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Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero)

26 Nov 2023 19 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Tom ConradLenny Rachitsky

Claim mix

evaluation 6belief 5recommendation 3prediction 2commitment 1uncertainty 1preference 1

Evidence policy

Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

19 published records

01 / recommendation

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.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

04 / commitment

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

05 / belief

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

10 / preference

I use an entire category of smart, creative, hardworking, talented, borderline visionary people who can raise that $2 million seed and go off and build some stupid company that's never going to go anywhere, that would be so much better off finding a team that needs their skillset and working on a problem that has, as I described, the mathematical formula that's going to win, that has the market opportunity that's the right size, that has the 10X thinking that can really...

“I use an entire category of smart, creative, hardworking, talented, borderline visionary people who can raise that $2 million seed and go off and build some stupid company that's never going to go anywhere, that would be so much better off finding a team that needs their skillset and working on a problem that has, as I described, the mathematical formula that's going to win, that has the market opportunity that's the right size, that has the 10X thinking that can really...”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

11 / 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

12 / 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

13 / recommendation

I really love that takeaway of as a CEO coming back to share, here's what you should be thinking about that the CEO is probably thinking about, as a product leader, you may not be, of trying to actually spend the time to think about the business model and understand it deeply because your founders are thinking about it all the time.

“I really love that takeaway of as a CEO coming back to share, here's what you should be thinking about that the CEO is probably thinking about, as a product leader, you may not be, of trying to actually spend the time to think about the business model and understand it deeply because your founders are thinking about it all the time.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

14 / prediction

We made a bet that we would augment those sort of- And we made a bet that we would augment those sort of episodic and serialized or Hollywood style shows with a bunch of daily content that we produce at the level of network television, nightly news, and so forth, that would be an alternative to some of the sort of daily content that you might otherwise get on YouTube.

“We made a bet that we would augment those sort of- And we made a bet that we would augment those sort of episodic and serialized or Hollywood style shows with a bunch of daily content that we produce at the level of network television, nightly news, and so forth, that would be an alternative to some of the sort of daily content that you might otherwise get on YouTube.”
Speaker
Tom Conrad
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

15 / 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

16 / 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

17 / 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

19 / 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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