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Maynard Webb

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20
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2018-09-28
most recent
2018-09-28
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1
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  1. “The CEO. And I said, Well, they're all different. Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Bennyall are different and Meg Whitman's different than them. And, you know, they all have different strengths and skills. He goes, well, the number one thing for me, though, is work-life balance. I said, hey, you just named one attribute that I think none of them have. And if you really want to be a CEO, there's going to be a lot of people competing with you to become the CEO. You're going to have to work hard. I hate to say that. The top jobs require lots of energy and time, and that doesn't mean you can't find moments and have a great family. And I want you to do that, but it's really hard. So I think people that dream about having the best jobs in the world and the best work-life balance may not be as practical as they hope it is. No, I think that's rather interesting response to the question from that individual. But I would love to finish Maynard. On the next five years for you, and what's that roadmap ahead? I just want to stay healthy.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Days when I was the COO, and I just went and did it because I thought that's what you wanted me to do. And I told Marissa that I had that same tendency. And she would be like, okay, I don't need you to be Action Jackson here, but let's discuss what we want to do. It's good to be willing to move, but you have to make sure you don't move too fast. Indeed. An ultimate question, work-life balance, is it really possible? Yeah, but I think everybody's definition of it is different. And I think life and work are a tapestry, and you have to find a way to get joy out of work and joy out of time with your family. And it's not always going to be perfect. And it's finding the moments and making more of the good moments. So it's a journey. And I think people that think, I had, when I was leaving live ops, I had one of our superstar young folks come up and say, hey, Maynard, I want to be a CEO. I'm like, that's great. And he's like, okay, what are the attributes?”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “To action being upset about that you have an issue is not that helpful once you have it. You have to figure out what to do about it. So that's the story that I thought I'd share with you. I mean, thank you so much for sharing it. My word I have. Goosebumps just thinking about that as a stress moment. Tell me, what's your biggest strength and your biggest weakness, Maynard? I think strength-wise, I actually do want to change the world and I want to make an impact. And so I'm always trying to aim high. And I think I'm pretty dependable when I say I'm going to do something. My say to do ratio is pretty high. And then weakness so many. But the thing that I've gotten both Meg and Marissa talk to me about from time to time was what I would call my bias for action, which is really a strength but can also be a weakness if you don't take enough time to make sure you have a full go. Meg would often be brainstorming something with me in my early”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “In my career, I've actually felt sick to my stomach when that happened because I was like, oh, this is not that cool. And a lot of people in previous places have lost their jobs doing that. And so I was like, okay, it's not going to help anybody if we're afraid. So let's just go fix it. I always have found that the move to action instead of being overwhelmed is a great deal. So I had three different teams tackling three different things, all communicating, all competing to see who has come back first. You know, we had all the communication going. We had the world going in. I had to go do a special call with some TV channel from the engine room to let them know that we weren't going to be dead for long. So you had to, it was multifaceted, but we got it all back and hung in there with all of us. And she came down to thank everybody at 2 in the morning when we got it all back. But I think the ship.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Might have ever felt was in 2001, I was flying home. We had spent a year and a half by this time at eBay and things were doing so much better. And I was wondering if I was even needed anymore. I was flying back with the kids and my wife from New York the first day back, the sight crashed hard. Our primary, our backup, our tertiary, the recovery process wasn't going well and somebody copied the corruption of my data to all the backups so everything was dead. We had gotten to the stage where if we had an issue, we could fail over within minutes, certainly no longer than an hour, where when I first started it was a lot of hours. And so we were all over knowing how to do what we needed to do. But when somebody made an error and corrupted all the data for the backups, we were then in a big issue, a long issue.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “About Silicon Valley and VC Maynard. Well, I think what I don't want to change is innovation. I think we want to continue to be the most innovative place on the planet, and we need to continue our progress and improve diversity and inclusion. Tell me the right way to view competition. I always viewed it as validation that we're on to something and couldn't get scared of it. It'd be great if you never had any, but I think competition makes you better. And if you don't have any competition, you're probably working on something that actually either you're so smart that no one else can figure out how to do and the world needs, or more likely no one thinks they need it and you might not be working on something that important. I'm never afraid of competition. I pay attention to it, but I count on my teams to go achieve what they're intended to do. Tell me a story of when you've maybe felt overwhelmed and the steps maybe to help with this feeling. Well, the most overwhelmed”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Member, you probably need to be 20, 80, talk 20% of the time and listen to 80% of the time, but you need to make sure your talk percentage is impactful. They're absolutely on the impact. I do though, May, not want to move into my favorite element of any interview being a quick firearm. Essentially, I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. About 60 seconds per one, are you ready? I'm ready. So tell me, other than my obviously favorite book is yours, but what would your favorite book be and why? My son got this one for me for Christmas last year and it's the better angels of our nature by Stephen Pinker. It just reinforced how much progress we have really made and how there's more peace in the world today than there ever has been, even though with all the noise and everything else it doesn't feel like it and how much progress there has been. So I'm an optimist and reaffirm my faith that we're living in the right direction. What would you most like to change?”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I love them putting your ball to element. In terms of kind of flipping sides of the table, you yourself have obviously been operating and managed many, many boards. You also have sound on the other side of the table as a board member. I'm super intrigued. How have you seen yourself really develop and change as a board member over time? People treat you often very nicely as a board member, which as an operator appears that I'm always that way or your board sometimes isn't always that nice. And so you just have to make sure that you're still doing your job and asking the right questions and knowing where the line is between providing advice and managing and jumping in, which as operators sometimes is hard to do. But I think it's making sure, you know, when you're operating and you're running your organization, you talk to listen ratio with your board is probably way over 50-50 as a board.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That. And by the way, you have to make sure you give, and I think I said in the book, and I mean that some of my best, some of my worst tires were when I went outside to get the rock star that had done the job way before, but they didn't want to do it again. And some of my best tires were when I gave my internal team a chance. And they stepped up in a big way. But the math doesn't close when you're scaling, and you need to bring people along with that. And we used to tell people, like, if you stay in your own job, if there's 300 people in the company today and it's a thousand next year doing the same job is like a battlefield promotion because you're already going to have more people and it's much bigger and we used to do everything”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Go hire people before we needed them because she knew we were going to scale into needing them. By the way, I used to think that was crazy. And then I fell in love with it because they all got gobbled up within three to six months into meaningful roles. And so I think the best CEOs are able to attract, retain, inspire, talent, and they know that that's a huge piece of their job. To ask, in terms of kind of attracting that best talent, often when one brings in a very talented individual into a maybe a leadership position or a position in a firm, there may be individuals existing within the firm who thought they were ready for that position. How do you think about maintaining role when bringing in external candidates? And how do you really look to balance that? You know, it is a balance, but some of it is just math. For example, when I joined eBay, I think we had 300 people. When I left, we had 14,000. You can't do internal promotions to cover.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “But I wouldn't see all the responsibility of the chairman. That would be not wise, in my opinion. No, I completely understand. In terms of kind of getting the talent around the table, and maybe moving slightly away from the board, we'll discuss that slightly more in the interview. But in terms of getting the talent around the table and the team itself, the very best CEOs hire the very best execs. Having seen multiple of the best CEOs, what are the commonalities in how they really attract and attain that best talent? The best folks, and I think Mark Benninghoff is one of the best at finding and keeping talent, he knows everybody in the industry and he knows for every slot he's got who the three others, if they're not in the, first of all, there's a lot of growth from within companies, but if they're not in the company, who is out there that he should be able to get? And that's when he went and got Keith Block years ago out of Oracle, and we just made him the co-CEO, as I'm sure you saw. But he's amazing. And Meg used to.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And so I think it's really hard and it's all tied to not just being a visionary and great technically, but you have to be human and you have to have a lot of social skills that you triage all those different entities. Can I ask, do you think it is the CEO's responsibility to keep the board all in simultaneous alignment and check or is it not a manager of the board really kind of being cognizant enough to all get behind the same mission and move forward? It's great if you have some board members are very independent. And I've been the chair. I was the chairman of Yahoo, right? And we had lots of different constituencies on the board. And they don't work for the chair. The chairman's a coordinator, if you will, but I think the CEO has a big responsibility to make sure the board's working well and getting the information they need. And I wouldn't outsource that and I'd be working in deep alignment, like Marissa and I did when I was at Yahoo with the chairman.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Things about you from VC. So I couldn't agree with you more on that. And if we kind of delve a layer deeper into the person who chooses on that round and chooses the board members themselves, the CEO, you are CEO at Live Ops, you're a president at eBay. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've interviewed many CEOs and the prevailing wisdom Maynard is the dominant role of CEO is management upscaling. How do you respond to this? And how do you maybe truly define the role of CEO today? I think being a CEO is one of the coolest jobs and one of the toughest jobs on the planet and it's multidimensional chess. You have employees and by the way it's very lonely because you are the only person making the final decisions on a lot and you have employees that you have to inspire and motivate and get to do things. You have customers that you have to sell to and keep happy and you have investors and board members that you have to keep happy. And they're not all always in sync.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Feels as you go through it, the easier it is for everybody to keep growing. I mean, absolutely in terms of kind of going through it several more times. I'm intrigued though for you as an angel kind of being cognizant of that. How do you think about that and kind of investing at the seed rounds and your personal reserve allocation and how you think about kind of maintaining ownership over time? Well, I know I am very cognizant of how it weighs down and I don't have enough because I'm investing my own money. I don't have and I'm investing five to seven million a year, which is a lot of my personal money. And so I'm very selective in going deeper into later rounds. I have done it, but I understand where the game is, but I haven't wanted to raise outside capital to let me play it all the way through. And I also want to be friendly with all the VCs, and I think I am, so that we keep having synergistic relationships with people. Absolutely, Maynard. And I always get a wonderful.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, I just think it's way more important who you get the money from than the price you get. And that's counterintuitive. But unfortunately, if you end up with a really good price and a really bad board member, you're going to forget that you got a really good price and your life's going to suck for a lot of the time you're dealing with a really bad board member. So you got to weigh all the factors in deciding who do you want to have with you for the journey? And by the way, they have a right to the journey so you don't get to say goodbye if you don't like them. So you've got to be super cautious about who you add. And then I always provide advice to CEOs and to investors to make sure everybody feels great about the round. So there's upside for everybody going forward and there's a lot of ownership left for the CEO because this is just when you get your first money, it's your first money. You're going to go through this several more times. And the better everybody.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Generally over 10 years to get to a liquidity event if it's going public and the market's going to change a lot in that. So I stayed pretty focused on just building good companies. It's an interesting one. Me and my partners today always say that the one”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Don't think it's nearly as frothy as what I saw in the 2000s. I'm so pleased you said about the 2000s there because I'm always fascinated when I have the chance with a guest as wise as you. How have you seen having kind of experienced the multiple booms and busts? How has that affected both your operating and your investment mentality today, Maynard? Well, I think any good company that gets started today is going to go through several booms and busts. And when you get into the timing of when you go liquid and go public, it's a crapshoot of whether the market's going to be ready for you or not. So I'm always focused on just building a great business to last. And sometimes you'll get better advantage in pricing if the wins at CEO's back and sometimes the wind will be at the investor's back and that will change market dynamics a little bit. But trying to time exactly when to get in or get out, like these companies, the good ones all tell.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Of angel investment out there, and then at the high end with folks like Southbank coming in with $100 million. That was never available before. Can I ask, do you believe then seeing that on both sides of the equation, the explosion of capital, do you believe that we maybe have an excess supply of capital today, or do you take the view of maybe Hemontonasia at general catalyst who said that we're just in a seismic shift towards tech and that actually the capital just correlates to the opportunity? I think there's a lot of companies that are still not getting funded. Often it's either boom or bust if you're a really cool company that everybody loves. You can raise all the capital you want. And unfortunately, as an investor, sometimes the terms aren't where you'd like it to be. But there's also quite a few people who aren't getting funded as well. And I don't know the stats on washouts today versus historically, but I bet they're not far different of the percentage of companies that got started. I think it's good that there's a lot of capital around, but I.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Have today That yeah, well, it's far easier to start a company today than it was 20, 30 years ago. The amount of investment you used to and capital you used to have to have was amazing because you had to build all of your own infrastructure. And today you can go to Amazon or Google or Salesforce and get started in a much easier fashion. So it's much easier to get started today than it was then. the ease of entrepreneurship being Amazon web hosting they were very very there were little groups of angels there have been and i don't know whether you would call this negative i think it's a positive since i am one of them but there's a lot more money in the market today both at the low end which frankly makes it even easier for the vcs who used to have to do more of the funding they're able to see things that are more proven out by the time they actually deploy big bucks but there's a lot”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Thanks for asking. When I was a CIO of Bay Networks, and prior to that, I often had startups trying to sell to me, but at Bay Networks, two of my colleagues, Jim Goetz and Monty Kirsten, went to start a new company called Vital Signs, and they asked me to chair their advisory board. And that was my first private investment outside of the stock market. And it was a blast, and it did really, really well. And that's when it started, 1997.”

    2018-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How The Best Founders Approach Bet The Company Decisions, How to Put Your Board to Work & How To Optimise Strategic Thinking on Boards with Maynard Webb, Founder @ Webb Investment Network & Everwise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source