Today I share my conversation with Ron J Williams. Fast Company rated him in the top 100 most creative people in business...back in 2012! He’s started some serious ventures - SnapGoods was an early vanguard in the sharing economy - and he’s also helped companies large and small get proof (rather than stay in conjecture) on their business ideas with his consultancy ProofLabs.
He’s currently working as SVP & Head of Program Strategy at Citi Ventures. We also went to High School together, which is why he still takes my calls!
I brought Ron onto the show because of a conversation we had months back about how businesses ARE conversations - that they can’t just extract value from people without listening, adapting and relating to the people they serve.
Ron offered the idea that each moment, each pixel, is an opportunity for a company to listen and to respond thoughtfully to their customers...this level of granularity and specificity in the opportunities for conversations between business and customers really lit me up.
Ron also happens to be a black man. This episode is coming months after we recorded it - I’m working through a backlog - and you’ll hear, at the end, my gratitude to Ron for bringing up the topic of racial inequality in corporate innovation...and the costs it has for our society as a whole.
I did not want to commit the sin of making a person of color speak for “their people”...it’s a burden that “non-minorities” don’t have to endure. I am rarely, if ever, asked to speak for all white men, as if I could.
Diversity is so important.
Innovation isn’t just a conversation between a company and its customers...it’s also an internal company conversation. And who is in that innovation conversation determines what problems get noticed, which ideas get funded and for how long. With a large majority of white male voices in corporate innovation and silicon valley, the problems that get addressed and resolved are the problems of a very small, very privileged group of people.
Ron says towards the end of our conversation, and I’m condensing a bit:
“it's amazing to see many more people popping on the scene, both as people of color, women, LGBT...we’re capitalizing networks...and empower(ing) more folks...when there are more voices in the virtual conversation of innovation, more lived experiences means more problem sets that maybe you and I wouldn't think to tackle, come up with... if they were networked properly, resourced properly, supported properly, would build something huge”
I hope more diverse voices get included into the innovation conversation. What can you do at your organization to help make that happen?
Enjoy the episode. Ron is fun to talk to and really fun to listen to!
Links and Resources
https://www.prooflabsgroup.com/
Jason Cyr on Designing the Organizational Conversation:
https://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2019/11/15/designing-the-organizational-conversation
More About Ron
Proven innovation leader and entrepreneur building mission-driven teams focused on solving hard problems.
Bringing together 15+ years of entrepreneurship, corporate strategy, startup advisory and product leadership, I have a unique perspective and an awesome network filled with doers.
I center my teams on the principle of customer obsession. I believe that sustainable growth comes from better understanding of and partnership with the customer.
Quick background:
I've founded, built, invested in and advised on peer-to-peer, sharing economy, marketplace, machine learning and social commerce companies. In varied roles as a founder, intrapreneur, consultant, Entrepreneur in Residence and Program Lead, I've helped Fortune 500 companies re-engineer core business strategies and innovation programs across industries.
Passion:
Working with smart people to solve problems that matter (one reason I sit on the Board of organizations like BUILD.org)
General approach to creating impact:
- Long-term shareholder value follows customer obsession (not the other way around)
- Values and value creation go hand-in-hand
- Diverse perspective is an organizational super power. It is not a box to check
- Cultivating a culture of trust and willingness to take risks is a competitive advantage
- The “why” is almost always more important than the “what”
- Mission and culture beat innovation theater every time
Full Transcript
Daniel:
Well, all right then. I am going to officially welcome you to The Conversation Factory. Ron J. Williams. This is actually ... I'm so excited to have you here. I have not yet published the interview that I did with E. Rodsky. I want to do a whole peg leg series-
Ron J Williams:
I love it.
Daniel:
... people who know us from back in the day. Thank you for being here. Let's just start in the middle because you and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about how every pixel a company makes is an opportunity for them to listen to their customers and not just be pushing their product out into the world. Let's start there and then we'll work our way back.
Ron J Williams:
Yeah. First up, thanks for having me. It is always nice to see folks you've known for a long time and have gotten to call friends just become great people that you admire and so I've, as you know, enthusiastically supported and enjoyed your work and as you continue to develop your craft, become now an acolyte. I'm going to walk around quoting many things from your world view.
Daniel:
You're too kind. Ditto. I've been dropping that quote on so many people and they're like, "Oh, my God. That's true." How long have you been suspecting that? Had you said it that way before?
Ron J Williams:
So, I'll start just before the middle-middle, which I hope is ... well, it's going to be the early middle in life. So, I think in my day job for a number of years, regardless of where I am and what company I'm helping, I tend to be a person who is there questioning some of the assumptions that underlie the thing that has been built or is planned to be built, and I say it that way to signify that oftentimes a lot of capital, a lot of really good time is spent thinking, and a lot of really smart people all together worked to get to a place where they are convinced they understand what the customer wants. And, either it is being built, has been built, and in some cases, it's been built, it's been deployed to not the outcome as desired.
Ron J Williams:
And so, I'm doing that now, in some way shape or form at City Ventures, but really the license that I felt to do that came from massive, what I considered to be massive failure on my part. You get really smart people with good ideas who build what they believe the customer wants, and then they expect that that's going to be it. For the folks who are old enough to remember Ron Popeil from when we were kids, that wonderful rotisserie machine-
Daniel:
Popeil automatic.
Ron J Williams:
You set it and forget it. That's it. You put the chicken in, you set the thing and you forget about it. And, I think the idea that digital itself is just a digital analog, to the analog world. You build a thing, you put it out and if it's good enough it sells itself and then you just count your money. It misses this point which I learned in my earlier, last incarnation, which was we built the startup that got lots and lots of clicks, lots and lots of attention.
Ron J Williams:
We were in lots of press. I was in every single magazine and paper that my mom read which meant she could finally take pictures of her baby to church and be like, "This is what he does. I don't know what he does, but he's in the New York Times and he's here and he's here."
Ron J Williams:
And yet and still, that didn't translate into enough value for our consumers that we were creating that we could capture some of that value ourselves and build the same old business. And, it came to us very late in the process of building that company that we needed to be better instrumented, that every single time a consumer hit a page that we put in front of them, if we could, we needed the equivalent of a person on that page being like, "Hey, what's working? What's not working? Why are you even here? What's up? How's your day going?"
Ron J Williams:
How do we actually turn ever single interaction into a conversation, into an opportunity to understand better that state of mind, that intention and then turn that into, even if you miss it this time, a reassurance to that person that we're listening and we're changing.
Ron J Williams:
And so, that occurred to me, frankly, as my business was blowing up and ultimately failing. And, it was with that mindset that frankly, longer conversations for another time, as I was like, as founders often get and haven't really talked about until recently. I was depressed about what was going on with my startup.
Ron J Williams:
I had a buddy who was like, "I need your help with my startup." And, I was like, "That's ridiculous. How can I help you?" He was like, "Well, you've been peer mentoring me whether you realize or not for the past year that we've been sharing space, and you've been talking about this customer segmentation thing and that all customers that come to my page aren't all the same customers, don't all have the same intention on that page," and like, "we're stuck in our revenue growth, could you help me think through this?"
Ron J Williams:
That was the most wonderful thing that he ever could've done for me, whether he realized it or not, because I was literally in the midst of signing over my company ... It was a crazy time and it was nice to dive into somebody else's business and look at that landing page as an opportunity to learn about the people coming to it and to have that conversation.
Ron J Williams:
That was probably the first real seminal moment where in taking that, customer segmentation isn't just something that mature businesses do, new businesses can do it too. How do we learn who's coming, what journey they're on, which ones we can make successful and how you should then rearchitect the pixels on the page and possibly on the product to better serve them. So, that was it. That was probably 2014, end of 2014 and it was a really interesting transition of my kind of mindset. Lot of words.
Daniel:
So, my brain's lighting up, because this idea of who is this person and what is their journey? What journey are they on? It's rare to even get that in an one on one conversation with somebody where you sit down at a bar and you just talk to a stranger like, "Tell me about who you are and where are you headed in your life. Spin me a yarn about your journeys," but that's how you get to really know somebody and in a way, you're asking your company to do the same thing for each person who's showing up, which is like, who is this person that I want to actually serve and be in communication with?
Daniel:
I Love the idea of set it and forget it versus I want to continuously create value to you. I want to be in dialog with you. I want to make sure you do not leave. And, we talked about this with banks. They're all, to the consumer, they all feel a lot alike, and there's no stickiness. So, how do we decide to stay in one place versus just pulling up our money and going to some other place? Stickiness is really important.
Ron J Williams:
It's huge Daniel, and I think the other thing that people, I think neglect is to, remember, you've got my brain lighting up now is, if you're in a business that is inherently, is increasingly commoditized, not just your traditional competition, but emerging challengers are showing up and saying, "I can do a small piece of that better." In fact, so much better, that it becomes a hook and sells itself, to a segment of the population that feels like they're not being seen by mature businesses.
Ron J Williams:
There's a huge inherent disadvantage there for large businesses, if they don't recognize that the window is closed on just using digital and technology as an enabling mechanism for distribution, for transactions, the idea that the predominant form of engaging prospects and customers is transactional. I find you at a moment and then I close you and get you to transact. That window's largely closed for most things, especially if they're commoditized things with long lead times and they're commoditized. Have I said that enough?
Ron J Williams:
You have to move from transaction to all the days and months leading up to that moment. We've been in some kind of ongoing conversation. You felt supported. I've got nuggets of knowledge, whatever on you, that you've gotten value in and that were infinitely scalable and almost free to me.
Ron J Williams:
It has to be an ongoing conversation. You've got to move from episodic, I hope I catch you at the right time when you need a mortgage, let's say, or I hope I catch you at the right time, right as you're thinking about switching from one platform for communications to another. I've got to be that source of information perspective and possibly even access to community where you can talk to peers who also are having conversations about that thing before you get to the point where you're ready to make that purchase decision or that switch.
Ron J Williams:
And, that is a really huge, I think that that's a huge switch for organizations to go from, we shouldn't just build a thing and figure out how to sell it. The long tail of engagement is, how do you create value before that moment of purchase. That is a conversation. That is that ongoing conversation.
Daniel:
And, that's being relational instead of transactional.
Ron J Williams:
And that's being relational. That's right. That's exactly right. And, it's even after that purchase, or that initial modernization moment, how do we stay in touch in a way that, again, it's not just about selling the next thing, but I am sussing out what you need. I am detecting changes in your life.
Ron J Williams:
I might have been the target market for a thing two years ago. My needs have dramatically shifted. My spending pattern is very different now than it was six years ago with [inaudible 00:09:29], right? That's different.
Daniel:
Yeah. So, there's two conversations I want to unpack, because one is, this roomful of people who are convinced and the process that you, how you design that conversation to make ... because it is the hardest conversation, I think, to have a group of people who are, it's the Ikea effect. People are in love with what they've built.
Daniel:
They're convinced of what they've built, because they built it and they've invested time in it, and then you're coming in as an outsider and you're going to try and get them to back away from it. That can seem threatening I presume.
Ron J Williams:
Yeah. Yeah. It definitely is. And I think, in some ways the hardest part of the job, a person who's coming in talking about long term growth opportunities, which I think in many ways, innovation is a super overused word.
Ron J Williams:
At the end of the day, what we're really here to talk about, when you talk about what innovative is, we've got a business that is working. We understand that parts of it are becoming commoditized and it's [inaudible 00:10:41].
Ron J Williams:
Long term, we're a certain degree of saturated, and we're going towards 99%. And somewhere before that thing gets really saturated and the business declines, we've got to figure out how to replace pieces of our business that are commoditized. That's long term grown that we hope will be organic. It might have to be inorganic through acquisition, but we have to be honest and sober and saying we recognize that we'll have to replace some of our business. That's fine. That's it.
Daniel:
Is that a conversation that people are willing-
Ron J Williams:
Conversation out the window.
Daniel:
... to have, of like-
Ron J Williams:
So, first-
Daniel:
The arc? This is this question, and this is, I'm not plugging my book, but there's this thing called the Berkana loop where you ask where are we on this arc, just presuming everything that's born, grows old and dies.
Ron J Williams:
That's right.
Daniel:
Are we on the upswing or are we on the downswing? That seems like a really hard question to invite.
Ron J Williams:
So, one of the biggest aha moments I had, I've had over past several years, of running proofLabs, of a producting strategy practice and then coming in house to help at City Ventures after being an entrepreneur in residence here, is exactly this simple frame, which is if you talk about innovation versus core, you're inherently setting up an adversarial frame.
Daniel:
Yes.
Ron J Williams:
If I say, we work on future, you just keep the lights on. Keeping the lights on is super critical, and has loads of growth that's left in most businesses that are big enough and have the budgets to figure out how to do more adjacent growth investment.
Ron J Williams:
How do you then say, how do we take what you do, the way that you serve customers, look at the gaps in the market, and then figure out together where future growth will be, versus the SM. That is very much, I think ... you and I talked for years about talking about this stuff. That is very much a conversation. That is not a ... let me stop you right there.
Ron J Williams:
I'll come back and tell you what the future's going to be, which is how I think the innovation, the cottage industry of it is like the core of innovation field, is going, I think through a lot of growing pains itself. What was maybe once sufficient to pass as meaningful innovation investment, you get on the stage and say, "Imagine your business on the internet."
Ron J Williams:
That window has closed. Now, we're at the place where I think, and I have loads of friends, loads of venture studios and other folks in this type of function in other places. People want to understand, [inaudible 00:13:14] wants to understand if put a dollar in the innovation machine, what comes out the other side? What so I actually get that's tangible?
Ron J Williams:
And in order to even get there, you've got to do this from the first question to ask, which is how do you broach that topic? The way that I need to broach that is by saying it's not other. We're always together. We're here to help. If we've got a good set of tools around take good research, take good perspective, and I like to say that ... I threaten to put this on t-shirts. Once we get past the point of productive debate, I want less debate and more experimentation.
Ron J Williams:
So, you frame less as other and more as, it's another tool to provide proof about what's worth investing further in. So, a little bit of money to find out where we should invest a lot of money is the thing. And, the idea of, you said it and I put a note here, of like, Daniel's right, the idea of, how do you take bar conversation, really good, bump into a new adult friend, that level of good conversation, and you're like, I just made a new buddy.
Ron J Williams:
I'm 43, I just made a new buddy. For that to happen on a page is impossible if you're targeting everyone. The idea of conversation also has to be as I've seen you do in a room, a person has to feel like there is room and space for just them in that moment to be themselves, and you're not asking them a bunch of questions about all the different people they might be. You're talking to them. When you're going to have a one on one conversation, I'm not like, "Hey Dan, or Jim or Bill."
Daniel:
[crosstalk 00:14:41] your first name.
Ron J Williams:
Your first name.
Daniel:
Your first name, please fill out the survey.
Ron J Williams:
I'm doing what companies have a really hard time with, I believe, which is this notion of be bold enough to understand who you're not talking to in a moment. Don't believe that every pixel has to be for everyone. In fact, I would articulate that the biggest issue facing most senior management teams is that they believe that they're a large business, that every new offering has to come out of the box for the mass market. That is what I call the myth of the mass market.
Ron J Williams:
It is this core construct that breaks all the efforts, because if your measure of value is, that I successfully have a conversation with every conceivable person that comes to the page, they're going to all be crappy conversations. We know what it's like to go to a party and talk for 30 seconds to everybody.
Daniel:
I've never been at that party, but that sounds pretty intense. But that's ... how do you get them to step back from that though, because the mentality of large corporations is they are in that mode of mass market. And, this is where "innovation" and making small bets so that we can make big bets, the small bets always look small in comparison to the big bets.
Ron J Williams:
That's right. So, to answer that question, let's talk about-
Daniel:
It sounds stupid once I say it out loud, but of course the small bets are small.
Ron J Williams:
No, no, no, but I think what you're getting at, you're not saying anything that ... I'll tell you, it's a smart ... we've all said it, and it's as smart as any CEO or CXO at a Fortune 500 company has said probably in a board meeting [inaudible 00:16:24] it's got to be a big bet. I think what's lost in translation at that moment is, in this day and age, and I'm going to get a little abstract, because I think you'll appreciate it and I want you to kick this around. I want you to really knock this out if it doesn't make sense.
Ron J Williams:
I would say that if we look at the old industrial age, if a person had a bunch of steel and they had the land rights, they built railroads. And, that capital investment, that infrastructure, man, that thing was going to be good for 50 or 60 years, 150, 200 years because we're going to always run trains and it doesn't matter how they change or got faster, combustion, electric, until they floated, they're going to run on those train tracks.
Ron J Williams:
That thing is a money maker. That infrastructure doesn't need to change much. We grew up in New York City and actually went to high school together. The New York City subway is running on a frighteningly old operating system, just a scary old operating system, very rickety. Those turns ain't getting any safer.
Ron J Williams:
Today, the new infrastructure is technical and it's digital, and what's funny about it is, it helps you learn where to go. Part of digital infrastructure today is not just distribution, not just pop ups that things you can click on, you can buy in your pocket, it is the fact that it can have these micro conversations, these points of engagement and learning with the consumer, which should tell you where to go next.
Ron J Williams:
Why do I draw that out? Because, if you start with the presumption that you've got to build for everybody first and don't recognize it, what digital is literally good at is helping you identify adjacent opportunities down the road, just worry about over serving the hell out of a niche audience, a smaller audience today that's well-defined. You're going to be good. You're good.
Ron J Williams:
If you can deliver and over deliver for a well-defined audience around a well-defined set of problems that they have, building out from there is easy. That's something that folks don't realize.
Ron J Williams:
If you're in a commoditized business, you've already said it. Switching cost is low. What's the number on thing I can do for Dan to make Dan stick around. It's by being valuable enough to them and building beautiful experiences that help them for habits.
Ron J Williams:
Habit formation isn't an afterthought. It's got to be top of stack in your thinking. It's not where do we go and then what do we build and can't we form habit, it's where can we go to form habits that are relevant to our business in a way that benefits our customer. And, if you can nail that, that next piece, monetization and adjacency, that becomes easy.
Ron J Williams:
So, we see Credit Karma help millions and millions of people do a thing that wasn't done well before which is take this opaque and Byzantine system of how your credit score moves and you might get your hands on once a year, and game-ify it, which is a word that I hate to use. I don't use it lightly, but turn it into these moments of micro progress, where you're atomizing your effort in for discernible progress out so you feel successful.
Ron J Williams:
Wait a minute. My score dropped by two points because this card I don't use, it's [inaudible 00:19:32]. Banana Republic, I don't use the card. I got it once, whatever, they drop my limit which in the scheme of things, it doesn't matter much, except it changed my credit capacity, my credit utilization.
Ron J Williams:
I was like, that's just annoying. So, I got on the phone with them and then they fixed it. I wouldn't have done that before. So, when they hit me with an offer to do a high yield savings account, I was like, "Oh yeah, hell yeah. I'll throw some money in there. They've got the highest-"
Daniel:
Because they've built some trust and value in that moment.
Ron J Williams:
Some trust, some value. They've been helping me. I'm in a conversation with them. I check my score every single week. I respond and react to every single thing almost that they put in front of me. That is why a mass market is a fallacy. Start with a thing, with a well-defined customer. Help them form habits. You build out, rinse, repeat. We're seeing this all over the place. So, that was super long, so I'm sorry about this.
Daniel:
No, it's not, because this question of how to do this well, I'm trying to look for patterns out there of what it looks like as a company to be better at listening at scale and responding at scale because it's clearly critical for companies to survive in some sense.
Ron J Williams:
You look at Intercom. I think Intercom did a good job with this as well. Had, again, a generic, not generic, a really good product, but this is for everyone. It can do these four things, and then ultimately broke it into these four distinct journeys. And they're like, this is for acquisition. This is for retention. This is for upsell, and did a good job of recognizing that, selling everything to everyone. That's not the place you start until you're Microsoft.
Daniel:
Well, and they still, well it's interesting, do they sell everything to everyone. That's a rabbit hole. I love this idea of creating value first, but that's a really ... it seems like that's a challenging mindset when the old way has worked so well for so long.
Ron J Williams:
It is challenging. I'd be curious. What is in your, and not to flip this on you, but what is the product that you are, whether you realize it or not, that you use the most. I'm not thinking about what you love the most and like the best, what do you use the most? What's in your pocket and on your screen the most?
Daniel:
Oh, beside just actual device?
Ron J Williams:
Yeah. On that screen, what's on that screen the most?
Daniel:
That's so interesting. I guess it's Google Calendar. I used to actually love Samsung Calendar, but it did a poor job of syncing, and Google Calendar is where I live.
Ron J Williams:
And why is that?
Daniel:
Well, I literally had a 15 minute call before this call.
Ron J Williams:
So, you're scheduled out the wazoo.
Daniel:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, tied into those things are ... actually this is a great example. I'm going to give a shout out to my friends at Calendly. They have a product, so Calendly allows me to send people four or five times because it's called ad hoc scheduling, and it's a fringe product.
Daniel:
It was actually designed by a whole other team. I know this because I actually got on a call with one of their integration product managers and I use the Chrome plug-in to do these ad hoc messages and there's literally two completely different flows and if I send somebody a Calendly link that says, okay, here's all these times that are available based on some sort of rule, they can book it and Zoom immediately connects automatically, and then there's an invitation on my calendar and their calendar and there's a Zoom link in it, boom. So, I pay for Calendly and I pay for Zoom. That works.
Daniel:
When I do the plug-in on Chrome, and I do send them five times because I'm like, I really want to talk to this person, and I don't want to just give them this link that might actually show no availability, because that's what I give to people who I don't really need to talk to. I'll talk to them whenever.
Daniel:
I really want to talk to this person. Here's five times in the next two days. And when they book that, it goes into my calendar and their calendar, but it doesn't have any Zoom information in it. The loop is broken completely, and I got on a call with this guy and I showed him the two different flows, and he was like, "These tools were all built by different people." And I'm like, "Yeah, but it's one product for me." And he's like, "I know."
Daniel:
They're treating it like two products. This is the classic thing where it's two products for them and it's one product for me, and I just want it to work. And, I'm saying to them, and I'm literally on an email thread of everybody else who's complained about ad hoc Zoom integration, and they're all like, "When are they going to work on this," and I'm like, "Don't hold your breath. They've got a lot of other things that they care about." I'm literally on a conversation thread where we're all talking and Calendly is not listening. And, that's my rant about that.
Ron J Williams:
No, no. But I think what's interesting about that is the institutional inertia is almost always rooted in, you said it actually, you're being very generous but, I think probably on point, which is, they probably have lots of things going on. So, there's always institutional inertia that's invisible to their customer, to the consumer.
Daniel:
Yeah, they want to integrate with Trello. They got to integrate with Zappy. There's all these other integrations and they've got this whole con-bon board of stuff. I'm not the only person out there, because I know that. I get that.
Ron J Williams:
But, what's interesting, and I'm not accusing them, I'm not thinking this way so, if anybody from the company's listening, I'm sure you're doing great. Clearly, you're doing great. But what's funny is, when I alluded to that kind of initial, I didn't realize that I was going to build a consultancy after my startup, but a person asked for help, I helped him. And then, it was a person in my life, somebody forced me to take a check because it turned out in that story was we, I think I might have doubled his MRR over two months. That was really an amazing, good product, amazing team, and just a little bit of me restating some of their stuff for them.
Ron J Williams:
But what was so interesting was, one of the ones I gave them, was, well I get why each of these four customers is important to you because you do have paying customers from each of these categories. But, my question to you is, what is the level of success for each of these paying customer types?
Ron J Williams:
I get that these guys pay the most and these guys pay the least, but forget that for a second. If I were to build, I think of two by twos as power grids when you think of those dimensions, because it's where you draw the source of your power. What is my power quadrant? What kind of power area on the graph?
Ron J Williams:
If the dimensions for that client of mine were short, what it's worth the company and how successful they are using your products as a proxy for what they keep paying, possibly upgrade and tell all their friends. What was interesting was, two of the four groups on average, were under performing in terms of their rate of success. So, they were not achieving success in the product, and I'm talking about a multiple.
Ron J Williams:
So, for the top performing group, meaning, they got through it, they did all the things, whatever signified success, I'm not giving them up, three and a half times as likely to succeed as the bottom performing groups of paying customers. And I was like, "No disrespect, but unless you intend to completely rearchitect your product and point it at these people's problems down here, they don't deserve, back to the original start of this conversation. They don't necessarily belong on the front page of your website, because you're not making this group of people successful."
Ron J Williams:
So, I would argue that in this three way conversation that you're involved in, I hope that at least part of the analysis is, Daniel's amazing, and we love users like him, but that's not our power link. Not enough people are utilizing that in a way that actually is successful because it's not, and there's a missed opportunity, because my guess is what you're describing sounds super smart to me. I don't know enough about your product road map and customer base-
Daniel:
Well exactly. So, how do you communicate what you're not going to do? That's a conversation that companies need to be having as well. You're like, "Hey, listen, thank you so much for your input, fuck off." Because, you can't say that, you can't say like, "I had a really good conversation with this very nice man," and I was like, "I feel you and I feel for you because I have a UX background. I get you," but you're not going to get this same level of empathy with the average customer who's like, "Wait. Why would I click this one? Does it copy the link automatically into my clipboard, and when I click this link, it doesn't."
Daniel:
He was like, "Oh God. I'm really sorry." I'm like, "Well, I get that you get it, because I'm walking you through it," because I'm like, "Here's the work flow, and it's different." And he's like, "I know," but it's not in his power to fix it.
Daniel:
So, he's got this very uncomfortable moment where he has to communicate, but the company's not communicating. It's just one guy. And so, your friend who has four user groups and only one is in the high worth, high success lane, I'm guessing, how does he communicate to those ... It sounds like you were just saying to him, "Don't put them on your front page so you don't get more of those people." Don't focus on [crosstalk 00:29:12]
Ron J Williams:
It was like, because this was the time when it was early stage startup that it needed to just go out and raise more money. It needed to demonstrate growth. And I was like, "Listen, unless you ..." when I talked about the myth of mass market, I think part of boldness, part of bravery for a company and for humans, is focusing, is being willing to know what you're not willing to do.
Ron J Williams:
If you're not willing to change your product for these people over here, then stop selling to them. They're literally only dragging down your numbers. Moreover, focus on these people and make them even more successful because this seems to be, I know you want to serve everyone, but these are the people that it seems like you can serve currently, so serve them even better.
Ron J Williams:
Go spend, and you know what this came out of, interviews. It wasn't just looking at pages. It was let me actually do some primary research and do some rapid work ups on how these people are using your product, how they're succeeding, how they're succeeding without you guys, how they're failing with you guys, without you guys. Let's do that work.
Ron J Williams:
And so, the ability to come back and say, "So, this is what these folks are trying to get done, and they're mostly getting it done, overwhelmingly." These people are trying to get something else done. They've got a whole host of other problems and you're easy to kill in their budget, because they don't succeed on your platform. Focus on these folks.
Ron J Williams:
That was a reframe. So my guess is, there's a whole bunch of stuff as you said going on behind the scenes. That poor guy, he doesn't have a playbook. One thing that I would like to see more of though, is, and this is a dare to any company, financial services-
Daniel:
Open dare everyone. Challenge accepted.
Ron J Williams:
Open dare. What I want to see more of in the world are brands and companies who historically have benefited from obfuscation as a key part of strategy just because it's industry norm, just because it's, oh stuff's too hard to understand. The average consumer probably can't, so we'll tease out the major bullet points on what an effective APR is or what our policy is if you get out of our SaaS product early.
Ron J Williams:
Where the brands that in digital are saying, "Our job is to be radically transparent and to radically make transparent the industry in which we make money." In other words, if I can't make your thing, I'm going to point you to two other products that do that. I'm going to send you away, but you always know that the minute that you make it, and you know that. All I ask is if you want to know when we make it, because we love you, we want to have you back. Stay tuned. Stay involved. Here's the community, whatever.
Ron J Williams:
I want to see that in banking. I want to see that in insurance. I want to see that all over industry. Radical transparency as a virtue and as a differentiator. Anybody who wants to build that, I got people to throw at that.
Daniel:
Well. Not for nothing, it seems I was just doing another interview with somebody about leadership development and we were talking about how important it is for leaders to be transparent, because they're going to be seen, and everything that they do is going to be interpreted and misinterpreted, and how important it is for people to be transparent in their work and say, "Hey, so this is what I'm doing, and this is why I'm doing it. And, these are the results you're going to see and this is how we know it's going to work."
Daniel:
And, that seems to go down, that kind of radical transparency and communication of intent is down to the product experiment level. We talked about that. This is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it, and this is how we know it's going to work, and it's not because I said so. It's because we believe for these reasons and that kind of honesty and transparency is clearly effective on the human level as well.
Ron J Williams:
That's right. What does it look like for a business to say to you, let's say, for these companies to say, "So, the reason why we can't do that is because of this. We've got teams working on this other stuff," or "here's the way that we make, we make the most money when," won't be specific to that example, but we make the most money when you click this stuff here and again, not to harp on it, Credit Karma did a good job with that.
Ron J Williams:
It was all objective of use, at some point they started making massive dollars as a point of origination and acquisition for traditional players, traditional issuers in the space. And, they disclosed that and they're like, "Look, if the users [inaudible 00:33:40] but these pixels over here, these are the ones we make money." So, you should know that.
Ron J Williams:
And, that's a slippery slope, but at it's core, the idea of as a part of our value creation and conveyance to you, honesty and demystifying and making accessible information that is otherwise hard to parse or understand, I want to see more brands that have that at the center of their engine built.
Daniel:
That's a big challenge because I think it's hard to be honest about, businesses are in business for a reason and it can be uncomfortable to acknowledge, especially if you're trying to communicate brand value as a trust and loyalty and the behind the scenes of this. I'm sorry, we're not going to support that anymore because of this, this reason. It's too expensive.
Ron J Williams:
I think that what's also different, there are lots of things that are different today versus yesterday, but I think the other knock on effect of everybody being on the grid, everybody having access to the bullhorn, or the microphone, being able to pitch into the conversation and sway opinion, so we haven't talked much about some of the stuff that I was building before, but one of my central assertions on what we were building was influencer marketing, something going to have shelf life because Kanye can only influence so many things.
Ron J Williams:
That does not scale at all. Influence, the graph of influence, I may only have 10 followers, but they all really care what I think about puppy dogs or whatever my thing is. That is infinitely scalable and also is a wonderful, renewable source of, I don't have to know about everything, if I can tell my one or two folks that care about a thing that they really care about that I authentically believe in, that's interesting.
Ron J Williams:
And what I think is relevant here is, if the consumer is a more informed consumer, think about when you go to the doctor's office. Nobody shows up at the doctor's office without some version of an opinion conferred upon them by their doctor-googled medical school degree and everybody shows up with an opinion.
Ron J Williams:
Someone said I think there's an interesting opportunity to help reduce some of that friction in that patient doctor dynamic, but that's a wonderful, I think, example of the rise of the informed consumer. So, if everybody's got a mic, and consumers are more informed, why not just step into that truth and just be like, "I know you've all got questions. Here's what this thing means by the numbers." There are great startups that work on using machine learning and not as much language processing, to take legalese and translate it into plain language.
Ron J Williams:
I want to see that approach at the business operating level in major industries, that I think struggle to build trust with consumers. That is the opportunity. I think there's a huge opportunity in that truth, in that transparency as an actual brand and value proposition differentiator.
Daniel:
So, we're coming up against our time, because you've got a wife and two beautiful young daughters to get to and I don't want to keep you from that because that's actually why we do all this stuff. But, I was just struck in this moment. You have such an amazingly fertile mind. You threw off, there's two businesses that you were just like, this should be a business, that should be a business. I want to see this happen.
Daniel:
I feel like you have this amazing yes and brain, and personally I just want to honor that. I feel like we should just fund all ... what are the businesses that should exist in the world and just give them away for free and see who creates success with them.
Ron J Williams:
I like that.
Daniel:
This is my favorite question. What have not we talked about that we should talk about? We actually haven't talked too much about your story, which is important. We haven't hit on that at all, but also stuff that's about innovation and product assignment. What's important to say about this topic that has not been said?
Ron J Williams:
So, I think, well, my story is a little findable in small doses if you dig, and I'm also enamored of your brands. I think I would maybe ask us to close on the opportunities for future proofing this world that we live in, I think actually ties very closely to, I think, one of the big pillars of this podcast and your work, which is, who's in the conversation?
Ron J Williams:
And so, when I think of how we traditionally thought of innovation over the past 30 to 40 years especially, in a post digital world, and I'm going to speak candidly right here, because I think you always want me to keep it real. If amazing products come from problems, and our problems come from lived experiences, when we're solving for our umpteenth pizza delivery app, we're solving for, generally speaking, relatively privileged, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley white guys for much most recent history until very recently.
Ron J Williams:
And now, it's amazing to see many more people popping on the scene, both as people of color, women, LGBT, all those things together, were both being capitalized networks, and also now, lending their privilege that they've been able to accrue to empower more folks. I want to continue to have that conversation around when there are more voices in the virtual conversation of innovation, more lived experiences means more problem sets that maybe you and I wouldn't think to tackle, come up with.
Ron J Williams:
There's a non gender binary individual that's living somewhere right now thinking about a set of things that annoy them, annoy [inaudible 00:39:44], that if they were networked properly, resourced properly, supported properly, would build something huge. It doesn't need to be a billion dollar business.
Ron J Williams:
We know it's all about niche and it's agencies. I don't care if it's a billion dollar business to start. That is actually an engine for, I believe societal and economic transformation that is worth continuing to dig on, which is when we have more folks with diverse perspective, that we are networking, resourcing, and supporting to solve problems that they see, the progress, the innovation, the pace, will be so much better, so much faster and inherently more diverse.
Ron J Williams:
And so, I think a lot about that. What does it look like to do social justice through the lens of the economic justice lens, where resourcing people to innovative is a core tenet. So it's more of a, that's what I'd love to talk more about and spend more time on.
Daniel:
So, two things, one, do you have a couple more minutes so we can just give that one more breath and then-
Ron J Williams:
Yeah, please.
Daniel:
... and now is an acceptable answer. I didn't want to ask you about that, because I didn't want to give ... I'm aware of the burden of asking people of color to speak for all people of color and so, I'm really grateful that you brought it up, because I think it's important.
Daniel:
My friend, Jason Cyr who was on the podcast a couple of months back, talked about how this idea of who's in the room organizationally will determine the conversation. Who is in the room in terms of is it a customer or is experts, it's a different conversation. And, this idea of putting the means of production in the hands of all people to solve their own problems and to enable them to freely ideate and to serve many, many, many populations directly without the intermediation of, oh, I don't think people really want that. Well, which people don't really want that?
Ron J Williams:
That's right.
Daniel:
So, what else ought to be said about that? Because I was thinking, the whole time you were talking about being the guy in the room who's talking to this group of convinced people, I'm also aware of that fact that you are a man of color and being, maybe feeling like an outsider in some of those dialogs.
Ron J Williams:
Well, I definitely do, man. You and I were fortunate enough to go to one of the best high schools in the nation, even though it's a public school, and that means that whether we recognized it then or not, we were surrounded by people that unquestionably will be folks who contribute meaningfully to humanity and in really interesting and in some ways, unbelievable ways.
Ron J Williams:
So, whether it be Bram Cohen who invented the BitTorrent protocol. It's nuts. Or, actors, directors, I saw Gabe Helper's name on the 30th show that I love on HBO, and I was like, "Look at that kid's name." We have these people.
Ron J Williams:
There is immense luck in that. We hit a lottery of sorts, and so I'm aware that there's privilege, but also still, yeah, I show up in these rooms as a six foot one, black dude with a beard who doesn't look like most of the people in these rooms I'm in, except for this one dude who's got a better beard who's on my floor, and him, I got ... not as [inaudible 00:43:26], this guy's got [inaudible 00:43:27] man, I got to find him. He's the only one.
Ron J Williams:
I think there is this open question of so two things, what is my responsibility? So, I've gotten in the door, and I think old world, it was hard to even conceive of there'll never be a black president, there'll never be, he'd have won the president asap, so unfortunately not this cycle, but the idea that you got to get in yourself and just take care of yourself, is easy and insufficient, because now enough of us, or all of us-
Daniel:
Well, I think it's very generous for you to talk about donating your privilege. Your privilege is very recently earned. For all the white folk who are listening to this, how should we be better in our ally-ship in that sense?
Ron J Williams:
So, it's guise, most of us and some are more, but most of us have some kind of privilege and I think just the presumption that if you have even a little bit, somebody can benefit from some act of generosity. It's an investment. And, this is the thing, if you wanted to just be hard nosed about it, you and I, I think, share an immense amount of value. Our overlap in value is probably pretty epic, but in some ways, I would accuse all of us who are progressive, almost moralistic in our arguments with folks who are, they see themselves as conservatives.
Ron J Williams:
Hard example, should everybody have healthcare? Of, fucking, course, I don't know if you have to bleep that out, but of course, morally. But you know what? Also, of course, financially. It is a bug of the system that you're going to pay for it some kind of way, conservative guy. It's going to show up in your tax base, conservative guy, so why not just ... let's just-
Daniel:
Let's plan for it.
Ron J Williams:
Like any bill, pay it off and early. Don't wait for the late fees. Don't wait till their account gets canceled. It costs more to get the lights turned back on. And so, I think in that way, when people think about diversity, my wife is a leader in the inclusion community around autism specifically, but really generally, it turns out, design principle.
Ron J Williams:
If you design to folks that have the most challenges in a system, even the folks who don't have those challenges, the outcomes are better for everyone. So, when you think about diversity as a thing that I'll do when I've got enough and I'm good, instead of, there's an immense amount of opportunity, whether it be old white guys who are VCs or young, not white guys who were VCs, in looking in places and at people and saying, "You know what, I don't even know your life story, but I know you're human, so you must have a whole set of perspectives and challenges that I can't even conceive of. I don't know, tell me about them, and let's cannibalize them. And, if I don't understand them, let me get somebody that does, and tell me if it feels legit and screw it."
Ron J Williams:
That's not just soft and squishy. That's not just ... it's actually good business. There's a diverse pool of needs and they're ironically, because they're often going to be somewhat local, somewhat tied to well-defined communities in either placed base kind of models or virtually, and again, because they're experienced based, they're the hardest ones for companies like Amazon to replicate, so actually more defensible, even if they're sub scale.
Ron J Williams:
What does that look like? That's a huge opportunity. And so, this is where I get to this place of we should do it because it's good, but for all the folks who are listening, who are like, "I don't know." I can show you the numbers. It's also good business.
Ron J Williams:
So, that's how I think we have to think about it is, where can you show up and be generous, because kindness is not a limited resource. Where can you show up and just shut the hell up and listen because listening is free? And then, where can our bias be towards less of the old school, old world, Rudyard Kipling philanthropy of my time and not be like white man's burden, and more of like, there's a huge about to be learning here and there are probably massive opportunities. How do I help? I think if we do more of that, we'd be good.
Daniel:
I love that. That's the we be good. We're good right?
Ron J Williams:
We be good.
Daniel:
I'm just going to leave the mike on the ground where you dropped it. I really appreciate, thank you very much for making this time. Because if we loop it all the way back around, this idea of the company listening and responding to a diversity of needs, what the company is willing to see is valuable and what they're willing to bet on will be determined by who's doing the listening on the other side, the mindset of that person and whether or not it's a diverse group or a person with a diversity mindset, whatever that is.
Ron J Williams:
That's right.
Daniel:
It's an honor. It's a privilege. I'm grateful. I'm going to call Scene.
Ron J Williams:
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on and for creating a space man. You are doing amazing working and having had a chance to watch how you are transforming people's perspectives in a room, I am more than grateful to be a friend, but I'm also grateful to have had a chance to keep learning from you man, so keep it up.
Daniel:
Thanks man.