Tom Conrad: evaluation

Transcript context

…Next up, we have Tom Conrad, who is chief product officer at Quibi and engineering leader at Pets.com. Two of the most memorable failures in product history, sharing his lessons from those wild experiences. Tom is currently CEO of Zero Longevity Science, which is a killer business and an app in case you haven't come across it. I'd definitely check it out. Here's Tom. You brought up this phrase of notable disasters and I want to talk about that. You've worked at two of the most famous notable disasters of product companies, Pets.com and Quibi. I think it's really rare someone sees the inside of so much hype and then such a fall at a company. And so I just want to spend some time in these two areas, and maybe the way to set it up is just what's a lesson you took away from each of these two experiences that you've taken with you to future work, and maybe advice you share with people? Probably the biggest lesson, it's not really about the specifics of the business. The biggest lesson really is these things make you better. In some instances, actually I think in both instances, they became kind of dominoes that opened doors for me in my own ambition and my own sort of professional life that maybe just wouldn't have opened at all if I hadn't gone to those companies and learned those things and had those experiences. And frankly, even in the case of Pets.com, like even the high profile nature of it, I could have worked at one of a thousand e-commerce websites in 1999. And when I went on to some subsequent job interview or something and talked about my experience, I had never heard of the thing that you worked on, but everybody certainly heard about Pets.com. It's a pretty funny example too of how some struggles are timeless. That was 23, 24 years ago now. And while as a leadership team, we made, I'm sure, all kinds of mistakes. One of the things that happened was that there were three kind of over-funded pet e-commerce sites, and we all raised in excess of $50 million, which is a tremendous amount of money now. It was a tremendous amount of money then, and we all thought it was a zero-sum game and that we as one player started to spend on promotion or to spend irrationally on national broadcast television advertising. We all did, and it became this kind of unwinnable arms race. So there is, I think a fundamental lesson about having an excess of investment can be its own albatross or lead you to make decisions that maybe would be unwise. And then of course, it's just like timing is really important. Chewy is a online pet store. It's worth $9 billion today. They were a private company and bought by PetSmart and then spun back out. But when they were bought by PetSmart, they were acquired for 3 billion, biggest e-commerce acquisition of all time. And while I think it's probably unfair to compare, Chewy who executed exceptionally well over a decade, grew their business brick by brick, and turned it into something really remarkable. To Pets.com, which was in a very, very different moment in time and tried to go to market in a really different way. The critique that is often leveled at Pets.com or at least at the time, was like, this is just a stupid business. They're shipping dog food around. You could never make that work, and that's just wrong. You absolutely can make it work. Probably can't make it work when 80% of the country on the internet is still on dial up. It's really, really early. I saw a stat I think you shared somewhere that you took Pets.com from nothing, to a public company, to completely out of business in 19 months.…

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