In the age of AI, we're going to have single-person trillion-dollar companies.
There's definitely smart people who think so. I actually think that every CEO should be on at least one board that's high-quality knowledge added, gives them perspective on how they're running their business center job even at the very early stages.
Mostly things don't work. We have such survivorship bias. Like, you know, here's how Snapchat won, here's Tumblr won, and Dropbox won, or whatever.
10,000, 100,000 failures for those. I actually, if I can, before I meet someone, I'll drop a note to three to five people and say rate this person one to 10. Anything between seven and nine is fine, but when you get a five or a call me, that's very interesting. And frequently when you get a call me, you don't
Yes, like a no, no thanks.
Welcome to the General Podcast, the show where there's no host, no script, just the best builders talking about what they do and why they do it.
Well, I guess we should start with how we met.
Yeah. I mean, it was funny. I remember being in Shawn White's apartment in New York because he at the time had gone off from being the former CTO of Lycos and WhoWhere and that kind of stuff and was now doing a PhD at Columbia in batteries and material, and I was visiting him. And I remember the look on his face saying, 'You don't know John?' And I was like, 'No.' He's like, 'Well, you're both Stanford guys and, you know, you guys would love each other. You should meet each other.' I was like, 'Sure, introduce us, you know.' And I think it came up from like kind of a discussion around who are people who are 100% technologists that are also 100% humanists and are like, 'How do we shape technology to make a very big difference in the world?' And what does that tribe look like? And that was when, you know, he mentioned to me, and then I think dropped both of us a connecting email.
Yeah, like, listen to you talk about it now, it's very characteristic in the way you talk about people and talk about your tribe. You know, from my point of view, I was working at my startup Reactivity at the time and I just got this once in a team email from Shawn who I hadn't talked to, I probably hadn't talked to him in like three or four years since he had gone to New York to do his PhD, and all it said was, 'John, Reid, you guys should meet each other.' And that was it. And so like you guys had this very expansive conversation about, you know, who should we be like and who should we connect with and all this stuff, and like, you should meet. And, you know, there's a set of people in my life, I don't know how big it is, it's probably 20 people or something like that, though if you get a note like that, there's no questions. You just, okay, let me schedule it. And I think that's how we started. As I recall, like we just started having breakfasts at Hobie's.
Yeah, we started with one. Just started with one. This is great. How about again in two weeks?
Yeah, and you were PayPal still. Although not for very long because I feel like that was right before you left.
Yeah, at the very end, yeah. That was also the reason I had, because that was part of it when I was talking to Shawn, and so there was like, okay, I know that I'm going to be going and doing something else soonish. So it was kind of head poked up from that the intense rush that is a blitzscaling startup, which is like, okay, like when I was at PayPal I was like, I have zero time for anything else. But I was like, okay, what am I doing? I was like, well, you should talk to John.
Yeah, I did think it was funny because you were saying, I think we'll be out of PayPal within like three weeks or four weeks. I'm like, come on.
You'll be there longer than that.
Whatever the time you said was, it was like a minute plus, one minute and you were out. That was a special breakfast and it was kind of characteristic of a lot of things that you and I have done over the years where I'd go in with a list of things to talk about, it'd be four or five things long, and then after a couple of hours of talking, the list would be longer, things to talk about, not shorter. And, you know, that's true of so many of the best relationships I have with people. It's just there's always more things to talk about, more things to pull on.
Well, and actually partially I think this also describes both of us, but to kind of do it from, you know, the angle from my side, is that part of the reason when I do a first meeting on any recommendation from someone I trust, like even on the Sean, 'You guys should, you know, blah.' But then it's like learning. Like I learned a ton from you, not just that time but that time and others. And it was like, oh, this is a really good way of looking at this. Right, those are a set of interesting questions about how to do it, a set of variables or frameworks or strategic tools that I hadn't given thought to before. And I was like, we should keep having this conversation.
Yeah, but I do remember like the first thing, like we just started talking, it's like, oh, how do you know Sean? And like, oh, well, do you know this other person? How do you know that person? And I remember the first few breakfasts were always about people, and that's still actually kind of the way you and I talk with each other. It's like, oh, what about this person? Have you met this person? And I even remember bringing in my, it was going to show our age a little bit, but I had little boxes of business cards, and remember that you and I had so many people to talk about and so many people in common. I would just bring them in and I'd just rifle through them and say, oh, have you met this person yet? This person? This person? And that was, I think, a lot of the sort of navigating and trying to understand how each other thought at the beginning, even before LinkedIn existed.
Yes, exactly. Although, you know, you were one of probably the first five people that I talked to about LinkedIn, saying, I've got an idea, this is the kind of thing I'm doing. And, you know, part of the, as you know, I tease you about it, but actually in fact I tease you about it in a way that is the actual instrumental thing for entrepreneurs about what you should be doing. You shouldn't be going to my friend John and saying, hey, do you like my idea? That's useless to me. Right, it's the, what are the challenges that I'm going to need to navigate with this idea? Why? What could blow it up? How should I navigate around it?
Well, what you mean when you say you tease me is you could say you give me a hard time for telling you I thought it would not work.
Yeah. Which is fine. I'm not self-conscious about it. I mean, if I was self-conscious about all the times I'm wrong, it would be a bad life. But yeah, you told me about it. I was like, 'Well, I don't think that's going to work.' Putting my network online is like, 'Well, maybe people with shitty networks will put their networks online, but my network is a good network.'
Yes. I'm not going to put my good network online.
But I was thinking about on the way up, like, what I got wrong in my estimation. There's part of it is I underestimated you.
Partly I just underestimated, like, you had a plan to make it work. And your plan was to use your social and political capital to go get people to do things that were a little bit irrational.
And you just walked around talking to them and get them to do it. And that's the way, I mean, first 50 people or something like that. And then the network was high enough quality that a bunch of your network and network effect magic could start to work. But actually it's a level
Deeper than that, which is important. Yes, by the way, because what you said is absolutely critical because it set a first initial tone that when people would first show up, they wouldn't go, 'Who are these random people from random countries or people who describe themselves as a networker and goes, "Hi, I'm Bob. I'm a networker extraordinaire."' Which is like most people go, 'Oh my god, run for the hills immediately as possible.' But it was like, 'Okay, these are high-quality interesting people for the first set.' Then part of it was understanding actually mechanics. So like one of the things that I did at LinkedIn was I said, 'Okay, what is the question that people first have when they come?' And the answer is, 'Who else is here?' Now, my team thought I was nuts, but we put on a, 'If you'd like to find out who else you know who's here, upload your Outlook.'
Now, you would not be the kind of person who would do that because you go, I understand, like, I don't know where this data is going. It's a little startup, etc., etc.
I did it probably because you told me to.
You did because of me, but like, cold you wouldn't have.
And by the way, a lot of people cold wouldn't have. But this was the essential strategic insight that I had that most of my critics didn't understand, which is, did I ever tell you what percentage of people would do that?
Yeah, for the first six months.
Right? So, that changed everything because then that kind of powered the people you may know function and a bunch of other things.
Was that more than you thought was going to do it?
Right. And, you know, it's kind of also within consumer internet being experimental, and, you know, these are the things that I learned from social and PayPal, which is like, give it a shot.
That's one of the things I think I learned from you early, which is just how many of these things are just manual, construct the thing brick by brick at the start.
From the outside you look at things in retrospect like, oh, this is inevitable, it was always going to happen, but like, just so many of these things, they get Twitter and Snapchat and whatnot and LinkedIn, they get constructed in a very deliberate way and then it kind of takes off from there.
Yeah, no, exactly. And then, you know, part of our breakfasts converted into Mozilla.
Yeah. Yeah, well, that's right too. So, like, I guess I was kind of between things and you were kind of between things. You had just started LinkedIn and then I was trying to figure out how to be a VC in 2005. And I couldn't find the right fit. I didn't understand why then, but I understand why better now, in retrospect. But yeah, we were trying to figure out Mozilla, and that's the only other thing that I learned from you. Like, we were looking at, so, Mozilla had just launched Firefox like six months before. I was helping out Mitchell Baker, who's the founder there, because it was like 10 or 12 people. It was growing really fast. And then I introduced, I think, you to them, and then I think you and Joey Ito and I all met at the San Francisco Airport when Joey was kind of going through the international terminal.
Yes, the usual back then.
Yeah, that was funny too. He's like, well, I see Joey every time he runs through, he flies through SFO. I'm like, we're going to SFO for a meeting? And it was a little weird. But we did it. And I think we all joined, and I think that was a, they weren't really looking for me and I wasn't really looking for them. But that was another thing that I learned from you is really critical, which was that like, mostly things don't work. And when things start to work, especially at internet scale, it's really special.
And we lose that a little bit because like, if you go look online on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and you'll see all these success stories. And then they go, you know, here's how Snapchat won, here's how Tumblr won, and Dropbox won, or whatever. And we have such survivorship bias. Like, we just
There's 10,000 and 100,000 failures for those.
Yeah, and so like the thing that you helped me realize is that Firefox was working. And when things work, you get sort of the right to do a whole bunch of other things. And so there was, you helped convince me to jump to Mozilla, and I went there to Mozilla, and like, you joined the board and Joey joined the foundation board, and that's how I joined and how I got to know Dan Portillo, who's the, you know, would start the GP.
Yeah, who's been just a treasure in a lot of aspects.
This is part of, I mean, the kind of one anchor that you and I think systematically about, which we think everyone should think systematically about, is network.
Right? Because that helped get you to Mozilla, and then you were like, oh, will you come join the Mozilla board? And you became the CEO of Mozilla, and we're driving that. And, you know, Mozilla is, you know, maybe, like, let me put it this way. There are no better instances of public interest technology that have deployed at massive scale and made a big difference, or maybe others in different zones, right? And that's part of how, you know, like, I met Dan, which is through you at Mozilla and the stellar work you guys did there. And but that network thinking about, like, how do we do things together? How do we learn from each other? You know, like, part of the index cards is who do you know, but also what do you know, and who do you know with what they know and what they can do that could advance these projects.
And that's part of actually the underlying of what really super-powered Silicon Valley. It's why Silicon Valley is, you know, frankly unique in the world and achieves at such a stellar level, is because of that kind of network
interface point. I mean, in fact, as I remember, it was one of your breakfasts that we were talking about the theory of Silicon Valley, and you said, read Regional Advantage, and I was like, Regional what?
Oh, you hadn't heard of that before?
That's an important book. Yeah, a woman named, professor at Berkeley, AnnaLee Saxenian. She just wrote about the difference between Boston and Silicon Valley. And Boston is, it's a little oversimplification, but like, basically said Boston died over time is that even though the technology is really awesome, because like, basically everybody was insular. So like, everybody eat lunch together, everybody at a company would eat lunch together, and kind of not share, you know, broadly.
And in Silicon Valley, there were no big corporate cafeterias, and it's hard to remember this now because they're all like this now, but like, the intermixing was so intense, yeah.
Yeah, and that, like, our breakfast is part of it. Like, one of the specific micro points in the book, which was funny because I thought about that when I was reading the book on your recommendation, was that in Waltham and the other places in Route 128, they all had corporate cafeterias, and so everyone ate with themselves. They didn't go out to other places. And once you go out to other places, you also, at least sometimes or many times, meet other people.
Like, you were Reactivity, I was at PayPal.
We're having breakfast. Even though there's no particular PayPal-Reactivity combination, it was like, we both know Shawn. So, let's connect.
So, your network's obviously very developed at this point and probably a little bit unique, we'll call it. But how would you, how do you suggest the founders and CEOs and like entrepreneurs that you work with, that they should think about building a network? Intentional, non-intentional, how do you do it?
Well, you know the answer, which is intention.
It's a rhetorical, it's a leading rhetorical question. And actually I'll go to some depth in it because like one of the things that when Jeff Weiner was the CEO of LinkedIn, spectacular CEO, came to me because he'd been approached about joining the Intuit board and he thought my answer would be, 'No, you should not join the Intuit board. You should just be focused on LinkedIn, etc.' And I was like, 'Hell yes. Those are good people. It's interesting. It's a different network. You should go do it.' I think as long as you love the CEO. He's like, 'I love the CEO. You should meet him. Great.' As a way of doing it, because I actually think that every CEO should be on at least one board that's high-quality knowledge added. It gives them perspective on how they're running their business and their job even at the very early stages. And so, the mistake is frequently thinking that the only thing that matters is the raw number of like 100, 120, 140 hours in the building, not doing anything else. Like, of course you have to be focused. Of course you have to be hardworking. Of course you have to be focused on your team. Of course you have to be focused on recruiting and selling and partnership building. Of course you have to be doing all those things. But part of what you also need to be doing is kind of learning what the strategy is, what to do. You have to be building long-term relationships. That's actually, you know, part of what makes Silicon Valley run, is like reference checking. It's like when someone says, 'Oh, would you be interested in that company?' It's like, 'Well, who's the person?'
Right? Are they good? I mean, I literally just got pinged both this morning on, 'Oh my god, here's a person who's doing really amazing things in bio and are thinking about starting a company that maybe you should invest in because you and Sid did Monashees.' And I was like, 'Huh. Oh, I know someone who knows that person.'
Dropped them the LinkedIn profile, said, 'What do you think of them?' Got an email back saying, 'Great talker, bad executer.' Like, 'Oh, great. Thanks.'
Well, you have some tricks on, so, I teach at the business school at Stanford, and like a lot of times people say, 'Well, how can you trust references?' Like, 'You can never trust references.' So, I give a couple of answers. One answer is like, well, you are honest with others about the references over a long period of time. So, you always tell them what you think for 10, 20 years. But, do you have some other tricks for how to get actual references?
Yes. So, actually those are worth saying and then I'll go back to the intentional network question, too. But, so, one, I actually, if I can, before I meet someone, even if I'm scheduled to meet them, I will drop a note to three to five people and say rate this person one to 10.
Right? Now, occasionally get 10s and I write back saying, 'Literally the best person you've ever met?' On this, you know, and occasionally they say yes and occasionally they go, 'Oh, well, sorry. I thought you meant American grade inflation.'
Solid nine. Solid eight and a half.
Yes, exactly. And so, you know, depending, anything between seven and nine is fine, right? But, when you get a five or a call me,
that's very interesting. And frequently when you get a call me, you don't get a call.
Yes. It's like, 'No, no thanks. Don't need to call you.'
Right? And so, that gives you a very quick pulse that has none of the kind of weirdnesses and liabilities of the people you know. Now, the next thing is say you're calling someone on a reference and,
they don't know you from Tom or Sarah or whoever. So, classic thing I'll say is like, 'Look, and you can't do this at the very first question. You have to, you know, build it into a little bit. But you go, "Okay, well, tell me a little bit about the person's work areas and challenges."' And just to be clear, if you tell me there's none, or you tell me that it's kind of one of these classic like works too hard,
or yeah, cares too much, too perfectionistic, I will assume the weaknesses are so bad that you can't tell me about them. Right? That's what I will take away, just to be clear.
Because then, they're in a slice like, 'Oh, if I say nothing, it torpedoes it. If I give the vanilla, like, "Oh, they just don't know when to quit working," it torpedoes it. So, they got to go, "Well, what do I say? What do I say?" And so, usually what they'll say is something vaguely untrue.'
And if you did that with two or three different people, you can usually get a sense, because everyone's a combination of strengths and weaknesses. I mean, as you know, from having worked with me,
you would say, 'Ooh, creative problem solver.' As best as possible. Person running the trains?
Little hard to get on the phone sometimes.
