Podcast appearances and mentions of bear sterns

In this episode, Brock speaks with Doug Pugliese. Doug is a former naval aviator and translator as well as the former managing director at Bear Stearns, where he rode through the dot com bubble and the GFC. Today he is head of 1042 QRP strategies at Alpha Architect. In this conversation we start with a bit about Doug's time in the Navy. Doug was a translator for an admiral and the president of Paraguay in the late 80s. He gives a bit of a history lesson about the US as involvement in South America during that time, and share some photos of him with some very notable figures, including the general who staged a coup and overthrew that President. We also hear what Doug learned about risk in financial markets working through a few of the most notable time periods in financial history. And we also learned about ESOP's or employee stock ownership programs, what they are, why they're important, and what Alpha Architect is doing in this world today. Episode Resources: ⁠Alpha Architect website⁠ Notes: (01:56) - What Doug is most proud of (06:13) - A near aviation mishap landing with a blown engine at night (12:43) - Acting differently in the light of recognizing your own mortality (16:32) - Sharing a few photos from Doug's time in service - first flight at Martha's Vineyard (19:02) - Doug's learning of Spanish early, exchange student, and skills for later in life (30:27) - Translating for an admiral in Paraguay in 1993 (35:15) - The general who staged a coup to overthrow the president of Paraguay (42:42) - South America countries and the future of America (46:48) - Joining the world of finance, leaving the life of riley (01:02:00) - Working at Bear Sterns from the dot com boom & bust through the great financial crisis (01:08:43) - Understanding financial cycles and commonalities between them (01:16:20) - Meeting Wes Gray and joining Alpha Architect (01:23:37) - Head of 1042 Solutions (01:26:37) - ESOPs, what they are and why they're important The Scuttlebutt Podcast - The podcast for service members and veterans building a life outside the military. The Scuttlebutt Podcast features discussions on lifestyle, careers, business, and resources for service members. Show host, Brock Briggs, talks with a special guest from the community committed to helping military members build a successful life, inside and outside the service. Get a weekly episode breakdown, a sneak peek of the next episode and other resources in your inbox for free at ⁠⁠⁠https://scuttlebutt.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠. Follow along:     • Brock: ⁠⁠⁠@BrockHBriggs⁠⁠⁠         • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠Scuttlebutt_Podcast ⁠⁠⁠      • Send me an email: ⁠⁠⁠scuttlebuttpod1@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠ • Episodes & transcripts: ⁠⁠⁠Scuttlebuttpodcast.co

Tech workers are saying that the main thing they don't do is...work. Doogles walks through Jason Zweig's seven traits of great investors. Skippy continues to watch the real estate market head toward bad. Doogles mocks active manager performance. The episode wraps with Skippy's amazement at Alan Greenberg's commitment to saving money for Bear Sterns in the 1980s.Join the Skippy and Doogles fan club. You can also get more details about the show at skippydoogles.com, show notes on our Substack, and send comments or questions to skippydoogles@gmail.com.

Jackie

One of the largest banks in the US has collapsed after it faced a bank run with customers scrambling to withdraw their cash. Silicon Valley Bank was the sixteenth-largest bank in the U-S by market cap.  It was highly invested in the tech and crypto sectors, which have both seen big drops in value.  Some investors are comparing it to the collapse of Bear Sterns, which kicked off the 2008 financial meltdown US investment bank Wedbush Securities managing director and senior equity analyst Daniel Ives spoke to Corin Dann.  

Art DeGaetano – is the Chief Investment Officer and Founder of Bramshill Investments. Before founding Bramshill, in 2012, Mr. DeGaetano was a Senior Portfolio Manager at GLG Partners LP where he managed the predecessor to the Bramshill Income Performance Strategy and a levered US credit portfolio for the GLG Market Neutral Fund. Combined, Mr. DeGaetano had approximately $375mm in assets under management at GLG Partners LP. Prior to GLG Partners in 2007, Mr. DeGaetano was Managing Director and Head of US Credit Trading at RBS Greenwich Capital from 2005 through 2006. He traded and oversaw the credit trading desk, comprised of 14 traders across corporate bonds, credit default swaps, and indexes from investment grade to high yield, averaging a $4B gross position. Prior to RBS Greenwich Capital, he traded credit for Bear Sterns and Co, Inc.

The financial entertainer, Jim Cramer with Mad Money, should embrace what makes this country so great. Instead, the TV personality appears to embrace dictatorship. I thought after he became so famous for his epically wrong prediction in March 2008 about Bear Sterns that he would gain some humility and wisdom. He didn't. My tolerance for inauthenticity is zero. I also talk about my philosophy of investing in the stock market: defenses win championships. Ken Greene transitioned from being a Professional Engineer (P.E.) to the “Engineer of Finance.” His goal is to help people become financially independent and help them earn better yields with less risk by investing Off Wall Street. Links and Resources from this Episode DISCLAIMER For resources and additional information of this episode go to http://engineeroffinance.com Connect with Ken Greene http://engineeroffinance.com Office 775-624-8839 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-greene https://business.facebook.com/GreeneFinance  Book a meeting with Ken If you liked what you've heard and would like a one-on-one meeting with the Engineer Of Finance click here Show Notes It's Important: The topic for today. - 1:35 The Bear Sterns argument. - 8:18 Humans do not want to be forced or told what to do. - 11:01 Is it purely financial entertainment? - 16:14 It's the wrong approach. It can be embraced in a different way. - 18:07 What's our number one investment? - 20:21 There's no one size fits all: Each family has different approaches, goals, and personalities. - 23:30 The biggest thing and the biggest you can do. - 25:24 The approach that Ken likes. - 31:03 How are you going to position yourself to handle things when there's a correction or if it keeps on going? - 33:42 Review, Subscribe and Share If you like what you hear please leave a review by clicking here Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so you get the latest episodes. Subscribe with Apple Podcasts Follow on Spotify Subscribe with Stitcher Subscribe with RSS

The huge Chinese property company, Evergrande, is repaying investors in its wealth management business with property instead of cash this week. The world's most indebted real estate developer faces a crunch this week while investors fear a default. Major banks have reportedly already been informed they will not receive interest payments on loans that are due this week and further interest payments of $84m (£61m) on the firm's bonds are due on Thursday. The company's shares dropped by more than 10% in Hong Kong trade on Monday, but are down 90% on its 52 week high. The multi-billion dollar property business deepening debt problems have triggered fears over the impact its potential collapse could have on China's, as well as the western world's, economies. Evergrande grew to be one of China's biggest companies by borrowing a massive $300bn (£217bn). How will it affect the world if Evergrande collapses? Thousands of Chinese investors riding the wave of a booming market have bought property from Evergrande ‘off-plan' even before building work began. They have paid deposits and could potentially lose that money if it goes bust. If Evergrande defaults, banks and other lenders may be forced to lend less. This could lead to a 1997 Asian financial crisis or 2008 style credit crunch, when companies struggled to borrow money at affordable rates after the collapse of major financial institutions like Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, which plunged the western world into recession. At the time, the relatively debt-free China helped to bail out America, but who can bail out China when western countries have already printed Trillions of dollars to save their own asses? Full article. The KEY to building and KEEPING wealth is financial education. Millionaires and millionaire habits have been studied and documented at academic levels for the last hundred years. Bestselling books, like The Science of Getting Rich and Thinks and Grow Rich, were written almost a century ago. I have also published my own book on how people get wealthy and how some lose it all - Yes Money Can Buy You Happiness. We know exactly what the millionaire and billionaire habits and traits are, as success leaves tracks. All you need to do is follow their tracks to become wealthy and financially free! If you would like to learn more about investing and managing your money, become a professional property investor, or would like to be financially free without working any harder, watch this free on demand training. I will give a special free gift which can help you to immediately transform your finances when you attend the online training. Click on this link to watch the free training now https://bit.ly/3wLWqx2 Book now as spaces fill up fast... #evergrande #chinacrisis #creditcrunch #realestatebubble #property #stockmarketcrash

It has been a mixed week for the respective silver spot price moving down slightly and the gold spot price testing but failing to clear $1800 oz. Thus the gold-silver ratio keeps climbing, likely closing at 77. We also witnessed many ugly images and video clips came out of Afghanistan; Chinese state-owned media were quick to jump on the opportunity to warn its neighboring island, Taiwan. Essentially pointing out in a widely circulating editorial from Chinese state media that once a war breaks out in the Chinese Straights, Taiwan's defenses will collapse in hours, and US Military will not come to its aid.  Citing that if it decides to interfere with China's likely future Taiwan takeover, the United States would have to have a much greater determination for a fight over Taiwan than it had in Afghanistan, Syria, and or Vietnam. Also, yesterday, a poorly translated article was published regarding the China Gold Association stating a large number of Chinese gold reserves proven in their ground as of the end of 2020. The race between which nations have the most gold in the ground yet to be mined is between China, Russia, and Australia in the decades ahead.  What has not changed is the understated Official Gold Reserves of the Chinese state at the moment, still standing just below 2,000 metric tonnes. Judging by physical gold bullion flows and mining production over the last four decades, increasing since the 2008 global financial crisis. It is fathomable that between the Chinese military and her large sovereign gold bank vault system, China could quite possibly add a zero to their official gold bullion reserves at any time in the future of her choosing.  Regardless of where her gold reserves stand, the likely issue China will continue to have to battle will be the world's collective faith in her word. The size of interest in China's currently near fully closed capital accounts, if and when they might somehow open, and how that might come about for the world at large. Swinging this opening back to official gold reserves already mined and owned by sovereign nations, but ones not sitting at home onshore but rather offshore for the nation of Afghanistan. The official Afghan gold reserves are still sitting with the New York Federal Reserve and have been there since 1939. There the nation has over 703 million ounces in the basement of the NY Fed building. But to surprise, the US Treasury and OFAC just froze known Afghan financial accounts in the hope of blocking Taliban leaders from accessing billions in Afghanistan's foreign coffers. Turning attention to our neighbors north of our North American border up in Canada. The following comment by the current prime minister of Canada running in a snap election should be worrisome for anyone seeking future financial restraint if he wins.  Next, we turn to JP Morgan Chase's rampant criminality in financial markets. In a bit of bad news, good news regarding the seemingly lawless financial and commodity market price discovery for the last decade-plus.  The good news is an Illinois judge ruled this last week that four former JPMorgan precious metal traders will stand trial beginning on October 19th, 2021. One of these former traders is Michael Nowak, the once co-managing director of the megabank's precious metals derivative trading desk. The trial will cover years of alleged criminality, beginning when JPMorgan inherited Bear Sterns's naked silver short bankrupt desk in early 2008, all the way into the year 2016. What will not be up for trial is the bank JP Morgan Chase itself, nor the trader's executive superiors who likely also heavily benefited from ill-gotten gains made from tens of thousands of spoofing and slammings of spot prices in precious metals for nearly a decade running. Now left to hang potentially, these former traders will face criminal racketeering, market manipulation, spoofing, conspiracy, commodities, and bank wire fraud.  It will be interesting to see what more financial market onlookers might learn as this trial gets underway later this year. And finally, to close this week's SD Bullion market update.  Palantir Technologies, a public American software company, specializing in big data analytics, has purchased $50.7 million in 100 oz gold bars to hedge against potential black swan events. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado. And co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Company customers include the • the U.S. Army • the U.S. Navy • the CIA • IBM • Amazon Its intelligence software is used in 150 countries, and its customers can now pay for services in physical gold bullion.  Which leads one to wonder, what kind of potential black swan is their data possibly purveying? And will a trend of publicly traded companies, organizations, and other institutions buying bullion as payment hedges begin to become more widespread? Or will most be caught owning no bullion or physical monetary metals in case of a failure of the internet and/or power grids, prolongs for weeks or even months at some point in our future. That is all for this week's SD Bullion market update. As always, to you out there. Take great care of yourselves and those you love.

Intro.(1:40) - Start of interview.(2:08) - Chris's "origin story": he grew up in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, but has spent most of his adult life in NY or outside of DC. He started out as a derivatives trader right out of college. Then he went to law school. After law school, he joined White & Case and later Sullivan & Cromwell to focus on M&A transactions. In the late 1990s (during the "dot com" era), he joined Bear Sterns as an investment banker in the tech group.(7:40) - On his move to join ISS in a newly created role as director of M&A research, in the midst of the HP-Compaq merger. "I think I was hired originally as a CYA sort of process." "But I happened to arrive at the onset of what I think was the beginning of the modern age of hedge fund activism in 2004 (Bill Ackman had just formed Pershing Square, Nelson Peltz started Trian, Jeff Smith with Starboard Value, etc.). It was perfect timing and fortuitous."(10:54) -  On how ISS makes its voting recommendations on contested M&A and activist campaigns, and how the first thing he did at ISS was to create a framework to deal with contested M&A situations and proxy fights for board seats. The framework is still being used today by the ISS Special Situations Team. Institutional investors needed this guidance.(15:53) - On how he grew the ISS Special Situations Team over time, with people experienced on public companies. Very different team than those of say-on-pay proposals or other more junior analysts. "The way I thought about it was the moment I pressed the button of recommendation, if I had all my retirement money on that one specific stock, how would I vote after I had the inside look."(20:34) - On the importance of the ISS vote: "Depending on the make-up of the share register, between 20-30% of the share register is going to be at least influenced by the ISS vote, in particular if Glass Lewis has the same recommendation."(21:52) - On his transition from ISS to Credit Suisse ("after 7 proxy seasons at ISS"). He joined CS to start a dedicated contested situations team on the corporate advisory side: "Today almost every bank has a dedicated team but back then it was only Goldman Sachs." "Banks do not represent activists, the market has dictated that. If you cross that Rubicon, the competition will use that against you. I personally think that is shortsighted, it may change over time. Just like banks did not represent hostile bidders in M&A, until they did."(27:19) - On his current role at Jefferies. "It's a growing platform seeking to capture market share for public company M&A." We have a team of 5 people dedicated solely on hostile M&A, contested "friendly" M&A transactions and activism defense.(30:00) - His take on the current proxy season, including Engine No.1's successful proxy fight with Exxon Mobil: "I've seen a lot of events that were deemed landmark, and Exxon could indeed be deemed a landmark situation. I know Charlie Penner (from his time at Jana Partners) and I knew that Engine No.1 wouldn't wage a proxy fight based on [Jana's 3Vs template], where one of those Vs is having the necessary votes...In addition, Exxon Mobil had been considered a pariah at least since the mid-2000s,  due to its refusal to engage with major investors and proxy advisors. These factors plus a period of under-performance by Exxon meant that Engine No.1 picked the right target [and they ran a very good campaign]."(34:33) - But for Chris, the hard part for Engine No.1 is what's next: now that they have 3 board members at Exxon Mobil, will they deliver on their promises? Chris is reminded of the case when he supported Nelson Peltz at Heinz (at the time a landmark proxy fight on a board election contest). Jeff Smith gave an interview about the Engine No.1 proxy fight and he brought up the Darden case, the first time an activist had succeeded in replacing an entire board of a Fortune 500 company (and they performed fairly well thereafter). "Let's see what we will be saying three years from now about the Exxon proxy fight, will Exxon change and if they do, will the results be good and driven by Engine No.1?"(37:00) - On the rise of global M&A and PE. "There hasn't been a ton of messy M&A, but we are starting to see more." On companies going private: "it's an inventory problem, more and more companies are leaving the public markets." In the UK, there is a national angst over the raiding of their companies (it's easy to take-over companies in the UK).(39:59) - On public vs private markets. "The private market is growing much faster than the public markets." On dual-class stock. On the different cultures in Silicon Valley and Wall St: "it depends on your story, if there is a story of value creation and people believe in the management and the board, they may sacrifice their own rights [to get a piece of the action]. The problems will arise as the company matures and under-performs with those structures [such as with dual class shares], but then you can always get rid of them later." The question he asks of his capital market colleagues: "Do people love this company? Is it oversubscribed? To what level? To some degree you don't have to give public investors anything. Money talks." Just like with shareholder activism: "It's where people have lost money, or money has been 'dead money' is when they start to get anxious and agitated about the people running the company." "Share price performance is the best defense, it's the first thing that I have in the book for boards of directors." "But almost every company at some point,  even the great companies, will have something hit them and that's when they are vulnerable. If they can fix it quickly then they're out, but if it sits there for 2-3 years [in the case of Exxon it was multiple years], then they become vulnerable."(45:56) - On the positive and negative sides the SPAC trend: "The real reckoning will only be known in 2023 when a huge number of these SPACs will have to deliver on their acquisitions." "The future of this market will depend upon will there be more success stories than failures and how they will be covered in the media and other outlets. The jury is still out."(49:41) - On the sustainability and ESG trend: "I don't know if it will maintain its current level of importance." "[It reminds me] of the overcrowded trade from back in my day as a derivative trader in the dot com mania peak. With ESG it seems like the same thing: the buzz over the last few years has created a tremendous flow into ESG focused funds. But there is a difference between saying that ESG creates outperformance or if it mitigates risk (the latter almost everyone agrees)." "What's interesting to me is that there are already three hedge funds that are focused on ESG strategies: Engine No.1, Impactive Capital (founded by Lauren Taylor Wolfe) and Inclusive Capital Partners (Jeff Ubben)." "There are also more companies supporting shareholder proposals (instead of opposing them)." "After the Exxon proxy fight, directors realize that they may be taken out by sub 1% shareholders."(57:48) - The book that has greatly influenced his life:For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), by Ernest Hemingway. "It mostly taught me about the economy of language, and the power of simple, stark, declarative sentences in the active voice."(58:56) - His mentor: his father.(59:52) - His favorite quotes: a mish mash of 'carpe diem', 'we're not promised tomorrow', 'live in the moment', don't stress over the past or obsess over the future', [they are all kinda the same thing] "but I try to wake up  every day and live that way, not only in the difficult times."(1:00:41) - An unusual or absurd habit that he loves: he's still a die-hard metal head. In college he had radio show and his moniker was "Dr Metal"!(1:01:37): The living person he most admires:  "To me it's the group of people that sacrifice for a greater good, whether it's the military, first responders, and particularly (most recently) essential workers, healthcare workers and others that let others live their lives (often under duress). To me that's inspiring."Christopher Young is the Global Head of Contested Situations at Jefferies, an investment banking firm headquartered in New York, with offices in over 30 cities around the world. Chris is an expert advisor to public company directors and senior management teams with respect to contested situations, including hostile M&A bids and responses, contested "friendly" M&A transactions and shareholder activism, including proxy contests for Board seats.If you like this show, please consider subscribing, leaving a review or sharing this podcast on social media. __ You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter @evanepsteinLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack https://evanepstein.substack.com/Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

In January 2018, Rebecca Rynhart was sworn in as the first woman City Controller in Philadelphia history. Before that, she served as Mayor Kenney’s Chief Administration Officer, and during the Nutter administration, she served as Treasurer and then Budget Director. This year, she is seeking re-election to continue her work. In this episode, you’ll hear how Rebecca initially worked in Finance on Wall Street. After years of seeing governments being taken advantage of by the private sector, she quit - and took a huge pay cut - to enter public service. That decision to leave Bear Sterns in the spring of 2008 turned out to be pretty lucky, as the entire firm collapsed 3 weeks later. She would become Treasurer of Philadelphia at the height of the Great Recession. And, as you’ll hear, she had to make some tough calls to get the city through it. Eventually, she craved the ability to affect more change for Philadelphia. So, she ran for office and took on an incumbent. Despite heavy odds, she won. This Episode is supported by Crossbeam. Crossbeam is hiring! Check out their available positions here.

Lions and tigers and Bear Sterns, Oh shit! This week we take a look at the man behind the curtain and hate every single thing we find there. Shaye finally puts his Master's degree to use, and Ian finally . . . uh . . . well, Ian's here, too, and that's not nothing! So come on down and test your financial literacy, because we're willing to bet money it's far worse than you think! This week's featured artist: The Millenial Club "Feel the Same" https://open.spotify.com/track/3slEFOS6joxpcIBtmaRgk5?si=rCMnXfaeQS--SCpX9fsWMw Find Us Everywhere: https://www.instagram.com/campreeducation/ https://twitter.com/CampReEducation https://www.patreon.com/campreeducation https://www.campreeducation.com https://www.facebook.com/CampReEducation/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/camp-reeducation/id1521486578 https://open.spotify.com/show/4ZJBBztQVmVgF1WwCbITc0?si=VZbPE3evTyGKgv8P2ymB4w Our Playlists: https://open.spotify.com/user/mvpz1svz1u7nmj4fjvdxl9l7h?si=u8E1N5oEQ_65tBV4AQvmqg Support this podcast

Happy Wednesday everyone. Today we have a great interview with Morris Amiri, Founder, President, and Chief Investment Officer of Sunset West Advisors (www.sunsetwestadvisors.com). Sunset West Advisors is a wealth management firm based in Beverly Hills, California. They help their clients crystallize their unique financial objectives and offer comprehensive solutions for how to best achieve them. If I had money to be managed Morris and his team is the first place we would put it. In this podcast we talk about our history, Connor met Morris while bussing tables at Toca Madera while attending Santa Monica Community College. That interaction led to Morris mentoring Connor around Real Estate, Finance, and most importantly the foundation of being not only a great businessman but a good person. We also dive into his past of working at Bear Sterns, RBC, and now owning his private wealth management firm. We also talk about the opportunities in real estate right now and how COVID has affected our lives. We hope you enjoy it!

Earning Freedom: Conquering a 45-Year Prison Term, by Michael Santos Running, getting ready for release. Transferring to Atwater and getting ready for release.   It’s Christmas, 2010, my 24th Christmas morning as a federal prisoner.  I’ve now served eight thousand, five hundred, and thirty-nine days, but today is a very special day and I’m excited to call my wife.  For the first time that I can remember, I’ll be giving her a magnificent surprise. I’ve been awake since 2:17, writing her a letter while I wait for the phones to turn on.  Now it’s nearly six and I expect to hear a dial tone soon. She received the envelope that I sent her, but we agreed that she would not open it until I called her this morning.  While waiting for the phone to turn on, I’ve been writing a letter to her, describing the joy that I feel at crossing into 2011.  We will begin making final plans for my release from prison, my return to society, and I am ready. “Merry Christmas honey,” she answers my call at precisely 6:01 am.” “Merry Christmas.  Are you ready to leave?”  Carole’s driving up to Taft for a visit this morning and I want to make sure that leaves on time so that she arrives as soon as the visiting room opens at 8:00 am. “I’m ready.  Can I open the envelope now?” “Do you promise you haven’t opened it yet honey?” “I told you I wouldn’t.” “Okay precious.  Merry Christmas.  You can open it now.” I wait, listening to her slice open the envelope.  “Be careful, my love, you won’t want to slice what’s inside.” “What is it?” I hear her giggle.  “Oh my God!  It’s a check for $45,000.” “That’s for us honey, to help start our life when I come home to you.  I want you to set that aside so that we don’t have any financial stress when I walk out of here to you.” “But we’ve already saved enough money.  How did you do that?” “I work hard for you, my love.  You’re my inspiration and nothing fulfills me more than to think that I’m providing for you, making your life better.  It’s the only way that I can feel like a man rather than a prisoner.” Whenever I earn financial resources from prison, whether it’s through a writing fee or a stock trade, I derive an enormous sense of gratification.  This environment is designed to crush the human spirit.  Prisoners are supposed to go home broken, without financial resources, without a support network, destitute.  Yet despite the quarter century that I’m serving, I’m going to walk out of here strong, stable.  My wife has earned her credentials as a registered nurse.  She has secured a job at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara and expects to earn $80,000 per year.  Besides that income, men who know the value of work have paid me well, sufficiently to have supported my wife through what others would construe as incomprehensible struggle.  After all of those expense, we’ve managed to build an after-tax savings account that now exceeds $100,000. Having achieved these goals from within prison boundaries magnifies the delight I feel. ******* It’s April 12 of 2011 and I have to make a decision.  My release date is scheduled for August 12, 2013.  I have 284 months behind me and a maximum of only 28 more months of prison ahead of me. But I know that I won’t serve a full 28 months.  Some complications surround my release date because I have that sliver of parole eligibility.  It’s strange.  My case is so old that I’m one of the few prisoners remaining in the federal system that qualifies for an initial parole hearing.  By my calculations, members of the U.S. Parole Commission have the discretion to release me as soon as February of 2013, in only 22 more months. That doesn’t tell the whole story.  Besides the parole date, I qualify for up to 12 months of halfway house time.  If I were to receive the February 2013 parole date, I could transfer to a halfway house as soon as February of 2012, in only 10 more months.  But even in the unlikely event that the U.S. Parole Commission declined to grant me parole, I’m eligible to transfer to a halfway house 12 months before my scheduled release date, which would be in August of 2012.  That means release should come for me somewhere between 10 and 16 months from today. I need to decide where Carole and I are going to make our home.  We don’t have roots anywhere.  It feels as if we’re going to be hatched in society.  Carole’s children, Michael and Nichole are grown and building lives of their own in Washington state.  She has agreed to let me choose where we should start our life together.  I’m thinking about what city would be best. My sister Julie lives in Seattle, and that’s an obvious possibility.  Both Carole and I grew up in Seattle, but after 25 years, we don’t have a home anywhere.  My younger sister, Christina, lives in Miami, which is another possibility we’ve discussed as a potential starting point.  My mother lives in Los Angeles with my grandmother, and in light of the foundation that my friend Justin established, we’re thinking about LA as well. “The reality, honey,” I tell my wife during a visit, “is that we’re both going to be 48 years old when I walk out of here in the next 10 to 16 months.  We’ll only have 12 years before we’re 60.  Just as the decisions that I made early in my prison term played a pivotal, influential role in my journey, these decisions I make going forward are going to have an enormous influence on where we’re going to be when we’re 60.” “That’s why I want you to choose, where we go.” Carole holds my hand during our visit.  It’s the only physical contact we’ve ever had during our entire marriage, but that life of celibacy is coming to an end. “As long as I’m with you, I don’t care where we go.” “What’s most important to me is that I go to the city where I have the best opportunity to earn an income and bring stability to our life.” “As a registered nurse, I can get a job anywhere.  And we have enough savings to give you that stability.  You should arrange your release to wherever you want to go.  How about Santa Barbara?” “The market is too small, honey.  As I see it, we have three choices.  We can choose Los Angeles, we can choose San Francisco, or we can choose New York.  I need to be in a big city.” “But how will you start in New York or San Francisco?  We don’t know anyone there.” “Geoff is in New York and Lee is in San Francisco. Both of them would help us if I asked.”  I remind her of my friend Geoff Richstone, the cardiologist from New York and my friend Lee Nobmann, the lumber baron of Northern California. “You choose, honey.  Wherever you want to go, I’m with you.” ******* I’m waiting on the track at Taft camp on Friday morning, April 22, 2011.  My friend Lee Nobmann is flying in for a visit today and his pilot will land the private jet, a Cessna Citation, at Taft’s airport.  I see the blinding spotlight as it approaches and then I hear the roar of the engines.  It’s a magnificent airplane, a sign of Lee’s business brilliance and the successful company he built in Golden State Lumber.  Carole is picking him up at the airport. “It’s good to see,” I say when I walk into the visiting room.  He is a great man and a great friend. I tell Lee about the dilemma I’m facing with regard to which city I should choose to launch my life.  While we dine on vending machine hamburgers, he listens to the different options I present and to the plans I have for building a career around all that I’ve learned as a federal prisoner. “Do you really want to be talking about your experiences in federal prison for the rest of your life?  I’ve got to tell you,” he says, “no one in the real world is really going to care anything about prison.  Why don’t you come work with me?  I could always use a man with your intensity and I’ve got the perfect spot for you in a real estate development company that my kids are running.” I have enormous respect for Lee. He isn’t only an extraordinarily successful businessman, employing several hundred people, but he’s also genuinely happy, with a loving marriage that has spanned four decades and great relationships with his children.  When he extends an offer for me to work with him, it’s an offer that I have to consider. “If that’s what you think would be best for me,” I tell him, “then that’s what I’m going to do.  But I’m passionate about this idea I have of building a business around all that I’ve learned.  There aren’t many people who’ve sustained a high level of discipline and focus through a quarter century of adversity.  I’m confident that I can find a market for products and services I intend to create around that journey.” Lee leans back and looks at me.  He has blue, penetrating eyes, white hair, and looks every bit the self-made man that he is.  I admire him immensely and I aspire to earn his respect.  It’s as if I’m always auditioning for him, trying to prove worthy of the trust he places in me with his friendship. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he settles it.  “Tell your case manager here that you’re going to relocate to the Bay area.  I’ve got a fully furnished guesthouse on my property.  You won’t need anything at all.  It has everything, including towels, silverware, even a coffee pot.  Use that as your release address.  You and Carole can stay there for a year without any cost.  One of my companies will employ you for a year so that you can earn an income while you build your business.  If it doesn’t work out, then you come work with me.” With Lee’s generosity, my decision becomes easy.  As he would say, it’s a no brainer.  Our home is going to be in the city by the Bay, a city I’ve never visited before. ******* It’s Wednesday, April 27th, 2011 and I’m sitting on a bench with my friend Greg Reyes.  We’re reviewing edits I’ve been making to the manuscript that describes his life and he turns to me with a peculiar question.  “Do you think you could run a marathon?” I’ve run every day without a single day of rest since Saturday, December 13, 2008.  During the 866 days that have passed since then, I’ve run 7,795 miles.  The strict accountability logs that I keep give me a clear indication of where I am.  I’ve averaged more than nine miles every day, but I’ve never been inclined to run a marathon distance of 26.2 miles.  The longest distance I’ve ever run has been 20 miles, and I’ve done that about a half dozen times.  I’m not a natural athlete, but running is an exercise of will, and these 8,661 days of imprisonment have given me a strong determination. “Anyone can run a marathon, I tell Greg.  But what’s the point?” “I’d like to run one before I get out.” Like my friend Lee, Greg is the type of man who clearly defines goals, and then he puts a deliberate course of action in place to achieve them.  As I do with Lee, I feel as if I’m always auditioning for Greg’s respect.  Since prison consumed more of my life than I lived outside, I need these tests to feel as I can carry my own around guys who’ve truly succeeded. “Then let’s run one this weekend,” I say. Greg laughs.  “You’re too much.  We’ve got to train for running a marathon.  Every book I’ve read talks about a strict training regimen, increasing distances in incremental levels.” Greg walked into prison weighing 252 pounds.  Besides working together on writing his life story, we set a disciplined exercise regimen in place.  He wasn’t a runner before, but he has run alongside me on several occasions and he’s lost more than 60 pounds during the eight months that he’s served.  He now has a chiseled physique. “That’s ridiculous, Greg.  We can do it.  Those books aren’t for people like you.  Running is all in your mind.  Let’s just do it.” “You’re nuts.”  He laughs.  “I’ve got four months left to serve.  Let’s just set a training plan in place and get to one marathon distance before I go.” “Look we can do this,” I tell him.  “But let’s start by running 20 miles on Saturday.” “I’ve never run longer than 10 miles in my life,” he says.  “I’m not running 20 miles on Saturday.” “You may not have run more than 10 miles,” I tell him.  “But you can run that routinely now and you run much faster than I do.  Without a doubt, you can run 15 miles.  Let’s set our mind to that.  You’ll see.  It’s no big deal.  Then we’ll run 20 miles on the next Saturday.” He agrees and on Saturday, April 30th, we run through 15 miles as if it isn’t anything.  On Saturday May 7th, we meet on the track with a joint commitment of running 20 miles. Greg may not have run before he surrendered to serve his sentence but he has developed into a strong runner.  We run around a dusty dirt track, and since he goes at faster pace, he laps me numerous times.  He paces alongside me at the 18-mile mark and asks how I’m feeling. “I feel great.  How ‘bout you?” “I’m okay.” “You know,” I remind him, “we’re in May now.  Every day going forward will bring hotter temperatures here in Taft. If you feel up to it, I think we should just knock out the full marathon distance today and be done with it.  What do you think?” “Let’s get through the 20 and see how we feel.” At 20 miles he is still lapping me.  He finishes his first marathon distance in four hours and 14 minutes; it takes me 15 minutes longer to complete the 26.2-mile distance. We celebrate with a good meal that my roommate prepares for us.  He’s elated at the accomplishment, as he should be. “I’ve got to tell you, what you’ve done today is really impressive,” I tell him. “We both did it,” he says. “Well, it’s not quite the same,” I say.  “What do you mean?  We ran the same distance.” “True, but you’ve only been running for a few months and you knocked out a marathon.  I’ve been running for longer than 20 years.  I don’t even feel tired.” “Then run another one.” “That’s what I was thinking,” I said.  “I’m going to.” “Are you nuts? I was only kidding,” he tells me.  “You’ve got to let your body heal.” I shrug.  “Yeah, I don’t think so.  I don’t even feel as if I’ve done anything.  Next time, I’m going to run a double marathon.” “You’re crazy.” “Seriously, I can do it.  I could totally do it.” “When?” “I was thinking that I’ll run it on Wednesday.” “On Wednesday of this week?  That’s ridiculous.” “Do you want to run it with me?” I ask him. “No, I don’t.  I’m not running 52 miles.  Don’t you think that’s a little excessive?” “I can do it.” “Then go for it.” On Wednesday, May 11th, I wake early and I’m eager to set out for the run.  I have a plan.  I’ll start at 6:00, when the track opens, and I’ll run for four hours.  By 10:00 I’ll knock out the first 24 miles.  Then I’ll return to the housing unit for the census count.  After that clears, I’ll return to the track and run another 16 miles, bringing me to 40 miles.  At the slow pace I intend to run, I expect that stretch will last about three hours.  Then I’ll return to the housing unit for the afternoon census and a shower.  I’ll go back to the track after the count and knock out the final 12.4 miles. “You’re a maniac.” Greg meets me on the track when I’m on the final stretch.  Temperatures are still in the 90s and he passes me a bottle of Gatorade. “I’ve got this,” I tell him.  “Only one more mile.” It takes me nine hours and 40 minutes, but I finish, reaching my goal. “What’re you going to do next?” Greg asks. “I thought about that during the run,” I tell him.  “I’ve got three marathons in now.  By the end of this year, I’ll run 50 marathons.” He laughs.  “There’s something wrong with you,” he says.  “You’re crazy.” “I’m going to do it.” ******* ******* It’s December 31st, 2011 and I’m now in the Atwater federal prison camp, with 8,909 days of prison behind me.  As far as exercise goals are concerned, it’s been an extraordinary year.  My fitness log shows that it’s been 1,114 days since I’ve taken a day off from running.  During that stretch, I’ve logged 10,773 miles.  Over the course of 2011, the log shows that I ran 4,073 miles, including 55 marathon distances, 98,500 pushups, with 857.3 total hours of exercise.  I intend to push myself harder in 2012. Carole and I transferred to Atwater on October 3, knowing that it would be our last prison town as I prepare for my release to the San Francisco Bay area.  As a privately run facility, the Taft camp could not handle the complicated issues of parole and extended halfway house possibilities.  When authorities determined that a Bureau of Prisons facility should oversee my return to society, I asked for Atwater. Carole settled a few miles away in Merced and she has a job as a registered nurse at Mercy Medical Center, her second job in a major hospital.  We’re counting down the days, expecting that my case manager will provide some guidance with regard to my release date soon. I expect this system to release me before Halloween, but to keep my mind from dwelling on that which is beyond my ability to control, I work toward some clearly defined goals.  The first is helping my friend Andris Pukke (pronounced ‘On-dris Puck-y’).  Like Lee and Greg, Andris built an awesome business.  He launched a credit counseling and debt consolidation company from his living room while advancing through his senior year at the University of Maryland.  Under Andris’ leadership, that company, branded as Ameridebt, grew to more than 250,000 customers.  It became so profitable that Bear Sterns offered to purchase it for more than $100,000,000 before Andris celebrated his 35th birthday.  I spend several hours each day with Andris, asking questions that help me write his biography. Andris’ story strengthens my resolve to write about lessons I’ve learned from exceptional businessmen.  Many business leaders served time alongside me despite their never having had any inclination that decisions they were making could expose them to troubles with the law.  Speaking and writing about what I’ve learned could bring more awareness to the dangers of doing business in America today.  Indeed, people I’ve met in prison convince me that business decisions can lead to imprisonment, even when there isn’t any criminal intent or efforts to self-enrich at the expense of others.  Prosecution of white-collar crime is the new frontier of America’s criminal justice system, and I have some unique insight that can help others understand the subject. Andris is the fourth man I met in prison who has built a hugely successful business.  In working with him to write his story, I’m able to push out thoughts about my imminent release.  It’s important now, during these final months, to focus on work.  Otherwise, the combination of excitement and anticipation could derail me.  As it always has, work and focus on goals carries me through. Andris is released on March 30, 2012.  That’s it.  He is the last friend I expect to make in prison.  I’ll serve the rest of this time alone, expecting that I’ll walk out of here before October.

Markus Koch is a German Wall Street journalist and entrepreneur. He started trading friends & families money very early and had 70k€ debt at age 17. He then paid back the money by working at Bear Sterns before starting his own journalism company. Markus acted as Economic Advisor for the Web-Series “We, the economy”, produced by Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen and was part of the Introduction of the Hollywood-Blockbuster Wall Street, Money never Sleeps” in Germany. What does Star Wars, Jazz, or Casanova have to do with Finance? Markus brings Wall Street to retail investors. This interview provides a very honest and open insight into Wall Street from an Insider's perspective. Markus shares his opinion on many different topics, ranging from Trading to Politics. We talk about how Markus lost his teachers' money, started at Wall Street while sleeping on his boss's couch. We talk about the stories that drive the stock market and what drives Markus to educate retail investors about finance. Markus gives insights into Trading and the traditions of the NYSE trading floor over the years.

Guest: Ryan Burke - SVP, International @InVision (Formerly SVP, Sales & Custome Success @InVision; Formerly @Compete, @Mainspring, @Goldman Sachs) Guest Background: Ryan joined InVision in 2014 as the Vice President of Sales. He quickly grew his remote salesforce of 3 to over 100 talented professionals responsible for identifying new market opportunities for collaborative design, developing new revenue streams and managing both enterprise and inside sales. Ryan was eventually promoted to SVP, Sales before taking on his current role as the SVP, International leading their international expansion efforts around the world. Prior to InVision, Ryan was at Moontoast as a member of the senior management team. He created and managed both enterprise and inside sales functions, selling both SaaS and custom solutions to clients including Toyota, P&G, GM, Microsoft and others. Prior to Moontoast, Ryan was the SVP of Sales at Compete which was acquired by WPP and later became Millward Brown Digital. He led all sales efforts, including a senior vertical enterprise team as well as an inside team selling the Compete.com SaaS product. Guest Links: LinkedIn | Twitter Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - The 3 F's to Build Your Sales Team from 1-50 - The InVision Story - InVision = 1,000 Remote Employees: How to Hire, Onboard, Manage and Communicate w/ Remote Teams - The Role of Sales in Creating & Cultivating a Global Brand & Community - Inside Sales vs. Enterprise Sales Full Interview Transcript: Naber: Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber: Hey everybody. Today we have Ryan Burke on the show. Ryan Burke joined InVision back in 2014 as the Vice President of Sales. InVision has a $1.9 billion valuation and $350 million in capital raised. Ryan quickly grew his remote salesforce of three to over 100 talented professionals responsible for identifying new market opportunities for collaborative design, developing new revenue streams, and managing both Enterprise and Inside Sales teams. Ryan was eventually promoted to SVP of Sales before taking on his current role as a Senior Vice President for International @InVision leading their international expansion efforts around the world. Prior to InVision, Ryan was at Moontoast as a member of the Senior management team. He created and managed both Enterprise and Inside Sales functions, selling both SaaS and custom solutions to clients including Toyota, P&G, GM, Microsoft and others. Prior to Moontoast, Ryan was the SVP of Sales at Compete, which was acquired by WPP and later became Millward Brown Digital. He led all Sales efforts at Compete as the SVP of Sales, including a senior vertical Enterprise team as well as an Inside Sales team selling Compete.com SaaS solutions. Here we go. Naber: Ryan, awesome to have you on the show. How are you doing? Ryan Burke:     I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Brandon. Naber: I've seen you with a beard without a beard and a lot of my research I've been doing in the last few hours here. I like the beard and without the beard. It's very rare you can say that about someone you like it equally, and I typically lean towards beard by, I really like both. Ryan Burke:     And now it's the grey beard. Now it's the grey beard. Naber: It's like, you go from all bald on the face to some salt and pepper, to a lot of salt, and then you're just, it sinks in. This is just a grey beard. This is just a great, love it. Love it. You and I have gotten to know each other personally over the last few months professionally as well, which is quite cool. I'm happy that we get to, go through a lot of this, as content today with you. What I figured we could do is go through some personal stuff first. So start with Ryan Burke as a kid, what you're interested in. Then ultimately graduate into, pun intended, where are were in school with Baldwin the Eagle up in Boston, and then all the way through your professional jumps into your time at InVision. And in that time we'll just cover a bunch of superpowers as well as things that I know, people have said that you are very good at. And I know that you excel at given a lot of the places you've worked, and roles that you've had. Sound okay? Ryan Burke:     Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Naber: So Westford, MA. What was it like for Ryan Burke as a kid? What were you like? What were you interested in? What were some of your hobbies? Let's go. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely, definitely. So Westford is about 40 minutes northwest of Boston. Typical New England town with the centre of town, and the old church, and the common, and all of that. And it was great. Kind of prototypical New England childhood riding a bike around the neighbourhood and doing that whole thing. It was funny, my first job actually was, snake busters. So my buddies and I, when we were, I don't know, maybe 12, decided that we were going to rid the neighbourhood of snakes. So we would walk to people's houses, knock on the door, and charge a dollar a snake. It went well, it went well. It went well. We made all these crazy tools and t-shirts. We ended up just grabbing them with our hands, harmless garter snakes. But it went well until my mother came home one day and found a giant trashcan in the garage that had about 40 snakes in it. That was the end of, that was the end of snake busters. Naber: Did you call it snake busters? Ryan Burke:     Oh yeah, we did the tee shirts that we hand drew. I mean, it was right around, I mean, I'm dating myself, but it was right around the Ghostbusters days. So, that was, that was my first commercial endeavour. Got me started in, got me started in Sales. But. Westford was great. I was kind of the athlete, whatever, captain of the basketball and soccer teams in high school, it was great. National Honor Society, I got kicked out my junior year, and came back in my Senior year and won the leadership award. So, it was a fun time and nothing but good things to say about Westford. I had a great childhood. I stay in touch with a lot of my friends still from Westford, pretty close to the community. And the Grey Ghosts, which was our mascot, which I still think is a great name, and I was the 200th graduating class of Westford academy. So it was public high school, but 200. Naber: So, one more question then we'll, we'll talk about your move up to BC. What did your parents do, when you were growing up? And what were some of the hobbies and interests you had outside of sports? Because obviously, you were quite athletic. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely, definitely. So my dad was, that day and age was still the time of the long runs at companies. And so my dad was that a Digital Equipment Corporation. So he was at DEC for shoot, 30 years, I think, a long, long time. He ran manufacturing for a couple of plants there. My mom worked there as well for about 10 years. Naber: Is that how they met? Ryan Burke:     No, they met outside of Hartford, Connecticut, in college. But my dad had a great run in Digital. My favourite thing was during his retirement ceremony, they renamed the big board room, the Bill Burke Board Room, and then they did a top 10 Bill Burke famous quotes. The number one quote for Bill Burke that I'm not sure what it says about him for his 30 years. There was f*ck 'em. I mean it was celebrated, and it was a quote on a plaque, and all of that. But for 30 years that was interesting, and it kind of describes my dad, in a nutshell, a little bit. Naber: It's funny because people that know your dad if you gave him 10 guesses, they'd probably guess it. People not knowing your dad, like myself, if you gave me a hundred guesses, that wouldn't have been it. I'm so glad that that just happened. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. So, and then the hobbies. Like it's interesting, you grew up in Massachusetts, but for whatever reason, my brother and I got really into fishing. And so, that's become a lifelong passion. I actually started and ran a fishing tournament for about 13 years on Cape Cod, kind of post-graduation. The Headhunt. The Harwich Headhunt. And yeah, it just became a passion, and I still fish all the time, and I've gotten my kids involved, and all of that. But that was one of the things that my brother and I would sort of hike through the woods, and find little ponds, and build our little boats or whatever, and float out there, and catch bass and perch and whatever all day. And then we got the bug and started to get closer to the ocean and do some of the offshore fishing, which has been great. Naber: Wow. Very cool. All right, we're going to get into BC, but I have to go rogue on this one. If you're not heavy into fishing, what's the best part about fishing? Like, why do you love it? Ryan Burke:     Yeah. I mean honestly now that we get out offshore and go out on the ocean, you're just so in such a different environment and a different mindset, and really things just kind of melt away. And just from the stresses of the world being 10-15-20 miles offshore in that type of environment, we go to tuna fishing, there are whales jumping, whatever's going on, it's just a real escape. The phone's half the time don't work, and so, it's just...a lot of times we'll go out for an eight-hour fishing trip and my wife will say, well, you didn't catch anything. What the heck did you guys do out there? You're in this small confined space with like three other friends. She's like, what do you guys talk about the whole time out there, not catching fish. And so, it is a fairly intimate experience as well with your buddies, and there are beers involved, and all of that. Yeah, I just liked the whole like mindset change when you kind of get out on the boat, and you're heading out, like everything else sort of melts away the further you get offshore, and I really enjoy that. Naber: Wow, that's great. And from your sons perspective, as they're growing up, that's so cool that you're bringing them into your headspace and that world, to truly disconnect like that. That's really special. All right, you're away from the Ghosts, you're moving onto the Eagles - Baldwin The Eagle, your best friend. Why Boston College? And maybe a couple of minutes on what you were looking like in University. Ryan Burke:     Yes. So, it's funny, BC was the only local school that I applied to. I really want to go to Duke, didn't get in. I almost went to Wake Forest. For whatever reason, I wanted to go and explore another part of the country, but I ended up, going to BC. Obviously great school, a lot of fun. And I'll say I'm really happy with the decision based on what it was able to give back to my family. And so what happened at BC, the football games and the tailgates. And so my dad, my mom would get season tickets and they'd come to every game. And they just developed a great relationship with all of my roommates and friends. Sometimes inappropriately with like, the conversations, they would hear were just crazy. And they get to meet other parents. And so over the four years, like my parents were really involved in my college experience. And for them to be honest writing the checks, like I felt like that was an opportunity for me to give them something back. And I always cherish that, bringing them into that experience. And we still talk about the glory days of the football games and beating another game Notre Dame, or whatever. So it was a great experience, and being in Boston was a lot of fun. Even most of the friends that I had at BC, were actually from outside of Boston. But yeah, BC was great. We were sort of in the heyday of sports when I was there too. We had some good runs, they're obviously terrible now. But I also, all things considered, I liked having a team. Me and my wife went to Holy Cross, and I kind of give her crap all the time because, it was great school as well, but like having a team and a brand that you can sort of follow. And I'd still all way too close to I know every high school recruit that football team is right now and I read it every morning. And it's a little creepy, I know, but I'm pretty involved. Naber: That's a job because they come from all the country to BC obviously. Ryan Burke:     And I did it, I did it as a job a little bit. So I got so involved after graduation that I actually started writing for a BC website that was all focused on recruiting. And so I did that for about three years, just on the side for shits and giggles, and go to the game, sit in the press box, interview Matt Ryan after the game on the field, and all of that. And I was when I was still trying to figure out if I was going to get into the sports, as a career. But it was a lot, it was a lot of fun to do that. Naber: You know, it's really interesting. We're going to get into your professional jumps. That's a really good segue. But what I find when I'm talking to a lot of these, a lot of folks in this podcast and a lot of the folks I really admire professionally with an entrepreneurial spirit, it comes out in so many different ways. And I actually don't think that the person talking about it really knows that it's coming out. So from snake busters all the way through to, like you have side hobbies you've turned into like organized things that you do. Like, getting into BC sports, writing about it, making an organized effort and project around that. Same thing with fishing, 13 years of running that tournament. Like, taking your hobbies and turning them into something organized, structured so that everyone can enjoy and you're the driving force behind it with your effort because effort is the great equalizer within entrepreneurship. I think that that entrepreneurial spirit always comes out in people's hobbies, and I don't think that most of the people talking about it often think about it like that. But it's coming out in your hobbies right now. That's pretty cool. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. And if you want, I can do a quick sidebar into a hobby that turned into somebody that, did you hear about my book club? Naber: Oh, don't tell me, scorpion something. What is it? Ryan Burke:     Scorpions. New Speaker:  Scorpions. Yeah. Tell me about it. Ryan Burke:     Something I'm proud of and something I will also say is potentially my biggest regret. But my wife was in publishing, and she'd go to these book clubs and she would come home have a couple of glasses of wine and saying, Hey, did you talk about the book? Nah, we just sorta talked, and chatted, and drank wine. And I was like, you know what, this is a bunch of BS. I'm going to go and I'm going to start a book club to spite your book clubs, and just show you that I can build a better book club than any of the book clubs you've been a part of. And she's yeah, yeah, whatever. And so I was all right, I'm going to call it the scorpions. I came up with a tagline that was "Read. Bleed.", and it was all sort of tongue in cheek. So in Boston, it was like the all hard guy book club. And so I got about seven or eight of my friends who were smart, a bunch of entrepreneurial folks as well, a few guys that have been CEOs and sold companies. And we all read. And so what we did was we would go to places like dog racetracks, or shooting ranges, but we would actually talk about the book. So we would actually talk about the book. We would do trivia about the book. And then we would typically end it with a physical challenge to see who could pick the next book. And so what happened was one of the guys that was in the book club worked with my wife in publishing, and he released a press release. Because my whole point was I'm going to create the Anti- Oprah Book Club. I'm going to create, where a woman can walk into a store and know exactly what book she should be buying her husband, boyfriend, or whatever with a scorpion stamp. And so we read a book, and then we released a press release just for fun and games. Scorpions select, I don't remember what the first book was. Scorpions select this book as their official monthly book club, Dah, Dah, Dah. And we did it a couple of times, and the next thing you know it starts getting picked up. And I get a call one day from The New Yorker. And the New Yorker says, Hey, we want to do an interview with you. We do a feature on a book club every month. And we read about the all hard guy book club, the Scorpions. And we're like, all right. And so, called and interviewed me, Dah, Dah, Dah. And they put it on their website. Called back the next day. Hey, this has gotten so, so many hits. We want to go front page tomorrow. we need more pictures. I'm like, I don't have any pictures. Like literally get up that morning with my wife, take my shirt off, put up World War Z, which we're reading the time up in front of me with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and she snaps a picture on her iPhone. And that next thing you know, that's on the front page of TheNewYorker.com next day. And so then it gets picked up, and Gawker picks it up, we had these magazines reaching out. And what happened was it snowballed very quickly where authors, I mean agents were calling me and saying, Hey, we want you to review our author's book. We want you to give it the scorpion seal. We made like a seal and all this stuff. And we're what is going on here? And we had people calling us from all over the country. Can we start a scorpions thing? A reality TV show reached out to us. My buddy called me at one point, my roommate from college, and he's like Hey, what did you start some stupid book club? I'm like yeah, the scorpions. He's like well I'm reading the 50th-anniversary edition of Playboy, and you guys are in here. And I was what? And so we picked up playboy and we're in there. So we almost got a book deal. We almost got a TV deal. And the whole thing sort of faded. It was at that stage, we're all just having kids. A couple of guys were going to sell their company, and so we really give it the attention. But finally I was able to go back to my wife and say, listen, I proved you wrong, I started a better book club. And now there's talk of bringing it back because I still think there's actually an opportunity in the marketplace for that sort of Anti- Oprah Book Club. And we actually read good, compelling books. And so that was my tie into the hobby question. Naber: You know, it's funny. One of the reasons I love doing the personal side before we jump into all this other stuff is, before you reach out to somebody, before you first have conversations and when you just look up on the pedestal of this person at this company with this title, and your background, your experience, I think it's quite intimidating before you start having conversations and humanize the experience. And that's one of the things I love about, about this section. But that's a perfect example. If you're hey, quick sidebar, I want to tell you about something and the entire Scorpion's book club, love it. It's great. So cool. All right. So that is, that is not a segue, but I'm going to create one, into, you're leaving Boston College. And so Scorpions Book Club, the best thing you ever did, but we'll talk about some of the second and third best things you ever did after, after that. You're leaving BC, and run us through your professional experiences, up through the end of when you're at Compete so we can jump into InVision. So just run us through, the companies you were at, and the roles that you're in, maybe like five to seven minutes so we can, we can get some detail on there as well. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely. Definitely. The first job I had out of college...I still get amazed at the jobs and internships that today...I'm really impressed. Like back in my day, it was kind of like, all right, we're going to travel to Europe, we're going to screw around after graduation, whatever. And so when I was midway through my Senior year in college, a buddy called me - this is 1996 the Olympics in Atlanta - and he said, hey, I work for a staffing company, Randstad, I've gotta hire like 20,000 people. Do you want to come work for the Atlanta Olympics for the summer? And I was sure, I got nothing going on. And I became known as the kid on campus that, like, I'd walk into any party and be like, hey Burke, I heard you can give me a job with the Olympics. And I'm like, yeah. So people giving me their resumes to work at the Olympics. So I think I got 40 kids from BC jobs at the Olympics. So we all went down there, and we all rented condos in the same little complex. And this was back in the Buckhead days of Atlanta too, the bars were open till five the morning before Ray Lewis ruined it. So worked for the Olympics. Great experience. I ended up staying there for a year, working for the Olympic Committee for a year. And it was just a really, it was a really cool experience. And then randomly, again, I was still trying to figure things out, and I had a buddy call and say, hey, you want to move to San Francisco? And I said, yeah. And jumped in the car, and we moved to San Francisco and slept on a floor for six months, and tried to figure it out. Did some temp things, and then I ended up getting into finance. So I got into a small kind of Muni Bond Equity House, which was, which was really cool. It was a really small, company. I touched so many different parts of the business. from the trading to the operational side and it was good. Series 7, Series 63 the whole deal. And then I use that as a springboard to get into Goldman Sachs. Worked in the private client services group in San Francisco, with Goldman. This was sort of during the heyday too. So, managing some of the early Amazon folks back in the day, and making some of those trades. I was what am I doing wrong? So it was great, and I had a good experience at, Goldman. And then it just, I got to the point where there were some family pulls back to the East Coast and at the same time I was at that stage where I was, on a pretty good trajectory in finance, but it was just something about finance that wasn't really getting my juices flowing. And I just knew. I mean just the culture of it. It very, obviously, money-oriented, and people are doing very well. And I just don't know, it just wasn't for me. And so I knew, okay, if I didn't get out then like I was just going to double down, sell my soul, and do the finance thing. And so I pulled the plug. I found a job back East at a tech consulting company. So this is the tail end of sort of the internet boom, and I got into a company called Mainspring, which was really interesting. It was a really smart group of folks from BCG, and McKinsey, and Bain that basically wanted to create a digital strategy consulting firm. And this is just at the time when all these companies are trying to figure out a digital strategy, nobody knew what it meant. And it was also interesting, in that they had a Sales function. So I joined as an Inside Salesperson, which was, your typical cold calling bullpen environment, and weird because you're dialling for dollars for high-end strategy consulting. And it actually differentiated us in the market a little bit, but I really cut my teeth in Inside Sales there, and just opening doors, and prospecting, overcoming objections. I really liked it. Mainspring actually had a pretty good run for a little while. We ended up going public. And then, the market sort of tanked. And then IBM ended up acquiring Mainspring. And so, it ended up working out in that, it was kind of offered a package. I could have stayed at IBM. It was another one of those decisions where similar to financial services, it was all right, I can take a job with IBM, but do I want to do that long-term at this stage of my career when I knew I wanted to be in something smaller and entrepreneurial. And I liked the small team environment, even at Mainstream when I started it was only 100 people or whatever it was. And that's when I got into Compete. Naber: You spent 11 years there. There's a lot of learnings here. So if you want to take your time and go through the next few minutes to talk about some of the things you learned as you're jumping through each individual step that you had, that's all right because that's probably helpful. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely, definitely. And so Compete was interesting because that was back in the incubator model days. So basically Compete was an incubated business. David Cancel, who's the CEO of Drift, was kind of the first employee founder there. And I journal joined early on. It was basically, we had a web-based panel that we aggregated data and sold back competitive intelligence to companies. So, Hey, my website traffic is this, how does this compare to my peers? My conversion rate is x on my site, how does that compare? And you know, there were some dark days early on. There was your typical start-up, really young management team, screaming matches in the glass-encased conference room that was like raised four feet above, so everybody could see it, you know. And there were a few turnovers of Senior Leadership early on. A few turnovers of the entire Sales team that I survived twice early days. And we did that for the first probably two to three years. I was kind of the top Salesperson. And worked with some really smart people. And again, that entrepreneurial environment that I like, we had trouble figuring it out. And then for us at that point, the inflexion point was really when we decided to go vertical. And obviously not something that I think every business needs to necessarily do, but from a competitive standpoint...I helped found a kind of the wireless practice, and this was back in the Nextel, Singular, AT&T days, and they were all so hyper-competitive. And so we had this really rich data set to show like, how much online traffic are each one of these sides getting. What is their conversion rate to get people to sign up for bill pay? What was their conversion rate for e-commerce? And really valuable data. And so we built some dashboards, we layered on a consulting component on top of that. And it was really, it was really interesting. And that started what was a pretty big catalyst. Wireless became the biggest vertical at the company. I sold the biggest deal with Sprint, which is $500k, when our ASP was like $30k. And it was interesting in the fact that as a Salesperson, what kept me there as well, is when I started that vertical, I was able to position myself as more than just a Salesperson. And I became a wireless expert. And I would go speak at conferences, I would write white papers because that always gave me the credibility when I wanted to go and sit in a room with Senior folks. I mean we would do crazy stuff like I had business cards made, different business cards for like the big wireless conferences, the CTIA's or even the CES's, and I'd get invited as press because I would write white papers, and so they would put me in as pressed. So like here I go to these things I get to sit down for 10 minutes with the CMO of Verizon and the CTO of AT&T to do briefings. And inevitably you share some data. And the other thing that we did at the time was we partnered with Bear Stearns, who was a big analyst in the Wireless space. And we created this really nice white paper that they distributed - a glossy cover, Bear Stearns, and it was all our data. And free data for Bear Sterns, whatever. But that became a little bit of every meeting we would walk into that was on somebody's desk. And so it was very easy to point to that and say, oh, that's our data in there. And they're like, oh really? We didn't know that. Tell us what you did. And so, building a brand beyond just being a Salesperson was really valuable to me from a career perspective. And partnering with somebody like Bear Stearns at the time was really powerful in the space from a wireless analyst perspective. And using that as a vehicle for content was just so big in building our brand at the time. And so, that was the kind of the earlier part of my career at Compete. And there are always times that thought about leaving, but every time it was sort of thinking about it, there was a new opportunity that would arise. And so then I moved into more kind of Sales leadership, and that was a new challenge. And building out sort of an Inside Sales and an Enterprise Sales team. Then `we were required. So the company was acquired by TNS, a big research firm. And then six months later by WPP, so essentially acquired by WPP, became part of that world. And that opened up a whole new world of opportunity and challenges, and that kind of put me into a new role. And then I became Head of Global Sales, SVP of Sales, across Compete. And that was within sort of the WPP, umbrella organization. So that was fun. So yeah, I was there a long time but worked with some really sharp people. My old boss Scott Earnst, I sort of followed him up as well, and he became CEO, and one of my mentors to this day. And so it was a really interesting ride. Definitely a really interesting ride. Naber: Very cool. And that brings, does that bring us to your jump into InVision at this point? Ryan Burke:     I did have a quick move, between there, I went to a company called Moontoast. Naber: Oh, that's right. Yeah, Moontoast. So, hey, before you do that, I want to talk about, you mentioned managing Enterprise and Inside Sales Teams. You've done this at three different organizations if not more if you've done some advisory work on this. But you've done Inside and Enterprise Sales at the same time. A lot of the people listening will either start a business, have started businesses, will be the VP of Sales, VP of marketing, whatever. And they'll either inherit Inside Sales or inherit Enterprise Sales. And usually, they kind of tack one onto the other or they graduate from Inside Sales Leader into Enterprise Sales. You've managed both at three different businesses. Let's talk about that for a few minutes here. What are the main best practices or tips that you have in managing Inside Sales as a contrast to managing Enterprise Sales? And we'll get into the top tips and best practices for that, but Inside Sales first. Inside Sales, what are the biggest differences between managing Enterprise and Inside Sales teams? When you're talking about Inside Sales, what are the best practices and tips for doing that? Ryan Burke:     Yeah, that's a good question. And I think the end of the day it's still, Inside Sales is obviously a lot more transactional and so it's a lot more around kind of that process. And Enterprises is around the process as well, but obviously very different motion, trajectory, timing, all of that. And so, with Inside Sales I would say one thing that's probably most important is figuring out what that customer journey is upfront, and really defining that path, and finding those friction points, and then building a process around what are the activities and behaviors that..like to me, everything kind of boils down to behaviors and activities when it comes to Sales. And that's relatable to Inside and Enterprise. And so performance in numbers is one thing, but you just need to figure out what the right activities are for Inside Sales. So break apart that funnel, figure out what those metrics are, and then really measure on those activity metrics. And that's been probably the most important thing. The other thing is, even when I started at InVision, we'll talk about it, making sure you have the operational infrastructure to define that for Inside Sales, whether it's hiring an operations person, like to me, you can never hire operations too early. I probably waited, I probably waited too long at InVision, and getting that in there early for Inside Sales, and building out, we even call them the leading indicators of what will drive you to a particular transaction. And so I think those behaviours and activities are incredibly important for Inside Sales. And then you just have to evolve it for Enterprise because that's a different motion, different ASP, whatever it is. And so same concept around leading indicators, behaviours and activities, it's just a different framework. And the hardest part is obviously, you sort of view Inside Sales as a stepping stone to Enterprise. And that's not really the case from a mindset standpoint. And that's, you almost have to break bad habits and rebuild them because the Inside Sales folks, currently really good at transactional, driving acquisition, boom, boom, boom. And then you move into Enterprise, you're like, whoa, slow down, let's talk. Now we're value selling, where before it's much more of a product sell. Inside Sales is much more of a product sell. Enterprise Sales is a value sell. And that's a big transition from a mindset standpoint where, step back, make sure you're asking these questions, figuring out obvious things like pain or whatever it is. And again, when we promote Inside Salespeople, sometimes there's that period where the onboarding for Enterprise is just as important as when you're onboarding them as a new employee for Inside Sales because it's a totally new framework and mindset. And if you're using the methodology like MEDDIC or Sandler or whatever it is, you've got to kind of break them down and rebuild them again. Naber: Yup. Yup. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. So moving from Compete to Moontoast, let's hop into why you moved to Moontoast, and then give us a summary of that, and then we'll hop into InVision and I've got a few questions on some of the superpowers that you have, some of the things you've done really well, and a couple that InVision has as well. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. And so Moontoast was a social advertising, kind of rich media, social advertising - rich media within the Facebook feed predominantly, or any social feed. Part of it was at the time I was looking to get out of Compete. Moontoast came along, social was obviously very sexy, they just raised some money. Kind of wanted an opportunity to go in and be the guy from day one, and build it up. And you know, everybody's got a miss on their resume, and this was a miss. I came in, and we had some good momentum, really enjoyed the product team and sort of the position we had in the market. But we also existed within the Facebook ecosystem, which I don't care what you say, they just own everything. It's really hard to do exist. They make one change in their technology and like 20 companies go out of business. So I built a really strong team. I've hired my top guy from Compete, brought him over. Hired some really good Salespeople, a few who I've actually taken to InVision. But the product, we had to re-pivot product, and we ultimately had to re-platform it to try to fill the gap with services while we got the platform, then Facebook changes. We missed it. We just missed the window and things got a little ugly. It was one of those startup things where it was a little messy. And so I ended up leaving. I ended up just saying, you know what, and Moontoast not seeing their Future, we'll leave it at that. But I left. It was a good learning experience, met some really good people there. Social space was interesting, I'll never go back. Then I left there and then that was when I had the opportunity at InVision. And I can tell you kind of how that's how that started as well. Naber: Yeah. So this is good. So people are gonna want to hear the story. You joined really early. You're employee number 35, I believe at InVision, you've got upwards of almost if not above, around the thousand employees or so, shed load of them remote if not all of them remote. Exactly, all of them remote. Like the largest, that I know of, tech workforce in the entire world that is remote - it's unbelievable. So, tell us about the story. Run us through the journey that you've been on so far, and then I've got a question around building your Sales teams from one to 50 that we'll cover, after you kind of tell us what the journey is up until now. Ryan Burke:     Sure, sure. And so the quick story of how I ended up at InVision was, I quit Moontoast so I was out of a job. I was in sort of this panic mode and got some opportunities right away. And I was I don't want to act, move too quick. And then, just really stressful at that time in life, couple kids, like the whole deal. I was like, what am I doing? And was really close, I had paper in hand to an offer as the CRO of another company in Boston. Ended up being out on a boat with a few folks for my old boss, Scott Earnst, goodbye from Compete, and was sitting with Dave Cancel, we're having a beer on this boat, and tell them about my situation. Naber: I've heard so many good things about Dave, by the way. So many good things through the grapevine. I'll meet him sooner than later. But as far as he's such a good guy. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, he is. And just sitting on the boat, and he was like, Hey, don't sign that paper. I was like, why? He's like, you need to talk to Clark at InVision. And I was I don't know anything about InVision. And he's like, design prototyping software. I'm like, I don't know anything about it. Just talk to him. So I didn't sign the paper. We had a couple of conversations, he introduced me to Clark the next day. Had a couple of conversations with Clark, Clark Valberg, the Founder & CEO of InVision, who is just an incredibly interesting, inspiring person. And so the way it went down was, it was like a Wednesday night at probably 9:00 PM in Boston. And Clark, who was in New York, calls me and he's like, alright, I want you to come down tomorrow and meet with the board and meet with me. I'm like, alright, what time? He said, eight o'clock tomorrow morning in New York. And it's like nine o'clock at night in Boston. I'm alright, I'll make it work. And so I go down there, meet with a board member. Clark comes in, and I've never him met in person or anything, and he just sits down and he said, all right, I'm going to spend the next two hours convincing you that this is the wrong job for you. I'm like, interesting. And so we ended up having about a four-hour session on design space, and how Enterprise might not work for design, all of these things. I remember at one point he was like, oh wait, when is your flight? I was well, I missed, it was like an hour ago. He's like, why didn't you tell me? And I was like, well, I want the job, this is super interesting. And so it was great. So we hit it off. Quick background, InVision before me had two VP's of Sales - one lasted a week, one lasted a month. And so I was pretty intimidated, and they were clearly a rocket ship. Even from the early days, you could just see the momentum. And that transactional business, like I had done some the Inside Sales stuff, but like not to that scale before, and build on it from a freemium model. So it was a pretty big leap for both sides and forever grateful for, for Clark taking the chance. And obviously it's been a successful path so far, and a lot of fun. But that's kind of how the whole thing kinda started, which was interesting. Naber: Great. Great Story. And so tell us, tell us about how many people were there when you got there. Like, what the Sales team can seem consisted of, which I'm pretty sure was like two people plus you. And then give us maybe a couple of stats on where you are right now as a company, so we can understand that growth trajectory. And then I'll hop into how you did a lot of those things. Okay? Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So when I joined those 35 people, I think there were three people on the Sales team, that I inherited. And the Enterprise business really didn't exist at that point. It was kind of formally launched a few months beforehand, but really there wasn't, there wasn't much revenue there. But what we were doing is we were getting about a thousand people signing up for the product every day to the free service or the self serve plan .So just incredible product-market alignment, and that momentum, and those signals for the business. And so I came on, now we are about 900 employees globally. We work with 100% of the fortune 100. We are fully remote. Raised $350 million total. So it's been, it's been a ride, that's for sure. And it's been a lot of fun. Naber: Man. Unbelievable. You've got almost a $2 billion valuation on that $350 raised. You've been there for about five years now. Is that right? Ryan Burke:     Yup. Naber: Wow. Amazing. First of all, congratulations on all the success you guys have had. I just think it's an iconic company, an iconic story. And I think you guys are can't miss, can't lose, badass product company who is, building so fast, doing it the right way, which is great...From the outside looking in, and that's even before you and I started having conversations, I'm so impressed. So let's talk about a couple of things. One, you have, you talk a little bit, in the past around building your Sales Team from one to 50. And you talk about it using the story of InVision, so let's use that story. But you talk about, building your Sales team from one to 50, you got to think about the three F's - the First Five, the Foundation, and the Future. Let's walk through each one of those bullets if you don't mind. Why don't we talk about the First Five, first? Actually, you know what, if you want to tee this up at all, that's fine. But I want to hear about the three F's for building your Sales team from one to 50 because it's an excellent framework. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. And so, the way I was thinking about it when I kind of looked back and break it apart is really, figuring out the right people for each stage. Because it evolves and it changes. And then the customer journey changes as you mature, and the deals get bigger, and you move more into the Enterprise. And so you kind of have to chunk it up and hire the right people at each stage, address the customer life cycle at each stage, remove friction points. And so, the biggest thing for me early on was getting the right people in the boat early. And fortunately for me, my first two hires, two Salespeople, that one is now a manager for me in Amsterdam, the other one's the top rep in the US, still here. Which is good because right before I took the job, Mark Roberge from HubSpot, a buddy of mine, called me and he was like, on speed dial who are your two best Salespeople? And I gave him these two names because I have a job. And they both got offers from HubSpot. And they both turned them down. And thankfully...Roberge was like, what the hell? I'm like, I don't know man. And so then I got the job with InVision a month later, and it just worked out like, I called both of them, and I was like you guys are on the team, and it ended up working out really well. And I think, back to the First Five, I think some of the important traits for those folks early on is, they weren't necessarily just Salespeople. Like they were product managers almost at that stage and they just, they knew the product inside and out. And without having, proper Sales Engineer support, or any of that product support on calls, like it was a little bit of the wild west and we had to do our own thing. And InVision couldn't be further at that point, especially couldn't have been further from a Sales culture. Like it was a free product, free value to everybody, designers, it wasn't a push market, it was fully pull-motion, it was all bottoms up. And so we were definitely a little bit out there trying to figure it out. And so, hired these folks early on, that really could talk to the customer, understand their concerns, and their process, and their journey. And then ultimately we built the Sales process around that. And the other key thing about those first people are, you've got to get the people that are on the boat that want to join a company at that stage for the right reasons. If you want to make a lot of money as a Salesperson startup, like InVision at that stage and start, that's not the right place. It's just not, go work at Salesforce. And so, you need to find people that are there because of the opportunity. They want the career opportunity. They want to be co-owners and building something. And that's what the early folks on the sales team, I actually think to this day we still hire people with those profiles...with the trajectory of InVision, like it's still early. And um, that was really critical to find people that wanted to join for the right reasons and not just purely on the financial side. And so getting those builders in early, the ones that can have those product conversations, that was really important for us early on. Naber: Very cool. Yeah, I think in one of the talks that you do, you talk about focusing on key traits - resilience, adaptability and fighters; and then focusing on key motivations - opportunity, vision and ownership. Those six things I think are so important. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Ryan Burke:     Yeah. And I would say resilience is probably the biggest one because, at any startup, you're gonna have so many challenges. And so, I mean, I've even made some decisions where we've hired people that have had really good runs at really big companies and their resumes are great, and you hire them to a place like InVision, and it doesn't work out, and they're not ready for it. We probably hired them at the wrong time, the people that are better off, like I even tell our recruiters like, go find people that had a big run at a company, at a really successful company. Then went to a startup that ran out of money or a startup that went out of business. And they've gotten their nose bloodied, and they know what it feels like because your nose is going to get bloodied at a startup inevitably at some point. And so you need the people that can take the punches and be resilient and battle through that. Not only can do it, but want to do it. And some of the folks we hired, like they just didn't want to do it at that stage in their career. I don't blame them either. So, you just gotta figure out that profile and make sure that things like resilience that is so important for those early hires. Naber: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's incumbent upon the person hiring them to help those Salespeople to make that decision. Like oftentimes you don't know that you need to go get your nose bloodied, or you need to go have a failure somewhere else after your first jump from an organization or you've had a really good run or a long run. Like you have to go get that, that that failure, you have to go learn and have that learning experience. Like it is incumbent upon the person hiring those individuals to help those individuals realize whether or not it's the right time in their career to make the jump into that startup or not. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, that was really important early on. And then in, the only other thing was that I talked about is finding all of those friction points early. So, mapping out that customer journey and figuring out why aren't people buying your product. Is it the price? Did they not trust you? Not know who you are? They do not want to sign up for a longterm commitment? Is it particular features? Like, whatever it is, you've got a map that out, and then start to figure out how do you remove each one of those and address each one of those. And that's really important early on. And that will evolve once you move into the Enterprise, you're gonna have different friction points and you have to readdress them. Security and things like that all start to come in a little bit more, overtly. But early on, like just why don't people have the product in their hands? And do everything you can to remove those friction points to get the product in their hands. Naber: Yeah. Awesome. So there's a couple of examples that you use and some of your past content. Like, if the price is a friction point, using free trials and freemium, you are getting the product into their hands with free trials. Seeing the product in action, doing group Demos. You talk about understanding how they use it, pre-populating the assets and pre-populating the product. Lack of trust in your brand, building customer testimonials. Longterm commitments to a product, offer an opt-out, just get them on board. And then lack of features, sharing the roadmap for the product team, from the product team, getting them involved with that journey, and setting them up, setting the customers up with the product team to help evolve that journey. And I thought the examples you used and the solutions to them, I think those are extremely valuable as you're thinking about each one as different friction points, both as you get started and sometimes you don't solve those problem points with those solutions that you just talked about until mid-stage, late-stage and building Sales teams. So sorry to kind of steal some of that thunder. But I thought you've talked about this a bunch of times in the past and using those examples, I think that that's really valuable for people and it's just great content. Ryan Burke:     You did your homework. You did your homework, Brandon. Naber: Hell yeah, brother. I'm always doing my homework. It's all about the prep in my world. So that's First Five. Now let's talk about Foundation. Ryan Burke:     Yup. Yeah. And so the Foundation is sort of when really want to start building out the process, and that's when, like I said before, like that's when it's really important to hire operations because you're going to start to build out those leading indicators that I talked about - what are those activities that you want to measure? Because again, at this stage it's less about the results. I know that the results are important, but you really need to figure out like all of the specific activities and that'll lead to potential success. You can start to understand like what are the points, even in the Sales process, that you need to, that you're struggling with. And these aren't, these aren't things that are meant to beat the team upon. There's always like this head trash, and people are like, ah, I don't you to measure how many meetings I have a week, and I don't want you to measure many prospecting calls I'm doing, whatever. And it's like, that's not the point. The point is not to like manage you out if you're doing it. The point is to help identify the coaching opportunities for the managers to say, okay, you're not able to get people to respond to your emails. Like, let's go through those and evaluate. You're not getting enough meetings. Like, let's look at some of your other outreach. You're not converting meetings opportunities. Let's go through your talk track in those meetings. Their guidelines and they're really coaching opportunities is what they essentially are. Naber: Diagnostics. Exactly. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, building that Foundation. The other thing, for a specifically for a company like InVision early on, is, how do you offer value beyond the product? And I'm really sort of incredibly lucky and proud of what we do at InVision because we offer so much more beyond the product. But that's really important early because to some extent you need to build the trust and the credibility with your customers when your product doesn't always fulfil every promise. And that buys you time, especially early on. That's really important. So even when the Sales team, I never want somebody to prospect and try to set up a meeting to just talking about the product, it's like, offer something of value - a piece of content, whatever it is, but like offer value to somebody all the time. And you can, there are opportunities to do that beyond on the product. I mean, just a quick, a quick thing. I mean, our CEO is a brilliant marketer. And one of the things that we did is we made a movie. And so, even when I first started, Clark was Hey, we're making a movie. I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like we're making a feature-length film on design. It's like, you're crazy. And we hired this production company out of New York and flew around the country, and we made a feature-length movie called design disruptors. And it was an intimate look at companies that were using product design to disrupt entire industries. Google, Airbnb, Netflix, all of these, all of these companies. And we made this awesome movie, and we weren't in it. InVision wasn't in it, but it was brought to you by InVision. And so what we did was, we did a world premiere in San Francisco, Castro Theater, red carpet, press, the whole deal, VIP dinner after. Then we did one in New York, and we did one in London, and they were huge. And then what happened was, we were like alright, we're going to release the movie. But then people started emailing us and saying, hey, how can we do a screening here? I want my executive team at Uber or NBC or at Salesforce to see this. And so we sort of weaponized. And we didn't release it to the public. And we said, all right, if you want to do a screening or at your community, you know, wherever, we will host it. And I think we've probably done 500 screenings across the globe at this point. You name a company, we're doing...we're doing one next week in Europe with a company, and what an opportunity to one, reach out to somebody and say, Hey, we've got this incredible story that will help your management team understand the value of a design-centric approach. It's super entertaining. Why don't we come on, have some drinks, get a couple of hundred people in the room, whatever it is. Sometimes we'll even do a panel, we'll get people and product leads. We'll do a panel discussion after the movie. And it's been such a great a vehicle for us. I mean, now we have a full, we have a whole film team now at InVision, we did a documentary with IBM or called The Loop on their process, celebrated and evangelize their process, which, sort of strengthened our relationship with IBM. But again, offered value to the community, which the movie then ultimately did. Like it was a free offering from us to the community. Here's some really good content, best practices, examples, in an entertaining format that we are going to deliver to you as part of what our brand represents. Now we've got a new movie that we're releasing this fall. And it's been incredibly successful. It's just another example of how do you go ahead...And not everybody can make a movie, I get it. But although I've seen some good copycats over the last six months or the last year, it's coming. It's getting out there. But, Clark Valberg, this is yours. Valberg this is yours. It was a really powerful vehicle for us. Naber: Nice. Very good. And so you talked about adding value beyond your product. You talked about focusing on behaviours and activities. You talked about some of the activities. And you talk about hiring your first layer of management. You talk about hiring coaches, and not managers. Can you explain a little bit about that? Ryan Burke:     Yeah, I just feel like early, early days you just, you need folks that are, they're not about coming in as a manager for title reasons. And you get people in there that are really good at coaching because that's what is so critical. Using those leading indicators, using those behaviours and activities, finding those opportunities to help coach the team. And that's why your first Sales Director, or whatever it might be, they've gotta be a really good coach. Because it's gonna be all about the failures, and the misses early on, and the objections, there's going to be so many objections you're gonna face, whether it's product, price, competitors, whatever it is. Like you really need to figure out how do you coach the team on overcoming those. And so that's why it's really important from a profile perspective that you really dig in when you're interviewing in terms of, talk me through, talk me through an example of where you identified something with a rep, and coached them through it to an improvement. What was the result? Those types of things are really important when you're building that Foundational team. Naber: Nice. Awesome. Okay. So that's that's the First Five, then we just talked about Foundation. Now let's talk about Future. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, and the only other thing that I'll mention on the Foundation, now that you're kind of bringing up the topic, which is just one of the things that we did that was interesting at InVision, was it's so important to understand your customer and like everything about their customer. This evolves at every stage. And so, early on, like I hired one. And so I hired a designer onto our team instead of a Sales Engineer. I hired a designer, this person came on boards, still with the company, he's great, but just gave that credibility to the Sales team in terms of the day in the life of what a designer deals with. And could hop on calls and give us some credibility in terms of talking to designers, which is a very unique persona to sell to. They don't like to be sold to. They want to touch and feel the product, learn about it, and then use it, and if they like it they'll tell their friends about it. So, figuring out who your customer is and then hiring them was really important. The other thing that we do now, which is an interesting kind of nuance is around understanding the customer. We now have a program called delicious empathy. And every person at InVision anywhere, again, fully distributed company, we have people all over the world, and anybody at the company from Operations, to Sales, to Finance, has the ability to take a designer out to dinner once a month and expense it. And the only rule is you're not allowed to talk about InVision. And so it's just about, again, building those relationships, understanding the motivations, the personal motivations even of your customers. And that just feeds into everything that we believe in and do as a company. And so that's been another kind of interesting thing for us to do across the company to help people build empathy with our customers. Naber: Yeah. Yeah. It's great. You call it, I think you call it relentless focus on the customer. It's a pretty cool example. Delicious empathy. I love the Pun. Delicious, as in, take you out to dinner, that's good. I'm not usually a laggard on the jokes, that was a good one. Le's talk about Future. so you talk about a Foundation for building the Future. Go ahead. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. So the Future is, I feel like, at this point, this is where, you built the Foundational team, you've got some infrastructure in place, you're moving into the Enterprise. Like this is when things will break. Like things are gonna start to break. And you've got to kind of revisit the overall customer journey. You've got to revisit the friction points as you move into the Enterprise, things like legal process, security, all of those are going to be new friction points that you're going to have to learn how to address. And this is also, in a lot of cases, this is also when you make that shift from a transactional product-focused sale to the value-based one. And that's when you've got to hire a different profile of Salesperson at this stage. You've got to have all your motion at this stage. And so, now is kind of when you're, when you're really selling, and you've got to get people that are, again, stewards of your brand. Along all of this, your brand is so important these days that just, I think people sometimes underestimate the impact of hiring the wrong Salesperson on their brand. And like, you gotta think about is this somebody that you would want in a room with 15 of your prospects, your customers? Would the be someone you would want presenting at a community event on behalf of your brand? And if the answer is no, they're probably not the right person. Even if they're the best seller in the world because they are representative of your brand. And you've got to create that value through your Salespeople and that represents the value that you want to project in your brand. That's really important. And the other part about this stage is you've got to find people that are really good storytellers. And that's so important. Can they tell a story? Because at this point, people don't really care about your product. Like this is when the transition switches on the customer side as well. They don't care about your product. They care about what the promise of your product can deliver. They care about the results, they care about the examples of what other customers have done to drive tangible business value from the product. And so there's that shift, and this is where you don't need the product experts in the Sales team. And this is where you can introduce things like Sales Engineers, or Product Specialists, or whatever it is to fill some of those technical gaps. But this is where you need people that can actually tell that story and sell the dream of what your products and more importantly what your brand represents. And that's really important at this stage as you kind of build out the team. Naber: Nice. Okay, so I want to hop onto a different topic or anything else you want to talk about before we conclude on that? Ryan Burke:     No, I think that's good. Naber: Okay, cool. I've got two more topics I want to talk about and then we'll wrap. First one is, hiring, onboarding, and managing, remote Sales teams, and really remote workforces are what you guys have to manage as an entire business. But specifically hiring, onboarding and managing remote Sales teams. So there are a few different things that I'd like to cover. I think there's five in total. First one is hiring profile and hiring execution. How do you search for the right person that is a great person to hire as a remote employee. What are some of the things you look for in making sure that they can do that? And then what's your execution process look like considering you're hiring people all over the world, you're not necessarily sourcing them in one city or one industry. You're looking for them all over the place. So what's the hiring profile and how do you execute on the hiring process? Ryan Burke:     Yeah, and I think we are the single largest fully remote company in the world now. It's a little crazy. There's definitely cracks at times and things. And just a little, a little bit of context. It started where our CEO wanted to hire the best engineering talent. So we started to hire folks in different places. Even when I started, he was like, Hey, if you want us to open up a Boston Sales office, you can. And I did the whole tour of real estate in Boston, and almost pulled the trigger, but then it just in part of our culture. And so we started to hire some people from all over, and you could kind of place people strategically in these maybe lower-tier markets, or whatever. And so it became really, really, valuable for us. And it's a big asset. On the hiring, you've got to find people, not everybody is ready for it. The last person you want is the person that found you on a remote job site, and you ask them what they like about InVision, and they say, oh, I want to work from home. Like, they're out. You do need to find people that are proactive. Like you need to find people who seek help because sometimes it's hard, and you can get lost or and you can hide. And you've got to find those folks that are very proactive in their approach and sort of ask questions around that in in the interview process. That's really important. But the biggest thing in one of the biggest lessons we have learned here is onboarding. Onboarding is so critical because it can be very intimidating your first day sitting there and not having anybody to talk to. And so we've evolved our onboarding process, pretty dramatically over the last couple of years to, we kind of map out everybody's first 90 days now. And they need to know exactly who they're talking to, exactly what they should be focused on, exactly what the expectations are. And we can still improve that. But even from things like time management, like I think there are still opportunities for us to improve there, especially for some of the younger folks that come in. And they're living with four other buddies in San Francisco, or they're off on their own somewhere, wherever, and they get up in the morning like, how do I spend my day? And so we're getting a lot more prescriptive in terms of just even time management training. And what percentage of the time per week should they be focused on these types of things? What percentage of the times did we focus on these things? Even like learning and development. And so the onboarding process is something that it's just so critically important for a remote team, and there are still opportunities to improve, but I think we're doing a pretty good job now. Naber: Nice one. So you just talked about hiring profile and some of the things that you need to assess to make sure someone's ready for that. You've talked about time management. And you also just talked about

In January 2018, Rebecca Rynhart was sworn in as the first woman City Controller in Philadelphia history. Before that, she served as Mayor Kenney’s Chief Administration Officer, and during the Nutter administration, she served as Treasurer and then Budget Director. In this episode, you’ll hear how Rebecca initially worked in Finance on Wall Street. After years of seeing governments being taken advantage of by the private sector, she quit - and took a huge pay cut - to enter public service. That decision to leave Bear Sterns in the spring of 2008 turned out to be pretty lucky, as the entire firm collapsed 3 weeks later. She would become Treasurer of Philadelphia at the height of the Great Recession. And, as you’ll hear, she had to make some tough calls to get the city through it. Eventually, she craved the ability to affect more change for Philadelphia. So, she ran for office, and took on an incumbent. Despite heavy odds, she won, and is one year into her term as City Controller. After listening to this episode, check out this week's episode of the Streets Dept Podcast with Conrad Benner - they also featured Controller Rynhart this week and talked more about what the Controller's office has done since she's been elected. Support Philly Who? Donate via Paypal, Venmo: @podphillywho, Become a Monthly Patron, Purchase a T-Shirt or Hat, Become a Sponsor

Three random stories about Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and the Quantum Fund during the Financial Crisis

As a bipartisan gaggle of spies and politicians lobby for Gina Haspel to become CIA director, we look at how after World War II, the U.S. and its allies prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs. Journalist Matt Taibbi talks about Trump, Russia, Putin, Stormy Daniels and the liberal embrace of authoritarianism. Sarah Jaffe reports on the teachers’ strikes across the U.S., the fight for unions and the rebellion of low wage workers. Former Goldman Sachs and Bear Sterns executive Nomi Prins talks about central banks, the Federal Reserve and economic neoliberalism. Plus, Melania Trump launches a campaign to educate her husband.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the collapse of Bear Stearns, the first of several large investment banks on Wall Street to fall in 2008. Its eventual sale at $10 a share to JP Morgan (down from $159 a year earlier) set off a spiraling loss of confidence that eventually led to the global financial crisis. Ten years later we unpack the forces that led to Bear Stearns’ downfall. What lessons have we learned and are we at risk of another global financial catastrophe? William Cohan, former investment banker and author of “House of Cards” – a chronicle of the Bear Sterns collapse, and David Wessel, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, are in conversation with Ray Suarez, former chief national correspondent for PBS Newshour. We want to hear from you! Please take part in a quick survey to tell us how we can improve our podcast: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PWZ7KMW

What just happened? Since January 26, the stock market is down by over 10%. Is it over? Probably not. It’s very difficult to time the bottom and there is usually a longer “bottoming process.” What do you suggest we do? Don’t overreact - keep recent perspective as well as historical perspective in mind for the markets. Also, perspective on how this might change your overall retirement plan. Let’s put it this way - imagine we met the week before Thanksgiving and reviewed your retirement analysis on planwithpeak.com. All of you know by now that I assume a future investment return of 5% per year when analyzing your future retirement, which is conservative by historical measures but I like to use a low rate for a conservative analysis. So we met less than 3 months ago, and your retirement plan looked good. You walked out the door feeling good knowing that you are track to reach your retirement goals.  And now here we are today with exactly the same market value. In fact, last night I met with my dad, who is planning on retiring at the end of the this month. I reviewed his analysis with these newly updated market values, and we are still good to go on pulling the trigger on retirement this month. I would also like to add that my mom retired in September 2007, just before the financial crisis meltdown and she is doing just fine a decade later.  Thinking about the losses over the last week is not fun, but at the same time, for most of you it is unlikely that it will affect your long term goals. If you would like to know specifically, send me an email or give me a call and I can update your analysis for you. Remember, you have access to view your plan online at home as well on planwithpeak.com. Now that I’ve address your own retirement plan, how about perspective on the recent market action? We’ve erased December and January and half of November stock gains. What’s really changed since then? We are actually seeing more growth and better corporate earnings since the last quarter,  which has led to higher interest rates and higher expected inflation which we saw in last weeks jobs report. As the economy has improved, people are making more money and getting raises. This can lead to inflation and higher interest rates. A spike in interest rates quickly is scary for the stock market. So that might be a big part of it. Antoher part could be that over the past couple months the market got ahead of itself. Let’s take a look at some historical perspectives. The market generally experiences 5% drawdowns 3x per year on average and a 10% correction 1x per year on average and a bear market which is a 20% drop every 3.5 years on average. We haven’t seen a 5% or a 10% correction since January 2016, which was a great buying opportunity. We haven’t seen a 20% bear market drop since 2011. So based on historical averages, we were overdue for one of these drops. The S&P 500 went 404 days without a 5% correction, which is the longest ever.  This one happened pretty quick, which makes it feel even worse. Furthermore, not only have we not experienced these drawdowns, but we have had record low volatility over the last year - only a couple days where we moved up or down 1% and now it seems like all the volatility has hit us all at once in the past week. Perhaps we are dealing with that pent up volatility. To drop 10% in one week is rare. The last time that happened was in Sept 2008 when we lost 20% in one week where Merrill lynch, Bear Sterns, Lehman brothers, AIG, Washington mutual, and many others either went out of business, were forced to sell themselves, or were forced to take federal bailouts. This is nothing like that. Back then companies were insolvent and today we are experiencing record earnings for companies. I spend a lot of time talking about risk with my clients and what they are comfortable with on the downside. As a result I don’t believe any of you are invested too aggressively. If you would like to see if your risk tolerance has changed, please take the Riskalyze quiz. The results will be automatically sent to me. Is the economy still ok? Are fundamentals still ok? Remember, your economics professor taught you that corporate earnings are the most important driver of the price of a stock. So far this quarter, about half of the S&P 500 companies have reported earnings with revenue growth of 7.7% year over year and earnings per share growth of 13.6% year over year. Looks pretty healthy if you ask me. Fourth quarter GDP growth was recently released at 2.6% growth, and the first quarter 2018 is forecasted to show over 5% growth by the Atlanta Fed. What action to take? If you have time and you’re aggressive, a 10% correction could be considered a good buying opportunity. Email nick@peakwm.com or call to discuss. Make sure you’re not taking too much risk in the first place. Click here to take the Riskalyze quiz. I will reach out to you after you take it. Let’s update your planwithpeak.com retirement analysis and make sure you’re still on track. It helps to have long term perspective to avoid making an emotional decision in times like these. Still feeling stressed? Call me at 734-681-7575. We are your peace of mind. Nicholas Hopwood, CFP is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER financial advisor in Plymouth, MI. Financial Planning and Wealth Management. Peakwm.com

Inform Fitness Founder, Adam Zickerman, welcomes Clinical Psychologist and InForm Fitness Strength Training Instructor, Joshua Cagney to discuss the varied psychological and emotional aspects encountered by both clients and trainers and how high-intensity strength training can be a cathartic experience.We want to reward you for listening to the InForm Fitness Podcast by offering a free training session at an InForm Fitness location nearest you plus an opportunity to qualify for an InForm Fitness Prize Pack.Earn one FREE SESSION when you leave a review for InForm Fitness in iTunes, Yelp, Google+, Facebook,  & Amazon! Simply write a review and send a screenshot to podcast@informfitness.com - that's it!  For each review you leave, you will receive and entry for the GRAND PRIZE!One lucky listener will receive a personally autographed copy of Adam Zickerman's book,  Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. That listener will also get decked out in InForm Fitness apparel including an InForm Fitness T-shirt, hat, and a hoody jacket. And we'll top off the prize pack with an Amazon Echo! Click here to see the Amazon Echo in action:http://bit.ly/2InFormFItnessGrandPrizeContest ends May 31st, 2017.  Listen for more details!To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.comIf you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question.  The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTenIf you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com28 The Psychology of the Trainer/Client RelationshipJosh: The truth is that if we're doing our jobs effectively as instructors, that's entirely placing the clients' needs ahead of our own. We each have an innate need to want to sympathize, to want to offer our sympathies whenever someone suffers a loss or a stressful period of time emotionally, but the longterm consequence of that is we blur those lines. The goal is making sure that you know the client well enough to understand what is going to be most conducive to getting her through a really productive workout. That's when an instructor is really showing his or her metal, when they're able to put the clients' needs ahead of their own.Tim: Hey InForm Nation, can you believe it? We are already at episode 28 of the InForm Fitness Podcast: Twenty Minutes with New York Times bestselling author, Adam Zickerman and friends. I'm Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting Network and I'm a client of InForm Fitness, and in just a moment, we'll hear from the founder of InForm Fitness, Adam Zickerman. Sheila Melody, the co-owner of the Toluca Lake location is back with us, and still on vacation is Mike Rogers. Looking forward to having Mike back with us next week, as we interview one of his clients from the Manhattan location, Gretchen Rubin. Next week's episode is bound to be one of our most popular episodes, and I'll explain that at the end of this one. Also at the end of the show, I will remind you of our May 2017, exclusively for InForm Nation. We have a really cool prize pack, valued at over two hundred bucks, but let's not get ahead of yourselves. Remember that voice you heard at the top of the show? That was InForm Fitness trainer/instructor, Joshua Cagney from the Restin, Virginia location. Joshua also happens to be a clinical psychologist, which is why Adam invited him to join us here on The Psychology of the Trainer/Client Relationship. Sometimes after a period of time, those who are being trained become so comfortable with their trainers, they might start to share some intimate details of their life, and the trainer, in essence, becomes their therapist. So where do we draw the line? Can this type of relationship actually help, or hurt the progress of your strength training? Let's join the conversation with Joshua Cagney, Adam Zickerman, Sheila Melody, and myself, with The Psychology of the Trainer/Client Relationship.Adam: So first of all, I've had this conversation with Josh in person, a resident clinical psychologist/exercise instructor. I was talking about — I was there giving a certification course, and many times when I'm talking with trainers, we talk about how to motivate, how to inspire, how to keep people on track. How to make them feel that, I know this is hard but you can do it anyway and stick with it. During that conversation, we were talking about the relationships that develop over time and that there is a definitely a psychology involved in maintaining these relationships and motivating your client. Then lines start getting blurred, and I hear very often, it's kind of a pet peeve of mind, and maybe it's a pet peeve of mine because I've been doing this for twenty years now and I've seen the damage, I guess. The pet peeve is when I hear that you're more like my therapist, the client would say. I come here and it's like a therapy session, or the trainer would say, I feel like I'm a therapist sometimes or I act like a therapist. People come to me, they talk about their problems, they lay it all on me, they can tell me things that they can't tell anybody else, and I get all that, but when I hear that, the hair on the back of my neck goes up a little bit. Maybe because it's my twenty years experience, and the reason that the hair goes up on my neck is just because there's a psychology involved in motivating and working with your clients, doesn't mean that we're psychologists, and that's when Josh said, unless you are a psychologist. I realized that Josh is not only an exercise instructor, which was what I was talking to him as, but I then realized that he's actually a clinical psychologist. So I guess that doesn't apply to him, he is a psychologist when he's dealing with psychology of training clients, and we have to be careful, both as clients and trainer, to make sure we're not blurring those lines, and the instructor doesn't get all full of himself or herself, thinking that they can actually solve these people's problems. I think that the client themselves needs to know what their boundaries are as well, and as much as you connect with your trainer, as much as you appreciate your trainer, as much as this trainer builds you up, not just physically but mentally, as much as all of that happens, they're not their therapist. The reason this is important to me and the reason the hair goes up on the back of my neck is because we end up, both client and instructor, we end up not doing our jobs. What we find happens during the exercise session is a lot of chit-chat going on, there's a lot of wasted time, and the workout suffered. It's a twenty-minute workout, and there's no way you can be a therapist and a trainer in twenty minutes. So then you lose a client, and this is where my twenty years experience comes in. What ends up happening is one day, the client wakes up and says, what the hell am I going there for. I'm getting bored, I'm not feeling the results, I'm feeling a plateau. It's becoming a chore to go there. Maybe the time before that, the quote unquote therapist trainer said something they didn't like, the way therapists sometimes do, and then you've got your patient not wanting to come back anymore, when they weren't your patient in the first place. They were your client, the person you were supposed to train, and now that they don't like you as their therapist anymore, they don't want to come back. So it's a slippery slope, and if you've been a trainer long enough, you've been there. If you're listening to this and you're not a trainer but you're a client of a trainer, and if you've been doing this for any amount of time, you might also relate to this trap that we tend to fall into. If you're listening to this and you've never hired a trainer, when you do, or if you do, this is an important thing to keep in mind. So Joshua, being both an instructor and a clinical psychologist, am I making sense? Am I right?Josh: I think you are absolutely right. From a clinical perspective, one of the things that's important for a therapist to understand is that we each specialize in something that's unique. So if I specialize in trauma based therapy, it does not mean that I'm a good marriage counselor, doesn't make me a good family counselor, and the inverse is true. So when we look at what the specific goal is for any kind of relationship that we have with a client, we need to keep that goal premiere in mind when we develop that relationship. There's blurred lines that come to play when, based on vulnerability and the relationship that you've built, and this is something that you commonly see in a clinical environment when you're dealing with long-term therapy, where clients will be opening themselves up in ways that make them vulnerable, exposed, and it's very easy to misassociate or misassign feelings that a client will have towards a therapist based on that vulnerability. Being in the studio isn't a whole lot different in that regard. You're in physically compromising positions, you're in incredibly intense situations under a lot of physical and emotional stress, so you feel incredibly vulnerable for those twenty, thirty minutes at a time. So the net result is, people tend to feel, when they're working out, open and extremely emotional and extremely anxious and stressed at different points, and the one person that they have contact with is their strength trainer, their instructor. So it's easy for those lines to get very blurry and it's absolutely critical for the strength training instructor to be in a position where they have clear boundaries and clear guidelines about what's appropriate, what's not, and leading that relationship. I think that you're actually really on target, I think that's pretty insightful. Whether it's twenty years of experience or whether it's something you're able to impart to people, it's important.Tim: Speaking from the client's perspective, as a client of InForm Fitness, as you mentioned Josh, it's a very intimate relationship and connection with that trainer. As you said, we're vulnerable, we're hitting muscle failure, but also the environment at InForm Fitness is conducive to building that relationship with your trainer because it's not a crowded gym. It's a very private, one-on-one situation so I guess it's incumbent on the trainer to manage where those lines are, where that blurred line stops.Josh: It is important, and those boundaries again, they're not always very clear, and there are certainly things that are critical for the client and the trainer to both bare in mind. Ultimately that is what is contributory and what is conducive to achieving the goal that my client is here for in the first place. If you have a client who walks in after having been thrown out by their spouse the night before, they're not going to be in a position, chances are, to exercise. So that may be an appropriate time to say, you're just not ready for today, and that's alright. Take a day, take as much time as you need to be able to put yourself in a position where you're ready to focus, but that's part of the boundary. Not saying, please talk to me about what it is that is going on and how can I help, but instead, staying focused on the goal and supporting the client back to what the real mission is.Sheila: Yes, people come in and they may have gone through something or they may have just received a very disturbing email or phone call or something like that, but they want to continue on their schedule because it helps them to stay feeling normal. I have had people come in and they're not revealing to me what happened, but then in the middle of the workout, you're in that really intense position, and after a couple times of exerting that, they can't hold it in anymore and they start crying because they cannot hold that emotion in anymore, because you're letting all of that energy go.Adam: This workout definitely brings out, for me and I've seen it with others, it definitely brings out your emotions. It's an emotional experience with such intensity, and if you have something going on in your life like you just mentioned Sheila, that's going to pull right on out.Sheila: We do need to be prepared to deal with situations like that, and understanding the difference between being a therapist and just being encouraging or being able to tell the difference of this person shouldn't be working out right now. Sometimes just quietly allowing them to move to the next exercise and get through it, we've had people say, thank you so much. For instance, after the last election, it was very emotional for a lot of people, and some people came in the day after. Especially in L.A, and it was like, we just took people through. They were all saying thank you, thank you for helping me to do something good for myself even though I'm really upset right now, but maybe because in L.A, everybody already has a therapist. Josh: That's different than Washington D.C. where everybody needs a therapist.Tim: For somebody who has been working out at InForm Fitness for quite some time, say with one trainer in particular. You can't help but have that relationship build. You're seeing that person every single week, you're vulnerable with them. There is a little bit of time between some of the machines and the exercises, and a good trainer, I believe, will find their client's interests and use those interests to motivate them through those exercises, so there's a connection that's made there. As in any relationship, it grows, there's ebb and flow, but do you think after a certain period of time, where it gets too comfortable, maybe it's okay or you should shift to a different trainer to kind of mix it up a little bit or start over again? What do you think about that?Josh: I think that's a healthy question to ask, but I think there is no one size fits all answer. This is really entirely dependent upon what the client is like, what their disposition is, what their needs and goals are, and then what the trainer is able to give them. So when we're talking about someone who is developing a relationship and a degree of trust, that's not really something that is easily transferable to another trainer, because we personalize that. So outside of that, when you're looking for something that's ultimately going to be most enhancing component of a relationship for a specific client, maybe it is breaking away from that personal relationship and creating something that's much more concrete and core.Adam: When you're a sole practitioner and you don't work for a company like InForm Fitness and you're the trainer, it's hard to give them to somebody else, one of your colleagues, and kind of swap out. So that's not even always an option.Josh: Particularly if your income is based on client retention.Adam: That's what you mentioned earlier before, Josh, the mindfulness of knowing when to speak, when not to speak. Knowing what to say, what not to say. They're coming in in a very emotional state. It reminded me of a client that I have whose sister passed away, and she's a client for a year. When I first met her, her dog had passed away, and I remembered how as soon as it brought it up with her, how are you doing with the dog, she'd get all teary eyed and the workout kind of suffered. Now her sister passed away about a year later, and I knew better this time. So it was interesting how I didn't say anything to her. Now here's somebody whose sister died, she comes to her workout, and I don't even give her a hug like hey, sorry, because I just know how that sets her off. It might have seemed insensitive but I think she really appreciates it because she comes in, we go in there, we work out. I don't say much, and she leaves and every once in a while, we'll talk after the workout, and I'll say next week, we'll talk about the future of her plans and stuff like that because we are friendly, and she says I'm not quite ready for this or that, she'll say. I've had a tough year. She knows I know what she's talking about, yet I've never even sent her a condolence. I know when I see it in her eyes, she looks at me when we talk about these things, that she appreciates the fact that I'm not talking about it. Sheila: I know I can be like that.Adam: This is one of those cases where you just don't bring it up. She knows you know, she knows you care, and because you care, she knows this is why you're acting this way.Tim: Well that's because of the relationship that you've build with her through the last year or so, but there might be some others that think how insensitive for them to act as though nothing has happened.Adam: Including me. I'm listening to this conversation with us right now, and I'm finally — this is like therapy for me, because I'm realizing I'm even judging myself. Like I can't believe I didn't say anything, but I just didn't feel right to say something, I don't know. Maybe it's just my own discomfort that I didn't say anything and my own avoidance. So if you're listening to this and you just listen to this podcast because you want to learn about techniques of training and health, and how exercise is related to that, so why this conversation? How is this going to help me, you might ask yourself, if I'm not a trainer or I don't have a trainer. At first, I think Josh hit on something, and that is knowing whether you should work out or not. We have somebody come in here after some kind of bad news or tragedy, and it might be too soon. I know they want to keep their schedule, I know they want to keep their routine, maybe but maybe not, you have to make that judgment as a trainer, to say to somebody, maybe today is not the day. Let's sit down, let's have a cup of coffee, no charge, let's just sit down and talk for a second and I'll see you next week. Other times, you might say to yourself as an instructor who is confronted with this particular person, say you know what, let's go in there, let's workout, let's not talk, let's just get this thing over with and do it. Let's just focus on the workout, that'd be the best thing for you. Let's face it, this is meditation. A high-intensity workout done properly — I had one client who I loved to death, he's definitely somebody I admire and has influenced me in a lot of ways. Very successful business man, has a great mental fortitude, discipline, and he knows himself, a guy I admire, and I remember him saying to me, I love this workout because it's the only time in my week that I'm concentrating on just one thing for twenty minutes, it's amazing. It's freeing for him, and I was like wow! Here's a guy who is very disciplined in his life always. He always has his stuff together, and he's saying that this is the thing that he has that keeps him totally focused on one thing and one thing only. So coming from him, that was like a big statement. So I get sometimes you might want to just do that with somebody who has all this stuff going on. I remember during a financial crisis, especially in Manhattan, I had guys that worked for [Inaudible: 00:18:53], guys that worked for Bear Sterns, coming in and I'm thinking these guys are going to cancel left and right, and gals for that matter, and they weren't. Matter of fact, they looked crappy, they looked beat up, but they came in and said, thank god I have this.Sheila: I also think it's very important to maintain — to remember that it's good to make people laugh and to feel like they're having a good time. That's how we kind of — we're like a family environment in Toluca Lake, and make people have a good time because I've recently heard, even in that Secret Life of Fat book and in some things that Gretchen Rubin's podcast and things they've done, studies that they've done about people who watch a funny movie or laugh about something, and they actually become stronger. They can maintain a little longer, so I think it's important to keep that mood fun and happy, and that's kind of what we try to do, and then the clients are competing with each other and things like that. So we try to keep that environment like a fun place so that they want to come in and they know they'll be uplifted.Adam: Good point. Levity in the face of a very intense workout can be very helpful, just not while they're in the middle of a set.Tim: Agreed. When I'm in failure, I do not need to laugh.Adam: I'm guilty of that. I think we might all be guilty of that. I am so guilty of like saying something to a client when in the middle of a set, it cracks them up and they laugh and I'm like, why did I just say that, that was the dumbest thing I just did.Tim: Agreed though. As a client coming in, I love the levity, I love the family atmosphere, that can only be achieved through connection. That's one of the reasons that I like to keep coming back, is because of that connection, those friends, that community that you instill over there at Toluca Lake and I'm sure at all of the other locations as well.Adam: Well it's important, but it's a bit of irony because it is a very intense, serious workout. Twenty minutes in and out, we're not wasting your time. It's not necessarily a coddling thing, but at the same time, we should all be excited that — first of all, as instructors we're doing incredible work and for me, it's very fulfilling to do this kind of work, very rewarding, but also it's fun. In a way, even though it's a serious workout, we're rejoicing in this fact, this idea, that we're getting incredibly strong and healthy from a twenty-minute thing. Whether it's InForm Fitness or any of the other great practitioners out there who are understanding brief intense workouts are where it's at. There is joy in that, that there is rejoicing, there is fun. We have lightening in a bottle and I almost feel like to a lot of people, it's still a secret in a way and I don't want to it to be this way, I want the whole mainstream to be understanding. In the mean time, I feel like I'm in an exclusive club, that we know something that nobody else does, but there's too much at stake to keep this a secret. So many people are not working out at all because they think they have to do everything. There's people working out too much, and listening to your advice that intensity at all costs and more is better and you got all those problems. So not only are we helping one person at a time, but wouldn't it be unbelievable if all of a sudden, as a society, the paradigm shift is what we're doing and everyone understands less is more? That would be fantastic. For the person who is listening to this that doesn't have a trainer, who is not a trainer, your emotions are important. Your emotions when you go into a workout are really important and it's okay to miss a workout if you're just not mentally up for it, that's okay. It's a once or a twice a week thing anyways, so it's not like you're not going to lose all your gain so to speak if you miss your Monday workout. As a matter of a fact, if you're an emotional wreck and you try to do it, you might lose focus, you might get hurt because you don't have the focus. It'll be a sub-par workout, it's just not something that you necessarily have to do just because it's your day and you want to keep your routine, and you don't want to think about it.Tim: So how much of this do you bring into your training when people are being certified, this component of managing the relationship.Adam: I end up talking about this stuff a lot, sometimes to the detriment of what it needs to be taught also. Sometimes two days of the workout will go by and I'll find that we talked a lot about these types of things, and then I realize oh darn, I didn't go over glycolysis with you guys did I?Sheila: One of the number one things you tell us —Adam: And that's on the test, so you need to know glycolysis here.Sheila: One of the number one things you tell us and teach us is to connect with that client. We have to connect with the client in order to understand what their needs are and to be able to design the workout for them, to make it work for them.Tim: The client, I can just speak for myself, we don't want a robotic experience so again, that's where the lines come in, the blurred lines. How close are the InForm Fitness trainers supposed to get to the clients? Would you encourage outside activities between the trainer and the client, is that something that shouldn't be approached, or is there a definite yes or no answer to something like that?Josh: I think honestly that one of the most critical things that we have to embrace at InForm Fitness, and I think this is more true than it is for conventional exercise personal trainers, is that I work with every client to teach them about mindfulness and self-awareness. This isn't just about a philosophical abstract idea of mindfulness, it is about being conscious of what is going on so that your mind controls the pattern of thought, throughout a stressful situation. So that there is judgment removed from what's going on associated with pain or discomfort, and instead, the mind is able to be focused purely on breathing. Focused on what muscles are being used, focused on the position of the shoulders relative to the hips. The goal ultimately is to create maximized performance. There's just a tremendous amount of research that's been done in the last 30 years or so about mindfulness training for top performance and top athletes. The relationship between the head and the body is overwhelming. That's something that I think we commonly understand to be true, but the mental gain, the metal component, the mental skill set of what we're trying to help InForm Fitness clients achieve is the level of awareness of what their body is doing, and a level of calm, devoid of anxiety, when they start to feel the anxiety build. When they start to feel the tension to build in their body, to be calm in the moment, to focus on letting go of the results and instead, let the results be what they are, and instead just be calm and focused on breathing, presence, and that's about it. So outside of that, I would suggest that the relationship that we build and the sort of contact that we build with our clients as Adam talks about is something that is being very conscious of the fact that we are instructors. I sort of pull back a bit when somebody refers back to me as a trainer. I'm not training anyone, I'm instructing someone on how to be calm in a time of high stress and tension. Outside of that piece, the physical benefits follow, but the mental piece has to be there at least at a basic level in order for them to build to a point, because without that, intensity can't come. In every consultation, I encourage clients to follow what I have found, and that is, this is a purely meditative and monastic time. You're in a very intimate environment where it's very calm and very peaceful, so to connect yourself with the environment such that you are focused entirely on just a handful of things, the phone, the iPad, the computer, the children, the family, the job, the dead car, all the things that are bothering us emotionally when we walk into the door, they stay at the door of the studio. They do not come in, they're not allowed. Everything in the studio is purely the relationship between the instructor and the client, and what the client is focused on doing at any given exercise.Adam: The idea of staying focused, the idea of working out when the conditions are good. Don't use the excuse not to work out every time you have a little bit of strife, then you can very easily say, I'm not in the mood today and Adam said it's okay if you're not in the mood, if you're emotionally — and then use it as an excuse not to work out. Obviously,  sometimes you have to kick yourself in the pants and pull yourself from the bootstraps and say Adam, go work out. Right now. Do it, and focus, and try to be meditative. Try to block out all of that stuff, which is exactly what meditation is supposed to be also. You're focusing on one thing, and understanding that while you're working out or while you're meditating, things break through that you don't want to have break through. Acknowledge it, move on, and keep going. Bring it back, bring it back to what you're there for. Sometimes, as a trainer, we have to understand that the best thing we can do is get out of our client's way and I think sometimes we are too empathetic. We try to be more empathetic, and we end up not giving them what they need which is a really good, kick butt workout that doesn't allow all these distractions to come in, and helping them to really focus.Josh: Adam, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think what we're really looking at when we look at the example you spoke about earlier with the client who had suffered a death in the family, where you were judging yourself by not being more empathetic, not offering your sympathies for the loss. The truth is that if we're doing our jobs effectively as instructors, that's entirely placing the client's needs ahead of our own. We each have an innate need to want to sympathize, to want to offer our sympathies whenever someone suffers a loss or a stressful period of time emotionally, but the long term consequence of that is we blur those lines. When those lines and those boundaries stay clear is when I'm placing the client's needs ahead of my own, as you did by recognizing that your client is going to most benefit from not talking about something, that she talks about probably the other twenty-three and a half hours out of the day.Adam: My wife has to know this. I have to put somebody else's needs ahead of mine.Josh: The goal is making sure that you know the client well enough to understand what is going to be most conducive to getting her through a really productive workout. That's when an instructor is really showing his or her metal, when they're able to put the clients' needs ahead of their own.Sheila: And luckily, our workout is only the twenty minutes or the thirty minutes, so you can completely focus, you don't have to think about — I have to go in there for an hour and not think about this or not think about that email, phone call, or terrible thing that just happened. So that's what's so great about our workout for anybody who is listening and want to give it a try. It's just as effective and yes, it's a very cathartic thing to just say okay, for the next twenty minutes, I'm just going to focus on me.Josh: The truth is that when we talk about — rest is a good segway — when you talk to clients that you only have to work out once or twice a week, I actually suggest to clients that you may only work out once or twice a week. It's not that you don't have to do it once a week, you may not do it more than once or twice a week. So then when they walk in with any kind of emotional stress or whatever it is that's bothering them when they walk in the door, I tell them you may not bring it in here with you. This is your opportunity to not think about it, I am absolutely demanding of you that you leave this at the door. You can pick it up on the way back out, but for the thirty minutes that you're here, you're focused solely on what it is that we're doing together.Adam: Question that comes up very often with me and clients of ours. When we talk about how you shouldn't be working out so often, like once or twice a week, and each workout is twenty or thirty minutes. How do you respond to the client that says, but I need exercise for stress relief and I'm afraid once a week for that purpose is not enough. How do you respond to that saying, I want to come three, four times a week but you're telling me not to. Part of it for me anyway, they'll say, I need more exercise for stress relief. You're telling me that I shouldn't do anything else, and I can't come here more than once and it's only twenty minutes. I don't know if this is for me.Josh: I think a that's healthy question to ask, but I think that the simple answer is something that we preach very heavily at InForm Fitness and that is creating a very clear line between constitutes exercise versus what constitutes recreation. With every client, I encourage them to walk, run, bike, swim, whatever it is that they enjoy doing that provides them some physical benefits, but that's not the primary purpose behind why they do it in the first place. People who run regularly, at some point, they cease to do it purely for the physical benefits, they do it for the endorphin rush, they do it for the stress management, they do it because they disconnect from the world around them. That's good stress management, so stress management from the physical manifestations, how it builds up our blood pressure, how it builds up muscle tension. Those are all things that we can address concretely here at InForm Fitness, but recreationally, those are the things I encourage clients to deal with. If they really want to do some good stress management techniques, get outside. Go for a walk, take your dog out, take your kids out to a park. Do something that is going to provide stress management and be recreational in the process, that's good mental health.Adam: Josh, do you have trouble separating the different hats you wear? Do you find yourself acting like a psychologist with your clients from time to time, do you catch yourself?Josh: Well yes, but having said that, I think it's more of an asset for me in the long run, simply because I'm relying on my clinical expertise and education to be able to keep clients focused on what it is that I want them to do. I let my expertise and my experience influence the way that I navigate a relationship with a client, but I never sit down and say, step into my office and tell me about your mother. That's not what we're trying to do here, but I think that the point simply is in any environment, when you're working as a therapist or as an instructor, the goal is going to be to keep the client focused on the specific set of goals. In the studio with InForm Fitness, that specific set of goals is entirely about getting the absolute best performance that I can get out of the client for a thirty minute stretch at a time, so that they're deeply fatiguing the muscles and achieving a level of intensity that is appropriate for what it is that I'm asking them to do. That environment is totally different in a correctional setting or in a therapist's office or something like that, but ultimately the drive to achieving those goals, whatever those goals may be, is the same.Adam: Like I've always said, there's definitely a technology involved in training people. Like Sheila pointed out, it's so important as an instructor to make that connection. I know plenty of instructors that are technically very good, they can put somebody through an incredible workout, but the experience overall for the client is left flat. They don't feel a connection to the person that may just seem like they're just dialing it in. As good as they are. So you can be the greatest technical instructor in the world, if you're not making that connection, if you're not figuring out how to motivate, to inspire this person to do what is arguably a very, very hard thing to do, even for just twenty minutes, you're not going to succeed. You're not going to be able to really help these people because they're not going to stick with it, they're not going to want to see you. So there's definitely that psychology that's really important, so I don't want people to misunderstand that psychology isn't involved in being a good instructor. Knowing people listening, being a good listener and hearing what they're saying, but also knowing what not to say sometimes is also very important, and just to be a listener. Not to be so full of yourself, and think that you're going to be able to solve all of their problems. The best thing you can do for them, the best thing that I think I can do for them in times is like that is to really, even more so, double down on the quality of the workout at that moment, and even pull back more from a friend position. Almost like a tough love type of thing saying hey, let's go there. This is for you right now, let's just go in there and do it. Even if you're training yourself to maybe have that same attitude sometimes and let it go. When you sit down at that machine or you pick up that barbell, take a deep breath, visualize, let it go, and do the job, be in the moment and do the job.Tim: Many thanks to InForm Fitness trainer and clinical psychologist Joshua Cagney for joining us here on the InForm Fitness podcast. Hey, if you're in or around the Washington D.C. area and would like to have Joshua as your high-intensity strength trainer, head on over to informfitness.com, click on the Restin, Virginia location, and request Josh. You'll also find six other InForm Fitness locations across the country, and you'll see Adam's blog, InForm Fitness Videos, and every single episode of the InForm podcast there at informfitness.com. Okay, next week: author, award-winning podcaster, and happiness expert, Gretchen Rubin joins us here on the show. Gretchen has a new book coming out titled The Four Tendencies: Learn How to Understand Yourself Better, and Also How Influence Others More Effectively. Utilizing the Four Tendencies framework as mentioned in Gretchen's book, we'll discuss how those tendencies might affect how you approach your workout, and why exercise is an important component to happiness. And one last thing before I let you go. Remember, here in May 2017, we are giving away a personally autographed copy of Adam's book, Power of Ten: The Once a Week Fitness Revolution, InForm Fitness apparel in the form of a hat, T-Shirt, and a hoodie jacket, and a device to listen to all the InForm Fitness podcasts, Amazon books, Audiobooks and more, using the Alexa voice service. I'm talking about the Amazon Echo, and if you haven't seen the Amazon Echo yet, check out the link in the show notes for a full description and even videos explaining what it does and how it works. This is a really cool prize pack, worth over two hundred bucks. Okay, so what do you have to do? Step one, leave InForm Fitness a review here in iTunes or on Facebook, Google Plus, Yelp, and even Amazon. If you do, you'll receive a free training session at an InForm Fitness location nearest you. Step two, take a screenshot and email your review to podcast@informfitness.com. That will be your entry into the grand prize drawing for the all the items I just mentioned, so here are the rules. You can only receive one free training session for your review, however, you can get an entry into the grand prize drawing for each review that you submit, thereby dramatically increasing your chances to win. For instance, if you leave us a review here in iTunes and then one in Yelp and Facebook, you only get one free training session, but three free entires into the grand prize, but you better get on it. You must emails to us by 11:59PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, May 31st to qualify for the free session and the grand prize. The winner will be announced on our Monday, June 5th episode here on the InForm Fitness podcast. So good luck, and thanks again for joining us. For Sheila Melody, Mike Rogers, and Adam Zickerman of InForm Fitness, I'm Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting Network.

Shahzad Khan VP at Moelis discusses what is what like working for Bear Sterns during the crisis and how being persistent can set you apart. Shahzad tells us why he went from banking to consulting and then back to banking and the differences between the jobs and personalities. Also, what he looks for in hiring analysts and associates.

Today's guest has an amazing story. This woman has worked for some of the biggest names on Wall Street. Cynthia DiBartolo's resume consists of jobs at Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney and Citibank. She also has her law degree from the Villanova University School of Law. In 2009, while working for Citibank, Cynthia was diagnosed with head and neck cancer. After undergoing extensive surgery, she was left unable to eat or speak. Her colleagues at Citibank feared people wouldn't have the patience to communicate with her, so she took a leave of absence. During this time she applied to FINRA and the SEC and felt empowered to start her own company for the next chapter, Tigress Financial Partners. Cynthia was inspired by 'Tigress' because it meant strong female. Her firm is a woman owned and operated service that provides research, corporate and executive services, asset management, sales and trading, wealth management and investment banking services. She also serves as the Chair of Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. In our conversation with Cynthia, we learn about how she climbed the Wall Street ladder in the 1980’s when the so called 'glass ceiling' was actually a really thick brick ceiling. We talk about her devastating personal complication in 2009, and how did she find the strength to bounce back even higher? And why, today, she describes herself, her approach to money, as a conscious capitalist. So, what does that mean exactly? For more information visit www.somoneypodcast.com. 

When the market went down in ’08 this weeks guest, Michael Melissinos was right there, in the thick of it. He was an analyst on the trading desk at Bear Sterns, and then later at JP Morgan after they were bought out. Since then, Michael’s left his Wall Street days behind him, and now trades a fund of his own, using a systematic trend following approach, that operates on 40 global markets. Although I missed a large chunk of the story there, you’ll hear how Michael got to this stage of his career during the interview. And a few of the lessons that shaped him into the trader he is today, including the advice he received from Market Wizard, Ed Seykota. I also like Michael’s thoughts around why you should consider playing a game that’s larger than money, and the emphasis he places on preparation.

My guests today are Michael Melissinos and Glenn Graham. Michael has assumed research and trading responsibilities. He also works on his emotional and mental game with the help of his local Trading Tribe. Tribe helps him maintain discipline through tough performance periods, remain inventive and push the envelope of improving the firm's investing and education strategy. He previously held positions at Rothstein Kass, Bear Stearns and J.P. Morgan.  Glenn's firm is Golden Point Capital. Graham has had extensive experience in quantitative trading strategy development in the futures space. He holds the designation of Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA), a designation focusing on the alternative asset classes. The topic is Trend Following. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Covel and Melissinos discuss Melissinos' career and beginnings; his history with Bear Sterns; Melissinos' introduction to trend following; “find trends, align with trends, and manage risks”; the similarities between crude oil, copper, sugar, the Euro, and wheat; and trading based purely on price. Graham and Covel discuss Graham's early trading track record; niche markets and hedging; Graham's early trading experiences and his history at a high frequency trading firm; early influences in trend style trading; the parallels between trading and backgammon; the importance of the size of your winners over winning percentage; and style drift. Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

Michael Covel speaks with Mike Melissinos and Glenn Graham on today’s “emerging trend following trader” episode. In 2011, Melissinos started Melissinos Trading in his parents’ house in New Jersey. Covel and Melissinos discuss Melissinos’ career and beginnings; his history with Bear Sterns; Melissinos’ introduction to trend following; “find trends, align with trends, and manage risks”; the similarities between crude oil, copper, sugar, the Euro, and wheat; and trading based purely on price. For more information on Mike Melissinos, visit melissinostrading.com. Glenn Graham’s firm is Golden Point Capital. Graham has had extensive experience in quantitative trading strategy development in the futures space. He holds the designation of Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA), a designation focusing on the alternative asset classes. Graham and Covel discuss Graham’s early trading track record; niche markets and hedging; Graham’s early trading experiences and his history at a high frequency trading firm; early influences in trend style trading; the parallels between trading and backgammon; the importance of the size of your winners over winning percentage; and style drift. For more information on Glenn Graham, visit goldenpointcap.com. For a free DVD: trendfollowing.com/win.

Brent Nyitray, Trade & Director of Capital Markets at DellaCamera Capital Management discusses the fiscal cliff, interest rates and the economy.  Prior to iServe, Brent was a trader at several hedge funds and ran the European Risk Arbitrage trading desk at Bear Sterns. Join the "Capital Markets Today" group on LinkedIn to discuss the show and received notification of upcoming shows.