Sean Mullaney

speaker

1,197 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 23 Apr

Sean Mullaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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The Entrepreneur Experiment · Why 10x Goals Are Easier Than 10% Ones: 5 Scaling Secrets from Google X & Zalando with Sean Mullaney · 23 Apr 2026 podcast

I was just going to say, those two pluses.

Yes.

And there are a lot of people like that.

And I've worked in a lot of organizations where those people succeed and it's just not a great place to work.

I remember when I was at Google X, you know, the team was like all PhDs from Stanford and MIT.

and they're all sitting around the table and man they could spend weeks arguing about a point trying to intellectually dominate each other without making any progress right that was kind of the game right that's the game that you have when you're in a phd program yeah yeah so you want someone who um has able to first of all like i just asked a question like what's been your biggest failure right and the number of people who will give me the the humble brag answer you know i got a b not an a

no no it's even worse than that they'll just be like well my last job you know there was like this project and um you know it failed um i thought we should do x the boss thought we should do y and the boss basically did y and it turns out that x was the right thing to do that was my biggest failure oh

and I'm like oh it shows all types of red flags straight away just so many red flags no accountability if you don't take the blame for something I've no time for you well then my question was like how could you not convince your colleagues that your idea was the right one right you know or can you influence people when you have a strong conviction on something um and so the best interviews have been the ones like when I just described to you my biggest failure like when I joined Zalando and I took over the team 150 people

man did i bomb like you know i want a real deep like kind of pain answer you know that experience to me of my first leadership role not working out and getting the feedback and having to change it's like a perfect example it was hugely painful for me to get the direct feedback about how bad a manager i was

But it also gave me that pain, gave me the incentive to really want to change, right?

And so, you know, I can tell you a hundred reasons why I was terrible in the first six months because I've reflected on it.

I've taken that feedback and that pain and then figured out how I can change.

Those are the best answers.

People who are self-aware of their ability to fail.

I've always been a founder.

I will always be a founder.

I feel like my detour.

Returning to the mothership.

Yes.

I feel like the, and to be honest, you know, Google was just like a startup experience.

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