#98: Why mid-career people are doubling down on self-learning | Gagan Biyani (CEO and Co-Founder @ Maven)

All right, we're live Gagan, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Welcome. Welcome. I have been very excited for this conversation. Mark and I as part of our pre-work for each of the guests that we talked to kind of take a little bit of a look at what they've been thinking about vis-a-vis what they post about and you have, uh, you make that pretty easy because we can just go and look at your LinkedIn and see some really banger, uh, banger posts there. One that caught our attention, um, and I think you're like the perfect person to talk to about it is self-learning and specifically Mark and I in the, in the Supra community that Mark runs constantly see people asking other product leaders, how are you staying on top of all this stuff? What's working? What's not working? Who's tinkering with what? And there's just like this moment happening where it's almost like there's no such thing as too much experimentation and learning from other people happening. And each person at the same time wants to be forming their own opinion about like what, what, what works, what doesn't work, et cetera. So what I want to start with is like, from your perspective as, as the person running Maven and having visibility into so many courses and topics and what students want to learn about, what do you think makes this moment right now, uh, arguably the most critical moment for people, especially mid-career people to be thinking about how they learn things? You know, it's funny, I am always learning something new. So for me, it's just kind of a habit. For mid-career professionals though, it's, it's hard not to admit that the AI era creates a velocity of change in the external ecosystem that they absolutely need to keep up with. I mean, and there are so many reasons for this. I mean, first, just from a hiring standpoint, like most companies are now expecting that if you are looking for a new job, you are keeping up with the modern AI tools. Second, from a product development standpoint, the most valuable things you can build are usually at the intersection of AI and customer need, because that's going to be the edge or the innovation in most companies today. And then third, uh, it'll just save you a ton of time. Though I, I do get a little bit annoyed by AI doomerism for sure, or even AI is going to take all of our jobs. I don't really believe that. However, I do believe it is one of the most powerful tools we've ever seen in our lifetimes. You know, it reminds me of witnessing the internet or the computer when I was a child. And as a result, as we all know with the internet or the computers, if you didn't learn it, like you, you were not in a position of competitiveness, uh, over your career. Yeah. I mean, I feel that learning and adaptability are probably two of the most important muscles that you need to build in this day and age. And, and yeah, I think building the learning habit is, is hard, especially if you have, if you're kind of like almost like responsible for your own learning, if you're doing self-learning, I think there's almost like two, two things. One is like the figure out like what, what to learn about. And then the other one is like, how, how do I have teaching yourself how to learn again? And do you have any advice? I mean, it sounds like you're someone who's picked up that habit and any advice for people like, I want to get better at this. Like, yeah, how should I start? Figuring out what to learn about or actually going about learning them? Probably the second one, right? Like, how do I, like, how do I build that muscle of like learning something? And yeah, in a way that's effective. I feel like the first one's a better one to start with because I feel like if you don't know what you want to learn about, how to learn about it feels almost like it's secondary. I mean, I definitely want to cover both of those, but maybe we take the first one first. Actually, I would, I would say I'll use the Naval quote about reading. It's like, if you don't have a habit of self-learning, just, just learn something that you're interested in and it doesn't matter what it is so that you can get in the habit and then you can go from there. So for example, so you would start, you would actually go with like, start by just learning. Don't even think about what you want to learn about. Just follow your curiosity and go learn. And then you could figure out where to point that, that gun later. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, an example for me is I, I know that in order to live a long, healthy life, I need to exercise regularly and I hate running. Cardio is super important for exercise. And so at various points in my life, I've decided I'm just going to pick up a sport that's going to allow me to, you know, get cardio. And so my, and then, so I, I picked up soccer, quickly realized that I was significantly worse than the average person who plays pickup soccer. So this is like the lowest level of soccer for adults, you know, pick up soccer, no pressure. Basically, I play with a bunch of Google employees and I'm still so bad that they kind of all are looking at me while I'm on the field, you know, and taking advantage of me and stuff like that. And so I had to get a coach and I had to learn and deconstruct soccer because I was highly motivated to do so. And I think that is the type of example, like if you can learn how to learn soccer as an adult, you can learn how to use AI at work. They're all the same. They're all the same thing. Like learning new things is just a fundamental skill and it doesn't really matter what you apply it to. But I think the motivation, by the way, if you're ever in New York and you want to play pickup soccer, I play here. I try to play every week when it's not covered with frozen ice and snow. But normally, that's actually something I'll take you up on. Yeah, I come here all the time. I've got a great group I play with here in Brooklyn. So open invite. But I think what I picked up on that I think is really important is that you were motivated. And I think that without motivation, I think it's really hard to kind of do the learning, right? So what do you think, what would you tell someone who's maybe not like either motivated to learn about something or maybe things people could sensitize them, like ways people can sensitize themselves to like the things they might actually be motivated to learn, but maybe just haven't like pinpointed those yet? Yeah, I think this is actually a huge problem in AI, in the AI era, because people are being inundated with numerous commentary that says, hey, AI is going to take your job, you're meaningless, etc. You're worth your skills are worthless, you know, all this sort of nonsense. And unfortunately, that does debilitate people's motivation as often as it amplifies it. So my main feedback to them is, okay, well, do something about it, you know, like, it sucks to sit and sort of grapple with the changes that are occurring, but do something about it. So how do you do something about it? You know, one of the things, one of the reasons we started Maven is because if you, you know, pay someone $500, $1,000 as a coach, it forces you to do something about it. It's very simple. So for soccer, for example, I hired a coach immediately, because I knew that I would not practice without a coach being there. And so, by the way, there is no market for soccer coaches, right? For adults, there is for kids. But no market for private soccer coaching for adults. So I had to create the market on Craigslist. You know, I use Craigslist, I found someone, I interviewed them, they did not coach other adults. So I had to sort of teach them how to coach someone like me, which is a little bit different. I had to set all the boundaries and the pricing and everything else. That's a lot easier if you're trying to learn AI. There's like literally thousands of ways to learn AI and coaches and consultants and courses out there. But for soccer, that's what I did. And I learned soccer over three years. I had a coach every Tuesday morning, and then every Friday morning, I'd play. And so how do you lock yourself into the motivation? It's similar to a fitness habit, you know? Yeah, Mark knows I just started working with a personal trainer, like I'm on the fourth or fifth week, I think, of my personal training journey after. I'm not kidding, walking past this gym for probably a year and a half, telling myself I'm going to go in there and I'm going to figure out what I'm going to say. And then I finally did it. And now that it's on the calendar, and I have a personal trainer, and I have to show up and I have to do the things. It's huge. And by the way, I see that also with my coaching. So many people are so busy, they don't want to think about interview preparation. But they'll do coaching with me because it forces them to sit there and think about the thing in a focused way. So big plus one to what you're saying about the accountability and the forcing function of having someone there with you. Yeah, and if you can't afford a coach or a course, I mean, courses are an insanely cheap version of coaching. So I would question that if you're a PM. But if you're listening to this and you genuinely don't feel like you have the budget for it, find a friend and ask them to be your accountability partner and gas them up in advance and commit to some sort of time period. But you have to create this sort of false accountability before you end up building a habit. And then after that, you have a choice. I'm someone who as soon as I quit my coach, I had a coach end of last year, I told him, look, I'm going to take a break. I stopped practicing. So I haven't been practicing soccer for two months, you know. So for me, it's just like, I always need a coach. I know that. However, I think there are many other people who use it simply as an on-ramp and then over time, you know, get off it. And by the way, like, I'm still learning soccer all the time, right? So I'm still playing regularly. I'm still so I don't need coaching anymore. I might take if there were soccer classes, I would take soccer classes for sure. Luckily, with AI, there are like thousands of different ways to learn this thing. So, you know, you got to find the thing that works with you and just do it. Yeah, no, I mean, I think with AI, especially there's like, yeah, the dumerism. There's also like, there's almost like there's so much content out there that almost you have like the decision paralysis of like, OK, like I need to curate or I need to find someone or like which, like, you know, all these new tools are moving so quickly. So I don't want to commit to one because what if the other one gets better? And so, yeah, I can see how that can get overwhelming. And, you know, my advice usually for these people is like maybe find someone that you like, right, that you can connect with them on a personal level and then just commit to like, you know, that person being almost like your guide through that world. And then I totally agree with the like experiential component of it. I feel like that's like where a lot of the education is going. That's where I've seen like the biggest unlocks. Like, for example, we have hackathons at Supra and we've also done a lot of like speaker series where people talk about like how amazing all these models are, what they're doing. But like the true aha moments happen when we have a hackathon, people block two hours and they actually like are forced to use the tool. They're like, oh, shit, like this is actually pretty good. And like I didn't have no idea. And then I think like the next level of unlock is like you take this learning and apply it to your job. And that also is like another, you know, big hill to climb for different reasons. But yeah, that last hill is actually the hardest one is applying it daily to your job. And I think that's actually where people need to recognize that social media is a terrible way to learn anything. And it's particularly bad for AI. And it's bad for AI because AI is not a skill you can learn in 30 minutes or an hour. You really have to spend weeks dedicating to it because you will, in order to integrate into your workflows, you have to go through all the hurdles that come from early AI usage, everything from, you know, hallucination. I'm not noticing nearly as much of that anymore, but at the very least, there's a lot of delegation and accuracy or communication challenges. When you're communicating with your AI, you have to learn how to tell it what you actually want. And, you know, you have to change your workflow pretty dramatically. You know, for coding, I hear people do 80, they switch from 20% planning to 80% planning. You know, that's a huge shift in coding. So if that's true for coding, which is honestly the task AI is probably the best at right now, then it's probably, you know, going to be relevant in any task that you do that you actually go about really investing and figuring out how to fit in your workflows. I also think you got to like live with it and find its edges for yourself. I think it's, by the way, I'm the guy that's looking at a lot of what's like, for example, like the trend around like open claw. I've been looking at that and I'm like, that's one of those things. It's like now like in meditation, they teach you to like detach yourself from your thoughts, look at them like clouds that are flying by and you are not the cloud. Like that's kind of like you are not your thoughts. Like sometimes that's how I feel about these AI trends is like sometimes I'm willing to let some of them just slide completely by me and let the dust settle. And then other times I follow just my own curiosity to what seems relevant to the task at hand. And I think that skill of discerning between the thing you're cool not learning and the thing that you are interested in kind of getting practice with, I think is really important. I don't know if that's making sense, but like for me, like buying a Mac mini right now and spending 10 or 20 hours figuring out how to like set up this thing that has full access to like a brand new machine versus I've been telling Mark like a ZO computer is like an alternative to that. It's like a virtual product. It's got a cloud. It's an AI product. You could text it. It does all the things for you. Like so for me, I'm like less friction to testing this thing. Why would I go with the heavier thing? So I think everyone's got to like weigh so many options. And I don't know. I think it's kind of an overwhelming time to be like a curious person because you just want to play with all of it. Yeah, I love that. I mean, my advice is only learn things that are six months old. So I mean, who cares about open cloud? I don't care at all. Like I'm completely ignoring it because if I find it on social media, I know that it needs to go through its digestion period before it actually becomes something I'm going to use. And so I'm willing to because of my job at Maven, I have to be somewhat cutting edge on what's going on to be able to predict trends and stuff. So I pay attention enough for that. But in terms of actual usage, I'm always using things that have already gone through the market digestion period, right? The market eats it, tries it out, tastes it. And then on the other end, like does it come out and actually still survive? I think that's actually critical if you are not someone who is trying to be on the cutting edge for some reason. Like if you're just using AI for work, what is the point of trying out every new tool? There is no benefit whatsoever. Just wait until it actually works and people are using it and be like, instead of being in the top 1%, be in the top 10%. If you're in the top 10%, you're actually probably going to be better off than the top 1%. I think the top 1%, generally speaking, is reserved for tinkerers and content creators, not for operators and experts. Yeah. And I also think what makes that, there's like so much nuance in being the top 1%, for example, where like, hey, if a new model comes out from OpenAI, like, you know, Codex 5.3 or whatever, there's a huge difference. Like, yeah, use the latest model because like it sits within a workflow that's probably already a familiar, mature workflow of using models. But if it's a whole new product, I think what you're, I don't think you're saying take six months to like play with the newest OpenAI model or the newest Cloud model. That feels almost like an implementation detail of existing models you're using. It's more incremental versus something new. Yeah. I mean, I update my Chrome browser or my iPhone whenever the updates come out and I just let the whole, you know, that's fine. I'm not saying stay intentionally six months behind. I'm saying like, let a little bit of, let the tinkers tinker, you know, and then once they tell you what actually works and not just what they're excited about, but what actually works, that's a really important distinction. Once they tell you that, then you can go and learn and use it. I feel like there's, sorry, Mark, I just like want to get Goggin's thoughts quick and actually yours too, because we talk about this a lot, but like, it seems to me that there's almost like a little bit of a status symbol that might be associated these days with like being an early innovator. Like, you know, people posting pictures of the Mac mini they just bought because they're playing with their Clawed bot or, you know, their OpenClaw setup. Like I've been trying to figure out why is that something people are like boasting about or like, obviously they wouldn't post about it if they thought it made them look bad. And even if they have like a major security vulnerability or something gets really like messed up in their systems because of this, like they're still posting about it. I'm kind of like, what do you guys think is underlying that? Is it just like trying to showcase I'm tinkering? Well, it's 100% a result of the algorithm and social media's hold on how we get information. And if you're posting something that is more than a few weeks old, you're not going to get likes, you're not going to get visibility. So actually what you're seeing is a very, very small percentage of people, like an infinitesimally small percentage of people who are buying the Mac mini at the moment that they, you know, that OpenClaw becomes like a huge thing. And then they are, they're the ones who are getting the views. But the reality is there's like tons of people who are not doing that. You don't notice them. They're not getting your attention. So personally, I think this is a huge flaw in the entire AI system is that it is being distributed over social media, because even though I love social for so many reasons, it also creates this, everything feels like it's 24 hours old. And so we have insanely low attention spans and inaccurate attention spans in terms of what we think is popular versus what is actually popular. Totally. Yeah, I almost get anxiety every time I go into X because I'm like, oh shit, like so much has happened in the last 48 hours. I mean, I think a lot of, I mean, I think the truth is that because of this fear that people have around being behind all this posts of like people doing cutting edge stuff with this, these models or these new agents, I think just do really well. I think the motivation for posting them can change. I think there's some people that are actually like genuinely excited about what they're doing and want to share it with the world. But I don't know. I feel like if I was really excited about something, I would just be kind of heads down playing with it and getting the productivity gains as opposed to posting. And then there's some people that have a business and want to sell something. So I think the motivations can change. But I think the truth is that people are craving that content because in a way they feel like, hey, I'm keeping up with the trends. Even though the funny part is I feel like probably the amount of people that actually follow those trends and take action is probably quite small. Yeah. And actually, by the way, just to be clear, I'm in no way denouncing the tinkerers or the posters. I think it's awesome. I want there to be a top 1% of people who are always at the cutting edge and playing around with things because then how else are we all going to get access to that? You know, Twitter itself started because a small set of tinkerers thought, oh, I'll try out this new like 140 character posting system. I mean, that's not something I was interested in, but I'm super glad that people were because now I find it to be one of the most valuable tools for information out there. I just think that it's important to put it through the lens of reality when you're trying to make decisions or feeling FOMO about things. So I'm a huge fan of people who post regularly. I love that there are people who are buying Mac minis. I mean, that trend, even if I'm not going to buy a Mac mini, you know, I'm super grateful for them. There's like new robots coming out. There's like a laundry folding robot that just went viral the other day. And I'm not going to buy it. I think it's like $10,000. I'm not going to buy a $10,000 robot just to save myself half an hour a week. Like it just doesn't make any sense to me. I just watch TV while I'm folding laundry. Anyways, I don't care. But I was not scoffing at that $10,000 price tag. I was like, there are people out there who hate folding laundry so much that they are willing to do this and good on them because they are funding the future laundry folding robot, which will be in every household in America, you know, in a decade. So, you know, more power to the early adopters. I love them. And I'm an early adopter for many things, just not necessarily everything. And I think that's an important distinction. Yeah, it's like almost like when I watch Brian Johnson do crazy shit with his body. I'm like, I cannot believe this guy went to Honduras and did like gen editing. And like, that's nuts. But I am very grateful that he's doing that and sharing the learnings with everyone. Like that's really cool. Absolutely. Yeah, Brian Johnson is a great example, because honestly, for a while, I really disliked this guy. And I think I wasn't the only one. Apparently, there was a whole post where he changed his image. And I disliked him in part because I'm a very I'm very skeptical of biohacking and generally believe that there's probably an 80-20 rule for most health and wellness stuff that if you just follow the 80-20 rule, that you're going to have much better long term success. And the rest of it is just like over obsession and stress inducing. I think for most people, it's not it's not for me because I don't pay attention to it. But, you know, and so for a while, I had sort of a negative feeling about Brian Johnson and biohackers in general. And then I saw someone write something about this and say, like, look, if you can't appreciate what he's doing, even if you don't want to do it, what's wrong with you? And I was like, yeah, I'm I'm being an asshole. Like, like, this is ridiculous. Like, biohackers are awesome. They are as a movement. They are solving problems that are going to trickle down to me and are going to become the 80-20. And so they're doing that extra, you know, they're doing the whole 100%. And as a result, I get to like, I have so many friends who are like this and I'll be at a party with them and they'll tell me, yeah, this is the one thing that makes the most difference. And I'll be like, great, I'll adopt that one thing while you do the 20 things. Thank you. You know, and that's that that's very similar to I have I have that role in many parts of my life. I am the 1% on adoption of many other things, you know, learning, being one of them. And so I think I really appreciate the people who are the early adopters in any field, even though they can be insufferably, you know, proselytizing at times and start to reframe that in my head of. This is amazing. Thank you for doing this. You know, you are doing the socially unacceptable thing in order to provide knowledge and wisdom to the world, because we all know it's not going to come from nowhere. It has to come from a small group of people testing this thing out. I mean, by definition, the edge is just can't have that many people on the edge. So, yeah. Go ahead, Mark. No, I was going to change gears. But one thing that's been interesting for me to maybe pay attention to in the last, let's call it like 12 months is so for Supra, a lot of people get their companies to pay for it. And I keep track of how many of the memberships are company sponsored versus, let's say, pay out of pocket, right? And a trend that has been surprising for me is that given all the change that's happening and the leverage you can get from the right education and the right training, I'm not seeing companies spend more money in education for their employees. And I'm curious, if you're seeing something similar, why do you think that is? Do they think that's not just the right level to pull? What is your interpretation of that? And I'm curious if it's different from what you're seeing. So Ben knows because he's a Maven instructor and we have open communication with our top instructors that I spent about three months last year trying to do, like see if Maven could move into B2B and sell to learning and development budgets in companies. And I mean, first of all, I would say that there is an increase in learning and development needs for AI and willingness to spend, but it's far lower than I would expect. I mean, you're right. It's wild, to be honest. And I think there are a few reasons, I'll posit them right now. The first is that I think the credibility of learning and development has completely tanked. And unfortunately, over the last 15 to 20 years, that discipline, I won't say just the function or the people or the software, but literally the entire discipline has a reputation problem. I think AI is like the magic moment at which that discipline could completely turn itself around, but it's unfortunate. Unfortunately, they are not asked to be the leaders in this problem and they're not respected enough, not just the people, again, the whole discipline within the organizations to be able to sort of solution the problem. And so what ends up happening is, this brings me to the second point, which is that, so what companies do is they are attempting to do company-wide trainings on AI, which is, as you, Ben and Mark probably know, is like, honestly, completely asinine. I mean, what are you going to do? Like, everyone's going to learn ChatGPT? Dude, everyone already uses it. And if they don't use it, you're not going to be able to convince them. Otherwise, this is a complete waste of time. Yeah, this is not like sexual harassment training or something. That's like, there's a common thing, like everyone can get the full message on in a session. Yeah, this is like, let's do internet training for people. It's like, what are you talking about? No, there's literally like 100,000 internet tools and every single person probably is going to use a different mix of tools. Like, even PMs within the same org with the same general function, depending on what product they are building and depending on who they work with and how good the engineering and designers are and what they're good at and what they're not, are going to use a different set of tools. I mean, if you're building a product that is zero to one, you are going to have a completely different set of AI tools than if you are optimizing the, like if you're an Amazon engineer or a product manager trying to optimize at the bleeding edges of like e-commerce and trying to get 0.01% gains. And by the way, even if you're the one trying to get 0.01% gains, the way you get those gains is different depending on what idea you have and you'll use a different AI system to do that. And so the second problem companies have is that they're trying to generalize their AI education candidly because they can't figure out any other solution and because the pressure is still just do AI. It's not specific enough. And so that's the second problem. And then the third problem is that honestly, most AI requires a system change at the company level. There's a system change at the company level. And so AI consulting is booming right now. I'll give you an example. At Maven, I asked by our lead designer, she's incredible, head of design, Yuen Wong. She was, we first met her because she was a Maven instructor. She worked at Airbnb. She's just like, honestly, kind of a savant. And I asked her on an offsite six months ago, hey, like, are you guys using AI in the design org? And she said, no, not really. And I said, why not? And we had noticed that design orgs in general were slow to adopt AI because we were seeing so much more demand for product and engineering AI courses than design, when design was a very big category on Maven. And it still is, but I would say there was a lag and it's changing now. So, and then Yuen told me, that's why I asked you for us to do a brand and design systems update. Because in order for AI to be useful, we actually need to redesign our design system so they're more legible to a computer, very simply put. And we did that. And now the design team is far more productive. But that took like four to six months. And it took the judgment of a human that with that level of experience and wisdom about her craft to be able to prescribe what step is needed to get to the point where you can get the gains from the AI. Exactly. And she had to have the credibility with me or with the company to get the resources to do that. So there's actually a lot of things that have to happen. At a small company, I mean, any leader at the company comes to me and tells me something, I will do it. I'm just saying that the credibility gap gets a lot wider when you have 1,000 employees or 10,000 employees. Like the one person who's at the cutting edge of AI like is actually not the person you want, right? Like you don't wanna listen. Right now they're listening. This is like the fourth problem. Like you're listening to the tinkerers. But the biggest problem with tinkerers and the biggest problem with your biohacker or in my case, I'm like the top 1% of learning, the biggest problem with these folks usually is they have trouble translating and generalizing what they're doing to everybody. And they often get more excited by videos and demos than they do by the actual use of the thing because by nature a tinkerer tinkers and moves on, right? That's the whole point. And so what you really want is you want your second tier adopters, your sort of, you know, again, your two to 10%. Or in the case of a corporation, we're probably talking more like the 10 to 30%, right? Because most of the corporations we're talking about are already on the cutting edge of AI relative to the general population. So, you know, your 10 to 30 percenters, those people, and that's what Ewan is, Ewan is absolutely at the cutting edge of AI relative to the general population. She's in the top, you know, whatever, 0.1% probably. But at Maven, she's not in the top 10%. She's in the 10 to 30%, right? And that's actually a strength. That's actually a strength. By the way, I'm in the 30 to 50 percentile, right? Like at Maven, because our Maven team, we have people who are just like insanely on top of everything. Why is that a strength? Because that 10 to 30% is the bridge from the top one to 10% down to the 50 to 100 because that person is only gonna use AI not just because it's fun and cool, but because it's useful. That's the difference. And so the fourth problem these companies have is they're listening to their tinkerers and their tinkerers are not the right people to listen to. Yeah, it's almost like getting life advice from like a billionaire, right? It's like, yeah, really helpful, but you're so disconnected from the world. Like, you're like, oh yeah, like just save time. Just fly private. Like, yeah, no shit. But like, you know, I'm still flying economy. Like there's like a big, there's like a big like delta there and it just makes it, yeah, feel like it's cool, but it's unrelatable. And almost because of that, sometimes like their message kind of fall flat. But yeah, it's a really good point around the, like there's almost like a really unique opportunity for the learning and development work or maybe a new work to emerge, right? To kind of help with that transition because what I'm seeing a lot in a lot of companies is they hire maybe like a byte coder or they hire someone who's like the fixer that creates like internal tools, stuff with AI. Like, you know, they'll embed themselves in the ops function or the sales function or in the product function. And they're just like building shit and then people use it. And maybe that thing that they're using makes them more productive. But like, I think that's like a, you know, low to medium leverage play. I think like long-term, the high leverage play is like that person that's like, hey, like let's start to like maybe educate everyone. And that's like my role, right? I'm like, and I'm kind of reading like, hey, like here's what's out there in the world. Here's where my org is. Here's like the changes that we need to make and almost like get everyone rowing in the same direction. But I haven't seen any companies do that well, unless it's like the founder or CEO that's like kind of like pushing everyone to do it. And they're like almost like the fearless leader in that kind of revolution, which is interesting. If you're enjoying this conversation, please check out the links in the show notes to support the podcast. Mark and I do this out of love, but to keep it going, we also need your support. Thanks, and now back to the episode. That brings me to a fifth challenge. I think that's a great comment. A fifth challenge that L&D has in the enterprise, which is that they are specialists and not generalists. So why is the CEO, founder or the CPO, COO so effective? They know what like 80%, they have to be relatively good at 80% of the functions of their company. So they actually understand the nuances of using AI in different use cases and can often spot the use case whenever speaking to an individual employee. The challenge with learning and development is it's a specialized discipline. It's actually about the craft and art of teaching things, not of knowing things. And the challenge that L&D has is historically, they've been teaching things that are already known. But in AI, you have to learn the thing first. And that is not where they are specialists at. As a result, it is not a good idea to blanket allow anybody. They have AI transformation folks within these companies now. It's like everyone has one person who's tapped to be the AI transformation person. First of all, usually that person is more junior than it should be, right? Instead of a C-level or a head of, it's usually like a chief of staff or a operations person, like kind of a more mid-level employee. They don't have the clout and they don't have the visibility to actually do what you're saying you want them to do. Or it's an L&D person with the same problem, fundamentally. And then the chief product officers and the CTOs, they're so busy figuring out what AI is and how to deal with it and to make a few major product bets that they wanna make with AI that they are not sufficiently deep or cross-functional, really. Cross-functional, what I mean is they're not in the middle part of the org chart, they're at the top of the org chart. And it's very difficult to influence everyone at the middle of the org chart from the top on your own. You need a partner. So I think, I'm just riffing here now, I think the ideal scenario is you have a C-level sponsor who's taking it very seriously. And when I say taking it seriously, they are taking the meetings, they are running the trainings. And then their chief of staff's job is just to enhance what they're doing. But if they delegate it to the chief of staff, this is another failure case I've seen, and the chief of staff then is dealing with it, then what's gonna end up happening is the chief of staff will simply not be able to make the progress that you're expecting. So this is me riffing, but I'm very curious if a couple people listen to this podcast and send me an email, who work at bigger companies, if this resonates, because I only did like 30 to 50 interviews, and that's what I concluded. I mean, that makes sense, and I think the system you're describing also would need some kind of very tight feedback loops from the ground level feeding into the chief of staff probably to make sure that there's a constant kind of, I mean, this is no different than product design and product development. You're basically treating the way your organization works as a product that has clear behavioral flows and expectations and success metrics and stuff. So if people are not behaving the way that you want them to behave, you also need to make sure you have the right feedback loops and kind of like observability or to some degree measurement, I guess, on whether it's happening and understanding why it's not happening, and then that information needs to flow probably back to the executive sponsor, just like any product review would flow back to an executive sponsor to make sure that they're aligned on what's going on in the product. So I think that makes a ton of sense. One thing that was coming to mind that I just wanna like get your pulse check on is I was kind of picturing you on the designer at Maven that you mentioned, and now that your team is benefiting from the benefit, like reaping the benefits of working in an AI-powered way, I'm just curious, do you think that her experience would translate very directly as like advice to someone in her exact shoes in a different company, or does it generalize to people doing like design leadership at like larger companies too? Like I'm curious how like size, almost like how unique her experience kind of leading this kind of period of change at Maven is versus how generalizable the concepts might be to design leaders in other companies who wanna do something similar. I have not worked at a really, really large company, so it's worth admitting my biases here, but I did spend a bunch of time talking to those types of folks, and my guess is it would totally apply. I mean, just think about the specific thing that I said, which is that she recognized that you had to under, you had to like a code level, and yeah, it is actually front-end code, but also a design systems level change in order to enable your team to use AI more effectively. Probably the other thing I didn't mention is we also are currently undergoing a people and process change. So pre-AI, we were roughly like three or four engineers in a pod, one designer and one PM. PM would typically run one or two pods at a time, and so you can kind of see how that works, and we're moving to a one PM, one designer, two engineer pod. So our belief system now is the design to engineer ratio needs to change a little bit, and that is because designers are more productive and engineers are more productive, but still the design thinking is still a bottleneck. The product thinking is still a bottleneck. I've seen some anecdotes that the AI can actually think for you. At least in my experience, it hasn't gotten to that point, and so as a result, until it can think for you, you kind of need to have your thinkers, which typically tend to be your sort of product and design folks, and when I say thinker, I'm talking about product thinking, not engineering thinking, because to be clear, I think it does do a decent job and a better job at engineering thinking, but not at product and design thinking. You need those thinkers to still put tens of hours before you build anything. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. The reason I asked, I mean, first of all, your shift to decreasing that ratio is definitely something that we're seeing consistently in other product orgs as well, so I think that's really smart, and obviously you'll figure out whether there's some cases or product areas where that ratio doesn't make sense, and you'll make those adjustments, but I think the trend and the directionality of that feels spot on. The reason I was asking my question is as I think about, I'm almost imagining 1,000 businesses, call it, maybe not Fortune 500, but let's say they have somewhere between 500 and 5,000 employees, and I'm just imagining 1,000 of those companies. They have a design leader. A lot of them, I'm sure, has a design leader who's facing some issues, and it almost seems like, let me know if I'm reading you correctly, but the best person for that design leader to probably learn from would be someone who basically did exactly, who's maybe one or two steps ahead of them on that journey, who, similar kind of size of organization, maybe similar kind of leadership structures and dynamics. It's almost like the closer you can get to simulating someone having been in your exact shoes, the more applicable their experience or more actionable their experience will be. Would you agree with that general framing? In AI, I would agree with it. In general, I would actually say that there's a even better person position. So when you're learning something that's at the cutting edge, it's very valuable just to learn from someone who's just a couple steps ahead of you. However, when you're learning something that is somewhat figured out, and by the way, 99% of everything we ever do is already figured out, right? Like there's thousands of years of literature around every problem you and I face, whether it's problems with relationships or kids or even social media or et cetera. Like there's just so much knowledge out there. In those situations, I mean, you're better off learning from someone who has seen a hundred examples of change and is further away from the change themselves, but has coached a hundred to a thousand people. And that's why we at Maven don't expect you as a IC, let's say you're an ICPM, you're not learning from the ICPM who's like two years ahead of you. There are some real lessons there, by the way, but if you're gonna get structured learning, it's better to learn from someone who's 10 years ahead of you, who's spent the last three years teaching a bunch of people in your shoes. Because teaching is in itself a skill, is that kind of? Yeah, teaching is in and of itself a skill. And more importantly, like think about the design leader situation, right? If one design leader who's two steps ahead of you is teaching you, the biggest negative you have is that what if your situation, like there's usually like 20 different situations, not one. And so, yeah, you're learning one skill. Everyone needs to learn the same skill, but the situation you're in has to map to that person's situation that they went through for the last two or three years. Whereas if you find, 20 is probably an exaggeration, probably closer to like five to seven different, but like if you find someone who has helped 50 organizations make this transition, they've absolutely seen the patterns that apply to you. So it costs more money, it's much harder, but most of these companies, you know, absolutely should be doing this. Yeah. I mean, the design leader example, right? It's like, you know, they got lucky because they have a founders, not lucky, but they have a founder CEO that's very open-minded. And there was like, hey, like I'm down to redo our design system from an AI native way, because I can actually see like that this is, even though maybe we're gonna ship less features in the next like three to four months, I know that in a year or two years, this is gonna pay like, you know, five X. And, you know, the time investment there. But like, if you're in a big org, they're like, no, actually like, or a public company like, hey, like we made some promises that we need to hit in Q1 financially. And this thing has a dollar amount and this other thing doesn't. So I think like in that way, yeah, it's a harder case. And where my head was going with this too, is like in a weird way with AI, and at least in this particular moment in time, I feel like soft skills are probably more important than ever, right? Because it's a very, a lot of these conversations can be very political. And I think having really strong soft skills probably can be the difference between like getting something done or not. So I'm not sure if you're seeing a rise in people seeing that connection yet or yeah. We are actually. I wouldn't say a rise, I'd say a steady, consistent sort of drumbeat from before the AI era into the AI era. The one topic that has not been disrupted on Maven by AI is the leadership category. And yeah, there is like one or two courses that are like, that are pretty cool, actually. They sound awesome. It's like become an AI super manager, right? So you can manage more people through using AI as a- Shout out Hillary, great course. So there are a few courses in the leadership category that are heavily, heavily AI sort of focused, but most of them are still teaching classic business, leadership and influence skills. I think that that's exactly right. So those have still stayed quite consistent over time. Whereas, for example, like your classic design systems course, which was huge in the first two years of Maven is now an AI design systems course. And you just can't teach design. You can't teach Figma without AI and still sell it today to the public. And the same thing is true with product, right? Like Ben, I mean, you did this with your program. Interviewing was a skill where there was a certain set of ways you would go about doing it. You often probably, I don't remember specifically your strategy, but you know, mock- I was adding a co-pilot. It was adding the- Well, I know, I'm gonna get to that. I know about that. I'm saying what you did like three years ago, but like the mock interviews, you'd have like big guides that people would read, potential questions, et cetera. And you'd ask people to get into pairs. I'm just making an example here. Now you built this co-pilot, right? And like this co-pilot is the modern AI disruption of the previous way people would learn AI, learn PM interviewing. And I think you nailed it. I mean, you're super cutting edge here. And if I think about it, like I'm just talking to a friend who's interviewing for a company right now. And by the way, you know, business idea for you, you should just expand the co-pilot beyond PM interviewing. It should just be all interviewing. Because my instinct is you could, I was having a friend who's interviewing for an HR role and he absolutely uses a co-pilot to help him prepare. And one that is like super dialed would be even better. And he'd gladly use it. So I love that you came up with that, Ben. And that was an innovation that, you know, we really, I saw and was like, okay, yeah, even this is gonna change. I appreciate that. And we're def, I mean, I say we, cause Mark and I have a separate business that we're building together called Insider Loops. And we certainly believe that the future of, you know, PM interview prep is going to be more co-pilots. It's probably hard to predict exactly what co-pilots will mean in this context in six to 12 months at the pace of innovation. But I agree with you. I think the application of the knowledge and the ability to get the reps, and especially the more simulated the environment, the easier it is to, I think, create the conditions in which the reps, the high quality reps will be useful. And anyways, that's kind of, I appreciate you saying that, but I agree with you. Like every course, you know, Tal Raviv and I, by the way, who is one of the people who's at the cutting edge and tinkering and sharing all the content, and shout out to Tal, cause it's amazing what he's doing. And his course with Amman, I saw it just hit number one on Maven today. You don't see how long it stays there, but I'm sure. Wow, congrats to them. But they're, and they're going to come on the podcast and we'll talk about what it means to build the AI product sense, which is what they're teaching. But Tal and I in Amman did a session a few weeks ago on a lightning lesson on Maven. And it was about unpacking the new, there's a new interview that rolled out at Meta called Product Sense with AI. And, you know, as I did all my back channeling and talk to some of my students who have gone through it, and it's basically a product sense interview where you get to use Meta.AI on the side. So it's like a little co-pilot, but everything is the same. Like it's like the same interview flow structure, same questions. So Tal was like, I'll make a prediction. In a year, we'll just have a product sense interview. Like we're not, we're not going to have a separate product sense with AI interview. And I think that I'm connecting the dots, the dots between what you said, because like there's a lot of courses about whatever the skill is. And maybe now there's like a need to position the courses like with AI or using AI or AI powered, whatever. But maybe once the dust settles, we'll just be back to like, we'll just assume AI is a component of everything. And we'll just get back to like what actually makes it, you know, if you just take the AI piece aside, what is it? I, yeah, that's inevitable. I mean, it's my analogy of the internet, right? Today, you don't talk about learning how to use the web for, you know, like how to use Google Sheets or something. You just, you know, you just sort of do it. And you don't even, you just assume everyone knows how to, you know, communicate over Slack and do email. But when it started, like these were all skills people kind of had to learn. Mark, I don't know where you want to go, but I had one thing I'm realizing that I wanted to ask and I want to make sure we get to it before you finish. Can I, can I ask? Okay. So where we started with this was talking about why like self learning is so critical at this point in time for mid-career people. And I think we kind of glossed over why the mid-career part is critical. So I'd just love to get your guys' thoughts on like, what's unique about mid-career people versus early career people versus, you know, however you might want to define like late career people when it comes to why it's so important to develop, now more than ever to develop the self learning skill. Mark, do you have it? Do you want to, do you want to kick it off? Sure. I mean, my thing's probably going to be less nuanced than yours, but I can try. So, I mean, I think compared to like the late stage people, I mean, I feel like they're already almost done with their career. Like say they have like two or three years, like maybe like the impact of learning, it's hard to get motivated, right? Like they're at the end, and so maybe they're just coasting. So I think that one to me is clear. Is that like a motivational issue, do you mean? Like they're just like less motivated to learn? I think maybe less motivated. And I mean, but also like- More set in their ways? Yeah. And also I think they're like, they're learning muscle. They're not a live learner. Like learners, it's maybe a little like atrophied. Which I think kind of connects me back to like early career people, right? Like these are people that maybe they just got out of school, right? And maybe they're like a little bit more AI native, right? Like they did their homework with chat GPT or like, you know, they're in TikTok. So I think they're like more kind of like early adopters. And I think they're just faster at picking it up. So I think like that muscle of learning and trying things is a little bit fresher. And, but yeah, the middle career people, they have 10, 15, 20 years left depending on how long they work. And then maybe they're already build expertise and they're already, or maybe like have credibility. They have a reputation and whatever they've been doing in the past has served them well, has allowed them to maybe get promoted faster. So I think just stop doing what has worked in the past. I mean, it's something that's hard for some people. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of like my take. It's like, you know, there's clearly a lot of value and if you don't do something about it, you're gonna struggle for 15 years, which is a long time. But yeah, but also like what you've done before has served you well. I agree, motivation changes over time and mid-career folks are the ones who are most unlikely to be motivated, but relative to the amount of motivation they need. Like if you're late career, you can also kind of get away with it. If you're not that motivated, the early career is very likely to be motivated. I mean, they're new and the mid-career folks are like, oh, I've been doing this for eight years. Like now I gotta change everything. Like, I mean, I can totally relate to that. Like I frequently every day end up recognizing, man, I easily should have, like I gotta go download this new software and figure it out. Yeah, the answer is yes. Yeah, you do, you do. Like, and honestly, like you're gonna thank yourself five, 10 years from now when this becomes second nature and hopefully you'll thank yourself in like a few weeks because honestly like this stuff, it does take time to learn, but we're not talking six to 12 months. It's not like getting in shape where you just kinda like, you know, where like it can take a while to, you see a lot of gains up front and then you just have to get used to the grind. I think this is like one of those things where like, once you do it a little bit, you will just keep doing it because your curiosity and everything else will sort of go. And so I think you can do this in short bursts, like once every year, once every six months, adopt a new tool or a new workflow, and then you'll just naturally start to figure the rest out from there. I'm curious, you know, there's some like, funders or product leaders, CPOs that are listening and they're like, you know, like I really wanna instill a culture of self-learning in my team because I really think that it's gonna be, it could become a huge alpha for us and allow us to keep being on top of everything. Like, are there any things that you've done instead of Maven or other places that you think have really helped kind of create that culture of encouraging everyone to learn and share that with the team? Well, in terms of self-learning, this is very similar to asking a billionaire how, you know, they did something, which is that I run a company where we explicitly are attempting to help people learn things, and it's a small company, and I personally am a huge self-learner, so everyone on the team's a self-learner at Maven, pretty much. I mean, of course, there's different, varying degrees on different tools. Not everyone's, like it did take some time to get a couple of people onto AI in the right way early on, but almost everyone is, so I will say that at Maven, I don't think we've learned anything that's super translatable, but I am, I'll add my third-party perspective as someone who does, you know, coach and talk to other companies and leaders, and the first thing is, you gotta hire and fire for it, right? So, like, that's just your standard cultural indoctrination thing, which is that if you, no matter how hard you try, there are people who will resist it, and you need to get them out, and then you wanna make sure they don't get in either. Is there anything, just on that topic, can you hold the next topic, or do you wanna get it out while it's fresh? Yeah, I can hold it. Okay, I was gonna ask, like, if I just double-click into what you just said, any, like, advice or, like, things, like, wisdom maybe you've learned over the years from hiring for that aptitude, for, like, that, like, people who are kind of, like, self-motivated to learn, like, how do you assess that? You don't wanna assess it directly. You wanna assess it indirectly. You don't wanna ask someone, like, are you self-motivated to learn, or even just tell me about something you've learned recently, because they'll, like, give you a great example no matter what. Everyone's got something. You wanna do it throughout the interview process. What you really need to do is ask yourself afterwards, did you see someone who was on a high learning trajectory in their career? You know, the classic way to do this is to interview them through their resume and ask them to explain each part of their resume and what they learned and what they accomplished, and you'll notice that the best people have the best answers, you know, over time. The most specific examples of things they learned from every experience that they had and how they bettered themselves throughout that time. But even if you don't have that interview in your loop, I still think that, honestly, if you just ask your hiring committee or whatever, we just have, like, committee or whatever we just have like our hiring team for every new every hire you know every role has a different group but if you just ask everyone like do you think this person is learning is gonna be like quick at learning in their natural conversation they'll have gotten it you just have to make sure you actually ask that question in the hiring in the debrief you know and so I do think that that's something people forget to ask they don't prioritize it and often the questions you want to ask in the debrief are observational questions not what the interview was actually focused on and so it's very easy in the interview process to say well your job is product sense how is their product sense your job was you know going through the resume do they have a high trajectory you know whatever and then you forget that actually there are other observations that you make just by doing your your product sense interview that you still want to make sure you double-click on with your team before you hire someone. Got it, makes total sense and in a bigger company I can see why that compartmentalization of interview responsibilities is needed because you need to be able to like every interviewer needs to be fungible at a company like Metta so yeah but sorry so what was your I interrupted you you were about to say the second thing and asked you if you could hold it you still remember what it was? I'll get there okay so I was talking about how you need to hire and fire the second thing is that as a company you have to celebrate and share the learnings that are occurring so if you reward the behavior not not just through promotions and hiring and firing but also you know subconsciously through just you know whatever we have a kudos channel at Maven or by giving that the person who's learned the skills the most responsibility or whatever you know various subtle ways you will absolutely encourage others to be like they'll feel FOMO about learning right and they'll do it more. Yeah I mean I believe incentives like yeah incentives are like everything comes back to if you design the right incentive system it's kind of hard for me to poke holes and how that doesn't that's not like almost like your best chance of getting the desired behaviors. Yeah I'm curious how have you has your philosophy around hiring changed at all in the last year or 18 months? Yeah I think we are more focused on whether people are going to be learning mindset more focus especially in engineering honestly where there is more of a resistance to new tools and more entrenched resistance and also more need to just be absolutely like even if you I think we're okay if you're someone who hasn't been playing with the tools at your last company those contexts are different and we're usually uncomfortable with that but if you are not playing with it on your free time and you are not coming in ready to sort of go on AI adoption and sort of you're asking questions about this like we're not gonna it's not gonna work out. So coming with side projects or things you've been tinkering on maybe like things that you found surprising from playing with these different tools or things that you've shipped and like what you learn from that those kind of stories are kind of very strong currency in the current market for you as someone who's hiring? Yeah and I would also just add willingness I mean it's pretty easy when you ask someone about AI what they feel they they'll that that question doesn't need to be very complicated like have you used AI what are you doing with it etc like okay and we're okay with people who are a B at that but we won't take C's and below so and the reason we're okay with a B is because we do believe that the adoption pattern is a little bit different in different places and so we're comfortable with someone who's gonna come in and adopt our philosophy on AI which honestly we are still developing but at least they're gonna do it with us they're gonna co-create it with us that's okay they don't need to come in and already have their own philosophy that would be an A right and that can also you know it's not challenging if they have the right philosophy so an A would be awesome and and that would give you like a much stronger chance in our interview process but but we're very very comfortable with B's on that on that level because the B's can become and by B I'm not talking about B players I know that's like a whole trope and whatever I think it's kind of stupid actually but that's a whole nother conversation but I'm talking about B's on AI adoption specifically it's my classic comment I made throughout this interview which is about the 10 to 30 percent like we're very very comfortable with being at the 10 to 30 percent we don't want to be below 50 and we only need a few employees who are in the top 10 yeah I mean I feel for like early career like especially like engineers like for example my I have a younger brother he just graduated from you know a top CS program and a lot of his classes have used you know have pushed them to use any like AI agent and at all and I'm like yeah I mean they like there's it's not has not been incorporated in like the curriculum and I think even some of the professors just graduated in this year like like six months ago yeah or I guess I mean ten months ago yeah I mean he just wrote it in in December and so my god so yeah Cornell Cornell University I mean I don't want to call him out but it's also my alma mater but yeah but he's been lucky that he's worked inside projects and I've been pushing him to like like you know there's this thing called cloud code that is pretty amazing and will probably make you a lot more effective you had to introduce cloud code to your yeah Cornell graduating CS yeah but but but I mean I think that's like an extreme example but like it's not an extreme example this is Cornell this is like your engineering school like like they weren't when I was young I think but they became a consistent output of Wow I mean can I put that in a social post that feels like crazy yeah so I mean I'm not sure like about other CS programs but and yeah or the fact that for example they don't have like you know they encourage like hey like you have free credits I mean I think a lot of these now have like occasional credits but like you know that they have that it's not that they don't have the tools they can afford it but it's just more of like it's not baked into the curriculum yeah which I think it's not like similar to like kind of we were doing the like pre conversation right about like you know like like you'd wanted to teach on a universe you know at a university and help out and you probably have a lot to say about a topic of entrepreneurship whatever it took maybe a professor has been there for a while but I think this you know like Oxford Oxford wouldn't let Gagan teach a business course he's willing to like basically do it for free for whatever reasons aren't relevant right now but that that was what Mark's referring to keep going mark yeah but I think just they're not moving quick enough and I it makes me wonder like what's gonna like if I had a kid like in you know I don't know like tomorrow like would I be like hey you should go to university I right based on that I'm like yeah I don't I don't know but I know that's a big thing to drop you know a couple minutes left but yeah I just I just feel for new grads that maybe haven't had that exposure are they going into an interview and they just don't have that you know that experience like it's gonna be a tough Gagan has so many things to say I want to hear your reaction I I will admit I okay I'm genuinely flabbergasted I mean I just assumed and have been honestly even like writing posts that the new grads are gonna do just fine because and I still believe that so I don't think this has changed that but because they're gonna be early adopters of AI and I think that's generally probably still true regardless of this detail but the fact that these schools have not yet integrated into the curriculum I mean that's embarrassing I mean that like this is it's too late now like I mean it's not too late of course that they could do it five years from now and it could still but it's very late I mean we are we're already in the world of if you don't show up to work and are using AI effectively as an early engineer like what's the point like you're useless to me because you're already useless as a as an employee in general by the way like early employees are a pain in the ass like we I don't hire them anymore like you know I'm too far along in my career I have too much hiring power basically like like as you get more experienced you can hire better people you just don't hire new grads unless they're truly exceptional of course but so not only are these folks graduating without the capability to work in a work environment which they've never taught in university and has always been a huge deficiency in the curriculum they also aren't on the cutting-edge AI tools yeah mark I feel for them too that's really sad and disappointing yeah I be so curious to have a conversation with the Cornell like Dean of engineering and I wonder if it's AI doomerism do you know mark is it is it like they are actually like against AI and therefore they aren't introducing into the curriculum or what's the reason I mean I think I think it's probably like part of it is just like speed of execution right like I mean cloud code hasn't been around for that long right like it's been like when did it come out like maybe like 11 months ago or 10 months ago like like it hasn't like yeah but I mean yeah it's been around for a few years now I have to imagine they taught them how to use IDs in the course I think they'll use like VSCode or something like that but yeah it's yeah but just not a part of it I think and GitHub copilot's been around forever true yeah that's like three or three years old I'm not 100% sure yeah I wonder if it's like almost like kind of like being like hey like we we need to learn to learn the fundamentals before you can use this tool like almost and maybe part of it is like a lot of the people yeah who's teaching the professor who's teaching the professor how to use cursor like I don't know they are not practitioners right they're not like they like me they're doing like very like intellectual research but maybe they're not like building like you know apps or they're developing so I think that's probably there's a little bit of disconnect from you know the academia and the industry and that's a plus like you know institutions moving slowly but I'll have to I'll talk to my brother and circle back by the way we did we did a full conversation with Steven Cognetta who runs exponent which is like you know a giant university partner for like interview preparation and stuff and we had a whole conversation about all these problems with how how it disconnected the universe like the undergraduate programs in particular are becoming from the job market so this mark this doesn't actually surprise me that much in the context of like if if someone just listens to the Steven conversation then here's this they're like yeah that that that's a perfect follow up. Wow. OK I'll definitely listen to that because I'm actually clearly not that plugged into what undergrads are what an undergraduate program today is like. Cool I know I know we are a minute over so Gagan as we wrap up we just have a couple of quick questions for you and then we want to do our very special gratitude corner. So first off if people want to learn more about what you're thinking about and what's top of mind for you where would you direct them to go deeper and then secondly how can the audience potentially be helpful to you. On the first one maven.com is definitely you know where I'm pouring all my energy and then I also post on LinkedIn and occasionally on X under my full name Gagan Biani. How can they be helpful to me. I would love any emails about the content of this conversation because I made a bunch of observations about companies and I would love to hear feedback about that. So you can DM me on LinkedIn or X or you can email me just Gagan at maven.com. And then the other way they can be helpful to me is if they have any feedback or thoughts on how maven can improve. I would always welcome that and I occasionally get really really thoughtful messages from our users and they're always making a huge impact on how I think about the product and the vision for the business. I want to give maven a shout out. I think one of them was impressive. I mean I've only heard incredible things. Also you know so many of the instructors and they're just incredible people too like Ben included, Tal, Aman, Hilary and awesome humans. And then the other cool thing is like I feel like you guys have made webinars cool again by calling them learning lessons. Like I feel like now it's like the coolest thing to do a learning lesson and I feel like it's all thanks to maven like that cool rebrand. It's super interesting. Thanks. We're trying. And one thing I want to just say quickly is like Gagan you I don't think I've ever shared this with you but we actually got Hilary, Tal, Aman and Colin Matthews all in Supra and I self-facilitate a it's every like four to six weeks but we've done probably four or five sessions already. 90 minutes we go around we basically have our own kind of like self-facilitated Supra cohort for just like maven instructors within Supra and it's been really really valuable for us. We keep trying to kill it and people want to keep going. So like it's clearly like you know useful and you're the reason we're coming together so I appreciate that. That's incredible. I'm so glad that y'all have built a community and we're super proud to have you as as experts on the platform. Great great chat with both of you Mark and Ben and thank you. Yeah so so gratitude corner. So basically given your journey to this point we're just wanting to make some space. Mark and I are in a big kind of like gratitude kick this year. It's kind of like an important priority for both of us. And so we want to bring a specific dedicated time in the episodes for it. Is there anyone or even multiple people who you would just like to take a moment and thank for the role that they've played in your journey getting to this point before we finish recording? I thought I'd go way back. The first good boss I ever had was Michelle Whitman who I think still works at Robert Half International or did for a long long time and just taught me a lot of basic work habits that I did not have and helped me feel confident in myself while also still like you know dramatically improving my quality of work. I was an intern there. So it was a short time but she was really amazing. Then when I was starting my entrepreneurial journey Adeo Ressi Baba Mararca and Keith Ravoy and Mark Sugarman Russ Fraden all those people at different times when we were starting you to me were kind of like absolutely critical to our ability to sort of build momentum in the early stage of the business when honestly like very very few people believed in us. Like each one of those happened after one after another. So at each point it was like man no one thinks we can do this. And we were getting like hundreds of no's that those people believed and sort of kicked off my entrepreneurial career. Amazing. Well we'll link to all those people in the show notes. Gagan I know you got to run. So thank you so much for doing this with us. We really appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks all. Take care. Thank you so much. See ya. If you enjoy this conversation please share it with someone you think would benefit from it as well. We really appreciate it. We'd also love a follow or a rating on Substack Spotify or YouTube. That's going to let other people find us. And if you have any topic recommendations for a future episode please send myself or Mark a DM on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks.