How to be an effective tech CMO - Robin Daniels - Episode 8

SCMOs to me have a heavy dose of EQ that they can lean on to get people to buy into a mission and then feel like they're in this together and go execute.

Welcome to my podcast. And what are we drinking today? You know, it's 7:30 for me. You suggested something that wasn't alcohol, which is great.

Well, I'm just trying to have mercy on you drinking alcohol that early. Coffee is what we're drinking today. I like staying caffeinated as much as I can. Though there does reach a point either I have too much coffee or it's too late in the day and it just kind of ruins your entire sleep cycle. And if you have too much, of course, you just get so jittery. I can definitely tell when I'm on my third or fourth cup in too short order.

Well, cheers to that. I'm drinking a. I'm drinking a Colombian blend that I just grind up with a little Japanese hand grinder every morning. And then I put in my French press and that's kind of how simple I do my coffee. Just black. What do you do?

Mine is just black too, but I'm even simpler. I buy it pre ground. I buy Pete's Coffee ground, which I think is great because it's a little bit stronger than like Starbucks or anything like that. So I like that a lot. It's pre ground and I just make it in a French press as well.

Nice, easy, it works. That's great. And on the West, I switched to black.

I switched to black coffee a few years ago. I used to, you know, I got, I got into the gateway drug of mochas and vanilla and vanilla lattes and shit like that. And then after I started doing, I started a couple years ago doing intermittent fasting and you know, for a long period of time you don't take in any, any calories. So I just drink black coffee now. That's kind of my thing.

Yeah, I think I did the same. It was during that sort of pour over phase where you know, really light style, tisane style, kind of high end coffee was doing it. And then I just never got back on the milk. I don't know why, but I'm not one of those, you know, crazy diet people. But whatever works.

Well, I'll tell you, the thing I never got into was cold brew or cold coffee. I'm just, I want to like it. I know it's super hip and everyone's like, oh, cold brew or cold coffee? I'm just like, no, it's just for some reason it just never tastes that great. I mean if you add a lot of sugar to becomes nearly like a Frappuccino kind of thing, but just cold coffee.

Yeah, that's great. Hey, so tell me like what's your situation? I mean I just. Really quick overview. I'm gonna do a bit of a bio before you know the intro to the show. But like you've had a pretty big career. Really quick 30 second overview. What's your story?

Yeah, I mean, well, right now I'm the chief marketing officer for a high tech company in Silicon Valley called Matterport. It's just less than 10 years old and we're a mid sized company, so about 200 people. Ish. And yeah, I mean I got here just because I think the strength of the technology and what they're doing in the world is super exciting too. But yeah, I mean I've been in tech now for just over 20 years. I moved to California in 2000, been here a long time and it's been an amazing ride full of lots of ups and lots of downs as well, which I'm sure we can talk about and actually think some of the downs are the most impactful moments you have in your career because those are the moments where you kind of force yourself to pivot somehow because you're forced to. You don't really have a choice. Right. But yeah, that's where I am today. I'm very excited. I just joined this company during a global pandemic, which is weird. I haven't met a single person on my team, which is weird. We launched, we did the biggest launch in Matterport history during a pandemic without ever being in the same room. So that's a little weird. I wouldn't say I'm falling in love. I have fallen in love with remote work yet, but I'm getting there. I think it's. I'm getting more and more used to it, but it's okay.

No, that's great. Yeah. Look, I think as I said pandemics, I see it as an opportunity to kind of reset and rethink and maybe people doing it with your career, when you go through the down period, you have a chance to self reflect and it's really powerful and you don't give that chance to yourself when you're in the moment doing your work and in the sort of cycle. So maybe economies are doing the same thing and some big businesses have time to pause and reflect as well.

I'd like to think so. I mean, it's certainly a moment. I mean Even the last four months have been such a roller coaster. From the moment the pandemic really hit, four or five months ago, initially everyone was panicking and everything shut down. Nobody was spending money, nobody was buying things, nobody was doing any marketing. It was just like complete shutdown. And now, you know, then we started entering back to a new kind of world. And actually look around, companies are still buying, they're still operating, they're just working, they're learning to operate in a new, in a new world, which is exciting. I mean, even Matterport, we're not going to go back to the office until January 2021 at the earliest. You know, and this notion of distributed work, we've proven it works and we've proven that people can have more flexibility in their lives, have more time to themselves. But there's also a cost. So you have to learn how to balance your time, balance your life, balance your environment, because it is easy. It's like there used to be, I would say in the last 20, 30 years, the dividing line between work and life has slowly gotten smaller and smaller. With technology now we're kind of always on and then when the coronavirus hit it feel like it just evaporated overnight. It's like there's really no dividing because your laptop is always there. It's like you can always do more work. It's always going to be more work.

And you're in the same room. It's even worse. Now you can't escape work.

Exactly. I'm going to go, I want to go on vacation to a different room. But when you come back, oh, it's still, it's still there. So I personally am still trying to figure out the right balance. I'm sure many other people are as well. Like, how do you not just work all the time? How do you be there for yourself, your family, your friends, how do you take time to recharge? And for me, in a new job, when you join a new company, you always want to really like, give it a good go and you've got a lot of energy and it excitement and it's been great. Four months. Incredible team, incredible journey so far. But it's been tiring. I'm definitely feeling it. I'm feeling a little exhausted. I'm like, okay, how do I pace myself? Because this is going to be here for a while.

Yeah, I suppose from my perspective as well. I work in like three different time zones now as well. So I've got uk, I've got some people in the sort of Eastern Middle east. Area, then I've got Australia, then I've got Asia, then I've got us both coasts. So it's so easy just to be working 18 hours a day. And I just find, like, yeah, I know all the time zones now. That's a good thing.

And also, I mean, I. I get it. I find joy in work, so I don't mind it. And also, you know, in this moment, I'm not great at just sitting still. So I kind of feel like it gives me a purpose, gives me something to do. You know, I have my family, which I try to spend time with, but we're all together and they're also busy with their lives. So it gives me a purpose to this work and I enjoy it. But it is exhausting. You know, sitting in front of a screen all day is exhausting. Not going outside as much is exhausting. Not seeing people. You know, I write a lot about this on LinkedIn because I'm very passionate about it. I love being with people, and I'm an extrovert, I would say, but I also like my downtime and my reflection time. But online meetings, video conferences, the energy in those meetings is just not the same. The other day I had a meeting with my team. It was a good meeting, but I just felt like it lacked some joy. You're staring at a screen of faces and everyone kind of looks here. You can't really interact with people in the same way if you're in the same room. There's laughter and camaraderie and joy and humor and an exchange of energy, which I find lacking a lot in these meetings. That's why I think it's so exhausting being on video conferences this all day long. Not because you're not productive, but because there's this lack of. If you're talking and you have a lot of energy, I receive some of that energy. That this is me, to boost me up and get me excited. That's lacking for sure.

Sorry to add another video interview to your day, then it's totally fine.

I bottle up the energy and let it go.

Just have another coffee. Okay. Hey, so that brings me to one of the things. I was listening to some of your other podcasts recently. I like to do my research on my guests. And you were talking a lot about the power of storytelling and brand. And I have to ask this question. Are you like an Andy Raskin convert, like, or is storytelling just fluff? Like, who do you think has done storytelling the best?

Well, I would certainly say that's a good question. I Like Andy Raskin. I don't really know him personally. It's not like we hang out or anything like that. But I know him. I think he does. He does a great job elevating what the real purpose behind marketing is. So I'm a big fan, but I don't know him personally. I would say in the industry that I kind of surround myself in the companies that do it. Well, it's different depending on, I would say the segment and so on. But I mean, Salesforce has always been a company. I both worked there. But I've also always been an admirer of Salesforce. And I think it starts at the top with Marc Benioff just being a great storyteller. And the story has always been bigger than the products that they're selling. It's always been a deep, deep purpose behind that, which I find super admirable. It's something that people connect to. I think people connect to an emotional story that draws you in and then they want to support that, especially if they're buying something that's expensive, with lots of logic and lots of facts and everything else. But if the story is not there, you can drive a lot of transactions short term, but I don't know if you drive love. I think another brand that's done it well is Airbnb. I know they kind of get some flack sometimes in the industry for certain policies that they make and change. It's hard when you're a global brand and you have such an impact on people. You can't please everyone. But I think overall they've done a really good job. The storytelling of being more than just a site where you go and book a house. I mean, like booking.com is a fine site to go book either a hotel or an apartment or a house. I just don't know what the story of booking.com is, besides being a transactional site where I can go and search for the cheapest hotel that I can find or cheap part. But when you go to Airbnb, there's a feeling to the brand that I think outlasts some of the short term impacts. So you see, I don't know if it's still true, but Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, came on TV cnbc, I think, a few weeks ago and said their booking levels are more or less back to what it was a year ago without spending any money on marketing. I thought it was a remarkable statement, but I think you get that kind of loyalty at least for a quarter of two if you've built a brand that people love. Of course, I'm not saying that you can shut off all marketing, maybe a quarter or two if you built a brand that people remember and hold here. But long term brand and performance marketing goes super, super hand in hand. So I think Airbnb has done it well, other companies, of course, I mean, there are much broader examples. Patagonia, I think, is a company that does storytelling really well and they take notes, they don't just tell stories. They really take a hard stance on issues, which I love. And that says something about who they want to be. And what's interesting, I had this discussion with my team the other day because we were trying to define what the mission of marketing is at Matterport. I said from a brand perspective, our mission is threefold. We need to make people aware of Matterport, we need to make people understand what Matterport does, and we need to make people fall in love with Matterport. And the first two are easy. And all of them were like, what do you mean, love? How do you measure love? We had a really great discussion about it and it's a great question. But love, to me is the most important ingredient. So, for example, Uber is a good example of a company. You're aware of who they are, you understand what they do. Not that many people love Uber, if we're honest. They're very divisive brand, right? It's true, right? Because of the culture and their aggressiveness and all kinds of things. I think they're trying to change it around, but it's true. Take a cigarette company, Altria, I think it's called, or whatever, I don't even know. But you're aware of who they are, you understand what they do, doesn't mean that you love them. So love to me is like this last ingredient. It's not enough just creating a brand that people know about. You also have to fall in love with, with what they do. And Sappho's is a great example, you know, of a company that sells shoes. You can buy shoes pretty much anywhere. They don't sell any different shoes than other places. But the story they told about how they value customers more than anything else is what made the difference for them. It was in the storytelling, of course, and then the operations of them, how they treated customers and made it easy. But it was that, that was the unique differentiator. The unique differentiator doesn't always have to be a. In the product you sell. It can be in many other things. The story, the operations, the way you engage with Your customers and community. There's lots of different ways to create a competitive mode around yourself.

Hey, so.

But come back to it. Brand is the secret sauce for long term success.

Okay, so that's a great segue into what I wanted to ask you. And this is a very loaded question here. But like, you know, you'll get to different companies as CMO and there'll be different focuses. Like you said, be demand gen or to be very product focus or you know, perhaps on the other end, FMCG companies, very brand focused, you know what I mean? Because I've got all those distribution networks set up. They're the product team and everything. So for you, which one is most important? A brand, product or transactional demand gen kind of activities?

To me it all starts with, I would say product marketing. Especially because I. Well, from the B2B perspective, product marketing is so key because you have nothing if you don't have a good story to tell. And in a B2B world, usually what you're trying to sell is a little bit more complex. I would say if you're in a B2C world, brand probably trumps product marketing. It's even oftentimes we don't have product marketing in a B2C world. But the caveat, I don't want to make it sound like it's more important, but I think it starts there. Demand gen is just as important, but you can't start there. I think if you start there, you're going to end up focusing a lot of your efforts on transactions, which is fine, but transactions, if you don't have a story behind it, become short term and you see it all the time so people can buy things again. Like back to the booking example, from a transaction perspective is a great website, very efficient, easy to use, but I have no brand loyalty to it. I have no brand love for that company. Not to say that the people there are not working hard to try to create that, but I just don't because I don't know what they stand for. I don't know what they're trying to do besides being a website that makes it as efficient as possible for me to interact with them. And obviously they're doing well, they're growing fast and everything else, but they have focused so much on just the performance of their site. And I think in the B2B world, product marketing. Product marketing is usually positioning and messaging. It's storytelling, it's making sure that your sales team is ready to go. So you're kind of being the sales team's best friend, giving them all the tools they need to be successful, all the skills and tools and everything else. You oftentimes in charge of competitive information, category creation, all these different things if you really focus on product marketing. But I think, you know, again, it's like yin and yang. You can't have one without the other. If you just have product marketing, you don't have a performance engine, you're going to fail. And if you just have a performance engine and no product marketing, no story, you can be successful probably in the short term. I don't know if you'll last a long time unless you really have enough transaction that you have a flywheel going. It just kind of keeps upping and upping and upping what it is that you're offering to the world. So I think PR, you know, is another discipline. Communications, PR, media. You don't often see CMOs come from those disciplines. It happens on occasion. I know. For example, the CMO over at LinkedIn came through the communications channel. Communications track. And it's just a rare one. I don't know. I can't think of many other companies that have a CMO that came through that. It's usually performance marketing or product marketing. Even brand rarely makes it to the level of cmo. They usually end up being a VP of brand, which is fine. It's a great job and one of the most impactful. Because if you can define the brand for a company, the impact you can have globally is just astronomical.

Yeah. Yeah. Hey. So it sort of reminds me of the three questions that I ask. Like a lot of executives and meetings is the three W's. You know, who are you, what do you do, and why does it matter? So you're kind of talking about the last one, which they can generally answer the first two questions, but when it gets the last one gets a bit sketchy, you get very different answers.

Well, so is that what I do? Is that what you're asking?

Well, that's what I do. But is that your similar kind of approach? Because I do that on a periodic basis. I ask the same questions to the staff, managers, executives. And it's amazing the different answers you get.

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, every company is also good. That's why sometimes, you know, I do some advisory work. And a lot of companies, the CEOs who come a lot of times from a more product or engineering background will ask me, how do you set up marketing to be successful? And there's no easy answer because it depends a lot on the DNA of a company. First, I need to understand that before I can give you an advice on what it is, how you should set it up, and how you should be successful. I think as a modern head of marketing, you need to understand all the disciplines. I don't think you will survive very long if you don't. But that doesn't mean that you're an expert in all of them. You know, you surround yourself with people who can do the job even better than you. And that's what I've always tried to do with my career. Of course, at some point, you have to lean in and take kind of something that you get known as being the best at. And that could be performance marketing, growth marketing, could be product marketing, brand communications, you name it. But at some point, you have to kind of put your stamp on something. And I was thinking about it the other day. For me, it was definitely choosing, going the route of product marketing and leading product marketing for Salesforce Chatter, which you mentioned, and really working my ass off and attaching my name to the success of that product. So when Box reached out to me for my next gig, they said, whatever you did for Salesforce and Chatter, come do it for us. Because I had come known for that. And I was reflecting. I think for everybody who wants to rise up in their career and become a head of a department or even head of a function, at some point you have to lean in and you have to really kind of give it your all. You have to decide when the right time is. You have to decide how much you're going to give. But at some point, if you want to create something of a momentum in your career, career and your life, you have to. I don't think you can get by doing the same level of work that everybody else is doing. And again, it's a fine balance because if you do it too long, you could burn out. Obviously, like one of my favorite leaders in the world, most inspiring is Arianna Huffington. I think she's awesome. And she talks a lot about how she created this incredible company, had a lot of success, and then she burned out because she was just running herself ragged. So there's a cost to it. So you have to be aware of that. But at some point in your career, she did it, I did it. You have to kind of go all in and say, I'm gonna really give it my all, become known for something. And when I talk to people who are kind of up and comers, that's. That's my advice. You have to decide when you have to decide what price you're willing to pay, you know, because trying to balance it all is just. It's just very hard to do. Right.

And it's.

It really is so. And it's not saying that you have to do it, not saying that at all. But if you want to become, you know, most of this, the CMOs I know, for example, they've done exactly that at some point in their career. It was a moment in time. Sometimes it's late 20s or early 30s or something where they just give it their all and that creates enough momentum that they will rise because they get known for being really great at something.

Yes, that's a really interesting point. I follow a lot of people, especially John Doerr from and what he says about execution. And I'm really interested to get your point on this because I did hear over here that you did this 30, 30 split between you said strategy epics and what was the other thing?

Tactical work.

Tactical work. Okay, that's my point. Eventually you need to get your hands dirty, and there's so much yield that you can get out of the execution side of things. And that's kind of, I think, what you're alluding to here. But you need to have the strategy there is like pointing in the right direction, but then a lot of the gain is like tactical execution. And you really got to know what you're doing right. To do that well. So tell me a bit more about that and how you split your time between these three things, because I think it's a really interesting way of framing your effort.

The way I think of it, you're executing at three different levels. The tactical level, strategic level, and the epic level. And depending on where you are, with the trajectory of the company, where you are with the trajectory of your career, where you are, and the level of things, you have to lean in in one or the other, there's no right or wrong. But the way I think of it and where I am in leading a function marketing, I need to inspire the team to do, I would say, the best work of their life. I succeed if they do the best work of their life. And we achieve amazing results in doing that. And I create an environment where people can feel like they're achieving, they're having fun, and they're actually producing something that is having an impact on the business, that's a great outcome. So where I spend my time is, I would say, 20% on the tactical things. I will jump in there and write a blog post if I need to, which I did. The Other day I will go in there and help write some copy for an email that's going out. There's no problem. But I try to spend the majority of my time on the strategic things, the things that we have identified as a team or as a company that really will 2x3x the business in some way, either our marketing programs or the programs as a business that we know we need to expand on. And then I try to also spend my time on what I call the epic things, like really thinking about what can we do that's so I would say new or game changing that 10x is the business that either has never been done before or has maybe been done, but has been done really poor. How can we identify some of those things and actually give yourself permission to spend time exploring what that could be? Because they don't happen automatically. If you just focus all your time on tactical and strategic things, you can do a lot of work, but you will not leave any room for creativity or thinking about what those epic things could be. And I think the greatest companies in the world, they find some of those epic things. Again, it could be either at the company level, it could be at the marketing level, the product level, but you have to give yourself permission. The way I define it is either you find something that's so broken and you say I can do it 10 times better, or you do something that's never been done before, but it requires the time and space to do it. It requires courage. Because a lot of people on your way to executing something that's epic will probably tell you it's stupid or it can't be done or nobody's ever done it before or what are you thinking. So you have to have some fortitude, you have to have resilience, you have to be able to have communication skills. But you have to probably convince a lot of people that this is a great idea. It doesn't just. Nobody will just come and give it to you. But I know that I'm onto something or the team is onto something when they come and present an idea that makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. Where I go, is this really possible?

I don't know. Because how do we scale this? Right, exactly, exactly.

But the secret of course is you can't just spend your whole time in la la land thinking about great ideas if you have one. Either a great idea, either an epic or strategic idea. Of course, at some point you have to break it down into the tactics. How you actually execute that idea, that comes the next step. And so I don't want people to misunderstand, like you're only spending your time that you have to, of course, break down to work streams and all the things that have to get done. A lot of times, these epic things, because they're so game changing, will take six months, nine months to really pull off. It's probably big product change, marketing change programs. It's not like a singular effort that somebody can do, can just do. That's why that's what that falls in the tactical column. Somebody updating an email or writing a new web page. Important things, but they're more tactical. You know, it doesn't require a full team to pull it off. And so I try, I try to think of it that way and I think.

But.

But then it also matters on where you are in your career. Of course, if you're, I think, just starting out in your career, you know, you need to again, give yourself permission to come up with certainly some bold ideas that you can take to your manager and say, here's what I want to do. Some ideas that can really move the business forward. It creates again, that momentum for your career and your life. But you also, of course, will be doing a lot of tactical work, and that's just the nature of it. But you have to prove that you can ace that. I'm going to be the best at this thing. I'm going to be the most awesome. I'm going to be super creative and execute like nobody else. That will also create a lot of momentum for your life. But as you move from being an individual contributor to a manager to a full leader of a function, it probably changes how you spend your time. So for me, it's 20% tactical, maybe 60% strategic, 20% epic or so. And those percentages are guidelines. It probably changes depending on where you are in your life.

Maybe I was just thinking, maybe that's why Burning man exists, you know, for the epic side of things. People go and buy something illegal, go to Burning man, and they come up with epic ideas. I know I've never been, you know, neither have I.

Seems like a crazy place. I'm kind of intrigued and scared at the same time.

Yeah, I'm like, am I getting on the bandwagon too late and am I getting too old for it? You know, but I don't know. I know a lot of very sort of, I would say geeky, you know, computer science engineers from SF that go there regularly and that's their kind of release, you know, from the day to day.

I know a lot of people way older Than me or you that go. And they seem to enjoy. Maybe. Maybe I'm just, well, too scared to do it.

I heard the story from the Salesforce founder, Mark Benioff. How do you say his last name? Benioff or Benioff. Yeah, yeah, Benioff. I heard that's how he came up with the idea for Salesforce, wasn't it?

Or yeah, yeah. At Burning Man. No, I don't think it was Burning Man.

He went hiking in the mountains or something.

Yeah, I thought he was, like, swimming with dolphins in Hawaii or something like that.

Well, it's a good story. Coming back to what we were talking about before. Right. That's a good differentiator. Hey, look. And I'm a bit interested because I know I first connected with you when you were doing some other stuff after finishing up at WeWork. And I don't want to talk about any of the negative things about. I think it's been covered in detail. I really want to talk about the positives, if you can, because I think they did some things really, really well in terms of, you know, on this theme of brand and building community and a big differentiator. And the reason I did this is because when I went to WeWork for the first time, I first heard about it, I went in, I'm like, oh, wow, this is really cool. And then the vibe was there. The people at desks were very collaborative. It was very welcoming kind of atmosphere. And if someone asked me, why would you go to WeWork? I wouldn't be able to put my finger on it. It's lots of things, a lot of intangibles. I think they did that really well. But from your perspective, what did you see at your time there that just, like, hit out of the park?

I think you certainly landed on some of the things that I think we did really well. Certainly the feeling of being different and the feeling of creating a space where you can be yourself and belong, I think was super powerful. They just nailed it. Again, if you think about that tying it back to what we were just talking about, the epic category, I think they didn't create a brand new thing. They just looked at the office space category and said, we can do this 10 times better. And it's true, most offices suck. They're great. They're soulless. There's no vibe in there. Right. And you don't really want to be there. You can't wait to get out. Right. And of course, I think, you know, Silicon Valley has always been a little bit ahead of the curve. It's like they've tried to make it nearly into like a play play place, you know, and like a college dorm or whatever it is. But it's been, they've been pushing the boundaries. But I think WeWork came along to set most offices for most people suck and most people don't want to go into work. And if we can find a way to give people more joy, more purpose, more community and bring people together, I think that's powerful. And I think they told a really good story around that. They had an emotional reason for being. Of course, it's the biggest market in the world, so they also. It's like something that could grow really fast. But I think they did a really good job in the. Even before I joined the marketing was really soulful. I remember meeting with the founders, Miguel and Adam and Rebecca, and they often talked about the feeling of a brand, the feeling of coming into a WeWork more so than coming in and talking about the tangible benefits. To your point, like, oh, well, we're going to lower your costs on rent and we're going to make it more efficient for you. We're going to have this many desks and so on. That came after. The first thing is can we get you in because of the feeling of what we provide? And I think WeWork just did that phenomenally well. The spaces were great, bright, full of love, full of care that was put into that. And it comes back to one of those core basic things that we as humans long for. We long for connection, we long for energy exchange with each other. Just going and being by ourselves is not really that fun in the grand scheme. There's a time and a place for it for sure. But as humans, I think we, we have certainly shown that we're social animals and we were just tapped into that feeling. Everything we did, the marketing, the social, the stories we told, very much tapped into that need for connection, the need for community. And it wasn't about a single person succeeding. It was about teams becoming better because they were with each other. That's why the whole concept of WeWork started as a co working space. We didn't even really use that word that much anymore because we were becoming more enterprise. But it really started more as a co working sort of. You would go rent a desk or an Office along with 50 other companies. And it was a way of creating a kind of a community. I mean, look at the two founders who grew up in communes, you know, one in the kibbutz in Israel and the other in the commune in Portland. And you can see that the DNA of who they were came through and the experience itself. So I think, yes, there's been a lot written about the mistakes from the founders and just kind of the investments maybe going wrong, all kinds of things. And I don't really particularly want to get into that because I can't add anything to what's already been said. But what is lacking from the stories, I don't think it was the product that was at fault. The product actually worked. If you talk to nearly every company out there who used WeWork, they love it. From small companies I would talk to all the time to some of the biggest companies in the world, HSBC, Microsoft, they're like, we love WeWork. And you know what? We have the data to prove that our employees are more happy in a WeWork because it provides a sense of connection and community. That's something I think that gets lost. The reason I think WeWork got into trouble is not because the product didn't work. That would have been one thing. It wasn't like a Theranos that was trying to sell something that just didn't exist. It got into trouble for other reasons. But the product really works. You take a product that works, that is something that people have an emotional connection to and you scale it and you tell a good story around it. And I think that's one of the reasons why they had such success and they're still around, they're still. I know they're trying to turn the company around, which I hope they can do because I still believe in what they're doing. The reason I went there, I was at LinkedIn before coming to WeWork and I think LinkedIn, you and I connected on LinkedIn and it's a great platform for human connection, probably the best one. I think it's the only pure platform because people take pride in what they post, they take pride in how they present themselves. Really positive platform. I feel like every day I go on there, it's like a mini TED Talk. So inspiring. It's a great platform, but it's still digital. It's still a digital platform. And we were. To me, when I first met the team and the founder, it was like, this is like LinkedIn nearly, but in physical life, it's a physical representation where people are coming together and meeting each other and making each other better. The fact that you have a small five person company and you're meeting an accountant down the hall that you can connect to and maybe make your company better, that's like the human physical Network. And I was really attracted to that story of people coming together to create magic. So you have something like LinkedIn that's still crushing it out there. I think they're seeing more engagement on their platform, and rightly so. It's a great platform and I hope I have no ill will towards rework. I hope they make it, I really do. Because I think the world needs some form of wework. I don't know if it'll come back the same after this pandemic or the offices will look different, but. But the world needs a better workspace. You don't want to go back to having great cubicles and, you know, horrible lighting and no fun or energy, just awful. Humans are not meant to live that way.

Well, I think after this pandemic, everyone's getting sick of their home office. They might have a V kickback in demand. So hopefully with any. I think so too.

But think about it, you know, I'm fortunate I have a little bit of a space. I can actually have a decent work. There's a lot of people, even on my team. I can tell it's just challenging being at home if you have a small kid running around the background. You've got pets or your space is small. My brother lives in a small apartment in Copenhagen in Denmark, has two kids under the age of two. I mean, he can't get any work done in this, so he can't wait to go back to the office. So this notion that the office is dead, I don't buy it for a second. Will it change? Absolutely, it will change and probably should change. I think it changes.

I think the discussion is more around hybridize. And like you said, it's broken down. The stigma, I think, of working from home and having a professional conversation and value transfer remotely. I think that's what's being broken and that ceiling is done.

I think that's right. I mean, think about it. Getting together physically, like we just talked about. Meetings are just, I think, better. There's an energy exchange. Right. That's not to say you can be effective and productive and collaborative using video conference. Absolutely. But the feeling is not quite there. It's also, I think, hard being as creative over a video conference as you are when you're together, because there's something about the energy exchange that brings out creativity in people, but we're getting used to it. So I think the future of the office, and if you were to ask me, is about providing spaces where people can do work if they need to. Like a space that's Fun and welcoming where you feel like you belong or providing spaces where teams can get together. The notion where everyone has a permanent desk, I don't know if that's going to be around for that much longer, except in rare circumstances. I think it's going to be a lot of open spaces where people can sit and hang out and put on their headphones and work or conference rooms where people can get together as teams and do creative work or important meetings or client meetings and so on. But we'll see. I mean, I certainly don't have an eight ball. The future is just kind of changing every week, so who knows? Who knows?

Well, speaking about change, I really want to ask you this because you've had a really good career in the tech space for a period of time and there must have been a lot of change in there from how you would launch a SaaS or tech company now versus maybe 10, 14 years ago. Right. And the pace of change in our industry is crazy at times. Really interested to ask you what used to work was successful and what you wouldn't do now. And has it sort of pivoted towards more brand marketing in terms of tech space as we've come hyper competitive and maybe before is more product and engineering based and more tactical demand gen. What's the shift that you've seen between those two sort of eras?

It's a great question. I would say the last 10 years have been super focused on performance marketing. There's no doubt about it. Nearly every conversation that I've had with startups who are thinking about how do I build marketing team or scale. My marketing team, a lot of it comes down to they really want to know what performance can we do because they're so focused on short term results. So that feels like that was, I would say in the last 10, 15 years, but it's starting to swing back a little bit to be a little bit more on the story and the brand and creating kind of long term, I would say category, so category creations coming back into vogue. I mean it's been coming back in slowly in the last couple years, but I feel like it's really hot. When I left we were back in, I guess it was November. I spent a lot of time with startups through BC Connection. It was really fun. I really wanted to like just see what's out there. And just my philosophy was let me see if I can give back on some advice based on all the things I've learned in the last 20 years. I maybe met close to 100 companies in that Time and nearly everyone said, can you give us some tips on how to create a category? So everybody wants to create a category now, which I think is really fun, but also a little unnecessary. Not every company needs to create a category. I think that's a little overkill. Sometimes it's okay just slotting into a category that's already there and winning that category. You don't know the only thing, you don't have to create a character for it to be successful. Sometimes you can just win one, but you have to have a point of view about it. So category creation seems to be something especially in the B2B space that's really on top of mind for everyone.

And maybe wrapping stories over the top of that.

Right, exactly, exactly. If you can dominate a category, I mean then that's how you become the leader, not just short term. And I think there are really three things you have to do to win a category or create a new one. You have to obviously have a great product. Marketing can take you far. I'm in marketing, so I certainly believe that. But if you have a shitty product at some point people are not going to buy or you're going to get shit reviews, whatever it is. So that's obvious. So you have to have a great product. So that's number one. Number two is you have to create a story around that product and a community around it. You have to have people talking about it more than you are. So creating a community where people go to bat for you and say, yeah, this company has the best products out there and they will self form and they will be part of promoting you to themselves, to their companies, to their team, to their friends and family. Community is really important. And the secret to community building is it doesn't just happen overnight, it takes a lot of effort. This is the thing I see a lot of teams going wrong on right now or companies like they want instant results. You can get instant results in certain fields of marketing but the community, the brand, it just takes time, consistency, it takes being purposeful about your actions. So anyway, so I think to create a category you have to have a great product. You have to have certainly also a community and a story around that community. And I think Salesforce is a great example of a company that's a great community. I think Box has done the same thing. Gainsight is another great company where they create a community of customer success. But the final thing I think that's really key also but hard to do but really makes you stand out is creating a new business model or A new way of interacting with you. When Salesforce came out with a CRM in the cloud, if we had just competed on being a CRM in the cloud versus being a CRM on premise versus Microsoft and Oracle and SAP and so on, you could just get down to kind of a feature war. But because the business model was different, it was pay as you go, it was on demand, pay monthly. Then it became suddenly something much more of we're in this together. Your success is my success. If you don't succeed, I don't succeed. Because I know if you don't succeed, then you're not going to re sign next month. Right? So we're in this together. It's not like the old model where if you just give me $3 million now, you can have it forever. I don't really care if you use it or not. It's up to you. That was the old model. They created this brand new model and it changed the conversation. So they had a great product, but it was kind of like nuance, which features are really better. They had a community, but they were still early days. But because I think they changed the conversation of the business model, the conversations that they were having with companies were very different because it suddenly just changed the playing field. They didn't go out and play the same game that Oracle or Microsoft were trying to play. They came out and said, we're going to change what the conversation is about. We're going to change the relationship that we want to have with our customers. I think that was an awesome move because it's very hard to just compete on features. If you come out, then it becomes kind of like this tactical feature war. And of course, if you have the best product, over time you will probably win, but it's a long slog to get there. But if you change the conversation, the nature of how you interact with your customers, I think that's great. I think the Apple App Store is a great example as well. Before you had the App Store, if you wanted to kind of download an app on your phone or your smart device, you'd have to go to some sketchy website and maybe download an app. You didn't really know if it worked. It wasn't really quality control or anything. Now you go to a place secure your experience. The developer wins, the user wins, Apple wins. And you know, there's a quality control around it. So it's a beautiful ecosystem of everybody winning. They kind of changed the nature of what that looks like. So there's. I think, I think so you have to have a great product, build a community around it and if you can, it's not easy to do, change the conversation to the business model itself. I think that's powerful.

Okay, that's great. Wow. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of talk. I was talking to Edgar, a branding expert, about ecosystems and the value that provides and the sort of competitive hedge that it creates for that company long term as well, because it's just really hard to replicate an ecosystem. There's so many little joins and network effects going on. Right. That you're not competing on features. I really like that answer. I suppose that's all the formal questions I had for you, but tell me a bit about what you're doing at Matterport as well. Obviously we had a conversation before this, but I'm working with a client in Melbourne who's doing some really interesting things around 3D modeling and it's going to be a very crucial aspect. We've got LIDAR coming out on the latest devices that Apple's releasing. Where do you see the future going with 3D modeling and physical environments? Must be a very exciting space to be in.

Well, it's a very exciting space to be in right now. I mean, it's also why I joined the company. I was first introduced to Matterport when I was at WeWork and I was just enamored with the technology. But that's not why I joined. As I just left WeWork and just talking to a bunch of companies, I got to know more and more about the Matterport strategy. We had a new CEO who came in about, I think a year and a half ago. His name is RJ Pitman and he wanted to expand what was possible with this thing. Now beforehand it was, we sold the camera and then of course the software to support that camera. Very high end camera, amazing. And he said, well, you know, if we really want to scale, we have to become a platform company that supports any camera out there. So last year we opened up the platform to support 360 cameras. So you can go buy your own camera on Amazon or anything like that for a couple hundred bucks. Buy a little 360 camera, you can go and you can record a space, scan a space and you can share it. Beautiful 3D. Then of course, this year, right after I joined, we launched Matterport for iPhone which now unlocks a billion plus devices to be able to go and actually capture spaces. So Today it's on iOS, iPhone and iPad. We're coming out with an Android version soon because that unlocks billions of more devices. But the idea was always, how do we unlock 3D to be accessible for every company, every individual, anywhere in the world and not make it this proprietary thing where you have to go and get our camera. Now, of course there's a difference. Shooting a space on your iPhone, the quality is not going to be as good as if you choose a high end, purpose built device for it. So if you're selling a house, if you're doing commercial real estate, if you're in some commercial enterprise, you probably want to go with that high end camera because it gives you the best quality, the best fidelity, incredible level of detail. But if you're just doing a small space or a cafe or a small gallery, or like my wife's yoga studio, using your iPhone can be completely fine to do that. And so we wanted to be the company that's known for mapping and turning any space into what we call a digital twin. So it's a twin of your space, but that lives in the digital realm. Not only does it turn into a beautiful digital representation of your space, but. But then you can do things to it. You can add tags and you can embed media. So I'm looking at a picture and it gives me a history of what that picture is all about. I'm looking at this wall and I can then change the color of this wall. It's like do all kinds of interesting things with it. And so I joined this company in a pandemic. I never met my team, never met anybody. Even during this launch, we never were in the same room, which is bonkers. But it's been really fun. And we just finished our Q2, the most amazing quarter in the company's history. Just, you know, and of course we're getting a coronavirus bump, you know, from what we're seeing, because the world is turning virtual.

Hey, at least you're honest with the results. No halo effect going on here, right?

No, yeah, yeah, no, no. I mean, of course it's all me, right? Yeah, yeah, that's what I want to say. No, no. The team has executed extremely well. And you know, we've. We did, we did lower our budget. So with less budget, we got better results. And of course, part of it's amazing execution of the team and part of it is also, of course, what we're seeing because the whole world is like, shit, I can't go into my office. I can't sell my house now because I can't get. Actually, I can. So I had a friend, for example, who I used to work with at WeWork, he texted me, this was in May. He's like, hey, I just bought a house in a different state in Montana. I'd never seen the house, never stepped foot in there, but they had a matterport tour of the house, and it gave me enough confidence that I should go buy this house, even with ever actually being there physically. And that's the level of fidelity that we're getting to.

I mean, that's a great customer story, right?

It's so wild to me, you know, 20 years ago, buying a pair of shoes online was like, I don't know, what if they don't fit and I have to send them back? What would I do? It's such a hassle. And now people are buying, not just cars, they're buying houses online, you know, without ever seeing it. It's wild. But you need the technology because a photo doesn't do a space justice. You don't know the flow between the rooms. Right. So being able to walk through a space, being able to look up, look down, look outside the windows, that's what you have to do. I don't know how many people are buying spaces, places without having a 3D tour. I certainly wouldn't. It's like you can't really get a sense for it. Even on Airbnb. Sometimes when I go, we rented an Airbnb a few weeks ago, it's really hard to know. Like, is it multiple floors? Like, what's the relation between this room and this room? Because we were a family going, Right. And if you have a 3D tour, it's like being there, you go through the space itself, it's very different.

And you bring up a good point. Like, without a 3D tour, sometimes it's like, oh, what are they hiding? What aren't they taking a photo of? You know what I mean? It's like, what are they omitting from the.

If I stand here in this spot, hide everything behind me, right? You can't do that with a feature.

And the wide angle. Yeah.

You don't know what is a dumpster outside my window. Because they're hiding that. So 3D3 can't really hide anything, which is a good thing.

Yeah, it's like, you know the trick, the real estate stu with the wide angle lens, and then they make the room look a lot bigger. And you're like, wait a minute. You go there and you're like, this is a shoebox.

That's exactly right. You see this all the time. You're like, this seems like it's really false advertising.

How much coloration have they done to those photos? You know, like. Yeah, that's interesting. Hey, I really want to ask you as well, before I ask you my standard set of questions, but traits of a good cmo? I mean, you're really high experienced, and I can just tell by the way you answer questions, you know, what you're talking about. What are the hallmarks of a good cmo? You know, maybe let's compare a junior CMO versus a more senior one. Are there any sort of red flags for the junior one or traits of a really experienced one?

Yeah, I think in my experience, the best CMOs I know, of course, they know how to drive results, and they know how to set a vision for the team, and they drive results towards that vision. But the best CMOs to me, have a heavy dose of EQ that they can lean on to get people to buy into a vision and then feel like they're in this together and go, execute. I think that the more junior CMOs I see, the more junior leaders, they oftentimes just think it's all about results that matter. Of course results matter. But you know what? You get better results when you have a cohesive team. What I call this esprit de corps, you know, where people really feel like they're in this together. So creating a sense of being part of something greater than yourself. I think the best CMOs, they do that. They tell a story, not just externally, which of course, any CMO needs to do, but also internally. And so, no, you have to master the skill set of being really great at something, because you have to. Sometimes as a leader, you have to jump in and show, hey, I can do it too, right? Being great at everything, like I said, it's just impossible. So there are things I know I'm good at and things where I know, okay, I need to rely on other people to do. But I think the superpowers, you have to be able to listen, you have to learn from the team and bring the best out of them, because everyone has a superpower. Everyone does. Everyone has a skill that they're really good at. And sometimes it's an obvious one, and sometimes it needs to be dragged out. And great leaders, they know how to drag out. Not only do we drag out those skills, but then they figure out how to make them all operate together. You know, I'm from Denmark, so I follow soccer. You know, that was kind of my sport. And I used to. My team was Manchester United. Great team, you know, and they had, you know, one of the greatest coaches of all time.

Sorry, what do you mean, was. Was Manchester United still is? You mean are you allowed to leave?

I just don't follow the team anymore because I've been living in the US for so long. But Sir Alex Ferguson, you know, he just knew how to make a team, work together. And it's so obvious when he left, they haven't really won anything since.

Hey.

Hey.

We just. We just won two nil over Crystal palace this morning. Just like, maybe 20 minutes.

Yeah, well, I started following them because they had a Danish goalkeeper, Peter Schmeichel.

Yes, yes, yes. Right. They want to travel.

Remember, that was.

They're very good at doing that. You'll notice that they'll. Because they're a global brand, they're always poaching the best players from. So when they got Pakistan from South Korea, they basically got every 60 million fan from. From South Korea, right? And then, you know, they'll. They'll get another person from another country and they'll have, like, you know, some African nations, and bang, they got, like another hundred million. So, really interesting strategy. And that's why some people say it's not about always the player being the best, but they're buying them for the marketability as well. Right.

I mean, of course, the key is if you can both find the best players and get them to work well together. That's just. That's what I would call epic. But even, like a mediocre team, if you can get into a mediocre individual so you can get them to play really well together, like getting the best out of them and getting to play well together, I mean, maybe I learned that growing up playing soccer, but I always think of, like, the team first. It's not about the individual. It's not about me or I. It's about the team. And, of course, you know, in any team that succeeds, guess what? You do have people who rise to the top and get noticed more. That's just natural. So if I focus on. As a leader, my focus is on making the team perform really well together. And out of that, I'm sure somebody. You know, my team at Matterport, there will be superstars that rise to the top of that just naturally. I don't even have to encourage you that much. It will just happen. Happens. In Manchester United, you know, you had Alex Ferguson, who brought the team together, and you had some incredible superstars, Cristiano Ronaldo, David Beckham and so on, rose to the top. But it's not like. I think he just focused everything on them, he focused on the team, which is, I think a key, key thing to do as a leader.

Okay, I've got a Peter Thiel question for you right now. What's something about your discipline of marketing that most people believe but which you know to be wrong?

Something that most people believe, but it's wrong.

So it could be like an orthodoxy way of doing something. It could be like they think that this is really important, but you figured out that maybe something else is more important. Anything come to mind? I know this is really hard to put you on the spot.

Yeah, no, no, it's a good question. You're making me think here. Something that most people believe but is wrong. I think most people still believe if I talk to most CEOs that it's all about performance marketing still. And I think, but it's hard to say it's wrong. Of course. I think it's so important to do, to have performance marketing.

Maybe the over reliance on it and ignoring other things is the thing.

Because what ends up happening, you can put so much money into performance marketing and guess what? A lot of times they'll come back to me. Nearly, nearly. I can tell you nearly every time after six months or a year, be like, oh, we got a lot of, lot of leads, but they're junk, they're shit. They don't really, they're not the right leads. I'm like, yeah, because you haven't either done it the right way or you haven't told the story of what it is that you're trying to do. So I think that's, that's something, that's just, it kind of frustrates me a little bit. But I get why companies, even VCs will say that to companies, is because it's easy. Because it's like you see instant results. If you, you don't see instant results in product marketing or in brand marketing or even communication, it takes a while. But performance marketing, you can see instant results. So that's why it's like, let's go do more on performance marketing. Right.

And it's easy to measure as well. Right. So like, it's just, I use the analogy of like, like the, the diet, you need your sugar hits every now and then when you're really low on energy, but you need to have that sustained, low gi. Kind of food. Right. To keep you instead of on the way up.

That's right, that's right, that's right.

Hey, sorry, I've got a couple, I've got a couple more questions. Do you have some more time, though. Or not.

I'm just about running out of time. But let's. Let's. One or two more.

Yeah, let's just skip to the basic ones. What books are you reading now? Or a topic that you're reading that you'd recommend other people read?

I'm reading this book by Robin Diangelo called White Fragility. I haven't really finished it yet, so I'm still reading it. It's just, you know, it's obvious that I need to do more to educate myself on everything that's happening in the world and what I can do more to be a good ally and play my part in making sure that everyone has equal access to opportunity and can rise above their station in life. I always think about somebody at some point in their life, took a chance on me. What can I do to take a chance on somebody else and make sure that I become a positive force in the world? So I'm trying to educate myself. So that's a good book. I also like a lot of spy fiction, so Daniel Silva's new book is great. Sometimes I can't sit and read nonfiction all the time. It gets a little heavy to me. So I also like a good novel. And Daniel Silva, I think, is the best spy author out there.

Oh, great. Okay. Favorite website for, you know, professional development.

Professional development. Oh, LinkedIn. Are you kidding me? By far.

Okay.

Like I said, every day I go on there, it's like a mini TED Talk. It's like great videos, quotes, insights on. Oh, it's awesome.

Yeah. I think they've done a lot as well. Improving the quality of the feed recently. You're getting less of those sort of spammy, you know, recruiter, kind of what I call recruiter porn kind of posts, you know, a bit more around the educational things. That's great. What about a piece of tech you can't do without, which helps you do your job better? My phone and iPhone.

It's my phone. My phone. My iPhone is the thing that gives me the most joy in life. It also sometimes a little annoying, but it gives me mostly joy, I think, just I love music, I love pictures. I love being able to kind of engage with the world. And my phone allows me to do all of that. I mean, the best, I would say the best. The best service that I couldn't live without. Spotify. I still marvel sometimes. Like, I pay $10 a month and it gives me so much joy. I paid a hundred dollars a month for this. Are you kidding me? It's incredible. You know, I couldn't live my life without music. It just changes my mood instantly. Either puts me in a state to focus or it makes me happy. Or when I'm running, It's great for $10 a month. Are you kidding me? Nothing?

No, that's great. Okay. And look, I think that's all I have because we both probably need to go. What's the best way for other people to contact you, though, if they want to sort of start a conversation with.

You just on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where I can be found. You can, like, we can connect there and that would be great.

Great. Hey, look, I really thank you for your time, Robin. I know you're a busy man, and I'll let you go to your next meeting now because I know your day has a and finished. So thank you very much. And I'll put all the links in the description of this blog post to some of the things you mentioned. And yeah, I look forward to chatting again soon.

Sounds good. Good to see John.

Thanks, buddy. Take.