The Circuit | Max Yoder: CEO of Lessonly
Behind every major tech headline of acquisitions, expansions, and raises, is a story of how a community supported the individual. And often, a story of how the individual continues to support the community.
These are the stories of TechPoint’s The Circuit, a new interview series dedicated to serving up the human stories behind the tech headlines of Indiana.
In our first episode, we talk to Max Yoder, CEO, and co-founder of Lessonly. Founded in 2012, Lessonly has grown to almost 300 employees and was recently acquired by Seismic. Max revisits Lessonly’s origins and the people who helped him along the way. He talks about Lessonly’s winning company culture and how the acquisition happened.
The Piano at Lessonly HQ.
Mike Langellier:
Max, thanks for having us into the office.
Max Yoder:
You bet. Good to be here.
Mike Langellier:
It’s a really, really cool space here on the Northeast side of downtown, right?
Max Yoder:
Yeah. Yeah. Just off the Monon.
Mike Langellier:
And I just learned the history of this, this building. What did it use to be?
Max Yoder:
Yeah, not long ago, stored all of IPS’s musical instruments when they were in a kind of repair state. Like we needed to get pianos tuned. So when we first walked up here and toured the place, there was a security… IPS security on the first floor kind of like centralized and then rows and rows of cellos up here, rows and rows of violins and pianos. So that was a very special thing, a lot darker than it is now. We opened the place up a bit light-wise.
Mike Langellier:
That had to be pretty cool for you with your musical background, musical interest as well.
Max Yoder:
Yeah. It drew me to the place and they let us keep a few pianos and we have one right at the end of the hallway and it is a very beautiful grand piano that we get tuned about every six months. And I like playing it. I come in on the weekends to play it.
Mike Langellier:
Love it. Yeah. Well, Hey, I know that you’ve had a big announcement here recently in an acquisition that we’ll get into here in a little bit and congratulations by the way.
Max Yoder:
Thank you. Thank you for all your help.
Mike Langellier:
That’s a big, big milestone and it takes a lot of years to get to what seems like a very overnight success for many from the outside.
Max Yoder:
Sure. Well, Hey, we walked together in the earliest of early days, Lessonly-wise. So thank you very much for being here then and now.
What is Lessonly?
Mike Langellier:
Well that means a lot. It’s been really cool to see your arc and the company’s arc over that time. We’re gonna have a myriad of people that are watching this and wondering about the story of Lessonly. Maybe heard of the company, but know varying amounts about the company. Why don’t you just first in a thumbnail share what Lessonly is. And what customers you serve.
Max Yoder:
Yeah. Lessonly makes training software and coaching software. So really what we help companies do is build lessons. Step-by-step lessons. People can take on their phones on their computers and then practice scenarios. So practice scenarios are like, Hey, I’ve just learned something. Now I’m gonna try to do it. So I might turn on my webcam and practice what I’ve just learned might just do something via, via a chat.
Max Yoder:
I might type out something basically build in the muscle after I’ve learned something. So we do this, this training and coaching for sales team and customer service teams, which is a little different because a lot of times you think traning software, you might think, sell the human resources and it’s gonna do compliance. And while we have sold the human resources and have done compliance 80 plus percent of our business sales and customer service teams. So it’s like, fundamentally, how do you do your job? Well in the customer service world, the sales world, let’s put that on to Lessonly we think a lot more people swim than sink when they’re kind of guided. And a lot of companies don’t do a lot of guidance. Right. That is true. It’s very sink or swim. So we’re like, Hey, if you want people to swim. Show them the way, you know, and it works.
Mike Langellier:
I did a little trip down memory lane in lead up to this interview. Yeah. And went back to 2015 when Lessonly won a Mira award.
Max Yoder:
Oh yes, I remember.
Mike Langellier:
You were up on stage and you were describing 2014 in the growth. And I think it was from like five to 15 employees at the…
Max Yoder:
I was giving you hand signals.
Mike Langellier:
<laughs> …that’s right. So little bit has changed since then. The growth has been quite a bit more significant.
Max Yoder:
Yeah. We, when we sold the business to Seismic and joined that team, we were about 260-270 full time. So yeah, it was a wild nine years. From inception to, to selling the business. It’s actually really impossible for me to think about how many people we had to hire. To get there and just how that all got done. I don’t really know.
Mike Langellier:
And the teams or the primary roles that you have across the team now?
Max Yoder:
Yeah. Sales, customer service. Is that, is that what you mean? Yeah. Marketing sales, customer service. So think pre-sales post-sale think, you know G&A, when we think of that as like, you know, our legal, we have like a fulltime legal team, which is like, never thought that would happen. You know, finance talent recruiting, all that good stuff. I’m missing plenty.
Mike Langellier:
In addition to your product?
Max Yoder:
Yeah. Product, here we go. That’s an important one. Yeah. Product and engineering services. I mean solutions and consulting. It really was cool to go from a lot of people doing a lot of things to, you know, this specialization, it took a long time to get for me to get used to that out of like highly specialized roles as opposed to kind of generalists.
A Seismic Acquisition.
Mike Langellier:
So you referenced Seismic. Major milestone of going through an acquisition process, to many it’s this kind of mystical mysterious process. But, but when you’ve lived through it, it’s oftentimes crazy how, just how serendipitous it is. Talk about the… What was the story? How did this all all happen in your scenario?
Max Yoder:
Yeah. 2018 Conner Burt and I are in… Conner Burt, is the president of Lessonly, helped me start the business. We’re on the phone with Doug Winter, the CEO of Seismic. And we’re like, we really like this guy and there seem at that point another company that was a competitor of Seismic had bought training software, acquired a training software company. So we were like, Hey, this might be a trend. It’s only happened once, but it might be a trend. It turned out to be a trend. Happened again and again and again, the market kind of pushed it that way.
Max Yoder:
Okay. So we’re talking to Doug in 2018 saying if you ever make a move like that, you know, we would love to be considered, but we just would like to be a great partner of yours. You know, and we weren’t too forward, like, you know, biased today. You know, but like, Hey, let’s build the business. Let’s build businesses together. Make sure we know one another. So if it ever comes to, to the time where one of us wants to make a move here. We’re already well established that worked out really well. 2019, we started formalizing our go-to-market kind of sales process together. So we knew one another in that way we had sold deals together had integration already. And so when it came down for them to say, like, if we do wanna do this, you know, the competitive landscapes changing we want to have both training and what Seismic does, which is really content.
Max Yoder:
We want to have them both. They looked at all their partners and said, like, who do work best with? They talked to everyone of them. Right. But ultimately they heard really positive feedback from their product org of “we really like working with Lessonly.” And the sales org that “We really like working with Lessonly.” And that I think was a huge, huge benefit, you know, of like… I don’t know how these deals ever get done. Having seen one get done. Like you said, has to have so many, so many things fall into place at the right time. But I think the fact that they could trust that we could work well together out of the gate made a big difference.
Mike Langellier:
So why Seismic for you? Your baby, you and Conner’s baby and the whole team that brought it to this point. And then you had to make a decision about who’s who’s the right partner for the business. Why Seismic?
Max Yoder:
Yeah. I mean, it was, to me there’s no other path than joining forces with that company. To me it was like, this is where the market is heading. We saw the sales teams and customer service teams. And we are seeing everybody else who does what we do either creating their own content offering or joining force with somebody who has one. And for us, it was like, we only have domain expertise in what we do. Right? Training and coaching. We do not have domain expertise in what Seismic does, and I’m not gonna pretend like I do. Right? I’m not gonna go raise a bunch of money. Act like I can just build anything. We built one thing, you know and Seismic’s really good, you know?
Max Yoder:
So we were like, Hey, this makes a ton of sense. And they had the, they had the urgency, right? Like we weren’t gonna come to ’em and be like, we have to do this. They had to want to do it. And so the timing was right. I just felt like the motion of the ocean was going that direction. You know, it was impossible for me to look at them and say like, this does not make sense.
“It doesn’t have to be scary at work.”
Mike Langellier:
Yeah. That’s awesome. You’ve also talked about what you envision will be the impact on the community, the company, the tech community here. Speak more about that. What do you think the potential is?
Max Yoder:
Well, my hope is that all the folks who got to work at Lessonly learned that they enjoyed certain ways of working, this is my, you know, my heart’s hope that they were like, I really liked how we did certain things at Lessonly and maybe they didn’t see them at other places.
Max Yoder:
Maybe they did, but either way, I hope they were inspired by certain ways that we approached work and all those people are gonna go work somewhere else. Right? They’re gonna start their own businesses or they’re going to be early employees at new businesses, or they’re gonna, you know, join other companies. And I hope they bring some of whatever it was that we had here, there whether they’re managing, you know, a team or leading a company, whatever it is. I think that is where the biggest ripple impact is gonna be.
Max Yoder:
It’s just… It doesn’t have to be scary at work…is a big message of ours. Like, people don’t have to be scared at work. They’re gonna bring scary. They’re gonna bring their own fear to work. Right.? Cause we wanna do well. Right? We all kind of push ourselves. We wanna do well. But top down pressure doesn’t have to be the way. Of, you know, the CEO opening pressure on the other executive team from push pressure down. It’s just not… What we wanted to operate at was, “Hey, Mike believe in you let us know how we can be helpful.” You’re gonna put the pressure on yourself and that’s the best kind of pressure. Right? It’s coming from you, not from me. Right? You just wanting to win.
Have Difficult Conversations.
Mike Langellier:
Let’s talk more about that. We talked about that in the lead up to this discussion as well, sort of this philosophical difference that when you think about the traditional role of a business. It feels, it can feel different to many. And there are some that are going to be that could hear that and say, that sounds like marketing fluffiness. So two questions: First, how have you found to make that tangible? How have you taken that ideology and then actually made it tangible in the workplace?
Max Yoder:
Yeah, so I got to… my teammates gave me space to write a book called do better work. And that was really an encapsulation of what are the values that when we’re doing them here, things just accelerate. And then when we’re not doing those same things, things slow down and it became pretty evident that like, these are just core relationship behaviors. Like as I’m writing the book, as I’m scanning the room, talking to people it’s like, these are just healthy relationship behaviors. So an example being having difficult conversations. If people in a relationship avoid difficult conversations or argue, as you know avoidance, an argument kind of being the two extremes instead of having a difficult conversation. That is a conversation, right? Argument, I do not consider a conversation. Right? I think that’s kind of trying to win. You know, both people kind of trying to win.
Max Yoder:
If we can have difficult conversations, we can have healthy relationships. Right? But that is not common. A lot of times it’s avoidance or it’s an argument. So it’s like, let’s figure out a way methodically to have those difficult conversations. So that’s chapter seven in the book have difficult conversations, a method for doing so we have to also highlight what’s working. So go to the other side of things, what’s going well ultimately, we got these things documented and we gave them words. So people knew what highlight what’s working meant. They know what have “have difficult conversations means.” They know what “share before you’re ready” means, these are all chapters in the book. And we gave 10 to 15 minute, you know, overviews on all of them in the book. So if you’re joining the company, you know, what, what you’re getting into.
Mike Langellier:
Did you build it into the software?
Max Yoder:
Oh yeah, totally. Oh yeah. Yeah. You can. I mean, all the chapters are in the software. Right? We and our customers use them, which is so cool. Big idea here is these things build clarity. They build camaraderie. Okay. But they’re, they’re not the easy thing to do. The easy thing to do is avoid having a difficult conversation. The easy thing to do is not share something that’s working. Right? They’re simple, but they’re hard. So we were like, let’s identify the simple and hard stuff that brings people together. And let’s not only put ’em on the wall, but, you know, give ’em words and let’s make ’em real by living them. Right? The executive team has to live them. You get the idea.
Mike Langellier:
So flip it to one of the other, the second part of the question is accountability that comes up as well. So how do you, this kind of soft, supportive type of culture. Then how do you, you know, in your case, when you’re a venture backed organization or one with ambitious goals, how have you found that you’ve been able to live that culture while also delivering the results with accountability you need?
Max Yoder:
Yeah. I mean, I think about a marriage, which a marriage is a loving place that has a tremendous amount of accountability to be built into it. Right. And accountability go hand-in-hand. I think a pseudo-version of love, what people might call love that isn’t love is kind of this fluffy thing where we don’t hold one, another accountable. That’s not love to me. You know, love to me is looking, is my wife looking at me in the eye and saying, I’m frustrated and we need to talk about it.
Max Yoder:
Because I love you. Right? And I wanna talk about it. Right? I don’t wanna avoid that. So accountability and like port of loving environment to me are, they’re one thing. And when somebody is, when I’m frustrated with somebody, it is my job to sit down with them and say, I’m frustrated. They might not agree with my frustration. Right? And that’s a teammate. That’s my wife. That’s anybody you have a real relationship with. Right? That’s how I proved you that I value the relationship is I sit down and do the difficult stuff. So accountability, I think, is hand-in-hand and we have metrics that we measure. Right? We have operational metrics that we measure. We have relational things we care about. and the blend of the two is where it becomes a really cool yin-yang. Right? Can’t just be relational, where we don’t think about the operations, and it can’t just be operations, where we don’t think about the relationship.
Slowing Down. Being Present.
Mike Langellier:
Makes sense. Very cool. You tipped opened the door to the personal side. Let’s go there. You’re you’ve talked about your baby of Lessonly. And now handing that off, but you fairly recently brought a new baby into the world in a very literal sense. How, how has that experience of becoming a father influenced your worldview or even your leadership style?
Max Yoder:
Oh, yeah. In a big way. I, for the first 30 years of my life, I think I was achievement-oriented. Like, how do I kind of figure out what muscles I have? Well, I’ll go out there and I’ll try to do something right. And I’ll kind of figure out what my strengths are. The next 30 years of my life, my daughter Marni she’s 14 years old… 14 months old, excuse me. She is gonna help me develop a sense of slowing down on not being oriented around achievements, being more oriented around, you know, being present. If I’m gonna achieve something, it’s not gonna be for anybody else, but my own soul, you know, like it’s not gonna be to make somebody else applaud. So I’m gonna, it’s just bringing a different energy to my life. And Marni brings that energy. She’s not, she does not care what dad’s achieving. She just wants dad to be present. It’s a grounding experience. Isn’t it? She just wants dad to play. You know <laugh> and that’s what I want, you know, that’s what I want to be doing. So my daughter came at the perfect time because I don’t want to be living this kind of high pitched over stimulated life anymore.
Mike Langellier:
But just so easy.
Max Yoder:
Oh the software world is like built for it right. 12 months out of the year, all the dang time. Right? High pitch stimulation. And my body needs rest. And I’m 33 and my body needs rest differently than it did when I was 23. You know?
Mike Langellier:
We grew up in a culture where even sleep was a weakness.
Max Yoder:
Amen. It’s insane. Yeah. It’s insane. The fuel in the tank, you know, we’re calling a weakness. Yeah. You know, it’s like, no, that’s the fuel in the tank. Yeah. that’s a fairly recent shift. It is. Yeah. I’ve been napping every day for like six years, man.
Fuel in the Tank.
Mike Langellier:
Really?
Max Yoder:
Oh yes. Oh yes. And you wanna know why fuel in my tank? Yeah. I’m a much kinder, more thoughtful person post-nap.
Mike Langellier:
So is this like a 20 minute power nap at a particular time of the day?
Max Yoder:
What’s this look like today? It was like a 35 minute “I fell asleep.” But some days I don’t fall asleep. Some days I just body buzz, you know, for 20 minutes. It’s almost like a “level one sleep” where like I am in a different place, but I’m not full asleep. But it’s still rejuvenates. It still charges the batteries, you know? And I find it to be that I’m…
Mike Langellier:
And by the way, just to make it clear, we’re at like 1:00 already in the afternoon. So you’re already you’re not even to the 2:30 feeling yet.
Max Yoder:
No, no. I usually start to feel that around noon. You know where I’m like, oh, I’m not my best self anymore. And if I really want to have a afternoon that, you know, is one where I’m getting things done and I’m not just kind of fussy. I’m just a whole different person when I’m tired, you know? And so I don’t want to, and that’s not the kind of person I want to show up to at work. I handle stress better, all that stuff.
Mike Langellier:
That’s good self-awarenes. Let’s go back in time. So formation of Lessonly time. So you Conner. What was the situation? What was the scenario and what was the driving kind of problem or opportunity that catalyzed the formation of this company?
Lessonly’s Origin Story.
Max Yoder:
Yeah. So Mike Fitzgerald, Kristian Andersen, Dustin Sapp, and I had started at a company before Lessonly called Quipol. So these are gentlemen who have a lot more experience than me, have a lot less time than me. You know, I’ve got time, they have experience and I’m like, “Hey, can you help?”
Max Yoder:
I was an intern for Kristian prior to that and you know, so I was like, “Hey, I know, you know how to do this. I’ve seen you build business with other people. Can you help?” So Quipol doesn’t work out. We.. we can talk about that. But a year and nine months I don’t sell a deal. And then it’s like, I wanna do this again. And Kristian really encouraged me… like, you just learned the hard way. Right? Like double down, like you just learned some skills right. By don’t shy away. Lean in. And you’ve just learned something. Right? By having it not work and to walk away right now, might be to not use the muscles you’ve just built. And that was great advice. And that was also not my mom telling me that. You know, if my mom tells me… she loves me.
Mike Langellier:
Yeah. Which is big of him too. Because he was, you know, probably financially invested in that whole that, that whole period of time as well.
Max Yoder:
Yeah. He knows how it works. Right. that this is a risk and this one didn’t work out. Maybe the next one will so the next one comes up, Eric Tobius… Dustin Sapp is really busy at Tinderbox, that becomes Octiv. Eric Tobias comes in and says, “you know, training software is something I’ve never bought. We should look into that space.” And Mike Gerold also said, “Hey, training software is something I’m interested in too.” But he was thinking on the business-to-consumer side, Eric’s thinking the business-to-business side. I’m like, I look at both. I look at both. So I just go explore both and find, get really lucky, a venture firm called Union Square Ventures, open sources all of its information on the on the business-to-consumer training side.
Max Yoder:
And it’s like, don’t go there. You know, basically like, Hey, we’re gonna have to raise a lot more money than we can raise around here. It’s gonna be a consumer business. It’s gonna be a big money burner. It’s not my, my DNA to do that. So we go B2B and start building Lessonly. Conner’s my roommate at the time. Okay. He goes and tries it at Salesforce without asking. He goes to Australia and uses Lessonly early, early version of Lessonly to train these Australian sales reps. And it works and he’s like, dude, I can go sell this, you know, like <laugh>, I’ve just done it. You know, I’ve just used it and it works. And everything changed when Conner joined the company. And I know we want to talk about some, like, really important moments in the business, but like this… The dynamics of the people that I got to surround myself with that were very different than me.
Max Yoder:
Yeah… Conner is my best friend. Him and I are very different. We do not share a bunch of interests. That’s actually what makes it really special. And he brought like a yin-yang to me. And then Cory, Kim comes in, brings another. And it’s like, almost like this ensemble where we all have different flashlights on the globe and like can never, we can never see the whole globe because it’s a globe. Right? But our flashlights are all different and they’re all in different spots and together we can illuminate more of the globe and the globe is the business. Right? And it’s hard yeah. To navigate business. So the more different flashlights we got on that globe, like the clear things are. And, I just really appreciate having all these different people around me who are so fundamentally wired differently than I am. That is the difference maker in the business.
IU and Orr Fellows.
Michael Langellier:
So let’s go there. If the Lessonly journey were a book and you had the chapters that were the real sort of inflection points and you now look back and you say, okay, there were those moments where the little thing mattered so much. Whether it was a introduction, a connection, whether it was a kind of a key hire or just an event that tipped in your direction. What were some of those inflection points when you look back on them now?
Max Yoder:
Yeah. Getting an internship with Kristian. I was at Indiana University and he gave me an internship. I didn’t know him, didn’t know anybody in Indianapolis. And I got an internship for design and strategy and I did not know what strategy was and I was not a designer. I had to look up strategy on Wikipedia <laugh> I was like what is this? How is this different than, you know, I just didn’t know. I was not a business student, you know, I just didn’t know a lot. So he lets me in, he tells me I should apply for the Orr Fellowship. And that’s the big inflection point is being, being a part of the or fellowship because Conner was in the Orr Fellowship. Cory was in the Orr fellowship. Mitch Cay. These are the first three people that come full time on the team. All people I met in the Orr Fellowship I don’t become roommates with Conner without it. You get the idea, right? It’s, that’s a gigantic change in my life.
Mike Langellier:
So build upon that, you and I have both had the good fortune of being part of the or fellowship. What, what brought us both Indianapolis, brought us to this tech community was really the entrée to both starting startups and that journey. Talk more about outside of those, you know, kind of initial connections… you’ve also had, you know, now it’s sort of the, the early relationships like Christian and Mike and Eric, you know, institutionalized as High Alpha now. What has, what has like the High Alpha set of relationships meant for the business? And then build upon the Orr Fellowship story as well.
Max Yoder:
Yeah, for anybody who doesn’t know about the Orr Fellowship, if you’re coming outta college you can apply for the Orr Fellowship. And they will help you get placed with a young… or high tech company in Indianapolis. It doesn’t have to be a new one, but it’s a tech company in Indianapolis.
Max Yoder:
Yeah. So Lessonly is 260 people. We don’t still, at this point do not have the capacity to go all the career fairs. So the Orr Fellowship goes out to all these career fairs. And finds people like me who wanna join startups. I wanna join tech companies but don’t really know how to, and then they place them. And right now I think they’re placing like 80 kids a year. You know, when I was in it, when you were in, it was like, I think it was 10 for you. And it like 20 for me. So it was I was really, really nervous. I wasn’t gonna get in. And then I got in, I was like, yes. And I got placed with Chris Baggott. And so Chris Baggot’s a guy who starts ExactTarget with Scott Dorsey in town. This is like the biggest success story we have.
Mentors and High Alpha.
Max Yoder:
And he’s my first, you know, the first guy I get to learn from outta school talk about good fortune. And he looks at me and says, “save your money. You can do whatever you want.” If you, if you can leave a job, right. Like the ability to leave a job and have a little money in the bank. Is the lifeline to kind of doing some what you want. You know, so he is like “save, save, save.” And I had student loans. So I was like, I gotta pay these off. And then I’ll “save, save, save.” But great advice from Chris. I meet all these people. I’m like one of the luckiest guys in the world mentor-wise, you know, like I wish everybody had mentors. I see the guidance, I see the gifts it gives me and it makes… I get sad and knowing that so many folks are just hungry for one , you know, and I’ve got like eight.
Max Yoder:
You know, and I don’t say that with like boasting, it’s just like, it’s amazing. You know, and I just wish more people did. Because they can help me. They’ve helped me. So in so many ways, and Scott Dorsey, as, as you mentioned from High Alpha, he’s one of them, he joins the board Lessonly I would I say five, five years ago. Four or five years ago. I was thrilled cause he was like, “Hey, I’d be interested in joining the board.” I was like, “I would love to have you join the board.” Like, wouldn’t he even thought to ask, you know, like I’m not gonna, I don’t even think he’s gonna go there. And he’s like, I’d like to join. And I was like, dude, that’d be amazing. So Conner and I have this person we can call who has not only done it, but done it exceptionally well. And done it in a way that we really relate to, you know, his style is one we really relate to.
Mike Langellier:
Where culture was core for ExactTarget as well. Right?
Max Yoder:
Right. And they had their own and we have our own, but relationships mattered. Right? They were big on relationships, we were big on relationships, you know? So we really jived, but he also brought this perspective of, “Hey, you guys you know, you can think bigger than you are right now?” He was very consistently that way. Like you’re onto some, you can think bigger and you’ll get there.
Scaling Up.
Mike Langellier:
So delve into that, because you’ve, you’ve talked about how the frugality was critical at the beginning in order to allow you freedom. But then you had to flip the switch at some point. How did you do that?
Max Yoder:
People like Scott. You know, hires who made like Kyle Lacy and Brian [Montminy] comes in as a CFO and they help us see that we can think differently about how we spend in the business and how it can be really wise to think differently. You know, going to like Dreamforce Salesforce’s conference. Like the first time we did that was a big, big get for us. But, you know, we had encouragement from folks who know what they were doing of like give it a try. Life will go on. Buying lessonly.com. You know, that was a big ticket item for us. We, we didn’t own lessonly.com when things started…
Mike Langellier:
What was the first URL?
Max Yoder:
Lesson-dot-Y.
Mike Langellier:
Oh, that’s right.
Max Yoder:
So a Libyan kinda top country code, you know…
Mike Langellier:
Which has problematic…
Max Yoder:
Yeah. Yeah. Because you can’t talk about a few things on Libyan country codes and like, and we had some customers who talked about those things, you know. We were like, oh, we might want to get off of this. But yeah, those expenses just, and it wasn’t just expenses, just like pushing ourselves. Scott’s like, “Hey Max, you can write a book.” You know, Kyle says, you can write a book. Scott says I can write a book. I’m like, well, I can probably go do that. You know, it’s just really good to have that encouragement.
Do Better Work.
Mike Langellier:
And the idea of a startup CEO, like allowing his or herself to think that it was okay to step away from the business to do something like that.
Max Yoder:
Yeah. I was terrified.
Mike Langellier:
You have to be liberated to do it.
Max Yoder:
I was terrified. Yeah. Cuz you know, everybody’s gonna be taking on things that I outta… hat I would’ve been doing. All the exec team now has more work. As I go focus on this. Because I’m not around do that stuff. So I’m sitting here thinking I’m burdening people. We don’t actually know what this book’s gonna be about, you know, because we…it was not clear. I had to write my way to it, you know so it better work, you know, and it might not. And and fortunately it, I got an alignment and a vision, a gentleman named Pete Gaul, another mentor of mine was like, figure out the one person you wanna write to and write to them and write it like letters. Like, and I had one person in mind who I was like, if I wanna pass on some information, here’s a person who might really benefit from it. And I guess wrote to them.
Mike Langellier:
A specific person or a persona of a person?
Max Yoder:
No, a real person. Yeah. Yeah. Luke, the CEO at Encamp, he was my person. I was like, hey… he, at the time asked me a lot of questions. And I was like, well, I’ll just maybe answer them. A bunch of ’em you know, about how I think work should work. And you know, dear Luke, and then start the chapter sincerely Max, but then cut those out at the end. And you know, that’s how the book was written.
Mike Langellier:
How long did that process take?
Max Yoder:
Like nine months to write like a hundred pages. Not a very big book. But it was a… It was tough. I cried, I cried many times. No joke. Many times I was like, what am I doing? This isn’t gonna work. When I didn’t get a lot of sleep I said, this is terrible. You know, then I’d get sleep and I’d come back and I’m like, not so bad. You know, like totally different approach.
Training in a Remote World.
Mike Langellier:
Let’s let’s shift to just what you’re seeing. You’re naturally in a space you’re helping companies train and onboard. Their teammates, their employees, a lot of times new teammates and employees. And then we enter COVID where in-mass companies are going remote and people are having to hire people in a nonphysical environment. What are you seeing change about employee onboarding and training in this new environment that we’re entering into?
Max Yoder:
Yeah, so we work with a lot of contact centers. So one really cool thing that I probably most be, people are not aware of is a lot of con folks who work in contact centers used to have to go into the office and that was a mandate. There was maybe a lack of trust there in a lot of cases like you have to be in here to do this. COVID hits, and all of them have to, like, we had a customer who had 30,000 people in contact centers every day. They had to shift those 30,000 people to be able to work from home. What a gift for a lot of the us 30,000 people who really enjoy working from home. Right? And never would’ve had the opportunity. And Lessonly is there to make it, so they, they don’t have to be in the training facility to get trained. So we have a really cool, important part in helping these folks now have more flexibility in their lives. You don’t have to drive in every day to do that job.
Max Yoder:
So basically our business it was a headwind and a tailwind for us because what we sold was really important in COVID world. Right? Ability to disseminate information to people on the same page, no matter where they are. Don’t have to be in the same room. A lot of training happens in conference rooms with PowerPoints and that was no longer a possibility. Right. So we really could step in help a lot of companies. And at that time, who were like, what do we do now? we could also steward a bunch who were already customers who were shifting from everybody was always in the office to not everybody’s in the office. They were like, how do you all do that? , you know, we’ve, we’ve had a hybrid approach, not as hybrid as we are now, but like we’ve had remote people for a very long time. And we were like, Hey, we do it well in some areas and not in others, but it was just a fun place to be… It was certainly, you know, if… If we’re gonna have something like happen with COVID, it definitely was not a negative impact to our business. You know? Like I, I felt badly for a lot of businesses who that directly negatively impacted for us. It was kinda like, Hey, there’s new people out there who might buy yeah. Also unfortunately, a bunch of businesses went out of business. Right? So that was headwind for us and them. You know?
Mike Langellier:
So when you, there are a lot of people that talk about now, the challenges of trying to onboard new, particularly early in career individuals into a workplace that maybe they’ve never experienced before. Going into a job that, where they don’t have the skills yet to be able to do it. What are your, what’s your forecast for what the world’s gonna need to look like in order for these earlier in career individuals to come in, can they do it completely in a virtual environment? Or do you think that it needs a hybrid or in-person type of setup?
Max Yoder:
I would really, really encourage any company who’s onboarding new teammates to make sure that they get the team together once a quarter in the same place. I don’t think there’s any, there’s any substitute for sitting in a room with somebody and being physically present and seeing the office. Right? Like even if you’re not gonna work in the office, being in the office gives it’s… there’s something about it, it something I cannot put words to. Right? But it gets a sense of place. You know? So I think, you know, the way everybody’s doing it with Zoom and with Lessonly and all these different tools matters, but not to forget how important it is to breathe in the same space with somebody it’s just, we treat one another differently. I think when we’ve had that.
Max Yoder:
And then, you know, one thing that I recommend and that we’ve done now at Seismic that has really helped is just doing the high, low exercise with new teammates, which is just like: tell me about a highlight, tell me about a low light. And going around the room.
Mike Langellier:
How frequently are you doing that?
Max Yoder:
I don’t think that’s a frequent exercise. I think that’s like, when the team feels like it’s kind of fresh, it needs a reset, you know? Like, let’s go, let’s go around the room and really dedicate like hours to just doing timelines and just learning about folks and what they care about. Because you are gonna get some low lights in there that, in my experience, help other the person make more sense, you know? Like, “Hey, I lost my dad at an early age.” We didn’t talk about it and I never really learned how to open up.” And then it’s like, well, they might not be as communicative. And I might have noticed that. And that might not. That might be why. Right? It’s not that this person doesn’t wanna be communicative. They never learned. Right? And we can learn those from stories. And we can be more graceful and I think gentle with one another, as a result speaking to some of those lessons.
Share Before You’re Ready.
Mike Langellier:
You referenced Quipol as part of the journey. Yeah. What lessons, when you then dove into Lessonly, what lessons did you take from the Quipol experience that you applied or that you wished you would’ve done differently?
Max Yoder:
Yeah, so I wrote about it in Do Better Work. Chapter two is called “Share Before You’re Ready.” And basically is like, what I did wrong with Quipol. It’s maybe an alternative title. So what I did with Quipol was I perfected it in a vacuum. I tried to build the software without talking to the people who ultimately were gonna benefit from it, who I wanted to benefit from it. Right? I kind of thought I knew what they needed. You know, a bit of hubris in there, a bit of naivety of just like, I’m gonna build this and I know how to build it. And when I when I’m done, I’m gonna show ’em and they’re gonna be pumped. What ended up actually happening is I built it with Dustin Sapp, with Mike and Christian and I had 300 people would sign up for early access. So the day that it’s go live time, I send a note to those 300, within three minutes, I get one response that says, “Hey, Max, congratulations. Why doesn’t Quipol do X?”
Max Yoder:
And I can’t remember exactly what X was, but it was this really neat idea that I never once thought of in all these nine months of development. And this is three minutes in this person sees it, within three minutes. This was a moment of kind of clarity for me of, I do not see all the angles, that was an important angle to have that I just, and there’s probably gonna be more and there were many more, you know, so ultimately I couldn’t sell the product cause it wasn’t built for anybody, but me. Right? I built it like I thought it needed to be built and it didn’t meet the market’s needs. So the best lesson I took from it is, you know, that’s perfectionist approach and sharing before you’re ready is an anti perfectionist approach, which is I don’t have all the angles.
Max Yoder:
I have a general sketch where I think X or Y or Z projects should go, you know, whether it’s Quipol or anything else I’m gonna get in front of the people who I ultimately depend on the success of the project and ask them some clarifying questions. What do you like about this? What do you not like about this? What am I missing? You know? And that requires humility. it requires being open to doing something that maybe wasn’t my first choice. but more than anything, it’s about hearing, you know? And so I went more with Lessonly we went out and heard and we built slower and we showed people screenshots and said, this doesn’t exist yet. Tell us what, tell us what makes sense. You know, where was we? I didn’t do that with Quipol. So great lesson of just kind of being slower and not being so sure.
Building a Business in Indiana.
Mike Langellier:
Yeah. You built a company here in the Indy tech scene, in the Indy tech community. Talk about that experience. What, what did that mean to the business? What was it like to build a business here in Indiana? What was, what were some of the benefits of that?
Max Yoder:
Yeah, I liked that we could take it at, at our own speed. There weren’t so many other companies around that had set a precedent for how a company in Indianapolis should be ran tech-wise that we could kind of felt like we could pioneer our own way. It wasn’t that everybody who was coming, joining us was coming from other tech companies and they had all these expectations of what we should have here. Right? Which I think if you’re the, of been out in New York or Silicon Valley, like you, you see a lot of, there’s a lot of sameness because people are just trying to keep up with one another. Oh they have a in-house chef, we’ll get an in-house chef, you know, like that stuff can really spiral. We didn’t have a lot of those pressures. So we got to kind of think our own way through things, which I’m sure had pros and cons, but we got to kind of set our own pace.
Max Yoder:
And we weren’t pushed to really, we weren’t pushed by any new hires to do something, something wild, you know? So I think that was, I think that was nice. We had a ton of great schools here, you know, and we still do right, that we were able to hire talented people from. And it was really nice to have somebody like Salesforce, you know, they can, they could move people here and those people work at Salesforce for five years and then they, the end of five years are like maybe the sixth year I’ll do something different. You know? And they might come here so the ecosystem was there, you know, like the ecosystem was definitely there to kind of make this work, but we didn’t, it wasn’t so well established that I don’t, our creativity was hampered, you know, we had to kind of do it our own way.
Paying it Forward.
Mike Langellier:
Yeah. I referenced the Mira Awards moment where you, where Lessonly won startup of the year. And you cited how you were so grateful for so many people that took time out of their day to say, how can I help? And to help you. You’re now in a position where you can pay it forward. So how do you plan to do that?
Max Yoder:
Yeah, I hope I already have been, I mean I get a lot of notes from a lot of folks saying, can I just, can we just spend some time, you know? So my goal is never to wait until this was done to spend time with folks. And I think that’s the best way that I can is just whatever degree of mentorship I can offer. You know, mentorship, I think requires a relationship that is long term, but if I can sit there with somebody and really listen for an hour about what they’re going through and just share with them what I believe.
Max Yoder:
Not saying it’s right or wrong. Just my perspective. I think that is a really important way for me to be helpful. And it’s also very life giving to me. Yeah. Whenever I have my last day at Lessonly, I plan to do some teaching and I like to teach generally my perspective on life, which has a lot to do with entrepreneurship, but also just as bigger than that and there’s some groups in town like Elevate Indy that I’m really interested in being a part of. That go into like high schools and help high school students who are hungry to learn, but might not have access to the folks who can share what they’ve learned. That’s a big, when I do that right now, when I spend time with those groups, it’s like, like 12 outta 10 energy for me. Like Jess can tell when I walk downstairs that like, I am energized, you know?
Mike Langellier:
Jess is your wife?
Max Yoder:
Yeah. Sorry, Jess is my wife. Yeah, it’s just evident that it’s very life-giving for me. Yeah. So I just plan to keep doing that and maybe have more time to do it in the future, you know?
Mike Langellier:
That is awesome. Max, this has been a pleasure.
Max Yoder:
It has. Thank you.
Mike Langellier:
Congratulations again. See you and the team on a successful journey and outcome for the business. And we look forward to great things with Lessonly and Seismic in the future and also with you personally. Thanks for taking the time.
Max Yoder:
It was my pleasure, man. Thank you.
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