Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta on letting go of senior leaders when their work no longer fits the company's direction. He cites Bill Gates telling YouTube's Chad Hurley that not everyone who starts finishes the journey, and Fred Wilson's insight that companies reshape their teams three times before IPO. Zappacosta treats product development like science: hypothesize, test, analyze, iterate.
Chapters
I met Chad Hurley, the guy who started YouTube, just like, I don't know, maybe 2 weeks after Google bought it for $1.6 billion or whatever it was.
In stock.
Yeah, yeah, it worked out okay. It was directionally sound. But I met him at this conference where the night before he had talked to Bill Gates. And the guy had a 1,000-yard stare. He was just completely white as a sheet. 'Cause the thing Gates had said to him was, just remember, not everybody who starts the journey with you is supposed to finish it with you. And he realized just the magnitude of that. Like, there were— he might have to fire a friend. That kind of thing is real too.
I've heard the advice that— I think Fred Wilson wrote a blog post about this— that from inception to, like, going public and being a sort of standalone franchise, you should expect to have to turn your team 3 times.
Wow. Is that your experience?
Um, no, not yet. We have not—
Good answer.
We have not had to do it to that stage.
But look— But you wouldn't dismiss it either?
We've recently let a couple of, you know, leaders go who would who were leading big functions at the company, who did great work and are great people. But while they were right, you know, a year ago, then, you know, at a certain point they stopped being right, and that's tough.
Yeah. And to change gears, but not too far, one time Scott McNealy said to a— at a meeting I was at, you know, the hard thing is not doing stuff. The hard thing is deciding what not to do and saying no to stuff. And that was back in the '90s. At this point, you're getting so many signals and you're seeing so many opportunities because information is flowing faster. How do you maintain a discipline like that? And also, you know, when things are going wrong, you're tempted to pivot. How do you know how to keep a kind of true north?
So I think the answer is sort of the same for both, and that is that you need a framework. You need a framework for evaluating trade-offs and for prioritizing different choices. And that framework ultimately has to be grounded in a very specific vision about what you're trying to accomplish. So, you know, walk you through ours. Our goal is to help customers hire professionals for any project, anywhere, anytime. There are certain things that that requires, and we know that we need professionals. But then we also know that customers are gonna evaluate us in 2 ways: the quality of the service, how good of a job did the pro do, and how easy was the experience. So then we can sort of continue to break it down. And I think we have, sort of collective we here, have done a disservice to entrepreneurs by creating, by telling them that it's an exercise of invention, when my view is it's actually much more of an exercise of discovery.
Yeah.
discovery. And you are trying to learn a fundamental truth about the world, about your customers, about what works and what doesn't. And you're building up a body of knowledge. I think it is very similar to the scientific method. You know, you hear Lean Startup methodology or customer-driven development. If you think about it, that's just the scientific method, right? You have a hypothesis. You run a test. And you analyze the results. You rinse and repeat. And through that, you're building a sort of a theory. theory, or a sort of a group of related sort of theories about something, and that's what you then use to evaluate sort of new ideas. Does it fit? Do we have data to support or to refute? And it's also what keeps you grounded. When, you know, something isn't working, you say, okay, we have to figure this out.
Right.
It's existential to the success of the business for us to figure this out, or it was a nice-to-have Turned out to be way harder than we thought it would be, and let's cut our losses and move on with our lives.
Right. There is a kind of discipline you need. Do you write this stuff down ahead of time, or do you just try to remember it? 'Cause I'd be so caught up in the moment.
Oh, you gotta write it down. I mean, we have a strong belief in the power of the written word, and I'm sure the journalist on stage with me probably does as well.
A little bit.
But, you know, we, we create a lot, a lot of documents, and sort of build everything up from first principles. Probably something you've heard Elon Musk talk about, you know, reasoning from first principles.
You know the Amazon rule about a product? They start with the press release announcing the product, just so they don't get caught up in, like, all the other stuff they build along the way. They, like, frame how would they explain this to the world, and then they go build it. And part of that is to just not get sidetracked on some other thing and build entirely different.
And that's a type of product leadership that comes from product marketing. Apple is extremely focused in that regard. They always think about, okay, how are we gonna communicate this to the customer? What is— why is it different? Why is it better? Why do they have to have it? As opposed to, I think, a lot of companies who start from the, you know, the technical side, or, you know, why would this be useful, or, you know, be fun to build, or be neat to build, which I think can really lead people astray.
And I think it does reinforce that capability of saying no. Because it brings you back to, like, why the hell are we spending all this time building this feature if it's not delivering the service we had in mind in the first place? Have we fallen in love with a science project?
Yep. I mean, great, great PMs are people who can say no 95% of the time and still be liked.
