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 so happy to be joined by Jennifer Knuckles.

Jennifer is currently chairperson and CEO of R0, the biosafety technology company. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Nuckles

Hi, Lindsay.

Lindsay Pedersen

So good to see you. Jennifer, to start us off, what is your favorite thing about what you do?

Jennifer Nuckles

I think the most meaningful thing for me is working in an industry that matters. And I have had the chance to work in a variety of industries. People always comment on that for me.I grew up in consumer packaged goods. I moved to technology. I worked in gaming.I worked in fintech. I work in health tech. For me, I'm industry agnostic.

And I look for products and brands to deliver on what benefits the common good or helps the greater population. And I think we all spend so much time at work. And if we have the chance to do something better for the world, while at the same time being great for the bottom line, it's very motivating.

And it's pretty rare. I in no way want to communicate that I'm not a capitalist. I'm 100% a capitalist.

But I do believe that you can have brands and products that help people while still making a profit.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. It's like that Venn diagram overlap of helping the planet, helping human beings, and also creating huge economic value. That's the crucible.

Well, for listeners, full disclosure, Jennifer and I know each other from Clorox. We kind of grew up together in brand management. So as general managers, so Jennifer, then you went to be a CMO at a number of companies, Zynga, Dr. On Demand, Plum District. So talk about moving from CMO to CEO where you are now. What's that like? And what's been both hard and easy about that switch?

Jennifer Nuckles

So as you mentioned, we grew up in brand management, which in CPG is general management.

People who don't grow up in CPG don't really understand that. So people associate brand with advertising or television commercials.

And I worked at Clorox for a very long time, almost 10 years. And every time I would tell my family what I had worked on, they would say, Oh, did you make this commercial? And I'd say, Not really.Were you on the shoot? Well, yeah, I was on the shoot, but I didn't write the script. I wrote the strategy or whatnot.

I don't really understand what brand management is. So brand management was a phenomenal training ground. I would think you probably would say the same thing.

You right from inception, right out of when we graduated MBAs, we were managing really large P&Ls. And I was very choiceful in my moves at Clorox. If you remember, I worked on really large brands where I could manage those P&Ls.

And I did everything from innovation to base brand management. So when I wanted to leave Clorox, I had some advice from some mentors that don't just take your CPG training and go into another CPG. Take the skills that you know, because you know how to do so much and you can parlay those into different industries.

So as you mentioned, I was CMO for very large companies, many of which IPO when I was in that seat, which was, you know, a gift for myself. And so once I'd had those roles, I always got asked to interview or to take on CMO seats. And I feel like I, when I was the chief marketing officer of Zynga, it was probably one of the most desirable CMO roles in the world.

I mean, large entertainment company, we IPO'd multi, I think the first company that got to a billion dollars in four years, like it was a rocket ship to be on. And you got to go to, you know, any concert you wanted, any entertainment venue you wanted. But I was hungering for more.I wanted to run the full P&L product from soup to nuts. And so I was really intentional with the next couple of moves I made. And I went to SoFi Social Finance, which IPO'd in 2021.

And we had three group business units, and I ran one of those group business units. And so it was a third of the company. It was all of the enterprise content and insights and financial services.

So again, I was back to managing large P&Ls, like SoFi's trading in about $18 billion. And, you know, I had done that within a group of businesses. And I thought, okay, now it's time for me to go do this on my own.

And so I gave myself a little bit of time. I was still in my SoFi seat, and I said, I want to go get a CEO seat. So I did.

I took the CEO seat at R0 about two and a half years ago. I think the biggest challenge for me and the biggest learning for me is like, when you are the CEO, everything is on your shoulders. Like every decision is on my shoulders, whether it's like office space, which sounds ridiculous, but it's actually like one of the biggest topics after COVID because, you know, you miss the collaboration of people being in an office, but you all recognize that hybrid is really helpful for employees and morale.

So every decision from like, which products to launch, how to build out the engineering team, where to spend resources, tactical execution. And so I think that's been the hardest. You want to surround yourself by experts in their field and also know where you can add strength and also where you can't.

And I think our backgrounds are really deep and go to market. And so I can always help sales, marketing, product development. And then I surround myself by experts in the other field.

So they have really a cohesive leadership team. That's all kind of paddling towards the same direction.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Yeah. You really have been a Renaissance broad ranging leader.

You started in CPG and then digital health and gaming and AI informed health for indoor spaces.

There's a lot made of how different tech is from consumer goods, but I'm interested in what's not different. Like what are the evergreen things from CPG that you bring to tech and what could CPG maybe stand to learn from tech?

Jennifer Nuckles

Yeah. So when I was hired at SoFi, I was hired by Anthony Noto. He's the CEO of SoFi.He was prior the CFO of Twitter and CFO of the NFL. And he specifically was looking for someone who had grown up in consumer packaged goods, which I think is very insightful for someone in tech. And the reason he wanted that was he wanted someone who could navigate a matrix organization.

And if you think about CPG, let's use Clorox as an example, because it's near and dear to both of our hearts. Clorox is actually made up of the number one and number two brands in a myriad of categories. No one actually knows that, right?

Lindsay Pedersen

I know. It's so funny.

Jennifer Nuckles

You may not remember this, but I worked on food for a while. No one knows that Clorox actually owns Hidden Valley Ranch.

Lindsay Pedersen

Hidden Valley Ranch. I do remember it when you were at Hidden Valley. Yeah.

Jennifer Nuckles

This is a funny story. I worked on Hidden Valley Innovation. So gosh, this is like 20 years ago now.

But when low carb first became a thing, no one had heard of low carb. And we put a package, as always, low carb. And that was like the consumer mantra, let alone 100% fat.

But that was a funny positioning. So anyways, Clorox is made up of a variety of brands. And you can't work within your silo.

So you, especially within marketing, you spend a ton of time with R&D. R&D and packaged goods is analogous to product in technology companies. It's where you spend the preponderance of your resources, especially in tech companies, engineering and product resources are really expensive.

So you have to learn to lead with influence when you're not directly in the reporting structure.

That's one parallel. The other parallel that I know is just like when we started off in marketing, you had all the tools in your tool belt, your five Ps and your five Cs.

And it's so funny because everything you know about pricing and merchandising and packaging extends into the digital realm. And so if you think about the transition from the physical store space, which most people don't shop in majority any longer, it's all online from anything from groceries to retail and clothing. It's the same.

You're looking at the packaging, you're looking at the merchandising, you're looking at the positioning, you're looking at the segmentation and the amount of data that's available in CPG that we had early on scanner data in grocery stores is what we're using online right now. You can see average order value, you can see cart size, you can see abandoned cart. So there's quite a lot of similarities.

What I would say, and this is the reason I left Clorox, the frustration for me in CPG was the time of decision-making. And I say this with all due respect to Clorox, I was sitting on a leadership team.

Then I had to go present to another leadership team that then would present to another leadership about as something as small as like a burst on a package that would land on shelf for like six months.

And so the more interesting thing I think in technology is that you can look for real-time data and make a decision where your purchaser enterprise or a consumer is playing and make a decision right away. You don't have to wait for the best information to come back to you. And I don't want to ever knock successful CPGs because they've been doing obviously a lot since they've been around for over a hundred years.

But I was looking to grow a hundred percent a year, not three to 5% a year. So I think in many respects, moving faster, not being afraid to break glass, make some bad decisions is where more traditional companies could benefit from learning.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's neat. It's interesting because it's almost like aligning what you want with what the shareholders want. Because in Clorox's case, at least, I mean, I can only really speak for Clorox with CPG.Shareholders expected a very regular and low return. And what that meant was very risk-averse environment where multiple leadership teams needed to stamp the decision to put a burst on a package. And that leads to a utility-like return in somebody's investment portfolio that includes Clorox.

Whereas with the shareholder of a tech company, doesn't want a 3% return. However, regular, they want a big return, which means you have to embrace the upside of risk and you have to move fast. You have to break things.

It's like aligning yourself with why does this company exist from an economic standpoint? And what do you want? What is your own risk?

There are people who would much prefer to be in a risk-averse environment. And then the other thing with tech, and actually a lot of industries outside of consumer goods, there isn't throwaway costs the way that there is in CPG. So a burst on a package, so for listeners, if you put a burst that says no carbs on the label of a package and you print those, well, if it turns out it was a bad decision, you either have to throw those away, which is expensive and bad for the planet, or you have to continue to use something that you now know is ineffectual.

So when it's digital, you just take it down. You don't have throwaway costs. So there's also this sort of an environment that allows you to break things because it's not that expensive to replace that broken glass and it's neat to weave them together.

I also think the matrix insight that your boss had at SoFi is very interesting because like you described right now as a CEO, you're in charge of everything. When we were brand managers, say at Clorox, we were the CEOs of the business, but we're in a matrixed organization with a really high need to use influencing skills because it was an authority across... You're sort of the CEO and then sort of not.

It's a very kind of nuanced set of skills that you're using because the buck does stop at you and yet you don't have as much power as the CEO might have. You still have to get approval. That's a really nuanced insight that he had about how useful that is.

Jennifer Nuckles

Yeah. And so he had a very short stint at Kraft. So he knew that.

And I think because he had been at Twitter and then at SoFi, SoFi, we had HR and ops and engineering and product and design. And so all these functions rolled up to their own functional lead, but then like kind of dotted line into me as the lead. And I am very thankful to the coaching and the personal development that I got at Clorox to understand that you don't have to lead with authority.

And it's such an important thing for people to understand that that like dotted line authority is like pretty artificial. Like people aren't going to do something just because you told them to do it and you're bossing them around. There's a lot of people that I, leaders that I will take as manager, you know, when they're moving into the executive role, first executive role, maybe.

And they're very much focused on like, well, I want this group to report into me. And I think once you are comfortable in the type of leader you are, how many results you can drive, you recognize it's actually a lot better to lead with influence. I would much rather have a team of people that's all working together than be a people manager of all these different functions.

Like people management takes a lot of time. And people management is a skill and you need to work on that as a manager all the time. How much empathy you're showing, how much people development you're engaging in, how much transparency you provide because you can't always provide all the transparency.

And so I think it's a learning process for a lot of people to realize like leading with influence, you actually get a lot more done. And I think especially when you're under time crunches or you have to make decisions faster, people assume that it's just that hard line reporting, which I have not found to be the case. That is really, really fascinating.

Lindsay Pedersen

Like just the kind of the human psychology that goes into that. And also I imagine that with strong influence, you can get more done. It's also more durable what you do get done because then like, and I don't know, I'm thinking about this in real time, but like a person who is doing something, even though they don't have to, because of the soft power that somebody else, because of the respect to this other person, or there's, there's influencing going on.

There's a more pure commitment to follow through on it. Or I don't even know if what I just said is true, but there's something very like powerful about somebody who is doing something not because they have to, but because they want to.

Jennifer Nuckles

They want to. Yeah. And I think a lot of that comes to relationship building.

And so recognizing that you're in it with your team for the long haul and things aren't always going to go right in the short term. And you're going to learn from those mistakes and be willing to fix things together. I'll just say that the tech world is hard.

And I've worked in some companies that are pretty infamous for their culture, honestly. And the one thing I will say about CPG is that it's a very respectful culture. If you remember, we were always evaluated, I think maybe even a couple of times a year on like 360.

Where you got like peer feedback and direct feedback and reporting feedback, whatnot. And I think that's something that tech could learn. I think if you look at like your, we use like net promoter score.

So like a manager, net promoter score, you know, so if you know, like how you're serving your directs or how you're serving your peers, it's really important. And I think I'm thankful that I got that training at Florax because I see that especially in people who maybe didn't work in an environment that really focused on leadership and people development. And they come up short on the soft skills.

That's pretty dangerous when you're in a large organization and people are really into like land grab mode or pointing fingers if something goes wrong. I was talking about this with someone recently. When you're in a large tech company like SoFi, for example, I was a named executive officer at SoFi, which means I was one of the top five in the company.

And there was really nowhere to go, right? I wasn't going to be CEO, like my boss is going to be there forever. And there were three of us who ran business units and then the CFO.

So that was the five of us. So the behaviors when you are there, not just to grow businesses, what you see from other people is like land grabbing, because there's really nowhere to go except for to get your span of control bigger, which we didn't have at Florax, right? Because it's like, gosh, I don't know.I probably had eight rotations at Florax. You move from like Kingsford to Hidden Valley to Florax Liquid Bleach to Innovation. And so that's also beneficial training to recognize like you're getting something from each one of those moves.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. What you bring from Kingsford Charcoal to the laundry category or to Brita water filtration, like amazing. It's amazing what you can bring from those, not just in terms of sort of like subject matter expertise, but different ways of looking at things and different kind of ways of gaining empathy for the consumer or the customer.

I'm interested in with R0 being very mission-based, contrast for me what it's like to be a leader and executive of a mission-based company versus a company that doesn't even try to say they have a purpose beyond economics. What are the unique challenges and gratifications of that?

Jennifer Nuckles

Yeah. So I think my largest investor is the first investor in SpaceX and Tesla. So he is the managing partner at Double Bottom Line.So what his VC firm stands for is Double Bottom Line, meaning that you can have both a profitable bottom line and for the better good bottom line. And so I think knowing that you have that surrounding from your key stakeholders is really important because to your point, it's not the super conservative investors who are like, okay, let's return next year 2% and yay, gold star, right?

But it's also not the like, okay, let's grow at all expenses and like, you know, hurt everyone while we do it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Blood on the floor. Yeah.

Jennifer Nuckles

Yeah. Which, you know, there are some industries that are like that. And I've always tried to find what is the reason to be for the products and the brands that I've worked on.

And so like in gaming, for example, I'm not an avid gamer, a lot of people, it's a pretty male dominated field. I was the only female executive at Zynga, really the only senior female in like most of the ranks. But anyways, most of the engineering and product people had grown up, were men and had grown up in coding and video games their entire life.

And so I was really fascinated by why is the consumer spending her time? Because it was predominantly female, actually, when you look at like mass general market games, why is she spending all her time on a phone engaging with games, right? And it's a form of entertainment and a form of satisfaction and release.

And I would not say gaming is like mission based, but it is like a juxtaposition to think like, what is in it for the end user? You know, I think for us at R0, so we have hardware and software. So the training I had in CPG is really applicable with hardware because you think about the price of that, you know, packaging we talked about with burst to throw out, it's much cheaper than throwing out a large piece of hardware.

So I have to really manage supply chain and make sure that we're not scrapping inventory and shipping is expensive. But the engineers and the product people who are developing the products are all about saving energy, our products save energy consumption, reduce energy consumption, or like providing insights to the key stakeholders or making the environments healthier in commercial real estate for people to be occupying. So there's a sense of like curiosity that's motivating them to let's push the boundary and make new products that have never existed before.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, it's like there's something really galvanizing about that in the same way that soft power and influencing is galvanizing for the person that we were talking about earlier, like there's something that makes somebody want to contribute more because it's inherently gratifying for them as opposed to only there for checking the box.

Jennifer Nuckles

Yeah, I have found that more in tech than I did in packaged goods. People have a lot of choices where they could work. And especially engineers and product, the salaries are like unfathomable.

And so to be able to be part of a team and feel like you're doing something together, and you have the autonomy to challenge assumptions and build something new, I think is pretty rewarding. And then having, I don't know that either the line engineers have empathy towards the end users. But I think always keeping in mind, like, what is the end user showing you and you again can see that real time when the users go into the dashboards and they're investigating and seeing like, what was their turn rate?

Or how many minutes did they spend on a page? Or how often did they come in? Like we do everything based off of KPIs.

And so you real time can see the business performance. And I think most people enjoy doing that and seeing that their products are being used.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, I mean, that's so satisfying. When you've created something for someone, even if that someone was kind of yourself, and you see the boost, whatever metric it is, like, especially when it's real time, if you get instant feedback like that, ah, it's like dopamine hit.

Jennifer Nuckles

Yeah, it's amazing. And that was one of the reasons I went to business school originally. So prior to business school, I worked in public accounting and consulting, and you are on multiple engagements, and you provide recommendations, but you never see anything go to market.

And so you kind of don't know what happened. You worked on something for months and months, and then put together a report and moved on to something else. And so I was really hungering to be able to see the fruits of my labor, and know that I had worked on something that actually saw the light of day.

Lindsay Pedersen

Hard to learn if you don't see the results, right? It's like, you can like theoretically learn, but you don't learn in the same way as if you actually see and feel and live what happens as a result of some decision that you made or if you decide and then move on. Yeah, I totally get that.

What are you most excited about with R0 right now?

Jennifer Nuckles

What's the most like- I think we're at a pretty powerful inflection point. Regardless of which side of the coin you're on, the current administration has like turned the world upside down. So a lot of our business is international, and many of our international counterparts are a little nervous about working with the US right now for understandable reasons.

I think you also see the speed of innovation in AI unparalleled. And so it's funny, I was presenting at the Fortune Global Forum in November, and I had been asked to speak on AI because actually R0 has been using AI. I mean, that's all we do.

We started with AI even though now everyone's like AI-washing. But we have machine learning models and large language models, and we're modeling the indoor space based off of risk factors or based off of occupancy metrics or based off of time of day. And then we integrate to the building management system.

So the building management system actually works when the rooms are occupied. We're already doing this, right? But the amount of money and investment that is being put towards new industries right now is pretty unbelievable.

And I think we're going to see, the speed is just unparalleled, we're going to see that things change so quickly in the next two years. The other thing I'm most excited about is when I think about what matters to me, and I'm a parent of three daughters, I care about education, I care about health, and I care about the environment. If you remember, at Clorox, I worked on Greenworks Innovation.

And so Greenworks was the first new brand for Clorox in 80 years. And for everyone listening, it was a sustainable brand, which was kind of unheard of that this large petrochemical company is launching a sustainable brand of cleaners. But there is a segment of the market, I think even more so now, that wants to consider what the runoff in the oceans are and prepare the world for our children and our grandchildren.

And my bias is if you don't think about climate, and you don't think about the world, then what matters? Because the planet won't exist.

Lindsay Pedersen

Right. It doesn't matter.

Jennifer Nuckles

Yeah. And so I think the interesting thing right now is that there is a massive shortage of energy that is being caused by data center population and the preponderance of AI and the growth. And you juxtapose that with the rising cost of energy, because energy is higher than it's ever been before.

And so you have this natural constriction of supply and demand, which is fantastic for our business because we save energy. But also, I think it's good for the world because we're all focused on innovation and there have to be new solutions that allow that innovation to occur, which are naturally benefiting the environment. So that's exciting.

Lindsay Pedersen

That is really exciting. I'm excited to watch it. Jennifer, this has been awesome.

I have a few rapid fire questions for you as we finish. You get to go. Okay.What is the last fiction book that you enjoyed?

Jennifer Nuckles

Oh, gosh. My husband always jokes that I read all these books that have like wife, mother, woman in the title. So I read like the woman in cabin 17 or the woman next door. I read a lot. I'm a voracious reader, but I would be embarrassed to tell you any of those fiction books. I've been reading a lot of Frieda McFadden.So that kind of gives you those.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. I love that.I love that. Okay. We'll add that to the show.

Jennifer Nuckles

Follow me on Goodreads and see.

Lindsay Pedersen

Goodreads.

Jennifer Nuckles

Jennifer Nuckles.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. What time do you usually wake up in the morning?

Jennifer Nuckles

People say that I don't sleep a lot. I tend to do a lot of work at night and I tend to wake up pretty early. So I'm definitely awake before six. That's gotten a little bit later since the pandemic because we all don't commute for two hours a day, which is a little freeing, but I'm a late sleeper, early riser.

Lindsay Pedersen

What other languages do you speak or wish you could speak?

Jennifer Nuckles

I only speak Spanish and I only speak that because of high school and college.

Lindsay Pedersen

Only that's like, that's awesome. That's awesome.

Jenifer Nuckles

I can speak different languages, which is interesting.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. They run circles around us. What is your favorite brand and flavor of ice cream?

Jennifer Nuckles

Gosh, I don't eat a ton of ice cream, but I'll tell you what I do eat now, which I think is a treat is I eat Oikos yogurt, which I'm a hard proponent of 15 grams of protein, which as you get to our age, you start focusing on your protein intake. I think of that as like my go-to ice cream now. Before though, I would have said it was like Ben and Jerry's.

Lindsay Pedersen

But Oikos, I know it is a brand of yogurt, but is it like, so you get like the full cream, full fat at least, or like you're indulging, right?

Jennifer Nuckles

It is, but it's like very low sugar. So yeah, high protein.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. It is delicious. It's not as delicious as ice cream. Okay.

And lastly, what is a memorable splurge purchase that you've made?

Jennifer Nuckles

Okay. So I think the best splurge purchase we made, and this is a big one, was in 2020, we bought a second house in Truckee. And the reason why I would say it's the best is I have three children.

My oldest is in college. I'll give a shout out to her right now. She just turned 20 today.

Lindsay Pedersen

She just turned 20, just like 15 minutes ago. Happy birthday, Devin.

Jennifer Nuckles

And my second is going off to college next year. My third is in high school, sophomore in high school. So for that year, 20 to 21, the girls were all home because schools weren't in session in California.

And it was a place that we could all be in our safe social bubble, see our immediate family, be outdoors a lot. And that was a place that I would like to have going forward because it has good memories for the kids and it's a place they could bring their families and it's outside and it's year round, whether it's Stowe or the lake in the summer.

So that was, I think the best investment I would say, but also splurge.

Lindsay Pedersen

Very joy inducing investment. I love that. Jennifer, thank you so much for this.

Where can folks find you online or learn more about R0?

Jennifer Nuckles

You can go to LinkedIn. It's just Jennifer Nuckles and I'm happy to connect with everyone.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yay. Awesome. Thank you so much.

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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