I Worked at Google and Uber, Lessons | Kate Parker, COO Transcends (Podcast 376)

When you were in a new market, when you've got a really interesting technology, when you've got such incredible customers right out of the gate, you can look out onto the field and say, gosh, there's so much I want to do here. And at a bigger company, you have the time, the resources, the people to kind of set all of those things in motion and watch all of them bear fruit.

All right, on today's episode, we have a great CEO. We have Kate Parker, who is Transcend's CEO. The are a company backed by Excel and Index Ventures. Transcend helps the world's largest companies better and govern their data, simplifying compliance, unlocking strategic growth, and improving business resilience. Kate has brought a decade of experience of having worked with some incredible brands for about 10 years total, working with Uber and running kind of one of their top business priorities, consumer safety. Also working inside of Google for a number of years where she was spearheading a couple of major business areas, including public affairs for google and google.org. she is a lifelong competitive athlete, has her undergrad from University of Pennsylvania, also got her master's degree. You're going to learn a lot from Kate today. You'll enjoy our conversation. You can also watch the conversation on our Second in Command podcast YouTube channel. We'll see you on the inside. So, Kate, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, same. I'm really looking forward to learning from you. You've got a really interesting growth to our growth kind of journey that got you to working as the COO at Transcend. Can you walk us through some of your kind of your bio of how you got here and maybe some of the experiences that got you there?

Yeah, well, it's certainly been eye opening for me. I never thought I would be in this role, but have always just lived my life following challenge to challenge and that has always been the ethos of my career. I started out in the public affairs world in regulatory. I actually worked on the Hill, did crisis communications, went over into tech and found myself in public relations and public affairs. And from there I just kept kind of clicking left into the different aspects of business. I kept looking over to the next organization and thinking, oh, that's really cool. They seem really close to the sort of the inception, the concept, the strategy, whether it was corporate, product or otherwise. So that took me into marketing, which took me into working on a business unit of integrated functions and then took me to Transcend where I was able to look across all of the go to market as well as the people, operations, finance and legal aspects of the business as well. So for me, it's always been about chasing the challenge and showing up where I think I can be helpful and staying humble in the process of, you know, what I don't know and where I can learn as well.

All right, and you're clearly humbled because you also have worked with two of the best brands on the planet prior to even getting to transcend, and you didn't even mention either of their names. So go back and name drop for us the companies that you worked with and kind of the core roles. But I want you to tell us what are one or two big lessons that you learned from each of them.

It started my career in tech in at Google. I ran communications and public affairs for google.org, which is the company's billion dollar foundation. We did, you know, economic investments across the world, particularly to help build and kind of create robustness around the Google brand for various issues. From there I went into Google marketing and spent a few years working there at the core of corporate reputation, which was just a fantastic experience. And then Uber came calling. They were looking for someone to oversee consumer safety advocacy. So a really interested sort of integrated business unit that looked across product, that looked across partnerships, the way we were approaching the marketing, the core fundamentals of how we were operating the business. And through that opportunity over many years, I was able to step into a role where I led consumer safety initiatives. A large piece of that was actually driving the CEO's number one priority, which was consumer safety. When Dara Khosrowshahi took over, leading all of that internal work to kind of build out the new operating model for the company in terms of how we would approach consumer safety and how we would really lead on KPI's clarity around initiatives, investments that we were making on a global scale, and that work stretched across all of Uber's markets and business lines. So it was an incredible learning opportunity for me, I think in both scenarios to kind of answer your question. I learned a lot around what it takes to change behavior, whether that is consumer behavior, the marketing front, or internal operational behavior, particularly around sort of change management and how different organizations are going to show up. So learning some of those influencing skills were incredibly valuable to me and, and something I'll take in my career for sure.

And I love that you kind of just Audrey shucks over the fact that it was Uber and Google and your initial explanation of where you'd been before, which is why I needed to go back and kind of ask about each of those. My biggest financial miss in history was the summer of 2008, when I brought Garrett camp to Burning man for his first burn. And he was in my camp at Burning man and was pitching five of us on Uber. Prior to Travis even coming and joining the company, I missed out on the founders round. And normally I would have put 10 to 25,000 in of the five of us sitting there that day. Mark said no, Tim said no, Dave said no, I said no. And Tim Ferriss, another close friend of mine, put 25 grand in, and it was worth 108 million at the IPO. And I told Garrett that Wednesday night that it was the dumbest idea I'd ever heard. Huge, huge miss. Huge miss. So what year did you join Uber?

2016.

Okay, so it was, it was established and it had traction. It had good, good, really solid, solid proof of concept at that point. What do you think that they saw in you to bring you into the organization? And what was their interview process like that? What have you pulled from their interview process that you use today, or what did you like about their interview or hiring process?

Yeah, I joined at a really interesting time, in part because at that moment in the company's history, it was a very general management model. So each sort of city to state to country, region was run by a regional general manager or general management component, and they were tasked with making all of the decisions for enabling success in their market. However, when I joined, the interest that they had in me was the fact that I looked across global advocacy and marketing components. So. So I actually spent my first couple years at Uber traveling from region to region, getting to know different aspects of the way that our brand was showing up in different markets. I remember right when I first joined, I ran into a colleague who also worked at Uber, who. Who we worked together at Google. And he was like, why are you traveling from region to region? That's not the way our company works. And I sort of laughed and said, I think that's right. But I think there are certain elements, whether it's safety or otherwise, where we're gonna start to need to see some global consistency applied. And so I think that was what attracted Uber to sort of my back and things like that as it relates to the interview process. One of the things, and it's not just specific to the interview itself, but one of the things that I absolutely cherished about my time at Uber was the speed in which folks made decisions, hired, grew teams. There was such a hard Charging mentality in a good way. And obviously it went sort of wrong in certain aspects. But to find great talent, to really suss out very quickly, to get right into the meat of things very early, you know, so in an Uber interview, you'd show up and it'd be like, hard question right out of the gate. You know, there's no like, there's no softness, there's just like, can you hack it? Can you handle it? And I think through that process, it created a team environment where you just knew there were a lot of capable, really passionate people. And I think that was huge. The only other thing I'll mention quickly, because it's actually something that we use at Transcend now, is the concept of the bar raising program, which is not unique to Uber, but I thought Uber just applied it so well that it's something that we've adopted. Particularly when you're growing and hiring really fast, being able to pull someone in from a completely different side of the business to say, does this person have our values? Will they show up consistently? Will they create and kind of grow the entire company? Is this someone we can't miss out on? And I thought that was a fantastic structure that worked really well at Uber and something we've had success with as well at Transcem.

Yeah, that's something that I brought into 1, 800 got junk when I was COO was we always had to raise the bar. If we had 10 people in a business area, the next person had to be better than at least five.

Right.

If we had 20 people, the next person had to be better than at least 10. It was always like, let's just keep increasing the average and kind of hiring the front end of the bell curve. How about working with Google? What do you think you pulled from there and what years were you there? Ballpark.

I was at Google from 2012 to 2016. Four years there. Yeah. I think Google had this beauty that was sort of at the other end of the spectrum. At Google, I learned the value of perfection in a really great way. I mean, you've got an incredible brand that is, you know, touching so many lives that the scale and the elegance at which it operated was just incredibly important. And certainly during the time I was there, that was sort of the ethos. We were big, we were everywhere. We were sort of consistent. How do we help show and grow that in a really meaningful way? I think culturally, the one thing that I took from that time at Google, which I loved and I know they sort of moved away from now, but it was really fun while we were there was this concept of let a thousand flowers bloom. And I actually just really loved watching teams from different aspects of the company run out of problem. And it was sort of this mentality of whoever got there first wins, like it doesn't matter, you know, like, let's just set. And of course it created sometimes, you know, you'd have these teams just absolutely like killing each other trying to get to the same end outcome. But it was such an innovative spirit and I thought it created such beauty around problem solving. It certainly doesn't work at every size and scale of a company. You need efficiency, you need swim lanes. But when you were that big and sort of creating that perfection aspect of let's just get this right, having a bunch of teams kind of work at it was an interesting sort of laboratory model, which I found to be very interesting.

All right, so talk to us about Transcend. You're there now as the coo. You've been there for three and a half plus years. What does Transcend do and what was it that attracted you over from Uber into Transcend? Why did you join and what did they see in you to bring you in?

Yeah. So Transcend is a data privacy infrastructure company. And by that that just means that we actually power privacy for some of the world's largest brands, whether it's consumer brands, AI companies, technology companies. In a few years, nearly two thirds of the world will have data rights under sort of various regulatory regimes and companies have to comply with those rights. And we are the infrastructure and the sort of the technology platform that enables companies to do that. One of the big things that brought me to Transcend and that sort of fueled my interest in it, is that I've always loved the intersection between regulatory and technology. I think it's very interesting. It certainly was the underpinning of all of my work at Uber on consumer safety and even prior to that at Google and before I even entered the tech world. Obviously coming up through regulatory, our co founders looked at some of the privacy regulations that were coming out. This was many years ago. And they thought to themselves, there's going to be a first approach which is very sort of legal oriented. It's going to be very sufficient based and then there's going to be a second wave approach and that's going to be understanding that this is actually a technology problem at its core. And that user data stored within technology platforms, it's operated on and orchestrated at the code layer. And there's going to need to be a technology player who can handle that size and scale of the data privacy industry. And they went with that direction. They're two computer scientists. They went straight at building a technology platform to enable companies. And I just found that to be really compelling. I think that sometimes going the long way around is incredibly satisfying. Regulators are really good at setting out their spirit for what they plan to do, but they're not always great at getting it right the first time. And so I think what Ben and Mike, our co founders, really realized is that they're just going to keep going. The regulators are going to keep updating the laws, they're going to keep tweaking it until they really get to the sea change of what they want to see, which is data privacy handled at a technology layer that actually makes sense and gives people the right types of data protections. And I found that to be just so compelling of a mission and I thought it was a really interesting market.

How many employees were in the company when you joined and how many are there now?

So when I joined we were just right about, gosh, we were less than 20 at the time. And we've been growing, you know, very significantly. We're sub 100 now as a technology platform. We obviously like to keep things very lean and we've got a lot of size and scale on that front, which has just been really impactful. But it's been awesome to see us grow so much.

Walking in from Google and Uber to Transcend kind of you could fit all of transcend into like part of one of the lunchrooms at Google. Like it's just a completely different business. Like how did you make the leap from going from admittedly tech and entrepreneurial and fast paced and ridiculously smart people, all that probably is the same. But from such a big corporate kind of environment, such a big company, how did you make the shift into more of this entrepreneurial sized organization? What did you have to change? What did you have to do differently? How did you have to grow?

Yeah, it was a leap and it wasn't in some ways in the ways that it wasn't. When I was at Uber, we actually were in a dedicated business unit. So we operated across all of the different functions and areas and were able to just be very quick paced in terms of what we were creating and what we were doing. And, and I loved that aspect. You know, over time, as Uber continued to grow, it didn't always make sense to have those types of structures. And so for me, I was really hungry to get back to that kind of quick component and really just sitting Next to products, sitting next to engineering, which is unusual for the rest of Uber, but for consumer safety, that's the way we were organized in the ways that it was a change. You know, I think the biggest one is appetite. Right when you were in a new market, when you've got a really interesting technology, when you've got such incredible customers right out of the gate, you can look out onto the field and see, say, gosh, there's so much I want to do here. And at a bigger company you have the time, the resources, the people to kind of set all of those things in motion and watch all of them bear fruit. But obviously at a much smaller startup, you know, at the size particularly of when I joined, you can't do that. You have to just be incredibly ruthless with where you're going to set your intention. And the appetite might be there and everything might be, you know, kind of mouthwatering as you're looking at all of the opportunity. But that to me was the biggest learning curve of really having to put down some projects. I thought man, this would, this is like a no brainer. But in this particular environment it just doesn't work to spread yourself that thin.

Now you've got some of the resources in terms of the financing side. You're backed by Excel and you're backed by Index Ventures. You've raised money and I know that you've raised a reasonably serious amount of money. How do you prevent from, you know, wasting that money? How do you be careful or cautious as a COO that you don't kind of overspend, that you don't get ahead of the curve? You know, I know that we're in a time right now when, when companies are doing down rounds and it's getting a little tougher to raise. But even if it was easy right now, how do you prevent yourself from growing too quickly and making some of those growth mistakes when you're still, you know, a sub 100 person company?

Yeah, I think for us the biggest element was just being incredibly judicious, making sure that we have the data to back up any types of moves that we were making. Certainly, you know, try iterate scale, scale mentality, looking for the most cost effective ways of proving out some of the bets that we were interested in. I love people with scrappy mentalities. We definitely hire for that. We create our structures around that so we would very quickly create sort of test and iterate components. That was on our marketing aspect, the way we're handling our sales organization or some of the investments we wanted to make on product and technology. I think the benefit that we had in sort of the privacy industry and the market overall is that privacy can have really interesting sort of waves of change. So obviously in my first couple of years of transcend, we were all in the thick of COVID I joined right in the heart of COVID you know, being even more judicious during that time. Let's really kind of double down customer success, great customer story. Let's let some of that organic component grow while we shore up the foundations. Was a very different time period when California announced, you know, enhanced regulations that they were going to tighten the screws on businesses. You know, that was a huge sort of win for us in terms of the types of support that businesses would need. Coming out of COVID they've obviously amassed even more user data based on a transformation of digital strategies. And now you've got regulars saying we're going to get even more stringent with some of these components. We watch those waves of change very carefully. We like to understand the market very, very deeply and we like to try to test things out in the scrappiest, most interesting and sort of first to market way that we can and then scale those components as effectively as possible.

So I know that one of the things you're doing right now is you're kind of this entrepreneurial scrappy, or not even scrappy, but like you are kind of still that smaller sized company, but really on a focused growth trajectory. But I know you're also kind of going after one of the big dogs like you are. Part of your corporate strategy, I think is actually really going after the old legacy company in your space, OneTrust. How are you approaching them? Why are you going after them directly? What's the thought process there? The kind of David and Goliath story.

It actually is a nice sort of full circle moment. Back to the founder story I mentioned earlier. So when I said that our co founders kind of looked at the field and said there'd be a first approach and then there'd be a second approach. And that second approach is understanding the deep technological components of privacy, how it shows up in a company and creating a seamless, efficient, sort of user experience and compliance driven program that is just faster, tighter, better, et cetera. And that's the direction that our co founders took. When it comes to going after, you know, such an established brand, we have obviously just followed first and foremost our customers, you know, so we've had folks switch over from OneTrust. We've just kind of followed the market in that perspective, in terms of being really proud of what we offer and how we think we are different in the field. But it's also been really fun. It's very energizing. Obviously at Uber it was a similar sort of competitive market. That spirit is so infectious. We are driven to just have great customer outcomes and, and when a customer is really happy and tells us about how excited they are to be on a next generation platform, and that's something that just adds fuel to our fire, whether it's on our brand campaigns. We just launched a big one in D.C. you know, sort of highlighting to the privacy community that we're the next generation platform or in the decisions we make on our product, you know, based on customer feedback and intel, it's just been incredibly rewarding and I think it sets up for just such an awesome culture.

So 50 years ago, one of the current world's greatest brands brands set out with this big, hairy, audacious goal to crush Adidas. And that was back in 1972. Nike set their goal to crush Adidas and Phil Knight was selling shoes out of the back of his car and people thought he was absolutely crazy. But it was a legacy business kind of that had, you know, was just ready to be disrupted. But they executed on a couple things brilliantly. What do you think the couple of things are that you're focused on that will allow you to crush? One trust?

I think the things for us that are just so important are one, being a technology platform that handles user data at the code layer. I think that's fundamentally different and something that we're just incredibly passionate about. Two, I think the outcome of being a technology platform allows for things like increased resource efficiency, which every company is excited about, increased compliance components, ad tech is what it is and user data flows the way it flows, you can't really govern that with a backend manager. Something that is technology as robust technologically as the rest of the industry. And then I think the third thing is that our sort of founding ethos is really around customer feedback, customer support. We had some incredible early customers. Folks I can mention, like Robinhood, Opendoor, Patreon were some of the earliest customers of Transcend. And I just watched the product team spend time with them, sort of bring their sort of intel into the product. And that has stayed with us really, really closely. And I think that will continue to serve us in a market that is only continuing to deepen and mature. And certainly we're not even getting started yet as it relates to a privacy industry. And so customer Feedback is going to be huge.

I love that. All right. Do you think that part of the reason that you're going to be successful as well is that you have these two co founders that are so product and tech focused, it feels like, because they are so obsessed with what the business really is, they're not just building the business to be business people. They're not watching, sitting, and, you know, caring so much about what their stock price is or what their value is, is going to be as the CEO, they actually are in it for the tech. Like, they're in it to build something and build something cool. Do you think that's going to be part of your strategic advantage as well?

Absolutely. And I've seen it. I mean, I think that when you have two co founders who are so deeply technical and understand not only the underpinnings of the way that technology is really sort of taking root and changing within businesses, but also where the market and the industry is heading, I just noticed that they're able to make calls and predictions about where. Where sort of the evolution will happen in such a crystallized way. And the fact that the both of them can do it together is our secret sauce, because they bounce off of each other. They've got just such a depth of ideas. And obviously AI governance has been a huge. Had a huge role to play in the data privacy industry. We're watching regulations come out around AI governance, a lot of which have foundational components related to data privacy. And so having two co founders who just fully understand sort of the evolution and the technological evolution that we're going to be facing is just incredibly impactful for our company.

You did your master's degree. Was that an MBA or what was your master's in?

Master's in public administration.

So in regulatory, that certainly helped you today. Do you think that your background in comms and PR has helped you in your COO role? My gut is that it has. And can you speak to that?

Yeah, I do. And I've had the opportunity to work just for some incredible communications experts and leaders. And I think one thing that I noticed, particularly at Google and Uber, is that clarity of communication solves a lot of challenges when it comes to internal strategy, external strategy, decision making, and really making sure that everyone is pointed in the same direction. And that's something that I take to with me and that I hope that I have learned a lot from those folks. I think a lot of times can come across as just sort of media relations, but for a lot of the great communications professionals that I'VE met. It really comes from an underpinning of campaign management, being able to set large scale teams with consistency out into the field, driving results, having that feedback and I think it's been incredibly beneficial to me and I think it probably an underutilized asset for most companies.

Well, what's interesting is that for many companies the CEOs tend to be a spokesperson for the brand. But there's a bunch of brands where the CEOs tend to be very inward product facing CEOs. One that comes to mind is Tobias Luque, who's the CEO of Shopify, a very inward facing product and engineering and tech focused CEO. They have a very outward facing product and comms and PR and sales marketing biz dev Harley Finkelstein, who is their COO. So my gut is that your two co founding CEO CEOs are like very inward product facing. Are you more the communications and the kind of the spokesperson for the company as well or do they do stuff with the media too?

They do stuff with the media too. I think it's really fun to work alongside of them with that mentality. As an example, there was a huge breaking news draft bill that came out over the weekend, a draft American privacy rights bill that everyone's following very closely. It's got bipartisan support and our, you know, our CEO and our executive team of really out front talking about the technological details of all of that. I obviously come at it more from a regulatory perspective. So unpacking some of those pieces, is this likely to pass? How does that happen? And I think it offers a nice one two punch. I'm not technical by any stretch of the imagination. So having two co founders who can really help the legal profession, the privacy profession, understand what their engineering and security counterparts are thinking and feeling on privacy is hugely impactful. And I often spend time talking about things like KPIs, performance management, regulatory elements, all of which are maturing. Privacy market is learning in real time, so that's been very rewarding to do.

You talked a little bit about and I think it was with Uber, a lot of the global exposure that you had and working and traveling around the world in different countries. Can you speak to some of the lessons of how businesses do business differently in different global markets and what you've learned from that and how you've kind of adapted or brought some of those systems back into North America both at.

Google and at Uber? I was exposed fairly early on to sort of the different workings whether it was in European markets or in Asian markets. And I think My top sort of insight and lesson that I always offer people who are interested in this and what they can take back is to come at it from a perspective to assume that things are different. And I think a lot of times, particularly technology companies, we can have an ethos that if we're US based, that things are sort of flowing from the US out and there's more consistency than not. And I think it can be a really helpful viewpoint to kind of turn that on its head and go in assuming that there are going to be key differences because it lends itself to curiosity, it lends itself to more deeply understanding where those differences are and what they look like and then being able to pull that back into the US market. So just as an example, when we were looking at safety in various components, you know, obviously in the US we think about safety through fairly specific lenses of what we mean when we say safety. We might mean physical safety in particular in the US culture, you know, drunk driving, it can be a large scale issue across the U.S. that's something that we focus and sort of have that lens on. But when you are in a region like Kuala Lumpur, you know, I showed up and we started talking about safety and a lot of it was around safety of income, safety of ensuring that your, the money that you had earned from that week was actually going to be in your account. So safety was on an entirely different dimension that we weren't even thinking about. And so having that curiosity, understanding and kind of coming at it from perspective that there are differences here. Let me start from that and kind of peel back and then find the similarities I think has been hugely impactful.

Super interesting. All right, so you've gone from being in senior roles and super important roles with both Google and Uber to being the COO of a, you know, smaller organization. How has your skill set had to change or adapt to become the CEO of a company? Where have you had to adapt and grow?

There are a couple things that come to mind. I'll say the silly one first, just because it was the one that popped into my head. But when I joined Google, the first thing that surprised me and that stuck with me through Uber, is that everybody returns your phone call because you're calling from Google, you're calling from Uber. So folks will make time to chat with you. They will assume that you've got something very interesting to tell them. They want to know where you're headed and what you're up to. And obviously at all the time I spent before joining Google and certainly at Transcend, when You are a challenger brand when you are making a name for yourself. Just reminding both, you know, for me and our teams, it's like we got to fight to put a shoe in the door, you know, it's not just going to fly open for us. So let's figure out how we do that in strategy and approach, which I think has been hugely impactful. That's just kind of the more humorous one for me. But on a more serious note, I think that the fundamental differences has really come down to clarifying swim lanes really consistently and making sure that we are using our resources as effectively as possible, particularly where you're in that kind of early stage structure. I used to work for a woman who had this great line around. Sometimes it can feel like kids soccer, right? Like everybody will run towards the ball. And I feel like a lot of my work and a lot of making sure that we have consistency of corporate strategy is kind of pulling back from that kid soccer mentality. How do we make sure we've got a great wing player and we've got defense and we've got a forward striker? Like, how do we make sure we're balanced on the field? Just because the ball is there doesn't mean that we all have to run toward it, even if that was our operating model three years ago or four years ago. And so that maturing process, I think is really interesting. And I think it's one that you have to stay ahead of really, really carefully at a startup brand where you don't need to pay as much attention to that. At a more established brand where people have kind of gotten into their groove, you almost need to do the opposite there. You need to shake things up and bring back that spirit of innovation. But for us, certainly making sure there's clarity in swim lanes has always been impactful.

Super interesting. I love that I was laughing because I just remembered my two kids who are now 21 and 23, kind of running towards the ball or playing baseball. It was ridiculous. It was super fun. In your role kind of orbit the giant hairball, how did you avoid the bureaucracy and the red tape and the crap? And then secondly is how did you. How do you now avoid getting sucked into all the stuff that you can sucked into? Like how do you focus on your roles and responsibilities and delegating more and growing people more versus getting involved in all the things that you could have opinions on or insights into any. Any kind of thoughts around that?

I think for me, particularly as it relates to sort of big companies and what can kind of happen There being consistent with my values has always been sort of the clearest and most mentally fortifying process for me. I believe fundamentally in, you know, attacking the problem, never the people. And I think if I have that consistency and sort of how I'm working things and I'm showing up in integrity and doing things every day, that is meaningful. I think it also enables me to take a step back and make decisions that I believe are on the sort of the best for the business without getting so personally wrapped up in them. That's been my personal sort of approach and perspective. It's interesting and you sort of drew the parallels in your question to sort of moving over to the early stages. You can certainly see how easy it can be to lose sight of the problems without consistency and clarity, particularly when the market is evolving so fast. So making sure that folks feel incredibly empowered that they have clarity around the problem that we are going after, that that problem is sort of reinforced and enriched and constantly adding dimension to that. What's missing in the industry where people sort of have unmet needs, how do we clarify our corporate strategy even more deeply so that people can really feel that richness of problem? And sort of. I've noticed that I've had to really try to create those structures and those components that we're constantly focused on that and that way it hopefully will allow for those other pieces to not take root with that hunger and that sort of laser focus on the challenge and the mission.

Love it. All right, I want you to go Back to the 21 year old Kate Parker and give yourself some advice. What advice would you give the younger you that you know to be true today? What you wish you'd known when you're just starting in your career.

When I was 21 years old, I was at the University of Pennsylvania playing lacrosse. Some of the best years in my life. I wish I had told myself that the lessons that I was learning on the lacrosse field would be more impactful than I ever thought possible and that I would just take a moment to soak it all in. Because I think the team orientation, the strategy, the leadership, the pulling yourself up when you all you want to do is sit down, coming back after a hard game, all of those lessons, I didn't realize it at the time how much they would stick with me. You know, 20 odd years later, there's still things that I draw on and still a well of inspiration that I take with me.

I love it. Kate Parker, the COO for Transcend. Thanks for sharing with us. On the second in command podcast. When a company in Ohio in the United States is losing an employee to a company based in, you know, Lichtenstein, all of a sudden they're going, wait, what the hell is going on here? The world has changed. I think we need to be able to grow our people faster so that they can adapt, because a person's job today is going to.