The Common Threads

When Ted King (@iamtedking) looks at a bike, he sees a whole lot more than two wheels. Ted King is a former pro cyclist and participant on the world stage, and has staked his claim as an entrepreneur and ambassador of the cycling community.

While he might be retired from the pro tours, he hasn’t slowed down, winning the storied Dirty Kanza two of the past three years. If you’re not in the cycling world, you’ll have to keep reading for more on Dirty Kanza

Ted King and I met recently on the deck of the family owned Cochran Ski Area, which is also the home base of UnTapped, the maple syrup-powered company Ted co-founded with the Cochran cousins. The Cochran family is a story in their own right, producing three generations of some of the country’s best skiers—straight from this quaint little ski area in the rolling hills of Vermont.

Ted King and his wife Laura recently left the California life behind for Vermont’s gravel roads, green hills, maple syrup, and IPA. We sat down to talk entrepreneurship, cycling, and health, but we didn’t need much conversation to see the opportunities for each right in front of us at that ski hill. Kids mountain biking with friends, drinking water straight from the ground, a barn housing a family of athletes, and entrepreneurs grinding away with the same focus they bring to sports. On my way out, a woman passing by invited me to a race that weekend to meet the community. I wish I could have stayed.

Our conversation has been edited for brevity.

Listen to the full interview on The Common Threads podcast at: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify.

David Swain: What did you have for breakfast this morning?

Ted King: I commuted to work today and left the house fairly early. First I grabbed a banana and went for a 90-minute ride. Then I rode to the bakery and got coffee and a muffin.

You’ve gone on pro cycling tours, made a name for yourself as an entrepreneur, and found your way back to the East Coast, where we’re now watching some kids get ready for a mountain bike ride on a very green ski hill. It looks like they’re having fun.

Those kids are having a blast. We’re actually catching the tail end of this, which I only know because I got to Cochran Ski Area right as they were getting ready. They look like they’ve just shredded for a ton of hours and now they’re eating their lunch—good program.

Now let’s talk about your childhood. These kids out here look like they’re between eight and 10. What were you doing over the summer at that age?

There’s this amazing island off the coast of Maine, and my family has been going there for six generations—a small island about three miles off the coast. Its circumference is about four miles, and there’re about 100 cottages. It’s one of those places where everybody knows everybody. It’s a great place for a kid to be a kid, learn how to stub their toe, kiss a girl, grow up. It’s heaven on Earth.

On the athletic side, from the time I could stand, I could skate. Hockey was a huge sport for me. For a good part of my childhood, I thought I’d be a professional hockey player.

How long did you play hockey?

I played through my junior year of high school. I also skied quite a bit. Being in New Hampshire, you ski and you play hockey. My hockey coach was not happy that I was risking my life and limbs on the ski slopes. Ironically, he was especially upset—maybe coincidentally—when I broke my arm. At that point, I decided I liked skiing more than hockey, so I stopped playing hockey at age 17.

So you’re an eight-year-old spending your summers in Maine and playing hockey. Not too many years later, you become a pro cyclist. How competitive were you as a kid?

I was a pretty Type A kid. I liked to do well in school. I liked to do well in sports. In school, I was the kid always raising my hand with the answer. I was verbose. I was outgoing. I think that allowed me to pick up cycling relatively late in the game. I didn’t only play hockey; I played all sorts of sports. I also played sports year-round: I was goalie for the soccer team, captain of the tennis team.

I pretty much played every other sport to figure out what I really loved. Hockey took up a great deal of time. Actually, as a result of hockey, when I went to Middlebury College here in Vermont I considered trying to walk onto the team. I know that sounds silly after taking my senior year off, but they have a great hockey team at Middlebury. They’re Perennial D3 National Champions and I wanted to get back into it.

Anyway, I was playing intramural and had some other friends attempting to walk on. It was also around the time my older brother was at Colorado College. He came east to race the Collegiate National Championships hosted by the University of Vermont, which was just 30 minutes up the road from where I was going to school. I went and watched this race, and I didn’t really care about it. I was my brother’s feed zone personnel at the halfway point. I gave him a water bottle and said, “This is kind of boring.” Then I went back to school.

But Robbie went on to win that race—the first of his three collegiate national titles. As anyone who’s into collegiate cycling or cycling in general in America knows, a national title is incredibly hard to get. And my brother won. It was around that time I was like, “I could do this hockey thing, or I could be the beneficiary of some hand-me-down bikes. I probably have these same genetics. Maybe I’ll get into cycling.”

Yeah, it wasn’t really until college that I got into cycling full-bore.

How were your parents with sports growing up? Was there pressure?

No pressure whatsoever. My parents were incredibly supportive from the time I could stand in athletics. They’ve always been very proud of Robbie and my athletic endeavors. Supporting kids who want to get into hockey and skiing—those are the two most ridiculous sports you could play. Think hockey tournaments at 6 a.m. on the other side of the state. I have a great deal of gratitude for my parents. They let us pick the sports we wanted to do and it worked out tremendously well. They were huge supporters but not so much influencers.

What would you say to the people who dream of becoming a pro athlete, or who have tried to become really good at a sport that requires the endurance of cycling? How quickly were you able to see your own potential?

I started college in 2001 and it was spring of 2002 that I got into cycling. What we see now in cycling is a very welcoming and more communal sport with the advent of things like gravel. It was a different era then—a different generation where it was all about racing, all about chasing points and moving up in the categories. I was chasing my older brother. Robbie was already great and I was aspiring to follow in his footsteps.

I’d describe my development in cycling as very organic. I never had aspirations to go to the pro tour. Every step of the way unfolded organically. There I was racing as a Cat 5 at 19. I got into collegiate racing. I remember I’d been picking up some of Robbie’s training plans. I also remember going to the first collegiate race, and I knew that I wanted to go to the collegiate national championships because my brother’s race was my first influence. I was on the start line at my first race when I said, “Okay, I’m racing the B’s.” Someone said, “You can’t go to the collegiate B national championship.” I was like, “Oh, shoot, yeah. No, I want to race the A’s.”

Then on the start line, I raced the A’s and I did pretty well.

That is a microcosm for everything. Afterward I went to the amateur scene and I started doing races. No, I didn’t walk away absolutely crushing the field, but I had a lot of success. I saw that cycling is a sport that rewards time in because time in is results out. I trained my tail off. It actually meant the end of my time at Squirrel Island in Maine—or very limited time at Squirrel Island because Squirrel Island is foot traffic only. It’s a really small place with no bikes allowed.

But that meant success in the amateur scene, and then in the collegiate scene. I got invited to the Under-23 National Team over in Belgium, so there was a lot of European influence.

How far after you started was that?

I was 22, so two-and-a-half years in. That program was USA Cycling. Our governing federation—that’s their funded project to give Americans a European experience. And it’s changed a lot in the 15 years since that time.

I continued with that, though, and then I went domestique pro. I raced that for three years. And while I never had aspirations to make it to Europe, I had a great third year and caught the attention of the Europeans. I went to a European team and turned that into a seven-year career. It was all very serendipitous with a heck of a lot of hard work thrown in.

What about your college experience? You were good at school and good at racing bikes—both take a lot of time and focus. Were there tradeoffs you had to make?  

There were funny tradeoffs all through college. Fast-forward a few years, and we’re in the heart of winter in Vermont where training is not the easiest in those base mile months. One semester I withdrew from Middlebury and went to the University of Arizona. I like to joke that that was my semester abroad. And really, it was an incredible experience. Tucson, Arizona, so far as the United States goes, is about as different from northern Vermont as it gets.

I had a great deal of support, though. There was just one political science professor who was like, “What are you doing? What’s your likelihood of success?” I put my head down. I didn’t set out to prove him wrong, but I remember that experience vividly. I was highly entertained by it because I thought we were all still kids—I was 21 at that point.

In Europe there were a lot of tradeoffs. In order to succeed, you had to live in Europe for 10-plus months of the year. At that age, in my mid-20s through my early 30s, there were a lot of holidays, birthdays, and weddings I missed—a lot of friends having their kids. That was definitely a tradeoff. It was a bummer, but I always made certain to be back for holidays in the cold weather months and see family. It was all worthwhile.

I’m impressed with what you’ve done for cycling as a sport. You’ve got your podcast now, King of the Ride, and you’re involved in the event scene helping to get people out. You’re also active on social media. Talk about the cycling community as a pro compared to where you are now, nurturing all aspects of the cycling world.

Let’s dabble in social media for a minute. I went to a small liberal arts school in New England in the early 2000s. I am a Mark Zuckerberg-era student, and Facebook came to my school very early. I remember when my parents got on Facebook—that was mind-boggling to me. I was like, “No, this thing is meant for college students!” Then I realized it was a much bigger network. Quite frankly, Facebook’s market is everybody on planet Earth, but for a long time it seemed weird. I was active on Facebook pretty early because that’s what we did in college. I was an early adopter of Twitter too, and an early adopter of Strava.

I was using these platforms as a way to stay entertained. I had a blog relatively early on as well: IAmTedKing.com. I started that in 2006—my first year racing pro. Having these tools at the right time allowed me to stay involved in the cycling community. It was a way to communicate. It was lonesome plenty of times living overseas, and I found it easier to write one blog post for a lot of people than write 25 different emails to all my friends and family back home. I think the same goes for Strava, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. At that time, social media was a way to communicate.

Racing in Europe is an entirely different sport than in America. It’s a bigger playing field. The sport is faster, harder, longer. I often compare it to soccer. Here in America we have Major League Soccer, but Europe is the big leagues.

Cycling at that point was called the National Racing Circuit, or the NRC. There is great American racing. At the end of the day, though, if you really want to be on the next playing field, you need to go over to Europe. And you end up in a community.

I moved to Girona, Spain, which is a mecca for cyclists from all over the world—primarily Anglo-Saxons coming into Europe to base their career, a lot of Brits and Aussies and Kiwis, but then also a lot of continental Europeans who just need better weather. There’s a tremendous community there.

I raced for an Italian team for a handful of years, so I actually moved to Lucca, Italy and honed my Italian. Lucca is sort of a smaller Girona in that a lot of cyclists call it home. At the end of the day, I like having a community—it’s important to be able to decompress after a race and either talk about it or talk about all things outside of bike racing.

Segueing out of my bike-racing career, early in 2015 I knew I was about done. I was 32 years old at the time, and I’d raced for 10 years. I had a college degree, but by no means does that guarantee you anything.

And my job as a domestique was to fulfill somebody else’s win and work for that other person’s win. Most certainly when that person wins, it’s a team win. I say this having worked for Peter Sagan for four years, as he is unequivocally our generation’s best cyclist. Anyway, we won a ton of races, and I was a part of those races, which was an honor and a privilege and something that I’ll always have.

That final year, in 2015, I was no longer teammates with Peter. We had moved to separate teams. What I mean by all this is that I sort of lacked that big-time fire. I decided that early 2015 would be the end of my racing career, and it was. I thought I would step onto Wall Street or try to do all sorts of other things that were related to my degree, but then a lot of sponsors stepped forward.

They said, “We want to keep you in the sport. We like your voice. We like what you represent. Would you like to ride on behalf of our brand?” At that point, athlete ambassadorship was still relatively new in cycling. It wasn’t something that I anticipated at all—and I still love riding a bike, absolutely love it—but the timing was right and ripe for the community, and for cycling in general along with the gravel scene. It’s been a really timely departure from pro tour racing.

Talk about gravel. 10 years from now, if you’re looking at where cycling is going, what direction do you think it will move in?

I think a lot of people are trying to figure that out. I’ve talked about this a bit in my podcasts: What is the direction of gravel? We see a lot of traits in gravel cycling that are similar to mountain biking in its advent 15 years ago, in its franken-bike heyday where it didn’t matter what bike you showed up on as long as you were out having a good time. It’s just a very welcoming sport.

With mountain bike racing, all of a sudden people started making the lightest bikes. They turned out to be a bit flimsy. It became too racy, in so many words, and mountain biking lost its luster. Basically, the question for a lot of people is how do we keep gravel cycling cool? This is all talk at this point because nothing is fluid about cycling.

But mountain biking is as freaking cool as it gets right now in the umbrella of cycling. They fell on a nadir and now they’re cruising up on an absolute wave. We want to skip that low point in gravel and keep it cool. There are gravel races. There are huge gravel races. There are 2,000-plus-person gravel races, and those are awesome.

I did Dirty Kanza this year—I’ve done it the past three years and it’s awesome. 2,700 people show up. And there are tons of other gravel events here in Vermont. We have Vermont Overland. We have Rasputitsa. These races are bringing anywhere from 400 to 1,000 people out.

And it is welcoming. One thing that’s awesome about gravel is you quickly find your tribe, even if you’re going into a race. Chances are if you’re going to finish in the 50th percentile, your goal is not to show up and be on the podium. You will quickly find your people—people with a similar biking physiological ability so that if you’re finishing this ride in five hours, you’re probably meant to do the ride in about five hours. Or if you finish in three hours, you’re probably supposed to be doing it in about three hours.

Compared to road racing, if you go into a race and you hit the first climb and you’re at the back, that’s the end of your day. You may as well go home. You are not going to be a part of the race for the next three hours. There is no longer a peloton, whereas gravel still has that sense of community due to it being such a big starting field.

There are some small nerdy nuances to it, though, like should we have aero bars? Should we include team tactics in gravel racing? I certainly frown on these because I’m a huge proponent of the communal aspect of gravel racing while still keeping it competitive. I don’t have an answer, but it’s interesting to see this progression of gravel that we’re absolutely in the middle of right now.

As fun as it is being on a pro tour for 10 months, keeping your brain in a good place has to be as important as keeping your legs on and your body functioning. What do you think of the mix of nutrition, training, and mental health?  

I’ve written some blogs about how it’s mandatory to be a jack-of-all-trades. You are a professional nutritionist, dietician, physio. You know how to take care of your body. You’re pretty much a professional EMT; you change your own dressing after a race. You have a minor in accounting, as you’re always exchanging a few different currencies.

Being a professional cyclist means you are a professional at many trades. There is a ton of downtime on the pro tour. You spend a ton of time twiddling your thumbs and looking at the internet, and you’re bored out of your mind. If you read up on the favorite activities of a lot of cyclists, you’ll often see reading or cooking—and I’m no exception—as those are ways to occupy your time as a semi-professional nutritionist.

It’s good to be aware of the food you’re fueling with. I really enjoy writing on IAmTedKing.com. My time on the pro tour was never tedious. It was fun to be out on training rides and races, to be thinking of all the things I was going to say. That is how my website became a place to tell the world what Joe Schmo Ted King does in a bike race on the pro tour.

It’s easier said than done, though. I know a lot of people who’ve been told to start a blog. And until you do it and do it regularly, it’s not going to go anywhere. There are plenty of ways to stay busy, plenty of ways to be bored, and it’s just a question of what you are going to choose.

On the training and nutrition side, what are some of the things that work for you? We’re sitting near the place you and your cofounders launched UnTapped. Talk about how that fits in.

That is a perfect segue. They are intrinsically tied and there are a lot of fads. There are also a lot of fast solutions. Overall, I think there’s a lot to be said about simplicity.

It was great being on an Italian team in a lot of ways, although they would also deprive you of food at certain times of the year. If you are training in Italy and you get a pasta dish, you’ll find there are very few ingredients on your plate. You have exquisite pasta with great olive oil, a little bit of cheese and salt, and that’s it. Keep it simple, stupid. If you crack open a can of SpaghettiOs, you’re going to find 75 different ingredients.

This is also the advent of Dr. Allen Lim, and bringing his methodology and his thinking into cycling sports nutrition. It is all about real foods. It’s about keeping it simple. Amid my racing and being known as a New Englander, I would often step off the bus at a bike race and very generous fans would hand me quarts, pints, or even half-gallons of maple syrup. I would think for one, they’ve trekked this all the way across the globe. It’s expensive.

And two, it’s not like a high-five or a selfie. These people have very generously given me this gift, and I would graciously go home and put it on my oatmeal or put it on my pancakes. Every once in a while, I’d start putting it in my water bottle—it’s liquid gold. I’d be so psyched to have just a spoonful of it, or to take a small slug straight from the bottle because after consuming so many gels—way too many gels in my career—you put it together that a gel is a whole bunch of carbohydrates and maple syrup is a whole bunch of carbohydrates.

But maple syrup is loaded with amino acids, electrolytes, antioxidants. It’s very easy for your body to digest. It is sucrose, so it breaks down in your body as glucose and fructose, which is a huge benefit in endurance sports. I was like, “I’m sitting on a goldmine here. Why has nobody ever put maple syrup into an individual gel?”

I would come back to North America in the off-season and ride to farmers markets. I would pull out a generic gel packet and tell farmers I wanted to add maple syrup to it. No one ever understood it, or they were purely focused on selling bottles of maple syrup, so they didn’t want to be onboard.

After about two years of that, I met my current partner at UnTapped, Andrew Gardner. He said, “You’ve got to talk to the Cochrans.” The Cochrans own this beautiful property that we’re sitting on right now, which is a small ski area in Vermont. They have produced three generations of Olympic alpine skiers. The four cousins my age started a maple syrup operation about six years ago. They are athletes making maple syrup for grocery stores, for restaurants, for people who sell bulk maple syrup.

They understood the power and efficacy of maple syrup. They had the bandwidth to put it into packages, to figure out all the insurance, all the distribution—all those requirements that I couldn’t manage while I was living and racing overseas. That is the long story of UnTapped, which is now a sports nutrition lineup, and it’s a great deal of what I’m doing now.

We have two packets. One is pure organic maple syrup. One is organic maple syrup infused with coffee, so you get a natural caffeine boost. We also have three waffles— maple, raspberry, and coffee—all of which taste like those three things because we only use those things.

We use only real foods in our products, so we use real raspberries. We use real coffee. We use real maple syrup. I’m very exciting about two new drink mixes that just came out under the same concept. One is super-simple with three ingredients, and the other has four.

How many years has UnTapped been going?

We started with a successful 2014 crowdfunding campaign while I was racing the Tour de France. Basically, we figured what better platform than the Tour de France to be racing and see what kind of momentum we can get from a worldly audience? We smashed through our goal and have been cruising since then.

I haven’t been a pro athlete, but there are likely similarities between entrepreneurship and sports. Talk about your transition into the business world.

One awesome aspect of our company is that everybody immediately had a role. I had a platform where I could tell people about not only our crowdfunding campaign, but also the product itself. I was lucky to bring it full-circle by being an early Twitter adopter, and an early adopter of Facebook and Instagram, so I had that audience. My partners, the Cochrans—since they already had the slope-side operation, they were able to figure out the distribution and all these things. Andrew Gardner has a PR firm, so his role was to get us into the right publications and magazines.

To this day we remain a really small company. We haven’t had to outsource. Much like a bike team, everybody has a role. As long as we do our jobs and do them well, it’s a blast.

That said, there are certain pressures in bike racing. Worst-case scenario, you’re racing in Northern Belgium. You’re on a road about eight feet wide. You’ve got Peter Sagan, the world’s best cyclist, on your wheel. You’re supposed to deliver him to a particular point in the race. It’s windy, it’s pouring rain, and it’s probably sleeting a little bit. There’s cow shit coming up in your face, and there’s somebody screaming at you in a foreign language because you’re on an Italian cycling team.

That to me is a level of pressure that we share in the peloton. There are a handful of very successful entrepreneurs who have come from a professional cycling background. Time in, results out—that’s all you know as a cyclist. You know that if you put your head down and grind, you’re going to succeed. That’s the truth here at UnTapped also. We certainly find more results the harder we work. It’s been an awesome transition.

Going back to kids and sports, watching the pressure that’s on really young kids these days to pick one sport from an early age—I’m personally worried about burnout. What’s your message to parents who want the best for their kids?

I would say to put them on a bike because the bike is the greatest thing ever. I was able to succeed and not be burned out, having gotten into the sport at a later age. Getting into it at 19 or 20, I saw a lot of people who had been racing since they were 12 years old. They were already finished.

Surrounded by these kids 100 yards away, that level of cycling is awesome. What Lea and Sabra Davison have done with Little Bellas—getting girls about 15 years or younger onto bikes—I think that is awesome. That’s everything that is right about bicycles.

I won’t give parenting advice. It’s great when a parent can share a sport with a kid, whether it’s skiing or hockey or just playing catch—or certainly going for a bike ride. You don’t want to shove it down the kid’s throat. You want them to embrace it and enjoy it. Not every day is going to be sunshine and buttercups. I think there’s a lot to be said about pushing a kid through some bad days.

When I was a kid I played every sport under the sun. I love cycling because it is a lifetime sport. I grew up riding a bike quite a bit, but it was purely to get to the local convenience store to buy candy or soda with my friends, to ride to my friends’ houses, to go to school. It’s the same thing that I do now at this age, riding a bike to a coffee shop or riding with friends to drink caffeine rather than soda. I suppose they’re one in the same. Drink coffee instead of coke.

Who are the coaches, trainers, mentors, and other people who have helped you along through your career?

Without question, my brother has been the coolest influence on me. I would not be a cyclist without him. He got into it in high school. I followed in his footsteps, getting into it a little bit later. We don’t get out and ride often anymore. He’s pursuing medical school now. When we do, we still have a blast.

I’ve had a handful of coaches, and I think they have all been very valuable. I’ve maintained really good relationships with them. Most certainly people hit me up for advice all the time. Often I say get a coach because, as you know, it gets very acute very quickly. I can give you 1,000 individual bits of training advice, but the reality is that if you really want to improve, then having a coach is a huge benefit.

Side note: I run a small coaching business and coach about a half-dozen athletes. As we were walking over here, we were discussing that I have all these things on social media I like to share because I gleaned a lot of insights and knowledge over my 10-year racing career, and I want to share that. It’s not different in the realm of coaching.

I had tremendous support from my parents as well. They were always on the sideline cheering, and they never force-fed me anything. They were just really great supporters. Family has been pretty awesome.

What does your role look like on the coaching side? Are you seeing people in person, or is it more about giving them tips and looking over their activities online, and then helping them think through their training?

It’s more the latter. With everything online these days, athletes can upload their training file. I can see geographically where they’re riding; I can see what hills they’re climbing. I can see the gradients. I can see their power outputs, their heart rates, their speed, their cadence, and I can coach them on all those things.

Generally, I see each of these six to eight athletes once or twice a year—and you can do a heck of a lot of training in person that you can’t do over a computer screen, so we work on a little bit of everything. It’s fun with the various sponsors I’m involved with—I get to do a lot of events and camps and product launches. As a result, I’m with cyclists who are not folks I coach all the time. I try to tastefully give them advice. It’s much like telling your spouse how to drive—you don’t want to do it because you realize there will be some ramifications.

It’s not easy to tell this person next to you—while you’re sharing this recreating activity— that they’re doing it wrong. Rather than simply telling them how to do it, you have to figure out a way to tell this person how to slow their cadence, stand up less, stand up more, increase their cadence, stop half-wheeling me, and more. There are plenty of really adept cyclists who have skill but no physiology. Then there are plenty of people who have huge physiology—huge engines—but they don’t know what to do with it. They’re like toddlers behind the wheel of a Ducati, or behind the handlebars of a Ducati. In this communal era of cycling, we’re just trying to smooth everything out so that the fast guy can ride with the slow guy—so that everybody can ride in harmony.

What about women’s cycling? On one of your podcasts, you mentioned they scheduled a women’s race in the middle of the week. Where is that going? What are some of the positive signs you’re seeing, and where is there room for improvement?

Professional cycling is the biggest amateur sport on the planet, and that’s on the men’s side. Domestic cycling is often in shambles. When it comes to women’s cycling, there is nothing but improvement that can be made. It goes back to the fluid nature of what cycling is in general. What we see this year—what we see this month or even today—is different than what we’re going to see next year, or five years down the road. The evolution is all very interesting.

I thought it was curious that the men’s Tour de France was running at the same time as the women’s Giro d’Italia. Initially I was skeptical of it, but it turned into an incredible race. I think as a result of cycling fans in general, paying attention to the men’s side, they were also paying attention to the women’s side. Directly after the Giro, a day or two later, they scheduled a women’s one-day Tour de France on a Tuesday. 99.9% of the time one-day bike races are held on weekends. I thought it was a really curious decision to do it on a Tuesday. It happened to be during the Tour de France and it happened to produce a really fascinating race.

Is anything perfect? No. The development is there. I think it’s often two steps forward, one step back. These teams will come along and have great rosters and great budgets. They’ll exist for two years, and then they’ll be done. That exemplary team is gone, but then another year or two later another example like that will come along. It’s great progress followed by some unfortunate fallbacks. By and large I think the sport of cycling—including female cycling, as well as domestic cycling—is going in the right direction.

Give everybody the 60 seconds on Dirty Kanza.

Time out—we haven’t started the clock yet! How well-versed is your audience in the cycling community?

It’s a mix. You’ve got some cycling fans and some people who are probably following the sport but not on their bikes.

Dirty Kanza is now in its 11th year. This is a 206-mile race across Kansas—a figure-eight loop. What started with 38 people 11 years ago now tops 2,700. I’d heard of it in the growth of gravel throughout my racing career, but it was prohibitive to do it when I was overseas.

In 2016, my first year retired, Rebecca Rush said, “You’ve got to come do this crazy race in Kansas.” I did, and I went in completely naïve. I knew how to ride on cobbles. I knew how to ride long distances. I came away with some success, though. I won the race.

The next year I went back, and I thought I was going to clean up again. The field got deeper, I had some bad luck, and I did not win. Then 2018 I went back again. The field was as deep as ever, and there were lots of professional cyclists amid this 2,700-person race. I came away the victor.

I was pretty psyched about that because I have totally different motivations and goals and methods through which I pursue those goals. Now in retirement, these gravel races are a lot of fun—they represent everything that’s right about bike racing and bike riding. I wholeheartedly suggest that people go out to a gravel event, be it Dirty Kanza or another one down the road from you.

Was it funny to say “retirement” and “won the Dirty Kanza” in the same sentence?

Yeah, but I have totally different motivations and levels of discipline. To be a professional bike racer, you’re perpetually starved, you don’t drink alcohol for long periods of time or at all, and you are training six days a week. Now I drink a lot of beer, I eat a lot of food, I ride my bike hard and often, but in a completely other level of discipline.

That’s amazing. I saw in Strava your goal for the year is 15,000 miles. Is that about what you ride in a year?

That is a Strava estimate based on last year that prompted me to state that as my goal. Rather than leaving it blank, I just hit confirm. I was looking at my Strava end-of-the-month report with my wife and realized that over the past three months—amid this drive to move across the country, and with all these life changes—I’ve been on a downward trend of shorter distances and fewer miles traveled. I think in this short window, I’ve fallen behind on my projected distance.

Let’s go back to UnTapped for a moment. Where do you see it in two years?

Taking over the world. It would be great to see it in every bike shop, ski shop, run shop, coffee shop, outdoor shop, pharmacy, and grocery store. The beauty of it is that it is real food, so parents can feel comfortable giving it to their kid as a snack, or at soccer practice. It’s great for camping. It’s great for hiking. It’s freaking delicious. I’ve seen people put it on their chain, true story. If you’ve got a loud chain, put some maple syrup on it.

Now we’re going to go through some quick questions. What’s in your garage that you can’t live without?

We just bought a house, so currently my garage is empty because we’re in a rental. But the thing I’m most excited about is the lawnmower that I don’t yet own. I could say my bike, but I own nine bikes. I don’t have a single bicycle. If it says Cannondale, it’s probably my absolute favorite.

You’ve been riding Cannondale since your first bike?

My first-ever road bike, my first-ever mountain bike, my first-ever cross bike. That was all a complete coincidence. And when I started racing professionally, I kept riding Cannondale.

What is your go-to food?

I love all food. From 100 yards away, I see four cool mountain bikers in their cool clothes; they’re sharing a beer. I love IPA. Moving back to Vermont, I’ve realized IPA is so good. It rivals maple syrup around here.

I love all maple products, anything sweet, and then I love healthy food too. Had the original question been about my go-to tool, I would have said my Cuisinart—I like making my own humus. There’s nothing better than happy hour with humus and carrots and cheese and crackers and beer.

Are there any apps or devices you can’t live without, or that you find interesting right now?

I am a slave to the apps. I do Instagram quite a bit, Strava quite a bit. I like the simplicity of tethering my Garmin so the Garmin Connect syncs up with Strava. I think that’s wonderful. Once upon a time I thought texting was the stupidest thing ever—that’s an app in a way—but lo and behold, my brother told me the other day that he sent 140,000 texts last year or something insane. That’s a lot of conversation. And I probably do twice that.

What are some of your favorite podcasts? Especially now that you’ve gotten into your own.

King of the Ride is definitely one of my favorites that is mine. I listen to it to make sure it’s functional. I also enjoy Freakonomics and Stuff You Should Know. If I just flip on the radio, I listen to all things NPR. They’ll often be in the middle of a show, so then I’ll Bluetooth it to This American Life or get the full story there. How I Built This is excellent as well. I’m just waiting for them to call me up and be like, “Ted King, we want to talk about UnTapped.” We’re also holding out for How I Built This. It’s kind of perfect.

East versus west?

I love California and the Rockies, and I realize those are two different places. I love the United States and the ability to travel, which I’ve been blessed enough to do. I haven’t really felt the need to leave New England since we moved about a month ago, though—but winter is coming.

Gravel versus road?

For the time being, gravel. Here in Vermont, we’re in God’s country for gravel right now. The gravel is so smooth, so buffed out. You can easily ride your road bike on it.

Strength versus agility?

Agility.

What do you do for agility?

I don’t know. I’m a big guy, just shy of 6’3”, so I’m not one of those shorter cyclists with an enormous power-to-weight ratio. I think I’d rather be brainy than brawny.

Sleep versus nutrition for recovery?

I was just talking about this the other day. Nutrition, in the acute example—if I’m going to finish a ride, I’m going to get the proper recovery food rather than take a nap. I’ll throw a third one in there and say massage is utterly important as well, although it’s not something I do terribly often.

What do you eat the night before a race?

Whatever I want.

How about two days before a race?

Same.

What’s the most important thing you’ve taken away from cycling?

Not to get too corny, but it’s sort of brought me everything. It brought me a life and a profession and my friends and my wife. I got into bike riding and racing because it was fun, and I enjoyed the competition. I never expected all this. It’s blown me away what it’s provided me over the past 15-plus years.

Let’s close it out with some Dirty Kanza. 

Listen to the full interview on The Common Threads podcast at: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify.

Interested in more from Ted King? Check out his profile here on Prokit and his King of the Ride website.

The post Ted King, Pro Cyclist and Co-Founder of Untapped appeared first on Prokit.

Ultrarunner Dean Karnazes runs more in 24 hours than many people do in a year. We often hear about amazing feats in human endurance, but Dean’s story is not the typical narrative of a few big adventures, or a few years in his prime setting records. His plays out over more than 25 years and is not stopping. 

We sat down to talk about what he has learned over the past several decades pushing his body far beyond conventional limits. His answers on diet, longevity, recovery and training aren’t what you might expect. No pre-race meal, no massage or stretching, no taking the day off after a big race. Instead, constant movement, strengthening, pushing further, nurturing your relationships, chasing passions and finding what works for you.

Dean also provides an inside look at what it takes to build a career as an endurance athlete in an industry where there is no playbook. 

Read the whole interview with ultrarunner Dean Karnazez here or listen to this episode on The Common Threads podcast.

Your feedback helps us make each episode better. If you enjoy The Common Threads, subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or review.

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In this episode of the podcast, we sat down with Mark Allen who is often referred to as one of the greatest endurance athletes of all time. His records are legendary. Six Ironman World Championships, and all ten attempts at the International Triathlon in France, with multi-year winning streaks that go into the double digits.  

We sat down at his kitchen table in Santa Cruz near his daily surf break. Since retiring from competition at 37 in 1995, Mark has become a coach, father, author and speaker. Technology has advanced dramatically over the past decades, but our genetics haven’t. Mark unpacks this and simplifies topics like nutrition, sleep, training, and preparing your mind for competition, work and life.  

You can read the full interview here or listen to it on The Common Threads podcast.

Your feedback helps us make each episode better. If you enjoy The Common Threads, subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or review.

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A new podcast episode with mountain bike pioneer Gary Fisher. From light shows for the Grateful Dead and decorating the Jefferson Airplane mansion to becoming one of the pioneers of mountain biking, Gary Fisher has seen a lot. And he remembers it all. Gary Fisher was born in 1950, and raced bikes until being suspended in 1968 for long hair. Fast forward to the 1970s and early 1980s, Gary is not only back on his bike, but starting a movement with $600 with his partners Charlie Kelly and frame builder, Tom Ritchey. By 1983, Gary was on to his own company, Gary Fisher Bikes, which was acquired years later by Trek Bikes.

I could barely keep up with Gary’s take on the past, present and future of bikes and society. He gets into it all: Growing up in Guam, Beverly Hills and the Bay Area; what’s needed to get more kids on bikes; bike shares, electric scooters and cities; the state of pro sponsorships; his views on nutrition and training; and a lot of fun.

As Gary says, “It’s not the nuts and bolts. The nuts and bolts are the carrier. It’s the places you go, the people you meet, the stuff you do. That’s what makes it a great adventure.”

You can read the full interview here or listen to this episode with Gary Fisher on The Common Threads podcast.

Your feedback helps us make each episode better. If you enjoy The Common Threads, subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or review.

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The post Gary Fisher, Mountain Bike Pioneer: “It’s the places you go, the people you meet, the stuff you do.” appeared first on Prokit.

Eric Antonow wasn’t the nerd, or the jock, or the drama kid growing up. In his words, he distinctly belonged to none of these groups. He wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do as a kid, or years later in college, or as a 20-something.

So he just did the things that seemed attractive at the time. While most of us were off chasing internships and following the obvious stepping-stones, Eric was laying drywall for Habitat for Humanity, running a bookstore, and teaching the ukulele to five-year-olds.

Skip ahead a few decades, and Eric has found himself in some of the biggest product marketing jobs in tech. But his path to Silicon Valley wasn’t obvious—before working at Google, Facebook, and Instagram, Eric helped start a small software company in his hometown of Chicago. He spent 150 days a year on Southwest flights to every small and medium-sized city in the country, selling software.

I spent hundreds of hours debating an approach or planning for the next product launch with Eric at Facebook and Instagram, but realized I knew little about how he became who he is today. Focused, deliberate, precise, and capable of articulating ideas with more clarity than the best of us, Eric is someone everyone remembers. And he does it all with character. Complete with a pencil and a piece of paper in hand, you’ll find Eric wearing an identical outfit from the day before.

Today Eric is the co-founder of a new company called Metabolic, based in Palo Alto. He joined founder Jonathan Gheller to attack the problem of changing what you eat. Eric has always been somewhat obsessed with how people learn, and as you’ll see in the interview, their approach to a health epidemic facing so many today is far from another fad diet.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. Metabolic launched its new brand One Fix after our original publication date. 

Eric Antonow: I had a bowl full of walnuts, blueberries, coconut oil, cinnamon, and chia seeds. I’ve probably had that exact same thing for breakfast for about 120 days.

It is a quarter cup of chia seeds mixed in water with a tablespoon of cinnamon, half a cup of walnuts, a handful of blueberries, and a tablespoon of coconut oil.

120 days?

Yeah. No variance. Another part of the experiment was seeing what it would be like not to have a coffee, given I’ve had one every day for a couple of decades.

How did you get to this breakfast of choice?

I’ve been testing a bunch of different breakfasts, but the goal of this is no impact on blood sugar. I’ve tried other breakfasts to find ones with no effect on blood sugar. This one happened to come from a guy, Adam Brown, who runs a Facebook group for diabetics. He’s a Type 1 diabetic and wears a glucose monitor so he can see the effect on his blood sugar. He has tested this breakfast hundreds of times.

I also wear a glucose monitor—not because I’m a diabetic, but because I’m curious about how my body works.

The blueberries are the only carbs?

There’s probably a little bit of net carbs in the walnuts and the chia seeds, but it’s immaterial. Basically, it’s a giant bowl of fat and fiber. It’s probably 50 grams of fat and, I don’t know, enough fiber to float a boat.

Most people who eat it find it incredibly stabilizing for their metabolism, but it’s an acquired taste. It’s not super-sweet, so to each his own.

Talk more about this 120-day experiment.

At the beginning of the experiment, I would usually take a full lipid panel to see what my blood looked like. Then I would take another blood panel every month or every two months along the way, and then at the end. You get a concrete idea of how your body reacts to the combination of things you’re eating. You can see how your cholesterol reacts, how your blood sugar reacts, whether there are any other markers that are materially affected.   

You can also see viscerally how you feel during the day. Am I hungrier before lunch when I eat this type of breakfast? Before this experiment, I was eating three eggs for breakfast consistently for about 120 days. How do I feel differently now versus then?

What’s the answer?

This breakfast works a little bit better for me. I feel a more consistent energy. It also means I can grab an omelet for lunch without having eggs twice in one day. That’s a long answer to what I had for breakfast, but you asked the wrong person.

At five years old, my dad was a diabetic, which meant we really had no sugar in the house. No sugar felt like a form of deprivation when I was a kid. We only had Special K or Product 19 in the house. On a good day, we’d have Rice Krispies.

I grew up in Chicago, downtown, in a highrise 30 floors up in the air with two younger brothers. They both live in Chicago still. One’s a fireman; one’s an attorney. I live in Palo Alto.

What brought you out to California from Chicago?

I grew up in the Midwest. I lived in Chicago for more than 30 years of my life. I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan for school. I’d been part of two startups in Chicago, and then I took a little bit of time off when my kids were born. I came out here to work for Google almost 11 years ago now.

Tech in Chicago—how did you get into that? What was your path into the tech world?

I don’t think it was technology. I grew up with a computer in the house, which was not yet normal. These were the first Apple and IBM PCs. We lobbied my dad to buy one. We spent most of the time playing games but learned a little programming. I had some background then but didn’t use it for almost a decade. My first jobs were everything from laying drywall to running a bookstore.

When did you lay drywall?

It was a couple of years after college. It was very unclear what I was good at or what I wanted to do. I didn’t have any strong desires that I can remember. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I just did anything that was attractive to me. I laid drywall for Habitat for Humanity for a while. I went and found a small bookstore that I really liked and helped run that. Then I worked for a music school, did some operational stuff, and taught baritone ukulele to five-year-olds.

It was at the music school I met Michael Hobor, who was doing consulting work, and he offered me an apprenticeship. He was incredibly generous with his time and took me on as a partner on a bunch of projects. He convinced me that there were interesting problems in business that were worth thinking about. I would have been pretty skeptical about that idea if it weren’t for him.

Tell me about high school. There are the sporty kids and the music kids and the creative kids, etc. Who were you?

There were all those groups of people and I distinctly belonged to none of them. I didn’t feel deeply connected to groups. I didn’t do theater, even though we had a pretty strong drama school. I didn’t do sports, even though we had good sports teams. I had lots of individual friends but didn’t feel any connection to a particular group.

I was just reflective, again not really knowing what I wanted to do, not really clear about what got me excited—other than the fact that I liked individual people. I had a couple of very good friends I loved hanging out with. Whatever they wanted to do, I was cool doing.

What about your family growing up? Were there any traditions or vacations you had that stuck with you?

My parents were really different people with very different outlooks. My dad was older. He’d grown up in Chicago. When I was born, he was already 53, so he was notably older than most dads. He looked older too, so people would often mistake him for my grandfather. He was also older in the sense that he just had a different perspective, both of his own mortality and of the world.

My mom’s personality was very different. She was younger. She was in her mid-20s and she was an immigrant. She was born and raised in France, left at a young age, borderline running away. Growing up, I had two very different perspectives on the world.

My parents eventually got divorced, when I was around 12. I think the strongest thing that came out of that for my kids is really recognizing that there isn’t a single way to do things. It wasn’t like I grew up with one family; I grew up with two really strong opinions that were pretty different. I think about that when I look at my own kids, when I just look at my own family—my wife Jennifer and I have two children—and I view it as four people with pretty different opinions living under the same roof. I think that’s the strongest thing that came out of my growing up; there are pretty different opinions in the house rather than a single vision of a family.

Your mom coming from France, almost running away—did she go back much? Were you connected to the French side of her as a kid?

Two separate things. One is you grow up with a parent who’s an immigrant and you’re making sense of that. The person has an accent. There are some traditions she’s not familiar with. You deal with some of that awkwardness as a child, or you experience some of it. Like her not knowing what to make me for lunch when I was in kindergarten or first grade, and me having an uncooked English muffin with peanut butter spread on it. I said there were other kids who were bringing peanut butter sandwiches, and she would say, “I’ve no idea what that is.” She would cut these Bays English muffins in half, uncooked, and just slather peanut butter on top, no jelly. It was horrible! It was really the worst (laughing). All kinds of funny things like that, where it just was awkward.

Then there’s the connection factor, her family and her parents. We would talk to our grandparents on the phone every three to six months; long-distance calls felt much more expensive back them, so it was rare. They spoke mostly French; my grandfather spoke a little English. We went to visit them every four years or so. I think we visited them when I was six, and then again when I was 10, and they’d come visit a little more frequently during the summer.

It definitely felt like we weren’t being raised in a particularly French way. Later on, after college, I went to live with my grandparents for a year, which was great.

Talk about living with your grandparents in France.

They were in Paris. That was a ton of fun. I got to meet two people who I really didn’t know, and I lived in a room off their apartment. Ate breakfast with them pretty much every day for a year. My grandfather was probably 90 at the time. My grandmother was in her mid-80s.

Living with two older people and their patterns and their conversation was great. I also got to know part of my family that I would have had no connection with—they ended up dying within a year or two of my leaving. It teaches you a little bit about your own parent and the environment they grew up in.

My grandparents, I think, had fun having their young grandkid around the house. I was right out of college, so I was also a little bit of a handful. They wanted to know what time I was going to be home, and I would be like, “I don’t know.”

A bit more abstractly, I do think that if I find something I really enjoy, my bias is to become obsessive about it. To really experience everything I can about it. I don’t know how long it’ll last. Whether it’s a writer or a piece of music or whatever, I think my orientation is to become pretty obsessive and then at a certain point that will stop. I’ve either exhausted my interest in it or I’ve exhausted the subject on some level, but yeah, you’re right—that’s my orientation.

Music in particular has always been something that just gets me really connected to a particular song or artist or genre. For a period of time, I could pretty much follow it. I would follow all the trails until I just couldn’t do it anymore, until I was either completely exhausted or I’d exhausted the thread.

What’s your music right now?

The most fun thing that’s happened in the last three or four years is most of the threads don’t start with me anymore. They start with one of my two kids. Some of the greatest experiences have been going to concerts with my kids where I went in blind, not really knowing the artist. I’ve found music I wouldn’t likely have found, and I got to experience it with them for the first time.

I remember three years ago going to Chance the Rapper when he wasn’t a big star. My son was about 10 and he told me, “We have to go to this.” He knew the songs and was deeply moved by all of them. It’s a combination of gospel and hip-hop. It was great to see him excited about something he loves. To have that experience with him—there’s no better pleasure than that.

The same thing happened with my daughter. When she was six I went to see One Direction, and experiencing that with her was very visceral—a direct line to being that age. It was like, This is who I am and what I love.

Any time I get to experience my kids through their world, it’s more interesting than anything I could come up with myself.

Have any musical influences stood out to you more than others?

It would just be this long, long list of weirdos—and I promise you, it would sound like it was intentionally eclectic. I guess at some point, I liked somebody to that extreme. Sometimes it’s a song, not an artist. Again, there may be something I enjoy about having just a pure eclectic thing. I like having this range of music because there’s some ego in it. There’s something that I find cool about it, but that’s not most of it.

I think most of it is you hear a song and it resonates with you. You’re just like, That says something either I knew to be true or I’d never heard of before, and now it feels really true to me. It’s the full range of everything. I don’t think there’s a genre of music where I haven’t been deeply, deeply touched by a piece.

I’ve tried to learn a number of instruments by myself. I’ve tried to understand how to do that. The goal isn’t to learn piano; the goal is to learn how you can learn piano.

Learning for me is much more feeling my way in the dark, as opposed to some people who, at six years old, know they want to be a doctor.

Back to piano. I know I’m not a brute force learner. I’m not going to lock myself in a room five hours a day and practice. Some people operate that way. Not me.

Instead of pushing myself, something has to pull me—something I’m attracted to. Something that I know to be true. I couldn’t force myself to memorize things in school; that never worked for me. I’d generally use the approach of finding things I liked a lot and letting those things pull me. I’d find a writer I liked in English and then I would like that English class.

What I think I learned with the piano, and what I’ve learned a lot since then, is that I have this incredible bias toward thinking of learning as an individual sport. You’re there with a book or a math problem or a piano, and your job is to work on it and progress on it individually. That was, I think, my thesis for a long time—or the way I oriented myself.

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned from work—from being in places like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and jobs before that—is how much faster I learn in the context of a team of people. I probably learn three to five times faster in teams than I learn alone. I think learning by yourself is often the least effective method. Join the right group, the right collective of people, and you’ll go much faster. I think that’s a huge misunderstanding of how we operate.  

Going from not knowing what you wanted to do, to having some pretty serious jobs at Google and Instagram and Facebook, what did you take away? When were you really in your element?

Before I went to Google, I started a small software company in Chicago with a couple other people. We built it up over about five years, to about 20 people, and then we got acquired. It was the first time I ran a decent-sized team or an organization. When I went to Google, I wanted to focus on what I was going to learn about managing, and how I was operating inside a bigger organization.

But what I got out of Google was entirely different. Most of it was just learning by watching some very smart people. Watching them work, watching how they made decisions, watching how they ran meetings, watching how they thought through problems—this was an incredibly fast way for me to learn. I felt really lucky. When I went to Google, we were already roughly 10,000 people and all of the challenges were at a completely different scale.

You went into product marketing before you founded the startup, right?

Yeah, I wasn’t particularly good at anything, to be clear.

Before Google, at my startup, I was the sales person because we were 15 engineers, a designer, a PM, and then me. So I was on a Southwest flight to every small and medium-sized city in the country 150 days of the year, selling software. I wasn’t good at sales beforehand, but I got good at it pretty quickly. When I went to Google, I didn’t have any other obvious skills.

But they hired you.

They sort of hired me. It took them a long time, at least five months and 17 interviews for them to actually say, “I think we’ll have you.”

When it got near the end of the process, they made me choose whether I wanted to work in business development, sales, or product marketing. Product marketing was closely tied to the product organization, which was closest to the way the organization thought. I really wanted to learn from the people and the culture, so that seemed like the right choice. I sat in the center buildings on campus most of my time there.

I was responsible for product marketing for an area called Client, which was all the software that was resident on the desktop rather than delivered entirely over the cloud. That was Google Toolbar, and Desktop, and a few other products, and when we eventually launched Google Chrome, that was under that same team.

Product marketing became your calling for a while. Fast-forward a few years, and you are responsible for marketing a little product called Facebook.

This was all very organic. I had three really great people on my team when I joined Google—John, Joyce, and Mendel—and they taught me everything I needed to know. My manager at the time, a woman named Debbie Jaffe, was the best manager I could have learned from. We reported to Marissa Mayer at the time, and so occasionally we’d have meetings with her to discuss stuff, and I got to learn from watching her. My product counterpart was a guy named Sundar Pichai, who post-Chrome, went on to be responsible for large parts of the organization at Google. I got to watch really exceptional people work.

Partway through that, I also became responsible for the developer side, which included all of our APIs and our developer events. Those were two very different experiences. One was consumer marketing; one was developer marketing. That whole thing was three-and-a-half very intense years.

By the time I was done with that, I think I did know something. When I got the inquiry from Facebook, it wasn’t crazy that I would take on a product marketing challenge. I had done enough of it that I felt somewhat confident.

The experience at Facebook was just as profound. The combination of such exceptional people and the intensity of the mission made it the best place to learn.  

I remember at Instagram we had the “Do Less” mugs for you. You had an intense focus on simplicity and making sure we weren’t spreading ourselves thin. Is that a philosophy you have in general, or is it specific to the environment?

Some part of it was specific to the environment at Instagram. Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom had a focus and a simplicity-oriented ethic that were at the core of what they built. That part was very clearly in the Instagram culture, and I think one of the things that made it special.

The second part of “Do Less” was more personal. In most of these environments, there are a handful of things that really matter, and then there are other things we spend a lot of time on. Trying to understand that when you have scarce resources, scarce time—what’s the one most important thing to focus on?

When you and I sat down with our teams, we would look at all these things we wanted to accomplish in a quarter, and it was always a massive list. The teams came back with these amazing ideas: “We want to do this project at a museum, and we really want to do this incredible thing with this artist.” We had all these incredible ideas, and we did many of them—so many of them. It was a little nuts.

Of the 73 things that people wanted to do, what’s the one thing you’d be most proud of getting done? What’s the one thing that would change the course of the organization, or the brand, or the product? “Do Less” is about putting more of your energy toward that one thing.

There are too many things to do, too many choices, always scarce resources. What are the things you’ve learned about filtering it down from 73 to one?

I don’t have an abstract filter. I know the process we would use. We would usually argue, which is to say, “Make the case for me how this will change the world on the other side.” To be worth doing, it must have a dramatic impact on the way we tell our story, and in how people interpret our story, and in how people understand us.

How, in that very brief time users give us their attention, can we do our best to close the gap between where we are and where they are? As we go through that list of 73, which of these items has a real chance of closing that gap?

That’s how we oriented ourselves toward the problem. We argued most of this stuff out.

I remember my daily walks with you. You had your pencil behind your ear, your piece of paper, and you were wearing the same-style shirt you’d worn the day before. These symbolic items and gestures are not that common. Talk about what they mean?

Yes, I wear the same outfit every day. When I moved here to the Valley, it was pointed out to me that there are other people who do this too (laughing).

For me, the most disappointing thing about being five years old was having a favorite shirt that you couldn’t wear every day. I remember having this t-shirt that I thought was amazing. It had an iron-on. I would argue with my parents, “Why can’t I wear it every day? This is the best shirt.” They’d say, “It gets dirty, and we have to wash it.” I would then say, “Well, can you wash it while I’m sleeping?”

If I found something that I really thought was the best, why couldn’t I wear it every day? The minute I got control over my wardrobe, which arguably wasn’t until my early 30s, I would find something I liked and just buy 10 of it. There are some things that seem totally reasonable to me, but looking at them from the outside they may seem a little more odd.

Metabolic was founded by Jonathan Gheller, and I joined him early on. The goal is to build a program and a set of tools to help people change what they eat. Many people—either for health reasons, or to change how much they weigh—turn to diet to go through that change. It’s mostly ineffective. Most people struggle to change what they eat, even if they start with a huge motivation to change, like how long they live or how much they’ll suffer. Even with those motivations, people struggle. We’re building a set of tools to make that easier. That’s what Metabolic is.

How far along are you in the process?

Pretty early, but we’ve made a ton of progress. You can think of changing what you eat as two problems: what to eat and how to change? We focus much more on the second part—on how to change.

I was thinking about your 120-day diet. Having the discipline to do that is not very common.

No, that’s not common. But it’s less about discipline and more about finding a way to make change easy. I’m changing just one thing: what I eat for breakfast. Most diets fail because they ask people to make multiple changes at once.

If I went to you and said, “Guess what, David? You’re going to wear all purple from now on. A big purple hat, purple shirt, purple tie, purple pants, purple underwear, purple socks, purple shoes, the whole bit, because that’s what it’s going to take to be healthy,” you’d be like, “I’m not a clown.”

If you tried to wear that for a week, you would reject it; it’s not you.

I might wear purple socks. That’s about as far as I would go.

Yes! Why don’t we just try purple socks? You do purple socks for a month. After a week or two, it’ll be less weird, and maybe you’re just the purple socks guy. People may actually know you as that.

It’s both a small fix and also, it becomes part of your identity. After a month, it would be weirder to find you not wearing purple socks than it would be for you to wear purple socks. With Metabolic, we find one small change in the person’s diet, the right thing to change. They do it for a month and lose between five and 15 pounds in 30 days.

Then, after wearing the socks for a month, we would ask, “David, how do you feel?” You’d say, “I lost seven pounds and feel great. I’ve got better energy all day just from wearing these purple socks.” And we would say, “Great! We’ve got one more change for you. Shoelaces—could you do purple shoelaces?” And a month later, the purple shoelaces wouldn’t be so weird. You’d feel better and you’d have lost a little bit more weight, and you’d go and do a lipid panel and your HDL would be up 15 points and your LDL would be down. Your triglycerides would be down and your A1C would be normal. You’d say, “This is amazing, and all I did was change my socks and shoelaces.”

For some people, they might be done. Those may be the only two fixes they need to make. For most other diets, you would get a black list of all the things you can’t eat, or a white list of things you must eat. That’s a dramatic change.

I actually can’t think of anything that’s a stronger expression of identity than what you eat. What you put in your mouth turns into your muscle and tissue, your cells and bone. That’s physiological. Then there’s the psychological part. People say things like, “I’m not myself without coffee” or “I’m a bread person.” Those are strong statements of identity, and making changes to your identity is really, really hard. If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to find small fixes with a large impact.

When you say, “I can’t imagine there are too many people who could eat the same breakfast for 120 days,” I would say, well, I’m not changing anything else. My lunch, my dinner—I’m not making any other edits during that time. I’m not trying to change my shirt.

So far this has been really effective for people. What you eat is important, but how you change is actually more important. Learning is actually just changing your identity.

How many employees do you have now? What does Metabolic look like?

About 12 people, but it’s still pretty early. It’s about one year in.

How do people use it?

There’s an app. You take a picture of everything you eat before you eat it. Within a couple minutes, a nutritionist somewhere scores the meal for carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. So your food journal is maintained automatically. After about a week, we can spot for the obvious patterns—the things that are probably affecting your body. We can see your best days and your worst days, and what foods are triggering them. Then we can recommend one fix. You then go and make that one fix for a month. You keep taking pictures of everything you eat so we can see the effects, and also find the next fix.

If someone is more interested in athletic performance than weight, can Metabolic adjust to that objective?

That’s not the focus at this stage. It is about long-term solutions to health risks. Things like, I’ve been struggling to lose 20 pounds for a long time. I need to lose this and I don’t want to be white-knuckling a diet for the rest of my life.  

Heart disease, diabetes, stroke, most cancers—those are downstream from what you eat. The goal for what we’re doing is to reduce that chronic disease risk through diet.

There are probably close to 100 million people who are prediabetic, a third of the United States. We’re talking large swathes of the population: wealthy, middle class, and poor.  

I think I’ve had a slightly different imperative about being a parent and being present. My dad died when I was 20 years old. It was my last year of college and I’ve really missed not having him around. He had diabetes, a stroke, and heart disease, and he was sick for the last three to five years of his life.

My early years of being an adult, I had many questions. How are you supposed to figure out the best way to spend your time? What are the mistakes to avoid? I found good people to get advice from, some wonderful mentors.

But I didn’t have a dad. It wasn’t because he was working all the time. He was just not there—he wasn’t alive.

As I had kids, I thought about the hierarchy of needs differently. I knew I wanted to be present as a parent, and I didn’t know how long I was going to be around. I thought, I really want to enjoy this. I really want my kids to enjoy this. I want to have as much time with them as possible. Even though I had very intense jobs, I allocated my time pretty well. The most important thing to me was being a good parent and a good husband. You’d have to ask my family if I’ve done a passable job at either of those things, but that’s what was important to me.

What about traditions and rituals you have instilled in the family? There’s presence, but are there certain things your kids will reflect on when they’re older?

We don’t have a ton of traditions in our house. I think both my wife and I are pretty aware of that absence. Her family has a certain way they celebrate Christmas. I’m so grateful to plug into that every year. It’s an amazing production they put on. I love that.

I’ll pick one that’s a little bit weird. Ever since my kids were either five or six, I would take them out to a parking lot, and I would let them drive the car. We would probably go once or twice a year, for maybe 30 minutes. I have videos of my daughter driving at five or six, having a total blast. They’ve felt this incredible power at the steering wheel, and I’ve loved giving them that sense of not being that different from me. “Your legs may not be long enough to do all the technical things right now, but you’re inhabiting the same world I am. There is the same risk. The same fear. I want you to calibrate against that.”

This year was really funny. My son Ben is pretty tall. He’s probably 5’9” now. He’s 14 years old. This year when we went driving, I sat in the front seat and said, “Come sit down.” He looked at me like I was crazy. He said, “I’m just going to drive.” I moved over to the passenger seat and he did it. He is a pretty happy-go-lucky person, but then he was dead serious and said, “I got this.”

That’s a tradition I want them to feel. I tried to set it up so they could feel like a full person, a full adult. My job as a parent is, on some graduated basis, to expose them to the danger, the awesomeness, and the risk of being in the world. The full ownership that comes with it. One part of being a parent is aggressively giving up that control.

I hope both my daughter and my son feel like I have interacted with them no differently than I would interact with any other person. I don’t view them as children.

Let’s talk meditation. One of the things you started last year is Pub Med, the Facebook Page. What does meditation mean for you? And then let’s talk Pub Med.

Meditation wasn’t a part of my life until a couple years ago. It was completely accidental. I was watching a comedy special on YouTube and it rolled into a benefit of Jerry Seinfeld trying to raise GAD Capital money for the David Lynch Foundation. He gave a 10-minute pitch on how he’s meditated every day for the last 40 years—particularly on how it provided him with the rest to be able produce a show, act, and be a standup comedian.

I went and learned a meditation technique, and I started to do it every day. I felt incredibly well-rested. It really changed the way I operate.

Then I ran into a bunch of people who had similar experiences with meditation, but they didn’t talk about it publicly. They kept it private, almost like they were ashamed of it. I was like, How do we fix that? How do we make it something that people don’t hide?

One morning at six o’clock, I broadcasted myself meditating on Facebook Live and a few hundred people watched it. People wrote these comments and sent me messages. My reaction was, I guess that’s all you need to do. When people see it, it becomes more normal.

So I invited guests to do it with me. It’s basically a talk show where there’s no talking, just two people meditating. I branded it Pub Med for Public Meditation. It’s taken off.

The next thing you know, you’re meditating with Arianna Huffington and Jewel.

Yeah. I did a Pub Med with some public figures, Jewel, and Arianna Huffington, and Sharon Salzberg, and a bunch of other great people. I would encourage anybody with a practice to do some of it in public. From time to time, do it at Starbucks or on an airplane, and eventually it will become normal to meditate in public.

That’s the origin of it. At the high level, no matter the particular practice, it is a little ludicrous that we don’t have a pretty simple form of daily mental hygiene.

And for our kids, it matters. You’ve got to exercise. You’ve got to eat well. Where does mental health fit?

We say to our kids, “You’ve got to do something physical every day and eat well.” We don’t have an accepted reflective practice that helps keep the mind in a healthy state. I’m not suggesting meditation as the only way to do it. But people should have some way to exercise or resettle the mind every day.

For kids, I can’t think of a time when there’s more change to metabolize than middle school, high school, and college. It would be great to give them better tools. You can view this as psychological rest or the ability to really experience the world as directly as possible and not get caught in all the narratives that you can get caught in. Investing in that seems like a pretty big deal.  

The post Eric Antonow, Co-Founder, Metabolic appeared first on Prokit.

In the early 1990s, Dick Costolo spent several years in Chicago trying to make it in comedy. When that didn’t pan out, he put his computer science degree to use.

Dick went on to start a number of companies, most notably FeedBurner, which he sold to Google in 2007. He became the COO of Twitter in 2010, and quickly transitioned into the role of CEO—a position he held through much of the company’s 2010-2015 expansion, including the 2013 IPO.

We’re not here to cover his success in business, but to learn more about what gave a straight-talking guy from the Detroit suburbs the confidence to build these companies while staying true to his roots. 

Dick and I sat down in November 2017 at the small fourth-floor office of his soon-to-be-launched fitness startup, Chorus, in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. He’s in very good shape, and has the energy and enthusiasm of someone just coming out of college. I’m sure he would run circles around me if I met him at his local CrossFit gym.

While we spoke, Dick shed light on his routines, his favorite books, his choice to leave Twitter, and what it’s like to walk on stage to deliver a commencement speech to 45,000 people.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

March 2017 Update: Dick’s startup, Chorus, has been shut down according to his conversation with Business Insider.

Dick Costolo: At its core, it’s a social fitness platform. The hypothesis is that in the real world, social motivation and social accountability are the ways people are most likely to change behaviors, get in shape, lose weight, stop smoking, stop drinking, whatever it is. Most fitness apps are just one-to-one, app-to-user; here’s a training program, here’s a workout, do this 15-week program. There’s no social motivation or social accountability, so when people inevitably have a motivation dip, or get sick, or are traveling for work, or are too tired, or run out of time in the day, they just fall off the bus. And there’s nothing to pull them back in.

In the real world, people solve this with personal trainers, running a half marathon together, the Turkey Trot 5k, the Spartan Race, or SoulCycle on Friday mornings. Social motivation and social accountability are what keep them going, and the idea behind Chorus is small teams of people all connected to each other, helping each other achieve some common goal.  

Describe the transition from Twitter to a startup.

When I left, Twitter was over 4,000 people, well over $2 billion in annual run rate from zero when I got there. We went from dozens of offices around the world, to literally 10 to 12 people at Chorus.

This is the fourth or fifth company I’ve started, and I knew what I was getting into. It’s always hard. Even if you’re doing stuff you’ve done before, in a new space with new challenges, you’ll have things like, “Why is it that research says X and we’re experiencing Y?” or “Hey, we prototyped this and it worked great, but now that it’s in the app, it’s only working for 50% of the user population.”

You’re always walking uphill. Like, always. The thing that’s the same is you’re always walking uphill.

The thing that’s different is when you’re over 4,000 people, everyone’s roles are really specialized. You’re sort of like cells in an adult body. All the cells are fully specialized—this is a liver cell, this is a cell in a pancreas that does this specific thing. When you’re a startup, much like when you’ve got 12 cells when the body’s first being created, you’re all doing everything. Every cell has a lot of responsibilities.

Right now I’m the janitor, the next minute I’m the office supplies person, and the next I’m the BD person, and the next minute I’m the product person. So that’s a really fun part of getting started when everything’s not highly specialized and everyone’s wearing a lot of hats, doing different things and pitching in in different ways.

What hat have you been wearing the most?

The thing I’m most excited about is getting to spend most of my time on the product. When you’re a CEO, you want to spend your time on the highest-leverage thing. Occasionally, getting really into the details on something is needed, either to make a point or a decision, or to help people understand something. But for the most part, you want to be spending your time on the highest-leverage things. What are the things and decisions that only the CEO needs to make?

The reality, though, is when you’re at a 4,000-person public company, you get dragged into things that are not the highest-leverage use of your time, but the required legal use of your time. I didn’t love that part of it.

I remember hearing you talk about the Twitter Roadshow before its IPO.

It was two weeks of literally answering the same question every hour for 70 different meetings. It’s the most broken process, but it’s that way because that’s the way the financial system is set up.

You’re building a company around fitness and health, but you’re still a startup—how are you able to balance work and health?

Generally speaking, because we made a policy that it’s okay to leave for yoga at noon, or CrossFit at 2 p.m., that stuff is going to be tolerated. We’re also telling everybody, “Hey, this is an intense time and it’s going to be a big commitment, and everyone has to put lots of extra hours in because we shouldn’t assume we’re smarter than anyone else.”

We’re going to get where we need to go by working hard, but we’ll make time for physical exercise knowing that has great results on your mental energy as well. So, with a few exceptions—today being one of them—I’m able to work out with some regularity.

My childhood was super-comfortable. I have a younger brother and a younger sister. We didn’t have a bunch of money, but we were perfectly comfortable because even if I have a bad credit score, I still grant for loans . You can visit this site more info here. I had jobs growing up, but my parents helped me pay for school. I didn’t need to get out of student loan default.

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My parents instilled a work ethic in me. I’ve been working since I was 12. The job you could get when you were 11 or 12 was caddying, so I caddied from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m., went to bed, and did it again.

I had jobs throughout college, during school, over the summer. During the school year in college, I ran the IT department of the student union. It was just in me from early on to work hard.

Did you see that work ethic around you as a kid through mentors or your parents?

My dad worked super-hard, and would come home and work harder. We didn’t have people who came in and did everything. My dad and mom painted the house, replaced the roof, redid the gutters—they did all that. It wasn’t like, “Bob’s coming over to do XYZ,” they did it. So I was brought up around that.

Did you have a big extended family? What were some of your traditions?

Totally. Aunts, uncles, cousins were all in the Detroit area. Grand Rapids was the farthest away anyone was. My grandparents on both sides all ended up in the Detroit area, so everyone was there.

My parents are still around. They’re in Northern Michigan. Lots of the extended family is still in that area around Detroit. My cousin still lives in Ferndale. It’s kind of the gathering place for Thanksgiving.

You ended up at the University of Michigan doing comedy. How’d that happen?

I was always kind of the funny guy in high school, but at Michigan, I decided to do standup at the student union. They would have the big standup comedian who was in town playing at Birmingham or Detroit on Thursday, Friday, Saturday; on Wednesday night they would come into Ann Arbor and perform at the University of Michigan, and you could sign up as a student to do warm-up acts.

Four or five students would go up before the big headline act, and I started doing that and loved it. So when I graduated from Michigan, I just decided to try to go get into Second City, and eventually audition for Saturday Night Live. I spent a bunch of time at Second City and the Annoyance Theater in Chicago, and eventually auditioned for Saturday Night Live and didn’t get it, and decided, Well, I better go back to CS.

Did you keep some computer science going on the side, or were you all-in on improv and standup?

I was all-in until I had auditions and didn’t get them. Then it was like, It’s time to go put that computer science degree to work and make some money. I was very hand to mouth for a good four, five years, when I only had odd jobs that allowed me to do Second City and the Annoyance during the day and at night. You’re rehearsing during the day and performing at night, so you’ve got to have random odd jobs—working at a nightclub as the door person, random stuff.

Fast-forward a few decades and you’re giving the commencement speech at the University of Michigan. What was that like?

It was amazing. Giving the commencement speech—for those who haven’t been to the football stadium, there are about 45,000 people in there for commencement. For football games with a comprehensive review like the one here, there are 110,000 people. For commencement you’re at the 50-yard line and half of the stadium is filled. The center is filled with the 5-6,000 graduating seniors in their caps and gowns. Around them are 40,000 more people, friends, family, extended family.

It’s just crazy. You’re walking out of the tunnel that the football players walk out of. I remember Mary Sue Collon, the president of the university when I gave the speech in 2013—Mary Sue is 5’1”, and she was standing in front of me very calm, and said, “So, have you ever spoken in front of this many people before?” I was like, “Yeah, for the invasion of Normandy. Nobody has spoken in front of this many people before except you last year when you did this, so when would I have spoken in front of this many people?” No, by like 44,000 people, I hadn’t spoken in front of that many people. That was a crazy experience.

You learned to be comfortable on stage through improv and standup. How’d you keep it together?

I did three things: two things intentionally, and one thing that sort of happened. The first thing was I rehearsed my speech more than I’ve rehearsed any other speech. I said, “I want to know this backward and forward.” And I reminded myself of something I always tell other people who are nervous about speaking—the more informal and less rigid you are, the more comfortable the audience is going to be. If you’re formal and stiff and sound like you’re reading from a script, people are going to be nervous for you. And if you’re not, and you’re relaxed and just let go, the audience is going to be more comfortable.

By telling myself those two things and being comfortable with the speech, I was able to improvise a little bit, which is what I wanted to do. I remember rehearsing it, and the assistant who was helping me at the time was like, “Don’t improvise too much. The more comfortable you’re getting, the more you’ll want to go off-book, and don’t do it.” She was right.

You really learn to listen in improv, and that’s a very pragmatic approach to being in the moment. Really listening, not just nodding and being quiet when other people are talking and waiting for your turn to talk.

Frankly, I’ve always tried to build off of that. I’ve tried not to worry about what comes next and pay more attention to what comes now, irrespective of what it is. In fact, it even extends to—I work out on Wednesday and Thursday nights with a guy who I’m doing a gymnastics strength-training thing with. It’s a combination of flexibility and strength—rings, handstands, all kinds of stuff. When he tells me what we’re going to be doing next, I’m always, like, “I want to focus on what we’re doing, not the future or past. I want to focus on this.”

It’s taking some simple, practical things like listening and trying to extend them to everything else. As I’ve gotten older, I notice a lot more when people have the sense that there’s always someplace better to be than where they are right now. We’ll be at a restaurant and people will say, “Do you think we can go to so and so? That might be better than this.” I really detect that now, and when I hear it, I think, Wow, what a miserable way to go through life. This is great, we are where we are, let’s do what we’re doing.

That must have served you well in the growth environment at Twitter. You have too many meetings, too many priorities, and being able to context-shift from one meeting to the next is hard.

That’s fair, with the caveat that there are moments when the thing hiding in the corner is so overwhelming that you can’t block it from the mind. To be perfectly frank, there are times when you’re running a company and you’re in meeting number four, but all you can think about is something from meeting number two. The repercussions or implications of that become overwhelming.

What do you do in that situation?

I never came up with a perfect coping mechanism. The bigger Twitter got—and I did this intentionally—the less I tried to have my schedule filled. When I took over as CEO in October 2010, in those first couple months, it was meetings. One would end, and the next would start. By the time I left in July 2015, I tried to have two hours free in the morning and two hours free in the afternoon every day. I wouldn’t go on email during that time. I’d go try to solve whatever pressing problem was weighing on me, or try to get ahead of whatever pressing problem I needed to be thinking about.

Having my morning and afternoon clear helped me see, Okay I gotta go think about XYX before I go to this metrics meeting at noon, or I’m not going to hear a word anyone says.

That was helpful, but there are times when something comes up where you’re like, This is what we’re going to be thinking about for the next three days. An investor thing, a metrics thing, some external event.

Did you hit a breaking point before you realized you needed those two hours?

No, I just felt like if you’re the CEO of a big company, you can always get pulled into things, but then you never stop to think, What should we do about this bigger issue? So you have to be religious about those hours. People can’t book that time. You’re not going to use that time for busy work like email.

If I didn’t have pressing issues in those hours, I would go talk to those people. If I hadn’t talked to direct sales in a while, I’d go see what they were doing. Or I’d go down to the Ads API team or the Android team to see about the new release and what was happening with the load time.

Those are great things to figure out—what’s going on in the company versus what you hear from your direct reports. You quickly learn whether everyone is saying the same thing when you just walk by and talk to people.

Are you able to carve out time at Chorus?

At this point, I have one-on-ones with everyone on the team. We’ll see how long that lasts as we grow.

What are your habits outside of work that allow you to be successful?

Exercise, for sure. I have way more positive mental energy when I exercise. Not even because I like exercising so much. I just have more positive thoughts and mental energy and a better ability to focus when I get an hour workout in four, five, or six days a week.

If I can work out in the afternoon or evening, I’m ecstatic. On Friday, I have to work out at 7 a.m. because of my schedule, and I dread getting up in the morning and going to work out. Especially as I get older (laugh), I need to move around for a while before I start working out. That’s probably the most common thread.

Even though we’re a smaller company now, I’ve also tried to stick to not having days where I’m in meetings all day, or all afternoon. It’s just not great for your mental focus and ability to think about things.

What about things like reading, music, and meditation? What grounds you?

Fiction. I’m an avid consumer of fiction. I believe reading fiction is one of the best things leaders can do. I think it builds empathy for how other people view the world, which in turn helps you motivate people, inspire people, and build resilience. It helps you understand what it means to be resilient and helps you understand mental toughness.

I think that combination of being able to look at the world through other people’s characters and perspectives, and intensive physical exercise, are great ways to build resilience and focus.

Any favorite books right now?

So many. I was just talking about this last night. I happened to glance across the bookshelves, and was thinking a lot more about Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, which changed the way I thought. In many ways for me, it’s the great American novel. A lot of people would say Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It; other people would say Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Sometimes a Great Notion changed the way I thought about America in a lot of ways, and it’s one of my favorite books.

Which parts of your day, or week, matter most to you?

I feel like it just takes me out of what’s happening to be in a routine. The things I have that are routine are physical exercise. I box on Monday afternoon; I do this gymnastics, strength, and CrossFit stuff on Wednesday and Thursday night; I do plyometrics on Friday morning; I run or mountain bike on Saturday (on Mount Tamalpais in Marin); and I do weight stuff on Sunday. That’s my one routine.

One of the reasons I left—no, the reason I left Twitter was, I remember telling Peter Curry, a lead independent director, “Listen, we moved out here when Rose, my daughter, was in sixth grade. I started working at Twitter that fall. She’s a senior in high school this year, and I haven’t seen Rose since sixth grade. I literally, not figuratively, have missed everything. The dance rehearsals, the birthday parties, the you-name-it, I missed it. She’s here for one more year; you guys pick between this date and this date, but once we get together and tell the whole board about it and vote on it, that’s it for me.”  

Where is Rose in school?

She’s in Michigan—in Ann Arbor, where I went, which is great. She loves it and is having a ball.

Would you talk about parenting before Twitter, when you were starting companies?

I had time to spend with the family, and I would always cut out to go see the dance recital, take Rose to brunch, or something like that. There was just zero time for that at Twitter. The notion that you could run a company and have balance—there was zero work-life balance.

How did your daughter react to that?

Well, I don’t know, because I didn’t see her at the time. Both my kids and my wife, Lorin, were very understanding that this was going to be super-high-volume, high-stress, until it was over, and then that would be that. They could tell there was enough going on not to expect things like my leaving work at 2 p.m. to get to something.

You know the family photos I hold at home—it’s zero to sixth grade, and twelfth grade. There’s no sixth through eleventh. That was when I decided, I’ve got to go spend time with Rose. I’m not going to miss the last year she’s home with us.

And here it is, Dick’s 2013 commencement speech. Don’t forget to visit direct payday loan company to get some idea about financial tools that you can use to have extra cash onhand. 

The post Dick Costolo, Former Twitter CEO appeared first on Prokit.

Those who have worked with Sandra Liu Huang won’t be surprised to see her in a publication about good people doing great things. Sandra leads product and engineering at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and has had a front-row seat to many of the great companies in technology over the past two decades.

I had the opportunity to work with Sandra during Facebook’s earlier years, from 2008 to 2010, before she left for Quora. She set my bar high for what to look for in an exceptional product manager and operator. Sandra leaves her mark through her actions.

During those early years at Facebook, Sandra brought calm, order, and focus to situations that could throw the best of us off-center. I’d been meaning to catch up with her, and sat down with Sandra in Menlo Park to learn more about how she became the person she is today.

Our conservation has been edited for clarity and brevity.  

David Swain: Why don’t we start with where you grew up?

Sandra Liu Huang: I was born in South Carolina, and grew up in Atlanta near Stone Mountain. I spent most of my childhood in Georgia, from age four to almost 14. After 14, we moved to Taiwan, where my parents are from. Until then, I’d only visited Taiwan once.

What was your neighborhood like as a child?

We were in the suburbs, but backed up to forests. I think, in general, my parents definitely trusted me. I don’t know if I was more trustworthy as a kid, or if they were more trusting as parents, but we used to run around all the time, just in the woods all day. Some of the neighbors had a blow horn or something, and when you heard the horn, it was the signal to go home for dinner. It was pretty free range growing up, I’d say.

Tell me more about life with your parents.

My mom started her career as a nurse, but all of my childhood she was at home. My dad is a mechanical engineer. He never brought work home, so I barely understood what he did. They were immigrants to the U.S., and I was one of two Asian kids in a class of 600.

Growing up, I was very, very shy until something—I don’t know what happened, but until fifth grade, when I ran for student council president. The rest is history. I think part of it was just realizing I was a little different. You don’t quite understand racial dynamics as a kid, but you just know you’re a little different.

At Chinese New Year, my mom would come in, and we’d bring Rice Krispie treats to school. My mom would write everyone’s name in Mandarin. It was special. My parents raised us to strongly identify as Taiwanese Americans, but at the same time, we were different than most of the people we lived around. Growing up, it was just figuring out our place and my place in that.

How did you figure out your place with your friends?

I actually had three birthday parties every year. One was for my school friends, one was for my Chinese school friends, and then a small one was for my Taiwanese-American friends, which was not quite the same group as my Chinese school friends.

My parents were the youngest and second-youngest of really big families (eight, nine kids on both sides), so I was the uber-big kid. In my family, I was the only firstborn child. I just did a lot of things pretty independently, maybe as a result of who they were as parents, or maybe from their experience as immigrants. They didn’t always understand the letters from the school. I would read them and tell my parents what they said.

What brought your family back to Taiwan when you were 14?

My dad changed jobs, so it was mostly for work reasons. Also, he wanted us to get to know our grandparents better and learn the language. It was really a big, crazy move, especially when you’re about to go to high school and leave all your friends.

You were in eighth grade? That’s a big transition year.

I was in eighth grade, yeah. I went to a bilingual school in Taiwan, so it was half-English and half-Mandarin. Culturally, it was still very, very different than Georgia.

We had a half-day of school on Saturdays all the way through the second half of senior year, when the law changed. We had to clean the classroom every day. I had to do bathroom checks. It was just different.

Did you like the intensity of the Taiwanese education system?

It was really academically-oriented compared to my experience in the States. Starting in third grade, you know who is at the top of the class. They call out the little third graders by name, so it’s just very academic. I think the bigger thing was when I went out into the city, my Mandarin wasn’t very good, and so it was such a different world.

You do learn quickly when you’re fully immersed because you have no choice. It was also a more urban experience—you’re in a really dense place compared to running in the woods of Georgia.

What was the cultural adjustment like for you?

What was interesting is that growing up, my parents were really active in the Taiwanese-American community. They support Taiwanese independence. I grew up with a strong sense of being a Taiwanese American. It’s a political choice to identify that way—I went to rallies and all these events. Then, when it came time for us to actually move, all of my friends in that community were like, “Oh, my goodness, how could you possibly move to Taiwan?” I found that really confusing because we were so pro-Taiwan. It was just this really big transition.

Have you gone back to the South?

I think I lost the twang years ago. I did go back between ninth and tenth grade. For some reason, my parents trusted me to spend the whole summer there by myself, and I just went from one family friend’s house to another. I literally bounced around all summer.

What I realized from that trip was even though I was not enjoying Taiwan, and I really wanted to be back in the States, after that summer alone I was like, Oh, actually, family is important. It was better to be where my parents were than to be in the States, and also, life in the U.S. was not the only way to live.

You left Taiwan to go to Stanford. How did you know you wanted to go to such a top-tier school?

It was, I would say, a lucky accident. I was thinking of going to a small liberal arts school and doing a Music and Technology major. I played piano and stopped taking lessons after I moved to Taiwan, but I accompanied the choirs—like the elementary school choirs—as the pianist.

Also, applying from Taiwan, we couldn’t afford to visit schools. There wasn’t really the internet. It was back in the brochure days, and you had no idea what college was like.

My cousin had gone to Stanford, and she randomly visited Taiwan that winter. It was probably my junior year, and she said, “You have to apply to Stanford.” I had no idea, so I was like, “Okay.” I figured Stanford had a lot of majors compared to the smaller schools, and applied and was really lucky.

What did you study?

I did an interdisciplinary major called Science, Technology, and Society. It was basically most of the Computer Science (CS) major. Then I took all these other classes that I thought were interesting around public policy, communications, and economics. In many ways, my college friends look at my career and are like, “Oh, it’s exactly that.” Even though I didn’t quite realize it along the way, it was a mix of how to think about building technology and having it impact the world we live in.

You have two kids, ages eight and five. How is their childhood in Palo Alto different than what you experienced growing up?

It’s very different. When I got back to the States for college, I thought California was really weird. There were a lot of Asian people, and that wasn’t the America I knew, where I was very different from everyone else. For them to grow up in California—if, in the world, the U.S. is a very comfortable place to live, I think California can be considered a very comfortable place to live within the U.S. I think about it a lot because I feel like it is a little bit of a bubble. I think about making sure they’re pretty grounded people, despite living in a place where you can order gas on your phone to come to your house. Crazy things like that.

How do you help your kids stay grounded in Silicon Valley?

It’s something I think about, and my husband and I talk about it a lot. When I was growing up, my parents would say, “Hey, when we were younger, we didn’t have shoes. We’d have to walk so far. I used to ride the water buffalo.” As a kid, you’re just like, “You’re crazy, Mom and Dad.” That was a different world, and so I struggled. How do you tell our kids that this is not necessarily everyone’s normal?

We’ve tried things like volunteer work. My eldest, at age four, was helping with projects at the local school. When we would drive by the school later, he’d be like, “Oh, that’s the school that I helped paint or plant flowers at.” We’ve tried to do service activities. They know they donate their Halloween candy to people—the military abroad. We try to have habits and traditions now that help them at least be more aware that they are fortunate and that they have some obligation to give back in, as kids, really small ways. That’s important to me to have them recognize that our experience is not normal compared to how a lot of other people live.

What are some things you do to navigate parenting, which can be so much more emotional than work? Who are you as a parent versus a product manager?

Kids are definitely challenging. You wish you could control them, but you can’t. They’re similar to you in some ways, but really, really different in others. I think, though, there is a similarity to work in that—whether it’s my kids, or my colleagues, or my team—my hope is that you realize what you’re good at. I see a lot of my friends getting to points in their careers where they’re really in their element. They’ve finally found what they’re supposed to do—really leaning in on their strengths and getting energy from doing work that makes them feel alive. That’s my hope for everyone. It makes me happy when I see people in their element.

As a parent, that’s the guiding thing. I hope my children can be both self-aware and independent. Having the right boundaries is probably the other part that makes for a healthy person. Even though my kids are very different, I have to remind myself that they’re on their own journey. Just like my colleagues from many different companies, you don’t work with anyone forever. I’m only going to be able to parent my children for these early years, and so in some ways, it’s quite parallel.

I do what I can to help them be happy and fulfilled. One of my kids is very different than me, and one of my kids is uncannily similar in personality. It’s weird. I think a big part of parenting is setting boundaries, teaching them to be thoughtful, and letting them be okay with who they are, even though it’s hard for me sometimes to watch and I’m sure it’ll get harder as they get older.

How do you and your husband balance kids and work?

He is an amazing partner on all fronts. He cooks and has all these skills I don’t, so we definitely share the home duty. Children, though, aren’t always 50-50, right? They just have preferences, and it ebbs and flows. We communicate really well, which helps make it work, and then I think we try to be gracious. There’ve been phases when I’ve done a lot of startups. He’s had moments. Not keeping tabs—we’re just trying to work together to make it all work.

What do you do to stay grounded in situations where you have those ebbs and flows?

A big thing I’m still struggling with is self-care and resting enough. Honestly, I have this coach—we’ve talked on the phone for eight years throughout my career. She’s an executive coach. We probably talk about sleep a huge portion, at least 50 percent of the time, and I’ve gotten better. I am a high-action person. I enjoy my work a lot, but over time it’s become clear that resting enough is critical.

Exercising—I could definitely be better at that, but I work a very physical job, even though it doesn’t seem like it because we’re just using our heads and talking and sitting in meetings all the time. Realizing it’s actually like a full-body thing has been important.

Before I started at Chan Zuckerberg, I took a little bit of time after Quora, although I still had assigned projects and things I was working on. For the rest part, I took art classes, and the art instructor in my first class kept yelling at me, “You need to relax! You can’t draw with your fingers. You need to draw with your body.” I was like, “I understand what you’re saying, but I can’t quite get there.” It took time. Now, I definitely recommend that people take time to just step back. It’s easy in the Valley to be in hyper-drive all the time, and I think we should all aim more for the marathon than the sprints.

Have you kept up your art?

I do sketch once in a while—it helps me find calm. I’m not a good artist, but I think what I learned from the classes is that to actually draw something, you need to be quiet. You need to see and observe, and then you can draw.

What about routines or habits that get you through your week?

With young kids, you just do what you can to get through. One habit that’s been important is understanding, at least for family stuff, what each kid most appreciates. This is the “languages of love” thing where I realize one of my kids just really wants me to do things. That’s how he feels appreciated, and so I have to be pretty conscious about doing things. Not just things that are convenient to my schedule. That makes me feel like, if not every day, certainly every week I have done the things to really meet my kids where they’re at.

In general, routine-wise, I’m definitely more of a night person. The mornings are a little crazy. I try to have family time in the evening when there are all the logistics of getting fed and to bed, but I think that is also time to just enjoy and be offline. There are a lot of antics in our house. It’s silly in our household, but it’s fun.  Bedtime probably takes longer than it could. It’s not the most efficient thing, but it’s part of our routine to enjoy our family at the end of the day.

“The thing that’s always clear is no matter the problem, I feel pretty confident we can do something—and we can do something better if we’re calm.” — Sandra Liu Huang

You’ve worked at Google, Facebook, Quora, and now the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative—all companies that work to have massive scale and societal impact powered by technology. Was that a deliberate choice in your career path?

My high school was in Taiwan’s equivalent of Silicon Valley. It was a school built to get people who had left to go to grad school in the U.S. to come back and have an affordable place to send their kids.

Even in high school, I was surrounded by the semiconductor companies and all of these international companies. I think what drew me to the school originally was the sense that you could create something new.

Some of the themes through my career I’ve realized in hindsight. Not all of it was super-deliberate. I just wanted to be working with people who wanted to build something new, and to do it in a mission-oriented way. I think all these companies really want to create tools that are helpful to people’s lives. For many reasons, they’ve been able to reach scale, but my time with those companies was always at the earlier end. For me, I’m drawn to that creation phase. Not just of the products, but also the organizations.

The other theme for me is learning. The transitions have all been around, Where might I learn more? I have always wanted to go to smaller and smaller places because, in startup mode, there’s more to do than people. It’s exciting to me to be in those situations.

The self-awareness to learn you like that creation phase—is that something you thought about over time, or did it happen more naturally?

I think, when I left Google, I did want to go to a smaller place, or I knew that at some point I would want to. It wasn’t easy to leave Google at that point.

Google was probably about 16,000 employees when I left, and about 2,000 when I joined.

At some point, you can’t really feel the size of a company. It’s just big. Facebook at the time I joined (2008) wasn’t tiny — it was 400 people. When I got there, I quickly realized, oh, many things are actually figured out even earlier in a company’s history, and so I knew even then that I did want to try to get closer to the creation stage. I had mentors who encouraged me to spend the early part of my career optimizing for learning, and so I had that as a value—to try different things while I had some flexibility. Now, looking back, I’m like, Okay, I really do love that phase, which is what draws me to Chan Zuckerberg.

One of the things I remember most about working together at Facebook is your bringing order and vision to chaos. Things like producing our annual event, f8, every year—I think it was 2010 when we had to line up 80 partners in six weeks, and you brought a sense of calm to it. Is that naturally who you are?

I was just thinking about that journey. I think there’s some part of me that’s always been like that. There was one year where I planned this massive scavenger hunt at the mall. I must’ve been no more than 10 or 11. I was calling all these stores, “Would you hold my clues? My friends are going to come.” I was so proud of this game I had created, but it turned out I made it too hard. My friends had to traverse the mall 10 times, and by the end, everyone was really mad at me because they were tired.

There’s part of me that’s always loved to pull people together, and do stuff for people. Also, I was a camp counselor pretty early on, and at this one camp they talked about servant leadership—something that, even at a young age, really resonated. It’s like, “Leaders, you lead because you model.” I both enjoy doing things, and also realize that at some point, to do bigger things, you need to bring people along. That’s always been some part of who I am, and I’ve been lucky to apply it at work.

You’ve worked through roadblocks and challenges, and still managed to stay positive and calm. Do you feel that way on the inside?

Yeah, that’s interesting. People will say I’m calm or graceful under pressure. There are definitely moments of freak-out, with some of the crises and things we’ve dealt with. But I think I know it’s not that productive to really go there and indulge in the freak-out.

The thing that’s always clear is no matter the problem, I feel pretty confident we can do something—and we can do something better if we’re calm. I think that’s part of my leadership style now, and I’ve dealt with lots of crises, bugs, and other problems. Those are some of my peak moments. At that f8 you mentioned, I distinctly remember when the keynotes ran really early—the food wasn’t out yet, and we were coordinating the simultaneous launch of the Like button on hundreds of partners sites. I was the one with the headset running the launch room. Those are the moments when I get to see all the pieces, and see a picture for how it will be fine. It’s just that we have to execute.

What do you do to stay focused and productive when you’re not in those intense moments? You’ve got to keep your team motivated too.

I look back at my time at Quora, where I think, overall, the team and the company—we managed it well. There weren’t a lot of fire drills compared to other startups. In some ways, if you talk to the executive team, everyone is at their best during some of these moments of maybe not crisis, but just high pressure.

Since there weren’t always high-pressure situations along the way, I think, especially as a product manager, you can create those moments. Whether it’s around a launch or a milestone, part of moving teams forward is recognizing that people feel good when they accomplish something, and you can frame the work into those moments in some ways. Not to cause artificial fire drills, but to really create a moment of, Hey, if we get to this line, we should all feel a sense of accomplishment.

A lot of us here in the Valley are younger when we’re put in challenging leadership situations. Things like being vulnerable, bringing yourself to work, and having hard conversations don’t always come naturally. What have you learned?

Yeah, I think I’ve grown a lot as a people manager and a leader. The core that’s always been there is the idea of servant leadership. That has helped me feel like, for better or worse, I have to model and do the work to be a leader. That’s one theme.

The other theme I’ve learned in recent years is the value of being direct, and I’m trying to do that more. I honestly believe getting feedback is a gift. If I can do things to help my team get better by being direct—even just by sharing where I’m at in my own journey—that’s really valuable.

I’ve optimized for learning in my career. I’m also a very strengths-oriented person. The idea of just working on your inner strength is what I think everyone should do, ideally. That would be awesome, if the world could enable that. For me, those things mean being direct, realizing everyone’s on a journey like I am, and doing whatever I can to give feedback to help people become more of who they are. That’s just something I strive to do.

You recently spoke at the Fortune women’s event. Where have you seen things progress in your career in the Valley with women in tech? How do you hope things will evolve?

On a personal level, and I think my college classmates, a similar-age cohort, shared this feeling—I think we all entered the workforce feeling very empowered and optimistic. You realize that actually, at some point in your career, it’s not that easy necessarily, right? It’s not quite as straightforward. The business world is complex. It’s not like you get good grades, and you’ll just definitely progress.

I would say, honestly, at the beginning of my career, I didn’t think about being a woman in tech that explicitly. I was a woman in tech, but it wasn’t necessarily a thing. Honestly, it just took more time in my career to realize there are certain things we need to talk about. It’s important as a leader to acknowledge that, but that was a journey for me.

Where we are now? I think a lot of the recent dialogue is great, both the work from Sheryl (Sandberg) and Lean In, as well as some of the more recent issues around harassment and other challenges that women disproportionately face, especially in tech.

At the same time, I do feel hopeful that in tech, where in many ways as an industry we’re really lucky, there are more and more people moving into the venture space, or there are new sources of funding. You’ll start to see a shift in more founders who are women, more leaders who are women. It’s just clear. Having that mix, there are more things you think about, and you will take better care of your team if you have a representative leadership team. I have personally seen the value of that and benefited from it, and just think we still have a long way to go.

I’m hopeful that tech can really be ambitious on this front because we’re ambitious on all sorts of other fronts. Hopefully, we can lead and model and innovate. What are the workplace policies that could shift to really support not just women, but also families better? What are the programs that we can do more systematically to improve things?

Is there anything unique to your approach to management and things like running meetings?

For me, as a product manager, you learn to operate in a very interdisciplinary way. Sometimes you’re working with engineers. Sometimes you’re working with finance. Sometimes you’re working with legal, with the communications team—a lot of experts from different fields. I think a big part of what makes me good at what I do is being pretty empathetic to other people, but also creating a safe environment to surface ideas. I don’t know if everyone agrees with this, but I really think that if we get the best ideas out there and we trust each other, a team will have great results. I fundamentally believe in the power of an interdisciplinary, diverse team. It’s hard, and someone has to create a platform to make it safe for the ideas to come out. Then someone needs to glue it together, and get the team to move in one clear direction.

The worst case is tons of ideas and no forward momentum. Part of what I see at my job is to get the great ideas, really hear them, and then create a strategy that is better for having had all those ideas on the table. When I run meetings or lead teams, that’s an important value. How do we hear from the perspectives we have, and then move forward?

What brought you to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative? What are you hoping for?

After I left Quora, I was looking for an opportunity that would still let me build products and organizations, but also, something with a little more tangible impact on the world. I had mostly built consumer tech software products. For me, Chan Zuckerberg is a very unique model, and I am here because of the combination of Mark (Zuckerberg) and Priscilla (Chan).

Mark, we all know, is the tech visionary, and thinks about scale and impact. Priscilla is a practitioner. She’s a doctor and an educator, and really pushes us to be close to the work. I think that combination makes CZI a unique vehicle to impact some really important areas. My role here is certainly on the technology side, which is more my experience, but I am super-excited to see us bring together a team of experts— whether from academia, or government, or philanthropy, or top technologists—to try to solve some really challenging problems that I don’t quite see other organizations solving.

Are there any problems where you’re digging in more personally than others?

Right now, I’m doing a lot of work to set things up across the organization. We work in science, education, as well as opportunity, and all three are distinct areas of focus. There are also a lot of patterns and adjacencies across the areas, which is to think about how CZI will bring technology, bring grant-making, and bring policy and advocacy to each of these problems. I’m thinking a lot about how this all fits together and how we develop strong product strategies in this context.

Here’s Sandra catching up with author Michelle Kuo about her book, Reading with Patrick.

The post Sandra Liu Huang, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative appeared first on Prokit.