Final Recap and Student Discussion | Blitzscaling 20

This is session 20 of technology enabled Lit Scaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Allen Blue and Chris Yeh. This lecture recaps the class and features a lengthy student discussion. This podcast has been produced by Greylock Partners. For more podcasts, class notes, slides and videos, please visit greylock.com so thank you.

Everyone, those people who have come to all the class sessions and who are here for the very final class in CS 183C technology enabled blitzscaling. We're going to be pretty informal today because we have food and drinks outside. We're going to be partying a bit, but. But since Stanford seems to want us to approach this as an academic exercise, we thought it would be a good idea to have a final lecture for the class. So we're gonna keep it pretty informal. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the high level. I'm talking a little bit about the high level concepts of the class and hopefully remind you of some of the classes that you may have forgotten along the way. And Alan will talk a little bit about LinkedIn and how some of the lessons have worked there. And John will bat cleanup and provide information that will be of interest and useful to you throughout your lives.

And this should be as interactive as you can be. So just raise your hand and ask questions as we go along.

So very quickly.

And what about videoing, just so people know what the rules are?

Oh, yes, of course. So we are taking video, but at a certain point in time we'll go ahead and cut it off so that we're not going to videotape the entire party, just the part we're having this discussion. And besides which, it's going to be really hard to talk into this microphone while eating a burrito.

Chris, questions that won't be videoed or. Yeah, we can, we can do that. So we'll turn off the video. Definitely won't turn off the video. Yeah, we'll turn off the video. And I guess.

But not yet.

And I guess read since his regards, he's doing annual LinkedIn planning types of things, which is what happens as you get to these atrocious scales.

Yes.

By atrocious I mean awesome.

Yes, awesome.

Awesomely atrocious.

Awesome. And a little bit more painful to run unless you're compassionate, as we learned.

At any rate. So as you know, this class is about blitz scaling, which is rapid, relentless growth. And we've looked at a lot of different issues around Blitzscaling over the course of the class. Probably one of the most important things to Start with is, when do you blitz scale? And we talked with people like Mariam Nafisi over at Minted, who actually talked about how she spent years growing the company before she shifted to blitzscaling. We also talked with Brian Chesky at Airbnb, who talked about how, interestingly enough, an external threat, the Samwer brothers, actually caused Airbnb to dramatically increase the pace of expansion, especially into Europe. So what we see with blitzscaling is that oftentimes the external conditions will determine whether or not it makes sense to start the blitzscaling process. We also saw that sometimes split scaling occurs whether you like it or not. Shashir Marotra talked about how at YouTube, he went into the CFO's office and the CFO put up the charts of how much money they were spending and how quickly that amount was growing and said, this may very well be the worst business model the world has ever seen. Well, that's split scaling, but that's split scaling that you actually have to address, not just as a strategy, but as a condition in and of itself. And finally, I want you guys to think back to when Reed Hastings from Netflix came and he talked about the importance of network effects to Blitzscaling. And I think that Alan may comment on it a little bit in terms of LinkedIn, but one of the key reasons to blitzscale is when there are returns to being the first person to achieve scale. And as Reid pointed out, there are certain businesses where those returns don't exist. Many years ago, they started a company called CDNow which sold CDs online. Probably all of us were customers of it way back when. But as soon as Amazon began selling CDs, they were flattened like the coyote by the Roadrunner. So there were no network effects there. But for a company like LinkedIn, there are very strong network effects. Alan may touch upon that later on the lessons of how do you blitzscale the techniques of blitzscaling. Well, one thing you guys have probably all heard from Paul Graham and many others is to do things that don't scale. And we saw how many of the speakers who came in, in fact, did things that didn't scale. Whether it was Larry and Sergey interviewing every single candidate at Google and putting all sorts of crazy rules on who they could and couldn't hire, and then breaking all those rules all along. Brian Chesky talking about how he actually went to his various hosts and photographed their apartments for them because they did a terrible job on their own. And they're like, wait a minute, this is the CEO I Just signed up, and he signed me up. And he comes over and he photographs it, and he's bringing an air mattress. This is kind of weird. And obviously he doesn't do that any longer. It was important to achieving scale. And remember Nirav Tolia talking about nextdoor and how his engineers didn't believe they could possibly get 100 neighborhoods that first summer and they would actually go door to door to make sure they could get their neighborhoods. This is an Internet startup working like a Fuller Brush salesman going door to door. But once you get that first hundred fans, those hundred people that love your company, then you can get onto the Blitzscaling train. And as the company grows, all of a sudden you have to start changing what you do. Maybe in some cases, it involves people hiring from the outside. We heard from Selena tabakawala over at SurveyMonkey that one of the key things they did at SurveyMonkey was to begin to bring people in from the outside who had the experience of scaling the technology that the internal team didn't have. Sometimes it was by acquisition. We also heard from. Let's see. Looking at my notes, we also heard from Mariam Nafisi over at Minted. She wanted to grow her team from the inside. And when she wasn't blitzscaling, she had the luxury to go ahead and give them the time to develop. But once they were moving at such an aggressive pace, she had to look outside. Although she did have a strategy, as you may recall. She went and hired people for HR and finance and things like that who had the experience and tried to keep the internal people focused on the product and the business side of the world. But the interesting thing is, even though you're trying to change what you do as a founder, as a CEO, which both of you have been, you also need to keep some things the same. And some of the things that I'll remember from the class are the ways in which, even at the most enormous scales, the leaders were trying to find ways to keep things the same. So remember how Eric Schmidt would talk about products at Google? One of the big things was, hey, every great project starts off as one professor and one grad student. And they would continually break it up into small teams. And I think that that's a theme you saw with a number of the folks involved. It's also a question of culture. I think that we've talked a lot about culture over the course of the class, and that's something that actually Reid has been emphasizing a lot recently as well, how culture is the way that we hold each other accountable. We hold each other accountable as peers and horizontally, in addition to the vertical accountability of management. And as the company grows larger and larger, if you rely on vertical management, you as an individual can only touch so many people, and there are so many layers between you and the people you're trying to affect that you need to use mechanisms like the Netflix culture deck or like Brian Chesky's weekly emails in order to reach everyone.

I think the things that occurred to me as we went through, the things that kind of jumped out at me is how clear, maybe three things were. One is how clear each of the leaders was about the phasing of the company, about how you're in this phase, that you needed to scale this particular thing, but not that. I think they were all super articulate about when they were in a marketing blitzscale or a user growth blitzscale or what have you. And I wasn't sure that was going to be the case. But in retrospect, it felt like that in Mozilla too. We were clearly in a user growth time, and then we weren't quite sure how to get out of that user growth time. So that was one of the things. The second thing I would observe is that I think everybody, with the exception of one or two people, they were thirsty for finding other people to learn from and other models to learn from. And it was really obvious when you had one or two speakers who didn't do that and were trying to invent everything from scratch. And I think it's harder when you're trying to invent everything. It's easier when you go talk to models and you're aggressive about finding mentors. You talked a lot about Bill Campbell, for example, and that. So I mean, those are the two big things I would take away. But then the third thing I would say is when Jeff was talking about compassion, he spent a lot of time talking about organizational compassion. I think that that was another way to talk about culture or emails, whatever. When I talk about culture, I talk about alignment, which is how do you help people make the same decisions whether you're in the room or not? And how do you make like, how do you set the rules of the road? And so I would say that my observation is that everybody was looking for models outside. Everybody's clear about phases and what was important, when and then they were all clear about how to get alignment in the organization. I think the alignment conversation, you guys probably all noticed this. Like Jeff, we hardly talked at all about products. We talked almost all about organizational Compassion, organizational alignment. I think the bigger you get, the, the more you look for these leverage tools to do that.

It's difficult to find out sort of what phase you're in when you're actually in the midst of it. It's like the boundaries are not super clear, but the need. And Jeff emphasized this for speed and quality of decision making and being willing to say that's exactly where we need to be right now. Even if you're not 100% right, at least you've decided, I think is key because knowing where you are in the process actually means a lot for your ability to be able to execute in a particular location. If you don't know, then you're going to get very fuzzy and it's going to get extremely difficult to actually make it succeed.

And I think we didn't. Sorry, one second. And I think we didn't look at counter examples too much about companies that did blitzscale and now didn't. I guess maybe Yahoo is the big example. And I think even with Marissa, you heard a lot about how do you recreate the conditions and recreate alignment so you can get back to where you were and where you started. I think maybe in the future we might try to find somebody willing to come in and talk about the counter case where it was going up and then what do you have? Yeah, so a lot of speakers have stress culture, as we just noted, and.

Just stressed a few days ago as well.

But from like a very naive perspective. You look at a lot of major Silicon Valley tech companies, you're like, oh, they all seem to have the same culture. Oh, but that's not.

Yeah, that's not, that's not a culture.

That's not culture. Oh, okay. So what would be, I guess what is the. Yeah, so here's, here's the thing you said. The question is more or less like, look, every Silicon Valley company has the same culture. You got skateboards and free food and slack and all that perks. Yeah. So culture is how you make decisions. That's the whole thing.

Yeah. And Jeff has a very distinctive. And he might have mentioned it.

I think culture is super misunderstood, profoundly misunderstood.

So you have values which help you make decisions. You have culture which defines how you work together and those things together. Culture and values is primarily about ensuring that different teams, wherever you are, no matter where you're living or what you're working on, they have the same sort of rules of engagement to allow them to work together effectively.

And culture is both in the things that you do and also Things you don't do, whether you. How you hire, how you talk about your customers, how you talk about your partners, it's everything. But it's primarily, how do you make decisions, from very large decisions to very small decisions, and how do you try to make sure that the organization makes them in a consistent way? And free food doesn't really have anything to do with that. Free food is a tactic around how do you get people to talk to each other? You know, letting people have scooters or whatever or, you know, hoverboards in the office. That's just a thing you do because that's what people like doing. But that's not the important bits of culture.

I think it's also important to note that so many of the elements of culture are set in the very early stages of scale. I think that, you know, having been there from the very beginning, Alan, I think you can see that there are key elements of LinkedIn culture that are established when you were all in just one room together.

It's absolutely ridiculous. It's almost like the interactions the founders have with each other just basically get expanded to basically describe the way the entire sort of, like, physics of the system works, the physics of the culture work in the future. It's remarkable. You have to be aware of it, but, you know, trying to shape it too much is a mistake. It's just not a good use of time.

Sure. What are some examples of distinctions in culture that you've seen? Examples of distinctions in culture that we've seen. Well, Google's pretty different than Twitter. It's pretty different than Facebook. What are good examples of why that's true?

So I think that we've heard that there are not good cultures and bad cultures. There's strong cultures and weak cultures.

I don't buy that. Just for the record, I know Brian said that, and Brian's super smart, so maybe he's right, but that doesn't feel right to me. I think there are.

So it depends on.

I have objectively observed horrible cultures.

So you have objectively observed cultures that we're. Yeah, we're not gonna name those names.

Strong and bad.

After we turn off the video, maybe we'll name some of those names. But the definition. I mean, again, the definition of culture is not necessarily does it make people happy or even does it make the company effective? Although that, I think, is a good way to judge a culture. The question of the culture is how much does it shape the behavior of the people in it?

Yeah. So maybe one example. So, you know, Jeff, bezos and Amazon culture got pretty pilloried recently. I think Amazon has a very distinct culture around very hard work, but also being intensely prepped for every meeting. So any meaningful meeting at Amazon doesn't have a slide deck. It starts with a two page or three page write up and everybody sits in silence and reads the write up for the first 10 or 15 minutes of the meeting. What that says is everybody who's doing this is going to read up, you're going to have time to read and you expect them to come and engage, not just talk to slides. That's a good example of a culture that has impacts. Apple, for example, is different now than it was when I was there, but it has an extremely segmented culture that only comes together at the very top of the organization. And so if you ask people what project they're working on at Apple, what I've heard people say is that they often spend a lot of the beginnings of meetings trying to figure out who's disclosed on what, who's allowed to know what, and talk about to the others. You figure that out. Now it's hard to be critical of Apple because that place works like a charm, like a dream. It's a great company, but it's not one that I could run. At Mozilla, we were the opposite. At Mozilla we were completely open and transparent and anything anybody wanted to talk about, I talked about in public. Often actually on the web and Twitter and stuff.

And probably the best example, the best known example of a culture for an organization is the military culture. Military culture is extremely distinctive. It's extremely hierarchical, it's extremely organized and disciplined and it works great. Would you do that with a company? I don't know. But it's a great example of a.

Culture people have tried. It usually doesn't work, especially in Silicon.

Valley.

If you don't have the luxury of spending time in a company to actually experience the culture. If you're a guy interviewing at a startup or something, what's like a 1 inch insightful question you could ask the founder to actually get a sense of the culture?

There's a bunch like one or question.

Is what is an insightful question.

How do you try to figure out if you're interviewing or something like that? How do you figure out what questions you can ask to figure out what the culture is? I think often it's how do you disagree, how do you fight, how do you argue to ask? I think poking around, that's probably most important. So what happens if I have an idea and I Disagree with you CEO, and try to figure that out to the extent you can work through it in really concrete, as far down as you can in the details.

Agreed.

One other question I will ask people about culture is I'll say, well, can you tell me about the last time that the culture caused you to make a decision that went against the financial incentives? Because ultimately, if your cultural values don't actually override the financial considerations, then you don't actually have cultural values.

Yeah. What are things people notice? I think maybe it was probably, maybe four or five weeks ago, we just started talking to leaders of very large organizations. Now, what are some things that surprised people as we went through anything?

I mean, one thing that really confirm my own experiences, but also, like, it seems like hiring is really difficult and also the most important thing because essentially all the things that people talk about, whether it's like compassion management or all these like, tools and like toolboxes kind of underlie like a good people. Like, you have to have the good people and share trust. You don't have that. You don't have compassionate management. You don't have, you know, firing, you know, nice way or whatever. You don't have anything else like that. So, yeah, the one like question that I have, you know, I would never have to ask, really, is that as.

You'Re blitzscaling, where you have to have.

The speed of hiring, like, how do.

You actually, I mean, where does your alignment look like?

Yeah. So I mean, the basic thing you said is that one observation is that people and hiring is the main thing, and how do you get great people? I think that my two cents are that almost anybody who's been successful will tell you they spend most of their time trying to figure out how to get great people in the organization, how to let them win, and that's kind of it, how to try to help them win. So I was talking to somebody every once in a while. As a venture capitalist, you see lots of founders, and we saw a founder the other day, and I had a very strong positive reaction and this other person had a very strong negative reaction, which is kind of unusual for us as a team. And I was trying to figure it out because I think at this point in my career, I've had probably. I've probably done 10,000 interviews, and I've probably hired 1,000 or 2,000 people. And so I feel like I've gotten a fairly good sense. And you start to develop over time. But even at this part, 20 years, in 1,000, 10,000 interviews, whatever it is, it's still hard to assess and you still make mistakes and you find that it's a little bit about where your mental state is and their mental state is. But I guess the first thing I would say is you just practice, practice, practice, keep doing it. The other thing is I would say as an organization, especially early, you need to talk about it with each other. So I was talking to another organization that's 20 people and they're trying to figure out how much to quote, standardize their interview process. And they're pre launch, they won't launch for probably six or eight or 12 months. And I was encouraging them to kind of standardize it now and talk about the parts of the interview process and then talk about it together because they have time now without being the pressure of publicly launched and so talk about it, talk about it, talk about it because then a bunch of that stuff will become second nature by the time they launch, by the time they run out of time to talk about it.

I think one thing I also want to call do a callback to Patrick Collison from Stripe who came in and one of the things that struck me in what he said was well, do you want to hire people from the pool of people who walk in the door and apply to you or do you want to hire people from the pool of the greatest people in the world at whatever it is that they're doing? And hiring isn't just a matter of hey, I'm going to put the job listing up and I'm going to hope people come in. People go out there and say, well, they talk to their employees, who's the smartest person you know? And they go out and they find those people and they bring them in other questions. I'm going to use the microphone as a way to bring the questions to people as well. As a matter of fact, new innovation. So pick someone close.

So I think we were talking about surprising, surprising things and Eric seemed like incredibly insightful about how you identify young people who have a lot of potential and will do great things in the future. And Google hires great people, right? I mean the best programmers go and they want to go and work at Google, but if you think about the best products that Google has come up with, they're all acquisition based. And it just tells me that even if you have the best people inside the organization, you have all the money. It's easy to come up with these.

Can we unpack that a little bit? So you said the best programs all want to go to Google. We should debate that for a little while 2015. Is that still true? I don't know. We'll just talk about it. The second thing is you said, well, all their good products came out through acquisition. Was that true?

Except the search engine.

Gmail.

Gmail, Gmail.

But aside from Google search and Gmail, Maps is internal. Well, no, Maps is not internal. Maps is keyhole and keyhole. It's a little bit more complicated than that because Maps is a fusion of Lars and Brett and Brett was internal. Plus ads, like the ad tech ads work pretty well. So this is actually one of the things that Alan was talking on the way in, which is how do you think about trying to create as you get very large, the things you do to be innovative are maybe different than the things you did before. I would argue actually that Google's been better at creating internal innovation than almost any company in the history of the world. Google, oh, Apple's a special case. And I find it hard to. I personally find it hard to reason from Apple as a starting point because it's such an outlier of company, but what I was going to say is that I find Google interesting. I think they've been actually very consistently innovative. You can argue about whether Google was any good or not and stuff like that. You can't argue very much. But Google Photos is a legitimately great product. Came 100% internal. But then the way Google innovates is pretty different the way Facebook innovates. I think Facebook, you could argue right now has more, more acquisition based culture. WhatsApp, Oculus, Instagram, three examples. Although they have a huge AI lab now and they've got drones coming too. So they're doing innovation too.

Yeah, there's a sense in which, I mean as you. This is actually one of the things that I think is worth following up on from the OS 4 and OS 5 conversations when you're actually growing. So as you said, OS 3 is about like doubling down on your core business. OS 4 is essentially about building up that business and making it a mature1. And OS5 is about how do you extend beyond where you actually are. So the problem is that if you're going through OS3 and OS4 and basically you've increased the size of your company a hundredfold during that time. The issue is that the people you've hired, you've hired in large part because they're extraordinary operators, because they're very, very good at what they do. You've come to a place where you've hired a bunch of specialists and in some ways you've Weeded out the original entrepreneurial, or at least you've attenuated the entrepreneurial approach within a company by basically really emphasizing operations. So then the question is like, when you get to OS 5 and LinkedIn just crossed the OS 5 boundary like literally two weeks ago, we're now just over 10,000 people. So with that in mind, like, how do you actually build disruptive innovation? How do you create new things? You already mentioned Facebook. Facebook basically has the ability, based on the strength of their existing business, to buy their way into additional innovation. LinkedIn, we've hired a bunch of people and some of our most innovative leaders inside LinkedIn are the people who came from those acquisitions, which is actually very powerful. But then the question is like, how do you actually home brew it as well? And you can invest in that or you can say we're going to do it through acquisition. It kind of depends on sort of what your business looks like and the way you want to approach it and who you have to actually run those things. Because recreating an entrepreneurial environment can be really tough. But this challenge of like how do you go from we went from extremely innovative to super successful and how do we get back to extremely innovative is a real challenge.

I think Google is actually a very, very positive case because again, we forgot the self driving car. Like Google's had a number of projects they bought that have succeeded and invented to succeed. And I was serious when I said I think it's probably the most successful company in the history of the world in terms of generating internal innovation that are unrelated to their core products, that have the potential to create other core businesses. It just doesn't happen very much.

I would also just say that Apple is kind of mischaracterized. I think if you see it as doing everything internally. Tony Fadell kind of brought the ipod in the early days, was all out of Xerox parc. And I mean Steve Jobs had a policy of no research at Apple for years, right? He would wait for a great lab in an academic institution to do a really cool thing and then find out how to productize it and distribute it and market it better than anybody else. I think that's super valuable. But I just think this idea of innovation is being like having a blank slate, inventing something kind of. It's Theranos model. Oh, it's all from scratch from inside. It's interesting, but not necessarily.

I think Apple has a bunch of process innovation, a bunch of user experience innovation, a bunch of manufacturing innovation. It's pretty hard to argue that the iPhone wasn't profoundly innovative on a bunch of different accents.

Oh, totally. I've worked with Apple for a while and I love it. I'm just saying I think the.

I'm not being defensive about Apple. We're all Apple fanboys or whatever, but.

Like, go on, I'll let some water.

Could you guys talk a little bit about tactics and strategies to help convince other people to work with you?

Help other people work with you?

You mean how to. How to hire people?

Yeah, but not just finding talent, but being able to convince them that they.

Should come work with you and not someone else. Yeah, be really good and have other really good people around you mostly. I'm not kidding. Like, work on something that matters, have really smart people doing it, and be able to explain why it matters. That's not.

Couldn't agree more. I mean, just the ability for me to say I'm gonna go work every day to work every day. I'm work with somebody who's really awesome, man. That matters more than almost anything else in terms of attracting somebody to a space. And then you've got people who are aligned with a mission or aligned with the technology they want to use. Are they going to have a role which aligns with who they are personally? You got those things. You have a great argument. LinkedIn fights on this all the time because basically we have to fight every startup and every big company in terms of attracting talent. How do we continue to get good talent? Well, it just so happens that our culture, our values, our mission and everything are really our differentiator. And that has allowed us to attract good people. And now we have good people we could offer as well.

And at the end of the day.

I know you feel like the way you're looking at me, it probably feels like we were just glossing over it, but that was a specific and real answer. Yeah.

Come on. And video the face we're not making.

What I would also say is, I think that the advice that John or Alan would give to you is basically that there's no certainty in this world in terms of which startups are going to work. There's no certainty as to what products are going to work. I mean, shocking as this may sound, not every investment works out and not every company goes on to become Facebook or Google or LinkedIn, as the case were so many times. The only thing you can actually control is who you choose to work with. And as you guys go out there, those of you who are undergrads or grad students going out into the workforce and Working for folks. Part of it's going to be the mission, part of it's going to be the technology you get to work on. But part of it is just, are these the people I want to spend the next several years of my life with? Probably more time than I would spend with any immediate family member? Is that what I really want to do with my life?

And for what it's worth, it's also the people you'll create your next startup with, because you're going to create a next startup with the people you're working with at your current company. Okay, I'm going to go to the back row.

Thank you.

I want to ask a question I didn't really get to ask Jeff Wiener. And so I think he talked a lot about compassionate management. A lot of people did talk about sort of the idea of leading by inspiring people. And that's extremely important. And I'm trying to figure out how to combine that with keeping people working hard. I mean, at the same time, in a startup you have people who usually during the first couple months, everybody just has to work hard as f. And certainly that's true in stages one through two. It might be less true at LinkedIn right now, but I went and asked him afterwards, so what do you do with somebody who's really inspired from 11am to 3pm? And he said, that's fine, and I disagree. So what do you do?

You have people who work from 11 to 3 at LinkedIn? Because I've got. I'm interested. That sounds great.

I don't think we have anybody who works from 11 to 3. Sorry to disappoint. I think so. Every employee basically has four. This is just off the top of my head, but has four main areas which encourage them to participate. So the first one, the most important one, is your own motivation, whatever it actually is. Second one is leadership, which basically allows you to align your own motivation with what's actually happening. This is something that Jeff is totally extraordinary at. The third one is you have directives, you have your manager who's telling you what to do. This is actually the difference between, as he said, the difference between leadership and management. Management is about, like, responsibility. Are we actually getting all the shit done that we signed up to get done? And the final thing is your colleagues. So those colleagues, if you see the people around you working hard, you're going to work hard as well. So it's not like the leader is alone responsible for making those things happen. The leader can be responsible for making sure that people feel the motivation and understand in their own minds how the things that they're doing connect to the things they care about. That's really what leadership is. That's what inspiration is about.

Yeah, I think compassion is a misunderstood word in this context. I don't think it means being gentle or nice or soft. I think what you're trying to do is be trying to understand and you're trying to figure out how to get close. Gaps is the way I would put it. So a lot of times, especially when my directs at Mozilla, they said, oh, I think I should be a VP or I think I should be this level or that or whatever. I said, well, let me, let's. Okay, I hear you. Let's talk about what the delta is between where you are now and what you aspire to be. So let's talk about the gap between here and there and let's talk about how to quantify and understand the gaps and let's talk about what we can do to close them. And then let's try to figure out a plan to close those gaps over the next 90 days or 180 days. And if we can demonstrate that, then we'll give you what you want. If you can't, we won't. We'll do something different. And so I think that what I would argue is that that's a very specific and metrics driven way to understand somebody, what they want and try to give it to them, which I think is fundamentally compassionate. But it's not really about like, yeah, you want to work like four hours a day. I think the compassion word will confuse people. And I think Jeff went kind of way out of his way to explain that it wasn't really just being nice to people. But yeah, I think that, yeah, I don't know. That's what I would say.

I think two more questions, then we'll turn off the camera so you can really ask some good questions. So since I'm lazy, I'm going to.

Go to the first round.

My question is about product, market fit and how we've talked about how it's a reiterative process that you do multiple times until you figure it out. But like, Brian Jeski went a year and he admitted that him and his buddies were like, working on some other side stuff. And then like, they also kind of were not necessarily doing the Airbnb thing. They went, they did a rental roommate, the VC from Floodgate, talked about how Lyft, the Lyft people were for multiple years on like, other stuff. Like, but then you Got like Facebook, you got SurveyMonkey, like the story about SurveyMonkey, how like it was. So how could. I guess the question is if product market fit is like the biggest thing at OS1, right? Like then how can you justify working on something that I guess, what should the expectation be? Should the expectation be of building something like SurveyMonkey and refine it, or should expectation be like, oh no, I have that deep core fundamental intuition like Branchevsky had with Airbnb and try different ways of making it work.

Look, everyone's different and we work and we play and we learn for different reasons. And so I think, I think product market fit is important and it's important to be successful, but equally important is working on something you give a damn about. And so what I would say is that finding product market fit in something you hate is kind of a disaster because you're like, this is a great business and I really hate doing it. You know, for me, like you laughed many entrepreneurs, you ask them, it's like, do you like ad serving or do you like insurance brokering? And they're like, no, but this is like, it's a top down, it's a big market opportunity, I can't avoid it. And I think I've got this angle. And you laugh, but it's not. A lot of people intellectualize themselves into saying, here's a thing I can build that will totally work. And I think that's a good way to start building things that don't matter and that you don't care about. For some people, that totally works for them and they'll build a company up and they'll sell it and then they'll go live on the beach or do whatever they want to do. For some others it doesn't work. And so I think it's that question, answering that question. You have to understand a lot about who you are and what you care about and how you run. I don't know how you guys would answer that question.

I would say for most of you though, again, because you're here at Stanford, amazing institution, obviously we were very big fans of it.

Acceptable.

Exactly. But for most of you, you're probably going to succeed at whatever you end up trying to do. And you'll know this because the school's going to hammer you relentlessly with appeals for money from now until the day you die. And so if you're probably going to be successful, why don't you go ahead and try to find a way to be successful at something that you actually enjoy. And I do Think that a lot of what you should do is to look inside yourself and look at what are the things that you've actually tried and enjoyed. A lot of people try to intu the meaning of life or the purpose of their life. I'm like, that's kind of hard to do. Why don't you try doing stuff and do more of the stuff that seems.

To feel right and the things that actually motivate you are going to be different. And the ways in which you approach it can be different. Intuition is actually. Some people really rely on intuition. And in a lot of ways, a good piece of recommendation is work on something which is actually solving a problem for yourself, because then you can take advantage of your own intuitions about what a solution actually looks like. But there are people out there who are motivated by building a great business or by executing an amazing strategy or whatever. And those sets of motivations are equally valid. Whatever it is has got to give you the motivation to get up out of bed after four hours of sleep and go back and do it again.

All right, so you had your hand up. This will be the last televised question.

So one thing I thought that was interesting. Brian Sheske was talking about how now where Airbnb is, he said he could take two months off and it would more or less run the same. And the two big questions he was saying was, what's our second product? And how do I allow the culture to expand while we're expanding? How do I keep the culture intact? How have you guys moved from more of an operator to a more strategic big picture? I'll even say fuzzier longer term operation, you know, capacity. And how did that change your daily routine? How did that change your thinking? How just all of that.

Do you want me to talk about that? So my original role at LinkedIn, as you know, was I was the original head of product, and then I ended up running a big sec. As we got bigger, I ran a big section of the product organization. And then two years ago, I made a shift from a central. From a form of. From a sort of siloed operational role where I ran product for a big chunk of what we actually did into a central strategy role. Part of the reason that I actually did that was that I am pretty good at thinking about the big strategies, so forth. And most importantly, the company needed somebody central in the product organization who had broad visibility into it, who, moreover, had the ability to actually influence our strategy at scale. That influence actually comes from the fact that I'm a founder. Founders have strange powers at organizations. And those strange powers are kind of in the form of moral authority. And that moral authority is something that you can use to get people to listen to you on stuff, which in our case is outside the operational realm. So I made this move to the center because it allowed, because basically I'm kind of uniquely positioned to be able to have that strategic influence in the company. So my transition was completely from like literally day to day one on ones, managing people, signing expense reports, doing quarterly planning, reporting things out, fixing the dashboards, all the other stuff you need to do when you're like you have purely operational role working for there when you're working. Now I get there at 11, I leave at 3. It's actually not true, but. But now I spend time working with every single product leader in the organization, just sitting down and working with them on strategy and then trying to bring it all together in one place. So it's a radically different kind of work.

My only sort of caution to you would be it's hard to go the other direction. So it's hard to go. So I started my career technical and then I moved to management and I moved from management to meta management and management to whatever I do now. And as Chris Barber, who's an intern at Greylock will tell you, my direct management skills pretty well suck right now and they're way better than my coding skills are. So it's very hard to get. I would stay as technical and stay as hands on as long as you possibly can because it's very, very hard to go the other direction again.

So with that one last thing. Since our esteemed colleague Reid isn't here today, I figured I'd end by quoting him or at least paraphrasing him.

Good. Because not enough people quote Reed.

So it's good.

We're going to get him a little airtime. There you go. This is for you, Reid.

So, as you know, one of the things that Reid likes to talk about is that launching a startup is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down. And what he's going to need to do to add to that saying is, in fact, you have to do it multiple times because each time your company scales up to a next phase, it's essentially like you found another cliff and you jumped off it and now you got to build another damn airplane. So hopefully we've taken the topics of this class and given you guys some of the tools to build those airplanes and we're looking forward to seeing what you guys build. Thanks.