The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Podcast Por Ryan Hawk arte de portada

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

De: Ryan Hawk
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As Kobe Bryant once said, "There is power in understanding the journey of others to help create your own." That's why the Learning Leader Show exists—to understand the journeys of other leaders so that we can better understand our own. This show is full of learnings taught by world-class leaders—personal stories of successes, failures, and lessons learned along the way. Our guests come from diverse backgrounds—CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies, best-selling authors, Navy SEALs, and professional athletes. My role in this endeavor is to talk to the most thoughtful, accomplished, and intentional leaders in the world so that we can learn from them as we each create our own journeys.Learning Leader LLC 062554 Economía Exito Profesional Gestión Gestión y Liderazgo
Episodios
  • 678: Jamie Siminoff (Ring Doorbell Inventor) - Shark Tank Rejection, Selling to Amazon for $1 Billion, Surviving $3M to $480M Hypergrowth, Hiring Passionate People Over Experts, and Jeff Bezos's Leadership Lessons

    678: Jamie Siminoff (Ring Doorbell Inventor) - Shark Tank Rejection, Selling to Amazon for $1 Billion, Surviving $3M to $480M Hypergrowth, Hiring Passionate People Over Experts, and Jeff Bezos's Leadership Lessons
    Mar 8 2026
    www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Jamie Siminoff is the founder of Ring, which he sold to Amazon for over a billion dollars. He's an inventor and builder who couldn't hear his doorbell while working in his garage, so he built a video doorbell. When his wife said it made her feel safer, he realized technology had changed, and home security needed a complete reinvention. Ring became the world's largest home security company with a mission to make neighborhoods safer. Key Learnings Jeff Bezos reads and writes his own stuff. When Jamie asked Jeff to write something for the book's back cover, Jeff actually read it and wanted his own curated quote that was from him. Jeff loves entrepreneurs, so they kept him out of negotiations. After the Whole Foods deal, Amazon learned to keep Jeff out of negotiations because he finds it tough to negotiate hard with someone he respects. Hardware companies can die while growing fast. Ring grew from $3M to $30M to $174M to $480M, which sounds amazing. But to go from $170M to $480M, you're buying hundreds of millions of dollars of product when you're selling less than that. If sales growth slows, you're basically going out of business. Going from $480M to over a billion in revenue was like being on a motorcycle at 200 miles an hour. If a leaf falls down and hits you, you're dead. At Amazon, when Ring said, "We need another billion dollars to order stuff for next year," Amazon said, "Okay, what else do you want?" There are different types of entrepreneurs. Jamie is an inventor/entrepreneur. There are business entrepreneurs who are maniacal business people we've never heard of that have just crushed it. Jamie is maniacal on product and brings invention into how they run the company. Hire marathon runners. Marathons are the dumbest thing any human could ever do. Even if you win, no one cares. Jamie finished the Boston Marathon in 22,000th place and he's so proud of himself. You want people that don't care about external validation; they just care about getting the mission done. AI has democratized all information. With AI making it so you don't even need to know C++ programming anymore, fill your business with passionate people who care about the mission and they'll crush anything. When building your team, start with the mission. Jamie tells people, "Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. Do you want to work on making neighborhoods safer? Because if you don't, you're going to be miserable here. You're going to hear it every day, and you're going to roll your eyes." Referrals work because people don't want to let you down. The best hires are when someone's referred by someone (uncle, friend, whatever) because they feel guilty. They don't want to let the person who referred them down. Find an infinite truth to work on. Amazon's core principles are infinite: Will customers always want lower price, more selection, and faster delivery? Yes. If you deliver in 30 minutes, they'll want it in 10 minutes. Making neighborhoods safer is an infinite thing to work on. Your wife saying one thing can change everything. Jamie built a video doorbell so he could hear the door from his garage. His wife said, "It makes me feel safer at home." That's when he realized technology had changed and home security needed a whole new approach. The hard part is bringing the infinite down to the tactical. When you have an infinite mission, you can get overwhelmed trying to solve it all at once. You have to figure out what to do every single day to work toward that infinite goal. Shark Tank was a disaster that turned into everything. Jamie went on Shark Tank desperately needing money. He got zero offers and cried in his car after. But when it aired, the boost in sales gave them cash to hire people and build Ring, which started the clock on their success. Sometimes you can't stop because you're in too deep. After Shark Tank bombed, Jamie couldn't back out. He'd already ordered too many products and owed too much money. He'd be personally bankrupt if he stopped. People think he's tough for keeping going, but he didn't have a choice. Being naive is a superpower. Great inventions are things people say can't happen because if they could happen, they'd already be out there. You have to be naive enough to say "I think I can do this" or "I don't even know that I can't." People said you couldn't build a battery-operated camera on WiFi. Jamie had never built anything before, so what did he know? They just went out and tried to put some parts together that seemed like they would work. Knowing too much gets in the way of doing the work. If you're thinking and analyzing the whole world, that's time you're not inventing, ...
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    50 m
  • 677: Erin McGoff - How to Communicate at Work, Negotiate Your Salary, Write Cold Emails, Overcome Rejection, Run Better Meetings, and Build a Career That Matters

    677: Erin McGoff - How to Communicate at Work, Negotiate Your Salary, Write Cold Emails, Overcome Rejection, Run Better Meetings, and Build a Career That Matters
    Mar 2 2026
    Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader The Learning Leader Show Key Learnings Go out and dent the universe. Erin's parents didn't put pressure on her to get perfect grades or go to Harvard; they wanted her to use her privilege and beautiful upbringing to make the world a better place. Youngest child syndrome makes you quick. Being the youngest of six, Erin learned to speak very quickly to get her thoughts in at the dinner table, and she was given unsolicited advice her whole childhood (which is why she loves giving advice now). Your siblings' sole job is to keep you grounded. Erin's parents are proud and supportive, but her siblings roast her and beat her down (all in good fun) to keep her as humble as possible. Success is attributed to a sense of humor. Erin gave career advice that was funny, and nobody had ever really seen that before. You don't get that unless you're the slightly bullied youngest of six kids your entire life. Rejection rage is a choice. At a Women in Film networking event, the head of the organization paused Erin's documentary trailer 30 seconds in and said, "You need to be more realistic." Erin went on to get a Pulitzer fellowship and premiered a feature documentary at 23 with international distribution. When you get a rejection, you can either let it beat you down or say, "I'm going to show them." "Tell me about yourself" is the world's worst interview question. It's lazy, not specific, and hard for the interviewee to truncate their entire life into 90 seconds. Use the past-present-future template: 1-2 sentences about your past, 1-2 about your present role, then future (where the interviewer's ears perk up), connecting to why you're applying for this specific role. Specificity is the magic word. When sending cold emails, the chances of getting a good response dramatically increase if you're specific: specific praise, specific question. Instead of "Can I pick your brain over coffee?" say, "I watched your video about X, and when you said Y, it piqued my curiosity." Higher quality questions get higher quality answers. This isn't just for podcasts or job interviews; it's a life skill. Good professional communication is like chess, not checkers. Most people just play checkers (you said this to me, I'm going to say this to you), but chess is thinking 10 steps ahead about what your end goal is and how this person falls along the path to that goal. Don't ask for a raise; ask for an adjustment to your compensation. Your job is transactional (you do work, they pay you). When you accepted your salary, you were doing X, Y, Z. Now you're doing X, Y, Z plus A, B, C. It's no longer an equal partnership, so you need an adjustment. It's not personal, it's just professional. Know your audience and your leverage. Emotional regulation is powerful communication. If we just act impulsively and say what's on our mind all the time, it doesn't actually get you where you want to go. Always keep your desired outcome in mind. It's about checkmate. Don't just react, think about what the end goal is and how this conversation gets you there. Humanize people, don't make them wrong. That egotistical senior VP is probably actually really insecure about where they are in their career and wakes up every morning not knowing what they're doing. Put your ego to the side. Being a great communicator requires taking a break from thinking about yourself and thinking about what the other person's life is like and what their goals are. Align your goals with their goals. Think about how you can create that authentic relationship by figuring out how your goals align with what they're trying to accomplish. Shut up and listen. We do a little bit too much talking when we're trying to negotiate or strategize. It can be very beneficial to embrace the silence and practice active listening. Curiosity is an amazing way to show love. Being genuinely curious about a person makes them like you, and it becomes more natural the more you do it. Compliments have to be genuine and specific. People are way better at sniffing out fake compliments than you realize. If you can't find one thing you truly admire about someone, don't say anything. Don't make it transactional. When people ask, "How do I not make it feel like I'm using them?" Erin says, "Well, don't use them. Just be genuine." The most loving thing you can do is respect people's time. Meeting bloat has gotten really bad since the pandemic, and a lot of time is disrespected in meetings across the world. Maybe don't have the meeting. A lot of meetings are completely unnecessary, or at least the way they're set up, the people invited, or the way they're run are really inefficient. Only ...
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    52 m
  • 676: Jesse Cole (Owner, Savannah Bananas) - The Beauty of Obsession, Building a Fans First World, Walt Disney, Mr. Beast, Radical Transparency (Opening the Books), Do the Opposite of Normal, Turning a $6M Mistake Into a Moment, and Creating Banana World

    676: Jesse Cole (Owner, Savannah Bananas) - The Beauty of Obsession, Building a Fans First World, Walt Disney, Mr. Beast, Radical Transparency (Opening the Books), Do the Opposite of Normal, Turning a $6M Mistake Into a Moment, and Creating Banana World
    Feb 23 2026
    Go to www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My Guest: Jesse Cole is the owner of the Savannah Bananas. He went $1.8 million in debt, slept on an air mattress, and built a business that is now valued at over a billion dollars. I spent half a day with Jesse in Savannah watching practice, and Jesse gave me a personal tour of their entire operation. It was incredible. Notes: Fans First - The sign is on every locker. And leading out to the field, "Tonight is someone's first time seeing our show." Obsessed/Focused - Banana Ball/Serving people is his life. We didn't talk about hobbies, TV shows, or anything other than what they're doing now and in the future. He's obsessed with what he does and super focused. Transparent - Jesse just released their full P&L as a private company: revenue, expenses, player salaries, everything. Most businesses guard this religiously. He's completely transparent. I asked why, and he said, "Fans first. They deserve to know everything." Reps - We went to the field to watch practice. It looked just like a game. Players were dancing all the time. And every single rep they practiced as a trick play (behind the back, through the legs, etc.). They never play normal baseball. You wonder how they are so good on gameday at doing a backflip while catching a fly ball. Because they practice it thousands of times without fans so that when they're there, they put on a great show. Hiring – "Love your people more than you love your customer." 12,000 people on the waitlist to work for the Bananas. When you hire, have them do a "fans first" essay. Then they write a future essay. Always Be Caring, Different, Enthusiastic, Fun, Growing, & Hungry Fans First: The Counter-Intuitive Decision - Jesse sacrificed $6 million in ticket revenue after a system messed things up for fans. Merch – 787,000 fans purchased merchandise in 2025, totaling 1.96 million total items. That means the average person is purchasing ~2.5 items at checkout, with 80% of total sales taking place in person. 621,000 at live shows versus 166,000 online. It's a $50m business! TV: The Distribution Strategy - Giving Away Value - Jesse insisted on free YouTube streaming even when ESPN wanted exclusivity. Jesse is building a zero-profit secondary ticket market. He's literally giving away things other sports properties would monetize. So, even with all of the team's games still airing for free on YouTube, the Bananas averaged 500,000 viewers on ESPN, The CW, and Roku. The team's most-watched broadcast was a July 4th game at Fenway Park, which averaged 837,000 viewers on ESPN, making it the holiday weekend's most-watched primetime sports broadcast. TV networks want exclusivity, but you demand that the games still be broadcast for free on YouTube (in addition to whatever channel they are on) Social Media - The Bananas added 12.7 million new social media followers in 2025 alone. That pushes their total social media following across all channels north of 35 million... Roughly 2x more followers than MLB's most popular team, the Yankees, at 18 million. You have to believe something before you achieve something. Six years ago, Jesse said, "We're gonna sell out Fenway Park," and his team looked at him like he was crazy (they were a college summer baseball team, not even doing tours yet). You have to get through the messy to get to the great. Their first world tour was brutal: the sound was terrible, the show wasn't great, the game finished in the seventh inning because they didn't have a rule to make it go nine innings. See what's best for the guest, not what's best for the business. Walt Disney was the first to go into full-length animation, color, sound, and with Disneyland, he focused on one entrance to control the experience, custom rides, and invested in a castle and landscaping, which made no money. Go where others won't go. Sam Walton went to small towns, and no one paid attention to him for the first five to ten years. It's somebody's first time every night. Fans wait three years on a waitlist to come to a game, so Jesse doesn't care if you're having a bad day. That's their first time. Control the entire experience. Walt learned he couldn't control the experience when people watched his movies at a theater (it could be dirty, and people might not be nice), so he built Disneyland. Who do we work for? Fans. Jesse opened the books completely (numbers, player salary, merch sales, everything) because they have a responsibility and accountability to their fans. We have to feel our mistakes. When they sent a wrong email to 44,000 fans instead of 4,000, it cost them $6 million to take care of those fans with tickets (more than ...
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    45 m
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This is the best podcast. Regardless of who you are or where you’re at in life, you’ll absolutely find incredible value. Literally every episode shared ways to just be a better person overall. And Ryan asks meaningful, impactful questions that drive to tactical approaches that we can actually use. Very grateful for him and this show.

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