Surviving Twitter's Growing Pains: Ex-CEO Dick Costolo

I just felt like Twitter was such, such a drama. Twitter is like the drama queen of hypergrowth companies.

Yeah.

You know, it was like when I took over as CEO that year, the Twitter bird had hanged itself and exploded on two different magazine covers. So I went up to our head of communications, Gabriel Stricker, and I was like, Gabriel, great news. Next year's goal: no dead birds on magazine covers. You know, low bar. Yeah.

Hey everybody, we have Dick Costolo on the show. He's a rare bird in Silicon Valley these days. He was CEO of Twitter, but he was the third CEO. The first one was Jack Dorsey. Who you probably met on the pod a couple weeks ago. Uh, the second was Ev Williams, the other founder. And Dick took over as COO and then ultimately as CEO of Twitter, and he ran it for 5 years. It was a really extremely fast-growing organization. They created a category, uh, didn't have a revenue machine and was famously dysfunctional. I think Dick did a really nice job and he was sort of the adult in the room. And he kind of ran this scale-up CEO masterclass. He talks all about in this podcast, he talks about increasing velocity of decisions and execution, which is tricky as you scale. He talked about how he managed by walking around. This is something I did. I think it's a really good idea. He talked about how do you give very tough feedback to very tough people. There's some gems in there dealing with the press, particularly press that doesn't like you. Um, he talks about focus. And how much focus you really need in the era of AI when you can build stuff so quickly. He talks about how do you manage the forest instead of fighting all the fires. He's got a lot of wisdom in here. He also talks about his regrets, including a whopper— his regret in not acquiring Instagram. That one hurt. If you're scaling, you're 100 employees, you're ripping, growing fast, you've got a lot of growing pains, maybe you feel a little out of control, this episode's for you. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it. I want to wind the clock back to Twitter, of course.

Of course.

I watched a documentary recently and—

Was it the one I was in?

Yes. I thought you were really good in it.

Thank you. Great.

You're great.

You're great in the documentary.

You were really—

of yourself.

You came off as rational and knowing what the hell you were doing. But you're in a long line of interesting CEOs of Jack Dorsey and then Ev Williams and yourself and Jack Dorsey and Parag and Elon Musk.

Elon. And don't forget You know, the— Elon's hired hand, Linda Iaccarino.

Okay. Don't forget, of course, of course. You joined as COO. What was the pitch?

What was the pitch to me?

Yeah. I pitched you.

I mean, yeah, pitch me. The pitch was— the initial pitch was I'm taking paternity leave for a couple of weeks. I, Ev Williams, am taking paternity leave. I need someone to come in and like just hold down the fort for a couple of weeks while I'm, you know, out. Interim. Yeah, interim. Would you, would you do that? But then while we were having that discussion, he's like, well, what if it was permanent? You know, what if you were a COO? And I was going to go start another company. So rewinding the clock a little bit further, I'd sold my previous company FeedBurner to Google. It's where I re-bumped into the Twitter guys because they were all there from Blogger and getting ready to leave and start Odeo, which became Twitter. Anyway, I'm leaving now. I'm leaving Google a couple of years later. Ev texts me that I was like, I'm going to go start. I'm going to go start another company again with one of my FeedBurner, one or more of my FeedBurner co-founders. And then Ev said, what if it was, what if it was permanent? What if you were COO? And Twitter was already— so it's, it's, it's summer 2009. It was already like had hit the, you know, Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey or you know, it was ripping, fighting for them. It was, it was going to get a million followers. I can see why you wanted to do it, but zero, zero revenue model, zero business model. All the articles were, sure, Twitter is interesting, but it'll never— they don't have a business model, they'll never make money. And I just kind of had the, man, you don't get an opportunity to go into these, to get on these rocket ships. And when you get the opportunity, you should do it. So I did it.

So it was famously dysfunctional and chaotic. I assume you knew that going in. Was it much more so than you thought, or was it about what the press was saying?

It's always both, you know?

Yeah.

Um, it was, it was the things that were different were, um, it was very much, um, a collective by which I mean like decisions were kind of made as a group.

Yeah.

It wasn't, okay, well you're responsible for engineering. I don't know. Make it, figure it out and, you know, figure out what the right answer is. Or should we, you know, have— should we make retweet a native thing or should it be, you know, just you write— you had to write RT at the time and like rewrite the tweet.

I remember that.

And, and there was a discussion about, well, should we just have retweet be a thing you can do in Twitter? And it would be kind of sit around the table and talk about it and decide. The group would decide.

Okay.

You know, so, so things moved methodically is a diplomatic way of putting it.

I see.

And decisions were reached over a period of time. It was chaotic. And then it was also just, um, it was just, we just didn't, it just didn't move very quickly. It was, didn't move quickly at all.

In the documentary, it went through the, you know, pushing Ev out and giving you the CEO job. It sounded awful, the whole process.

It was awful.

What's your side of it? What was going on?

I don't really have a side of it other than it was awful. Like, it's, you know, these things in hindsight are— it happened very, very quickly. It happened super slowly and painfully. And, and, you know, I was informed like in the driving rain on the road home by, you know, Evan, Jason, that the board decided that you should be the CEO. Yeah, but I hadn't been told. And then Bill Campbell called me and like, you should just quit, you know, and then, and then I was like, why am I quitting? You know, like anyway, and then this went and then like the board decided actually, no, Ev is going to remain CEO, but you've been great and we're going to vest a bunch of your options and so long. And that, I mean, no kidding.

Yeah.

Over many, many days and weeks. And finally I was like, listen, just write up the separation agreement and, you know, I'm good. I'm good. Like, whatever. I'll go find some— I'll go do something else. And then, you know, to make a long story short, the board got back together. I was like, oh no, no, no, no. Remember Bijan Sabeh from Spark texted me, don't quit. Okay. I was like, I'm not quitting. Like, okay, you guys told me you wanted me to leave because I was going to stay anyway. It was super crazy.

Yes.

And there was obviously a ton of stuff going on. And anyway, long story short, they were finally like, look, you got to do it anyway. And, you know, A really long story short, I was like, all right, I'll stay and do it.

Okay. You take over. You're the adult. What did you do initially?

Yeah.

Like, it's very tricky. Yeah. The situation.

Yeah.

And I think the current— the existing founders are hanging around, probably looking over your shoulder, if not breathing down your neck.

Well, Jack was the chairman of the board, right? Still, Ev had made Jack chairman of the board when he made himself CEO. Ev's still on the board. So two of the founders Ev and Jack are still on the board and Biz was in the company and Biz is in the company and Jason Goldman's in the company running product and, you know, and a bunch of other people. Yeah. The, the first thing that I felt and I've sort of foreshadowed this, the first thing that I just felt we had to do was like velocity, velocity, velocity. And that remained a concern of mine throughout my time there. Like faster, faster, faster, cadence, cadence, cadence. Like, how can we go faster? Why do things take so long? If this takes 6 weeks, what could— what would have to be true for it to be 2 weeks? Yeah, we just— I did stuff like that constantly because I was always like, man, this is like dental surgery. But it was starting from a position of we're not going to make— we're not going to sit around the table and vote on things anymore. I remember vividly the status, like the status line changed from like, what are you— what's going on or what's happening to something else. Or maybe it changed to what's happening. I don't even remember. I wasn't even involved in it. And one of the front-end engineers, Brit Saveteville, came into my office and was like, hey man, what's going on? I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, the status bar changed to what's happening. I was like, okay. He's like, I didn't— no one asked me, you know, what I thought about that. And I was like, oh man, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. Like, it's going to start being— there's going to start being a lot more of that. So that was thing number one.

Okay.

Thing number two was there were a set of operating principles that were written on a whiteboard that Biz had been involved in with either, either on his own or with other people. But they were like, you know, like sometimes you'll get on a United Airlines flight or whatever and they'll say, here at United Airlines, we believe in integrity and honesty. I'm like, okay, who cares? Like, that doesn't help me. That tells me nothing about you. Every company says that. Yeah, I know. Like, whatever. And also it doesn't help me make any decisions and these things are meaningless and they're usually weaponized against management by like, you know, well, it says right here anyway. So it's like, all right, we got to get rid of these things. They're like, they're like not useful.

They're— did the founders push back?

No, they didn't really.

Okay.

And so good for them. Got rid of those. Like there was, there were just, I remember there were just like everything was just kind of like messy, you know, I remember there was this kitchen and there was like, it was just kind of a mess and we're like dirty dishes in the sink and everything. And I think I sent out an email. I was like, this is why the— this is why the fucking site crashes. Like, you may— you know, you may not get it, but like, this, this is why the site crashes because everything's just kind of fucking like, oh well, someone else will clean it up. And I was like, this is ridiculous. And it was just try— I just tried to get this sort of like, we're not going to do this. Like, oh well, we'll get them next year stuff anymore. There was a poster on one of the floors that was like, we'll make better mistakes next time or something like that, you know? And I was like, get that poster out of here. It's not— I don't really care about it, but it's just sort of indicative of, oh well, you know, and then the site would crash again and people would go like, oh well, we'll figure it out. You know, hopefully it won't happen again next, you know, next year or whatever. So it was a lot of cleaning that up and a lot of velocity, velocity, velocity.

All anybody CEO wants to talk about now is speed.

Yeah.

And particularly like companies seem to slow down as they are in hypergrowth.

Yeah.

Because it's like you get bigger and get less done.

Yeah, you— because barnacles build up on your— you get like organizational barnacles.

Yeah.

You know, so a couple of things. Initially, when we were smaller, this is sub, sub-200 people. What I did to speed things up was, one, we're not going to make decisions as a group. We're going to push decisions down the stack. By the way, I don't have to be like, don't come to me and ask me what you should do about this unless you have no idea and want my opinion. Like, figure it out, you know? And And don't tell your team what to do. Tell them to figure it out and push as many decisions down the stack as you can. And I don't want to hear, you know, I remember I would talk to Jack Dorsey at these dinners we would have from week to week when he was chairman and was CEO of Block down the street from us. We would get together on Tuesday nights and have dinner. And I remember telling him, God, I hate hearing Dick said in the company as a reason for things, because what would happen was I'll give you an example. I remember this example really well. The Android app started taking longer and longer and longer to boot. And so we had a, we would have a metrics meeting. I was like, hey man, the, you can see the usage numbers going down almost linearly with Android boot time going up. People are firing up Twitter and it's taking too long and they're moving on to something else. Like over here on iOS, That doesn't happen. It's got to be the same boot. It's got to take just as long to boot Android as it does iOS. Okay. So 2, 3 nights later, a week later, I'm walking around like one of the engineering floors after hours. And this Android engineer comes up to me and goes, hey, can I ask you a question? I'm like, yeah. He goes, hey, did you say remove the JSON file from the Android boot system? I was like, I didn't. I know what a JSON file is, but I couldn't tell you what's in the Android boot JSON. And he's like, okay, because I was told Dick said remove that.

Okay.

And I was like, aha, I think I know what's going on here. Right. And this would happen throughout the company. Some manager or director decides here's a way to solve this problem and the engineer pushes back against them and they just go, you know what Dick said, do it.

Yeah.

And it became like this reason for doing things. So part of the speed was, no, we're not going to have So-and-so said. It's push the decisions down the stack. And by the way, if your team makes a decision and you can't defend it to your manager, like, that's— don't go, well, so-and-so said. Like, have the engineer talk to the director, whatever. The second thing I did as we got bigger and bigger is I started realizing, oh, the organization is slowing down because there are all these fiefdoms in the organization that want that want like ball control over their stuff. So very common, very common. So, so here's, here was, here's how it surfaced. We ran an experiment and I was like, oh, this is actually really super interesting. What are the hypotheticals about what this experiment would do in production? The engineer runs through it in an experimentation meeting, like, great, let's go ahead and launch this to, you know, X percent of users and see what happens.

Yeah.

One week, two weeks, three weeks go by. I'm like, hey, where's— I'm like looking at the app. I'm like, where's the, you know, where's this engagement experiment we're running? And I find the engineer. He's like, oh, I'm waiting for, you know, trust and safety to sign off on. I'm like, what? It's like, oh yeah, well, I asked so-and-so if we could launch this, if ready launch, and they didn't say no, but they said you have to go get approval from years of security. And I've started realizing that that when people would try to go do something, they wouldn't be told, no, you can't do that. It was something much, much worse and slower than that.

You need approval from security.

You got to get from security. You got to go ask these 14 people.

You got to ask your mom.

Go ask these 14 people. And if they all say yes.

Okay, everyone's got this problem. How do you fix it?

So what I did was it's very similar to what Bezos used to do at Amazon with bias to action. I had— it was from my improv background. I was like, we're going to have a bias to yes. Yes. And bias to yes is only your direct— the person you report to is allowed to tell you you're not allowed to do that. Or legal can tell you if you do that, you'll be fired because it's illegal and a violation of the privacy policy. But no other organization, period, is allowed to tell you you can't do that or you need to go ask these people for permission, just your direct manager. And that means if you have an idea for an experiment and your manager signs off on it and you have time to do it because you're done with whatever else you're working on, No one can tell you you can't do that. Or, you know, the marketing team's not allowed to tell you you can't use the MailChimp software we license because that's the marketing team's, right? And so bias to yes was, I don't want to hear about something being stalled because Organization X said you have to go to get approval from Organization Y. And that was great. Experiments started flying out the— flying out. In fact, engineers started going like, wait, I don't have to necessarily get design to build all these wireframes for something. I can just do it myself since we're only launching it to 1% and see if it works. And so that was just great. It worked throughout the organization and I would repeatedly get on stage at all hands meetings and like talk about like bias to yes and what it means and what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean you can go do— stop doing what you're supposed to do because it's priority and do whatever you want to do. Because your manager is going to go like, if you do that, I'm going to fire you because, you know, the—

you're being measured on no group decisions. No, DRI, DRI, and bias to action. Anything else that all these CEOs I work with are like, we're slowing down, how do we speed up?

Yeah, don't solve problems with processes. So it happens all the time in organizations, like some customer problem happens, the customer churns out or the advertiser quits.

Yeah.

And the CEO goes, that can never happen again.

Yeah.

You know, and so what happens, some step gets added to some process that's like, before you do— I remember at Google famously, the launch checklist got to be like 17 pages long or something. And Larry was like, this is insane. I was like, yeah, it's because, you know, it's like the FDA, never another thalidomide, or the TSA, like, make sure there's no water bottle on the plane. And pretty soon you're not managing to outcomes, you're managing to the processes, and you got to go through 9 steps before you, you know, Yeah. Instead, instead of just managing to the outcome of make sure there's not a bomb on the plane. So the way we did that, you— whether you do that is you solve problems with DRIs, operating control, and not processes. You should probably only really have a couple organizational processes and everything else should be span of control and decision-making. When you do that, you can't— and this was a this was something I had to come to understand and adapt to. When you do that, you can't punish people when things go wrong. Yeah, you want them to take risks. You want them to be bold. You want them to have this bias to action and doing things and not going around and asking for— tiptoeing around asking for permission. Yeah, but one of the implications is you can't punish people for making mistakes. And I would got to the point where I was— I would tell the team, it's not the job of leadership to prevent mistakes from happening. It's the job of leadership to correct mistakes quickly when they happen. So if you screw something up, like, by all means, tell us so we can help you fix it. But no one should get in trouble for screwing something up or making a mistake. And I didn't come to that immediately, but I came to realize that that was an important artifact, if you will, of pushing decisions down the stack and bias to yes. And we're not going to have lots of processes.

Love it. So many of the CEOs I work with, I just was at a— I won't say the company, but here in New York City and spoke at their company meeting. And here's how I would just describe every company when it's, call it under 50 employees. Everybody knows what's going on all the time. When it's over 150 employees, nobody knows what's going on any time.

Yeah.

How did you fix— how did you scale communication?

Yeah.

Keep people on page and tell me a little bit about the management by walking around.

Yeah, well, I did two things. First of all, I taught this management class at Twitter. It was actually based on Ben Horowitz teaching a management class at LoudCloud. Fascinating. And Ben had in his outline from his management class a statement that I like highlighted and underlined and circled three times. Yeah. Was make sure everybody understands what you understand. So I would always tell my managers that. Like your job is to make sure everybody understands what the priorities are and what it means for them and their team, how they fit into those priorities, and more importantly for your team, what it means for them personally and professionally if we achieve what we have to achieve. Those kinds of things are great. I remember somebody telling me a story of taking a factory tour at a Tesla shop and seeing some guy who's like screwing a widget into the car and asking the guy like, what are you doing? And the guy didn't just say screw in the widget in the car. He said, well, if I do this and we're able to build these kinds of cars and these kinds of cars can become more popular in America. I mean, the guy understood the story and I thought that was great.

And so it's like the analogy is somebody asked a bricklayer, what are you doing? And yeah, the bricklayer says, well, I'm laying bricks. And the other bricklayer says, I'm building a beautiful cathedral. I love that.

Yeah. Like you want people to under— I mean, how much more motivating is it to work in a company where, you know, if I'm successful in my work, I understand what the implications are for both me personally and the company.

Priorities in context.

Priorities in context.

Good news travels fast. Bad news travels slow. And it's slow as the org gets bigger, it slows down and the signal gets distorted.

Yeah.

How does CEO deal with that?

Yeah, I said earlier, it's not the job of leadership to prevent mistakes from happening. It's the job of leadership to help correct them quickly when they happen. So I would always communicate. You got to tell leadership if something screwed up. If you, if your situation is screwed up or your team or some decision is a mess, you have to communicate that constantly. And then secondly, I would regularly communicate the priorities to the team over and over and over at all-hands meetings. Here's what the priorities are that we're working on. This is how we're going to measure them. This is why they're important. And this is what they mean for us as a company if we're successful. You always wanted people— I always wanted people to understand not just what we had to do, but why it was important to do it. And I think that scaling communication architecture is like one of the most important things in any company. And part of it is never saying, because so-and-so said, that's not context. That doesn't help your team understand context for why some decision was made or what, or what they should do or how they should go do it. So that combination of pushing decisions down the stack, making sure that everybody understands what you understand, and that a lot of that is context. And always communicating problems or issues up the stack as a means of helping get, helping get it resolved quickly were the ways we dealt with that. One last thing that I picked up from Steve, a Steve Jobs trick.

Okay. So I love a Steve Jobs trick.

Yeah. So when Steve was managing both Pixar and Apple, so at the— so he's CEO of Pixar still, but now he's back in the, he's back in the seat at Apple.

Yeah.

So now he's only at Pixar one day a week because there's all the stuff I got to go fix at Apple. So they're making like Toy Story 2. And what Steve would do, so he's got one day to come up to speed on what the heck's going on at Pixar. So he'd go into the office on Friday and he would say, all right, today I want to sit down with like the illustrators, you know, without Lasseter, the director of the movie, John, without Lasseter in the room. I just want to sit down, me and the illustrators. And he would go, there's like 8 or 9 or whatever of them. It's a, you know, Janet, Tell me something that's not working well at Pixar.

Yeah.

And then, you know, Bob, do you agree with that? You know, taking notes like, okay, Phyllis, tell me something that's working well at Pixar. Not on the movie, not about your job. And at the end of the meeting, 45-minute, 1-hour meeting, would say, okay, here's what I heard. You know, people are having these kinds of issues. This is going really well. I'm going to go talk to John about it and he'll deal with it on— he'll deal with the rest of this on Monday. You know, you can follow up with him. So he's not saying, oh yeah, that sucks, or, or, you know, no, you're wrong, or whatever. He's taking notes, making sure he hears everything that was said, and then going to talk to Lester about it. I started doing that with teams. You quickly find out if that team knows what the priorities are, is in sync with what you're hearing from the leadership of that team. And some of the leaders of the company hated it. And I was like, well, now I'm concerned about why you, why you hate it, because Yeah, but I wouldn't, you know, you're not in that meeting doing things like throwing the director under the bus. You're going, okay, here's what I heard. I'm going to go talk to my management team about it on Monday. And, you know, Chris or whoever will follow up with you guys.

Let me switch to you on priorities. So all these CEOs I coach, they have their list of priorities. It's January 1st, but oh my God, there's so much opportunity, so much interesting stuff. And this employee has this thing going on. How often did you rejigger those priorities? Were you disciplined about it over the course of whatever that period was?

Yeah. You can rejigger them once in a while.

What's once in a while?

I don't know. Like, you know, if you've got 4 huge priorities for the first 4 to 5 months of the year, you can't— you can't get to February and go, these 2 are stupid and we're, you know, once or twice a year you can go, this one is— let's, let's actually change that one to this other thing. If you start doing it regularly, people are like, well, we can get to work on the direct messaging architecture. But Dick's probably going to, you know, 50/50, he's going to— you just can't do stuff like that. By the way, that's another way companies slow down is because people are just like, look, I'm not going to bust my ass on this thing when there's a 50% chance Dick's going to throw it out the window in a month.

Yes. Let me test something on you. A lot of these hypergrowers, it used to be that there were a lot of one-way doors in the software industry. Stuff took a long freaking time to get out the door, even to test.

Yeah.

And you had to kind of do things serially.

Yeah.

Now you can do so much so fast. Yeah. And so they're just doing more and it's more parallel. And a lot of those one-way doors are two-way doors. Is focus overrated now?

No, focus is— I don't think focus is ever overrated. However, however, the fact that you can do more quickly and since they're two-way doors, you're like, great. No, I mean, this is the old Jeff Bezos. Only take a long time to make decisions that are existential. Like we might die as a company if we make the wrong decision. There's fewer and fewer of those decisions that can be like, if it doesn't, if we screwed it up, we can go back and do the other one. Do those right away. So focus is, is still important. But it's also true that you should feel, you should feel like you can do a lot more now with less because you can. There was a point in 2011 when we want to try to get Jeff Bezos to join the board of the company. Like, we have an independent seat open. Who would be the best possible independent director? Jeff Bezos. So Jack and I go meet with Jeff Bezos. I think it was like at the Allen Company conference or something like that. And Jeff asks a question about strategy. And Steve Jobs was still alive at the time. And Jack said, well, Steve says the most important part about being a CEO is focus. And you should say no to almost everything. And it's in fact, it's the, it's the CEO's job to be the editor-in-chief and you should say no to almost everything and do very, very few things. And Bezos looks at Jack and goes, oh yeah, well, I like to do everything. And he does the big Bezos laugh and he goes, my team has to talk me out of stuff. He goes, you know, there's lots of ways to be successful.

Yes.

And I remember that like it was yesterday. And he's right.

There's many ways to climb the mountain.

Yeah. I think it's true that today he would say, great, I can do even more now. We can still, we can still be focused, but I can do even more things. I think those, I think those things can both be true.

Okay. Just want to get back to some of your management techniques because I think they were great. This management by walking around was a very old school Hewlett-Packard concept. Just talk about it. Sounds like you did the same time every week.

No, I did it at all hours.

Okay.

And mostly late night. It started because Bill Campbell— for people who don't know or listen to the podcast, Bill was on the board of Apple and famously coached Larry, Sergey, and Eric at Google. I wrote a book about him called Trillion Dollar Coach. The Benchmark folks had also brought him into Twitter before I got there. And Bill famously said, when I took over as CEO, like, you could roll a grenade into Twitter at 5:30 PM and only take out the cleaning people. So, and he was right. And he was, and he was right. So I was like, okay, how do you, you can't tell people, you just can't tell people work harder.

Yeah.

You know, they're like, okay, you work harder.

Yeah.

You know? So what I did was I just, I mean, it's so such a stupid thing, but I was like, all right, I'll walk around at night. I'm gonna start, well, I'm gonna go out, get dinner. I'm gonna come back at like 9:00 PM, 9:30 PM. I'm gonna walk around and whoever's here, I'm gonna talk about the stuff they're doing at the next all-hands meeting. And I'm going to like, I'm going to like bump up the prioritization of that.

Yeah.

And I remember like Marcel Molina @NoRadio on Twitter. That's a, that's a little promotion for Marcel there. Marcel was always working late on stuff and I would like, what are you working on? And, you know, I'm working on native retweet or whatever. And I would get in front of the company and go like, what, the work Marcel is doing? And people are like, how can, how does he always know what Marcel is doing? And other people are like, oh, Dick comes back after dinner at night and walks around and people slowly, slowly, slowly started to change the culture of, okay, the people who are around when Dick's walking around are getting their stuff prioritized. I did.

I copied you. I walked around Friday afternoons and I learned a lot.

Yeah. And you, yeah. So I would just go, you know, up to engineers and go like, what's going on? What are you working on? Yeah.

Um, you have an interesting expression that I don't understand about forest fires in forestry.

Oh yeah, yeah.

What the hell are you talking about?

Yeah, I, I had— I was trying to help, um, a director in the company be more strategic. They were super tactical. Okay. And it's finally like, you're like, your job as a director, as you grow in this company, is you can't just say like, well, I put out this forest fire and put— like, your job is to map the territory and start to do forestry management. Like, what are we going to do so that next year if there's a fire over here, that highway is not going to be in trouble? Like, you can only work so many hours a day, and stamping out fires isn't going to work as we scale. You need to push those down the stack. Your team should be like fighting the fire that's over there because it might, you know, burn a house down or something. You need to be focused more on like thinking about this whole pie and what, what's going to be true, what has to be true 24 months from now. So this whole pie is in this whole territory is in better shape. And I just— that was the way I— that was the metaphor I had for helping people try to think strategically versus like, well, I'm doing, you know, I'm chopping down the trees. Look, I'm looking at all the trees. That's not like leadership and strategy.

That's Tactics. I like that. Okay, now I get it. One of the people I connected to, connected with before interviewing you said something interesting about you.

Oh boy, I can hardly wait. I'm sure most people did, but anyway.

And both sides of this are interesting.

He's both sides.

He said, you know, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, everyone's passive aggressive. And so I'm curious your take on that. Because I'm— I don't live in Silicon Valley. And the second thing he said, Dick's not passive-aggressive. Dick's aggressive.

Yeah.

What's— give me both sides of that.

I was just like, I am super impa— I know this is a personal flaw, but I'm super impatient. Like, people would come in and go, here's why I'm, you know, why I think, or whatever. I'm sad, you know, like, and they would start talking to me like, okay, stop. Like, it seems like you don't like working here. You should quit.

Okay.

No, I want to tell you I'm sad. You know, like, okay, I don't like— I don't care. Who cares? I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but like, we have a million things to do. I remember. And then, you know, I just like— this is just direct and blunt with people. Yeah, not a jerk. You don't have to. You don't have to. People think like— I think a lot of times, especially maybe engineering leaders who, you know, I've come up in the organization like coding and programming and doing stuff on my own, and now I have to manage people. They think when you tell them you have to like, look, you have to manage performance in your team and have to manage poor performers out. They think you have to be a jerk when you do that. You have to be a jerk about it. You have to be direct about it and forthright and not, you know, no one's sadder than this about than me. You know, don't say stupid stuff like that. Okay? You can be empathetic and still be straightforward.

Okay. A lot of these CEOs I coach, are in their— call it in their mid-late 20s. And like in their whole life, they haven't given— they don't go to like, Mom, I got some feedback on dinner. Or like, you're playing, you're hogging the basketball. You've just never given a Homo sapiens feedback. It's unnatural.

Yeah.

Advice for that CEO?

Yeah. My advice for that CEO— Bill Campbell actually gave me this advice early on— is like, write down what you want to say. And then say that and don't say anything else. So the night before, if you write back down the honest feedback that, you know, I would give Brian, especially if I have to give Brian a bad performance review the night before, if you write it down, I guarantee you 99 out of 100 people, if they go into the meeting the next day, they don't say that.

Okay.

They're like, listen, Brian, instead they're like, you know, it's really hard time here for everybody. We're all working, you know, Shut the fuck up. Like, the person knows you're about to, like, hit them over the head or something. And you also don't have to say, like, hey, Brian, that's just the way it is, you know, too bad if you don't like it. You just, just write down what you want to say and be forthright and honest. And, you know, you can say, like, I understand. It's like, if you can't, don't want to deal with it anymore, I get it. And say those things and don't add a bunch of fluff around it. I thought that was great feedback and I would do that.

Sit with the silence.

Yeah. Sit with the silence.

Sit with silence is hard.

Yeah. So it's unnatural. It's unnatural. The best person. So I used to do a thing in my management class where it was a 6-hour course. There was a ton of stuff in it. But one of the things I would do, it was about giving people feedback and like, okay, you're like, Brian, you're going to give Dick feedback and the feedback is, You've been working on this thing for 6 weeks and busting your ass and you've been here till midnight every night and we have to cancel the project because it's no longer a priority. Yeah, for what? Something horrible that no one wants to hear.

Yeah.

You know, some made up, made up. Of course, the only person who did the role play that was ever good at sitting in silence was Elad Gil, current venture capitalist. Elad sat in the chair and gave the person the feedback. And I, and I say to the employee, the IC before the roleplay, I kind of pull them aside and go, you're— this is bullshit and you're going to tell Dick and you don't want to hear this and it shouldn't be canceled. They need to look at the data, whatever. And Elad was great at just sit there.

It's hard.

And then eventually the other person runs out of gas and stops, you know, talking. That's— and Elad was great at that and the only person who ever did it.

Okay. One of the things I want to ask you about is you had some very talented folks, some of which you brought in, probably others brought in like Adam Bain and Kevin Weil. Anthony Noto, Ilad.

Yeah.

How did you guys recruit? What did you look for? Are you looking for slope or experience? Like, what was your filter?

It's a great question. I always— I actually tried to promote from within as much as possible because you want people inside the company to feel like we're not like going to get capped out at which point, you know, I can only get to this level because anything above that, Dick just goes out and finds someone. So Kevin Wheel, for example, was promoted from within from an IC when I got there in 2009. Well, there were only a few people, like 40 people or so in the company when I got there, to eventually running all of product after running all of ads product. So he was promoted from within. Nodo was I just felt like Twitter was such, such a drama. Twitter was like the drama queen of hypergrowth companies.

Yes.

You know, it was like constantly in the news. When I took over as CEO that year, the Twitter bird had hanged itself and exploded on two different magazine covers. So I went up to our head of communications, Gabriel Stricker, and I was like, Gabriel, Great news. Next year's goal: no dead birds on magazine covers. You know, low bar.

Yes.

Anyway, but it was just constant drama. And Noto was so good at Goldman Sachs, where he ran technology and media, at dealing with investors and communicating with them, etc., that I had been— I had been trying for a while to bring him into Twitter, and I was— I was finally able to. And he was— of course, he's— he's fantastic.

How about Adam?

Adam was funny. Adam was a non— what we— what you call a non-consensus hire when I first recruited him, because it was while I was COO and I went to the board and Ev and said, I got the perfect person to run revenue at Twitter. It's this guy, Adam Bain. He's in LA and he works for Fox Interactive. Everyone was like, you're going to bring in someone— you're selling ads, so you're going to want to bring in someone who works at Fox in L.A. and bring them to San Francisco to run our, like, you know, revenue side of the business. But he was the perfect person to do it. I must have flown down there to L.A. for 5 or 6 months before I could convince him to do it. But I met him while we were in the process of selling FeedBurner and his employer, News Corp, was one of the interested parties before Google bought it. And I got to know him and I was just like, man, this guy is like tireless and we're going to be in like a constant dogfight and fighting from behind against Facebook for social ad dollars. And Adam was just— he's just like one of those people who's got a motor that doesn't stop and who's the perfect person for the role.

There's an old adage fire fast, hire slow. Yeah, I always say that out loud. I didn't do that.

I didn't.

I fired slow. And almost every time I was like, man, I should have been 6 weeks. I knew.

Yeah.

Yeah. Were you disciplined about that?

Yeah, we— I tried to hold myself accountable to that. And it's horrible. Like, there's nothing horrible. There's nothing worse than having to do something like that. I remember one of my board members, David Rosenblatt, you know, I was I always am a little bit like, come on, when people are like, oh, I like firing people because, you know, it's the right thing for them. Like, that just sounds like you're an asshole because it's horrible. Yeah, but you have to do it.

Yeah.

And I remember I asked David Rosenblatt because I had to terminate someone with global operating responsibility. I was like, wait a minute, if I fire him in the morning, the people in Japan are going to be in bed. But if I fire him in the afternoon, then, you know, whatever. And So I was like, I got to figure out— and I was talking to my board about it. And David Rosenblatt, who had been the CEO of DoubleClick before it sold to Google, is like, oh, I had to do that. I actually saved the calendar date from that because I had a whole series of communications I had to roll out. This is where now a couple thousand person company, etc., with like 30 offices around the world. So I get his day, I get his day of communications. And the only thing I remember from it, it's a whole, you know, it was a whole layout of how to go about it. The only thing I remember from it is 6 a.m., wake up in a cold sweat. You know, it's just horrible.

Yeah.

You know, it's not fun. You can't wait till it's over. Yeah. And you just have to be. But you have to do it. And most— Jeff Weiner's old analogy from— he was LinkedIn CEO when I was running Twitter. Jeff Weiner would call it the— for those of you who are baseball fans, he was like, you know, sometimes you're watching a baseball game and you see the pitching coach or the manager walk out to the mound and talk to the pitcher, and the pitcher's like, no, no, no, I totally— don't worry, coach, I still got it. And the manager walks back to the dugout and this guy cranks one out of the park again. And you can see the manager walking out like, I knew it, I knew it. And Jeff was like, I never— I always tell myself, don't be the manager having the first conversation with the person when you know what you should be doing is having the second conversation with the person.

As a Red Sox fan, that really hits, really hits home.

I think his example is actually Pedro, Pedro Martinez from the Red Sox.

But anyway, Grady Little, you take him out.

Yes.

I work with all these hypergrowth companies. I think you do too.

Yeah.

What, what are the pitfalls when you're in hypergrowth and what are your tips for the CEOs listening today who are growing incredibly fast?

One of the real pitfalls, especially for these hypergrowth AI companies that are going from, you know, a single-digit revenue million to $100 million. Is it's very, very easy to take your eye off the ball when you raise too much money. And by taking your eye off the ball, I mean we're thinking about operating leverage and operating efficiency, because once you've— once the money is there, you're like, don't have to worry about that. I'll go worry about this thing over here. And next thing you know, the, you know, burn is like, we haven't— we know we have. What are you worried about? We have it. It happens all the time. And Ryan wrote this great post saying, look, I thought I was like Mr. Efficiency. We're going to be super. It's not going to be the same for us. We're going to be super capital efficient. But when you don't have to worry about it at all and there are a million other things to do, you stop worrying about it and you start getting—

Are people raising too much money?

I think so. In many, many cases. I don't know that the models are. The models probably need all the money for compute.

But like an app company, you want to put some money in?

Yeah, I think people are raising too much money. I think a lot of companies are raising too much money because raising $100 million Series B is the new raising is the new $20 million Series B.

What else in hypergrowth, like what breaks in hypergrowth?

Hiring. Hiring almost. I mean, my favorite thing is you talk to, you know, you talk to like a CEO who's like, I don't know, whatever, pick, pick some number, you know, first company they were lead product manager at awesome fintech company X and now they're CEO. And they're like, we're only going to hire A players, you know? I'm like, yeah, p.s., guess what?

Everyone says that.

Yeah, yeah. Come back to me when you're— when your customer success team has to hire twice as many people next quarter because you just churned a bunch of customers because no one checked in with them last quarter because you're growing like a weed. And then tell me, you know, and you just you just end up not doing that. And so one of the things that you have to do when you come to the realization that we don't only hire A+ players is you have to get like religious about— you have to manage out low performers. But as you move down the stack and you've got inexperienced managers who are first-time managers, first-time directors, man, there's nothing that they want to do less than let someone go. Yeah, they'll do anything to not do it. You prevent them from transpiring people, you know, transpiring is like, Janet would be great on the ads team. She loves ads. You need people.

Yes.

And then you're like, no, no, no. So I had a, you know, we had, we had sort of performance reviews. I was like, if your review is below an X number, you can't switch teams. Yeah.

Like, that's a good idea.

You know, whatever, let's say it's 1 through 4. 4 is amazing. 1 is you got to go. If you're a 2, you can't move teams until you're no longer a 2. P.S., if you go 2 to 3 to 2, I'm going to talk to your manager again and go, don't let me guess, this person can be a 3 again this next term so you don't have to put them on a performance plan. So we would, after performance reviews, always go through as a senior team like, okay, I can see from the way these people, these couple people or these 8 people are bouncing from 2 to 3 to back to 2 to back to 3. Like, you're just trying to not fire people. And I can see that your curve is inflated and blah, blah, blah. So we would just be super hardcore about that. So you can't do that.

You know, let's talk about competition for a second. You had some— I mean, you're competing with Facebook.

Yeah, they were the juggernaut that we just had the hardest time.

Like, in like tomorrow I'm speaking at another company meeting. I'm not gonna say the name of the company, but they're, they're going to be competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. Almost every boardroom I'm in is talking about that. Everyone's anxious about that. Their employees are anxious about that. Advice about that.

First of all, you have to acknowledge it and then you just have to— I mean, one of the things I would always do is like, they're like huge and Mark is the most competitive person on the planet. Trust me when I tell you, like, they don't like— they don't say to themselves, oh, whatever, Twitter won that thing. That's fine. They're like, that can never happen again.

Yeah.

So we have to be like, And we're, we're way smaller than them and have far fewer resources and can, you know, and so it was just like, we just have to be, we have to, we have to think about them. We have to talk about them, have to understand what they're doing and have to try to figure out how to out-hustle them. And Bain, Adam Bain on the revenue team was great at that. He would come into company meetings at Consumer Electronics Show at the beginning of the year. And go to one of the first big customer meetings, like let's say it's Unilever. And he would sit down with the CMO from Unilever before the meeting and say, how'd the Facebook meeting go? You know, oh, great. But what are they like? What are they— what are they psyched about? What are they psyched to show you this year? You know, and then he would go into them and he would learn all that. And then he would go into the meeting with the Unilever and say, you know, even if we had a bunch of things to show them, he would say, we have some things we want to show you, but we really want to spend the next 2 hours today just understanding your business and what you guys are concerned about, what your problems are. I mean, knowing that She just told him that the Facebook people came in and showed us this and this and this and weren't asking those kinds of questions. Now, Facebook wised up to that over time, etc. But Adam had just come up with a great way of thinking about how to compete with this juggernaut and the juggernauts rolling out new things every quarter. That's really good. It's just good salesmanship. He's like, I can't compete with their 8 new things and their micro-targeting and blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to totally come at it from a different angle. And it was just smart about learning how to do that by talking to the customer beforehand.

You guys picked the advertising model to make money. As you look back at that, good call?

Yes. Advertising is undefeated. The ARPU is higher. It just is on versus subscription revenue, etc. I think we would do the same thing over again.

Any other, as you look back, like, man, I wish I had a do-over on that one.

Oh yeah. We tried to buy Instagram the month before month and a half before Facebook bought it. And by the way, for a much higher percentage of the company that, you know, Facebook's offer was famously $1 billion. And I think it was $700 million of stock and $300 million of cash. I only had 8 or 9 employees at the time, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. But we knew well before that, like, these guys are— Kevin is an extraordinary product manager. Kevin and Evan Spiegel, I think, are probably two of the best product thinkers in Silicon Valley. And so I knew that. And well before Mark made his offer to them, I pulled Kevin— I went out to dinner with Kevin and Mike and told them we wanted to buy the company and would end up giving them basically, oh, well over 10% of Twitter. And, you know, something equivalent to $700 million in stock. And we were maybe valued at $5 billion at the time. And You know, I would have gone and, and could I go back there and talk to Kevin? I would say like, you can run the company when I leave. Like, congrats, you'll get to be CEO. I mean, may still not have done it. And I would also say also, I'll go borrow $300 million from JPMorgan and give it to you.

I see.

And you can have it all and we'll pay them back later. That because that was a game changer. Once they had Instagram, I was like, oh man, we're like boxed out on That is, that is the future of, of rich media, social media feeds. We have Vine, but it's much, much smaller and they're not going to come at us with on, on Instagram with video, which of course they did. And that, and that was, that was sort of checkmate.

Other regrets, any regrets on, man, the content moderation stuff has been in the news over the last 5 years as you, it wasn't as hot while you were there. Any, as you look back at that?

It was always like— it was the thing I'll say about content moderation that people get wrong. Yeah, all the time. It's like, this is really easy. Just prevent people from doing that. They're like, okay, well, that is a lyric in a Kanye song. Can you not tweet his lyrics or whatever? Or it's easy. Just— I'll give you— I'll give you a specific example that I always think highlights why it was such a pain in the ass. And it's so hard. And you can't just come up with a set of— these companies try to come up with a set of rules and like, Well, if it violates the rule, you have to kick it off. And if it doesn't violate the rule, you can't kick it off. Like, that's— you just can't think about it that way. These things are so subjective. So ISIS, the terrorist organization, captures 3 pilots from some, some air force and puts them in cages basically on a beach and lights them on fire and kills them, basically burns them to death. And they post these to Twitter photos and videos. And my general counsel comes to me and goes, hey, these terrorist accounts are— I'm like, great. She's like, suspend the accounts, right? Like, yeah, of course. Like right away, anyone that posts the, you know, media of these pilots being lit on fire, like suspend the account. Well, the frickin New York Post an hour later posts the picture, huge photo of this pilot being lit on fire and suspend, you know, and then I get this like, hey, what, you suspend, you know, Kara or someone like, why did you suspend the New York Post? What? We didn't suspend the New York Post. Yeah, you did. And you're like, okay, wait, I guess the New York Post can do it, but now who can't do it? And that was one tiny example. It was just so, so infinitely hard. And you just get my— the big— if I could go back again is you just can't have these hard and fast rules. There has to be, again, pushing you know, having operating control and somebody with an understanding of the situation like our GC, you're gonna just have a bunch of judgment calls and you're gonna get a bunch of 'em wrong. And that's life.

And like after your tenure and like, I don't know what to believe, but it looks like there was a lot of conversation between the Biden administration and that group. And then a lot of accusations from Elon that that group was just very left of center in their orientation. Any reaction to that? Was that the case when you were there?

I mean, yeah, probably it was left of center, but I don't think that— I don't think when I was there that— I don't think it impacted the way we thought about abuse. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, we didn't have any, like, for example, we didn't have any like, oh, you're not allowed to deadname trans people. I like that stuff was all post me being there. At the time, it was mostly what we were dealing with.

Culture War kind of happened after you left.

Yeah, the, the, yeah, the stuff we were dealing with when I was there were ridiculous amounts of Russian bots, which at the time were not election stuff. It was maybe they were preparing for it, preparing the groundwork for 2016, but it was mostly like phishing attacks and just massive bot farms that were doing phishing attacks on people and trying to hack into their accounts or get credit card information, et cetera.

Most of the CEOs who have been around a while have got a shit ton of bad press. You got a metric ton of bad press.

Yeah.

It must— I got a bunch of bad press. It impacted me. I tried to show a face like it didn't, but it was soul crushing to me.

Yeah. How did you handle it? I don't know. I had the fortunate opportunity to be a performer and do improv comedy and stuff and auditioned for SNL a couple times before I went back into business. And I had been like, you know, I was— I remember I was at the Adelaide Comedy Festival with my improv group and we had this midnight show at the Opera House, the Adelaide Opera House. Adelaide, Australia. Yeah. And the crowd is hammered.

Okay.

Drunk. Maybe 1,000 people. And it's like an hour and 10-minute show, completely improvised. We get on stage and like 5 minutes in, The crowd starts yelling like, "You suck, get off!" And like, man, we got 80 more minutes or whatever. And, and so I don't know, I just became resilient to like, oh well, I see. You got to like—

did it hurt inside?

I don't know. Like, we got good press. I remember my daughter called me.

The good press never hit for me.

No, no, no. I'll tell you. I'll tell you, my daughter. Called me. This is at the end of 2014. So 2013, we go public, IPO successful, everyone's super excited. Go, yay us! And there's some, you know, these stupid awards that come out, come out and like CEO of the Year, Dick Costolo. End of 2014, my daughter texts me. She's like, I have bad news and good news. And I was like, what's the bad news? She's like, Yahoo Finance says you're one of the 5 worst CEOs of 2014. I was like, what's the good news? She goes, nobody reads Yahoo Finance.

Okay, got it. Okay.

I just felt like, I don't know, it's like you're like, okay. And I'll say one last thing on it. I've said this a bunch, but, but I think is important. I got invited to go to like the Vanity Fair Oscars party one of the years.

By the way, that must have been cool.

Well, I got invited to go. I didn't go. And I told my daughter. Good question. So I told my daughter, I don't want to start going to a bunch of stuff that I get invited to because I'm the CEO of Twitter, because then I'll be, I'll be like, oh, I don't want to not be the CEO of Twitter because I won't get invited. So I went to the NBA All-Star Game because I knew Adam Silver and he invited— I felt like it was a Dick Costolo invitation. I was like, I want to— I'll go to things I get invited to because I'm Dick Costolo. I don't want to go to things that the CEO of Twitter gets invited to. Because then I'll be like, wasn't it part of your job? No. I mean, I mean, going to the White House, sure. Like, hey, the president wants to talk to you about, you know, Edward Snowden and abuse on the platform and what are we going to do about terrorists using the services? Yeah, you got to go to that as part of the job. But going to the like, going to these things, you know, like the Oscars or whatever, like, I don't know. I don't know any of these people. They don't care about—

I totally would have done it.

Yeah, I totally would. Well, you would have been standing over in the corner going like, no one's talking Tom Cruise won't talk. Totally nobody's talking.

Tom Cruise isn't talking to me. It's exceptionally rare these days that somebody, a founder-led company is replaced or—

Yeah.

Just that they don't hire the adult external CEOs. Is that, should it be happening a lot more?

I think it goes in waves and—

It's like not, doesn't happen at all these days.

Yeah, I know. I think it goes in waves and I think it will continue to, be there. Something will happen and people will start going, you know, we really need for these companies that are making, you know, $4 billion in revenue after 3 years and the 26-year-old founders are— they'll just— something will happen and it will— there will be a wave of, you know, operating executives coming back in and run some of the companies. It happens a little bit like Slootman and, you know, yeah, pretty rare. Yeah, yeah. Rare.

Even the public companies like MongoDB.

Yeah.

Workday recently, but like maybe one a year.

Yeah, it's true. I do think it goes in waves. We'll see if it happens again.

Okay, you're a VP at blah-bitty-blah company and you want to be a Dick Costolo. What should you do? You want to be that adult.

Oh, you want to be that adult.

I want to be you when I grow up.

I'm going to be you. Do what Anthony Noto did when he was CFO at Twitter. He started like telling, making it clear to You know, executive recruiters like, I want a CEO role. Like, start, you know, when you start seeing CEO roles, I might not get one right away, but like, I want to, I want to talk to you about CEO roles when you get them. I got to get your name out there and just— I never— and Anthony would tell you this too about his own career. I never took like a risk that I didn't, you know, that I wasn't super psyched I took. Even though I was like trying to get on SNL and wasn't successful, it ended up benefiting me down the road because it was like, like, all right, like, like live TV on CNBC. Are you okay doing that? I'm like, look at the camera? Like, I would get booed at midnight in Australia by 1,000 people. I can look in the camera and talk about it.

Should all CEOs take a— my co-founder took a comedy class in business school. Yeah, it really helped him.

Yeah, being on stage and, you know, being uncomfortable being on stage makes— I mean, you got it. You stand up at an all-hands meeting, you were like, I know exactly what I'm going to say at the all-hands meeting. I'm just going to talk about the priorities. That's easy after doing that.

Okay, let me give you a fun one.

Yeah, hit me.

Is San Francisco passive-aggressive? Is everyone passive-aggressive? Are CEOs passive-aggressive?

I think there's a lot of passive-aggressiveness. I think I know, I know the person you talk to and I think, and I know the other companies he's been at. I think he's generally right, but there are some great exceptions. I think the Collison brothers at Stripe are, are both that rare combination of really, really widely read and polymaths and understand, have a broad perspective on humanity and biology and the human condition and are forthright communicators and are, you know, neither passive-aggressive nor hyper-aggressive. They're just, they're forthright and straightforward and blunt. And I think those guys are great. And I feel the same way about Reed Hastings, a totally different executive at Netflix. Reed is always like, this is just how it is. You know, like, I'm not— I don't— I'm not trying to be mean about it. This is just the way it is. And I think it—

I think you rhyme with Reed in my head.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I take that as a huge compliment. I love that guy. I always thought those three people, John and Patrick at Stripe and Reed at Netflix, are extremely self-aware. I remember I was at a table with Reid at a dinner once, and he went around the table and said, I want to hear everybody's opinion on this. How much of your success do you think is based on your DNA and how much of it is based on like, I just learned how to kick ass and be amazing? And I kind of— I was like, I think I know where he's going with this. And of course, when he got around to himself, he was like, I think it's basically like 80% DNA.

Interesting.

Yeah.

How would you answer that?

Yeah, I think similarly. And I think that's a— I think that's a result of him being—

versus skill.

Yeah, I think there's certainly a bunch of luck, but I don't think he was saying luck versus skill. I think he was sort of saying like, you're not like some, you know, exceptional person who came out and like, I'm going to fight against the— like, it's basically encoded in you to be this way. And, you know, it's ended up helping you. And sure, there's like 20% luck along the way that put you in the position to get this role that you might not have otherwise had. But you were always going to do something like this.

Yes. Okay. You brought up some good CEOs. The CEO rulebook feels to me to be changing. Your take on how Jensen Huang runs that with like 60 direct reports, no one-on-ones, talking and criticizing.

Yeah.

He's got a whole different playbook. The thing that surprises me is I work with all the CEOs.

Yeah.

Nobody's copying him.

Yeah.

Which I think is interesting. Your take on that.

I go back to the Jeff Bezos comment to Jack Dorsey. Jack, there are lots of different ways to be successful. Yeah. I think that I think that the mistake that CEOs make is they read the Walter Isaacson book on Elon Musk or they read the one on Steve Jobs and they think this is the archetype.

Yep.

And Walter's just left out a whole bunch of stuff, you know, and that's not—

Did you have an archetype?

No, I didn't have an archetype.

Steve Jobs was mine. I tried to copy everything he did. I did it quite poorly.

I mean, it goes again to the like Well, Steve says you have to be an editor and you said, "Sine no." And, you know, and Jeff saying like, "Oh yeah, well, there's lots of different ways to do it." I think the— and the reason I say that about the books is not just because they're more mythology than they are what really happened. Some of it's, of course, this happened, but it leaves out a bunch of stuff. But more importantly, you just— if you try to be someone you're not, nobody is fooled. Like, you think people are fucking fooled? Nobody is fooled. Everyone knows you're spinning them or you're playing some role and you're not yourself. And nothing is more miserable than trying to be someone you're not. One of the things I used to do, I used to do this in my management class, actually, during one of the NBA Finals back in the '90s. This reporter's in the Houston Rockets locker room, and it was at a time where Charles Barkley did this ad for Nike where Charles dunks a basketball and he looks at the camera and goes, I ain't no role model. Something like that.

Yeah.

And this reporter's in the Houston Rockets locker room and asks Hakeem Olajuwon. He wasn't wrong. He wasn't. He wasn't. He wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong. Although he appears to be on Ozempic or something. He's got to have his suits retailed. This reporter's in the Houston Rockets locker room and goes up to Hakeem Olajuwon and says, you know, Charles Barkley says that kids shouldn't, you know, idolize, look up to NBA players as role models. What do you think about that? And Hakeem Olajuwon goes, I'm happy to be a role model. I love being a role model for kids. He's like, well, What do you— and Hakeem says, well, here's the deal. Charles is a different person in public than he is in private. And so he's got this anxiety and tension in his mind about whether he's supposed to be public Charles in this moment or private Charles in this moment. I'm always the same person. So if people want to look up to me as a role model, that's fine with me. I just think that it's nothing but misery if you're trying to, you know, look at some written-down playbook of how Steve Jobs did things. And I got to go do that when it's almost— it was impossible for Steve to do it almost. And you're certainly not going to be able to do it and you'll be miserable trying.

Okay. Last question I have is like the Twitter board, man, there was a lot of friggin drama there.

Tons.

So much.

So much.

You're building that. You're $100 million company going on $400 million. You're building a board. Advice like, should you bring in independents early? Should you wait?

I had two board members that were immensely helpful to me. Peter Chernin, who had brought in from News Corp as an independent director because he'd managed tens of thousands of people and I need someone with operating experience, global operating experience. And Peter was great at always like, always did the sort of the Jeff Bezos, let's talk about this from the user's perspective instead of like, how are we going to do X, Y, Z? He would always back up and say, you know, wait, if I'm the chief, if I'm the chief user officer at this company, You know, and I'm thinking about this from the— and so that was immensely helpful in lots and lots of cases. And then secondly, Peter Fenton from Benchmark would always help me interview candidates and either close them or help me with, hey, how should I think about this candidate? And that having someone on your board who's not in the day-to-day at the company and who can also give the candidate a sort of a third-party perspective on why I think this is going to be a monster and why I think you should do this. Was like crazy helpful and helped convince numerous execs like Adam Bain and Anthony Otto.

Do you bring in— okay, you're at $100 million, you're doing your Series B. Do you bring in an independent or you— I think what happens now is they wait right before the IPO.

No, I think it's helpful to have operating people with operating expertise in there much sooner than that.

Okay. And just while we're on IPO, you took Twitter public. What's your— it's been very hard to take companies public. Yeah, it's become very unfashionable to take companies public.

Yeah. I would, I would have kept it private longer if I could go back and do anything over again.

I would have.

It's just so much easier running a private company and not having to like, okay, well, that's going to mean we're going to miss the revenue number by a percent. It's the right thing to do. But, you know, the employees are going to be running around like, what's wrong when the stock goes down 8% after hours? You know, and as you know, you don't have a daily ticker that the employees are freaking out about when you're a private company. And it's just a lot more— you can be— it's so much easier and stress-free to focus on the long term as opposed to, okay, now we have to make a long-term versus a short-term to have a discussion about this because, you know, everything's going to go sideways if we do this in Q1 instead of blah, blah, blah. You get it.

Okay.

It was just— it's just a lot easier to run a private company.

I wanted to talk to you for a long time because you are kind of a rare species these days. The adult CEO brought into a hypergrowth company. And you delivered. Thanks for coming on the pod.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Okay. I thought Dick was great. It's a masterclass on how do you scale and be a terrific scale-up CEO. There's a few things he talked about that I think are worth reviewing, some of which I did, some of which I wish I did when I was CEO of HubSpot. One thing he did that I totally did was management by walking around. I'd wait until like 7 o'clock at night and I walk the halls of HubSpot through the dev organization, support, sales, who was around, and really hear what was happening. That was super useful for me. It was great context and it was also good to see who was burning the midnight oil. I liked his feedback around giving tough people tough feedback. I was never very good at this and his advice is good. It's, you know, the night before you're going to give feedback for that tough person, it's not great feedback. You got to write it down the night before, practice it in the mirror. I think that's good advice. And when you deliver it, you deliver it and you sit in silence. No fluff. You sit in silence. Really hard to do. But I think that's great advice. He talked about killing committees and using DRIs. A lot of the CEOs I've interviewed are talking about similar things. Particularly important as you've got silos in your organization and the important stuff cuts across boundaries of those silos. Uh, he gave a great quote from another podcast, Ben Horowitz. He said, make sure everybody understands what you understand, not just the what, the why, and what success means for them personally. Priorities without context are useless. I thought that was a gem from Ben, and I thought it was really cool that he repeated it. He accuses Silicon Valley of being passive-aggressive. He said he's not, he's aggressive. I think good advice. Like a lot of CEOs, he says you should hire fast and fire slow. He didn't fire slow. Almost no other CEOs don't fire slow. I did not fire slow. And so he wishes he did that. Some gems in there. Hope you enjoyed it and looking forward to having you in the next pod.