Prevent Burnout In Your Startup: Alternative Advice For Entrepreneurs And Tech Leaders

How to balance ambition and well-being in high-pressure environments with Matt Wright of Gaia Net.

In this episode, I sit down with Matt Wright, a seasoned community builder and leader with a fascinating journey from making pizzas to driving global tech initiatives.

Matt shares his unique perspective on leadership, shaped by his experiences in sports, emergency medical services, and the tech world. We dive deep into how these diverse experiences have molded his approach to team building and management in the fast-paced startup environment.

Here's what we cover:

* (00:36) Matt's journey from California to New York and his love for cultural diversity
* (04:29) The birth of Matt's passion for community building in college
* (11:00) Matt's unexpected leap into the world of hackathons and global tech events
* (21:14) The importance of understanding your 'why' in career choices
* (28:59) Matt's approach to leadership and building resilient teams
* (35:50) The value of diversity in thought and culture within teams
* (47:10) Matt's insights on finding mentors and being a mentor
* (54:44) Balancing tough love and nurturing in leadership
* (59:53) Creating a positive startup culture without the "grind" mentality

Whether you're a budding leader, a community builder, or someone navigating the complex world of startups, this episode is packed with practical wisdom and inspiring stories. Matt's journey reminds us that the path to leadership is rarely straightforward, but it's always enriching.

Join us for a conversation that might just change how you think about your own leadership journey and the communities you're part of or hope to build.

☀︎ About Matt:
Throughout his career, Matt has much experience as a community growth expert with emphasis in emerging markets. He has been responsible for community development around various technology brands in North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Mainland China, and three additional international startup ecosystems as AngelHack’s Director of Community Development. 

While there, Matt contributed to the development of their global developer community that scaled from 50k to 100k members in two years, powered by 200+ global Ambassadors. Along with his team and the Community, Matt remotely organized 150+ hackathons for Fortune 500 companies such as Mastercard, Motorola, ABInBev, RBC, Barclays, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and UBS, all with the help of a variety of local tech partners, NGOs, universities, accelerators and government agencies that embrace startup culture.

T: @mateo_ventures
M: medium.com/@mateo_ventures

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Transcript

Emily Rose Dallara (00:00.296)
I invite folks to, if you're ever doubting what it is you want to do, go and ask a thousand people how you can help in a specific field that you're passionate about and do some math on where you're seeing the most impact and go and spend your time there. Welcome back to Bubbling Out, where we are popping the norms on leadership and giving you new sustainable ways to lead. Now, the podcast, as you know, is for anybody who's leading a team and

You know that I don't define leadership by the title that you have, right? Leaders are anybody who's stepping up and leading a team to a common goal, to a common mission and vision. And even if you're a manager, you can be a leader. You can choose to start leading as a manager. And that's what makes leadership so interesting for me as a topic, because we take you out of the weeds and we help you to understand how to get shit done.

how to inspire others and how to get really big results and still have everything ticking along nicely and taking care of your own mental health, physical health and emotional health. So that's what we talk about here. And today I actually brought on an amazing guy. He's called Matt Wright from Guy -O -Net and he is, we had such an inspirational, fascinating conversation and I never know what conversations are going to be like and the directions are going to go in and

I treat them like I'm talking to a friend, as you will know by this episode and all the other episodes that you've listened to so far. And I always prepare the questions and I always make sure that we have a structure to the conversations, but it never, we never get past the first question a lot of the time, just a bit of BTS there. But the reason I prepare guests in this way, I tell them, you know, we're going to go off on a tangent is because I want to.

make sure that we're going in the direction that is the most interesting for you guys. So I would love your feedback on this episode to help me understand if this is the kind of content you like, because I've been toying around with ideas of should we make these episodes shorter? Is there another format that you like? So I've got a few ideas percolating in the background and I'm really excited to present them to you and start recording in a different way. Matt is amazing. We talked all about

Emily Rose Dallara (02:22.702)
leadership, how sports really structured his entire life and how that now makes him an incredible leader, how his transparency and communication has been the biggest strength of his and why that's helped him to grow companies. Matt has actually built really interesting communities and he'll go into this in the episode, but he's scaled developer communities from like 50 ,000 people to 100 ,000 members.

He's ran hackathons for those of you who don't know what a hackathon is, it's basically people building stuff together. And he's run 150 for Fortune 500 companies. And he's been at the forefront of emerging tech like blockchain and web three for years now. And one thing that we really got into in this episode was the aspect of building community and why that is important. And we dive into his childhood, we dive into the kind of small jobs that he had as

growing up, his university days, the projects that kind of got him into community building and why leadership is so important when you are building communities. We also talked about remote work, cross -cultural collaboration. We touched on how different cultures really inspire the way that you build teams and lead them. And we got into one of my favorite topics, is SOPs, standard operating procedures, and how things totally fall flat without them. And so...

I'm really excited to share this episode with you. Matt shares a lot of personal insights, lots of rituals he does. We talk a lot about his leadership style and we later go on about how he envisions things moving forward and what he envisions for his business. And I think this is going to be really inspiring for you at any stage of your leadership. Even if you haven't considered yourself a leader yet, I want you to listen to this and see what you can take from it. Now, before we dive in, I want to share with you something very exciting.

So Power Up, my first ever rollout of Power Up is coming in October. Now Power Up is a 12 week program. It's specifically for people who have recently moved into a leadership role or are looking to move into a leadership role, specifically for women, not just people. And you might be a new director, a new hedge. You might even be a new VP. You're working in a startup or a scale up environment and

Emily Rose Dallara (04:47.636)
You are now responsible for business goals. You're now responsible for a team. You're now responsible for making sure that everything moves forward. But what you found is you're currently still doing what you were doing before as a manager. maybe you were, so to give you an example, I used to be a marketing manager before I was a director, obviously, and not obviously because some people just jump straight into directorship. So I was a marketing manager and I was doing things. was executing, I was in the weed.

weeds, I was good at doing the marketing. And then I moved into a head of global marketing role and I was still doing that. And to feel good enough, I felt like I always had to, I always had to be learning how to be better at my job. And that meant learning more marketing. And actually it's a completely wrong approach and it slowed me down massively because I was not leading the team. I was just doing the things. I wasn't doing anything different. And slowly.

I started to not get buying. People would say no to me. I wasn't communicating clearly. I was getting frustrated. I was starting to lose my confidence in myself and I just didn't know what was going on. I was feeling overwhelmed. I felt like I had to prove myself and I just wasn't getting anywhere. I just was constantly terrified that I would lose my job. Now, so many leaders who come to me in their first few months, even their first year or two,

struggling with this, having to prove themselves. You've already got the salary. You don't need to prove yourself. But what you do need is the competency because competency breeds confidence. You need support. You need emotional resilience and you need high growth leadership skills. Without those, you're not able to lead effectively. It's just a fact. And that's what we provide in Power Up. We go through three different areas. Like I said, support you have

a community, a group, you also have access to me. You have the emotional resilience. We do tons of somatic practices. We build you rituals. We help you to dissolve your triggers and help you to deal with them. We work on your inner resilience and we help you to develop the high growth leadership skills. And what I mean by high growth is high growth environments require different leadership skills to corporate environments. We help you really nail what it takes to lead in a startup or a scale up.

Emily Rose Dallara (07:12.652)
Okay, that's what makes it different. And if you want to sign up and get on the waitlist, just head to emilyrolesdallara .com, just pop your email address in to jump onto the waitlist. If you have any questions, just message me on Instagram, EmilyRolesDallaraCoach. Okay, let's get into the show. So welcome Matt to the show. Lovely to see you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. And it looks very sunny and summer like there, which is very opposite to Europe right now.

and where in Europe are you? I totally forgot. I'm in Lyon in France and it's like an early autumn. beautiful. Yeah. New York is wrapping up in summer. It's quite gorgeous. Fall is actually one of my favorite times in New York. enjoying it. lovely. I need to visit. I haven't visited before. So I need to that. yeah. You've got to come check it out. Yeah. I know quite a few people who live in New York. They like just come over. It's literally not that far. Am I okay? From Europe it's not bad at all.

Yeah, know, can get yourself some pizza. I've heard about this. Okay. Yeah, I need to, I need to be involved in this. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. For everyone who's listening, we're to be diving straight into Matt's experience of leadership, his career, building communities, working cross culturally and cross time zones. And we're going to dive deep into

all my curious questions around his life basically. And as you know, when I... I don't know if you've listened to the show before Matt, but I go into the nooks and crannies and I'll pull things out that maybe you were not expecting sometimes and I do it with our listeners in mind. So they are new leaders or evolving leaders who just really want to be doing a good job without the stress. They want to be enjoying life and enjoying work at the same time. And so we'll keep them in mind throughout it. So hi.

Hi everyone who's listening. hope that you enjoy today. So first of all, I wanted to ask you if you can think back to a life experience that really inspired you to start pulling people together in community. Yeah. So this was, I would say the beginning of my career. I started learning Spanish language when I was 15. I worked at a pizza kitchen. I grew up in California. we're around Latin American culture quite frequently.

Emily Rose Dallara (09:37.694)
I'm not Hispanic, but I was just eager to learn this culture. And I learned Spanish while working in the food industry, making pizza, ironically. Speaking of pizza earlier, it's probably what dragged me to New York. But through that process, I was really welcomed into that culture. I did not expect to just be so warmly embraced and made feel very comfortable to speak the language. There was other times where I wasn't super comfortable.

It's hard learning a new language, it's to just put yourself out there. But I was welcomed and it became a huge part of my life. I still am fluent in Spanish, it ended up being my major. But through that time in my life, I really appreciated the conversational aspect of learning that new language versus sitting in a classroom. so I was actually in high school, I was working my night shifts at the pizza place and then going to school and learning the grammar. And so that whole process made the language stick for me.

And so while was in college, I wanted to do the same for folks that were learning English. And so I started a group in college called We Speak English Project, so we set up and that's where I met a of my international friends. We basically ran events like party buses, wine nights, picnics, you name it for all the international students that were trying to learn English as a second language and wanted to meet locals, make it more conversational. And my job as a community manager at the time, which I had no idea was

even doing, I had no idea that was a career track was getting all my, you know, American native English speaking friends incentivized to come to these events. Like, hey, look, there's this crazy party, bunch of cool international kids, you know, come through. And to the international students, I would go to the international student departments and do the same thing, but say, Hey, there's a bunch of American students who want to meet you want to take you around want to go party. And so I was kind of in the middle of this, like model UN event scene and all my, you know,

friends were so confused with just my life in general, because typical American college experience is like, you know, you're at a frat, you're doing all this kind of, you know, extracurricular activities. Me, I was just hanging out with international students, and I was just infatuated with building that community. And it's funny, but you know, in the next chapter of my career after college, it actually came in real handy. I traveled all around the world and ended up

Emily Rose Dallara (12:02.338)
you meeting all these friends that I had welcomed into my city, to my country, you know, they welcome me into theirs and I always had a couch to sleep on. But, you know, from that moment, I never doubted or regretted just following my passions. love this story. So you spent all of your college building community. I'm interested, like, what was it that drew you to do this? Like, what was the desire? The first thing that comes to mind was just how happy it made people. I remember one of the first

sessions I did, you know, we, I first called the thing like the club, clubbing glass, cause I was first trying to help Spanish native Spanish speakers. And then I had three women from Iran come in who speak, you know, natively Farsi and they're like, Hey, can we join? Like we need to practice English too. And I was like, yeah, of course. Why, why wouldn't you? And they're like, well, it's clubbing glass. It's like a Spanish speaking club. And I was like, no, like it's not meant to be that that was kind of the name. And so that's kind of when it's, you know, snowballed into this wider.

community, but these women would like bring me like Persian meatballs. Like they invited me to their home, maybe their husbands and like their families. And it was just like for me, it's what I hope humanity is. And, you know, for me, I just, felt like I was a part of something amazing and I was just addicted to it. I just kept wanting to meet more and more people and see how important even a conversation was to them.

in a place that was foreign to them, you know, in the U S the reason we, I even called it, we speak English project. But back then was because I hated the notion that, you know, in the U S folks are, it was like this, this colloquialism where it's like, if you don't speak English, like, you know, get out of here. And me, I was trying to turn it to something positive, like, Hey, we're a community. We speak English. And you know, that, just drove me. And it always has like, I think the work I do today, I work with so many different countries and, and GOS and

cultures and it, you know, for me, was just understanding where they come from, what their passions are. And when you really get down to it, we all have the same drives in life, you know, family, work, passion, a bunch of other things, foods. But, you know, I think that just drove me, just drove me to understand humans a little bit more. Yeah. And was that, like, if you don't mind me asking, because I'm curious, was that something that you had when you were growing up? Did you have that community as like a child? That's a great question.

Emily Rose Dallara (14:30.528)
I did. I grew up in Long Beach, California, and then eventually moved to Southern Orange County and Southern California in general is quite diverse. My grandmother herself is a Japanese immigrant to the US. So I grew up in a group in a home that had a white grandfather from rural Alabama, grew up dirt poor, worked in the Navy and then a Japanese grandmother who was Buddhist by religion and

kind of introduced a lot of these Asian cultures into my upbringing. I grew up eating curry rice and fish and all kinds of Japanese foods and miso soups. And so I don't know. And I would always get involved in, at least as a kid, my parents would put me in this Japanese cultural fairs I would do these little Japanese dances. And then grew up in Long Beach, again, we had a big Hispanic community. a lot of my friends were very diverse. I was always...

trying to like mimic Spanish growing up, but I never like dove into learning the language. But like when I moved to Orange County, was really kind of a shock because most of my friends growing up were, you know, of different, you know, races and diversities. And going to Orange County was a little bit, bit of a shock for me. But, you know, I ended up finding that in that place as well. So I don't know. I just always kind of seeked out being in an environment where I'm a little bit different or at least all of us are a bit different because

You know, opinion diversity has always been a strength and I don't know, it's just where I feel comfortable. That's really interesting. Thanks for answering that. Because when we have either a normal or we have a lack of something, it's usually the same thing that we're working towards, right? And so if your normal was having a community, having diversity, then you are a magnet for that. Yeah, I get bored when I know what to expect in a conversation. And so if I'm...

throwing myself in a place where I have no idea who they are, what they're about, maybe some notion. But for me, it's an adventure. It's this stroke of curiosity and I get to really dive in and figure out about, you know, how this person sees the world. Like for me, that's where I get excited. That's where I wake up a little bit. I don't like to kind of remain stagnant or just assume. I like to kind of be surprised. Yeah, I share that with you actually. And I think

Emily Rose Dallara (16:55.296)
A lot of expats are addicted to that feeling. And I wasn't expats of sorts. Yeah. did digital nomad more than expat. yeah. Digital nomad. Yeah. Before the expat term was just like the blanket term, but it's really interesting because when you first move abroad, right, I'm interested to hear your experience. Actually, let's start there. We'll go off on one here. But what was your first experience moving away after being in America for long time? I think what inspired me to

You know, while doing all that stuff in college, I got the opportunity to do a study abroad program in Spain and that I had a professor who just changed my life and you know, she, got us, he organized this annual trip and you know, I was only in Spain for like a summer for like a month or so, but that was plenty to just click my brain into gear and be like, wow, like, you know, actually physically seeing another part of the world that wasn't.

oriented towards just tourism because growing up in the US, you know, we if you're lucky, you know, growing up, you get to go on a trip abroad. It's it's not, you know, it's usually like a structured kind of tourist environment. This was like full range, like exploring a new city with, you know, folks my age. And so that was my first like wake up. And I just was hungry to go travel after that. And I got this crazy opportunity after college and I was kind of bummed out about.

This startup I mentioned earlier was doing events. I had to kind of go and seek a real job at this point, graduating college and hopefully for folks listening that are pivoting startups, this is just part of the process. Life takes you down different paths. You kind of just have to go with the flow and stay true to your passion and you'll hopefully align back to what your goals are. And that's the exact experience I had. I had an opportunity to, again, organize communities in LA when I graduated.

We had a startup group where we organize intramural sports for engineers in LA. And at the time it was called Silicon Beach. We had, you know, Snap, Dollar Shave Club, Honest Company, and we basically take all the engineers, get them to play dodgeball or volleyball together after work. And so I started meeting a lot of engineers just because I like to be around startups and like -minded people. Again, kind of this cultural component. And one of the folks I was helping out.

Emily Rose Dallara (19:17.73)
I was like, Hey, I've got this company that's hiring for a community manager and they're organizing hackathons all around the world. Would you be interested? And I was like, one, what the fuck is a hackathon? I was like, two, was like, community manager? Like, that's a job. I had no idea. And so I was like, OK, I'll take the interview. And I went in like plain t -shirt and jeans and wasn't really taking it seriously.

you know, in retrospect, it doesn't matter. But at the time, like I was totally downplaying, like me going and meeting this person. And the minute they start telling me, hey, we organize these hackathons in 60 different countries, and you're going to get to travel these places and organize these events with the engineers. I felt severely underdressed. I did not take the interview seriously. I was like, I really want this job. Like, what the hell? Like, I should have, you know, took some time to think about this. And

You know, they called me and really liked me and the next three years of my life, I went to about 40 countries. you know, organized event, the hackathon events with 200 ,000 engineers all around the world. And, you know, I worked with companies like MasterCard, Motorola, UBS, Barclays, JP Morgan, you name it, you know, tech and tech around 2015. We were helping them scale APIs and SDKs all around the world. And I learned very, very.

repetitive and tactical skills that are still used to this day, which are along the lines of growth marketing in diverse regions with niche developer communities, understanding how to scale emerging technologies and get feedback from those engineers and bring it back to core engineering teams. And it's a very odd and rare opportunity that I had. I think, you know, diving into some of our combo later too, some of the interesting aspects that, you know, you

aren't like kind of the hard tactical, but more of the soft skills. You know, we were a majority female company. I was, you know, one of the few men on the team. And so I learned how to work in a very, not just that too, like, you know, culturally diverse as well. And so, you know, I learned to work in a different team environment and really learn more of a nurturing side of growing a business versus like just a male dominated kind of aggressive dominating approach. You know, we are actually able to build something very holistic and, and inclusive.

Emily Rose Dallara (21:41.07)
And we were a team. were like 25, but we had 200 of these global ambassadors all around the world that I was kind of managing. And so we had to run a completely virtual, remote worker kind of program. Like we had no office. It was a hundred percent remote. And this was in 2015. We were using, you know, your slacks, your Google hangouts at the time, you know, just Google suite in general.

And it was just an incredible learning experience. I never would have expected it. And so that's kind of why I hope people can kind of just keep it open mind if you're really determined to just go down one path and you need to be stubborn to some extent. at some point there's opportunities waiting on the other side that you have no idea are even there until you jump in.

There's a lot to unpack there. So I want to go back to the moment. No, no, it's good. It's really interesting because from like a metaphysical perspective, you were in the frequency of I'm already doing this. You became a leader at a young age. You are leading communities. were inviting people into your world and leading them with one mission, which was to all learn English, right? And bring people together and immerse yourself in different cultures. And then you continued on to do that. And

For me, it's never a coincidence. This is something that you attracted. I think what's interesting is you subconsciously set that goal out there already. And I think for people listening, I get a lot of people who come to me and they don't have any self -belief. They're in a stage where they're like, I don't believe I can do this. Or maybe they've just been laid off and they come to me and they're like, I need to get a new role. And the difference between them and what you did was you actually just

we're doing what you love to do. And then then things naturally fall into place. And I think that's, that's often a key. When you're trying to achieve things, the missing key is like, you're not doing what you enjoy in the first place and you don't believe that you can actually achieve what you think. the right way. Yes. So there's a few thoughts here. One is just like, I, am extremely lucky that I luck has a lot to do with it. Like it's, it's, know, you always need opportunity to be

Emily Rose Dallara (23:57.122)
prepare for the opportunity, but luck has some part of that formula. For me, my luck, in my opinion, was just my notion to always align why I'm doing something first and then, know, kind of like the Simon Sinek thing, know, where it's, if you look at like three rings of a circle and the core, it's why are you doing something on the outside? You know, what are you doing? And last is like, how are you doing that? Some folks, you know, I think for different life circumstance or

where you grew up in the world, privilege, you don't always get to start with the why, perhaps, and that handcuffs a lot of folks. Sometimes you just gotta put food on the table, and so you start with, what am I doing or how am doing this? need to make money. But if you do have the privilege to create the opportunity and really think about why you're doing something, that tends to drive me. have to always, for 10 years of my career, I've had to always.

This is even before my career even started. This is like me in school, to be honest, but you know, always kind of pull back and just understand at its core, like, why am I here on earth? Why am I waking up today? You know, you know, what is that goal that, you know, I'm looking to achieve in the words, the impact I'm trying to have before my time is up. And, you know, how am I going to do that? The end of the day, it's just how am going to do it? It's going to last puzzle in my head. And that has driven me.

to kind of realign myself, refocus consistently. It's not, you don't wake up one day and you're like, this is this crazy vision. It's like, it's a process, a daily process, daily fight with yourself. There's a lot of times I'm not confident myself. There's a lot of times I doubt, you know, why I'm doing something, how I'm doing it, what it is that I'm doing, but you have to constantly like program your brain to just go back and like, re -question yourself and.

Yeah, that confidence piece is super important. You know, for folks that don't have confidence in themselves, you know, I just invite them to seek a way to find that. For me, I have my path. have friends who lack a lot of confidence and they have, you their path. Some of the time it's, you know, having someone like me alongside of my, come on, man, you're like, totally capable of this. Like this is, this is what you do great at. Sometimes as a leader, you have to remind folks what they're great at. You know, that's kind of my leadership style has been, you know,

Emily Rose Dallara (26:18.326)
I need to be confident in my path so that I can go and be that for others. I like to kind of do, it's like, what do call it? Like tough love. I'm very transparent, but I started out with the beginning of the conversation, beginning of the relationship. I'm like, look, at least I work. I don't do this to my friends. My work people are my friends, But I started out with like, it's going to be very challenging working with me.

gonna be tough on you. I want you to be your best. I know you're great at this, this, this, but I need to see you work at this, this, this. If we're not gonna have any conflicts, are you okay with that? And usually they're like, my gosh, I would love like criticism and feedback. At some point, maybe, maybe it's annoying. They're like, I didn't set up for this, but I'm generally very nice. So I try and find people's strengths and boost up their confidence as much as possible, but in a very authentic way. Like it's not, you know, fluff. It's not like,

great job. Just to say great job. Like when I say great job, I mean it because I will tell you when you're not doing a great job, we're not doing your best. This doesn't always work for everybody. My upbringing was very, I had really great upbringing, but it was really motivated through sports and based on my whole life. And so it was always very like one directional, like, come on, like, you know, like pushing your go to the next level. And our high school team was very competitive. We

We're like number one in the US at some point when I graduated. so it, you know, you get pushed to your limits, but the way we worked in teams was you always had to pump up each other. And so that's how I operate. I, I work in a team. Like if, you're failing, I'm failing. And I see that in my direct teams. I see that in an organization I work in. I see that in my community. So, you know, that's kind of just to kind of circle back and give a TLDR, you know, I.

I would hope that folks that are kind of on this path, you know, seek their own confidence, remind themselves daily on why they're here, what they're looking to achieve in this world. And, know, lastly, like involve people in the process or help pull people up into that process. It's like the phrase, you know, what is it? Tides rise all ships or high tides rise all ships. know what it is. The exact structure. Yeah.

Emily Rose Dallara (28:43.262)
We'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone can correct us. Some fun banter. Yeah. But no, as you were saying that, you kind of like mentioned it a bit, but I was interested, like, where did that leadership style come from? Because you mentioned the sports background and the coaching, because that's what came to mind for me. It's a very sports coach. Yeah.

It's a very coaching attitude. Yeah. So there's a book everyone should read that's kind of done sports and are working into entrepreneurship or startups or just working in any industry to be honest. Trillion Dollar Coach, that's about Bill Campbell. And he was this coach. He was a football coach and he mentored a lot of Silicon Valley's like top executives, top founders, Google founders, believe Mark Zuckerberg. And there's like three others and really space in a lot of these but

He didn't even take a paycheck really. He just wanted to go in and motivate these founders to build strong teams, think efficiently, like think strategically. And so I think like sports really do have a huge carryover to, you know, to startups. Like we see so many firms and you know, I do blame my male counterparts for all these sports terms. Like, yeah, like you can quarterback that work stream or, you know, let's, you know, let's have a huddle, like let's do a sprint. So I think sports are very integrated in that culture.

Again, like I think it's because we had a very male dominated kind of upbringing of that culture. but it, you know, it has worked to some extent in terms of getting like work done, like helping people work in teams, helping structure, you know, proper communication amongst teams. For me, you know, I grew up, again, I mentioned I grew up playing baseball. I, you know, played on very successful teams. We were very collaborative. Those guys I played with, like, we're still best friends to this day. It was a big part of my life and

It taught me a lot about, you know, respect for the other team, respect for your peers, your immediate team, hard work, dedication. You know, for most of my life, like I would go to school and then after school I'd have practice for, you know, I don't know, I would say since maybe 10 years old to 18. And so, and then weekends were like tournaments or some sort of a lesson practice, whatever it was. And so, you know,

Emily Rose Dallara (31:01.858)
you get older and it's like, you have free time. You're like, I don't have to do this free time. You're building the discipline muscle. It was a discipline muscle. You know, it's that was another thing. And, know, you just kind of, you learn to endure pain. You learn to endure, you know, just tough attitudes, even like from leadership. Like you start to realize, like you will always have a boss. No matter if you're a founder, CEO, you always have a boss. There's always someone you have to report to.

It's not an investor or an advisor or a board. It's your community. And so, you know, I learned a lot of these life lessons. It's a lot of patience too, at least in baseball. It's lot of patience. You're like sitting most of the time and you have to like just jump in and, you know, be your top performer at, you know, drop of a hat. But that was a big, piece of my, my, culture of leadership. I, I lead from behind. I, I was, you know, leading a lot of these teams and I never was like the aggressive like.

Follow my lead kind of guys kind of like, Hey guys, here's what we got to do to win. Like, you know, you're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this. Like let's get on it. Like I'm here. You let me know where you need my help. I'm here. And that's just how I operate today. And I leave from behind and you know, another kind of life experience that happened after that, that was again, team oriented. I, I wanted to be a firefighter or a doctor and like working in healthcare. Cause I loved kind of the

the energy of that world and I loved helping people. And so I drove an ambulance for two years. I was at EMT and that was a very similar environment. It was very team oriented. I think the interesting thing that I learned in that space was kind of like realizing what I had experienced in sports, but I never really practiced. It was like, if you jump teams, it's the same experience. So I don't know how describe this, but in

In emergency medical services, we have a concept of triage. so like if a building's on fire and ambulance shows up, fire shows up, police show up, they all have an SOP that is aligned and you don't even have to communicate necessarily with those operators. know, firefighters are the first one in the building. Medics are like waiting on standby. Police have to like make sure that no one's armed with a weapon or that no one's like opposing threat.

Emily Rose Dallara (33:27.394)
And all of this is coordinated just through like SOPs within these organizations. And you know, you could jump over to any one of those teams at whatever point in your career and understand the other one's SOPs. And there's so many, so many like, you know, radio codes and there's communication. for me, that was such a like mind opening experience because at least at the time I wasn't even really thinking about it as like, it's super cool and interesting. And I had such a interesting learning experience about life throughout that time.

lot of stories to go down on that path. like in retrospect, honestly, only recently while operating a very large team, you start to think in that way on like, how do we help, you know, our marketing or community team think in terms of SOPs so that, you know, the operations team can kind of just catch a signal and operate off of that versus, you know, there's so much use communication and organization around, hey, like you guys were doing this whole like go to market campaign.

we had no idea you had, you know, vendor payments coming down the line. And so if you're able to create rules inside of organization where it's like, Hey, like if we are kicking off this kind of a process, there's these kinds of expectations that are coming down the line. creates a huge reduction in communication necessity. And so, yeah, thinking about those two worlds has been something interesting for me recently. And I have seen great leaders kind of lean into those processes.

where your organization has very strict SOPs and processes and communication. Wow. What an experience. It's so cool to see how this all stacked up on each other and how the community building, working I've had a weird life. No, it's really fascinating, honestly. I find it fascinating and everyone who's listening will because some people who are... I'm not laughing. People who are stepping into a leadership role, some of them...

haven't heard of SLPs, right? Standard Operating Procedures. They haven't understood that it's a necessity. can't just keep being in the weeds. You can't just keep like executing all day every day when you have a team. You have to step back and allow other people to do things and collaborate. And, and this is one of the biggest problems that happens. Yeah. I love that you mentioned that words, stand back because, or step back. I have to do this recursively with, with our teams because I've

Emily Rose Dallara (35:53.75)
worked in different capacities. And I hope this is inspiring to some people here, like, or, you know, motivates you guys. Like I was not on the typical career path. Again, like I made and delivered pizzas. I drove an ambulance. I, you know, scraps around random startups. And then I eventually got to do some really cool, you know, traveling, you know, startup. It was not very well paid. And then I went into like the bigger roles in my life. But, you know, all that, all that process I got to explore, like,

you know, being the weeds, I got to explore like what it was to be on certain certain roles. And it might seem like it, it didn't make sense. You know, if you looked forward from that point, it wouldn't make sense. It's like, why? Why would you like go through those challenges? I had people all the time question, like, why? Like, why are you doing that? You know, I don't get it. And for me, that never knocked me off my track. I remember one one person in college was like,

Cause my major in college was Spanish and linguistics. She's like, what are you doing with Spanish? Like teach Spanish. And I was like, no, could do whatever I want. Like, because in my head, I was like, why I'm doing something is more important. And that's just going to keep driving me what I do kind of follows. And then, you know, the money I'm making, the, the role I have that all is last in my head. At some point in your career, that shifts a little bit where you're like being strategic, but I've always had to kind of again, step back.

and look at the fields and look at, all right, am I still on track? I can see, you know, kind of the path I'm going on, but, you know, should I reconsider some sort of a judgment? And the team and I do this every day at work, like I'll go deep and then I pull myself out and I just take another look and I go deep and I take a step back because, you know, if you're just going down one path, it's really easy just to, you know, accidentally go in the wrong direction a little bit. And, you know,

You also don't want to step back the whole time. So you got to find that nice balance. And I have to remind our teams every day to remember what the big picture is so that, you know, at the end of the day, if we're just going on some process and it's actually counterintuitive to the mission, we need to stop it immediately. know, it's, it's something I'll also guide folks to think about as they're kind of working in teams, building teams is just always remember the big picture, the vision, the mission. Yeah.

Emily Rose Dallara (38:16.738)
Because it's one of the things as you scale and grow, it's one of the things that dissolves the quickest and that's what causes the biggest misalignment. And that comes from lack of communication and transparency. It's also easier on your life when you, you know, because if you look in the weeds and you think of all this work that you haven't done, you're like, my gosh, I have this massive task list. But then you step back and you're like, am I helping people? I, you know, did I make one step in the right direction today to

You know, in the case of Gaia where I work right now, you know, leading teams over there to build decentralized AI, you know, are we building a better world for decentralized AI infrastructure? we countering, you know, the centralized incumbents who are capturing our data and, you know, providing more locked in systems to their customers? know, are we, are we opening up this ecosystem for more people to participate in?

I wake up every morning knowing that we're at least going one step in that right direction. It's a big journey. You can't just be consumed with like, I have a ton on my plate right now and I'm not doing any of it effectively. That's just going to bog you down. That's going to really drive you in a negative direction. And so you got to always step back and look at the bigger picture. Yeah, a hundred percent. And I'm going to ask you another question in a minute, but it's so easy to forget why you're doing something.

when you're in the weeds and when you have all of this stuff on your shoulders. And I'm big on goal setting and chunking things down. But one exercise that I actually recently did with my own coach was writing my own eulogy. And it sounds quite molded, but that really helped shift a few things for me recently. And I've been coming from what do I want to achieve? So I was like more forward thinking in my own personal goals and business goals. And we sat down and we imagined that someone was reading my eulogy.

And I wrote, I did it when she wasn't there. did it afterwards and I wrote and I had lots of stuff flow through that would never have come up and it had nothing to do with what I'm currently doing. Well, it did have stuff to do with what I was currently doing, but it was not what I thought I was meant to be doing. If that makes sense. I've heard a ton of people doing this. Yeah, I've heard a ton of people doing this exercise. I haven't done it. Surprising. I should do it. I've had friends that done it at different levels. Like I remember my dad did this in college. So he told me about it years ago.

Emily Rose Dallara (40:39.2)
And I was like, that's so interesting, but like kind of odd. then yeah, you hear it so much in a lot of executive coaching. And then, you know, I had even someone that does like meditation groups, like around that whole process, like they do a fake, even like a fake funeral. that's a little, you know, that's, that's going down the rabbit hole. But I think it's super important to understand your own mortality and why, you know, how you're spending your time, know, Steve Jobs used to notoriously talk about this all the time. did.

wake up at the morning and look himself in the mirror and ask like, am I doing what I want to be doing today? you know, nine times out of 10, I'd say yes, but if you ever wasn't, he said, you know, try and change that. I don't know my process. I, I write daily notes and memos, you know, about where my brain's at. And then I even keep like a few folks like productivity apps, like Notion. have one page I use where I can I keep my goals in, you know, for me, I like visuals.

So I've created visuals of, I guess you could say it's kind of like a, what do call it, mood board or like a vision board? vision board's a brilliant. Yeah, it's my version of one that's minimal and not cheesy from my perspective. That's really interesting. Okay, continue. We'll talk about that. It just works for me, my style. And I have it on my mobile phone. And so I can open up my notion and just like, instead of looking at Instagram, I program my brain to just look at that.

something positive to look forward to. And, you know, it's not meant to be complicated. You shouldn't make it complicated. It's like three blocks of like, and like a couple images of like, things I look forward to, like a future version of myself, a future kind of, you know, metric oriented goal, like for other my company or myself. And it's just something nice to kind of stay focused on too, instead of, you know, I think if your brain gravitates towards like social media or

work. Like if you immediately go to your phone for like something negative, you know, of course your brain's gonna keep kind of pulling you down into this hole. But if you have something that's like, you know, looking forward, I don't know, for me, it's just been super helpful. And I change it around quite often. It's kind of a little game for me. No, it's it's a really cool ritual. And what you're doing there is chart the training your areas. So your reticulate activating system to focus on the positive, our brains are naturally

Emily Rose Dallara (43:05.004)
wired to look for the negative in things to keep us alive. But we can train it to move towards the positive and the fact that you're basically brainwashing yourself every morning and rehearsing things, right? By reading it, imagining this is going to be so nice when this happens, manifesting, raising the frequency, all that stuff. You're doing that every day. I like the brainwashing word. That one's fun. Yeah. You're brainwashing yourself that I'm going to do this. I love brainwashing myself. Yeah, it's fun. But

I'm really interested, like, who did you learn from? Like, who inspired you? Who taught you these kind of practices? Yeah, short answer is no one specific. I would say mentors of my life, I've had hundreds. You know, I actually wrote an article like years ago about like, you know, your mentors, I forget the title of it, it like, your mentor is not who you think it is. Like, it's not one person. It's not this. Because as a young person, I always hope to meet like this.

Mr. Miyagi like mentor in my life that would just, you know, was the one person I like, you know, learned everything from and you know, that's not the reality of life. People are busy. People have like things to do. No one sits on a mountain waiting to tell you Confucius isms, Confucius isms. It's a multitude of people who, you know, come into your life and have something to teach you whether you know it or not. And sometimes they're, they don't even prescribe to be a mentor or subscribe to a mentor. They don't know that they're becoming a mentor.

It's not like an official handshake and like a signed contract. So my mentors were negative, you know, in my life, but they've taught me something. And, you know, so there's a good mix of that. I would say to note biggest mentors in my life. One was my, my dad, big fan of my dad. Second would be, one of my high school teachers really believed in me. as I learning Spanish, I, know, I was about to quit the language and she just motivated me to, she gave me that confidence boost.

So I might've been working at where some of that came from. She was like, my gosh, you're, you're like amazing. You just gotta like practice more like grammar. And that was the right approach to me versus being like, you know, kind of negative, like, you're no good. And like people tell me I'm no good. I try and move away and prove them wrong by just ignoring them. And so like, you know, I kind of learned how different styles of leadership work on me actually.

Emily Rose Dallara (45:29.472)
And then I had my college Spanish professor. She's the one that took me to Spain. She, again, changed my life dramatically. She, you know, it's just the most cultured globalized person I've ever met. And so she just made me want to be kind of this globalized person. Just such a vibe. She'd wear her like Miu Miu glasses and a little scarf over her shoulder and like traveling through Europe, cutest woman in world. And then so many other people, but you know, the, one of my bosses who I hate to say boss, one of my colleagues.

who built that company called AngelHack that did all these hackathons all around the world. She's a massive part of my life as well. We're still great friends. We worked together on several projects and companies, but she taught me the value of community and really taught me core principles that I take to my work life. I think from there is kind of where I snapped and understood how to, you know, build consistent communities at scale. Cause I took those lessons there.

and brought it over to my time at Consensus Software and then my time at Gaia where I'm now. But yeah, you know, think advice to young folks, like mentors come far in between. A lot of them are what you would imagine or hope them to be. And then most of them are those who you never would have expected. Sometimes they're not like, you know, motivating to you, but they do something that ends up motivating you to do to make a decision and choose a path.

And so I take good notes on like what I learned from some of these folks. But again, like as a young person, when I was like, you know, coming up, I always thought it was going to be one person that I got to sit down with and have coffee with and like get a brain dump from them. I usually find that those mentors were not super helpful for me. My mentors were more people that I collaborated with because usually the richest exchange of value or information that you're going to get from somebody is when you're actually doing the thing versus talking about doing the thing.

And so, know, that's, that's just kind of what I would guide if you're looking for mentors, you know, like I've been a mentor to people as well. And usually, you know, folks like, Hey, can I get 30 minutes your time and da da da, you know, I tend to kind of, I get busy. So I kind of tend to push those, but the people who learn the most from me are those who go, Hey, what can I do to like work with you? What can I help you with? I just want to like get my hands dirty. want to learn from you. Those people are getting a lot more value out of it.

Emily Rose Dallara (47:54.088)
And that's how I actually got into my career as well. Like I didn't get paid for like a lot of the earlier stuff I did. And I just was going around asking where I can add value. You how can I help? How can I jump in? You know, what do you need help with? And that's when I started to figure out, you know, like engineers, engineers, you know, by the majority are not the most social people in the world. And they're like, Hey, like, you know, I want to stay focused on this code.

And these guys are bothering for me for some stuff and I need to stay focused. And we also need to like market the software that we're building and pushing out. Maybe you can like organize events and you can like get other developers around the software, answer some of the like the high level questions for me. And that became my job for 10 years. So, you know, I invite folks to, if you're ever doubting like what it is you want to do, go and ask a thousand people how you can help in a specific field that you're passionate about.

and do some math on where you're seeing the most impact and go and spend your time there. Wow. That's such an interesting approach. And I really agree with you on the mentor thing. I used to think the same, like I need to go get this mentor and I'm going to learn so much and I'm going to be a superstar. But actually, when I moved abroad, that's when I first started learning just from different people.

and looking, okay, I really want to be here. Who else has done this? And now how can I be in their world? How can I like just be where they are? And, and like, I was thinking about this the other day, because someone asked me, like, when did you decide to go into coaching? And it was when I was a CMO, and I'd been building teams. I just loved it. I love building teams. And, and I used to be that person that's the leader who people used to get really upset when

when I would leave, right? Because I'd finished a project, okay, let's go. And I used to take a lot of people with me everywhere. Like I used to have my core people who would come company to company with me. And I love that. And I was in Dubai one day and I was chatting to one of my friends who's really successful entrepreneur. And I said to him, what, what else can I do? Like right now I don't want to be a CMO anymore, but I just don't know what to do. And he said, Emily, you're the best coach. Like you coach me all day, every day. You don't realize you're literally answering my questions in WhatsApp.

Emily Rose Dallara (50:09.324)
And I really think I'd be a good coach. And he's like, honestly, and then I went on to do a lot of exploration and stuff around it. But he, would say, is a mentor because he helped me see things that I wasn't seeing at the time. And I looked up to him as a successful entrepreneur. so, yeah, I was just thinking earlier, like, who else have I learned from and what did I learn? And I would just say to everybody who's listening to this, like, have a pause for a second and think about who has helped me indirectly and what did I learn and how am I implying that today?

I will say it's, least for me, it is the most humbling experience when people remember that and they recall it. You know, like they don't need to get paid. They don't need any sort of value. But to know that they were important in your life is super powerful. Like it makes people like it can change someone's day completely, like their whole life completely. You know, a lot of the teachers are impactful to me. I'm like, look, I could not have gotten here without you and

you know, to someone like a teacher who, you know, probably is making crazy like, you know, salary or perhaps it's like, you know, small town, you know, where you grew up that might not, you know, it might be monotonous work, but when you know that you empowered somebody 20 years later on their path and they remember that, you know, you start to feel this value that you can't even measure. It's just like a life worth living. I agree. I agree. I recently had

a mentee of mine. He was not official mentee and he's now building his own business and he texts me the day saying something similar and it really does everybody. That's so sweet. Yeah, it really does. If you're having a shit day, like, my God, someone actually likes me today. Yeah, no, it's and it could just like be the universe tapping on your shoulder. Be like, Hey, just a reminder. Like you are important. So you know, can't expect it if you're not giving it. So I, I constantly like to give praise because I hope

one day when I'm just not on my game, I get a reminder that, man, like you have impacted me substantially. Cause sometimes we forget, sometimes we don't, you know. And don't you think as you progress in your career and your life that you have more of a drive to pass that on as well? Definitely. And I'm still like fairly young in my career, but you know, I think I have hit kind of a milestone of, pretty much a decade in my career now. And that

Emily Rose Dallara (52:34.808)
kind of starts turning in where you're like, okay, I'm hitting a point where I'm I forget when it actually was. I think it was like during consensus when you know, I was I was kind of at the time reading, reading a book, I can't remember the name of it. But, know, leadership is not given it's earned. And so, you know, I, I never in my career was really given management positions or like leadership positions. I actually was always labeled as a flight risk, because I'm

just very startup oriented and I go against the grain. would piss off my managers all the time because they would say one thing and I'd be like, yeah, that's cute, but I'm going to go do this. Yeah. And, I still present results. So it's frustrating for them because they were like, well, he's doing great. You know? And, so I got to this point in my career where that started to match up, where people just let me, you know, free rein and people just started following behind me. People started saying, Hey dude, what can I do to help you out?

like, hey, I'll work on this project with you. And like, not even getting paid really, like they weren't directly managed by me, but people would rather come and work with me than who they're actually supposed to work for. And, you know, I think that that slip in my career was like, okay, I'm now entering my phase of like, I get to be the leader that I want to be. I want to, you know, invite people to come and, you know, join my team and go on this mission with me.

And I don't ever want to be in a world where people are forced to work with me. I actually like to have direct combos with everyone I'm working with and make sure they understand the mission and that they feel like I'm supporting them through the process. It gets harder with larger teams, but it's super important to nurture that leadership where people want to follow behind your mission. Definitely. We could go in different directions here. I want to ask you loads more questions, but I'm going to try and keep it under an hour. But the one last thing that

everybody is always very interested in is you've been through this whole journey and you've developed your leadership style and you've built teams and you have a very specific way of supporting your teams. And you mentioned as well that you have kind of a tough love, but in a nice way, because for me, I don't respond well to tough love personally when I was exactly. Yeah. And it's not for everyone. And it's interesting because if that is your leadership style, how do you support them to develop this?

Emily Rose Dallara (54:59.618)
the emotional resilience to be able to like have that tolerance to you? yeah. No, no. Great question. Resiliency is super important in these teams. And, know, I think I'll say one thing I said earlier, but diversity is strength. And again, like at my time at AngelHack, we are majority female company. And, you know, I've always felt balanced in the presence of female employees. So we actually have

women in leadership on my team, like close to C -suite out of four. And we are like, because we brought in those leaders, we are also, you know, onboarding a lot of female team members to the entire group, whether it's like marketing, develop like engineering, dev rel, operations, et cetera, like the whole stack. And that has kind of created a different kind of relationship because of my male counterparts, I could be a little more aggressive, fortunately, and kind of

have that like coaching mentality really strong. Like if I, if I do that with some of other colleagues, like, you know, that I don't know as well, it's a little harder to kind of assess if that's coming off, you know, correctly, that works for them. If that like really motivates them. And I think, you know, we're now entering a phase where our team is, you know, kind of creating its own culture. So like, you know, I think we now have like a really cool diversity of thought on the team where folks are coming in with, we're hitting that phase of the team where.

Folks are coming in with, know, I operate better under these conditions, I operate better through this process. I don't respond well to that kind of feedback. And I'm of the mind where we want to stay, you know, focused on the goal and not, you know, get too distracted. However, you know, we want to be a conscious company that thinks about everyone involved because if you're building decentralized AI and it's a technology that needs to embrace all of humanity, not just a small group of people, then we need to have a team that kind of reflects that.

And, you know, so I'm kind of entering a phase where my management style might've helped us get through a sprint, but I think we're going to have to figure out how, does our team culture evolve now with everyone in mind? Of course, like I would hope to kind of be the guiding light and perhaps like the guiding energy, but you know, I think it's going to have different phases. think at some point, you know, it'd be more nurturing in some aspects and others it's, you know, a little more aggressive and like.

Emily Rose Dallara (57:26.156)
You know, right now we're going through a crazy sprint. And so I've kind of made it a statement. I look, it's time to buckle down. Like we have no time to kind of think about all these like nice to have right now. It's like, it's go time. know, after that, let's assess, let's think about what made you more productive during this time, what, what hindered you. And then we can maybe think on longer horizons. And this is kind of what you get in these larger companies who you're able to be a little more.

supportive of, you know, various diversities and ways of working in a small startup. It's really hard to do so. And in a startup, if you're, you know, if you're not embracing this, this culture though, like it's also debilitating. So we're really trying to like think hard on like, how do we keep the speed while also like bringing in like a cohesive team that cares about each other, that pushes each other positively and feel supported. And so far, like I

I don't want to speak for the group, but I feel everyone feels like a strong team dynamic. And that's the most important part. Yeah, because at the start of our conversation, you were talking about how you can't lead the team without leading yourself first, in other words. Correct. Yeah, it's like you have to be OK before moving forward with your team. And I think you as a leader also cultivate that in your own team. You help them to develop self -leadership. And I think the only way, and this is something I'm a bit obsessed with,

The only way you survive in a startup, no matter what level you're in, is embracing that high growth environment and developing the resilience and self leadership to be able to do that and thrive. Yeah, two, you know, two kind of summarizing points on this. Like one, like I'm not a big fan of the machismo kind of like, you know, startup culture where it's like, let's grind, bro. Like I'm up till four in the morning. Show me the money. Like we don't want that culture. You know, that's not.

That's not a world I want to live in really. And, know, I know my team doesn't want to either, but like we, do have a very, you know, strong, like fast moving culture where we're like, look, let's buckle down. Let's do this because we are supporting each other on this mission. And, you know, we just, want to accomplish a goal together. We've all think the common thread with everyone on the team is they've won on great teams together. And, you know, they are ecstatic to be working with great people and we just want to keep.

Emily Rose Dallara (59:54.126)
driving that mission. you know, in all like my goal is with Gaia, like with our company right now, we have like 50, 50 team members, pretty much. That's what I mean. Like we have like a pretty sec team. and we work across a couple of geos. right now, most of the team is New York, LA and Singapore. And so there's time zone restraints, cultural differentiation between how marketing or business operations are done in Asia versus in the West. We also, you know, just, you know,

operationally as a decentralized, you know, kind of web three company that is doing AI. We also are having these interesting dynamics of, you know, eventually having a, an open source foundation that manages the open source projects. We'll have a Dow at some point. And those are like decentralized primitives that like just create much more complexity in your team and your community building. And so we're doing our best to kind of stay focused and push. But at the same time, like you said earlier, just now.

You know, we want to be a team that pushes out leaders. I'm not looking for people that want to do a job. I'm looking for people that want to eventually lead or own because accountability is the biggest problem you have inside of organizations is when folks, it's like the lack of wanting to have ownership of your work. It also can be a massive problem if everybody wants to own one work stream and they're like, Hey, that was mine. You know, you get, you know, kind of jealousy and these kinds of, you know, weird human behaviors coming into the picture, but

I've also seen it on the other end where everyone's just there to collect a paycheck and they're like, yeah, like so -and -so will handle it and no one's accountable. And so it just falls to the floor. so we're trying to breed a strong group of leaders who are passionate, who are like driven to, you know, move fast on a path, but also create an inclusive environment for folks that like are trying to join that work stream on that team and create opportunity for folks to like go upward in their career.

and work kind of in that environment. Yeah, you're really nurturing your team. It reminded me actually, had a conversation. you're doing well. I had a cool conversation with Samya from Global. She's got a PR company and that's exactly what she likes to do. So when she hires, it's like, what do want to build? Like if you're here, you're an entrepreneur because I need you to help me build this business as if it's your own. And I know you're probably going to leave and build your own business because of it.

Emily Rose Dallara (01:02:20.974)
This is actually, hopefully I have time, but this is the last thing. Yeah, because that was a really interesting point you made. When I joined Angel Hack and was doing the hackathon circuit, yeah, my boss, Sabine Ali, she actually asked me that question one time too. And that like put my head in such a positive place because she said, well, what do want to do with your career? Like, what do you want to in five years? And most people are like, like they get scared that their manager is going to hear that like they would eventually want to leave.

And maybe I'm just more of a transparent person, but I was like, well, I want to start my own thing. Like, so I'm loving learning from you. I love that, you know, we're going down this process, but like eventually I want to own my own work stream. want to own my own project that I'm building. And I see that as an independent startup. She's super supportive. And like the reality is you get employees for like two to three years if you're lucky these days. And then, you know, there's a lot of turnover, but that's not a negative thing. It's just, that's the way of the world. But I think.

you know, supporting those folks that come into your life, impacting them to a point where they become great leaders and, you know, having them go off on their own is such an amazing, you know, feeling. And it always comes back. Like at some point they want to work with you again. Maybe you start your own thing and you have someone to go hire again. Like you mentioned, have your go -to team. But yeah, so for also for listeners here who are, you know, building companies that are afraid they're going to lose employees.

I would highly recommend you find a way to make it a positive because it's just the reality people leave. It just happens. It's not anything against you. It's people have goals and we should figure out and nurture those goals so that it works for both of you during that time. But it could be something better in the future as well. Exactly. And make sure you develop SLPs so anyone can take over. It's the magic recipe. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much. I know we went over time by a bit, but it was a wonderful conversation.

And I want to bring you on again, maybe in like six months to see where you're at with everything. I would love to. Yeah. So we're building Gaia. I guess that's my call to action. If you folks want to get in touch, you know, you can find me on Twitter. It's at, you know, Matteo, -A -T -E -O underscore ventures. And then you can find Gaia's website there. It's GaiaNet .ai. I'm also kind of driving this thesis of the future of work. So yeah, we'll let her talk about that in the next one. Yes, definitely. We'd love it.

Emily Rose Dallara (01:04:46.444)
And we can even do more in between. could talk for a long time. Count me in. is fun. You're very welcome. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful and we will speak to you next time. Awesome. Thank you for having me. Bye. That's all for today on Bubbling Out. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a five star review. Your reviews and subscriptions help more people, more leaders, more entrepreneurs like you access the Bubbling Out podcast. Also,

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