Jason Shah: belief

Transcript context

…Going in a slightly different direction, one of the things I wanted to chat about is you worked at all these different companies and they have different types of leadership and different approaches to leadership. And so, I'm curious, what have you learned about effective leadership watching all these awesome operators work, and what kind of separates them in your experience from folks that maybe aren't as effective? Yeah, it's a great question, and to briefly recap, right, I've gotten to see somebody like David Sachs who've been the CEO of PayPal and then the founder of Yammer and gone to do many more things since then. I've gotten to see sort of Jeff Bezos at a distance. I was never that close to him obviously and never got to work with him, but got to observe his impact on the organization. Obviously, I've gotten to witness Brian Chesky and his leadership in sort of the pre-IPO days as well as through the ups and downs of COVID, and then also now at Alchemy, our co-founders, Joe and Nikil are leaders that have really had an impact on me as well, and I would count myself, but I've also see myself as a bad leader in the start of [inaudible 00:29:56] and learn from that. I think it's a really important thing to reflect on, and I think for me there are three things that have stood out the most. I think number one, nothing is above them. I've seen whether it's Brian caring about the full bleed image on the homepage, whether it's Jeff Bezos who famously would receive customer emails, read many of them, forward them, and he's famous for question mark emails where for his time's sake he would just forward an email to a leader with a question mark and you would just have to figure it out and then report back in 24 hours with the resolution thereof. But nothing's above them, and a lot of founders or a lot of CEOs or even CPOs and leaders think you get to a certain point and then I'm above a product spec, I'm above looking at the data running a sequel query, and I think that that is a mistake in a lot of ways, especially from a standpoint of who people come to respect as well as efficacy at one's job. And then the other two things would be, I think they're in the details. So, it's less about being above something, but this is kind of Amazon's famous for auditing the details for example, and leaders are... For example, when we were going to launch Prime, order a bunch of Prime things and see what happens and really test things out, and write up a long feedback email on Saturday or something like that, and make sure that things are moving forward. So, I think in my opinion, some of the best leaders, David Sachs would do this too. He actually ran the product reviews. It was the CEO of the company doing product reviews, not some kind of middle tier of a director of product who was just running them. avid Sachs would do this too. He actually ran the product reviews. It was the CEO of the company doing product reviews, not some kind of middle tier of a director of product who was just running them. They were force involved and there were things to delegate and activate around, but Sachs was in all of those details and ran those product reviews himself and would talk to the product managers directly, and I think that was really impactful, and it also, I think from an accountability and culture perspective, when you're PM and you talk to the CEO and you feel like you're presenting something at product review, it's totally different, and it creates a certain amount of responsibility and quality, frankly, that I think is really important, and it's a way to coach obviously as well for those leaders to really make a mark on the organization. And then lastly, I think they adapt, right? I think that are a lot of leaders who are like, "I've worked 20 years to become a leader in this way and I have a playbook," either based on past experience or based on some sort of philosophy that they've developed over time that they feel committed to in some way, and I think coming back to some of these examples of watching Brian lead through COVID or watching Joe and Nikil now through this particular crypto winter shift gears and figure out exactly like we're still building the core business, but how else can we lean into this and adapt to the unique opportunities that are in front of us. I think that's really powerful. So, what I've seen is nothing is above them, they're in the details, and they adapt to new information and new situations. That's what I've seen the most that I've appreciated in the best leaders that I've gotten to either observe or work closely with.…

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