Aydin Mirzaee, Fellow CEO on Mastering AI Productivity

Michael Koenig: Does this sound familiar? You wake up, you take a look at your calendar, and you see it's filled with meetings. Project meetings, stand ups, weekly check ins, one on ones, town halls, and those are just the internal ones. Some of our Meetings are complete and total waste of time and treasure. I mean, be honest with yourself. How many times have you thought. This meeting could have totally been an email. I bet a bunch. Now consider that in the U. S., there are 55 million meetings that happen each day, and 85 to 90 percent of them have no agenda. That's a lot of wasted time, and one of the reasons why a while back, Shopify canceled all of their recurring meetings, saving them 322, 000 hours over a two week period. Well, there's a [00:01:00] SaaS out there that is completely dedicated to making products that optimize structured management processes, like optimizing meetings, agendas, formats, action items, notes, and even calculating the cost of the meeting based on the attendees pay. It's called Fellow. And today I'm between two COOs. We're going to do one of the things that I'd love and bring on the people behind the companies whose products I use every day. Our guest is the founder and CEO of Fellow, Aidan Mizrahi, and we're going to talk about optimizing our own time, our team's time, management, building successful companies, you name it. Aidan, welcome. Thanks for

Aydin Mizraae: being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to do this.

Michael Koenig: So let's get started. Meetings. Fellow. How did this start? Why did you choose this as the problem to solve?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, it's interesting. It's kind of, uh, I mean, it is a little bit of a longer story, but to, to shorten it when we, um, my last [00:02:00] company, we started this company, it was in the online service space, bootstrapped it, sold it to SurveyMonkey. We were this scrappy company, just around a hundred people and getting acquired into SurveyMonkey was, was a very interesting process for us because we got exposed to all of these. Uh, call it like structured management processes. You know, you'd be surprised, but I had never done a one on one meeting in my entire life. I didn't even know what that was or why you should do such things. No quarterly business reviews, no, you know, staff meetings. It was just like a very scrappy, everyone all over the place kind of startup. And, yeah, we get acquired in and, you know, are part of the process of growth and until IPO and everything else. And we just got exposed to all these management constructs. And so the, the first iteration of fellow for us was what if we built a manager's co pilot? What if we built something that would teach, you know, the unknown, like the unknown, knowing entrepreneur how to run a business and how [00:03:00] to, how to scale a business. And so that was like the original vision. But then as we kind of got deep into what a manager's co pilot is, what we realized is that manager spend. You know, half of their time in meetings and it's a drain and nobody shows off about that. It's kind of like one of those things that you don't want to admit and you don't necessarily feel good about, but it was just such a large portion of time, you know, managers have many tools in their toolkits. But a lot of managing is done through meetings and human interactions. And so, what ended up happening was a lot of our focus just ended up being on meetings. And at some point, we said, this is a large enough global problem. If we don't solve this, we're worried that it might never be solved. So we might as well, you know, dive right in and, and, and see if we can tackle the meeting problem.

Michael Koenig: Oh my gosh, there's so much to unpack there. First off, you have the company, and You ran it. You didn't [00:04:00] have any of those normal management processes, one on one things of that nature, but it was successful. You exited. Tell me about it. It, it, it was successful. You didn't have those usual things that you experienced. How did that happen?

Aydin Mizraae: So there, there are a lot of things that, and you notice this in business too, right? Sometimes you see a successful company do something and then you would say, oh, they're doing it. It must be a good thing to do. Right? Uh, but sometimes you're successful in spite of those things. So. I think this was definitely one of those cases. We were just, um, I think it was a lot of, we just weren't exposed to ways, like, you know, ways of scaling companies and creating the right processes in place. So yes, we were there, but it was not, we were successful, but not because of that. And, you know, the truth was that had we scaled a little bit more than that, we would have been in big trouble. Like, I think we were We were definitely bursting at the seams and, you know, disaster waiting to [00:05:00] happen, but we just, um, you know, we, we made it work. Everything was kind of, I would say, duct taped together and relied a lot on, you know, uh, you know, the founders basically holding things together and, you know, some structure and some process would have gone a long way.

Michael Koenig: So when you joined SurveyMonkey, you had all these new structures, all these new processes. The first question is, did it improve the business? And the second is, how'd you learn it all? How long did it take?

Aydin Mizraae: I think with a lot of these, these processes, a lot of them are, you know, frameworks that people have discovered over the course of time that you should do, right? So when you think about a one on one meeting, like, what is that, right? To, to some extent, it's a, at the highest level, it's an alignment meeting, right? Like it, it's, it's many things, but at the highest level, it's an alignment meeting to make sure that your [00:06:00] manager and direct report, leader and team member, that they're aligned on, on the outcomes that need to be achieved. You know, and another, another level, it's a feedback meeting. So it's a, how are we doing? How can I help you? There are other elements too, like there's an element of career coaching, there's an element of support and unblocking, and many other things that go into it. And when you kind of think of the individual elements that, you know, happen there, at some point you think, hey, these are really useful things to happen. And so, if I'm the CEO or COO of a company especially, I'm thinking, well, I really want these things to happen. How do I make sure that they happen at scale? So then I might say, well, for my company, I want to create a process where every manager does these sorts of things. And I want to go a level above that. And I want to make sure that not only do they have that time in their calendar, but also that they talk [00:07:00] about a certain type of thing. So I'm going to go so far as to train people or create like a default template that they can use to make sure that those things happen. So now we're just talking about a one on one meeting. Now let's take another concept, say like the quarterly business review. So quarterly business review. Also, there's a lot of, you know, benefits to it at the highest level. It's probably about. reviewing what happened. It's kind of like, you know, the military after action review, right? But on, on a quarterly basis, but it also has other purposes. It's, you know, the ability for executives to kind of see the rising stars. Um, right. There's probably opportunities for a cross functional understanding of, you know, what teams are focused on. And these are generally good things to have. So then now you start to say like, well, we should do this on a quarterly basis. And every time you run this process, it is a meeting. But it's effectively a process that needs to happen because a lot feeds into it. You're doing all this prep, you're doing all this work, and so you're like, okay, [00:08:00] this is another process, and you have a template for that, and the template improves over the course of time because you learn things. You're like, well, You know, when we do the QBR this way, when people prep in this format, it turns out to be better, when the questions are like this, it's better, and you kind of keep improving this process. And if you kind of take a step back, meetings, to some extent, especially recurring meetings, are effectively processes. that are put into place that force a series of actions, discussions that are in general very beneficial. We can talk about, you know, retrospective meetings. We can talk about, uh, you know, discovery meetings for salespeople. Like, every kind of, you know, interaction in this way is effectively like a process. And, and I'll go even a step further outside of this, which is like in, in our society and humanity. These are some of my viewpoints. But, for example, like if we were designing a society, We might say it's really good like when you're thankful That's actually really good and it's a good part of [00:09:00] society and we should once a year make sure that everybody is thankful Right, and so you insert like a holiday for that. Once a year we should We should celebrate our presidents or we should celebrate our veterans, right? And so you start to to build these things into society and they're effectively again the calendar is a very very powerful thing because it can ensure that certain things happen and on a certain cadence. And so as I started to be exposed to these things and really just think about companies as just a series of systems and processes, it started to make sense why, why these things can be very, very powerful. And it was just like that systematic viewpoint that led me to believe, Hey, there, there must be a way that. We can allow people to very easily build these systems into their companies, start with the best templates, and just give them the tools to make each and every one of those things effective. But also not do them blindly, right? It's not about just saying, you know, [00:10:00] I'm, I'm doing one on ones because I have to, but like really understanding what the purpose is of what you're doing and, you know. How you should do it and what the best practices are.

Michael Koenig: You mentioned that, uh, there are different processes for different meetings. I love how you equated, uh, national holidays to societal processes. Now, how do you go about implementing one on ones at scale? And the reason I ask this is Early on, you mentioned Fellow as a co pilot for founders that haven't necessarily had exposure to these processes, right? So there's a product that's built there. What about with the Shopify, who I believe is a customer, isn't it?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah. Yeah. Shopify has been a customer for, I think more than four years now and they use it all across the company.

Michael Koenig: And it just continuously scales and do they [00:11:00] do improvements? You talked about different processes for different meetings, right? You have a different process for a QBR. You have a different process for these one on ones. I mean, these are feedback loops that you're getting from your customers about how to make the product better. Is that something that you all are harvesting, learning, et cetera?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, so I think the, the learnings, um, You know, materialize themselves in the form of templates. So there are different, I mean there's a bunch of things that we do, but you know, one of which is we take expert templates and curate them from our customers and like make them available within the product just to give people a sense to do those sorts of things. So, you know, say there's like a famous CEO or a famous COO, right, that you're that you admire, like, wouldn't it be cool to be able to know what their staff meeting looks like? Because I think, like, this is a thing that all leaders struggle. Like, most people that I ask, I'm like, tell me about your staff meeting. And then their first thing is, well, [00:12:00] I don't know that we do it the best, but this is what we do, reluctantly telling you about it, right? So, everybody's looking to learn. And, you know, the truth of the matter is that all of these things have to be evolving over the course of time. Because what matters is who's in the meeting. Uh, what is the, what's going on in the business? What's going on, you know, um, is this wartime or is this peacetime, right? And so all of these things kind of dictate a different set of things that should be discussed. But what is important is that once you figure out best practices, like the places where a lot of this stuff is very familiar is, um, you know, for, for example, for sales, right? In sales. There's a lot of typical things that, that happen, right? You have discovery meetings and follow ups and like there's a cadence and you build a pipeline, but, but this kind of process also can exist for many other things. So for example, customer success folks, uh, can have different series of conversations or, you know, [00:13:00] implementation specialists or onboarding. Teams can have like different types of meetings that they do with their customers. And so the thing is that when you have any one of these, these processes, then what you want to do is you want to kind of build in the tools. So when you hire new people, everybody kind of follows the same agenda, same, you know, structured process for running those types of meetings. And so it's kind of different, like, so from, from the individual level, you just want to run an effective meeting. So, you know, use a product. Uh, you use fellow to be able to do that. This one time I remember talking to, uh, a VP at Shopify and I said, so why do you like fellow so much? And they said that what's, you know, for me, you know, I kind of take, yeah, I'm a user and you know, I like it as a user, but for me it gives me the confidence that I know across my team, uh, across my organization that, you know, everybody is doing it and everybody's doing it in the same way. Right? And so there's a lot of [00:14:00] power that comes from like knowing that these things happen because I think the reality is that if you stop any leader, and again, we're just going to pick on the one on one meeting, but if you say, hey, like, do you guys do one on ones? They're going to say, yeah, I mean, I think so. Uh, everybody kind of does it differently. I don't know how effective they are. But, but again, when you think about like the importance of say managers within your companies, we like to think of them as the highest leverage point within organizations. Like you want to create organizational change. Like, how do you do that? It's largely through your managers. When people grow, it's, you know, thanks to partially the help of the managers. When people leave companies, they leave the manager and not the company. And so the pivotal meeting or interaction that happens is, for example, through these, these one on ones. And so it's just, these sorts of concepts make it that when we think about operations, typically we think about, you know, customer requests come in and we do these [00:15:00] things with it, or an order comes in and this is kind of how we handle it. But we don't think about like the standard interactions that happen across our companies. And there's a lot of examples like this, like, let's, let's talk about, if, if you're okay with it, Michael, to talk about communications. Communications are, like, really hard, specifically from, you know, exact level and down. Like, take any message, and you want everybody to kind of understand and internalize that. Like, it's not a simple thing, right? You, it has to be mentioned, you know, nine different times across all the channels. And then still you'll have people who say, oh, how come nobody told me? Right. And so there's a lot of things. So one of the things, for example, that we thought very purposefully about is Again, like thinking about the one on one meeting. How powerful would it be if you could get every single person every manager in your Organization to talk about a specific topic during their next one on one. So we have these like [00:16:00] Corporate like basically, you know from an organizational leader can say, you know this week I want everybody to talk about this topic and I want it to kind of bubble up and like get back to me and you can kind of like You know, insert these topics or these suggested topics in the conversations or the agendas that people are going to have. So again, this is what we think about at scale. But obviously like on the end user level, it's just about, you know, building a delightful experience that's going to, you know, help you very practically run a better meeting. But on the organizational level, it's just like a different set of things that, that you care about and, uh, think about.

Michael Koenig: There are. Many things about meetings that drive me crazy. One of them is, uh, the cascading messaging that you just described. Something will be decided, and then it gets siloed, it gets dropped, certain people forget about it. So having that different type of reminder, super valuable. Tell me about how you go about [00:17:00] About making sure that meetings are actionable, that you don't just have a great conversation and then it's done, right? There are action items that really need to happen. Otherwise it's a complete waste of time.

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah. So I think that this comes at a lot of different levels. It's, you know, starting from making sure that a. You know, meeting has a purpose. And again, like technology has changed what a meeting needs to be. It used to be, you need to actually bring people together to hear something, right? Technology has, has really changed that. So concepts like if you're still having status reports and again, we're not even talking about the individual level, right? This is, this is about organizations. So you have to think about within my company, within my organization, how many people are still doing. meetings where it's about status updates, right? Like you think about creating more efficiency and more bandwidth in your company to get things done. Like that's probably 15 percent of [00:18:00] all the meetings that happen. The content of all meetings that happen across organizations everywhere is just that. So there's a hack 15 percent cut out of all of your meetings everywhere. Um, but, but the thing is, if you have the right purpose and, and the purpose is usually to get to an outcome. As long as that's defined, then it's about, like, taking that outcome, and then, you know, detailing the way that it's going to get done, and indicating what the next steps are. So, you know, the way that, at least we structure it inside Othello, is that there's a structured agenda, and then there's a very purposeful place for action items. And so, it just kind of prompts you that, you know, as things are recorded, that you can basically have those action items there. And so now we're doing some fun things with AI that will, you know, suggest action items and, and do, do that kind of stuff as well. But the other point is the accountability factor. I think one of the things that we hear very often is that, you [00:19:00] know, we talk about all these things, people agree to do them, but then they don't happen or, or, you know, things slip through the cracks. So I think like the other really important thing is to, once an action item is determined, That it, it is something that is, like, constantly brought up in the subsequent meetings or subsequent, uh, series of conversations. Because if it's not, you're kind of saying that it's okay for things that we agreed on not to be actioned on. So I think, like, the other part of that is to, to make sure that, that recurrence is there. So there's a lot of stuff, like, when we think about the flows of how we build software, is to make sure that when an action item is indicated, That there's all the proper reminder flows, but the opportunities for you to be able to discuss those in subsequent meetings, that those things are carried forward automatically, for example. Uh, so, so those are some other things that we think about. But we also measure it, right? So things that are interesting, again, like I always put on the organizational hat [00:20:00] as well, which is what percentage of meetings that happen at our companies come out with action items? Like, and is that, and where are the culprits? Like where are the meetings that are happening that don't have any actions coming out of them? Right. And, and that's a valuable thing to know because, you know, we referenced Shopify, for example, and, you know, canceling meetings, uh, we can discuss that, that topic too, but it's just, again, when, when you're an operational leader, we're talking about 15 to 20 percent of. Your entire payroll being spent on people going to meetings and so again like when you spend that much time doing anything what you want to do is you want to make sure that it's done well and Just because you know meetings can be valuable Doesn't mean that you you need to spend all of your time in meetings, right? And so you really have to think purposefully about it and then some those sorts of analytics are very valuable like what percentage of meetings come out with Action items, what percentage are [00:21:00] prepared for in advance, what percentage start late, um, what percentage are, you know, more than one hour that don't need to be, right? There's just all these different things that are just very, very helpful in order to like just build a hyper efficient, you know, well functioning company. It's

Michael Koenig: tough to look at your calendar and just see a block of meetings because when do you get things done? So how do we think about that? How do you all think about, as the meeting experts, not just having an entire day of meetings?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, so, uh, I have a lot of, lot of thoughts on this. Um, so one is that we, we, we kind of have to come up with norms around what is acceptable in terms of the number of hours of meetings that you should have in a week, right? So, nobody's ever talked about this. Uh, right. So what, what is the hour like, would, you know, like if I were to ask you, actually, let's play this game. What is an acceptable number of hours of meetings per [00:22:00] week?

Michael Koenig: Oh my gosh. I think it's, it depends, right? That's the best answer. No, it depends on, on the level, on who you are, um, what your responsibilities are, what's going on in the company, right? But, oh gosh. For operations folks and executives. Meetings are the death blow, right? So I, I don't even know. Do [00:22:21] you

Aydin Mizraae: know how many hours of meetings you have per week? That's a good question to ask.

Michael Koenig: Um, that I actually do. Sometimes it could be 20, 25 hours, right? It's crazy. And this is, I, I don't work a 40 hour work week, and unfortunately I work much more than that, but, and that probably has to do with the fact that I'm losing so much time in meetings.

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, yeah, and so this is the, again, like for execs, like this is very, Uh, very common to hear. So, the way that we think about it is, you know, when you said it depends, that's exactly the right answer. It [00:23:00] does depend on the role. So again, if you talk to a sales leader, they'll say, I want my sales reps in meetings at like, I want all 40 hours. Right? If I can do that, and I can pull that off, then that's what I would do. Uh, but again, so it does depend on the role, but one of the things that we think about is that we need to come out with a number And educate people about that. So one of the things that, that we've thought about is, for example, for individual contributors, that the number should be seven and a half hours or less. So in other words, like if it's more than seven and a half hours on a per week basis, then that is too much. For managers and directors, our number is 15 hours. So it shouldn't be more than 15 hours. And so, and the way that we've come up with these benchmarks is like, as you can imagine, we just have a lot of meeting data. And so when we look at it, we also look at, you know, types of companies, but we also look at what is the top 10% best quartile look like [00:24:00] and what are the averages look like? And so these are kind of the, the numbers that we look at. Now, here's a very powerful thing. You can what? So what do most, most companies, so most companies think, okay, well that's a good idea, Aiden. We should, you know, have those numbers. But then what do we do with that? Most companies will just like put it in a wiki somewhere. And great, first step. But we all know that that doesn't work, right? So the way that we like to do it is we kind of enforce these things through these, uh, through this thing that we built called Meeting Guidelines. So it's kind of like built into your calendar. So if I'm going to invite you, Michael, into a meeting, I will get told At the time that I'm committing the act of inviting you to that meeting that you, you already surpassed the maximum threshold of meetings that we want you to have. Now I could still do it, but I've been warned. And then we make it very explicit where it's like violate on purpose, like, you know, showing you the red button. And so, so there's a [00:25:00] lot of respect that comes with that. But the way that we think about it is it's just like an educational process. Um, so, so this is one thing, which is like, how much is too much? The other thing that we like to think about, and this is really, really hard to implement, but I think, again, now with AI tools, um, you know, and of course, like, a lot of stuff that we're building, but, you know, things that are starting to become accessible, this is starting to change. But everybody knows that meeting, especially if we're talking about, okay, say your company's a thousand, two thousand people, like, this is not an uncommon occurrence, where you'll come in and you'll say, hey, there's this meeting, there's sixty three people in it. And out of the 63 people, only 4 people ever talk. And every now and then, you know, someone will say something from like, the other cohort. And so the way that we, we think about it is, who need to be the active participants? And so in other words, if you're not gonna be speaking during the meeting, and the way that, again, [00:26:00] like, we like to think about it is that if you're not at least speaking, or you're not an active participant for at least, you know, 5%, Of that meeting, and I know that sounds like a low bar, but there are many meetings where people don't even take up 5 percent of the talk time. Right? And so, if, if you're not going to do that, then that's not a meeting that, you know, that you should actively be involved in or participate in. So in other words, we have like meeting participants, and then we have, you know, these meeting attend, attendees. And we don't want you to be an attendee, we want you to be a participant. And if you're not going to be a participant, again, like, what you should do is record that meeting, you should summarize it, and then send it to the relevant parties. And then, if people want to comment on the recording, they can do that after the fact. And then the original parties can consume that information. But again, it allows you to be able to listen to things at 2x speed, um, right? Consume it at your own time. [00:27:00] Maybe go for a walk and You know, do something healthy while you kind of consume the content, right? It just gives people that opportunity. I know you're a big fan of remote work and and hybrid and and and so again like it Allows for this and then there's another thing. There's all sorts again I can list these things off from now until forever, but I'll put one more in there so with every meeting that has more than seven attendees The ability to get to a decision actually drastically reduces to the point where you're, when you're, I think around 14 attendees, the ability to get to a decision goes to near zero. And so when you think about that, it's just like, once you have that threshold, it's okay, everybody, we should really not have meetings with more than seven people. And then educating those people, right? So the next time you're about, about to add that eighth attendee, we have these calendar prompts that are like, Hey. How about you invite fellow bot instead and, you know, [00:28:00] and just make them optional so that they don't actually have to go. But it's just like teaching people. It's just because those norms don't exist and everybody comes from a different company and they bring their own norms and practices, nobody ever goes out and says, Hey, at our company, we want to avoid things with more than seven people. And this is how we run meetings at, say, Two Cows, as an example, right? So, unless we define our culture, we define our values, we need to define our meeting culture. We need to define how we run meetings within any organization and agree upon them, and then constantly encourage and enforce those types of guidelines. No, for sure. I mean, you can tell I'm very passionate about this stuff after being in it for a number

Michael Koenig: It's funny because there's a connotation with meetings that it's like, oh, it's so inefficient, right? Oh, I have to attend this meeting now. And there's that connotation because why, right? There's a history of meetings sucking, right? I think, I see coffee, people [00:29:00] with coffee mugs, meetings suck. And so the way that you've all approached this is one of the reasons why we use Fellow at Two Cows, why we love it.

Aydin Mizraae: Oh, I should tell you about this other thing that we do, which is a little controversial. This is very advanced. So I don't know that most companies would do what we do. But we have a, but you could do it. You could do it using Fellow and some companies do. We have a setting that will automatically cancel meetings all across your company if they don't have an agenda. Now you can specify. You can say like, you know, one hour before. And one hour before is, you know, at least, come on. It needs to be there one hour before. At the very least. And so it'll just auto cancel it. And so the first time you enable this across your company, what I promise you will happen is a lot of people will get very angry and they'll say like, Hey, it disappeared from my calendar. Like this thing was happening. But if you want to change behavior, behavior change, as you know, as a COO, you know. Behavior [00:30:00] change is like the hardest thing that exists, right? To get people that have been doing things a certain way to do things differently. And sometimes a shocking event like that is necessary. And you know, maybe, you know, one time they miss it. Second time they miss it. Third time it won't happen. They're going to be in there. There's going to be a very specific agenda. And, you know, people are gonna make sure that, and, and the motto we like to use, which is fun because it's viral, you say it once and, and it, it's sometimes like people just need the words because once you have the words you can just like communicate them and everybody can understand them. Uh, so it's, our motto is no agenda, no attenda. Again, once you hear it now, but then it gives you the words, right? Like, Hey, you, the next time you invited to a meeting and there's no structured agenda, it's about, well, no agenda, no agenda. Everybody knows that it's part of our culture. Gosh, you must

Michael Koenig: be friends with Darren Murph, who was a previous guest who shared. No agenda, no attenda as well. So this really needs to catch on. So every single listener [00:31:00] ready? No agenda, no attenda, no agenda, no attenda. That's actually kind of difficult to say 10 times fast. Uh, anyways, um, well look, let's talk about your

Aydin Mizraae: podcast. By the way, Darren is, is great. Uh, huge fan.

Michael Koenig: Oh yeah, he's the man. Um, I, I remarked I was, uh, I've been working remote, as you said, since like 2007, 2008, and. You kind of start to think, uh, I, I know most things about remote work. And then when you talk to Darren, you're just like, wow, I really don't know much about remote work. And here, here's this guy. So let's talk about remote and let's talk about meetings. What as the meeting experts, what do you see? As being different for successful meetings, is there a difference between remote and in person?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, so I think, I think remote gives you a lot of, um, a lot of opportunity. There, there's this term that we use called the [00:32:00] asynchronous meeting. And it's, uh, you know, so, like, maybe you think that's an oxymoron or, or something, but it's, um, Some things need to be done synchronously. So we do believe one on one meetings because part of it is about report building, part of it is about getting to know people as humans. Some things should be done synchronously, for sure. But there are a lot of things that don't need to be synchronous. And I'll give you a very basic example. We have this one I'll give you two different examples. One where, again, like you talk about, you think you know a lot about remote work, but then, you know, you learn more about it over the course of time. Um, one of our, you know, do you know Tony Jamis from, uh, Oyster? Not

Michael Koenig: personally, but I love hearing

Aydin Mizraae: him speak. Yeah, yeah, so it's, um, you know, I was chatting with him, and he was telling me about their exec meetings. And so, they do a really interesting thing, which is, you know, before the meeting, there is [00:33:00] an entire recording, like a, you know, a loom, or just like, or a vidyard video, and you, you have this, uh, this recording, and every exec does it, so everybody kind of gives like their, you know, few minute update, and it was very interesting, I asked them, well, why a video? Why, why does it have to be a video? Can't it just be text? And, And he said, listen, we're remote, and sometimes it's not about like the bullet points, but it's about the tone. It's about, you know, your facial expressions while you're saying the thing. And when I'm reading text, it's kind of hard to weight things, right? But when, when, when you're speaking it, I can, you know, apply appropriate weighting to, Oh, that's actually, I should pay attention to that. So everybody does that. So this is, this all happens before the meeting. And so, you know, when you come into the meeting, you already have all the contacts and you really only talk about, like, the things that need to, to be discussed. And so, this is what we like to call a hybrid [00:34:00] meeting. And so, we do the same thing at, at, at Fellow for our exec. Meeting or a staff meeting and this is hybrid because you know part of it is done on on a remote basis You can kind of consume the information in advance and then only part of the meeting is actually synchronous that involves discussion And so the beauty of this is this is how you kind of reduce the synchronous time required within your company And you know Amazon talks about their you know There are six page memos that, that, that come in, but there's this notion of a lot of work should be done, you know, in advance of the meeting. And when you do things like that, it makes it really powerful because a lot of people are, take time to process things. So I'm definitely like that. You give me information right now and then ask me to discuss it. I can do it, but it'll be surface level. You give me one night of sleep between when I consume the information. I'm going to come in with ideas that you would have never imagined, right? And so, so, so that, that's why this is better. And I think like when you think about it that [00:35:00] way, asynchronous or hybrid meetings are actually a lot more powerful. They, they, they have the potential to even give you better results. Um, another example that we have is, we had this meeting, we had this situation where we had like an SEO search engine, like, you know, issue that we were kind of trying to deal with. And so that started as, again, like a very important event. So we started it on a synchronous basis. So it was, you know, once a week synchronous. And then we morphed it into, uh, once every two weeks. And now it's an asynchronous meeting. And so what that means is it's on our calendar. So we just know that what that means is like prior to the meeting, we go, we click on the meeting and we interact with it in Fellow. Right? And everybody's doing the things. And then that just becomes a thing that doesn't need to be synchronous. Everybody's just like, we're, you know, the reports are there, people can comment on it, and then we can move on. But the reason why it's nice for it to be in the calendar is again, it just [00:36:00] programmatically lets you know that this is something that needs to be actioned and, and there's a time associated with it. Like when we think again about a structured process in brackets, it says async. for the meeting title. So you know that this is not something that I need to jump into. I just need to do things before the end time of this meeting. And it kind of becomes a structured task that, that needs to happen. So that's what I think about asynchronous meetings. I think over the course of time, most work will become asynchronous because it's just more efficient and just better to be able to do that. But again, the way that you do that is you just have to be purposeful about it and really think about what things need to be synchronous or not. The other thing I, you know, I, I learned about when it comes to synchronous versus asynchronous is the advantage of asynchronous is, is just the micro prioritization concepts, right? So some people wake up and they're morning people. Uh, some people are evening people, some people are afternoon people. And so, [00:37:00] uh, do you, do you know Dan Martell? Again, not, not

Michael Koenig: personally,

Aydin Mizraae: but yeah. So Dan has this really cool thing, which is. Everybody says, okay, my time, you know, come up with a large number for your time. Say, like, my time is worth 1, 000 an hour, 10, 000, 100, 000, doesn't matter. Some large numbers so that you can really think about your time purposefully. And so the point is that, say that we choose an arbitrary number, 1, 000 an hour. So the problem is that, like, that 1, 000 an hour is not equally weighted. Maybe between 9 a. m. and 12 a. m., 12 p. m., That's 10, 000 time because that's like my brain is wired like I can do my best possible work whereas like, you know at 6 p. m You know, that's like 50 an hour like I'm just you know, not really like I'm already drained and so on and so forth and Again asynchronous allows for you to be able to use the best tasks at the best times but if a lot of your meetings are synchronous and they don't have hybrid [00:38:00] components Then like, you're, you're injecting them potentially in the wrong place. And again, if we're just thinking about an optimization flow of like, how do we optimize everyone's time? And again, this is another reason why it can be a big driver of success.

Michael Koenig: Yeah. I mean, of course you're preaching to the choir, right? The people listening to this are just, everyone is just like, yup, oh, this is so cool. And I mean, I want a like behind the scenes peek. I think we all do at the operations and processes at fellow because you all are the masters of this. It all ties into, you know, one of the things that, that I like to say, which is just tech companies are people, processes, and servers, right? You got to have the right people, but without the right processes, oh boy, that's not going to be great. So, uh, this is why I love it. Now you, you distinguished a couple of different components of a meeting. I love the asynchronous meetings for, it sounds like [00:39:00] FYIs, right? Here's what's going on. Here are the announcements that you need to know. It's not really a discussion, but hit me up if you have any questions, right? Then there are the discussion meetings. And then there's the decisions. Am I thinking about this correctly? Are there different ways that we should think

Aydin Mizraae: about this? Definitely. So one of the things that we like to think about is, again, being very purposeful about these One of the things that we've learned, for example, over the course of time is it's very hard to do a creative session and do a session, like, at the same time, arrive to a decision in the same context. Because what ends up happening is arriving to a decision is, it's almost like a different part of your brain than the creative, you know, let's explore possibilities. And so when there's kind of like a time crunch and you're trying to do both things at the same time, some people are trying to be creative [00:40:00] and explore, and other people are like, let's get back on track. So one of the things that we've learned is, again, if you're very purposeful about it, like you could have a brainstorming session which is about, you know, let's come up with ideas, creative solutions to this, to this problem, and, but we're not going to decide. We're going to be very specific that we're not going to decide. But then You know, a week from now, when we get together, we will have considered all the different options brought together, and then we're going to focus this decision, uh, we're going to focus this meeting on actually a decision that, that has arrived. So, so this is one, one, one kind of like just tactical thing that, you know, has been helpful. Uh, the other thing is again, there's, uh, ma many different frameworks. Um, you know, like there's the Rossi framework, there's di different ones, but what a lot of them have in common is just having specific roles around what people are gonna make a decision, who's informed, who's [00:41:00] participating. And so as long as you explicitly define who the decision maker is for a particular meeting. This, this also takes another, you know, another part and makes it a lot easier for people to Um, have a more productive discussion. Hmm.

Michael Koenig: One of the things you, you, previously you had spoken about, if you're speaking 5 percent of the time or, or less, right? That's an appropriate, uh, It's

Aydin Mizraae: a low bar too, by the way.

Michael Koenig: Low bar to be a participant versus an attendee. I actually use crisp. ai. Originally I started using it for like, background noise cleanup, things of that nature. Of course, Google Meet and, uh, Zoom have gotten really good at filtering that stuff out. One of the features that keeps me around though, is it tells me what percentage of the time I speak. And so, as a leader, you know, it's our job to maybe do more listening than speaking, right? Let me ask you a [00:42:00] question. Again, being the expert on meetings. What's your favorite meeting? What's the most important meeting? If you were going to have one meeting a day or one meeting a week, what would it be?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. Uh, so I think the, the most impactful meeting and so we, we kind of think about these things in terms of the cost of the meeting, right? And so cost of meeting, simple concept, you know, people's salaries, times, you know, time that they're in. So for every company, the most expensive one is their version of the town hall or the all staff or Or whatever that, that, that meeting is. And so you think about it and whenever something you spend a lot of, you know, resources of the company, the most expensive meeting in any company is in fact that. So I think that the, the thing that most people, not, not every company does is like they don't spend the [00:43:00] proportionate amount of time of making use of that to the fullest effect. Right? So I think, you know, this is a, another. opportunity where to get the entire company aligned, but also get them pumped and excited about, you know, the week ahead. And so I think for me, this is the, that's my most favorite meeting just because it is like the opportunity it's has the opportunity to be the highest impact. Part of the company. And I think, again, as a CEO, part of my job is to be the chief cheerleader and, you know, be able to like, yeah, tell the story and get people pumped about the future. Right. And so this is my opportunity to do that at a, at a large scale. And so, you know, I just think about it that way and why, why that's my favorite meeting. You mentioned

Michael Koenig: AI earlier. There's so many applications happening right now. It's so easy to go down, gosh, any number of rabbit holes. [00:44:00] How are you all thinking about using AI to be more efficient?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, I mean, we all know, again, like you said, preaching to the choir, I'm sure everybody knows super transformative can change every business ever. Everybody, everybody should be scared shitless is the, is the real answer because every business is up for disruption, I think. Like the only business that you know, there's like maybe some that are not I was I was joking with a friend that there's this there's this park, um, You know close ish like within an hour drive where we live where You can take your kids and they can see real animals and it's kind of like we should buy this thing because this is maybe the only place that isn't going to be disrupted by AI, right? But yeah, I mean, that's kind of really, really, really happening all across the board. And so, yeah, there's a couple of things. Again, I think about processes and I think about like systematic ways of making your company. AI centric and AI forward. [00:45:00] So, we, we did a, we did a bunch of things. So, one of which was when, We, we have two, two times a year we get everybody again as a remote first company, two times a year we get together and, you know, do an employee summit and bring everybody together. And what we like to do during those employee summits is we do them as three day events. And so day one is summit. So lots of internal talks, maybe bring some customers. And then the other two days are actually a hackathon. Um, and we do in person hackathons because it's really cool to just like let everybody go in and, you know, interact and like sales people can interact with developers and CS people can interact with marketers and everybody participates in our hackathons. It's not just developers because everybody can build processes and like do something that they normally wouldn't do during their time. And so the last time we did this, we, we really emphasized and the way that you can influence the outcomes for these things. is you want to give people the [00:46:00] freedom, um, to, you know, be able to work on anything they want. And I, for example, as, as a, as a CEO, I make sure that I don't give people ideas because, you know, I, this is the one time where, like, you want the opposite to happen, so you actually don't want to do that. But the, the one way where you can influence things is what are the awards, right? And so you, you create these, like, award categories and, you know, if you just make sure that all of them are AI based, then you know, you know what's gonna happen. But, yeah, so we did these hackathons and, like, our hackathons are very largely focused on AI because I really think that every company needs to reinvent themselves. And if you don't reinvent yourselves, it's basically over. And that stands for us at, you know, Fellow as well. So we did the hackathon, but I didn't think that that was enough. So the other thing that we do, again, talking about the most powerful meeting for any company, which is the town hall. Again, opportunity to be a cheerleader, get everybody [00:47:00] aligned, but also kind of set the stage for what's truly important. So we have a section in our town hall every single week, which is called AI Presentations. And so this is an opportunity for anybody to come in and discuss something that they've been doing. Either using chat GPT or another tool or, you know, co pilot or, you know, whatever else people are using in order to basically demonstrate and teach everybody else in the company what's going on. And so we, we highly encourage it. We, you know, everybody at our company can expense, um, you know, like we give everybody an AI budget and so they can expense AI tools because we want them to be more productive, more powerful, and we just need to give them room for experimentation. Right. So I think the, the weekly presentation thing is really, really powerful because, you know, this other week we had one of our, you know, our head of growth and he came in and he did a presentation around, uh, Hey, I uploaded a bunch of [00:48:00] spreadsheets. And using the advanced analysis mode on chat, GBT, I was able to do all these things. I could have done it myself, but it literally saved me six hours and I can't believe that this is possible, right? And so, but now everybody else sees that. And the opportunity is, Hey, like he had the analysis skills, but there's a lot of people on our team in different roles. They don't have that. But now it kind of democratizes it and allows them to be able to kind of have that kind of information. The other things that we think about, for example, are, you know, building, you know, personas. So, for example, in a marketing context, we work on building these large prompts that are collaborative within the company, that the more we learn about those specific company persona, or these ICPs. Like, what we'll do is we'll keep iterating on, on the, uh, the, the context, right? And so then, anybody who wants to do work on a particular ICP, the first thing they're gonna do is go to our library. They're going to grab the [00:49:00] collective knowledge of like a whole bunch of information, plug that in, and then start working from that point on. So the other way that we like to think about it is like how can we all build on top of each other's knowledge and being able to use AI effectively. So, yeah, it's really important. We're all learning. And the thing is that just encourage that creativity and then like constantly just have it every single week hammered in that like, we need to change. Otherwise, we don't, you know, we're gonna and we need to disrupt ourselves. So that's a lot of our company process. But of course. We think a lot about that within the product, uh,

Michael Koenig: as well. In terms of AI presentations, I mean, there's Aidan, there's, there's a lot of questions now. You talked about, uh, encouraging AI use and experimentation. You have AI budgets, but one of the things, uh, COOs and operations folks, we also have to think [00:50:00] about the downstream effects and guarding our flank. A big concern is uploading and exposing proprietary and confidential information to these AI bots and training model, AI products and training models. How do you all approach that? Because now you just talked about, uh, your, your growth team uploading a bunch of spreadsheets, things of that nature. How do you balance that risk, but also how do you govern it?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah. So, so, so these are really good questions. So. You know, I think it's, um, you, you have to have policies around it. So no identifiable information, no, again, it's like only aggregate anonymized information can ever be used. So, um, Yeah, basically nothing that is personally identifiable, nothing that's like customer information. But, um, you, you know, those are things that [00:51:00] we, again, today we enforce primarily through education and, you know, giving people the notion of what's possible and what's not possible. And then we have a channel in Slack, um, that, we have a channel for AI and a channel for security. And we ever say, like, if in doubt, it's better to ask, you know, before you act. And so if it's a use case that, you know, you haven't thought about before. And you're not sure, like, this is an opportunity to talk about it. So, that, that's how we approach it today, but again, like, we're talking about this stuff every single, and you know, it's, it's one of those things when someone gets up and is gonna do a presentation, like, we reiterate it again, because we always have new people joining the company. So it's like, okay, just so you, like, you know, just to repeat, disclaimer. Like, you know, this is what's, what's possible, this is what's not possible. And I think like that's just a, a better approach. Um, then, a lot of this [00:52:00] stuff, by the way, relates to general security practices, right? So, for example, we have all sorts of security practices. I mean, people put, um, again, we host a lot of very confidential information inside of Fellow. And so all this same kind of like training rigor that we put the, you know, for people, our customer support teams, accessing that kind of information, we just use the same training mechanisms to make sure that, um, you know, customer data is, is held in a responsible way. And, um, again, anybody who's SOC 2 compliant, like you just need processes in place and you just need that training. But my, my hope is that over the course of time, there's like. More tools that, just like all the stuff that we do on meetings that prevent you from doing bad things for meetings. I expect that these sorts of controls will, will continuously be built. What are

Michael Koenig: some of the notable AI presentations and use cases that, that come to mind?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, so the, the [00:53:00] analysis stuff is, um, is very interesting. The, the other one, I remember we were doing a One, one member of our marketing team, one of the things that we do is we produce a whole bunch of videos and it's very hard to, like creating video, like creating scripts takes a long time. And so, but we have a whole bunch of really great content, right? And that we've written and blog posts and things. So one is like. I remember, you know, a presentation where this person on our team literally produced 40 scripts, 40 video scripts, um, you know, from content that we'd already created. And, you know, obviously you, you know, you still edit it and you do stuff like that, but It's just like how much work is reduced or another one. I mean, I think you and I talked about this, which was for our podcast. So we run the super managers podcast. And one of [00:54:00] the things for anybody who has a podcast is you, you want to create like these highlight clips. And so there's a manual way of doing it, but now there's a whole bunch of AI tools where you can say, grab the highlight, cut the segments, you know, make it available. And, you know, what used to be a lot of work is now, you know, very specific. Um, another one that we used to do is, you know, for, for training purposes, right? And so, when you think about training, sometimes the way training happens is, you know, like, you talk about Darren, right? Darren in remote work. So one of the, one of the, in the remote community, I'm sure you all have the same, which is, when someone asks you a question, respond with a link, right? The, put it in the wiki, grab the link, and then so that it doesn't get repeated. But sometimes a lot of information just, it, it takes time to record it. So one of the things that we do, for example, is when we're recording internal conversations, what we might do is literally take the transcript and then feed it to ChatGPT and say, turn this into a wiki [00:55:00] document in the form of documentation. And then you might, again, have to go and like grab some screenshots and, and so on and so forth, but like a lot of the work is done. You just explain something to someone, but then you took, you know, the work that you had done and you turned it into documentation. So, yeah, these are some of the, uh, I mean, you know, on the product side, we're doing some really cool fun things, you know, just like with Enfelo itself, but in terms of processes that are not product specific, this is, this is some of the stuff.

Michael Koenig: Everyone listening to this, if you can't tell, I'm a fan of Enfelo and One of the things that's great is we're always looking for ways to automate processes. We're always looking for shortcuts and ways to be more efficient. Just use Fellow and it's just going to get better and better over time, it sounds like. You mentioned weekly all hands. That happens every

Aydin Mizraae: week? Yeah, we do it every week. Oh wow.

Michael Koenig: And

Aydin Mizraae: how long are those? So they're 50 minutes. And that's another thing that we, again, we don't have [00:56:00] one hour meetings. There's no 30 minute meetings, it's 25 minutes or 50 minutes. And all of our meetings start after the hour, so we do 10 past the hour, and we do 5 past the hour. So, that, yeah, that's kind of how, how we, and because, again, by the way, like, how do you do that? Like, that short hack of 10 minutes less for your meetings, like, that's 16, I think that's like 16%, 17%, right? So, how do you reduce your meeting time by 17%? is, is this one hack, but it doesn't work if you just shorten your calendar event, right? That's not how it works. What you, you actually need to do is you need to have a plan. And if you have a structured agenda, that's very well prepared. You can actually do that and finish things in 50 minutes. And so, but yeah, every week 50 minutes. The

Michael Koenig: questions around this are just all hands are actually a lot of work, right? These are really expensive meetings and you want to make sure that it's the best use of everyone's time and that they should actually [00:57:00] be there. To do that on a weekly cadence, one, that's a lot of prep work. Two, is there that much new information every single week that needs to be conveyed in that

Aydin Mizraae: setting? Yeah, so I mean, great question. So not every meeting is an hour. So we've certainly had meetings that have ended, you know, in less time than that. We don't keep people if we don't need to. One of the things is that, you know, the end of a town hall meeting can also turn into a Q& A session. So we also use that opportunity. And the questions aren't necessarily for me. It could be for anybody in the company. Right. And so, but in terms of like the, the way that it's structured, we always have a section for a, you know, presentation. It could be like a product demo. Uh, it could be, you know, something, some, someone else is presenting, but the way that it's not a lot of work is that every team, every, or like every department in the company [00:58:00] has the ability to, to bubble something up, uh, to the town hall level. And it's just like, we, we have a cadence where everybody bubbles up. Like the most important thing that needs to be mentioned or, um, you know, at a town hall setting and so that's just like a process that kind of happens and the most important things are bubbled up and if there aren't super important things, then that section kind of gets skipped and so it's just like on a cadence where, you know, to some extent, it's like this show that we produce every week. So we just have a process of like, How to minimize the amount of effort that's required to get that there. But one of the things, you know, that, that I think is very important to me, I mean, I do a few things. So, one is the, we do this town hall. The other thing that I do is on a, every week I, I send an email to the company. And this is something that I write, you know, on weekends usually. Cause it's, it's my creative brain space. But what it's really about is giving people the why. The, the best analogy that I've heard about in terms [00:59:00] of what it's like to run, um, a startup is that it's kind of like you're driving this bus. You're, you're, you know, sitting in the front row. You're the driver. And everybody else is in, you know, the back. They're doing things. They're building things. But the problem is this bus doesn't have windows. So they can't really, like, look outside and see what's going on. But part of your job sitting in that front row is like to see what's coming, what you need to avoid, where, what the promised land looks like. And when you see the promised land to be able to describe that. So this, this weekly email is about me kind of describing what I'm seeing, but also explaining the why, right? So why are we doing things? So a lot of it, it will be like something happens in the town hall and then I'll kind of riff on that in the weekly email. Now you heard this person say this about this customer. And here's why this is super important. And like, let me give you context. Cause like, ultimately, if everybody had context and understood the why behind things. It's not about like learning processes or [01:00:00] following like a step by step procedure. They, they come, it's like a higher order solution. And so that's what I kind of do. So to me, like my town hall and my, my weekly email, like these things go really hand in hand. I think, you know, at the most basic level, when you think about company building. You know, when you're one person, you know, you have all the context, you know, all the things, every additional person you have, you're a little bit less efficient because not all the knowledge is kind of centralized in this one place. Maybe AI changes that, right? And you can have like one, uh, you'll have one, two cows, you know, general AI, and I'll have one for fellow and it'll have all the knowledge. But, but in the meantime, you know, these are opportunities where we can like share contacts and just get everybody aligned. And so you just have to do this work to really empower, you know, everybody to function, uh, really optimally. You mentioned

Michael Koenig: super managers, your podcast, got to talk about this. You've, you've interviewed now [01:01:00] close to 200 managers. You've had to learn a lot of stuff. Tell me about that. What are some of the most valuable lessons you've learned and taken into your day to day practices?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah. So there's, I'll mention two. So I'll mention my favorite one. So. One of the things that I've learned is, one of the, the question that I ask everybody when they come on this show, the first question I ask is, you know, what was a mistake that you started making when you first started to lead teams, right? And so, when you hear the answer to this question, like you said, 200 times, you start to see patterns. And so, what I realized, and, and, and again, this is what makes this stuff hard, right? So what I realized is that, If you kind of abstract this stuff out, you get to something what I call, which is the pendulum of management. And so, the way that it works is you start managing, and the first thing that you do is you're managing from a place of wherever your context comes from. So, you start to think about, hey, [01:02:00] when I first started, you know, my manager, that one manager I disliked was such a micromanager. Like, I just hated that and I just wished that they would let me operate. And so you come in with that context and so your first thing is, I'm going to be the opposite to that. I'm going to give them, I'm going to, you know, hire smart people and get out of the way. That's what I'm going to do. And I'm going to do that to the extreme. And so you start to do that and then before you know it, like, people are saying things like, I don't get enough direction, you know, and then so you, you, you, you swing the pendulum again. And then you swing it again and again and eventually you, you arrive at this midpoint and you're like, I get it now. It's like, I need to arrive at the midpoint. But then what you realize is that even that only works for some amount of time because what it's actually about is that every single person on your team has a different pendulum. And not only that, but depending on what's going on, what, what role they're occupying, what's going on in the business. Even that [01:03:00] changes. So it's like this very dynamic thing. And so what you realize and what makes management and leadership so hard is it's an individualistic, like, framework for each person on your team. But it also can change over the course of time. You know, something as basic as you need to have one on ones every week, but then over the course of time you don't need to do that. Maybe ones every three weeks is just fine. Like I feel like a lot of people take management constructs and say like these are the best practices I shall do exactly that but that's actually not true. I remember having Michael Watkins on on the show He wrote the book the first 90 days and my favorite thing about that episode was he started talking about, you know People think that man, you know management or even building businesses any of this stuff has has this instruction book and people get religious about it and follow it to a tee and But none of those things are absolute and I said, well, what's an example of something that's not absolute? And he said, well, you know, you should create a mission statement for your company and [01:04:00] focus on, on values. And I, and I said, well, what, that's not universally true. It's like, no, what if you just got hired as a CEO and your job is to, you know, rejig the whole corporation and maybe you need to lay off 40 percent of the staff. Is that your number one priority? Sit around and you know do those sorts of things. That's a thing that maybe comes later And so it just allows you to really question some of the things that are maybe everybody does and think about it more holistically I'll mention one more since since we're talking about one of my other favorite ones was We had John Fasoli. He was a chief product officer at MailChimp Um, and so one of the things that he was talking about is the difference between absolute and relative decisions. And I kind of experienced this firsthand. I remember one time, you know, we sold our company to SurveyMonkey and there was this, uh, decision that, you know, was made and I, I [01:05:00] just, like, I didn't get it, but then there was this person that was kind of trying to force us to do this thing or change our business in a certain way. And I was like, I don't understand, like, where is this coming from? I just, like, can't logic it. And they're like, nope, like, it's been decided. It's, uh, it was an executive decision and, like, a bulldozer, like, without, like, listening to reason, I'm gonna plow this thing all the way to the end. And it wasn't until I talked to John that I really understood something at a very meta level. Which was that when you make an absolute decision as an executive, that sounds like, if I say, Michael, what should we do here? You just give me the answer and you're like, we should focus on project X, right? But that's an absolute decision because there's like no context around it. But if you say that we should focus 80 percent of our attention on project X and remember that there could be other priorities that arise. in that 20 percent that may take precedent. So as long as these things [01:06:00] are true, you know, we, this should be the focus area of the company. And that's kind of like a relative decision and you're kind of putting a little bit of context to it. It's not an absolute we must, you know, and ignore everything else and all reason and get tunnel vision. And so, as executive teams, The more relative decisions that we make, the more successful our company can be and how we can kind of avoid disaster. So there's lots of little gems like this, uh, you know, Michael. And so one of my favorite things is that, you know, it's an opportunity for me to kind of learn decision making frameworks, different ways to think about things from some of the best people out there, which is again, like one of the things I'm sure you can relate. I mean, it's just these podcasts are so fun because you can learn. And again, we're all learning machines, right? At the end of the day. That's

Michael Koenig: 100 percent why I do this. That that's it, right? I was, I started this because I would have these conversations and originally it was [01:07:00] just COOs and we'd think, Oh, there really isn't much out there. We should put this out there. And then it was like, Oh, cool. And then if I have a podcast, Hey, more people will come and talk to me. So that's the entire thing behind, uh, this podcast between two COOs. Time for the last question. We've all had those moments in a leadership position where we've just seen something completely off the wall, something new, something that surprises us. And we've thought, well, I never thought I'd see that. Do you have one of those that you can share?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah, I'm going to share a fun one. That's very recent. Um, and so If you have ChatGPT on your phone, circa the last, uh, few weeks, uh, depending on, you know, when this goes live, uh, there's an opportunity, so you, there's a voice mode. So, if you haven't tried it, you can actually, yeah, there's like this, uh, headphone, like, icon, and when you press it, it turns into voice mode, and you can actually talk to it. And so, the interesting thing is, like, for [01:08:00] the, for the last week or so, every day after my drive home from the gym, Like, in my car ride, all I'm doing is I'm talking to ChachiBT, voice native, and I'll give everybody a hack, because this took me a while to figure out myself. So the problem is, like, when you first start talking to it, it keeps interrupting you, because like, as you pause, it'll just start speaking, and you're like, nah, it wasn't ready, why are you interrupting me? So I figured out, like, what you can do is you can say, I don't want you to say anything until I say the trigger word, I just use the trigger word Rolex, because I'm like, I won't use that in conversation. So And then, and then, you know, and then this way it will only respond back and like let you think. And so then what you can do is something really fun. So I'll give you an example. I was like thinking about a PR strategy. I was reading this, this book, uh, Ryan Holiday's, um, um, Trust Me I'm Lying. It's a fun book on, around PR and just understanding how the media works and, and all of this. And so, I was reading that book, and then I said, [01:09:00] like, I wonder, like, how I could use some of these strategies for a fellow. So I said to ChatGPT, Hey, like, you're Ryan Holiday. You wrote this book. You're gonna coach me. You're gonna ask me questions. And you're only gonna respond when I say Rolex. So, and then, you can kind of start talking to it, and it just becomes like this idea generating machine. It never gets tired. You can talk to it for as long as you want. And again, I find that this kind of, like, active You know, thinking is a lot of times more powerful than just like passively listening to, you know, any sort of material or article or things like that. And anyway, so I, I am at like, I really enjoy that kind of conversation. And then the beautiful thing is now you can have, again, like different coaches. You can talk to Seth Godin, you can talk to, you know, Ryan, you can talk to all these people, continue conversations where you left off. And so every day just becomes like an active process of like. You know, how can I improve any particular thing and It's really, really awesome. So anyway, that's the [01:10:00] surprising thing that I'm, this is a thing that I'm actively doing now. I'm shocked as I say it, but this is where the world has

Michael Koenig: come. That's amazing. And everyone, next week on, uh, Between Two COOs, we'll have, uh, Seth Godin. Oh,

Aydin Mizraae: excellent.

Michael Koenig: That'd be cool. As a chat GPT. As an AI. Yeah, exactly. Uh, well, Aidan, uh, this is awesome. Thanks so much for joining me. Where can people go to keep up with you?

Aydin Mizraae: Yeah. So, um, I'm, I'm most active on LinkedIn. Uh, so, you know, most active on LinkedIn and, and of course, uh, there's a super manager's podcast, which people can find. Um, and then also the, you know, it's just the company URL is fellow. app.

Michael Koenig: Fantastic. There you have it. Thanks for listening to Between Two COOs. I'm your host, Michael Koenig. And a very special thank you to Aidan Mirzaei for joining us. Tune in next time for our next podcast episode on Between Two COOs. And be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you go [01:11:00] for podcasts. And if you have a minute, give us a rating. So, thanks for listening to this week's episode. And tune in next time. Until then, so long.