Brad Pederson | The Four Types of Luck: How Dumb Luck, Grit Luck, Attraction Luck, and Seeing Luck Can Shape Your Success

. Brad Pedersen, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Brad Pedersen
Perfect, it is great.

Brad Pedersen
Hey, I am super excited to be here today and really looking forward to the conversation and seeing what we are going to explore together.

Srini Rao (02:22.25)
Yeah, so I was introduced to you by way of Dan Martell and his wife. And when they told me you ran a toy company, I thought, yeah, I have a one-year-old nephew and I have always loved toys. So I definitely want to talk to Brad Pedersen. Um, you have a new book out called startups and to all of which we will get into. Um, but given the subject matter of the book, I wanted to start by asking, what is the very first toy that you remember getting as a kid and how did that end up influencing where you have ended up and what you have been done with your life?

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, look, that is a great question. Because I think this is what I love about toys. Well, let me answer it first by just saying this is what I think toys do. Toys are really important to our development, right? Because play is a part of how we develop as people. And we learn how to interact. We learn new skills development. And we learn how to problem solve. And toys are a facilitator of all that. So.

And I love the fact that if you think back as a kid, you can remember those really great toys, those moments where you got that thing under the Christmas tree and you opened up and it was like, wow, you were so excited because this toy was going to be full of possibilities and release your imagination. So for me, I was fascinated with flight and I remember opening up a big giant styrofoam glass.

And the reason I was so excited about that, because I'd been with my parents in the mall, and I probably was six years old, and I was watching these guys throwing these gliders, and the gliders would do these loops. You remember these? Okay, and the gliders would do loops, and I just was like captivated and mesmerized by the fact that this thing would fly, and it was big, and it was colorful. There were some stickers on the foam.

Srini Rao
I remember those. Oh yeah.

Brad Pedersen
And I just instantly imagined, okay, I am going outside and I am going to make this thing glide down. We were up on a hill and there was a big lot below us and I was already imagining how I was going to explore all the possibilities of flight with this incredible new toy. So it wasn't the first toy I got, but it is the one that I remember that was really impactful for sure. How about you?

Srini Rao
You know, it is funny, as you were saying that I was trying to think back to the ones that stood out. So there are two that come to mind. So my parents didn't have a lot of money when we first moved from Australia to Canada. My dad had just finished his PhD. My mom was pregnant with my sister. And I don't know if you remember key cars, but they were like hot wheels where you squeezed a key. And I shot them under the fridge Christmas morning. And, you know, my parents at that time were not resourceful enough to get them out. But my dad went to Japan.

Brad Pedersen
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Srini Rao
in the 80s and my dad literally hated anything that was not made in Japan. So anytime we would buy toys, he would go and look at them. He is like, this is a piece of crap. It was made in China. And like today I joke with him, he realized your iPhone is made in China, right? Like he gets annoyed that things are made in China. But back then there was validity to that. And so he brought me this remote control boat. And because the Japanese were masters at making really, really high quality toys.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah.

Brad Pedersen
Hmm

Srini Rao
I remember he brought a remote control boat and we lived in Canada, we were snowing like eight months of the year in Edmonton. So we'd have to go find swimming pools at relatives apartment complexes. But that toy stands out to me as one that really kind of struck me. I'd always loved those kinds of toys. Yeah, remote control, airplanes, that kind of stuff. I had a remote control car and then we started looking at how expensive they got. He was like, this is an expensive hobby.

Brad Pedersen 
Yeah.

Srini Rao
But I think that the thing that struck me most about what you said was like, just seeing the sense of possibility, right the moment you walk into a toy store, you see a toy. And I feel like we lose that as adults. Like as adults, we are not as easily mesmerized. And I have noticed this with my one-year-old nephew is that he is mesmerized by everything. And the joke is it is like, why do we buy this kid toys? He literally wants to play with like pots and pans. My sister was like, you guys got him a drum set.

Brad Pedersen
Hmm.

Srini Rao
He ignored it. I gave him an open empty milk can, and then he started using it as a drum. But why do you think that is? Why is it that as adults, we don't have that same sort of childlike curiosity and that sense of possibility? Like what happens to that and how do we get it back?

Brad Pedersen
Yeah.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, and this is such a great question. And this is really a big part of my book, is trying to just unpack what happens. Like, why is it that, you know, we grow up, we grow up and get mature and we stop doing the things that we did as kids that really allowed us to grow and develop and explore possibilities within us. You know, I think Shaw said, you know, we don't stop playing because we get old, we get old because we stop playing. And, you know, as you think about kids and

just all the energy and vitality that is in youth. And just what are the attributes you would describe? You'd say, well, okay, they have incredible enthusiasm. They wake up excited to take on the day. They have incredible curiosity. You know, a caterpillar crawling on the ground, a leaf that is unique in color or shape. They stop and pay attention to it, right? They have...

just abounding faith. They believe anything is possible, right? They just, they can see it. They believe they could fly if they put on the right cape or that they could transform things into, with magical tricks into something that was unique. And they just, they are incredibly hopeful, right? They really do see the good and the possibilities. And I remember as a kid, I was going to be a fighter pilot, probably a fireman at some point.

Srini Rao
Yeah.

Srini Rao
Uh-huh.

Brad Pedersen
potentially be a police officer, you know, I was going to scale Everest. There just was no bounds. And what happens as we go through life, we start to, we just start to face friction. We just start to feel resistance. And when that resistance hits us, we have a choice to make. We can either push back against it, but our natural tendency is to actually submit to it.

And it is a slow process of building apathy over time. And apathy actually means a lack of passion. But when you think about kids, kids are very passionate, right? You see them, and of course they get into fights and they are not great sharers and all that, because they are very passionate about the things that they love and what they want to do and being in the moment. But you see people go to this place of apathy. And Ben Franklin said, most people die at age 25. They just wait to 70 to get buried.

And I think it is a sad statement or a humane experience, but I think it is what will happen if we don't lean into continually pushing against the natural tendencies, the natural gravity that the headwinds of life will force on you. And it is a big part of the story in the book and how there is gotta be purpose to your pain, because pain is a part of life. Suffering is optional.

Srini Rao 
Yeah.

Brad Pedersen
You decide what the pain is going to mean. I am a big believer that on the other side of the pain is a better version of yourself There has to be purpose to your pain, but it is a choice, right? It is a it is a choice that you decide what it is ultimately going to mean and how it is going to be form formative to you But it is a part of our human experience that we can't we can't you know, the great It is paradox of life for all the joy happiness and success that we are all striving to achieve we have to be willing to accept the pain the suffering and agony that comes along with just

Srini Rao
Mm.

Brad Pedersen
the realities of life. It is two sides of the same coin. And unfortunately, I think a lot of us just choose to get beaten down by the resistance, by the difficulties and the pain. And I really believe that that is what drives away a lot of the fascination and imagination in terms of what is really truly possible for our lives.

Srini Rao
Yeah. Well, it is so fascinating that you mentioned observation, because I remember my parents came back from India and my dad had hung up these paintings in the entryway to our house, these new sculptures or whatever they were. And probably a good week and a half went by, and my dad was like, what do you think of the new sculptures in the hallway? And I was like, there are new sculptures in the hallway? And I realized that as an adult, I'd walked through that door.

probably a thousand times and gone through the same routine a thousand times that I just kind of didn't pay attention. And I thought, yeah, but if that was my nephew, he would have instantly noticed that.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, you know, one of the things that I was fascinating to discover as I was going through the book was this study that NASA did in regards to human creative genius. And there, this study was then translated into kids, they were tracking kids from early age all the way up to adulthood. And what they found is that the attributes for creative genius for kids five and under was in the 90th percent. So in other words, most kids are born.

with an incredibly high EQ towards Creative Genius. They measured those same kids further down the line. I think it was probably 12 year old, 10 to 12 years old, and suddenly found that it had gone from 90% down to like 50%. And then they followed them right through to adulthood. And by the time they hit their mid 20s, it had gone down to 2%. And it kind of just speaks to this, I guess, momentum of life that you can choose to participate in or,

become aware of it and then choose to push against it in terms of how do we continually remain childlike? Like I think when Jesus called us to be like little children, I honestly believe that he wanted us to mimic and adopt these attributes.

of kids, of being eternally curious and fascinated and constantly imagining. Like, you know, we were created to create and I believe we live in a place that is full of our creator is imagination. And then we were called to continue to do it. This is something that we are supposed to be doing as humans. It is what makes us unique as humans. In fact, you know, the three things that make us unique are, you know, we are born for relationships. We thrive when we build relationships with others that are meaningful in terms of connections.

We are called to be creative. We are called to actually unleash our creative force and our creative genius in the world to build more value for the planet and for people. And then we are empowered to choose. We get to choose that every other creature works off a habit and instinct. We get the opportunity to choose what we do with what happens. And we are the only species that can choose to be less than we were designed for. Like a tree will grow as high as it can. A squirrel will collect as many nuts as possible before wintertime.

Brad Pedersen
A human can be less than the best version of themselves if they choose. So it is incredibly daunting, but also incredibly rewarding to understand that that is an incredibly powerful, unique attribute that we have been gifted as humans. And it is up to us to decide how we unleash that, how we release it. But I can tell you for someone like myself who is lived through a bunch of things and some things have been high and some things are low,

My goal is at the end of my life to be laying on my deathbed knowing that I had wore out and not rusted out. That within my faculties that I had unpacked all the possibilities that I left behind in the field of life. I don't want to go to my grave thinking like, what if, what could have, should have, right? So that is, I think the call for all of us. So I think it starts with childlike curiosity, imagination, faith, hope, and just enduring belief in anything was possible.

Srini Rao
Mm.

Srini Rao
Yeah.

Srini Rao
What role do you think our education system plays in kind of drilling that out of us?

Brad Pedersen
Well, hey, I... So for me... Yeah, okay. Look, here is my belief, honestly. I think that school serves two distinct functions in our life. It serves a function of getting us to think, okay? To be problem solving and to be thinkers. And I think that is a really important skill set to develop.

Srini Rao 
It is a loaded question, I think. You can hear my bias in the question. And I am the son of a college professor.

Brad Pedersen
Second, you develop important relationships. I mean, I met my wife in college. So without going to college, I wouldn't have had that incredible blessing in my life. Beyond that, I am just, you know, I think our current education system has, it is still legacy from the industrial revolution, industrial complex, not to minimize it. I think it is very valuable to continue to learn, but I wouldn't say that I believe in finishing school. I believe that it is...

You know, it starts at home. We are the result of the environment that we are raised in. We actually adopt, mimicry is a big part of who we are. So, you know, our first influences are going to have impact in the way that we learn and the way we see the world, our belief systems. And so if we know that, then I think the real education system starts at home. Starts with you as the parents leading by example.

and setting precedents for the way that your kids ought to live a life of abundance. But of course, school institutions have a part to play. I just don't think they are the part that is going to make the most meaningful impact in terms of how someone forms their belief systems, their values, and the virtues that they would then want to express as they live out their lives.

Srini Rao
Well, makes me think it is probably a good thing we are telling my one-year-old nephew every day that he is a genius. Hehehe.

Brad Pedersen
I think affirmations of what you know to be true based upon scientific results is probably a good thing.

Srini Rao
Yeah, trust me, that guy has no lack of self-confidence. He is already pretty sure. I can tell half the time I am thinking he is in his mind, he is like, you guys are idiots. You keep asking me the same stupid questions over and over again. I already showed you where the fan and the light are. Let is move to something else. So it is funny because as I was reading your book, and I was thinking about all the brands that you mentioned, I have been thinking about sort of the evolution of toys, because in the 80s, late 80s and 90s, when I grew up and a toy came out,

Brad Pedersen
Hahaha

Srini Rao
it just sort of had this iconic imprint. Like you can take toys from the eighties, like a G.I. Joe or Transformers or things that you mentioned. I mean, there is even an entire Netflix show about this. Like you remember the Cabbage Patch Kids craze, right? Like that was one of the funniest things my sister was too at the time. And Cabbage Patch Kids were expensive as hell. They were like $80. My dad was like, we can't afford that. So he got her a knockoff. And as a two-year-old, she literally looked at it and she was like, this is a fake. We are like.

Brad Pedersen
Sure.

Srini Rao (17:19.45)
Yeah, it is needless to say, you know, my sister is going to have her hands full with my nephew. But the thing that you know, really, as I have read through your book, and as I am talking to you thinking about is like, I don't feel like toys have that same sort of iconic imprint in the way they used to in culture, right? Like, because if you think about those years, like you think about something like a cabbage patch kit, like you associate that period of time with that toy, because it was so prominent.

Brad Pedersen
Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao 
So like, what role do you think our advancements in technology have, you know, made toys better, like improved toys for better or worse? Because I think there are upsides, right? Like I am thinking to my nephew, he has this little digital fake phone, but it actually teaches him things. On the flip side, the toys that he seems to gravitate towards most, which makes me really happy, the first toy I ever got him was Curious George. And he still loves that thing. And, but the thing is that, like I can't think of a modern day Curious George equivalent.

Brad Pedersen
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pedersen
Hmm. Yeah.

Srini Rao
Does that make sense? You see where I am going with this?

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, I agree. It is, I think it is just a phenom within our society in general as we have evolved. I mean, we talk about share of wallet and I would just say share of mind. There is so many competitive forces now towards that. Like when we were growing up as kids, so I grew up in a very similar era as you, there wasn't mobile phones, there wasn't laptops.

There was no subscription video services. We had two channels, you know. And so there was just time, capacity of time to invest into play things and to be with physical toys. Cause that was the alternative, right? That is really what was there at the time. But now there is a lot of competitive pressures into what can we use to occupy our time that...

unleashes our playful creativity. And it is not a negative thing, quite frankly. I think that a number of the new technologies are super helpful and a bunch of the toys have incorporated that into them. But it is like anything in life, right? It is all about...

everything in sort of a reasonable amount is good. It is when it is excessive that it becomes potentially harmful. And even with that, I remember when I was a kid, there would be times I'd be playing with my capsela set. I don't even know if you know what that is, but it was like a construction toy that you connect these things together and you can make these robotic...

vehicles and or vehicles have actually run and stuff like that. And that, you know, my parents would say you have got X amount of time to play with it. And if I exceeded that time, I was in trouble. Well, that is been replaced with like an app on a phone now, right? It is it is play. It is engaging. It is it is unleashing creative forces and a part of development that is a part of our humanity. It is just a different medium by how we are doing it now. But, you know, it is like similar to.

Brad Pedersen
I talk about this today like iconic bands. Like I just went and saw U2 play at the Sphere in Vegas. Mind blowing experience, incredible. And, but I grew up when I was in college, U2 released Octume Baby and it was a, it was a very influential album at a time in my life that I still go back to and I have all these fond memories. But let is also remember that there was no Spotify. There was no Apple Music.

Srini Rao
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pedersen
I mean, I had to buy, I think, I think I got the record. I am not sure, but I think CDs were just kind of starting to come out if in a meaningful way, but there was limited mediums by which you could communicate with those artists. Therefore there was less of them and they became iconic. Well today, I mean, name a band in the last, you know, Taylor Swift aside, name the band last five years that truly has become iconic.

Srini Rao
Mm.

Brad Pedersen
I mean, music has become much more transactional. Like a song you like, you hear it for a while and then it is gone. And you probably don't even know the band, you just know the song. So there is kind of a different dynamic. And I think toys have a similar sort of phenom that it is a faster paced society, multiple competing mediums. And so those Cabbage Patch, Furbies, you know, Yo-Yos for that matter, right? Things that were really big at a period of time that captured everyone is imagination.

Srini Rao
Yeah.

Srini Rao
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pedersen
and also the medium by which they were communicated was limited, it just was easier to build that kind of phenom. And I think today it is a lot more noisy, a lot more busy, and it is harder to stand out amongst the current environment.

Srini Rao
Yeah, well, you are lucky that you got to be part of the Octang Baby generation. I unfortunately was part of the disco tech generation, which I think is the worst album that YouTube has done. Because I remember very distinctly my first YouTube concert, that was the first concert I ever attended. It was in college, it was in Oakland, and the disco tech album had come out. And they started the concert playing all, you know, some of the disco tech stuff and people were just kind of underwhelmed. And then the minute they went back to the old stuff, everybody was thrilled. And then finally on the next album, they got back to like the YouTube we know.

Brad Pedersen
Mmm.

Srini Rao
Yeah, that always stayed with me as one of those bizarre experiences. I was like, Bono may think I am an idiot for thinking that album sucks, but I will probably never meet Bono. So it doesn't matter.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah.

Brad Pedersen
Have you listened to his audiobook, Surrender?

Srini Rao
I have read the book. Yeah, I read the book. U2 is to me one of those fascinating case studies because they are a band that has sort of transcended time. There is almost no musical group that has managed to stay relevant for multiple decades the way they have, that I can think of.

Brad Pedersen
Okay, all right.

Brad Pedersen
Hmm.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, yeah, and evolved and to your point, not all the evolution was good. I mean, I talked about that album, they released free on Apple and how that was a disaster and I love the fact that you just kind of owned it, said that, okay, we thought this was going to be a great thing by giving this away on every Apple device and in the end, everyone resented the fact that they were stuck with the, I, in fact, I think, I think I still have that album and I don't, I don't think I have ever listened to it in full cause it was just not good. So, um.

Srini Rao
Yeah.

Srini Rao
Yeah.

Brad Pedersen
But I love that he owned that, you know, they didn't get it right. They had some evolution that didn't go the way they wanted. And yeah, I love as a band to see them though, that they have pushed the possibilities. They want it to evolve, they wanted to grow. They wanted to continue to show that they weren't just like a one trick pony. And I think that kind of speaks to all of our humanity. It is like, let is, you know, the Greeks had this term called a Rite and

I love the term because basically it was something that was ascribed to people in Greek society that had basically utilized all their faculties to their possibilities. They were just really, they used their physical strength, they were wise, they were caring for the community and they just, they did as best they could with everything they got. And if I think about U2 as a band, I think they have really evolved and they have tried a bunch of things and they didn't get it all right. But they are at a point where...

you know, this sphere crescendo, if we are going to call it that, is, you know, it is the most incredible, multi-sensory experience I have ever been in. And it just, it was focused on Octune Baby, but they brought in some Joshua Tree and some other iconic songs into it as well. And it just showed how they, over a band over time, as you said, have progressed and been relevant right up until modern day. So it was really cool.

Srini Rao
Well, talk to me about the trajectory that gets you to actually starting a toy company and what advice did your parents give you about making your way in the world? Like what role did they play in you ending up here? How have you gotten to the point where you ended up starting a toy company and then now writing a book about the experience?

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, look, I tell people that my life is a series of happy accidents. It makes no sense that I started a toy business because I don't come from the toy business. In fact, I come from a line of chiropractors. Like my father is a chiropractor. His father and mother were chiropractors. My great grandfather was the very first chiropractor in Denmark. So this was kind of like what we did as Peterson is. And and then on top of that, we grew up in the prairies of Canada that were known for oil and agriculture.

Toy companies didn't exist there. So what I can say though, that my dad was such an incredible influence, even though he was a chiropractor, he always had businesses that he was invested into or yet on the side, and he was very creative and entrepreneurial. And he always challenged me to push the possibilities of what I was able to do.

And so, you know, he, he actually subscribed to a magazine that I was in his office one day. I was, I was actually going to college, going into chiropractic. So I was in pre-chiropractic. I am sitting in his office and I read this article about a kid who invented a toy. And it was a regs richest story. And it was about a flying toy, which I have already told you, I love flying toys. And I was super intrigued, inspired. I ordered some, they got shipped to me.

played with it, I thought it was super cool. And then I got this idea, I said, I wonder if I could sell these. And fortunately for me, they were just as naive about Canada as I was about selling toys. So it was kind of like a perfect marriage of people who didn't know what they were doing. And I became a distributor of toys in the Canadian market. That was my first product. And it was an amazing product because I had to solve a bunch of problems. You couldn't sell it just by looking at it, you had to demonstrate it. So that...

me to think about marketing and then distribution and then ultimately licensing partnerships and it was kind of a crazy just early beginning that probably shouldn't have worked but because I had the willingness the curiosity first and foremost about what could happen there the creativity to put together a proposal around a business and then try and make it work and then the courage to just try which is kind of the combination of the three things that are needed to launch any idea.

Brad Pedersen
And that is how I had the happy accident of launching into the toy business.

Srini Rao
Yeah. Well, one of the things that you talk about in the book was the fact that, you know, this didn't go very smoothly. In fact, you had some problems. And this in particular struck me. You said what I did not realize at the time is that fast, undisciplined growth tends to sugarcoat systematic problems that have left unchecked and have grave consequences for a company unknown to us, our fast growth lulled us into a ready fire aim approach. We were growing recklessly flying by the seat of our pants.

and through the grit and sheer force of will, we somehow managed to always pull off our plans. So the funny thing about that is I think that, when people are building a business, like you talked to any online business owner, we are like, oh, we wish we were bigger, we wish we were growing more. And the idea of undisciplined growth, I think just doesn't really occur to people. I think we have seen the consequences of that in Silicon Valley, where you have serious problems, ranging all the way from what Facebook is like today to something like a...

Uh, what is it? Uh, Theranos, you know, where nobody is there, there are no like sort of checks and balances, but how do you get yourself into a place like when people are craving growth, why did they not even think about undisciplined growth? Like that just doesn't occur to you. I think when you are early on, you are just like growth. That is it.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, yeah, look, people ask me all the time, what is your greatest regret in business?

And I tell people that if I had to go back in time, first of all, I say, I wouldn't change anything because I had to go through what I went through in order to become who I am today. So, I mean, there was a bunch of unhappy moments in my life, but somehow that was a part of my journey to grow through that. But if I had to change one thing, I would have went and worked somewhere else and learned from somebody else is mistakes versus my own mistakes, how to properly build, grow, and sustain a business.

And when you grow a business, there is kind of like four phases it goes through. It is starting a business, scaling a business. Then you are trying to sustain the business, make it profitable. And then there is a succession side of it. At some point down the road, you need to figure out how you are either going to sell it and, or have a new generation come in and run it. So, um,

I spent, obviously, I was in my early 20s when I got into this business. I was incredibly energetic, enthusiastic, and my real attribute at the time was I was just the hardest working person I knew. I would just go longer and harder than anyone else. I just never gave up. I was very tenacious and I would just really try. And so for me, growth was not an issue. I found ways to grow the business and in fact,

most of my startups have had high growth, but that first startup in particular.

Brad Pedersen
I learned a bunch of tough lessons. And here is the thing, we all are supposed to grow. That is a part of our human experience. You are supposed to grow. It is about growing in a way that is sustainable, that actually is measurable, and it is not just growth for the sake of growth. And I found out the hard way that if you grow too fast too quickly, that you can break things. And there is three areas I identify that need to be constantly reinvented, and reinvented.

The frequency of that reinvention just depends on the state of your growth. And those three things are your people, the people you surround yourself with, because as a founder, when you start off, you are the one doing all the work, but...

You can only do so much. Ultimately, if you want to scale something to significance, you have to bring in others around you to complement your efforts and to build in redundancy to where you are not necessarily strong. So reinventing your people, reinventing your systems. So the systems, everything from the ERP you are using to track things.

but also the cadence and the rigor by which you are measuring, you are inspecting what you are expecting and how you are communicating and how people are all singing from the same song sheets. And that, you know, every time you grow a business, you break systems and you break the way that flows happen and you get upset customers and or problems. So it is a constant reinvention. And then finally, the third thing is you have to reinvent your cash because the businesses I have been involved in have required cash to get going. Most businesses require a certain amount of seed capital and or, you know, venture capital to get them up and running.

And oftentimes you don't realize, you just say, oh, we need to grow, it will be fine. We grow and that generates cash and that is how we grow. Well, typically you have to like, you know, it is like going to a fireplace and say, give me heat and I will give you wood. No, you have to give it wood first and then it gives you the heat. So cash goes in to hire the people, to build the products, to then be able to solve a problem and sell products and or services that usually you are getting paid for on some kind of terms. At least in my case, it was like we made

Brad Pedersen
toys in Asia, we had to ship them on the water, put them in a warehouse, ship them to customers who took up to 180 days to pay us. Well, to grow that model, you need a whole lot of cash to order the product in order to get paid down the road. So those three areas are the flanking maneuvers, if they are not reinvented, that will come back and haunt you. So everyone wants to grow, it is aspirational. And I warn founders, I say, yes, you do want to grow.


Brad Pedersen
make sure you are getting ahead of your growth, that you are growing these three things, these potential flanks within your business, so that you don't actually end up being flanked by not having those in place ahead of the problem.

Srini Rao
Yeah, it is funny you say that. I think it was actually Dan Martell who recommended the book on his email list is Victor Chang is book, Extreme Revenue Growth, where he actually talks about systems and he says one of the first things he does when he works with companies to get them to a million to 25 in revenue is sit down and make them document every single process. And he was like, if it sounds mind numbing, that is because it is. And yet he said, you

you can't do it, you know, you can't scale without it. Cause like I, after reading that, I finally realized why companies like Google have like these HR departments and all these processes and procedures, which seem like bureaucratic bullshit. And then you realize it is like, oh, that is actually necessary in order to, you know, maintain this thing. But I think the other thing, you know, when I think about uncontrolled growth, like we have seen this happen to bloggers who, you know, have some blog posts go viral and, you know, they get flooded with like thousands of email subscribers and they haven't monetized the thing at all.

and suddenly their email newsletter costs way more than they were ever expecting it to. It goes from an $80 a month service to now $600 a month, and they are bringing in nothing.

Brad Pedersen
Hmm

Srini Rao
But yeah, I mean, I think that systems are one of those things, like they sound boring, but I have found over and over again that like, once you start to codify processes, it makes a world of difference.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, look, it is sort of the theory of constraints. It sounds obvious, but it is not. You are as strong as your weakest link. So as you go through and look at your organization and how ultimately what we are doing is the business of business is people, and we are solving somebody is problem with our business or service. So how do we ensure that we get that product or service to the customer in as a low-friction-free way that ensures that they are delighted by the experience? And in the beginning, it is easy.

Srini Rao 
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pedersen
if you are a bakery and you are making muffins and all of a sudden they become the most, you know.

sought after muffins in the world, you just have to actually, you know, now you have got to hire people, get more equipment, maybe you have to expand your facilities. Well, there is all kinds of things that will break if you don't actually have the systems to be able to make sure that customer at the other end is getting the product on time, right quality and ensuring the experience is delightful. And it sounds simple. It is simple. It is just really hard to consistently manage that unless you are going to reinvent these things on an ongoing basis.

Srini Rao
Well, let is talk about the role of the CEO, because you talk about the three roles of the CEO being vision, values, and finding talent. And it is funny because their books start with Y, and every one of these sort of books, we kind of conceptually get it, and yet they are really hard to kind of make actionable, because vision is often so sort of broad and vague. So talk to me about how those things actually get determined. I mean, finding talent.

That obviously means sometimes you make bad hires to find good ones, but that one I think is a bit more straightforward. But vision and values, I feel like can be somewhat nebulous.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, no, for sure. I don't think I got this right until these most recent companies. In fact, I think I confused and conflated a bunch of ideas about what it really means to have a vision into that values. So first of all, I just want to clarify that it depends on the what phase of business you are in. Like if you are in the startup mode, where you just get an idea off the ground, you know, in that case, you as a CEO, probably the

a founder or co-founder, you are a generalist. You are doing everything, right? It is hard to do anything but just make sure kind of the thing is going. But as you are starting to scale up, and this is really where the focus of my comments are, the three things that the founder has to be thinking about all the time is setting the vision. So there is a difference between purpose and vision in my experience. The purpose is the purpose of the company.

It is what are you called to do? And it is something that we believe is very sacred. Like we tell people we are a purpose for the company. When I think about Lomi and Pila and what we are doing with those, we have got this incredible purpose to make impact or creating a waste free future, which in our lifetime is probably never going to happen, but we are going to put momentum in place to actually get that to become a possibility. And that is sort of the overall purpose of why this organization exists. It is the why, right?

The vision is seeing that these are the steps that we have to take in a series of one, three, and five years to move us towards that purpose.

And so when I say the CEO is setting the vision, they have already identified what the purpose statement is, which is the why statement for the business. The vision is an ongoing view down the, it is taking the telescope and looking towards your destination and kind of zooming back a little bit to say, okay, in order to get there, here is what we have to be in the next 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, 36 months. And quite frankly, 36 months is kind of the farthest out that I look, because I think it is hard to predict what the planet is going to be doing, particularly in the rate of change that we have at this point in time.

Brad Pedersen
but you are visioning the possibilities. You are casting that vision into that future, which is kind of what I love about being an entrepreneur is that we are time traveling. We are literally going into the future, imagining what it could look like, and then we are coming back and we are creating it. Everything is created twice, first in our minds, and then we action it, right? So setting the vision is basically evangelizing your team that this is where we are going to be in 12 months, here we are going to be in 18 months, and this is going to be in 36 months, as best as we can.

Okay, because of course it is, it is dynamic and we have to be fluent, you have to be willing to be nimble and along the way we may have to change course, right? It is, it is not like we get this perfect every time. So it is an ongoing process, not a one and done, it is ongoing. And it is something we are doing on an annual basis, quarterly basis, and quite frankly, even weekly based on feedback, we will do slight course corrections along the way, but setting the vision and then ensuring that they have the right resources in place to make it possible, coming back to the systems, the processes, and then people.

So the people is the second role of a CEO in scale-up mode. And the idea is this, is that as a CEO, if I said you should double your business, you could probably imagine how it would be possible with you on your own, just more effort could double the business. But if I tell you to 10 times your business, that is going to like break your head to even imagine what would need to happen in order to tax the outcome. In that case, the only way it is possible is to actually

hire the people that would actually be able to then come in and go from being generalists to specialists. And if you get it right, it is not additive. It is exponential. Like high-performing teams, when they are high-performing and they are working together, they are creating exponential outcomes. And I tell people that my belief system is this. If you hire the right people, they are free. Because the value they are going to create is so much greater.

than what you are going to pay them, that they will absolutely more than pay for themselves and then some in terms of the value of credit. So that is the people side. But then finally is the values. And we call them values. I think they are more like virtues. They are the attributes of behavior. So you as a CEO can say, you know, our value is courage. Like for instance, we in PILA have four values. One of them is courage.

Srini Rao
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pedersen
And courage is taking action despite uncertainty. So it can't just be a noun. It is got to be like described as behavior. Cause that is what that is about. It is, it is the behaviors of the organization and the values and our virtues of a company is going to be determined based on the people you hire. Right. They will ultimately create the culture based upon the behavior that you are hiring for and that is why it is really important to have clear values and our virtues so that you know exactly, these are the type of people we are looking for. But then you as a CEO need to live it out.

best than anyone. You can't say we have courage as a value or virtue and then do things that are not courageous. Or you are out of integrity with what you are saying is important to you, right? And then it is also using those as a baseline to call people out, both good and bad. So when people are, like I would tell you, at our all hands, we, monthly all hands, when we have people together, we go through our values every single time.

Srini Rao
down.

Brad Pedersen
We talk about them and then most importantly, we call out people who have lived them. We create, we want people to see examples of where they have lived that out. And we want to celebrate it, cause we want to see more of it. You will get more of what you focus on. And if you focus on what you want in terms of good OEMs, you will get more of that out of your organization. The flip side is that, particularly within our executive leadership team, you need to call people out when they are not living in the integrity of those values. And quite frankly, if teammates,

are not living in those values, that is how we let people go. Because ultimately that is the behavior set. Your behavior is so important to ensure you get this right. Because if you give any leeway in this, it becomes the new standard that everybody gets measured by. So it is something you got to hold on to. It is very, very sacred. So again, the three things that I think a CEO should be doing, setting the vision.

They should be hiring the right people and empowering them and leashing the possibility of them and then living up the values better than anyone else in the organization and or celebrating them when they see it in others.

Srini Rao (42:07.67)
Yeah. Well, it is funny because it reminds me of a story that Sam Altman told. They made the entire Y Combinator curriculum available via a podcast called How to Start a Startup. And he was talking about culture and how hard it is to get it right. And Airbnb, he said, didn't exceptional job at this. And apparently Brian Chesky at the early days of Airbnb, when he would interview people, he would ask them if they would still take the job if they had a year to live. Like that is how dedicated he had gotten these people to.

Brad Pedersen
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pedersen
Hmm. Great.

Srini Rao
this sort of mission and culture of Airbnb.

Brad Pedersen
I think it is such a great, I mean, that question really quickly distills down. Is this something I am passionate about? Is this something I feel this is worth my life? But like, if your life is limited, which it is for all of us, by the way, then what are you going to give your precious most precious resource to that really you believe is, is being in good conscious, a steward of, so I love that, that call out. And I also love.

Tony Shea, when he would hire people and then bring them in through his Zappos University, at the very end, he would offer people I think it was two or three grand, if they would leave and very quickly flush out the mercenaries from the missionaries. The missionaries are there for the mission. They believe in what you are doing. The mercenaries, they take the cash. Good way to get rid of them, because they are going to cost you more money down the line. Smart.

Srini Rao
Yeah.

Srini Rao
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let is talk about something else that you said in the book. This really stood out to me. You said, pride typically flows from the intoxication of success at the apex of accomplishment, just when it seems we can rest on our laurels, relish in our achievements or take delight in what our hands have created. This is when we are most at risk. And you said success often leads to pride and pride quickly results in excess overhead, apathy and a lack of vigilance. Left unchecked, it will be.

the flanking factors that compromise your business and be the beginning of the end at a once promising opportunity. I think that stood out to me because I have experienced this myself. And I remember my mentor, Greg, used to tell me that, in every business you have something called the momentum window, where if you play your cards right, you will never be back down at the same level again. And the funny thing is that, as I thought about that, anytime I have had a moment in the spotlight, I become exceptionally paranoid of

Brad Pedersen
Hmm.

Srini Rao (44:21.91)
this is really dangerous because this is a pinnacle and it should not be seen as such. Like I am always very wary of moments in the spotlight now because I have seen how much that can blind you to like the reality of the situation.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, nothing fails like success. In general, by the way, success tends to be a terrible teacher. And I think that, speaking from my own personal experience, so young age, start this toy company, scale it quickly, get lucky, let is be clear. I mean, a big part of success in business is that it is the right idea at the right time. And that timing piece is really what we call luck.

like meeting my wife, you know, we walked in the same hallway at the same time in university and it was the most lucky thing ever happened to me. Um, but it is amazing that if you get some of that early success, um, two things happen, you start to feel like you are pretty good. And secondly, because you were successful, you don't stop to really reflect on it. You just, oh, this is the way it is.

Right? We tend to reflect only when things go bad and we are forced to stop and we go, Oh, what happened? How did it happen? Why did that happen? How can I learn from that and unpack the lessons from it? Whereas success, we don't naturally do that. Um, and I think it is actually an important lesson on its own, but at a young age, I had built success, had momentum and our company was actually tracking to the top 100 fastest growing companies in Canada, five years in a row.

And so here is me, a young kid from this place that is not supposed to have toy companies making it work, growing this thing and feeling kind of cocky. And as I have come to learn that a little bit of ego and pride leads to overhead and just poor decision-making.

And very quickly, the company went from being a hero to zero because we tipped some governance to their bank, got upside down our balance sheet, and I was throwing the special loans. And that was actually a fantastic forcing function to me to stop and reflect, for maybe the first time in a long time as to what had gone wrong. And so as I, and you know, I have had many other sort of, I would say.

Brad Pedersen
tragic business events over time. Although my father used to say all the time that if money can solve your problems, it is not really a problem. And he is right because if it comes down to your health and or your family, those are real problems. Financial problems, while they are a problem at the moment, they typically are something you can solve, which is some time and creativity. But the thing that I have come to learn is that, you know, hubris or pride is like, pride comes before the fall.

And in fact, Jim Collins documented this. And when he actually, after good to great and built to last, he went out and wrote How the Mighty Fall. He said, okay, there is a pattern for how these companies have gone big. Is there a pattern for how these companies go from, being world-class brands like Rubbermaid and Zenith to capitulation? And the very first step is hubris born of success.

You stop doing the things you used to do to earn the success and start expecting you deserve it. And that is actually a really important thing to think about. Like it took us a lot of hard work to get to a place to earn the supposed success. But when you go to a place mentally where it is like, no longer do I have to do that work. I just deserve it because of who I am and the brand I am, the way I show up. I think it is something we are all pretty susceptible to, quite frankly, and I am not immune to it even at this point in my life. And so I think it is one of those really...

important things to constantly think about like my coach says to me all the time like a skilled hunter knows how to hunt the master hunter knows how he or she is hunted and What that really means is if it is true that success

kind of leads to complacency and instead of earning it, you now believe you deserve it. And that is, I know that is true for me because I have experienced it firsthand. Then what do I need to do to ensure that I remain humble and that I look at these outcomes as blessings and things that were actually.

Brad Pedersen
probably more time. I mean, yes, I had to put the work in, but timing had a lot to do with it. Let is be clear, like, I love this Guy Ra is question, like, were you good? Were you lucky? It is like a lot of people are kind of stuck, but I am like, hey, yeah, I had to do something. But let is face it, my idea at this time was also a big part of why this became the outcome we got. But it is just making sure that you never let your ego get in the way of the rational decisions and understand you still have to do the work.

Srini Rao
Yeah.

Srini Rao
Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao
Yeah. Well, it is funny because I think you are alluding to the importance of context. You know, people will ask me on podcasts for advice and I like literally, I have probably said a hundred times. And like, I should preface this by telling you to consider the possibility that everything I am telling you is bullshit because it very, very well could be in the context of your life. Like, I am under no delusion that like I am anything special because I realized I was like, I was the beneficiary of a 10 year head start on what became a massive cultural trend, which is podcasts.

We started in 2009. I am like, nothing that I did would work for anybody today. And that was just the luck of timing. But I want to come back to luck, because I know you talk about the different types of luck later on in the book. But I actually want to talk about your economic philosophy, because you say in the book that most people believe that there are only two basic forms of economic philosophy, pure capitalism, a system in which greedy people race to the top, collecting as much as they can for themselves, pure socialism, supposedly the antithesis of capitalism,

Brad Pedersen
Hmph.

Srini Rao
as a sharing system with no exorbitant winners. And you said the problem with this capitalism versus socialism dichotomy is that they both focus on greed as the central component, one suggesting the solution, the other that it is the problem. So talk to me about this in the context of sort of the modern world where we are not, I doubt you are under any delusion. We are dealing with like massive inequality in our world right now.

Brad Pedersen
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, look, I think. So we grew up in Western culture. We were taught that capitalism is good. In fact, I still remember when Gordon Gekko said greed is good. That was kind of like a meme for a period of time. And, and we were taught to go be, you know, we want to be economic developers, we want to grow businesses, we want to build things that actually

Srini Rao (50:31.38)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pedersen
create value and I agree with all of that. However, the philosophy of greed is where I focus on using people to acquire more things and more capital.

Whereas what I propose is outside of capitalism and socialism and like I am going to leave socialism to the side because I think we have enough evidence To prove that there is not a bunch of people trying to escape from North Korea Cuba or Venezuela Yeah, or people trying to escape to go into those countries. It is the reverse So those we have now over a hundred million people dead after a century of trying that I think that model is pretty self Explanatory in terms of why it doesn't work, but back to capitalism

My nuance is that it is more about free enterprise. And some people say, well, they are one and the same. I am saying, I don't agree with that because if you take the root of what free enterprise is, it is about creating freedom. Freedom for humanity and freedom for yourself through executing really well.

At the end of the day, we get compensated for the value we create in the marketplace. It is that simple. And the more value create, the more you get compensated in terms of enduring enterprise. Yes, there can be Ponzi schemes and things like that short term that do that. But if you want to create something that is enduring and durable, it is about how can I create as much value as possible? Well, what does value made up of? Value is made up of more freedom and optionality for people with the way they live their lives. And as a free enterprise or as the name bespokes is that

Your goal is to continue to expand more freedom into people is lives and where you are actually using things to build more value for people. So it is a flip. It is the same idea, but it is a flip in terms of if I focus on just creating enough value and enough freedom for the world and for people around me, by default, I must buy as a byproduct, I will be compensated.

Brad Pedersen
And I, and the compensation could come in terms of monetary recognition, whatever, but it is not the focus that we are actually chasing, which I allude to as the four Ps power, prestige, possessions, and pleasure. You chase those four things. You will never have enough. It is like chasing rainbows. It will constantly just satiate you for a short period of time and you got to get more, whereas I talk about focusing on the four C is, which is challenges contributions in the form of charity.

and or creativity and then connections, meaningful connections with people. So use things and value people and create more freedom in a free market economy is ultimately what I believe is the enduring and durable way to build meaningful enterprises.

Srini Rao
Well, let is talk about the four types of luck that you discussed in the course, which are dumb luck, grit luck, attraction luck, and seeing luck. Because I think that people who are self-made, they'd never like to talk about the role of luck. And it is one of those things where I am like, you know what, there are a lot of factors that are actually quite lucky. Like being born in a certain decade is a factor of luck that is completely out of your control. But talk to me about, I mean, that is probably dumb luck, right? So talk to me about each one of these and how they play a role.

Brad Pedersen
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pedersen
Yeah, well, I think you gave a great example. Being born at this point in time, living in these incredible countries, I mean, that is just dumb luck. I had no control over that. I just happened to be here, running into my wife in the hallways at college again. That was just super dumb luck. So that happens to all of us, and we are going to have various doses above it. That is not something we can control. It just happens to happen.

The second one is what I call grit luck. And grit luck is really just where you just keep at it. You just don't quit. So you are kind of in the mud, the blood and the flood of whatever you are doing. You get knocked down, but you don't stay down. You choose to get up again and take your learnings and maybe do either persist or pivot or whatever is the outcome, but you continue to go forward until you finally get to a place where you have achieved luck, that you have been able to build something. And I had that happen with my.

my toy business, you know, I just didn't quit. I went through bankruptcy three times. I am a slow learner. So, you know, on the other side of just gritting it out, I eventually got to a place where I had an exit and that afforded me freedom and optionality then go chase other opportunities. The third is C-Luck. And C-Luck is where you have been in the game, you have seen kind of trends and patterns. And you know, the analogy I use in the book is with surfing.

When you become a skilled surfer, you can scan the horizon and you can see the swells coming. And you can kind of judge the size of the swell, how big the wave is going to be based on that swell and kind of where you need to be in order to ride that wave. And you know, I would say that my current businesses that I am involved in with both Peele and Lomi, those are examples of Sealock is that when I left the toy business and I was deciding what I wanted to do when I grew up again,

I sort of picked areas that I was passionate about. And one of them was around sustainability, particularly because I'd been in a business where I'd shipped billions of pieces of plastic around the planet and most of those ended up in landfills. So I had some recompense to make for all that. And so the ability to see the change of what is happening and position yourself as best as you can to take advantage of that change. And then the third type is attract luck. And this is just, you become so good at what you do.

Brad Pedersen
your world class in your respective area, that people are coming to you because you are just that well known. And lots of examples of that with people like Dan Martell. He is a good friend of ours. And he is so good at what he does with SaaS that he gets a bunch of people who come to him because they want him involved in their ventures, whether he is an investor or an advisor or somehow involved. So I think that just comes with time, time and experience.

Srini Rao
Absolutely. I love that. I love the surfing analogy because I am a surfer. So I surfed for 10 years prior to moving.

as one of those experiences where it is funny because I think that, you know, so many of the things that you and I have been talking about in this conversation, I feel like they are hard to truly understand until you have lived them. Like, I don't think reading about them is enough. It is like, so for example, you go to business school, right? And you basically do all these case studies and all this other stuff. And I am like, yeah, but the truth is in the real world, they are idiosyncrasies and dynamic variables that don't express themselves in a static.

Brad Pedersen
Hmm.

Srini Rao
situation like reading about it in a book that you can only learn through experience.

Brad Pedersen
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Look, I think going to school, get an MBA to learn how to run a business is the same as reading a book to learn how to surf. Until you get in the water and start paddling with the board, that is how you are going to learn. That is how you are actually going to benefit from the experience.

Srini Rao (57:30.87)
Yeah, well, I wrote an entire business book with surfing as a backdrop for metaphor as a metaphor. And I think one of the lines in that book was like, you don't catch waves standing on shore, you catch them in the water.

Brad Pedersen
I am sorry.

Brad Pedersen
Amen. That is truth.

Srini Rao
Well, let is talk briefly about some of these rock bottom moments like bankruptcies and stuff like that. Like, I think that psychologically, you have to be a certain type of person to be able to navigate those. And I am guessing it is kind of like, you know, I had a chapter in my book called The Impact Zone, you know, you have alluded to surfing, so you probably know what that is. Like in the impact zone, you are just getting your ass handed to you one wave after another thinking it is never going to end. And I realized after, I think, six, seven years of surfing, I was like, okay.

Brad Pedersen
Hmm.

Srini Rao (58:15.01)
that each one of those, like the more of the ways that you take on the head, the easier it is to actually handle being in that place. But talk to me about the psychology of navigating these very, very challenging moments, because I remember in the, you know, not to keep beating a dead horse, but in that Sam Altman, how to start a startup podcast, one of the things that he talked about, which was the very last lecture, was managing your psychology. And the crazy thing I think that struck me about that is people, he said that people think it gets better.

Brad Pedersen
Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao
He said, but it actually gets worse because he is the highs are higher and the loads are lower. So talk to me about navigating that sort of, you know, part of running a business because I think anybody who does anything entrepreneurial is going to go through that at one point or another.

Brad Pedersen
This is again the great paradox of our humanity. I think you have to kind of come back to first principles of understanding, what it takes to be fully human. And to be a human, you need to eat, you need to sleep, you need exercise, you need relationship water. These are the basics of Maslow is hierarchy. And I would add to it, you need struggles, you need difficulties.

because this is the only way that we actually develop our potential. It is no different than you and I going to the gym. And if you want to develop our muscles, you have to be willing to break them down. You have to hurt yourself in small doses to actually build back stronger.

Um, and the word resilience gets used a lot, and I think it is a good word, but I don't think it is actually the right word because, you know, resilience just means you are coming back to where you were. You want to be anti-fragile, uh, using the scene Talib is word where you are actually getting, coming back and you are actually better than you were before. Um, and so I think if you understand that that is a part of the process, that in fact, biomimicry all around us shows that to be true. Like you prune trees in nature to grow back stronger and more fruitful. Um,

You know, snakes shed their skin to grow to, which I am assuming is not a pleasant process. I am assuming there is some pain involved in that, to be stronger on the other side of it, a bigger version of themselves. And I just think if we understand that about our humanity, then we should expect that struggles are how we build strength. Challenges are how we forge our character. And through our adversity, if we choose, we can then turn it to our advantage if we take the lessons and we become better for it.

So look, I don't recommend people take my path. Like I said, I went through three bankruptcies in the time, I can tell you they were terrible. You know, I lost a million dollars of friends and family money in the first one, which it was really hard to go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and try and have conversations with folks. And so at the moment, it was a felt terrible experience. But now as I reflect back on it, the point is I had to choose what it meant. Like what happened happened.

Srini Rao (01:00:55.612)
Hahaha!

Brad Pedersen (01:01:09.093)
I got to choose what it meant and I could either become a victim of what happened or I could use that to actually forge my character to be more resilient and resourceful and anti-fragile. And fortunately I had a great role model with my father who, you know, there was many, many times that he would counsel me through really difficult times and just said, Brad Pedersen, don't despise the process for what it is making of you. I know it is hard, but this is a part of you becoming you.

And those words of encouragement kept me going. And I realized that there was very few things I could control. I could control what I say, what I do, what I think, and ultimately what I choose to feel. The first feeling, you will feel whatever it is. If you feel sad, you will feel it, but then you get to choose if you are going to land on that or turn it into something that is more resourceful for you. And I think the most important thing is just keep moving, just one step at a time. Sometimes that is all it is, just one step at a time, but just keep moving your feet.

And as I reflect back now, which it is easy to do now, I can see that those were all inflection points that forced me to stop, that ultimately led to a better business, a better outcome that I wouldn't have found otherwise. Because if I had been kept going, I would have been just on that business, which at the time seemed like a pretty good model, but it would have been successful, so there was no need to change. The challenges became the forcing function of me being forced to stop and then reflect, choose again, and oh.

This is a better business than that was. Oh my gosh, who knew? And ultimately, that is, I would say, today. I said at the beginning, series of happy accidents. I have literally failed forward. Like, where I am today is a result of a bunch of mistakes that forced me to stop, unpack the lessons, choose again, and so far, the choices have led to a better future.

Srini Rao 
Well, I think that makes a beautiful place to wrap up our conversation. I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Brad Pedersen
Courage, I think that is the most important virtue. Aristotle defined the four virtues back many, many years ago and said that it was justice, prudence, temperance, and courage. And they talk about courage being the cardinal virtue because the other three don't matter until somebody first has the courage to do something. And...

Ideas are like noses, we all have them. It is what you do with those ideas that ultimately turns it into something meaningful that can build value for you in society. So I think if you are choosing to be unmistakably remarkable in your creative endeavors, it takes the courage to take those creative ideas, the curiosity, the creative ideas, and then the courage to actually try.

Srini Rao 
Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your insights and your wisdom with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, the book, your work and everything else?

Brad Pedersen 
Yeah, you can go to bradpeterson.com and Peterson spelled all with Es and Echoes and Ds and Delta. Most people get it wrong, but it is the Danish way. And you can also go to startupSantaBook.com and we offer the first chapter for free. And we have some videos and resources that I think can be very helpful for founders.

Srini Rao 
Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.