How Robin Daniels' Relationships Fueled His Rise

There you go. So that made people quiet.

Yeah, exactly. I'm just going to do a short intro. So. Well, we had to talk about relationships today, and it's no surprise to any of you that we live in a digital world where most of the connections that we make these days are online. And however, recent events such as COVID 19 has shown us that, you know, we do like to work remote. But after COVID 19, we've seen companies actually move that back quite a bit. Companies such as Amazon, leaders in their industry has actually abolished remote work. So it's super interesting to see what, what's actually going on here. What's this thing? How do we strike the right balance? And we decided to invite Robin in to make us all a little bit smarter on this. What's going on? And Robin came to the US 20 years ago. So even though he has more than 40,000 followers on LinkedIn, he must know the good old game because back then there was no LinkedIn or social media. And during those 20 years, Robin worked for industry leaders such as Salesforce, LinkedIn, Matterport, WeWork. Very famous case. And now you're back in Denmark.

For what it's worth, I am, I am. I need more alcohol to talk about WeWork.

Yeah, I was hoping for some war stories, but yeah. So super interesting to have you here, Robin. And we're so excited. I'm so excited to hear more. Could we just get a quick round of applause for Robin?

Thank you. Thank you.

And I promised you to add a little spice and also to say that you could be opinionated if you want. You don't have to hold back. But you made a huge career in the US over the last 20 years. And the first question I would like to ask you is, would it be fair to say, or is it truthful to say that you're a self made man?

No. And the reason why is because I am 100% convinced that I am where I am today. Because so many people along the way have believed in me and invested in me and given me the skills and growth I needed to be successful. Can you hear me in the back? Is that coming through? Okay, perfect, perfect. We need higher. Okay, okay. We need it. Yeah, I have a feeling it sounds low and I'm not speaking low, so there must be something going on. Thank you for fixing that. I appreciate it. Is that better? Can you hear me better? Okay, perfect. Okay, so the short answer is no. Because there's so many people that have invested in me for sure, like pushed me in the right direction, bosses Managers, parents, teachers, siblings, and so on. But the answer is also yes in some way, because I also think you need the internal motivation to constantly seek out challenges and make yourself uncomfortable. And so the answer I think you need. There's two kinds of motivation. There's the internal motivation that you have to have in order to constantly have a mindset of improvement and getting better and so on, and getting uncomfortable. So I think I have that because I've had many uncomfortable situations as a kid. But I also think it's not true, because I wouldn't be where I am today without all the people around me who gave me the nudge in the right direction of where I could go. They saw something in me, the potential in me, a skill in me, or something that I didn't see myself. And they said, maybe if you learn this or connect with this person or take this path, you can become something that you don't even know exists today. So the answer is absolutely, I am where I am today because of the people in my life.

Thank you. Makes good sense. Tell us a little bit about how you think about relationships. And is there always a clear distinction between a professional relationship and a personal relationship? Can there be a mix? Is it important to separate the two?

Well, I think. I think it used to be. Before COVID happened. I think there was. The lines in the last 20 years have been really blurring between your relationships, because people work very differently, especially in tech. I think a lot of people here are probably in tech, but even if you're not, the lines have been blurring where you're kind of friends with the people at work and so on. Then I think overnight in the last five years, it kind of changed nearly instantly. And people have also realized that these are the people I spend the most of my life with, and I want them to be my friends, too. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think we had this thing that I had to have my work personality and my personal personality, and I couldn't really mix the two. But it also forces people to show up every day in a very inauthentic way, because you're trying to be something you're not. And I think the happiest people, the most engaged people, are the people who are showing up every single day, being true to who they are. And what you realize when you do that is that people also fall in love with who you are as a person, and that strikes up the relationships with you at work that ends up becoming the most valuable things in your life. If you look back on your life, many of you here, and you think about the work that you've done in all the companies you work for, I can nearly guarantee that the thing that stands out to you the most that you remember the most are the relationships that you had. You're not going to remember the kick ass project you worked on or the launch you did here, or the cost savings we did here or this funding round. It's nearly always the people and it's because the people are the things that will ultimately make your work joyful and meaningful or make it really suck. Right. And that's why oftentimes you end up leaving and so on.

Cool. That makes a lot of sense as well. Can you tell us a little bit, maybe a story or two about the most important relationships in sort of your career? Coming to the us, trying to figure out without a network.

Yeah, yeah.

There must be something there because otherwise.

You wouldn't have come to where you are. There's many of. So the first one. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm born and raised here in Copenhagen, Denmark. When I was 21, I bought a one way ticket to California. I didn't have a job, I didn't have a place to stay. I didn't know anybody, I'd never been. But I always had this dream. I wanted to go to California and make something of my life. I didn't have a fancy degree or anything. I just had the energy and initiative and excitement about the future that I wanted to go make something of myself. So I came over there February 1, 2000. I applied to every job I could find. And at that point in time everybody was willing to kind of take a risk on somebody pretty unexperienced. I was 21 at the time and so I ended up having like 15 job interviews in the first couple of weeks. I was there for very junior roles. And I ended up getting two job offers after that. And again I just thought to myself, if I can show up to all these different interviews with excitement and energy and some ideas of what we could do, maybe they'll fall in love with me. Because I'm like, I always had this mindset of I just need my foot in the door. I mean, I can't control what happens in the outcome of how they think of me. But if I can just show up in the way that is authentic to me and with high energy, maybe I'll make it. So I ended up getting two job offers. I took a job at a company, a startup company in Silicon Valley. And I remember calling home to my family, like, yeah, I made it. I got a job, you know, it's awesome. I found somebody who believed in me, which is a part of this. And then a month later, the whole market crashed. And I was like, oh, shit, that was pretty tough. But the boss that I had, I was hired as a engineer. I was okay at it, but I wasn't great. But I was good enough to kind of fake my way through it. And she said to me, you know, you're pretty good with this engineering stuff. I think she was being kind, but she said, you're really good with the product people and the sales people. I think you should be in product marketing. And I go, what's product marketing? I had no idea what product marketing is. And then she explained it to me what it was. And, you know, you're in charge of launches, but you have to be quite technical. And it's like this beautiful mix of marketing, but technical understanding of what we do and so on. You should be in product marketing. And I still credit her to this day with, like, seeing something in me that I didn't know. I didn't know it existed, and I didn't know I had it in me. And she took me under her wing and she kind of got guided me towards that path. And that was the beginning of a path of kicking ass in product marketing over a long period of time. I had a lot to learn in the beginning, but then as I started excelling in this field, I started making a name for myself. But it started with her seeing something in me, you know, and I this company didn't end up making it. And we ended up keeping in touch for a while until she unfortunately passed away. But then every time, I now at least had something in my background that made people want to talk to me because it was very clear that product marketing was a perfect fit for me. It's a little bit about storytelling, category, creation, marketing, but it's also about deeply understanding the technology and the impact that that could have. So I credit her with, like, getting me to where I am. She was the seed of that creation of where I am today.

Cool. And so coming back to sort of a little bit more sort of professional questions. Do you think it's important to be a great networker, to have, like, strategically going for creating relationships with people in order to be a good cmo? And has that changed over time? Is it different now than it was 20 years ago or 30 years ago?

Well, there's a saying maybe many of you know it your network is your net worth. Many of you might have heard this before, and I certainly believe that's true. And yes, but it's a very fine balance of figuring out how to do this authentically where your network doesn't become transactional. I think networks fail when they are purely transactional, when there's always you're seeking to get an outcome out of it. I think the best mindset to have is I'm going to show up, I'm going to give something. If somebody contacts me and they need something with the mindset that hopefully it will help you, I can pay it forward in some way. And if someday, because I certainly believe that karma is somewhat real, if it comes back to me, that's great. You know, like for example, when VCs reach out to me or recruiters reach out to me, hey, do you know anybody for this role? I 100% always answer the call because I always have the mindset that, you know, it takes me a couple of minutes to help them. Maybe one day in the future, if I need their help, they will also answer my call. Right. And I think about like some of the people who are here, I have a table here, four people who are really part of my core network. Erica, Reagan, Sina and Mads. Right. And they've all come through different parts of kind of my network. They've all been. They've all grown differently, which is really interesting. Erica came through, she moved from the US to here to work with me. It's great. Thank you, Erica. But we met over 10 years ago in my son's school. That was like a real life connection that we started building up in real time. Reagan, we met online. Right. You know, during COVID struck up a friendship, you know, and now you're here as well. You moved from the U.S. sina, I met a few years ago in an adversarial way. I thought she thought I was an idiot at first, if I'm honest about it. But now we've become best of friends and we're having dinner later tonight. So I'm very excited by that. But she was the CMO at Lunar and she was at paternity when we met. Anyway, it was a long story. And then Mass, I met Mads, the founder of Lapster, through one of the investors, David Helkus, and he said, hey, you two should connect. So it just goes to show there's so many different ways you can build your network. But my mindset in all of this, this is I'm going to show up and Try to be myself and see if I can help out in some way. And if I can, maybe we become friends, and if not, that's okay, too. But showing up with a transactional mindset, I'm trying to get something out of this, I think, always fails.

So does that mean that when you meet somebody, do you act more on instinct and intuition, or do you think more strategic about the relationship and the potential benefits and how you can help that person out and vice versa.

It's nearly always an instinct if it's authentic. I'll give you an example. So I was working at a company called LinkedIn. Hopefully, many of you know LinkedIn. I'm a little bit of a super user. Maybe too much, some people would say, but that's okay. And so I was working there, and I got, I guess, messages every now and then from people on LinkedIn saying, hey, can I pick your brain on this? Can we do coffee? And it's hard to find time for all of it, but. But I got a notice from somebody super authentic, very, like heartfelt. His name was Yannick, and he was like, hey, you've had a great career. I've really struggled with kind of finding people who believe in me. I don't know if it's because I'm black or because I don't have the right companies or the right skill sets in my background, but I feel like I have so much to offer to the world and I just don't know what I'm doing wrong. Can I buy you coffee for 30 minutes? And just pick your brain on what you've done? Because I know that you don't have a. You didn't go to a fancy university, and you've talked a lot about your upbringing, how it was tough and so on, even though it's very different than his, obviously. He said, can I pick your brain? So I said, sure. I have nothing to lose by spending 30 minutes with this guy. Right? So I invited him to Coffee at LinkedIn and the headquarters there in San Francisco, and it was meant to be 30 minutes. We ended up spending an hour and a half together because he was just so compelling. He had so much energy and excitement about the future and. And I could see that he just needed somebody to listen and believe in him and kind of maybe point him in the right direction. And at the end of it, I thought I said to him, would you want to come work for me? And maybe that was his plan all along, right? To, like, get in there and so on. Right. But I could just see. I Love taking a chance on an underdog because they come in, they fight for something, they have such a hunger. And the three things that I hire for oftentimes that are non negotiable is grit, passion and aptitude. And he had all three in spades. But he just needed somebody to see that. And now he's a CMO for his own company and a different company. He's really kind of excelled in his career, but he needed a little bit of that push. But also belief in him. But it comes back to what I started with. I am also where I am because people have believed in me, seeing something in me. So I tried to pay that forward and sometimes they end up working for me and sometimes it's just, can I point them in the right direction. But I'd never go in with the deck. And what is this going to be? A strategic relationship that I'm going to call on in six months and then ask for something. Help. Never once. I think you fail if you do that.

Okay, have you ever been, I mean, you say you use your intuition a lot. What's your biggest mistake? Have you ever been wrong with that intuition? And how did that pan out?

Yeah, I think when I've been chasing the wrong things, I've been wrong, honestly. So I worked at Salesforce for a couple of years. That kind of skyrocketed my career in many ways. And until Salesforce, I had kind of been going from job to job. My career has been growing fairly steadily. Then I joined Salesforce, my career skyrocketed because I think I worked at the right place at the right time with some of the best people in the world. And since then, companies have found me. I didn't have to kind of look for a job again, which is. Which is a very big blessing. Then I went to a company called Box and we skyrocketed them through an ipo and that was super fun as well. And then I thought to myself, but I wasn't a cmo. I was. I was working for the cmo. I was the head of enterprise marketing. And so I thought to myself, I want to be a CMO myself one day. And I was kind of like really nearly blinded by that ambition in some ways. And so I ended up speaking to a bunch of companies, like when after about three, three and a half years at Box and one of them, like offered the right title, the right job, the right growth trajectory and so on. And so I hadn't done. I didn't end up doing enough due diligence on him. As a person and the relationship as well. And I came in there, and in the first week I was there, this company, it's not Even on my LinkedIn profile, so you won't know who it is, because I just. I scrubbed that clean. That shit is like, get that out of here. But the first week I was there, the CEO, somebody. Somebody shows up and says, hey, you've been served papers for a sexual harassment lawsuit. I'm like, oh, this is not good. You know? And then we were in San Francisco, and he was living in San Jose, and he's always like, at the end of each day, I'm like, I'm gonna take an Uber to go home. Like, why? Why are you ubering? That's like an hour and a half. Why are you not driving? Oh, I lost my license due to a dui. Drinking under influence. I'm like, oh, that's. That's not good, you know? And then I found out that his numbers had really been inflated, you know, around what he told me about the growth journey. I'm like, this is not good. And so it was so clear that I'm like, shit. I had not done my due diligence around, like, him as a person, his morals, his ethics and so on. And it really, like, it was shocking, you know? So I ended up leaving after, like, a month and a half like this. It also turned out that he was kind of a bully to other people. So now I have this test that I do. It's a little harder nowadays with remote work and so on, but so I would oftentimes after this company did something else, but then I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go join another company somewhere. And I ended up having kind of four companies who are in deep contention for me. I'm like, okay, that's great. It was Asana. Many of you probably know Airbnb, Uber, and LinkedIn. And I have this test that I do where I go and I show up to an interview, like, 30 minutes early, and I just sit there and observe how people interact and engage with each other to give me a vibe for what the culture is like, because I really care about the cult. Like, I want to work hard. I'm ambitious, but I also want to have a good time doing it. And coming into the Uber office, it was like the end of 2016, early 2017. It was right before the big scandal hit, which was like, in. Around sexual harassment, which happened in early 2017. And everyone there just seemed tense. A lot of frowny faces, a lot of tension in the air. Nobody was smiling. I just thought to myself, you can't pay me enough to work in a place like this. I mean, like, yes, I know it's a great brand and it's skyrocketing, but it's like, it just seems miserable to me. And I would go into Airbnb or LinkedIn, everyone's like hugging each other and high fiving each other. I was like, that's the kind of company I want to be part. I ended up joining, of course, LinkedIn. But there's these tests you can do. It's a little harder nowadays with remote work. Coming back to that one, because oftentimes you're talking through a screen, but you can still do some testing around the people and the culture, asking the right questions and so on to really get to a core truth about this.

Cool. So I promised you a little bit of spice. Was working for WeWork a mistake?

No. How do you look at that? So I like working for crazy people. Let me just be honest about that. And my current CEO is a good enough amount of crazy. If he's listening. I don't know if he is, but you know what I'm talking about. He's sane and stable, but he's also a little crazy. And I like that. I like working for crazy. So I was working at LinkedIn and links. Great brand, good company, growing well, the product line I was in charge of was around 6 billion in revenue. So it's pretty, pretty significant. But if I'm honest about it, it wasn't thrilling or exhilarating. And so wework kept reaching out to me, asking if I was interested in coming over there because they were probably the fastest growing company at that point in time. And I kept saying no, like, no, I'm not interested. I'm working at LinkedIn. What are you going to offer? And then they kept asking and asking and one day they say, hey, Adam Newman, the CEO, is in town in San Francisco and he'd love to meet with you. I'm like, who am I? Of course I can spare an hour of my time, not that important to go meet with him. So I go meet with him. And I was just blown away that the vision of what he wanted to do and the vision of how he wanted to bring people together, the whole core of WeWork, for those who know the story is around how do we bring people together, whether that's at work or in life, to make each other better, that was kind of the core of it. And it really spoke to my hippie upbringing. I Was raised by two hippie parents. And it's like this idea of community. Like, my mom spent time on a kibbutz in Israel when she was younger. He was raised in a kibbutz. So we bonded over a lot of this idea of community and bringing people together. And I came in there and it was. And I love working there. I met some of the best people in my life. And it's not like any of us predicted that it could have ended the way that it did. It's not like any of us, like, thought that it was going to. I came in, it was worth $20 billion. Then it went up to $47 billion. Then we were going to go towards an IPO, and then it all came crashing down. Right? And for many reasons, and that's a whole different story. And there's certainly a lot of lessons I took away from that. But the most important is I was only there a year. It's all the relationships. That's when I first time worked with Erica. I had a team of about 400 people, the biggest team I've ever managed in my life. And I just thought, holy shit, it's so chaotic and crazy. Like, Adam Neumann always had this philosophy of, we can get more done in a week than most companies can do in a year. So we moved extremely fast. Even for a big company, we're like over 10,000 people. And my life was so chaotic. We were opening one WeWork a day. This is not like a Starbucks. These are big offices. One a day in 2019. So we were moving. And the goal for 2020, we never got there, was to open two a day. That was the level of ambition. And my life was so crazy. So I thought, well, who can deal with crazy? Somebody who can deal with parents and teachers and kids. Erica used to be the principal of my son's school. So I call up Erica, Erica, I need your help. And she's like, I'm in. You know? So she came and joined me at WeWork. So the relationship. So coming back to, like, I love that. Of course, I'm like, of course nobody wanted it to fail the way it did. And it was very painful to be the CMO of a public failure. It was embarrassing also, like when you have the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reaching out to you, asking for commentary, what's happening? I just kind of wanted to hide away, if I'm honest. But my job as a leader is to show up relentlessly. And you've always said, I remember you saying, I was amazed at how you showed up in the darkest of times with energy and excitement. Because that was my job. Just to try to get the team to still focus on work, even though they're getting friends asking, they're reading stories in the news about them. How can I show up relentlessly to give them the motivation and ambition and focus that they need to do great work every day?

Great.

It was really tough.

Yeah. And I like the way. I mean, it's a. I think an American culture very different from Danish. The way that you take people in that you feel has the power and the energy and the right mindset, regardless of the industry they come from, and they can succeed in a totally different role. In Denmark, it's very. If you don't have the right degree or whatever, it's very different to change careers.

Yeah. I'll tell you. I'll just tell a quick story around that because. So I met this. This has been kind of like a red thread in my life. I met this woman back in 20. I think it was 15. A friend of mine introduced me to this. This. This woman. I didn't know her. He said, she's brilliant. You got to meet her. She is an SDR for this tech company, but she doesn't want to be an sdr. And she has so much. But I don't really know what to do with it. Can you talk to her? And again, like, Janique, the other story, I met her, we went for a coffee, and I just like, wow, she's gonna be a CEO one day. She's brilliant. Like, the way that. The clarity that she spoke about her life and what her vision was, and I ended up hiring her in product marketing. But it's a very, like, odd move to go from an SDR to product marketing. But it's like you could just see that this person had that potential. And I think you're right. And it's one of the things that I left Denmark for, actually in 2020 and in 2000, because I felt it was very confining for somebody like me who didn't fit in a box. I didn't have a. From a great university. And I always felt like in order to make it in Denmark, one of the first questions asked is, where did you go to school and what did you study? And what I loved about the US at that point in time, I think it actually has changed in Denmark. But it doesn't matter who you are, where you're from, what background you have, as long as you're willing to work hard and show up every day. With great energy and ideas, you can make it happen. I still think the US is probably the best country in the world for that, but I think other countries are certainly catching on to that as well.

Cool. Just to tie the knot on your career, you come back to Denmark and we talked about this. You have lots of coffee meetings, you speak to a lot of people and obviously companies are still pulling at you. Why did you choose LM365 or Sensei as they're now called, and did you have something to do with the new name?

I had everything to do with the new name. But it wasn't like a Robin effort. It was a big team effort. But we instantly knew that we wanted to create a category leading company. Let me just take a step back. So the last company I was at was a company called Matterport. And I joined in March of 2020 during COVID And so from day one, I was remote. It wasn't planned that way, but the pandemic kind of made that happen. And during that time we went into hyper growth and we ended up with taking the company public in 2021. Super fun. But in that whole time, I was there about two years, but in that time I moved to Denmark from California. The company was based in California, so I was sitting up every night till 1, 2, 3 o' clock from Denmark because my whole team was in California, the whole executive team. But we wanted to try and move here because the schools were open. Denmark had handled Covid a lot better than the US to be honest. But I was burning out. And so. And it was. I was very proud of the work we did. I always felt like remote work. You can be super productive, more efficient than ever. You can just kind of get shit done. You can move from meeting to meeting to meeting, but it's joyless. I think it's very joyless if you haven't created the connection. The two years I was there, I never once met my team. Not once. To this day, I still haven't met him. I met the executive team when we went to New York to take the company public, but I never met my team. And so you can imagine, yeah, we get a lot of shit done, but it's not like I felt super close to any of them. We never had the moments of bonding where you really open up. Tell me about your family in the same way. Let me understand what your desires, your motivations, your ambitions in life are and so on. So I went afterwards, I'm like, I'm going to take a break. I'm going to try to be a little bit of an advisor to companies, maybe start my own thing, but I'm going to try to advise them. So I spent the next year and a half doing advisory work to companies in the us, in England, in Singapore, in Germany, all over the world. And during that time I spoke at a conference called Tech Barbecue. Many of you probably know it. And at that event in 2022, I met Rasmus, the CEO of LMS365. And we just met for coffee. Like I have a lot of coffee meetings. As you can tell, I like coffee. So it's always a good lure for me. So we ended up meeting up and having coffee and we kind of hit it off. He lived in the US for a while. Even though I didn't know him from there, he lived abroad. So we kind of had very like similar mindsets in many things, but I didn't really know him. That was it. And then a few months later, he asked me to be an advisor to his company. I'm like, okay, sure, that sounds interesting. I like what you're doing. And during that time I got to know him a little bit better. And then what happened is after a year and a half of doing advisory work, I thought the freedom was awesome. The pay is pretty good if you can negotiate some good deals. But it's pretty unfulfilling. If I'm honest about it, I'd never have the impact that I fully believed that I could have. You're constantly in and out. You don't really build any deep relationships. And if you know anything about me, I'm all about relationships. You're never really building true deep relationships because you're not there on a day to day basis rolling up your sleeves with the team. So it's, yeah, from a freedom perspective. Like I can pick and choose who I work with and so on, but it's a little unfulfilling. So I wanted to go back in. So I started talking to a bunch of companies and I had two realizations. One is, the first one was this realization that I wanted to be back with people. I wanted to work in a company where I can make a real difference. That was number one. I don't want to be on the sidelines. I'm too young, I have too much energy. I don't want to be on the sidelines of anything. And the second realization is I don't love remote work. I like it sometimes. I write about this a lot. I like the freedom it gives me. I just spent two weeks in Italy working Remotely, it's great. But the idea of 100% remote job sounds awful to me. I don't know how you're going to create the relationships that matter, the meaningful contributions to the company in a way that's really creative, because I think the creative spark happens when you are together in person. I think when you're in the beginning of forming projects, being together is critically important. Once a project is in motion and it's about updates and execution, remote is totally fine because this is about like, how are we getting shit done? But in the beginning, when you're trying to form that space, creative spark, I mean, think about what is a company. A company is just a group of people trying to solve challenges together. Sometimes they're small and sometimes they're really big. But if you want the most creative ideas out of those people, you got to figure out the right environment. And I still haven't found any replication online for that. In person it's much better because you can get a flow going between people where it's much easier to get diverse ideas across in an online meeting. We've all been there. It's like there's five people on a meeting and goes, okay, Erica, now it's your turn to talk. Reagan, now it's your turn to talk. Sina, now it's your turn. There's no flow at all. It's very hard to get a creative, any kind of creativity going. But at the same time, we also live in a world where you do need to give people the flexibility because the idea of people sitting in an office five days a week, I think is pretty horrific to the new generation at work as well. Right. So if you want to attract a great, great talent, I think that's not going to fly either. So you've got to be clear that the best thing you can do, I think from a work perspective is have clarity around what you expect out of people. When there's lack of clarity, then people get confused and it creates a lot of tension. You can either say, I think we're an in office first culture with the flexibility. You're an adult, we treat you as an adult. If you want, you need to work from home once or twice a week, totally fine, we trust you to get your shit done. But we're an in office first culture, or you say we're pretty much a fully remote culture where we will get together every couple of months and so on to get work done and do the brainstorming and so on. Either way it works. Lots of models work, but you Just have to have the clarity. If you're leaving people to figure it out themselves, it creates a weird disparity between people, a weird kind of connection, especially when you're trying to do anything meaningful together. So you just got to have that clarity.

Cool. Just from a more technical perspective you just touched on. So you ended up with.

Since I now, I didn't even mention why I joined, so I met Rasmus. So I ended up speaking to a lot of companies around joining them. And then I went for a run with Rasmus up in Duoheon in Clampembo. And during that one hour run that we did together, he shared with me all the shit that was going wrong at Sensei at LMS365. And I go, that's awesome. I'm in, you know, because I like when there's a lot of shit to do, I don't like to come in and just tweak and optimize and kind of fix small things. I like when there's like really big things and there's really big things to do here, like changing the name of the company. Category creation. How do we become a company that's not just seen as a Danish company, but as a global force for good in the world and so on? So there was a lot of, like, things that he had the ambition of, but he didn't have a team around him with that same ambition. So I ended up joining. But it was funny because then I had some people reach out to me when I just joined LMS365 last year, like, Robin, I thought you would have joined a much bigger, sexier brand, you know, based on your track record. And I go, no, I joined this because I can make it a big, sexy brand. Right? Because coming into a big, sexy brand means that all you're doing is defending yourself all day long to try to maintain the status quo. I like disrupting the status quo. The upside, I like if it works great, it's on me and the team who execute this. And if it doesn't work, at least we tried. But going into a big company where it's all you're doing is like, we can't change this. We got to defend this. We're disparate position. It's a pretty awful place to be. I've tried it before, you know, especially when I joined LinkedIn. I came in there to do big, big things. And they kind of sold me and they wanted me to do big things. And it was nearly impossible to get anything done because all they wanted to do was defend their brand position. All they're like, we're number one with the most trusted social platform. We can't do anything that disrupts them. Like, well, then why do you. Why do you need me? Like, I'm the guy who comes in and blows things up a little bit, you know.

Yeah, totally get it. So, you know, back to the little technical question. I've spoke a bit to Rasmus before the meeting and he highlighted a few things that he thought you were really excellent at. So I thought it would be a shame not to ask you about that now that we have so many of your peers here. Category creation, it's kind of, you know, the old days where, you know, you have to sell, sell, sell, sell shit. Like Steve Ballmer said, I'll, you know, all day long, it's good. Then we had this era of build it and it'll come kind of, you know, product LED growth, whatever. And now what? Category creation, It's a new way of thinking about marketing. It's not that new anymore, but it's still, for some people, it's new. What's that about? What's the power of that?

Yeah, I'll try to say something because there's a whole. It's a much deeper conversation, but basically, I've spent my career trying to create categories. And the reason why is simple. All the odds are stacked against you. When you're a small company, you're going into, usually a market, there's a lot of bigger players. Even if you don't compete directly, you kind of do. And so you're always competing on the battlefield that they have set out. Like in our space. I would classify Sensei as an HR tech platform. So that means we compete against companies like Lattice and Culture Amp and Workday and SAP and Oracle. And if we're going in and competing against them, we get compared to a criteria set that they have laid out because they're the category leaders, they're the big. They're the big gorilla. So we have to constantly defend our position against them and how we're better. It's a very tough position to be. All startups go through this, and the truth is you have to continue playing that game. The way to get around is if you create a new category where you get to set the criteria that others get judged against. And I've done that successfully at Salesforce or box or even WeWork, because then you get to dictate the field of battle and your odds of winning are much higher. Doesn't mean you win all the time, it's still tough out there, but at least you get to dictate of the criteria set that you get judged against. So that's one reason why you want to be category. But the truth is, the reason why startups are so hard is because you have to do both. You have to compete in a field of battle that has already been laid out for you. Where there's certain criteria, it's super tough. And then if you can create a new category, then you get to set that criteria. The other benefit, if you finally get to the hallowed land of being a category leader, is you become the default choice. If people think of a category of, let's say, expense management in Denmark, who do people think about? Pleo, probably, Right. If people think of electric cars, who do people think about? Probably Tesla's first brand that comes up, even though they have a lot of competition. Right? So by being the category, you're the default choice again, which means that you get to kind of dictate in some ways what the comparison is versus everybody else. But that's a long journey. I said to Rasmus, from the beginning, the journey of category creation is not measured in weeks or months or even quarters. It's usually years. And so we've launched this. We changed the name of our company. We've been on this journey of let's change HR to human success. We've been talking about it a lot, and you can spend a lot of, like, free capital on social media doing that, but we're in the early innings of that journey. It's been less than a year of us talking about this movement of human success where it's about not about managing people and treating them as resources, but about investing in their growth so they can become the best they can be. That's what we stand for. But we're at the beginning of this journey. I'm very proud of how far we've come, but it's a journey that will probably take a few years. Because the way, you know, you've created a category is when others start using the term, you can't have a category of one. It doesn't exist. And you're just making shit up about yourself. Right? And a lot of companies do. That's fair enough. You got to start somewhere. But, you know, you've really started making it with others are starting to use the words that you're using. Right? So I will be really excited when others start using the words human success and not hr. And we're starting to see a little bit of that you know from some of the industry experts and influencers and so on. But it's still very early days, you know, because we're at the beginning of that journey. But category creation, I think you don't always have to do it, but it's certainly something that will help propel you into a unicorn company. I think the companies we have here in Denmark who have become the unicorns that we know of Lunar. You know, Sina used to be the CMO at Lunar, right? Amazing company. They disrupted the category, they set different criteria, they were all about mobile first and friendly for younger generations, so on against the old stodgy banks. Great work. Right now, if you think about an online bank, you probably think about them first. Lunar.

Is creating a category, the most important job as a CMO today?

No, because that's a long term job. Right. I mean there's, there's two things that every CEO who comes to me asks me. I want to create an epic brand that stands the test of time and I need predictable and scalable revenue. And these are two oftentimes very opposed like thoughts because one is a very long term, highly immeasurable thing to do. Category creation, creating an epic brand. How are you going to measure that? In the short term it's nearly impossible to do, but at the same time you got to of course make sure that the revenue is coming in. I mean, marketing is the key partner in revenue generation in any company. And so you have to do both, right? And I would say over time it changes how much time you spend on each. I think if you're an early stage startup, early to mid stage startup, you're probably spending 80 to 90% of your time on creating predictable and scalable revenue. And then maybe a little bit you're starting to plant the seeds of category creation and building a super brand. But over time as that mix might change to 70, 30, 50, 50 even, and so on. Right. But, but you got to start somewhere. One of the things I love about the world that we're in today is that creating a super brand doesn't actually have to cost a lot of money. I think there's so many great ways to get the story out about who you are and what you do. You can use TikTok or I use LinkedIn, but you can use TikTok or podcasts or videos and so many great ways to get your story out there. And it doesn't have to cost a lot if we're honest about it. Right. The downside of this golden age of storytelling that we're in is that there's so much noise out there, it's so crowded. So if your story is not interesting or sticky or controversial or edgy, you're never going to break through. So it requires a CMO to have tremendous courage in putting something out there that might be awesome, but also might piss off a lot of people. The moment you put out shit that's bland, nobody's going to care. Right. And we see that all the time. I'm sure all your feeds and social media is filled with stuff that's kind of like nobody cares. Right. Do you think they're going to remember any of that? Probably not. So it requires you to have a point of view, a stance on something, take a position on a topic and have the courage and conviction to talk about it. And you can do it in a positive way, which I prefer to do. I always told my teams we only market in positive ways because there's enough fear in the world. But I do recognize that fear is an awesome emotion to drive people to change. Of course, it's what Trump does super well. Right. So it's a very powerful. I just don't want to add more to it. But it's. But the point is, you got to have some extreme points of view, either positively or negatively, to drive people towards action.

Cool. We're going to leave time for a little bit of questions just now. You know, you can think about. I'm going to pose one last question for Robin and then you can, if you have anything you want to ask Robin, just shout out. I'll try to repeat it up here from the stage. And then so it goes into all the recordings. Just one last question for you from my part is, obviously you met a lot of people. You have a lot of relationships, lots of connections, lots of professional, you know, connections to people. What do people mostly get wrong about you?

I think that most people think that I'm a hyper extrovert, and I'm actually not. I would say I'm kind of like borderline. I like. I like meeting people and it's the fuel of my life. I get a little depressed when I'm not around people, but I also really like being by myself. I'm totally fine being by myself. I love having moments where I can get clarity around the things that I need to think about in my life. And I think people have this assumption that I'm like, just need to be around people and I'm an extrovert all the time, and I'm not really. I love, like, doing Stuff like this, but it also takes a little bit out of me if I'm honest, right. And, and I need a little bit of moment just to like recover after these kind of things because I also just like need to center myself a little bit. But I think the personality I have, especially on LinkedIn and others, like people think I'm a hyper extrovert, but also because I do, when I, when I do show up, I try to show up in the way that is meaningful for other people. So I always think of it this way. If I show up for other people and I can leave them just a little bit better off, whether that's a one on one or a group meeting like this or something, then I can look myself in the mirror and be happy about it. But I also just need a little bit of time for myself. I mean, many of you can probably relate to that. I know Erica is kind of similar. It's probably one of the things we bonded about is if you meet Erica, you probably think, wow, she's extrovert, she talks to everybody, she's super chill. But I also know her enough to know that she really values her own time and being by herself, you know, and so on. She gets frustrated, right, when you don't have that. So it's like, I think as humans we are complicated and it's hard to get all the truth about people to what we present in social media. I mean, it's the same, the same problem I have with LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn, I use it all the time. It makes it seem like my career was always just going up and to the right and it's not true. I've had many failures and like spectacular moments of doubt and feelings of imposter syndrome and things that went horribly wrong. But that is hard to explain unless you know me well enough.

Does social media and LinkedIn make it harder to create truthful relationships?

It's a great question. There's this term I've been using lately. I don't know if you've seen it, I call it pretend proximity. There's a lot of pretend proximity happening on LinkedIn where people fake that they know you because you've liked the post or you're connected to this person and so on. Real, real relationships require work. It requires you to show up without any expectation of outcome, like we talked about earlier. And just like, because you want to be there for people, you want to listen to them, you want to help them, you want to get help from them and so on the moment you can show up with an agenda, which, again, I think LinkedIn tends to error more towards transactional, at least at the beginning. There are some people who have mastered how to create authentic relationships through that. But it's, It's. It's certainly what's hard about it. Once you start getting a little bit of following. I know many of you here have decent followings on LinkedIn. People start thinking that they really know you and they know a part of you, but they don't truly know you. Real relationships require work. Any relationships, they have a meaning. I mean, like, when I met Sina for the first time, she was very skeptical about me, maybe rightly so. And we got to know each other and we now, like, we really kind of had a bromance. What's it called in the. Man, female, whatever it is. We love each other now and we spend a lot of time together. But it required work. It required work like it didn't just happen overnight. It's like she leaned into it, I leaned into it. We took the time to invest in it. That's hard online. You can do it. I just don't think it's as easy as if you really, like, spend the time, the real effort.

Cool. So let's. Is there any questions? Anybody? Yeah, in the back.

Hi. Thank you so much for a very insightful conversation. I have a question about your advice of managing our circles of friendships. Because, like, we probably all are here because we have networks and also friends and private lives and work and everywhere, and sometimes it's very difficult to maybe even prioritize. I can say. So do you have any advice or experience? I do. It's something I saw. So the question was really, how do you manage your circles of friendship and how do you think about prioritizing your time around that? It's a good question. I struggle with it a lot myself, honestly. I think you have to have the clarity in your head around, like, who's your inner circle, your inner, inner circle. You're kind of ride or die people that whatever happens in the world, if they call you or email you or text you, you will be there for them 100% instantly. That's kind of like the inner inner circle. And I'm lucky I have a few of them here, so thank you. And then there's like the next circle of, like, I will do whatever I can to show up, but not at the expense maybe of like dropping everything, but depends on what the thing is, if it's an emergency, of course. You know, like, I think most of our good people would do that. But if it's like, hey, can I pick your brain? Yeah, but I'm not gonna drop everything I'm working on right now to kind of do that for you and so on. And then there's another circle of, like, get these people who are acquaintances, right? And those are the. These are the toughest ones, especially if the acquaintances are through people who are in your inner circle. This is where the. The stickiness comes when somebody I love and trust who's in my inner circle says, hey, I really want you to talk to this person. They could use your advice. And I'm like, I like you, and I want to respect our friendship and relationship, but I do you want me to go spend an hour with somebody I don't really know? Those are the tough ones. I struggle. And sometimes, depending on what's happening in your life, you invest in those moments. And other times you just respectfully say, I will do it, but I'll push it out quite a bit. And that's been. My secret is to figure out how to have respectful responses back to those incessant requests for your time, which is, again, an honor and a blessing to have. But also, you can easily get derailed from actually focusing on the things that matter in your own life. You don't want to look back. The test I've kind of come up with for myself is, well, first of all, so just to finish that. So the answer I usually have when those kind of requests come, I say, yeah, I'm happy to meet with you, but let's do it. I'm really busy right now. Can we meet in a month or two? And oftentimes, if it's not that urgent, it kind of goes away by itself. So it's a good test of, like, just, like, will it go away? But if they're. If they. If they really value your insights, relationships, you know, whatever it is, they will persist and say, no problem. I respect your time. I will. Happy to meet up with you for coffee in two months. Fine. So I think that's. And I've been fairly good at kind of like, trying to respond in a way that's respectful of that and not be an asshole and so on. Because at the end of the day. So the test I've devised for myself is that I love the weeks where I'm having a big impact and when I'm making shit happen on the things that matter most in my life. The worst weeks is when I get to Friday evening, and we all have those moments where it's like, I was so busy running around, fighting fires, meeting with people and so on. But I don't really know if I achieved any. Those are the worst weeks ever and I've had way too many of them in my life where I'm like, I felt busy. So it feels good in the moment because you're doing stuff, but it gets that Friday and you're with your friends or your family or your loved ones and you're talking about what did you do? I'm like, I was really busy but I don't really know if I did anything that mattered. It was like it was all empty air. So I try to think about it. I always try to project myself forward to like when I get to Friday, should I take that meeting? Should I? Is this important for my health, mental health, insanity and happiness in life? And if the answer is no, don't do it, you're just going to regret it later. That's a long answer.

Thank you. And I think there was a question there and then over here.

Yes, just question on relationship as well. How would you deal with maybe a difficult relationship you have with your boss, for example, especially in the corporate world that you mentioned and insights. Maybe that and to you the fast. Yeah. So the question is, how do you deal with a difficult relationship? Maybe it's your boss or a co worker, something. Right. I think you owe it to yourself and the person to lean into it and have some open discussions around it to see what you can do and hopefully the other person sees it and feels it. Well, because usually it's two sided. They, if you feel it, they probably feel it too. Right. So it's rarely one sided and if both want it to work, you'll lean in and you'll figure it out over time. It might take a lot of work, might take a couple months, might take a year or so to fix it, but I think you owe it to kind of try to work on it together. Right. It's like you can't just discard people because you have to work with these people on a daily basis. But over time, if it's not working, then I think you have a couple of options. If it's a, let's say secondary or third degree relationship even at work and you don't interact with them that much, but you're kind of like meh, it's probably fine. But if it's somebody who's like somebody you working with all the time and they're making your life miserable, I think life is too short to go through that over too Long a period of time. Like the reason I've left jobs oftentimes because I didn't get along with my boss. Actually, not oftentimes. It's happened once only really. And it was just like I just thought to myself, life is not worth it. You know, I tried and I tried and I joined this relationship because we had this actually conversation before I joined that he said, I want to be better, I want to learn from you. But it became pretty clear when I came in there that he didn't really want to learn from me. He'd said that, I think in some ways, but he was stuck in his way. So I'm like, you don't really want to change, you know, and good relationship requires both people to lean in and change a little bit and modify. You shouldn't change your core, who you are. But maybe it's a different way of talking to each other. Like the way I talk to our CFO versus how I talk to our CMO versus how I talk to somebody who is an engineer. Very different. Right? So you got to learn how to like talk in a way that they hear what you're saying. You can't treat everybody the same because everybody has a different mental model of what they care about and how they like to be communicated to. So you have to learn that over time. But that's the only way to be successful, especially as an executive, I think, is you got to learn how to do that effectively.

Cool. There was another one over here.

But to add to the point of like acquaintances and when they ask for your time, one thing I do is I say, great, let's have a 30 minute virtual ink coffee at 8am And I'm like, if this person is willing to take something at 8:00am, then okay, I'm gonna take it. More oftentimes than not, they say, say like, oh, we'll see. Or they just don't show up. But my question is, I love that hack.

I just had it yesterday actually, because I lived in California for a long time, so the nine hour time difference can be quite severe. And I had somebody who kept pinging me and I know the person but not super well. And I said, hey, the only time I have is 6am for him, it's 3pm for me. It's like, I'll take it. I'm like, great, great, you know, great hack, Great, great hack, yes. Anyway, go on.

Sorry.

And so.

I was born in London.

I lived in the U.S. now I live in Malmo. And some things that I see with startups is at A certain size, they end up keeping their engineering teams and product teams in the Nordics and then shipping over their other teams which are like marketing and sales and SDRs and all of that to either London or the US. So my question is, what do you wish you would see more of in Copenhagen? Automatics.

It's a great question. So if I can just repeat really quickly, you know, you've worked everywhere, which is great. But a lot of times Danish companies or Nordic, Scandinavian countries will start here in the Nordics and they'll keep a certain part of the company here, especially like the back end, operations, engineering and so on. But a lot of times the go to market ends up getting shifted off to us. I know, I've noticed the same thing and it's one of the things that when I came here in 2020, so what, four and a half years ago, I was shocked at how unambitious, if I'm honest about it, many, much of the go to market is in the Nordics. Some of the companies I talked to and I think it comes from maybe a mindset of that we can't upset the Apple card. We have to be a little bit more conservative and, and how we say things and what we say and I think that's very different. I think my observation is that European and Scandinavian, Scandinavian companies especially build really great products, phenomenal products. But the go to market is very unambitious and the US is actually nearly the reverse. A lot of products are kind of shitty if we're honest about it. They don't really work that well, but they'll come out and say it's the best product in the world. You can't live without this product. You need it in your life. And you're like, wow, okay, I need it. And then you get it and you're like, okay. And my hope is that I can be a little bit of a bridge to like bridge that gap so companies can think a little bit differently. This is what I try to co inspire is how I met Sina as I came into her company and talked about how you think about epic marketing. And she's done some pretty epic things in her life. She's one of the few I think I've met in Denmark who thinks differently and ambitiously and boldly about marketing. But most people, if I'm honest about it, I think there's too much conservativism in the thinking around go to market where you have to like, you're using words that are not super exciting or emotional. So the way you do great marketing is that you have to elicit an emotion and then you support with data and facts. It's always that way around. That's always how the best marketing is. You have to get some people to feel something and then you support some logic. Because now we have to justify that purchase, whether that's an individual consumer or it's a company. And I think Danish companies, Scandinavian, have it the other way around. They think if you just say enough facts and logic, then people will get it. You know, they're very literal, right. And then the emotional part is very little, very small part of that. And it's changing. I would say when I moved in 2000, 25 years ago, there was really unbearable. Now, actually, you're starting to see you have some examples of companies here who have dared, I think Pleo and Lunar and Dixa. And you have some companies who are like, okay, they're doing some really cool stuff. They're daring through their storytelling to be a little bit different. But it's still. It's on the rise here. And I think in the U.S. of course, it's like, it's just built into kind of the DNA of people, if that makes sense.

Thank you so much, Robin. I could do this all day, but unfortunately, we've reached the end of the hour. I want to thank you so much for being so honest and sharing. You just said that it requires a lot of energy, of course, to do that. So thank you so much for coming and giving us your thoughts and telling about your career and your relationships. Let's hear it for Robin.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.