YouSaid · the spoken record

Howard Lerman

lines on the record: 32
first: 2018-09-14
most recent: 2018-09-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, it's the whole concept of the web to the brain. Every business in the world that today has a website will very soon have a brain, and that brain is a structured database of their public facts. If you're a restaurant, it's your stores, your menus, your events, if you're a hospital, it's your physicians, your facilities, your hospital areas. This is the data behind the AI-powered future. And it starts with structured information. Without structured information, a brand can't think for itself. That's what we're going to provide is the platform for every business to think for itself.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's like a marathon where when you're tired halfway or even a half an hour into it, if you just keep going, somehow you find more energy without slowing down.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you a story. I was riding a train, the Gautia is what it's called. It's a high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai. And I was about to give a speech about AI. And I memorized the speech in Mandarin. And I wanted to practice it one last time. We were in the front car of the train. There were eight seats in the front car, seven of which were occupied by Yext. And the last seat was occupied, not by Yexter, but by a Chinese national. We had no And his eyes kind of like lowered, and he stared at me, and he said in perfect English Yes, I know, I am an engineer for the Chinese military. It is the mission of my generation to study America and to crush you. And then he sat back down.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Requires you totally to focus. If you ever want to feel like a two year old child and be dumb, it's almost like when you go into the ocean, it's meditative because you have to totally concentrate when you're in there. Similarly, if you don't have complete and utter concentration on speaking Chinese, you won't succeed as a Westerner. So it's a great way to take your mind off stuff. I love learning. I read a lot of books like I told you I'm reading a book on Hadrian right now. I study leaders of the past and I try to learn new things. And those new areas spawn a renaissance of new ideas within Yext. And so we try to have a growth mindset culture where people are learning all the time.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been a long time since I've raised VC. So I'm probably not the best person to answer that question. We were lucky. We had great VCs from Andy Sheehan from Cedar Hill to Jules Mall to IVP to Mike Walrath to Marker to Devin at Insight. I never had any problems with VCs. We did pretty well, so I will say that you can tell who your friends are when things aren't going well and who sticks by you. But I don't have any generalized thoughts on the VC community as a whole except to say that my experience with the five VCs we raised money from was phenomenal.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private, nobody bets against you, public people can bet against you. First off, being public is way better than being private. For those people that say that you shouldn't be public, that's just a timing thing. And honestly, sometimes it's a VC that has a self-interest that wants to do a late stage round before you go public. Being public from a competitive perspective, you're bigger, you're badder, you have more cash. Cash is king. You can pay people more because you have RSUs. You attract better, more executive senior talent. Your brand is more famous. You get the ability to sell to big banks that want to look into your financial statements and know you're real before they install or use your software. Being public is the only way to be big. If you actually want to be a gigantic, huge company that changes the world being private is just, it's like a step along the way. It's like asking a butterfly if it's better to be a butterfly or a caterpillar.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does a great job putting on dinners. Part of enterprise software is entertaining customers that spend a lot of money. And one of the things that he does better than anybody in the world has put together executive dinners with interesting people from around the world, including customers but mixing in celebrities too. If you go to one of the dinners he hosts, he'll have customers, he'll have Chris Rock, he'll have comedians, he'll have entertainers. And what he does is he gets everyone involved. And similar to the five-minute meeting, what are you working on where I ask a question to my team Beniov brings 50 people in a room together? They're all sitting around and he has everyone go around the table and answer the question of what's on their mind. It's a brilliant way to get everyone to say what's on their mind and facilitate a great conversation from Chris Rock to Sir Richard Branson.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we in outer space again? Let's do it. So Why, what must I read on my Have a number of favorite books, but one I'd recommend reading right now is Five Stars by Carmine Gallow. It's all about storytelling, the oral tradition. He's one of the people that inspired me to come up with a unique story playtelling format to tell the X story.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Voice search is only half the puzzle. While exciting, augmented reality is going to be the other part of that puzzle that completes the evolution away from the smartphone into a next generation user interface.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intrigued with the kind of database answer you just gave. I think VoiceSearch is half the puzzle, to be frank. It's the most natural way to engage with the computer, but I also think that you're going to see augmented reality become a huge part of it. I think VoiceSearch is only half of the natural computing input puzzle when you combine being able to speak with being able to see who wants to be hunched over their phones typing, looking at stuff all day. You want to see the windows in your screen. You want to be able to talk to them. My view strongly is that voices in its early days. And a lot of the reason that voices become big in the last couple years is because of the fact that we've gotten really good at transcription. We're now at, you know, 96, 97% accuracy, which is about as good as the human ear at transcribing things. NLP is that next step, being able to take what you say and understand the intent of it so that we can essentially build a database query to give you that answer. I don't believe that brand is over because I think that”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Database based brains. And so for a company like a McDonald's, like a Burger King or a hospital, instead of presenting their information on the web in unstructured way of text, we see a future where every company that has the website has a database-like brain. And that database-like brain is a set of structured information that's capable of putting information everywhere and answering more complicated queries and also powering the brains of intelligent agents like Alexa and Siri and Google Assistant so that you can get more precise computed answers and you as the end user don't have to do the thinking. The service does the thinking for you. Can I ask, I had an interesting conversation with another VC on the show the other day and they said that the power of brand will completely diminish and the rising world of voice because you will ask for more toothpaste, more neural, more commoditize whatever you want to do, but you lose the power of brand. How do you think about that?”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you wanted, and you have to do the thinking. So while documents are a really powerful way to present information, they're also, they're kind of dumb. A user has to do the thinking. A user has to think about the results. And a user can't ask complicated questions. You can't say, hey, document, give me all the hamburgers that have less than 600 calories out there. Document's not very good at answering that question, but a database is good at answering that question. And the intelligence services of today, Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, now instead of sending you to a part of a document when you search for something, they just tell you the answer directly. They look it up. So if you ask K-Siri how many calories are in a Big Mac, she just says the answer is 550. And if you type that into Google today or Google Assistant, instead of sending you to the spotlight part of the document that contains your query, they now just look it up in their own database and tell you. And so that's the way the world is moving. The information is moving from web-based documents to what we call”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, information today is moving from the web to the brain. If you think about what a website is, it's nothing more than a document that contains text and links and pictures. And 97, Larry Page had that brilliant dream in the middle of the night. He woke up and realized he could download the entire web into his computer and build a search around backlinks. You type in a search, you get the most relevant part. And his big insight was that the web was not a bunch of individual documents, but instead one gigantic document. And Google can take you to the part of the document, let's say you want to find how many calories are in a Big Mac. You type in Big Mac calories and the original Google search would find the best part of the document that had that. But then it's up to you as the end user to look at the part of that document, probably on McDonald's.com slash menu and look at the line on the table there and read Big Mac calories and interpret the number 550 as corresponding to”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of being a new category because there's no analysts that are out there saying, hey, Yax is the leader in this new market just because that market doesn't exist. But that's okay. That's the ill-defined outer space part with no gravity. But that also makes it fun because we are building something gigantic.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day you ring the bell, walk the floor, at least in our case as we were in the New York Stock Exchange. And everyone's all amped up. And then you go out and party and the next day it's kind of business as usual. But for us, the usual is never the usual. So the journey is still just beginning. And next is a special company. We're not just a feature of some other SaaS platform that ought to be part of this bigger SaaS. A lot of the SaaS companies out there should just be features of Salesforce. In fact, it's annoying that they're not features of Salesforce. Things like billing, things like order management, things like contract management. But Yext is a platform in itself. We're building the brain to power every company's information in the AI powered future. That's really exciting. We're in the super early innings of a more than $10 billion market, of which we are less than 2% penetrated today. So it comes with the territory.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bit more orders than for just that the amount that we ended up selling. And so the end of the road show, the night before your IPO, you price it. You sit down with the bank and their headquarters and you get a sense of based off their trading desk how much you can push up the initial offering price or what you want to do with that. And so you do that. You get to pick who your shareholders are at least initially. Do you want to choose long-term long onlies that you felt really understood your story and will stay in your stock and really got it? And then you wake up the next morning and at least for us we chose the New York Stock Exchange. It's an emotional moment when you see yext hanging from the banner of the New York Stock Exchange and 250 people that helped you get there standing in front of it. That's the moment you know when you did something and you did something permanent. You did something that's going to change the world forever. And also that it's still just day one and a big journey. And so it's an amazing.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They bet for you, they could short you. So you have a whole new set of people that you have to think about that you have to deal with. And so the roadshow, it's one of the cool things is you get the banks get you a plane. You're in a different city every night. You have a breakfast meeting where you pitch investors, four meetings that are about one hour each as you zoom around whatever city you're in from Boston to Kansas City. A lunch meeting where you pitch more investors, four more meetings, a dinner meeting potentially, and then you're on the plane to the next city. You repeat that, call it for 12 days. One of the coolest things is that you get pretty fast feedback. So we had this little app that Morgan Stanley gave us that you could see as investors after you met with an investor, they pretty much placed the order or not, which gave you an indication of how well you were doing. And you want to be very oversubscribed. I think we sold 10 or 12 million shares in our IPO, depending on how you count the green shoe. And presumably there was quite a lot of...”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The IPO is a step along the way. It is certainly an achievement. It's an achievement that no one can ever take away. And I'll tell you the story. When you go on an IPO, you pick a couple of banks, and we chose Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan and then some other banks to round out our syndicate. And they were all terrific. And you spend a couple weeks going on this crazy roadshow where you meet with at least eight meetings per day to investors that for the first time in your life aren't just thinking about betting for you but could also bet against you that's a new thing that an entrepreneur doesn't have to deal with because when you have your vcs and your cap table and your early investors they're all rooting for you and that they choose not to invest in you that's fine too but now there's a class of people that are extremely smart they are quantitatively superior to you by an order of magnitude and they see things in your numbers that you didn't even know existed and if they don't like you not only”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference in why respected CEOs that run big companies like PepsiCo or Caterpillar want to hear from Coach K about how to lead things in an existing game. Because the bigger we get, the more of an existing game this becomes. But for a startup, for that entrepreneur that's their first company or their first idea, there's no clock. There's no scorecard. There's no tournament.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm playing a set game and I need that next step along the way and raising that next round is that next step I think is a big mistake because funding is not an end in itself. It's a means to get to a bigger end of building a company. Now the problem is in building a company, being an entrepreneur, there is no established game. There's no clock. There's no championship at the end. There's no tournament. You have to be able to deal with ambiguity. Now, I would argue that you asked me about what it's like to be a CEO. It's a bit different to be an entrepreneur than to be a CEO, even though I am both. Over the last decade, I have had to change what I do dramatically every day from playing an undefined game in outer space with no gravity to more managing a larger operation. So I think I'm being more of a CEO now than an entrepreneur. That said, you still do entrepreneurial things and I'm still the founder of the company, but I can understand”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just want to make sure you knew. And when I was starting the company, I was like trying to look at a lot of the leadership techniques that he employed. And I was thinking to myself that he has an advantage in leadership because he's playing a game that is known. Basketball is a game by which there is a set of established rules by which there's a set of established scoring. The game is set. And at the end of that 60 minutes or whatever it is, there is a winner and there is a loser and then there's a set of games throughout the season and there's a tournament at the end and then there is a conclusion at the end of the season. Playing an established game, playing a set of rules that already exist, that is not what entrepreneurship is at all. In fact, the gamanship of entrepreneurship, I would argue, that is raising a C round, raising an A round. A lot of entrepreneurs buck up and think that raising a round is the end of itself. And it's the human desire for that conclusion, for that feeling of, okay,”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always look at other leaders and I study them closely. One of the leaders I study is Coach K from Duke and that's because I'm a Duke. He's a college basketball coach. I'm not sure if you knew him since you were in the UK.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the office leaders from Berlin to London to Paris to Tokyo are in that head of product is in that. And that's a group that I get together. I actually focus more on cultivating that group a bit more than the executive team because the execs are pros and the leaders need to be the ones that are carrying out the vision, the mission, the strategy, the culture in the field.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you grow your company from 100 people to 200 to 500 to 1,000 and beyond, you have to apply, adopt different techniques in order to win. And one of the techniques I figured out early on was two bodies of leadership. That is I carefully work with my direct reports and I've got yex now, I think, 12. And that's about the maximum number that I think a leader can really have. But I also carefully work with and cultivate and frequently communicate with all my direct direct reports of which there are 55. So I don't manage them directly, but I'm constantly in communication contact. And so I have two bodies of leadership at Yext. I have the executive group that's 13 of us, myself included plus the 12. And then I also have the extended group, the second body, the leadership team. That team is not a decision making body, but it's instead a group of leaders that help set that culture from around the world.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you memorize your lines, you create something that's memorable. And that's what John Lennon figured out, that when you're telling a story, whether it's a hit song from the Beatles or a speech that you want to give in an AI conference in Shanghai, if you memorize your lines, you will deliver a better speech. Your audience will remember it because I can guarantee you, if you can't remember it, your audience won't.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To your heart. Human brain can remember that kind of thing. But the human brain does not remember bad rhymes, bad rhythm, bad poetry or a bad song. You can't remember a bad song. By definition, a good song is one that sticks in your head that you can hear later on after it's over. And by definition, a bad song is one that, ugh, you can't even listen to it because you'll never forget it and it'll be gone forever. And it turns out that the greatest speechwriters, the greatest composers, the greatest politicians, and even for us the greatest entrepreneurs and business people that have to communicate every day what they do can exploit this trick to their advantage, which is to memorize your lines. When you memorize the line, you craft it as you write it if it's a line you say out loud, it will be better than a line that you have written down. If it's a line that you say out loud, if you want to remember it, each time you try to memorize it, you're going to make it shorter, crisper, better. It's going to feel more.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things down on paper. It was certainly before we could digitally record any bit of information. Now today we can write everything down. We can record everything. Probably Alexa is listening to everything as we say it. But 10,000 years ago, the only things that survive, the only works that survive were those that could be remembered from the oral tradition. And so the human brain, I believe, has evolved in a way to understand certain rhythms and to remember certain rhythms. And if you look at the greatest texts that survive over time, it's because they were passed down orally. The greatest religious texts. And then as writing became a thing, then you see the Shakespearean types of things. But here's the defect in the human brain that you can exploit to your advantage when you're giving a speech, which is the human brain is really good at remembering lines that have terrific rhythm, that have terrific poetry, that really sing.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's funny, John Lennon was one of the greatest storytellers, greatest musicians of all time. And he realized he once said that when he would write a new song, he would intentionally not write it down. A lot of us, when we write something, we have to write it down immediately or we'll forget it. But he wanted to, when he composed a new song, a new line, he purposefully didn't write it down and would come back the next day and see if he could remember it because he realized that if he couldn't remember it, it probably wasn't very good because if the author, if John Lennon, the master genius Beatle can't remember it, how is a 14 year old on the radio going to remember it? And so in this, when I read this quote from John Lennon, I realized that he had figured out a hack, a defect of the human brain. Let's take a step back 10,000 years. The oral tradition was the only way to pass things down. This was before we could write.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Factions around the world. Right now I'm reading a book on Hadrian, the ancient Roman emperor. How do you keep on tab of Portugal and Persia, you know, in the land of chariots and couriers? It's a tough thing to do when communications are not instant. And so Teddy Roosevelt in his presidency developed a technique that we can all learn from. This guy, his productivity was amazing. He was once shot during a speech blood dripping down. He insisted on finishing the speech because he wanted to complete the job. But one of the techniques that, and by the way, he died when he was 53, so maybe he sort of squeezed in about 80 years and 50 years. But one of the techniques he did was during, in the White House, he would hold five minute meetings. He'd have an assistant keep kind of a close time on the meeting, and he'd line people up outside of his office. He'd set the timer, and they would come in and deliver their five minutes. And in five minutes,”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're building a company, we've now got more than a thousand people around the world in offices from Shanghai to Berlin. It's pretty tough to keep on top of that. What you want to do as the founder and CEO is stay attached to the office. As you grow, want to make sure that your company culture is there, that you have a good pulse, a read on what's going on. And the question is, how can you do that? How can you, sitting in an office in New York, know what's up in Shanghai when you're not even on the same time zone? How do you know what's up in London? How do you know what's up in Beijing? How do you know what's up around the world? It's pretty tough to keep a pulse on everything going on. And so I learned a technique from Teddy Roosevelt that turned out to be a really effective way to keep a pulse on what's going on. Teddy Roosevelt, as we know, was a remarkable productive individual. And running a global company is not so dissimilar from running a country where you've got”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is possible to do either. I think it's completely possible for you to assess potential markets from the top down or from the bottom up. I will say that I think if you historically look back at the greatest companies in history, they typically have come from more of a grassroots organic type of feel like Microsoft or Apple or even IBM or going back to the Ford Motor Company, going back eons ago, it's entrepreneurs that have an idea and they make a thing from the bottom up. I'm not sure how often Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were conducting market analysis of potential businesses to start and then jumping into it. I think they had an idea and they executed on that idea. They dominated a niche and it turned out that that niche, which appeared to be small, was huge.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no single pivotal moment when you start a company. A company is really a group of people when you found it. And the most important thing you can do is pick great co-founders, which I happen to do in Brent Metzon, Brian Bistelberger. We wanted to start a company and build a company. What you find is that the original idea you have is almost never unless you're extraordinarily lucky. The idea that you end up winning with, so through a process of iteration over a long period of time, we stumbled upon a gigantic idea, a huge idea, one that we think is going to change the world.”
2018-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source