FAILURE Is Required In Business | Launch Academy VP Of Programs, Sam Chan (Podcast 231)

Failure is vastly overrated. Like, we think that if we create something, nobody wants it or it doesn't translate to a new market. That's the end of the world. That's the end of my business. We got to start anew. We got to go get jobs at McDonald's or whatever. And that's really like a fear that I think a lot of entrepreneurs need to overcome, that perfectionism. It's never going to be perfect.

Today is Launch Academy's VP of Program, Sam Chan. Sam oversees the programming and strategy for Launch's network of tech entrepreneurs. Over his eight years with the company, Sam has advised and supported thousands of founders from over 35 countries, and those companies have gone on to raise over $2 billion. He helped create Maple, a startup acceleration program focused on helping founders expand their startups to Canada, and has helped grow over 100 founders and their families to Canada in the last five years. Sam is also the host of Bits and Bytes and the Launch AMA podcast. Both focused on unearthing the stories behind every startup. Aside from Launch, Sam is also the founder of Chicken, an advisory focused on Web3 projects. So, Sam, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Thanks for having me, Cameron.

Yeah, lots to dive in here. I love it. When I saw that you helped create Maple, I always think of the maple syrup mafia. Is that the tie in there?

Not exactly. So maple, obviously a very Canadian thing. You, Cameron, being from Vancouver, know this very well, and as long as I don't add the word leaves to it, then it's all fine, right?

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

But. But the. The concept of maple trees and kind of being a staple of Canadian culture is actually the background of how this program was made. Because maple trees, as you and I both know, when it comes time to fall, as we're approaching, the trees actually fade the leaves themselves in order to protect itself. Right. And they kind of acclimatize to the generally colder weather of. Of Canada. And so in that way, when we're working with companies that are looking into expanding to Canada, we want them to acclimate to the culture and the weather and things like that, too. So there's this kind of fancy story behind it, but it's easily recognizable for anybody from abroad because they see maple leaves, they recognize Canada. I love it.

And the reason I brought up Maple Syrup mafia was the PayPal mafia, the Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and that whole investor group. And then there was, like, an investor group that kind of started. I think it was starting in Vancouver that kind of was. They started calling Themselves, the maple syrup mafia. Do you guys tie in with the C100 at all with what you're doing with maple? Are you familiar with C100?

Yeah, not too much directly, but we've definitely worked with folks in the past and a bunch of our alumni, I think Thinkific was and later were some of our old alumni that went through the C100 program. It's a great tie in. Right. Because whenever we're working with a company that's already either in Vancouver or they're looking towards coming to Vancouver, at the end of the day, we don't want the companies to just focus on the Canadian market, we want them to expand. So C100 is a great program for those that are looking into the Valley, looking to expand into North America directly from Canada.

Yeah. For any of our listeners who don't know, C100 is a group of Canadian venture capitalists who actually live in the Bay Area. And I think at one time there were more Canadians doing VC work in the Bay Area than there were Canadians doing VC work in all of Canada. And that was the, the kind of the bridge between the Bay Area and up. Now you just kind of like Audrey shucks that one of your portfolio companies was Thinkific. They are a legit billion dollar valuation company or they were during their IPO stage. Greg Smith from Vancouver and Mir, who's a coo, she's a former COO alliance member. Walk me through what your tie in with them was and how did you help them. In the early days, Gavik was one.

Of our Day 1 members. So we kind of have to walk the story all the way back to the beginning, the genesis of Launch Academy. And really what it was is there was five co founders back in the day and they were all founders of their own startups. I was not one of the co founders, just to be extremely clear about that. I joined the company in 2015. But in 2012 Launch Academy was kind of formed and the genesis was very, very simple. They were all founders that were trying to build their companies, probably pre Seed. Seed. Ish. Quite early on. And the goal was in Vancouver at the time. The community was quite small. There really wasn't kind of like a watering hole where resources could be gathered. If we wanted to bring in Amazon and AWS to come give a talk, for example, they'd probably have to individually know contacts and companies in doing that. So LaunchCam was a vehicle to kind of bring everybody together and the very much the kind of general concept of rising tides raises all boats and so when we opened the door on April 1, 2012, there were 12 companies that kind of came in and thinkific, Greg and Matt were one of them. And the fascinating story is one of the co founders of Launch Academy, Roger Patterson, later went on to join Matt to create another company called Later Graham at first and now it's called Later. The history of Launch Academy and its impact on Vancouver startups is this kind of overnight story, 10 years in the making.

Wow, interesting. And I'm just kind of scanning through to see. I was getting emails from Launch Academy back in 2012. 2013. Yeah. Launch Academy invites you to launch day demo day, July 24, 2012. The Hive.

Wow.

I think I was there. Okay, so who were some.

I think you were.

I think I was there. Was it upstairs on the second floor?

We. So, so that's, that's actually a really good memory. The building in Vancouver, in Gastown, second floor, was something called the Hive, which was. Is a well known and established co working center. It's still there to this day, there's still companies working out of there. And then we were on the third floor and I think a lot of people were initially very confused because it's like, aren't you guys competition? But not exactly, because what we were trying to do is very much focused on startups and growth and programming. Right. We did have coworking desks available for our entrepreneurs and our members and our founders, many of which like you know the names of and we've, we've just talked about. But the point wasn't to rent out desks. The point was that we could gather these kind of really smart minds and they could solve problems together. And then because of that, whenever there's a VC or we had Travis from Uber who came in and he was here for Ted, but he came and gave a talk to our members. So it became a central point for people to kind of hop in and out as they're meeting different people, kind of this inflection point.

I have a horrible, horrible knack for not recognizing super successful talent in the earliest stages. I actually told Garrett Camp, who was the founder of Uber, months before Travis even joined him, that it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard. How do you know at Launch Academy who to work with, who to bet on and kind of walk us through what your model is?

Yeah, for sure. So I think first things first, because the founders were all founders themselves, I think at that point in time it wasn't meant to be a vehicle for investment or profit or at least directly Right. And so the goal with Launch Academy from day one was really, how can we create something that's for founders, by founders, that helps founders, but doesn't dilute their shares, especially when they're super early on. So for the first couple of years, we did a lot of startup education, so these were a lot of folks that were changing careers. The classical story of, I've been accounting for 35 years, I'm tired of the system, I want to build my own thing to make the system better. We worked with a ton of people like that that have kind of gone through kind of the ranks and are now starting their first company. Maybe they're 40, 50 years old even. And so that happened a lot in 2015, which is coincidentally when I joined the company, but not because of it. That's when we also launched our conference focused on growth called Traction. We partnered with a great company called Boast AI, and together we kind of built the Traction Conference to become a landing spot for Canada, an excuse for CEOs, CXOs to come to Vancouver and learn about growth. You've been in Vancouver and you've grown businesses in Vancouver. Like, you don't really need too much of an excuse to come here. For a lot of folks, it was just that extra nudge. Because of the Traction Conference, we expanded our brand and our reach a ton outside Vancouver itself. And that's when we started working with companies that are international. We started doing trade missions with companies like in places like Croatia and Brazil, in Asia even. And that's really kind of how we branched out. But I know, I know I've diverged a little bit, but talking a little bit about trying to recognize companies that have talent. What happens is in all of our programs, we have community programs, similar to something like On Deck, for example, where people can join and they receive programming, they receive mentorship, and they meet other people in the system. Really, I think comes down to a couple things. I think the major thing for us is because we're not investing in the company, we're not always looking at their LTVs or their cost of acquisitions. That's great. And we want to know that you have the capability to do those things. But for me and my team specifically, I look for three traits. One is the curiosity. So when we talk about curiosity is, are the founders wondering things about the problems that they're solving? Like, are they genuinely curious about it? Are they looking at it just as a vehicle for cash grab and they see arbitrage in the moment, or do they actually want to dig Deeper and find out why hasn't anybody solved this yet? What am I missing in the way that I'm solving it?

It's kind of like the core purpose side.

Exactly. So that's the first thing. So curiosity alone obviously doesn't build a company. The second thing that I find that a lot of successful entrepreneurs will have is humility is because first they're curious, right? They find out, hey, this is a problem that's really interesting. But then they go to the source, they go to Sam, they go to Cameron and ask them, hey, why haven't you done things in a different way? Why are you still doing things the old way? And they're humble enough to accept the answer isn't oh, I just need to download this guy's app. They're observant enough to understand that whatever demographic or market that they're trying to serve in, that's the way they do things. And how can we supplement a solution to the problem without being argumentative? Right. And so that part is really key for a lot of entrepreneurs because a lot of people, because when we start building we get tunnel visioned, we think our solution is the best. Why doesn't other people just use my solution and pay me? Right? That's, that's kind of the kind of vision that we often get when we're building. But, but that humility allows the, the solution to be morphed to the actual demographic that, that companies are trying to build.

Got it.

And then the third piece is tenacity. So that's knowing when to step on the gas, when to, you know, be humble enough to admit like hey, there's no market for this, we need to put a pause on it and we need to look in a different direction. Obviously the way I'm spelling it out is sounds like, oh, this is like the go to strategy. But of course all three of these things are very, very hard.

Do you where I love the tenacity part and then the knowing when to quit as well. Because the tenacity that dog like work ethic to get over, under, around any obstacle put in there's path is one side. But then at some point it is like are you the fly just trying to get out the window when you're not going to get out the window, right? How do you tell them or suggest to them or do you even get involved to tell them when it's dead, when it's not going to happen or do you just try to show them or do you just stay out of their way and let them Figure that out for yourself in case you're wrong.

I've talked to a ton of companies over the years in many different aspects. A lot of times people know it. Usually their wallets are what hits first, to be honest with you. Because if your customers aren't buying, you don't need Sam telling you that you don't have a market. Your wallet will tell you that.

Yeah, yeah. You know, so then. And then dovetail into what you're doing with Launch Academy then and what you're also then doing with Traction Conference. And when I reached out to you to ask you to be on the podcast, the reason was I remembered what you guys were doing. But then I saw the suite of actual speakers that you had coming into the conference, Traction. I was like, holy shit. You have a really, really, really strong agenda. This is not like the information marketers who are all trying to sell their courses. You have like Some seriously legit CEOs and senior executives of some really great brands. How did you pull that all together?

Yeah, there's a lot of credit, I think that needs to be given to the most co founders, both Alex Popa and Lloyd Lobel. Lloyd for many years lived in San Francisco himself and he's built an amazing network for himself. So I think a lot of credit goes to our co founders at Traction Conference, first of all. Secondly, I think I want to give a shout out to our VP of operations, Alana. She used to build events for TED Conference itself, so she knows how to run a world class show. And I think on top of that, she knows how to work with founders and their needs, whether they're speakers or their attendees. Right. And so I think our biggest rule of thumb whenever we build anything, whether it's something very, very small or something as large as a conference with thousands of people is I think the golden question is, is this something that we as founders ourselves would find useful? And I think that's the golden rule for everything.

Okay. Because I was super impressed with what you pulled together with that as well. All right, so let's back up. Talk to me about your role with the organization and kind of how you got yourself role, because you said you've been there for about eight years, you kind of grown up into the VP of programs and kind of effectively the second in command in this business. How did you get there? How did you continue to scale up and grow?

Yeah, so I think I started my career, I worked for a consulting company that is very, very niche. It was called wip. And what they did was they were Consultants for developer relation agency, developer relation teams. So we'd work with companies like Nokia and Microsoft, Facebook, Twilio, all those kind of folks. I don't want to dumb it down, but we ran a lot of events for them and the goal was like these companies wanted to connect with developers and so very common thing we did there was run hackathons, because hackathons is one of the easiest ways for devs to get a hold of your code, to get a hold of your tools to see if they're any good. It's basically beta testing, not for free, because I think there's definitely cost running an event, but it's beta testing and engaging with your potential customers all in one package. Yeah, through that. That kind of led me around the world as this kind of young out of college guy who, who didn't really. I'll be completely honest, I was probably very underqualified for, for the role. And I saw project after project after project being built and a lot of them are actually thrown away through hackathons. That's also when I met Ray, because Ray at the time was Ray, who's our CEO of Launch Academy, by the way. Let me just back that up. He was working on a mobile app himself. And so that's kind of how I met Ray, because through the different kind of mobile community connections, that's how we kind of got connected. And as he was starting Launch Academy up, he was kind of attracted by the fact that I'd seen more things outside of Vancouver. A lot of times when somebody's trying to pitch a company to you, they're trying to tell you that the company is something you've never seen before. Because of my background of running hackathons weekend after weekend after weekend, chances are I'd seen that idea before and I'd seen some sort of, you know, minimum viable version of it. Right. Obviously it's not all fleshed out because they built it in 48 hours, but it exists. Right. And that was one of the biggest things and one of the biggest growth periods that Vancouver had to go through, in my opinion was that because it's so comfortable here, we're not looking outside our bubble. And so I was hired on as program manager to kind of give more outside perspective to the companies that we had in house. And a lot of that was just opening their eyes and saying, like, hey, focus on what your customers want, not the fact that you have this absolutely unique idea, because that uniqueness is probably only unique in the pond that you're in now.

You said that earlier, and I think it was probably even before we went live, that you operate as a nonprofit or a not for profit. Are you operating as a venture capital firm as well or as an incubator, or is it more as a resource for the Texas scene? How do you describe it?

Yeah, yeah. So. So this is an ever changing term. I think the terms we're using these days is. Is a nonprofit accelerator. At the end of the day, the. The goal is very simple. We want to help founders grow. And I specifically use founders and not companies because we invest our time and our energy into building founders. A lot of the companies that went through on the early days, the companies that they applied with, are not the companies that you now know as, as thinkific and later and, and so on and so forth. They were very different projects. And a lot of times that involves creating a safe space for them to fail. And so a lot. I mean, you've done a lot of these interviews. You can imagine, like, how many of these. These founders, like, made it huge on their very first startup. It's not. It's not. It's not impossible, but it's rare.

It's not rare.

Yep, exactly. When it comes to how we can create the environment, it's about for us to create sustainability. So we do charge for our programs because we don't take equity, but we try to just kind of. Try to kind of narrow that gap between, you know, what's affordable for the companies and what doesn't break their back. Right. So we're very careful with our pricing.

Okay. Now, when you're helping so many founders and you see so many founders, do you not wake up in the morning and go, I could just do this on my own? Like, with respect, there's a whole cohort of founders that just aren't qualified to be founders. They're probably not the ones you're working with. And then there's this other whole cohort of founders that are just horribly average as normal human beings like the rest of us that you must. You're a really, really smart guy. Do you not wake up and go, God, I could do this? Like. Or do you just not want to run. Do you not want to run your own show?

That's a really, really great question. And I think that's where I think I give a lot of kudos to. To Ray Wallia, our. Our. Our CEO. I think the environment that he's created at launch is really, really unique. And it starts with his management style. Right. I wrote an article, I think on year one When I started working at Launch Academy and it was called Sink or Swim. And one of the jokes, the running jokes now eight years in, is that he never gave me a job description or I don't think he looked at my resume, to be honest, because we had had a couple of conversations, but literally on day one, I went in and looked for something to do, right? And we do this a lot with a lot of our company. Not that they're looking for something to do part, but where we kind of give them just enough work so they get a taste test and we see what they can create. The joy that comes with my role now, and I think a lot of people are surprised that I'm still here eight years in and like yourselves, like, hey, why don't you go do something yourself or why don't you join a different place? Is because I think I get a lot of job satisfaction out of, out of the fact that we're making macro impact, right? So the companies that we're working with, both the companies that we're literally importing from all six continents of the world into Canada, like these people are going to collectively change the world. I could create something small on my own. Maybe it's a lifestyle business, maybe it's ventured backed, right? But that silo is not the same impact that we can make again collectively. And I think that's what kind of motivates me to kind of keep on going.

Well, it's interesting because if I think about our COO alliance, so we have members that are all seconds in command like you, from 17 countries around the world. We've got members and a bunch of them are brands that you know the names of as well, but none of them, like 98.9% of them have no desire to ever be an entrepreneur. They none, like, they're, they're super happy just being and getting to run the companies they run again. Some that we know the names of, like, you know, 15, 5 and Bumble, and like, some, some cool brands that, that, you know, those second. You know, Sheryl Sandberg, the queen bee of coos, never wanted to be a CEO. She just wanted to run Facebook for Mark. So I get it. While you're there, I was just curious whether that entrepreneurial seizure was knocking at your door ever, but for sure.

And, and I think something that's special about the, the small team we've created is they all have kind of what we call side hustles, right? So, so when you talk enough about, you know, how to create, how to build a brand how to build a business. I think you have to scratch that itch a little like we talked about, I think just before. Like you, you have a little bit of art collection. I love, I love to collect sneakers. I'm learning now to collect art and that's starting with NFTs and Web3 and all this kind of stuff. So we do find outlets to scratch our, scratch our itch. But right now I think, I think if I'm putting, you know, comparison points, the impact is just far greater on what I could do with Launch versus if I was creating an NFT project. All right.

At the moment anyway, so you get some really interesting visibility to this entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem. What advice do you find yourself either you giving as, as kind of the second command there or you know, within launch or even attraction. What advice do you find yourself that you're giving these founders or founder led companies. That seems to be consistent advice like what would your top three things be? You know, you gave us the top three things you look for. What would the top three types of advice be that you're on? You find yourself giving frequently, I think.

To rip off Gary Vaynerchuk a little bit. The first one is self awareness. I think that anybody that I'm lucky enough to work with here at Launch and all the companies that, whether they're applying for companies or applying for programs or whatever it is, they're usually very, very smart in some things and understanding what those things are, using that as a strength and then also recognizing the parts that you need help. And so with needing help, that's where something like Launch comes in. When we have 10 very smart people around the room, they're not all going to be smart at the same thing. Right. They're not going to all have shared experiences. They'll have likeness, but not the same. Right. So you really need to find that community of support. Some of the support is going to be within your internal team, but some of that support has to be outside of your team.

The mastermind is huge.

Exactly right. Like right now we're in the middle of a pretty tough period in terms of business and macroly it doesn't look great. A lot of companies are talking about is it time to downsize their teams. These aren't issues or discussion points that you want to discuss literally with all the members of your team in a very open and I don't know what I'm doing manner. Right. You want to be decisive. And so that's where what is your community that you can kind of go to these unclear thoughts, these unresolved thoughts. Who are those people that you're going to. And that's really what I'm trying to create now at launch with, with our Launchpad program is we want to be that watering hole you go to, to be a safe place to where you don't have answers yet.

Okay, so we've got kind of that, that introspection in themselves and the understanding themselves. What's the next thing you look for? That's common.

The next thing that's common is be ready to fail. And what I mean by that is, and this is something that kind of cursed me early on as I was creating different projects and things like that. And again back to kind of raise management style of autonomy is he allowed me to build things that didn't work. And I think the big takeaway, and probably what I tell myself if I was younger is that failure is vastly overrated. Like we think that if we create something nobody wants it or it doesn't translate to a new market, that that's the end of the world, that's the end of my business. We got to start a new, we got to go get jobs at McDonald's or whatever. And that's really like a fear that I think a lot of entrepreneurs need to overcome, that perfectionism. It's never going to be perfect at any part. Whether it's pre seed seed series A to a public company, as you're probably very familiar with, you're always going to have headaches, things are always going to go wrong. And so it's just about getting past that part and learning to see that failure can be part of the solution in a long term setting.

Great. I remember one of my early mentors used to say that it's all about bobbing and weaving. It's kind of like oops, that went wrong. Oops that went wrong. And so you kind of bob and weave towards success. And what would the third thing be if you had a third kind of commonality that these founder led companies struggle with?

The third thing it kind of ties back into to the first two. But I think you want to create an environment where you enjoy your lives. And I'm using that very, very broadly because I think it's more than just being a founder yourselves. And we're not investing into companies. Right. We will work with a services tech company. We will work with what we call lifestyle businesses. So just for those in the audience that aren't, you know, fully familiar, lifestyle business are usually businesses that VCs are not as interested in because they're not going to grow a hundred x or a thousand X. But for a lot of founders that's the right choice for them. Maybe they don't want to get bogged down in board meetings or have, have advisory meetings all day long. Um, and it does tie back into that whole self awareness thing.

Right, that's interesting.

But. Yeah, but for sure, like with, with these founders, a lot of times they, they feel this unknown pressure even if it's. And a lot of times it's not coming from their investors or family members.

It's just that it's societal and the buzz of what we read.

Right, exactly. And it's knowing what is what is enough for, for you. And, and like are you dreading going to work even though it's something you built or are you actually enjoying it?

I love that because it's interesting because if you're in the VC community or you're. You're raising money. Yeah. The push is build. Or if you're in the vc, it's build or bust often. Which is a really, really sad. You know, this is also our life. At the end of the day, none of this shit matters. We die. There's a great book about that called Small Giants and Bo Burlingham was the writer of Small Giants. But it talks about people that build these amazing companies that give you amazing lives. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I'm glad you actually have a space in your programs for those people because you're not driving them all towards just build or bust. The other one, when you talked about your first point, there's a great book from years ago called Leadership and Self Deception which talks about self awareness and leaders really truly understanding it was something I really struggled with when I was the COO at 1, 800 got junk is I was often bumping into myself and not noticing the things that I was doing wrong inside of the organization. And that book was really helpful for me as I scaled as the COO back at 1, 800 got junk days. All right, let's talk about about your growth, Ray. Where have you had to grow, you know yourself and your skills as you've scaled. And I want to talk to you a little bit about you and Ray as well.

Yeah, for sure. So I think one of the things for sure is when I started out I was definitely risk adverse. I think perfectionism. Like I'm not like I talk about it but I'm not like immune to it. I think just understanding that we're going to Build things, and not everything's going to work out. When we built that Maple program, and I was talking to a company from abroad, and they agreed, like, yeah, we're going to join your program and we're going to pay you this money, and you're going to help us move to Canada. It all felt so surreal to me. But if I hadn't taken that call, like, none of the following things would have happened. Right? And so. So that really is the first thing that I think I learned and I grew. And the. The second thing is a little bit of imposter syndrome, right? And so when I mentioned that I'm really blessed to be in a position where I get to talk to really, really smart founders, and even, like, I'm sitting in this room with you, Cameron, like, that's a blessing to me, frankly speaking. And I'm not just trying to, you know, brush you up for your show, but, like, I really enjoy having these conversations with people and learning their journeys and figuring out how they kind of navigated their lives, both mentally and as they growing their business, growing their staff, and all that kind of stuff. At the same time, as you mentioned, like, I've never built anything on my own. I've never raised money myself for my own venture. So there's a lot of. Lot of doubt that can come in through the days as you're building out these things. And the battle is. Is constant because at the same time, when I write down my bio and things like that, I've talked to thousands of entrepreneurs. I've watched them grow, I've watched them fail. And other people can learn from that, too, right? So one of our models is everybody has something to learn, everybody has something to teach. So that's just something that I have to constantly remind myself.

I love that. How do you think you got over the imposter syndrome? And I'm going to share something after you tell me what you did to get through it. But how did you get over it? Or is it something you're still getting over?

Every. I think it's something that we're still. Every. Every day is a battle, right? Like, some days you feel better, and some days you get some wins, and some days you feel like shit.

It's funny. I been paid to speak now on State over 800 times. I've been paid to speak in 26 countries, and I've also been paid to speak on every single continent, including Antarctica. I was paid to speak in Antarctica in January. And every time I get ready to go on a stage, I Get nervous.

And.

And so often I'm like, why are they even paying me to speak to this group? Why? Like, what can I contribute? And somehow I end up doing a pretty good job of them, but I still feel that today. And then I remember years ago, I was coaching Marcelo Claret, who is the CEO at Sprint, you know, the 82nd largest company in the US and I'm sitting in his boardroom, we're doing, going through a coaching session, and I remember him kind of saying, feeling like the imposter. Like, I don't even know what I'm doing. Like none of us do. At the end of the day, this is always the biggest thing we've ever done, right. It's always that. We had a member of our COO alliance who at lunch one day at one of our in person events, we had about 30 coos together. And he came up to me and he goes, you know, I feel like an imposter. And I was like, God, I would have never known that. So I went back into the room and I said, just for fun, I'm not going to say who it was, but someone at lunch mentioned this to me. How many of us in the room feel like an imposter? Put your hand up. And every single person put their hands up. And then we all started to crack up laughing because we realized, like none of us thought the other people were imposters. We only thought it was ourselves. Then we realized we're all that. I think we're all 16 year olds trapped in adult bodies.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's a battle. And I think what your point really, really helps because whether you're a celebrity or you're a world class entrepreneur, like you will always feel that. I think it's lies we tell to ourselves, honestly speaking. And it's that kind of balance between being confident and being humble. I think that we're trying to straddle that fine line.

All right, I want to ask you something about, about the dynamic between you and Ray. So Ray is classic entrepreneur, right? The big shiny object. He had lots of ideas and working in a very entrepreneurial style organization. How do you apply the brakes to his gas and how do you work with his style that is probably slightly different than your style? What have you guys learned in terms of the dance and the yin and yang between the two of you?

Yeah. So with a lot of CEOs, I think what's really important about them that we probably haven't talked about yet is they need to be vision casters. The mission and the vision, I'm sure these words of, I'm not the first person to mention it on the show, but when you're running that company and you're in that title, we're really looking towards you to kind of drive it. You're not the only person that makes that happen. But it has to come from a tip of the spear. And the CEO, in my opinion, is the tip of that spear. From my perspective, I'm very happy not letting Ray, but having Ray be that tip of the spear and allowing him to be bold, to dream things that we didn't think were possible. If you had told me five years ago we'd work with companies in every single continent, I would have showed you to shut the front door. That's really, really important. Where I think my role comes in and to compliment him is I purposely do things that are not scalable. And that's where I kind of pull him back because, because I know for Ray to get to the top of the mountain or for launch Academy to get to the top of the mountain, it has to start with one foot at a time, right? And so that forcefulness where in this situation Ray is pushing me to think a little deeper, think a little longer. I'm keeping him grounded in the sense that he knows that, you know, for us to get there, we gotta do all these kind of a thousand little micro things for us to get there. And that's I think really interesting for, for the team to watch from a, from a third party perspective because they, they kind of have to live between the both of us, right? And so that's kind of the dynamic.

It's kind of like mom and dad, right? How do you guys have, you know, date night? What's, what do you enray. Do to stay on the same page and to stay connected, you know, after you've maybe had the good, the good argument or the good healthy, healthy conflict. You know what? Because conflict is really good, right? If you think about five dysfunctions of a team, Pat Lencioni's book, the Fear of Conflict is a really bad thing. So you need to have good, healthy debate. But then it's kind of like makeup sex, right? You know, and so what's, what do you and Ray do to stay on the same page and to like each other as humans? After you go through the, the periods or times when you really have the good passionate debate on something about the business?

I would say we're not really up in arms all that often. I think, I think both of us are, are actually introverts Believe it or not, we, we do step on the mic quite a bit. But I think naturally we know when to give our down times and things like that. It's hard, I think, to continue to build that relationship and I'd say that's one of the struggles because after eight years, Ray is a close friend of mine. He's the mentor, he's taught me a ton of things, but he's also responsible for my paycheck.

Right.

So that's such a weird dynamic. A lot of people will go to their watering hole and complain about their boss or complain about their job and that just simply doesn't exist for me. Not that I have a lot of complaints. Ray, if you're listening. But I think for both of us, we all have lives outside of launch academy. For Ray, he has probably 15 other ideas or businesses that he's working on. He pulls me into things that are beyond launch when he thinks it's interesting or to me or helpful. But I think what's built our relationship over the years is we tend to put each other's interests first. Right. He's only pulling me into an external project when he thinks I would be interested in it. I'm pulling him into things that are not launch related because I think maybe he really needs a vacation. Right.

Right.

And I, I'm like the only person that tells them probably more than anybody in this world. Like, dude, you just got to take a week off. I'm not trying to get rid of you, but you need a break.

It's super healthy. And I'm glad you actually mentioned that as well. About, about the founders and helping them to have lives and to recognize that it is about balance. Right. That you don't find a single pro athlete who is absolutely in the maximum performance of their sport, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. It's insane. They cross train, they decompress, they relax, they outsource everything except genius. And then they're on the field and they're hitting hard. Game day. But I don't understand why business people don't get that, especially in North America. I think it's a huge disease in North America. I've been blessed to be spending so much time globally now that I just see businesses being done in another way. So your focus is not just the Vancouver market or are most of your clients out of the Vancouver marketplace now?

Yeah, we work with probably hands on, day to day, 120 plus companies. They're situated all over the world. Their commonality between each other is one they have to be working on something technical they're creating, whether it's a product or service, there's a technical component to it. The other thing that they have to have in common is they're looking to build global companies. And so that's one of the biggest tie in why a company from Korea, Taiwan would want to work with us is because Vancouver is a great gateway into the entire North American market.

Yeah, for sure.

So. So that's, that's definitely one of the goals. And that's what we kind of base a lot of our programming around is like, you know, how to hang on to what's made you successful in your home country and how to expand that to a new region.

Well, if there's. If there's any of the clients that have come out of kind of launch academy or that are attending the. The Traction conference that, you know, would be good guests on the Second in Command podcast, let's make sure that you introduce us because we'd love to be able to give them some.

Absolutely.

Exposure and also to. From them. And one of the big things I've been most obsessed about in the last year, or probably two years, if we truly want to scale and build these global organizations, we have to grow our people. And if we don't grow our people, we're never going to grow the business. And the growing the people for me is all the soft skills. I launched this course called Invest in your Leaders where we focus on situational leadership, delegation, coaching, time management, email management, effective meetings, running interviews. Do you work with any of your portfolio companies on those sets of skills at all, or is it more on the tech side that you're focusing with them on?

I think it's definitely a little bit of both. And frankly, because specifically with the Maple program, we're basically tied to these companies for the next three years of their lives and our lives, we go deeply personal. And that's something that I'm pretty proud of because our team just seems to care more than. I don't want to make it like comparative, but they seem to care more than anybody that I've met. It's not just a matter of, hey, we'll make sure that your company's doing okay and we're connecting you with the Camerons of the world and things like that. They'll go out of their way and they'll. They'll talk to their spouses. Maybe their spouses need healthcare or daycare or they need to find work on their own. So we're creating secondary services because we know at the end of the day, like to use like, I guess it's only one gender but like happy wife, happy life. I needed the pun, so I needed to use that. But we really kind of take care of the founders holistically. Right. I'll remember like one time, like we had to pick up one of our founders at the airport because their phone had ran out of battery and they don't know how to get through their Airbnb. Those aren't going to be in our program specs, but at the end of the day, it's to acclimate the companies as much as possible. So that could involve working with their teams, working, making sure that. I think a big topic right now is the concept of hybrid working, which especially when you have a global workforce and you have half your team back in India and you're now living in Vancouver. How do you manage meetings? Right. And what are ways to mitigate? Maybe it's less meetings, maybe, maybe it's more. It's a different environment of meetings. And I think right now we're in a period post Covid where a lot of it is frankly, trial and error, right? And collectively, if our group of companies can trial and error faster, we're going to figure that strategy out.

I love it. Well, or mastermind together, right? So you can share the ideas and resources together. We have a. The by the time this airs, it'll already be completed, but we have a co alliance event that we're running over the next three days in Scottsdale. And it's all about building a world class culture post Covid, because culture is no longer everybody coming into a physical office space. If you were going to give yourself some advice, the, you know, the 21, 22 year old Sam just getting ready to kind of launch out into his career, what advice would you give yourself back then that you know to be true today?

I think I've touched on a little bit of it, but I think the overall message, I think is dream bigger. The global business today, I think is very different than when I started my career. Business is the same at the core. Everywhere in the world. There's a problem that you're trying to solve and you have a spin at trying to solve it. Right? And to do that, you'll need lots of support, you'll need a community, you'll need customers. Sometimes you'll need investors and you'll need to build a team that enjoys working with you and you enjoy working with them. The basic pieces are always the same, right? It doesn't matter whether you're at Launch Academy or Y Com or Harvard Business School. It's the same lessons. I think that message to younger self even at that age when I don't have the experience yet. The crux of it is the dirty secret of business is there's no secret.

Yeah, I love the whole dream bigger and the reality is business is extraordinarily simple. I think we often overcomplicate it.

Yeah, for sure.

Sam Chan, the Vice President of programs at Launch Academy and Traction Conference, thank you so much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast.

No problem. It's a pleasure being here.

You can't build a great culture by ripping into each other and allowing other people to rip into each other, because as soon as they actually realize that that's okay, then all of a sudden you got a bunch of people around and then that just starts to really ruin the beauty of a culture and productivity starts to fail and people aren't happy. And if people aren't happy and motivated, I'm not going to thrive.