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Tom Conrad

Published podcast speaker

Claims
16
Episodes
2
Shows
1
Named items
1

Books, apps, and tools

The evidenced stack.

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book / likes

High Growth Handbook

“I really love Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook. It's organized into chapters about foundational company building, building a leadership team, building a board, and in addition to the thoughtful synthesis on that topic from Elad, he has an interview of someone that he does relevant to that section on each of the chapters. Really, really great read and super actionable if you're a leader in a young company. In a completely different end of the spectrum, I love big, complicated science fiction and there's a lot of garbage science fiction out there to be sure, but when you find something special, it's the best. So probably through the years in that category, there's a book called Hyperion by Dan Simmons. That's just a total classic. Everybody should read it.”

Lenny's Podcast · 26 Nov 2023

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Claim ledger

What Tom said.

9 transcript-backed records

01 / evaluation

Now you can argue, I think the content on YouTube is really, really exceptional in this category, and maybe we were never going to do better than that. But I think what was really fundamentally broken with Quibi was that the actual foundational equation of can you make enough premium content that's totally bespoke and made for the service and takes advantage of the nature of the phone, is that enough content to get people to sign up and retain, and can you do that for a couple billion dollars?

“Now you can argue, I think the content on YouTube is really, really exceptional in this category, and maybe we were never going to do better than that. But I think what was really fundamentally broken with Quibi was that the actual foundational equation of can you make enough premium content that's totally bespoke and made for the service and takes advantage of the nature of the phone, is that enough content to get people to sign up and retain, and can you do that for a couple billion dollars?”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Episode
Failure
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

02 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Episode
Failure
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

03 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Episode
Failure
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

04 / evaluation

It was a company that required additional investment to get to profitability. It was better to wind down early, take the money that we had in the bank and get it back to investors than to just spend every last penny on what was a fruitless attempt to salvage it.

“It was a company that required additional investment to get to profitability. It was better to wind down early, take the money that we had in the bank and get it back to investors than to just spend every last penny on what was a fruitless attempt to salvage it.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

05 / evaluation

I'm going to CC Tom and maybe we can convince him that this was a bad decision." And we did all of that because we thought one of our superpowers as a young company was that we could just engage with our audience as real human beings, not as a shiny brand that was trying to be something that we could just never be.

“I'm going to CC Tom and maybe we can convince him that this was a bad decision." And we did all of that because we thought one of our superpowers as a young company was that we could just engage with our audience as real human beings, not as a shiny brand that was trying to be something that we could just never be.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

06 / evaluation

Environmentally, we weren't set up for that at Pandora, but I think in some ways, I wasn't temperamentally inclined to those kinds of big swings. And I think I take bigger risks and encourage bigger swings now because of things I learned from Evan and Snap.

“Environmentally, we weren't set up for that at Pandora, but I think in some ways, I wasn't temperamentally inclined to those kinds of big swings. And I think I take bigger risks and encourage bigger swings now because of things I learned from Evan and Snap.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

07 / evaluation

I'm not sure what the point of this story is other than maybe it's something about, I think we all do this as designers and product people. We take these shortcuts that we think that we'll go back later and clean up.

“I'm not sure what the point of this story is other than maybe it's something about, I think we all do this as designers and product people. We take these shortcuts that we think that we'll go back later and clean up.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

08 / evaluation

Having said all of that, I also think that it can be a mistake to be that kind of leader in a smaller org because part of the opportunity in a small org is to assemble a group of people that are incredibly talented that believe in your mission and where who you can easily influence with a much lighter touch and set them up to build a culture in an organization that can execute.

“Having said all of that, I also think that it can be a mistake to be that kind of leader in a smaller org because part of the opportunity in a small org is to assemble a group of people that are incredibly talented that believe in your mission and where who you can easily influence with a much lighter touch and set them up to build a culture in an organization that can execute.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

09 / evaluation

Musicmatch was 400 million, they were Pandora at 8 billion, but even above that they were Netflix at 100 billion. And so investors just had this new sort of optimism about what you could do in subscription and in streaming, and Spotify really played that to their advantage in a way that we couldn't because we had gone public and the public market investors were still trying to figure us out.

“Musicmatch was 400 million, they were Pandora at 8 billion, but even above that they were Netflix at 100 billion. And so investors just had this new sort of optimism about what you could do in subscription and in streaming, and Spotify really played that to their advantage in a way that we couldn't because we had gone public and the public market investors were still trying to figure us out.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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