Google spent years studying what actually separates great managers from the rest.

And out of thousands, they ranked just 25 people a year as elite.

My guest today was one of them.

Our team was blocked back on the Gmail team, which was my first time ever leading a team inside Google.

Inside Gmail, high visibility and nothing was moving.

So what actually separated the leader who broke through?

I've had multiple people tell me that my spirit animal is a wolverine, meaning I don't stop.

I never give up.

That mindset didn't just win awards at Google.

It carried Keith from Google Manager to adobe to CEO of PandaDoc, scaling the company past 100 million in ARR.

This is the Wolverine mindset playbook.

It's time to lead the team.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

I'm your host, Ben Fanning, and this conversation that you're going to hear is meant to challenge, inspire and ripple out.

It's not just a podcast.

It's a positive movement to build better leaders.

And, and you can help by taking just 10 seconds to rate and follow on Apple, Spotify and YouTube and drop a quick review over on Apple.

This helps more bold leaders discover the show and keeps the mission alive.

Enjoy.

You've won the Great manager award at Google back in the day, and that was an award given to just 25 people in a company literally of geniuses.

What was a specific human trait that you had that others lacked on?

Honestly, this is one of the biggest honors in my career.

It's given to 25 people a year.

I think they only did it for eight years or so, and I still don't know exactly how I got it, but I think, and I'm not sure if it's really a human trait, but I've had multiple people tell me that my spirit animal is a wolverine, meaning I don't stop, I never give up.

And you know, as I think back on my career, that wasn't something that I always had, but I kind of developed over time through perseverance.

And what that led to, and I think maybe helped with my great manager award, is that anytime my team had a problem, I wouldn't stop until I helped them be successful.

And my job is to make my team successful.

And so I go after that with determination.

And I think that helped them trust me and come to me knowing that I always had their back and was always going to do everything in my power to help them get what they needed, which ultimately made our team.

So what, what's on your.

Your Mount Rushmore of Google achievements where the.

That really demonstrated the wolverine spirit animal.

I mean there were just times where our team was blocked.

You know, back on the Gmail team, which was my first time ever leading a team on.

On the Gmail.

Yeah, it was, it was back on the Gmail team and my team was the operations part of Gmail.

We had customers who had this one very significant problem which I can't speak to in detail, but the engineers didn't want to work on it.

And we ended up creating a program in Gmail where we made it really exciting for some of the engineers to work on these customer facing problems.

They loved working on the product roadmap.

They always loved that.

But how could we swing them to this?

And we came up with this really unique angle.

So we kind of like went around instead of just a direct confrontation, like make it appealing.

And that worked out really well.

That's, you know, one of the best things that ever happened to one of my.

Wow.

So you unleash the internal desire of another group to help you what you're trying to do.

I mean, a lot of companies, like that's how they get things done, right?

Well, that team's the engineering.

They're not doing what I want them to do.

So I'm going to tell my manager to tell their manager's manager and it's going to come back down the other side and put the fear of God in them until they do it.

If that wasn't your approach.

Yeah, I always like to think through how you motivate other people and sometimes it's referring back to the vision.

Like you align on the vision of the company or the team they're on and can you make what you're trying to do part of their vision or do you just understand their incentives and what they really care about?

And that was what we did in the Gmail frame.

We tried to turn it around from something that seemed like an ask we were making towards something that they wanted to do.

Man, that's so good.

So mental note for the leaders here inside the Google machine, you're working with all these geniuses changing the world and it go.

And, and the trait that, that really sets you apart though was the wolverine.

And then being able to unlock the motivation of others, it wasn't like the best idea.

So I mean, I guess maybe one other thing would be humility.

Like I firmly believe that I don't have the right answers all the time.

And I rely on my team who is closest to the problem to tell me what they need.

And part of my job is to coax it out of them and to ask tough questions and pressure test whether it's what they really need or whether it's something that's just going to make their life easier.

But I think a big part of it is the humility of just knowing that my team is what makes me successful.

It's not me.

Is it possible that the traits at the very traits that make someone a great manager actually can make them a bad CEO because you got the luxury of having both experiences?

I sure hope not.

But I don't think so either.

And the reason I don't think so.

I'll go back to my Google time again.

Google did a ton of research on the best performing managers and they called it Project Oxygen.

And it's definitely worth looking up if you have the time.

It's things like people who empower their team.

They show concern for the team's success, they make decisions, they're good communicators and they have a clear vision that they collaborate with others on.

When I think about those things, those are things that I think a great CEO does.

And so to me that intersection between those traits in what makes a good manager also makes a good CEO.

And I'm definitely keeping them top of mind stepping into this.

Yeah, I really like that for leaders to think about because there are plenty of traits that can help you get stuff done as a manager, but they may not be the ones that the world's top CEOs follow, you know, to get things done on a sustainable level.

And I, I just think it's really cool that, that you see so much alignment between the principles you learn as a great manager at Google.

And what's your, like the foundation of how you're leading PandaDoc today?

Yeah.

Interestingly, the most impactful CEO presentation I had was from Mark McLaughlin.

He's the former CEO of Palo Alto Networks and he said a CEO's job is three things.

It's to set the vision, get the right people in the room and on the problems and then empower those people and clear the roadblocks.

And so if you go back to the Project Oxygen ideas that I mentioned, they really line up very nicely with those things.

So I'm, I try to lean into those as much as I can.

And then I'm keeping Mark's advice top of mind this year as I love that.

And I think that first when you said like have a vision and I think a lot of managers run around, I'm curious about you appended doc and what you've seen A lot of managers don't believe it's their job to have a vision for their team.

Feel like the CEO has the vision.

I just need to make sure we're following that thing.

And it really misses, I mean, to me it really misses an opportunity.

Do you ask your managers to have that vision?

Is that something that you think is important or is it more about just getting it sort of getting in alignment with the CEOs?

Well, I think you need to have vision for the company.

You must have a vision and a lot of companies have a vision statement.

But then how do you turn that vision statement into something more like a three year vision?

And, and you know, the job that we do is we work with the executive team and the finance team to turn that three year vision into a one year vision, including a financial plan.

And so then you have this like cascade.

You have your top very aspirational vision, then you have a three year vision of what your product and business will look like.

And then you have the one year plan and everything is laddering up.

And then within that, you know, Your team's developing OKRs and annual plans to tie into.

I do think it's helpful for each function to have a vision.

I don't know if it needs to be at the manager level, but our sales team here has a vision, our marketing team has a vision.

And I think it's been really helpful to create an identity and to align people with how we want those teams to operate.

I love that.

It really puts the onus on them to be thinking bigger for their own teams and verticals inside the organization to make things happen.

I didn't get that alignment.

Now before we get back, I'll say the more present day stuff.

You work for Adobe for a long time, which is another icon like iconic brand, and you left the safety of the Adobe brand, that Adobe document cloud, to join the challenger at pandadoc.

Was there a moment of identity crisis when you went from the giant to, to the underdog or.

Yeah, to be honest.

To be honest, absolutely not.

No.

Okay.

First off, I loved my three years at Adobe and I learned so much.

I mean it was a master class in marketing, it was a master class in sales and how to use the channel effectively and then amazing PLG and self service.

So I learned a ton.

But I have no regrets.

I had no identity crisis.

I love the challenge and I love being the underdog.

And I've got a saying with a couple members of my team here, like, it's no fun when the fish are jumping in the boat, you know, like, if you could just swap me out and put somebody else in and the business is going to be successful, then what am I actually accomplishing?

Like, I want to be in a business where I drive it or my team drives it.

And so that's been, been really fun working for a company where I can see an inflection in the numbers, I can see a change, and I know it's because of my team and the work I do rather than a company.

Not to say it's on full autopilot, but like, Adobe has such a great name brand that they're going to come no matter what you do.

And so I love knowing that I can be the driver of that chain.

So just play by for me, like when you wake up and go to work when you're Adobe versus when you wake up and go to work now and, and like Pentadoc, how is your mindset different when the fish are jumping in the boat versus when, you know, you know, you got to get on the water and make it happen?

Yeah.

I mean, you're, you're figuring out how you can harvest more.

So adobe.com is a website juggernaut that brings in millions, hundreds of millions of visitors a year.

And you've got to figure out how you can drive small changes.

Those small changes, take those law of large numbers and turn them into real revenue.

And it's meaningful, but, you know, it's probably going to be successful with or without me.

Right.

Like I left, I would say Adobe didn't miss a beat on the stuff I was working on there.

There might be some other areas of the business that are going through some challenging times and then a Panadoc.

It's like you're, you're hunting for survival every day.

If you people are ready to eat your lunch, like they're going to go to competitors if we don't figure it out.

And so the fact that we have been able to inflect our growth, to be more efficient in driving that growth and to continue to build great teams, satisfy our customers, has been extremely rewarding.

So maybe that it may be a little more stressful in some ways.

Oh, for sure.

But that gives you your edge and your innovation edge.

For all that.

For all that matter, if there's no stress, like it's, there's no challenge or less of a challenge, you know, it's harder to grow.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, what do you want out of a job?

You know, some people, they want the title, some people want the Money.

Some people want the lifestyle, some people want the challenge, some people want the scope.

You have to figure out what mix of those are most important to you.

And you know, for me, that challenge and working with great people and knowing that the success that happens is because of my team's hard work is the most important thing to me.

It's going to be so satisfying.

I've worked in corporate like I worked for Honeywell and some bigger organizations, and with my own company and growing it, it's a completely different feeling.

Like I'm way more engaged, I'm way more creative, and it's completely unintentional.

But it's like the situation you're in just calls on different parts of you to.

To grow.

And I mean the growth, like your growth trajectory, I. I suspect since you joined pandad, Doc has been probably incredible learning, right?

In terms of.

Yeah, I have learned so much in three years, but it's been amazing and I'm definitely better for it.

And your rise there has been like a rocket ship in terms of your personal success.

You came in as what, Chief Revenue Officer, President, and now CEO.

And in my research, I noticed an interesting nuance that the founder is now the cpo, Right, The Chief Product Officer.

So what is it like having your founder and former boss, I guess, being a director port, for lack of a better word, how does that go?

Yep, I'm still figuring it out, to be totally honest.

But I do think I'm really lucky because over the past three years, Makeda, who's the founder, he and I have established this incredible relationship, and it's built on trust.

He, you know, he took a little while to trust me, but then over time, he knew he could trust me and knew I would do the right thing.

And I think that's been really important in this evolution of my roles.

But it's funny because he and I actually disagree a lot, but we work to persuade each other and channel each other in the right direction, and I think that makes us better.

There's some times where I'm absolutely wrong, and I love that he proves me wrong.

And then I know we're on the right path.

And then there's other times where I know I'm right and I'm able to shift him into that direction.

So that's been great.

You know, I think stepping in, I was a little bit tentative about it, but I realized quickly, like, you just gotta grab it, go take the role.

And he's been really respectful of my decision making and giving me the room to leave.

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Yeah.

The good news is you're CEO.

The even better news is I'm your director.

Pork.

You're like, how does this work?

Yeah, but I love that it sounds like, you know, it's worked out well.

If you guys have are be able to bounce ideas, you know, off of each other in terms of who gets the final call on a big decision.

Who is it?

It's me.

All right.

And if we disagree then, and he firmly disagrees, then we will eventually of a significant magnitude.

We would take it to the board, but we haven't had anything like that.

And again, that's what I mean by he's been really respectful.

That is cool of me.

He's like, this is your decision.

Yeah, like, if that works out, like it, like it seems like it is, it is really a great thing because you've got someone that's all in entirely passionate and wise and experienced, that's on your team.

Ideally, he's a huge asset.

That is so cool.

So can you share?

Was there like the first, hardest conversation that you could remember?

Yeah, I mean, I would say, let me start by saying Nikita is a visionary.

Like many great founders, he has some of these ideas that sometimes I don't always get them.

And then three months later, I realized how prescient he was and that he saw something that like, I couldn't figure out.

One of those ideas was a way we're manifesting the way we're changing how companies drive agreements in a, in an age of AI.

And that's really what like our three year vision is.

How do we change the way companies create sign and understand agreements?

We want to be the place where every SMB in the world can do that in a frictionless way.

This hard conversation came about though, because I felt like we were being a little too cautious in shipping and waiting for the product to be perfect.

Because Makita has this vision.

He knows exactly what he wants to look at, look like.

And so I started pushing him on moving faster and he's been really good at taking that feedback.

He cares about the outcome and he knows the outcome is so important to our customers.

He wants that to happen.

Yeah, I love that and I'm glad the leaders can really hear that because in this time and age that we're in with AI and how things are shifting so fast, it is helpful to have people that are more of your peers that push back and you listen and you may have these difficult conversations versus hey, I'm the leader on here.

Everyone's job here is to say yes and get on board with whatever I say.

And having these different lenses is really important.

But I think most people would acknowledge, yes, I get it, but they rarely see an example of how to do it.

Do you guys have these conversations over coffee, text, a cocktail?

Like where how do these things play out?

Yeah, we have the conversation probably every week.

You know, we check in, in our one on ones.

We talk about them in every board meeting.

And then Makita is a big fan of in person meetings so luckily he lives fairly close and we're able to get together over coffee or food and talk through them.

A lot of people think that being promoted to the CEO role is like the ultimate win and yes, it is a huge win but the seat of the CEO is famously lonely.

What is the most difficult conversation or decision I guess you've had to make since taken over and, and in having that, I guess maybe realizing like, hey, there's no one to delegate this to.

I've got to do this myself now.

Yeah.

So it's funny because when I took the job to be CRO at PandaDoc, I had no aspiration to be CEO here.

I had no intention of it like I wanted to be CRO.

And yeah, the journey has been what the journey has been and I'm incredibly honored by the trust that Vaquita, Sergey, our other co founder and the board have put in me.

I guess this difficult decision was at a board meeting.

We had my first board meeting as CEO and I can't share the exact details of the conversation but I had to change the short term direction towards that three year vision.

We agreed on the three year vision but there was something that I noticed in the data and through talking to the team and so I pushed for us in that board meeting to be more focused and you know, it was tough because I went in telling Makita and Sergey, the two co founders, that I was going to do it and you know, I think I did it in a very respectful way.

But we, I think we've all aligned on this being a great outcome and working it through the board of which they're members.

So that was probably the most difficult thing I had to do went out of the gate.

What was the.

So coming from cra CRO, I mean, I think listeners might find it interesting.

What have you found that you've had to sort of kill off in terms of your old CRO mindset or the metrics you were provide or focus on versus had to sort of be reborn as the CEO?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I would call it kill off, but I would say compartmentalize is probably a good way to.

You know, I still care a lot about revenue.

I still care a lot about the growth numbers.

I'm trying to let the team drive more of it without me.

And the part that's really important for me now is to make sure the product and the engineering org and the designers know me, know that I'm all in for this long term vision and that I don't have favorites.

Just because I came from the revenue team doesn't mean like that's my favorite team.

And you guys are this new team that just falls under my umbrella.

Like these are all teams that I want to be successful and care about.

And particularly for that R and D function, it's the forward long term thinking and making sure we pursue that strategy of becoming that frictionless place for agreements to happen.

I've read about a controversial move that you, that you made earlier in your career where you eliminated essentially one of the foundational roles of the company known as the sdr, these sales development reps. And I think, and you were in charge of sales and top level growth.

A lot of VPs of sales, I don't know if they would go all in on that normally because that could backfire when you're changing and eliminating the people that were responsible for helping you get the results that you need to get.

You made this move and literally the company was able to in fact check me.

But you're able to increase the price of what you were selling.

Like 4x5.

Okay.

5X.

Which, which sounds, which sounds crazy.

Like that, like that could actually happen.

Walk us through that.

And was that decision you made?

I'm really curious if it was like a gut decision that you know, based on what you'd seen or, or what.

Did you notice that the traditional sales model was just not working?

Yeah.

So first off, this was an incredibly hard decision because it impacted a team of people and those people all meant well.

But I had a responsibility to the business and to the rest of the team members to ensure they were successful.

And so I didn't take it lightly.

But how did I come to this?

Although I do have a lot of gut feelings, this started with the data.

And not just data, but conversations and looking at the data we saw that we had these MQLs that were making it to S1 but the S1s weren't closing.

And you know, I'm a big fan of breaking down pipelines.

So you've got the pipeline qualification, then you've got the like the close of the pipeline, you've got the size.

And what we were seeing is that throughout these things either the SDRs didn't understand what would close and so we would have droppage there, or things that went through would then get dropped and not close or would close at a lower win rate.

And so we were able to see that and align the leads with the closing.

So moving AES to full cycle.

Because CanadaDoc is a fairly high velocity business, our deal cycles are between 30 and 60 days.

Meant that we could compress the time because we would have a single qualification call, we'd have a better customer experience because we didn't hand them to someone else.

We didn't have any loss of information and transforming of what the SER notes were to the AE and then the AE knew what would close so they would be able to disqualify deals early.

That didn't go there.

You could say that ultimately we could have done better training of our SDRs, but I think this resulted in a really efficient machine that's been really good for PandaDoc and our customers.

How does this relate to the leading through the TE philosophy that you've really honed?

Yeah.

So leading through the team, like I said before, I definitely didn't invent was in the culture code at PandaDoc before I got here.

And Sean knew who's the CEO of Adobe is probably the one that I saw use at first and talked about.

And the T is like in any leadership role you cover a broad spectrum of things and you have to understand it at least a surface level of depth.

But you've got to understand everything at a surface level and then every once in a while you've got to go deep and that's where like the cross section of the T comes in and you go all the way down into the nitty gritty details and you understand it and you hopefully solve it and then you pull back up and you go scan across the T to figure out where you Go down next.

And, you know, when I first got here, sales performance was the area that I dove in on first.

I own marketing and CX as well, but sales was the one that appeared like it needed the most structure.

And so, you know, scanned quickly across to understand all the functions and then realized that was the area I needed to go deep on from the numbers.

And then I went all the way deep, working with rev ops, working with the sales leaders, talking to the AES, talking to the SDR to figure out what we were going to do.

Well, what did you say?

Those managers were sitting there thinking this is just an excuse for micromanagement.

Like, if he's got, like, don't want the, like, the chief Revenue officer is going to use the T on me, he's going to get up in my business.

And I mean, there's got to be a little bit of that because you're diving in deep and they're going to feel that.

I'll use another framework.

But I think going back to what Mark said, if there's three things I'm supposed to do, setting the vision, getting the right people, and removing the blockers.

This is about removing the blockers.

And if I don't understand what the blockers are, then I can't remove them.

So I've got to go all the way deep to remove the blockers.

But then I know I can't stay deep all the time because there's other things where I have to remove the blocker.

So I'll come back up and move on.

And I'm just.

I try to always be transparent that this is the thing I'm focused on solving right now.

Once we solve it, I'm out of your hair, like.

And I, I think most of my team knows that I do want to empower them.

And if I'm stealing ownership, I'm not giving them the agency.

Uh, so I want to give them agency.

I want to drive accountability.

It's only when that blocker really needs to be cleared.

And it's not that I've got to go in deep to get at it.

Really, really good to communicate it.

If you're going to use the T structure, explain when someone's getting the T on their.

The T part on their organization.

I think leaders really don't think about that, though, and setting the expectation that there are going to be areas where they've got to be able to go deep and not just stay strategic.

I think that's a real.

Like, when I hear leaders say, well, I'm just trying to stay strategic, like you're only missing some opportunities, you have to be able to go deep, selectively on that.

And man, did you get good results with that one.

I mean, 5x the price for doing a lot of the same type of work, right.

You get against pretty much, pretty much every dimension.

So the qualification rate and pipeline generation is up, the close rate is up and the ECVs are up.

So it's been a really good change.

That's the power.

Now you, you've been quoted in fact, check me on this.

But saying that nobody cares about document workflow, is that, is that somewhat of accurate?

It's somewhat accurate.

So I would say it's accurate in the abstract.

So nobody cares about like what happens with their documents, like from a process standpoint, but they very much care about the pain that occurs when you lack good document workflow.

And again, I think that's where PandaDoc really differentiates itself.

A lot of people think we're a simple E signature tool, but we're much more than that.

We're an agreement workflow platform.

And so we try to make sure that we're differentiated by making workflows really easy so businesses can concentrate on the things that matter to their financial results and doing the work that they love.

Like nobody loves working on.

Like taking a document and making sure it gets routed to the right person or downloading the right document and then signing it and re uploading it or making sure it's got the right approvals.

Like, that's just not something that's fun or exciting.

If you can automate that so I can get my sales quotes out faster, so that I can change a quote without having to go through like seven layers of deal desk that I can get a contract edited to match the counterparty much faster.

Those are the things I care about.

I just don't want to deal with all the redlining and like download, re upload back and forth multiple times.

And that's where PandaDoc stands out.

So I try to try to say nobody actually cares about the flow itself, but when you make the flow work, they suddenly realize what a painful experience they have.

Yeah, what we do is we solve a problem people have and people don't say I have a workflow problem or a paper flow problem.

One of the things I was looking at with Pandadoc, I think it's so cool, is the level of detail it can provide a sales leader who's trying to track all their own sales agreements.

When I worked for DHL and some other organizations in Sales man.

I would have loved to have a tool, and frankly, today I would love to have a tool that could tell me what's going on with that agreement, where it's being circulated or what's happening, because otherwise you're not going to have visibility of it.

It's so great running pandadoc on Pandadoc because we can go in and ask it for the status of any deal and where the agreement is, and it'll tell you.

And we launched an AI copilot inside that helps you get these answers even at the end of the year.

You know, one of the reps was working a deal at the very last minute.

She's based in Poland.

All the sales execs were out.

She sent me the deal.

I'm able to ask the AI to give me a summary of the terms and how it's different from other terms that we signed.

And I can send it out or the one that I really love is at the end of the month, you've got tons of proposals out that you're trying to get signed.

And as a sales leader, you only have so much time you can spend which one's the right one to go after.

What do most people do?

They go after the big ones.

But what we're able to see is the level of engagement and how many times have been open, how many people have looked at it, what page they've looked at.

And so for our sales leadership, we can zero in on the ones that we think are closest to getting done because we see a lot of engagement there.

Yeah, you can really focus your help.

Your team prioritizes.

If you're gonna.

If you're following up on a document that hasn't been opened in 60 days and you're hoping that's gonna close.

Yeah, it's a long shot, man.

Yeah.

Look at the ones that are hot, that are getting the engagement you can focus on.

So I thought that was a really cool feature.

Now, bringing it back to what y' all are doing as an overall business, you guys are just cross 150 million ARR.

Or I'm carrying 100 plus.

We'll call it plus.

Okay, that's big.

That puts you.

And for the listeners, because I was looking up a lot of this, you're in the top, like 1 to 2% of software organizations based on this, having this kind of ARR.

You guys are in the elite and you've got big growth dreams.

And so from a CEO standpoint, beyond this, you got to protect what you.

Have.

But also you're probably thinking I'm wondering about like what do you need to break next or what do you need to disrupt inside your own organization to get to 500 or to get these bigger growth numbers.

And I'm thinking like what, how are you thinking about protection versus disruption in your organization and what kind of advice might you have there?

I would say we're, we're not too focused on protection.

I mean we, even at 100 plus million, that's, that's small in a very big category.

Every small business in the US and many overseas can benefit from panadoc.

So we've got to play offense and we've got to make sure that they know we're a solution that exists, that we're a solution that solves their problem.

And then we've got to do the execution to make sure that we hit those from a go to market perspective and the execution from a product and engineering perspective that we have a differentiated solution that evolves in a time of very fast change.

If we continue to just say, well, we have the best agreement workflow solution on the market and we just need to make it incrementally better, someone's going to come out and leapfrog us.

I do think workflow itself gives a fairly decent moat, but it's not enough.

And we've got to be a little bit paranoid about that and try to dramatically reinvent what this looks like in the age of AI.

Yeah.

So what is it going to look like in the age of AI?

And we're just getting started.

I like to remind the listeners, like it hasn't really been as big as it is.

I mean ChatGPT came out like two years ago.

Right.

In a very public way.

In a very public way.

And we got a long ways to go.

What's going to happen?

Yeah.

So I tend to think for us at PandaDoc, we're using AI to solve high friction but high frequency tasks.

So what are the things that are really painful but you do them a lot?

It's things like organizing the documents that you have.

It's things like negotiating every new document that you need to send out.

We want AI to solve those things.

And so those are the first places we're deploying it.

And in many ways you can imagine that AI will make or give small businesses access to superpowers that they never had.

And that's what you want to do.

Man, with our.

What's the.

So a couple of fun questions.

Send us out on here.

What's the one document in your life, personal, professional, that changed everything when you signed it.

I gotta pick two.

I gotta cheat a little.

First, my marriage license.

So, you know, getting married was a game changer.

You needed to say that one for sure.

Yes.

My kids and family are really important to me.

And the second would be my employment letter at Google.

It changed my life in so many ways.

I formed incredibly deep friendships there.

I worked there for a decade.

It was still pretty early.

It was 2007.

So I mean Google was like 16,000 people at that time.

And I learned so much and that shaped how I lead teams today.

What's happening?

What's going to happen with Google?

I am so impressed by what I so impressed by what they did with the new Gemini release.

I really thought they were in trouble for a while and they just pulled it out.

I mean Sundar is an incredible leader.

They have the best world class engineering talent.

So it's really incredible.

Yeah, you just don't really know what they're working on over there until it just appears.

And Gemini is.

Yeah, it was a huge leap.

We'll see what comes next.

If you had to lead a team through a crisis tomorrow and you couldn't use any data or analytics, what is the first sentence you would say to them?

I have confidence in you.

And that's definitely what I would say, you know, and I'd follow it up with, we built an incredible team.

You know how to do it and I'll be there in the trenches with you to figure it out.

I have heard or read you like hiring people that have a chip on their shoulder.

What is the one word you hear in an interview that makes you immediately know that they're one to hire?

I was thinking about this because I've been redoing some of my interview questions, but I look for the word persevere or something like I stuck with it.

That's not one word.

But persevere is a great word because it just signals the ability to get through things and find ways around problems or solve things.

And I think that grit and with like when you've got a chip on your shoulder is incredible.

Sounds like a wolverine to me.

Or maybe that comes up in your email.

People are just going to be saying all goes together.

Yeah, that's spirit animals.

A Wolverine.

And so 12 months from now, a lot of things going to change with AI.

Will AI be doing 10% of a panda?

Docs users work or 90% and they'll be off to do other things.

We're aiming for 90% and I would say 18 months.

18 months.

Maybe not 12 months.

We want to be at be close to 90.

Wow.

What about if you had to look at your whole Panda Doc workforce today, the ones on the inside?

How much of their jobs would you say are going to change in the next 12 months in terms of what their daily work's going to be like?

Yeah, I mean, we are seeing it already.

There's a lot of work that's been changing from using cursor and Claude code on the engineering side to changing how we run our go to market using AI tools as well as tools that we're building in house.

And it's all designed to make us more productive.

Like, our goal is to not shrink our headcount, but to invest less and still grow the business at a faster rate than that headcount growth, which we're doing.

But I think the more we can inflect that growth rate through using AI to make us more productive, the better we're going to be.

And that's where we've been investing our.

AI tooling outside of document workflows that Pentadoc is so famous for.

Revenue operations.

What's the one vertical skill on the tea that you've mastered that has nothing to do with business?

I've mastered making a spatchcock chicken.

It is.

That is like, the one thing I'm really good at.

I can't cook a lot of food.

Great.

But I make a mean spouse.

You, you cut the, the backbone of the chicken and you, like, fold it.

Open like a butterfly.

Butterfly.

Okay.

So it cooks much quicker, much more evenly, and you do it on the grill.

It gets like, really crispy skin and it's moist inside.

It's.

That is a useful skill, my friend.

And it's impre.

Visually impressive.

It comes out.

Yeah, I would, I, I would say everybody who tries it is a fan.

So that's, that's the one thing.

That's the one vertical skill I'll, I'll brag about.

You've said and, and you can, you can fact check me on this, but I believe it's.

Repetition doesn't spoil a prayer is a saying that you're known for.

What's the one sentence that you've repeated most of your team in the last 30 days since you've taken over a CEO?

Well, first off, this is another one that I borrowed from an old boss and he would say it all the time, and I love it.

So I think it's really important.

I mean, a lot of times people need to hear the message multiple times before it really sinks in.

But the one sentence that I'm repeating is that what we're developing for PandaDoc with this frictionless agreement platform is a game changer and is exactly what our customers need at the exact moment when they need it.

And so PandaDoc is ready to fire on all cylinders to go get there.

Yeah, that's so that's such a good reminder.

It's like a, like a mantra that people can fuse into their day when they're responding to an email or they're trying to prioritize their to do list.

It's like, is this making it?

Is this adding more friction or is this adding less friction?

Keith says less friction or friction less.

I actually like frictionless.

Powerful man.

What's your parting thought to our listeners tonight?

Keith I don't know that I have a parting thought more than thanking you for having me on just phones.

Always fun to kind of reminisce about how I got to where I am and very thankful for it and thankful for you to allow me to share it with your listeners.

It's been a fun one.

I've really enjoyed diving into the Google foundation and also seeing, you know, it's been fun to hear how you've been able to channel that so successfully, you know, through your eyes.

And I can't wait to see what Pentadoc does next.

Man, it sounds like big things are ahead.

Thanks, Keith.

Thank you.

Thanks.

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