Laurent Bride - CTO at Talend

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Laurent, the CTO at Talend, and we discuss using a customer advisory board to test out new products, mentoring your direct reports with objectives and key results, and the three steps to think about when innovating on new products. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) I think companies are always in a state of kind of going out of business. Even if you're in a startup and you're growing really fast and the market's great, you always have something that could come along and knock you out. There could always be a change in technology that could happen. You always have to be on your feet. You always have to be innovative.

(Laurent at 00:00:51) Yeah. Yep. And I mean, from a Talend perspective, we've been surfing innovation forever. I mean, since the inception, it was all about disrupting the integration and the data integrity or governance market. And so first company we disrupted at the time was Informatica through different models. I mean, business model, code generation, being able to make integration much easier than it was at the time. So yeah, I'm with you on innovation, and then we surf wave of innovation one after the other. When big data came in six years ago, we jumped on that wave of innovation. We were the first company to bring Spark code generation as part of our data integration solution. So it was all about speed and performance and so on and so forth.

(Laurent at 00:01:44) Then later on, we jumped on the cloud transformation. So yeah, I'm with you. I mean, innovation is at the core of everything we do. And if you want to survive in the business, you really have to be innovative technology-wise or how you address business problems, your business model, even your licensing. I mean, you have to find new ways to serve the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) You know, and I'm curious because two or three days ago, I got a call from a friend who is doing some research, and he was asking me about—he said we know a lot of the companies, they move to the cloud. And we've been, you know, demystifying in a couple episodes, we've been demystifying what the cloud is and stuff like that. But he asked me, are there any examples of companies that are going to the cloud, but then they've come back?

(Laurent at 00:02:36) Yeah. I don't think that you come back from the cloud. I mean, what we see happening in our business is you have companies that have different pace of adoption. So when you think about Talend, the first years of Talend, of course, it was an on-premise business. The cloud was not there at the time, and we jumped on that wagon.

(Laurent at 00:02:55) And if you look at our customer install base, not everybody is adopting innovation and cloud technology at the same pace. But as soon as they do, you don't have a lot of companies that go back. What you end up seeing is some systems will stay on-premise until they adopt new technologies to solve that specific problem that those systems were solving. But you live in a hybrid world. I don't think companies will move back from cloud to on-premise. What you're going to end up seeing is a different pace of adoption of the cloud technology. And for things that remain on-premise, you need to be able to provide solutions that work in a hybrid model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:35) I agree. And you know, when he called me, I said—you know, because he was doing paid research, right? And I said, I don't think that really happened. I was talking with them. I just said, I don't really think that happens a whole lot or I haven't heard of it happening a whole lot, but I'll ask around for you. And I said, why? Who are you doing research for? He said, well, we can't say the client, but they're a huge company and you would know their name. And I said, well, why are they having you do the research?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:04) He goes, well, they make on-prem materials, like machines or whatever it is. They make on-prem equipment. And he goes, their customers are saying we want to move to the cloud and they want their help and they want to figure out is this a market of us taking them to the cloud? Should we do consulting and take them to the cloud? Or should we just advise—how are we going to get them to the cloud and still have a business?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:29) And I was like, they're just going to have to adapt.

(Laurent at 00:04:34) Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Every company has to adapt. And when we say cloud, you know, it could be a public cloud. So the public cloud would be the Amazon, Google, Microsoft of the world. And if a company does hardware, they can always have their data center and still provide that technology to the cloud in an "as a service" manner. So ultimately, everybody is going to consume services from the cloud, either public cloud, private cloud, or a mixed model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:03) And I'm curious. When you—I don't work with a lot of enterprises on this cloud stuff or the transition or whatnot, but I want you to help me paint a visual in my head. So when they—because I do have, you know, seventeen years of engineering experience, writing code, building apps, software. The process for deploying when it's on-prem, what is that like? Because I'm so used to just using Heroku or just spinning up a server with Amazon and then just deploying my app through CircleCI or something like that.

(Laurent at 00:05:37) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:37) Is it a different process, a skill set to when you have on-prem technology than all these cloud services I'm used to?

(Laurent at 00:05:46) I mean, I think when you look at the deployment services, when you deploy in the cloud—let's say public cloud, right? You will use some of those CI/CD deployment services. In our world of DataOps, those would be more, I mean, specific versus the app world. But you are using the cloud public provider services. When you deploy an application on-premise, I mean, you might end up with a bunch of executables on Windows or some libraries and the same executable you have to deploy on Linux boxes. But those are the old days. So you are not using the same type of services that cloud providers offer. What you could still do, I mean, when you live in the on-premise world, it depends where—at what level of the stack that you are. If you're working with a Red Hat type of stack, you can also use specific CI/CD commands and so on, but they will be specific to that technology stack. But deploying on-premise, it just means that you're not using those public cloud services.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) Got it. And I also always forget that there's all different types of technology and applications. We use the word application. We use that for a SaaS app that we're building in the cloud, but that same word is used for, let's say, if you're a restaurant and you have a point of sale and you have an operating system and you have some application actually running on the operating system.

(Laurent at 00:07:15) Yes. Absolutely. A query or a widget with some IT code information could be called an application as well. That data pipeline on the Spark cluster could be called an application as well. So application means a lot of things depending on where you are on the stack of technology that you deal with. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:37) So I want to talk with you a little bit about just a general open conversation about roles and titles. Right? Because I get questions about this a lot. I get questions about what does it mean to be a CTO or CIO or COO? And I noticed you have two titles. And so I'm curious to how you think about—what's the purpose of roles or titles?

(Laurent at 00:08:08) The purpose, I mean, it's to try to describe what you do on a daily basis. I mean, people like boxes. When you say something, I mean, right away, they want to know, okay, he's a CTO, so he must work on technology. Now I think it depends—are you a CTO in a software company? Are you a CTO in a manufacturing company? Are you a CTO in a banking industry? So those roles could be different depending on where you are. In my case, I'm CTO in a software company. So as part of my role, I manage R&D. I manage product definition requirements. So that's the product management part of it. I build the product, so that's the R&D part of my hat. And then I support the product that has been deployed on the cloud. That's SRE or the deployment part of the job. So I think that people like titles because they mean something behind, and they can put you in a box and quickly get an idea of what you're responsible for. But that a specific title can mean different things based on the industry that you're in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:18) Yeah. I agree. I do. I was—I guess I was—I'm also trying to think I often get that question from, I guess, less experienced people too. Because I find that people who have more senior positions or more work experience at the executive level, they understand that we're a group of people. We're a team. And we have different responsibilities. And we sort of figure out what the customer needs, what the company needs, what the market needs, and then we allocate those responsibilities, figure out how they associate to revenue or bringing value, and then we own them and have metrics around them. And then we just kind of put a title around that for the outside world. So when the outside world comes and says, hey, where's the person that handles all the money? They're like, oh, I'm going to go to the CFO, right? Or where's the coach of the executive team? I'm going to go to the CEO, right? And they kind of use it to help the world figure out a good starting point.

(Laurent at 00:10:18) Yep. And then depending on who you have under your team, I mean, if I look at my case, I mean, CTO, you could have CTOs that are just focusing on the future, and they are much more research-y type of CTO with a smaller team that will look at N plus two wave of innovation. You can have CTOs that do that, but also they live in today's world and they develop products and so on. And I'm more the latter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:45) I've never heard that before, and I love it. N plus two wave of innovation. That is good. That is good. So how do you separate—because you have CTO and COO—in your calendar, in your planning of your responsibilities, do you have certain ones that you consider to be COO responsibilities and certain ones you consider CTO responsibilities?

(Laurent at 00:11:07) So everything that's CTO responsibility for me in my world, it's everything that relates to product. So it's the definition of the product, like understanding the market, understanding what the customers are looking for, building, and then defining the future of our market. So that's the definition of the product, the R&D, which is the actual developments of the product, and then there's the production support. So that part is really my CTO world. It's everything that relates to a product. If I look at my COO hat, it's much more what I do around the IT. I'm also responsible. I have a VP of IT with me. And here, it's everything IT, like the applications inside the company that we run the company on. It's the infrastructure. It's the data center and all of that. So that's more my COO hat. And as part of my COO hat, I'm also looking at analytics. I'm looking at some processes as well for the company, like transversal programs to transform the business and so on. So that's more the COO hat. Yeah. So that's how I separate the two. Now they are very complementary with one another. And if I look at how I manage team, every week, I spend time with everybody, and I like everyone to understand what others are doing and force them to put themselves in everybody's shoes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:33) I'm curious. You said you mentioned researching a market or defining a market. What goes into that? How do you approach that?

(Laurent at 00:12:43) So, I mean, when you think about new wave of products, right, you're going to look at technology trends. What are the next technology trends in your space? That's one source of information that you're going to look at. When you define new products, you're going to look at what analysts are saying. So here, for example, we are very close to Gartner, Forrester, IDC. So all of those groups have a bunch of analysts that we are working with, and they are also looking at the market and where things go. And I would say the third source of inspiration is, of course, customers. So we look at what are the new problems that customers are facing today. And then we look at those three buckets altogether, and we see, okay, how can Talend address those problems or those trends, or how can we make the best of the new technology to solve our customer problems, and also build the products that customers didn't even know that they needed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:43) I like that. Okay. So the analyst—and I'm always learning, by the way. And I like to be transparent about my learning too, just because I found that if I am transparent about it, people sort of take me under their wing, and they explain stuff to me in a simple way. And then that makes me smarter, faster. But I've always seen the Gartners. I know they do the research and I know they do the Magic Quadrant and I've seen all the analysis, but you're using this analysis to actually figure out what products and services to look into more to offer?

(Laurent at 00:14:23) So we work with them in different ways. We work with them whenever—I mean, to your point about Magic Quadrant, that helps position the company into a box or into a quadrant or into a wave. So we work with them in that way. There's an education part of us telling analysts what we do, how they need to look at us, and so on. Now when you—so that's true for the quadrants or the wave that we are in. But then when you look at those groups, those big groups of analysts, they're working on many different topics. And here, it's also important for us to see whether or not we can tap into adjacent markets. And then we learn what others are doing and how they see markets evolve. And when you think about analysts, of course, they are looking at the current product that many companies offer, but they also have forward-looking statements about what the data world will look like in 2025, for example. And that really helps us validate some of the assumptions that we might have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:28) And they're getting that because they're connected with all of these companies. So they can figure out—for us, we have such a large listenership and subscribers that when I put out, oh, hey, what's going on in your world? And we get 50,000, 70,000, you know, people responding, it comes down to three or four things and we're talking globally because everyone's in this technology industry and it's like we're all so different but we're all experiencing such similar things. So I guess they're kind of having that effect too. They're analyzing and strategizing with all of these businesses and they're sort of the pulse and they know what's going on in the markets. And so if you take that perspective and then start looking at the research, you can actually make business decisions on it.

(Laurent at 00:16:17) Absolutely. I mean, one of their key roles is they aggregate a lot of information. So they talk with different vendors, but they also talk—and that's where it's the most important—with customers across many, many different industries. So they have that role of aggregation, and then they deliver things that we can consume as a source of inspiration.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:39) So they'll break down, like, the market that's trending and then the different solutions inside of that market and then what's going on with them and why they exist. And so when you start engaging with the executive team and, like, maybe the chief of sales—right? Because if you're doing product, you'd have to engage with them somehow, I'm assuming—and you start looking at, okay, we're gonna test this product, you start talking to your existing customers. Like, at what point do you test value propositions and figure out if the thing has legs, if it's gonna work?

(Laurent at 00:17:15) Well, it depends at what cycle we are in the product. Right? And it depends whether it's an increment on an existing product or it's a brand new thing that we want to go after, a brand new adjacent market, or we want to deliver a new application. If it's a new application, I mean, we're gonna spend time with our customers. We have what we call customer advisory boards. So we spend time with a few of our core customers, and we're gonna ask them, "Okay, we are thinking about launching that. What do you think? Is it something that you would see a value in? Do you think it can change the game for you and something that you'll be willing to pay for?" Then we'll go into more of an incubation phase. We're gonna iterate on that new product. But, of course, I mean, throughout this cycle, we will always get engaged with both the marketing team and the sales team because it's really important to have a go-to-market strategy to ensure that we have adoption of those new products. And I've seen so many technologies in my life that were decorrelated with a go-to-market and that failed miserably. So technology for the sake of technology, it's a hard sell down the road. But when you have the right balance between the technology, the go-to-market, some early customer validation, then that's where you can really have great successes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) The interesting thing is they're all dependent upon the organization being, like, socially connected to the industry. Right?

(Laurent at 00:18:49) Yeah. Well, it's key. I mean, either socially connected through technology—I mean, we talk a lot to IT people or I'm talking a lot to the other CTOs and so on. But vice versa, the CMOs will talk to the CMOs, the CIOs will talk to the CIOs, and that's where you get all the input. So absolutely, I mean, that's the social connection that makes the difference there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:15) I love it. And this has been such a journey for me going from, like, engineer, introverted engineer, to learning all of this stuff and how the business side of everything works. I'm curious, Talend—is there, like, a story behind the name?

(Laurent at 00:19:32) I was not part of the founding team of Talend. I've been with the company five and a half years. So there are different stories and myths. At some point, I mean, we were in the ETL business, and they wanted to make sure that they could find a name that had the three letters in it. So then they were a talented bunch of people, so they started with talent, and then they changed the T at the end with a D for data. So they wanted to have the D for data, and they wanted to have the ETL letters in the name and show that it was a talented bunch of people. But there are different stories flying around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:12) Well, that's clever. And for, like, my instant—when I saw it, I thought you were technical recruiting. Like, right when I saw Talend, because it makes me think of, like, talent and data and technology. And I was like, oh, it's probably, like, they probably recruit technology people. And that's something you technically kinda do. I mean, recruit great technologists to come work for you guys. Right?

(Laurent at 00:20:35) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:37) So what's the culture like there?

(Laurent at 00:20:39) The culture—and I'm sure that you've heard that so many times from so many different companies—but it's very unique culture. So we were born in France, but very quickly, a bunch of people moved to the U.S. in the Silicon Valley. And the French culture is still very present inside Talend. We have a dual culture. I mean, we are a global company. We are present in many, many different countries. There's a lot of humility in the company. I mean, sometimes people picture French as being arrogant and so on, but when it comes to technology, you know, most of the time, French people are fairly humble. So there's a lot of humility, a lot of—there's a culture of helping each other, culture of having a lot of fun, but still being serious. And then with the U.S., and because we went quickly international, we had a lot of growth coming from the U.S. So all that business sense, all the—you know, let's make sure that we are addressing the needs of our customer, and it's all about the customers. That's something that we learn a lot from the U.S. culture. But we have offices everywhere in the world. So it's very global, unique culture of humility, and we try to push diversity a lot as well inside the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:02) Now I will say, like, companies definitely have unique cultures. It's almost like culture and uniqueness is combined into one. Because I go around and I get to sometimes visit these places. I was actually supposed to be out in California last week, but I get to go visit and walk through their offices and hang out and talk to their people. And, you know, sometimes we do talks and then we do different things. And I've been, you know, 100-plus companies probably in the past two years, and they are, like, very different. And they're similar, you know, traits, but they all are pretty unique and mostly in, like, a really good way. And so I like to—it's like trying different foods from different countries. Right? It's like they could be different and good. You know?

(Laurent at 00:22:52) Yeah. And, actually, I mean, when you think about our recruitment process, the culture is something we validate for every hire that we make. Is there will there be a fit from a cultural standpoint? So when you recruit in engineering, of course, you have the code testing and you can have algorithm talks and architecture talks and so on, but we're gonna validate the culture. How easy is it gonna be to bring that person on board? Will that person fit culturally? I mean, those are very, very important points for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:24) Do you do that in, like, a—like, I've seen a lot of softwares and things out there that will analyze the person before they join. How do you guys do that? Do you just rely on the people, or do you have, like, a methodology?

(Laurent at 00:23:37) No. We don't have a methodology per se. I mean, we have a bunch of questions that we ask, of course. But then it's a feeling. So what we make sure of is whenever we have interviewers, they represent Talend culture, and that they can validate and they get a feeling. So it's really a soft skills and something where, you know, emotional intelligence is really highly valued for us. So that's something that they're gonna validate. It's not a method. There's no tools. There's no application to validate any of that. So there's a lot of gut feel and emotional intelligence from the interviewers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:13) Yeah. And I've always kind of, like, questioned the—I've never used them. Like, I've never used them in my company or anything about, like, the psychological profiling of people in teams, because it felt a little bit too cold for me. But I know that even in a company, the teams have their own culture, I guess. Like, you can boil culture down. They have their own relationships and each team is unique. And if you're gonna have a person working with those teams, they really have to, like, actually just engage with those teams that they're gonna be near or on. And I found that that seems to be the most effective way is just engaging with the people on the teams that have the highest level of, you know, emotional intelligence that like doing that type of thing and then just letting them decide.

(Laurent at 00:25:04) Yeah. Absolutely. And it's true when we recruit. It's true when we open a new center. It happened to us a couple of times already. So when you start from scratch in a new R&D center, you wanna make sure that the culture you're building in that center is gonna be very similar. It can have its uniqueness, because to your point, every team could be unique. But you want to make sure there's continuity from one team in one country to another. That's something that we really pay close attention to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:35) Yeah. And the French theme is cool, because you guys have, like, awesome food.

(Laurent at 00:25:40) Yeah. That's a stereotype.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:42) Is it? You guys don't have good—if you go to France, there's not good food?

(Laurent at 00:25:46) No. Yeah. There's good food. But you can find good food pretty much everywhere in the world. You have to know where to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:52) That is true. If you go and you find the locals, you can find the good food.

(Laurent at 00:25:56) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:57) But that's, like, a pretty good stereotype to have. Right?

(Laurent at 00:26:01) Yeah. Yeah. It's better than French sometimes being perceived as, uh, know-it-alls or arrogant. Right? Which is not the case. We'd rather—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:09) No. We'll stick with the good food.

(Laurent at 00:26:11) Good food and great culture. Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14) I love that. I love that. Yeah. And nice relaxing meals and friends. They seem very friendly and social, and it's like—I mean, I've been to so many different countries and people. It's like every place has good people. You just have to go—you have to find the good people.

(Laurent at 00:26:31) Yeah. Absolutely. I'm with you totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:34) So how do you—I mean, it's pretty large company. I'm curious, like, how do you grow your direct reports, or how do you coach them? Like, how do you, yeah, how do you grow them?

(Laurent at 00:26:47) Yeah. So Talend today is about, what, 1,300 people. And, yeah, it starts to be a fairly, I mean, mid-sized company in the software industry. When you look at your direct reports, what's really important is to make sure that they know what to expect out of them. And so be clear on the key objectives, key results that you want them to drive, and you give them some guidance. You give them some guidance. You can share your experiences. I think sharing experiences is the best thing you can do with them. And you give them some room to thrive on their own and sometimes do their own mistakes. And but you're not far off and, like, you meet on a regular basis and you check in and you make sure that everything is going fine. And, yeah. So it's all about mentoring, coaching, while being clear on the expectations and giving them guidance and regular checkpoints.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:44) When you're hiring, like, direct reports or bringing them on, promoting them up, do you spend—like, I found that some people—I don't think there's a wrong or right answer. I've just—I'm just polling and asking different people. Do you tend to hire them, like, quicker, or do you tend to spend more time with them before you hire them? Like, how do you approach bringing someone on?

(Laurent at 00:28:06) It depends on the profile and the seniority of the person you recruit. If you are looking for a developer, I think that having, like, three, four, five interviews, that's the maximum that you can ask for this kind of role, especially when you are validating technical skills and code capacity, these kind of things. When you are hiring people that are higher up in your organization that will have more management skills, you might go and ask for more interviewers in the hiring process because you wanna make sure that you validate the person through different angles. So it's not just you doing the recruitment. It's making sure that they have a chance to talk with their future peers, making sure that they have a chance to work with some other people they will interface with in their day-to-day operations. So here, depending on the seniority, the higher you go, you might have more interviewers. But you don't want the process to be too long either because people will lose patience, and there's a point where you have to make a decision. You know? Is the person a good fit or a bad fit? Can you—you have to make a decision. So I would say, overall, like, going beyond six or seven interviews for a hire, that's the max I would go for. And if you had a chance to work with the person before, then you're gonna limit that number of interviewers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) You know, I never realized how—like, I like—one of my favorite things in life is I'll read books and I'll be like, okay, that makes sense. Good strategy. Or, you know, I'll just let it go. And then five years later, I'll have enough experience to be like, oh, that's what that really means. And one of those that's happened to me, I guess, in the past couple years is I always heard, you know, it's good—you have to have a good reputation when you're working with people because in the long term, those people will be out there in the market and you will know them and you'll come across them again or be able to work with them again. You'll have a, I guess, like a network or past peers that you could call on for specialties. And then as I got into, you know, starting this business, it was amazing because I was like, oh, yeah, I need, you know, Yuri from that project. I need this person from that project. I need the—I could pull all these people together and, like, we could—or, you know, three of them, we've already worked on a project together. And now they're all just kinda doing, you know, jobs that they're just like, oh, okay. And we could all come together again. And in those—that those teams and knowing that you can bring someone on that you've already worked with before and that you know they can execute, that is incredibly valuable. So, like, now when I'm looking for executives to grow the company, I'm like, where's the executive that's been doing this for twenty years and knows, like, their entire all-star team?

(Laurent at 00:31:04) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it just happened to me. I hired earlier this year a Chief Information Security Officer, and I worked with her before. Not in my previous company, in the company before that. And it was easy. I knew her. I knew what she was capable of. And here, it was not—I mean, the interview was not a proper interview, I mean, between the two of us. It was more like me telling her about Talend, why she should join, and so on. So it was more of me selling Talend to her and that, you know, it could be a great career opportunity for her. And then you lined up a handful of people to do a proper interview in that case because it's not just about bringing the people in without cutting all the lines. Right? You still need some validation from third party. But I'm totally with you.

(Laurent at 00:31:53) I mean, if you can bring some of your previous people from your network, it's always better. And that's what we tell employees as well, and that's why we have referral bonuses in place. It's faster to hire from your existing network because you know the people and often they're good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:11) Oh, nice. So if you work at Talend and you refer a friend, that's good. You get a referral bonus?

(Laurent at 00:32:17) Yeah. It depends who. Executives, VPs, I think directors, you can't. But everybody that don't have this kind of title, yes, they absolutely can get referral bonuses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:29) Oh, that is really cool. You just basically supercharged your workforce to be a recruiter.

(Laurent at 00:32:35) Yeah, absolutely. That's the idea. And we are not unique there. I think a lot of companies are doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:41) They are. I don't hear it a lot. I guess I don't ask about it a lot, but I know that a couple companies have had some pretty cool culture items where they have, like, hashtag always be recruiting, or they'll make it part of their culture where they'll have a day where they'll bring in people that you know, and we'll have an event or a meetup, and they're proactive about it. And I always find that really interesting, and I like it because it seems to me that the best companies do that.

(Laurent at 00:33:12) Yeah, yeah. And if you look at our LinkedIn, our employees that are on LinkedIn, every day you'll see a referral for jobs, and everybody's a recruiter. I mean, that's part of the success of the company. If we have those open positions, we need to hire, and we need to hire the best.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:28) So what do you do for fun? You play music. I mean, what are you into?

(Laurent at 00:33:35) Yeah. Playing music, I used to, not anymore. I'm big on the triathlon. I used to be a rugby player for like twenty years.

(Laurent at 00:33:44) Rugby was big in France. But yeah, I'm too old to play rugby. It's too painful now. So I'm more into triathlon, so the swimming, the running, the biking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:57) Oh, wow. Yeah. Dude, you're a badass. Rugby? That's awesome. That's a good contact sport.

(Laurent at 00:34:04) Yeah. And it's a good culture. You know, what I love about rugby is not just the contact sports. But I mean, I like that part. It allows you to break some steam. But what I like about rugby is the humility behind it. It's the culture that you have around that. It's, you can be really hard at each other for eighty minutes on the pitch. But after that, you get together, you have a beer, and then there's a big social part of rugby that I love.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) Nice. And then is there a community in the triathlon area?

(Laurent at 00:34:34) Yeah, absolutely. There's a community and it's a sport that you can see everywhere in the world. And I must say that triathlon in the US is also very inclusive. You take people from everywhere and whatever their shape or their capabilities are, and you see some huge transformations. Like, people coming to triathlon because they want to get back into sports. They are not in shape and so on, and you see them transforming themselves in a couple of years, and it's amazing. So I like that part very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:07) Yeah. I like the interactivity. A lot of the workouts I've been doing because the gym's closed are circuits, like calisthenic type circuits where I'm doing jumping jacks and sit-ups and things like that in circuits. And it just really keeps your attention when you structure a workout like that.

(Laurent at 00:35:29) Yeah. And you know, when you think about triathlon depending on the distance you do, there's the physical abilities of people, but it's all in their head. You know, when you do a half Ironman or a full Ironman and, you know, I look at people who do a full Ironman. It's like a two point three mile swim, then they do 180 kilometers of cycling, and then a marathon, a full marathon. So I can tell you that at the end, it's all in the head. So yeah, it's quite amazing. You need to be focused. You need to be dedicated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:12) Yeah. That's what I like about working out. It's difficult. Well, it doesn't get fun until it gets difficult. My favorite part of the workout is two thirds of the way through when you want to quit, because that's going to determine how good I feel for the rest of the day. If I, well, I don't really quit out. I just stopped. Because I was like, why would you only come this far to only come this far? Right? But if you've ever quit out two thirds of the way through a workout, you feel shame.

(Laurent at 00:36:44) Yeah. Well, you know, it's the same in the business. Right? If when you start building new products, you want them to go through, and you might have bumps along the way, but you just have to hold on and power through. So there are similarities in the business. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:59) Amen. Yes. Preach. That is awesome. Dude, way to bring it back. This is great. I'm going to let, we're going to wrap up on that note because that was really good. Thank you so much. You're the best.

(Laurent at 00:37:12) Thank you, Joel, and be safe, you know, most importantly. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) Talk soon.

(Laurent at 00:37:17) Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:20) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.