Rachel Konrad was the Director of Communications for Tesla working directly for Elon Musk and also the CCO for Impossible Foods, helping both companies become household names. She’s now a Lecturer at Stanford Business School and will share her gift for all things communication, including how to inspire and unlock the power of storytelling.
In this power-packed dialogue learn practical tools to craft compelling narratives, delight audiences and disarm challenging people and situations through the power of effective communication.
She talks about the power of STORY-telling and describes a process for building your personal brand. This is a MUST LISTEN for entrepreneurs, coaches or anyone who wants to scale.
I’m Todd Jason by the way, and I did this interview with my former business partner Lauren Weinstein. My work is ALL about helping people get clarity and make game plans that allow them to LIVE THEIR PURPOSE in this crazy world. Come hang / work with me, my door is always open!
Full Episode Transcript:
Rachel: If you have a personal brand, you can get any job you want, really. You can get anyone to give you money. You can get any board membership or appointment or whatever, because you can just always rely on that personal brand.
Todd: Welcome everybody to what is going to be a very powerful episode of untapped today called the superpower of doing what matters.
And I’m Todd Jason, and I’m joined as always by my cohost Lauren Weinstein. And today’s episode is truly near and dear to our hearts because we’re talking about the notion of having, or being connected to, a bigger purpose in our lives and work. So in untapped, we aim to interview the most successful and interesting people that we can find who found some perspective or principle or technique, or even a philosophy that has driven them to experience life at their full capacity that has helped them untap more of their full potential.
Now, today’s guest is Rachel Konrad, who has many superpowers, but the one we’ll focus on is the art of finding a larger mission and then what happens when we allow this to drive our actions. Now, we can learn a lot about her story, her way of viewing success and fulfillment. And I really encourage you as you’re listening to take notes and think about how you can apply this mindset shift in your own life.
So as for Rachel, she started her career as a business reporter writing about the world’s largest industries and then in 2008, she moved into corporate communications working directly for Elon Musk at Tesla. Okay, so we could probably talk a lot about that, but we’re going to stay focused. Later, she took a job with, a stealth mode, synthetic biology startup that we now know as Impossible Foods, where she helped build the team that made Impossible a household name.
Okay, so she’s done a lot of incredible work, and right now she’s teaching a very popular and oversubscribed class at the Stanford school of business called winning writing. And with that, Rachel, we are just so honored and grateful to have you here today and welcome into the conversation.
Rachel: It is so much fun to be here.
Thank you, Todd and Lauren.
Lauren: Thank you. So happy to have you. I know Rachel because she co teaches with my dear friend, Glenn Kramon, another guest on our podcast, and as soon as I met her, I was so struck by how lovely, genuine and authentic she is. So, so happy for you all to get to experience her as well.
And so for our first question, as Todd mentioned, you’ve worked and had a big impact at two of the most game changing companies. Tesla and Impossible Foods, ones focused on creating a better planet for all of us. You’ve shared that it was important for you to use your intellect and capital, everything you’ve been given to make a difference in this world.
It’s why you left a successful career in journalism to join Tesla, because you realized you had more you can contribute. Can you share with us more about the importance for you in having a meaningful mission and why you think we all should?
Rachel: Oh, God. Yeah, that’s a great question, Lauren. So as you guys all know, I’m sure you’ve studied it.
Ikigai is that Japanese word for, life and value and purpose, and I just think it’s essential for everybody to have one, because especially in the corporate world, you’re going to have days or weeks or quarters, or maybe even a year or more, Where it’s really going to be a grind.
It’s just going to be a brutal grind. There’s one going on right now out here in the startup world in Silicon Valley. There’s just very little VC funding going on. And as a result, people are really having a tough time. And if you don’t have that mission that gets you up in the day, that big picture mission, then, you can just get down in the dumps pretty quickly and become dispirited, dejected, depressed, and that just goes into a spiral, right? So I always really encourage everyone, especially entrepreneurs and people in the business world to really articulate your big mission as well as your company’s and, hitch it to something big, whether that’s decarbonizing the atmosphere or, biodiversity, stopping biodiversity collapse or increasing gender equality or eliminating the income gap or eliminating food deserts or whatever it is, increasing access to higher education. Always align your mission and your company’s mission with something bigger, because that’s just what’s going to get you through the really brutal periods.
Lauren: Thank you. What we’re sharing really reminds me of Steve Jobs commencement speech. I was actually in the audience live, uh, that he gave at Stanford and he said when he was fired from Apple, how devastating it was. But what got him back on track to Apple 2. 0 was he still loved what he did. He was still mission and purpose driven, right?
So when you, even during the hard times or the setbacks, if you have a greater purpose, it really gets you through and you have that, that fortitude.
Rachel: Yeah, that’s absolutely it. It can really, it is the only thing that gets you through it. Even money and your status in an organization, whether you’ve reached the VP or SVP or EVP or the C suite that ends up being fairly hollow, but if you feel like you are really working towards something that’s going to improve humanity and keep earth livable and these really big civilization level goals.
Then you’re good. You can get through it.
Lauren: Yeah. And also your career reminds me a little bit of my own and that you keep moving, you keep moving to the next mission. And I found it’s the same for me because I’ll have a lot of energy for something, and when I do, I really go above and beyond and I’m giving my all and I’m successful because of that.
But then often there comes a moment where I’m like, oh, I don’t have as much energy for this, and then I find there’s not as much success. So always being willing to move, I feel like where that juices, because you will excel when you have that energy and passion. Can you share a little bit more about that?
Rachel: Yeah, I think that’s actually really important. My attitude is I don’t want to overstay my welcome. And I want to always be at the highest point of impact. And, and once I’ve sort of reached that, if I ever reach the point at a company where I can legitimately say, look, I can stay another five 20 years, I’m not going to get fired, but I’ve already made my biggest impact at this company that usually means it’s time for me to go.
So in my career, I tend to stay, anywhere from whatever, four or five years, something like three or four or five years. And I do feel like at that point, even if I get another job in the company, it’s kind of like, I’ve done my thing and it’s probably time to move on. Yeah.
Lauren: Makes sense.
I really relate to that. I taught at Stanford for five years and at year five, I was like, I’ve done my impact, like that was it. And then that cycle felt like it completed and I was ready for it for the next thing. And I really saw that looking at your career. As
Rachel: Yeah, I’m that’s really good to hear.
One of the things that I often say to students is, I have very, very few regrets in life, honestly, in my career. But one of them is that I’ve multiple times. I feel like I’ve stayed too long in a position. And I have never regretted leaving too early. So, don’t be surprised if you get to a place and it’s just the wrong fit.
You can leave after even a month or two. It’s okay, but, but don’t overstay because that time, that year or two of extra time that you stay there is really valuable real estate in your career. The average American. Only has about 12 jobs in his or her life 12. That’s not a lot,
And when you think about it, realistically with economic cycles and everything, maybe only, I don’t know, four to six of them will be super high impact , and so you don’t have a lot of, bullets, in the gun, in the revolver
like you, you actually need to be pretty fast moving when it comes to your career and career management.
Lauren: I love that. Yeah, go ahead.
Todd: Yeah, and I think that how to make these transitions is something that we can dive in deeper with you, but I’m actually going to go back for a second and talk about the mission oriented part of what you do, because I think this is really important for us to really understand how you hold it.
Because it, when we talk about, okay, well, I get behind a mission, right? So Tesla had a mission that you got behind an Impossible Foods it’s very easy to understand that those companies are here to change the world and in a very direct way.
Rachel: Yeah.
Todd: How do you, how do you hold their mission? Are you able just to is this something that you’re passionate about before, and then you’re actually looking for someone out there that’s doing it and then like emotionally speaking, cause I think.
It’s one thing to understand this cognitively, but then it’s an emotional thing to be able to use leverage to motivate yourself to get through the sloggy stuff as you mentioned, we have to be connected with that mission. I think there’s an art to that. I’m just curious, how do you do that?
How do you stay connected and use leverage and like the bigger mission as the thing that’s pulling you through the tough moments when it’s also changing over every three to five years?
Rachel: Yeah. So, that’s a great question. I, I’ve been pretty, true to the same mission actually since about 1992.
So, I mean, just remember I was born and raised in Detroit. I’m a student of the auto industry. I applied for a Lee Iacocca fellowship to go to college, right? Like , I’m a real, Detroiter, through and through. And, In 1992, I was in college and I was taking this class called Environmental History of the United States, and we read what was at the time a pretty radical manifesto about global warming and the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelf and things like that.
It was written by the Vice President of the United States, Al Gore. It was Earth in the Balance, right? And, that just really, really opened my eyes to the fact that, my God, my entire way of life in Detroit Is not sustainable, right? It really introduced me to this concept. And, I’m, I love writing.
I always have, I was on my high school newspaper. And so I went into journalism and I covered the Detroit auto industry. I wrote about the General Motors EV1 and their struggles with emissions and the rise of the Toyota Prius, the first like alternative propulsion system. But, I realized pretty quickly after, years covering the auto industry that like, man, there’s got to be a better way here instead of being an objective observer, like a bystander covering, the auto industry and having to quote climate deniers and stuff, right?
Because you got to have two sides to every story in journalism. I realized, you know what? I will have more impact applying the writing and communication skills I’ve gotten inside of a company. And so I applied to Tesla. I sent them an email to the VP of sales and literally within like three minutes, I got a response saying, Hey, can you come in tomorrow and do an interview?
And so I did. And so that the mission of Tesla of just completely blitzing Detroit and the old status quo incumbent internal combustion engine hegemony really appealed to me. And then over the course of my career, I realized it’s not enough just to decarbonize the auto industry. That’s important and don’t get me wrong, I only drive electric cars powered by our solar panels. But at the same time, You know what you eat the clothes you wear all of this other stuff also contributes, right? So anytime there is a CEO and a company that is really, really interested in decarbonizing can have a significant impact on the planet.
I’m interested, right? And and that’s how I met Pat Brown at Impossible Foods, we were at the time at COP 21 in Paris, the big environmental conference, and he was like, Rachel, you’ve done a great job, you’ve personally helped contribute to the shift towards zero emission vehicles, but nobody’s talking about the impact of animal agriculture, which is actually more than the impact of every, Internal combustion engine, car, truck, ship, rocket, train, et cetera.
And I was like, what? There’s just no way that’s true. And I went home and I did some diligence and it turned out he was right, and so I, we moved and I ended up working directly for Pat for five years at Impossible Foods. So, it’s something that’s always motivated me.
Todd: Well, yeah, you’re clearly mission driven, and I love getting your backstory, because it’s I can see you like in the early 90s reading this me like, ah, like you, you found this thing, and then your career has been dictated by this passion that you have and it’s wonderful,
and it’s very inspiring to hear. If somebody doesn’t have that. Kind of built in passion or that moment or that lightning rod moment that you had, and they’re just at some job or they’re in their career and they’re doing well,
what do you say to those people? What does having that deeper sense of mission do? Like why is it potentially worth finding that?
Rachel: Yeah, I would argue that most people have the, the spark, but they might choose to suppress it for whatever reason, I just can’t emphasize to you that 1992 moment of getting assigned to read this book and realizing everything I was brought up with is almost, it’s not just a lie
it’s ruining our planet, right? That Lee Iacocca fellowship that I applied for was like probably the most disgusting, vile thing I could have done. I had no idea, it was really like, Somebody telling me the truth for the first time. And people have these revelations all the time.
They just choose to suppress it. Well, I can’t because I’ve got this stable career. I can’t leave the money or the position, or I can’t move from the suburb. It’s a high cost place, and if I get the job that I really want at a nonprofit or in an academic situation, I I’m just not going to be able to live the lifestyle, right?
So Let’s be clear that people actually do have these revelations, but they choose to suppress it. If you have kids, almost every >kid>, some point between age, like five and 10, they realize it is. Oh my god. You mean, like, when I eat chicken, that’s Big Bird, or that piece of hamburger that I ate was a, an actual cow that I saw in the fields the other day?
But they choose to suppress it then, right? Or their parents are like, don’t worry honey, just, you need your protein or whatever, you need to be open to those moments. And when they happen, and they do happen to everyone, you really need To listen and do a gut check. It might be that because of your, college loans or your family responsibilities or whatever, you can’t actually act on it right now, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to it and think about how you could iterate and maybe five years later when your kid graduates from college or whatever, you could be in a different position, right?
But I would argue that most people do have these sparks. They just choose to very quickly throw water on them.
Lauren: I love what you’re saying. It’s reminding me of another guest we had, Bill Burnett. Who wrote the book, Designing Your Life. Exactly. And he says, I want you to imagine your fantastic life, like money’s not an object, nobody’s going to have any perception of you,
what would you do? And then people like, I’m an author, I’m an artist, I’m like speaking on stage, whatever it is. And so you, to your point, like, I think we have that secret desire. But we very quickly squash it. Well, I couldn’t, or how would I make money? Or I don’t know how to get there. But when you really take the constraints off, I think there is that thing that we’re so passionate about.
Rachel: Yeah, exactly. Like when I went into journalism, just again, I went to college, um, and I studied journalism and then I got into a series of journalism jobs, and ultimately, I was like, you know, the bureau chief at the Associated Press, the at the time, world’s largest news organization in Silicon Valley.
And I thought, wow. For a journalist, I probably have the best job on the West Coast. And even though I’m totally bored and I’m like really, really eager to get out, I can’t leave because if I leave, 30 really qualified journalists are going to apply to it. I shouldn’t leave for that reason. And oh my God, I had college loans and my parents wanted me to be a journalist, I shouldn’t leave, right? But again, I go back to this thing. One of the very few regrets in my life is that I’ve, I, I should have left sooner. I should have left that job sooner. I could have taken two, three, four years and applied them to other interesting startups in the world of decarbonization. I mean, my God, that would be incredible.
But I didn’t. And for a bunch of stupid reasons, ultimately, most people when they have these sparks and , they extinguish them. It’s actually for good reason. Again you need the money, you gotta pay off loans, or the mortgage, or the kid’s college tuition, or whatever. And I get that.
But, you should still listen to that. And is there some way you can take that spark, that desire, and reapply it somewhere else?
Todd: I really love that. Because I think listening to this, it gets me fired up. , like how clear am I around the embodiment, and the actualization of my real mission?
How much am I really doing that? And I think you’re such a stand for that. It’s courageous, right? It takes courage, to even admit that there’s something more here. That’s why we’re doing this podcast called untapped because we’re wanting to actually understand our true selves and to actually have that be untapped, which really requires some level of self awareness and just honesty, like looking at ourselves in the mirror and like saying, hey, this is what I’m really for.
But I also love that you’re measured, meaning that, well, you probably can’t do it all right away,? So you need to be able to step into this new mission or you need to keep it alive. You need to keep the fire attended to some extent. How would you, recommend navigating that process to somebody,
let’s say they’re in a job, they have kids, , they have everything set up, but there really is something else that they may want to do, or a larger interest. You Are there certain things that they can do specifically to tend that fire, or the ways that you’ve done that? Because, hearing you, it’s interesting, like in retrospect, you’re always like, man, I should have just done it faster,
I had all the excuses that didn’t matter. That’s the wisdom here. But, as we’re in it, it’s not so easy for us to see, being able to take that leap. So how do you recommend people slowly but steadily head towards that more important leap?
Rachel: Well, one, one way to do that is to take your skills, whether you’re, if you’re in finance or you’re biz dev or sales or comms and marketing or whatever.
And let’s say you’re at some big incumbent industry and it doesn’t really attach to your mission anymore, right? You can keep that job, keep earning the money and apply to, boards of nonprofits, right for example. You could apply to, you can talk to startup founders, right? They will suck you dry of information,
They want to meet with you, they want to do half hour Zoom calls, etc. And again, whether you’re in finance or marketing or sales, or it doesn’t really matter, you can actually apply those skills into a field that’s closer to what turns you on right to your mission. And whether that’s in climate tech or like I mentioned, equal access to higher education or, gender equality or whatever.
You, you can apply that to those disciplines pretty easily. Again, boards, volunteer organizations, and then just helping entrepreneurs. They’re really keen to, to talk to people who’ve been, who are five, ten years ahead of them in the career progression.
Lauren: I think one fear that people have is what if I’m not successful?
And you’ve actually worked with two people, Elon Musk and Pat Brown, huge success, with their missions. What can we learn from them? What would you say they’re doing that others aren’t or that we can apply to have more success with our own missions?
Rachel: Yeah, I would say that the secret to both Pat and Elon is that, it’s two things, really.
Number one is that they completely reject cynics. There’s gonna be haters and complete jackasses, and cynics who just don’t want you to succeed, and they reject that. That’s not to say they don’t listen to consumer demand, listen to surveys, listen to, actual real feedback from investors and stuff,
they do. But when there’s a cynic, a true disbeliever, they’re just like, I just don’t have time for them. And they just, they don’t let the haters get them down. And it’s really inspiring. That’s one. And then the other thing is that they plan long.
Like Elon ultimately is planning to have a Martian colony that’s going to be one, two, three generations beyond his, so think about the long game. One of the things that I always talk to my students about is, right now, if you’re at Stanford Business School, you’re 25, 30 years old,
you have very good odds of living to literally 2099. Okay. So think of yourself on your death bed and you’re a hundred years old, roughly. What do you want to have accomplished? Think long term and don’t think about it just like I want to get a 15 percent promotion this year and that year.
But think really long. The long arc of your career, and even the long arc of multi generational, space travel or whatever, and tie your mission to that. So it’s those two things, reject cynicism. And then plan long. Also, the other thing tactically about both of them is that they’re both very good communicators.
They can inspire people, they can lead a mission, they are really excellent, authentic communicators.
Lauren: Just to prove your point too, it’s reminding me of Taylor Swift, actually, right? Because she had a time where people really hated her and vilified her, but she had such thick skin. She really drowned that out and came back and, you know, the shake it off, the haters.
Rachel: Yeah, exactly. In fact, I actually play, uh, shake it off in, uh, in whenever I’m doing crisis, communications work with companies, I, I play shake it off, you know, like it really, it shocks me every time I go into a executive coaching kind of thing with someone or consulting and they’re like, well, I was reading the comments, you know, and I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You know, why are you reading the comments on X or, you know, Reddit subthreads, right? Like you got to focus on the big picture again, plan long, give us that mission and then let the haters hate. They’re going to hate. That’s what they do. My attitude is like, haters are my motivators,
I love when the haters really cast, aspersions and cynicism and debunking them with facts, but debunking them, but for, for Pat and Elon, I think they need people like me around them who can do this sort of, you know, tactical ground warfare, but they are, they just don’t even pay any attention to them.
And, and it’s, it’s really inspiring.
Lauren: That strikes me. Oh, well, just a quick, one thing that strikes me about you is you really bring a, a lightheartedness and a play to this too. Like you say, I’m listening to Taylor Swift, shake it off. Right? So it’s not like I have a mission and it’s so serious. You are serious and committed, but I think you also bring levity and play and can you I think that is very important. Can you share just a little bit more about your own approach?
Rachel: Oh, yeah, I think first of all, I think that’s kind of my nature, right? I definitely don’t take myself too seriously. But I try to, split the difference here between being lighthearted, but not lightweight, right?
So I want to have a big mission. I want to know all the facts, but sometimes, you just got to laugh, right? You just, you really have to. And I really, in my career, one of the things that I always look for is, the mission has to be , something I’m really passionate about.
And then after that, I try to find a team of people that when I’m doing the job interviews, who I know I’m going to be able to laugh with, cause we’re going to be going on business trips, we’re going to be really dealing with like 2am crises and things like that. And you know, major, major, lobbying groups coming after you and trying to cut you down and creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt about your product and your mission.
And so you want people who, can really laugh with you and celebrate the wins.
Todd: Yeah, and does that, um, also come into play with belief and conviction? And I’m asking because when Elon started Tesla, it was in 2008, I believe, like right during the financial crisis. And I think Goldman and Lehman were like, you know, he’s crazy to start this right now.
And even he said at some point that he had like a 10 percent chance of being successful with Tesla. Um, so in addition to kind of leaving the cynics behind, right, and, and some of the other advice they’ve given being lighthearted. What about belief and conviction in oneself or in one’s product? Like how much does that come into play?
Is that something that you’ve just found the best leaders that naturally do, or you do yourself? Or is this something that can also be cultivated in some ways?
Rachel: That’s a really good question. I want to just emphasize, I don’t think that Elon or Pat, they don’t have, Blind conviction or blind belief in something at all.
It’s really quite rational and reasonable, right? When I first met Elon, he said, Rachel, let’s just be really clear here. The odds are really stacked against us, and there’s probably about a 90, 95 percent chance that Tesla will fail. And I was like, good Lord, that’s thanks for the upbeat, inspo there, Elon.
And but If we just leave it to the, vile, gross polluting, incumbent, smokestack industry, auto, auto sector, there is a 100 percent chance that they will catapult us into a complete carbon crisis and civilization cannot continue with any reasonable quality of life. Oh, wow. Okay.
So in that kind of scenario, what are you going to choose? I’ll take the long odds any day because the, I think a lot of people believe that the status quo of incumbent industries is actually more sustainable. It’s not. It’s especially when it comes to climate change and our biodiversity crisis.
Just doing the same old, same old is actually the riskiest thing you can possibly do. Same thing with Pat, right? If we continue to rely on animals to make our protein, we’re screwed as a civilization. We’ve already used more than a third, almost half of the Earth’s land mass for animal agriculture,
mostly cows. And if somebody came here from Mars and looked at our planet, they would think we live on planet of the cows, and as a result, in all of the places that cows live, pasture land and everything else, we can’t have any native biodiversity, any Flora and fauna that are the native ecosystems
and because of that, we’re in a late stage biodiversity collapse. We are in the sixth extinction, right? And it’s largely because of what we eat. And so Pat understands that and he knows that there will be an inevitable transition to synthetic biology or some kind of non animal based agriculture. It’s just his job to accelerate that transition by a few decades or something in order to make the transition as harmonious as possible, right?
So they really don’t have blind belief and conviction, it’s almost like they have this sense, that what they’re doing is inevitable, it’s just their job to accelerate that inevitable transition by, I don’t know, 5, 10, 20 years.
Lauren: And what would you say helps them be successful in that? You mentioned in the face of critics, but what, like, what are they doing in particular that gives them that vision and then that ability to execute on it?
Rachel: Well, I would say, Elon in particular, I mean, obviously he’s a brilliant applied physicist and stuff like that.
And he’s a great fundraiser and all of that. But I would say that his superpower is that he can see 5 to 10 moves ahead on the chessboard, right? And so he doesn’t really live in today’s reality. He really lives, a few moves out, right? It’s very analogous to today, right? Like we’re in a total VC liquidity freeze, right?
The venture capitalists here on Sand Hill Road and Menlo Park, they really are, Investing very little. Same thing happened back in 2008. It was the Lehman Brothers liquidity crisis. The VCs, all of the doors on Sand Hill Road were bolted shut, and Elon very quickly realized that there would not be another round of venture capital.
And so we at one point had less than 24 hours of runway before literally like he couldn’t pay payroll, and I’ve been in, Companies that were, pretty tight, but not that tight. And, so he invested his own like 45 million from his PayPal windfall. And then we, which is nothing in the world of auto industry.
That is like pennies. And then we started applying for a federal low interest loan from the Department of Energy, and we ended up getting that. It was 465 million. And that’s what got us to start producing the Model S sedan, which really changed the fortunes of the company, it was because he knew like in this downturn, VCs are not going to invest in an electric car company.
And we’re in the exact same thing where it’s I talked to so many entrepreneurs who are like, I’m spending all of my time fundraising and, I just keep getting no. And it’s like, yeah, you’re not going to get a yes at this point. When you go into this VC trough, when you come back, they don’t invest in the stuff that they invested the last cycle, right?
They never, never. So you’re on your own and you can either get to cash flow break even and profitability, or you can try to get some alternative funding source like a federal low interest loan or, I don’t know, some grant or something like that from a state or university, but that’s really all you got.
And Elon was just uniquely the master of seeing That this is the state of play and so we got to get ahead of it. And I just felt like being part of Tesla back in the day, 2008 to 2011, it was almost like Elon’s taking all of us across these bridges. And as soon as we cross, it’s just burned.
It’s just completely up in flames. And we do that over and over and over. So it’s like really being able to see a couple of steps ahead of every other player.
Todd: Yeah, I I really love also what you said before around how some of these visionaries that we look out and you say, well, how do they do that?
It’s not really their visionary. They just, they know that something is inevitable and they’re just trying to do it faster. And, in coaching for 20 years, I tend to find that we all have something like that.
Something that we uniquely can see. Or know or understand that it’s inherent to us, whether it’s our upbringing, whether it’s what we were trained in, just our wiring, who knows why. And it doesn’t have to be necessarily in business or what Elon Musk sees. It could be sometimes in relationships. It could be just in a way to get something done faster or better.
It could be a skill and mastery and interpersonal communication. There’s so many different ways that it can play out. And that’s why we started this podcast was to help people to hear your story and to help them understand that, wow, like. We all do have some way that we understand as being inevitable, but we have to be brave enough to own that and say, yes, like there are things that I’m great at.
And I’m willing to go ahead and take the risk to do that. And I love how you’re sharing it. My next question though, is around, um, you talk a lot about the power of succinctly being able to express your one’s mission statement, right? Or your purpose and that there’s real power in being able to condense it into a sentence or two sentences.
Talk a little bit about that. Like, why is that so powerful? And how do we get better at that?
Rachel: Yeah, so I teach, the class that Glenn Kramon famously started 10 years ago, and I don’t pretend to be the master at that. He really changed the game for communications and writing at Stanford with that class.
I just kind glommed on to it. But one of the things that I do is I teach a class within winning writing, on personal branding. And I think it’s really important to think about your personal brand. Most people in the world, including senior executives, do not think about their personal brand.
And that gives a huge advantage to people who do put a little time into it. And so what I do is I break it down into three legs of the stool, and, the first one is; what is your dominant personality trait? Like maybe you’re super shy, introverted, maybe you’re the class clown.
Maybe you’re the provocateur, maybe you’re the middle child who’s just like quiet, but needs to solve problems and be the peacemaker . I don’t know what it is, you pretty much usually have one. It’s often like what your siblings say about you, What kids your friends in high school wrote in your high school yearbook, that kind of thing, right?
It’s your dominant personality trait. And number two is I call it your professional spike. What can you uniquely do better than anyone else? Or most people, let’s say in your ecosystem. Maybe you’re just like really good at aligning the right Influencers with the right companies and marketing campaigns,
finance, right? And tax code and accounting and stuff like that. Or, maybe you’re just, you’re really diligent about legal contracts. You do not let anything fall through the cracks. What’s your professional spike? That’s number two. And then the third thing, this is really important, is what motivates you?
Like for me, it’s biodiversity collapse, and our carbon crisis for other people. It’s public health for some people. It’s fashion, it’s education. And your personal brand is some combination of those three things. So I asked students on the first day of class like
their first assignment is to rewrite your LinkedIn bio. And not the CV that goes really deep into every single year that when you work where, but the about section. And give me a sense of those three things. and tell me a story while you’re doing it, right? It’s hard if people, once people realize that they’re like, oof, but that is essentially your personal brand.
And if you have a personal brand, you can get any job you want, really. You can get anyone to give you money. You can get any board membership or appointment or whatever, because you can just always rely on that personal brand. Elon has one,
Pat has one. Everyone I’ve worked for, I helped develop it for them, right? And that ends up becoming a real workhorse for your career.
Lauren: I love that. Would you mind giving us an example of yours or Elon or Pat so we could see how it all comes together?
Rachel: Yeah, sure. So I, spent the last two years working for this guy named Dave Friedberg.
He’s a venture capitalist. He has a very successful podcast. It’s 4 million users and, and he’s become a real, household name amongst business, business professionals as a result. And I would say that his three traits are, number one, he is an extreme optimist. This guy can look at any issue and figure out some kind of interesting way to you know, turn it into a value add for the business, for his family, for America, for the world, right?
It’s really an unusual trait. Number two, he’s, they call him on his podcast, the sultan of science, right? He is an astrophysics Kid from Cal Berkeley. He loves anything related to molecular biochemistry. Astrology, astronomy, you know, astrophysics, any like, he’s just a science guy. He’s amazing. So call him the sultan of science.
And then the third thing is, the He really believes profoundly in the power of entrepreneurship and capitalism to help save the planet. And he, we call him as a result, the adventure capitalist, right? Because he really believes that we can use the power of businesses, um, and capitalism to get stuff done that frankly government has, has failed to do, like help, mitigate the carbon crisis and things like that.
So those are his and everyone I work with for I, mentally come up with that and I go over it with them and, you know, I, I use that in order to get them more, podcasts and media appearances and to get them the right kind of, um, you know, external messaging to figure out how to get them to the right panel discussions and conferences and things like that.
So again, it can be really, really powerful.
Todd: What I found so powerful about that is, did you hear what she was sharing that like at each and each of the three traits, like, oh, they call him the Sultan of science. Yeah. Like it’s, it’s so powerful, like to be able to think that clearly around oneself where almost like a tagline comes about for that trait.
That you actually can then use and it’s so clear who you are and what you stand for and what you’re good at and what motivates you to the world that everything else just flows in. Is that, is that accurate? Like you’re creating such a clear communication around who you are and what you do that everyone could just understand it and whatever needs to happen business wise or personally just ends up happening.
Rachel: 100 percent Yeah, that’s it’s a lot simpler than you think, right? I mean, I’m not the sultan of science. I’m not getting deep on the biochemistry, right? but I’m the storyteller, right? And so stories, as everybody here probably knows you, they always work in threes, right? I do the same thing for product communications, right?
So when I was at Impossible Foods, the Impossible Burger, yeah, you could say, oh, there’s this synthetic biology component, and there’s this animal welfare component, blah, blah, blah. No. It’s three things. It’s delicious, it’s nutritious, and it’s sustainable. That’s it. And I would literally create a pie of three pieces delicious, nutritious, sustainable, and I would tell Pat or whoever is going on stage like at this event.
It’s a group of 150 chefs in the audience. So we’re going to dial up the, delicious aspect. We’re going to talk about how it’s the veggie burger that bleeds and it’s super unctuous and high umami and the most important chefs in the world eat it. And for this audience, we’re really not going to talk at all about sustainability or nutrition.
And then, he would go down the street and go to a conference of, medical professionals, and it would all be about nutrition. Animal meat is the most toxic thing you can do for your body. It’s considered a carcinogen by world health organizations and you shouldn’t eat it, et cetera, right?
Here’s, the relative benefits of our product, which has zero cholesterol, et cetera. So literally you just do that, three different character types, for people, for products, for companies, for corporate brands as well. It’s very powerful.
Lauren: Really, really what you’re getting at is the storytelling.
It’s the story that you’re telling because we’re really wired for a story and you’ve touched on this, I’m wondering more directly, like what makes for a great story? What makes it clear? And also what really inspires us and gets us to take action, would you say?
Rachel: So I have a slide that I present to students and to business executives about how to have a great mission and how to tell a great story.
And it’s an acronym. And I don’t know if I can swear on this show, but it’s SHIT. That’s the acronym. And the first one is S. So it stands for simple. Every story must be simple. And by the way, the more complex the technology is, the simpler it has to be. That’s often very hard. , H. Means heroic.
Every story must have a hero and a villain. And maybe it’s your CEO who’s the hero. Maybe it’s your customer who’s the hero. Maybe it’s your product that’s saving people from cancer. But there’s always got to be a hero and then there’s always got to be a villain. So it’s the vile, awful incumbents.
It’s, lack of awareness. It’s, some fear uncertainty and doubt group that’s trying to, make your product seem unappealing. It’s a lobbying firm. It’s whatever. And then I, that stands for inevitable. You actually want to be part of a trend that inevitably will shift.
You don’t want to be on the wrong side of history. You don’t want to be, defending big tobacco when we know that it causes cancer, like there’s going to be an inevitable shift you’re just trying to accelerate something that’s already going to happen That’s the real flywheel and then T is timely And especially when it comes to corporate communications and marketing social media, etc It’s got to be timely, right?
You need to have a sense of news jacking,? So if Donald Trump or Joe Biden or whoever says something, you want to glom onto that immediately and talk about how your product is also X, Y, or Z, or it’s not X, Y, Z, or whatever, right? When, Back in the previous election, there was a, like a 24 hour news cycle when Donald Trump was said something like, they’re trying to take away your hamburgers.
And I was like, Oh, thank God, this is amazing. This is a gift, right? So you got to use that. So basically, this is how you’re, you make your company the shit. And it’s actually very simple. So yeah, but most people, they fail somewhere in there. Engineers and scientists, they can’t even do simple,
they get really stuck on explaining the science, or some people who were raised to think I got to be a renegade. And it’s , actually it’s the opposite. You want to do what’s inevitably going to happen, right? So most problems come from inability to follow the shit rule.
Todd: Really love this. You know, the theme of like, there’s things that are inevitable that we each have a sense to and I hope that everyone that’s listening to this can get a sense for what they intuitively know, for whatever reason, and really start to focus on that. And then also what motivates them, like adding those two things in together, right?
Just seems so powerful. I also love how before, um, You talked about thinking over the long term and how some of these great leaders and visionaries are thinking not just, you know, five years, 10 years, but, you know, a hundred years out, 200 years out, five generations out, right. And how that starts to relieve a lot of these short term pressures that we’re all under.
Cause we really are living in a culture, I think we can all agree that there’s a pandemic of just focusing on like the very, very short term. Uh, which creates the survival mechanism. But to bust through that, we really do need to kind of like get over that hump and then really start thinking over the big picture, which can enable us to foster some real change and to untap more of our purpose and our potential.
And so we’re almost at our time here. I have one last question for you. And then you’re generously, uh, said that you would stick around for a question or two. So for those of us in our live audience, you have a question. Definitely. We’re probably only get to one or two, maybe. So, um, think of that for Rachel, but I’m curious.
Um, what you might say to your younger self, like who might be listening in some dimension right now, what advice you would give yourself from, let’s say, 20 or 30 years ago, things that you’ve learned, you know, in this beautiful journey that you’ve been on that might even help you accelerate and get there faster.
What would you say?
Rachel: I would say stop worrying about it, Rachel, right? I mean, I don’t feel like I was very fretful person, but honestly, the stupid bullshit that I worried about, I just like, why did that occupy my brain at all? Right? You know, um, I would also say as, you know, this is a theme that you’re going to hear, hear me talk about is, um, get out.
get out sooner, right? Just move on. If you’re not happy, if there’s no mission, if you don’t have co workers who you really love, who you want to crawl through that foxhole under barbed wire with, just get out. It’s okay. I actually have a friend who’s a very senior person in HR and she, like, sometimes she’ll take jobs for a month or two just to kind of try it out.
She doesn’t like it. She doesn’t ever put it on LinkedIn. You don’t have to worry about it, right? Just leave, you know? And it, the time that you spend in a job that is not making you happy is much better spent getting a job that makes you happy or investigating what jobs will make you happy or actually working in the job that makes you happy.
Lauren: Amen. That’s personally resonant with me. Uh, one last question that I think is really important is so much can happen in our personal lives or with our companies that really throw us off balance, right? Like there’s crises that hit, internal, external. You’re so good at crisis communication. That was a big part of your role.
So when something happens, we’re faced with crisis or thrown off balance, what would you say is the best way that we can handle that?
Rachel: That’s a really good question. I mean, I think that if you’re, if you’re in the C suite in a company, right, if you’re pretty senior and a crisis hits, um, I, I actually think you have to spend some time on it.
Right. And, and one of the things that Pat Brown and I talked a lot about is I designed my job so that 50 percent of the time doing crisis communication. Right, because if you’re truly a disruptive company and you’re trying to disrupt animal agriculture, right, a 2 trillion market with the world’s biggest lobbying firm, the U.
S. Cattlemen’s Association, trying to defend it, right, you should expect the incumbent industry to come back with you, to you. And, and try to stamp out this existential threat. So you’re going to be in crisis mode. You know, we also had multiple GMOs in our product, et cetera. Right. So, so I always have had personally, I always try to have a relatively small team and people, you know, you know, one or two deputies who I just would really kill for, um, so that I can hand it off and deal with some urgent threat.
You know, we had the U S cattlemen’s association that funded a Super Bowl ad against plant based meat, and I found out 24 hours in advance, right? What am I going to do? If I’m dealing with meetings, and I have all these other board calls and investor meetings, I can’t deal with it, right? But if I’ve designed my job to handle crisis, um, because I’m at a disruptive company, then then I can do it.
And, and Pat was the same. He was always willing to, I mean, I’ve had to call him at 2 AM and, you know, can you look at this Google doc? I got to go live with this. It’s going to be on Bloomberg at 3 AM. East West coast time, et cetera. Right. So I just think crises are just that it’s an existential threat to your business.
And if you don’t take it seriously, if you kind of try to just outsource it to someone else, you’re screwed. It’s game over.
Lauren: I’m curious, how did you handle that? So I’m guessing you stay calm, like you accept it’s happening, you stay calm, and then what? Like, how did you handle that Super Bowl ad?
Rachel: Oh, the Super Bowl ad was like one of my most fun campaigns ever.
We actually created, within 24 hours, a parody Super Bowl ad of their of the plant based meat companies. I’ll send it to you. Um, so, you know, we used humor to deflect that one and we actually created a complete satirical send up of their ad. And whenever that ad that the cattlemen’s industry ad ran, we would we would inject ours in social media circles so that people could understand that this
cattleman’s ad is bullshit, literally. Um, and ours is the truth. Here, go to this website. And it was hilarious. I’ll send it to you guys. You will love it. Please, would love to see.
Todd: So good. I mean, uh, so much. So much gem. I mean, I think your clarity, you know, um, and the inspiration to just, like, do what we know we need to do just comes through so clearly and just to take action.
And if we’re not happy, we move. I mean, it’s just so resonant for what we’re trying to do here. And so we’re, Rachel really kind of at the end of our official time at the end, we’re going to maybe see if there’s a question or two from our live audience here, but we just want to both thank you. Um, you know,
Rachel: for the, what about when you’re
Todd: doing in the world, like you’re out there, like making big change, right?
Like you’re taking on the big, the big stuff. And like, just to be in your field, just to be with you is like, so inspiring. Like it makes me want to think bigger, like makes me want to think. What are we really here to do to get bigger and stronger? And so your message is just so, it’s an amplifying effect.
And I just want to really honor what you’re doing and for taking the time to be here with us. Thank you.
Rachel: Well, and, and wait, I want to honor what you guys are doing because I’ve thought a lot about this and I’ve spent like 15 years of my career really trying to scale up, you know, the sustainable low carbon, uh, technology that will replace the big, you know, high carbon unsustainable technology.
Right. And I do think that that is one way that you can affect change. But frankly, I think that there’s another way, which is through one on one communications, including teaching, including counseling, advising, doing exactly what you’re doing. You know, uh, Vinod Khosla, who’s a real mentor of mine, uh, you know, very famous venture capitalist who invested in Impossible Foods and others, huge bets, right, on fusion energy and synthetic biology and all, I mean, he’s incredible.
He’s one of the first investors in Open AI five years ago. And, he says that the way that we’re going to get out of this carbon crisis is, we find and train like six to 10 more entrepreneurs who will be like Elon and have that kind of level of impact. And when I heard him say that, I was like, actually, you could be right. So enabling people to figure out what their true calling is and going for it is actually might be the highest impact of all.
