YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Miller

lines on the record: 43
first: 2024-06-13
most recent: 2024-06-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Perseverance Got to persevere. If you're passionate about something and really believe in it, it's not always going to be easy. When we went public, it looked like we were an overnight success, but we had been at it for many, many, many years. But the other piece of that is you better really be passionate about what you're doing because it's not all going to be good days. And you got to remember why you're there.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our tagline was educating the world. When we started the company, that was completely absurd. But when I sold the company, we had delivered 2 billion courses so we kind of did educate the world.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“but it didn't matter did not matter so we got crushed that day And then I became convinced that we needed to prep for what could happen with a pandemic. And so I did this three-day test at the beginning of March. We were going to shut the office down worldwide for three days just to see what would happen. Did people need monitors? Did people get locked out of their accounts? And the whole management team thought I was crazy. Like what are you doing? You're closing the office for three days. We had offices in 25 countries. And we did it. Wednesday there were some issues and on Thursday we fixed those issues and Friday everybody was still home and on Sunday There was a government announced work from home ord”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And literally, we open way down because overnight Wall Street had become obsessed with financial viability and how much leverage a company had, specifically what was their debt to equity ratio.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a So I would play a solo with Angus, drop the bike, and leave. And that was it. I was done. Was thinking about this dream that kept happening over and over again. And I started to also believe I'm 20 years in if I'm ever going to do anything else, 20 years is going to be the right time to step off. So I realized 2020, I was going to be done. For my swan song, I thought I'm gonna show that we have truly dominated the industry by acquiring our biggest competitor. Our biggest competitor was a company called Saba Software. But this was yet another example of really bad timing. We announced an all-cash deal where we had taken on a lot of debt to make an acquisition. Pre market when the market opens, COVID hit Wall Street This was february of twenty twenty.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't stop learning after grad school. I kept going. I kept reading. I kept trying to learn from people. Even after a public company, you get to go to these conferences with other public company CEOs. And I would be taking extensive notes. And sometimes the bankers would come up to me and say, Adam, you're the only one taking notes. But I was really paying attention to what was going on, trying to learn from my peers, trying to learn from experts that were out there, always thinking about how can we do better.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when the time came to be able to take the company public, I was super excited. This was kind of a dream that was about to be fulfilled. But we were in a race at the time. There had already been a couple of public companies in our space. We were on the smaller side of those four. And I knew that only one of them was going to be able to go public. And the rest of them would probably get acquired or merged. I also believe that you had to have a top tier offering. So you need a top bank. And we got Goldman Sachs to lead the round, to lead the IPO. And we ended up going public in March of 2011.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With dad looking at the newspaper, working and he would teach me like how to invest and how the stock market worked. And I always wanted a four-letter symbol on the Nasdaq because Microsoft and all the other companies that were on the Nasdaq all had four letters. And that was always my dream.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had always wanted to go public because when I was a kid, my dad taught me how to read the stock charts. Back then it was in the newspaper.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought, well, they're definitely going to cancel the meeting. And the meeting never got canceled. I went to the meeting and I said, why are we even having this meeting? You just put out this manifesto about how to cut everything. Why would you possibly invest right now? And they said, in our experience, The best companies grow in good times and bad.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Winter is coming. How to magic recession. And it was cut your people, prepare for the worst, take action early, do it in full, don't do it piecemeal.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You might remember this Sequoia had put out this very famous brief Was one of these early social media posts that went viral talking about what to do in a downturn.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They said you need to go raise money. And you're telling me I have to go do it from other VC firms, even though you guys could invest. And they said, yes. I said, explain to me how that makes sense. They said you're our best performing portfolio company, so you're the only one that could raise money from other people. We need to save our money for the other companies. I'm like All right, now I know why people don't like VC sometimes.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have another board meeting a few days later, and they say, okay, this is the forecast we want to use. You're running out of money. Said, we're not running out of money. We're doing fine”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looks like the world's going to end. Now we still had capital, so we weren't running out of money, but we had a board meeting. At the board meeting, We go over our projections, our forecasts, and they're like, no, no, no. You understand what's going on with the world. We want to see a financial forecast assuming zero sales. Like, what are you talking about? We're selling every day. They said, we don't care. We want worst case scenario. Assume zero sales.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were able to continue to build the business simply by hiring where we absolutely had to hire. But it was also inefficient. We knew we could grow faster. We knew we could sell more. And ultimately, we were in an arms race with some pretty big companies. And so we needed the money, not to mention the corporate viability issue that we had perpetually, right? We had no capital. Our balance sheet was terrible. We finally raised venture capital. Besssemer led the round. Byron Dieter led the round. It was his first true cloud deal. We ultimately became his first unicorn.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were doing 60% growth a year. So every two years, you're almost tripling. Was pretty good. But we're growing very linearly at first because we couldn't forward invest. We had no capital. So the business became very efficient. We were essentially operating a break-even from the very beginning. And we basically were building the company off of sales. So every time we sold, we'd hire another person. Every deal we did, we'd hire more people.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listeners, Bob, here, if you listen to rapid response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the Devilware's Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to do this. We're going ahead. We had four deals that we were working on at the time that were all close to signature. We ended up closing three of those deals.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether to hibernate or not. Whether we hibernate or not Actually, we're going to close some of these deals. And if we don't have the staff, we're not going to be able to perform on the deals. And they'll fire us and we'll go out of business So I'd rather go out of business trying than not trying.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the 15th, I walked into the office and I said, we're hiring. I thought, look, there's only two scenarios here. There's a scenario where World comes to an end, these markets don't come back. We're not going to win any of these deals and we're going to go out of business.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had developed this great pipeline of financial services firms on the east coast, mostly in New York, that were going to be the turning point for our company. And then 9-11 happened. Our entire pipeline went away. I got frantic calls from our investors and advisors who were all in New York. They all said, you got to go into hibernation mode. Cut the staff. I mean, we had barely any staff. Cut the staff. You don't have enough money to keep going. You're going to go out of business. On September fourteenth, I watched the West Wing that night. So the West Wing was this old show. Martin Sheen was the president. This was one of these shows where he had a huge decision to make. He was in a church trying to figure out what to do. And he made this big decision that went against what everybody had advised him to do”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember the first time somebody said, we're doing an RFP. Can you fill it out and come back to us? We had no idea what an RFP was. Request for proposal that a business will give to a different business to solicit. Products and services. We didn't understand how that worked. There was no chat GBT to ask. You had to figure it out yourself.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were designing the product. We're thinking we have like twenty people and they have 20,000, 50,000, 75,000 people. They're never going to buy from us. But actually, what started to happen after many months of doing this is we would go to these meetings and they would say, wow, you guys really listen. And then they would start to say, we could really use this. And they would say, can we get this? And we were terrible at sales. You didn't understand that they were literally saying that they would potentially buy it.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here it is. We would go to these meetings in New York, I'd fly back to LA, I would draw on cocktail napkins what the screen should look like. I'd hand it to the developers and they would build it.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These were the big banks, the big insurance companies. They would tell us something, and two weeks later, we had built it.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's very little money left. So we started begging for money. This was the beginning of seven years of begging for money. Friends, family, VCs, strategics, corporations, anybody that would meet with me. And so went back and forth, flying back and forth, maxing out credit cards any way to get money. There were an enormous number of no's. And it does impact your confidence, right? If you reject”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was too expensive the way they were treating us, risking the entire company on this one deal. Thought this is just not the right move, and we left. We never said goodbye to anybody because nobody was in the room. We don't know where they were. We just left. Two weeks after we walked out of that conference room, the internet bubble started to crumble. And about a month later it burst. And had we signed that deal, we definitely would have been out of business. That would have been the end of the company. So I remember we went to big deans, which is a bar on the beach by the Santa Monica Pier, and we sat there all day thinking about, okay, what do we do now? The AOL deal was off the table, and we didn't really have any business customers at the time. And we didn't have any capital. We had the same few hundred thousand dollars that we started with, but we were burning it.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was absolutely the make or break for the company. And I remember piecing the room, looking out of the bridge. And I turned to Steve and I said, You know what? This just doesn't feel right.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now they had already been notorious for doing things like this. It's one thing to hear about it. It's another thing to be in the room.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our general counsel at the time, Steve Simon, and I were sitting in a room in San Francisco with a great view of the bridge. We're in this big conference room And the people from AOL came in the room, threw down the contract, and said, We've been talking about this long enough, you have two hours to sign and walked out of the room.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were hiring predominantly for potential, not for experience. Because nobody had experience doing B2B software. So we had to hire for potential. And that, I think, served us very well. We had people that We're able to scale with the company because they were curious. They kept learning these were high potential people that were ambitious and willing to take chances and take feedback. We hired web developers to build a website. We hired a team of students from UCLA and USC who sat at these folding tables with folding chairs in this one bedroom office on Ocean Park and they would surf the web looking for any online training that was out there with the goal that we would tabulate and simplify the ability to search for online courses. That was the original consumer idea.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was literally home alone in this one bedroom apartment trying to get this company off the ground. And so I came up with this pattern where every day I would go to staples and buy something. I usually only buy one thing that made me feel like I was starting a company. Like I was doing something business related You ever go into staples?”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was incredible, but it was very, very misleading for me because that start was so incredibly easy and that was the end of it being easy.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second you resign. So I'm fully prepared for it. And I go to my boss and I say I'm leaving. Why are you leaving? I'm going to start a company. He says. Oh, we all knew you were going to do that How much time do you need and how much money are you trying to raise? And so I tell him I probably need a couple months to do the business plan. And I probably need a few hundred thousand dollars to get this going. And he said, okay, great. We'll give it to you. So no security guard showed up, I never left the office, I wrote the business plan while finishing up work in my initial capital came from everybody I work for. Every single person in my chain of command invested in the company.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was working at an investment bank at the time. So I went to tell my boss that I was starting this company. And I had seen that anybody who had left the firm was immediately escorted by security guards out of the building because investment banks have confidential information. And so they're very concerned about people having access to the information and taking it with them.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Exactly. This was pre-streaming, really pre-web. By 99, the consumer internet had exploded and there was a lot of opportunity out there. But bandwidth still was not very good. So I was watching what was happening with the cable modems and DSL and thought I'll start the company when we're about two years away from full broadband in the home. That seemed to be the right time to start a company, get it going, build the business and over a two-year period you would have product that could be delivered over the end. Right.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CyberU was intended to be at the time what they called a mid interior. We're going to sit between the sellers of education, like universities and the buyers of education who would be adults. The idea we came up with was using CD-ROMs to train adults at concepts that were difficult for adults to understand, like Wall Street”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interestingly, adults have the least access to education because they often are working nine to five or more, and training can be really expensive. A lot of people can't afford it. The original name of the company was Cyber U. This is back in the day of Cyber Everything. The idea was really premised on leveraging the technology to help people learn things. It was self-paced. It was easy to access and it wasn't expensive.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I go to this guy, sign the deal. It was the highest interest rate you would ever pay on money. He wires the money. We pay payroll, and then like three days later, we paid the guy back.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, it's over, we're done. Payroll is due tomorrow, and we miss payroll. And I'm like, oh crap. And I was sitting at lunch. I was totally depressed. My friends were like, What is wrong with you? I told him, and they're like, How badly do you need this money? I'm like, I really need the money. And they said, All right, you can call this guy, but only call him if you really need the money. You have no other alternative. These guys had a little bit of a gambling problem. And I call him up and he has me come to his office. Was a midtown Manhattan one room office. He wasn't at a company. This was definitively not a bank. This guy was a loan shark. He didn't give a crap about the company, but he was asking all these questions about me, and he said, yeah, you know what? I think you're good for it.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got one of our existing investors to put up some money, but he said he'll only do it if we raise a million dollars And then I went to every single person we knew. I had raised $350,000. I was 150 short. And then I got 50. And then I was 100 short. And I just could not get the last hundred.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In 2005, the company had a near-death experience. I had hired a boutique investment bank in LA. Got called into a meeting with them, and I went to the office, and the main guy there says, Adam, you know what? It hasn't worked out as planned, and we're not going to be able to do this anymore. And I thought. Oh shit, we are screwed.”
2024-06-13 · Masters of Scale · Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT