Speaker 1: Welcome to Office Hours, where we sit down with the
Speaker 1: chief executives shaping the world and into your most pressing
Speaker 1: questions about leadership, careers, and life. I'm Mike steib and
Speaker 1: today we are with my very good friend David Rosenblatt.
Speaker 1: David is CEO of First Dibbs, a marketplace for the
Speaker 1: world's most beautiful things including antiques, furniture, jewelry, art and more. Previously,
Speaker 1: he was CEO of double Click, and he orchestrated it's
Speaker 1: three point one billion dollar sale to Google in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. He sits on the boards of IAC
Speaker 1: and far Fetch. He is a pillar of the New
Speaker 1: York tech community, and he's my occasional tennis partner. David,
Speaker 1: I've been looking forward to this. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Mike. Likewise happy to be here.
Speaker 1: So what everyone should know is when I was thinking
Speaker 1: about coming to Artsy, the company I currently lead, it's
Speaker 1: a company that has a lot in common with David's company,
Speaker 1: First Dibbs. And David, you were the first person I
Speaker 1: came to see to ask for advice. You said, do it.
Speaker 1: I did it. I've had a blast for four years.
Speaker 1: So you're not only my friend, I are you a
Speaker 1: lot of gratitude for the advice.
Speaker 2: I'm flattered.
Speaker 1: A bunch of other folks have called in I want
Speaker 1: your advice today too. So we've got questions on luxury marketplaces,
Speaker 1: New York Tech, your career journey. So sorry with you,
Speaker 1: We'll just we'll get right into it, okay, all right.
Speaker 1: First one is a call we got from Emily in Dallas, Texas,
Speaker 1: who says you.
Speaker 2: Each came from outside of art and luxury to run
Speaker 2: the leading marketplaces in your industries. How did you find
Speaker 2: your way to these rules? My career arc has been
Speaker 2: relatively straightforward. I did a tour of duty. First of all,
Speaker 2: I majored in East As studies and Chinese language, so
Speaker 2: not very helpful for the career good so not very
Speaker 2: helpful for a commercial career here in the US. But
Speaker 2: I spent a couple of years in Asia. After I graduated,
Speaker 2: I did a tour of duty on Wall Street in
Speaker 2: investment banking. Decided I was neither very good nor very
Speaker 2: excited about it.
Speaker 1: We've heard that a lot on the show.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, There's been a lot of Crigerons that started in
Speaker 1: Wall Street consulting or NBA.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, stuff. Yeah, I wonder how much of that
Speaker 2: reflects the fact that we're sitting here in New York City.
Speaker 1: There's some selection.
Speaker 2: And you know, my honorable discharge from investment banking was
Speaker 2: to go to business school, and I happened to be
Speaker 2: at Stanford exactly at the sort of inception point or
Speaker 2: ground zero of the commercial web. And you know, along
Speaker 2: with many other people, I kind of got the bug
Speaker 2: and and wanted to focus after I graduated on early
Speaker 2: stage tech companies. So I moved to New York, which
Speaker 2: was probably not the smartest way to approach your career
Speaker 2: in early stage tech, but I did it because my
Speaker 2: now wife and girlfriend was here, and also because I
Speaker 2: wanted to live here, and I lived all over the world,
Speaker 2: and you know, I was excited by the city streets here.
Speaker 2: So I came. I connected very quickly with Kevin O'Connor,
Speaker 2: who had previously who had had recently founded for a
Speaker 2: double click, and he brought me on board as one
Speaker 2: of the early product managers. And it cut a long
Speaker 2: story short, it was a real roller coaster of an experience.
Speaker 2: You know. When I joined, we were.
Speaker 1: Doing double clock, was inventing internet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we basically created display the display advertising industry online,
Speaker 2: and you know, it was it was thrilling and exciting.
Speaker 2: Everything we did became sort of, you know, definitional to
Speaker 2: the industry that we were operating in. It was also
Speaker 2: a real roller coaster. I mean when I started, we
Speaker 2: were very small. We went public in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2: By two thousand, we had a market cap of fifteen
Speaker 2: billion dollars. A couple of years later, we had a
Speaker 2: negative enterprise value, meaning our the value of the company
Speaker 2: was significantly less than the amount of cash that we had,
Speaker 2: meaning investors. That was probably sort of two to three. Yeah,
Speaker 2: right after the bust. But I stuck with it, and
Speaker 2: you know, we did have the benefit at that point
Speaker 2: of having a lot of cash. We used that cash
Speaker 2: in retrospect to do the opposite of what we should
Speaker 2: have done. What we should have done is retain confidence
Speaker 2: in our market and double down on the display advertising industry. Instead,
Speaker 2: what we did is we took that cash and we
Speaker 2: diversified into related industries where we thought the things that
Speaker 2: we were good at by virtue of having done display advertising,
Speaker 2: you know, would apply. And that turned out not to
Speaker 2: be a great idea because what happened was the display advertising,
Speaker 2: contrary to most kind of projections of a few years earlier,
Speaker 2: did come back, but we didn't come back with it
Speaker 2: because by that point we were no longer the sort
Speaker 2: of you know, proxy on that industry that we had
Speaker 2: been going into the market correction. And so what we
Speaker 2: did is we decided the board decided to take the
Speaker 2: company private, and we ran an auction and ultimately did
Speaker 2: take the company private with home and and Freeman. I
Speaker 2: became CEO in conjunction with that take private deal. And
Speaker 2: essentially what we did over the following four years is
Speaker 2: we reversed the diversification process that we had undertaken previously,
Speaker 2: doubled down on display advertising, and you know, and that
Speaker 2: ended up working, and so I sold the company in
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight. As you mentioned a Google spent
Speaker 2: a year at Google kind of helping with the integration
Speaker 2: and the adoption of.
Speaker 1: Its resting investing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was trying to be productive, not not always successfully,
Speaker 2: as you know from having been there at the time.
Speaker 2: And so a year after that I left and joined
Speaker 2: a few boards, one of which was Twitter. Through Twitter,
Speaker 2: I met Benchmark. Benchmark had been an early investor in Twitter.
Speaker 2: A couple of years after that, they invested in first
Speaker 2: St Dibbs, and you know, I got the call from
Speaker 2: them to see if I was interested. What was appealing
Speaker 2: to me about first Stibbs was the same thing that
Speaker 2: appealed to me about Double Click, which was, even though
Speaker 2: it was a completely different industry, both companies were kind
Speaker 2: of reinventing what had been a very old industry for
Speaker 2: a digital age.
Speaker 1: Mae Ling, who is in San Francisco, texted this one
Speaker 1: into me. She said, how has tech changed luxury buying?
Speaker 1: And what about building a luxury marketplace is different than
Speaker 1: other marketplaces.
Speaker 2: Listen the tex change.
Speaker 1: You can now buy luxury online, so in one way
Speaker 1: it's changed it quite a bit.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean listen, the internet changes everything it touches, right,
Speaker 2: I mean listen. The degree of difficulty, as you know, Mike,
Speaker 2: you know, of running a luxury business online, and particularly
Speaker 2: one in the in the sort of in the arts
Speaker 2: broadly speaking, arts industry, the degree of difficulty is higher
Speaker 2: than any other company I've.
Speaker 3: Ever been around.
Speaker 1: You're dealing with unique objects, You're dealing.
Speaker 2: With unique options, one of the kind objects. You know.
Speaker 2: The sale of those objects requires trust, which is hard
Speaker 2: to achieve online. The sale is very complex, both logistically
Speaker 2: and also kind of psychologically. It's highly fragmented because you know,
Speaker 2: the item that a given buyer is in the market
Speaker 2: for might be eight thousand miles away, or it might
Speaker 2: be eight hundred yards away, right, and one doesn't know
Speaker 2: going into it. And again, the order itself is very complicated, right.
Speaker 2: Shipping is complicated, Insurance is complicated, Crossing borders is always complicated.
Speaker 2: The communication required between buyers.
Speaker 1: Because it's a longer consideration.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's not like buying a razor, right. I think
Speaker 2: in our case, the kind of initial value that we
Speaker 2: created for buyers was simply aggregating all of sort of
Speaker 2: relevant pieces in one place on one website, you know.
Speaker 2: And I remember, by the way, I just sort of
Speaker 2: back to the sort of the difficulty the degree of
Speaker 2: difficulty question. I remember when I was doing my own
Speaker 2: diligence on first DIBs, one of the you know, one
Speaker 2: of the moments that the difference between this market and
Speaker 2: every other market I'd ever been exposed to was sort
Speaker 2: of made concrete to me. Was I interviewed I don't know,
Speaker 2: nine or ten sellers on first STIPs to understand kind
Speaker 2: of how they thought about the company and the market
Speaker 2: and their business. And one of the really simple question
Speaker 2: I questions I asked them was what do you do
Speaker 2: when a piece of yours doesn't sell? And you know what,
Speaker 2: almost all of them said, raise the price. Oh and
Speaker 2: it's sort of the light bulb went off, like this
Speaker 2: is a different thing, you know, that's a different kind
Speaker 2: of things, a different kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Well, in art, the if you buy a thirty six
Speaker 1: by forty eight painting, the raw materials probably cost thirty dollars, right,
Speaker 1: but is the work of the artists that made it
Speaker 1: a value that could be tens of thousands or hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands or millions of dollars in value. So it's
Speaker 1: you're buying, you're buying aesthetic and cultural appreciation, and you're
Speaker 1: buying you're buying a tiny and you're buying a tiny
Speaker 1: slice of our of our culture. And it's that is
Speaker 1: very different than booking a room in Miami and a flight.
Speaker 1: It's very very different than we.
Speaker 2: Tea you know, I do consider First DIBs to be
Speaker 2: a mission driven company. I think, you know, part of
Speaker 2: the mission that motivates me, and I think many of
Speaker 2: our employees is what you say, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: in less companies like first DIBs and like Artsy succeed
Speaker 2: and scale, then you know, the market for a lot
Speaker 2: of what defines our culture disappears.
Speaker 1: And you know, and the people who sell these objects,
Speaker 1: whether they run art galleries or whether they are an
Speaker 1: antiques dealer, they're very special people. They follow their hard
Speaker 1: and do a thing that they love. And the business
Speaker 1: of selling art is not easy. Business of being an
Speaker 1: antiques dealer is not easy. When we can bring more
Speaker 1: demand to those entrepreneurs and help their artists succeed, it's
Speaker 1: it's really rewarding, and it's and to your point, it's.
Speaker 2: Really important, that's right. So in addition to all the
Speaker 2: challenges that are specific to working in the arts and
Speaker 2: kind of running an arts business as a commercial entity,
Speaker 2: you know, they're also small businesses and it's difficult for
Speaker 2: them to do things like, for example, figure out how
Speaker 2: to work with Google and search engines, figure out how
Speaker 2: to ship cross border, right, I mean all of those
Speaker 2: sorts of things.
Speaker 1: How many dealers could create their own appeah part of
Speaker 1: the app ecosystem and all of that stuff exactly, So
Speaker 1: you touch on something in the introot. You followed your
Speaker 1: you followed your heart to New York, and you ended
Speaker 1: up being an important part of the New York tech community.
Speaker 1: Connor and New York City asked the New York tech
Speaker 1: scene has boomed over the last twenty years, and first
Speaker 1: DIBs and Artsy our two leading examples of New York
Speaker 1: founded companies. How is starting and running a tech company
Speaker 1: in New York different than Silicon Valley for other places? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's been so you came here for the love,
Speaker 1: you stayed for the.
Speaker 2: Tech, stayed for the food.
Speaker 1: And by the way, was the same situation for me.
Speaker 1: My wife was an investment banker, and that means that's
Speaker 1: a New York job. And so you know, we're not
Speaker 1: the first people on this podcast to say we sort
Speaker 1: of are in our city because we did it for
Speaker 1: love and then and then you wrap your career around it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true. I think you know what's interesting, and
Speaker 2: I've been at it for a quarter century in New
Speaker 2: York tech, so you know, I, in a funny kind
Speaker 2: of way, the challenges between New York or the sort
Speaker 2: of difference between running a tech business in the Valley
Speaker 2: versus New York are almost sort of inverted in the
Speaker 2: sense that you know, early on when we were scaling
Speaker 2: Double Click, the biggest challenge was just finding engineers and
Speaker 2: also separately finding non engineers who understood what it was
Speaker 2: like to work in a kind of tech driven business.
Speaker 2: And we, of course had no shortage of people that
Speaker 2: kind of knew the industry that we operated in. You know,
Speaker 2: the Valley was the opposite, right. There were you know,
Speaker 2: great engineers growing on trees. There were very few people
Speaker 2: who who had experience with the underlying industries. And you know,
Speaker 2: I think the two kind of coasts have converged in
Speaker 2: that sense. Right There are now plenty of engineers here
Speaker 2: and there are now many more people than understand kind
Speaker 2: of non tech industries in the valley, And so in
Speaker 2: that sense, actually the difference between the two is much
Speaker 2: much smaller today than it was before. Those that remain
Speaker 2: really have to do with just scale, right. I mean, yes,
Speaker 2: there's venture capital in New York. There's a lot more
Speaker 2: of it out there. Yes, you know, there's a there
Speaker 2: is a developer community here. It's much bigger out there, and.
Speaker 1: I think the numbers are like it's roughly thirty percent
Speaker 1: now of sort of US venture starts in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: and like twelve or thirteen percent is New York City,
Speaker 1: so closer, but.
Speaker 2: Still civil service. It's still still different.
Speaker 1: One of the things I found different. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you have as well, but if you're especially by
Speaker 1: you know from our friends who who live in the valley,
Speaker 1: it's if you go to the soccer game, you're a
Speaker 1: drop off for your kids. All of the talk is tech.
Speaker 1: It is definitely a tech town. I remember our kids.
Speaker 1: Each of our kids are teenagers now, but I remember
Speaker 1: when we were applying my son for preschool and they
Speaker 1: asked where I worked, and I said I worked at Google.
Speaker 1: And one of the ladies in admissions at the school
Speaker 1: gave me your phone and asked me to ask me
Speaker 1: to fix it because they hadn't met someone in tech
Speaker 1: during the entire process of meeting the parents of the
Speaker 1: incoming preschool class. So New York, you have diversity in
Speaker 1: New York. And for companies like ours, which are these
Speaker 1: sort of culturally rich marketplaces, being adjacent to New York
Speaker 1: City culture, I think is a huge advantage. Huge advantage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think this. I don't think either of
Speaker 2: our companies could operate successfully from you know, San Francisco, potentially.
Speaker 1: Especially in the early stages of it, Especially in the stages.
Speaker 1: I think that's right.
Speaker 2: By the way, if I had a dollar for the
Speaker 2: number of times people asked me to fix their computers,
Speaker 2: you know, in the in the early days, once they
Speaker 2: learned I worked on you know, at a tech company
Speaker 2: in similar experience, I think we all had that right.
Speaker 1: The next one is from rajesh In, also in New
Speaker 1: York City. He asked, online advertising has grown to hundreds
Speaker 1: of billions of dollars a year and is the business
Speaker 1: model of countless Internet companies. Double Click and Google were
Speaker 1: the pioneers in the space. Can you talk about the
Speaker 1: evolution of advertising and what lessons you see for other
Speaker 1: newer Internet industries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, you know, the big change in the
Speaker 2: digital at least the display ad industry was the shift
Speaker 2: from a kind of what I guess you could call
Speaker 2: a kind of cut and paste application of the historical
Speaker 2: ad model to the Internet, meaning, you know, there were publishers, publishers,
Speaker 2: higher salesforces. Salesforces went out and sold ads agency. Yes,
Speaker 2: it took a little bit more technology, but kind of
Speaker 2: basically it was the same thing. The big change in
Speaker 2: the industry was the evolution from that in favor of
Speaker 2: AD exchanges and aggregators, so very large AD networks changes
Speaker 2: like Googles and double clicks and so on, that had
Speaker 2: the impact of divorcing audience from context, right, meaning if
Speaker 2: you wanted to buy an in more access to an
Speaker 2: in market car, you know, auto buyer. Previous to that,
Speaker 2: you bought car and driver. Whether you bought the print
Speaker 2: or you bought digital, it didn't really matter, you know.
Speaker 2: Once the ad exchanges and aggregators emerged, those two things
Speaker 2: could be separated and you could buy an in market
Speaker 2: auto buyer irrespective of where he or she is, right,
Speaker 2: And that led to all sorts of arbitrage models and
Speaker 2: you know, things like that, So that sort of you
Speaker 2: know that What was the reason I mentioned that is
Speaker 2: that is a I think every industry waits for its
Speaker 2: moment where it is reinvented, employing kind of attributes or
Speaker 2: technologies that only the has that's unique to digital. It
Speaker 2: doesn't exist offline to some degree, you know, I think
Speaker 2: first Stibbs, at least in our industry, has created a
Speaker 2: version of that, right simply by aggregating all the inventory
Speaker 2: in our market that otherwise had been super fragmented, and
Speaker 2: then also making it possible to buy that product online
Speaker 2: and receive some of the benefits of online of e commerce,
Speaker 2: right and being able to talk to the too many
Speaker 2: sellers at the same time and all in one place
Speaker 2: and compare prices and you know, arrange shipping and so on,
Speaker 2: and to do all that without having to pick up
Speaker 2: the phone and talk to somebody, which you know a
Speaker 2: lot of people don't like, you know. But at the
Speaker 2: same time, I don't think we're one hundred percent of
Speaker 2: the way there yet. It feels like there's another kind
Speaker 2: of chapter in this and you know, part of what
Speaker 2: is sort of you know, helps me remain very excite
Speaker 2: and engage about working in this industry is that I
Speaker 2: don't quite feel that we're one hundred percent of the
Speaker 2: way there yet. Sure, even though we've made a lot
Speaker 2: of progress.
Speaker 1: An interesting thing that happened in internet advertising is according
Speaker 1: to the Department of Justice, Google one and the and
Speaker 1: the double click being a part of Google is a
Speaker 1: big part of how they're looking now at Google having
Speaker 1: won the space. Do you think is that pattern going
Speaker 1: to be repeated as we look at sort of what
Speaker 1: comes next and what comes next sort of one of
Speaker 1: the things everyone's saying is that the Adobe of the
Speaker 1: AI world, for example, is going to be Adobe. That
Speaker 1: a lot of the technologies that are merging now are
Speaker 1: going to benefit more than anyone else the biggest players
Speaker 1: in the space get Do you get that sense?
Speaker 2: I do think that will happen, primarily because you know
Speaker 2: what the Internet is good at is connecting fragmented sort
Speaker 2: of nodes in an industry, right in sellers, buyers, whatever,
Speaker 2: And you know that that creates a network effect, and
Speaker 2: network effect industries favor scale players, right, And so it's
Speaker 2: not just the case that the bigger a company gets,
Speaker 2: you know, the sort of more powerful they become. But
Speaker 2: the bigger they get, the better the experience for sellers
Speaker 2: and buyers, which of course leads to even more scale.
Speaker 2: And it's the sort of, depending on how you think
Speaker 2: about it, either a vicious or virtuous cycle which ultimately
Speaker 2: culminates in the largest companies being the most powerful and
Speaker 2: actually having the best products and services. And so I
Speaker 2: don't think I'm saying anything that's you know, path breaking necessarily,
Speaker 2: but I don't see why that pattern wouldn't repeat itself
Speaker 2: in almost every industry online.
Speaker 1: Right For years, read Hastings was saying, we have to
Speaker 1: become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bingal exactly.
Speaker 1: They did, good job, guys, Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: But now that's become sort of part of the received
Speaker 2: wisdom of running a tech company, and I think it's
Speaker 2: to be harder to be a disruptor for that reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right. The next one is from Malik in Detroit. David,
Speaker 1: you sat on the Twitter board during its most formative years.
Speaker 1: What do you think of all the changes of Twitter?
Speaker 1: Presumably your nbas have all burned off and everything you
Speaker 1: can tell you.
Speaker 2: I mean, listen, they have. I mean, I will say this,
Speaker 2: I'm not as close to it anymore, just because I
Speaker 2: haven't been involved since since the change of control, and.
Speaker 1: I know, and people barely talk about it in the news.
Speaker 1: I mean, you probably haven't even heard.
Speaker 2: What's it's true? Yeah, I don't read the news.
Speaker 1: Just kidding.
Speaker 2: I mean, listen, I think you know there are there
Speaker 2: are a lot of different ways to think about that
Speaker 2: company and the impact of new ownership on it. From
Speaker 2: my perspective, one of the questions that I think is
Speaker 2: among the most interesting, which is sort of a commercial
Speaker 2: kind of geeky tech one is you know, one of
Speaker 2: the one of the attributes of Twitter that was always
Speaker 2: the most compelling from my perspective was its network effect, right,
Speaker 2: the fact that it had aggregated, you know, all of
Speaker 2: these content providers offered them a unique way to publish
Speaker 2: their content and a unique way for consumers of the
Speaker 2: content to understand it and read it in the sort
Speaker 2: of interaction of those two things. Creator and a network effect,
Speaker 2: which is part of the reason why you know, there
Speaker 2: is no real and has been no real competition to Twitter.
Speaker 2: Some of the changes that the current management are making,
Speaker 2: you know, I would think might undo some of that
Speaker 2: network effect. Charging for the market is the biggest one,
Speaker 2: right so you know, So the question for me that
Speaker 2: I'm most interested in, or as interested in as all
Speaker 2: the others, but which I haven't really heard anyone talk about,
Speaker 2: is what's more powerful the network effect that Twitter brings
Speaker 2: into this, you know, by virtue of having been around
Speaker 2: or seventeen years or so, you know, or the sort
Speaker 2: of negative impact on the network effect of some of
Speaker 2: these changes that the current management is thaking, like, you know,
Speaker 2: making a blue check mark available for sale. So far,
Speaker 2: the network effect is winning, right, So in spite of
Speaker 2: all of the changes, so not just the blue check mark,
Speaker 2: but also the relaxation of a lot of the content
Speaker 2: moderation investment, you know, the seemingly the seeming favoring of
Speaker 2: you know, some some tweeters over others and so on,
Speaker 2: none of that has undone the network effects. So that's
Speaker 2: what I'm going to be looking at over the next
Speaker 2: couple of years. And one of those things that I
Speaker 2: one of the aspects of this that I think is
Speaker 2: underserved but kind of fascinating.
Speaker 1: Next to a really good one from Alejandra in Albuquerque,
Speaker 1: New Mexico.
Speaker 2: You've both a lot of multiple companies. What is one
Speaker 2: way in which your leadership approach has changed the most?
Speaker 1: What is your advice to new leaders change one? It's
Speaker 1: a no question.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's a good ques. It is a
Speaker 2: good question necessarily. You know, I do my job differently.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you do years differently at age fifty five
Speaker 2: than I did at age thirty six, which is how
Speaker 2: well I was when I became CEO of Double Click.
Speaker 2: I have more things in my life, you know, both
Speaker 2: personal and professional and it's my hope that first Ebb's
Speaker 2: benefits is it sort of comes out positive on that trade, right,
Speaker 2: Like I can't I don't have the ability as I
Speaker 2: did when I was thirty six to put every single
Speaker 2: waking minute of my life.
Speaker 1: Well, could we had twenty six possibly have had time
Speaker 1: to sit on two boards, that would have been unthinkable.
Speaker 2: I didn't have time to Yah, everybody cared it was
Speaker 2: the minutes.
Speaker 1: We didn't have the minutes.
Speaker 2: And also it would have been hard. Yeah, I mean, so,
Speaker 2: you know, on one hand, it just at you know,
Speaker 2: at my advanced age. You know, it's it's it's just
Speaker 2: hard to put to sort of make any one company
Speaker 2: one hundred percent of your time my time. And my
Speaker 2: hope is that the company benefits from the pattern recognition
Speaker 2: I have and the experience.
Speaker 1: That I have, thee those.
Speaker 2: Network and all that that the benefits of that outweigh
Speaker 2: the fact that I'm not able to spend as I
Speaker 2: did at Double Click at age thirty six, every single
Speaker 2: waking minute on the company.
Speaker 1: I've come to appreciate over the last ten or fifteen
Speaker 1: years how much my job is getting everyone on the
Speaker 1: team to cooperate as effectively as possible. I think everywhere
Speaker 1: I've worked as long as I can remember. Now we've
Speaker 1: read the Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you guys David's nodding here on the podcast is
Speaker 1: a book everyone should read. But one of the core
Speaker 1: principles of it is everyone on the team is part
Speaker 1: of that's their first team, like your executive team, is
Speaker 1: one team that runs the company, rather than a group
Speaker 1: of people who run silos. And I have seen in
Speaker 1: my career a lot of teams where the leader thinks
Speaker 1: of the direct reports as sort of extensions of his
Speaker 1: or her greatness other than the team is a unit
Speaker 1: that the CEO or the general manager helps to cooperate,
Speaker 1: and that is It's something I'm it is a constant
Speaker 1: area of development, I think for every leader. But that
Speaker 1: is definitely what's changed for me over the long arc
Speaker 1: of my career is realizing that that's my role. My
Speaker 1: role is to be the My role is to get
Speaker 1: the best. Yeah, I'm the conductor. My role is to
Speaker 1: get the best out of that team.
Speaker 2: Right, you don't make the music, you are the conductor.
Speaker 2: It's you need to have the best cellist and the
Speaker 2: best violinist, and your job is to get them, not
Speaker 2: just to make sure that the company has the best
Speaker 2: of each, but that they obviously make beautiful music together.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you nailed the metaphor.
Speaker 1: You may have named the episode. I think we've got it.
Speaker 3: I think we've got it down, all right.
Speaker 1: It's the last one so from you and I have
Speaker 1: talked about this casually a number of times. I think
Speaker 1: every person with a knowledge worker job is talking about
Speaker 1: this these days. So Fatima in Jersey City texted this
Speaker 1: one into us, she said. In a recent Resume Builder survey,
Speaker 1: seventy five percent of companies said that they are mandating
Speaker 1: some form of in office work in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: What are your views on remote work and how have
Speaker 1: those views evolved?
Speaker 2: So, look, my own personal view of remote work is
Speaker 2: that I hate it.
Speaker 1: For me, you hate doing it.
Speaker 2: I hate I hate I hate work personally, I don't
Speaker 2: like working remotely, and you're an extrovert. I to be
Speaker 2: good for companies for employees to work remotely. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, part of what makes any group special, whether
Speaker 2: it's a team or a class or a company, is
Speaker 2: the kind of results from the connectivity that's created by
Speaker 2: people working together, and you know, the better you know people,
Speaker 2: and you know, the more sort of intimate that connectivity is,
Speaker 2: the better the Helpput, there's no question about it. On
Speaker 2: the other hand, you know, I have to recognize that's
Speaker 2: not the world we live in anymore. I think it's
Speaker 2: I think it's you know, regardless of all of the
Speaker 2: sort of movement in favor back to work. My own
Speaker 2: point of view is that we're at the beginning of
Speaker 2: a very long process of fragmentation where because of technology primarily,
Speaker 2: and the lack of friction and the ability of people
Speaker 2: to work together even if it's not ideal, and for
Speaker 2: companies to find the best available talent anywhere. I think
Speaker 2: that we're sort of what's the opposite of what is?
Speaker 2: Is it centripetal or centrifugal. There's like this sort of
Speaker 2: force right that we're all a part of it, like
Speaker 2: the expanding universe as a sort of you know, image,
Speaker 2: It's always in my mind, and so I think that's
Speaker 2: the world we live in, and I just think because
Speaker 2: of that we have to figure it out. I'm a
Speaker 2: little surprised that the technology has been so slow to evolve.
Speaker 1: I mean, still we've gotten two new features on Zoom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, right, exactly and no, exactly and so no
Speaker 2: new product in Zoom itself hasn't changed that much.
Speaker 1: And well, but this is to your earlier point on
Speaker 1: the network effects, because everybody else I talk to externally
Speaker 1: has Zoom already installed, so to show up with the
Speaker 1: new startup it's too large. Video conferencing software is a
Speaker 1: pain exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's you know, teams Microsoft, you think
Speaker 2: would do more, at Google would do more? You know,
Speaker 2: I don't. Again, I don't. I'm not smart enough to
Speaker 2: know what the answer is. But I am surprised that
Speaker 2: none of these there isn't, none of these platforms has
Speaker 2: been able to really change the way we work remotely.
Speaker 2: I think it'll happen. I think that technology will catch up.
Speaker 2: I think our role as managers is to kind of
Speaker 2: supply the non technology parts to this and figure out
Speaker 2: how do we achieve connectivity to complement the technology that
Speaker 2: likely will emerge over time, even if it hasn't yet.
Speaker 2: So the bottom line is, I don't like it. I
Speaker 2: think it erodes what makes companies special and you know
Speaker 2: what provides a lot of this sort of fun and
Speaker 2: joy in life, even for those of us who aren't extroverts.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, it's the world we live in.
Speaker 2: I don't think we're going back to the old one,
Speaker 2: and so we got to figure it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And for our company, we're Arts is a global company,
Speaker 1: and we have business partners in every time zone, and
Speaker 1: we have people and many time zones, and so already
Speaker 1: we had to deal with the challenge of being in
Speaker 1: separate locations, and in hindsight, we didn't deal with it
Speaker 1: very well. I would stand up and do an all
Speaker 1: hands in New York and half the company was there
Speaker 1: in the room and the other half of the company
Speaker 1: was watching on a little window where they didn't They
Speaker 1: felt like they were not a part of it. And
Speaker 1: so now we've augmented our practices so that we do
Speaker 1: we largely come into the office half the time, I'd
Speaker 1: say sort of most of the company, the large cern
Speaker 1: of the company half the time, some of the company
Speaker 1: all the time. It's a mix. But even when we're
Speaker 1: in we do a better job with hybrid or remote
Speaker 1: practices so that everybody feels included.
Speaker 2: And I think this transition that's important. And there are
Speaker 2: many you know, there are many upsides, right, I mean
Speaker 2: finding great talent, in allowing that talent to express itself
Speaker 2: and realize it's potential wherever they are is really powerful, right,
Speaker 2: And so there are many benefits to remote work. But
Speaker 2: at the same time, what I miss the most is
Speaker 2: the sort of serendipitous or unplanned conversations yep, right, and
Speaker 2: just you know, yes, you know, you can invite whoever
Speaker 2: you want to a meeting. The meeting could be run
Speaker 2: efficiently and well. Tools will evolve to improve in you know,
Speaker 2: feelings of inclusiveness and the ability to communicate and so on.
Speaker 2: But what you miss is you know, the meeting's over
Speaker 2: and somebody walks in early for their next meeting, and
Speaker 2: you talk to somebody you wouldn't have talked to otherwise, right,
Speaker 2: And so if you don't plan it, it doesn't have
Speaker 2: happened in this world, and I think we lose a
Speaker 2: lot from that.
Speaker 1: I'm now stacking up my calendar for the in persons
Speaker 1: certain days a week, and then the video conferences certain
Speaker 1: days a week, and it's it's starting to click in.
Speaker 1: But who could have imagined five years ago?
Speaker 2: Yeah. I will say one other thing on this, which
Speaker 2: is the part of all this That is most amazing
Speaker 2: to me is that, you know, whatever it was on
Speaker 2: you know, March ninth, tenth, eleventh of two, that twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: You know, there's no way that anyone could have imagined,
Speaker 2: you know, the world that we're in today, and yet
Speaker 2: it happened overnight, and now that we're in it, it's
Speaker 2: difficult to remember what it was like before. It's just
Speaker 2: the sort of adaptivity and the plasticity of the human
Speaker 2: mind is really just kind of awesome.
Speaker 1: Whatever we do now, that's what we do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And it's sort of like you assimilate to
Speaker 2: this new reality. And then again, not only is it
Speaker 2: impossible to imagine going back to the old one, but
Speaker 2: it's hard for many of us to even remember what
Speaker 2: it was like.
Speaker 1: Right, So, what will be that thing in five years?
Speaker 1: So tune back in. We'll we'll know soon enough. We'll
Speaker 1: know soon enough. David, this was super fun. Thanks for
Speaker 1: common entity, sharing your wisdom, and it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2: To see you man Likewise, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Well, my friends. Today we talked with someone who's been
Speaker 1: a pioneer in multiple industries and with tremendous success, and
Speaker 1: one of the things that I really appreciate about David
Speaker 1: is how interesting and interested, how curious he is across
Speaker 1: disciplines and across industries. And because David, I think, has
Speaker 1: has worked across a number of different formats, he brings
Speaker 1: that energy of he brings that approach of asking first
Speaker 1: principles questions about the business that he's building and about
Speaker 1: the industry he's trying to improve. And anytime we've talked
Speaker 1: to an interesting entrepreneur, a successful executive on this podcast
Speaker 1: who's done big things in her or his career, it's
Speaker 1: been by looking at their business, at their industry, at
Speaker 1: the needs of their consumers from a different angle, from
Speaker 1: an angle of first principles, rather than saying, how do
Speaker 1: we usually do it? Here? Can I do it just
Speaker 1: a little bit better?
Speaker 3: Let's you go about your.
Speaker 1: Week this week, I'd encourage you to look for the
Speaker 1: opportunities to take a first principle's approach to your problems,
Speaker 1: to take a first principle's approach to better serving your customers,
Speaker 1: to being a better teammate, to scaling up your business.
Speaker 1: Assume that there's a different and a better way, And
Speaker 1: the more curious you are in more aspects of your vertical,
Speaker 1: but also others. The better job you'll do, that's a gang.
Speaker 1: We've got some amazing guests coming up the next few weeks,
Speaker 1: including a CEO who's helping to cure cancer. Text or
Speaker 1: call in your questions at two point three four one
Speaker 1: nine oh five nine six, or just hit me up
Speaker 1: on LinkedIn Instagram. It's set up at Mike Steibe. I
Speaker 1: want to thank David and of course Jen, Meg, Jada,
Speaker 1: Matt and the whole team at Blue Duck Media for
Speaker 1: pulling this all together, Dylan and Sasha Gay and Nathan
Speaker 1: and Christine at iHeart Ben and the team at William
Speaker 1: Morris Endeavor for all their support, and of course Byheed
Speaker 1: here in the studio on the ones and twos. Office
Speaker 1: Hours is a production of Blue Duck Media and distributed
Speaker 1: by iHeartRadio. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Everybody,
Speaker 1: make sure you stay on your grind