55. Dani Weinstein: The Expert in Community Building shares tips for Tennis and Corporate Community Success

What if the strategic thinking you cultivate on the tennis court could shape your corporate journey? That's precisely what tennis enthusiast and corporate community-building expert Dani Weinstein did, and he's here to discuss his journey from the tennis courts to the corporate world and to the heart of Israel. He shares some lessons from his tennis pursuits, emphasizing how maintaining focus, learning from losses, and adopting effective routines can transition seamlessly into your professional life.

Dani's expertise doesn't stop at applying the mental skills honed on the tennis court to his corporate journey. A master diplomat between technology and consumers, Dani unveils his unique MSEE model, a strategic framework for community building that propelled him to launch seven language communities in 15 months. Hear how he navigated the corporate landscape, from his experiences with two high-achieving unicorns, Domo and Kaltura, to his current role at SAP.

As an Israeli, Dani lends insights into the multifaceted conflict gripping the region. Urging listeners to dive into history and absorb multiple perspectives before forming judgments, Dani underlines the importance of nuanced understanding in the face of complex realities. So, buckle up for an enlightening discussion that traverses personal journeys, corporate landscapes, and global issues. Dani's story will inspire and provoke thought, so don't miss this captivating episode.

Resources:
Connect with Dani: Linkedin, X
Learn more about Community Building: Community Strategy Academy, In Before the Lock Podcast, Build Better Communities, CMX Hub
Books: People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams, The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage, Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging
List of causes and organizations supporting Israelis in this challenging time:
Jewish Agency Fund for Terror Victims

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Transcript

Dani: 0:00

How do you crowdsource or harness the power of your customers to share knowledge, share best practices, optimize the value of their investment in your platform, capture ideas? I mean Apple is an incredible example. We've been there. They have one of the strongest communities in the world. I actually have several friends in the HP community days that actually are at Apple now running the support community. I have other friends in the industry that used to run the Apple community years ago and with that it's like anything else and you go by and talk to them.

Klara: 0:30

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Grand Slam Journey podcast, where I, together with my guests, discuss various topics related to finding our passion and purpose, maximizing our potential sports, life after sports, and transitioning from one chapter of our lives to the next, growing our skills and leadership and whatever we decide to put our minds into. For my guest today, Dani Weinstein, areas of community building. Dani and I discussed his passion for tennis, corporate community building, and Israel. Dani is from Israel, and I figured would make sense to talk to someone who is from that area of the world to discuss what has been going on lately. For context,his tconversati on was recorded about a couple of weeks ago and so a lot has transpired since then. We started the by podcast talking about Dani's upbringing and what led him to tennis. Dani shares how playing tennis helped him develop his mind and strategic thinking and how it's a good analogy for life. talked We talk about the importance of staying focused and having a routine before matches, as was the value of learning from losses and taking a step back to understand what happened.

Klara: 2:04

Dani shares his journey of becoming an expert in community building. He has an extensive experience in building a community and highlights the importance of communities in improving customer engagement and satisfaction. Donnie advises starting with the most important and passionate customers to incubate and crowdsource ideas for driving the vision of your community. He also emphasizes the need to connect with conversations happening in channels that are not owned by the company. So what's the value of community building? This whole episode has been a big learning from me and I realized how little I knew about the importance of building a community around your brand and the whole process of it. Donnie explained it beautifully. He calls it the MSEE model.

Klara: 3:07

The M stands for marketing, which leads to advocacy. Your top customers are the most passionate about your brand and when you find them and identify them, you can harness the community to drive advocacy. The S stands for support. Well-run communities create answers and solutions that lower customer support costs, as the community provides answers and feedback for other customers via contribution, such as sharing their tips, guidance, and expertise. E stands for education, which translates to content. Communities create great content that allows your customers to learn and use your products more rapidly, leading to greater adoption. And the last E stands for engineering, which translates to innovation. Your top customers are the biggest users of your product and, in many cases, have the best ideas to make your products and services even better. Dani shares some real business examples of creative rewards and marketing strategies and a wealth of resources for building community, as well as supporting Israel, which is a topic that we dive into at the very end of this podcast.

Klara: 4:36

I've had a blast talking to Dani about all things tennis, business, and community as was the difficult situation in Israel. I hope you do your research. I know there's quite a bit of misinformation happening, so please study the history. Look at things from all angles before you evaluate what is right and what is wrong. As always, undefined you enjoyed this episode, I want to ask you to please share it with someone who you believe may enjoy it as well. Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and don't forget to subscribe.

Dani: 5:36

I'm doing okay, clara. I'm really happy to have this opportunity and I appreciate you having me on the podcast.

Klara: 5:42

Yeah, I know it's actually a hard time for you and your family, I'm sure, being from Israel, all that's happening, so I hope to get into a little bit of that, but obviously talk mainly about your background and tennis, so hopefully this podcast will be also a little bit of fun then just serious. But I think, given what we have been all reading and watching, it justifies to have some conversation around it. But before we dive into many of these topics, I want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, please, donnie.

Dani: 6:17

Weinstein. So my name is Danie, pronounced Donnie, and I've been in the community world now going back to probably later part of 2007,. So 16-plus on years here. I'm kind of a global citizen, so I was born and raised in the New York City area on the island. I studied abroad at both Tel Aviv University and the Rodin School of Management, in both undergraduate and graduate school. I lived in Israel for quite a few years, so I speak the language. My dad is from Israel and we have quite a bit of family there, and I had the opportunity to be Clara through our common connection with Ilana, Golan and Leap. And yeah, I'm super excited here to talk about my passion in both community, as well as tennis.

Klara: 6:59

Yes, we're going to touch base on many of those things and your touch base actually a little bit on your background and upbringing. But I'm always curious how our upbringing shapes our passion, that we choose for ourselves, perhaps even later on. Sometimes it is very planned and purposeful, sometimes it seems like we just stumble across of things, but they seem to resonate with us early on in our childhood. So I know you're big into tennis. We've shared a couple of connections and calls, talking about tennis and your passion and creating even community through tennis and leading the teams to some great national representation and tournaments, and you actually build community in your profession around the technology and what you do in SAP. So I'm curious, if you reflect back on your childhood and upbringing, what are some of the key things that influenced your passion towards sports and sort of this community aspect?

Dani: 8:04

So I grew up in a middle class suburbia on Long Island and a great place to grow up at that time and both working parents. We had a nice house and we had food on the table. But it was also like, well, if you want to go and have something nice, you need to go work for it. And so I've been working since the age of 13. I took my dad's lawn mower with my best friend across the street. We started to go around the neighborhood and essentially build our own community of landscaping business and so the first year we made enough money to buy our own equipment and by the second year we had a little empire of about 40 houses and with that they kind of kept us out of trouble and learned how the basics of business and how you hustle and get referrals and word of mouth and understand how to deal with all kinds of people friendly and angry and knowing the personalities, whether you're going to get paid on time or not. You can get paid on time and what good customer services like. And it was sort of like year on thing, because you had not only the grass cutting year round, but then you would clean up the leaves in the fall and then when the snow fell, they would call you to come clean their driveways. So that was a great thing, but it also told me the ethic of working hard and earning enough money to buy a car, buy a nice stereo and save money for college. And with that my parents taught my brothers and I those values that you've got to work hard and education was incredibly important, and so we were fortunate enough to get into some decent schools and have my parents pay for that.

Dani: 9:28

So that was sort of, I think, an early aspect of your community. I think the other piece, too, is just. I was raised Jewish. You're part of the Jewish community, and that too is also an important part of my, my upbringing. On the sports side. I really wasn't a very big kid or particularly athletic, and, however, tennis is definitely in my family DNA. My grandmother played till she was 86 years old.

Dani: 9:52

I didn't take it back to my grandmother until she was 78. I was 13. My mother still plays. She's 87 years old and playing twice a week. You know all the other 89 year olds that's amazing.

Dani: 10:02

And I've been playing since the age of eight, not competitively but just for fun. And I did play in high school. But I do remember going to the US Open every year back in New York, sitting in all the cheap seats you know, really high up because the first week take the train there and seeing people like Roscoe Tanner and John McEnroe and so on, and in addition to that we would always watch the majors I mean the Grand Slams on TV every year. So that kind of planted the seed as far as you know, scored for me.

Dani: 10:29

I really became passionate about playing tennis and I have been playing with friends for many years, and then I started playing league in 2009. And so I was fortunate to was a sort of a sandbag of 3.0. We'll get into the kind of the ratings later on but I did start captaining when I was a three five, was fortunate to take my team to nationals back about 10 years ago and we came in fourth in the country and so still playing quite a few teams and that keeps me fit and somewhat sane.

Klara: 10:56

Love it and I'm also curious what attracted you to tennis, because I have to admit, every guest I ask about their passion for sport and even tennis particularly. I learned some new things because it seems like there's always different things that we appreciate about it. So it seemed like it was clear you had some precedents as far as your grandma and your mom played, so you had family members you can observe and it seemed like they opened up your eyes towards the sport. Naturally, but as you look back, is there something that really resonated with you? Why tennis?

Dani: 11:33

Yeah, so certainly there's definitely familial influence there. Number one, number two I played a lot of, literally, baseball and we play stickball touch football on the street, but I really wasn't a good enough athlete to be competitive Either one of those sports in high school and I was pretty good at tennis, so that was sort of one and two. I think. The fact of, on one hand it's really if you're playing doubles it can be a team sport, but I really thrived on the singles aspect of it and so, as I grew older, it really helps you, I think, develop your mind and your strategic thinking, because especially when you're a singles player, you know you can start really strong and you have to maintain that level of composure in order to get across the finish line.

Dani: 12:17

You probably know the hardest games to win are the final points of a match. At the same time, if you have a weak beginning, you have to recompose yourself, and it's sort of like the analogy I put is that you're like you're on an island and you've got to figure out how do you recompose yourself, how do you think about? All right, this is a new situation or maybe there's a situation you've been in before. You reflect upon that, you adjust, you pivot, and that's just like it's a good analogy for life. You know, life is not a straight line up or down, it kind of you have. You know peaks and valleys, and as you experience life you learn ground, hopefully develop even more, and I think the same is true with tennis.

Klara: 12:53

Yeah, I love that about the sport, definitely too, and there's some aspect of you're there completely alone. Obviously you have maybe fans or coaches cheering for you, but then at the end of the day it's very black and white. There's nobody else you can hide behind. If you win, you win because you're where better than the opponent that day. With exceptions, there are sometimes those very, very close matches, so one or two balls make a difference, but that happens very, very rarely. And if you lose, you lose only because you are worse than the opponent, and so the wins and losses you can celebrate quite a bit, but they also hurt quite a bit, and so there's a lot of analysis and strategy that you can then adjust based on how you play that day. And that's very black and white sport.

Dani: 13:45

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, there was a period of time when I lived my actually live in Tel Aviv. I was trying to play squash and tennis at the same time, which is very hard to do because there are different functions of the wrist, you know. And tennis you're not moving your wrist, squash you have to, and I decided I'm going to stick with tennis. But with that I integrated some pretty nasty spin and slice into my game and so many people don't like playing against me.

Dani: 14:08

And I didn't discover Brad Gilbert's winning ugly book until I was captaining about 11 years ago and I started reading it like, oh, this is my Bible. And so for people who don't know Brad Gilbert, he didn't have the same level of skills, let's say Connors or McEnroe, but he beat people like that with his mental game. So I like to tell people that you've got to have the physical skills, but tennis is very much 70% mental and 30% physical. You've got the game, but you have to figure out how to navigate the water, understand your opponent, and for me, the longer the match goes on, the better chance I have to win, because I break people down mentally.

Klara: 14:46

Love it and I love your comparison. Thank you for stating that the difference is between squash and tennis, because for what a reason? People typically think that they're very similar, even racket ball. Or sometimes they throw table tennis Like they ask me are you good at table tennis? I play table tennis for fun Back in the day when I was a kid, maybe for a week, when we had in the winter conditioning, and we would play it in a way that you have a team and you run in a circle and you rotate, you hit a ball and you go on the opposite side.

Klara: 15:19

But I'm awful at whatever other racket sport other than tennis. Well, although I know how to hit a ball with a racket because there's the hand-eye coordination, but they're very different. I remember once going to play a racket ball, actually with my friend in college and he was more of a racket ball player and so obviously he beat me very easily because I didn't know how to move between the four walls. That's another thing that like constrained me. I would run into walls and then we went back on the court and I couldn't hit a ball. It was so weird because the technique was so different. I was like I'm never doing this again. This is ridiculous.

Dani: 15:57

I did take a racket ball class in college. Miguel taught us I think it was like top five in the United States at the time. Squash was kind of interesting, but again my passion came back to tennis Even now global pickleball craze. I played pickleball several years ago. When we'd have rainouts here in California We'd play indoor. But it's a totally different game For me. I still have a pretty solid game, especially now that I, after going to Nashville I got bumped to 4-0. If you're 4-0, you're basically playing people that were at college level or even higher. Doing that at a singles level is very challenging. Going from winning 80 to 85% of matches is a 3-5 singles to maybe 15-20%, which is fine. Again, you kind of grow your game. But now I actually got bumped down. I learned to play more doubles as a 4-0. Now I'm playing against a 3-5 and mostly playing more mixed. I'm playing with a 7-0-8-0 and still having a chance to compete pretty well.

Dani: 16:55

We went to sections in 3-5, 18-over. Last fall we were in 7-0 Men's League that went to Orlando. We came in 6th in the country. It's fun. I enjoy the sport Even to that point. There's definitely an element of community. Even as a captain I would get to know players from the different clubs. You're starting to straddle these lineups and seeing who your matchups are going to be, even going back years ago. Sure, everybody wants to win, but I think when you lose, you actually grow. This is like start-ups for business as well. When you fail, you learn. You actually grow from that.

Dani: 17:34

11 years ago there were 20, 3-5 teams in Sacramento. They had two flights of 10 teams each. The top two were going to play off. Three were 11-2. We had to beat the last place team in our last match. Nobody else had only two losses. I was on vacation. We lost three guys to availability. The other team played out of their minds. We ended up losing on the default and we dropped and we got knocked out of the playoffs. That was devastating, but the next year we rebounded and we went all the way to Nationals. It's simply like anything else. You have to take a step back, understand what happened, learn from it. As long as you're learning and growing, there's opportunity to improve and get to that next level.

Klara: 18:15

I 100% wish I knew that skill earlier on when I competed when it mattered. But learning how to lose and taking it objectively, not emotionally, and looking at what can I improve and get better at, is definitely a skill that one can continue to master, I think, for the rest of our lives. I'm way better at it, obviously now, but also because tennis doesn't mean so much that I used to back in the day. There's way bigger pressure and the losses are obviously way more impactful and important than, let's say, losing now in a tournament, but it's always fun competing. Do you have any tips or tricks on how you look at losses now and how you digest the information you've got, or to help you improve and get to the next step like overcome that pain from the loss?

Dani: 19:12

Yeah, I mean you have to put things into perspective and even within a match, it's really it's that mental game and so it's really trying to one of our pros, who actually gave us a lot of coaching on our way to Nationals, doug Atkinson his analogies if you have a bad point or bad game, it's basically the analogies it's like the water going down a shower drain it's gone, it's not coming back and each point is a fresh. It's essentially a fresh start. So it's a question of who can play calmer, more composed, and even as I tell people it's their first time at the district, their first time in playoffs, first time in the section said you don't have to play like a four or five, you have to play a strong three, five or four a game, but you're ready to that and you have to do it calmly. And so it's easier said than done, but the more that you can be relaxed and focus on it. And I always tell my teammates look, that's the first couple of games, it's not about crushing the ball or it's about let's find. You know, get ball control, get comfortable, get placement, put the ball where you put, where you want to put it. If they beat you on a great shot, okay, that's great, but if you beat yourself, that's a different story.

Dani: 20:17

And even when I was competing at four, I'd be playing these young guys that are singles players. The advantage that I had is a lot of the 18, 19, 20 roles. They just want to hit the ball really hard. They don't care about a mental game. And so, with that, if you're and one of my strengths is actually getting every ball back and they can hit another ball and another ball, another ball, and so with that, if you make get them frustrated and get under their skin, then they're going to bound to make mistakes. And so it's as I said earlier, it's a there's a strategy to it, there's a mental game to it. And again I figure I go back to you know Brad Gilbert and look at the success he's had now with Coco Gough and even prior to that with you know Agassi and Andy Roder.

Klara: 20:58

I was actually going to comment. The strategy that you mentioned was literally the strategy that Coco applied that helped her win the US Open, like in the final, especially the third set. I mean, what was visible is she was just fighting every ball, resetting and just going the extra mile and making her hit the extra shot and Sublink eventually broke down. I think mentally she started over hitting too much, going for way too much, which helped Coco get her footing and win. So yeah, I love what you mentioned, that literally the finalists came into a mind when you said it.

Dani: 21:33

No, that's a great example.

Dani: 21:34

I mean which that match was incredible between Coco and Sabalenka and yeah, sabalenka is like the hardest sitting female out there.

Dani: 21:42

I mean it's incredible and to your point, it's about the end of the day, it doesn't matter what's five miles an hour or 105 miles an hour If you're not in the ball, in the court doesn't mean anything. So, yeah, I mean again, it's so those, you know, those analogies are good and they've certainly helped me in, especially when you're playing casually or just hitting with friends or just it's not a let's necessarily a section match, but if you're having a pretty intense week at work and you got a lot of a lot on your mind, you're trying to figure out, you're like stuck in a project and then you start to play a lot of. For me, a lot of times I will actually my creativity will actually thrive in the tennis court. Oh my gosh, I just have now an idea to figure out how to get you know, move, kind of move the needle on something. So it's for me, it's. It's not only physical therapy, it's also mental therapy.

Klara: 22:27

Yeah, and I do want to touch base on that also in the aspect of it Obviously it's tennis player talking to a tennis player, so we don't have anybody who can disagree with us or oppose. But I think one of the things in tennis they're really miss in any other sport and other sport that I compare it, such as lifting weights, crossfit, running that I sort of do on my own is the amount of focus that it requires, and so especially kind of the switching off from work to tennis, because you have to focus so much on so many things the ball, your technique, moving, running you can't play tennis effectively without being focused, and so going on the court now really allows me to disconnect from work on a way different level than if I were to just go lift weights, which I still do, like in my gym, but it's just a different level of relaxation that I get and separation from kind of the day job. Does it happen to you as well? Oh yeah absolutely.

Dani: 23:28

If I'm racing to a match last minute, I'm getting off a conference call and, like workers, still in my mind and the chances of me being able to play my best game is it's going to be challenging and even I'm playing 7-5 now. One of the guys that's on the team I had an opportunity to play with him. I've always played against them and he's one of the toughest four players in our local league. He's lefty, he's really tall, he's like a spider at the net and he was on his phone literally a minute before we started the match and he played like a 3-0. We lost that match. I mean, he missed about 10 overheads, he double-faulted eight times and I'm like I was in shock and he apologized to me and it was like I could tell it was work right.

Dani: 24:11

So you can't disconnect and again it's that relaxation and it's that muscle. Again, it usually takes me a few games just to get warmed up. But the point is, especially when it's more serious, if it's a playoff or you're getting to the districts or nationals I've kind of got my routine. You're disconnected from electronics, you're having a certain meal, but you want to have that warm of time. It's not just the stretching and getting your body physically warm, but it's also just that you listen to certain music, but getting in a relaxed mode so that you can just play on. It's all about ball control.

Klara: 24:46

I love what you mentioned and I always used to have a routine Bumpers. What does your routine look like? You mentioned some aspects of it, but can you take us through, or do you have? I'd say, a game is at 6pm. What would ideal routine for you look like?

Dani: 25:02

Sure, so usually I want to get there. You get 30 minutes for warmups. I try to be there on time for warmups, usually an hour before I get there. I want to finish at least a meal, not a huge meal, but let's have some cars. Get something in my system. Make sure I've got plenty of water. I've got a power bar for in-between sets.

Dani: 25:24

One thing I've learned, especially as I've gotten older and especially playing in war and climate like in California North and California Sacramento. It's probably similar to Austin as far as the HECOs I didn't know this years ago but bringing extra pairs of socks. So if you can't have a 76 first set, as you get into your 30s, 40s, 50s, the Changing socks on a change on a set, change over, actually give re-energizes your legs. So that's huge, but making sure you know you've got enough fluids and so on. Even earlier this year we went down. We were at the at sections. It was an early morning match, wasn't very hot, was in the Bay Area, but it was a really long match. And the second set I Think we were up for two.

Dani: 26:09

I started cramping in both camps. I took a medical for two minutes, down again, you know, down a Gatorade, and they rattled off four games that one second, seven to a tie break, one, the tie break like 10 Eight. But point is that you know, you know, but no one's when that's gonna happen. So it's a matter of making sure you've got changing clothing, liquids and just energy so that you're not Depriving your body with of the electrolytes. And then we know, once you arrive at the court, I have routine. Just you know certain stretches, simply from my lower back, so you know a lot of hamstring stretches. You know running for a few minutes and they just you know hitting the ball, getting Comfortable, hitting the ball, whether be at the net, baseline strikes, whatever it may be, overheads, and then just you know getting game on.

Klara: 26:52

Yeah, it seems like a good routine in many Aspects similar to what I go through and, yeah, you hit on all the big things. I Wonder if it's a good time Maybe just to shift a little bit more also to your professional life and if you can describe a little bit the journey that it took you now being a community builder at SAP. I know if you've had many various Experiences, which I hope we can touch on as well, but what led you to the position you have now, donnie?

Dani: 27:24

I've been a community leader for quite a while now, going back to again late 2007, and there really was no Straight line or say I mean, this is what I'm gonna be when I grow up. I came out to California in the mid 90s for my MBA University, california Davis. I was fortunate to get hired at the Healy Packard. I was a global product manager. Yeah, and people like what does a product manager do? Well, the way that I describe it is this is this is a very profitable Division of a, you know, network printing products. So this is a time when people were in IT and in the office, were moving from having everyone having a printer on their desk to having essentially shared printer, you know, in the office space, and so having those, those network cards, either in the laser jet or external ones, to share on the network was was key. It was very profitable business. The business was growing and we're mainly serving enterprise customers. So accounts like Citibank and State Farm, fidelity, high-end enterprise accounts around the world, and so with that, responsibilities really were how do you Negotiate or be that diplomat between you know the geeks in the lab that want to build cool stuff. They're like well, we had this cool feature of it. Then Dealing with the customer success teams, the sales people. They can't wrap. So what is the customer? What are they? What problems are they trying to solve? You know, what do they need in their next generation? So if that balancing act of getting the right feature set, product mix, price points, time to market, all the above forecasting and you know that was a really well disciplined education for me. I mean each was very regimented on on on process, on reviews, understanding you know what, what we're gonna do and when we should be launching your products if it's also with that doing, you know, international road shows of new product introductions, doing market research with large accounts, but really incredible team building across functionally, across the organization. Make sure you're, you know you're doing the right thing. Net, net is I had from there. I went to a startup that HP had acquired, bare phone. I took over a part kind of a dead product line and traveled the world to kind of get the requirements because the sales people were not cooperative, they wouldn't tell me anything and ended up killing that whole line.

Dani: 29:27

Came back to traditional HP and spent most of my career in important services. So what does that mean? Hp's consumer business was massive. So all you think about all the printers and PCs that were in the world at that time. This is back in in around 2000 and they had a massive support organization. So phone, email, chat, web and, and held a series of global program management roles over several years. So, overhauling the web experience to you know, three clicks or less to get to the content you're finding, having the content written in a consumer speak not in a highly technical subcontent, but then every kind of global program management role around chat support, email support, remote control support.

Dani: 30:08

In 2006, the America's team won a JD power award for support and In 2007 they were not renewing it because we were missing an HP owned or branded forum for support. But we had a charter to go and create one. We went to IT and they said, well, it's gonna take a several years to build your community. They went all the way to the CEO because they said we're not gonna license anything from any better, we're gonna build everything ourselves. And we had an exception. So we vetted vendors went into going with that. The time is for lithium, and today they're called chorus and. And then, oh, a partner with them and I was on the ground floor of a brand new social care team.

Dani: 30:44

So this is where my community journey began, and so I was on the original three person team and we launched seven language communities in 15 months, from the fall of 2008 through the spring of 2010 English, french, german, spanish, portuguese, simplified Chinese and Korean. So the global footprints each were separate communities, fully localized. We had teams in Amsterdam managing French and German, so Apollo for Spanish and Portuguese, singapore for simple Chinese and Korean. But this whole seven-year period became my PhD in community management, community leadership. How do you grow and scale? How do you optimize? How do you know, mentor your teams? I, we went from you know nothing to drop. When I left at the end of 2014, there were Two million members. We were driving 9 million customers a month, of it to the community, 100 million customers a year. We won not one, but two ground solo awards, which is industry gold standard, and even within HP, the legacy enterprise communities that were homegrown were actually sunset and they adopted our model.

Dani: 31:43

So from there I went to two unicorns, the first one being Domo. I get hired to basically build out their brand new B2B community. They were a four hundred person company they're not having any kind of presence and had a great run there, spending five and a half years building out their B2B community, running user groups, really having fully integrated processes with support with the customer success teams, education and so on, and, you know, went through the IPO, did okay with the IPO and Dem in COVID hit that's. That was the time when I met Medi Lanna they they were going through some downsizing and took advantage of that as sort of air cover and had a number of you know Downsizing during that period, which the second I was affected by. So with that and my first tour with Lee, talked a lot of great brands and ended up going to another unicorn, caltura. They were in the video sass world Similar story, but in this case they actually created the role to bring on board and then spending about 15 months there. Now the first six months Couldn't have got any better. I had reviews all over the CEO. They proved 90% of my budget. We hired vendors, we started building our community. Then you know we're getting rid of the IPO. They kind of slow things down post IPO, started to launch, wrap things up and then, early part of 22, they had a. They had a rough quarter. They decided and they'd let some people go and I was impacted there and so my second sabbatical was two servers ago, again talked a lot of great brands and was fortunate to join SAP. So I know kind of shared a lot about the journey.

Dani: 33:14

But when we talk about community, that in these cases it's been really about building out that web experience and so it's that community domain. But it's more than that it's really. When I talk about community, it's really about how do you crowdsource or harness the power of your customers to Share knowledge, share best practices. You know optimize the value of their investment in your platform. You know capture ideas. And Apple is an incredible example. You've been there. They have one of the strongest communities in the world. I actually know Someone who ran the actually have several friends in the HP community days that actually are at Apple now running the support community and other friends in the industry that used to run the Apple community years ago and you know, with that it's like anything else.

Dani: 33:56

So when you go buy a new product today we've now, we're not conditioned to well, I'm not going to go and pick up the phone and talk to the salesperson.

Dani: 34:04

No, you're gonna go online and look at the reviews and Google it or go to Amazon reviews and see what people are saying about the product or the service, and it's all about that trusted advisors. So if you know, three generations ago for a great grandparents had a car. You know the first thing to the theta problem of the car they were going to they weren't gonna call up for it as an example. They were gonna go to their neighbor, steve, down the street and say, oh, can you help me with my problem in my car? Or, susan, you know, if they have a problem problem with their appliance, oh, susan, those appliances, they're trusted advisor. So it's the same thing. So that can come through again. The internet today people googling, finding information in a forum, but then beyond that, it's also conversations into people. I go to Twitter, they go to YouTube or they go to channels that you don't necessarily own. So it's understanding where the conversations that are happening about your brand in other channels that you don't necessarily control. And the last part is really the in-person Connections.

Dani: 35:00

So it's all the meetups, all the user groups, all the conferences, all the virtual events, all the community meetups that are happening. You've got to be plugged into that to understand the tone, the sentiment. But also who are those people that are Running these events? And it sells for us to sort of gold standard in the space, especially an enterprise of the trailblazer community. I know Erica close a good friend of mine she's. She was a driving force who built that whole experience.

Dani: 35:26

She's not a very successful consultant and so you know it's the point where your super fans are so passionate about the brand and the experience they want to get together and barbecue and talk about, talk about the product, and it's the same thing. You know Apple same thing. You go there's a new iPhone, 15 or 16 coming out, people camping out at the Apple stores and you know Robert Swills is very famous Apple guru. He, I think he was on many newspaper covers back to the day and he was always the first person camped out at the Apple store in Cupertino. So you reach that level of passion.

Dani: 35:59

And so when in SAP's world we have a massive community it's been around online for more than 20 years. We still get more than 3 million unique visitors every month and right now. I was excited to join really as a strategist to help improve or should say help the vision of the next five years when we want to go, and so Right now we're doing a lot of work to improve the overall online experience, but also we're thinking about how do we connect the dots across the company so that our organizations are working better together and taking advantage of this, this big community, in addition to how do we get plugged into the conversations that are happening in the channels we don't own, as well as the organizations that are running the user group. So there's a lot of work to be done. You know we're making progress, so this is really about a lot of heavy lifting on the back end as far as our own experience that we do on yeah, thank you for that description.

Klara: 36:48

I Would like to dive into this even a little bit more, because maybe I'm actually slow. Just to describe for you and listeners, I Would think tennis fit me well because I'm very individualistic. When there was something going wrong, I'm the one person I lean on, and so we're literally even at work. One of the things I had to learn is how do I unleash even the power of the team and bring people together. I'm definitely better than I used to be and I'm sure there's much more. I can still learn and improve, but one thing that even stood out to me Is how you talk about the community and importance, and it really seems that you just get it and it comes so natural to you, donnie. So what are some of the things? Or maybe you would guide person like me to look at wise community, so important, and how should one start to build it.

Dani: 37:47

Sure. So there's many ways to look it in. And the thing you need to ask yourself Well, what's the content? Am I, you know, a founder of startup? You know I'm getting seed money?

Dani: 37:58

Everybody has a community and so when you, when you come into an experience, you say, well, how are you going to start? So even like, for example, I went to Dome, I'll say, well, you're already having conversations with your customers, right? You know who your most important customers are. You know who your most passionate users are, so you start with them. I mean, again, they're your most important customers. So it's sort of, when you're building that vision, you want to incubate and kind of crowdsource again those most important Beta customers to help you, you know, drive the vision. So there are communities that are essentially you could build a whole product around the community. If we think about more like an enterprise world and you start to talk to, well, where's the ROI? What should be? We be investing, you know, this much money in a platform and a whole team. And well, most people don't want to ask for a lot of money, most people don't want to ask for help, most people don't want to pick up the phone and call support and talk to somebody in another country. They want to just google it and find the answer. And so if you create that experience guess what and they find the answer and it actually helps them, then you're actually preventing them or your creating situations. You know, to support deflection. They're not going to pick up the phone and cost the company X dollars for every hour. They're going to talk to one of your agents. So there's a Support savings. That's number one. Number two as you ask questions in community or even elsewhere, that's brought into the community. If it's on youtube or twitter and someone successfully answers it and that Helps that person, that becomes rich content and that becomes a knowledge based article, because if you have that question, then there's at least 10 other customers that have the same question or they will, and so if you can then put that in a place where it's easy for someone else to find it, then it becomes valuable content and it becomes part of a learning journey.

Dani: 39:41

In the B2B world which SAP lives in, why do people spend time in community? Well, sap professionals are getting measured on how successful they are in implementing our software. And it's not easy software to manage. It's very complex and this is not unique to us. It's probably true of Salesforce and Oracle and all the other big players. So the person who's in charge or is responsible for using our software at, let's say, deutsche Bank or Fidelity or Universal Studio, whatever it may be they want to basically get better at using our product. How do they do that? How do they learn and grow? Well, they can learn in the community. They can connect with others.

Dani: 40:15

So if I'm a manager of finance at Deutsche Bank, I want to find, I want to meet the person that has the same job, the same role at another company, because then I can say, all right, I don't want to talk to SAP Salesforce, I don't want to talk to you and say, well, all right, how was the last release of this product?

Dani: 40:32

How many people do you have on your team? How do you get the most value out of the investment? What tips and tricks? Again, we've got all the release notes, you've got training videos, you've got webinars, you've got certifications. That's all everybody from the most part can get to that stuff. But then there's beyond that. There's the human element of our customers, and most customers will always find a another use case. They'll figure something out that the team really think about or how to discover that. So you want to have a capture of that knowledge, and so so how does that add value? The more that you can enable your customers to be more knowledgeable about your product and get better at using your product guess what it's like anything else the more someone uses a product by default.

Dani: 41:10

They like it more and they have more demand for it. They're prepared to thirst for that problem, and so that leads to greater demand, greater upsells, greater retention. It minimizes the tradition that becomes potentially big money, and so this is a language that then resonates with marketing and sales and customer success. The content piece is very useful for the education teams because again, they can take those tidbits of content whether it be Q&A or videos or discussions and convert those into learning terms and, again, anything else. You can't create 10 years of learning in a one hour webinar. People are busy, so you've got to find these, you know, 30 minute, 60 minute or even short, quick one videos, and so all that can be done within the community. And then, lastly, like anything else, your most passionate customers are going to tell you how to get better. So if you can tap into your community to actually get great ideas and crowdsource that and have them, give them the ability to suggest and vote up and comments, then they feel like they're part of the team. They feel like they're getting their voice heard and they're. Now their representation in the community becomes even stronger and so showing that the brain is listening and actually adopting. Now it's not going to mean that you're going to do every idea or it's going to happen tomorrow. You've got to set expectations. Well, yeah, we hear you as under consideration. It's going to take time, but most people understand. Of course you're going to have some naysayers like, well, this has been the ref, I wanted that five years ago. And sometimes you say, well, I'm sorry, it's just not a priority. This is why, but that's better than not saying anything. The point is that communities about having that transparency, having an open conversation and, again, connecting people and one analogy that is a lot is actually it's like creating a catfitting with your brand on it. So anybody that has, you know, wants to have a conversation about your brand, can come by the main entrance and then it's sort of like okay, well, who are you and what do you want to talk about? And say, oh, you're a VIP, come to the back room, or you want to talk to sales or over here, or you want to talk about, and you get, you navigate to the right place. So it's the same kind of thing, and of course, you may get a disgruntled customer and you just say I'm sorry and you move on. But for the most part, most people get it and so that leads to kind of that.

Dani: 43:25

The business values around you know again, deflection and content and value of content creation. The customer, the customer attention piece is huge and these things take time to curate but if you do that successfully then you're getting stickiness on your brands and with that you're then getting passionate members from that camp that actually influencing people writing the checks. So that becomes incredibly valuable. And, of course, the ideas piece is saving you tons on market research. Number one it's also creating brand value because you're showing your customers that they're listening to you. And thirdly, it can help you validate. All right, let's look under the who's actually talking about the ideas. Is it the CEO's best friend you went to college with? Who's running a small startup or is it? You know these are top five accounts that are actually spending 10% of their account for 10% revenue. So now the VP of engineering actually has context when did the idea come from and what does it mean? Okay, if we do this, how much more business will we get? So then you've got actually data that it's an informed decision.

Klara: 44:24

Thank you for describing it and it made me think about all the things I'm not doing or doing wrong in creating this Grand Slam journey community, because one of the things there's many reasons for my podcast that's obviously for myself to learn from guests and bring up the best in my guests around what I call the athletic mindset. I think it's not specific to athletes. I think athletes must have it in order to be great, but other people possess this athletic mindset to you of always wanting to be better at what they do and improve and grow and be the best at their role, whatever they're doing. But I definitely didn't create enough opportunity to connect with my listeners, so maybe that's one thing I'm going to start adding, and I always thought it was so weird that people scheduled these calls, and now I know why they actually work, so I'm going to try creating one.

Dani: 45:19

Donnie, thank you so much for that You've got your Grand Slam alumni group.

Klara: 45:24

So yes, I've actually thought about that too, of creating just a group of my Grand Slam journey guests too, so they can reach out and connect with one another.

Dani: 45:37

With the community that we line up with now with LEAP. It's pretty amazing. Yes, it started pretty small, so it can happen.

Klara: 45:44

Yeah, and that's definitely, I think, one of the biggest benefits of that program right, the community that you get through it and the people like you actually were here on the podcast because of that.

Dani: 45:56

So, yeah, yeah, in fact, last week actually, I was reached out to you by a good friend of mine from my HP days. He's part of the American Marketing Association Sacramento and they had an event, I think it was on Thursday night. It was a fundraiser for the SPCA and it was like a local beer garden and actually a different Clara from LEAP. She's local. I invited her, she showed up, so I got to meet her and then I realized another friend of mine from my HP days I went to grad school with her years ago, kirsten Gage. She just joined LEAP like three months ago. Okay, so we both met up at the event. That was pretty cool.

Klara: 46:29

Nice. I wonder if it would be useful to dive a little more into what you call the MSEE model for a community, because I was browsing through LinkedIn and it's definitely something that caught my eye. You stated that something that provides value to each of the verticals. Do you want to touch base on it, donnie? Or what else would you want to mention about the community aspect?

Dani: 46:53

I did touch upon a little bit and call it out in that way, but it's a model like I developed sort of in my first sabbatical and when I was investing on my expertise and sharing this knowledge and actually use that in the slide deck when I got hired at CalTura. But it's really that those four pillars of value that community can bring to business and so, when done right and getting that level of advocacy within an account, that's actually driving up sales and retention, but it's also driving referrals and customer stories, so that benefits marketing. The support piece is usually something that can be captured pretty early on in your journey because again, you can measure online, survey customers, ask them did you find what you're looking for? Do you intend to contact support? So those are measurable dollars. The education piece is really on that rich content. So if it's a valuable conversation on use cases and or successfully answer questions, again those things help the customer learning journey and the last one's around the innovation, because now your engineering team's got a huge pool of really smart people and, more importantly, passionate customers that not only want to tell them how to make the product better, but they can also, based on their persona, their profile, their ranking, whatever it may be. One of the benefits of community is the recognition. They could be invited to a beta program and actually kick the tires and some different ideas and be part of a focus group. So all of those things are highly valuable to the brand.

Dani: 48:16

And again, in most communities you've got sort of this. Some say it's a 99-1 model, sometimes it's like 70-20-10. Somewhere in that mix the vast majority of people in online world are just going to Google, they're going to read it, they're going to consume the content and they're going to move on. They're never going to sign in because they're just going to browse and that's fine. That larger percentage, or the mid-level one, are sort of these passive contributors, meaning they chime in once in a month, a few times a quarter. They'll like a bunch of stuff, they'll tag some stuff, they'll ask a question, they'll comment and they're a very important piece of the puzzle to it. There's a really small percentage that's anywhere between 1 and 5 percent.

Dani: 48:57

That are your most passionate and active members in the community and the reason that there's so motivated is they want to get recognition as being an expert on your brand and so they care about the game application. They want to be on the leaderboard. They want to get the monthly recognition by the community. They want to get invitations to your conferences. They want to be held, they want to be invited as a speaker somewhere, they want to get discounts to your learning offerings, and the reason they're doing that is they want to show their manager that they have an outside reference point that says, hey, I'm an SAP expert.

Dani: 49:31

I'm now, and when I built the Domo community, what Domo means is actually thanks. In Japanese, like you could say Domo and Agato is thank you very much. And the ranking structure I came up with was like in martial arts, you have a belt structure, so we start out with a visitor, then a white belt and move all the way to a black belt. So when we ultimately had it took several years Domo, black belts and people who earned those community rewards I mean they were putting that on LinkedIn, they were showing their manager because they want to get promoted or they want to get hired across the street. So there's a lot of motivation there and so those people have become the most valuable members of your community because, again, they're there all the time. They're providing a lot of valuable content. They've become an extension of the team.

Dani: 50:14

And also, when I talked about this earlier, this community everywhere theme that's really going on in the marketplace. Now it's not just in the domain that you own, because not everyone's going to show up there. Where are those top members that are providing a lot of engagement in LinkedIn and Twitter, youtube, github, stack Over wherever it may be that's relevant to your brand, and also you have other members that are like you know what the digital space is not for me. I want to go to all the user groups. I want to host events. I want to meet people in person. So, understanding, okay, who are my top people in Chicago or New York or in San Francisco, and having a program that recognizes them in a similar manner, because, again, they're part of your extended community. If you're able to do it right, then you've got this passionate army that you can't spend enough marketing dollars to get to the level of brand love and recognition that they're going to provide in the marketplace.

Klara: 51:10

And one thing I wanted to double click on that really you mentioned, but I want to highlight one more time is the stories you can get from them to help innovate to the next level, right, because they're such an authentic user as well, as you can use them to showcase somebody how they're using the technology or the software, how it helped them transform and I've been in sales, business development for quite a while, but really there's nothing better than showcasing those examples. It's the most powerful way if you have this community, and lead from those examples, because I would say most people don't really trust us sales people because they think we're salesy. I'm sure there's truth to that. So if you can just talk to somebody or really learn from why they chose the technology they did and how it helped them evolve and solve the problems they have faced, I think that's just the most authentic and real way to communicate that somebody can learn from.

Dani: 52:10

I mean, I'll give you a great example. I presented about 30 to 40 user groups for DOMO in North America years back and this is later in my time there I think it was the summer of 2019. And we're in the loop in Chicago and early in the year we had our community awards in our customer conference. We had our first time issuing black belts, one of the things I came up with. Every year. Early on we had a lunch, then it was a happy hour and we became 100 person events at our conference. I have these really cool framed awards. We have some really cool swag like DOMO branded AirPods or a little trophy. But then budgets were getting tight and we now have five black belts.

Dani: 52:52

So I went to my youngest martial arts studio. I said, where do you guys get your black belts? And they connected to the vendor and I had five real black belts made. It had DOMO and one end the brand. It had the Doja, which is a community, and had their community handle in the middle and nobody except for me knew about it. So we get to the awards ceremony to have under a blanket and we got a big you know step and repeat wall with our brand. And when I handed these out, people went crazy. They're like, where do I get one of those? And again it was like a $20 ride. But the point was it was a. It was a real black belt and with that. So I'm in Chicago and we're partnering up with education.

Dani: 53:31

We now had what we were calling major donor awards for people who really were. I think it was our first 10 people that had the DOMO admin certification program. So I was flying to Chicago and we had it was a glass award, so I actually carried my suitcase and one of my black belts, scott Thompson from Abbott Labs, was there. So I'm presenting to him the awards and what I did know is that there was someone from a, I think the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. She was a new customer. She's sitting in the audience and I'm presenting to Scott and she's telling her colleague oh, the thing was, scott had one of the coolest avatars.

Dani: 54:06

He actually had an avatar which was half Clark Kent and half Superman in our community and he took his digital award for the certification. He took the digital image and he put his avatar on top of it and he posted that in the community. So, long and short, he was known as Superman in the community and she's talking to her colleague oh my God, they're Superman on the flush. He's answering, like you know, a bunch of my questions and so we're at the. You know, we're at the happy hour afterwards in the evening at that bar and she's like oh, I want to selfie with Superman.

Klara: 54:41

That's awesome, and I mean who would want to have questions answered by Superman? That sounds pretty cool. It's a smart marketing to pick the right picture or representation.

Dani: 54:53

Yeah, and she came up with a creative name. She actually coined this term to Dome of Liberty.

Klara: 54:58

Dome of.

Dani: 54:58

Liberty. That's where you're getting that kind of story and you know showcasing it and talking about how now this new customer is not learning from you know, our experienced person, and they connected and that's great.

Klara: 55:11

Yeah, Anyone who's still contemplating about the importance of community, power of community, and they don't know where to start any tips down you would give them of how to get there or what to think about, as now. Hopefully this conversation inspired them to think about the importance of community.

Dani: 55:34

Oh yeah, there's a bunch of really good resources. So two of my closest friends in the industry who are the top in this world they're not both successful consultants Brian Oblinger as well as Erica Kool they started doing a podcast during COVID. It's called In Before the Lock. I'll get you the URL to share out.

Klara: 55:52

Awesome.

Dani: 55:53

Anyway. So In Before the Lock basically means in the forum world from a moderated perspective, you've got the ability to kind of lock bad behavior out of the community and so they kind of jokingly called their podcast In Before the Lock. And so what they did is they've got over 100 podcasts looking at now 103, and they really have just emptied their brain on anything and everything about community, all kinds of resources. I think I've been referenced in there several times. That's a great place to start. You can learn a time. There are a couple other places you know. Cmx Hub's got some great resources, a community club. Brian Oblinger actually just started a brand new thing called the Community Academy. It's launched pretty recently and I haven't had a chance to go into really deep diving there, but knowing Brian, it's just going to have a wealth of courses, information, a lot of free stuff out there. So that'd be another good place for that to look. And then people can also reach out to me directly if they want to connect and learn more about ABC's around community.

Klara: 56:58

Excellent. I'll add those resources to the episode notes and, of course, your LinkedIn profile as well, but I do want to a little bit also transition, I guess community. Hopefully, with everything that's been happening in Israel, there's a big community being built around the support of everything that people are facing there with the attack of the Hamas. It's been horrifying reading the articles and seeing the videos. I know you mentioned you have family and friends there. Anything you want to state in regards to that or support? I know you're following local news Maybe. How can people help?

Dani: 57:36

Yeah. So at the end of the day, you know Israel people live in a tough neighborhood and they're dealing with people that, frankly, have no value on life and have no interest in coexisting. At least the leadership and they demonstrated that with the barbers in the took place in recent days. It's a very difficult situation and you know, being well connected, especially with the Israeli tech community, you know we're sharing a lot of resources. I'm trying to pull up a couple links that I could put out and provide to you as well, if people want to help out.

Dani: 58:07

But I think that at the end of the day, part of the challenges we'll have is having a finding a partner for peace. And that's been a challenge because when the other side says they want a two state solution, well, in reality they don't want any state solution. They want to stay for themselves and nothing for Israel. So it's very complicated. Again, we're dealing with a level of barbarism I don't think that we've witnessed in our lifetime. It's kind of reenacted of what happened in Nazi Germany, but possibly worse, and thankfully the Israeli army is strong and they're going to take care of business. But it's going to take time and it's going to be very painful, but at the end, goldie had a great quote saying you know, peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than themselves, and so it's a sad reality. That's just that's what we're dealing with.

Klara: 58:52

Yeah, I really have no words because I feel like this situation of I don't know how to say it, even in the right ways the reality is people killing others for just being different than they are or having different beliefs, Like it's just something that I know existed ever since the history of our times, but I still can't wrap my head around it. And I know this conflict, especially the Middle East, has been full of conflicts forever, and so I'm educated a little bit around it, kind of what I read but the reality is, because I have lived there, I don't think I can fully sense and feel and understand. I think one thing is to really grow up there and going through it and another thing is to just read the news or kind of observe what's happening. What's your take on it, Donnie? Anything you want to share in regards to even just the history or how you see this potentially playing out. One of the things that I've been reading people are comparing it to pretty much the 9-11 in the US, but on an even larger scheme.

Dani: 1:00:01

Yeah, again, to put this into perspective, I'm in a population of, you know, 8-9 million Israelis, and for a thousand of their citizens to be murdered in cold blood women, children, elderly and soldiers it's 10x what 9-11 was and a Pearl Harbor. But it's just more than what took place. It's also how it happened and what they did and the barbarism and the fact that they are, the brutality I mean some of it's just indescribable but small examples. For them to go invade communities and go door to door and kill a daughter in front of the rest of their family, or to murder a grandmother and then take her phone and film on a Facebook Live on their family chat, her killing I mean these are just levels of barbarism that are just not comprehensible. And even this festival, this raid festival you know they had 3,520 rolls there and it was the theme is about peace and that was one of the motivations for going in they knew that this was happening was two miles from the border and they slaughtered hundreds of these kids. It even took some hostage.

Dani: 1:01:15

So again, the history is long. I mean the net. Net is that back in 48, the state was established, there was a UN resolution. The Israelis accepted the resolution. The Arab countries did not. They were invaded by seven armies. Israel survived it. My father actually fought in that war.

Dani: 1:01:32

The country lost 1% of its population and since then there's been, frankly, no partner for peace Aside from Egypt and Jordan. He went through bloody wars and now they said, okay, we have one piece, but the net is with the Palestinians, which are now turned Gaza into a terrorist state and are being funded by Iran. And again we got to take a step back and look at this. There's a global picture playing out here and Iran is funding Hamas and Gaza and Hezbollah and Lebanon, and they're now our friends. So there's a much bigger geopolitical situation here. Israel will survive and get through this. It's just going to be worth, but very painful.

Dani: 1:02:08

A few books I could recommend. There's one by an author, noah Tishby, called Israel Simple Guides. Another one, daniel Gordes, g-o-r-d-i-s. Israel concise history of a nation reborn. Another one called Startup Nation. But at the end of the day, this is about a different type of civilization, so it's a question of is it a civilization that values life? Because, again, israel is a democratic, electric country that actually has Arab, christian and Jewish populations. You know, people don't realize that there are Arab ministers in the government, they're Arab Supreme Court members, they're Arab doctors and the vast majority of the population gets along. Sadly, we have a terrorist organization that wants to destroy all of that Right now. You know it's praying for the safety of everybody there and that this can end as quickly as possible, but I also know this is going to be a long road and I'm just trying to pull up. I can say offline is there's a variety of organizations that are that are trustworthy. If you want to send in attacks to nations to help with the situation, that'd be great.

Klara: 1:03:06

Yeah, thank you, and I'll ensure to add that to the episode notes too, and hopefully we'll find a way to end this craziness sooner rather than later. And I have full trust in the Israeli military. I've heard it's one of the best in the world, obviously, even from kind of just understanding the attacks, and so I think this was one of the things also that caught, I'm sure, everybody in Israel in the world by surprise, just because it happened so abruptly without really anybody knowing that and knowing about the attack and just obviously the scale of it. So hopefully we will get the crazy people under control and contained and make them pay whatever you know the justice system ask for for what they have done. I think it's just the only thing we can hope for and people will support Israeli in whatever way. I know we at our organization do have a way to do that and so whether it's through our personal contributions or the corporations that are opening paths to support through our charity programs, maybe.

Klara: 1:04:19

On that note to end, one of the articles I've been reading today is a little bit related to that and just the craziness that's been happening in this world lately through the wars obviously started with the war in Ukraine and the conflicts in the Middle East continue to escalate. If nothing else, this is obviously an example of it, and the article also talked about potentially the risk of weakening US as being the world power to really help elevate some of these conflicts and step and support them, and we all can question whether that is right or wrong. But what I'm thinking about there's a lot of these things happening in the world. What would you inspire people to be doing more of, or less of, danny?

Dani: 1:05:15

Well, I think a few things. One is to I think we need, the end of the day, we have to kind of love that neighbor and think about how we want to be treated as fellow human beings. But also be involved with your local and federal governments and letting them know if you're agree with what they're doing or not agree with, be part of the process and if you're not sure about what's going on, educate yourselves. Question authority. There's a lot of great resources out there. And also, you're not going to get a history lesson by following the Twitter feed or watching a TikTok video. That's not going to work. So there's a lot of great content that think more relevant on maybe a YouTube, but do your research, talk to people who live there, connect with people that are part of that community, or whether they're from Ukraine or from Russia or from Israel, whatever it may be.

Dani: 1:06:05

I mean, even now, just watching it infuriates me is just there's so much anti-Israel hatred in the world, and I think there's a lot of many people. For example, there were demonstrations in Times Square, san Francisco, seattle, yesterday, supporting the Palestinian cause, but they're doing so in a manner where there's no combination of the barbaric acts that the Palestinian terrorists did. They all are chanting their freedom fighters and heroes. So it's really heroic and freedom fighters to murder women, children and elderly in their homes, to take babies hostage, to rape dozens of girls at a concert next to their dead friends and then kidnap some of them. And so the fact if you're really standing there and not condemning those activities and saying, oh yeah, because this is the end thing, then you have no credibility. So I think the people get caught up in the craze online or go into this event and they don't understand the context. And so that's the reality that Israel is dealing with, and I know that there's a long road ahead, that Israel is going to persevere and carry on.

Klara: 1:07:21

I concur with that and just hopefully this will end sooner than later with, obviously, the people who are doing this crazy barbaric thing paying for what I have done and will be able to hopefully live in some sort of peace and anything else you want to mention. For the end, I will again add your LinkedIn profile and some of the resources to the episode notes. But anyone who wants to talk about tennis or building a community, what is the best way to reach you or find more information?

Dani: 1:07:56

Yeah, so LinkedIn is good. My LinkedIn profile is just slash I and slash Donnie Weinstein and Twitter. My handle is Dannyboy777. I'll give that to Clara Putnam in the notes and, yeah, feel free to reach out.

Klara: 1:08:11

Thanks, Ellen.

Dani: 1:08:12

Someday, either when you're out in California or I get to Texas, we can have coffee and go hit some test balls 100%.

Klara: 1:08:18

If you have a trip to Austin, please let me know. If you enjoyed this episode. I want to ask you to please do two things that would help me greatly. One, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, spotify or any other podcasting platform that you use to listen to this episode. Two, please share this podcast with a friend who you believe might enjoy it as well. It is a great way to remind someone you care about them by sharing a conversation they might be interested in. Thank you for listening.