Yearning for integration

Many of us—especially if we're working 9-to-5 jobs—have come to see work as drudgery. We trudge through the week and live for the weekends: TGIF, we celebrate! If you happen to be in a stressful leadership position, work can be a never-ending slog. In such a situation, it's easy to become a truncated version of ourselves. Is it possible to integrate our work with activities that help us feel more fully alive, more authentically ourselves—and to do so without falling into the trap of workism?

My latest podcast guest, Andy Youniss, thinks so. Andy is founder and former President and CEO of Rocket Software and currently serves as the company's executive chairman. Andy has been the guiding force behind Rocket’s innovation, acquisitions, partnerships, strategy, culture, and values since the company launched in 1990. Andy has been recognized as New England Technology Entrepreneur of the Year (2017) by EY and is one of the world’s foremost experts on making an impact through innovation in, and modernization of, mission-critical legacy technology. Andy has inspired many through his TEDx talk about the meaningful intersection of music and technology throughout his life. In addition to his role as executive chairman at Rocket, Andy is a trustee at Boston Medical Center and at Berklee.  He also mentors, coaches, and advises rising leaders and growing organizations such as Spoonfuls, The Record Co. and We Make Noise.

Andy is also an accomplished pianist and guitarist who has performed on stage in Boston and Las Vegas, solo and with the Rocket Band, and has opened for Aerosmith, Elton John, Maroon 5, Gwen Stefani, Elvis Costello, and others.

In the episode, we talk about:

• how Andy developed his passion for music for early age
• why he decided to start a software company
• how he learned to integrate music into his work life
• the power of music to connect with people
• the importance of creativity in both music and software
• the beauty of coding and problem-solving
• what a beautiful company culture looks like
• and the significance of pursuing beauty in one's life and work

You can listen to the audio in two parts below or watch the full episode on video. An unedited transcript follows.

Transcript:

Brandon: Well, to start, I would love it if you could share a story about an encounter with beauty that you had in your childhood, any memory that lingers with you till today.

Andy: Yeah, I knew you were going to ask me something like this. So going back to my childhood, I guess the beauty story that I want to talk about is around music. I guess a little bit more than music. But I remember as a young child, I can't remember how old I was, my parents brought me to a musical theater production. It happened to be at Catholic University, in Hartke Theater. It was a musical production of a series of fairy tales and fables. I remember walking into the theater. It was kind of set up as a black box theater. On either side of the theater of the stage, stage left and stage right, were scaffoldings and platforms and ladders. And on the different levels were musicians: guitar, bass, keyboard, drums. The production started, and they were kind of acting out these fables. But then they would introduce contemporary music. It was the first time I really heard live, amplified, powerful songs. I remember two distinctly, both by the Beatles. One was Good Day Sunshine, and one was Here Comes the Sun. Just seeing that come alive with real people playing real instruments — I mean, I still close my eyes and I can see that in front of me, I'm sure, not completely accurately depicted — just the beauty of the music, the power of the music, it just touched me so deeply. Obviously, that's still with me today.

Brandon: Wow. Well, did that influence you at all into pursuing music? I mean, I recall you had a story about a piano teacher. You didn't like practicing, and then you wanted to quit. Then somehow, after quitting, you really got into it. Could you connect these experiences a bit?

Andy: Yeah, so I grew up in a family, three sisters. We all took piano lessons. The piano teacher come to our house. She would have given us pieces to work on all week. My sisters were very diligent in practicing, and they were proficient when they had to play in front of the teacher. I was not so diligent in practicing and did not enjoy the experience. I didn't enjoy the music that I was supposed to be practicing, the specific technique around it. I love playing but not in the way that she was teaching. And so I can't remember how long that went on, but I finally did convince my mother to let me quit playing or practicing and taking these lessons. But that was such a massive unlock for me. Because at that moment, I started to play what I wanted, more contemporary music, and how I want it. But really not being defined, it was more like I heard this something one way, and I wanted to now reproduce it in a different way.

I say this to people, and it's quite accurate. Since that moment, I haven't stopped playing piano. I try to play if not every day, almost every day. It's been with me my entire life, just that puzzle solving to me, that ability to listen, figuring out somewhere in those 88 keys where it was, how it was. Today it's a lot easier because you can start up YouTube and actually watch people doing it. But way before that, it was listen, try it. Listen, try it. Just kind of this iteration, this loop. Finally getting to the point where, hey, I think I've got this in a place that to me sounds really good.

Brandon: So was it just the sort of rigidity of the structure and just sort of rote imitation compared to the creative process of problem solving? Was that the distinction there?

Andy: Yeah, I think so. I was listening to a podcast the other day on a totally different topic. It was the discussion of technique versus task. And so learning or thinking about the technique, focusing on the technique, is kind of one way to get it done versus focusing on the task at hand and the technique comes along for free. And so I think back then, I didn't know really what it was. But as I reflect back on it, it's more of the technique was not as interesting to me as the outcome. And if I could get to the outcome that I was looking for, kind of the technique, your fingers figure out what to do if you're trying to accomplish that sound or that chord or that syncopation. So I think that was the distinction for me.

Brandon: Talk a bit about your journey into software. Because I recall you wanted to go into music as a kid, and how did you end up then pursuing a career in software?

Andy: There was a point where I was seriously considering do I study music or take a different path. A physics professor at Catholic University who's a good friend of the family, who also had a hobby playing music, his recommendation was: music will always be with you. It's an amazing, life-long hobby. But you may want to consider pursuing something in the sciences. I was always good at math. I was very interested in math. In my middle school years, in high school, I happened to go to school that had access to computers. And so I was taking classes back then of basic programming languages. So I really had an interest in it. Similar to music, it kind of spoke to me right away.

When I attended Catholic University — I think it was my sophomore year — this computer science program, the ability to actually graduate with a degree in computer science, I was the first class that was offered to. And so I took a lot of math classes, but then I started taking more of the computer science curriculum and just thoroughly enjoyed it. I love the whole, again, puzzle solving. I'm trying to get to a certain outcome. How can I get this machine to do what I wanted to do? I started getting summer internships in and around computer programming. All this sounds silly today in this world that we all live in with so much technology around us, but it didn't exist back then in the early '80s. And so I happened to find internship at an engineering company who had just bought a computer. They wanted someone to figure out what to do with it. And it happened to be, my neighbor owned this engineering company and knew that I was interested in computer science. He's like, "Hey, we just bought one of these things. Can you come help?" And I just got hooked on it, again, from a very early age.

Brandon: How did you decide to venture into starting a company? Because that's a whole other thing from working on software to actually becoming an entrepreneur. Tell me about that journey.

Andy: That was an unexpected journey. I didn't really set out to be an entrepreneur. I was working for a small company up here in Boston, and the owner of that company decided to sell to a larger corporation. So I became an employee of a larger corporation. But I became frustrated very quickly because I had a lot of ideas for products to build. There were problems out there in the world that I knew that I could build software to solve. I just remained a productive but frustrated employee of this larger company. But one of my colleagues approached me and said, "I know you're frustrated. I also know you have all these really good ideas. Why don't you start a company?" I had recently got married. My wife, Marianne, was pregnant with our first child. So starting a company really wasn't part of the plan. But my colleague suggested and said that he would help get this thing started.

And so I came home one day and said to Marianne, "What do you think about this idea? What if we start the software company?" And so that's how it started. It was just kind of an idea that I knew we could build some software that could solve some real problems for real customers. Someone kind of gave me this nudge, this shove, if you will, to start. I was young. I didn't know what I didn't know, but I knew what I did know and figured out how to build this software and quickly got the first products sold. That journey started 34 years ago. You just learn as you go. I always tell people: if you're committed to it, and if you really are in it for the long term, and you're in it for the right things which is, again, solving real problems, great things can happen along the way.

Brandon: Amazing. Were there any moments during your career where you regret it not going more full time into music?

Andy: Never regretted it. What I did was figure out a way to integrate my music life, the side of me that really gets positive energy for music, and bring that into my work life. And bringing those two worlds together, I really never felt like I left music. It's always been a part of me. But to then make it come alive in the context of my company and the culture of the company, it was just, again, another one of those aha moments that happened along the way. I mean, when I first started the company, I really put music to the background. It wasn't a big part of what I did. Yeah, I still played guitar. I still played piano. It was still part of the family life but not part of what I did in my work life.

I met one of our customers I was having dinner with when I was out in Silicon Valley. She said, "You know what? My husband has got a studio behind our house. It'd be great if you came over and after dinner, we play music in the studio." And so one night we did that. We went out to the back house, we called it, and had an amazing night of playing music together. It kind of clicked at that moment that you can integrate these two parts of your life where you're talking about business and technology, on the one hand, but you can connect with people through music. From that little spark, that little kernel, it's something that I ended up bringing everywhere I went, to all of our customers all around the world, all of different geographies. Playing music with people was such a, for me, authentic way to connect as human beings, as people.

Brandon: Do you have an example or a memory of that where it worked really well, and you found this moment of integration?

Andy: I have so many, so many examples. I mean, I'll give you one big and one small. But the big example is, our company would sponsor technical conferences. Technical conferences would be attended to by thousands of people. These conferences typically were in Las Vegas. That's where everybody would gather. We spend the day in technical sessions hour after hour after hour. But at night, there'd be entertainment events. We would typically — it would be an IBM conference. IBM would bring in a big-name entertainer, names that people would recognize. And so we would do this year after year. We got to the point where we'd done it enough, where I would be the one on stage introducing the band that was coming on, welcoming everybody and introducing them to the band. Then I thought, how cool would it be if I stood up on stage and played the guitar? I gave the guitar away to someone in the audience and then introduced the band. That would be a really fun thing to do, a really good way to connect with the audience in a different way than through the technical sessions during the day. Eventually, after multiple years of asking to do this, the production company said, "All right. We'll let you do it. We'll give it a shot."

And so I was able to stand up on stage at a big arena in front of 10,000 people and play something that I wrote on the guitar, maybe a three to five-minute guitar riff. The positive feedback I got from that, from people who attended who knew me as the CEO of Rocket, a computer scientist, a technician, an entrepreneur but didn't know me as musician, really, people came up to me and said, "Wow. You are a real person. You don't just sit up in your ivory tower. You're here putting yourself out in front of all of us." I was the only one on stage in front of all the people doing that. And so the amount of positive feedback I got from that, it still, again, resonates to this day. If I talk to customers, they remember each of those moments. "You opened for Aerosmith. You opened for Elton John. You opened for Maroon Five." And I'm not just name dropping. Those are the people that we would introduce, and people remember that to this day. "Andy is the CEO who plays guitar." So that's the big example

The small example is, wherever I went — whether it was Japan, or India, or all throughout Europe — I'm just playing music with people, like sitting down, picking up a guitar. When I went to India, learning some Bollywood songs and just playing with people, in front of people. Music is global. Music is so human. Music translates across languages and cultures and geographies. And so if I was a sculptor, maybe I'd sculpt with people. If I was a painter, I'd paint. But I'm a musician, and so I play music with people. It really breaks down so many barriers and builds up all this connective tissue.

Brandon: That's amazing. How did you feel the first time you were in front of this large crowd playing the guitar by yourself? Was that challenging to do, difficult, or were you feeling at ease? How did you feel?

Andy: Extremely challenging, extremely difficult, anxiety-provoking, surreal. Not to get too deep, but it was truly an out-of-body experience. When I did it for the first time, I practiced for — I can't even tell you how many hours — 20 hours, 30 hours, to play a three-minute riff. I played it. I think I played it. I can't quite remember. I was kind of somewhere else when I was doing it. But I was actually disappointed when I finished. I was like, wow, I didn't play it exactly the way I wanted to, exactly that I practiced. But it didn't matter because it was the authenticity. It was the willingness to put yourself out there. No one knew what the riff was supposed to sound like other than me, because it was something I wrote. Everyone was just blown away. Like, that was so amazing that you did that. That was the only time that I've done it that I felt anxious and nervous and oh, my gosh. And every other time, it was the most enjoyable experience.

Brandon: Wow. Amazing. Talk a bit about creativity both in music and in your work. Because it seems like that's a big theme that runs through. It really seems to animate the work you do and who you are. So how does that work for you, both in your music and in your software business?

Andy: I get so much energy from the creative process, whether it's creating music — I write a lot of music — just channeling these ideas and then converting that to something that sounds the way I want it to sound, the creative process. The parallels to computer programming is so similar. But it's more than programming. When I talk to a customer and try to understand what it is they're looking for, what problem are they trying to solve, truly, I use the word empathy a lot, truly having empathy. What is it that they're not finding a solution in the world for, and why haven't they found a solution? What hasn't worked before, and what is it that will make them satisfied, make them happy? Listening to that and then creating something that delivers to their expectation is really why I have done what I've done for so many years. Because I love doing that. I love listening, understanding and then figuring out a way to solve that problem. The satisfaction that I see from them when I deliver it or if I get it wrong, like if I get it wrong, that's such a motivation to go back and try it again, do it differently. That human connection through satisfaction is such a key driver. People ask me, "Why are you still doing this after all these years? Why are you still building software and trying to solve these problems?" I love that aspect of it.

Brandon: One of the aspects of software that people I've talked to associate with beauty is coding, like the elegance of code and the way in which you can solve a problem in a way that intrinsically has some sort of structuring to it that's quite beautiful. Could you talk about what beauty means in your world, in the software world?

Andy: Yeah, it's so true. There's beauty on so many different layers. I remember the first job I had out of college. And, again, this will be so foreign to people. But you would write your code, and then you would print your code out on paper. That's how you would start to debug your code. You'd look through it. It'll sound odd to people. But the beauty of what that code looked like on paper, the way that it's formatted and spaced and indented. You can write code that looks really messy, or you can write code that looks really beautiful. I'm just talking about the esthetics of looking at it. Like, that's one level.

Another level is just the beauty of the algorithms. I can figure out how to do this in a more efficient way. I could brute force it, or I could come up with a more efficient algorithm. Then I can convert that into really efficient code. That's another layer of beauty. There's the beauty of the performance of the code. I can get this code to perform much more efficiently. I can measure that. That's something that, again, I get immense pleasure from. There's the beauty of what it looks like to the user of the software. How does this program, this application, expose itself? How does it interact with the user? And so, I mean, I find beauty at every single one of those layers. Then when you convert that into a company that doesn't have just one product, it has multiple products, then those products fit together in a family, and those families fit together in businesses. Then there's a beauty on how you bring that to market, I mean, I don't know. I could keep going on and on. But you get the sense that the beauty of it is there and is really just driving me at every step of the way.

Brandon: One aspect of work that's really important to you is the thriving, or healthy, or even beautiful culture in your company. Could you talk a little bit about the ways in which you tried to shape company culture and what that looks like?

Andy: Culture is really important. I think when the company started, we had a pretty simple culture, which was, we wanted to have a culture of listening. We wanted to have a culture that focused on solving real problems. Those are kind of the two key tenets. The company grew, whatever, let's call it thousands of employees and lots of customers around the world. Then one day, I was challenged by somebody who said, "Why would I want to work for your company, and who are you really? What do you really stand for?" And so it was really challenging to come up with, define our culture. Like, who do we really want to be and differentiate ourselves from everybody else in the world? And so we thought about that long and hard. We took our senior leaders in the company and said, "Let's talk about our culture." We had a bunch of words that we put up on the wall and ultimately distilled that down to four simple words but really powerful words. And we tried to live those values everywhere Rocket existed in the world. Those values were: empathy and humanity, trust and love, those four words. We started telling stories about each of those values, and we started holding each other accountable for each of those values. We started celebrating when Rocketeers exhibited those values. We talked about them externally to our customers and our partners and essentially living those things every day.

Those values were really with the company from the beginning. We just didn't talk about it that way. And so stand up in front of people and talk about empathy and humanity when they expect you to be talking about bits and bytes in programming and to talk about trust and love, those are hard words to talk about when you are a tech CEO. But they are absolutely required words to talk about because they authentically describe who we are as a company. And when you talk about it repeatedly, when you live it repeatedly, when you hold each other accountable repeatedly, when you celebrate it repeatedly, it starts to become a part of who you are. It starts to become the connective tissue for all of us and the unifying model that we all live in. And it's how we are now recognized in the market. It is the thing that I am absolutely most proud of, that journey from starting the company to where we are today. Not only doubling down but tripling down on those values every single day, that's what makes the company what it is. That's what makes the company successful.

Brandon: Right. Could you say a bit more about trust? I mean, that's one of the biggest challenges I think a lot of companies face. When I was doing research among tech firms about a decade ago looking at Global Fortune 500 companies, I would constantly hear this refrain: "The company doesn't care about you. So why should you care about the company?" So a lot of folks, management level folks, were planning their exit the day they arrived in the company and anticipated being thrown under the bus at some point. And so this sense of apprehensive individualism was quite strong where everyone sort of played their cards close to their chest and don't want to be vulnerable with anyone. In such an industry where it's so competitive and so volatile, how do you create trust?

Andy: And trust, how do you create it in multiple directions? You talked about it from the employee perspective. So employees trusting the company. Then there's the trust with customers. I think the first thing to do, and the first thing we did on both directions, is to measure ourselves. We thought we had a good culture in the company. But then we started to measure it, employee engagement surveys, asking our Rocketeers, are we as good as we think we are? Do we live these values? Do you feel the empathy and the humanity and the trust and the love? And if you don't, where don't you and what can we do? All of us have taken, let's call them employee satisfaction surveys. We really bought into the concept of employee engagement, and we bought into this idea that it's a cycle. It's a journey. We know we're not as good as we say we are every day, but let's measure it. Let's focus on those areas where we need to improve. Let's improve those areas. Let's measure that again. And so we had this cycle going.

I think the interesting thing that we did to build trust that I really haven't seen before is where our employees told us that we were falling short. What I said to the employees, okay, who wants to help improve Rocket? So we set up these employee engagement work groups, people self selected into those work groups. I was not a part of it. The employees got together and they said, "This is where you've fallen short. These are the improvements that we, the employees, believe you should make." We implemented every one of those recommendations, and then we measured them again. And so the employees got this feeling that we measured, we listened. We got their involvement. We implemented the recommendations, then we measured again. We did this year after year after year. That was an incredible way to build trust. But I don't even call it trust building. It's an incredible way to improve your company based on what your employees say is needed.

We did the same thing with our customers. We thought we were pretty good. We thought our customers liked us. But then we got the courage to go ask them. What do you think about us? We learned a heck of a lot about what they thought of us. Our customer satisfaction index grew year after year because we listened to what they said, and we implemented the improvements. Today, our employee engagement is, I believe, one of the best in the industry, and our customer satisfaction is one of the biggest differentiators of our company.

Brandon: That's amazing. And it looks like it takes a lot of humility to be able to do that, right? To be able to put yourself on the line and hold yourself accountable to what people say.

Andy: Yeah, I mean, look at it. That's the hardest thing, I think. It isn't about me. It's about us. It's about the company, if you are committed to the company, if you're committed to this organization and what it represents, and the community that it represents. It's the employees. It's the customers. All of that is incredibly positive input that you do something with. To me, that's the definition of empathy and humanity. "I'm really going to listen to you. I understand why you think we're falling short. Boy, I didn't see that myself. Let's go fix it."

Brandon: Do you see any lessons that you have learned from the music world or from your musical work about trust? Is there a way in which music can teach us to improve that aspect of our lives?

Andy: Well, yeah, the story I'll tell here is: I used to run this, I called it my leadership summit every year. And look, I learned along the way. I learned how to do things better. I used to structure these annual meetings. Here's the agenda. Here's the content. Here's when we're going to meet. Here's how we're going to meet. Everybody sat in rows, and I'm up on stage. I got the recommendation from someone one year, just put everybody in a room and trust that together, they'll come up with the agenda. They'll come up with the content. They'll come up with the action items. They'll come up with the game plan. I followed that advice and had amazingly good results from that. So my lesson there was: you put good, smart people together who have a common objective, and you don't need to tell them how to do it. They can figure out how to do it.

And so the parallel to music is, we were performing a show. Our band was performing a show again in Las Vegas. We had musicians from all over the world. These are Rocket employees, Rocketeers, but from Japan, from the Netherlands, from France, from various states here in the US. We were going to perform a show. But we didn't live near each other, and so we all had to practice what we needed to practice. And the first time we actually played together was at the show.

Brandon: Wow.

Andy: And it was unbelievable. The performance was one of the best performances that we've ever done. Again, it was that same concept. You get good, talented, smart people. You put them on stage together. You know everybody has prepared as they should have. The chemistry between us will happen in real time, and the outcome is going to be beautiful. Those two fit so nicely together for me, those two stories. Because it's really that idea that, you know what, you don't need to control it all. That you put the right people in the right place to succeed, and they typically do.

Brandon: Is there ever a challenge of people's egos getting in the way? Because sometimes you bring talented people together, and they don't actually work together. The whole is not greater than the sum of the parts, right? How do you deal with those situations?

Andy: No, it's so true. And I think the culture thing, I come back to that, which is, if you have an organization with a certain culture, those type of people either don't want to come. Or, they self-select out at some point because they want a place where it's all about egos, it's all about politics. Love is a value that's uncomfortable to them, for example. And so that's what's happened over time. Because of the culture, you get a certain type of person who fits, who wants to be part of that. And so, yeah, that's how over time it's worked. Obviously, we've made mistakes along the way. We've had the wrong people in the wrong roles, and we've had bad results. But again, if culture isn't just words on a wall, if it's real, if it's what you live, again, you'll get it right more than you get it wrong with people because of that.

Brandon: This is a question that you might have been asked a few times around the theme of love, which relates also to those sort of value that some companies have a family, right? They say we're a family here. But families don't fire each other. And so in a company, sometimes you have to make hard decisions, let people go. How do you embody the value of love when it comes to those sorts of challenging decisions?

Andy: What I say to people is, they have a choice of where they're going to work. Everybody is smart. Everybody is talented, especially today where people can kind of live and work wherever they want. You have to work somewhere that you love what you're doing. So to me, you have to love your work. You have to love the industry that you're in. We happen to be in an industry — our company is an industry that has really, I think, innovated more than anyone else in the area of what we would call legacy technology. So we're taking technology that's been around for many decades, and we're modernizing it in a way that it fits into today's world. And so at our company, you have to love legacy technology. You have to love taking what's worked for decades and figuring out a way to connect it into today's modern technologies. So you have to love every aspect of that. You have to love the customers that we deal with. We deal with the world's largest government, insurance companies, banks, manufacturing companies. They're the best customers in the world, but they're very demanding customers. And so you have to love working in that environment. And so love, again, at all of these levels.

Then, yeah, we have to love each other. We have to come to work loving the people that we work with. And if you don't love any of those things, you shouldn't be there. You've got so many other things you can be doing in your life, and so don't go somewhere. When we have our summer interns come in, this is the talk I give them: "You're here for the summer. You're interviewing us as much as we're interviewing you. Is this a place that you really would love to come and work at every day? And if not, you probably shouldn't come here." And so, yes. And so there's tough decisions along the way. To me, going through big organizational reorgs, for example, or having tough conversations with customers or tough conversations with employees, to me, it's very consistent with love. We do all that because we love the organization we're with, and we're committed to the best outcomes for each other. Sometimes the best outcome for an employee is to not be at the company anymore. It's to go somewhere else. I've had to have that conversation with so many employees, but those employees are still my good friends. On holidays, on Thanksgiving and Christmases, or when things happen in our lives, those are the people that I'm texting with. These are people that at one point were at the company and are no longer there because it wasn't the right fit for them. We're still not only great friends but immense love for each other. So it all fits in my world. It all fits together very nicely.

Brandon: Yeah, that's amazing. I want to ask about one theme that we're going to try to keep as a thread across the episodes in this season which is about longing or yearning. And when I hear you talk, I hear a couple of things that seem to be things that you might have been longing for in your work which is for integration, so between your music and your software sides of who you are, and then for really deeply listening, to people you're serving and solving problems for them. Is there anything else that you would say through your journey in your professional life that you would consider a deep source of longing or yearning? What was it that you would say you were longing for in your work?

Andy: I'll say two things. One is longing for the empathy gene. I just feel like that is what's missing in so much of the world right now but in the context of work, like truly understanding, putting yourself in the shoes of someone else. Real empathy is, to me, the key unlock to so much in a business. I physically react when I see or hear about employees that just lack that empathy. At that moment, they're just not understanding. They're not giving themselves to the problem and understanding what it is and why it is and what is needed and why it's needed. So that is just something that's deep inside me. So I would say that's kind of a longing or yearning. It's such a positive reaction when I see it and feel it, and it's such a negative reaction when I don't.

The other thing is this just core belief that I have. That if you do culture right, so in our case, if you get empathy and humanity and trust and love right, everything else flows from that. I happen to live in a world — our company is not a public company, so we live in the private equity world. I've been asked multiple times by people. Like, how do you, on the one hand, serve private equity and on the other hand serve this value system that you talk about? What I longed for and yearned for so long is to remind everybody that if you get the culture right, the results for the private equity world come from that. It's not the other way around. That's what I continue to remind people. That's what I continue to talk about, and that's why I'm so listening in for the values thing. Because there's lots of ways to have a successful company. But our company is successful because we get the culture right. And so that's this lifelong journey that I'm on that I feel like I'm in the minority on. If you focus on the right inputs, you get the right outputs. And for us, the right input is the culture.

Brandon: Well, looking forward, at this point, you're not working for the company anymore. At least you're on the board. But what is it that you're longing for looking forward? What would you say that looks like for you?

Andy: So two and a half years ago, almost three years ago, is when I replaced myself as CEO. So we have a new CEO and a new management team. I am executive chairman of the company, so still involved with the company but not running the company. So I don't have any day-to-day accountability, and I'm not operationally involved. And so looking forward, if I think about the company's been around for 34 years, what I'm looking for is, the company should be around another 34 years. How is it going to be around another 34 years? How much of what I've talked about today, how much of that is going to continue? And how can that transition from founder CEO to someone else happen in a way that preserves the value system? How can the new management team preserve the new value system, and how can Rocket and the Rocket community preserve the new value system or this value system? To me, that's the legacy that I'm looking to leave behind. It's not looking back on 34 years and saying, "Wow, that was successful." That was the first part of the journey. The second part of the journey is, can this transition to the next generation happen and stay true to our values? That, to me, is the real definition of success.

Brandon: I want to extend this theme of longing to talk about music. Which music, for most people, I think, is really evocative of things we deeply long for, existential longings or yearning for some kind of whether it's sort of sense of fulfillment that one doesn't find in their experience or for something greater, for something beyond. I'm just curious as to whether you could speak to ways in which music for you has been evocative of these deeper longings.

Andy: Yeah, I see it kind of like a barbell. On the one end, music is very personal to me. I sit down at the piano, and it helps amplify the mood that I'm in. If it's a more down mood, it's giving me comfort in that space. And if it's more of an up mood, it's giving me more energy in that space. Guitar, same thing. I'll sit down on my acoustic guitar and do more strumming if it's more of a down moment. It's on the electric guitar, more power, if it's more of an up moment. So it's very personal.

I'm sitting in my studio right now, and I spend hours out here. But this studio is also, at the other end of the spectrum, a place of celebration. You can't come to any of our parties or family get togethers and not end up here in the music studio singing late into the night. I mean, it's a place to connect. It's a place to celebrate. It's a place of happiness. It's a place of family. Those are kind of the two ends of the spectrum for me. Those are kind of the moments and emotions that I'm tapping into most often. Performing on stage is a different thing. But in our home-based studio, this is what I'm typically doing. It's me and myself and my thoughts and my emotions. Then it's the big groups getting together and just absolutely just having fun.

Brandon: I don't know if you're set up for it, but would you be willing to share some music with us? I don't know if that's going to be tricky to do when you're—

Andy: It would be super tricky to do. Kind of disconnect with everything to get this working. It will take a while to do it. Sorry.

Brandon: No, that's fine. Maybe I'll ask you for a clip or something that you're willing to share—

Andy: Yeah, I could do that.

Brandon: —and we could add it to the thing. I don't have any more questions. But is there anything else on these themes of integrating your music and software and, more generally, about beautiful work and what you're longing for that we haven't touched on? Anything else you'd like to add there?

Andy: Here's what I'd say, and feel free to edit all this out. I think finding the beauty in what you're doing, finding the love in what you're doing, people don't talk about that enough. People go to business school to talk about other things. But it's so important. Then bringing your authentic self. Again, for me, it's music so that's why we're talking about music. But bringing your authentic self to whatever it is you're doing. Again, you're not hiding behind a computer screen, or you're not living inside of a spreadsheet. You are a real human being with your emotions and your skills and talents and hobbies. And so bringing all of that authentically to your work life is where I think people get fulfillment and satisfaction. Again, it's not taught in business schools, but it's such a key to not only business success but life success.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. Is there any advice you'd have on people who might be struggling to do that, where they feel like if they were to try to bring in more of their authentic selves, that would not be accepted, or they have to navigate promotions, or that feeling of insecurity? How might they navigate that better?

Andy: The advice I typically give people there is, don't be afraid to try it. Put yourself out there and try it, and you'll be surprised what you'd get back. And if it's not received well, it's not you. It's them. That's the other thing. If it's not received well, you might be in the wrong company. You might be working for the wrong boss, if you will. People want to connect as people. It's the way business gets done. I know it sounds so counterintuitive in today's world, but people want to be part of communities where they understand who you are as a person. And so if anybody who wants to try it, they should contact me. I'll coach them through it. I've helped so many people with this. People are always surprised with how positive it's received.

Brandon: Amazing. Thanks, Andy. It's been such a pleasure. Really, really, quite a delight to have you on the show.

Andy: Well, it's great talking with you. I love the work that you're doing. When you and I first connected on this, it just, it felt so right. And so I'm glad I was able to help a little bit today.

Brandon: Yeah, great. Thank you.

Andy: Thanks, Brandon.

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