YouSaid · the spoken record

Sandy Lerner

lines on the record: 102
first: 2018-10-01
most recent: 2018-10-01
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

“You know, I've always said that it's a third being smarter, a third working harder, and a third luck. No, take that back. It's half being smarter, half working harder, and a half pure luck because that adds up to more than one. And there were times that Cisco could have just been an asterisk and a footnote. I mean, there were so many times that company could have gone under and we were saved by circumstances out of our control. So there was huge luck in there I still work harder than anybody I know. That's my great gift, and I love work. I'm besotted with work for me. I've already designed my epitaph. It has one word on it. What do you think it is?”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think that nobody can see the future and that Lynn and I agreed to sell our stock on a very joint basis and we did it because we fundamentally had no respect for people running the company. And it wasn't really that we didn't believe in the company. I mean, I was the one who said that Cisco would be a billion dollar company. And I knew that that was, as long as those people stayed there, even without me and Len, they had a technology legacy that they would be successful. It was because Lenn and I did not wish to live our lives with those people having any more control over our day. It had nothing to do with financial. You know, we made a pile of money and it really had nothing to do with ROI or P&E rates and what that company was going to do. It had to do with the quality of our life and how we wanted to look at the morning.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know, it is good that Lennon and I found each other because we probably were more suited to each other than most everybody else on the planet. My parents thought Lennon was a space alien until he fixed my uncle's chainsaw. Then he was like the golden boy. When my parents and Lynn's parents met each other for the first time, I think they were each expecting sort of like ET and wife, you know, because both of their children were so bizarre. It was a little touchy there for a while.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we both have put our money in no matter what we do with our personal lives the rest of our lives, we are each other's legatees.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I'm one of those people that doesn't have, I guess, the good sense God gave it act to just not do something because it's going to take a whole lot of hard work. Farming is the hardest thing I've ever done, much, much harder than learning calculus as a graduate student and physics and the rest of all of that stuff. It's much, much, much harder than anything I've done. And it takes more work and more heartache and more aggravation than you can ever imagine.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I was raised on a farm, and I believe in eating meat. I mean, we've got these pointy teeth right here. That's why we survived the ice age, which may come again. But, you know, the idea that you would factory farm to me was beyond horrifying. And I absolutely believe that we did not use that kind of farming when I grew up. We farmed the way my grandfather knew how to farm, which was the manure on the fields, and you fed your cows good things. And at the end of the time, your cow fed your neighbor. I mean, we would know more of poisoned our cows because we would have poisoned our neighbors at that point. So I was convinced that I could find an economic model because I had the resources to raise large livestock profitably in a sustainable, organic, and humane paradigm. And I am”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have this entirely other part of your life, which is arguably the biggest part of your life now, which is a sustainable farm in Virginia. You completely left the West Coast, you built your life in the Virginia countryside where you raise rare breeds of cattle and pigs and chickens.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$400 million. $400 million. That's not what they paid you in 2000, unfortunately, right? No. But still, you know, you started this company. It's probably cool to see this around. I mean, still around. Absolutely. So you...”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted it to be a total departure because I was using my technical chops for PetNet. So I was doing that. And the makeup to me was really, I was quite offended by the makeup industry putting all the women in this pink box, you know, our first adverb and decay was just pink make you puke. You know, to me, it was about choice.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would sit on the bench with the people and make it, and we had three weeks to get it out on the shelf before the same company would knock it off for the other people down the street”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really easy. The base of the nail polish, how much micro you want to put in it, the base for the color cosmetic eyeshadow, what kind of mic are you using, how much mica, how much pigment you're putting in it, everybody uses the same stuff. It's just how they put it together and what they're willing to pay for.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it was a really good product, and B, I think it was good timing because you're talking about the mid-90s, you're talking about Nirvana and the Grunge wave and Pearl Jam and that whole thing. And I think Nordstrom rightly felt that they were missing a market.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really, really good ingredients. The first place we were in was in Nordstroms and Neeman Marcus. Wow. We were using top-of-the-line ingredients and it was absolutely committed to no animal testing”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Well, I just thought, you know, there's a whole market for people like me that really grew up in the time of, you know, Vietnam War and hippies and punks. And I was really heavy into the punk scene at that point. I was a little delayed gratification. So I just started making these really cool colors. Beautiful blues. We had a kind of light steel blue that was called UVB. We had plague, which was kind of Purple with a green tint roach, which was an absolute drop dead gorgeous brown. And we had mildew, which was a really lovely, lovely green. We had Uzi, which was a gorgeous kind of steel color.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your hands up by your face? No, your nails should maybe match your clothes. Add $50,000. Because at this point, you were like, I am never going to outside investors ever again. Bingo. So you had the money, and you funded this company. That's right. And because you could do that, you can make it happen quickly on your terms. And so what was urban decay? What would make it different?”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just go, I can't do this for the rest of my life. This is not right. Why is your nails red? Well, because it has to match your lipstick. Why do you stand there and put your hands up by your face? No, your nails should maybe match your clothes. How about that? What if your nails matched your clothes? So makeup's a very easy thing. You can do it three weeks. We're on the shelf in three months. You know, just add $50,000.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I adored her and I thought she loved me, and so I took that to heart. And I thought that jeans and t shirts were not a negotiable item, so I would concentrate on the makeup. And I went to go look at that, and I went to the department store, and it was all great if you were a Christie Brinkley. You know, I don't look like Christie Brinkley. And I've always been kind of a... Hippie Cupunk sort of person just because I don't fit in. So I tend to gravitate toward those fashions that belong to those people who enjoy not fitting in. And it was all pink.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My aunt, whom I adored, I was turning 40 and she said, hey kid, it's time to lose the t-shirts and jeans. And by the way, you could use a little makeup.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I come from a family that believes very strongly in the common good. I've been given great values with respect to work, and you know I decided that Animals were always my first love. And there were five animal shelters in the Bay Area that if your pet happened across the street, it could end up in a shelter 60 miles away. And they had no way to tell where your pet was. And a lot of times by the time you figured it was really missing, it had been euthanized. And I went across the street to the animal shelter and I said, you know, hey, I have this idea for network. And we could put all these animals in this database. It would be shared by all of these five networks that ring the bay, and we could call it PetNet. And you guys could just sit there and take a picture of the animal and like.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. You know, certainly people would say, well, you look, you're crying all the way to the bank. Yeah, how much money can you spend? How much money do you really need? I'm not somebody that, you know, I live in a log cabin. What they had taken from me was what they meant to take for me, which was basically my whole working identity.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, and we've paid out about $50 million on a private charity that we've been funding since that time. So, you know, I had money, but we're not talking about billions. We're talking about a tenth of that.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The people who were customers of them were no longer now not my friends. And it was a time that Any kind of tentacle or root that I had managed to put down was just forcibly ripped up. I was on my own. I had a comfortable amount of money. Remember that right after that, Lennon and I put 70% of the proceeds in the charitable vehicles.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, my entire adult working life was tied up in everything that had been done and sacrificed and built in that company. And the people who stayed there were no longer not my friends”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it could have been that way had the sequence of events been less brutal and less personal. They could have bought Lennon and I out. We could have kept, you know, a facade of a relationship. It could have been done five hundred ways that would have been a positive thing. Yeah, it was probably time for me to go. It was probably time for Limb to go. We're just not good people in a collaborative environment.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. But what fundamentally hit was something that they could not have reckoned on, and that is that there exists people in the world who fundamentally see black and white right and wrong. And Len is one of those people that has an unerring sense of ethics.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agree with you, and Lennon and I, you know, we respect each other as people and we adore each other and we're each other's best friend.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Potentially, we ended up getting it back, but only because it would have looked very bad for the stock six months after when both of the founders walk out and you can't tarn feather the other one with girls don't know how to play on a team.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, except for one thing, and someone like Don Valentine has no way to really internalize Len for all of his things that can make him very unusual and sometimes very difficult. He is fundamentally fair and decent, and it is inviolable. And I went to him and I said Len, I don't know, you know, you're on the board whether you've heard about this, but mortgage just fired me. and then looked at me in his usual way his little nose kind of goes up one side and he says I am sure you are mistaken. And I said well I'm sure I'm not the words you are fired leave the building were said, and so Lynn I think you probably could have knocked over both Valentine and everybody else like little bowling pins when Lynn walked up there and walked out with me.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people handle stress in different ways. And they were simultaneously pandering to Len's ego, and I had no idea Len had an ego until then. But, you know, he went on the roadshow. He got the board seat”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, at that point, it was women don't get along, they're not playing team players. This was six months after the company IPO. So you fire one of the founders, Big Deal. And Lennon and I were not getting along. We did have an adjustment period where it was very difficult.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've got all this money now. You just time to retire. And I said, well, John, I'm not even half vested yet, and I've got a lot. I still think I'm doing here, and I started, of course, in my practical way to tell him what I was doing, and he practically told me to shut up, and basically I was fired.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sitting in my little office in the corner as I did every day, and he came in and he sat down in the chair without making an appointment and he said, you know, I think it's time you retire.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, not very many, although we had a couple that were doing inside sales and we had my friend who was still at that point running the purchasing department. I do remember that at the executive meeting, the head of HR who was the former Ms. California and I were the only women.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, Look at the people here and then I said the most stupid thing I've ever said in my life, which was leaving me out of it. These people are really, really special. And I did it because I felt I grew up with a grandma who said pretty is pretty does and you don't say nice things about yourself. I was being modest. I was saying, you know, even if you don't like me, which he didn't. He loathed me. Look at these other people. They're truly special. I mean, these were people that came out of Stanford at the end of the 70s. You don't know what you've got here.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had no clue, and so I was trying A to translate and B to take the flak from the salespeople, translate it, write it up, and discuss it with the engineering people. And these guys were used to having a product that they frankly didn't understand, but to sell a Cisco box, I think you had to understand some part of it because it's what made us different and it's what's made us successful. And at one point, I looked at Don and I said because he was arguing that we didn't need more floor space because we literally didn't have a place to set the boxes that we were making. And he says, every company I invest in always wants more space. And they always go out of business. I said, you don't understand on this is going to be a $1 billion company. Looks at me and he goes, How do you know that?”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, if you think about it 20 years ago, try explaining what a router did to people. And we didn't talk normal things in the salesman, they would come in and they would start talking to Dave Means or Lena or Robert Michaels or Kirk Lahid or Greg Zoutz or one of those people. the engineers would just like be staring at them.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, then I had a different motivation, they had a very different set of experiences, and we had a very complicated product. I mean, we were people who'd been talking to each other for a decade at that point.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a type you're saying that came into Cisco So it sounds like once the money came in from Don Valentine and Sequoia, there was just a complete, they kind of took over the culture that you guys had. You had this culture of Passionate computer programmers, and they brought in salespeople who had a different motivation”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Cisco by this time had a sales force. Remember the sales force looked like Don Valentine but younger. Salesmen way into the discurrent millennium are still having the parties with the naked girls jumping out of the cake and all of this stuff.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and he denies it, but I will swear on the lives of my cats. The first thing he said to me was, I hear you're everything that's wrong with Cisco.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, Don is much more clever than that. You know, Don said, well, for the good of the company, we need to get you a professional CEO. For the good of the company, we need a professional CFO. And Lennon and I were still kind of doing the, I think we wanted to believe it. We had given our health, our marriage, everything for this company. And here's this guy who's been wildly successful. And we truly did want to believe that that was for the best. And his next strategy was to bring someone in who was hostile.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He gave us $2.6 million, and Lennon and I got about 30%. But remember, he was the chairman of the board of the company, and he got stock from that, and all of his friends got stock.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes and telling us that Dough don't worry about getting your own lawyer well, you know, we'll pay for it. You know, Lennon and I walked into a four-year vesting plan after funding the company for three years, clearly a mezzanine investment. We were booking a quarter million dollars a month at that point.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Told us that, well, you know, I've taken 200 companies public, you walk into his office, and you have your little cubes back there. He's got like all these Lucide cubes, you know, making this kind of untenable mountain. And he says, you know, you'll be part of the Don Valentine group of companies.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you can imagine being in a World War I trench in the mud being constantly shelled by the Germans and the mustard gas and no food and no relief and no sleep, it was that exciting.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We could get enough income fast enough to meet payroll, and we had a whole bunch of free labor. Len's parents were building cables, and my aunts came down and did Xeroxing for us, and I was managing the cash flow. But it was very hand-mouthed. In a way that I think that people who want to be entrepreneurs these days really don't understand.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that I've never been in a war, but I think that we had all of us who were there. There were probably about ten or twelve of us at that time, very much had a trench mentality.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had no clue what I was talking about. First of all, there was a woman founder, and they're all sixty or seventy. They just didn't know how to relate to a woman. In business. And you know, Lennys, a great guy, but he's not normal Well, two of us are pretty abnormal. I mean, so I was basically a translator a lot of times.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the problem was that at this point the investor community, which was a whole bunch of old Fairchild semiconductor salesmen, They didn't think that you could make any money on a public protocol because, of course, everybody would do it. You know, DeckNet was a proprietary protocol. SNA was a proprietary protocol. PUP was a proprietary protocol.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I mean literally, we would get the money and get We had pretty good margins. I mean, we were doing a good business. We would get the money and we would pay off the two months bills before. But then if you had an order for another 20 boxes, we had no collateral. We'd already mortgaged the house.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT