The LinkedIn Podcast Podcast Network is brought to you by The Progress Report, a podcast created by Kindrel,

your partner for Continuous Technology Innovation.

Listen to the Progress Report, wherever you get your podcasts.

From the editorial team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hemphill and this is Hello Monday, a show about the changing nature of work and how that work is

changing us.

This is an episode about an underdog. And I love an underdog.

I think a lot of people do.

Because they're the ones you aren't supposed to win at work at life wherever the odds aren't in their favor and yet they pull it off anyhow and once you've been the underdog you understand that you don't have to be the favorite contestant to win.

It gives you a kind of superpower for your career.

It lets you take risks because the stakes are lower if you fail.

People assumed you were going to fail anyway. It makes you believe, like really believe that you can

pull off just about anything if you put your mind to it. You've done it before. And sometimes

it makes you able to see a winner when no one else does.

When Troy Carter met Lady Gaga, she didn't seem like the kind of artist who was about to become a worldwide sensation.

And she had just gotten dropped from Def Jam records and she was sleeping on her grandmother's

couch for a while in West Virginia.

But Troy recognized something special, and he signed her.

And maybe one reason he could see it is because he knew something about

Underdogs. He'd been one his entire life. He grew up in a

dangerous part of West Philly where he wanted to become a rapper and well I'll let him

take the story from here.

In like eighth grade, you know, I had this dream of being a rapper.

...