YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Metcalfe

lines on the record: 141
first: 2018-02-14
most recent: 2018-02-14
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

“So there it was. I encounter it. You can have the human cognitive processing system can tolerate. You can take care of 150 friends. That's like a constant of the universe. So I call up Facebook and I say, Well, how many connection friends connections do you have and how many friends do you have? And then you just divide one into the other, and I'll be damned, it was 140. And remember, Facebook is rapidly growing now, so who knows what's going to happen. Now that was a surprising answer to me, both because you would think that now with the tools of Facebook, we can tolerate more friends than when the days of the campfire. But that number was still close to 150. I actually go back and try it again.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While Metcap's law says that the value grows as, meaning is proportional to the number squared. But it doesn't say what the constants of proportionality are. And those can be changed. So when Facebook Adds a feature, you expect that curve, whatever that curve was before, my theory would say, is still quadratic, but it's been moved because the constants, the services delivered are enhanced. While writing this paper, I discovered a sociologist I'm blanking on his name now. But for decades he studied people and he determined that And he was using that term friends in them, whenever it was, 50s, 60s, so on. What was his name?”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I met Charles Sandberg, Zuck's adult supervision, and I began my little pitch to begin the discussion, and then I realized within 10 seconds that Cheryl Sandberg had never heard of Metcalfe's law. So that was going to be weak, but she summoned one of her Stanford PhD mathematicians to join the meeting. And he had never heard of Acap's law. So the whole meeting just ended a complete collapse. Anyway, I still believe Facebook is a Metcalf's law company that well leverages the network effect. And not just positive word of mouth, but... It's in the interest of each user to sign up other people because it makes their use of the network better. And that creates this very strong network effect.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I like to say, you know, Facebook is the Metcalf's law company. Which reminds me in the early days of Facebook, I went to visit Zuck and Cheryl. When their place, it was still on California Avenue in Palo Alto before they moved to Menlo Park. And I got an appointment with the two of them, and my mission was to discuss with them the impact of Metcalfe's law and what they thought of Metcalfe's law and how it bore on the growth of their company and I had all sorts of questions. So I show up at the head of California Avenue. It's up off El Camino and dead ends and there's a building over here and it was right over here seething with activity. I'm sitting in the lobby cooling my heels in the lobby for an hour and then a woman comes out and says I'm sorry Zuck can't see you today, but Cheryl can see you. So please come in.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the world use Facebook. So on this adoption curve, they're right in the middle of the steepest part. But as they get close to everybody being on Facebook, well, then their growth will taper off, and then the value will not go to infinity. The value will also. So I publish that paper in a peer-reviewed journal. Happy to say. So I have some defense at my law. So that's the network effect.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and then I did some math. But the trick is that n doesn't go to infinity. So therefore, the value doesn't go to infinity. So that's how I fixed it. And then over time, so I did a model called it the netoid, which modeled adoption rates as a function of time, what an adoption, and you know what an adoption curve looks like, it looks like this, and it looks like this. And so this netoid function was a way of saying, well, you can't grow the network bigger than the universe, and there's only 7 billion people here, and there's only 3 billion users of Facebook. These are all caps on the value of the network. And then I took the first 10 years of Facebook. Mapped it onto Metcalfe's law using this adoption figure. And by the way, Facebook's about halfway there, about half a people, half the people...”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Misuse. So Metcalfe's law, which is about the, it's a quantification of the network effect. It says the value grows as the square of the number of users, which is pretty powerful. By the way, it's technically not exponential, even though the two is in the exponent, we call that quadratic, not exponent. But in any case, I'll take exponential. And the trouble with it, the principal complaint is that as n goes to infinity, the value goes to infinity. And everyone has a hunch that that's not really true about networks, that they don't go to infinity with n. And so I looked at that. I wrote a paper a couple of years ago looking at that feature. And of course, one of the constraints I brought to this paper is that I would defend my law, I would not revise it. So just to be clear. This was not an honest investigation, but I figured out how to solve this problem without changing my law.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's one principle of misuse. People mix up word of mouth. Testimonials with the network effect. So I really like this product. I think you should use it too. Well, that's good thing, but it's not the network effect. The network effect is when it's in my interest for you to use this. That's a different effect. It's much stronger than word of mouth testimonial. So that's the one.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You, Steve, that every pixel Of that movie was carried by Ethernet, and Steve smiled, and so this is another thing I learned from him, and he said Thank you. And I've been living off thank you for ever since. So he was capable of gratitude, and he was really good at it, because I remember that moment today him saying, he paused, you know, so I would be in doubt about what he was going to say. And he said, thank you. And I think that was a purpose in inviting me to the opening was to thank me for lugging his bits around so he could make this.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will he call me one day? I'm fond of telling this story, and he said Pixar is debuting Toy Story at Danza College, and I'd love for you to come, and I'll send a limo to your house, pick you up. And I'm this network plumber, so 3Com had, this must have been in, when was Toy Story debuted, 90-something? Yeah, it was 90. I want to say this is a bit of a stab in the dark, but I want to say it's like 95, 96. That might have been when they IPu'd. Pixar was the first stock I ever bought, so I'm pegging it around. So around then? Around then. So 3CON was substantial, and I was a minor tycoon. And so he sent the limit to my house, and we went down to Danza College, and we saw the movie. And he had a red carpet, like a Hollywood red carpet. And he shrewdly hired photographers with huge flash attachments who would then take our pictures and make us feel important. So it was really cool. And then I'm coming out of the movie, and there Steve had a sort of an outgoing receiving line. And I told him this film was just fabulous, and I really enjoyed it and how great he must feel. And then I said, but I want to remind.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because Butler could win any argument, but he wasn't always right, yes, and I learned to step back and think about it a little more and maybe he wasn't right. You're not obligated to change your mind just because you lost the argument. And then you run into Steve Jobs, and boy, is that a protective because he could win any argument too. But you had to get away from his reality distortion field, which is an R-squared field. back out of it about 15 or 20 feet. And then you could think about what he said. And mostly what he was saying was defending high standards. Is there anything else that you would say you learned or observed from Steve Jobs that stuck with you? The high standards goes a long way. Just that alone obviously covers a ton of ground, I would think.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel like you were gonna that you were an idiot and you would suffer for the rest of your life if you didn't agree with it. That kind of intimidating both of them have this feature. And he had it. But I had learned a lesson that protected me from him. Have I mentioned that I worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which was packed with really brilliant people, including Butler Lampson, who is another mentor of mine at Xerox. And I learned from Butler. That you are not obligated to change your mind just because you lose an argument.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he pulled over on this hilly road with Daily City over here to the left. And it became clear to me what was about to happen. Steve stood with the two women chatting them up while I changed the tire. So he was the engineer. He was the leader and the spokesperson. I think I learned, so Steve could be a jerk. And I've always viewed that as a package deal. It came with the rest of him. It was inseparable. He had to be a jerk because his standards were so high. And that's what I learned from him, is to have high standards and not put up with mediocre things. And of course, if doing that, you piss people off, and then they think you're a jerk. And I think that's how it happens. He was scary. I mean, he was superly persuasive, and he and Gates had the same feature. They could make you feel...”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was that like? Well, we have a vivid recollection. We went to the symphony one night up in San Francisco and we're driving back along 280 and there's a big hill coming up Daily City. And the car we were in I forget what car it was, but it got a flat.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then a good thing happened. He wasn't pissed that I turned him down. He helped me build my company. It was helpful all along. He lived in Woodside. My wife and I were living, my soon-to-be wife and I were living in Palo Alto. We later moved to Woodside, by the way. And there's a little white church there in Woodside, California, and it turned out to be two or three blocks from Steve's house. So he was invited, of course, but then he actually showed up, which no one expected, with his then-girlfriend, and was a perfectly fine wedding attendee, and no one remembers anything else. Well, I suppose, you know, at least they remember your wedding was associated with Steve Jobs. I suppose a lot of weddings just have no data point, no visual whatsoever to make them memorable. So there's at least that. Well, we had double dated with Steve before that.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He pitched me on joining Apo, but I told him I just started my company like last week. And not only that, Steve, I have a proposal for how to network your PCs together. And here it is. I've called it Orchard. See, orchard, appleship. That was so clever. Anyway, that went right by Steve. He had no interest whatsoever in that.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was interested in, he knew I was a networking guy and he had these PCs. He was interested in networking them. And when I come down and meet with him, which I did. And we went to a sort of an organic hippie restaurant on Stevens Creek Boulevard.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was sitting in my apartment in Boston, Massachusetts. I had two apartments, one in Boston and one in Palo Alto in 1979. And I was consulting and I was going back and forth. And one lonely, dark evening in June of 79. A few days after I started my company, Incorporated, the guy named Steve from a company named Apple called me at night out of the blue. I'd never heard of Steve, and I'd never heard of Apple. He was in a city I hadn't heard of. I had never heard of Cuputino because that's way south of Palo Alto. I never got down to Cupertino. Or maybe I went past it on the way to San Jose. I'm not sure.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Under the cloak of that fear. So the worst thing you can get, they'll say, I can confirm that Fred worked here between April 17th, 1989 and October of the next year. And if that's all they're willing to say, you should take that as a bad reference”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when you call somebody cold and say, Oh, who are you? Oh, you're Tom? Oh, yeah. Oh, my favorite thing is the good meeting thing when you're a venture capital. This is a slightly different situation, but you're a venture capitalist and you're evaluating a company. And they say, we've had a good meeting with Procter& Gamble. Really, that's great. And who would they meet with? They give you the name and phone number, and then you call the person and they don't remember the name of the company or anything. They don't remember nothing. That's just forgetting to call the guy at Procter& Gamble and say, I'd like to use you as a reference. And if so, will you say good things about me? If the answer is no, you don't give them as a reference.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is surprising. It's sort of like fundraising too. You should check what the, you're about to refer your customer or your VC to someone. You should check with them. By the way, may I use you as a reference? Yes. Will you say good things about us? Yes. Oh, good. Thank you. I really appreciate it.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obvious answer reference checking. You must check references, but you have to be pretty creative. Often people will give you a list of references. And you need to call all of those people and check. You'd be surprised how many times there's a surprise there. But then you have to use backdoor references to these people that were not recommended. And you need to be very careful and listen carefully to your references when you're checking them. And that matters. If you take shortcuts and you assume that the references that they gave would be positive, that's a slippery slope. You'll be surprised how many times people will give a reference who dings them.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other is to use the team with which, in the case of recruiting, this person's going to work, it's that team that's recruiting the person, not you. Because these are the people that he or she is going to work with. And so they're the most important factor in their evaluation of whether they want to work with these people or not. So you have to push down the recruiting to the people who are going to work with this person.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then keep them But making promises is a way of spiraling up the credibility. So in dealing in a sales situation or recruiting is a sales situation, you've got to start with little bits of credibility showing up on time. Just being sure that what you say is true, don't exaggerate much. And then eventually you believe you've spiraled up to the level of credibility where you can ask the question, are you going to join or not? And that's a test of how successfully you've spiraled up your credibility in that case.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All that you just said is part of the pitch, but the core of it is credibility. That is, are they going to believe you when you say all those things that you just said? So it's how do you get credibility? And I view it as a spiraling thing. You have to start with little bits of credibility and then spiral up to little bigger ones. And the technique for that... Is promises. Now you've heard people say you need to keep your promises. My advice is slightly different. You need to make promises.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there's the compensation subject. And I remember this event stuck with me. I was recruiting this kid as a not so much a kid, as an engineering, senior engineering manager reporting to the vice president. And I offered him a stock option. And I asked him if the offer was attractive to him. And he said, you know, Bob, I don't understand stock options or anything, so I'm counting on you, he says to me. I'm counting on you that when we go public people won't think that you took advantage of me. But this offer had been prepared by Deborah Engel according to an airtight HR. I was confident this was a fair offer to him. And when we went publicly got a house, which was the rule of thumb, not the VP of engineering, but the directors of engineering should all get a house out of it. He got his house, so my conscience is clear.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it is hard at the beginning because you have to be really persuaded. Like Steve Jobs, who I'll keep mentioning because he's a buddy, a mentor of mine. He was successful because he was enormously persuasive. So he could persuade people to do stuff that others couldn't persuade them to do. You walked into his reality distortion field and you'd believe anything. So part of the knack is learning how to be persuasive about your company and why people should join it.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it got easier and easier over time, but at the very beginning it was very hard because no one really knew what networking was or what the internet was or what a personal computer was. So that was part of our sales proposition. And so a lot of hiring, did I say hire just then? You did. I correct myself. So we made, I made some recruiting mistakes early. And one of the reasons to, I was driven to because I couldn't get anyone to come join the company because they didn't believe that it would amount to much or that networking was important or something. But over time, as the internet emerged and as networking became more important, it became easier and easier to sell the vision of a worldwide internet that people wanted to participate in building.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we got a professional salesperson recruiter. See, an engineer doesn't know what a good salesperson looks like, so you need to recruit a recruiting team that knows what a good salesperson looks like if you're recruiting a salespeople. And they sent me in to interview this guy, a very senior sales guy, and I came back and I said, I love this guy. He's super. And then they said, well, what do you know about him? What would you learn about I thought about it. I said, nothing, actually I did all the talking. This guy had tricked me into doing all the talking. And I really like myself. So it really, I thought he was super. One of the things that you have to do is not be snookered, especially if recruiting salespeople who are good at this.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If your company is rapidly growing, you trick them and you hire all three. You choose the one that's going to be for this job and then you find other jobs for the other two because they're great and that's a side issue. So when you're rapidly growing and you invest all this time in a three candidate process, you got to look at the other, after you choose one, the other two are pretty good. So you want to not just throw them away. Find a place where you reject them. These are people you're recruiting. They already have jobs. And then I got tricked early in my recruiting days. We were recruiting the salespeople.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can describe some of the aspects of that process, but that's how I learned how to recruit is I listened to Bill Krauss and allowed very early in the history of our company to get a superly qualified HR person who knew how to do everything because she had done it for years. So one rule of recruiting is you should have three candidates, any one of which you think could do the job before you choose one.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'll tell you my secret Bill Kraus, he's our adult supervision, recruited information from HP, and Bill came into my office and said I'd like to hire Deborah Engel to be our BP of human resources, and I said, Bill, we only have thirty five people in this company. We can't afford a vice president of human resources. Are you crazy? And Bill said, No, I'm not crazy. I know what I'm doing, and you're going to go along with me on this, and we're going to get Deborah in here to BHR. So we got Deborah to be HR, and she knew how to recruit people. So she ran a process. She helped us all run a process.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Severs are the people who move the cargo around on the docks. I'm sorry, I may have this backwards. The Stevedores hire the longshoreman to move the stuff around on the dock. Now we have containers, so it's a little different. In those days, they moved individual televisions around. But she supervised hiring. And hiring, the picture I have of hiring is there's a bunch of people dying to have this job and you interview them and evaluate them and you deign to pick one of them to take the job. And they're so grateful to have the job and all the others are waiting for the next one. And that's hiring. And that is the wrong mindset for growing your company. And the word I substitute is recruiting. You're after people who have other options and they're the best. And you have to sell them on the proposition of joining your company. You're not hiring them. You're recruiting them. So I seize up when I hear the word.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I learned this early hiring, it's a small bit of language and people debate the semantics of the words, but my grandmother Fought organized crime on the docks of Brooklyn, New York, and she would supervise the hiring of Stevadores by the Longshoremen.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thrust of it is the general management decision. It's not personal, that this job and you are not meant for each other, so you're not performing well in it. We want to get you to a job that you'll do better at. The company needs everyone to be doing a good job, and you're not in this position, so we'd like you to move or leave sometimes as a recommendation. So spending a lot of time on reasons and debating and sort of sharing this, no, the decision, oh, making clear the decision is a done deal, that we're not here to debate this with you. This has been concluded. So making that clear at the beginning is helpful. Otherwise, the employee begins to become a debater and becomes emotional and gets into the details, getting into the details is not productive generally. So don't give a lot of reasons. Make sure it's clear. It's a done deal and get some help to bring help with you.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of them is not to give too many reasons. In fact, zero reasons is the best, which is we've concluded you're no longer working out in this position and we'd like you to take that position or leave the company whichever. When you start to give reasons, then you begin a debate and it's never ending. As venture capitalists, this was a rule of mine, which is to avoid giving reasons, because as soon as you give a reason, you have a pen pal and you're in a discussion forever.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So she and I went on this long walk around the building. We probably did it 10 times. I explained to her that I needed her to be a salesperson and to cover the Northern California region and we didn't need the marketing she was doing. But she saw herself as a marketing person. So she argued with me 10 times around the building and eventually quit. I mean, that day she quit because she wasn't going to take the sales job. And she went off and started another company and made billions of dollars. That would be evidence that she needed a different kind of job and she found it and everything went well. you Anyway, you don't want to fire people. It's no fun.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get your servants package right. Now it's just better to have More than two people in the room keep things calm and it's not personal, it's business. And here's some alternatives. So don't do it alone. And the other thing I learned is about halfway through the interview you both realize it's the right thing And you don't want to do a job that you're not doing well. You want to go find one that you can do well. So this is getting that message and then you make the adjustment. Some do and some don't. Some get very upset. I remember Marlene We needed salespeople, and she was our marketing person. And so I took her for a walk. We used to do this around the parking lot. The building had a parking lot around it. And this is before I learned about don't do it alone.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not smart from a compensation point of view, by the way. It's much better to be fired than to quit because you get your seven.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you should bring help. So you usually bring the head of human resources to help you. Because funny things happen when you let people go. By the way, in all these cases, we offered the person the option to take another job at the company. But that didn't work. I remember Chuck stormed out the door. He wasn't going to put up with that because he disagreed with our management assessment that he was the problem. And we offered him a regional thing, I forget what it was, but he wasn't having it. And he stormed out. In the case of Mike Hallaberka, when we replaced him as national sales manager, he took over the western region and prospered. So you have different outcomes, but you should never do it alone.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what we're talking about is management, so it's up to management to make the very subtle decisions about if you have a salesperson who's underperforming in a region, is it because the salesperson isn't right or did you set their quota to high, or is that market not really as big as you thought? And that's thinking that through and deciding is called management, then eventually sometimes you reach that really that person really needs to be replaced. So one thing I learned about that is never fire anybody alone.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what I mean by operating ranges. So some of it is the details of the, oh, so for example, when you're running a multi-billion dollar company, you have different divisions for different products. You have different channels of distribution, and there's many layers of management, and you have different skills. Like when you're an engineer, you build things. When you're an engineering manager, you manage people who build things, which is different from building them. And then when you're a manager of managers of engineers, that's even that's a different task. And so different people, some people have very broad operating ranges, and some people have very narrow ones.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, people have, if you look at different sizes of companies, people have skills related to size, scale. So, for example, my specialty is when chaos reigns and the company doesn't quite exist yet, and that seemed to be where I performed the best.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gears, and you have to do a lot of that when you're growing a startup. You have to be sure the company's growing more rapidly than the people. You have to pay attention to which people have been left behind by your accelerating company. And then you need to, in some cases, shift gears.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I've recruited I want to eventually with six regional managers, but initially three. And you'll be surprised how many more orders you get when you actually go out and ask for them. And so revenue started upward from zero. But when it hit around a million, and this touches on one of my favorite metaphors, I redlined and we needed to shift gears because selling is very complicated. So, you know, sales competition, territory management, channels of distribution, contracts, it's complicated. So Mike Calaberco was recruited to be from HP to be our new head of sales and marketing. And he took us from a million a month to five million a month. And then he redlined, so he succeeded and then redlined. And then we replaced him with Chuck Kempton. And Chuck took us from, I'm losing track of the numbers here, but $5 million to $25 million a month. And then he redlined. And then we got Bob Finocchio to take over there, and he took us into the billions. So what we were doing was shift.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That helped enormously, but it was keep in mind our revenue was zero. So the kind of selling that was required was personal selling. And having invented the technology, I was in a good position to do personal selling because I could get an appointment with anybody. I invented this. I'd like to come talk to you about it. And so I could get appointments at a normal salesperson couldn't get. And I took us from zero to a million a month in revenue. But then...”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's good. But when he arrived, he then became the CEO and we were running out of, we were starting to spend that venture capital. And the board of directors asked, I was kind of annoyed. I recruited Bill, but I didn't recruit him to be CEO. But then it became obvious to the board that he should be CEO. And the board then said, Bob, we want you to be head of sales and marketing. That's how I got the job. And there was... I was a VP of sales and marketing. I was also the only member of that function. There were no salesmen. No marketing was just me. So I started learning really quickly”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway I didn't learn this from Steve Jobs, but I later saw that Steve knew this, which is need adult supervision. A lot of people think Steve was the CEO of Apple. Well, he wasn't the CEO of Apple to 1996. He founded the company in 1976, so it took him 20 years to make CEO. Well, I was a CEO, but I saw that I needed adult supervision, so we recruited Bill Krowes from HP. And that was a good decision. Bill joined the company when there were 12 of us, and we kicked him upstairs to chairman when there were 12,000 of us. He did good.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was another course called Managing Tasks Through People. I took that one too. But then... Time passed. I started in my company. I was chairman, CEO, president. And we raised Recomm Corporation in 1979. In 1980, we were initially consulting for revenue, and then we started selling a book that we developed. Then we're getting ready to have products, and we raise venture capital. And one of the things that you do is then you recruit adult supervision term of art, adult supervision.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We called it charm And I went and I took a course called Xerox Selling Skills. And by the way, there were 35 people in the class and 34 of them were blonde women.”
2018-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #297: Bob Metcalfe — The Man (and Lessons) Behind Ethernet, Metcalfe’s Law, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT