North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader, it's your job to deliver. But where do you focus? Where do you direct your time, your team, your budget, and your emotional energy?

We're learning this together on the North Star Leaders Podcast. In this podcast, I talk to purpose-driven leaders about the choices that they make to create audacious economic value while also realizing their distinctive purpose. I'm Lindsay Peterson, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of the North Star Leaders Podcast.

Let's get to it. Today, I'm really happy to be joined by Deborah Kilpatrick, who's formerly CEO and board chair of Evidation Health. Evidation Health is a technology company that pioneered the use of person-generated health data in real-world evidence.

She also founded MedTech Women and is currently partner at Sonder Capital. Deborah, welcome to the show.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Thank you, Lindsay.

It's so nice to be here.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's nice to be here with you. To start us off, Deborah, what is the most energizing part of your job now that others would never guess from the outside?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Wow, what an interesting question. I think that everybody would probably expect that it's something to do with being at the cutting edge of medical technology and science and engineering and kind of seeing what's next coming on the horizon. But there's some nuance to that that, for me personally, I really dig, which is I like the figuring it out part.

And I think to be a really good early-stage investor, an early-stage builder, an early-stage founder, or just to work in kind of the early-stage innovation space, especially in healthcare and life sciences, you have to be really willing to like and love the figuring out part because there's a lot of figuring it out. And you can't be an expert on everything, right? Like you can't be, I mean, most people can't.

I can't be an expert on everything. I can't be an expert on physiology and biology and energy modalities and medicine and engineering, you know what I mean? So you try to find a way to constantly learn and sort through the complexity from a space or state of strength that is your domain.

And that I really like. I like that part.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's because it's so early-stage and because of the kind of the nexus of these different fields of knowledge, there's this intellectual, kind of the deep intellectual part of it, but there's also like a kind of roll up your sleeves and like get the nitty gritty down.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yes, that's exactly it. Yeah, that's totally it.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that.

Is that new for you as now that you're a partner at Sonder Capital or is this something that has always been really like lit you up?

Deborah Kilpatrick

It's always lit me up. In fact, it's why I'm very convinced that if Georgia Tech had let me go to grad school forever and just I could just keep getting degrees and PhDs and didn't have to pay for them, I would have just kept doing it forever.

I really, really, really liked and like the figuring it out part and don't mind the complexity. It's part of the game to me. So I've known that about myself for a long time.

And in fact, of course, it can be an Achilles heel, right? Like if I'm not careful and not self-aware about this, then I can always default to really, really hard things or working for really, really complex things, maybe unnecessarily. And I have to be self-aware about that.

But yes, I've known this about myself for a while.

Lindsay Pedersen

You mean like you could get because you so enjoy the figuring it out, you could stay there longer than is necessary?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Exactly.

And so I used to or pick unnecessarily hard things to work with, right? Or in fact, I can remember at some point during my last year or so of graduate school, when as a PhD student in science engineering, you always have sort of your last set of experiments and they're designed to kind of confirm and really solidify the things that you believe that you nailed down by that point. And I can remember being in that phase and having to make up kind of a rubric for myself.

Like if I've spent more than 90 minutes on this aspect of this problem, I'm probably done. You know what I mean? Like I would really have to pick patterns of behavior out that indicated I was delving a little bit too long on the complexity and that I probably was done.

And I had known this about myself and know how to work in this space for myself for a long time.

Lindsay Pedersen

Would the Deborah of the PhD student days be surprised to know that Deborah became a CEO, a co-CEO? What led to that?

Like what was that transition or arc?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yes, she would have been absolutely shocked. In fact, she would have been in deep denial and said that will never happen.

And I have this strange, but now very clear pattern of saying I will never do fill in the blank. And then within a relatively short period of time, I'm doing that exact thing, including the job I'm in now. Because when I was, I so liked being an academic, I mean, a grad student that I always thought until the last year of my PhD program that I was going to stay in academic.

I really was like tenure track professor, tier one research university, like that was going to be my thing. And then it wasn't like that. I just sort of had this realization that like, nope, that's not what you're here to do.

So I left, turned down my postdocs and then went into industry where I was in R&D, which is what I expected I would spend my whole life doing. And in fact, had gotten opportunities to go into more general management outside of our research and development, even a guided corporation, you know, which is where I spent the early part of my med tech career. And I turned them down because I wanted to like, I'm an R&D person.

That's what I do. That's what I do. And so I envisioned myself maybe at most kind of becoming like a VP of R&D or a chief technical officer at a small company or something like that, but always staying in very technical leadership roles or technical contribution roles.

So I never thought I would go into general management. I certainly never thought I would go into general management in C-suite roles. And I certainly didn't think I'd ever become venture capitalist.

So like it just kind of evolved over time. But no, the Deborah Kilpatrick of 1990, mid 1990s would have said absolutely no effing way.

Lindsay Pedersen

Is the voice that told you your last year of being a PhD student, maybe this isn't for me, is that related to the voice that like pushed you to actually be willing to do the general management role and ultimately C-suite? Like, is that a similar nudge from inside?

Deborah Kilpatrick

It is. It's a desire to look really objectively at like, what is really getting me out of bed every day?

What am I really both enjoying and feeling challenged by, but also where am I maximizing impact? Like where am I maximum impact, like truly? It became very clear when I sort of looked at it really objectively like that, my last year of grad school, that it wasn't going to be in academics, that it wasn't.

And then, you know, later on, when I was going into general management, it was becoming clear to me that my best role for impact probably wasn't inventing the things or researching the things, but helping those things that got invented or researched or discovered get to a commercial stage. And once I kind of locked in on that, and I was like, wow, that's a really different way of being innovated and a really different way of doing early stage innovation and R&D that I hadn't thought of myself doing. But once I saw it and saw that I could do it and saw that I was having impact doing it, it was very clear.

And so then it's been just very sort of, if that was the ice cream, my whole later part of my career has been about, you know, flavors of that ice cream.

Lindsay Pedersen

Wow. I love that.

So now that you are a leader and you have been a leader for a lot of your career now, I've heard you say that everything in your life stems from having a high school football coach father in rural Georgia. How did that distinctive upbringing shape the way that you lead and the way that you build teams?

Deborah Kilpatrick

It's so funny.

I was just talking to my colleague before we got on this interview and she was like, oh, what are you talking about? I said, I think we're talking about like leadership and different styles of leadership and formats of leadership. And she said, oh, what's your leadership style?

And I said, Southern high school football coach. And she laughed because she's like, yeah, that's it. There's something about having grown up with my, watching my father and by small town in the south, I mean really small town, like 2000 people, like 10,000 people in the county, you know, there's more churches than there are traffic lights, you know, like really, really small town.

And so Friday night lights is a really big deal. And, you know, I would say it's almost as important as the churches in terms of infrastructure of the community in these, in these small towns. And my dad was, it's funny, the older I got, the more I realized, yes, he was of course coaching plays on the field and coaching people on the field and coaching teams and coaching players.

But what he was really doing is really developing people to do things together that they couldn't do alone. And that became somehow in my brain and my psyche, I think I really absorbed that. And from a sort of leadership intention standpoint, have always wanted to be a part of groups doing something really like special and magical and hard and, but doing things that none of us can do by ourselves and being better on the other side of it, both as a group and as individuals.

And so when I was a CEO, I always wanted to have a company that when you came to work there, no matter how long you stayed there, you learned something and you were better on the other side than when you came in, right. In terms of some skill or the way you thought about yourself or the way you thought about your role or your contributions. And I definitely learned that from him for sure.

I did. I really believe I was exposed to that, you know, from the time that I was, I was born during football season in 1967. And I'm quite certain that I was an infant at a football game in 1967, you know, just kind of watched him for many, many years doing exactly that.

And he just did it on football field.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's like, there's a transformation that happens the before and after, before I've been on this team, before I've had this group experience and after I'm different, I have a skill I didn't previously have, or I have a maybe scars that benefit me in some ways.

Deborah Kilpatrick

But I am changed by that experience somehow.

And having, like I said, like a leadership intention that has that as part of the intention, I think is important.

Lindsay Pedersen

What would your teammates or like your colleague that you even just talked to that nodded her head when you said that you are like your dad in this way, what is it about your leadership style that, what are you like as a leader? And how is that similar or different from the leadership of your dad as a coach?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Well, you know, one of the things that I can remember my father telling me growing up in different situations is like, remember the most important score is not the one on the scoreboard. It's the one that you keep to yourself. It's the idea that to truly become number one, you must constantly strive to surpass yourself, not the competition.

He even gave me a poster once that I can see in my mind right now that was on my bedroom wall growing up until the time I went to college that said exactly that. And there's a kernel of that in my mindset around how I want to show up on a team and how I want people to show up to be on a team. I want us all to bring our best selves.

And in doing that, we don't really know what we're capable of. We don't really know as a group until we come together and just do it. But I do know that to maximize our impact on any team, we've all got to really surpass ourselves on the individual level in some way.

For some people, it might be physical. For some people, it might be mental. For some people, it might be skills development.

For some people, it could be interpersonal development. It could be anything. But for us to accomplish the most that we're here to accomplish, and I think for people in healthcare and life sciences and med tech, like, this is real.

Like, hopefully we're all in it because we're trying to make a difference for patients and physicians and nurses at the end of the day. This is serious. We should bring our best selves.

And by the way, that pain and comfortableness we feel sometimes in doing that, that's called growth. And so, you know, not shy away from the growth part of it that's going to occur too. And individually, there's a fire.

Lindsay Pedersen

And individually, there's a fire. There's a drive for almost like some intrinsic deep, whether it's change or improvement or some proof that there's some, like, fire there that's individual. And then there's also the fire, the collective fire of the team that requires everybody's individual fire.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yeah, that's exactly it. Like, the team is not a, it is both a singular thing and a collection of singular things.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, that's such a, it's such a neat kind of just a position of both and, of individuals and it's the group. So you also, when you were with Evidation Health, you and Christine Lemke pioneered the co-CEO model at Evidation, which is rare in any industry. What did you learn about leadership when you shared leadership? And how can the rest of us who are not maybe sharing the helm as directly, what can we learn from that?

Deborah Kilpatrick

It's funny, it's probably one of the things that Christine and I, individually and together, have been asked about more than any other thing.

Because it's so unusual, right? It's so hard probably to make work. It didn't feel hard to us.

And maybe that's part of the question. Like, I think that in our case, I think there are reasons that it worked that have something to do with, first of all, we have very different domains of expertise. Like, really different skill sets, really different experiences.

Like, I had worked at, my first, you know, industry job was really in the aerospace industry. In MedTech, it was at Guidant Corporation. You know, when she was working at Microsoft doing Xbox stuff, like, it's like, we came from these really, really different worlds and experiences that we both mutually knew we didn't know and respected the other person's knowledge and expertise.

So, that's part of it. I think on a personal level, we like each other. Like, we still talk every week, even though we're not in the company together anymore.

And so, there's a thought partnership there that is, I think, important for both of us. Like, I think for that kind of model, that kind of shared leadership model to work, you want somebody with whom you can both have radical candor. Like, truly, you really need to be able to have very hard, open conversations about anything.

And at the same time, use the yin and yang of that to turn it into a productive tension, such that your only job really is to get to the best answer collectively. It's not your job to be right. It's not her job to be right.

You know what I mean? It's our job collectively to get to the best answer, the best decision, the best next action, the best whatever for the company. And we both were really comfortable in that mindset.

And we were really comfortable deferring to one another in cases where one of us felt really compelled by something. So, it's a form of risk-taking. And we're both really risk-tolerant people in that context.

And so, to me, that may be the easiest way to explain to people in some ways, right? Because I've talked to a lot of people about the Co-CEO model. And one of the comments I always get back from seeing CEOs is like, I don't think, I don't know how that would work for me.

And when I ask, oh, why do you think that? And it's like, well, I don't know how I would let somebody else make a decision. And I think that's the part that isn't clicking, right?

And it's not that we ever let the other one make a decision. It's just sometimes we deferred to the other's opinion or expertise for our collective decision. And so, it's just a really different kind of model.

And I can't say that it would work for everybody, of course. And I can't even say that it would necessarily work for either one of us with other people. It's just kind of this magical pairing that for us really worked.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. It sounds like so much of it is fit. It sounds a lot like marriage in some ways, actually.

Like there's 95% of it are the raw materials going in together, a good fit with one another.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yes. Yes.

We used to refer to each other as we were each other's work wives.

Lindsay Pedersen

Really?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Oh, yes, for sure.

Lindsay Pedersen

Well, and I mean, maybe this comes up in my marriage where you mentioned like when somebody feels really compelled by one thing, there's sort of more leeway on the other, kind of a trust.

And well, that in my husband's case, and like once the garbage taken out really, really quickly and like as soon as it's like I have a higher tolerance than he does. So, that is a silly example. But it's a really pragmatic one, though.

Pragmatics is kind of where 90% of this is.

Lindsay Pedersen

And I care about, I don't know, I care about tidiness more than cleanness. So, he kind of bows to me on that. So, that requires a couple things.

One is that you don't have like a compulsion in the opposite direction on the same thing very often.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And that you're completely comfortable deferring to another person.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah.

Deborah Kilpatrick

And what they feel strongly about is very much trust.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Yeah. What's an example of the time, like I just shared the example of my garbage situation in my house.

What's an example of when once you or Christine felt more compelled by something, so you kind of like let the other take the lead?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yeah. I mean, it often would be related to kind of our respective operational swim lanes. For example, if I felt really strongly about a matter regarding our quality management system or our regulatory approach, or if she felt really strongly about product roadmap in a way that I didn't necessarily have a strong opinion, but I may not have strongly agreed either.

Like, it was really, we had very clear, and maybe this is also part of why it worked, like we had really clear swim lanes. Yeah. Between the two of us, which generally map to our areas of expertise.

And in some cases we pass things back and forth organizationally over time, because we would feel like, oh, the other one could maybe do a better job of this in this particular phase of the company. And we're very comfortable doing that. And so there was this type of fluidity between the two of us that, like I said, I don't, like, I don't know that I'm just by default a co-CEO.

Do you know what I mean? Or that she would be, but together it was just really easy. And the funny part was we constantly got questions about why it was easy.

It was hard to explain. That's so funny because you're like, because it's not hard.

Lindsay Pedersen

So how do you, that's why it's not easy. I know.

Deborah Kilpatrick

It's like, it's like you said, it's like trying to explain to somebody like, well, why are you married to that person? Because I am? I don't know.

Lindsay Pedersen

Right.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Right.

Lindsay Pedersen

What is a problem or a tension that, and this could be then an evidation or it could be now, a problem or tension that you've learned to embrace rather than resolve or tuck away where it's actually become a good thing?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yeah. It's probably something in the realm of, and I definitely learned this from Christine, learning what has to and should be solved right now today versus what should play out another day or two or week or two or month or two before the CEO or anybody in a C-suite steps in to solve it. I always told her, I was like, I think this, she's a good poker player.

And so she's very comfortable waiting on the next card. You know what I mean? That is not my default and I don't play poker.

And so I had to really sort of learn from working with her and sort of adapting my style of it to, and really trusting her gut on things that needed to be dealt with immediately versus not. In my own case, reflecting that also back into areas where I needed to not put my energy in versus hang back because I can have fairly like get in there intense energy. And it's like learning how to throttle gas, throttle gas, throttle gas instead of just gas.

And knowing when to do that and knowing how to do that. And it's probably stylistically the biggest thing that I learned from her in working with her. What's the reward of having learned that?

Like what's better? I think the reward is a, I think people probably are better at developing their own solutions to problems, like right, than me just stepping in and throwing my energy into it. So it's better development of people around me.

And B, it's energy conservation and focus for me as a leader, right? Like it's like learn where to put your attention and when to put it is the way that you will maximize impact as a leader, whether you're the director of R&D, the manager of finance or the CEO of a company. And it's easier to say than it is to do.

But I definitely learned a lot better how to do that in a co-CEO model personally.

Lindsay Pedersen

She sounds like she was, is a really good model of patience and sort of the strategicness of patience.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yes. Yeah. We're very stylistically different. And yes, she's very much that.

Lindsay Pedersen

Wow. I am learning so much from you and it's time to wrap up. So here's a different kind of question.

When you're finished with a work day, what do you do to replenish your body and spirit so that you bring your best self the next day to work?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Yeah. So I have a couple of answers to that.

One, I've sort of, and I think I learned this from also watching my dad kind of go through football seasons in Southern high school football. It's like, there's only so much you can do in a day. There's only 24 hours.

You've got to sleep. And the art of discipline in many ways is doing your very best, getting home, taking care of yourself, getting to bed, and then being willing to get up early and start doing it again. There's a discipline to that routine that I watched him have that I certainly it's how I play.

It's how I work. I'm very routine driven and it's part of my discipline. And for me, that is part of the cleansing, right?

Because I know that I'm, I am going to stop working at a certain point and stretch and get my mind off this and go to bed. The other aspect though, is that I don't drive very much. Like I think driving is a giant waste of time and I like public transit and I like bike commuting.

And so I would say I'm probably 60, 40, 60% on the train, 40% on my bike. Some weeks it flips back and forth. And so the time when I leave the office on the days that I bike, where my only job is to get from point A to point B and I've got my own energy to do it.

And I've got my favorite podcast in, I don't know, that's a pretty cleansing breath. And I live about 20 miles from here. So it's a good enough long ride that I feel, I feel good.

I feel, I have endorphins when I'm done.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, physically.

There's a physical reward for it.

I love the word cleanse for this because it's like, for both of those examples, you use the word cleanse. There's something cleansing about the rhythm and predictability of routine.

And then there's also letting nature and your animal body and the oxygen around you and the scenery around you kind of wash away the day and bring you back to a different part of yourself.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Oh, that's so cool. You know, one of the reasons I really have grown so fond of bike commuting over the last 20 years is, and here in Silicon Valley, of course, I'm bike commuting on a lot of surface streets with quite a bit of traffic in some cases, but everybody's got something.

Everybody's in their car or on their bike or on the train or walking down the street. Everybody's got something. And there's something about being out in the world for me like that, that is a reminder of like, you know what?

Everybody's got their thing today. It's not just this thing that you're dealing with, right? Like there's a collective bunch of things we're all dealing with.

And I find that that is also balancing for me. It's like a, I guess, perspective, I guess is the best word.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Like that story in your own head is just, that's just in your own head.

Deborah Kilpatrick

Everybody, there's another story in their head. And a lot of people, a lot more challenges or a lot more serious challenges, right? Like people driving to the doctor that may be going to see a sick kid or a sick parent.

It's just, I don't know. I like being out in the world and being reminded that, you know, we all have our stuff and it's okay for it to be uncomfortable because everybody's uncomfortable a little bit. Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh gosh, Debra, that is so beautiful.

Okay. I am going to switch us over to some rapid fire questions. These are sort of like one word answers-ish.

What is the most recent song that you've listened to?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Chaperone's Phenomenon.

Lindsay Pedersen

Awesome. Awesome. Okay. What is your favorite kind of candy?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Oh, there's this, I don't know the name of it, but it's like a ginger chew that also has peanut butter in it. Ooh. I don't know what they're called.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay.

I'm going to do research and put that in the show notes for listeners.

Deborah Kilpatrick

If you text me or send me an email, I'll take a picture of them at home and you can, yeah, they're delicious. Wow. Little ginger.

I know it sounds like it doesn't go together, but it does. It's like beautiful. Yeah.

Beautiful.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's actually kind of highbrow too. You didn't say like Reese's Pieces or...

Deborah Kilpatrick

It is kind of highbrow.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah.

Deborah Kilpatrick

A very refined ballad. Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

What time do you wake up?

Deborah Kilpatrick

All right. So my alarm goes off at about 5:10 or 5:15.

I listen to NPR news because I like to listen to the news right when I first wake up. And I am usually out of bed by 5:45, 5:50. Yeah.

And then I exercise in the morning. Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

What is your favorite trait in a person?

Deborah Kilpatrick

Honesty.

Lindsay Pedersen

What is your favorite way to work out?

Deborah Kilpatrick

It depends on the day.

I mean, I cycle a lot. I have a heel injury now, so I can't run right now, but I do like to jog. And some days I just like being in my gym.

I have a gym in my house and sometimes I like just doing a gym workout.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Let the day take you to whatever.

Deborah Kilpatrick

But I love cycling a lot.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. This is, yeah, you light up when you're talking about cycling. This was so great. Where can my listeners find you online if they want to learn more about you or Sonder?

Deborah Kilpatrick

LinkedIn, for sure. LinkedIn is where I tend to focus all my social media energy and probably nowhere else, really. And if you want to learn about what we do at Sonder, SonderCapital.com.

But we post a lot on LinkedIn, so you can see about our investments in our portfolio and what's going on with these companies.

Lindsay Pedersen

Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Deborah Kilpatrick

It's my pleasure, Lindsay. Thank you so much.

Lindsay Pedersen

Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North Star leader, whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com.

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