Venture Everywhere Podcast: Katherine von Jan with Kevin Delaney
Venture Everywhere Podcast: Katherine von Jan with Kevin Delaney
Kevin Delaney, co-founder and CEO of Charter, catches up with Katherine von Jan (KVJ), co-founder and CEO of Tough Day.
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Episode 41 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Kevin Delaney, co-founder and CEO of Charter, a media and research company that equips leaders with research-backed best practices in AI, flexible working, and inclusion. Kevin chats with Katherine von Jan (KVJ), co-founder and CEO of Tough Day, an AI platform that offers confidential, tailored advice to employees and managers facing tricky situations at work based on workplace law, management, HR best practices, and company policies, in turn reducing grievances, investigations, and turnover. KVJ also discusses how AI integration in the workplace extends beyond automating tasks to improve decision-making and support employee resilience and performance.
In this episode, you will hear:
Challenges and opportunities in fostering innovation within tech companies.
The mission and role of Tough Day in providing workplace guidance.
Addressing the increasing complexity, confusion, and distress experienced by workers.
Tough Day's potential to support middle managers in handling difficult situations.
Recognizing the importance of providing workers with the tools to thrive in their roles.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:20 Kevin: Hi, and welcome to the Venture Everywhere Podcast. This is Kevin Delaney. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Charter. We're a media and research company focused on the future of work and that means equipping leaders with research-backed best practices around things like AI and work, flexible working, and inclusion.
00:00:38 Kevin: I'm here for a conversation today with Katherine von Jan. She is also known as KVJ, and she's the co-founder and CEO of Tough Day, which is an AI platform helping employees navigate tricky situations at work successfully. Hi, KVJ.
00:00:55 Katherine: Hi, Kevin. How are you?
0000:57 Kevin: I'm good. Thank you. So let's dive in. I want to hear about Tough Day, what you're doing currently, but maybe could you start by telling us about your professional story? What are some of the highlights of the things that have brought you to this point?
00:01:10 Katherine: Yeah, well, that's a great question. Thanks. I have to go way back to even to college when I dropped out of college. And yeah, I was studying communications, it wasn't really my jam. And I moved to Hawaii, not really knowing what I was going to do there, and just kind of wanted to surf and got odd jobs, waitressing, hostessing, working in a bathing suit shop, whatever I could do to afford this lifestyle of living in Hawaii for a year.
00:01:43 Katherine: And I met amazing people, both the local Hawaiian people, culture, the folks that I worked with day to day. But also, it was such an interesting place where people were coming from all around the world, sort of east meets west in Hawaii. And I was constantly either serving or involved in these conversations with really interesting world problem solvers, if you will.
00:02:09 Katherine: And that kind of set me on this course of, hey, there are a lot of problems in this world that we need really diverse people coming together and solving them together. And so I went back to school to study international affairs and really strategy and culture. And then a master's focused on matrifocal culture, which is really about shared leadership power, leadership models. And so..
00:02:34 Kevin: Matrifocal culture, as opposed to patriarchal–
00:02:38 Katherine: Patriarchal being more hierarchical and matrifocal being shared power model.
00:02:43 Kevin: Yeah.
00:02:44 Katherine: And in doing that, my advisor said, hey, you really ought to go into the tribe at work and understand the power models there. And at the time, the best place to work for women was Lotus, Lotus Development, which a lot of listeners may not remember.
00:03:02 Katherine: It was Mitch Kapoor's company and created Lotus 123 and Lotus Notes and Domino. And we were at the forefront of the Internet at the time and how companies would use the Internet to solve problems.
00:03:13 Katherine: So I worked for Irene Greif, the mother of collaborative technology, and she and her team were leading the charge on that with people like Peter Drucker. And it was really a magical beginning to a career in tech and using technology as the enabler to solve big problems.
00:03:30 Katherine: So I'll say I've always been interested in this intersective tech culture strategy and throughout my career kind of navigated that. And I will say, having been a woman in tech, I have seen a lot of the challenges that we're trying to tackle with Tough Day firsthand, either as someone who needed some help or someone who was there to help someone else. And so...
00:03:56 Kevin: That's great.
00:03:56 Katherine: That's how I got here, I guess.
00:03:58 Kevin: And so you worked at Lotus, which is one of the critical, important, iconic tech companies of, I think, the '80s and '90s, basically with productivity software as a big rival to Microsoft, among others. And you stayed in tech, the tech industry, including a more recent stint at Salesforce as their head of innovation, right?
00:04:19 Katherine: That's right. I spent the last about 10 years at Salesforce, always in innovation roles, leading the incubator Futures Lab. Also, the last three years as chief strategy officer leading innovation. And in that role, we were both customer facing and helping customers with their challenges, but also serving the ELT.
00:04:41 Katherine: So any of our leaders that needed some additional innovation help, we were there to assemble a team and help them through that. So during the pandemic, it was an interesting time to be working with our chief people officer and his team, and of course, our chief product officer, wherever the innovation was needed.
00:05:01 Kevin: I want to shift in a minute to talk about Tough Day and what you're doing now. But just from that extended period of time focused on innovation within a pretty big tech company, what are your observations about the state of innovation, both within tech companies broadly, and also within bigger organizations that a lot of them are? What is the level of innovation activity? And what are some of the keys to being successful in that area?
00:05:31 Katherine: Are we talking specifically about the tech industry at that size? Or I guess every company is a tech company at this point.
00:05:38 Kevin: Yeah, or maybe the tech industry, because that was your, you know, most directly your experience.
00:05:43 Katherine: Yeah, I think a few things. I mean, we were born sort of digital, right? The company was started in 1999. The internet was new. Mark was a complete maverick in inventing SaaS and SaaS business models and, you know, totally operating differently than traditional software.
00:06:01 Katherine: And I would say that culture, those values, those behaviors were embedded in the company at such a deep cultural level. It was, everyone said, when I joined Salesforce, oh, it's so entrepreneurial. And I thought, well, can it be really? There were 12,000 people at the time. Can it really be that entrepreneurial?
00:06:21 Katherine: And in fact, it was. And I was blown away by the resiliency, the agility of the organization to move when it needed to move, the generosity of people to come together around a problem, and really that everyone was empowered and expected, actually, to identify challenges and go and fix them, innovate.
00:06:45 Katherine: And so I think one of the things, and even as the company grew to when I left, it was over 70,000 people. A couple of things that were really important, values, our values of trust, innovation, equality, customer success. Those were really part of every conversation, not just the words on the wall, but behaviors that were measurable and expected and we were held accountable to.
00:07:09 Katherine: The second thing is the transparency generally. We had all hands calls weekly where the entire 70,000 people were invited to participate. And use Slack and ask questions. And there was a lot of vulnerability in the leadership to open themselves up to really tough questions in such an open way.
00:07:29 Katherine: But we had lots of channels for raising issues that I could talk about. And then the other piece of that is data. And I think data was really the sunshine in the organization. And I'll just give you an example.
00:07:44 Katherine: When some of the women leaders thought there might be a problem with equal pay, the chief people officer at the time, Cindy said, hey, Mark, I think we've got a problem. And he said, no way. And genuinely, he thought, how could we at Salesforce have this problem? And she said, well, if you want, I can go look at the data. But if we lift the hood and see something in the data, you can't just close the hood. We've got to fix it.
00:08:10 Katherine: And he was completely enthusiastically behind that. We did see issues. We wrote $5 million of checks and then created a program where we were continually evaluating. And every acquisition had its additional challenges. So we really were striving all the time to be better and hold each other to higher standards.
00:08:30 Katherine: And I think even as we grew, that was just part of the operations of the company. And I think that's uncomfortable for people that are not used to that kind of agility and constant reshaping and goals changing and going where the puck is going. So I think combination of moving fast and all aligning quickly, I think we were able to do that.
00:08:56 Katherine: People coming in through acquisition, which is one innovation strategy, you know, those were some new behaviors. So learning to integrate those fast, quickly. You know, I think at some point, we got to the point of the acquisition strategy as a major strategy for innovation as opposed to internal innovation and growing something completely from scratch.
00:09:18 Katherine: But it's a balance. And I think having a portfolio, and we looked at the entire portfolio of innovation from homegrown to potential acquisition targets and made sure that we were cultivating each kind. So Salesforce might be different from some of the other tech companies. I learned a lot and I am very grateful to have been on that journey with them.
00:09:42 Kevin: That's great. Can you talk now about what you're doing currently and the impact that you hope to have with it?
00:09:48 Katherine: Yeah. Thinking about those trends in terms of organizations going through continuous transformation and reshaping and rethinking their own businesses. The advent of Gen AI and soon we'll have AGI and the speed of change is never going to be as slow as it is today.
00:10:08 Katherine: So we're just moving very quickly into a whole new world where really the rug is kind of being pulled out from under normal practices for workers. And generally, workers are distressed. I mean, there's lots of reasons to be distressed in the world. They're bringing that experience with them to the workplace as well.
00:10:26 Katherine: So all this to say right now, and I think increasingly so, workers have challenges and they may not feel comfortable going and asking about these questions and sorting through it or have a source of truth for these things. And so they're struggling and we've learned that 6% of workers are struggling on a daily basis with just how to work and what's going on at work, confusing situations.
00:10:52 Katherine:12% weekly and 58% monthly. So that's a lot of pain, a lot of distraction. And that's what we want to tackle is really being a safe place for workers to come get expert, objective advice, wisdom that can help them sort through their challenges, be resilient and get back to work and doing their best in their workplace. So yeah, we're creating the AI that can help them with that.
00:11:19 Kevin: And the idea is to have an interface, a tool that employees themselves are interfacing with the way they might with a manager or a mentor or a therapist or someone else who they talk to about the tough issues that they're facing.
00:11:37 Katherine: The combination of all of those. So we know that when workers typically have a challenge, kind of the first thing that they do is talk to their friends about it. And those friends and colleagues may not be the best people to talk to.
00:11:49 Katherine: One, they might not have the information or the expertise, and they might just feel like they want to make you feel better. So they validate your concerns and nothing gets fixed. And/or workers will call someone in their family or friends outside the workplace who don't have context or don't have knowledge. They're not lawyers or not managers. They're just like, oh, that's really awful. Sorry.
00:12:13 Katherine: There's not a productive solution for that. And so we're training our AI on legal employment law and labor law, best practices in management and in HR best practices, including the organization provides us their employee handbooks, their policies, processes.
00:12:33 Katherine: So not only are we knowledgeable about the best practices in the world, we're also knowledgeable about that organization and how they work. And so an employee can come here and much like having a conversation with those other folks, they're having the conversation without judgment, without any sense of shame.
00:12:54 Katherine: There are no dumb questions. They can come here and really let it all out what's going on and get both a diagnosis of what the problem probably is, because often that's tricky, and then some recommendations to go forward.
00:13:07 Kevin: So that's for the worker side. For the employer side of things, what's the value proposition?
00:13:13 Katherine: Well, it's about reducing grievances, de-escalating challenges before they become an investigation or a messy exit or a payout of some sort. So what we're hearing, there's a few layers to this.
00:13:28 Katherine: What we're hearing from CEOs and C-suite is, gosh, I spend an awful lot of time answering calls and questions and one-on-ones with people who are having challenges. And a lot of those are not illegal or unethical. They're just uncomfortable situations. And these people don't scale and they need to be focused on their jobs as well.
00:13:49 Katherine: So if we could be that layer before it gets to that level where an employee who's moving from, let's say, green to yellow on the scale of grievance or distraction can get some answers and get back to green faster, the value prop is that they don't go from green to yellow to red and out the door and save the time, energy, and money of the HR team and the C-suite and the managers in that case.
00:14:15 Kevin: You talked a bit about the issues that employees are facing. Is part of it also that managers are under-supported and under-trained and part of the instinct of organizations has been to strip out middle managers who might be the front line for some of these questions that you're tackling?
00:14:35 Katherine: So, yes. And I would argue that a lot of folks are moved into middle management because they were great individual performers and they aren't getting the training. The companies want them to be good at that job and to de-escalate and to do those things. They're just not equipped.
00:14:54 Katherine: And so that, combined with a lot of reorgs and organizational change, makes it very difficult. And what we're seeing is managers using the platform in the same way that employees would. So, a manager might come in and ask a question about a situation and get the advice that they should actually give the employee if the employee comes to them.
00:15:16 Katherine: So, we want to support those employees and managers who want to be doing better, that want to get answers and move on and correct their situation.
00:15:26 Kevin: And people in these circumstances sometimes will put their question or their situation, we used to put it in Google, now someone might put it into ChatGPT. And the difference with Tough Day is that you're actually training or you're contextualizing the responses in rigorous sources around workplace law and a company's own guidelines and practices. Is that fair?
00:15:52 Katherine: That's right. Yeah. And other management content. Yeah. So, I can share our strategic partner in law is Fisher Phillips, who's one of the top four employment law firms on the planet. And they were partners in CoCounsel, which was the first AI to pass the bar exam in the top 10%.
00:16:11 Katherine: And they're not only incredibly wise about the law and all of the challenges related to employment and labor law, they're also incredibly innovative and have done this AI thing before. So, they are not only providing us content, but they're also helping us define the guardrails.
00:16:28 Katherine: They're red teaming and blue teaming with us. They're helping make our AI helpful, human sounding and harmless, really. So, that's really important to us. I would say the other piece of this, and there's the content, but we're also really trying to align the voice and tone to a human guide, if you will.
00:16:51 Katherine: So, if you go to a lawyer or a therapist or a good manager and you have a problem, usually they don't just answer, here's your answer. They'll ask you more questions. So, we're really training the AI to listen and to ask and to contextualize a situation before giving any advice. It's been pretty exciting to see that come to life.
00:17:14 Kevin: What is the hardest thing to get the AI to do and what's the easiest thing to get it to do right now?
00:17:21 Katherine: It's a great question. I will say I've been blown away by the answers and I can give you lots of examples of things that we can only come up with so many use cases ourselves. It's when you see real users using it and you're like, wow, we did that? Like that's so cool.
00:17:40 Katherine: So, the feedback has been really positive. I think we've only seen one hallucination was along the way was related to making up a source for something that it was saying, oh, well, this is the professional organization that would have more information about that. And it was a fake organization.
00:17:57 Katherine: So, really focused on eliminating those, identifying, eliminating hallucination. I would say it was in the beginning repetitive. So, we had to really work on that, but we've solved that. It changes so fast. Week by week, you see leaps and bounds and I think that's what's great AI engineers. You just see magic really come to life. I don't know how else to say it.
00:18:22 Kevin: What are examples of some of the questions people are asking Tough Day?
00:18:28 Katherine: Well, I think one last week was a really, I didn't expect this, but it was someone asking about, well, their manager is smelling and they can't stand being in the same room and they would normally go to HR, but he's married to the HR professional and they're like these complicated situations where it's not one issue, it's multiple combined.
00:18:48 Katherine: And so, the AI helps them understand there's multiple issues here and really you need to escalate this. The best thing for you would be to escalate this and to do it in an unemotional way. And it actually asked the person, would you like me to draft the email for you that you could send? And when we showed it to the lawyers, the lawyers were like, oh my God, I get paid $650 an hour to write that for someone. So that's an example.
00:19:15 Katherine: But I would say the top questions that we're getting are around communication, communication breakdown, 99% of things are communication problems, struggling with one-on-ones and performance as a category, aligning your goals, understanding if you're meeting your goals, having conversations about your achievement and your performance.
00:19:36 Katherine: Another is around management in general, toxic behaviors, disagreements with managers, or can managers do that is a big question. And then the answer sometimes is a legal answer and sometimes it is dependent on the company.
00:19:51 Katherine: So, we've seen, for instance, nepotism, people asking, can my manager hire a sister? And you know, in some companies, it's a family-run business and everybody's related and in other companies, it's not. So, that's where it really matters what the organization's policy is on some of those issues.
00:20:10 Kevin: And so, you're currently in the alpha stage with some partners and customers. What kind of other feedback or success stories or indicators of impact are you seeing at this point?
00:20:23 Katherine: Well, I can share, I had a pretty magical experience yesterday and preparing for this podcast where there's a question about like, what do you struggle with professionally? And I was like, hmm, probably balancing the amount of time I spend in exploratory creative mode and the essential work that needs to be done and really being focused and getting to the next milestone.
00:20:46 Katherine: So, I asked the AI about that and it came back and said, actually, it's really important to do both. And that, you know, Harvard studies show that the amount of time you put into the creative and exploratory work will actually improve your productivity on the essentialism side.
00:21:04 Katherine: And then it asked me if I felt that I did either one well, how much time I was spending on each, how I protect my time for each, and asked me if I'd like some tips on either. And I was like, you know what, let's talk about essentialism and how I can get better at that.
00:21:20 Katherine: And it gave me some really great tips, including something called the Pomodoro Technique, which I had never heard of. So it was, in that case, not necessarily a problem with a co-worker or anything. It was just a personal challenge that I was like, this is really good. This is really helpful. Thank you.
00:21:38 Kevin: And the Pomodoro Technique is where you set a timer basically to do a task, right?
00:21:43 Katherine: Yeah, it kind of goes like you should have 25 minutes of work, five minute breaks, and then do that three times and then take a half an hour break and then do it again. So we'll see. I generally try to do that, but I might actually schedule it into the calendar now.
00:21:59 Kevin: Let's step back for a minute. What is the future of your business? What's the big vision? How are you getting there?
00:22:05 Katherine: I think looking five, 10 years out, I can imagine there's going to be a lot more change in terms of the organization and we'll be a lot more comfortable with co-pilots. But I think the real vision is that some workers are really good at management and some would be happier not being managers and that doesn't need to be their career path.
00:22:26 Katherine: So I think helping the right people get into the right job and get the training that they need, and that's a very important part of the role for the entire organization. But then free up a lot of those people who are managers just for the sake of a promotion and they should be able to have an IC role that makes them happy and do their work.
00:22:44 Katherine: And I go back to sort of three movies, if you will, to describe this vision. One is Moneyball. Every organization should be able to move people around their organization, just like you'd move a player from first base to third base.
00:22:57 Katherine: We should be able to do that in organizations depending on the scenario, what the business objectives are. And people should understand why, what those business objectives are, and we can support that.
00:23:08 Katherine: The second thing is really inspired by The Avengers. If you think about when those superheroes go to battle, there's no manager, there's no one telling them what to do. It's like they're all empowered. They know what their superpowers are. Sometimes they lead, sometimes they follow.
00:23:24 Katherine: We should all have that model and we can support them as well in understanding what the battle is about and what superpowers are needed and how people show up with the support that they need.
00:23:36 Katherine: And the third movie would be Her. I think probably every AI company out there is like referring to Her. But having that trusted guide that you can talk to 24/7 on demand when you've got challenges, the sooner you address your own situation, the better.
00:23:52 Katherine: And I can see a world in the future where talent is moving fluidly in a gig marketplace within their organization and people have the trust of one another and the security to say, okay, in this battle, this is the role that I'm going to play and I'm ready for it and let's do it.
00:24:09 Kevin: Are there any other trends shaping the future of work that over the next five or ten years that you're thinking about?
00:24:16 Katherine: I think there will be a lot of change in roles. So that's one where roles move into tasks and/or projects and the job description goes away, but we're able to quickly understand and identify what the projects are and what's important in terms of execution on those.
00:24:35 Katherine: I think there's a big bifurcation and I'll say multiple futures of work where some organizations will be wildly transactional and some will be wildly developmental and transactional, meaning some workers just want to go to work, get paid, go home and have a nice life outside of work and they're okay just being paid for their skills.
00:24:58 Katherine: And from the organization's perspective, the organization is like, I will pay you for your skills until I no longer need them and then you'll be let go and then I'll go buy the skills that I need from someone who has them. And for both sides, it's very transactional.
00:25:12 Katherine: On the other end of the spectrum, you have companies that like to farm their talent and they're continually reskilling and retraining and thinking about the skills that are coming and where the shortages will be and managing the glut and the gap of talent and helping people come along on that journey and moving them around the organization.
00:25:29 Katherine: And I think some employees want that experience as well. So I think the most important thing for workers and companies is to know what kind of workplace they want to be and attract the kind of talent that wants that experience.
00:25:42 Katherine: And finally, I would say a big shift is from HR into employee experience design. A lot of the HR role is very operational and a lot of it can be automated. There's still a very strategic and important role for HR professionals and we will need them to be focused on those things.
00:26:02 Katherine: But ultimately, their job is about creating an amazing employee experience and that employee experience will drive a better customer experience and drive growth. So really, HR becoming part of the growth engine in terms of developing that employee experience.
00:26:19 Kevin: Yeah, you're talking about the HR people right now. And I think one of the hesitations people might have about putting AI into an HR a context is that it depersonalizes it, that you're basically redirecting people rather than speaking to a human being that might be speaking to a machine.
00:26:41 Kevin: And I think what you're just describing is a reimagining of the HR person's role from what I'm hearing is to redirect some of those interactions to AI to allow them to focus on other things. How do you think about that proper use of AI in a context that's literally called human resources or people or things like that?
00:27:05 Katherine: Yeah, I mean, I think the terminology human resources should just go away. At Salesforce, we called it employee success and I love that. I think we want all of our employees to be the best value creators that they can be. And that's why we're part of the organization in the first place. So I think people realizing that.
00:27:23 Katherine: And then I think one of the metrics of the future is revenue per employee and that doesn't mean cutting employees and so it's all machines doing work and then your revenue per employee goes up. I'm talking about like, every employee doing their best, living their full potential for the organization.
00:27:40 Katherine: And therefore, if you have more people, you're creating more revenue and you're creating growth and solving the biggest problems in the world. And I think HR is really strategic and vital.
00:27:51 Katherine: And I think what happens and what the opportunity is for Tough Day is that, let's say, 50% of their time is answering calls that are meaningful but they're really easy to answer and I'd say, a level of answer that an AI can do really well.
00:28:08 Katherine: And the AI actually can help bring one, that feeling of catharsis that you might have with a friend or family member or talking to an HR member. But it also can give you a lot of great insight without that, I think we talked about before, sense of shame or judgment or anything.
00:28:26 Katherine: So, actually, it's preferable for many people to talk with an AI, get the answers that they need, and not bother the HR person. And then the HR person's role can be transformed because they've just gotten 50% more time that they can do more strategic, more interesting employee experience innovation that's going to make the entire organization higher performing and more successful.
00:28:51 Kevin: So, as you're tackling this question that you just outlined and building Tough Day, what keeps you awake at night?
00:28:58 Katherine: I think speed. Actually, I worry about it probably less than I was before because I'm seeing like we're part of the speed machine, how quickly things can improve and change. But I think every business of any size has to constantly balance quality, cost, and time.
00:29:19 Katherine: And when you're a startup, your pockets are not as deep as some of the big AI players who've raised billions of dollars and cost is not really the factor for them. It's really speed and quality. We are trying to be thoughtful and provide high quality experiences and to do that as fast as possible.
00:29:39 Katherine: And that's really important for us to create a differentiated experience that way. When I start to feel like, we have to go faster, I realize sometimes going slow to go fast is better. And we're getting some really important things right along that way, maybe because of those constraints.
00:29:59 Kevin: Like a mature entrepreneur's observation, I think. So at the end of these podcasts, these Venture Everywhere podcasts, we do a quick speed round of some questions that touch on how you spend your time, basically.
00:30:16 Katherine: Before we do that, can I ask you a question?
00:30:19 Kevin: Yeah, go ahead.
00:30:20 Katherine: Because I'm fascinated by what you're doing. I guess my question twofold is one. Why are you on this journey of now doing all content related to future of work? And what's getting you out of bed in the morning with respect to that? That's a big change, I guess, from just generally Wall Street Journal, New York Times, all of those things. So, what are you seeing that you want to see created in the world?
00:30:44 Kevin: So I was in the situation that you talked about, you know, as a good individual contributor, as a good journalist, and I was based in San Francisco in the early mid to mid 2000s and I was a tech reporter covering Google and Yahoo and those internet companies for the journal.
00:31:02 Kevin: And I saw that news organizations were not taking advantage of technology in the same way that those tech companies were. And so I wrote a long strategy memo for the management of the Wall Street Journal and wound up coming back and being a manager and leading the digital newsroom for the journal. And I did that without a lot of training or for the most part.
00:31:26 Kevin: And so my experience was very similar to what you described. You're a good individual contributor, and then you get put in a managerial role, and you have to figure things out. And so I felt like that's kind of my life. I've been trying to figure things out, including by reading management books and Fast Company articles and posts on Medium at 11 o'clock at night from people who I respect.
00:31:49 Kevin: But I felt like there wasn't a resource that I could go to reliably that was a playbook for leadership in our time. And that was treating some of the central issues of our time, sustainability and inclusion in AI and automation and multiple generations living and working together. Was treating those as core management opportunities and issues and trying to equip managers to lead in ways that actually moved us forward on those issues.
00:32:20 Kevin: And so it was this idea of a kind of next gen Harvard business review that equipped leaders better with rigorous research-based, actionable things they could do to tackle some of the most important, urgent questions that they are facing, knowing that people are the biggest lever for value creation for a lot of organizations, which I think is probably an observation that we share because it seems to be one of the core thesis behind Tough Day that if you can unleash, support, enable the people, the workers in your organization, then the outcomes are better for everybody.
00:33:01 Kevin: So that's really the story of how I did this. I'm a journalist by training, so I'm less comfortable being asked questions. I'm going to go back to asking you questions.
00:33:12 Katherine: Okay. Fair.
00:33:15 Kevin: So what is a book you're reading or a podcast you're enjoying?
00:33:20 Katherine: I've just been reading Rachel Maddow's Prequel about pre-World War II culture in America.
00:33:27 Kevin: Great, and you recommend it?
00:33:29 Katherine: I highly recommend it. It's mind-blowingly well-researched. I mean, she references lots of other researchers that helped her, but I just like, every paragraph is so insightful and astounding information. So I highly recommend it. It's very relevant for today, too, I think.
00:33:48 Kevin: Were there any facts or observations that particularly stood out to you?
00:33:53 Katherine: I just didn't realize how anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler so many Americans were and that it was really, we were really close to not entering the war in the way that we did. And so the role that the movie industry played, all the industries were kind of playing a role in this.
00:34:12 Katherine: So I don't want to give away all the details, but it's a fascinating read about what was happening in families and in towns and in the movie theaters, the role that movies played in that time, as well as the major cultural event. It was fascinating.
00:34:27 Kevin: Okay, that's great. So that's Rachel Maddow's Prequel. Another speed round question, if you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:34:36 Katherine: I've lived all over the world in different places. I've lived in Sydney and Barcelona and Germany and across the US and Hawaii. So I think what I realize, I feel like I can live anywhere for a year and be really, truly happy. And I might like to live on one of those cruise ships that just goes everywhere for a year.
00:34:59 Katherine: And I'm very interested in seeing places that are less touched by development, less consumer oriented. I love the woods and nature and probably would try to find places that were still fairly pristine.
00:35:14 Kevin: So your answer is everywhere, which is very on brand for this podcast. What's your favorite productivity hack?
00:35:21 Katherine: I have to say hugs from my children. They're 15 and 18, and fortunately they still love hugs and I can just be working away and take a break, a big deep breath and get a giant bear hug from my 15 year old son, it just totally, like the world is good. Everything's right. It's almost like instant meditation. And then I go back to work. Productivity goes up after that.
00:35:46 Kevin: That's great.
00:35:47 Katherine: It's like people for your soul.
00:35:50 Kevin: It's a non-traditional productivity hack.
00:35:53 Katherine: Yeah, we all need more hugs.
00:35:56 Kevin: Where can listeners find you?
00:35:59 Katherine: Best place is LinkedIn and my handle is Kvonjan, K-V-O-N-J-A-N, and/or just email hello@tough.day.
00:36:09 Kevin: Because it's a startup and hello@tough.day goes to you.
00:36:13 Katherine: Every email pretty much like other than the people who have specific links.
00:36:18 Kevin: Yeah.
00:36:18 Katherine: There's a catchall, I have to say.
00:36:20 Kevin: I can be reached at hi@charterworks.com similarly.
00:36:25 Katherine: Excellent.
00:36:26 Kevin: KVJ, this was a great conversation. I'm excited to see how Tough Day develops and for it to be out of alpha so that other organizations can benefit from it as well. And it's been great to chat with you. And thank you for joining us for the Everywhere Venture podcast.
00:36:46 Katherine: Thank you, Kevin. And I can't wait to continue the conversation. And thank you, Everywhere, for having us.
00:36:53 Kevin: This is KVJ from Tough Day and I'm Kevin Delaney from Charter.
00:36:58 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Kevin Delaney in Founders Everywhere.
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