Ingenuity

Please welcome our special guest, Nilima Achwal, an experienced social impact executive who's spent years studying and driving behavioral change in people across cultures and countries. In this fascinating episode, we discuss an interesting case study she hypothesized and executed that transformed misled, bullying middle-schoolers into healthy members of society. Then used a similar approach in the world of startups and fundraising to create impactful change in society. Her new fund is based upon a thesis that disruptive system design, driven by an underserved population of founders, can generate outsized returns. You'll find no lemming behavior here.

Please welcome our special guest, Ashley Faus, a product marketing executive at Atlassian (the makers of Jira and Confluence). Our fascinating conversation ranges from her own hero's journey from musical theater into the wide world of marketing, and dips our toes into podcasting, facial expressions, tone of voice, genuineness, and improv. If you're at all interested in what separates good from great marketers, you've come to the right place.

Please welcome our special guest, Samer Hakoura, who is an equity investor focused on the concept of using synthetic leverage to compound returns faster than competitors. He started his career as a classically-trained Chemist at Oxford, then became an investment banker, and subsequently moved into the family business running an international real estate portfolio and high-growth food business. This is where he witnessed the fantastical compounding effects of low competition plus free cash flow reinvested into the business. A fellow student of the Berkshire philosophies, we delve into investing, hobbies, and philosophical shop. A fun one you won't want to miss.

Please welcome our special guest, Omar Sher, a Business Development, Strategy, and Energy expert who has lived and operated in many countries within Asia, the Middle East, and just moved to Singapore. We discuss the state of the world, core values and principles for operating at a high level in modern society, the basis for smart buildings, and the desire to seek craftsmanship in all its forms. It was an enlightening conversation that hopefully helps you discover a new book, video, show, and way of thinking that can help you achieve a better life.

From August 7, 2022 to December 31, 2022, we performed a series of hypothesis tests to determine the actions that drive steep and profitable growth in the current market landscape. We gave ourselves the following requirements:Anyone could recreate it with free tools, a computer, and the internet.A sales, marketing, advertising, and sponsorship budget of $0.The growth rate of the North Star metric must be greater than 50% per month.Results needed to be achieved in less than 90 days (i.e., one fiscal quarter).The same person must create the strategy, content, and distribution.Time investment could not be more than 2 hours per day.It must attract advertisers organically with zero reach out.The market must be highly competitive (e.g., social media).Download the full case study at: https://www.everettadvisors.com/podcast/case-study-3x-growth-per-month

Please welcome our very special guest, Montreece Smith, the EVP People at Per Scholas. In this holiday episode we talk about building on-ramps for emerging talent, a not-for-profit model growing faster than most VC-backed startups, how values can be the core of a growth engine for any organization, and the fine art of patience. We hope you have as much fun listening in as we had recording it.

Please welcome our special guest, Beau Billington. He's the founder and CEO of the Free Agent, a business that works on behalf of early-stage startups and private equity companies to place high-performing executive talent with high-growth companies. In this episode, our conversation ranges from what sets talent apart from peers when everyone has similar skills, what A and B clients look like, what trends he sees in the market as we move into 2023, and ends with a bit of a preview of what comes next. The name of the game is client and candidate experience.

How do you grow with smaller budgets, under pressure, when the market becomes more competitive? We've operated during these periods and made it through successfully. Talent - It all starts with talent. People who have been there, done that, and used to executing rapidly to achieve outcomes.Hypothesis Testing - This is both a mindset and a process. List out the biggest problems in the organization, stack rank them in terms of importance, effort, cost, and return. Then begin executing them one by one.Organizational Design - Click through to get our proprietary process wheel that aligns an organization with a growth process that has improving cycle times built in. Basically, learn faster and apply the findings faster to grow faster than competitors and capture the market. Learn more at https://www.everettadvisors.com

Please welcome our special guest, Jeff Davis, a longtime friend from the Chicago Booth business school days and an experienced leader in generating high-growth revenue. His latest platform platform, RevEngine.com, brings the sales and marketing functions together to execute against the new requirements in the fast-moving world of big business. You may find yourself nodding your head up and down repeatedly, like we did, as he speaks. Let's listen in.

Perhaps you've never thought deeply about what your core values and principles are in life or business. Or maybe you have. But you're not quite sure how to determine if those values are really yours, or if you're just hoping they're yours because you've heard about them talked about in a positive way. We give you a single test to understand which values are really core to you.Go deeper on Core Values.

Please welcome our special guest, Christopher Chin Fong who's a rare talent in today's technofuturist world. He's a growth hacker, product person, startup aficionado, and agency veteran who's been around the block a few times at this point. We've had the distinct pleasure of working with him for a decade and watching him tackle new areas with reckless abandon. His skill set varies from comic book animated content distributed via Instagram, drop-shipping on Amazon, artificial general intelligence in robotics, ecommerce for steel, and yes, even helping invent the Stories media format.Learn more about Christopher Chin Fong.

Curious how you win this infinite game of business when everyone is playing the same game? The answer is iteration speed. And how do you get faster iteration speed? We provide one tactic in this episode.Go deeper on Organizational Design & Handoffs.

Is there a fundamental principle we can use to ensure product-market fit before even starting a business or app? In fact, there is. And it's been staring you in the face for decades. Sometimes all it takes is a fresh perspective to see what's already there, differently.Go deeper on Zero to One.

Have you ever worked in an environment where the default when anyone has a question or something goes wrong is to schedule a meeting? So have we. But we've also been a part of designing high-growth companies that don't have this issue. And the speed that results is astounding. Let's dig in.Go deeper on Organizational Design.

Have you ever watched kids organize their candy haul after a successful Halloween night? Did you know they have been creating AI models without even realizing it? You can use this simple concept of Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive to organize and simplify anything, which then lets you create a model of any system from that to predict the future based upon the past. Just remember, correlation is not causation.Go deeper on Strategy.

Ever wondered how to stand out in a sea of sameness? Here's a few minutes on unlocking the secret. Click through and scroll down for bonus content, including a new Everett Music playlist that accompanies the episode.

Have you heard this phrase before? If you're deep into research it's likely you've come across it if you've gone down the AI, Biologic Intelligence, or Social Networking rabbit holes. But if you haven't, we break it down to hopefully make it easier to understand and help you realize what product managers in big tech spend most of their time thinking about.Go deeper and learn about Biologic Intelligence and Connectomes.

Please welcome our special guest, Deb Mashek, PhD who quite literally wrote the book on Collaboration, with a capital C. Not only has she put in the research hours to figure out the framework for optimizing any organization's speed through the power of relationship building, she also developed proprietary frameworks for helping individuals, departments, and entire organizations work better together. Her tactics pass the smell test, stress test, and the real-world test so she is one we suggest should you be having trouble executing the plan.Don't forget to click through and scroll down to get a link to pre-order her book and pick up the bonus framework she shared with us as it was in development.

Take a look at the things you interact with on a daily basis. Our guess is that you're consuming a lot of content. Text, emails, calls, TV, movies, social posts, you name it. So why aren't there more people or businesses creating it the right way? Let's dig in and see if we can find a solution.

Take a look around your home. What do you see? Objects, sure. But are you also reminded of memories for the story behind those objects and the moments in your life related to them? Let's go deeper at https://www.everettadvisors.com/innerverse

Are you trying to raise capital, or about to? Sure, you can be like everyone else and throw a million bottles into the sea and hope that an investor picks one out of the ocean because it seems interesting. Or you can focus on creating a growth rate so steep and so durable that investors compete for your business. This is the secret masters use to control capital markets.Go deeper on Growth.

What is an Internet Money Crank, you ask? It has something to do with this web 3 future you may have heard being discussed in the hallways of the internet. It comes standard with augmented and virtual reality, some three-letter acronyms, and some artificial intelligence. But no matter what we call it, the United States Securities & Exchange Commission are investing heavily to make sure all types of investors are protected from scams an non-compliant offerings to the general public. So if you go down this route, make sure you do this the right way. This is one book you don't want to get thrown at you.Go deeper at https://www.everettadvisors.com/incentives

If you're not familiar with OKRs, it stands for Objectives and Key Results. It's used by startups to large organizations in order to align many people against common goals. But issues arise when they are designed and distributed incorrectly, the component pieces are not aligned, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, or if the objectives and key result metrics are poor. So, in this episode we give you the single universal answer if you want to build a high-growth business.Go deeper at https://www.everettadvisors.com/growth

Have you ever felt uncomfortable sitting all day at work, on a road trip, traveling in a plane, or even while eating. You're not alone. The problem isn't with you. It's with these feeble tools we've created that scrunch us up into a ball. Bonus: if you're in the Seattle area over the next few weeks and enjoy chatting about building better systems, we'd love to make your acquaintance.

There's about 3 different types of Cloud Jumping that occurs in our world. And no, we're not talking about the big fluffy things that float in the sky. We're talking about the cloud of computing that's become so popular over the last few decades. Listen in, and let's break it down. Go deeper at https://www.everettadvisors.com/podcast

Have you ever felt like you wanted your favorite person or pet to come with you somewhere but they couldn't for whatever reason? Now there's a solution. Be sure to click through to everettadvisors.com/podcast for bonus content for this episode.

Why is it that some organizations just keep pushing their products and services down your throat upon the first meet-cute instead of giving you an experience you can vibe with first? We break it down in this episode. And make sure you click through to grab the Everett Music Playlist: Showtime that accompanies this episode. We out here, and we on.

Click a button, get an outcome. Add talent to your home screen, just like you used to do with apps, and tap ONE when you need to hire a skill.

We beta tested Stable Diffusion's artificial intelligence to create an image from a series of words. Our prompt was, “Mickey Mouse in the style of Dali drinking coffee in Paris during dusk with Minnie looking at him longingly”. Click through to see the four resulting images.

Have you ever thought about treating yourself as if you were the primary asset in your own business? What kind of incredible things could happen for yourself if you approached your own career life as most businesses treat themselves? Would it change your perspective on what you spend, nay, invest money in? Would it change your perspective on how you treat your own health? Listen in for more. Go deeper at https://www.everettadvisors.com/learn

Whether you're designing real, augmented, mixed, or virtual reality, environment design is critical. It sets the stage, the mood, and the scene while giving the audience a bit of foreshadowing on what comes next. The best in the world transport you between dimensions effortlessly using human senses as their paint brushes.Show Note: please click through to the full episode to see the video. And if you're only subscribed to the audio version, make sure you check out every episode link or subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the video version as well.

Have you ever found yourself dancing on a rollercoaster? Probably not. But that's exactly what happened to us yesterday. Which resulted in us coining a term to describe what happened during the creative process. Find out what we mean in 60 seconds.

Ahh, Walt Disney World in beautiful Orlando Florida. Is there anyplace in the world with more magical experiences? We don't think so. And so we've commenced our annual pilgrimage to this wondrous place in order to better understand how our internet future will play out in our everyday lives.

We think we may have figured out the mechanic that can work both at the individual scale and global scale. It might be a way to make our own lives better while also making the world a better place to live in. Let's keep going.

In this very special episode, we welcome our guest, Derrick Zierler, a gentleman who's been in the wearables, glasses, and augmented/mixed reality space for a long time. He's certainly put in the hours, working closely with the people who make the things we'll all be wearing in the future, investing in the areas he believes have merit, and has done the technical diligence on quite a few approaches. As a result, you might find yourself keeping a tab open and Googling quite a few terms and names throughout the course of the episode as even industry insiders might pick up a nugget or two they hadn't thought about before. We can't wait to do this again once a few of the consumer products drop over the coming quarters. Here's to our mixed media future! Get the full experience at everettadvisors.com/podcast/the-reality-of-augmented-reality-featuring-derrick-zierler

Human beings are such an interesting species. We've learned to expect real-time benefits based on the things we interact with in the world (thank you Amazon, same-day delivery). But the down-side is that it reduces our ability to stick with something when it doesn't work immediately. In this quick episode, we describe how absolutely low the bar is to surpass the performance of 99% of the human population.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go from a career as a software designer to product manager in a high-growth, Venture Capital-backed environment, and then do a full shift into an owner and operator role for your family's 150-unit rental property? David has done exactly that, and we break it down to figure out what it feels like on either side of that equation. We can't wait to see what comes next from our old friend.

Are you building a custom app or software product from scratch and wondering what the best analytics choice is for getting out of the gate quickly? We give you the answers after years of battle-testing them in real-world startup scenarios.

A thought came up in our latest guest appearance. What is it about getting started on something new that makes it appear in our minds as if there's some gigantic gap, when in reality it's just a tiny step? We think we figured out why, but you tell us if it's the same for you or something different.

Welcome to the future, as told by Steven Berry. The gentleman who's taking his knowledge of human capital at Watson Wyatt and the Federal Reserve and translating it into improvisational comedy, singing in the voice of Baritenor, and composing sick beats in the actor's studio. This episode is guaranteed to make you laugh, or at least smile. We certainly couldn't help ourselves. Here's to you, Mr. Ace Ventura.

Wouldn't it be cool if you were able to teach a horse to fly? It would stop becoming a horse, and transform into something else entirely. In this episode, we break down one of the blockers we've found operating in this wild world of business. And perhaps, a shift of perspective that can take place to unlock something better.

Have you found that people often over-complicate simple things in life? Search engine optimization is no different. So we break down the primary thing that matters and how to make sure you're driving that metric in a positive and sustainable way.

Today, we welcome our special guest, Timothy Busbice, a long-time software and internet person. We're talking decades and decades and decades. He's also the guy who founded the OpenWorm project. This was the first time the human species took the fundamental framework of nature's biologic intelligence (read: the connectome of an earthworm) and applied it to self-driving robotics. His YouTube video showing it in action is closing in on 2 million views. Click through to watch it.He continues that work today, splitting his time between collecting connectomic data from labs for more complex animals (read: fruit fly, field mouse, humans), writing the software to run in the cloud, locally, or on-premise, and on a variety of low-powered robotics to bring it all together.Show note: Sean and Tim are co-founders and owners of PROME.

As we've described in prior episodes, Duration Beats Everything™. But that's not the full story. When you combine duration with a growth rate, the continuation of extra cash over time can create magical returns for you. And this is why the venture capital community is so obsessed with finding these very special businesses. Learn more at https://www.everettadvisors.com/strategy

We take our experience from years of designing monetary incentives for employees, salespeople, executives, and the board of directors of the biggest companies in the world and apply it to new economies talked about in Web 3 circles. There's one fatal flaw that most white paper designers forget. Learn more at https://www.everettadvisors.com/incentives

We've been describing this enterprise software feature to founders, boards, and product teams for years. The best enterprise products exist to help their customers make money, so shouldn't they get a notification when they wake up how much money your product made for them? Or even better, new opportunities for the company to earn more money? We break it down in this episode.

In this episode, we describe the most fundamental concept in game design and ponder an interesting question. Why is it that most software products have not adopted this principle for helping people onboard into their app?

The Stories media format is now used by billions of consumers and copied by every major social network on the planet. In this very special episode, we take a peek inside the call that started it all. This was recorded a decade ago, and was just found in an old, dusty place on the internet. It gives us an inside look into the creative process for how the Stories new media format, and StoryApp, was concepted and created from scratch. It also includes the animated emoji that understood emotion from your voice and reacted accordingly (referred to as the Artifact in the call). Team members on the call include Sean Everett, Tragnark, and Chin Fong but also reference other members, Jerod Chirico and Tina Shah. Two other members, Sam Baumgarten and Jon Miller, could not make the call.Show notes: some portions use NSFW language.

What do Google, Facebook, and Ricky Bobby have in common? They all become first by being last. Counterintuitive, we know. But ponder this one on a beautiful Sunday. Learn more at https://www.everettadvisors.com/one

Wouldn't it be incredible if we lived in, or created, a world where everyone was better off? That's the concept behind this economic term coined about a century ago. We use this simple idea to help us design better products and services that help people. Perhaps it helps you too. Learn more at https://www.everettadvisors.com/one

Seemingly everyone and every company want to Go Viral these days. But is that really what they want, or is it just what they think they want? In this episode, we unpack it using Drake (yes, that Drake), and provide an alternative mindset that produces greater long-term value.