YouSaid · the spoken record

Lloyd Tabb

lines on the record
19
first
2017-11-10
most recent
2017-11-10
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Well, Looker is going to do total world domination. Our manifest destity is everybody who uses data, which is just about everybody. We present a way to access data that makes anybody be able to ask any question of a large data set. And we're doing it in a way that's very different than everybody else and actually much more powerful. So the two questions that make a company a great VC investment are how fast can it grow and how big can it get? And I still can't answer those questions about Looker. So I think we have a lot more work to do. So I'm excited to do that.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You know, there are mentors all around you. Look around to see who's doing something that you want to know how to do and be useful to them.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You know, I've had so many mentors. Early in my career, I realized, well, actually, my whole life, I've realized that mentors are everything. And there are really too many to talk about. Evar Wold at Borland teaching me really languages really deeply to, you know, Jim Watson when I was first becoming a BC and learning about venture.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'm not sure about today, but the biggest challenge has been letting go of various parts. I essentially did every job in the company and I've given every job away. And each time I give away a job, it's painful.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think that the common path is the safe path is what most people believe is true and I think that's not true. I think that if you choose your path, it's much safer than following what the conventional wisdom of the path is, of the safe path is. So a lot of times you'll be told, oh, follow this recipe for success. And it's actually not true. That's not the recipe. And that if you follow your own instincts about what is the right path for success, you'll do better.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I love all Seth Godin's books. He's really good at seeing the change that's happening in the world and the way to approach markets in the world. The internet has changed everything and he's got a great perspective on how that has happened.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Not only do we do bike sessions, but I haven't a bike, so I do bike every week, but there's also a surf club at Looker and a skateboard club, and there's kickball, and there's a book club, and there's a game night where people play games. I really think that hiring people that like to be with each other is great. And that the company should figure out how to help make that happen. Like, it should endorse that. And it's good for the company. It's good for everybody to be able to be together. And, you know, we leave an hour early every Thursday, and the company sponsors bike rentals for people who don't own a bike. we go mountain biking just out the door about a mile from looker there's some great trails and we all go riding together because we're here in santa cruz and it's one of the benefits of being in santa cruz and we invite people outside the company sometimes come along and it's a great chance for people from different teams to talk together so like i'll be riding on the trail and i'll be talking to somebody who's in department of customer love or somebody who's in sales and hear how it's going and those conversations are kind of”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Stake happens, and then engineers at fault there, you know, the company's having a bad day, but an engineer is probably having a worse day. They're having a really bad day because they cause this thing that costs thousands of dollars a minute. And you can easily get a culture where everybody is afraid to do anything. If you let that engineer get shamed in a way that they become afraid to act, your engineer organization is going to become afraid to act because mistakes happen and bad stuff happens, but you still have to be able to forget. So we culturally built something called the lemon, which was literally a lemon. If you made a mistake that cost the company money, the lemon would sit on your desk and the lemon would move around to somebody, whoever it was. And the thought behind the lemon was not shame. It was saying, if you never get the lemon, you're not trying hard enough. You're not taking enough risk. If you get the lemon all the time, you're taking too much risk. It was a way of saying, hey, life's hard, bad stuff happens, but we are okay with it, right? And so you have to build it into your culture to be able to handle bad things.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Never hide it, first of all. That's going to create a degree of pain and shame that you're not going to want to live with. So like at LiveOps, I'll give you an example of a bad day. We were answering phones for TV commercials and we had this big system of computers that routed calls in the cloud. And if that thing went down, it was thousands of dollars a minute because people had bought ad spots on TV and we weren't able to answer the calls and it was lost revenue. And so it's literally thousands of dollars a minute that we were down. And we had a half an hour outage on one day. Maybe it was even longer. It was a big deal. It was a bad day, right? We're sitting here and it's a bad day. And one of the things to do would be the first thing is to try to hide it so that you don't have to pay your customers back for their lost revenue. But we didn't. We just, you know, we were like, okay, this is what we call them right away. We were totally upfront with them. We made them whole. And it was very expensive for us. You know, another way of dealing with bad things is, I'll give you another example of how you deal with bad stuff. We have when I'm in.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “But what you're risking at that point is damage to the car. And once the car is damaged, it's a problem. And so basically we have the philosophy that you can actually get a tremendous amount of work done in a workday. And it's your attitude towards the work that's the most important thing, not the number of hours that you put in. And it's the conscientiousness with which you approach the work. Some of the best programming I've ever done has been on my bicycle. I'll take a break. I'll go ride my bike and I'll come back and I'll know the answer to what I was working on. And it's actually stepping away from the problem and giving it bake time. I'm not pounding on it to get the answer. You know, in a creative process, actually getting some away time or getting some actually quiet time is probably the best way to solve a problem. And then business processes need to be automated. You should build your business so that it isn't hard work. I mean, if you're doing stuff that's fully manual, that's a mistake. You haven't figured out how to automate it enough.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So, you know, I think a good life is a series of good days. If you're having a good day today, then you'll stay positive. You'll enjoy your day. You'll want the next day to be as good as yesterday. You can't run a car at the red line across the country or the car is going to blow up.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Frank and I interview people all the time. I mean, I swear my main job is interviewing people and making sure that the people that we bring in are the right people. And the analogy that I give is, and if you came into Looker on the weekend and you were going to rob the place, you'd walk into this beautiful building with these great conference rooms and some TVs on the wall and a bunch of nice desks with some monitors on them. But there are no computers in here. And the machines that we use, we rent from Amazon in the cloud or Google in the cloud. So we don't really own those either. We rate programs, which is really just the ideas of the people that work here. And we have some business processes, which is just our rules of interacting with each other and with our clients. And so if you look at what Looker is, which is this amazing business, it's really just the people. And the only thing we are is the people. And focusing on making sure that the people have the right values and have the right attitude and actually are on the mission with us. They think that what we're doing is important.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “You stop and answer it again, and you never make anybody feel bad for asking a question. And you keep the mutual respect. You never let anybody feel ashamed for not knowing something and you respect differences. And it's the middle school you wanted to go to is looker.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Appearing stupid, so you stop asking questions, which means you stop learning. And the school that I was working with was very good at this. So they just had a very high bar about never letting anybody be publicly shamed for asking a question and never allowing that kind of reaction to happen. And so I ran a computer club for five years. And the rule in the computer club was that if anybody asked you a question, you had to stop and answer it to the best of your abilities so that you asked me, I would stop what I was doing. And we had this great culture in this computer club where there was a lot of learning going on and the kids were doing amazing things. And at Looker, I realized, you know, when starting Looker, I realized that we're trying to teach the world a whole new way of doing data. It's not like the way anybody else does data. We have a very different approach, a very different take. The traditional data warehousing stuff, we don't think is the right thing for big MPP databases, and we have a totally different way of looking at the world. And we have to teach the world that. And we have to teach everybody the company that. And so setting up Looker, the first rule is that if anybody asks you a question at Looker, you stop and answer it. And if they ask you the same question,”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You know, so after Netscape, I got the curse that a lot of successful young people get, which is, okay, you can do whatever you want with your day. What are you going to do next? I'd done the thing I'd always wanted to do, which was to be financially independent, to be able to choose my day. And I wanted to give back. I wanted to give back to the communities that I, you know, and one of the most important times in my life was middle school, where it was a really rough time for me, actually. And I had a teacher who taught me basic programming in middle school. And he was amazing. And it got me through. And I realized, okay, I'm going to go do that. I'm going to go teach middle school and volunteer teach at a local school. I wrote some software that I gave away to a bunch of schools that was basically blogging software. This is around 2000. And what I learned from this school was about how to make a safe learning environment for kids. How do you make it so that lots of kids can learn lots of different things at the same time? How do you make it so that they feel safe asking questions? Because in middle school, what happens is that you're becoming an adult and you get afraid of.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You know, I studiously stepped out of management my whole career, even though I've been this TO, I generally avoid having people report directly to me because I get distracted and go deep on things. So my strength is my depth of knowledge of certain areas. And so for me, the moment was, okay, I'm going to have to manage a bunch of people who I don't understand what they do. So I was looking for a COO. And actually, when Frank came in, he came in as president because I didn't want to give, I was, you know, I was very concerned about control. And over time, after actually after doing the fundraise and seeing how well Frank and I work together and how good of a team we were together, I realized, yeah, he needs to be the visible CEO outward facing person. I'm the deep product person. That's what I do well. And I was comfortable with it. But at first, Frank came in wanting to be the CEO and coming in as a president. And I came in. And then after a period of trust, you know, we'd gone through a tremendous battle in our fundraise. I realized, well, okay.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So that moment was so I'm doing the selling and it's working. And the next logical step is to hire a VP of sales, hire three sales teams. And a sales team is made up of an SDR, somebody who's going to go out and lead gen, somebody who's going to do the sales and a sales engineer who's going to go work and sales process get three teams so that you know that and see if you can get at least two of the teams functional because then you know you have a repeatable process. And I realized I was totally out of my league at that point. It's like I don't know how to do that. I've never done that. I'm going to screw that up.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I always remember it really well. I was at a board meeting with Tim and Bill and Mark Randolph, who actually advised me tremendously through this whole process. Things were going really well. You know, with Looker, it has always been, wow, things are going amazingly well. It's going perfectly. How come that is? And so the old startups are a hard story. It just hasn't been true for us. It's been a lot of work. It's been a tremendous amount of work. But we haven't had the hard things like that.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “You know, self awareness is probably one of the most important things that you can have as an entrepreneur. I know what I'm good at and I know what I'm not good at. I'm a world-class CTO. I've been CTO at a lot of great places and know how to actually architect things and build stuff that people want to use and make great software. I'm not a world-class CEO, and I can get by as a CEO for a while, but I'm not going to be the best one. So it's knowing when to give away the job and when to keep the job.”

    2017-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Self-Awareness Is The Most Important Characteristic For Founders, When Is The Right Time For A CEO To Hand Over The Reigns & What CEO's Can Learn About Company Culture From Teaching Middle School with Lloyd Tabb, Founder & Chairman @ Looker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source