The Art of Resilience: Navigating Crises and Growth | Sam Fankuchen

Sam Fankuchen:

You take somebody operating an organization and don't just say, "Here's a tool to do your job better," but you start to strip away the work that was debilitating for them so that they can feel empowered to actually achieve their mission, and we start to show real proof that missions are being achieved. What happens if you train people that way and then you have AI find patterns like that?

Nick McLean:

Hi, I'm your host, Nick McLean, and this is Ambition.

The words volunteering and acts of service aren't often used in the same sentence as million-dollar startup, but Sam Fankuchen is writing a new story.

Sam loves volunteering and wanted to help others navigate it easily. So he started Golden, which is currently the most awarded volunteer management software. They're based in Los Angeles, California where Sam is currently the CEO, as well as serving on the board of directors for numerous other groups.

Sam is a highly sought after leader for his overall technology aptitude. I'm impressed by his background and big heart for helping others. In this episode, we're talking about finding people to solve the problem, not just having the people and figuring out what the problem is. We're learning what it takes to motivate a widget manager and how to focus on a niche to expand your business. Sam's story begins with a feel-good idea, but the formative life event that shaped his purpose is moving and important.

Sam Fankuchen:

The idea behind Golden was to help anyone of any background live in their golden moments through acts of service in all their forms, and to help organizers at any scale and in any sector have a real-time understanding of the productivity of their programs so that they can make more informed decisions toward achieving their missions. And in that capacity, we've become the most popular app in the world for volunteering and in fact created the category of such applications, and also the most award-winning software in the world for managing public service programs. And we're lucky enough to work with about 40,000 organizations on six continents, some that are very informal and just getting started, and others that are global institutions that we know and respect across, again, every business sector and sometimes in very sensitive and regulated environments including disaster settings. So, happy to be here.

Nick McLean:

Well, thank you very much. How did this company even get off the ground? What was your inspiration to start it and grow it to where it is today?

Sam Fankuchen:

This is my second social enterprise in the space of making volunteering more natural and more productive. And the first one I started while I was in college. But the story goes back earlier than that. I wasn't always a volunteering and public service enthusiast. In fact, for a while I was kind of distanced from it because I saw other people becoming involved in service and thought that their experiences didn't appear to be super fulfilling or genuinely oriented. They were just performative. And I didn't want to spend my time doing those things. And I had a whole series of life events happen.

One of the most formative ones was I believed for about 36 hours that I had lost my entire immediate family in the 9/11 attacks. And I later learned due to a strange set of circumstances that they had survived.

Nick McLean:

Wow.

Sam Fankuchen:

And it made me think in a very deep way, in a very general way, about how lucky we are to be alive and what the reason for all of us being here could be for each of us. And I became very intent on finding that for myself and that led me to wanting to serve other people so that I could understand the world around me better and understand where my skills and interests could fit into advancing quality of life for all of us.

And so I tried exploring service through all of the conventional ways at the time. So we're talking about a period of time between basically 2002 and 2006. And felt that for anyone who's truly motivated to discover and participate in these activities, it was very difficult to understand where to get started. And in fact, if you talk to most people today, they would say the same thing. 90% of people in the US, for example, want to volunteer, 24% did last year. And it's largely because they don't know how to translate an interest they have into the practice of being there, whether it's online or in person.

And so we created a way for any one of any background to see what was truly available and to participate in it in a seamless and secure way that also encourages a lifestyle of service, not just episodic service. And that changed the way that individuals were able to break into the experience at a high level. Just to give folks a sense of the ways that Golden has been used in complicated settings, it's been used by the first major government, city government in the US, to do real-time reporting on disaster relief activities in order to get reimbursement from FEMA. It was used by the second-largest group of hospitals in the United States to decentralized care of discharged patients during COVID. It's used by the largest refugee placement organization in the world to do their intake. It's been used by the largest corporate day of service in the United States to organize 400 of the Fortune 500 companies on one day to do collective events.

We're able to help each person understand where they can fit in, how powerful they can be, keep them on a personalized journey toward having that kind of effect, look for similar people to somebody like that to involve them in a similar way, and start to have folks who are transformative enablers of the mission because they become true agents of the entities celebrating the work they're doing, activating their personal networks in ways that are not just asking for donations but are bringing people into the fold, and then asking them in the right way at the right time for the right donation. That makes all of us feel like we're fulfilling our potential rather than just responding to requests.

Nick McLean:

Truly amazing. I mean all those organizations and all the organizations that are seeking you out. I mean, there's not surprising to hear that you've had the level of success that you have or Golden has had, I should say. But as you were starting the company, what were some of the initial challenges you faced as a leader knowing that not only you wanted this to succeed, there was almost an additional pressure because you realized how badly it was needed by all of these organizations.

Sam Fankuchen:

When you're deeply involved in these entities and other people are trusting you, your team members, your clients, investors, you can't let them down either. And sometimes it's beyond the organization. Like place where I was living flooded twice, COVID happened, these are things that affect us every day and you got to deal with them. And then they're also the things that happen with the company. And it's just been a big series of these. And what most entrepreneurs I listen to will say is, "You got to be really gritty and you got to be able to kind of grind to the bone and see through it." And it's certainly true. I mean, if somebody were to ask you on paper, "Is this going to kill you or make you stronger?" And it looks like a close call and you just got to see through to make those choices, that's one thing.

But the other thing is at least I feel, and many of my other friends who I admire in their professional careers as entrepreneurs sometimes feel, is that I know personally I just have a different understanding of the playing field than others who've existed in this space have. I just see it differently. And the reason why I personally have been so involved in Golden is because I just know that if our team weren't working on this, with the values that we have, the culture that we have, the access that we have to people doing meaningful work, that the work would not be done the right way. And if the work were not done the right way going into an era of AI, we can be sure that the AI is not going to fix the problem. It's only going to compound it.

And we just have a real sense of duty, I will call it, to show people how it could look in one way, not saying it's the only way, but to show people what happens when you make anyone feel like they can be a part of it. When you help them understand that their activities are part of a journey. When you help them understand that big picture goals like the UN sustainable development goals could be achievable if we allocate resources properly. What can happen when you take somebody operating an organization and don't just say, "Here's a tool to do your job better." But you start to strip away the work that was debilitating for them so that they can feel empowered to actually achieve their mission, and we start to show real proof that missions are being achieved.

What happens if you train people that way and then you have AI find patterns like that? Instead of in our world what the historical precedent would be, which is get lots of content out there, don't really supervise the content to know if it's quality or not, reinforce the patterns of people engaging in suboptimal content. Or use professionalized tools to reach people who are not mature in their adoption of those tools and get them to use it wrong. Whether that's somebody in practice operating a program or an individual being mined for donations that isn't ready to give in an effective way, all you're doing is reinforcing suboptimal patterns and preventing the world from getting to a better place.

So there's of course economics involved in our business like there are with any other business, and we see the promise of a more mature and valuable market. And that's why we've been able to get really leading investors on board with our mission. But I think if you were going to ask them, they would say, "Yeah, of course. It makes a lot of sense on paper when you do the market sizing and you look at the kind of growth metrics and revenue retention metrics." They would be able to justify an investment with enthusiasm. But they don't really think about that when they interact with us because they just feel like the energy that we have as a team and what we're able to do with a small team and a big network is powerful in ways that most companies never get to experience and we feel like we have that kind of lightning in a bottle energy.

Nick McLean:

I want to jump ahead to another, a topic. Some of our listeners are going to be manufacturers of widgets, for example. And as a president or owner of a company, part of what we need to do is motivate the troops and try to have a workforce that is engaged trying to achieve a goal. You can make the argument that as the owner of a manufacturing firm that's just out there producing widgets, they don't have the luxury that you might have in terms of motivating your workforce because there's a common good associated with what you're trying to do, whereas the common good of the widget manufacturer is at best obfuscated a bit. What would your response be to the business owner that says, "Sam, great job motivating your troops. It doesn't correlate to mine. If you were in my shoes, how would you motivate and engage a workforce of widget manufacturers?"

Sam Fankuchen:

Well, let's pick a really extreme example. Let's say we're really just talking about basic assembly line manufacturing. In the '90s, Toyota's Kaizen manufacturing philosophy completely upended conventional thinking about how mass production should work. And the idea behind Kaizen philosophy and manufacturing then, and this is when Toyota came from basically domestic obscurity and completely displaced American manufacturing of automobiles in the '80s and '90s and others with just more sophisticated manufacturing relationships between line workers and management. And the theory of Kaizen has been famously documented. This is repeat for everyone actually in the world of the question you just asked, is what if you ask every single person touching every part of production what could be done better, and you challenge them and incentivize them to implement it because it means something for the whole team? And what happens is you start to get a really good feedback loop and you start to find competitive advantages everywhere and you start to outcompete people.

And there's also a culture of teamwork and celebration and a degree of selflessness, but also a degree of self-celebration when you contribute to the betterment of the team. That becomes more powerful than just the pure skill of doing the job, which is also rewarding in its own way. And that enables people to do really impossible things. Companies can't translate the objectives to the team in a way that the team feels a shared goal and like everyone's incentives are aligned, then it won't be possible to compete at the velocity of firms that have figured out a way to do that in a lower cost environment. So we just bridged a pretty wide gap of talking about ecosystems of technology online across sectors to talking about pragmatic considerations of retention of hourly employees in manufacturing roles. But there's some lessons that really are universal and giving everybody a sense of purpose in their work and celebrating everyone for their individual contributions is an essential part of a culture of effective production, whatever that production of widgets may be.

Nick McLean:

Very insightful answer. As we think about your organization, surely there were certain points when maybe not the revenues or the new organizations signing up were plateauing, but certain elements within your organization were plateauing. Maybe that was just new features being introduced. Could you talk to me a little bit about one or two periods of time when you felt the organization did plateau and how you broke through that plateau?

Sam Fankuchen:

One of our real calling cards is we have exceptional client and revenue retention rates. So much so that they would be considered basically absolute top percentile in any industry. And we've had to work really hard to earn it and I don't know if we ever thought we would have that in sight, especially with the sort of ratio of employees to clients that we have. It would be a very extreme example. And so it's something we've learned how to operationalize quite well. But there was a time when we lost like 65% of our recurring revenue. And it may not surprise you to hear that that was when the first six months of pandemic. Basically a core revenue line for us is recurring software as a service contracts for enterprise scale clients, buying basically business to business software from us.

And when I remember March of basically 2020, we started hearing little stirrings, a pandemic coming about and what would happen, and then 48 hours later, shelter in place requirements. Nobody was going to the office anymore. Nobody really knew what was going to happen. And in the world of volunteer management where the historical organizers were basically bringing people on site, training them, and then enabling them and doing top-down command and control organizing of the production of whatever was getting produced, that couldn't happen. And basically nobody knew what would happen and everyone shut down their physical operations.

The problem was that usually these kinds of entities, or actually there's a bifurcation. There were two classes of clients that we were working with. One delivering mission-critical services like getting people to donate blood, delivering meals to people in need, operating healthcare facilities. And then there were lifestyle organizations like bake sales and community gardens and all kinds of the other wonderful texture that makes every place we love the place that we love. And the lifestyle ones shut down kind of indefinitely, so we lost some contracts there where there wasn't a total line of sight until when they would come back and we hoped they would. And then there were the operators of mission-critical programs who also shut down and then very quickly started to realize that by shutting down there were compounding the consequences of the pandemic in their communities. People were not able to get the basic services they needed more than they ever needed before.

And so they were forced against a culture of complacency, as exists in many sort of under the radar operations, they were forced to reimagine how they would deliver their core services. So if you are a food pantry, rather than bringing people on site, how are you going to feed hungry people? Well, that's going to look like decentralized logistics. And what if you've never adopted that? How would you do it? And so we built an array of tools that allowed people to decentralize what were formally centralized programs and to enable the kinds of interactions that were considered radical at the time. And those kinds of interactions are peer to peer interactions. So rather than going to a specific facility in a trusted environment, is there somebody else who could act as an independent agent and give you the service in a safer, more convenient or timely way?

And that tradition is thousands of years old. It's often referred to as mutual aid. It's kind of a tribal philosophy where you're in a group, maybe formally or informally organized. An example of formal organization may be a place of worship where you have a congregation or you may be in a mutual aid group, like in Brooklyn there's certain neighborhoods that have very active mutual aid groups. Or it may be a lot less formal like, "Hey, we're in this general area, we have general interests like in Lander, Wyoming, we're a rural community and we got to take care of ourselves because there are no services coming here, but we care about each other."

And we created a technology that allowed people to safely interact with each other in a peer-peer way or for a community leader to broker relationships, like a religious leader putting people within the congregation in touch with each other, or a hospital group putting nurses in touch with patients in certain environments. And that became imperative in correcting delivery of these essential services in local communities. And it allowed us to open up the contracts again and then the result of that was building a level of trust by meeting our clients where they were and solving their problems in that moment. And looking past what would've been very damaging economic metrics for our organization, just saying, "We have a sense of ownership over doing what we exist to do as an organization, and there will be an end to this. We're going to try and accelerate the end to it. And we're going to learn what it takes to innovate together with our partners and hope that they come with us." And they did.

Nick McLean:

So to summarize your perspective, it wasn't, "Let's weather the storm." It was, "We are innovators. We're doing something different. It's part of our core DNA to continue to adapt. And this is just another, not opportunity, but another situation where we're going to be forced to let our DNA help us get through this challenge." Is that at all fair to say?

Sam Fankuchen:

Yeah. And it required total alignment of all of our stakeholders. We just had a very natural conversation about it, which is, "Here's what we're facing. And here's what everyone else is facing. And we have some runway, a little bit. How do we want to use it? What do we feel is the right thing to do? What would we feel most proud of if we had to look back on this?" And fortunately, because the premise of our company, not just what we do, like what our services are, but it's how we recruit people, what we say are our priorities when we work together, what we feel when we work together, that dictate our own framework for processing priorities. And I'm not saying everyone should have our culture. Everyone should have their own culture. But if the culture is really clear, then you can get that extra performance out of everybody, because hey understand that it's not you asking something of them, it's the situation demanding it of all of us.

Nick McLean:

Very consistent with how you answered the question to the widget manufacturer. It's building a team and building the culture so that everyone is committed to the goals of the organization.

Sam Fankuchen:

Yeah, we have never published our culture. We speak to it often. We don't usually directly say what the tenets of the culture are. But before we named the company, before we incorporated it, before we built any products, before we hired really any full-time staff, we were completely maniacally focused on creating the culture document and making it something that we could service as we grew and evolved, but something that was authentic throughout. And we created a culture that was certainly not performative, but was instead if we deleted everything that we ever did and the culture remained, would we rebuild a company as good or better than Golden? And because that is our absolute central and only focus, and that products and team and clients are all function of the culture, it allowed us to have some operating framework in a very uncertain set of circumstances.

Nick McLean:

Well, you were clearly light years ahead of me because the first idea I had for our company was we were focused on manufacturing at the time. It was something along the lines of Midwest Manufacturing Acquisitions company, and I told a few people that, and I was met with blank stares. And I think that that was their way of saying, "Nick, that's the worst idea for a company name I've ever heard." We of course didn't choose that. We chose Four Pillars to stand for the four ideals that myself and my partner stand for. We're a little bit more vocal about them. That's just our style. But understand where you're coming from in having those ideals really guide what the company, who the company is, and who the company will grow to be over time, as opposed to having these five generic words on a piece of paper or a poster like ethical and integrity, where I feel like if you have to put those words on a piece of paper in your building, you've completely missed the boat on that one.

Sam Fankuchen:

100% agree. So I do want to ask you a question, but before I ask you that question, Nick, because of what you said, I'll challenge the audience to say, "Take your culture and look at it, whatever you have documented. Your four posters about ethics or whatever." And say, "If everything about our company were deleted, and the only document I could hand to somebody coming in on a blank slate environment, would they build what we have or better with these values that we have or whatever document you have?" And if you don't, then you need a new document. But what I would say to you, Nick, is for the benefit of all of us, myself included, can you walk us through the four pillars and how you decided to have that kind of principled approach for your company?

Nick McLean:

Absolutely. So again, started off with that bad idea for what the company should be called and realized that myself and my partner were both very principle centered people. And we came up with a list of, let's call it 14 ideals or values that we stood for. We kicked some out, we consolidated some, and ultimately realized that four fairly well captured 80% of what we were trying to accomplish, if you will.

The first one, and the one that I would say exhibits itself or manifests itself every day in what we do is relationships as a cornerstone for success. Anytime we meet with folks, it's not about transactional relationships, it's really about getting to know people, and appreciating that person for who they are, even if that relationship is not going to benefit us directly or indirectly even.

The second pillar is servant leadership. There's a lot of different concepts around servant leadership. Really how I think about it though, as a leader, doing things for your team as opposed to having your team do things for you. That entails removing obstacles. Also, it means giving folks the ability to complete tasks on their own without micromanaging or without trying to insert your beliefs about how something should be done.

The next one is challenge the status quo. My partner and I don't like things to stay static for too long.

The fourth one is persistence. I've had a lot of failure in my career. I would say probably more failure than successes. But that failure is really what has made me into the person that I am, and if I didn't have that level of persistence, then I probably would just be working a 8:00 to 5:00 job, which is fine, but I would be miserable in that because of the entrepreneurial spirit that resides within me.

Sam Fankuchen:

Good for you. And how has your feedback loop been with your team related to those pillars?

Nick McLean:

Definitely strongest as it relates to relationships as a cornerstone for success, because that really, again, permeates almost all of what we do in what I would consider a very relationship based industry or function that we do here. As with anything that I do, there are certainly areas where I could improve.

I would say that the second area that I would like to think that I do a decent job is with servant leadership. Certainly let the team have a much ability to affect an outcome as they want. So if I try to be there whenever they need support or assistance, but I try and stand out of their way if they're not raising their hand saying help.

I think for me personally, challenge the status quo and persistence, those are two areas that you don't coach. You don't try to implement or try and get other people to accept those. I kind of feel like to some degree, you're either going to have that drive to be persistent, have that drive to always challenge things, and if you don't, that's great. You're not a bad person. It's just those two values don't resonate with you. And I would say that to the extent that we had somebody that wasn't at all persistent or didn't at all challenge the status quo, there might be certain roles within the organization for that person, but generally speaking, my response to that would be that we didn't do a good job during the evaluation process of determining if this individual would fit well with our culture.

Sam Fankuchen:

Yeah, hugely helpful. Thanks for sharing.

Nick McLean:

Talking with other business owners, there has often been a tension between going down a more niche path versus a more generalist path, whether that's a focusing on a certain customer, focusing on a certain capability, etc, etc. In your experience leading Golden, has there been that tension between being more of a niche provider versus more of a generalist?

Sam Fankuchen:

Yeah. And I think every business has its own trajectory and sometimes it makes sense to be more niche, and sometimes I guess it makes more sense to be generalist. What I've heard from others is that iterating and understanding a niche where you operate, that's a core niche that you can build upon later, is usually a very helpful path no matter what, no matter how generalist the company is. But making sure that you don't get kind of backed into a corner by paying attention to macro trends, market dynamics, the competitive landscape, buyer preferences, is really important regardless of what niche you're operating on.

So for example, we'll use a totally different example. It was possible last year to make an insanely good living as a realtor, maybe a super specialized realtor. You understand some market pretty well, and if you had access to inventory and customers, you could decide how much money you want to make. Then there's a class action lawsuit made it to the Supreme Court this year, earlier 2024. It basically said there was price fixing among realtors to charge, let's say 5% commission, and that that was illegal under antitrust law. Now all of a sudden, if you were super niche and specialized, well, your life looks really different if you were over indexed on that instead of had a way to hedge that kind of lifestyle according to what threats might be possible, even if we didn't see them coming. So a general awareness is really helpful, a niche dedication is often helpful, but where you set in the spectrum of super niche or super generalist probably varies.

Nick McLean:

It's interesting though, because it flies in the face of standard statistics where diversification reduces risk or standard deviation. So on the face of it, there's that argument, but I think what most entrepreneurs realize is that by decreasing that standard deviation, you also essentially are reducing your ceiling. And if that's okay, great. But if there is the goal to not only reach that ceiling but blow past it, then perhaps being more diverse is going to prevent you from doing that.

Sam Fankuchen:

Yeah. So just because we're using first person examples here, in the case of Golden, we raised external financing. But in other companies, especially podcast listeners, many of them are bootstrapping their companies on their own or maybe they're taking debt from a lender. And in a situation like that, your enterprise value and the exit opportunities for your business are going to be dependent on your ability to build healthy economics, a healthy balance sheet, healthy cash flows. And so niche makes a lot of sense in a situation like that. In a situation where using a lot of external financing, defending the size of your market is also going to make a big difference for valuation multiples on either EBITDA or revenue.

Nick McLean:

So oftentimes we think about businesses that have achieved scale as losing their entrepreneurial spirit. As companies grow, firmly believe that you need more processes, more procedures, more structure. Now your organization I think is a little bit different because you've mentioned how few people you have. However, I know that you have a desire to help more organizations and continue to get Golden out to more folks to make a bigger impact. How do you think about the challenge of keeping that entrepreneurial spirit while also recognizing that as the company grows there will need to be more structure, more processes, more procedures?

Sam Fankuchen:

We lean into and celebrate process and procedures where it helps all of us feel like we're doing more of what we could be able to do, and not just process and procedures for the sake of having them. So there's a healthy tension between evaluating whether or not these processes and procedures will help us. And we operate in very sensitive environments, so we have to comply with regulations and other mandates, so we have a culture where we take that stuff seriously and have rigor around it. And we're the first to rise to the occasion when there are new standards to be met. And that's certainly part of our culture. And we would welcome it, I think, where it's truly due and we're willing to sacrifice and reevaluate processes that don't work. And certainly you have to try them out and try and optimize them If there's something that needs to come in place or they need to be removed, you have to be willing to sacrifice them as well, not just lean on them too heavily.

Would also say that understanding who your external stakeholders are and celebrating their stories in conjunction with your own allows a more natural tone around what it feels like to be entrepreneurial. Because sometimes you're being entrepreneurial and sometimes you're enabling people you work with to be entrepreneurial, and doesn't always have to be you. As a founder, there's a very well-known blog post in tech circles about going into what's called founder mode. And the idea is there's certain behaviors that founders will do as CEOs that non-founding management CEOs might not do, that would be seen as being unusual, for better or for worse. And we can all think of CEOs that embody that, whether it's Steve Jobs or Travis Kalanick at Uber really kind of stepped on a lot of toes in the early days of Uber. But Uber wouldn't be Uber without a CEO like that.

Today's CEO of Uber is a very different style of management that's more appropriate for where they're in their maturity curve, they have a lot of different process. But there's a natural part in the growth curve where you really have to be an entrepreneur because the odds are against you and showing up to customers sites and understanding what affects them and going to bat for your team when their life gets in the way, all these things are displays of character and they earn trust in ways that often aren't measured, but determine the success, the ultimate success of the company. And we just have bitten off every set of responsibilities that we possibly could, sometimes in ways that we pay the price for, but at least we have a track record of integrity in those matters and it has earned us a huge degree of authenticity of having our own entrepreneurial journey and that attracts a certain type of talent that you can't get otherwise.

And sometimes that culture will far outlive the founders. And if there's integrity around a company doing what the company should do in its setting and you believe in the company's choices on your own, and you're willing to take time off of your personal balance sheet to invest in working in the company, then that's a really good start. But the company should always be looking at what they can do, what we can do as operators or owners of companies that aren't operating companies, to think about is the company being the version of itself that it's stakeholders requires?

Nick McLean:

Great comments. Sometimes how I think about that is for certain organizations, the company requires a level of sacrifice, of giving, et cetera, that it's not willing to reciprocate. They want you to be there, they want you to give up everything for the company. However, if the company hits the slightest bit of rough patch? Oh, layoffs, layoffs. No level of the stability or the reciprocity, I guess, in this. And I think from my perspective, that might be why some of these situations unionization is a better answer because there isn't that willingness to be there for the employees. It's only about the company.

Sam Fankuchen:

Yeah, I mean, all of these situations vary. And let's look at something like layoffs, which is a situation everyone wants to avoid. Companies shouldn't just be, and it happens this way a lot, which I can say as being a former partner in a management consultancy, visibility into how companies make decisions sometimes. And in mature companies, companies will look at spreadsheets of who's on their team, where the cost is coming from, what the conditions are, and they'll make broad stroke choices about who should be at the company right now. And those can have devastating consequences for the company and for the employee. Or they can have benefits sometimes, for each. Maybe the employees get severance and it enables them to do something they wouldn't have been able to do. Maybe the company can survive and be better in the future. I mean, there are life cycles of these things, even when the conditions are hard.

But those decisions shouldn't be taken lightly. The companies shouldn't always think of more employees on something as the solution. They should be thinking of what the solution is and how many employees are required to achieve the solution, especially in a world where AI will be able to do things. I'm not saying about automating out manufacturing jobs, which it will do to a certain degree. But it will also enable each of us as contributors to the company's benefit or society's benefit to accomplish new things with a higher degree of success. And a question all of us should be asking too is what could I do? If I had all these modern tools, you don't even need to know how they function, but if you can just imagine what you would want to do, if you could do anything, or if you had technologies that could help you do stuff, what would that be?

Because we're at a stage in the adoption and future of the world where there will be no world without AI anymore. And understanding how to interact with artificial intelligence is the fundamental responsibility of humanity from this point forward. I try to think of it in my own little ways every day. What are the parts of my life where maybe this is an advantage and I can start playing with it? It doesn't even need to be at work. Just get kind of comfortable with how you would use AI. But also at the systems scale, the big picture. Think about those questions at the same time. And where there's overlap in your interests, just develop those interests. Because right now, those are the highest paying jobs that exist are the people that understand how to apply AI to places where AI hasn't yet come, and how that can be used to create more jobs for people who can create more value with AI.

So I think it's kind of an exciting time and I don't want to see AI come in and do things wrong and rip out productivity and infrastructure that should not have been displaced. But I think all of us want to live in a world where there's more value for all of us and where the human quality of life is improved. So if you can think about where those areas exist for you personally or where they exist for your company and take some small steps in experimenting, then you won't have to worry about your job because a lot of people want to hire you and you'll have a refreshed sense of honor in the work that you're doing because you can see how it's going to improve other people's lives.

Nick McLean:

Good points. Good points.

Sam Fankuchen:

Anyone who'd like to know more about Golden, please go to goldenvolunteer.com and you can find free offerings for yourself as an individual or your organization, or you can find really sophisticated offerings, just depending. And if you have any questions, please feel free to send us an email at hello@goldenvolunteer.com. Thanks for having me.

Nick McLean:

Pleasure was mine. Really enjoyed the stories, especially as you were able to relate them to companies in different industries, companies of different size at different stages of their life cycle. I really appreciate your ability to translate your own experiences to those of people in many different situations. So for that, I thank you.

Sam Fankuchen:

Thanks again, Nick.

Nick McLean:

Sam built a successful business doing what he loves while helping other people do the meaningful work they love too. There's something really powerful about challenging your whole team, incentivizing them to always strive for excellence. Generating that feedback loop, creating friendly competition, it all leads to doing the impossible. Golden is a successful business because the people who created it, the people who run it, and the people who use it all care deeply about the mission. This is something we should all strive for in our businesses. If you were inspired by this episode of Ambition, please share it with a friend or colleague. Thanks for listening.