51: Julie Zhuo - Authentic Leadership

And what I think about the intuition is like it's the subconscious layer of our brain. And so I think there's a lot of wisdom in the way that our body feels, in the way that our subconscious is now. It also, by the way, is wrong a lot of times. So I'm not trying to say that like, oh, this is somehow smarter or more wise in every instance than our logical or analytical brain. I think about them sort of both as like they complement each other and we need to keep them in balance and both have really great wisdom to bring to helping us decide and make ever better decisions.

Welcome to the product here with Lea. I am your host, Lea Thoren, and we are about to spill the tea with the best from tech about product growth and senior leadership topics. Good morning everyone. Today's journey is one through design, data and delightful decisions that matter. Once upon a time, she was the design virtuoso behind Facebook's consumer app, where she turned simple ideas into features that billions now cannot live without. Like the tiny like button you click 100 times a day. Now she's building Sundial, where data meets design to help builders make more intentional decisions. Her best selling book, the Making of a Manager, is like a GPS for navigating the management jungle, and she does so in her very unique style. Let's dive into the data and design driven world of the wonderful contrastful Julie Zhu. Hi. Hi, Julie. How are you doing this morning?

Leah, that was such a wonderful intro. Thank you. It's so nice to be here.

I am so glad that you're here. How would you rate this introduction from shriveled mushroom one to perfect cherry blossom 10?

Perfect cherry blossom 10? Really? Maybe it's because, like, I'm thinking about myself too much, but sometimes when you hear someone else describe what they think of you, and you do know me more than many other podcasters that I've talked to like it. It's like more delightful than ever because it's not just like, here's the bio that I give to everyone ahead of time.

Yeah, here's a secret, right? Like, I only go myself only on podcasts, just to see occasionally what other people think about me. Okay, no, joking aside, Julie, really quickly, what do people get wrong about you once they get to know you?

Oh, well, okay, you and I were just talking about this. But the challenge sometimes is because I wrote a book and because I've written a lot, people get this impression that I'm somehow do or embody everything that I say in my book and my writing and so they have this expectation that I'm somehow, like, the world's best manager, or I just know all this stuff about design. And then when they get to know me, maybe it's a bit of a disappointment when they realize I am just like an ordinary human being, like they are. And so I always try now to set expectations accordingly. You know, I always say this about my writing my book. Like, it is very aspirational for me. The reason I love writing is because I'm writing letters to myself about what? It's sort of like just getting this noise out of my head and trying to structure it. And so a lot of it is, like, the theory that I do know to be true, but theory is still very different from practice. And so what I want to embody is, like, a person who practices this, but I am like anybody else, not a perfect human being, make a lot of mistakes, don't do a lot of things that I would want to do. And so I just want to make sure that people understand that I am like, a normal person, like, they are.

I can relate to this so much. And we are going to talk about it a little bit more. Can you introduce yourself to the audience in two or three sentences, really quick, in case someone has absolutely no idea who you are?

So I'm Julie Zhu. I wrote a book about management. I did a lot of design at Facebook, where I grew up with the company for 14 years and led design and user experience. Now I am a founder of a company called Sundial. In the data space, the way I would self identify is I am a constant learner, and that is why I do what I do and what I really love doing.

Okay, So I was thinking long and hard how to describe you. And while the intro before was more like on a funny quip, I would like to give it another kind of try. Why we get along so well. At least I can tell for myself why I really appreciate you. So you are very contrastful, Right? Like, that's what I said in the intro really quickly. And out of my more famous friends, you are the one person that I would describe as having the most affinity for aesthetics. You know, like, and how you appreciate beauty and the things that you do and so forth. And you're also, like, this role model for almost every designer that I know. Everybody knows you, right? Like, and at the same time, you're building Sundial, which is a data analytics platform, which is the complete other side of the spectrum, if you just think about it for one second. But then on the other side, I was Always thinking that you're really like, this brilliant conceptual thinker like you. I think we both think from first principles quite a lot. Like, we try to always try to understand. So why is this the case? Why does this go in this way? That it does. And I think you give yourself not enough credit when we talk about management because you give a lot of good guidance, specifically, also for women who do not try to go into this macho type of leadership and management, where we have to aspire to a certain stereotype. And I came up with the perfect metaphor for this. I feel like. So I'm dyslexic and I struggle with reading text that is not structured well. This has nothing to do with the content. It's more likely, you know, like, how the spacing is and so forth. And I feel like with you, the thoughts are in a typographic kind of design that makes me appreciate. I can understand the structure of it, besides that the content is good. But this is how I kind of see this. And I appreciate this a lot with you. And I'm pretty sure that the people that are listening to this episode will also come to this conclusion by the end of it, I hope. Does this ring in some way true? Can you relate to this?

I think that's the first time someone's mentioned that, so thank you. Like, this is like, a new piece of information for me, at least in terms of the structure or the presentation of the idea. So I'm going to think about that more. So I really appreciate that tidbit. What I think does really resonate is what you said. Like, we both, I think, are yearning for understanding, a deeper understanding of the thing. And so that's how I often think about whether I really get something. Like, can I distill it down into an explanation? And that's often why I write so much. Like, it's a little bit of a litmus test for me. Like, if I can really explain this in a way that is really simple and frankly, convinces me, then maybe it convinces other people. But then it. It's sort of like, I understand it well enough at that level. And so I do like this idea of, like, it's very. It's like one idea leads to another. It should be very straightforward how you get from one to another, and you ultimately arrive at the conclusion. And I want the conclusion to feel compelling because you have been there every step of the way since the beginning. And I think that is one of the things I get the most, I would say, joy and value out of writing, because it helps me think more clearly.

Yeah. I will also put it in the show notes afterwards for people like, what you're talking about right now is mostly the looking glass, right? Like, so your substack where you try to put this all down. I have a question in this regards, because I was trying to also understand if I look. If I go by the numbers and I'm looking at the guides and the stuff that I've written that are the most popular with people. One of the fears that I had when I was pushing the button to publish was that this is too simple. This is not complex enough. And when you just described how you're writing these kind of thoughts down, you kind of structure them, right? Like, you bring them into a simple form. Is this a feeling that you also kind of dealt with sometimes that when you're kind of done with an article and you just think like, this is too basic. There's not enough. I don't want to call it meat, but it's like, it's not complex enough for everybody that's reading it. But then at the same time, you get the feedback that, hey, this is so well structured and it's simple that I don't know how to balance it. So do you. Can you resonate with this?

I absolutely can. It's something I think a lot about just through my background in design. Because I think with design, the way I distinguish, by the way design and art is that with design you always have like a particular audience in mind. You're trying to do something, convince that audience of something. Right? You're trying to create a behavior that is towards the intent, but you have to do some understanding of the person who you're trying to convince to do something. So that's how I see it. Whereas art, I think, is much more about personal expression. And so I bring these as parallels because I constantly have this question, at least in my writing, right? I have to try and first ask myself, who is this writing for? Sometimes the answer might be, it's. For me, it is really personal expression. And therefore it has different rules, right? It should abide by different rules. Because then the goal of personal expression is I should feel the thing. I should feel like it's true to me. It speaks to me. It's the thing I would want to say. There's like a voice and a freedom. And that's one extreme end. And then the other extreme end would be, I'm thinking about a particular audience, a particular type of person. Maybe, you know, when I wrote my book, it was that first time manager. And now I want the ideas to be as simple for them for that particular audience to get what I want them to get out of it, which is I want them to feel more empowered. I want them to feel like they have a set of tools. I want them to feel less embarrassed or stuck or overwhelmed. And a lot of feelings I could relate to when I was a manager. And so when I embody that headspace, then the writing changes and I often then have to not think about, like, what it is that I would want to say to myself, but what is it that I want to say that person? And now if I think about my blog, my looking glass, it actually the answer of like, where am I on the spectrum changes. And previous years I think I was more oriented towards the reader or the audience. In more recent years, I'm more oriented towards like my own expression and writing for me. And I don't know if, you know, readers can tell. I think maybe the way readers can tell is like some stuff resonates more with them and some less. And it's not to say that every time I focus on that reader that I'm always successful, of course, but there is that intent. And the more that I am clear with myself at least of like, what am I trying to do here? Who am I trying to write for? What's the purpose of this? The easier it is for me to at least not be confused about where I am. And I think that's very much true in design. Because with design we always have to pick like the hardest thing often. And I experienced this too, when in our startup is one of the first things you have to do is like, who is this product for? And in the beginning you have this night, you know, I was very naive. This is for everyone. Everyone loves data. So like, you know, that designer wants to know data, the engineer wants to have data, the data person wants to know data, the executive wants to know data. But then the more we learned about it, we realized, oh, there was actually somewhat different needs for each of these people when it comes to data. And in a perfect world we'd have like a large team and we would have infinite time and we could design the product to fulfill all of those needs. But in reality we kind of have to prioritize and pick and choose. And that is a very important decision to make. And if you don't make that, well, you, it just everybody has a different assumption and you get into that dissension and gridlock about, you know, is this a good feature? Well, yeah, maybe it is for that type of person, not for that type of person, who are we really talking about? And so it's such an essential question that I find that sort of crisscrosses all of these different topics of, you know, design, building products, and writing.

So I find that quite interesting. Let me see whether I can make a really weird connection now to the main topic that we wanted to go into. So we wanted to originally also talk a little bit about taking risks. And one thing that you just said really resonates with me. I'm also now at the point in my career where I actually start to explore new concepts for myself that I start them to write down. And I'm challenging notions that are very much, you know, like, I'm starting to challenge how companies are built, like how we do management as leaders, how we recruit people and so forth. Right. Like, I'm not going anymore with what people tell me has been the case. And I want to describe you a very specific situation where also remember that I have seen an interview from you about what you're looking for in candidates. You know, like, I don't know, let's say you have to hire a senior VP of, I don't know, data, design doesn't really matter and what actually matters. And I feel like, if I remember correct, I think you said a lot of the stuff is happening between the letters, right? So to speak, like, how does someone feel and so forth. And I am absolutely of the opinion right now as well, that when I look for candidates that I'm hiring into my product organizations and all that kind of stuff, I can tell usually between three to five minutes, whether I'm feeling this person. And there is no way. I never managed to really put down in writing what it is that I'm looking for. I have the rational figures, right? So, like, you know, they need to have this amount of years of experience and that kind of stuff. But you can check this on the door, right? Like, this is the thing that if they do not lie, that's. This is kind of, you can check this on the door, but the other stuff, you really can't. And I feel like this is a bit like design where we have our principles, but the sum of it is more than the individual parts. And when we are hiring with people, I oftentimes go with the gut. I have to, because whenever I'm not listening to the gut, this is where the mistakes are starting to happen. And this is very uncomfortable. It's very uncomfortable because I cannot exert control over this. I cannot give Someone sometimes a reason why, hey, this is why you're not a good fit. But at the same time, I still feel we have to make really, really tough decisions like this. I expected with senior leadership that this goes away at some point, but the exact opposite is now happening. It's much more about walking into a room with 5 to 10% of the context and then making a decision about something that should be data driven. Right. How do you feel about this? Do you resonate with that?

I really do. I think that the intuition and the, and what I think about the intuition is like, it's the subconscious layer of our brain. And so I think there's a lot of wisdom in the way that our body feels, in the way that our subconscious is now. It also, by the way, is wrong a lot of times. So I'm not trying to say that like, oh, this is somehow smarter or more wise in every instance than our logical or analytical brain. I think about them sort of both as like they complement each other and we need to keep them in balance. And both have really great wisdom to bring to helping us decide and make ever better decisions. And part of this is like this work. And you and I have talked about this too, of like trying to figure ourselves out, like, where is it that our logical brain tends to take over? And I'm that kind of person generally very analytical. I. It's very easy for me to start constructing stories with the logical brain. And sometimes I think I don't listen enough to my intuition and I'm trying to re trigger that balance. I know people, good friends who've kind of been the opposite. They're like, oh my gosh, I'm acting too much based on that. I realize what I need is a little bit more balance in bringing that. And so we're all built a certain way and, and I think our goal is to try and leverage the wisdom of each of these things to be able to make the best decisions. And so whatever is the prescription is likely very individual to each of us. It kind of goes to like, do we really understand ourselves and how it goes? But going back to the wisdom, right, I think that the more you have done something, so the more you are quite experienced and you know, you have done hundreds, thousands of interviews, I'm sure. And so all of that has been encoded in your subconscious for. And in a way probably where you can't necessarily explain it. But it's not like you've never interviewed someone. If you've never interviewed someone, I would probably suggest that you don't maybe trust your intuition so much because you still have.

Fair enough.

A grounding. Right? But it's more that a person has done something over and over and over again. It's more likely that a lot of how they feel and what they have pattern matched through all of those things, thousands, hundreds of experiences has a wisdom there. And that is where it starts to go into the feeling. And I feel the same way as you. In fact, when I realize and I go back and I actually, you know, after I hire a bunch of candidates and sometime later I look back and I try and assess, I realize that the candidates for which I had a strong same as you, like a strong feeling, like, I really enjoyed the conversation. I felt we could talk for hours. I was sad that the interview ended. I had so many more things I would have loved to discuss with them. The feeling of that producing a hire often continued to carry into how we work together. And that person and the ones where I was like, I don't know, but let me rationalize, like, let me rationalize on paper why this person would be good. Those were the ones that tended to be. Again, there's always, you know, I'm not. These are no, there's no hard and fast rules here. But those tended to be the ones where I felt like it wasn't actually as great of a fit. And so that taught me that, hey, because I've interviewed a lot of people, like, let me just trust that feeling a little bit more. Do I want to continue the conversation? Would I be excited to have this person be in my team? But again, if you've really not interviewed that many people, you're very early in your career. You haven't actually even worked with that many people. I would caution you to not trust and lean into your feeling too hard because you actually need many more patterns to. To be able to develop that.

Yeah, it's actually a good point. You know what? Like, I think you nailed it on the head there as well. I think if I had any kind of advice for people that have to deal with hiring managers like us, it's very important that they let us see who they are as well. Like, this is one thing that is also quite annoying in recruitment calls when you feel someone is trying to play both sides all the time. So, like, for instance, you say, hey, what do you think? Like, what is a big weakness of yourself? Or like, what do you struggle with? Oh, I'm always working too much. You know, it's just like, oh, come on. It's just like, like, don't give me stuff that you could turn around, right? Like, so, like, just. Just lay yourself bare. And I think being opinionated and having character and edges is so important because I think the one thing that has always let me down with people is not the lack of skill, but the lack of accountability and just, you know, like, hey, Leah, I'm not sure whether I messed up, but I think I have that with this, I can work, right?

Yeah.

With the other things, I just cannot work.

I think you're pointing to something that is so important, which is this level of honesty in a relationship that we can get to with each other. And honesty really does require a leap of faith. It requires trust. It requires vulnerability. It's really hard to say these things. We all have this story of ourselves that we want to be true, and we want other people to think that story is true, because then it makes us feel worthwhile. It makes us feel like we're doing good. It makes us feel all of these things. Right? It's a dream. And unfortunately, though, like, it can get in the way. Like, it can get in the way of this much deeper, more honest sense of knowing each other. And I think the more that I have managed and the more that I've grown in my career, I think similar to you, the more I really value that quality of, is this person feeling comfortable enough to be that honest but willing to take a leap of faith with me, that we can really develop that trust and that bond.

And if we flip this now around and we say, okay, so now we demanded the candidates to take these risks. Before the podcast, we also talked about this. You said that you are. You've given yourself kind of, I think, a New Year's resolution where you were about, like, I have to take more risks yourself. So, again, Julie is someone that is a senior leader. You've done this many, many times. What kind of risks are you talking about? And, like, what. What's triggered this potentially also in this year, that this is your New Year's resolution?

It's the same. I think it's the same story we go back to. Like, I have this very deep belief that everything that I've ever done, everything I know in my head, that's either knowledge or skill or what have you. I think of myself as like, an extremely ordinary, probably less than, you know, Like, I look at people now who are in their 20s, their 30s. I talk to them. They always strike me as being so much more self assured, confident, aware of who they are compared to when I think of myself at that age. Now again, I could be remembering wrong, blah, blah, blah. My own perceptions may be incorrect, but I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to people. But then there's this dissonance because they look at me and they're like, oh, you're something really special and amazing. I'm like, I don't think so. I always thought of myself as an outsider, an imposter, a person who frankly didn't know enough. I have now come to realize that, frankly, that is a gift of sorts too, because it maybe keeps me more able to be open to other ideas because I don't think I know very much. So it has its strength, it has its own difficulties, as anything in life does. But one of the reasons I wanted to do this resolution is because I felt that last year, in fact, it was a really good year for me in terms of personal growth and learning. And so I've been doing the startup thing first time founder learning a ton. As every founder will tell you, right? You probably always start thinking you can build a company and having a little bit of a naivete, like, this is going to be like, I could do this. Because I think everybody who starts doing it thinks they can do it and will succeed to some extent. And what happens is you go through actually doing it and then at one point you're like, oh my God, this is so hard. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. And there's these ups and downs, right? Very high highs, very low lows. I think that's like standard literature for like if you talk to anybody and. But what I loved about it, when I go back and look at the journey. So yes, high highs, low lows. But then I also have this sense of satisfaction that through the lows and the highs I learned more about myself. That everything that was hard taught me something about me, every piece of feedback, everything that didn't work, that I was hoping and wishing could work and didn't work. Like every rejection in a sales call was a gift of sorts because it taught me more about obviously how to make the product better, but it also taught me more about myself and where my assumptions are wrong. And one of the biggest things I learned in the last year was how to, I think, just enter into a deeper level of knowing people on my team. And my team is a little bit unusual because I am in the us Most of my team is actually in India. And so we're remote and there's a very large time difference. So that means When I'm talking to them, it's early morning for me, I'm tired, it's late evening for them. They're tired. And so neither of us are necessarily in our best to be able to be in this engaged zone, but we're also on zoom, and so that makes it doubly hard. And so I do go to India every few months and then I have two weeks to really spend with the team. And I've just, I've tried so many new things of, like, how do we really feel connected? Because it is really important to me. It's actually something that I find really motivates me to feel connected to other people that I'm working with. And so by trying a lot of things, you know, I've. I've kind of gotten to know the individuals and it's been so rewarding, it's been so wonderful. And I realize this very paradoxical thing, that the more that I can be very open and raw myself about what's going on, what am I worried about? Like, when I was feeling those lows, expressing them to other people on my team, which to me for a long time was like, I can't do that. I'm the leader. If I do that, they will lose motivation. Like, it's going to be, you know, I need to be like, the strong one. I think I learned, paradoxically that it actually does the opposite. It helps bring us closer together. And when we can see each other as again the human beings that we are, we can appreciate that we all have different strengths, experiences, perspectives, but we are all in the same boat in that we want the same thing at the end of the day. And it is just about how do we work together. And there are times when we do need to take a leap of trust. And this is actually, by the way, feedback my team has given me in the beginning days of our startup. The bit like after the first year, the feedback I got was like, you're too hands off. I think I had been carrying too much of the big company. Like, how do I manage in a context of a larger company where, you know, most of the time I was hearing a lot of feedback that, like, my reports do not want me to get too involved. So I think I brought that to a startup and then I got this opposite feedback, which is like, you know, you're the founder of this company. If you don't know what's going on while we're trying to get to product market fit, that is a huge problem. And so that was hard to hear. But Necessary, right. That I had to really adapt. And then at a certain point, I did that for a long time. Like, I got into the details, and then I started to hear the opposite, which is like, you are micromanaging too much now. You need to, like, actually help. You need to, like, demonstrate more trust in us. And I was really grateful that we had gotten to the point where the team felt comfortable enough sharing some of this stuff with me. But every single time, it helped me reflect on, like, wait, why do I do that? What stages do I do that? What is it like when I'm stressed? How do I come across in a way that isn't productive? And how do I really want to respond? And I don't think I would have been able to get to that level of dialogue without, frankly, having this very honest relationship with people that I work with and being able to cultivate that. And so part of my resolution this year is I want to do more of that. Like, I want to take more risks in saying the things that might be a little uncomfortable because I haven't done it before, and just see what happens. Right? They're all little experiments, but hopefully what happens is we can reach a greater level of depth and connection, because I think that's so much of what we do when we work is we work with people. And it's a relationship like all of the other relationships in our lives. And the quality of that relationship can make a huge difference to how much we feel engaged and love our job. And I know that it does for me personally, and I want to. I just want more of that.

I can relate to this. I also think, just like, to hook onto the last thing that you just said, I feel like this is a big shift from how we looked at our jobs 20, 30 years ago, I think. Or like, how our parents were perceiving their jobs in regards to, you have your job and then you come home, right? Like, so there's like, this really kind of strong separation. And now I always thought that you're spending so much time with these people together. This is part of your life. It's not just like a sidekick to your life, right? Like, you're not working to be in the free time. We should really have a good relationship with each other all the time. And this is quite important. I just want to say to this that I found it quite funny when you told me that, you know, like, this is a New Year's resolution for you, taking risks. Because in my mind, what you did in the last year, maybe I can reflect a little bit on this with you now because you also showed me your product. I think it was about six months ago or maybe even further. I don't know when that was exactly. You went from this huge company scale, corporate kind of crazy scale, in a very, very specialized role, exactly the way that you said, you know, like you were hands off, you had a lot of stuff to manage to. Now this ultra small scale that is extremely data driven, different kind of thing. This sounded to me like you're taking like five risks at the same time and you're just throwing yourself into, you're being open about it. I Also remember the LinkedIn post that you made about Sundial when you, when you were really jumping into it and you said like, hey, now I'm trying to understand data. I'm not a data person per se, but now I'm trying to get it out there and so forth. And I found this just really, really incredible and also very encouraging. But the thing that always saved you is exactly what you said. It's like this feedback loop of if I'm going too far, I know the people will push back that are with me. And this is not a devaluation of your own personality or like how valuable you are to the others. And I think I see this all the time when I Advise companies or CEOs or any C level. If the feedback loop is missing, if you're not capable of just like putting away that C title and just really, really hear the hard truths, then you will say you will get stuck and you will be one of those leaders that you do not want to be the people that are not liked in a company. And I think it's that feedback loop that always grounds you because we will never get the perfect equilibrium. It's always too much, too little. You know, like then you scale again and things break and so forth. I find that really, really good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really think it is that. Yeah. Because that's why we, we're social creatures at the end of the day. And I think that's what the best relationships do for us. They help. They hold a mirror to who we are and we do that for each other. Because sometimes it's easier to look at something from a distance. Right. And we do that for our friends, we do that for our family. We should do that for the people that we work with. And they can all be really rich, deep, meaningful relationships. And it doesn't mean that necessarily. It's always about how much time you spend together. I think it's always about now. At least the limits test for me is if we spent time together, even me and you right now, did we both come away from it feeling like wow, like that we both gained something from it. You know, there was a depth there, there was a little bit more of a pushing in an area where we hadn't gone before. That is like the adventure that we created together with each other. And how did that feel?

I think it's been very important for me as an introvert to kind of understand that the way that the world has been constructed, you know, like, and how it interacts with us and the expectations that we have. So what we think we should be and what we should do with others is very, very much designed for extroverts. And I'm saying this because as you just said this, like you have expectations, right? Like the first time you have a leadership role, you kind of have expectations on how you have to behave, how you have to attend, you know, like this celebratory get togethers where you drink champagne and you celebrate each other and you just talk about the weather and everything. And I always cringe at these. I'm just like, I want to deal with this. This is not me. I love one on one conversations, I love digging into a problem. But please do not talk to me about the weather except when I was leading the product org of an actual weather organization. But it's a different topic. But this is just so, it is so fascinating to me because in the cultural context where you are, there's just like the one personality that just fits perfectly, right? And I'm like, everybody is like this. And it is quite important that I make extroverts, just as introverts, for instance, feel welcome in the organization that we create. And I find this kind of flag super, super, super difficult and challenging. But I give the freedom where I can. And I feel like, yeah, I feel like you strike me as someone that also pays attention to that.

I think I am an introvert. I think I am by nature an introvert. And I think that when I was young, very much I was, I was an immigrant to the United States. And I think one of the things that maybe is a shared immigrant story is you don't feel like you belong and you have to pay attention to what are other people doing and how might you adapt yourself so that you get to feel like you belong. And I think maybe what I was always craving is that sense of do I belong? And so all of that. And again, I didn't know this, of course, when I was Little. This is a little bit of a backwards glance at trying to maybe rethink about the story of my life. But I think that often when you do feel a little bit like, oh, I'm always watching people, I'm observing, you know, I don't know what to say, but I'm trying to study like, I'm trying to observe most like religiously what it is because it's a adaptive mechanism to then survive and be counted as part of the, the in group. Right? So that's me. Like I was much more in the corner. I'm much more observing. For years I did not know how to share my own opinion to a group. And very much like you, I had this like in a one on one setting, it was so much easier because maybe we can look at each other eye to eye, body language, you know, there's like a. It was just. And it still is. It's so much easier for me. I love one on ones. To this day, being in front of like a large group of people is much more challenging for me. As with all things, doing something a hundred times makes it easier. Right. So for me, again, if I can go and speak in front of a group, it's by no other reason. It's not like naturally I'm talented. It's just I literally did this like hundreds of times. And so now it becomes a little bit more in me that at least the fear, a lot of it goes away, some of the discomfort, I think still lingers. But I think that's a natural part of at least how I'm built. And I also do, by the way, I do very much admire extroverts. I admire people who can get in there and tell stories and make a room laugh and make everyone feel welcome. I want to be able to do that. It's still something that I am working on. But I. I've resonated with you very deeply about just the introvert way.

I think I have one more point to this which like I feel like I never really spoke up in these really big leader meetings, you know, like where you have super senior people around, you know, like the board and all these people that you do not understand. Like before I can understand, like, how does all of this work? How much is everyone winging it? Which everybody is by the way, right? Like everybody's winging it. So when I had this kind of ideal state of like, oh my God, these people have the secret sauce and I don't. I think one of the things that really kept me back was always like this anxiety of. I am someone that does not have a lot of quality control in their head. I just. I speak my thoughts very fast, and then usually, what happens if I do it in front of important people, so to speak, then I start to get anxious about afterwards, hey, what did I say? Should I have said this? Should I have done this? And this happened all the time. So my defense mechanism then afterwards was to not go to these meetings anymore or hold myself back completely, which is also not a solution. And I found this really comfortable space now where I'm like, hey, I can have an imposter syndrome totally, but still at the same time be a defender of my ideas. I do not have to be judge, jury, detective, and everything. Of all situations all the time. It's okay to just have an opinion on something that I'm passionate about and then see what happens. And this is an interesting concept that I've never learned where you just like, also sometimes you just put an opinion out there to see whether there's pushback, is there something that is going to come? And I found this so fascinating, specifically with more senior leaders, which is probably an entire podcast in itself. But, yeah, I found this very. An interesting dynamic because this is what extroverts do. You know, they say something and then nobody's saying something, and then they're like, oh, yeah, well, it looks. Looks like I'm right, right.

Yeah, right, right. I love that. And that really rings true to my own experience. The thing that really struck me is when you said, like, you know, yeah, I'd get so nervous in front of important people. And I. I certainly certainly felt that way. One thing that I think has also helped is I realized the reason I was nervous is, like, you get this narrative that plays like, what did they think? Oh, my God, they thought I was too rambly. They thought I was scattered. They thought I had no idea what the hell is going on. You know, you start to create these nightmare scenarios of what it is they were thinking. And then what I realized is, like, look, if you literally ask them to just tell you what they were thinking, it is never as bad as the nightmare scenario that you were thinking, even if they don't say, like, you were perfect, you were. So what they tell you is grounding. It is extremely grounding in a lot of ways, makes you feel so much more relieved, because now you don't have to wonder about all of this stuff. You know exactly what it was they were thinking. And if there are things you can do better, great. That's actually very Tangible and just cutting off that entire train of wondering what the nightmare narrative is, is so much less noise in the head. And even though it feels very scary to ask for that, whatever the answer is, I've always found it makes me feel better.

I 100% agree. And I don't know whether it's age or whether it's now, like, the amount of experience that I've also gathered with myself on this. I cannot believe to say this, but I'm starting to get over this kind of fear myself. I just know that I'm good enough in some regards and that I can also be the most senior person for being myself without having to know everything. And that's a very, very comfortable place to be. Maybe it's because I'm getting older. Maybe this is what happened, you know, like, maybe the hormones are just like switching and you're just like, yeah, you know, whatever, it's fine.

I have thought about that too. I've been like, you know, is it that I actually know more? Is it any of these experiences or is it literally just age and brain chemistry changing as we grow older? I don't know if we'll ever know. I would love for someone to know what it is, though. Like, can. To help me understand the root cause here.

I think we also got better in choosing our battles, right? Like, I just, I don't have to win every argument anymore. And that's. I think I was very exhausting back in the day. Like, oh, when I was 30, I had to win every argument. It was so stupid. Just like, hey, whatever, you can have these three. If I can have the other one, that's fine. So, yeah, Julie, we've been going at this already for quite a while. Is there something that is still on top of your mind that you feel like is going to be a good takeaway? And how can people then afterwards also get in touch with you? Do you want people to get in touch with you? Should they buy Sundial? Should people just pour millions into the startup? What should happen right now?

I mean, I hope that more people can feel inspired to start companies. I have personally found that to be such an incredible journey. So if I can just go out there and be like, guys, do it. It's not easy, it's not always fun. But you always learn a lot about yourself and that is worth something. That'll be the first thing I say, definitely, you should buy Sundial. I'm not going to be a founder if I don't pitch on my company. We basically build a automated insights platform. We're kind of like a data modeling and a analytics and a visualization tool in one. And I care very much about data being accessible, understandable to as many people as possible, probably because I've always been that person in the room that thought that I was an idiot for not understanding what this triangle chart on the screen was. So that problem is very close to my heart. I write a lot, so my book Making of a Manager for People who Are Interested in Management or the Looking Glass, which is again, more like letters to myself. But if you're interested in whatever I'm thinking about any current time, that is what I write about.

All right. It will be in the show notes and I highly recommend also your specifically your substack. I think it's a work of beauty that I really enjoy. Every time you drop something and yeah, that's it. That's the end of the episode. So thank you very much for joining me today.

Oh, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure.

Baboon, thank you so much for listening to the product. Tea with Lea if you don't have enough yet, you can subscribe to my podcast right now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or you can head to my website leahtaren.com which is Leah T H A R I N where you can find much more of my material or just want to work with me.