Jeff Standridge:
Welcome to season five of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. In this season, you’ll learn from successful innovators who have influential stories, practices, and strategies that will have your gears turning. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered. This is the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, Jeff Sandridge here, and welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, it’s Jeff Amerine as well. Glad to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, good to have you, man. Good to be here, man. We’ve got a great show today. Got a great guest. I’m excited. Her bio calls her a triple threat. I don’t know if it’s probably quadruple or quintuple-threat professional athlete, former TV anchor, tech startup executive that took a company to IPO. She’s also an author podcast host. So Nina Sossamon-Pogue, great to have you with us today.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Thanks for having me on, Jeff and Jeff, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, that’s great. Tell us a little bit about you. We have the headlines, but kind of fill in the blanks a little bit for us. Will you?
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Yeah, it’s a lot of headlines. Sorry about that. It’s been a little busy year. Busy. I mean busy lifetime for me. So my background, as you said, I call that my resume, what you went through and discussed there. What I like to talk about and what I like to share when I’m speaking on podcasts is all the stuff you didn’t mention. I was on the US gymnastics team, but then I didn’t make the Olympics crushing blow at the age of 16. Thought my life was over. Then I was on the LSU gymnastics team, D one athlete, doing my thing, and then blew out my knee crushing blow, thought my life was over. And then I was in television and was really popular, big fish, little pawn, news anchor. And then I got let go in budget cuts. And then I had another time where I was top of my game with best news anchor in the southeast one, an Emmy. And then I was in a horrific accident and became part of the news and went to a really tough mental health space. And then I got out of tv, got into tech and had some big success there. So my life is all of these ups and downs much more than just the wins. I am flawed and not perfect and don’t have all the answers. There you go.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, gosh, Nina, start with a bunch of downers. I’m kidding, obviously. I’m kidding. Well, I’d love to unpack some of those and we won’t hold LSU against you being Razorback fans here.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
I had to get that in there. I knew that.
Jeff Standridge:
Oh no, that’s great. And you talk a lot about resilience, and so talk to us how you weave in and out of your talks on resilience, this concept of failure,
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
And for your listeners. It’s all of us. So nobody gets a pass. It has an easy life and everything goes exactly as planned. And you set goals and targets, KPIs, whatever you’re working towards in your life with business or your personal goals. And I talk about how you handle that when things don’t go your way. So that’s how I weave it in. And resilience is the ability to learn, adapt, and grow stronger from anything that happens in your life. So there’s perseverance, go at it, go hard, stick with it. Very different from resilience, which is this. Adapt in a positive way. You can’t just go hard. You got to make a change. You got to learn from what you did and get to the other side. So there’s this perseverance and survival piece. People survive climbing a mountain or doing something big. Resilience is everything in your life after that, having learned what you learned from that thing. Yeah,
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. Very good. So you’ve done a lot of things in your life from athlete to tv, anchor and a number of other things, but you ended up in a tech company. Tell us a little bit about how that transition came to be and then I’m sure that’ll spur some dialogue as well.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Super. So I worked in television and a local TV station and was friends with a lot of people in the community when you’re a news anchor in a small community. And a buddy of mine had a tech startup. And I was looking to make that, I was looking for my exit strategy to get out of TV and get into something else. And I looked at a lot of different things, go into marketing or maybe work with attorneys who had to do big PR stuff. I went to a lot of areas and actually fascinating story, hurricane Katrina hit and we had the dope local tech company in to do part of our answer the phones, let’s raise money for Katrina survivors. And so we had these people, different company every night would come in the TV station and be part of that effort to raise money.
One of them was a guy who I’d sort of known I’d sat on some boards with who had this tech startup. And we started talking then and he saw me in my element managing a lot of things during hurricane coverage. And we really clicked. And so when I looked to get out, he was one of the ones who made me an offer. And it was really fascinating to jump into that world. I went from TD to tech, I didn’t even know what SaaS was. I didn’t even know, I knew very little about the space, but he gave me an opportunity and I came in and it’s right after Google had just bought YouTube 2006, Google bought YouTube 2007, his angel investors, Goldman bought out his angel investors. And so he had this opportunity to look at video and creating content very differently. And he brought me on board to sort of explain healthcare in little video snippets and then code it into that part of the application that they were building. So really interesting switch, had to learn fast, didn’t know what I was jumping into, but oddly was very confident and I can figure this out.
Jeff Amerine:
And how was it riding that all the way to an initial public offering? I mean, a lot of people have spent time in the startup world. Not everybody has been from kind of early stage all the way through an IPO talk about that experience.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Yeah, so as I mentioned, they had about, I wasn’t early startup, so I do want to preface that because I’ve worked with a lot of early startups now on VC funding in their first round of funding. So I came in, we had about 250 employees at the time, and we had some core companies and we were chugging along and as I said, Goldman had just bought out our angel investor. So I came in on that first wave of let’s get to the next level. And then I was there for 12 years and I worked my way first communications and then ran marketing comms during the IPO and we got to 1200 people by the time the IPO hit. So I went from 250 people to 1200 people, and I did a lot of the marketing comms, crafting the message that we were going to take to the street, talking how we were going to do the road show, how that deck was going to come together.
It was me and a team. It wasn’t me, you know how that works. But to be part of a road show and just be part of that world and that stress and several people dropped out of the team as we did it, it was so stressful, very smart, very capable people who just could not take themselves to that level of stress. And I think having had my past and having gone through all the things that I had gone through, I was like, yeah, I got this. Come on guys. We can do anything. So that became part of my job too, was just to really bolster up everybody and remind them how smart they were and how good we were and what the opportunity was and that we could do this thing. But it was very stressful. So I went from about 250 people to 1200 people and got to be part of that team that year.
It’s about an 18 month effort once you make the decision. And there were times when several people, even our CEO at one point walked out of a meeting with all of our investment groups and he came out of the meeting in those glass meeting rooms. I can picture it in my head, walking down the hall and I was walking the other way we passed because I was coming and going during one of the breaks and he’s like, I don’t want to do this. We’re not doing this, we’re not doing this. And there was just this moment of I’m not doing this thing because you give up some control and you have to really listen to a lot of people and CEOs who don’t really giving up all that control and being told how things should go. So it’s very, very stressful, but a fascinating thing to be a part of.
Jeff Standridge:
So what did you learn during that time of being a tech preneur, so to speak, a tech executive that maybe you relied on your past, but what did you learn maybe some key lessons?
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Gosh, there were so many lessons. As I said, I stepped into tech not knowing the tech space. So I called myself. What I was really good at was taking large volumes of information and crushing it down into snippets that people could handle. And you didn’t have to. I used to say, you don’t have to have all of the answers to light up the world. You just have to have the whole ball of wax. I used to say, you just need enough to make a candle. And so I think your part in any success is what you have to lean into and surround yourself with really good people. I learned that very quickly. That doesn’t matter how great a handful of people, like one or two people are. You need a full team to do big things. That’s part of what I talk about. So when I went from being a news anchor, obviously you have a team, you have somebody talking in your ear, you got a co-anchor, you got somebody running into cameras, you’re part of a team.
When I stepped into tech, the pieces that I didn’t know, there were people who knew it really well. The CTO was going to talk technology, and I didn’t have to learn the core functionality and how the stack was built. I didn’t really have to understand that I needed to do my part, which was get into his head enough to communicate that to a broader audience who didn’t understand it, who was going to invest. So I think one of the main things I learned is to do your part and don’t really lean into your strengths when you’re at that level. I had to really lean into my strengths and add that to the team instead of trying to play catch up with all the things I didn’t know. Does that make sense? I think it was probably the biggest lesson I learned. Yeah,
Jeff Standridge:
You work with tech founders and others today, so tell us a little bit about what you do and how you translate all that you’ve done, all of those successes, all of those setbacks. How have you translated that into what you do today?
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Well, a lot of the work I do with when I work with a tech startup is to try to figure out what their story is. Being able to tell a story affects who’s going to invest in you, who’s going to buy you, who wants to work for you. So being able to tell your story of your company is really, really key. Can’t just keep it all in your head. You have to figure out a really very specific way in which to share it and to get other people to share your story in the same way. I always say get the whole team telling the same story. And a lot of times when you work with executives, they’re so far ahead of everybody else. They’ve already built this thing out and can see the future. So getting out of their head where that vision is, and then getting the whole team and individuals to see it the way they see it, and then come up with what is the story, not just the value prop, not just the green pasture out ahead, what the opportunity is, but why it was started, how it’s going to help people, how it makes a difference to the world, but also weaving in how it makes a difference to the person you’re talking to, whether it’s an investor or someone who wants to work for you or someone who you need to get buy-in from maybe your champion in another company you need to do a collaboration with.
So crafting the story of the why and why it matters to other people is really the key. And when you work with executives, they’re so smart. I mean, you get the chief technology officer in there and every third word is what I was understanding at some points. So I would have to really ask the questions, ask the questions, ask the questions until a light bulb would go off in my head like a journalist would and go, oh, I get it. It does this. So it does that, and that’s why it works. And that’s why so-and-so needs it, but I would have to ask those questions often and be the tech whisperer. But what I work with now is if companies are going for a round of funding or if they’re early in stage and trying to attract people to be on their team, attract a strong engineering team, attract investors, they have to be able to tell their story and they have to be able to do it briefly and in a way that inspires people to action. So the story behind it becomes really important. Not just the passion, but all of the pieces that come together in the story.
Jeff Amerine:
How do you get ’em around the bend on that? Sometimes highly technical people that they don’t always understand why concise communication is important or how to explain a complex subject in simple terms. What sort of techniques do you use to get ’em around the bend on that kind of thing to where they get it? The importance of messaging and clear communication
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Specifically in the tech community. And I’ve got one person, a couple people in my mind as we’re talking about this one’s the CTO, and one was the president of the vice president, actually the vice president, our engineering department. And it would be a lot of long conversations. It’s difficult. And some of them are sort of on the spectrum and communication’s already not their strong suit. You find a lot of people in engineering are introverts and they have all these thoughts in their head, but they’re not going to come out in a way that I would even understand them because they can only talk to like-minded folks. So I became a person, and I think this is anyone who’s in this space that’s trying to do better communication. It’s a lot of listening, finding the things that I understood and then asking them back and repeating them back to them and having them explain to me again, and I would repeat it back to them. They’d go, no, no, no, it’s like this. I would try as best I could to repeat back what they’d said in words that made sense to me, and then they would explain it again. I do find people in that space love to explain. You have to set the stage and say, Hey, don’t get frustrated. I don’t know your world.
I never say dummy it down, that language is not accepted. Well, don’t say dummy it down or talk to me like I’m a fifth grader. I just say, Hey, I’m going to tell you what I understand this to be, and then correct me please, and then correct me please, and then correct me, please. So they are helping me get there. They’re helping me get to a space. I’m not poking at them, poking at them, poking.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s great. So I want to talk on two different things that you share with your audiences. One is, and I want to hear a little bit about it, the achiever success cycle. You talk about that, and then once we do that, I want to talk about the framework that you use to help people take control of challenges they’re facing. So can we talk about each of those things?
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Yeah, Jeff, these are my favorite things to talk about. I can talk all day long. Obviously I’m not a loss for words here, but the first, that piece of, wait, where did you start? Did you want to do the framework first? The achiever success cycle. The achiever success cycle. Okay, got you. The achiever success cycle. So this is really cool, and your listeners will get this in spades. So at the beginning of the year or some point you are handed either your tasks for the year are goals. Most of us, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re not fine with just status quo. You want to be more, do more, get smarter. You’re trying for something, whether it’s financial gain or something, you’re not just okay with how everything is right now, you want more. So you set a goal or you set a target, or maybe someone sets it for you with your goals for the year that align with the corporate goals or however they have ’em done, or your KPIs or wherever you put that language together on your goals. And then you have that goal.
And then you start in this circle, and I look at it like a watch. You set the goal and then you try some things to figure out what’s going to work. And then when you figure out what works, you get to work at them. So you work hard and some things kind of fall out and then you get better at things and some things don’t work. But the ones that work, you dig down and you persist and you go at them and go at them, and you’re coming around the circle and now you’re persisting. You’re doing what works. You figured it out and it gets hard towards the end. But you have grit because you want your thing. And so you get back up to the top of the circle and you have that grit and then you achieve, okay, so you go all the way around
Trying things, learning things, working, persist, grit, and then you achieve, and then you get to the top of that, and then what do you do? You set a new goal and you go around again. And so there’s this idea that we have to celebrate the wins, but we’re the type of people, when you’re in the success cycle, you’re always going to be setting a new goal. Once you achieve that one, you’re not going to be like, okay, I achieved it. I bought the house, done. I made the money done. I did the thing done. You’re always going to put something else out in front of you and up that bar, up that ante just a little bit and jump in and do it again. The analogy I use on the stage, which I love, and I bet you out where you guys are. You have some of these, remember those old merry go rounds, like the metal merry go rounds when we were kids? I see gray in your beards. You got to be close to where I am. Absolutely. Wait a minute. Oh, I didn’t need, okay, there you go. There you go. Yeah, I can’t cover this up. This is what, it’s in my fifties. Anyway, so you remember those old metal merry-go-rounds and you jump on, they did some kid just start pushing it. We’d all jump on and they’d spin around and around and you’d hold on and people getting thrown off into the dirt. It was dirt back then. It wasn’t all cushy like it is now. You’re on your butt in the dirt somewhere, and then the kids would all go slinging off, and sometimes you jump on, there’d be the bully kid who’d stomp on your fingers with his feet with his shoes and stuff. But sooner or later, everybody, he flies off and there’s one kid left and then it slows down. And then what do you do?
Jeff Standridge:
You get back on it.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Yeah, you jump back on because you’re that kid. So we’re all those same kids all grown up, no matter how hard it gets or what we do, we go after the hard thing and then we grit and they get flown off, or we make the thing and then we jump back on because we like the challenge. We want to see how hard we can go, how fast we can go, how good we can get at something. And there’s that piece of us that’s always going to be doing that. So that’s the success cycle. It’s this constant, we’re creating our own stress. This framework is how you handle any challenge or change that comes into your life. So it’s a little bit of science, a little bit of stoicism, and it’s a long answer, but the quick answer is it’s four part framework. I call it this framework because whatever you’re dealing with is your this. So whatever challenge you’re facing, whether it could be something big like getting fired or a divorce or a death in the family, like a big this, or it could be a little this like you just had a bad quarter or you lost many big customers. You just got to figure out a way around it, get back on track. And then there’s the little, this is just the little stuff that happens every day. You go out and hit traffic. So now you’re going to be late and your whole day’s behind, or you have a whole day planned and somebody comes at you with all their problems before you can even get to your stuff.
You get all their little thises before you can get to yours. So whatever this is, you take that thing that’s taken up all the space in your head and you put it on, shrink it down and put it on a timeline. So if you draw, you take a piece of paper, here’s this framework, take a piece of paper, turn it horizontal, draw a line across it, and then put dots, 10 dots from 10 years old, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, all the way. We’re going to live to be a hundred, which I need to drink less wine and take better care of myself, but let’s make it so we’re going to live to be a hundred. And then you take whatever this is and you put it on a dot where it is on your timeline, however old you are. So if this hits you at 37, if you’re listening and you’re 37, you put a dot on that timeline at 37 when this is happening.
And that’s the timeline piece. And then you isolate it, you put lines on front and back of it, and you can’t think about what happened before and how you got here and the things that didn’t go right. And you can’t play it forward and go woulda should have coulda any good. Therapist will tell you if you’re living in the what ifs, I wish if you’re living in the whata, should’ve could is that’s where depression lives. If you’re living in the what ifs and doomsday scenarios, that’s where anxiety lives. So you put the lines there, what exactly are you dealing with? And you can look at the facts in that moment and you draw a circle around it and figure out who needs to be in the circle with you, because people who have big success don’t go it alone. So we edit our people, we get some people out, pull some people in, and then we say, this is, you write, this is at the bottom of the paper. And the idea is to switch your language in your head and come up with language that’s not, not catastrophizing, and that’s not jumping to conclusions, it’s just it’s not, everything’s ruined or this is terrible. This is a challenge. Here’s why I’m going to move forward or we change to what we’re calling this because the words in our head come out of our mouth and become our story. So that’s this framework in a nutshell. Got it. As short as I can get it.
Jeff Standridge:
I love it. I love it. So we talk a lot about in the startup world, we need to fail often and we need to fail faster because it’s really in those failures that we learn how to pivot and how to adjust and how to adapt our approach and our style in order to ultimately overcome.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
Yeah, I’m a big fail-fast fan. Absolutely.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. Very good. So Nina Sossamon-Pogue, athlete, tv anchor journalist, author, tech executive. Great having you with us today. Tell our listeners how they can contact you or getting a connection with you.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
You can always find me on LinkedIn, Nina Sossamon-Pogue on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in me speaking at a conference or doing other work with me, that’s the best place to find me. If you want to follow me for, I do some inspirational and some thought-provoking stuff on Instagram and Facebook, on Instagram. I’m Nina Speaks on Facebook. I’m Nina Sossamon-Pogue. You can find me if you put my name into either of those platforms on Instagram. I also do some funny stuff. I think I’m hilarious. So there’s some of that out there, too. You may not, but that’s okay. You don’t have to like me. It’s all right. I’m old enough. Don’t care.
Jeff Standridge:
And I think we’re hilarious too, but all of our people are not so much, right. Masters of the Dad jokes. Well, it is great having you with us today. We appreciate you taking the time to spend it with us and our listeners.
Nina Sossamon-Pogue:
My pleasure to be here, guys, so nice to meet you, Jeff and Jeff, and all the best to you and to all of your listeners.
Jeff Amerine:
You as well.
Jeff Standridge:
This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining. Talk soon.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. We hope you gain some valuable insights and inspiration from today’s conversation. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes featuring leaders in the forefront of innovation. And don’t forget to connect with us on social media to continue the conversation. See you next time.