YouSaid · the spoken record

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

lines on the record

96

first

2021-10-22

most recent

2021-10-22

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

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

1. “Well, Tech Women Choose possibility was a letter, an open op-ed I wrote on a platform called Recode, well-known digital newsletter, really at a time where everybody and myself included was frustrated that the narrative on women in tech was incredibly negative. If you think about 2015, many headline articles, the Atlantic, the cover of many, the New Yorker, I think, all of these folks have articles about sort of where all the women in tech and how terrible it is. And there's also like a lot of great, not so great stories about biased discrimination and so on. And so at the time, I'm a startup entrepreneur. I'm running joyous. And of course, I have a multifaceted view of this. On the one hand, I think, hey, you know what? All things being equal, I would still choose Silicon Valley. It is mostly meritocratic. It has been very good to me. I found my tribe, right? I've been able to thrive. Yet at the same time, I remembered that early experience I had, you recall, where my boss told me.”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Continues. It's still painful to me because obviously I was early but right. And that's one of the risks you have in entrepreneurship when you really do try and innovate, right? Maybe if I had started Joyce five years later, it would have been an entirely different outcome. It probably would have been. But hey, that's the way the internet rolls.”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Yeah, you cannot. Facebook is probably Facebook probably the best video shopping experience. Instagram has good shop ability, but it's adding shoppability because for a long time, Instagram was like kind of more pure, but it's adding it. But they all want it, right? Everybody talks about shopping video. I mean, everybody, and many people have enabled it. So, yeah, look, I would tell you I find it endlessly frustrating that I couldn't land the company at one of the places I think even today could use the technology. By the way, HSN, QVC, if you were to look at the list of the people I talked to in 17 as Todd is trying to sell my startup, I can only tell you I found it fairly shocking. But this tells you also how early it was. Like today, video commerce is the hottest thing in 2021. In 2017, I literally could not get some of the best platforms on the internet to buy this pad with technology. Now, I ultimately sold it to another private company that's doing very well and was doing shoppable content and still is. So, you know, Enjoy us is a brand still.”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “You can ask any startup CEO that have they go on to sell a company. I spent a year trying to sell Joy. That's the gritty, nitty-gritty truth. And think about my Rolodex. Sure. Pretty darn good, right? It has Amazon. It has Google. I mean, I'm a known quantity. By the way, this is one of the hard truths that when you're running a money-losing startup, sometimes you can get people to bite, but often they think they can build it themselves. YouTube, you know, we had a conversation there. They certainly thought they could build it themselves. I would say up until today, YouTube still doesn't have a shopping cart. Right.”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Not used to like being on a site, Instagram was just filters and products at the time. And being on a site where you could watch and shop products. So, like when you have no consumer understanding of that and you put out a new innovation, you're hoping they'll adopt it, right? But if it's not something they recognize, you know, what ends up happening is you're searching for consumers who want that experience. And that can be very expensive. You spend a lot more money on marketing and advertising in order to convert people into watchers and shoppers. And that was our case. We kept growing. We kept doubling every year. But we really needed venture capital money to keep growing the size of the customer base. And it was too expensive ultimately. So that's why we sold. We didn't sole sell for some glorious reason. We sold because, you know, a $50 million in, we were growing the revenues, but we couldn't find a path to profitability.”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Right. And then you have Facebook video where there's a lot of shoppable ads. Like today video, you know, there's really a video unit on Facebook that has a shopping cart in it. You can watch video as an ad and buy it. But when I am building this business, there is no Facebook video. There is no Instagram video. There's no Snapchat. There's no TikTok. So people aren't really used to watching video for anything other than content, really like funny videos, short form videos on YouTube and really for quite a young audience. And even Netflix isn't building and growing, but it's as a long-form video platform. Like we went to Netflix and said, would you like to buy a shoppable show? Like, we can give you shoppable shows. And nobody was interested. Nobody was interested in carrying shows that were about shopping. So we had neither interest from kind of any of the big platforms and all the platforms were really interested in content that was only monetized through advertising, right? So, and the consumer.”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “But when I say too early, if you think about it, today we have Instagram video where people are used to the idea of looking at products in their feed. Half the people”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “First of all, we required for a very small sum. Like, you know, nobody made any money. My venture capitalist didn't make any money. I didn't make any money. But why I say we were too early is we raised, you know, we raised close to $50 million, which in today's world is not a lot of money. People raised that in one round. We raised that in over six years.”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “But nonetheless, I sort of just embraced the idea that e commerce was going to go through another revolution and I spent all my time working on the video side of that equation.”

   2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Like 11 years ago. Not that many people are thinking about this. And ultimately, I found that idea so compelling that despite myself, I turned down the safer CEO jobs and I took another startup risk. And I started that company, which you call Joyous. Yeah, that was my video shopping startup. And I ran it for six years. And we sort of built literally studios, had brands give us products, we had curators who told the story. We created a patented video player that had a shopping cart in the video player. We distributed that video player online multiple places at multiple different third-party websites to get people to shop and watch at the same time. And that was an incredible experience. I mean, again, sort of like the risk of, you know, trying to be an innovator, never something I would regret.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Sure. In Amazon. So I'm getting large company calls. In fact, I was at the final rounds of the CEO job for a travel brand you would well recognize. And at the same time, I had this idea for a video shopping startup because I had seen that at Google, you know, YouTube was starting to have young women who were like hawking products. They were called haulers in the day. They'd go shopping and show all their wares on their YouTube videos. YouTube wasn't shoppable, but I saw that trend when I was at Google. And then, of course, I'd been at Pauli Board, the shopping startup in fashion and lifestyle, and all the brands wanted to work with us. They all wanted to somehow showcase their wares online. And they wanted to do it with great content. So while I'm interviewing for these larger company CEO roles, I have an idea to like effectively create a new version of QBC, which again, many people are doing video commerce today. I think 2010.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Yeah, absolutely. By the way, I heavily negotiated for that circumstance. You're right. I was very financially protected, but my ego, and we'll talk about that later, was just incredibly bruised. And I was a very humiliated, as you can imagine, to have lost that battle. And we'll come back to that. But to your point, look, I start my next company not wanting to because I just had this very brutal startup experience, right? And remember, I'm still pretty relevant because I've been at Google. I still have the sheen of Google and everything.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Them first as a CEO who's replacing a founder. So I go there for, I go, I study the landscape. They try to recruit me multiple times. I've been at a venture capital firm. I spent like really nine months looking for my next thing. And I took that job. And within six months, I was out. I mean, the founder and I butted heads. I wouldn't even say we butted heads overtly. He just wanted to run the company again. I came in as the CEO and within six months he wanted the company back. And that's what he told the board. So I actually got, you know, I lost my first job outside of Google, which was humiliating. That's how I entered e-commerce. This is what I mean when people are like, or re-entered e-commerce. People are always like, wow, started your own next company. I was like, no, no, first I was the CEO of a startup where I battled with the founder and he wanted the company back and I gave up my 2,000 person multi-billion dollar job at Google to fail at a 10-person startup. Like, let's not miss that part of the story.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “I'd started my current e-commerce, right? At Jungle and at Amazon. And it was like circa 2009. And I believe that e-commerce was going to go through another revolution in which people were shopping less for things they needed, like things based on convenience and more based on wants. So this is the era where fashion, you know, decor, experiences all start to rise as sort of marketplaces on the internet. And they're all just getting launched, by the way. If you look back 10 years, it was not obvious that Airbnb would be a big company. It was not obvious that fashion would become one of the biggest categories, right? It's just super early to think about anything other than price and convenience. So I study sort of all the things in the landscape. And one company had been pursuing me very actively, a company called Polyvor, which was sort of like an early version of Pinterest, subsequently got bought by Yahoo several years later for $300 million. And I actually, before I start my own company, I go to”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Interest in leaving. They don't leave. And it was Erica. Eric Schmidt as well. But it's also clear that any successor at Google would be from product or engineering. And so, you know, and by the way, I mean, pretty mighty company, Cheryl Fanberg is my peer, Tim Armstrong, who went on to run AOL, Nikesha Aurora, who today runs Palo Alto Networks. I mean, it was a pretty crazy, talented group. But all of us started peeling off in our own time. My colleagues, a lot of them went to larger companies. And I actually wanted, to your point, I had the startup itch again. I was 39 years old and I thought if I'm ever going to build another company, this might be my time. I'm older, but I'm not so old that I wouldn't not start a company or go to something early. And I wanted to be a CEO. And so I combined those ambitions and I went to a venture capital firm for nine months. I basically parked myself there. I had my third child. I said to them, I want to study everything in e-commerce.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Yeah, so 09, I am three months pregnant with my third child. I've had, you know, gotten married, had a family at Google. I met the pinnacle of my career. But it's also clear that I am not going to be the CEO of Google. Like, it's not happening. It was obvious that Google”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Well, remember, I have one more big chapter at Google that's probably ironically even bigger than my local and math chapter because I'm at Google. We've launched local and maps. And what's happening is people are saying to me, well, saying to my boss, who was the chief business officer at Google, hey, we have all these other products that need us to license data. Like we want to have a library product. We want to have a scholar product. We want to have a shopping product. By the way, we want to have a video product. So I end up building”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “It Yeah, absolutely. And to be honest, when we started the product, local and maps were different things. Type into the search box, like you know, movie theater near me, and you would get literally a listing of results. Today, of course, they'll show you the results on a Google Map as the preferred way for you to see those results. Like, yes, you can get a listing if you want, but every Google search result has a map embedded. And like you, I actually often do all my local searching on Google Maps. I don't even go to the main Google website. I can, but I just go to Google Maps and I type in restaurants near me and I get all of them with a reviews and the results. And so look, very, very, very fun product to have launched and to have worked on.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Yes, but not, but like when we laid overlaid, I was like, okay, I guess if this is cool, I'm going to make this anybody. But what a great kind of product feature and like kind of great vision. So those are some of the funner experiences about building maps and then local as well.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Larry and Sergei were like, we need to buy that. We're going to overlay that on maps. And that was the innovation, right? Overlaying satellite technology on top of maps like, hey, you can't give me any credit as a business person for seeing that. That was really product vision. In that case, led by the founders. I mean, Brett liked the product too, but from what I recall, Larry and Sergei were really gung-ho on buying the company and overlaying satellite technology on top of maps. And that's an example of sort of one of the things I admired about Google. They didn't really care about how it would make money. It was just a very cool and differentiated and, you know, it turns out very useful feature to have Google Earth on top of Google Maps, but like no commercial application, just super cool, at least not then. Well, events.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “engineers. So on the one hand, the product could have been pretty straightforward like Yahoo or AOL, but Google made two innovations that I think people will remember to this day. Number one, believe it or not, just putting the name of the road inside of the road, not on top of the road was one innovation. You're like, oh, the name of the road is like on the road. And visually, it's just like a prettier experience. And it's like the map is less crowded that way. But the second innovation, and this I give a lot of credit to Sergei and Larry early on, a guy named John Hanky showed Google once we'd launched local masks his cool technology that had satellite imagery called keyhole.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “But not for long. I mean, look, look, digital really wiped that business over, you know, by the way, they were still yellow pages around the country around the globe, but nobody would think of that as a juggernaut industry. So, yeah, you know, online really, really changed and transformed the face of local advertising fundamentally. I would say I knew it would be big. I mean, that's what led me to move in that direction. I'd say what was unknown about Google Service, and you appreciate this even by me, is, you know, I was paired with a product manager. I was the business person, meaning I had to go license the data for roads and businesses to put underneath inside of that service, right? All that data was not online. I had one product manager, Brett Taylor, ironically now the president of Salesforce. He was my product manager, and we had 10 engineers. And 12 of us built that product effectively. I did the business deal. He guided me.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Google, and within two weeks, I said yes to the job because I was like, holy smokes, the yellow pages industry, which at the time was, you know, those thick yellow books that everybody got to find places was a $23 billion industry in annual advertising. And I was like, surely, if Yahoo has a product and AOL has a product, Google should have a product. And look at all the ad dollars available in this category and look at all the usage that's pretty antiquated. So I said yes very quickly.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Well, it's a couple things. So, first of all, when I got the call, Google originally called me to come join them and I actually said no. And I said, gosh, you guys are also quite big. You're 1,200 people. Remember, in my warped brain, you know, Amazon is big as 1,200 people. So is Google. And I was like, I'm going to start another company. Hard pass. I know. So funny. And Google called me back seven months later. They said, you said you wanted a startup opportunity. We have it. We have something Greenfield called Maps. And they said Yahoo has a product called Yahoo Maps. AOL has something called Maps. Google has no products to help you search locally or find navigate locally, i.e. both find goods and services locally or businesses and navigate, right? Because Google Local is like search for business, Google Maps is search for a place. In fact, today they're very merged. Nobody thinks of them as different. And I studied the landscape. I went and interviewed.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “And he wasn't going anywhere, by the way. So I always say to people I topped out at my own startup. Like literally I'd had every job. I'd done sales. I'd done marketing. I've done PR. I was our spokesperson. I raised the money. And in many ways, I was partnered very closely with the CEO. And we had a great relationship. And in 2004, I was like, okay, Anell, like, what's my next horizon? Like, I've been here five years and I've done all of these roles, but there's like the company's not growing fast enough to give me an entirely new career, you know, a set of challenges. And so that's, I actually for the first time, you know, did what I'd call a more studied search thinking I might start another company, but also thinking that I wanted to find the right idea.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “No, I stayed with Yodley for five years In that time, I had every job under the sun. I was predominantly responsible, as we've talked about, for not just raising the money. We raised about $100 million in the time I was there in several rounds of financing. But I was responsible for sales and business development, selling our technology to all the banks and brokerage companies. And so I stayed until 2004. I helped us hire our CEO in 200”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Yes, yes, yes. I mean, it was 12 engineers in a room, and as I said. And I was effectively the first business leader to be hired at the company. And so I gave my notice at Amazon maybe a month later and moved right into Jungle E and we raised $15 million from venture capitalists within a month of that. And we were off to the races. And thus began kind of a six-year journey to build what today many would consider the pioneer in really aggregating your financial information. I'm really proud of the fact that Jodli really did create a whole industry of companies that were able to access financial information using our services and our kind of technology backbone and build many of the financial apps that people use today. So Yodeli had a 15-year run before it became public and I was there for the first five of those years.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “You know, my brokerage balance in one place and gave me this educated view. Nobody can do that. I'm just pretty revolutionary technology at the time. And they offered me the opportunity at 29 years old to become what's called a co-founder of the company and the first business executive. And I just jumped at the chance. I love the technology. I love the fact that I would be five engineers at this company too, again, very similar to jungley. But now I was going to get a seat at the table as, you know, as literally one of the executive team at such a young age and get to raise the money from venture capitalists, write the business plan.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “About a year, and I get a call one weekend that sort of says, hey, there's this professor from UCSD who's a computer science professor and he's built this really cool technology that goes out across the web and it gets all your financial information behind all of those sites with passwords and it puts them in one place. You can have an aggregated view of your financial life. And by the way, the technology is not the same as jungle-e, but it has some analogies. And they're like, and they're looking for business co-founder, they have all these engineers, but they need somebody to establish the business model, raise the money. And so I got one of those inbound calls. And it was through that network of, you know, angel investors who were the founders of jungle. I flew down from Seattle to San Francisco for a weekend. I took one look at the technology and I was suitably impressed. I was like, wow, you just grabbed all my credit card balances and my bank balance.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Well, remember, we were chatting about that rather restless and impatient young woman. I don't think any of that solves when I was at Amazon. It was a great experience, by the way. And remember, I had never gone intending to be at Amazon. I had gone to a startup, right? Which got bought. And while Amazon was a great company, he was up in Seattle. It was now public. And so there's me thinking, gosh, when am I going to get the chance to start my own company? I know many people listening to this podcast will be like, really, you left Amazon to start your own company. Was that a really smart decision? But in some ways, you know, Amazon to me still at the time felt very big and I wanted to get there. So I'm at Amazon. And remember, many of the founders of Jungle League, you know, have made a lot of wealth. They're certainly mentors of mine. They are even today. And they start angel investing in a number of companies in the valley. And knowing that I have this ambition, I've been at Amazon.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And so you could say, hey, could I see this company becoming one of the larger retailers? Sure. But as defined by what Amazon is today, yeah, no way to predict. Quite fascinating.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “The view was not that we were going to become the juggernaut we are today as defined by Amazon's not just a retailer, but it's like a dominant movie studio. Oh, it's not just a movie studio. It owns a grocer. Oh, it's not just a grocer, but it happens to own the largest infrastructure backbone for the web called Amazon Web Services and other merchants. Like, no way was that obvious. As I said, like literally, these were the days where we were selling books, music, and video and launching new categories. And Jeff, as I said, like he was impressive, but he was also very accessible, funny, young. Like he told me a few years older than I am at best. And to know, I don't, I mean, all the people that you think of now as soon as quite famous, there was no indication. You know, as I said, now you might and I might say, wow, buying a company in 1998 to launch Amazon Marketplace. Certainly the early inklings and he has a vision to sell a lot of stuff.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Show you every product on the internet, whether or not they had it in stock. So this early vision of marketplace. But Amazon at the time was just building out its own vertical. So what was it like? He was really the main champion of this acquisition of buying us for our technology. He used it to start version one of Amazon Marketplace, which he shut down several years later. So he had made many attempts at Marketplace before he got the one that worked. And by the way, before the world was ready for it. So it was pretty, it was a pretty neat look into how sort of visionary. He was even early on, of course, not nearly as sort of daunting a presence as he might be now, just like, you know, very accessible, pretty goofy, actually, pretty quirky sense of humor. And I got to work with him specifically because I was one of the people selling new merchants, you know, like people like Macy's and others on the idea of putting their products on Amazon's website. So I got.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Believe it or not, back then it was a pretty small company. There was about 1,200 people. We were public. So everybody got exposure to Jeff, myself included. So what are some of those early times like at Amazon? Well, first of all, as I said, everybody was, you know, it was a small enough company that you could fit most of Amazon in one or two buildings. So we made a couple of moves where, you know, we were all in the same building. Number two, we all had to work in the warehouse, including the very top executives at Amazon, Jeff and Rick Galzell. Everybody have had ships over Christmas. You had no day job. You literally all had shifts in the warehouse, which was a pretty amazing cultural, you know, cultural feat. And by the way, that included like overnight shifts. You were picking and packing books, music, you know, books, TVs, and videos. That's true. Jeff had bought the company because he believe it or not in 1998, still had his vision of a day where Amazon should”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Had this very cool technology. I took the interview. I didn't really understand fully the technology, but I loved them. They were smart, they were candorous. And so I switched. And luckily for me, I made that switch. Jungle ended up building a whole engine for shopping for comparing prices across the internet. And Amazon bought the company six months later. And that was really the start of my career in Silicon Valley, just a great experience. But following a very poor one.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Lot of responsibility. He kept telling me I was the rookie that needed to be coached. And I quit six months later, actually fairly deflated because I was like, wow, if this is what it means to be in Silicon Valley, it's supposed to be this meritocracy. You know, I'm supposed to be, you know, having the time of my life. Maybe I'm not meant for this place. Luckily for me, I started to think about getting another job and a recruiter called and pitched this idea of a company started by four Stanford PhDs in”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “If you can't tell already, I was a fairly impatient young woman because, you know, I moved to Fairbound in that first six years of my career. As I said, I was looking for a job in the valley. I found one. Unfortunately, the job I found was not nearly as positive an experience as I'd hoped. As we just talked about, I actually had a really good experience at Merrill. I even had a good experience at B-Sky B if you look at the fact that I got responsibility, I was promoted, and I got to this, you know, I found a startup in Silicon Valley that was in interactive television, which was, you know, at least somewhat related to what I just got at, you know, at Sky. It was in the TV industry. And then second day on the job, my boss told me I was scaring the secretaries. And I was like, what, like, what do you mean? What does that mean? What do you mean? Yeah, what do you mean? I'm like, I just come from two industries that are highly male dominated. Nobody ever told me I was scary. And thus began a rapid decline in our relationship. I felt like I wasn't getting a”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Once you visit California, you sort of realize that it's possible to live in good weather all year long. But the other truth was I wanted to be an entrepreneur. My father loved running his own small business. I had no idea how I loved the Bay Area for the weather and I sensed that it was, you know, that there were a lot of people starting companies. So I quit my job. I went skiing for three months in Whistler. And I moved to the, I moved to California and bought a car. drove up the coast from LA to San Francisco. Luckily, those friends of mine, their parents put me up at their very nice house in California until I found a job. And I started over.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Probably a more dramatic story. I was promoted. I was working first on the top floor for one of the two top bosses. And I'd been there. I'd been at B Sky B for only a year and I walked into my boss's office and I told him I quit. And he was shocked. And I said, you know, I said, two things are true, David. Number one, I have this epic promotion. You know, I sit down the hallway from you. I get lunch every day. I'm on the, you know, I'm on the executive floor. I'm like, but you don't really use me. It was true. My boss is very used to sort of operating like a lone wolf as sort of effectively the president of the company. And I said, number two, I think I want to head back to North America. I'd been there for two and a half years. And a girlfriend of mine, a very dear friend that's at Stanford Business School. I had visited her the year early, and I fell in love with the weather in the Bay Area. And this kind of sense of entrepreneurship, that's true. I mean, for a girl who comes from, you know, Ontario, Canada, where it gets pretty darn cold.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Well, so ironically, I made my way to the West Coast, not from the East Coast, but via London, because if you recall, Merrill sent me to London. And when I was in London, I had spent maybe, you know, two years with the bank. And the classic length of these programs is two years, and then they expect you actually to move on. So analyst programs are two years at investment banks. So I spent two years, they offered me a third, and I really wanted to be quote unquote in industry. Now, I had no idea what that meant, but I wanted to work for one company. And so I was able to secure a role with the CFO at a company called British Sky Broadcasting, one of the biggest satellite broadcasters in the world, he recalled. This is part of News Corps' kind of empire. And luckily for me, I parlayed my job in finance to a job in finance inside of a company at East IB. And then I was promoted to working for the CEO and the COO there. So actually.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “At it. So I was very inquisitive, very curious. And as a result, Henry kept staffing me and putting me, I would say, on jobs with increasing responsibility. And so pretty early on, I was going to meetings with CEOs that he would set up and let me attend. Of course, I was carrying the pitch books, but that didn't really matter to me, the exposure did. And as a result, I ended up working on an IPO early, the Long Island Savings Bank. Henry kept giving me more and more responsibility. And in my second year, Merrill sent me to London, which was unusual as well to send Sunday that early. And I got to go, you know, work on banking in the, you know, in the European banking industry and had just an amazing experience. So I gave Henry Michael a lot of credit. Henry definitely skipped a bunch of layers to teach me. And I, as I said, maybe my best contribution was I was a rapt student. But the result was that, you know, an experience where I got a lot of exposure very quickly to”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Books with facts and details about different industries. I was in the financial services industry. That was a group I was assigned to. And you really create those books for what's called managing directors who go out and pitch large companies on using their services. M&A services, IPO services, what have you. And so the average analyst is spending days and nights, often through the night toiling to create these perfect pitch books. So I certainly had that experience, but I ended up working for a pretty eclectic young managing director called Henry Michaels and Henry was, you know, as detail-oriented as they could get, pipe smoking, you know, definitely, you know, capable of driving others crazy. But he took a really deep and early interest in just teaching me about believe it or not, the savings and loan industry. And I think he found me to be maybe a rap student, and I freely admit, after taking a year to get that job, I was just bound and determined to be successful.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “And I think this is probably the second formative experience I had at Merrill. So my role as a financial analyst, anybody who maybe has studied finance know that that's really a job where you create pitch books.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “And then they accelerated me to the final process, which as you know for investment banks is very competitive. I came down on a weekend and competed with all the sort of Ivy League American kids who had been through rounds of interviews, undoubtedly. And I got the job. So it was a pretty sweet success after a year and a half of trying, but it was very formative for me because it really informed, I guess, my view of how often you have to just keep choosing in order to get to the goal you want.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Well, the first is, honestly, just to struggle to get the job, believe it or not. And I say that to people because often we look back on the careers of others and think they look so pretty from the outside. But from the inside, it took me a good year plus to get that job. I was rejected by a number of banks. Merrill didn't even come to Canada to recruit. And they offered me one of those polite informational letters that said something like, if you're ever in New York City, we'd be happy to give you a 15-minute informational interview. And I remember saying to my father, I'm like, well, look at that. They just rejected me. And he said, well, why don't you take a train ticket and head down to New York? You never know. And I was at the end of my rope. I'd been searching for jobs for over a year. As I said, determined to get this job and not successful. And I took that train ride and 15 minutes turned into a three-hour interview.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Well, a couple of things. Number one, I'd say the most more intelligent reason was because I wanted sort of a base in financial literacy and financial analysis, which I thought would be great for any career I had. And then the more emotional reason, honestly, I was at a top undergraduate business school in Canada and all my friends were doing it. I was like, well, if they were doing it, I should be doing it too. So in some ways, I call it a copycat goal. I'm sure there are many ways I could have gotten financial literacy, but I was bound and determined to keep pace with my rather competitive colleagues and get a job on Wall Street.”

    2021-10-22 · Masters in Business · Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Entrepreneurship (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source