Insight
Quarles: Wealthy People Falsely Attribute Success to Skill Over Luck
“Oh my God, like, there's just so much more capable. Like, it's not luck that I'm just really that much better than everyone else. I think that's the goalie. I think understanding the importance of preparation, meeting opportunity, i.e. Luck, that's an importan…”
Insight
Quarles: 150 Employees Is a Company's Most Significant Scaling Breakpoint
“Companies tend to break at 50 people, because it's like, you used to be able to just get everybody in the room, and like shout at them, or put them in a Slack channel, and tell them what to do, and you knew every single person, and you could direct everything …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Quarles: OpenTable Failed to Give Its Product Away Free in Palo Alto
“We picked a street in Palo Alto and I said, give it all away for free. I said, I don't care. Don't charge anything. I just want to see if we can get a hundred percent of the restaurants on the street. And what was interesting was they came back and we literall…”
What-if
Quarles: OpenTable Pay Would Succeed Today Due to Modernized POS Infrastructure
“Had that launched now, it'd be wildly successful because you think, see food delivery businesses and other things like that have changed the paradigm of what point of sale looks like in a restaurant, but we were just early.”
Insight
Quarles: A CEO Operates Three Months Ahead of Their Organization's Perception
“My time equals zero is always, like, three months before it hits everybody else, so I have to recognize, like, they're just seeing this for the first time. You've already been processing it”
Insight
Quarles: Remaining Stuck Is More Dangerous to Performance Than Falling
“I think that's the most dangerous place for anybody to be is the stuck state. Falling, fine, all right, I know what I'm dealing with, you know, ugly truth, fine, bring it on, let's go, let's, now I know what to do. It's that, that moment before you let yoursel…”
Insight
Quarles: CEOs Distracted by Delegable Tasks Limit Company Growth
“The other critical thing is understanding which decisions only you can make as the CEO. Many other decisions can be delegated. Many other decisions can move down the ranks. There's certain decisions that Only you can make. And one of the reasons why this is im…”
Insight
Quarles: A CEO's Unique Duties Are Mission, Team, and Board
“Brand mission, you know, kind of purpose of the company, the people of the company. And then really the third thing would really be, you know, kind of how we interface with our board. How are we Driving forward that conversation. You know, I can't put my, you …”
Insight
Quarles: Early-Stage Executives Rarely Scale Past 50 Employees
“So the person who was amazing with From zero to 50 often can't take the next leap. Some people can. Some people are purple unicorns and they can ride the ride.”
Insight
Quarles: Executives Waste Energy Trying to Change Employees' Core Nature
“So like I've often said, I was like, if you're an apple and I need an orange, I can't make you become an orange. I can make you a juicier apple. That's great, but I can't actually make you be an orange. And so it's not personal. And so the kind thing is to say…”
Insight
Quarles: Board Members Lack Operational Context and Retain Very Little Data
“These people show up You know, five times a year, or maybe a lot more often in some VC board that they just simply don't have the context. In fact, somebody gave me this advice early on. They said, don't underestimate how little your board retains.”
Insight
Quarles: CEOs Must Directly Address Recurring Board Member Pet Peeves Immediately
“To lean in with curiosity, and then to not let it repeat, though. I think it's kind of like a stuck state, back to that other part, is if you just let them, like, keep asking every meaning, and you just don't hit it on the head, you're gonna be frustrated, the…”
Insight
Quarles: Employees Must Prioritize Self, Family, Then Company in Strict Order
“You know, one of the things I say in my company, like, you know, it'll often happen, like, somebody's going to a funeral, or somebody's mom gets cancer, or a kid gets sick, and I will say to them, you know, like, self, family, company. Always in that order. Be…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Quarles: Bob Iger Context-Switched Between High Diplomacy and Product Details
“He had this Incredible ability to one day, like, conduct high-end diplomacy for Disneyland Shanghai, and then the next day, debate the finer points of The Sims with me, and I was like, how is this possible?”
Disclosure
Quarles: Disney Acquired Playdom to Understand Shifting Consumer Media Habits
“When we sold Platum into Disney, a lot of that was, hey, consumers are spending different amounts of time with different types of media. We gotta understand this, and I think that was Bob who leaned in”
Disclosure
Quarles: Playdom Reached 150 Employees Without an HRIS or Written Policies
“And this was exactly what happened to me at Playdom. Like we hit one 50 and like pretty, you know, all the software that's helped companies grow, but like we didn't have an HRIS. It was like in somebody's like spreadsheet on Excel or we had never written a pol…”
Insight
Quarles: Culture Is How Employees Make Decisions When Leaders Are Absent
“Culture is how people make decisions when you're not in the room, and increasingly, you're not in more rooms as the company gets bigger, and you have to really adjust and figure out how that transition is going to go.”
Assertion Supported
Quarles: OpenTable Ran on an Old Microsoft On-Premises Database
“When I got into the company, we were at a point at which the software that we had inside the restaurant was an old Microsoft on-prem distributed database, like not in the cloud.”
Insight
Quarles: Asking Who Would Make a Great Number Two Reveals Candidate Weaknesses
“One of my favorite reference points Questions to ask is who would make a great number two for this person? And what that reference question is getting at is like, you know, of course it's like sort of quote unquote weakness, but nobody can spike along every di…”
Assertion Partly supported
Quarles: Playdom Was Second to Zynga in Social Gaming When She Joined
“Sitting on the sidelines, armchair quarterbacking, as we say in America, and I was like, I want to go play the game, and so the only way to do it here is to just go to a startup, and so I went to a small gaming company called Playdom, and we were second to Zyn…”
Disclosure
Quarles Forfeited Her Investment Banking Bonus to Join Startup Playdom
“I dove in, I gave away a giant bonus that I was going to get in my old banking world to go join this company. Cause I like, I was like, screw it. I'm just going to go. And I didn't get paid my bonus that year. I left in December and I was going to get paid it …”
Disclosure
Quarles Hires Detail-Oriented Executives to Offset Her Corner-Cutting Style
“I am a corner cutter by nature, I'd say. In fact, I've surrounded myself with, like, iDotters and T-Crossers. So that they keep me safe sometimes.”
