What was said the 50 best matches, newest first
People cannot move on from their family narrative until they face the truth of the world that shaped them, and that doing so takes bravery.
Doug says many people hold a fanciful view of their family and buy into a narrative because they fear that talking about it is disloyal. He says the work requires bravery and that people perpetuate the lie until they face the truth. He frames it as something to do for oneself and for one's children, so the story does not repeat.
“until you can face the truth of the world that shaped you, you can't move on”
A palliative nurse who heard many deathbed stories found the top regret was living the life others expected, and the second was not taking more risks.
Doug cites an Australian palliative nurse who he says had probably listened to around 3,000 stories of people at the end of their lives. The most common regret was living the life others expected rather than the one they wanted. The second was wishing they had taken more risks.
“Rather than live the life They should've lived they lived the life that others expected of them”
Schools reward compliance and resume-building, so students who take risks and build things are not celebrated, which Doug calls a tragedy.
Doug recalls a billionaire classmate who said the others got great grades while he was a C-minus student and a risk-taker who built companies. He argues that kids in high-risk neighbourhoods who build drug empires may have an entrepreneurial drive without an outlet, and that schools should celebrate entrepreneurship, risk-taking and trying things.
“so we don't reward that and i think it's a tragedy”
Doug splits life into two circles, the things you must do to meet obligations and the things that satisfy you, and suggests pursuing both rather than assuming passion alone will pay.
Doug says people are told to live their passion, but a 20-year-old asking how to support themselves needs a way to start. He draws two circles, one for what you have to do, such as paying rent, and one for what you know satisfies you. He says you can try both, and that if you are lucky they intersect and you get paid for what you love, though it is not guaranteed.
“Ik heb twee cirkels opgemaakt. Een is de dingen die je moet doen.”
Parents who shield children from every hardship may be removing the adversity that builds capability, as shown by a camp where a counselor's report about bruises triggered a two-week investigation.
Doug argues that modern society builds guardrails so children cannot figure out life, so parents protect them from the very hardships that build drive. He describes a family whose kids were allowed to take risks and got cuts and bruises at a camp. A 15-year-old counselor reported possible child abuse, which launched a two-week investigation into the family's life.
“This launched a two week investigation into their life”
A 1962 study of 400 eminent people found that about 75% grew up in very hard circumstances, which Doug describes as the engine that made them great.
Doug cites the 1962 Cradles of Eminence study by Victor and Mildred Goertzel, which looked at 400 eminent people of the 20th century, including Henry Ford and Louis Armstrong. He says about 75% grew up in utter poverty, hopelessness or a non-nurturing environment, and that this adversity was the very engine that birthed their greatness. He names Howard Schultz and LeBron James as modern examples.
“Het interessantste was dat 75 % van die mensen in een heel moeilijk omgeving gingen.”
Johannes Haushofer's CV of Failures lists rejected PhD programmes, unreceived grants and lost interviews, showing that a list of only successes is a narrative rather than a full record.
Doug describes a Princeton professor with a Harvard PhD who published a resume of failures. It lists the PhD programmes he was rejected from, the grants he did not get and the interviews that did not lead to offers. Doug says people need to know that a golden list of achievements does not show the whole path.
“Hij heeft gewoon een failure achter de andere.”
McMahon sits for 15 to 20 minutes each morning asking which version of himself is present that day, since an earlier self such as a ten-year-old can still drive his reactions.
McMahon says he sits every day for 15 or 20 minutes and asks himself who is there. Sometimes it is a scared ten-year-old, and he and John Kaplan joke about an edgy 13 or 15-year-old version. He says at 63 he can still feel as if events from age ten are happening, and the practice is to recognise which self is showing up before the day unfolds.
“Ik zit elke dag voor 15 of 20 minuten en ik vraag me zelf, wie hier is?”
A financial planner had wealthy clients pick an age they would die and plan backward, spending and gifting now, because clients who never calculated their end date never felt they had enough.
Doug recalled Die Broke by Stephen Pollan and Mark Levine, in which a New York planner asks clients to choose a death age, such as 95, and then works backward. The plan involves spending the money, thanking the people who helped them, and giving to their children while they can enjoy it. Doug said the planner felt most wealthy people never addressed this because they lived in fantasy land about dying.
“they never calculated that we were going to die.”
The best leaders recognise suffering in others and stay present with it rather than trying to fix it, and sharing their own suffering gives people a different view of how long it will last.
One of the hosts draws on the concept of sitting shiva from his father's background, which means being there for another person in their suffering. He says the most authentic leaders share their own suffering in the moment of pain, which gives a different perspective on how long the struggle will last. He describes this as a huge leadership attribute, and Doug agreed.
“I think the greatest leaders I've ever been around are the ones who can recognize suffering”
After losing a major client, have each person write two questions for ten minutes before discussing answers, because the usual meeting lets the most talkative people set the direction.
Doug's example is a leader with ten direct reports who has just lost their biggest client. In the usual meeting the two people who talk most come up with ideas and the group ends up where it started. Instead, he has everyone take ten minutes to write two questions that would give insight into how the client was lost and how to win them back. He says the quiet person who never speaks contributes, the conversation widens, and the outcomes will be better.
“Let's all take ten minutes Write down 2 questions”
PathNorth runs salons of 35 to 40 people where the questions matter more than the speaker, and the conversation becomes uncomfortable before it builds connection.
Doug says PathNorth gathers 35 to 40 people for dinner at someone's home or a club, with a speaker who is secondary to the questions. At a San Francisco salon hosted at the home of the chairman and CEO of Kimpton Group, the question was what your children would say is most important to you. He said it was uncomfortable at first, but within 30 minutes some people were crying and others felt connected for the first time, and that all of it depended on trust.
“It is not about the speaker. It's about the questions.”
In the Challenger Sale research, the risk-taker profile overwhelmingly dominated top performance in complex enterprise software sales, where a deal can take nine months to a year.
McMahon described five seller groups from The Challenger Sale: relationship builder, hard worker, lone wolf, reactive problem solver and risk-taker. The risk-taker won because they were willing to assertively push back on clients and disrupt conventional thinking. The generalist was least likely to succeed, and relationship builders became the ultimate people-pleasers.
“the risk-taker wins overwhelmingly dominated top performance especially in complex enterprise software sales areas”
In a study of 81 high school valedictorians followed for 14 years, students who played it safe by conforming and chasing grades and test scores rarely became standouts in their fields.
John McMahon summarised the Lives of Promise study by Karen Arnold, which followed valedictorians for 14 years after graduation. Per his account, valedictorians were typically playing it safe, conforming to expectations and prioritising high grades and test scores over passionate, specialised pursuits. He said real-world success more often comes from deep specialisation and risk-taking than from broad compliance.
“waar ze 81 hoge schoolvaledictorien trakken voor 14 jaar na de gradatie”
Leaders often chase a scoreboard they never chose, and the measurable how is easy to replace while the why is rarely examined until a setback forces it.
Doug Holladay contrasts the how, meaning everything measurable and easy to replace, with the why, which leaders almost never discuss. He says the how keeps working until it stops, and then the leader has to ask what their why is. The host who raised the scoreboard question offered the hypothesis that the earlier people realise this, the better their lives go, and Doug agreed.
“Ik contrasteel de verschil tussen de hoe en de waarom.”
Operating executives such as CROs rarely receive public recognition for growth, unlike founders and investors.
Sam says investors and founders are still the celebrated heroes of startup stories, while operating executives feel pressure and are rarely credited for their wins. He gave the example that when companies announce fundraises, no one thanks the CRO who took a company from about $1M to $50M in three years. He thinks technical founders find sales and marketing people hard to come to terms with.
“Not once is somebody saying, you know, kudos to the CRO who took this company from like a million to like 50 million in 3 years.”
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Pavilion invests directly in chapter operations and enablement, treating local chapter leaders as the heart and soul of the business.
Sam says the company equips its local chapters with marketing materials, sent each one a stand for events such as happy hours, and runs automations for them. He says the chapter team is a function Pavilion invests in directly and is not an afterthought.
“We invest in chapter operations and chapter enablement.”
A club which grows too fast loses its exclusivity, citing Soho House.
Sam says that when Soho House tried to grow too quickly and expand too much, it didn't feel as exclusive. In the discussion that followed, a host said clubs can become cool again. He said a second Soho House location in London became shiny again because even very famous people could not get in for two months. Another host said the Austin location had a two-year waitlist but members are now talking about leaving, and suggested it varies city by city.
“when they tried to grow too quickly and expand too much, it didn't feel as exclusive”
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Sam built a three-year vision with a coupled financial plan, something Pavilion had never had, after realizing he had not answered the board's question about where the business was going.
Sam says the board asked what he wanted to do with the company, and he realized he had not answered that for anyone. He built a three-year vision that specifies what he wants to do, when, and which pieces will go into it. He presented it to the company two weeks before the episode and said it gave him confidence about direction, while acknowledging that building clubs the right way takes time.
“We'd never had like a three-year vision with a coupled financial plan.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Strategy & market Link to this
Fixing the problems caused by opening up Pavilion would take three to five years, and that slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Sam says the company has to slow down and that fixing the problems will take three to five years. He wants to keep the idea that there can be a Pavilion for everybody while building programs for members who are not the very best and keeping an exclusive top tier.
“It's going to take three to five years to fix”
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A host observed that members began sharing their playbooks openly, which he said correlated directly with the community scaling.
A host says that in the early years he saw go-to-market leaders being territorial about their playbooks and treating other leaders as competition. After a couple of years of Revenue Collective, he says, sharing frameworks openly became common, and members realized they benefited when the whole community got better. He called this one of the most beautiful things Sam's team achieved, and Sam thanked him.
“it became very common for people to start sharing openly”
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Pavilion originally defined clearly who it was for and who was not allowed to join, positioning it against investors and CEOs.
Sam says the community was built for operators and not for the investors and CEOs and founders who are celebrated in the startup world. He says the audience and exclusions were both clearly defined from the start, and that it was in some ways a response to those people.
“So first who it was for was very very clearly defined and who was not allowed to join and who it was not for was very clearly defined.”
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Pavilion's founding point of view was that it acts as a union or guild for operating executives, teaching them to negotiate and protect their careers.
Sam says the community taught members how to negotiate, ask for severance, and understand equity, including double trigger and cashless exercise. It also taught them to build the right to consult into employment agreements so CEOs could not block side work. He describes it as an association that advocates for the operating executive, not just a go-to-market skills program.
“We taught people to bake in the right to consult into their employment agreement”
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Slack gave members an organized, real-time group chat that felt more useful than a messaging app, offering learning they could not get by googling.
Sam says Slack became a more sophisticated group chat than iMessage that could be organized, and it became a place where members shared in a way that felt real time. He says people felt they were learning things they could not learn by searching online.
“Slack became an opportunity for like a really more sophisticated group chat than like iMessage that could be organized”
Members putting Revenue Collective on their LinkedIn profiles as a badge of honor was a key driver of growth.
Sam says the business would not have happened without LinkedIn, because people started listing Revenue Collective on their profiles. He says it became a badge of honor that the company measured very carefully, and that it produced very strong referrals.
“people started putting revenue collective on their LinkedIn profile and it became a badge of honor”
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Pavilion's main membership is now more of an educational institution than a private club, and Sam asks whether a private club can be built on top of it.
Sam says Pavilion offers education such as CRO school and CMO school and wants everyone to take them. He also says the company needs programs for members who are not the very best, so they can have connection with peers and feel part of a bigger group, while the exclusive tier sits at the top.
“now I would say now it's the the main membership is more of an educational institution than it is a private club”
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A small exclusive top tier creates the brand halo that gives value to the platinum and gold tiers beneath it.
Sam compared Pavilion's tiers to the Birkin bag and the black American Express card, saying the top tier's brand halo gives value to the tiers below. He framed the goal as keeping a private club inside an educational institution, asking whether there can still be a Harvard while many people take Harvard online. Gold is what he is building for that purpose.
“we need the black American Express card because that brand halo is what gives value to in some ways the platinum and the gold card.”
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Pavilion Gold is an invitation-only tier for current operators at companies from about $50M ARR up to around a billion in ARR, admitted through an interview.
Sam describes Gold as an elite membership that sits on top of Pavilion's roughly 10,000 members. Candidates go through an interview process, CEOs and service providers are excluded, and fractionals must be in an between-role state rather than fractional for more than six months. Advisers can qualify after leaving an operating role such as at Databricks or OpenAI, but consultants generally do not.
“It is for operators, current operators from 50 million in ARR up to a billion and sometimes north of a billion.”
A profitable low-growth company can find growth more easily than a high-growth unprofitable company can find its way to profitability.
Sam cited this idea, attributing it to McKinsey, while describing Pavilion's cost problems after 2022. He said he was quite proud that the company reversed course and got back to profitability.
“it's much easier for a low growth company that's profitable to find and discover growth than it is for a high growth unprofitable business to find its way to profitability.”
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After raising money in 2022, Pavilion built a large sales team to sell corporate memberships, and its cost structure became bloated.
Sam says he was much more reactive as a leader in 2022. The company had raised money and built a big sales team to drive corporate team memberships, even though the point of Pavilion was not to sell to members, and it also built a slow-moving educational team. Sam says the cost structure became so bloated that the company had to reverse course to get back to profitability.
“all of the STRs that we hired were just prospecting into the membership”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales team, hiring & comp Link to this
After opening up, Pavilion became too diffuse in its focus and lost sight of what had made it work.
Sam says Pavilion expanded from go-to-market executives to CEOs and then began planning an operations collective for CFOs and COOs. He describes this as losing focus on what got the business there.
“we just got so diffuse in our focus”
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Removing the qualification barrier and letting anyone sign up online was the single biggest mistake Pavilion made.
Pavilion, formerly Revenue Collective, originally had strict membership requirements and an application process. After it opened sign-up to everyone, the company moved away from its focus on go-to-market executives and let in CEOs, and Sam says the impact of those decisions was still being worked through years later.
“we made it so that you could sign up online without talking to anybody and we let in so anybody can join. That's the single biggest mistake we've made.”
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B2B marketers limit themselves by looking only for B2B-specific examples, and that the best marketers pattern-match ideas from any industry.
Gerhardt says many marketers ask for a specific B2B landing-page example and can't make connections from elsewhere. He contrasts this with Braden, who learns from Nike, HubSpot and consumer brands rather than only other universities. Gerhardt says the episode made him rethink his own habit of interviewing only B2B marketers.
“You can learn more for people who are not necessarily in your industry”
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Braden credits his career range to a Lilly leader's question: is he a category expert or a great marketer? Category experts can't be moved; great marketers can go anywhere.
Early at Eli Lilly, Braden went deep on the pain indication of a drug. A leader, Mike Mason, asked whether he was 'a pain expert' or 'a great marketer'. Braden says focusing on the craft let him move across pharma, nonprofit and online and traditional universities, and that he believes he could do the same at a consumer brand like Yeti. The same leader advised taking jobs with 'enough clay to mold something beautiful', meaning a large gap between what is and what could be.
“are you a pain expert or you a great marketer? Because if you're a pain expert, I can never move you to something else? If you're a great marketer, I can put you anywhere.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Hiring & team building Link to this
Braden deliberately uses 'hardworking words' and names, such as calling alumni 'former students', because he wants one word to carry the weight of a thousand.
Braden says A&M's shared language (former students, the Twelfth Man, the ring) binds people across generations. More broadly, he wants marketing words to carry great weight. Gerhardt added that he and Dan have started intentionally naming internal things, like their Friday meeting and goal-setting process, because named things feel more real and get picked up through repetition.
“I want the words to carry weight. I want the one word to say a thousand.”
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A&M announced an 'Ag Passport' that documents students' out-of-classroom education so employers can see it, packaging an intangible benefit into something concrete.
Braden describes the president's announcement of the Ag Passport. It records service projects, study abroad, involvement in 1,300 student organizations and civic activity. The aim is to show employers what that experience looks like at graduation and to set the expectation that students gain it while enrolled.
“announcing what we're calling the Ag Passport, which is basically documenting all of the education a student gets outside of the classroom.”
Braden sees falling public trust in higher education, driven by price, perceived value and politics, as both a headwind and an opportunity to position A&M as an exception.
He lists rising prices, affordability, access, relevance and usefulness of degrees, and the political environment as forces making families wary of whether, where, and for how long to attend college. He says he likes where A&M sits on the 'pendulum' of what the public wants and frames its role as being a beacon that the American dream is still accessible. Fostering trust is a content pillar for the coming year.
“I think for us it's a giant opportunity. I love where we're positioned in the spectrum or the pendulum of what the American public wants, but the decline in trust, the decline in perceptions of value.”
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Braden's top challenge is hiring marketers who perform at the level of Yeti, Sony or Coca-Cola while paying public-university salaries, largely to work in College Station.
Braden says he has to build 'a hell of a marketing team' that can do justice to the institution, though he has quite a few remote workers. He says one advantage is that he can recruit people out of the corporate world to come to A&M.
“Paying them on a public university salary and get them to contribute at the level that they would at Yeti or Sony or Coca Cola or American Eagle.”
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Braden tracks earned media through Cision and sees between 150 and 2,200 media hits overnight from A&M's experts and announcements.
He uses Cision to measure earned media volume, including per-expert counts such as the jump from 35 to 3,500 hits. He reviews the overnight hits each morning as a gauge of how outside perceptions of the university and its people are being shaped.
“I come in every day and see between a hundred and fifty to twenty two hundred media hits overnight from our experts and our university”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Metrics & finance Link to this
Braden curates a pool of media-trained experts he knows will perform and puts them on owned platforms (SXSW, the Fast Company Innovation Festival, commercials) so the team learns who handles media well.
Faculty are free to talk to the press on their own. The team also runs media training and maintains a pool of experts it trusts to build credibility with reporters, because consistency and repeat appearances matter. Using these experts at events and in ads shows who knows what and how they perform. When a reporter calls, matching them to the right expert becomes 'a really easy equation'. One physics professor has over 2 million Instagram followers.
“So we're able to understand who knows what how do they do with the media, And when we get a phone call, it's a really easy equation of you need to talk to x y z”
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A dedicated earned-media team that catalogues faculty experts and what their work is worth to the media nearly quadrupled A&M's earned media hits in three years.
Braden has a team focused on knowing the university's roughly 4,300 faculty, what they work on, and the media value of that work. When outlets like the New York Times call about public health or egg and beef prices, the team routes them to a specific expert. An agricultural economist, David Anderson, went from 35 earned media hits two years earlier to 3,500 last year. Braden says Anderson 'didn't become an expert overnight'; the team gave him the megaphone.
“I'm gonna give you David Anderson out of the ag school who literally two years ago had thirty five earned media hits. And last year had thirty five hundred.”
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Braden filters story ideas through the overall strategy first, then through a few yearly content pillars, and aims to nail two or three priorities a year.
A story must first serve the strategy: best university for the nation, impossible to ignore, easy to understand. It then has to fit a current content pillar. For the coming year these include fostering trust (affordability, access, value of the degree) and health, where all twelve colleges work on Alzheimer's and dementia even though A&M isn't known for it. Braden says that with so many colleges you can get 'extremely distracted', so focusing on a few priorities for a year is how public perception actually changes.
“You can get spoiled, but you can get extremely distracted. As to what would you focus on versus bringing in things two or three priorities that we're gonna nail for a year”
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A&M runs full co-marketing partnerships with brands founded by former students, such as Dude Perfect, using them as case studies of the university's impact.
Braden wants everyone aged 8 to 16 to know that the five Dude Perfect founders are Aggies and that it started at A&M. He does similar work with another former-student-founded company. He stresses these are not just licensing deals or sponsorships but 'full blown partnerships' that A&M can tell stories around and create impressions with. Gerhardt framed them as the B2B equivalent of customer case studies.
“They're not just light sensing deals and not just sponsorships are actually full blown partnerships that we can then story against and create impressions about”
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Braden replaced A&M's own SXSW house, which mostly drew existing alumni, with a presence inside Fast Company's venue showcasing research instead of football, and Fast Company later added a full A&M-focused day.
A&M had spent 'a pretty penny' on an Ag House at SXSW, but Braden says it mainly attracted Aggies, who already knew the university. For three years A&M has partnered with Fast Company magazine at its grill venue, with exhibits on innovations in space, health, farming and national security, plus panels of researchers and astronauts. Attendees routinely say they had never heard of A&M or didn't know about its work. Fast Company returned asking to add an entire A&M-focused day.
“who comes to an Ag house at South by Southwest? Ag. Right? Well, the Ag know us. That's a bit of the choir.”
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At Drift, Dave Gerhardt bought the Nasdaq billboard for just a 15-minute slot at about $17K instead of a full day, and the social content got the same perceived impact.
In 2018-2019 the Nasdaq billboard was associated mostly with companies going public, which made it a perception play. A full day was out of budget, so Gerhardt asked for the smallest increment, which was 15 minutes. He brought video and photo teams to New York and used the footage on LinkedIn. He argues nobody on social media cared that it wasn't up for the whole day.
“So We bought it for fifteen minutes. I went to New York with a video team with a photo team, we took the pictures”
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Marketing can't create the lightning but can build the lightning rod: A&M's three years in IndyCar paid off when its sponsored driver won the closest Indianapolis 500 in history.
After three years of accumulated presence, the driver whose helmet and fire suit carried A&M's mark won the closest Indy 500 in its 110-year history. A&M was on board for the dramatic final 86 seconds. Braden says this drew major attention that weekend and across the other 17 races, along with search interest and inbound. Gerhardt drew the lesson that marketers want a viral hit right away and won't put in the years of reps that make one possible.
“Marketing can't create the lightning, but it can create the lightning rod. And our job is to put us into environments where the extraordinary can happen.”
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In IndyCar, Braden identified the back of a driver's helmet as high-value placement because the in-car camera shows it during broadcasts across 18 weekends a year on Fox.
A&M sponsored a driver and initially put just its logo on the helmet to create intrigue. It then layered in its commercial and had its social team working at the races. Dave Gerhardt noted A&M is the only university in IndyCar, which he said has 40 million fans, up 20% year over year.
“That a valuable piece of real estate when they go to the in car camera is the back of the Driver's helmet.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Positioning & marketing Link to this
Braden chose NASCAR because its 80 million US fans are 41% women and, in his account, the most brand-attached of any major sport, and A&M uses it to tell engineering, national security and veterans stories rather than racing stories.
The relationship began with sponsoring a driver's helmet and grew into an associate sponsorship with a team plus race sponsorships. A&M sponsored the Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day with the name of a former student, a soldier missing in action, on the car's windshield. The goal was to tell A&M's story as the top veteran-serving university 'largely alone'. Braden says NASCAR's fans are getting younger, more diverse and more spread across the country.
“there's eighty million engaged Nascar fans in the United States alone. Forty one percent are women, and they're the most brand attached of any of the major sporting events.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Positioning & marketing Link to this
Braden's 'blue ocean / strategic presence' approach skips billboards and airport ads and enters engaged fan communities where A&M is the only university and has an authentic right to be there.
Braden first identifies audiences whose perception and trust he wants to grow. He then looks for novel access points where he isn't competing with a hundred other universities. 'Strategic presence' means having every right to be there and adding something to the experience, so people react with 'I didn't know that about Texas A&M'. He says this has earned A&M a lot of attention and greater understanding.
“I don't need to win the billboards of the highways. I don't need to win the security bins at the airport. I wanna go to where there's fandom and communities who are engaged”
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Marketing to the same standard of rigor as finance, engineering or medicine: its job is to change audience attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, not to manage colors and taglines.
Braden says he learned this at Eli Lilly. He wants marketing to materially contribute to the organisation's goals, demand, reputation and future, the way finance, law or faculty do. He describes marketing as both art and science (gut, judgment and taste plus a lot of data), and says part of his role is bringing non-marketers up to speed on that.
“Materially contributing to the creation and the reinforcement and sometimes the changing of audience attitudes, beliefs and behaviors is what we're in the business of.”
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