#8: Daniel Eberhard, Founder & CEO of Koho - Trying to be useful at scale

I think that 99 of business [ __ ] your [ __ ] there's certain like things which are Evergreen in terms of the usefulness of their knowledge that are way more useful than I don't know some book about smart shortcuts you can take

around Excel or something like that

[Music] welcome to actualize a podcast focused

on the intersection of performance ambition and mental health I'm Rob pintuala and I'm joined by my co-host Kim Foster Yardley rather than

fixate on the wins and successes our mission is to uncover the whole picture of the human being behind the performance join us as we interview top performers across business Sport and the

Arts actualize is presented by first session have you ever considered trying therapy or simply just want to level up in your personal or professional life I started

first session back in 2019 to help Canadians find the right mental health professional for them since then we've connected thousands of Canadians with the right therapist and I'm really passionate about helping each individual

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was founded by myself Kim Foster Yardley I combined my 20 years of experience as a clinical psychologist with my passion for sports psychology and I built a team of therapists to specialize in working

with high performance Olympians and Founders find us at the mentalgame dot me thank you

today's guest is Daniel Eberhard Daniel is the co-founder and CEO of Coho a Canadian fintech company Coho was founded in 2015 and recently surpassed

the 1 million customer Mark about 350 folks work at Coho and in this episode we get a glimpse into Daniel's leadership style how he thinks about psychological safety in the workplace

values about being a parent about living intentionally Daniel is open about his experience with therapy and coaching and discusses how he thinks about these tools both in his professional and

personal life please enjoy this episode with Daniel Eberhard Daniel it's great to have you here on actualize I wanted to jump right in and ask you about meaningful work

and I've heard you say in the past and maybe I'll paraphrase a little bit but that you can only control two things if you're proud of the work you're doing and if you're proud of the people you're

working with and I wanted to ask you a little bit more about how you landed on that and if that's always been the case I don't know if it's always been the case so I think I think kind of the the

real teaching lesson so just my background was in wind energy and built the business in that space and then after that company and I don't talk about this

too much but I built a business in the e-commerce Logistics space um and it was it was I think in the first year we like grossed 300 Grand it was like it seemed like it was a real

business and this was in the Heyday of uh group buying I don't know if you remember like uh uh Groupon and these kind of these kind of folks and what happened was

they basically created a lot of incentive to like highly inflate the prices of things and then sell the cheapest thing that you could so you'd have like this big manufacturer suggested retail price and you'd be like

it's 80 off but what that incentivized was a bunch of just like low quality stuff that you just couldn't shake the feeling was going to end up in a landfill um and so even though this business was

kind of working we shut it down after the first year just because it was like the least energizing thing to do and it was acting in fact like such a drag and

so you know I think I think that like the way that I kind of framed this is there's a two by two and you know you want it and on one of those axis is are you paid well or not and on the other

axes is is the work purposeful or not and I actually think if you want to have a great career you have to be in that top right and you also have to be working with people in that top right and there's like lots of personal injury lawyers who make a lot of money but

probably don't see a lot of purpose in what they do and there's lots of folks in NGO who like probably feel a high degree of purpose but don't want to but don't get paid very well and I think the best folks in the world are in the

top right quadrant to do work that they care about and so it's like um you know I think it's just like the it's it's a precursor if you want to be competitive in your career with the best

folks in the world um and so yeah I mean I think I think I clicked on that a little bit earlier than most and it was one of the things that has kind of served me very well in my career

um I'm curious if that has anything this is a selfish second question here but if that has anything to do with how you've uh positioned yourself around like

raising Capital does that have anything to do with just like accelerating the speed at which you can hire great people and like afford great people or nothing for sure like I think it's an enormous

there's this here I think I always liked which is like what makes one thing what one thing makes everything either easier or unnecessary and it's like having a great Mission and a connection to that mission

just makes uh work so much more fun and so much easier and you also like it actually creates a lot of common threads with the people that you work with um because they generally see the world the same way and so it is like this

great kind of unifying principle and it also applies to investors who are like there are people at the end of the day too and they don't they want to feel like they're funding useful businesses that are impactful and they have emotional components to their decisions

too um and so it's it's been I think like the the big thing that was like um you know if you think about a business which is like a million dollar business

versus a billion dollar business the person who builds a billion dollar business can't possibly be a thousand times smarter more hard working whatever than the person who builds a million dollar business and so the real variable

there is like luck um and so you can like build a wonderful business and succeed for good or bad reasons or fail for good or bad reasons and so there is this big externality

that you price in when you're going to start businesses of like how much external things can will inform you so that that's kind of why I try to like

connect and anchor to a career that I will always hopefully be proud of even if we don't do the things that we say that we want to do from like

an equity value creation perspective I love that yeah uh on your on your LinkedIn profile uh you have listed on their reluctant Banker uh I find that

hilarious and I think I understand it but I'd love for you to to explain that yeah I don't like um there's a there's a saying in banking

and it was like and it's changed a lot but the old saying in banking was like 363 and so it was like lend money or borrow buy money at three percent lend it at six percent and be on the golf course by three

and so but look I mean I think that banking in its current manifestation in Co-op in Canada is like hugely problematic but I do think that if you want to change this

industry you have to do it from the inside not from the outside like I don't think it's going to be crypto or web3 like I think there's roles to play for those kind of things but I didn't plan

on starting a bank that wasn't it's like sort of ancillary to the idea of what we're actually trying to do which is just to give folks a great financial foundation and democratize access to the best financial products and in doing so

build like a really big business yeah yeah that's amazing uh I think it's interesting to hear people I mean the banking experience in Canada Is Not

Great by any means but with all this uncertainty South of the Border with the banking system it almost like lends to the fact that we're accepting of a subpar service

because they're so anti-risk and like oh we're safer I don't know maybe that's just but not like it's it's it is like it's a very Canadian thing to think that somehow and this is like the big thing

that unwind in Ottawa and in across this country but like people somehow think that like competition is count a counterweight against systemic stability and the truth is like

there's World Bank study after World Bank study which is you actually need to foster a competition if you want to create a long-term healthy scalable banking system and we as Canadians are like yeah our Canadians have bags have

been like systemically stable but they are also like 50 more profitable than banks in the United States and so like where does that money come from it comes from Canadians it's like a zero-sum game

right and so um you know it's it's just like it's it's a it's a false dichotomy in the sense that somehow these are opposing forces when they're actually like

complementary forces that's great Insight yeah um so I want to talk a little bit about how just the weight of being

a CEO of such a large company now and the pressure that comes along with it like I've I've worked at some venture-backed companies and I've heard about the pressures from investors and

from like delivering that return but now you've got over 350 staff you've got you know nearing a million customers how do you manage the pressure

uh not that well it is you kind of get I think it's a very strange position to be in in the sense that like then and it's a necessary position in

the sense that somebody's always in this seat in these companies but it's it's wild to be responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars and um and hundreds of employees and like

you know uh and not that I'm solely responsible for it but like certainly the nucleus of a lot of these things and so but look I think what you try and do there's kind of like two things that

exist in tension to each other and there was a General in the US Army his name is General Sherman and you know he said this thing which always struck me and which I always liked which is like

it is very expensive when I learn from experienced people die and most of the lessons that I need to learn most of the battles that have been fought people have taken those ideas and written them down in books or talked about them or whatever and so like it is

I'm obviously massacring this but it is like irresponsible borderline sociopathic to not take that responsibility seriously in terms of learning and getting better and trying to be self-aware like all the

things that you I think are incumbent upon somebody who with any position of responsibility and then within that you also and this is kind of the hard part you kind of

have to and I'm not good at this set quite clear emotional social you know work type boundaries in your

life because it's very easy to be in the Trap of like I should always work harder and I have a responsibility to the team and to fundraisers and like you can always do more and that but you got to kind of recognize when

it's no longer serving you you know when you're going too hard when you're burning out um and all those kinds of things and so I I certainly haven't got it right I have a bunch of tools that I use to try and get it right

but it's It's Tricky man it's it's easily the hardest part of the job yeah I would love to ask you about those tools maybe a little bit later but uh was wondering if you could anecdotally

talk about some of the you know hardest times uh maybe at coho in your role or even before that uh and then like how you ended up getting through that you

know if there was any you know hindsight I mean this is like so there's there's been a few times about coho's been near death and we've

had like five weeks of pay and how it typically shows up for me is I it's kind of like a vicious cycle where I don't sleep very well and then very often I'll like wake up in the middle of the night and

it'd just be like drenched in sweat and then you know not sleep and there was like times when I spent you know kind of weeks living in those kind of states and then looking back it

seems crazy and a little bit removed but um so it's it's less so there's been a few times like that and I'm happy to talk about them but the way that I kind of think about this is

careers are like a function of like Talent effort and skill or excuse me luck talent and effort are like the three variables in a career right and so talent I think is broadly fixed IQ EQ

those kinds of things that are you can you can certainly like work around them but like those are innate natural qualities and then how much you effort is like how much do you develop those things to be successful read whatever

those things are and then um and then luck is the third one but effort is like the real variable that we control and this comes back to the mission where it's like if I was doing something that I didn't care about I

would have quit a long time ago right and so there is like effort is actually a function of like how hard you can push on something but also how hard something pulls on you and I think pull is like a

way more useful idea than push I can summon some amount of discipline or whatever to go do some body of work but like I am pulled by the idea that I

think if we win we can change millions of lives for the better and like that will so when [ __ ] gets hard I don't know if I can swear on this part when when stuff gets hard that's kind of the thing

that like is consistent throughout and so you kind of don't really have the choice of going backwards you know what I mean it's like you're burning the bridge behind you because you care deeply about trying to

create the outcome that you're trying to create yeah yeah yeah you can definitely swear to uh uh no that's amazing I mean I

think what I notice uh is just like in here you talk and and listen to you some other podcasts and stuff like that is that you know you you seem to be able to

step back and like pull yourself up into like the the higher altitudes like we actually do one of our first episodes here on this podcast with uh Mark McLeod who you may know from I know Martin and

CEO coach um and he's talked about altitude you know a lot as a CEO and like being able to you know be on the ground but then lift

yourself up and transition uh has that come natural to you always or have you had to work on that I'd say that it comes like very unnaturally to me um

there the the thing that I think is sometimes misunderstood is like it's totally a skill that needs to be developed you know what I mean and people earning in their career and you get some System Shock as a function of like your manager leaving or whatever

the the form of volatility is and it feels like so permanent but the ability to like you know as Mark calls it we call it um we just got like zooming out or

whatever but Mark change altitude but the idea is to like zoom out and contextualize this against the broader trend line of what's happening in your career or with Coho or whatever is a superpower right because so much of

burnout is I think a function of Framing and not of like actual workload and if you're contextual and like burnout happens a lot because people don't feel like they're making progress but mostly that progress is just because

they're zoomed in way too far and it feels like they're going backwards but if you actually can zoom out 3 6 9 12 months um it becomes like way easier to draw energy off these things but I'm not

always good at it for sure and I'm I'm probably like bad at it objectively Daniel just a question about that how

what if you use to learn to get better at it because you're saying you know like you you it's you sound super self-aware actually around noticing when it's

happening when it's not happening and I'm just wondering what are some of the strategies you've used to help you to be able to do it yeah so um fortunate to rely on a bunch like at

different points in my life I've relied on coaching mentors therapists all those things are like forcing functions it's it's yeah the real Beauty about any of those things is they force you to check in for

an hour a week and they actually you do it is like the job to step outside your day-to-day to think about those kind of things and so if you can like pre-wire

some of those things it's a big help I'll show you folks this this is what I've had some success it's called like a parata method I don't know if you folks have seen this but I'll share some links and you folks can share it in the show

notes but it's um it's basically kind of the pillars of my life and there's things like family being a father being a learner Joy Financial Independence CEO longevity and

then I have like pillars attached to these things and I just review those things at night and so um with a little Sharpie and a little uh dry erase marker and um that's been like a useful habit for me

um and then the other kind of third one that's that's been consistent throughout my life is exercise I try not to judge being in a negative headspace unless I've exercised and then if I've exercised and I'm still in a negative headspace I feel like ever in that

headspace that's amazing wow that's amazing that's incredible yeah so I mean what I'm hearing is that you've you've you've done a lot of the work in terms of

getting that support that you need to help you to have that mindset um and I'm I'm curious to see more about the pillars and how you what that process was for you I don't

know if we have space in this discussion for that but but also um giving yourself that space like just doing that exercise so that you don't

kind of take your own headspace too seriously too quickly yeah that's what I'm hearing I mean I think that the real trick right is like everybody knows what the right things to do are the the hard

part is remembering to do those things and and this is like just kind of a it's it's this is not in a hippie sense but it is a Consciousness question in

the sense of like so much of us is just living inside the own like linear stream of thoughts like that's 99 of all our lives and so if you can create the ability to step out of that and then you

will have a better chance of like having a more grounded perspective across these things but it's like I literally you know this was maybe a little bit over the top but I used to say I used to have like reminders that would go off every

two hours on my phone which just would say like how are you spending your time and it was just like a little reminder to be like oh where am I am I present you know and it's not like go work harder sometimes it was but it was more

just like stop like stop just being on autopilot you know I love that I mean it's it also sounds

like that technique helps you to check in with what's important to you and what you value I mean I don't think that circles back to what she was saying around the pool rather than the push and

I I just wondered what are those values and and how did you develop them because it sounds like you you're working from a very value-based

leadership style so I'm curious about that yeah that's a that's a good question um uh I mean the the

values that like I think we are we all internalize a lot of values that we like the core values and beliefs that we have we often get in our childhood and from our parents and from our community and

those kinds of things and so I think I grew up um to a single mom who you know worked very hard that's like work ethic is I think part of what I'm good at um I don't think that's I think that's

consistent with that and then we also like you know relied a lot on the community growing up and I we weren't impoverished by any stretch I don't want to create that picture but like to go to hockey practices and games and like there's

just like a lot of community supported so I do kind of feel a sense of social responsibility as well it's not overly complicated for me it's just like I'm trying to be useful at scale and then if I'm useful at scale I'll feel like I'm a

good person and then I might be like I'm a good person then you know I'll uh I'll like sleep better at night you know wow thank you

sure yeah I've heard you talk about how you view humility and the importance of humility too um and I wanted to ask you yeah if you

as you value humility so much like do you believe that you can be like fully sort of expressed and fully confident and remain humble or how do you sort of balance that

there is a tension there for sure like I I I I you know I I think there people can fight like humility with subservients sometimes and that's not more like

meekness and that's not at all the case I think humility as particularly as you get higher in your career is more important because it's so easy to get confirmation that you're right all the time you know what I mean and so humility is like really just staying

open to the possibility that you're wrong um and creating the conditions that folks you know psychological safety is a word that's thrown around a lot and is not is

a a janky word for a lot of reasons but like folks need psychological safety so that they can tell you when you're wrong you know um and so we do care about that here at

Coho uh so I think like humility in that sense is really important I think that false modesty which is often humility is not a good service particularly because a lot of Canadians are like falsely modest and I think it does not serve us

well um I think it's okay to have some bravado while also being humble to the possibility that you're wrong yeah yeah I was going to ask you about

the psychological safety and and actually um I've been in I've been in the in the shoes of being an employee and having the CEO and and

feeling the power of that uh Authority like and and knowing that like oh I actually like considered them a friend but being yeah it's like this Force that's hard to

explain that like you don't want to challenge it or you know like so yeah what do you what do you do to to maintain those conditions and like

do you have you found success like and you know being able to be challenged it's such a biased position to even ask me totally but it's it's um

this is the only like real job I've ever had as an adult I would say and so I am uh it took me a long time to realize how much weight was attached to the title like too long in terms of like how hard

it was for people to speak up if they had better information than me or whatever and so what I what I try and do now I am a CEO is like fairly operational and we'll go like click around and go do

and I think that that's the right posture and I don't like apologize for that but what I do do is I front load this with the team which is like look it's not in my interest if my hit rate is low and so I will go do this and

sometimes my hit rate will be high and sometimes my hit rate will be low and this system only works and it is a system if you folks just tell me and be like this is no longer productive and

then we can have that conversation as to whether it's productive or not but you have to create the conditions in advance for people to tell you to shut up or tell you that they think you're wrong or people that you know course correct you

um and you gotta surround yourself with people who will do that there's I I certainly have those people here at least at the highest levels and I'm trying to like sprinkle it down through

the organization yeah yeah let's go ahead Kim yeah I just I think you're saying something so important about psychological safety uh well a couple of things actually the

one is that it's something you set up in Advance it's something that will that you suddenly try and get into in the moment it's really about that trust in the

relationship to begin with right and I was just curious about what are some of the kind of characteristics you look for in

in people that you end up hiring that tell you that they would be those people who will tell you when you're wrong yeah so just maybe like I think that people

think of psychological safety in the context of like employee safety and and that's like an important but much smaller part of the equation like psychological safety pre is a precursor to high performance and I think if

people want to be on their front foot they have to feel like psychologically safe to like go take risks and do things and be wrong and all that kind of stuff um and so I think that's like an important nuance and distinction and

then look when it comes to the team I think that there's kind of like three qualities that map to this one is like humility

um like there is if if folks have a lot of ego wrapped up in what they do then you tend to have really unproductive conversations and and not objective conversations and it's much harder to get to truth the other side of that coin

that I really look for is actually warmth I think like warmth creates an openness in the culture and is a very useful posture for folks to have and like just a fun and nice thing to be

around is people who are warm versus kind of standoffish and then the third thing is like horsepower intellectual and and sort of

um in the sense that like if folks want to be able to do this they have to be able to keep up intellectually and and like basically procedurally from the way that we're operating at Coho and that takes like

that takes a certain degree of like Acumen and competence and and that has to be like clearly and visibly available um and I think if you have those three things and then you're set up quite well

uh and then yeah if you you gotta like from other conditions to let folks know that that is their expectation and if they're not doing if they're not speaking up if they're you know not not operating on a disagree and commit model

but sort of a passive aggressive you know uh uh type posture then then that is them not doing their job and so clearly setting the standards and the expectations to reinforce there's I

think an important part yeah that's that's super interesting I think uh where my mind goes and before we started recording you said do companies mostly

distributed now and I think about the warmth uh trait and how yeah I like I could see that being so important um

how do you how do you create that warmth on like a distributed culture um do you have to you know actually create the system to like

help it or to keep people just show up like on slack or in meetings and uh I found very little success in like

what I call like manufactured culture you know um like I don't know if this is exactly where you're going but we tried like coffee roulettes and like Zoom chats and like all the kind of like [ __ ] Hangouts

they just don't work they're not fun everybody has other stuff that they want to be doing and uh and so we haven't really been able so the the there's two things I think one is like I do think

that this is kind of an innate quality and and you can hire for it um you know warm and like and with that with warmth you tend to get I think it's probably correlated with more of like a

resilient optimism which is which is certainly a useful posture for folks to have um and then the other part about all this kind of is like when we get together and we do

get together as a leadership team once a year and as a company excuse me once a quarter and then as a company once a year we may actually increase that um it kind of is really pure like we're just there to connect as people because

we do all our work on the remote on the remote day-to-day and so when we're there we're like really just building connective tissue you know it really is like in the best interest surprise just to like go for a walk in

nature and have some laughs and whatever um and so we try and over rotate on those things when we're together to build the real relationship and I think I think we are a group of folks who care quite a bit around each other and

seems to be working I mean I think Daniel you're quite right um my other job is mentoring and supervising therapists and when I when I

choose someone to supervise I I also look for warmth and because I feel like wanted something that is innate

it's it's just temperament whereas the technical skills can be learned if the person is dedicated enough and has that intellect and that resilience and grit to do the work

so I'm I'm really kind of in I'm so intrigued by this conversation just because it sounds like you've done a lot

of the the psychological back work to make the performance easier when it comes to the actual day-to-day running although there's something thoughtful about that

um that I'm hearing yeah like um maybe I think I think that what we're trying to do here is

like I I do think all these things are completely couched in building a great business you know and I think in some ways and there's lots of different ways to build a great business but I think they're all like supportive of that

um and having a bunch of warm people around the table just like think about if you had a company full of warm people versus a company filled with like standoffish people which one of those companies can have better information flowing better

decision making like it's not even close you know um and so uh yeah I mean I I think so and um some of these human more human things

are not talked about as much and uh and I think that they're actually they're quite important in kind of being intentional culturally culturally intentional I think it's a good time

Kim to to ask uh Daniel about his experience with therapy and coaching and and yeah like personally and within the organization because I know you're very

deliberate and intentional about what goes on um but yeah I'd love to hear like what you've gotten out of therapy and or coaching and also how do you distinguish

the two um yeah yeah um yeah definitely definitely different but but probably on the gradient right and so

uh so if if on one side like therapy a good therapist should making these numbers up it will be like 80 personal and 20 business like they're obviously deeply correlated or deeply related

especially when you're the C the founder um and so you can't really untether them all the time uh and then and then you kind of flip that equation for a coach right where you're talking like very

specific problem set around tactical things that you're dealing with but but in order for either relationship to be successful I think you have to bring both parts of the equation otherwise

you're just missing a huge part of the map you know um so look I've done therapy in the form of like a lot of personal therapy um

couples therapy and and we still do couples therapy and it's like more of a tune-up and I think we do it like once a month our current our current thing is like I have a week with a therapist and then my wife does and then we do a

couples therapy and then I do and then she does and so it's kind of that's where we are today um I think that it's like as I said it's kind of a forcing function to step out

and important to step out and I do think that uh there's a guy named Jerry Colonna who's a really great CEO coach

at a company called reboot and uh I remember him saying ones that like your whatever whatever [ __ ] you carry is like a Founder will show up in your

company right and so if you lack self-awareness around these things like it will show up and your company is an outward manifestation of many of the things that you are as a human being and so like you kind of I think it's smart

to work on those things and the way that I think about all this stuff is like just self-awareness is just kind of like the filter that every conversation we will ever have has passed through right and so if you can actually catch

yourself and say oh I'm triggered or whatever you'll have a better chance of navigating that conversation successfully and then coaching is like we've we've always had coaching at Coho we have three full-time coaches at Coho

I can talk about the ROI of coaching how we think about it as a business because I think it's a no-brainer um and I think the math is super clear for me it's been you know like therapists are useless

generally when it comes to solving real business problems and so the ability to like combine those two worlds of like real experience that you can draw on particularly as a CEO where you kind of

there is you can't be totally honest with your team A lot of times we're we're there now with a strong c-suite but like and you certainly can't be totally honest with the board a lot of times and so is there like this

objective neutral party who's there just for you is an important part of like uh being able to think through some of these things yeah I uh I I think it's incredible and

I I feel like you're doing an incredible job at sort of uh explaining all these things like coaching therapy leading with values as all like the business

case for it which I totally get behind and I think that's it's very like professional almost here I think on this on this podcast like sure and our Kim

and I's business is like we just think that's just the way to do it regardless and I I guess like you know if you weren't the CEO of a of a big company like you know would you be doing these things

anyways if you had them used to you know what I mean like which is it which comes first I was using coaching before I started Coho like the first coach that I found

he was like it's like I knew nothing he like he was on Oprah and I was like oh you must be legit he was on Oprah and so I just found him on some like coaching website like a decade ago

and uh yeah I was paying for that one I didn't have very much money you know what I mean um just because uh yeah I felt I I look I I think that

it like it comes back to self-awareness and like is this like consistent theme throughout your career so I I am doing it for like very rational reasons but I think that those rational reasons are

like the emotional reasons that a lot of folks connect with you know yeah and I'm sure when you have to justify it to the board too you're you're damn good at that too totally

well but it's yeah it's like it's super easy right if you make one or two or five percent better decisions as a function of coaching then like it pays for itself many times over

it's incredible um yeah I wanted to uh transition a bit into uh like why do you think you you went down this road of Entrepreneurship if you

were to back pedal a little bit like do you did did you have to push yourself to become an entrepreneur or was it just like you knew that you were uh

I think that so I think that entrepreneur like when I was little I wanted to be a pirate you know it just like I think that lives of like Adventure my son when I'm on my front

foot I remember that most of being an entrepreneur is just about the sense of adventure um and so I think I was more solving for that uh you know can't when I went to UNI when I was finishing University

I went and interviewed at some places and the idea of like those people controlling my destiny they were interviewing me was like terrifying to me like whatever happens in my career

good or bad I'll live with it but I will be in control of that outcome to the degree that I can you know and so I remember just interviewing them like a

supply chain Logistics manager for Husky Oil or something like that I was like this seems like a nightmare and there's no way I'm like putting my chips on this table you know um

yeah and just like that you can do the conservative thing I'm sorry go ahead I was just curious like did you have that sort of like sense of like clearly you weren't thinking like I

need to get the first job that I'm offered like yeah you know uh where did that sort of like I guess like really sort of like I'd call it confidence or early patience or autonomy like come

from do you think yeah probably like look I mean I think that I would probably if I was gonna guess like draw that back to just a sense of self-worth

that was instilled by my mom you know um I took a year off after high school I went traveling for a year and like that was supportive and I think that that gave I'm super I think Gap years are amazing in terms of giving folks a sense

of like once you realize that you can kind of what your floor is and your floor is a lot higher than people I think Naturals intuitions are meaning doesn't take that much to have a job and pay your bills and do all that kind of

stuff and just be independent and like that life is still a pretty good life it kind of gives you more air cover to go and take a swing um and like like the other the other

part that's not lost on me is like I had the financial means to do so and many folks do not you know many folks have eighty thousand dollars in student debt and like not a lot of and so like you gotta

go get a job and like the thing that pays down the student debt is the next step very rationally and I was you know fortunate that I didn't I wasn't saddled with that kind of stuff

yeah yeah I can draw the connection to the what you just said about finances and Europe and building code that's that's badass um Kim I feel like you got something

good yeah I do actually I I wondered because I so I'm South African and now Canadian so I come from a different culture um even though I speak the same language

it's very very interesting to me um do you think the time away that Gap year helped you to think about Canadian

culture from a more objective point of view because it sounds like you've done like maybe is it just because you're in the banking sector that that you've kind

of really thought through the Canadian culture and approach to the sector did going did traveling or did something else help you to be able to have that

objectivity yeah I mean not not so so all and I've spent about two years of my life traveling like combined at various stops and starts um not so much that Gap year because I

was 18 and I was mostly interested in you know drinking beers Byron Bay or whatever it was at the time um but uh but I did go to school in Europe and then I did very directly get exposed

to a very different bank and climate and a very different and then I came back and I was like this is crazy this is how it is in Europe and I think without that you don't know and then I also think like when you go traveling

you and I've spent a lot of time in uh impoverished countries and you start to kind of realize well we've all already kind of won the lottery if you're living middle class or

even lower class life in Canada right and so um you know I I I think that it does kind of inform a bit of a sense of a this is probably a less obnoxious way to

say it say this but like a bit of responsibility as a global citizen to just try and be useful um when you see how many people are living on two dollars I remember being in Nepal and watching an 80 year old

woman work in the mind smashing rocks with other rocks you know and like and you just can't unsee that stuff you know in terms of how it informs

how you think about your like just what it is to be helpful I think do you think that's part of that

for sure to be useful I like because I was going to ask you about what motivates you but it sounded like that desire to be useful and those experiences and memories kind of

instilled it besides your yeah your values growing up yeah I mean I think that look I think there's values growing up I I think that that's that's definitely part of it is is seeing some

of that kind of stuff um can't help but but shape you oh but it's like you know and then you know part of and part of this therapy conversation it's also because I've got

like deep self-worth issues around um you know like you're not deep but I've got you know what these are things that are like part of my personal identity in terms of what it is to feel

good about the person that I am and am I hard working and am I whatever you know and so I think we all tell ourselves stories around this kind of stuff and mine happened to be correlated

to to working hard I think yeah I wanted to ask you about being a dad um where does that fall into your in terms of the roles that you play

as a human where does that fall into level of importance for you it's been fascinating it's it's a superpower in the sense that like I can

have a really bad day at work and my three-year-old doesn't care you know and it's and so it's like um look there's lots of parts that are like hard and time consuming or whatever

about it but it's it is just such a superpower because it is another one of those things that should have said it earlier but like forces you to be present in reality and not spin out about work you know

um so it's like yeah it's it's it's been amazing in that regard and like what's been interesting

is and just I'm being very open but like I have had to learn to measure myself as being a good father and like I a lot of the days I would measure that day predicated on whether I did good work or

hard work or a lot of work that day it was a very unnatural and remains a very unnatural thing to be at the end of the day be like ah maybe I wasn't that great as a CEO today but I was a great father and I was a great partner and like

creating feedback loops which actually give me energy which are actually part of my identity in those worlds is like something that's very new to me and I'm

not particularly good at it yet yeah I I can relate to that have you have you found that like do you think about a father as your identity at the end of the day and we were talking

online about you having an 18 month old yeah I think about it actually like uh first and foremost I think you know the more you listen to

successful you know in air quotes people at later in their life and they're always talking about time with their family and you know uh you know if you

see the number of separations that occur you know when you are an entrepreneur running a business so um again I'm also quite fortunate

um to be able to go at my own speed a little bit um but it's extremely important to me and I think like every day right now I'm biking my son to daycare cool like not

only is it amazing physically but it's like yeah it's really really special it's hard to have a bad day when you do that stuff exactly yeah exactly so Tim Tim Urban has this great he's a Blog

called wait but why I don't know if you all have seen it but he he reverse engineered the math and it's like by the time your kid leaves and is 18 and leaves the house you'll spend 95 percent of the time that you

will ever have spent with them in other words you on in total days together you get about 19 years with the average kid it's changes dramatically if you live in the same town and it also can be viewed

out with lens with lens of like time left with your parents but like it is it is you know after they turn 18 it's like it's very little you're at the 95 Mark

of your time with that that human you know so that's awesome it's awesome me and Lola go my daughter go for coffee is going for a coffee this morning we usually start days that way so it's great that's the best yeah I mean I

think a a big motivation for like even just doing this podcast not necessarily just for like people who are you know lucky enough to have families but you know we talk to people who outwardly are

successful um and and uh you know but part of it's selfish on my end and trying to figure out like what like what's important at this stage right

um but I I I sort of you know really want to put a spotlight on folks that can that way that have that balance I know a lot of people don't like the word balance right but

um Harmony or whatever you know work-life balance but uh you know people who are like living a life of intention and holding themselves accountable like that's the type of people we love

talking to and like that's why I wanted to talk to you uh from the outside I've uh I've kind of witnessed that and figured that but I guess on that point like is there anyone that you've looked

up to you know during your life it sounds like your mother was an inspiration but you know who are like the most badass leaders that that you see today that you you know

are inspired by yeah I mean I think that so I think that so A few names come to mind um of various different places one of

them is uh uh Sam Harris I think Sam Harris uh is one of the highest quality thinkers and I think he taught me how to think and I think you can agree or disagree with his positions but he's

certainly like intellectually courageous and intellectually honest and so I I've followed his work forever and he's probably been the single most useful

person uh in that regard um and then the for the Rams have a uh and I'm not a big

NFL fan but I when I find these folks I tend to go deep on them there's a the Rams head coach is the youngest coach of in the NFL he's might not be any more he goes at the time got an head coaching

job of 32. uh his name's Sean McVay and he's if you like track down his podcast he's incredible in terms of how to think about so many of these Dimensions um and then the third thing is just like

I read a lot um books are I've I'm uh I do believe in the power of reading for sure and uh it fairly intentional about what I read so

I I know that's like not really what you ask but those are kind of the big three things in addition to a mom and a wonderful stepfather and you know great great family around me yeah I was going to mention it before

when you were talking about reading and the responsibility especially of running like a financial company in like the volatile Financial world that we live in but it sounds like you approach reading

like professionally almost as like if you read advice it's not just to be like hmm like maybe we'll like maybe this will work or not or something it sounds like you're you're looking for maybe some guidance

from people who've done it before right again it's part of your job almost is that maybe I'm wrong yeah no I I do think it is part of your job like if I'm doing my job I should be making fewer and fewer decisions of higher and higher

quality right and so but I think just because I have a uh like a rant attached to this but I do think people spend I think that 99 of business books are [ __ ] and I think

most people read the wrong things and I think but if you read like history um there's certain like things which are Evergreen in terms of the usefulness of their knowledge and it's and it's history is one of those things human

nature is one of those things biology is one of those things physics is and so all of these things can like be drawn on and applied to a lot of different scenarios whereas like the shelf life of

what happened in the news today will be useless in 24 hours so like the half-life of that knowledge is very quick and literally

a hundred times less than the half-life of like reading a biography on like uh I just read the biography of the Wright brothers which is incredible

um and you know it's watching this like these two little brothers stand up against enormously well-funded U.S

projects and um you know increasing military tensions and uh competition from France and all these different things it's like you draw a lot from those kinds of things

um that are way more useful than I don't know some book about smart shortcuts you can take around Excel or something like that yeah yeah from the

lens of like being a parent and even yeah just like in this world of like Tech and social media and now ai um have you thought about how do you

try to influence that like independent thinking in the world of like endless distraction and also like super computers being able to solve problems

for our kids yeah you mean for me or or like publicly in that like in the public Arena yeah or both yeah both I mean I I have thought about it with in

the sense of my kids like I don't know what the nobody knows what that future state is going to look like but I think the the three things that I try and really focus on is values for my kids

are like kindness curiosity and diligence and I think if you have those three things you will be and then if you wrap that with like agency and the belief that you are

competent as a human being and the ability to like go which I think follows curiosity um that I think that you'll end up in the right place like I yeah I don't know what the outcomes are but I think those

are like the inputs to get to good outcomes when there's all kinds of volatility around what the job market will look like in 12 months or let alone 20 years you know um

more publicly and like at a social level not really I don't think so yeah yeah okay Kim I'm curious what you think about this but I I love those

values um and I'm curious about the the curious about curiosity uh and and how you think about like making space for your kids to

be curious because I'm not a therapist Kim is uh and uh I've like read a lot that you know approaching depression with curiosity is often and it's not

like you can't just like flip from depressed to curious but like I've read that Curiosity uh is almost the opposite of depression and uh yeah Kim I'm wondering if you can comment on that

because I think that's really so interesting I mean I think because curiosity implies playfulness so and and that playfulness

is a a lack of fear about being wrong like you were talking about earlier Daniel um and openness to what's happening in front of you and the ability to be present because

when we're curious we're fully present in what's happening in that moment um and so if we can't trust that to depression you know a state of

depression is a state of rumination of either worrying about the future or the past um it's a sense of hopelessness and

and actually being very self-critical a quite a bleak Outlook as opposed to that Curiosity and and that um that playfulness

that's a curious energy has yeah that's a great answer um sorry go ahead yeah there's like fostering curiosity in your kids say what does that look like does that just

look like allowing them the space to explore yeah so I try and be really intentional about I don't like to say you're so beautiful or you're so smart

or kind of these fixed and innate qualities I like to say you tried really hard and I like to like focus on process compliments I still tell her she's

beautiful all the time but like um I you know that that's kind of what it shows up and then look the reason I think it's so important is because there is more Curious you are I think the faster you will discover the things that

fill your tank as a human being you know and so if you can give them the sense of like they will figure it I I believe they will figure it out if they feel like

they have agency and then they're curious to go explore whatever those things are that that inform their career or their Hobbies or whatever you know I

just think it's an important part of a uh of figuring out your your equation it's also an important what you're talking about asking if you read Andrew duck quotes

because it sounds like you have you know it's that that um that ability to be focused on the process rather than an

outcome or or an Accolade and you know like I'm beautiful or I'm I'm this or I'm that but rather what is the process been like for me and

my agency around totally life right around doing totally yeah I think that's right um the Bill Walsh has a great book here called the score will take care of

itself and it's just and there's lots of who have written about that's one of my favorites and it's just he's also an NFL coach um but yeah the if you focus on the process over a long enough time those those returns compound and I think I

think that's right and one of the things that I do struggle with that I not yet because she's so little but is like this notion of diligence which is this third one which is like you know when your kid gets frustrated and

doesn't want to go to gym class you know do you push them to go to gym class and like for how long do you push them to go to gym class because it would there's many like you will have Peaks and valleys in your relationship

with sport or whatever those things are but you want to do those for a long time and I think it's doing a disservice if you let them quit very easily but I also there's a clearly a place where you can take that too far you know and so I

haven't I haven't figured that out one out yet Kim maybe you know but it is something that I'm thinking about I mean like fee and honest I don't have children

yeah so I can't speak to to being a parent I can only speak to dealing with the adults that are the consequence of parents doing a lot of you see the downtown

yeah I do want that work um but I think that it depends on the child like because each child is different right so

there's no uniform you can apply this rule with everyone um I also think that I mean this I must be honest this is why South African

Heritage I guess as well but we're quite hardy people and we believe in doing tough things totally so you know so we we pride ourselves I think on

self-discipline um and just like knuckling down and doing the work um and I and that is certainly something that has been instilled in me so I have a bias towards

a festival towards self-discipline um and part of grit is perseverance it's the ability to do something that's hard and when it's

gets tough keep going but then on the other hand um the ability to be compassionate with yourself is to see when you're pushing yourself too far

so it's I think it's a balance of both kind of like the breaks versus the push right I just I don't know let's answer your question

I agree sorry Rob go ahead I think that was an awesome just aside there and uh reflection so thank thank you for that yeah I want to be conscious of your time and I just wanted to ask you one more

question before we wrap it up here but um how do you view uh you know you're in one role right now uh how do you view the permanence of that and just like

maintaining your fulfillment you know in the next year and the next several years um you know how do you maintain that

yeah I mean I I think that I remember having a conversation with one of our investors a couple weeks ago and um he was he was ranting and slash venting

about another CEO in a portfolio being like this guy just he's not the right guy and um I have said that I will sit in this chair until I no longer think I'm

the right person to do so uh and today I think I am the right person to do so and then I've also said to the board if you no longer think I'm the right person to do so I want you to tell me so I've

tried to kind of front load that as well um and so I don't know man I don't have a I don't have like a long-term game plan um I do think that we're in a like particularly in this market cycle and

where we are with the company uh I need to see this thing through for at least the next two or three years here and just make sure the company's on on solid footing and I don't think anybody else

would be positioned to do that um today and but and then you know I don't know I don't know I have a I have a goal to take a one-year sabbatical with my family when the kids are a little bit older so that they're

at some point that will come to a head but who knows it's a long ways off that is exciting uh and uh just to kind of wrap things up here I I believe you're you're are you sort of always

hiring a Coho and like where can people find out more about working yeah um we are we are hiring not as much as we were but we still are hiring there's probably 15 open rolls or something like that right now so come to the website

check it out we're in the App Store um and then you can follow me at Twitter on Dan Ebbs and then I'm I'm more active probably on LinkedIn and someone on Twitter but that that's where I'm I'm

doing my stuff so drop that all right well thank you so much for joining us today and hope you have a great weekend I understand you're traveling some friends so thank you very

much awesome thanks Daniel it was it was great to meet you um sorry you couldn't see me but it was great to see you I assume you have a face and a body [Music]

thank you foreign to this episode of the actualize podcast you can find the show notes for this

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you next time [Music]