Tom Conrad: evaluation

Transcript context

…At Pandora, I was the head of product and was head of engineering. And our CEO was brilliant, but he was a product marketer. I mean, Joe was all things. He was an engineer by education, and a great marketer, and a great finance person, and just such a utility player at a very, very high level across every discipline. But he was also really, really good at letting his team do their jobs. He really let me run product and engineering. And so not only did I have tremendous latitude to make good and bad decisions about product, I also really got a seat at the table to help lead the company. So rewarding, so gratifying. Best professional experience that one could have. So I leave Pandora after a decade. I take a year trying to figure out what I'm going to do next. But after about a year, I got introduced to Evan. And it's kind of a funny story. A mutual friend sent this introduction over. Evan immediately responded and said, "Why don't you come down to Los Angeles and have a coffee with me?" So I fly down. It's not clear if it's a job interview or what it is really. I mean, I was just lightly exploring things that were out there and was a big fan of what he was doing with Snapchat. So I spent 45 minutes with him, and then I spent 45 minutes with the head of engineering, and another 45 minutes with the head of legal, and then they tossed me into a conference room with a dozen product designers, all in their mid to late 20s, many of which had gone to school at Stanford with Evan. I would come to learn all really, really, really impressive super, super talented people, but it was just 10 of us sitting around a conference table. And it wasn't really clear that they knew why they were talking to me, but we had an hour long free ranging conversation. And so I left, and I thought it was a totally fascinating morning, but I wasn't sure what had happened, really. It was like "Well, with these interviews, it all seemed very ad hoc. Is there a job opening?" It was a little odd. And I went to lunch on Abbott Kinney and got a text from Evan's admin saying, "Can you come back to the office? Have you gotten on your plane yet?" I was like, "I was just ordering lunch. I'll just come back right away." So I go back. Now, it's one o'clock in the afternoon. This entire thing started at nine o'clock in the morning. I sit down in the conference room. Evan comes in with a manila envelope and says, " We loved you. We'd like for you to be our VP of product," and handed me a written offer, all the terms, the stock compensation, the whole thing. I'm gobsmacked. I'm flattered, that this is really playing to my ego. I can't believe that this company that feels like maybe the most interesting thing that's happening in consumer tech, that their notoriously brilliant and mercurial founder has taken enough of a shine to me that he wants to give at least some of the keys to the product kingdom over after such a short courtship. tech, that their notoriously brilliant and mercurial founder has taken enough of a shine to me that he wants to give at least some of the keys to the product kingdom over after such a short courtship. So I leave, and when some of that buzz wears off, I start to wonder if there's some red flags here maybe. So I tell Evan, "Listen, I'd like to come back and meet more of the leadership team and spend more time with you, go a little deeper on what this means." And so we extend our courtship by another week or so, and I'm super impressed by the rest of the leadership team and the product thinkers and the designers and things that I was going to get to work with on a daily basis. And so I take the job full knowing that it's going to be wildly different than Pandora, where I had all of this latitude to do whatever I might want to do, and in the context of Snapchat, at best, I was going to be Evan's right hand, a person that principally executed his vision. And that's certainly what it was. I mean, Evan and I ended up having a really great collaboration, but it was certainly most days, I was executing on his vision, both at a high level, and very much in the details. And Evan's truly brilliant, I mean, and he's also actually a really nice guy. I think in some ways, he gets a bad rep for... He has very high standards, but he's a very kind person, in my experiences with him. But it was a super exhausting job and not as soul satisfying as I wanted it to be. And after a couple of years, like I said, I thought maybe I just wanted to make croissants or something. But one really, really big important lesson that I learned at Snap is about risk taking. And when you have the financial support and the foundational relationship with your investors that Evan has, it really allowed him to take these really big swings, acquire a technology that he thought was game changing, build features speculatively that maybe would be pruned in any other product roadmap planning process because the odds of them having an outsized impact were modest. And it just allowed him time after time to make bets that paid off, and we forget about the ones that don't work when there are so many home runs in those years. And we didn't have... Environmentally, we weren't set up for that at Pandora, but I think in some ways, I wasn't temperamentally inclined to those kinds of big swings. And I think I take bigger risks and encourage bigger swings now because of things I learned from Evan and Snap. That is an awesome story. It resonates a lot with what Brian shared about how he thinks about product now and just telling people what to build versus very bottom up, "Tell us ideas you have." That impact, the way you run, we're going to talk a bit about you as CEO now, but I guess, do you have a place that you try to be of CEO as, "Here's what we're building"?…

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