Michael Sippey (Vice President of Product for Medium.com) on Your Goal Should Be to Wow Your Customers Every Time

Show Notes

Michael Sippey, the Vice President of Medium.com shares about why it’s important to ask yourself what you can be doing in your business to improve your customers experience better, how can you find their needs and solve them, and why you should never stop trying to wow your customers.

  1. Ladies and gentlemen on today’s show we have the incredible pleasure of interviewing, the Vice President of Medium! Michael Sippey welcome onto the Thrivetime Show, how are you sir!?
  2. Michael, for all of our listeners out there that are not super familiar with what Medium.com is, I’d like for you to share about Medium.com and what it is?
    1. Medium is an online publisher where anyone can come and write stories.
    2. It was founded by a co-founder of Twitter
    3. We create a personalised experience where people can purchase a subscription to read about a wide variety of topics.
  3. Michael Sippey, I know that today you are the Vice President of Medium.com, but I’d love for you to share what a typical day looks like for you and what all you are responsible for?
    1. I manage a team of 20-25 people who do product management and design.
    2. I work with the rest of the executive team to determine where we are going and what we should be working on
    3. Most of my days are spent in meetings.
    4. I have to mentally curse less and less per day.
  4. Now, I know that you are kind of a big deal now, but I’d love for you to share about your first “real” job after you finished school?
    1. I went to school at Colgate University and majored in English Literature
    2. My first job was at a software company
    3. I loved the team and the people. I really got hooked on the startup environment
  5. Michael Sippey, I would love for you to share about your time spent at 512 2nd Street and what you learned there?
    1. It was an unbelievable time. It is in a neighborhood of a market
    2. It is in a place called South Park which is where the conception of the internet really took place.
    3. The thing that I loved about working here was that it really felt like we were a tight knit team all growing and working together.
    4. It was lead by an incredible woman who at the time was a groundbreaking pioneer 
    5. I love the Giants. Buster Posey really defined the modern team.
  6. When do you believe that your career first began to gain traction?
    1. It actually was at Advent. I was a young person who was new to tech and could just work hard.
    2. They gave me some responsibility in a project management role.
  7. I know that you are passionate about the concept of “Get In The Van.” Can you share what you mean by this?
    1. The more time you can spend listening to or talking to your customers, the better off you are.
    2. Before you start making on a project, get a team together and meet 30 potential customers. If you can’t get 30 people to meet you and your team then you probably don’t have a product
  8. Michael, why do you believe that is so vitally important for entrepreneurs to talk to their customers at least once per day?
  9. Michael, I watched a presentation that you gave online where you stressed the importance of asking 3 questions:
    1. What problem are we solving?
      1. This is what I tell people who are building products
      2. You have to know in detail what problem you are trying to solve
      3. For example:
        1. At Medium we send you an email called “The Daily Digest”
          1. The problem we solve is sifting through Medium and finding what you really need to read
    2. Who are we solving it for?
      1. At Medium, we see that we are solving a problem who are curious about the world. People who are looking for facts.
      2. We have a set of curation guidelines. It is about the quality of the writing that makes sure the story actually has a point.
      3. There are thousands of stories published on Medium every day
      4. We have tools to filter stories
      5. Some of articles you can actually listen to it
    3. How will we measure success?
      1. We look at weather or not the subscription business is growing
      2. Are we giving our customers enough value?

***I’d love to have you break down what why these are so important…

  1. Michael, I’d love to hear about your role at Twitter?
    1. I was Vice President for Twitter for 2 years
      1. Vine is no longer a product
      2. It started as an app where people could make 6 second looping videos
      3. The kids are using Tick Tock
      4. The founder of Vine is coming out with a new version of vine
  2. What one Tech Person do you really look up to?
    1. There are two people:
      1. Marc Andreessen
      2. Ben Horowitz
  3. You come across as a very intentional person, what does the first four hours of your typical day look like and what time do you like to get up?
    1. I wake up at 6:00 am 
    2. I will run
    3. I leave the house at 7:30 am
    4. Drop the kids off at the bus
    5. In the office at 8:30 am
    6. I plan my day
    7. Meetings start at 9:30 am
    8. Lunch at 12:00 pm
  4. If you could go back 20 years and talk to yourself, what would you say?
    1. Take more risks personally and professionally
    2. The biggest risks I took were starting a business after I left Twitter and also when we bought a project house.
  5. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
    1. Building Medium and other ventures
  6. You come across as a very well read person, what are two or three books that you would recommend for all of your listeners to check out and why?
    1. The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz
    2. Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
    3. Far Sighted – Stephen Johnson

ACTION ITEM: What can you be doing in your business to make your customers experience even better when they try your product/service? How can you find their needs and solve them?

Michael Sippey Thrivetime Show Slides

Business Coach | Ask Clay & Z Anything

Audio Transcription

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Jason, what has been your role at elephant in the room over these past few years? My role, other than my position has been to wow our customers. And your title, I believe was the super manager. Correct. And now you coach business coaching clients. I do. And our goal is to wow our customers because when people are wowed, they will tell their friends. Now. So on today’s show we decided to have the vice president of medium.com to come join us on the show to share with us why your goal should be to wow your customers each and every time it’s worth it. It’s worth that extra dime to wow those customers, Jason, we have to stop everything. Tell the customers about the new meds, the new meds. Oh, the Andes mints. Yeah, the new meds. Oh yeah. So we scrapped our old butter mints and replaced them with better mints.

So you’re saying we used to have butter mints and the Elephant in the room. Men’s grooming lounge. Yeah. You know those like soft round ones. And why did we replace them with the Andes myths? Because the Andes are what people are asking for. They are something that goes above and beyond. My understanding is the uh, the, the, the uh, Andes mints might cost more. They do, but they wow the customers. Absolutely. And when people are wowed, they’ll tell their friends. Now on today’s show we teach how to wow your customers and we are joined here with the incredible Michael Sippey, the vice president of medium.com.

Some shows don’t need a celebrity in a writer to introduce the show. This show dots to me, eight kids co created by two different women, 13 moat tie, million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the thrive time

Shawn [inaudible].

[inaudible] started when the [inaudible]

yes, yes, yes and yes. Thrive nation. Welcome back to another exciting addition to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we are interviewing the vice president of medium.com Mr. Michael Sippey. Welcome onto the thrive time show. How are you sir?

I am great. I’m great. The rain has broken here in San Francisco and it’s a nice day. It’s good.

Now what I want to ask you, you have this career that is a epic and growing. And so for all the listeners out there who are not super familiar with you, I know all of you are going to Google, search your name right now and try to figure out the DD tapestry that has made your career what it is. Can you explain to us a, to the listeners out there, what medium.com is and what it does?

Yeah, sure. Uh, we are an online publisher. We run a platform where anybody can come and write stories. Uh, we’ve been around for about five years, uh, started by uh, the I, one of the co founders of Twitter after he left where I am, so anybody can come on, right? ADM. Uh, then we curate a great stories that are written by the community and we commission original writing from professional journalists and writers and we package all of that up into a personalized experience for people that come and register on medium. And we sell subscriptions for unlimited access to those stories. So we’re essentially been growing the subscription business for the last year and a half, and it’s going really well. And we’re essentially a platform where you can come and, and read about a wide variety of topics from a technology and programming and Java script and all the things that are happening in tech to artificial intelligence to help and all of the things that are happening in medicine to, uh, all the way to kind of self help and personal stories that people are sharing about their lives.

I know there’s none of our listeners eat our, our, our people without talent other than me. So I want to know on behalf of the people out there who have no talent, um, what does it mean to be the vice president? I mean, what does your schedule look like on a daily basis? Are you hopping into a board meeting and smoking cigars? You order a nuclear strike is what we’re asking, right? Do you have the power to hit red button?

I can. I can rarely order a nuclear strike.

Hmm. And I gave him the Guard Day

is pretty busy. So I am, uh, I manage a team of about 20 to 25 people across the organization that do product management and design and data science and uh, and support for our users. And so I, and I’m work with the rest of the executive team to help kind of work on the strategy for medium and where we’re going, what we should be working on. And so I, my day is, uh, pretty much scheduled back to back with meetings from about eight 30 til about six, uh, pretty much every day and then find some time in there for, uh, catching up on email and chatting with folks. But I get a lot of my energy out of working with the team and spending time and talking through hard problems. And so I really enjoy it.

Now this is a z, this is a question I’ve never asked to a guest before ever, ever come off the cock. I just, I want to know, dries up my call. I wanna apologize up front cause immediate medium is growing. It’s a great company. It’s growing. Things are going well, a z, you and I own multiple companies and we’re in the Bible belt. So the Bible belt, like if you wanted to really go off at somebody in curse, you might say something like, well shucks. Shucky darn, really. You know? Um, how often Michael, during your typical day to make this company grow and to, to grow the team and to hold the team accountable and to set the vision, how often do you mentally curse [email protected] you personally as the vice president,

mentally, mentally, or out?

Mentally we say shucks, Chuck’s there. That’s not so great. And I just think your swell,

uh, the goal is less and less every day. Right?

Right. He’s

trying to essentially help people get better

every day. So it happens, you know, probably, you know, multiple times a day where you’re swearing on the inside. Right. And what am I 29

he and resolutions is to do left swearing on the outside.

There you go. That’s a good move now. Okay, so now, now you’re kind of a big deal. We know you’re kind of a big deal bad. Look for you to share about your first real job after you finished school. You know, when you, where did you go to school and what was your first job after school?

So, uh, I think I’m only a big deal with my mom and maybe my kids, but um, but after I went to school at Colgate university, which is upstate New York, I majored in English lit. I moved out to California. Um, my first kind of real job after college, um, I did a bunch of like working, I worked for a law office for awhile. Um, but my first like real job in tech was at a software company called advent software, which is actually still around. And they did something that I had no idea what it was and I barely know what it didn’t now, which is like portfolio management software for biocide money management firms and, but I love the team and I love the people that I kinda got hooked on startup culture and, and how technology works.

I went to the Google map there cause I’m a real cyberstalker. I went to five, 12 second street. Can you talk to us about five 12 second street and what it was like working there.

So it was, it was kind of an unbelievable time. So that right now that now second street in San Francisco is in a neighborhood called top of the market and we’re five 12 second street is right around the corner from a little park called South Park. And South Park is essentially the kind of ground zero for what happened with the Internet over the last 20 years, um, in San Francisco. And so, but back then when I, when I first started working there, this is pre web. So I w I started working there in 1991. The neighborhood was not what it is today. There’s been a lot of development like right around the corner is the today is the, um, is where the giants ballpark is. And that wasn’t built yet. The giants are still playing at candlestick, so like neighborhood is completely transformed. And the building, the thing that I loved about working at five 12 with per advent was when I joined, we were somewhere between 30 and 40 people.

Um, and it really felt like this unbelievably tight knit group of folks that, that acted like a team. We had software engineers, we have sales people, we had support people. We had, um, you know, for folks from kind of a bunch of different disciplines who were all, uh, rowing in the same direction, trying to solve the same problem for our customers. And that was really inspiring. Um, even though I didn’t really understand the problem space at all, and the team was, uh, essentially so passionate that you really started to understand, um, more about the business every day that I was there. And it was led by an incredible woman. So Stephanie Demarco, who is the CEO and advent, um, at the time, this was the early nineties, was a really a groundbreaking pioneer of being a female CEO of a tech startup, working in financial services. Um, and she just led that company with such passion around the business, around the customers and compassion and empathy for her employees. And it was just really an incredible time to incredible, incredible time to be there.

Now, speaking of, of passion here, are you passionate about your San Francisco giants? Cause your room, you guys were pretty close, right? You are within, I’m looking at Google Earth now. You right four blocks away from the stadium. Oracle Park right there, my friend.

Yeah, I love the giant. In fact like I, I’m lucky enough to have the opportunity to participate in uh, in a season ticket traffic later this week where I get to work with, you know, a group of other folks and pick out games for the year. So

do you like all time? Great. San Francisco giant. Are you going to go with, will Clark? Uh, maybe Kevin Mitchell, are you going with Matt Williams? You go in with a Barry bonds. Who’s your all time favorite giant?

Uh, I’m going to go with buster posey.

Buster Posey. [inaudible].

Okay. Yeah, I’m going with buster. You basically defined like the modern era of the giants and it’s just a stall word of the team that basically leads that clubhouse. So I’m going with buster

and we’re going to get back into this interview about business busy kind of businessy kind of things, business. He kind of is. But I do, I do want to ask you one last question cause Michael Sippey, you have all the insider information. You know, you’re in that tech world. You’re right there you are at five 12 second street but basically four to five blocks away from the stadium. Do you, I know he’s, you know, it’s, it’s come out of a phd. A lot of people have alleged things, but do you think that that that Barry Bonds was on steroids?

Uh, yes I did.

Okay. Just wanted what, did you still cheer though?

Absolutely.

Okay. Yeah

of course. Like home runs like, you know, well he was amazing.

Do you think that it would be a good move for baseball to go ahead and accept the use of steroids moving forward and just to say we allow it, do you think that would be good for the game moving forward? Cause that that’s kind of mine proposal.

I think that it would be bad. I think that would be bad for again.

Okay. Well I’m not, I’m not a purist.

You don’t think I’m sort of a purist that way. And I actually don’t think that balance should end up in all of that.

Alright. I, I don’t know in all sincerity, I do agree with you cause I think if he gets in and it sets the precedent, next thing you know, we’re going to have the incredible hulk in the whole thing. Okay. So now we go back to our businessy kind of questions. When in your career did you believe that you first began to really gain some traction where you thought, Oh God, an idiot, I know what I’m doing, I’m having some success, I can call my mom. And when did you feel like you finally got some traction? Exactly.

I got to call my mom. I think it actually was an advert and it really was a product of the environment that I was in, which was really supportive and learning and they took risks on people. So I was a young, you know, young person in like new to tech and then English lit major. Um, and essentially just worked hard and uh, proved that I had half a brain and they gave me some responsibility to, uh, essentially become, have my first product management role. Um, and I went from essentially doing kind of marketing assistant type jobs and organizing events into doing real product management. And it was, uh, it was a real challenge, but uh, but I felt kind of lucky and blessed to be given that opportunity. And it’s, I’m super grateful for that team for how they taught me how to do it. Um, which was a lot of fun.

I saw one of your, uh, interviews or one of your presentations on this thing called youtube CZ or you good with youtube? We’re in Oklahoma. Not a big part here. It’s big with the kids. Yeah. Big with the kids that people are starting to use, the Google and the youtube. These are things people are starting to, Oh, I think I’ve had a girl, the Oklahoma. These are just now started figuring out what are your things you talked about was getting a van. And I say that all the time in the office. I’m always, you know, cause the 18 was such a big thing as a kid. Oh yeah. He admit Mr t he’s like, we have to get there quickly. Step one, we’ve got to get in this thing and then we’ve got step two. We gotta wait, we gotta make sure the van door never fully shuts or the helicopter door we could fall out. But it doesn’t matter because as Matt, you don’t have time to get to a full stop. We do a rolling stop, get out. Talk to me about right. Talk about getting the van. What’s that about?

Alright, so, so here’s, here’s what the thing that you learned is that as a product manager really early on, which is the more time that you can spend listening to or talking with your users or your customers, the better off you are. So I had a, a, a board member who taught us this, uh, this methodology of um, of a, she called sinked up now or market validation back then where it was essentially before you, even when you had the first inkling, an idea for a product, the thing you should do is essentially get into van, which is get a group of people that are going to have to be responsible for building the product and supporting the product. So in our case, back in the early nineties, there was like engineering manager, QA person, product manager and support person and you’d go and you’d go get meetings with 30 customers and it’s like a 20 something year old product manager.

I had this board member telling me, okay Michael, your job is to go schedule 30 meetings with potential users of this product idea that you have. And if you can’t get 30 meetings so you don’t have a product and these spend, you basically get in the van with the rest of the team and you go see all these customers and you ask them a series of structured questions of like, Hey, we think you have this problem. Do you have this problem? We think this solution could help you do it. Let’s talk about it. And you asked them, you know, would you pay for it? How much would you pay for it? Would you Beta test it? Would you like recommend other people for us to talk to? And that’s really the only way to start to validate whether or not the idea that you have is a, is the right idea before you write a single line of code. And so that process has been super useful for me throughout my career. And now working in kind of consumer Internet where you have, we have access to a lot more people. Those same principles apply, which is how do you go and concept and test your idea before you actually go invest a lot of engineering resources and a lot of design resources in the building.

Uh, in Oklahoma, in Oklahoma, we’re, we’re kind of, you know, Z, we’re kind of a little bit behind the times with the technology and a one of these, uh, websites that the young whippersnappers are out there using. We talked about the Google, the youtube is zip. You heard about this thing called t witter? No, but I’ve heard the one that’s twit a terror. Yeah. But I quit twit spaced. Her twit hurt Twitter. You barely knew her. I mean Twitter and we went. Okay. So I want to ask you, Michael Sippey, talk to me about your role working with t winter.

Uh, so I was a vice president of product at Twitter for a couple of years, um, and uh, worked on, uh, basically the mobile apps and the website. Um, worked on a product called Brian for a little while. Um, essentially like help lead the product management team and design team at Twitter for two years.

What happened with vine. I know that beaver was obsessed with vine for awhile there. What happened to vine? Where’s vine now?

Vine is a no longer a product, which is a shame. I thought it was a really creative, really creative product. [inaudible] yeah, it was like you’d love it. I think what happened is that it started as um, uh, an app where anybody could make, you know, six seconds, six seconds looping videos. And what happened is that people that were really, really good at that were the folks that got really popular. And so it’s sort of like they couldn’t really figure out how to turn it into a bigger community product. And then I think Twitter can figure out like how to really use it best inside Twitter. And so, uh, vines no longer, um, a lot of folks are using, a lot of kids are using TechTalk now. It’s a thing that is very similar to what vine was back in the day. Um, and a old cofounder of Vine, uh, is actually working on a new version of vine called bite. So the idea is still out there of how do you essentially give people tools to make short, uh, fun videos to share with their friends. So

you are very good. The five 12, a second street building was very close to Dropbox. Have you ever met Paul Graham? Hung out with Paul Graham, met the great Paul Graham.

I met Paul. He wouldn’t remember, but I met him years and years ago at some party.

Okay. Of all the tech people you’ve worked with throughout your career, is there one person that you look up to the most because you’re in the, this is what you do. You’re in this space. If you ever met somebody where you thought, wow, that guy, that lady, wow, that is the sharpest human I’ve ever met in this tech space.

So, uh, there are two people, um, one of whom they’re both investors at Andreessen Horowitz. So mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, um, both people that I’ve looked up to for a really long time and I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Ben a little bit, uh, because he’s on the board of medium. Uh, the company I work for. And so she’s just a really tremendous guy. And his book, the hard thing about hard things, it’s, um, is really, really great. So I highly recommend Ben’s book.

Oh preacher, that book is awesome. That book is awesome.

Yeah. Yeah, I put it so good. And then, um, I’ve had the opportunity, I really look up to mark, um, because he has such an enormous brain and it’s such a very thinker and I’ve had the opportunity to be, um, in meetings with them a few times and just feel really lucky to have that experience work, uh, being able to be with them.

When you spent time with Ben, did you talk about uh, 1990s a gangster rap at all?

We have occasional,

yeah,

nineties gangster out. And the fun part is like, I get a thrill like watching the warriors because he has courtside seats. So it’s fun, like as the camera pants always see, been watching the warriors. So that’s always fun.

There it is. There it is. Okay. Now I watched the presentation that you gave online where you stressed the importance of asking three questions. And so I’m going to tee up these questions and I want z to kind of interrogate you about these questions. Okay? So of course number one is asked, you know, what problem are we solving? Who are we solving it for and how will we measure success? So let’s go with the first one here, Mr. Michael Sippey. Um, what problem are we solving? Why is it so important to ask that question?

Yeah, so this is where I tell, this is what I tell people that are building a, that are building products. So especially as product managers, but they’re really responsible for being able to answer these three questions. Cause if you, if you can’t answer these three questions, then you really can’t help guide a team to build the right things. So what problem are we solving? I like people fall in love with technology and instead what you have to fall in love with is the user and their problem. You have to really understand the problem really deeply in order to build great software to go solve that problem. So the first job of a pm is to really understand like, what problem are you trying to solve?

What problem are we trying to solve? So like for instance, some of the, some of the projects that you’ve been working on, give us the, the project and then the problem that was solved. Give us some examples.

Yeah. So we, uh, we send a a medium you can, when you, when you sign up for an account, we will send you an email every day that we call the daily digest, which is a personalized email for you based on the tens of thousands of articles that have been published in the last week on medium. What are the best ones for you every day. Um, and the problem that we’re trying to solve there is make medium. Like how do we deliver, uh, how do we help you sift through all of the great stories on medium to find the best things for you to read. And so we, uh, we essentially look at like, at how do we make medium a part of your daily, your daily email habit and solve the problem with you. You know, getting smarter about the world, getting smarter about your job, um, getting smarter about yourself and making sure that we’re crafting, uh, and you know, product that is personalized you based on your history of reading and interacting with medium so that we can deliver you a great email product. So it’s really about, you know, how do we solve that problem for you of like having a great stories to literally for you, um, every day that can help you get smarter about, uh, the things that you want to get smarter about.

Now you, you say the next question is who are we solving it for? So it medium. Are you solving problems for extremely right of center libertarian slash conservatives or extremely left of center, uh, or is it for everybody or who are you solving problems for it? medium.com.

Yeah, that’s a great question. So we’re, because we’re a platform where anybody can come in, right? Uh, we, we don’t really think about solving it for a particular political ideology. We do see that, um, we’re solving it for people that are curious about the world, right? So we’ve decided that we want to go after a segment of folks that care about, uh, complex issues that are willing to dive in and understand like the array of facts that are available to them and listen to, uh, uh, diversity

only Democrats. Then basically only Democrats is what he’s saying. Here’s the only Democrat that’s only Republicans. Maybe alcaide I’m trying to [inaudible] this up. Okay.

I actually don’t think that’s true.

Okay, good. I just, I wanted to, I want it to stop because there’s somebody out there, you know, when you guys curate stuff, I think there’s somebody out there that thinks there’s maybe a bias in it. How do you guys do that or how does that work if somebody is come that, you know what I mean? If somebody is a very left of center of a right of center and they’re wanting to, you know, figure out what they want to look, how do you, how do you do that there? How do you keep it objective?

So we essentially, we have a set of curation guidelines that we put published online. But basically it’s not about political ideology. It’s about the quality of the writing and about the quality of like, making sure that headlines are not click baity make sure that the story has a point. Make sure that it’s well written, make sure that it’s not spam, make sure that it’s, uh, it’s not essentially just trying to like, while people up, but it’s actually a considered piece. And so, um, I think that we, you know, we’re, we’re still learning and evolving. Those will evolve those criteria over time. But that’s the thing.

That’s great. So how many writers do you have? How many people have, like on a typical, I don’t know, day, week, month, however you, how do you want to put that into perspective? How many writers do you have writing in?

Yeah, well, there’s, there’s thousands of stories that are published on medium every day. Uh, and not every writer writes every day, right? So there’s many more, many, many, many times the number of writers in there are pizzas published every day. And we have, um, you know, between kind of 10, 20,000 stories published on an average day. I mean,

wow. So do you read every one and then categorize them yourself? Is that kind of your daily routine?

Yeah. No. Yeah. I, that’s all I do.

Yeah. That’s awesome. He knows everything.

No, we have a, we use a variety of tools, um, for filtering those and for putting the right stories front of curators, whether that’s through um, kind of machine learning and algorithm.

If you don’t have a room, you don’t have a room full of like guys with thick glasses on. They’re just sitting there just reading articles all day long. Right. It’d be drinking and drink monster drinks or caffeine drinks.

Well that we have, yeah, we view those people, but not that they’re not reading it,

you know, if, if medium is looking to add, I need to use, you guys use a variety of tools. If you’re looking for an additional tool. I’ve often been called a tool. Yeah. So I wouldn’t be a great reader. The empire, can I, you know, I’d probably, if we could get like the articles on audio, I’m going to me IBI, you know, [inaudible] more a variety of tools.

Some of our articles they actually make available so that you can

say you had a problem for me and you solved it already. I like that one step too.

How do I read while driving?

Right. Well what clay just reads, he says the worst driver in the world plays Rooney. Mike live a funny and true story for you. Do you, do you happen to drive a Tesla?

Yeah,

I do.

You do? Okay. So one of my, uh, do you have the self driving thing? Is that a thing you use?

No, no, that terrifies me.

Well there’s a, there’s a guy who’s a client of mine who lives in Dallas who is trying to edit a franchise disclosure document, which by the way is 160 page document of just legal ease. And it’s all when you franchise the business, you know, you have to make this crazy thing. So this guy puts the car on self driving mode and begins to edit the FDD while driving and then thinks this is kind of fun. I’ll send photos through clay cause he knows how against the self-driving feature you need it because you’re the worst driver. What world self drive. You can never be worse than you driving. I could never at all do anything but just be in pure panic and terror. Being in a self driving car, you can try to be in a car with you driving. It’s on my watch. Okay. Okay. So now I want to, I wouldn’t ask you this, here you are a guy who’s talked a lot about, you’ve got to ask the question, how do you measure success at medium right now? How will you measure success? How do you measure success? What does that look like?

Yeah. So we look at, um, I mean the ultimate measure of success for our business because we’re selling subscriptions is those is the subscription business growing. And, uh, and that is for us, what I love about the work that I’m doing right now. And so that ties the value that we’re creating for readers, uh, directly to, you know, do they love it enough and do they want it enough to pull out their credit card? And that’s a mix of publishing the right stories, making sure that we’re finding the right stories, that we’re personalizing the experience for them, and that they’re getting an experience like either in the app or on the web or in their inbox that they care about. And so that, for us, it’s kind of the ultimate measure of success. Just like Netflix, just like Spotify, just like Hulu, you know, are they growing their subscribers factory base back for us as the core measure of success?

No. You come across as a very intentional guy and I’m sure it would be very easy to spend your entire day reading every article on media or to be distracted by calls from people or, you know, there’s a lot of ways you can get distracted with this world of constant communication and connectivity. Um, how do you spend the first four hours of your typical workday and what time do you wake up? Most days?

So I’m usually up between six and six 30. Um, on a good day, I will run. Um, I usually leave the house between like around seven 30, uh, drop the kids with the bus. Uh, into the office by about eight 30, um, meetings you hear usually don’t start till around nine 30. So I spent in the morning kind of planning my day, looking at my calendar, um, making sure that I’m kind of prepared for what’s coming up through the reps for the day. And then it’s kind of off to the races. I do, you know, I don’t eat much in the morning. I just do like coffee basically. Um, and uh, and then, you know, by, you know, 12 or one, it’s uh, it’s kind of, you know, time for a little bit of salad. So just try to like kind of keep trying to stay healthy, trying to stay focused. That’s basically it.

Now, do you have certain, have you have a certain book, if you could look back and say, okay, maybe it’s the hard thing about hard things or it could be any books. Is there a certain book that you would say, this is a book I definitely would recommend every aspiring entrepreneur should read and here’s why.

Okay.

Oh yeah. Well, yeah. Well, all right. So Ben’s book is really great. Um, I also recommend, uh, Daniel Kahneman’s book thinking fast and slow, um, which is about kind of the two modes of thinking in the way that your brain works. Um, kind of the reactive thing and the, and, and the more thoughtful, uh, way to kind of process emotion and process ideas. Um, that’s a good one. I also really enjoyed, I just read, um, Steven Johnson played his book, farsighted, um, which is all about, um, how we make hard decisions and, uh, that’s very, very big. Um, I would definitely recommend that.

Z, I’m going to paint you into a corner here. My friend. We’ve got a guy on the show who’s his sort of a big deal. We think he’s a big deal. He, his mom thinks he’s a big deal. Apparently Twitter thought he was a big deal. Medium thinks he’s a big deal. What is your final question you have here for the man and the myth and the legend if you didn’t? One of the questions I’d love to ask is, you know, as you go through life, we learn things, we learn things, we learn things. And, and it’s, uh, uh, this is kind of a pretend thing. If you could go back 20 years and talk to yourself, what would you tell yourself?

Okay.

Oh, that’s a great question. Um,

okay.

I think, uh, I think I would tell myself to take more risk. Wow. Um, that, that, uh, I remember, um, yeah, he used to walk in this neighborhood on the way to work and there was a sign in the window that someone had put up that said leap and the net will appear. And I wish I had taken that advice. Um, more frequently. I would essentially like take more risks. Uh, both, you know, personally, professionally, like there’s, um, there’s really, you can just be bolder and be more true to yourself and take more risks.

Well, I now segue, last question for me is what was the biggest risk you took?

Uh, that’s a good question. I think, um, I, I started a company after I left Twitter. Uh, that was a lot of fun. Um, I think the biggest risk I took was with my wife. We, we bought kind of a project of a house, uh, and read it back together. Um, and that, and that kind of proved us out. But like, we took a big risk and every step along the way when we thought we were kind of done with this project, like things kind of turned around and we were able to make it work.

Fantastic. Okay. Mike? I, this is actually my last one now. So where do you see your secret last one? This is the secret one because you’re, you’re a clever man. Fun to talk to. Uh, where do you see yourself in, uh, say you can either tackle it five or 10 years. I’ll let you choose.

Oh Man. So I think five is easier than 10, so I just turned 50. Um, I love what I do. Uh, and I’m committed to, to building mediums. So I think that it’s really about, um, you know, in five years my, my kid will be out of high school and away at college. And so

don’t worry this time about the limit of the shift, but I like love

working and so I love what I do. I love managing teams. I love working with people. I love building products, and so I don’t see that changing in the next five years. I still have a lot of stuff to go. Oh, fantastic. Sam’s hardware.

Now, do you have a particular, if you could sit down with all the listeners today and say, Mr Listener, Mrs Listener, I want to give you one piece of advice. Would you want to be riskier? Yes. You can sit down and say, here’s the hard conversation you need to have right now. I wish someone would’ve had this hard conversation with me. What’s that knowledge bomb, that truth, that epiphany, that that set hot sauce that all the listeners need to hear today.

Trust your gut. Felony something trusted.

Trust it. That’s awesome. Oof. Z my head. You know what? That was the sound of my bracket. That’s a good, that gets a bomb chicken a holy cow too. Yeah. Okay. I’ll give him a hug.

Oh, me.

Give him the Gallagher button.

Why were you big? Shout out to Drake.

Back to you sir. Um, how really this is, this is not even a question then was really more of a hanging up. This is really more of, it’s more of a statement. How can you sleep at night knowing knowing that your home team stole Kevin Durant. Oh, dad is Oklahoma. I mean, how do you sleep at night or do you have to medicate yourself? You want to know how did you medicate yourself greatly or what? [inaudible]

Aye. I sleep,

I sleep very well. Safe. And the knowledge of a gazillion wins every season. Oh, that’s just dirty. Oh, they’ve got the great weather. You’ve got out the trash, you’ve got south park around the corner. You’ve got everything from us. Oh, well Michael Sippey, thank you so much for being on the show.

Really Fun. Thanks guys.

You Bet. Well done. Now Jason, if you’re out there, let’s just say that you’re, you’re uh, you could give a big shout out to one of your clients. Big shout out client, a client that you’re working with. Okay. That is just doing really well. I will say angels touch, they are a auto body detailer and a detail shop in Bourne, Massachusetts. They are number one on Google right now. Come on. They didn’t just hit number one on Google. Yep. And are they wow. In their customers, they are wowing their customers. They have two dogs that greet you when you walk in. What’s the, uh, what’s the Botox, uh, business you work with? They’ve been doing such a great job, revitalize medical spa. You vitalize medical spa, they have been killing it. They had one of their biggest days, $10,000 a day. That’s a day not week last, uh, last week.

Now, who are the ladies who you deal with? Who are the owners of the company so of revitalize that is, um, Krista and Lindsey, Christa and Lindsey. Can you make sure you share this podcast with them? Absolutely. I’ll tell you, I have, I’ve got a complaint real quick. Oh, let me talk about wow. And customers, right? I go in there to revitalize and I said, hey, you know, 38, 39, 39 years old. Now I’m looking to, you know, get some botox. And what were their names again? It was Christa and Lindsey. Kristen Lindsey. Okay. Which, which is the one who has the little edge to her hoses. Lindsay or Krista who’s, um, they are both super awesome, but I think Krista has a little bit more of an edge. No, I think it was Krista who had said, she says, you know, we could start, we could do a botox but I’d recommend to save money.

Why don’t we just Redo your whole face? And I’m going really? And then I realized it wasn’t actually them, it was probably a competitor of theirs, but right. But it could have been that. It could’ve been them. And if you’re out there, uh, just ladies, um, I just want you to know that, uh, I will never be a botox customer of yours because you don’t have enough cosmetic, uh, things that can fix my face like mine. It’s all right, but they’ve got hair removal. You ask and ask them if they’ve ever fixed somebody who looks exactly like Jabba the Hutt facially say, have you ever totally fixed that? Cause if they have, I’ll be, I’ll be a customer. But seriously, those are great ladies. They wow their customers. Oh they really do. And we’ve got angels. The angels, people are wowing their customers. Yep. They are.

Who else is, well, there’s, there’s, what’s your one more you can think of right now that maybe a win, maybe from the coaches meeting this morning, maybe, maybe a different client, maybe a client that you’re not working with. Maybe a client you are working with. Can you think of just one more? Well, just maybe one more hot. I’ve got, I’ve got a house, I’ve got a hot, well the good folks at Papa Gallows, pizza pizzeria. Oh yeah. These guys in Satellite Beach, Florida, they are killing the game. They have great hand tossed pizza. And uh, if you Google search papa gallows reviews or Papa Gallo’s pizza in satellite beach, you can see what it’s like to wow your customers. And they’re actually on a trip right now to Colorado just to explore and to research and to study other companies to see if they can take their wow game to the next level.

They’re trying to see other restaurants in Denver that are wowing to see if they can take back some of those ideas to wow their customers more. And Jason, why would they want to wow their customers more when they’re already wowed? Well, I mean, you want to wow as many people as possible. You never want to stop. Like that’s like, you know, we want to provide a wow service at elephant in the room and then we want to do it up to a certain point. And Mick, no, we’re good. Who does it benefit the most? When you, wow the customer, it benefits you as the business owner. Yes. It’s the most selfish thing you could possibly do. Wowing your customers is the most selfish thing you could possibly do. So the ladies that revitalize, they are selfish. They’re out there. Wow. Their customers. Oh yeah. Those guys had papa Callow’s dish.

Oh Wow. And their customer office. And then you’ve got the guys up there, the angels, angels, angels touch. Wow. When their customers, how selfish, how dare they now thrive nation. If you’re out there today, we encourage you to be a doer. And not just to hear her. Now is your time to enter. Act Now is your time to take that action. Get off the wall. Don’t be the person that the eighth grade dance who’s on the wall. Get off the wall. Get in the game. The dance party has started. We only have a limited amount of time left on this planet. Be a doer. Book a ticket to one of our business conferences. Be a doer scheduled 13 point assessment. Be a doer. Subscribe to the online school. Do it. It’s 20 bucks a month. You say, I can’t afford it. We have a scholarship. What? Yeah, just email info at thrive time.

show.com info at thrive time. show.com we can help you out or you can book a ticket. Why can’t afford a ticket? Email us right now. Info at thrive time, show.com we’ll scholarship yet. Check this out. If you leave a review today [inaudible] the tickets are normally two and $50. Yeah, but you know how much that would be if you’ll have to review and you take a screenshot of the review and you send it to info at thrive time, show.com a, you’d probably discount. It’s like, what? $200 from two 50 it’s $37 wow. Because that’s the cost of having you here, serving you food both days, having all the printouts, the workbooks, the worksheets, you can do it. This is your year to thrive, Jason, with now, without any further ado, here we go. Three, two, one, boom.

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