The Exchanges

Q Can I ask, how do the best founders manage their boards? You've seen Reid manage a board. You've seen Daniel manage a board. Now you manage the board yourself. How do the best founders manage boards? There's often big voices. Big characters. What's, how do you manage a board?

A Well, I would say that founder-led companies have a different board dynamic than companies that are led by professional managers. I'm the professional hired gun, and that's totally different than a founder who's, you know, bootstrapped the company, become an iconic leader, picked all of the, of the board members in the room. For the longest time, I think the board members at Netflix didn't want Read to not think they weren't strategic and value added. You know, God forbid he walk around Silicon Valley and say something bad about one of his board members that would have trashed their, you know, their reputations permanently. And so everybody's on their best behavior and, you know, let's take the Apple board. I mean, who was going to get in Steve Jobs face, but anything ever like this wasn't going to happen. Even when they were running it like a depression era company and they had More cash than the U.S. Treasury.

AI assessment note: “founder-led companies have a different board dynamic than companies that are led by professional managers.”

Q they said, you have this incredible ability to bring your glasses down and say the hard thing that everyone is thinking. Now, As a board member myself on the ambassador side, I struggle with this. I like to please people. How do you advise me on the right way to deliver tough news, if I bring my glasses down, and deliver that feedback in a hard but, like, fair way?

A Well, if you had less EQ, um, you wouldn't wrestle with it as much as perhaps you do, and I'm not blessed with the same degree of EQ as you are, and so I don't act, I'm less self-aware when I do it. I mean, oftentimes, It's just a question that's top of mind, and I think it's particularly relevant to the discussion, and so it just asks the question. I'm, I'm certainly not trying to be confrontational. I don't mean to do it in a confrontational way, for sure. If I could liken personalities to radio frequencies, some, some people are, are frequency agile, and they can deal with many different kinds of personality types, but, but some are not, and to be interpersonally effective, you have to find frequency. You need to find a voice. And the way of communicating with the, with the CEO, particularly if they're a founder, in a way they're able to take it on board. They're raising an issue or you're challenging them or you're trying to get them to see something in a, in a different way than maybe they, they're thinking about it. Well, in human nature, it's not. You need the same skill set to be an effective employee and, you know, interacting with your, your boss, right? Like, that's the art of it. So you need to get your, like, check your ego at the door and your intellect to If necessary and, you know, find the interpersonal skills required to, to say it in a way that makes it acces…

AI assessment note: “find the interpersonal skills required to, to say it in a way that makes it accessible”

Q It was a large data set. But really, what, what, what do you think led him to say that?

A Well, look, we were a great team, and we had a terrific run together, and a lot of success, and we, we broke new ground. We were quite compatible. You know, um, I wanted to do new and interesting things, and, and he's particularly interested in new and interesting and smart things, and he's, he's a risk-taker in ways that were appealing to me, and two, I had a skill set that was complementary to his own, and so, um, we never stepped on each other's toes. And he absolutely has skills that from a product perspective that, you know, I just, uh, technical, um, skills that for running engineering teams that, that I don't have. And I would say the business model from a financial perspective was sort of a mess when I walked into, well, there was a lot of low hanging fruit. Let me put it that way. When, when I got involved in, in Spotify. And so the partnership worked really well at a personal level and, and professionally. Maybe that's why he said it.

AI assessment note: “Maybe that's why he said it.”

Q This is what I go back and forth on actually in my mind, which is like, was, you know, obviously COVID is a terrible thing and obviously terribly sad at happening, but was it like a good thing for the business or not? Because it also placed a huge amount of unnecessary expectations and pressures on a company that maybe wasn't ready for such hyper growth Overnight.

A You know, what has made, um, among the things that it makes Reed Hastings such a great executive, and I would say Daniel, great executive. One is that they deal with the world as it is, not as they want it to be. And they, they process data at a bit rate that, you know, humbles most of us. And they have the capacity to pivot based on the data that they ingest. At a pace that would make most people's head snap, read in particular. I would say that the Peloton team didn't exhibit that capacity, right? That imagine that COVID was going to be the new normal. Now, in twenty-twenty hindsight, kind of hard to see how That was a logical expectation, but, um, you know, we weren't in their shoes at the time. So, you know, but is what it is. Whereas Reed, um, at least at, at Netflix, for the most part, not entirely, but for the most part, and Dan, and Daniel, when he pivoted into, into, um, podcasting, have been able to anticipate reading streaming, let's say, by way of example, you know, reinvent the business model in important ways that anticipated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, and then they've been able to surf those waves. So, you know, there is a scenario where you could have scaled it and then anticipated, you know, in a post COVID world, it was, you know, going to be the shift in position for the shift, but there aren't many companies. I mean, we're talking about a very …

AI assessment note: “I would say that the Peloton team didn't exhibit that capacity”

Q Can I ask, how do the best founders manage their boards? You've seen Reid manage a board. You've seen Daniel manage a board. Now you manage the board yourself. How do the best founders manage boards? There's often big voices. Big characters. What's, how do you manage a board?

A Well, I would say that founder-led companies have a different board dynamic than companies that are led by professional managers. I'm the professional hired gun, and that's totally different than a founder who's, you know, bootstrapped the company, become an iconic leader, picked all of the, of the board members in the room. For the longest time, I think the board members at Netflix didn't want Read to not think they weren't strategic and value added. You know, God forbid he walk around Silicon Valley and say something bad about one of his board members that would have trashed their, you know, their reputations permanently. And so everybody's on their best behavior and, you know, let's take the Apple board. I mean, who was going to get in Steve Jobs face, but anything ever like this wasn't going to happen. Even when they were running it like a depression era company and they had More cash than the U.S. Treasury.

AI assessment note: “founder-led companies have a different board dynamic than companies that are led by professional managers”

Q they said, you have this incredible ability to bring your glasses down and say the hard thing that everyone is thinking. Now, As a board member myself on the ambassador side, I struggle with this. I like to please people. How do you advise me on the right way to deliver tough news, if I bring my glasses down, and deliver that feedback in a hard but, like, fair way?

A Well, if you had less EQ, um, you wouldn't wrestle with it as much as perhaps you do, and I'm not blessed with the same degree of EQ as you are, and so I don't act, I'm less self-aware when I do it. I mean, oftentimes, It's just a question that's top of mind, and I think it's particularly relevant to the discussion, and so it just asks the question. I'm, I'm certainly not trying to be confrontational. I don't mean to do it in a confrontational way, for sure. If I could liken personalities to radio frequencies, some, some people are, are frequency agile, and they can deal with many different kinds of personality types, but, but some are not, and to be interpersonally effective, you have to find frequency. You need to find a voice. And the way of communicating with the, with the CEO, particularly if they're a founder, in a way they're able to take it on board. They're raising an issue or you're challenging them or you're trying to get them to see something in a, in a different way than maybe they, they're thinking about it. Well, in human nature, it's not. You need the same skill set to be an effective employee and, you know, interacting with your, your boss, right? Like, that's the art of it. So you need to get your, like, check your ego at the door and your intellect to If necessary and, you know, find the interpersonal skills required to, to say it in a way that makes it acces…

AI assessment note: “find the interpersonal skills required to, to say it in a way that makes it accessible”

Q This is what I go back and forth on actually in my mind, which is like, was, you know, obviously COVID is a terrible thing and obviously terribly sad at happening, but was it like a good thing for the business or not? Because it also placed a huge amount of unnecessary expectations and pressures on a company that maybe wasn't ready for such hyper growth Overnight.

A You know, what has made, um, among the things that it makes Reed Hastings such a great executive, and I would say Daniel, great executive. One is that they deal with the world as it is, not as they want it to be. And they, they process data at a bit rate that, you know, humbles most of us. And they have the capacity to pivot based on the data that they ingest. At a pace that would make most people's head snap, read in particular. I would say that the Peloton team didn't exhibit that capacity, right? That imagine that COVID was going to be the new normal. Now, in twenty-twenty hindsight, kind of hard to see how That was a logical expectation, but, um, you know, we weren't in their shoes at the time. So, you know, but is what it is. Whereas Reed, um, at least at, at Netflix, for the most part, not entirely, but for the most part, and Dan, and Daniel, when he pivoted into, into, um, podcasting, have been able to anticipate reading streaming, let's say, by way of example, you know, reinvent the business model in important ways that anticipated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, and then they've been able to surf those waves. So, you know, there is a scenario where you could have scaled it and then anticipated, you know, in a post COVID world, it was, you know, going to be the shift in position for the shift, but there aren't many companies. I mean, we're talking about a very …

AI assessment note: “Peloton team didn't exhibit that capacity, right? That imagine that COVID was going to be”

Q The thing that most founders get wrong is they don't have milestones or signposts for what is wrong. And so they just let it continue and continue. When you think about like, as you said that the only way, you know, with Amazon is to try it. What is the sign of success versus failure?

A When you look at that in particular as a guiding post, I will say by way of answering the question that it's super helpful sort of before you start down a path. To try to define for yourself what success looks like. So, so when you get there, you, you know it, or when you're falling short, you know it, just like if you're going to buy a company and you're thinking about buying company, it's really helpful before you start the bidding process and the emotions kick in to decide where you're going to draw the line from a pricing perspective, you know, what's your walk away. So, um, we definitely had some very specific goal posts in mind when we thought about direct listing and what success would look like by way of example, Before we started.

AI assessment note: “it's super helpful sort of before you start down a path. To try to define”

Q The thing that most founders get wrong is they don't have milestones or signposts for what is wrong. And so they just let it continue and continue. When you think about like, as you said that the only way, you know, with Amazon is to try it. What is the sign of success versus failure?

A When you look at that in particular as a guiding post, I will say by way of answering the question that it's super helpful sort of before you start down a path. To try to define for yourself what success looks like. So, so when you get there, you, you know it, or when you're falling short, you know it, just like if you're going to buy a company and you're thinking about buying company, it's really helpful before you start the bidding process and the emotions kick in to decide where you're going to draw the line from a pricing perspective, you know, what's your walk away. So, um, we definitely had some very specific goal posts in mind when we thought about direct listing and what success would look like by way of example, Before we started.

AI assessment note: “it's super helpful sort of before you start down a path. To try to define”