Tal Raviv: evaluation

Transcript context

…Can you describe the prank? So the prank was... I'll say, first of all, the best April Fools pranks are the ones that touch just ever so gently on people's biggest fears at that time. So in a work context, whatever somebody's biggest strategic fear is that quarter or that March of that year, whatever people are talking about, you just have to touch it a little bit, they'll do the rest of the work. So this company, there's this really big debate about internationalization and should we do that, and there's a big trade-off to doing it and other things we could be doing with the same resources. And this was just on everybody's minds, especially the leadership team. And it was March, so my buddy and I, also at the company, we decided what would be people's biggest fears would be that a really big company would launch the same thing in Europe. And we created not just a fake screenshot, not just fake news, we created a fake domain name website publication. It was really detailed. We really invested a lot in it, and of this German website, and we made up a tech arm of Der Spiegel. We called it Spiegel Tech. We bought the domain, I'm probably incriminating myself by saying this, and then what we did is we knew that if we had sent that link on the 1st of April to the executive team, nobody would believe it. So what we did is every executive on leadership team has that senior report that they really trust. So we got all of them in on it, and the link would come from them and each of them took it further. The senior engineer who was really critical to the company, he created a fake recruiting poaching email. If I recall, I think the legal counsel created a fake cease and desist. We just went all out and this was on a Saturday so we ruined the executive team Saturday, they had an emergency call. It was a Saturday. We ruined the executive team Saturday. And every time that we decided that a particular executive had suffered enough, depending when they woke up and how long they had been dealing with us, we would let them in on it, let them into the private channel and ha ha. So Monday rolls around, CEO sees me, "You, Tal." "Great. I'm still employed." And I hear later that day that the leadership team had their Monday meeting and somebody mentioned that even though that was a prank, it really got me thinking. And then the CTO of the company goes, "Wait, what do you mean prank?" And it dawns on him and he just gets up, throws down his jacket and walks out of the room. So we forgot to tell him. He had to stew with that the whole weekend. So yeah, sometimes something goes too far. And that is well executed. Oh my god. It actually reminds me at Airbnb when I was leading a lot of the April Fool's jokes year after year, and one of the best ones we did was we launched, it's basically we did the opposite of what you did. We launched AirBrb, which was a desk sharing service, and we made a whole launch video. We announced it as a new product, AriBrb and the idea is you go get lunch and you can, "I'll be right back," and then your desk can be rented out for 20 minutes.…

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