Shaun Perkins Podcasts

Episode 85 boasts a special guest, Zhenya Yevtushenko, the great poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's son, who talks about his dad, reads his poetry, and discusses his legacy. and his life in Tulsa and points beyond. The opening music snippet is from Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 based on Yevtushenko's poem "Babi Yar," with Oleg Tsibulko conducting the Russ…

Guest: Ariel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Navan As a business travel-focused startup, Navan (previously known as TripActions) was heavily impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020; after laying off 24% of the staff, CEO Ariel Cohen says he became a “wartime CEO,” spending three months in “complete denial and just executing.” By June, employees w…

Episode 84: Off the Beaten Path explores the most misunderstood poem in the world, diverges into misunderstood song lyrics, and includes a multitude of poetic ways of seeing what a "path" is and which one you are on. There's a little bit of wacky to satisfy the "wacky" in our name, of course.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Seth Dallaire, CRO at Walmart When Seth Dallaire was approached by Walmart about joining their team as CRO, he had one question: Are they serious? Seth knew that Walmart wanted him for his digital experience, having worked at Instacart and Amazon, but he also knew that building alternative revenue streams at a traditional retailer could be a…

Episode 83: She Seen Gunholes takes us into the wacky world of incident calls reported in our local paper in the POLICE BLOTTER column. Of necessity, the entries are heavy on nouns and verbs and guess what else is . . . poetry. We have found our calling.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Matt Mochary, CEO of Mochary Method Matt Mochary was only 31 when he sold the company he co-founded, Totality, to Verizon, “and I made enough money that that was it,” he recalls. “I didn’t have to make more money anymore.” Instead, he decided to pursue projects that in one way or another would help other people, including a documentary about…

Episode 82: Old Bobi the Dog is about the oldest living dog and dogs we have loved, dogs that are suitable for poetry . . . or not. Dogs who hide under trailers. Dogs named Toby Keith. Dogs everywhere. Dog Dog. Arf!By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Shoaib Makani, CEO of Motive “When we fail,” says Shoaib Makani, “it is because we have not understood the customer problem deeply and allowed them to guide us.” This wisdom is hard-won: Motive’s first product, an app for fleet management of trucks, idled for four years before becoming a runaway success story. Emboldened by this, the CEO tri…

Episode 81: Plague Doctor Rat Taxidermy is precisely what it sounds like, a foray into the world of taxidermy, well, sort of, and literary taxidermy, cool plague doctor rats and all things stuffed or stuffing. ALSO, be sure to enter the Literary Taxidermy Contest and win a free WPL t-shirt! Enjoy!By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Tom Hale, CEO of Oura When he was growing up, Tom Hale’s family had pretty ordinary dinner-table conversations: What happened today, how was school, etc. But every day after dinner, Tom and his father would play backgammon, an experience that indirectly taught him a lot about business. Now the CEO of wearable health company Oura, he recalls …

Episode 80: War Monster steps back to let the Poppy Lady speak. She stands in the museum in the theme area about WAR. Write your war experience haunting you on a red poppy card and offer it to her. We read some of the offerings.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Rachel Pike, COO at Modern Treasury Payment operations startup Modern Treasury is not afraid to do things in “our own weird way,” says COO Rachel Pike. Its values statement is a 150 word essay, it has gone viral by writing about nerdy ACH payments minutiae, and it has an unusual rule for quarterly internal reviews: No slides. Instead, depart…

Episode 79: Lizards Will Be Running was originally titled Skinks in May, and it is about skinks and about May and about skinks in May, but it is about so much more, dear listener, so very much more. Enjoy! Opening bird song recorded by Bill Guthrie.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Ashley Kramer, CMO & CSO of GitLab One day, when Ashley Kramer was an SVP at Alteryx, one of her direct reports hit her with a dose of reality: “She said, ‘I think you are trying to put me on a path to be you, and to have your job. I don’t want any of that.’” Now the CMO and CSO of GitLab, Kramer — who has been a perfectionist since childhoo…

Episode 78: Reba has Pockets may or may not mention Reba McEntire, but it is all about pockets, particularly POEM IN YOUR POCKET DAY, and we are quite sure that Reba would stuff a poem in the pocket of one of her pairs of REBA jeans!By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Jen Vescio, Chief Business Development Officer at Uber and founder of Awestruck Ventures If you were to look at Jen Vescio’s calendar, it might look like a pack of Skittles: Every single one of her meetings is color-coded according to the Insights Color Focus system, which assigns the colors red, blue, yellow, and green based on what methods…

Episode 77: Hunt and Peck begins with a wonderful ode to typewriters by Zhenya Yevtushenko and proceeds to give you a bunch of useless information about typewriters. Qwerty Qwerty Qwerty . . . Guffaw! Guffaw! Guffaw!By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO and Chairman of Palo Alto Networks Nikesh Arora has been in the C-Suite for more than two decades, including a 10-year stint as Google’s chief business officer and — most recently — five years as Palo Alto Networks’ CEO. But the COVID-19 pandemic made him radically reconsider the gap between the executive floor and the rest…

Episode 76: 76 is not an episode where we couldn't think of a title. It's actually episode #76 about the #76. We have our reasons, both poetic and popular. Then again, we are full of snot and Grenache, too.By Shaun Perkins

Guests: Alex Smith and Shaun Livingston, former players for the San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors “I just thought, the best of my life is behind me.” That’s what former NFL quarterback Alex Smith recalls of a devastating leg fracture in 2018 that threatened to end his football career forever. Former NBA guard Shaun Livingston suffered a…

Episode 75: Oklahoma Bookshelf delves into a imagery-filled Oklahoma found poem by a local writer and podcast fan and includes numerous bad Chuck Norris jokes and Bill’s attempts to deflect Shaun from continuing to make them. Also, some great poems by some Oklahoma poets now on display in the oklaPOEThoma exhibit in the museum.…

Guest: Andre Iguodala, forward for the Golden State Warriors The average professional basketball career lasts around four years. By the first time Andre Iguodala came to play for the Golden State Warriors, in 2013, he was already on year 10 in the NBA. “All I wanted to do was get somewhere where I just truly enjoy going to work every day,” he says.…

Episode 74: Trash and Treasure is about precisely that, or more imprecisely, about women and how you can't put them on a pedestal, nor can you bury them under it. Can we just learn how to be decent human beings? No. Okay . . . well, let's just read some poems and tell trashy jokes then.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Al Gore, Former Vice President and chairman of The Climate Reality Project Al Gore has been talking about all kinds of renewable energy for decades. The former U.S. Vice President, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and star of An Inconvenient Truth says it’s “thrilling” to see things like wind power and sustainable forestry becoming the norm. But as…

Episode 73: Stalked and Branded is a sort of continuation of Episode 72, where we discuss more poet stalking information around the Ruth Finley case, plus other poets as stalkers or stalkers as poets and carving poems in desks. Oh, also a branding or two.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti, CRO of Zapier “I live in a constant state of paranoia,” says Zapier CRO Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti, “which I guess is healthy and unhealthy.” A lifelong hard worker who shows up early and stays late, GC could have kept his job at team collaboration company Atlassian, which he joined before the company even offered stock…

Episode 72: Poet as Stalker diverges from the normal WPL path and into serial killer/stalker territory with a true crime case not far from home. When poetry is therapy, when it is threat, when it is . . . therapy once again. And in the midst of it all: Blood and railroad tracks.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Claire Hughes Johnson, author of Scaling People and Corporate Officer at Stripe Former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson’s new book, Scaling People, is not your typical business book: Informed by her experience scaling one of the most valuable private companies in the world, it’s a tactical reference manual, “almost like a textbook,” aimed at…

Episode 71: Agent Hunger and the Flaming Ducks is the working title of a new fantasy novel about a world where a secret agent is aided by a band of pyromaniac fowl in a land devastated by a poultry apocalypse . . . just kidding. It's about the poetic symbolism of fire . . . and ducks.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Rania Succar, CEO of Intuit Mailchimp Ten years out of college, and with two advanced degrees under her belt, Rania Succar knew she wanted to be an operator. Taking a job at Google taught her a lot, but she chafed under the limitations imposed on her control and personal impact. At Intuit, she finally found what she had been searching for: “…

Episode 70: Love Is . . . begins with a knock knock joke and concludes with a fart joke. In between, there is Shakespeare and the biology of truth and trust as explained with a cell diagram by Dr. Bill, and through it all . . . ah! . . . the power of metaphor!By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Lesley Young, CRO of Gem Lesley Young’s favorite book is “The Obstacle Is The Way,” in which Ryan Holiday argues that the process of working hard to achieve something is more important than the achievement itself. When you find yourself in a position of leadership, the Gem CRO says, “you realize there’s a lot of wisdom that you’ve gained in …

Episode 69: Rhianna is Pregnant is perhaps not about Rhianna, but you will just have to listen to find out. You may discover it's about the poetic things that people have left in the world for others to see . . . or perhaps not see. Or maybe it's about the little known news that Rhianna is pregnant.By Shaun Perkins

Guest: Javier Molina, CRO of Starburst Starburst CRO Javier Molina’s peers, former colleagues, and even his wife often tell him the same thing: He’s difficult to read. That doesn’t mean he’s not listening, though. In fact, he’s focusing on many different things such as speech patterns, the words being used, and the priority of those words while sim…

Episode 68: It's the Real Thing is not about a Coca Cola ad, which you would not even think about anyway if you are under the age of 55, but it is about hands, hand in hand, fingerprints on one's hands, Ma Barker's gang of outlaws during the Depression and . . . hands, particularly Nancy June's hands and her lovely poem.…

All of Dennis Lyandres’ mentors — and even his parents — thought he was making a mistake when he joined Procore in 2014. At the time, he was working at the “it” company in Silicon Valley, Cloudera, and the startup was more than 10 years old without any major wins under its belt. But he knew someone “was gonna build a massive company” in constructio…

Episode 67: Lady Gaga Scarecrow is actually about scarecrows, which we dare to discuss in winter, as this poem left in the museum pissed off Shaun but then it was all right and then, it becomes a pretty good poem or "pome," as the case may be. Bill reads it 3 or 4 times. We lose count and then we talk about Lady Gaga in her lampshade dress and stuf…

In the middle of the Great Recession, Thomas Dohmke quit a stable job at a good company because “I wanted to build stuff again.” Specifically, he was inspired by the release of the first software development kit for iOS, and wanted to be part of the mobile revolution. Two companies later and halfway around the world, he is the CEO of software devel…

Episode 66: Murder Poets is really only about one murdering poet, but it’s also about a poet writing about that murdering poet and . . . also Barbie and Ken. In all seriousness, we celebrate the winning poem from our Okie Outlaw Poem Contest, which Bill McCloud wrote: a lovely lyric about Bonnie Parker, herself a proclaimed poet. Reba McEntire also…

Freshworks president Dennis Woodside copes with stress by running as often as he can, a habit that began when he was CEO of Motorola Mobility. So far, he has run “16 to 17” Ironman triathlons. He’s also continually challenging himself in his professional life, leaving Motorola in 2014 to advise the founder-CEOs: Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Impossible F…

Episode 65: Fallen Woman takes you on a journey to the roadside haunts of a female in distress, a Precious Moments doll (to be honest), rescued by Bill and the instigator for Frankenstein-like transformation and poetry and tales of empathy of those who cannot suffer a naked baby doll. Yeah . . . that about covers it. OH, ALSO! Suggest a name for th…

The best advice Brex founder and co-CEO Henrique Dubugras ever received came from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel: The best CEOs, Spiegel told him, are “extremely authentic to themselves ... If you try to emulate being Elon Musk and you’re not like that, you’re just gonna fail.” This wisdom has empowered Dubugras and his co-founder, Pedro Franceschi, to focu…

Episode 64: Rodeo Clown has us tripping through the land of Couplets and Clowns, of the rodeo kind, in particular. Learn about the history of the rodeo clown, the joys of the couplet and hone your clown joke skills, while riding in a barrel through the 30 luxurious minutes of this episode. You know you want to.…

“When you create something,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, “that gives you the ability to help and do good and achieve for the most people possible.” Bill left his first corporate job at Xerox for a short stint at Gartner, then served as CEO of SAP for nearly a decade. He made one more transition three years ago because he saw a great opportu…

Episode 63: Wooly-Headed Decline takes its name from a computer-generated poem about loss. Never fear: Real poems are also a part of this episode, along with restless shadows, brain dissection, losing one's marbles and general cluelessness involving the meaning of the lyrics in Steely Dan's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number."…

With more than 1,200 employees, it isn’t easy for Gong co-founder and CEO Amit Bendov to stay in touch with everyone. So, his team has established a series of regular programs to communicate the company’s priorities and give workers a chance to ask questions. And despite the revenue intelligence company’s scale, they’ve established a core value cal…

Episode 62: Abject Terror takes its title from Professor Darren Hick’s response when he realized his students were using a program that writes essays for them. Thus, this is not a Halloween episode or a Poe or King story, but it could be–depending on your sensibilities. Bill and Shaun discuss computers writing poetry and the end of the world as we …

Jon Levin has been teaching at Stanford for more than 20 years, and has been the dean of the famous Graduate School of Business since 2016. Although teaching at Stanford puts him in contact with some of the most promising future entrepreneurs in tech, he says he hasn’t yet been tempted to leave academia for a startup because “I actually love being …

Episode 61: Fish are Biting Today details the inner workings of the fish mind, a wonderful poem by a visitor to the museum and a wonderful poem by Elizabeth Bishop, a memory of floating turds and various and sundry other memories. Do tell.By Shaun Perkins

“Think about the pandemic without the internet,” says Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn. The world’s sudden shift to doing almost everything online only worked because network engineers, IT administrators, and internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare had done the work. Michelle says that, both personally and professionally, she…