YouSaid · the spoken record

Joanne Bradford

lines on the record: 70
first: 2024-05-02
most recent: 2024-05-02
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

“So how I ended up at honey in Silicon Valley, Cheryl Samberg used to hold dinners, women in Silicon Valley dinners where we'd all meet each other. I met an amazing woman there. Her name was Emily, is Emily White. She works at Anthos Capital. She had held the COO job at Instagram and Snapchat and was an early investor in honey. And when I told her I was leaving SoFi after four years just because I was done with my financial services chapter until now, and she said, hey, I've got a company for you in LA that I'm just about to invest in with two great founders. Can you go meet them? And I said, what's it about? She said, well, it's a coupon code company. I said, absolutely not. Who wants to work on coupon codes? Are you kidding me? And she said, no, no, just go meet them.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a lot. And so, you know, you had to learn how to, you know, make deals, drive LeadGen, build a community. And I would say that SoFi was and is beloved amongst that segment that helped them refi their loans. A very interesting fact that we learned while I was there is that people If they had a lot of money at play, they would refy their loans. But if it was a little bit amount of money, they would say, oh, it's kind of a pain. I'm not going to do it. And so the magic number was $388 a month. If you could save them that then they thought it was worth it.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private private sector, so we would, you know, and the premise of SoFi was that students that went to good schools and were getting law degrees and MBAs and had high student loan debt and engineering schools were not going to default on their loans, that they were going to be employable for as long as they wanted employment. And they weren't going to default. And so we really underwrote great qualities of loans. And so we did that. And then we got into the personal loan business, which we were, when I left there, we were doing about $3 billion a month. I was there 2015. There were 75 employees when I joined. We were doing about $10 to $20 million of loans a month. When I left, we were doing $1.5 billion of student loans and about 1.5 of personal loans, of volume a month. Wow. It's a lot of funnel. It's a lot of funnel.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't care if you fire me. I just want to try to do this job. He was a hedge fund guy and he said, look, I don't know anything about marketing. I want you to build this brand like it's a multi-billion dollar brand. I want you to take risk and let me know what the risk is. I want you to hit the CAC, which is customer. And I want you to make sure that we underwrite loans at quality so we can sell them on the capital markets. And I said, I don't even know what you're talking about, but I will get it done.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, I sort of took stock and I said, look, what the heck do I do now? I've sold every ad. I've sold videos. I've sold, you know, keywords, done deals with every single person in the world in the ad tech business. And so I said, I need to go learn something completely new and I want to work in an industry with new people and new ideas. And a friend of mine that I knew from Business Week said, hey, I work at this little company called SoFi and they do student loan refi. And I've always been passionate about money. I think people should really, you know, be educated about money, think about their money, you know, student loan debt is one of the biggest problems in America. And so I said, oh, this is interesting. So I met the founder and I said, look, I...”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we went out and sold the ads. And I knew that Pinterest would be big. I went in there in the valuation was below a billion dollars and I left after two years. And two years, the valuation was $13 billion. And so that was a fun run. Also.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It should. At that point in time, I was the independent director for Kara Swisher and Walt Mosberg. I helped them leave the journal, raise their money, and ultimately I helped them sell it to Vox media. But I had written a strategy at San Francisco Chronicle for Hearst to sort of reinvent that. And there wasn't really a ton of appetite for it. So I spent six months there. Again, I do not mind cutting and running if it's not working outright for me. Pinterest had called several times. I loved Pinterest. I knew Pinterest would be big. So I went to Pinterest as the head of partnerships. I set up and sold, I hired 125 ad sellers, account managers, and a team to go out and sell the first promoted pins. My first hire there is now the chief revenue officer there, Bill Watkins. He's great guy.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at that point in time, I was like, wow, I've been selling internet ads for a long time. I would like to do something different. So I went back to my roots and I became the president of the San Francisco Chronicle. And why I did that was because I felt like if you're a Bay Area native and you use SFGate, it is not a great product And I really felt like San Francisco and the tech world should have a bigger voice.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, everybody out there that has dependencies on those platforms needs to figure out alternative channels and alternative ways. And that is just an important, important task for people. You can't just optimize. You know, Google will change the algorithm, they'll change the UI, they'll change the rules, regulatory changes will come. I've seen every change possible impact businesses. I mean, remember when we used to sit around and talk about the Facebook news feed, like it was, you know, we don't do that anymore, right?”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was called Demand Media, and we took it public. We were doing $450 million in revenue. Google changed the algorithm and wiped out the business. And so everybody out there that is AI dependent. Remember, the algorithm can change.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most are going to crush and burn. You know, it's romanticized. It's hard to navigate as an employee. You don't know what to ask for, what to look at. So then I knew the Yahoo folks, Jerry Yang and Sue Decker asked me to come in and help them in 2008, again, a giant crash. Right. So I went to Yahoo and worked on their revenue and sales and marketing for a few years. And then I really still had the entrepreneurial itch. So I went to a company called Demand Media, which was sort of the first reverse engineering of the algorithm. We looked at what people were searching for, you know, how to make a smoky eye, how to write a check, how to make a strawberry margarita, and then we'd write that content.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so when I went to leave Microsoft, I'd sort of done everything that I could do up until I was a corporate vice president. There was 125 of us. And I was like, I want to go really be an entrepreneur. I wanted to start something. And I went to a little startup that was a failure, like not all startups are great. This one had taken $100 million, didn't really have a product. And I spent six months there and said, get me out of here.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I learned so much, and Microsoft was like a startup inside of a big company for me. I worked my last job there. I worked and reported to Satya Nadella. Which is amazing. Yeah, amazing.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, so at Microsoft when I went there, I knew that people were spending more time online. And I knew that advertising dollars would eventually follow that. We had to convince the industry, and I had to go convince people like Procter& Gamble and Coca-Cola and Walmart that they should spend money with Microsoft. They were spending most of their money with Yahoo. Google wasn't on the scene yet. And so we did crazy things, we did flyovers on the front page because that made marketers feel good and feel like they were doing flyo.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I went to work there, and over the course of seven years, I grew it from nothing to two and a half billion dollars in revenue. We did a deal with Facebook to represent them that led to their investment, Microsoft's investment in Facebook. We did video ads, the first video ads. We formed the Hulu Consortium. There were a lot of firsts during those periods at Microsoft. It was an amazing, amazing time in my career, and Microsoft was an insanely good company to work for to learn how to work at an engineering-led company.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Business Week wanted me to move to New York to become the associate publisher. 9-11 happened. My husband wasn't that excited to come to New York City. And so I said I have to go beg, borrow, and steal my way into a technology company. So I got the job as chief revenue officer of MSN in 2001. Nobody believed the bust had happened. Nobody was buying spots and dots or ads on the internet”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you do learn a lesson about equity based comp, and I finally got that right later on, which we can talk about. But yeah, I was making commission at that point in time. So when I was a salesperson at Business Week, I sold Morads than anybody and I made $2 million commission when I was 29 years old.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They sent me to a little known land called San Jose and Silicon Valley to sell advertising, and I sold ads to people like Hewlett Packard and Cisco when they had a hundred employees. And I went to Seattle and called on a little company called Microsoft and learned everything I could about technology, sun microsystems was the hot ticket at that point in time. And I talked Business Week into buying me an Apple computer and signing me up for an AOL account. And I never looked back on tech.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was no tech world, really. I mean, you know, after I graduated from college, I went to work in the Macy's management program because they were the only people that were hiring. It was either go drive a Frito Ley truck or Macy's management program. I did that for two years. It was fun. Learned how to buy merchandise. But my love of advertising called, and so I ended up working at Business Week magazine for almost 13 years. Right.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aztecs. I was a journal as a major because it was the easiest major at the time. And I went and took advertising courses and went to work at my college newspaper, one side were the writers, one side were the ad salespeople. They paid the ad salespeople. So I went in there and didn't turn back for 20 years. And so I've sold billions of dollars worth of advertising in my life.”
2024-05-02 · Masters in Business · Joanne Bradford on the Power of Marketing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source