Producer’s Note: In honor of the upcoming Insight Innovation Competition at IIEX North America 2023, the podcast is re-running one of our favorite episodes featuring past Insight Innovation Competition winners, Zappi. The episode dives into the success stories of previous winners and highlights their groundbreaking ideas that have shaped the market research industry.

As the competition gears up, innovators are eagerly submitting their new ideas, and judges will be tasked with selecting the finalists. However, the ultimate decision lies in the hands of the attendees at IIEX North America, who will have the unique opportunity to witness the finalists’ live presentations and cast their votes for the next big innovation.

The GreenBook Insight Innovation Competition has been a launching pad for countless innovators over the last 10 years, propelling them to become industry leaders. Don’t miss out on one of the most exciting parts of IIEX: the moment when the GreenBook Insight Innovation Competition finalists take the stage to deliver their captivating pitches. It’s a chance to experience this year’s most inventive and cutting-edge ideas firsthand, and to play a part in shaping the future of the market research industry. Make sure to tune in to the podcast episode to learn more about our first winner Zappi and their remarkable achievements in the field! 

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In this week’s episode GreenBook’s host, Lenny Murphy, is joined by Steve Phillips, Founder & CEO of Zappi — a powerhouse of consumer testing for advertising and innovation development.

Take a deep dive into the origin story of Zappi (who just so happened to have won GreenBook’s very first Insight Innovation competition way back in 2013) and discover how they became a leader in prioritizing global sustainability by taking the Net Zero Pledge, get the rundown on how they’ve built a strong company culture in a hybrid environment, and uncover the important lessons about leadership they’ve learned along the way.

Use the code PODCAST25 for 25% off your registration to IIEX North America

Many thanks to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, James Carlisle.

Transcript

Lenny: Hello, everybody, it’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the GreenBook Podcast. Today, we are actually going to bring back an oldie but a goodie. It is a conversation I had with Steve Phillips, CEO of Zappi store. And we’re doing that because Zappi was the first winner of the competition, the first IIEX. And of course, it is the ten-year anniversary of IIEX and it was Zappi winning the competition and IIEX North America is in just a few weeks. So, bringing this up so you can listen to Steve’s story from his own mouth about the growth of Zappi. And we do that to reiterate the value of IIEX North America as well as the competition as a whole in bringing companies that are innovative and doing new things that are game changers in the industry to the fore. So, enjoy and we hope to see you in Austin very soon.

Steve, welcome, welcome.

Steve: Thank you. Thank you, and happy new year to you.

Lenny: Thank you, same to you. So, as I said, Steve is the CEO of Zappi. A little bit of context on why this is interesting, particularly, is Zappi was one of the companies that won the Insight Innovation competition in our very first IIEX event in Brazil, many moons ago. And now you know, gosh, what, seven years later?

Steve: I think it might be eight or nine then.

Lenny: Wow. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Steve: Exactly.

Lenny: Well, the cool thing is, it’s been a unique experience, at least for me, to know Steve and Zappi from literally it was an idea pitched on stage with no real substance to now. Zappi has become an adjective through the industry. We want to Zappi that’s right, in terms of being really the driver of automation in research across the board and have grown to become a real powerhouse. And it’s all Steve’s brainchild, so it’s fun to have that perspective from early stage. So welcome, Steve.

Steve: Thank you, Lenny. And I should say that it’s great to hear that it’s being used as a verb. That was one of the goals when we launched was to see if we could make our brand name a verb. We know that it’s true within some of our clients, and the more it’s used as a verb, obviously, the better we feel, so that’s very nice to hear.

Lenny: Thank you for correcting me from adjective to verb. That’s been a long time since I took high school grammar.

Steve: [laugh].

Lenny: But today, we’re really not talking about the Zappification of research. We are going to talk about some different topics that you’ve been leading the charge on that maybe have even greater impact than automation. And one of those has been that your pledge to make the business net zero by 2026. So, you want to talk about that? Let’s just start off there.

Steve: Sure. And I should say, we’ve actually made Zappi net-zero already, or at least at the basic level of net-zero, and hopefully will get a chance to talk through what is, on a surface level, quite simple thing, the more you think about it, the harder it does in fact get, and there are more complexities to it. But the critical thing we’re trying to do” and this is not really a Zappi thing” this is, it kicked off with the MRS, which is the insight association of the UK, and increasingly we’re talking to other associations around the world who are trying to make the industry net-zero by 2026. So, that’s our goal and we’re hoping that other companies” and there are lots of other companies that are driving this with us and helping us” and frankly, in some sense, it’s not even a company; it’s individuals within those companies who equally feel passionate about making the industry at stage one net-zero, and stage two, more sustainable, generally in our practices more sustainable. So, that’s what we’re trying to do is kick off a global movement within the industry so the industry plays its part in making sure the planet is a good place to be living in 50, 100, 300 years time.

Lenny: That’s a commendable goal. And if I recall correctly, this has been a topic that I don’t know if we’ve ever” you know, I’ve ever talked about in-depth, but I’ve always gotten the impression that this idea of global sustainability and climate awareness and being good stewards is a topic near and dear to your heart. Is that correct?

Steve: It is. I could tell you the origin story of how we kicked it off. So, we exactly have been thinking about it anyway and I can talk to you a little bit about what we’ve done at a company level, too. Basically, there are three core things to do. First of all, you measure your carbon footprint. The second thing is you try and reduce our carbon footprint. And the third thing is that you offset that carbon footprint.

So, at the basic level, it’s those three steps. We as a company had been going through, and are still going through, becoming certified as a B Corp. A B Corp is a type of company and the idea it balances people, planet, and profit. So, it doesn’t say you’re a social enterprise; it says yes, absolutely go for profit, make profit, but make sure you’re balancing it with treating people really well and fairly. That’s both internally, employees, but also suppliers and people who work for suppliers.

And then also that you’re doing a good job in terms of helping steward the planet as much as you can, as much as you can. So, companies like Unilever are moving along these lines, and some of the other big clients, but also it’s obviously easier for smaller companies with less complicated supply chains. But it’s a process we’re moving through. I happen to be on one of the MRS boards, which is the company partner board, looking at how company partners within the MRS and the UK work and what products and services the MRS can offer them. The MRS had a diversity and inclusivity committee; I suggested, stupidly, that there should a sustainability committee. As soon as you suggest anything, it looks like volunteering”

Lenny: [laugh].

Steve: [laugh] so I ended up running it. And we copied a lot of what the MRS had done on the DNI pledge, which is, come up with a pledge, get CEOs on board with that pledge to, get them signing it, and then use that as a way of getting any industry to move in terms of diversity/inclusivity. And what we wanted to do was do the same for sustainability. So, we kicked this off about a year-and-a-half ago in the UK, we came up with a pledge, we started getting companies involved in that pledge. And it’s all the way from people like [Cantar 00:06:34], if signed up, down to some of the small, mid-sized companies, GFK have signed up as well.

So, there’s a lot of momentum behind it in the UK. And we’re beginning to try and roll that out more globally. SMR getting behind this, we’re talking to the insight association in the US, we’re talking to the Canadians and the Australians, the German insight association also, hopefully, we’ll be taking this up. So, slowly but surely, we’re getting the associations to get behind trying to make our industry that we know and love as sustainable as possible. The obvious thing that we need is for other companies, and frankly, other people to just join in that movement.

And first of all, the simple thing is to sign up to the pledge. And when people have done that, there’s a lot of help and resource that we can give in terms of how you go through that process. And that process again, is first of all, measuring, then reducing, and then offsetting.

Lenny: You know, I already liked you, obviously, but wow. I didn’t know that you were playing such a key role in helping to drive such an important initiative, so that is very, very cool. And it’s cool that the MRS is driving that across the board. Honestly, it’s not something that” and maybe this is just my own personal bias, I’m already a very, not just digitally-first but digital-only worker in our organization in GreenBook, and other organizations I work with are so digitally-focused and I’ve never actually thought about, well, what does it look like to really be committed to this from a business standpoint? How else do we reduce that carbon impact? This is a first for me. I just have not given this consideration. So, can you give some examples?

Steve: Sure. So, one of the things we’ve done in the UK is we’ve partnered with a calculator, so it’s a company that does a carbon calculator. I have to say, once you’ve signed something like the pledge, you’re saying you’ll do it within five years or we may even extend it, make it longer because it’s not the simplest thing, it takes a bit of time, but you have time to do it. So, when you start thinking about what your carbon footprint is that there are multiple things that” multiple aspects to it and degrees of complexity in terms of the measurement. If you’re a one-man band, then it’s a lot easier, it’s a lot more simple.

If you’re a larger corporation, that will become more and more complicated, more and more complex. So, the thing to do is, if you’re a one-person band, you can do it relatively simply, you can probably go onto the calculator, work out what your footprint is, think about where you’d offset, and then look to offset, and there are” we have some guidance [about 00:09:13] good offsetting schemes.

In terms of when we were looking at our footprint, I would say” and this was 2018, 2019—not surprisingly, most of it for us was travel. Then you start looking at the calculations of what the footprint of that type of travel is. We tend to fly economy, which is significantly better off than flying business class. So, you start factoring in those aspects to it. The great thing about looking at travel is immediately it said to us, let’s start making sustainability also an element in that travel decision.

So, if we’re getting a group of people together, a group of 20 people together within Zappi to brainstorm about a particular subject, in the past, that decision was made pretty much on the basis of how busy are people and what’s the cost and what’s the outcome of that get together. We would now include the state of ility in that decision-making. Now, it’s not going to override it, it’s not going to mean you can’t go, but it is going to be, let’s think about others a factor in that travel decision. So, that’s one important step that we made, just thinking about it when thinking about travel.

The next thing for us is, frankly, our AWS costs. So, our data storage, we’re a data company, there’s a lot of storage there. That is not true for a lot of other people. Energy consumption within an office environment is also a big thing. Moving to a green tariff is really important.

So, it’s a process of going through the places where you may emit, sometimes you will, sometimes you won’t, and then also trying to understand purchases of things that you do and what the common issues are related to them. We don’t print much out, so we don’t have an issue with that like you do, but there are people who create data tables for companies and obviously they do do a lot of printouts and report printouts. So, it’s an evaluation of your business, it tells you” the calculator will tell you” how much carbon you’re emitting for each of the types of activities you’re doing. And then you can start using that as a way of thinking, okay, how can I reduce this over time?

Lenny: I’m assuming that 2020 was a bit of a boon”

Steve: [laugh].

Lenny: Right? It kind of forced the issue on multiple fronts to have greater a greater offset and reduction of the carbon footprint. Is that accurate?

Steve: Yeah, hugely. I mean, certainly for professional services companies like ourselves. We’re an international professional service company and the classic profile of an international professional service company is travelers, by far your biggest carbon emission. If you’re a domestic company, that’s probably not true, except in the states where there’s a lot of flying domestically. Yeah, it’s about that process of evaluation, and then reduction over time is the critical thing.

So, there’s a lot of discussion in the offsetting industry about how appropriate offsetting is, and really, what we should be doing is reduction. And certainly, I think that the science-based targets suggest that, at least by 2050, we need to reduce the carbon emissions by 70 to 90% I think it is, rather than just offset them. And then the offsetting, there’s arguments within the offsetting of do you plant trees, which is one of the things we do, but there are some tree-planting schemes that frankly, are slightly scam-like and green-washing and some that are much more thorough and thought-through. And again, there is advice from the associations of the type of offsetting. But ideally, the trouble with planting trees is that they offset the emission you’re making now over the next 40 years. Ideally, you’d be offsetting them immediately; that’s carbon capture.

So, there are carbon capture schemes that we’re looking into. They’re much more nascent, so that early stage, but the only way that you get nascent technologies to being mainstream technologies is to invest in them when they’re early stage. They cost a lot more money, but that is the only way that they’ll be able to scale up is if they get people early-stage helping them out. So, we’re looking also at how much money we can potentially put into that as both as a company and potentially as an industry to help that technology move along because that will be a major, significant way of reducing carbon as it hits the atmosphere. And we know that it’s going to hit, so let’s do what we can to take it out if we can.

Lenny: And has this been a initiative that you’ve factored into from a company culture, that the entire team is behind this from the get-go? Like, look, this is” as you said, we’re not just here to make money; we can make money, but we can also do good and this is one of the principles that the company is focusing on doing good. So, is it baked into your cultural DNA at this point?

Steve: Yes. I mean, obviously, there are some people in the industry” in the company who are more passionate about it than others. Some people are more passionate about things like DNI; we do some pro bono work as well and we’re involved in other charitable stuff, as I know lots of companies are. There’s a group of us, and that includes me, who are passionate about the sustainability thing. Everyone would know about it.

So, part of becoming a B Corp, for me, is saying that as a company, if you want to join this company, if you want to be part of this company, we are not just about business, we are not just about growth, we’re not just about profit. All of those things are important, but also our impact on the world around us is really important. It’s important to us as a company, it’s important to us as a culture. And so, I think we attract and retain people who think that is also important to them. And probably consequently, we don’t attract people who are not” have a much more simple-minded pure, growth business approach to them and they’d like to be more cutthroat about things. So, people know about it and it’s baked into our DNA, so it just attracts and retains that type of person.

Lenny: Do you think that ”so that’s maybe an interesting sidebar. You know, we’re going through this great resignation phenomenon, and certainly, our industry has not been spared from that. It is happening, although I don’t think it’s happening at quite the level that it is and in others. But have you seen that focus on values and principles helping to really be a retention driver within the team, more so than other companies that maybe are just, you know, solely profit-focused and people don’t find that connection to them?

Steve: I think so. I think it’s difficult to know what’s happening to other companies, obviously. What we are finding is that, I mean, we’re growing, we’re hiring and we’re finding that the talent pool is strong at the moment. We are finding our retention is very strong, is very good. So, when we haven’t seen a particular uptick in people leaving voluntarily over the last year, so we look like we’re in a good place.

For me, there are probably two key aspects to it from a Zappi perspective. One is the culture, that culture that we were talking about, in terms of what the company is about, what it’s trying to do. The other thing is at a much more individual level, which is allowing people to grow, experiment, have the autonomy to pursue what they’re passionate about. And that’s very important within Zappi. We want ideas to come from anywhere. We want people to be able to go, I think we should be doing that and try it; experiment with it.

We have a mantra, which is kill, scale, or amend. And people should just experiment and try something out, and if it doesn’t work, great, kill it. That’s not a problem at all. And if it does work, brilliant, scale it. But the worst thing to do is amend. It means you haven’t designed your experiment very well and you’re constantly just messing around on something. And so, we really actively encourage experimentation and autonomy within the business and within people. So, we give people, we hope, the opportunity to grow within the company, rather than feeling that they need to move somewhere else in order to be able to grow or try and try something.

Lenny: Now, as a founder, you think back, you had another company before Zappi, this was not your first rodeo by any stretch of the imagination, but when you began this journey as an entrepreneur and a founder, the ideas that we’re talking about of building a organization with values and principles and doing good, was that part of the motivation or was it in the back of your mind? Or is this been an evolutionary process for you? As the company has grown, you realized, “Oh, holy crap. We can do these things, too. What’s that journey been like for you?

Steve: So, I think I’ve known it’s always been important and not just as a founder, but as an employee when I’ve been in previous companies. So, I was part of a company in Asia that I thought was brilliantly run. I loved my boss, I love the way the company worked, I thought it’s a wonderful place to be. But I’ve also had my share of being in places that were hierarchical, you were stifled or told what to do and didnt agree with them and you couldn’t voice yourself and you know, so we’ve all had those experiences, I think. So, when you’re founding a company, of course, that drives the direction you want to take and the type of place you want to build the type of atmosphere you want to be in.

The thing that’s been very different from me with Zappiâ”probably two aspects to it. One is it’s a technology company, not a market research company. I’m a market researcher. I know market research very well; I don’t know technology very well despite the fact that I’ve sent myself a learn-to-code-in-a-day course. I spent an entire day learning to code and so you’d think by now I’d be an expert. But no, it appears I’m not.

So, the idea that I would be able to tell them what to do, it’s completely obviously stupid. So, as much autonomy as you can give is the solution to that. When you have people with brilliant skills across a whole range of areas, you want them to be able to utilize them. And then other aspects of the culture, again, coming from the technology side, but also the size, as Zappi has grown, it’s not been possible for me to, in any sense, manage the culture of all of the different people in the company. And so” and also a lot of the ideas are coming from other founders.

So, Zappi and Intellection were two different companies and we ended up merging. They were the technology company, and the founders from Intellection came in with a lot of different ideas as well, particularly about how you run a brilliant technology organization. And so, it’s really been a melding of those ideas and a sort of a natural growing from all of the people within the company. So, I wouldn’t say in any sense that it’s my culture. It’s definitely Zappi’s culture, and Zappi, of course, I’ve had an influence on it, but I’m just one of the people at Zappi .

Lenny: Yeah, I really do sound like a fanboy now, which is just odd because we’re friends. But we have not delved into these ideas. And I just think that’s an incredibly enlightened, for lack of a better term, way to think about of being a steward, a key influencer, if you will” an enabler; maybe that’s even a better way to think about it” of individual-level growth versus your own key vision. And I even just thinking about, you know, other companies that have achieved significant scale, not even in our space, just outside of our space from the tech companies, and I imagine that some of those successful founders would have a similar outlook, compared to maybe some of the others that, you know, the train wrecks that we’re all aware of, companies that scaled up really quickly and became billion-dollar unicorns and then realized, oh, wow, their founders are real assholes and everybody hates them.

Steve: [laugh]. No idea who you’re thinking of.

Lenny: Yeah [laugh]. I think there was a movie about one recently. But [laugh].

Steve: I think on that, Lenny, that’s a good point because we do read a lot as well, so a lot of our culture” I don’t know, if you’ve seen the Netflix deck, the Netflix culture deck from 2008, 2009; it went through Silicon Valley” it was described by the woman who used to run HP as the most important document that had been in Silicon Valley in the last ten years. We read that. That was a big influence. Lots of other things were a big influence. You talk about leadership; there’s a concept someone else named we’ve adopted as well, of servant leadership.

And it’s the idea that leadership isn’t about, necessarily, just telling people where to go and what to do; it’s often about serving them so that they can become better and they can make the best decisions because you want them being able to make decisions rather than then coming to you for decisions. Because they’re the people who know what’s happening on the ground better. So, if you’ve got someone running, I don’t know, a category or a country or someone managing a particular category of client in an area, so they’re running a telecom unit within Zappi, obviously, they know telecom better than I do, or anyone else does, so obviously, they’re best positioned to make the decisions about where to go and what products to do and how to work with the clients. You’re there to help them. You’re there to enable them, you’re there to give them advice, which they can then ignore. Though some of those ideas do absolutely come from other places that we’re very interested in learning about.

Lenny: I love that. I love that. That’s actually, I’ve even thought about that often as a parent to instill within our family as well as in the business, this idea that it’s about being of service. My kids ask me, What do you do for a living, Daddy, I say, I help people. Because ultimately that is how I view my role in life regardless of the specific application, right? Whether it be work, whether it be as a parent, whether it be as a sibling, a friend, and neighbor. And I think as you said it, that often means not doing for, but enabling others to do for themselves, giving them the appropriate resources, so that they can succeed. And what a powerful concept. It feels right as a human.

Steve: I think the primary part of my role is trying to set the vision, not how we get there. I think lots of other people are better at doing that. So, I’m trying to say where I’d like the company to be three to four, five years down the line. And once you set that and let people free, they’ll hopefully get there in the smartest way that we can get there.

So, I think that’s the primary role. It is what increasingly the sort of direction that technology companies are taking. It’s also difficult, I recognize, particularly as a founding entrepreneur, that suddenly you’re having major decisions being made that you might not even be consulted about, that you might disagree with. Jeff Bezos says, there’s a phrase that we again” again, we’ve stolen, which is, Disagree and commit. So, in a typical company, sometimes you’ll disagree with something and then you’ll moan or bitch about it from the sidelines. The idea is, you’re disagreeing with someone, but you’re going to help them make it work, whatever, because that’s the best thing for the company. So, there are those types of ways of thinking about it.

Lenny: We touched on that obviously the pandemic helped accelerate” maybe” some of the thinking, or at least the execution by default, of your plans from a reduce your carbon footprint. As we come out have that, I think hopefully, knock on wood [laugh] we keep thinking that the light is at the end of the tunnel and it looks like, you know, another train comes down. But I think maybe this time we’re actually really are coming out of it” how do you continue to implement a lot of the policies that we had to do just out of default? Like travel, right? Travel was limited, right? Not having a big office because everybody worked from home. You know, those things.

What does that look like going forward as we try and find a little more balance between more of a traditional, you know, view of how businesses function and build and scale and this new idea of wait, there’s things that we learned from here that may we were forced to because we had to, but it’s actually really good and were going to keep these things in place. What does that look like for you?

Steve: Yeah, it’s something frankly that we’re all struggling with, I think: what is the new world of work? What does the office look like? When do we get together? When do we not get together? I think we decided that we would embrace a hybrid approach where we are not getting rid of our offices, but I’m sure we’re not expanding them.

We said to people, you can work wherever you like. Now, some of our job descriptions when we’re hiring, say, We would prefer you to be in this geographic location, but that location has expanded, right? So, wouldn’t be London, it would be the UK. But some of the roles are just, we don’t care where you are. We absolutely believe that getting together face-to-face is important. It builds a level of trust.

And we have the core of our sort of culture, we describe as being founded on trust and truth. The company trusts people and people trust” I hope” the company. And truth is not just about telling the truth; it’s about getting to the truth and getting to the underlying element behind. You know, asking five whys, what’s behind the simple answer or the simple question. And that trust, I think, is a bank and you have to keep on making deposits into that bank.

You make withdrawals, and you make deposits and those deposits often happen over a cup of coffee, sitting in a, it could be a Starbucks, it could be an office, it could be somewhere where we chat about family or we chat about what’s not working in our lives or what’s not working at work, but we can also talk about work. And it’s those conversations” it might be a beer in the evening, you know” those conversations are really important. They build trust. They build trust between people. So, we know that that’s important.

Does that have to happen in an office at nine o’clock on a Monday morning? No, of course it doesn’t. Does that have to happen five days a week? No, of course it doesn’t. So, we will get people together and we will continue to get people together, but we won’t do it, I don’t think, in the way that we did probably three years ago. So, it won’t be naturally office space; it will be sometimes office space. That will require some travel, but we got to be careful about that.

The second thing I think is changing the way we do mainstream work to making it more possible to do more asynchronous work. So obviously, Zoom is one way of going about it, but we have people all over the world; Zoom fatigue is real. But tools, like, whether it’s Miro or are just frankly getting better at it utilizing tools that are already there, and saying, lets work on this idea at which I’m going to express through a document asynchronously. I need ten people inputting into it. We use sort of fun retro boards for doing retrospectives on projects. Again, those can be worked on asynchronously. And so, it’s embedding all of this, these new ways of working, none of which are a magic bullet, but put them all together and you get a pretty decent way of running a company, I think.

Lenny: Yep, yep. Yeah, I think we’ve been mirroring that same idea. It’s cool that the tools have caught up now to enable us to be more effective in doing those things. But like you, certainly agree there’s a time and a place for in-person and meeting face-to-face and I think we’re all looking forward to that as things progress. So” but that hybrid model is I think what makes sense.

So, just to kind of wind things up a little bit, now you are incredibly well-read. Our listeners can’t see this, but there’s bookcases behind both Steve and I, and his bookcase is far more impressive than mine. I’ve always been kind of jealous of it because he has this cool ladder to go up to the top, and it” I’ve always.

Steve: It looks good, Lenny. It doesn’t mean I’ve read any of them.

Lenny: [laugh]. Well, that’s the question. Because obviously you are well-read overall, or at least the cliff notes, right? What content are you really following right now, that you are reading, that you think this is just incredibly fascinating and impactful and you’re just addicted to?

Steve: To be honest on the business side, it’s much more podcasts. I do a lot of cycling and when I cycle, I have these special off-ear” just for safety-conscious” and they’re bone channeling headphones. And I listen to podcasts. So, at the moment, I’m listening on a series Exponential. I don’t know if you’ve come across the Exponential podcast” Azeem Azhar, brilliant interviews, some of the most respected people in AI, but also in just thinking about economies, thinking about business.

So, there was just one with Yanis Varoufakis, who was the Greek Finance Minister, who’s also just a brilliant speaker, just really fascinating, but also just listened to one of an AI researcher and where they are with AI and machine learning. So, that type of podcast I like. The one. Yeah. So, it’s probably podcasts that I listen to more from a just expansive thinking about business.

And then if I’m” I have a pile of business books on my desk that I need to get around to reading. There’s one on building a brilliant product team, which not only did I read, but then I half-forced the rest of the company to read it, as well. Have a bit of a book club at Zappi, so when someone comes across something, they’ll share it around and then we’ll have a nice discussion about it. That’s another thing that we do to try and expand everyone’s mind.

Lenny: Now, a few years ago, you introduced me to a blog.

Steve: Wait, but Why?

Lenny: Wait, but Why. Yes. So, which was fantastic as well. But what happened? I just realized I haven’t gotten an alert from them of new content in quite some time.

Steve: He’s writing a book. He’s putting it all”

Lenny: Okay.

Steve: Together into a book, as far as I know.

Lenny: Okay. All right. But, Wait, but Why was incredibly fascinating.

Steve: It’s brilliant. I would thoroughly recommend that.

Lenny: Yep. Yep. There’s actually one that I just discovered on YouTube called the Theory of Everything with Curt Jaimungal.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Lenny: So, he is a mathematician and physicist by training. And it just has these fascinating conversations with everybody, from everything from, you know, UFOs to consciousness to AI to, [laugh] you know, across the board in a very, very grounded way. So, there’s one that I’ve been paying attention to. Now, that is interesting because I was never a podcast listener until, really, probably the last year. And like, you listen while cycling; I’ve gotten in the habit of listening to podcasts or webcasts in the background, while I’m working.”

Steve: Yeah.

Lenny: Well, when I’m not in a meeting. And it really is addictive. And, you know, feeding the beast, I guess, of my brain in a way that I was having challenges doing just in the run of just working all the time, right? Working, parenthood, when do you have a chance to sit and read or listen? And that’s been highly effective.

Is that something you support as a business within the team, to be able to folks to pursue those interests and say, Hey, you know, here’s things you said you got a book club,” follow these things, pay attention, you know, incorporate this into your daily routine?

Steve: Yeah, very much so. So, we have a pretty much an open budget for people to spend on learning. So, we have people pursuing degrees in things, masters in things, and we’re very supportive of that, all the way to just doing courses on Coursera [laugh] you know, there’s that old adage of, if a company doesn’t support someone doing training, they’ll go somewhere else. You want your people to get better, you want them engaged, you want your people learning and trying new things. And nowadays, it’s not terribly expensive to support that, so it’s sort of a no-brainer, to be honest.

Lenny: Yep. Steve, you and I can go on for a very long time. Our listeners may not appreciate that as much as you and I would enjoy it, so thank you. It really is interesting, after all of these years of us knowing each other and talking regularly from a business standpoint, and we’ve talked on topics that we never have. So, I feel like I know you better now. So, it really is a pleasure. I’m really glad we spent this time together. Where can our listeners find you? Anything, final thoughts you’d like to convey to them? The floor is yours.

Steve: Thank you. Yeah, so it’s [email protected]. Or just find me on LinkedIn. A couple of things” I mean, I’d love to hear from people in the industry anyway, particularly if you’re interested in sustainability, get in touch. We can help you think through the best way of approaching it. And secondly, if you’ve got any book ideas or podcast ideas or ideas, I’m also always open to those. So, please do drop me a note.

Lenny: All right [laugh] that’s great. I really appreciate you taking the time. Congratulations on all the success across the board. I think that this will be an amazing year for the industry and that you and Zappi will play a big, very visible part of that.

Thank you, audience. We appreciate you tuning in as we keep experimenting with this format. We’ve got more GreenBook Podcasts coming down the pike soon. And I think each one keeps getting better and better. So Steve, let’s bring you back to help raise the bar again, later on.

Steve: Delighted. Delighted, Lenny.

Lenny: Okay. All right.

Steve: Thank you, everyone.

Lenny: Thanks, Steve. Be well. Goodbye, everybody. Take care.