Catching Disco Fever, with Candice Faktor – Episode 427 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Candice Faktor, CEO and Co-Founder of virtual online learning startup Disco, and a serial tech entrepreneur, explains going from a victim to the agent of our lives, possessing the unique motivational drive of an immigrant, learning to be calm and creating a sense of self, why the pandemic was the single best time in the world to start a company, and how to build your own “live learning empire”.

About Candice:

Candice Faktor is the CEO/co-founder of Disco virtual online learning startup, and a serial tech entrepreneur who has a passion for learning and community. Before launching Disco, Candice scaled Wattpad to 80 million users, making it the world’s largest platform for creators to share their stories (sold in Jan ‘21, for US $660MM). She is a frequent speaker on the future of learning, and creator of Gamechanger.co, a live learning community of 3000+ innovators. Candice is a venture partner for Lobby Capital, and a Board Member of Coveo, an enterprise AI platform valued at over $1Bn. She is from South Africa, and lives in Toronto with her husband and two boys.

Learn more at Disco.co.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Dan Moore:
Everybody, this is Dan Moore, so pleased you could join us with The Action Catalyst today with Candice Faktor. Candice, you have an amazing life story. And you’re having a tremendous impact on the world of learning, as you have consistently throughout your career. What if you could maybe share some of the most important pivot points in this incredible journey that you’ve been on in your life?

Candice Faktor:
What a big question, What a great question. Because it’s a really difficult one, you know, life is not a straight line. And I’m really grateful for that, because it would be quite boring if it was, I don’t know if you’ve ever done this exercise where you actually map your life, and you map sort of the highs and the lows, and sort of what what those were. And when I, when I think about my life, there really have been so many pivot points. So the first one was the 14 years old and told, you know, I have six weeks left in South Africa, and we’re moving to a new country in six weeks time. So you know, that was a huge pivot. Everything I knew about life and the way I lived was being turned upside down. And it was one of the greatest pivot points of my life, moving to a new country, really difficult. My family left everything behind for a safer, better life. And we moved to Toronto, Canada, pivot number two, I would say was taking some space, after working pretty much nonstop I’d felt since I was someplace 14 years old, you know, I’d had a career where I was just go, go, go, go go from business school to strategy consulting, to building a corporate venture arm to helping scale a startup. And you know, another huge pivot point was actually stopping and taking a year to really get connected to what I was passionate about again, and really actually rest.

Dan Moore:
If I can unpack a couple of those points. First of all, moving at about the age of 14, you were pretty embedded in your friend group, I’m sure at that time, and then all of a sudden, having to restart in a completely different culture, completely different world. What advice could you share with some of our listeners who maybe are going through similar life resettlement or turmoil at this point?

Candice Faktor:
Yeah, I would say we don’t choose our circumstances, right. And I think, you know, something that I fundamentally believe is we choose how we respond to our circumstances. And what was so interesting about this period of change in my life is it was hard, it was incredibly hard. And it was hard for my parents, and it was hard for us. But there was love between our family and a mindset that my parents brought to the circumstance that made it not just tenable, but actually a growth experience for us. And I think a lot about this, you know, raising kids myself, and climbing different mountains at different points in time, or how we respond to the circumstances that we have, is actually what creates the experience of those circumstances. So my biggest advice is be very, very mindful around the stories we tell ourselves about what is occurring in our lives. And so this just very simple sort of shift between victim to agents of our lives, and our circumstances. And there’s a really wonderful book that was a life changing book for me by Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. And you know, he’s got so many wonderful quotes about this very topic. And the one I also really love is, it’s really hard to change our mindset in the moment. And so there’s this beautiful quote, and I hope I don’t botch it up for your podcast, but it’s something like between stimulus and response, there is space. And in that space lies, our freedom to choose. And in our choices, lies our gross, that’s also something I would just recommend to this audience is, you know, don’t beat yourself up if you’re really triggered by the circumstance. Instead, create some space for you to be reflective, for your emotions to settle and for your attention to actually go to being intentional about how you are thinking about the circumstance, because it’s really, really hard to do when we’re in fight or flight mode. But it is a lot easier when we create some space for ourselves, especially living in an attention economy where, you know, there’s a lot of powers that are trying to fight for your attention to not make space for yourself.

Dan Moore:
That is certainly true fact as you talk about the phrase make space and reminder what they say you’re supposed to do when you’re caught in an avalanche. Take your elbows and push them in front of you to create some space for at least a breathing because if you can breathe and calm your heart rate, then you start to think, Oh really, another quote from the same book where he said when we are unable to change our situation, we’re challenged to change ourselves. Very, very similar thought process.

Candice Faktor:
I love that. Yeah, I get goosebumps. In fact, a wonderful thing my son is actually reading. They’ve been asked to read books about the Holocaust in their class. And especially in a society right now, where many books are being banned, I was quite excited by the idea that kids are sort of looking at difficult times in history. And there’s a young adult version of Man’s Search for Meaning that he has just started reading. And I thought to myself, Man, I would have saved myself a lot of trauma had read this bug a lot earlier in my growth, but he’s seems to be enjoying it so far.

Dan Moore:
Hmm. The second thing you said that was so significant this pivot is when you took literally a year out, what were some of the difficulties was stopping what you were doing, because you were headlong, leading a major company with worldwide reach, to be able to make the decision to just stop but probably like stopping an ocean liner, you can’t just hit the brakes, and it stops.

Candice Faktor:
It was such an interesting period of my life, where, you know, I think if you’re an immigrant and you you have a lot and you lost everything, you’re really motivated to be successful to achieve do well to please you know, I just was in a people used to throw things at me, because why I had the shoulders to carry them. And at some point, it just nothing seemed fun anymore for me. And, and I was really emotionally triggered, like, it’s very easy for me to tell your audience Oh, just take space. And, you know, don’t, you know, be a victim. But I was feeling the weight of the world in many ways. I actually think I was burnt out like it was, you know, if I really look back on their period, I had two very young kids, I was scaling a venture backed global platform on a plane all the time I had and stopped, I was responsible for a lot of people. And so going to your question, like, what made me stop my body? In many ways? Yeah, my body and this knowing that I should, you know, I thought I had done all the things that I was meant to do to be happy. And yet I felt so empty inside, even though outwardly people would say, wow, you know, you you have to had a very successful career. And I did have many wonderful things, I actually realized I didn’t enjoy my life at that moment, and something was wrong. I felt like I was on this treadmill. And so it was a really unlike me thing to do, where I just said, I have two young kids, I need to take a year not to not work. In fact, I was actually quite successful as an entrepreneur that year, but where I’m not going to give every ounce of myself to something, I’m actually going to take the time to stop and get curious about what I’m actually passionate about, and where in many ways I need to heal. And I get to spend time and space being reflective. You know, what was hard about that was I felt very naked, you know, I’d run around the world with all these big fancy titles, and always having something to show for you’d like a brand name right of that the startup I was running, or the media company I had helped create, and all of a sudden, it was just little me, you know, and the best way to describe it is I felt completely naked and in some ways, embarrassed. You know, if somebody asked me, what do you do is the first time in my whole life, I didn’t have an answer. And so I actually remember going to a dinner party, and thinking, Oh, my God, what do I tell people that I’m doing. And it was the single best thing that ever happened to me. Because what I realized is so much of my life, I had spent worrying about what other people thought of me, pursuing what their definition of success looked like, achieving for the sake of, you know, being successful in in, you know, society’s eyes. And it had come at the expense of my, my personal well being and my personal vision for success. And so this was just like such a life changing moment for me, where I claimed back my identity and my sense of self, I actually took the time to do things from a place of what I wanted to be and do in my life versus what society had deemed to be a moniker of success.

Dan Moore:
I think it’s interesting that you said you didn’t just stop working, he didn’t just stop producing. He just took a different view of the whole thing. You put things into a different set of harmonious interactions in your life. So it’s possible for somebody to do that without letting go of everything. and disappearing into the wilderness.

Candice Faktor:
Absolutely. And in fact, you know, I was one of those people, I had responsibilities, like I wasn’t in a position where I can just have somebody else, you know, foot the bill and take care of knees sitting on a rock. But it was the first time in my whole life, I took care of myself, I went for walks in the morning, I did yoga, I journaled, I created space, I did some advisory work, you know, but maybe I but I wasn’t responsible for like hundreds of people, like I was able to design a life that was much more harmonious, I love that word. I never even thought about that. That was in pursuit of not somebody else’s success, but of my harmony, right. And there’s another way I would describe this moment in my life. And this may ring true for some of your listeners, which is our circumstances, as you just mentioned, caused us to change. So I had this like, very shiny silver lining outside, right, I was ambitious, I was innovative, I was an achiever, I was responsible, I had a whole bunch of superpowers, I was highly resilient. And it’s wonderful. Like, I’m so proud of all those things I have to have, because that was my circumstance in life. But what I always love to say to people is if you have something that’s really shiny on the outside, what’s the underbelly? What’s underneath it, that caused that shine. And if you want to really grow, you know, I don’t know, if you ever read the book years ago, you know, what, Who Moved My Cheese, like, what, what got you to somewhere is not going to get you to that next level. And what got me to my next place was actually not focusing on my strengths anymore, but focusing on that messy underbelly of like intertwined, you know, just stuckness that I’d never created the space to really, really deal with or heal, or acknowledge, or, you know, the big one for me was my relationship with stress. You know, people loved having me in charge, or responsible because I got stuff done, because I was really anxious and stress, you know, I looked at people and I thought, how can you be so calm in this situation, I’m not wired that way. And so a big part of my gross, what I realized is, if I’m going to be a leader, in a totally different context, I got to learn how to be calm, I got to learn how to not actually, you know, get so worked up about things I’ve had to like, totally work on the opposite side of what made me successful to this point in my career, I now have to work on the stuff that I actually neglected. And in many ways that year, and you know, following those years, is the work I did around that.

Dan Moore:
Well share a bit more about that, then what that led to.

Candice Faktor:
I think I had so many beliefs that I needed to rewire. You know, there’s this like, way of thinking about the world from a place of scarcity. And scarcity is powerful, right, because it’s a motivating factor. But in some ways, it’s fear driven to abundance. And to, you know, filling your own cup first so that it overflows, right when you’re giving. And so going from this idea of like selfless to actually making sure you’re in your peak performance and the highest care of yourself so that you can really lead not from a place of fear, but from a place of generosity, from a place of, you know, grounded and pragmatic, like abundance. And I think that was my journey, which was learning that actually taking care of myself and being well, and not needing to be so stressed about things I can’t control is actually going to make me a far far better leader, and able to bend and allow me to take on things that were really, really scary for me, but that I always knew I wanted to do. And so the best example is obviously being a founder of a, you know, wonderful new startup that we’ve created called disco my entire life. I’ve been in the innovation field. You know, I started in strategy consulting, I worked in innovation. I built a massive media innovation and venture arm but for a media company. I joined a startup but I wasn’t the founder, I help their go to market. And the one thing I always wanted to do but I was too scared to do was be a founder myself. And I can tell you now Had I tried to be a founder? In my old version of me pre sort of working through the underbelly, I think this would be the worst experience of my life. Because it was a highly stressful, right? There’s so many ups and downs. And yet, you know, working through some of the ideas or beliefs I had around what makes a great leader, how do I sort of go into the unknown and uncertainty from a much more balanced place, you know, not making the highs as high or the lows as low, has allowed me to enjoy this experience in a way that I just never could have, and truly allowed us to do really bold and brave and courageous things I just can’t even believe we’ve been able to do. So you know, just such an interesting moment for me of moving from what other people thought of me. And being really fear driven to building a really solid sense of self and a much more even keeled nature, to allow us to pursue really uncertain things.

Dan Moore:
I think it’s absolutely awesome. Candice, here’s a question; when you run into a friend or acquaintance you hadn’t seen for some years? Did they ask if you’d been a hill or you’d had a major accident because his personality changed?

Candice Faktor:
You know, I mean, I, I love so many of the people I’ve had this privilege of working with, for so long, and I’m still the same knee right? And I’m, I’m being really vulnerable and open and sharing the inner workings. I’m not sure people truly knew, you know, the stress or the the belief systems I had outwardly facing, but internally, it’s like a difference. Yeah, as you say, like a different person. And I’m, you know, I’m so grateful for that, whether people see that or not, I feel the change in my own life, like, I’m able to enjoy my life so much more than, you know, I used to, and it’s really funny, I, I never really understood this. But I think I had crazy anxiety for most of my life. Because I was always worried I was worried about the future, I was worried about what we’re gonna do. But I never identified that way until I no longer was plagued with that same level of anxiety.

Dan Moore:
So again, to make some space for yourself, is a conscious choice that everybody has the ability to do. It’s like the notion of putting your own mask on before putting others when you’re in an airplane, because we can take care of ourselves and the only way we can truly take care of someone else. Now, shifting gears because you’ve had this wonderful trajectory, what about when you hit a sudden brick wall, things are rolling along? Businesses, successful things are going well in your life? And this unexpected obstacle that you can’t see over 100 rounds through at the moment? What advice or guidance? Could you share with us regarding what to do in those brick wall moments?

Candice Faktor:
I love this question, because so many people want to push through the brick wall, right? It’s like the fly who’s like trying to get out of the window, and doesn’t see that there’s an opening like right next door, it just keeps bumping his head on the same spot on that window. Here’s my advice, don’t force things that aren’t working. Look for other ways of putting those pieces together. I’ll give you a really great example of this. So obviously, COVID for everybody was that brick wall in some way, right? Like we were all going about our lives. And all of a sudden there was a very significant brick wall. So for me at the time, I was investing and I’d run a very small micro fund for early stage startups, it had done quite well, I partnered with a family office. And my vision was to create a bigger fund it was to go from, you know, being a few million dollar fund to a 30 to $50 million fund, I’d made great progress pre COVID, in sort of lining up investors, I was an emerging manager. So it’s a big deal to get family offices, institutional investors to get excited. And the day that COVID hit, I just remember the series of emails and phone calls, saying we think you’re fantastic, your performance is great. But we got a pullback because you’re an emerging manager and the world is falling apart. And I can’t commit to you know, the allocation I’ve given you. And so basically this thing I’ve been working on for a long time started to just completely crumble. And it was the single best thing that ever happened to me yet. There is a you know, a version of myself or somebody else who may have really, really pushed forward on this brick wall and I knew that this was going to be a brick wall that wasn’t going to be an easy one to overcome and quiet for Thankfully, there was something in me that didn’t even know was certainty that this is what I wanted to do. And so it wasn’t easy. Like, you know, noticing that this thing that I’ve been working on for like the past six to 12 months was falling apart. But I didn’t make it mean that it was necessarily about me or my failure, it was just this thing. And I actually had empathy for the funds that were like, We don’t know what’s happening in the world. And because I kind of was open that this isn’t the only path that there’s other paths, I actually just started pursuing different directions. And, you know, my my co founding story with some of my co founders wonderful, I’ve known him for the past 15 years, we were both actually investing at the time. And when the pandemic happened, we were working on a passion project, actually I T company, that was just going to be like a hobby kind of business. And our supply chain got, you know, completely blocked. So again, another block, right. So what designed everything, it was really innovative T Concept with QR codes and meditations with each QR code, we’re very excited packaging was done supply chain completely locked down, wasn’t going to be able to move forward for the next foreseeable future. So again, another block. And it was actually in the reflection of this moment of the pandemic that I reflected on two things. One, it is the single best time in the history of the world to start a company because there is massive behavior change across literally every single human in the world. And number two, it was a really good reminder that life is short. And when I really comes down to it, when I thought about what’s my regret minimization, if I use the regret minimization framework, which I’m happy to talk about, what is the thing I’m going to be most, you know, sad, I didn’t do if I don’t do, it was actually starting a company, not being an investor in other people’s companies. And so it was this wonderful moment where we looked at each other. And we both said, there is this massive opportunity, what we’re doing right now on Zoom, live synchronous video is literally going to change the world as we know it. And the very thing I care most about which is learning is going to be deeply, deeply impacted in a positive way, by the idea that we can learn live together. And literally in a matter of weeks, I went from shutting down my efforts on raising another fund, not pursuing the T project, to building disco, which is a platform that allows you to build a live learning empire.

Dan Moore:
A live learning Empire. Will you please explain a bit more about Disco, how it works, and how us mortal human beings might be able to access or get involved with it.

Candice Faktor:
Absolutely. So virtual learning has been around for a while there’s, you know, decade of virtual learning. And what we identified was, wow, we’re both lifelong learners like Chris and I, we love learning. This is Chris’s sixth startup. But neither of us have ever taken a pre recorded course before. And we looked at that was that isn’t that so interesting? Why is that? Well, version 1.0 of learning was about content and consumption, the best learning experiences Chris and I had ever had, were exactly that they were experiences, and they were with other people, and they were live and they were really in person at the time. And all of a sudden, we realize, wait a second, with live synchronous video, we can design learning experiences that virtually that anybody in the world can access at a fraction of the cost. And you can actually deliver a transformation. And so what disco is, is the operating system for anybody to create, market, operate and scale a live learning business. And so we’re not just a course platform, you can run live cohort based courses on our platform. But you can run a series of different learning experiences everything from you know, live interview series, like we’re doing today, to paid workshops to masterminds to challenges to big live cohort based courses. And we are just your purpose built all in one operating system. So you may have heard what Shopify did for E commerce right Shopify is the platform that allows you to build market and scale your e commerce Store. We’re doing that for learning empires so everybody from you know maker pad the largest no code school in the world Jesus disco to run their business to ondeck education system uses us now to run their academies to individual creators like Aven Davidson, the founder of planet money runs his storytelling empire on dispo. Anybody can can use this, it’s a SASS platform, and we just make it super easy for you to run your live learning business.

Dan Moore:
Sounds fantastic. And I love the phrase create your own learning empire. Why not? I think it’s fantastic. Thank you. Now how do we locate this go what’s the URL or website or best way to access it?

Candice Faktor:
So disco is Disco.co. Little secret about the word disco is obviously learning should be fun, and it should be live and interactive. But disco is actually the Latin word for learn. You know, we got really excited about that because you know, it’s the right word for discussions and discourse. And it really is, you know, we want to change learning from being this like very static consumption driven sage on stage thing to a much more dynamic and engaging experience.

Dan Moore:
And all this time I thought disco was Latin for Saturday Night Fever.

Candice Faktor:
Exactly.

Dan Moore:
This is absolutely fabulous. Candice, thank you so, so much for being with us today. We could spend hours on anything and your background, your life and what you’re doing going forward. But I know I feel personally encouraged and I will always remember this one.

Candice Faktor:
Thank you so much. I think it’s great the work you’re doing and keep doing it real honor to be interviewed by you.