Pat Wadors, CHRO at Intuitive (the company behind the da Vinci surgical robot), the architect of LinkedIn's Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging framework known as DIBs, and the author of the 2024 Wiley book Unlock Your Leadership Story, joins Jessica Neal and Peter Clarke on Truth Works.

From losing her mother during her freshman year of college and getting diagnosed with dyslexia in a career center conversation at LSU, to declaring at nineteen that she was going to run HR, Pat traces the unlikely path that took her from a fine art major in Louisiana to one of the most respected CHROs in Silicon Valley.

She walks through the moment Jeff Weiner called her in the middle of a staff meeting at Plantronics to come fix LinkedIn at three thousand employees, the whiteboard exercise in her first five weeks that forced the executive team to admit they were not actually being "open and constructive," and the 3am realisation that became DIBs.

She talks openly about why John Donahoe pursued her for ServiceNow with a now legendary line about marriage, and the comment from a head of product that has stuck with her for years, telling her she was the dentist while the rest of the executive team were just dental hygienists.

She then opens up about her Personal Scorecard, and the moment her son devastated her by pointing out that if she actually stuck to her own scorecard, she would only see her grandchildren seventy two times by the time they turned eighteen.

In this episode, Jessica, Peter and Pat discuss:

• The art show story that taught Pat at eighteen that she only sold to people she actually liked
• The three year clock she runs in her head to avoid getting pigeon-holed in any role
• What joining LinkedIn at three thousand employees was actually like
• The whiteboard exercise that became the foundation of LinkedIn's culture
• Why she gave DIBs to the world rather than keep it inside LinkedIn
• The dinner with John Donahoe that turned into a marriage proposal for a job
• Why she thinks of HR as a product with agile development methodology
• What a CHRO actually needs to learn about the business to earn a real seat at the table
• Why she had a hysterectomy with the da Vinci robot and was ready to cook dinner that night
• The Personal Scorecard framework and how her son broke her heart with it
• Goldilocks, the Three Pigs, the Tortoise and the Hare, and Mulan as leadership lessons
• The one question she keeps on her desktop that empowers her every day

Pat's book, Unlock Your Leadership Story: How to Build Understanding and Motivate Teams Using Fables and Folktales, is available now on Amazon, patwadors.com and as an audiobook.

Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke sit down with Gagan Biyani, co-founder of Udemy, founder of Sprig, and now co-founder and CEO of Maven, the live cohort-based learning platform reshaping how the world's top operators learn from each other.

Gagan started his first business at 13, teaching speech and debate to kids in his living room while his parents went through a divorce and his family rode out multiple tech recessions. By his senior year, that summer camp had 150 students and was financing the trips of every student on his school's debate team.

In this conversation, Gagan walks Jessica and Peter through the unlikely path that took him from a Fremont kid with no idea startups existed, to obsessively reading TechCrunch four hours a day from a government consulting desk, to becoming the business co-founder of Udemy after a single Skype call with two Turkish immigrants who didn't even know they wanted to run the company yet.

He talks openly about getting pushed out of Udemy, raising $60 million for Sprig and watching it crash and burn, and the years of self-doubt that followed before Maven finally clicked. He shares why his habits get stricter the more pressure he's under, why a status-oriented social network is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a founder, and the friend group from high school speech and debate that has kept him grounded for two decades.

Then he and Jessica get into the part of the conversation that should make every leader sit up. Why most AI rollouts fail in week three. Why "just give people the tools" is the laziest mistake HR teams keep making. Why Maven has already restructured its engineering pods from 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2, and is asking whether that ratio still needs to shrink further.

He explains why universities will be the single biggest laggards in the AI transition, why the education gap is about to widen dramatically, and what he'd actually do if he had a six-year-old in the public school system right now.

Topics covered:

• Starting his first business at 13 during his parents' divorce
• The Stanford summer camp that became a $50K business with 150 students
• Why he was a terrible boss as a teenager
• How TechCrunch and one comment from a friend changed his life trajectory
• Becoming Udemy's business co-founder after a single Skype call
• Getting pushed out of his own company and starting over
• Raising $60M for Sprig, burning out, and shutting it down
• Why founders need friend groups that aren't status-oriented
• The counterintuitive habit pattern: stricter routines under more stress
• Why product-market fit is the #1 job, and recruiting is #2
• Why Maven exists, humans still have a place in modern learning
• Restructuring engineering pods because of AI: 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2
• Why most AI rollouts fail in week three
• The biggest mistake HR leaders are making with AI right now
• Why universities will be the laggards in the AI transition
• The Alpha School model and the future of K-12 education

This is one of those episodes where a founder you might not have heard of teaches you more about building, leading, and surviving in the next decade than most of the household names ever will. Gagan is honest about the failures, generous with the frameworks, and clear-eyed about what's coming.

What if illness was optional?

Naveen Jain has built seven companies. He was on top of the world running Moon Express, the first private company ever granted permission to leave Earth orbit, with a $2.6 billion NASA contract to mine the moon, when his father was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and given three months to live.

He got exactly that.

That moment broke something open. Naveen walked away from space and started asking a different question: if we can land on the moon, why are we still finding cancer by a dentist running a finger across someone's gum?

In this episode, Naveen sits down with Jessica to share the framework behind every company he builds: why this, why now, why me.

That framework led him from helium-3 mining to founding Viome, the company now running 1.5 million tests, sitting on 400 quadrillion biological data points, and holding FDA Breakthrough Device designation for detecting stage 1 oral and throat cancer with 95% specificity.

A stage 1 pancreatic cancer test launches in the next three months.

Jessica and Naveen go deep on:

• The three questions every founder must answer before starting anything
• Why DNA testing companies are asking the wrong question, and what RNA reveals instead
• The 100 trillion microbes producing 99.9% of the genes expressed in your body
• How a classified Los Alamos biological defense project became the foundation of Viome
• Why cancer immunotherapy works for 1/3 of patients, and what changes when you fix the gut
• The double-blind data: HbA1c down 0.42 in 90 days, IBS reversal in 64% of patients, anxiety down 50%
• Building a culture where loyalty shifts from the founder to the mission
• Why Naveen, at 66, still believes he owes a debt to his fellow humans
• The advice he'd give every leader: dream so big people think you're crazy

A masterclass in first-principles thinking, mission-driven leadership, and the radical idea that chronic disease isn't a feature of aging.

It's a signal we've been ignoring.

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Netflix CHRO, here to interrogate what actually works in leadership and life.

If this conversation shifted how you think about your health, your work, or what you're capable of building, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

She built one of the first podcasts in the world.

She turned down the CEO job after twenty years.

And she wants you to ask yourself one question: if not now, when?

In this episode of Truth Works, Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke sit down with Debbie Millman, the founder and host of Design Matters, the longest-running design podcast in the world, now in its twentieth year. 

Over two decades, Debbie has interviewed more than 700 of the world's most creative people, written eight books, and shaped some of the biggest consumer brands on the planet, including Burger King, Häagen-Dazs, Star Wars, Tropicana and the No More campaign. 

She co-founded the world's first Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts, is President Emeritus of AIGA, and in 2024 was named an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.

This conversation goes way deeper than the résumé. Debbie talks about failing as an artist, writer, and designer before stumbling into branding by accident. 

She explains why she turned down the CEO offer at Sterling Brands. She shares what hundreds of interviews have taught her about confidence, insecurity, and reinvention. And she gets refreshingly clear-eyed about AI, and what it is quietly doing to the next generation's brains.

TOPICS COVERED

• Failing as an artist, writer and designer before finding branding
• Becoming the rainmaker at Interbrand and Sterling Brands
• Why she turned down the CEO offer after four months of deliberation
• How Design Matters began in 2005 as a paid internet radio show
• What hundreds of interviews taught her about insecurity and legacy
• Career advice for creatives and knowing your value proposition
• Marrying Roxane Gay and acquiring The Rumpus together
• Writing Love Letter to a Garden
• Why AI should have a drinking age
• The one question she now asks herself every day: if not now, when?

What makes this episode hit differently is not the résumé. I

t is the reminder that even the most accomplished people on the planet built their lives the same way the rest of us have to, one brave decision at a time, often with no clue what was coming next. 

Debbie's story is proof that reinvention is always available, that confidence is built and never gifted, and that the best chapters of a life can absolutely come after sixty. If you take one thing from this conversation, let it be her question. 

Whatever you have been waiting to start, finish, or finally claim as yours, ask yourself honestly: if not now, when?

He joined when Snowflake had 0 customers, no CEO, and no website. The company was in stealth mode, he wasn't even allowed to list where he worked on LinkedIn.

Twelve years later, Snowflake was doing well north of $4 billion in annual revenue.

Chris Degnan was Snowflake's first sales hire and spent over eleven years as its founding Chief Revenue Officer, growing the company from zero to one of the fastest-scaling enterprise software businesses in history. He joined in November 2013 as employee number 13 and spent the early days cold-emailing thousands of people a week just to get meetings.

He is now semi-retired, sitting on seven boards, and advising companies across Silicon Valley.

Denise Persson joined Snowflake in May 2016 as employee number 120, when the company had $3 million in ARR and fewer than eight people on the marketing team. She had never worked at a company that small.

She is still Snowflake's CMO today.

Together, they have one of the longest CRO-CMO partnerships in the history of enterprise technology. They survived three CEO transitions together, multiple executive team overhauls, a global pandemic IPO, and a company that grew from a handful of believers to over 8,000 employees.

They wrote a book about it. It's called Make It Snow.

In this episode of Truth Works, host Jessica Neal sits down with Chris Degnan and Denise Persson to pull apart exactly how they built the sales and marketing alignment that most companies never achieve — and why most people in those roles don't last long enough to find out.

They discuss:

• How Chris joined with no customers, no website, and no CEO — and why two French founders were the reason he said yes
• What Denise did on day one that built more credibility with the sales team than her entire resume had
• Why Snowflake was always a customer-led company, not a sales-led or marketing-led one — and why that distinction changes everything
• The 3am text message, the new CEO, and why every executive on the team was getting fired except the two of them
• How they gave each other feedback that most colleagues would never survive — and why acting on it was the only way to keep getting it
• Why heads of sales typically last 18 to 24 months — and what made this partnership last over a decade through four CEOs
• What the book Make It Snow gives founders, CMOs, and CROs that most go-to-market frameworks completely miss

Chris Degnan and Denise Persson are proof that the tension between sales and marketing is not inevitable. It is a leadership failure — and it is entirely fixable.

Guy Kawasaki: Don't Pitch What You Can't Believe In

Guy Kawasaki: Apple's original software evangelist, Chief Evangelist at Canva, host of the Remarkable People podcast, and bestselling author of Think Remarkable, Wise Guy, and his upcoming Everybody Has Something to Hide , joins Jessica Neal on Truth Works for a conversation that goes everywhere you didn't expect.

Guy didn't have a plan. He fainted on his first day of a pre-med hospital tour, dropped out of law school after two weeks, and ended up counting and shipping diamonds in the jewelry business after his MBA. That jewelry job taught him how to sell, and selling taught him how to evangelize. Everything else followed from there.

At Apple in the 1980s, Guy's job was simple: convince developers to build for Macintosh. That was the birth of tech evangelism as we know it. Today, as Chief Evangelist at Canva, he's still doing the same thing — spreading the good news of tools that make people better communicators and creators.

In this episode, Guy and Jessica go deep on what separates remarkable people from everyone else, why most founders are building the wrong way, what AI is actually going to do to humanity, and why the single most powerful thing you can do in a pitch is show a product that works.

Topics covered:

• What evangelism actually means — and why you simply cannot pitch something that isn't great
• His non-linear path: pre-med dropout → law school quitter → jewelry salesman → Apple → Canva
• The three traits every remarkable person shares: Growth, Grit & Grace — and why the third one matters most
• The "Guy's Golden Touch" rule and why it applies to everything you build or sell
• Why founders who build products they personally want to use almost always outperform those who build from market research
• Why he openly uses AI in his writing process — and why every author should
• AI as the biggest shift since the industrial revolution — and his theory on where it actually came from
• Privacy in the age of AI: Signal, encryption, and his new book Everybody Has Something to Hide
• Women in leadership — the numbers, the reasons, and why Guy thinks women should run everything
• The F-16 pitch framework: how to get off the deck in 38 seconds or drown

Want anything adjusted?

Lucy Guo didn't follow a path — she built one nobody had walked before. She was trading Pokemon cards for cash in kindergarten, running bots on Neopets in second grade, and teaching herself to code before most kids knew what a startup was. By 21, she had co-founded Scale AI — one of the most consequential AI infrastructure companies ever built. By her late twenties, she had become the youngest self-made female billionaire in history.

But the real story isn't the title. It's what happened before it, during it, and after it.

In this conversation, Lucy breaks down what it actually took — the fundraising dynamics nobody talks about openly, the co-founder tension that led her to walk away from Scale at Series B, the detour through venture that sharpened her instincts, and how she built Passes to nine figures in under three years with almost no playbook to follow.

She's also refreshingly direct about the parts of building that don't make it into press releases — firing a senior manager she'd trusted, realizing playbook executives can quietly kill a startup's culture, and why she now requires every senior hire to still do the work themselves.

This one is for founders, operators, and anyone who's ever been the only one in the room.

Topics Covered:

• Trading Pokemon cards and running Neopets bots as a kid
• The Thiel Fellowship and dropping out of Carnegie Mellon
• Co-founding Scale AI at 21 and building its early culture
• Fundraising as a woman — the unspoken double standard
• Being the only woman on Snap's product team
• Why she walked away from Scale at the Series B stage
• Her venture fund and the HF0 founder residency program
• Building Passes to nine figures in under three years
• The pay-per-minute product and creator monetization tools
• Hiring for competitive winners over credentials
• Why senior managers must still do IC work
• The "repeated idea" dynamic in male-dominated rooms
• What the "youngest female billionaire" title actually meant to her
• Advice for female founders navigating a system not built for them

From the earliest days of executive search to shaping the leadership of companies like Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Spotify, few people have seen more of Silicon Valley’s hiring successes—and failures—than Jeff Markowitz and Peter Clarke.

In this exclusive episode of Truth Works, host Jessica Neal sits down with two of her closest professional allies and heavyweights in the world of venture capital and executive talent. Together, the three share over 30 years of experience navigating the highest-stakes hiring environments in the tech world.

Jeff Markowitz, currently an advisor at Greylock Partners, shares the incredible story of being hand-picked by Google CEO Sundar Pichai to reshape senior leadership at Alphabet. Peter Clarke, a Talent Partner at Accel for over 13 years, opens up about the evolution of search and his role as a "fifth Beatle" in the founding of True Search.

This conversation goes beyond standard interview advice. The trio pulls back the curtain on:

• Why most companies get hiring wrong, even today.
• The dangers of "war for talent" thinking vs. relationship building.
• The specific simulation techniques the best leaders use to interview.
• The critical, and often missing, step of referencing as a management playbook.
• How great CEOs, like Scott Dietzen (formerly of Pure Storage), learn the job before they even make the hire.
• The one question Jessica asks to immediately identify a truly great recruiter.

Whether you're a founder looking to make your first executive hire, a leader struggling to build a balanced team, or a recruiter looking to level up from "salesy" to strategic, this is a masterclass you cannot afford to miss.

Timestamps: – 

Intro: Reconnecting with friends. 

– Peter Clarke's unique career path: Graphic design to software engineer to executive search. 

– Accel's unique investing approach and portfolio impact. 

– Jeff Markowitz's journey: CPA to opening the Silicon Valley office to Greylock. – The call from Sundar Pichai: Mapping out the senior talent role at Google/Alphabet. 

– Why hiring is still so hard (and wrong) in 2026. – The flaw in prioritizing "diligence" over assessment. 

– The true cost of a bad hire (and why it's not what you think). 

– Moving beyond standard questions to "unfiltered conversations." 

– How to simulate working together during the interview process. 

– The best CEOs get this one thing right (Pure Storage example). 

– How can CEOs really identify great recruiting talent? 

– Closing thoughts on friendship and mutual career impact.

Claude Silver is the world's first Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia — one of the largest independent agencies on the planet with over 2,000 employees globally. What started as an unexpected conversation over breakfast with Gary Vaynerchuck turned into a decade-long mission to build what he calls "the greatest human organization in the history of time."

Her only job description? "Touch every single human being and infuse the agency with empathy."

Claude never wanted to be in HR. She started in grocery stores, survived the dot-com boom and bust, built a career as a digital strategist at some of the world's biggest agencies, and stumbled into the most human role in business almost by accident. Today she leads a global people operation and has written the book — literally — on what it means to show up as yourself at work.

In this conversation, Claude and Jessica Neal go deep on why most workplaces are quietly breaking people, why the traditional path to leadership is fundamentally broken, and what it actually takes to build a culture where people don't just perform — they thrive.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why psychological safety disappears long before performance numbers start dropping
• The difference between culture fit and culture addition — and why mixing them up destroys teams
• The "Lie Exercise" Claude uses to dismantle imposter syndrome in real time
• Why promoting your best people without coaching them is one of the most damaging things a company can do
• How to scale empathy across a 2,000 person organization without losing the human touch
• Why heart-led leadership isn't soft — it's the fastest path to real accountability and zero drama
• What cynicism, politicking and late night Slack messages are really telling you about your culture
• Why the loneliest role in any company might just be the one responsible for everyone else's wellbeing

The moment that changed everything: At 19, Claude left college, strapped 80 pounds onto her back and spent 93 days on an Outward Bound wilderness program in the Colorado Rockies. No tent. No toilet paper. No way out. What she came back with wasn't just confidence — it was a blueprint for servant leadership that still runs through everything she does today.

On the book: Be Yourself At Work is Claude's answer to watching talented people shrink in the workplace — just like she once did. It's a practical, honest, deeply personal guide to self-awareness, team dynamics, and leading with courage. Part memoir, part playbook, part mirror.

Claude Silver's book Be Yourself At Work is available now everywhere books are sold.

In this incredibly candid conversation, Nikki Krishnamurthy (Chief People Officer at Uber) joins Jessica Neal (former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix) to discuss the high-stakes reality of leading people through crisis, transformation, and the AI revolution.

Nikki opens up about the "Strategic Calmness" required to navigate Uber’s most turbulent years, from handling global layoffs to dismantling a culture of leaks and entitlement. She shares the internal mechanics of her 13-year partnership with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, explaining why a Chief People Officer must act as a business leader first and why being "the mirror" for a CEO is the most important, and loneliest, part of the job.

We dive deep into:

• The C-Suite Burden: Why the HR role has shifted into a hybrid of Chief Medical, Diversity, and AI Officer.
• The "Entitlement" Trap: How Uber moved from "investigating everything" back to a culture of high judgment and "doing the right thing."
• Managing Up: The exact moment Nikki gave Dara feedback and how that blunt honesty built a foundation of radical trust.
• AI vs. Innovation: Why Nikki is prioritizing "AI-native" college grads and her warning to big companies: Don't let efficiency kill your ability to invent.
• The Art of "Disagree and Commit": Navigating executive hires and knowing which hills are worth dying on.

This is a masterclass in leadership, human psychology, and the raw reality of what happens behind the closed doors of the world’s biggest tech companies.