The Ledger, every show

“Yeah, we, I did kill customer success at every company I've been in. I think it's the biggest bullshit thing that goes on in Silicon Valley.”

“Companies like Salesforce and even Google come to mind, but you know, in the end they're laying people off too, by the thousands. Okay. So I guess it's not family after all.”

“Don't go working for some consulting firm, you know, out of school, right? Try to get a real job in the real economy, building real products, selling real products. He says, you really need to feel what it's like, you know, to sort of be in the drive train of …”

“Culture shorts and sifts. You attract the right ones and you start losing the wrong ones. So it's actually quite perfect. If people are leaving, they're just not your DNA. They're not your blood type.”

“A lot of the MBA types, I mean, they're sort of schooled, you know, to kind of have these knee jerk, you know, very quick, I know what's going on here. I've seen this before. I read about it. I've seen it before. And then boom, boom, boom, you know, and that, …”

“Written performance reviews end up being used against you know, it's like a legal trap.”

“It's just the absurdity of, you know, of celebrating things that you're supposed to do. I'm constantly reinforcing what a great job people are doing. I think that's just complete nonsense.”

“I'm looking for mal-adjusted people. People will have a chip on their shoulder. People will have something to prove. Versus people that, you know, they are so well balanced, they have to think about a reason to get out of bed.”

“We very quickly separate on behavior. You know, performance is something that we will give more time behavior. We won't. And that's because behavior is a choice, not a skill set.”

“I don't think a business is a family. Unfortunately, in a family, you can't fire your family, even though you sometimes want to, you have to tolerate them and deal with them. And sometimes in the most egregious way, that is just the nature of families. I mean,…”

“We very quickly separate on behavior. You know, performance is something that we will give more time behavior. We won't. And that's because behavior is a choice, not a skill set.”

“It is a lack of adjustment because if you were a perfectly balanced person, you wouldn't have any ambition. You're so happy with where things are. You barely have a reason to get up in the morning, you know?”

“There needs to be a bell curve. We want to know who is, you know, deserving of two X, three X versus who is deserving of zero. So that we see the full spectrum, the bell curve, if you will of people that are, you know, performing, you know, incredibly well. An…”

“You get much better sales organization when you have full alignment in the entire company so that everybody works, you know, for sales effectively. We always say that we're all working for sales here. Because they're the tip of the spear and the rest of us are…”

“Great salespeople can't sell a bad product. Right. But lousy salespeople can sell a great product.”

“Typically sales problems are product problems, but Typically that's not the initial assessment because, you know, you don't want your baby to be called ugly”

“Some people are, you know, not good enough to keep, not bad enough to fire, you know, those are the worst cases because like, well, you know, person looks nice, speaks, speaks well, articulate, you know, but they're the ultimate passenger. They never move a di…”

“I find that people rush, especially in fast growing companies, you know, we have hiring targets and they're just slamming bodies. And it's the worst thing ever. I'd rather hire, you know, more slowly, but better than faster.”

“This is what naturally happens to human beings. It's just, it's innate. We slow down to a glacial pace unless there are People who are going to drive tempo and pace and intensity and urgency. That's what leaders need to do because people naturally slow down.”

“CEO jobs are insanely confrontational, which is not human nature. We don't like it. We aren't naturally confrontational. We avoid it.”

“When you're in the enterprise, you're dealing with structured proprietary data and, you know, they're not planning trips to Yellowstone. They're gonna, you know, they're gonna ask really hard questions... Believe me, you're not going to get the answer to that …”

“Anybody semi-literate will be able to get, you know, way more value than they ever imagined from the data. And it will change, you know, how products Get used. I mean, BI will not be the same. I think I see that as severely affected by this evolution”

“In a world of AI, if you don't have highly organized, optimized, sanctioned, and trusted data, what do you want, you know, your models to do? Just kind of train on, on, on a data lake. I call it a landfill. You know, I mean, you have no idea what the hell is i…”

“We don't do layoffs because we don't wait until there is a, you know, huge headwind. We're always pruning the tree, so to speak, right? So we don't have to do it as some massive event that is super unsettling.”

“I've killed off MBOs in every company I've ever been in.”

“The real reason that we're doing this is not so much that I want to take money away from non performers or marginal performance. It's really that I want to overcompensate, you know, the top. People in the company, I don't want them to feel like, I'm getting th…”

“No, we feel insecure and high anxiety all the time. I mean, I often tell CEOs, if you're feeling anxious, congratulations, because you passed the intelligence test. You should be anxious. People are trying to kill you. You know, you'll be insane if you weren't…”

“Yeah, but the reality is a board needs to be led. Okay. I mean, I always tell people the worst thing you can possibly do is go into a board meeting and go, What do you guys think? You've just created a vacuum. Okay.”

“Most CEOs are far more, you know, timid than they should be based on what their role really is. And the reality is the CEO has enormous power, but most CEOs don't realize they have it and they don't exercise the full measure of the power that they've been hand…”

“You gotta be very careful that, that you don't get into a rinse and repeat mode where, you know, you just think you have a formula or an algorithm and you can just apply it over and over again. That's just really simplistic thinking. It will lead you astray be…”

“In business, it's more like being a professional sports franchise, right? You're assembling the best players and you know, we may be friends, but we don't have to be friends because we're not coming together on the basis of friendship. We're coming together on…”

“Companies like Salesforce and even Google come to mind, but you know, in the end they're laying people off too, by the thousands. Okay. So I guess it's not family after all.”

“You can create focus in, in a multi mission organization. You absolutely can. I mean, certainly Google was actually quite legendary for doing a lot of that stuff. Cause they had a lot of successful things that they did. And I think there's many other companies…”

“Hierarchy or charge mean nothing to us. You know, we operate through influence. If you can convince people, great. And if you can't, well, then you just can't. It doesn't matter what your title is or what organization you come from or who your boss is. So it's…”

“Now the whole text to SQL has become, you know, table stakes. I mean, you can interrogate, you know you know, Salesforce data on Snowflake, you know, what just text to SQL. And it's really nice by the way. I mean, hell, it's all a lot better than using dashboa…”

“But the way to find out anything about people is to fully surround where that person has been, okay? And, you know, if they've been at Company A, you know, you go find out who in my company was at Company A while this person was there, and let's go, I'm gonna …”

“Culture is not a general thing. There's no such thing as general goodness. I mean, a culture needs to really enable your mission, right? And whatever, whatever enables your mission effectively is, is a good culture. There's no universal culture. That's good.”

“I have an allergic reaction every time I hear data warehousing, because To me, it's just a type of workload now. It's no longer a market.”

“We don't think, you know, you can have a data cloud in a single public, on a single public cloud platform. By definition, you can't, right?”

“Historically a database was just, you know, a platform that was self-contained and it had standard interfaces like ODBC and JDBC that you, that the application used to access the data. Now it's like, well, wait a second, you know, we don't want to operate that…”

“Going to natural language is like, it's like the last mile here. And that is, is an enormous thing. I mean, the effect on demand will be just enormous because every mortal, if you're semi literate, maybe not even literate, you can just talk, you know, you can …”

“The systems will be able to start giving you insight into those kinds of questions... Imagine in medical, we have diagnostic models, you know, and we have all these different, you know, levels of intelligence that we can build. That as long as they have the da…”

“I think that there still will be a future for BI companies, business intelligence, sort of, Tableau's, Looker's World. And, you know, dashboarding is done for a number of reasons. Sometimes it's just, you know, basically providing data in the consumable format…”

“Supply chain management is an email spreadsheet business. I mean, they're still living in, in, in the world of Microsoft, 30 years ago.”

“You know, when I was at ServiceNow, you know, I always felt that it was not an equitable relationship that we have with our customers. Cause oftentimes, you know, they would sign up with us for many millions of dollars and It took them nine months to even get …”

“If you're in a SaaS subscription model, they got to wait for their next drill before they can start cutting off a limp here. Whereas with us, you can do it in near real time. Investors don't like it. I understand because they love it on the way up. They just h…”

“Don't be afraid, you know, that people will react poorly to it. They won't. The good people will actually love it. And especially if you're in the leadership role and who isn't, you know, this is really what people want. They want to inject energy and focus an…”

“So it's, you really gotta choose carefully because your individual merit cannot overcome, you know, the circumstances of your choices.”