Bret Taylor: preference

Transcript context

…Frontier was my first company. At our peak we had 12 employees, 12 of the best people I've ever worked with. Started the company with Jim Norris, who's an engineer I've known since Stanford and Paul Buhite and Sanjeev Singh who Paul started Gmail. Sanjeev was the first engineer at Gmail, so we had the Google Maps people and Gmail people. It was a pretty awesome founding team. We made a social network, as you said. We invented a lot of concepts that became popular in the newsfeed. We invented the like button. It was really neat. It was a fun time. We were only really popular in Turkey, Italy and Iran, and at one point, we were blocked in Iran, so we were only popular in Turkey and Italy and Silicon Valley. To this day, actually a lot of folks in Silicon Valley are like, "I love FriendFeed." I'm like, that's awesome. It wasn't really a successful business. We were a follower-oriented social network, not a friendship-oriented social network, which meant a lot of our content was more like X or Twitter than it is Facebook in that respect. And a lot of sharing newspaper articles, interests, scientific communities, things like that. And there was a period when Twitter, which was one of our competitors at the time, that there was a lot more social networks at the time. I am probably screwing this up a little bit. I think Obama, Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey all went on Twitter in a summer and we just got our ass kicked. And it was a great example of you... I think 11 of those 12 people were engineers and we were just making product and I think it was Biz Stone. If you talk to the Twitter folks, they could give you the history on this, but I think Biz was really focused on getting celebrities and public figures onto Twitter, which is totally obvious. If you have a social service that's oriented towards following people, put some people on there worth following and instead, we were exclusively focused on polishing the product. And we actually, I think at our peak of popularity, we were very confident just, I think it was a time when Twitter had the fail whale and it was down half the time and people couldn't even use it. And our product, we were innovating faster, we had more features, people liked it and we were up 100% of the time and we totally lost for no reason related to product at all. And it was an example of, I think somewhat famously not a lot of great entrepreneurs have come out of Google because Google was so successful, I think it's hard as a product manager to see distribution and product design and even business model when you have AdWords and money's raining from the sky. There wasn't as much scrutiny and I think folks like the PayPal Mafia I think learned a lot more about entrepreneurialism than a typical PM at Google. So, we're just getting punched in the face and learning this the hard way. tiny and I think folks like the PayPal Mafia I think learned a lot more about entrepreneurialism than a typical PM at Google. So, we're just getting punched in the face and learning this the hard way. And so, that was probably the most prominent example of it and I think we probably did have a... I can tell you all the flaws of that product, but I don't think that was the reason why we lost. There's a lot of reasons. I think there was a lot of flaws of the product, but it was a lot of other stuff. And so, I've learned, accumulated these skills over time, but I say the hard part of that question is answering it correctly, is it's hard when you don't have experience in something, than to have intuition in it. So I think if there's probably a structural flaw, it wasn't that... I don't know if I could have figured out how to reach out to Ashton Kutcher [inaudible 00:27:28], it's not he's on my Rolodex. But I probably wasn't soliciting advice from the right people. I think that what's great about the technology industry is there's a lot of advice. Choosing whom you listen to is actually quite difficult, but I think we're somewhat myopic. We're in our own little world, creating this product and we weren't asking people from the outside in to say, what are you seeing that could go wrong? What are you seeing that could go right? What are you seeing in the industry that we're not doing that you think we might want to do? And this is why boards are important. This is why finding the right advisors, the advisors will actually tell you what you not [inaudible 00:28:09] want to hear, but you need to hear. I think that was probably the missing part. I'm not sure I was great at market at the time, but if I had solicited the right advice, I could have learned that that was a shortcoming. And I think that was a deep lesson I took from that. I'm a huge believer in boards and getting good advice. Any heuristics or advice for people to know whose advice to listen to? What do you pay attention to when you're like, okay, ignore this person but listen to this person?…

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