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Hosted by Leila Ansart
Leadership Impact Strategies

Find your fuel for the challenges in front of you.

 

Episode 6:

Rewarding Failures

—with Jennifer Chang,
CEO of Playform


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Brief summary:

On today's podcast, I have the privilege of speaking with Jennifer Chang, the CEO of Playform, a Khosla-backed tech startup that is applying no code AI solutions to make it possible for all creative people to create original artworks and join the NFT art movement. Jennifer also talks about her view of failure, and why she finds fear of regret so much more powerful than fear of failure. In fact, she explains the how and why of how she rewards herself for failures

Key insights from this episode:

  • (at 05:19)   The role of AI in freeing us up from our ‘productive work’ so we can spend more time being creative, in our zones of genius.

  • (at 08:24)  Jennifer shares her view of the role of artists in our world and culture right now.

  • (at 19:20) How Jennifer started her MBA with a list of things she needed to know

  • (at 25:43)  Why being driven by a fear of regret rather than a fear of failure can be a great motivator

  • (at 29:34) Rewarding failure

Links / Resources mentioned in this episode: 

Personal:
Jennifer on Twitter
Jennifer on Instagram
Jennifer on LinkedIn

Business:
Playform.io
Playform on Twitter
Playform on Instagram

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Read the full transcript of this episode.

FUEL Episode 6 with Jennifer Chang of Playform

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Leila Ansart - FUEL Podcast Host

LEILA ANSART, ACC

CERTIFIED EXECUTIVE COACH

ABOUT YOUR HOST
Leila Ansart has served as a strategic advisor to a wide range of clients, from top tech executives and business leaders to smaller businesses. She is currently the CEO of Leadership Impact Strategies and leads a team of brilliant consultants who help their clients increase profitability and attract and retain sought-after talent, even during these challenging times.

Prior to leading Leadership Impact Strategies, Leila Ansart held sales and entrepreneurial roles for over 20 years. She is recognized as an talent management and development expert. She currently lives in north Florida with her husband and children.

Learn more about Leila.


Transcript:

FUEL Podcast hosted by Leila Ansart
EPISODE 6: Rewarding Failures with Jennifer Chang, CEO of Playform

INTRO: On today's podcast, I have the privilege of speaking with Jennifer Chang, the CEO of Playform, a Khosla-backed tech startup that is applying no code AI solutions to make it possible for all creative people to create original artworks and join the NFT art movement.

Playform is Jennifer's fourth startup.

In addition to her startup experience, Jennifer has held roles at KPMG, Disney and Apple. The accomplishment, she says, that makes her most proud is hearing her grandmother say she is proud of her life choices.

In this conversation, Jennifer explains her view on AI and how it’s impacting the ability for all of us to spend more time in our individual zones of genius, rather than on the to do list we all manage. Even if you don’t consider yourself overly creative, you’ll find in this episode some refreshing nuggets related to entrepreneurship, how to manage your reaction to failure, and your approach to risk. As Jennifer says, sometimes the only way to see what you are capable of is just to jump in.

She also shares her view of failure, and why she finds fear of regret so much more powerful than being afraid to fail, also how and why she rewards herself for failures. Let’s go ahead and dive in.


Leila Ansart, Host

Today we are diving into an amazing conversation with Jennifer Chang. I'm super excited to have you share your story, Jennifer, with the audience. Do you go by Jen or Jennifer? Do you have a preference? 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
I don't have a preference at all. 

Leila Ansart, Host
I'd love to say Jennifer in its full length. 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Why not. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Jennifer is the CEO of Playform and she's going to be sharing with us today, not only where she is currently in her career journey and her business journey, but also some of the challenges that she's been through in the past. And I think it's quite an interesting story. One that you don't hear all that often so I'm excited about you being able to share those, Jennifer. 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Yeah. It's nice to be here.

Leila Ansart, Host
Absolutely. Why don't you start out by telling the listeners who you are, what you're doing currently, talk to them about what you're passionate about and then we'll see how that leads into your story. 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Yeah. So, I'm Jennifer Chang, I'm the CEO of an AI startup called Playform. And, what we do is we make it possible for anyone to create original artwork, with digitization. It just kind of changes the skill set you need in order to create anything. I've been thinking a lot, with EDM (electronic music), for example, you have a whole new way of creating music. If you had a background in music, it would be helpful to go into this direction, but you don't necessarily need it because it's just a new way of creating music, but it does still have the kind of traditional fundamentals of what is great music. 

The introduction of AI into art is kind of similar to that. What you're able to do is you're able to have the AI kind of do all the busy work like do the multiple iterations. Come up with other ideas for how you might be able to do something as well as you can adapt your process by using these digital tools to create something in a different way. 

Ultimately what it's really about is having that “eye”, and really understanding what is visually appealing. How do I express myself and tell my story through art? It's just a new way of art making and Playform is making it possible for all artists, whether or not you're classically trained, whether or not you can draw or paint, whether or not you can code, to create new digital art through the help of AI. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Which is just so inspiring. It really makes you feel like the sky's the limit in terms of, like you said, you don't have to have that technical background or knowledge. You could have the whole artist side of things, and not have to learn all the technical to be able to foray into this area. Now, is that something that you have Jennifer or you transitioning into a new area with the startup? 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Well, so my background to date has really been around -- I have kind of your traditional MBA background. I did my undergraduate in finance accounting. I did my MBA focused on entrepreneurship. But in between those, I actually got a master of arts in cultural and creative industries. That was really born out of my personal passions. I've always been really into reading. My mom was an artist and so my earliest memories are all like sitting at the kitchen table and drawing and painting. I was really into pastels and stuff like that, which my mom hated because it was so messy. It was like my favorite form of art, of course. I was just always doing things like that. I was always into film and television and I think that the creative aspect of humanity has always been the thing that drove me. 

In my career I found that's continued to just kind of be part of everything that I am. I love finding creative people, whether they be artists or filmmakers or technologists.Technology is actually a very creative way of thinking. It requires creativity. I just naturally gravitate towards those people and those are the people I want to be around. All of the businesses I've started  have been in the creative space, working with creative people, whether it be in the film industry or I've worked with kind of celebrity influencer industry that's written over the past decade -- been very involved in that. Now with Playform, I feel like I've come full circle from that kitchen table where I was drawing to now building a platform that enables all artists to create what they imagined, and to kind of maintain that childlike wonder of putting your vision out there for others to experience and see as well. 

Leila Ansart, Host
I love what you just said, “create what you imagine”, is that a tagline that you're wrapping into your conversation or did you just happen to be that brilliant in the moment? 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Yeah, I guess that's really what the tool is about. The way I see it is, people are really scared of the singularity and AI is going to come and kill us all. I don't see that yet but really where I see AI being applied is in productivity. AI is more productive than humans. It's able to do more, it's able to process at different speeds. What AI really enables is like, they're human assistants, right? They're helping us at this point. What it frees us up to do is by taking away all that productivity work, it's allowing us to be more and more creative. So an artist that's using Playform, for example, can skip all the, oh, let's paint 10 different versions of this, so that we can see what colors look the best. You don't need to do that. 

The AI can apply 10 different colors to this and show you what's the best. But ultimately, the AI can't create unless you tell it what to create. It's not going to really be able to come up with something on its own, or if it can, which actually we do have the technology to do that. What we found was it lacks story. So people weren't as interested in it. When it comes to art, I think especially now that we're applying AI to it, we're learning what art is really about, which is it's creative expression. It's about sharing. It's about connection. It's about storytelling. I think with AI taking over more and more of this productivity stuff, we're learning more about what it means to be human. I think creativity is such a big part of that. Our ability to imagine is such a big part of that. 

There's this book that I referenced all the time, because I think it's just so applicable to what I talk about. There's a book called Sapiens. It is just about looking at us like animal species. What is unique about us is our ability to lie or our ability to tell stories. None of the other animals can do that. That's really what took us to where we are today because we could convince each other to like, let's work together on this. I have a vision for this, I think we can do this. Being able to share that is what brought us here. I think now with AI, it's taking away a lot of the work and the productivity and just the detail level so that we can think at this whole other level of just being creative beings. 

Leila Ansart, Host
That is really inspiring. It's almost as if you're freeing up your mental load, you're freeing up the bandwidth so that you can spend time in that creative zone of genius, instead of thinking about all the things you have to do. We all love to spend more time there, whether we're classical artists or not. 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
And that's what I find too. I think if you asked anyone, like I have all these friends who have creative jobs, but I think if you ask them, I'll pay you 50% of your salary just to create art, they would all jump at it because I think art is not just like something you do, but it's something that really nourishes you and makes you more human. 

I've been thinking a lot about this. People refer to this time as the culture wars, and there's just a lot being disrupted right now. I think particularly in times like this, we really need artists. We really need people who can help us express what we're feeling, and to process all of that and then to share it with others so that we're not just talking but also showing. There's just so many ways to communicate. 

Art is such an important aspect of it. I think artists really drive the culture. So, in this time, I think it's really important that we invest in artists because I think we are shaping, kind of a whole new way of us as a culture. You know, the human culture is changing. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Wow, that's quite a view. You talked about coming full circle from the kitchen table, drawing pastels with your mom, the artists, to now being able to lead the charge on an AI startup that allows people to unleash their creativity. As you said, create what they imagined. Tell us how you got there. Was this just a clear linear path for you? Were there some bumps in the road? Help us understand that journey. 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Yeah, I mean it depends on how far back you go, but I think, to be an entrepreneur is to be open to failure. There's really no other way to get here. If you're an entrepreneur you're forging something new, right? You're creating something new, you're creating a new business, you're creating a new way of doing something and whenever you're doing anything new, you're going to fail. Kind of going back to the artist as well, your first sketch is probably not going to be your best sketch. You're probably gonna have to keep creating to get better at it. That's kind of how I feel about business. Business to me, entrepreneurship, is a creative expression of what's going on in my mind, the possibilities that I see. As a creator, I've had to fail in order to succeed. 

There's just no other route there, I don't think you can shortcut that. If you're gonna create something new, you have to take a risk. So yeah, my entire journey to date, it's been ups and downs, even every day today it's ups and downs. Like you come out of one meeting and you're like, that was amazing. You go into the next one and they go, well, we have this huge problem. You're like, oh my God, that's just  a day for me is like ups and downs, an emotional roller coaster, and throughout my career has been as well. I think the key to all of it, something that I have as a mantra, there's the saying that goes, “Fall down seven times, get up eight”. You just have to basically bounce back more than you fell down. 

That is the key to success. That's about it, just getting back up. Because as long as you keep getting back up, you can't fail, right? Someone knocks you down, well get back up. There's no end to that cycle. That's something that I always think about. Another bump in the road, well all right, let's get back up. Let's take on this one too. Then you see the next success, then you see the next failure and just keep doing over and over again. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Just one more, get back up 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Get up one more time. 

Leila Ansart, Host
When we spoke last time when I asked you about your mantra, you said, “I really believe you can recover from anything.”
I think that's an alignment with what you're saying now. It's just about getting back up, but I like the way that you worded it last time, because I think it speaks to that creativity in you and that artist's view of the world, if you could put it that way. To say that you can recover from anything, in other words, no matter what your circumstance looks like, or the failure that you just experienced, or you drop the plop of ink on your canvas, you can really recover from anything if you look at it with creativity and with some resilience. 

Tell us that story, if you don't mind about your journey working at Disney and then the steps that you took out of that and how that landed for you, and part of those stepping stones to get you where you are today. 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Yeah. So, my journey into startups was very impulsive. As I explained to you before, I didn't really think it through. People are like, oh, how did you end up here? I just did one thing after the other. I ended up here, there was no plan. People ask me all the time, what's your five-year plan, ten-year plan. I'm like, I don't believe in planning ahead because I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what the scenario is going to be. I believe in really taking everything one step at a time. So, just going back to when I started in the startup world, I actually started off at KPMG. I started off at this accounting firm and I just really didn't see a creative outlet for myself there. 

Creative accounting is considered fraud. (both laughs)  I was there right after the Enron scandal. I just felt like I had to do something else. I went and got my master of arts in cultural and creative industries. I went to London to pursue that degree because I just wanted to be somewhere different. At the time I figured, well, if I go to London, they speak English so I could study there. That's pretty much as far as I took it. 

I ended up coming back to the states and getting an internship at Disney, particularly because I had gone to this program at King's college London, with this idea in mind. It was 2006 at the time and I started seeing television go online. I was thinking this is going to completely change the way we see television. 

I wanted to write my thesis on that. I told the program, I’m going to write my thesis on television and online video back in 2006. YouTube had just started. While I was writing that thesis, I also had to look for an internship and then it turned out, hey, Disney is putting television online. They heard about what I was doing. I got in there and I worked there working on online video and social media strategy, like looking at what Disney could be doing in this space. Which led me to work with a lot of different startups. At the time I didn't think about it this way, but if a startup made it to work with Disney, they're probably pretty successful. I'm looking around, I'm like all these people are doing startups. This doesn't look that hard. I'm reading on tech crunch, Mark Zuckerberg is my age and he's doing great. 

So, when an opportunity came around where some guys I didn't know reached out to me on Facebook and they were looking for another Jennifer Chang and accidentally found me. They were like, hey, we're working on this startup. We're going to make it possible for people to have conversations and engage around video. I was like, I wrote my thesis on that. That sounds really cool. I just flew up to Berkeley and I met them. They were all living in a house. It looked just like HBO, Silicon valley, I kid you not, where all the tests are in the living room. It was like five dudes and me, and we started this company and we did not know what we were doing. I quit my job at Disney to join this company. 

In 2009, after all the layoffs and the worst economy we've ever had, I joined a startup with a bunch of guys who weren't paying me but I thought, hey, well, if that Mark Zuckerberg guy can do it, why can't I? I just jumped in. I have this tendency to jump into the deep end without really measuring how deep it goes. I tell this to the people who work for me as well. I'm going to throw you in the deep end and I'm going to see if you can swim. Don't worry, I'm here as a lifeguard. 

The only way to see what you are capable of is just to jump in. And so I did and  there were some things that I was really good at, like I could put together the presentations really well. I had a lot of really good ideas. In regards to building the tech, that was really fun. But then as a result of that failure, I learned everything I didn't know how to do as well. That's what I mean by “you can recover from anything” because part of the process of failure is learning what you don't know how to do. Just right there, that's the starting point for recovery. How do I learn these things now? How do I change these things now? 

So for me, after that failure my next step was, how do I learn this stuff? And that's ultimately what led me to an MBA. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Such a great story. I remember when you shared it with me earlier, you were talking about several people around you saying, what are you doing? You're leaving a good job. You don't have the stability anywhere. And you were just saying, what? no, this is where I'm feeling pulled to go and I'm going to try it out. As you said, I can recover from anything. I think the optimism in your personality in those statements and the maturity to be able to say in the moment of failure, not what many of us do which is, oh my God, I'm such an idiot or what was wrong with me, or how could I make these mistakes. Perhaps you did? 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
I would say back in that failure -- this was back in 2009, I would say, no. I did jump in, all these people were like, what are you doing? I was like, I don't know. I feel like doing this. This was what was exciting to me. The other problem with 2009 and the economy we had was the stuff I was working on at work was just not interesting anymore. Prior to that, I got to work on whatever I wanted because there was just so much money. You were at Disney and they're funding this new division, you got to try all these cool things and I really love that. But then the recession happened and it was like, oh, all these projects got canceled. That's really what led me to start working with the startup because I just needed an outlet for all my ideas. 

I needed to be challenged in a way that I didn't feel like was happening at work. So I got into that. As you said, I followed my gut, I followed my interests. I just  did what felt authentic to me. 

When I failed, that was my first huge failure, that was rough. I mean, at the time, I had been living at home with my mom. She was like, what did you just do? And I got sick of her nagging. I packed up my car and I'm like, I'm leaving now. I'm an adult and I can leave. But then I discovered you can't rent an apartment. No one will lease to you if you don't have a job, if you don't have steady income. So then I found myself homeless, which I think a lot of people think of homelessness as people who live on the streets, but actually a big part of the homelessness situation is just people who can't get a lease, people who are living in their cars that are living on couches. 

In my case, I spent like a month couch surfing from friend to friend. At one point I just wanted some time alone so I drove up to Las Vegas, Monday through Thursday. You guys, Las Vegas is really cheap. You can check into a hotel for like 20, 30 bucks a night. I did that and I just hung out in Vegas Monday through Thursday. I got back in my car and drove up to the bay area and crashed with some friends there. Then, ultimately I did figure it out. I got whatever job I could find. It wasn't going to be my dream career, but I was like, I need to get a job to get an apartment. So I did all of that. 

I did that day job while I worked all night on my second startup and just got right back up again. In that time I also ended up applying to MBA programs and I got into USC with a full ride, which was much appreciated because I had just blown all my savings on this whole journey of my first startup. That's what took me into the MBA program. As I mentioned, I think I just got so much more out of the MBA program than your average person who had planned to go at this phase of their career. Because while I had never planned to do an MBA, I went into it with a list. I knew exactly what I wanted to learn. I needed to figure out what this angel investing thing is and venture capitalists, because we try to go out there and raise money and I found out like, I don't understand this at all. 

I knew that I needed to learn how to work with a team better because that was really our downfall. It wasn't that we couldn't build a product. It was that we couldn't figure out how to get along during the hard times and ultimately a bunch of us gave up. I really believe that you can recover from anything if you learn from your failure. If you go through that journey and take some time to reflect, why did I fail? What don't I know? And then your recovery is just basically figuring out how to address that. In my case, it was really going into MBA, I knew exactly what I wanted to learn. When I got out of there, I feel like I was just really ready to go on to even more and more startup ventures. 

That first one had been so painful, it was such a painful failure. I think that resilience that I have now comes from having gone through that so early on and having failed so massively, like any other failure I go through, I'm kinda like, well, I survived that one when I was 25 and didn't have a place to live and had no money, and didn't know anything. I figured it out from that one. If I can figure myself out of that, what other failure could I not --- I mean, there's really no failure I feel like I couldn't bounce back from. So I think it's important to fail. It helps build that resilience as well. It's just such a big part of the journey, 


Leila Ansart, Host

Why not try, right? Why not try and see what comes up. It's funny. I think the psychology of us as humans and maybe, I mean, this is what I hear from a lot of my clients that I work with and certainly not everyone, but we have this strange expectation that going into something we're going to know what to do -- it's like you would never expect a five-year-old to know how to drive a car, an average five-year-old because why would they? They have no experience. They have no frame of reference. They probably aren't tall enough to reach everything. I mean, there's so many factors. I know that's a simplistic example, but I think sometimes we get caught up in thinking, I don't want to do that because I don't want to fail. What if instead, we shifted to, I want to do that so I can learn what I don't know. 

I can learn what I'm good at and what maybe is not my strength. That's easy to say, obviously on a nice day when we're just having a conversation, but it's remembering those moments. You said something earlier about, you have more of a fear of regret than a fear of failure, which I think is less common of an approach toward failure. Let's talk about that a little bit.


Jennifer Chang, Guest

Yeah. I do notice that too. I see people are just so scared to fail. In my case, I feel like I was always driven by this fear of regret. So for me, the scariest thing is to ever look back on my life and go, oh, I could have done that. I think that attitude really just helped me be very proactive. If you change your mindset from this fear of failure and towards this fear of regret, then you're really going to look at the world differently.

I was looking at my first startup, should I join this startup? Yes. Logically it wasn't a great idea. The five other guys were actually even younger than me. I was 25 and I was the oldest, most experienced person on the team. Yeah, not a great idea, but at the time it was, well yes, I could fail, but oh my God, what if they become the next hot thing? I don't want to regret that. What if they become the next Facebook? And I'm going to sit here and kick myself that I didn't chase that opportunity. 

That's what really encouraged me to drop because I was like, well, I rather fail than be that person that goes, oh yeah, I was invited to be on the founding team of Facebook, but I decided I was going to stay at Harvard. I don't want to be that guy. That's something that always drives me. I'm always aware of this idea of like, well, I can do this and then I won't fail, but then I won't know what I'm capable of. I think that's just something I'm not sure if you can change about yourself, but I would encourage people to try, really try to shift your mindset from a fear of failure towards a fear of regret, because it's going to really drive different decisions. In my experience, I think it's resulted in decisions that now with a lot of hindsight, just having gone very far from that, it's been almost 15 years now. I'm able to look back and go, yeah, I did everything I wanted to do. I don't really have any regrets. I did join all the startups where I felt like, oh, I wonder if this could be something. I didn't wait to find out. I just joined. I think the results for me have really led me to believe that this is the way you want to think about life, because life is short and  regret is a scarier thing to me than the failure. 

Leila Ansart, Host
I'd love the chance to unpack that even more. I'll do so very briefly, but what I'm hearing, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, is that you not only reframed it or naturally feel that it's a fear of regret rather than feel a failure, but your fear of regret is not fear of losing out. It's not that sad, depressing, debilitating feeling. It's more of a, what am I capable of and why do I want to pass up the chance to test myself and see what's there? And I think that really depicts courage and self-assuredness. In all honesty, it's you leaning into your intuition and trusting yourself. So much of that, I think, gives you the ability to make that statement. It'd be something that drives you and something that rewards you. 

Finally, the other piece that, again, I'm bringing up, what you shared in our last conversation, was part of what you do is you kind of retrained your brain. Those are my words, but you've retrained your brain by rewarding yourself for failure. Tell us about that as we close today. 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
Yeah. So I believe in rewarding failure, personally. I always tell myself, if you fail, you can do this. Usually it's a plane ticket. It's like if you fail, you're going to go here. You're going to buy a plane ticket there. If you succeed, you get a plane ticket too. I like to always think about failure and the worst case scenario is I fail and I buy a plane ticket to Bali, or worst case scenario is I fail  and I get to eat cake. Reward yourself for failure, it’s one way to create that soft landing. And to also encourage you to keep trying again, because the worst thing that can happen is that you fail. And failure is not the worst thing because if you fail, now you have time to go to Bali. 

That happened for me. A company I worked on didn't work out, well that just freed me up to go take a vacation. When you work in a startup world, even beyond the companies I've started, I've also held executive roles in different companies and I've gotten fired all the time. You're just going to get fired. It's not personal, it's because the company is going through a constrained time. Your skill is no longer needed at that company because they are such a small startup. Every person has to be invaluable. It's not like a big company where they can carry on extra people. Yeah, every time I get fired, I'm like, oh, well, thank you. Now I get to take a trip. Now I have time, thanks for that severance payout. That's two weeks that I get to go on vacation.

I really prefer to approach failure in that way, because I think if you reward yourself for failure, it's also gonna give you the courage to keep going after new things, try new things. Because failure is really not the worst thing. You can take that from someone who's failed. I am someone that failed over and over again. And in my opinion, that's just made me very resilient. It's led me to listen to my intuition, which is why I think I ended up where I did and in a place that I feel very happy with myself, because I didn't  make decisions based on what you should do, but I just made decisions based on what I want to do and then learn from that. 

I also think if you want to be an entrepreneur, if you want to be in the startup world, this is just part of the journey, regardless. You have to learn how to fail, because that's also how you create great businesses. 

When I start working with a team or anyone in general, this is kind of one of the things I put out there. Here's one of the things you need to know about learning [when] working with me is, don't worry about failing. Please don't, because I never want anyone on my team to be scared to try something with the business or bring up an idea because they're worried that it's going to fail or that's not going to work. Even more so, I don't want anyone who I'm working with, who is testing a new idea to try to manipulate the results, to make it look like a success. Because if it's a failure, I want to know that it's a failure so that we can fix it or try something else. 

To maintain that transparency. I'm very big on creating a culture of failure is not the worst thing. What I emphasize though, the other thing being as part of that failure, never point at someone else. I think a lot of times people look at other people and go, well you're the reason we failed, or you made that mistake, or pointing at yourself and saying, you're the failure, you're the person that made the mistake. Failure is just part of the journey and mistakes are just part of trying anything new. If anything, I want to build a team culture where people are very comfortable with failure and making mistakes and can own up to those mistakes and say, you know what,  that test failed, that product failed. I think it's because we did X, Y, and Z. We're going to try it again, but we're going to fix X, Y, and Z, or we tried everything and I think we did everything that we could, and it didn't work. So let's just try something completely different. 

In order to build any company, one, you cannot do it alone and two, you need brave people alongside you. I think as a leader, it's really important to give people a place where they can feel brave because failure is rewarded, right? Hey, if this fails, you guys are going to try something else. Or if this doesn't work out well, that means you don't have to do that anymore. I really like to think about it from that point of view, with my team as well. 

Leila Ansart, Host
I think that's pretty enlightening -- a way to view the challenges especially in the startup world where so many things change on a dime so quickly and so often. 

Thank you for sharing that and for being open enough to tell us your story and speak openly about the experiences that you've had so that we can see those insights too. It's really been awesome to talk to you. 

Jennifer, tell us, as we close up today, how can the listeners learn more about you and get in touch if that's an option, what would you like them to know about your platform and where you see yourself in the future? 

Jennifer Chang, Guest
I have no idea where I'm going to be in the future. As I said, I don't make plans. I focus on whatever's in front of me. It's like one step at a time. I might have a strategy of where I'd like to end up. But how I'm going to get there, it doesn't matter. I do believe if you listen to your gut and intuition, it'll lead you there. If you listen to yourself, you're going to end up where you belong. I have full faith in the universe, and myself that I will be somewhere great in five to 10 years. 

In regards to me, people can look me up on LinkedIn. I have a personal policy that if a young woman reaches out to me for career advice, I have to give her 30 minutes. That's just part of how I pay it forward because I've just had these amazing female mentors. 

I mean, I could do a whole episode on that, on mentors and how important they are. So people can always feel free to reach out to me. As for my company, if you're interested in creating art or seeing if you have an inner artist, I encourage you to check out Playform.io. We have a free trial so everyone can get started free. Most of the tools within our platform you can use for free, it's just you pay to download the results that you really like.

I really encourage everyone to check it out. I also think it's a really great tool for anyone who's interested in learning more about AI. I think AI, especially after this pandemic, is going to become the driving tech for the next 10 years. I think it's so important that everyone understands how AI works and how humans are going to be interacting with AI moving forward because it's already in our social algorithms, it's already powering all these things around the world. Over the next 10 years, I think it's going to just start becoming more and more pervasive. In Playform, we've really created this tool that allows for some transparency, between the AI and human. For me, I think it's a really great way to get over this fear that a lot of people have of the coming AI apocalypse, because that's really not what's going to happen. If you start to understand the technology, you're gonna really start to see the potential for this and how it can really unlock more of what it means to be human. Anyone curious about that, check it out. Play with the AI and see what you see. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Wonderful. Well, again, Jennifer, thank you. I wish you a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you for that create what you imagine statement. I think that's probably one of the ones that I'm going to keep with me for awhile, put that on a post-it on my desk. 

Jennifer Chang, Guest

I think that's also going to that -- trust your intuition, right? Yeah. That's your imagination, create it. 


Leila Ansart, Host

Yeah. That's definitely a big piece of why that speaks to me. So thank you for that. Wonderful. Well, with all of that, we'll sign off and until then.