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 sit down in the conference room. Evan comes in with a manila envelope and says, we loved you, we'd like for you to be our VP of product and like handed me a written offer all the terms, like the stock compensation, the whole thing. I'm gobsmacked. I'm flattered. Like, this is really playing to my ego. I kind of can't believe that this company that feels like maybe the most interesting thing that's happening in consumer tech that they're notoriously brilliant in Mercurial founder has taken enough of a shine to me that he wants to give at least some of the keys to the product kingdom over after such a short courtship.”
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
“At a conference table. And it wasn't really clear that they knew why they were talking to me, but we had kind of a hour-long free-ranging conversation. So I left and I thought it was like a totally fascinating morning, but I wasn't sure what had happened really with these interviews. It all seemed very ad hoc. Is there a job opening? It was a little odd. And I went to lunch on Abbot Kinney and got a text from Evans admin saying, can you come back to the office if you've gotten on your plane yet? I was like, oh, I was just like ordering lunch. I'll just come back right away. So I go back. Now it's like one o'clock in the afternoon. This entire thing started nine o'clock in the morning.”
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 trying to figure out what I'm going to do next. But after about a year, I got introduced to Evan. And it's kind of a funny story. A mutual friend sent this introduction over and then immediately responded and said, why don't you come down to Los Angeles and have a copy with me? So I fly down. It's not clear if it's a job interview or what it is, really. I mean, I was just lightly exploring things that were out there and was a big fan of what he was doing with Snapchat. So I spent like 45 minutes with him and then I spent 45 minutes with the head of engineering and another 45 minutes like the head of legal and then they tossed me into a conference room with like a dozen product designers all in their mid to late 20s, many of which had gone to school at Stanford with Evan. I would come to learn like all really, really, really impressive, super, super talented people, but like, you know, it was just like 10 of us sitting.”
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
“Pandora, I was the head of product, I was head of engineering, and our CEO was brilliant, but he was a product marketer. I mean, he was Joe was like all things. He was an engineer by education and a great marketer and a great finance person and just such a utility player at a very, very high level across every discipline. But he was also really, really good at letting his team do their jobs. He really let me run product and engineering. You know, not only did I have tremendous latitude to make good and bad decisions about product, I also got really got a seat at the table to like help lead the company so rewarding, so gratifying best professional experience that one could have. So I leap into her after a decade. I take like a 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
“You know what's really, really funny about that just today, there's a headline A Hollywood produce show that's launching on Instagram Reels and TikTok that was shot vertical. And the headline is literally something like, is TikTok the new TV? And it's pretty funny that literally that's what Jeffrey and Meg called it when they were incubating the idea. I mean, I think it's pretty clear that purpose-built video for mobile looks a lot like TikTok. And I don't want to take anything away from all of the innovation in that space that they and the other players are driving that could be didn't capture in its initial product definition. But I mean, you know, obviously we stare at our phones consuming video of all kinds, you know, all day, every day. So there's definitely something there.”
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
“In any format was going to be delivered as a stream from the cloud and that the record labels in particular are going to, they were going to set the terms on what the structure was. And the structure that they preferred was the Spotify structure. And we operated under a different licensing regime that they hated that was a statutory license that we got from the government. It was exceptional. It would have been exceptionally risky for us to come out from under the statutory license and do direct deals with the labels, but it was a requirement to play in the world that they imagined as the future and we should have imagined as the future too. And eventually the company got around to it and that it was just too late.”
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
“Rhapsody, which was Spotify before Spotify, they were all going to chase this smaller owned recorded music opportunity and that we could be left relatively alone over here going after the less sexy but actually bigger market. And I think We just got it wrong. It should have been obvious that. Inevitably, all of your music”
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
“To take the same kind of risks that Spotify took. But then I think we just completely misjudge one really important thing, which is that we were really inspired by disrupting terrestrial radio. Terrestrial radio is like the predominant form of music consumption in the country. You know, people spend, I can't remember the exact stats, but it's like, you know, by minutes consumed, it's something like 10 times more music minutes a month on radio in the aughts. um early 10s than unowned music and the advertising supported sort of radio market was a 30 billion dollar category and recorded music with eight billion dollars and so we had this idea that we're going to reinvent radio and spotify and rdo and apple music and like the 14”
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 never like an investor enthusiasm for the company in the category that was anything like the investor enthusiasm that a company like Spotify enjoyed just six, seven years later. Snap enjoyed for its pre-public tenure. And I think part of it was different for Spotify is that the comps were not music matched for 400 million. Pandora at 8 billion, but even above that they were Netflix at 100 billion. And so investors just had this new sort of optimism about what you could do in subscription and in streaming and Spotify really played that to their advantage in a way that we couldn't because we had gone public and the public market investors were still trying to figure us out. So we didn't have access to capital. It's very hard for us to.”
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 of the things that was tough for Pandora was that when we started it, digital music was like a category that no investor wanted to touch. It was lawsuits. There was no money to be made. There were relationships with the labels that were completely impossible to nurture. And there have been no big outcomes. Like the biggest exit in digital music when we got going was Yahoo had bought music match for like $400 million. And so that was seen as like kind of the ceiling on the opportunity. And along the way, we found investors who believed in our vision and invested ultimately hundreds of millions of dollars in the company over its pre-public years.”
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, it's still going, and there's the numbers off, still tens of millions of people in the US listen every month. So it's a thing. But yeah, I mean, it's a little sad that it didn't have quite the staying power that some of these other things have come along since 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
“We also, I mean, I think my product stewardship in some ways set the scene for Spotify to walk through the digital streaming door and like show us the exit. So Pandora is, you know, it's, I mean, again, such a privilege to be able to work on something that touched and continues to touch tens of millions of people's lives every month. But it's bittersweet from the standpoint that I think we had an opportunity that in some ways we misplayed.”
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 think you're right, and I'm like really struggling to get our stupid head of product to agree with me. I'm going to CC Tom and maybe we can convince him that, you know, this was a bad decision. And we did all of that because we thought one of our like superpowers as a young company was that we could just engage with our audience as real human beings, not like as a shiny brand that was trying to, you know, you know, be something that we could just never be. Like this is this period is where the iPod and iTunes are at the peak of their powers. And so, you know, there was no way we could sort of out Apple, Apple on the brand from it. And so we were just ourselves. And I think it really, really was a catalyst for the word of mouth that developed around Pandora. And like, we never spent any money on page user acquisition, like literally no dollars the entire time I was there because people of the product and they told their friends about 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
“I think we met our early audience in like an incredibly genuine way. For example, when we launched the support at Pandora.com was an alias for all Pandora.com. So if you sent a customer service request to Pandora, every single person in the company received it. And because we had no, we made a decision to have no customer support team in the first year. The expectation was that whoever sees the request first should respond to it. And so you would write to us and you would get the founder or you get me or you'd get the engineer who wrote the feature, you'd get the CEO and there were no macros to like respond to commonly asked question. There was no read the FAQ. And there were no rules about what you could and couldn't say if the person's like, I think this feature is stupid and broken. We would encourage people to say like, you know what?”
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
“He sort of gave me the keys and just said, as long as it fits the brief, one-click personal radio, like it's all yours. And I got to, you know, I had to build the team and the culture in collaboration with him and Tim, the founder over the course of the next 10 years. And it's just every good thing. So, I mean, it's just a million, billion lessons from Pandora. I mean, everything I am as a product leader and an engineering leader comes from things that happen at Pandora. But maybe the thing that I think of first is.”
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 the product that I wanted to build. And I won't bore you with all of the details, but like 90 days later, after some typical early stage founder drama stuff, the founding head of technology and product had resigned completely unrelated to my arrival. And the company had a new CEO, Joe Kennedy, and Joe had this idea for what he called one-click personal radio. Joe's a product marketer and just the best CEO in the whole world. We spent 10 years together building Pandora.”
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
“Music recommendation engine that they license to other companies to put in consumer products. So Savage Beast's customers were best buy who put it in kiosks and AOL who used it on the AOL music website. And they were looking for a BP of engineering. And I got the offer, thought about it a little bit. I declined because it was kind of this B2B2C thing and I really wanted to do something in consumer. I had an idea about the app. And like a month later, they called again and said, you know, we keep talking to people. We really think that you're the person. And interestingly, one of the reasons they thought that I was the person is they were really impressed by the fact I had run engineering at pets.com. So, I mean, it's just one of those things where like these things do pay dividends even when they're a disaster. And honestly, in like what I would really say is like almost like a lapse of judgment. I said yes, even though it wasn't.”
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 flew down to Los Angeles to go out to Coachella in 2000, in the spring of 2004 and completely randomly like physically bumped into a guy that I had gone to high school with on the polo field and hadn't seen him in a decade. And the thing that we had in common in high school was we loved music. And so I tell them the story of like, I'm going to start this company to do personalized digital music on the internet. And he said, there's this woman I work with who just left our company to move to Oakland to work for this little company called Savage Beast that are also doing something in music recommendation. Do you want to talk to them? And I should sure, why not? So I got introduced to Tim Westergren, who was the founder of Savage Beast. Savage Beast was like a seven or eight full-time employees at that point. They made 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
“And I promised I was going to tell stories about luck in my career. There's been a gazillion of them, but one really dramatic incidence of that is I was sort of biding my time to exit this enterprise software company. I was VP of engineering, a whole team reported to me. I felt a lot of responsibility to exit in a responsible way. But I was really excited about this digital music company that I was going to start. But I wasn't telling anyone at all because I didn't want to kind of get back to the team.”
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 one of the enterprise software things I did was a personalization recommendation engine that used a vector space. It's like a lot of the things that we're talking about now in AI, albeit 20 years ago. And so I knew something about recommendation systems in the enterprise space. And I was super passionate about music. I'm not a musician, but I was that kid in college who would corner you and be like, oh, if you like this band, I got to play this for you. stereo until you would like beg to leave. And so I had this idea that like maybe I can use the internet to do that at scale, not with just one person, but with, you know, hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people maybe introduce them to music that they would love, but otherwise would miss out on.”
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'd say my lesson for my lesson for me to underjack was definitely like it really does pay to get good at something and not just be a generalist. And then, I mean, Pandora, it was the next thing that happened after you don't know Jack was pets.com. And then after pets.com, there was nuclear winter in the industry. And I worked in enterprise software for a while. And after nuclear winter, I had this idea that I was going to build a destination for music discovery on the web. And I've been doing enterprise software, the consumer internet was like non-existent for those years early aught. But around 2004, things started to thaw a little bit and you started to hear the first signs of the companies that we came to call Web 2.0 like Flickr would have been one of the early examples.”
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 feel really lucky that I stumbled into United Jack when I did. And it was also, I mean, it was the first thing that I worked on that had just like huge cultural. Awareness for a couple of years. I mean, it's crazy. They're still making sequels. It has been nearly 30 years. And there are versions that you don't know, Jack, that are in all of the stores and the PlayStation store and the Xbox store in the iOS store. You can play new versions if you don't eject to this day. It's crazy.”
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 was such a blessing to be forced to go deep on something because I spent a lot of time developing chops as an engineering manager, but I also wrote a ton of software. And that's really honestly when I became a software engineer. Like my college education was insufficient to get me there and the amount of software I wrote at Apple was insufficient to get me there. But I came out of my Berkeley systems, you don't know Jack experience, like feeling like I could really hold my own technically in a way that just wouldn't have happened. And so I do think that there's something to be said for a culture where there are swim lanes and people are encouraged to be like really, really exceptional in their lane. 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
“And when I met them, they were kicking off this game development for this Trivia game and were looking for someone to lead the technical team. And so I joined Culture than when I was used to at Apple. It was certainly the case that I was welcome to weigh in on the game design or the, you know, the marketing or some other aspect of the deliverables. But my job was to build the software on time with high quality, period. And like if I did those things, I'd be rewarded. And if I didn't, like, I would not be successful and no amount of insightful feedback on the gameplay or the packaging or whatever else I might want to do was going to benefit me and my career at all.”
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
“that you could build a really great reputation inside the company by playing all of those positions a little bit day to day. And so when I left Apple after four years, I look back at my time. I didn't ship as much software as I had hoped. And I felt like a little bit like a professional gadfly. I was like, you know, six miles wide and like a centimeter deep. I went to work for this company called Berkeley Systems. In addition to you don't know, Jack, they may be flying toaster screensaver, if you remember Remember the 90s”
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
“Particularly in that transition, we really struggled to ship consumer software features. I mentioned that I wrote freelanc folders and some other consumer features. Like in my first six months at Apple and they shipped four years later, actually after I'd left the company, I was a little surprised they were still in the software repository even candidly. But I'll tell you that one of the things culturally about Apple in that moment was at least I felt like a person was really rewarded if they could make a kind of broad contribution across functions. So if you were, you know, a talented software engineer, but also a thoughtful product designer and maybe also had interesting input on product marketing.”
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
“Worked at Apple in the interval where Steve was gone. John Spelly, that kind of period System seven, system eight Power Macintosh, like that whole era. And we were doing a lot. We shipped a bunch of great hardware. We transitioned the company from Motorola 68,000 CPUs to the PowerPC architecture.”
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 certainly painful to take money from investors even if they know what they're doing and to not get them a return. I feel a real responsibility to investors to do better than we did at Quibby. But yeah, I mean, there is a risk-reward thing that goes along with these investments. And part of the reason I get all the riches on the upside is that they're going to bet on some quivers along the way too.”
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 didn't appreciate with just how quickly you go back to the foundational math and then the math really says like you just can't you can't spend two years iterating your way on optimizing the funnels like you would in a startup that had a different cost structure like in a world where you have to spend a billion dollars a year making content you just can't afford Not be a hit”
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 then when we inevitably struggle to retain those users and at high percentages, I mean, we retained it sort of what I think of as like a good industry starting point, but we weren't setting any records on retention. I just imagine that what happened next is like the thing that happens in all young companies, you iterate. You would like grind on the funnel until a year later, two years later, six months later, whatever it is, you figure the formula out to get people in and get them to stay and get them to retain.”
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
“What made it hard was Wasn't structurally impossible. Like, if you had to be bigger than any app that had ever been made You could probably make the case it's impossible. But since you only sort of had to land in the top 10, you couldn't quite say it was impossible. You could just say it was highly improbable. And maybe one of my mistakes was I guess I imagined that we would launch. And when the likely thing happened that we got Millions of people to download the app, which we did.”
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 to the Hollywood marketing apparatus, the numbers that it takes to get there felt kind of small. If you can get 20 million people in to see Shrek on Opening Night, new IP, like surely you can get them to take their front out of their pocket and download this thing and start a free trial. Now, those of us who have spent our life in Silicon Valley making software and really, really tried to get people to show up and download new IP in large numbers, know just how hard that is. So maybe if I critique my own contribution to the math equation, maybe I should have beat the drum a little harder about just how unlikely it was that we were going to land the kind of distribution in month one that the model sort of required. I had to go back and do it 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
“20, 30 million people into the theater on like opening weekend for Quibi. And that was always a very, very audacious take, I thought. Like, you know, Uber has all the money in the world to experiment with page user acquisition and they're not consistently a top 10 most downloaded app in the app store. But the theory of Quibi, like the math of Quibi did record”
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 of the bets. We weren't going to just use the apparatus of Hollywood to make the content In part, we are going to use the apparatus of Hollywood to market the content. So, you know, Jeffrey had recruited this incredible Rolodex of the world's, literally the world's most famous celebrities to make shows for Quibby. We kind of had like everyone either made something for launch or was going to make something. And like part of what they were going to do is like turn up in culture and talk about their shows. I mean, we've heard a lot in the last six months about how hard it is to market movies because the stars can't go out and talk about the movies during the strike. There was this theory that you could apply the marketing sort of technique of Hollywood to get”
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
“Of the phone. Is that enough content to get people to sign up and retain? You did that for a couple billion dollars. And I think the answer is no. The library has to be much, much bigger. And you have to have like any company. You have to have sufficient time and energy to iterate on the content format itself because we were really, our roadmap really wanted to innovate on the content format. And so I think part of what happened is pretty quickly it became clear that the math was just wrong. It wasn't going to take 2 billion. It was going to take 6 or 8 or 10 billion. And the risk reward profile of betting 10 billion on the format was just more than anyone can stomach.”
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 it was really expensive. Like I said, it was like a third of the investment we were going to make in content, maybe half, almost half the investment we were making content. And we launched two weeks into COVID and we couldn't make any of that content except literally in the garages of the host homes. And so we had this thing that was supposed to seem like really set apart from YouTube that literally now was being made exactly like YouTube content, which is sort of like self-produced at home with, you know, very little sort of the support infrastructure of Hollywood. Now you can argue, I mean, I think the content on YouTube is really, really exceptional in this category. And maybe we were never going to do better than that. But I think what's really fundamentally broken with Libby was that the actual foundational equation of can you make enough premium content that's totally bespoke and made for the service and takes advantage of the unique nature.”
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 we made 70 shows in 18 months, which is like more content than all of the major broadcast networks combined made in a single year. So that's a pretty major accomplishment. And we made a bet that we would augment those sort of episodic and serialized or Hollywood style shows with a bunch of daily content that we produce at the level of like network television, nightly news and so forth that would be an alternative to some of the sort of daily content that you might otherwise get on YouTube. And that was going to be about a third of the content spend. One super interesting thing that no one talks about is that All of that content was designed to be made like day of or day before it aired. So there was no back catalog of it. And it was all designed to be shot in these professional studios that we built out.”
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
“Companies are also kind of like a, they're kind of a math problem that describes how you take investment and pour them into the equation and out the other side comes returns on some time horizon. And yes, Are variables in that equation that are influenced by the product that you build and all of the little details and decisions that you make about making that product great. But if the equation is fundamentally broken or a big swing in and of itself, no amount of like iteration and execution can kind of Get you out of the failed outputs of the broken equation. And I think You know Quibby made a bet that you could build an entirely bespoke content library that was sufficiently scaled to get people to subscribe and retain A couple billion dollars. I mean, it was a huge amount of money.”
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 think I sort of misunderstood or misjudged companies sometimes. Thinking about them. Really focused on the product execution. If you find an interesting problem that people care about and you solve that problem in a really beautiful, elegant, delightful way that's 10 times better than anything else that they can get in that same space, they'll tell their friends and all the rest of them will sort of take care of itself. And so that was always my ambition. Find a thing that I cared about building, do a great job building in a really delightful way. Go really deep on listening to people and their feedback and iterate your way to success and sort of breaking through that membrane that we all strive to get across to kind of really great word of mouth. The second thing I've come to better appreciate is 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
“Night at six o'clock, close your Qui laptop and be like, all they're paying me for is for Tuesday and Wednesday, and then open it back up on Tuesday morning. Like, that's all you've got to do. Well, you know, she's right about most things, and she's wrong about this. I fell deeply into it right away. And it was just so fun to get to build a team from scratch and to design and build a product from scratch and to take advantage of all. And, you know, I'm embarrassed about some of what happened with Quibi for sure. But I'm super grateful for the experience because I just really fell in love with the industry again and was reminded of just how rewarding it can be to build something and to try to put it out there even if you stumble pretty mightily along the way.”
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 Meg's like, we've raised all this money and we've told the world that we're shipping this product in about a year. We got an awful lot to do and I really could use some help. And I would like consider it a personal favor if you would to come and spend just a couple days a week helping. You know, she's like, I'll continue to look for someone who actually wants the job, but it would really be, it would be great if you could help me get this off the ground. My wife is a freelance writer, marketing strategist. loves her life as a freelance contributor and she's like, you should do this. Like, why not? It's two days a week. It's just a few months. What's the worst thing that could happen? Like maybe you'll like it. And I'm like, no, no, the worst, here's the thing that will happen. Like, I won't do it two days a week. It will like immediately be three days, then four days, then five days, then six days. Like, I just know myself. And she's like, no, she's like, you know, just on Wednesday.”
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
“Would give me an update on the progress they were making. And I would decline the invitation to get involved somehow. And then late in that year, I went to Lynch one more time. And Meg explained that they brought on someone to lead technology and they brought another person to lead product. And both of them, for really, truly for reasons that are completely disconnected from Quibi itself, both of them had left after about six weeks.”
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 few months after my last day at Snap, I got a call from Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who were starting up, it was called New TE at the time. And the pitch was we're going to try to take the best of mobile and Silicon Valley and consumer tech and sort of weld it to the best of sort of Hollywood style content production to build something like completely bespoke and purpose made for consumption on the phone. They were looking for both technology leadership and product leadership and wanted to know if I was interested in one or both. And I took the meeting, even though I wasn't really taking these kinds of calls from anybody. It just seemed like who's going to pass up the opportunity to have lunch with the two of them. So I listened to the pitch and politely declined and told them that I was going to be like a pastry chef or something. And we kept doing that every couple of months for like seven months. We go to lunch.”
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
“Also seem like maybe it would be fun to have like another chapter of my life that was just completely different. And I had a whole list of things that I thought I might want to do. I mean, they were really kind of ridiculous. It's like maybe I want to be a pastry chef. Maybe I want to be a landscape photographer. Maybe I want to, you know, learn to make bad music to put up on SoundCloud or something. And really, the only thing they had in common were all things that I knew nothing about. People would be like, oh, you think you might want to be a pastry chef? Do you like debate? And I'd be like, no, I didn't know anything about baking. You know, oh, you think about landscape photography. Do you take photos? No, I don't make photos. But I was kind of committed to the bit, actually to the point where when TechCrunch interviewed me about my departure from Snapchat, I was like, you know, I'm out. I'm going to do something else entirely. That story is very much out there.”
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
“Kind of miraculous thing about Quibby for me was it relit my enthusiasm for the industry for doing this work I had left in I think it was December of 2018. And I thought that maybe I was just done making software. I had done it for a really long time. I'd done it for like 25 years or something. And I had changed a lot. The industry had changed a lot. And I thought maybe I just didn't have the same passion for it that I had a decade before.”
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, that's about right. You know, the other thing that's forgotten in the tale is that we actually didn't go bankrupt. We shut the company down and returned the remaining balance to the investors, which no public company had ever done before. And the leadership team just reached the conclusion that given the way market conditions had evolved, there was just no way we were going to be able to get more capital into the company. And it was a company that required additional investment to get to profitability. And so it's better to sort of wind down early, take the money that we had in the bank and get it back to investors than to just spend every last penny on like a, you know, what was sort of a fruitless attempt to salvage 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
“Chewy, who executed exceptionally well over a decade, grew their business brick by brick and turned it into something really remarkable to pest.com, which was in a very, very different moment in time and tried to go to market in a really different way. The critique that is often leveled at pets.com, or at least at the time, was like, this is just a stupid business. They're shipping dog food around. You could never make that work. And that's just wrong. Like you absolutely can make it work. Probably can't make it work when 80% of the country on the internet is still on dial-up. It's really, really early.”
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 one player started to spend on promotion or to spend irrationally on national broadcast television advertising, we all did. And it became this kind of unwinnable arms race. So there was like, I think, a fundamental lesson about the having an excess of investment can be its own albatross or lead you to take decisions that maybe would be unwise. And then, of course, it's just like timing is really important, Chewy is an online pet store worth $9 billion today. They were a private company and bought by PETSMART and then spun back out. But when they were bought by PETSMAT, they were acquired for $3 billion e-commerce acquisition of all time. And while I think it's probably unfair to compare.”
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
“While as a leadership team, we made, I'm sure, all kinds of mistakes. One of the things that happened was that there were three kind of overfunded pet e-commerce sites. And we all raised in excess of $50 million, which is a tremendous amount of money now, was a tremendous amount of money then. And we all thought it was a zero-sum game and that we”
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
“Probably the biggest lesson. It's not really about the specifics of the business. The biggest lesson really is these things make you better. In some instances, actually, I think in both instances, they became kind of dominoes that opened doors for me in my own ambition and my own sort of professional life that maybe just wouldn't have opened at all if I hadn't gone to those companies and learned those things and had those experiences. And frankly, even in the case of pets.com, like even the high profile nature of it, I could have worked at one of a thousand e-commerce websites in 1999. And when I went on to some subsequent job interview or something and talked about my experience, we looked like I had never heard of the thing that you worked on. But everybody certainly heard about pets.com. It's a pretty funny example too of how some struggles are like timeless.”
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