I asked a friend of mine to come because um I think his story is so interesting so we've all been many of you have been in the community for a while um and Adam is running uh in trada so he stepped into this role a couple of years ago and one of the most interesting things for me as I sit in my role for women in Tech is we know a lot about companies and about how women feel about them it's just the ecosystem that we sit in women for some reason have a very different underground network of how they talk about companies and how they ask for referrals and how they think about companies that they should go to and I told Adam this too A couple of years ago um no one would have ever published this but women were not going to go work at inada it was a company that women were not attracted to um for a whole series of of reasons and Adam came in two years ago and he has completely changed that there are actually more women Tech award finalists working at inada today than any other company in the state and I'm fascinated by this journey because in the world of tech and in the world of trying to change cultures this is a constant conversation everyone asks how do I hire more women everyone asks how do I increase the number of women in Tech and then to have someone do that in two years it really is amazing and something that we can learn so much from so I asked Adam to come and join me so we could talk a little bit about what that Journey has been like and how he's been able to change something that I'm not sure I would have believed could have changed and so Adam thank you for being here and please join me on [Applause] stage thanks for having me I'm very nervous you're very nervous well it's probably that underground Network you were just talking about but yes I wore my Tiffany Air Force Ones to impress everybody like of those yeah that's very that's very nice yeah Adam came and he's like I didn't really think there'd be that many people this is a big audience but I'm excited and it's a great audience okay so you tell us a little bit about how you ended up joining in trada oh gosh U talking about taking a breather so uh company I ran before this was called Podium um was there for four and a half years with the the two co-founders loved every second of it and it we went from 1 to 100 million of ARR in 4 and a half years and it almost drove me into the ground personally emotionally spiritually with my family so I Katy moral from Podium by the way I see so many people I've worked with before this is making it a lot less uh making me a lot less nervous um we had like a midlife crisis my wife and I we moved down to San Clement California and I kind of thought I was just done like I found myself in the hospital one night um at the end of 2019 after a series of of um just illnesses and things that went wrong and left and I was just planning on I didn't know what I was going to do sit on boards join a venture fund maybe go take a CEO gig I didn't really know um learned a lot about myself during that year um figured out what was important to me um and was able to really reflect on the companies that I had been a part of building what I was proud of what kind of was things I would do differently um and there was one convers ation I remember when Google Ventures invested in Podium I remember the partner was on site and they brought their talent team in to meet with us from Google Ventures and they showed us a quad chart and it was a study that Google Ventures had done on finding a balance between high performance and psychological safety and like nobody can do that and I remembered thinking at the time we were really good at performance at that business and not good at psychological safety so that's when I I kind of decided like all right I want to find finally figure out how to do both of those um and I had I set up a few rules for myself one okay I'm not going to work with anyone I don't like ever again so I get to pick the exact team I get to pick the board and I get to pick all the investors so I thought I had to start something new like to get all of those you have to start a company right so I I had I had a a plan for a business came out to Utah had met with like Josh James and um Jeremy Andress and uh Ryan Smith and my plan was to tell them about my idea get him to invest and make their companies buy it so Dave ends up finding out it's good strategy right uh Dave finds out I'm interested in getting back in the game and we start talking about why don't you come to inada and as I learned more um there was no board there was no execu team and there were no investors so it but there were 2200 employees and this beautiful business um the other thing that I really wanted to find in my next gig is every business I've ever started was like a horizontal marketing software product that is great it adds value but at the end of the day if it doesn't work it's not that big of a deal and I wanted to find a business that really impacted The Human Experience and made it better and I found that in atada um fell in love with the place and um it's it's I think it's going to be one of the most important companies ever built in Utah partially because of what we do I mean you think about when people go find we so we build software for apartment communities you think about when people go find new apartments those are usually accompanied by very emotional events um having babies uh marriage graduation divorce um you know someone in the family is sick that requires you to move and our software helps these Frontline Community managers job so much easier so they can focus on that human aspect um and we can take all the operational stuff that out of the way so that's why I joined that's why I fell in love with it it's an amazing business it was amazing long before I got there um but I don't know if the story was being told about how great it could be and that's also what partially attracted me is um you know I'm a student of kind of the history of silicon slopes and I found uh that the legacy of companies that are built here just become the legacy of those who built it and the people who built in trada which is far more than just a few people or a few Founders it's many Executives over 20 years they deserve that you know that Legacy and so I'm just I I'm honored to be a part of it and play a small um you know play a small role okay so when you joined um and there were no women around the table did you like what was your how did how did that journey start of transforming that culture gosh this was the question you sent me yesterday that made me super super nervous so let me just tell everyone one of my weird little triggers is most people with my title you're not one of them are like narcissistic sociopaths right I don't like to be confused with one of those so when you send this question I'm like whatever I say I don't want it to come out is me saying because I'm so amazing so just know that's not what I'm saying here um no it's I took a very like I said there was no board no exec team no investors so we we I was really careful about who those few people are you know when companies are really small the culture is really the culture of the founders personalities and then once you hit about 50 employees it kind of becomes the collective um personalities that create the culture and then at that point as a leader or a founder of a business the only control you have over the culture is who you invite into it this was a 2200 person company that I joined in the middle of Co with a culture that I had to like train morph myself into so the only thing I really could control is who I invited into it and people who were already there and amazing there's actually a lot of amazing uh women in leadership roles at an trata who were there before I came um many of them uh that will be Executives in this community for a long long time it was finding the people who wanted to go you know have the same goals as me the same folks on diversity and making sure that the new Executives I brought in had that same priority um you know so one of the first Executives that joined was our CTO Jason Taylor who is Super Active in this community and Jason is a huge supporter of of um women in Tech it was important to him as well and then it just starts to snowball and then all of a sudden you get like all of a sudden Katherine Wong works here and I'm like I don't even know how that happened exactly um but I've known Katherine for 14 years and um I couldn't be more honored to have someone of that quality here so when you sent me that that stat of eight women in Tech finalists that work in TR out I was super humbled by that and that wasn't like a goal I wrote on whiteboard two and a half years ago but I'm I'm I'm honored that that's happened um I think it's important that it's happened um when you were showing all your stats I was glad that we we beat all of them at inada although we still have a long way to go we've got amazing leaders there like Katherine I had to peel her out of retirement and I won't let her go back into retirement because she needs to be a multi-time CEO in this community like she's going to be a really really good one so don't worry I won't let her retire again what do you think it you have seen from the day that you started to today that have been the biggest kind of changes or even if you had to isolate like you know this is one thing I've learned that I now would do time and time again because it's much s made such a meaningful difference for your ability to retain that kind of talent um I've been on kind of a journey over the last few years that started that year I took off in San Clement of trying to become acutely self-aware of my own unconscious biases and my strengths and my weaknesses look I grew up like a couple miles down the road here in South Jordan in the river bottoms I grew up in the predominant religion I'm a white dude I like to cycle I kind of have certain groups I go to Jazz games I go to BYU football games I kind of have inherent unconscious biases that I don't know about and I'm going to make fun of myself for a minute one of them who Karine Clark Karine Clark um I hired her to be the CEO of Allegiance and her first day on the job job was it was like January 2nd and at Allegiance oh I'm such an idiot over the Christmas break I would do a beard growing competition like I really did this and then the women would vote on who had the best beard what were you thinking exactly that was exactly Kar came she like what is your problem I'm like yeah this might have been a mistake um there's just dumb like that was clear back in 2009 like thank goodness that like I I've just been I've tried to become acutely aware of that so I think for any leader that's probably been the main thing I've learned is you have to have a deep understanding for what those are um and what and it's the reason you need diversity on your team um and not diversity just for gender or for race or any other specific but you need diversity of thought and the way that people think and the way that they bring ideas together I asked Katherine this question I'm like why did you come and like she made this one interesting observation she said I could tell that your exec offsites weren't boys trips they were like we would have like a one-day offsite at a hotel that was near the office and then I wanted people to be able to go home to like take kids to mountain bike practice or to go to you know the recital I didn't know that that that was an unconscious bias that in my past I probably was very guilty of of turning exec offsites into these three-day boys trips and not even realizing that that's unconsciously what I was doing so for me that's probably my biggest learning is um if you don't understand that you're not even going to know when you're like stepping on trip wires so how do we help other people like have those ahas like you had this really deep journey and because of that it actually whether you thought about all the steps that you were changing or not the results that I see from the community I know Catherine really well right and like I also know she wouldn't have made that choice four years ago and so to there's this this question I always have in my mind of we still have companies who haven't evolved in the same way who haven't embraced that same thinking and so I'm always thinking about like what are the things like we hold we this is you are a perfect example of changing something that is Meaningful for all of these all of us in the room and how do we create that as a catalyst for change in other things because if you didn't have that experience over the last four years it might you might not have been on the same path and we don't want everyone to have to have that experience to realize they must make change um I mean that's a really really good question I think what you're doing here is is helping like I I stumbled into a lot of this self-awareness and this desire to kind of figure out what my own kind of dark side was um when I'm talking to other CEOs I talk a lot about having EXA Co my exec coach is here in the room Rachel Jensen right over there I see her every week uh I've got a wife they will show me when I'm messing up I don't know if my mom's here I've got a strong mom like I I've been able to look up to these examples and the more examples you have of strong women in leadership the easier it's going to get for the Next Generation to come through so I'm not trying to plug my podcast but the fourth node podcast we released yesterday we interviewed Karine um so Karine Clark um and she she she has great advice for everyone in this room but also for leaders she's like we need leaders whether you're male female whatever pushing women into opportunities giving them at bats like the I few things I'm pretty good at as a CEOs I know how to raise money I'm really good at running board meetings I know how to build teams the best thing I can do is teach Katherine how to run board meetings like I do and then when she's running her board meetings she's had some app bats the only way to run a board meeting is to do it wrong a few times the only way to raise money is to ra money at really bad terms and go sell a company and be like oh that's what a participating preferred preference is I should not have that the next time I raise money not it um I try to like just be inclusive in not that everything I do is right because it for sure isn't um but I just try and be really open about why I do what I do how I do it and just try and give people as many BS as we can because that's the only way we really change it longterm and like you said the 50-year thing is not acceptable for me either and the only way we change that is we have to accelerate that training and the at bats and the exposure and the experience to some of these difficult things that you can't get until you just try it you know okay thank you for sharing that it's something that I firmly believe too is this idea of acceleration right put people in situations they can't normally get into or in in ways that you have all this experience that if they can learn they're just so much better as you've thought about how this then permeates the rest of your culture Are there specific things that you're doing I do actually believe even at a 2200 person company that the CEO sets the tone and what they expect from their peers and then those people down it does Cascade down very strongly but we also have gaps in leadership at all stages of the company right who where they also too have been changed to embrace those things are there intentional ways that you're working with the rest of your leadership to really Embrace these changes yeah so the way I kind of run a business is so my background is I have I have a masters of accounting so I'm a numbers nerd and so for me to be able to tell the story of where we're going for the business is I just do it with math um so when I got there I took kind of the broader leadership group which has a lot of really really strong women in it um we meet once a month at least try to at least every couple months and I just started trying to teach them how like the math of SAS Works growth rates what the rule of 40 is what gross margin means what CAC ratio is LTV to CAC and then we we all started speaking the same language so they kind of knew really what I was trying to drive and what's important to me and I probably I've always felt this but in torado we've been a far more intentional about it is if we can't build a financially successful business without doing a lot of good in our community it's not worth it I'd rather go ride my bike in Stan clenia again cuz that was a lot funner than this is a really hard job um so we've we've been very deliberate and took a lot of this from Mike m and Ryan Smith with fight for the fight I talked to them once about why did you pick that how did that come about and they said well most zsr programs sprinkle a little bit across a million different little things and then you don't make an impact um if you pick a couple you can really make a difference so we picked two one is you know we're we want to be a big sponsor and supporter of this group and then we've also chosen the foster care system in in Utah that Christian Andress and a few of others have partnered with us on you know it's one thing feel strongly about is if our state can't take care of the most vulnerable children um in our state then we shouldn't be proud of of of everything else that we love to brag about about how cool Utah is if we don't take care of foster kids like we really shouldn't be bragging about anything and I've just tried to make that super inclusive with the the entire leadership group and I feel like we have a lot of unity it was tough entering a 2200 person company with these leaders who've done things for 10 12 15 18 years and I just had to be very explicit and intentional about just just explaining the why and what the end goal would be um and some didn't like it and left and that was totally fine and Ashley CI and people like K and Emma Corbett they stayed um and I'm grateful they did so I really appreciate you letting me ask all these hard questions along along the way because I think it is so critical to what that is so what's that when you when you think it's kind of my final question for you here when you think of all of the other CEOs what's the one thing that you're that you think they should all hear about as your summary of this journey that you've been on that you think would help them to also Drive change gosh also I don't follow any question scripts that I ever get of anyone it's also true this is great um you've all seen a star is born with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga you know when before she goes out for her big solo performance and they're on that rooftop looking at the billboard of her and Bradley Cooper says to her you better reach deep down inside and you better believe the words that you're going to say cuz if you don't really believe them they're going to know it and that's probably the advice I give to other leaders is you really actually better care about diversity because people are getting too smart now they don't believe the TED Talks anymore they don't believe you can jump up in front of a Town Hall you can do press releases you can come and pay money to to to organizations but if you don't fundamentally believe fundamentally believe it and you can't authentically be who you are um it's just not going to work long term um so Katherine gave me another cheat uh before coming in there's a Mackenzie article uh talking about kind of latest trends in women in Tech I think you covered a lot of the the the stats but one of the themes was women in in business in particular are becoming far more aware of facades inside companies and they're congregating to the companies that believe it and actually believe and do diversity the right way which if so for any other CEO or leader out there if you truly believe it and you'll go execute on it you're going to have an amazing competitive Advantage CU I've watched it as all these amazing women have come and joined and have been promoted here they're like little centers of gravity that start to attract the very very best people so you know a lot of the work is now in their hands of continuing on and continuing to bring in talent and I just feel fortunate like I said to be a small part of it thank you thank you for all your work and sharing the journey please join me and thanking Adam for stepping on stage today thank you very much appreciate it