Pat Wadors, CHRO at Intuitive (the company behind the da Vinci surgical robot), the architect of LinkedIn's Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging framework known as DIBs, and the author of the 2024 Wiley book Unlock Your Leadership Story, joins Jessica Neal and Peter Clarke on Truth Works.

From losing her mother during her freshman year of college and getting diagnosed with dyslexia in a career center conversation at LSU, to declaring at nineteen that she was going to run HR, Pat traces the unlikely path that took her from a fine art major in Louisiana to one of the most respected CHROs in Silicon Valley.

She walks through the moment Jeff Weiner called her in the middle of a staff meeting at Plantronics to come fix LinkedIn at three thousand employees, the whiteboard exercise in her first five weeks that forced the executive team to admit they were not actually being "open and constructive," and the 3am realisation that became DIBs.

She talks openly about why John Donahoe pursued her for ServiceNow with a now legendary line about marriage, and the comment from a head of product that has stuck with her for years, telling her she was the dentist while the rest of the executive team were just dental hygienists.

She then opens up about her Personal Scorecard, and the moment her son devastated her by pointing out that if she actually stuck to her own scorecard, she would only see her grandchildren seventy two times by the time they turned eighteen.

In this episode, Jessica, Peter and Pat discuss:

• The art show story that taught Pat at eighteen that she only sold to people she actually liked
• The three year clock she runs in her head to avoid getting pigeon-holed in any role
• What joining LinkedIn at three thousand employees was actually like
• The whiteboard exercise that became the foundation of LinkedIn's culture
• Why she gave DIBs to the world rather than keep it inside LinkedIn
• The dinner with John Donahoe that turned into a marriage proposal for a job
• Why she thinks of HR as a product with agile development methodology
• What a CHRO actually needs to learn about the business to earn a real seat at the table
• Why she had a hysterectomy with the da Vinci robot and was ready to cook dinner that night
• The Personal Scorecard framework and how her son broke her heart with it
• Goldilocks, the Three Pigs, the Tortoise and the Hare, and Mulan as leadership lessons
• The one question she keeps on her desktop that empowers her every day

Pat's book, Unlock Your Leadership Story: How to Build Understanding and Motivate Teams Using Fables and Folktales, is available now on Amazon, patwadors.com and as an audiobook.

Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke sit down with Gagan Biyani, co-founder of Udemy, founder of Sprig, and now co-founder and CEO of Maven, the live cohort-based learning platform reshaping how the world's top operators learn from each other.

Gagan started his first business at 13, teaching speech and debate to kids in his living room while his parents went through a divorce and his family rode out multiple tech recessions. By his senior year, that summer camp had 150 students and was financing the trips of every student on his school's debate team.

In this conversation, Gagan walks Jessica and Peter through the unlikely path that took him from a Fremont kid with no idea startups existed, to obsessively reading TechCrunch four hours a day from a government consulting desk, to becoming the business co-founder of Udemy after a single Skype call with two Turkish immigrants who didn't even know they wanted to run the company yet.

He talks openly about getting pushed out of Udemy, raising $60 million for Sprig and watching it crash and burn, and the years of self-doubt that followed before Maven finally clicked. He shares why his habits get stricter the more pressure he's under, why a status-oriented social network is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a founder, and the friend group from high school speech and debate that has kept him grounded for two decades.

Then he and Jessica get into the part of the conversation that should make every leader sit up. Why most AI rollouts fail in week three. Why "just give people the tools" is the laziest mistake HR teams keep making. Why Maven has already restructured its engineering pods from 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2, and is asking whether that ratio still needs to shrink further.

He explains why universities will be the single biggest laggards in the AI transition, why the education gap is about to widen dramatically, and what he'd actually do if he had a six-year-old in the public school system right now.

Topics covered:

• Starting his first business at 13 during his parents' divorce
• The Stanford summer camp that became a $50K business with 150 students
• Why he was a terrible boss as a teenager
• How TechCrunch and one comment from a friend changed his life trajectory
• Becoming Udemy's business co-founder after a single Skype call
• Getting pushed out of his own company and starting over
• Raising $60M for Sprig, burning out, and shutting it down
• Why founders need friend groups that aren't status-oriented
• The counterintuitive habit pattern: stricter routines under more stress
• Why product-market fit is the #1 job, and recruiting is #2
• Why Maven exists, humans still have a place in modern learning
• Restructuring engineering pods because of AI: 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2
• Why most AI rollouts fail in week three
• The biggest mistake HR leaders are making with AI right now
• Why universities will be the laggards in the AI transition
• The Alpha School model and the future of K-12 education

This is one of those episodes where a founder you might not have heard of teaches you more about building, leading, and surviving in the next decade than most of the household names ever will. Gagan is honest about the failures, generous with the frameworks, and clear-eyed about what's coming.

What if illness was optional?

Naveen Jain has built seven companies. He was on top of the world running Moon Express, the first private company ever granted permission to leave Earth orbit, with a $2.6 billion NASA contract to mine the moon, when his father was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and given three months to live.

He got exactly that.

That moment broke something open. Naveen walked away from space and started asking a different question: if we can land on the moon, why are we still finding cancer by a dentist running a finger across someone's gum?

In this episode, Naveen sits down with Jessica to share the framework behind every company he builds: why this, why now, why me.

That framework led him from helium-3 mining to founding Viome, the company now running 1.5 million tests, sitting on 400 quadrillion biological data points, and holding FDA Breakthrough Device designation for detecting stage 1 oral and throat cancer with 95% specificity.

A stage 1 pancreatic cancer test launches in the next three months.

Jessica and Naveen go deep on:

• The three questions every founder must answer before starting anything
• Why DNA testing companies are asking the wrong question, and what RNA reveals instead
• The 100 trillion microbes producing 99.9% of the genes expressed in your body
• How a classified Los Alamos biological defense project became the foundation of Viome
• Why cancer immunotherapy works for 1/3 of patients, and what changes when you fix the gut
• The double-blind data: HbA1c down 0.42 in 90 days, IBS reversal in 64% of patients, anxiety down 50%
• Building a culture where loyalty shifts from the founder to the mission
• Why Naveen, at 66, still believes he owes a debt to his fellow humans
• The advice he'd give every leader: dream so big people think you're crazy

A masterclass in first-principles thinking, mission-driven leadership, and the radical idea that chronic disease isn't a feature of aging.

It's a signal we've been ignoring.

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Netflix CHRO, here to interrogate what actually works in leadership and life.

If this conversation shifted how you think about your health, your work, or what you're capable of building, share it with someone who needs to hear it.