Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: OpenTable Co-Founder Chuck Templeton

I recently interviewed OpenTable Co-Founder Chuck Templeton on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today co-founded a business that changed the way millions of people make restaurant reservations. Chuck Templeton is the co-founder of Open Table, which was acquired for $2.6 billion, and currently seats more than 1 billion diners each year. Chuck is also the co-founder and Senior Managing Director of the venture capital firm, S2G Ventures. Chuck, thank you for joining us.

Chuck: Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Adam: You grew up in Lafayette, California, and before you were a highly successful entrepreneur, you were an Army Ranger. Can you take listeners back to your early days. What experiences and lessons were most instrumental to shaping your worldview and to shaping the trajectory of your success?

Chuck: When I was growing up, I would ride my bike to school, and there was a bumper sticker on a truck that said ‘Question authority.’ And that always stuck with me because I grew up in Lafayette, California, like you said, which was a very well-to-do environment. And it was definitely one where you follow the rules. Day to day, the schools were fairly strict. And my parents were fairly strict. And so I had to follow the rules. And that bumper sticker really stuck with me about questioning authority. And so certainly – not from like a revolutionary type of thing – but certainly from thinking about, why are we doing what we're doing? Or why are we doing something the way we're doing it? So I became an entrepreneur. In high school, I had a couple small businesses. One, I would go over to the high school, which was about a 10 minute walk, because my mom would have dropped me off before school. So I'd walk over there, I go to the vending machines, I buy candy, and I'd bring it back and sell it in my sixth grade class to people and actually make money on it. And so it was a great way to get lessons on negotiating and thinking about product-market fit and who wants what and how do you take nine Jolly Ranchers and break it up. Cost you 45 cents to buy it? So it's five cents per and how do you sell each of those for 15 or 20 or 25 cents. And so that I think was the foundation of ‘there are lots of opportunities here to be able to do different things and not do it just the way everyone else had been doing it.’ And so when I went to the military, the reason I did that is because I wasn't super great in school, and a lot of my friends got accepted to the four year schools, and I knew that I wasn't ready for that yet. And so I just wanted to go take some time to grow up a little bit, to serve my country, to get the Montgomery GI Bill in the army college fund. And so I that. Three years really helping myself grow up so that, as I grew a little bit and I got out of the military, I was hopefully ready for college at that point in time.

Adam: How did the idea for Open Table come together? And how did you turn it from idea into highly successful multibillion dollar company?

Chuck: There was this thing called the Internet that was starting to get popular in 1994/1995, after I graduated from college, and I think you talked to Steve Case in the past, and he was sort of 80s in this and it was certainly pretty mainstream then. But as the craze was starting to happen, people were skipping business school to go join Internet companies. There were companies getting these great valuations and that was just the beginning of it. And so I applied to a bunch of different Internet companies, and none of them would hire me because I didn't have enough Internet experience. And so one day, watching my wife try and make restaurant reservations, I had seen her frustration as she was trying to make them for the next Friday, Saturday, Sunday night, when our parents were coming into town who were restaurateurs out of Chicago. And so we were living here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and thought there's gotta be a better way. And so what I thought is I'd worked in restaurants when I was in high school and college to pay my way through school and whatnot, I hadn’t realized that I hadn't really seen any technology that the host, Dan, that would help a host or a server or a restaurant manager be able to seat people, because I was just going to take the Internet and plug it into the back of these other systems. And I realized there were no other systems. And so then we looked at ‘how do we build OpenTable?’ And it was a lot of luck and hard work and serendipity and all the above. We started off here in San Francisco and really found our way through a number of challenges of how do you go get a restaurant, especially a high end restaurant to trust you as a startup. And so we had to sit there and go talk to you and build get out in the field and actually really build relationships with a lot of the best restaurateurs in San Francisco, to show them that we had this system that could do three things: reservation management, table management and guest management and so we started that journey. And here we are. 

Adam: You described a lot of the obstacles and something you shared right off the bat, those early lessons: selling candy, learning how to negotiate, understanding product-market fit, I would imagine critical as you're launching, building and growing scaling OpenTable. Can you share with listeners how you were able to overcome those challenges? How you were able to win over those early customers and build those key relationships? How were you able to do it? What lessons did you learn that anyone listening can apply to their business?

Chuck: I think the number one thing for OpenTable was to get out into the field. And so for about the first nine months, I spent two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, and just going and watching what restaurateurs were doing. I would look at the notepad or the reservation book that they use, and I would look at all the little marks in it. And at the end of the night, I was getting ready to leave and ask them okay, what does this mark mean? Or how did you do this? Or why is there a four here? When there's two over there? How do you think about, what are these two dots? And what are these two circles? And I would just continuously ask all this stuff and listen to the order in which they answered the question or ask the questions when people call up to make a reservation. Was party size first, what was the date first? Or was it name first? So we then really focused on how do we take the paper-based system that they used to have and digitize that because we knew that restaurants were not a super tech savvy places at the time. Most of the restaurateurs who were high-end were really good at creating ambiance, cooking meals, that kind of customer service, but they didn't have a lot of skills and technology. And there was not a lot of technology. Most of these were still pre-POS system for a lot of these high end restaurants. And so we knew that if we were going to convert them to using our system that we were going to have to take the paper-based system and mirror as much as possible into this digital world so that that transition wasn't a hard transition for these restaurateurs, and we had to really work with them, to show them that okay if there was a bug, or that you show us what that bug is, and we will get that bug fixed ASAP. For us, the two best things I think, frankly, were one, working with our customer, the restaurant, very closely and two, taking feedback from all parts of the organization. A lot of the best feedback came from the people training the restaurateurs, or some of the software engineers. So that's where we really focused on: how do we get to the best answer because I didn't know the answers. I don't think anyone knew the right answers at the time. And so we had to go get them by trial and error, and obnoxious acceptance of feedback, if you will.

Adam: Chuck, you shared a lot of really important lessons that are applicable to anyone and everyone, whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you're in any business. Understand your customer. Dedicate yourself to understand your customer. You spent two to three hours a day in the field, studying your customer. The importance of listening and asking questions, something listeners of this podcast have heard over and over and over again. Great leaders are great listeners. Great leaders ask great questions. The power of feedback. I love that when you said the two most important things that you did. Number one, work closely with your customers. Number two, took feedback from all parties. Anyone and everyone who could give you feedback? You took it and you listened, you didn't know what the right answer was. But the only way to get to the best answer was by listening to feedback, consuming feedback, and then acting on it.

Chuck: Yeah, we had a philosophy inside of OpenTable at the time that was – and I'm not sure why we named it this or call it this – but we said if a restaurateurs could sign an agreement while falling over, we'd get the system in. Because at the time, a lot of these restaurants didn't have connectivity. They didn't have broadband, they didn't have power. Even a lot of the host stands, there might be a pin light that comes down and just lights up a tabletop or a desktop that doesn't have power to it. And so we had to really think about ‘how do we get these systems into there in ways that, as long as they paid us full price?’ We had a team and we had some of our early team members who would be crawling through rafters bringing Cat5 cable – this is before WiFi was really prevalent. We might have a 12 or 14 week delay for a building to get DSL installed into it, especially if it was a restaurant at the bottom of a hotel or bottom of a big building that had a union worker who wasn't used to what the system was or what WiFi was or what the Internet was. And so it was a lot of problem solving. And actually Internet service was one of the early things we had to provide to our customers, because we knew if we waited around for our customers to get it, it would take three months or six months, or we might never see it. The other expression we used to do was called polishing the friction off the sale.

Adam: Can you elaborate on that?

Chuck: Yeah, so think about all aspects of the sale. So we did a number of things. We didn't call it a contract, we called it an agreement. If we called it a contract, then the restaurant needed its lawyers to get involved. And then suddenly, there were all kinds of iterations of that. And that cost money, it slowed it down. Two is, we did things like we got the agreement down to a single page. And so we looked at, okay, if we don't put it's unlimited, you can't cancel – a lot of restaurants never canceled once they got the system. And so we said, why do we care if that phrase is in there, it's going to cause people to slow down, have more to read or have something to push back on. So we really polished up the agreement, so that it was a one page agreement. Then someone looked at the sales process, and we used the spin sales technique. So restaurateurs at the time, we could get from 10:00 - 11:30, and then from about 2:00 - 4:30. So basically about four hours a day, to be able to sell to them because otherwise a lot of these restaurateurs are managing the host stand or the chef's or whatever. And so we had to find times when they were available to talk. Well, if you're hiring a salesperson, you need to be able to talk to a CEO, or the owner of the small businesses, and you're paying these salespeople a lot of money, but they can only sell for four hours a day. So we've really had to focus on things like we made the sales process, we've got it down to about a 35 minute call, and started off 7-10 minutes of asking the restaurateurs some rough questions on their business that would help us frame and then the next 15 or so minutes, was really on about how do we answer those questions, how do you show how the system works for them. And I got into a demo. And then the last 10-ish minutes or so was all about how do you work to the close, right? Here's the agreement, you slide it across the table, when should we get started. And so really move into that. So you could actually make that sales process. So now, a salesperson would get to multiple, instead of just one call in the morning, they could generally get to two calls in the morning. And then they can get to three or four calls in the afternoon, which allowed them to actually start to accelerate the sales process. And then we did things like we would actually take their reservation books. And when we did the install, we would type all of the reservations because remember, a lot of these restaurants had reservations in their books for the next two months. And so to get that transition to work, we would have our team in there all night long typing in reservations, so that when they started in the morning, that's when the training was, that's where we would cut off the paper-based reservation system and do it to a digital reservation system. And so there were all kinds of innovations like that, that the team really pushed, that were really focused on how we polish that friction off the sales process. To make it easier and easier for the customers to say yes.

Adam: You shared so many great tips around streamlining the sales process, eliminating friction. Can you talk a little bit more about how to close the sale?

Chuck: So one of the things that we did is looked at our customer base and tried to think about what would get them to a yes. And so if you look at the restaurant industry, and I'm sure it's very similar to a lot of other industries, but you've got your visionary folks who everyone else wants to be like those folks. And at the time, that Zagat Most Popular Restaurants and so Zagat was a dining guide at the time, that actually rated the number one restaurants in each market. And so we would go to those number one restaurants. And those number one restaurants didn't care about new customers, they cared about taking better care of their current customers. And so when we can provide that tool that actually helped them take better care of their customers, because the OpenTable system did three things. It did reservation management, which is making changes and canceling or confirming reservations. It did table management, so once the evening’s begun, what's happening? Which server am I seating? And then it did like a CRM tool. So guest management was a third thing. And so a lot of our high end restaurants did a lot of that stuff. But they would do it on three by five cards. They might go back into the old reservation book and say, look for whatever names seem to be in there a lot. So it was a very manual process that they hadn't used before. And they didn't care about new customers, which was good because we weren't going to bring them new customers in the beginning. No one knew to go to OpenTable.com and actually make a reservation. And so that first set of customers was all about helping them take better care of their current customers. That was the sale and that's what our salespeople learned through time as the process. And so after about seven to 10 to 12 or 15 of these top 20 or 25 restaurants, depending on the market, would start to buy the system. Then the next let's say 75 restaurants in a market, all it mattered – they all aspire to be in that top 20. And so whatever the top 20 were doing, they would start to do so now the sale became not taking better care of your current customers, but the sale became, if you want to have this service level that they have, here's what you need to do, to be able to have that service level. And here's one of the tools that does that and helps it. We can give you best practices. And then by then you've got 20, 30, 40 of your top restaurants in the market, then you start to get the flywheel effect of now online reservations start picking up and because a consumer searches for a single restaurant, or they search your system for ‘party of four, French food, this part of town this day of the week, at this time of the day,’ if there's a single result that comes back, the chances of them booking are very low. But if you get like five or six or eight results to start to come back all the way up, there was an S curve all the way up to about 12. And it was early days, once 12 came back peak is to when the acceptance rate or the completion rate of a reservation. And so as consumers started to get confidence that they were going to go to OpenTable, the time they'd spent on it would actually be fruitful for them to get them a reservation. So now, reservations started coming into the network. And so now it was about the next 200, 300 restaurants who were all concerned about butts in seats. And so then it was a story about, how do we show we can show you that we can actually bring more butts into your seats, and it can actually be profitable. And so the restaurant business is a high-fixed cost, low-variable cost business. And if you think about it, the economics is 30/30/30/10. So 30% of your cost is people, 30% of your cost is overhead. And this is all rough numbers, obviously, but for illustration, and then 30% of your cost is food. And then 10% of your revenue is profit, or the last 10%. And so what's your variable cost there? While your people have got to be there, no matter what, if you serve 10 people or 50? People? Yep. So you could say there's a few more people that show up, your restaurant’s already got to be there. But you’ve got to have the chairs in place, you’ve got the electricity on, you’ve got the heat going. And so the only variable cost was the food cost. And so if the food cost was 30%. So let's say an average check, per person, was going to about $50. So if you could bring an incremental person to a restaurant that you could prove was an incremental person, then, of that $50, $35 of that was profit, %15 of it was the food cost. Because again, you've already got your overhead, you've already got your people that are already showing up, and you've got your profit, and then you get your food cost. So food cost is the only incremental cost to that. And so if you could bring in an additional person, that's a $35 value to you, as a restaurateur. And so the system costs, at the beginning, $300 to $400 a month, somewhere in that range. And so if you could bring 12 incremental diners into a restaurant in a month, then basically the system paid for itself. Plus you got all this other benefit of the floor management, the guests management stuff, all those other tools. And so what we would then do is show these restaurants how you can actually drive more consumers through and actually get more and increase guests. And so at one point in San Francisco, as an example, we would ask all of our people booking online, is this the first time you've been to this restaurant, about 50% of the people would answer the question, and about 50% of them would say yes, this is the first time I've been to that particular restaurant. And so we would then say, ‘Okay, how many people are coming to each restaurant every month?’ And so it was about 300 diners were coming through OpenTable to each restaurant per month. And so you take about a quarter of those, or 50%, you had 75 incremental diners, for the cost of 12, or 13, or 14 incremental diners. So then, the ROI story got really powerful for that third group. And so for us, it was really thinking about the early adopters, and what their benefit was, early majority, that's the next group of 75, and that was the late majority of the laggards. And they had all three different reasons as to why they should want the system. And so that's what began our sales team thinking about that sales process based on trial and error and mistakes and things that went right.

Adam: And the key lessons, to me at least, are having clarity around who your customer is, very clearly understanding what your customer's needs are and then being able to very clearly articulate and ultimately deliver a solution that meaningfully helps them with whatever their needs are.

Chuck: Yeah, that's what we really tried to do is stay customer centric and again, that goes back to: all the restaurateur had to do was sign an agreement while falling over and we get the system in. That was the mentality that we had as a company and it was really about the culture and a lot of the people that brought their their best selves and made it a challenge for a lot of people and there was a couple other competitors at the time and so we want to be better than these competitors. A lot of things went right.

Adam: Chuck, you threw out the word culture. And I know that culture is a big area of focus for you right now. Your time is spent in the world of venture capital. You lead a company where you oversee more than 100 portfolio companies and so much of your time is spent helping those different portfolio companies build successful cultures. As the leader of OpenTable, much of your time was spent building and leading a highly successful culture. What do you believe are the keys to building winning teams and building winning cultures?

Chuck: Yeah, I mean, I think part of this depends on certainly the size of the organization. And so that can have a very different meaning, or indicate what actions an entrepreneur or leader might do. However, I still think it comes down to authenticity, being able to believe in what you're doing, and being passionate about it. And then leading from the front. Again, one of the things as a leader and what I like to see from the leaders that I work with is that there's nothing they wouldn't do that they would ask their people to do. And obviously, the CEO can't do everything that all of their people could do. But they wouldn't put their people in a position where they've got to do something that they wouldn't be willing to do themselves, right? And so that I think is a fundamental, foundational thing is that you've got to have a CEO or leader who is willing to put it all in and work alongside their people, if they have to. And so that's leaning in and being authentic. Next, I love to see in leaders people who actually take time, and you've talked a little bit about this, and listen to what's going on with their people, and take the feedback that they can. Being infinitely curious for a leader to me is one of the most important things about how do we go out there understand what the real world is like? What are things like in the market? How do we find what the solution is here, rather than come in with too many assumptions? And those to me are the things around culture. It’s this curiousness, this interest in getting to the right answer, not just to my answer. To getting it right versus being right, as we like to say. I also like to think about it inside out. How do we take care of our people first, and our customers next, and then our stakeholders and our investors and really work out. That and then I think there's a piece of humility or humbleness that we're learning as an organization. We're going to get some things wrong. But when we do, we're going to figure out how to get to the right answer and move forward. And I think having a culture where people can make mistakes, people can learn, and you're not so buttoned up that failure is not an option. I think there are times where failure is an option, and you try something, it doesn't work, you learn from it, and you move on. That's where I think the world is. I don't think you can predict everything perfectly. And if you wait for perfection, I think that slows you down as an organization.

Adam: Curiosity, authenticity, humility: key characteristics of the most successful leaders. The best leaders lead by example, is something you said. Failure is an option. I love that. Can you share a time in your career, where you failed and failed significantly, and what you took away from that experience, what you learn from it, and more broadly, what advice you have for anyone listening on how to manage and navigate whatever failures they encounter in their lives and in their careers?

Chuck: The list is so long, I don't know where to start. One of the big failures that we did, and we did it twice at OpenTable, which is probably more embarrassing, but one of the things we looked at was the reservation system. So some of our salespeople started talking to the large volume restaurants that don't use reservation sheets, but use waitlist technology, right? And so you figure, waitlist is just people writing names on a piece of paper and saying, ‘Oh, based on the number of people in front of you, it's going be 45 minutes or 50 minutes.’ Like you show up to The Cheesecake Factory or something and that's what they tell you, right. And so we decided to go down the path of reservations. We know that postman, we can just create a walk-in waitlist type of technology. And when we started, we wait, ‘Wait, this is a little different than our current technology. Let's get our own engineering team.’ Okay, we built another engineering team. Then we decided, ‘Oh, well it’s sold a little bit differently and we’ve got to do a different pricing structure, so let's get a different sales team.’ And then we got to market a little differently. Then we got the website and we’ve got to figure out what that looks like, so that's got to be a little bit different. And eventually it turned into trying to build two businesses at once, side by side, which is one of the things that I get most concerned about as a venture investor and looking in on companies is when they need multiple revenue lines to be successful. If you look at a lot of the biggest companies of all time, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, a lot of them had a core product and that was the vast majority of their revenue. And probably, frankly, the most profitable part of their revenue was a single business model. And so when I see companies that are needing two or three or four different revenue lines to get to a big number, that to me concerns me. It's hard enough to make one business successful, let alone splitting up your resources and trying to make two businesses successful within the same organization. Then we did that, again, we wound it down, we actually bought a piece of software from someone, we then realized how hard it was going to be. So we wound that down and got out of it. And then probably a year later, one of our customers who had, I don't know, about 30 hotels as well, and about 30 upscale restaurants that we were putting the system in. And then they said, ‘Okay, we've got these 30 hotels, we would love to get a room service app so that people could on their TVs order room service to be able to be delivered to their room.’ And so then we were like, okay, we can do this, and this customer wants it. And so we went down the path of bringing on another engineering team and bringing on another sales team. And we did the exact same thing. And so for me, this maniacal focus on a way going forward, and it doesn't mean there's always an opportunity to change that direction, but being deliberate about it. But a maniacal focus on: ‘I love revenue,’ when it comes to a business. I know there's a lot of industries out there where it's not purely about revenue out of the gate, it can be life sciences, or pharma or other stuff like that, was really about getting to certain milestones. But for me, I love the proof concept of revenue. And so how do we really focus on getting to commercialization, because there's a lot of entrepreneurs who are really good at the science or the technical aspect of it, but they're not as good at the commercial aspect of it. And they want to make a product that's perfect. And in some instances, like security, or cybersecurity, or financial security, or things like that, you do have to have a much higher bar of putting something out into the wild. But many businesses, most of these entrepreneurs, I think, could put stuff out into the wild sooner, learn earlier, really figure out if this product has legs, or what consumers would need to buy it or the B2B would need to buy it, and work with them to get their fingerprints all over it while you're scaling it up.

Adam: You've raised a lot of money as an entrepreneur. You've invested a lot of money as a VC. What are your best tips for listeners on both sides of the table? How to most effectively and strategically raise capital and how to most effectively and strategically invest in private companies?

Chuck: Like frameworks and rules of thumb, obviously, the best thing you can have is from a fundraising standpoint is customer revenue. But we know that sometimes there is investment that needs to happen on that. And yes, you're right, I've certainly raised a lot of money as an entrepreneur. And so I think there's a two-step process of raising capital that to me has to happen. One is to create scarcity, and two is to get the first check. One is certainly making sure that you've got a differentiated version of your product relative to anything else, or you've got a right to win somewhere. And so if you can have that, then in that same process, you're able to identify who are the 15 to 30 investors who are the most interested in that on the planet. If they invested in a direct competitor of yours, it's harder, but who have the ability to write checks to you. And it's understanding what their bogeys or milestones are that they want to see, how they think about the space, the size of checks that they write, how long their diligence process is. So I always like to try and get this list of 15 to 30 companies. And if you can meet as many of them ahead of time as possible. Because, for me as an investor, I don't like to write someone a check the first time I meet someone, I want to meet him and get to know him a little bit. So I like it when an entrepreneur comes to me and says, ‘Hey, I'm not raising yet, but I'm going to be raising in the fall. And I'd love to understand what you would want to see from me or what milestones you'd want to see from me that would make it interesting for you.’ And so now I can work with the entrepreneur ahead of time. And as an entrepreneur, now you can get a sense for ‘okay, what's the market like? What are people going to want to see?’ And again, it takes a lot of time to do this. And I know that entrepreneurs are doing a lot of different things, but I think having a well-thought out fundraising process, creating scarcity, understanding those potential investors or what they want to see, having a lot of them that you can talk to them all at once or relatively close to each other. Because otherwise, if you wanted that mojo and that energy from just coming off one meeting and going to another and whatnot, and then to getting a first check, and then figuring out how do you work with one of them to get them term sheet and over the line, because I feel like not a lot of investors want to be the first investor on but no one wants to miss a great deal. And so if you can figure out how to get that first check, more times than not in my experience, the round does get closed. And so as an entrepreneur, if you can get that right lead investor – and I would focus on getting the right investor rather than the right price, or the best price, I should say, because I just think that so often entrepreneurs are focused on the wrong thing. They're focused on, how do I maximize in cases of success rather than maximize my chances of success. Getting the best investor in there, for you at that point in time, is really about maximizing your chance of success, not necessarily optimizing in case of success. So I think as an entrepreneur, or as an investor, I like to see companies that are focused on the commercial aspect of their business, and not as much on the science or technical aspects of their business. Because to me, oftentimes, the best solution is a simple solution, you don't need the best technology. Sometimes you need the best business model. Sometimes it's the best go to market plan. Sometimes it's the best partnership or relationship that's out there. That can all be more powerful than a better technology, or a better gizmo, or widget. And maybe best is in the eye of the beholder too, because if you have what's the best pizza? Well, if you're from New York, you have a very different mindset as to what the best pizza is then you might have from San Francisco or Chicago. And so having the best in one instance may not matter relative to a lot of your other markets that you may be going into. To me, again, it's maximize the profitable revenue opportunity that really helps entrepreneurs win.

Adam: Chuck, a lot of the tips you shared are applicable outside of the space of raising money, outside of the space of investing. Develop meaningful relationships, invest time into relationships. You can’t expect to meet with someone once and get the deal done. It happens, but more often than not, deals get done over time. Chuck, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Chuck: I'm a big fan of reps, getting reps. Look at finding something you're passionate about, but getting reps, going out into the wild and understanding what does it take? Who's willing to pay for stuff? Is there a big market here? What do they want from this? And so you want to stay away from catastrophic failures or catastrophic reps where you put it all on the line. I mean, sometimes that's necessary, but just go out. And like you can hypothesize all you want in an office or in front of your computer, while you're doing yoga in the morning or something in your mind, you're thinking about all the different things that are possible. To me, the best way to really figure that out is to start is to just go do it and get out and do that. And that's where I think you're going to find yourself in some embarrassing situations, and you're going to find yourself wrong, uncomfortably from time to time and embrace that, though, as they say in the military, embrace the suck. It's going to happen. And that's okay. And that's how you learn and get better. Get the reps.

Adam: As you know, I interviewed your good friend who you work closely with, Mike Evans, You're heavily involved in GrubHub. And I asked this question to Mike. ‘Mike, what can anyone do to become more successful personally, professionally?’ And he said, ‘Get started.’ You get started, you’re 51% there.

Chuck: Lean in and get started.

Adam: Chuck, thank you for all the great advice. And thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Chuck: Yeah, Adam, thanks a lot. Great to be here. Thank you for your time. Thank you.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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