YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Jordan

lines on the record
72
first
2022-05-10
most recent
2022-05-10
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “You know me, I'm thinking of this change. What do you think? He's incredibly mature. He gave me great advice. A couple days later he calls me and he goes, you know Mark Andreessen's on my board, right? He asked me if I know anyone who would make a good consumer investor. Do you want me to throw your name in the ring? It's like, hell yeah. I'm sitting down with Mark and Ben a couple weeks later. They frame today get to know you. They didn't know John had back channeled with me. Pretty aware I'm being interviewed, but they're not calling it an interview. And I go, well, a lot of CEOs are just heads down. A couple make one investment or sit on a board. Where are you on that spectrum? I go, I got about a dozen companies. Let me tell you about. Next question was, what is interesting out there probably 11 years ago. What's interesting out there that we should be going. I just seen Brian Chesky present Airbnb at Allen Conference and I go, Airbnb. And Mark looks at me quizzically and says, you know they're raising, right? I go, no, I didn't know. And so we ended up my first.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You nailed it. It was seeking a new learning curve. In my spare time at PayPal and at Open Table, I'd meet with entrepreneurs. That's actually how I met Alex Rampel. He was running trial pay and reached out and I became a seed investor and advisor. I was enjoying that side hustle way more than I was enjoying my day job. I had a dozen seed investments I'd made. And I remember I got a call from one of the leading venture firms. And that usually meant they wanted a CEO. They wanted a board member. And this time they said, hey, we're looking for a GP. And it's just like, oh, I've never really thought about doing that. I was intrigued because of the new learning curve that firm had me interview one person at a time and they had about 50 partners every week. So it went on for like a year. So while I was doing that, I remember I grabbed my good friend John Donahoe, who I've known since as a school and played hoops with and were neighbors. And he's currently running Nike. He was running Bane at the time. And I said.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think it's the same public and privatially on both sides of the table. Treating the investor like an owner. The worst thing for me is when the operator is not talking to you about their real problems and their real concerns, I was told that I was pretty good at, hey, this is going well. Hey, this isn't going well. Here's our plan. For me, it wasn't a sign of weakness. It was almost a sign of opportunity. Open table hadn't really figured out its international expansion. And it's just like, hey, we haven't figured out internationally. The opportunity is X. Here's where we're at. Here's our approach. If we're successful, it'll be great. We're working hard, treating the investor like an owner for me is a philosophy I try to use on both sides of the table.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Okay, that's great. I have any questions. Let me know. Do you want me to fly to Boston? No, not really. That worked very, very well.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “One was risk mitigation. We were one of the first very small IPOs to go. When you're taking the risk of going out in a god-awful market storm, we didn't want to, you know, we didn't want to risk the company. I give a lot of credit to bankers on the deal. JD Moriarty and Harry Wagner and Alan, we ended up highly concentrating the offering into a handful of the best internet investors. I had a strong history of if the company holds up their side of the deal, they'll buy and hold. They did large. I mean, this is Henry Allenbo, going to his at T-Row, Dennis Lynch and Sam Shiani at Morgan Stanley investment management, Mark Casey at Cap World, Will Danoff at Fidelity. They bought big. They won it in and they held for a good chunk of time, which makes very stable investor base. And let me focus on running the business. Super mature. I'd go to Will. Hey, how do you want me to update you? He goes, I will dial into the conference calls.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “The NASDAQ was off like 70%, and we go public, and it was the first venture back tech company to go public in like two years. No pressure, no everything. It was my first financing. That was super interesting. We did a secondary after. And so that was my introduction to the capital markets.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It was surprisingly different to me. I'd run ebay.com and I'd run PayPal and PayPal was a very autonomous job. I mean, I'd worked for Meg forever. And so we got into a cadence where I knew when I had to tell her certain kinds of news, like, hey, I might miss the quarter. That needed to come early. But I'd sit down with her 101 like maybe once a quarter. So I had huge autonomy. Very interesting when you go from being a division head to a CEO. The level of worry and the level of final quality control check dials up like crazy. And so OpenTable is way smaller than PayPal, but I was more stressed because it's on me before it was on Meg. Now it's on me. That was interesting. The second thing is I'd never done a financing before. I'd always joined companies had finished their financing. My first financing was the open table IPO at the death of the financial crisis in May 2009.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “When I was 15, my dad died, and if I was going to have gas money, I had to get a job. A friend of mine had just gotten a job at Joe Thisman's Restaurant. I started there on weekends as a dishwasher, and it turned out the chef who worked 13.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Actually, it appeared to be pretty good at it, but my career was just I continually went back to earlier stages. eBay grew, I went to PayPal, PayPal grew, I went to Open Table, Open Table grew. And there's a point at which the good news is I got pretty good at that stage of growth. Consumer marketplace businesses at that stage of growth, the bad news is the learning curve just shout out like crazy. When I'm operating, I'm always on, always stressed, always tired. And then you throw on board on top of it, and that was a pretty toxic combination.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And then there was a point where I remember one night I want to go home, I get to work at 5 a.m. and it's 7 at night. There's still a line outside my queue waiting for me to make decisions. I go, this is not scaling. I got to change something. And you become a coach. You hire a bunch of people. You try to get them into a place where they'd make most of the decisions similar to how you would. And then the mode's very different. You turn into a coach. At some point with hyper growth, they can't make all the decisions. So they have to build a team. They become the coach and you become a general manager. And you're further and further from the action in the field each time. And then taking a logical conclusion, PayPal with 5,000 people, I was commissioner of the league. And it's interesting. The job is fundamentally different. You're not in the action. You are orchestrating it. I called it a bunch of shuns, organization, motivation, communication. And I didn't like the job anywhere near as much. I was very gratified that I.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I learned to be an operator. I'd only had a couple semi operating jobs up to that point while I was CFO at the Disney stores. I was also responsible for managing the Disney stores in Japan. But we had someone on the ground, so I was kind of overseeing the person who was overseeing it. When I got to eBay, I'd never really run anything. And so I joined, Mick was building bench depth. So she found a job for me and had me managing two people, one of whom promptly quit to go run a Baja Fresh franchise, which at that point might not have been the best financial decision unless he owns Baja Fresh at this point. I was managing one person. And a few months in, she reorganizing, gave me eBay North America, which was ebay.com website. Seven years later, I was managing 5,000 people. One of the blog posts said, I get the most comments on is, I think it's titled Leaving It All in the Field. It brings a sports analogy to managing a hypergrowth business because early on, you're the player. Things are crashing around you and you're making every call just like they're.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The amount of young talent that Michael Eisner and Frank Wells attracted to that company was just remarkable. So I was in the Consumer Products Division. It's the third child of the company, the theme parks and the entertainment studio. So consumer products was like, okay, it's a bit of an afterthought. The execs I worked there include Meg was my hiring manager. So she had an okay career. I worked with Paul Presler, who became CEO of the Gap. I worked closely with Steve Burke, who had a long career at Comcast and MBC Universal. Everywhere you look, there was unbelievable talent. That made an impression on me. I've like company had a 10-year run that was amazing and it was driven by a bunch of 30-year-olds at the time, which was very counter to what Hollywood was about. So the big lesson for me on Disney was just talent.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Cohorts just tell you so much about what is happening. One of our partners, Olivia Moore, just wrote a very nice blog post on leaky bucket problem where if you can attract a lot of people, that's a very bullish sign. If the cohort curve never bottoms out and just keeps going down, that's just plain smashing it at the ground. I get very worried on that metric. If you just need fresh meat to grow, you'll reach a growth constraint at some point.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “They come back to Open Table. They wouldn't go back to Google. They'd quickly learn a behavior to go to Open Table. The open table was getting paid to acquire their restaurant's consumers. While I was there, we didn't spend a penny on demand acquisition and we're growing very nicely based on that. So the best models don't really rely on paid. They figured out some other way to get that distribution.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The best models are ones that don't really rely much on paid acquisition. The best entrepreneurs have figured out hacks to get demand at scale through a user proposition. And one of the most brilliant hacks on this was the Open Table hack that preceded me. The team figured it out ahead of time is they build a widget that restaurants could put on their own websites to empower online reservations because the typical behavior at the time is I want to go to the slanted door. Okay, let me search on Google for the slanted door so I can find the telephone number. Go to the website and you see this widget that says make an online reservation. It's just like, oh, I'd rather do that than pick up the phone and have that experience of can you hold, sir, get back to you and call multiple restaurants. Just awful. And so we put it on there. And what it ended up doing, the diner would click on it and was redirected to the slanted door page on open table. They would then discover, oh my God, I can make an online reservation at all these.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Oh crap. One is fragmentation. The other is ideally lead gen. You're creating relationships that otherwise wouldn't have been created. The thing you try to avoid is, okay, I have a relationship with my car repairman, my hairstylist, my whatever. And it's a frequent relationship. Those don't do well because the service provider, they'll pay a little bit for convenience. They'll pay a whole lot for a new customer. Ideally, you have a combination of currently inefficient market that's very fragmented and lead gen is a part of it. So Airbnb has lead gen. Hosts are being introduced to guests. They never would have known. It's spectacularly fragmented, the average host owns one property. It has those two characteristics.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Two main ones Is fragmentation of the marketplace? I often have used the difference between open table and Fandango in explaining this. Open table, the average. Restaurant owner on Open Table owns one restaurant. And so aggregating them is a pain in the ass. But once you've aggregated them,”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And so, if you're in the middle of the country, it's very hard to buy one typically, and eBay entrepreneurs were figuring out, okay, here's what we do. So we took that nascent behavior and built eBay motors, which then... Made it much easier to list and discover cars, generated the supply, and created the awareness. Best actions we had was watch that nascent Community behavior and amplif”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I mean, the most interesting thing is early on we try all these initiatives that we baked on our own and debuted the community. And we found out the leverage was way more to watch what the nascent behavior the community was doing and seek to amplify it. Iconic thing there is Simon Rothman, who's bounced around. He's a valet veteran now early on in his career was just an early exec there, and he has a very high interest in collectible cars. And one day, I think he was searching for Maserati or Ferrari and expecting to see. Little replica cars, and he found real ones. And it's just like, why are people selling Lamborghinis on eBay? Well, it turns out Lamborghinis are only sold on the coasts.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's where supply meets demand than determines pricing. My partner, Andrew Chen, just wrote a book called. The cold sharp problem. He was talking about the hard side of the marketplace and every marketplace. You're constantly challenged to keep it in equilibrium. Watch a play out on eBay, there'd be certain areas where an entrepreneur would find an inefficiency where they could list items and make disproportionate yields because of scarcity. They were chewing off the very top of the price curve. And then other sellers would observe that activity filled the gap and the pricing then would regress to where it rationally should be. Sometimes there's supply inefficiency, sometimes there's demand inefficiencies, and the two would very quickly resolve over time.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Dean of the Stanford Business School, I've subsequently learned to get the data to test their theories. Fascinating little machine. My right-hand guy, Michael Deering of Harrison Metal, he had the same model, and so we just sit there geeking out on what happens when this kind of thing. It was really fun.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I got my first taste of marketplaces at eBay. Web one, if you want to call it that, almost all of the best business models ended up being marketplace type models. Taobao and Alibaba in China, you have Rakutan and Japan, Micardo Libre in South America. Now Amazon is largely a marketplace. At that point, it was brand new. There was no playbook early at eBay. I got there in 99. You're sitting there like, okay, what do we do? So the model that worked best in trying to figure out how to grow eBay was basically microeconomics. It is a perfect, at least it was a perfect economy where it was self-contained and all of the things in economic theory and microeconomics were playing out on eBay. And so we made pricing decisions based on that supply acquisition decisions. You just watched it would work as predicted. I mean, it was fascinating. We started getting tons of requests from academia, including, by the way, the current.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source