Christopher Lochhead Follow Your Different

In this episode, we are taken for a ride on how to go from sales rep to Chairman of the board with the amazing Elisa Steele. We have a powerful conversation about how she went from sales rep to regional sales to CMO, then CEO. We also talk about what she’s learned from working in massive tech companies like Microsoft and Yahoo and many more, Wait for the part where she gives advice on how women can design legendary careers and have children too. From Sales Rep to CEO Elisa Steels is the Chairman of the board of two publicly traded tech companies, Cornerstone on Demand and Namley. She’s also on the Board of $25B Splunk. More of her career background includes former CEO of Namley and Jive and former CMO of Skype, and Yahoo. She candidly shares what she learned from her career in these huge tech companies and from smaller entrepreneurial companies. From the time she graduated, she had a clear vision of what success looks like and she believes she will achieve it through sales.  “If I went into sales, then its

This dialogue is a glimpse into a legend— whose name might not be world-renown but surely is worth getting to know—Dr. Sean Peterson. We connected over our love of people and children who are, “differently-abled. We talk about autism, uniqueness, human behavior and more. Love For Kids We’re at a point where every guest we have on could be someone famous. But just because someone’s well known, doesn’t mean you can have a real-life affirming conversation with them.  Today, Christopher converses with Dr. Sean Peterson. Dr. Sean has a Phd. in Applied Behavior Analysis and has spent 10 years running an autism clinic. He’s a wonderful guy, a husband and father. He also runs a physical therapy clinic with his wife called FYZICAL. “I think people are wonderful in general but working with kids in particular, is amazing. the delight that they have in their eyes, the ability to just make me laugh about ridiculous things.” - Dr. Sean Peterson What is Autism? Dr. Sean defines autism as “a neurodevelopmental disorder. He

For our first episode this year 2020, we hang out with professional athlete fitness trainer and founder of Paradigm Sport in Santa Cruz, CA, Joey Wolfe. Today we go beyond all of 7-minute abs BS, get fit quick, scams and shams and have a real, different conversation about making fitness and wellness stick in your life. Trainer of Champions and Weekend Warriors The last time Joey Wolfe had a conversation with Christopher was a year ago. Joey’s episode remains one of our most popular ever.  We’re definitely sure, listeners will get practical ideas for well-being improvement, He has trained superstar athletes like Mitch Haniger of the Seattle Mariners. Additionally, he has worked with former UFC champion Luke Rockhold.  World Surf League rookie of the year Nat Young and a lot of regular weekend warrior type like us have trained with him. “We all know what to do. We all know that going and exercising in the gym for a min of 30 min is a good thing. But for a lot of people, there’s something preventing them from

Today, one of the most prolific and important writers in the world, Dushka Zapata, joins us for a very unusual but moving discussion. They talk about grief, happiness and why its okay to opt-out for the holidays. Her work has been viewed over 150 million times on Q & A site Quora.  This might be the most different conversation you’ve ever heard about the holidays! Remembering Those We Have Lost The holidays are wonderful celebratory times for us to focus on our friends, family and for many of us, our faith. For many of us, the holiday season can be a happy season. However, there are quite a number who have moments of some sorrow. The holidays, intentionally or unintentionally, reminds us of the people we have lost. “As you know, I write a lot at Quora. A lot of questions I answer are about people who are asking permission.’Is it normal for me to be sad? How long should grief last? i lost my dog four years ago and I’m still mourning, is that normal?’ To me, my answer is always, ‘who cares?’ Who cares if it’s

One of Christopher Lochhead’s hero, UFC Hall of Famer and MMA legend Bas Rutten joins us today for another powerful and insightful conversation. We talk about how as a Dutch Kid, Bas, over-came horrible asthma and eczema, and bullying to become, the “Baddest Man in the World.” He shares about his outlook in life, his techniques when learning a new skill and a lot more. Fun, Playful and Affable Bas Rutten shares how some people see his life as almost like a cartoon character. He shares how he did a commercial for Cartoon Network focusing on anti-bullying and getting fit. These campaigns were personally moving for him as he was bullied when he was young due to severe asthma and eczema. “I know people who have asthma 365 days a year. I know people who are covered with eczema. Compared to them, this is not really that bad. That was my outlook always in life. There's always somebody, out there who has it worse than you.”  - Bas Rutten Greatest and Most Terrifying Bas is a Sensei, commentator, and inventor. He is a

After breaking the internet with our Mia Khalifa Episode 111, we are bringing you another episode with John McAfee, Legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and 2020 U.S Presidential candidate. He joins us to share his experiences in Silicon Valley and talks about why he thinks “it doesn’t matter who the President is. This will no doubt be one of our most controversial episodes. Then and Now John has been called “The most interesting man in the world.” He was an outlaw, from parts unknown, He has lived part of his adult life, on the run, somewhere in Latin America. Today, John is a candidate for US President in 2020 If his name rings a bell, that is because he is the founder of McAfee The Security Company. John also got into a well-publicized Twitter war with Kim.com, the founder of now-defunct file hosting service Megaupload. Garden of Eden of Technology John passionately describes Silicon Valley then as the Garden of Eden of Technology. It was known as a tech hub for the world. He also shared interesting tho

Join us in another fascinating and timely discussion with Yancey Strickler, Co-Founder & former CEO of Kickstarter, one of the most important new companies in the Startup ecosystem. He is the author of the new book This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. Yancey is an experienced entrepreneur who shares very powerful insights that apply to your business and your life. Listen to our discussion about Bentoism. It’s an intriguing way to think about life. A Chapter From The Book In a chapter of Yancey’s new book This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, he shares about Adele and how he found a startup company that measures loyalty and engagement. Adele faced issues with scalpers purchasing and jacking up prices of her concert tickets. “Currently, we imagine that economics is how everything should be distributed and here, Adele, found some other value through which to make herself available.” - Yancey Strickler Through the algorithm, Adele chose Top 30 per area of he

Today, entrepreneur and the incredibly creative guy Steve Lieberman, Founder & CEO of SJ Lighting, joins us today for another riveting conversation. Steve and his team have had a hand in almost every nightclub and electronic music festival in the US for the last ten years. He shares how he creates a lasting impact on attendees and how the whole production process goes, from planning to execution. Monumental Impact Even at a young age, he shares how he finds big, monumental art pieces as impactful. He carried on this astonishment for impactful art as he pursued a career in events production, specifically focusing on lights. “Whether it’s a big show or a little show, its 100,000 or 300-people-intimate-club-show, we like impact. An audience is coming to some show, they want to be moved. They want to be stimulated.” - Steve Lieberman Steve Lieberman has worked with more than 50 clubs and major festival brands like Electric Daisy Carnival, Coachella, Ultra, Lollapalooza, Rolling Loud and many more.  Similar Philos

In another riveting episode, Scott Kupor, the managing partner of one of the highest-profile VC on the planet over the last decade, Andreessen Horowitz, joins us today to discuss startups, how to get funded and a lot more! He is also the author of the book called Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. “Inside Baseball” Scott addressed the common issue of "inside baseball" between entrepreneurs and VCs. He shares that there is no reason why questions shouldn’t be answered and that VCs should reach out to entrepreneurs. “People don’t understand why decisions are made. I think that just leads to mistrust quite frankly between VCs and entrepreneurs.” - Scott Kupor Moreover, Scott shares the reason why he wrote the book. He wanted to bridge the gap between VCs and entrepreneurs. Through this book, he answers several entrepreneur questions that previously were assumed to be understood, since they have done a lot of deals in the past.  Information Asymmetry Scott discusses the idea about inf

Today, Dave Bittner, Producer and Host of The CyberWire Podcast and Hacking Humans podcast, joins us for a timely discussion about security, the future, deep fakes Apple glasses and more. He is a regular guest of podcast Grumpy Old Geeks with previous guests, Jason DiFillipo & Brian Schulmister. Trade-Off Between Operations and Risks Security has played a huge role in every technology company nowadays. The episode starts off with a very timely topic on security. Christopher poses the question “why security is hard?”  Dave honestly answers that there is a trade-off and risk-reward decision-making process that needs to happen.  Dave continues that breaches started getting bigger as well as ramifications and costs resulting in bad publicity, too. Board Members now have started giving their attention to security threats, as they, themselves can be liable for these breaches. “I think these days good board members have to have a certain level of knowledge and education in cybersecurity because it touches everythin

We continue our run of legendary authors and today, we hang out with one of the smartest people in business, Joe Pine, one of the godfathers of “The Experience Economy.” It’s the 20th anniversary of his seminal work and he is reissuing an updated version of the book In this episode, we dig deep into the future of experiences and how companies use it to differentiate and create massive competitive advantage. Pay special attention to Joe’s radical insights around building a data flywheel and the big strategic difference between Facebook and Amazon. From UI to UX Joe Pine shares with us about the re-release of The Experience Economy, bearing a new preview, that he and his partner wrote. They focused on the subtitle: Competing for Customer Time, Attention and Money. Companies embraced the importance of user interface in the past and now, user experience, or UX.  “When the first book came out, we talked about it as a nascent, an emerging, a forthcoming experience economy and now, we say it’s here. It’s all around

In this episode, we continue our run of legendary authors as we feature Buster Benson and his new book, “Why are we yelling?: A fascinating look at why and who we argue.” Buster shares with us the inspiration of his book, the constant-learning that he is having and how it can be applied to work and life, in general. Agree to Disagree Buster candidly shared with Christopher that of all the hard topics he decided to take on, it was the topic about disagreements that he deemed to be one of the hardest. He still pursued this topic as he was challenged to tackle this topic. He also admits that the inspiration for the book was his curiosity on cognitive bias. “That is the initial problem. in order to have a conversation about disagreement, we have to be open to the idea that we don’t have the right answer.” - Buster Benson Birds and Biases Buster shares that cognitive bias is an evolutionary term. It is a threat that could potentially lower our survival. It has the connotation that if we’re wrong, we would want to

We continue our run of legendary VCs and legendary authors like our guest for today, Ted Dintersmith. He’s a former top tech VC and he’s the author of the book What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America. This is a powerful look at what’s possible in education from a smart, committed, super thoughtful guy. What School Could Be Ted Dintersmith went to all fifty states, visiting some 200 schools and spoke to different school personnel and students. He says he was stunned by the innovative classrooms and schools he found across the USA. However, he also talked about schools who he described as good in paper, but not as good in reality. “There were so many schools like that, where on paper, it looks likes the kids are doing really well. Good grades, good test scores, reasonable to good College placements. The point I make is that I think these kids, are not really being helped in terms of being prepared for a world defined and shaped by innovation. They're actually being impaired.

This special episode is with Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce.com Vala Afshar. Coinciding with Dreamforce —Salesforce.com’s annual mega-conference in San Francisco, Vala shares with us what it’s like to be a leader in the digital media age.  He also shares some of the key practices that have made Salesforce #1 on Forbes most innovative companies list. Social Business Excellence Vala is the author of The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence. He is also the co-host of DisrupTV and one of the most visible and impactful thought leaders in enterprise tech. On the side, he is a contributing writer at HuffPost, which he claims were one of his ticket for his CMO career. “I was a CMO for 4 years. Complete impostor syndrome from beginning to end because I never had Marketing experience, I never went to school to study the art and science of Marketing. My CEO called me on  a weekend saying ‘on Monday I'm gonna announce that you’re going to be the CMO.” - Vala Afshar He narrates to Christopher how the energy and

Today’s guest is none other than Silicon Valley Legend, Heidi Roizen. She is an accomplished, Entrepreneur, former head of developer relations at Apple and now, a legendary VC. She shares with us why today is the Golden Era for entrepreneurship, how any company is literally a tech company and more about VC-backed company, Memphis Meats. Silicon Valley's Greatest Connector The Financial Women of San Francisco honored Heidi as Financial Woman of the Year in 2018. She is also dubbed as “Silicon Valley's Greatest Connector.” She is currently sits on the board of companies such as Zoox, Planet, Memphis Meats, HelixRE and DMGT. “I talk about the fact that there should be more women entrepreneurs and there should be more women venture capitalists and diversity. Not just gender diversity but other diversity and I try to support that through my actions. I think it’s appropriate given my role in Silicon Valley. If I have an opinion about that, I should be vocal about that.” - Heidi Roizen Other than these achievements,

For the second part of our two-part series on legendary category king companies, we are featuring John Rossman, author of “Think Like Amazon.” We have a fun, insightful conversation about how Amazon became arguably the most innovative category king in the world and most importantly, how you can learn to think like Amazon in your career. Digital vs. Traditional Christopher probes John on his thoughts about the distinction between traditional businesses versus data-driven, digital ones. John shares that other than the technological aspect, he could relate digital businesses to athletic attributes such as speed and agility. In detail, John said speed is about doing a repetitive motion, extremely well and efficiently. In business terms, that is considered as operational excellence.  The second attribute, agility, is the ability to sense and make change happen.  “Part of being digital is about the eternal pursuit of becoming perfect. How do we reduce cycle times? Improve quality, reduce costs? Cut out little pi

Category King Marc Randolph, the founding CEO of Netflix, joins us today for a stunning conversation about business and life. He’s got a legendary bestseller out called That Will NEVER Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea, which he also talks about in this episode. This is the first in a special two-part series about two of the most legendary category king companies in the world now Netflix and Amazon. Next episode is with John Rossman, author of “Think Like Amazon.” Book: That Will Never Work After nearly 16 years after he left Netflix, Marc Randolph talks about his book That Will Never Work. He candidly shares that all those years waiting for the right time to write a book helped him to gain perspective. First, he says he is wiser business-wise as he worked with a lot of startup companies in the past 16 years. He says he can now identify patterns as they emerge and can safely say he can tell between what works and will not. “The other cool thing that came out of waiting was, being ab

As California is suffering another horrible season of wildfires, we thought it would be powerful to give you some inspiring insight into how heroes fight these massive fires. On this special reissue episode, Retired Battalion Chief TJ Welch gives us an insider’s view of how thousands of Firefighters and first responders spring into action in a matter of hours to save lives and property. TJ Welch – Starting Out in the City TJ spent the first years of his career dealing with brush fires and structural fires. He also had his fair share of wildland fires as a chief officer. But he and other city firefighters pretty much only stood guard in front of the houses. It wasn’t until the late ‘90s when they made full use of city firefighters. They went to timber and brush areas to stop fires and perform other operations. “This was my moment where it kind of changed my perspective of my role as a chief officer.” – TJ Welch Wildland Fire in Numbers Back in the day, the biggest of wildland fires reached up to 160 thousand

Former adult actor and now digital media star, Mia Khalifa, joins us today for another riveting conversation. She walked away at the peak of her popularity to design a new life and career. She shares with us today about her past and how low self-esteem affected her decisions and how she’s moving forward with her life. Sports, Punk Rock, and Pets Mia Khalifa is a sports commentator, with a special love for The Washington Capitals Hockey team. Other than hockey, she used to watch basketball a lot when she was a young immigrant from Lebanon. “It's kind of just been a common ground that I could have with people and a way for me to connect, a way for me to feel like I am part of something or feel like I'm a part of this group even if I don't know anyone. Sports is the unifying factor in this world.” - Mia Khalifa Other than being a huge sports fan, she is a self-proclaimed foodie and she loves punk rock. She also shares in this episode how she loves her pet dogs so much and how she is trying her best to be the per

We have another riveting and insightful episode today with Viviana Faga, Operating Partner at Emergence Capital. She is in-charge of marketing and helped create over 150B in new market cap. Today she shares some of her amazing experiences working both with startups and VCs. The Importance of Marketing Viviana Faga worked in Senior Marketing roles with companies like Salesforce.com and Zoom Communications. She was the Head of Marketing at Yammer and pioneered the enterprise social space. At the moment, she coaches CEOs and Founders and leads them in finding the importance of marketing in scaling their businesses. “You just got $5-15M and you're thinking, ‘where do I want to spend my money? I want to spend money on building my product and I don't know who to hire? Why should I hire a marketer? It just seems like one big massive waste.’ That’s what I deal with and those are the kind of questions that I get everyday.” - Viviana Faga The Best Doesn’t Always Win Viv narrates her current client who has a great prod