Episode 12: Co-Founder & CEO: "We're At A Cultural Tipping Point" (Why You NEED Spiritual Practices At Work) - Anthony Kennada
Life is FULL of ups and downs.
Our schedules quickly get packed.
Our to-do lists often feel endless… and only keep getting longer.
At the same time… God invites us to find REST, peace, and strength we need from him.
But HOW do we practically do that, in the midst of an increasingly fast-paced world?
If there’s anyone familiar with this struggle, it’s Anthony Kennada, Co-Founder and CEO of AudiencePlus, and Alex’s former colleague turned friend.
Join us today as Anthony shares powerful testimonies (including a life-changing medical miracle) and hard lessons he’s learned throughout his career and journey as an executive leader, marketer, husband, dad… and how God used all of it to ignite a personal revival in him and his family, revealing to them the importance of spiritual practices for thriving in all areas of his life.
Together, we’ll explore real-life examples of WHY and how to practically incorporate and live out spiritual practices in our everyday lives - regardless of the increasing pace or changing circumstances around us - as well as how to cultivate a healthy attitude towards our spiritual growth, instead of being driven by religion and perfectionism.
TOPICS:
0:00 - Intro, how Alex & Anthony met
1:23 - What led Anthony into marketing & entrepreneurship
4:52 - What led Anthony to personally follow Jesus
8:57 - Testimony of Anthony's life-changing health scare
13:30 - Paradigm with which Anthony integrates his faith & work
16:46 - Rule of Life & what sparked Anthony's interest in Spiritual Formation
22:53 - Grace's ironic story
23:49 - Spiritual "practices" vs. "disciplines"
24:43 - Why & how Anthony incorporates Sabbath & other spiritual practices into his schedule & company
28:27 - How to navigate the tension between spiritual practices & external pressures (e.g. hustle culture)
30:05 - A shift in cultural values re: "work-life balance" & holistic wellbeing
32:05 - Anthony's company value of "Ruthlessly Eliminate Hurry" & the difference between Hurry vs. Speed
33:30 - Anthony's life before vs. after having a Rule of Life
34:13 - One conversation that changed Anthony's view on work
36:49 - The role of spiritual practices in the future of work
39:38 - Practical steps to begin incorporating spiritual practices into work
41:15 - Anthony's rhythm of weekly Sabbath dinners
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Anthony Kennada is the co-founder and CEO at AudiencePlus, the Owned Media company. As the former Chief Marketing Officer at Gainsight, Front, and Hopin, Anthony has pioneered a market-making playbook that leverages content, community, and events in order to build, engage, and monetize an owned audience. Anthony is also the author of Category Creation: How to Build a Brand that Customers, Employees, and Investors Will Love.
RELATED RESOURCES
[FREE GUIDE] Episode 12 Reflect & Apply Guide
[BOOK] The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World by John Mark Comer
[RESOURCES] Practicing the Way - Spiritual Formation guides (including a Rule of Life workbook), podcast, recommended books, & more for individuals and groups to use together
[PODCAST] Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership podcast with Ruth Haley Barton - 30-minute episodes on how to cultivate a life-giving connection with God as a leader
Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome back to Let's Unpack That with Alex and Grace! We are so thrilled today to have Anthony Kennada, CEO and Co-Founder of AudiencePlus, or I like to call him AK for short.
So, AK actually has a pretty impressive background in marketing and business, most recently founding and meeting AudiencePlus, but he’s also been Chief Marketing Officer at other companies, like Gainsight. I remember AK and I met at our company conference, our annual company conference, and then AK invited me to go to one of their fellowship and prayer meetings, super early in the morning, like 7 a.m., but I was like, yeah, let's do it.
And so I've always admired AK just from the way that he conducts business, and he's very successful in his career, but also a strong passionate follower of Jesus, which, obviously, I really, really love the intersection of the two.
So, today we're gonna understand who AK is at the heart level, but also really talk about how do you integrate spiritual disciplines with your work, especially if you have like a high demand fast-paced job.
Yeah. Thanks so much for being here, Anthony. We're so honored to have you. And yeah, maybe just to start off: Can you kind of share a little bit of backstory? How did you end up doing what you're doing right now?
Yeah, thank you guys and so excited to to be on the show.
It's a big question. I mean, I think no one sort of grows up dreaming of working in enterprise software. I feel like you sort of just find your path there.
For me, just as I look back on, kind of the signals of my life, there were kind of shades of marketing, kind of from my earliest days like, you know, building websites kind of in my very young days. In college, my job on campus was to be a concert coordinator, so opening on events, and then even in my earliest jobs as an SDR and kind of frontline tech professional, I found my way into the events teams that were putting on events and conferences.
So I feel like I've always had this sort of draw to creative marketing, and what's really ironic is, I didn't pursue a career in in marketing, it was Alex, our former CEO Nick, who asked me if I would be willing to take a marketing role at Gainsight that completely sort of, you know, changed my life.
So, yeah, I mean, I think I've kind of just been pushing the thread or whatever the saying is, like, just walking through doors that God had been opening up in my life and career, and just trying to be faithful. And, you know, even this jump into becoming a founder, which, you know, we'll talk about, wasn't something that I set out to do, you know, from our my earliest days of my career, to sort of walking through those doors that I feel are being open. So, yeah.
So that's a very high level journey, but, you know, something that I think is a story that is still being written in a way. And it's kind of fun to see what God's doing.
Yeah, I love seeing your journey and you’ve definitely had a very incredible career. I’d love to know: were you always creative? Were there any significant moments in your earlier years that really sparked this curiosity towards marketing?
It’s a good- I've never answered that question before. I've never done the introspection to- I mean, I think one thing is, I'm an only child raised by single immigrant mom (same). Yeah, my mom immigrated here from Lebanon in the 1970s, 80s? And kind of grew up balancing that culture at home and then my integration into the, into the world.
A lot of that was me spending a lot of time alone, frankly, you know, and I think, I don't know if this is correlated but, you know, developing creativity when you're going to working your imagination.
For me, a lot of that happened on the basketball court, just kind of being out there by myself, shooting hoops, thinking. So I suspect that was like a part of it.
The other piece is that I remember distinctly getting an Apple computer, or like a handed-down, like an old Apple computer, when I was like, I don't know, 10, or something to that end.
It didn't do anything but like Paint or whatever, whatever the Apple equivalent of Paint was. But, you know, it was a chance to tinker with with something new and and just load in like four CD-ROMs, till I get one game going or whatever.
So I think that- there was sort of an intersection, less so in the creative side but more on the technology side, that I think kind of whet my appetite for innovation or what's new.
And I think a lot of the sort of ideas that I’d kind of come up with over time, I think, as a child, helped kind of strengthen that muscle a little bit, perhaps.
First of all I can totally relate. Both me and Alex were also the only children, we talk about this a lot, how when you're alone you have nothing else to entertain yourself but use. You learn to be creative. I think the first, besides Microsoft Paint, I remember being on a Jasc Paint Shop Pro. (Yeah) Spending hours… it was like the budget version of Photoshop. Like, I wasn't ready for that yet, but it's just so funny how God puts those seeds in, and it leads you to where you are now.
And maybe, before we, you know, talk about right now and like what you've been learning recently, can you talk a little bit also about your faith? Did you grow up in a Christian home? Like were you aware of God leading you in these steps? Or was it more in retrospect you realized like he was there?
Yes, I grew up in a Greek Orthodox home. And so, if you've ever watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding, that was my entire childhood, basically. (Yeah.) So you're familiar: the lamb, the painted garage door, everything- except not the garage door.
But I grew up in a prayerful home, a home that like, my mom really instilled a lot of the values in me. And I went to a Lutheran preschool, Greek Orthodox Elementary School, Baptist High School, and Church of Christ college, so I'm a product of Christian education, as well.
And I think for me, this big shift happened between elementary school and high school. So sort of growing up again in more of, as we talked about disciplines, especially like, more of a sort of branch of our faith or a denomination that celebrated a bit more of the ritual perhaps.
And then I got into high school where there were like, electric guitars and like, people putting their hands up in the air, and I was like, what is going on, like is this the same, you know, faith that I know?
What first was a little bit offsetting, like, I just didn't know how to process that, really sparked this journey for me of developing sort of my own faith, not just inheriting the faith of my family, my mom in particular. And so I think I credit that phase of my kind of walk as more of my own, kind of asking some questions and really kind of, you know, the third part I'm really like proud of and grateful for is asking those questions in the context of a community of non-dominational believers and Christians.
And you know, I got a chance to play in a worship band even before I knew like, what worship bands were. And that was a chance to really kind of build relationship and have exposure to again, the personhood in the relationship of and with Jesus.
So that was sort of one of the big transitions for me.
And but I would argue like even from from my earliest days, I've definitely had sort of a awareness of Holy Spirit and just the sort of work being done in my life, you know, and personal side, work side, or anything, not knowing kind of what God had planned for me, but just knowing that, even though I was walking and living with through the like, you know, work and school context, or sports, or whatever, that there were sort of a higher calling for all of my actions and words and behavior, and that was always something that I think was front of mind for me and having that awareness in my earliest days.
I can totally relate to that. Because I grew up in a Catholic home where it was more traditional, and I would go to mass, but didn't really understand it until, similar to you, actually more in college, went to a worship service, where it was more contemporary and modern. And that's totally piqued my curiosity. It wasn't, I guess, boring or (yeah), it was more modern. Like, I could relate to it more. So, totally can understand your story.
But were there any significant moments in your life that really drew you more to Jesus? Like what was the spark that really (yeah) put your foot forward?
There's two in particular. And one, one more recent than than the other.
One was, honestly my relationship with my wife. Like, our significant others play such an important part of our own development and formation, whether that is relationally or, you know, I think even spiritually.
And, you know, there was a moment early on in our dating relationship where I was like, I felt like I wasn't walking in the walk, in a way that I was sort of worthy of her love, in a way. There was sort of this reckoning moment for me of saying, like, hey, I want to be deserving of the love of someone like Brittany, I've got a sort of change things in my life, and I need to reorient myself a little bit.
So that was one big moment of, you know, having gone to church, I was never sort of like a troublemaker or anything, but like just like, some real shifts in my heart that I had to make and then translate that into my actions and make sure that I was sort of living in a way that was leading me to a Christ-centered relationship, which almost 10 years into marriage now and two kids later, you know, I look back on that moment as a very important one.
The other one was fairly recent, and kind of, I think, leads us a bit into this, the spiritual, disciplines, the spiritual practices, but I had a very random health scare three years ago where actually my heart went out of rhythm: something, an arrhythmia, called AFib, which is the most common arrhythmia, but the average age is like 86. It is not common for 30-year-olds to experience AFib.
And it- I’ll spare the long story, but it's basically this struggle for about a week in the hospital of trying to get my heart back and rhythm, and nothing working, that chemical, you know, medicine they're putting into me through, an IV was supposed to get me back into rhythm. It didn't work.
The next option was to shock my heart to rhythm, which, by the way, is actually (that’s scary) it sounds terrifying. It's a very like standard normal procedure, but I don't want to reset my heart, that sounds like, you know, terrifying, and so I was doing literally everything I could to avoid having the shock of having to have my heart reset for me.
And there was this moment that led to again, days and days into the hospital. But they're like, there's nothing else we can do for you. Like, this is literally the only way to get your heart back into rhythm.
And so I had this sort of moment of surrender. And it was really kind of this very vulnerable and raw kind of conversation with God of like, look, and again, I didn't appreciate at the time how common this procedure was, but, you know, if like, literally if, if this is it, if this is the end of my life, if as a result of tomorrow - of the procedure tomorrow - I'm going to heaven, I just fully give control away on the situation. And I just just pray that you love me and accept me and you know, forgive me of my sin.
And so the next morning felt like literally the last morning of my life. Like, I'm very dramatic as an only child, too, if you guys are as well, we have to, okay, and they checked me and I'm still in AFib, and they wheel me down to like the, not the operating room, but the place that they would do the procedure.
They are like getting me ready for the procedure. They're about to administer anesthesia to to shock my heart.
And the nurse says, you know, “Hey doctor, is this the guy we're doing the cardioversion on?”
And she's like, “yeah.”
And she’s like, “he's in rhythm.”
And it was within the, like, three-minute walk, or gurney ride, down from the hospital room to the center… where God reset my heart. After medical intervention did not. (Woah.)
“Yeah, cool. You can go,” like, that’s it. I just went on with my life afterwards.
And it was this profound moment for me, of like, literally the poetic metaphor as a creative or marketer was almost too much to bear, that God reset my heart for me for a purpose.
And it sparked in me this revival of faith and this journey that I've been on for the last about three years or so of my family that has gone from sort of participation in church and having sort of a rhythm around prayer, but fairly high level going through the motions, fitting God in where I could fit him in, to this like transformation of meaning and purpose, but also this active kind of discipleship quest that that my family and I are on, which led us to the practices, which led us to frankly, a bit more of a charismatic, perhaps, you know, side of our faith, to see the Holy Spirit work in our lives, in the lives of our community and others.
So it's been a crazy. Three years of really pursuing that, feels like we're just kind of getting started.
That is amazing. I have goosebumps right now. That is such a crazy story.
I think it reminds me of you know, recently we actually interviewed another lady, Alicia Michelle, on the topic of overcoming overwork, and it's just crazy how many people like, myself, Alicia, you, I'm sure so many others, actually another one: David Kim, too.
We all have like, house scares that (Oh, yeah) gave you renewed clarity on life, because I think most of the time we go through life lost or confused, because we don't have that clarity, where we're going to forget what's actually important.
