 From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering The Churchills 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara, California at The Churchills. It's the ninth annual kind of awards banquet that The Churchill Club is on. And the theme this year is all about leadership. And we're excited to have not one of the winners, but one of the newest board members of The Churchill Club, and someone who's going to be interviewing some of the winners and a very many-time Cube alum, Ray Wong, you know him from Constellation, research and founder, chief analyst, and also a new board member for The Churchill Club. Ray, great to see you. Hey, it's awesome being back here. I love this event. This is one of my favorite ones. You get to see all the cool interviews. Right, so you're interviewing Graham Stanton from Peloton for the LifeChanger Award. Yeah, so this is really incredible. I mean, this company has pretty much converged, right? We're talking, it's media. It's sports. It's fitness. It's like social at the same time. And it's completely changed. So many people have seen it. They've got more riders than SoulCycle. Can you believe that? Yeah, I don't know. I just like to ride my bike outside. So I'm just not part of this whole thing. But I guess on those bikes, you can ride anywhere, right? You can ride anywhere. With anywhere. With anyone, but it's not that. It's the classes, right? You basically hop on. You see the classes, people are actually pumping you up. They're saying, hey, go, go, go. You can see all the other riders that are in the space. It's kind of addictive. But let's shift gears, talk about leadership more generally, because things are a little rough right here in the valley right now. And people are taking some hits and black eyes. You talk to a lot of leaders. You go to a ton of shows. You go to more shows that we go to. You talk to a lot of CEOs. When you kind of take a step back about what makes a good leader, what doesn't make a good leader, what are some of the things that jump into your head? You know, we really think about a dynamic leadership model. It's something you can see on my Twitter handle. It's basically the fact that you got to balance all these different traits. Leaders have to perform in different ways in different situations. Like sometimes we're like, oh, wow, that's a general. They've done a great job. It's that commanding leadership. Other times you're like, oh, that individual's a wonderful empathetic leader, right? There's a balance between those types of traits that have to happen. And they curl in like seven different dimensions. And each of these dimensions, it's like sometimes you're going to have to be more empathetic. Sometimes you're going to have to be more realistic. Sometimes you're going to have to be harder. And I think right now we have this challenge because there's a certain style that's being imposed on all the leaders that might not be correct. Yeah. The other thing though, the hypothesis for you to think about is when a lot of these people start the Silicon Valley companies, the classic, it's not like they went to P&G and worked their way up through the ranks. They started a company, it was cool and suddenly boom, they get hundreds of millions of dollars, the IPO, and now you've got platforms that are impacting geopolitical things all over the world. They didn't necessarily sign up for that. That's not necessarily what they wanted to do. And they might not be qualified. So is it fair to expect the leader of a tech company that just built some cool app that suddenly grew into a ubiquitous platform all over the world that many, many types of people are using for good and bad to suddenly be responsible? It's a really interesting situation for these people. Well, that's why we talk about the need for responsive and responsible leadership. Those are two different types of traits. Look, the founding individual might not be the right person to do that, but they can surround themselves with team members that can do that. That can make sure that they're being responsive or responsible depending on what's required for each of those traits. You know, a great example is like that Black Mirror episode where you see the guru of some social media guy. Some guys like Colin is like, he wants to make sure that someone's paying attention to him. Well, the thing is like, a lot of times at least folks are surrounded by people that don't have that empathetic view might not have had what a founder is looking at or it could be the flip side. The founder might not be empathetic. They're just gung-ho, right? Ready to build out the next set of features and capabilities that they wanted to do and they need that empathy that's around there. So I think we're going to start to see that mix and blend, but it's hard, right? I mean, going through a startup as a CEO and as a founder is very, very different than coming in through the corporate ranks. Those are very, very different skill sets. Right, defining a big company. You know, it's funny, you know, again, you go to a lot of shows, we go to a lot of shows, you see a lot of keynotes, a lot of CEO keynotes. And it's just interesting, some people just seem to have that it factor. One that jumps off the top is Adobe. You know, some people just seem like to have it where they can get people to follow. And it's really weird. We just had John W. Thompson on talking about, you know, Satya changing the culture at Microsoft with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world. What a creative and amazing job to be able to turn that ship. Oh, it is. I mean, I can turn on the charm and just like get really excited about something just like that, right? And it's also about making sure you bring in the input and make people feel that they're inclusive. But you got to make decisions at some point too. Sometimes you have to make the tough choices. You cut out products, you cut out certain types of policies, or sometimes you've got to be much more, you know, responsive to customers, right? It might look like you're eating crow, but you know what? At the end of the day, companies are really built around customers. They're stakeholders. The stakeholders are bigger today than just shareholders. Right, so last question. Churchill Club, how'd you get involved? What makes you excited to jump on board? You know, this is like an institution for the Valley, right? This is, you know, if you think about like the top interviews, right? If you think about the top conversations, the interesting moments in the Valley, they've all happened here. And it's really about making sure that, you know, the people that I know, the people that you know, I mean, there's an opportunity to recreate that for the next set of generations. I remember coming here when I was like, I got to go back and think about ages. I remember coming out of here. You don't have to make it. I'm not going to give out ages. I'm going to go out here in 96, right? And just thinking like, hey, what were the cool activities? What were the interesting conversations? And the Churchill Club was definitely one of those. And it's time to give back. Very good. All right, well, congrats on that new assignment and good luck with the interview tonight. Hey, thanks a lot. All right, he's Ray. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Churchill's in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.