The Team that I am Blessed to Work With
What separates the startups that actually make it from the ones that quietly fade away? In almost every case, the answer is the same: the team.
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About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Building the Right Team
In every startup, or any project that makes an impact, there is a great team that makes these things happen.
I am a firm believer that instead of coming up with great concepts and having great execution yourself, you should get people with great concepts and great execution on the board.
As a leader, my biggest job is to get great people on the team and make them even better.
With a strong vision of making society better by connecting people to the careers that they are passionate about, I am blessed to have an extremely qualified, passionate, execution-focused team that has complementary skills.
Jun Loayza: CMO and Execution Machine
Jun Loayza: My CMO (Chief Millennial Officer) Jun is completely Godsend.
Jun and I met at the Business Fraternity of Delta Sigma Pi in 2005, and had since talked to him at least two times a week on average.
Jun has a few natural talents. He is a natural speaker, and is extremely personal with all his engagements. Being one of the most presentable people I know, Jun impresses people the moment he starts his first sentence.
There have been moments where Jun starts to talk, and whoever listens goes “whoa, this guy speaks so well.”
I remember the first time I met him, he was doing a presentation, and as soon as he started speaking, I made a determination to become friends with him, which happened 25 minutes afterwards.
Many times when I or someone else makes a presentation, with Jun just making an introduction, there would always be a group of people swarming around Jun, asking him questions regarding the presentation, and the speaker might just have 3-4 people talking to him.
It is even to the extent that whenever the programmers had a personal issue, instead of talking to the CTO or me, they would call Jun, the furthest removed CMO, and ask him. Jun is that good at being personable.
Execution Skills
More importantly, Jun is extraordinary in execution skills.
I have met and worked with a lot of people, ages between 14 and 55, many of them highly intellectual and successful, but Jun is definitely one of the top among them when it comes to execution.
If the goal was to meet as many recruiters at a career fair, Jun will go around the room for 2 hours, meet ALL 55 recruiters while making a personal impression with each, go home, and send a personal followup email to all of them within an hour and a half.
On one Friday he decided that Future Delivery needed to have a whole series of podcasts (4 hours of audio), an eBook on making yourself stick out to employers (30 pages), and 6 videocasts all by Monday. On Monday, he had it all finished.
The eBook received a lot of great compliments from people who downloaded from the site, and the audio series became helpful for those who recruited.
Culture Builder
Finally, Jun is essential in creating the right culture for Future Delivery.
Jun created the Premiere Business Organization at UCLA called Bruin Consulting that took UCLA by storm in just 1 quarter. As president, he created a culture of “fun-loving people who want to do good work.”
In FD, he remains to support that culture of combining work and play. Every meeting with him is not dull but full of laughter, and our brainstorm sessions involve the “trash/genius” model, which creates a lot of idea synergy and moves things quickly.
Future Delivery can never and will never be what it is, or what it wants to be, without Jun Loayza.
Related Reading
- 90 Days of Entrepreneurship
- The Octalysis Framework
- How to Become Irreplaceable in Your Company
- Books by Yu-kai Chou