Do Hard Things Podcast

"Don't make an assumption, ask the question. Ask your senior people two things: what's slowing you down, and what would make you consider leaving. That pattern is your real priority list." -  Alex Seiler

Alex's HR career started with a job creating employee ID numbers by hand at Citigroup. 

Nobody dreams of being the employee ID guy, but he paid attention to what he was good at and let that pull him forward. 

He still respects the people who do the unglamorous work the whole company depends on.

From there he worked across Citi, WeWork, and Control Risks, and he's blunt about what that taught him: every size of company has its own flavor of chaos. 

Bring startup speed to a battleship and you blow past every stakeholder. 

Bring the battleship process to a five-person startup and you bore everyone into quitting. 

The skill that transfers is judgment about pace, and diagnosing the environment before you prescribe anything.

His rule for earning a seat at the table: lead with the business question, not the HR program. 

He doesn't pitch leadership development to a CEO as a way to lift engagement scores. 

He opens with the two VPs the company lost last year and what it cost to backfill them. 

As CPO, he brought recruiting in-house, saved $500K, and put $360K of it into better benefits.

His hot take: companies buy engagement software to fix a management problem. 

The survey says people are unhappy with their manager, and the action plan is to run the survey again next quarter. 

The data was never missing. The willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation was.

"CEOs don't fund feelings. They fund downside protection and upside acceleration."

"I wasn't making myself an NFL player. I was making myself behave like an NFL player before anybody believed that I could do it." - Cris D'Annunzio

Cris spent three years buried on Princeton's depth chart, bitter and barely playing, to the point of calling Joe Paterno to ask about transferring to Penn State.

He stayed only because he'd never quit anything in his life.

Once the hope of football working out left the room, his ego left with it, and he started writing everything down, tracking every input, with no expectation it would lead anywhere.

It led to an honorable mention All-Ivy League season and a shot in the NFL.

Then Wall Street, managing over $500 million in client assets.

Then thirty years as a working actor (American Gangster, Seinfeld, Animal Kingdom) in an industry that rejects you more than nine times out of ten.

Then high-ticket sales, where he still closes every week.

His conclusion after all four arena's: talent was never the gap.

The gap is whether you keep the process intact when nobody's watching and everything in you wants to negotiate it away.

It's the premise behind Metal and Method: you don't know what you actually do every day, you know what you think you do, and your mind lies to you most in moments of duress.

"At some point you will actually break. You can't do it yourself. This is why validation is so important."

"I wasn't making myself an NFL player. I was making myself behave like an NFL player before anybody believed that I could do it." - Cris D'Annunzio

Cris spent three years buried on Princeton's depth chart, bitter and barely playing, to the point of calling Joe Paterno to ask about transferring to Penn State. 

He stayed only because he'd never quit anything in his life. 

Once the hope of football working out left the room, his ego left with it, and he started writing everything down, tracking every input, with no expectation it would lead anywhere.

It led to an honorable mention All-Ivy League season and a shot in the NFL. 

Then Wall Street, managing over $500 million in client assets. 

Then thirty years as a working actor (American Gangster, Seinfeld, Animal Kingdom) in an industry that rejects you more than nine times out of ten. 

Then high-ticket sales, where he still closes every week.

His conclusion after all four arena's: talent was never the gap. 

The gap is whether you keep the process intact when nobody's watching and everything in you wants to negotiate it away. 

It's the premise behind Metal and Method: you don't know what you actually do every day, you know what you think you do, and your mind lies to you most in moments of duress.

"At some point you will actually break. You can't do it yourself. This is why validation is so important."

"Be authentic and tell the truth. In the end, people buy from people they know, like, and trust. Trust is the one thing our industry doesn't have a lot of." - Dave Slagle, Founder of ICON

Dave grew up in Berkeley in the '70s, around parents who treated nutrition and supplements as normal, and spent his teenage years as a competitive powerlifter.

He landed his first supplement industry job almost by accident, hired at one of the earliest Whole Foods Markets in the early '90s because of his grocery background, not his health science degree.

Thirty years later, he's worked every link of the supplement supply chain, retail counter, raw materials, contract manufacturing, clinical trials, and now runs a nonprofit built to defend one ingredient… creatine.

His reason is blunt.

The industry is full of marketing puffery around creatine gummies, bars, and drinks with no public data proving the creatine survives heat, moisture, or shelf life, layered on top of decades-old myths that creatine is a steroid or causes weight gain.

So he partnered with an independent testing lab to certify batch-level purity, because he wasn't willing to accept purity claims he considered mathematically impossible without proof.

He calls himself an "ageless athlete," borrowing the term from a philosophy he says most people get backwards: health span and strength span matter more than lifespan, and America is good at keeping sick people alive but bad at keeping healthy people healthy.

"If you want a recurring customer base and a good reputation in this industry, be authentic. Tell the truth. You may not close every deal, but you'll build one that lasts."

"Be authentic and tell the truth. In the end, people buy from people they know, like, and trust. Trust is the one thing our industry doesn't have a lot of." -  Dave Slagle, Founder of ICON

Dave grew up in Berkeley in the '70s, around parents who treated nutrition and supplements as normal, and spent his teenage years as a competitive powerlifter. 

He landed his first supplement industry job almost by accident, hired at one of the earliest Whole Foods Markets in the early '90s because of his grocery background, not his health science degree.

Thirty years later, he's worked every link of the supplement supply chain, retail counter, raw materials, contract manufacturing, clinical trials, and now runs a nonprofit built to defend one ingredient… creatine. 

His reason is blunt. 

The industry is full of marketing puffery around creatine gummies, bars, and drinks with no public data proving the creatine survives heat, moisture, or shelf life, layered on top of decades-old myths that creatine is a steroid or causes weight gain. 

So he partnered with an independent testing lab to certify batch-level purity, because he wasn't willing to accept purity claims he considered mathematically impossible without proof.

He calls himself an "ageless athlete," borrowing the term from a philosophy he says most people get backwards: health span and strength span matter more than lifespan, and America is good at keeping sick people alive but bad at keeping healthy people healthy.

"If you want a recurring customer base and a good reputation in this industry, be authentic. Tell the truth. You may not close every deal, but you'll build one that lasts."