Darrin Murriner - Co-Founder & CEO of Cloverleaf: Rejection, Resilience, and Building a Winning Team

Darrin Murriner 00:00
I think the biggest thing is just do something right, move in a direction, and like you can always course correct. You know, you can change careers. You can do something different. The thing that will hold you back is not doing something. Just take a step, and good things will happen. You'll learn some things in the process, and it'll get you to the place that you want

Callan Harrington 00:18
to go. You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Darrin Murriner. Darrin is the co-founder and CEO of Cloverleaf. Cloverleaf is an identity discovery and team-building tool that uses the most common behavioral assessments to help you discover how to work more effectively as a team or as an individual in a team. Prior to Cloverleaf, Darrin co-founded Babysitties. He is also the author of Corporate Bravery, a book about eliminating fear-based decision making and transforming corporate cultures into brave places for people to do their best work and stay engaged. This was a really, really, really interesting conversation. Darrin is a great example of taking leaps of faith backed by mindful planning. We talked about his experience leaving corporate life, some of the lessons that he had learned there, and really importantly, how to build a team that balances people you already trust with people that bring fresh ideas. I know this was something that I personally struggled with. I oftentimes, and I still very much do, bring a lot of the same people to a number of different companies, but it is so important to bring additional people in there that bring a totally different viewpoint. And it's something that I think I under-invested in early, and I love Darrin's take on this. We also discussed how to handle rejection well, especially in those early stages, and what Darrin does outside of the office to make sure that he can handle the lot of the rejection that just comes with those early stages of a business. And some of these include an exercise routine, nutrition, and just home life in general. And I love hearing the breakdown that Darrin provided here. Now that said, my favorite part of the conversation was discussing how entrepreneurship is a constant evolution. Darrin shared the moments where he knew his role within a company had to evolve in order to continue to provide the most value. Like I say, this is probably one of the most common things that founders struggle with, in particular, that transition from being a founder to being a founder and really a professional CEO. And I really appreciate him sharing all the honesty that he gave towards this. So with that, let's get to the show. One of the areas that I'd love to jump in, and this is probably a little atypical from other guests. But how did you meet your wife? Actually,

Darrin Murriner 03:05
our credit cards got switched at dinner. We were with a large group of people, and we were actually going to a concert afterward, and was about 30 of us, and we weren't sitting at the same table. There wasn't a really strong connection. But at the end of the dinner, a waiter brings our cards, and we're cashing out at the end, and we happen to have the exact same credit card, and so it obviously got switched. Neither of us paid attention to the name. We were blissfully ignorant. And I went, I went through and spent a bunch of money on the card, and was driving back home over the weekend and got a call; it was an unregistered number in my phone book. She had figured it out earlier than I did, and had made some connections and called around to other people that were in the group to see if anybody knew this guy, and got my phone number. I did the only smooth move I think I've probably ever done in my entire life, and I said, "Hey, I've spent all this money on your card. Let me take you out to dinner to make it up to you." And I think it's just a huge kind of level of serendipity that has totally changed the course of both of our lives. Well,

Callan Harrington 04:13
one, that is an incredibly smooth move. I think I just want to underline that real quick. And two, I'm very curious to hear how that skill right there translated into going after enterprises, yeah.

Darrin Murriner 04:25
I mean, sales, right? Yeah. I think you got to be brave. You got to go if, if you're feeling it, you just got to go with it, right? And so I don't know there was something about the moment where I was like, "Hey, this is, it's such a unique thing to have happened. And I feel like worst case scenario, we have dinner and we don't see each other again. But it just felt like, it felt like something that needed to happen." And sometimes, I mean, you get some wild and crazy ideas when you're trying to sell enterprise software or anything, frankly, because you're just trying to get people to pay attention to you. Fortunately, it didn't end there. And fortunately, oftentimes our wild, crazy ideas don't end in dead ends as well, well.

Callan Harrington 05:07
And we'll definitely circle back to this on the sales side and things like that. There are a couple of things I'm curious to jump in there. But before we go there, this is unconventional, right? How you met your wife, and it's fairly unconventional, I'd say, and how you became a founder at all just on the research that I looked at before this episode. So as I understand it, you spent a good amount of time in the corporate space before making this leap. Was this something that you always were planning on doing? Or when did that bug really start to set in?

Darrin Murriner 05:36
I think my story, to some degree, plays into the product that we built as well because I would say, I've always been an entrepreneur, right? Grew up in a relatively poor household, right? So financially, we didn't have a lot of extra money. And when the original Nintendo Entertainment System, and I'm totally dating myself right now, when it came out, I was in the fourth or fifth grade. My dad sold specialty advertising at the time, and this was before the internet. Somebody had to actually go and sell this stuff, right? So he drove around the Kentucky countryside to small convenience stores and funeral homes and sold branded merchandise to people. He got all these samples. And I took these pens and pencils that were samples that he would get, and I took them to school. Within a week, I had sold enough to buy the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Good things can happen, right? So I had a series of those things that happened over what I would say, maybe a couple of decades. But I never called myself an entrepreneur. I just felt like, "Hey, the path to career success was through some career path, right? Like, I go to college, I study accounting, or I study engineering or whatever, and I get a job, and I work my way up the career ladder, and that's just how it works." It took me probably 15 years of a corporate career to realize that, oh, even those moments from back in the fourth or fifth grade, that was like, "I'm an entrepreneur, like I'm just built to do this," and whether I was doing that inside of a corporation, like starting new products or new product lines or building a new team, I was doing that in a corporate environment, but oftentimes it wasn't very satisfying or fulfilling. But I mean, it literally took decades, right, for me to embrace the fact that, "Hey, I am an entrepreneur, and I should just lean into

Callan Harrington 07:21
that." Making the final leap for me was very difficult, and I had been in startups, so, like, I knew what I was getting into. And the final moment for me was I had to come up with report after report, like, "What are you doing? Just go try to do this on your own." That was like, the final straw for me.

Darrin Murriner 07:37
Did you have a moment like that? I found myself doing compliance-related work. I had a moment where I called my wife on the way home and I was like, "Man, I feel like where I draw the most energy in the work that I do is building things, and I'm being asked to literally destroy things that I have built, or other people have built along the way, and it just leaves me with this gap, like it feels like a hole in the level of engagement excitement I get from the work that I do." And I think that is what kind of started me down a path, right? And I'd have a couple of bad days, and I'd call my wife and be like, "I don't know if I quit today. Like, how bad would that be? Would you let me back in the house?" And so she's like, "you know, I don't find you to be an impulsive person. So like, hey, let's talk about this a little bit more than just turning in your resignation today." Maybe the reason why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling is because I'm not actually doing what I should be doing. That's probably the thing that started me down that path. But I think it was really a whole series of things that we needed to plan. And I think it's probably part of what you were saying as well is, "Hey, there are some real financial realities of going from this place where you have a paycheck and you're putting retirement savings away, and you've got health benefits, right? These are all like real, practical things that oftentimes get in the way. But, you know, if you put a plan in place and you start to put a spreadsheet together, and you adjust some of the things that you're doing, it's very achievable." I

Callan Harrington 09:01
think that's a great exercise to do because then you can get an understanding of how much cash do I need to save. And that's what I was originally doing, was saving cash in order to give myself a nest egg to be able to do this. But then the opportunity cost. I thought the opportunity cost would be through the roof. If I go do this, that's going to damage this career path that I've been on. And then I found it to be the literally, the exact opposite ended up being true on that. So you went out you and correct me if I'm wrong, but Cloverleaf was not the first company you founded. Is that right?

Darrin Murriner 09:30
Yeah, that's correct. I mean, my wife and I started a business in 2003 and it turned into two different businesses, and we sold both of those. You know, over the last 10-15 years, there's just been an erosion in local news coverage, and so I started a local news business that has since been sold a couple of times, and as part of a larger media group in the Cincinnati area, some of that stuff was just pure passion projects, right? Like, I just needed an outlet to create some things, or I felt like a need. Need to be a part of a solution on something, but it's been so worth it, right? Not just in terms of, like, the sense of satisfaction I get from the work that I'm doing, but also financially, it's been extremely rewarding. So

Callan Harrington 10:11
talking about Cloverleaf a little bit. So you met your co-founder, Kirsten, at an advertising agency that the two of you were working at. How did you know that the two of you would be good co-founders?

Darrin Murriner 10:23
Yeah, I mean, to some degree, like with any good partnership, there is a bit of a leap of faith, right? It's like completely impossible to know that it's going to be a great partnership. In the same way that I had no idea when our credit cards got switched and I offered to take my future wife on a date that was going to be as good as it was, right? Like you do have to take a little bit of a leap of faith. I do think, like in my lifetime, I generally keep a running list of people that I am just like, "Man, I want to work with these people. I've worked with them before. I worked with them in this capacity. Or, Hey, maybe I didn't really work with them, but I got to see the work that they did and really admired the work that they did," and just said, like, "hey, I'll go back to those people if there's an opportunity." And so we've definitely done that in our business, right? Some of those folks, not just even with Kirsten and I and our partnership, but other folks that I've worked with in previous companies, but I think mixing in a healthy dose of people that you really trust, and then mixing that with fresh new ideas from outside. It's been a really good mix.

Callan Harrington 11:28
How do you strike that balance? Because I've been through the same, identical to what you just described. I will recruit a lot of the people that I really liked working with. And it does. It ends up becoming this club, if you will. Since then, I've, I've tried to be more intentional about the diversity that I'm hiring and not just hiring off of referrals. But at the same point, I still end up gravitating towards hiring a lot of those people and recruiting a lot of those people that I've worked with before. I'm comfortable with, how do you strike that balance?

Darrin Murriner 11:57
I think in the early days, I probably didn't strike that balance well, right? But I would say, like, now that our business has grown and we've got a head of people, and generally, what I'm doing is just pulling those folks in into a selection process, and I'm really letting, kind of, our head of people, make sure that there's fairness in the selection process, that we're, you know, getting a good pool of candidates. I feel firmly like I wouldn't be recommending these people if I didn't think they wouldn't rise to the top, and then process and sometimes that they haven't risen to the top right, and it's like also kind of having that separation of saying, "hey, look, I'm going to, I'm going to introduce you into this selection process, but I'm going to stay out of it for purposes of creating some separation and just making sure that we're creating a fair process" and generally it works out that makes

Callan Harrington 12:44
complete sense, no guarantee that, because Darrin knows them, that they're getting the job. That's right. Yep. So you and your co-founder have talked about before how you don't have the traditional tech founder background of either having something very engineering focused, or something with, like, a deep sales background, with a deep sales network that you're coming into this, what challenges did you face as you jumped into this, not having those traditional backgrounds? Rejection?

Darrin Murriner 13:14
I think you know, when you're creating something new, you're going to get rejected a lot. And I think where I really felt it was on the fundraising side. So we've raised a fair amount of venture capital to build this business. The old adage is, you have to talk to 100 investors to get one yes. And that's a pretty low hit rate, you know, I think most salespeople, you know, you're probably in the 20 to 30% range. So that's a lot of rejection, that's a lot of people to talk to, and a lot of no's. And one of the things I realized very early on, because I did struggle with psychologically like it for some reason, for a period of time, it felt like most of those investor pitches happened on a Tuesday, and I just started calling it rejection Tuesday. And there is something good and healthy that can come from having somebody just say no, knowing that it's a natural part of the process. And, you know, really kind of asking yourself, like, "hey, what do we learn in this process? Was it just not the right fit? Should we not have taken that call to begin with? Are they not the right ideal customer profile for us? Should we be adjusting that go to market strategy, right?" So it's okay. What are we learning in the process? And I think it always has helped me reframe that rejection element. But that was definitely, I think, for me, personally, one of the hardest things initially,

Callan Harrington 14:34
I've got a sales background, and when it comes to cold calling and things like that, I a couple of things that I've mentioned to my teams for years is time block, that you can't just do this all day. Block off an hour and a half. You know that's going to be a tough hour and a half. I don't care who you are. Like cold calling is tough, and you're going to face a lot of rejection, and there's going to be a lot of anxiety on the fear of the unknown when somebody picks up and time blocking, that's great. And then I'd always say, take an hour and a half lunch. Huge go work out you need something to reset. What I'm curious about is, I love that you're talking about the reframe. I think reframing, it makes a huge difference. Was there anything else that you needed to do to make sure that you can reset psychologically? I continue

Darrin Murriner 15:14
to find new ways to do this, building disciplined habits, and then also building some breaks throughout the day so that you can just go and clear your head. And so I think that can look a lot of ways for a lot of different people, right? Sometimes it's more mindfulness kind of things. Other people, it might be more faith based, but I think you have to really work on and have a disciplined, I think, schedule or rhythm to that to make sure that you're not getting too high or too low, because it is when you're starting something you're doing something hard and new, it's going to be full of hardship. And so how do you build in the right support system finding advisors, really good people that you can go to whether, whether you want to call them a coach or a mentor or an advisor, but I think that's another really important element. I would also say, like having a healthy balance in your life. For the first probably couple years that I started, I didn't have a really good health regimen, and so last probably four years, I'm a huge Orangetheory junky shout out to any of your listeners out there that are Orangetheory fans, but just having that disciplined process and making sure that I have time and space to decompress the end of the day before I go home and engage with my kids and my wife. So

Callan Harrington 16:29
I'm really curious, how did you start to get early traction on this product?

Darrin Murriner 16:33
We're a workplace coaching solution that is that doesn't have a human involved, right? So no actual human is involved in the coaching process. And you might say, what is that experience like? So we leverage those behavioral assessments and the data behind that to build an automated coaching experience that comes into the tools that employees use every day. So email, calendar, Slack, Microsoft, teams, etc. And that's not where we started out, right? We thought we were going to be a recruiting tool. One of the very early things that we saw is like, how do we keep this real in life? For people that experience with a behavioral assessment, if you've taken Myers Briggs or disc or cliftonstrengths, is you're like, "Hey, I got this report. I learned a couple of things, and we go back to work Monday, and we fall right back into the same patterns. It doesn't actually change anything." It became clear to us early on that was something that we really wanted to break that kind of mentality or that approach because we're like, "hey, there's meaningful insight here that could be brought to bear every day for employees." And so we really just focused on that end user experience and like, how do we give them something that is meaningful and valuable? And part of that is, "hey, it has to be relevant to your relationships. Who are you meeting with today?" And that has really been a guiding light for us because, let's just say we find some learning and development or HR leader who really believes in behavioral assessments and wants to bring our product into the end of their organization that, in and of itself, is not going to sustain that right? That person's going to potentially, they're going to leave the organization, go to a different company, or they're going to get promoted, and they're not the person that's in charge of continuing to renew that budget year after year. And so if we're not giving value to the rank and file employees that are using it on a daily basis, then what are we doing?

Callan Harrington 18:26
I definitely hear you in building for that individual can an individual sign up? Or does there have to be a company agreement in place in order for an individual user like that to use the platform?

Darrin Murriner 18:37
Yeah, I think that was one of the unique things that we unlocked pretty early on, is that we wanted to make it accessible, almost like a 401 K for your development plan, right? If you left the company, or even if you weren't at a company, you were a solopreneur that we could still give you value. We were really, I would say, one of the first HR solutions, or kind of in that human capital space that employed that bottoms up product led growth kind of experience. Because usually, if you think about most HR solutions, it's like you go to the head of HR and you try to sell it and roll it out to the whole company. Our solution, our product, is so unique and different you can't just get somebody to commit to roll this out to 5000 people overnight. It's sometimes easier to serve those smaller populations and then identify where those bigger value creation opportunities are across the enterprise. And so we very much have been a bottoms up sales process, or it's just been fully product LED.

Callan Harrington 19:35
So I guess getting into the weeds a little bit, I'd love to kind of walk through an example of this. So you've got somebody, you got an analyst at a large company that's using the free version of the product. How are you landing and expanding? What does that playbook look like to get the rest of these very large accounts? Yeah,

Darrin Murriner 19:53
I mean, it's mostly product LED. And what I mean by that is, when you come on for the very first time, if you were to go into cloverleaf dot. Me today, and there's a button on there. One of our calls to action is to start a free trial. And if you do that right, one of the things that you're going to experience when you walk through that process is we're going to encourage you to engage with your teammates. The thing that really unlocks value for people is when they're doing it with others, whether it's their core team or, you know, especially in larger organizations where there's a lot of cross functional work, and you might have to sell an idea to somebody in another continent that you've never met before. You have no idea how they think you know what's important to them. And cloverleaf can give you that insight, right? That's going to be infinitely more valuable than just learning language or new things about myself, right? That's valuable on its own, but where it really unlocks value is when you're doing it with other people. And so there's almost a natural pull to invite other people into the product experience with you. And so what we find is there's just some natural viral growth that happens. There's not really a defined market here. We're really carving out a little bit of a new segment to really allow people to try that and then leverage the data to really make the business case for that larger investment.

Callan Harrington 21:12
So essentially, by the time you're getting to the decision makers, you already have the business case is almost probably already written as Mike. You're giving them experience, yeah, yeah. You're giving them a ton of free information that they couldn't have got otherwise. Are all of those people up at that point using the product for free, or are they, I don't know, putting on the company card they're paying for the product at that point, and then now it's like, how do we can consolidate all of this? Or what does that look like? It's a

Darrin Murriner 21:39
little bit of everything. Sometimes there can be people who are using it for free, but, you know, they're using a slimmed down version, right where it's not going to give the whole thing away for free for forever. So maybe they're getting enough value with the free piece. I think about like, slack in the early days, you know, somebody invited you to Slack, and you were kind of like, okay, I get this. But you know, having an active team that you're doing that with, right is going to give you more value, and then at some point, you reach a point where you're like, Oh, I can't search beyond three months when you reach these places where you're like, oh, I need to unlock this feature in order to get the full value of the product. Sometimes it is people, and they're paying and upgrading, and they just put it on a corporate card, because maybe they're not managing a large budget, but they have spending authority up to some amount on a corporate card, and they have a budget to support that. And so sometimes we're managing multiple billing records inside the same organization, because there are these pockets of purchasing, and that's where it's like, hey, even to be able to walk into a conversation with the ultimate enterprise buyer and say, Hey, one people are finding us, and clearly we're demonstrating value to your organization in these pockets. If we upgraded this and went with an enterprise plan, we could potentially even save you some money, right because of the efficiency that comes from having a single billing record a single person to negotiate with a larger seat count that we can apply with some volume discounts. So that's really the play. How do we just help that naturally work itself out until we get to the point where there's an opportunity to demonstrate even more value at the enterprise level?

Callan Harrington 23:19
Yeah. So it feels like almost like, I'm saying random numbers here, but like, 80% of this is focused on, how do we get more of these individual users? 20% of this is once we have these users on, how do we formulate an account management strategy to get the whole enterprise on? Is

Darrin Murriner 23:34
that right? Yeah. You know, a lot of the lead forms that we have, the lead form submissions from our website, one of the questions that we ask is like, how did you hear about us? And I would say a very large percentage, let's say 80% plus is referral. I use you in this other place or so, and so came from another organization where they did use you, and they had a great experience. And we have similar problems, right? I mean, those are the things that we're hearing we've never really had an outbound process, like where we've been doing cold calls or running zoom sequences or any of those kinds of things. It's never really felt like something that demonstrated the kind of value that we, you know, from a go to market motion, at least, that we could generate by leveraging the product and just getting it in people's hands, letting them try it themselves. So

Callan Harrington 24:21
you guys became an enterprise company. Didn't necessarily start out in the enterprise, but as I understand it, that was always your vision. Your vision was, we're going to have the most impact with large enterprises, because there's so many different people. They're oftentimes international companies, so a lot of the values unlocked in the enterprise, but you are a Midwestern company, and you have to deal with raising capital in the Midwest, which in my experience, has always been you've got to have good unit economics, you've got to have good revenue. You don't have this long runway in order to deal with a 12 to 18 month enterprise sales cycle. But it's not. Was like, that might not even matter, because you're just focused on the user regardless. Is that correct? Yeah,

Darrin Murriner 25:06
I think so. I mean, I do think our client mix skewed more towards SMB early on, and you know, we're not going to we're going to turn somebody away. I think that's the other thing. We just might not necessarily have a go to market strategy and invest marketing dollars on some of those smaller organizations, we typically reach kind of a tipping point around 100 100 employees inside of an organization where it's like, hey, if we can get to 100 employees, the value just starts to go up exponentially. And largely it's because of that, getting coaching on people that you just don't know, right? But you need to know at a deeper level in order to really have an effective, effective sales pitch or an effective project meeting or an effective performance conversation, right? If you're a new manager. So that's why we focused more on the enterprise, because we can really layer value inside those larger organizations, but we can give value to anybody. And I think a good example of this is we've also created a bit of a channel strategy, because we're not trying to replace Coaches and Consultants. I think there are plenty of scenarios where you need somebody, an actual human, to talk more complex scenarios out with and the challenge often with coaches and consultants, it's the sustainability of their work, right? The only way I can generate more revenue is to either work more hours or charge more for the hours I work. And neither of those things are very appealing. And so how do we create some sustainability around the work that you're doing? How do we keep your brand in front of your clients? How do we expand your access and influence inside those organizations, so really tapping into even that like coach, consultant market to say, how can we partner together? Let us be the technology arm, and you do what you do best, and you know we can help you grow your audience, your platform, your more sustainable revenue streams on

Callan Harrington 27:01
the channel side. How do you maximize those partners? Most, all of our referrals come from VC and private equity, and it really is. It's 8020 I'm curious if you found it to be the same. Or have you found that there are specific things that you can do to drive more sales out of the partnerships with particular partners?

Darrin Murriner 27:23
Yeah. I mean, I think one, it's a constant evolution. If you looked at the numbers, it probably is a bit closer to that 8020 kind of scenario. I think we have a belief that it doesn't have to be 8020 and I think part of what we've tried to do is continue to tweak the product offering for coaches and consultants, so that we make that process easier. And so we were just like, why shouldn't that be a product led experience in the same way that it is for somebody that comes to our website? We just align that product experience with that contract term that client gets to use it for the entire length of their engagement with that coach, and then at the end, they get to make that same decision that somebody coming onto our website gets to make, which is, hey, do I want to continue to pay and pay for the use of this product, with or without the coach? But even for the people who aren't just fully embracing and building the technology into their coaching and consulting experience, it can still drive value for all parties, right? The customer, the coach and us, Darrin,

Callan Harrington 28:25
one of the things I'm curious about is you guys, have you've had what, five funding rounds the company's been very successful, and when you looked back at this on when this started to where you're at now, what were those areas that you personally needed to improve at to operate, to continue being the right leader at this company. I

Darrin Murriner 28:47
mean, I feel a little bit like I'm going through an evaluation process right now, just in terms of, like, my approach and my role. Up to this point, I've led all of our go to market efforts. I don't have a sales background, and so we just hired a new head of sales. We're in the process of hiring a head of marketing. And so one what is my role in that I'm not going to be as involved in those sales experiences. And so one of the things that I, I've, I've started to kind of take on, is like anybody that churns or, you know, is saying that they're going to churn at the end of their subscription. How do I reach out to them, but not in the way that is part of the operating experience, right? And I think that's the little that I have started to move in that direction, right? As we've onboarded our head of sales, I'm already seeing massive dividends, right? And as our company gets bigger, one of the things that I don't think we did well the first couple years, right? There's really not a leadership team. It was primarily Kirsten and I. We did build a leadership team, but it was like four or five people, and now we're at this place where we have all the functional leaders together on a leadership team. And how do we really make that team? Team One?

Callan Harrington 29:57
What comes next for yourself? Cloverleaf, what does the future look like?

Darrin Murriner 30:02
Pretty much everything that we're doing right now is focused on, how do we scale this in a really sustainable way? And one of the things that I'm working on as we speak is kind of a new operating model from a financial standpoint. How do we think about what those drivers of success are, and where do we think about applying investment so that we can really have a bigger impact on the upside. Companies spend $350 billion a year on learning and development, and I would say the vast majority of what is being spent has no meaningful impact on employees and their their the level of skill and their opportunities to grow and evolve with the company, and it also has very little impact on companies bottom lines. And so we just believe that there is a meaningful opportunity for us to be a part of that solution.

Callan Harrington 30:52
So Darren, last question I have for you is, if you could have a conversation with your younger self, age, totally up to you. What would that conversation B, what advice would you give them? Generally, I

Darrin Murriner 31:02
would say, I don't have a lot of regrets, right? I mean, I think part of the process and part of what makes life so amazing is, you know, hey, even if there are things that you potentially would have done different, you learned really important lessons that led you to be in the place that you're at today. And so, like, it'd be easy for me to sit here and say, like, oh, I go back and tell my younger self like, hey, just throw yourself into entrepreneurship. I actually really think that experience of big company problems, which I got to experience before I really jumped into entrepreneurship full time, were really valuable lessons, both in terms of leadership and in terms of like, the real challenges that companies at that size face. So I don't know that I would say to do anything differently.

Callan Harrington 31:43
It is pretty amazing how much those early whether it's jobs, whatever that might be, you don't realize when those skills will show up again, or when a relationship shows up again, but it is amazing how much those come back around. I don't know if you felt the same way? Yeah, I

Darrin Murriner 32:01
actually just talked to somebody at coffee this morning, and one of my daughters really wants some international experience. She's 14, right? She's just like, ready to go and travel the world. And I was talking with this lady at coffee, and she felt the same way at that age. And really pushed and got an opportunity to do, like a foreign exchange kind of scenario, but it was a full year, and it was in Japan, and she just talked about how she's had four or five different careers over the course of her life, but the one constant was the investment that she made in that year in Japan, and how that has consistently just paid dividends for her. And she had no idea. She had no choice over Japan. She had a desire and pushed hard to see it through, and she had no idea how valuable that was going to be for the rest of her life. I think the biggest thing is just do something right, move in a direction, and like, you can always course correct. You can do something different, but like, the thing that will hold you back is not doing something right? So, like, just take a step, even if it's going to be in the wrong direction. Just take a step, and good things will happen. You'll learn some things in the process, and it'll get you to the place that you want to go.

Callan Harrington 33:14
Darrin, this has been a ton of fun. I really enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate you coming on today.

Darrin Murriner 33:19
Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate it

Callan Harrington 33:21
absolutely. I hope you enjoyed Darrin and I's conversation. I love talking about Darrin's evolution as a founder and as a CEO. If you want to learn more about Darrin, you can find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you like this episode, you could find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show. A review on Apple podcast or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I'll see you next week. You.