335 - Pivoting with Purpose: A Journey from Dance to Product Management and Supporting Young Adults with Qualpay's Penny Townsend

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Penny Townsend, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You're the co-founder and now chief product officer of a company called QualPay. Which, as I understand it, is in the business of helping people receive money. So I'm gonna be interested in learning a little bit about that. But I think I, where I, what I'd like to do is have you start with giving us a little bit about your background, starting with your, you started in England, you've been all over the place with a lot of different degrees.

Yeah. So I like to think that I've had 3 careers so far. Maybe I'm heading for a 4th.

Yeah.

My, my first love and passion, and probably if you ever saw me out and about with music, I love to dance. It's just, just brings pure joy to my heart. And I taught dance. I started teaching dance actually when I was 11 years old, and I taught all the way up till I was 22, 23. I have a professional qualification in teaching dance from the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dance in the UK, and I loved doing it. I loved teaching, leading, creating. It was a very enjoyable time. And then I had to grow up a teeny tiny little bit and enter a different time of my life. And so I did an undergraduate in management and systems theory, and I went into marketing and I worked in marketing, which would be my second career for a number of years. And then my husband decided that he wanted to meet moved to the US and I did not want to move without having independence from him. And I'd already planned to do a master's program. So I came over to the US and did MBA at USF. And I got to meet a lot of people that became my family and friends that are still my family and friends today. And from there in the second year, I met a gentleman called Philippe Couteau, who has since passed away, but I met with him and we had put on a conference to help people get into e-commerce and it was very early days of e-commerce and he met me and he offered me a job on the spot and I was just like, oh, that's just nonsense. But I knew I didn't really want to stick just purely in marketing. I wanted to spread out and do something that was a bit more making and creating, which kind of took me by a little bit too. Dancing and teaching. The job that they offered me was a product role, and actually when I graduated, a year and a half later, I did go to work for them. And I've had ever since a career within product management, and I've had the opportunity to work at some very early-day stage companies like PayPal when they were just starting to build out what they sell to businesses, and led and owned the build-out of that very— I think when the The day I got there, they had one merchant and that was it. And got to build out that portfolio for them. And eventually, like anything, I was like, oh, I have to go try something different. I will pause.

How is your internet connection? Can you tell?

Mine seems good.

Are you on Wi-Fi or are you cabled in? The reason I'm getting some real audio distortion on you every now and then.

I am not on my cable. I'm on my Wi-Fi.

I don't know if that's better. I just wanna make sure that we get good audio cuz we got what happens when things slow down. The audio doesn't catch up. You're, you drop down and you start growling at me.

Oh no, that's not good.

I heard it too. I thought it was my connection, but I had, I heard it as well. Yeah. Yeah.

I haven't plugged in my cable for a long time. I'm not entirely sure I've got the right connection.

Oh, you're fine right now. We'll just try to work around it. I think what I'll do, if I hear that again, I'll just stop and we'll just redo it and we'll just The joy of editing. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So just, well, let's get back going. And so you were a dancer, taught dance for a long time, decided you had to grow up and go back to school. You might be interested in knowing that I'm a jazz violinist. And so I've been a musician for all my life. And then, so you, so you go back to school, you're at USF up in San Francisco, meet a bunch of people, become friends and family. You get offered a job. Now you're working at PayPal. And end up as a product manager. And that's where you've been in that role growing, as I understand. So what happened after PayPal?

I left to go work again with Philippe Couteau in security, and it was a very different style than I had experienced before. And Philippe just had— he was a very inspirational leader, knew how to package up products like nobody I've ever met. And he was not— he didn't listen to his people. He worked on motivation perhaps by making them feel less than, which is not great to be around. And I decided after 9 months that this was not authentic to who I wanted to be or where I wanted to work. And I went to work for somebody that I had met right when I started working in the US and He offered me a job and said, you can come work for us, but you can do whatever you want to do. And I was just like, when is it that people actually ever offered that to you? So I was like, of course, let's do it. I don't know what that means, but let's go try and do whatever it is. And it was exciting. I was at Rational Solutions. I got to build things that I wanted to build.

There's a growl again. So that was exciting work that you, in this new job. Yeah. So what did you design your job to be?

So, I designed my job to be, was really, it might sound quite boring. So, I love looking at processes or how things work and like, how do you operationalize them? And then how do you make them be closer to being delightful? So, I got to build out an entire backend and I got to connect directly with MasterCard and Visa, American Express and Discover. And then the thing that I feel like I did that was delightful, which obviously everybody else is the witness to it is I built out a proof of verification system that took somebody a whole day.

There it is again. You built out the proof of verification system. Yes.

And it took one person a whole day to do something that we built out in a UI that basically you just look for exceptions. And so it took 5 minutes and it replaced a job role, but the person moved on to some, to do something different, but it was a real big swing and change in somebody's job. And then what we could offer to other, other banks that we dealt with to make their jobs easier. So it was, I found that very meaningful and satisfying and felt like we had really created something that helped change at least operational efficiencies for people. And we were then acquired by Cielo and I worked in Brazil for a couple of years to help with the integration with the technology that they had built. And after 2 years, a group of us decided that we wanted to leave and start a company together. So, I left with 7 others and we founded Qualpay, which we've been there for, I think we're in like year 11 now. And it was, you might want to know, why did I want to do that? And I sometimes think that was really wildly crazy, but I really wanted to have the opportunity to build and direct something from the beginning rather than taking something that somebody else had done and making it better. I wanted to begin, begin right at the beginning, which is a challenge.

And exciting. So tell me a little bit about Qualplay. I went to the website. What is it? Who are its customers? What differentiates it from all the other payment processors out there like Stripe and PayPal and everybody else?

Yeah, so it's a very muddled environment out there. Everybody says that they are everything to everybody. I will try and establish where we exist within. So we started really around reporting and reconciliation, and it was just something that from my experience that merchants or other businesses really look to move if there's something not quite right, like they can't make things match and nothing quite makes sense. So we solved the concept of reconciliation and answered this question of where's my money, whether you are a business, whether you are a partner that's reselling us, like where is my residual money? Or if you're at the bank level answering like, did all the cash and all the money flow to the right people at the right time? And we built out a really an acquiring platform in the cloud and it is custom made by, we run our own portfolio. So we have our own merchants, gaming companies, vacation homes, people that are selling vacations. We have an energy portfolio. So we have a mixture of portfolio and then we sell to ISVs. You can think about vertical SaaS companies that look to, I don't know, in there's like gym software, dance software, like things that kind of answer those specific verticals that we also sell into. And then we also sell more from an infrastructure perspective. We sell our technology to help others do what we do, and maybe they'll take a little module or they'll take, take the whole thing. And so we have a deal today with Equifax and they take what we built out for dispute management or chargeback chargebacks, and they use that and help that and then resell it and package it to other people like us out there.

And what exactly do you do?

So I have the title of Chief Product Officer. I have marketing and I run operations and I help with strategy and guiding the company forward. Wow.

So you've been doing this for quite a while. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you really excited to go to work?

The dogs get me up in the morning because I have to go for a walk in the morning to keep things calm. I am very excited to grow, solve problems, be creative, make things better for whether it's just the people around me or it's for the businesses that use our software. I am convicted to build things in a very delightful way rather than just slapping it out there to just get the job done. And that makes me happy.

Looks like— it sounds like it's very satisfying to produce, create, and sell a high-quality experience for people.

Yeah.

And that means a lot to you and make some money from it. Yes, and make some money too. That's, that's important. Yeah. So what do you think it is Penny, about you personally that's made you successful through all these iterations and different things you've done and all the growth you've gone through?

I think that what's made, probably made me personally successful, and maybe people around me say this about me, is that I am very driven. And people that I work with Call me a honey badger, because if I am gonna go after something, I'm going after it. I am adaptive and resilient. So resilient to— we obviously have had a lot of challenges in the work environment and just throughout my career and my life, and the ability to fail and start again and learn and keep going is important. And I think it's a deep facet of me to be able to keep going and bring curiosity to everything that I do. And I want to, and you'll probably see this from looking at LinkedIn, I want to continue learning and I'm very driven by the learning experience.

I've lost count of how many degrees you have. I think you've got 3 MBAs. A master's degree, an undergraduate degree. Do I have that right?

I think so. Yeah. Yeah. So my most recent, we, we had a tragedy in the family and so it drove my decision to do a master's in psychology and neuroscience. And when I talked about my 3 careers, I hope one day to have a 4th career and I would like to focus on people that are either suffering from mental health, but more in the like 15-year-old to 21-year-old group and help build programs out to support how can you be mentally healthy and have that become more of a norm. And so I have an idea what I want to do, but this part of my life is still ongoing. So yes, I'm not going to retire. I'm going to keep going.

Oh, it's interesting. I was a trial lawyer for 22 years and I went back to school and earned my master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies. And that's what led me into neuroscience, tutored by a professor down at Caltech. And because that when you talk about people fighting and making peace, it's all happening in the brain.

Yeah.

So better understand what's going on up in the brain to, to be able to understand what people's behaviors are. And I learned a lot and I learned a lot that completely flies in the face of everything that I learned as a lawyer. Our behaviors are not what we think they are. Yeah. And I found that, I still find it to be fascinating. So, so you're thinking that sometime down the road you're gonna take the stuff that you've learned in psychology and neuroscience and put that to practical use since you're really good at developing products. What kind of a product can you develop? Or series of products or apps can you develop for young adults to help them navigate what I think is very difficult cultural terrain for young people right now and has been for quite a while?

I think that, yeah, it's something that I toy with and I think technology is going to be very different probably in another 5 years than it is right now. And I think at core, the way that you build product is like you understand the process and then you bring it to life in whatever form factor you want to bring it alive. And so really understanding and probably connecting with schools, connecting with doctors, people that are currently supporting that group will help lay out like, how do we build up that kind of program? And in the last year I've been doing a certificate in nutrition because nutrition is so important to our mental health. So layering in the things that I think will help from a program perspective. So when you layer in nutrition, exercise, which, you know, obviously I have a bit of a background in that too, and then giving people a toolset that they can help. I think one of the most important things I learned, and it was just such a funny thing to resonate in my brain, was that the reality you have in your brain, you believe yourself, you're convicted that you're 100% right, but you're not.

Not even close.

Yeah, and that's where a lot of the conflict comes. This is where you get disconnected from the reality of what's there. And it's like, how do you teach that? So people go, oh yeah, hang on a second, let me step back and see and take a moment.

Yeah. I teach graduate courses down at Pepperdine University. I actually teach in decision-making under stress and uncertainty. And the first thing that I teach my graduate students is there's no such thing as rationality. There are— human beings are emotional beings, not rational beings. And the moment we start thinking of ourselves as emotional and everything driven by affect, then all of a sudden we can make sense of ourselves. But if you try to judge people from the old Kantian, or before that, Neoplatonism idea that we're rational beings and rationality is the only way to get to morality. Yeah, we'll never figure ourselves out and we'll always have Kant. And in my peacemaking practice, I've applied these, that idea to great, great success. But you're right, we're not who we think we are.

No.

The whole question of free will is not being questioned, but that's a massive piece of information for people to understand that there may not be anything such called free will. It's driving lawyers crazy, but there are plenty of neuroscientists who say, nah, we're deterministic beings. We respond to our environment. And yeah, so pretty radical stuff. This is called Listening with Leaders. And the reason is because I think listening is a foundational skill. I noticed on your LinkedIn profile, you talked a little bit about consensus decision making. I'm curious to learn more about that, how you conceive of that, and I'll share with you my thoughts on that too.

Yeah, it's the idea of getting people on the bus rather than dragging them behind you. And so how do you lead somebody to be where you would like them to be? Because you're 100% convicted that this is the path that you need to be on. And telling people to get on the path and come with you, it just is not motivating and it doesn't work. So, for me, consensus is around building conviction around a vision, a task, something that you need to do in a way that motivates. So, you entice, you put a problem in front of somebody, you ask for suggestions about which way to go, and you can help lead the group to get to a conclusion that perhaps you made in 2 seconds, but may take a group, I don't know, hours to come to. And the consensus building allows that motivation and drive towards a unified goal rather than just telling people what to do, which I've tried very hard in my career to move away from. Because in, in dance, you tell people what to do, you direct, and people should follow. And then when you leave that world, to motivate and get excitement or get people to really drive something, you do have to use consensus to move them forward, at least in the US. I haven't found anywhere else that other option might work.

I think that I write that changing human behavior is the toughest job of a leader and consensus decision-making is a powerful tool to use. Have you run across the definition of consensus decision-making that is used by the Friends, the Quakers? Have you ever come across that?

Mm-mm.

So the way the Quakers, they were the ones that really came up with this concept of consensus, which means the sense of the group. And under their rules, a group forms a consensus when everybody in the group has spoken on the issue at hand and nobody has a principled objection. And a principled objection means that the decision that's in front of the group that's being decided violates either a fundamental value of the group or a fundamental value of one of the individuals. And the person who makes the principled objection has to articulate what value is being violated and why. And then the group has to decide, is this a principled objection or not? So if we're in a conference room, we're talking about repainting the conference room to purple and somebody says, I hate purple, we're not gonna do that. That's not consensus because it's not a principled objection, it's an aesthetic objection. And an aesthetic objection is not principled. And so when you engage in that kind of decision-making, you do exactly what you're talking about. People have to be willing to talk and listen and talk and listen and talk and listen until everybody's satisfied that there is no principled objection. And then everybody can— they may not agree with the decision. Yeah, but they are okay with it because process has led to a higher level of trust that the decision is the right decision, even though it's something that I may not like personally. I can trust the group to make— the wisdom of the group to make the right decision to move forward. Does it sound something like what you do?

Yes. And when you build products or you're driving towards building out a vertical and trying to sell in, you are selling You're selling a story as well. Like, there's no, there's nothing hard for you to go, yes, I'm 100% convicted that this is going to work. You're selling a vision. And to do that, you, there is no real other way, in my opinion, to really get a whole group because you need your engineering, you need the operations team, you need your sales team to all come together and coordinate to be successful. And if they don't, this is where you get organizations that where, you know, everybody's in their silos and they're not really walking the same goals.

Exactly. So tell me about the importance of listening. I think the guests might— where did you learn how to listen?

Okay, so when I was about 5 years old, I was sitting in the back of the car and I was a very talkative young girl and my sister and actually my dad pulled over the car and they turned to me and said, you need to stop talking so much. You need to listen. And I was like, oh, okay. They were very irritated. Maybe I was just like talking super quick. And after that I got very quiet, but also during that quiet, I probably listened more than I was externalized and verbal. And oddly enough, dancing is very much a listening skill because you have to hear the music in order to embody it and to express it. So you, like, when you start to build all that together, then you drive towards the concept of listening. And I'd probably take it a step further that I don't like to get— I don't want people to listen to me, I want people to hear me because I want them to comprehend it, and I don't want them to give just FaceTime and we'll just have a conversation. I just, I really want to engage with somebody. And so they can feel the empathy, the empathetic discussion that I have and that I bring to bear when we're, when I'm engaged in a conversation.

Exactly. I talk about, there are two, I talk about two types of listening. One, one, one type of listening, type one listening is listener-focused. And that's the kind of listening we do when we're trying to get information. Or we have our own agenda and we're listening to somebody else because we want to satisfy our own needs, soothe our anxiety, gather information, ask questions, that sort of thing. And in that kind of listening, the speaker never feels heard. The speaker's just an instrumentality of my need to gain information, maybe control stuff, maybe it's power. But the second kind of listening, Type 2 listening, is listening to people. I call it listening others into existence. And the role of that kind of listening is to make the speaker heard, deeply heard from the speaker's frame of reference. And that means that you are, when you are listening to the speaker, your agenda is not on you, the listener, your agenda is on the speaker, making sure that the speaker feels deeply heard. And what's remarkable is there's some really interesting brain scanning studies that show that when you listen to people, especially if you listen to their emotions, it completely changes how the brain processes information. The, specifically it's Lieberman study in 2007 shows that the, when you affect label, which is basically emotional validation, the amygdala and the limbic systems associated with negative emotion are inhibited. And at the same time, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is activated. That's the part of the brain that constructs emotional databases, the abstract concept of emotion. And it's the only, it's phenomenal what happens when you engage in this process. People calm down almost instantly if they're upset. They feel deeply connected to you. So it's powerful stuff.

Yeah. One of my other things that I've done in my lifetime is I did a certificate in yoga teaching and I taught yoga for a while. And every class is really, you have to have a theme and you do the plan of what you're going to do. And one of the things that struck me so deeply, which is actually what I try and practice when I'm talking with people, is I'm watching how they're breathing and their breathwork. And when you start to bind your breath in with the same person, there is a connection that happens between you and that other person. So somebody's really angry, and instead of reacting and trying to respond I work with my breath and I try and calm my breath or I'll try and elevate my breath a little bit more to get closer to how their cadence is so I can have more of a fascinating, a conversation with that person.

Have you run across the HeartMath people down in Santa Cruz?

No, I haven't. I like them.

Gus, you will like them.

Yeah.

They talk about heart resonance and how our hearts synchronize with each other. Our heartbeats can actually synchronize. Yeah. A ton of research on this and they, they do amazing work. So just check out, you can Google her, ChatGPT HeartMath, and figure it out. We're at the end of our time here, Penny. I could obviously talk to you for hours about all this sort of stuff. You're fascinating. And we have a lot, we have a lot in common. You do, you did yoga. I'm a Tai Chi master, contemplative practice. So it's really pretty cool to hear all the different stuff you've done. I've got one more question for you and then I'll let you go. What is one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh, that's an interesting— I'm trying to think, 'cause I'm a fairly— I feel like I'm a fairly open book. I was, as a younger being, and I think it was because I was very talkative and I was very active, and I might have had a different diagnosis when I was a kid. In today's environment. So my parents had me in dance, ice skating, piano, guitar, horse riding.

Oh my goodness.

Yes, all at the same time, just because they were just trying to completely exhaust me so I could go to bed and get up the next day. So it was a strategy. When I look back, it was just, it was I didn't know any other child that was raised the same way as me. And my sister wasn't raised even the same way as me. It was just, they just put everything on me today.

I love that because when it, that's where you got your love of learning. Think about all the different things you learned that you were exposed to as a child where you had to learn stuff from writing to doing dance to sports to everything else. Every time you're in a new environment, you have to learn a new skill. It's constant learning. Your parents did you a great service when they did that to you. That's very cool. Thank you, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day today. I really appreciate it, and I know that my audience does too. Thank you again.

Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag Listening with Leaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEDougNoll. Doug Noll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.