YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Conrad

lines on the record: 112
first: 2023-11-26
most recent: 2023-11-26
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

“I'm at T Conrad on all the socials from Twitter to threads to Instagram. My DMs are open everywhere. And I really, I would absolutely be delighted to hear from any of your listeners on any topic that they choose. And what can you do for me? Well, I would love for folks to download Zero and give it a try and send me some feedback about what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong. And we'd love to have our little product be part of your life.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a guy on the team named Steve Wilhite who invented graphics interchange format, GIF. And he was a straight out of central casting 1960s neckbeard programmer type. And the first I had ever encountered. And very prickly. It's crazy, but at the time Steve would take all comers in the fight that it was pronounced Jiff. Now, he's obviously wrong. It's obviously pronounced Jif. It's crazy to me now 35 years later, this is still a topic that pops up on the internet every once in a while. It's somehow like Zeleg. I cross paths with the, you know, the guy who creates. And I know his opinion on the topic, even though it's an unpopular one.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you can't be like a product person without having an eye rolly Charles Eames quote that's at the center of your existence. And for me, the Charles Eames quote is the details are not the details they make the design. And I just really absolutely believe that the devil is in the details when you're a product designer and be uninterested in nuance at your peril.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a company called EarTune that are these kind of their replacement tips and they just have like the littlest bit of like compression foam on them. So they still, they don't make the AirPod so big that they won't fit in the recharging case or anything and they work miraculously. They stay in my ear. And Apple has this feature called like size fit or something. Go in settings, find your airpods, scroll all the way down in the settings. And you can run this test where they play some audio and they tell you how good the seal is. And that revealed that my right ear is weirder than my left ear. So I actually have to use different tips in either sizes. Suddenly it sounds like a vaguely disgusting conversation to be having. Anyway, I'm just really thrilled about my ability to wear Apple's AirPods after all. These”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have bought every pair of headphones on the planet, in part because Apple's headphones do not stay in my ears. They just like, I've sneezed one across the room. I've lost one down a drain pipe. They just, they don't stay. None of them, the wired ones, the not wired ones, the inner ones that they're just. And it's left me feeling honestly like I am some kind of anatomical freak. Like I look at other people wearing them. I'm like, what is going on with their ear that it's just staying there? Perfect. It seems inconceivable to me. Nonetheless, I have a pair of AirPods Pros that I want to love and put up with the fact that I'm going to drop them, lose them, sneeze them across the room. But recently, I came across this product.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me about what was it that you did on that day? Because I'm trying to figure out as kind of like left to their own devices, what do they go to naturally because it rewards them? Because I think it's really important to find the highest, best use of everyone you hire. And sometimes you can get a little bit to the bottom of like, what's the highest best use if you understand the things where there's a natural reward mechanism? Because like, well, I had this great day. I'm going to do more of that tomorrow. What was the thing? And it's just a pretty illuminating.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I tell people that almost every interview question should start with, tell me about a time in your career when to give them permission to set their expectation that I'm asking them to tell me about something they've actually done that is relevant to the topic that I'm probing. So that's just a structural thing that I try to do. And then usually towards the end of the interview, I ask almost everybody, Imagine that you had like a really great day at work.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two things about interviews. The first is I always encourage people when they're thinking about their interview questions to take any question that they're tempted to pull from their own current experience with the goal of trying to how would this person solve this thing that I'm working through right now because it just calls on the other person to like speculate oftentimes like about your own business. I think you know really well that they don't actually know anything about it's just It creates this imbalance between the interviewer and the interviewee that feels like out of sync with how I think about that kind of collaborative nature of a great interview.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I consume a lot of video content, both like, you know, stuff that I'm very proud to talk about and stuff that I'm less proud to talk about. Really liked the new Damon Lindeloff show that's on Peacock called Mrs. Davis. So Lindelof, of course, from Lost and the new Watchman on HBO. Mrs. Davis is about an AI that you wear in your ear, like the her AI and a nun that is hell-bent on the AI's destruction. And it reads like an early Cohen Brothers movie. It's super darkly funny and really, really thoughtful and unlicked too much streaming. I think it's seven episodes and it is a perfectly encapsulated story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end and doesn't need to ever have another episode. It's amazing. It's worth the, you know, get yourself a Peacock subscription for at least a month to watch Mrs. Davis.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there is a sequel that's exceptional as well and it's probably worth warning your readers that Hyperion is quite long and has an absolute cliffhanger.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really love Elad Gill's high growth handbook. It's organized into chapters about sort of foundational company building, building a leadership team, building a board. And in addition to the Leader in a young company. I mean, in a completely different end of the spectrum, I love big, complicated science fiction. And I mean, there's like a lot of garbage science fiction out there, to be sure. But when you find something special, it's like, it's the best. So probably through the years in that category, there's a book called Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It's just like a total classic. Everybody should read it.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is play hard too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and like, just to be perfectly clear, there's something really special about founders at both Pandora and now at Zero, the actual founders have from time to time said, well, you're like a founder. And I'm like, I'm nothing like a founder. You took all the risk. And like when I showed up, like there was a team and there was like, you know, momentum and there was money in the bank. I appreciate your desire to say complimentary things, but like you're like a founder is not one that I'll take.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I described the mathematical formula that's going to win, that has the market opportunity that's like the rate size that like, you know, has the 10X thinking that can really, and I'm a little biased here because I'm, well, I am a CEO for the first time now, I've never been a founder. I've been lucky enough to find a bunch of young teams that could benefit from my skills and enthusiasms and sometimes to some success and sometimes to some embarrassment, but always really, really interesting. Yeah, if you're out there and you think that like the only possible way you can be successful in this industry on any metric, whatever metric you care about, you want like the acclaim of your peers, you want financial reward, you want any of the things that people aspire to have an outsized impact on culture, like whatever the thing is, it gets you out of bed every morning, you can achieve.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just segments in our industry that believe this very intensely, which is like there's this belief that everybody needs to be a founder. And I think in some ways our industry would be much better off if there were fewer founders. I think in some ways the And he was an entire category of Smart, creative, hardworking, talented, you know, borderline visionary people who can raise that $2 million seed and go off and build some stupid company that's never going to go anywhere. That would be so much better off finding a team that needs their skill set and working on a problem that has, you know,”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know what people do on Monday morning? They go to work. And so if you want to be engaged with humanity, like where they are on Monday morning is at work. And so more than I had the itch to build things, which I do very much have, I had the itch to collaborate, to like be in the game with other people. That was what took me to Snapchat, took me out of like chasing experiences and took me back to building again. And then as we've already described, like, you know, at a point, I thought, well, I care about this collaboration, but maybe I don't, maybe it doesn't need to be software that I'm creating in the world and could be like gave me a chance to sort of fall back in love with that process again. And here we are, more software.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And after doing that for six months, the thing that I came to realize is that what I care about way more than experiences is relationships. And like if you're the person who is constantly on a plane going seeking out some new experience, it's really hard to form and maintain intimate, satisfying relationships. So I went back to San Francisco. I'm like, I can't be all over the world if I want to be engaged with friends and like-minded people.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was particularly in love with the idea that I would like, I had access to experience. Like I didn't really care about things. I want to fancy watch or whatever a car, but I wanted to see the world. And so I thought like, I'm going to just go and I'm going to live in London for three months and then I come back to San Francisco for a month and go live in Mexico City for three months. And like I'm going to just have this life where I'm like soaking up experiences.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so after 10 years, I left and I didn't know what I would do, but I thought maybe, I mean, I really need, I did really need a break. It was a really hard job. And that was definitely a moment where I needed some time to recover. But I think if you had asked me on that first day, I would say like, I don't know why these people find success and then start another company right away. Like, why? Like, you know, so many things you can do in the world. Why would you start another company? It's so hard.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I do try to create environments where people have a reasonable balance between the regular life and their technology life or room for that if they choose it. And I do think that that has helped through the years helped me keep at it. But I still work a lot of nights and weekends because I love it. It's what I do. Here's the other thing I got very, very lucky with the Pandora experience and got this sort of, you know. Outsized, probably inappropriate financial reward for being a part of it and gave me options that I never imagined that I would have.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to celebrate is if you can show up and do it and go home and have other things in your life because I think that's a recipe for being able to do it on a sustained basis rather than kind of burning yourself out. I think there's some nuance in this. I think 22 year old me Was always going to want to work through the night. And so I think creating space that that's okay too is important. And I think maybe in some ways at Pandora, like it was almost like that wasn't okay. It was like you should be taking more breaks. Why are you doing going this hard?”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through the night, and my, you know, boss will come in the next morning and be like, Are you still here? And I'm like, I'm still here. Look at the school thing I did. And I got a lot of attention for that. And then there's this woman on the team who showed up every single morning at 8.30, sat at her desk, wrote a ton of great software, and every night packed her stuff up. She contributed more than I ever did. And I don't think she got the same kind of recognition that I got because of the way she did the work. And when we were building the teen and culture at Or, I thought about her a lot and really made a point of saying that I just wasn't interested in performative contribution, that it's the work that matters.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But a couple of thoughts about how one engages with their work. One thing is I'm really not like a hashtag hustling kind of leader. There was a woman that I worked with on the Finder just out of college that left a really big mark on me. My own style of work then, I think I mentioned that my memory of like flashing, like blinking the folder animation was like a 2 a.m. kind of thing. I mean, I was 23 years old. I woke up at 11 o'clock in the morning. I went to the office. I screwed around and played video games in the Apple arcade and went to a couple of meetings and had lunch and stood at the whiteboard and pontificated about some nonsense. And then about four o'clock every day I would start writing software and I would write software until two or three in the morning. And then I would go out to dinner with people from the team in the middle of it and whatever. And so it kind of looked like I spent 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week at Apple. And it was, I was really, I was celebrated for this. There are lots of nights where I would like work clear.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are like, you know. Your hobbies, and I'm like, I like, I don't think I have any hobbies. And I think about what kinds of things do I do on the weekend for fun? And it's like, you know, I'm like teaching myself after effects or something, which I will immediately forget. But like, you know, I just. Like it's just sort of fun to go really deep on some piece of interesting software. So I'm very lucky. And so I think that has been super sustaining for me. You know, like one of the reasons I've been able to do it as long as I have without really burning out is that just like it's what I do. And in some ways it's why I come back to it. It's easy to say I'm going to become a pastry chef, but like left to my own devices, I use software. I make software. It's my hobby. It's my, you know, passion. It's my, it's all the things.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's really interesting is that the ones that are three but not four, I think because they are the ones that are like close but not quite to this really satisfying thing. And so it's like when you find those, it's really easy to choose a job or to choose a path where you have three but not four, which is a really great recipe feeling like there's something just out of your reach that's really important. Anyway, it's a great framework to think about your life and your career to start. I'm incredibly lucky that it's all Icky Guy for me. Like what I'm good at, what I love, what the world needs, what I can pay for, like they're just, they've always overlapped. And a big part of it is just like what I love is this world. Like I love software. I love building software. I love writing software. I love using software.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the idea is it's a Venn diagram, and there are four spheres. There's one sphere that's labeled what you love. There's a sphere labeled what you're good at. There's a sphere labeled what the world needs. And there's a sphere called what you can be paid for. And where they all intersect is this Japanese idea, Ikigai. It's like the intersection of what you're good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. If you find that, it's a good guy. And interestingly, your listeners should go and find this because there are interesting ways to label the other intersections, the intersections that where they all four don't come together.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I feel somewhat fortunate that my natural inclination as an entrepreneur is more in sync with the expectations of the market than it was for a while.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that's really fortunate for Zero is Mike Mazer, who founded the company and I have both been sort of around the block long enough and enough times that we remember 2008. We remember 2000. And so in these moments, like kind of in the pandemic, there were companies in our category that were raising hundreds of billions of dollars or the attention of sort of throwing it at paid user acquisition. And we made a conscious decision to optimize the value of the organic traffic that we were getting and to drive our growth through LTV expansion rather than top of final expansion, which was candidly not in fashion in 2021, 2022. Turns out it's much more in fashion these days as companies are called upon to be much, much more capital efficient than they were during the pandemic era. And so”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like I said, every startup is hard. And I never stopped being surprised at the new hard things that pop up every day. But we're on a really great run. We've had a tremendous year, and I'm just so, so proud of the team we've assembled. They're incredible to the last.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think particularly if you sit on 25 boards. Probably a much more efficient way to evaluate how your companies are doing where to spend your time and how to help by thinking about them abstracted up at that layer. So I will never stop thinking about software development as being in our format. I will never stop enjoying the days when I get to sort of lean in on the details. But it's been pretty eye-opening.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so funny too because it's a thing I suddenly understand something that mystified me through my entire career, which was I go to board meetings and, you know, the investors would ask these probing questions, but they were really never about the product and what the product did and what the product roadmap was and like what the features were and what this, you know, it was all, it all seemed to operate at this level that sort of was almost completely independent of the details of like the what is the solution you put into the world, which is a product-oriented thinker was just completely baffling to me. And I like, I now realize that they were tilling the soil that I'm talking about. They were tilling like, it doesn't really matter what the screens are, what the features are. And like, you know, I mean, it certainly matters, but like there's another higher order way to look at a company, which is really about the optimization of this equation.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of these variables. And it's just not at all the way I ever thought about products before. And I know that you've got lots of listeners like, this guy's an idiot. Like that, this is a fundamental way to contemplate product work. But if there's anybody out there like me who sort of thought of it as art first and then sort of optimization in the details, it is really, really powerful to spend the time to create the model that describes the whole thing. So you can identify like what are the high leverage points to focus on. So we've been doing a lot of that at the company in the last few years. And it's really starting to deliver incredible results. Like everything in life, you just, I mean, you sign up for things so you can learn. And that's the big one for me in the last year.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in the process, though, of trying to understand where we could take the business as we optimize those various dimensions and trying to understand too, which of the dimensions had the most leverage, I started building these ever more sophisticated models that describe the whole business. I mean, in startups, you get to where a lot of hats and definitely a hat that I'm wearing that I didn't anticipate at all is I am I am the full-time FP&A guy for zero. And so I built this sort of spreadsheet that aggregates data from all of our business intelligence tools and raw data from our subscription transactions and looks at all of our historical results and all of our expenses and spend. And then could use that to predict future scenarios by sort of manipulating.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, oh, what percentage of people do we convert from install to registered and from registered to trial and these very sort of way down at the bottom of all the funnels and to like ask the product team, like let's try to optimize these?”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But here's the thing that's really, my eyes have really opened in the last two years. While companies are definitely the software that they make and the products that they deliver and the news and art and science to that, as they describe, there is also, if you step back, there is an equation that describes the business. It talks about like how you turn investment into returns. And I suppose I had come up through finance and been a business major that maybe that's the way that I would have conceived of companies to begin with. So maybe it's a little embarrassing that I had to be 53 years old before the scales fell through my eyes. And I was like, oh, like companies or equations. And so, you know, when we first started talking about lifetime value and customer acquisition costs and getting those two things balanced and just sort of thinking about the unit economics of the business, my natural instinct was to go immediately to sort of the leaf nodes of the equation.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really systematic way. And, you know, I'm looking at my whole career, I'm definitely a person who started off thinking software development, was like mostly in art form. You know, you find brilliant visionaries who have a deep understanding of human behavior and they craft solutions for problems that other people don't see and they make them delightful and they get all the little details right. And when you found product markets fit for the art, then you sort of optimize them through a really sort of quantitative sort of take. And so I'm definitely a person that sees both sides of that sort of left brain and right brained equation. That's important in software.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pandemic when lots of health and fitness companies kind of saw retreats. And most importantly, it actually works 75% of the people who use the platform lose weight. People lose on average 5 to 10% of their body weight in the first 60 days. And it because of the success that people have, we grow just completely organically. We have no paid user acquisition at all. It's really a word of mouth business. But that's not to say that it's not challenging. All startups are challenging. And what we've really focused on for the last couple of years is we've been really focused on unit economics, like really trying to understand how much value can we derive and deliver for every person who downloads and installs the app? How do we convert them through all of the funnels efficiently and get them engaged with the product and get them to retain and sort of drive that up in a”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mike Mazer founded the company four and a half years ago, and he and I were talking in this interval about my own experience with the product. I was just kind of giving him product feedback and so forth. And he was telling me a little bit about his own entrepreneurial journey. And somewhere in the conversation, Mike said, you know, my intention is to step up into the executive chair role and to find a CEO for the company. So again, like in my story just over and over and over, this incredibly fortuitous thing happened. I just sort of knew immediately that it sort of ticked all the boxes. You know, here is a chance to, you know, lead something that already had some momentum to impact the culture and values in a really direct way and was like really, really close to my own personal jury. And so, you know, we've got a great little company in 2017 people. We've got more than a million users on the platform every month to over 100,000 of them pay us tens of millions of dollars of revenue through the years. And double-digit growth even coming out of the platform.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Health, my longevity, and suddenly I was. And so my solution to that was to like go really deep on metabolic health, like just like thousands of hours of podcasts and videos and glucose monitoring patches and aura rings and digital fitness gear and just to try to understand the things that impact health and longevity. As much as I would like to report that what I learned is that there's some like magic pill that you can take, maybe some oscillable rapamyasin or something. The truth is that to live a longer and healthier life, you really have to attack what I would call metabolic disease, which manifests in overweight and obesity and pre-diabetes and diabetes and high cholesterol and all of these things that impact your long-term health. And so I found zero in this path. And was using it to help my own sort of health journey.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what can I do that could have a really positive impact on the world in my next chapter? I've been an awful lot of media stuff through the years, video games and streaming services and so forth. And it seemed like maybe there was something that had a little bit more weight to it that I could spend my time on. And so my first thought was I would start something. So I work a company idea. I was kind of quietly workshopping for some months and completely independent from all of that. It's eight months into the pandemic. And my own personal health was at an all-time low. I was 50 or 60 pounds overweight. My cholesterol was in the red zone. I mean, I was like out of breath climbing stairs, which is something that I had never encountered in my life before. I'm”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been a really, really incredible couple of years. You know, in the aftermath of Quibi, I spent a lot of time sort of as I'll do sort of soul searching about what I learned and what I might want to do next. And as I thought about it, I realized that I really wanted to move on to something where I could have like a direct impact on the culture and values of the company that I was involved in. I really got that opportunity at Pandora in a big way. And, you know, I had spent the five years of like Snapchat and Quibi working for Evan and Meg and Jeffrey who are all incredible business leaders but have their own very specific sort of style and approach and that leaves a mark on the culture that's unique to the founder. And then as we've discussed, I'm always really interested in building things that are near and dear to me. And I was particularly thinking about”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to do a lot of that, I wish I could say that in my experience that that pays off. I say very clearly just one person's opinion, focus group of one, you know, don't change your priorities to go work on this. It has more of an outsized impact on people's behavior than I intend.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I swing by their virtual desk and say, you know, I've been thinking about this little detail. I thought important right now, but what do you think? Nine out of ten times that person is going to go and start working on that thing. And so you do have to be just really careful about the way you engage in some of those details, I think.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having said all of that, I also think that it can be a mistake to be that kind of leader in a smaller org because part of the opportunity of the small org is to assemble a group of people that are incredibly talented, that believe in your mission and who you can easily influence with a much lighter touch and set them up to build a culture and an organization that can execute. And so I see my job as CEO is to try to surf that edge of like I'm really in the detail, so I deeply understand the business and the product decisions that we're making and the processes that we're using to run the business, but not overplay my hand with respect to dictating outcones. The one thing you'll always have as CEO is no matter how much you tell the team that”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't there So I think what broke Apple out of that mode was Steve came back. And they didn't vote anymore. Like, you know, Steve was just making the call. And so I have some sympathy for Brian and Evan, who have these big thousands of people working for them. And as they delegate, they grow frustrated that there's not progress at the pace that they're looking for and that there's indecision and the people on the teams report that there's just like churn and no progress. fiftoms and politics and all the rest and that as the CEO is a brilliant product oriented CEO they are uniquely situated to come in and cut through all of that garbage and you know get the trains running on time again”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was at Apple, one of the reasons that we struggled to ship things is that Apple did a great job of assembling incredibly, incredibly smart and talented people, just like everyone around me at that early stage of my career was so, so inspiring. But one of the side effects of that is we would get in a room and we would turn over some problem or opportunity and we would talk ourselves out of every good solution because it wasn't perfect. I used to joke that like Apple is like the only place in the world where like a vote of a thousand to one was a tie because that one person would be so thoughtful in their critique that the other thousand people would be like, hmm, that's right. That's right. And even though there's been this huge consensus of what the radio answer was, we got to talk ourselves out of making decisions.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A product oriented CEO, how much you should kind of lean in to the details versus Set direction and create an environment where great people can do great work. I suspect there's not one answer that applies to every company stage.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really allowed him to take these really big swings. You know, acquire technology that he thought was game-changing, build features speculatively that maybe would be pruned in any other product roadmap planning process because the odds of them having an outsized impact were modest. And it just allowed him time after time to make bets that paid off. And like we forget about the ones that don't work when there are so many home runs in those years. We didn't have environmentally we weren't set up for that at Pandora, but I think in some ways like I wasn't temperamentally inclined to those kinds of big swings. And I think I'm, I take bigger risks and encourage bigger swings now because of things I learned from Evan and Snap.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was a super exhausting job and not as soul satisfying as I wanted it to be. And after a couple of years, I, like I said, I thought maybe I just wanted to like. Make croissants or something. But one really, really big, important lesson that I learned at SNAP is about risk-taking. And like when you have The financial support.”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For desires and things that I was going to get to work with on a daily basis. And so I take the job, full knowing that it's like going to be wildly different than Pandora. We had all of this latitude to like kind of do whatever I might want to do. And in the, you know, the context of Snapchat at best, I was going to be Evan's kind of right hand, you know, person that principally executed his vision. And that's certainly what it was. I mean, Evan and I ended up having like a really great collaboration. But it was certainly most days I was executing on his vision, but at a high level and very much in the details. And Evan's truly brilliant. I mean, and he's also actually a really nice guy. I think in some ways he gets a bad rap for he had very high standards, but he's a very kind person in my experiences with him”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I leave, and when some of that buzz wears off, I start to wonder if there's like some red flag inflagged or maybe. So I tell Evan, listen, I'd like to come back and meet more of the leadership team, have more time with you, go a little deeper on what this means. And so we extend our courtship by another week or so. And I, you know, super impressed by the rest of the leadership team and the product thinkers and”
2023-11-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source