What Gives You Energy? E23
Adam Freed, Managing Partner of GSV Ventures and former C-level leader at Teachers Pay Teachers, Etsy and Google shares how life continues to challenge him to get closer to who Adam really is and serve from that integrated place, as husband, father and leader. How do you get to your purpose?
He sees it as an ongoing process of trial and error and one in which life presents us with challenges that are invitations for us to transform and live more closely aligned to what we deeply value. This doesn’t mean we will be comfortable all the time.
We will experience, fear, pain, anxiety and yet we can grow through times of change as long as we keep practicing big curiosity. Also, he invites us to not be grandiose in our changes. Rather be practical: what is one lever you have that you can change today to live more aligned with what gives you energy?
GSV Ventures invests in Education and Workforce Learning companies across the PreK to Gray spectrum and across the globe. GSV also leads the ASU+GSV Summit every year, convening leaders from across the sector every year.
Adam Freed is a Managing Partner at GSV Ventures.
Adam has spent much of his career building businesses and leading teams in high growth companies.
He was CEO and board chair of education marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers, which recently sold to IXL Learning. Adam helped grow the company to an annual reach of more than 75% of all K-12 teachers in the US, Canada, and Australia.
Prior to TpT, Adam served as COO of artisanal goods purveyor Etsy. Adam also led International Product Management and International Sales Operations at Google — before, during, and after the company’s IPO.
Before joining the education and technology worlds, Adam was a TV reporter and anchor in both English and Japanese. He is the recipient of both a Knight Fellowship and a local TV Emmy for his work.
Adam has his undergraduate degree from Harvard in Linguistics and his master’s degree from Yale Law School. He is also a Pahara Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Adam also speaks 11 languages, including Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, and Japanese. He has lived in 11 locales in five countries around the world.
A Brooklynite for the past decade, Adam serves on the board of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and lives in the creative borough with his husband, Ken, their two children, and their dog, Kiki.
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn.
About Rooted & Unwavering
Peace, Compassion, Wisdom, Purposefulness, Creativity and Strength come online in us when we deeply connect with the true, unwavering greatness that lives within ourselves and others.
In this podcast and radio show, Hylke Faber, seasoned transformational coach and author of the award-winning Taming Your Crocodiles series, engages in deep inquiry with leaders from all walks of life about courageously connecting with our true selves, others and the world at large.
How do we stay connected to our true selves and our greatness, especially when we are challenged? How do we rest in the heart, also when our mind keeps us restless? What becomes possible when we truly stay committed to our own and others’ best selves, also when we don’t feel it? How do we practice staying connected to our true selves, in the midst of our busy lives?
Join us and leave inspired to act on your heart’s greatness and that of the people around you.
About Our Host
For as long as he can remember Hylke Faber has been curious about what this life is about. His ongoing inquiry has become his work: helping people individually and collectively to discover what is possible in life and express that authentically and fearlessly.
Hylke started his work life with Towers Perrin as consultant and then as Partner with Strategic Decisions Group, serving a wide range of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, consumer electronics and life sciences companies. A major shift occurred during this critical phase of his life. He had become the typical, hard-charging, 16-hours-a-day strategy consultant, and was burning out at a rapid clip.
When he discovered meditation, everything changed. He was so taken by his new discoveries that he chose to bring to business what he was learning: that there is a way we can have it all – we can be fulfilled, do work we love, and create extraordinary results with others. He thinks of it as creating a sense of ease in business.
He learned how to coach and facilitate human transformation completing his coaching certification with Newfield Network and by working at Axialent, the culture and leadership company. After a few years, he founded Co-Creation Partners together with other leaders in the field of transformation and personal development. Then he formed Constancee to help people grow by creating the conditions where deep personal, interpersonal and organizational shifts happen routinely.
He leads Growth Leaders Network, the culture and team development consultancy. He has also taught coaching at Columbia Business School Executive Education and has contributed to Harvard Business Review. He is currently teaching a course on Climate Conscious Leadership at Arizona State University. His award-winning book, Taming Your Crocodiles: Unlearn Fear & Become a True Leader, was published by Dover in 2018.
His next book, Taming Your Crocodiles Practices for Leadership Depth, came out in 2020. Besides helping others grow, which he loves, he is a trained opera singer, enjoys hiking and writing, is an avid reader, in particular of biographies, and is always in the process of growing himself. He integrates all of what he learns in his work with executives.
Connect with Hylke on LinkedIn.
About Our Sponsor
Realizing Your Greatness
We are a team of experienced facilitators and coaches dedicated to helping individuals, teams and organizations thrive by helping them recognize their innate greatness and putting it to work.
- Executive Coaching: we work with clients individually to help them connect to their calling and use every challenge as an opportunity to help them grow more into what makes them great.
- Team Performance: we help teams evolve to their next level of excellence, connectedness and impact by working on the root drivers of team performance.
- Culture Development: we help organizations to evolve their culture by creating clarity about where they aspire to go, and by building role models, coaches and systems that catalyze people being energized to work the new way.
- Key Notes: we deliver powerful speeches at conferences and other events that help audiences become energized, more connected to themselves and each other, more open to discovery and ready to commit to the next stage of learning in their career and life journeys.
Growth Leaders Network (GLN) serves Fortune 500 companies, smaller organizations and non-profits globally.
GLN clients report that we catalyze significant business transformational impact and profound shifts in people, team and organizations at the root cause level.
Learn more about the Growth Leaders network here.
