YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Hohman

lines on the record: 102
first: 2018-08-15
most recent: 2018-08-15
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

“The information that helped you figure out what's the story with this company? And I have this offer in front of me. Is it fair? Could I ask for a little bit more or would I be overplaying my hand? Interview questions were a huge one in the in 08 recession. People were freaked out. There are people laid off that had not been ever laid off. like an interview is one of the most stressful things that you do short of like public speaking and they said if i could just be a fly on someone else interview like know how long is it gonna take what are they gonna ask me right and that was one of those times we went helpful information”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Our mission is to help people. We wanted to help people find a job and company they love. So if we could.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, okay. So they had to contribute to something and to create a thing. So what then became the goal? I want to talk about the business model also, but what became then the goal is to give just, as a clearinghouse for information so you can make better hiring decisions, essentially.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you have to get something. Not going to be a salary. It's going to be light, it'll be on your phone. Typically, it's a salary. But some people, I was skeptical, and I was stunned at the quality of reviews we got from mobile devices. It shocked me”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question. And we worried about this early on. We were really afraid we'd see this bimodal distribution, either people that hate their company or love their company, and no one in the middle. And like I said earlier, we needed to get a really broad distribution. Yes, I agree. And so we created various mechanisms on the site, the strongest of which was if you wanted salary information, you had to give, it was called give to get. You had to contribute. So, you couldn't, unlike Yelper Trip Advisor or other, you couldn't consume content on Glassdoor without contributing.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seem to be like the worst behaviors. Exactly. Like, oh my God. This is terrible. Can't take a criticism, can you? But again, going back to the United States, devolving, like how do you, you ask helpful questions, which suggests that you want a serious answer and then people don't just throw mud at each other. But it does create a situation where you're going to get a certain type of person versus the whole company. How do you... Solve for that”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They could, but we don't see that. What we do see is little companies like usually small law firms in Florida. I don't know why. Seem to be like the worst behaviors. Right. So trying to figure out who's being mean about them. Exactly. And they will. They'll go look at like every last because they presented to us. They're like, I know who left this review. Like, here's the firewall logs. Like, oh my God. This is terrible.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, at microsoft.com or at Dell.com or something like that. And we feared that companies could just go look at, you know, logs and see that people had.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made him serious. Well, there's anonymous, there are shades of gray on that first off. Glassdoor is anonymous to the community. Those people are not anonymous to us. We have to have an email address, and we also have to be able to communicate with you, or we will take down all of your content on our site for all the reasons we've talked about to date. But at the same time, it's super important that your information be anonymous to obviously the community and workplaces because they will retaliate. And one of the debates we had early on was should we require a company email address to contribute?”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was one of those subtle mindset things that put people in the mindset of, yeah, if I could tell him, what would I tell him?”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And so we didn't want to be that. We wanted it to be a serious review about a company's shortcomings and the things that make it great. And one of the things we ask is advice to senior management. Like if you could sit with Steve Baumber, what would you tell him on how to run Microsoft at the time?”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was. Yeah, it wasn't actionable or useful information. You didn't feel like you were getting the full story or a nuanced version of the story. You were getting like a sensationalized, you know, extreme version.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, and we were, we kind of had a mantra internally like, we don't want to be fucked company.com Well, it was really a humorous but not very helpful”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it was a little. Glassdoor was different enough because of the seriousness of what was being discussed is different than Facebook. It's different than Twitter, is the fact, right? So I actually have there are, but I mean, it's such a broad diversity of topics happening on those platforms. I have some sympathy for the decision of when and where and how to moderate. It was pretty clear to us early on that this was going to be a serious conversation. It was meant to be a serious, we wanted it to be a serious conversation. We didn't want it to be. Do you remember at the time there was my lord swear? Yep.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over time, you evolve these standards or values, there's values and standards and rules are all different things. But I find that unusual because a lot of companies here in South America don't do that. They just sort of have a free-for-all, open is best kind of thing, whatever floats. And companies that made choices like this, like I remember Apple when they made the App Store choices. Now, they haven't been perfect, but they certainly definitely were mocked at the time that they did that, I remember. Like, why you can't decide about anything? And I was like, well, yeah, you kind of can. It's their store. They can put anything they want on their shelves. Talk about that concept because not putting things up is such an anathema to Silicon Valley people are like, let's get it all out there and let's see it. I think it becomes, like you said, accessible.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we always look at through the lens of will it help a job seeker make a decision on whether to go to work here? And obviously, that information is relevant to whether you're going to go to work there. And so we allow it. There were other types of crimes being reported in reviews that weren't relevant to whether you'd go to work there per se. And we decided basically, you know, violent crimes or drug use or this person, you know, a lot of times it's one person doing something to another person, which doesn't necessarily reflect the workplace as a whole. And so a lot of times we would say, okay, that belongs more with law enforcement. It doesn't belong on the site. We're talking about things that matter.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They both had their say. Hard things we've had to figure out over the years are when someone alleges alleges sexual harassment in the workplace.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's that rule. There were rules around Early on, there was no way for an employer to respond. And so then we allowed for an employer to respond and for a job seeker to respond back and this tit-for-tat started. And that was bad. That got really bad fast. And so then we adopted the one response method, which is basically the review goes up. The employer gets to respond. And that's it. And that felt like the right balance.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we made a rule which said you couldn't even have a singularly identifying thing. You can't say the regional director of Akron. That's still individually identifying it. The review comes down or never goes up.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We mostly listen to the community. So, Jeremy Stoppelman from Yelp once gave me that advice early on. He said, look, your community is going to tell you where it once and needs to go. And we used... There are reviews and the complaints about their views to listen to what was fair. And so things we heard, things we heard were, one, it's okay to talk about quasi-public figures in reviews, not okay to talk about people that are not quasi-public figures. And that pretty rapidly meant we...”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. So, what was different about Glassdoor is that we couldn't, a lot of sites like Yelper TripAdvisor, other user-generated sites, 0.1% of people can leave the majority of the reviews because they stay at a bunch of hotels or they eat at a bunch of restaurants. If you're reviewing companies, like it just doesn't work that way. You work at a company and even in the Bay Area, you only change every two years. So we needed lots more people to contribute. That is definitely true. So the structure of the site had to encourage that. And so there was a variety of ways we did that.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the question was what was different for us? And what I always felt from the beginning was this was a little different though. This was a review of a company and a serious topic. And so I always felt a responsibility to get the community rules and norms right and to make it constructive because there had been sites before us attempting this and they kind of devolved into cesspools.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I agree with that 100%. And so, yeah, I mean, that was our goal, was to educate job seekers. And so. Took a while for companies to come around on this. But there was a kind of wave of transparency happening around us anyway, and that helped, right? Twitter was happening, LinkedIn was happening, Facebook was happening. And it was kind of clear that Yelp was happening, TripAdvisor, that if it could be reviewed, it was probably going to be reviewed.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, that is true too. And by the way, that's part of the reason the CEO approval rating we felt was so important is because when it's the very tippy top person, it does tend to affect the whole organization.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or even if you don't, you know it's a problem and you know you should fix it. It just never makes the list when it's public and it's harming your ability to hire and recruit it sort of forces you to deal with it. And I think I've had that experience with our own problems on Glassdoor, posted on Glassdoor. Right, about”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like having run a company, it's so easy to take those surveys. And it's just like, even well-intentioned, you mean to fix the stuff. Right.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and typically it either goes only to you or to you and your manager. But it's private. It doesn't go, it's not open and available. And so I don't even think we fully understood at the time how powerful this would be. But the idea that this information was public and that anyone could see it meant that even though many companies get the same information internally from surveys, they get a more authentic tone from an independent third party and a platform. And also it forces companies to do something about it.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so it's very interesting. What's different about Glassdoor from things like that is first off, it's public. The very nature of”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would take more time to figure that out. Yeah. So the idea was because one of the things that had broken out in Silicon Valley was this 360 evaluation. Which was already within companies. Why is that different? That's what they try to do and try to get the full scope. They never get the full scope because people are dishonest about their work experience inside of a company, I find.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like your individual manager, like all the way through the org, and we did the tests with users where we sat behind two way mirror and they loved this concept of Glassdoor. Like, you know, it was just a concept thing then. And they're like, this is great. Can I get it? Does it exist? And you know you got something when people say that. And then we get to the part where like they were raiding their manager and then it's like, it took about four seconds and you could just see their brain turn. They'd be like, wait a minute. Does this mean I could be up there? This sucks. This concept is terrible. And it was just clear like, okay.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is salary because that's so critically important, and we knew that. And there was basically how much confidence do you have in senior leadership. And that was one of those tiny decisions at the time where like, hey, let's have a CEO approval rating just like a presidential approval rating turned out to be like a big deal because lo and behold lots of CEOs care about that rating and it opened a lot of doors to us and it helped us become important in their organizations because it was very personal. It's funny we tested at the time there was going to be a fourth leg to that stool. We were going to let you rate your manager.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that then, and we were just feeling it as we were reading it. We're like, wow, this is really valuable. And so to this day, I think we're still the only site that still pre-moderates. So when you post something on Glassdoor, it doesn't go live. It goes to a moderator who decides if it fits norms and guidelines. I want to talk about this.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A way to enforce them. So when we launched Glassdoor, we started collecting these reviews and we read them before we published them because mostly because we wanted to see what's going to come in and we weren't sure yet.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For what separated the two. Absolutely. I wrote about that today about Todor. I was talking about that concept on community, like that you can, if you make rules, it's not just rules you need to have values, you have to have all kinds of things. People can view rules with values.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The constructive part is based on the community rules and norms. And that's the hard part about a site like Glassdoor or any user-generated site. And what I experienced in gaming was the first time I ever actually belonged to a community for one. I got up, was happy to see my guild mates. And the rules and norms that were adopted really kind of, there were some groups that were toxic and there were some groups that were not toxic and it was super fascinating to see how very small subtle decisions were what separated the two.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really bad for companies when people make poor decisions about where they go to work. And they usually do that because they have poor information. Right. And so if we could just pull this together in a constructive way, it would be really, really valuable. The part that came from gaming was”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly, and his assistant luckily had saved him. But we were like, what if that had just gotten out? And what if that salary that had everyone spreadsheet or the spreadsheet that everyone's salary and stock? What if it just became public knowledge? Like how bad would that be? And like we started going through the thought experiment of it. People think Glassdoor was used to think, anyway. Glassdoor is born to stick it to the man. And I used to joke, I'm like, I think I am the man. Rich and I are the man. We were both CEOs of companies. That wasn't what we were trying to do. We were trying to figure out like.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mean literally, like, how did the idea come up? Rich and I were on the phone. I'd been playing World of Warcraft for like seven months, and I learned this about myself. I hit the max level in World of Warcraft, and the next day I called Barton and I was like, okay, I'm done. I'm so gold-driven. It's very interesting. I learned that about me. And so we literally started brainstorming on the phone about things. And he's like, you know, you remember that time we left this, we had left a printout of like every company takes these surveys, you know, and then there's like the detailed comments at the end. Those are the best. And Richard printed them wherever you're both. Yeah.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We knew that it would be hard. We knew that it would be somewhat tricky to get right. But if we could get that information out of people's heads in a constructive way, we could make a contribution. And we might be able to build a really big business around that. And so that's how Glassdoor was.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, airlines. You went to airlines? And then, if you went to an agent, they had the green screen, and you kind of felt like they were interpreting it, and you wish you could just take control of it yourself and look at it. And that's fundamentally what we did is we provided that transparency. And that allowed us to build a really interesting business. People knew nothing. Like, maybe you knew one person that worked at a company and you could ask them what's it like, but like you knew very, very little. You knew very, very little about salary information and fair pay. And that's come to mean be very, very important. And so”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Awesome. Well, so Glassdoor, I guess, triangulated from two forces one was Warcraft and Gaming, and I'll come back to that one. But the main one was transparency. So we didn't realize until about halfway through Expedia that what we thought we were an e-commerce site and if you would have stopped me, I would have told you that. But in reality, what we were doing with providing transparency to the travel landscape. We didn't understand that. But if you think about it in hindsight, you had to call every hotel. Oh, I remember.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I stayed at Expedia for quite some time. And then in 2000, I guess it must have been five, I moved here to run Hotwire. Expedia had acquired Hotwire. I moved to San Francisco from, because I'd been in Seattle all this time. Acquired Hotwire. I moved down here, did that for a year. So, and then I needed a break. I was tired. So I took a year off. I worked on my house for a little while and I learned how to fix anything in my house, which is I recommend to anybody for a geek. It was a really fun thing. And then I spent a good six to nine months playing World of Warcraft. Oh, okay. Which was...”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spun out and went public. And that was a crazy, crazy ride. And I learned an awful lot about building companies and building cultures because the Microsoft culture is super fascinating. The culture we build Expedia was super fascinating. And I took that on to my other companies.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was. And again, the thing that was interesting is, I remember, we were building a website in'94. Nothing existed. So for the engineers listening to this, like, you know, it was all in C++. Like I've lost years of my life to tracking down memory leaks. There was no security infrastructure. We had to write all of it. It was kind of a crazy, crazy, wild west time on the internet. But it was fun. We grew really, really fast. You know, Rich convinced Bomber and Bill to spin us out. I think we're still the only company that Microsoft ever let go. Right. Right.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I joined Expedia really, really early. It was one of these things, another lesson I kind of look back on over my career. I kind of had to choose who I was going to place my bet on. And I met Rich and I met a couple other leaders at Microsoft. And I placed my bet on Rich as potentially being my mentor. And that's the way it turned out. He's been my mentor for 25 years. And sort of the rest is history.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, no, you don't understand. Like, in 93, Microsoft was like, you know, dominant in a way that no other, like even today, like no one had that kind of, it was amazing. And I worked on Windows for a little while and got a really good education then met Rich Barton, who was starting”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did a software engineer. I'm in my soul. I'm a software engineer. I write code. But after, and I always wanted to start a company. I had a dream of starting a company from going way, way back. But as I was graduating Stanford, I just felt like I didn't know enough. good engineer but I didn't know marketing and I think I talked to a lot of tech founders that feel this way too I didn't know marketing I didn't know finance I didn't know a lot of what I thought I would need to start a company and so I thought okay I'll go work at a big company for a little while and learn so I went to work at Microsoft and by the way people still to this day when I say I go to work at Microsoft they're like oh I'm so sorry yeah I didn't say anything I”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I got on a plane and I fell asleep and I suddenly woke up in California and it was one of the most amazing things you've ever seen. Because if you grow up in Ohio, right, California is like this like, you know, far away land where stars live and everything else. And my grandmother is convinced every major synergy in California. So everyone was opposed to me going. But I went and it was amazing and that kind of opened.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, where I'm from, people don't usually go off far from school, to be honest, but I had an uncle who had gone to Stanford, and I did well in school, and he said, you should apply. And I got in crazily enough.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah. So I made money by bailing hay in the summers. That's what you did in that area. And so I would bail hay to buy memory for my computer. Oh, wow. That's it.”
2018-08-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT