David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Oh, is it really? Wow. And it’s crazy. It’s Alice in Wonderland stuff. It’s Harry Potter–inspired stuff. It’s Wizard of Oz–inspired stuff. Just google pictures of the Verona campus for Epic, and we’ll link to some in the show notes too. It’s bananas. But it is extremely attractive to new hires coming out of college, who want to feel like they’re still in college, and want to go work for a company that seems fun and interesting. Epic is this two-sided culture that seemed to play well together somehow, this goofy, whimsical fairytale thing and this hard driving win at all costs, performance-oriented, fierce competitor. It just is both. To understand the company, you have to hold in your head that the DNA is both of those things concurrently, and I think it’s because that’s what Judy is. Yes, 100%. That is completely spot on. I had in my script here the question of all this is why on the campus, and that is exactly why. We are hiring super smart, young, hungry, new college grads. How are we going to attract them to Verona, Wisconsin? Well we are going to create a paradise for them. Some interesting stats. It’s 1700 acres, 410 of them are the campus, the rest is the farm. It now covers 89 buildings. There are 4 indoor auditoriums with 18,000 seats total. The big one, Deep Space, is the world’s largest subsurface auditorium. There are 11,400 seats. This is an auditorium. This is two Radio City Music Halls full of people smashed together in one giant auditorium underground on a corporate campus. The number of seats is much closer to a Chase Center. It’s much closer to a basketball arena than it is to any other auditorium that I can think of. It goes down 74 feet beneath the surface. The whole logic behind it is when they built it, they thought, oh we’ll never grow to 11,400 people. We can have our all hands in here, no brainer. But this can also be the place where we have all of our customers and our whole ecosystem can come here. Of course, now they don’t actually fit in there because they’ve outgrown it. Not even all their employees can come to all hands there. The logic for building it was that they had a movie theater that they used to do their monthly all hands meeting, and they wanted to have this opportunity to do it on their new campus too. It’s wild. When you look at it, you just can’t believe the scale of this building.…

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