David (00:00:01) - Many years ago, it was a really good exchange on Twitter. Somebody was asking Elon Musk about the Tesla car product and he said, no, our cars aren't the product. The factory is the product. And if we can get the factory right, then we get the cars right. That's how I think about what Chris does, Chris is building our fundamental product that everybody leans on.

Ariana (00:00:29) - Hi, Secret Ops listeners, your host, Ariana here. To give you a little bit of context on a very special episode that we've got today, for the last six months, we've been hearing from specialists within the field of operations, from revenue operations, chief operating officers, data scientists, solution architects, you know, list goes on and on, and we've really gotten to preview what it's like behind the scenes as an operator. The big question I get though is, as somebody who loves operations, how do I get someone else to understand the importance of it and how do I work with people to build operations? Now, this episode is gonna do exactly that. Today we are speaking with David Perell, the founder of the business Write of Passage, as well as Chris Monk, Chief Operating Officer of Write of Passage. They have kindly offered to give us a peek into the dynamics that go in between a founder and a COO in building the operations of the business, not just from the gears and the technical details, but also from how you do that and enhance how you talk to your team, how you work with your team, and build it together.

Ariana (00:01:49) - It's a treat. I just love talking to both of them. So I really hope you enjoyed this episode and feel free to share feedback if you want more of this. Enjoy.

Ariana (00:02:03) - David, Chris, thank you so much for being on Secret Ops today. Like I said in the intro, this is a bit of a special episode and I do feel like we're getting a secret inside scoop behind the scenes in building a business, not just from the lens of an operator, but also from the lens of a founder. So to kick off, I just wanna thank you so much for being generous in your knowledge and open and sharing this experience. I really think it's gonna help a ton of other folks learn from both of you, so thank you.

David (00:02:34) - Of course.

Ariana (00:02:36) - Let’s jump in. Why? Why did you wanna share your story? Why were you willing to come on to Secret Ops?

Chris (00:02:43) - Yeah, I think for me it's because I'm a massive ops nerd and I think David is a bit of a nerd in a different way as well, that we both have this love for how to build good businesses, how businesses work, how people can be effective and happy and all of that in their working lives. And I think the more that we can have positive conversations about how to run small and big businesses better…that to me is the, is the end goal.

David (00:03:09) - Yeah, I think for me…I'm very excited about the changes that are happening at a really macro level with work and the possibilities of remote work. And Chris and I have a lot of fun talking about what remote work opens up and really thinking through…whenever there's a new technology, it starts off, you know, you have this with the car, right? They say that if you had asked people what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse. And Chris and I are really interested in the car and what does the car uniquely open up? Highways and suburbs and all of that. And really thinking through, if we take remote work seriously, what becomes uniquely possible both from an efficiency perspective, but also from a quality of life for people who work at Write of Passage perspective too.

Ariana (00:03:57) - Amazing. I'm even more excited after that. So let's set the audience in your world of Write of Passage. David, can you talk to us about the origin story of the business, you know, where it started, how it grew and where you're at today?

David (00:04:11) - Yeah, so I hated school. I hated school and I really didn't like writing. And I eventually learned that writing on the internet was one of the biggest opportunities in the world and it was worth getting good at. And also it wasn't learning that I hated, it was school that I hated. And I think that in society right now, we think of learning and education as being synonyms. And often they're actually antonyms that when you are in a world of education, learning actually slows. And a lot of our schools that we've created, they are catering to the averages and they actually go against and hurt people who are really curious and wanna move quickly. And I spent 20 years in a classroom thinking I can do way better than this. And all that time ended up creating a lot of the energy and the impetus for Write of Passage.

David (00:05:13) - So in 2017, I took an online course called Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. And I saw the potential of what online education could be. Something about the experience was religious or psychedelic, where you're a person right before, and then you were a different person right after and after I took the course. About a year later, I called Tiago and I said, Hey, I would love to make a course with you. He jumped and said Absolutely. And we started slowly, but it was always around this idea of let's get people writing on the internet. And it has grown over time and we're about to begin our 10th cohort and now it's just exploded. We started 2022 with a team of three, brought on Chris about a third of the way through the year, he became our COO put together a plan to really grow this thing. And now we're at roughly 20 full-time and teaching almost a thousand students per year.

Ariana (00:06:10) - At what point in that journey did you think, oh, this is actually working and I need to keep going with this? Was that off the bat you thought, all right, I see an engagement right away, or did it take a while to, to really get your footing?

David (00:06:26) - There were two moments. So the first moment was whenever you start something that's an experiment. And the first moment was at the end of our third cohort. I was in Mexico City with Will Mannon, who's our director of student experience, my co-founder, he's our chief product officer. And I was sitting in the room and at the end of every cohort, the students go around talking about what they got out of the course. And I don't know what happened, but I was just utterly moved to tears in this moment, hearing student after student talk about the transformations that they'd had in the past five weeks. Things like, I thought that I was joining a writing course, but I ended up getting a whole new identity. I see a vision for myself and the future of the world and society that I didn't see five weeks ago.

David (00:07:06) - And that was after the third cohort. I remember going out for a beer with Will after I remember I had ordered a Modelo at a restaurant, they were playing trumpets and all that in Mexico City, they had the mariachi band in there. We were just sort of celebrating. And then that gave us a big push of momentum. And then I remember after the fifth cohort, that was the COVID cohort, so we did it in May, 2020 and we got a video from our students 35 minutes long from…it must have been 40 or 50 different students thanking us for the experience that we had delivered. And I was in that moment and those moments just blown away with the potential of what we had. And now just continuing to really try to fulfill it.

Ariana (00:07:57) - Hmm, that's special. It's easy to get jaded. We literally were just talking about this, it's easy to get jaded as you become older and to adulthood and to be able to have those moments that snap you into, I don't know, a part of the world or a part of learning that you didn't think you could even see is really special. So let's talk about the businesses growing. You know, you've got almost 10 cohorts now. What was the point at which you realize I need to factor in somebody in operations, I need a COO?

David (00:08:29) - Yeah, you know, often the most profound realizations come from the most mundane of moments. And I was in Denver with Will who's our co-founder, and we were talking, we were planning for an upcoming cohort and there was a card that we wanted to create on the site. And the card was basically a mini case study. And Will and I have a very similar personality type. We're both highly creative, highly frontier, good in white space, not finishers…not finishers. And it was like a very small project and we got in a raging argument about who was gonna be responsible for it because deep down both of us knew that it wasn't gonna get done. And that pattern was showing up all over the place, good ideas, good vision, great student experience…messy business, horrible tracking, no systems. And from there we brought on a recruiter who had been recommended to me by my friend Jeremy Giffen.

David (00:09:34) - And we worked with the recruiter, we must have gone through 60, 80, 90 different candidates and we had a rule that we wouldn't work with anyone outside of North America. It was a hard rule. And it was eight, 9:00 AM one morning and he said, Hey, I just spoke with a guy named Chris Monk who is exactly what you're looking for. He lives in London and I know that that is a hard and fast rule, but this guy is so good that you need to talk to him. And indeed, Chris was so good that we broke many of our rules to bring him on.

Ariana (00:10:05) - Oh my, I mean, for context, I do know how good Chris is at all the things. And so I totally understand. Now, Chris, let's talk about the interviewing process and Write of Passage. I know you come from a technology education background, you're also very technical. I mean, you've got a gazillion skillsets, but what about the mission and the people drew you to wanting to work with them?

Chris (00:10:29) - Yeah, so it was interesting. I've told this story many times, including to the recruiter who got in touch. I'd initially been sent a message on LinkedIn, you know, classic. But the subject line was not a good subject line. If you want to get someone to pay attention to the message you sent, I've fed this back, it's all, it's all good now, but I'd actually just been turned down for a different role that I was very excited about in a completely different world, the world of crypto trading, which is worlds away from, from where we are. I was very down about that and I thought what do you do when you've fallen off the horse, when you've got a bit of a rejection is you hit LinkedIn and got back on LinkedIn. I was actually with one of my best buddies, had a beer, got on LinkedIn.

Chris (00:11:10) - That's how you resolve those situations. And I started going through these messages and I went back and I saw this message that was called Write of Passage, thoughts? And it had flashed up on my phone and I'd just ignored it. Like, I don’t what that is. And it was only when re-reading I was like oh, this is a job, this is a job! That sounds interesting. So then, you know, pinged back the recruiter and was like, yep, I'd love to have a chat. And then backwards and forwards. And then I think the moment he realized I was serious is when we sort of failed to arrange something for a while. I sent him my entire availability for the next two weeks, broken down into half hour chunks and I think that was the point he went, oh, this guy really wants to talk to me.

Chris (00:11:50) - Like, we wanna have a conversation about this. So then we had that first conversation. I'd seen the information about the business. It was a business at a really exciting point in its journey. I'd been with my previous company, Decoded…when I think I was the eighth person to join and had been with it through that journey up to 110, something like that. And this was a company back again at that sort of 4, 5, 6 person size. So I thought, this is something I've done. This is something I've learned a lot about and would love to have the opportunity to do it again given everything that I've learned beforehand and the growth that the company had shown so far and what they were doing was really interesting. You know, writing is a skill that everyone needs and not enough people appreciate.

Chris (00:12:30) - So I thought, yeah, we'll have a conversation. It sounds exciting, it's my skillset they need. And then I met David for the first time and that was it really, this is the thing I wanna do. And that was on a Tuesday I think, and then on Wednesday night it was the penultimate week of the cohort that was running at the time. And so David said, look, come along tomorrow night, see what we do see how we do Write of Passage. So I stayed up till midnight because it's 6, 7 PM ET when most things happen. And I was over in London, jumped on this in my pajamas, but you know, bottom half pajamas, top half looking professional, jumped on this call looking—

Ariana (00:13:07) - Looking fabulous. Yep.

Chris (00:13:09) - And so I relegated to downstairs because my wife was asleep upstairs, so I couldn't be in my normal study. And I got goosebumps. From the first time that I saw a session in progress. It gave me an incredibly special feeling. In fact, the same feeling that I got the first time I walked into my previous role, Decoded. The first time I walked in and saw them running a training session in their space in London, that was in person. But I got this feeling of some very special people doing a very special thing in a very special way. And from that moment on, I knew I wanted to be part of it. Then I spoke to Will, then I spoke to Dan, then I spoke to Dean. And every single one of those conversations just meant I was more and more convinced that I wanted to do this.

Chris (00:13:53) - And then we got to the final interview and my memory of it is we just basically laughed for about 45 minutes while talking about where the business could go and what we could do with it. But it didn't feel like an interview, it was just pure joy. I think the guys were in Denver and having that conversation. And then they did the classic good recruitment trick of saying, well, we'll get back to you early next week. Four hours later I think I got the email saying, we wanna work with you. And and that was it. Yeah, I was completely…well actually, I wasn't completely sold at that point, if I'm gonna tell the truth. I was mostly sold. But yeah, it was a big step. It was leaving a job I've been in for nine years joining a new startup in the US.

Chris (00:14:36) - I never met these people. You know, this is a post covid world where you're making life-changing decisions about joining a company run by two people who you've never met in person. And so I sent this email back to them saying, look I’m really flattered, I'm really excited this has made my Friday. And then I panicked that making my Friday didn't sound grateful enough. So I then said you've made my month, even my year maybe. Then I signed that off like without my name. I signed it off “Cute” instead of Chris because of autocorrect then panicked cuz I just signed off “Cute”.

David (00:15:06) - I didn't know any of that!

Chris (00:15:09) - I put that cute message at the end of it and it was just like, oh my God…I'm excited about a job and signed it off with “Cute”, awful. And I sent this email back just like about really boring logistical stuff. But also things like about paternity leave because I hadn't, you know, it was always scary. I knew I had a baby coming, I hadn't mentioned that and just got the best email back from Will and David that I immediately went this is the company that I want to join because these guys want to build the kind of company that I wanna build and be part of as well.

Ariana (00:15:40) - Thank you for sharing that. And also, autocorrect is the best and the bane of my existence.

Chris (00:15:45) - Yeah, it was just, you know, that moment of, oh it's gone and I've signed it. “Cute”. Do I hope they don't mention it or do I send it out? I dunno. Yeah, it was, but it was, it was all okay. It worked out fine.

Ariana (00:15:56) - Listen, I guess I think cute sealed the deal, but you know, David just doesn't wanna say it.

David (00:16:02) - Well I actually got really lucky because I lived with a Chief Operating Officer who as we were living together, he was going through the process of selling a company for 40 or 50 million. So I saw what it was like to live with one and I told the recruiter, find me Alex, because if I could have Alex then it would be, it would be great. And I think that hiring, what we find is we often need to go through multiple iterations of a job description. But this one was so clear and so easy, which allowed me to then speak to a recruiter and say, this is exactly what I want. This is what we're going for. And I wanted to hire somebody who had done what we were doing already. And Chris had built Decoded and taken it from, I think it was the sixth employee, at Decoded or something like that. And then the company had grown quite a bit, had worked all around the world remotely. And there were so many parallels that I didn't feel like Chris would come on and be like, okay, how do I do this? He would say, I know exactly how to do this, just get outta my way and let me go execute. Which is exactly what happened.

Ariana (00:17:12) - Do you think, cuz I wanted to ask David, I mean now that I know that you were living with someone that was a COO , you had a pretty good idea of what operations is. When you were looking for a COO was it still a little bit of a mystery or were you very clear on what operations would do for your business because you had such a close connection to somebody that was that thing?

David (00:17:34) - I was pretty clear and I think it was because I had also a very keen sense of where Will and I lacked. And I think that the cardinal sin, when you're running a company, people are like, oh, what are your strengths and weaknesses? I think that that's less important than just acknowledging your weaknesses and being upfront about them. And people go wrong when they try to surpass their circle of competence, not when they have a bunch of weaknesses. And so what I tried to do was get close and personal with my weaknesses, acknowledge them, try not to have too big of an ego around, Hey, I still need to do those things and then get really clear on the things that I am good at. But Chris's skills are so inverted with mine that it was quite easy. And I think this is the thing with the COO, I wouldn't say to an average person, go hire Chris. That's not what it is. It's go hire the inversion of who you are and being clear about what do I bring to the table and where do I falter? And then find somebody who's really good in those areas. And if you can be clear about that, then you'll go out and hire a good COO.

Ariana (00:18:47) - That is an incredible insight. I cuz I think that I often get the question, you know, what is it that a COO does? Do they organize, do they do this thing? But COO can just depend on the industry and what you're doing. It can shapeshift. So to have an awareness of where your weaknesses are, I think also a vulnerability to share those with others and to find somebody that can help you, support you on your weaknesses. I hate to say it, but I think it's rare and it sounds like you, I don't know, are encouraging others to approach it the same way. If I'm wrong, please let me know, but that sounds right to me.

David (00:19:25) - Well, we can say vulnerability, but this was much closer to a life raft for me. I mean I was really drowning under the weight of my commitments and I mean this was my Hail Mary of desperation much closer than some sort of noble and virtuous way of thinking about my own psychology.

Ariana (00:19:45) - Oh, I love it. So let's get into the first three months Chris comes on board. We always know that the first 90 days, I always think of it as the wild wild west. Like you're trying to figure out the business, you're trying to figure out each other. I guess Chris, can you talk me through what that initial moment was walking into the business? Did you have a particular plan in place of how you wanted to approach assessing things? Was it just jumping in and seeing…talk to me about that.

Chris (00:20:15) - Yeah, so it was really interesting cuz over here in the UK we have crazy long notice periods that everyone in the US cannot wrap their heads around. But obviously I wanted to leave…you know, I've been with Decoded for nine years. I wanted to leave them in good shape. So, I think we agreed 10 weeks I would have between handing in my notice and actually finishing at Decoded. So the first 10 weeks at Write of Passage, I was working part-time. I'd finish Decoded at 6:00 PM, start doing my Write of Passage work at 6:00 PM and start doing that. It was a pretty intense time. I don't think I had a first 90 day plan. I've read the book the first 90 days, but that works really well in a large organization where a lot of the advice is to come in, use your two ears, one mouth and just sort of absorb things that doesn't work at startup scale. If I'd arrived and said for the first three months guys, I'm just gonna sit here and listen, I think David would be really confused as to why he'd hired me.

Chris (00:21:14) - Because three months in the startup world is a huge amount of time to just sit there and absorb that information. So you had to come on and start executing. I think as David said, one of the best things was, there were a lot of challenges that I just knew how to solve. You know, there were communication things, right? We need to get Slack, we need to implement that. That's the platform that we all need to get with. We need to get Google Workspace rolled out to everyone. So we were working on the same domains, we're using Google Docs shared drives you real nuts and bolts stuff that is really important to being able to to scale and, and grow a business. So the first three months were really spent on just establishing those basics. Getting that technology in place so that we understood the platforms we were using, what we were using those platforms for, where information could be shared, what we're gonna put in different places, all of that kind of stuff. And then working with David and Will on planning. There was…I think David will forgive me for saying limited forward planning–

David (00:22:16) - What planning?

Chris (00:22:17) - Yeah, exactly what planning? I think I went over to Austin to hang out with Will and David back in May…I was still working part-time and still working at Decoded. They knew I was going over there. And we sat down in a room and we got some spreadsheets out and it was kind of the first time that any kind of business planning or budgeting or anything like that had been done. But it was an incredibly valuable exercise for me to understand more about the business, to get under the covers of that kind of stuff. And to introduce them to my way of working. And I think that was really important to get together physically early on in that relationship, especially for a fully remote business.

Ariana (00:22:54) - Do you think that's like a foundational thing that even if you are a fully remote team, to get that baseline together, where you can be in a room, you can feel each other's energy, you can see each other face to face, do you think that should just be a part of the setup when you're starting to work with people?

Chris (00:23:11) - Especially for, you know, I was the third member of a two person leadership team. So for that to shake itself out, I was very nervous coming into that. You know, these guys have worked together for years, they're really good friends, they're really close to each other. I had to get in a room with them, and also had to work out whether I made a terrible mistake and they needed to work out whether they made a terrible mistake. Cause if you didn't enjoy it hanging out and being in a room together, then this was not gonna work. You know, fundamentally, if you don't like spending time with the people you're in that relationship with, I think it was incredibly important and it really sealed that I've made the right decision at the end of those– I think it was only three days, something like that.

Chris (00:23:48) - You know, we all sort of said to each other, it feels like we've been working together for years. This feels like a relationship that's been going back a long time. And that was really valuable to start getting that planning in place and start laying the foundation for a more planned and slightly more structured and mindful journey that we were gonna go on for the next couple of years. So that was the first bit. And then from there it was organizing finance, getting those systems in place and then once…that was the first three months of baseline and let's get to a baseline so everyone knows how we communicate, everyone knows what we're doing, everyone knows how we work, then breathe and start thinking about where we're gonna go as we move from one to two.

Ariana (00:24:31) - So David, on your side, three months, a lot of change happening, baseline being built, foundation being built. How did it feel? Was it a relief? Was it scary? Was it exciting? What were the emotions going into all that?

David (00:24:46) - Yeah, I remember it's all sort of encapsulated in one story. So after Chris joined, I took a few weeks off and I was designing a production studio in Austin. And so I took a trip to France to get inspiration for it. And I remember I was in southern France and I get a text that says, Hey, Chris wants to go to Slack. We're communicating over email at the time I get a Slack notification. And I had made a commitment for the entirety of our company to never use an instant messenger platform. And you know, Newton has his laws of gravity and David had his laws of no Slack and I remember sitting at breakfast saying, how am I gonna respond to this? And there was one way of responding to this, which is “absolutely not, kick Chris off the can and say, Hey, we didn't even talk about this”.

David (00:25:49) - And I said, you know what, Chris is in charge now we're using Slack. And he was totally right about it. And I think that it's in moments like that where you really decide what this relationship is gonna be all about and you cannot micromanage people. Like the way that I treat my leadership team is that all of them are the CEOs of their worlds. And we work together four times a year to the beginning of the year. We set high level goals for the company and OKRs. And then we have four admin weeks throughout the year. And I'm very involved in planning and also at a company level we can talk about this, I'm pretty principled in terms of the way that we're gonna function as a team, but insofar as things are aligned with the OKRs, insofar as they're aligned with the principles, it is their world and they run the ship. And I default to trusting them more than I trust myself.

Ariana (00:26:45) - I definitely wanna dive into the principles, but I wanna backtrack. What was your mentality about like the no Slack rule or the no chat messenger? What, what was your feeling because I do see the other side where Slack can become a cluster and you're constantly reacting to it. So was that where it was coming from or was there something else there?

David (00:27:05) - Yeah, I don't think it's good to be constantly on if you're trying to do deep work. And if you're not careful with Slack, the line I love is that it's an all day meeting with no agenda and you're constantly expecting pings. There's constant back and forth. And I had worked, I'd interned at a few companies that had Slack and then I worked at one and it was horrible. We did not use it well. Everything was urgent with a capital U, everything was a priority and it drove me crazy and I didn't want that. I didn't want that for myself. I didn't wanna build a company that was like that. And what I realized is that there were a lot of advantages to Slack in terms of searchability and in terms of…the key thing about Slack is that conversations are structured around topics instead of people.

David (00:27:55) - And that is the fundamental paradigm shift. And that's very smart. But frankly, I still wish that there was a rule that you would send a Slack message and then the person wouldn't receive it for five minutes or vice versa. That every message has to wait five minutes because the problem with Slack is the instantaneity and we have this heuristic as a society that less friction and more instantaneous is always better and that is not the case at all. And if we had a world where, for example, on weekends Slacks defaulted towards sending Monday at 7:00 AM or we had a world where Slack defaulted to having a little bit of latency in the communication, people would be a lot more thoughtful. And that still bothers me about Slack, but everything in life is a trade-off and I'm happy to accept this one, more than happy to accept this one.

David (00:28:45) - It's way better than email, way better than iMessage. But Chris and I have been very deliberate around setting expectations around Slack. For example, even last week we had a big debate around what are the expectations around a message. So one side of the debate was, should we have the average be five hours and should we say, hey, we expect a message within five hours and ultimately we zoomed out. We said, actually no that's not right. Like this is a place where we're gonna be a little bit less prescriptive and we're gonna understand that hey, sometimes five hours is way too long and sometimes it's short and you can take longer to respond to a Slack message. But we're still trying to figure it out. But man, I do wish I could get into the code base and tweak a few things.

Ariana (00:29:28) - It does sound like there needs to be some parameters cuz I also agree, I am going through an email addiction problem and trying to not constantly check my email. And it, it's like I do need a forceful pause to be able to disconnect and do that deep work. It's impossible to context-switch and it just uses all of your mental energy that could be put toward better things when you're reactive to things all day long. Let's jump back to the principles. David, talk to us about your approach to the principles for Write of Passage and then Chris, I'd love to hear how that's translated into you sculpting the operational side.

David (00:30:05) - Yeah, so I have a very dear mentor who has bought more than a hundred companies, has done extremely well in his career. And we were having a conversation a few months ago and he told me a story from back in 96 or 97, he was hosting the company holiday party and their strategy for growing the company was to go get the best engineers in the world. And what he thought was, Hey, these are really smart people, I need to always be entertaining them with something new every time I talk to them. And his director of HR came up to him at the company holiday party and said, Hey, you're getting it all wrong. Rather than saying something different every time, you have to say the same thing every time. And so he's at the company holiday party and his director of HR goes you have three things that you can say at your speech tonight, no more than three things.

David (00:30:59) - Keep it simple. So he gets wasted, gives the talk and he's so scared. And after the talk, the employees come up to him and they say, oh my goodness, I've never heard you speak so clearly in your life. That was incredible. We have such a sense of mission, such a sense of purpose, and we feel so aligned. So it's been 26 years now and his whole strategy has just been saying the same things over and over and over again with different stories and different ways to say them and constantly repeating the same things. And I've taken that to heart and I think Jeff Bezos does the same thing that when you scale a company, it's not just about scaling people, scaling operations, it's about scaling decision-making. And what we've done is we've thought deeply about what are our ways of working, what do we believe?

David (00:31:47) - What is the spirit? What is the quality bar? How do we go out and build the world's best writing school? And I've codified that into principals that I just repeat constantly. And what those allow me to do is, first of all, I have stories for every single one of them, both internally inside the company and outside of the company. And then whenever we praise somebody, whenever we critique somebody or a project, whenever we're working, we're always coming back to these ways of working. So one of them, for example, and most of them come out of my own flaws, like one of them is I have a tendency when I get stressed out to get a little bit serious and a little bit stern to the point of being even a little rude. And it's not something I'm proud of. But because of that I have a photo of Usein Bolt on my desk, I'm looking at it right now.

David (00:32:31) - And our third way of working is Usein bolt mentality, which means we're gonna be the best, we're gonna be the fastest, we're gonna gun so hard and work our tails off, but also right before the gun goes off, we're gonna be high fiving, we're gonna be laughing, we're gonna be dancing and having a damn good time out there. And that's how we work. Another one is, hey, we're flipping tables. We're not here to make incremental change in the education industry. We are flipping tables. There is preWrite of Passage history and there is post-Write of Passage history. And if I see something that is too inspired by the traditional education system, something that is bland and boring and already exists, wants to put me to sleep, I can just say, Hey, I don't see that we're flipping tables there. It's time to flip tables, turn the ambition, energy, humor, dial up and come up with something creative. And so we have 10 of these and they allow us to operate in a way that has me be in the room without being in the room very often at all. And that's one of the core components that you need to scale a company.

Ariana (00:33:31) - You know what I really adore about that too is company values is a normal thing, right? And you identify words that drive your decision making based on those values. You know, I was leading an offsite leadership team and they all were like, oh my god, I hate the word, can we come up with a fun tagline that describes the thing instead of just like, you know, creativity. Like it just wasn't enough. So I love the idea of you having that image of like, we're gonna flip this table, we're gonna do this and this is what it should feel like. Because immediately yes, and you have that image and I even feel a little tingly now. Like, I wanna flip a table, why not, you know? So Chris, when it came to operations having this sort of very vivid way of approaching the way of working, how did that translate into building operations and did it affect how you did things initially or did it sort of come in when you started to refine the ways of working?

Chris (00:34:27) - We developed those ways of working over time. They weren't, they weren't in existence when, when I joined the company, we had our values and we talked a lot about culture and we sort of threw as a leadership team, I think I called it out. We were throwing the words culture and ways of working and values around and using them almost interchangeably. And it was when I was in a conversation, I think with, with the rest of the leadership team, I was like, guys, we are using these three words and we've used all three of them to mean I think different things but then also the same thing. And that's not good enough. We need to work out what we actually mean by these different things. So we did some thinking, bit of reading, and we fundamentally decided that your values are things that you hold dear.

Chris (00:35:12) - And we have those, we have our four right of passage values. And then the ways of working are how you embody those values. Because values should be high-level, you know, like creativity. What does that mean? Like okay, that's a value, right? We understand what it means as a value, but when I turn up for work on a Monday morning, what does creativity mean to me, in my day-to-day job? It doesn't mean anything. So we had to translate those values into the ways of working. And then we've deliberately not defined a culture because anyone who tries to define a culture is my belief. And David's belief that you onto a loser. You can't define culture. Culture is emergent. Anyone who sits down to write, this is what our culture is here. That's not how culture works. Culture wins out.

Chris (00:35:56) - But culture wins out because it forms itself from the principles that you can define. So we can say these are our values, then we can define our ways of working and then we can see the culture that comes out of that. And that was a learning process over the sort of first six months that I spent a Write of Passage. We gradually worked out what our ways of working were and then what we wanted them to be. Because you can't just sit down and go, right, this is how we're gonna work and this is a complete change. It has to be a combination of emergent and then codifying. And that's a really important thing as David says to do, is that you observe and then codify at that early stage before you scale a company. So that when new people are coming in, even now I've done it in a couple of screening calls and interviews that I've been doing.

Chris (00:36:38) - When someone says, what's it like to work at Write of Passage? I can just send them the ways of working and go, that's what it's like to work here. This is how we work. If you don't like it, this ain't the place for you to work at. So it's incredibly important for that growing and scaling company, how it feeds into operations. I think obviously the initial base setting was the initial base setting. We had to get that stuff done because that's like, well we need functioning finance, systems functioning, all of that kind of stuff. But then as we developed from that, as we've started to become more sophisticated and started to think about how do we set objectives? How do we carry our performance reviews? What is the management system of our company? Which is something that we've sort of relaunched the new version of back in January of this year.

Chris (00:37:22) - That's when I've really lent on those ways of working. So things like Usain Bolt mental, like, don't need to be boring. And I guess that feeds into when I'm writing operational documentation. A lot of it comes from being a writing company and pop writing and whatever. And David I think called me out early on when I started writing documents. Hell yeah, I did documentation. He's like, Chris, when you talk you've got all these examples and it's fun and you've got this vocabulary or whatever. And then I read what you've written and it's boring. Why have you left all of that early? You put me to sleep. Yeah, exactly. And it's a really important point to actually just sort of go, well just cuz we're writing about what some people would consider boring, what I actually consider quite interesting stuff about how to pay expenses and how to do that.

Chris (00:38:04) - It doesn't need to be boring what you write. And so that feeds into that and that whole sort of idea of how can we make this fun? How can we use stories, how can we get this stuff across that means that people actually buy into what we're doing in operations. That I think it's really important. And then in those ways of working, we've got things like process serves people. And that's a really important feature of operations. And again, if I come up with something that is maybe slightly too bureaucratic, I'll be called back on it by the whole team. And that's one of the great things about having them written down is it's not just the leadership team who could do that. Anyone in the company can go, Chris it doesn't feel like this process is serving people here. This feels like, and then sometimes it's like, okay, well actually this is why and this is why we need this.

Chris (00:38:47) - And there's a few things that you don't have the context of so we need to do that. But it empowers people to call me out because there's a way of working, it's not them versus me, it's them pointing at this sign on the wall and going, dude, this doesn't feel like process serves people are you sure about this? And that's a really healthy, uh, healthy thing. And then things like work as soulcraft, you know, it's not just a case. That's another one of our ways of working. Don't just bash out the first thing to do. I think our example of that, that I can think about with operations is pay rises and pay reviews. How do pay reviews work? And this is something that I saw done badly in previous companies and I've seen done badly all over the place and I think it's a really important thing.

Chris (00:39:29) - And you could just say, oh, pay rise is just managers putting in a record. Like that would be the easy thing to do. But actually work is soulcraft meaning that there is almost an imperative on me that if I'm gonna come and say like, this has gotta be not just a way of getting pay reviews done, it's got to be the best way of getting pay reviews done that any company has ever done. And so to come up with that, I went and spoke to people, I read a load of stuff, I interviewed people, I looked at people doing it badly, looked at people doing it well. And that then meant that we've come up with this, I think, beautiful way of doing pay reviews. We'll see, we haven't actually tested it yet, but that goes back to that work of soulcraft. It's not just what's the, what's the quickest, easiest thing I can do? It's what's the best thing I can do to make this the best way of operating.

Ariana (00:40:16) - So I hear you on finding the best way about it and approaching it in that sense of like, you're building this from the ground up. You're not just taking one thing and doing the thing like you're trying to find the best way for Write of Passage. How do you balance that level of work with time startups, smaller companies, you're always balancing time with the amount of work you can put into something. So how do you do it?

David (00:40:45) - Yeah, well we have answers. In our ways of working. So one of the books that really impacted me was Amp It Up by Frank Slootman and he basically has three principles that he uses to lead his companies. The first is to increase the tempo, the second is to raise the standards. And the third is narrowing the focus. And the third one is the most important. Every company isn't focused enough basically. And it is a constant battle of narrowing the focus projects are power laws. The best projects for you to take on are orders of magnitude more impactful than the average ones. The most important goals that you can hit are orders of magnitude more impactful than the average ones. And so what we try to do is we begin every year with focusing on what do we want to do? And we think of that qualitatively, we think of it quantitatively, then we begin every quarter with doing that as OKRs where every team and every individual finds the things that matter most.

David (00:41:55) - And I review every single team OKR and many of the individual ones and I say, how do we narrow the focus? How do we narrow the focus? How do we narrow the focus? Do less but better? And if you can properly narrow the aperture of what you're doing, you can become like a laser. And the reason that a laser is so strong is because the light is concentrated in a very narrow aperture towards a specific place. And that's what we wanna do. That's the advantage that small companies have against big ones is we can focus on a very specific way of thinking about education in a very specific project set. And if we do that, that is the trade off that we make so that we can then increase the tempo and work quickly and raise the standards in everything we do and get that work as soulcraft.

Ariana (00:42:41) - Well that's beautiful too cuz then you're also creating this culture of being able to push back lovingly to say, Hey, we need to narrow this. We want this to be of this quality. You just, I feel like you've bitten off more than we can chew here in this timeframe. Let's actually make this achievable. And that's something I feel like a lot of companies don't do where they're like, oh I think this just might be too big. But you don't wanna, you don't wanna rock the boat too much so you don't say it, but the amount of work and energy and stress that you're saving just by narrowing your focus, it just compounds over time.

Chris (00:43:13) - Yeah. Russ Laraway puts it really well. He talks about prioritization being an exercise in subtraction, not addition. And that's something that we really believe in. Get rid of the stuff that doesn't matter, focus on what does matter, do that really well, then come back to the rest of it. We also have much more tactical things like meeting skeptical. That's one of our ways of working. So we don't have time just absorbed by meetings that go on and update meetings. None of that stuff happens. We write stuff down, we believe in deep work, we protect time to do all of that kind of stuff. And we do that really intentionally. And I think that means that I can have a whole day where I don't speak to anyone else in the team sometimes two days a week that I don't have those conversations and that gives me the time to go, “I'm gonna go do some academic study on how we do pay reviews” and that allows that deep work. And I think David alluded to that right in the beginning. It's one of the beautiful things about remote work is that it gives you that space to be able to do those deep dives without people grabbing you and bothering you. I mean it's got some downsides in different ways, but it allows us to really focus in and produce work in soulcraft.

David (00:44:19) - And also the language there is very, very intentional. Meeting skeptical. Skeptical means we default towards pushing away, but when a meeting needs to happen, it needs to happen and we make sure it happens well. I will not go to a meeting unless there's an agenda and we try to make sure that that's the case inside the entire company. The person who calls the meeting is responsible for the agenda and it has to be written out enough in advance that everybody else can not only read it but comment on it before. We basically use Tuesdays to run the company. So all of our internal meetings are one-on-ones happen on Tuesdays. What happens is all the people that I work with, they prepare a one-on-one document in advance of our meetings. Then what I do is I go in and I comment on the meeting agenda before it begins.

David (00:45:18) - And by doing that I knock off about 50% of the things that we need to discuss just cuz we can get it done in text. And what it does is, the thing that takes the longest in the meeting is the context load. Well, so let me tell you this. And they go into some, some crazy story. They talk about their emotions, the conversation just expands into infinity. And now something that could have taken literally 30 seconds takes 10 minutes. And that's what kills meeting efficiency. And so what we do is we go in, we're always prepared with an agenda, we try to comment in the agenda as much as possible. And then once we have the agenda and the comments and everyone's read through it, you won't believe how efficient our meetings can be once a pair of people or a team have worked together for about two or three months.

Ariana (00:46:11) - So I will say as somebody who's made so many agendas and nobody reads them, it's refreshing to hear one, that they're actually being used and that two, it's used to engage and refine the conversation.

Chris (00:46:24) - The level of detail you put in agendas, I wrote about this on LinkedIn last week of my sort of thing to share with everyone is that the way that agenda becomes effective is that there should be enough written about the point you want to raise in the agenda for the discussion to take place in that document. And that's the thing that people don't do. So an example would be, if someone put in our leadership agenda document their cohort timing, and you can imagine agenda item four, cohort timing, the timing of we we're gonna do the cohort nowadays, if I wrote that in our leadership huddle, I would just get a comment, just a list of like question mark, question mark, what timing, what are you talking about?

Chris (00:47:10) - What does this mean? Because now instead of writing cohort timing, I would write something like the flagship cohort is coming up in spring this year. One week of it overlaps with David being away in South Africa. We've got two options, three options. We can move it forward by a week. That would be this date to this date, move it back by a week, the date to this date, or we can do it and we just don't have David for a week of it. Thoughts? And then from that, the conversation, boom, boom, boom. That means that that's not gonna take up time in the meeting because everyone will just green ticket. Yep, yep. Great. Move it forward a week or will come in and say, I vote move it forward a week. David's like, yeah, I'm great with that. Aaron's like, works for me, gives me an extra week, happy days.

Chris (00:47:46) - That's then 20 minutes because it would take five minutes in a meeting of four of us, 20 minutes that we've saved by having that detail. But it only works and it only turns agendas into living documents if there's enough detail in there. And you have to hold each other to account to do that. And David's been fantastic at that because it, and you know, it's so easy to just, I'll just stick it in the agenda and then I'll bring it up in the meeting. And you need your colleagues to be like, what do you mean dude? Like what are you talking about? This is not enough detail for me to log on in the morning and understand exactly what we're gonna talk about. Do you do that? Meetings become so much better

Ariana (00:48:19) - And it also pairs beautifully with the days that you can just have head down quiet space to actually think about those things too. It all goes together. It has to go hand in hand. You won't have the time to review the agenda, you won't have the time to make a detailed agenda if you don't have that space carved out to do that deep thinking and really think through decisions.

David (00:48:39) - You know what, like what you're saying there is key. It all goes together. We're not trying to build a company for every single person. We're actually trying to build a company that most people would hate working at

David (00:48:51) - But the people who like working at Write of Passage, we wanna make sure that they love working at Write of Passage, that they feel respected and that they feel like it is a place where they can thrive, where they have agency and autonomy. And we want to pair that with what we need to do to deliver a best in class product. And so we're not saying that this is the right way to build a company. We're saying that this is one way to build a company that works with the product that we're delivering. And what I would say is that if you work remotely, because you're pulling from a global talent pool, it helps to be more distinct, more opinionated. Because on the internet, the more singular you are, people think, oh, that means fewer people will be drawn to me. It's actually the opposite on the internet cuz the internet is an amazing matching tool that's fundamentally the first 25, 30 years of the internet has basically been a matching tool.

David (00:49:50) - It has been eBay, people wanna sell Pez dispensers with people wanna buy Pez dispensers. Uber, I have an open car, I want a ride. Airbnb, I have an open house, I need a place to stay. That is the fundamental killer app of the Internet…matching. And so what we want to do is not only codify our ways of working, but talk about our ways of working and have people from around the world say, oh my goodness, I'm so aligned. Not just with your mission, but how you work. And we wanna be a 12 outta 10 for those people and have a high variance rather than being pretty good to a lot of people.

Ariana (00:50:25) - This also ties into immediately thinking about the four day work week and businesses trying out that as an experiment. You know, these are all things that if we start to communicate the understanding of when it works, when it doesn't, because we're all doing these little micro experiments within our own organizations, it can help others to sort of find their own path and their own combination, almost like a recipe, because it's always gonna look different based on the business and the culture and the industry and the region. It's about cross pollinating though, to get that to happen. Now if I were to zoom out a little bit, you all have worked together. You have like the salt and pepper thing, you've got different skill sets, but they're similar. What would you say, I guess, David, I'll start with you. What would you say is the thing that you have learned to appreciate the most about Chris, but specifically about having an operator in the business?

David (00:51:19) - One thing that we talk a lot about is, many years ago there was a really good exchange on Twitter and somebody was asking Elon Musk about the Tesla car product and he said, no, our cars aren't the product. The factory is the product. The factory is the product. And if we can get the factory right, then we get the cars right. And that's how I think about what Chris does. Chris is building our fundamental product that everybody leans on every team at Write of Passage depends on an operations layer that Chris runs, and that operations layer underpins the entire business. And if we can get that right, we have a firm foundation that we can build on, on top of that. And that's why the work that Chris and I do is so intentional because it begins with operations in so many ways. I think what Chris does uniquely well is he is both detail oriented, has a heart on fire, which is one of our core sayings at Write of Passage, but also works quickly and works at startup speed. And it's hard to find people who are as chipper and jolly as Chris, but also as efficient and then at the same time have efficiency, but still have a heart on fire and in the synthesis of those things. That's what we look for when we hire and it's very hard to find. And Chris does that well.

Ariana (00:52:51) - Well now, Chris, you know, I gotta flip it on you. Having watched David in this last year, you know, watching him as a founder, what he's built, what he's wanting to build in the future…what are some takeaways for you? What are the traits that you have learned to appreciate over this last year?

Chris (00:53:08) - I get asked this a lot, in interviews when I'm interviewing…people say, what's it like to work with David? He knows what I say. I think David is everything that you want in a leader of a startup in that he has a very clear vision, incredibly clear, he's passionate about it, knows where he wants to go, but will change his mind without any ill feeling. If you can convince him or disagree with him or explain to him why the current direction and stuff is wrong. Which I think, yeah, it's summed up. Strong opinions, lightly held.

Chris (00:53:49) - Yeah. Strong opinions, loosely held. And that's something that David is, is really, really good at. And I sort of experienced that early on. I think before I'd even joined full-time, we had a bit of an issue with something that had come up during the cohort or post the previous cohort that had just finished and David and Will had this view of how we should deal with it. It was pretty nerve wracking. I had to sort of say in this meeting, sorry guys, I think you're both wrong here. I think this is not what we should be doing. This is what we need to do because of X, Y, and Z. And both of them just went, yeah, I hadn't thought about it like that…but that is so rare for someone to be able to, you know, someone who hadn't even started working at your company yet to turn around to the CEO and the CPO and say, I think you're wrong.

Chris (00:54:33) - And for both of them to go, okay. Yeah. And that's continued, that's incredibly important with how we work as a leadership team. That respectful challenge, that respectful debate. David doesn't always do what I say, I'm not always right, et cetera, et cetera. But that is incredibly rare, I think, within a CEO to have someone who is so open to feedback. So open to challenge, but also so clear about where we're going because it's not just a case of saying whatever the next person comes into the room suggests, let's go with them. Let's go with their view, let's go with their view. It's about having a viewpoint, but them being open to anyone disagreeing with that, and that's not just me, that's anyone across the business will be listened to. And I think that's rare and special.

Ariana (00:55:13) - Yeah, it's a fine balance too. So before we get to some rapid fire questions, if you are listening and you are a founder of a business, a CEO, a COO, an operations director, I want you to get some advice that you can take away. Just from this year that you've had working together. And Chris, I'm gonna flip the script. I'll have you go first and I'll give David some little time to think about this. What would you give as far as a piece of advice to other operators when it comes to working with founders and CEOs and building the operations for a business with what you know now?

Chris (00:55:52) - The most important thing I think would be write things down. Write things down. And this is very Write of Passage. This is obviously what we talk about. The writing brings clarity, but by writing things down and sharing them in a written format rather than a presentation format or in a meeting and that kind of stuff, it gives people the space to absorb them, to comment on them and to create a debate in a less hot, less heated kind of way. It creates artifacts and it allows you to point back to things. And then it does allow you to sometimes do, once things are been accepted, they're written down, they're agreed. Three months later, you can sometimes be like, Hey mate, we agreed that three months ago and we wrote it down. And that's sort of how we have to do things. And that can be, I call it my passive aggression linked to Notion, which I do with a lot of the leadership team every now and then.

Chris (00:56:40) - It's like, why is this like this? Why have we done, or what, what do I do in this? And then it's just, you know, I warn everyone…passive aggressive link to Notion coming up and then share the link to the documentation of where we've written it down and where we agreed with that. So I think that's really important. The other thing particularly about building a great relationship, I would say is read the same books. If you've got books, you're reading about operations or your CEO's got books they wanna read, your founder's got books they wanna read about business, read the same books. David and I like, we absolutely love The Great CEO, The One Minute Manager, although it's really hokey, but the principles of it get things done. Radical Candor, when they win you and like, these are all books that we've both read and that means that we have now a shared vocabulary and a shared understanding of these different things. It doesn't mean adopt everything that's in them, but you can, it's just as useful to go, we don't want to do that. I disagreed with that as well as being able to say, go and read that chapter again. I think that's really important. Or do you remember the example of X, Y and Z that allows you to have a much more structured conversation than you might have been able to otherwise.

Ariana (00:57:43) - All right, David, you're up a year into having a COO on board as a founder and knowing what you didn't know a year ago, what would you advise other founders and CEOs to understand about the process of building operations alongside an operator?

David (00:58:01) - I think be really clear about what you want is a really big one. I think Chris has a very keen sense of what I'm going for. I think our very keen sense of what he's going for, and we've worked it out together in conversation and in writing. And people need structure. They need a vision, they need a visceral feeling of what they're trying to build. And Chris and I have worked very hard on making that the case. And what I'm trying to do is codify as much of how I think into language and stories and clear visions for the future so that people have this visceral feeling of what we're trying to build. This is a course operations thing, but you know, we're trying to build an editing program and there's one version of it, which is where I started, which is, Hey, let's have a whole team of editors to make sure that people can get editing on their writing.

David (00:59:05) - And what I say to the team is, that's not what we're going for. What we're going for is a team of editors so that students can submit something before they go to sleep at night and wake up with their writing, having been edited by the time their eyes open in the morning. You hear how much more visceral that is, how much more clear it is. Doesn't matter how many editors we have, doesn't matter. What matters is that feeling that I can be inside of Write of Passage and by the time I wake up after submitting something right before I go to sleep, I can finish my article before I start work in the morning. And it's those sort of visceral stories. That's how you create a sense of aliveness. And that's always what we're going for, as we build Write of Passage.

Ariana (00:59:49) - Thank you both just for sharing your experience. I I think that so many other people are going to just learn a ton and be able to take away a lot of this into their day-to-day life. And the whole goal is to be able to work together harmoniously. That's gonna look different for every team, every combination of operators, founders, CEOs. But if you can take a little bit away and just try it out, it's a start for what it could be in the future. Alright. Let's do some fun rapid fire questions, shall we? Get to know about you too. Okay. David, I'm gonna have you answer these first and Chris, I'll have you go second just so that we get a nice little flow going. Okay. What is your favorite part of the day?

David (01:00:31) - My writing time. Better be!

Ariana (01:00:36) - And Chris.

Chris (01:00:38) - I love being in Europe and having quiet mornings before this lot wake up. But then I also love it when they all wake up in the US as well. It's like, it gets about one and then they're like, ah, morning! Now I've been talking to myself all morning and then everyone comes and joins me. So I love both the quiet and then when they all come online as well. It's all cool.

Ariana (01:00:55) - What most inspires you on a day-to-day basis?

David (01:00:58) - Well, I have a mood board right in front of me. So let me tell you what's on my mood board. There's Walt Disney and Disneyland. There's EDM visuals and Casey Neistat, Versaille the Gardens of Versaille, Usain Bolt. And the person who I'll share is Brunello Cuccinelli. He runs an autonomous cashmere brand that's based in a small little village in Italy and they're public on the Italian stock market. He's been running the company for decades now, and they're all about quality and building a company that's also a joy to work at and very humanistic in their orientation. And some of the things that they do is everybody comes in at 8:00 AM and leaves at 5:00 PM and they do a 90 minute lunch every single day. You're not allowed to have your phone or your computer in any meetings because you need to know your information by heart.

David (01:01:53) - You're not allowed to send an email to more than two people inside of the company because they don't want people to be overwhelmed with information. And they make things that are very…they make things in ways that are fair to the animals and that are fair to the environment. And I think that Brunello Cuccinelli is a company that I deeply admire in terms of how principled they are. And I think that the world is better because that company exists at the level of what customers feel, at the level of what their employees go through at the level of the life that Brunello has been able to cultivate for himself. And it'll take me decades, but I want to build a company that is very similar to what he's done.

Ariana (01:02:43) - Chris, what inspires you?

Chris (01:02:45) - Yeah, since I've joined Write of Passage, I've got so back into reading and improving my craft of operations and every time I read a good business book or a good book about people management, you know, Radical Candor reduced me to tears because it's so eloquently described the way that I've been trying to lead and be a manager and be in business. So those are fantastic examples. I think when I read those books, just to be the best version of a leader, a manager, an operator, that's what really inspires me.

Ariana (01:03:18) - Alright. This is maybe a tough one, but what is the best thing you've bought under $50?

David (01:03:24) - My laminated mood board is awesome. I have it on my mirror at home, it's my phone background, it's on all my desks and it's all over the place. And I love having this thing. I have this little image that I look at a hundred times a day for the future I want to create and it fires me up. And right next to it, I have our ways of working, all of our internal sayings and all of our company goals that I look at as I work. And so whenever I'm in a meeting, I can just tilt my head down, you know, 10 degrees and I can see my entire vision for my future.

Ariana (01:04:01) - I just gotta say the added detail about being laminated made me love it even more. Okay. Chris, how about you?

David (01:04:07) - We got a laminator. So we have a printer and a laminator to make sure that whenever I wanna change it, I can change it within 30 minutes.

Ariana (01:04:14) - Now the real question is, do you also have a label maker? That's the trifecta.

David (01:04:18) - I do have a label maker. Don't worry. worry

Chris (01:04:20) - We knew it was a proper office once we got a laminator moved in, then you know, it's a real company. Right?

David (01:04:29) - Although it was funny cause the label maker arrived in a box that looked like Godiva chocolates and I was so confused.

Ariana (01:04:36) - Chris, what about you? What is the best purchase you've made under 50 bucks?

Chris (01:04:42) - So I was gonna say something from my train set, but then there's an alarmingly few number of things that are worth less than $50 on my train set, which is one of the big problems with model railways once you get into them is there's an absolute money sink. David and I send each other photos of our model railway presents that we got at Christmas and then we tell each other how much they cost. We don't tell the rest of our family cuz it, it gets embarrassing. So there's, I'm sure there's some stuff on those under $50, but I am gonna say it's this actually, which is my Pass Pixie, you can see that Ariana, which is a little laminated, it's laminated, high vis sort of traffic camera warning side. And you can wear it on your back when you're cycling. And it has a magic effect of making motorists know that I'm running video cameras and they give you so much more space when you are out cycling. And this is like 12 bucks, I think it's 9.99 in pounds. And it's quite literally a lifesaver. So I would highly recommend that as my object.

Ariana (01:05:44) - If you had a soundtrack like you're walking on stage, there's a soundtrack that you wanna play to represent you, what song would represent you?

David (01:05:55) - I don't do songs. I do EDM live sets and I would do Porter’s Nurture Together live set. I did a documentary that I haven't released on Porter Robinson and he means the world to me, and it's the live sets that really move me much more than individual songs.

Ariana (01:06:12) - Chris, do you have a song? Do you have your hype song?

Chris (01:06:15) - The Harry Potter theme track.

David (01:06:18) - Oh yeah. Chris goes to Harry Potter World for his birthday every year. It's one of his days off.

Ariana (01:06:24) - Do you have a wand, Chris? This is really important. You don't have a wand.?

Chris (01:06:28) - I'm not a child. Come on!

Ariana (01:06:36) - All right, last question. What do you wanna be when you grow up?

David (01:06:40) - I wanna be Walt Disney meets Brunello Cuccinelli meets the friend who you go to when things are difficult and you're working through something hard and there's that person who you go to and they listen to you enough that you feel heard, but they're also proactive enough that you feel like you are reoriented again.

Ariana (01:07:04) - Chris, how about you? What do you wanna be when you grow up?

Chris (01:07:06) - I have no idea. That sounds a bit like a flippant response, but it's really not because a lot of the time people ask me about my career and like the trajectory and I have to confess that I've had no plan. I left university, ran a tent company, massive tents for a long time, and then I stumbled into the amazing world of Decoded because my brother knew one of the founders. And then, you know, moving on from that, I came to Write of Passage because it sounded great and it looked like a really good opportunity. I have no idea what the next one or the next one is gonna be. Just keep your eyes and ears open and throw yourself into every opportunity that you get and then keep going.

David (01:07:46) - Speaking of planning, Mr. Monk!

Chris (01:07:50) - Yeah, I can plan for other people. I just can't plan for myself!

Ariana (01:07:57) - I think we just got a new insight on Chris.

Chris (01:08:03) - I guess we will have to wait and see, ask me again in 50 years though.

Ariana (01:08:06) - Alright, I’ll set a Google reminder for then. David. Chris, this has been truly such a joy and a treat and I just really appreciate you first of all coming up with this idea. This was not my idea, this was their idea and it was a brilliant one. So I'm just really appreciative, not only for being willing to share your story but also for being quite funny. I'm just gonna say it, you two are a dynamic duo. I hope to see a standup routine soon. But before we wrap up, where can the audience find you? They're listening. They're connecting with what you're saying. Where should we guide them to check out what you're up to?

David (01:08:40) - So we write about operations on our website writeofpassage.school. And we've written out some of the things that we spoke about. For example, there's a memo on there that I wrote to the team around Amp It Up, remember, increase the tempo, raise the standards, narrow the focus. If you wanna do that for your company, just type in Write of Passage and Amp It Up. You'll see, you'll see that. And then also I'm watching a podcast of my own How I Write. And imagine if every writer did a book, like On Writing by Stephen King, a memoir of the craft. Well, you can't have every person write their own book, so we're doing it on a podcast form. So I'm interviewing writers about their craft, how they work, their creative process, How I Write, check it out.

Ariana (01:09:24) - Awesome. And Chris, how about you?

Chris (01:09:26) - Well if you search really hard, you can find me on Twitter, but that is just me banging around about things like Pass Pixies and pro cycling. So, don't come to that if you want the operations content, that's all shared on LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn. And every couple of weeks I share a little bit about what I've learned over the last couple of weeks. Although I missed it for a few weeks, which is very not right of passage, but yeah, on LinkedIn, follow me or connect with me on that and you'll see some of this stuff written.

Ariana (01:09:53) - Perfect. Secret Ops listeners, I hope you gained as much out of this episode as I have. We will link everything in the description. Thank you both again for sharing your knowledge and your brain. And please continue to follow us wherever you find your podcast. Or you could check us out at secret-ops.com. We will see you next time.