There's a guy named Dave Smith. He was the first isn't archivist and I've been reading his stuff for 20 years now. And that was What I want to do is I want to kind of be a Disney archivist, and I wanted to be the librarian at the Disney Archives, which is a really weird thing.

That's Greg Co Burger founder and CEO of Read Me, an online documentation company on Maureen Taylor, co founder of S and P Communications. And this is, I think, like a factor. When I first met, Greg Read Me was just beginning. As we continue to work together, I've gotten to see Greg grow with the company, and what has always struck me is his creativity and curiosity is a deep desire to learn, which is essential to the founder mindset. For these qualities, he tries to bring a sense of fun, toe everything he does by finding inspiration in ordinary, everyday things that could make the read me community more vibrant. For the people who work there, One of the biggest challenges of founder has is to learn how to be a good and effective leader. So I asked Greg about what he's learned as he steps further into his role as a leader.

I started the company. I wasn't a leader. It was just straight all the code I was doing, everything I was doing, the design worked with all the sale stuff like that. Then we started hiring people, and for a long time I was still doing the same thing. I was doing a bit of hiring but was also writing code and all that stuff. It's been kind of interesting to see how, as those jobs have been replaced by people are much better at it than me how my rules had to change. So it's kind of what I'm going through for the past few years and Wolf in next

year's as well, I'm sure. As Greg's roll shifted, he began to realize the kind of impact of leader can have on the company culture. How leaders personality can set the tone affect the vibe, the people and their productivity. So then he mentioned a time when I had him take an assessment, kind of like a personality test.

The results Did you get this like long packet of information about you? There's a section about what your office looks like, and I read through the answer. We had this. It described our office exactly. It's like colorful posters on the walls with this kind of stuff, probably brick walls. It was creepy how close it was. All this test new was kind of just my answers. My personality and I was weird how well it was able to describe the office. And I think it definitely the reflection of me and affection that people it's nice but not too fancy. We do a good job. We put a lot of effort into making you feel clean and friendly, without feeling too pretentious or too nice and kind of attracts the people who want to attract. And everyone works incredibly hard, but also is friendly, outgoing,

nice. We get along. We eat lunch together every day, hang out outside of work. We've built an awesome company of people who just really like each other and trust each other. It's a little rocky is as we grow, but the people we've attracted to the people that are those same kind of people,

a lot of long standing companies that have been around for a while and interesting data point is that the founder did learn how to run the business as well as builds the product. Think of the idea, create the culture. Have the vision come up with something disruptive that nobody else has had to do. They're both artists as well as the position of leader. Do you think you're that person? I hope so. One of the things I like about you and like working with you, is you established values and you stick to them. Tell us what they're. You have sex, which I think is three too many. But we've talked about that. Okay, my three favorite. Okay,

there's a lot of product focused. So something like air on the side of whimsy when we get kind of lucky at the company where I was bored by myself. No employees at this point, and I put a little Albert, our mascot on the log in page as you tab to the password field. He covers his eyes, and that got incredibly popular, and it kind of showed me that I could run a very serious product. More product. We haven't talked about it, but it's an enterprise product of the other day for developers. People pay us money for it to be to be company, being with little bit of Lyndsey. And there was great and I kind of realized that I didn't have to be serious all the time. We had to be serious about the things. They're important, but we could have a little fun here there.

That's definitely a product thing that we do, that the company as well. We do a lot of fun, little things. The company that I think it makes the product better makes coming to work every day better, makes people better friends, both of the product and in the company. We really focus on a little bit of whimsy here that I always joke that some day one my job not to be CEO, but C W o Chief wins the officer and just spend all day doing fun. Little things that make people feel I say funny things. I don't mean just fun things. For the sake of fun. We do a lot of different things. One thing that I do that I really like, I want you to feel kind of important, so we give everyone challenge. Coin

thes challenge coins are of all things, a military tradition. The most common origin story is about a young American pilot in World War whose life was spared when his would be executioner recognized the insignia on the coin that he wore on his neck.

Traditionally, they are proof if you're challenged that you're actually part of some sort of organization in the military. So, like if before the Internet like that, if you're you know, we're talking like 100 years ago. If you're at a bar and I'm in the final first, they know someone's like, No, you aren't. You pull your challenge coin, which would tell that you're part of this even after you'd already left. The whole point is, if you're challenged, if you can prove it, you owe them a drink. But if you can prove that they are you a drink.

So people carried around the challenge coins to prove that they were part of something. And this isn't just for current employees or night just for employees, people who have really helped the company. So we give everyone who is a part of the company a challenge coin like that other all numbered, and we give them out to everyone who just kind of made a huge impression on the company.

That is so cool.

I got it from Ah, guy named Jon Favreau, who is the director Jungle Book and few others, and he used to do a movie sets. I just love the idea because it was definitely the actors would get it, but so would the Craft Service person. Anyone who contributed to this larger thing would get this proof that they were part of the company. It's a little Lindsay. It's something that it's not any startup playbook, what you're supposed to do. Whatever but, you know, making people feel involved in something that's been great. Weaver credits Page as well, So the number on the back of your challenge coin correlates to your number on this listing with credits page just like a movie credits. Who's think Founders? As much as I want the credit,

we get too much credit. I could have done it without ah bunch of employees and a bunch of people who are in a place. People gave me a chance when I didn't deserve one, or maybe I deserved it, but like they didn't need to give it to me and some people actually had nothing to do with the company. There's people along the way. They were amazing managers. That set me up for what I want to be. This time is going on. It's obviously less people who helped me. And more people have helped the company. And the bar for getting one of these has grown a little bit since the early days. Yeah, in my favor, things we do is giving

up one challenge coins. And what number is yours? No, Number

two after me is my friend Eric Willis was my first boss. One move to San Francisco. We worked at a start up together. He was CTO. I was in turn and we spent the entire you know what, six months together? He was a phenomenal manager and kind of shaped how I look at start ups. How I look at San Francisco, how I look at everything since then. We're sitting in this little startup room back in 2008. We're building out a P I. Documentation like this should be like a startup, and we talked about it for big kind of forgot about it, but we have the idea together in 8 2007 years later actually started a company, so he was great for two reasons. One was we just sat around in brainstorm the idea together and to Is that most my thoughts on leadership and management stuff like that. He

was the nexus for a lot of that. Greg is the founder and the CEO, so I asked him what he thinks. The differences.

Right now my job is both. And as time goes on, Founder's Forever founders kind of a title which never goes away. There's something like founders out there who don't want the company's Still where a CEO. There's a job description, founder commune. A lot different things. Sometimes founders walk away after a week, but still get that Tyler founder. Sometimes they're they're company shuts down. Hopefully, I'm theall Adder and I'm there forever. CEOs the one who actually runs the company, whereas founders kind of set the tone a little bit more. And there's a lot of examples where they split where the founder might take a CTO roll or might take a chairman roll or might leave come to completely. But I think that's still trickles down and maybe they have a goal, which is to make more money or to grow the company or to do something whereas Founder can mean a lot different things.

And I'm trying to figure out what what that means for me. Going for in the company is tough because I started just to make things. I didn't want to be CEO. It was just the job that came along with it. I started to build a product, but now I'm realizing that the product itself is going well. Now it's my turn to build the company a lot of hiring. It means a lot of figure out strategy, things like that. I never really realized the difference between founder and CEO is kind of the title you gave yourself. If you were the sole founder of a company, they're very different jobs, and it's only been kind of trying

understand. So as a founder, you really have to be willing to learn what you don't know about running a business in order to also be the CEO. Yeah,

it's tough because the other day founders and CEOs have very similar goals, but I think that it depends on why the founders replaced a CEO. Whether they set down doesn't want to do the job there. Step down because the board forced them to. But I do think founders make decisions that CEOs can't or won't and vice versa. And the best cos those are the same decisions. But I'm a decisions for the company that probably don't make a lot of sense if I was a professional CEO, and I think this company better because of that. Whereas I think a lot time to see Yoko also make decisions that might be better for other parts of the business. Not to say that founder make something cool and CEO kind of words about the business itself, But that's kind of the split up, and we're really lucky that we have something that I absolutely love that people are willing to pay for. Those two roles could be the same for a long time. For us. I think so. I really like I'm in a position where I could do both, at least for the foreseeable future,

okay, My last question is, when you were a little kid, what did you want to be when you grow up? I wanted

to be the librarian at the Disney Archives, which is a really weird thing. Like everyone else said, Normal stuff like, Wanna be a doctor or lawyer? I had such a very specific. It wasn't even like I wanted to CEO of the distant company because, you know, a lot of people look at Steve Jobs. Is their model their idol? Whatever. For me, it was Walt Disney, not as a person. People are complicated, especially people at this level. But his attention to detail and the way he thought about building product I loved wasn't the movie I loved.

It was wth e learning every little thing that went into the movie the good, the bad. Ah, few weeks go into the Disney Family Museum and in San Francisco in the Presidio and walked around. I just love the way he thought of a building company and buy back in 1932 and he was starting Steamboat Willie. And then Snow White was the first thing, and it's also obvious that hindsight. But I was reading quote by him where he was talking about how he thought he was six years late to animation because animation already been done and all the companies they were gonna do animation had already been invented. That's crazy to think about that now that he thought he was six years too late when we still love movies he made eight years ago. You have a talk once in a while to my employees about Main Street in Magic Kingdom and just going through all the little things that he thought about and put into it back to them. I said before about the credits. I got that from him. If you walk down Main Street and you look at the windows, all the window signs, Roy Disney's florist or stuff like that and make that one up and he put everyone who worked on the Magic Kingdom he put in the window. So if you look up on either side,

you can see everyone who worked on magic, and he had a really good job of making sure that everyone felt involved. That was what I want to do is I wanted to kind of be a Disney archivist, and there's a guy named Dave Smith who died about four months ago. I believe now I regret that I never tried to meet him or got to meet him. But he was the first Disney archivist, and I've been reading his stuff for 20 years now. And that's what I wanna do when I grew up

s Oh, that's really cool. That's been inspire a lot of people. All right, you just got investment. Congratulations. You're on to the next chapter. So now you have money. Now, what are you afraid of? Yes,

we things flipped. In fact, I'd say we got money because of this fear, not vice versa. But we started a successful and we started realized how much people liked us and dependent on us and how we're building something really cool. And the fear became not that don't would like us. I wanna make sure that, you know, we didn't We're, like, kind of this, like, safety mode, but rather now that people really like us, things going well, it's a different kind of fear where we're trying to make sure that we're living up to this potential and all the pieces we put in place makes you actually take advantage them. Now who's a similar fear?

We still want to go to business, right like that. But now my fear isn't Oh, my God, We're not gonna make it. It's Oh my God, we're on the track to make it Mossad lose this momentum and, like, lose all the stuff we put into it. So many people have trusted and read me and worked for Read me and helped read me. We gave early customers challenge coins because they were so important to us is not just employees. It's everyone kind of capitalizing on, like put a lot of seeds out there and actually kind of now making sure things that started sprout, making sure we take care of it and

find a way to make that happen. Thank you so much for being with us. That was Greg Co. Burger founder and CEO of Read Me Read Me gives teams the tools they need to create, manage and easily collaborate in personalized online documents. They make it easy to create a beautiful experience for developers who are building platforms, and they're growing like gangbusters. In 2019 they doubled the size of their team and secured $9 million in Siri's, A funding from one of the world's most influential VC firms. Next time on, think like a founder. I talked with Christian Ottman, our founder of Intrinsic, which is now a net at company. He tells us about growing up in Spain with five older siblings, tricking computers and satellites to watch free soccer as a kid and how his entrepreneurial spirit has brought him all over the world, including North Korea.

Um, Maureen Taylor. And this is think like a founder. Think like a founder is produced by S. N. P Communications in San Francisco, California Learn more by visiting us at S n p net dot com or connect with me. Maureen Taylor on Linked in to Continue the Conversation. They're serious Producer His Rushing Hunt Sound Design by Mark Greene. Creative producer Eli Shell. Content and Scripting by Mike Sullivan. Production coordination. Natasha Thomas Thanks also to Selina for Siani Shell, John Hughes and Ren Vera.