Episode 12
· 24:58
Welcome to momentum mode. My name is Mike Shannon. And alongside my co host, Corey Faringle, this episode will feature an interview with Dan Dale Deegan, a k a triple d. Dan is a seasoned SaaS leader, investor, advisor. He's on countless boards of directors and chairman, and has played a key role in scaling and exiting some of the biggest names in enterprise software.
Mike Shannon:He played an early role at Salesforce, so pivotal that he was personally thanked by CEO Marc Benioff in his autobiography. We cover a range of topics with Dan, including growing and leading high performance sales teams, scaling companies through major acquisitions, and the evolution of leadership in fast growing organizations. Before we jump in, we'd like to thank our sponsor, Kilpatrick, Townsend and Stockton, an innovation focused law firm with 22 offices around the world, including right here in Chicago. We've worked with our partners at Kilpatrick for a long time, including on issues related to m and a transactions and scaling software as a service businesses, both of which Dan Dal Deegan knows a thing or two about. So let's dive in.
Mike Shannon:And we have Dan Dal Deegan, man myth legend, triple d. Thanks
Corey Ferengul:for joining us.
Dan Dal Deegan:Thanks for having me, Mike, Corey. It's great to be here.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah.
Mike Shannon:Alright. We could spend a whole episode just reading your bio, so let me give give kind of the high level. Currently on something like four to five boards across multiple private equity groups, a whole bunch of advisory boards early at Salesforce to the point of being thanked by Marc Benioff in his book. Sold at least one company as CEO, north of $250,000,000 to DocuSign. Let's see.
Mike Shannon:Multiple CRO type roles, currently coaching CROs as part of cofounding Thales. Kellogg MBA thrown in there, actually studied computer science in undergrad. But if you look up Dan Dal Deegan and you find him on YouTube, you don't find keynote speeches. You find a guitar in his hands, and he's known to jump on stage and and play songs. So, we need to unpack this alien life form in front of us.
Mike Shannon:Dan, thanks for joining us.
Dan Dal Deegan:I'm gonna try to live up to that intro, Mike. I and for a while, I was wondering, who are you describing? Oh, yeah. I've done a few of those things.
Mike Shannon:Huge fan. So alright. We're gonna skip a lot of that.
Corey Ferengul:Please do.
Mike Shannon:Yes. Short episodes. Alright. So, Dan, can we narrow in on the first time you were CEO? And let's do an opening question of what was most surprising or unfamiliar for you.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. So I I talk about this a lot, especially with other CEOs that I work with now. And my role as an operating partner in private equity, as you referred to, Mike, is a bit like I'd say it's 60% operational and, like, 90% therapeutic.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah. Okay. As in you're the therapist.
Dan Dal Deegan:Exactly. Yes. And that comes in really handy for the first thing I realized as a CEO is that and after you get past the pomp and circumstance, oh, I got the CEO title now. I'm in charge. And all those times that we've rolled our eyes as leaders in an organization, wondering, well, I wouldn't have done it that way.
Dan Dal Deegan:How could we make this decision? And you and you wonder, boy, when I'm in charge someday, we're gonna do things differently. You finally get that mental responsibility and you realize, oh, shit. It's it's now on me. Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:And it it gives you a different mindset about your balance of risk and reward. But here's the thing that but I think made the biggest impression on me early on that now is reflected in the way that I coach and work with and befriend and support the CEOs who I serve. And that is it is a lonely job. And I say that in the and for a couple reasons. And this was I would have even given you the speech before COVID, but it made it even more so when you go to remote organizations.
Dan Dal Deegan:Everybody's working, you know, distanced from each other, and now that's a standard we have to adapt to. It was hard enough when you had your whole team in the office five days a week. Getting alignment with a team, including the rank and file as well as your own executive leadership team, that's a task, but you can do it. And when you're all together, it's a lot easier. Sure.
Dan Dal Deegan:Being spread apart like the teams that I'm working with now, the degree of difficulty is gone off the charts. And I think so too, the loneliness factor I referred to. CEOs have very rarely somebody they can go to as a confidant and have a safe harbor conversation about hopes, fears, anxieties, concerns, trepidations, lack of confidence. I I'm not I think I've got a blind spot on this thing, maybe about one of our team members. I'm not sure.
Dan Dal Deegan:I'm looking at this through the right lens. And if you can have a vulnerable conversation with somebody who you trust and not feel like it's gonna come across as, I'm not sure we you still have the kind of confidence in this executive anymore. That's a hard balance to strike. And a lot of CEOs don't have anybody on their board or on their network they can go to for those kind of conversations. I try to be that board member.
Dan Dal Deegan:I know, Corey, the role you play is your board member. You have that kind of supportive role. It's vital. I think it's as vital as having the right operational experience and pattern recognition available to you on your board.
Corey Ferengul:How How do you build that level of confidence with the CEO? Like, okay. Even though he's on the board, he's not here to mess with me. Right? He's really here to give me that support.
Corey Ferengul:I can I can open up to him about these things that I'm not comfortable usually opening up?
Dan Dal Deegan:That's a great question, Corey. Because on face value, I think the role needs to be set up in a way that makes it easier to achieve that. And so, structurally, I'm an independent board member. Right. And I do that specifically because even the PE firms with whom I work, I am not a full time employee of the PE firm.
Dan Dal Deegan:I'm I'm hired, if you will, by the portfolio company, actually paid by them, and have equity in these companies. So I've got skin in the game. I'm usually also an investor. I've usually written a check, and I'm on the cap table directly. So there's alignment of objectives, but because I'm not under the employ of the private equity firm or any of the VCs who might still be investors on the cap table, I'm here in service of the CEO.
Dan Dal Deegan:And I make that clear from the beginning that success for me is not just a great financial outcome for that company, but for that CEO to have a wonderful monetization, whatever the form that exit takes, could be IPO. There aren't as many of those these days. Yeah. Yeah. More likely a strategic or a financial sponsor buying the company.
Dan Dal Deegan:And I want that CEO to to experience the springboard effect that that opportunity can create for them through the rest of their career. It could be a next CEO gig. They might go on and do the kind of thing Corey and I do now as operating partners with private equity firms and VCs. And that I take personal pride in that. And it's a lot like being a parent and seeing your children and the friends of your children they grew up with grow up and pursue their professional careers and grow and take on more challenges.
Dan Dal Deegan:Seeing the CEOs and CROs and other executives I've worked with achieve great things, that's very gratifying. Sure.
Corey Ferengul:And and let me just real quick clarify. For those that don't live in the boardrooms, like, they're the different seats, people think, oh, there's just one board. Well, no. There's independent directors that aren't associated with investors, and then there's investor seats. So you're taking even though an investor may have introduced you, you're considered independent
Dan Dal Deegan:That's right.
Corey Ferengul:Which means when that CEO is speaking to you, they're not speaking to one of the investors that wrote them a big check. They're speaking to a independent who's typically an independent director, simply been in the seat or has operating experience they can lean on. Right?
Dan Dal Deegan:That's right.
Corey Ferengul:So just trying to clarify.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. That's it. That's important to structurally lay out for the audience because it's not avail it's not probably not obvious on the surface. Yeah. And it's especially not obvious if you just drop in as a as a fly on the wall in a board meeting.
Dan Dal Deegan:That's right. You're not necessarily sure who the independent board member is. That's right. You spend enough time with him. You can probably figure out over time based on who the CEO is probably experiencing some comfort with.
Dan Dal Deegan:Even the seating arrangement can can, give that away sometimes.
Mike Shannon:And you're probably a phone call that the CEO is making before that board meeting, I would imagine.
Dan Dal Deegan:That's right.
Mike Shannon:That was similar to our dynamic Yeah. Which makes this this serious fun. Let me ask you. When you were first CEO
Dan Dal Deegan:Mhmm.
Mike Shannon:And your career background, if I looked it up accurately, started in sales and sales management. It's a very sociable role.
Dan Dal Deegan:Mhmm.
Mike Shannon:And so to then enter into this domain of loneliness
Corey Ferengul:Yeah.
Mike Shannon:How how did you first approach that?
Dan Dal Deegan:At first, I started acting as if I was still a sales leader or still in other roles that I've played in the companies that I've supported and run and been and been been really lucky to be in such great growth trajectories of places like Oracle and Sybase and Siebel and Salesforce. But the role that I played as a sales leader, you've gotta be operationally rigorous. You've got to be tenacious. You gotta be a great purveyor of talent and both find and and retain great talent. But the way you conduct yourself, you're also a high energy cheerleader.
Dan Dal Deegan:Right. Unlike, let's say, a CFO, a CMO probably also has to be that kind of energy. But the customer facing executives and especially in the software company, which is where the industry I've spent my entire career, and it's it's all I know. The customer facing executive, CMO, especially CRO, need to be high energy cheerleader types. That's the kind of vibe I brought to the CEO role too because I figured, well, there's a reason we see a lot of customer facing executives go into the c suite and end up as CEOs.
Dan Dal Deegan:When I was coming up in this business, you'd see product executives, maybe who started as engineer and chief product officer, become founders, become CEOs, sometimes financial leaders, CFO becomes a CEO. We're I think we're seeing I haven't I don't have the data to back this up. I haven't done an empirical study. But we're seeing more and more CROs now make the jump into CEO. Revenue officers.
Dan Dal Deegan:Chief revenue officer. Thank you. And I think that trend line is for a few reasons. One of which is the skills are very transferable based on what you need to be good at to be a CEO. But I I draw a really important distinction.
Dan Dal Deegan:And as a father of five children, I've had a chance to see this as a live laboratory. It's my kids who've grown up. They have five kids between 21 and 31 years old. They're all embarking on their careers as well. And what I see now, and the young people in the organizations that I serve and support as a board member, is mentoring is dead.
Dan Dal Deegan:Mhmm. And I I say that with dramatic effect because the kind of mentoring that definitely you and I, Corey, the generation we represent and also probably for you, Mike, and, you know, even though you're younger and you came up a couple decades behind us, mentoring that we experienced, which was based on these unscheduled, unstructured conversations were happening in a hallway or or lunch. Let's have a beer after work. Or, hey, Corey. I want you to come in.
Dan Dal Deegan:You're a young guy. I want you to come listen to the sales call. You're gonna learn something. We're dealing with this objection handling. You might you should listen to this.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. Why don't you join this account team? And you learned early in your careers as did I, subconsciously, I'm guessing, how to attach yourself to great mentors and what are the qualities of a mentor. And even bad leaders, the smart young people in an organization will look at bad leaders and say, well, that's good for me too because I
Corey Ferengul:know what
Dan Dal Deegan:I don't wanna be.
Corey Ferengul:Stuff to learn. Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. A bad example can be a great teacher. Right? Losing is a great teacher. Winning's also, you know, nice, but usually don't learn much from our victories.
Dan Dal Deegan:Right? So I found, you know, the loneliness of the CEO job and the fact that in the and now in the COVID generation, the teams that we're leading are virtual. They're not getting mentored like they used to. We've gotta be even more proactive in figuring out ways Yeah. To give mentoring experiences to the young up and coming talent organizations, because I worry about where the talent Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:Cultivation and skills development's gonna come from for the people that are now the age of my children, probably your children too.
Corey Ferengul:Exactly.
Dan Dal Deegan:Because they're not getting the kind of mentoring we did.
Corey Ferengul:No. It's a great point. I had a a software engineer at the last company I was leading say, how are these kids gonna learn the the you know, these other three great guys, you know, in our engineering team, and they were guys. They sat next to me for two years and looked over my shoulder.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah.
Corey Ferengul:And, you know, he's like, I'm willing to come in the office. Nobody else is. What am I gonna do? So it's it's complete demonstration of what you're saying that that casual learning doesn't
Dan Dal Deegan:exist. Exactly.
Corey Ferengul:So how do you overcome it?
Dan Dal Deegan:I think Can I
Mike Shannon:can I answer that question? The overcome, but also how do you design it?
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. Because
Mike Shannon:what you just described was, oh, that senior executive, I I saw them in the hallway. And then they, hey, young kid. Yeah. You know, that's right. Tag along.
Mike Shannon:Now that happened somewhat accidentally.
Dan Dal Deegan:That's right.
Mike Shannon:Now it has to be, by design, intentional.
Dan Dal Deegan:So what is the design today? It's a great question, Mike. And I think it does need to be programmatic because the the novelty and the spontaneity of that dynamic you described because it's not happening when you're in the office one or two days a week. Right. And and I how many times each of us have probably been in this position before where you're on the phone with somebody.
Dan Dal Deegan:It could be an organization selling to you, could be one of your own teammates, and it's a BDR, some young customer facing, could be CSM, BDR, customer success manager, business development rep, sitting in their bro apartment in their own bedroom with an unmade bed behind them, a baseball cap on, and their energy is like this.
Mike Shannon:The unmade bed is part of the pork.
Dan Dal Deegan:I got I got one
Corey Ferengul:in the middle of a call. A woman's mother came in, put a sandwich on, and then patted her on the head and walked out of the room.
Dan Dal Deegan:At least they're getting comfort food.
Corey Ferengul:Right. Exactly right.
Dan Dal Deegan:But it's it's depressing as hell. And I and I put my 20 self in that role, and I think, oh my god. I would've I would've probably left the industry. Yeah. I probably because I I doubt if I'm unique in this sense.
Dan Dal Deegan:Sales people that go into sales and end up having a good experience aren't all extroverts. I've seen some very good introverted customer facing executives and CEOs. You don't have to be an extrovert. But if you are that type, which clearly is what I was born as, I thrive on being around human beings. And I think all humans do.
Mike Shannon:Right.
Dan Dal Deegan:Maybe in varying degrees. Not getting that, it it creates mental health problems that are that are mounting, and for individual contributors and rising stars, not just for CEOs. I mean, mental health awareness, probably one of the the the best developments in the last couple of decades of our careers in this industry has been an awareness and the opening of the conversation of being mindful of your mental health, how to manage it just like you do going to the gym for your physical health. And, you know, there's no easy answers to it, but the fact that it's now openly talked about. And, generally, people are gonna be more willing to raise their hand and say, you know, I need to talk to somebody and not feel like it's coming across as a sign of weakness.
Dan Dal Deegan:I'm glad we're there. We got a long way to go still. Yeah. But that's, I think, part of the answer to how do you do it programmatically. You need to acknowledge that that's going on and then try to pair people up in an organization with and I've seen big brother, big sister programs.
Dan Dal Deegan:I've seen mentoring programs within a sales team. You know, a proven seasoned rep maybe who's being groomed to be a manager is gonna team with a couple individual contributors, newer rookies maybe. You it happens in engineering and product. You can do it in all lines of the functional responsibilities within a company, but you can't count on it happening organically. And I think Right.
Dan Dal Deegan:In the eighties and nineties when I was growing up, if you will, in the business, it's not that Oracle had a great mentoring program.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:It's just there were so many talented, smart, accomplished, successful people around. I was like a kid in a candy store. Like, I can hang around these people and learn.
Corey Ferengul:In the Oracle world, I remember going to the, international Oracle user group, the IOUG. Right? And learning just walking around and learning from people there around the Stony Center. Right? I mean, that was but you those don't exist as much anymore.
Dan Dal Deegan:That's right.
Corey Ferengul:I'm finding it fascinating that we started out with surprising thing about being a CEO. We've ended with mental health and the social coaching, not the mechanics of the job. Right. That's right. So interesting how it's evolved in that direction.
Dan Dal Deegan:It has. And yet the mechanics of the job and operational excellence is still one of the key responsibilities of the CEO, is to make sure your team is sharp, that we're we're operationally delivering upon the objectives that we set out, that you got the KPIs and all the the operational rigor associated with how do we keep score Yep. Of incremental progress so that at the end of a quarter end of a year, the results are not surprising. Right. Because there's only two days a year we want surprises.
Dan Dal Deegan:Christmas and our birthdays. Right? Alright. Yeah. In business, we don't want surprises.
Mike Shannon:Yes. So let me ask you this on time management. Your time can be pulled in all different directions as CEO. Where does your time go, and how do you design where your time goes as CEO?
Dan Dal Deegan:Well, it's another great question because something that happens when and not just when I became a CEO, but also just a function of not being 25 anymore, as you can obviously tell. I'm not getting any younger. Is it with age, I've developed a deeper appreciation for the value of this currency called time. Okay.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:I used to give time away like it was, there was never gonna run out of supply. And now I'm I'm I'm starkly aware now that compared to money, time, you don't know your balance. Right. Money, you always know your balance. Money, you can make more money.
Dan Dal Deegan:Or you can even get money back Right. In certain situations. None of that is true about time. Can't make more of it. Don't know how much you got left.
Dan Dal Deegan:So I'm But, yeah,
Corey Ferengul:we have all there is. Is.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. Exactly. But yet we still operate in a way that we, you know, we're gonna live forever.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:So to your question about how do you manage your time, I think a great leader and may not just a CEO, but I think a great leader, and it could be a leader of a five zero one c three. It could be a leader of a band, of an athletic team, are the ones that will spend time with people in their organization or partners or customers outside the organization in a way that makes that person feel like, I'm not worried at all about how much time I'm spending here.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah. I've got all
Dan Dal Deegan:the time in the world for you.
Mike Shannon:Right.
Dan Dal Deegan:Because nothing's more off putting than us meeting and me continuing to go like this and not or checking my phone and and and making it very apparent to you that I am I feel like I'm giving you too much time or I shouldn't be there. In my in my view is that then don't be there. Right. And do something else. And a a mentor of mine gave me really simple advice long ago.
Dan Dal Deegan:He happens to be the mentor that introduced me to my wife of now thirty five years.
Corey Ferengul:There's an impact on life.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. There you go. And, he's a dear friend. And he said, and I was doing that in a meeting. This was even before mobile phones.
Dan Dal Deegan:This was in the in the late eighties. Okay. As I was fidgety, I was taking notes, and I was, you know, being very kinetic. And he looked at me. He stopped at me, and he goes, if you're here in the room, then be here.
Dan Dal Deegan:Here. And he dropped a few f bombs in there too. Yeah. So, and I and I it occurred to me. Oh, yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:Be available. Be present. Because in ways that we're not aware of, we're sending all these signals to people. And that's another thing to be aware of as a leader, especially as a CEO. Everything you do is a message.
Dan Dal Deegan:That's
Corey Ferengul:Mhmm. Such a big
Dan Dal Deegan:And you can't walk down the hallway like you get off a tough call with somebody that has nothing to do with the business. Yeah. Could be your contractor who's building your house and something went sideways and you're pissed off and you walk on that. And people see that and go,
Corey Ferengul:oh, what's going what's wrong with the business? Absolutely. Wait. I've lived it.
Dan Dal Deegan:I quarter going okay?
Corey Ferengul:Yeah. And you Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:And you've gotta be aware of that and be, like, on message. As soon as you open that door and walk in the hallway, it's showtime.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah. Smile. Yeah. Smile away, boys.
Dan Dal Deegan:Smile away. And you gotta make contact with at least three or four people on the way to the restroom no matter how bad you have to go. That's right. It's like if somebody stops you, hey. Can we talk?
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. Okay. That's the time when I'm
Corey Ferengul:It tells you how universal it is. I told someone the other day, they they were like, you know, don't you miss not being in the office. I miss one thing. A walk to the bathroom is easier. You know, and it's exact because you're exactly right.
Dan Dal Deegan:Nobody stops
Corey Ferengul:you because you're exactly right.
Dan Dal Deegan:You're completely on your own terms at home. Right. Yeah. But it does take an adjustment when you go back into the into the office. So so, you know, the question of time, what I try to focus on and here's another element of it I think is an important, pothole to be aware of and and avoid stepping if you can.
Dan Dal Deegan:I grew up in sales. What what was your functional responsibility growing up in business? Customer facing?
Corey Ferengul:Started with sales and moved into product management.
Dan Dal Deegan:Okay. So you're product management. And, Mike, you were a product and a sales lead Yeah. Entrepreneur.
Mike Shannon:So Yes.
Dan Dal Deegan:So you had to do it all. You were
Corey Ferengul:He never had a real job. He started a company right away. That's right.
Dan Dal Deegan:So you
Mike Shannon:had a student. I had homework, and then I had the company. Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:Then you're like an athlete whose first event is the decathlon. That's right. You had to do it all.
Mike Shannon:That's right. We tripped a lot in that.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. Exactly. So so I grew up in sales. And so let's say for let's let's just say for hypothetically, you grew up in product. I grew up in sales.
Dan Dal Deegan:And let's say you were
Mike Shannon:Sales most.
Dan Dal Deegan:In sales. Yeah. That impacts how you think as a CEO in the meetings that you gravitate towards. And And I think and then one of my mentors again warned me of this. He said, don't spend all of your time with the sales team just because it's comfortable for you, and you're familiar with the vocabulary, and you feel you can contribute to those discussions.
Dan Dal Deegan:You can even finish people's sentences for them if you wanted to. And you gotta force yourself to go spend time in engineering and product and finance and g and a. So they don't feel like, oh, triple d is a sales. You know, he's he's all about sales. That's all he cares about.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah. And you gotta divide your time and be visible and present in those places so people think, oh, a show of love and attention. And Right. And I would joke with the engineering team that I've not written a line of code since 1985 when I less left the U Of I Computer Science program, and my professors were delighted to hear I was going into sales. It's kind of a left handed compliment.
Dan Dal Deegan:Oh, triple d. Where are you gonna? Well, I'm going to Oracle in sales. Oh, congratulations.
Corey Ferengul:Congratulations. Now now you can tell them you came from Dubai. Is that what you're saying? They're
Dan Dal Deegan:a little worried to be my about me writing code that was gonna end up on airplanes or in military, you know, weapon systems. And the world's a safer place for the fact that I don't write code anymore. And, so it was a natural evolution for me to go into sales, but I've always had to be, aware when I went to sales from sales into executive leadership and later as a CEO, is to is to show up in those other meetings in a way that doesn't look like, oh, oh, I'm gonna pretend to be an engineer now and be a poser.
Corey Ferengul:Right.
Dan Dal Deegan:Because they'll see right through that. And, you know, engineers are a lot like musicians, and I've spent a lot of time in both universes where they do not suffer fools.
Corey Ferengul:K.
Dan Dal Deegan:And if you come in, you know, trying to, you know, hey. Show me the Python code you're writing. Yeah. Like, I even recognize it. They'd be like, what?
Dan Dal Deegan:But you're there you're
Corey Ferengul:there to represent process and try and Yes. Understand. Right? And try and make sure they're moving forward. Good questions.
Dan Dal Deegan:And just ask them, how's this going? What what kind of challenges have you encountered you didn't anticipate? Yep. So they don't feel like it's suddenly an ops review. Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:And they gotta drop everything and, you know, snap too. But if you're and and really what it comes down to, authentic curiosity.
Corey Ferengul:Yep.
Dan Dal Deegan:If you're really just genuinely curious about what people are working on and especially on your team that impact your outcomes, and you and you know their names.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:I mean, here's basic skill and goes back to Andrew Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. When you remember things about people, like most obviously, their name and elements of their lives in and outside of the business, their personal lives, and you play that back to them in a way when you're talking to them as in in very casual ways, it reinforces for them that you give a shit. Right. That you weren't just asking because you were, oh, these are the things I'm supposed to ask to sound curious. But when you play it back to them and you demonstrate you remembered it
Corey Ferengul:Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:There's this. And you've probably both experienced it before because you you both are good at this too. Is people sometimes back and go, oh, you remember my wife's name, or you remember my kid's name, or what school my kid's going to, or the fact that he plays lacrosse or volleyball or whatever. Yeah. And it makes it so much more personal and human and authentic.
Dan Dal Deegan:And when you develop those kinds of relationships with people, and it doesn't have to be somebody you see every day or that you work with every day, but their the degree of trust that you earn from that is off the charts.
Corey Ferengul:Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:The inverse is also true. Insincerity is is is transparent as hell. And especially in an organization with smart, accomplished people, they'll see right through that. Yep. So if you bring your authentic self and you can be curious, I think it gives you a big head start on being an effective leader.
Corey Ferengul:Well, we work to keep these episodes tight, tight, and, man, we've flown through our time here.
Mike Shannon:So So let me do one wrap up
Dan Dal Deegan:Alright.
Mike Shannon:On that point because authentic self, you open the episode talking about authenticity. You talked about mentorship. Part of the c suite perspective, I think, from Dan Dale Deegan is you as a musician as well. So I mentioned if you find him on YouTube, you find guitar videos, not keynote speeches. You can find those too.
Mike Shannon:So just to wrap up the perspective episode here, what role does this musician side of you play in you as an executive? Or is it totally to the side, or do they merge together?
Dan Dal Deegan:They're absolutely intertwined. And it's a great point that you raised, Mike, because every company I've been in since, gosh, probably including Salesforce. Probably my last half of my tenure at Salesforce, we started getting a lot more into music as a function at work, karaoke parties at our off sites Sure. Yeah. Forming a band in the company.
Corey Ferengul:Yep.
Dan Dal Deegan:And what you find is when you form a band I think every company should have a band.
Corey Ferengul:Yep.
Dan Dal Deegan:When I later became CEO of SpringCM, we formed a band. And what it it happens is you start talking to people about music, and you find out that this engineer over here plays the saxophone. It's really good. This this person over here in marketing is a drummer. It's like, we who knew?
Dan Dal Deegan:Like, bring it on. Yeah. Yeah. And you learn all these elements of your teammates' lives. And then once you know that, you start learning some other things about them.
Dan Dal Deegan:And then you get together and you jam and you rehearse and you put on a little show.
Corey Ferengul:Right. Yeah.
Dan Dal Deegan:And then so and then peep everybody else, you know, especially after a few pops, will come up and start doing some karaoke. The the bonding that happens on a team, it could be an athletic team, a business, the whole company, a small division, the bond that you form, especially in these days where you're craving that kind of human interaction and that kind of energy that you can draw from your teammates, it's a great catalyst for it, especially in the COVID generation.
Mike Shannon:Well, as my co founders and I hosted an open mic event for five years out of our offices, you know, we never got here before we were closed.
Dan Dal Deegan:Yeah.
Mike Shannon:I I you're preaching to the choir. So, anyways, wrapping up the c suite perspective with Dan Dal Deegan, man them at the level.
Dan Dal Deegan:Thank you.
Mike Shannon:Thank you so much for coming, Dan.
Dan Dal Deegan:Thank you. Appreciate it, Mike. Thanks, Corey.
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