David Ko
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
David Ko’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And is it going to be used against me?
Is someone going to write about it and say I'm too weak? Is the board going to think I'm weak as a leader? And I think that's ultimately also a fail of corporate stewardship because they have to also look after your mental health. And so I'm fortunate to be on the board of Calm today, but if I wasn't CEO, I would be asking that CEO, hey, how are you doing? How are you holding up?
Let's not talk about the numbers today. I find it really effective when I meet with CEOs and they ask for some coaching. We don't talk about any numbers. We don't talk about the metrics. We just talk about life. And we'll eventually go to that later.
But I think when we start with more of a trusting place where we can understand what's happening around you, then I can be much more thoughtful in the type of advice I give. But this also means I have to create the space and the time to do it. So not everyone has that, right? And that's where I think it's just really important to be really intentional, right?
Be really purposeful in these conversations.
Well said.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Speaking of that, because you've talked about, you know, certain rituals, are there certain things that you do every day, like religion every day that you just do?
Yeah. I love that. I sometimes start my beginning of the week staff meetings with like, how was your weekend? Just tell us something that happened personal. I also find sometimes we get into all the details without getting to know one another. Yeah. And I find a lot... A lot of times teams don't work well. They can work better together when they're a little bit more personal with one another.
And it may, it doesn't have to be deep. It could just be like, hey, what did you do? Some people will say, I went on a hike. I, you know, went to my kid's game or, you know, I went, I traveled somewhere. or binge watch the show and we're all like, what show? What's your favorite show or something? And we just get to learn something a little bit more personal about the individual.
And then it's less about, oh, did you hand in that PRD or something, right? It's just, it's more personal. Yeah. And I think, and by you just doing your wins every week, you know, how, I just, I love that.
recharging and recharging your team. It's actually really interesting. I used to be one of the youngest execs in the room and now I'm the oldest person in the room. I think when I was younger, I felt that I had to be in every decision process. And that's a little bit of like, oh, I'm productive because I got my hands in everything. And it was probably the opposite.
I was probably causing more stress and less productivity on a person. And I realized that later that it's not the number of meetings or decisions you're making. It's not the quantity. It's the quality of those decisions. And I keep going back, always the quality of decision-making.
Yes, that's great. So it's things that you feel that where you sit, for me, can move the business forward in the most meaningful manner. So sometimes it could be helping teams unlock a product decision. Sometimes it could be helping teams with partnerships that may move it forward. Other times it may mean things around culture or HR.
But it's really being intentional in terms of the types of decisions you're making and where you're spending your time. It's not being in every decision with everybody because ultimately they have to make decisions too. One thing we've been doing now that I feel that has really brought the company closer together is we did this retreat where it wasn't just the leadership team.
We brought many different people together. And I said, you guys come up with the company strategy. And they were like, and this woman, they were like, what? And I'm like- They're like, don't you have it? My younger self would have been like, here it is. I was like, no, you do it. And I'll tell you, it was so much better than what I was thinking.
And it just reminded me again, you hire all these smart people. You take all this time vetting them, doing reference checks. Let them do their job. Give them a chance, if it was a sports analogy, to shoot the ball. Give them a chance to play. Don't feel like you're keeping them on the bench the whole time and you have to do everything. And give them a shot. And I do that a lot more now.
I'm much more intentional with it now. It was great. We rolled it out to the company at that offsite you were at. People came away and said it was the most inspiring offsite. And they were like, that was great. I said, I didn't do it. They did it. It came from the team. And I think it felt so much more meaningful to them because it came from them. And it was so much more spot on.
And really what it was around was we've talked about trying to make the world healthier and happier. We've talked about as a company trying to be with you every step of the way in your mental health journey. And this was really around how do we become the most impactful consumer mental health company in the world? And when I sat back and said, that's what we want to become,
and the team had kind of been the one synthesizing it, then everyone started mobilizing against it on their own. And they had thought about things that I had never even thought about because I'm just too far sometimes away from the details. And then now I've seen us accelerate. And I know that motion and muscle can be repeated, right? And you can bring it to other companies regardless of size.
And I think sometimes as companies get larger, and I've had the fortune of starting my own company where it's like three of us, and then it grows to 30, whatever, 300, and then to thousands. And then I've had the fortune of joining companies later where it's thousands and it becomes hundreds of thousands. Ultimately, that culture is your bedrock.
Showing 121–140 of 161 · page 7 of 9
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