Tien Tzuo on Why Agility Is the Key to Finding Fulfillment | EP 653

0:00Coming up next on PassionStruck. What I've really learned is you have to understand people for who they are. You got to have to understand what motivates them. And if you can create an environment that creates the right motivation, then people will put their heart and souls into the company. And look, not everyone's going to be aligned to what you want to create. But how do you create an environment that allows people to bring their best selves? How do you create a vision that inspires them to say, hey, this is something I want to work towards? and then how do you give them the freedom to really bring the best selves to work, right?

0:36Including understanding that a lot of that freedom is dependent on the coworkers. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.

1:20Now, let's go out there and become passion struck. Welcome back, friends, to episode 653 of PassionStruck, the show where we explore the mindset, science, and strategies that help you live with intention, work with purpose, and unlock your fullest potential. Whether this is your first time joining us or you've been with us from the very beginning, thank you. Your presence here matters. Together, we're building a global movement of thinkers, doers, and changemakers committed to leading with purpose and living intentionally. Before we dive in to today's episode, let's recap some of our recent episodes.

1:55On Tuesday, I sat down with Christopher Wong Mickelson and Jennifer Toste-Karis to unpack one of life's most pressing questions. Is your work worth it? We explored what meaningful work really looks like and how to align careers with values in a culture of burnout. And last Friday in my solo episode, I tackled the exposure gap, the growing distance between the challenges we think we can handle and the challenges real life will inevitably hand us. Both conversations lay the groundwork for today's discussion because at the heart of them all is a central question. How do we thrive in a world of constant change?

2:31My guest today is Teen Su, visionary founder and CEO of Zura, bestselling author of Subscribed and the End of Ownership, and one of the leading voices behind the subscription economy. Teen helped scale Salesforce in its earliest days with Mark Benioff and Parker Harris before pioneering a business revolution centered not on products, but on relationships. In today's episode, we explore why agility beats control in today's fast-changing world, what the end of ownership really means, and how it's reshaping business and personal identity. We discuss how leaders can balance long-term vision and near-term adaptability, and why the most successful people and companies treat transformation, not as a phase, but as a mindset.

3:12And if you're ready to take this episode a step further, head over to the ignitedlife.net. That's where I share curated playlists like the psychology of success, the inner voice, and the space where you matter, along with tools, reflections, and behind the scenes insights from these conversations. Want to watch the episode? You can find full length interviews, shorts, and exclusive content on our YouTube channels, at John R. Miles and PassionStruck Clips. Want to wear your purpose? Then visit our recently revamped PassionStruck store to explore intention-driven apparel designed to remind you, you matter, live like it.

3:46You can find the link at passionstruck.com. Now let's dive into this mind-shifting conversation. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

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5:06I am so excited today to have my friend, Tin Zou on Passionstruck. How are you today, Tin? Good to see you, John. Good to see you. Glad we can talk. I have to tell you, it's been almost 17 years We've known each other now, and we met under kind of a pressure-baked situation. At the time, I was a CIO at Dell, and to give the audience some appreciation of the dynamics that were going on, we were the largest customer of Oracle at the time, and my boss had signed, our predecessor had signed this mega deal with Oracle, and we were putting in this solution called Cash to Collect. And I came to the conclusion that given the new direction, the way the business was going, that after we had installed this whole thing globally, it wasn't going to meet our customers' needs.

6:04And so I had this controversial opinion that we needed to do something completely different. And so we ended up surrounding ourselves with Salesforce and then plugged you in as the major vendor for subscription billing. And at the time you were a tiny startup. And I think Dell was probably your largest client at the time by far. And so to have to bring you in on that environment where it was, we cannot fail at any cost, it was kind of an interesting environment for you to walk into. What are your memories of those times? It was pretty intense. Certainly we started the company, and this is very early with primarily working with other startups, right?

6:48Some of the companies we work with like Zoom and Box are gigantic companies today. But at the time they were doing single digit, double digit million dollars, 1 million, 3 million, 30 million. But I do remember that Dell was going through saying, hey, we want to go beyond just selling PCs and we'll continue selling quite a bit of those, but let's try selling software. And given the software is moving into software as a service, let's see if we can be inspired by these other software as a service companies. And you did give us a chance. You did give us a chance and it was definitely a pressure situation, but the advantage of sometimes of being a startup and then being a founder of a startup is you can move quickly, you can move fast and you can direct resources.

7:33And we worked really closely with your team and I think was one of the fastest cool lives that you all had experienced and hopefully in hindsight, a successful project. Well, I remember after I had left, I got a call from our CFO Gladden, and he was not a supporter of moving. Yeah, he was very risk averse, very risk averse. Yeah. And I remember after I had left, I got a call from Andy Karabusta, who had taken my position, and she said, you're not going to believe what happened in this meeting. Gladden actually stood in front of everyone and said, Miles had it right all along and we should have listened because we were spending like 125 millions a year trying to roll out this Oracle solution.

8:19It was going to take six or seven years where we were able to get this alternative solution up in well under a year and in a fraction of the cost. So I think it shows the ability to be a visionary leader, but that it comes with risks, as all things do. I know, look, we're here to talk really about the new book and founders and startups and that whole psychology. And the story really does bring it home. We certainly saw that what Dell was trying to do at the time was to do a series of acquisitions. You find it funny, I was just talking to some of the folks over at Boomi that ultimately did its turn inside of Dell.

8:59And it was just the pace of the existing infrastructure was not really built for an environment where a company of Dell size would be doing six, seven, eight acquisitions a year and just didn't give Dell the agility. And founders tend to have an ability to see those opportunities and take a leap of faith and get customers and employees and investors to take that leap of faith with them. And I don't want to take credit. I think your vision at Dell certainly was really important. But I think that story of saying how a startup can go and displace a large incumbent like Oracle, I think it is ultimately what founders really dream of.

9:34Thank you for giving us the opportunity to. Well, and look at where the company has gone since then. So I'm just excited for you and all that you've accomplished. And as you mentioned, today we're talking about your new book, Founders Keepers, Why Founders Are Built to Fail and What It Takes to Succeed. And why did you think now was the right time for this book to come out? Well, it's probably two dimensions. Part of it certainly is personal. I've been working with Rich Hagberg, my coach, for the better part of 15 years. And I credit Rich a lot with my ability to break through some fundamental flaws that are built into that founder character, right?

10:16Everything has two sides, if you will. So the same energy and vision and risk-taking that allows founders to do what we do can actually trip us up as the company scales and grows. And so Rich was a critical person to help me work through some of those things. And Rich has a very specific framework that's data-driven. And so we just started looking at the data. He's got a data about thousands and thousands of executives and close to 200 founders. And we kept the names anonymous, but some of these are the folks that you would know, right, and read about in the press. And so we were able to really tap into that data to find patterns.

10:52And look, part of it was saying, hey, this is certainly very therapeutic in terms of seeing myself in some of the data. But what we found was this wasn't necessarily unique to me. This was unique to the founders as a species, if you will. The second thing is on an external basis, you hear it all the time, right? We hear all these stories in the book starts off with a count of how many people on the Forbes 30 under 30 list actually want to be convicted for a crime. And you just see stories of founders blowing up. There's HBO specials being created of founders blowing up. And so I think given where the world is going, I certainly believe we continue to need innovation.

11:34We continue to need the spark that founders bring. But if we can tame it and really direct it towards positive ways, I think it could be a really powerful thing. so in the book you use a number of metaphors which i love one of them that you talk about is that founders have a phantom limb the old company that doesn't exist anymore but they try to run when did you realize your instincts were wired for an earlier version of your business and how did you begin to catch up to the company you had actually built in hindsight the data is all there right and the question is as the founders can you really spot it so this would be three four years into the company probably we were successful with what you did with us at dell whether it was feedback from we did a culture survey from employees where there's hallway conversations whether it's what the board was trying to tell me what the executives were trying to tell me there's a sense and when i talk to earlier stage founders sometimes i see them i see them go through that I can pick it up in their eyes.

12:37And there's a sense that the company is starting to fray at the seams, right? That the wheels are starting to come off the bus, if you will. For us, the feedback was, hey, we used to have a fantastic culture. And now all of a sudden, we've lost our culture, right? We don't really know what our values are anymore. It seems like management is in an ivory tower, and they don't really know what's going on anymore. We seem very uncoordinated, right? The left hand doesn't really know what the right hand is doing. And the problem with that is when you hear these things, the founder instinct is to take greater control of things, right?

13:13That's really what allows you to power your way through the initial product market fit. And what you find is the more control you try to exert on the system, the more it actually starts to fray. And so through conversations with the rich, this is when, you know, the stories in the book when Peter Fenton, the venture capitalist that funded us from Benchmark Capital, Benchmark Partners, really introduced me to Rich. And that was a journey of self-discovery to really see my personalities, the decisions I was making, and the way I was leading was actually a big contributing factor to what we were experiencing as a company.

13:54To go on with that, you say that one of the hardest moments in any founder's journey is realizing when the company starts to outgrow their own instincts. What was one instinct that you had to unlearn as you were going through this process and getting mentored in order to lead at scale? Well, I mean, there can be countless. In the early stages as a founder, you're so close to the problem, right? There's only a few customers. You're in the technology. You might even be coding the solution. You're talking to the customers. You know what every employee is thinking. And so you can almost run based on instinct.

14:31But once again, we were about 150, 200 employees by the time I was experiencing this. You can't really know what's going on anymore, right? You don't have a necessarily a visceral sense. You don't know every single customer situation. I certainly threw myself into our Dell implementation, but we had a lot of customers by then. And so you have to really allow the organization to start making decisions. Right. You have to start, let the organization and make sure information from one part of the organization flows to another. So it could be anything from pricing. Right. I would just go with my gut.

15:08And a lot of our folks are coming back saying, look, I think we're pricing the product wrong. I think in these situations, we can price it higher. In these situations, we can price it lower. In these situations, you actually a higher price actually drives a stronger customer commitment that allows us to get through the deployment process. because we're all in the boat together, right? And so they have all these subtle information that they have. And what I found was, again, as a founder, you tend to question everything. You're in meetings. Your mind is just trying to understand the scope of the problem.

15:42You step into it and everyone winds up looking at you and saying, well, look, we're just going to wait until you make a decision. But you might not be the best person to really make that decision. And all of a sudden, the feedback comes back that the founders can be very indecisive, which is odd because founders certainly took the leap. And the risk-taking, that decision-making actually causes them to make rash decisions. But when they don't have all the information anymore, they slow down their decision-making. The rest of the company is still looking to them to make decisions. And that's where things, that's a good example of where things really start to get bogged down.

16:17It reminds me of when I was at Lowe's before I was at Dell, we were purchasing a new warehouse management solution for some of our facilities. And this was a new startup SaaS company. And they came in with their bid and it may be the only time I've ever done this in my career, but we actually told them that they bid it too low and we offered an additional 25 % on top of their bid. And the reason I did that, which listeners might think is crazy, is we didn't want them to go out of business. We didn't want them to get to a point where they were spending as much as we knew that they were going to have to invest and not have the capital to keep going with the project.

17:01So to us, it made sense to support a new partner like that when we knew we were going to be the biggest fish in their pond to ensure that we not only got the service we needed, but that we were going to help fund their growth so that they would be along in the future. Because you never know with these startups, if they're going to be able to get over that hump. And I think all the founders that might be listening, all the startup founders are hearing this and saying, gosh, we wish we had more customers like John. It's to create that win-win situation is really what founders are after. It's interesting.

17:40Last year, I got to interview Gary Vaynerchuk. And I remember when Gary first started to speak, he used to talk about, you need speed. I remember him saying that all the time. You need to be fast. You need to be quick. You need to be experimenting. And then I remember he started to switch his dialogue to trade urgency for patients, which is something that you talk about. Was there a particular moment when going slower for you actually led to better decisions or deeper growth? It's an age-old tension, right? Certainly, if you look at what's going on in tech right now, there's a force called AI that every company is trying to wrestle with.

18:20And so that sense of urgency is certainly there. The question really is, how do you balance that, right? It's an age-old tension of saying, if I get too involved in that, a company slows down, but you don't want to completely disengage. And that tension is really a key theme in the book, even for places like how do we hold executives accountable? Right. That's something that founders struggle with all the time. And they tend to be on either extreme. They tend to be micromanaging the people that they're hiring because they want to be in all the details or they say, OK, you've got this and I don't even think about you anymore.

18:53And that can be a problem as well. And so that whole tension of trying to find the right balance is really key. And I say, listen to Gary, there are times where you really want to move fast. And there are times where you have to learn patience and let the organization, give the organization time and space to learn and to develop. And so when I talk to like earlier stage or younger founders, I'll ask them, like, is there a time where you actually do disengage from the company? Perhaps once a quarter, you can actually go on a retreat or just go on the road. If you're a B2B SaaS company and you're working with large companies, go on the road and just spend time with customers.

19:31Get out of the office. Let the executives do their thing. Check back in in two weeks, four weeks, set a date and go do your thing. Be available. We founders are always 24 by 7. But find techniques and find rhythms in how you manage the company that allow you to find really that balance. So you lay out three different types of leadership archetypes, the manager of execution, the relationship builder, and the visionary and evangelist. Why is it that the manager of execution archetype is so atypical among founders? Well, you talk about these three archetypes, maybe just a couple of minutes on that.

20:12What we really try to do in the book to make it different from other books is it's very data driven. And so, again, we had data. So Rich has a what I'll call a framework of leadership that has 46 specific leadership competencies. And he's developed this over the decades at all sorts of companies, large companies, small companies, media supplies, companies, technology companies, biotech companies, service companies, really all sorts of organizations. So it's a great generic framework for leadership. and over the last 15 years or so, I think I was the second founder that he worked with. He's been applying that framework to founders and so we started the project really looking at the data, understanding and the last thing is he actually collects information on personality about 100 or something, maybe 130, 140 personality attributes of who you are and in working with rich, you first take a self-assessment that identifies your personality traits.

21:12And then you do a 360 process where the board, your executives, your investors, you try to get about 20 people, all provide feedback of what are you like as a leader. And the last thing we threw into the data was some measure of success measured by multiple invested capital as a measure of success. And so we're able to skis apart what makes a founder different than a traditional non-founder executive, a good leader. And then what makes unsuccessful founders different from successful founders, right? Just tease it apart. So you can imagine one source of one audience that really wanted to get their hands on the book.

21:49We're the venture capitalists, right? We're betting millions of dollars of capital on this person. And how do we know? Is there any way to predict or to see the trends of, is this going to be a founder that's going to last a test of time and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value? Or is this a founder that's going to blow up once a company's at scale? And let's see if we can diffuse a time bomb and help them really last the test of time. Now, what the research shows you is that leadership competencies come in clusters, right? If you're good at this competency, you tend to be good at overall at this cluster.

22:22And when you looked at the cluster, which is the three leadership styles, that people either lead by vision. So think of Steve Jobs as your prototypical founder that leads by vision or a leader that leads by vision. They lead by execution. So think about Jack Welch, right? As a person that knows the numbers based execution always delivers a train on time or then lead by relationship. And so in the tech fact sector, probably John Chambers or Meg Whitman is often described as people will follow them to the ends of the earth because of the relationship skills and that they loyalty that they're able to generate from that.

22:57And so founders, unsurprisingly, index very strongly on vision. And what you find is some of the founders that we work with really started their company early. They hadn't seen scale before. They don't necessarily appreciate execution. They see a whole execution processes as systems, as bureaucratic. There's a part of them that wanted to rip it down in the first place, right, which is what inspired them to create the thing that they created. And so a big part of the journey is to help founders understand, look, once you get to scale, if you don't have the right systems, and yeah, don't put in systems that are more appropriate for a larger company and slow people down, but systems actually help you run faster.

23:42Systems help people understand, this is my role, this is how I fit, right? These are my dependencies. And just like you need to know what your role is on a team, right? And to reframe systems as a way to help the organization run faster is often what Rich tries to do to help founders appreciate the importance of having systems. So for the audience who is unaware of your background, before you founded Xura, you were one of the first 15 employees at Salesforce, if I have my numbers correct. And you got to work very closely with Mark Benioff, who most people probably recognize the name and Parker Harris, who some might not recognize Parker's name quite as much, but he played just as pivotal a role.

24:30When you think of these archetypes, how would you describe Mark and how would you describe Parker and why did the combination of those two together work so well? That's a great question. Look, Mark is clearly a visionary. And so he is probably a classic founder that indexes very strong on vision. Again, these are the specific competencies. If you look at the specific competencies under vision, which whether it's to be able to create meaning, the ability to tell a great story, to strategic vision, being received around corners, right? These are all aspects of skills that visionaries often have.

25:07Mark index is incredibly high in all these things. And if anything, he was an inspiration to me and certainly a source that I try to learn from. And look, I remember conversations with Mark where he actually really looked up the Steve Jobs and saw Steve as the ultimate visionary, if you will. But I think what you get at is Mark also knew how to surround himself with strong execution-oriented folks. And Parker was certainly one of those, right? Parker's really kept the trains running. Parker knew how to hire. Parker knew how to deliver on time. Parker knew how to build systems and hire people to build systems around whether it's testing or development processes.

25:43I remember Parker also had his growth. And we were probably about 100 developers plus product managers at the time. And he was running systems that was, I wonder if he'll hear this, right? That was more appropriate for a smaller company when he had control of everything. And I remember folks like Chris Fry would come to him and say, look, you really want to rebuild the systems using this agile methodology, using a scrum team and retrospectives. And to Parker's credit, Parker really listened and gave people room to do that and really break through some of the size and scale limitations we were starting to experience.