Bridging Startup Culture and Traditional Auto with Ted Serbinski

[Transcript]

[00:00:00] Jan Griffiths: Welcome to the Automotive Leaders Podcast, where we help you prepare for the future by sharing stories, insights, and skills from leading voices in the automotive world with a mission to transform this industry together. I'm your host, Jan Griffiths. That passionate, rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales with over 35 years of experience in our beloved auto industry and a commitment to empowering fellow leaders to be their best authentic selves.

Stay true to yourself, be you, and lead with Gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership. Let's dive in.

This episode is brought to you by Lockton. Lockton redefines business insurance and people solutions with a personal touch. Their global team of 11,000 is driven by independence, not quarters, to tailor success for your business. Discover the Lockton difference, where your goals become their mission. Independence is not just how you think but how you act.

In our beloved automotive industry, we often struggle with this idea of startup culture and technology. We know we want it. We know we want all the new technology, and we want to engage with those startup companies, but sometimes, in traditional Autoland, we don't know how to do that. When we're faced with young startup entrepreneurs who think differently, act differently, behave differently, and have all the passion and energy around the product but are not so familiar with the ways in which we do business in the auto industry. Sometimes there's a problem. So, today, I wanted to go to the pioneer of the startup culture in Detroit, in the mobility space, and that is Ted Serbinski. Ted, welcome to the show.

[00:02:24] Ted Serbinski: Thank you for having me. Excited to be here and talk all things tech in Detroit.

[00:02:29] Jan Griffiths: Let's do it. First of all, Ted, who are you as a leader?

[00:02:35] Ted Serbinski: As a leader, I think of myself as a trailblazer, always trying new things to learn about the new paths, the new ways, and then share what I've learned with others to kind of follow. I'm not afraid to try new things or crazy things that people think aren't going to work, and I always come at it from an approach of learning and sharing, and we're all better off the more we can move forward together.

[00:03:04] Jan Griffiths: What shaped the entrepreneurial spirit in you and that leadership in you? What happened in your background and in your story that shaped that?

[00:03:12] Ted Serbinski: I think what happened in my background is probably a little bit of actual rebellion. I grew up in a military family. My dad was in the Navy for 27 years, and we've lived all over the United States. And I think there was in my DNA and my personality that I've always been a creator, a maker, loved playing with Legos growing up, SimCity. Dad would teach me how to work on cars and make things, and so there's always this component of making, creating, and learning. And I think what I learned in college when I went to Cornell for computer engineering was how to rebel against some of the ‘what rules you follow? What rules do you not have?’ Sort of nature. And the funny thing I like to share is I'm a computer engineer, and I graduated without taking statistics. And everyone I tell that to, they're like, 'How did you graduate without taking statistics?' In retrospect, I wish I would have, but what I figured out was that when I was at Cornell, I interned at Intel back in 2003, and we were working on some crazy 32 multicore chips. And I realized it was too boring for me. I didn't like just sitting there, the electric, the gates, how does this thing work? I was drawn towards the web, the internet, and websites, and I ended up making a tool called Triage bug reports for computer design. And when I got back to Cornell, I asked, 'Hey, can I do information science, this web thing?' This was back in 2002, and it wasn't yet a major, but they said you can make your own major as long as you got a Dean's approval. So, I ended up taking classes in law school around patent law, hotel school around strategy and business, and winemaking and wine tasting. I was able to somehow graduate without taking statistics. And I kind of look back to always figuring out what those loopholes are. What do you have to do to move forward? And I think that's really what shaped a lot of how I think about innovation and technology.

[00:05:22] Jan Griffiths: And then what brought you to Detroit?

[00:05:25] Ted Serbinski: What brought me to Detroit was another one of these rebellious type things. I was living in San Francisco; I had sold my first startup 52 days before the market crashed in 2008. Timing's everything. This was back 2006 through 2008. So, we were in the web community era. We had built the largest network for parents. I wasn't a parent, but my co-founder was, and we had sold that to Lifetime Television, which brought me from Washington, DC, out to San Francisco. When I was out there, I just loved it, but I'm also an East Coast, Midwest type of person. And one day in 2011, just a cold email to Dan Gilbert and his team. I saw that there was Detroit Venture Partners, and two months later, I was out in Detroit in 2011 and thinking to myself, 'What have I done?'

[00:06:22] Jan Griffiths: And then, you founded the Detroit Techstars.

[00:06:27] Ted Serbinski: Yeah. So, when I came out here, what I discovered was just a passion for the area and the region. Dan Gilbert had just moved Quicken Loans downtown, and the Madison building, kind of one of his first buildings, was opening up. We were building a venture fund to get ventures and startups working; it's really a community. It can't be just one person or one investor. And so we were trying to bring Techstars to town, and we ended up bringing Techstars to town, and I left Detroit Venture Partners to figure out how to build an automotive-connected car platform program in Detroit with Techstars. And this was back in 2014, so cruise was not acquired yet. Mobility was not a thing. It was unclear if we could even do innovative investing in the Detroit region.

[00:07:20] Jan Griffiths: Yeah, wow. Well, imagine, I mean, look at where it is now. As you look back, what do you think about where it came from today?

[00:07:28] Ted Serbinski: It's amazing to see what's happened over the last decade, but it's also still early in the life cycle. Early on, Brad Feld, who had started Techstars, was from Foundry Group out of Colorado; he had written books on startup communities, and he always came back to it takes 20 years because you need businesses to start, grow, and exit. And those things take time, five to 10 years for an average startup or even longer. And so, as I look back over the last 10- 15 years, it's been amazing, the progress that's been made, and all of the challenges that have been worked around and worked through. And so, I'm very optimistic about the next ten years, the next 15 years, and where things are going. It's amazing to see, but still a lot of work to do.

[00:08:17] Jan Griffiths: When you were at Techstars, you contracted with 15 corporate innovation partners, including Ford, Verizon, Magna, Dana, Honda, Michelin, Siemens, and Bosch, so a lot of traditional auto companies, a lot of traditional tier ones. As you look at the progress we've made and the experience that you have, what advice would you give to the tier ones out there who are struggling to engage with the startup community or need some help to accelerate how they're engaging with the startup community? What would you tell them?

[00:08:53] Ted Serbinski: Yeah. So, when we launched the Techstars program in 2014, Bill Ford announced it to the world actually the day after Detroit exited bankruptcy, and there's an article or the picture on the front page of the Detroit Free Press: Detroit exits bankruptcy, and on the left side was Techstars, tech startups are coming to town. And it was really that juxtaposition of kind of this old and this new really on this front page, and this was a decade ago. And at the time, Ford was really forward-thinking. Bill Ford thought about mobility as a human right and the ability of people and things to move around. Magna, one of the other suppliers, started out with a very similar mindset, and in Verizon, from a connected point of view, as we got the program launched, we designed it in a way where we wanted it to be a consortium of partners. Automotive has lots of OEMs and suppliers. It's a whole ecosystem. It's not one company. And so, over time, we brought on, like you said, over 15 partners. And so we had OEM, suppliers, service makers, and I think the biggest thing that I noticed was, and we ran this program for over five years, there is this challenge of waiting for the results, and innovation takes a long time and you plant the seeds, but then six months later you reorganize your company. You're pulling up those seeds, even though they're starting to sprout underneath the ground, and then you just don't give it enough time to really grow. And when I look at this what Ford had did with launching as one of the key partners of this Techstars program to the opening of Michigan Central later this year, in about a decade, those startups that they helped seed have now started to grow their establishing presence at Newlab including HAAS Alert and others. And so, it just takes time. I think that's the biggest challenge of any corporation, and even in particular, auto, is it takes time. And so, publicly traded companies are at odds up and down with the markets, but at the same time, you need to have this long forward-looking point of view of when it's going to take five to 10 years; how do we know if it's working? In the meantime, we might reorganize our company 20 times, so all these things are at odds with each other.

[00:11:32] Jan Griffiths: Yeah, I've interviewed some other guests, and they've talked about the fact that what really stifles innovation is the traditional model that we have in automotive, in most legacy businesses actually, and that is this focus on the quarter and the month and the numbers and the results. And so, there's not this tolerance for long-term vision, as you say, to let these seeds sprout and grow, but you may also have to reorganize and pivot a hundred different times along that journey, and that's not something that we like to do.

[00:12:09] Ted Serbinski: Right. I remember the first kind of wave was autonomy. So, back in 2015 to 2016, when Cruise was acquired, there was this huge surge of everything's going autonomy: Silicon Valley was going to win, Detroit was going to lose, and so this narrative started to emerge. And I remember I was pretty clear that I was like, even if we figure out autonomy today, it's not going to happen because there are hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road. They aren't going to disappear just because we figured out how to make one drive by itself. And if we look to other industries, like the rise of the internet in the late 90s or early 2000s, one of the biggest challenges was just uptime, and so if anyone used Twitter, there was kind of this fail whale like Twitter's down again, websites are down again. It took 20 years; we have that reliability today; it's rare to see a website go down. But it's been 20-25 years to get that reliability. Autonomy is going to be very similar. We may have cars that are driving themselves, but driving them reliably is probably going to take 20 years. And so, all the money, the hype that was dumped into it then ignored, the next hype which submerged very quickly: everything going EV, and the same thing, the race to EV, a little bit different because that was kind of augmenting the existing vehicles, not trying to replace the human, and now it's AI there was blockchain in between. I think there's a challenge. Where is actual innovation happening? How does it apply to the industry? But then there's that long-term effect as well.

[00:13:52] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. You've looked at the 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership, and I'm curious about your perspective because you have not worked in the traditional automotive industry, and your thinking is not clouded by the way that we operate. What is the most important trait of a leader in the automotive industry today? Who wants to be innovative, who wants to be able to engage with startup companies, and who wants to move their company forward? It's kind of a long-winded way of asking questions, but what trait do you think is most important?

[00:14:31] Ted Serbinski: I think the most important trait is trustworthiness. It kind of dovetails into honesty and integrity, and the reason I say that is startups can last a long time; that journey isn't a year or two; it's a decade or more. I think, on average, the stat is a startup that raises money from venture capitalists will have a relationship with their venture capitalists longer than the average US marriage. You're married more to your investors than to someone that you're actually have a personal relationship with, just statistically looking at it. And so, if you can imagine the trust issues in a marriage and in a relationship, startups got those, and in times even more because it's even more complicated. And so, I think what I see over and over again is, yeah, we want to work with you; six months later, it's like I changed jobs or my boss changed mine, and it's like there's no authentic relationship there. And I cautioned startups, like you may not want to work with automotive companies, like maybe eventually you do, but like they're elephants, you're a little mouse, they're just going to step on you, and it's hard to have that culture of we take care of what we say we're going to do. And so, to me, it's really that trust piece that is the most important and also very complex with just the dynamics of life and business.

[00:16:06] Jan Griffiths: You know, it's interesting that you say that I just finished a presentation to MEMA in a joint session with their Emerging Leaders Council and General Motors, and we talked a lot about supplier collaboration, working collaboratively with suppliers, and trust. So, often in this industry, trust is breached and broken constantly because we play the power game. The OEMs have the power, but the tier ones do not. The OEMs punch the tier ones, the tier ones punch back as much as they can, and then it goes all the way down the chain, and that model of behavior and that culture has to change. Otherwise, startups are not going to engage, are they?

[00:16:53] Ted Serbinski: Right, and that's what I see over and over. As the startup, time is on their side, and so they might not be as big or have other resources around money and clout, and things, but if time is on their side, if they're wasting time with this company, they're going to work with another company. And so, it's less about they're not going to work with the auto industry, but they're going to work with a different partner in that auto industry. What's the one that's like has that reputation of trust? I had gotten an email earlier today from a friend actually down in Alabama, and he said, 'Can I connect you to this startup founder?' And he said in his message, like, 'Hey, Ted, we'd really like to connect. You're in the Detroit area, but you have a reputation for helping founders and letting founders trust you.' And I think that's, to me, like something I really focus on myself. When you look at it from a corporation point of view, it's really hard, like what startups trust automotive companies and OEM suppliers? I don't even know if that list exists or who I'd put on that list. But if you look at Facebook or maybe at Google or Apple, there is a different level of trust to some degree. But I'd say that's an opportunity. It's really a top-down, at the CEO and board level. Do we want to build that track record, that trust where innovation and small companies can work with us because we're going to do the right thing?

[00:18:17] Jan Griffiths: It's more a nurturing coaching mindset rather than position and power, isn't it?

[00:18:24] Ted Serbinski: Right. Just that mindset, like you said, kind of that coaching. I have four little kids. It's the parent-child relationship like they have to be able to trust you, but you also have to be able to help them grow and give them the freedom to grow too, and it's hard in this innovative culture. The startups are like, 'We're gonna disrupt an OEM or supplier. We're gonna put them out of business,' or 'No, you can't put us out of business.' And like you said, it's that power struggle. And so, I think it depends on whether this is a growth mindset. There's more opportunity if we all win versus I'm going to take your share, and you don't have yours anymore.

[00:19:00] Jan Griffiths: Yes. I interviewed Kate Vitasek, who is a faculty member at the University of Tennessee. Her work revolves around collaborative relationships, and she says exactly that. She says, 'Grow the pie, share the pie.'

[00:19:15] Ted Serbinski: Yes, always grow the pie and share it. There was an analogy I gave to founders because they have the same issues as tech founders; when they're going to raise money or hire people, they're giving away equity. And so, that same power comes into it. It's like, do you want to own an entire grape, or do you want a piece of watermelon? And so, the whole thing got way bigger. Yes, you have a sliver of it, but your sliver is way bigger than the tiny little grape that you had to start with, and it's hard to think that way. We're not wired because we're losing something, but we're also gaining something. And that's what I think a challenge with the auto industry or corporations is that they have that shareholder mindset. We have to dry profits, but then every six to 12 months, there's a reorg, and you have to restart that thinking again, or it gets lost because it's not ingrained in the culture.

[00:20:08] Jan Griffiths: And you mentioned growth mindset; we're very much transactional-based. It's all about the transaction, and it's very small and very defined. We don't look at the opportunity, the strategic relationship, where this thing is going, what's involved, or how we are going to coach each other through this. It's very narrow and very transactional, and that's something that we absolutely have to get away from. Now, Ted, you are working with a startup right now, you're actually in production, I believe. Tell us a bit about that company, and that is in the automotive space you're engaging with OEMs right now. So, tell us the story of HAAS Alert: where did it start, and where is it going?

[00:20:51] Ted Serbinski: Yeah. I'm working with this company, HAAS Alert, as general manager of Detroit, and working on strategy and helping it to grow. This company is in the connected vehicle space and connects vehicles to other vehicles, starting with emergency vehicles and sending alerts to other cars; it's really part of the entire ecosystem. This company actually started in 2015 when the founder Cory was almost hit by an ambulance, and it just dawned on him: why can't you get that alert like you can hear the siren, you could see the lights, but if it's around a corner, you don't know where it is. Why can't this be like a digital alert? And so, he ended up starting the company with his co-founders Jigar and Noah and. initially when I first saw the startup in 2015, it was kind of using a new type of microphone inside vehicles, and they quickly went from that microphone to the in-dash, and we can actually display the alerts on here.

[00:21:53] Jan Griffiths: So, you're in production right now.

[00:21:56] Ted Serbinski: Yes, so HAAS Alert is live with Stellantis; we're live on all their newer vehicles: Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, Ram, and a police car, fire trucks, construction, and other types of sources can send out alerts into these vehicles. Or, specifically, in Michigan, Michigan State Police are equipped with our technology, and if you're in the newer Grand Cherokee, you would get an alert that a police car is pulled over somewhere, like, slow down and move over. And what's been really great about that collaboration is Stellantis has been really forward thinking around we want to solve this problem and solving this problem around digital alerting because you can't hear if you're hard of hearing or line of sight around buildings, you don't know where if something emergency is going on, if you need to slow down or move over. We all think to the highways where you can visually see, but for the most time, you don't know where something is. And so, digital alerting can go around all those bends, nooks, and crannies. And that's what Stellantis has really seen as kind of forward-looking like we want to push this into our vehicles, and they've been fortunate enough that their cloud infrastructure, how they've thought about it, has been relatively easy and compatible with ours. As we've worked with other automotive OEMs, what we've seen is different cloud infrastructures have different challenges. And so even if they may want to work with HAAS Alert, their technology might not be ready. And so, that kind of comes back to this innovation over the last decade as Apple and Google started taking away everything from autos. And putting Google Android Auto or Apple Car taking this data out. It affected, I think, these automotive makers just how they were thinking about cloud strategy, data, and infrastructure. What else can you do in the car if it's music, the phone, and some podcasts? What else is possible? And we're seeing with HAAS Alert that there are all kinds of things that are possible and lifesaving, and now these automotive makers have somewhat had to play catch up over the last couple of years.

[00:24:08] Jan Griffiths: I've been pretty hard on Stellantis with some of the things that they've done over the last few years, particularly with a new set of terms and conditions they put out to the supply base a few years ago. So, now I'm going to have to give them kudos for being able to engage with a new technology like HAAS Alert. What is it about the culture or the way that you engaged with Stellantis that allowed this to come into production and into fruition?

[00:24:37] Ted Serbinski: It seems like that with Stellantis, what allowed this to come into production so fast was there was an internal desire to have this technology. There was a campaign internally, I think, sourcing ideas, and one of those ideas that made it high up on the chain was for someone who was hard of hearing: how can we get maybe digital alerts inside a vehicle? There was this 'Aha!' moment of, 'Wow, we could do that. We have dashes now and these screens; let's see what we can do.' And when they came to HAAS Alert, it was like, 'Oh, this is built. We can use it. It's production-ready.' And so, there was, I'd say, bottoms-up kind of inside of Stellantis and a top-down from kind of the sea level, like, let's make this happen, and HAAS Alert was a solution that was ready to be plugged in, and ready to go. And so it was fortunate across, I'd say, both the timing, it was something they wanted, something we had, and then there was also the leadership buy-in, and they were technically capable of pushing that in right away, and it's been amazing to see that. And what Stellantis has done even kind of further is there's been some other dealerships now that are buying HAAS Alert and donating it to local police and fire to give back to enable those individuals, those first responders to have this life-saving technology that's now pushing out digital alerts to vehicles in the surrounding area.

[00:26:03] Jan Griffiths: Ted, when you wrote that letter to Dan Gilbert, I think about Dan Gilbert, and I think about this billionaire, and he's not an auto guy, really? What do you think guided him in terms of his mindset toward innovation and the auto industry?

[00:26:21] Ted Serbinski: I think when I worked with Dan, what I learned early on, and he was pretty adamant about saying it was, 'spreadsheets measure, they don't create.' And when Dan would use that in context, this would be if you think about Detroit back in 2013, 2012. So, before the bankruptcy, so things were still going downhill. Dan had moved Quicken Loans and is just starting to look at buying buildings, and why would you be investing money if everything's going downhill and then continue to go downhill? And when you contrast that with the auto industry, when they think about investing in autonomy, which was going up a few years later, there was this big gap. And I think Dan's really like hits the nail on the head. When you think about innovation, you can't measure it on a spreadsheet. You can measure ROI. You can measure I invest a million dollars. I own this much in a startup, but 5-10 years later, you don't know what that's going to be worth. You don't know what's going to happen in the future. And I think that's like a key thing that Dan really would talk about at Quicken Loans, and now Rocket Mortgage and Rocket Homes and his Rock Holdings are spreadsheets that measure what they don't create. And so, for auto companies and suppliers, it's all about the margins and numbers, but innovation is really hard; you can't really measure it. But if you plant the seeds, you believe in it, and keep watering, like stuff will sprout and continue to sprout over time. And now, if we look at Dan Gilbert in Detroit, maybe what did he know that we didn't? It's like, well, he didn't know anything about the future that we didn't, but he believed that all these things are possible and it's a good time to buy because everything's on sale. And now, where we are today and where we're going, it's like, that makes a ton of sense, but that was a 10-year to 15-year horizon. And so automotive companies, suppliers over the next 10-15 years, yes, autonomous cars are coming, and maybe they'll be more on the roads by then, and they'll be electric. Maybe they'll be on the blockchain or AI or whatever's going to be there. All we know is the future's going to happen. It's going to be different than we think it is today, and if we're trying to measure what we anticipate to happen, we're going to miss what's actually happening. And that would be like the big thing I see with innovation over and over is there's gotta be this area, this bucket that's we're five to 10 years out. We're looking at how can we start to incorporate stuff that we can't even talk about yet because we don't even know what it is, like we don't know what we don't know. How do you bring that in and incorporate that into an organization?

[00:29:11] Jan Griffiths: I love that. You have to believe, and you have to trust.

[00:29:14] Ted Serbinski: Yes.

[00:29:15] Jan Griffiths: And not try to measure everything with a bloody spreadsheet, which is what we love to do in automotive.

[00:29:21] Ted Serbinski: Exactly. It is so hard to get out of that. We as humans like to control and know where things are going, but ultimately, we don't know; we never will know. And so, if businesses can start to think that way, what's possible all kinds of things start to sprout up.

[00:29:39] Jan Griffiths: Well, I'm on a mission, Ted, to change the culture to make that happen. We're going to make that happen. It's going to happen in this industry. It's going to happen in Detroit, in traditional legacy companies, it's happening. It's just not happening as fast as we would like it.

[00:29:53] Ted Serbinski: Yes. Everything takes time.

[00:29:54] Jan Griffiths: That's right. That's right. That's what you just said. I have a question for you: As somebody who is so influential in the startup community and cares so passionately about founders and their success, how does somebody like that start their day in the morning?

[00:30:10] Ted Serbinski: I think every day is different. It's a rollercoaster because when you're working with startups, founders, people that are leaving maybe a very 20 years at an OEM to go out on their own, it's hard because there's gonna be good days and bad days. And when you're by yourself or maybe a team of two or three people, those good days and bad days are magnified because you're the only ones on the ride. When you're at a bigger company like an OEM, there are good days and bad days, but you're kind of insulated by there's so much, so many people, we're so big like it's not as bouncy. But when you're smaller, it's much bouncier. I guess it'd be like a raft in the middle of the ocean versus a cruise. A little wave is gonna rock that raft, but a little wave is not gonna bump that cruise. And so, there is a lot of just trusting in the journey, trusting in your instincts, what you believe in, what you're trying to do, but also surrounding yourself with people that you can trust that can give you mentorship, can help you think differently because even if you're trying to start a company that doesn't mean you're going to be successful or you know what's possible. And so, how do you augment what you don't know with other people who may have done it may have had other experiences that can help you along that way?

[00:31:28] Jan Griffiths: So, how do you start your day to be able to advise these founders as they go through this, the ups and downs of a startup business?

[00:31:37] Ted Serbinski: I spent a lot of my day reading, and I think Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, I think Warren Buffett, something like 80 percent of his time he spends reading. And for me, reading is learning, obviously, things I don't know or new perspectives, and there's a quote, and I forgot exactly how it goes, but if you look at all the books on my bookshelf, there are books above me and downstairs, all these books are a reminder of all the stuff I don't know. So, it's not all the books I've read; it's stuff I don't know. And I'll find myself buying books and never reading them, but then it's always a reminder, I'm like, ' I know nothing about that topic or that nuance topic.' And so I spend a lot of my time just trying to learn, get new perspectives that I can share with others. And also, it helps me just kind of better understand whatever it is I may be trying to do. And so, while there's like typical industry-type stuff, a lot of it shifts over into like philosophical and spiritual type areas as well, just like what's the bigger picture? What's this? So, what? Because, ultimately, the uncertainty of innovation is always going to be there every day, and sometimes you don't know what's sitting right in front of you. And so, the best thing I've seen is just the more you can learn across different industries, apply new knowledge you might be able to spot things before they happen.

[00:33:03] Jan Griffiths: Well, you really do have a growth mindset, don't you?

[00:33:06] Ted Serbinski: Yeah. Sometimes, too much of a growth mindset.

[00:33:08] Jan Griffiths: Yeah, I can see that. You live it and breathe it every day. What are you reading right now?

[00:33:12] Ted Serbinski: I'm actually reading a book called Traction, and this book is all about just more tactical ways to run a business, and what I'm seeing with startups that I work with and at HAAS Alert is what's the common vocabulary to build your business? And we talk about goals and objectives and things, but more often than not, everyone's talking about the same thing but using a different word. But that word means something different to someone else. And so, the diversity of thought and the diversity of people is a great thing, but you need this common vocabulary, a common operating system. And so, Traction is a very tactical type of book. I'm kind of learning about new phrases and word choices and ways to kind of create modular systems inside of companies. As a startup that's kind of messy, it starts to get bigger, and they start to have their own processes. And so, they also can become a victim of themselves trying to disrupt these big organizations that are very bureaucratic, but at some point, you have to become bureaucratic to grow, and so how do you balance that?

[00:34:16] Jan Griffiths: Yeah, fascinating. Well, I got a good book for you. It's called Autoculture 2.0.

[00:34:21] Ted Serbinski: Yes, it's in my bookshelf over here, too.

[00:34:23] Jan Griffiths: Is it really?

[00:34:24] Ted Serbinski: I do need to read it though.

[00:34:26] Jan Griffiths: Oh, please. Well, Ted, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for your time.

[00:34:32] Ted Serbinski: It was great to be here today and thank you.

[00:34:34] Jan Griffiths: Thank you for listening to the Automotive Leaders Podcast. Click the listen link in the show notes to subscribe for free on your platform of choice, and don't forget to download the 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership PDF by clicking on the link below. And remember stay true to yourself, be you, and lead with Gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership.