YouSaid · the spoken record

Bracken Darrell

lines on the record: 80
first: 2021-12-21
most recent: 2021-12-21
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

“That's a good thing you guys make a line of video conferencing product. So you like. Are you dog feeding? Like you're the CO are you lighting up your camera and being like, man, this doesn't look good. I got to find that product manager. Like, how does that work for you? Because I would be very”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have gotten a lot there. We actually were about twice the size we were in people over the last three years. So half our people are new over the last three years. And a lot of seen many other people in Logsteck. You know, it's really weird in person.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The decisions I make, you know, I think any CEO makes are the ones that are left over when all the other decisions are made, the ones that nobody can make, the ones that cross over organizations, like some of the questions you made about duplication through places. Should we make it more efficient or not? That's a decision. So those decisions are the ones that I usually make. I try not to make decisions that are inside of everybody's business if I can. I certainly have opinions on them that I don't make them. And so those are the big ones. So it's really what's the vision, what's the strategy? What are the effectiveness or efficiency choices you can make that are crossing over things? And then hiring decisions for key people that I'm going to work with every day.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say I spend maybe half my time on new products, new innovation stuff, whether it's these teams or on the products teams we have, getting updates and talking about stuff and trying things. And probably the other half of my time is split, but most of it I would say is people stuff, whether it's bringing in people or talking one-on-one with people here. I love to be in touch with people at all levels, the company, so I really try to, even in the pandemic, I've tried to not just be doing one-on-ones with my director ports. I really want to be more in touch with that. And I want this company to be like almost like the small company you walked in, you know, everybody knows the CEO, they give him advice, you know, and I like that, you know. So I try to do that. So I spend a lot of time doing that. And actually, I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs on the outside too. Maybe 20% of my time I'm talking entrepreneurs. I talk between three a day and three a week, and I have ever since I got here. And I love that because I feel like I'm really on the edge of what's coming that way because entrepreneurs.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I wouldn't say we're probably going to buy something the team would say you guys got to develop the best product in the world and then they would start and then they don't really want to buy something. So we're looking inside for something to buy. They're not really interested. They want to create this.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you put together a small team to say imagine a product that would enter some new category. I don't know. Keyboards with a track ball attached. I'm just making up a category Gotta make up something, and you say, Really, what we think we're going to do is we're going to buy something, but I want this team to understand what that product should look like and what that market should look like before we go shopping.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just talking to the CEO of Anchor, he told me that they have a long process to think about how to enter a new product category. There's memos and meetings. What's your process to enter a new category with all these independent teams?”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you know, we have the debates you expect, and those things flare up once in a while, you know, and then I see a fo kind of hits me over the head with a frying pan. Try to shake it off, and then I traded something to swing back at him. But, you know, we do have those debates. And occasionally efficiency wins, but usually creativity rules the day. Is more a little duplication.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could maybe have more efficiency in how you invest in engineering if you shared more stuff. But it seems like you're making a very clear trade-off, some duplication is fine as long as you go fast.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit our teams are pretty independent and they work hard on the engineering side though things like blue microns for example we now have blue microphones working directly with our gaming team who are bringing blue technology into the gaming mics into gaming headsets so yeah we definitely try to take advantage where we really got a strong capability and one team and bring it to another one but i love the independent you know i loved my you know playing basketball you know a five person team you know i love small teams so i love keeping them separate and small as much as we possibly can You probably give up some scale because of that.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had 22 businesses, not brands, so we had fewer brands. Logic's big brand, Logic G. Now we've gone from 22, we're over 30 now, we're in the mid 30s, so we keep adding categories all the time. And that's not going to change. We'll keep adding categories as we go. We always have these seed programs in development that are secret, and they're small teams, sometimes run by entrepreneurs developing new things. A lot of them don't work, which is fine. We give them a bonus and they move on to something else. But it's a very dynamic place for new category development. And it's happening throughout the company.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this kind of leads into what I think of the decoder questions. So the last time we talked in 2019, you said there's 22 brands inside of Logitech. They have some autonomy. Have you changed that? How is Logitech structured now?”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're never moving as fast as you want to, but we do move pretty quickly. I mean, we have a very fast development cycle for products. We measure that all the time. It did slow down during the pandemic. Ironically, it slowed down mainly because our resources were being pulled into developing alternative components, you know, alternative suppliers. But we're pretty fast. And I'd say from a competitive standpoint, I love our position. I love the fact that we do occasionally meet small competitors who are coming into the market, who are hungry, who are startups, makes us better. One of the things I've really tried to do, Elijah, I've been here almost 10 years now, is I really want to feel smaller as we get bigger. And, you know, that means you got to have small teams. You got to have them feeling complete ownership for what they're doing, have a lot of freedom. You got to give up a lot to give a lot. And I love that feeling. When I was running a general manager running a small team, I loved that moment. And so I want to give that to more people in our company. So we try to organize that way. And I'd say we're 50% successful.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just wondering because you transition to being a software company, right? The great benefit software companies have is they can change the product at a moment's notice. They can react to the market very quickly. I think Zoom had like reacted every 20 seconds at the early part of the pandemic to market very quickly. But you know, mice and keyboards are physical products people use them conference microphones, webcams, like people are using them in ways that were sort of unexpected, maybe the trend accelerated, but in the moment unexpected. And I'm curious how you know you're having problems shipping the products, but you still want to change them and meet the market demand. How is that competitive environment for you? Do you see competitors moving faster that are smaller maybe? Are you moving at the speed you want to?”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, for sure. And it was a little worse for us last quarter going into Europe. But yeah, there are. I mean, and there are in almost every company, by the way. So we're not unique. But this will clear too.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're in the certainly inside a year. I think six months to a year. And even, as I said, most of our chipset issues are resolved. We still have some left, and we're limited, but we're just about there. The shorter term issues for us now are really ironically all logistics. This is probably another thing that your guests are talking about, you know, just this bizarre thing where really there's just not enough big cases to put things in to ship them over the water. It's really a strange dynamic.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've talked to other CEOs in other industries The predictions of when the chip crunch will end are kind of all over the map, depending on where you sit, right? So the car makers are like, it's another year. Right, like maybe even more that they just seem tired people who make smaller things, things with newer kinds of chips in them, they're like, we feel like we can see the end. Are you at, we feel like we can see the end?”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of lucky in that we have a very distributed portfolio, so we're in 36 different categories and probably 30 of those have chipsets. They're not 15 chipsets that go in 36 categories. They're like, I don't know how many of them a lot. When we were short on one chipset, we tried to shift our business to other products that didn't require that chipset. Between that and really having good long-term relationship with our suppliers, we've probably managed around that better than most companies have, but we're not immune to it. So we've had to develop alternative sources of supply. If you've talked to people like me, and I know you have before, you know that we've got like instead of working 100% of time on new products, we were working 80% of our time on alternative supply. We get uses different chipset and an existing product. That's largely over for us or most of the way through that. I mean, I would say we're 80% of the way through that. We still have some limitations, but they're not terrible now.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flip side of things building things with chips in them has gotten increasingly difficult. There's a chip shortage, there's a supply chain crunch. Is a trend increases? The demand is there, but what I've been told from everyone, it's actually the supply that's the problem. How have you been managing through that?”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The lucky situation we've been in is that those four secular trends I talked about secular is long term. So they're very long-term trends. So we were already making products that really fit into your home. And so we were already there. We really ran the same play instead of growing double digits. We were growing at first 25%, then 64%, then 100%. So our growth rates went way up, but it was the same play. We really didn't change the strategy, didn't change the portfolio. We were already building that portfolio for those people who are working in a hybrid environment. The hybrid environment just came much faster than we expected.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the things that's really interesting to me is I can see now, right, we're 18 months into this thing and some people are going back to the office and some people aren't, and that's going to play out however it plays out. But I can see now there are products that are designed to be work from home products. You have some, there are some like Zoom displays. There's a new webcam startup, which is not something we'd ever seen before. There's an ecosystem of companies and products now that are focused on, okay, people are going to work from home. Not you're going to buy enterprise. So the bet you made to make sure you have the inventory that was the existing product line, I'm assuming. When did you kind of start saying to yourself, We got to make new kinds of products for work from home?”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to make that back, you know, a minimum of two months, in some cases, you're making about four to six months in advance, depending on parts availability. That was a short-term bet, but we set the table for the next six to eight months. And we were lucky. I mean, I won't pretend we were geniuses. We were really lucky. We just followed our intuition. Now it seems obvious.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was an early bet, you were assuming people were gonna work from home, was gonna be here for real, people are gonna need mice and keyboards. That's a hardware business, right? You've got to actually make the stuff and have it to sell. How early did you have to make that bet? What's the time from, okay, we're going to increase inventory to, I'm selling it.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We knew it wasn't going to stay like that, and I don't think people knew what was going to happen yet. Our retail business had disappeared. We knew people were buying for working at home, but we sold mostly through retail. So the toughest part of that individual moment was, what do we do now? And a lot of people started cutting costs and conserving cash. And I had a discussion with my head of operations. We said, you know, this thing's going to come roaring back as people got to work from home, but we won't have enough inventory to supply them if that's right. So I said to him, what do you think about making a big inventory bet? He said, yeah, I think you're right. So we made a very big inventory bet. And we're lucky we did it. We agreed 74% last year because we had the inventory to sell.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As it was for everybody listening and watching, it was surreal. I think it was March 8th or something. I was in New York. We just gave an investor meeting where we kind of forecasted what we're going to do over the next several years. And we kind of had a plan. And of course, this COVID thing was being talked about, but it wasn't a big deal. And then literally, I flew home in the next Monday, we shut the office down and everything was closed. We had a very good outlook for the year. We were expected to grow kind of eight to 10%. And we'd been growing at or near double digits for the last five or six years. And along this trajectory, these long-term secular trends that were, you know, video is going to take over, audio, gaming's going to become the biggest collection of sports in the world, streaming and creating going to be the next big, big, big, big thing, even bigger than gaming. And then the mouse and the keyword is going to continue to do just fine. What happened was all those businesses went through the floor. So they just dropped off of existence. Our sales completely collapsed for the first month or two after COVID.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it was impossible to get, it was great, it was worth it But just tell me about that moment in the business for Logitech, right? Well, you were on a trajectory to become a larger kind of software and services organization, and then everyone went home and demand for things like keyboards and mice and webcams shot through the roof. The peace industry experienced a little bit of a renaissance. Tell me what that moment in managing just through that early part of the pandemic, because it seemed really challenging.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The last time you and I had a chance to talk to each other, it was 2019. I had you on our other show, The Vergecast. You were just acquiring a company called Streamlabs. We were talking about becoming a software and services company. And then 2020 happened. And we all went home. And I bought a Logitech webcam for like a 300% black market markup.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are pros and cons and trade offs with both. Bracken really makes the case for speed and innovation with his approach. We also talked about how Bracken manages Logitex relationships with the tech giants, after all, Logisek products tend to connect to products made by other companies. Logitech is one of the few companies with close access to Apple's very tightly controlled ecosystem, and it, of course, sells its products on Amazon, which has a long history of undercutting its own vendors. How does Bracken manage that? We also talked about the decision to kill the Harmony Universal Remote Line, the growth Logitech has seen in products for creators and streamers, the mess that is USB-C, the metaverse, and more. Bracken even told me what his favorite mechanical keyboard, which is R. This episode has everything. One quick note, we ask all of our guests to record themselves locally for the best audio quality on the show, and we do record the Zoom call as a backup. Somewhere in the shuffle of producing”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suddenly Logitech keyboards and mice and webcams were the hottest things around. I actually wanted to buy a Logitech webcam in the middle of 2020 and I paid like a $200 markup from a gray market reseller because demand was just that high. But now, 20 months into this thing, Logitech has met the demand and it's making new products specifically designed for working from home. Bracken and I talked about that, how Logitech met all that demand, whether the pandemic has changed as overall plans for the company, and how the supply chain issues around the world affect his very physical hardware business. We also talked about Logitech's structure. Bracken pretty much lets the various teams at Logitech run independently. He hasn't stressed about duplicating effort or syncing up product roadmaps. If you're a decoder listener, you know that that kind of divisional structure is all the way on the other end of the spectrum from the functional structure other companies like Airbnb use.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nehlai Patel, editor in chief of the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell. Now Logitech is one of those ubiquitous companies. It's been around since 1981. It sells all kinds of important things that connect to computers of all shapes and sizes. Mice, keyboards, cases, webcams, you name it. When Bracken took over as CEO in 2013, he focused the company around growth. He started making acquisitions like blue microphones and invested heavily in software. In fact, the last time I talked with Bracken, it was the end of 2019, and he laid out a vision of Logitech as a software and services company in addition to that familiar hardware business. Unfortunately, 2020 happened right after that conversation, and the pandemic sent a huge number of people to work from home.”
2021-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Logitech bet big on work from home · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT