The Exchanges

Q It is always a good sign, but I do want to start today on you, really, though, and ask really the question, which is like, I'll pretend I haven't stalked you for the last few days, and this Everything you've done before, but how did you make your way into the world of tech, and how did you come to found Coda?

A See, I grew up mostly in Virginia. I went to school at MIT. Out of my grad program there, I started a company called Centrada, and that was mostly because myself and a friend of mine, we were both obsessed with the idea, and neither of us really wanted to go get a job, so we turned our grad work into a company. Then after that, I spent about six years at Microsoft. I worked on Office, Windows, and then SQL Server, a wide variety of different projects in lots of different spaces. And then through a set of sort of odd circumstances, I thought I would start a company again after that. I ended up joining Google and working initially on a project called Mosaic, which became a Google TV and then Chromecast and then the Google Home team. But I spent most of my time at Google working on YouTube. I was responsible for sort of the tech side of YouTube. Myself and the guy named Robert Kinsel ran the day-to-day operations for YouTube. It was an amazing journey, six years of taking a company from really what most people would have called a joke into something that was Obviously a big property, and then I got my itch in 2014, and decided I wanted to do something different, and actually starting a company was the last thing on my mind, but I had this friend and ex-colleague, Alex Nye, who is busy starting a company, and thankfully that company wasn't going particularly well, and so in the pro…

AI assessment note: “we ended up coming up with the idea for Coda”

Q I'm really interested because I totally understand that that's important, but it also seems to kind of go in the face of, like, fast decision making and, like, speed and iteration, and I spoke to Daniel Eck at Spotify before the show, and he mentioned his or your operating cadence, and he asked, like, how do you fundamentally think about your own operating cadence, and what does that look like?

A I think, and Daniel and I spend lots of time geeking out on this, and I think there's a lot of things that Spotify does well that I've learned a ton from in that process, and I think it's important to note that your operating cadence Is often the backbone of your culture, and so designing it and taking ownership of it is really important. I think there's probably three main elements of cadence that I think are important, what I call the macro, the micro, and the personal. I give you this sort of quick view of each of them. I'll try not to be comprehensive. So macro cadence. And generally when people say macro cadence, what they're generally referring to is planning cycles. How often do you take a step back, decide what you should be working on, take a look at the big picture and so on. One of the key choices we made at YouTube, so Google has a process called OKR, which is fairly famous at this point, objectives and key results run on a quarterly basis. We made a key decision to not run our process quarterly, and instead we did what was called a six- and twenty-six-week process. We basically follow the same thing at Coda now, and instead of running a quarterly planning cycle, we ran a cycle that was every 26 weeks, so twice a year, you would do what we call H-one and H-two planning, and you'd spend some time looking far out, and where should we really be headed, and so on. And t…

AI assessment note: “three main elements of cadence that I think are important, what I call the macro”

Q Love that. Tell me, what's the biggest challenge in making a transition from application to platform?

A I think it's being open to being surprised. I sometimes describe founders in two ways, people that like to create products and people like to create platforms, and I've had the pleasure of having worked on some of the biggest platforms out there, whether it's YouTube or Windows or Coda, and I think, if you think about the people that are the classic product folks, and I think Steve Jobs is probably the most iconic of them, his view of designing a product was He had to control every piece of the experience. And in his view, there should be no gap between what the user experience is and things that his own team designed. And, you know, use special screws to make sure you couldn't open the box and ship the iPhone without an app store and so on. On the flip side, you work on a property like YouTube, you walk in every day and you are And you have to realize that for a consumer, that platform, the product is not the bits that we built for streaming video and so on. The product is the platform of the content. And so that is what it represents. And being comfortable with that is really important because sometimes you're going to be surprised in a very positive way. You know, I can't imagine that Sal Khan was able to build an entire new model for education on top of our platform. And sometimes you're incredibly disappointed with humanity. Like people do some really depraved things and y…

AI assessment note: “I think it's being open to being surprised.”

Q I'm really interested because I totally understand that that's important, but it also seems to kind of go in the face of, like, fast decision making and, like, speed and iteration, and I spoke to Daniel Eck at Spotify before the show, and he mentioned his or your operating cadence, and he asked, like, how do you fundamentally think about your own operating cadence, and what does that look like?

A I think, and Daniel and I spend lots of time geeking out on this, and I think there's a lot of things that Spotify does well that I've learned a ton from in that process, and I think it's important to note that your operating cadence Is often the backbone of your culture, and so designing it and taking ownership of it is really important. I think there's probably three main elements of cadence that I think are important, what I call the macro, the micro, and the personal. I give you this sort of quick view of each of them. I'll try not to be comprehensive. So macro cadence. And generally when people say macro cadence, what they're generally referring to is planning cycles. How often do you take a step back, decide what you should be working on, take a look at the big picture and so on. One of the key choices we made at YouTube, so Google has a process called OKR, which is fairly famous at this point, objectives and key results run on a quarterly basis. We made a key decision to not run our process quarterly, and instead we did what was called a six- and twenty-six-week process. We basically follow the same thing at Coda now, and instead of running a quarterly planning cycle, we ran a cycle that was every 26 weeks, so twice a year, you would do what we call H-one and H-two planning, and you'd spend some time looking far out, and where should we really be headed, and so on. And t…

AI assessment note: “there's probably three main elements of cadence that I think are important”

Q Okay, so we mentioned Trinidad Coach there. What's your favorite book and why?

A If I have five slots for favorite books, I would give two slots to a single one. It's a book called Switch by the Heath Brothers. It's about how to change things when change is hard. Easily the most impactful book I've read, and I constantly go back, reread it, re-reference it. I'll give one piece of advice as people read it. Pick a list of things and actually make a list as you read the book of things you're trying to change, and I would pick a wide variety in your business, in your personal life, and so on, and they have nine techniques in the book. Just catalog how much you're using each technique and As you go through them, and you'll be shocked at how much you don't stretch the different techniques you can use to change behavior. Very powerful book.

AI assessment note: “It's a book called Switch by the Heath Brothers.”

Q that we have today. And when I spoke to Quentin again, he told me about the onion and he told me about the onion and I was like, what is Quentin talking about? And then he said, you have the onion as a way to think through product evolutions. And so my question to you is, how do you align onions to building products, and what's that mentality for you?

A Yeah, so the onion, it's an exercise I generally run with founders, and what we'll do is we'll sit down, a group of founders, and everybody takes out a sheet of paper, do it on a whiteboard, whatever, and you draw kind of a quarter of an onion, and the idea is there's a center, and then there's a set of rings, and you have kind of two axes, and one is generally something like features or capabilities, things you build, things you deliver, so on, and then the other one is the value proposition. And like, why does that matter? And everybody sits down, and the rules are, the center of the onion has to be an existing product, service, solution, and so on. And then in every ring, you can add a series of features and capabilities that then lead to a certain set of value propositions. And the rings have to be in order, meaning they can't depend on something further out. It's sort of a way to think about a roadmap. So that's kind of a fancy visual for a roadmapping tool. But what will happen is, so we'll run this exercise, all the founders will do their piece, and then we'll staple them up on a wall, and we'll compare. And generally, a couple things happen. So number one, if you take the union of everybody's rings, they're generally about the same. What you'll find is that in a startup, the yes and mentality is very high. We can do this, and we can do that, and we can do this, and we c…

AI assessment note: “the onion, it's an exercise I generally run with founders”

Q Okay, so we mentioned Trinidad Coach there. What's your favorite book and why?

A If I have five slots for favorite books, I would give two slots to a single one. It's a book called Switch by the Heath Brothers. It's about how to change things when change is hard. Easily the most impactful book I've read, and I constantly go back, reread it, re-reference it. I'll give one piece of advice as people read it. Pick a list of things and actually make a list as you read the book of things you're trying to change, and I would pick a wide variety in your business, in your personal life, and so on, and they have nine techniques in the book. Just catalog how much you're using each technique and As you go through them, and you'll be shocked at how much you don't stretch the different techniques you can use to change behavior. Very powerful book.

AI assessment note: “It's a book called Switch by the Heath Brothers.”

Q It is always a good sign, but I do want to start today on you, really, though, and ask really the question, which is like, I'll pretend I haven't stalked you for the last few days, and this Everything you've done before, but how did you make your way into the world of tech, and how did you come to found Coda?

A See, I grew up mostly in Virginia. I went to school at MIT. Out of my grad program there, I started a company called Centrada, and that was mostly because myself and a friend of mine, we were both obsessed with the idea, and neither of us really wanted to go get a job, so we turned our grad work into a company. Then after that, I spent about six years at Microsoft. I worked on Office, Windows, and then SQL Server, a wide variety of different projects in lots of different spaces. And then through a set of sort of odd circumstances, I thought I would start a company again after that. I ended up joining Google and working initially on a project called Mosaic, which became a Google TV and then Chromecast and then the Google Home team. But I spent most of my time at Google working on YouTube. I was responsible for sort of the tech side of YouTube. Myself and the guy named Robert Kinsel ran the day-to-day operations for YouTube. It was an amazing journey, six years of taking a company from really what most people would have called a joke into something that was Obviously a big property, and then I got my itch in 2014, and decided I wanted to do something different, and actually starting a company was the last thing on my mind, but I had this friend and ex-colleague, Alex Nye, who is busy starting a company, and thankfully that company wasn't going particularly well, and so in the pro…

AI assessment note: “in the process of brainstorming for him what he should pivot into, we ended up coming up with the idea for Coda”

Q that we have today. And when I spoke to Quentin again, he told me about the onion and he told me about the onion and I was like, what is Quentin talking about? And then he said, you have the onion as a way to think through product evolutions. And so my question to you is, how do you align onions to building products, and what's that mentality for you?

A Yeah, so the onion, it's an exercise I generally run with founders, and what we'll do is we'll sit down, a group of founders, and everybody takes out a sheet of paper, do it on a whiteboard, whatever, and you draw kind of a quarter of an onion, and the idea is there's a center, and then there's a set of rings, and you have kind of two axes, and one is generally something like features or capabilities, things you build, things you deliver, so on, and then the other one is the value proposition. And like, why does that matter? And everybody sits down, and the rules are, the center of the onion has to be an existing product, service, solution, and so on. And then in every ring, you can add a series of features and capabilities that then lead to a certain set of value propositions. And the rings have to be in order, meaning they can't depend on something further out. It's sort of a way to think about a roadmap. So that's kind of a fancy visual for a roadmapping tool. But what will happen is, so we'll run this exercise, all the founders will do their piece, and then we'll staple them up on a wall, and we'll compare. And generally, a couple things happen. So number one, if you take the union of everybody's rings, they're generally about the same. What you'll find is that in a startup, the yes and mentality is very high. We can do this, and we can do that, and we can do this, and we c…

AI assessment note: “It's sort of a way to think about a roadmap.”

Q Tell me, what's been the biggest challenge in scaling Coda?

A Two answers come to mind. The most obvious one is balancing power with simplicity, and our promise is we allow anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app, and you can take both sides of that as hard objectives. Like, the product has to deliver for the very simplest cases. You need to open up Coda instead of your notepad, instead of Word, instead of your Google Doc, and take your meeting notes in it and have it be a delightful, thrilling experience. And on the other side, our view of the world is that anyone can make docs as powerful as apps, and they're going to stretch what you want to do in the product Balancing that is incredibly hard, and we spend a lot of energy on it. The second answer I'd say is biggest challenge in scaling code is I think anyone who honestly has that question for you should probably be talking about something with team, because I think the hardest part of building any product is getting the right team on board, keeping them aligned, keeping them headed the same direction, the right balance of motivated and inspired, but also rewarded and sense of accomplishment and so on. So I think the macro one, balancing power simplicity, but developing that perfect team is I think what you spend most of your day doing.

AI assessment note: “Two answers come to mind. The most obvious one is balancing power with simplicity”

Q else, but I do have to ask, you mentioned Google there, and you're also at Microsoft, Microsoft. And you saw so much value creation take place in the years that you were there. A big thing that I thought when kind of brightened your schedule was like, what were the single biggest management takeaways for you from each? And how do you think it changed how you think about operating?

A Microsoft, I do almost like, for me, it was almost like business school. I learned a lot of fundamentals of how do you build teams? How do you build products? How do you, we'll talk a little bit about Quentin. I'm sure Quentin was my boss at Microsoft through that time period and just learned a lot of the basics. What makes for good products, what makes good product design, what makes for good team culture. Me was the power of a really clear thesis. And I think the benefits of that have stuck with me throughout everything I've done. What I mean by that is, if you think about great products, they tend to have one simple idea that really forms the essence of what they're working on. Take easy examples. Google search was fairly really a simple idea that search was simply wasn't relevant and fast enough. And in a sea of different search engines at the time, they managed to break through with that one perspective, really caring for a long time. Gmail was all about, you shouldn't have to delete your email and. I'm talking about a really simple idea. YouTube , it took us a little while to figure out exactly what it was, but for YouTube, the thesis was that online video will do to cable what cable did to broadcast. Then we'll go from three channels to 300 channels to three million channels. And the interesting thing is the first time I made that statement, I was giving a talk at a conf…

AI assessment note: “Microsoft, I do almost like, for me, it was almost like business school.”

Q schedule with a lot of this, isn't you? But it's just, I love, I love the kind of natural chat. Dissent is also important in terms of widening one's aperture, both internally, but also from a, like, strategy perspective, and having kind of those open debates. Like, what does it take to create an environment of open debate, Discent discussion internally, and how do you think about doing that effectively?

A A couple different things in terms of open debate. The first is you have to establish trust in other ways. You know, there's a phrase that gets used a lot that is, don't make it personal, don't take it personally. What do people mean by that? And one thing that I think happens is a rule I actually use with my kids a lot is what I call the implied sentence. And sometimes when you say something to someone, there's a sentence that comes with it that really is what's being expressed in the rest of your past history, body language, so on. You know, somebody walks into work and you say, that's a great sweater. And depending on your relationship, the next sentence might be, that's a great sweater, and I admire your taste so much, both in your clothing and in your products, and boy, I really wish I could be more like that, and that could be the implied sentence. Or it could be, that's a great sweater, I have really nothing else good to say about you, and thankfully I've now checked it off my list. Like, that's the one thing I can say. And so, implied sentences are really important. As you build trust, you have to help people actually say those things. You have to help people get past them, say them, and that's what I think of as trust development, is you need people to be comfortable with That the implied sentences are, that either they aren't any, or they're not attacking someone pers…

AI assessment note: “A couple different things in terms of open debate. The first is you have to establish trust”

Q Tell me, what's been the biggest challenge in scaling Coda?

A Two answers come to mind. The most obvious one is balancing power with simplicity, and our promise is we allow anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app, and you can take both sides of that as hard objectives. Like, the product has to deliver for the very simplest cases. You need to open up Coda instead of your notepad, instead of Word, instead of your Google Doc, and take your meeting notes in it and have it be a delightful, thrilling experience. And on the other side, our view of the world is that anyone can make docs as powerful as apps, and they're going to stretch what you want to do in the product Balancing that is incredibly hard, and we spend a lot of energy on it. The second answer I'd say is biggest challenge in scaling code is I think anyone who honestly has that question for you should probably be talking about something with team, because I think the hardest part of building any product is getting the right team on board, keeping them aligned, keeping them headed the same direction, the right balance of motivated and inspired, but also rewarded and sense of accomplishment and so on. So I think the macro one, balancing power simplicity, but developing that perfect team is I think what you spend most of your day doing.

AI assessment note: “Two answers come to mind. The most obvious one is balancing power with simplicity”

Q else, but I do have to ask, you mentioned Google there, and you're also at Microsoft, Microsoft. And you saw so much value creation take place in the years that you were there. A big thing that I thought when kind of brightened your schedule was like, what were the single biggest management takeaways for you from each? And how do you think it changed how you think about operating?

A Microsoft, I do almost like, for me, it was almost like business school. I learned a lot of fundamentals of how do you build teams? How do you build products? How do you, we'll talk a little bit about Quentin. I'm sure Quentin was my boss at Microsoft through that time period and just learned a lot of the basics. What makes for good products, what makes good product design, what makes for good team culture. Me was the power of a really clear thesis. And I think the benefits of that have stuck with me throughout everything I've done. What I mean by that is, if you think about great products, they tend to have one simple idea that really forms the essence of what they're working on. Take easy examples. Google search was fairly really a simple idea that search was simply wasn't relevant and fast enough. And in a sea of different search engines at the time, they managed to break through with that one perspective, really caring for a long time. Gmail was all about, you shouldn't have to delete your email and. I'm talking about a really simple idea. YouTube , it took us a little while to figure out exactly what it was, but for YouTube, the thesis was that online video will do to cable what cable did to broadcast. Then we'll go from three channels to 300 channels to three million channels. And the interesting thing is the first time I made that statement, I was giving a talk at a conf…

AI assessment note: “Microsoft, I do almost like, for me, it was almost like business school.”

Q schedule with a lot of this, isn't you? But it's just, I love, I love the kind of natural chat. Dissent is also important in terms of widening one's aperture, both internally, but also from a, like, strategy perspective, and having kind of those open debates. Like, what does it take to create an environment of open debate, Discent discussion internally, and how do you think about doing that effectively?

A A couple different things in terms of open debate. The first is you have to establish trust in other ways. You know, there's a phrase that gets used a lot that is, don't make it personal, don't take it personally. What do people mean by that? And one thing that I think happens is a rule I actually use with my kids a lot is what I call the implied sentence. And sometimes when you say something to someone, there's a sentence that comes with it that really is what's being expressed in the rest of your past history, body language, so on. You know, somebody walks into work and you say, that's a great sweater. And depending on your relationship, the next sentence might be, that's a great sweater, and I admire your taste so much, both in your clothing and in your products, and boy, I really wish I could be more like that, and that could be the implied sentence. Or it could be, that's a great sweater, I have really nothing else good to say about you, and thankfully I've now checked it off my list. Like, that's the one thing I can say. And so, implied sentences are really important. As you build trust, you have to help people actually say those things. You have to help people get past them, say them, and that's what I think of as trust development, is you need people to be comfortable with That the implied sentences are, that either they aren't any, or they're not attacking someone pers…

AI assessment note: “A couple different things in terms of open debate. The first is”

Q there at Google, like, the fact that actually if you only hit 70% of your OKRs, that's kind of expected. A question that I constantly think of today with management teams is, like, how do you set goals which are a stretch and are ambitious, but also not a stretch too far and are a disincentive or discouraging if they don't hit them? How do you think about that balance?

A There's a lot of art to that, and I think the spirit of how OKR started at Google were a really good attempt at it. I mean, the rules for doing it aren't really the important part. A lot of it comes out of the example that gets set, and I think the thing that Larry and Sergey are amazingly good at is challenging you to think bigger, and almost in a, like, Socratic way. Like, I can't tell you how many meetings I was in with them where you'd say something, they'd say, why not? And you'd say, like, well, I don't think we can do this, and they'd say, why not? And some of them were kind of, like, ludicrous. Like, you know, can we map the world? It's like, well, yeah, but only part of it. Like, why not? Why not all of it? And you kind of, like, work your way through these things And I think a lot of it comes out of that aspiration. And so I think there's sort of an example to be set on it. I think that the art of coming up with goals that hit that mark between inspirational and practical, it's besides team building, it's the second most important thing that an executive does. And so I don't think it's easy to prescribe how to do it. I mean, there's a, John Doerr wrote a book called Measure What Matters, all about OKRs and some of the techniques he picked up from Intel and brought to Google. There's a chapter in the book about YouTube and about a really famous bet we made called the B…

AI assessment note: “I think that the art of coming up with goals that hit that mark”

Q And then the final one, what are the next five years hold for you and for Coda?

A We're just getting started, so I'm pretty excited about where we're headed here. We shipped Coda One Dot O last February, so it took a while for us to build the base product for Coda, but we've only been in market for about a year and a half, and it's scaling super well. It just crossed 25,000 teams using Coda, and it's a product that's kind of built to spread, so perhaps not surprising that way, but I think we're just getting to the exciting part. For me, this is like, we now have a, to use your last question's analogy, Like we now have a kid, and now the kid's ready to grow. And we have all these theories of what should happen as we allow anyone to make docs as powerful as apps. And we work on reinventing a set of paradigms that really haven't changed in 4050 years. So for me personally, I expect to be working on Coda for at least that long, if not much, much longer, hopefully. And then for Coda, I think we'll see more and more of that vision go from that crazy to that believable. Like I said, YouTube used to use this phrase that online video is going to do the cable, what cable did to broadcast. I get asked a lot about How I went from YouTube to Coda, they seem so different. One's in media, one's in productivity. In my mind, it's a very straight shot. The people that didn't understand that statement 10 years ago were mostly people that underestimated human ingenuity, and the…

AI assessment note: “I expect to be working on Coda for at least that long”

Q Being of those that you listen to, we heard Quentin say in there quite a few times, and I spoke to Quentin before the show, and he mentioned a very specific love of yours when it comes to operations, being white Whiteboards. Now, I love whiteboards too, but I want to dig in here. Why are whiteboards so important to you, and how do you specific pen colors deliberately?

A Yeah, it's a little bit of a weird quirk of mine that has worked very well for me. My whiteboard obsession is fairly deep. Every office I'm in, I spend more time designing the whiteboard layouts than often any other part of the office design. It was probably one of my hardest things. Not being able to go to the office was reprofitting my own office, and then slowly discovering that that didn't work, and I had to switch to digital whiteboards. And probably one of my best moments was when I figured out how to use Miro really well. And so I'm a big, huge digital whiteboard fan now, which has changed my perspective on it. But to answer your question, I'd say there's really two things about why Whiteboarding is so meaningful to me. The first is obvious power of a great diagram. It's a somewhat trite saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. And I feel like that's just really important. And the ability to take an idea and lots of ideas and synthesize them down into a very digestible diagram or digestible picture. It's just really helpful and amazing how much you can unblock a discussion and really clarify an idea and so on. And the second one is the power of this term we call eigenquestions. And there's a good write-up on eigenquestions people can go find on the internet. Eigenquestions is a word we made up to describe a mix between a mathematical concept called eigenvectors a…

AI assessment note: “to answer your question, I'd say there's really two things about why Whiteboarding”

Q You mentioned decisions there quite a few times, and like, a question that I just have to ask, it is striking for me, and it's like, the best leaders make very strong decisions with imperfect data, and feel comfortable doing so. How do you get comfortable making decisions at speed with such imperfect data?

A You implied a lot of things about decisions there, so maybe to break a couple of them apart. I get asked a lot about what makes for good decisions, and there's a lot of qualities people describe. They say that they're fast, they'll say they're They'll say they're well-informed. My view, the number one quality of a good decision is a decision that sticks, and there's a now pretty famous saying from Amazon and Jeff Bezos is about one-way doors and two-way doors that I think is well-used, and so there's clearly a time for what people will refer to as two-way door decisions, where the goal is speed is the main objective, and it's really important to designate between the two, where it's one-way doors and two-way doors, but I think when people really struggle with decision-making processes, it's you have these one-way doors, and they forget to switch modes, And they forget that actually at this point, speed is not the most important thing. The most important thing is a decision that sticks because the worst thing you can do is decide fast and feel really proud of yourself. And then you come back a week later and have to change it. And so this concept of eigenquestions has been really helpful in that I think most people will skip the process. There's a really good book. I think you're going to ask me later about books, but I'm going to talk about the Heath brothers because I love eve…

AI assessment note: “You implied a lot of things about decisions there, so maybe to break a couple”

Q Being of those that you listen to, we heard Quentin say in there quite a few times, and I spoke to Quentin before the show, and he mentioned a very specific love of yours when it comes to operations, being white Whiteboards. Now, I love whiteboards too, but I want to dig in here. Why are whiteboards so important to you, and how do you specific pen colors deliberately?

A Yeah, it's a little bit of a weird quirk of mine that has worked very well for me. My whiteboard obsession is fairly deep. Every office I'm in, I spend more time designing the whiteboard layouts than often any other part of the office design. It was probably one of my hardest things. Not being able to go to the office was reprofitting my own office, and then slowly discovering that that didn't work, and I had to switch to digital whiteboards. And probably one of my best moments was when I figured out how to use Miro really well. And so I'm a big, huge digital whiteboard fan now, which has changed my perspective on it. But to answer your question, I'd say there's really two things about why Whiteboarding is so meaningful to me. The first is obvious power of a great diagram. It's a somewhat trite saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. And I feel like that's just really important. And the ability to take an idea and lots of ideas and synthesize them down into a very digestible diagram or digestible picture. It's just really helpful and amazing how much you can unblock a discussion and really clarify an idea and so on. And the second one is the power of this term we call eigenquestions. And there's a good write-up on eigenquestions people can go find on the internet. Eigenquestions is a word we made up to describe a mix between a mathematical concept called eigenvectors a…

AI assessment note: “there's really two things about why Whiteboarding is so meaningful to me”

Q there at Google, like, the fact that actually if you only hit 70% of your OKRs, that's kind of expected. A question that I constantly think of today with management teams is, like, how do you set goals which are a stretch and are ambitious, but also not a stretch too far and are a disincentive or discouraging if they don't hit them? How do you think about that balance?

A There's a lot of art to that, and I think the spirit of how OKR started at Google were a really good attempt at it. I mean, the rules for doing it aren't really the important part. A lot of it comes out of the example that gets set, and I think the thing that Larry and Sergey are amazingly good at is challenging you to think bigger, and almost in a, like, Socratic way. Like, I can't tell you how many meetings I was in with them where you'd say something, they'd say, why not? And you'd say, like, well, I don't think we can do this, and they'd say, why not? And some of them were kind of, like, ludicrous. Like, you know, can we map the world? It's like, well, yeah, but only part of it. Like, why not? Why not all of it? And you kind of, like, work your way through these things And I think a lot of it comes out of that aspiration. And so I think there's sort of an example to be set on it. I think that the art of coming up with goals that hit that mark between inspirational and practical, it's besides team building, it's the second most important thing that an executive does. And so I don't think it's easy to prescribe how to do it. I mean, there's a, John Doerr wrote a book called Measure What Matters, all about OKRs and some of the techniques he picked up from Intel and brought to Google. There's a chapter in the book about YouTube and about a really famous bet we made called the B…

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's easy to prescribe how to do it.”

Q You mentioned decisions there quite a few times, and like, a question that I just have to ask, it is striking for me, and it's like, the best leaders make very strong decisions with imperfect data, and feel comfortable doing so. How do you get comfortable making decisions at speed with such imperfect data?

A You implied a lot of things about decisions there, so maybe to break a couple of them apart. I get asked a lot about what makes for good decisions, and there's a lot of qualities people describe. They say that they're fast, they'll say they're They'll say they're well-informed. My view, the number one quality of a good decision is a decision that sticks, and there's a now pretty famous saying from Amazon and Jeff Bezos is about one-way doors and two-way doors that I think is well-used, and so there's clearly a time for what people will refer to as two-way door decisions, where the goal is speed is the main objective, and it's really important to designate between the two, where it's one-way doors and two-way doors, but I think when people really struggle with decision-making processes, it's you have these one-way doors, and they forget to switch modes, And they forget that actually at this point, speed is not the most important thing. The most important thing is a decision that sticks because the worst thing you can do is decide fast and feel really proud of yourself. And then you come back a week later and have to change it. And so this concept of eigenquestions has been really helpful in that I think most people will skip the process. There's a really good book. I think you're going to ask me later about books, but I'm going to talk about the Heath brothers because I love eve…

AI assessment note: “actually at this point, speed is not the most important thing.”

Q You spoke about that, the kind of the importance of optionality. I'm super intrigued because I always believe in the paradox of choice, and I don't know if you've read Dan Ariadne's book there, but I always kind of believe a refined and constrained optionality That is optimal, often with no options at all, actually. How do you think about the paradox of choice given that?

A Yeah, Dan was a consultant for us at YouTube, so we've spent a lot of time with him, and there's a lot to be said for that. Just to be really clear on, I actually think, in new grading XROM, Find the right item question. I'll tell a quick story so you get a sense of it. When I joined YouTube, one of the hardest questions facing the team at the time was what we called the link out question. At the time, this was back in the day, YouTube was already second biggest search engine on the planet. People would come to YouTube and they would search for all sorts of different things, and the example that was used a lot was people would come and search for Modern Family, a very popular show on ABC at the time. We didn't have Modern Family on YouTube, so they'd come, they'd search for it, they'd get a bunch of really crappy results. Sometimes they'd stay for something else, sometimes they'd leave, but we were clearly under-delivering on a quite popular query. And the team basically divided. One side of the team basically came to the conclusion that we should just link out to the right place to find this content. We don't have it on YouTube. We should just point to the place it was on abc.com and let people go find it. This is mostly the product and engineering team. And their viewpoint on it was, we now work for Google. Google's whole ethos is give people the answer to the question that t…

AI assessment note: “I'll tell a quick story so you get a sense of it.”

Q final element, though, before the quick fire, and it's something that actually Daniel again mentioned to me, and he mentioned about kind of your relationship with Bill Campbell, and so I wanted to ask, what do you think are the core differences between your style and his, and I guess what were some of the biggest takeaways from your time with Bill being such an incredible legend that he was?

A Truly one of a kind. I think if people read the book, I think it probably understates His level of impact on everyone he worked with. His funeral was simultaneously one of the saddest and one of the happiest memories I have. I mean, it was one of those cases where he showed up, it was at Sacred Heart, a high school here that he was very close to, and speech after speech of everyone there had the same observation that despite this person being so incredibly busy and helping all these other people, as far as I could tell, he always had time for me, and I think that scale of people that he impacted, I mean, I think all of us could only dream to get to where he did, so very sad that he It was gone, but it was just amazing to see the level of effect he had. When I think about Bill and meaningful stories, I mean, there's a couple that come to mind. Probably one of the best ones is Bill was one of my advisors at Centrada. So this is, I was a twenty-one-year-old founder. Actually, I'll tell you a funny one, and I'll tell you a different one in a second. So I'm a twenty-one-year-old founder. Vinod Post was my primary investor. Anyone who's worked with Vinod in those days, especially, very active investor. You know, I get the term sheet, and immediately he starts sending me an email. You need to meet this person, you need to meet this person, and most of them were engineers. Like, you ne…

AI assessment note: “despite this person being so incredibly busy... he always had time for me”