The Power of Scrappiness [Entire Talk]

Who you are defines how you build.

Welcome YouTube and Stanford Community to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. I am Ravi Balani, a lecturer in the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford and the Director of Alchemist, an accelerator for enterprise startups. We are kicking off the Winter Quarter with a bang. We are very, very honored to present to you today to have as our first ETL speaker Deb Liu, the CEO of Ancestry. How many people have heard of Ancestry.com? terrific. So I don't need to tell you this, but Ancestry.com is a $1.4 billion publicly traded company that's also the largest for profit genealogy company in the world. Deb is also not only is Deb the CEO of Ancestry, Deb is also the author of of Take back your power 10 new rules for Women at Work. Deb also serves on the Board of Directors of Intuit and has been named one of Business Insider's most Powerful Female Engineers and one of Payment Source's Most Influential Women in Payments. Deb grew up in South Carolina in an Asian American family and then got a Bachelor's in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Duke and then an MBA from Here on the Farm at Stanford. Deb started her professional career as a consultant at BCG. She then spent seven years at PayPal and eBay in various product management and strategy roles, and then spent 12 years as Facebook, including being the Vice President of Facebook's Platform and Marketplaces and Facebook's Application commerce division. Then two years ago, Deb became the CEO part of Ancestry.com Deb is also actively involved in promoting diversity in tech. She founded Women in Product, a Nonprofit with over 30,000 members with the goal of connecting and supporting women in the product management field. She's a member of the committee of 100, which is a group of prominent Chinese Americans, and was named an A100 by Goldhouse, which is an honor recognizing impactful Asian Americans. She lives in California with her husband and three children and enjoys chronicling their family adventures in her Mommy School comic strip. So please welcome Deb Liu to etl. Just a note on the agenda. We have far too little time for the fountain of wisdom that Deb can bestow, and so what we've decided to do is we're going to kick it off with Deb doing a talk on the virtue of scrappiness, and then we're going to do a fireside chat between me and Deb for a little bit and then open it up for for the students to ask questions. So with that, let me turn it over To Deb.

Thank you so much, Robbie. It is amazing to be here, and it's such an honor to be back on the farm after a long time. And I have to say, I came here 20 years ago and the business school was not nearly as nice as it is today. So everything has been upgraded. It is amazing, and it is an honor to be here. As we talk about scrappiness, so you're probably wondering, you heard my resume, lots of big companies on there. What does she have to teach entrepreneurs about scrappiness? Well, I'm going to start with this, which is it is never too small or too big, and it's never the wrong time to be scrappy. And so there's a few lessons I have of my career along the way, and I want to share those with you. But it's also about how you stay scrappy in your career and how you think about the products that you build. So I'm going to start with a story. And this comes from Matthew 13 from the Bible. And there's a parable called the parable of the sower. But imagine, let's call him the scrappy sower. And this is a person who decides that he wants to. And he takes his seeds and he spreads it into four different places. One is a path. So some of these seeds fall in the path and birds come in and eat them and it never germinates. The second group of seeds fall into rocky ground and they try to germinate, but there isn't enough nutrition in the soil. And so again, doesn't take root and it blows away. Third is it falls amongst thorns and other plants and they're choked out by competition before actually able to hit product market fit. And finally, the sower drops seeds into good soil. So this is the part of the talk normally I would say, and so therefore, you should build your plant, you should build your company on good soil, right? But actually, as entrepreneurs, you don't actually know what good soil is. You are plowing new ground, you are planting new seeds, you are building new products and new spaces. And I like to say that this sower actually was testing and being scrappy by ab testing and finding the right soil to develop their product. And it's the same thing for you. Rather than saying, well, I'm just going to build it where there's high tam and my product's going to have product market fit. Actually, really thinking through, are you testing? Are you learning? Are you building this into your culture, a culture of experimentation, of actually allowing things to fail and of Growing. And if you're not, that's something you need to keep in mind. And so I'm going to talk about something I call the four Horsemen of Anti scrappiness. Before I tell you what it is, I want to tell you about what it is not and the things you need to watch out for. Okay, so the first one is process. And I know, I hear you, you guys are entrepreneurs. Process is a four letter word. But there is such a thing as good process. After all. You need to have expense reports, you need to have employee handbooks, you need to have contracts. There are things where process is important to the functioning of, of what you do. And so process doesn't have to be a bad thing, but you need to think about what is actually facilitating progress and impeding progress. And I'll give you an example. So I joined out of Stanford. I actually didn't know what I wanted to do. The economy was terrible. It was after the dot com bust. And I went to this table for this startup called PayPal. And now it's obviously not a startup, but it was a few hundred people at the time. And I joined the company and the biggest thing was we were trying to figure out how do we build? And I remember writing my first spec, it was probably five pages in total, this feature we wanted to build. And then we were bought by ebay. And I worked on the eBay PayPal integration for some time. And then they said we really need to mature our processes and so we need a spec template that everyone can use. So I was One of the PMs that participated in building the spec template. The template itself, before you had filled in a single word, was 35 pages long. And there were two dozen teams that you. And by the way, the company was still not that big at the time. And so you had to fill in. You had to actually check with all these teams, have them read your template and improve it. And so the joke was there was actually two dozen teams you had to check with. There were a bunch of people you had to get approvals from. You know, we're going legal process, you know, customer service. And you just went around the company and we called it the gauntlet. And so PMs would run this gauntlet. They would try to build a feature. And then if team number 13 had a problem and you had to do a change request, you had to get re approvals from the first 12 teams. So think about what it was like to build a product going from a handful of pages in a spec that you handed to the engineers and you could build fast to an organization that actually everything slowed down. It became harder and harder to get things done. It became more and more frustrating. And that's when process is playing against innovation, because now you can no longer test anything. You had to get approvals through all these people. So you had to have the right product. You had to know exactly when you build, and you had to know it at least a year ahead of time because it took that long to run the gauntlet, get it coded and get it out to the market. And that's what bad process is. I would say that beyond that, though, is the veto. There are organizations where there are. Everybody gets a chance to say no, and nobody gets a chance to say yes. And this can happen with small companies and big companies. I've seen really consensus driven cultures where actually everybody has to say yes. And if somebody's on vacation, heaven forbid you forgot somebody at a meeting, you have to go back. And there was this project that I was working on. I was kind of peripherally on it. I didn't understand why there were so many people involved when it seemed pretty straightforward. And. And one of the executives said, well, we didn't actually disagree and commit. We all agreed never to commit. So think about that. Everybody in the organization working on this was pocket vetoing this project to slow it down because nobody agreed and no one could say yes. And that's something which is very dangerous. Having a clear process, which I said in the first actually to a yes. What does it mean to get approval? Who do you have to get the yes from? A lot of organizations don't have a clear way of thinking about that. And so it's really important that you think about who gets to say no, who gets to say yes, and who has to get out of the way. The third is institutional memory. Just like we have memories of the last battle we fought, the times we failed, institutions also have memories. And that's a very powerful thing, but also a very dangerous thing, because when I first got to Facebook at my interview in 2009, I said we should build a marketplace. And I told this to Sheryl Sandberg. And she wrote in my book, actually, I didn't know she thought this. She's like, she came to this interview and pitched me a product, and I wasn't hiring her for that. And I didn't know if I should hire her. Anyways, it's in the opening of my book she wrote for the Ford. And actually we had a good conversation about it. But the point is, I believe That a marketplace could survive and thrive in environments of a social network, and no one else did. And it was interesting because they said, well, we had done Beacon, which was passively sharing what you buy on Facebook. That did not work out. They had done a deal with a small company called Oodle to do a marketplace, and it hadn't worked. So they were like, nobody wants to buy anything on Facebook. Actually, I was told that many, many years. So for five years I just was told this and that institutional memory reminded that there was no commerce could be done here. And yet that was the wrong answer. The answer was maybe it was the wrong product or the wrong time or the wrong place or the wrong team. But I think sometimes institutional memories actually give you the wrong answer. And finally, it's about companies and teams that don't know how to fail. Because we are here in Silicon Valley. And what makes Silicon Valley incredible and amazing and a great place to be is that we have no fear of failure here. Think about all the VC funds, right? What percentage of the VC's investments had to take off for them to be successful? But think about also how many failures there are. What's great about Silicon Valley, what's great about what we do in entrepreneurship is there is not a penalty for failure. You can raise again, you can try again, you can go to companies. That's the opportunity. And yet we take those lessons that we do as an industry and then we go, well, the team failed at this. Maybe they're just the wrong people or we're not hitting the numbers. Maybe this is the wrong. This is not what we should be doing. But if we don't teach ourselves to fail, well, we actually are teaching the lesson of risk aversion, which is slowing things down. How do we get everything right? How do we get, you know, we have to get everything perfect. And allowing perfect to the enemy of the good is actually anti scrappiness at work. So when I talk about scrappiness, I'm not talking about something that people come in with. It's not like, you know, this person has a scrappy gene. You know, we do genetics at Ancestry. There isn't a gene for scrappiness. However, scrappiness is a culture. It's the process you set.

It's the.

The things that you reward is what you teach every single day. And so one of the things that is important is a lot of times organizations or teams, they fall in love with the solution. We have to do X. But why? What is the why? The answer is not, hey, we need to make Money. The answer isn't we need to ship this product. The answer is, what is the customer problem? The need that you're solving. Falling in love with the problem means that even if you don't have the solution at the start, you're believing, you're persisting, you're trying new things. And so with Marketplace, I ended up the rest of that story is five years in, I finally got the green light to start working on it. And we believe that there was a place I could see people buying and selling things because I was a mom, was one of the few moms at the company. In fact, I was the only mom PM for many years at the company. And I was buying and selling all sorts of stuff on the site and everyone else didn't have any idea what I was talking about. And we worked on the product for two years and it was failing. It was failing badly. We could not get product market fit. And I remember the day we went live at the Marketplace tab. The headline in the New York Times was something like, guns, Drugs and Baby Hedgehogs. The story of a marketplace gone Wrong. And that was the auspicious day we launched. And two years later, we still hadn't really hit the level of product market fit we wanted. And it was a small team and we couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong. But we persisted. We knew that this was a problem we could solve, but we just kept testing and testing and testing. And that's one of the things is, you know, how much time do you give something and how fast you iterate and how fast you learn is such a part of the actual product. And four years in, I actually wrote an article and the quote I put in there was, it was the four year overnight success because suddenly it became successful one day, kind of year three. And everyone's like, well, that was really obvious. Of course everyone wants to do this. And today over a billion people use Facebook Marketplace. But it wasn't obvious to everyone all along. And part of that was because we had to test to get it right. And a lot of companies you think are overnight successes are actually. You read about their origin stories, the slog that they went through. It was a lot of people believing and working and testing to get it right. The next thing is building an organization that wants to learn. When I joined Ancestry, it's an incredible company I'd been around. Actually, we just celebrated our 40th anniversary. And learning to learn was something that I wanted to build. Product led growth was something I wanted to build. When I first got there. So I built a great team. And that was great, except that I realized that we didn't have a product based AB testing and holdout system. And so we couldn't tell when we were testing things how we were actually going to be able to deliver these products. Is it accretive to customers? Are people using it more or less? And so we had to get all the pieces in place and then we needed, we put a growth team in place. But rather than saying, okay, you need to make a certain amount of money or you need to win certain number of things, we said, how fast can you get tests out the door? The first metric was not about winning, it was about learning to learn. And then it was about learning to win. Because a team that actually delivers 20 products and has a 3% win rate, 20 tests and a 3% win rate is going to exceed a team that's 100% win rate at five tests every single time. And you can move up the 30% to 50% over time. You can get better and you're also learning from all the failures at the same time. The other thing is you read these great pitch decks before people build products, of course. And I've read a lot of the early decks for some of the products that I've worked on again, and you realize that no product strategy actually just like battle plans, beats the enemy, wins a meet with the enemy. Because once you get out there, your customers tell you something completely different that you started with. And so we call it, we say shipping is data and data wins arguments. And so shipping faster, pushing yourself, that's super important. We actually worked on a product called Mobile App Install Ads. And we was a small team. We were asked to work on mobile monetization for Facebook. We were assigned to this product and we didn't know ads, we didn't know monetization. And the team that put together, we actually started building with three engineers, myself and a borrowed data scientist. And in three months we figured out the ideas we wanted to test and we went to market in three months after that. And it just didn't work. It was failing. But we knew once we shipped that we were within one order of magnitude of where we wanted to go. Our goal was a $2 cost per install and we started at $20. So it is absolutely possible. If we started at 200, we thought it was DOA. So we needed to get out there and actually test. And we tested faster and learned faster. And that's really important because here's the thing, success is actually failing fast. Or succeeding fast. The long slog of opportunity cost is actually what's going to cost you the most in the long term. And so what we did was we built and we pruned. We built and we pruned and we built and we grew and that was it. And that team, over time, actually reached a billion dollar business within. In record time. And it was the first direct response ad product at Facebook. And finally, we had on that same team, our cat was our. The cat was our mascot. And we had this hashtag called NoSacredCats, which is constantly questioning your assumptions. What happened with that product over time was we ended up, the original team actually led a lot of other products over time. And so that was within our portfolio. And every new team that came in, new people that came in, they would question the assumptions, they would retest things that we failed at, they would continuously iterate. And one thing I did when I got to Ancestry was to do the same thing. I asked the team to put together a fresh look list, which is, what did we fail at? What decisions did we make that were institutional memories? What are the things that were verboten and what are the things that we wanted to change? And so with that, we actually keep a list and we say, no, yes or not now. And if it's no, we put it on ice. If we say yes, we put it back on the roadmap. And then the not now, we actually have a revisit date. Because here's the thing. So many things, it's because once bitten, twice burned, you just don't go back and revisit. But sometimes it's not the right time or the right team or the right environment. Or maybe it's just something else has changed and you need to figure that out. Constantly forcing yourself to take another look and another look is really critical. As you plant your seeds in your good soil, A reminder of this is scrappiness is about testing and learning. It's not just about moving fast and breaking things. It's really about a culture where you forgive failure, you learn from mistakes. You're actually building a system, a learning machine. And that learning machine gets you closer and closer to what you want to achieve every single day. That you're building a culture where it's okay to fail and it's okay to succeed. And we celebrate everything that we gather as an organization. And one of the things that I hope that you'll take with you from this talk is that not everything has to be an overnight. Not everything has to be a win at the start, but it's the ability to iterate and to learn and to grow that is the difference between success and failure in the long term. Thank you.

That was fantastic. So thank you, Dan. I want to start off just by actually, really double clicking on this idea of iterating to learn, because that canyon of trying to find product market fit is such an existential gauntlet for most founders that it's so hard to know if you're actually fumbling towards victory or fumbling towards failure and if you should keep going. Especially when you're in the middle of, you know, if you're 18 months in, and you said it took you two to three years to get to product market fit, and you have this decision about whether or not to quit. And so I'm curious about what are the leading indicators to know that you will get to success when success is not visible, based upon something maybe procedural. So what I want to know is what are the actual KPIs that you should measure? And I know you hinted at some. If it is the pace of releases of product releases, what was the pace of release that you guys did at Facebook? Or what are the KPIs that you should be measuring when you're in that phase?

Well, start with a story. I advise this founder, and she started this company, and she said, I'm really, really trying to land one or two of these deals. And I said, show me how many people you're contacting. Show me your funnel. Show me. And she said, well, I'm talking to these three people. And I said, the list should be 20, because you need to have all these threads. And part of her product actually requires going into partnering with these larger organizations. And I'm like, you should be having 20 active conversations because your yield is probably less than 10%. And at 3, your probability of success in six months or a year, you're burning faster. And suddenly she's like, oh, I had no idea. And say, this is not. She had an amazing product. But at the same, this is not her. This was her first kind of founding of a company like this. And suddenly once she started pulling the cadence into 20, and she's like, I'm having all these conversations. You know, suddenly there's like five hot leads, right? And it went from three kind of lukewarm leads. And so a lot of it is really for your industry, for what it is. What is your KPI? For her, I just gave her an arbitrary number. And for that, you know, when I was talking about the growth team, the number that we were really focused on is like, how fast can you actually show that you can ship? Because part of the issue was we had shipped really slow before and we needed to prove that a team could ship first of all. And that while we were building the A B testing system, we wanted to show that we could ship and we couldn't measure everything and that once you get that machine rolling, then you can actually improve it over time. I think it really depends on what you I said for app install ads we were testing, we actually tested like five or six products. Where we landed on that one and we cut a bunch of them. You know, first is, do you believe that you have the right TAM in the right market? Right. Like, if that is really critical and if you do believe, then the question then becomes, you know, that you're a farmer now. You've got to find the right soil. You already know what seed it is, but you have to pick, like either you pick the soil, you pick the seed. The challenge is some people are like, okay, I know what seed and what soil and therefore I just keep planting and it's failing. What should I do? I'm like, well, you could buy fertilizer, it could be really expensive or you could actually find better soil for you. And so really thinking about for your industry. One thing we did in platform when I was at Facebook was we had this rule we would just ship things. And I just, when I started leading platform like Nunu do, we're going to alpha customers and we're just going to offer this product to some partners. And then in beta, if we tell them we shut it off and they beg us to keep it, then we know we're going into beta.

And was there a metric that you were looking for there?

Basically, yeah. Yeah. So the metric we had was we actually would go back to the alpha customers and say, we're going to cut this off. And if no one protested, they didn't want it. We kind of just, they did it as a favor to us. But if they were like, how can we get to be on the launch list? Then you knew that they had something that they wanted. And we knew that when we started building things, we would shut things off. And then if no one complained, then nobody cared. But if it was actually accretive to their business and they were starting to depend on it, suddenly it was something that they were begging for. And it turned out that the thing they ended up begging for was an ads product, not an organic product. Because they could now predict they could raise money on this. It was Just a very different way of looking at the world. And so really kind of figuring out what that key metric is for you. And the metric isn't profit. The metric is what early indicators for marketplace. Actually, the first thing we looked for was not transactions, which is our ultimate metric. Previously it was actually weekly active users. Could we get people even interested enough to actually come back? And what is our weekly active retention? It had nothing to do with transactions. Can we get even people to come to this place? And then we got to our people like actually clicking on that. Then we looked at our people messaging each other, then we looked at measuring transactions. But it was a long journey to get to the actual ultimate transaction.

Okay. And so almost as a precursor to predicting willingness to engage or pay, you were looking at a certain level of usage and then you were taking it away once you had that certain level of usage to look for conviction that they were going to actually champion. But I love this idea of these meta things that you're looking at, like the pace of release versus the actual thing that you're releasing and just getting that as a predictor of ultimate success.

Well, I think especially in a subscription business, some of those downstream metrics take months to mature. Right? And so you don't know if you're going in the right direction. So we look for upstream. What are the precursor metrics? And the first was can we release? Second was are we what is our win rate for those releases? But also like what are the interim metrics along the way, like hints accepted or users like bill through rate? So we actually would look. But ultimately a subscription product, people subscribe on monthly or six months. And so it might actually take you six months to mature any cohort. And so you have to be really careful understanding that.

And was there a philosophical view? You said you did five or six at once. Do you have a bias about whether or not you should do multiple experiments in parallel or just do one each at a time serially and get to a kill or victory and then move on to the next one?

Always do, you know, depending on the size of your team. One of the things even in a small team, when we were testing the app install ads, we were testing five or six things at once because we wanted to see what is again, the sower sowed all of it at once. And then you see where do you want to double down? It is really hard. Some teams aren't great at doing that. But it is important because you might actually find good soil in a place that you didn't expect and you might find failure in the place that you would have spent 100% of your resources. The problem with serializing it is you could end up in a place where if it doesn't work, you've wasted a bunch of time. And the most precious resource as an entrepreneur and as a startup is time, because it's opportunity cost. Every day you're burning, it's not just burning dollars, but you're burning your engineering resources, you're burning your customers time, you're burning your marketing time. All of that is actually your most precious resource.

So you're doing five or six parallel experiments and they're in very disparate areas, I assume. Not, not five or six. Around a locus of. It's sort of disparate.

And then you get actually do themes like where they group into like we do themes. We have like a group that does like various areas. And so each of those themes actually grab like a group of things. And now we, I think we're doing something 30 or 40 experiments and they do it around themes now.

Okay, terrific. I would be remiss if I also didn't ask you about your book, because I think your book is going to resonate either with people in the audience or it's going to be lessons that they're going to really value maybe five years to ten years from now. So I want to talk about taking back your power 10 new rules for women at work. And what I find so fascinating about it is actually how you've been able to proactively change your own behavior. And so can I invite you to share about that? About what norms did you cult develop in your upbringing? And can you share that? Can you share the moment when you realize that those norms actually might be doing more harm than good and how you navigated through that transition?

Yeah, you know, I grew up in a small town in the south and this town was kind of about half an hour outside of Charleston. And looking as I do, we are one of the very few Asian families in South Carol at the time was less than 1% Asian. And so everywhere we went, people were like, go back to where you came from. And I'm like, new York. Because I was born in New York, by the way. And I moved down when I was 6. And people were like, no, where are you really from? And I'm like, no, really? I was born in New York. And so it was just really baffling for me because I didn't feel different inside. But everyone looked at me and I was the odd person out. And it was this weird forever Foreigner thing where people just thought I was weird no matter where I went, because people just didn't have an opportunity to meet people, people like me. And so I just got insular. Like, I had a great interior life. I was just like in my head all the time. And I was like, if people just don't notice me, if I don't say anything, maybe they won't say these things to me. Maybe they won't make fun of me. And it worked really well because I just focused on getting into college, getting a scholarship. I went to Duke on scholarship. And engineering school was great because you do the problem sets, you do the. You can actually have mastery of engineering and never say anything. And it was amazing. For those of you, I think engineering school might have changed a lot over the last 20 years, but I was good at that. I got great grades. And then I graduated. I went to consulting and I was like, whoa. And they said, well, you need. You're bad at the client service part of client service. And I said, what do you mean? And they're like, you don't talk to people. And I said, but I have great analyses. I am a great strategist. I write great slides. And they're like, this is not what the job is about. And suddenly the things that work stop working for you. And I really struggle with that. I ended up getting at Stanford. And then when you go to business school, by the way, 30 to 50% of your grade is class participation. And I looked at the syllabus and I thought, crap, what am I going to do? I had to teach myself to actually change. And I took the class touchy feely, which you guys may have heard of. And everyone told me that was really hard to get to know that I was very like, I wasn't warm, I couldn't connect with people. And I really struggled with it because the thing that made me successful for so long was the thing that was holding me back. And it took me a long time to really unpack all of. And I could never have given a talk like this back then. But part of that was the learning process of opening up to be able to be vulnerable to actually. And the book was the ultimate vulnerability, which is sharing all of those experiences and saying, you know what? Just like, I had to iterate on our products, I iterated a lot on myself as well. And I think that that is the journey. And what I talk about is that often we give away our power because we're afraid to speak up. We're not afraid to show up in the room. We were like, maybe I'll just. How many times do you go to a meeting or to a class and you say, I'll just sit in the back. But then you had no impact. And when you're out in the workplace, what people judge you on is something that's completely different than having great slides or having great, having code. What they actually grade you on is literally the 5% where you're talking in front of other people, fear or not. I'm saying it's not fair. You can read the book Susan Cain's Quiet. It talks a little bit about the bias towards people willing to speak up. And then you kind of have to decide, what am I going to do about this? And that's what the book is really about, is what I decide to do about it.

I really want people to grok this because I think it's super important. So I'm going to, I'm going to even double click further on this because. So I'm going to play devil's advocate here because the book is titled take back your power. And I think some people have also, you know, myself included, I grew up sort of in an Indian American family which might view this as sort of being a narcissistic thought piece about, you know, the virtues of power. Can you talk about, you know, the method, can you address that mentality to say that this idea of being self interested in grabbing power is narcissistic and why that actually is not true. And if you do sort of believe that and believe that, you sort of come from a background of just working hard and trusting a meritocratic system to take care of you, why that might be a false notion to follow?

Well, you know, growing up in a family, immigrant family, my dad was like, put your head down and get the job done right. And you think that that's what is rewarded, but that's not at all what it's like in the workplace. But let's touch on the word power for a second. I actually, in the very beginning of the book, power is not a dirty word. It's actually the desire or the desire to take power from other people. That's actually what the lust for power is actually bad. But in and of itself, power itself is not a bad thing. In fact, in the dictionary, power is the ability to influence and impact events and people. Isn't that what you want in your daily life? And yet we corrupted this and say, well, it's narcissistic to want power. No, you actually want to leave an Impact on the world. And the last chapter is really about what legacy you're leaving. If you walk into a room and nothing happened, and it was no different when you were there, why are you even there? What impact did you leave on the world? If you join a company you build and start, but you didn't accomplish anything. And so I think we need to turn this idea of power on its head and actually say, we want everybody to have influence and impact on the world, and how can we do that in the best way possible without hurting others? And I think a lot of the taking back your power is about coming into your own power, making a conscious choice of what you choose, what you choose to engage in, being intentional in the choices that you make. And rather than allowing whatever happens to you, happen to you, actually taking that back and saying, I make these choices proactively.

I love that. And any other examples of how people give up their power without even realizing it?

Yeah, I mean, there's so many examples. I see this happen all the time where learning to ask is such a big thing. Because I remember there was somebody who wanted to get promoted on my team, and she kind of said this thing where she said, well, you know, I've been on your team for a long time. I'm like, great. And she's like, I've been at the company for a couple years. And she's like, I've been doing a good job. And she went, 20 minutes like this. And I said, are you asking me for a promotion? And she said, yes. And I said, well, why didn't you just ask me? And she said, because I was afraid you'd say no. But here's the thing. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And if I hadn't been on my radar, and I said to her, actually, don't ask me for a promotion. Because when I say, hey, Ravi, you're going to give me your promotion, I suddenly put you on the other side of me. But I say, hey, Ravi, what is the distance between me and the next level? Here's what my aspirations are. How can we partner so I can get there? Suddenly you're on the same side of the table with me, right? You are my ally, and I'm asking you for advice and help, not for a decision. And so, again, all I did was I subtly changed it so that now my manager is my ally. And in your internships and the jobs that you have in the. In the businesses you build so often, we're putting people on the other side I think somebody said once, it was like, you know, if you want money, ask for advice, and if you want advice, ask for money. It's absolutely true. Like making someone your ally will, you know, asking them for advice and actually building relationship can get you there where they actually are financially and emotionally invested in you. But if you don't ask, by the way, if you ask neither, you get nothing.

I love that framing. What is the distance between me and this next goal? I want to open it up for questions. So this is like classic entrepreneurship. No risk, no reward gang. So don't give up your power. You have power even by being in one of these seats. So if there are any questions, raise your hands. I am an MBA one now. So you have had several roles, different kind of experiences, and I want to know, like, what are the skills that you think were the most important throughout your professional experience? And now the kind of intelligence and knowledge is becoming much more a commodity. What do you think are the skills that are going to give you like the next years of your professional career?

Yeah, I'll answer that question by saying this, which is, I think our schools do a disservice to us, which is you're taught this idea of mastery, right? All of you took like, you know, you took the SAT or the act. There is a perfect score, right? You get, there's a class rank, there's a gpa. A lot of you got in because you have great scores and GREs and things like that. And suddenly you're like, okay, I know how to be. I know what mastery looks like. When you get into the workplace, it's like a playing field like no other, because somebody is always better than you, you at something. And the skills that we're taught, which is this, like, the person with the most knowledge is the person who's the best is not at all how it works. It's actually the person who learns the fastest, who adapts the most. The person who is, you're never going to be smarter than. Because people are at different points in their lives. People are experts in different things. And to really being most adaptable, most introspective, and most able to actually force yourself to learn and grow. The people who take feedback the most, those are the people who actually have careers that are outsized over the experts. When we actually do hiring, there have been many times we had the opportunity to hire an expert, the person who did exactly the thing on their resume that you absolutely needed to fill this specific role. And you're like, that person's great and Their Runway is probably two to three years. And then you hire someone who's up and coming because they came from a different industry or maybe they're trying new things, but they have a learning mindset and they're introspective and they say, I just, I'm eager to learn. Those candidates tend to outperform in the long term because they're adapting and changing and they're growing. They're thinking about things not the way it was always done, but the way it could be. And so that's the one skill I wish we could teach as opposed to this idea of I'm going to be the expert because in the workplace, expertise is valuable, but adaptability is way more valuable.

I agree completely. Terrific. We'll go to the next question here and then there. Yes. First of all, Deb, thank you so much for sharing the learning insights. So I feel like as product and company gets larger, when they reach massive user base, a lot of the existing teams or new hire end up to focus on the incremental change. And also you mentioned you also spent five years to convince maybe Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg to launch the marketplace. I'm wondering, as an ic, given the current environment, how can we encourage the team company to continue drive like a big innovation and drive growth? And I also want to know, how do you prepare the five years? How do you actually prepare to convince them?

Well, first, I didn't sit around for five years. I actually worked on the games team. I worked on payments, I worked on the ad network, I led platform. And so I did a lot of other jobs in the meantime. And a lot of those jobs were optimization jobs. And by the way, that is the important engine. I think we talk a lot about innovation and I've had a lot of innovation jobs, but actually a lot of what makes companies great are the 5% improvements every single quarter or every single half. And so that's something to keep in mind. But the outsized gains that what I really enjoyed is during that time, while I was doing a lot of those things, like I was running an ads billing system, you know, at different points, was also seeding some of the disruptive innovation at the same time. And so for me, that's what was, that's where you get the outsized gains. A lot of organizations, though, will punish somebody who fails. Right? So they, you know, the safest job is doing the 5% job because you're always going to need that. Every company needs to show growth and that's a safe job. I Actually found that my adventure was greatest because I could go from zero to one, sometimes taking years and sometimes not. And I think that, that, you know, I built a lot of new products, and that's what energizes me. And so you kind of have to decide where you want to play. It is absolutely fine to say I'm going to have impact 5% of the time, but it's also really incredible to have a journey, the challenge. And I used to teach a new hire class to product managers, and I said, look, many of you will take these jobs where you're improving the product, and it is critical. A lot of you want to try the 0 to 1. But here's the challenge. 70, 80% of those products will fail. And you kind of have to decide, are you ready to take that risk? But if you win, you win big. And so you have to believe in your idea so much that you're willing to take that risk. And this is why entrepreneurship is amazing, is because you don't need everyone to win. You just need enough people to win. And organizations are a collection of people. But you yourself might actually not get ahead, because if you're in the 70, 80%, that doesn't work. You have to go find another job within the company or outside.

Thank you for the question. We'll do the next question here and raise your hand if you have a question, and we'll arm you with a mic. We can do a mic here or there. Okay. Oh, right there.

Hi. Thanks so much for your talk. One question I have is in your book, you write about the difference between mentors and sponsors and how part of securing someone as your sponsor is being, like, not only showing promise, but actually living that out and taking and achieving. So one question I had was, if you're currently struggling or maybe, like, transitioning from one field to another field, how do you still maintain, like, the confidence of the people who are mentoring you? Yeah. You know, I talk about mentors and sponsors and the difference. For those of you who don't know, mentors give you advice and sponsors open doors, but they put the reputation on the line to actually, you know, give you a stretch assignment to suggest you for an opportunity that you would never have had. Mentors are super important. I don't want to take away from that. But sponsors are the people who actually help you do the step functions in your career. And I talk a little bit about some of those sponsors in my book that have really changed the trajectory of where I am, and I would not be where I am today. Without that group. I think one of the things is, as you evolve though, how do you take the skills and your mentors from one area to another? I think that's your question, right? I think first, just being upfront, I am trying to change from X to yeah, how can you know? Do you have advice? What are three things you think I could do to make this an easier transition? Are there people. One of the things when I say learn to ask, formulating a question, well, will get you the answer 80% of the time by saying that you're now giving them information about you. I'm trying to transition from X to Y. This might not be your expertise. You're giving them the opportunity to give you advice which you can follow and follow up on. Then you're giving them opportunity to maybe introduce you to other mentors who are closer in that field. Opening that door. Look, you're not going to get yes 100% of the time, but if you're not hearing no enough, you probably aren't asking enough.

That's great. We're going to go back there and who has the next question? We'll arm you. Right here is one and then there's one over there.

Hello. Hi. I'm a human biology major and I am a super senior. I'm returning after a time away and I'm very interested in your experience as a mother. I have a two year old at home and I'm just interested in what advice you might have for a young mother entering an entrepreneurial world. What barriers do you encounter and what sort of opportunities have you been able to open up and create for yourself? Yeah, you know, I wrote an article, I have a substack, it's Deb Liu substack. And I wrote about, you know, the challenges of paternity leave and motherhood. And it is hard. During the six years I had my kids, from the time I was pregnant with my son to when I finished, you know, when I finished maternity leave from my daughter, my career not only stagnated. I went part time, I took another job, I pretty much took a demotion. And, you know, it was hard, like, and it was a time when I needed to focus on my family and it was the right thing to do. But not everyone gets out of that kind of dip in their career. And a lot of women end up not having the support or the ability or the sponsors to actually get out of that. And we just need to acknowledge it. I feel like it's kind of this elephant in the room. It's like, well, you know, you just have children and then you just keep going. And if you actually look at all the statistics, and I think there was an article in the Economist where in six odec countries, they mothers after maternity leave, like, fathers make the same amount of money and mothers make a huge dip in the amount of money. A lot of them leave the workforce or else they have to go part time because they just don't have the support. And you think of the entrepreneurship journey that makes doubly hard because people are kind of asking, like, are you focused on this? Are you not? And they're not going to ask you the question outright today. But I've had people actually ask me. There was a VC who asked me, I was thinking about joining a startup at one point during my journey. And they're like, you're not declining having kids anytime soon because this company is pretty young and they need somebody who's really devoted to the job. And the answer actually was, yeah, I was actually thinking about having kids. I didn't end up joining that startup. But think about that, right? I mean, it discouraged me from taking the entrepreneurship journey at that point. And it was okay. And I think it turned out okay. But I think we need to acknowledge the cost of that and then to say, okay, there's compromises and sacrifices, as somebody said, and you have to decide what you're going to prioritize. And it's hard when the kids are young. And I think we need to acknowledge that. I do suggest I tell everybody that the most important career decision you ever make is who you choose to marry or partner with. So. So please do think about that, because I would not have reached this level of success without an incredible partner. And I think that without somebody supporting, it's so much harder on your own. And so either find your village or find a partner who's going to really support you in that.

This is such an important topic. There is such a double standard, because I don't know if a VC would have asked the male founder that same question.

Of course not.

And so if you are a female who's. And I feel like that giving birth is a time when many women get off that track of power, and so the guidance is still pushed through.

Well, I think this in the book Lean in, it talks about you have to push in every season of your life. Don't take your foot off the gas pedal. But I actually say there are times there's seasons in your life when it's okay to say, you know what? I don't want to do This, I want to do that. And that's okay. But you kind of have to decide. The thing I ask is that you do it intentionally. Don't do it because someone pushed you off of the road. Do it because you say, hey, I'm going to take this exit, I'm going to take the rest, and then I'm going to get back on. At this moment, you know, the answer isn't no. The answer might be not now, and I need to wait until my child is in school or I need to wait until X. It depends on kind of. But I think we just need to be realistic. I would love for everybody to be able to do that. I just physically, I had really difficult pregnancies and. And one of my kids was really, really sick for a long time. And it turns out it was nothing. It was really hard to diagnose. And so I just couldn't do it. And I just knew that that wasn't possible for me. And so I just said, you know what, I'm okay kind of taking a step back, but then we need on ramps back into growth. And for me, I got a call when I was on maternity leave with my daughter and my friend had joined Facebook and said, do you want to join this 900 startup? I was like, okay. But people at Facebook work all the time. It was very different than I was working part time at the time at ebay. And so I had to really make a lifestyle change and I had to sit down with my family and my husband and my sister and her husband, and we talked through exactly how we were going to redivide everything. And it was really important for us.

Well, terrific. I know we could keep going, but we're out of time, so I just want to exercise my prerogative and we'll close this session of etl. So everybody, let's thank Debate for her time and for her wisdom. Next week there is a change. So next week we are not going to have the CEO of Montai. She's going to actually be coming. Margot is also a former CEO of Ancestry. She was going to be here virtually next week. She's going to come in person in the fall. Next week is also going to be a virtual session, but we're going to have the co founder of OpenAI, the chief science officer, Ilya is going to be our guest next week. So we're going to be talking about generative AI. So thank you all and we'll see you next week.