Molly Graham: preference

Transcript context

…And so I sourced what I think are the greatest hits from a lot of colleagues that you've worked with, a lot of people you've worked with. We've chatted about the stuff that you find other people find most helpful. So we're going to be going through all that stuff. But let's help people understand why they should listen to this advice. What's kind of the backstory on these frameworks? Where did they come from? Where did you develop them? Tell us that story. So first of all, Ami Vora, who you have had on your podcast, once said to me that all advice is just someone telling you what they did. And I always think about that. Because I really think that basically what I tell people is I've made every single mistake in the book. And then I got to the end of the book and I started inventing new mistakes. So mostly what I feel is that I like sharing my stories because I want to help people. I want to help people not make the same mistakes I did. And I also want to help people make sense of what they're experiencing. But I started in tech in 2007. I actually started at Google the week the iPhone launched and a lot of my scaling battle scars come from a couple of experiences. They come from a year and a half at Google, which is not very long. And Google was pretty big when I was there. It has thousands of employees. But my department, which was the communications department, was 25 people when I joined and it grew in nine months to 125 people. And that was really my first experience with just all the sort of things that I still talk about today. In terms of what it feels like to grow really, really fast and sort of all the tools that I started developing from there. After Google, I left and followed Cheryl Sandberg and Elliot Schrage to Facebook. And I spent five years at Facebook. And I joined Facebook in 2008, and it's important context because it was 80 million users at the time. We were smaller than MySpace. It was 270 million in revenue, 500 employees. It did not feel inevitable. Most people thought we were going to sell it to Microsoft. When I told people I was going there, they were like, isn't that place just like a site for college kids? And so I was there for five years and it was a crazy five years. When I left, it was 5,500 employees, five billion in revenue, over a billion users. So a huge amount of what I experienced, what I write about, what I talk about in Glue Club, which is the community that I run, comes from that rapid scale at Google and Facebook. But I also, I left Facebook right after we went public, about six months after we went public. And I only like doing jobs that I'm highly unqualified for. I like being on learning curves so steep that I'm scared I'm going to fall off. And so I left and I wanted to learn what it took to build something from nothing. And so I joined this little startup founded by Brett Taylor, a startup called Quip. I joined a couple of months before we launched and ran everything that wasn't product and engineering there for him. And that was such a valuable experience to me because the experience of building something from nothing is actually quite different than the experience of holding on for dear life while things are scaling so fast around you. And it really taught me about all the tools and skills you need to go from zero to one and then from one to two and how lonely it can be to build something. And we eventually sold that company to Salesforce. really taught me about all the tools and skills you need to go from zero to one and then from one to two and how lonely it can be to build something. And we eventually sold that company to Salesforce. And then again, only take jobs I'm highly unqualified for. But the last really chaotic scaling experience I had was actually helping Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan start their philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And I basically helped them for the first two years of its existence or its sort of like first full existence. And philanthropy sounds calm. You know what I mean? We're like, oh, giving money away. Must be so peaceful over there. And CZI grew from, I think the week I joined, it was 30 people and we bought two companies that week and it grew to 250 people that year. And it was like using every single tool in my toolkit that I had taken from every other job that I'd had. So my advice and frameworks, like I said, come from having made a lot of mistakes. But I've also sort of made a personal study over the last 18 years, believe it or not. Essentially what does it take to thrive inside growing and changing companies, not just to hang on for dear life. What does it take to lead in the face of constant change? And really the other piece that I find truly fascinating is what genuinely makes the difference between a business that grows but then plateaus versus these generational businesses. The ones that go on forever. Sort of the difference between a Twitter or MySpace and a Facebook. Billions in revenue versus hundreds of billions in revenue. So what I like to do is take my experience and use it to help other leaders. I want to give people tools that work. And I also want to be honest about how hard all of this stuff really is.…

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