YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Rose

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2023-02-14
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2023-02-14
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  1. “Been right a lot more than they've been wrong, and the times when I thought they were wrong and they were right have been transformational for the company. And so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to disagree when I think they're wrong. And I actually think it's really important to have a culture where you encourage disagreement and debate. And both of them did that. But once the decision's been made, you disagree and commit. And you commit because you believe in the person and you believe in the vision and you trust them because they've proven that they're capable of doing 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

  2. “But if you do it over and over again, eventually you realize it's not luck, it's skill, and both Jeff and Mark were so difficult to work for, we would oftentimes sit around complaining about them, just how impossible it was to satisfy them or to work for them. But at the end of the day, I would always say to the people who are complaining, yeah, but.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “On once, and I wanted advice from different people in my network about where I should go. I was talking to a lot of startups in Silicon Valley. I ended up getting introduced to Peter Teal. And I said, Peter, I'm interviewing with these six companies. And by the way, four of them are companies that you've invested in. What do you think I should do? And he said you should go to Facebook. And I said, why? And he said, simple. They have the best people. And the companies that have the best people are the ones that ultimately went. Mark was able to attract incredible people because he was able to articulate his vision in a way that resonated. The second thing you have to do as a founder to emerge in that category of credible is you have to be right over and over and over again. And that just takes time. You just have to prove that your insistence and stubbornness was actually the right answer and not just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. Sometimes that's a little bit of luck. Sometimes you just catch a break here and there.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's hard, and I would say you're right, there is a fine line there. Sam Lesson and I have laughed about this as well. I think you have to do two things to get over that line, to emerge into the category of credible founder who is going to be able to attract the best people around them and really build something substantial. And the first thing you have to do is you have to articulate why it is that you're so insistent on this thing that you believe is so important. And that articulation has to resonate with the people who are going to go build it. And it has to resonate with people who are smart and thoughtful and are ultimately credible enough to make that happen. The best founders are able to attract the best people. Full stop. When I was joining Facebook, I talked to a lot of people in my network as it was a big decision for me to leave Amazon. I knew I was only going to be able to leave Amazon.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And as a founder, you have the right to do that. You can tell people look, we're not going to ship until we get it right.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And it was one of the things that I really just admired Mark for his stubbornness and his willingness to stick to his vision in the face of resistance from executives, who in his case were usually much older than him and had a lot more experience. When I joined Facebook, he was 21 years old. Yet he had this in his DNA. And I saw this, I pattern matched it with Bezos and I thought, gosh, at 21, if this guy has this level of conviction about what he believes is going to work and is willing to push through to get to the outcome, even if it's really hard and is going to create a lot of brain damage along the way. But he knows that if we get there, it's going to be magical and transformational. Imagine what he's going to be able to do when he's 30, which is how old Jeff was when he started Amazon. I think great founders are able to do that. They trust themselves enough and they believe in their conviction.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think it's something that the best founders are really exceptional at. There's something about a founder CEO that they have the right to ask for completely unrealistic things of their team and to be stubborn about those things and wait until they get to the answer that they like rather than accepting the compromise that the team insists is necessary in order to deliver the end result. And I saw Jeff do that over and over again. He was just incredibly stubborn about his vision for what he believed was necessary for something to be successful. There's been lots written about Alexa, which I wasn't there for. I left before that product got started, but there's just great stories about him insisting on things that the team also insisted were impossible and then ultimately when you put that goal in front of people, they find a way through. It takes longer. Sometimes you have to be super creative, but you get there. We certainly did that with the Kindle. And I saw Mark Zuckerberg do it at Facebook 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

  8. “We were able to actually take that product, which wasn't sufficient for reading a book. It was good for searching but not for reading. And we were able to refine it and actually make it better so that a lot of books that you were able to get on your Kindle on day one weren't produced by the publishers or they were physical books that we had engineered into digital books and were good enough to get us over the hump. And then two is ultimately finally after a lot of arm wrestling, I was able to get Jeff to let me tell the publishers about the Kindle. And when I showed him the device, they suddenly went, oh, now I understand why you're being so persistent on this. We just couldn't understand why you kept harassing us about publishing books so that people could read them on their palm pilots. Nobody's going to do that or their laptops, but now you're showing us that you're making a real investment here. And with this eink screen, maybe it has a better chance of succeeding than the last generation. And so they were a little more open to it at that point.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Would mean for their cost structure and how they were going to manage through that. There were a lot of reasons why they were resistant, and it was going to take real work for them to do it. It wasn't like they just flip a switch and suddenly you start generating ebook versions of your books. But on the flip side, we were making a case to them that, look, this could be really good for you because it costs a lot of money to print a book. And if we are able to sell digital books, it could remove a lot of costs. And if you think into the future, if you're worried about piracy, we're going to take that really seriously and we're going to do this right. bought a company that was really good at DRM and we built that into the Kindle from day one. So we had a lot of good arguments, I think, for what we were offering was actually something that they should consider. But ultimately, there were two things that we did, I think, that really made a difference. One is we developed on our side some technology that allowed us to digitize physical books before we started this effort. We already built search inside the book.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “A combination of a couple of things one, we were fortunate because we were already a large customer. So they had to listen to us. I would go out there and fly to New York and meet with them and they would say no. And then I would come back a couple weeks later and they would say no again. And they could keep saying no, but they couldn't not take the meeting with me because Amazon was a really, really important distribution channel for them. So that was a huge advantage that I got to continue to build the relationship with them. My personal style of partnering is to really try to understand the other side and understand where they're coming from and figure out creative solutions to the problem. And they had legitimate reasons for not wanting to do this. It wasn't like they were just being obstinate. They had tried and they had seen other digital book efforts fail and they felt like it was a waste of time and energy for them. They legitimately had concerns about their own business and if digital books were successful what 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

  11. “So finally, we model together to barely make the math work. And it turned out that he was completely right. I think the combination of those things is what made the Kindle such a successful product and why everybody who owns one feels like it truly is a magical 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

  12. “Your Kindle. And so we said, okay, we can figure that out, and we had a great technology team that built that. But then he said, no, that's not good enough because if you're not in a Wi-Fi zone, then you can't get your book. And what if I'm on the plane and I'm just getting ready to take off and I forgot to download a book and I want to download it, I want to be able to get that book. And we said, but that doesn't work because to do cellular downloads is going to cost maybe $20 a month. And if we charge $20 a month, then nobody's going to buy the device. And he said, well, let's just pay the carriers for the cellular coverage, but give it away for free to the customer. And we said, well, we can't make the math work. There's not enough margin on the books and the device to do that. And he said, well, why don't you go back and make the math work? And we came back 15 times. And we just couldn't make it work because we said, okay, we'll charge more for the device. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, nobody's going to buy it. We have to charge less. Well, we'll charge more for the books. And he said, no, then they're not going to buy the books.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Why this was a good idea. And the other thing I had a hand tied behind my back because Jeff didn't want to tell him we were building a device. He's worried it would leak, and he wanted to be the big Apple type moment when we launched the product. That was really hard. The second thing was the screen we talked about that at the time, there were no devices with E ink screens. We took a big bet on E ink. We thought this was a big part of the answer to making the digital book as comfortable to read as a physical book. And we always said, and Jeff started the whole thing by saying physical books are an incredible invention. They've been around for hundreds of years. In order to convince people to put them down and pick up a new device, it's going to have to be better. It can't be better in some ways, but worse in other ways. It has to be better across the board. And then the third, which was a total stretch, but again, classic Jeff Bezos was he wanted it to feel magical. And magical meant that you clicked a button and the book showed up on your device. And that at the time, iPods, you plugged them into your computer to download songs. He wanted it to happen over the air. He didn't want you to have to plug 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

  14. “Were three things that Jeff really charged the team with. All three were going to be extraordinarily difficult. And frankly, at the time that we got started, it wasn't clear we were going to be able to do any of the three. But he was just committed to it, so committed to it that he delayed the launch date three or four times until he felt like we had the magic formula. The first was selection, and that was my job. I can't overstate how difficult it was to convince book publishers to put real energy into digital books. And it turns out the entire process of publishing a book is analog. It seems crazy to think that because every book is written on a digital device, but it then gets converted into an analog format before it goes to the printing press. And book publishers don't really have an incentive to publish digital books because their whole cost structure is tied up in printing and packaging of physical books. We had to go out there, and I spent a lot of time in New York selling them.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Great on your eyes, and most people read books, and the sun when they're on the beach or in bed at night, and he just thought, we can come up with a better technology for this. And so that set us down the path of developing this new platform and really internalizing the innovator's dilemma, I think, in a perfect way that shows that you can think about that idea intellectually, but to actually do it takes a lot more courage.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “He used to go into the public library and literally hand copy by hand books that he loved because he couldn't afford to buy them himself. And he taught me to really love books and I loved reading. So to me, this was a dream opportunity. I joined Steve, and our job was to build the Kindle, and my job specifically was to get the book publishers on board with producing more books in a digital format. At the time, there were about 20,000 ebooks in the world. And Jeff gave us a goal of launching the Kindle with 100,000 books in a digital format. He knew that one of the important things to this platform is going to be selection. And there had been e-book devices before the Kindle that had failed. And there were a couple reasons he believed that they had failed. One was that there just wasn't enough selection that when you take your device out, if you can't find the book you're looking for, you're not going to pull it out again. And two was the screen wasn't really designed for reading a book. LED screens are not.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “That we were still teetering but getting our feet under us, and Jeff decides that we have to. Build a product that's going to Whole company Interesting thing is not only was”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Your new job is to kill your old business. I want you to put the physical books business out of business by building a digital product that's so good that people don't buy physical books anymore. If you run both, you'll never be motivated to do that. So we're going to bring the head of finance for the media business, a guy named Greg Greeley at the time, and we're going to put him into your old job, and we're going to put you into this new job. You can bring one person with 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

  19. “Jeff had seen the iPod come out and decimate our physical music business and had the recognition that the same thing was going to happen to books. And if that was going to happen, we better be the ones to do it, not someone else. He said to Steve one day, Steve, I need you to come over and run this digital business and get this digital book platform started so that we don't get IPodded out of books. And Steve said, great, I'll take one of my best people. We'll put them on it and we'll get a team going and it'll be great. And Jeff said, no, you don't understand. I want you to do it. And Steve said, but perfect. I'm excited. I'm fired up. Let's go build this. I'm going to put this person who I think is the best executive in Oregon, and we're going to have him go build a team. And Jeff goes, no, Steve, let me make this clear. As of today, you're fired.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Shirt, and it's great to be here, Patrick. Thanks for having me. The Kindle was for me actually a big break in my career. I was at Amazon for four years. I had done a few different things. I started out in business development. I actually dropped out of business school after a summer internship at Amazon to stay on full time. Then I ended up moving over to the retail business and got to experience buying inventory and pricing it and running sales and that whole part of the business. And then Steve Kessel was asked by Jeff Bezos in 2004 to start up this new division. And Steve at the time was running the entire media business at Amazon. He was running the books, music, and video business, which was the largest business by revenue, but even more importantly, the books business alone was the vast majority of Amazon's profits. At the time.”

    2023-02-14 · Invest Like the Best · Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate - [Invest Like the Best, EP.316] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source