Sriram Krishnan: recommendation

Transcript context

…He's great, he's fantastic. Let me know when you have him, I have some questions I want to get you to ask him. But Boz had a few ways of thinking. First of all, let's start with Zuck. Thing I loved about Zuck's exec reviews was that it was clear when you walked into the room that you are talking to one of the most powerful people on the planet. But what he did which not a lot of other people in this position do, is he would tell you what the rules of engagement were for every meeting or [inaudible 00:58:08]. He'd be like, "Look, I'm going to give you a spectrum of A, how much I care about this topic. Everything from I don't care, I don't know why you're talking to me, do I care kind of care little? I kind of care so I'm happy you're getting this update, do I really want you to do this? But you know what, if you overrule me, that's fine. All the way to I'm the founder, I'm the CEO, just do this." But he will make it clear where he stood on the spectrum. The second thing he would make clear is why he believed the things he did. For example, the very first time I pitched him on what is the Facebook Audience Network which grew into probably one of the largest ad networks on mobile, he had all these sort of ideas, he was like, "We shouldn't do an ad network because," and he had all these opinions on, "Well, mobile ads all look terrible, they are spammy, X, Y and Z." But he was really good at articulating those to you and also saying, "Well, if you can prove me wrong on these legs of my logic tree, I will let you overrule me, unless I have a strong opinion." So when you walk in a meeting, you're like, "Well, I know the framework, I know what the dance is, do you convince him?" Or maybe there's no shot to convince him and that's fine. He's the CEO and that's fine too. So I really learnt that it's so important to clarify for your team the framework you're operating in with you. And it's also maybe a clarifying function for yourself as so how do you actually feel about this and why do you feel like that? That's number one. The second part of it is inside a meeting, there's a few things I think you need to do which is clarify what kind of meeting is it. Is it just an update? "Great. We're just going to get an update? I'm going to listen to you, I'm going to applaud you for a job well done, I'm going to send you on your way." Or is it a decision in which case, what are the pros, cons, et cetera? There are some real big failure modes where one kind of meeting slides into another kind of meeting where somebody is like, "Why are we doing that? Is that a thing?" And then somebody will start fighting on and people are like, "Oh gosh, we shouldn't have brought this topic at all." And everyone listening to this has probably been to one of those meetings. There's also something else which teams sometimes like to do, which is they'd be like, "Hey, we have a hard problem. We don't know what to do." ning to this has probably been to one of those meetings. There's also something else which teams sometimes like to do, which is they'd be like, "Hey, we have a hard problem. We don't know what to do." They're trying to kind of push the responsibility of the [inaudible 01:00:02] from them to you which may be fine, but you should be like, "Hey, are you saying that you can't make up your mind and you want me to make up your mind for you? " You want to be very explicit because often I've seen this when there are hard decisions, teams are like, "The exec feels strongly, we don't want to know what to do," and they kind of want to push the accountability to you and here, we watch out for that a lot. There are a lot of hygiene things we think are very important. For example, send out a pre-read before, make sure it's the right people in the room, not everybody, but not missing out key people. Make sure you're paying complete attention, make sure everyone gets a chance to talk which by the way, I was really bad at. And those things go a really long way. Oh, and one final thing, have a regular rhythm to those, so you're doing this every month, et cetera. What I hate, I stole this line from Gokul Rajaram, is the phrase, "Hero meetings." All of us have been this which is there's a big thing, there's a big review, it's probably a go/no-go, maybe it's career limiting, maybe it'll get our team funded and everyone is stressed out. You spent two weeks working on a deck and the first 20 minutes of conversation goes totally sideways because the exec thought of something. Every one of us has been one of those. Those are bad. The way to fix that is to have a regular check in, so you have meeting every single week and becomes like you're not spending weeks, it a muscle, it's a rhythm of what you do and those are reason. Sorry, I went on a bit of a speech there. What I was thinking about is you two have worked at basically all the big consumer companies and coming back to imposter syndrome briefly, what's the worst product you've built or the biggest failure you've each built and what did you learn?…

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