YouSaid · the spoken record

Megan Quinn

lines on the record: 138
first: 2017-12-20
most recent: 2017-12-20
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

“My understanding of it is a lot of meetings and it's a lot of listening. And then 99 times out of 100 you say thank you this was great. We can't actually give you money, but let us know if we can be helpful. That's most of the meetings, right? Yeah, except that reporters were never helpful.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't anything specific to my gender? It was that I didn't know what the job actually entailed. And I think from the outside, it is hard to say your VC, Tuesday, 9 a.m., what are you doing? And you just have to sort of figure that out. I've never gone golfing not once.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You definitely can, and frankly, I only ever worked for men and had wonderful bosses and mentors in my time at Google and Square. But Mary is a woman, obviously, and hugely inspiring to me and was a critical part of my going into venture capital in the first place.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm still doing it, quite frankly. I learn every day, every meeting I have is in education. And it's really through meeting other people and talking with folks. I mean, one of the most humbling pieces about being a VC is that it is your job to be the student. I mean, inevitably the person sitting across from you knows a lot more about their market and their business and their product than I ever will. I say unless they're building something in maps, there's no question that they know more specifically about their business than I do. And then to pass judgment and know that you're often wrong. But that ability to be a student as a job is really exciting. If you're someone who's intellectually curious, that context switching is awesome.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it was truly so that I could see a bunch of different products and businesses. I had felt like when I was at Google, I was really deep in that bubble. I mean, if you're in Google, especially early days, you thought the world revolved around Google. And then at Square, I was working honestly 18, 19 hour days, and all I thought about were payments. So the opportunity to stick my head up and learn, frankly, at scale for my job was really exciting.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I probably went one more layer on references and talking to some people, and Aileen was really helpful in that capacity. Aileen Lee at Cowboy. She'd previously been at Kleiner and decided it was worth trying myself.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting story I had signed my offer letter from Kleiner and the Ellen Powell trial or lawsuit was announced the next day.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's great. So I had been chatting with the two of them and then a couple other Kleiner partners reached out and said, hey, we have this open partner role on the early stage team. Have you ever thought about venture capital? I really hadn't. I had never seen a woman VC before Mary. I thought you had to be like a member of the ARP to be a VC. And so I just started talking with them and was really attracted to the idea of getting to see a horizontal view across a lot of different products and entrepreneurs and businesses that I hadn't had when I was just focusing on maps or just focusing on payments.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so John Doer was on my board at Google, and Mary Meeker was on my board at Square, and I knew both in those board functions while I was at the respective companies. Really, really liked both, admired both, and spent a lot of time with Mary in my role at Square. People I don't think fully appreciate just how product-oriented she is as an investor, which is surprising given she has a banker background. But she was extremely helpful to me. Oh, yeah.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I truly walked away with a hybrid view of the benefits and pitfalls of both. I believe strongly in data and leveraging data to build better products, but I do think you can't ignore intuition. And that's really where the design thinking comes in.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing great. You know what I really appreciated about Square at the time, and subsequently it's, I think, been a real advantage for them, is their focus and emphasis on design. In my seven plus years at Google, I met one designer. I didn't really even appreciate that it was a function that would accord a product building that was not how Larry and Sergei and Marissa to some extent thought really hard about building products. And so, you know, obviously Jack brings that perspective and that priority. And that was really very interesting to me.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I sent this long letter to Jack, which unfortunately I don't have the email because it was on my square email. I've always wanted to get it back, about, hey, I'm the new girl here. Don't want to step on any toes. But here's like six or seven things I would do differently as we think about building out this product engine across engineering design and the PM function. And he just wrote back, congratulations, you're our head of product.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it turns out I get there. I said yes, by the way. I said, okay, I'll take this job. I have no idea what this means, but I'll figure it out. And not even two weeks had passed and the company launched some product or another, and everyone came back in the next day. I was like, oh, should we build? I was like, I don't know, what's next on the roadmap? And they were like, oh, there isn't really a roadmap.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I definitely had strong points of view on building product when I went to Square that was very much indoctrinated me by the Google system. Actually, I was originally hired at Square to be the director of risk. It was about 20 people. Keith and Jack hired me. And they wanted someone who had never done risk before because they wanted someone who would treat risk like a product. And if you know anything about payments companies, risk is really foundational.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only in the sense that I loved working there, but I knew that I needed to see more business models, products, worked with different types of entrepreneurs. And so I really went for the 180. You know, Larry and Sergei were not cults of personality. In fact, they tried to push decision-making to the edges and prop up other spokespeople. The company was obviously quite large at that time. It was about 35,000. And I had never worked in hardware. So adding those three things together and looking for the 180 opportunity ended up being square.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started having recurring nightmares that I was going to wake up and be 55 and SVP of some product group at Google. I would have never, ever worked anywhere else except Google.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the second project I had left at this time, or is helping on early prototyping was a game called Ingress, which is still live today and enormously popular, actually. And then the rest is history. They continue to build.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love field trip to this day. I think it should exist. In the concept on field trip was what if you could walk through Wikipedia? So as you're walking down the street, you get pushed an old photo of what that building looked like, an interesting fact about what happened at this intersection. What would it be like if you had all of the world's geotagged information at your fingertips in a way that wasn't annoying and was interesting and compelling and so forth? So that was the first project.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use is how we always refer to it for autonomous units. So we went and we started Neaantic, this group of us, and I worked with him on that for a while before ultimately going over to Square.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And John had been there for a while, been extremely successful. Google obviously wanted to keep him, but I think what he was interested in doing was figuring out ways that we could leverage the map data that we had just spent all this money, frankly, building, for new products and services that maybe weren't Google Maps, weren't directions or local search. And so he started an autonomous unit. He took me and four or five other people with him.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I baked a cookie and sent it to them. I ended up making 8,000 cookies, over 8,000 cookies, as part of this debugging effort. And then we launched it.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For Street View. So Street View actually was not only just to give consumers street level imagery of the world around them, which is interesting into itself, but also so that we could build them out because you need to have street level imagery to understand road direction and road priority is something a major highway. Is it a backcountry road? And so I moved to the product role for that. And actually, given that I brought some cookies, there's a good anecdote around that. When we launched the US internally, so we were dog fooding, which is a famous kind of Google notion at the time, it was really critical that we get as much feedback from people as possible about errors that we had. We knew we weren't 100% correct, but if we were going to exchange this map that people are using every day in number of products with one that we had homegrown built, it needed to be perfect. Expectations were high. So basically, I started a three-month-long effort to have people dog food find errors, and there was a different number of different ways that we asked them to find errors. And then for every bug they said,”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So I started a project at that time with Sebastian Thrun, who I think you both know, who's gone on to found Udacity, and he was a technical lead. I was the product lead for something called Ground Truth. And frankly, I got the job, I think because I was most interested in maps and I'd worked with John and he trusted me a lot. So it started off as a large business development effort. We went around the world. We were acquiring different data types. fun fact every single geo point on the earth requires 22 different data types so you need polygons to know if you should fill in the map with water or if it should be a forest and be green you need geocodes you need road names you need road direction and so on so it started off as a massive business development effort and then when we had enough data acquired to actually start building is when i moved over to the product role so i did quite a tour of duty within google and then led that from a product perspective”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I left, I think there was something, I'm going to get the number wrong, but let's call it 400 odd product managers. And I was one of four that didn't have some sort of technical degree, maybe electrical engineering or something. Well, what happened was, quite honestly, is that Nokia bought Navtech and TomTom bought Tele Atlas. And now we're dating all of ourselves here. But at the time, that seemed really threatening because Nokia was a fierce competitor. And we depended upon them for the data for our maps. And so we started to think, you know, maybe we need to have data independence if this category is going to be important to us, both from a consumer product perspective as well as from an advertising product perspective.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, actually, San Francisco has this collector, David Rumsey, who's famous. He has one of the largest collection of historical maps in the world. He's just downtown.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always loved maps because I've found them to be sort of the perfect intersection of utility and design. I find them personally beautiful, aesthetically interesting, especially the further back you go, the more interesting they are. I mean, there's places, you know, in the oceans that they had monsters that they believe were there. And this year too shall not pass and so on and so forth. But at the time in which they were created, they were actually a utility. They help people get around. And so I was very attracted to the idea of being a part of cartography 2.0.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was really excited to work on what would end up being Google Local and Google Maps and went through a series of different jobs at Google and my seven and some odd years there.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, and I was part of an acquisition team that fall, so after the IPO for a company called Keyhole, which was led by John Hanky. And that ultimately served as the underpinging for Google Earth and Google Maps. And I was a historical map collector by personal passion. I've collected maps since I was a kid. Yep. I've always loved maps. I always tell my husband MG that if the house catches on fire, like leave the photos, leave the Apple products, grab the maps.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so I worked for Cindy. You know, my first actual activity was kind of being a gopher for the IPO. I mean, I was nobody. I was like taking, accepting the gifts that people kept giving them and then filing away who they had to write thank you notes for. But that was the best.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was definitely in the group. I had to interview with Larry Sergei, so it was a point in time when they were still interviewing everybody.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And 18 interviews later, and I'm sure lots of different intelligence tests or something, I got an offer and I still was like,”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was the first stop actually. Yeah, she was. And David Crane. And to tell you how little I knew about the company, I sat down with David Crane and she was like, well, why are you interested in Google? And I had looked at the website super quick before coming over. And I was like, well, it just seems that Larry and Serge are really on to something. And he said, I'm sorry, what was that? Surge? I had never seen the name Sergei. It shows how sheltered, I guess I was.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was early, but not early, early. And the only thing I knew about Google was the white homepage that we all know. And she said, just come in, meet some people. And I said, sure. And so this was before Google had optimized their interview process. So I had 18 interviews, including with some people you definitely remember, like Cindy McCaffrey. Sure, absolutely, who ended up being my first boss. Yeah.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And so she had been a year ahead of me at Stanford, and she loved working there. She was like, it's an extension of college. It's so great. And at the time, what's recalled? This was before Gmail. So it was truly just white year.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But after school, of course, I was thinking about returning to LA, it's where my family is. I had had these gigs in the entertainment business, and so that seemed really natural. And it was about halfway through my senior year that a friend of mine, Merrill Stone, who, Carrie, you may have recalled, she was one of Larry and Sergei's very first assistants back in the day.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More than one, and I knew the Weinstein brothers from afar, but I'm not claiming to have known them directly. I was a baby answer.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So during college, I was an intern at Miramax. So I'm originally from Los Angeles. So the entertainment thing always seemed sort of interesting. And I would intern there during my summers.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And maybe a good place to start would be with something that you tweeted, I believe last week, and Neil Dash was playing this fun game on Twitter, sort of give a shout out to somebody who helped you early in your career before you had to. And Megan, you tweeted that in college in 2003, Merrill Stone convinced you to join you at what you thought was a boring search engine company instead of going to work for the Weinstein brothers at Miramax.”
2017-12-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Megan Quinn, general partner, Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT