My guest for this episode is Bob Baxley, design advisor, mentor, author, and speaker. He is one of the most familiar design leaders in Silicon Valley, having worked on products you probably use every day.

Bob and I worked at some of the same companies (e.g., Apple, Yahoo), but only crossed paths once at one of my favorite coffee shops in Mountain View, CA.

He has strong opinions about design, leadership, creating great products, and crafting a lasting career, so I know you’ll enjoy this episode!

About Bob

Bob Baxley is a designer, executive, and advisor who has built and led UX teams at some of Silicon Valley’s most respected companies, including Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo!, and most recently, Thoughtspot.

During a career spanning over three decades, Bob has played a pivotal role in the design of the Apple Online Store, Yahoo! Answers, the Apple Store App, Buyable Pins, and ClarisWorks—products that have been used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Committed to recruiting and inspiring the next generation of designers, Bob also mentors individuals and advises organizations that are working to improve the practice, craft, and culture of digital product design.

We talk about

* His background in tech, starting with Claris

* The tough decision of moving from Yahoo to Apple in 2006

* The opportunity to work with a historic figure, Steve Jobs

* The wild rise of tech companies in San Francisco, CA

* How he looked for opportunities in his career to “witness history”

* The concept of getting on the bus with the right people

* Making decisions at branches in your career

* How a tech career can be much like playing poker

* What you can control is placing yourself in interesting environments with the right people

* Thinking of time with an employer like a “presidential term” and time-boxing your plan for impact

* Why four years feels like the sweet spot for staying in one role

* Patterns he’s observed in people who succeed vs. those who do not on his teams

* How he structures job interviews and what he looks for (especially for designers)

* Design education, training, mindset, and careers

* How our modern transactional environment might impact design and design roles

* Design may become more powerful and influential, but with fewer people

* The impact of AI on professions and entry-level jobs

* How to stay relevant in the industry

Scroll up and hit play to listen to our full conversation.

Where to find more

* Bob’s LinkedIn

* His personal website

I’m Larry Cornett, an executive coach who works with ambitious professionals to help them reclaim their power, become more invincible, and create better opportunities for their work and lives. Do more of the work you love and less of what you hate!

📕 Check out the Summer version of my Invincible Daily Journal!

My guest for this episode is Ha Nguyen, Founder and Managing Partner at NextStep Advisors. Her company helps early-stage founders become master company builders, operators, and people leaders. They help founders with strategy and planning, operational excellence, and executive coaching. They also provide fractional consulting and advisory services.

About Ha

Ha Nguyen has 22 years of deep expertise in building and scaling startups, as well as venture investing. She was most recently the Chief Experiences Officer at Swimply and a Founding Partner of Spero Ventures. She also has 16 years of product leadership experience, having started her early career as a product manager at eBay, where we first met many years ago.

We talk about

* Her impressive background

* How she defines fractional leadership

* Why she bet on herself to create her current business

* How and where she finds new clients

* How she is leveraging AI, personally and professionally

* The concept of building portfolio careers

* What work-life balance really means for consultants

* Why hard work feels different when you choose the work you do

* How people should think about their careers for the next 10 years

* The massive disruption of AI in the industry

Scroll up and hit play to listen to our full conversation.

Where to find more

* NextStep Advisors

* Ha’s LinkedIn

* Her personal website

I’m Larry Cornett, an executive coach who works with ambitious professionals to help them reclaim their power, become invincible, and create new opportunities for their work and lives. Do more of what you love and less of what you hate!

📕 Check out the Spring version of my Invincible Daily Journal!

🎟️ Get your ticket for our live Job Interview course launching at the end of May. Two ex-tech leaders teach the insider secrets to getting hired, promoted, and staying off the layoff list. The price goes up in 4 days!

Tim Yeo joins me for this special episode so we can share more details about our upcoming live cohort course, Too Valuable to Lose. We discuss our backgrounds as leaders in the tech industry and career coaches for the past several years, and how this inspired us to create the course.

* We’ve seen that the quiet, good people are often overlooked for raises and promotions.

* Humble people and introverts frequently struggle with selling themselves during job interviews.

* And talented people sometimes get put on a layoff list because their bosses aren’t fully aware of their value and everything they do for the company.

Well, Tim and I want to change that! Scroll up, hit play, and listen to us discuss the course in more detail.

Learn to become so valuable that your employer keeps you happy (e.g., receive raises and promotions, stay off the layoff list), and potential new employers can't stand the thought of losing you (i.e., they make you job offers quickly).

What you'll get from the course:

* Practical and doable steps you can take the very next day

* Access to two live sessions with the instructors and other attendees on May 31st and June 7th

* Homework exercises to help you put our advice into action between sessions

* Downloadable templates to help you showcase your accomplishments and talents

* Scripts you can use during your job interviews and conversations with your manager

* Techniques for using AI to help you with preparation and practice

* Q&A feedback from the instructors to help you fine-tune your strategies and materials

* Lifetime access to our private community for the advice, feedback, and support you need

What you'll learn:

* Get better at selling yourself for the jobs you really want

* Learn how to ask for a raise or promotion the right way

* Consistently demonstrate your value so your manager can't imagine losing you

* Become so valuable that your employer fights to make you happy, retain you, and keep you off the layoff list

⬆️ Scroll up, hit play, and 🎧 listen to this episode to learn more about the course, what you will get if you join us, and who we are.

Where to find out more

* The Too Valuable to Lose course

* Read more about our backgrounds and see our testimonials

* The video version of this podcast episode

I’m Larry Cornett, a Freedom Coach who works with ambitious professionals to help them reclaim their power, become invincible, and create new opportunities for their work and lives. Do more of what you love and less of what you hate!

Tim Yeo has been an introvert for 40 years! He is a design leader, speaker, empathetic storyteller, facilitator from problem to solution, open collaborator, builder of design teams. He spent 18 years in UX & Design. He's now the chief introvert at The Quiet Achiever (TQA).

🎟️ Get your ticket for our live Job Interview course launching at the end of May. Two ex-tech leaders teach the insider secrets to getting hired, promoted, and staying off the layoff list. The price goes up again in 5 days!

My guest for this episode is Steven Puri, the Founder and CEO of The Sukha Company. His mission is to help millions of people find their focus, achieve more, and have a healthy work life.

About Steven

Steven's career started as a newscaster/interviewer for the #1 youth news show in the DC/Baltimore market (on WTTG-TV) and then as a junior software engineer and Thomas J. Watson Scholar at IBM. After attending USC in Los Angeles, he began working in film production and produced computer-generated visual effects for 14 movies, including Independence Day, which won the Academy Award for Visual Effects.

Steven’s first tech company was Centropolis Effects, which produced those CGI effects. When he was 28, he eventually sold it to the German media conglomerate, Das Werk.

Steven then produced some indie films and eventually went studio-side to develop and produce live-action features as a VP of Development & Production at 20th Century Fox (running the Die Hard and Wolverine franchises) and an EVP at DreamWorks Pictures for Kurtzman-Orci Productions, where he worked on Star Trek, Transformers, and more.

After Fox, Steven returned to building tech companies and founded The Sukha Company. In Sanskrit, “Sukha” means “happiness from self-fulfillment.” The Sukha is a focus app that bundles all the tools necessary for a focused experience and a healthy, productive workday.

We talk about

* Steven’s unique background that blended tech and creativity (e.g., his time in Hollywood)

* How good timing and lucky breaks can guide your career path

* The good and the bad of our new remote working world

* The needs we all have for getting into flow state, doing focused work, being more productive, and connecting with other people

* How the Sukha app helps us all with those needs

Scroll up and hit play to listen to our full conversation.

Where to find more

* The Sukha Company

* Steven’s LinkedIn

I’m Larry Cornett, a Freedom Coach who works with ambitious professionals to help them reclaim their power, become invincible, and create new opportunities for their work and lives. Do more of what you love and less of what you hate!

📕 Check out the Spring version of my Invincible Daily Journal!

We may feel powerless at times like these, but we are not.

Over 70M people in the U.S. didn’t want the outcome we are dealing with now. Millions more are now regretting choices made that enabled what is happening.

However, if we unite, we become powerful. The coordinated focus of our time, energy, and money would have a massive impact on those who think we have no voice.

We are familiar with the idea of voting with our dollars. We change our spending habits to favor one business over another, to show that we reject a corporation’s policies, and to influence a company’s actions. It happens all the time.

But we also live in an online world that isn’t about the money we spend with a company. Instead, it’s about the time and attention we give to their platforms, services, and apps. We are the product. Our data, behavior, and clicks are harvested to feed their advertising platforms. We don’t pay Meta to use Facebook, for example. But that corporation sure makes a significant profit from our time spent in the app.

So, we can vote with our time and attention, too, not just our dollars. By deactivating or deleting our accounts, we can starve specific platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X). We can also feed other platforms that represent the values we believe in (e.g., Bluesky).

Money talks. When a company loses enough advertising revenue, they take notice. They may decide to change their policies and actions before it’s too late, and they lose everything. We have the power to make that happen if we are willing to redistribute our time and attention.

We can decide how we spend our money, time, and attention. We get to choose the companies that we feel are aligned with our values. But there is another way to live your values and influence policy that we don’t talk about as often:

Where you work.

You can also “vote” with your blood, sweat, and tears. Our jobs are where we spend a significant portion of our adult lives. Of course, we need to work to live. We must cover our bills, buy groceries, and pay for housing.

But work is already hard enough without being completely miserable while we are doing it. And working for an employer that doesn’t align with your values adds another layer of pain to the misery.

Being selective about choosing an employer is undoubtedly a privilege that not everyone can enjoy. If you live in a small community with few employers and no options for remote work, you are stuck with few choices. I grew up in a tiny farm town like that. The online world hadn’t been created yet, and few local employers existed. You took any job you could find.

However, those who do have more options for their career paths can use this opportunity to research, plan, and select employment that:

* Aligns with their values.

* Supports their belief system.

* Positions them for the future.

* Gives them flexibility and resilience.

This podcast episode discusses these points in more detail, so scroll up, hit play, and listen.

In summary, you have more power than you think to help change this world and right wrongs.

* You can vote with your dollars to help influence policy.

* You can vote with your time and attention to make change happen.

* You can vote with your blood, sweat, and tears to reward the right kind of employers with the precious remaining time in your career.

You deserve a career and a job that makes you feel good about waking up on Monday mornings!

📖 Get your free chapter from the book I’ve been writing for the last few years, Becoming Invincible in Life: A Guide to Reclaiming Your Power, Freedom, and Future. I’m in the editing phase right now, so I’ll hopefully be able to publish it later this year!

I’m Larry Cornett, a Freedom Coach who works with you to optimize your career, business, and life. My mission is to help you take complete control of your work and life so you can become a more “Invincible You.” My wife and I live in Northern California near Lake Tahoe.