 Wow, that was, that was amazing. So first off, I have to apologize. I believe I'm the last person that is keeping you from getting to the bar. So just as a little tip based on what happened at lunch, if, if you want to line up now, I understand. Or if you can get a drink, I'm going to be way more enjoyable if you've had just a couple of one. So, but thanks for, thanks for listening to me. I didn't know I was going to be last. So, so I am, oh, one other thing I did want to say, this is actually my first keynote. So hopefully, hopefully it goes well. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Now, if it goes well, this is going to be my last keynote. So thanks for coming. I appreciate it. I did get a note on LinkedIn earlier today that said that someone really enjoyed my talk, and they wanted to connect with me. So I think I'm going to just spoiler alert, I think I crushed it. So, so I'm here today to talk about stagnation to innovation and how to create a culture of change. As a, as an intro to me, I am Drew Lissisco. It's not, it looks like Lissico, but it's okay. On the VP of product and technology, I oversee product tech, engineering, IT, data engineering, e-commerce, if there's something there. I apologize. I know you thought you saw me come up and you're like, oh, a SoulCycle instructor. Yeah, no, it's, I get that usually, but it's, it is what it is. But I've, I do bring 18 years of product management. I was doing this starting in actually 1999. I helped Russell Simmons build his first website, which eventually became BED.com. Most of my job is getting him vegan burritos, but I also helped him think of what to do. You know, I'm also formerly from IAC, as most of you see the building on the west side, AOL, Yahoo Verizon. And, you know, I'm sure, you know, some of you are thinking, wow, some innovation, some guys talking about innovation, and you worked at AOL. Like, what the hell? But the truth is that where I'm coming in and what I'm going to talk a little bit about is not innovation, like how Google looks at it. It's more about when you find yourself at a company that's well established, that's been around for a long time. How do you help them find the innovation? You know, companies become stagnant. They lean into their business models. We're going to talk a little bit about that. But what you can do is help them find something new. I'm not going to tell you how to do it. I'm just going to tell you how I did it. And if something, you know, rings a bell, I think that's, you know, always good. Now, a good product person always, you know, establishes what something is not. It's the beginning of a good PRD if we still do those. And so one thing is I'm not going to talk about. I'm not going to talk about innovation theory. I'm not an innovation guy. I'm not a theory guy. I like to build. One of the things that I think that is important in product is you have to ship. If you're just thinking about products and thinking about things, you're not adding value to your customer. I think that's been a running theme of today. Add value, do things for the customer. If you're just thinking about it and spending time in theory land, it's not going to work. Think of, you know, I'm not going to talk about the frameworks. I'm going to talk a little bit about experiences, but not specific frameworks. And I'm not going to talk about ideation. Within each of your companies, you can go in and think about how to create ideas. But I'm going to say that ideas are simple. I know it's easy to create ideas. There's no value for ideas. I can tell you how many times someone has said to me, oh, I came up with that. Be like, I don't care. Because that person built it and they launched it. So they're awesome. And, you know, you should think about building the thing that you come up with next time. What I am going to talk about, I'm talking a little bit about some success stories, things that have worked out. I'm going to talk a little bit about why companies don't want to innovate. They will say they do, but they might not. I'm going to talk a little bit about how if you're a product person at one of these companies and you want to introduce innovation, how are you going to go about it? How are you going to be able to do it? And I'm going to talk a little bit about how you can find success. One thing I'm going to notice, I have my coffee. It's like a crutch for me, so I apologize. I was going to put it on the floor, but I'm sure I'll kick it over. So innovation, question mark. How do we define innovation? I'm not going to try to do it myself because I'm not that great with words, but I trusted some other people to come up with some, you know, themes and, you know, I figured, read these out. Innovation is the introduction of new products and services that add value to the organization. Innovation is the fundamental way the company brings constant value to their customers, business or life, and consequently their shareholders and stakeholders. Innovation is work that delivers new goodness to new customers in new markets and does it in a way that radically improves the profitability equation. Now, when I read a few of these, and I read a bunch of these, these just stood out to me and I figured I could easily put them on a slide. But there's some themes that kind of were consistent across here. One is the value to the organization. When you come in and you want to build something new at a company, it has to provide value. It has to be something that brings that company to a new place. It can't just be something that seems fun. It's not about fun. It is about value. This is something that also brings something new to the customers. It is not about like it's, you know, do you feel good about it? You had a great idea and you're going to go out there. What if the customers don't want it? What if it just like the things that we often get into our own heads is that we're really good at stuff. We get to build cool things and I had an idea to build something that's really, really cool, but do they want it? You know, it's not, you know, one of the, one of the examples I have of this was we were building a product called Soulbeat. We were introducing data into, into our studios and we had all of these great ideas about like how we build this cool score that you'd leave. You'd leave the studio and you'd be like, I got a 48. That's great. And you know, we ended up like watching people as they left and they got their score and the first, you know, first person gets it and they got a terrible score and they just, their face fell to the ground. They're like, no, I'm like, I can never do that. You can't do that after a SoulCycle class. You've seen the SNL skit. You're supposed to feel great after a SoulCycle class. So we had to change it because that's not what the customer wanted. We thought it was cool because it's cool tech, but it wasn't what they wanted. So you have to think about that. The other thing that's on, that's not on here is anything that says that this is what's going to make the developers happy and like their jobs. That is not what this is about. This is not Innovation Fridays. This is not, hey guys, do whatever you want. You got cool VR shit. Yeah. Let's do it. No, that's not it. It's not like that doesn't add any value to things. Like we're not here to make ourselves feel better. We are here to help people. You know, I had a conversation at lunch and talked about how, you know, especially young, young product managers, they're like, we get to be the mini CEO. Like, no, you're the advocate for the customer. You're their voice in the room when marketing and business and engineering are like, we want to do this. We're like, no, I'm speaking for the customer. This is what they want. So you got to keep that in mind. Here's just a little thing that I think about a lot. I found this. This is the six most innovative companies according to Forbes in 2022. This is not an Elon Musk thing. So just think about that. But here they are, you know, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Tesla, Samsung, in case you don't know any of these logos. But one thing that really sticks out to me is this. This company is 85 years old. These companies have all been sadly pretty much in my lifetime, which shows how old I am. But 85 years old, how are those guys still so innovative? How are they still so big after all of those years? And I think about it a lot. I remember going to the campus and going to their innovations lab and thinking, holy shit, Samsung, they started out selling fruit on the street. And now they make the coolest phones, even though I have an iPhone. They're really cool. They fold. So like thinking a little bit about Samsung, why they why they were able to innovate? They were founded as a grocery trading company and they had some success. And then World War II happened. And they're like, hey, we've done this success. We've been able to circumnavigate the war. What else can we do? Let's enter the textiles space. We can then expand more. We can do a little bit more. We can help people regrow. And they're like, hey, this is working. What about electronics? We still import fruits and vegetables. People have a lot of refrigerators. Why don't we get into that space? People need to wash those textiles. Why don't we help build washing machines? And they became huge at that. And then finally they started, they said, we're doing this really well in South Korea. Why don't we expand to the rest of the world? And they started building new products. They went from selling fruit on the street to being one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. And I'll tell you that we get into our own little world of you walk around, you're like iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. But when you leave the United States, a lot of you know you see Galaxy, Samsung, Samsung, Galaxy. It's a little bit different. And that impresses me. It doesn't impress me when Zenga is the biggest company in the world and five years later they're gone or Myspace is the biggest company in the world and three years they're gone. That's our tendency. We tend to build these great things and we don't know where to go with it. Meta's going to go away at some point. A lot of these companies are going away. But companies like Samsung stick around because what they do is they think about how can they take the money and the revenue that's coming in and innovate and change and go into a new space, which is really, really crucial. So stagnation. Why does stagnation happen? Why do they company? Why do they kind of go into this space? The first one, and I think is always one of the biggest issues, is they're over-reliant on their business model. All of their money comes in from this one thing and then everyone's like, well, why are we, why would we not keep investing in this? That's because it's going to go away eventually. Something is going to change. We all talk about that Henry Ford, if we asked people, they'd ask for faster horses. That's the same mentality. You're just kind of focusing in. When I was at AOL, and the first thought about AOL is always, oh, they leaned too much into a dial-up, which they did. But when I was there, we were more of an advertising company. And one of the things that was a huge problem was we were, so 50% of our traffic at the time was on mobile devices, 50% off-dent desktop, but 90% for 5% of revenue was on desktop. And so the GMs of Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Gadget, Moviefone, there's something obviously Moviefone doesn't kiss anymore. But anyway, what they said was as a GM, they're like, why am I going to invest in mobile? That doesn't make me any money. Desktop makes me money. But that's not where the customer is going. You're just thinking of yourself. You're thinking about keeping your money and investing in someplace that's going to die out, which doesn't help. The other thing is a focus on iteration versus innovation. I remember one of the times after I founded Alpha and we merged, and this was at AOL, we merged together with Yahoo and one of my counterparts at Yahoo said to me, well, I don't understand why you guys exist because I can change a button on Yahoo.com and maybe make it a little bit bigger and I can increase conversion rate by half a percentage point. That's going to make me $10 million. Because that's what's going to work today. If that's going to be $10 million, then it's going to be $5 million next year. It's going to be $2 million in a year. But if I can build something on a new platform, connected televisions, for instance, that then maybe doesn't have as much scale now, but then next year it's going to be bigger, and the year after that it's going to be bigger, and now that's where everyone wants to spend their ads. They have ad money. They want to go on connected televisions. And now you're set up for success on the new platform just to leaning into what you did before. And the last one is fear of change. Everybody's scared to change. I get it. I'm scared to change. I don't want to do like, I know what I know. And I have to learn something new. I have to learn a new platform. I don't know how to make money on Alexa. I don't know how to make money on mobile. Well, you have to figure it out. You have to take the leap. So how do you do it? How do you introduce innovation? So a couple of things that I think you need to consider when you're actually thinking about bringing some innovation into your team. The first one, and this is, you know, you'd understand maybe some of you've seen this phrase before from the Lean canvas or the Lean startup mentality is what's your unfair advantage? What is the basic thing that makes your company great that the basic value that you're providing and how do you lean into that? When you build something that's innovative, it doesn't have to change that. It should continue to lean into the unfair advantage. When I think about SoulCycle, for instance, and I don't know how many people have actually taken a SoulCycle class, used to be that SoulCycle was like, people would talk about Peloton. They'd be like, oh, Peloton, that's like the SoulCycle, but at home, now we're like, oh, SoulCycle, that's the Peloton in person. It's a sad, but anyway. I don't even know if that makes any sense. But when I think about SoulCycle and I think about our unfair advantage, everybody comes up with something different. They're like, oh, your unfair advantage is that you've got cool instructors or you've got awesome music or I'm like, no. You know what makes SoulCycle what our unfair advantage is? We take something that inherently sucks, working out, and we make it fun. So that actually is a baseline that you can build new things on top of. It's not necessarily I need to bring in 40 people and put them on a bike to listen to Dua Lipa and dance around for 20 minutes. I can actually do something that's a little bit different because I found what my unfair advantage is. You also need to look at what's happening in the market. This is a lot of times when you get pushback from, for instance, what we were doing was looking at new and emerging platforms and they're saying, well, but this is not scale. You can't wait for scale. Scale doesn't work when you're talking about innovation. Look for trajectory. Look for something that is growing. We would have never built things on the Apple Watch or Alexa or Apple TV if we were waiting for scale. We wanted to be first adopters. We wanted to get on them. We wanted to make sure that when someone bought that product, they had the huffing to post on there that SoulCycle was part of that product. You got to think about what resources you have. You have to have the team around you. You have to have back-end engineers. You got to have a go-to-market plan. You got to have people that are going to be around that are going to help you from soup to nuts. And you need a business model. One time I spoke in a conference in San Francisco and we were talking about chatbots. And I was like, well, there's no business model. There's no way to make money. And everyone's like, you don't have to make money. You build it and grow and the business model come. No, you got to think of how you're going to make money. You got to think of how you're going to succeed because if you're at a company, they don't care. They don't care about cool. They care about revenue. They care about value. So make sure you think about this. So learning. So as I said, I launched an innovations lab at AOL called Alpha. I co-launched it with a guy named Peter Rojas who is the original founder of Engadget. And some things that we found in building Alpha and figuring out how to create this five-year innovations lab that existed through AOL and through our acquisition by Verizon and our merger with Yahoo. We needed to introduce a fail-fast-fail mentality. I'm sure a lot of you already have that and you already think about it. It's sort of ingrained in us now. But you have to remember that when you're at a big organization, there's a lot more fear of failing. So you have to make sure you introduce that. You have to make sure that everyone knows it's okay. You're going to fuck up. You're going to release something that doesn't work. You got to get in alignment with the brands and the partners. That's what we needed to do. We were building things for Huffington Post. The Huffington Post team had to care about what we were doing because if you're building something that's innovative and if you have an innovation lab, your goal is to not carry that thing all the way. Your hope is to get to market fit and then hand it off to another brand and say, great, now it's your thing. You do it. So you got to build something that they're really interested in. You also have to make sure that you're aligned. I talked about how important marketing is. Make sure you're aligned with the marketing team. They are really good helpers. We're two sides of the same coin often. You need to redefine success. It's not about scale. We'd launch a product and we'd hit 100,000 users and Tim, our CEO would be like, why do I care about that? I've got 500 million users on this. And they're like, well, it's not about that. We're not going to hit scale yet. We've got to grow. But the growth trajectory says we're going to get there eventually. You got to embrace this kill pivot persevere mentality. You've got to be able to be, you know, to like, if you build something and you realize that it wasn't, you didn't build the right thing, you got to remember, you got to either say, I'm wrong. I was wrong. I'm going to change it. I'm going to, or I'm going to have to kill it. One of the things that, you know, when I work a lot with consultants and consultants are always like, well, you got to, if you did all the research, you know, you're going to do it. I'm like, yeah, it's bullshit. Like you can't guarantee success. You can't like, we can do, we can get all the data. We can get all, like, we can figure out all the things. We can do all the research. But when we build something, we're making educated guesses. We're making really informed guesses, but we don't know how the market's going to perceive it. So sometimes we're just going to have to kill it or we're going to change our ideas. The same things be ready to let go. If you're, if you built something and if you hold it too close to your heart, you're not in, you know, you need to like be able to hand it off to someone else. That's really important. At SoulCycle, a lot of the, the, the findings that we've had and, you know, it's been tough, you know, in 2020, we had to shut down all our studios. We're like, all right, what now? How do we keep, how do we keep making money? We had to innovate. We had to change. We had to make sure that we could still keep ourselves afloat, you know, launch and all at home bike launched, you know, live streaming classes and what was about six weeks. You know, we had to figure out a way to go forward. And, you know, some of the things that we learned were, you have to stay true to what makes your company special. Talked about that, your unfair advantage. Don't try to create something that's brand new. At SoulCycle, we're not going to, you know, we're not going to start a drone racing league. It's not what we do. I think there is one. It's cool though. You know, change can be hard. Like one of the things that, you know, in SoulCycle has been around for 16 years, people are very ingrained in what it is. And so sometimes you have to say, I get it, but the world's changing. You're going to have to change with it. Something is different. One of the things that we did was the introduced digital check-in for our customers. And it was because, you know, if you've ever gone to a SoulCycle class before, the process is you'd go in, you'd have a sign-up sheet, everyone would go and they'd sign up and they'd go. The first perception was that, like, this was the customer touch point. Like, oh, yeah, we can't get rid of that because you're forcing the customer to come in and talk to people. So we have to have that. And be like, no, that's a shitty customer touch point. It's stressful. You're, like, trying to grab shoes and water and run away and get into your bike. Like, if we digital check-in, we'll allow them to, like, walk in and set up the bike for you. And so we launched it. And then nothing changed because the staff was still sitting behind the desk waiting for people to come in. And be like, no, it's digital now. Get out there, talk to people. Like, do customer service things. And so we had to get that change. We had to get that alignment with everybody. You have to make sure you're working with your cross-functional stakeholders, making sure that everyone's aligned in this. Like, you're probably coming up with an idea and trying to build something. But if you don't have that alignment with all your different partners, they're not going to embrace it. They're not going to help you out with it. And don't be scared to ruffle feathers. You're going to. Like, you're trying to build something new, and it's going to be a little bit hard for you. So make sure that you go in with some confidence. So just some tips to succeed as I finish up. Not every idea is a good one. Choosing what to build can be the most difficult challenge. You know, we talk about it all the time. Being a product manager, one of the biggest things, most important things is knowing when to say no. And being able to collect all these ideas and say, okay, I've got a thousand ideas. This one's the good one. Figure out what those want. You are going to fail. There's going to be times when you screw up. Learn and move on. Don't be too beholden to it. Don't worry too much. And remember, you need to make some money. You're going to have to make money at some point. It's not about being cool. And that's it. I think it's alcohol time, but I'm not going to. Thanks.