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Healey Cypher (multi-time founder and CEO of BoomPop) joins GTMnow to unpack one of the fastest growing channels for company growth: in-person events.
As AI floods digital channels with perfectly personalized messages, trust is becoming harder to earn online. Healey explains why events, dinners, and in-person experiences are becoming a premium GTM channel, not a nice-to-have, and how founders can use them intentionally for distribution, alignment, and acquisition.
Healey also shares a powerful insight from Sam Altman that reframes how we should think about AI’s impact on trust and human connection.
If you’re interested in scaling events as a growth channel, this episode will give you all the details you need and an understanding of what is working in today’s world.
Discussed in this episode
- Why in-person events are becoming a premium GTM channel in an AI-first world
- How founders can de-risk distribution before building the product
- The most common internal missteps that derail startups early
- Why offsites are the new HQ for remote and hybrid teams
- How to design offsites that drive alignment, not just fun
- What makes a dinner actually work — including overlooked details like acoustics
- How teams use events for customer acquisition and partnerships
- Why kindness and positivity can be a real leadership advantage
Episode highlights
00:00 – Why founders underestimate distribution
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=0s
03:30 – Product vs distribution: what actually matters early
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=210s
06:45 – Why most startups fail from internal misalignment
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=405s
10:30 – Culture, communication, and focus as scaling constraints
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=630s
14:40 – Hybrid work broke alignment
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=880s
17:45 – Why offsites are becoming the new HQ
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=1065s
21:30 – Events as a go-to-market strategy
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=1290s
25:00 – AI, outbound fatigue, and inbox trust collapse
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=1500s
28:40 – “In-person experiences are becoming a premium”
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=1720s
32:30 – How to use events for customer and partner acquisition
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=1950s
36:15 – What makes a high-impact event vs a wasted one
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=2175s
39:50 – Dinners, summits, and unforgettable experiences
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=2390s
43:30 – Leadership, kindness, and “don’t be a jerk”
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=2610s
47:40 – Mental state as a competitive advantage
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=2860s
52:30 – Final reflections and advice for founders
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdWRk-MgWXk&t=3150s
Key takeaways
1. Distribution matters just as much (if not more) as product.
Founders spend years perfecting product, but if you can’t scalably and efficiently reach people, there’s a real chance they’ll never even know your product exists. Distribution is the final remaining moat.
2. Events are becoming the most effective GTM channel in the AI era.
As AI floods inboxes with perfectly personalized outbound, trust is getting harder to earn digitally. In a world where it’s hard to know what’s real online, in-person experiences are becoming a premium.
3. You can validate demand before you build.
At Atomic, Healey learned that you can test messaging, pricing, features, and competitive positioning before writing a single line of code. Early distribution signals dramatically reduce risk and shape better products.
4. Most founders don’t think like their investors.
A solid 20% growth business is not what venture-backed businesses are optimizing for. Founders need to honestly ask whether their market, ambition, and exit potential match venture, or if an alternative funding method is more suitable.
5. Most startups fail from internal misalignment, not competition.
The biggest threats are usually unforced errors: lack of focus, poor communication, and misaligned priorities. Culture and communication are not soft topics. They are survival mechanisms.
6. Offsites are becoming the new HQ.
In a hybrid world, intentional in-person moments are how teams align, build trust, and remember why they’re doing the work. The best companies now plan these moments as part of their operating cadence.
7. Mental state is a real competitive advantage.
Healey shared a powerful story about elite athletes and micro-positivity. How you respond to small losses compounds faster than almost anything else.
Brought to you by: HockeyStack
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HockeyStack is the AI platform for modern GTM teams. It unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action. Built-in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works. That’s why teams like RingCentral, Outreach, ActiveCampaign, and Fortune 100 companies rely on HockeyStack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions, and make space to think.
Learn more at hockeystack.com
Follow Healey Cypher
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/healeycypher
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healeycypher
- Healey’s podcast: https://www.dontbeajerkpodcast.com
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
- Website: https://gtmnow.com
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com
Where to Find GTMnow
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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
- Podcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast
GTM 176 Episode Transcript
00:00:00 – 00:00:23
Sophie Buonassisi: You are a multi-time founder. You’ve had multiple successful exits, helped atomic scale to almost 800 million assets under management, over 40 companies. If you zoom out across all of those experiences, what are the things that founders are consistently underestimating early in company building?
00:00:23 – 00:00:27
Sophie Buonassisi: Healy Cipher is the CEO and co-founder of Boom Pop, an AI powered events and group travel company. He’s spent his career building and selling companies that center around great customer experience.
00:00:28 – 00:00:50
Healey Cypher: Events are now the number one go to market method for scaled air businesses. As AI becomes more and more pervasive. It’s going to become increasingly hard to know if something digital is real or not. Yeah, well, product, of course, really, really matters. Distribute matters just as much. If you can’t figure out a way to scalable and efficiently reach people, then there’s a chance they’re never going to get a sense of your product even existing.
00:00:50 – 00:00:56
Healey Cypher: And you know. My favorite example of this is Kim Kardashian. They have such insane reach with like zero cost to acquire customers.
00:00:56 – 00:01:00
Sophie Buonassisi: A lot of people wanting to leverage events for acquisition purposes.
00:01:00 – 00:01:19
Healey Cypher: Someone was interviewing Sam Altman, obviously the CEO of OpenAI, and asked him, what do you think the biggest change AI is going to have on society? What’s it going to be? And his answer was really surprising. He said, the biggest change I have in society is.
00:01:19 – 00:01:25
Healey Cypher: The.
00:01:25 – 00:01:28
Sophie Buonassisi: Healy. Welcome to the GTM now podcast.
00:01:28 – 00:01:30
Healey Cypher: Thanks for having me. Sophie, I appreciate it.
00:01:30 – 00:01:55
Sophie Buonassisi: You bet. Thanks for being here. And now. Now you are a multi-time founder. You’ve had multiple successful exits. You’ve been an operator. You’ve helped atomic scale to almost 800 million assets under management, over 40 companies. If you zoom out across all of those experiences, like what are what are the things that founders are consistently underestimating early in company building?
00:01:55 – 00:02:08
Healey Cypher: It’s a great question. So, a quick pitch for atomic, which is which is an absolutely amazing organization. When I joined, I had sold my third company, which I’m happy to tell you about. And I kind of thought, like, I knew how to do things, you know? I was like, I know how to raise venture. I know how to hire team.
00:02:08 – 00:02:25
Healey Cypher: I know how to sell. Like, I can do this. And I came into atomic, which is which was founded by Jack, Jack Abraham and Chester Ng and Chris, and they’re all amazing over there. And the first 30 days were so insanely humbling. Sophie, I had no idea you could do the things that they figured out how to do at atomic.
00:02:25 – 00:02:45
Healey Cypher: And one of the things they taught me. And then what I ended up teaching founders over and over again early on was that while product, of course, really, really matters. Distribution matters just as much. And what that means is, if you can’t figure out a way to scalable and efficiently reach people, then there’s a chance they’re never going to get a sense of your product even existing.
00:02:45 – 00:03:08
Healey Cypher: And you know, my my favorite example of this is Kim Kardashian or the Kardashians. I have no idea how good their products are. I’m sure they’re fine, but it kind of doesn’t matter. They have such insane reach with like zero cost to acquire customers. They can nail it. So one of the first things that I learned at atomic, and I think founders often underestimate and I mean, I’m a very commercially driven CEO, is you can de-risk distribution very early on.
00:03:08 – 00:03:24
Healey Cypher: You can get a bunch of positive signals before you even start building the product, on the messaging, on the pricing, on the features, on the competitive set. And this is one of the things that we did often at Atomic, as we put a little bit of money in, we get a sense of, is this thing going to really sell?
00:03:24 – 00:03:49
Healey Cypher: And then then we would, start building the product. So I’m happy to talk about some tactics there. I think another thing that a lot of founders forget to do, selfie, is they forget to really empathetically get into the shoes of investors. And I can tell you, you know, I we were talking about this beforehand. I come from Nebraska, which is, you know, pretty conservative.
00:03:49 – 00:04:18
Healey Cypher: I’m from a farming family, you know, like, you’d think, hey, I got a good business. It grows 20% year over year. Why would someone not want invest in this thing? And it turns out that that is not what venture is interested in. Especially. Especially now. They subscribe to this thing that, you know, called the power law, which is if they make 100 investments, they’re kind of assuming that 90 are going to be zeros, that there’s one investment that’s the Airbnb, the booking, the Facebook, the whatever it is Uber that’s going to return more than the entire portfolio combined.
00:04:18 – 00:04:33
Healey Cypher: And then you have a number two investment, which won’t be close to as good as number one, but it’ll also produce more than three to the bottom. And that’s how they invest. And so basically if you are a founder and you have an idea you have to think about, okay, is this in a big enough market. Can we exit here.
00:04:33 – 00:04:54
Healey Cypher: Be big enough. It can return the entire fund for my investor. And do they think that I’m aggressive enough to be swinging for the fences? I’d say those are probably the two biggest mistakes that a founder makes. The third, maybe if I had to do a three because, you know, you’re supposed to do that is I think founders, especially early on, struggled to tell their story.
00:04:54 – 00:05:09
Healey Cypher: And I’ve done so much coaching on this. There’s actually 12 perfect points if you want to tell your story, which I’m happy to go over at some point. And I think if you can nail the story efficiently, you have to have your one sentence version, but you also have to have your 12 points if you can nail it.
00:05:09 – 00:05:30
Healey Cypher: You’ll bring along an investor with you oftentimes. And anyone, by the way, someone you want to hire, someone you want to sell your product to. But if you just jump in in the middle people, you haven’t brought them with you and they have no idea what you’re talking about. So it’s distribution can can de-risk understanding your investors. And it is learning how to tell your story and making that something you really, really focus on.
00:05:31 – 00:05:52
Sophie Buonassisi: I mean, incredible points. All of those I know you’re you’re speaking our language with the first one on distribution. Yeah. Yeah. But those subsequent two ones are really, really interesting too, especially because you’d founded multiple companies and you’re coming in and still having that perspective from atomic. Yeah. And for anyone listening unfamiliar with Atomic Adventure Studio, that helps to incubate and grow startups.
00:05:52 – 00:06:13
Healey Cypher: The backstory is atomic is a venture studio. It’s an LP fund, just like GTM, which means LP’s or investors in the fund and GP’s are the managers of that fund. But the big difference is, instead of taking pictures from, you know, companies that are already formed, atomic only invest in companies that it started. And of course, boom pop, the company that I’m very honored and grateful to be the CEO of now.
00:06:13 – 00:06:15
Healey Cypher: I founded at atomic too. So it came out of atomic.
00:06:15 – 00:06:49
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I want to get into all the kind of company building aspects around why you started Boom Bop and spun out and so forth, but I’m also really interested to hear more about kind of the, the pieces of what makes a company successful as a whole with your holistic perspective. Yeah. You know, from our side and our seed on the venture side, what we see across the entire startup ecosystem and landscape, because we’re constantly keeping an eye on it all, is it’s often not your competitors that creates the friction that dissolves companies.
00:06:49 – 00:06:58
Sophie Buonassisi: Sometimes it’s things like misalignment and so forth. So I’m curious why that is, because you’ve seen that from your seat too.
00:06:58 – 00:07:21
Healey Cypher: Yeah, 1,000%. So I have some stats I’d love to research and make sure the numbers are exactly right. But directionally they are right, which is it’s something like 80% of failed startups might even be 90% is not because of an outside threat, it’s because of its because of internal unforced errors. Founders are misaligned. Lack of communication, lack of, you know, lack of focus, lack of priorities.
00:07:21 – 00:07:46
Healey Cypher: I don’t know if you knew this, but it wasn’t until the 1900s that you could even make priorities or plural word priority, which just meant the most important thing starting in the 1400s. So the 1900s. And it was only in the 1900s, they were like, what are your top priorities? Yeah. And so there’s just like, you know, there’s the kind of adage that anyone that goes a mile wide and an inch deep is not, you know, it’s like if you imagine your energy and this is a ball, if it’s going everywhere, you’re not going to get that far.
00:07:46 – 00:08:07
Healey Cypher: But imagine all that energy just going straight, how far and fast you can go if you focus, focus, communication, alignment. Those are the things that I’d say in the mid stage of a startup are critical early on. It’s just grit, traction. Can you can you figure it out? There’s nothing more important than talking to your customers, iterating on the features and doing that nonstop.
00:08:08 – 00:08:30
Healey Cypher: That’s all that matters. Like nothing else matters. It doesn’t matter. Don’t. Don’t go to conferences. Don’t do anything except for talk to your ideal customer profile ISP’s and iterate and make sure that you’ve got something that they absolutely love. By the way, there’s a there’s a measurement for this, okay. Which is if you measure your customers and you say, how upset would you be if this product no longer existed, you know this.
00:08:30 – 00:08:52
Healey Cypher: If 40% say, really upset, then you got product market fit. But that’s the general rule. But but back to your point, Sophie. This is why, you know, if you look at some of the most successful companies, especially when you’ve got product market fit and, you know, growing, they have this relentless focus on culture. Yeah. And there’s a that famous Peter Drucker saying, which is that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
00:08:53 – 00:09:16
Healey Cypher: It’s absolutely true. And I’d also say that one of the cornerstones of culture is communication. It turns out, as a CEO, as, as a revenue leader, as an executive, one of your primary jobs is just to communicate effectively repeatedly with focus, with tenacity. And if you don’t do that, that can be a huge reason that companies sadly unravel.
00:09:16 – 00:09:21
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. It’s like any any good relationship and it’s like a marriage to community.
00:09:21 – 00:09:22
Healey Cypher: Turns out.
00:09:22 – 00:09:23
Sophie Buonassisi: Cornerstone.
00:09:23 – 00:09:41
Healey Cypher: Yeah. Yeah it does. Yeah, yeah. And and you know, to bring it to the point of, you know, what are the tools? I think look, the world has changed a lot. We all know this. Hybrid is kind of the default way that companies companies exist. I remember seeing the stat buy Castle, which is this big kind of real estate, company.
00:09:41 – 00:10:02
Healey Cypher: They expected post-pandemic office occupancy, to level out around 40%. Now it actually is 50%, but it’s still only half of what it was pre-pandemic. And even even the companies that have maintained offices. Smaller footprint. You come in every now and then. It’s very rare that you have like the nine, nine, six, you know, people are in the office all the time.
00:10:02 – 00:10:24
Healey Cypher: And so what it does is it makes it incumbent upon leaders to put even more of a fervor around intentional communication, even more of a fervor around writing things down, even more of a fervor on debriefing and making sure that everyone knows. Yeah. And so there’s tools for this. I think, you know, if you were if you were to, force me to rank it, the best way to work on the planet is you’re all in the same room.
00:10:24 – 00:10:59
Healey Cypher: There’s no question. The second best is actually probably your all remote. The worst is hybrid. And that’s where we’ve all landed. Because now you have first class citizens. You have second class citizens. It makes this mishmash it’s we’ve landed in the absolute hardest place to work as a business. And so what we see a lot of our clients doing a boom pop and boom pop, you know, which, you know, is where I need a platform that makes it very easy to put on group travel and events for for corporates, think off sites, CEOs, you know, client events, customer summits is we’re seeing the best companies putting a bunch of intention, not just on
00:10:59 – 00:11:05
Healey Cypher: internal alignment and communication, but on a regular cadence of getting together.
00:11:05 – 00:11:24
Sophie Buonassisi: A quick pause for a company. We’re a huge fan of yours. If you run go to market, you already know the problem. Your data lives every spreadsheet, CRM, sales, calls, ad platforms, yet you’re still guessing what to do next. Hockey stack is the AI platform for modern go to market teams, unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action.
00:11:24 – 00:11:55
Sophie Buonassisi: Built in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close in, expand deals and scale it works. That’s why teams like RingCentral outreach, Active Campaign, and fortune 100 companies rely on Hawking stack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions, and make space to think. Learn more at Hockey stack.com. That’s h okay e y esta seacom. I’ve heard you actually use the term offsides for the new HQ, which I thought was really interesting.
00:11:55 – 00:11:57
Sophie Buonassisi: You unpack that for me a little bit.
00:11:57 – 00:12:05
Healey Cypher: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I didn’t come up with it. There was an offside, article in the Wall Street Journal that said offside. So the new office. But yeah, I think,
00:12:05 – 00:12:06
Sophie Buonassisi: You can coin the HQ. Yeah.
00:12:06 – 00:12:08
Healey Cypher: HQ. Yeah. That’s the new.
00:12:08 – 00:12:09
Sophie Buonassisi: HQ, right? That’s my.
00:12:09 – 00:12:33
Healey Cypher: Yeah, that’s that’s our statement is so. Yeah. I mean, when you get together as a whole company in person, it is this incredibly intensive, effective time to make sure everyone’s aligned. Also to remind everyone why they’re doing what they’re doing. But it’s something I think people forget. You know, everyone’s like, oh, you want build the company. Yeah. But but that gets, you know, there’s a spectrum of who works at your company.
00:12:33 – 00:12:53
Healey Cypher: Are they like mercenary employees or are they missionary employees? A mercenary employee is like, I’m just doing this to pay the bills, get rich, whatever. A missionary employee might be motivated by those things, probably, as is all humans. But but perhaps more importantly, has a very real why that motivates them. I want to make this positive dent on the planet.
00:12:53 – 00:13:14
Healey Cypher: Here’s why I care about this and so on that spectrum. You want to get as many of your employees towards the missionary side. And so when you get together in person, it’s a really good opportunity to remind people, hey, here’s why we’re doing this. Here’s why, here’s why it’s so important. Here’s why you are important in this important mission, and here’s why you should be incredibly excited about it.
00:13:14 – 00:13:37
Healey Cypher: So I think that’s it. And the third thing is, it is very easy. Communication has so many different layers to it. You know, like we’re communicating, I’m talking, but there’s visuals. There’s there’s all these things when you just, narrow down to a single component of that, just the words in slack. Yeah. Or just like the voice message in audio messages, you start to lose things.
00:13:37 – 00:14:06
Healey Cypher: And so there there is a lot of room for misinterpretation or misalignment without knowing it in person. There is no room for that. You’re in the room, you’re solving the problem. And so what we have we kind of subscribed to is this. And I think it’s a generic belief that a lot of folks have people inhabit 90 day worlds, which means if you don’t remind them of why what they’re doing is important, why they are important, what matters, the context, they will lose it and they’ll lose a lot of things, or lose efficiency.
00:14:06 – 00:14:27
Healey Cypher: They’ll lose excitement. They probably lose loyalty to the company. So we’ve seen that at a certain size, the best companies get together four times a year, which seems like a lot. But if you actually do the back of the envelope math, it’s still cheaper than office space. Yeah, which is interesting. And then there’s a certain point around 100 folks, 130 folks, where the whole company will get together definitely once a year.
00:14:27 – 00:14:43
Healey Cypher: And then the teams, certain teams get together on a regular cadence. And so, you know, I think one of the bigger mistakes people make when they think about getting together is they don’t do enough advance planning. It turns out if you plan an event like six, nine, 12 months in advance, you can get insanely great everything. Flights, hotels, activities.
00:14:43 – 00:14:50
Healey Cypher: It’s all a really great. People tend to kind of wait till like 90 days before and then it gets a little more expensive.
00:14:50 – 00:15:10
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, definitely. We’ve got, I mean, so many operators in our network that are are planning kind of 90 days out. I know we, we’ve connected. So thank you for all of your work on your site. Yeah of course, of course. Community. But I want to get into more of the tactical side of off sites. Yeah. And then swing back to more of the building side because you talked about how you incubated out of Potomac.
00:15:10 – 00:15:22
Sophie Buonassisi: Love to circle back to that. But now that we’re on the topic of off site, there’s so much to unpack here. So what, you know, you’ve seen you’ve seen thousands of off sites putting in a lot.
00:15:22 – 00:15:22
Healey Cypher: We’ve seen a.
00:15:22 – 00:15:28
Sophie Buonassisi: Lot. Seen a lot. Yeah. What differentiates a really high profile site from one that’s maybe just more fun?
00:15:28 – 00:15:43
Healey Cypher: Well, so I want to I want to dispel a myth, which is sometimes a more fun off site is a worthwhile investment. So there’s broadly speaking, if you’re, if you’re going to be reductive, there’s three categories of like off site types.
00:15:43 – 00:15:43
Sophie Buonassisi: Okay.
00:15:43 – 00:16:15
Healey Cypher: You got the internal kind of work focused one. You’ve got the external which is like client facing partner facing which by the way as a as a as an aside, stat events are now the number one go to market method for scaled er businesses. And I don’t know if you’ve seen this I’ve seen it. The amount of dinner invites you know it’s just it’s nonstop because as AI becomes more and more pervasive, it’s going to become increasingly hard to know if something digital is real or not, including zoom, including Google meets like, there’s so few real like, I know you’re real now.
00:16:15 – 00:16:17
Healey Cypher: Yeah, but like, it’s very hard to know.
00:16:17 – 00:16:36
Sophie Buonassisi: I also have a theory that we we were able to get away with these intermediary methods like online and so forth. But at the end of the day, it’s always just come down to trust. And so now that it’s harder to establish trust than ever online, yes, people are swinging back the other way to in-person, but really it was it was always about trust was always more secure.
00:16:36 – 00:16:40
Sophie Buonassisi: We just had the optionality before I completely agree.
00:16:40 – 00:17:02
Healey Cypher: You know, it was it’s interesting you say that. So someone was interviewing Sam Altman, obviously the CEO of OpenAI. And asked him, what do you think the biggest change AI is going to have on society? What’s it going to be? And his answer was really surprising. He said, the biggest change I can have in society is a premium on fantastic in-person experiences.
00:17:02 – 00:17:17
Healey Cypher: And even recently, a masters of scale. Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, said, look, I think the future is going to be people put their phones down and they want to be in person, and that is the way you gain trust is if you’re in-person, you break bread with someone, you look them in the eyes.
00:17:17 – 00:17:39
Healey Cypher: I have a personal rule I will never hire anyone. I don’t meet in person, I love it. You got to meet in person. There’s just things that, you know, you kind of understand better about people and people. And so I think, you know, to go back to your question, which is what what makes these things incredible is one, people are intentional about the theme in the programing of the event.
00:17:40 – 00:18:00
Healey Cypher: Have some fun stuff in there. People love Award shows. They love people love seeing the C-suite do funny things. They put a lot of thought into it. I think another thing you got to remember is that the human condition is such where every human wants to feel important. And so when you think about your event, think of it as you, the executive team hosting everyone.
00:18:00 – 00:18:00
Sophie Buonassisi:
00:18:01 – 00:18:18
Healey Cypher: And there’s a different mindset there. If you’re hosting everyone how do you make this incredible for them. How do you how do you make them feel important. How do you think about every minute of their day. And then the third thing is a very common problem is people over schedule. And it’s funny, I feel like I’m talking to my parent friends who overscheduled our kids.
00:18:18 – 00:18:37
Healey Cypher: Like people need time just to have serendipitous connection, to do nothing, to have free time. That’s also important in events too. So don’t don’t overscheduled. That’s another big thing that I’ve I’ve seen happen a lot. And then of course, the obvious stuff is, you know, logistics of events are so, arduous today. This is why a popup exists.
00:18:37 – 00:18:54
Healey Cypher: If you’re not using a company like boom Bob to make it significantly easier, you’ll over rotate on, like, all the details of the logistics and under index on the content. And that’s also a big problem is of like if it’s the night before and you’re trying to figure out your content, it’s just it’s going to be a lot harder to be hired.
00:18:54 – 00:18:55
Healey Cypher: High impact.
00:18:55 – 00:19:09
Sophie Buonassisi: And how does the sequencing work based on the three different models that you shared before around in person, remote or hybrid, does the sequencing of how often you should be hosting off sites vary based on which of those three buckets you’re in.
00:19:09 – 00:19:30
Healey Cypher: For the first, if you’re in office all the time, yeah, then your need for regular company sites is probably relatively small. Like, you should probably have certain things you’re conscious about, like are there certain things where you go and you have a task you want to do together? Is there the incentive trip? I’d say, you know, customer events continue to be important no matter what configuration you have.
00:19:30 – 00:19:46
Healey Cypher: Customer events are so, so important. If you’re remote, I think it’s very important to get to get on a regular cadence. You don’t want to tax your people too much. Like if they’re spending, you know, four weeks out of the year, that’s an eighth of the year. It’s 12% of, you know, everything’s going towards off sites. Like you have to be careful about that.
00:19:46 – 00:20:08
Healey Cypher: And then hybrid kind of depends on the setup. I found that hybrid is, the most common thing we’ve seen in hybrid is people will do their off sites on site. And so they’ll say, hey, here’s the week where everyone’s gonna fly and just be in the office together for the scheduling, which I think is it’s a good way to use the existing assets you already have.
00:20:08 – 00:20:39
Healey Cypher: Like, you may as well use the office if you’ve got it. Yeah. And then it’s a total expense in flights. The cadence of remote and hybrid is basically the same. It’s like you want to have a drumbeat that people can rely on. I think, for, for in-person, it just depends on the business, the scale. I’ll also say this, that there’s this moment and it’s generally around 50 people where just because you’re in office actually doesn’t matter as much anymore because you’re going to be in multiple floors, you’re going to be all over, people are doing their own thing.
00:20:39 – 00:21:02
Healey Cypher: And so I think early small teams, especially before a product launch, before, you know, finding PMF, if you’re in person, it really matters. It’s they pass that you still want to think about getting to see events, whatever form that is on a cadence, just to kind of bring people together because they think about the Google Campus. Yeah, it’s massive, you know, and I remember when I worked eBay and PayPal, I would spend hours every week driving between campuses.
00:21:02 – 00:21:04
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, I’m sure, you know.
00:21:04 – 00:21:26
Healey Cypher: My gosh. And so there’s also just the truth that even when you’re in person, like we at eBay would have, we’d have, I think it was twice a year we’d have these all company events and there was directors only there, the VP’s only there was like whole company. There were sales kick offs, like events. Just, it turns out, are kind of a staple of communication and inclusion and importance, which in turn is a staple of just how you operate businesses.
00:21:26 – 00:21:38
Healey Cypher: And this is why, you know, if you got to level up and you wonder, like, what is the size and impact of meetings and events in general? Because, look, it sounds pretty boring. You know, like like I’m in meetings at events company, like, oh.
00:21:38 – 00:21:42
Sophie Buonassisi: I mean, that’s a pretty interesting to me, but maybe I’m biased because, well, that’s.
00:21:42 – 00:22:05
Healey Cypher: Definitely biased in a great way is, you know, travel is 10% of global GDP. Yeah, it’s $11.7 trillion. It’s so, so big. And if you just look at the numbers for hotels, 30 to 40% of all of the revenue comes from group travel. So it’s 30% of all of travel easily, which means it’s a 3 to $4 trillion industry.
00:22:05 – 00:22:25
Healey Cypher: It is such a massive part of how we all operate as humans already. It’s not like I need to pitch it. I guess it’s more like as a as a founder, think about in your annual cadence of how you want to bring people together. What can people rely on? What is the bookmark? What starts a year off? What NZ year off?
00:22:25 – 00:22:30
Healey Cypher: What are the moments at least every 90 days that people can rely on? And then just that. That should be your event strategy.
00:22:30 – 00:22:53
Sophie Buonassisi: From a strategy perspective, what are your thoughts on the the different kind of mandates? So we’ve seen from our side a couple different styles and mandates. Yeah. Where a revenue operators CRO will simply be tasked with, hey, run the CEO. Yeah. Be a marketing leader, run, like a MKR or a Portland or an RKO. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so forth.
00:22:53 – 00:23:13
Sophie Buonassisi: And then there’s the alternative where this is actually a true deep rooted strategy, where everybody’s coming together and understanding how they actually want to sequence in a very intentional way. Yeah, yeah. Aligned the value of that really. Well, yeah. Do you see both scenarios happening or do you see and. Yep. You know, a singular operators that are tasked with these kind of events.
00:23:13 – 00:23:35
Healey Cypher: Totally. So, when you have relatively small companies, it’s easy to have a cohesive plan for how you’re going to bring people together on a, on a cadence because, like, you just talked, you kind of know when companies are bigger. One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve seen is until you have, a certain maturity, we have the time for the stuff.
00:23:35 – 00:23:51
Healey Cypher: People don’t really think about the fact, well, they don’t people don’t think about what the experience is going to be like for individual employees. And so there’s certain employees, they’re going to go to like eight events a year and like they’re taxed by it. Yeah. And are certain employees who don’t give out at any. Yeah. And that’s really hard.
00:23:51 – 00:24:14
Healey Cypher: And so I’d say one of my encouragements is as, as a CEO or a CEO is just, just like when you’re thinking about your annual planning and you’re thinking about all of the things you’re doing to keep your company operating as part of your operating schedule, to include the company wide and team events, and just get a sense of when all these things are going to happen.
00:24:14 – 00:24:33
Healey Cypher: And it’s very tactical. But, you know, goes without saying that if there’s certain important moments as a company, like an important product launch and you need all the sellers ready, but they’re all going to be at their arco, that’s a problem. Yeah. And so there’s tactical reasons for it. But I also think that there’s very like logistical reasons for it, which is you just want to make sure that you understand what the employee experiences.
00:24:33 – 00:24:39
Healey Cypher: More often than not, we found that it’s the leader or the EA who is tasked just to do it.
00:24:39 – 00:24:41
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, that’s what you see all the time too.
00:24:41 – 00:24:58
Healey Cypher: And it starts small and makes sense. Like, oh, I’m an EA for the CMO and I’m going to do this, this marketing kickoff. And it’s 50 people. I could do that next year. It’s a hundred people. You’re like oof! And then all of a sudden it’s 150 and you feel way underwater. You’ve never done an event like this.
00:24:58 – 00:25:16
Healey Cypher: And as simple as an event sounds at the kind of cursory level when you go beneath the water. Oh, it’s so it’s it’s it is surprisingly nuanced and challenging. That’s been the most big the biggest surprise Renee. Boom, pop. And so there’s this natural moment where like, the event’s just too big and you can’t do it yourself. Yeah.
00:25:16 – 00:25:36
Healey Cypher: And so we tend to have I’d say the first engagement, can often be that person who’s like, help, I don’t know what to do. We can jump in, we can help. And then once they’ve seen how wonderful it is to work with Boom Pop, then it’s like, oh my gosh, let’s just do this all the time. That’s that’s a sequence at a time.
00:25:36 – 00:25:53
Healey Cypher: So anyway, to wrap it up, I think as part of annual planning and you’re thinking about operating cadence, which includes, you know, like what your goals are for the year, think about the structure of how your team’s going to get together, how they’re going to receive communication, what the experience is like for every employee, and weave that into the annual planning.
00:25:53 – 00:25:54
Healey Cypher: That’s my biggest push for any leader.
00:25:55 – 00:26:15
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it, great, great advice. And we’re talking a lot about internal events. And you do customer events. Yes, types of events too. But what we’re seeing right now on our side is a lot of people wanting to leverage events for acquisition purposes, too. Yes. Customer acquisition partners, partners, total forth. How do you think about that sequencing from an event perspective?
00:26:15 – 00:26:19
Sophie Buonassisi: Do you advise companies a lot around strategies for that?
00:26:19 – 00:26:40
Healey Cypher: 1,000%? This is probably the fastest growing segment of our business. Okay. Is customer and partner facing events? It is. I don’t know about you, but every day I’ve got 15 perfectly worded outbound SDR emails. They know something about where I grew up and about my wife’s preferences and about my kids. And they like, it’s like the perfect frickin email.
00:26:40 – 00:26:52
Healey Cypher: Yeah. And they make it past on my blockers. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t listen to them anymore. I don’t even read them because it’s just like, obviously this is another area and you can see it the emails, right? In no way you can just see it. You’re like, okay, this is obviously written by. Yeah.
00:26:52 – 00:26:59
Healey Cypher: And so what it means is a lot of the outbound tactics that used to work no longer, it’s just there’s too much noise.
00:26:59 – 00:27:00
Sophie Buonassisi: Way too much.
00:27:00 – 00:27:19
Healey Cypher: And so then the question is how do you cut through that noise. And again, it comes down to, you know, we kind of talked about my favorite books, one of my favorite books. I encourage everyone, especially in a revenue position to read, is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. And one of the core truths about people that he always says is people want to feel important.
00:27:19 – 00:27:35
Healey Cypher: People love being invited to stuff. It makes them feel important. And so if you can do that when they show up, think of it as I mentioned before, as a host, and I think, I don’t know if we talked about this. I grew up in the middle East, and the Middle East is all about hosting it. It’s like this fabric of society there.
00:27:35 – 00:27:55
Healey Cypher: And so part of why I love to host events is I love hosting. Yeah. And so from the moment that person hears about it, accepts the invite, gets there, arrives. How do you make that experience wonderful? How do you think of that as the beginning of the relationship? Where you are, you are setting the tone for what it would be like to work with you as a partner.
00:27:55 – 00:28:11
Healey Cypher: So eventually down the line they go, yeah, of course I’m going to work with this company because it was amazing. And I’d say, you know, step one is start planning, but step two is, okay, how is this going to be really useful? Like what’s your goal in the world of your attendee? What are they going to get out of this when the ending when this thing is over.
00:28:11 – 00:28:27
Healey Cypher: They made some great connections with other like minded folks. They learned some interesting things about the industry, and they’ve learned that you are a wonderful partner who’s available whenever they need. Like, what are those things? And make sure that as you do that, it’s a really thoughtful, good event. Is it great just to host an event and say, here’s a private dinner, let’s all go?
00:28:27 – 00:28:39
Healey Cypher: Yeah, it actually is. It’s totally fine to do that. But the best people have a huge amount of intention in what are the guests really going to experience and take away from this event. So that’s the biggest push.
00:28:39 – 00:28:41
Sophie Buonassisi: Always the how. Not the one, always the half.
00:28:41 – 00:28:43
Healey Cypher: Yeah. Yeah totally the how and why.
00:28:43 – 00:29:02
Sophie Buonassisi: And the why. Always a why. Yeah. And what are you seeing in terms of different strategies for companies on the acquisition side of events right now. We talked about dinners. Yeah. We’re getting a ton of requests for dinners. Just overall advice. We’ve got people publishing a lot of media pieces on dinners that are reaching out, asking for advice and who to talk to.
00:29:02 – 00:29:06
Sophie Buonassisi: Who’s doing it? Well, for example, what are you seeing other than dinners?
00:29:06 – 00:29:27
Healey Cypher: Yeah for sure. So there’s there’s there’s like a few things. So the obvious one is dinners is easy. Yeah. The second which is becoming more elite, is, these unforgettable experiences. So like, hey, we’re all going to go and we’re going to do racing Laguna Seca, we’re going to do I’m not going to say paintball, but like, we’re going to go to this like crazy, sort to slay dinner thing, right?
00:29:27 – 00:29:43
Healey Cypher: We’re going to do something that where you like, you would not normally get a chance to do that. Hey, we’re going to take you to a suite at the 40 Niners. Yeah, a suite at the Warriors. Like the thing where you feel like. Well, I would never do this personally. It’s so interesting and memorable, and I want to be invited to more of these.
00:29:43 – 00:30:03
Healey Cypher: And it makes you then want to be a partner, like one of my favorite companies, who’s always been great at this is Silicon Valley Bank. They are known for this. They have dinner series, they have sports suites. They made this investment. But it is a huge way that clients and prospect clients gain close, trustful relationships with those those members of the crew.
00:30:03 – 00:30:34
Healey Cypher: But also like you want to be part of the SVB squad because you’re going to keep getting invited to come back to stuff. So I’d say really cool experiences is one. And the third is, is, I’m seeing more companies host. It’s like industry specific with wonderful guests and talk tracks and studies, like summits. And so if you’re in a space, hey, you know, we’re going to host the Revenue Summit, and this is all about the best revenue leaders at all walks of life.
00:30:34 – 00:30:54
Healey Cypher: The lessons they learn, the biggest mistakes to make. You’re going to hear from, you know, the CEO of Twilio. And you’re gonna hear from the, you know, the VP of growth at at cursor. And you going to hear from OpenAI, like whatever it is. And those things I found are interesting because it’s a combination of one people not going to learn a lot of stuff, and as a result they’re going to say, hey, like it was amazing.
00:30:54 – 00:31:18
Healey Cypher: I was invited to this and and like, you can go about your bosses and here’s all the things I’m gonna apply to, to, you know, to my daily job. But the second thing is they also know, just by default, by walking the hallways, sitting down at breakfast, going to, you know, the line and doing drinks or something. They meet a bunch of other like minded folks in the industry that will be wonderful, either mentor or coaching or just like, you know, colleague relationships.
00:31:18 – 00:31:19
Healey Cypher: Yeah, those are the three I’ve seen.
00:31:19 – 00:31:34
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely, definitely. And I actually think that we’ll see more skew towards your second bucket, which is more of the unique experiences, because dinners are increasingly more popular because, like you said, they’re easier to execute. And once that becomes the status quo, it’s a differentiator.
00:31:34 – 00:31:48
Healey Cypher: I’ll say this every dinner you have, if you’re going to host a dinner, just know there’s two things you have to do. Yeah, you have to have a welcome speech and you have to have a thank you speech. You got to do it. If you don’t do it, it just feels like you’re kind of there for whatever reason.
00:31:48 – 00:32:08
Healey Cypher: Host it. And then the best thing you should probably also do is you should have a bunch of either prepared or ready to go questions that can kick off the conversation. If you don’t do those things, it is a wasted dinner. And so just be ready. And there’s a very easy like it’s so easy. You’re welcome. Speeches one thank everyone for coming.
00:32:08 – 00:32:20
Healey Cypher: Call people out. It’s so easy. The second thing is you say, here’s the goal of this. Here’s what I want you to achieve. And the third thing is you then ask a question to go around like it’s such an easy way to kick off a dinner. Yeah. But so many people just don’t know that. And it’s so easy.
00:32:20 – 00:32:26
Healey Cypher: So I’d say there’s a big difference between a very well hosted dinner and just like a dinner where you got together.
00:32:26 – 00:32:28
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely. The how and why?
00:32:28 – 00:32:29
Healey Cypher: Yeah.
00:32:29 – 00:32:41
Sophie Buonassisi: Exactly why. Okay. There’s a great dinner tips. Are there any other dinner tips that you’ve seen work really well, because you can get a ton of questions about dinners and executing dinners from revenue leaders?
00:32:41 – 00:33:00
Healey Cypher: Yes. Not all private dining spaces are ranked the same. The big thing you would ask them is, is it quiet? I’ve had this mistake before. You have a big private dining, and it’s just like a curtain from the rest of the space, and you’re screaming. You can’t hear each other. You want people to have, you know, the ability to hear each other.
00:33:00 – 00:33:11
Healey Cypher: I think there’s also perfect sizes. So just note that if you have a 50 person private dinner, your job should be at some point to do musical chairs. Yeah. So people can, can, can kind of swap around.
00:33:11 – 00:33:12
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely.
00:33:12 – 00:33:39
Healey Cypher: I’d also say, don’t forget about and this is like obvious stuff, but don’t go somewhere that is is such either a niche food category or doesn’t have enough of an aperture where like if someone has specific dietary directions, I can’t get it done. That just is a small thing. But don’t make that mistake. And then little touches matter, you know, like even even in advance, printing out name tags or like having one of the menus with your little logo on it, there’s little things that kind of make it feel special.
00:33:39 – 00:33:57
Healey Cypher: But the biggest thing is sound. Don’t don’t just assume because you have a private dining space and it’s going to be like ask, look, look at the qualifications. I will tell you, boom, pop, if you go, you can search private dining options in 180 cities worldwide. We will tell you the sound quality of these things will tell you the configuration.
00:33:57 – 00:34:11
Healey Cypher: Like all these. Yeah, that’s one of the big things you spend too much time building out is like private dining is a really hard thing. And by the way, if you’re having a leader, you want to do this, just go to Boom Pop. Now check it out. APT boom pop.com. You can you can easily book private dining.
00:34:11 – 00:34:15
Sophie Buonassisi: So you stand boom pop. Yes. Out of atomic.
00:34:15 – 00:34:21
Healey Cypher: Well, it wasn’t spun. It was, it was. It was co-founded at atomic as atomic does. It was a kind of standard course.
00:34:21 – 00:34:27
Sophie Buonassisi: How did you decide to go from operating within atomic to actually founding and building boom, Paul.
00:34:27 – 00:34:37
Healey Cypher: Yeah. Well, I guess the full backstory is I moved to the Bay area after having a great consulting job in New York. I followed my my then girlfriend, now wife, and it was really hard to.
00:34:37 – 00:34:38
Sophie Buonassisi: Get a job. Who was Italian?
00:34:38 – 00:34:43
Healey Cypher: Who was. Yes. Very Italian. Yes, yes. So was Italian also.
00:34:43 – 00:34:46
Sophie Buonassisi: Not by blood, through marriage. Okay. I feel like I’m an honorary, you know.
00:34:46 – 00:34:47
Healey Cypher: Yeah.
00:34:47 – 00:35:05
Sophie Buonassisi: Italian with the.
Healey Cypher: Italians are incredibly fun. But also, it’s a thin line on the. Yeah, you’re almost always in trouble. Anyway, and and, it was hard to find a job. I was, you know, the global financial crisis was happening. I finally got a startup job, and I kind of hit a lottery. Sophie. Because we sold within seven months of me joining.
00:35:05 – 00:35:22
Healey Cypher: It was amazing. And I then went from having, you know, very, very little money in the bank so I could get married in California. And I’ve been writing and selling companies ever since. I sold my third company in 2019. And what it was was, if you ever walk into a McDonald’s or a Burger King or Wendy’s and you see one of those touchscreen kiosks, you order food.
00:35:22 – 00:35:23
Healey Cypher: Have you ever seen those?
00:35:23 – 00:35:23
Sophie Buonassisi: I have.
00:35:23 – 00:35:40
Healey Cypher: Yeah, we did all those for the top 40 quick of restaurants, and I have some really fun stories about what that was like. It turns out people like them. They order a lot more. Yeah. And so and so after I sold that, I was kind of trying to figure out what to do in life. Like, do I move to Osaka and eat crickets for a while?
00:35:40 – 00:35:41
Healey Cypher: Turns out I don’t like crickets.
00:35:41 – 00:35:42
Sophie Buonassisi: You know?
00:35:42 – 00:35:59
Healey Cypher: Understand or do I or do I kind of get back into it? And then my good friend Jack, who runs atomic, you know, we always chat on and off. He was like, hey, come join atomic, be my chief operating officer. Help me to run this 0 to 1 program. Help me to scale the platform in the team. And so it was a ton of fun.
00:35:59 – 00:36:20
Healey Cypher: And I did that, for almost almost six years, actually. And as we did that, you know, one of my job was to start as many high quality companies as possible. And the thing that I knew and I did warn Jack about this when I started, I said, hey, just so you know, I am an operator at heart, and there’s a really high chance I fall in love with the company here.
00:36:20 – 00:36:34
Healey Cypher: Yeah. And it had just happened to my good friend and your dude at hims, who when I started, he was just leaving atomic. He did the same thing. Him that I’m doing a boom pop. And he said, I’m just warning you, you’re probably going to do what I’m doing. And I was like, no, no, no, this is it.
00:36:34 – 00:36:56
Healey Cypher: And lo and behold, I fell in love with Boom Pop. It’s all the things that I love in a company. It’s a massive tam. It is an overlooked market with a very fragmented, low NPS set of, I mean, all mom and pop event agencies. It is an enduring trend I believe will persist. I think I is doing a lot of things, including creating a deeper need for people to get together.
00:36:56 – 00:37:14
Healey Cypher: The distribution, all that, all the the tests I did, as you’re talking about initially were really good results in distribution, like just wildly fantastic. We’ve grown very fast. We continue to grow very, very fast. And I just love it. I love traveling, I love bringing people together. You know, I kind of I think this is a little meta and I’ll try I’ll try to make it work.
00:37:14 – 00:37:17
Healey Cypher: I probably won’t, but I think often about humans.
00:37:17 – 00:37:18
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
00:37:18 – 00:37:58
Healey Cypher: We’re not the biggest animals. We’re not the strongest, we’re not the fastest. But we have done one thing which has made us the dominant species on this planet. And it is we have come together and work together. And as I think about that, the kind of, you know, innate quality we have as, as, as a, as a race of, my gosh, this is something I just believe in.
Healey Cypher: Like, I love bringing people together and what not higher calling could I have than just spending all my time on that? And, you know, you could you could say, hey Healy. Cool story, bro, but aren’t you focusing on corporate events to start and like, yeah, we are good. Turns out after sleeping you spend most of your time at work and why not enjoy it?
00:37:58 – 00:38:18
Healey Cypher: Why not have a really great experience? Why not have friends? Lifelong friends come from work. I mean, a lot of my friends are lifelong friends were my first jobs, and especially in a world that I think is people are kind of figuring out the landscape of of of what it looks like setting, setting a course. Just saying. This is we’re planting a flag.
00:38:18 – 00:38:36
Healey Cypher: You should get together. You should make it a part of who you are as a business of your strategy and as your go to market. Like that is why I love it so much. I also, you know, one of the wonderful things as, as a co-founder, there’s a lot of hard things. Yeah, one of the wonderful things is you get to choose the team you work with if you’re lucky.
00:38:36 – 00:38:55
Healey Cypher: And and this team is so great, you know, we talked about Simon, who’s our VP of sales, customer service and marketing. He is amazing. And the fact that I get to work with people like that who teach me so much every single day is so fun. You know, whenever we we have problems. I’ve learned one thing which I love about Boom pop.
00:38:55 – 00:39:16
Healey Cypher: It hasn’t always been the case for companies I’ve been in, which is whenever we bring up an issue for the company and say, this is an issue we’ve got to solve, we solve it every single time. And it’s because these people are so and they’re not just fun and hilarious and witty, but they’re just so focused and they’re so talented at solving, solving these problems and doing what they do.
00:39:16 – 00:39:35
Healey Cypher: So every part of it I absolutely love and and, you know, I haven’t worked in travel before. I was in retail for a while and commerce before that. It’s a very addicting industry, like when you’re in travel and it’s the things you think about, the people you meet. It’s, it’s a smaller industry than you think. Everyone helps each other out.
00:39:35 – 00:39:41
Healey Cypher: And it’s so fun. Yeah, I think it’s going to be hard to not do travel, for the rest of my life.
00:39:41 – 00:39:58
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, well, hey, you might we might go travel in different flavors and kind of themes. That’s the goal. And now you talked about the incredible team that you have, you know, the privilege to work with and bring on it. Also on the inverse relates to your leadership style. And I know you have a very bold perspective around leadership.
00:39:58 – 00:40:17
Sophie Buonassisi: You even have your own podcast. I see that the name is quite literally, don’t be a jerk. It is podcast. Yes. Great podcast. Also, for anyone listening, please check it out. It’ll be in the show notes, incredibly engaging conversations like what is that philosophy philosophy that you’re super bullish on and kindness as a competitive advantage.
00:40:17 – 00:40:36
Healey Cypher: Yeah. Thank you for that question, Sophie. Look, I think early on in my life and in my career, I this has been a fabric of who I am. I want to have fun. I want to laugh. And I remember there is this, this first consulting job I had out of New York. I had my engagement manager at the time.
00:40:36 – 00:40:53
Healey Cypher: I won’t say this person’s name pulled me aside, and they were like, Healy. And I was like, yeah. He said, we’re hearing you laugh a lot around the office. And I was like, yeah, you know, I try to have fun and whatever I do, and this is my second week out of college, by the way. Yeah.
00:40:53 – 00:41:16
Healey Cypher: She goes, they go, yeah, well, if you want to have fun, maybe consulting isn’t for you. And it just felt so wrong. Yeah. And I felt like there were so many moments in, in my career growing up where I believe that it was not right to not enjoy work, to not have fun in life, to do the right thing, to be a good person.
00:41:16 – 00:41:41
Healey Cypher: And as I collected more and more data and experience more and more, I found invariably over time, while the headlines reveal analyzing people and saying how awful they were, the reality was that even those same people, the reason they got there was because they were really good people that were givers and helped other people along the way. And every leader I’ve ever met who has been the most successful, I’d say 99.9% of them.
00:41:41 – 00:42:03
Healey Cypher: It’s been great. They pay it forward. They kind of they just they focus on making everyone better. The kind of rising tide lifts all boats. And so and so the belief is, as you said, I do believe that one of the best strategies you can have for being successful in life is doing the right thing, being a good person and giving without the expectation necessarily, of getting back.
00:42:03 – 00:42:25
Healey Cypher: And so don’t be a jerk is we have a wide range of guests. It’s FBI negotiators, neuroscientists, CEOs, it’s VCs, it’s actors, celebrities, Stanford professors. It is a common thread across all of them quantum physicists, which is that they have all these proof points where when they have been, they’ve seen people who are good people and do the right thing.
00:42:25 – 00:42:43
Healey Cypher: It has led to tremendous success. And so my hope if and this is this is my hope if even one person listen to the podcast and it encourages them to be a better person or to hold to their, you know, hold to what they believe to be true and do the right thing, that, to me is success of the podcast.
00:42:44 – 00:43:01
Healey Cypher: It’s a ton of fun. Yes, please check it out. Of course. And, and that’s that’s it. And you know, my wife, my Italian wife, as you mentioned, she asked me all the time, like, what’s the goal of this? And I honestly don’t have a goal. I just want the content to be out there in the hopes that it affects even one person positively.
00:43:01 – 00:43:04
Healey Cypher: And if it does that, I feel very happy. Yeah, that’s that’s it.
00:43:04 – 00:43:11
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. We should do more in life with that goal, helping one person and also just bringing things into existence without an end goal.
00:43:11 – 00:43:13
Healey Cypher: I agree, yeah, I agree, I love it.
00:43:13 – 00:43:16
Sophie Buonassisi: Any specific words that you live by?
00:43:16 – 00:44:01
Healey Cypher: I know so have a couple ones. One is related to don’t be a jerk and one is maybe esoteric. So early on when we had our son Theo, which by the way, was a long, hard journey to have a kid were older and it was. We had a bunch of false starts, so we were so grateful. He’s he’s with us.
Healey Cypher: I remember I’d been I’d be in business meetings often the kind of like behind closed doors, like CEO and board meetings. And if it was ever like a decision point, I would ask, how would Theo feel about his dad if he learned about the decision that I just made? And it made it so clear every time it was so I’d say if you have someone that looks up to you that you love, try that as a barometer and see how see how it simplifies and makes easier, your decisions in life.
00:44:01 – 00:44:18
Healey Cypher: Second thing is, you know, I think people often forget that their mental state has a tremendous effect over their lives. So there’s a study done recently, and it looked at the top 25, tennis players on the planet.
00:44:18 – 00:44:19
Sophie Buonassisi: Yes.
00:44:19 – 00:45:03
Healey Cypher: And it said, okay, well, the top five tennis players worldwide, how were they different than the rest of the other 20? And this is related to mental state. And and the question was, okay, well, we’re going to figure this out. What makes them the top five players in the planet was it their diet? No. Was it how early they started playing the sport in life?
Healey Cypher: No. Was it how much sleep they got? No. Was it how hard they practiced now was it their coach. No. It all came down to their mental attitude. Specifically after they lost points in a game. In the game, they lose a point and instead of think, oh, and having a bad mental state, they said, I love this game.
00:45:03 – 00:45:06
Healey Cypher: I’m pumped to be here, I love it, I’m playing it, and I’m going to win the next one.
00:45:07 – 00:45:24
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
Healey Cypher: It was a micro positivity, which makes them the best players on the planet. And I think especially now when the news is so negative and headlines are so rough, it’s hard to see a bunch of realities, you know, like if you’re if you’re to pull the average, person on the planet, they don’t trust each other more than ever.
00:45:25 – 00:45:42
Healey Cypher: They don’t trust government or politicians. They also think that the world is worse off. In contradistinction to that, we have the lowest percentage of violent crimes in the history of man. We have the lowest poverty in the history of man. We have the highest quality of life in the history of the human race. Yeah, people don’t realize this stuff.
00:45:42 – 00:46:11
Healey Cypher: And so I’d say the thing that I try to do all the time, I try to teach it to my executives, I try to teach it to my, my children, to any anyone who listen to me is you have to remember, if you say positive, everything will absolutely, without a doubt work out in your favor. But you have to remember that you have to know that deeply, and the moments when you start to forget that is when things start to go off the rails.
00:46:11 – 00:46:22
Healey Cypher: And so it’s a bit esoteric, but it’s, it’s something I’ve known to be true my entire life. If you are positive and you know things will work out, your life will do literally anything you want it to do.
00:46:22 – 00:46:40
Sophie Buonassisi: Wow, what a what a place to end off. And I completely agree. And that notion resonates. I feel like we could now talk for an hour about it and get a little get a little further esoteric on it, but this has been just wonderful. Thank you. Really appreciate the time. Thank you for all the insight on all sides.
00:46:41 – 00:46:42
Healey Cypher: A great questions and healing.
00:46:42 – 00:46:45
Sophie Buonassisi: Where can people feel along with you with Boom Pop? Obviously the podcast.
00:46:45 – 00:47:03
Healey Cypher: Yeah, yeah. So so boom pop is easy. It’s boom pop. Com I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter, I’m on Instagram. The podcast is don’t be a jerk podcast.com if you want to see it, we’re on Spotify or an Apple or on YouTube, on Instagram. And and then of course, you know, Healy at Boom pop.com is a pretty easy way to get hold me brilliant.
00:47:04 – 00:47:04
Sophie Buonassisi: Thank you.
00:47:04 – 00:47:05
Healey Cypher: Healy. Thanks.
