Di-Ann Eisnor: What is Authenticity?

So authentic of undisputed origin. Genuine, true, you get it. But when people say it about me, I think they mean something more like this naive outsider who is intensely optimistic. I could throw in a lot of other adjectives, but you get the idea. It's when I hear authentic, I hear, okay, maybe that's a little off. And just to kind of go into that a little bit naive. My ninth birthday, I was in love with Michael Jackson. Thriller was out, days were good. I invited him to perform at my 9th birthday and he didn't reply, but I was sure he was coming. So I told everybody at the birthday that Michael Jackson would be performing. And of course I had a lot of kids over, I was very popular that week. And then he didn't show up. And okay, that's a lesson you learn. But that kind of naive feeling that you can make anything happen has served me personally very well. And I think it's an important thing for entrepreneurs to be able to harness because you need it a lot. Because Michael Jackson usually won't show up, but sometimes he does not these days, outsider, everyone in the Valley, when you first get here, you feel like they've all been to Stanford or they've all been to MIT and everyone has advanced degrees. And I come from a family of truckers in a kind of post industrial town in Massachusetts without an advanced degree. You heard that I studied painting and business. So it was kind of this new notion to come in here. So when someone I give a talk at a place like this and they say, oh, that's so authentic, I hear outsider and intensely optimistic. Just listen for a second. It's kind of a lifelong theme song. So that's what it's like to be inside of my head on this journey. Now let's look at what that means within the context of ways. Because if I walked around with rainbows and unicorns singing that song all day long, the that would be called a non profit, that would not be a company. And within the context of my team, I've got Israeli special forces guys, I've got cynics, I've got academics, I've got the best engineers on the planet. So the fact that I can stand up here and even in the company and be talking about this rainbow and unicorny stuff, which I actually don't talk about, but I have that vibe. It allows me to not have all of the cons that come with the pros and cons of who you are. Right. How do you harness who you are to become to make it as much of A pro as possible. And I think that's what we're really trying actively to build within the culture of our company. When we sold the company, we were just over 100. Now we're about 350, which is still relatively small for what we do. Some of the things that have worked for us. So what is it about building this team that we've tried to keep in mind? So obviously you want a diverse team, and from some of the news that's been coming out in Silicon Valley the last couple of weeks, it can seem disheartening. But it's not always like that. We have an incredibly diverse team, and we're committed to getting these new perspectives that are coming in because we think that healthy debate is really important. But it's not just diversity for diversity's sake, right? You need a common set of values, a common purpose that you're pushing toward. And without that, it's just a lot of noise. It's very difficult as an entrepreneur to stay focused and to prioritize. These are two of our biggest challenges. And it's all the things that you say no to, not the things you say yes to, that matter most. So that common purpose is what you check yourself against in terms of the debate. I'm often asked, well, how do you work with Israelis? And, you know, I was the first non Israeli there and all of that. And, you know, it's amazing. We would go into a room, we would have a very difficult decision to make, and we would fight and we would scream and the doors closed and we would come out at the end of the day with a decision. Everybody pointed in the same direction and never look back because we were encouraged to be able to have a space to get anything out that was relevant. And that's so important in the early days when you have no idea what the heck you're building or who it's for. Oh, one thing. And, yeah, let's just go here, because you already saw it. Two other things that were important, squashing territorialism. It's difficult when someone is running, say, I don't know, community programs, and then all of a sudden you have 500,000 members of your map editing community. It's not that the same person can necessarily do that all by themselves, but they might feel territorial about it. And how do you squash that? It's a very normal, human thing. How can you not let it fester, address it, move on? And then, of course, the no asshole policy is something that we take very, very seriously. The other thing I would like to mention is not just respecting the differences within the team, but kind of reveling in it. Everybody will come to me with their problem because they know that. They won't judge it. Everyone will go to X person for something else. It's really reveling in those differences and what make people tick and what brings out the best in them. When are they at their best within the company? And for every single person at the company to know that's not always a single person. There's never one person who can solve all of those problems. Cat.