With experience from Google’s recruiting front lines to playing a pivotal role at Google Ventures, Maximos Lih offers firsthand insights into what it means to build, scale, and reinvent not just companies, but yourself.

Welcome to another episode of Empowering Entrepreneurs, where we talk about the journeys of visionary leaders who dare to break the mold. Glenn Harper and Julie Smith sit down with Maximos Lih, founder and CEO of Emboldened LLC—a dynamic executive coach known for guiding leaders out of their comfort zones and into game-changing growth.

From his early days navigating cultural transitions as an immigrant, to a unique academic journey in cognitive science and the rise and fall of civilizations, Maximos Lih shares how his background shaped a distinctive approach to leadership and innovation.

In this episode, you’ll hear how Maximos Lih turns challenges into entrepreneurial advantages, why understanding the "secret language" of venture and leadership opens doors, and how his vision for human-first growth drives his work today.

Whether you’re at a crossroads or ready to take the leap, this conversation is packed with stories, strategies, and the mindset shifts that empower entrepreneurs to thrive—without settling for mediocrity.

This episode is brought to you by PureTax, LLC. Tax preparation services without the pressure. When all you need is to get your tax return done, take the stress out of tax season by working with a firm that has simplified the process and the pricing. Find out more about how we started.

Here are 3 key takeaways for fellow leaders and entrepreneurs:

1. Your background is your superpower. Navigating different cultures and systems teaches adaptability and unique leadership skills (07:47, 17:19).
2. Execution beats ideas, every time. The best product doesn’t guarantee success—the right strategy, culture, and understanding the “secret language” of your industry are often what set winners apart (26:36, 32:04).
3. Human-first leadership matters. AI and technology are tools, but true business transformation happens when you center people, empathy, and shared growth (38:20, 48:42).

Running a business doesn’t have to run your life.

Without a business partner who holds you accountable, it’s easy to be so busy ‘doing’ business that you don’t have the right strategy to grow your business.

Stop letting your business run you. At Harper & Co CPA Plus, we know that you want to be empowered to build the lifestyle you envision. In order to do that you need a clear path to follow for success

Our clients enjoy a proactive partnership with us. Schedule a consultation with us today.

Download our free guide - Entrepreneurial Success Formula: How to Avoid Managing Your Business From Your Bank Account.

Glenn Harper, CPA, is the Owner and Managing Partner of Harper & Company CPAs Plus, a top 10 Managing Partner in the country (Accounting Today's 2022 MP Elite). His firm won the 2021 Luca Award for Firm of the Year. 

An entrepreneur and speaker, Glenn transformed his firm into an advisory-focused practice, doubling revenue and profit in two years. He teaches entrepreneurs to build financial and operational excellence, speaks nationwide to CPA firm owners about running their businesses like entrepreneurs, and consults with firms across the country. Glenn enjoys golfing, fishing, hiking, cooking, and spending time with his family.

Julie Smith, MBA, is a serial entrepreneur in the public accounting space. She is the Founder of EmpowerCPA™, Founder of PureTax, LLC, COO for Harper & Company CPAs Plus, and Co-host of the Empowering Entrepreneurs podcast. 

Named CPA.com's 2021 Innovative Practitioner of Year, Julie led Harper & Company's transition to an advisory-focused firm, doubling revenue and profit in two years. She now empowers other CPA firm owners nationwide through consulting and speaking, teaching them how to run their businesses like entrepreneurs. Julie lives in Columbus, OH with her family and enjoys travel, coaching basketball, sporting events, and the occasional shopping spree.

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Copyright 2026 Glenn Harper

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Brought to you by Harper & Company CPAs Plus

Hello everyone.

Welcome to another edition of the Empowering Entrepreneurs podcast.

I'm Glenn Harper.

Julie Smith.

What's going on Julie?

Well, we switched up our coffee today.

Yeah, I know.

We're doing this coastal coffee, it's pretty good.

Do you like it?

What's your.

I like it.

It's had a long travel time here so it's kind of chilly, but that's okay.

The thought that counts.

It's right.

I appreciate that.

Well, we're gonna have some fun today.

We've got a very exciting guest today.

I'd like to introduce fellow entrepreneur Maximus Lee, founder and CEO of Embolden llc.

Maximus is the guy you call when your startup company is at the crossroads.

It's the same old story.

The startup owner who generally knows their business but knows nothing about how to grow, scale, outfit, market, hire a team, set goals, execute on the goals and plan for their exit either going public or via private equity sale.

Maximus is an executive coach and has helped many executive leaders get out of their own way.

He has worked at Google but when I googled him he doesn't show up.

Apparently he's under current NDA and he's raised breaking the contracts to talk to us today.

So we really appreciate that.

As with any executive coach, one of the most unders under one must understand the mindset of these wannabe high performing leaders and figure out how to crack the code to make them see the light.

After spending light years in the megacorp, his knowledge of how the system works give him the incredible advantage against his competent competitors.

Newly self employed, he has plenty of wisdom to share with our listeners of what it takes to jump out of the safe corporate world into the Arctic Ocean.

Ocean of entrepreneurialism.

Thanks Maxis for being on our show.

I'm excited to be here.

That's great.

Well we like to try to get to know our guests and figure out their journey a little bit because it makes it exciting.

We would like our listeners to try to relate to what does it mean to be an entrepreneur because it's just a whole different language than working for somebody.

And I did look you up a little bit and it says you grew up in Rome, Italy and your parents named you after General Maximus Decimus Mirtius of the Roman Empire.

Is there truth to that rumor?

I did have to do that speech many, many times when I finished my grad school.

That's awesome.

I'll tell you a funny story that accompanies that.

So I went from grad school where I studied.

I majored in something called cognitive science which is the early beginnings of linguistics, computer science, and neurobiology.

And then I minored in Greek and Roman civilizations.

And at my interview, because Google recruited me to go join their team, I said to my interviewer, I don't know very much about recruiting, and I don't know that much about Google, but I know more than anyone would care to know about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

And the woman who interviewed me, who later became my manager, said, oh, that's exactly what we're afraid of.

We'll create a job for you to come here and do that.

And that's my first job in the world of corporate.

How crazy is that?

Was that just something that you were interested in or how did you get to want to take that minor?

I knew that I wanted to work at the intersection of people like systems and revenue.

And there wasn't a lot of jobs that were available for somebody without any kind of MBA degree.

But I knew that there were these companies in the Silicon Valley that were growing pretty fast, and I figured I'll just do whatever I needed to do to get in on the floor.

Recruiting was a place where they were really trying to scale headcount very quickly.

Google was looking to hire 3,000 engineers that particular year to grow from search to map.

And what I didn't know that came out in that interview was Google was also very afraid of scaling itself into mediocrity because it had seen that happen in other older companies.

And, you know, Simon Sinek has this great quote where he said, when Best Buy went out of business, right?

Like Amazon didn't win anything, right?

Or like when Blockbuster went out of business, Best Buy didn't know what was coming up next.

And so Google sort of had this, you know, amazing sense of impending doom where they were trying to avoid themselves from doing that.

And they're like, we need to figure out how to do psychology.

We need to have figure out how to do organizational design in a completely different way than we have.

And so I got to be a data researcher on the floor.

And that was sort of the beginning of how I got in there.

They figured since you had this vast knowledge of culture and history and such, that would be a good change from the typical just looking at the numbers and.

And that kind of thing, I suspect, right.

I think that when you are a company or a leader that basically always asks the question, if it's not going to be a billion dollars, a billion users, or a billion data points, then it doesn't really matter.

The Roman Empire is a Very attractive analogy to be drawn to.

May not even be the best or the most accurate one, but that's the empire that they sort of gravitate to, that we know about.

And so that then becomes a really easy entry point for language to be able to make some points about, you know, how to do things well.

And I, you know, as I've become a coach, I'm still thinking about what are the hot buttons, the gravitational anchors that we can communicate to somebody to say, oh, yeah, there's an identity thing that we need to be aware of, or there is a behavioral thing and a cultural thing that we need to be aware of.

Otherwise you will scale yourself into something very unhealthy or something mediocre or something.

Very toxic, which sounds terrible.

So, so take us back and tell us, where did you really grow up?

I was born in China.

I moved here when I was quite young.

My dad was doing his PhD.

He's an electrical engineer.

And then we moved to Silicon Valley afterwards.

So I've sort of been around the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay area since then.

And how many siblings do you have?

Two.

Younger brother, younger sister.

I'm the oldest in the family.

And what did your mom do?

My mom was an elder in the church, a woman of deep faith.

She was really the person who was responsible for raising us with the values that were aligned to the people that we had potential to become.

If I was seeing my dad work out in technology tools and in the corporate world, what the environment and social fabric we were living in could become.

And I saw, right in Silicon Valley, my neighborhood, go from sort of fruit tree farms into one big IBM Watson factory research lab, into all the startups that it is today, and no fruit trees in sight.

My mom was the person who said, yeah, but the internal changes matters just as much.

And sometimes the internal changes and foundations keep you sane when everything around you is changing.

Did your, Was your born in China, the Chinese culture, then when you came to Silicon Valley, how did you, did you try to assimilate more to the American culture?

Did you try to hold on to your Chinese culture there?

Or did you guys just kind of run parallel?

Because there's similarities, but differences.

How did you navigate that as a young lad in California?

I would say that's probably the first truly entrepreneurial experience.

Because I came and my parents didn't speak English that well.

I learned English much more quickly.

I became the translator for, you know, schools at parent teacher conferences, and certainly helping my brother and sister learn how to do homework and all those Things.

And it was this experience of how do you go from zero to one?

And you know, and I think that there are things about my mindset which have always stayed very Chinese because my first language is Chinese and I still know how to read and write Chinese.

But making that change to say, oh, right, the innovation, energy, the way that you actually feel like I am the master of my own destiny, the individualism and self sufficiency values, oh, that's all part of what drives me.

And those are not as much, right.

The collectivist postures of somebody who was born and raised in China and then came here in their college or grad school years.

Is it funny once you turn somebody loose to see what's going on, everything changes, right?

And you're the master of your domain and you get to figure that out.

Either take it and go with it or you fall back.

Right?

It looks like you took it.

I remember being in third grade and the school in Santa Barbara, they were so nice, but there wasn't a lot of Asians there.

So they very, very kindly thought, we will bus in a translator who is Asian from another school district.

And so unfortunately, the woman that they bust in is Japanese, not Chinese.

So we were actually not able to communicate with each other.

She would write like kanji, the Chinese characters that I could read.

And that was how I figured out how to do my math homework.

But I came and I, for whatever reason, I knew exactly two English words.

I knew yes, and I knew window.

And I figured out that if I said those two words, something would happen.

Like I would make a movement happen in my environment.

So if I said window and they said whatever back that I didn't understand, I said, yes, either the window would open or the window would close.

And that was like a little bit of my ability to say, I'm making things happen in my own small way, you know, when everything else felt very helpless or like very out of my control.

Well, you know, when you, did you guys as a family, did you guys just kind of stay close knit in that or did they, your parents, encourage you to go out and get a job, go play some sports or things like that?

Yeah.

Yes and no.

I think my parents, they didn't know what to do with us and they were trying to figure out how to survive and learning all the culture.

And my dad was in school, so he was figuring out his schoolwork.

And we lived in international quarters with international students.

And so I would just sort of figure out that, oh, like there are these Afghani neighbors that live next Door.

And neither of us knew what Thanksgiving was supposed to look like, but we, you know, wanted to take time off.

So then we would just go and play with the kids.

And then, you know, we would bring, you know, our potlucks were very, you know, smorgasbord, like, oh, yeah, cornucopia.

You know, I'd watch a lot of Disney cartoons.

We probably knew them all by heart.

I learned English through the magic of Disney, which was both an extremely optimistic as well as, like, a very wholesome way to learn English.

And then I would go out and I would find, you know, random trash that was on the street and then make the play structures that would house my brother and my sister, myself.

At one point, I, like, found a trampoline that I hauled up into a tree so that we could have a tree house, you know, and then, like, you found the discarded sand bucket.

And, like, that would be a pulley system.

And then I would go find other kids who wanted to help, like, pulley food up to the snack station, which was my trampoline, until the administration of the schoolyard very fairly said that is unsafe and not too cold code and, like, took down our structures.

That's just not fair.

Stuff that was happening that I was, you know, leading the gang to get into trouble.

Yeah.

The excitement is the hint of danger.

Right.

And that's why we as kids go do all that stuff.

So that was unfortunate.

They busted you.

And I think you see, even today in the world of startups, is that hubris of, I don't really know what I can or cannot get away with, and even more, I don't know what the wisdom is of not doing something I should say no to, even though I can do it right, really kind of propels you to try different things.

And at the very least, it gives your fearlessness a channel to create things, to build things.

So growing up, so you did a lot of translating.

Did you do anything else that would have given this entrepreneur spirit that now you look back and you're like, oh, yeah, did you sell things, go gather and try to.

Or newspaper?

I don't know, anything like that.

My.

In high school, my first and second year in high school, there was sort of like this rare opportunity for a teacher to teach us about the stock market in, like, a future Business Leaders of America program.

And he would do competitions where everybody got $500 to create a paper portfolio, track it through two weeks, and see how things performed.

And I won that competition probably three times in a row.

That was the first time that I was like, you can generate value by looking at trends or, you know, harvest value by looking at trends.

And I think I probably got, you know, $20 the first time and it ended up to be $100 the, the third time.

And you know, and, and become much more involved with the speaking, you know, persuasion, mock trial stuff that was all part of business leaders.

Because that high school teacher just really gave me that opportunity to see how somebody would.

No real understanding of business could understand the markets here in the United States.

That's pretty cool.

Again, that seems like you were very fortunate that you had a teacher that actually taught you a little bit about real life versus all this theory that never ever happens.

And when you come out of school, you never know anything, right?

Oh my gosh.

I mean, the village that I have had the privilege to benefit from is just incredible because it really did allow me to have a very broad toolbox of things that I've seen snippets of and didn't really have an ability to thread together in a framework or sort of a vision of what I wanted my career, my future to look like.

But it gave me such a clear understanding of these are the reward incentive systems that work for success.

And I'm so grateful for that.

And I now tell people sometimes who are parents of young children, just let them try because don't just teach them how to save, teach them how to invest.

And that's actually going to be really different in the terms of how you think about business success or career, career success later on.

Was this all through junior high and high school?

Was this in that same international school community where you guys were at?

Or did you finally move and get to like the, the normal kids school?

Right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So, yeah, I, I had exactly 3/4 to get out of ESL because then there was no more ESL at that school.

And by junior high my father had graduated.

He got a job up in Silicon Valley.

We were in San Jose.

So then I was part of a regular school program in the public school system and that.

So this plan that this futures thing, this was at, this was not at high school, at the regular public university high school.

This was the other place.

Man, you're probably light years ahead of everybody when you went to the regular school.

Oh, crazy, right?

It's like I don't even know that.

Why is that?

Well, I was going to ask how that transition went.

It probably was, you felt like the good.

You, you probably could have graduated that school immediately when you got there.

I think that the transition at the Time I was trying to make it feel like no transition because I was so tired of being the visibly standout person.

And, you know, everybody goes into high school thinking about how am I going to reinvent myself, right, to adjust or redeem from the things that I didn't like about being in junior high or being in elementary school.

So I tried really hard to make that a non adjustment.

And then it took me a while to realize, oh, I actually have.

I have leadership qualities that are different than other people because of this translation stuff that I'm so accustomed to doing.

And so, like, at one point, I was on a interview board for students to be able to interview future teachers.

There was like three of us that were nominated to do that.

And I would write up really serious interview notes.

I went to the library and looked up how interview notes were supposed to look.

I did that.

I was in the journalism program, and so we were covering teachers unions when teachers on strike.

It was a pretty professional publishing setup.

And so I tried to do those things that allowed me to always balance having sort of like a creative output against the biology stem things that the very competitive public school that I was at was interested in to measure excellence.

You know, it's weird.

You're the freedom to kind of know how to have the taste of how things work in the real world.

You didn't have this fear of failure thing.

You just were like, you kind of could put it all together.

And then when you know something that somebody else doesn't know, you immediately become the authority in the room because they look at you like you know it, right?

And so you had a couple pluses in your column that made you be able to be, when you walk in a room, be like, oh, there's that guy.

He can translate.

He knows this and this.

He's had this experience.

And you probably carried yourself a little bit different than if you were just went to public school your whole life.

I think that's fair and also very, very flattering.

So thank you for that.

I think that there are two things that I learned.

One of them is you do learn better when you have to explain the thing that you know to other people.

And so I found a real joy in doing that.

Classroom sizes at Lynbrook High School, where I went were like 40 to 60.

So if you weren't helping the person next to you, something about you hoarding information felt very antisocial or not pro social.

And so there was sort of like the peer pressure to be like helping other people.

But I also sort of had this heritage in the back of my mind that comes from, you know, a story about my grandfather, which I've told in other podcasts, and I'm happy to share.

My grandfather was an orphan who ran away to join the military and by the end of his career was a four star general, literally taught himself to read in the army.

And there was a phrase that he used to carry which is, if you can't be normal, then just be exceptional.

And I kind of felt like, oh, there was a part of my heritage where after a while I was trying to be normal, I was trying to be assimilate.

And I realized, oh, my English doesn't have an accent.

I'm getting away with it.

And then they would do Dr. Seuss for prom or for some sort of like, spirit.

And I had no idea who Dr. Seuss was.

I knew Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Disney, but I didn't know Dr. Seuss.

And so I was like, oh, I'm just never going to really fit in.

And what tools do I have?

And like, well, I have this heritage that says, can't be normal, be, be exceptional, be extraordinary.

Right.

And, and lean into that.

And so then I, I sought out opportunities to do that.

Yeah, if you can't quote Dr. Seuss, you're never going to fit in anywhere.

That's the rule.

That was something that everybody knew.

I didn't have any of the old.

Yeah, right.

I had no Mac and cheese.

I had no, you know, I just didn't have any of those things.

And it, it was.

Then how do I find a different way to connect?

Well, you're just weird and exotic and like.

But you can, you can explain it, right.

As opposed to be isolated because of those differences.

I was like.

So, like, let me explain it in ways that I think will, Will, all of us can share in the joy.

Do you think your siblings were able to kind of take their adventure how you have been able to kind of do the same?

Did you guys all navigate it the same way or how did that look?

Just curious.

Yeah, my, my siblings are very much second and third in the birth order, so my sister is so much smarter than me.

She didn't get in half as much trouble.

She saw the things that I was doing that was going rogue, and then she figured out how to do it in much, much less glaringly different ways.

And so, like, my sister was editor in chief of the newspaper, and I think that she was in line to become one of the prom queens.

And that was just never something that people would never even put me into.

That category because I wasn't mass appeal kind of.

I had made that my, my thing, right, where it's like, oh, I'm in the margins and I can speak into it.

And my brother was constantly struggling with having two extremely high achieving older siblings and then trying to find his own thing to be in much more.

I think he did pottery class instead of journalism.

It was, you know, so, so he tried to find his own territory in that way.

How did you pick the University of California in Berkeley just because it was close by or did you have some kind of scholarship or is there a chose that university?

Yeah, I did have scholarships.

My parents also told me we have three kids to pay for college, so please go somewhere cheap and then you can go wherever you want private for your grad school on your own merit.

And you know, Berkeley is still to this day the greatest bargain investment of my life.

I did all four, you know, years of my grad school plus two years of graduate work and I think my total bill was $26,000.

Crazy.

That's like not even one semester today, right?

And the thing that I love about doing CS at a place like Berkeley was Introduction to cs.

The first day of class you go in and they say in this class you're going to learn how to create your own computer programming language someday.

Your homework assignment is due on Fridays.

We will not talk about any of the homework assignment.

By the way, we created our own language called Scheme.

All your homework assignments will be due in Scheme.

Somebody in the TA office will tell you where the computer Lab is.

There's 400 people in this class.

And then they just go into all the intricacies of like creating a computer language.

Language structures describe reality.

So you need to be really careful about the ethics of the reality that you're creating.

It's just like, figure it out.

Everybody comes out of that program with low self esteem because we think we're getting away with something every day.

But you had to figure it out yourself.

Whereas the first week CS program at a place like Stanford, they walk you to the computer lab, they talk about the context of what you're creating.

It's a much more gentle on ramp for somebody who's new compared to Berkeley.

But you know, I, I was a Berkeley kind of guy.

Like, I love that.

Just test me and I'll figure it out.

So you were the typical thing, just dropped right into the fire and see what happens.

And that's, that's how you thrive, right?

Well, that means a lot, you know, and you're in the class with 15% of the people who came from private schools who had already taken CS1 at a community college or as part of, like, pre start before, who are pre med and trying to get, you know, 4.2 GPAs for the thing that they're doing.

So it really keeps you very humble.

But, you know, you're just like, oh, how do I learn?

All right, great.

Like, what resources do I need?

Right.

What do I need to do for myself to be able to not just pass the test, but absorb the information?

Because there's no way for me to compete with the person sitting next to me otherwise.

So there you are, you're.

You're in school and you're still not thinking of hanging up your own shingle and being your own.

Being an entrepreneur.

You were trying to get the hardcore Silicon Valley experience, right?

You were trying to go work for megacorp and try to figure that out.

That was your path that you were on, correct?

Sort of, yeah.

Yeah.

Did your dad have any influence into what you were majoring in?

He wanted me to do engineering.

And in fact, I think that was at one point where he disowned me because I didn't want to do engineering.

I wanted to be pre med, which is very Asian.

Yes.

But I feel like, oh, I, I was a coach basically from my first year in college because there was just not a lot of mentors and infrastructure.

And so the way that you could reinforce your learning or establish some sort of social belonging was to figure out where you're going to be.

Somebody who organizes the study group or somebody who joins the study group, or somebody who already knows what you're doing because you took the class before.

And so I figured out that, oh, this thing of watching people grow or being with people and being able to harness the energy of a collective group was something that gave me a sense of joy and thriving.

So I just always wanted to do that.

And I gravitated towards the majors and the studies and the courses that would also give me that opportunity.

So your, your, your corporate career again, you spent a long time at Google and you probably learned a crap ton of how things really work.

And what was going on.

What, at what point in that stint where you're like, you know what, you know, I just need to do this on my own.

I just don't want to get paid a salary.

I'm not sure about the bonus and options.

I just want to go do what I want to do.

When did that hit you?

Well, wait, first I want to know you're in you go through, you do all of this school, what attracts you to Google?

The, the fact that they would create a role for me to do this thing that was a problem I was really interested in solving was the thing that made me say yes.

And you know, I spent a year and a half with the recruiting team at Google.

We were part of a project that discovered that GPAs and elite schools were not correlative to high performance.

I was one of the first people who looked at Google at that time.

The culture test for whether or not you were Google or esque was called the airport test.

And the test was if I spent four, if you were stuck in an airport for four hours with either Larry and Sergey, did you have enough things to say that were interesting, interesting to keep them engaged?

And my response was, I don't think that I would pass the airport test.

I said this to my manager and she's like, why you like box?

You do all these things, you have such interesting stories, why wouldn't you pass it?

I said from my culture is extremely inappropriate to initiate conversation with somebody so high above you who is important.

I would just assume that they were busy and I would never strike up a conversation.

So I would fail that test.

And like, we basically shifted a lot of the ways that we then evaluated for culture with that understanding, right?

With like, oh, that's actually coming from a very specific kind of rashness and initiative taking that maybe is not indicative of performance if you don't come from that culture of permission.

But long story long, I went from Google to a startup.

The startup was acquired, they didn't keep any of the non engineers.

My CEO cried at my exit interview and he said, I'll write you a reference anywhere.

But for some strange reason, Joe Krause, who is on our board, wants to talk to you about a role at Google Ventures.

And so I ended up joining Google Ventures.

I was there for almost 10 years.

There was 50 companies in the portfolio when I started more than 600 companies by the time I left maybe 400 active startups.

I saw Uber go from 80 people to 500 in six months.

And it was that, you know, you know, piece of being in the boardroom, being able to help write, follow on investments, watching companies with great ideas scale themselves into mediocrity or not know the difference between building a product, building a company and building a business.

That then was like, oh, I don't work for, you know, a company.

I work for a venture capital partnership of which I get, you know, compensation if the Portfolio does well, 80% of Series A companies fail.

If I can move that from 70 or 65%, then everybody wins.

And I think some of these companies are really good ideas, but not always the case that the best ideas win.

It's the best execution and the best sales and the best strategy of the best ideas win.

And so it was really coming out of that, going into Covid, realizing that everything about the way the work happens, employment, employer relationships happen, is getting reinvented, that I said, I don't actually want to be a consultant on the sidelines anymore.

And it's actually starting to feel a little bit icky that I only benefit from companies that are in our portfolio instead of just more broadly open sourcing the things that I know that I started in my own practice.

And just based on how you just described your career up until, you know, being an entrepreneur, it feels like you still had that entrepreneur sense through your career though.

You're working with startups, you're working with the entrepreneurs, you're making decisions that impact essentially the entrepreneurs themselves.

Did that kind of like open your eyes to some of that as well?

Yeah, there were two things that I really opened my eyes to when I was at gv.

The first thing is everybody is a startup onto ourselves.

You are building your own startup brand.

You do get to write your own job description.

It's a matter of whether or not you can close somebody to buy into your own vision of the job, but you're always doing it.

And especially in tech and in startups, you're not really rewarded ever for saying, oh, that's not my job description or that's above my pay grade.

In fact, completely the opposite.

Right.

And if you're in a place where there's not enough hands, grab as many things.

Because the punishment for not doing well is actually very low.

But the rewards for having seen a lot of things is very, very high.

And so I definitely learned that, oh, I should be writing my own description every two years.

So when I was hired on the job and the identity of GV was, we are the most hands on investor.

We will help you hire your first five engineers and then teach you how to hire your next 20.

And it was like, oh, I'm just an agency recruiter grinding out lists of leads those two years.

And then basically two years in watching Uber, watching Nest get acquired, I realized, nope, that's the wrong model because I can't be an agency recruiter.

Then my only path would be to leave venture capital and start my own agency.

I get to be an any pitch meeting any follow on meeting that I want.

And if talent is the reason why somebody makes it or doesn't make it, I should have more influence over how we pick.

And so then I got to write to be much more in that front end.

And then by the time that I was in my latter five years, I realized if I work with a CFO to design their headcount plan and I can see how they're hiring, gosh, I can go back to a partner and say we should preempt their next round because I know exactly when they're going to run out of money.

I know how well they're executing, I know how well they're hiring.

And we're going to get so many benefits from preempting because the cost will be lower.

And by the way, investors are always much more focused on new deals that they're chasing.

I'm actually the expert on the existing portfolio compared to them.

Why would I hold back just because of my title from giving that insight?

And it just completely changed the way that I was able to create more the entrepreneurial function of operations even within a venture firm.

It's so bizarre out there in these portfolios.

They're trying to identify they're going to grab 50 and they hope five hit or whatever that is.

You can't possibly put all your resources to all 50.

You're just doing the law of average.

You're just trying to get them all in and just see who sifts through and is the best.

Whereas as an entrepreneur, you can go strategically and find the one that will probably be the one that will be successful and your odds are probably way better than 20% or probably closer to 7 or 80% success.

So that's probably a lot more rewarding.

But at the same time, you're like all these people, if they just had the product that you offer and the knowledge that you have, half of those would be successful probably, but they just don't have access to somebody like yourself.

Why is that?

It seems like there's an open space in the market for that.

Where are these people at that can help these companies?

I think that being an entrepreneur is so hard.

Oftentimes the question that I get right is like, how do I find time for coaching?

In fact, that could feel really selfish if I were to do that.

Because my company needs me, my business needs me.

I am the sole point of failure and the bottleneck for so many different things.

And so there are VCs who have said, well, you have to, right?

This is a mandated thing you have to do coaching, or this is a mandated thing where you have to time for me as a board member to advise you, and then that becomes an entry point into, you know, being able to do some of the deeper work.

And so I have a tremendous amount of empathy for that, because even as I've been building my own practice, I have to ask myself that same question, right?

What is everything that I can do?

And then what are the things that only I can do and be able to distinguish between those things?

But I also think that what happens in venture and investment culture in general is the person who has the inside information gets to win more.

So how many of our checks are we written where it's like, oh, I met this person at Marissa Mayer's Halloween party, right?

Like, what.

What percentage of them are all Stanford grads, that all come from this extended network?

And then a person with a really great idea comes in, and I can tell within 30 seconds, oh, we're not going to write this check because you don't know the secret language and the handshake that's going to get you the check.

And it's not because of anything having to do with your potential or your capability.

It has to do with not knowing that inside language.

And so when I say I started to feel a little bit icky about only servicing my portfolio, it was because of that.

It was because this is a very specific kind of throughput line, and it's not actually necessarily making the world a better place, even though everybody who comes in and pitches us has the dream of truly making a difference.

So why would I put myself in a place where the conflict of interest makes it difficult for me to share that more broadly?

So do you think.

And again, I'm just off the cuff here.

Do you think that your impact comes from helping people learn the secret language to get them in front of the correct people with your experience?

I think yeah.

So I would say when I look at the stories of transformation that I felt really pleased with, there's a good 30, 40% where it was.

I didn't need to change anything about your skill or your mindset.

I just needed to teach you a couple of code words so that you could format it into the color and texture that we need you to be.

And a lot of those happen to be minorities, women.

Right.

And I remember during my time at gv, AVC had started a boot camp for female entrepreneurs.

And I talked to the female entrepreneurs that were my investors in my portfolio, and they had a very strong negative reaction.

Reaction to that, they said, we don't need more training.

We just want the same shot at money that Mark Zuckerberg got when he was nothing and didn't know anything.

Right.

He didn't have to.

And so I do feel like, oh, this is a thing.

I was working with the executive director of a nonprofit organization who was almost fired from her job because the board asked her for a budget, and she accurately put down all of the things that she wanted to spend money on against the money that was coming in and ended up to be a deficit of something like 300k.

Is that bad?

Oh, that's not right.

It's like, so, like, well, you.

What I need you to do, board, is to help me raise 300k to be able to make my budget work.

And I'm like, oh, that's so easy.

You already know your plan, you already know your vision, but the budget has to be zero at the end.

And, like, don't put a number there that you're not confident you can raise yourself.

Because the executive director does fundraising.

Right.

Like, she didn't understand that that was part of the secret code.

Very.

Things like that.

And then I think there's another whole category, which is.

Is the mindset of how you're thinking about growing your company and scaling your company, understanding that you're selling a company and a business, not just a product, which is that engineering fallacy.

Right.

All I need to do is just to build the most perfect thing.

And of course, people will line up to take my money or to give me money.

Untrue.

100%.

It's.

It's so bizarre that.

But there is such a competitive advantage of either you're in the club or you're not in the club.

And there's just.

That's a real line.

It's a real thing.

And navigating it, I guess, creates a lot of opportunities for you and your clients.

Are you trying to be a solopreneur or you're trying to build and scale your company like you're trying to teach everybody else to do?

Where are you at in that journey in your business?

I am trying to figure out, like, every one of my companies, how do I properly use AI as a tool that still allows us to be human first?

So I think about scaling my business, and there have been people who've come up and said, what if you just cloned your phrases and questions into an AI chatbot that they can install as a browser extension?

That's not something that feels very human first to me.

And I Think that it would actually take a lot of the joy and the impact that I get out of my work.

I tell the story as an example, what's the difference between tool first AI and human first AI.

They had grown their business to $250 million ARR and figured out that oh, customer service agents on average can take about 20 to 25 tickets a day but the great ones take 80 tickets a day.

So the question for people was how do we create compensation incentive structures?

And we asked a question through one of the hired VP of data.

I was like why does an online travel agency need that many phone calls and customer service agents to begin with?

And they did some research and found out, well guess what, 40% of the calls are from people who just want a copy of their itinerary email to them.

So we built a button that says like email me my itinerary laid off, you know, 60% of the customer sales.

Customer service installed a bot with extremely low quality transactional question answer system.

But you can still get answers from them.

And they built their business in this very efficiency tools based way.

There is another company that we interacted with through.

It was a softbank introduction for me after I'd left GV and they were doing very similar things and had a very similar question how do we use AI?

And I told them about this travel agency.

So they did the same experiment and research very similar numbers.

Actually I think it was higher.

52% Of the calls were from people who wanted a copy of their itinerary emailed to them.

But this is Japan which is a very different efficiency oriented culture.

So they asked a follow up question was what do we know about the identity of the people who call in?

And they discovered that it was disproportionately senior citizens who were extremely uncomfortable with technology and or just lonely and wanted somebody to talk to.

So they did not lay off the workforce.

They still incorporated that button on the website.

But they said to every single one of their customer service agents, your job is to spend as much time as you need to get the person on the other line feeling confident about their ability to use our product at the end of the call and that's how I'm going to pay you.

And the lifetime value of every single one of those clients went up, right?

They started spending 20 or 25% more.

They bought more packages because they now felt very confident about how to use the product and they were Introduced to products that they weren't using that were going to serve their purposes.

And that's the difference between human first AI versus tool based AI.

And I think that we need to find more opportunities for leaders with that instinct to do human first AI to be able to do that.

And I absolutely want that to be a core part of my business.

Business as well.

Yeah, there's definitely some things that I just want to hit the button.

It's a transactional thing.

I just want it done.

But as a general rule or just a society that we want to deal with people and we want to be heard and we want our problem to be understood and then hopefully somebody can give us a solution back or give us some guidance.

And that's really hard to get from an AI bot.

I just.

The human touch.

The human touch.

That's it.

So I'm curious, so when you go to leave gv, how does that, how does that go down?

Because I can't imagine them wanting or allowing you to leave.

I imagine they want to retain you.

So how do you make that jump?

Repeat the question one more time for me.

So when you go to jump, you're leaving Google Ventures and you want to go on your own, how does that go down?

How do you make the leap of faith to go on your own?

Or do they try to keep you in?

Like, how does that go as going from an employee to, you know, entrepreneur?

Yeah.

The great thing about GV and I think the Google ecosystem in general is that the, what we call exoglers, the alumni network is really strong.

And so, and my first boss who was very much a leadership mentor to me, a guy named Bill Marisa, he would say every Christmas party, right?

This is a Christmas party that's for our spouses and our friends and our partners.

Because it is only because you let us borrow our colleagues that we get to have the business and the company that we have and to work with such amazing people.

I am very realistic about the fact that everybody who is here is a volunteer because we hire great people and great people have choices.

And so because that's always been sort of an overarching phrase, we are very free about.

Right.

People like leaving and people are coming.

So long as we're still part of the same ecosystem, there's a lot of friendly support and I'm still on great terms and people will send me referrals from the network and for the portfolio.

So talk us through though, how do you get to the point that you're just ready to leave?

Oh, I see.

I think that Covid really was the point where I saw the trend being very, very clear.

We had gone from predominantly thinking about executive team build outs or business and revenue to HR leaders and entrepreneurs.

Like though I remember having a call with somebody who was crying in their car because he had to put his mom in a assisted living home.

And the reality was that I had just dropped her off and I'll probably not be able to say goodbye because the shelter in place is so strict and so stringent.

And, you know, the amount of current events.

Right.

Crisis that was going on at the same time just was a realization.

If we are going to ask people to spend 50, 60, 70 hours at work, which is the reality of a startup, but we are not asking questions about how we can drive their thriving or how to actually help them be leaders authentically in their own voice, then all I am doing is perpetuating, you know, a system of exploitation.

And it felt like that was a very.

Because I was supposed to be on a call with that founder to ask, do you need to do layoffs?

Because I need to box my spreadsheet to know which companies are doing layoffs and who I need to help.

And what he needed was somebody to process this extreme grief.

And so by sitting with him, to listen with him in that way, in many ways, acting as a coach instead of as a venture investing operator, I was not technically doing much job, but I was doing the thing that I was meant to do.

And so I think that that was one of those places where psychologically I thought, oh, there's a confidence here that I, I can't rewrite my job description to accommodate that and still stay in venture.

Nice.

You know, those are some crazy times.

Everything changed and we learned a lot from all that.

And.

And here we are.

And if that wouldn't have happened, who knows where you'd be right now.

And.

And I guess you turned out where you're supposed to be.

I guess.

Julie, you've got your money question here.

You're finally us.

Well, I have a yes, I'll do my money question.

So this is the hardest question you're going to get the whole podcast, and that's why we save it till the end.

But what is your end game?

I've heard you ask this question before, and so I will answer this, and it is a very hard question.

But I also wanted to comment just because I have a neurobiology psychological background.

I think it's interesting that you say end game as opposed to what is your vision or what is your what is your meaning?

So I think that's interesting because you are creating pressure for me to think about my mortality, and that's a different prioritization and accepting framework.

So I think that's really interesting and I'm actually really curious why you do phrase the question that way as opposed to, you know, what is your plan or what is your exit strategy?

Well, I think as entrepreneur.

Well, I mean, let me speak here.

And I don't know that we think it through as much as you're maybe giving us credit for, but I think as entrepreneurs, we think of the word vision.

All those things, plans, those all get thrown around a lot, but we don't often go straight to the end and think backwards.

Right.

What are your plans for Q1?

What are you going to do for Q2?

I think those we hear all the time, right?

Like, it's second nature.

But to really think about what you said is like, your mortality is thinking a little bit deeper and further of, like, what is your purpose in this life?

Like, okay, so tomorrow you're going to go take three meetings and you're going to do three coaching sessions.

Like, that's really not what I'm after.

I think there's really two lines of people, right?

The people that have a job, their end game is, I want to put in my 40 years and retire and relax.

Entrepreneurs, they're just not wired that way.

So the end game is different.

It's hard to find an entrepreneur that wants to, oh, when I hit 50, I'm out.

They never really stop.

And that's why the question is, the end game for most people have real jobs, is I just want to get to retirement and vacation all day.

Entrepreneurs.

It isn't like that.

Yeah, absolutely.

No.

And I like the phrasing of the question because.

Because of how it forces me to think about that.

And, and I would say when I started my coaching practice and I suddenly remembered all of the stories that I had sort of taken for granted and not revisited about my grandfather.

There was this sense of like, I want to create, I want to be a good ancestor.

I want to build, like, infrastructure that allows us to be good ancestors.

When I look out at the leadership structures that exist today, we have an incredible group of people that are 55 plus that want to stay in the workplace.

Longer and still have a lot to give.

We need to find more creative ways to retain them in the workforce that doesn't necessarily require full time.

And we need to have better programs for women past menopause to be able to come into the workforce and like be bosses.

It's like very, very clear to me.

And then we have 27 to 35 year old people who from the magic of Instagram, because of their fire, because of what they see as injustice and advocacy and mutual aid, are coming up through much more media based channels and leaders.

And then 35 to 55 is sort of a desert.

And I don't know exactly why that is, that like Gen X and Millennials tend to not step up into leadership, not want that responsibility.

It is possible because they are in the sandwich generation.

So they're doing elder care and young children care at the same time.

It's possible because they have seen very little rewards that come from taking on those extra responsibilities.

It could just be because it feels like a very exposed place to be and nobody has given them the opportunity to learn that secret language that gets you in the room to really exercise your powers.

And so when I think about like what do I want?

You know, my eulogy from the practice was like, oh, like I created a million to 5 million leaders that actually are good ancestors for the generations of people coming into the workplace.

Right.

So that, that feels like something that's really important.

And it's also really important that they not be imitating me when they're doing it.

That there is an ability for them to integrate it into their own sense of identity and their own voice.

Because that's what I had to do as an immigrant and that was my grandfather's story as well, that there should always be that healthy sense of how are we scaling with people as opposed to building leadership factories or we're just spitting out copy images or something that, of what it's supposed to look like because those take away from the potential of people becoming.

So if I could do a translation here, from what I hear, your impact is too great that you're ever going to stop.

Your knowledge that you can break it down like that, you're going to continue on.

And once you crack the code, which I, I'm sure you're close to, why would you ever stop making that impact with all the experience and knowledge that you have?

The legacy, right?

Which is legacy, you don't ever want to stop.

I, I think that that is.

Yeah.

And I think it, it's that sense of let's just keep getting better, like, together.

Right.

Let's just keep getting a little bit better together.

And if I get right, like a million to 5 million here in the United States, there are leaders in Hong Kong, in Taipei, in Australia who have reached out to me because of conferences that I've spoken at who are saying we're asking very similar questions and we're anxious about data sovereignty.

Right.

And so it just feels like, no, no, no.

This is a world in which real leaders matter.

And I've seen that again and again.

And leaders that are entrepreneurial need different kinds of support and need different kinds of empathy and.

Right.

We just get to do better together.

Well, and as we close here, I want to full circle this.

I think what your goal is is to make sure that these businesses, these entrepreneurs, whomever they are, that they're not growing, scaling, entering into this place and going to be mediocre.

Your goal is to kind of help keep that mediocrity out of it.

And I can appreciate that.

Yeah.

Can you imagine if the default of most companies dealing with AI, instead of going to bots that are transactional, took that Japanese company's model and created an entire workforce incentive reward structure, which is help the senior people who help anybody who is lonely and insecure about technology be able to feel good about how our technology making their lives better.

Not just technology, though.

I think you could take that across, across everything.

It's bigger than you.

You know too much.

You got to bring it to the people.

When you, like you said, when you're just a kid, when you're teaching people, that's when everybody learns.

So now you're in the position again, if you can believe it, after this, you're now teaching the people, are going to teach the people, and that's your end game, which is so much, so much fun.

Yeah, it is pretty crazy.

Yeah, it is, it is.

It's a fun time to be alive.

It is.

Well, we, we appreciate you being on the show today, Maximus Dzu.

Can you give a plug of how people get a hold of you?

LinkedIn is probably the best way to get a hold of me and, and I've, I'll send the link.

I've decided.

Oh, I'll.

I'll make some free strategy sessions available for people who want to reach out from the podcast and just to talk.

Appreciate that.

And absolutely, you know, feel free to come and find me.

I check my own LinkedIn messages.

That's not done through an assistant.

Yeah, hardcore old school.

I like that.

Well, we appreciate you taking your time and getting up early obviously, too.

It's early where you're at, so thank you a million.

And another great addition of the Empowering Entrepreneurs podcast.

I'm Glenn Harper.

Julie Smith.