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 think people are really, really good at this. I mean, every single time I've taken a job where it turned out that I was, you know, working with people who had a different set of values or working styles than I had, I knew. And you tell yourself that, at least in my case, I tell myself a story about why the thing I suspect might be the case isn't the case. you know I mean, you do this in your personal life all the time, right? You meet people out at dinner so you get seated next to them at some industry event or something. And sometimes you come home and say to your partner, oh my gosh, the person next to me was just the worst. And then sometimes you're like, I think I made like a permanent lifelong connection with this total stranger who just happened to sit next to me. Like, 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
“Big financial return, et cetera, et cetera. And I've also worked on some things that were like, you know, really notable disasters. My sort of, when I look back on my career and think about the things that I've done, my professional satisfaction is not well correlated with those sort of external metrics and very, very coordinated with I love the thing we were building and I love the people I was working with.”
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 a kid, my ambition to work at Apple was like entirely about the product. And so probably that version of me would say, find a product that you're passionate about and like go spend your time and energy on that thing. Pretty quickly you learn that an awful lot of your development and day-to-day satisfaction really comes from the people that you get to collaborate with. Can you learn from them? Do you like them? Do they challenge you in the right ways? Do they give you latitude in the right ways? It's so much about not just what but who. And so for a very long time, my advice would have been entirely in the category of like, find something that you love with people that you think are amazing and the rest will kind of take care of itself. And interestingly, like I have been lucky enough to have some things that were successful on the metrics guitar talked about the most big audience.”
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
“Okay, I'll tell you just one other little thing to center you in time about what the finder was like in 1992. We didn't get royalties, but our names were in the about box. Like you would go to About the Finder and the seven of us, there were seven engineers at Apple that worked on the finder. Like our name would scroll by the Finder Copyright 1992, you know, yada, yada, yada, one name after another. Totally different era.”
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
“Roll the clock forward six or seven years. Mac OS X comes out, entirely new finder, rewritten from scratch, no spring-loaded folders anywhere to be seen. People complained about it. It got re-implemented. So all of the code, brand new, folder blinks five times when you're ever over it. Roll the clock forward another decade. IOS comes along and they added folders. And when you drag an icon around, it blinks a few times. I'm not sure the coin of this story is other than maybe it's something about, I think we all do this as designers and product people. We take these shortcuts that we think that will go back later and clean up. And sometimes, I mean, it's literally been 30 years, you know, that little design detail lingers three implementations later. And now it's just a part of the way that these apple products work pretty bizarre.”
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
“Thought that was a fine idea, and so that was the way Apple worked in those days. I just went off and started coding that up. And I got to the point late one night, two in the morning. I'm at Apple. No one else is there, where I needed some kind of animation to indicate that the folder was about to open. And I'm certainly not an animator, and I certainly wasn't going to do anything in the middle of the night. I just wrote some code that blinked the folder like selected, unselected, selected, unselected five times. And thought, oh, I'll get one of the really talented visual designers to do something much more interesting. Long story short, Apple finally shipped that feature like four years later. It sat in the source code repository forever while we did other things. And when it shipped four years later, it blinked five times.”
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
“Think like the finder should do the same thing when you're dragging an icon around and you want to put it in a folder, you should be able to kind of hover maybe over the folder icons and drill down into the file system to get to where you're going. And then when you drop the file, like all of the folders that opened up between you and your source and your destination would close for you.”
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
“The college recruiting department just told me that I have a college hiring rep. Don't use it by tomorrow, I lose it. Like, I can't even interview you. You can't meet the team. But you're basically a freebie for me. So do you want this job? So just insanely lucky moment. Got this job. So yeah, I get to Apple in the summer of 1992. And I have a laundry list of things that I would like to do to make the finder more usable. And I remember sitting in Ron's office and saying, you know, at the grocery store when you're carrying”
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
“Last day of the internship. I was thinking about really what I wanted to do when I came back, hopefully came back to Apple after I graduated. I had worked on a product that became like shipped, it was called the QuickDraw GX's earlier kind of second generation rendering system for the Mac. I've been that team's intern for the summer. But what I really wanted to do is I wanted to work on the finder. The only thing in the whole world I really wanted to do. And so I went and found Ron Lichty, who is the manager of the Finder team, and said, I graduate in 10 months. I'd love to be a part of your team. And I think he was kind of like, well, why are you coming and talking to me now? You're literally going back to Michigan tomorrow. So I go back to Michigan in May, the phone rings, and Ron says,”
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 talk about my career, it's just over and over and over. I'm going to say. An incredibly lucky thing happened. And the first incredibly lucky thing that happened for me in my career probably was that University of Michigan happened to be a place that Apple recruited from. I didn't know that when I chose the school, but it made it reasonably easy to connect to a hiring app manager at Apple. And I wrote an actual letter and put it in an actual envelope and put it in the mail and got an internship and drove out in my dad's Pontiac from the Midwest to California, spent a summer interning. 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
“So let's see. I was 15 years old when the Macintosh came out. Remember really clearly my entire teenagers, like all I wanted to do was to move from Columbus, Ohio to Cubertino and work for Apple. And my heroes were that team of people that had like, you know, written their signatures on the inside of the Macintosh. We cracked open the first Macintosh case. You would find the signatures of the 20 people or so who worked on the Mac. And that was like, that was my only ambition, truly. And I mean, this was a period where like No one wanted to work for Apple. I mean, that wasn't a thing. And it seems like maybe a little obvious today, but it wasn't an obvious ambition at all back then. So anyway, I went to college. That's all I wanted to do, study computer engineering at University of Michigan.”
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's this belief that everybody needs to be a founder. I think in some ways our industry would be much better off if there were fewer founders. And here's 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 a mathematical formula that's going to win on any metric, whatever metric you care about. You want like the acclaim of your peers, you want financial reward, and you want outsized impact on culture, whatever the thing is. It gets you out of bed every morning. You can achieve that in collaboration with others. You don't have to be the person that raises the seed ground.”
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