Scaling Organizations with Molly Graham and Greylock's John Lilly | Greymatter

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, Greylock's podcast. I'm John Lilly, one of the partners at Greylock, and in this episode we welcome Molly Graham. Hi, Molly.

Hi, John.

So Molly's have been in a variety of some of the most interesting companies in the world. Really. She was at Google and Facebook. I got to know her very well as an investor in a company called Quip, which was eventually acquired by Salesforce. And then more recently, she spent some time at the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, or czi, which we'll call it in the pod. And she was the head of operations and so set up a whole bunch of business processes there. So we'll talk about all this stuff today. We'll mostly talk about organizations and how you build culture and how you operationalize that culture. It's going to be a super interesting pod. So, Molly, thanks for coming. It's great to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

So, like I mentioned earlier, you've been in a variety of interesting companies and roles, even being an outdoor teacher. Can you talk about the arc of your career for a little bit?

Yeah, for sure. Well, I guess my first job out of college you just mentioned, which was that I didn't want a conventional job, which stressed my parents out a lot. But I became a wilderness instructor for this school called Knowles, which is the National Outdoor Leadership School. And they teach more or less management practices in the wilderness. Though that's not how they frame it. They frame it as leadership and communication, but it was the best management training I've ever been through. And I led like 75 day wilderness trips in Patagonia and Alaska for a year.

75 days. So that's more than two months. For people that are math challenged, that's.

More than two months. Anytime somebody makes me do that game to truth and a lie, one of them is always that I've gone without showering for 52 days, which is actually true.

That seems like a long time. Where did you go to college before that?

I went to Wesleyan. I majored in African history, which I'm another poster child for liberal arts education. Than the fact that whatever you major in doesn't have any indication of what you're gonna do with your life.

That's interesting. We may come back to that because I think that's not what's in vogue right now. Like computer science education is kind of what's in vogue. Did your parents expect you to go be a wilderness leadership guy?

No, they are wonderful and have always been very supportive of anything I wanted to do. But I think they. Everybody thought I was gonna go work in Africa, and then I wanted to just do something different. Which is often advice I give to people. Leaving college is like, go once you get on the work treadmill, it's, like, actually really hard to get off it. And so I'm a huge fan of go do something weird for a couple years because it's really hard to actually do that later in life.

Yeah, that's something I think that people hear a lot, and I think they kind of write it off as, like, old person advice. Like, do something interesting that it's hard to do later, but it's really true because either you'll go from success to success, and you're like, I gotta make as much as I can out of this Google job to go, you know, parlay it into Facebook and parlay it into this startup job.

And it's terrifying. And I've done it now, actually four times where I've left a job without another job. But it's actually really terrifying. And I've seen a lot of people just be unable to do that. So I think actually in between college and, like, whenever you start your real stuff is actually a really nice time to do that, although also very scary for people. I was lucky enough to not have student loans, so it was actually possible to do it, which we should just acknowledge.

Yeah. We all have certain privileges that help.

Yes.

All right, so you didn't take a shower for 52 days. You took a shower, and suddenly you took a job at Google?

Yes. Well, there was one job in between, which is I worked for a nonprofit in New York that works on foreign policy that gets called the Council on Foreign Relations. And I worked as a copy editor in their publishing department. And then we were a Google Book search partner. And this wonderful guy who really launched a lot of things for me, inadvertently came in, and we were talking about Google Book Search. And then I was walking him to the door, and he said, have you ever thought of working at Google? And this was in 2005. So they had, like, just gone public a year earlier. And, like, most people understood them as a white webpage with, like, a search box on it. They were just writing the articles about the big bouncy balls that people sat on in the office and stuff like that.

Sure.

And so I was like, no, I've never thought of working at Google. Like, what is that? And then I started researching the company, and I just got kind of obsessed and applied for a job. Didn't hear back.

You got obsessed because of the Culture because it was different or because.

Yeah, it just sounded weird. I love. I mean, I did not know this at the time, but I would say that one of the consistent themes for me is doing things that I'm not sure I can do is, like, really sounds like fun for me, which it sounds like torture to most people. And I think that it would be really interesting to move to California for two years. It would be really interesting to go work for this. These weird Internet companies. I could learn a lot. But it is important to know. Like, I applied, didn't hear back, even though I had this guy at Google that had, like, been like, you should come work here. And then I literally went through every single person I knew and who they knew that worked at Google and ultimately got connected to this guy, Elliot Schrag, who ran communications there and is still one of my biggest mentors and advocates.

And he's at Facebook now.

He's at Facebook now. So he runs comms and policy at Facebook. So I followed Elliot from Google to Facebook as well. But I ended up working in communications. I spent six months writing a lot of blog posts for them. And then I got annoyed because the department wasn't very well organized, no offense to Elliot, and was like, can I help you organize this? And ended up working with him and his leadership team for nine months as his chief of staff kind of person. And then he left and went to Facebook. Another consistent theme for me has always been following wonderful people around.

Sure. So now you said two things that I've noticed as core patterns. One is that the jobs you're interested in mostly often won't give you the time of day. They'll say, hey, please hire me. They're like. And they won't even respond to you. And actually happened with me with Mozilla, too. They just didn't have any time to respond to me. And I just eventually started showing up. And I know to hell with it. I'll just start showing. Yeah. And then the most interesting jobs, I think, are found that way because the companies are interesting. They got too much going on to respond to people inbound.

Yeah.

And the second thing you said is following great people, which has been consistently what I've done in my career. And you've done your career, I think, find the best people you can and just do great stuff with them.

Yes. And in many different forms has basically been the guiding principle for every decision I've made. Quip probably being the most powerful example of that. But Facebook was actually a really interesting decision because one of the Things about when we talk about Facebook is like, it all seems very obvious now because it's like, the fifth most fancy Internet company in the world. But when I joined, it was 2008, and they had launched this relatively catastrophic advertising system seven months before growth had slowed down. They had gotten invested in by Microsoft, the $15 billion valuation.

Seven months before, $250 million at a $15 billion valuation.

Right. And everyone was like, that's crazy. Like, they'll never be worth that much. And basically a lot of people were like, I don't know. That place is silly. It's just for college kids and it's going to get bought by Microsoft. That was actually the narrative when I went there. A lot of people being like, why? And I actually didn't really get it when I really just followed Elliot and Cheryl. Like, I just really wanted to work with them. And.

Well, it's interesting too, because, like, at that time, the management team was going through a little bit of churn.

Yeah.

So, like, another thing that people know about Facebook is, like, for the first three or four years, Mark Zuckerberg churned through executives.

Yeah.

CEOs and his chief of staff and all that stuff. And then 2008 is about when it started coalesce with Cheryl having just gotten there, and Mike Schreffer, cto.

Yeah.

And since then, it's been, like, kind of rock steady.

Well, there have been other folks that have left, but everyone that is on the executive team today, for the most part, started in 2008, 2009, and a few in a little bit later than that. But they started either right before or right after I did. So it was amazing to watch the company come together and then obviously end up being successful. But part of what my point is, it was not an obvious choice. Like, I wasn't like, oh, obviously you're gonna go there and it'll be like a really successful company. But also, I didn't get it. I was very much following people. And I walked in and I remember sitting through orientation on the first day, which at the time was given by this guy, Chris Cox, the head of product for a long time. At the time, he was the head of HR and recruiting.

I didn't know that he was head of HR recruiting.

Yeah. So Chris is one of my favorite stories. I like to pretend like I take after Chris, but he was hired as an engineer and helped build Newsfeed. And then Mark asked him. I think they had had trouble finding a head of hr. And so Mark just, like, asked him if he would do it for a while. So he took over HR and recruiting for a year, and he wrote the very first Facebook values and was just an amazing person to watch operate in an industry that he didn't know a ton about. So I joined in communications at Facebook, and then Chris actually approached me and was like, do you want to come work in hr? He said, hey, we wrote down these values. We need to, like, make them scale. Do you want to come help me do that? And I was like, I don't know if that's actually a job, but, like, sure, that sounds like fun. And then he was like, hey, Mark said this thing to me about running product, because at the time, someone had left, and so we didn't have a head of product. And he was like, mark said this thing to me, but running product. I just need to make sure he was kidding.

Yeah.

And then he, like, went and was, like, came back. He wasn't kidding. He wants me to run product. So he was like, I'm gonna go do that. And then Lori Goler, who's now the head of HR and recruiting, started, and she and I actually literally started at Facebook on the same day, and then basically started in HR and recruiting at the same time.

Interesting. And then you got this weird title. So your title was. You remember what your title was?

The culture and employment branding thing.

Yeah, Manager of culture and employment branding. That's what it says on LinkedIn.

Yeah, it's kind of made up.

Why did you pick that set of words?

So it's actually a combination of what lo wanted me to do and what Chris wanted me to do. So Chris said that thing about, like, values. We want to figure out how to help them scale, which loosely is sort of what I think of as culture, although we can talk about that, because that's a complicated word. And then Lori said, I really want to help the world understand what it's like to work at Facebook. So Lori's background is actually as a marketer. She was a marketer at ebay, and she very famously is the person that called Cheryl and was like, what's your hardest problem? And Cheryl was like, recruiting. And so Lori came to run recruiting from running marketing, but she came at it as a marketer, and she asked me if I would come help her think about marketing for recruiting, which is essentially employment branding. And that part of my job is. Was really fun because Facebook at the time was, like, defiantly against using the word hacker externally because they thought it had negative connotations. And the world will think of us as people that break into banks. So I spent, like, two years trying to find any other word in the impossible universe that we could use to describe our culture. And ultimately, Lori and I went to Mark and a bunch of other people, and we're like, we need to start calling ourselves hackers, because, like, that just who we are. And then it was fun to see it in the S1 as, like, the hacker way and all that. So that was a fun journey. One of the things I realized very early at Facebook was because it was growing so fast, it was like a different company every three months. Anytime you wrote down a job description, it sort of immediately expired, which is definitely true in all scaling companies. So I started defining jobs by questions. I still use this today in scaling companies. So the questions have to be big. They have to be almost unanswerable. They have to be probably other people's jobs too, but something that kind of gives you a North star, regardless of how many things change around you.

So you mean that the definition of the job is what question or two questions are you responsible for answering?

Yes, 100%. So my two questions in HR and recruiting were, how do we talk to the world outside about what it's like to work at Facebook and who do we want to be when we grow up? Those don't fit in job titles, so I call it culture and employment branding. But those were what my job was for two years or a little bit more. And, you know, those are also Lori's job and also a lot of other people's jobs, but that's what I spent my time on.

That's interesting. I mean, the thing about recruiting is marketing is an interesting angle, and I guess that came from Lori's background, but also just the competitiveness of recruiting at the time.

It's one of those ones where you have to, like, take the time capsule back in time to Facebook. I think There were, like, 500 employees, and now I think they have over 25,000 or something. They have a lot of people. And it was like 5,500 when I left. And it was, oh, Dropbox. We occasionally lost candidates to Dropbox, and they were like, 30 people, which you definitely remember.

Yeah, I may have helped that. Sorry.

It was more fun to compete against them than Google, who was really horrible to compete against because they did this thing that I advise everyone to not do, which is like, if you got an offer from Facebook, they would literally just double it and do a bunch of shit to get you to stay at Google. And so you could literally one person at Google could be sitting Next to another person at Google, they could have the exact same job, they could have had the exact same number of years of experience, and one person would be making four times as much as the other person because they got an offer from Facebook. So you literally incentivized people to go.

Get offers from Facebook and that happened all over the place. So let's come back to recruiting and counter offers in a minute. That's a super interesting thing. I agree with you on not countering. Okay, so you were there for a little while.

Yes.

In HR and recruiting and then you did some other stuff. Not HR and recruiting.

Yes. So then a guy named Chamath came to me and said, we're thinking about building a phone. Do you want to come do that with me? And I was like, well, that sounds like a terrible idea. I was like, why would we do that?

You were right.

Well, I was probably. I was wrong in the sense that it was really important for Facebook to figure out how to be more than just an app on someone else's operating system. There's a lot of power dynamics in the mobile ecosystem and it was framed a different way. I would say that it began a three year journey of Facebook trying to figure out how to be more than just an app, and that's really important for the company and ended up being critical and fundamental to our long term success. The phone version of it was a total experience in trying to like teach a dog to be a cat, like trying to teach a software company what it means to do hardware and a bunch of other stuff. Trying to teach Facebook how to work on a project that was two years long versus three months long, which Facebook is a very iterative company. It was just fascinating on every dimension.

But yeah, although I was skeptical when Google started doing that. When Google started to become a hardware company. But Google's made that transition mostly, I think, but in Microsoft now is making the same transition into hardware. Facebook, I think, has always been a software and systems company at heart. And so maybe that's one of those situations where they were asking the wrong question, how do we build a phone? And maybe they should have asked this other question, which is how to become more than just an app.

Yeah, exactly. I think it was a tactic. We started with a solution rather than the problem, which you often do, and then make mistakes. But I was telling somebody the other day the story of the phone because I was explaining about the way I think about failure. And the phone itself was a total failure. It did launch in like 2013 and just like didn't really sell anything. But I said to this person, I don't think of anything as a failure if you figure out who you are in the process of doing it. And I really feel like Facebook, and Mark in particular, like found deeply its identity as more than just an app in the process of struggling through building this thing. It was very painful and quite expensive, but we learned an enormous amount. And I don't think it would be the company it was today without that experience.

This was like 2011 or something like that. Right.

It started in 2010 and we launched it in 2013. But there was a lot of splinter projects, like in a lot of ways, like Internet.org and Oculus and WhatsApp and Instagram to some extent were like little children of this longer thread.

For better or worse, I think of the current phase of Facebook is starting around 2012, 2013. It's probably out of the ashes of.

The phone and going public, which is right around the same time. Yeah.

So but you also got to work with another guy on the phone.

Yes, that's right. Yeah. So that's where I met Brett Taylor. He was at Google for a long time and then left and founded a company called FriendFeed, which Facebook acquired in 2009. And he was actually one of the first big acquisitions that Facebook did, I think, then became CTO of Facebook and at some point took over mobile in addition to platform, which he ran. And I worked for Brett. Brett took over the phone stuff and the longer term mobile strategy stuff. And so I worked for Brett and then Brett left Facebook right after we went public because Brett, at his fundamental DNA is a founder and a CEO and really wanted to go do that again. So he left and then I ended up taking over part the longer term mobile stuff and then spectacularly burnt out a couple months later and ended up leaving Facebook myself at the end of 2012. And I was like, I'm gonna go do a big process and I'm gonna look at lots of jobs. And everyone was like, you're gonna go work with Brett, aren't you? And then lo and behold, some number of months later, I ended up working with Brett at Quip.

Yeah. And Brett, I mean, I've known Brett since he was I think 18 at Stanford. And that was obvious to everybody who. Everybody who could work with Brett on the way out would.

Yeah, yeah.

So you joined Brett and his co founder, Kevin Gibbs.

Yes.

Pretty early. Like how many people were there when you joined?

So Brett and Kevin, literally they founded the company and then immediately hired five people and I think I was in nine or 10 or something like that. But I joined three months before we launched the product, and I joined trying to help them figure out what the business was.

What are your two sentences on what quip was, what you did?

I'm not supposed to say it this way, but I would say it's like Google Docs, but way more awesome. And it's basically we were trying to build the productivity suite of the next generation. And the initial theory was that the most important thing for the next 20 years is going to be being able to work on any device that you want at any time, always have your information, et cetera, with other people. Collaborating. Right. And then working with other people. So it was combining all the trends we were seeing in messaging and then all the mobility trends and built an incredible product that I still use today.

Yeah, me too. It was hard to explain to people because they say, well, I've already got Google Docs and Google Docs seems fine.

Yes.

So what do I need? This other thing.

So many lessons.

Yeah. So that's a core marketing challenge, I think. So you were there and you were the coo. What was the question you were trying to answer?

My initial question, the one I was hired on, which was basically my question the whole time, was, we need to build a business. How are we going to do that? Right. So I ran everything at the company that wasn't technical, which, since I joined three months before we launched it, meant that I figured out how to market the company, the product, what the business side of it was going to be like. What business product are we going to sell? I sold all of the first company customers with a lot of help from Brett, and then hired the first salespeople, hired marketers too late. And then built a sales team and a marketing team. And then ultimately we sold the company.

To Salesforce in 2016.

Yes. August.

Yep. And Brett's now the chief product officer of Salesforce.

Yes.

Which will be interesting given you just said, you know, his fundamental DNA is founder and CEO.

Yeah.

Which is not exactly his job right now.

No, it's not. But I think he is having a lot of fun. I think of him as one of the most talented product guys in the Valley. And I think that there's a lot of landscape at Salesforce, and I think him and Marc Benioff are great compliments to each other. So I think of Marc Benioff as one of the most talented marketers and salespeople in the world, and I think of Brad as one of the most talented Product people. So those are actually two sides of a coin. Whereas I think if they were more similar, that might be harder.

Yeah, I think one of the things that's I think probably obvious to us and maybe it's obvious to the ones on the outside, I think Mark and Brett are just exceptionally. Values aligned.

Yes.

Around being the force in the world, trying to make the world the way they want it in terms of equality and representation and that kind of stuff. It's been interesting to see Mark as he tweets and blogs and does more and more in the political realm and Brett stepping right into that too.

Yeah, totally. And I think as you well know, Quip was super lucky. And Brett and Kevin had a lot of choices on how they could have grown or sold the company. And I think Brett very much wanted to work with Mark for a lot of reasons. But one of them was about being aligned on values and how to move the world around.

So culture. So Google was more or less a pretty formed cultural place by the time you got there. Facebook had not figured out how to operationalize it at scale, but their values were already pretty clear. And we'll talk about how you operationalize culture in a second. So Quip was all kind of brand new. So it had some people from Google and people from Facebook. So what did culture mean at Quip?

One of my strong beliefs about founder led companies is that the culture is very much led by the founder. So when I'm talking to founders about how do I build a culture, a lot of times what I tell them to do is run a self diagnostic. So like write down all of your strengths and all of your weaknesses and to some degree those are the strengths and weaknesses of the company. And so Google, great example. Google was founded by two PhD academics that fundamentally are research scientists that really wanted a permanent university and they built one. And Google is very academic in so many of the ways that it does things. And I think of that as, you know, I don't know Larry and Sergey, but I think of that as what I know about them. Very true to their personalities. And then Facebook was built by a 19 year old dude in a dorm room who really loved just trying things. Like he just built stuff and like put it up there and let the world react sometime to his deep dismay. The most elegant or beautiful like code writer in the world is going to be sort of dismayed, I think, by the way Facebook does things. But one of their informal motto is better done than perfect. And I think of Google's is probably the other way around. Better perfect than done. But no matter how many words you put on a page, at the end of the day, this is about, like, who the person that founded it is. So. So when I think about Quip, fundamentally, it was an amalgamation of Brett and Kevin. And both of them are extremely technical, really intelligent, very cerebral in some ways, both of them really caring, thoughtful guys. We had this incredibly strong engineering and product culture that was very much an engineering led company with this underpinning. And they actually made a lot of decisions when they founded the company, which you and I have talked a lot about over time, where, for example, Kevin had just had his first baby when they founded it, and Brett, I think, already had two kids. So they wanted it to be a really good place for people with families. So they agreed before they even found the company, I think, to leave every day at 5 and come in at like 9. Even if they were going to go home and work more, like, they would, number one, not make that visible to the company, and number two, make sure they left the office. So they made it okay for everybody else to leave. And they did enormous numbers of things like that to just make it a really caring environment.

It's an interesting set of decisions. I think a lot of the prevailing wisdom, and maybe mine too, is that it's hard. You have to be exceptionally talented and exceptionally lucky to make those kind of decisions work for you.

Yes. And I think they were super blessed, both of them, in different ways, to be able to attract like almost anyone they wanted to work with in the Valley. So they were able to like, really craft and design the culture the way that they wanted to, which is. Which gave them a springboard. But I think it's really important point about culture because I think sometimes people think about making culture or shaping it. I honestly, having worked in as many jobs as I have where theoretically I've been responsible for the culture, a lot of times what I think I'm doing is actually just articulating it like it's a thing that already exists. And what you are doing is writing down what exists. And then sometimes you can ask intelligent questions like, should we still be this way? Like, do we actually need to make a very concerted effort to try to change which Facebook has done a number of times while I was there. And then since I've left, Like, they've sort of tried to push themselves in certain directions, which I think you can do, but it requires first really writing down who you are and how you do things and being honest about that. And one of the hardest things I think for founders is to write down the things they're bad at and to realize that if you have trouble making decisions or if you're not a naturally data driven person, your company is going to be like that. And you would actually have to aggressively hire for the opposite of you, which is very hard to do for a bunch of reasons to like, counterbalance that. And even then I think the CEO is such a strong presence that it doesn't always really counterbalance.

Yeah, that's interesting. I think my sense is that every founder has real flaws and every CEO has real flaws. Yeah, Humans, bags of chemicals and meat. Such flawed humans. But the best ones finally figure out how to bring along the people they need with them.

Totally. I've been thinking a lot about this recently. I've been spending a lot of time talking to founders and I think the two things that I look for the most when I talk to and just thinking about what's going to make people successful is number one, self awareness. And number two, the ability to truly hire people that are better than you. And that second thing is the people that actually do it. It requires a huge amount of humbleness, like a really amazing recruiter, salesperson. And I think also self awareness, humbleness, but also confidence.

Because it's scary as hell to have people on your team who are all better than you because you're like, oh my God. I think you have a little bit of imposter syndrome. When you start a company, you start to put executives who are genuinely talented. Like it reinforces imposter syndrome even for the best CEO.

And particularly I think when you hire that first person. I remember talking to someone that hired a wonderful friend of mine and he was like, when she said yes, I was like, oh my God, what am I building and what have I done? And how can she believe in me this much? Like it caused a whole waterfall of. I might have duped her into something that's not really real. I think that's exactly right.

So next, one more question about quip and then we'll go to czi. So one of the, I think really notable things about quip not many people understand is that the team is very diverse, gender wise. Can you talk about that a little bit and how you made that happen?

I'll give all credit to Brett and Kevin on this because they very much wanted that to be a pillar of the company from the beginning and so went out of their way to make sure that early on we hired as many female engineers as as possible.

And just through the personal Networks from Google and Facebook or some other way.

Yeah. Well, you guys helped us. Great acting.

Sure.

Just a small advertising moment. We tried every means necessary. So I emailed Dan Portillo, I think, and you helped us a bunch. And you guys found us one of our wonderful female engineers, Yunji. And then we had a wonderful woman from Dropbox just walk in the front door who's one of the most well respected female engineers because we had such a strong engineering team. It was a combination of things. We had such a strong engineering team, so people wanted to work there because there was exciting people to learn from. We clearly had a really friendly culture for people with families, men or women. But it definitely, I think, made it easier for women to want to come there. Like it wasn't super bro y or whatever. And we actively went out and Brett went out and Kevin did too, to just go find folks that might want to work with us. And so it ended up being, I think for a long time we were like 40% female engineers. And one of the most important things when you're looking at diversity stats in tech companies is you can look at percentage diversity in technology, but that often includes design and product, which are. It's really important to have females in all of these industries. But companies can skew their numbers more positive because those two industries tend to have more women. So if you actually look at their pure engineering numbers, most companies are 6 to 10% women. So to have 30 or 40% women, it's amazing. Yeah, it's crazy.

And that was actually in the first.

Place, 10 or 12 within the first 25. By the time we were 25, we were 40% women.

Yeah. It's interesting. 10 women by the time you're 25. It's so unusual still.

Yeah, yeah, it was cool.

Quip got bought by Salesforce.

Yep.

And then. And so you decided you didn't want to work for Salesforce or you decided big companies weren't for you or you thought it's time to go do the next thing you didn't know how to do?

Yes, that last thing.

I wasn't trying to be productive. And then you just didn't do anything for a little while.

I didn't.

Or you tried not to do anything. Did that work for a while?

Yeah, it worked great. So after I left Facebook, I took three months off. After I left Quip, I took six, basically. And I've learned a couple things about. As my friend very wisely said to me when I was leaving Facebook, she said the hardest thing in the world to do is leave take your hand off one rung of the ladder without your hand on the next rung of the ladder because. And it all comes to a head in cocktail parties where people meet you and they're like, what do you do? And you're like, nothing. I actually said to a Lyft driver the other day, I was like, I'm unemployed. And he was like, oh, my God, are you okay? And I was like, this is awkward. So I've gotten good at the letting go of the one rung of the ladder without a hand on the second rung of the ladder. But one of the most important things you have to do. I'm lucky enough that I get recruited for things versus feeling like I have to go out and look for jobs, but.

Well, you've worked with some people and you've done some stuff.

I've worked with some people on tuffs.

Mattered for them. And so they tend to call you back.

They call me back, yeah. It's true. But I tell everybody that I'm. I disappear. And that's what I did. When I left Clip, I said I was real tired. I was there for three and a half years, and it was incredible. But building companies, as many of your founders know, is extremely hard and emotionally exhausting. And I was not a founder, but I maybe felt like one. And so I went home and I hung out with my sister for four months. And I really didn't totally know what I wanted to do next. I had two sort of outlines. I was like, either I want to be a CEO myself or found a company, or I might do, like, one more operating role, but it's gonna have to be really weird. So this is something you and I ha.

Congratulations. You found it.

Everybody that doesn't know you offers you the job you just had. So I had a lot of, like, series A founders or series B founders being like, will you be my coo? And it's only the people that know you really well that are like, hey, there's this really weird job that no one would ever think to offer you. Like, are you interested in that? You actually said this thing to me that I still use today I rip off aggressively, which is at some point, you stop looking for jobs and you start looking for holes that are shaped like you. I consider that a John Lilly ism. And so I started sort of aggressively looking for holes that were shaped like me. And Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan sent me some very casual email.

Scrappy entrepreneurs. Scrappy social entrepreneurs.

Yeah. So they sent me a funny email that was like, hi, what are you doing? And I was like, oh. And then to our point earlier, Elliot Schrag actually is the one that said, hey, I think you should go work at czi. And I was like, what is czi? What is that acronym that you just used? And I learned a bunch more about the Tan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is Mark and Priscilla's philanthropic organization that they founded to give away all of their wealth, which is a large amount over the next hundred years. And it definitely was like a job that no one reasonably should have given me. But it's, you know, it seemed like a totally once in a lifetime opportunity. These. My sort of rationale was like, organizations like this get set up sort of once in a generation, depending on how you define generation. And this was the beginning. So they had set it up in 2016, but it was sort of like 25 people for a year, and they were still figuring out what it was. And I think at some point late in 2016, they realized that they really wanted to model it after a technology company, not a philanthropy. Exactly. I think CZI requires you to ask what a philanthropy is. But they hired a CTO and started hiring engineers, and then I think, realized that they needed someone to come help operate the company and help them set it up. So I spent a year helping them get that off the ground, which was a huge privilege.

I mean, you say once in a generation. I'm not sure anything like CCI has ever quite existed. It's a different. It looks different to me than anything ever.

I do think my brief time in the philanthropic world would say that each one of these things looks very unique.

I think there are a lot of nonprofits that all look the same.

Yeah, that's right.

And they all go fundraising. They all do this other stuff. I think the ones that are. I mean, Mozilla, where I spend a lot of time in Mozilla. And Mozilla is obviously different than everything else and unique and weird and glorious. And CZI is a bit like that. But just the organizational structure and the scale and the scope is just as ambitious in outcomes as the Gates foundation is, but more ambitious in organization than Gates was because Gates is still relatively traditional.

Yeah, it's a 501C. Yeah. I think they're both incredibly ambitious. I think Gates set up their organization initially as a 501C3, which is an organization that has a. It's a legal definition that has a bunch of rules around how you can give money away and how much you have to give away. Mark and Priscilla set up CZI as an LLC specifically because they wanted the flexibility to be able to use as broad a range of tools as possible in order to solve the problems they wanted to solve. One of the things I thought a lot about in the last year when I was there was just like, what is a philanthropy and what does it mean to be philanthropic? So one of the most philanthropic things that has happened in the last couple of years is actually Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, which was not actually a traditional definition of philanthropy, wasn't about giving money away to solve problems. But I think of it as something that could only have been done with someone that had a goal other than making money. So eventually, like at czi, my definition of philanthropy was an organization that is set up to solve problems whose primary goal is not to make money. It's something else. It's to solve problems, not to make money. And I think Jeff similarly bought the Post because he felt like it was an institution that needed to exist for the world, and he thought he could help it over 50 years, but he was very willing to lose a lot of money in order to make that happen. So, anyway, I do think that CZI will challenge all traditional definitions of philanthropy just because it is oriented towards solving problems in the world and not making money. But most people's definition of philanthropy is giving money away.

So thinking back to this exercise you did at Facebook, where you got Mark and others to write down the value, I think of culture as operationalized values. How do you make the things you care about actually go work day to day? Did you do that exercise at CZI when you got there?

Yes, we did. They wrote an amazing document called the Letter to Max. Marc and Priscilla did, which was the letter to their first daughter. And they basically founded CZI when Max was born and wrote this huge foundational document, which I think of as layer one of what CZI is and what it was trying to do in the world. A lot of things in that that I would call operating principles. And for a while, people at CZI referred to as values.

Ooh, what does that mean? What's an operating principle?

Yeah. So I'm laughing partially because I had a lot of debates with Mark and Priscilla about these. So, for example, one of the operating principles at CZI was we should have an engineering team, which isn't a value in the sense that I think of values. And actually, this is a ripoff from a guy named Jim Shelton who runs that education initiative at czi. He said it's how we do Things around here. And I think of that as values. Operating principles is like the columns that hold up the building, which is who we are.

Well, like Brett and Kevin going home at 5 o'. Clock. That's an operating principle. That's an operating principle that reflects.

Yes.

Of value.

Right. Which is that they care about diversity. Yeah. And the value might be like we believe diversity is going to build a stronger product or something like that. So CCI like definitely had values. And it was super fascinating having worked with Mark somewhat closely on the values exercise at Facebook and really gotten to know him very well. And then watching him and Priscilla come together to found an organization and really seeing half of Mark's personality and Priscilla's personality inside of this organization. Priscilla is this insanely empathetic first generation immigrant who's a really incredible, brilliant doctor, went to medical school, was a pediatrician. When I first met her, she wanted to, she like her whole goal was to be a pediatrician and she was teaching actually at the time. So she's also a teacher. But she is like an empathetic, humanistic leader. And Mark is a somewhat aggressive, very goals oriented somewhat. He's a very like single minded human. And watching those two come together was such a, an incredible place and they have such an incredible partnership which was so fun to get to work with them.

I mean it's interesting thing about. I think probably most people assume it's like, oh, if it's a non profit it must have values. And which is a funny. Which is not right. Like nonprofits come into existence. They have, they have a different reason for being. They have a different mission.

Yes.

But they don't all have values. So like it's like I think a lot of people assume that the values exist because it's a non profit and that's not quite right.

And I think it's, it's super important. Like the point you're making is important because one of my big things in life is these things I call black hole words which are like words that everyone can use and everybody kind of means something slightly different. And so I think of values and mission and all of these things as words that whenever someone uses them I always say what do you mean by that? Because it really genuinely. They all mean something different to somebody else. Black hole words. As a tangent, one of my favorite topics is like these are very fun family games of like when you say manager, what do you mean?

How do you get out of traps with black hole words? Because I've gotten myself into traps millions of times where I thought I was talking about the same thing with somebody. And then you're like, holy shit, we're not talking about the same thing at all.

I'm a huge fan of the question what do you mean by that? Which I annoy the shit out of everyone that works with me by asking that question all the time. But I think the most important thing to do is to realize when you're having an entire conversation that assumes a common understanding of a word. Like, one of the things that you and I went through together is like when we went to go hire a cmo, a chief marketing Officer at quip, and we were with this really wonderful recruiting firm and the first thing they did was say, what do you mean by a cmo? I don't know why I never thought about marketing as a black hole word, but it is. It can mean. But it means something totally different to every person. And at this point, there's also a thing called growth in the Valley, which is basically a different form of marketing. The most important thing is to identify those words and pause the conversation and just say, hold on, can we just. Like, what do you mean by that? Because, like, here's what I mean and. Or the other thing I always tell people is like, use words that have one syllable. Because it's almost always multiple syllable words that are black hole words or acronyms actually also fall into that category. But yeah, I think with czi, the thing we were talking about was like values and mission and writing those things down. I would say two things. One, those things always exist in every organization. That is a group of people that have come together and are working towards a common goal. There is a set of how they're doing things and how they're making decisions and how they're working together that is driving them. It may or may not be commonly agreed upon, well understood, or written down. But czi, like, we basically operated for a year without anything very clear written down, which was actually super fascinating because we also grew a lot. Yeah, we tripled or quadrupled or quintupled or something.

That's usually a tough mix.

I did a lot of stuff last year that I would not necessarily advise other people to do. What we did at the end of the year was basically a huge exercise and writing down everything that we had learned. And it was a really wonderful moment in January where we did an off site just having Mark and Priscilla and a bunch of people articulate all the values. And I think we did a good enough job. And I'm sure there's Bumps and bruises. But we did a good enough job that it resonated with people and there was a lot of relief at having things written down. But I'm sure they will iterate on them as well.

Was there anything that was really surprising?

One of the things that would surprise most people about CZI that did surprise me and is written down and it's a very fast paced place and it's. Anyone that's worked with Mark would be like, yeah, of course. But it's a philanthropy and most people that have worked at a philanthropy are not like, gosh, we better get this done tomorrow. You don't think of fast and philanthropy because the goals are. I mean CZI has hundred year goals and a lot of times I wouldn't be like, why are we freaking out about this? Because there isn't a hundred year mission. But I think the sense of urgency at czi, which is written into the values, it's a purpose. Just because they have hundred year goals, they don't want to be content with progress on year long time horizons. Mark's mindset, and I think Priscilla is very much the same way, is iterative and so it's trying things and learning. And that will be the bias of that organization.

If you can do something now, you should.

Yeah. And also I think they're very conscious and that they're not going to get a lot of stuff right and that there's a lot of mistakes in their future and that, you know, some percentage of the stuff they're doing now is going to, they're going to learn a lot from it. I'm sure some of it will be seen as like a failure or whatever, but I think they're just ready to learn and want to move forward with that.

That's interesting. I'm glad you're explaining stuff about being llc. I think nonprofit is one of these black hole words. When I was running Mozilla, I really hated the word nonprofit. I'm like, well really the term is tax exempt. And because like we're running like just like a technology company, you have all this stuff in your head about doing right for the world and pacing and all this other stuff that may or may not be true.

Yes.

And so let me just bust that stuff up. But it's.

Yeah. And actually one of the things that was really interesting at CZI is I realized that most people don't know the difference and for frankly for a while I didn't either. Between a philanthropy, a non profit, an ngo, which is a non governmental organization. And so I would talk to people just out in the world and they would refer to CZI as an ngo. And I was like, it's definitely not an ngo, but it's just all of these things. You actually just need to get rid of the big words and break them down into small words.

Focus on what you're doing.

Yeah, exactly.

We talked about self awareness a little bit ago, and I agree with you, like, self awareness is the number one necessary attribute to success. Why do you think self awareness is so important?

So a couple of years ago, Cheryl actually gave a talk at Airbnb, and somebody asked her, what do you think is the number one most important quality to look for in people? People that are good at handling scaling organizations. And she said, people that ask for feedback, which I think is principally the same point. So what I have noticed, and somebody else wrote an article that basically the most important things to survive inside scaling companies were growth mindset and growth mindset.

It's a term Carol Dweck popularized, a Stanford psychologist.

Yes. And I have happened to work inside of companies that are growing and changing and evolving very aggressively. So I should caveat this with that. But what I've seen is that the best people in the world to work with are the people that see themselves as a work in progress, that are constantly looking for ways to be better and not assuming that they are good at things. And those are the people that surround themselves with folks that are going to be honest with them, that aren't afraid of the shadows and the dark corners of their personality because they grow, they change, they actually are able to evolve, which is certainly inside of technology companies, one of the most important attributes, because, like, one of the things I always tell scaling companies is, like, your company is different every three months, six months, sometimes at Facebook, at value, it'd be like a month, and then it would be a different company. And so your only job is to grow as fast as the company or faster. And if you don't, one of the craziest things you would see happen at Facebook, for example, is like, someone would be the literal highest performer in the entire company, you know, by whatever scale in 2008. And then the company would grow and change and evolve, and that person wouldn't. And they, in one year or six months would be like underwater, just, like totally falling out the bottom of the company. And so I think scaling companies in particular really exacerbate the point. And I think also founding companies really brings to a head every strength and weakness you have, but it's. You have to Grow?

Yeah. The thing about the companies changing so they top performers become bottom performers. I've never thought about it that way, but it sounds like it's related to the Peter Principle in a little bit, where, you know, Peter principle is like, you get promoted to your lowest level of incompetence, so you get promoted until you can't do the job.

Yeah.

And I think maybe that this is the company version of that, which is like you're in an interesting company until the company changes, so you can't do it and you kind of flame out.

Yeah. I mean, every company that's growing really fast has a graph that they stare at and obsess about. And Facebook, it was the graph of monthly activity. I did a talk in Slack and I was like, it's probably your customer graph. Or I guess they have a DAU.

Graph back before Facebook had all humans.

Oh, yeah, exactly. Now I think they have a different graph. I say that's a graph of your success and what you're aiming for, but it's also a graph of how fast the company is changing. And I do think one of the hardest emotional experiences for people is realizing that what was successful yesterday won't work tomorrow. So particularly I think for folks that are there very early, everyone has imposter syndrome that I've met anyway. But it's really exacerbated by growing companies because I think you're constantly feeling like you might not be good enough for the next phase. And it's hard to know when that's true. You know, it's hard to know when it's real and when it's not.

Yep.

And generally speaking, I tell people your job is to not worry about it. Your job is to just like, continue to grow and learn and evolve as fast as you possibly can, but put.

People around you, you trust to tell you.

And I think your manager's job is to look around the corner and realize when you need to be scaffolded in one version or another by someone else that has different skills or experience.

So I was going to ask you if self awareness can be taught, which is kind of a leading question. But now I kind of want to ask you whether you can learn to have a growth mindset.

I mean, I think so. I do think people are naturally grown, either wanting or not wanting to hear the things they are not good at. But generally, if you think about the basic growth mindset being someone that wants to get better, and I think that is naturally paired with someone that is willing to face down the things that they are truly not good at, I think, can absolutely be taught. Teaching people that feedback is not like. What is that silly phrase? Feedback is a gift. But, like, it's not just like a gift. It's literally a necessity. You have to get it in order to survive. And not just survive, but thrive. Teaching people that, that is like, one of the fundamental principles for how you're going to, like, be at the company in three years. I think people can learn that. The thing that I've noticed is you have to teach people that it's okay to not know. And I think there's just a lot of people that walk around feeling like they need to pretend like they have the answers, and so they just fake it. One of my principles inside of scaling companies is always like, you can learn anything if you're willing to sound like a moron. And I learned that actually from Chris Cox when he was in hr. These wonderful people that you teach with, some of them, like Bob Sutton, would come in and, like, give us all this advice on how to run the company, basically, and they would use all these industry terms from HR and organizational development and stuff. And Chris would, just because he didn't know, he would look at them and be like, I actually have no idea what you're talking about. Can you explain that to me? I feel like what I learned from watching him do that was that to be a leader doesn't mean you have to know. It means you have to be willing to. To ask the question if you don't know the answer and not worry about it. I have become, I think, a professional moron, but I have become really, really good at learning things I don't know anything about because I'm totally willing to sound like an idiot. That is the critical switch. Realizing that it's actually an asset to not know and learn versus to pretend like you know and sort of hit a natural cliff.

That sounds right to me. So you left Czi a couple months ago?

I did, yeah.

And you're trying not to think about what to do next?

No.

How's that going?

Good. Yeah. So I left CZI to move back to the east coast where my other half lives, and I'm doing a great job.

You're not picking up the phone, not answering your mail.

One of the best things that CZI gave me was a coach, and she has totally changed my life. And she and I agreed that I wasn't allowed to say I was doing nothing. So what I'm actually doing is doing all the things I didn't do for the last year. So Czi, for one reason or another, was a very intense year, not the least of which was I was commuting back and forth to east coast to be with my boyfriend, but I wasn't exercising, I wasn't going outside, and I wasn't picking up the phone when people called and asked for help. Which I actually get a huge amount of joy when founders or friends or whatever are like, I need help thinking through a problem. And I just had to say no because I didn't have any time. So what I've done, in addition to exercising and going outside is just say yes to everything. And it's been super fun.

Any piece of advice you'd give to people or founders, what should they do if they want to make their culture the best culture they can be?

My thoughts on this one are actually probably a little different than some other people's because there's a lot of articles out there that say culture is the only thing that matters. And I actually believe the only thing that matters is building a really strong business and a really strong product or however you measure your business. And at the end of the day, culture, which is a black hole word, but how you do things is in support of that. So I think the number one most important thing for founders to realize is, like, you need to have goals. You need to aggressively focus the company on those goals. There are a lot of decisions about how you move the company towards those goals and how you work together, and those are really important to reflect on, but only in service of moving the company towards those goals. I don't like when people separate the two when there's the culture and then what we're doing.

Yep.

I think they are inextricably linked, and I think the culture does not matter if you don't have a good business.

Amen.

Oh, good. I wasn't sure if you're gonna agree with that one.

Oh, I agree with that for sure. Organizations exist for a reason. You're trying to get something done. You've got to build things. If you don't build things, you don't get to do the mission. You don't. Building things. There's a lot of different ways to do that, and culture is how you make things work. But it's all. I was just listening to the song.

Let'S Remember why we came 100%. And the most annoying moment for me, running companies is when people forget when they start to talk more about the stuff around the edges than around the core of what we're doing here.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Molly. It was amazing.

Yeah. This is so fun. Thanks, John.