YouSaid · the spoken record

Chad Fowler

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29
first
2015-10-09
most recent
2015-10-09
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1
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  1. “Ah, so for me in WonderList, it is integrate deeply into Microsoft be the layer that connects things in terms of tasks, things you need to get done, and continue to both learn from one of the largest, most important technology organizations ever, but also spread the Wonder List culture and way throughout the company.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Before that, very honestly, when I was at GE, I had the opportunity to start a development center in Bangalore, which was the most educational experience of my career and my life. And if anyone has a chance to put themselves in a culturally uncomfortable situation like that, I would highly recommend it”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Maybe it's not my favorite, but one I always reference is the e-myth revisited by Gerber and the reason is just be warned it is really hard to read if you don't like the style. It's a conversational style. E stands for entrepreneurial. It's about why small businesses fail. And the why of it is that he lays out a strategy and a way of basically a systems thinking approach to business that you could apply from Your own personal career up through running a large company.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Thank you. So I guess I can say that what we did was we evaluate whether there would be a fit in the same way that you would evaluate an employer when you're being interviewed and essentially interviewing them for a job. At least that's the way I looked at it and I think the rest of our management team did. We thought, is this someone that I really want to work with for a long time? Do they understand what I'm trying to do? And when I say I, I mean the company at this point. Do they understand what I'm trying to do, do our goals align? And will I be able to work in a way that makes me and my team comfortable? And for us, the answer to that just consistently was a yes. And so we went ahead with the deal. And it has so far worked out very well and proven to live up to our expectations.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, in fact, I wrote a book like that about how to be successful in one's career, and I fully understand that a lot of it was luck and a lot of it was stuff that only I would do”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, it's hard to say it's kind of like these people who have success in one business, so they write a business book that's prescriptive about how to be successful in business.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yes, yeah, really nothing has changed. We're operating in Berlin. We're a solid team making decisions the same way we did before. Like I said, we have freedom to do things exactly as we did in the past, but we have more help when we need it.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think, so the way the question is phrased is interesting because the question says like Microsoft and I think it would be really hard to generally answer this question because I can imagine it would be very different depending on where we went for us at this point in time joining Microsoft has been just like joining a larger version of ourselves to some extent so In fact, when we first met the team at Microsoft, we were amazed and surprised at how well our visions overlapped and aligned. And so you probably won't even believe when I say it, but joining Microsoft has really just meant that we have more resources, we have more people to talk to and learn from, more colleagues, I guess, but otherwise it's very much like it was before. Only kind of amplified.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “the engineering inspired very data oriented approach to a broader more human approach of just literally sitting with people and seeing what they do with the product.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “We experimented with a lot of different things. Sometimes it would just be like we really believe in this feature. We're just going to launch it and we're going to compare and contrast the effects of the feature after we launch. We are very fast when it comes to product development. So even in a scenario like that, it's easy for us to make changes, tweak, and relaunch something if it doesn't work as expected. But we also built our own feature testing system, our own analytics frameworks. And we have recently made quite an investment of time and energy into user testing of features, sometimes even before we develop them, so that we can get features into the hands of real people who aren't inside our heads and see what makes sense to them. And that's been kind of a huge revelation coming from a”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Creating an experience that is, as I said, a joy to work with, but also doesn't get in your way. And that's where we get into really looking at funnel metrics and removing barriers to usage in a more engineering style approach. So with Wonderlist, we literally never paid for advertisement. We never really poured gas on the top of the funnel because we were so obsessively focused with the next steps, with not losing people when they started using the product, with understanding what it was that kept people in, that got people excited about the product, that confused and frustrated them. And so it has for us, it's all always been about engagement and monthly and daily. Active usage.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Sure. Well, I think in both scenarios, the products were inherently habit forming. With living social, of course, you're receiving a daily email and that's what you're signing up for, at least back. And so therefore, it will create a habit as long as you continue to receive and look at the emails. With WonderList, the whole point is to drive your habits. So we kind of start off with an unfair advantage there in terms of habit formation, but I would say in both scenarios, the teams, the product designers and technology teams at LivingSocial and on WonderList were radically driven to simple solutions and to avoiding complexity at all cost. And that's the core of how you can make something habit forming. If you have a product that is complicated to work with and not a joy to work with, then it's going to be harder to get yourself into a habit of using it, even if you want to use it. So we have that as a foundation for habit formation. On top of that, of course, it is all about”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “To manage our work and lives with Wonderlist without the folders, and so we started to look for ways of working that emerged that would satisfy the needs of folders without introducing a new feature. Ultimately, we decided that folders really were an essential part of the experience for power users, and we added it later this year. But I think it had been on the request list since the initial launch, like four and a half years ago.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “In the past The biggest one that we held off on for an incredibly long amount of time was folders. For those who haven't used WonderList, it is a list of lists of things that you need to do. And inside the lists are tasks, and inside the tasks you have comments, files, subtasks, et cetera. And for a long time, people have been requesting the ability to create folders and put lists in folders. So essentially just creating one more layer of hierarchy. And we held off for a crazy amount of time really in doing that, even though many of us on the teams sort of knew we wanted it. It was an internal battle to hold off on doing that as long as we could. And that is sort of the way we approach feature requests, even when they're coming from ourselves, because we realize that we were able to...”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “that you have via messaging applications, whatever they happen to be, WonderList can and should become the glue that recognizes those things, or at least allows you to explicitly input them in a seamless way and helps you make sure that you don't forget them and you're doing things in the right order, that you're able to prioritize, and then integrates with external services that could then help you accomplish them.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “No, no, I don't want to add any features. And that's not to say we won't, but personally, I would like to never add another feature to this piece of software. I think it's done. And I say that it's sort of a lie because I think the product, the client of WonderList is done, and it's up to us to guard simplicity. That's the promise we made, actually, in that post I was talking about, why business software is broken, is that we would be the guardians of the simplicity of the product. That said, Wonderless can and should be the thing that connects all of the other things in your world that you need to get done. So, you know, there are all these different implicit and explicit inputs and outputs of the tasks you need to do in your daily life. For example, email is a big one, calendar invitations are a big one, trips coming up, conversations.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Even figure out what the essence of software is. And that's something that the team before I ever joined Wonderlist was really great at. And I think why we were up of the year and ones and many other rewards and ultimately were acquired by Microsoft.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Thing called WonderKit, and the DNA of the company was very much exactly what I'm talking about, this simple consumer first approach. But WonderKit was their experience of going in with that mindset immediately and completely losing their way. They made something incredibly too complicated and they replicated the mistakes of the past. They ultimately realized their mistakes and killed the product and went back to the basics of WonderList and realized the vision of WonderKit by building on simple building blocks of WonderList instead of trying to create this complicated beast. And I would say that a lot of the companies that are trying to create simple, elegant human-friendly software, they will have bad habits that they've learned that are hard to even recognize. And that's why I said earlier it's kind of like a meditative introspective process.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, it is at the cocktail parties I go to. Wonderless is one example, but the enterprises run on a whole lot more than to-do lists and a whole lot more than even just the productivity applications that we think about day to day. There are so many enterprise specific ones, domain specific ones. And I think even the consumer first approach is burdened by an industry-wide legacy of this thing that I was describing before, which is not really understanding, like we're all kind of sitting inside this vacuum of how enterprise and business software has worked in the past. And even those of us who want to break through it, it's hard for us to see. So with Wonderless, for example, the team before I joined created”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Oh, I mean, we're heading in the right direction, but definitely. And the reason I say definitely is that WonderList is a to-do list application, although I like to say technically it is a multi-master cross-platform mobile-friendly distributed database system, but that's only because I'm a nerd.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “say yes to everything, you can use that as a way to significantly drive down the price when you're comparing vendors. So vendors end up saying yes, which means the software that they create gets worse and worse and more complex over time. And it ultimately makes the experience for the customer way worse as well.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “We actually wrote a post that summarizes a career full of observations that I've had and that Benedict has had about business software. And it's called Why Business Software Is Broken and it's all about the historical war between customers and suppliers of enterprise business software where it's like this self-defeating fight for features and complexity that's all driven on fear and it's driven on fear-based negotiation tactics. So I've been on the purchasing end of this at big companies in the past and the way it sort of plays out is you're trying to negotiate a license for some business software and you ask for everything you might ever possibly want every ridiculous bit of complexity you can think of. And ultimately if the vendor can't”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Simplicity primarily. Our chief design officer, Benedict Leynard, he always says that the advantages we had and have are technology design and simplicity. And the design of it, it's absolutely beautiful. That's the thing that kind of first catches your eye. And by that I mean visual design, but taking it another step further, what we have done is removed everything we could and there's probably still more that we can remove.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And we just love Berlin. It really stands out among the European cities as a wonderful place to be. With that in mind, it has been very easy for us at Wonderlist, for example, to attract international talent from almost all over the world and certainly even the west coast of the United States because it's a nice destination for people, a place where you can have a good lifestyle.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Oh, absolutely, yeah. In fact, it starts by being just a wonderful place to live. I've talked to a lot of investors recently who are asking about whether Berlin is a good place to go, investors and sort of LP level people. And there is often this kind of like, what's the scene in Berlin question? To me, the advantage of Berlin is that people want to live there. That's the first thing. It's just a cool place. It's cool if you're young and sort of alternative or you're interested in even the more kind of conservative old school European values. You get kind of everything in Berlin. So when my wife and I first heard about the opportunity for WonderList, it was first Berlin that made me even open the email at the time because the subject said CTO Berlin.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “In the US that have the same sort of international footprint, it is incredibly cheap to live and operate in. That's not a Europe-wide advantage, but that is something very special about Berlin itself.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “It's kind of hard to say maybe there is no competitive advantage over the US, and maybe that doesn't matter. It used to. So it used to matter when, like I remember going to Europe in the 90s playing music and being completely disconnected from the rest of my world. But at this point, it's not like that anymore. It doesn't really matter where you are in the world. There are some cultural factors in Europe that I think we're still getting over that are a disadvantage. Europe has historically in the tech industry been kind of behind the United States, a little more conservative. But even that is sort of fading away. So for me, the advantage of Europe and specifically Berlin is just that it's a fabulous, very international place to be. And compared to most of the cities, or in contrast to most of the cities,”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Would be really stupid. Maybe some people do, but they're not very intelligent if they do. You do it because you think you can bring something special to it. And so I arrogantly entered the technology field with the same naive mindset as the kid that thought he was going to be a famous saxophonist someday or famous rock star or something. Fast forwarding a bit like by almost 20 years I was most recently before WonderList at Living Social in Washington, D.C. My company Info Ether was acquired by LivingSocial as a talent acquisition. So we doubled the engineering team size and I came in and became VP of engineering. I ultimately took over the entire technology team filling in the management responsibilities for the CTO and co-founder Aaron Battalion. It was after that point, after some time that I was a”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Okay, sure. I have a somewhat long history now relative to most of the people that I work with these days, it seems, in technology. I came into technology via music, and the connection there makes absolutely no sense other than I was really into video games and wanted to learn how they worked. And so therefore discovered a passion that was similar to that that I had for writing music and performing music, which led me to sort of leave my music career to rot or maybe put on hold. I like to think of it. Temporarily falls. Yeah, temporarily for 20 years so far on pause. But I did kind of come into technology with the same mindset that one would approach music, which is you don't become a musician to get a good job.”

    2015-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source