An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
We are on a mission to make gratitude a daily habit in the workplace, changing the way people incorporate appreciation into their business relationships.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brendan Kamm.
Brendan Kamm, co-founder and CEO of Thnks, a digital gratitude platform that empowers business professionals to build better relationships by sharing personalized gestures of appreciation in a thoughtful, efficient way. Incorporating technology, program analytics, compliance adherence, and the science of gratitude, Thnks helps its users improve client relationships, customer engagement, and employee appreciation.
Kamm is responsible for all day-to-day operations, including Thnks’ strategic vision, while advancing the platform’s tech capabilities and partner integrations. Through Thnks, Kamm is improving the way gratitude is expressed within the workplace and between sales teams and their clients.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
My background as a sales executive really opened my eyes to the lack of gratitude in business and how relationships were suffering as a result. I knew there had to be a better, more scalable, way to help people show appreciation and establish stronger connections using the incredible technological tools that are available to us today. With a background in sales and a vision of gratitude, Thnks came to life.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
We are on a mission to make gratitude a daily habit in the workplace, changing the way people incorporate appreciation into their business relationships. Thnks is a digital gratitude platform that makes it easy to send small gestures of appreciation with the goal of relationship-building. Relationship building in business has traditionally been focused on brand marketing swag and businesses putting their name out there. Doing this places all the attention on the company versus the recipient of the item. There is an opportunity here to focus more on the recipient and catering to them, this builds interpersonal relationships instead of just one transactional item being sent. Thnks gives people the quick and efficient ability to send genuine gratitude.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Before we officially launched Thnks, we were testing out a new feature we’d built that allows any Thnks sender to share gratitude to hundreds or even thousands of recipients at once simply by uploading a spreadsheet. Today, it’s one of our most popular features. At the time of our test we hadn’t fully built the proper checks and guardrails into the system. The test was to send 54 recipients, who worked at our largest investor’s office, a cup of coffee (an important note here — on the back end of Thnks each item you can send is assigned an ID. The cup of coffee was ID 50322).
You may already know where this is going — we inverted the ID and the quantity columns on the send and ended up sending one recipient 50,322 cups of coffee. Even worse than blowing up the recipient’s inbox, we charged our investor $300,000+ on his credit card (who even has a limit that high?). Thankfully that was an easy reversal before he even noticed. Lesson learned — measure twice, cut once.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
‘Disrupting’ means things like innovating, progressing, and improving — all things that are generally considered good. Innovation does not need to be a brand new invention. It is more often based on new combinations of existing mechanisms that reduce cost and add value. In that sense, a system that has withstood the test of time has most likely been ‘disrupting’ itself over and over again.
There are a few ways in which disrupting an industry can go bad. One prominent example would be MoviePass. A fantastic product for movie lovers that wasn’t the slightest bit economically feasible. While it ultimately failed as a business, it still managed to disrupt the industry by inspiring major theater chains like AMC to introduce subscription passes.
Segway is another great example. The idea of a personal transportation device for urban dwellers was great. But as practical as it may have been, they just looked ridiculous. On top of that, the hype prior to release set incredibly high expectations. Ultimately the Segway failed, but the concept was spot on as services like Bird and Lime had taken over in many cities.
Ultimately, successful disruption lies in the execution way more than the idea or theory.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Pay it forward.
- Solicit opinions and ideas from employees.
- Lead with empathy and appreciation.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
For starters, we’re growing incredibly fast and are looking to hire a lot more employees at our headquarters in Nashville. In terms of our software, our ultimate goal is to get to a point where our users never even have to use our tools because they will be incorporated so seamlessly into their daily work flow. We currently have add-ons to platforms like LinkedIn and Salesforce — so whether it’s out of your email, your CRM, or any other tool you use Thnks will be right there beside you
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
“Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
I first read the book as a teenager in the 90s. I continue to re-read the book every couple of years and am amazed to find new insights and new ways to think about problems each time I re-read it. The book teaches readers to learn critical and skeptical thinking. It presents a set of tools that Sagan calls the “Baloney Detection Kit.” I am such an optimist at heart that it’s important for me to have an objective and systematic approach to recognizing common rhetorical and logical fallacies.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
The life I’m most grateful for came from my high school basketball coach, Joe D’Alessandro at Somerville High School. Coach used to always tell us, “Don’t complain. Don’t explain.”
To me that always meant we don’t make excuses. Mistakes happen. If it’s something we can control, we can fix it. If it’s not, we let it go. Learn from it and move forward. There is no time to dwell on mistakes and there’s no value in complaining about them.
We practice a form of this at Thnks. One of our core values is extreme ownership, which is the concept that there is no one else to blame. A leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
With all of the changes taking place in workplace culture we’ve seen our tools being used in all kinds of new ways. Virtual socializing has become necessary and important, and our customers had great ideas of ways to make virtual sessions seem much more personal, like sending cocktail kits for Zoom happy hours as one example. Although there have been some obstacles to overcome this year, I have been constantly reminded of the power of human connection. If I could inspire a movement it would be to harness our intrinsic need to be social and connect and use it to bring people together through gratitude. If everyone took a few minutes once a day to write down 3–5 people or things they are truly grateful for I think the world would be a very different place.
How can our readers follow you online?
To use our tool, you can use our web app at www.thnks.com or our mobile apps for IOS and android. Check us out on Instagram and Twitter @alwayssaythnks and LinkedIn and Facebook. You can also always reach out to me directly at [email protected].
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Brendan Kamm Of Thnks On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
