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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Pianpian, welcome aboard to the show. So happy to have you today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, Ari.
Speaker 1:So you finished your degree, keep me honest here at Yale, an MA, and then you went down the path of kind of the traditional corporate America. I think you worked for for GoDaddy, a few other places, and then you made the decision to go and become an entrepreneur. What was going through your mind as you made that decision? What pushed you to do that?
Speaker 2:I'm originally from China, grew up in a village there, and I grew up in a family where my dad tried to be on entrepreneur field a few times and my kind of ancestors had businesses. So I think there's something in kind of there that I was always thinking about it. I was fascinated by the tech industry because I thought without internet, I wouldn't be able to apply to schools in The US from a village in China. So I became a product manager first, I was on a visa, so led product team for a few years at big companies. And then I was thinking about starting a company at some point.
Speaker 2:And in the meantime, when I was a new product manager, I found it very challenging to connect well with my American colleagues and managers. I always wish there's something that can stop me from saying the wrong things and guide me on, like, what are the right thing to say when I was talking to my colleagues. So I was thinking about that for a few years, and I started talking to my colleagues and friends about an idea of something that
Speaker 1:can Before before this is a very personal journey for you. Yeah. Tell me more about these challenges in communicating with your colleagues. What what did that look like? How how was that frustrating?
Speaker 2:Well, it was it was very painful. At the time, I didn't I mean, probably like a lot of people, you got thrown into a job. There was no training. You just kinda learn as you go and and oftentimes you you swim or you sink. And I would kind of enter into arguments for hours that I would later regret.
Speaker 2:It caused me a lot of trouble and I thought I personally lacked emotional intelligence. That's why I started reading a lot of books about it and learn about it. Yeah. So so I guess like that kind of pain there, it was just long lasting.
Speaker 1:Emotional intelligence, I would agree is part of the complex environment, but there's also some really interesting differences in culture.
Speaker 2:Knowing what is the right thing to say and also kind of being able to control yourself to say the right thing. So they're different and then understand how the other person is feeling.
Speaker 1:What was your kind of personal most painful moment where you kind of figured like, this doesn't work. I need to figure out something better.
Speaker 2:I don't say that kind of things anymore. When I was a new product manager, and I don't know what was kind of why I was doing that, but I think I had an argument with my, one of my, counterparts, and, I was a product manager and my counterpart was an engineering manager, and we had the disagreement on how we approach building the product. I don't even remember what was the specific was, but I I clearly remember I said something like, I have three masters in sociology on on this, and I know, like, what's the right thing to do. And and I was like, okay. Thinking back, like, why would I say that kind of things?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And yeah. So it's like kind of, I guess, now I have this self awareness, but at the time, I didn't.
Speaker 1:First of all, thank you for for being humble and sharing your It's your not easy to do that, especially not, you know, online in front of an audience, but I think I myself definitely resonate. I've said stupid things, I still say stupid things all the time, just ask my wife, she'll testify to that. But we all do this at work as well, so I appreciate you sharing your story. What did you so from kind of this this low point, what are the lessons that you learned? What are the techniques that you built, and how did you even approach learning these new skills?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I I started kind of reading a lot about emotional intelligence, and I went to Yale. And the Yale one of the Yale former presidents was a top psychologist in the world. He actually invented the term emotional intelligence. So I read a lot about that.
Speaker 2:And then at some point when I decided to do a company, I reached out to him and then he introduced me to some of his colleagues and and I started partnering with some of his colleagues to actually host workshops on how to develop emotional intelligence. So I also learned a lot from those experts, and we started doing things like doing deep debriefing and kind of paying attention to your own feelings and try to kind of ask open ended questions to understand the other person's feeling better, kind of different techniques on being grateful, kind of doing grateful journaling and kind of talk on purpose. Yeah. All those things.
Speaker 1:You're saying saying so many important things. I wanna stop you so we can kind of touch on them one one on one. So you talked about paying attention to your own feelings, you talked about gratitude or being grateful, you talked about journaling. Let's let's talk about those three. So why is it important when you're kind of interacting with other people to pay attention to your own feelings?
Speaker 1:Like, okay, you have feelings, but what does that got to do with anything?
Speaker 2:So there there are four pieces of emotional four parts of emotional intelligence. I mean, there are different school of camps, but the one that I that the expert that I work with, there are four pieces. One is sensing and detecting emotions. Second piece is understanding emotions. And then the third piece is managing your own emotions, managing your behaviors to kind of adjust your emotions.
Speaker 2:And then the fourth piece is managing and changing your behavior to try to change other people's emotions. So there's always like a interaction between you and other people. It's not just a one kind of one size thing. Now, I mean, it's even if you when you're not interacting with other people, it's still very important to understand your own emotions. Otherwise, like, you can't if you don't understand what it is, you can't do anything to adjust it and change the behavior.
Speaker 2:So other techniques that we try would be kind of practice talking through some very challenging situations and see how you can kind of narrate it and then talk through it with other people. So kind of practicing handling both negative and positive triggers.
Speaker 1:That's so important. I think the key thing that a lot of people sometimes miss is that our emotions impact how we perform in They also impact how we perceive or how we interpret what other people say. So we kind of think, oh, what does emotions got to do with it? But you're right. It affects our communication.
Speaker 1:It affects our communication. And if we don't pay attention to our emotions and manage them, then you know, we're not going to get any better. You talked about being grateful. What's being grateful got to do with it? Why is that important?
Speaker 2:It's one of the techniques for kind of it's part of the mindfulness practice is to a way to handle stressful situations. I mean, even if you practice a lot, like, we when we get into stressful situations, like, we're we're still nervous. I'm I think I'm a little bit of kind of nervous because I'm in a recording, but if so being grateful is one of the techniques to kind of mindfulness practice for you to develop the the muscles to to manage your own emotions. So it's it's it's not gonna be immediate, but it's a gradual thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'll tell you a very short story about being grateful from that I experienced and I'll do it very shortly. My son was being bullied at school. Oh. And I told him give your bully a compliment every day.
Speaker 2:Oh, my.
Speaker 1:Now this broke my son because the idea of giving his bully a compliment was he started crying when I told him.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:Anyway, three months later, I'm like, hey. How's it going at school? And he's playing with this friend, and he's telling me about it. And I see his sister is like angry. And I'm like, what's the problem?
Speaker 1:So my son answers, oh, she doesn't like this friend. And then I'm like, wait, hold hold on a second. Who is that boy? And then his sister answers, it's the boy that bullied him. So through this process of giving compliments or being grateful, he turned a bully into a friend.
Speaker 1:And if anybody in our audience doesn't think that, you know, being grateful is powerful, I mean, that story should exemplify just the incredible power of being grateful and appreciation. Incredibly, incredibly powerful. And I would argue that it's not only powerful on affecting others, it also affects yourself, changes your sense of mind and how you see the world. Mhmm. Very powerful tool.
Speaker 1:I I appreciate that greatly. So you're on this journey organizing these workshops, and I'm guessing also learning through the workshops yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And at some stage, you're like, okay. How do I do this at scale? How do I bring this to a larger audience? What were you thinking when you were about to start the company?
Speaker 2:Actually, my original idea was actually building the AI that can listen to me in at the time, there was not much remote work. So to listen to me in any conversation, mostly in person, because at the time, most of the work things are in person, and then tell me, like, hey. You're you're getting upset. Take a deep breath, and you should say this instead. But, I mean, AI was not as readily available like years ago and people were like, you're crazy.
Speaker 2:You're talking about you need to raise millions and millions of dollar and hire like 12 machine AI engineers to build this kind of thing. So, so, I mean, of course I, I couldn't, like, immediately jump. I did try to raise money to build that kind of thing, but I wasn't able to. So so we just continue doing the human stuff first. And then and then the AI the generative AI APIs becomes become available.
Speaker 2:And then one of my friends tells, hey. You you know, this this AI there's some AI tools coming out. Maybe you should try using in your product. And so we started kind of just using the OpenAI API to build a chatbot. Now still, it's not what I built.
Speaker 2:And I always thought it was difficult to build what I wanted to build because, like, well, the AI can listen in real time. Yeah. How do we make it work? And I was not there enough to build it. And then and then I joined an investment firm as an entrepreneur in residence, and they didn't give me money, but they they kind of do some, like, mentorship sessions, and they kept asking me, what is the 10x thing you're gonna build?
Speaker 2:What is that? And and I kept things like, okay. I know it's difficult, but let's just give it a try. So I talked to my team. Hey.
Speaker 2:I wanna try building this thing. Not sure if it's gonna work, but let's try building it. And and we we make it working. And even, like, I I was at the Dreamforce conference last week, and even people who would know who know about these tools, when I tell them, hey. Our AI can listen in conversations and calls live and then give you give give you, like, could be in sales or customer success or any conversations live.
Speaker 2:Right now, starting with virtual conversations like this, give suggestions on what are the right thing to say. And they're like, real time? I was like, yeah, real time. I like, wow, never heard of anything like this. So it's a new concept.
Speaker 2:And I'm glad that we make it working out. There's a lot more work to do.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean, you know, it's funny, there's a very famous saying that the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed, right? So if you're on the cutting edge of technology like yourself, you're aware of, you know, what Anthropic and OpenAI have brought to the market, but if I had to guess, of the general population don't really understand what it can do. And then, you know, putting companies together that are really leveraging and taking AI to the next level, is what you're doing, can give it capabilities that you know, ChatGPT on itself just, just there's no way it can do it, right?
Speaker 1:So that's pretty amazing. I have a question to you. When you look at the future, right, five, ten years into the future, company's doing exceptionally well.
Speaker 2:Person? Yeah. If I just take some of the example of our current users and customers, part of what what our product is doing now I started this broad, like, helping me improve, emotional intelligence, but we're kind of right now honing in some use cases of in the customer facing roles like sales and customer success. Partly, I was doing some finalised sales, and I found it pretty challenging to do sales, but also kind of, I mean, lot of companies, people care about doing sales and making it successful. So some of our customers are, for example, like junior salespeople, but they don't have a lot of experience.
Speaker 2:They just started. Sometimes they are not even native English speakers. They might be located in other countries or could be in The US too. And their their leaders don't have time to coach them all the time, and their leaders don't have time to be in their in every of their call or re listen to every of the call to guide them on, hey. At this moment, this is the right thing to say.
Speaker 2:They might give them some general guidelines, but they have still have to figure it out. Now some of our users, they their our product is very helpful for them in in terms of that the product can give them at the moment guidance on at this moment, this is how the other person is feeling, and this is the right, like, this is the right questions to ask, or this is the right thing to say at the moment. So figure out when to say what at the right time is trial challenge for them. But without AI, it's almost like they are bringing their sales coach with them in every call. And we can make them immediately be like a star performer in what they do.
Speaker 2:So this is just the sales. Now we can expand to customer support, and we can expand to kind of internal employee management communications, and a lot of it could be later expanding to doctors and patients communications, and teachers and students. I
Speaker 1:appreciate you joining the show today. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me over.