This episode features Craig Walker, the Founder and CEO of Dialpad, discussing his 20+ year journey leading the business communications space. Craig has started 3 companies, 2 of which became Yahoo Voice and Google Voice, and shares insights from his experience building communications giants.
He emphasizes the value in communication, transparency, and flexible leadership. Craig reflects on strategically selecting investors and how product acquisitions led to rapid growth for Dialpad. He also shares his thoughts on maintaining a balance between work, family, and personal growth, underscoring the critical role of adaptability and team dynamics in achieving success.
Takeaways:
Jump Right In: Craig emphasizes the importance of diving into challenges directly, sharing his journey of building, getting acquired, and going on his own to continue building within the business communications industry.
Ups and Downs of Success: Any successful company has periods of growth and decline when you look under a microscope. Try to focus on the bigger picture when things get difficult.
Communicate Often: Craig emphasizes the significance of overcommunication for transparency and maintaining a strong company culture. It is important to keep everyone in the organization up to date on information, even if it isn’t positive.
Focus on Direction, Not Speed: Strategic vision is crucial, and businesses need to select the right investors who share the long-term growth perspective. This ensures a long-term and beneficial partnership as you grow.
Make it Delightful: Consumers should not have to trudge through a dull experience. Ensuring there are opportunities for delight helps keep user experiences positive and increases retention.
Quote of the Show:
“ Just because it's a business B2B service, it can't have moments of delight? Like that's crazy. Of course it can.” - Craig Walker
Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cwalker123/
Twitter: https://x.com/cwalker123
Website: https://www.dialpad.com/
Ways to Tune In:
Spotify:
Apple Podcasts:
Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7c6328f0-9b42-41db-8fe2-d263b4fbb261
Transistor: https://podcast.notanotherceo.com/
Episode Transcript
David: Today's guest has been a trailblazer in the voiceover IP and unified communication spaces for almost 25 years. He's a serial entrepreneur. His first company was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. When he was there, he created Yahoo Voice. His second company was acquired by Google in 2007. When he was there, he created Google Voice.
And his current company is his most successful so far. It's the leading AI powered communications and customer intelligence platform in the world. He's someone I've looked up to for much of my career. Please welcome founder and [00:01:00] CEO at Dialpad, Craig Walker.
Craig: David, great to be here. Great to see you too.
David: It's awesome. I've been, I've been looking forward to this for years. So let's just jump right into it. So what is one thing you've done at Dialpad, big or small? That's had the biggest impact and that you'll absolutely do again. If you're CEO of another company in the future.
Craig: So the one thing we do, in fact, we just had one this morning, um, but we try to over communicate with, with the teams and particularly with distributed all around the world. Like it's super, super important for us to over communicate with them and to like really explain everything we're doing.
When I was at my very first CEO job back in 2001, I walk into this all hands meeting. And, and it was clear to me that those employees had no idea of the dire straits that that company was in. Right. It was clear to me that like [00:02:00] the leaders who preceded me had not shared the reality of the situation with them. And then I had to be the bearer of bad news and the reality check. Um, And if you were recollections of 2001 was pretty grim time, right? Like companies were going under nonstop. So I kind of like vowed then, man, I'm going to always tell the truth. I'm going to always over communicate. I may not be able to answer every question, but I'm, I'm never going to like delude the team, right?
And, and I look at it as, you, as an employee, you have one bet, like where you plan to put your work effort or the chips you're putting on the table. So like, if I'm investing my chip, my pile of chips into this company. Like, you got to tell me how my investment's doing. Like, I got to know how we're doing. So I've kind of always taken that and I was always shocked that other people didn't do that. So do, we do this thing called, uh, [00:03:00] user manuals, which I learned from my friend, David Politis, where every single person, when they get hired, they write. They write what's called a user manual, and they answer a number of questions of what their work styles are, a little bit about their background so you can understand where they're coming from, um, really humanize people, uh, you know, like when you, when you understand someone's background and like they say, you know, like I have, I came from a very, you know, I don't know, like a very challenged, poor background, I'm very tight with budget. Hey, that helps you understand when your budget isn't just getting blindly approved by this person. Like, things like that are super helpful. So we do, I will always over communicate. will always I have open forums. I will always do the user manuals and always encourage our team to be as kind of like honest and open as possible as well.
But like, you know, like that doesn't mean someone can just walk in and be like, you know, tell me absolutely everything, you know, or are [00:04:00] we thinking of, of doing some strategic acquisitions or anything like we're obviously not going to give away state secrets in this, but we try to be pretty forthcoming.
David: now, now Dialpad, I think is a thousand people or maybe over
Craig: About 1300.
David: 1300. So at 1300 people and you have offices around the world, literally.
Craig: Yeah.
David: how do you, that's a lot of people to speak to at one time. Is it all at the same time? Everyone together? Is it recorded and distributed? Like tactically, how do you actually do that?
Craig: Yeah. Tactically. So we have, uh, we have offices, we have offices. in kind of like the Western Hemisphere time zone where it works and offices that don't, right? So, we have folks in Argentina, folks in the Bay Area, Phoenix, Austin, Texas, Vancouver, British Columbia, and, uh, Kitchener Waterloo, which [00:05:00] is, you know, north of Toronto. those, that group kind of sees the live Like what we did
David: Hmm. Hmm.
Craig: hour, once a month talk about stuff. Um, we now do a PM version or we do a PM version at nine o'clock tonight that I get to do again tonight at nine o'clock. And then our team from India, our team from London, our team from, well, in London stuff, like London was actually on this morning.
David: Hmm.
Craig: go either way. Um, team from Japan, team from Manila. They're all on that, that evening one team from Sydney. So we kind of do it twice. We try not to record them. I wish we could, but we like, give out too much kind of like financial information that we don't want possibility of a recording to get out. But you just got to be really intentional. And, and the other thing that I do is like, travel around and host it from
David: Oh, I like that.
Craig: So today was like [00:06:00] the first time in four months that I've done it from headquarters, like last month I was in Denver where our customer success org is, the month before that I was in Austin for the end of the quarter. at the end of July. month before that, I was in Tempe or Phoenix where our other sales office is. Then I'll go up to Vancouver. I haven't been there in a while. I got to get up there. I haven't been, haven't been to Argentina in a while. It's a heavy trek to get down there, but it's worth it. You know, you just got to kind of do those things.
And then, you know, I'm heading out to Manila to see the team in the Philippines. Um, And you just got to kind of like personally invest the time to go make those, those offices feel, you know, feel, that they're loved, supported, appreciated, that they're important, and that they're not, you know, just, on the far side of the world and out of sight, out of mind.
David: And I think specifically from knowing you and seeing you speak and seeing you with your team and everything, you definitely have [00:07:00] that kind of, you know, You probably bring that energy to those offices when you're, when you're there. So when you leave, people are kind of operating with that energy for months after you're there.
Craig: Yeah. I mean, like as a founder, you know, who else can tell the story, you know, like, and get them excited. Like, here's why we did it. Let me tell you about the early days. Um, And wants to be part of something bigger than just a paycheck. Right? So if you can, if you can like help share that narrative them feel that, like we, it's funny, we were talking about it.
Um, we were talking about it in our dialed in, we call it dialed in. We're talking about it today. And like, we had some goals around net new ARR. And I'm like, I'm sorry. Like. I
don't wake up in the morning and get excited to get out of bed to go to efficiently increase our net new ARR. That has, that, doesn't do it for me. But if it's going and making business communications insanely great and showing a bunch of empathy for our [00:08:00] coworkers and customers and partners, like that gets me out of bed, like I'm excited for that. And like, it's these, these little tweaks that, you know, kind of as a founder, even though like, I do want to like. together a team and be able to delegate virtually everything, not virtually everything, but a lot to them. You still gotta be, always keep your hand on the tiller of like, make sure you're getting the messaging right. Make sure people understand the mission and make sure they feel, you know, the same connection. And I think founders do that better than anyone.
David: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, uh, it's, it's the people that's where the energy and the soul, I think of the company, you know, it's like, you need to, you need to be in front of the team to show them that. Um, so. I, you know, I first saw you, I met you. I did, I kind of met you. I don't know. It was probably literally 20 years ago when I was in the voiceover IP business.
You were up on stage. I remember at this conference and you had this long line of people when you got off stage. I got to like shake your hand. You know, that [00:09:00] was literally 20 years ago, probably. Um, and you've been in this space. for a while. And actually, when you got to Google and you built Google voice, I assumed personally that you were going to build really what Dialpad is today.
I assumed you were going to build that inside of Google. I was at the time at Cloud Sherpas and everyone was like, Oh, Craig's going to build this. PBX inside of Google. And, um, why did you decide to leave a place with unlimited resources to, to build it on your own?
Craig: Um, yeah, a couple of reasons. One, I love Google. Google is great. So I'm not in there an awesome partner. Um, there it's a big company. And so, and this is kind of the fallacy that people have of, I'm worried about competing, like, what if Microsoft were to do this? Or what if Google were to do this? They're big companies, but they don't just like, you know, Slash money at every single idea that comes across their desk, right?
Like 90 percent of their, you know, revenue comes [00:10:00] from, the operating system or the office suite, 90 percent comes from search. That's where 90 percent of the brain, you know, like in the resources go to as well. So, so it's well capitalized. Yes. You have great brand advantage, but it's harder to get things done. There's more people. you need approvals from. There's more people who have opinions on what should be done. Um, they don't like, it would be nice if they're just like, Craig, here you go. Pile of money and no one's going to bother you. Knock yourself out. Let's see what you can do. And it's not like that.
And by the way, that is to a degree what running a startup is. It's like, here's the money. You're on your own, go, go show us what you can do, which kind of fits my, my personality a little bit more. And specifically though, with Google, we were going to build this internally. I got moved. Like I had transitioned out of the consumer side or [00:11:00] the consumer app side.
And I was working with the enterprise team and we were going to build a Google voice enterprise edition, and it was going to be insane. It would have been, would have been just like what we did. And in 2010, um, Google got really obsessed with Facebook and they wanted everyone to, to work on. The Google plus social network. And, uh, and I had absolutely no interest in working on the Google plus social network. I have a, I was a communications guy, true and true. And I saw this huge opportunity to make business communications so much better my co founders and I left and God bless Google's credit. Google ventures made me their entrepreneur in residence and they let us, You know, germinate the whole idea there. And then, uh, then they funded us and they've been a great partner ever since. So were, well, even though we left the mothership, they were super supportive and helped us get to where we are. So that was part of it. And then, you know, [00:12:00] just the end of the day. Being able to move really, really fast and, and the ability to move really, really fast comes with being at a startup. Like we, we acquired, like, for example, we acquired a real time artificial intelligence company in way before AI hype,
David: I remember. Yeah.
Craig: anyone was talking about it and I, I went in, saw, I had never had AI on my roadmap at all. Saw a demo from the founders of this company called TalkIQ and like I walked out of the meeting, I'm like. On that demo, their AI was understanding a conversation in real time and telling the sales rep here, Hey, you're doing the right things you did. You know, here's how to handle this objection. You know, here's another question to ask. Man, once you see that, like I was convinced like, okay, connecting everyone and making it sound right and making it beautiful and reliable. That's great. That's important. That's table stakes. And by the way, that used to [00:13:00] be voice over IP biggest hurdle. But then you got to just assume, okay, we're going to get there. Everyone's going to get there. So what's the next step? What's the most innovative stuff? I'd never seen anything like the idea of a machine understanding the conversation and making it better. And so, Like we, we ended up getting approval from our board to buy that company, like within 30 days of that meeting and like within 90 days of that meeting, they, they were part of our company. Like we had closed the acquisition. Like that would never happen at any, any other company other than a startup.
And I don't even think it would happen at most startups either. So, those have been the things that made it, that's why we left Google to do it, just having that flexibility and just confidence that we know what we're doing and don't need to want to, we don't want to slow down to go through a lot of approvals every step of the way to do it.
David: When you, so you talked about your investors there, um, you know, The board you've seen, you've been in, [00:14:00] obviously had multiple companies and this one you've raised quite a bit of money for, you've scaled it to the largest of any of the three companies, um, in, in the voiceover IP space. Um, how did you choose?
Because I assume you got to choose your investors and, and, and, you know, in some case, at first time founder, you may not get to choose. You're kind of taking the money that's available to you. In this case, you probably chose them, including Google. How did you choose those investors? Like what, what was your priority when you were looking for them?
Craig: Well, I'd say in the, in the, what I was looking for changed kind of like, as the company matured too. Um, first of all, fundraising is the hardest thing of any, you know, You know, that's job number one of an entrepreneur, right? Your, your money is your oxygen. no guarantee there'll ever be another dollar coming in the door. it, do it really wisely and be very, you know, very blessed to be able to do it successfully. Um, that [00:15:00] being said, though, we were fortunate that we had had two exits or Previously in the prior three years, you know, one Yahoo, one to Google. So you kind of had a lot of credibility when you're talking to investors and you had a lot of investors who were willing to meet with you and showed interest. Um, the reason we chose Google Ventures was It was a brand new venture fund. I knew the guys who had started it. Uh, you know, Rich Minor, Wesley Chan, Bill Marris, David Crane. Um, I liked them all. Um, and I was their EIR, so it was just kind of understood that they would be the investor for the Series A. Um, the other thing on top of that, though, they had a really great process of helping you Work through your ideas.
Like they had designers and UX folks and people who would prototype things for you before you even had that capability on your own team, which I thought was just genius. Um, when we did our Series B [00:16:00] and kind of like had our first product, which was Uber Conference, um, and won TechCrunch Disrupt with that product, you know, there was a lot of interest and then we were going, okay, well, let's go talk to like the real, the real, real of the Silicon Valley and all the, all the tier one names you could imagine. And I walked into the meeting at Andresen Horwitz, you know, and you're meeting with, meeting with Mark Andresen, who at the time was on the board of Skype, if I, if I recall, or had just left the board of Skype. So he understood the space and you're like, okay, this guy's brilliant. Like, I'm not meeting with the underlings.
I'm meeting with the guy whose name's on the door. Oh, and by the way, who invented the browser that made the internet work are useful. Um, But we were talking to some other tier one folks who are obviously similarly very impressive. I get a call from, um, within next day, I [00:17:00] got a call from our, our kind of like liaison at, Andreson Horowitz was this guy, Blake Krikorian, who was founder of Sling. and he was kind of like a special limited partner there and he worked with other funds too. he had been in the meeting at A16Z and he, he's like, Hey, it's Thursday night, they'd love to meet with you. And I was at some telecom conference down in, in Pebble Beach. And I'm like, look, I just got down to fricking Beach. Like we're teeing off at 10 in the morning. Um, we have a dinner tonight until 10 at night. He's like, the partners will meet you at 7am in the office at Menlo Park tomorrow. You're out at 8. You can make your 10 o'clock tea time. You know, can you be there tomorrow morning? Bye. I can totally do it. So I wake up at 4.
30, get on the road by five, get to Menlo Park by seven, pull in, the parking lot's full of, I walk into the [00:18:00] partner meeting at Anderson Horwitz, 16 partners at the table, everyone you've heard of, you do your pitch, have your conversation, do the thing. I leave at eight then we've got a term sheet, I think. The next day or that night or something like it was like, it was, I'm just like, wow, you know, that's impressive. These guys are all radically successful people still they're working really hard to make this new startup. They're in this venture fund, radically differentiated and show how much I care.
And like, they're super into it. And when I saw that, I'm like, okay, are the guys I want to work with. So they, they really impressed me. And Mark really impressed me and has been on our board for a long time. And then as we got more and more mature, it was like Iconic Capital has been like our big investor lately.
And then Omer's, which is a pension fund out of Toronto. The thing, the reasons that I loved about them is they just take a long term [00:19:00] view of investing. And we had, we had term sheets from others other late stage investors. And I won't name them, but one of them specifically said, look, you know, we're a late stage investor and this is a well known fund.
It's like, you know, our goal is to hold it for no more than five years and to, you know, at least triple our outcome. And that's kind of like success. That's what we're looking for. like, wow, that's affirmatively the opposite of what I'm looking for. Like, I'm like, this is a. There's a hundred billion dollar TAM. This isn't like an overnight, we're going to triple it thing. This is like, let's put in the foundation to build a company that could literally be massive for a long time and be disruptive in this massive market for a long time. like let's financially engineer, like some short term things to make, to make a quick exit.
So iconic. Will Griffith from Iconics on our board. He's awesome. in [00:20:00] every great B2B SaaS company, basically. And they take a very long term view of investing. And so that's been fantastic. And then the, the OMERS, which is the pension fund. Ontario Municipal Employee Retirement System is, uh, same thing, like, you know, and, and it's a long term, they're looking for quality investments, these are pension dollars of, you know, nurses and doctors and school teachers and firemen and stuff like that.
It's like, it's like, great, like this, these aren't, you know, telecom or communications is so big, this isn't a race to to the next hurdle. This is literally like, let's go disrupt this. Let's go, go change, challenge these large legacy folks who have all these, you know, mindset, but they do have a ton, ton of market share to, to go after.
And it's, it's not an overnight thing. So I really was interested in our later investors having that long term view.
David: Do [00:21:00] you think that you would have had this long term view for this business if it was your first?
Craig: Uh, good question. Doubtful. Doubtful. I think, you know, like the, one of the benefits of having a couple exits beforehand is like, you can take that longer term view look, this is, this is only the most attractive opportunity I've seen, but something that I'm now prepared for. Like I've, I've kind of like made it through junior high and high school.
Like this is like my, my master's thesis type project. And I've, I've. Reconciled or gotten excited about the point of, even though I'm getting up there in age and I've been here for, you know, for 14 years, like it, it does fire me up every morning to come to work and to go after this. And I think that's put all those things together.
It's kind of a win, win, win. Would I be able to do that if I hadn't fortunate enough to [00:22:00] have previous successes, probably not. I'd probably been a little more. How do I, you know, we, how do we pull some, you know, some chips off the table,
David: Hmm.
Craig: the good news is I don't have to now. So I'm all in.
David: Yeah. It's interesting. Cause I feel like from the first time we met post like dial pad, starting dial pad, I, I feel like you were talking about this long term view for, for the whole time. And I'm like, I wonder if he's actually like thinking that long term and then every kind of couple of years, I'm like, it seems like he is, you know, every, every next step that you get to and every, um,
Craig: They'll do it.
David: yeah,
Craig: it's, it's interesting. You know, there's, and there's ups and downs obviously along the way where there's sometimes you're like, God, if I just dated Google, man, like the stocks up, you know, I don't know, 800%, I could have just hung out there, but, um, it wouldn't have been nearly as exciting.
David: what, so let, let's the early days, um, of. [00:23:00] Like you mentioned, it was Uber conference was that first product that you had. And that went kind of viral. I w I mean, for a B2B product, I don't think a lot of B2B products go viral. And that, that kind of went viral. Why, why was that?
Craig: You know, it's, it was funny. It was really funny because it was conference calling. It wasn't video conferencing. It was literally conference calling. You dial a number and get on a conference call, which, you know, before every single person on the planet had a broadband connection, that's how you, that's how you got together with people for dozens of years.
That's how you did business. And legitimately. The services prior to UberConference were so bad. would, you'd dial a number. You'd enter, like, a nine digit code. And then you'd hear a beep. You'd hear a bunch of voices. And you'd just be like, Hey, uh, I just joined. This is Craig. You know. Who's here? And then like, they'd all say their [00:24:00] names and where they're from. And then you'd go through the call. Then five minutes later, a beep would happen. Someone else would join. You'd have to do it again. then you'd hear these voices talking and you weren't sure who it was. And we're like, this is just crazy that there's been zero innovation in this space. And so what we did is we, same thing, you dial into a number, but we got rid of the pin.
You don't have to enter a pin. Just dial in and you're joined, which was a big thing because trying to enter a nine digit pin when you're driving was like a near death experience and the brain cannot remember nine digits in a row. then the second thing is we gave you a URL we could visualize who was in.
So I'd see who's on the call already. And when that person's talking, we'd make them glow. So, you know, that guy's talking and then we'd put their LinkedIn profile. So it's like, not only do I know it's David Politis, who's talking, I know what he does and at what company. And like all of a sudden, and then by the way, if someone, for [00:25:00] whatever reason, Felt they wanted to secure the conference.
You could lock it. You can press a button and lock it. And you can kick a guy out if you didn't know who he was. You can have like this web control over a telephony experience, which was super innovative. And then we did other cool stuff. We had, had a bunch of. Bunch of interesting features. We had, we, we had a, when we launched, we had this feature called earmuffs. Like I could put earmuffs on you and then I could talk about you and you couldn't hear me and then I can take them off. we had to get rid of it cause people couldn't figure it out and they thought it meant mute and then it like, it was like, it was really hard, but it was a cool feature. Um, and then one day. One of my co founders, this guy, Alex Cornell, Alex is like super creative. He was our design guy and he was this musician and he looks like John Mayer and he sounds like John Mayer and he's super interesting he comes in. He's like, Hey, I [00:26:00] wrote a, I wrote a song over the weekend and recorded it. And it's called I'm on hold. And it's a story of a guy waiting for a conference call to start. Do you mind if I play it for you? And if you like it, can we put it in as our hold music? So he did, I liked it. We put it in as our hold music that thing went viral. Like loved I'm on hold music.
It's still our Dialpad hold music, default
David: Oh, it's still, it's still that music.
Craig: Oh yeah, it still is. And it's, but it's amazing. It's it's when you hear it, you don't realize it's a song about being on hold unless you're paying attention. And like, you don't pay attention unless you hear it a couple of times. And then people are like, Oh my God, that was amazing. just those little things of like. Like, why not just because it's a business B2B service. it can't have moments of delight. Like that's crazy. Of course it can. I'm the same consumer who then, like I'm on a [00:27:00] business call. Then I turn around and use my iPhone to go do something as a consumer. I'm still a consumer. I still get delighted by stuff. Maybe like, why wouldn't, why would I treat you different? Why, shouldn't products be fun and delightful and cool and useful and helpful, and I think that's kind of one of the things I'm super attracted to about going after, Enterprise Business Communications, because they've, it's like it's been designed by someone who absolutely was trying to take all the fun and delight out of every single product and mission accomplished, they did. So now we get to, it creates this opportunity for us to come in and put it back in and to make a much better thing.
David: That, that was, you know, I think to your, the, the user experience at that time, the user experience, the hold music, all of that, I think that was for B2B SaaS that your, your product may have been one of the. First to introduce that kind of delight. I mean, now you look at a product like Asana, just as an example, you finish some [00:28:00] task and it's, you know, confetti going all over and it's like, but, but I think at that point, at least for the first kind of chapter of SaaS applications, no one even thought about the experience, you know, we can do it cheaper.
You can access it from everywhere, all of that, but it wasn't actually the, the experience. So, um, that holds me. I love, I, The first time I, you kind of wanted to be on hold, like in the very beginning, you're like, I kind of want to hear this song all the way through, you know?
Craig: right. Well, I used to, I used to come to meetings a couple minutes late, just so people would hear it, you know, I'm like, Oh, cause it was a total like icebreaker. It was, it was great.
David: Um, so let, let's talk maybe about your team. You, you've 14 years, you've had a number of executives on the team. And of course, as the company has scaled, you brought in different people, um, at the early stage, like I'm saying this Uber conference period of time, what was it that you looked for? [00:29:00] In someone that you were hiring, like what was the number one attribute back then that you were looking for?
Craig: Ooh, uh, great question. I'd say, uh, and it's kind of hard to, hard to tell, um, but like grit more than anything. Cause like you were those early days in a company, you're, you're underfunded, these big ambitions. You're not going to build. Like when you bring in an executive, you're not going to build a big team for them.
They're not going to bring in an army of folks they've worked with in the past. have to be able to do stuff themselves too. And they have to be gritty and they got to be scrappy and they got to care about the right things and the guy, which is literally the customers and, and the coworkers, um, and, and there's like, there's, there's these gems, man.
Like we got, we got these gems. Like if I look at our first 10 employees. Eight of them are still here 14 years [00:30:00] later. Like, that's impressive, right? Like, like, the people who built the foundational stuff, the first database ever built, the first product, the first soft switch, the first anything. Those folks are still here with their fingers all over it.
And they're now running massive teams and they're, you know, they're, they're, they're, you know, they've evolved as well, but we would have never got here if we weren't scrappy and had a lot of grit and had a lot of kind of like, just like a common desire to, to shake things up and to go after this legacy boring industry and really try to make it interesting. But they're, they're needles in the haystack, you know, they're
David: Yeah.
Craig: in the haystack. And like the only reason we found guy who used to work with me at Grand Central, which Got bought by Google and became Google Voice. When we got bought by Google, he went to YouTube and then at YouTube, he met these two guys and kind of like [00:31:00] rebels, kind of like, you know, thought the company was too big, didn't like people telling them what to do, wanted to just go do interesting stuff. And so he snagged those two rebels and they joined us. And then Chan on our, you know, from Google Ventures got us this big. Insanely great guy out of Microsoft, who again, uh, super talent, but inside of a big company that's just kind of sucking the life out of them. And then they come to a place like this where there's just, they're given just a ton of freedom, not a ton of, not a ton of scaffolding, but a ton of freedom and it's really liberating for the right folks.
David: And now, now the stage you're at 1, 300 people growing like crazy, big company. What is it that you look for now? And I guess probably at this point, you're only hiring the execs. Like, what is it that you're looking for now?
Craig: Yeah. For me on the execs now, it's. It's less of that scrappiness, I can learn it on the fly type of a thing, and more of, I've seen this before, because you, you do [00:32:00] want to, don't want to just make, you know, want people to be making mistakes of like, not mistakes, like, hey, this, you know, this may, might make sense, let's try it, it's, it's nice to have some pattern recognition, it's nice to have real experience, um, That doesn't mean they have the right answers, or it doesn't mean what they've done before will work here, but it does give them like point of reference to come from, that experience is important.
And it's, it's a, again, it's a tough balance because you don't want to just, you don't want to load up with a bunch And a career type folks either who may have lost the spark of the spring in the step. So you gotta find the people who are still fired up to get out of bed in the morning. Still fired up on the mission. Still, you know, excited about the ability that will give them a lot of creativity to do stuff. But hopefully actually have some experience in
David: And
Craig: it.
David: you can see around the corners, right? I mean, basically, [00:33:00] yeah.
Craig: right. And I think, you know, like when you see companies grow, and we've been similar, you know, there's, there's turnover of executives, you know, we've had, we've had multiple CMOs, we've had multiple CROs, that's to a degree, kind of like the level of experience or headroom that each kind of gets to.
And at a certain stage, you want someone who has a lot more experience and understands a lot more about the details of, marketing. Versus an earlier stage, the creativity is probably more important, So it's like, it's, it's finding the right folks for the stage you're at as well.
David: For you personally, given that this is the biggest company you've run, obviously we're at Google, but the biggest company you've run, how do you keep evolving yourself? At each of these stages is, do you have a mentor that you go to? Do you have a coach? Do you just read and is it just natural to you?
Craig: Yeah. It's interesting. I've never, never [00:34:00] really had a mentor or a coach. Um, I do leverage the board if there's like, if there's something really on my mind, I'll. Reach out to Mark or to Will or to, or to, um, Rich and, and really kind of like, cause they've seen their portfolios of dozens and dozens of companies.
So they've seen, talk about pattern recognition. They've seen others do various things and they know which, which behaviors turned out better for the majority of them. Whereas like, all I have is like two prior startups. I mean, that's two more than, than a lot of people, but that's still only two and they both kind of turned out okay.
So. But they were much earlier stage. So having someone to talk to is good. I don't do it very often. I do it probably once every couple of years. Um, but as far as think you gotta, it's an interesting thing. There's this whole, know if you read the Paul Graham thing about Brian
David: Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm.
Craig: mode from, the [00:35:00] Airbnb thing I listened to that podcast. 7 months ago from Brian talking about as a founder of like they had built in like all these senior leaders and he kind of like as a founder, he stepped back and let them effectively run the company and he kind of oversaw it. And his point of view was like, as a founder, I got to be in the details.
I can't delegate this stuff. I got to in the weeds and figure out what's going on with the product. Because think most founders are product founders they really care about the product and product like live. Like it's, in your DNA. Like it courses through your blood. You can't delegate that.
So like I can delegate that. A lot of things, like our head of marketing is way better than I am, right? God bless, go run with it. Our head of sales knows, knows so much more about sales than I ever will. God bless. But when it comes to [00:36:00] product and what we're launching and how it works and how we talk about it and, why we get excited about it, Yeah, like the founder's got to be involved in that.
So like I've, I've kind of become less of a, less of a meddler the things where the folks running it are way better than me
Hmm.
more of like dabbling or not dabbling, but in the details of the things that really, that I'm good at. So product I'm really good at, um, be more of a front, Person for the company, getting on the road, seeing all the employees, rallying the troops, getting them fired up, going and seeing customers, going and seeing prospects, going and seeing partners, going to talk to analysts and go talk to the press. Like those are the things that I'm. Where I'll add a lot of value, um, and setting the strategy. Cause it's like, look, like our mission hasn't changed from day one. Like we want to make business communications insanely great. Like we haven't, I don't think anyone's gotten there yet. I think we're, we're far along.
I think we're better than all of our [00:37:00] competitors, I don't think that's. Anyone near good enough? I don't think, it's not an industry that my socks off of like, look at how great this contact center product is. Like, I think a lot of them are terrible and being better than the terrible ones isn't enough for me.
Like, I really want to be amazing and I want people to be like, wow, if you're not using Dialpad, you gotta have your head examined. Like, you're, it will change your life. That's where I want to get to. Um, that's, that's kind of like more of my role these days. Is, uh, spend a lot of time on product, a lot of time, you know, out on the road with all those various constituencies, but you still have to like, you're still like when things come up, you got to get involved.
Like you can't just delegate
David: Hmm.
Craig: You got to get involved. And like, I'm, I'm getting really involved in our pro services now, involved in making sure when a customer signs up for us, they get a white glove experience being turned onto the product and getting value out of it [00:38:00] almost immediately. And I might. Leaning into that heavily because that is. As important as closing a deal is then getting that customer up and running with a smile on their face as quickly as possible and driving value. And so that's now a real focus. So I think you've got to kind of around to things that come up as, as things that you think you can, you can solve by digging into. I've never got to the state where everything's just humming so perfectly. All I do is like, you know, check my email every once in a while and just get to go talk to customers like one day perhaps. But I think I'll always be, there'll always be something that you gotta dig into,
David: I wanna, I want to tell one quick story because at you mentioned being a front man and you, you are an amazing front man. I need to tell this story because when, when, uh. You know, Tenshi invited us both to Japan. Um, and we had that big event with all the top CIOs in Japan and Tokyo. There was a big [00:39:00] Google event and, um, and he invited the two of us to speak, which for me was a huge deal at the time.
I thought this is going to be my entrance into Japan. We have these big CIOs and. I remember that we arrive at that beautiful hotel, had all the round tables, and we're sitting in a room being prepared to be brought in and presented to all the CIOs. And I show up, I'm wearing my jeans, my untucked button down, and I think sneakers, and you're in maybe the nicest suit I've ever seen you, like you looked amazing.
And as we were going in, you said, Dave, listen, when I get up, I'm going to do my demo. And can you just call my cell phone? It'll ring. It'll show up on the screen. Like I said, no, no problem at all. So we go into that room, we sit down, you're at one table. I'm at the other, I'm preparing myself for my presentation.
First time I'm doing simultaneous translation. They had the translator sitting in that little room there next to it, not room, but like, and then you get up and you walk past me like, okay, cool. You're going to call me. I'm like, yep. And [00:40:00] you get up on the stage, you put in your laptop, presentation comes up.
Nice. And you just start speaking in Japanese and I will never forget that period. I first, I got so nervous. I said, was I supposed to learn this in Japanese or something? What is, what is going on? And you kept going and I thought you're just going to say hi. And you just kept going. And when you stopped, I think it was like five minutes in.
I was floor. I was literally, the CIOs were all like basically clapping for you. And I'm like, I got to follow Greg now after this, we did the demo. It worked perfectly. We did. And you sat down and you're like, how'd I do? I'm like, that was pretty good. I got up, plugged in my laptop. It didn't even render correctly.
My demo wasn't working. Couldn't connect to the internet. I was trying to tell jokes and the simultaneous translation was happening and no one was getting my jokes. That was. That was my memory where I was like, man, Craig is good. [00:41:00] Like that, that was like a different level.
Craig: let me tell you, there have been plenty, plenty of bad ones that preceded that, that got me there. But we were lucky enough that, uh, that had a couple of native Japanese speakers in the company at the time. So I'm like, okay, write out the first couple of paragraphs and I'm just going to memorize these things. And then, then it kind of flowed. And, uh, it was funny because like people were like, Whoa, he does know Japanese. Then I, the paragraphs came to an end. I'm like, all right, that's, that's, that's all we got. But similarly, I had, think I was at Google and, uh, this was like 2008. there was this event in South Korea and it was the same thing.
And the president of South Korea was there. It was. Giant ballroom in this beautiful, beautiful thing. But it was massive. And it was like the UN at the back of the building, there were like 30 different interpreters and everyone had things in their ears. So no matter what language, you know, they can do it. [00:42:00] And I was up on stage, Tim Draper was up with me and there were a couple others, but we were going around. So anyway, it's my turn at the podium there's literally like. There's one table of Americans in the front and I'm talking and I'm telling jokes and I'm trying to tell jokes and these guys are howling and the other like 800 people are in absolute dead silence because the translation comes like 10 seconds later and then it's not even funny by the time, because you're on to something else by the time they do. Man, it was the biggest bomb of a, of a presentation I ever gave. one table of Americans thought it was awesome. The whole rest of the room thought I was crazy. Um, so there've been for, for every good one, there've been, there've been plenty of challenging ones. Trust me.
David: That one for me, I'll never forget that. Um, one thing I've always wanted to ask you about is the super bowl commercial that you guys did. That was everywhere [00:43:00] on the actuals for the super bowl. And then I feel like I'm getting hit with it on YouTube all the time. And I'm seeing it again on the, can you just talk about, Why do a Superbowl commercial?
Was that a dream of yours or was that a CMO who said, this is going to be, this is the, the opportunity and, and was it a good use of funds and time and energy? Um,
Craig: CMO at the time. Um, and I thought it was a great idea because you're, one, it forces you to get like a really high quality, thing that you can use for other mediums. Um, so we, we spent the money on that. Um, then launched it during the Super Bowl, but like it's, it's like anything in the world, right?
You, it's a relationship thing. We got to know the folks Google and at YouTube TV really well. We got to know the folks at, uh, You were, you were handling the Superbowl that year [00:44:00] really well at Fox and turned out to be a much bigger thing than, than we planned because just through those relationships we developed, they're like, like, cause I have these slots all over the place, right?
Like they have pregame slots. They have, you know, wrap up slots. They have, you know, all this inventory, but it never is like. It's never just a perfectly filled thing in every single market has every single slot perfectly filmed. They try to, but you know, like if you watch YouTube TV, like every couple hours, it'll be like, show you like a B instead of a commercial and like, enjoy this Zen moment of like watching a river roll by and that's because they, for whatever reason in that zip code, they didn't have an ad for that slot at that time. So they just show you like. So, so like we, for whatever reason, became friendly with the guys who own the slots. So they were slapping Dialpad these slots all over the place. And so we [00:45:00] got so much more coverage than we paid for. And it was, it was a really good commercial was about. was about artificial intelligence and how it's the good AI and not the bad AI. And this was February, two years ago. So this is literally like a month before Gen AI and OpenAI really kind of burst onto the scene. So we were the, we were the single only AI commercial in that Superbowl. And then within like three weeks, the whole world was like, Oh, crazy on AI. the timing couldn't have been better. The, uh, the kind of the exposure was way more than we, we. Expected or hoped for and then you're able to just reuse it on social channels all day long Like hey, do you see our Super Bowl ad? Do you see this? And whether we played the ad in their market or not Most people just assume they were in the kitchen, you know grabbing a drink or some chips and they missed the ad So it's like you kind of get credit for having this worldwide Even though we didn't pay for the worldwide ad.
[00:46:00] So about it was, was really good. And it really was a cool thing. And so, you know, like it's a question of like, there's so many ads, there's so much creativity, there's so many like consumer products out there, you know, do you do a Superbowl ad on a B2B SaaS product? Um, but it was kind of cool to do. I don't know if we'll do it every year. We did it the following year. Um, we may do it again. I don't know, but it's, it's been really good. It's been really fun.
David: you, you, you've, you're open, you know, that it's not always up and to the right and there's challenges. And, um, what, what is the biggest challenge you've faced over these last 14 years, um, at Dialpad and, and how'd you overcome that? If you did, yeah,
Craig: where, know, virtually any, any kind of successful company, you take a step back and everything kind of just looks like, of course, you know, you, it just keeps going, but then you zoom in and it's like a Richter scale of [00:47:00] ups and downs, but like, you know, in the whole it's great. and I think that's true of any, I've talked to a million, you know, founders and entrepreneurs, they all say the same thing. like, yeah, it looks really easy, but when you get down to the details, there's a lot of hard work behind it. Um, say the biggest challenge or the biggest, the hardest thing is having the right people at the right time and being able to understand that and recognize it. you know, like you can, so you may hire an executive and this is mostly on the executive ranks. You hire an executive. And they have this great experience. They have this great resume. They're great on LinkedIn. Their references are great. And then for whatever reason, it doesn't work out for you the way you expected that they would. And it, and as a founder or the operator. Like I always thought, I'm like, gosh, you know, that's weird. I wonder, you know, what it was. Um, [00:48:00] but then with the benefit of hindsight, you're like, okay, maybe the product wasn't where I thought it was back 12 years ago. And I remember we let, we let this amazing CRO go and don't, cause like, you know, we were selling, all it was, was SMB, SMB, we're just selling SMB, SMB, SMB.
And this was like, you know, 2012, 2013. And she's like, well, maybe it's just an SMB product. I'm like, know, like what? Like how dare you? How dare you say this about my SMB product. And it turned out she was right. I just, it took me five years to realize that. And she went off to go have just an incredible
David: she's crushing it.
Craig: it.
Absolutely crushing it. And so, um, so it turns out, turns out she was right. So it's, it's being able to be. Able to identify what you need, when, and not be, you know, particularly when every day it's a bigger company than it was before, and this is the biggest company you've ever run every day, being able to identify those [00:49:00] breakpoints of like, okay, this, now this type of person is going to be right for the company at this point. And being honest enough with yourself of like, maybe it's, maybe it's not always them, maybe it's me. Um, don't know. I saw Mark Anderson wrote something the other day of like, know, hiring an executive. to be right half the time. You can have a 50 percent success rate. an individual contributor, probably 70 percent of the time. Those are low numbers. it's, it's like, it's, it's really hard to get, to get perfect at that. And I don't think you ever can. And by the way, the bigger you get. The more, you know, the more pedigreed executive gets, then the little, probably the more pedigreed the executive gets at your hiring, the more kind of inflexible they get, or the more they think that they, they know more than you.
So it's like, it's a, it's a whole delicate dance. I think we're, we're in a really good spot now. Um, but over the last 14 years, that's been the [00:50:00] thing that just, you know, like each phase of the company, you kind of face it again and again and again.
David: What, what are you most excited about for the future of Dialpad?
Craig: You know, than anything, I just love that this is such a massive market that every single business needs to communicate with their customers and with their prospects and with, you know, candidates and with, you know, internally. And so it's something that's, it's almost like a consumer product in that it's so pervasive, it touches every single person who works.
David: Hmm.
Craig: so, If you can make the best product that makes the most, makes those people happy and more productive, that's amazing. So I think we've been really fortunate in that we, I wish I could say this was a strategy from day one, and this is why we're so smart, our, the thing we did, we did two really smart things.
We said, look, we're going to start with this fully modern Communication [00:51:00] platform that can serve any single type of communication, texting, video, voice, contact center type of like all these, all these types of things are just literally routing decisions of how do I get these, the right two people together on a call? You know, like you call, call a business. Traditionally, like, let's say a receptionist would answer, then patch you through to the right person. You call a support line, they try to, okay, is this a billing question or a product question? They'll put you to the right people. That's really it. It's like, how do we get the right people to the right people at the right time?
Um, and then, so we have this platform that does all of it. So you don't need, oh, this for conferencing, this
David: Hmm. Hmm.
Craig: this for contact center, this for my sales team, it's just one. So that, that one is really useful and powerful. Um, On top of that, we bought this real time AI company six and a half years ago, Like, way before we [00:52:00] knew even what we'd get out of it. We knew we'd be able to understand the conversations. We'd be able to be able to do things like a CSAT score on every interaction. knew we'd be able to, like, determine sentiment. We knew we'd be able to pop up a battle card if someone mentioned a competitor. All those things were, like, amazing, and we were able to get transcripts of full conversations that you could go search and link. That was super differentiated that just doing that for six years gave us this, this training set of about billion minutes of, of conversations and they're all just business conversations, right?
So it's not 6 billion minutes of. Play, you know, the smithereens it's, it's literally like long form business conversations. And so, um, sitting on that, having all these AI PhDs and then generify AI comes out and then these great foundational models you can build [00:53:00] off of, then use all that data to train a model, to be able to like have a very intelligent, secure, fast, and. Affordable engine in the core of everything you do, put that one unified stack, fill it with this real time AI capability here. Like the, the future, the future is unlimited. Like, like not only right now we're going on, we're, we're. We focus on roles. So we have a great sales product. We have a great support product.
We have a great recruiting product and we have a great just collaboration product, but we have enough training data that now we can layer in like horizontally on those industry specific training data models.
David: Whoa.
Craig: oh, so this is what it looks like in a law firm. That's what it looks like in a car dealership. This is what it looks like in a retail establishment. That's what it looks like for a dentist office and start getting really, really, really granular in the models for each one of those verticals. Like that's [00:54:00] a, that's, that's going to be hard for anyone to replicate. Just sending stuff off to like some generic thing that's trained on the internet circuit 22.
Right.
David: Hmm.
Craig: so to me, the most exciting thing is going after this still super legacy industry that's massive and bring just a whole new set of features to it that no one else can do. And that, like that, could keep me busy for the rest of my life.
David: What, um, I want to, I want to transition kind of quickly to your, to your background. Um, did you, did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
Craig: You know, um, I went to, I went to undergrad at Cal I'm like, okay, I'm going to go to business school. So I went to, went to Georgetown for my MBA, came back. Um, it was late, it was early nineties, 91, working at Apple computer. Then the group I was in got moved to Austin, Texas. I'm [00:55:00] like, know what, I'm just going to go back to law school.
There was kind of a recession going on in 91. So I'm like, I'll go back to law school. So I ended up getting this pretty good education of. Of legal slash business slash undergrad. And then I worked at a law firm in Palo Alto, know, representing public companies, companies wanting to go public, companies raising private rounds, venture capitalists, investment banks, mergers and acquisitions, all these types of things.
So you were in the middle of that whole world. when I, when I looked at that whole universe of, of players, like the one that, the one that was most. like the guy who was having the most fun was the founder, you know, like the, like the, so I'm like, okay, well that, that's kind of like the goal. Now here I am as this lawyer in this universe, how do I get from lawyer to founder? and my path that I thought would be, go lawyer to Then you go to investment banker. [00:56:00] Then you go maybe to a venture capitalist. Maybe that's as far as you can get. but maybe you can get to founder. I don't know how to make these steps, but
David: Hmm.
Craig: of like the journey that I saw. And so I basically, after four years as a lawyer, I was interviewed for jobs at investment banks and I got a, got an offer for an investment bank to be an investment banker. I was telling my client said, Hey, I'm leaving to go do this. Here's the transition plan. And here's the new guy who'll be helping you. And one of my clients was this guy, Arjun Gupta, who was starting a venture fund called Telesoft. And Telesoft was all about making investments coming out of the 96 deregulation act that basically allowed voice over IP to exist. Arjun, he's like, well, don't go to investment bank. Come work at my venture fund with me. So I'm like, Oh, done. skip that whole step. All of a sudden, now I'm at Telesoft. And I get, and we're [00:57:00] making investments in like, now it's like 98 and investing in, you know, it was such a heady time in 98 and 99.
Like, I think like out of our first 10 investments, like four got acquired, four went public, you know, one went sideways and one went out of out of business. Like that's unheard of. Right. Like it was, it was a crazy period of time. But then the world did catch up to us. 2001 came and money losing internet startups that had just tons of money thrown at them were all of a sudden like about to go out of business.
Cause no one like no one was paying the ad dollars for the eyeballs. Um, the models were totally broken. And one of the investments that I've been affiliated with was this company that had done voice over IP, and they were given away free minutes to call the US over the internet, but you had to watch an ad on the browser and this little like this little, you know, I don't know what the little bar. And, uh, and it had like 14 million [00:58:00] users, tons of traffic, but super upside down business model. So they put me in as CEO to literally like to turn it around or close it down gracefully. like, this is October of 2001. Like you could not raise money for a company. Like it was a disaster. Um, And I made some really tough decisions.
I had to let a lot of people go, like, immediately. Cause like we were on fumes, there was no way to pay them all. Um, uh, once we did that, everyone worked like the remaining skeleton crew, we worked like, I don't know, like 14 hours a day, at least. Um, keeping the lights on realize after a month or two, like the. The users worldwide notice we were just a very small team working on this. And, and we took the burn from millions and millions a month to like 400, 000 a month. And then I found an investor who was willing to give us 5 million and we took it through a chapter 11 and we got rid of all the debt and we [00:59:00] paid off everything and had no creditors and started, basically started over with a couple million bucks in the bank grew that like inchworm, inchworm, um, changed the business model. And then, uh, Four years later, we get acquired by Yahoo by that time we were profitable and we were kind of growing and doing well and really made me realize like, look, you know, like one hard work totally pays off. Number two, like you don't have to be, you don't have to be crazy. Didn't need, like, we didn't have a ton of money.
We had like a little bit of money, but we just kind of like built properly. So the nice thing is even though like now this company I've raised over 400 million, like we still, we still kind of have that, like. for children of the depression. Like, that's a memory I'll never forget. Like, I, I hold Pretty dearly on every single penny we have and make sure our investments make sense.
So, but that was, that was this weird opportunity to go from VC to, to executive [01:00:00] or operator
David: I didn't know. I actually did not know the beginning of that story. I did not know
Craig: all right.
David: how you got into dial because it was dial pad, right? That, that.
Craig: it was dial, but we call it dial pad one. Cause once, We bought the name back from
David: Right.
Craig: 15 years later. Um, but yeah, it was, it was a crazy,
David: You're like literally thrown in the fire. I mean, that literally is like,
Craig: like legitimately they were, um, they do this all hands meeting to announce me as a CEO and everyone's clapping. There's like, I don't know, about in the room. And they thought it was like, okay, some savior came in. Like we got acquired, some savior came in save us. I'm like, Whoa, like this is, to say it, but this is not good news.
Like, like this is, this is, we're going to have to dramatically cut costs immediately. And there's only one way to do that. like, like you could hear a pin drop.
David: wow. [01:01:00]
Craig: it was kind of a rough way, but it was crazy. It was fun. I remember, I remember it was in the offices were down in, uh, down in Sunnyvale and, or in Santa Clara actually. And then we moved them to Milpitas, but they were in Santa Clara. And I'd be driving home and there was literally no Bay Area traffic for me because I was always, I was driving home at midnight every night. I'm like, this is, I guess, I don't know why everyone's complaining about the commute here. This ain't bad at all.
But like, but legitimately probably for three years straight, we've Didn't leave the office before 10 o'clock at night. And I'm not talking just me, but like Vincent Pacquet, head of product here and my co founder at Grand Central. Like he was my wingman there and we were, we were in it. Like there was, there was no option.
Like, you know, like there weren't other hot startups to go to. I had quit my good law firm job. My venture fund was no longer making investments. Like this was it. Like we burned the boats. You had to [01:02:00] see it through and it turned out okay.
David: You, you, I mean, I, I, you have a crazy work ethic. Obviously you're on the plane all the time. You're doing, you also have a family, um, and you've. Kind of that family has grown over those years as you've been building these companies. Do you have work life balance? What does work life balance mean to you? If it, if it even exists and maybe in all of that, how much is your family kind of part of the businesses that you, that you build?
Craig: Yeah. I read this somewhere and I totally believe it, but there's like things, three buckets in life, work, family, friends. if you're going to be good, pick two, right? So like the one that, the one that always took the hit in my world was friends. Cause I just, just didn't have time to go hang out with my college buddies and stuff.
Like it was certainly not the time that I wanted. Um, the way I tried to kind of scratch that [01:03:00] friend ditch was to make. people at work who I was friendly with. And so like work is fun and we have board meetings and we'll go out for dinner afterwards and go visit the other offices and we have fun, right?
Like it's, it's my, my friend itch gets scratched through work. So one that kind of opened up a little bit of time. Um, number two, yeah. When the kids were young and my kids were born in 99. 2000 and 2003. And that was in the heart of that terrible, you know, real hard work period. Um, and, uh, yeah, very rarely did was I home for dinner. Um, but I did coach They're little, like when they got a little older, coached Little League, coached soccer. I remember when I was a lawyer in Palo Alto that Larry Sonsini, the founder of Wilson Sonsini, the biggest law firm Palo Alto, was still his son's soccer coach. And I'm like, okay, well, if Larry Sonsini can find time to coach his kids, I'm going to find time to coach my kids.
So I always kind of [01:04:00] figured out a way to do that. but yeah, did I miss a lot of dinners? I missed a ton of dinners. Like I missed it. Like I'd come home. Even if I came home early and I'd get home by like 730, it was too late. You know, like the kids are already doing homework or whatever. Um, but we always like, we always spent a lot of time doing good vacations, go to Tahoe together, do a lot of things together, do sports together. Um, and we're really, really close now. So couldn't imagine it any other way. Um, but I'm sure, I'm sure in retrospect, someone would be like, yeah, I didn't really see you all that much, but now, and now they're in their twenties, so. they're kind of like off on their own journey. And it's now,
David: Now they don't have time for you.
Craig: only, they, they come home all the time. Like just when I get the place clean, they start showing up
David: Um, last question for you. What is something new that you've [01:05:00] learned about yourself in the last year?
Craig: last year. Um, yeah, so I think one of the things I've learned is I feel confident that I can understand virtually any problem, even if I don't know anything about. That other than like engineering stuff,
David: Hmm,
Craig: like most most challenges or most issues in an organization They're all just human dynamics type things You know, and it's like, have you created the right motivations for folks?
Have you, you know, do you have the right structure? You know, if there's tension in a, in a part of the organization, like what's really causing it is like, you know, like, and so I've spent more time kind of like digging into, this, you know, like, You have a pretty big org. I have 12 people on my executive staff that all kind of report to me with different things. would love to say it all, all 52 weeks out [01:06:00] of the year, all 12 pistons are humming perfectly, but they're not. Like, you know, there's, there's an issue here. There's an issue there. And over the last year, And probably a little bit before that, I really kind of like dug into what those issues are. And, and yet I'm yet to get to a point where like, I can't solve it. You know what I mean? Like, I, I feel like really comfortable and confident. Like I've been doing this now since, I don't know, 2001. I got years under my belt running companies. So like I'm really good at being able to get in and solve it. But in the past, I probably wouldn't have had the confidence to go try it.
Like, you know, what do I know about. But it's, at the end of the day, it's generally, you don't need to know a whole lot about XYZ, but you're able to say, okay, like, what are the metrics we're measured on? What are we trying
David: Hmm, Hmm,
Craig: are we doing that? Where's the tension? Why is this? Are we, know, are, are incentives aligned?
Why does this team seem to think this [01:07:00] team's not working well? You know, like, what's really going on under the covers? Like, you can solve all those things. without knowing anything about the actual topic at hand.
David: Hmm, Hmm.
Craig: I've really kind of got a lot more confidence in being able to, to sand down any rough edges in the organization.
David: I like that a lot. Um, Craig, thank you so much for doing this. Uh, it means a lot to me. And, um, I think people are really going to enjoy this, this story and, um, your background and all the advice you have to share. So thank you very much.
Craig: David, it is wonderful to see you again at 20 plus years of friendship. I appreciate it and, uh, look forward to 20 more.
David: Awesome. Thank you everyone for listening. If you enjoy, please share this with your networks, like, subscribe, and we'll see you for the next episode.
[01:08:00]
