Today I am speaking with Susan Hunt Stevens. Susan is the Founder & CEO of WeSpire, an award-winning employee experience technology platform focused on engaging people in purpose-driven initiatives, ranging from sustainability to social impact, holistic wellbeing, and inclusive cultures. She founded WeSpire to use her digital behavior change expertise to help people embrace healthier and more sustainable lifestyles after her son was diagnosed with serious food allergies. She was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year for New England, a Boston Business Journal Woman of Influence, and to the Environmental Leader 100 list. Prior to WeSpire, she spent 9 years at The New York Times Company, most recently as SVP/General Manager for Boston.com, a $60M digital media division.

Key points addressed were  

• The core tenants of WeSpire and their goal to help companies actualize integration and processes increasing aspects of company values, positive work culture, sustainability, well being, and social impact under each company’s unique purview

This podcast series is hosted by Patricia Kathleen and Wilde Agency Media. This series is a platform for women, female-identified, & non-binary individuals to share their professional stories and personal narrative as it relates to their story. This podcast is designed to hold a space for all individuals to learn from their counterparts regardless of age, status, or industry.

TRANSCRIPTION

*Please note, this is an automated transcription please excuse any typos or errors

[00:00:00] In this episode, I speak with founder and CEO of Respire, Susan Hunt Stevens. Key points addressed were the core tenants of Respire and their goal to help companies actualize integration and processes increasing aspects of company values. Positive work culture, sustainability and well-being. And social impact. Under each company's unique purview. Stay tuned for my informative talk with Susan Hunt Stevens.

[00:00:31] Hi, my name is Patricia Kathleen, and this podcast series contains interviews I conduct with women. Female identified and non binary individuals regarding their professional stories and personal narrative. This podcast is designed to hold a space for all individuals to learn from their counterparts regardless of age status for industry. We aim to contribute to the evolving global dialog surrounding underrepresented figures in all industries across the USA and abroad. If you're enjoying this podcast, be sure to check out our subsequent series that dove deep into specific areas such as Vegan life, fasting and roundtable topics. They can be found via our Web site. Patricia Kathleen ARCOM, where you can also join our newsletter. You can also subscribe to all of our series on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Pod Bean and YouTube. Thanks for listening. Now let's start the conversation.

[00:01:28] Hi, everyone, and welcome back. I'm your host, Patricia. And today, I'm elated to be sitting down with Susan Hunt Stephens.

[00:01:35] She's the founder and CEO of Respire. You can find out more about her and the products that we're talking about on w w w w we Spier dot com.

[00:01:44] Welcome, Susan. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:48] Absolutely. I'm excited to look at the services that we Spier we're just talking off the record and the endeavors that you have within that company.

[00:01:55] And everything that you guys do is is so on the market right now. On trend for what? I think that a lot of the economy, especially the United States, is headed into and I can't wait to unpack that with you.

[00:02:05] And it's an interesting time, needless to say.

[00:02:09] Absolutely. Before we get into that, for everyone listening who might be new to this podcast, we will first read a bio on Susan prior to prepping her with questions.

[00:02:18] However, before I get to that, a quick roadmap to you all. Follow my line of inquiry. We will first look at unpacking Susan's academic background and early professional life that led her to founding Respire. Then we will also look at unpacking Respire itself. We'll start with the logistics, the who, what, when, where, how and why of the founding of it. Funding all of those things. And then we'll turn our efforts towards looking at the ethos and the philosophy of Respire and what the company is and stands for, as well as the utility of it and the different industries and audiences they serve. Then we'll look at goals that Susan has for this next one to three years in regards to Respire and perhaps herself personally. We'll wrap everything up with advice that Susan has for those of you who are looking to get involved with Respire or perhaps emulate some of her success as promised. Before we get into questions. A quick bio. Susan Hunt Stephens is the founder and CEO of Respire, an award winning employees experience technology platform focused on engaging people in purpose driven initiatives ranging from sustainability to social impact, holistic well-being and inclusive cultures. She founded Respire to use her digital behaviors change expertize to help people embrace healthier and more sustainable lifestyles. After her son was diagnosed with serious food allergies, she was named an e. Y Entrepreneur of the Year for New England, a Boston Business Journal Woman of Influence and to the Environmental Leadership Leader 100 list. Prior to We Spier, she spent nine years at the New York Times company, most recently as an SVP, general manager for Boston dot com, a 60 million dollar digital media division.

[00:03:59] So this is not so exciting and I kind of actually want to start there.

[00:04:02] I'm hoping that you can unpack your academic background and professional life leading you up to the founding of Respire.

[00:04:10] Sure. So in high school, my passion was journalism and I was fortunate enough to be at a high school in Spokane, Washington, with an outstanding journalism program and ended up editor of the school newspaper. I interned for ABC News. I went to college to be a journalist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and worked for National Public Radio.

[00:04:33] And then about halfway through college, I realized that the starting salary for a journalist and my loans didn't match and needed to figure out something else to do.

[00:04:47] And so I tried one summer in government working in D.C. and realized that was not for me. And so got into business thanks to on campus recruiting and companies coming to recruit. But I've always had this passion for impact and feeling like your job needs to make a difference in this world. And so I remember having an offer for an investment bank to go work in investment banking and a consulting firm that was going to try to fix health care.

[00:05:18] And I think, you know, most would have chosen the investment bank and I picked health care. And if I look at my career and when I have been happiest and most fulfilled, it has been when I feel like the job that I am doing is connected deeply to making the world a better place for people. And I have had times where that was not true and it took having those kinds of jobs to make me realize this is impact thread throughout my career has been a really, really key one. And so I worked in management consulting for a health care consulting firm based in New York City, then went to business school, like many people do after three to four years of management consulting. So I went to the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

[00:06:01] And then that is when I said I really actually think I want to go back into journalism and but on the business side.

[00:06:12] And so I worked my two years in business school to figure out how to get onto the business side of journalism organization. My dream in Life had been to work for The New York Times and to make a very. Long story short, because it was not an easy path. I did manage to land a job at The New York Times after business school in this thing. It was just getting started, called the digital side of The New York Times. They didn't even let us in the main building. We had this really rather lame office space over about four blocks away, you know, and at the time, there were people who would literally say out loud that they thought the Internet was a fad. It was that early.

[00:06:56] But I realized is that I got to be on the ground floor of building a digital news business is one of the earliest employees.

[00:07:05] And, you know, one of the things that I did that will connect my Weese by our experience is that we wrote the very first white paper on behavioral advertising and how you can use digital behavior to target at two people. And that makes them more effective. And things like that. And so I've got to write that white paper. And that really was an exciting place to be. New York City, early days of digital and so exciting that people start calling and asking if you want to help start new businesses and be an entrepreneur. And so one of the things that I did is left The New York Times after a couple of years to go be a co-founder of a startup. And that has the other connection to what I'm doing now with Weeds. Fire is I was an entrepreneur for two years. I co-founded a company with an amazing woman who is coming out of Microsoft. And we wrote it two very high pinnacles. And then 9/11 wiped us out literally and figuratively. We had all of our hosting and data centers in the basement of one of the World Trade Center towers and lost everything that day. But we had our lives. And that is something that I'm always grateful for, is that I lost a startup in the context of people who lost so much more that day, you know?

[00:08:33] And I think that's another life lesson that you bring into entrepreneurship, is as long as you're still alive and healthy, you can you can crawl back from anything.

[00:08:41] Absolutely. And similar things are happening now. You know, I think with the pandemic where I count myself among the lucky ones, even with having projects and things like that postponed and changed with it, to have my health, you know, and things of that nature.

[00:08:56] I'm wondering if you can really quickly. The New York Times, I've spoken to a couple of people that have had affiliations and things like that, but the time period in which you were there is so iconic to outlets for all media. You know, the change that happened during that time paired with the advent of digital changed. I mean, you know, the people still talking about the change with the advent of the Internet are the news outlets are people still talk and nobody else even acknowledges the change anymore. So I'm wondering just really quickly, if you would, I'm kind of indulgence. Can you describe the work environment like the the ether? I think it has a lot of mystique around it. And there are a lot of people that attributed to Hollywood, Eske, you know, moments. But did you find it to be an equal opportunity workplace? Was it behind the times? There's a lot of those industries. You know, long before Fox News was FOX, that was that was kind of the old guard. There was a lot of sexism. There was a lot of inequality of representation. And since your current company kind of deals with these issues, you can speak to not The New York Times now, but back then for working there to that effort.

[00:10:02] Yeah, so.

[00:10:03] So I had my first two years at The New York Times that I left and did a startup. But after 9/11, I actually went back to The New York Times and I spent another seven years there, but up in Boston.

[00:10:14] So what a lot of people don't realize is the New York Times company actually not only on The New York Times newspaper, but at the time a lot of other regional properties. And one of their biggest regional properties was the Boston Globe and Boston Dotcom up here. So I am extraordinarily grateful for my time at The New York Times, especially once I was on the senior management team in the properties because it was hindsight, 20/20 and incredibly progressive environment. So we had a chief diversity officer. You know, at this point I was there. This would have been 17 years ago who was really working to ensure that the company broadly had a very good career passing for women and underrepresented minorities. And our CEO at the time, Janet Robinson, was female, head of advertising, was female. So I had really strong female role models in in the company for for leadership. In fact, the person I came to work for in Boston became the chief customer officer for The New York Times.

[00:11:25] She's amazing. And. I feel like as a female executive, I had three women, at least, if not more, that I could look to who were just really, really amazing people and really good at their jobs and who were navigating, to your point, a company through just a extraordinarily painful transformation process. As you know, the digital side was growing, but the economics of the ad model are just completely different.

[00:12:00] The economics on the consumer side were very different. You know, when I was there, we weren't charging for any of the content in either location.

[00:12:10] You know, ads, you know, per impression costs. Even in digital, we're starting to get disrupted by ad networks and things like that. And so you were seeing the switch from prints to digital. But what was falling apart was the business model at its core. And being in an industry where a business model is falling apart is is really challenging. Some people, you know, embrace that that change and can really navigate through it and other people just implode. And I saw bubbles happen.

[00:12:43] But what I was always convinced of in my heart to heart and still am today is that the world needs journalism organizations like The New York Times and anyone on the business side who worked there had to be committed to this idea that if we don't figure out how to keep what our newsroom does alive is regardless of which format it's in, then who is going to give a voice to people who don't have one? Who is going to stand and check the power of businesses who may be doing things that they shouldn't be doing or governments that are doing things that they shouldn't be doing? And so it was a very mission driven business organization, in my experience, who really felt like we had to figure this out in some way, shape or form. And what was interesting about being at the Times versus a regional property is that the idea of charging for the content was in credibly challenging and political. And there were people who wanted to and people who didn't want to and all of this. But there was always this sense that what the Times did was truly unique and therefore very chargeable. I think when you started to look at the regional properties, it it was a it was a much it was a harder set of numbers to run. They didn't come out as strong, you know, and so it was. I actually think it's a harder decision. It was a harder decision to charge at the regional properties than it was for The New York Times. And then The New York Times has been extraordinarily successful at it and has proven you can do it, which is great. But I think some of the regional properties are still struggling. You know, there's a lot of free substitutes to regional news.

[00:14:31] Well, and everything needs to be, I think, measured when it comes to the evaluation of something like that against a different metric.

[00:14:38] And I think it's this similar concept of real estate trying to develop numbers for like houses that are incredibly different, you know. Now, on these very disparate characteristics and everything has to be, I think, each unique metric unto itself, especially when it comes to something like a powerhouse, like the Times, it's still being kind of tweeted about by our president from time to time.

[00:15:01] So which just means it's having an impact.

[00:15:05] That they weren't having an impact. It wouldn't upset people so much. But it's you know, the one thing I did get to do when I was at Boston, at the Boston Globe in Boston, dot com is Marty Baron, who is the editor at The Washington Post with the editor here. And he was an incredibly forward thinking editor about digital and really was a strong partner for me on the digital side. And so, you know, there was never a question about, you know, time and energy and resources being put into digital. And he really encouraged his team to embrace digital and to think about what digital recording does and can look at. And so I think so much of that mine is. Who did you get to work with? And were they resistant to what digital could do? Or did they see digital as a new opportunity for storytelling?

[00:15:57] Absolutely. And what a world that changed without maybe even having the foresight of that. I want to turn now to unpacking Respire, and I want to start with the logistics. So if you can tell us when it was founded. Who were the original founder? If it was you, other co-founders or additional sub founders, things of that nature. And did you take funding when you initially started out or was it bootstrapped?

[00:16:18] Yeah.

[00:16:18] So in I left the New York Times company in the fall of 2009, and then we Spier was a. Really incorporated in February of 2010. And my co-founder was Jason Butler, who I had worked with at Boston Acom, and then a few months later, another woman, Seraphine Robinson, joined the team as one of the members of the founding sort of group of people sitting around my dining room table. And the vision originally was that we were going to create essentially, you know, RunKeeper or Strata or Weight Watchers for sustainability, an app that you would use to motivate, inspire yourself to be more sustainable, to reduce energy and waste and eat healthier from organic and pesticide standpoint and things like that. And for about 18 months, that's what we did. We launched on Mother's Day 2010 because we thought moms would be the ones that would be most interested in being sustainable. We had some amazing partnerships with people like NBC Universal and Real Simple and others.

[00:17:29] And, you know, really, we're excited to see some explosive growth in the early days. And then we got into this really cool incubator space. But we were bootstrapping this entire time.

[00:17:41] And then right after we signed the partnership with NBC Universal, I did raise a seed round of capital from Converge Venture Partners here in Boston, which is a syndicate.

[00:17:52] It's a fund with a syndicate of most of the high tech successful CEOs and founders. So it's really this idea of founders funding founders. And it was was that 11 2012 when the seed round was the fall of 2010.

[00:18:09] OK, so you launched 10 and then seed round after round after we launched.

[00:18:14] Yeah, yeah, exactly. So right after the partnership with NBC launched in November, it was around that time at the end of 2010. But the challenge was that by 2011, I kind of knew this model wasn't going to work. I had spent a long time in digital consumer products. I knew what you needed to have from a viral coefficient. See, you know, how many users invite other users. And we had really high people loving the app, but really low recommending it to others. So we did a bunch of consumer insights. And basically what we learned is that people were hesitant to recommend the program, even though they liked it for themselves, to others, because they thought people would think they were judging their lifestyle or that they were a hippie liberal or would be like telling somebody they need to go to Weight Watchers. You could maybe say that to your sister or your mom or your best friend in a loving way, but you really can't broadcast it widely. But when you lose weight, people see it and then say, what did you do, you know? And then you have permission to tell them, well, when you are now buying organic chicken, nobody knows. So, you know, when you've just turned down the thermostat on your water heater, nobody, you know, this isn't something you see when you're being more sustainable. We didn't have that same. We had the stigma, but not the benefit of the visible changes. So I almost shot it down literally this month where I was just grubby. But we got on. We were able to on Earth Day 2011, got on to NBC and thought, OK, this is going to be it. You know, we're going to this is gonna give us thousands and thousands of users. And it didn't. It got a, you know, a few thousand, but not what we would have hoped.

[00:20:03] But the phone started ringing. And it was companies asking if we had an enterprise version of our sustainability program that they could use with their employees. And so after the first call, you kind of ignore the second one. You're like, huh? By the third call, I'm a big believer in three.

[00:20:20] By the third call, I'm like, all right, maybe there's a they are there. And so I started interviewing the chief sustainability officers and companies, thanks to some folks that have been helping us and some investors who knew people. And sure enough, companies forward thinking and kind of early companies like Seventh Generation and Organic Valley and folks were really struggling with employee engagement in sustainability and needed tools and technology to help them do it.

[00:20:47] That could measure the impact and tell them the benefit that their employees doing these things are having. And that's what we did. So we did a classic pivot, which I think happens a lot. 18 months in to two founders and decided to focus on running enterprise sustainability programs.

[00:21:06] And that's what we did exclusively from 2012 to 2016, is just run know large global companies from Disney to Caesars to eBay and others, their sustainability engagement programs.

[00:21:20] What techniques do you use? Because I understand the ethos and the philosophy of what you're talking about. But as far as the action items and you know, I'm also putting it into latter day times. This is back in 2011.

[00:21:31] I'm putting in 20, 20 times when you would start a Twitter campaign or launch a YouTube campaign or something of that nature would do that then.

[00:21:39] Yeah.

[00:21:40] So the whole behavior change component of we Spier is really based on some of the science and research that's come come out of B.J, Fogg's lab at Stanford on persuasive technology. And these techniques are most notably used in a lot of the social media apps.

[00:21:58] And the idea is that we combine a combination of game mechanics so and social mechanics and targeted personalized content to essentially close the gap between intent and action. And so it not only helps you understand and a specific pathway what the different micro choices are. So say you're wanting to, you know, eat less meat or eat more plants. What are the different decision points that you need to be thinking about? What are the different actions that you can take? That's the first piece. But then we have a point system, you understand which of these is most impactful? Do I want to do something that has a lot of impact or, you know, something that has smaller impact? And then as you do on your end points and as you do it more, you are an achievements that give you a sense of accomplishment to get a pat on the back. And then the social mechanic, you can see who else has done it. And when you see that a lot of other people have done something, it makes it so it's not so impossible. And then when you do it and somebody likes it and gives you a positive comment, you know, keep this up where you can share your story or things we see is that motivates people to keep doing more. So there's a lot of behavioral science behind how each of these campaigns, competitions or even events and idea boards is designed. But it can be that template, that behavior design template can be used for any sort of behavior change that you're wanting to make. And we sort of joke that at its core, we Spier is about, you know, helping people be better and helping humans make more positive choices. And we've chosen to focus now in four areas sustainability, social impact, well-being and inclusive culture. But it could be applied to almost anything.

[00:23:42] Yeah. Absolutely. I'm wondering this this. Do you have an algorithm that you employ or did you just look at the Stanford research so it it and this idea of looking at chain of command. You know, these micro choices that kind of end up in fruition to this end goal, this backtracking, if you will.

[00:23:59] I think it's been employed across industry for years to great. And it's one frequently overlooked. I think with social media can be a tool or can be a distraction. You know, in a lot of people have this miscommunication where they just immediately go to it before doing this kind of reverse action that it looks like you guys are doing. Do you have an algorithm that you currently plug in for companies once you've actually kind of crystallized the goal of the area that they need to reach out in or what they want to do personally, the kind of develop this game plan? This roadmap, if you will, of what needs to happen or is it's just research that you look at in order to form your own techniques.

[00:24:38] Yeah. So there's. There's algorithms kind of all over the platform that make the right things happen at the right time to get people to take action. And so baked in to the you know, the whole user experience is a lot of personalization that's driven by algorithms. A lot of understanding what content needs to be shown, at what time, what triggers need to be sent, at what time to make things happen. So there's a lot around that.

[00:25:08] But in terms of the actual wheel, we don't want is we don't want our customers who are largely, you know, program managers inside big global companies to have to suddenly become behavior designers. That's a complicated field. And so what we did is we baked all the behavior design elements automatically into the templates.

[00:25:31] They know what they want their people to do. They know generally that, you know, they're trying to drive energy efficiency.

[00:25:38] And the seven things in this role in this plant or in this property for these housekeepers is that this set of activities, what they didn't know is how to order them in a way that that got people moving and getting them the right feedback so that they could do more than they ever expected from the beginning. And then they get the sense of satisfaction and achievement that comes from active participation in the program. So what we say is that we use social mechanics, but it's not social media, per say. It's much more like what you would use in a game, you know.

[00:26:16] So I don't know if any of your listeners are big overwatched players or Destiny or Worlds of Warcraft or things like that.

[00:26:24] But all those mechanics that you see or even Mario, part of, you know, having levels and having quests and having challenges and having points and having ceremonies, all of that is are game mechanics and social mechanics of what you're doing with people. And we use those same kinds of things. We're just wrapping around real life behaviors as opposed to behaviors in a game.

[00:26:48] Yeah, absolutely. And it's exciting. I mean, looking at it from that standpoint, you know, there's a really measurable statistics to that.

[00:26:54] You can absolutely you can alter and tweak. And really, I feel like when you can take a process and make it more uniquely suited to an individual company, the more successful the process that's out of the can, out of the box moment is destined to be flat. As far as figures or yield or social impact return is which all of this?

[00:27:16] Well, one of the biggest AHA's I have and I know it tops a little bit into your background, and I'll never forget the day I was I was driving down from Santa Barbara to go to the airport in L.A. and I was coming through the Hollywood Hills.

[00:27:28] And one of the things that we were thinking about at that time were our programs, you know, the actual campaigns that people were running on the platform, because when we first started, they were just actions. And then it was like, well, these actions need themes and campaigns. So then it was the pathways with the actions. And one of the things I thought about was the studio approach, which is that, you know, no, no, no one can start a studio just for one movie.

[00:27:59] You know, a studio to survive needed to be a specialist in making lots of different movies and things like that. You didn't necessarily know what the public was going to want or what the interests were gonna be and things like that.

[00:28:10] But you had to kind of design it to to create these different things.

[00:28:14] And then these campaigns could have authors just like there's different directors and different producers and things like that. And what that gave us was really this idea that the content library of these behavioral programs should be a library that is open to all of our customers.

[00:28:31] And when they use the tools to design their own custom campaign, they should be given a choice. They can keep it private to themselves or they can share it back into the library and get credit for this great campaign that they just created that others can run. And so one of the things that's been really just fascinating to see is how customers, when they create something really successful, are very willing to share it to other customers and let them use it. Who then tweak and edit it and who put it back in. And so not only when you license the platform, you're getting access to these great tools to create these great content, but you're gaining access to the expertize of those who have gone before you and been successful. And you can modify and edit, you know, because some people use the word associates and others team members and things like that. You can always make those tweaks or modifications, but you're not starting from scratch every time.

[00:29:21] Absolutely.

[00:29:22] I'm wondering, given that and it sounds like it's this evergrowing platform and with the advent of it, it's got to affect the verbiage for all of your clients on the, you know, covered 19 pandemic end inclusive city of acknowledging reality has reached every industry I've spoken to, regardless of. One thinks of the applicability or not ignoring it is alienating someone's reality. I think it does. Absolutely. And I'm wondering, moving forward, what are some of the goals that you are employing with Respire or recommending that your clients kind of look at in shaping their particular reach or expanse or their own personal kind of social choices?

[00:30:01] Sure. So I'm going to paint a picture of what kind of our world was like immediately prior to Coalbed and then how Cobbett has influenced that. So we've been doing this for 10 years. But candidly, it was a niche business that was very small. There were certainly companies that were embracing sustainability and all of these things, but they tended to be large companies. The teams were understaffed, underfunded.

[00:30:29] But with the advent of the UNSCR GS, which really started to gain more momentum in twenty seventeen, we started to see companies coming together around this idea of responsibility and purpose, and they were bringing together these teams that had been really siloed. So we'd been working with sustainability for years. But now the sustainability officer was having responsibility for their social impact efforts there. Inclusive inclusively efforts and often even well-being and things like that.

[00:30:59] And so we're seeing this consolidation in the enterprise. And then in the last 12 months, whether it's been the letter that BlackRock has sent to all their portfolio companies about the importance of purpose, or Jamie Diamond and the Business Roundtable saying that business needs to have a purpose in addition to profit. The rise of ESG investing. There's just been this tailwind into people understanding the importance of purpose and therefore activating purpose in their enterprise. Like I had not seen in 10 years. So we came into COGAT thinking 20, 20. I was just going to be the most amazing year ever then covered, hit. But what was really fascinating to me is, is, you know, we obviously went rmo every single one of our clients that went remote.

[00:31:49] Some of our clients, everybody got furloughed because they were hospitality organizations or auto manufacturing.

[00:31:56] But digital engagement now became the only way of reaching your employees. And they had to engage and get them doing things related to health and safety, managing stress and stress and anxiety, remote work, best practices. And so we, thanks to our clients, were sitting there with the right tools at the right place at the right time to design these campaigns and programs to get their employees doing the things they absolutely needed them to do during combat. And so we've been almost countercyclical in the sense that, you know, yes, we got hurt by clients shutting down and not having any employees to charge for. But we also had these clients where, like, we need you up and running in two weeks and we need to launch this fund to do employee assistance in two weeks. So we need to launch this giving campaign or we need to launch this thing. And just as life was calming down, all of a sudden, the George Lloyd.

[00:32:50] Protests began and companies started responding and acknowledging that they have not been doing enough to build inclusive cultures and to create an anti-racist workplace. And we are sitting with a whole module that's around in reducing implicit bias, increasing allies, ship and all these programs we work to create immediately for several clients, you know, an anti-racist workplace program and have been now beginning to work with them, wanting to fundraise for donations to racial equity organizations. And so there's been, you know, in another module now a lot of momentum and change. And so, you know what? What it's done, in my opinion, is pulled forward the future by five years.

[00:33:41] If you had asked me where organizations were going to be feeling about remote work, digital engagement, equity and inclusion, mental health, you know, and then sustainability just continues to be more urgent and pressing, given we have very little time left to cut 50 percent of carbon emissions. So twenty, twenty five has started to happen in twenty twenty. At least, you know, for for these kinds of programs.

[00:34:10] What are the future goals for what you're doing with Respire like? And now that you feel like there's been this hyper consideration, what are the future goals?

[00:34:17] Yeah.

[00:34:17] So I have beliefs from day one that at some point in time every company of any significant size was going to need a technology platform like we Spier, having come out of marketing and seeing this transition in the 2000 to 2010 around marketing automation platforms.

[00:34:37] Companies have not had something to do, this level of sophisticated engagement and behavior change with metrics that prove business value for their employee efforts and were so I have just felt like this category was going to emerge. She'd been speaking about it for eight years, mostly to small groups of people. And so, you know, to me, it's really about how do I take us from being a relatively small organization with the right product, the right customer base into something that can service the global demand that I think it's going to be there. And so I'm looking very closely at, you know, who do you partner with, who you raise capital from? When do you do it? Because I also believe fully that we are not out of this anytime soon. And the economic dislocation that is going to occur over the next few years is going to be profound. And so, you know, I lost a business after 9/11. I manage the media business in the middle of the Great Recession. You know, this this this next few years is gonna be tough for everyone. And we need so we need to be prepared to work with the right people who understand that and yet recognize that by 20, 30, you know, this will just be a default piece of technology in every major workplace. Exciting loft. It it's exciting. It is exciting. It's just how do you make it happen? But the challenge is not to prepare.

[00:36:03] Right. Well, Susan, we're running out of time.

[00:36:06] And I wanted to kind of wrap up today with asking you and Craig that I have for most people that I speak with on this particular series, and that is if someone approached you from a safe social distance tomorrow or the day after and it was a young woman or female identified non binary individual, and they came up to you and said, I'm so glad I found you. I wanted to ask you, we have a friend in common. And I've spent the early part of my career, the bulk of it actually, you know, in this heavily steeped media and news company, it is once you're one of its most important transitions throughout all of history. And now I'm looking to go out on my own. And I've got this great co-founder. I'm thinking about a startup with one of the top three pieces of advice you would give that individual knowing what you know now.

[00:36:46] So the first would be to keep your day job as long as possible. Wow. Validating your hypothesis with a test group of users.

[00:36:59] One of the most important things I did with we Spier was 100 users. We called them the motherboard. And we we started with product paper prototypes of what we're gonna do and put in front of and got feedback. And then we built a really, really late prototype and put it in front of them, get feedback.

[00:37:19] And, you know, and I was still consulting on the side and bringing in because I didn't know and I don't think anyone knows until you start to put a new product or solution into somebody's hands, whether you have a there, there. And I think if you talk to most entrepreneurs, they pivot. You know, you don't.

[00:37:37] Your first idea usually I guess that's my second piece of advice, keep working because your first idea may not be the one that sticks.

[00:37:44] But if you have the right people around you and you're passionate about the problem, you're solving, not necessarily the product you've come up with to solve that problem. But if you're passionate, the problem, just keep going. You will find a way to solve that problem that will work. And then my third is, is that this is a marathon, not a sprint. I speak somewhat frequently about. The prevailing messages that come from tech media in particular. But I think all startup media, which is that we glamorize the successes, that we generally tell the stories of those where it was an, you know, a relatively instant hit and three to four years. You're a unicorn. And that is not most entrepreneurial journeys. The vast majority of underground journeys are slow, long, painful processes of twists and turns and navigations.

[00:38:44] And you only hear about the company once they hit that inflection point. And you don't hear about the eight years it took to get there. And so, you know, sign up for and realize that this is a marathon. And so take care of yourself. Take care of your family and realize that what what you want to enjoy is the journey of being an entrepreneur, not just the destination of having a successful business.

[00:39:09] Absolutely. All right. I've got keep your day job while testing your idea, number one. Number two, surround yourself with people and be prepared to pivot.

[00:39:17] Keep the problem alive, but don't be overly married to the product. And number three, it's a marathon, not a sprint. It's a game of endurance. And pay attention to your quality of life. Will you go along that marathon?

[00:39:28] Perfect.

[00:39:30] I love that so much. Well, Susan, thank you so much for coming on and giving us all of your information. I know you're busy. Everyone's at once these days kind of home, but twice as busy. And I really appreciate your time.

[00:39:41] It is so true. Exactly. Well, thank you for having me. It's been wonderful to be here.

[00:39:45] Absolutely. And for all of you listening, thank you so much for giving us your time today. And until we speak again next time, remember to always bet on yourself. Slaínte.