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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“That looks like. It's like, okay, so we can do this right now. It's okay. 10 years from now, what could San Francisco look like or some city? What happens to the parking spaces? Are there still parking garages? Are those parks now? What are the modes of transport? Are there like bus-like things that are autonomous that are connecting people to bikes and computers? And how are people living? Do they live in the far suburbs even more because autonomy and they have a nicer house and they come in or with all the space repurposed and actually it's cheaper to live in the city because we compact things, blah, blah. It's not even about having the right one. It's more just like kind of developing some sort of, you know, picture of the future that gets you fired up, right? And then, yeah, you got to go like, you know, articulate that and communicate it and get people to come on the journey with you. But like from meth picture, it's like, well, first principle is what's going to be true, you know, 10, 20 years from now. Well, autonomy is like Given, I think most people would probably agree with that.”
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 even a couple of humans, right? We do an Uber pool or a share, right? And you move two humans or three humans. Even then, like that's pretty inefficient, right? You think about just the physics there of like the energy expenditure, right? It's like, and that's where I think, you know, you might come up with bikes and scooters and little other things, right? And sure, it's not always, it's raining. Maybe you want the car. But that's sort of an example of why questioning like why are things the way they are? is the way they are like super inefficient or like not optimal from in some sense right and that is often a doorway to opportunity right to see okay well maybe things could be different and so i kind of extend that you know at a larger level to the future you know my my general thing is just like yeah that's the mountain thing is like i i try to just like close my eyes and imagine the future as far out as i can you know it's like five years from now ten years from now whatever and it's like develop a really salient picture of what”
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
“A long time is a precursor to being successful. The other thing I would say, though, is people always talk about first principles thinking, but there's truth in it. I think that's like, you know, and like when Elon's like, well, why does the rocket cost gazillion dollars to launch? And there's no reason they have to throw away the materials. And it's blah, blah. You know, one example might be, why do we need a 4,000 pound vehicle to move a human three miles”
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, and like I get really jazzed when I think about wow, like work I do could actually impact their future lives and other people. It's like, whoa, I can feel the chills right now. It's just like super motivating. So that's the first place, just getting myself kind of fired up. And then the next thing, I guess it's been helpful is, you know, I've deeply immersed myself. You know, I have, it's also, you know, I haven't really jumped around between crypto and gen AI and other stuff. A lot of people do that's great. Nothing wrong with that. But, you know, I've been in this, you know, largely focused on mobility space for 10 years now with some stents over in the restaurant tech and delivery side, but very related in terms of last mile logistics. And so, you know, I think it's hard to come up with a great strategy if you've only been working in an area for like six months or so. It's like, especially things like this have been nuance. Like shared rides is another good example where it's a super hard problem to crack. And like, you know, it's like going deep on that.”
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
“Couple things have been helpful. One is, you mentioned earlier, finding a mission that you're really passionate about. I think it would be hard for me to come up with a strategy for improving the healthcare system. It's important. I hope someone does it and figures out how to deal with HIPAA and whatever all this stuff. But it's like, it's just not for me. It's not my purpose, mission, and vision in life. And so step one is like, am I working at a place and in a product area? in which I have a tremendous amount of passion, right? Because for me, that is the fuel and the motivation that helps me break through to getting the strategy. That's like the first step. So that's where I feel enormously lucky because, again, like this, you know, revolutionizing transportation and car ownership and what happens with autonomy and form factors and future cities is something that I'm super excited about. I think about my daughters growing up and having a, you know, a different world to live in that's safer and more environmentally friendly, all this stuff.”
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, thank you. I appreciate the compliment. Thank you. That is a great quote. Wow. Yeah, I mean, there's no magic toolkit or manual. I've long ago given up on the notion that I'm one book away from the perfect elusive answer to whatever plagues you in life. And there's obviously lots of books about strategy. And, you know, you get into all that. I guess for me.”
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
“Not about the optics itself. It's like what the Buddha is saying, don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. And the finger pointing at the moon can be the presentation, the OKR, whatever. And it's like, that's not the actual outcome we care about, right? That's an input to the output that really matters, which is the work, the product.”
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, and to be clear, I do think it's important, like it can't be all work and no optics or all optics and no work, right? There does need to be a balance there. And I think it does change depending on the size of the company and this level of seniority when you're an IC, you're probably hopefully doing more actual work and leaders are supporting them and presenting and communicating that work so that they get. I mean, the optics does matter, right? Like at some senior level, you do spend more time on that. And it does have influence back to the influence piece, right? Which is like, you know, how will I communicate an idea and the need for engineering resourcing and so forth might mean that team gets more engineers or doesn't get more engineers or we do this project or we don't, right? Because at the end of the day, executive kind of research allocation is largely based on the quote unquote optics layer. So it does matter. I want to be clear. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. But to me, again, it's more about that's a means to an end.”
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
“Shared rods, right? And there's lots of different ways we can take the product and all that. And it's really about I want to make a fucking awesome product, right? And it's like whether people like me or think I'm a good PM or presenter, as long as I manifest, you know, a great product into the world that makes writers better off, drivers better off, cities better off, less congestion, all these things. Like that to me is the reward. And sure, in order to manifest that, it is often helpful to communicate things, present, align, all this sort of thing. But those are a means to a more powerful and transformative end than just my career. I'm tapping into a larger purpose and sense of belonging and identity and sort of meaning. And from that place, it's like, I'm just, I just dropped the kind of egoic self-centered focus on, you know, whether I did go in the presentation or not. And then, yeah, maybe paradoxically, by doing that, it actually”
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, again, and maybe it is a little paradoxical, but what I found was the more I focused on how I show up and optics and having a good deck and all this, the less I got promoted. And then the more I dropped focusing all that. Because for my first few years, we were Ken Housing Year PM. And then I finally got my group and started kind of, you know, moving through the product ladder. And it was really like correlated to me at least, maybe causal with, yeah, dropping a lot of the focus on the on the presentation and how I show up and whether people like this or not. And just really focusing on the work. It's like, you know what? I am here to be a conduit from what wants to happen in the world of transportation and mobility and shared rides is like one that I've always been picking pressure ambassador. It's a good example. And then how can I kind of, you know, get present and listen to like what wants to happen next in the world?”
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 not, you know, it's not permanent, right? Like, I mean, it's like, sure, there might be some high stakes things in life where you only get one shot, but for the most part, it's like, you know, if I screw up, if I didn't do a great job in this presentation, you know, there'll be another one, right? Like, it's okay. You know, and think of it as practice. The other thing is like from the fear threat state, I'm like, uh-oh, this is a risk. Alarm bells, right? You know, like my career could be over. Whereas if I'm in that trusting, curious open space, it's like this is an opportunity for feedback. You know, how can I learn? How can I get to become a better presenter? You know, it's like the feedback from others is no longer a threat. It's actually a gift. It's like, you know, it's like, you know, information, right? I can use or not use to, you know, alter how I show up in the future and the Skola develop and all that good stuff.”
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
“Was that as long as I was going out there looking for all that stuff to try to complete something inside of me that was missing, it was like I was like a hungry ghost. It's like it doesn't matter how many Michelin star meals and promotions and money and title and whatever, right? It's like it's never enough. It's like you can kind of enjoy it for a little bit. And then you get back to like, hey, you know, so it's like a never-ending like sugar addiction. And so that's kind of the next step for me is like allow it. Yes, allow the emotion allow the thought. Come home to I am okay even if Darth does think I suck. And then also.”
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, that would be the first step is just to allow whatever's here, thoughts, and emotions are arising. They come, they go, they're transient. It's not permanent, right? There's a lot of wisdom, I think, in the Buddhist lineage around those concepts. And then the next piece for me, once I can take a breath and relax a little bit, is coming home to the fact that this has been a little more radical for some people, I don't actually need Dara to approve of me in my presentation in order to be okay. Right? Like what I'm up to over here is trying to force self-worth and self-love from within. And so, you know, we talk about like approval, control, and security. It's very easy to look for that from the world, right? Do you approve of me? And if not, can I control outcomes to get approval or get security and get, you know, the job, the bank account, the house, whatever it is. But what I kind of woke up to at one point.”
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 think you're right. It is a little counterintuitive, but like one of my first coaches actually had a great phrase, what you resist will persist and what you fear will appear. And so in my experience, this is another reason why I'm becoming more aware of my internal world is so important. I have more agency than I realize on the output of my experience, right? And so when I think of thought like, gar might think I suck and I have a thought that I suck, that can become a self-enforcing negative feedback loop. where I have a thought that creates stress, anxiety, fear. And then that triggers more thoughts. And we call it cognitive emotive loop where you're kind of in this cycle of like thinking stressful thoughts and then having unpleasant, you know, anxious, fearful feelings. And so one way to break that, yeah, is to just allow it and not try to fight it with other thoughts.”
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 like my daughter the other day had some nightmares, and she was like, Dad, how do I stop thinking thoughts that, you know, kind of about the nightmare or whatever? And I was like I said, you can't. Don't try to stop the thought. Just allow it. Let me show you why it doesn't work. I said, don't think of a pink elephant. You just think of a big elephant, and then now she gets hilarious, she tells his district, don't think of the pink elephant.”
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
“Amazing, but I did help name Uberpool, Uberpool, which I Selfishly like to bring back, it got renamed to share during my external APM rotation.”
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
“Is that true? Yeah, that's right. I think that's right. When I joined, we were already scaling UberX rapidly. I joined in early 2014”
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 built the Uber X model and scaled it out to the world. That's primarily how we got here. And now it's like, you know, we're going out for all these different new sort of modalities, whether it's reserving a ride in advance or shared rides or renting a car or buses and then different supply types too, right? Like it's not just contractors, right? We have a lot of fleets in the platform. We now have a lot of taxi drivers in the platform. You've seen we've signed deals with Waymo and Cruz and other autonomous players. I feel like we're now at the beginning of another era of Uber, right? And transportation that the next decade or two is going to be like super exciting.”
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 that got me interested in kind of pursuing more skills and coaching of individuals and teams. But yeah, to your Uber question, yeah, the Uber 1.0 was crazy. Uber 2.0 was kind of like, you know, Travis is out. The board is feuding, is leaking the Mike Isaac, whatever. And then Dara comes in and, you know, kind of the peacemaker and then tries to state wise, but the IPO is rocky. And so now I would say we're in Uber 3.0, which is full pirate ship to Navy in Hoffman's words, profitable company. We're printing free cash flow. We're in S&P 500, right? Like, you know, we've kind of established the independent contractor model, right, in a lot of states and jurisdictions. And it's like there's less kind of risk of that model changing. And yeah, I would say we're in an area, an era now of kind of Cambrian explosion of different types of transportation, you know, the company kind of really.”
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
“Pricing and driver pricing and incentives and how we bring surge pricing and all that together. And it gets very algo heavy. And we have all these PhDs in the room, right? Some of the best minds in the world. We were able to hire people like Garrett Van Rizen who was the foremost horror person, right, from Columbia and other people. But everyone's like back to Lizard Brain. Everyone's like arguing. They're like, well, no, I think we should do it this way. We should do it this way. And I was like, huh? It's like as much as I enjoy the content of this, like, believe me, I'm an algo PM end to end. I love that stuff. But I was like, I don't think this conversation actually needs another like, you know, PhD or I'm not even PhD, but content expert, right? It's like what we need here is a way to shift again back to that, you know, out of that fear threat righteousness sort of state into a more co-creative, collaborative, open-minded, curious, trusting sort of state.”
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. I mean, I would say I have been fortunate to experience probably three Ubers at this point. At the time, but like looking back, I was like, wow, I learned a lot. But yeah, I would say it was not a very conscious leadership sort of place. You're right. It was like many organizations that run on fear because you can do that. Courage and sticks do work. But actually, that's kind of how I found this work is it was like in 2015. And I was a very junior product manager at that point, kind of in over my head in a fast-growing place in these weekly reviews with Travis. We were building out Uberpool. And I had a six-month-old daughter, my firstborn, and we had just moved to San Francisco from Chicago. My whole life was kind of in flux. And it was a very stressful place. And I was like, I think I'm going to snap. I don't think I can handle this. And that's kind of what led me to start to explore this sort of inner work and meditation and sort of like finding a way out of that. And that's what got me interested in bringing it to teams too, is because like, I remember I was in one meeting where we were working on this future pricing thing, which is like, you know, rider price.”
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 like my last chance to say something. But that's also more true and more senior, right? Because when you're more junior, it's like, well, this is the one presentation I have with Dara for the next six months. I really got to nail it. And so the pressure is a little bit different.”
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, but what was it? Theodore Roosevelt speak softly and carry a big stick. Yeah, I think I've evolved in that department. I think when I was younger in my career, I thought it was really important that, you know, we got to show up to the meeting and have the right slides and be the loudest, rightest voice in the room. And, you know, that's the way to have influence. And, you know, there's certainly a place for, you know, having leadership in a meeting and presenting a point of view and helping guide the narrative. But to me, it's, yeah, I say I've evolved more towards sitting back. It's also as I've become a more senior leader, I'm aware that there are power dynamics there. There's imbalances, right? Where junior folks don't feel as comfortable speaking up or I say something's not a good idea. And we're like, well, I don't want to disagree with JMs. So it's like back to being more aware of my influence in the world. Like I really try to spend more time being mindful of that and say, you know, I want to hear from other people first. I want to create space. And like, I don't need to win the argument in the meeting, right? Like there can be a follow-up, right? There's.”
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
“To me, leadership is broadly defined as having influence in the world. And so by that definition, to me, everyone is a leader, right? Because we all have influence in some way. You know, it's not about whether you're a manager or not. It's like, I have influence on my kids or my partner or my community, the world, the way I vote, the way I show up, right? So we all have influence. We're all co-creating influences of each other. So that's the leadership piece. So just like the conscious piece then is becoming more aware, waking up, right? To me, it's like learning more about my interior world, you know, what my background is, my biases. We all inherit sort of kind of certain belief systems from our parents or our church or our community. And a lot of times they kind of go unquestioned and then they end up in conflict. And so it's really just about becoming more aware and then taking responsibility for the influence that I have.”
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
“Thank you, Lenny. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. I really appreciate your dedication to helping product managers kind of like improve their craft and up level. There's not a lot of great researches out there for that. And coaching and development, as I'm sure we'll get into, is a passion of mine as well. So we have a lot of shared interests 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
“Get clear on your objective function. And one way that I've gotten clear on is trying to think about it from future me. 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? Not to be like morbid, but just, again, most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end. 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 and go on vacation and do what we do. To me, an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities.”
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