Reboot Podcast #26 - Finding your Business Soulmate - Founders of The Grommet with Jerry Colonna - Reboot Podcast

Reboot026_Finding_Business_Soulmate
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**
“And that’s when I knew he was my business soulmate. I knew that we could get along
intellectually, but it’s like can you match at the values level? Can you match at the human level?
And if you do, something special, something really magical starts to happen.”
Welcome to the Reboot podcast.
“The greatest gift of relationship proves to be that as a result of encountering each other, we are
obliged to grow larger than we had planned.” – James Hollice.
I remember the fear and the grumbling knots in my stomach; I was less than two months away
from the birth of my daughter at first, but smack dab in the middle of helping birth a new
company, the one that ultimately became Reboot, and just starting to work with my new partners,
the fear and the stomach grumbling were the result of an inner argument. One voice spoke
strongly, “I need to do my best, I need to work hard, I need to earn my place in this new
partnership.” Another voice spoke equally as strong, “I will not miss one second of my
upcoming baby’s first few weeks.”
I nervously fired off an email to my new partners; the two voices showed up in my request. I’ll
say that I am pretty sad I am being there, fully present with the baby for at least the first few
weeks. I know that limits my worth as a partner in Reboot efforts likely until the end of June and
July, so I want to make everyone aware of that. I waited and waited and waited nervously for a
response. I happened to be near my wife when the first response came in, I read it aloud, “Dan,
that is the right thing to do. Don’t give it a second thought. The only life more precious than our
own is that of our child, hold them. Be the dad.” As I looked at my wife, we both had tears
streaming down our face; these were tears of joy, the joy of being in a partnership not just
aligned intellectually and not just aligned energetically, but aligned around values, aligned at a
human level and magic things start to happen in that space.
As we see in our episode today, the two co-founders who refer to each other as ‘business
soulmates’, they too find themselves in that magic space of alignment. Jules Pieri, this is her
second time on our show, and her partner, Joanne Domeniconi, are the co-founders of The
Grommet. They join Jerry to talk about the beginning of their partnership, how and where they
found alignment at the human level, how the relationship and partnership has evolved over time,
and the challenges it represents as they scale the business.
Co-founder bootcamp is our invitation for you to discover how your leadership team can work
together, better. Do they work towards that alignment on a human level, very much like Jules
and Joanne share in this episode? Listen in at the end of this episode, we will hear from the
Adcade co-founders who attended our first co-founder bootcamp; they share how it impacted
their partnership. To learn more and submit your application, go to reboot.io/co-founders.

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Jerry: Hey Jules, it’s good to see you again and Joanne, it’s a pleasure to meet you.
Interviewee: Hey Jerry.
Interviewee: Hey Jerry.
Jerry: Hey, so before we get started, could you both each, take a minute to just sort of
say who you are so our listeners can really get a sense of your voices, and what
your roles are and – I know we’ve done a podcast before, Jules, about what The
Grommet is, but tell us a little bit more about it.
Interviewee: Yeah, so this is Jules, I am Jules Pieri, the co-founder and CEO of The Grommet,
and we’re a product launch platform. So, we launched the story of one company
and product that you probably would want to know about, and maybe have never
heard of every single day. So, in the past we launched products that became
famous today, you know, the household names, we have launched our products
like Fitbit or Idea Paint, but I promise you, what we are launching today, some of
them, will be those same kind of super stars tomorrow.
Jerry: And Joanne?
Interviewee: Yeah Jerry, I’m Joanne Domeniconi, and I am the other co-founder of The
Grommet, and I am in charge of discovery. So, I am the chief discovery officer,
and my role at The Grommet is to identify potential makers, help the team, guide
the team to tell their stories in an impactful, effective and honest way, and keep
the business of discovery and product launch advancing here at The Grommet.
Jerry: Gotcha. Well, Jules, we were really fortunate to have you on the podcast a couple
of months ago, and it was really a great conversation, it was really a delightful
conversation, and we’re even more thrilled, I don’t think we have ever done this
before, we have had people revisit but we have never revisited and ‘let’s get the
co-founder in’. That’s really exciting because one of the things that’s really
become clear over the last few years for me is how important this co-founder
relationship is. We did a co-founder bootcamp last spring, we are going to one
again this spring, and really focusing on the co-founder relationship is probably,
in some ways more important than focusing on supporting the CEO, especially at
that early stage. So, it’s really an opportunity for us all, to sort of have a
conversation about that and as we do that, I know that there are a few different
items that we would like to talk through and maybe do some work around, but I
think it might be helpful if we spent a little bit of time just talking about your
relationship and really the history of it, and the roots of it. How did you guys meet
and how did you come to co-found the company?
Interviewee: You talk about how we met –

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Jerry: And I just want to say that I’m lucky because I get to see your faces and
everybody else is just hearing your voices, and the two of you just lit up like
Christmas trees. So, that makes me really happy; so I know we are on to
something good.
Interviewee: So, I’ll go first.
Jerry: All right, you go first Joanne.
Interviewee: I think the year was 1993, and I was the vice president of product development at
Keds, I was overseeing design and engineering and sourcing, line-building and we
were growing like crazy. Keds was, you know, we were having record quarters
and we needed some additional help, and so I was interviewing, or helping
interview talent to build the team up for the next wave of growth. And in walks
Jules Pieri to my office; she had a red dress, and red tights and shoes on, and I
was like “Whoa!” And we talked for an hour, and it was really amazing. I was
immediately struck by her insightfulness, her – while being humble and humorous
too, I think we ended the conversation talking about job sharing. She had just had
her second child, and I had a two or three-year-old at home, and both of us were
trying to kind of have it all, really kind of engaged careers, but also raising a great
family. We were challenged by that, but we had a lot of alignment on you know,
how we wanted to conduct our lives, and I knew that I had found kind of my
business soulmate, or I thought maybe I found my business soulmate in that
conversation and of course, our relationship grew over, I think it’s been 17 years
now that we have been friends.
Interviewee: Actually longer.
Interviewee: Has it been 19 –
Interviewee: 23.
Interviewee: 23, see that’s how –
Interviewee: We lost eight years –
Jerry: 23 years, my goodness.
Interviewee: So, we didn’t end up sharing the job; I remember saying, “I’m no miracle worker,
I can’t be you, 0 to 60.” She had a massively important job, tons of time in the Far
East, but I did get a role in the company and we did get to become colleagues and
ultimately oddly enough, we shared a nanny.
Jerry: Oh, wow.

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Interviewee: That’s the other way we got to know each other because I learnt through that that
you get a lens on somebody through their children and their family in a way that
is pretty special. So, I liked what I saw at work, but this kind of funny glimpse of
what I saw through Joanne’s children completed the picture, a great picture.
Jerry: I’m so struck by Joanne, your term, ‘business soulmate’. I don’t think I have ever
heard of it.
Interviewee: I just made it up.
Jerry: Well, that’s what you do; right? You make up stories. You are good at this, but
it’s brilliant and you know, what it meant to me was, you know, not just
alignment intellectually, not just alignment energetically, like how hard do we
want to work, how do we drive ourselves, but also alignment around values. And
Jules, to your point, getting a lens about who this person by seeing their children
and seeing their family, and it’s really quite an expression; if I can share it, it
reminds me of the first time I met Fred Wilson and we decided to go into a
partnership together. And what happened was, Mark Pincus, who of course folks
know as having founded Zynga, Mark had been hounding – Fred and I looked at
funding one of Mark’s companies in the early days; Mark and a fellow named
Sunil Pal, and Fred ended up funding the business and I didn’t and I was with
C&G Ventures and there was a big fight and all that stuff, but Mark still thought
of me as a resource and would still call me relentlessly and try to ask for my
advice on how to deal with the press and things like that as a former reporter. And
I was walking through the airport one day, and all of a sudden my pager goes off,
that’s how old the story is, and it’s Mark, and I go, “Oh geez, what does he want
now?” And so I call him back and I say, “What is it?” He goes, “Fred Wilson is
leaving Euclid partners; you guys should be partners together, you are perfect.”
I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. I email Fred and we start making plans to have
lunch and here’s the part that I was really thinking about: the night before we
were supposed to get together, he cancels lunch, and he cancels lunch because he
forgot that he was supposed to attend his daughter’s kindergarten graduation. To
me, that was the best possible reason to cancel a lunch with a potential business
partner, was for his daughter. And that’s when I knew he was my business
soulmate. I knew that we could get along intellectually, but it’s like, can we mesh
at the values level, can we mesh at the human level, and if you do, something
special, something really magical starts to happen. And so, I love that phrase and
I’m going to steal it and use it relentlessly and I may not even credit you.
Interviewee: That’s okay with me. It’s funny you use the word values; there’s something, I
don’t think I’ve even told you this story Joanne, we were both working in the
same company, and I sometimes would get trotted out into a training session that
HR was leading around something. [Unclear 0:13:16] the topic even, I think was
the topic even and I thought, how do I crystallize values in a way that it
transcends all the teams in this room because we don’t all work on the same thing,
and I landed on this story of Joanne’s son Alex and my son Dane, and how – my

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son Dane had two good friends, Alex is one of them, and then Jonathan was the
one he saw more often, our neighbor, and we did not share the same values with
Jonathan’s family. So, when Jonathan came over, the nanny and myself knew
they can’t go in the basement together alone, Jonathan and Dane, that’s not okay
with me. And then I said to the team in the room and people in the room are like,
Alex doesn’t come over as often, but when he comes over, everything is okay.
Like, I’m not worried about what is going to happen when Alex is over.
Jerry: Yeah, I love that. It’s like you have a felt sense of who this person is because of
that alignment in values and you know, as you point out, our children often times
are an expression of what we believe about the world. And so Alex is probably a
pretty dear expression of what you believe about the world for good and for bad.
Interviewee: He is.
Jerry: He is.
Interviewee: But the interesting thing is, we are not the same person though; we are very
different people, but there’s that soul that is aligned and you know, if I was to
think about Jules, she’s thoughtful and thinks about - she is more of a thinker and
I’m more of a doer and I think that that’s another reason why our relationship
works. I think that we have a really deep alignment on how a brand – I think we
kind of have like one brain on brand, and I think we are very aligned on what we
are going for here, what the vision is. I think that Jules maps that but, I adopt it
and kind of mould it, we mold it together, and then I think we have like this kind
of singular focus on succeeding. There is a tenacity, and we never give up that we
align on, but if I was to think about how we make it work in the company, she is
kind of like the more spiritual leader and I am more of the coach, the person who
is driving our results. I’m on speed, quality, results, business, innovation, and she
is thinking way ahead of me, but it wouldn’t work if we didn’t have two brains
thinking about those kinds of things and being expert at them. So, there is that,
kind of fundamental soul but then there is this kind of divide and conquer type of
action that we practice that you know, it’s surprising to me how sometimes how
well it works.
Interviewee: And it’s actually kind of a funny thing that happened was we had somebody come
into the company who was observing us and thought maybe we didn’t get along
very well, because we ultimately learnt she worked for two famous co-founders in
her last company, and they were always together.
Interviewee: They always travel together –
Interviewee: Always in the same room and we were rarely in the same room. And she came to
us and said individually, “Are you guys okay?” And for a nanosecond, Joanne and
I worried about it like, are we okay? Are we supposed to be doing this differently?

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And we even did a couple of like weird, fake things like stand next to each other
in team meetings, and I remember –
Interviewee: That was my stupid idea.
Interviewee: And then I realized, wait a minute, those to co-founders who she used to work for
must not have trusted each other very much if they had to be in the same room to
make all the same decisions. We’re way too efficient, and efficiency minded and
we trust each other too much to want to – we rarely do the same things. Rarely.
Jerry: Yeah, see I think that some of the best partnerships are made up of people who
have a diversity of styles and experiences and it comes together and blends in a
harmony, you know, and I have always enjoyed duets and singer-songwriters who
work together. One of my favorite groups is Indigo Girls and you know, the two
women are – in so many ways, they could not be more different and yet when
they sing together, the harmony is incredible. And I think in my own relationship
with Fred, we are very temperamentally different, we are very different human
beings and yet I trust him completely. And even though we don’t even work
together, I trust him and I know that even though we may see each other once
every three or four months now, if I need something, I can pick up the phone and
call. And I have that friendship, I have that in my partnership now, in my partners
at Reboot, and again, all four of us, five of us, each of us is just different and yet –
you know, forgive the sports analogy here for a moment, I’m a baseball nut, but
when you watch a good infield play, the short stop never checks at third base to
see if the third base is there. They just throw the ball.
Interviewee: They know it.
Jerry: They know that they are going to be there.
Interviewee: That’s right. We don’t use baseball analogies too much here, but I like that.
Interviewee: I like that.
Jerry: You know, and what you see when a relationship and the teamwork isn’t working
is there’s that hesitation, and there’s that hesitation in the throw. Are you there?
Are you going to catch it? And gee, that is a really hard way to build a story up;
double-checking to see if I toss you the ball, are you going to catch it? Did you
catch it? Not only, ‘Are you going to catch it?’ but ‘Did you catch it? Can you tell
me if you caught it?’ I can’t work that way. I got to let it go and let the other
person – I think you have defined in some ways, a beautiful type of relationship
between alignment and trust. I mean, what is trust but that ability to like look over
third base and say, I know that that person will be there. Even if their foot is not
on the bag right now, they’ll get over there because 23 years of friendship has
proven to me that that person is there. Am I naming some quality that is in your
relationship? Am I naming it, this notion of trust at this level?

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Interviewee: I think that’s evident. Yeah, we share that, we would express that directly, you
know, it’s I think obvious to people but I think –
Interviewee: I think people sometimes don’t understand our relationship, but they can see the
trust there.
Interviewee: Right, I think it’s because we are so wildly different temperamentally that they
don’t understand that part of it potentially but –
Interviewee: People that are really close to us as a team grows, people watch us from afar.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: We are 55 people so you know, it’s not giant, we can talk to every person every
day theoretically, but at some point they are not really seeing you make decisions
you know, or see you do your work as directly as –
Interviewee: Or see us connecting at night or on weekends.
Interviewee: Yeah. A lot of our connecting happens after hours and on the weekends when we
both have space to kind of, think and ponder. I don’t know, that’s how I feel, it’s
kind of by me, that’s how it has happened; some of our best kind of strategic
thinking happens outside of the office.
Interviewee: Yeah, on the phone often, cause we are with our families or not even in the same
state necessarily, but on the phone.
Jerry: Is that sustainable as the company grows?
Interviewee: It has to be.
Jerry: What do you mean?
Interviewee: She’s off fundraising, or speaking, or, you know, taking high level meetings; I’m,
you know, kind of more of the person inside, although I am doing more and more
travelling and speaking these days too, and so we are on often in the same
geography. So, we need to you know, connect outside of face to face, and make
time when we are here because you know, our time is swallowed up pretty
quickly in the office. We have an open booking system so that anybody can book
our time, and we like that in some ways, but really the time gets booked up pretty
fast.
Interviewee: We are also really effective on email together, so I know Joanne will answer me.
It used to be within the hour, I don’t remember quite at that speed level anymore,
and it was probably more trivia before, whereas now they are less of them and

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more important emails. But I know, I will hear back, and even if I don’t, I know
one of two things: she is absolutely swamped or pissed off.
Interviewee: I’m pissed off. And this same thing on Jules’ end; I know when I’ve pushed a
button, and that’s the other thing, you have to be able to push each other’s buttons
to create that tension so that you can advance a decision that you know, is hard to
make and that happens, you know, and she’s got her territory and I have my
territory and you have to find alignment. So, it’s not – the trust is really kind of
rooted as a foundation of our relationship, but we are strong enough to have
disagreements, and know each other well enough that she’s purposely not that
one, but I got to go for it and I got to get an answer in here.
Jerry: I will give you one of my favorites quotes, which is from a brilliant Buddhist
psychologist named David Richo, and what he writes in a book called ‘How to be
adult in a relationship’ is to be an adult in a relationship is not to be conflict free.
Interviewee: Right.
Jerry: It’s to resolve conflicts mindfully.
Interviewee: Right.
Jerry: And it’s unrealistic to expect conflict – to have a conflict-free zone and conflict
isn’t necessarily a sign that there is a problem. It’s what happens with the
resolution of those conflicts that indicates whether or not there is a problem.
Interviewee: And I mean, it doesn’t even have to be a conflict, it can just be a decision that half
the team wants to handle one way, and the other half of the team wants to handle
another way, and we have to come down in a unified way to decide, you know,
how are we going to proceed and keep everybody motivated and moving
efficiently forward, and not get stalled out by indecisiveness or difference of
opinion.
Jerry: Yeah, I also saw the two of you do something almost innately, just now, which
was really quite wonderful and something that we often try to teach, and that is
really what I would call giving each other an operating manual or more than that,
you know, I did a podcast interview with the founders of something called the
Center for Collaborative Awareness, and they have a process they call the
Blueprint of WE, and what it does is, it takes new partners, whether romantic or
business partners together, and they say, okay, work through these issues. When I
am pissed off, this is what I do, and this is the way to approach me. You have
come to learn that about each other. When I am feeling overwhelmed or when
Joanne is feeling overwhelmed, she won’t respond to your emails, so you know
not to take it personally Jules, but you know that there is something going on
there, and you might actually need to check it out because she might be drowning,

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or she might need to be left alone; because you’ve learnt that rhythm with each
other and I think that’s another essential element, you know, of like –
Interviewee: We both have rhythms that we have learnt –
Interviewee: Yeah, she knows like give me 24 hours and I recover.
Jerry: Right.
Interviewee: And I have learnt that she sometimes needs time to think it through, and I don’t
have to push her. You know, she needs to be fair and objective and I’m impatient,
you know?
Jerry: Yeah, see but not – Joanne, I think what you just described is a beautiful
expression of emotional intelligence. You know, I often used to teach that
emotional intelligence boils down to two things: self-awareness and empathy;
understanding of the other person and in fact, without self-awareness, it is really
impossible to develop empathy. So, you know Joanne that you can be incredibly
driven and impatient, that’s both a positive and a negative, and you know that if
you let that impatience get out of control, you are going to knock into Jules’ needs
for quiet contemplation, for a methodical approach in a methodical decision. And
Jules, you know that if you are steamrolled by the impatience, you are not going
to be at your best and you might end up being resentful or you might end up being
short-tempered or any of those things, and you have come to know that about
each other. And I think that that’s another expression of that trust is like, I know
where you are going to be on Tuesday mornings because I know that Tuesday
mornings – you’ve got your yoga class in the morning and that I should just leave
you alone so that you can transition in.
Interviewee: It’s Thursday mornings, by the way.
Jerry: See, how did I know?
Interviewee: We switched it. It used to be Tuesdays.
Jerry: Oh okay, but it’s that kind of knowing each other that I think really, really
strengthens the partnership and becomes a basis of a really healthy leadership
function. And too often, I see young entrepreneurs bypassing all of that, thinking
that it is unimportant.
Interviewee: There’s a maturity and wisdom here that are partnered [Crosstalk] that I think I
see in us that has helped us lead a good company.
Jerry: Yeah, you know, in the last podcast, I got a glimpse into the values of the
company in the conversation that Jules and I had, and I just want to say what I
said to Jules at that time, I’m so admiring of this Joanne, of this company that

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you’ve created, and before we started recording, Jules and I was talking about the
fact that I will be visiting Rhode Island soon, on a fairly regular basis because my
son will be going to school there, and she said that I think she was going to hunt
me down and shoot me if I didn’t visit. No, I’m just kidding.
Interviewee: Yeah, I think I would love to hear you –
Jerry: Well, I would love to come visit quite frankly because I love seeing the smiles.
There’s a quote that we use all the time at Reboot, from one of my favorite
writers, a fellow named David Whyte, and that’s “Good work, done well for the
right reasons.” Like, good work, done well, for the right reasons; and that’s my
sense of The Grommet. Good work.
Interviewee: I went to hear David Axelrod speak recently, the political campaign advisor, the
new book, and he was at Harvard, and he said something that I will never forget;
he said, “There are politicians who want to be something, and there are politicians
who want to do something, and I only work for those.” It was a breakthrough for
me because I felt this was true for both of us; neither of us got out of bed when we
were ten years old and decided we were going to be entrepreneurs. We’ve had
corporate careers, we had done lots of different things, but this itch of The
Grommet, the business opportunity and the need of in the world, it’s good work
that we do, is so big that we felt it had to get done, whether it was by us or not.
And because we do enjoy the entrepreneurial side of it, if that’s not a necessary
evil, it’s what we do, but I love that. We are entrepreneurs because we want to do
something.
Jerry: I love that. I think it’s a beautiful expression and it really speaks to the healthy
part of the obsession, if you will. The healthy part is, “I want to bring something
forth in the world of meaning and consequence.” I’ve got a little bit of notoriety,
and it’s so easy for the egotistical part of my character structure to be satisfied and
dance, but the truth is, what I’m more interested in is people having a genuine,
heart-felt, conversation about the existential challenges with work. If everybody
has that and I don’t have to have that conversation any more but could just sit
around the fire and read good books, I’ll be thrilled. Me and my ego will be little
bit lost, but really that I what motivates me. Good work.
Interviewee: [Unclear 0:32:09] for you Jerry, you have tremendous job security. You will
never ever be able to retire. I’m sorry, that’s the truth.
Jerry: Well, I’ve warned my partners; I’ll be 52 this year, they’ve got eight years, that’s
it, I’m done.
Interviewee: We’ll talk to you in eight years about that.
Jerry: Oh, you’re both sweet, thank you. Well, one of the thoughts that sort of occurred
to me would be, how do you keep it going as the company scales? I mean, you

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already talked about 55 employees, and we touched upon briefly even before we
started recording, the notion of you guys staying in touch and how do you do that
and you know, if I may, I know you’ve got fundraising on the landscape in front
of you at some point, and you will be successful, I can feel it and so as that goes
forward, how do you hold on to this? How do you hold on to this and the listeners
can’t see me, I’m pointing to the two of you; so I’m pointing to the space between
the two of you.
Interviewee: Well, you’re supposed to tell us that.
Jerry: Well, don’t you know a good coach never provides the answers, but only good
questions?
Interviewee: Yeah, well, I think, when it’s hardest is when our travel schedules are misaligned
and you know, and we’ve had a pretty good summer actually, you’ve done more
travelling than I have, which is unusual –
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: – and so one of the things we do let go, we have this regular touch base every
Friday when we are in the office, but for a while there, when I was traveling, we
had that by phone. We’ve been better lately, actually we’ll do it by phone, when
we have work from home days and things like that, so I’m just thinking out loud,
that’s just one thing we probably have to commit to harder because here’s the
thing, there are other people on our team who always appear needier than Joanne
does to me; unless she’s in a really tough situation, everyone else – you know, she
could probably wait. And I even did that to you last Friday –
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: – because I was dealing with sort of a higher – a longer list basically, and you
started to say, “Well, I have some stuff that’s kind of minor” and I said, “Could
you please not tell me?”
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: “I just can’t have it in my head right now, more stuff” and so we can sometimes
cut those corners where it may be in this situation where there are going to be
even more needy people, we can’t really afford that where we sometimes draft it
off of that knowledge that we are okay.
Jerry: Well, in a sense it’s like the trust is so strong that you trust it too much.
Interviewee: Yeah. We had a year maybe, ending fairly recently where I took a lot for granted
maybe -

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Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: – about that, that I sort of backed off and said, “Wait a minute, we are moving fast
here and we are changing a lot. I can’t just assume we are aligned in the way that
we have always been.”
Interviewee: That’s right. Speed and just the sheer number of initiatives that are happening at
all times, and the kind of friction and tension that can be created when you are
driving at something probably with not enough resources, and then you hit a
bump in the road and I expect her to react one way and without this talking and
she reacts differently, everybody gets confused even more –
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: – dangerous, not even between ourselves, but for the team who is responsible for
advancing things. So that is, I think that is the reason why we need to at least have
that one hour touch-base every week and pretty consistent, like FYI, this is what
is going on; even if it’s by email –
Interviewee: Part of the dynamic is that I am really universal; I’m out there, I’m getting
external feedback, I am seeing technical or competitive or economic moves or
whatever, which aren’t necessarily immediately important, but I know I have to
work them into the mix and I’m trying to communicate those, translate those back
to the company mainly to Joanne and my direct reports, and if she is in the middle
of that, “Here’s the reality today Jules”, you know, moment, which she is a lot,
that is not going to land for her, it’s not going to be important to her, but I have to
keep going at it because I do know she will care when she has time to think about
it –
Interviewee: Right.
Interviewee: And in the meantime, I will be proposing ideas that advance the company, that are
pretty far cry from the reality we can achieve today, and I’m pretty oblivious at
times to that reality. She doesn’t let me stay oblivious very long, but if she can
count on some gaps in my knowledge and I count on her to fill them, even if I
don’t like it sometimes frankly because I just want to be told, “Yeah, we can do
that” and she’s going to say, well, here’s A-B-C and she’s not obstructionist, she’s
–
Interviewee: No, I generally can see where she is headed with it. That’s actually the magic of
our relationship is that she visions it, and I can see it. It might be way out yonder,
but I can usually see it and get behind it. I will see all the obstacles and that will
frustrate her, but I generally can embrace because I have always been so highly
respectful of her insightfulness – that’s like the number one, vision and
insightfulness, I have learnt to trust that implicitly and I think she trusts me
implicitly.

Page 13 of 23
Interviewee: My like high concern, Joanne is going to bring a level of savvy to the business
that I don’t bring, and she also can see around the corners that I don’t see, like the
implications in the inner relationships –
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: – and she’s always driving towards the same goal, it’s not like we are going down
different highways, but if the work I have to do, and it’s hard sometimes to get
her, like I said, to see kind of like – for me to communicate thoroughly enough so
she can really understand what I’m talking about because sometimes I speak in
shorthand, and then she can often improve you know, usually improves on the
‘how are we going to get there’ part.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: But sometimes there’s a lag and that’s hard for me, and it’s a strain on Joanne
because I’m like, “I want this, we should do this, you know, I’m scared about this
–”
Interviewee: And I’m still pushing on six months ago idea; still like trying to get that under the
– get adopted by the rest of the team. Sometimes they struggle to understand you
know, that slight shift, and they struggle to understand the why that strikes the
slight shift because the opportunity has shifted just little bit. And so I have to kind
of move the team, and Jules is also doing this too, don’t get me wrong, but you
know, I’m more ‘in the weeds’, if you will, of kind of really riding the business.
Instinct, I have good instinct, business instinct, and I understand the business at a
very visceral level, and so I can see pathways to meet up with her vision, and that
is how we make it work, if that makes sense.
Jerry: It does and I want to bring you back to – that was a beautiful explication of the
way in which you work together and you know, I know that when you listen again
to this, you’ll hear yourselves describing a relationship in a beautiful way, and I
let it go because it was really important for you to be able to express that. I find
sometimes that expressing it not only helps the other person, but also helps
ourselves really solidify what it is that’s going on.
Interviewee: Jerry, I’m thinking about our team because a lot of individuals –
Jerry: That’s what I was going to ask you about.
Interviewee: And I’m thinking, as we are talking that this is going to be helpful for our team.
Jerry: Yes.
Interviewee: Understand-

Page 14 of 23
Jerry: Well, I’m going to go one step further Joanne; you don’t have to rely on Jerry’s
podcast to tell the team –
Interviewee: Yeah.
Jerry: You could actually take some time, with the whole team, to talk about the fact for
example, that sometimes, you are each responding to the needier children, and
leaving your business soulmate to the side, and taking them for granted.
Interviewee: Kind of.
Jerry: Yeah, like we all did. We are – all three of us have children around the same age,
you know what it’s like when they were two and three.
Interviewee: Yeah, well, it’s not even just people; it’s about a needy business.
Jerry: Yes.
Interviewee: Business that can kind of suck up your entire day –
Jerry: So, let’s take it up a level because you’ve put the question to me in a way, and so
what I did was a little Jedi mind-trick because I got you to answer your own
question, because now I’ll show you that you gave yourself the answer because
the question on the table was, how you are going to scale this space between you
as the organization grows. And what did we just describe? Oh, Jerry encouraged
you to take this knowledge that you had of each other, out to the larger company.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Jerry: Take this very, very special gift that is the relationship between the two of you,
because I will argue, very strongly, that this is what makes The Grommet special,
it’s the space between the two of you, and let everybody else in. Let them
understand so that they understand that when they fill Jules’ calendar on a Friday
afternoon, they have knocked Joanne out, and Joanne has to be on the calendar;
and Jules has to be on Joanne’s calendar. It can’t be ‘we intend to do this every
Friday’.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Jerry: It actually is written in stone.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: Let me ask you a question now Jerry, how do you do this in a way that is healthy
and doesn’t exclude other people very much – we don’t want to run the Jules and

Page 15 of 23
Julianne show, you know, that’s not scalable or that’s not aspirational for other
people.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Jerry: How do you what?
Interviewee: You talk about this space between us, but there has to be that kind of healthy
space and you talked about an infield in this catcher, first base, second base too –
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: – Like the short stop and the third basemen aren’t going to win the game alone –
Interviewee: How do you pull more people into the circle?
Interviewee: Yeah, where they can have –
Jerry: It’s actually difficult, but easy to express, okay, you pull more people into the
circle; what do I mean by that? When was the last time you had a senior team off
site?
Interviewee: Yeah, we’re [Crosstalk]
Jerry: How did I know that? I knew that because the two of you are working well,
whereas if there was conflict here, you would be reaching out to the team, but
because this is working well, what you want to do is slowly expand the circle.
Any time, and this is a Jerry general rule of thumb, any time we’re working with
senior team, we are working with senior managers and the question arises, it says,
‘How do we put that very question to the team?’ and by putting that question to
the very team, the team co-creates the answer. So, if the question is, ‘How do we
scale so that this is not the Jules and Joanne show’ ask the team. They live with
you every day; they have feelings and ideas, I guarantee you. They are going to
come to you and say, how about every other week that meeting is expanded? Are
you having weekly senior team meetings?
Interviewee: Yeah, we do that every Monday. We are working on –
Interviewee: Improving that meeting.
Interviewee: Yeah, because basically we know it’s not all the way it should be, and maybe
some advances there and it’s a TBD if what we do is the right solution.
Jerry: Who is taking responsibility for improving that meeting?
Interviewee: Well, we did it collectively, we actually had –

Page 16 of 23
Jerry: I like that, good.
Interviewee: Okay.
Jerry: I like that collectively, you know, because that’s the thing, because this is the
tricky part. When you start a business, it’s all on the senior team, it’s all on the
senior – it’s all on you guys; all the vision, all the direction, all the answers
everything, and my favorite writer, Parker Palmer calls it a form of ‘functional
atheism’ where the leader has to hold all of the answers. What should we do,
what’s the – and sometimes, out-of-control leaders, the leaders who want to be a
politician because they want to ‘be something’ versus ‘do something’ get so
trapped in staying in that position that they hold on to that, even to their own
detriment because nobody has all of the answers. That’s not your instincts, either
one of you, that’s clear, and yet sometimes the team inadvertently, subconsciously
wants to maintain that structure. ‘Hey guys, just tell us what to do. Hey guys, tell
us how we can improve this meeting. No, the problem we are talking about isn’t a
problem that has scaled Jules and Joanne, the problem is, how do we scale
Grommet?’
Interviewee: Yeah, right.
Jerry: How do we scale Grommet’s senior leadership team, and that is a problem that is
not your problem to solve. That is a problem that’s the team’s problem to solve.
What your responsibility is to do is to make sure that the team is focused on that
problem, and has the tools they need: facilitation, training, communications, the
right conditions, the right set of values; has the tools they need to solve that
problem. But try to resist the impulse to solve that problem.
Interviewee: For them.
Jerry: For them, because in solving it, you actually end up repeating the lack of scaling
problem.
Interviewee: Yeah. Makes sense.
Jerry: Right, so we want to use the problem as a demonstration of scaling the team and
so this question, which is a beautiful question, is how do we maintain the
specialness here? Connectivity with the two of you, commitment to
communication; you are already starting to express the other thing which is, Jules,
you were so open and brave about this, you said, “I kind of give you short shrift
here, Joanne; I bypassed you and I went to the squeakiest wheel.” A very, very
common problem. So, just naming it creates space for Joanne to be able to go
back to you and say, “Hey Jules, do I have to be squeaky wheel?” Because what
we want to do is to make sure that that commitment between the two of you – you
can make it fun, make it lunch time on Fridays, make it happy hour, go to yoga

Page 17 of 23
class together, it could be anything, it could be out of the office because that may
actually help you guys, but it’s your time together. That’s sacrosanct. And then
you expand the circle and you explain to people what you do and what we try to
do is not be more insular, but we are trying to preserve and protect the thing that’s
between us. I don’t know, does this resonate at all?
Interviewee: Yeah, it does; I mean it seems pretty basic stuff.
Jerry: Thanks, I appreciate that; to hell with you.
Interviewee: That’s for you Jerry. I couldn’t help it.
Jerry: “That’s obvious Jerry. It’s a good thing you are not charging for that.”
Interviewee: [Unclear 0:49:24]
Jerry: Are you doing it?
Interviewee: We have to do it.
Jerry: Oh no, that’s what I said. I asked you if you were doing it. No. So, if you are not
doing it –
Interviewee: No, we do but there are weeks we don’t and I mean –
Jerry: Why don’t you?
Interviewee: Because the business swallows up our time.
Interviewee: Lately, I would say like six months –
Jerry: That’s because your fears about the business swallow up your time. The business
will always make its demands; how you respond to those demands is your choice.
What’s behind the impatience Joanne?
Interviewee: Me?
Jerry: Yeah, it’s fear.
Interviewee: I like to go fast.
Jerry: You like to go fast because it’s fun? Okay, so I don’t want to drive in a car with
you.
Interviewee: It’s a total burden.

Page 18 of 23
Jerry: Right, so what’s behind it?
Interviewee: Huh?
Jerry: What’s behind is this fear of failing?
Interviewee: Yeah. Is it really fear of failing or –
Jerry: What is it?
Interviewee: Or is it –
Jerry: Is a fear of being bypassed?
Interviewee: Driven to succeed.
Jerry: Why is it [Crosstalk]
Interviewee: - difference.
Jerry: Why is it so important to succeed?
Interviewee: Because people are depending on us.
Jerry: What if you fail them?
Interviewee: I’ll be fine with that too.
Jerry: Okay, so let it go; don’t be so impatient. It’s easy.
Interviewee: Oh, that’s not easy for me.
Jerry: I know.
Interviewee: You got these like telepathic eyes coming streaming –
Jerry: Of course it’s not, it’s easier said than done.
Interviewee: But you have to allow for it Jerry; we don’t have to give in the [Unclear 0:51:16]
of our business, it has a daily deliverable.
Jerry: Right because of the structure of your business.
Interviewee: [Crosstalk] an early stage companies have a daily – it’s like getting up, you know
–

Page 19 of 23
Interviewee: A magazine every day.
Jerry: Like I used to be an editor of a magazine, you know this.
Interviewee: That’s right. Well, then you can relate, right.
Jerry: Every day you have deadlines.
Interviewee: Well, aren’t all editors relatively impatient?
Jerry: Yes, and what I used to say is, I used to often times take out a magazine, open up
the pages, and tell me about the number of blank pages you see. None. So, every
day, deadlines are met. So, I get that feeling, I know that feeling; trust me, I know
the feeling. My only point is this, as you scale the business, those demands, those
daily demands, as you put it Jules, they are just going to increase.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Jerry: And the fact is, we can increase the size of the senior leadership team
exponentially and it’s still not going to catch up with the demands because every
one of those people is going to start to generate their own demands.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Jerry: You said something before Jules, you said, there are 55 people and it’s just
enough that we can meet with them all of them all of the time. Well, it’s not going
to happen if there’s a hundred. And so, even though this is obvious in some ways,
it’s worth bringing your attention to how do you scale the business, how do you
scale yourselves. Well, the answer is going to be, you are going to have to learn to
let go of a lot of pieces that seem incredibly important every single day.
Interviewee: Yeah, that’s what I struggle with.
Jerry: Yeah, I thought so.
Interviewee: She can handle so much; Joanne, she has huge breath and when we were – you
know, we did the work of 40 people with 10 people for four years and that would
have never happened without Joanne. She probably personally did 20 people’s
work.
Jerry: Yeah.
Interviewee: And so she kind of knows every corner of the business. She, like I said, has a
pulse on the business like nobody else could possibly have, or at least it would

Page 20 of 23
take a long time for – to have that kind of level of experience and yet, the business
has changed and it has scaled. We have grown – geez, I haven’t done the math
lately, but we probably grown revenue 700% in the last couple of years and you
know, that’s required staff and much more officially properly wasn’t ever going
to scale if Joanne tried to be 20 people for that much longer, but she can’t
possibly know all the corners. Nobody could. And so you have to be able to know
the second base is ready to catch too obviously – I love your analogy, but they
have to develop some of the same instincts, no one will ever be Joanne, I could
never be Joanne. So that’s obvious, but they have to have their own instinct and
actually I was surprised that Joanne wasn’t out there [Unclear 0:54:28] getting
ahead of her is sometimes too is really helpful because she can't be everywhere
anymore. She doesn’t try to be any more she can.
Jerry: Yeah, well, I think one other analogy that might be helpful to hold on to, is that
the two of you are starting to transition where your responsibilities used to be, to
actually build a products and services or to build the services in fact, and actually
your job now is to build the company which builds the products and services.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Jerry: So, Joanne, all that prodigious talent is really about building capacity more than it
is about actually producing output, and that can be a really difficult transition for
high achieving people like us because we are used to getting a lot of stuff done,
and a lot of stuff’s worth out of getting a lot of stuff done. And we have to find
that self-worth by looking out at the team, and remembering something that Lao
Tzu used to say; Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, “A leader is best who when the
work is done, the people say, we did this ourselves.” Your values, I can see it in
you, your values are such that what I am about to say will resonate with you. Ten
years from now, you are going to look back and you are going to look at this
company and you’re going to say, “What a great thing they built. What a great
thing those people built.” And that is the opportunity here, and that is how you are
going to scale the business.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Jerry: And in effect, maintain the specialness of the relationship here.
Interviewee: I think you actually get a lot of joy out of that and have done that.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: Joanne loves to start to form people and see them grow, and then not need her,
you know, she enjoys – you were just telling me something about yesterday, you
know, and I was like she is off and running.
Interviewee: Yeah.

Page 21 of 23
Interviewee: And the person thinks Joanne is an amazing mentor –
Jerry: She probably is.
Interviewee: Oh, she is, I know this. You did that at Keds, I have seen this for years, you love
to.
Interviewee: But I had this reputation for being – what is that word, I don’t like it, but like what
is that –
Interviewee: You are relentlessly dissatisfied.
Interviewee: Relentlessly dissatisfied; that is a terrible thing.
Interviewee: No, I say that about you, I don’t know if anybody else said that about you. I say
that because –
Interviewee: It’s about quality; it’s about speed and quality and results.
Interviewee: Yeah, but you start with yourself.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewee: So, it works well, and actually this has been a good week so far, and one of the
reasons if I try to decode it, like the ordinary stuff is going well you know,
everybody is doing what they need to do and you are doing – [Unclear 0:57:16]
something really important strategically this week, that you are super excited
about and no one else could probably do it because you like to do the hard things
first. Like the things that are – wouldn’t be fair to ask somebody else to do
because you don’t even know how to do them yet. You like to do that, like
pioneer bushwhack and –
Interviewee: Rambo stuff.
Interviewee: Yeah. And like somebody came out of the meeting, a new person [Crosstalk] she
can just go like the person, five men on the other side table and three – I wasn’t in
the room, but three people on our side, and one of the men on the other side table
looked at Joanne and said, “I can see in your eyes, you are honest, I can trust
you.” And she’s going hard for what she wants.
Interviewee: That was a big compliment, I was very happy. I was happy when he said that.
Interviewee: But you weren’t standing there giving away the store, not being – making it a 50-
50 and it was all new stuff; like we didn’t know if it was going to work.

Page 22 of 23
Interviewee: Totally out in front of the business, but important if we could make it happen.
Interviewee: Right. So, that was like a new product piling, that’s what I get excited about.
Jerry: Well, I’m going to take this pause to actually thank the two of you, because I feel
honored, I feel like I got to witness some deep and profound love and respect
between two people, and I feel really fortunate, and I feel led into a circle in a
very sweet and beautiful way. And you know, Jules, I said this to you before, but I
am going to extend it, I am so admiring of what you guys have here, both at the
company, but really in this space between the two of you. I know that people
listening to this podcast are going to benefit from this, and I’m just grateful that
you allowed yourself to just have this conversation there, because this is how we
all grow, we help each other grow in this regard. So, thank you so much.
Interviewee: And you’ll visit.
Interviewee: Thank you, Jerry.
Jerry: And I promise I will visit.
Interviewee: Good.
Interviewee: We’ll make you work though, so you know –
Jerry: Just don’t make me work for Joanne. I hear she is relentlessly dissatisfied. Thank
you so much guys.
Interviewee: Thanks Jerry.
**
Meet the co-founders of Adcade.
I’m Rob Prentice, the COO of Adcade.
Rob Cromer, CEO of Adcade.
Buzz Wiggins, CTO and co-founder of Adcade.
There was a group consensus that our relationship was not as healthy as it was when we started
the company; just kind of casualties of running a business. The first thing to go is the
communication between best friends, and there were things we needed to unpack and we did not
have the environment here to do such an exercise on our own.
Let’s say we didn’t have the framework.
Didn’t have the framework; and it’s not to say that we haven’t done things that bother each other
since the boot camp, but we made it like a point to sit each other down, and just say it so you
don’t build up resentment, you don’t feel as though you’re holding something in. You sit them
down and have a conversation about it, tell how you feel. I think that goes a long way and it’s
something that we would never have done before naturally.

Page 23 of 23
Co-founder boot camp is our invitation for you to discover how your leadership team can work
together, better. Join us this March 2nd through the 6th; learn more at reboot.io/co-founders.
**
So, that’s it for our conversation today. You know, a lot was covered in this episode from links,
to books, to quotes, to images; so we went ahead and compiled all that, and put it on our site at
Reboot.io/podcast. If you’d like to be a guest on the show, you can find out about that on our site
as well. I’m really grateful that you took the time to listen. If you enjoyed the show and you want
to get all the latest episodes as we release them, head over to iTunes and subscribe and while
you’re there, it would be great if you could leave us a review letting us know how the show
affected you. So, thank you again for listening, and I really look forward to future conversations
together.
[Singing]
“How long till my soul gets it right?
Did any human being ever reach that kind of light?
I call on the resting soul of Galileo,
King of night-vision, King of insight.”
[End of audio 1:02:45]
[End of transcript]

Reboot Podcast #26 - Finding your Business Soulmate - Founders of The Grommet with Jerry Colonna - Reboot Podcast

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