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Why do so many executive hires fail, and how do you spot a bad hire before you make the offer? Brad Stadler, co-founder of True Search, has spent 25 years in executive search placing CEOs, CFOs and leadership teams at venture-backed and growth companies, and in this episode he explains what is broken in executive recruiting and how founders, CEOs and boards should hire leaders today. Brad started as an auditor at Arthur Andersen, went on only two job interviews in his life, and moved into executive search at Howard Fischer Associates and Heidrick & Struggles, where Netflix was one of his clients. He then co-founded True Search, an executive search firm and talent platform. Host Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix and an expert in culture and talent strategy, asks him how search firms really work, how True pays its people differently, why he stopped doing searches himself, and how AI is changing what makes a great executive. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN How an accountant who never planned it ended up in executive searchWhy executive search felt superficial for so long, and what True set out to changeHow compensation inside search firms really works, and why True made it transparentWhat you can't fix when you hire someone: the baggage they bringWhy the "three-time CFO who took a company public" is often the wrong hireHow True uses data from the last 20 similar hires to set realistic expectationsWhy founders who don't make recruiting their top priority loseThe signs in an offer process that say you should walk awayWhy "there's no opportunity in certainty"CHAPTERS 0:00 Trailer 0:42 Truth Works intro 1:30 Welcome and introduction 3:39 From Arthur Andersen auditor to executive search 6:54 Two interviews in a whole career 8:39 Leaving to build a firm 12:24 What was broken in executive search 14:19 Netflix: the client who got it 16:24 How superficial the industry was 20:19 Starting True Search 22:09 How compensation really works in search firms 24:14 The baggage new hires bring 26:24 Building True differently 29:39 Why he stopped doing searches 30:54 What makes a great executive is changing 33:14 Hiring with data, not anecdotes 36:54 Recruiting must be the founder's top priority 40:44 Hiring CEOs: beyond checking boxes 42:54 When to walk away from a candidate 48:24 There's no opportunity in certainty ABOUT THE GUEST Brad Stadler is co-founder of True Search, an executive search firm and talent platform working with venture-backed and growth companies. He previously worked at Heidrick & Struggles and Howard Fischer Associates, and began his career at Arthur Andersen. ABOUT THE SHOW Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal. Each episode is an honest conversation about why work is hard and how leaders can make it better. #TruthWorks #ExecutiveSearch #Hiring #Leadership #Recruiting #Founders #Netflix #TalentStrategy

Why do we keep sitting in meetings we know are a waste of time? And why do 75% of employees say AI makes them more productive while only 13% say their company sees real value? Dr. Rebecca Hinds has studied both. She leads the Work AI Institute at Glean, holds a PhD from Stanford, and wrote the USA TODAY bestseller Your Best Meeting Ever. In this episode of Truth Works, host Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, asks her what actually fixes meetings, why AI is not showing up in company results, and what leaders should do about both. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Why a packed calendar became a status symbolThe 4D CEO test for deciding if a meeting should existWhy there is no conclusive evidence that agendas improve meetingsThe 27-minute meeting and the calendar cleanseWhy two productive people with AI can make the whole system worse"Botsitting": the 6.5 hours a week workers spend supervising AIWhy copying NVIDIA's management style is dangerousWhat the best CHROs are doing first on AICHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 0:27 Welcome to Truth Works 1:06 Introducing Dr. Rebecca Hinds 2:36 From Stanford swimmer to studying how organizations work 5:38 Why we can't stop having bad meetings 7:25 Meetings as a status symbol 9:24 What Netflix tried 10:39 Treat meetings like a product 13:10 The 4D CEO test 15:43 The truth about agendas 18:25 Parkinson's Law and the 27-minute meeting 21:09 What to do tomorrow: the calendar cleanse 23:57 If you don't own the meeting 27:23 The AI productivity gap 29:42 The hamster wheel of AI slop 31:22 Redesign the work, don't layer AI on top 35:52 Everyone is a manager now: delegating to agents 38:18 Good friction and where not to use AI 40:44 Flattening, layoffs and regret 45:15 Why what works for NVIDIA won't work for you 46:14 Advice for the CHRO 49:59 One thing to take into your week ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Rebecca Hinds leads the Work AI Institute at Glean and previously founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana. She is the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. ABOUT THE SHOW Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal. Each episode is an honest conversation about why work is hard and how leaders can make it better. #TruthWorks #Leadership #Meetings #FutureOfWork #AI #CHRO

Nate Sokolić started and sold companies in college, spent three years in executive search at Russell Reynolds, then led the firm's AI strategy, where he brought Findem in and rolled it out globally. He now works at Findem, helping HR leaders and talent teams adopt AI. Shane Driggers has spent close to 30 years in human resources, starting in Bay Area startups during the dot-com boom and most recently serving as Chief Talent Officer at T-Mobile. He now advises growth-stage companies. Most companies are already using AI. Employees report that they feel more productive, and budgets for tools and tokens keep climbing. Yet very few leaders can point to the result in product innovation or revenue. Nate and Shane argue that the problem is rarely the technology. Companies are adding AI on top of workflows and org structures that were designed for a different era, and they are letting the tools set the strategy instead of starting with the problem they want to solve. In this episode, Jessica sits down with both of them to talk about what it takes to make AI deliver measurable outcomes, why the people function has one of the biggest opportunities in the business right now, and how recruiting is changing from searching keyword profiles to getting verified, finished work back from AI agents. In this conversation, Jessica, Nate and Shane discuss topics such as: ◼️ Why "tech wags the tail of strategy" and how that derails AI programs ◼️ Why employees feel more productive while the business sees no gain ◼️ How to redesign work from a blank page instead of rebuilding the past ◼️ Why AI is creating a new wave of tech debt inside large companies ◼️ How to decide which work should be human-led and which should be AI-led ◼️ Why HR leaders must be human thinkers, business thinkers and systems thinkers at once ◼️ How the CHRO role quietly became the company's chief AI strategist ◼️ Why the best AI adoption starts small, proves ROI, then expands year by year ◼️ How recruiters can search for real experience, like a CFO who has taken a company public ◼️ Why shifting from SaaS tools to AI agents changes how companies buy and use software ◼️ How Findem Studio produces market maps, succession plans and talent inflow/outflow reports ◼️ Why every AI output needs to show its work before a leader can trust it ◼️ Why transparency is the most valuable currency a leader has in an anxious workplace This episode is sponsored by Findem. Findem is the AI infrastructure for people decisions. Its People Intelligence platform turns fragmented people data into context teams and AI can reason over, and act on. The 3D People Graph connects billions of data points across individuals, companies, and time. Expert labeling translates that data into consistent, evidence-backed signals about experience, capabilities, and relationships, with explainability behind every insight so teams can act with confidence. Findem's agents and enterprise applications run on this foundation, and partners can build on this infrastructure and bring the same intelligence into their own products. Findem is trusted by FedEx, Intuit, Nutanix, and Emirates. Learn more about Findem: https://www.findem.ai/platform Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, bringing honest conversations with the leaders shaping the future of work.

Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, explains how Legora became the fastest company in history to grow from $1M to over $100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), in 21 months. He joins Truth Works hosts Jessica Neal and Peter Clark live from Legora's office. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WHO IS MAX JUNESTRAND? Max Junestrand is the 27-year-old Swedish co-founder and CEO of Legora, an AI platform for lawyers, law firms and in-house legal teams. He studied computer science and business, worked at two Y Combinator startups, and is not a lawyer. WHAT IS LEGORA? Legora is a legal AI company founded in Stockholm, Sweden and backed by Y Combinator. It helps lawyers review contracts, research case law and draft legal work. Legora serves some of the largest legal institutions in the world across Europe, the UK and the US, employs 900 people, and acquired five companies in 2026. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ HOW LEGORA STARTED - Founded in 2020 by a psychologist, an engineer, a physicist and a lawyer - Max joined in 2023, after the release of ChatGPT - Started with €50,000 in angel funding before Y Combinator - Rejected by Y Combinator once, accepted on the second application - Built inside Mannheimer Swartling, the largest law firm in the Nordics, for nine months Before Legora, Max applied to 400 jobs and got two interviews. Both rejected him. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ HOW LEGORA HIRES AND SCALES - Headcount grew from 250 to 900 people in one year - 0.3% of applicants receive an offer - Max personally interviews every director-level hire - Recruiting is treated as a privilege, not an obligation - Performance reviews use a 1–5 scale with direct feedback - The company is office-first with almost no remote work ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ KEY FACTS FROM THIS EPISODE - $1M to $100M+ ARR in 21 months - A contract review estimated at $44M was completed in 4 days - A third-party study found Legora helps lawyers catch missed errors in 71% of cases - Legora builds for where AI models will be in 3–6 months ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS EPISODE → How did Legora grow so fast? → Why did Legora's team move into a law firm? → How do you hire at scale without lowering the bar? → How do you give hard feedback in a culture that avoids it? → How do you build one culture across Stockholm, London and New York? → Why is it becoming unethical not to use AI in legal work? → How will AI change the work of lawyers in the next two years? → Can legal AI improve access to justice? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ "You can just do things. You can be a little bit unreasonable in your ambitions." — Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABOUT TRUTH WORKS Truth Works is a podcast about building companies and the people behind them. Hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, and co-host Peter Clark. Legora: legora.com Legora careers: legora.com/careers Sponsored by Manifest Law, the AI-native immigration law firm. #Legora #MaxJunestrand #LegalAI #AIforLawyers #YCombinator #StartupGrowth #Hiring #TruthWorks #JessicaNeal

Marcus Buckingham has spent more than 25 years studying what makes people extraordinary at work, and his newest research points to a word most businesses are too nervous to use: love. In this episode of Truth Works, host Jessica Neal sits down with the co-creator of StrengthsFinder and author of First, Break All the Rules to talk about why Net Promoter Score barely predicts anything, why not one of the world's top business schools teaches the most powerful force in business, and how even a Netflix-level performance culture can accidentally train its best people to feel afraid. Marcus traces his own fascination with talent back to a UK brewery with two thousand pubs, the unlikely origin of Gallup's decades of research into what separates great performers from everyone else. He walks through the "five feelings," control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, and growth, that decide whether a customer or an employee ever ends up loving a company, and why skipping the order backfires every time. The conversation also gets personal: what Marcus calls "red threads," the parts of a job someone loves for no explainable reason, why no one else can spot yours for you, and what happens when AI starts writing your performance review before you have said a word to it. Marcus closes with the idea he calls mover and maker, that every person is, whether they notice it or not, making an experience for someone else in every single interaction. Guest: Marcus Buckingham, researcher and author of First, Break All the Rules, Nine Lies About Work, and Love + Work Host: Jessica Neal Subscribe to Truth Works for more conversations on leadership, culture, and what actually makes people great at work. #TruthWorks #MarcusBuckingham #Leadership #Netflix #WorkCulture

Alix and Marta were the people who had to make Netflix's culture work outside America. Alix moved from the US to build the Amsterdam office and Netflix's European headquarters from a handful of desks; Marta, a Venezuelan-born recruiter who had just scaled Booking.com from 5,000 to 15,000 people, read the Netflix culture deck and assumed it was "American BS" until she flew in to interview and find out. Together they built the HR function for EMEA during the company's fastest international expansion. In this episode of Truth Works, Jessica Neal and Patty McCord sit down with both of them to talk about what happened when a Silicon Valley operating system met European labor law, "work to live" and a workforce that expected HR to keep the peace. We get into: - Why the culture deck was never a values poster: it was the practical rulebook for how you behaved or got fired - The first time "adequate performance gets a generous severance" was said out loud in Europe, and the reaction it got - Alix's first real piece of constructive feedback, delivered to a senior male executive with Patty sitting in the room - Being "too American": the well-intended US executives who piled onto EMEA and stalled local agency for years - Why the fix was slowing down and explaining behaviour with examples rather than pushing harder - Same destination, different path: how Amsterdam, Tokyo, India, Silicon Valley and Hollywood each got there differently - The people who wanted Netflix to admit the culture didn't scale, and why it did - Whether European regulation is holding back the continent's startup ecosystem, and why Spotify is the exception - Why culture change fails unless the founder or CEO personally drives it - Their consulting firm, two years in, and why they refuse to sell the beautiful transformation deck - Why every consultant is now an "AI transformation expert" and nobody knows the future of work Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix. This episode is sponsored by Manifest Law, the AI-native immigration law firm.

Eric Partaker built Skype's early business team into a multi-billion-dollar exit — then had a heart attack at 35,000 feet from years of 80-100 hour weeks. He rebuilt his entire approach to work around one method, and now coaches CEOs on it worldwide. In this episode, Jessica Neal talks to Eric about his new book Ultra Productive and the science behind doing more by doing less. In this episode: 1. The heart attack at 35,000 feet and the days leading up to it 2. Building Skype's business team from the ground up 3. The 90-minute method behind 2-10x productivity gains 4. Why the average leader only focuses 23 minutes a day 5. The sleep science behind deep work and recovery 6. Digital sunset and shutdown rituals for better sleep 7. Using the 80/20 rule to filter signal from noise as a CEO 8. Why "what to stop doing" matters more than what to start 9. Growing a LinkedIn following past a million by simplifying complex ideas Chapters: 1. Introduction 2. Eric's path: McKenzie to Skype to founding a restaurant chain 3. The heart attack story 4. Matching energy to your most important work 5. Becoming a CEO coach 6. The 90-minute method: focus, sleep, stress 7. Sleep science and the digital sunset 8. Eating close to bedtime and sleep quality 9. Helping CEOs cut noise and find leverage 10. Ultra Productive book and preorder bonuses 11. Closing advice Eric Partaker's book Ultra Productive is available for preorder now at ultraproductive.com — preorder bonuses include a free 5-week Ultra Productive Accelerator with Eric and co-author Christian Poensgen. This episode is sponsored by Manifest Law — the AI-native immigration law firm handling filings across 40+ countries. Subscribe to Truth Works for more conversations with founders, CEOs, and leaders on building without burning out.

For 30 years, Jeff Joseph has been one of the most influential lawyers in American immigration law — and he just joined Manifest Law, the AI-native immigration firm, as President of Immigration Strategy. On this episode, Jessica Neal sits down with him for a rare, no-spin look at how U.S. immigration actually works, who it works for, and why almost nothing about it has changed in decades. Jeff is the 79th President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), the 18,000-member bar association for immigration attorneys. Before Manifest, he was a Partner at Berry Appleman & Leiden, where his litigation reshaped the rules employers hire under — including beating the State Department's COVID-era visa ban and the Department of Labor's H-1B wage rule. Jeff traces his path from a debate-team kid inspired by "To Kill a Mockingbird" to a public defender, to building a 25-year immigration practice with his wife, to leading strategy at a company betting AI can fix what Congress won't touch. Jessica — who ran global immigration programs as Chief Talent Officer at Netflix — pushes him on the parts of the system most people never see: why the H-1B lottery is decided by luck, not need; why new student visa rules are quietly shrinking the talent pipeline; and why nobody in Washington actually wants to fix the 65,000 cap. What we cover: – Jeff's path from public defender to 30-year immigration litigator – Why immigration is a "creature of the law" that Congress refuses to touch – Inside the H-1B lottery: why higher wages now mean better odds — and why that punishes small business – How new OPT and duration-of-status rules are cutting off the international student pipeline – Why the 65,000 H-1B cap hasn't moved in decades, and probably never will – A better model: allocating visas by real local labor data instead of one national number – What great companies get right about immigration as an employee benefit, from Jessica's own Netflix playbook – Inside Manifest Law's AI-native model: no equity partners, lawyers as owners, and why that changes who does the paperwork – How Manifest's AI learns from every filed case to predict a case's odds before it's submitted – The "sentiment meter": using AI to catch a stressed employee before it becomes an HR escalation – Why every immigration firm will adopt AI — and why in-house, native tech beats bolted-on tools This episode is brought to you by Manifest Law, the AI-native immigration law firm,  real-time visibility, fast filings in 40+ countries, and straightforward pricing for startups through enterprise. Whether you run global mobility for a Fortune 500 or you're the one person in HR handling visas on the side, this conversation will change how you think about immigration as a talent strategy. 🎧 Subscribe to Truth Works for more honest conversations at the intersection of work, leadership, and the systems that shape our careers.

Bipul Sinha failed his first shot at India's hardest entrance exam. His father told him to drop out and try again — the only other option was selling tobacco on a street corner. Bipul is the co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Rubrik, the cybersecurity and data management company he took public on the NYSE in April 2024. Before Rubrik, he spent four years as a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he was a founding investor and board member of Nutanix and part of the team behind early bets on AppDynamics and Snap. Before venture, he was an engineer at Oracle, American Megatrends and IBM. In this episode of Truth Works (Part 1), he joins Jessica Neal and guest co-host Peter Clarke to trace the full arc: growing up poor in India, the exam he failed once and passed the second time, arriving in America with almost nothing, and the first 45 days at Rubrik when he couldn't hire a single person. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE ORIGIN STORY Bipul grew up in a tier-4 city in India and wasn't a strong student. His father pulled him out of the local track and told him to prepare at home for the IIT entrance exam instead, an exam with roughly a 1% acceptance rate. He failed it once, passed it the second time, and studied electrical engineering at IIT Kharagpur. He took a job at Tata IBM to support his family, then moved to Atlanta for a hardware engineering role at American Megatrends before landing in Silicon Valley in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, where he and his wife paid $1,000 a month to live in a garage apartment. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ FROM INVESTOR TO FOUNDER After seven years at Oracle, Bipul moved into venture capital at Blumberg Capital, then spent four years at Lightspeed under Ravi Mhatre, where he backed Nutanix, AppDynamics and Snap. He explains the theory that pushed him from investing to founding: investors operate from a "state of intellect," founders from a "state of will." He left to start what became Rubrik in 2014, sat through 45 days with zero hires, and camped outside the Google and YouTube offices with a pitch deck until he landed his first four. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ TOPICS COVERED → Failing India's hardest entrance exam, then passing it the second time → Moving to Silicon Valley in 1999 and paying $1,000 a month to live in a garage → Leaving Oracle for venture capital, and the $10M check Lightspeed wrote off a slide deck → Early investing wins: Nutanix, AppDynamics, Snap → The "state of intellect vs. state of will" theory of investors vs. founders → Naming Rubrik after almost launching under a different name entirely → 45 days with zero hires, and the pitch deck that turned it around → Why the old world of cybersecurity is dead in the age of AI ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Find Bipul: rubrik.com | LinkedIn: Bipul Sinha Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal & Peter Clarke. Part 2 of this conversation coming soon.

A former Groupon product manager set out to bring back supersonic passenger flight. Everyone told him it was a bad idea. He couldn't find a single reason they were right. Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the company that built the first civil supersonic jet outside of a government or military, and then made the sonic boom disappear entirely. He joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke on Truth Works for an honest conversation about audacious goals, telling the truth inside a company, and the leadership lessons he learned the hard way. Blake did not have the aerospace resume for this. He started his career at Amazon, spent years in startups, and was running internet coupons at Groupon when he decided to teach himself aerospace from textbooks and build a spreadsheet that said the whole world should be flying supersonic. A decade later, his airplane broke the sound barrier. In this episode he breaks down why supersonic flight really disappeared (hint: it was not the noise), how he rebuilt Boom's culture after hiring the wrong senior people, and why he now says he has learned to "love the riff." TOPICS COVERED → Organizing every idea by how happy you'd be if it worked → Choosing passion over resume, and why skills are more changeable than what you love → The real reason supersonic flight was banned in 1973 → Solving the sonic boom by accident, and going from breaking the sound barrier to a repeal of the ban in 115 days → Using supersonic technology to power AI data centers and bootstrap the company → The "talent distillery": how Boom grows its own senior leaders → Why he fired every direct report in one day, and what happened to morale → Learning to "love the riff" and saying goodbye without making it personal → The first-flight story and the safety rule: "I might say f**k, but I won't say f**k you" → Velocity over predictability, and why padding your timeline makes you later → Designing for tranquility, and the small details airlines ignore → The birthday his board told him to shut the company down Whether you are building something people call impossible, leading a team through a hard call, or just trying to tell the truth at work, this one will stay with you. New episodes of Truth Works every week. Subscribe so you don't miss what's next.

Glenn Kelman ran Redfin for 20 years. He says the most important thing he learned had nothing to do with software. Glenn joins Jessica Neal and co-host Jeff Markowitz on Truth Works for an unusually honest conversation about love, leadership, boards, and the handful of decisions that actually decide a company's fate. Glenn is not your typical tech CEO. At 21 he tried to write a novel, got nowhere, and his girlfriend broke up with him for being unemployed too long. He nearly went to medical school twice. He co-founded Plumtree Software in 1997 and took it public, then almost got fired from the company he started. He joined a nearly dead real estate website that a Seattle VC had put $500,000 into, and spent the next two decades turning it into Redfin, a business that saved consumers roughly a billion dollars in commissions before Rocket acquired it for $1.75 billion. In this episode, Glenn traces the whole thing back to his older brother's struggle with alcohol, the emergency room doctors who kept fighting for a patient any business person would have written off, and the moment he decided he wanted to be good like that. He is candid about the parts most CEOs edit out. The board meeting where he quoted Yeats and Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men. The walk with a Greylock partner that reset his entire relationship with his board. The rentals acquisition he financed with debt in 2021, right before the music stopped. Rewriting a single email 83 times because he could not figure out how to disagree with his new parent company's CEO. Jeff and Jessica bring two decades of executive search experience to the hiring question Glenn admits he never fully solved, including the advice from Jeff that gave Glenn permission to walk away from a candidate he had already taken to dinner, drinks, and references. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ TOPICS COVERED FINDING THE WORK → Why writing alone in a room made him depressed, and why business is just being creative with other people → Working for three founders barely older than him and realising he could do it too → Picking the big idea over the small one, and why ambition makes recruiting easier → His brother's addiction, the ER doctors, and the decision to do something good inside business HIRING AND JUDGEMENT → Jeff's method: go in looking for every reason the person is wrong → Never hiring someone you are not genuinely excited about, even when you have come too far to stop → What negotiating severance reveals about a candidate before they start → Why subjectivity is a feature, not a bug, and the Peter Chernin story behind it BOARDS AND CEO GROWTH → How a fraught, adversarial board became one of his greatest assets → Blaming the board when the real problem is the product → The one question that turns a board meeting from a performance into a working session → Why $50M seed rounds at $400M valuations have made honest board conversations harder LEADERSHIP AND THE HARD CONVERSATION → Being too kind for too long, and the cost of hints instead of clarity → Writing down what you need to say, then throwing the paper away and saying it anyway → Getting nearly fired at Plumtree in a 30-second conversation, and the turnaround that followed → Why founder mode has a real insight buried inside a bad excuse → Making the call people disagree with, then calling them afterwards to replay their argument back WHAT HE ACTUALLY LEARNED → Working 15-hour days when four or five one-minute decisions created more value than all of them → Why he stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room → Real estate agents, a sea of love, and how they changed how he sees business → His closing gift to listeners: if people feel the love, they will forgive almost anything ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people who have actually built things.

What does it actually take to build the people function at a company that went from a design tool to a global platform of 5,500 people? Jennie Rogerson, Chief People Officer at Canva, joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke on Truth Works for a conversation about culture as an operating system, not a perk. Jennie's path into the role is one of the more unlikely ones in tech. She came up through hospitality, running restaurant floors where 220 covers a night meant 220 individual experiences to manage. She moved into hospitality tech, then got dragged to an after-work Canva workshop on making better presentations — and walked out convinced she had to work there. She applied. She didn't get the jobs. A colleague told her to look elsewhere. She ignored the advice. When the executive assistant role for co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht opened up, thousands of people applied, and Jennie had no experience in the domain. So instead of a resume, she built a website. Canva launched Canva Websites the night before she planned to send it, so she rebuilt the entire thing on the product overnight. Then she spotted a line in Cliff's LinkedIn bio — "you're great, we're hiring" — and sent it to him directly. The interview process was two live challenges and a lot of real-time pushback. By the end of it, the role had been rewritten into something new: Leadership Operations, a chief-of-staff seat between the founders and the leadership team. Eighteen months later, Cliff called on a Sunday to offer her the top people job. Her first response was to ask if he'd lost his mind. She took it as an interim role. It's been years. Jennie is refreshingly clear that Canva hasn't figured everything out,  especially around parental leave re-onboarding, which she says most companies get wrong and hers is still actively learning. But what they have built is worth studying: managers are called coaches, performance reviews are called Growth and Impact, and every employee can anonymously submit to the Fix It Form, which has been running for roughly eight years and asks two questions — what's broken, and what's your solution. The conversation also gets into the support playbooks Canva built for grief and loss, family and domestic violence, and cancer and long illness — written with the employees who lived through those moments, and then open-sourced so any company can use them. One of them started as a single Fix It Form submission from someone who had lost their wife. And on hiring: Canva's CMO started as a communications intern. One of their AI researchers was found on a Discord community while he was stocking supermarket shelves. Those sit alongside senior hires from Zoom, Uber and Google — because the blend is where the value is. TOPICS COVERED: - Why hospitality is underrated training for building a people function - Getting hired with a website instead of a resume - The interview challenge that turned into a brand new role - Being offered the top people job with no HR background - Why culture is everyone's accountability, not the people team's - The Fix It Form — anonymous, always on, and it requires a solution - Why Canva calls managers "coaches" and reviews "Growth and Impact" - What a performance cycle looks like when it isn't a box-ticking exercise - Season openers and building public accountability into the calendar - Parental leave re-onboarding and why nobody has solved it yet - Building and open-sourcing the Grief and Loss guide - Talking about family and domestic violence at work - The risk of not talking about hard things - Finding talent internally and hiring for curiosity over pedigree - Using AI to draft the process, then keeping humans in the loop Most of this episode comes back to one idea. Jennie was hired into a role she was unqualified for on paper, by people who were looking for something other than a track record. Everything she has built since runs on the same logic — the AI researcher on Discord, the intern who became CMO, the engineers she invites to tear apart her own processes because they're the ones actually living inside them. Her closing challenge cuts both ways. If you're running an organization, the person who could take the next big step is probably already inside it, waiting for someone to bet on them. And if you're the one looking for what's next, the most interesting move might not be the logical one on paper — it might be the thing you're genuinely curious about. Which is why the line she keeps returning to isn't really about Canva at all: You don't join Canva to experience the culture. You join Canva to be the culture. Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal,  former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, now in the business of telling the truth about how work really works.

John Lilly has had a front row seat to almost every major shift in technology over the last thirty years, and he has sat in almost every chair while it happened. He was a Senior Scientist at Apple in 1997, when the market cap was two billion dollars and most people assumed the company was finished. He co-founded Reactivity, later acquired by Cisco. He became CEO of Mozilla and led Firefox past 450 million users, running an open source nonprofit at a time when nobody else in Silicon Valley was doing anything like it. Then he spent over a decade as a General Partner at Greylock, where he led investments in Instagram, Dropbox, Figma, Tumblr and Quip. He sits on the boards of Figma, Duolingo and Nuro, and recently joined Gigascale Capital as an Advising Partner, backing companies rebuilding the physical economy. In this conversation with Jessica Neal and co-host Jeff Markowitz, John walks through what he actually saw in the founders everyone else missed. He tells the story of chasing Kevin Systrom for six months, wiring the money on a Thursday, and getting the call three days later that Instagram was selling to Facebook. He explains the moment a friend showed him Instagram and what clicked was not the filters, it was the distribution. And he describes meeting a 19 year old Dylan Field at a Starbucks in Palo Alto, telling him his product did not matter, and then spending the next decade watching him prove it wrong. He is also honest about the parts that are harder to hear. Why some partners at Greylock wanted Dylan replaced. Why he thinks micromanaging the right things is a feature of good leadership, not a flaw. Why he does not tell CEOs anything, and what he does instead. And why, at a moment when OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling talent out of every company on earth, the answer is not matching the money. He closes with something a colleague at Mozilla told him years ago that he still carries: we had a chance to make the world we wanted, and we did it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WHAT WE COVER ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE FOUNDER QUESTION → How John spotted Dylan Field at 19 → Why recruiting senior people is the strongest early signal → The trait every great founder shares: relentless about getting help → Why non-defensiveness beats raw intelligence → The lunch where they told Dylan he had to build a go to market THE INVESTMENTS → Chasing Kevin Systrom for six months → The underwater photographer who explained Instagram to him → Why the network mattered and the filters did not → The four day flip to Facebook and what he told his LPs → The Adobe Killers that came before Figma and why this one was different LEADERSHIP AND SCALE → Going from 12 people to a quarter of the internet at Mozilla → Why he never learned the delegation lesson everyone teaches → Larry and Sergey reviewing every resume and what that signals → Learning to be simpler in your message as you grow → Deciding you would rather be successful than comfortable THE TALENT WAR → Why every great person is now a free agent → The spreadsheet exercise he gives every CEO → Tour of duty and the bilateral deal between company and employee → Never making an offer until you know it will be accepted → Why money is rarely the only reason people leave THE CURRENT MOMENT → Why leadership now means stability without pretending anything is stable → The collision of faster scaling and total vulnerability → Why org size no longer scales with impact → Alpha nerds, Tim O'Reilly, and following the most technical people around → Investing in transformers, copper recycling and rare earth supply chains → Why none of the AI future is settled and it is all still to play for ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CONNECT WITH JOHN LILLY LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnlilly ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, with co-host Jeff Markowitz.

What if your teams became 10x more productive — and your business got nothing out of it? Dr. Mik Kersten has the data to prove it's already happening. After studying more than 8,000 value streams across enterprises, he found that only 8% of end-to-end delivery time is teams actually creating value.  The rest disappears into planning, approvals, reviews, and coordination. Which means you can multiply team productivity by 2x or 10x with AI, and deliver nothing faster to your customers. Mik started his career as a research scientist at Xerox PARC, completed his PhD in Computer Science, and founded Tasktop, which he led as CEO until its acquisition by Planview in 2022.  He's the creator of the Flow Framework and the bestselling author of Project to Product. His new book, Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI, launches July 14, and it argues that the constraint on knowledge work is gone. What's left is your organizational structure. And for most companies, it's the thing standing in the way. In this episode, Mik joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke to break down why AI productivity gains aren't showing up in business results, what happens to companies that spend big on tokens without rewiring how they work, and why the future of leadership means every manager becomes a maker again. You'll learn: - Why only 8% of enterprise delivery time is actual value creation — and where the other 92% goes - Why 10x team productivity means nothing if your organization can't absorb it - The four competing structures inside most companies: org chart, value streams, incentives, and architecture - What Netflix got right about aligning technology, teams, and leadership - The "outcome tree": one unified structure replacing the matrix - Why humans should keep reporting to humans — even as agents join teams - How incentives quietly sabotage transformation (and why Mik wrote half a chapter on them) - Why outputs are easier to measure than outcomes — and why that's now a fatal trap - The dark factory thought experiment: what happens when production cost trends toward the price of electricity - Zero bonuses for engineers: what Mik learned from the experiment - Why planning still matters — but on weekly and monthly cadences, not annual - Managers to makers: why the first-line manager role is changing completely - The middle managers whose roles are gone — and the new role that replaces them - Why companies that get this right are hiring more people, not fewer Mik's message to leaders: get hands-on with the latest models now. The only way to make AI work for your teams — instead of the other way around — is to lean in. Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI is available now wherever books are sold. Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix.

Everything breaks in a startup. Culture is what kicks in when it does. Leif Abraham and Jannick Malling are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Public, the agentic brokerage putting AI agents to work directly inside your portfolio. They started in late 2019 by bringing their two former teams back together, and have since watched every market cycle twice: from launch, to the GameStop chaos of January 2021, to the AI shift they're now building on top of. In this episode, they sit down with Jessica Neal and Peter Clarke to unpack how they actually run the company. They break down their 10 open-sourced operating principles ("Honesty kills b******t," "Find a way," "Move fast through organised speeding"), why they treat culture as capitalistic tooling rather than fluffy values, and the moment Principle 10 drove a small engineering team to scale the trading system overnight when GameStop doubled their user base in a week, a decision that still compounds into Public's reputation for uptime today. They also make the case for the co-CEO model most investors say never works. The trick, they argue, is that they don't share a job, only a title: Jannick lives inside product and engineering, Leif runs growth, and they only converge on the 1% of existential decisions where more perspectives actually matter. It lets them stay deep in their craft and install one C-level hire at a time instead of scaling leadership in risky staircases. On hiring, they get pointed. Avoid the "badge hunters" who collect logos and optimise their LinkedIn, and instead find people who had to fight for their growth at companies you've never heard of. Be "truth-seeking to an uncomfortable degree" in interviews, because technical ability is table stakes, but motivation is the thing that actually predicts fit. Plus Jannick shares how he generates 20K a month selling covered calls, why AI agents are about to compress trading strategies into a single prompt, and how the pair are betting the next decade of investing will be about resourcing individuals, not just granting them access. 00:00 Intro 02:00 What Public is: the agentic brokerage 06:00 Selling covered calls on autopilot 11:00 Access vs resources: the next 10 years of investing 16:00 Building culture from two merged teams 20:00 Principle 1: Honesty kills b******t 27:00 Culture as the operating system, principles as the tools 33:00 The GameStop scaling story and Principle 10 39:00 Making the co-CEO model actually work 48:00 Disagreement as a feature, not a bug 53:00 Hiring: stay away from the badge hunters 1:00:00 Truth-seeking in interviews 1:05:00 Closing: problems, purpose, and health first This episode is not investment advice. #TruthWorks #Public #Investing #AgenticAI #Startups #Founders #CoCEO