Between Two COO's with Michael Koenig

The episode has occasional useful operational observations - like OKRs failing because they're not linked to someone's actual job, or integrating OKRs into performance management - but too much of the runtime is spent on surface-level frameworks and Noda product description. The ratio of novel insight to throat-clearing and restatement is low for 38 minutes.

“they often fail when teams, you know, you put out these goals but they're not actually linked to projects or initiatives um, that are, that people are actually working on”

“one in three building engineers, the teams that really take care of these buildings, are retiring and those positions aren't being backfilled”

Most of the thinking here is recycled: the 70% OKR rule is textbook, the Roger Federer failure analogy is a well-circulated speech, and the 'what business are we in' framing is classic Bain consulting 101. The grid-synchronization vision for buildings is the freshest idea, but it gets only a paragraph.

“there's this great, uh, video of Roger Federer, the Dartmouth address, where he talks about, um, failure in tennis”

“they explain how that's, you know, where companies make, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars mistakes when they don't understand what business they're in”

Quintans is a genuine practitioner - Bain-trained, with enterprise and startup COO experience at a company serving Marriott and Hilton - but Noda is a small climate tech startup and her answers rarely demonstrate the kind of hard-won, at-scale operational depth the title promises. She's credible and relevant, not exceptional.

“I think when I took this job, I was surprised to learn that we had a distribution warehouse for sensors in the uk”

“we actually just put our okrs into the performance management system and you know, people are paying a lot more attention to it”

Industry-level statistics (200B energy spend, 30-50% waste, 40% of GHG emissions, 1-in-3 engineer retirement) give the building context some grounding, and Marriott/Hilton are named clients, but Noda's own performance metrics, acquisition details, and OKR outcomes are almost entirely absent - the specifics that would actually help a B2B operator learn are missing.

“In the US alone, commercial buildings spend about 200 billion every year on energy. And somewhere between 30 and 50% of that is just wasted”

“globally commercial buildings are responsible for 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions”

The host asks reasonable structural follow-ups and catches an interesting thread with the UK sensor warehouse, but he rarely challenges a claim or digs into a vague answer - when Quintans deflects on the sensors with 'we're finding a happy home for them,' he moves on immediately. Too many questions are framed as compliments ('it sounds like you've cracked the code').

“Last question on okrs. Well, I promise we're going to talk about other things”

“So if anyone has interest in, uh, interesting opportunities or ideas on how to use a warehouse full of sensors”