YouSaid · the spoken record

John Doerr

lines on the record: 117
first: 2018-05-14
most recent: 2018-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Andy was an engineer, a great manager, but also an educator. And he took, he thought the role of a leader was to educate the organization. And so he taught a course at Stanford, which in my view didn't really scale, but he taught something called IOPEC, which was Intel's organization, philosophy, and economics. And through that, he propagated the culture, the all-important answer to the question, why? Why is it we do what we do? The book is less about Bill Campbell. So I put an afterword or a dedication into”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Andy, as I told you, Andy said to young, inexperienced John Dore, it almost doesn't matter what you know. What matters is how you get teams to work together, how you execute, how you deliver. And Kara, you've seen this throughout this valley. It was so many great ideas. But they don't know how to execute Andy was an engineer.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The book's dedicated to it seems like a weekend. Interesting. The book's dedicated to two of the most amazing leaders that I was exposed to, mentored by Andy Grove.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so talk a little bit about that because you also talk about some of your mentors in the book. Bill Campbell was one of them. The book's dedicated to, it seems like a weekend of Andy Grove and Bill Campbell, which is interesting.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'll mention this is not a business book. This is a handbook, and it's only been out for a little over a week, but the feedback I've gotten is people are underlining it, reading it, putting stickies in it, and using it, adapting it to be better at. Making their teams better. As Campbell said, we got to be better every day.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because you're not At the top. The key results are absolutely measurable and verifiable. In fact, if they don't have a number attached with them, they're not good key results. One of the things in the book, by the way, is I put at the back of it a bunch of resources. So there's an internal guidebook on how Google sets them. There's timelines.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So those were at the top of the organization. Then at the next level of the organization, someone would say, okay, I'm on the anti-HIV. Objective, that's what I'm aligned with. How am I going to get that done? Well, I'm going to make sure the global fund gets funded. And one way to fund the global fund is with the REDD campaign. And if I'm going to make the red campaign successful, And indeed, Apple's been an enormous contributor to that effort. And I don't think that would have happened without OKRs.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the really key measures there was getting antiretroviral HIV drugs, initially two pills. Principally to women in Africa”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the key results was debt relief for the neediest countries. And they track that over time and they achieved it. And the other was to eliminate preventable disease.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Bono Organization. So I offered to do the OKR pitch to Bonos one nonprofit. They had two gorgeous objectives, one of which was to eliminate extreme poverty, stupid poverty.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most nonprofits, as Bill Gates says in the book, confuse their mission with their objectives, and they never get to specific key results. And when he launched the Gates Foundation, which was a $50 billion nonprofit startup, One of the most amazing things that's ever happened, he was also still chairman of Microsoft. And how could he keep track of everything that was going on? Well, Patty Stonecipher, who you'll remember. Was the CEO, and they used OKRs and the grading of these every quarter to allow Bill, as he says in the book, to earlier discover, flag whether or not a program was going to be aligned and going for the right objectives. Usually they were because of the system, but sometimes he found they needed course corrections or even to be shut down. So that's the power of the tracking.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what are the ones that are there other management systems that do work? Because sometimes an overwhelming CEO does work. I'm thinking of Apple, although I think they probably are much more of a team than people realize. Much more so. I mean, one time I remember Steve Jobs saying to me, they think I'm like Willy Wonka and everybody else is anpa, but I'm not. But he kind of was. But it was an interesting he was left out of it.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's nothing special about the latitude and longitude of Silicon Valley that says leaders there are going to be effective if they're not clear in using goals to empower their team.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you don't have clear goals, measure your progress against them, share them among your team members and get the team aligned and working on them. That's potentially the power of this system. But if you're in a founder worshiping culture where you have a narcissistic CEO who's never run anything before and is out of her depth.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm going to push back in a little bit about how things are run in Silicon Valley because they do talk a lot about OKRs, and we've got these new ways of management. And many companies are just not well run. Things happen. And then suddenly I'm thinking of what happened at Facebook recently. It's clear something happened in the management of that platform, although they're sort of pushing it out there. Like we have no idea what happened here. How a surprise this happened. And you think about Uber, you think about a lot of companies. And it just seems like they're just badly run or not run at all, or they have a set of ethical guidelines that are non-existent. Talk about that. Consilium Valley likes to pride it safe on being this sort of these well-run organizations when in fact many, many of them are not. And they're run in a very CEO-centric way. They're run a little bit of a cult of personality. If you're talking about team building, it's sort of an antithesis to the way we think of”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That depends on the CEO wanting to have that kind of conversation happen. The CEOs find it's a powerful tool to get consensus among their team about what's possible, what's a risk, what is not. I want to come back to boards now. When an organization has transparent OKRs within their organization, of course they're going to share them with the board. And then the board members can review those in advance of the meeting and not talk about the operating issues in the company. We can talk about the really strategic things that matter. So, I find them to be, and more importantly, entrepreneurs who use them find them to be great for communicating and aligning and great for making sure the board conversations are about things that really make a difference.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I have both professional and personal OKRs, but staying with companies for just a moment, I find that they're very useful for boards because they can ensure that all the stakeholders in the company are on the same page. They sanction a kind of conversation in an organization that otherwise often doesn't happen. Let's say we're in a staff meeting and Kara and I are both working for you. I can challenge Kara and say, I don't think that's aggressive enough. We can take more risks. Can't we stretch further? And you push back on me.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't write OKRs for companies. I encourage companies to do it, but I want the leadership of the company to write those.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I would love to get into what OKRs look like from where you sit as a venture capitalist. I mean, obviously you have personal OKRs as your family life and your professional life. But we'd love to unpack kind of when OKRs might conflict with one another. You might have a goal as a board director for a company, a CEO might have a different OKR. How often do objectives kind of clash? Obviously you serve on a lot of boards. How do you manage that?”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And especially if you've decided to do it instead of your doctor telling you to do it. That's the power of this system. I see.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And your key result then is going to be to complete a marathon or a half marathon. You're much more likely to succeed at being healthy if you've chosen the key result.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because usually people get motivated. There's an intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic motivation that is the point. You know, it's pretty amazing that these OKRs have never leaked out of Google or for that matter, lots of organizations that use them. They form a kind of social contract. I think it's because I generated the key results for myself. Let's say the objective is for Cara to be healthy.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you don't get a grade on it, how do companies, where's the discipline if you don't reach those goals, I think is more my question. It's like you set them and then if nothing's attached to them, what's the point? Because usually people get motivated.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is not a good grade. But aspirational ones are stretched. They're nearly impossible to achieve. In getting to 70% of them the way Sindhar did. In his second year.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in fact, of course, the Google engineers don't just measure them to 70%, they get it to a tenth of a decimal point. Right. They've adapted this so they have both committed OKRs that you need 100% of, an aspirational ones where 70% between.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not stressing enough Not stretching enough. And if you only get 20% done, that's another kind of problem. And it takes time to build goal muscle and to get good at this. I think as Larry Page said, I would rather have a team aimed to land on Mars. And know that if I'm going to fall short, we can still get to the moon.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end, whether you get the end of every quarter, done or not done. And let me then finish on the two other properties that this system delivers. Because one is it allows for tracking. So you can track your progress along the way. And by the way, common sense prevails. If something mid-quarter is no longer important, just drop it. And if you get to the end of the quarter and you didn't get it done, then roll it forward. This is nothing other than a tool. It's just a system. The fifth and final property, though, is the one that I really love. And that's to set stretch goals. So that you decide as a culture that head recode, it's okay to fail. We're going to try to do things. And if we get 70% of them done, that's a good grade. If you consistently get everything done, you were probably sandbagging.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The organization knows in a heartbeat. Right. So Ginie Kim's company, Nuna, struggled with them in the beginning. They were very helpful to get some focus. But it wasn't until Jeannie said, I'm going to stand up every quarter and put my personal OKRs out there in addition to the companies. And I'm going to grade them that...”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So sometimes the founder CEO is just not that disciplined. You might have seen that from time to time, and they won't commit to using it. And if they don't value it.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, why do you think companies decline to do this? If obviously in the situation excited about it, but I'm sure the urban companies over time that say, you know, John, I don't know if I agree or why should this be a priority? What's the counter argument to why to impose this kind of management system in the first place? When you're talking with CEOs, what's the resistance you get?”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You do have time to set some big ones for the company and then let everybody else at each level set their own. And so it's a distributed system.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's the point. Every quarter since then, every Googler has written down her objectives and key results. And they posted them internally, and they've graded them. And then at the end of a quarter they toss him aside. They're not used for bonuses, they're not used for promotions. Instead, they're for a higher purpose, which is a kind of collective commitment. A social contract that I'm going to try to do these things aligned with and focused on”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just wanted the money, but go ahead. No, not quite. Actually, what he said was we don't have any better way to manage this company. So we'll give this a try. All right. And I took that as an endorsement.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, the better story is to tell you about Larry and Sergei. I introduced these to them in 1999. They were 24 years old. They were in Susan Wachick's garage. Yeah, they were. I remember. I went through my slideshow with them, and I said, okay, so what do you think? And Sergei enthusiastically said,”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You align everybody's work by making these public and transparent. And if we go to the average company in America, just the very idea that the goals are all transparent in public. That's revolutionary. That's a big change. The third thing, let's see, they're focused. They get a level of commitment. That's extraordinary. And here's the key. The most times that I've seen this system fail is when the CEO or the leader of a business unit doesn't personally commit. So we tell the story in the book about Sundar.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in any given time, about 30% of the people are working on the wrong things. Right. It's just hard to know which ones they are. Right, right, right. And so.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's actually five things that it delivers for you. The first is focus. So you're only allowed to pick a small number of objectives and key results. The fewer the better. I'd say three to five objectives, and they can be long-lived. And then maybe three key results per objective. Remember, objectives are the what. Key results are the how. And if I achieve those hows, those key results, I will provably get to the objective. So picking the few ones, OKRs are not the sum of all tasks. It's not everything you're trying to do inside Vox or inside Recode. It's the few things that really matter. So they allow you to focus. The next thing that they do is they align your organization. I love Aaron Levy. He said to me something along the lines of”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so OKRs are not a silver bullet. They are not a substitute for either strong culture. Stronger management. But when you have those fundamentals in place, this system all the time will take your team to the mountaintop.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supposedly pick-throughs. Okay, and then he optimized the browser to maximize click-throughs as opposed to something that was a better reflection of overall user satisfaction.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in some cases, it's because they're bad or they're unethical. In other cases, though, I think they've picked the wrong objectives. They've led us to those, and that's led us to totally unacceptable outcomes.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so to have an open source free kind of browser. Now, why did I say picking the right goal is so important? I think we're at a moment in time Where our leaders and some of our great institutions are failing us.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He would demonstrably get the world's best browser. So for three years, he had the same objective. But each year after that, he raised the key result. The first year, I think it was in 2007, it was 20 million users. And he only got 10. The next year he raised it to $15 million. And he only got 35 million, but that was 70% of the goal. I'll come back to that. The third year, he upped the ante once again to 100 million users. And this time with better technology, superb marketing campaign and distribution deals, he blew it away. He got to 111 million users. And if you and I reflect back on what the internet was like in 2007, It was slow”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, really good key results are strategic and time bound. They're aggressive but realistic. But most of all, they're measurable and verifiable. So, again, with the best browser example, Sundar chose numbers of users in latency or speed. He could have chosen a lot of other things. He could have chosen downloads, revenues, click-throughs. But when he picked those, he knew that if he achieved those, and they started with nothing,”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The what for a good objective is something that must be significant, concrete, action-oriented, and inspirational. But it need not be specific. So an example would be Sundar in 2008 took on an objective to build the next generation platform for web applications. Or in other words, build the world's best browser. Now, the key results then, picking the right key results, is really crucial.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's three fundamental questions you must answer. The first is why in the book's a little light on this topic, but why has everything to do with our values and our mission, and I think is a particularly relevant question at this moment in time. We're going to return to that. But objectives in key results are the answers to the question what I want to have accomplished and how I'm going to get it done. What and how objectives and key results and this is with full credit to Andy Grove. I did not invent. You know, one angstrom of this idea.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So just for starters, I mean, you say in the book that for a long time you've been preaching about OKRs, but you felt like you weren't getting the job done. I would love to hear just about kind of reflecting on whether it was with Boz Bezos or with Larry and Sergei, like what the challenges were in kind of getting people to adopt your line of thinking. And it's interesting you kind of open with a self-critical remark that you felt the need to write the book because you weren't getting the job done. Like, what was so hard about it? Shouldn't people be naturally taking your advice?”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody does these things by themselves. And so their commitment to assemble an outstanding technical and leadership team, I think, is the difference in executing. And the theme of this book is executions everything. Ideas are easy.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really? It was opposite the free needle clinic, as you'll remember. And so Jeff, who was a Princeton grad and from the hedge fund DE Shaw, he was a quant, came bounding down from that second floor loft with his booming voice. And he and I both studied computer science. And so we hit it off. And I'm usually pretty quick to judge whether or not I want to get in trouble with someone or not.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the headline is I saw amazing entrepreneurs. Amazing entrepreneurs. But more than that, I saw explosive growth. Jeff Bezos, I remember meeting him in a loft that was Amazon's headquarters in a very seedy part of Seattle. I went with”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I and others saw what was possible there, it was like a tsunami of opportunity within a few years that led to Amazon. It led to Google. It led to all kinds of companies that either adapted to that and exploited it or they got left behind.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT