Jeff Hunter:

Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you were listening to Coaching in the Clear, the podcast

committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we

believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best

way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your

coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their

potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the Clear is a

production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders

achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a

weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues

affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to

enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Today I'm

speaking with Eric Kinariwala. Eric is the founder and CEO of Capsule, the pharmacy of the

future. Over the last five years, he and his team have built Capsule into a multi-city, multi

pharmacy platform across the United States. Eric and I met soon after he started Capsule and

I've enjoyed watching him learn, struggle, and grow as a successful entrepreneur and a

self-aware leader. We'll talk about talent, being a craftsman, helping others to do the same,

contextualizing intuition and much, much more. Eric, thanks very much for joining and welcome

to the conversation.

Eric Kinariwala:

Thanks for having me excited to have the conversation.

Jeff Hunter:

Yeah, well, let's give this a shot. So Eric, you have envisioned designed and built an incredible

company. You've worked with me, you've partnered with Talentism. So, you know, you're

familiar with our approach and our thinking. And of course I've seen you do a lot of your own

coaching over time as a successful executive and investor. And that leads me to ask you, how

do you think about the value and importance of coaching?

Eric Kinariwala:

It's been really interesting. I'd never had a coach before you and I started working together a

handful of years ago now. And I think there was sort of initially I had some trepidation around

coaching as almost a sense of like, you know, I don't need a coach. I can kind of figure it out.

And I think the phrase, the idea of like; Hey, even tiger woods has a coach that kind of always

resonated with me which is like, no matter who you are and where you are in your own kind of

journey. I think everyone needs somebody to bring out the best in them. Then that can mean a

lot of different things. But for me, it's really been, I think what's been valuable, has been a

couple of things. I think one has been to create a safe space to really have somebody be able to

work through with you some of the unique challenges that really only, you know, in my case that

only the CEO has to deal with and to have somebody who can provide and share a framework

that I think that not only has helped me, like, think about the specific sort of situation that I'm in,

but what are the kind of guiding principles that let me then apply that framework to the same or

similar situations are gonna happen over time. I think the other thing that's been really helpful is

sort of a process of self discovery around, you know, my own mental models, my own

assumptions that are bacon decisions. I make that I might not even know their assumptions

because they're so deep rooted. So this idea of a mirror and somebody who can both

understand who you are, but bring that mirror back and help you kind of work through what the

impact of your words, your decisions, your actions are on those around you all with sort of, I

think the consistent goal of unleashing the greatness within, you know, that exists in each of us.

And so I think for me, it's been two things. One has been sort of a set of tools and a framework

to approach problems over time. And the second has been a mirror to be able to uncover blind

spots or to better understand myself, to be able to be more effective with others over time.

Jeff Hunter:

That makes a lot of sense and so thank you for saying that and thank you for saying that

because of course that's what we're trying to do. So it's good to know that it's working in some

way. The thing you said about self discovery is something I wanted to pick up on a little bit. So

as you know, cause you and I have talked about this frequently, the way I think about it as the,

you are the only tool that you have to bring to the table when you're a leader or a manager like

fundamentally, you've got this mind and the mind has models and capabilities and impressions

and all these things in it. And the most valuable thing you can do is to get to know that tool

better and become a real craftsmen with that tool, as opposed to trying to acquire new tools,

because fundamentally, if the underlying thing that you're working with, the, you know, the brain

you've got is something that's a mystery to you. All the other tools are going to be secondary to

that primary problem of you don't know how to use that thing. So that self discovery is a critical

part of what we're trying to do. And of course, as you and I have talked about many times, what

makes that especially difficult is you yourself, can't really interrogate your own mind to figure out

what's going on underneath. There's this really thin channel between your consciousness and

your unconsciousness, the consciousness of what you're going through and how you think and

what you believe, etcetera. And then this whole huge mass of intuition and instinct and memory

and emotion and all those things that are really not accessible. So you have to go into battle in

essence, you have to like get to work and you've got to do things and then try to take the data or

the evidence that you produce and bring it back to the table and say, okay, how am I going to

make sense of this. How am I going to make sense of what this says about me? Because

frankly that surprised me or I thought I was better at that or whatever it was. I think the role of

coach, at least a clarity coach is crucial to try to help you make sense of that. So one of my

questions would be just for you personally, what's been one of the things that, because you and

I have worked together so long, what have been the things that you started out and thought, you

know, I'm pretty good at this thing. I think I'm good at it. And then over time through the process,

through the work and through just being a successful executive, you've come to maybe a bit

more humility or a perspective of like, wow, I've learned that's much harder than I thought, or I'm

not as good at it as I thought.

Eric Kinariwala:

A lot of things. Hey, you know, one of the things I spent a lot of time doing is building an

amazing team to tackle the mission that we have, which is large and ambitious. And so I spent a

lot of my time recruiting and interviewing, and I think there's, I think getting more, in some ways

getting more sophisticated about interviewing, but in some ways actually just becoming much

simpler and much clearer about what, you know, what is an interview process and what is the

point of the interview process and what are you actually trying to do in a conversation or a

series of conversations in an interview process. And I think the thing that has resonated the

most for me is that it's all about context and that, you know, one of the things that I've learned

through coaching is really to start with what is the context that exists at our company? What is

the context that exists of somebody working for me or being on my team? And then how do you

use the interview process to collect evidence, to suggest whether that person or that individual

can be successful in that context as almost the primary driver or predictor of whether that

individual you know, will be likely more likely or less likely to be successful, you know, in that

environment. And so this idea that it's not about finding the world's best marketer, it's about

finding the person that can be the world's best marketer at your company, working for you. And I

think that's a really important distinction that maybe was less clear and less codified when I

started doing this five years ago. And I think has come in to pretty extreme focus as an

individual and as a company, as a team, we get better and better and better at assessing talent

and building out our team. That's been a really powerful way I think to kind of combine what you

said is like, how are you a craftsman with your own tool and your own set of tools? And then

how do you bring folks in that are going to enable them to be the best craftsman they can be?

And that's all about the context and past evidence of being successful in contexts and

environments that are successful. So I think that's probably the, one of the biggest things that I

have. I think a lot of humility for people that are really good for being able to pattern match, you

know, what kinds of people will be successful in the environment that you have, or that you've

created, you know, both who else is around the table, but also just what are the values and

norms that exist at your own company. And a lot of that for founder led businesses, the way

Capsule is, you know, stems from the founder, you know, herself or himself. And so being able

to understand your own, the context that you create as a virtue of being you and then being very

upfront, open and transparent about what that is, and this is who we are. But also then seeking

to collect evidence, whether that individual can be successful in that context. So, you know, an

example of that is really, I think, you know, communication style and pattern is something that

you know, that is perhaps not unique at Capsule, but it's certainly consistent at Capsule. And

that we're a company that prefers to be in rapid sync to be in continuous communication. And

we, because we're a company that is very focused on learning and iterating and moving quickly,

the idea of, you know, we have found that there are individuals on either end of the spectrum.

There are individuals who really prefer to take a problem and then go away for a month and put

together a very polished presentation and come and kind of have like the, tada, big presentation

moment. And we have generally found that, that is not the context that we have at Capsule. And

so like while that presentation might be really excellent and that person might be very excellent

at their craft, that at Capsule we are about learning together. We're about winning together and

we're about, you know, continuously staying in sync so that, you know, every day, every week

we're learning so that over the course of that month, the information that gets put into whatever

the initiative is, is actually kind of an uphill trajectory versus staying static for a month. And then

I think we found that people that thrive in that environment of kind of short bursts of

communication and wanting to stay in sync with the folks around them really find the

environment energizing. And for individuals who prefer to be able to go off in a corner by

themselves for an extended period of time, find that environment to be, you know, find the

environment to be distracting, believe they're being micromanaged. And generally find that to be

the opposite of energizing.

Jeff Hunter:

Yeah. I want to connect something you said, because I think it's a really important insight for

leaders and for managers, you're bringing up this idea of context, but also something that you

started talking about, which is like, what are your underlying mental models? So my experience

of us working together as when we first started working together, that you have had this great

career where you'd done a certain thing you'd been worked in the hedge fund industry, and

you'd have this sort of pedigreed educational background. And so early, when we started

working with each other, you would talk a lot about, oh, this person went to a good school, or

they've been at good companies, etcetera. And you'd really think, wow, given that resume, this

person's going to be great. And then over time, what I saw you do is cause you're very analytical

and you tend to like follow the data through to completion. So you can, so you can learn. What I

saw you do is say, you know, there doesn't seem to be much correlation in this context, inside

the Capsule between having done these sorts of things and being successful here, there must

be something else that is a correlation. And through that work, I think you've come to these

insights, but I believe connecting to coaching and the value of coaching. And what you talked

about in the beginning is this self discovery process. We all come to the table with these mental

models and we all come to the table. Anybody who's having a conversation at work is operating

from a position of having underlying unconscious mental models. And in those mental models

are all sorts of assumptions about how the world works and about what we're like, the

connection between the two and then all sorts of things like what kinds of people are going to be

successful here or not be successful here, etcetera, and a lot of those models are just wrong.

They just aren't predictive. They aren't helpful or predictive of future success. And it's incredibly

difficult to try to uncover those things because you have to again, do it through the, you know,

evidentiary investigative process. You've got to do stuff. And then you got to look at the results

and say, wow, that really doesn't work. What if we tried something else? And I've found you to

be very good at that sense-making action taking experimentation sort of loop. But now, so one

of the things I think you're especially good at is, I think you're very good at trying to use data to

understand what's happening and why something is happening. And you describe not only this

thing where you're in constant sync with people, but I can imagine also trying to find people who

want to speak your language since as CEO, you have ultimate hire, fire authority, and you sort

of create the context under which other people are going to be successful. How do you think

about having conversations about data and situations versus how people feel about things

versus how, when you're thinking about yourself as a leader and who you need to show up as in

different times in order to achieve the goal that you want, how have you thought about your

strengths around data and analysis versus other things that might be needed in leadership and

how you've come to learn about yourself in that over time?

Eric Kinariwala:

Yeah, I think a lot more like facts than data, I think same concept, but thinking about really,

because I think, you know, data can be, data is usually perceived to be quantitative, but I'm a

believer in sort of, you know, driving to decisions based on facts. And those facts can be either

quantitative or qualitative. And being able to use those facts, to be able to tell a story, to support

a hypothesis for a decision that needs to get made and being able to do that relatively quickly.

And I think it's, you know, I think in all businesses, there are parts of the, there are some parts,

hopefully they're some, if you're innovating and learning, there should always be parts of the

business that are more nascent and more unknown than others than when you first start out.

You know, you have the maximum period of uncertainty and as your business matures, maybe

there are, you know, new initiatives and new projects that have less certainty and less data and

evidence. But I think the ability for individuals to be able to gather facts and to compare those to

a hypothesis they have for a decision that they need to make is a really structured way of being

able to ensure that the decision making in the company compounds on itself, you know, with

every decision that you're getting better and better and better. And so the input to the next

decision is informed by what you learned from the prior decision that you made. But if you're

not, if you're not able to use facts to make your decisions, and you're really not getting better

and better over time, your really just staying on the same plane and just making, you know, kind

of spring a gun and just making a bunch of decisions versus really, you know, kind of coming up

a hill with every decision sort of elevating the next decision and the next decision. And so, I

mean, looking for, you know, looking for facts or looking for evidence of when people have done

that in their prior careers or in prior experiences has been something that we, or I personally

have, you know, found to be really valuable to ask in an interview process.

Jeff Hunter:

So that make sense to me, but let's talk a little bit about that. My experience is as CEO, not just

as a coach, but as a person who's started businesses is that there are times that you need to

deal with data. And I understand the distinction you're making between data and facts. Third

times you need to deal with facts and there's actually times you take a leap and there's times

you use intuition, which is a pattern matching, which of course is pattern matching, but it's

pattern matching blur consciousness or awareness, and in the intuitive space or artistic space of

like somebody is going to come in and say, I think we should just try this. And it's an opinion it's

not grounded. In fact, it's not grounded in analysis, there's very little data to support it. And yet I

do believe we should do it. I have found that to be important inside an organization as well, and

especially in the early stages, because every founder as a founder, I can say this. Every founder

I've ever dealt with is a little bit crazy because you just can't do enough analysis or have enough

facts at your disposal to convince yourself of anything other than the fact that you've got an 80%

probability of failure. And that, that's a pretty high probability. And yet you, I know you well

enough to know, you know, those odds are long and you know, that you probably could have

made more money doing other things. And yet you were inspired and compelled to start

Capsule and get this done. And to me, that was as much an act of intuition and drive and

compulsion as it was rationality, in fact. So how do you think about balancing those things and

how do you think about the time when someone shows up to you and says; Hey, listen, I really

want to give this a fly and I don't have a lot of rationality behind it, versus when someone comes

to you and says, I want to do this thing. And you're like, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. How

do you think through that as a leader, especially as Capsule grows.

Eric Kinariwala:

I think it's spot on. I think there are high beta decisions and high and low beta decisions that you

have to make. And so I think teasing out, you know, hey, like does this decision even matter,

like, is it going to have a big impact or not? In fact, I think at some of the mental models from,

you know, Amazon and kind of one way decision, two way decision. I think those are helpful

heuristics in terms of how much time should any of us be even talking about this, because

whether it goes wrong or right, like just doesn’t matter. So it's just, you know, the benefit isn't

just making the decision and moving on, I think for decisions like, that can have high impact and

yet there's no facts and data. I think what is helpful then is to really understand, well, if I'm right,

what happens and if I'm wrong, what happens? And one of the reasons that might inform, you

know, either of those things. And so I think there's intuition is a wonderful place to start because

I think as you mentioned like intuition really is, is really just, is the accumulation of experience.

That is almost so second hand that you're not taking time to kind of separate it out and codify it

the way you might with something else. And so I think we're believers in having strong intuition

for things, because it probably reflects having, you know, done something, the quote, you know,

proverbial 10,000 hours. And having the ability to sort of almost instinctively kind of know what

that decision is. And so I think there, it becomes can you really just understand what the

decision path is then going, you know, going forward? Is it, you know, if I do this, then this

happens. And if I do this and it doesn't happen, this is the next thing I'm going to do, but I, you

know, I think you're spot on like, you know, early stage companies are moving often too fast,

and there's so much unknown that you can't have facts perhaps to inform the decision, but you

can certainly have facts to understand what the impact of that decision is going to be and how to

make that decision stronger and better or to mitigate the risks that, you know, may exist from

being wrong. Which, you know, there's inherent uncertainty in everything.

Jeff Hunter:

Yeah. I think there's two things that you said over the course of our conversation, I just want to

pick up on and tie into that. So one is, I think there are, not to steal liberally from economists

and Klein and others, but there are people who are good at intuition. There are people are bad

at intuition, and you have to actually understand how to differentiate between the two. We all

have intuitions and we al,l there's innumerable biases littered throughout our intuitions. And then

the thing that I always loved about like, you know, thinking fast and slow and Gary Klein's work

is sort of differentiating and separating our, when should you trust your intuitions versus when

you shouldn't. And then to connect that back to something that you said earlier about context. I

think what that work show to the extent I understand it is people who have actually had to make

decisions that have big impacts and make those intuitions quickly without all available data, and

then experience the loss for the problems associated when those decisions go wrong and had

to repeat that and get it more right over time, because they were in that context, those people

have intuition more like that you're more likely to trust or should trust assuming they're in the

same sort of context. I think what many have talked about is the, station commander or fire chief

who shows up at a burning house and can make a relatively good decision about whether to

send people into a burning building or not, there'll be right more often than wrong in a sort of

surprising above random sort of way, but it's because the mechanics of building that intuition

have been pretty good. And the good feedback loops, high-impact feedback, loops, immediacy

low latency, etcetera. And that if you put them in situations similar to that, you can probably get

a good decision out of it. But where we make a lot of mistakes is we think because you are a

good fire chief, you're going to be good stock picker. As an example, you know, a lot of gut got

to make the trade, got to move fast. And the reality is they're extremely different contexts. And

so one of the things I've seen CEO’s think about is like, okay, what is my own mental model of

what intuition is and isn't and how I can use it and not use it. And who am I going to choose to

trust with their intuition? And some of that is, I don't know what I don't know. So I'm going to

pick, as you said, two way doors you know, simple two-way doors, sorts of situations and

decisions so that I can see how you do and we can test your intuition. And some of it is like,

yeah, I think this context is the same, and you're good at this. Like you have a good sense for

how to do these things. And I think I can trust you in that being explicit about that and learning

about your own sort of internal understanding of that through the coaching process, or just

through experience and being able to bring that as a leader, I think improves your own

leadership and management over time. And I've certainly seen that with you. I've certainly seen

you improve in that over time just by having that awareness of what intuition is and isn't, but it

very often has to do with building a fact base about the person, not a fact-based about the

situation itself and knowing when you can and should trust somebody or how you should be

able to test them as you move into that. Now, when you think about the future of Capsule and

what you're facing and all the things that you're aspiring to, cause you have huge, a huge vision

and a huge drive to disrupt the pharmacy industry, you know, to your credit, so far, so good.

What do you think about with regards to the challenges you'll face as a leader in that next stage

of growth, that next stage of evolution, what are you going to face and how do you expect

coaching to be helpful to you in that?

Eric Kinariwala:

I think you know, I think at some point you don't know when, but at some point, you know, my

job went from the very early is actually building the product that created value for the consumer

and for the doctor and for other parts of the healthcare ecosystem and making sure we got that

product right and spot on and that people love using it and that it was scalable and the

economics were right and the brand was right. And I think my job has evolved, continues to

evolve to really from building the product, to building the company that can then continuously

build the product or a series of products that create value. And so really almost from a macro

perspective, thinking about my job is now building the product, which is the company that can

then produce, you know, things of value or you know, consumers and doctors and other people.

And so that evolution or that transition is, you know, what I think about as the next what the next

phase of leadership needs to be. And so that's things like the communication cadence of the

business, that's the management, you know, it's the management rituals, it's like goal setting.

It's the team that we have in place. It's how the team engages with one another. It's what it's

culture, it's what are the behaviors that are rewarded, accepted? What are the behaviors that

are rejected and punished? It's all of those things that can then be built sort of a self

perpetuating, you know, organization or organism that allows us to, you know, systematically

and continuously uncover needs in the marketplace, you know, friction points, frustration points

consumer needs and then solve those and distribute those in the market and sort of build that to

build a quote unquote product that enables multiple products to be built and created without,

you know, without my hands in everything. And so anything from, moving the role from sort of,

you know, the builder to the, to kind of the architect, you know, is sort of, kind of something

that's already started, but where I foresee, you know, my role continuing to evolve into. And I

think the role of coaching in that transition or in that evolution, one is to have somebody who is

reinforcing that with you and making sure that your time allocations are, and your mind sharing

your attention are on those things. And that can come through a variety of things that can come

through, but the problems that get surfaced in a coaching session, you know, part and parcel of

that is fundamentally asking, you know, why are you even dealing with this? Because that really

seems like something you need to process and a machine to deal with as part of like the

organization that you're creating versus you actually need to solve that on your own. And I think

that coaching will help will be essential in uncovering where, you know, my own mental models

may prevent or preclude or make more difficult, the ability to build and architect that

organization. And so where there needs to be extra, you know, extra kind of attention to the

places that will preclude something that is highly effective from being put in place and then sort

of sustained.

Eric Kinariwala:

Yeah. So I think you're raising something that actually now that I'm thinking about it, you and I

haven't talked a great deal about, but we have this idea called the four D model. We love

models with numbers and letters in them, but the four D model is based on this concept of how

a leader, you know, a founder's evolution sort of maps to enterprise value creation. And so we

start at the lower, lowest level of enterprise value creation. When the founder first starts in their

doing, their just doing most of the work, a founder in the very early days as somebody who's

actually has to carry most of the load, they do everything from new product development to you

know, taking out the trash, and then at a certain point, you can't do everything and you start to

hire other people and enlist them in your vision and what you're trying to achieve. And then you

move from a doer to a decider. And the deciding is deciding what is important. What's not

important. What should we work on, etcetera. And the decider tells the people who are doing

stuff you know, what to do and how to do it. But at a certain point, there is a transition where you

can't possibly decide everything that needs to be done. And you move from deciding to

designing the, actually playing the role. As you just said, as an architectural role, a design role

of trying to see how this thing would operate, what is the org model and what is the strategic

model, etcetera, and how do you get people who are good deciders to be inside of that model?

And then ultimately as you grow and you build more enterprise value, you're going to start to

move from designing to decoding. And decoding is where you have the ultimate strategic birch

and you sit there and you see the longterm of the market. You see the longterm of the

customer's need in that market, and you're no longer really designing the organization. You're

just the person who sets the direction and talks about the vision and how to get there. And one

of the things that a lot of founders have is they're actually very good at the decoding. That's one

of the reasons they get into foundings because they have a vision that other people lack or don't

see, or can't activate. And I would say that was certainly true of you and that, but they also then

have to be the doing, they actually have to everyday be doing stuff to get that done. And when

they start to move from doing to deciding, it's still, it's the same sort of psychological and mental

activity. Like it's sort of quick turns high impact a lot activity in the moment. But moving from

deciding to designing is very difficult. It's a very different thing where you step back and sort of

visualize and imagine, and strategize and construct as opposed to do or tell. And so I think what

you're describing is like, you're in that moment, I think you frankly have been in that moment for

awhile, but you're in that moment of moving from more of the decider to the designer, which

makes a lot of sense to me. And then I think what you're doing is describing the role of coaching

as being like, hey, if you're going to be a designer, you've got to be good at A, B and C, and I'm

not sure you're actually good at that, which I think you should expect from coaching. But the

other thing I think in at least clarity coaching, what you should expect is calling out whether

you're actually good at that or not, because that's a very difficult term to take. And whether you

actually, I've worked with founders who cannot make that term and they can still be incredible

CEOs. They just have to make sure they have good designers around them. And so it's really a

self-awareness, which we're also describing with the self-awareness piece, so that not just like,

I've got to be good at it. So hopefully you expect that out with your coach since we continue to

work with each other and that's what we'll be doing. But I hope that makes sense to you.

Eric Kinariwala:

That makes sense and the self-awareness piece is incredibly, I think important as part of the

coaching process which is just sort of, you don't have to be good at everything. You just got to

make sure that the set, you know, in aggregate the set of people you have around you can be

good at the things that need excellence around them. So that's probably where everything starts

is being able to have the honest conversation with somebody who cares about you and who

knows you to be able to get to the realization of like, well, what are the things that you have a

shot at being great at? And what are the things that are going to be like Sisyphean, I guess, like

pushing, you know, pushing the Boulder up and it rolling back on you over and over and over

again. And which of those things may you want to bring somebody in who can actually get the

Boulder up and over the hill so that you can be that person for the things that you are that

person for.

Jeff Hunter:

Well, I certainly always enjoy a conversation that ranges from Greek myths to behavioral

economics. Eric, this has been an absolute joy. Thank you so much for agreeing to be on the

show and participating. It's been a real honor to work with you and watch you build Capsule.

And I'm just very grateful for everything and especially for you being here today. So thank you

very much.

Eric Kinariwala:

Thanks Jeff, always fun to to catch up.