Most people that drop out of high school, get expelled, have problems, don't end up going to graduate school at Stanford. I just went off the rails. I was the only high school dropout that would show up for trigonometry class, sometimes under the influence of something. One day, one of the teachers came up to me and he said, "You know what? You can ruin your life all you want, but you're not going to ruin the rest of the people's lives in this room. Get the hell out of my class." At the moment, I just laughed at him. It didn't stick with me. But not that long later, when I was expelled and I got into a very serious car accident, almost killed the passenger in the car, I was handcuffed. I was on the ground in a gravel driveway, smashed down. I was injured. And his voice just banged through my head.
That moment was pretty seminal in my life. Actually, having almost hurt someone, I think you just sit there and you reflect and go, "What am I doing?"
This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. With us today is Andrew Anagnost, the CEO of Autodesk. And while you may not be familiar with the company itself, you're definitely familiar with what the company does, because pretty much everything that you are looking at in the real world, their software helped make. Welcome to Masters of Scale.
Thank you. Yeah, we like to talk about Autodesk as the biggest tech company nobody's heard of. Everything that you see in the world—the cars that you see on the roads, the bridges they drive over, the machines that you see, the phone, the buildings—it's built and designed using our software.
And I'm keen to get into the story of how you joined the company and became CEO and how you're leading it through this era. But I want to go way back. We were learning before we started the recording that you and I have more than a few things in common. But one of them is neither of us was our best self as a teenager.
No, I was not my best self as a teenager.
So, what were your teen years like?
Yeah, my teen years were a little rough. As I progressed through and got into high school, I essentially started numbing myself and, for lack of a better word, I self-medicated to try to calm the energies down, get the noise in my head under control. And I just went off the rails, and I dropped out of high school for a while there. Ended up in the wrong places. Was never a violent kid. The only person I really ever hurt was myself.
I was the only high school dropout that would show up for trigonometry class, sometimes under the influence of something. And one day, one of the teachers came up to me and he said, "You know what? You can ruin your life all you want, but you're not going to ruin the rest of the people's lives in this room. Get the hell out of my class." I remember to this day, right? I can see his face in my face. I can feel his breath, right? At the moment, I just laughed at him. It didn't stick with me. But he was very brave of this teacher.
I remember, oh, not that long later when I was expelled and I got into a very serious car accident, almost killed the passenger in the car. I was handcuffed. I was on the ground in a gravel driveway, smashed down. I was injured. And his voice just banged through my head.
And I've never forgotten him, for Mr. Carrington, the math teacher. Most people that drop out of high school, get expelled, have problems, don't end up going to graduate school at Stanford. So, in that respects, I'm kind of a statistical anomaly. But it's because of people like that, actually, that I met along the way that saw that I had potential and I was just pissing it away.
Well, Andrew, what happened between the face down, handcuffed in the gravel, having already had the experience with Mr. Carrington trying to get you back on the right track, that got you all the way to Stanford and that has us sitting here today?
I think that moment was pretty seminal in my life, actually having almost hurt someone. It really was a switch moment, and it was voices like that that kind of propelled me forward. So, I got into the local Cal State. I worked my way through that program. I fought to get into internships. I had professors along the way that told me, "Look, you have potential." They believed in me.
And I believe that you have to work hard. You do make your own luck in some ways, but none of us rise alone. Let's be perfectly clear, okay? And it's kind of a fool's errand to think that your environment hasn't in some way either pulled you down or pushed you up. And I was fortunate that some of these people really believed in me. I suspect one of them used their legacy credit to help get me in. And I was not going to let them down.
There's something really profound about the "there but for the grace of God" of this. How incredible that you had people who stepped in for you and helped you get on track.
I did, including the judge that chewed me out in juvenile court. Look, I think we are the product of the people that lift us up. I really believe that. My life experience has taught me that I never believe this bull crap that I hear out there about, "Oh, I did this all myself." Really, the most important people in your life—and I think this is a leadership axiom—they tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.
So I actually went to a startup that was a deep technology startup. It was a simulation software startup, which was a magical experience. I tell young people it's like, look, you should try a startup while you are young.
Why do you tell people that?
Because when you're at a startup, what you do is you learn a little of everything very quickly. And a startup is very low hierarchy, and if there is any hierarchy, most people ignore it. And you make decisions very quickly. You learn the value of speed and kind of arguing things out in kind of a Socratic way, where the ideas got to be challenged, not the people. You learn a set of skills that is really hard to learn in a larger company because everybody's being so careful in a larger company, or they're being so political, or all these things. All of that is stripped away in a startup. You're just trying to survive and you're trying to make it happen. So that journey from $0 to $10 million is so educational.
Yeah. And from 0 to 30, 50 people or so, you kind of know everything happening in the company.
You know everything, right?
Everybody knows everything, and you know exactly who to go to to get something done.
And you know how to get your relationships in place. You also know that you can cut through the BS. Now, of course, it teaches you some things that do not translate to large company environments. This high-speed connection that you have in a startup where you've been sitting there late at night eating with these people, and you can call BS on them and they don't feel bad, it doesn't translate. So, I was actually recruited out of this company by Autodesk. The funny thing was is I met the woman who had become my wife, and she wanted to move to California.
Oh, wow. And you met her in Boston.
I met her in Boston. She was working in Chicago at the time. We were working for competing software companies. Can you believe that?
The only reason I took the job, though, is because it was in a team that was trying to fight against this company that I had actually partnered with at my startup. And I go, "Oh, yeah, they're terrible. We should build a product that defeats them." And so I got a little bit excited about that. But let's face it, I think I thought it was a stepping stone to something else. It turns out that when I got there, I really liked being in this counterculture team that I was working with. It was very much a rebellious team in terms of rebelling against the primary culture in the company.
How big was Autodesk at the time?
Just like less than 1,000 employees.
Okay. But still not an early-stage startup. It's big enough to have a well-established culture and well-established norms. And most companies at that scale with well-established culture and norms don't really want—they may say they want a rebel group, they may say they want the innovator, but it generally doesn't go so well.
Carol Bartz did this, okay? Carol Bartz set up this team, and we were butting up against the big, established part of the company that was really built on top of the core product that the company started with, which was called AutoCAD, the name that most people know.
And it was kind of an exciting period. I learned a lot about how you operate and how you kind of use the edge, but then soften the edge over time through that experience. Carol Bartz kind of showed me the importance of commercial discipline and the rigor associated with that, and the need to have accountability on getting things to customers in order to scale, because I knew 0 to 10 pretty well.
10 to 100, I didn't know that very well, right? And she was really influential on me, and I look back at her in positive ways. I always like to say I'm the product of two dysfunctional parents, and they both have the initials CB. One was Carol Bartz; one was Carl Bass. Totally different people, okay? Both CEOs that I reported to. Carol much more on the commercial side; Carl on the respect for innovation, respect for the customers' processes and what they do. Each of them taught me something. Each of them taught me what to do and what not to do in many ways.
What did Carol and Carl do to allow a rebellious group inside the company not just to function, but to flourish?
Yeah. So, Carol only allowed a small number of these, like one. She had a good sense for who could push things and who could not, and she supported them. Carl, on the other hand, would create hundreds of these. He'd let them pop up everywhere to the point that it would stress the company's ability to execute. Carl's style was much more let a thousand flowers bloom and maybe never prune a single flower.
It's almost like working at two different companies with leaders that are that different.
Very different companies. And even the company that I'm in that I run now as Autodesk, it's somewhat different, but it learned from both of those companies. And I'd like to think that because we can scale new businesses, because we're very passionate about killing our own businesses, killing our own products—which we are very passionate, and I think that's a cultural norm in the company—that I've done a decent job. But I owe it to the experience and the experience arc.
I want to come back to the norm of killing your own businesses when you need to, but I do want to hear about the journey to CEO, because you weren't given the job outright. You had to really fight for it. Will you tell us about the process that started as a co-CEO and led to the lone CEO?
Yeah. So, when they started the succession planning before the activist came into the company that ultimately led to the co-CEO scenario, I kind of opted myself out of the succession process because I just never saw myself that way. For some reason, I looked at that job and I said, "Well, then you don't have any fun anymore." Which might actually be true.
It was only as the activist process progressed. There was someone from the old culture that was up; there was me from the newer culture, the inside outsider; and then there was the threat of an outsider. As I was looking at the plot evolving, the culture norm wasn't going to get the job. It was very clear to anyone that that wasn't going to happen. So, I just said, "Okay, I love this company." And that's when I said, "I'm putting my name in. I want to try for this job." And that's how I ended up in this situation where they then pitted the old-timer against me in the co-CEO role. And for six months, no decisions were made at the company.
Why did they do that? I mean, it's not exactly a model that's likely to work unless you are deeply partnered.
Unless you're a deeply hyper-collaborative. It works much better at smaller companies than it would ever work at a large company, right?
I think they did it because they were afraid of disrupting the current culture of the company and they wanted to kind of—
I think they were creating theater.
"We've got to make sure that we assess all—"
They were buying themselves time to get through the process. And it was awkward for both of us, and it wasn't a great time. Like I said, for six months, no major strategic decisions were made at the company.
And were daggers out? Were you all basically trying to kill each other? What was the dynamic?
No, we weren't like that. At least I can speak for myself; I wasn't like that. I knew intuitively that the job was probably going to go to me, not necessarily because I was more deserving or all of those things, but because I was the inside outsider. And I think that's what people wanted at that point. Frankly, it's probably what the company needed. They needed a separation from the Carl era. They needed to move forward, and I think they wanted to do it in as gentle a way as they possibly could and make it visibly look like it was a fair process. You have to ask them, right? But it wasn't great. It wasn't a fun time.
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So when you became the sole CEO, what was job one, day one?
I fundamentally believe that you've got to have a guess at what the future is. You've got to have a guess, and then you have to have the fortitude and the strength to pay attention when your guess is wrong and correct. So I pulled out a lot of flowers that I thought were weeds. A couple of real flowers got pulled out in the process, and I had to dig out of that over time. And that was move number one. And believe it or not, I shifted money to the back office, which is a very odd thing to do.
