President Barack Obama: When the moment chooses you, part 1

My guest today is President Barack Obama but we're not talking politics, we're talking about scale and have a lessons. He learned as president relate to any organization, but we'll start our episode. As we often do with a story related to the ground will cover. It's a story from someone else who definitely doesn't mind being Obama's opening act and it starts with a phone call

someone calls me and

says your song I got it from my mama, we want to borrow that.

That and turn it into I'm voting for Obama.

I said no, no, no, you guys can't do that. He's definitely gonna lose

that is William. Grammy award-winning artist co-founder of the Black Eyed Peas, we'll also created the yes we can video for Obama that went viral, but when he first got the call, it was a hard no to be clear, will didn't say no because he thought Obama would lose. He thought Obama would lose if he used the song.

Got it from my mama,

the original is me on a beach in Brazil, what a bunch of models? That's not a recipe for success. That's not, the ingredients

will do degree to reconsider the assignment. If it could be a little more strategic if you want to use a

song to help get him elected. First off, listen to the sentence that you're saying, that's like saying, let's throw this rock and landed on the moon. You can get the rock to the moon but you can't throw it on the moon, you have to figure

about what your spaceship is going to be to take you off the planet, to then landed on the moon. So, what's the spaceship? I think the spaceship is that speech. He just did in New Hampshire. The simple Creed that sums up the spirit of a people? Yes, we can.

The 2008 New Hampshire, address Wills referring to is now, one of Barack Obama's most famous speeches in part because of what will did next take the speech.

Chop it up and then somebody needs to say the words melodically and turn. This

Peach into a him, but it can't have drums. It has to be an emotional progression. That gives you emotions. No different than if you didn't speak English and you heard Old Friends by Simon & Garfunkel, Redemption Song by Bob Marley. And if we could do that, we did something.

The result was a star-studded Anthem that also became a rallying cry for the campaign.

It's the core progression. It's that there was a Creed written on the founding documents.

Yes, he can. Yes we can it was whispered by slaves and abolitionists that Melody with the progression was like pulling on my

The song features John Legend, Scarlett Johansson common and many others. How did he coordinate? So many celebrities on short, notice and opportunity of timing

Wilmer Valderrama? It was his birthday party. Everybody was in Hollywood at that time. And the studio was down the street.

That's right, well, coordinated with someone at that birthday party. The final guest over to his video. Shoot a great example of how to grab hold when

Presents itself, but it's not done yet. After the shoot, will in company race to finish the video. The timing would be crucial the song debuted on ABC. The Friday before super Tuesday. Will also released it on

YouTube and in a day or so yeah, like stupid million views that was rare for political content. I think the campaign was blown away. It was shared like crazy Oprah.

Was using it to kick off rallies, and it did what it was supposed to do.

Yes, we can. What's a Triumph of strategy and timing not bad for a concession speech? That's right. Obama lost the New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton.

I don't even know. That was a concession speech. I just thought that was a speech. He asked me can hit me in a different way that sentence. Thank you. Cesar Chavez. See Subway, we didn't see that as a concession speech.

So that moment chose Obama and then that moment created momentum and that momentum created a movement?

The moment did choose Obama as much as a chose will and everyone else had that birthday party, but none of it would have mattered if everyone involved hadn't acted fast, I believe that the moment almost always chooses you, but to seize that moment, you have to move fast. That means being in the right place, having the right mindset and building the right team,

You got to have incredible Talent at every position. There are fires burning. When you go on home,

this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. So, so, so I have no idea what to

do. Sorry, I made a mistake. Would you have to time it, right?

This is masters of scale.

We'll start the show in a moment after a word from our exclusive brand partner. Capital One business

We have a little girl scientist playing with the chemistry set. She has the most adorable hair and afro puffs that's Matthew, goings, CEO of puzzle huddle. And that adorable young scientist appears on one of their jigsaw puzzles. Matthew founded the company to bring diversity to toys in last year, sales spiked for all kinds of reasons, you got the parents looking for tools to help create a learning environment for their kids at home. You have the Resurgence of black lives matter. What else? Drove those spiking sales. Well,

Puzzle huddle was chosen for Oprah's Favorite Things which never hurts, but a booming business can create complex questions for a small company especially in a year like this Matthew's holiday shipment got tied up in customs for months for a toy company. You're going to pay your bills during

Christmas. The products that I ordered this summer to have them in my facility ahead of Black Friday. These products did not arrive until December

23rd. How did Matthew break the bad news to his customers and how did that experience?

That's how he's thinking about growth will find out later in the show. It's all part of Capital One, businesses look at entrepreneurs who are persevering with courage and innovation.

I'm Reid Hoffman, co founder of LinkedIn, partner, Greylock and your host. And I believe that the moment almost always chooses you, but to seize that moment, you have to move fast. That means being in the right place, having the right mindset and building the right team,

That's why we're going to start this historic, Master descale Episode by talking about launch Windows as in the launch window. For this mission is closing. Its sounds like a physical Target but it's actually a window of time to make your launch window. You have to put your spacecraft in the right place at The Right Time watches synchronized coordinates set. In other words, it's not enough to be fast. You also need to be ready. I wanted to talk to President Obama about

The idea for a lot of reasons and not just because as commander-in-chief he used to oversee NASA, my

first press conference in Washington. I remember reporter asking me Senator Obama. What do you think? Is your place in history? And I was like, I literally just got here. I'm trying to figure out where the bathrooms are. I am not considering my place in history at this stage.

President Obama unquestionably has a place in history now, but back in 2005. He was Illinois is newly minted. Junior senator

And it was not the easiest time to be a Democrat George W. Bush had just been elected to a second term and Democrats were in the minority in the US Senate and the house,

I think there was a lot of distress in the Democratic party and I was one of the few Bright Lights. Having been one of the few Democrats to win a Statewide race.

It wasn't just that he'd won in a year when so many other Democrats hadn't. Then Senator Obama had seemed to catapult into the national spotlight.

Light with a message of Hope and an unusual backstory.

I had this weird trajectory politically where after 20 years I'm an overnight star. I ended up serving in the state legislature mostly in the minority party, lost a race to move up to Congress considered getting out of politics decided, finally, as a last hurrah to run for the US Senate and that ends up being this.

This weirdly magical race where everything falls in place and I end up Against All Odds winning by the largest margin history in

Illinois. The details of that weirdly magical race are in President Obama's new book, a Promised Land, the book Chronicles, his first term in office, and the events that got him there. It's a story of mostly, well time launches from organizing voter drives in Chicago to running a presidential campaign.

Like a killer startup data-driven consumer lead or in this case, voter LED with an agile team that leverage social media networks in unprecedented ways.

But the story that emerges most clearly from a promised land is that Obama didn't run for president in 2008 because it was his last chance or even his only chance, he ran. Because he saw the right chance and quickly, build up the right team mindset and message to make it happen. It wouldn't be the first time

when I moved to Chicago. This is in 1985. I had been inspired by the civil rights movement, and John Lewis and people like that.

I was inspired by the notion of big movements as the most reliable means to bring about significant social change. I was inspired by Gandhi and solidarity and Poland. And I thought that electoral politics tended, to be geared towards the status quo that those who participated in it often times, weren't pushing for the kinds of changes that I want to see in the country.

The young Barack Obama had come to Chicago famously as a community organizer. He was looking for a grand social movement of his own, but

but there was no movement going on at the time. This is right. Smack dab. In the middle of the Reagan Era is, or a Gordon Gekko. Greed is good America's back. And so there was a lot of skepticism at that point about social movements.

In terms of pure product Market, fit, it seemed like the timing was all wrong.

The didn't seem to be much appetite for a new Civil, Rights era or a war on poverty. At least not that. This recent Harvard Law, graduate could see.

When I first arrived, this older organizer. Ask me. All right, what do you think your plan is to bring about change? And I said, well, coming from an academic background, I've got all these ideas about how we can put people back to work and change policy on education and this and that the other he says, yeah, that's fine. But I want you to spend the first month

Just going and talking to everybody. You can meet in this community and then come back and tell me their stories. And I thought well that doesn't sound very exciting. That doesn't sound like I'm charging the ramparts and changing the world but it probably ended up being the most important valuable lesson, not just for organizing, but for politics. Because for a month, I went around and all I did was just listen.

It might seem simple but learning,

To listen to something every entrepreneur needs to do. You can't identify a launch window if you haven't even identified your mission, but listening to your customers. Or in this case, your community can make that mission. Clear,

I ask people about their families and the history of migration from the south to Chicago and what it was like when they first started working at a steel mill and what the church meant to them and what their Traditions were and what their hopes and fears.

Hers, were you discovered that everybody's got a sacred story of their own? I'm a big believer in the power of people's stories as the thing that moves people to action. And I think that I ended up importing into my campaign work,

Barack Obama had come to Chicago, looking for a movement and on the surface. It seemed like he'd come too late. But the daily organizing practice of knocking on doors listening to people's stories and

registering them to vote was actually sowing the seeds of a new movement, that was just beginning.

There's actually a parallel here in the startup world as a strategic entrepreneur. You're not trying to get in at the peak of a trend. You trying to be one to three years early, so you can have time to build toward it. So when the moment arrives you already have momentum, while everyone else scrambles to get up to speed in Obama's case the organizing he was doing wasn't just coalition-building, it was working to a very specific end with a clearly defined goal increase voter registration in

Represented, communities, and increase turnout in the upcoming

election. I did a bunch of voter registration work in 1992 that added historic number of people to the roles in Illinois and contributed to Bill Clinton being elected and Carol Moseley Braun the first African-American to be elected from the senate in Illinois and that attracted the attention of people who thought, you know what you'd be actually a pretty effective candidate.

This is an interesting point.

People started to talk about the young Obama as a candidate before, they knew what office he'd be running for that highlights. A certain Nuance to our Theory. Sometimes you're the right person with the right mindset and maybe the right product, but the opportunity isn't there yet. So you exercise some strategic patience and you wait for the right launch window, your first campaign for state senate. What was the thing that caused you to go? It's time for this now and I'm going to go

This, the state senate race comes up in my district, which was in the south side of Chicago Hyde Park. Some people asked me to run, I decided to run. I had this picture of mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and I'm going to go out and do things in a very idealistic way. It turned out that the way rules were set up there, even getting on the ballot was very restrictive and very

complicated. I should tell you that the chapter in a Promised Land about this racist unmissable,

Not just for its dramatic reversals and rough-and-tumble Chicago politics but also for the deeply personal story that runs underneath it.

But here are the basics, the Hyde Park state senate seat was opening because the woman who held that seat was planning a run for Congress. He was running because the congressman she wanted to replace was about to go down in a scandal. It was a window upon window of opportunity suddenly opening and Barack was

ready. I had the endorsement of the person who I was intending to replace a woman named Alice Palmer. She was an ally,

Progressive African-American, she ran for congress, except it turned out that she lost her Congressional race and then kind of went back on her willingness to vacate the seat.

This was a problem suddenly, the accident of timing that had led to this moment was seeming like the other kind of accident, the kind that attracts rubberneckers on the road.

But he done something that is critical to any startup trying to make its launch window. He had built a team that was far more expert than he was

that first Senate campaign is really a mom and pop operation. I had a couple of wonderful campaign staff who I had worked with on voter registration drives who were longtime Grassroots political operators and they schooled me on. All the naive screwed up ideas. I had about how I was going to run this race.

Do a bunch of policy papers and they're all like nobody is going to read your policy papers for state senate race. This is all about getting on the ballot meeting with block clubs and church groups and stuff. So, they were very practical.

These insights, from his team, would prove life-saving for his campaign. They help them focus on the most important task, which was getting his name on the ballot. That meant collecting valid signatures from voters in the district, knowing that any fishy-looking autographs. Could be thrown out.

In the end the Obama team collected, four times the signatures that they needed just in case. So when Alice Palmer decided she wanted back in the race, the Obama team was ready.

I ended up actually winning my first race because she didn't have enough signatures for her to get on the ballot because it was done sort of last

minute. In other words, Alice Palmer missed her launch window.

It was both a lesson for me in that politics isn't always

Quite as smooth and exactly the way you'd want it to be, but it also gave me a lot of respect for the fact that politics, like everything else requires attention to detail and execution. And that a lot of times, we think of politics and social change generally as a matter of vision and inspiration, but a lot of it ends up being preparation and

perspiration. That's true of Entrepreneurship to preparation and perspiration as how you ship code move.

Of product meat delivery Windows, no entrepreneur with a shred of experience would say otherwise but let's not move too. Quickly past the vision and inspiration half of what President Obama just said because that vision is also a tool for Speed.

Think about the last time you and your team had to pull off an insanely difficult project to many deliverables. Not enough time. Endless Sprints and no sleep. Now ask yourself did you and your team have a shared sense of purpose? Did you all feel in your bones? Why was so important to succeed? If you did the project probably went better than if you didn't

Without the ability to inspire without the power of story. As President Obama put it, you'll never be able to motivate a team at speed.

The story's not just why the team shows up. It's also the rocket fuel.

Keep that in mind, as we look at another time. President, Obama found himself, seemingly chosen by fate and opportunity the 2004 Democratic

Convention. I am selected to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, which ends up sort of catching the Zeitgeist. Personally, I think he's underselling

it, a little, let's be clear at this moment. He wasn't even a u.s. senator yet. Although, by the convention it looked like a safe bet. He'd be one soon.

Remember that weirdly magical Senate race President, Obama mentioned earlier in the episode this is that race in his book. Obama describes his keynote speech vividly how long it took him to write. The fact that his staff thought, maybe he should use a speechwriter for this one, but it was actually very calm because he was ready.

The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name.

America has a place for him, too.

He knew what he wanted to say.

Obama spoke to a vision of unity in America. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. He had said he asked the crowd. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of Hope, the line killed and it's easy. Even so many years later to see why it was the message America wanted to hear after Decades of some of the most basic

Her partisan Rancor in the nation's history to that point Obama's message was genuine and was also just right for the moment and the Democratic Convention, provided the perfect window of

opportunity suddenly I'm attracting all this national attention, very rapidly. Then there's this buzz and suggestion that I should run for president at some

point to pundit and party operatives, at some point. Mint soon,

Just arrived in the US Senate. Still being relatively young. I was 43 at that point. Having only really been in the National Spotlight for about six months. I thought that probably didn't make a lot of sense,

but as the year war on, it started to make more sense all the time

Katrina happens. And as the only African-American the Senate, I addressed that in a pretty forceful way, which in turn generates more talk.

In the midterms I campaign for a lot of people and so I suddenly have sort of a national audience and a national following circumstances converged in a way where it at least became plausible for me to run for president. It was no longer far-fetched that I could mount a serious campaign.

Notice the President Obama says circumstances converged. That's true. But he wasn't sitting passively by either. He spent months on the campaign

Trail for other candidates, he made speeches and took high-profile principled stands. These weren't cynical Ploy is to win a presidential nomination, but they were still strategic when it comes to strategic patience being in the right place at the right time, isn't something you need to leave up to chance. They're often steps. You can take in the direction of your goal. Knowing you can't predict when the opportunity will

Then I had to ask myself, a series of questions about actually taking the leap and the conversations. I had both with my staff but also with most importantly my wife really centered around three questions. A could I actually win? Because I didn't feel as if I needed to run for president and I wasn't interested in going through just a symbolic exercise. Number two. Why me as opposed to all the other candidates who are running, what is it that I could bring?

NG to bear that was uniquely important or would make a significant contribution. And third could my family survive, what is an insane? Essentially two-year

process in these moments? It's often best to seek counsel from someone in your network, someone who would understand the art of strategic patience in a Promised Land. President Obama brings this moment to life. Listen closely, you'll hear something that sounds a lot like our Theory.

I described the scene where I'm visiting with Ted Kennedy in the book,

Ted Kennedy a term Senator from Massachusetts. Brother of JFK,

he seen all sides of this process and was a legend in the Senate. And he says, to me at some point, look, I can't tell you what to do, but what I know is that, you know, sometimes you don't choose the time, the time chooses you

That doesn't mean, you have to seize that moment but it does mean, you have to be comfortable with the possibility that the moment won't come again and we decided to go ahead and take the

plunge. How much did the later Hamilton, which you and Michelle helped Elevate because the early performances in the White House of they you know, I'm not going to miss my shot. How much of that factored into going? Well, we just got to run now because this might be the shot.

Yeah. Hamilton or Eminem, right? Yes. Yes.

I think there was a sense that I might miss my shot. I have to confess and maybe this is naive of me. But at the time I was 44, I didn't think that if I waited until I was 55, that somehow, it would be too late for me to run for president. But I do think there was a sense that there was something in the air at the time, there was a moment in which the country felt a little stuck, there'd been

Enormous division around the Iraq War, you saw some trends that unfortunately continued even through my presidency of growing inequality, the sense of Politics as a blood sport and the inability of government to get anything done. It might not be that this was my only shot but it did feel that a voice that talked about unifying the country and getting stuff done in common sense practical ways.

The tried to recapture a certain idealism about our common Enterprise that might gain some resonance.

The launch window for an Obama, presidential run was officially open. The moment had chosen him and he'd been strategically about being in the right place for that to happen. But to seize that moment, who's going to have to move fast? He was in the right place. He had the right mindset. The question was, could he build the right team?

We'll be back in a moment after a word from our exclusive partner Capital, One business.

We're dining on boxes, the kids are watching TV on

boxes. There are boxes around our washer and dryer in our basement. There are boxes on the staircase there. Just boxes everywhere. We're back with Matthew goings of puzzle huddle. And he's describing how shipping boxes have invaded his home, which doubles as his office, and his warehouse and is call center earlier. He was telling us about the nail-biting, wait for his holiday shipment, which arrived months, late on December 23rd and fell to him to break the bad news to customers. That was an interesting experience.

Embrace our customers to try to be transparent. And to answer

those emails with a much empathy and emotion and support and understanding as possible. Matthew's Personal Touch one. I'm a lot of customer love but he knew it was time to get some help answering those late-night customer emails. Very often. I'm reading the email at two or three o'clock in the morning, so it's not with a fresh brain. It's my exhausted. Brain

were onboarding, someone to help with customer support and

email during the daytime when they have lots of energy and fresh perspective that fresh.

Active is so important to the long-term health of your business, but entrepreneurs often hesitate to hire, it's something and Cave of Capital. One business sees all the time, it's hard to ask for help, particularly, when you're a business owner, and this is your baby. We are here often with business owners where they knew they were reaching sort of a next-level knowing that they needed to ask for help. They needed to tap expertise that they didn't directly bring to the table and all those boxes around the house of God. Matthew thinking

It may be time to look into warehouse space, but he's cautious.

Well, I've been very hesitant to move into a business

space. I don't want fixed cost to be the thing that derails my business, because now I have a lease in that money can't be routed into marketing, so it's a very hard balance of decision-making and no one can tell you. The answer is, you're an entrepreneur, you have to

generate your own answers and make your answers

work with less time, spent answering emails math, you will have more time to think big. How does he envision?

Asian, the next level of puzzle huddle will find out later in the show. It's all part of Capital One, businesses Spotlight on entrepreneurs who are building their businesses with grit and

We're back with President Barack Obama.

When we last left him, he started his campaign for president. In the 2008 election, he had a skeleton staff. A knack for giving great speeches and a family who agreed to turn their lives upside down the rest, they'd have to build from the ground up.

I do think that there is an entrepreneurial element to a successful presidential campaign, running a Statewide level, Congressional race. You can do it sometimes by numbers. When you think about

Out of the successful campaigns that have been run a lot of times it has to do with catching Folks by surprise presenting something new both in, how you're running and your message, keep in mind, I was still sort of the upshot candidate against Hillary Clinton. Who had most of the traditional institutions in the Democratic party like the big unions, the state parties and the big traditional donors, they generally were supporting her

Candidate Obama had gotten the blessing of party leaders, like Ted Kennedy before declaring his run.

But even Kennedy hadn't yet chosen a side, it would be up to the Obama campaign team to move their organization to

I thought, you know what? If we build a Grassroots Movement, we couple that with the power of the internet to both organized people but also on the fundraising and communication side that we can. Maybe compete with better funded more institutionally powerful

candidates. I'd first encountered you personally through the humanity and hope of the speeches, which is

Things. I've always admired and respected about you, which is like, look, let's play for who we want to be. I'll ever lose sight of that and then it was as you moved into the campaign where I began to say, oh, he's an innovator and starts doing the campaign in different scale ways because you ran a first-of-its-kind campaign in a lot of different ways degree, which Grassroots degree, Which online.

I actually think you're right about the 2008 campaign.

It was as good of a national campaign as has been run. And I don't take most of the credit for it, except for having chosen, some terrific people to work with me and maybe I'll take some credit for building a culture. Inside the organization. That worked

listen closely to the story, you'll hear Concepts we discuss on the show all the time building culture for example because getting a fledgling campaign off the ground is a lot like building a startup especially if you're the

David plus our campaign manager, turned out to be a savant what a game to organizing he was experienced, but he was still pretty darn young and had never actually managed a campaign, and he just turned out to be terrific. The guys, sweated the details and was smart and disciplined. He understood that for us to be successful, we had to empower people at the lowest levels the organizer in some

County in Iowa. They had to feel as if they could make decisions on the ground and be able to be nimble and respond to events quickly.

This distributed empowerment of teams, help the campaign grow exponentially, which was a critical advantage in order to make their next launch window. The Iowa caucus, there was no arguing with the calendar. Iowa was the first Statewide race in the primary season.

It's obsessively covered in the press as the newcomer and the underdog success meant winning Iowa. Think of it as creating first mover to scale advantage.

This was a mindset fully consistent across his

team. We ended up having a horizontal sort of structure. Put a lot of money into our organizers on the ground, capped salaries, and Bloated expense accounts and all that stuff. David just said, look, this is how much I'm making this, how much senior folks are making everybody's going to be making half of what you can. Get paid another campaign if you want to work in another campaign, go ahead. But it's because we

Use this money to hire more 23, and 25 year old kids who are going to be running around Iowa busting their butt trying to get folks to turn out for Barack.

This is such an entrepreneurial approach to campaigning that I had to take a moment after the interview to talk it over with my producers. The precise reason why culture is a theme that we come back to again and again within Masters scale is because when you're scaling, if you don't have the horizontal culture, your culture will not

At scale. And then that will become a competitive disadvantage because it's very hard and takes a lot of energy to refactor culture. And that's part of the reason why everyone tends to be get culture right from the beginning. And scaling is scaling lots of people, like what happens when you're hiring a hundred people a week, right? Well, the co can't be infusing. The culture in all of those people that just like, they got other things that going to be doing. And so that's why you need to have the culture, lots of people within the organization. And

General network of reinforcement of the culture within the organization when you're trying to make a deadline meet a moment or time, a launch empowering, your ground. Team is how you grow quickly. And with Integrity,

you had this Esprit de corps. That develops, young people feeling invested because they're empowered, they're not just going around getting coffee for people, but they're actually our Frontline workers, and have decision-making, power, and authority, and we're respecting them

this horizontal distribution.

Of responsibility and Trust works both as capacity-building and product Market fit, it gives you a growing team. The means to product test out in the world

that democratization of the campaign. Even though we maintained a lot of discipline within it combined, with our Innovations with social media and the internet which again required us to give over power to a bunch of 23 and 25 and 27 year olds, who understood how to use my spatula.

Listen meet up in ways that I had no idea what the heck this stuff was that's really what ended up winning it for us,

right? Not to hold you in suspense, they won but winning. Iowa was only the beginning of a viable campaign. Just like any startup being first. Mover at scale. Isn't a race you run and then stop. You have to run it over and over again. I don't know what I was expecting. I guess maybe I

thought it was well.

Oiled machine that I was joining with this big

infrastructure but now it was it was just me and a lot of fun numbers to call on a lot of doors to knock on. That's Ryan holiday. He was one of those 20-something kids. Powering the Obama campaign, he's also the music director for wait, what? The company that makes this show. So if there's any weird sounds, you've heard throughout this

episode of and that was probably me.

Since we knew Ryan worked on the Obama campaign, I couldn't resist asking him about it.

I started as a volunteer there, eventually leading to a campaign

staff position where I was running my own office in Michigan. And when I say running the office, I mean, it was just me. I was sharing the space with a small Congressional Campaign and Clausen outside of Detroit. But it was really my job to turn this into a robust volunteer network. And I had to make a lot of decisions on my own.

Notice, this is exactly according to the plan. President Obama described to move fast field organizers, like Ryan were entrusted to make decisions on the Fly decisions. Like what do you do if you run out of something important?

So, when you're running a campaign

office, you're trying to get people to come in and volunteer. Their time to knock on doors, make phone calls, and help. Get as many people registered to vote.

But for a while, it felt like every other person that was calling wanted one thing,

Our design, we had so many people looking for yard

signs and don't get me

wrong. The enthusiasm was great, but yard signs don't vote. And we'd gone through the only

stack that we had like weeks ago. One day, one of my star volunteers comes in with her two kids and she's like, okay, let's make these yard signs.

So for the afternoon she and her kids is made these handmade slightly

off brand Obama yard signs. So after that, when someone would call and say do you have

Of yard signs. I'd say. Yep, come and get it. We have a whole stack of them and then they come in and you know it was this

Crayola looking yard

sign. But who's gonna get mad at a six-year-old kids artwork and then he'd say, while you're here, do you want to make a few phone calls? This story is exactly the kind of move fast initiative that get your team to scale. Ryan star volunteer felt empowered to make those new handcrafted signs, and Ryan felt empowered to take advantage of this unexpected opportunity.

That line Obama said, we are

the ones we've been waiting for. It was kind of like oh maybe this is what he means that we're just building this ourselves

just like earlier in our story The Vision and the inspiration Obama offered worked as tools for Speed belief in the mission, animated volunteers and staffers to move fast. Enough to meet the launch

moments. It did end up being this strange process where like a successful startup, what began with

With a credible campaign but not a juggernaut. By the time we are finished with the primary into the general, we really have built a national Juggernaut. Have you ever been on a freeway and you tell yourself, why am I sitting in traffic

once again William

you start seeing these Lanes opening and you already can tell ahead of time okay? If I just accelerate moving front of this car and who I see another Lane and you start seeing these lanes open. It's the same with pop.

Culture and events in society, the lanes open and you can see them.

I saw

the speech and the next Lane opened

after I realized that hey, if I take this speech and put a him on it, another Lanes going to open, that's can Inspire teachers. And when that happens, those kids are going to go home and Inspire their parents and then another Lanes going to open and you see the lanes

open

and from that was Lanes opening, you see a potential trajectory to the White House? You can see that but to do that, you gotta act fast.

Whether you are in the u.s. or not, whether you voted in that election or not, you probably remember where you were the moment. You heard that America had elected. Its first black president

America. We have come so far, we have seen so much, but there's so much more to do so. Tonight let us ask ourselves if our children should live to see The Next Century. What change will they see?