Transcript

The Salesforce CFO who left to save lives

0:01 The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Got to the end of the call and I agreed I would at least Thank you

1:38 So the next week I'm thinking about it and I came to the same conclusion. This is ridiculous. I am not going to do it. Crazy. Yes, exactly. It was absolutely unprecedented. Amy Weaver had just been offered a new job.

1:57 Чіф фінанш офісер в Сейлсфорс. It took her totally by surprise. But the opportunity was too intriguing to pass up. Amy had already spent enough time with the iconic software company to know it be hard work. But hard work.

2:12 Worse. doing. How do we make it faster? How do we make it more efficient? How do we get rid of any of the bottlenecks? It's very hard to scale. If you have a Ricky platform, you really have to invest in having the right systems, the right processes in place. If you've got those, you can scale very, very quickly.

2:33 You gotta have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy way. So I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. We haven't made it. Just how you do it. This is masters of scale.

3:09 I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, we're talking with Amy Weaver. As someone who's had a pretty nonlinear career myself, after all, it is not every former public defender who goes on to work at places like MySpace and the NFL and lead companies and host a podcast like Masters of Scale. I'm always drawn to others who charted unconventional paths, and Amy's story is truly an extraordinary one. We reveal how Amy, a lawyer by training, zigzagged her way into the job of chief financial officer at Salesforce. We also dig into the latest challenge she's taken on.

3:49 As I dove in. and started learning more and more about direct relief, I've realized that it's probably the largest, most efficient, most effective, and most impactful global humanitarian group that you may never have heard of. Amy is now the CEO of Direct Relief. You may not have heard of it, but you need to know what it is. It is an incredible humanitarian organization that distributes billions of dollars worth of medicine and supplies to people in need. Ever single year.

4:24 We'll talk more about that. Later in our conversation. Amy, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you, Jeff. I'm really excited to be here. I'm thrilled you're here. We have so much to talk about. You come from a family of lawyers. Being a lawyer almost seemed preordained. So when you say I come from a family of lawyers That's not an overstatement. I think we stopped counting after we hit, you know, twelve, fifteen in the extended family. My grandfather served on the Washington State Supreme Court. He had four children. All four, including my father, became lawyers. I'm the oldest grandchild. It just felt very natural.

5:00 To become a lawyer. Did you have a vision of what that would be for you? Well, if you had asked me in sixth grade what I saw as my future. I thought I would practice law in Washington State and at some point move into the public sector. And I was determined that I would eventually be the first female president of the United States. And I was so earnest as a twelve year old. that I remember I actually sat down and made a list of who my cabinet would be. And I remember very distinctly that one of my best friends at that time, I decided she just And I gave her Secretary of Interior.

5:40 I broke the news to her and she went skipping off, and when she went skipping off I thought I knew she wasn't vice presidential material. What I didn't anticipate is that my career would take me to Salesforce, to being a CFO, and then now to being CEO of Direct Relief. Amy's first step away from the traditional law career she'd always imagined happened because of her love of travel. I got a call from Expedia, and they were looking for a securities lawyer. Xpedia operated all over the world. It was a product that is simply my favorite thing in the world, which is travel. So I jumped over. It was a wonderful jump, but it was very hard. I remember I told my father on Father's Day and

6:22 The entire day he kind of looked like all he wanted for Father's Day was for me to say I was joking about going in house. I'm throwing away one career and I'm gonna take a big shot. What was it where your dad wasn't like, This is awesome, good for you? I think what was hard is We have so many lawyers in my family and they're all doing different things, but they're all very strictly within the law. And I remember my father kept asking me, but will you still be a lawyer? Hm. really view law in the most lofty terms. It's there's something beautiful about it and about the profession. And I think he wanted to make sure he was still going to be part of that.

7:06 And I'll tell you many years later, I still feel like I'm part of that. I don't think I'll ever not identify as a lawyer. Yeah, I very much understand that feeling. So You were expedient for how long? Five and a half years. Worked for a terrific general counsel, but I recognized I'd gotten very comfortable in That second seat. And I really realized I need to push myself and find that number one chair and see if I could do that. Where did you find that number one chair? It was a company called Univar.

7:35 It was a hundred year old Northwest company, and I was very committed to being in Washington State. So jumped and went over. Loved being in the number one seat. But within one year, CEO who had recruit me left. And the new CEO decided to move the company to Illinois. Wow. It was one of those times in my life I remember

7:56 Waking up at two A. M. quite a bit. Mm-hmm. And just feeling like I've really done the research. I thought about this. I thought I was doing Everything right. And suddenly I felt like my career was just sc

8:14 an experience that so many of us feel. We have these moments where we just we're waking up at two in the morning and going Made a wrong turn. Yes. On a personal level. How did you deal with that?

8:30 Enough. Certainly not enough. There was a few things I learned. One is that 215 is never a good time to contemplate your life. No one has ever woken up at two fifteen and felt really great about their decisions. So I've gotten much better at not um contemplating life at that time. But the other is you've Got to take charge.

8:50 of your life. And I did. I decided to leave. And I did it without lining up any other jobs. And it was Terrifying. But It was much better than languishing in a role where I knew I was not gonna move forward. What gave you the clarity

9:06 To say I have to leave to be able to get to whatever's next. One of the things that really comes to mind is a favorite quote of mine. And it's from William Sloane Coffin. He was actually a chaplain at Yale University back in like the 1950s. And he was talking about leaps. He was talking about it in religion, but I think it transfers. And he said, I love the recklessness of faith.

9:30 First you leap. And then you grow wings. And I said that to myself probably a million times when I was trying to make that decision. And then again later in my career with big decisions, sometimes you're gonna have to take that leap. And have the confidence that the wings are going to grow. I love that for so many reasons, not least of which because Ried Hoffman talks all the time about how entrepreneurship is jumping off of a cliff and building the airplane on the way down. How long did it take to grow the next set of wings?

9:58 Not long because Salesforce came calling very quickly. And I got a call two months later asking me to consider being uh general counsel. How did they identify you as their next general counsel? So actually they had the chief legal officer. So the general counsel was one step below and it was a man named Burke Norton and I'd worked for him at Expedia. And he called, asked me to consider the role and I was not interested. You know, I just left Univar partially because I wanted to stay in the Pacific Northwest and this was going to require a move to the Bay Area. Also my kids had just started school, like literally that week. It w it just wasn't gonna happen. And uh Salesforce is persistent. So a couple of weeks later I finally agreed I would fly down my husband and I flew down and so spend a day there.

10:46 came back to the hotel that night and Jeff asked me, how was it? And I said, Horrible. And he said. Why? And I said I think we're gonna have to move.

10:58 And I had just gone there and I had never seen a company with the potential that I saw at Salesforce. And they also had this incredible thing called the 111 program. And this was this new basis at Salesforce where they put aside one percent of their pre-IPO equity, 1% of employee time, 1% of their product All for good causes. And over the time I was there. Almost everyone I knew who joined Salesforce That played a role in why they joined. And within a couple of months we had packed up, done a mid school year move, and come down to California. Just on the one one program.

11:36 I love hearing that that was such a critical part of recruiting in Salesforce. But I think the other thing that's really important about the one one Is Starting small. So yeah, Mark and Parker like to joke that when they adopted it The equity was worthless. They had four employees and they had no product. But if you look at where they are.

11:58 Twice later. It's hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone out, millions of employee hours and something like 70,000 nonprofits running on the Salesforce system. That's what you do, and that's how you scale good works over time. You start small, but you keep at it.

12:18 Still ahead, more with Amy Weaver on why she left the corporate world to become CEO of a not-for-profit. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi.

12:53 And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely.

13:38 From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel and Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. We've got a link in the show notes.

14:12 While you were there, Salesforce was you really at the front of gender pay equity. Could you tell us a little bit about those very public efforts? It was twenty fifteen, two thousand sixteen. There were two women, Cindy Robbins and Layla Sega. And they went to Mark. And said, you know, great company, great values. And we don't know for sure, but we think anecdotally there may be a gender pay gap. And I think Mark's reaction was, Of course we don't have a problem. We're great people, we do good things, we don't uh pay women less. Three weeks later, Mark went on an interview live and said

14:50 we would be investigating whether we had a gender pay discrepancy. we would publish anything we found. And we would fix it. And I'll tell you at that point I was general counsel. And half of me as a woman was so excited about what we're doing. As general counsel, I remember thinking, I'm not so sure this is a good idea.

15:10 We had no idea what we were going to find and no idea what the scale was going to be in terms of uh trying to fix it. We're we're trained as lawyers, not to ask a question we don't already know the answer to. Exactly, exactly. I was like, how about like a little digging in behind the scenes before we jump in. But you know, it showed a few things. First, you know, huge credit to Cindy and Layla for raising this. But Mark really makes decisions on where to go on that. And once he makes a decision, we are lined up and we're gonna make it happen. So we did dive in, we did a very deep study and we found out. No surprise really at the end, that there was a discrepancy and we fixed it. But one of the things we learned in that is that you can't do that once. So we ran the study again the next year.

15:55 And sure enough. We also found a gap. So we had to look at what was causing that. How is this repeating? And they've continued to do it every year. But I also think this really goes to something about gender pain your expectations at the workforce. When people first started talking about the differences in gender pay, what I heard a lot was Look, it's because women don't ask for more pay. I mean, Bobby's in my office every week demanding more.

16:22 And I always hated that argument. First As a manager, the last thing I wanted were more Bobbies coming in my office and demanding more pay. Right. But second, you're putting the pressure on the person who has the least amount of information. So if Julie on your team thinks she might be underpaid. She doesn't know anyone else is being paid. And it's her job to fix it is just the wrong approach. What you need is that the company that has the information needs to be using their data, they need to see what's going on, and they need to fix it. And I think you can use that analogy for so much about what is going on in the workplace. Yeah, and that is

17:00 Both leading nationally, globally as a company that has innovation as one of its core values and showing away, it's also doing what's right for your team. Right. And frankly, to your point, for your your leadership, for your managers who don't want people in their office every every week, you're incentivizing wrong behavior. So let's go back to your Salesforce journey because you're now the top lawyer, one of the top companies in America.

17:26 You could have a wonderful and linear path from there. Definitely not down the linear path. No. So and it's one thing for general counsel or chief legal officer to jump to an operating role. It's another thing to become CFO.

17:41 Yes. How does that happen? Very unusually. So at Salesforce, I had been there about seven years. And my lift's point, I was the chief legal officer. And It was twenty twenty. And we realized that our current CFO, Mark Hawkins, who's just a wonderful person, had indicated that he was thinking about retiring. So behind the scenes, I was working on a global search for a new CFO with Mark Benioff, our CEO, and our audit chair.

18:11 And one day I remember Mark FaceTimed me out of the blue. I remember it very clearly'cause he was in Hawaii. It was his birthday. He had the Hawaiian shirt on. And he said he wanted to talk to me about the CFO search. I said, Well great, I'll pull up my list of people. And he said, I have a new name. I said, Who? And he said

18:31 Amy Weaver. And this was so far off my radar screen, so incomprehensible that I just remember looking down at the list and saying, She's not on my list. And I barely remember the rest of this conversation other than just thinking there is no way I am going to do this. Well. But Mark is quite persuasive and it got to the end of the call and I agreed I would at least

18:56 think about it. So the next week I'm thinking about it, I came to the same conclusion. This is ridiculous. I am not. going to do it. And you're not Crazy. Yes, exactly. It was absolutely unprecedented. As far as I know, this is the only time in the Fortune 500 that anyone has gone directly from the chief legal officer role to the chief financial officer role.

19:20 It was going to be. Hard. It was gonna be very public. I mean, when you're CLO, you make mistakes, they're embarrassing, you get through them. Your CFO, the stock dips, you're on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But there were a few things that changed my mind The first was a conversation with Brett Taylor.

19:39 So Brad is now founder of Sierra. He's the chair of the board of OpenAI. And at that point he was COO of Salesforce and was about to become co-CEO. And a very, very good friend. I sat down with him and I said, Brad, I am not qualified to be CFO. And he said, You're right, you're not. Which is actually not quite what I was fishing for in this conversation. But

20:03 He said you're not qualified to be the traditional CPA. CFO He said, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a partner. To help lead the company.

20:14 And said the financial strategy. He said, I want you to take the job and make it yours, apply your skills, your experiences. Bring that to the job. And his comments were such a gift because it immediately took away all of the comparison I was doing in my head between myself and every other Fortune five hundred CFO. And it let me start thinking about What were the skills I did have? And how can I recreate?

20:42 The role of CFO. Mm. The other thing is I started thinking about all of the times I have spoken to other people, whether it's mentoring Or, you know, new people coming into the workforce or just general advice. And I would always tell them the same thing. It's look, you gotta lean in, you gotta take risks, don't be afraid, just go for it. And I realized that was really easy to say to other people and really hard to apply to myself.

21:10 And I started imagining myself trying to speak to groups. Of people again, or maybe even going back to Wellesley College, my alma mater, and talking to young women. And maybe they wouldn't now, but I would now That when I was offered to that point the biggest opportunity in my career. I turned it down because I was afraid.

21:30 And so he jumped in. First of all incredible and to live the advice you're giving other people, take that risk. What did you do substantially to prepare for the role?'Cause even if you're making the role yours. You have to have the base, right?

21:45 So there were a couple of things and I got some incredible advice. So the day after I was announced and something had been in the Wall Street Journal I got a series of texts that evening from Julie Sweet, and Julie's the CEO of Accenture and Julie's another former lawyer. We practiced together at Crevat, and then she had become general counsel of Accenture, moved to become CEO of North America, and then global CEO. And she started texting me quite insistent that I call her that night. And I remember thinking it was almost midnight on the east coast, but I did it anyhow. And what she wanted to tell me about was how she moved from general counsel to North American CEO.

22:28 And she said. At Accenture, you know, they knew she was hard working, they knew she was bright, they knew that she knew Accenture inside out. But she said at Accenture, what gets you the credibility is can you sell? So she she said she took the first six months and focused On showing everyone she could sell. Mm-hmm.

22:47 And her advice to me was find what is gonna give you the most credibility on the job. And focus on that. So for me I decided it was Wall Street. It was the relationships with the shareholders and our analyst community. So immediately started to listening to her with our shareholders. It was we were still kind of coming out of the pandemic, so I was able to do this very quickly on Zoom. But I also started making sure I could speak the language of Wall Street.

23:16 And I remember our investor relations team and our PR team really putting me through. the paces just throwing question after qu it was these days were just brutal as I was trying to memorize a million numbers, trying to learn The approach on this, I remember one day. Evan Goldstein, who is then uh leading in IR for us. Throwing out a question, it was pretty

23:41 Technical question financially. And I answered it and I knew it, and I was so proud of myself. I looked at Evan And he said And I said, Evan, I got it right. And he said, Yes, you got it right technically, but you didn't sound like a CFO. You didn't use the words a CFO would use. You didn't organize it. Do it again.

24:04 And we would do it over and over until I had that comfort level and I knew I could go head to head with our analyst community. And not only was Julie's advice just game changing for me in terms of credibility, but investor relations and working with the analysts and working with our shareholders actually turned out to be one of my favorite things about the job. It's a great reminder that getting the substance right is only part of it. Yes. And having truth tellers on your team. Yeah. He was, and he did not he did not shy away from giving me that feedback. So remarkable. Okay, Amy, you've got this Stunning run at Salesforce. One of America's best run companies.

24:52 Certainly short list for any number of extraordinary roles. You made another leap in this next phase of your career. So tell us about going to direct relief. I had an incredible experience as Salesforce and never really considered going to another company. It would be very hard To beat the experiences I had there. just the faith that Mark put into me and the opportunities he put in front of me. But particularly when I took the CFO role, I knew it was gonna be an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to see more about how to run a company. But I really want to take those experiences and use them in a different way. So I announced last August that I would step down from the CFO role and help a search for my replacement. And really thinking I would take some time away and then look for either public sector or nonprofit work.

25:44 So within a couple of months, an email came in through LinkedIn called call about a global CEO role at an organization I had never heard of. And I came this close to deleting the email. And I'm so glad I didn't because as I dove in and And started learning more and more about direct relief. I've realized that it's probably the largest, most efficient, most effective, and most impactful global humanitarian group that you may never have heard of.

26:16 And the mission of direct relief is to provide medical aid. To people who are impacted by poverty, by disasters, by civil conflict around the world. Anyone who's in need, and that is in ninety-two countries last year, all fifty states, four territories, we provided nearly two billion dollars of medical aid. And when I really think about what direct relief does and what our mission is. It comes back to something I heard John Green say on Masters of Scale. So John, of course, is young adult fiction author. known for things like the fault in our stars, but he became really uh I I think he'd be okay with the word obsessed with tuberculosis and wrote the book Everything is Tuberculosis. And you asked him

27:05 How is it possible that a disease that was generally curable in the nineteen fifties is still ravaging parts of this world? And John said very simply, it's because the cure is where the disease is not. And the disease is where the cure is not. And a direct relief. Our mission is to get the cure.

27:26 to the disease. Profound. It's one thing to say I want to be part of it. The phase of career where you are, you could join the board, you could help them raise money, you could become a global ambassador for them. There are all sorts of things. Becoming CEO is another thing. What did you see as the opportunity to take the experience that you've had and apply it and to five, ten X the impact around the world. So the move to direct relief from being a corporate CFO can look

27:55 Very sudden. It looks like a very sudden sharp left turn. But it felt actually like a very natural progression. Throughout my career, throughout my life, I have been very involved in volunteering in working with ways to structure and strengthen nonprofits. For the last five and a half years, I served on the board of Habitat for Humanity International, traveling to Poland, to Kenya, to Puerto Rico, around the country. really to support their efforts and their mission. So the opportunity to be the direct relief actually to me felt very natural. It felt like the chance to take everything I'd learned in the past and apply it in a new way and to give all of my best efforts all of the things I had learned. And to focus it on one organization and direct relief is absolutely that organization. I can only imagine the scale of operation required for this. Help us understand what you do and how you do it. Sure. So we work mostly with pharmaceutical and biotech companies where we either procure the medications or they are donated to us.

29:00 And then we handle all of the logistics through to a network of partners that we have all over the world and in the United States. So we are kind of that middle process, the supply chain between those. And they're really different programs. First, we have some structured programs where we work with organizations. For example, Eli Lilly has a wonderful program called Life for a Child. And they are providing insulin, working with us. In countries around the world serving 60,000 children with juvenile diabetes, and with plans to scale that to 150,000 by 2030. Another great project is Global Hope at Texas Children's Hospital that brings together direct relief and TEVA pharmaceuticals. to fight childhood cancer in Africa. So very structured programs. We also take excess inventory. So in situations where a pharmaceutical company may have overproduced or for some other reason have medicine that would otherwise not be used, they will donate it to us. We will find the right place in the world to get that to as quickly as possible.

30:09 We also respond to emergencies. So whether that is a tornado or a war. In fact, Ukraine has been a huge focus for the last three years, and we just passed one point eight billion dollars in medical aid over the last three years to Ukraine. And then we also do something called kiting. That's putting together kits that can be used ahead of time. So what that would mean for disasters is we have hurricane preparedness kits. So we pre-position these June first of every year in 70 locations throughout the US and Caribbean. looking at where we think hurricanes are most likely to hit. And the kids have about three days of medical supplies, you know, hypertension medications, insulin, anything you may need during that time period. And that the three days is important because that's about how long it may take FEMA to get there or for us to get there, the American Red Cross to get there. And then if those kids aren't used, but if the hurricane does not hit, on November first, the clinic can open them up and use them for community purposes. How do you take

31:13 what you learned about scaling, particularly at Salesforce, and apply it to what you're doing now. I think there's a couple of things. First It's very hard to scale. if you have a Rickety platform, you really have to invest in having the right systems, the right processes in place. If you've got those, you can scale very, very quickly. So coming in, as you can imagine, very interested in this in the technology, what we were doing for data, what we could do with artificial intelligence. But also just the end to end processes. How do we, you know, from the first call from a pharmaceutical company to the time something arrives on the ground in Uganda. How do we look at that process? How do we make it faster? How do we make it more efficient? How do we get rid of any of the bottlenecks? So I think having strong platforms and optimizing for speed are two of the most important areas.

32:08 Not just as a lawyer and a CFO, but with Salesforce DNA. I mean this is a hard charging, fast moving, innovative company. How are you managing the scaling, the growth, the change that you want to bring to direct relief and bringing your team along, bringing in new people? So it's all of those things you said, and then I'm also following a CEO who was there for 24 years. Thomas Tike, also another former lawyer who um worked for the Peace Corps, and has an incredible legacy with direct relief. But needing to come in really make this my own and gain that trust. looking to a number of things I've learned in the past. One, I went back to Julie's words about what gains credibility.

32:52 And I realized it was going to be very different joining direct relief. It wasn't going to be dazzling them with my knowledge of Gap. It was gonna be listening. Mm. Because I'm working with a group of people who are there every day because they care so much about the mission. And

33:09 doing anything that might change that mission or change the focus on the people we serve. Is really scary. So I came in determined to listen. And then that meeting with almost every single employee at the organization, meeting with our board of directors, each one individually, and then getting out into the field to meet our partners. So traveling down to the Santa Barbara neighborhood clinic to see what the needs were locally, traveling to Uganda and Ghana.

33:37 And being on the ground. All of that has been incredibly important in terms of gaining, I think, the trust. And the credibility with the team. But the other part goes back to values. So I pulled together the top twelve executives at direct relief. We went off site for a day And I said I want to talk about where we're going. Yeah. What is the next version of direct relief? What's the evolution? But before we do any of that.

34:04 I want to talk about what our values are. And we were off site for five hours, and we spent the majority of that. Just trying to hammer it out. What do we believe our core values are? And I think if you tell people that you're starting With your values.

34:21 Any change that comes from that. They can trust that you're doing it for the right reasons and going forward. I mean, I have to ask, I understand you don't rely on government dollars. You are have never taken a dime of government funding. But we're in a moment where healthcare is politicized, science is under attack, not just in the US, but this is happening globally. As you focus relentlessly on this profound mission and you are serving people all over the world and all over the US, how are you navigating this? And I ask that question both as a leader of an organization with this profound mission, but also as a leader of humans who wake up And seemingly almost daily, there's something else to read about kind of the attack on the values of the work that they're doing at direct relief.

35:06 And I I not asking to be political here. I'm just I'm trying to understand as a leader how you manage through this. So the week I received my offer from direct relief was the week that U S A I D was defunded. Mm-hmm.

35:20 And in the time period from that moment to the time I started the job We watched budget cuts coming up at that point still being discussed to Medicaid. We saw PEP FAR cuts. And there were definitely times when I asked myself, and certainly a lot of other people asking me, Why would you move into humanitarian aid? at this time. This is gonna be the most difficult. And really thought about that. I also think this is the most important.

35:47 time to be doing it and the opportunity to have the most impact. Direct relief is incredibly well positioned. We don't take any government funding. So we're very, very solid. We have wonderful relationships with both the biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well as organizations on the ground throughout the world. That gives us the opportunity to step up. And I think right now it's all about meeting the moment. You know, I talk to people every day who just don't know what to do. Or they talk about things like, you know what, they're gonna volunteer after they retire, or maybe, you know, they'll save up and give their money to a good cause at some point. Now is the moment. This is the time. It's the time for people to use their money for good causes, their time, their energy. And for direct relief, that means stepping up to where we see the need. And I'm saying it both in the US and abroad. We've got the ability

36:44 To do more. And I firmly believe that if you have the ability to do more. You have a moral imperative. And that's what gets me out of bed every day, and that's what's helping me navigate these times. When you look back on your

37:01 Zigzag. How would you describe what you're great at that you're now applying at direct relief? I think part of it is building teams. Part of it is learning how to scale, but part of it is also a commitment. to showing people that you can do that. in a way that is still kind.

37:21 And I think that there has been a real change in the last twenty, thirty years, certainly over the course of my career. in who is coming into the workplace. Certainly many more women are coming in, many more people whose backgrounds wouldn't necessarily bring them into corporate America. But we haven't made as much change in terms of showing people that you can succeed as a leader unless you fall into the same model of every leader that is coming. Before you. So it's an opportunity where we say you're welcome in the workplace, but to move up, you need to act like everyone else who was here before. I think we still think of leaders as the loudest, uh, the tallest, probably the deepest voice. All things I will never ever be.

38:06 I've really been determined throughout my career to show people. That you can be the most effective. And that you can lead and you can do it with kindness, and you can do it without necessarily having to fit into that model of everyone who's come before you. I wish people could be in the room with us as you give this answer because the entire energy in here shifted as you gave it. You absolutely light up with that response. And I think it's a really important note for everyone who's um watching and listening. What a wonderful place to bring it to a close. Thank you for being on Masters of Scale. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for having me here.

38:41 Than to Amy Weaver for joining us. As this episode drops, I am on my way to Santa Barbara to tour the direct relief facilities and spend more time with Amy because honestly. After listening to this, if you don't want to spend more time with Amy Weaver, I think there might be something wrong with you. Seeing how Amy is translating all the scale lessons she's learned in her career to supercharge Direct Relief's humanitarian work is deeply inspiring. To learn more about Direct Relief, check out the link in the show notes. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. Before we wrap our last new episode for the year on Masters of Scale and what a doozy of a year it's been.

39:39 I want to take a moment to recognize what it takes to make this show, more importantly, who it takes to make this show. What it takes to plan the show, to support it, to promote it, to bring it to life, both on a podcast, video and audio, and on stage, and much, much more. There is an absolutely extraordinary team, not just of talented colleagues, but of humans who put heart and soul in addition to. Thoughtfulness and strategy and kindness. Into what we do. I'm so proud of this team and of the contributions from every one of these people.

40:22 With that. Her the full credits, acknowledging every single person on our team who helps bring Masters of Scale to you. Aaron Bastonelli. Alex Morris, Alfonso Bravo, Alexis Mayer, Annabella Penna, Anya Perfumo. Brian Pew

40:39 Shineme as a quina. Chloe Gauchet. Call Matkin. Colin Howorth. Dan Neelen.

40:46 Emily Wick. Eric Drobney. Eric Purcell. Eve Tro Jess McAfee, Jodine Dorsay.

40:54 Jordan Warner Justin Winslow Kelsey Sison the Tabulad. Marcia Makatenina. MG Frederick, Nicky Williams, Nicole De Giovanni, Noah Walstein, Philip Keen, Rachel Ishikawa, Ryan Holiday, Stef Bernstein Rosen, Stefні Stern.

41:13 Taylor branch. Tim Cronin, Trisha Bobida. our co-founder and the creative heart of our company, Jay Punjabi, and my partner in running the company, our Chief Operating Officer, Terren Fixel. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening to Masters of Scale, a Wait What original.

41:33 Merry Christmaca, Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, good Kwanzaa, all the holidays. We're wishing a wonderful holiday season and a wonderful new year to you and yours. See you in 2026.