George Arison

Coaching in the Clear

Jeff Hunter:

Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you are listening to coaching in the clear, a podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the Clear is a production of talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to enable you to unleash your potential. Learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Today I am speaking with George Arison. Talentisms’ been working with George and Shift, the company he co-founded with Toby Russell for over three years. I've come to know him as a hard-driving entrepreneur who has worked with the team at Shift, overcoming incredible obstacles. The results of all that hard work paid off this past October when he and the team at shift went public. I’ve also enjoyed getting to know George as a person over that time and I'm excited to have him share that story with you. It's pretty extraordinary. In our session today, I'm going to ask him about how a kid growing up in the former U.S.S.R. dreams of moving to America and becoming a successful business person. I'm going to ask him about the inspiration for those dreams, his plans for the future, what it takes to become incredibly successful by overcoming even more incredible obstacles. And finally, we're going to talk about how he's tried to stay humble in the face of that success and as he's learned from his many, many mistakes. George, thank you so much for being a guest on Coaching in the Clear just as background for everybody George and I met about three and a half years ago. I've had the great privilege of being able to work with him. His co-founder Toby Russell and the team at Shift over the last three and a half years, and have learned a ton from George. And George, I'm just really grateful to have you on the show and to learn from you and be able to tell your story to the audience, so thank you so much for joining.

George Arison:

Thanks for having me. And likewise, it's been awesome to be working with you for all these many months now. And you've been really instrumental in helping shift get to where it is. So we are super appreciative of that as well.

Jeff Hunter:

Thanks, George. I appreciate that. All right, so for the audience that has listened to our last nine, 10 episodes or so they may hear something a little different. I'm always in the process of experimenting and learning. I'm going to try a little bit of a different approach now. And so rather than having a back and forth about coaching, I actually just want to learn about you and I want to learn about your story and where I'd love to start is actually with your professional career. If

you could just take the audience through your career, where did you start? What was your first job and take us up to being, you know, founder and Co-CEO of Shift.

George Arison:

Totally. So I think to answer that I need to just start a little bit, even more back, which is that I'm originally from Georgia, the country. I was born in the Soviet Union when it was still very much the Soviet Union and then grew up while, you know, Soviet Union is going through a lot of transition. I had the, I guess, big fortune of learning English when I was quite young and we can talk later about how that happened, but that allowed me to get out. And I ended up leaving Georgia when I was 14 in 1992 to come to the U.S. to go to high school. I was the first Soviet kid they allowed to leave to go to a private U.S. prep school. And you know, my life kind of took off from there. I, in some ways you know, joke that I was reborn once I came to the U.S. cause a lot of what I probably would become would not have been possible had that not happened. And obviously it was a very fortunate event for me. I always thought that my life would take kind of the shape of; Hey, I'm going to learn, then I'm going to earn some money and eventually go back to Georgia and run for office and be in politics there. That was kind of always my aspiration for a long, long time. And being in business for the long term was never the plan. I thought I would start a company, but I never thought that I would start a company in technology, kind of the things I always thought about had to do with government relations. Cause that's pretty much what I knew. I actually thought I was going to become a lawyer first, because that's the logical kind of path you choose if you want to be in politics most of the time, right? So I got your technology a little bit, a roundabout way, and I'll talk about how that happened. So after college I moved to DC and I took a job at a small consulting firm locally which mostly did consulting without traveling. So that pitch was; Hey, you do the same work that you might do at McKinsey or BCG, but you don't have to be on the road. That sounded intriguing to me. And I liked the idea of living in Washington because it was so close to the types of things I'm really passionate about in politics, but obviously getting a job in politics was not an option because I was not a U.S. citizen. So I had to do it more of a businessy style job. So that's how I started my career. The first job I had was quite frankly, a horrible experience. I really hated it. It seemed super rudimentary and basic, and I really didn't like it, but I started to get to know more and more Georgian politicians and people in DC who were working on Georgia. And I was this kind of really unique animal who knew a lot of what was happening in Georgia and spoke Georgian really well obviously, and understood what was happening there, but also knew a lot about U.S. politics as well because I had always followed U.S. politics so closely, so had an opportunity to switch within about nine months to a job at a think tank with me, myself, having raised the money to fund my presence at that think tank to work on Georgia. And so then I spent the next couple of years writing and presenting a lot of information to you as policymakers on what was happening there and why it was really critical for the U.S. to stay very actively engaged on promoting democratic change. Georgia had a government that needed to be transitioned out. The president was very old and was ready for the new younger folks to take over. And there was later, two backups of people who could take over the country. A set of very socialist and ultimately not very democratic folks, and then a set of more pro-business and more democratic set of folks and the goal was to try to push the ladder, contra the former. So eventually in 2003 that many of the people I was working with asked me to come back to Georgia and help run

them, their political campaign for parliament. Obviously I said, I don't really know anything about how to run political campaigns, but perhaps we could hire somebody from the U.S. who knows a lot when it comes to what to do. And that's when I came in contact with a guy named Mike Murphy, he's a political consultant who had run Jeb Bush’s campaigns and Mitt Romney’s campaigns. He's really amazing actually. And so I convinced him to come to Georgia with me and run this political parties’ campaign for parliament ...