The Exchanges

Q You mentioned the concept there and the ideation process. So combining that with Looker, you were really the main founder in terms of, in terms of product and idea. With that in mind, how do you respond to traditional VC caution around solo founders?

A Well, I'm not quite solo founder. Ben Porterfield is my brilliant co-founder. He is very complimentary in terms of skills. I'm an architect of data and languages, and Ben was an architect of basically of the platform and the current tools and ops infrastructure and those things, and so we were able to pull stuff together with just the two of us. You know, I So there's a kind of a visual that I kind of think about when doing a startup. If you imagine a white wall and a paintball gun, and you're going to try to cover the white wall by shooting paintballs at it, and each pattern of the paintball is people's different skills. It's the question is, how few people can you cover the wall initially with? I happen to be able to cover a lot of the wall. I did a lot of the sales. I'm old enough to be able to cover enough of the wall. That's probably, it's probably why. So yeah, you know, if you've got the right Skill patterns. I mean, I program, I sell, I do data analysis, you know, and what we were trying to do was very specific, and we had enough skills between Ben and I to be able to pull it off.

AI assessment note: “Well, I'm not quite solo founder. Ben Porterfield is my brilliant co-founder.”

Q Okay, so you felt the CEO wasn't the position that you were right for. Having said that, you have excelled in terms of culture creation, scaling, and building, and you said to me before that you learned great startup culture from teaching middle school. So, I mean, sounds unconventional, but talk to me. What's the story there?

A You know, so after Netscape, I got the curse that a lot of successful young people get, which is, okay, you can do whatever you want with your day. What are you going to do next? I'd done the thing I'd always wanted to do, which was to be financially independent, to be able to choose my day, and I wanted to give back. I wanted to give back to the communities that I, you know, and one of the most important times in my life was middle school, where it was a really rough time for me, actually, and I had a teacher who taught me basic programming in middle school, and he was amazing, and it was, it got me through, and I realized, okay, I'm gonna go do that. I'm gonna go teach middle school and volunteer teach at a local school. I wrote some software that I gave away to a bunch of schools that was basically blogging software. This is around What I learned from the school was about how to make a safe learning environment for kids. How do you make it so that lots of kids can learn lots of different things at the same time? How do you make it so that they feel safe asking questions? Because in middle school, what happens is that you're becoming an adult and you get afraid of appearing stupid, so you stop asking questions, which means you stop learning. And the school that I was working with was very good at this. So they just had a very high bar about never letting anybody feel Be publi…

AI assessment note: “What I learned from the school was about how to make a safe learning environment”

Q Okay, so you felt the CEO wasn't the position that you were right for. Having said that, you have excelled in terms of culture creation, scaling, and building, and you said to me before that you learned great startup culture from teaching middle school. So, I mean, sounds unconventional, but talk to me. What's the story there?

A You know, so after Netscape, I got the curse that a lot of successful young people get, which is, okay, you can do whatever you want with your day. What are you going to do next? I'd done the thing I'd always wanted to do, which was to be financially independent, to be able to choose my day, and I wanted to give back. I wanted to give back to the communities that I, you know, and one of the most important times in my life was middle school, where it was a really rough time for me, actually, and I had a teacher who taught me basic programming in middle school, and he was amazing, and it was, it got me through, and I realized, okay, I'm gonna go do that. I'm gonna go teach middle school and volunteer teach at a local school. I wrote some software that I gave away to a bunch of schools that was basically blogging software. This is around What I learned from the school was about how to make a safe learning environment for kids. How do you make it so that lots of kids can learn lots of different things at the same time? How do you make it so that they feel safe asking questions? Because in middle school, what happens is that you're becoming an adult and you get afraid of appearing stupid, so you stop asking questions, which means you stop learning. And the school that I was working with was very good at this. So they just had a very high bar about never letting anybody feel Be publi…

AI assessment note: “What I learned from the school was about how to make a safe learning environment”

Q What if you're willing to drive the car on red for half the length of the country?

A But what you're risking at that point is damage to the car. And once the car is damaged, it's a problem. And so basically we have the philosophy that you can actually get a tremendous amount of work done in a work day. And it's your attitude towards the work. That's the most important thing, not the number of hours that you put in. And it's the conscientiousness with which you approach the work. Some of the best programming I've ever done has been on my bicycle. I'll take a break. I'll go ride my bike and I'll come back and I'll, I'll know the answer to what I was working on. And it's actually stepping away from the problem and giving it bait time. I'm not pounding on it. To get the answer. You know, in a creative process, actually getting some away time or getting some actually quiet time is probably the best way to solve a problem. And then business processes need to be automated. You should build your business so that it isn't hard work. I mean, if you're doing stuff that's fully manual, that's a mistake. You haven't figured out how to automate it enough.

AI assessment note: “what you're risking at that point is damage to the car”

Q You mentioned the concept there and the ideation process. So combining that with Looker, you were really the main founder in terms of, in terms of product and idea. With that in mind, how do you respond to traditional VC caution around solo founders?

A Well, I'm not quite solo founder. Ben Porterfield is my brilliant co-founder. He is very complimentary in terms of skills. I'm an architect of data and languages, and Ben was an architect of basically of the platform and the current tools and ops infrastructure and those things, and so we were able to pull stuff together with just the two of us. You know, I So there's a kind of a visual that I kind of think about when doing a startup. If you imagine a white wall and a paintball gun, and you're going to try to cover the white wall by shooting paintballs at it, and each pattern of the paintball is people's different skills. It's the question is, how few people can you cover the wall initially with? I happen to be able to cover a lot of the wall. I did a lot of the sales. I'm old enough to be able to cover enough of the wall. That's probably, it's probably why. So yeah, you know, if you've got the right Skill patterns. I mean, I program, I sell, I do data analysis, you know, and what we were trying to do was very specific, and we had enough skills between Ben and I to be able to pull it off.

AI assessment note: “Well, I'm not quite solo founder. Ben Porterfield is my brilliant co-founder.”

Q Can I ask, Laurie, do you seem an immensely happy and cheerful chap? So what's your process for when the shit hits the fan, so to speak? Or maybe when a good day starts bad and you have to figure it out from there. What's the process like for you then?

A Never hide it. First of all, that's going to create a degree of pain and shame that you're not going to want to live with. So like at LiveOps, I'll give you an example of a bad day. We had a, we were answering phones for TV commercials and, um, we had this big system of computers that routed calls in the cloud. And, um, if that thing went down, it was thousands of dollars a minute because people had bought ad spots on TV and we weren't able to answer the calls and it was lost revenue. And so it's literally thousands of dollars a minute. That, that we were down, and we had a half an hour outage on one day. Maybe it was even longer. It was a big deal. You know, it was a bad day, right? We're sitting here, and it's a bad day, and one of the things to do would be to, the first thing is to try to hide it so that you don't have to pay your customers back for this, their lost revenue, but we didn't. We just, you know, we, we were like, okay, this is what, we called them right away. We were totally up front with them. We made them whole, and it was, it was very expensive for us. You know, another way of dealing with bad things is, I'll give you another example of how you deal with bad stuff. Uh, we have, When a mistake happens, and an engineer is at fault there, you know, the company's having a bad day, but an engineer is probably having a worse day. They're having a really bad day bec…

AI assessment note: “Never hide it. First of all, that's going to create a degree of pain”

Q Can I ask, Laurie, do you seem an immensely happy and cheerful chap? So what's your process for when the shit hits the fan, so to speak? Or maybe when a good day starts bad and you have to figure it out from there. What's the process like for you then?

A Never hide it. First of all, that's going to create a degree of pain and shame that you're not going to want to live with. So like at LiveOps, I'll give you an example of a bad day. We had a, we were answering phones for TV commercials and, um, we had this big system of computers that routed calls in the cloud. And, um, if that thing went down, it was thousands of dollars a minute because people had bought ad spots on TV and we weren't able to answer the calls and it was lost revenue. And so it's literally thousands of dollars a minute. That, that we were down, and we had a half an hour outage on one day. Maybe it was even longer. It was a big deal. You know, it was a bad day, right? We're sitting here, and it's a bad day, and one of the things to do would be to, the first thing is to try to hide it so that you don't have to pay your customers back for this, their lost revenue, but we didn't. We just, you know, we, we were like, okay, this is what, we called them right away. We were totally up front with them. We made them whole, and it was, it was very expensive for us. You know, another way of dealing with bad things is, I'll give you another example of how you deal with bad stuff. Uh, we have, When a mistake happens, and an engineer is at fault there, you know, the company's having a bad day, but an engineer is probably having a worse day. They're having a really bad day bec…

AI assessment note: “Never hide it. First of all, that's going to create a degree of pain”

Q But do you not, do you not, okay, question. Do you not think everyone feels like that when it's their first time doing something? The first time entrepreneurs who are 24 going, I've never hired a CMO. What am I looking for? All the non-technical, all the non-technical founders who are hiring incredible individuals like yourself going, I have no idea what makes a great CTO.

A You know, I studiously stepped out of management my whole career, Even though I've been, even though I've been this TO, I generally avoid having people report directly to me because I get distracted and go deep on things. So my strength is my depth of knowledge of certain areas. And so for me, the moment was, okay, I'm going to have to manage a bunch of people who I don't understand what they do. So I was looking for a COO and actually when Frank came in, um, he came in as president because I didn't want to give, I was, you And over time, after actually, after doing the fundraise and seeing how well Frank and I worked together and how good of a team we were together, I realized, yeah, he needs to be the visible CEO face outward facing person. I'm the deep product person. That's what I do well. And I was comfortable with it. But at first Frank came in wanting to be the CEO and coming in as a president. And I came in and then after a period of trust, you know, we've gone through a tremendous battle in our fundraise. I realized, well, okay, I trust this guy. His value's Coincide with mine. It's safe enough to have him be the CEO.

AI assessment note: “You know, I studiously stepped out of management my whole career”

Q But do you not, do you not, okay, question. Do you not think everyone feels like that when it's their first time doing something? The first time entrepreneurs who are 24 going, I've never hired a CMO. What am I looking for? All the non-technical, all the non-technical founders who are hiring incredible individuals like yourself going, I have no idea what makes a great CTO.

A You know, I studiously stepped out of management my whole career, Even though I've been, even though I've been this TO, I generally avoid having people report directly to me because I get distracted and go deep on things. So my strength is my depth of knowledge of certain areas. And so for me, the moment was, okay, I'm going to have to manage a bunch of people who I don't understand what they do. So I was looking for a COO and actually when Frank came in, um, he came in as president because I didn't want to give, I was, you And over time, after actually, after doing the fundraise and seeing how well Frank and I worked together and how good of a team we were together, I realized, yeah, he needs to be the visible CEO face outward facing person. I'm the deep product person. That's what I do well. And I was comfortable with it. But at first Frank came in wanting to be the CEO and coming in as a president. And I came in and then after a period of trust, you know, we've gone through a tremendous battle in our fundraise. I realized, well, okay, I trust this guy. His value's Coincide with mine. It's safe enough to have him be the CEO.

AI assessment note: “So for me, the moment was, okay, I'm going to have to manage”

Q What if you're willing to drive the car on red for half the length of the country?

A But what you're risking at that point is damage to the car. And once the car is damaged, it's a problem. And so basically we have the philosophy that you can actually get a tremendous amount of work done in a work day. And it's your attitude towards the work. That's the most important thing, not the number of hours that you put in. And it's the conscientiousness with which you approach the work. Some of the best programming I've ever done has been on my bicycle. I'll take a break. I'll go ride my bike and I'll come back and I'll, I'll know the answer to what I was working on. And it's actually stepping away from the problem and giving it bait time. I'm not pounding on it. To get the answer. You know, in a creative process, actually getting some away time or getting some actually quiet time is probably the best way to solve a problem. And then business processes need to be automated. You should build your business so that it isn't hard work. I mean, if you're doing stuff that's fully manual, that's a mistake. You haven't figured out how to automate it enough.

AI assessment note: “what you're risking at that point is damage to the car.”

Q sales pitch. I do have to also, it's not easy, but it's easier to create that sort of kind of harmonious and nice environment to work in with a middle school class size. How do you think about that when you scale exponentially, as Looker has done, and the challenges that occur at different stages, what, what have been those inflection points in the scaling, and where's it broken, potentially?

A Frank and I interview people all the time. I mean, I swear my bit, my main job is interviewing people and making sure that the people that we bring in are the right people. And the analogy that I give is that if you came into Looker on the weekend and you were going to rob the place, you'd walk into this beautiful building with these great conference rooms and some TVs on the wall and a bunch of nice desks with some monitors on them, but there are no computers in here. And the machines that we, that we use, we rent from Amazon in the cloud or Google in the cloud. So we don't really own those either. We rate programs, which is really just the ideas of the people that work here, and we have some business processes, which is just our rules of interacting with each other and with our clients, and so if you look at what Looker is, which is this amazing business, it's really just the people, and the only thing we are is the people, and focusing on making sure that the people have the right values and have the right attitude and actually are on the mission with us. They think that what we're doing is important. This is everything. And that they're brilliant, right? We only hire brilliant people, too.

AI assessment note: “making sure that the people that we bring in are the right people”

Q sales pitch. I do have to also, it's not easy, but it's easier to create that sort of kind of harmonious and nice environment to work in with a middle school class size. How do you think about that when you scale exponentially, as Looker has done, and the challenges that occur at different stages, what, what have been those inflection points in the scaling, and where's it broken, potentially?

A Frank and I interview people all the time. I mean, I swear my bit, my main job is interviewing people and making sure that the people that we bring in are the right people. And the analogy that I give is that if you came into Looker on the weekend and you were going to rob the place, you'd walk into this beautiful building with these great conference rooms and some TVs on the wall and a bunch of nice desks with some monitors on them, but there are no computers in here. And the machines that we, that we use, we rent from Amazon in the cloud or Google in the cloud. So we don't really own those either. We rate programs, which is really just the ideas of the people that work here, and we have some business processes, which is just our rules of interacting with each other and with our clients, and so if you look at what Looker is, which is this amazing business, it's really just the people, and the only thing we are is the people, and focusing on making sure that the people have the right values and have the right attitude and actually are on the mission with us. They think that what we're doing is important. This is everything. And that they're brilliant, right? We only hire brilliant people, too.

AI assessment note: “it's really just the people, and the only thing we are is the people”