Tom Conrad: evaluation

Transcript context

…The kind of miraculous thing about Quibi for me was it relit my enthusiasm for the industry for doing this work. I had left in, I think it was December of 2018, and I thought that maybe I was just done making software. I had done it for a really long time, I had done it for twenty-five years or something. And I had changed a lot. The industry had changed a lot, and I thought maybe I just didn't have the same passion for it that I had a decade before. And it also seemed like maybe it'd be fun to have another chapter of my life that was just completely different. And I had a whole list of things that I thought I might want to do. They were really, they were kind of ridiculous. Maybe I want to be a pastry chef. Maybe I want to be a landscape photographer. Maybe I want to learn to make bad music to put up on SoundCloud or something. Really the only thing they had in common were they were all things that I knew nothing about. People would be like, "Oh, you think you might want to be a pastry chef? Do you like to bake?" And I'd be like, "No, I don't know anything about baking." "Oh, you might landscape photography. Do you take photos?" "No, I don't make photos." But I was kind of committed to the bit, actually to the point where when TechCrunch interviewed me about my departure from Snapchat, I was like, "I'm out. I'm going to do something else entirely." So that story is very much out there. But a few months after my last day at Snap, I got a call from Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg who were starting up, it was called New TV at the time. And the pitch was, "We're going to try to take the best of mobile and Silicon Valley and Consumer Tech and sort of weld it to the best of Hollywood-style content production to build something completely bespoke and purpose-made for consumption on the phone." They were looking for both technology leadership and product leadership and wanted to know if I was interested in one or both. And I took the meeting, even though I wasn't really taking these kinds of calls from anybody. It just seemed like who's going to pass up the opportunity to have lunch with the two of them? So I listened to the pitch and politely declined and told them that I was going to be a pastry chef or something. And we kept doing that every couple of months for seven months. We'd go to lunch, they would give me an update on the progress they were making, and I would decline the invitation to get involved somehow. And then late in that year, I went to lunch one more time and Meg explained that they brought on someone to lead technology and they brought another person to lead product, and both of them really truly for reasons that are completely disconnected from Quibi itself, both of them had left after about six weeks. And Meg's like, "We've raised all this money, and we've told the world that we're shipping this product in about a year. ly disconnected from Quibi itself, both of them had left after about six weeks. And Meg's like, "We've raised all this money, and we've told the world that we're shipping this product in about a year. We got an awful lot to do, and I really could use some help, and I would consider it a personal favor if you would come and spend just a couple of days a week helping." She's like, "I'll continue to look for someone who actually wants the job, but it'd be great if you could help me get this off the ground." And my wife is a freelance writer, marketing strategist and loves her life as a freelance contributor. And she's like, "You should do this. Why not? It's two days a week, it's just a few months. What's the worst thing that could happen? Maybe you'll like it." And I'm like, "No, no. Here's the thing that will happen. I won't do it two days a week. It will immediately be three days, then four days, then five days, then six days. I just know myself." And she's like, "No." She's like, "Just on Wednesday night at six o'clock, close your Quibi laptop and be like, all they're paying me for is for Tuesday and Wednesday and then open it back up on Tuesday morning. That's all you've got to do." Well, she's right about most things and she's wrong about this. I fell deeply into it right away, and it was just so fun to get to build a team from scratch and to design and build a product from scratch and to take advantage of all of the sort of modern software architecture stuff that had come into being over the course of the 15 years since we had started Pandora. And I'm embarrassed about some of the what happened with Quibi for sure, but I'm super grateful for the experience, because I just really fell in love with the industry again and was reminded of just how rewarding it can be to build something and to try to put it out there even if you stumble pretty mightily along the way. Is there something that you took away from that experience that taught you what to try to avoid, to try to pull towards?…

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