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 Pedersen, 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 Joe Davy. Joe is CEO of Banzai, the SaaS company driving digital engagement, lead gen, and virtual events.

Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Davy

Hi, thanks, Lindsay.

Lindsay Pedersen

So glad to have you. To start us off, what is your favorite thing about what you do?

Joe Davy

The people I get to work with. I think that work is where you spend most of your time, and it's where you spend most of your energy, at least for a lot of people, especially people my age and with trying to do the kind of stuff that I'm trying to do. And I think the people you choose to work with are the most critical part of that, that people can take a great situation and make it horrible, or they can take a horrible situation and make it manageable.

So I've always thought that just surrounding myself with people I really enjoy working with, both personally and professionally, that's always been a priority for me in my career.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Has it always been that way, or has this been an evolution for you that you realize more and more how important just the human beings are in your day-to-day interactions?

Joe Davy

That's a great question. When I was younger, it wasn't a priority for me. I used to think that you could kind of outsmart people problems, right?

Somewhat arrogantly so, right? Think like, oh, if you're just smart enough, just come up with a good enough plan, good enough processes, good enough whatever, good enough ideas, that that's what it takes to be successful. And it's actually the opposite of that.

I mean, the more that I've kind of grown in my career, the more I've realized that the most important decision that you make, or the smartest thing you can do, is basically find people who know more than you do about whatever you're delegating to them. So from my perspective, that means we try to have a great, for example, we have a great general counsel, Nancy Norton. We have a great CFO, Alvin Yip.

We have a great CTO, Simon Ballmer. We have great sales leaders, great marketing leaders. We try to make sure that we really control the funnel at the top.

Because one thing I've learned is if you're kind of weak there, then no amount of being smart will solve for that. But if you're really tight in terms of having great people in your organization, then you don't really have to be that smart. You can let them be smart.

And frankly, I think it's impossible, just the complexity of businesses these days, especially as we start to scale up to, you know, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, you know, and beyond, businesses get more and more complex. And as that happens, it gets harder and harder to be the smartest person in the room on any given topic, or really any topic whatsoever. And so I think, you know, you have to give up that dream.

And you got to focus on bringing in really capable people alongside yourself.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love how you put it. It's almost like it's a mirage. Like, there's really no such thing as like, the smartest person in the room, maybe at one thing or one domain.

But it doesn't, that doesn't scale. And also, it's funny, because I remember when I was in business school, all of the kind of the quote, unquote, the hard topics, so finance, accounting, strategy, had more respect than like organizational behavior. And all of the OB classes were a little bit looked down on just, I mean, not like severely, but like, yeah, it was a little bit looked down on like that, that was just OB, that wasn't finance.

And yet, now it's kind of like, those OB, those organizational behavior, people scenarios are really the thing that most stymies leaders and companies. So it's sort of a funny, and it made me think of it when you said I used to be able to think we could outsmart people problems. There really isn't, it doesn't work that way.

Joe Davy

You know, you say that you encountered that in a college environment. And my view on this is like, for me personally, when I was young, but also, I think, for many young people, there's a kind of over indexing on personal capabilities, personal skill set, right? When you go to college, you get rewarded for your personal success in whatever, you do the occasional group project, but really, college is a very much learn the information, demonstrate the knowledge, proficiency, that's how you succeed in that environment.

And we're trained that way from a very early age, from the age of five, six, onward, that the people who do the best work, get the gold stars and ultimately get the SAT scores and ultimately get into the best college and get out of graduate with the best programs or whatever. And the system really sets people up to very much focus on what can I contribute? How smart can I be?

And I think in that system, you have a kind of overvaluing of things where it's easy to objectively demonstrate how smart you are. So this is stuff like, you know, mathematics, finance, you know, accounting, they are hard, they do require you to be smart, without a doubt, but it's a very specific type of intelligence. I mean, it's a very specific, you know, linear problem solving, you know, learning the rules, learning the systems, learning the principles, and repeating that.

And I think, you know, for me personally, like, there's like an under indexing, especially in a lot of places, especially with people that end up going into business, okay, of what I would call like soft skills, things. So for example, like, you know, a lot of people would like look down on arts majors, art history majors or whatever and say, well, that's not a serious major, you know, if you want a serious major, go get an engineering degree, you know, go get a sciences degree. And I think that really kind of ignores like the human element of business and really ignores like the human element of success in really in any endeavor.

I mean, I think, you know, you look at people like Steve Jobs, right? Steve Jobs wasn't great as a CEO, because he was a great engineer, or because he could do calculus in his head. You know, Steve Jobs had lots of people who could do calculus in their heads and were great electrical engineers.

Steve Jobs was great, because he had an ability to understand the aesthetics of a product, the needs of the user, the technical requirements, the technical possibilities and put those things together. And that's a very unique skill set. And I think you can be successful in many, many ways in life.

This is a mountaintop and there's many, many paths to the top. And I know people who are very successful, because they are really, really smart. And they sit down in front of a computer and run a hedge fund all day.

Or I know a guy who's very successful, who repairs underwater ship propellers, okay? He's like, one of the best in the world at doing that. And that's a really unique thing and a hard thing to do.

And he's built a great career out of that, okay? You can really be successful doing a wide range of things. But I think if you're going to be in business, and you're going to be specifically in a leadership role, you really have to ultimately be able to work with people and get along with people and understand how to deal with people.

And part of that does mean having good systems and thinking deeply and being clear on what you want. And part of it also means understanding how people behave and understanding what motivates people and focusing on that as a part of your role. So I think, you know, every leader really has a responsibility to evolve beyond.

Everybody kind of has to go through this phase. When you go from being an individual contributor, maybe to being, you know, a manager to being a CEO, you have to go through these different phases of saying, okay, this is all about me and my personal contribution to, okay, this is about my personal contribution to how I can make this team successful to this is about me building a great team. And, you know, those are very different mindsets.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. And it strikes me that there's like, almost like an overdeveloped muscle for individual contributors or individual contribution, in a sense, because our education is more aligned to that. And so once you go from being an individual contributor to being a manager and a leader, the education that takes you along that route is more fuzzy and maybe like harder to access.

And like, also, it's not required in the way that a degree might be. And so you might not seek it out proactively. It might be more ad hoc or, you know, unsystematic.

So how do you maintain your learning and growth, personal and professional development? Now that you are a CEO, you are a leader. And it's not like there's college again, for being the leader of a company at bonsai stage, like, how do you make sure that you're still growing?

Joe Davy

I think that growth is kind of thrust upon you in a way, maybe this is your experience to, you know, get yourself into a situation, you got to figure out how you're going to navigate it. And I think the people that grow the most are the people that get themselves into the most tough situations and navigate them, right?

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, it's about like volume of exposure to the tricky things.

Joe Davy

It's like, you know, if you're going to be a great whitewater rafting guide, right, you're not going to do that by learning a lot about whitewater rafting and getting really good at designing oars and boats and stuff like that. If you're going to be a great guide, which is a distinctly different thing, you're only going to be good at that by going down lots of whitewater rapids of progressive difficulty over periods of time, and learning how to navigate those things safely, and sometimes falling in the water, probably, you know, because that's a part of it, too.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah.

Joe Davy

And there's no way to avoid that. And so I think a lot of people, when they are just starting their career, are very over indexed on the idea of this is about what I can contribute and how I can distinguish myself. And, you know, what skills I can bring to the table.

And that's great. And that's valuable. That's like there's an appropriate phase of a career for that.

But I think it changes over time. I think the perspective changes over time. Certainly, you don't want every single person in the company to only be thinking about team building.

You want people in your company to be able to execute. That's a necessary thing. Not deriding that, I just kind of, you know, want to tie that back to, you know, I do think a lot of it is because of the way our education system is structured and the way our incentive system is structured, right?

If you look at the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. And if you incentivize kids for nearly 20 years of their life to get really good at learning, executing, regurgitating, passing the test, that's the outcome that you're going to have is people who are very over indexed to that skill set. And the rest of it, you have to build.

I think athletics can be a part of this because athletics are kind of the opposite in many cases. I mean, I played soccer as a kid and, you know, it's a very different thing, right? It's a team sport.

You got to learn how to communicate with people. You can't be good enough that your team can win just because of you, mostly. So you have to learn how to play with a team.

You have to learn how to cooperate with people so that, you know, there's probably some value there. And a lot of people who are CEOs are former athletes. I think I find that kind of interesting.

Lindsay Pedersen

That's really interesting. There's something about, I mean, I'm thinking of soccer now, where it's like the open-endedness of it is different from the closed-endedness of a math class. There's got to be a lot of comfort with ambiguity and with quick thinking and in a way that it's traditionally anyway, at least the hard subjects.

I mean, even the humanities, like it's fairly closed-ended, but once you're an entrepreneur, it's you who's deciding. Like it's really limited only by your imagination. So I can see that.

And it's also strategy. I mean, being an athlete is also strategy, game theory.

Joe Davy

Humanities are more subjective in a way, but humanities and educational environment is still about individual achievement.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yes.

Joe Davy

It's about, did I read the book? Did I internalize the concepts of the book? Can I pass the test about this book?

Can I write a good essay about this book? Can I do good comparative writing, argumentative writing, whatever? There's a lot.

I mean, a lot of, I'm just picking English because both of my parents are English professors, but I think that's a really good example is like, yes, you're right. It's more subjective and there's more right answers when you're writing a paper versus when you're trying to solve a math problem, but it's still very much, what did I learn? What did I accomplish?

What grade did I get in this class? In almost every class, every student gets their own grade. Class doesn't get a grade.

When you're on a soccer team, the team gets a grade.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah.

Joe Davy

No grades that say like, oh, well, this player got an A, this player got a D. How many games did we win? How many games did we lose?

How many points did we score? All that. You look at maybe individual players' stats and their contribution, but look at the Chicago Bulls from back when I was a kid, right?

Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman. They were all very, very different players. You couldn't put Michael Jordan or Dennis Rodman or Scottie Pippen up next to each other and say, which of these players is the most valuable to this team?

I mean, maybe you could have Michael Jordan, but they're all excellent players. But Dennis Rodman almost never scored any points at all, but he got more rebounds than anybody else in the entire league. So they're different skill sets.

And I think when you're on a team, you realize the value of those different skill sets, maybe more so than when you're in a class, there's really just one skill set that's being refined. But I digress.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love it. I love the digressing.

Joe Davy

I just think it's a barrier to young people sometimes who are looking to get into entrepreneurship. You know, I work with a lot of young entrepreneurs, people that are maybe like just coming out of university and they have an idea. And I was myself once, you know.

I'm 36 now, but once upon a time, I was a kid dropping out of college to start a startup and made so many mistakes. And almost every mistake I made, not every, but almost every mistake I made was a mistake. Wow.

Lindsay Pedersen

Tell my listeners more about Banzai and the business that you're leading right now. What is Banzai?

Joe Davy

So Banzai builds tools that give marketers superpowers. So we have eight products now in our lineup. The most popular ones, things that probably a lot of people, a lot of your listeners probably are either customers of or have used before or have seen before are Demio, which is our webinar platform.

Basically lets marketers run AI powered webinars that can run in any language. They can scale and run 24 hours a day. It runs entirely in a web browser.

It's fully brandable, doesn't require a PhD to operate like some webinar platforms out there. So that's been a very popular product for us. Got a lot of great customers on that product.

We have a video creation product for remote teams or enterprises called Open Reel. Basically allows you as somebody that's capturing video content remotely, like for an interview, for a, you know, if your marketer wants to enable your team to go create videos and make sure that they all have your branding, that they all look good, they all look consistent, they all look the same, the lighting's the same, all this. Lets you set this up so your whole team can do it on their own without your, without every single video having to go through your creative team.

Literally lets you multiply the productivity of your creative team by a thousand X, by allowing them to build templates and presets and things that then thousands of people in your organization can utilize to create video that's going to look great every time. And then probably our most well-known product, well it depends on who you ask, is Create Studio, which is basically allows anybody in the world to very quickly and easily create Pixar style 3D videos that can be used for ads, for explainers, put it on social, put it on your website. You know, there's a million ways you can leverage this kind of content, but it's a super powerful product because it lets you do what would take $20,000 and a team of 3D developers and 3D designers and video people lets you do that in 15 minutes to an hour just sitting at your laptop.

And so it's an incredible product. And in total at Banzai, we have over 90,000 customers and they range in size from small businesses to the Fortune 500. So, you know, lots of big companies, Capital One, Dell, AWS, yada, yada, yada, use us.

We're used in 90 countries around the world. So it's a great business. We're having a lot of fun building it.

Yeah. And we have a great team, as I mentioned earlier.

Lindsay Pedersen

Is the customer across the different products, how much similarity is there from one business to the next in the target audience, like the sweet spot user or buyer for each? Are they similar?

Joe Davy

That's a good question. I mean, 90,000 customers is basically the size of a small city, maybe even a maybe even a medium sized city. And so you're going to have a wide range of people within that.

But I think everybody has the same goal, which is they want to communicate more effectively with their potential customers or their potential viewers or followers or whatever it is, the people that they're trying to engage. So, you know, our focus really is just building great tools that help marketers of all kinds do that connecting. Our view is like there's a couple of ways that we add value to this.

One is through integrations. All of our products integrate with each other. So if you're using Demio, you can push your recorded webinars directly into OpenReel, for example, and you can edit there and publish them.

Or, you know, if you're using Create Studio, you can take your videos out of Create Studio and host them using our Videlo product, which is a video marketing and hosting platform. And you put it on your website and change the colors of the play buttons and all the stuff and put form gating on it and whatever you want to do with it. There's a bunch of different ways that that plays out for the customers day to day, but that's a big part of it.

And I think long term, like our vision is that AI is going to eat marketing. And we're really thinking about how eventually the end state of this is a marketer would be able to go in and say, I want to look right now and create studio. Somebody can go in and say, I want to create a video that looks like this, talks about this, and it will write the script.

It will build the videos, like build the images, put the scenes together and give you the product. And then you can go edit it and it saves you a lot of time. But, you know, another example that would be, I think a further extension of that would be marketer being able to go in and say, hey, I'm launching this new product, build a campaign for me.

So write my emails, build my landing page, set up my tracking, like build my audience, run my ads, write my ads, all this stuff and, you know, ultimately like create a whole funnel for you. And so our vision ultimately is to own all the pieces of that funnel that go into that kind of end-to-end and enable the marketer to leverage that and just, again, like we're all about the superpowers here.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. And there's connective tissue amongst them. There's those seamlessness.

I love how you once used this metaphor of solving your customer's sore tooth, I think is the phrase you use, that going to the dentist is not fun. So they are only going to go do that if they're solving a really painful problem. So how have you found that to be true at Banzai?

Joe Davy

Well, you work with a lot of marketers, Lindsay, so I think you understand, but marketers are like the busiest, most stressed people in any organization. Typically, their calendars are always full. They always have more things to get done than are going to get done.

And so if your approach is to go to a marketer and say, I'm selling you vitamins, that's going to be really hard. If your approach is to go to a marketer and say, I'm solving a major problem for you that's costing you money or holding you back from hitting your objectives or whatever, that's going to be a much easier thing to deliver on. And we think of all our products in terms of, we call them Mario mushrooms.

So if you're Super Mario, I don't know if you ever played Nintendo, you get the mushroom and one mushroom you get, you grow bigger and you can jump higher and break bricks. And then like another one lets you shoot fireballs. And like another one gives you like the little tail that you can spin and fly around them.

So we like to every time somebody buys one of our products, what's the superpower they're getting here? And why is that critical to them delivering on whatever they're trying to deliver on their business? So if you're a marketer and like you're trying to get more leads out of your webinars, then you need Demio because Demio is going to deliver two to three to four times more leads per webinar than what you're going to get from what you were using before, whatever it was, go to webinar or Zoom or whatever.

If you're a marketer wants to produce more video content, then you need Create Studio or maybe you need Open Reel. If you want to host it faster, easier, you want to use Videlo. If you want to run a demand gen campaign, you want to use our reach product, for example.

So there's a lot of different examples, but that's basically like the ethos of how we think about product management and product marketing.

Lindsay Pedersen

What are you having most fun with right now as a leader at Banzai?

Joe Davy

That's a good question. Well, we've been doing some M&A lately. So we've acquired two companies in the last six months, and that's been really great.

And the teams, we've integrated the teams and they're doing a great job. So that's been really fun. Just working with those people, kind of getting that strategy aligned, making sure everybody's in the right seat, kind of learning what everybody's strengths are and how to best leverage those.

So that's probably the area I'm having the most fun.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, that's so fun. Well, as we wrap up, I have a few rapid fire questions to ask you. One word or phrase answer to five questions.

Are you ready?

Joe Davy

Shoot.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. What's your favorite meal?

Joe Davy

Burrito.

Lindsay Pedersen

Introvert or extrovert?

Joe Davy

Both.

Lindsay Pedersen

Amberbert?

Joe Davy

Amberbert.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. Dog person or cat person?

Joe Davy

Dog.

Lindsay Pedersen

That was very clear and resolute. Your favorite thing to do on a Saturday afternoon?

Joe Davy

Play with my son.

Lindsay Pedersen

And what is your favorite salty snack?

Joe Davy

Salty snack. Potato chips. Absolutely.

Like the Ruffles kind.

Like the black pepper sea salt?

Oh, yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

Ohhhh. Yum. I didn't know that Ruffles made a black pepper sea salt skew.

Joe Davy

I think the brand is called Kettle or something like that.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, sure. Of course. Kettle chips.

Joe Davy

Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

Love. Awesome. This has been so much fun.

Okay. I'm going to send people to, if people want to learn more about Banzai, they can go to Banzai's website. If they want to learn more about you, how can they find you online?

Joe Davy

I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. My handle in there is at JPDAVY.

Okay. And we'll put those in the show notes as well. Thanks so much for joining me today, Joe.

Thank you very much. Great to see you.

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.

Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.