Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#220:
Cyrus Wadia, CEO of Activate – $3.6B for PhD Scientists Founding 200 Startups. 1,000 Application for 50 Fellowships. Corporate and University Partnerships. Nike, Amazon, and the White House.
Podcast Introduction
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Cyrus Wadia, CEO of Activate. Activate helps scientists and engineers bring their transformative technologies to life through a two year paid fellowship. These science entrepreneurs receive the support they need to turn their ideas into hard tech startups. Activate Fellows are working across many aspects of science innovation, including climate solutions, advanced manufacturing and robotics, new uses of chemistry and materials, reimagined food and agriculture, space innovations, and much more. As a nonprofit, Activate partners with philanthropies, universities, government programs, the corporate sector, and VC investors to help Fellows bridge the gap from lab to commercialization, all without taking any equity in their startups.
Cyrus was previously director of Worldwide Product Sustainability at Amazon, Vice President of Sustainable Business and Innovation at Nike, and Assistant Director of Clean Energy and Materials R and D in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a Senior Program Officer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the founding co-director of the Haas School of Business Cleantech to Market Initiative. He holds a PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, a MS in Chemical Engineering from MIT. Also in the notes for the podcast, you'll see five short paragraphs with some notes on our conversation. Hope you enjoy it. And please give Cyrus and Activate a shout out on LinkedIn, Slack or X by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
All right, before we hop in, I've got a challenge and I guess an invitation for you all. First, the background. My goal is to empower 250,000 entrepreneurs, investors and university students to tackle climate change through startups, finance and personal growth. Is that enough? I don't know. It's a lot. Maybe it'll grow. Anyway, the podcast is one way to do that. To that end, the sector needs more inspiration, tools and tips from CEOs and investors in this space. Conveniently, as you may guess, these folks are precisely my guest on this podcast. So here is the challenge.
If you and five of your friends rate, review and follow this podcast on Apple and Spotify and share your efforts with me on LinkedIn or in response to my newsletter on Substack, I'll hop on Zoom and brainstorm a climate, tech, business or investment challenge or opportunity with you. Now, is that a reward? Is that punishment? I don't know. There it is. This is the best way for new folks to learn from the CEOs and investors on this podcast. If the process is unclear, as it was to me, in the show notes, you will find a link explaining how to do this. I read every single review. So please tell me and all of us which guest insights you like the most. Thanks so much. Hope you enjoy it.
Podcast Interview
Chris Wedding:
Cyrus Wadia, CEO of Activate. Welcome to the podcast.
Cyrus Wadia:
Thanks for having me.
Chris Wedding:
So you know what's really interesting is yesterday I was teaching my Climate Tech Startups and Investors course at Duke University, 65 super eager students to come work in the kinds of companies that your fellows found. And someone said, actually we had Af. Hernandez over at Azolla Ventures talking about the kinds of CEOs they like to back, which sound a lot like the ones that go through your all's program. And one of my students said, well, you know, how are these deeply technical people often PhDs? How do they unlearn or learn the skills of starting a company? And I said, it's funny you should ask that question. My podcast guest tomorrow runs the kind of preeminent program to do just that. So anyway, this is to the students, Cyrus.
Chris Wedding:
As folks go to your all's website, which hopefully they all will after this podcast they'll see somewhere on the homepage three stats which are pretty impressive about your all's program. I'm going to read them right now. 249 fellows to date, $3.6 billion catalyzed to follow on funding across 197 startups. I'm sure those numbers are slightly higher since publication. So. Wow, a crazy scale in the best way. Can you comment, perhaps just to get us started, what are a couple of the hardest things that these deeply technical PhDs have to learn or unlearn to become company builders?
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah, I think it's a really good question to start with. And you know, we're really proud of the stats that you just walked through with Activate. I mean, that's culmination over the 10 years we've been doing this. The fellowship has certainly grown in that period of time. And one more I'll add to the list is that, you know, over 95% of the companies that have come through Activate are still active, which isn't the sort of the monetary, you know, measure that you kind of were pointing to, but does speak to this idea that we can, you know, support scientists making this transition from the lab to being a CEO, becoming entrepreneurial. And once they started going down this road and the ones that we've brought through the program, they're staying with it. And that's pretty exciting because who knows where that goes from here.
Now if you look at what the transition is like, it is not easy. So let's kind of just ground set in a couple of things. First, being an entrepreneur is a very hard job already. Being a first time entrepreneur founder is even more complicated. And then if you add on to that, coming from a very deep science or engineering technical background, you do learn some things in the ability to succeed in that environment that as you kind of pointed to, you may have to unlearn or you're trying to learn new skills. And so I'd say one of the hardest first things to do is understand that effectively your job description has changed. You know, yesterday my job was to, you know, seek objective truth about a scientific challenge and advance the understanding around that.
My job today now is to run a business and find a commercial market and figure out how I'm going to actually get this technology de-risked, matured, to a point where we can see this into the world. And sometimes that sort of vision for how it gets into the world feels very near, but most of the time it feels quite far. And when you start learning about what you need to do as a first time founder, a CEO of a new startup, a venture, the realities of how am I going to get resources in for this venture, how am I going to accelerate some of the tech side of this, but also the business side. You start to kind of see and learn the challenges in front of you. And then the mountain, the hill starts to feel a little higher and higher.
So the first thing that's, I guess, one aspect of it, another aspect of it is good sort of general ops practice or business practice. This is not something that you're taught necessarily, especially as you're going through a PhD and so there are these elements of being an entrepreneur, being a leader, of being kind of someone who's hiring for the first time or building a culture, or even just, you know, figuring out how to manage their business as well as go out and fundraise. There's a lot of things that they're learning simultaneously that's in addition to just the, this mental transition of, you know, I was doing one thing yesterday, I'm doing this new thing, and now I've got to be really open to learning these new skills. And so all of that to say, yeah, that is job number one.
It is a hard transition. It's best if you have a support, community and network. And I think that's what Activate brings. The last thing I'd say, I don't know if, you know, I'm going too long on your question. I think there is something about the balance between now you're building a business, but you still have work to do to retire risk from the technology, the science that you're coming to the table with, and understanding that balance and how you trade off your time is like really hard. And there's no answer. It's going to be case by case dependent. But that is another, I think, new skill set that our fellows are learning really fast and showing, you know, us that they're like figuring it out quickly, which is exciting to watch.
Chris Wedding:
Well, and also that balance between, you know, working on the business versus in the business, if you will, you know, the business versus the technical, you know, it isn't a balance that's consistent over a long period of time. Right. It is one. What is one kind of ratio today or this week, or this quarter, but then changes as well, I think for listeners. Well, I think most of our listeners and as entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, will appreciate the fourth statistic that you added, that 95% of these companies that were formed by these, call it 200 fellows, are still around, which is an extremely high percentage given relative rates of what happens innovation.
I think that says a bunch, and I'll say this one last thing, which is, you know, I'd got a, you know, whatever, a soft spot, if you will, for for PhDs turned CEOs, partly because I was not a technical PhD, but a PhD working in private equity, having to unlearn a lot of the things that were useful in academia but were not useful in PE. However, both sets of trainings were useful. So that balance you highlight is crucial.
Cyrus Wadia:
It's really so true. And I'll add one more thing that's probably kind of subtle, but something that's getting me really excited, which is our alumni. As they move on from maybe their initial venture, we're starting to see some of that time to time, they're staying in the game of entrepreneurship. And these are all people that, you know, post PhD, you know, could have taken a faculty role and gone down that road. And so what's really exciting is because of Activate, in a very small way, we're like, we're actually seeing some of these incredible geniuses go into a direction that didn't seem available to them 10 years ago when Activate started.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, so we hop right in, let's back up a little bit. Let's start from 30,000ft. I think listeners kind of get what Activate is, but let's spell it out clearly and then what is included. How do you all support these, as you call them, proto-founders? I believe you have whatever four or five pillars or let's say for that support.
Cyrus Wadia:
So, okay, so what is Activate? Activate is a non profit that is scouting scientists and engineers across the country. And we give, you know, a select few, 50 last year. We give them a fellowship for two years. And that fellowship provides both monetary support, coaching, mentoring a community, a lot of training for them to make that transition to being the CEO of their own business. And we are all working in the area of deep tech. So that's I guess our lane. And not just deep tech, but deep tech for societal benefit. Right. So there's a, like a big impact driven part of what we're trying to do.
So if you work backwards, start with climate as an example, you know, I think we could probably all agree that we're racing against the clock and we're not, you know, we're not even close to, you know, really getting after this problem. Then we could go into reasons why. But for us to really solve this problem, we're going to need, you know, software is not going to save us. We're going to need materials and chemicals and steel in the ground. There are actual physical things that need to get built for this world that are going to help us decarbonize and decarbonize even faster than we're able to imagine today. We have to get there. That is the area of hard tech.
And if you work backwards from that, there is a long kind of tortured path for an idea in this area that starts in a lab to find its way through the gauntlet of, you know, venture and other capital stacks to getting into the market. We gotta all work harder to make that happen faster and accelerate. And where we introduce ourselves is at the point of probably highest risk, where, you know, private investment or even government, sometimes they're not willing to take that risk on the ideas that are coming through. So we're taking that risk. We're uniquely positioned to do that. And by doing that, we're able to actually, I don't know, drive some real disruptive transformative technologies through this pipeline.
And sure, we take some of it for granted when we see companies like Fervo or Antora or 12 already out there making a lot of progress. But those weren't always the case. When they came through Activate, they were as crazy an idea as anybody else. And this is probably the strength of our model that we're able to provide a lot of this non-dilutive support early to take on the risk. We're de-risking the technology, we're de-risking the people. And I think I'll probably pause there because I've.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, yeah, that's helpful and I, I think it's good. You also reference, you know, three example companies that are showing great traction after coming out of Activate. You, you mentioned non-dilutive. You mentioned Activate as a nonprofit. So I think listeners can kind of pick up. Okay, so Activate's not taking equity in the company is what's to support. I believe you will provide various forms of cash support to these founders.
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah, yeah. You know, when the fellows come in, you know, they're not just looking at Activate. They, some of them are, you know, looking at actual job offers, academic offers, sometimes something that they've been working their entire life to achieve. So we provide financial support in the form of a salary. On top of that, we provide $100,000 in a recoverable grant that is meant to help them build their business, de-risk their technology. Every fellow comes in at a different stage. And in addition to all of that, we provide access to other forms of capital to keep accelerating their business. We're also always, you know, working with them. How do you navigate this like, sea of potential resources. How do you talk to venture capital? Like, that's something a lot of them have to start thinking about on day one.
How do you think about a term sheet? What does that actually look like? Who can I trust? And so we've built this sort of community of potential investors that we have pretty close relationships with. And then also on non dilutive side there's, you know, we work with them to figure out, okay, maybe there's a government grant here that you can apply for and you know, this is what that would look like and how you might actually succeed in doing that. So again, there's so many different ways in which you can kind of nudge one of these things forward. And what's kind of exciting is it's different in each case. But over the course of the years we've built the way to help them navigate that.
We have like these rockstar managing directors that kind of manage a portion of our like annual cohort, but they like at the certain community levels. So Boston, New York, Houston, Berkeley, we have a virtual one, Activate anywhere. And they're super talented and expert in helping the fellows figure out all of these things as they go along.
Chris Wedding:
You referenced that the $100,000 you provide is in the form of a recoverable grant. Can you just say more about why you chose that instrument as the mechanism for providing that support.
Cyrus Wadia:
As opposed to something that might be.
Chris Wedding:
Oh yeah, I mean, I just think like, you know, there's a, just a straight grant, there's you know, low interest loan, there's all sorts of other instruments to provide, you know. Yeah, equity, which you're not doing for sure. But why you chose, I mean, I think I know the answer, but why you chose recoverable grants?
Cyrus Wadia:
You got it. Yeah, well, you know, we operate first off as a non-profit, so we're supported by various philanthropic funders. We're supported by government funders, both federal and state. And in the design of this support, we wanted to provide capital. But you know, you got to recognize too that all fellows walking through the door at different stages and so if they're able to, you know, fundraise like really effectively and get to a point, hit some milestones where the grant can return back to Activate. What that's doing, Chris, is that's just supporting the next generation of fellows, we're able to move it right there. And, but at the same time, you know, we don't want the pressure of having that return. So like, honestly, you know, many of these will come back to Activate, but that's not why we designed it that way.
We want them to, you know, feel like they can get access to that capital, start deploying it quickly and you know, 100k is significant, but you know, it's, it may not even be enough. Right. If we really want to move faster on these things, we have to continue to insource different pools of capital to support our fellows and allow them still the space and time to explore risk, make pivots in their business before they feel like they're locked too much down the road on a specific track.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I mean that makes sense. I think I just asked because you in a parallel world. So I co-founded of this nonprofit called Terraset. We moved owner capital to do CDR by pre-purchases. But we're also thinking about, well, you know, how else could we support say a CDR company that's got a wonderful offtake but they got to get from here to the offtake. And we're like, well you know, what if we provided recoverable grants where again, it isn't like some, you know, ticking bomb of you got to repay this or more expensive equity or whatnot. It's hope you repay it. If you do, we're going to recycle it. Right. To have more impact. And if you don't, well, shit, it sucks for everybody. But that helps, you know, kind of a not unlikely outcome.
Cyrus Wadia:
Can I just want to use this as a jumping off point to say a couple of things. The first is we see a thousand applicants a year roughly, for what we're able to support 50 fellows. So what does that tell? And there are, you know, easily another 50 high quality scientists who we could take through this program if we had the capacity and if we had the resources. So what this tells me is there is a lot of demand for us. There are a lot of scientists out there that could be supported in this way.
And if we can begin to find a way to scale our offering but also support the ecosystem out there for scientists learning, you know, how to go down this road, that is like, that is a major major potential win not just for these societal challenges we're trying to solve, but also to establish kind of this pathway a little bit broader. And that's what we want to do. And so one way to think about that, and you know, we've been deep in some strategy thinking for like what does the next three years look like? How do we stay true to our purpose but keep expanding our impact? How do we do that in a sustainable way. This notion of a flywheel where we bring it back into the organization is like pretty foundational.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, well, okay, so I'm glad you said that. Listeners here, a thousand possible fellows, only 50 per year, due to logical constraints of time and people and so forth, budget. Who else. Who else would you like to hear from that can open up, not the floodgates, but anyway, open up the aperture so you all can support either the same more fellows, same intensity, or more fellows, different level, different intensity, perhaps.
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah, the degree of intensity. a good question and a framing. So where we sit, we're very early in the stack. We're catching folks right out of the lab. We're taking them through this learning experience. We're seeing the results kind of speak for themselves, kind of as you said at the start. But I think upstream of that, I really would love to hear from more universities who want to establish some level of program, some level of learning, some level of incentives in the university structure to kind of make more of this possible. And there are a lot of places people will look like a tech transfer or, you know, maybe there's some business curricula that engineers can kind of opt into. All that's kind of formally out there.
But I think we can get even more focused in terms of how we give scientists and engineers at least a view of what this path could look like. And because where we sit, I think we are maybe uniquely positioned to bring some of what we've learned a little bit upstream of where we are. That's upstream. Now I also want to look downstream. And one of the things that I recognize is, again, where we sit in the stack, sometimes we're still a little too early for big companies, corporates to take us, you know, to look at us as like, oh, we should be working directly with these people right now. Most of the time it's, oh, we'll give it more time. Let's see how this thing matures.
And I think that's slowing us down as well, because what you need from the corporates who kind of in a way define the market in like this idea of commercialization, we need them to send us the demand signals and the support signals. And that doesn't always look like, hey, we're going to work directly with a fellow, sometimes it could, but we want them to actually be as bought into this kind of pipeline of science entrepreneurs as a future sort of, it pays off in the future for them as well. And so I think that, you know, I'd like to hear from them as well. Basically both sides of where we sit because we're that bridge between the best of the nation's scientific infrastructure and the commercial market. And so I first look immediately left and I first look immediately right.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I mean I, I could say just with my own experience as a faculty member at UNC and Duke, tons of effort on the entrepreneurship side, growing interest for sure in the student body in all things climate and impact, you know, the, for the work to have, you know, meaning in the real world. But every university has a room to kind of reshape possibilities for entrepreneurs for sure.
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
On the corporate side, what would it look like for corporates to collaborate with, Activate, I think about other models out there which I know to greater or less degrees, plug and play, or the kind of partners at third derivative. What corporates could do with Activate, I don't know, similar or different?
Cyrus Wadia:
Well, just a lot of different ways. And you know, I kind of, I lived in that world at like two really large Fortune 50 companies. And so I would say there's a couple things on my mind. The first is I look at the corporates really as helping us create the market. Now government has a role in that as well, but let's suspend that for a second. So where the incentives are lined up right now, a lot of these companies, they have ambition behind net zero carbon commitments or sustainability goals. I need them in a way to codify those as here are the hard problems that we don't know how to solve that will be required for us to hit our goal. And maybe that's an industrial materials they've identified, maybe that's in something else.
But if we had those types of science questions in a way it's like validating a future market. And I can then be like even sharper in terms of how we scout for some of these game changing technologies. There's a link there that should happen that I don't think has happened as fluidly. It's a very hard question by the way. So it's not one that we all know how to answer. But that's one way that corporates could engage with us. Give me your hard questions and I might have something for you. So it's like a bit of a marketplace idea. Second is naturally support.
You know, I think that, you know, where companies tend to get comfortable offloading innovation risk, there's an expectation sometimes, right or wrong, that oh, innovation is going to happen outside of our company walls, but when it's ready we'll be able to just bring it in immediately. I think that's kind of a false premise that hasn't really borne out. So if these companies want to, you know, see, I don't know a world where some of these things that they want to onboard can come in and like come in more easily. I think there has to be more proximity to the capabilities that exist to do that like Activate. And there has to be some financial support so that they feel like they've got skin in the game as well. And so that's another way companies could kind of be working with organizations like Activate.
There's a lot of different models out there. Like you brought up Plug and Play. And I think that a lot of companies are still trying to figure out how do they kind of bridge innovation that happens outside with what they need to do. Because at the end of the day, you know, like innovation, it's not a clean pipeline. Right. It's, there's a lot of reasons why good ideas don't work out inside of big companies. So I don't want to force our fellows or technologies down that road. But then I guess the last thing I'd say is we need our corporate partners.
We have many right now to be sitting down directly with our fellows because if they can sit down, be as mentors, coaches, like understand like oh if I were to do these things or this is what it would mean to have a relationship with a corporate that is probably the most powerful thing that they could be helping us with right now because it's equipping our fellows to find a way to succeed in that space.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I really like what you said around, if the corporates could more clearly communicate. These are the hard problems. They're a must have not a nice to have what you got. Right. I can imagine for you all you mentioned kind of sharpening the focus as you go from a thousand to fifty companies. You're like well how about we include the filter of who could solve some of these hard ass problems these corporates have. Yeah, we just earlier today we finished one of our monthly peer group meetings for our CEOs and one of them said look, I need XYZ counterparty to clarify the rules so I know how to win the game. Right. I don't know what the rules are. It's really hard to win a game. So that's part of what are the rules? What are the rules here?
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah, and we need referees too. And that's where government is kind of letting us down.
Chris Wedding:
Well let me ask you one more question before we switch to kind of the person or personal side of the podcast. Sure you alluded to this, but. And folks who are listening have, will have read your bio, I think. But you know, two executive roles at Nike and an Amazon advisor to the White House former, entrepreneur, you know, PhD and stem type stuff on, combine all those things and appreciating that we have deep tech founders who probably are and need to look to the government, federal and state, either here or overseas to fund the early work before you get to a point where VC would fund. Of course we're at a weird time right now. This is March 6th as we record this.
How are you all coaching these founders on how to find what has been a pretty trustworthy source of federal state funding and now is just way more uncertain whether it's about keywords or whether it's about. Are the people actually at these agencies to deploy the capital?
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah, well, like things change every day and I think the one thing that we understand, all of us, is that change can happen fast in one direction or another. And when I think about the changes in government, yeah, there's definitely some anxiety of our fellows, you know, where as they're they're looking at government grants, SPIR grants, different, you know, tools that are out there to kind of help support their business. I think right now it's too early to say, you know, how much or how little of that's going to change. But right now, I mean, the way we're coaching them is no different than in the past, which is these are potential grants out there for you and you have to go after them and continue to put your best story forward.
And obviously I think that you have to kind of always inspect, you know, how in putting the best story forward, how am I kind of matching to kind of what the government is telling me they're interested in. And so I really do hope those resources stay pretty stable for early entrepreneurs, for, you know, small businesses, etc. And then I think the, you know, the other side of this is they're, you know, they're not alone. A lot of folks are kind of trying to navigate these changes and you know, there are other entities out there who are, you know, looking seriously at how do we support things that maybe, you know, the government changes their mind on. And that's always been the case.
That's kind of, I think, you know, over time you see, you know, that there are good people out there doing good work and you know, continuing to try to, you know, push for things that are slipping through the cracks. Externality is being one. And so I think that, you know, we just got to get creative, which is in a way what we've always taught our fellows.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Okay, well, lots of other threads we could pull on, but let's switch to the next part of the podcast. So three questions here. Primary questions. Cyrus, what kind of advice might you share with your younger self, seeking to build a career of impact?
Cyrus Wadia:
Well, I would say, you know, there's no set road to a life and a career of impact. And if I was early in my career, if my advice is to myself, like really at the start, I would index hard on focusing less on the actual role, the actual company or non profit or, you know, the actual thing, and more on mentorship. Someone who I can learn from, someone who is going to help cultivate the right leadership mentality. Someone who's also values based and you know, is in this world to drive impact. And I can learn from that person. And that's probably the most important thing I should do early in my career. And honestly, it doesn't change. I mean, I feel like that's been a current for me. I always look for this, like who's kind of continuing to coach and mentor me.
You never stop learning and, you know, you've got to have that appetite. But it's that curiosity and that openness to learning different skills that I think equip people with, you know, tools to help drive impact at any point in their career. And like, maybe as you see your career flourish and you start doing different things, all of a sudden these tools from, you know, several years ago, they come into play in a way you didn't expect. But that would be my advice.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I like that. Certainly. Great to have mentors for sure in person. Maybe they're in the corp, the kind of organization where you work. Maybe they're not, pros and cons. I think, yeah, I think the other interesting thing which is possible right now is to get mentorship, you know, by training GPT on various people you respect out there. Right. I mean like take like quintessential examples of, oh well, I want my, whatever, one of my financial advisors to be Warren Buffett. Well, guess what? GPT can crawl a gazillion quarterly letters that are publicly available to learn on that and then be a free. A free tutor. Yeah.
Cyrus Wadia:
I'll tell you, Chris, there's something to that where, if you've heard about Digital Twins that, you know, there may be a moment in time when we all have our own digital twin. So imagine a server sitting next to you right now that's talking to the world without you really even knowing it. I think we have to really lean into that as a way of scaling knowledge and retaining knowledge because I think that will move the world faster and some of these positive vectors that we need, even something so small as, you know, making a connection. Right. I have, you know, fellows every day who might ping me and say, hey, do you know someone in this company or this industry?
And I know that'll go a lot faster if we have these digital twins out there that are there to say, yeah, I do, and here's a good way to kind of make that connection really fruitful. It's not a solve all, but we're going to have to experiment a little bit with AI to figure out how we scale ourselves. And, and if we get to a point where we're able to scale ourselves, that may actually yield a lot of positive benefits. Now there's always the potential for the other side too, which we have to be careful of. But I think there's something very interesting about this trend and this new capability. So we're certainly looking at it at Activate.
Chris Wedding:
100% agree. Let's go to the next one. Tell us some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane and focused either now building Activate or in the past in your other roles, whether corporate, you know, government, entrepreneurial.
Cyrus Wadia:
Well, yeah, it changes sometimes as you go through life. You know, I've got two boys, you know, sometimes they keep me sane, sometimes they do the opposite. They're, they're in high school years, so I think it's indexing harder on insanity. But my place where I go to just ground myself is my bike. I do both mountain biking and road biking and it's hard for me in Portland, Oregon, to be honest, because they're about four to six months where it's tough to get on the bike. But when I do, that's usually kind of how I ground myself. It's, it's kind of meditative to me, especially on my road bike. So that's, it's physical activity for me that helps.
And then, yeah, just the other thing I'd say is, yeah, spending time with my family and how, you know, how I, I think I've gotten better at this. Certainly I was terrible at this, you know, earlier in my career, but I've gotten better at just setting boundaries and being able to turn off work when it's time to turn off work. I, I Tell you it's still hard to do, but I think I'm getting better at it. And I don't know how to be honest, but I'm pretty intentional and I'm working on that. So that means when I have time away from work, it truly is restorative specific time with my family, on my health, on other aspects of my life. And you're never going to win. Like it's not a perfect ever. There's no blueprint for this.
But I, I definitely, I do things with some intention in terms of being able to switch that off when it's time to switch it off.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I mean I think we're, you mentioned it's never perfect. I'd say it's about batting averages. Right.
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
What percentage of the time are you living according to your kind of ideal, you know, day or self? Yeah. When you, when you're fully present in those other situations, non work situations. Is that because you've whatever left your phone in a different room, you put it done a disturb. What's like the practical ways of, for you to kind of go offline, if you will?
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah, I think actually it started with my phone and this tether had to get cut. So it's not that I leave my phone behind. I don't have my work slack and email on my phone regularly and I found that to be my biggest solve. Now sometimes I turn it on, especially when I'm traveling and I can't be away from that as often as I'd like. But by doing those two small things, there's no temptation because it's not like you're picking up your phone and you know, just kind of glancing over. Right. Because that's what's going to happen. Right. You're going to glance then you're kind of back, your brain's back in it. So that is something I've done.
The other thing I've done with my teams really for the last 10 years is set a pretty clear expectation that I'm not going to reach out to you on the weekend. And I don't expect you to reach out to me. You know, there are moments where that you have to have an exception to the rule. But the way I manage my team is basically setting the bounds that I want them to set as well. And things like that can be really clear because not all leaders, not all managers. I certainly had many kind of bosses through my career where yeah, it could be on a Saturday at 2 and I'm getting called or during my PTO. And I gotta be honest, Chris, like, unless the house is totally on fire, there's nothing that really demands that level of interruption.
And there are people who disagree with me on this. And, you know, there's a lot of go getters out there and they have a certain self image of what a strong leader is, what a, you know, effective leader is, and, you know, oh, got to be working 24 7, sleeping four hours. You know, just. I fundamentally disagree with them. And so I subscribe to a different philosophy.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I think we've subscribed to the same philosophy. You know, I think for a good counterpoint. I mean, basically it strengthens your point, but a counterpoint to the hustle culture always on is the the book Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, who also wrote Deep Work, which I think many listeners, you know, have read before. But the idea that you can accomplish great things and part of the way you get out of the hustle is to expand the timeline of the, of kind of accomplishing those, if you will, you know, one.
Cyrus Wadia:
Okay, keep going on this topic just for one second with one of my teams. This is now about 10 years ago. I would call it the tyranny of Outlook. Now this is kind of during your workday too. So I've just talked about setting bounds like outside of your workday. Great job done. But what about inside your work day? Because I called it the tyranny of Outlook, because the default for a meeting could be 30 minutes, could be an hour. But maybe what you really need is only five minutes. Maybe what you need is something different, like a walk through the campus to have a conversation with a colleague. So I think that we get so accustomed to how technology is there to create productivity that we succumb to it. And it takes active energy to extract yourself from it.
So my call to action to that team was break away from the tyranny Outlook. And you need to create space in your day. Maybe it is to, you know, midday, do a yoga class or take a walk or pick up a book, but you yourself will become more productive for this company and creative for this company if you are able to protect that space and break free of the tyranny of Outlook and the tyranny of, you know, like endless meetings. So that was something that I like, just went very directly to my team with. And I saw it pay off. I saw it have a positive spillover.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, plus one for sure. All right, final question here. Tell us. I don't know a book or two or podcast or whatnot. You think listeners could find value?
Cyrus Wadia:
Well, I'll share, I guess I'll share one that I read recently and are you familiar with Rick Rubin from the music industry? He, he wrote a book called the Creative Act.
Chris Wedding:
Oh, yeah.
Cyrus Wadia:
Way of Being.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, I've read it, yeah.
Cyrus Wadia:
Oh, you have read it.
Chris Wedding:
Oh, yeah.
Cyrus Wadia:
Okay. Well, you probably can say more for this as well. Sometimes it was hard to read that book, I'll be honest, because there's a lot of, you know, nuggets of wisdom. And so it's kind of like reading, you know, hundreds of pages for sort of fortune cookies in a way. Like that may not be a fair characterization, but it read a bit like a manifesto. But what was really interesting to me in reading this book, Rick Rubin, famous music producer, you know, really at the forefront of hip hop and you know, what was going on, especially in New York in the 80s, right. If I got it right. You know, he comes in with this like real sort of Zen, you know, sort of style.
Chris Wedding:
Okay.
Cyrus Wadia:
But one thing that I, as I was reading this, it was kind of written in many ways for what we would consider artists, traditional artists, maybe, you know, people who are building sculptures or painting or creating music or art and theater. Well, as I read it, I kept thinking about our fellows because a lot of times people, you know, think about science in a very reductive way where, you know, you have a question, go find, you know, a fact, go talk about the fact to like, does that confirm or like refute this hypothesis? But I feel like that way of describing science is so incorrect because really science is one of the most creative endeavors that you could embark on. And, and there's so much art involved in good science. And I see it every day with all the fellows that come through Activate. And so as I was reading this book, there's so many places I was dog-earring to say, oh my God, that would be a really good one to share with the fellows as a way to inspire them to think about their work and also where like their place and in this kind of world. And so thinking about these fellows really as artists and they're creators because they're building, you know, they're building every day. And it would, there's a lot anyway of connection there that I really liked. So that's one that I read recently.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I would add to that, that if listeners are going to read the book, I would encourage them to listen to the book on audible okay. It's almost, it's almost like a meditation. Like in between chapters there is a bell as if you ran an Asian temple somewhere. I would also say that if folks don't know who Rick Rubin is, they just heard your description. Right? Like for example, producing a lot of the great hip hop artists. Go look at a picture of Rick Rubin. Wait, that dude was producing all the hip hop? Yeah. And I just, I'll underscore what you said that the act of building a business is a creative act. And so I think a lot of that book does res, that should resonate. with builders as well.
Cyrus Wadia:
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
Chris Wedding:
Well, hey Cyrus, glad this worked out. After hanging out at a couple of conferences and after you getting over, you know, a sickness here. Sounded fluid, as if you're full of health and vitality. Must be the mission of Activate. Anyway, rooting for your all success at Activate and just to see those numbers continue to grow.
Cyrus Wadia:
So thankful for you having me today, Chris. And that was a really fun conversation. I hope to continue it.
Chris Wedding:
Here here. Okay, thanks for listening. And if you're not sick of hanging out with me just yet, then Please join over 20,000 entrepreneurs, investors and innovators who get our 3 minute newsletter about changing the world through startups, finance, humor and wisdom. Or at least four attempts at the last two. You can subscribe on Substack or at our website, EntrepreneursforImpact.com. You can also come check me out on LinkedIn where I share five or ten posts each week with commentary on climate tech startups, impact investing, better habits, and perhaps too many references to lessons from Buddhism that may apply to our work here tackling climate change. Okay, that's all y' all make it a great week because it's usually a choice. And P.S.
Chris Wedding:
If you're curious, that is not my kids favorite thing I say to them most mornings before going to school, but it's still true. All right, take care.