so far, I don't think there's a very clear answer. There's more fear and understanding that this is a massive need from a customer standpoint. One of the answers is better data.

garbage in, garbage out in an AI. And so better data is in a defensive way, more security, more governance, kind of zero trust, things like that. And then offense, understanding new product lines, new revenue models that can be monetized, essentially as a reaction to the fear that OpenAI is going to steal all my content. And so

And so I don't want them to sell my content. And I do want to be able to have an offering that could possibly compete with them. That's definitely a massive theme. The second thing is, when people think about those fears like your privacy and such,

I would recommend to translate them into very specific risks because especially when product posts, you have conversations with customers like, okay, the fear, like let's narrow it down to what is the fear? What are we afraid of? Therefore, what is the risk? So if you take privacy, for example, generally it comes down to three topics, right? Fear of like, like,

Individual identity theft, like a person stealing your identity. We're very clear that we don't want that. So you want to protect against it. Corporation, what happens if corporations use our data? We don't like to say it, but most of the time we're okay with that. We like free products sponsored by an ad over a paid product and

and so on. And then the third entity, individual customer is government. And there we generally have a very kind of ambiguous answer because obviously nobody wants big brother. We know the consequences of that. But also when we look at how we protect our borders, it's really rudimentary, right? It's like color of skin, age, race, gender, as opposed to

Things that with AI or honestly with any technology could be a lot more in our control. Is this person talking on the phone with terrorists? Or are there characteristics that an AI could come up with that would flag them as a risk based on way more criteria than those very rudimentary ones? So that's kind of how I would think about ethics and trust.

But I also do think that in 2025, there's going to be more experimentation around that. Really good perspective. I see. I let this one go way over time because it's hard to not forget that we're not just two friends having a coffee and biscotti. But I'm not letting you off the hot seat without answering one last important question for me.

You've kind of seen the future because you invest in it like every day. If you were to look at the themes in your portfolio, what you're investing in and project out, you know, SC and Dan are back in a decade. It's 2035 and we're having a version of this conversation. It's actually the end of 2024 right now, but the end of 2034. And we're having a version of this conversation. What has changed about the world that is just like commonplace then, but right now seems like science fiction?

I think a few things, like what are the key problems that have not yet been resolved that AI could solve?

One of them, I think, is drug discovery. One of our portfolio companies is trying to do that. Another one of them is autonomous driving. We do have right now some point-to-point Waymos in San Francisco, and it's fun. But if you put two Waymos in front of one another, the system does not compute very well, and AI can solve for something like that.

Another one is, I mentioned earlier, like media. I think we're going to see a completely different form of entertainment, media, social gaming. That's going to be very disrupted. And then loneliness, I think, will be a problem that AI can solve.

Where I see that, and this is part of why we're so excited about People Reign, is also solving for, I recall, solving for freedom. Humanity is working and performing tasks that it shouldn't, that should be done by machines.

And giving people their time back, I think, is going to be one of the major accomplishments of AI in the next 10, 20 years. And you'll be a part of this. You'll definitely be making a massive contribution to this change.

I jotted that one down. I'm going to reuse it with attribution, solving for freedom. I like that. I was going to say, I have a couple of questions for you, Dan. Of course. Are you kidding? Turn the mic. So let me do that. You know, we invest mostly in serial entrepreneurs.

But I'm curious with your experience starting so many companies, what advice would you have for first time or serial entrepreneurs who are trying to do what you've been doing, which is start a successful AI business? I get asked a lot from first time entrepreneurs whether or not they should start a company.

And I say it's a silly question. You know, the time to start a company is when you can't not start that company. Every waking hour is consumed by that. The problem, the thing that is broken, the thing that you're passionate, the thing that needs your attention. When it's just like that siren song, you just hear it. You can't ignore it. You have to do it. That's when you start the company. And so the question is never, can I raise the money? Can I hire people? Can I dot, dot, dot? No, it's

Can you solve a problem uniquely that you're so passionate about that you can't be on this planet and not solve? That's what my advice is. It's like the world is different. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah. So I think if you don't have that conviction, it may be better to help someone else build a company or invest in other companies to do something else. But when you can't not start the company, do it because you have to. I love that.

And one of the things that we absolutely love about you and PeopleRain is you're doing that in a way that's capital efficient. And we love that because what it creates is a situation where everybody wins. Maybe share some of your learnings, your best practices, advice for others. Yeah, you've heard me say frequently, our only currency at PeopleRain is customer value.

And so the team's myopic focus is just how fast can we create the maximum amount of customer value? And if you exclusively see the world, your company, your team, your customer through the lens of how can I create more value for you faster, it leads to a very different way of capitalizing a company.

Because every decision that you make, you're thinking about what's the incremental amount of value, the return on value, or the return of value that I can get on this investment. And so I find that you certainly know how we run PeopleRain. We're always asking the question, what can we do today to give another employee, two employees, eventually a billion employees, back four to six hours of productive time per day? And it turns out that's not directly correlated. In fact, I'd say it's

anti-correlated with the number of marketing dollars that we spend or how many emails we send. Because all we need to do is understand at a visceral level who needs what we're building. And it turns out, you know, if we just have authentic conversations and find the people who are ready to embrace, you know, the future of work, you know, a technology that really embraces

what humans can do at work and celebrates, you know, work as the, you know, the pinnacle of what we were put on the planet to do, then you can be so specific that, you know, your target, you say your ICP, your ideal customer profile, they'll come to you. They'll seek you out because you made it very clear who you are and what you do. And I really believe that that's the secret to building a capital efficient company. Yeah. So it's like work as a contribution as opposed to kind of a checklist, right? I really like that.

Maybe one more thing, which is your company grew 600% since we invested, so in about a year, which is incredibly impressive.

what's the secret sauce? Like how can other people accomplish and achieve the same fantastic results? Thank you for mentioning that, by the way. Well, of course, it goes without saying, great partners, great investors who believe in our vision. That's table stakes. I'll say something that's going to sound like a cliche, but I think you know me well enough. You know, it really is. It really is genuine. I say it with or without the mic on. My only job is to create a safe place where everyone on my team can do the best work of their life.

We call ourselves the rain train. When I look every member of the rain train in the eyes and I say, people, it's the last job you'll ever have to have. You do what I know you're capable of doing. I'm going to do what I believe you need me to do to make you exceed even what you can do in your wildest imagination. I'm only going to keep pushing you because I know what you're capable of and I want you to push me back.

And when we create that environment, that flywheel effect where we love working together because we're all aligned by a common passion. And every day, it's nice to be able to point to a 600% growth number and things like that. The financial benefits are there, but

Knowing that everyone on the team is motivated by truly delivering more value and changing the world of work, that's something that that mission is actually bigger than the financial returns. I think that, again, a bunch of cliches, but

But if you live your values, if you're very clear day in and day out about why you exist, what problem you're solving, who you're solving it for, and you just come into work every day and you myopically focus on doing more of that thing that the world is responding well to, you're bound to be successful. And perhaps way more than 600% in a year. And we're certainly still just getting started. But I think that creating that culture and that visceral appreciation of what it is that we're doing to make an impact, I think that's the secret.

Love it. Essie, this has been so much fun. Thanks for hanging out. And thanks for turning the mic. Always happy to share my thoughts. I always learn from you. And likewise. So where can the audience learn more about you, Mighty Capital, Products that Count?

Yeah, so Mighty Capital, mighty.capital, no.com, products.count, products.count.org, a nonprofit. And then you can also email me or connect with me on LinkedIn. My email is sc at mighty.capital. Excellent. Thanks for hanging out.

Have a great day. Okay, we'll have you back soon, okay? You have an open invite. That is all the time we have for this week on AI and the future of work. As always, I'm your host, Dan Turchin from PeopleRain. And of course, we're back next week with another fascinating guest.