Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
Well, if we’re honest, some of us never really choose our careers. Sometimes we wake up one day and we realize that we’re somewhere we never even decided to go. This week’s guest moved to London at age 18 to become a rock star. And then 3 months later, a job offer in a pub of all places launched a successful sales career in tech and he never saw it coming. That accidental path carried him through big tech, an 8-year startup and its acquisition, all the way to becoming the youngest partner at one of the world’s largest consulting firms. And then he walked away from it, not because he failed, but because he started choosing his own path. Tim Lidman left that prestigious role to build something that he believes in, a way to help teams adopt AI without losing the people in the process. Tim, welcome to the Life Fulfilled Podcast.
Tim Lidman [00:01:05]:
Thanks so much for having me, Bernie.
Bernie Borges [00:01:15]:
You are the founder of Climb. You’re a sales and leadership veteran. Your career spans big tech, a startup that you helped build and exit. You had that partner role that I mentioned in the intro at one of the world’s largest consulting firms. And you’re originally from Sweden by way of a short-lived rock and roll dream in London. And you spent more than 2 decades learning that the best opportunities rarely arrive on schedule. And today you’re building a company that’s focused on helping teams collaborate with AI in a way that keeps people and human judgment at the center. So let’s begin, Tim, with that rockstar dream.
Bernie Borges [00:01:55]:
Tell us about that story about how you left Sweden, you went to London to chase that rockstar dream.
Tim Lidman [00:02:02]:
So yeah, I mean, when I was 18, I had hair sort of down way past my shoulders. I was a heavy metal drummer in a band and I moved to London to sort of take a gap year before college and kind of chase the dream of making it as a rock star. And so roomed together with the lead guitarist, And started working in a pub to pay the rent. Interestingly, my salary was lower than my rent, which was kind of interesting.
Bernie Borges [00:02:40]:
That’s a little negative cash flow there.
Tim Lidman [00:02:42]:
Yeah. Anyone that’s an expat in London at that time pretty much were in that boat. And so what ended up happening is through an unexpected turn of events, I ended up getting a job offer to go into tech sales. And I, to that date, had really not been involved in tech at all. When I was in high school, it was all about drumming and kind of living the high school, almost rockstar life. So we really didn’t think of tech as a place to build any kind of career. But what started happening was it started going somewhat well in this first sales role. And so I started earning a little bit of commission, which at the time when you’re 18 living in London and can’t pay your rent is a pretty welcome thing.
Bernie Borges [00:03:44]:
Yeah.
Tim Lidman [00:03:45]:
And so after I saw that that was a path that could could earn me some income. Basically cut the hair, cleaned up.
Bernie Borges [00:03:54]:
I was gonna ask about that. Okay, go ahead.
Tim Lidman [00:03:57]:
Cut the hair off, cleaned up. People often laugh when I meet them at this stage of my life and told them that I used to look very sort of rough and anarchistic. And then my bandmate did not take it well. He even kind of got sucker punched when I delivered the news. And then And then he went off back to Sweden and Stockholm. And then I suddenly found myself in this sales career. And so what happened was when it was time to finally go off to college, I found myself in a spot where I had been promoted, started seeing kind of the early stages of sales management to sales leadership. And so kind of took off on that path.
Tim Lidman [00:04:47]:
Yeah, I must’ve been 24 when I decided to go join this startup think tank. Historically, it had been an academically led sort of startup where they were researching heavily into behavioral science, how groups come together to make decisions, how they align. And Since I grew up in the collaboration industry and kind of seen how it was progressing, there was something that really appealed to me around putting people, co-creation, and outcomes kind of at the center of a collaboration platform. Because to date, all the platforms had been focused on just physically being able to connect people, allowing people to remotely talk to each other, But no one had yet kind of put a purpose into why we collaborate. And this product had that at sort of its core. So then I joined Think Tank and that was quite the ride. So I spent 8 years at that company, eventually ended up leading the company.
Bernie Borges [00:06:00]:
You ended up leading the company. You went from joining the company. When you joined them, what was your role?
Tim Lidman [00:06:06]:
I was sort of the sole sales guy. And they had just at the time landed their first major client in this refounding, which was one of the largest consulting firms in the world. And so then I basically drove that company to acquisition. And so in 2021, We were, we were acquired by one of the, if not the largest consulting firm in the world. And then that kind of concluded that chapter. And then we kind of went into the, the post-merger integration into this huge organization.
Bernie Borges [00:06:49]:
So I, so I want to pause right here, Tim, because I want to, I want to put a little context into our conversation and the context being that On the Life Fulfilled Podcast, I talk about fulfillment across 5 life pillars: health, fitness, career, relationships, and legacy. And I hear you talking about the relationship pillar with your wife and the culture shock for her. But really, most of your story has been about fulfillment in your career, your early stage, how you went from the rock star dream to Getting into tech sales, realizing you’re good at it and advancing very quickly, then leading a company through acquisition. And now you’re at the part of the story where I want to really bring some attention to the fulfillment aspect of it.
Tim Lidman [00:07:42]:
So, so yeah, now we get to this moment of really bringing sort of me and the whole team from Think Tank into this acquiring firm. And this was quite the moment because we were a product company, right? A tech-led organization moving into a professional services organization. And anyone that’s in the product or services world knows that it’s kind of like oil and vinegar. a product-driven culture is extremely different to a consulting-driven culture. And so what I immediately realized was that the team was going to have a very difficult time integrating into this environment. Now, for myself and one other person, it was a little bit different because we had already been exposed to big consulting. We had already interacted with it. We understood how to network in that world.
Tim Lidman [00:08:51]:
And so I was less concerned in the immediacy of it about myself, but I was really worried about the team that we brought over a dozen people who most of them didn’t even have a natural role to map to. into the new company.
Bernie Borges [00:09:10]:
Okay.
Tim Lidman [00:09:11]:
Um, and so I felt, because I had spent 8 years getting to know these people and really it, it gets banded around a lot, the whole, they became friends and family, but they, but they really did become friends and family because we did something pretty amazing together over an 8-year period. And so I, I just felt this insane need to make sure that they were okay. Make sure that they were in some ways protected from an environment that at times could be quite cutthroat, quite dysfunctional in some ways, because in some of these large professional services organizations, it’s sort of, you’re either selling or you’re delivering. And if you’re not doing one of those two things, you’re in big trouble. And here we had product managers, support engineers, developers, right? That don’t do any of those 2 things. And so what I did is I spent quite a lot of time, certainly in the first 2 years, most of my energy went to one, being very active in the performance review cycle. And I put a lot of time into translating what they were doing in their product roles into a story and a language that would make sense in the professional services context. So I became this just constant translator.
Tim Lidman [00:10:41]:
And when people would push back, the senior partners would push back on like, oh, well, this person isn’t selling and delivering. I had to find ways to prove and quantify that by doing this type of product development, it is improving the metrics of the business, albeit in an unconventional, indirect way.
Bernie Borges [00:11:03]:
Did they know this or were you doing this unknown to them?
Tim Lidman [00:11:08]:
No, they were extremely aware of it because I was extremely transparent about it. Okay. And Uh, if I have a leadership style, it— one, transparency is definitely a huge component of it.
Bernie Borges [00:11:24]:
Sure.
Tim Lidman [00:11:25]:
Um, now they weren’t in the conversations. They didn’t see the, the tactics. They didn’t see the method to the madness, but they, but they were aware of, of the dynamics that were taking place. And, and the, the level of mentorship that came with that to teach some skills that hadn’t been required in the startup world. A specific example I can think of is networking, right? So the first thing that everyone kept telling our team when they got acquired was, guys, you just gotta go network. It’s all about networking. You gotta build the big network in this machine because that’s how you make it and that’s how things get done. And ask a developer to go network in a large corporation, right? And they just didn’t even know where to begin.
Bernie Borges [00:12:16]:
Right.
Tim Lidman [00:12:16]:
And so I remember having several conversations on one, I had to teach myself how to teach others how to network, because naturally I can network myself just fine, but teaching someone how to network is a whole different kind of ballgame. And so I remember coming up with certain principles around how Don’t just reach out to people in the spirit of networking. Find a way to add value to something they’re working on. Try to find a way to be helpful first and then be helped later. And sort of, I had all these, had to come up with these tools to help people. And networking is just kind of one example. I had to come up with a broader toolkit. And what ended up happening is Some people integrated well and were able to actually go and find other roles.
Tim Lidman [00:13:10]:
Um, like for example, my best sales guy, we ended up getting him a role in the sales team of the big part of the company, and he ended up becoming one of their best salespeople. And he just did a really good job of learning how to sell services. And it was, it was a great story. We had some other people that we just realized after a couple years that we, we need to help you find something that you want to do, and that might not even be inside this organization. And so I also did help some people, uh, transition out of the company, um, not by— in no way terminating them, right? But actually—
Bernie Borges [00:13:51]:
Now let’s talk about your career progression inside this large, globally well-known, unnamed consulting company?
Tim Lidman [00:14:04]:
So yeah, so my journey was interesting. The first 2 years really did feel somewhat selfless in the way that I was just putting so much focus and energy on making sure that The people and the post-merger integration went well. What’s kind of interesting is by doing that, I did manage to create a pretty large network pretty quickly just because of, it kind of goes to my own advice around being helpful before being helped, because before I knew it, I was very well connected with many of the senior partners. at the firm. And because I was removing friction and tension, and to be honest, headaches for them a lot of the time, um, I kind of quickly established, um, a bit of a name, um, within the organization. And so I think it was after 18 months or 19 months, um, they, they made me partner.
Bernie Borges [00:15:10]:
Uh, so you make partner in under 2 years, which alone is an amazing achievement, which of course in my world, I call that fulfilling, but it kind of sounds like maybe you weren’t feeling that way yourself. So why don’t you kind of move to the part of your story where like you have some second thoughts and you actually end up leaving?
Tim Lidman [00:15:33]:
Yeah. So I, I felt very fulfilled when I made partner. It was a big deal. I was like, oh, celebrations and sure. But It didn’t take long for me to realize that, okay, so now we’ve hit this milestone. So now what’s left? What do we want to do? And then I realized that the activities that a partner does are not things I enjoy doing. I don’t think I’m— my personality is not built for a big corporate partner role. There are levels of innovation that I love to drive.
Tim Lidman [00:16:14]:
There are changes I like to make. There are initiatives I love to drive that just take 20 years to do in these large systems. And I knew partners, senior partners that had been there for 30 years and they had spent 20 years on like one initiative. And that was their big pride that they managed to drive this one thing through, which yeah, might have netted the company a billion dollars, but I didn’t see that as close to fulfilling for what I was interested in. Like, I love driving rapid innovation, rapid change. I love, like, positive disruption is something I enjoy deeply. And I just started finding more and more that that was less and less possible. And I just found myself having to play more politics than I wanted to.
Tim Lidman [00:17:08]:
And I kind of looked 10 years down the line and I thought, do I want to do this for 10 years and then retire? Because that’s kind of what you do. You do it for 10 years and then you can retire early and then go do what you need to do after that. And I just couldn’t imagine doing that for for 10 more years. And so I had this moment and it’s all— I can almost remember the exact moment where I thought to myself, like, what do I actually want to do? Like, I’ve been on this train and I was like, I’ve never thought to get off it. Like, I’ve never thought, do I want to be on this train? And And so I, as I was really contemplating this, there were some other things happening in the world at the same time around AI and all the disruption and transformation that comes with that. And then I really started looking at my background and started realizing that since collaboration is what I’ve anchored on as a space or an industry, AI is about to completely disrupt what it means to collaborate in an AI-native world. And I thought to myself, no, I don’t think people are going to get this right. Like, I don’t think people are going to develop a collaboration tool that keeps human decision-making at its core, that keeps the behavioral science and aligning people and group decision-making at its core.
Tim Lidman [00:18:52]:
And then what I started seeing was a lot of the legacy collaboration tools that are out there, they were just starting to slap AI on top of their product, right? And there’s this really funny meme that I love, which is a picture of someone trying to put a soap dispenser on a bar of soap. And then thinking that that’s gonna dispense soap.
Bernie Borges [00:19:15]:
Mm-hmm.
Tim Lidman [00:19:15]:
And as I was having this personal inflection point, I also started seeing this market inflection point. And then I thought, whoa, I have the expertise, experience, and access to the right team that could go and, and build something here that could potentially build a market-transforming product and company. And so ultimately I decided to leave the consulting firm and that’s when I negotiated a sort of a partner buyout and then was able to raise a little bit of money and start Clyde together with a small team.
Bernie Borges [00:19:58]:
So what is the purpose of Clyde? Because of course, Tim, The world needs another AI platform, right?
Tim Lidman [00:20:07]:
So Clyde, if you think about sort of what it is in its essence, it is a collaboration platform that is built completely AI natively. And so what it does is it’s been trained on the behavioral science that I mentioned. It’s been trained on how to get groups of people from ideas to outcomes or problems to outcomes, and to do so in an aligned way and to make sure that everyone has a shared and common understanding as they move through that problem-solving sort of process, if you will. And so what I did is, or what we’ve done is we’ve built this product that combines the very structured way of working with AI to solve a problem. With the ability to actually engage and invite, you know, human beings into that process and to make sure that whenever human beings need to be providing inputs, when they need to be aligning, when they need to be making decisions, that that’s happening in this workflow. And that it’s not, the AI isn’t just assuming that it’s going to make decision or the judgment or the assessment. And I think that’s really something that’s been lacking a lot in this sort of the age of AI because everyone’s trying so hard to automate everything that I think people are forgetting to consider what should be automated versus not. And then how to marry those things into a functional product that sort of adds value.
Bernie Borges [00:21:50]:
Yeah. Well, I think you know where we’re aligned on this because I gave you my backstory on this topic. I published 4 podcast episodes not too long ago on essentially what I call human-led AI transformation, and then I put it all together into a white paper that’s titled exactly that, Human-Led AI Transformation. So there’s a lot of alignment between my thinking and your thinking, your premise for Clyde, because while I haven’t had the experience of actually working with Clyde yet anyway, what I understand about it is that it really is focused around bringing people together to collaborate so that people aren’t just using AI by themselves, they’re using it together in a collaborative way to solve business problems. Is that right?
Tim Lidman [00:22:44]:
Yeah. And AI, I mean, it’s, it’s sort of, they’re collaborating with humans to solve business problems, but they’re also at the same time collaborating with AI where, where AI is, is more effective than humans. So I’ll give you an example, synthesizing large amounts of information very quickly. So if you think about, let’s say they ran a brainstorming session with a group of 20 people and all those 20 people came up with 300 ideas. Historically, there’s a poor, poor analyst that has to take a panicked lunch break and try to scramble and figure out what the themes are, how to collate it into something that is digestible. And it’s very stressful. They’re up till 2, 3 in the morning sometimes collating these all together into these deliverables. And I can take that pain away from them.
Tim Lidman [00:23:39]:
And then I can also in the same product, give them a way to meaningfully engage with, with their stakeholders and become more thoughtful and strategic. And so I think it’s two sides of the same coin. It’s like, how do we use AI to take the pain away from our lives and our work, but still keep the essence of, of why we’re needed as people?
Bernie Borges [00:24:02]:
You’ve got the human at the center of it, meaning, right? So am I getting that right?
Tim Lidman [00:24:08]:
Yeah, I think that’s a good way to sort of philosophically characterize it. Now, of course, there’s the boring product demo that shows the specific buttons of what it does, the value that adds, but philosophically, I think that’s exactly what it’s doing.
Bernie Borges [00:24:22]:
Tim, in this age of AI disruption, disruption is a real thing, but We can give lots of history lessons of lots of examples of disruption across centuries that may have even disrupted industries. The meaning of people is still very much at the center of it. Give us your thought on what it takes to lead in this current world or current age of AI transformation while we’re seeing all this disruption and how you’re contributing to that with, with Clyde.
Tim Lidman [00:24:54]:
Yeah. And I mean, even if you step out of Clyde the product for a second, I’ve been having some thoughts on sort of how leaders are helping people through the current AI transformation that’s happening. And I don’t know if this is controversial or not, but I think we all need to be doing a much better job of leading people through this change. It’s It’s one of the largest technological shifts that will happen surely in this generation. And I’m seeing a lot of leaders that are telling people that you need to use AI or you’re out. I’ve seen companies that are measuring people on their AI usage in this very static sort of systemic way. But then not really empowering them with how they need to be doing that without giving them purpose-built tools that help them in their specific workflow. And so, and if I kind of almost dumb it down, I think what a strong leader needs to do is show up with 3 things here.
Tim Lidman [00:26:10]:
One is the right tool, a purpose-built tool for how they need to apply AI, to a workflow that actually helps and supports them as opposed to just sort of figure it out. And then 3, like most importantly, is are the leadership tools, the toolkit to help guide people through the change? Because most people are going to have to fundamentally change how they do their jobs, right? They’re going to have to upskill, they’re going to have to reskill, And they’re going to have to find their place in, in a very, very different world. And that’s a really tall order. And so if you’re not up for that journey as, as a leader, then I think you got to ask yourself some, some questions on if, if you’re able to help people.
Bernie Borges [00:26:59]:
I call that the meaning gap, meaning no pun intended, meaning that the leader needs to really have conversations with They’re teams that really identify the meaning of the human role within the job as it’s evolving. And those are real conversations that need to happen, and they also need to be building trust along the way. I did a whole dedicated episode on that, Tim, that I called The AI Trust Audit, where I provide 5 questions for leaders to ask Questions like the relief question, the identity question, the transparency question, the capacity question, and then finally the trust question to really establish those lines of communication that build trust and credibility between the people and the leadership. Because it is a transformational time and leaders need to get comfortable with the fact that they may not have all the answers right now. And that’s okay because people want transparency anyway in order to build that trust. So, Love what you’re doing. Tim, let’s wrap here, but first, first, I want to invite you to share your contact information. If people want to connect with you, learn more about you, Clyde, et cetera, how can people connect with you?
Tim Lidman [00:28:19]:
Yeah, you can reach me on LinkedIn, Tim Lippmann. I think I’m the only professional Tim Lippmann out there. And then for Clyde, you can go to Meet Clyde. And obviously I believe that Clyde is providing a tool that is humanizing AI and that if you’re a knowledge worker will likely help you in your journey of trying to apply it to what you do.
Bernie Borges [00:28:46]:
That’s what appealed to me when I first connected with you is what you’re doing with Clyde. The fact that you really are integrating that human element into it. So I just wanna thank you for joining me on this episode of The Life of Phil Podcast. to have this conversation, sharing your backstory and how your career fulfillment journey has not only evolved, but the current chapter that you’re in right now and the contribution that you’re making to the human side of this AI transformation that we’re living in. So thank you, Tim. Really appreciate it and enjoyed our conversation.
Tim Lidman [00:29:19]:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
