450. Silicon Valley Secrets for Scaling with Gokul Rajaram

Because AI cannot just help you in your profession, it can help you in your day to day life. For example, if you're say, negotiating over email to buy a car from a dealer, it is very likely that if you take the dealer's response and you feed it into AI, it'll actually give you a good response to send back. And I've heard of people negotiating this way and actually getting the dealer to lower their price and buy a car. And I think basically think of almost any situation in your life where you're locked or stuck. It could be planning a trip, it could be negotiating with a car dealer, it could be writing a memo or a draft. It could be writing an email to a loved one. A difficult email. I promise you AI will be able to help with each of those things and make your life easier and better.

Welcome to Marketing Speak, a series of interviews and monologues featuring thought leaders and industry practitioners in search engine optimization, e commerce and online marketing. Here's your host, Stefan Spencer, SEO expert, author, speaker, consultant and Internet entrepreneur.

There's a lot US Marketers can learn from Silicon Valley's top product and software development team leads such as today's guest, Gokul Rajaram Gokul serves on the executive team at DoorDash, the premium food ordering service. Prior to DoorDash, he led product development teams and served on the executive team at Block. Before that, he served as Product Director of Ads at Facebook, where he helped Facebook transition and its advertising business to become mobile first. Earlier in his career, Goeckel served as a Product Management director for Google AdSense, where he helped launch AdSense and grow it into a substantial portion of Google's business. Goeckl is also on the board of the Trade Desk and Coinbase. He's an avid investor, having bet on literally hundreds of startups. Gokul holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science Engineering from IIT Kanpur, where he received the President's Gold Medal and was Class Valedictorian. He also holds an MBA from mit, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Master's of Computer Science from UT Austin, where he received the MCD University Fellowship. In other words, he's one smart dude. In this episode, Goeckl revealed his famous decision making framework called Spade that he developed while at Square. We also discussed the GTD time management system made famous by David Allen and his best selling book Getting Things Done. Goeckl recommended implementing pre mortems and postmortems in marketing teams, just like what product teams do. He shared best practices for having productive meetings and his prognostications on what AI has in store for all of us business folks. Fun times indeed. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

Gokul, it's so great to have you on the show and we have known each other for so long. It's so great to finally do a podcast interview with you.

Thank you for having me, Stefan. It's crazy how long we've known each other, right? The world was very different almost 15 years ago when we first met, and it's great to continue to stay in touch and to do this podcast together. Thank you for having me.

Thank you. So I would love to have you share a little bit of your origin story, how you went from living in India and probably would only dream of achieving what you have already accomplished. That might have seemed like something impossible as you were growing up. Walk us through how you turned this dream into reality.

I think it's funny, my dreams have been very much about working on things I enjoy. I really enjoyed math. I didn't even know what computer science truly was in high school and I knew I wanted to do something relevant to mathematics. When I went to undergrad I discovered this thing called computer science and I and I was lucky enough to be There was a competitive entrance exam in India. Many of the seats in engineering colleges are decided or you get admitted based on your rank in entrance exams. So you're kind of trained to be pretty competitive in terms of exam taking and so on. The scores, you're ranked in absolute order. The grades are less important than your rank. You could have whatever grade you have, but you could be ranked whatever. So I think the interest in math led to an appreciation and discovery of computer science in the early 90s, which ultimately paved the way to come to the US for grad school. I was considering staying back in India, but I talked to a few of my friends who had come to the US for grad school and they talked about just the opportunities that computer science graduate programs open for them working in the industry. And back then it was nascent. I remember very well. I had read about the Mosaic browser being developed in 1994 and the first thing I did when I arrived in Austin for grad school at UT was I ran into the computer science labs and I said please, there's a student working. Can you please show me what the browser looks like? Because we didn't have access to the browser. Someone showed it to me and that was just mind blowing. Just seeing a website and now it seems so obvious. But if you Think about it, it's the file hosted on another server and you can see it visually in a browser. That was just incredible. And it just seems crazy to say that, but in 95, fall of 95, that was just mind blowing. And so that was the seminal moment that I decided that this is the space I want to work in for the rest of my life. And I basically left the PhD program early to join a company that was building free email and Internet services for people. I really liked the mission where the same service, now you want to make it available for free, called Juno. You might remember it was a very early free email service along with Net zero to emerge to form United Online. And then from there I took a detour to business school and then was super lucky to again join Google. It's all about helping people find information online, democratize access to information, and then from there various other things. But really it all was catalyzed by an interest in computer science. And then Marc Andreessen's creation of the browser, which I think was still underappreciated as I mean email existed for decades before I was using email from India, et cetera, to email professors and others in the us but, but the browser just catalyzed. I mean, I spent so many nights at UT in the lab, just throughout the night, just creating my website, learning HTML, learning CSS, and slowly learning JavaScript as it came on a few years later. Java for a while, I mean, it was just every time you tested and there were so many, I mean, every website back then was a blinking crazy thing because you were just testing and trying out new things. It was a wild west of the Internet. And SEO was much easier than it was, than it is now, I'm sure. But there was no SEO actually back then. There was no Google. But yeah, what great days. I'm sure the pioneers or the early folks in each part, whether it was a PC, in our case it's the browser. We all look back and say, oh, how far we've come. And now someone who's young and starting out their career, they just take these things for granted.

Yeah, those were fun times. I have kind of similar story to you in that I was studying for PhD myself and I dropped out because I got enamored by the Mosaic browser. I decided to build some websites just for fun as well as volunteered to build a website for my department. I was studying biochemistry at University of Wisconsin Madison. And so then I ended up speaking at a conference or not speaking, it was more like presenting a paper, got a big Poster board on how to use the Internet to convey 3D information about virus structures. Because I was studying viruses and I remember I met briefly Tim Berners Lee at this conference, it was the second International World Wide Web Conference. And I also met Rob McCool and I got to have a conversation with Rob. Do you know who Rob McCool is?

Yes, I do. Yeah.

Yeah. So he was poached by Marc Andreessen to join Netscape and build Netscape server because he coded the Apache server. Well actually at that time it was httpd the NCSA server. And then after Netscape server he then coded Apache. And I just was enamored by it all. I thought, okay, what am I doing studying biochemistry? I'm going to become a professor and just have this crazy low paying job for the rest of my life and try to fight for tenure. What am I doing? So I dropped out and the rest is history. Yeah, fun times.

Both of us dropped out of PhD programs so yeah, we have that in common also basically because of the Internet really. So I'm sure there are hundreds like us who just said, God, we just go build. Back before there was. I didn't think of myself as a builder. I just wanted to experiment and work on this amazing technology that was out there.

Yeah. So what's the most meaningful thing that you have built or created? And it could have been way back when you were a kid even. It doesn't matter. Just something that really pops for you is like, wow, I'm really proud of this.

I think it's basically being part of a national. There was something called quizzing which is in many of the UK and affiliated countries, like countries where the UK used to be there it's basically similar to a quiz bowl or something in the US When I was growing up I was really into quizzing so I won a pretty big competition in quizzing which really it's a rapid fire general knowledge exposition where they you're either part of a team or by yourself. So I was solo participant in a quiz show contest. Quiz contest. It was a state level. Yeah, it was a state level contest and I finished first in it. There were multiple rounds and so that was one of my proudest moments. I played badminton, so I was not a. But it was more at the district and I was not super good at it but I enjoyed playing it. But I was not an athlete but I really enjoyed quizzing because I loved absorbing information of all kinds. So winning quiz contests and I used to go and attend and do parts of winning some big high level Quiz contests was something I'm really proud of.

So what would be important for our listener to understand about product engineering, product development, as far as everything from mobile apps to websites to software as a service and systems, what will help our listener to take more advantage of the opportunities that things like AI and the advancement of technology is providing for not just marketers, but for business owners, for everybody really.

I think the biggest thing I would say is keep trying new things. Tinkering is the most important thing. In other words, it's so accessible now through ChatGPT to all these other tools, unless you use the tools. So make a resolution and set half an hour aside in your calendar every day or even 15 minutes to just try something and you'll be amazed at the capabilities. For example, I was trying out this negotiation tool I found and crazily enough, the AI does a very good job negotiating. And so I've heard of people who basically, because AI cannot just help you in your profession, it can help in your day to day life. For example, if you're say, negotiating over email to buy a car from a dealer, it is very likely that if you take the dealer's response and you feed it into AI, it'll actually give you a good response to send back. And I've heard of people negotiating this way and actually getting the dealer to lower their price and buy a car. And I think basically think of almost any situation in your life where you're blocked or stuck. It could be planning a trip, it could be negotiating with a car dealer, it could be writing a memo or a draft. It could be writing an email to a loved one, a difficult email. I promise you AI will be able to help with each of those things and make your life easier and better. Think of AI as a smart, super smart assistant, sometimes maybe not as socially savvy, but extremely knowledgeable, like someone who can win any quiz competition ever created and has, is just infinitely patient with you, will never rebuke you. So never going to say I'm done, I'm tired of this. Never going to say tireless, indefatigable, extremely knowledgeable assistant you have at your fingertips. But try it. So that's what I've just started trying it out for different situations, personal, professional, et cetera. And every time I do it I just get an unlock. And now I use it for drafts of things I'm working on, emails I've sent to people, even personal situations, emails, some negotiations I've used it for. And you'll find it seeping more and more into your life. That's a great thing. It's not just professional, it's also personal. It's almost anything. People use AI for counseling now. There are companies and enough companies that I'm sure. Hopefully you've used it for your symptoms. I've used it for my symptoms. Oh, I'm having an ache here. As you get older, you have aches. What could this be? Or something is wrong. What should I do? And my goodness, what are the top three? And it actually identifies and you go to the doctor and it's actually one of those two. So it is extremely good. And getting better all the time. All the time, yeah.

So how much time do you spend on a daily basis in AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or some other LLM or it's some sort of specialized AI tool?

Probably a few hours a day. I have ChatGPT, Cloud and Bard or Gemini. I forgot what it's called now. All three of them in three different tabs and almost many problems I have. I'll put the same prompt in all three and see which one. That's the other thing. You have access to all three now. And think about it. If someone told you you could get an assistant for $20 a month, would you? Human assistant. You would say, get me like a hundred of those. Right? And so I'm surprised. I mean, I think number one thing is to make sure you go to the highest best version of ChatGPT. And the best version, many of them are paid versions. The difference between GPT4 and GPT 3.5 is massive. You can upload images into GPT4 screenshots, and it'll analyze it and do stuff. And it also is multimodal, which means if you ever have to do a sketch or a drawing. I'm not a very good artist, but it is so much easier to generate art now for articles, for content and for other stuff through these AI tools. That is incredible. It's now become my companion to my email and other stuff I do. I always have it open in three tabs and I'll input the same prompt into all three of them and see which one is what. Basically, I have three assistants with different strengths working and that's awesome. I can see which one I like best and use that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you probably would like this tool called Chathub. Chathub GG. It has all the windows set up for ChatGPT and Claude and Bard and Bing, and you can have conversations going with all four of these simultaneously. It also can Juggle like Llama and Perplexity and so forth. Instead of having all these tabs open, you can have it all through one interface and it tracks all of it. So how do you manage all the tasks and projects that you have going on at any particular time? What is your project management tool of choice? Is it Asana or ClickUp? Some other more programming focused tool for project management? How do you do this?

Yeah, so what I do is my whole approach to efficiency came from 20 years ago at Google. There was a person who came and did a seminar on something called getting things done. It's called gtd. It's like a philosophy.

Yes, I love GTD and there are.

Many things about getting things done. But the thing that resonated with me the most, which I still, I don't remember much of it, remember one thing which is what is called the Touch once philosophy to email. I was being inundated right when this was 2004. Gmail had come out just then and so basically there was no need to delete email. So I was just drowning in email then and I was up to my ears trying to figure out how do I use email more effectively. And I think if you can conquer email, everything else becomes easier. So for me the philosophy I use is when I open an email I have to do one of three things. If I can process the email within less than five minutes, I reply to it right then and there. Done. It's out of my inbox. I archive it after that. Second, if it's not something I have to do, I have to delegate it to someone or pass it on. I'll just pass it on to them and archive it. So it's their responsibility now it's gone from my mind, from my brain. And third, if it's going to be on my project or to do list, I basically have a separate notes in Apple Notes on my phone. I'll just add it to my list of projects and I archive it again. So the goal is to use email inbox as a triaging room. So you triage emails just like when you go to a hospital, they don't operate on you in the waiting room. The waiting room is a triaging place where they kind of shunt you off to different places based on what your ailment is. Email inbox is a triaging room where at least for me, I can't deal with like 50, forget 5000, I can't even deal with 50 emails in my inbox. I get very anxious. I need to clear it all out and I need to have a separate place on my phone which is a list of projects I'm working on. And then what I do is I use calendar. So basically I will say, okay, I have to prepare for this thing, I have to do this memo. I will block off time on my calendar. I'll estimate how much time it's going to take to do a first draft. I typically believe in a two draft process for anything and most of my stuff is writing memos or presentations really. Unfortunately we are all information workers. I think at some point much of what I do will be automated and thankfully now we have these AI agents which make it much easier sketch and automation. Either case, it's writing content really of different kinds to perform, to influence people and whatever the case may be or to make a case for something. But it's really time blocking on calendar coupled with this GTD coupled with his Apple notes are my project management tools. That's it. Nothing more complex than anything else. Simplicity for me is the key.

Yeah, I love GTD. I discovered it probably in the late 90s and it changed my life.

What facet of that is that? I don't even know what GTD is. I just know this one thing. There must be other things to gtd, right? Besides this email thing.

Oh my goodness, that's so huge. Yes. So the creator of GTD is David Allen and he wrote the book Getting Things Done that sold many millions of copies and it's got a whole system. For example, everything that is more than one action is a project. And so you have a projects list and you have a next actions list. And then there's also someday maybes where you park stuff that you're not going to keep looking at over and over again. Maybe just once a week you review your projects list and your someday maybes, but you're really working off of your next actions. If, let's say you're going to buy a car, you don't have to figure out all the things involved in buying a car. You just need to figure out what's the next action. Is it to send an email to the dealership? Is it to do some research on different car models? Is it to go in for a test drive? You don't have to map everything out, just find what the next action is, make sure it's one action and not like a mini project, and then that goes on your next actions list. And then you assign it a context. Is that an errand or is that something at my phone is like a phone call or is it an email, Is it something that I do at home or at the office? And so you can sort or filter actually by context and say, well, I'm sitting in the doctor's office waiting for my appointment. I can do stuff that involves my phone, but I can't do stuff that requires me to be on an errand or at home or at the office. So I don't want to see any of those items in my filter set. So just show me, for example, phone calls I can make. And you can also filter by project or by area of focus. An area of focus is ongoing, not a final finished project comes to completion, you have a finish line and you're done, it's closed. But an area of focus like being a father or a husband is ongoing thing. Right. So you don't want to treat it like a project. It's an area of focus. So there I'm just scratching the surface of this whole methodology, but it's been life changing for me. And it turns your brain from a warehouse of trying to remember all the things that you need to do and all the little nuggets of wisdom and knowledge that you picked up to having a trusted system where all that goes into important. That word trusted. You need to underline that because if you don't trust it, then you go back to using your brain as the warehouse instead. And once you switch from your brain being the warehouse to that GTD based system, then your brain can be a factory, which is what it's meant to be for inventing and creating and innovating. Yeah, your brain is meant to be a factory, not a warehouse. That's one of the primary philosophies of gtd.

I love that. I love that. I didn't know some of these details. I forgot these details. I just use. That's the thing. It's an expansive program and so you can, I think, pick and choose the things that work for you basically right out of that.

Yeah. So it's really good. I have my email organized based on gtd. So I have an action folder, I have a read review folder, I have a Someday maybe folder and archives. And then my assistant, she will go into my inbox, keep it at inbox zero. So every day there's only stuff in the inbox from that day until she goes in and files. Like she goes in multiple times a day to file stuff. And I try and stay out of my inbox. It's tempting, but I try and stay out of the inbox and just go straight to the action folder and only Focus on that. And then once in a while, once every day or two, I'll go into the read review folder. That's where this, the kind of the CC type stuff is. I just need an FYI. I don't need to action anything. And that's been a game changer for me. I can't imagine maintaining my own email inbox anymore. I haven't done that for ages. That's a poor use of time for pretty much everybody.

Amazing. I had no idea. I was talking to a GTD maestro there.

And I went to his workshops. I've had him on this podcast. I've had him on twice actually. Another thing that I just love, love, love that he didn't write up in the book, but he told me in one of the interviews that we did is if you have an overwhelming amount of information, let's say in your inbox, let's say you've allowed it to accumulate to thousands of emails, instead of trying to cut that down, all you do is you create a new folder called DMZ Demilitarized Zone and you drop all of those emails into that folder and you start fresh with an inbox zero and you maintain your email hygiene from there. Not trying to go back and worry about all the stuff that's been sitting in there for six, eight, ten months. That's really helpful. DMZ folder.

I like the dmz. I like that.

Yeah. And that can apply to any aspect of your life where you've gotten out of control, with papers, with files, with to dos, anything. Say, all right, instead of declaring to do list bankruptcy or burning all my files, let's just put it all in the DMZ folder and start fresh. And I'm going to have better hygiene from here. So let's talk a bit about agile lean, the stand up meetings, all this sort of stuff that is more programmer focused. But a marketer may not be familiar with what would be some of the best strategies and systems and ideas and ways of being that you know from the programming world, managing programming teams and so forth, that would be ideal or at least somewhat beneficial for a marketer to know about, maybe implement.

I think one of the most interesting ones is the notion of post mortems and pre mortems where in software development before you. A pre mortem is basically before you launch something, you basically try to say what could go wrong here? If you're sitting here a few days or a few weeks after this thing launches or goes live and saying it's a failure maybe a year after that what could have gone wrong? So everyone lists all the things that could go wrong ahead of time. And then you're like, okay, do we have a mitigation plan for each of them? And so I think that's a good strategy for almost any function, because many times we are all optimizing for the happy case or happy path, which is all things go right. But I think giving permission to people and encouraging them to talk about the things that could go wrong ahead of time and formulate a plan for each of them is a very powerful exercise. So that's the pre mortem. The second thing is a postmortem. And then recording that and really having an action plan. And then you see the pre mortem will surface many things, that many risks, basically, that people we didn't actually articulate. And then you come up with a plan ahead of the launch to fix them. Post mortem is the opposite. Right. Which is after something happens. Having a postmortem discipline is something engineering teams do continuously. And so I think that's something that many functions need to do better, which is once you have a launch, whatever the case is, once you start a project, kick out project a few weeks later, you need to have a postmortem, a retro, as they call it. Right. Retros are very common in engineering. What is a retro? And retros happen even if there's not a launch. How did the last few weeks go? What is working, what's not working? And what could we do better, essentially? And continuing to keep being intellectually honest with yourself so that you can keep improving is really important. I think that's the thing that I think engineers, if there's one thing they're really good at, is being completely, brutally honest, maybe in an apolitical way, and it drops people off the wrong way. But you'll get the unvarnished truth for the most part from engineers.

Yeah, I like that. I don't think in my company, we do enough of the pre and post mortems. Even if a client leaves, let's say that they're having financial issues and it's not our performance, but they still left anyways. Maybe they laid off some of their marketing department and stopped work with other vendors as well, and we just move on. You know, it's like, oh, okay, we got to replace that client with another one. This actually happened not too long ago, and it was a big client. We didn't do a postmortem. We didn't do analysis on what worked, what didn't work. What would we do differently next time. How could we have helped them in a more meaningful way as they were, as the wheels were starting to go off the bus for them financially? When did we learn about it? Like, how did we react or respond? These are good questions.

Really. A lot of the postmortem is to uncover root causes or process issues, things that we can fix for next time. That's the key thing of postmortem. It's what are we going to take away that we can use for the next client, the next incident, the next event, the next launch? And that's really the key thing to improve. That's how you continue to improve your process. As I said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. So how do we avoid becoming insane and basically fix our process? And the postmortem provides a way for us to. Again, I think the key is avoiding blame. And so you'll see the postmortem, there's simply a doc that is maintained and there's a person who's like taking notes and then everyone is just, you know, what went well? Everything, even the worst situation is something that would have gone well. What didn't go well? It's not even the person is what didn't go well. It's about not the person, it's about the what versus the who. What didn't go well and how can you fix it? What's the implications going forward? Very simple. Very simple. Yep.

So what would be an example of a root cause that you were able to ferret out from doing postmortems and make a change in one of the companies that you helped lead? Something maybe relevant to our listener.

I think one was at one of the companies, I advise we spent a tremendous amount of money in. I think the company came across a marketing tool or an ad platform that promised very low cost downloads. App downloads. So they had a consumer app, or Was it a B2B? It was a prosumer app. And so they basically wanted to. They were growing, but they wanted to go up in terms of. They wanted to get their scale grow. And this was a few years ago. This is in the mid. It was 2017, 2018. They basically were unable to themselves get their app downloads increase. They had a viral channel going, but it wasn't growing that fast. It was growing, retention was strong. So they wanted to grow, they wanted to scale acquisition. So they came across this company that promised very, very fast growth in app downloads. And so they basically said, okay, let's try it. So they gave a $10,000 budget. Turns out it increased their app downloads by I think they got 50,000 app downloads, so 20 cents per app download. And it seemed that some percent of these people were converting. So the payback period, et cetera, seemed good. So then they went to I think 100,000 from there and that which was a big part of the marketing budget. And unfortunately right there, even though it got 500,000 app downloads, the download to conversion to customer ratio was extremely low. And so I think in the, I remember very well we did a postmart and we were like, how did we go wrong? We did start small with 10,000. What did we do here that was wrong? Why did we blow up all this budget? I think we realized that this was, this company was actually a scam artist where they would basically, for the first small budget, they would get you good customers and good traffic. But then as you scaled, they would figure out they would basically just get you really crappy traffic and then you had no recourse at that point. So what we should have done, and we are going to do, I mean the company basically is going to do or has done since, is any new channel. We asked them for two or three customer references to real customer reference and we talked to them to understand how it worked for them at scale before we ever engage with any new channel. So I think we just didn't do that and that was bad diligence. So I think that from now on then became part of the playbook. For any new channel, any new vendor, any new vendor of any kind across the company, any third party, we are dealt with. Got to get a reference check. Will not be approved. Budget will not be approved. Before you think of a reference check, do a reference check.

Yeah, that's great. It's a good lesson. Expensive, but a good lesson. Yeah.

Painful, but good lessons. Sometimes the best lessons are the most painful.

Yeah. How many companies do you advise? Currently?

Very few, I think. I'm an investor. I think with investment comes advising by automat by default. But pure advising, it's tailed off over the years. I think maybe half a dozen maybe. But even that's just, I think, active. Very, very small number. It's mostly investing. I invest in a lot of companies maybe I've invested in. Once you're investing, you're on the cap table. Till the company has a liquidity event, dies or continues running, you're on the cap table. So probably hundreds of companies. I mean, definitely more than 200. Could be 300 or so.

Wow. You have invested in 300 companies?

Yep.

My goodness. I don't think I know anybody else who's invested in that many companies. That's awesome.

I mean, it's over 15 years. So if you do something, think about how many clients you've helped. Right? I mean in some ways if you do something for 15 years. I started in actually now 17 years, 2007. I say 15 because I think 27, 15 years ago is 17 years ago. So yeah, if you do something over 17 years, 300 is not that much. It's only like 10 or 15 a year. 15 a year or something like that. 15 or 17 a year.

I think that's pretty impressive. So let's go back to this idea of applying programming and agile type systems to marketing. How about standup meetings? How about weekly sprints? What sort of recommendations do you have around these sorts of approaches?

I used to run these things many, many years ago. Over the last 15, 10, 15 years, I'm much more of one level above these sprints. I think they have evolved around how to use them. Especially during COVID I think people realized that having everyone in person, I mean literally back then you used to stand around a table when everything was in person. Right then it became remote. And then people realized I do think a weekly meeting is important as a checkpoint. That said, people also realize that look, if you're just going around and talking about what you did, what is the impact of that meeting? So I think people have started focusing more on problems that people want solved versus just a status report. I think just a status report. Everyone comes together, five minutes, gives a status report and goes off times when a status report could just be given over email or some other slack channel or something like that. So I think some of these weekly things have become more around only raise things that are problems that are blocking you from accomplishing your goal versus like the only people who should actually raise their hand is people who are not on track to hit their weekly or monthly goal and really ask for help. And then everyone jumps in to figure out how to help them and takes action to help them versus like everyone's just giving a status report. Increasingly, I feel it's the same thing for meetings broadly. I think we all realized during COVID and I think many companies declared meeting bankruptcy where they're like, look, there's too many meetings with calendar. I think Shopify did this famously where they just removed all meetings, everyone's calendars and any meeting above and company that said any meetings about two people, you've got to one on ones yeah, you should meet with your colleagues one on one. Any meeting about two people. You've got to have a very high bar to cyber meeting because it's just a multiplicative waste of time for most meetings, especially status updates. So my take on most things is, unless there's a very clear reason most, the meeting shouldn't exist and should be done asynchronously over Slack or email. And you should only have a meeting if you're trying to make a decision, solve a problem or unblock someone or something like that, or make forward progress. But most things should happen asynchronously.

Yeah, I remember hearing about or reading about, I think it was Jeff Bezos, maybe it was Elon Musk. When he would go into a meeting and if there was no agenda, he would cancel the meeting. It doesn't matter how many people were in it. If there was no agenda for the meeting, he'd leave immediately and he'd cancel the meeting. So they couldn't keep meeting without him, the meeting's over.

I completely couldn't agree more with that philosophy. And that should be the case. Any decision you take, whoever the meeting person is who called the meeting, they better have done pre work and typically have a document or something sent ahead of time so that people can come and not spend, you still might want to spend five minutes reviewing the document. But if it's a long document, and of course documents need to be short, no one has patience to read long documents. But yeah, meeting pre reads are also very important to make these meetings be efficient and not waste people's time.

Yeah. So what does pre work look like besides an agenda? What are some of the pre work items that you would expect prior to a meeting?

It depends on the meeting type. And so for example, if it's a decision, then you have to ideally follow a framework. I think I created a decision framework called Square, not square, called Spade at Square, along with a few people. And that decision framework, spade is now used by many companies in Silicon Valley. And that involves, it's only to be used for, I would say, important decisions that are one way, one way, door decision, another term that Bezos coined where they are irreversible in some way. Once you make it, it's like changing the name of the company or like pricing or something. It's just hard to reverse it. It's very painful to reverse it. Almost irreversible. And so I think for those, you need a lot of thought and you need to really consider alternatives. You need to have the right person making the decision you need to have right people, they consult, and you need to really understand each alternative, how it compares against the other and what you're optimizing for first and foremost. So there's this framework that says that kind of walks you through pulling it all together. And there's a lot of, I mean there's some overhead, it can take a few days to even a few weeks sometimes if it's a pretty complex decision. And you put that together and there's multiple, it's multiple rounds of discussions with the people you consult in fleshing out the pros and cons of each alternative, in evaluating it, sometimes even quantitatively against the objective function you want to optimize for. And you pull it all together. And then at the end you come to a decision meeting where kind of, you basically talk through. I think there are various ways of voting on this. I personally believe in private voting on decisions so that you're not going around the room and saying what do you think out of all these choices? Because if you, I'm sure you've been in meetings where the first person what they say and they anchor, there's an instant anchoring effect on everyone else and everyone looks to see what the peer or manager is saying. And it's much harder to go against what say, maybe a person in power is saying, as I say, Hippo. Right, Hippo, the highest paid person in the room. And so I think having the consulted people give their feedback or the option they prefer with their rationale to the person in private by email, Slack or whatever the case may be, or even in person. And then you call a decision meeting at the end, which is around hey. And then the person makes a decision, getting all their input and feedback and their choices and they basically tell everyone, here's the decision I made, here's why. And then everyone has to disagree and commit, really, the meeting is to disagree and commit, which means that even though you disagree with the meeting, with the decision, you have to commit to implementing and following through. And that's an important character of great companies, for great teams, where it's not about what the decision is, obviously that matters, but the quality of decision making. Everyone's voices need to be heard and the right process needs to be followed. And then once decision is made, you've got to disagree. You can't undermine it because a decision needs everyone's support to get implemented.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And if you don't do it, it sounds like that would be a pretty big source of dysfunction in the organization. Is there a name for this whole framework that you've been describing?

Yes, it's called Spade, S, P, A, D, E S stands for setting, B stands for people, A stands for alternatives, D stands for decision and E stands for explain. Because the explanation phase turns out is the most important phase turns out most companies, one of the biggest sources of discontented companies is that people don't understand how decisions are being made at the company. In fact, the Spade framework came over because at square at an all hands actually we had done an employee survey in 2014 or 15 that revealed that one of the highest negative, one of the highest negative feedback scores from employees was people felt decision making was not transparent. It is not clear who was making decisions, why they were making them and how they were thinking about it. And so I was assigned to basically create a framework for making decisions and that led to Spade. So if you search for my name and Spade, you'll find it.

Yeah. I found a nice article you wrote on Coda IO about the framework. I'll include that in the show notes for this episode. It's really good stuff. There's a great story in there about how you'd helped Larry, Sergey and Eric with difficult problems using your framework and stuff. Yeah, really cool. So what would be the things that our listener needs to know or do in order to prepare for the big shakeup that's coming because of AI? With most jobs becoming redundant or or unnecessary or automated, including creative jobs, what should our listener do to skate to where the puck is going to use a Wayne Gretzky quote, Become a power.

User of AI tools in your profession. Stay on top of AI tools and become a user. Because I do think if you're offering a service, I think the future is not going to be pure AI. It's going to be human, hybrid human and AI. And I think AI enabled services can help you scale your business massively. I think the future of a consulting firm is not pure. It's basically I think nowadays people have been saying it's the one person billion dollar company. Right. I think that's still a far fetched. But it just showed that earlier you might need to have a team to do stuff, but now you can scale yourself as a solopreneur, as an entrepreneur, significantly using AI. If you think of AI as an assistant, they can help you serve your clients much better. And I will repeat the same thing I said earlier. You can't be afraid of it. Just like I think even though every Industrial Revolution or every revolution has basically maybe in Some cases eliminated jobs. It's also created new jobs of different kinds. So we need to basically understand these tools, use them, become parties of the tools so we understand how we can be part of the go forward thing, which I think is going to be a hybrid human and AI future. Not a pure AI future. Not a pure human future.

Yeah, yeah, hope so. So what sort of new jobs do you envision being created or in the process of being created now?

I think it's the same jobs as always. I think new jobs itself. I do think training these AI models is going to be very interesting. I do think for maybe the next few years being able to converse with these AI models and use them, what used to be called prompt engineering, but probably might be called AI fine tuning or something might become a very interesting job. I think if you think about SEO, right, what, you're the number one top, one of the top people in the world and that itself is going to evolve, Right. If you think about it, SEO is never going to be dead. It is just going to evolve. So I think just being a lawyer is never going to be dead, it's going to evolve. So every job that we have today that serves a fundamental human or business need is going to evolve. Being a hairdresser is going to evolve. Everything is going to evolve. So we just need to be part of the evolution.

Yeah, absolutely. So what have we not spoken about that you would like to share like a wisdom nugget before we close out the episode? Something that maybe would be universally applicable to everybody, but we haven't discussed it so far.

One of my core beliefs is, is belief in helping others without any expectation of reward in the near term. I believe in the notion of karma and the fact that everything evens out in some way over long periods of time. So I think it's very important to not be very calculated in. Oh, if someone asks you for help, what do I get out of it? In fact, not do that calculation. If it's easy enough now, if you have to go massively out of your way and it's super inconvenient and it's hard for you to do, that's different. But if it's an easy thing, especially in the information age, a lot of help is just writing an email or tweeting something in favor in support of someone that you believe in or doing something, those are easy things to do. And I do think, I mean, I've written so many letters of recommendation of people. I mean, I know them and I know them reasonably well, but they've just approached me and it took me five minutes or 10 minutes of my time to just send a note to someone or help them in a different way, or connect them with someone. It's just humanity and turns out. And who knows if it's true or not. But I attribute something good that happens to me. It's validated to something good I did for someone a few years ago or a few months ago or a few days ago, who knows? But that's my belief. And I think it also makes you feel good about yourself. To be honest, I think it's a great way to feel. I think gratitude, I mean, people report. I've seen studies of people report feeling good about themselves after you do something good for someone else. So I do believe just helping someone, if someone asks for your help, if it's not that hard, if it doesn't put you out in a big way, is one of the best ways to feel good about yourself. Which is selfish in some ways, but also have good things happen to you in the future.

Yeah. Do you have a story to share, A personal story of karma and how that showed up in your life?

Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, I advise the company. I help this company after Google, a colleague that I worked with, I just helped them a few times and turns out, I mean, they basically referred one of my best ever angel investments to me. Two, three years later, I had forgotten about them. And then they suddenly pinged me saying, hey, this is an entrepreneur you should meet. And it was one of the best ever companies. It was incredible for me for many aspects. And I just done a couple of calls with them. I enjoyed that. I learned from that call. And they thought so highly of the help I provided that they remembered it. And several years later, I was like, oh, yeah, sure, that's. That company introduces amazing entrepreneur that I invested in. And that was one of the best angel investments I've ever made.

That's cool. All right, well, that's a great way to end this.

And Stefan, you are the same way. You help so many people. I'm sure you. I'm curious, do you have a story like this to share? I'm sure you help so many people. I'm curious because as this happened to you.

Yeah, I mean, it's how I live my life, really. So I hear from somebody years later that I helped or that I introduced somebody to or whatever. The thing is that it's important to not claim credit for creating that opportunity or making that introduction or whatever. We're just agents for God. We're just delivery agents or pizza delivery people for God's miracles. And if, for example, I've had multiple couples working in my organization that started as singles and then they ended up getting married. And for a while there, I thought, oh, wow, I've created a company where I've helped some families get started. That's pretty cool. And then I realized afterwards, maybe years afterwards, like, there's nothing for me to claim credit for. That was written in the stars. That was meant to be. That was destiny for those souls to come together and become soulmates. I was gifted the blessing of being able to facilitate that. But it was destiny. And because of my good karma, I was given that role to play of bringing them together or helping facilitate in some manner.

Amazing. I mean, you've always been so gracious when asked for, hey, can you work with this company or just do a call? I mean, that just permeates in how you live your life. So thank you for that.

Yeah, of course, of course. Well, for me, I feel like we're all soul family. As Ram Dass famously said, we're all just walking each other home.

I love that saying.

All right, so if our listener wants to learn more from you, follow you on social platforms and all that sort of stuff, where do we send them?

Twitter is probably the best place. It's G O K U L R Gokulr on Twitter, so if you just search for my first name, last name, you'll just find me. Just search for me on Google and you'll find it. Thanks to great SEO work that Stephan has done and helped me think about. It's up there.

Awesome. And Gokul, I want to say publicly how much I appreciate you. You've been wonderful support to me personally over the many years. You've given me book blurbs or the testimonial praise quotes to go on the front matter of multiple editions of my books. And you're very supportive of me and I really appreciate you.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure working with you and knowing you, and I'm excited for our partnership to continue over the next few decades and beyond.

Yeah. Amen. All right, well, Gokul listener, thank you. It's just a beautiful life. So make it even more beautiful by doing something unexpected and wonderful for somebody you care about. And we'll catch you on the next episode. I'm your host, Stefan Spencer, signing off.

If you want to hear more conversations like this about applying product development approaches to marketing, then I recommend episode 38 with Sujan Patel. Episode 287 with Matt Astofan and episode 447 with Alan Dibb. Also, I invite you to check out the show notes to transcript, action based checklist and all the URLs mentioned in this interview with Gokul Rajaram@marketingspeak.com 450. Thanks for listening to the Marketing Speak podcast. This is your host, Stefan Spencer. I'm the founder of the SEO agency NetConcepts, co author of the Art of SEO and author of Google Power Search. In addition to this podcast, I also host Get Yourself Optimized which is about up leveling your life, relationships, peer group, career, business and spirituality. If you want more traffic and you want to work with me and my team, visit www.netconcepts.com. the site also contains a wealth of resources that include online courses, screencasts, webinars, white papers, articles and more. To reach me directly, email stefantephenspencer.com or visit my personal website at www.stefanspencer.com. until next time, ra.