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- [00:01]
A
This is mission.org.
- [00:05]
B
What is one mind? What are you building?
- [00:07]
A
We are building superhumans for go to market. It is a face, voice, and a go to market brain in the form of a virtual AI that has empathy and can understand the buyers. And she does that so well. So if you're dry, she's going to be dry. If you want to lean in and you want to be funny, she's going to inject humor.
- [00:24]
B
So wild. Where did this idea come from?
- [00:26]
A
The best categories are built on a fundamental thesis that the majority rejects. Am I going to rent my house out to a stranger for Airbnb? Am I going to get in a self driving car? No. These were all like, absolutely, positively most of us. No. Not doing this.
- [00:40]
B
How should marketers be thinking right now? What should they be training themselves on to stay relevant?
- [00:45]
A
I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think everybody should be thinking about.
- [00:52]
B
Amanda. Welcome to Marketing Trends.
- [00:54]
A
Thanks, Stephanie, for having me. Excited to be here.
- [00:56]
B
I'm excited. I don't know if you know this, I think I told you this back in the day, but you are my first official Marketing Trends guests ever.
- [01:04]
A
Ah. How did I get so lucky?
- [01:06]
B
I know there was some, like, reschedules, and I was like, I told Amanda back in the day she would be my first. And then people started getting booked in between you, and then all of them got shifted because of the holidays. So I'm really excited to have you on here. I know when we connected, I was just, like, enthralled by your story, all the stories you were telling me, all your background. I'm like, we need to get you more exposure, the company you're building. And so to start this interview, I wanted to ask you, if I went to your former colleagues, your friends, people that you surround yourself with every day, and I said, who is Amanda? What would they say about you?
- [01:36]
A
Ooh, that is such a good question. And I did not have this prep. So the first thing I think of. So this is how I describe myself. I got really clear on my personal mission statement, and I think it embodies who I am. Is I like to say I'm a passionate, positive, spiritual warrior to empower women and girls. So I think if you ask the people closest to me, they would definitely say I'm passionate. I am 99.9% positive. We're not all always, but my set point is pretty high. And I'm always on a mission. So I think that's what they'd say about Amanda. And I'll break down walls. I'LL make things happen.
- [02:14]
B
I love that. Okay. And then what about former colleagues and people you maybe early days at Sixth Sense? What would they say about you?
- [02:21]
A
I think they would say I have quite a bit of empathy. Like I truly care about people at my core. I think I'm always thinking about the human side of it, which is interesting. As I go out and try to build human replicas in the form of AI, I'm always thinking about how to inject humanity and empathy into the experience. So I think you would find most people would say that. Some people would say that I'm probably ruthless and quick and we'll make tough decisions, which sometimes can be hard. But I'm always trying to put the company first before myself and before the team. So that's, you know, can be difficult and I'll make difficult decisions as needed.
- [03:04]
B
So why we connected in the, you know, on our first time we met was around these unconventional marketing strategies that you were just telling me, like snippets of, like, here's what I did at 6 cents and here's how I, you know, started that company. And so I'd love for you to maybe back up again, go into your background, like, where did you start? Tell me, like the audience a bit about six Sense and then some of your strategies throughout that, like, informed where that company got to today.
- [03:30]
A
Yeah. So if I'm going to tell the sixth sense story, I have to go back before 6 cents and tell how it got started and how I got started on my journey. So I grew up below the poverty line, lived in 22 houses before I was 18. And I'll never forget the day that I basically graduated college and I was walking down a blockbuster with my oldest brother. And he said, what are you going to do now that you're done? And I had a journalism degree and before I could get a word out, he said, oh, you'd be lucky if you were a telemarketer. And that really pissed me off and I didn't have a chance to respond. And in my heart of heart and in my gut, I felt I got to prove him wrong. And then that's when a year later, I started my first company. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. So I started my first company company which is just was a services, a healthy lifestyle business services company that went on for 16 years. And Six Sense got started from the idea I was working with Cisco and HP and intel and other big enterprise companies and we were looking back on data and doing analytics and I had a thesis that was Instead of looking backward, what if we could look forward? What if we could look at patterns of companies that buy from Cisco and then when other companies are exhibiting the same pattern, could I predict that they're in market? That's where six Sense was born. On the thesis of intent data that we can look at intent and look at signals and determine when companies were in market. So then went out and sought venture funding. Sixth Sense started, came to life and yeah, so that was the story of six Sense and how it got started and was on a mission to bring abm Intent data and AI. You know, before AI was a thing, it's a new hot thing in a different way. But 12 years ago it was using AI for sales and marketing.
- [05:16]
B
Okay, and then when did you start 6sense?
- [05:18]
A
2012. 2013 is when we officially formed. But I was starting to build the company and the thesis and going out fundraising in 2012.
- [05:27]
B
And what was fundraising like for? I mean to me that's like, especially when it came out, it was so cutting edge. I mean now I know there's so many competitors and everyone's kind of figured it out because you all figured it out. But back then trying to what was raising money, especially as a woman like back then.
- [05:40]
A
Hard. Very hard. Yeah, very, very, very hard. Yeah. I think, I look back now and I think if somebody told me how hard it was going to be and what the journey I was going to go on, I wouldn't have done it. I think I probably would have said no, that's not for me. I'm going to stay on the easy path because I had a healthy lifestyle business that I was living across the world and I would hire really smart consultants and, and IT managers to help deliver the projects that I would go source from these big companies. I had 66 VC meetings, 22 all partner meetings before I was able to raise for 6 cents and kept thinking I would be at the finish line and realized that, you know, I didn't have, I didn't fully have the right team behind me. And then I acquired a YC company who became my co founders. And soon after we had multiple term sheets. So it was a combination of, we had, you know, let's call it 9 out of 10 of the boxes to check. But you really have to have all 10 in order to raise the money. And so I always say that when people come to me with ideas and they're going to do something, it's the idea isn't enough, the market isn't enough, the technology, the team isn't enough. You have to have all of it combined. And that's why I got so excited about what I'm doing now is I just knew what we had, I had all the boxes and this was going to work at least. I still believe strongly that one mind is, is off on a really incredible journey. That very different world than when I was raising for 6 cents. But yeah, it was incredibly difficult.
- [07:06]
B
Okay, so early days, Sixth Sense, building something. I mean you guys created an entire category. So probably hard to explain what you were doing. What were some of the tactics that you did and you and your team did to get exposure for this brand new concept.
- [07:19]
A
Yeah, I had a thesis that it was, I knew we were out there, everyone was doing things and like building their lead gen and their pipeline. It was all about the individuals and how can we get a new lead, a new individual that would come into our pipeline and fill from the top to the bottom. And I was trying to get people to think about things differently from a buying center and an account based perspective and use intent data and use this idea of signal and somebody actually having a need and timing being important. So my thesis and what we did with the marketing team was always the line of go big or go home. So we had raised a considerable amount of money at the time. So we raised 12 million for our series A. Um, we didn't have a seed round because I had built, you know, the, the basis of the product on my consulting business. So uniquely like other companies, you know, One mind, we have raised a seed round and I've done it the traditional way. But at Six Sense we didn't. And you know, we would, I would double down like at the Serious Decisions event we would be the number one sponsor as if we were a massive company. And then we would do no other small booths, like we're not going to do the salesforce, little teeny booth. We're going to do everything we do, we're going to do big. And that worked for us. People thought, oh, who is this new kid on the block? They must be somebody because they have this massive presence everywhere we went. And then there was tactical little guerrilla marketing things that I would do. When we would send out a press release, I'd make sure I tag all of the influencers in the space so it showed up in their LinkedIn feed. And I mean it sounds obvious now but in 2012 it wasn't obvious to do those things that other people weren't. So I was always trying to find scrappy ways to get exposure and I think I'm kind of doing the similar thing now with one mind is we don't have a marketing team and I can promise you we do not have a pipeline problem which is pretty exciting at the early days to not we're few months in and like over 10 million in pipeline right now of highly qualified opportunities which is like beyond exciting.
- [09:11]
B
Wow. Okay, so since we've teased enough now tell us more about what is one mind, Where'd the concept come from and what are you building?
- [09:19]
A
Yeah, so one mind, we are building superhumans for go to market. And so it is a face, voice and a go to market brain. She can spin up, she spins up her own laptop in the virtual cloud and can do the things a human can do. So she can give a pitch, she can give a demo, she can share slides, she can join a zoom, she can answer the questions, she can write the proposal. So our goal is to build your go to market team in the form of a virtual AI that has empathy and can understand the buyers. We're putting the control back in the buyer's hands away from the sellers. So today if you think about the pain we're really solving for, we're solving for two things. One, from an organizational perspective, we're solving for we no longer live in a world where it's growth at all costs anymore. We can just throw money at the problem where we need to cut costs and we need to grow. And people are a linear growth model. So as you try to hire more people to the problem, that is highly expensive. Right? And your buyers aren't looking for that experience. Your buyers don't want to talk to a junior sdr, then an ae, then a solutions engineer and then get routed to your legal team. And they have so many steps and we make it so challenging for buyers to buy. What if we could shift the power back out of your sellers pockets and into your buyer's hands and give them the power to be met wherever they go on the website in zoom in your product in deal rooms with a high quality conversation to get the answers to the questions they have and truly have an empathetic buying experience where the AI can ask the hard questions to understand their business, the pain that they're solving for and then not only give the solution that matches their their pain and what they're looking for, but also show the case study and the story and align it in a way that sellers, we have all the best of intentions but can't do that in real time. They can do all the prep that they could possibly dream of. But they get on a call and then they just can't turn it those experiences and give the buyer exactly what they want when they want it. So our goal is to provide, to build superhumans that can talk to buyers, meet them across every channel, anywhere they go, and put the control back in those the buyer's hands and out of the seller's pockets. And allow organizations to grow and grow efficiently and exponentially. So not to have a linear growth, but be able to grow exponentially without bloating the costs.
- [11:36]
B
Okay, so where did this idea come from? Especially after leaving Sixth Sense? I think you left because you were having babies, right? You were like, I'm good. And then what?
- [11:46]
A
Yeah, yeah, I left. I brought somebody in amazing to take over and they've had exponential growth since I've left. It's been awesome to watch from the sidelines. I always said if you looked at my LinkedIn profile a few years ago, it said I was permanently on the bench. I was good, I was done. I was going to do what I thought to be the most important job in the world is to be a mom. But for those of you who have kids out there, being a mom is the single hardest job, as you know, Stephanie, on the planet. So I like to think I'm going to outsource that. And I came back to work. So I say that in jest, but I'm a single mom with two babies, Fiona and Gia. Adopted my oldest and did a petri dish baby for my second and decided that, you know, like, I want my kids to see me doing the hard thing. I bring my oldest, I bring my 4 year old to events now. So she comes and watches me give talks at conferences. I want to do things differently. Like I think that I can be an amazing mom and go be a CEO and build something incredible for the world that I care about of B2B sales and marketing. So I came off the bench because a company had approached me. I wasn't actually looking. They had built this technology, they've been working on it for five years and they had used it in a horizontal fashion. So they had cloned the likes of Barack Obama and Deepak Chopra were customers. And so the AI had read all the books, could have a conversation and talk just like you're talking to Obama or just like you're talking to Deepak. However, all these use cases were very horizontal and it was hard to scale. And cloning one individual to me wasn't. I didn't feel that that was of high value. It's kind of an ego play, if you will. Right. And I was like, where can we use this technology that can actually drive business growth? And it became really obvious right away to me, like, we could use this in sales. As a salesperson, could this superhuman act as your best seller, as your best sales engineer, as your best AE and as your best SDR on the website? Meet the buyers where they are and give them the full pitch. Answer all their questions, not just qualifying through a lurking chatbot in the bottom right hand corner. So when I got clear that that was possible, I was all in on it and basically took the company, spun it off, created a new company, raised money, bought my team, and here we are.
- [14:00]
B
So wild. I mean, so it's interesting how like the first company you built was, let me help you find the leads. And then now the company you're building is like, I'm going to close it for you. I hope you get those leads. Like, if not, go to 6 cents and get them there and then we'll close them for you. You built the whole ecosystem.
- [14:15]
A
Yeah, I like to like, ingest. I like to say I started 6 cents to find buyers and I'm starting one mind to close them.
- [14:20]
B
Yep. So what does the future of go to market look like to you then while you're building this out? I mean, it feels like it's going to be vastly different in a couple years based off how things are moving so rapidly.
- [14:30]
A
So Mike Maples is one of my favorite investors in the Valley and he talks about this concept of backcasting. Right. So back casting is like looking to the future to build something. And that's how you create categories. And the best categories are not created from incremental change. So if you think about like Uber, were you going to get in the stranger's car?
- [14:50]
B
I'm not trying to get inducted.
- [14:52]
A
Yeah, exactly. Nine out of ten of us were like, absolutely no. The best categories are built on a fundamental thesis that the majority rejects and a few accept and get excited about and like it and love it. And then all of a sudden the pros outweigh the cons. And so then we then start to see, you know, the laggards and the later adopters. And then it begins, it breaks out and becomes the norm. Am I going to rent my house out to a stranger for Airbnb? Am I going to get in a self driving Waymo car? No. These were all like, absolutely, positively, most of us, the majority were like, no, not doing this. And I feel it's the same right now with where we are with one mind and building these superhumans. Every time I get a no where people are like, whoa, I'm not going to talk to an AI, I'm not going to talk to this face that's not a real person. But then you have people who have conversations and lean in and actually give her a shot and ask her the hard questions and give her their real pains and what they're trying to solve for and oh my God, her answers just blow them away. And she actually has personality, right? So she's not dry, just giving the answer. She has better personality than 9 out of 10 of your reps, right? She can inject humor and bring in relevant context for what's going on in the world. Like it's actually amazing to watch her do her job and she does it so much better than a human would. So I like to think, you know, what we're doing with one mind is I'm trying to build a new way for go to market and teams. So it's not just I'm not building a new inbound SDR which that is one of the roles she plays. I'm not building a new sales engineer or solutions engineer. I'm building a new way to buy. If buyers could talk to sellers at any time in any channel and pick up on the conversation where they last left off, right? So the AI knows everything about the account going into the conversation, looks up in Salesforce or HubSpot, knows what's happening in the account and the opportunity can have that context into the conversation, remembers her past conversation. So she doesn't have, you don't have to remind her next time you get on the call, she picks right back up. She gives the demo, she gives the pitch, she shows the case studies, she writes the RFP response to the RFP and moves the buyers through. So you don't have a solutions engineer, you don't have a sales engineer, you don't have the AE and you don't have the sdr. You're just talking to the superhuman who takes you through your journey, on your time, in your way. That's my ultimate vision. Of course the world isn't ready for that yet, right? So I am selling it. As you come in and you talk to the inbound SDR on the website, she's a ride along sales engineer. She's in passive mode ready to answer the hard questions. So we are selling it in those siloed roles. That's just because the market in the world's not ready. But in a short amount of time we'll be selling that. This is your AI, this is your superhuman for go to market. She can onboard your customers, she can sell, she can pitch, she can qualify, she can close and she does all the next steps. And it's just a matter of like incrementally increasing her brain for each of those different functions.
- [17:39]
B
Yeah. Amazing. So what is the scope of savings? I mean, I'm just imagining, I know you, I tried to get in on this and you're like, sorry, Steph, you're too small. You're like, I'm working with enterprises right now. I'm like, oh man. So like what is the scope of savings for having something like this come in? And I mean, honestly, probably replace like a large portion of your sales team.
- [17:58]
A
Yeah. Like to say like, she's the cost of one junior SDR and she's the cost of one junior SDR without having to pay recruiting costs, without having to pay benefits, without having to pay severance. Right. So it is just the salary of one person and she can do the work of 20x30x. You know her efficiencies. The more the way our pricing model works is it's, there's a usage based component. So the more usage she has, the more affordable she is per conversation. So if you just have her on. So for you, if you just had her on a few conversations, she'd be equivalent to maybe three or four people, which I don't think that's enough roi. We need to. It's what's really interesting about AI. She has more capacity, she can do more, she's smarter, she can join in every channel, she has no time limitations. But when I'm selling this, she actually has to have exponential capacity of a human in order for people to say yes. Right. So it's really like she's better than a human, but she also has to operate and cost exponentially less in order for this to work. And as we all know, like with, you know, everything that's happening in the world of LLMs and the generative wave and all the synthetic media costs are just coming down.
- [19:10]
B
Right.
- [19:10]
A
The GPU costs are coming down. So whatever it is today, it's going to be a fraction of that tomorrow. And that's what's super exciting as well.
- [19:17]
B
Yep. I'm especially excited for that. So when it comes to this space, I mean, there's a lot of misconceptions sometimes around AI, of course, because it's so new and people are still, I mean even so many people still don't use simple things like ChatGPT, they're still trying to figure that out. What are some misconceptions that you hear that you think need to be addressed in this space?
- [19:35]
A
Yeah, the first, my favorite question people ask me, they're like, oh, does your AI hallucinate? We've all seen the stories, right? So we've seen the example where, you know, I forget what it was at Chevron and, and was. And Tesla came in and was like, selling the AI, the bot was selling the competitor's product. You know, that happens all the time. But there are ways to create guardrails and you can create really tight guardrails. So that doesn't happen. Right. So you can really prevent that. And my favorite response when somebody asked me, well, will the superhuman hallucinate? Will she, you know, say something that's not accurate or sell our competitor's product? I like to say, does your seller hallucinate? And how often do they hallucinate to get the deal done and make up an answer? And she's going to do it again at like exponentially lower rates and a fraction of the rate. And we can keep her on super tight guardrails. And the way we've built her is she's not fully generative. So if she were fully generative, and that's what we're relying on, she would hallucinate all the time. And so I think that's the challenge with some of the bots that people are building today. We use a combination of deterministic, so the if, then the old school way of doing this with the generative. So it's basically she goes down different paths. She's goal based. She has a goal, she knows where she's trying to get to, and she has to stay in her lane for the task that she's doing and what she answers, how she says it. We use the more creative generative approach so that she sounds relatable, she sounds like a human. But what she's saying, she's going back into a more deterministic way and using, you know, just traditional methodologies of embeddings and different rag architecture, et cetera, to make sure that she's saying it accurately.
- [21:09]
B
Okay, so then she basically has rules built into her system that you build out that you can be like, your goal is to close the sale. Here's the things you can or can't say. And then if you get questions that you actually don't know the answer for, you just say you don't know. Like it's.
- [21:24]
A
Instead of exactly, she deflects and says, hey, I've only been trained on this. I don't know. And then we have something called a knowledge gap detection, which when she gets a question about something she doesn't know, she flags it to our customer. So it would go back to, for example, New Relic is a customer. It would go back to the team at New Relic to say, hey, she didn't know this answer. Do you want to fill that gap? So then they can fill that gap with the content. So the next time somebody comes in and asks the question, she doesn't, you know, just defer the answer. But sometimes you don't want her to answer the question. You know, when we first released Mindy, when people asked us about pricing, she'd just say, I don't know. You're going to have to ask the human. Do you want to schedule a meeting? I'm happy to schedule a meeting with one of our humans. Um, now she answers the question and she'll say, you know, we're about the cost of a human. And when we. She shows a slide that shows how our usage and our pricing works without giving specifics, like, into the question.
- [22:11]
B
Yeah, it'd be cool if she was like, I have to go take a bathroom break. I'll be right back. Make her even more.
- [22:17]
A
She does really funny things like that. It's actually my favorite, like, magic moments are when people really lean in and have a real conversation, and then they like when they try to say something financial. Get you right back with your same humor. So mirroring is like a tactic we teach salespeople. Right? You want to mirror who you're talking to, and she does that so well. Right. So if you're dry, she's going to be dry. If you want to lean in and you want to be funny, she's going to inject humor. So we. We like her to, like, emulate who she's talking to so that eventually, right now, each of our customers chooses the profile of what they want their superhuman to look like. But my ultimate goal is that the buyer would choose that. I get to choose who I buy from. I want somebody who culturally aligns and resembles, you know, what, what. Who I want to talk to. Let me. What if you could choose your seller? Like, imagine going to a company, going to Amazon and, you know, you're about to buy, you know, AWS services, and you could say, yeah, I want to buy from that person. Like, that's the person I want to buy from with that personality, you know, has the same cultural background as me, talks the same or looks completely different because I don't want to buy some from somebody who looks like me, et cetera.
- [23:23]
B
Yep, that's amazing. Okay, so now to switch back to, you know, I'm a marketing leader listening right now and I want to hear about your scrappy marketing techniques in going into 2025 right now because you're, you have this company, you're having to do things very different than how you built Sixth Sense before and how you built your previous company before that. So what things are you doing today that you think are contrarian or different that other marketing leaders are probably not even thinking about?
- [23:50]
A
Yeah, I mean, honestly, we are really, we're doing something I didn't do in the early days. I made a lot of mistakes at six Sense and one of them was we did not eat our dog food early enough. It took us a while to start using our own product for ourselves. Like, I never prioritized it and man, I wish I like could go do things over again and start using it earlier in the cycle when we were having pipeline problems. So today at One Mind, we are eating our own dog food. So we are creating a superhuman of myself, which I was very resistant to doing. I did not want to create a clone. I don't really believe in cloning, but I'm like, what if I can send out my superhuman to all the CMOs and CROs I want to sell to? Or after I have a conversation, she's there to say, hey, you can schedule another meeting with me or just talk to Amanda AI, Right, So they can have that follow up conversation with me. Ask me about like you could bring her onto the podcast and Talk to Amanda vs. AI vs. Talking to the real Amanda. So we're gonna, we're starting to do things like that where we're using our superhuman to. When we send outbound emails, there's a superhuman. So instead of, you know, just sending content that's static in one way, what if it's a two way engagement? What if you can actually bring your content to life and have a conversation about what we can do and how we can change your business and how we can help you grow and close business and onboard customers. So we're really trying to like embrace this and just everything we do be all about our own product. And I think in the early days we can, as we all start companies, we get so bogged down with like, we need to do it the way everybody else is doing it that we forget there's a reason why we exist, especially in like marketing and sales. Tech, like, there's a reason why you built that. You need to use your own. Your own solution to help you grow. And it's. It's working. Like, this week alone, Mindy, who's On our website Rai, has booked over $2 million worth of qualified opportunities by just having conversations. Right. So she's having those conversations before even getting to a human, which, you know, it's. I never thought I would ever say I don't have a pipeline problem, but I really don't. Like, she's doing it for me, and she's virtually free.
- [25:53]
B
Yeah. How are you getting people to Mindy right now?
- [25:56]
A
You know, I have the blessing of, like, I have a background. So, you know, I didn't have that at six Sense. I was, you know, essentially no one. I had never done anything before. But, you know, I. I do get to, you know, if you will, ride the coattails of six Sense in the sense that it's doing very well as a company. And I was the former CEO and founder, so it's very easy for me to. To book a meeting and get exposure. And, you know, I think it goes back to, like, even at the early days of six Sense, when I didn't know anyone, it was all about relationships. When you're starting out, the founder, like, mentality of people are buying you and trusting you and your brand, you really have to double down on that. And even today at One Mind, while I have experience and I've done things before, I have to double down on myself. Right. And it's uncomfortable sometimes. I'm like, I don't want it to be about me or. But, you know, we're building a new product. People, do I trust this? Do I trust you? And so, you know, I was always doing things in the relationship. Like, I would always. Whenever I would take CMOs to dinner, it was never about talking about the product of six Sense or One Mind. It was always about trying to get to know them as a person and how can I offer value to their life? And then later I would say, hey, can I give you a demo a few weeks later? Right. It wasn't never trying to sell in the moment. It was always about building those deep relationships, and that's what we're doing now. So it's always, I love people and I care about people, and I. As much as I'm building AGI superhumans that have empathy, I always want to focus on people first, you know, within my company and outside as customers.
- [27:25]
B
I love it. Okay, what about other big things you're seeing Outside of AI, when it comes to the marketing world, like, what do you believe that others maybe aren't looking at right now? I mean, you have so many CMO friends. So what do you hear? The things being talked about right now or the things that marketing leaders are looking into or, you know, ready to pivot into?
- [27:44]
A
Yeah, I think it's a. I think the big conversation right now is a consolidation of tech. Right. So I think a lot of the incumbent technologies that are out there and the big guys that have made it, there's a whole new way of doing things and trying to figure out, like, which of those pieces of the puzzle do I still need? And, well, I have one vendor that can do five, but maybe not as well. And so how do they consolidate all those pieces together and how do I do things in a new way? I think The CMO of HubSpot does a really good job. They have a podcast that they do. They talk about all the different AI technologies that are out there and consolidating them. I think they do a great job of showing people the new way of doing things. We don't have to go through the old methodologies. I think agencies. I worry for a lot of agencies, you know, they're going to have a hard time going forward. We don't have to do it that way anymore. Right. We don't have to bring the people into it. The AI can do it better than a person. And then you just have that final mile where you have the human in the loop at the final stage.
- [28:44]
B
Yep. Yeah, I completely agree. Okay, so when thinking about humans then, and I mean, the world changing very rapidly. I've even seen it here, within my company's mission, relevant, like it's. People can do a lot more with a lot less. Now. What are some skills to, like, future proof a marketing leader? How should marketers be thinking right now? Or people who have agencies, like, what should they be training themselves on to stay relevant?
- [29:07]
A
I know this is gonna sound crazy, but I think everybody should be thinking about how do I replace myself. I think about that every day. Like, if I'm doing this right, I'm building for where I don't need to be here anymore. And I think there's a new societal structure that's gonna come out of that as well. But I think it's always, what are the skills that I don't. What are the actions and the tasks that I'm taking today or the decisions that I'm making? How can I make it using AI and using all the tools that are available so that I can become obsolete. And those leaders who are thinking in that way are actually going to have the most success and be around the longest.
- [29:42]
B
Okay, yeah. I mean, I definitely hear what you're saying with this, and I know where you're going with it. And what comes to mind is like, you know, building infinite games versus finite games. And it feels like that mentality also is like building constant finite games where you're like, all right, I'm done with this. All right, figure that one out. So then how do you keep your mind working to see the expansiveness of a project or a company instead of, you know, just being like, okay, I'm going to build it to replace myself in one month, in three months. Like, how do you stay relevant?
- [30:11]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I. I don't have the magic bullet. Like, I honestly, I think it's like finding those people that you follow that you really believe in. Right. And, like, just trying to stay on top of everything that's happening. Yeah. I used to not go to as many events, and I used to be so myopically focused on whatever it is that I was doing that I had to get out of my own way. And I think that's one of the things I'm trying to do different this time around as well. I was so focused on six Sense and what we were doing and the product we were building that I wasn't seeing everything else that was happening for my buyers around them. And to truly understand, like, you know, again, that the word empathy of, like, really putting myself in their shoes, not just for what I could solve for, but everything else. I think at the end of the day, that's what we all need to be doing more of. And I think we focus, we get so in our jobs and in our lane and where we are versus, like, what's the macro picture look like? What does it look like for not only myself and my team and my company, but the world? And so I really try to stay ahead of where the world is going and not necessarily where one mind is going on a daily basis, so.
- [31:11]
B
Good. Okay. I want to spend these last little bit of the interview more on, like, personal things, especially your personal mission statement, because I know you said at the top of the interview, and I would love to hear, where did this come from? How did you define it? How can people think about defining their own personal mission statement?
- [31:26]
A
Yeah, I think it was like eight or nine years ago. I was thinking to myself, you know, I'm building a B2B marketing AI company. But I care about so many things and so like the world and I want to like, why do I exist? Like I, you know, I have a Zen Buddhist practice in my personal life and I was trying to get to the root of like, well, why am I here? Like am I really here to be build B2B software? What, what am I doing? The best companies have mission statements. So shouldn't the best leaders and shouldn't the best individuals, shouldn't we all have our own personal why? And so I did a lot of work like self reflection on like what's my why? I grew up with two older brothers. You know, as I mentioned, I grew up with modest means in my family with a, you know, single mother. I saw my dad on the weekends and you know, there were days where it was tough and I want to show my kids. And at the time I didn't, when I came up with this, I didn't have kids. But as a CEO, a woman CEO, founder, less than 1% of women founders in tech ring the bell. So people who go take a company public, 99% are men. Right. So I needed to have my own personal goal. So my goal now is to be part of that 1%. I know it's a stretch goal, but I truly believe that it's possible. And so I got clear it had to be around women and girls. I really wanted to empower women and girls. And I thought, well, if I'm building these companies, I can make that a core part of my why. As I try to be a role model for women, a role model for my girls. That if I have that as my North Star, doesn't mean I'm always going to hire a woman or I believe in women more like there's no preference either. It's just this is why I'm doing it. Like I want to show other women and girls that they can do this too. And yeah, it's effing hard sometimes and I think it is harder for us and we do have a steeper hill to climb, but we can do it. That's my why. So. And then I also there's like so my mission statement being I'm a passionate, positive, spiritual warrior to empower women and girls. And so there's a spiritual component that I can bring into my work as well. And I'm okay with that. You know, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. I want to bring a sense of peace and calm as I am trying to make decisions, you know, through it all that there is like to tap into I believe that there's, like, an energy that we can tap into ourselves. So I try to tap into that, especially at the hardest times. And that's really helped me, like, as I'm making tough decisions or deciding even to come back to work was, wait. I want to come back to work because I want to show my girls that I want them to see what this is all about, and I want to. And I knew I left before I was done, and I knew I had more work to do. And so it's easy to take some time off. I got four amazing years, four and a half amazing years on the bench, playing a lot of golf, doing a lot of yoga, riding my mountain bike. And I was like, all right, I'm kind of bored. I'm ready to have mental stimulation. As much as I love my kids, I wanted that hard challenge again because that gets me up and gets me excited.
- [34:24]
B
And so your daughters, they came to you on the same day, but they're two years apart. Can you tell our listeners and our viewers how this happened?
- [34:33]
A
Yeah, it's pretty like I might tear up, so I'll apologize ahead of time if I get a tear every time I tell this story. When I was at Sixth Sense, I was trying very hard to have children. I knew in my core I wanted to be a mom more than I wanted anything else in this world. And so I had been through nine rounds of ivf. Actually, at the time, I'd been four rounds. And I had my doctor at the time, four rounds, several miscarriages, said, no, you're not going to have your own biological child. It's time to find plan B to go to plan baby. So I went down plan B of adopting. So I went down the adoption path. And at the same time, I had another doctor tell me, well, you have 0.001% chance of having your own biological child. And I was like, so you're saying I got a shot? So I was like, all right. She's like, well, if you want me to take your money, I'll take your money. But most doctors won't take on the case. And I'll tell you why. Because they don't want their rates and their numbers to go down. So they're all optimizing for their success rates of a child. But this one doctor said she would do it and she would continue. And that's when I was leaving Sixth Sense, and I was like, well, I do not have any other thing to do, so I might as well just keep doing some more ivf. Having Some emotional breakdowns because of all the hormones in my body. So I was parallel tracking IVF with adoption. And then to add to the story, as a single woman, you are at the bottom of the adoption list. So most adoption agencies are very religious. No knock against religion, just that they put me at the bottom. So they were looking for monogamous couples to give babies to. And so knowing that, I said, well, I need to create my own lead funnel, because this isn't going to work. I'm not going to go through an agency and wait four years. So I created my own website, my own page. I SEO and SEM optimized it, and I had on average, about 10 women a day reaching out to me, saying they wanted to give me their baby. So when somebody searched for how to give my baby up for adoption, I came up in the top page, on the first page, in 1 through 10, 90% of the time. So I had this amazing lead funnel that I had generated myself, had all these women coming to me. But most of them, unfortunately, it's a scam. So most of them are looking. They know that you can't buy a baby. So I could give them money to help them with their pregnancy, and then they have the baby and they say, oh, change my mind and there's no recourse, which is fine. I looked at that as anybody who was gonna do that scam. That was again, me just supporting them. I was like, you know what? Let me help somebody if this is where they're that desperate that they need to do that. I was helping these women through the process. So getting to the story, I was on my ninth round of ivf, about to extract my eggs the next day, got a call from, actually my lawyer, who said he had called one of the women to say, what is your plan for the baby? She's due in a few days. And she basically said she was in the hospital and if I wanted to go get her, I could go get her. And so I got on a red eye with my suitcase and went to Philadelphia to go pick up my oldest daughter, Fiona. But I was exposed to extract my egg. Next day, I had three follicles. And those people who know about IVF, three follicles is like 0.0000001% chance at my age of becoming a baby. Something in me said I needed to go back and extract. So I left Philadelphia, got on a red eye, back to San Francisco, extracted my egg that day. The next morning, 7am, back on a flight to Philadelphia. So that egg on that day turned into gia, so. So they both came to me after about nine years of trying to have kids. They both came to me on the same day. Sorry, that story was really long.
- [37:48]
B
That story's amazing and I love every detail. That's. I'm like, we cannot get off this interview without hearing how much of a badass you are. So when having children I feel like something that came out in me was like my intuition just skyrocketed and it became so much easier to know what I need to do. Especially in business with decisions. It's like something dropped in where all of a sudden I'm like, yes, no, don't need to think about it. Don't know why you're out from the company you're in. And it was way less data was needed and is needed now than ever before. I'd love to hear if this also happened for you. And like, how do you use intuition to drive decisions now?
- [38:23]
A
Oh, I love that. Yeah, I think it did a couple things for me. It. I think the intuition 100%. You can just feel the energy. I'm always about feeling. I'm like a little woo woo, like that. Like I'm very spiritual energy person. Feel your energy is why I loved you. When I met you, right away I was like, oh, you're my people. I see this, we're going to get along and you can feel it right away. You don't know what it is and nobody's telling you. And there's not a thing, there's not an objective piece of criteria. You know, I still try to weigh that with like, okay, I have to do things rationally and logically. So there's like the emotional and like the logical side. But it also really helped me having kids prioritize and like my day. I am so productive. Holy. Like I want to get out to pick my kids up from school. You know, at 4:30 I go pick them up, I spend about an hour and a half with them and then I give them to the au pair. But that hour and a half, that's my hour and a half with them. And then I go back to work and do a couple more hours before we go to bed. But man, my day, I don't. I mean I am never on social media during the day or looking at anything or checking an email or a Slack channel that I don't need to. I've got my goals, I have my priorities. I know what I need to get done and I'm doing it for a bigger purpose, a bigger reason. Like I. I have a reason to do it. I like to tell Fiona I'm doing it. My oldest is Fiona, and I tell her, why does mommy go to work? Mommy goes to work because I'm trying to create generational popsicles for you, you know, so her kids can have the popsicles too. But there is something bigger than just driving for myself or fight for the financial gain. Like, I'm. I'm doing this to show them and show other women and girls, and that's what really gets me excited.
- [39:59]
B
I love that. Love this so much. Man, what an amazing first interview. A first Marketing Trends guest to have. This is just so fun.
- [40:06]
A
You are awesome, too. I wish. Can I ask you questions as well next time?
- [40:10]
B
We'll have a next one where it's like, then you can just ask me whatever you want. And we still get to have hangout sessions in person too, to come. I really love that. All right, I want to round out this interview with. What's a piece of advice that someone's given you or something that a mentor has said that has stuck with you over the years?
- [40:27]
A
Oh, so many good ones. But I would say when somebody shows you their true colors, believe them. That is something that really resonates. And then the other thing that I like to like, I truly live by is let somebody tell you that you can't and let that fuel your fire. Right? So when people don't believe in you, thank them because. And then use that to propel yourself forward to prove them wrong.
- [40:53]
B
So good. I love this. All right, well, Amanda, you are amazing. I can't wait to follow your journey. Where can people learn more about you and what you're up to at One Mind.
- [41:01]
A
Well, you can learn about One Mind by going and talking to our superhuman Mindy on the website. So onemind.com and I can be found on LinkedIn. Amanda Kalo. My last name.
- [41:11]
B
Amazing. Thanks for coming on Marketing Trends.
- [41:13]
A
Yeah. Thank you for having me. This was so much fun.