YouSaid · the spoken record

Barry McCarthy

lines on the record: 52
first: 2022-12-19
most recent: 2022-12-19
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

“I can't say farther than my role here at Peloton. And the immediate challenge is to finish the turnaround. I've said publicly, I think the ship is turning and there are lots of shoots a bit, which I'm super enthusiastic. I think we're on track to get the business to cash flow break even, which enables us to control our own destiny. As Andy Radzcliffe would say, cash is oxygen as life. So he got a husband that's scarce resource. And we're doing that really well. And then the question is how high is high? How quickly can we grow the business? What will the growth rate be? We still have to solve for all those things. And so I'll be here for a period of time where I figured that out. And then eventually, hopefully I planned successfully for my successor and manage through that process well. And then I'll go off and do back to California and discover the rest of my life again.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to use my personal resources so that I don't have to worry about anything in life. And I get places quickly and things are taken care of so that I can remain entirely focused on work and my marriage and nothing else. And now I'm not entirely proud of that. My personal relationships with friends and whatnot suffer as a consequence, but it does help enormously me be successful in my day job.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company money or personal money? I really haven't one. Never see it. Don't think about it particularly. I do use it to make me more efficient in my job. I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit that almost everything in my life is optimized around my performance at work if I need to or if I can use my resources to make myself more efficient than I do. This was something I saw read Hastings do very successfully at Netflix and I've sort of emulated that behavior.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one I've worked with most consistently is Jay. Oh, I remember when Netflix was actually going down after the dot-com bus, we were running out of money, even though we were going, we were doubling every year. But the world was in meltdown. You couldn't get capital from anybody. And he stepped up in a moment of immense bravery to the long-term benefit of his industrials, I might add, they made a killing. But it was a moment of great courage. And I have known him Spotify through through a number of really terrific Netflix and other really lucrative investments. And he was responsible for bringing me here to Peloton. And he's been enormously helpful to me in stabilizing the performance of business and moving it forward. He would be at the top of my list.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I find myself riding a lot with Ali Love and a few of the other instructors kind of in the 30 to 45 minute range and in the zone three, zone four, two, three, four. Kind of”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why not? I'm not going to answer that question because they're all my children and I love them all. I do. I thank God for the content team because the reason that we're still here.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I wouldn't presume to have advice from my peers. I'm still unproven myself. Talent density is job one. That said, if there was one thing to focus on more than any other, aside from the structure of your business model, and I can't emphasize the importance of that enough, by the way, it's the thing that helped us be successful at Netflix. It's the thing that propelled Daniel to success. It's the thing that's propelling us to success. It can enable real structural, sustainable advantage. It's people without him. You can't execute.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm pleased to have gone through any of the lessons. I was in basic training in Quantico in Watamana and ROTC program in college, same one that Reastings had gone through. So I suppose that experience was very formative, but it was quite painful at the time.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe at this point, strength is pattern matching skills from all of the various business models and people that I've had the opportunity to work with in this situation in particular has helped me move its speed. And I would say the biggest challenge of my interpersonal skills, I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but unfortunately for me, I have more IQ than I have EQ, and I would be a better manager if I had more EQ. So I try to compensate by surrounding myself with people who have more EQ than I have, but I still have an EQ deficit.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I literally am working 24 7. The only thing I'm reading is The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal every morning. I did find myself in Thanksgiving flipping through a Peter Kaufman book about Charlie Munger that is a long time since I've had the time to sit down and actually read something casually.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think how many years it took before Disney underwrote the cost of trying to get there. There are real barriers to entry associated with trying to build out your distribution to end users. And there are many examples, music labels by way of example, who tried and failed. So all of the music label, almost all the music labels, let's say Sony, went down this path and it wasn't until they went down the path and failed that they repositioned themselves on licensed content. Serious exempt do the same thing. Or sorry, Stars tried to do the same thing and then pivoted and licensed. So Disney's one of the few examples of a company that had a brand that was umbrella that was broad enough that consumers saw value in the brand broadly enough that they were willing to license the content of a subscription model, but many companies have tried and failed.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he understands demands your likes and your dislikes, he's able to drive discovery and drive this virtuous cycle. And he's able to demand shifts so that when individual suppliers trying to extract margin from him, he can depress demand for their content on his website and shift to lower cost content from other people's. And in the process, he's been able to negotiate economic incentives with various suppliers that reflect his ability to own and shift demand creation. So at a high level, I would say whoever owns demand creation owns the gross margin.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their content and making it cheaper for you to buy. And if it's cheaper for you to buy, you will buy disproportionately large percentage of it and they will punch above their market share, which is in fact what happens. Now, that strategy only works for someone like Netflix if they're able to demand shift you from a universal title to a Warner title without sacrificing your satisfaction. And as it turns out, there are a ton of movies that they can demand shift you to because they do know what you like and they can find something that's nearly similar in Warner's catalog to something that you did want in the universal catalog and you won't even notice the shift and as I say in the process doing that they maintain customer sat. I think we had a hundred thousand things to choose from so on and demand creation becomes super important now it's infinitely more important in the music business because Daniel's got a hundred million things for people to choose from and you would love a bunch of them but you're never going to find them because it's just too much stuff but”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's catalog. It actually, for the first time ever, creates a catalog content in the home video marketplace. In the process of doing that, it developed an understanding of what Ben likes that's different from what Harry likes, that's different from what Barry likes and Gustav likes and Daniel likes. And when you come to the website, the content that it serves you is what Netflix thinks you like. This is something that Daniel has invested in aggressively at Spotify. Okay, now if it's really true that I know what you like, I can begin to shift demand. So if I have a limited number of suppliers, one of them is charging me a lot for my content, one of them is charging me a little for my content, let's sue Universal and Warner by way of example. Let's make this specific. So universal thinks that the way it maximizes its profit is by maximizing its profit margin. And so its cost per movie is pretty expensive. But Warner takes the difference approach. They think the way they maximize their profit is by lowering the cost.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's think back to Netflix. So DVD by mail, Blockbuster is the gold standard, the sort of retail model. The 4000 things in their store that they rent on an a la carte basis overnight. 90% of what they rent comes from what's called the new release wall. And the core thesis in the marketplace is that what consumers want to watch are new releases. Netflix has this revolutionary view of the home video market that's not true. What consumers want to watch are movies they like, but they can't remember the names of them. And they rely on their friends to tell them what it is they should be watching and they walk into the blockbuster store and they use the new release wall to find something to watch because the middle of the store which has thousands of DVDs is too imposing to actually flip through. And plus you don't recognize any of the title so they don't mean anything to you. So 90% of what Blogbuster rents is new release. 30% of what Netflix rents is new release and 7%.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your boss, but that's the art of it. So you need to get your check your ego at the door and your intellect if necessary and find the interpersonal skills required to say it in a way that makes it accessible to the people or the person you're saying it to.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you had less EQ, you wouldn't wrestle with it as much as perhaps you do. And I'm not blessed with the same degree of EQ as you are. And so I'm less self-aware when I do it. I'm in oftentimes it's just a question that's top of mind and I think it's particularly relevant to the discussion. And so I just ask the question. I'm certainly not trying to be confrontational. I don't mean to do it in a connotational way for sure. I do think, by the way, to be effective as a board member. If I could liken personalities to radio frequencies, some people are frequency agile and they can deal with many different kinds of personality types, but some are not. And to be interpersonally effective, you have to find frequency. You need to find a voice and the way of communicating with the CEO, particularly if they're a founder, in a way they're able to take it on board, right? They're raising an issue or you're challenging them or you're trying to get them to see something in a different way than maybe they're thinking about it. You need the same skill set to be an effective employee and thing with.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, it is. But look, I mean, did the shareholders do well? They did fabulously well. They had a brilliant founder. And so the board should be enabling of that kind of unique talent. I'm just pointing out that those are uniquely different situations than the situation that most of us find ourselves in. There you need to invest in the relationships and invest in their understanding of the business and know when you need help and be courageous enough to ask for it when you need it instead of trying to hide it, be proactive about it as a CEO.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the founder led companies have a different board dynamic than companies that are led by professional managers. I'm the professional iron gun. That's wholly different than a founder who's bootstrapped the company, become an iconic leader, picked all of the board members in the room for the longest time. I think the board members at Netflix didn't want Reid to not think they weren't strategic and value added. God walk around Silicon Valley and say something bad about one of his board members that would have trashed their reputations permanently. Everybody's on their best behavior and then let's take the Appleboard. I mean, who was going to get in Steve Jobs about anything, ever? It just wasn't going to happen.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their understanding of the business. So as a CEO, you kind of get out as much as you put in the more informed they are, the more value added they can be and the less context they have and the less visibility they have, the less value they're going to be to you in your running business.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now I rustle with this. I would say managers managed and board members don't, and that's important to bear in mind. The best board members tend to be operators who are strategically focused, who can help provide context for the management team and sort of see around corners and anticipation of issues that maybe they're not thinking about and encourage them socratically to steer them towards anticipating issues that they might not otherwise have seen. So that's one model of value add I've seen. Another is they've got a lot of functional expertise. And if you want them to lean in and help you in some particular aspect of your business, that's been true here at the Peloton White Web example on the supply side. We've had some really valuable help from one of our board members in that regard. That can also be quite value added. But it's from time to time sort of thing. In my experience, I'm sitting on boards and I'm saddle men, no matter how hard you try, my experience has been you never really know what's going on inside a company. So board members are entirely dependent on the management team and the CEO to”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to give them permission and authority to actually own their decisions, and maybe once in a blue moon you might decide that it's time to move to the cloud and the whole company is pivoting and turning right. But the rest of the time, you can be an advocate, but they get to own it. And that is the approach taking and assembling and running the team here. And it does afford you the opportunity then to get buy-in and ownership and drive performance, at least that's been my experience.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scramble to figure out how we could reallocate it to marketing or content to something else in this particular world, yeah, I don't know, 30 or 50 million dollars to spend. And we, really wanted that to invest in feature film content, which Ted thought was really stupid idea and argued about it for weeks and finally, you know, Reed can be relentless. And the Ted finally gave in. And so he invested in it. And then it was clear almost from the start that it was a big huge mistake because none of the subscribers were engaging with the content. It's a complete waste on what we should have invested in was television shows, serialized content instead. Then Reed proceeded to just be 10 or 50 for having invested in the content, which of course everybody on the team thought was incredibly unfair. Reed's point was, look, my job is to advocate for what I think is best for the business. Your job is to keep me from running us into the ditch and you are the expertise. Like you own it. I'll advocate, but you own it. So your decision. So if you're going to surround yourself with really talented people and ask them to play at a high level.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he would afford the organization the time that it needed in order to reach some consensus. Now, the Swedish culture would say the benefit is that once the decision is made, people commit and there's none of the passive aggressive kind of behavior that you see from in US companies where people aren't really committed. They're behind the scenes trying to deep six the strategy changed because it wasn't really theirs. Where does that leave us? If everybody's playing on the same team for the benefit of the organization, it needs to be absolutely clear who owns its decision. all the people who don't own it are free to weigh in on the different pros and cons and express their point of view. We're going to hold the person who owns the decision accountable for the results of the decision. And if you have the right people on the team, then more often than not, you'll have a terrific batting average. It won't get everyone, but they'll get most of them. And that's why they're there. I'll show everything in the temple. Early in the history that Netflix, Ted was running content, was running the business. Periodically, as the quarter progressed, we would assess our performance. And if we were running at a budget, we”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we do it pretty well. The decision making process in a Swedish culture, and that's Spotify can at times to an American feel a little bit like watching the paint dry. I mean, the amount of time that Daniel invests in allowing the organization to work its way through the decision-making process when, in fact, he's already made the decision. He's just waiting for everybody else to catch up to decision he's already made. It just seems to an American like a complete waste of freaking time. They certainly don't move in Silicon Valley time. And this would be like, I'll give you an example. There was a point in time, very early before the world had discovered AWS and its progeny. That's where the world was moving. He decided overnight, literally, that we were moving to the cloud. And there was no discussion. There was no debate. Had no interest in tolerating any discussion or debate on the subject. And so if you were an engineer and you disagreed, you could leave. Those are your choices. Get with the program or leave. Okay, that kind of decision would have taken, oh, maybe three or four months at Botify, even if Daniel had decided overnight that we were moving to the cloud.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disagreeing about it has caused you to reach a different conclusion perhaps than they recommended. And if you can do that on a balanced and a matter of fact tone of voice and take the emotion out of it, it's pretty successful. And I'm less good at that”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree. And I'm susceptible to that in eye pressure situations, and particularly when I'm being surprised with negative news that is inconsistent with the mental model that I'm bringing to the conversation or with people who are advocating for a position that I think is not well reasoned and don't have the data to support the position they're advocating for, I can get frustrated pretty quick. And as you say, it can be really demotivating for the team if that's frequently your MO, people don't want to work for you and the good people will leave. So try to strike the balance between being inclusive and listening. People want to be heard. It's not important that we all agree, but it's important that people feel like they've been given the opportunity to voice their point of view. And then I think it's important if you disagreed, Danny was particularly good at this, at articulating the reasons why you are deciding to do whatever it is you've decided the business should be doing at that particular point in time. So people can at least understand what you're just doing.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a decent margin. We bring in an incremental subscriber, a user that we, from a demo that we hadn't previously been able to access. If they would otherwise have purchased directly from us at our”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say by way of answering the question that it's super helpful sort of before you start down a path to trying to define for yourself what success looks like. So when you get there, you know it or when you're falling short, you know it. Just like if you're going to buy a company, you're thinking about buying a company. It's really helpful before you start the bidding process and the emotions kick in to decide where you're going to draw the line from a pricing perspective. What's your walk away? We definitely had some very specific goal posts in mind when we thought about direct listing and what success would look like by Web example before we start.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jeff Bezos at Amazon provided us both a really helpful framework for how to think about the answer to that. It begins with this concept, whether it's a one-way or a two-way door. If you can make a decision and you can undo it, then you can afford to move a lot faster with that decision. Then you can if it's an irreversible decision that you're going to make, which you described as a one-way door. And if it's one-way door, then you really want to make sure that you got all your ducks right. You fully understand the scope, what it is that you're deciding and what trade-offs here are making in the process of that decision. And if it's a two-way door, you could move faster. You can afford to be wrong. Let's take by way of example the expansion of our business into third parties with exporting goods and with Amazon. It's a good thing or a bad thing for the business. The only way to know that is to actually do it. And if it doesn't work out, then you stop partnering with them. We can all agree reasoning from first principle. It seems like it's kind of a no-brainer, but you could be wrong. And you just got to get started.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on the nature of the problem, depends on whether I have functional expertise or not that makes me competent. My experience is that oftentimes it's the way that people articulate the problem and the solution is relatively uninformed because they have misinterpreted or they haven't done the data analytics rigorously enough to understand the full scope of the problem. I just start pulling on strings and trying to a basic understanding of the root cause and I try to understand the data that informs us about why we think the nature of the problem is what it is. I should follow the data and see where it leads. That's kind of the approach I take.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“about it on any day. You just learn to accept it and move on. Be confident in what you do and do it to the best of your ability and it is what it is. If you're good at it, you get to play another day. And if you're not, you go someplace else.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I've said to our employee base here, and as we said to the employees at Netflix, we are not a family. We are a special sports team. You will be afforded the opportunity to work with some of the most talented people in the business. And because of their talents, we will all succeed. But if we as managers make a mistake of hiring someone who we send down the field to catch a pass and that person keeps dropping the pass, that that puts into our business at risk, we will swap out that player and put someone in who actually can catch the touchdown so we can win the game for the benefit of the entire employee base in spite of the loyalty. So I was at Netflix for 12 years on to God. It wouldn't have surprised me in the least if on any particular day that I'd walked into work, Reed had walked up to me and said, I think it's time to make a change. Now, that's not for everybody. Many people said they want to be a gunslinger, but once the people start getting shot, not everybody thinks that's such a good idea. So did I worry about it every day? I didn't.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Covered world, is this going to be the shift and position for the shift? But there aren't many companies. We're talking about a very few truly exceptional CEOs who could have taken that information on Gordon in anticipatory way and repositioned their businesses because of it.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among the things that it makes retasting such a great executive, and I would say Daniel great executive, is that they deal with the world as it is, not as they want it to be. They process data at a bit rate that humbles most of us. They have the capacity to pivot based on the data that they ingest at a pace that would make most people's heads snap, read in particular. It would say that the Peloton team didn't exhibit that capacity. But imagine that COVID was going to be the new normal. Now, in 2020 hindsight, kind of hard to see how that was a logical expectation, but we weren't in their shoes at the time. It was read, at least at Netflix, for the most part, unentirely, but for the most part, and Daniel, when he pivoted into podcasting, haven't been able to anticipate read and streaming, let's say, by way of example, you know, reinvent the business model in important ways and anticipated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior. And then they've been able to surf those waves. There is a scenario where you could have scaled it and then anticipated in a post-”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The brand is golden user experience is platinum and always has been. So many mistakes may walk away. But from the get-go, it's had product market fit. And despite all of the footfalls, it has never once damaged the product market fit. There is an army of consumers who were pulling for this success of the business because they absolutely adore the user experience. That's the asset. It's the content that we have won and two, I would say. Let's put it best when he was talking about the Instagram business, but it absolutely applies to the Peloton business. COVID was the margining campaign that Peloton never could have afforded. And the growth that happened during COVID propelled the business to scale to a level that no other company in the space has achieved. And that has afforded the company access to capital that it wouldn't otherwise have and has made it the dominant player in the connected fitness category.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Reed Hastings who taught me the importance of business models. If you don't have the right model, you can't win. It would be enormously difficult for you to extract competitive advantage and sustain those advantages in a way that enable you to be successful in the marketplace. So first and foremost, you have to have the strategic chops that enable you to think about your business model, its inherent weaknesses and strengths, and how you can leverage it for the future success of the business. And secondly, great leaders for all about talent density. It's both the ability to recognize talent for what it is. And then it's the ability to hire it, to recruit it, get people to want to work with you. Lastly, it's the ability to extract from that talent every ounce of their talent and getting them to perform at a high level for the benefit of business.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it does eventually grind you down, but that's not a formula for successful leadership. You've got to motivate the troops. Same time you're trying to solve all these problems. The same time you're trying to manage your own emotional state.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew that inside from experience in situations like that you don't know what you don't know you're absolutely going to discover things that will be challenging to you and you're going to have to be good enough in real time in order to figure out how to deal with those black swan events. And we had a couple. Maybe a few more than I was anticipating, but we've been able to navigate them successfully. The biggest surprise to me is the amount of emotional resilience required of a CEO in a situation like this. People don't come to you when things are working well. And in a turnaround, almost nothing's working well and constant mode. And it's just one mess after another is robbing on your death that needs to be dealt with. You need to both have the intellectual horsepower and the emotional energy to fix it. And you need to also be able to lead and motivate the people you're trying to fix the problems with. And this is where that emotional resilience comes into play.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Daniel and very successful venture capitalist who'd been on the Netflix board for a long time, named Tim Haley, both of whose counsel I had thought and my wife together got me thinking about the CEO role because initially I was talking to Peloton about a COO role. So I wasn't entirely sure that I had the jobs to actually step up and lead it. But in the course of understanding the sort of the challenge ahead and the business, I thought, well, the only rational way that to actually do that is if I can be assured that at the end of the day I have the final say how we manage through the turnaround because different from Daniel where I had a relationship of trust and I'm not throwing shade at any of the founders we didn't know each other and I didn't know if I could trust their judgment or not we just simply were unknown to each other and that was more risk than I was willing to take”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, none in the current capital environment, and that's because public company shares are trading at such a steep discount that the only way you're going to get a company public is if you essentially promise to the institutions who are going to buy the IPO a big pop in first day trading. And that's a traditional offering.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been well north of a billion dollars. We already had lots of billions on the balance sheet, and we didn't know what to do with the existing cash. We certainly didn't need any more. The existing investors had no economic incentive to dilute their ownership interest or raise more cash than we more and use productively. So how do you solve that problem? That's what got me thinking about the direct listing as an alternative to solve questions for the lawyers was securities lawyers. Okay, well, how do you go public without actually selling stock? Is there such a thing? How would you do it? And so we've ripped off an existing structure mostly used by companies that are coming out of a bankruptcy proceeding or being spun at a large bubble of companies and then used it in a novel way in the IPO market. I think the thing that most people don't understand, even very experienced bankers have to point out, is that a stock opens in a checklisting exactly the same way it opens in a traditional ITO, which is exactly where it opens for already traded public companies.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were there a couple things to unpack as it relates to direct listing it's a drug that's very effective for addressing certain kinds of clinical circumstances? It's not for every occasion and not for every company. Point one, so at Spotify, I was trying to solve a particular problem. I wasn't trying to reinvent the going public thing very much to Daniel's credit. I walked in the room and I very intentionally said to him, hey, I have this crazy idea to do something that's never been done before. Now an awful lot of CEOs and boards I know if you were foolish enough to say that to them it was like leaning forward in his chair and couldn't wait to hear what the idea was to when you take a company public you need to sell enough shares for there to be a liquid market and you dilute the existing shareholders now the typical rule of thumb you're going to raise sort of 12% of the market cap of the company 10 to 15 maybe as low as seven if it's going to trade by appointment in the aftermarket okay so for us that would”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were a great team and we had a terrific run together and a lot of success and we broke new ground and we were quite compatible. I wanted to do new and interesting things and he's particularly interested in new and interesting and smart things. He's a risk taker in ways that we're appealing to me and to had a skill set that was complementary to his own. We never stepped on each other's toes. He absolutely has skills that from a product perspective that I don't have, I would say a business model from a financial perspective with some S when I walked into, but there was a lot of low hanging fruit. when I got involved in Spotify. And so the partnership worked really well at a personal level and professional.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I fell miserably the first time. I had our shared values and we have common interests. We actually like be with each other. And interestingly enough, most of the success I've had in my career has come after we met. So I would say that she's been very much part of it.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was a little bit of a struggle. But I would say in comparison to the life we led in California before we moved to Stockholm, it was an absolutely fabulous experience. We led a relatively small and insular existence in Silicon Valley, and we had a much bigger life, much more adventuresome in Stockholm. Reflecting on those two years, it was a terrific opportunity. And interestingly enough, it brought my wife and I'm much closer together. They could have gone south pretty fast. But since, you know, we were in a foreign country, we didn't speak the language and we were sort of dependent on each other. And we actually still has friends that she engages with in Stockholm Book Club. Eventually, we moved in New York one Daniel Aspen also run the ad business and it was kind of sad to go. But it was tremendous fun while we lived there.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Music on you music from my previous life at a company called Music Choice, from my experience on the board of Pandora. Spotify owned Cool. Daniel was using my pattern recognition skills as exceptional in his own way as Reed was exceptional in his way one in twenty five million. It was a unique opportunity to work with someone that I had come to”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From boredom, and whatever the antidote for boredom is what I'm running to. I love the game and I love being able to play on a team. Let's say if I was used to musical analogy, I say the kind of music that you can play as a soloist is quite a bit different than the music that you play when you're in an orchestra. And I find the orchestral music to be particularly engaging. My whole life, I've been involved in organized sports on teams in high school and college, and I miss it terribly when I'm not playing on a team for me business provided that opportunity. We happen to be associated with fitness, which has also been an important part of my life at the mission and the values of the business happen to resonate with me personally, but it's mostly the opportunity to dupe with a group of folks.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the performance kind of got sideways and payment off the sidelines and replaced Mark Randolph as the CEO. And then the very first thing he did was to bring in Patty McCord and rebuild the entire team. So I came in as part of the rebuilding and it was an a la card business. Now he had been very successful building company culture software which ended up selling and taking public by Morgan Stanley and I think was maybe the second most successful IPO of all time, if I'm recalling correctly out of my depth there. In hindsight, I think he wished that he had the opportunity to build it in a slightly different way. He had been a first-time CEO at Pure, and this was his do over in effect. He was quite deliberate in the way that he built the culture and measured performance. Eventually, we found product market fitness. This is subscription model, as it turned out, not as an a la carte business. And once we stumbled into the subscription model, the business literally started doubling each year.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Game of an iconography rant which Peloton is. And fortunately, I was able to convince them to give me a shot at jumping in and turning it around.”
2022-12-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy on Leadership Lessons Learned from Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek, What is Peloton's Competitive Advantage and Why Peloton is a Team and Not a Family · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source