How leaders can nurture and support resilience the workplace | with Dmitri Julius

Is it just me or can Christmas and the end of this year just not come fast enough? It's mid December. We're coming up on the final show of the shortlist for 2022. And if you're like me and most people, I know you're just dying for this year to come to a close. But we're not done yet. We have two more episodes, including today's episodes, for you to enjoy, to make you think, to make you relax into next year and hope we invigorate you and get you excited about what you can do next year. Today on episode 1, 2, 4 of the shortlist, my name is Johnny Campbell, by the way. I'm the host of today's show and CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And we're going to be talking today about how leaders can nurture and support resilience in the workplace. Because you know what, it's been a tough year year. It's been a tough few years for the world, for many people and for different reasons. And resilience is something we've kind of had to just come to terms with in the last couple of years. Right? But people have been weathering all sorts of storms. And today's question is how can leaders within a company create an environment that supports resilience but without creating unrealistic expectations? Now, really, resilience doesn't mean how do you endure high levels of stress, like all the time? You know, it's more about building a sustainable, supportive environment so people have the right tools to tackle whatever challenges arise. So what does an empathetic, equitable and critically, a psychologically safe culture look like? Well, joining us in today's shortlist to talk about the strategic elements of establishing your company culture is Dimitri Julius. He's had a special project at icon. Dmitry recently took on this new role after serving as Icahn's chief people officer and he's based in Texas and joining us from the US today. And it tells a little bit more about icon. For those of you don't know us, know the business and about their, how they're helping us get to space and get to get to the moon and further on to Mars. But I'll pause on that, but we're going to discuss more broadly the resilience of the human spirit, how to nurture that within a company culture and the role that psychologically, psychological safety plays in, in meeting people where they are and working together for the best outcomes. Dimitri, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. I'm Excited to have you on the show. Since we first met a couple of months ago in Dublin. I was hoping perhaps you could begin by introducing yourself to our audience but also giving them some background on the organization you work with and the amazing work that you all are doing there.

Well, thank you so much for the tremendous introduction, Johnny. It was a pleasure. And I just got to say before we get started, my time in Dublin, my time with the Irish people that I had the opportunity to meet was amongst the most special visits that I've ever been a part of. Getting to know you and your team over the course of this last couple of weeks has been tremendous and I just thank you so much for having me. But yeah. So ICON is a large scale robotics as a service organization that exists to try to help make a meaningful dent in the global housing crisis. So we utilize our scale robots. So not, not small desktop 3D printers, but large scale, the same size as like the home foundation to 3D print houses, faster, more resilient and cheaper to create housing stock that then drives down the cost and potentially creates opportunities for people to live in a dignified way at an affordable rate. And we're doing this from Austin, Texas, but we've also done some of this work internationally as well. And so we'll get into the space stuff you mentioned later, John. But yeah, just super excited to have an opportunity to talk to your audience.

So we're in Ireland as I'm broadcasting from Dublin, Ireland, my home as you mentioned. And the housing crisis is a big issue here in Ireland. It's a big issue in many, many parts of the world. Just tell me a little bit about, first of all, the business's mission again and just kind of walk me through what, what does a 3D printed home look like and tell me what are the benefits? How do you actually realize those benefits? And maybe if you could walk me through one or two examples of where the business has actually deployed this on scale, I'd love to just get, give, give our folks listening a visual kind of interpretation of what the business is doing and the meaningful work that the business is doing as well.

Absolutely, yeah. And so a 3D printed house is not too dissimilar from, from a traditional home. You know, it's still going to have all those things that you're used to seeing. So windows, doors, you know, countertops, cabinets, all those sorts of things. But the actual presentation of the housing envelope is going to be like a printer. Imagine a large tube of toothpaste or cake frosting is printing inch by Inch layer by layer in support of building an entire envelope of a home. And so the robot uses a digital design file that already has the layout for the home in its memory bank. And then we're going to utilize that file to basically trace the interior and exterior wall systems for your house until it's completely built. We pop on a roof, you add your windows and doors, and you've got yourself a 3D printed home. Now, the advantages of this technology at scale are a couple of different things. This automated robotic system allows for the minimization of the use of materials. So said another way, and we like to use this internally, we print to the drop and then we stop. That's just because it rhymes. It also means that the additional construction materials that you see oftentimes at job sites are eliminated. Exactly how much material it's going to take to print these things. And then we stop and produce no more material after that's done. And so we utilize a small batch methodology. So you've got the 3D printer itself, the Vulcan system, then you've got the material delivery system. It's basically the small batch mixer that we refer to as maga. So you're seeing the, you're seeing the volcano through line there. And then the concrete material that we use we refer to as lava crete. Those systems as well as the back end and front end software allow us to 3D print houses. Now the fun part is you can give me 200 different designs and as long as they can exist in the built environment, the computer has no feelings about what you're building. So I can build a community all to all the specifications of the needs of the families there. Each one of those units can be different and delivered with one machine. And so now you're talking about design freedom and flexibility without adding additional cost or time. And then we can utilize these tools to modernize the workforce to allow for that, that, that inroad in housing stock that you're experiencing in Dublin and we're experiencing in Austin to really start to catch up to the need so the demand is met. So yeah, that's a little bit about how we're approaching this problem.

So the business is amazing, with amazing technology, a superb mission, doing fantastic things, and up until recently you were the chief people officer in Icon and I guess our audience would probably be forgiven for thinking, you know, in a fast scaling startup, you came in to hire, put in processes, scale things, and do all the typical things that the person in charge of HR or the people ops would be responsible for. But is it fair to say that the role of CPO in Icon was probably a little bit different to perhaps your traditional cpo. Perhaps, you know, words like progressive or more involved might be used that this wasn't a typical CPO role. Would that be fair?

I think that would be fair. The scale at which we grew our organization and the opportunity that we had to build an equitable business were kind of all in front of us. So again, our business is a missionally oriented company. We exist in service of humanity. We want to really help solve the global housing crisis. And so when you're scaling up a business like that, yes, you've got a responsibility to hire quickly and kind of put butts in seats if you will. But there's also this real opportunity to showcase that a diverse, agile and fluid thinking organization is one that belongs in the, in the ecosystem of startups. And so we tried to make sure that we weren't hiring in a vacuum. We wanted to think very clearly and critically about where we were finding talent, making sure that we weren't creating a homogenous group of people and thinkers who weren't able to approach these very real human problems on the ground without perspective. And we also wanted to showcase that, yes, it's fantastic to have your traditional background and skillset to deliver something like this, but it would also be really great if we could find talent in other areas that aren't traditional to technology or construction and build out a world class organization. When I took the role of chief people officer, I think there were 29 full time employees in our building and in less than, in less than 18 months we built our organization to about 525 full time employees that were working as a government contractor. So through the pandemic we kind of scaled this thing which is a really special thing that I'll always think fondly about. All the job opportunities we created and just the makeup of this organization which allows us to think in a really freewheeling and plastic way to solve some really challenging on ground problems. Problems.

So for folks who've never worked in an organization who scaled at that pace, which is probably most of us, right, what they, they might just think it's exciting, right? It's amazing. This growth is fantastic, it's brilliant. But can you share with us some of the stressors that exist in an organization scaling at that pace during a pandemic just so that we can get some context as to what was, you know, what were the kind of background factors to the need for resilience within the leadership team? In icon at that time.

Absolutely fantastic question. I think one of the things that we foresaw being a challenge, and it absolutely was, was when you're growing that fast, you've got like that core group of people, your early adopters, your, your believers in the thing that you were going to do. The people that kind of show up wide eyed and bushy tailed and kind of believe wholeheartedly. This is the only way to solve this problem, which is fantastic. You need that. And when you're scaling that quickly, every degree that you kind of move away from that early adopter group, you're introducing new ideas, but you're also introducing new culture. The thing that people forget is you may be expanding your culture, but you also have a responsibility to shepherd these new people along in this very fast paced building. And so at a certain point you reach this inflection moment where there are more new people in your organization than the classically trained individuals in your org and that creates some natural friction. Some friction, that's good, but it's something that you have to be aware of and be able to speak to honestly about the things that are changing. As, you know, people take on less responsibility because we've hired a subject matter expert for that thing. Or there may be a new set of ideas that differ slightly from the ones that you had about how something should be built. And so I think there is a level of trust that goes into allowing the new people that enter your organization to be full fledged, you know, members of the team that, you know, take on responsibility and allowing them the freedom and flexibility to interject their talent into your business. And then I think there is this thing that I think people are aware of, but it may exist as the elephant in the room. When you're growing that fast, there is a tendency to think, well, if we've got all these people here, all the bases must be covered, we're good to go. This thing is like on track and it's just going to be successful. And I think it's important to remember that the goal of every scaling organization, the goal of every startup is to eventually grow up and grow out of that phase. And so changing in culture is like both great because you need to get there in order to be the sort of org that can, that can nurture all of those people in the business. But it also needs to be a culture that reminds people why the business exists in the first place and how working with one another helps get you there faster as opposed to like seeing that tension as something that you take Personally, and maybe you miss an opportunity to really get in there with your teammates and learn what their talents are and how they're bringing that to bear.

When you talk about resilience in that environment, Dimitri, can you basically maybe contrast what does resilience look like versus lack of resilience, and what are the effects of not having the resilience versus somebody who perhaps does develop that resilience? Maybe can you just give our audience a view of what that looks like, the kind of contrasting resilience versus lack of resilience?

Yeah, I think when we talk about resilience in our building, I'll give you a brief example. I won't spend too much time on it, but. So we were. We were working on a special project contract with. With NASA. We're doing a SBIR Phase three, which is a private grant opportunity to be a part of Project Artemis to deliver automated robotic systems to help rebuild Moon Base, to give us an opportunity to explore in extraterrestrial environments beyond the moon. And first of all, that's a really cool thing to be able to do your business every day. So I don't want to skim past that like, it's a small thing, but there is this tendency that can exist within the organization for people to be like, oh, that's the new shiny thing. I want to go chase that. And I think in my mind, a level of resilience is understanding that there may be all sorts of interesting bespoke opportunities swirling around your business, but being able to focus on the core mission and the core reason we exist as an organization means tactically being able to focus on. Focus yourself and your team on your key items that you bring to bear for the business. So all of the other areas of your business can continue to move. And if you lack focus or you're unable to communicate clearly what your goals and your contribution to the business are, to me, that's a lack of. Because it's going to stifle everyone else's effort. It's going to make it more difficult for your teammates to go out and win. And so there's this mindset that needs to exist. Like, yes, there's a lot of really interesting stuff happening out there in the ether. But my responsibility to my teammates and to this business is to be able to show up and focus and do the thing that only you can do really well. And I think in chaotic environments, it can be difficult to have people intrinsically focused on the things that are going to help them. And the organization ultimately wins. So I think that would be an example for me of maybe people who you would showcase as you know, there's an opportunity to gain some more resilience when it comes to sorts of things.

I want to dig into how you create that resilience in a culture. But maybe if I can ask you a question before that, Demetri, is where does your personal resilience come from? I don't want to make, I guess, as I know you're. You're a military guy, you've served, you are from a long generation of folks you've served. Does that inform your own resilience? Or where does your resilience come from? And then from there, maybe I'll ask you to talk about how do you build that into a culture in an organization scaling so fast?

Absolutely. Yeah. I served eight years in the United States Marine Corps. My father served for 30 years in the Marine Corps, and my mom served for 12 in the air Force. And a lot of people will just assume, hey, this discipline and this resilience that you have, but must have come from the military. And I appreciate that kind of immediate recognition of traits that people understand about service members. But I will definitely say those traits came specifically from my grandmother and my father. In our upbringing, it was very well understood that some of the things that we wanted or needed may not be readily available. And so we had each other, we had a positive mindset, and we had a thirst for life and education that was going to afford us an opportunity to do some broader things in the world. And I think that mindset of show up, give it your all, and give it your best and be the best version of yourself every day. And if you can, strive to be 1% better every day. And I don't just mean like, in terms of work, like whatever that thing you're working on, if it's secondary language skills, if it's being more emotionally intelligent, if it's being. Being a better communicator, if you show up and you put in the effort to be 1% better than yourself every day, then you're going to be a person that's well suited for all the vicissitudes of life. And that's definitely one of the things that I took from my family, for sure. And then what I will say is anyone that's out there in pursuit of doing something that they see as important to the world should take full advantage of the opportunity to lean into their own personal superpowers. You know, I talk a lot, and I try to be an effective communicator. And the universe has afforded me the opportunity to talk to people about this that we're on. And so the work that I get to do, I get it for free because it kind of lives within my natural skill set. So I think one of the things that I always implore people to do is to find work that brings them joy. And I don't think it's the classic and you'll never work a day in your life. I think I work incredibly hard for things that give me joy. But when things are difficult, I am bolstered by the fact that the thing that I'm doing is something that adds value to me and again, adds value to, I think, the broader human condition. And I am buoyed by that. And that gives me resilience.

I love that positivity and resilience. It's been recognized that the newest generation of workers who've entered the workforce the last five years or so, again according to studies, a very generalist comment, have the lowest levels of resilience of many generations workers. So resiliency is a hot topic. And I think most organizations are recognized that you need a resilient workforce, particularly you need resilient leaders. But most of them are really keen to understand how do you embed that in folks, how do you embed that across an organization? And perhaps people who don't come naturally to the business with resilience, how have you done it in icon? What were some of the things that worked for you? And perhaps, if you don't mind sharing, what were some of the things that didn't perhaps work that surprised you?

Yeah, absolutely. And so one, I think, and we read the studies as well, but I think that there's this really interesting maybe miscarriage of information that goes along with the top line, like this generation isn't resilient. I think what we owe this generation is true leadership. I think one of the things that I was afforded is I always had managers and leaders, excuse me, that were interested in my interpersonal development, not just someone that was managing me to a task or wanted to make sure that my deliverables were in. And that's like the one thing that they wanted for me. They were really looking for opportunities to stretch and grow me outside of my natural skill set. And I think you create resilience in people when you are open and honest with them about the things that they are doing incredibly well in the areas of opportunity that they may have. And so when we were building our company culture and we were scaling the business, some of the intangible things that we were looking for were people that had backgrounds that were able to find success in unknown environments. And so, you know, regardless of you know, age, educational prowess or background, people that had exemplified the ability to go deliver something to the world, whatever it may be, software, hardware construction that had done something really difficult that kind of came without a playbook. And the assumption was if you can go do whatever that thing is in the world without anybody kind of telling you, you know, up, right, left or right, you could translate that skill set into this business that was oftentimes going to come without a playbook and require of you to kind of orient yourself and be able to trust your skills. And so that was definitely something we kind of looked for people who put their hand in the air and self selected into like I'm super comfortable in environments of unknown distance that have a little bit of chaos or friction in. And we didn't always 100% hit that out of the park. You know, there's fantastic folks that come from bankers hours and, and they're like really understand like what they need to deliver in a certain amount of time. So I won't say that we batted a thousand. In fact, I'll give you a really interesting example. We, we hired one of the, one of the foremost software engineers in the world. Like Google has like a rating system for, for individuals that write code. I think it's like level one through 10. There's something like 10,000 in the 10,000 people in the world that like qualify to be like a level 10 Google engineer. And we were lucky enough to secure these people. But culturally we had a really difficult time getting this person to kind of fit into the overarching mission because for as talented as they were, there was always a tendency to not be able to necessarily like work harmoniously with the rest of the team. And so sometimes it's not even just your ability to go secure top flight talent that's going to get you some of the way that's not going to take you all the way there. There also needs to be a level of trust, psychological safety and camaraderie within the team that you're building to allow for resiliency to take place. It really only takes one bad apple to take that safety away from your team. And if people are in your building or working remotely and they don't have the ability to trust that the people that they work to their left and right of inherently have their best interest at heart and trust them when things go you're not building a resilient team you're building, you're building a team that's kind of one tough happening away from, from, from unnecessary friction entering the, the equation.

How does that play out like that connection between psychological safety and resilience? You know, talk me through that because I, I, we talked on the show before about the importance of psychological safety. Had several guests on about it. I'm a massive believer in its importance for leadership and getting things done. But the connection between resilience and psychological safety, how does that bad apple mess things up and make it only one step away or one bad apple outcome away from the team kind of disintegrating? What, what happens to drive that, do you think?

Yeah, I, so the reason I'm actually in this hotel room right now instead of doing this from my home office is we're here at our end of year company retreat and one of the things that we try to do is, is bring everyone together and create an open dialogue for the things that worked, the things that are challenging and the things that we're going to discontinue doing. And one of the things that continually comes up, especially in a high performing group of folks, is they take the culture very seriously. And there's a tendency to move very quickly and pivot as an organization. And I think if you've got trust in one another, that the senior leadership team is asking you to do this thing over here as opposed to this thing that we were working on for very real and meaningful reasons. If you have trust in your organization, you can make those pivots very quickly. If there's a level of distrust or, you know, you've got, you've got somebody that's not necessarily bought in to the overarching goals of the business, but you get like a lot of friction that can be either a squeaky wheel or a loud voice. And what we've determined in our organization is more often than not your people that aren't abiding by the culture, introducing that friction into the business are your loudest voices. So you could have, you know, 100 very happy people, four or five folks that like aren't adhering to the culture. And it's, it's impactful because the feedback loop might tend to tell you and other leaders in the org that like, it's not working, everything's awry and we're clearly in the wrong place. You zoom out from that, it's like we've got a handful, we've got a microcosm of people that either is actively being rejected by the culture or, or like their inability to create that safety between them and their teammates is actually introducing hardship into the very difficult work that we already have to do. And so I think it plays out this way where you have to be like, one willing to have those conversations. Hey, what, what's working? What are our points of friction? And can we sit down and have these conversations between team members as we go forward and try to do really difficult things together? Or as leaders, if we're noticing that we're not allowing for those people who are creating very, you know, those difficult moments within the business to, like, speak openly honestly to them and the people around them that are being affected by that, then I think you really miss an opportunity to create safety within your organization. People know what good like and they know what bad is. I think one of the greatest quotes I've been introduced to is nobody really knows what company culture is. But you know, when you have a bad one, and if you're, if you're not seeking out opportunities to correct that and find ways to make your core team feel really great about who they were with, then I think you're taking away their safety, and I think you're taking away the ability to continue to grow your culture into something really wonderful.

Reed Hastings and Netflix is probably one of the most famous people who talks about building culture and the importance of culture and whether people disagree or, or agree with the type of culture Netflix has. One thing that's hard to argue with is that they have a very strategically driven culture. It's a very deliberate culture, and they built it for very specific reasons. And Hastings talks about principles that are important to try and develop that. Do you have principles in icon that shape that culture and shape that environment? Won't use the word rules or processes because maybe that's a bit harsh, but are there core principles that you've seen that work to scale and build that psychological safety to build that resilience in an organization?

Yeah. So we've got some tenants that we go by, but the first one that I'll start with is courage. And I think that, like a weird thing to, to tell people that one of your core tenants in a, in a tech startup is courage, but I think it kind of ties in very nicely to this idea of psychological safety. The, the one rule in our business. Well, there's two. And so there's one is, is don't be an a hole. Right. Like, nobody is allowed to be a mean person here because we will get so much more done if we're treating one Another with respect. And I know that's kind of an aggressive first place to start, but I think everybody understands what that feels like. Well, we've all worked with people that we think are absolutely wonderful, and you would run through a brick wall for that person. And then we've all worked with that one person that you're like, man, you know, I had joy today, and now I don't have it anymore after that interaction. And so that's the first thing. But we talk about leading with courage, because I think the only thing that you can actually do wrong in a business is not try. And when I say not try, I mean, like, the only punishable thing that we've got in our business is, like, not attempting to do a thing. You will be applauded. You will get accolades for trying to go do something good, bad, or indifferent with the outcome. You have to try. You don't change the world by doing average things, and you definitely don't change the world by, like, resting on your laurels. And so we encourage people to go out there, make mistakes, fail fast, break things and not people is something that we live by. But you got to go out there and try to do it. And I think when you encourage people to go try new and oddly shaped things, when it comes back that they don't have success in that attempt, but you treat them well as a result of going out there and taking the shot. You build this thing inside of people where they inherently trust that you're not going to bark at them if it doesn't go well, and then they trust themselves to look at the thing that you're building more organically and say, well, how could I interpret this in a different way? Maybe it's not written down. Nobody's telling me to do it. I have the trust that I can go do this thing, and if it works, I will be recognized for it. And if it doesn't work, that's okay. In fact, that's exactly what I'm being encouraged to do. And I think that that allows for people then to go out and really explore the realm of the possible in a way that I think doesn't exist in cultures where people, like, if they make a mistake, then they're going to get slapped on the wrist. And so courage is definitely one of the things that we talk about a lot in our building.

I love that. I was reading about, again, the Netflix culture. One of the tenets that they have, one of the principles is they call it sun shining. The outcomes are, you know, the, the. The failure and the idea there is that you shine a light, you pull, pour the sunshine on the outcome. You don't hide it, you don't try and, you know, dust it under the carpet. If something didn't work, you have to call it out and very publicly call it out and explain it and explain what we learned from it and what you think were the reasons why it was an unsuccessful outcome. It is encouraged and applauded. And then the other element of that, again to build that safety, is if a manager has disagreed with something, the individual reporting into that manager are several lines there from the manager can still go ahead and make a decision to go ahead with the project. But if the manager was turned out to be wrong, they are not just encouraged, they are told they have to go out there and publicly declare that they were wrong and how happy they are that the person managed to do this thing and what they learned as well. So again, that safety, that sharing is critical to that success. You know, it's a part of that whole culture of making sure that you know it's in it to drive innovation. You're going to have to accept a certain level of failure and you need to give people the autonomy that's probably required to try and hire the type of folks you're looking to hire. Dimitri, you mentioned the hiring policy. I hate to use the word policy, but are the focus you had in the early days of trying to find individuals who have overcome challenge or struggle in whatever shape or form in their work or life, because that's the kind of attribute you wanted to build into the culture. Does that scale though? Because I know there's, there's kind of a, certainly in the, in the software as a service kind of investment world, there's an idea that the folks that you hire to build a business like that, the entrepreneurial spirit that kind of just give me that, I'll do it. Come on, whatever needs to be done, I'll make it happen. I don't care about the challenges. Is different to perhaps how you scale a business. To your point around, you need to move to a phase two, which is a bunch of folks who can take what was learned from those original team founding members and scale it. Have you beg, begun to see that challenge at all in the business? Have you begun to kind of start working with those two types of folks, the folks can go create, overcome the scalers?

No, I, I, I love it because this is, this is one thing that I believe I'm still kind of exploring as I'm on my journey to continue to build startup organizations. And so this idea that, like, there are very different people that are going to maintain business, as opposed to the ones that, like, had the initial ambition to go, like, start it, I think they are different, but I don't think they're an order of magnitude different. So when you talk about, like, how do we select for our culture and what are we looking for as we continue to scale up this business? And I think there are ways to continue to find the sorts of people with the mental plasticity, with the ambition, with the courage, and with the velocity to continue to move your business forward that also respect the idea that, like, there's a handbook now or, you know, that there's, like, full process is in place that maybe didn't exist when you started. But I think the overarching characteristics of someone who's going to find success in these sorts of environments, I think you can find even beyond that. First, you know, 20, 50, 100 employees, I think they're out there if you are actively speaking to your talent community about what it is that you're looking for. So again, I think that goes back to, like, clearly writing job descriptions, being, like, overtly honest with people about what the job is or isn't at that moment in your company's history, and then also finding people that are well aligned with the mission of the business. And I think one of the things that's made us wildly successful at finding the right talent is being incredibly honest with people about where we exist today. Like, here's the overarching goal. We want to get to Mars, right? Like, that's. That's a thing that we are going to do on a line item within the next 30 years, we're going to achieve that thing. And if you're honest with people about this is what it's going to take to get there. This is what we believe it's. We're going to require you at the very outset. You're kind of really clearly setting expectations about what you believe this person will need to do to achieve success in your organization. And if you have those conversations, you find more of those people than not. And again, it's never 100%. This is a human game we're playing. And so you can't learn everything about everyone interview. But what you owe people is an honest assessment of how they're performing within your building once they get there. And what you owe people is the opportunity to provide feedback to you about the things that work within your business and the things that are causing them undue stress. Double work, et cetera. And so I think it's this like really interesting, like back and forth conversation that we just have to have with one another to create spaces that allow for people to do incredible things together.

On the topic of resilience, have you found that there's a need to support folks who perhaps stray from that? Like folks who find it really challenging? And you know, what have you seen work to, particularly at a leadership level, to provide support? Whether it's coaching, a safe space for somebody to be able to kind of just take some time out, get some advice, mentoring. What have you seen that's work that, you know, again, 95% of the time somebody might be resilient, firing on all cylinders, working great with the team, but then they just wobble, or perhaps they just have a moment of crisis or they just need that bit of support. What have you seen that works on scale as you've built the team in icon for leadership to try and have that or do folks have that moment? Is that needed?

Well, I think it's absolutely needed and I think that that exists kind of no matter what your core business is or what the core business model is. I think we're dealing, dealing people, right? Like we inherently build these businesses and staff them with people that we believe in, right? We hired them, we onboarded them, we invested time, energy, money, training, et cetera, all of these things into this person. And when people arrive at a moment where maybe they're not performing at the level that you would hope for, or like you said, they wobble or they've got something going on, interpersonal that's having an impact on their day to day. I think what we owe people is to treat them like the humans that we know them to be. The outputs of our business are important, but they're no more important than your friends, your family, your own emotional stability and your ability to show up every day and feel proud of the work that you're delivering. And so if you see someone that is notably struggling within your organization, I think you owe them an honest conversation, but you owe them a question and answer like what's going on with you that maybe we can present some training for. Is training, is it coaching, is it sabbatical, is it a weekend off, is it just someone hearing them out about what they're going through? And I think you can achieve that while scaling if you set up your organization in a way that allows for small unit leadership to still exist. And so I don't think it's the responsibility of the CEO to Reach five layers deep into the organization and say like, hey Dimitri, how are you doing today? But someone in that person's reporting loop should have the latitude, the responsibility and frankly the respect for their team member to know what's going on at a level that allows them to directly reach out to that individual and see what the challenges are. Here's the beautiful thing about this. If for whatever reason in that conversation you discover like the struggle is actually like a business alignment issue, like they're no longer able to feel successful in that role, exiting people from your organization or accepting a tendered resignation doesn't lessen the human being that person is and was when you hired them. So allowing people to leave your organization with as much dignity as they came to it with is as important piece of the puzzle as anything else. And I think people forget that. You know, you get a lot out of people and you know, you build a business with them. And sometimes at organizations when they don't serve that core purpose anymore, there's a tendency to allow people to leave your org in a way that I don't think anybody would be happy with. And allowing people to be dignified in their time with your business and when that time comes to an end, for whatever reason that is leaving new Org doesn't make you a bad person suddenly. And we can root for you and we can champion you and we can even help you find something that's going to make you feel great about what you do for the world. And those things can coexist. And I think you get that when you focus on leading people in smaller units so you know what's happening in their lives and then you have the conversations with them on a, on a personal level about how their work is being impacted by whatever is happening in their life. And I think we all deal with that.

For people leaders who are perhaps earlier in the journey of scaling their teams, what advice would you give them around how to build a people first culture that is full of the empathy you speak about, that is sustainable from scratch? What are some of the tenets or principles that you would share with with our listeners who perhaps are earlier in that journey as a people leader, what have you learned that you would share with them or do differently yourself?

Yeah, I think early on scaling journey, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. But I think one of the things that we focused on was, you know, we're an engineering heavy organization, right? Software engineers, hardware engineers, wrench turning folks that build things. But one of the insights that we had early on in our organization was that building out a world class people team was going to be one of the things that was going to be necessary for us to scale as quickly as we wanted to and support team members from a full swath of different backgrounds and skill sets. And I think if you're thinking about the business that you intend to build, you're at all these really awesome moments to think, how can I support these people that are going to go do this, like, very interesting work. And so one of the insights that we had there was to provide all the services that we possibly could to allow to move as much out of the way for these team members from an HRVP standpoint, from, you know, a meal, set up, benefits. They don't have to worry about the other stuff. They just get to show up and be full versions of themselves, try to solve this like very big, very deep, very human problem. And when you do that and people feel seen and they feel supported, they can fully lend themselves to the challenge of going to do something difficult or big or large or interesting. And so just building up the support systems as you are able within your kind of capital constraints, to be thinking about what's going to make Johnny the most successful at his job and can we provide that as an organization. And so things like you mentioned, like finding mentorship opportunities and looking for ways to level up people's educational certifications and those sorts of things we provided early on, maybe earlier on than maybe some of our investors even understood would be impactful. And today those things pay benefits tenfold because we were thinking quite critically about what it would take for people to feel great about the job that they do every day.

You yourself have moved into a new role, Head of Special Projects with the office of the CEO. Talk to me about that evolution. Why did it come about? And you're thinking around the CPO's role in influencing company strategy at that level, beyond just people strategy.

Absolutely. So my journey with this company has been super interesting. So I'm employee number one. I've been here since the very beginning and I think every year I've made this tidal shift in career. As you know, when you're starting something, everybody's wearing 10 hats. And it just so happens that the hats that fit me best were the jobs that I was afforded the opportunity to do. So I came to this business as an operator, you know, a decade of that in the Marine Corps. And so operations and delivering, you know, bespoke projects to the world was right up my alley. So the first thing that we Ever built was a one singular permitted 3D printed house in Austin, Texas. But right on the heels of that, we took this brand new technology and immediately packed it up and moved it to Mexico, rural Mexico. And so new language, escalating trade war with the Mexican government at the time, you know, trying to figure out how to deliver something with a nonprofit partner of ours. New story to build the world's first D printed neighborhood. So that was the challenge of the first year and it was super exciting and a fun experience that I'll never forget. Fast forward to the next year. Challenge with scale. So how do we take this 30 person company and grow it to a full fledged business with all the business units that you would expect. Finance and biz dev, software engineering and hardware engineering, that was the next challenge. So I took that hill for the last 18 months and now we've moved into this world where the business is scaled, we have raised the appropriate amounts of capital and now we're in the go to market space. So how do we create revenue opportunities to continue to evangelize this technology, but to showcase to our end users, our homeowners, our customers. These houses that we're building are greater than the stick frame hoses that exist currently, today that provide them an economic press break that also gives them some flexibility in design and creates beauty. And so now that we're in that space, the challenges for the business are incredible. You've got consumer facing challenges. You're looking at working with cities, states and municipalities to continue to scale this up and a lot of relationship building. And so fortunately for me and my, my, my love of talking, it has afforded me the opportunity to kind of move into this space where the consideration for all these different use cases for our technology is now kind of my, my everyday. And so whether that be, you know, some tastemaker or some, some nation state over here, or you know, a dignitary or a king and queen, we are going to entertain those opportunities because they may have realized intrinsic value for our business long term. And I am afforded that because of the trust and the flexibility and the safety that I've been given by my leadership team that says leverage your superpowers in this business in a way that benefits all of us. And so I don't think you get there without leadership that doesn't have the foresight to allow people to grow within your business.

I love that, I almost love that to be our finishing line. But I'm going to ask you one more question. Dimitri. We're at time. I can't believe we are already. We ask every guest who comes on the show to leave our audience with one piece of advice that they've either garnered from their career, their experience, or that's been passed on to them by perhaps someone wiser during that same period of time. I'll ask you as well to finish us up today. Dimitri, what piece of advice can you leave our audience with today?

Whatever you dream can exist in the world. You should pursue it relentlessly. This dream job that I have, I was told by just about everyone who would listen that this business couldn't work. Didn't make sense. You won't be able to raise money. The problem that you're chasing is too big. Yes, houselessness is a problem, but how are you going to solve that? Robots. And had I listened to all of those voices, I wouldn't be living my dream every day. So whatever it is that you are chasing, chase it with vigor, chase it with energy, and chase it like your life depends on it. Because you will not be the fullest version of yourself if you haven't afforded yourself every opportunity to go be the full visionary that we know you to be. The people that are making the world worse don't take days off. And we're going to need each and every one of you to pursue your dreams relentlessly.

I absolutely love that. It reminds me of a story I heard last night about Frederick Smith, who's the founder of FedEx, and when he was in Yale in an entrepreneurial course, he wrote a thesis on building a business that would deliver an overnight parcel across the US from one state to state on the other side in one night. And he was given a D, I think, by the instructor going, because he said it was an unrealistic ambition. And he founded FedEx three years later. So I think the world needs more dreamers, people who don't say, don't take no for an answer and who fight for what they believe in and make that their passion. Dimitri, you're obviously one of those people. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Hopefully that's inspired others in our field, in our world, to try and break those barriers and do things that others say can't be done. Because, folks, you know, you're sending. You're sending robots to Mars to build buildings and homes in the next 30 years. This is a pretty awesome mission. I'm sure a lot of people will tell you that can't be done. And no doubt that your team at Icon, and you especially can make it happen. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me. You'll have a fantastic rest of the afternoon. And I love your posters, Johnny. Those are two of my favorite films.

Thank you, Demetrius. Thank you for listening. Thanks for joining us this week on show 124. We're going to be back next week for a final show of the year. And if you haven't heard all the shows this year, this is the show for you. You we're going to be going live Wednesday, 21st of December, 4pm Irish Times, 11am New York anym West coast in the US are dropping in your podcast app on Wednesday evening with the 2022 retrospective. So myself, my colleague Holly who's joined you on many of these shows during the year to host our fantastic guests. We're going to be going through our favorite shows, our favorite quotes from a lot of the guests we had over the year, over 40 unique guests over the last year. We'll be taking some snippets of their advice, their tips, and disseminate that into four or five themes for you to sit back, enjoy some eggnog, a whiskey, a lovely cup of tea, whatever works for you to kind of sit back and think about the year and hopefully wind down for the Christmas and the holiday season. Join us next week for that show. Thanks for joining us today and don't let go of those dreams, as Demetri would say. Take care.