YouSaid · the spoken record

John Mark Nickels

lines on the record: 76
first: 2024-10-06
most recent: 2024-10-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, in the spirit of welcoming and embracing feedback, you could most be useful by reaching out, telling me what resonated, what didn't, what was useful. Where did your energy go up when I talked? And where did your energy go down? Because that to me is a signal of where I'm back to tracking the life, right? Where's the juice? And then that way in the future, when I do other versions of this or other conversations, I'll pay more attention to the energy up stuff and kind of go more there. And the energy down was like, okay, maybe that wasn't as interesting or didn't resonate. Great, no problem.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So I am occasionally on Twitter at Nichols JM, but I don't tweet a lot, but maybe I should start. But the best way to find more about my kind of thoughts and thinking on the soft skill stuff is a website called Rhythm ofbeing.com. And I've got some blog posts and stuff there that go into detail on some of these things. And yeah, I do a little bit of coaching on the side with folks. I do very little now. My day job at Uber and my night job with my kids takes up most of my waking hours. But, you know, for the right person, a few select spots, I can make time. But yeah, that's the best place to find me is rhythm of being.com.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Travis Callanick. Yeah. Yeah. I'll share a quick one that's short but sweet or hilarious to make known. So we used to have the Uber office at 1455 market, right? And so there was a one conference room we often do reviews with Travis and that wasn't the war room whenever I don't know why it was taken. It was interior and no windows. But so this room had windows overlooking, what was that, 11th Street, right? So kind of 11th in market. And so we'd have like a presentation up on the projector, you know, some big screen. We're about to go through some of the Travis. And reliably, every time he'd come in, he would close the blinds of the windows. And what are we doing? It's not because there was glare. Like they were orthogonal to the screen. And one time I was like, why are you doing that? He's like, I'm pretty sure Lyft has drones outside the windows of our office and they're spying on our presentation. Oh my God. I was like, whoa.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I probably have had different ones over the years. The one right now that really serves me is this track called sit around the fire by John Hopkins, but it's on Spotify, Apple Music, but it's basically music with one of Ram Das' talks, less renowned talks. And so the monster that's been really serving me recently is the very first part of that, which is he says, Beyond all polarities, I am. Let the judgments and opinions of the mind be the judgments and opinions of the mind. You exist behind that. So sometimes I have an abbreviated version of that where I'm noticing I'm activated, I'm clinging to an opinion, I'm arguing with somebody, and they're like, I'm just like, Beyond all polar”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so eight sleep is a smart mattress company. They're on their third or fourth rep now, but it has like a tempored mattress where you can put their cover on any mattress, but it has a cover that has little like tubes of water and then it has a little computer thing and you fill with water and then an app. And basically what you do is you program it and it learns it has sensors. It can measure your heart rate, your HRV, body temperature, all that. But you're basically trying to program a temperature curve to help you maximize your kind of REM sleep and deep sleep and get more value out of the sleep that you do have. And so for me, it's like super cool early for deep sleep. And then it warms you up as you want to wake up, which is like, you know, an alarm and all that. But back to my thing about like wanting to show up with, you know, the right mindset and energy and aliveness, having really high quality sleep is a really key part of that is like, if I don't sleep well, you know, they didn't get enough sleep or didn't sleep well. Like you're already starting off on a bad foot.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, consistent with the emotional awareness and allowing the different emotional parts. And I don't want to spoil the movie for no one hasn't seen it, but it's very sympathatic with that lesson of like you can't just let one emotion run the show. They all have wisdom. And the first one right, sadness. Joy learning that sadness was necessary, right? It's all about integration and kind of, you know, but it was beautiful the way Kitchen understand it. It's a way to teach emotional literacy to your kids. So I think what they've done there with those inside out movies is just like brilliant.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Totally. Actually, Sam Harris is waking up that now has the entire, he worked with, I think, once his son. So the waking up app has all like 80 or 100 hours of Recorded Alan Botts”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need, you need money, time, resources to join your company. Great, you know. So anyway, resonate, Nancy Duarte, great book. Those would be some of the top two that I recommend. There's not one specific book, but I really love Alan Watts' books if you're into he was one of the first people to articulate and kind of import Buddhism and that sort of Eastern thinking into the West. He just has a very satirical, comical sort of not taking myself too seriously style and just like the way he explains a lot of those concepts. So that'd be another one.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or Duarte, sorry. I love her book Resonate. And then she has some other ones too on slide design stuff. But what was so cool about that, I gave it to PM all the time when I'm trying to help them develop their communication, storytelling, and presentation skills. She goes through those TED talks and Martin Luther King. I have a dream and going to the moon and basically make the sparkline against it to understand this concept of resonance with the audience. And it's actually a great skill for back to vision and North Starring, you know, she said all these things do is they alternate tension between the world as it is and the world as it might be. And it's like, you know, here's that beautiful future of transportation San Francisco, blah, blah, blah. And then, but here's why it sucks today, like all these problems and this and that. But here's how I could look in a few years. And then, you know, you're creating that tension, the audience at the end is like sweaty palms and like, I want to help build that future, you know?”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the realm of the soft skills and conscious leadership, the best one is the 15 commitments of conscious leadership by Diana Chapman and Jim Duffner. And those were my kind of early coaches and teachers almost 10 years ago. And Diana is still my coach. So I think that's a fantastic Another one more in the content world is I think you had Nancy Dwart on your podcast at one point, but I love her.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And choose to see it as a growth opportunity, learning how am I co-creating it, even things that I play a small part in in justice in the world, how am I perpetuating that and being willing to see the world as, you know, I am the painter of my existence, right? Like I think Victor Frankl's manuscript for meaning is probably the best example of that. He's in a super oppressive situation, very horrific and tragic. And the way he described his relationship with the people in the camp and the guards. And he was given, he gave talk after he was freed. The amount of compassion and empathy he had for his oppressors was like just like amazing. So I'm like, well, if he can do that in the face of those conditions, I can show up differently in a product review or in a conversation with my partner meeting or whatever it is.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing I'd encourage folks to do out of all the things we talked about is to see if you'd be willing to commit to breaking out of victim consciousness and mentality, right? And it's not to say there aren't victims of the world. There are real injustices and things happening. But most of us, you know, I've experienced, I often can fall into a trap of living my life at the effect of the effect of other people and what they do. I'm at the effect of circumstances like COVID or Trump or whatever. I'm at the effect of the conditions and circumstances of life. And I feel like this is happening to me, right? And so to me, the most empowering and radical kind of transformation that I've been able to cultivate and develop is shifting from that to a state of I am willing to take responsibility for how I see the world. And I may not be able to change the weather or the election or all that, but I can change how I'm being in relationship to.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go on vacation and do what we do. And that can lead us to doing things that ultimately don't matter in the long run, right? And like, you know, focusing on the wrong things. And so to me, it's like, you know, an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities. Stop wasting time on things that don't matter with people who matter. This relationship, this journey, it will come to an end. I'm actually cheering up and feeling tingly just saying that. It's like even right now, come back to it. How am I going to spend my afternoon? Going to hug my daughters? Am I going to spend time with them after work, or am I going to do email all night I wish I had done when I'm in my last breath.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On your objective function. And one way that I've gotten clear on is like trying to think about it from future me, right? Because like five years from now, I'm not going to give a shit if I made the presentation slightly better, but I'm going to care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters. And like that means that the next action, the next thing I do today and tomorrow, those will translate into the relationship with her, right? And I think a lot of us aren't just tuned into that. I love the Stoic stuff, you know, being mindful of deaf, you know, Seneca, Marcus Julius, all those great ones, not to be like morbid, but just like, again, most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end. And we kind of avoid that, right? We try to pretend like we're going to live forever and just not think about it. And the horror of it is that we succeed, right? We mostly manage to just go live our life and eat ice cream and go to work.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the key insights he comes to is like it's Sunday night, and you have the choice of playing with your daughter or reading a book or playing a game and you have a presentation to Dara on Monday. And you said, oh, I did make the slides a little bit better and I could go practice or knock out some emails or whatever it is you want to do. And so what he basically found was like the type A successful people are very short-term OF driven. They're like, well, presentations tomorrow and that can either go great or okay based on Sunday night. Whereas like my daughter will be here. I'll play with her next week. And the problem is getting this cycle where it's like, okay, you start working every Sunday night and then years and years go by and suddenly you don't have a relationship with your daughter who's now a teenager. And it's like, but I think we're just not conscious of that. So to me, the first piece of advice would be get clear.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the problem is that a lot of us aren't conscious of it. It's just kind of like an implied OF that you inherit values from your church or community or what your parents valued or what you kind of learned to be good at. And I do this for work and blah, blah, blah. I'm just kind of bobbing along. That's why I love Ray Dalia's principal thing where it's like, hey, write down your values and your principles and get clear on what they are. Clinton Christensen wrote a great book that he's less known for. He's obviously known for everybody at Plem. But he wrote a book called How Will You Measure Your Life? And he was trying to answer this question of, you know, he teaches whatever MBA students at Harvard. And he's like, wow, all these executives are super successful. They're like Fortune 500 execs. They're like, you know, most super successful. But they're all like divorce and their kids hate them and their personal wants are best. What's happening, right? And so, you know.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, and I think lots of people have different prescriptions for that. And I don't claim to have the one truth around that. But the first thing I would say as a meta observation is, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about objective functions. We designed algorithms to do matching and pricing and think about short-term effects and long-term effects. And so I really am ingrained in this idea.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I noticed that I just feel fear around this. Everyone was like, wow, I feel fear too, right? Like that would just totally change the tone of the conversation.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right anger to me is something is not of service to me or my people or my mission or whatever I'm up to. And so again, that can be a great signal to like, okay, pay attention to that. I want to change something. And enjoy is like something wants to be celebrated, right? Like, you know, we had a great win. We nailed the OKR. We had a great product launch. Like, you know, it's a lot of times we spend too much time moving back into the next, okay, let's set another goal. It's like, it's okay to stop and celebrate. And then like creative energy is like something wants to be born into the world, right? It's like almost like I'm going to birth an idea or a vision or he has some new product thing. And then, you know, that just tuning into that. So yeah, I would say welcome emotions, maybe even talk about them, God forbid, in the workplace, you know, like imagine it instead of having an OKR review where like you're behind target and everyone's like blaming other people and like, you know, you can tell everyone's kind of fearful. If someone was just like,”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About safety, and you want to be super, you know, that's one of the things I love about Waymo is they're very committed to having a super strong safety record. And so there might be fear around did we really consider all the edge cases of what might happen if a dog runs in the street or a ball or child or whatever, and you might see, wow, fear. It's like great. That's the wisdom of that is something wants to be paid attention to and listened to. Okay, great, right? Sadness for me is something wants to be let go of. There's a morning, there's a letting go of like I had an idea or vision for the future that will no longer be because whatever something happened people don't want to do it, this or that. But it could be a vision of a relationship. It could be a vision of, you know, what you thought your life would look like, you know, whatever we all go through those sorts of things. But there might be micro moments of sadness of like, wow, that feature didn't work. You know, it's like I really wanted it to be successful. I just let go of that, move up on the sadness.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I can start to access noticing them more. Like, where do I feel sadness in the body? I notice I feel fear, you know, and the kind of center of my chest. And then sadness is like a sinking feeling in my stomach. And I notice when I'm angry, my jaw gets tight, my eyes furrow a little bit, right? And so, you know, they're common ones, but you may have your own little signatures of like you pick up. Where is joy? Where is creative energy? Where is fear, sadness, anger? And then noticing those in a meeting or in a conversation or review. And actually, if you're willing, even just voice of other people, that's like the next step. But start with just, you know, acknowledging it to yourself. And so for me, the wisdom of emotions is, you know, fear is something wants to be paid attention to, right? Like there can be the saber truth tiger, you know, is not really Dara disapproving of me, whatever, I shouldn't be afraid of that. But there are times where fear is applicable. There might be fear around like, you know, let's say back at Waymo, you know, you want to really intentionally.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is back to kind of being aware of your internal state and allowing emotions and thoughts is emotions in the workplace. A lot of people have the thing of like, well, there's no need for emotion in the workplace, right? We're going to be logical. We're going to be data-driven. Keep your feelings at home. Just, you know, show up and presentation in JM mode. And I guess in my experience, there's this thing around like whole body intelligence and like whole body, yes, which is, yes, there is signal from the head and logic and data and left brain reasoning are amazing and it could be great. But there's also like heart and like gut, right? And like there's, you know, to me, what is an emotion? It's just energy moving on the body, right? And often it's correlated with a thought too as well. You know, I might have a thought that creates fear and so forth. But like to me, there's wisdom and emotion, right? And I can.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just work with Uber and have a faster path to high utilization of the vehicles, which unlocks financing and more vehicles. And that gets them to scale faster. And so if you look at the landscape right now, it's a bit of both, right? Like Waymo is obviously working with Uber and Phoenix. And we just announced Cruz will come back to some city next year, I think. And then Waymo's also still bullying their own thing, right? So they're kind of hedging their butts at the moment.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, we'll see what happens. I think Uber got out of the autonomy business when it divested autonomous technologies group or advanced technologies group. And right now But you know, when you look at what made Uber successful, you know, what we've been perfecting for the last decade, A, the marketplace tech that I alluded to earlier, but also, yeah, like how we manage a large writer base and doing rider support and driver support and logistics and, you know, all of the helping finance electric vehicles and working with regulators and cities and making sure we have safe and accessible pickup points and on and on and on, right? And it's like, you know, those are all the depth of the iceberg that you don't really realize or think of when you're like, oh, I can just build a rideshare up, right? You know, Tesla publishes their FIGMA design and some earnings report and everyone goes crazy like, wow, okay. Well, I don't want to bet against Elon because that sounds scary, but there is more to it than just the app and the autonomy. So yeah, I think these companies will have an interesting question, right? Like, do they go it alone, build their own rideshare network to capture all the value? Or do they say, well, I could.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's like just be mindful that it's more than just one there's multiple pillars of that, right? There's the self-driving piece, there's, you know, getting a lot of cars at scale, financing them, operating the fleet, getting the demand, filling the cars with people. And then it has to all come together.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then scaling a fleet of thousands of cars, and how do you operate them, clean them, charge them, maintain them? And then how do you build a rideshare network? It's like, okay, well, we got to build an app and we got to acquire users and do classic growth stuff. And think about that marketplace and matching and pricing. And those are like very different skills, right? And so it's like, you know, warning that those are different things and trying to hire for that and build culture around that was probably what's hard, honestly. It's just like you're kind of a different, you know, thing than the host organism. Most of the host organism is just obsessed with like perception and planning and, you know, kind of all the core autonomy pieces. And you're like the commercialization people there, well, I'm going to make money with this thing. So I think, you know, that's an example where like your overall vision would say Waymo is to build Waymo one.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know is you've probably seen people in San Francisco, right? They're quite prolific now in terms of they're all over San Francisco and you see them all the time. And I'm not sure, I can't remember the last time I saw one toad. So, you know, I don't want to say that they've solved self-driving, but they are obviously driving at scale with very minimal, at least real world intervention. Like, you know, you can't tell by looking at the cars how many humans behind the scenes might be helping provide guidance of the car or whatever. But yeah, I would say what's really interesting about Waymo is they've largely solved the self-driving piece, right? However, they've done that, right? And in a complex environment like San Francisco, and you see them driving in fog and rain and puddles and like, you know, it's like, wow, that's pretty cool. But I think what Waymo was learning, and I was trying to help them learn, is that, you know, building a self-driving car on a test track is a very different problem statement.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's a balance. It's back to, I don't want to deliberate and pontificate for weeks on end about which door I should run through. And I don't want to go to the other extreme and just like. Spend 30 seconds thinking about what to do and just go, go, go. So it's like finding that kind of happy medium. If I had to pick one, I'd rather biased towards running through a wall than not doing anything because you still get learnings from that and you either make progress or you don't. And that gives you feedback and you can run through another wall as a result. So I think the biggest failure case is probably erring on the other side of deliberating too long without action.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify, if that makes sense, right? Amazon has always been more consumer focused. Shopify is obviously very merchant focused. And by the way, either of those, again, there's no right or wrong, is a fine strategy. They're both great companies. And I actually don't know if you could do both, right? Like, is it possible to be Amazon and Shopify to really focus on consumers and build all the merchant restaurant tech? And maybe with enough resources and time, but that would lose focus. There's a trade-off there.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Side of the marketplace. But you will get DoorDash, and it's like, you know, Tony grew up in his parents' restaurant kitchen and the DoorDash thesis was, how can we help small businesses be more successful? And delivery was just the first instantiation of that sort of meta purpose of DoorDash, right? And so they're much more merchant-centric as opposed to consumer-centric, right? By the way, the consumer centricism of Uber that started with Rides then translated to EAS, right? I think when Uber started with EATS, it was like, well, we just want Lenny to have some great Thai food and, you know, sushi and have some options, but selection is a means to Lenny having a great eater experience. Whereas DoorDash with their merchant focus is like, we want every Thai restaurant in this city to be successful and be on DoorDash. So their motivation for selection is we want all of the merchants to thrive and survive. And so that happens to give you better selection as a result. But the motivation was very different, right? So the analogy I use is like Uber.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's really amazing to get to see different places and kind of pick the best of what you like. And also the other thing is back to like, for me, there's no right or wrong. It's just like differences have pros and cons, right? There's always like two sides of the coin, right? So what's interesting, I think, about Uber and DoorDash is first back to the mission and the strategy. They started with different DNA, right? So like, you know, Uber started with, you know, it was still like utilize block cars at the airport that were like not doing trips, but it was more about the riders, right? It was like whatever Ordin Story Bleak, you know, Travis and whoever, you know, can get a ride in Paris, right? And so then it was about like, you know, better than taxi and all this stuff, right? But it was very rider-centric. It was consumer-centric in that sense, right? And so, you know, for a long time, I think Uber kind of took that too far. We got to the Blair. It's like drivers or commodity, you know, blah, blah, blah, and they had to flip that back and start, you know, really investing more in the drivers.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love that. It's almost a different flavor of, I think, the Bezos saying of, you know, he's like, I like a crisp dock and a messy meeting. The whole Amazon thing, if you have the three page or seven page narrative, it's written with the clarity of angels singing from on high, at least describing how the problem state and our future or whatever. And so it's like super crisp and organized and well articulated. And then you might have a meeting where you pick it apart and you talk a lot. That's what made me think of that. So yeah.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, I think it's about balance. And it's, you know, can you adjust? Again, it's dynamic. I think there's times where you're in a soul searching sort of what is our product strategy? You know, we got to pivot. Maybe you're a startup and you're not working and you want to think about. And then it's like, okay, well, off the. Pull off the gas a little bit, ease up on the execution, and let's lean into the strategy vision piece. And then there's times where the strategy and vision is pretty baked, at least for the next whatever six month year. And it's like, okay, pedal to the metal. Let's just go execute. Let's get it done.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you thought about this one random problem that could happen two years from now if teens become this much of demand and blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever? And it's just like we do get wrapped around the axle on that sometimes. But yeah, so the future Bryce is a really good example where you wouldn't go too far in the three one. But you could probably go too far into execution land too. And I'd say DoorDash, in my experience, would do that sometimes where we used to actually even have joke there. Some of us leaders would be like, it's like ready fire aim And it was like people would be like, I'm just going to run through a wall. I have no idea if that's the right wall to run through, but at least I know I'm running through a wall.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this was a point to try to bring together, say, how we do driver pricing, time and distance rates, but also we do incentives for drivers, where it's like if you drive as many hours a week, you get a bonus. There's also third pricing and like how to tile the systems together in a very sophisticated sort of way. This was back in 2017 or something and it was just winged a little too hard into theory land. And we still have that bias sometimes. You know, we joke about marketplace, especially when we talk about with other teams that are trying to integrate into marketplace. Let's say they add fleets or teams with a big new product, right? And then marketplace people would be like, well,”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you can go too far either direction, right? It's like everything in life is about balancing the polarity between two opposing forces. And so in this one, it's like, yeah, you go too hard into vision and theory land. I've seen that go off the axle at early Uber, where, again, back to the future of pricing, it's like, you know, we have all the data scientists and PhDs walked in a room for two weeks. There's a beautiful whiteboard diagram, what it could look like. And then it's like, how do we actually build this thing? And engineers are like, this is like boiling the ocean, you know. And like you just get wrapped around the axle of like, well, that sounds really good in theory, but I have no idea how to even start executing on this. So that's probably an example of like we tilted a little too far towards, you know, vision theory land.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to go on that table. Whatever structure you use, I think the most powerful takeaway from that book for me was if it's in your head, you're screwed. Because it's like you're trying to keep track of stuff and be creative and come up with future transportation and remember to pick up something from the pharmacy. It's just not, it's a recipe for disaster. This whole idea of empty mind, you know, beginner's mind, well, you have to empty the mind of all the to-go's first and just get them out of the head.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. I tried to do the David Allen GTT thing once, you know, the super complicated organization system. And it's like, it was too much structure for me. I couldn't do it. At the end of the day, when you just write, there's basically three things that I need to do next. And then there's just some random backlog that could just scan through periodically. And that's it. That could see most of the way.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, sometimes if first and like you got to do that, you have a large team. Like, I do obviously review the press team. I'm not saying I don't do that in some days. But it's like, yeah, like, what are my top few things, right? Like, I think you're right. I think it was Peter Tor from the early PayPal guys talked about that too, right? Like going really deep and having a person or a leader, like really responsible for one core deep thing for the company. And that's like something they immersed themselves in. And so in the micro, that to me again translates to, yeah, I don't have a to-list of 20 things, right? I try to have a to list of three of the most important highest leverage things that could kind of have impact broadly across the company and then try to just like you said like, but that one top thing marinate and chew on it.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that's at the macro level, maybe spending 10 years in a space. But at the micro level, back to kind of like don't defrag your day. Don't just do the 30-minute meetings, you know, 20, 30 minute meetings on 20 different topics.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we built something that no one else has ever built. And relative to like the digital marketplaces, for example, just different physical world requirements. And then this next arc of what I described of thinking about different types of supply and different kind of demand channels just adds even more concrete to that. But the aha was like, I guess, yeah, we got to think about all that stuff and think about how the supply and demand relate to each other.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have taxis on the platform, and we have fleet providers, and we're starting to add Waymos and crews and other things. We have to have a marketplace that's aware of those different types of supply. And, you know, which ones might be available for what trips and how to think about cost and quality and kind of allocation of trips and all that. And then on the demand side, it's like, yeah, we've got all these different products like shared rides and reserved rides and comfort and X and priority. And it's like, how do we think about how to price those relative to each other, right? How do we think about which ones to show which user? How do you think about the ranking and so forth? And then that all has feedback loops into the pricing and matching itself as well. The dynamics of the thing when I think about the future of marketplace and Uber is like, whoa, you know, it's like, and I don't think it's ever built that's the super cool thing about it. I think we have the best logistics marketplace tech on the planet.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it wasn't maybe a specific wrinkle, but one of the things that we're thinking a lot about, I'm fortunate to be involved in trying to help develop and articulate kind of a multi-year three-year sort of product or even overall three tech strategy for the mobility business. And one of the, I guess, big ahas for us is as we move away from the kind of, in some ways, somewhere world of Uber X, right, being the predominant product, which is it used to be pretty simple, right? It's kind of like a taxi meter on the driver's side, right? There's a time and distance rate that everybody gets. And then on the rider's side, it's like, sure, there's some search pricing based on supply and demand, but it's one product that's pretty straightforward. And so, you know, this future of multimodality and on the both demand side and the supply side is what makes marketplace like even more complex and challenging to build. And so it's kind of around like, okay, well, now that we”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's something to what you said, which is there's always a lot of content out there to pursue. And I have been in that where I'm like, yeah, more content. But yeah, actually similar to you spend a lot of time now not listing anything, you know, go on a hike where you don't listen to a podcast or music or your commute and see what happens. You might be surprised.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you move into co creation. But I love that. It's like, you know, the Pixar calls the brain trust, right? If you mole's book, right, where like how they come up with Toy Story and inside out and all these things, right? It's like they have this group of people that just sits around riffing on ideas. And again, there's no judgment. There's no attachment to being right. There's no, you know, they're in a co-creative sort of space where they're just like co-exploring and riffing with each other. And I love to be in that space with other PMs and engineers and data scientists.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't work, right? And so I'm a big fan of carving out time, again, versed for myself, a couple hours, you know, whatever that's where I can just get out of the day-to-day craziness and get into that headspace in five, ten years from now, right? It's just a different place. So you need to transition into that. And then, yeah, bring that to teams. Like if I have like an outline of that kind of future transportation in my head, I might share that with a group of folks and we'll come together also for some extended period of time. Like we recently had an all day Monday thing where eight of us came into the office to talk about future of marketplace. And it was super productive. It was like, you know, laptop's down. We're going to spend all day together on a whiteboard. It's like a lost art. People use the whiteboards anymore. But yeah, and then from there, it's like getting more people. And then you can kind of iterate on, right? It's like I had some vision of the future and someone points out something that is a little bit off with it or it has a better idea or you kind of your”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's not like something you can just schedule 30 minutes for in the middle of your day of packed OKR reviews and run-on on ones and meetings. You know, it's like, I like to do it on my own first, unless it's something I already have a kind of an outline for and I'm ready to move into a team space. So for me, it's like, yeah, like, can I get into a quiet, contemplative space, right? So yeah, I like to go for a run and that obviously gives me ideas or I'll go for a hike up in Morin. And sometimes I'll just like think of stuff or drop something down or make a voice note while I'm doing that kind of get things going. But yeah, like the first step for me is just getting out of the craziness of day to day. Like to me, it's still insane. Like how many product manager leaders of all kinds, right? Just run the schedule of like back-to-back meetings, you know, 30 minute reviews, a big meaty topic. You're running out of time. Running the next thing. Answer a bunch of emails and then cram some PRDs in there. And it's like, you know.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. I think you could probably do either. I typically like to start with the farmer, which is just like, what will the world move towards absent me? Just trying to take a, you know, kind of bird's eye view of what I think is the trajectories are and trends and what's going to happen. And then, yeah, you could apply a lens of, okay, if we were to build product X, Y, Z or to have this strategy, how might we influence the outcome or benefit from it? Or is it in congruence with that or is it rubbing against that and trying to change that? Either could be good, right? You might say we're going to tailwind or a headwind. Both are overcomable, but like having some awareness of the relationship between those things is good. Yeah.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With single occupancy, we're just going to have even more grid luck than we do right now. Man, maybe we'll do the boring company thing and dig tunnels, but it's even likely. So then for me, it's like, well, for principles, shared rides is going to continue to be an important part of the future transportation and other modalities where, yeah, back to the three mile thing. It's like, well, it probably will be various form factors of bike scooters and little mini golf cart things and whatever we end up building, right? And so that's kind of hopefully an example of how I try to think about what are the likely things to be true in the future. And then how does that lead to a potential kind of ecosystem and strategy around what we might build towards that future?”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, we'll probably solve it with just cameras and multi-lide argument because humans don't have LIDAR. And the cost of vehicles and sensors will come down, remote support will come down. And at some point, it'll be super cheap. And it's like, okay, I can extrapolate that will be a thing separate from which player wins. I'm not saying I can predict the ecosystem of companies that will win here. It's more about just the underlying dynamics, right? And then, you know, that would be one. And that one would be, yeah, sharing away. It's like, well, a lot of people are like, oh, well, once we have cheap autonomous cars, like everyone can just have their own super cheap Uber, Tesla, whatever it is here on the city. And you're like, well, that doesn't work because then we're going to hit this induced demand concept, right? Which is like what economists call up and like, yeah, used to when text messages cost 50 cents a piece, how many did you send, right? Versus now when it spreads and a million. Same thing when they add a lane to a highway, right? The traffic just gets just as bad as before because more people drive and so forth. So if we flood the streets with super cheap autonomous cars.”
2024-10-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source