Rich Fernandez
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Return on Intelligence podcast. So delighted you could join us today. I'm Rich Fernandez, your host. I'm also the CEO, SIY Global. And I am delighted to have a key colleague and partner of ours, the CEO of Absorb Software, which is the software we use for our learning management system. but their CEO and chairperson, Kimberly Williams is with us today.
Rich Fernandez
So welcome, Kimberly.
Kimberly Williams
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. Now let me tell you all a little bit about Kimberly. because, it's wonderful that you bring this blend of experiences to the role and to our organization today. So, you know, Kimberly is a global technology leader and has decades of experience to draw on as Absorb Software's chairperson and Chief Executive officer. one thing I love about Kim and how she describes herself is that you are equally competitive, strategic and empathic as a leader.
Rich Fernandez
So I'm imagining your leadership style brings out the best in people, helps people feel seen, heard their ideas, shared openly. but also that competitive and strategic edge, which, which is awesome. And, of course, prior to Absorb, Kimberly was with CST Holdings, Global Technology company as well. And she grew that company more than fivefold during her seven year tenure there.
Rich Fernandez
And so, she succeeded in taking CST Holdings as a technology company from the number five position, its market to the number one position. So, again, a wealth of experience in this space. And what's really cool, Kimberly, is I love that your pursuit of lifelong learning has kind of come full circle and brought you here to this role as CEO of Absorb.
Rich Fernandez
So I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.
Kimberly Williams
Yeah, it's great to be here and I agree with you. Getting the offer to come to absorb was sort of a dream, to be able to combine my personal passion for learning and and building technology that helps other people embrace education and learning. It's great.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. Well, tell us about that, actually. So, you know, you are lifelong learners. You like to describe yourself. I'm sure there were mentors and coaches also along the way. What work? Tell us a little bit about your journey as a leader, and how these different factors, you know, the love of learning, mentoring, coaching, how did they influence your journey?
Kimberly Williams
Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's really interesting how, maybe the way that I was brought up really focused a lot on an education and and textbook knowledge. getting good grades and, to some extent, I would say leadership as well. My, I played a lot of team sports and my dad would have a lot of conversations with me about how to be a leader, kind of that player coach on the floor.
Kimberly Williams
and, you know, I think how to build a team and get the most out of your teammates. And I remember really, early lesson and strategy was, we had a very good team. We were going into my senior year in high school, and we were had graduated a pretty good player. And we had a whole we needed, you know, somebody who was going to kind of fill the the two spot on the court.
Kimberly Williams
and basically what, you know, my dad and I talked about was like, how do you take somebody who hadn't had a lot of playing time in prior years and get them ready to parent more pronounced role in the season upcoming. And I spent the summer really working with that person, inviting them to go to camps with me, inviting them over to just do drills with me.
Kimberly Williams
And, you know, it was kind of a you can't do everything by yourself. Obviously, I was a basketball player and I was on the court a lot, but you need a bunch of other players around you, and it was probably one of my earlier memories of making sure that you equip your teammates to with the school, you know, tools and skills they need to help the team win and, you know, and great success with that.
Kimberly Williams
It was a good lesson my father taught me when I was quite young.
Rich Fernandez
It's amazing story, actually. We have someone at that age used the term player coach, you know, taking up that role. and that's an interesting concept. We hear a lot about player coach, you know, what do you what does that mean to you in terms of leadership in terms of, you know, the contemporary workspace, let's say?
Kimberly Williams
I mean, I think I'm a big believer that you don't have to have direct reports to be a leader. And, that everybody has the opportunity to lead and you should look for those opportunities as an individual, because I think it makes you a better person. and to approach every situation as if you were the leader, what would you want the outcome to be?
Kimberly Williams
And how can I get to that, help the team get to that end point? so I think everybody should embrace the role of being a player coach. And, you know, I, I have that now where I have roles where I'm not the leader. I'm, you know, maybe I'm on a board of directors with other people, and you're you're not in control.
Kimberly Williams
You don't have the people necessarily working for you. You have to do things to influence. And, you know, trying to get the board to get to the point where they're making good decisions, where you don't have direct responsibility, as a chairperson of the board or as CEO. so I still use those techniques to this day.
Kimberly Williams
And I think it's important one for people to learn early in life.
Rich Fernandez
Appreciate that. You know, we of course, we train emotional intelligence and other leadership skills. And people are always asking us, you know, well, why is this just for leaders as well? But everybody has the capacity to lead in some way, even if you're an individual contributor. Right. So really when we talk about leadership, we talk about self leadership, as well as leading, you know, bigger, bigger, complex organizations.
Rich Fernandez
So I love that player coach model. What about, things like mentoring and coaching? I think player coach obviously has that word in it, but how has that looked for you in your journey? Kimberly. Mentors, coaches. What roles have they played in your journey?
Kimberly Williams
I think a huge role. I would say for me personally in my development, I was pretty early in my career when I had an opportunity to, do a start up. Basically, it was within a larger company. Internet was a relatively new phenomenon at the time, and the the CEO wanted to launch some businesses that they thought leverage the capabilities of the company.
Kimberly Williams
and, and, you know, honestly, I think I was one of the youngest people around. And he's like, you must know something about this technology. You go do this business and, it was a great experience. and one where I think I learned a lot, like I leveraged a lot of my kind of more academic or my, business acumen.
Kimberly Williams
But I think from, leadership perspective, it definitely showed some holes in areas, you know, I could be doing better. And I would specifically say in this situation, it was really important that we could I could leverage relationships with my peers so that we could get the customers of my peers. So maybe a business unit within the company to consider our service as the startup within this bigger company, so that peer to peer relationship became much more important than it had been previously.
Kimberly Williams
And, the CEO decided it would be really helpful for me to have a coach. I was somewhat resistant to the idea, but I would say that I it for me, it was a life changing experience to go through that process, more formal coaching process, and really got me to not just have lifelong learning as it relates to more kind of academic type topics, but also leadership topics.
Kimberly Williams
And I just became somebody who read a lot about leadership. maybe it was academic studies about leadership. What works, what doesn't work. but I really embraced a lot of new leadership. I think, approaches and really honed in on what I wanted my style as a leader to be different.
Rich Fernandez
That sounds like you had some assists there with, you know, folks who maybe had some experience, the mentorship, the peer coaching as well, like, all of it counts, right? Which makes me wonder about this next thing, you know, the multigenerational workforce. I mean, you just the example you just gave is a great example of like a generational interaction where, you know, they pulled you into a role because of were the generation you were we see that a lot these days.
Rich Fernandez
Right? There's in effect there's four generations working today. in the workforce, right. Disease, the millennials, the Xers and the boomers. You could, technically have that full generations in the workforce. So from your perspective, how do leaders, how can leaders best leverage a multi generational workforce?
Kimberly Williams
Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I'm I'm at the very, very I think the last month of the boomers. So right in between those boomers and, and the gen X people. So I can definitely relate to having a multi-generational workforce. I think, you know, one of the things that I have noticed is because of my age, I've been through three really large technology transformations.
Kimberly Williams
So the first one was the kind of advent of the PC. I was one of those, you know, as a kid, one of those, you know, first people to get a TSR, RadioShack, TSR 80. We didn't buy software at the time. You had to create your own software. and, you know, just loved playing around with it, but saw, you know, through the years, obviously, the change in how that, you know, really impacted business and, you know, people's lives generally.
Kimberly Williams
And then I saw the internet transformation that occurred, which also significantly altered, a lot of things about life and, the way we do business, the social impacts of the internet. And then now we have a lot of the AI, generation. And so for me to be able to like, remember, these are the things that happened, you know, and how fast it can happen, how broadly it impacts things.
Kimberly Williams
I think leveraging people have a lot of experiences. A lot of years of experiences can help, guide when you're in a situation like we are now with, the use of generative AI and how that's going to transform all the businesses. so, you know, I think trying to figure out what people know the best and leverage those experiences is really important.
Kimberly Williams
I also just think you have to recognize there's really there are not to stereotype because not every boomer is the same. Not every Gen Z is the same. But as you know, cohorts of employees, you have a lot of loyalty in your Gen Zers and your boomers that you don't necessarily have in generations that are younger. And so sometimes it takes some time to teach them new skills, especially on the technology front.
Kimberly Williams
But once you do, they're loyal and the tend to stay with use that investment to grow and develop them has a great ROI. and so I think just, you know, making sure that you keep that in mind because obviously somebody who's been born with, smartphone in their hands almost from the time they were eight years old is just going to feel a lot more comfortable with different technologies than somebody who, you know, like, I had to take typing when I was in high school.
Kimberly Williams
They made all the girls take typing, right, like it was. And I'm like, why are we not? Because I had already started to use PCs, am I right? I don't know, I'm just going to like, you know, how you can like, put, comments in code. I'm like, that's I made that my word processor. I just, I'm like, I'm not going to be using some typewriter.
Kimberly Williams
So but you have to recognize you have these people who are, you know, that's what their experiences were growing up. And so you just have a blend and and you need to manage that as a CEO or as an island leader in a company.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah I agree. And you know, the other component of that, I'm hearing a lot from our clients, for example, who have these four generations from a cultural perspective and a people and culture perspective as well. The expectations are different, right? I think, with the earlier generations, the Xers and the boomers, there is a sort of more, nose to the grindstone mentality.
Rich Fernandez
I know I was coming up and I got my career started in investment banks and like, those were like pretty long face time related hours, especially because I was supporting trading floors. you know what we're hearing a lot now, especially post-Covid. But in addition to that, just the expectations of the Zs and the millennials a little bit is this flexible environment, right?
Rich Fernandez
and, and other aspects of kind of bringing your whole self to work authenticity. You know, these human centric skills which our organization, that's what we spend our entire focus on, on training. But it presents differently across the generations in the workforce. And I was talking to a client the other day who was saying, I'm trying to strike that right balance.
Rich Fernandez
so that everybody's expectations, there's an understanding of how we're going to gather with these differing sets of expectations around the ways of working. Right. So I, I think that's also a challenge for a lot of leaders that we see.
Kimberly Williams
That can make you a better CEO, for sure. I know, I feel like the younger generation, at work really pushes me to make sure that I've got a better, I think, work environment that I have, like processes in place that help them have career paths and career plans and just recognizing they may not be at absorb like, but that's part of our kind of fiduciary responsibility as a company is how do we develop them.
Kimberly Williams
And even if it's you know, not something that they can achieve within our, you know, our structure of absorb that they can be successful somewhere else. I do think, you know, it's just a very different, loyalty level. I guess it's what I would say. And, and it makes me, I think, a better CEO because of it.
Kimberly Williams
Like, they expect more. And you have to deliver.
Rich Fernandez
You have to deliver. And I think it's important then also to just bring it what I call into the light of day. Right? Like, ask, what do you all need? You know, what are you wanting and what's needed for the industry and our culture and our expectations? And how do we kind of all find that kind of strike, that right balance?
Rich Fernandez
that's how I approach it. That's literally a client was asking me the day, how do I deal with my younger generations and the older generations? And I said, well, like, be in conversation, you know, have an open conversation about it. It's it's there. It's there in the system. And so you want to just bring it to the light of day and, and, and speak to it, you know, invite people to speak to it too.
Rich Fernandez
So that's super interesting. I mean, the workplace dynamic is, is changing so much. And when we think about learning and development solutions, for example, there's that age old question of how do you measure the effectiveness of old programs. And I know for you, Kimberly, also, this is a particularly, interesting question for you with regard. How do we measure the impact or the effectiveness of L&D in terms of promoting women's leadership?
Kimberly Williams
Yeah. you know, I think in general, I would very nicely tell you a little story about inclusion that I think is an interesting story, because for me, it was one of those things that kept with me. I think about it a lot when I'm in an interaction. I was in a meeting with some potential investors, and this is probably now like seven years ago, and there were three of us on our team there.
Kimberly Williams
So it was myself. There was somebody in the room who was from Iowa, and then there was another person in the room who, was a senior leader in our company but hadn't gone to college. So I'm a little bit of a backdrop. the person we were meeting with said something that was incredibly arrogant and offensive. Like, basically we're everybody listening to it on our end was like, boy, he thinks we're complete idiots.
Kimberly Williams
Like, that was just not a great comment. But what was fascinating to me was over dinner that night when the three of us were talking what was going through our head. So the person from Iowa said, I think he said that because I'm from Iowa, and he thinks that the only people smart in the world are the people who are the coastal elites and the person without a college degree said, oh, that's funny, because I thought he was saying it because I don't have a college degree.
Kimberly Williams
And so he thinks I'm stupid, right? And I said, well, what was going through my head is he must think I'm stupid because I'm a woman. And so what what I've kind of like, recognize is that everybody has their thing. You know, when we think about inclusion, we often think about gender inclusion or race inclusion or sexual preference.
Kimberly Williams
But it really goes beyond that. And everybody has something that they feel like has hampered their ability to excel at work or has hampered their ability to get promoted. And then what happens is anything that happens, people tend to see it through that lens, even if that's not the intent of the person. I mean, clearly we all laughed and said the guy just was kind of a jerk.
Kimberly Williams
Like it wasn't related to anything about us. It was really all about him. But I think that's one of my big learnings about leadership is that anything that happens, your employees generally are going to see it through their ones. I'm not a native English speaker. I'm in the United States. I'm not a native English speaker, and it's inhibiting my ability to get promoted.
Kimberly Williams
And they see those type of comments as they automatically associate it with that. And that's one of the challenges I think, that we have about diversity and inclusion in general is you're trying to balance two things. You're trying to know balance, like how do you really make sure that people are not stereotyping, making an effort to be inclusive.
Kimberly Williams
But you also have this other issue where almost every employee sees things through their own lens. And how do you teach them to recognize that they've been I call it a trigger, like, how do you recognize that you've been triggered and that reevaluate? This may not have been because I'm a woman, or this may not have been because I'm black or this may not have been because I don't have a college degree and try to go back to more of, just assuming in a sense and curiosity.
Kimberly Williams
And so I think it's a, a challenge that we have and clearly, you know, educating the workforce through a learning, you know, learning system is, is a great way to shine a light on that. But I also think it's making sure that you're talking about it with your employees and teaching them like, you know, about how they can, you know, both better be a proponent for others, but how the they themselves don't see everything through their lens.
Kimberly Williams
so it is a big interesting, problem for us. I would say overall not, you know, as a society overall. and so you had asked specifically about women.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. And measuring the effectiveness of those learning solutions, you know, when. So I loved your story and you know, it, it points to the fact that we all have sort of challenges to overcome, like within ourselves, to be effective leaders, to be effective learners. Right. And, how do we know that we're actually overcoming those and doing the learning and making that developmental leap?
Rich Fernandez
Right. So how do we measure the effectiveness of learning and development for promoting leadership, for promoting emerging leaders? You know, for for folks in general? Yeah.
Kimberly Williams
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that I and when I talk to customers, I encourage them to do is to think about the application portion of where they're applying the strategic learning system and what's the business goal of that, and then trying to make sure they've got the appropriate measures against it. So most recently we are going through some things about new employee onboarding.
Kimberly Williams
And obviously a lot of people use the, their learning system to do all their compliance training to sign off on policies and track all of that. But, you know, if you think about where, a lot of turnover occurs for companies, it's in the first year of employment. And, you know, nailing the compliance training might help a little bit, retaining those people.
Kimberly Williams
But what moves the needle from a retention and engagement perspective is how to use a learning system for connection. How do you use it for cultural assimilation? and so making sure that, you know, you're assigning tasks as part of the curriculum for them to have a one on one with, a culture mentor or to, maybe a peer mentor who can answer the, you know, how do we do this type of questions in addition to sort of building that relationship with their people leader?
Kimberly Williams
And so, you know, in that particular case, if you're focusing on cultural assimilation and connection, the metric you need to measure is what is your first year turnover rate? And did it go down once you implemented the, you know, these aspects of community cohort learning connection within the, your learning system? I think I encourage people to not just broadly think about, well, let's use it for our employee onboarding, but, well, what specifically are you trying to reduce your first year turnover?
Kimberly Williams
Are you trying to get people like to full productivity faster? And then that really drives what you end up measuring as part of the program. And it also helps you think through the focus of what you do. Right. So if you're working on connection and cultural assimilation, don't spend all of your time, you know, making the perfect compliance training because it's not going to drive the engagement and connection, right?
Kimberly Williams
So you've got to put the thought into, okay, I've got this tool. How do I use it to accomplish the goal? and so I think with women development, I think, you know, it's an interesting overall leadership is an interesting topic. one of the things that we have as headwinds is that the people who are, self promoting, so people who raise their hand and say, I want to be a leader, the most I've read a bunch of studies.
Kimberly Williams
Those actually are the least likely to be successful leaders. And so what you have to find are actually people who have maybe not raising their hand to say, I want to be a leader, but identifying those people that have the competencies and skills and the emotional quotient to be able to lead, and, and so it is an interesting dynamic because, you know, unlike many things where you can raise your hand and say, I want to do this and maybe you get good people out of that.
Kimberly Williams
In a leadership standpoint, it's typically not the people that are raising their hand. And so you have to be, just, I think, more diligent about identifying what types of people are going to be successful and encouraging them on that journey, rather than just relying on their hand raisers.
Rich Fernandez
And I couldn't agree more. And I mean, back to your story about high school, your high school basketball team, and how you kind of bolstered that two guard. Right. I'm thinking about teams and leadership teams in particular, coming together to think about pull through rates, advancement, promotion. And now, of course, I'm biased. I used to run talent management at eBay.
Rich Fernandez
I used to run executive development at Google. So, you know, I've seen my share of leadership development. and what I've seen is when the teams, actually the senior teams, are really coming together in a collaborative way and looking at, you know, the performance potential matrix at looking at like the development opportunities that they could slot people into and not necessarily, as you say, those who have raised their hands, but those who have been demonstrating leadership both on the what and the how.
Rich Fernandez
Both are the business and technical results, but also on the sort of being, the champions and culture carriers, and having that robust conversation and leveraging all of those, I guess, for lack of a better word, human capital tools. Right. and doing it deliberately. I think that's what I heard you say to being intentional about leadership and how you want to promote other leadership and give those folks the experience, whether they're experiences, because we certainly had those, for example, we, you know, and, lots of organizations have their hypo programs or emerging leader programs, you know, and those are great and connective, but I think it's also the task of the current
Rich Fernandez
senior leadership to really be deliberate the way you're in high school, you and your dad in high school were deliberate about the two guard that you need it.
Kimberly Williams
You know that you talk about the what and how, and obviously then you have the leadership side, at least for me. I'm a big believer in servant leadership. And so, you know, finding people that are, caring, empathetic, enabling their teams as opposed to the one who wants to take all the credit and be the the one who has all the answers.
Kimberly Williams
Like, I'm just a big believer in that approach of leadership, but I think what's interesting, when you kind of back up early in somebody's career and you think about somebody who is caring and empathetic, you also and feel like as, you know, more senior person in the organization, this person would be really great in a support role because they have that caring, nurturing aspect.
Kimberly Williams
And so you move them into jobs that are, you know, maybe sales enablement as opposed to kind of SDR, SDR manager type of a thing. You move them into an HR role of some kind versus delivering numbers. You move them into, just things that are more supporting of the what and how. And then the problem that you get into then is when you're looking for someone that's, you know, be your next chief revenue officer.
Kimberly Williams
The people that have a lot of those caring, empathetic attributes were pushed into a job where they didn't do the what and how and didn't have to deliver numbers. And so I think that's also a challenge that a lot of companies have, that I would say you have to be really cognizant that you're keeping your, whether they're female or male, these caring, empathetic people in line positions so that they're equipped to take that C-level role, you know, COO job, CRO job, which obviously is more of a path to a CEO typically than somebody who's gone into, like legal general counsel, CEO.
Kimberly Williams
It just doesn't happen as often to come up, through a staff position. and so I think one of the challenges that many companies have is they just don't have enough diversity in their line positions, and then it makes it difficult for them to get that what, how experience to then progress in the company.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah, because I think it stems from a cognitive error that says that you if you have some sort of people related skills empathy for example, that yeah, then you should be pushed off into a support function, not to sit, not to criticize support functions. But, you know, the idea that that that these things can't co-occur. I mean, Kim, your own self-description in your biography is equal parts strategic and empathic, and you've been a very successful technology leader.
Rich Fernandez
You increase, you know, revenue fivefold in, in your last company. and you can bring all of those. I think we don't like to hold complexity and understand that people can have many different attributes. It's not just check the leadership or it's not just people leadership. It can actually co-occur and in in a very powerful way. You're not compromising anything because you have, you know, these people leadership skills.
Rich Fernandez
So I see all the time that people sort of gloss over that or as you said, shunt people off into, more of a support function than kind of those central functions that lead to the, the, you know, top most leadership roles, which I think is also at a very interesting question at this point in the emergence of AI and sort of the shifting the third wave of technology.
Rich Fernandez
You said there's three distinct eras of technology, right, earlier that you've lived through, and now we're in this next era where AI is predominating. What's your perspective on balancing? You know, technical and I relate skills with what I'm going to call people have called them soft skills. I think that is the wrong word. Another cognitive error there a core skills right there.
Rich Fernandez
Core skills because you got to work with other people enough done to create influence, to get investors, to get customers. You got to work with other people, right. And so there are core essential skills. But then there's the technical skills and the core essential skill. What's your view on the balance between those in this new emergent reality with AI?
Kimberly Williams
Yeah, I'm not sure. It's changed a lot. I would say I, I, I mean I obviously the, the, the type of technology, is changing for sure, but I don't see that you're going to be able to maybe use AI exclusively and be an expert there. You even if like even if you say because I use as like outside can you play right.
Kimberly Williams
That's to sound a little bit more this way when I'm doing an email, you know, but you have to have the emotional quotient to recognize the tone you want. Right? And so I'm not sure that you can say AI is going to completely, you know, replace the need to have great emotional leadership. I would also say that, you know, the number of times I have to go back, my second prompt into Chat GTP and say, can you make this sound a little bit more diverse than you've made it sound is incredible.
Kimberly Williams
Like, I am a little bit surprised how, I would say in this particular case, probably male centric things are when you get responses back from Chat GTP, and you'd think it would be just such an easy thing to weave in a little bit more diversity, to it, or at least kind of a filter of that when you're getting responses.
Kimberly Williams
So I worry sometimes that the AI will reinforce stereotypes that we have about races, religions, genders, sexual preference, any of that. so but I think it is getting better. I have noticed, you know, less having to do less of that.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. And the other from pulling a pull fleet back, the back. Me for me, you know, as AI starts to address a lot of operational work, you, you know, a lot of people talking about doing the kind of AI, doing the heavy lifting. I think it frees us up to build relationships more in fact, it necessitates us building better relationships.
Rich Fernandez
The more we have AI operationalized, the more we need to operationalize our emotional intelligence skills in order to better collaborate. Because now we're not so preoccupied with as much operational detail we can get on with. And how do we actually collaborate and scale this up in a different way? So I think it presents new opportunities for work and for cross cooperation and influence.
Rich Fernandez
But you got to have those skills, right. And that's those are or people skills that I will talk about correlation skills. so I do think AI, both in its substance and what it's trained on, to your point, can use some work in terms of bringing in the diverse voices and perspectives. But I also think that, you know, once you are harnessing AI in a significant way, you need the core skills to be able to basically sell the outputs right to your stakeholders.
Kimberly Williams
Right. And I but I think it's on the we still have to encourage, or we have to, ensure people understand the importance of that. Right, as opposed to just I'm going to go solve even more problems. Yes. Because you can use the, the, time you generate in a variety of ways. Right. And so how do we, teach people the importance of, of applying that extra time they may have freed up towards?
Kimberly Williams
How do you impart change? And imparting change really means you've got to tap into kind of the personal relationship side of things and get people that to come along with you, right?
Rich Fernandez
Absolutely. and it's and forever lifelong learning process as we like to say, in fact, that I know you yourself are a lifelong learner, and maybe we can end, just by talking again, a little bit about your journey and how you ended up, sort of full circle at a company such as absorb, which focuses on learning.
Kimberly Williams
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I'll, I'll go back to just kind of getting a break early in my career when, you know, they said, hey, we go to this startup. And that really got me into the technology space. And, at the time, we did not call it a SAS company. We called it an application service provider and ASP, and it was basically the same sort of subscription model that we see in the SAS world today.
Kimberly Williams
And I'm really thankful that I had I love technology and had always used it personally. but I would say that it was nice to like break into being in the technology industry. and I just had a number of, you know, different positions that, you know, it was, e-commerce, like more of, like a Shopify type product.
Kimberly Williams
That was what the startup was back in the day. Then was more of a point of sale type of a product for, for quick service restaurants. And then I went to consumer safety technology, which was like more of like an embedded system. Internet of Things product. And that was an interesting experience. but when I was at the last company CST, we had an investor called Welsh, Carson, Anderson, Stowe.
Kimberly Williams
They made an investment in the business in 2017. They then made an investment in Absorb in May of 2021, and I was still running CST at the time, but we were about to exit at that point for Welsh Carson was about to exit their investment and they said, you know, the, the founder of, Absorb is going to be moving into a board position as more and more of an advisory role versus having like, the day to day responsibilities of running the company.
Kimberly Williams
Are you interested in moving over to Absorb? And so I think some of it's just, you know, kind of having the right skills, because I had already had a number of experiences, but also being in the right place at the right time. Which of course, we know is always, you know, luck always plays into it. Right?
Rich Fernandez
So absolutely. And you know, that alignment as well. I get the sense from you that Leon learning and growth and leadership is, is a central part of your life story and your journey. so it's so wonderful to see you, you know, at the helm here of a company that promotes that at scale in the world.
Kimberly Williams
And I don't know, like what your background when like, your, family came to the United States, but my family, you know, came from. Well, one side was here for a really long time. My dad's side, they came over, you know, like in the 1700s or something. They've been here a long time. But, my mother side was more recent immigrants from Poland.
Kimberly Williams
And, you know, I can't say enough about the, well, one, the courage it took for my grandparents to come to a country where they didn't know the language and didn't know what was it going to, you know, they were going to expect in anything else. But they were really instrumental, I think, in teaching me that lifelong learning, kind of mindset, that they really believed that education was the route to change somebody's life and from a very early age and still be important of, you know, no one can ever take away your education.
Kimberly Williams
You know, you might lose your house, you might lose your car. but no one can ever take away that education. And it's, I think they really instilled from a really early age the importance of that. I think all of their grandchildren went on to get master's degrees. and so I think, you know, it was started early in my life and just continued and hopefully then still that same thing in my own child.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah, I, I can totally relate. You know, I'm first generation Filipino American. And for me, it's also been, you know, the lifelong learning process has been about understanding broadly like, you know, what are these forces that brought us here to this place in the world, me in my life and, you know, my family and so forth.
Rich Fernandez
But also, where do I want to go and how do I want to bring those threads together? I feel like I have a very global perspective. I lived in the Philippines. I lived in Europe, the United States, and worked in all those places. and so, it's essential to be able to have lifelong learning, to navigate all of that well and to, you know, provide something of service.
Rich Fernandez
I think I've been a huge student of human nature since I can remember, even as a kid, because I've been so curious about all these things. And that coupled with like a strong passion for education, you know, I went and got my advanced degrees. So it's a it's a, I guess in some ways a similar story, from such different geographies.
Rich Fernandez
It's something we all benefit from. And it's wonderful to be in conversation with you today as a, as a fellow traveler and leader in the space learning. So, you know, thank you so much, Kimberly. it's really great conversation. Yeah.
Kimberly Williams
Thank you. Rich.
Rich Fernandez
All right. Take care everyone.
