YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Rose

lines on the record: 70
first: 2023-02-14
most recent: 2023-02-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thanks, Patrick. It was a blast being with you. I love telling my stories. I appreciate all the great questions, and I'm a big admirer of you and love the podcast. So thanks for having me on.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was 100% right. It's a total blast. We're operating at tremendous scale, and I love that part of the job. And we have an incredible team. And I get to work with brilliant people every day. It's very hard to go from working with the smartest and the best people at companies like Amazon and Facebook to anything less than that. You're just used to operating in an environment where everybody is smarter than you and everybody is debating at the highest level with intellectual honesty the hardest questions and the hardest problems. And that's what we've been able to create at Kotu. I think it's very unique in that way. I think we have built something really special and it's been a total blast.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was ready to move on from Facebook and start doing investing, I was really unsure about what and how to do that. And I considered a lot of different possibilities and talked to a lot of different people. Thomas Lafont was one of my friends at the time. We were close, not as close as we are today. But he talked me out of going down a path that I think would have been a mistake. I was very seriously considering doing something on my own. And he reminded me that I'm a people person. I get energy from people. I love being on teams. I love bouncing ideas and winning together and losing together. And I also really love scale. I had worked for two of the most consequential companies in the world. And I love the opportunity to work at scale. And he over the course of a six-month period convinced me to join him and to join Kotu. And I really am grateful for that because”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an interesting question. I mean, I think we kind of did this a little bit with our data science platform at Kotu, like I talked about earlier. The other thing I think we did that's very interesting and is now very much a trend, but it wasn't at the time was we said, why can't we do everything from seed through public company investing? And by the way, if founders need help with other parts of their business, we should be open-minded to that too. We recently started doing structured equity, which is becoming really important in this environment, especially. Why can't we just think of ourselves as business builders rather than just investors and add new products and add new solutions all in the name of supporting founders and building great companies and serving our LPs? I guess one way to answer your question is to say, I don't know, but I do know that if there's a product out there that should exist, I think there's a good chance that we will find it and go build it.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founders, but I also get to coach our team at Kotu, and that was part of explicitly the arrangement that Thomas and I had when I joined was, hey, I love building things. And most investment firms don't think of themselves necessarily as companies. It's an assemblage of humans that are all individually working on things. That's why it's called a firm. I thought, and Thomas and Philippe were really aligned with this, that actually there is an opportunity here to build something that is more of an institution. You can't just say, oh, well, let's do all the things that we did in our corporate environment here because that wouldn't work and it would smother a lot of the things that make firm like CO2 great. But there are a lot of building blocks that we put in place since I joined. And you can just see how Kotu itself has grown over the last four or five years. And the success that we're having now as a result. So it's really fun for me to be able to do that both inside of Kotu and outside.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally think it's a lot of the same principles. And that's why I love what I do because my job is to find those people and then coach them and try to help them along the way. And I tell these stories that I'm sharing with you today all the time in my one-on-ones with the CEOs where I'm on the board or where we have investments. I think of my job as trying to grow them into these next generation leaders. The fun part is there's so many more companies being started now. There's so much more opportunity. The scale of the market is so much bigger and the inspirations are all there. People grow up now wanting to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos. And so it's really fun for me. I think of myself as having gone from playing a position. I was a position player, right? I think of like a Steve Kurt who was a position player at the highest level and now is a coach at the highest level. And that's my aspiration. I want to be a coach at the highest level. And the fun thing for me is I get to coach our”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To realize that, yeah, I have those issues too. And by the way, everybody in that room has them. And then to be able to connect at that level really builds a bond. And I had people come to me after those sessions and say, I was actually on my way to resigning from the company, but after this experience, I decided to stay because I just don't think I'll be able to have this culture anywhere else. I've had lots of people after the fact since I left Facebook reach out to me and say, hey, that training you did or that talk you gave was one of the most impactful of my life. So it's been really rewarding for me and it's something I really care a lot about. And that story I told about the feedback from Cheryl subconsciously, my response to that was definitely inspired by my experience in those seminars because what I knew is that the only way for me to break through with people who now don't trust me anymore is to just be vulnerable with them and to share with them that this is really hard for me to hear. This is not who I believe I am in my core, but obviously my behavior is telling them something different. Those conversations”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we would start off each of these two day sessions with me being interviewed by the group that was training us. And she would sit there in front of 10 or 15 people in my organization. These were senior people, manager level people in my organization. And she would ask me questions like, can you share with us something right now that's going on in your life that's really upsetting for you? These are not the kinds of things that we often talk about at work. But at the time, my mom had Parkinson's and was obviously not doing well and I was worried about her health and how long she was going to live or my sister was going through a divorce and talk about that experience because the person she married happened to have been one of my closest friends. My son had some anxiety issues and I talked about that. When you start talking about these things with people who you work with every day and who, by the way, look at you oftentimes as being on a pedestal. I'm the guy who stands up on stage and tells the team, hey, this is the hill we're going to go take and this is the strategy that we have.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Student, but then also working for the company and getting to help teach these seminars or be an assistant at the seminars. Those lessons have stayed with me my entire career. And the lessons are we're all human. We all have our own issues that we deal with every day and how we communicate and how we engage with each other are driven by a lot of that, even if it's not obvious and on the surface they're there behind it. And if you can break that down a little bit and get a little bit closer to who the other person is, you can build a bond and a relationship that can really go much deeper and can allow you to do things together that you wouldn't have been able to do. So at Facebook, I actually started a training program called Flow. And we would take our senior team in my organization through two days. This was a business setting, so we're not doing hardcore therapy, but we would take them through uncomfortable exercises where they were vulnerable with each other and show them what was possible when you were able to really connect with somebody on a deeper level, much deeper than the surface.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“College, I was on a track probably in college to go to law school and become a lawyer. That seemed like the straight and narrow path for me, but largely because of the inspiration of this seminar that I had experienced, I decided to not do that, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And so I called the guy who ran the seminars and I said, hey, can I just come work for you? And I'll do it for a meager salary. And I don't know what I can do to help you, but I'll come help you. I thought that that would be like a graduate school experience in life and philosophy and spirituality. What I found was after six months, I was actually much more interested in the business. It was a small business. There were like eight employees, but I really liked how you sell the product and generate revenue. And then what your costs are and how you generate profit from that. And that's what put me on the path to going into business. I ultimately went to business school and then I was lucky enough to get an internship at Amazon where I stayed on and built a career from that. But those lessons that I learned early on, both as a”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it. I love talking about life mastery. So you can imagine this as a Tony Robbins-esque type of company. What happened was I was at Harvard as an undergrad and I was very successful on the outside, but like many of us, I had a lot of anxiety and my parents could see that. And they offered to send me to one of these seminars. They happened to know the guy who taught the seminars because he had run a business prior to that that they were a client of. And my dad came to me and said, hey, if you want to go do this, I don't want to do it because it sounds scary to me, but I'll send you and you can go check it out for us. So I went and did this week-long seminar and it really opened my eyes to a lot of things around what drove me and what group therapy type of environment. Well, anyway, I got really into it. I love the ideas behind it. The guy who led it was very much a student of Carl Young and Joseph Campbell. And I was studying sociology at the time. So I started reading up on them. And a lot of those ideas really started to resonate for me. So after four years of”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience with me to implement a 360 review process for the entire company, which they still do to this day. And every single employee has the opportunity to get that feedback and to grow from that.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was religious about her weekly one on ones with every single person on our team in the midst of all the chaos and how fast we were moving and how busy everyone was, she never missed a one-on-one with any single person on our team. And if she was in town, we were sitting down in her office every single week for a half hour to talk about things, which allowed us to stay completely synced up. She did the same with Mark. She was always getting synced up with him. And so she just through her exceptional people management skills, she kept the company organized, which is to say she just kept everyone aligned. She was the bridge between the product and the”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feedback as uncomfortable as it is, even just to ask for the feedback in the first place and then to give it to me. And then, of course, she gave me the space. She helped me get a coach. She herself coached me through it over the next couple years. I was able to fix a lot of those things. And frankly, I would have never gone on to have the career that I had at Facebook over the next 10 years if it hadn't been for that feedback. That's the thing that makes her so exceptional is that she is the single best people manager I've ever worked with in my career. She just cares so much. And Karen doesn't just mean being a cheerleader. Karen means also giving the hard feedback when it's necessary so that people can grow and change. And she was exceptional at that.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a real problem. And she said, Not only can I not promote you, but if you don't fix this, I can't have you at Facebook. I can't have somebody in a senior leadership at Facebook with this kind of reputation. And so it was obviously devastating. I spent a couple days going deep into how do I rectify this. And ultimately, I realized that the thing I need to do is go sit down with everybody and ask them to give me that feedback directly and to help me not just in that meeting, but in the moment when I was doing those things point them out to me so that I could start to change the behavior. And it did two things. It showed some vulnerability with them that I was willing to acknowledge this and that I wanted to change. But also more importantly, it actually got people to start to give me the feedback, which allowed me to see the bad behavior that I was doing. But the reason I tell that story is because think about what it took for Cheryl to do that. How many leaders would do that? Both identify my capability and give me a chance, but also then give me the really hard.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“360 performance review. And I thought, wow, that's great. I'm excited because I'm awesome and I can't wait to hear about other people telling me how awesome I am. So she sends out requests to everyone who worked for me and all the people that I worked with as peers at the time, the senior leadership team of the company. And she brought me into her office a week later and she said, Dan, we have a huge problem here. This is not only a bad review. This is one of the worst reviews I've ever seen in my career. It literally felt like somebody had kicked me in the gut. I mean, I was almost out of wind. I had a breath when I heard her say that. And what she said was, look, what I'm seeing is that people really believe and respect your ability as a negotiator, as a business development person. You're extremely highly skilled in that area, but they don't trust you. And they think you're political and they think that you are primarily focused on yourself and not on others.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll just tell a quick story because it's actually, for me, it's the canonical story of my entire career. This was the most important moment in my career and the make or break moment in my career, which was right when Cheryl joined Facebook. I had already been at the company for a year and a half. And before that, I had spent six years at Amazon. And in that entire time, that was the totality of my professional career working for big companies. I had never really had a performance review. Amazon had sort of a version of it, but it wasn't that organized. The company was just trying to survive. And certainly in the early days of Facebook, we didn't have that. And Cheryl was there for about a month, and she brought me in, she said, I've now met everyone at the company. There were 400 people when she joined. And all the senior team, and I really think you're super talented, and I want to give you more responsibility, which was to me, that was the thing I had been waiting my whole career to hear from somebody that they really believed in me and that they wanted to promote me. And so I was so excited. And she said, before I do that, I want to make sure that I'm seeing the same thing that everyone else is seeing. So I'm going to do.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always thought that was just such a great interview question because it tells you so much about people. I didn't interview with Jeff. I wasn't senior enough to be hired into a role that he would interview for, but I heard from other people that that was something that he would ask. And there's no question that that reveals a lot about people. And I think we make our own luck. If you believe you're a lucky person, then you're more likely to end up being successful. And he was looking for people who really believed in themselves. And frankly, it takes a lot of luck to go from being a startup to a successful company. You got to catch some breaks. You have to be at the right place at the right time. And so if you want to increase your chances of catching those breaks, hire a bunch of people who are really lucky. And I think he was able to do that by asking that question to people. I think that you learn a lot about people by asking them who influenced them the most. You get those kinds of answers that you're getting from me about the people that I worked with and the things that they taught me and what I took from that and how I”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those conversations are every bit as much about how good the founder, how big of a trend are we in, how high of a quality is this business model, the same kinds of conversations we have at the Series A. Obviously, there's a lot more data to analyze in a public company, so you're combining that with the analytical side as well.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideas was to bring in people like me, and now we've brought in multiple people who have differentiated experience, put them together with these professional investors. But two was we said, look, we have this incredible data science platform. How do we apply that to early stage investing? And what we realized is you might be able to use that data science to give you an edge in identifying founders who are starting companies that might be high probability of success or companies that are starting to inflect at the early stage. But actually the best thing you can do is hand that data off to your founders and let them use it to run their business. And so we flipped the screen around and we said, hey, why don't you guys take this data and figure out what you can do with it? And it's been hugely helpful to our company. So I think that sometimes it's a little bit of a myth that like early stage is all about the art of investing and the public company is all about the science of investing. I actually think our strategy is to blend both. And I will tell you in conversations that I have with our public company.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly things have changed in the last year, obviously, and I think founders have really come around to this. It's a different environment. I think it's a healthier environment, frankly, because everything's slowing down a little bit. We have time to process and really work with our companies and help them build sustainable businesses. And I think there's a little more pressure on people to focus on that now and understand that at the end of the day, what we're trying to do here is build for the long term, not the short term. But I will say this about qualitative versus quantitative. There's no question at COTU, we have brought a lot of that DNA, that quantitative analytical DNA into early stage investing. When I joined the firm, which was four years ago, Thomas LaFon had just for the first time said, hey, we're going to start doing seed and series A investing here. And he and I talked a lot about what the strategy was and how we were going to differentiate because that's a very crowded market. So how do you differentiate in that market?”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another operator turn investor at Kotu. We have Sri Biswanath, who is the CTO of Atlassian. Karen Marooney, who ran global communications with me at Facebook and started Outcast before that, one of the top agencies in the Valley. And she works with a lot of our PLG startups and open source. And so I think if you can bring those three pieces together, I think you can really stitch together this full life cycle strategy, which is what we've done.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough and lucky enough to be able to do that pretty early in their career. And they develop an incredible muscle around just that understanding of what drives success for startups and how do you pattern match against founders and business model and how do you build out the analytical capabilities to really help companies succeed because they do need that even at the earliest stages. But you see a lot of those people in Silicon Valley who are just incredibly successful and have done it their whole lives. And we have some of those folks at Kotu, like Michael Gilroy and Lucas Swisher who are just professional investors and are really capable at identifying and helping startups. And then the third, which is my persona, is lifelong career operator turned investor who brings to the table their experience with working at great companies and learning from great founders and running these different functional areas like partnerships or sales. We mentioned Dave Schneider, who's”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With him, realized that it was important if you're going to be investing in technology companies, it was important to also be participating in the private market as well. And so Thomas moved to California from New York, opened up the Kotu West Coast office. That's when companies like Facebook and Snap and others were starting to really mature in the private markets. And so I think you can apply a lot of those public market insights as an investor into late stage growth investing because a lot of the same drivers are what move these companies. You look at a stripe today, it's 13 years old and it's still a private company, but the best people to really evaluate what Stripe is worth are people who invest in the public markets. And so I really believe that that's an important skill to have in order to do late stage growth investing. Then I think you have the second persona, which is career venture investors. And these are people who all they want to do in life is invest in startups.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's three personas here. One is I happen to work for one of the great investors of all time, Philippe LaFont, who started Cotu in 1999, is a brilliant, very, very big picture visionary type of investor. And I will say, running a hedge fund, which is what Kotu was for the first 10 years, is very different from venture investing. Every day you are winning or losing based on what your performance is. And I think the best managers are really, really big thinkers. They really understand both the broad macro as well as they're able to dive in at the detailed model level to an individual company and unpack it and really try to get at what's the core of what drives this business. What happened in the early 2010s is that a lot of these private companies like Facebook were staying private for so long that they actually looked more like a public company even though they were not listed. And Philippe and his brother Thomas, who's the co-founder of”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The nicest possible way. And he's willing to sit and work through stuff, even if he's not super happy with it and just keep grinding on it until he feels like we get to a good outcome. And he's definitely less business oriented in the sense that he just wants to build great products and he believes deeply that if we do that over time, we'll figure out how to make money from it. And you see WhatsApp today, 10 years later from the acquisition still hasn't figured out how to make money. But believe me, I'm certain that they're in meetings all the time with Mark grinding on that question. And he knows in his mind that's going to eventually be a huge revenue driver. He just needs to figure out the right way to do it.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're very different, and I think they're similar in the ways that I've described, but they're very, very different personalities. I don't know what they would disagree about, but I can describe the differences to you. Jeff was extraordinarily short-tempered and had a sense that he was always frustrated. He just wanted to go faster and he wanted it to happen sooner and he wanted it to be better. And if he didn't get what he wanted, he would be really upset. And he also came from a background where he was at a hedge fund before starting Amazon. He had technology experience and computer science experience, but he also much more business oriented. He had this brilliant business mind that he brought to the discussion. And a lot of the conversations started with, well, what's the ultimate business here? How do we make money from this? Mark is much more patient, not to say that he suffers fools, but he'll end a meeting early if he doesn't think it's productive, but he'll do it.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very narrow path to being able to outecute eBay and then ultimately made the right set of decisions that allowed Amazon to start to incorporate that two-sided marketplace into the business, even at the risk of potentially harming the core business, again, Kindle asking that way by putting third-party listings on the same page as first-party listings. Very, very controversial decision at the time, especially among the retail team. And I was on that retail team when that happened, and it was hard. You're telling a buyer, hey, by the way, buy this inventory and forecast how much you're going to need based on what price you're going to sell it at and how you're going to discount it and market it. But also, by the way, if someone else comes along with a better price than you, they're going to get the buy button and it's going to completely blow up your inventory plan. But don't miss your inventory plan. Your job is to get it right and figure it out. And we're going to hold you to a higher standard, even though it's totally unrealistic. So I think execution matters. I think network effects.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, network effects are super powerful, and if you have one, it can create a huge mode, and it's probably the best mode you can build around any business. Interestingly, in the early days of Amazon, eBay had a much better flywheel than Amazon. Amazon was more of a straight up traditional retail business. eBay had this two-sided marketplace and that's its own version of a network effect, the more buyers you get on the platform, the more sellers want to be there and the more sellers there are, the more buyers want to be there. That was the reason why actually eBay started after Amazon, but in the early 2000s when Amazon was really struggling, eBay's market cap was five or six times Amazon's market cap. And so then you have to ask yourself the question, well, how is Amazon able to come back from that and ultimately prevail? And I think that that comes down to a second thing that's undervalued or underestimated in startups, which is just perseverance and execution. And Jeff navigated this.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so sure enough, we did. And it turns out our community loved it. There wasn't a lot of pushback. And in fact, all of a sudden, as I was saying earlier, the more people on a social network, the better the product because the more people you can connect with. When I joined the company, we had 7,000 new users a day and we had 30,000 people a day who were trying to sign up for Facebook who were being told that they couldn't use the service. Have you ever heard of a business that's turning away four or five times as many people as they're accepting in the door as customers? And the day we flipped the switch on open registration, all of a sudden, we had 37,000 new users a day. But very quickly, within a month, we had 70,000 new users a day because of those network effects. And within six months, we had hundreds of thousands of new users a day. And it just continued to grow like that exponentially. It was definitely better for the product and the people on the service loved it.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it just went from one thing to something completely different the next day, and everybody was fully engaged with it. The challenge was we were now scheduled a couple days later to ship what we called open registration, which was to open the service up beyond college. And we knew that that was also going to be controversial because for the first time your mom was going to be able to get on Facebook. And if she asked you to be friends with her and you accepted, she was going to be able to see all the stuff you were posting. And so I went to Mark and I said, hey, I really respect you for having the courage to see this news feed thing through. And I really supported you through that. And I believe that that was the right decision. And I'm glad we held our ground. But I have to tell you, I think it's a mistake to ship open registration in two days because we just got through this. We need to give our community a chance to absorb and get comfortable before we do the next big shock to the system. And he goes, no, you're totally right. I was thinking about this too, and I'm really glad you said something. And yeah, we're going to wait until next week to ship Open Registration.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my mid 30s, and we shipped newsfeed, and famously or infamously now, our community revolts. They hated it. They felt like it was a privacy violation. A lot of the people at Facebook at the time were trying to convince Mark that we should turn it off. We have to roll this back. We're going to kill the company over this. And he was, again, just resolute. This is the right thing. We may not have launched it the right way, but it's the right thing long term. We need to hold our ground. We can tweak it and make it better and explain it better to people, but we can't give up on it. And sure enough, within a few days, the storm quieted down. People started to get a little more comfortable with it. We did make changes to make it better. But more importantly, it was completely clear from the data that people loved it because all of a sudden, instead of coming back to Facebook two or three times a day, people were coming back to Facebook 10 or 15 or 20 times a day. Never in my career seen a switch flipped that quickly on a product.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, wow. Well, we went through a lot of those. I was actually fortunate to have gone through that period at Amazon when the company almost went bankrupt. I think that experience really served me well because when I got to Facebook, we experienced a number of existential moments. In fact, I joined the company in the summer of 2006. When I got there, I found out that we had plans to ship two new products in the coming months that were going to potentially transform the company. One, we were going to open it up to anyone, not just people with college email addresses. And two, we were going to launch a newsfeed. And at the time, in order to see what was going on in your friends, you had to click around to their profiles. And so these two products were on the roadmap and were scheduled to be released a week apart sometime in October. I'd been there a couple months. I had just moved my family from Seattle to Palo Alto. I had three young kids at the time. I went to work for this 21-year-old kid.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cheryl and David together that really understands how to empower the sales team and make them feel like their jobs are important while also recognizing that they may not be driving the bus, that sometimes the company is going to go in a direction that makes their job harder, that that's okay. That might be the right decision for the company and the sales team needs to figure out how to support it.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dave Schneider is my partner at Kotu who joined us a couple years ago. He was the president To me, Dave is the ideal sales leader. She just understands how to go to market, how to bring a product to a customer, how to serve that customer after you sell them the product, how to close that loop. And our founders who are running products that need to be sold. And by the way, even companies that start out more product-led eventually figure out that they have to sell too. Dave just has them eating from his hand when he starts talking about how to build a sales organization and how to build sales DNA into your company. And it's hard because, again, in technology companies, usually the product org is the driver. The product org drives the strategy. The CEO tends to be more product driven. Sometimes enterprise sales companies, it can be more driven by sales. You think about a guy like John Chambers at Cisco. But for the most part, the sales org oftentimes feel like second class citizens. And so you need to have a sales leader like Dave or David Fisher at Facebook did this really well.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's very, very detailed understanding of Javi not only run the growth org, but he also ran the data science org. And growth fundamentally has to be data driven. And it's hard. Looking at a screen full of numbers, the best growth people are able to really hone in on the numbers that matter and focus on how to move those numbers in the right direction.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to me, hobby is the platonic ideal of someone to really lead growth. He's from the early days of Facebook understood the data at a deeper level than anyone in the company and was able to really in a very, very detailed way push on the different levers that help the company grow. And ultimately for us, growth wasn't just about growth because that's a good thing. Growth actually meant making the product better. The more people on Facebook, the better the product was for the existing users because they had more people to connect with. They had better content coming into their news feed, et cetera. So that was a really, really important part of making the product work well. And Javi was exceptional at it. And recently he was promoted to COO when Cheryl stepped down, which I think is a reflection of how talented he is.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a chief product officer. And he and Mark have had an incredible partnership for now going on probably 15 years. It's not that Chris is not capable of going into the level of detail that Mark goes into on product. It's just that Chris understands that Mark's the CEO, Chris's job is to make sure that when they are reviewing product that they're making the best use of Mark's time, which means he's not spending time on things that other people could be doing as well or better than him, and that the two of them are completely aligned and in lockstep, if Chris disagrees, he disagrees and commits ultimately if Mark decides to go in a different direction. So you want to hire incredible people under you, but you want to make sure that they understand your role and their role and that there's no space between you.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a good way to put it. When I posted this concept on Twitter, one of the comments said, what about Mark Benioff? Mark's actually a good friend of mine, and I think the world of him. And I would argue that Mark is a product leader. But if you had to describe him, you'd probably describe him more as a sales and marketing genius. I mean, he took a product that was software product for salespeople and elevated it into a company that's so much more aspirational and the Dream Force conference and the Trailblazers and all the things that he's built around that. And that's just pure marketing genius. Highest and best use is a good way to put it. The founder, CEO should focus on the things that they're the best in the world at and the most capable of doing. If it's a technology company, hopefully that's, if it's not product directly, it's tied very close to product. And then empower the people around them to fill in the gaps. And it doesn't mean you don't hire incredible people under you to do the product stuff. Chris Cox, to me, is the platonic idea.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she was very good at it, and that was a great partnership for a long time. So, I wouldn't say being a great CEO means being a great micromanager. I would just say it means knowing where to dig in on the things that you're especially capable of helping and actually matter the most to the company. Hopefully those things are aligned and being willing to empower people to do the other things and not waste your time on those things where other people are actually going to be able to do better at that than you are and it frees you up to spend your time on the stuff that matters.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think when it comes to product, the founder has to micromanage unless they are not a product founder, it's not a hard requirement. But I think if you are a product founder, you really have to micromanage the product. You have to care enough about it that you're going to get into the weeds. And I have this conversation with the founders that I advise and sit on the board all the time because they're asking me, hey, you know, I hired a really good product leader and they're asking me to give them some space so they can run. And my feedback is always, yes. Of course, you have to empower them if you demoralize them. they're not going to stay. But you also have to explain to them that you're the CEO. The product is the strategy. And at the end of the day, this is something that you have to be hands-on with. That's your job. But at the same time, you can't do that and do everything else. You can't micromanage the whole company. And so you have to hire great people around you who are good at the things that you're not going to spend as much of your time on. Mark famously hired Cheryl and let her run with a big part of the business.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the electric grid exists, we're going to build the electric grid for compute. Everybody just open their eyes to this idea that actually this does need to exist. And why not Amazon? Why not take this incredible infrastructure that we built, our own data centers, and pivot them into something that can be a service to other companies? So you have to be able to articulate the vision and the strategy, and it has to resonate. And then the second thing that's really important is what I saw with Jeff and Mark and what I've heard about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and so many other great founder product visionaries is the level of detail, the caring about the details really matters. And I saw that with Mark in that we would sit in product meetings with him. He spent five days a week sitting through product reviews and he would ask questions about the tiniest little details. Why does this pixel over here belong there instead of over here and challenge the team on those things?”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“it gets back a little bit to what I was saying about credibility you have to articulate why you're doing something in a way that really smart thoughtful people are going to buy What gave us the right to do that? But what he did is, and I actually still have the video of this all hands talk that he gave because it was so eye-opening, he described all of the things that had to be in place for Amazon to exist. There needed to be a global fulfillment network. There needed to be a credit card system. There needed to be the internet. All these different foundation layer technologies that had to exist in order for Amazon to be built in the first place in 1994 when he started the company. And then he went through all of foundational layers that existed in 2004 that he believed made it possible for cloud to finally be built. And he made the analogy to the early days of electricity. He said, it used to be the case that in order to own a store, you had to have an electric grid built behind your store. And that's the equivalent today of launching a website. You have to build your own electric grid, which we call data centers in order to launch a website. And you can't imagine that being the case today 100 years later.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really believe that. First of all, I worked for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, two of the greatest product visionaries of the last 50 years. And so I saw it up close. But I also believe if you look across the great technology companies that have been built in the last 50 years, most of them were led by people who really deeply cared about the product. The product in technology, the roadmap for the product drives the organization. It drives the alignment across all the people who work there. And you don't need to come up with a big strategy framework. All you have to do is describe where you're trying to take the product and it immediately aligns everybody behind what you're trying to do.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or when you think about those first early partnerships that you're going to use to build the larger platform behind, those tend to be very open-ended and you have to be very creative about how you approach them. And the people who do well in partnerships tend to be good at the business side, but also have real product intuition. A lot of the people in my organization at Facebook who worked in partnerships ended up graduating into the product order. They would work closely with their product counterparts on an area of the business for a while and then the product team would say, hey, we think you actually would do really well over here on the product org. So you want to find people who are a hybrid of business and product and are super creative and love the open-ended nature of it.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that. That's actually something that a lot of our companies have done. And it's a great way to try to prove some product market fit early on. I think in partnerships, it's less formulaic. One of the things I really like about partnerships and typically what you find in partnerships are people who are business oriented but don't like the rote movement of a sales job. Sales is an incredible job for people who are amazing at turning the crank and there are people who are just cut out. That was the thing they were born on this planet to do. If you're not interested in that, if you get bored by that, partnerships is great because it's super creative and open-ended. And there are ways to build repeatable movements and partnerships. And certainly a lot of the partnerships at Facebook that we worked on were very scalable. If you think about media companies, we worked with millions of media companies and you have to build some motion into that. But when you think about big strategic part.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the company, it depends on the stage. You're right. As they get bigger, companies tend to start to need partnerships more. Facebook early on didn't do a lot of partnerships. I joined when we had about 130 employees. The company was a couple years old, and they were starting to think about things like how do we work with media companies who are calling us saying, hey, we want to have access to your users and we want to publish content into your system. So those were some of the reasons that they ultimately brought me on to help with that.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my favorite parts, by the way, about ventures I've gone from player to coach and it's been a real blast. Honestly, the answer to that question is it's different for every company. You're right. For the most part, super early stage companies aren't thinking about partnerships, but it depends on the company and the product that they're building. A lot of times they will need an early partnership to get them started. In many cases, these days, that might look like a partnership with one of the cloud companies, for example. Certainly in AI, that's been a very hot topic. And a lot of our AI companies have been coming to me for advice on how do I work with Amazon or Google or Microsoft and how do I navigate this whole landscape. And you've seen what OpenAI has done with Microsoft. And so others are now thinking about how to try to replicate something like that. And that's a great example of where partnering can be totally transformational, a total win-win for open AI and Microsoft and a lot of other AI companies, I think we'll be able to strike similar types of arrangements. So it depends.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To publish these digital books, but they were certainly willing to give us the right to do it ourselves. And it turned out we had some technology that allowed us to do that. And so I went in asking them to publish these books digitally and I came out asking them to give us the rights to publish the books ourselves. And that was a great outcome for them because they didn't have to do the work and a great outcome for us because we couldn't do it without their permission. So that was part of the solution to getting to 100,000 titles on the Kindle at launch.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you a simple anecdote that to me in a nutshell describes what partnerships is all about. In negotiation classes, you'll often hear this idea that when two parties are negotiating over The meat of the orange and the other party, for whatever reason, actually wants the rind. And so if you can get to that insight, then 1 plus 1 equals much more than two. I always go into partnership discussions with that attitude. How do we get to an outcome where we both get not just half of what we want, but all of what we want? And we're both perfectly happy with the outcome, not partially satisfied with the outcome. It's not always possible, but a lot of times if you're willing to keep digging and what it takes ultimately is just dialogue. It just takes time getting to know somebody and getting to really understand their motivation, not the surface level motivation, but the much deeper level motivation to realize that actually you may be much more aligned than you thought and there may be ways for you to each get exactly what you're looking for. I'll give you the example we talked about in the Kindle, which was that the book publishers didn't want to do the work.”
2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source