High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 318: Having Courage and Taking Big Risks with Timothy Campos, CEO of Woven & Former CIO of Facebook

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

As the former Chief Information Officer at Facebook, Tim Campos doubled overall productivity to $1.8 million per employee - making it the most productive company in the world. Now, as CEO of Woven, he is taking those lessons to reimagine how people use their calendar, so they can spend time on what matters most to them. In this podcast, Tim and Cindra talk about: Why we don’t value our time like our money An exercise his life coach taught him to see the value of his time How they use the motto “Fortune Favors the Bull” at Facebook + what it means for you Why the best companies keep asking why How to impact culture within your organization How Facebook is flawed You can find more about Tim’s company, Woven here where you can set up a free account.

Hey, my name is Cindra Campoff and I'm a small-town Minnesota gal, Minnesota nice as we like to say it, who followed her big dreams. I spent the last four years working as a mental coach for the Minnesota Vikings, working one-on-one with the players. I wrote a best-selling book about the mindset of the world's best and I'm a keynote speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. And I am obsessed with showing you exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your goals and dreams. So I'm over here following my big dreams and I'm here to inspire you and practically show you how to do the same. And you know, when I'm not working, you'll find me playing Ms. Pac-Man.

Yes, the 1980s game Ms. Pac-Man. So take your notepad out, buckle up, and let's go. This is the high performance mindset. In terms of culture, culture is really the result of your leadership decisions. Culture is what you reward. Culture is what you tolerate and encourage. I do think you can be deliberate about culture. You can sit down with a group of people and ask what you want the culture to be. But I think more than anything, it is reflective of leadership decisions. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Sindra Kampoff, and I'm grateful that you're here. Now, the goal of these interviews is to

interview the world's best, to learn more about mindset. And if you know mindset is essential to your success, then you are in the right place here at the High Performance Mindset. So welcome back or welcome to the podcast. In today's interview, I interview Timothy Campos, the CEO of Woven and the former CIO of Facebook. And as the former chief information officer at Facebook, Tim Campos doubled overall productivity to 1.8 million per employee, making it the most productive company in the world. And now as CEO of Woven, he is taking these lessons to reimagine how people use their calendar so they can spend time on what matters most to them. In this podcast, Tim and I talk about various things.

We talk about why we don't value our time like we might value our money. We talk about an exercise that he learned from his life coach that taught him to see the value of his time. We talk about a motto used at Facebook called fortune favors the bull and what it means to you. We also discuss why the best companies really keep asking their why and how they keep culture front and center. And at the end, he talks about how he sees Facebook as flawed. And my favorite part of this interview was when he was talking about Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders that he's been able to witness and be in the presence of. And he says, courage is the willingness to do what might be painful or difficult. I did want to give you a

heads up that there's some echoing throughout the interview, but it's way too good not to share. All right, without further ado, let's bring on Timothy Campos. Timothy Campos, thank you so much for joining me here today. How are you doing over there from Utah? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me today. We just found out that he's probably about five miles where my sister lives. So I spend a lot of time in Park City meeting my sister and seeing her. So as we get into today's interview, tell us a little bit about your passion and what you do right now. Well, my passion is actually my company. But more importantly, what my company is about, helping people spend time on what matters most. And that truly is my company. But more importantly, what my company is about,

helping people spend time on what matters most. And that truly is my passion. This is what I care about personally. Like I said, I'm in Utah right now and I'm here with my family. My family is a part of my life.

I'm passionate about them. But I'm also passionate about creating meaning in other people's lives. And that's what I do with my company, and so I'm passionate about that. But ultimately, getting a little bit of feedback there, I'm not so passionate about audio feedback, but I'm definitely passionate about helping people spend time on what matters most.

Awesome, awesome. And what matters most? I would guess that that changes for people. Best thing about that being sort of our mantra is that each of us can sort of interpret that in terms of what it means for us. You know, you might be somebody who's, you know, all about your job is recruiting. So you're passionate. What matters most to you is spending time meeting new people. You might be a philanthropist, in which case What matters most to you is spending time meeting new people. You might be a philanthropist in which case what matters most to you is, you know, making your philanthropic endeavors successful.

You might be somebody who's, you know, just super passionate about technology. So it matters most to you is spending time coding or something like that. And there's no judgment on this. There's no right or wrong. What matters for people is what matters for people. The challenge, I think, is that we often spend time on things that don't matter to us. Sometimes because we have to, but oftentimes because we're not in control of our lives. And that's in part why I left Facebook. Facebook used to ask people this question, how much time are you spending on what you love?

And for me, that number kept going down. But also, you know, I felt that starting my own company would give me the opportunity to really invest in the things that I care most about. So yeah. Anyway, very long-winded answer to your question. That sounds great, Tim. So I know from 2010 to 16 you spent time as the chief information officer at Facebook. So I want to ask you some questions about that,

but what I want to love, you know, I'd love to learn more about is how'd you get from there to what you're doing now that one was easy uh how i got there was a little bit more complicated but that's a different story so like i said i in 2015 after answering facebook's uh semi-annual employee engagement survey for myself um i started to really think about this question of, am I spending time on the things I really care about? And I felt like I wasn't. Felt like things were evolving to a point where I was spending a lot of time on administration or just things I didn't care as much about. And I wanted to do something about it. And as I was thinking about what can I do, I could go,

you know, leave my job and go find another one someplace else. But that didn't sound quite interesting. Because to be quite frank, for a CIO, being the CIO of Facebook is like the pinnacle of your career. There's really nowhere else. Yeah, yes, exactly. Yeah, I wasn't ready to retire. I love to work. I love to do what I do. So that then got me thinking about what are the things that I might do on my own? And a lot of how I achieved what I did at Facebook, productivity growth at Facebook, was by leading a team that custom engineered enterprise software to help make Facebook more productive. And so there was a lot of really cool things that we built. And I decided that it might be a good idea to go build some of that stuff for the rest of the world. And that's what ultimately gave birth to Woken. Yeah, excellent. You know, and I know that the productivity piece is really important to you, why you started the new company. You know, one of the questions I want to ask you, Tim, is like, why do you think that sometimes

that we see time as worthless? We don't necessarily kind of take control of our time. You know, I know at one point you said we can always earn more money, but we can only spend so much time. So where do you think that comes from? I think it's because we can't see how limited it is. If you, you know, are standing in front of an ocean of water,

the last thing on your mind is going to be, oh, there's, you know, going to be a drought, right? Because you're looking at an ocean of water that goes as far as I can see. It's the same thing with our time. Like, you know, you wake up in the morning and you, it's the morning, you have the entire day. And even though this day might end and you know that it's going to end, you have tomorrow and then the next day and next week, next month. But when you really take a step back and look at your life, it is finite, right? It's hard for us to internalize that because the end date

isn't known. And it's for many of us probably far out in the future. But it is there. And you, you know, if anybody who's had children, you can see how time can really catch up to you quickly, where, you know, the moment that you have with your child as a one year old only lasts a few moments. And then all of a sudden, they're older than that, and you can't go back to it. That's crazy. So you get a much greater sense of the passing of time. We don't have that for a big part of our lives.

And so that can lead to us thinking we have an infinite amount of it. We have all the time in the world, but we don't. I like what you said there, Tim. I think about some of the clients I've worked with. So I work with a lot of elite athletes and entrepreneurs doing executive coaching and high performance coaching. And I have one of my clients passed away from cancer about seven months ago. It was really, really tough. But I saw her live her life a lot differently at the end of her life, that it was more about other people than her. And I think because she knew her time was infinite. So what strategies do you think that we could use in terms of owning our time more and being really deliberate with it if it is infinite? So I read a blog post last night that reminded me of something that was very meaningful to me.

I engaged a life coach 12 years ago. And the life coach, when we first started working together, had me do a bunch of different exercises, all on these little index cards. And one of the exercises was to write out on an index card every single year from birth until, basically go from one to a hundred. And then he had me circle three dates, my birth year, which is so basically zero,

my current age, which at the time was like 35 um i don't know if i want to admit that and uh then he also had me circle 78 78 is the expect life expectancy for an American male. And so he's like, here's your life. And you're almost halfway through. You don't have a lot of, you have a lot of things that are already circled. So you had to circle every single year before my current year. You only have so many left. And the whole point of this was to help create a sense of urgency that if I was going to accomplish life goals those weren't going to happen by waiting then the best time to take action on them was today

what am I gonna do right now and quite literally after working with this guy for a couple weeks I I quit my job. I got myself set up to go do a completely different thing. I went and decided to go back to school, went back to get my MBA. I did a number of things that created a significant alteration in my life trajectory. That led me to Facebook, that led me to my co-founder, person whom I started my company with, that led me to a set of people that I have spent my life with over the last 10 years.

And all this came from the realization that if I wanted to accomplish certain things, I was going to have to do it now. And not wait, not five years from now, not later, now. So that's my best advice on this front. But there's obviously lots of other things that people can do. That's powerful that it was like a life coach that had you think about that in terms of what, where you are now in your your in your life and what you want to do and I like what you said about is like just taking massive action because time is not infinite

right it's like we don't have a certain amount so give us a little insight on leaving Facebook right like pinnacle of your career or what people might see it as and then starting woven and tell us a bit about what that process was like when you started the company you're in right now. Well, it started with very much the same mindset. When I left Facebook, I was 43, I think, something like that. I knew I wanted to do a startup. I did not want – I didn't want to wait forever.

The idea of doing a startup when I was in my 50s sounded not very attractive and so that's part of what created the urgency to make the hard decision to leave and to go do do this right now I was

fortunate that there were certain things that were an advantage for me people knew who I was they knew what I did so that there were certain things that were an advantage for me. People knew who I was. They knew what I did. So that gave me some credibility when it came to meeting with investors. I knew I wanted to do something big, which is why I needed investors. I didn't want to do something small. And when I looked at this issue of time, it was

meaningful to me. It seems valuable to everybody because one of the great equalizers in life is that we all have the same amount of time. It doesn't matter whether you're super wealthy or ridiculously poor or somebody who's focused on the needs of others, or someone who's very self-centered, we only have 24 hours in a day. Nobody has more. And so it seemed meaningful. And the state of technology around this particular thing seemed really nascent. The calendar as we know it is really a slight evolution

from the calendars of the 1980s, which were pieces of paper, diaries. What am I doing on this day? That's it. That's all I do. So that's what led me to the problem that I'm focused on right now and gave me the motivation to go do some things that were hard. It's hard to quit a place like Facebook. It's hard to get investment no matter who you are. It's hard to build a company. You have to do a lot of things that are difficult. The first employee that you hire, who else is making the decision

to hire them besides you and your co-founder. You don't get enough information. It's a big risk for them. Like, where's everybody else? Like, why? Because they're not a founder, but they're part of the founding team. So these things are part of what is difficult. But when you have that North Star,

what is it that you're trying to accomplish? Why are you doing this? It makes it all not only possible, but worth it. Yeah. So I like that you just admitted that it was a little scary leaving Facebook and then starting this company. And I think, Tim, that what is scary is actually the thing that you need to move towards to grow and learn and build the business that you want and live the life that you want. What did it take from a mindset perspective in terms of actually doing that? Because there might've been people, my guess is that were like,

what you're leaving Facebook, like, you know, international recognized brand, you know, like, and you've been, you were so successful there in terms of doubling the productivity. So what did it take from a mindset perspective in terms of leaving there and getting these investors, which you're right, is difficult? So it starts with just a couple words. One is courage. Courage is the willingness to do something that might be painful or difficult in the short term for a greater purpose. And there's lots of demonstrations of courage. Starting a company, I do believe is courageous, but there's a lot of people who do courageous things that don't

start companies. And in fact, there are many ways to exercise and demonstrate courage without having to do something as crazy as what I did, which is quit a perfectly good job and try to build a new company around an idea. But you need that courage. If you don't have courage, then you don't have the strength to walk through what's difficult. So I'd say that's the first thing. The second thing for me is I have a character trait, which is, you know, made me very successful in the longterm,

sometimes stupid in the short term. But I'm tenacious. I don't give up. I am very, you know, when I get focused on something just because it gets hard, I don't give up. I am very, you know, when I get focused on something, just because it gets hard, I don't give up. It doesn't mean I don't complain. It doesn't mean I don't go home and cry and think that I'm doing something stupid. But I don't give up. And anybody who knows me well will have their own stories of how I did something difficult and overcame it because I'm tenacious, because I don't give up. And so those two things were really the core fuel. I'd say the third thing that helped make this happen is I do have ambition. I am always looking at what more can I do? And, you know, once you get to a state that

you might have previously defined as success, you know, an ambitious person is always looking at what's next. In some respects, it can be a curse. It's hard to sort of take a step back and look at the universe and appreciate everything that you have. And that's a weakness of mine. I'm not as good at that, but it is a driver. And it helps motivate me and move me. And I'm never satisfied with where I'm at. I'm always thinking about where can I, you know, what, what else can I do?

So those three character traits are what fueled this. I have a bunch of other skills and strengths, but maybe one of the most important ones is I know that I'm not the smartest person in the universe and I like to surround myself with people who are. And that's where my co-founder comes in. He is one of the smartest people in the universe. And so I was able to get him motivated to solve this problem too. And now we're doing it together.

So we get to leverage his brain and my drive and tenacity and connections. It's a great combination. And that, but those things are really the raw ingredients and everything else derives from it. And what would you tell people who, maybe in a similar situation, who are in a full-time position and want to do something that's scary in terms of starting their own business? You know, what advice would you have for those people who want to make

a similar career move? You know, what would you say to them? Well, the phrase that comes to mind, this is probably because I'm sitting in utah right now yeah i'm supposed to be skiing but my my body gave out on me so i'm not able to right now um but no guts no glory you know at facebook we had a maybe a slightly nicer one which is fortune favors the bold um you know the no risk no no reward is many different phrases that we celebrate. The risk taker is the one who usually achieves the biggest wins. And you can't, you know, we look at all the people who are successful in our world today. It's hard to think of many who got there because they were just

given something like, okay, here's $100 million. And now all of a sudden, you get to be who you are. There's some people who are like that. But a lot of people, you look at the Bill Gates's and the Mark Zuckerberg's and the Michael Bloomberg's and the Sergey Brin's. And, you know, there's a long list of them in technology and not in technology who were, you know, willing to take those risks. And they would not be where they are today by playing it safe. They certainly wouldn't be there when they are working for other people. Just not to say working for other people is bad. And I would not push the entrepreneurial life on anybody who's not prepared for it. And I think you can have a fulfilling and happy life and not be an

entrepreneur. And in some respects, if you try to go down the entrepreneurial path and you're not ready for it, you will not be happy. It is hard. So you really have to be cut out for it. But if you are, there's no time like the present. Yeah. What would you say to those people who say, risk isn't part of my blood or who maybe have the story that they can't take the risk? How did you develop it in yourself Or what advice would you give to other people who, who maybe just don't naturally have that? I think many people just

don't. And I think that's okay. And, you know, as long as they're happy with their lives, then don't take those risks. You're not that kind of person. And you're probably a fantastic supporter of somebody else who is yeah that said um you know that you might be that kind of person if you know when you hear what i just said and you kind of feel a little awkward like yeah that's i don't really want to stay where i'm at and there's something inside of you that's unexplored there's a there's a drive there's a motivation yeah and uh when you fight it it can lead to unhappiness right you know because some people get depressed they stay where they're at and they don't like where they're at but they don't do anything about it um so it's depressing because they're in the same situation.

Ultimately, what's causing that is that they have ambition for something different and they're not taking the action on it. So my advice to those people is if you are unhappy with where you're at, then stop being unhappy and make the decision to go take an action and do something. And you will instantly feel better, even if what you do is a giant failure. Because you'll learn at least from the failure. Fortune favors the bull. So failure.

Fortune favors the bull. Next question, Tim, is tell us about a time that you failed. Maybe an epic failure in your mind would be great. And what you learned from it. And just the reason I want to ask you that is sometimes people might think well you know Tim he didn't fail he got to Facebook right and had a successful career there but tell us about a time that didn't go so great for you and what you learned from it well I'll start by saying my wife has this, this cork board in our bedroom that has all these little sayings. One of my favorites is the difference between the master and the novice is

that the master has failed more times than the novice has tried. I love it. And I think it's totally true because I failed a lot in my life. You know, when I first was promoted to be the CIO of KLA Tincor, it was a dismal failure the first six months. I was not being a good leader to my team and I was being an even worse CIO. I would go into the executive staff meetings and talk to them about what we were doing in my organization. And not only would it go over their heads because they didn't understand IT, but they

didn't care. They didn't want to hear any of that. And they weren't hearing what they did want to hear, which is what business outcomes was I driving? Because as a CIO at KLA Tincor, I was a general manager. Every general manager had a business objective. They had a business, whether it's, most of them, revenue or profit. Some of them had cost savings and others, but they all had business objectives. And that's what they did when they would talk with each other.

It was, where are we on the business objective that I'm responsible for? And it took my boss at the time, who was not very nice about this, but he was direct. So it was effective. It took him telling me, like, I don't want to ever hear this shit from you again in one of these meetings. And that message, he didn't tell me exactly what to say, but he told me what I was saying wasn't working. And it forced me to take a completely different approach

at my next business review. And I remember the night before, I was looking at my slide deck and I was like, if I do this slide deck, I'm just going to get skewered one more time and I don't want to do that. So I decided and didn't feel comfortable. I reversed the order of the slides. I started talking with my costs first and all the cost savings initiatives I was driving, starting with cost savings in my organization.

And that's exactly what the president of the company wanted to hear about. That's what everybody else was looking for me to do. And I didn't get a standing ovation, but I got a very strong pat on the back afterwards. Nice. Okay. That was the best review we've ever had from your function. That's fantastic. So it took those failures to learn what I needed to do. I have tons of examples of these,

whether at Facebook even at woven or in previously in my career, I did not get to where I am because I always succeeded. I got to where I am because I learned from all my failures. Yeah, excellent, excellent. And what do you feel like was the main take-home that you learned in that situation? Like what's the main point or the main lesson that you learned? Well, I learned several things. One was that I learned what the purpose of my organization was, and I learned to always know the purpose of my

organization. Second, I learned how important it is to speak to your audience in language that they care about, not the language that you care about. I also learned that what you say is not always what is heard. To be quite frank, I have some stories about my relationship with my wife where I learned this experience even better than I did in this other one. But this was an example of it. And so it's really important to pay attention to your audience. Are they getting the message that you're trying to get across? And not just to assume that just because you said it,

that's what they heard. And so those are probably the three big ones for me. I also learned, that was sort of the beginning of the end of my time at KLA 10 core. Even though I stayed with the company for another three years after that, I learned that the mission and the purpose of the, of my team wasn't something I wanted to do in the longterm. And I won't wanted to first prove to the world that I could do this job. I could do it. Well, I could be well respected in my abilities to do that job.

And then I wanted to go leave and do it someplace else, which is sort of the seeds into the story of how I got to Facebook. Excellent. You know, Tim, one of the stories that I read about you was that you were in a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and you're biting your tongue because you disagreed with the consensus of what you were talking about and he called you out on it. So tell us about that and what you learned from him or what you learned about his leadership and the lessons you took from that. Yeah, I actually, this, I always respected him for this. Because as you said, we were in a meeting, we were talking about a set of information technology

that strategically we wanted to move off of. Okay. And Facebook wasn't comfortable having its data managed by this company. And the nature of the technology was kind of unique. So moving off of, and it was important to the workforce. So moving off of this technology wasn't going to be easy because it wasn't a good replacement. And it wasn't something that was going to be well received by employees. But there was a good reason why Facebook wanted to do it.

So I wasn't disagreeing with the decision to move off this technology, but there was to me a lot more potential. And it was a lot closer to the technology that Facebook was trying to move off of. And so I, Zuck saw this. I didn't know him well enough to know that I actually had license to speak out forcibly about this. But he gave me that license in that meeting. He's like, Tim, you disagree with this. I want to hear what you have to say. And so he gave me the floor. I got to speak my disagreement. I said, if we move to the technology that everybody wants to move to, I know it will not work. I know there's going to be unhappy with it. I know that it's going to cost us on the very one thing that you have asked me to be responsible for, which is the productivity of the workforce. This other route, I don't know that we can make it work, that I can get them to specifically tailor their product to be more

acceptable to Facebook. And we're going to be not only in a much better state from a technology perspective, but we'll have a better partner in this. So whatever we might need in the future, that these guys would be very responsive to us. And Zuck said, okay, well, what do you need if you wanted to go down that route? And I said, I need two weeks to talk with them to come up with a plan. And I will be the first one to say the plan is not going to work

if after talking to them, I don't believe it can work. But I need two weeks to get to that point. And he gave me the two weeks. We ended up going down the path that I advocated for. It's an embarrassing one to talk about because the technology still was suboptimal, but it worked. to get to that point. And he gave me the two weeks. We ended up going down the path that I advocated for. Nice. It's an embarrassing one to talk about because the technology still was suboptimal, but it worked. But the more important thing is the importance of leaders looking for the dissenting opinion. And that's one of the things that Mark Zuckerberg

is particularly, I give him a lot of credit for. He doesn't want to hear what everybody else believes. He wants to hear what he doesn't know. Yeah. Awesome. What are the things do you see, you know, the best of the best like him do differently in terms of mindset or leadership or taking risks? Well, there's, there's a lot. Yeah., I think that one of the things that Facebook, and this also comes from Zuck, has been very good at is being very mission-driven organizations, I think, are far more effective than organizations that are driven by, say, profit or things that are smaller. Because the mission is what people will use to make decisions when you're not in the room, if you can set your culture up right. So that's one. I think another one is this idea that you know not wanting

to be the smartest person in the room i think when you are a very intelligent person that is both difficult um and it's yeah it's not very comforting to the ego to have people who are smarter than you um it feels good when you're smarter than everybody. Yeah. But it's not very effective because then you're basically limited by your own capabilities. And I think I'm fortunate, this is going to sound really self-effacing, but I grew up in a family where I was definitely not the smartest person. My father is a college professor. He was brilliant. My older sister is a bazillion times more intelligent than I am. So I kind of learned that humility on that front. I almost had the opposite problem. I didn't realize how smart I

am, but I knew that I wasn't the smartest and I was comfortable not being the smartest. So that's made it easy for me to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am. And I think it is a very valuable skill, especially when you know what you are good at and what you're not good at. And then you can sort of build a company where you look for the people that compliment you, know the things that you don't. I think Facebook's a fantastic example of that.

So, Sam, I got one other question for you that kind of follows up on that. When you say like mission-driven companies and organizations, tell us what your perspective on in terms of how to develop that mission or, you know, what that looks like in terms of the best. And then you said, and then if you set your culture up, right, tell us what your perspective is on that in terms of how the culture, um, connects with the mission. Well, uh, starting with the mission, I think the, um, the mission is the answer to a, to the question. Why, why are you doing this?

Um, and when that answer is meaningful, uh, then you probably have a good mission. Yeah. When the answer is meaningful, then you probably have a good mission. When the answer is shallow, like I often get asked the question, oh, did you start Woven to basically flip it and sell this to Google in a couple years or to sell it to another company? And my answer to that is, if I did that, that's like option three or four in the route for this business is definitely not option one. Option one for me,

what I'm trying to do is something big and then I go back to the mission and the mission is how people spend time on what matters most. That's a big answer to the question. Why am I doing what I'm doing? If the answer to my question is because I want to make a million dollars. Okay. That's a small, it's not particularly inspiring. That's not a very good mission. It's a mission. You could have a mission like that. Yeah. But I think the way that people get meaningful missions is to keep asking the

question, why, why are you doing this? In terms of culture, culture is really the result of your leadership decisions. Culture is what you reward. Culture is what you tolerate and encourage. I do think you can be deliberate about culture. You can sit down with a group of people and ask what you want the culture to be. But I think more than anything, it is reflective of leadership decisions. So if you fire somebody for standing up to you, you're creating the culture of yes. I want yes people,

people who are not going to challenge me. And you're going to have small minded people. If you reward somebody for making a mistake but learning from it, and it's a big mistake, then you've created a growth-oriented mindset. Absolutely. And so I think ultimately, the answer to this question, how do you do it,

it comes down to what you reward and what you choose to reward. Great, I like that. When I think about Facebook's why, you know, their mission, what's their mission? The mission is to make the world more open and connected. And that drove all the decisions. So when you're talking about, well, why are we selling advertising?

Advertising helps fund this business, which is going to enable people to connect. Why are we trying to grow more users? Why are we trying to get to 1 billion and 1.5 billion, 2 billion? Because that's making the world connected. Absolutely. Why are we trying to encourage people to share? They're making them more open. So that's been the mission of the company.

I think the mission is flawed. And that's a little bit of the trouble that Facebook finds itself in now, because it assumes that that's what the world wants. And I think we found some examples of why that doesn't actually work. But without getting too judgmental on the mission, they have absolutely, that's a big mission. And when the company is small and has like a million users, making the world more open and connected sounds gigantic.

Now that Facebook is what it is, you can almost say mission accomplished, right? It's like you really have done this. Yeah, they have done it. So, Tim, I want to talk a little bit more about your company, Woven. Tell us what makes it different than other similar companies like it. Well, I think it starts with the people. You know, my co-founder and I are a very different kind of founding team. And the team that we have built around us is a very experienced,

highly technical group of individuals. So although every company likes to claim they have the best and the most unique team. But in terms of our approach, calendars haven't evolved in large part because everybody's been focused on fixing the UI, the interface into them. Let me make the calendar prettier. Products like Fantastical. Or let me make it a little bit easier to create events so put like a little bit of natural language processing in um or there's companies have gone all in on that user interface like x.ai but it said let me create a voice or a

a text interface to the calendar so i i can talk it and say, Hey, let's get into this meeting with Joe next week. But they don't change what the calendar ultimately is. The calendar is a date book. It keeps track of the following four bits of information, the name of an event, the time of an event, sometimes the description of the event and the people, sometimes the people that are going to the event, that's it. So if you want to go to your calendar and say, ask it the question,

am I spending time on what matters most? It actually can't answer that question. Now let's start with the fact that it can't tell you how you're spending time. There's no query interface. There's no ability for it to calculate you know how busy you are it's just very good at making you busy but it doesn't it also doesn't know how you're spending your time it doesn't know the difference between an interview and um you know date night your wife, meeting with a supplier or meeting with a co-worker. It doesn't have any kind of descriptive information. So it's impossible for the calendar to answer that question.

And if it can't answer that question, then it can't help you. It can't help you spend time on the things that matter most. It's not there to help make sure you have an agenda. It's not there to help make sure that you actually accomplished your agenda or that you got all of the action items to accomplish your agenda in the future captured. It's not there to even help you schedule the event. It's there to just tell you what you're doing. Other people have to do the work to make that possible. So what we're trying to do is complete it. We're actually not trying

to replace it. We're trying to complete it. And that's what makes us different is everybody else is focused on taking the same four fields and just wrapping a different user interface around it, making it prettier. And we're trying to make all the information around your time connected in a way that helps you accomplish what you're trying to accomplish and i'm sensing get information about how you're spending your time and are you spending it on the things that matter most to you yeah and we just released this um nifty little it's a lightweight analytic and it's just the tip of the iceberg but when i I open up WorldBend, the first thing it does is it tells me when my next meeting is and how I'm going to get there, whether that's driving or I got to call somebody or maybe it's a Zoom link. And then right below it tells me what's changed on my calendar. So what new events

have been scheduled or maybe the location has changed on something. And then at the bottom is the summary of what my week looks like so far. How am I spending my time? How many events do I have? How much time in events and like how much of that time is personal time? How much of that time is time spending marketing, recruiting with investors? These are the major parts of my job. Right. And Woven helps me keep track of that.

Cool. And it's right there where I can say, you know what? I'm not spending that much time marketing this week. Maybe I need to make an adjustment. And it will help me make decisions on the future. I think about how I work with a lot of salespeople, they're real estate or financial planners, and they're always keeping track of their numbers and the meetings kept and, you know, kind of clients they were meeting with. I could see how

like woven could really help you get the analytics like right away, exactly how you're spending your time. So super cool. I know you can go on there, woven.com and you can go on and get a free account. Tell us like why else would we want to go check it out? Well, it's the fastest way to schedule. So I don't have an executive assistant and I don't need one of them. He least not to manage my calendar because I'm, I'm able to handle all of those things myself extremely quickly. It's fast, not just for me, but for people on the other side. So that's, that's a big win for the product.

The second thing is that Woven helps me manage my entire life, not just my work life because it works across all of my calendars. Today, it works across multiple Google accounts. So I have a personal account and a work account. We're just about to release our Office 365 version, which will allow people who use Office at work, but Gmail at home, to bring all their time together in one place so that when you're busy at home you're not available go do something at work and vice versa so these are some of the things that we do in addition to helping you keep track of how you're spending time and then the things that we're moving working on moving forward are how do we make that time spent more effectively? How do we help you manage your

agendas or manage the follow-up actions in ways that will help make sure that the time that you are spending is effective time? Yeah, nice. Awesome. So woven.com is where you can go over and check it out. Sam, if people have any questions or comments for you, or how can they get a hold of you in terms of just following what you're doing there at Woven or any other place on social? I'm easy to find. So you can, you know, just, you know, reach me at Woven or on Twitter. My Twitter handle is TCampos. Very responsive on both of those fronts. We have Slack groups.

We have Facebook groups. And we're very active on social media as well. If anybody wants to tag Woven in a question, the Twitter handle there is Woven app, Woven underscore app. And those are really the easiest ways to get a hold of me. Awesome. Well, Tim, thank you so much for joining us today

on the High Performance Mindset. I'd love to give you just a summary of what I got from today's interview as a way to wrap it up and as a way to help the listeners like, oh yeah, this is what Tim talked about. So when I asked you about why we don't always value our time, you said because we don't see how limited it is and that it's really, it's not infinite. And I appreciate what you said about that. And just the exercise that your life coach gave you, just helping us think about how many years do we really have left and how are we going to spend it? I liked what you talked about related to risk. I thought that was really powerful. And when I think about the people that you've been exposed to, but also like you moving

forward with Woven from Facebook, just like this fortune follows the bull and taking risks is really important. And the people that you gave us as an example, like they took huge risks and then there was a big payoff. So continue to take risks in our lives and being courageous, like you mentioned. And at the end, the culture piece was really interesting. When you're talking about how culture is reflective of leadership decisions, what you tolerate, what you encourage, what you reward as well. So really good stuff today, Tim. I encourage everyone to check out woven.com.

I was over there earlier and created a free account and I'm going to be checking it out because I'm busy. And so I got to make sure I keep my calendar. I'm on top of it as well. So thanks again for joining us today. All right. Thanks for having me. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow. Did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers, where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr.

Sindra. That's D-R-I-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.