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That's the Supercarter.com slash perch. Supercarter. And this week's interview episode, we have Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who's the president for stuff. I'm just gonna say, Sukhinder is badass.
This conversation was super fun. She's incredibly smart. She's been a founder and entrepreneur. She's run big things.
She's run small things. Importantly, she was the president of Google Latin America. And she built Google's businesses in Latin America. And we talked about how she's that.
You might know about two weeks ago, 15,000, 20,000. Google plays a watch off the job to protest sexual harassment and discrimination in Google. Sukhinder has a huge respect about that. She has a combination called a board list that places women on to the board companies.
And we talked about how to build better companies, whatever culture is how to think about starting a company. And we talked about stuff up. Sukhinder is a new president. She has a lot of ideas about how a company likes stuff up, which started out as a disrupter.
And now has to behave as part of the fabric of the economy. And their mobile team can go next, which is surprisingly interesting. So check us out. Sukhinder is a badass.
It's a super fun conversation. All right. So I'm joined by Sukhinder Sankasti, who is the president of stuff. Welcome.
Thank you. Thank you for joining us. So you and I met a few months ago, right as you took over at stuff up. And I'm just going to be honest with you.
I didn't realize it was part of you. It was a bigger company. But you had this long history of being a founder, of being CEO. How did you end up at stuff up?
What was your path to there? So I think I ended up at stuff up for a couple of reasons. Number one, a big part of my career was spent at Google, which was very much an entrepreneur's journey. And before and after Google, I was an entrepreneur.
I was a founder at Yodelay. And after Google, I started a company called Joyce. And I started a company called Boardlist. But you know, from my time at Google, I really learned that I love scale as much as I love entrepreneurship or scaling.
I love kind of, you know, growth when you're at scale. And it's meaningful. And I love the journey of creation. And so as I started Boardlist, it was, I don't know, circa 2016, 2017.
I was in the midst of selling joyous. I really was thinking long and hard about what was next. And realizing that as much as I love the last seven years of being an entrepreneur, I really missed scale. But I wanted a job to combine both.
With a consumer brand that I really could identify with in some sort of like category. And lo and behold, I was chatting with an executive recruiter about what my next job would be. I was like, I don't know. But it looks like this.
And she said, what about stop up? And within a couple of months, I had a job, which was great. So it was really a chance to combine, I think, my love of creating an entrepreneurship with my love of leading a scale. And to get that uniquely for a brand I love, any category I love.
That's a great answer. I want to talk about a lot, actually. But I'm really interested in these kinds of journeys, especially the people who started and helped build the big companies that we take for granted. So you were actually the president of Asia Pacific and Latin America at Google.
And so it didn't exist before. And it did exist. And you were along that journey. What was that like?
How do you say I'm going to take Google to Latin America? What was the next day? You know, it's interesting. So to be fair, when I inherited Asia Pacific and Latin America, it was a 69-yard business.
It was mostly virtual. So I read online, if you recall, my peer, Cheryl Sandberg at the time, was writing out with online, and we had a virtual presence where advertisers could sign up right in any geo effectively and publish ads on Google. But we had no physical presence. And you say, well, why do you need a physical presence in these countries?
And you need every one of two reasons. Number one, you want to go get all the money, right? Like all the money. You want to go with medium and large advertisers in countries, not just the smaller advertisers that you serve.
You want to get all the money and all the currencies against all the demand on Google search platform. And then number two, you would spend in countries like, you know, CJK, China, Japan, Korea, where inherently the consumer value proposition is different and you may need a localized product and engineering team to go think about how to build a demand. And then, of course, go get the money. And so Larry and Sergey at the time was circa 2003, basically said, internationally was less than 50% of Google's revenue, and they had an ambition for it to be more.
Because they saw that search demand was already larger outside the United States in it. And so they basically said, go forth and multiply faster. Get us all the money faster. Get us there faster.
And at the time, I was responsible for Google and maps and a bunch of other business initiatives at Google and was asked to move over and build it out. So what did I do on the day after I got the job? Well, first of all, the day I got offered the job. I went home and had a rather long few weeks negotiation with my husband.
Because I was married a year. Admissions to starting a family. And I was like, uh, so they want me to run international. What do you think?
And went him over. I negotiated with Google to, I remember saying, I'm going to bring my husband on a couple trips this first year to get us all. And they were like, uh, okay. So it was a long negotiation, actually, but not that long of a few weeks.
And then my first job was actually, I believe they're not traveling to countries, opening up regis offices, renting space in regis offices and finding our on the ground either country manager or CFO. Those are the first times you make it any country. And you say, well, why? And what you make it a finance, because it turns out that there's no point in opening up an office and hiring salespeople if you don't support the currencies, local payment options, you know, a finance person actually really great to figure out what your payment options need to be.
So you go in a finance person and then you hire your country manager. It's effectively an ad sales leader, but you can build an office in morale and your response for median revenue. And you do it. And when we started, we basically contained every country you want to be in to less than 10 people believe they're not.
So we started with the scoring matrix. You can imagine we looked at all the countries were in virtually and what our revenue rate was and then we prioritized markets tier one markets. And the first year we went, I think we picked five to go after. And like I said, it was regis offices.
The little rental offices is your hand. Little rental offices, less than 10 people. Everything's in Google. So mighty.
But I always remind people that we were building businesses. And from zero to 10 people, you were allowed to hire as many as you want. And you need to start your revenue. Really?
Yeah. It was either a finance person or an ad sales person who was the first on the ground. I took people from the US and I shipped them out to markets because we had no local people to start. So some of these markets would shift something from the US.
They'll start the office and hire that first person into the interviews. And I would fly in and, you know, sit in that same route as office. And then we'd even have to stay behind and make sure we sat behind. And literally we had employment agreements in local countries and all of that shit you go through to open a local office.
So that's what I was like in early days. And then every year we kind of started measuring people on metrics post 10 people, you know, largely sales and beauty people to start. And then they ended up being full fledged offices and sales, beauty, finance, marketing. In some cases product, we opened a number of engineering centers in our local offices.
There were local countries. In the time I was there, we ended up at nine engineering centers in the back in Latin region. But that was sort of a combination of local needs. And also just whether it was great engineering, talent, even a civil market, we ended up sponsoring and lobbying for engineering to be in our markets as well.
How long were you there? That seems like a really big project. Did that take five years, ten years? I was there for five and a half.
I guess that the first year I was working as I said, I launched local and maps with the engineering product teams. I was on international for roughly five of the five and a half to six years. I was at Google. The first year was as I said, local and maps.
So it was a big journey. But you know, it's like anything. It's iterative, right? You start small and then you just keep adding.
And one day you look back, you're like, whoa, that happened. Yeah. And in our case, we ended up with 18 offices, nine engineering centers, 2000 people in the region and a multi-billion dollar business. And to be honest, if you contrast that to being an entrepreneur, because sometimes I look back at Google and I thought, oh gee, I thought I worked hard there.
Not a chance. I hope to see people now when I compare the journey. I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot that, you know, it seemed hard at the time. But Google had all that demand.
And all I wanted to worry about was supply. And actually trying to get a career to create a demand because we were not the winners in that market. And search was not naturally growing. But I mean, when you're an entrepreneur, that's a luxury, right?
Like Google has spent all my time fulfilling demand. And outside of Google, I spent all of my time trying to create the demand. I mean, just do fundamentally different jobs. Were you there when Google left China?
Oh my goodness, thank the Lord not. I left in 2009. And I think within a year of my departure, they announced their exit in China. And my heart broke for my team that was there because it was a really difficult position, right?
Because I was the person who lobbied for us to go into China along with Alan Eustace who ran engineering at the time successfully, you know, five years earlier. So it'd be the person who opened China and then just saw the team that got quite frankly abandoned there when Google decided exit, you know. It was really tough for local employees. And of course, now Google wants to be back in.
Yeah. When you make up this sort of shadow project to go back. To be honest, it's the person who thought we should have been in there in the first place and lobby to be in. And a strategy would try to be one of resistance or one of engagement.
I continue to believe in engagement on China. I mean, you know, I think we like the rest of the U.S. is the world's largest economy. But let's not forget, it's the world's largest economy.
And people get caught up and I understand the very dicey issues of censorship and they're real. The converse is I would argue that access to more information versus less. And at the time, remember, when we didn't go into China, we were blocked. Eighty-five.
Fifty percent of the time you could get answers to any search results. When the reality is the vast majority of the information people want is relevant and useful. And by being there and engaging, I believe we have a better chance of opening up markets culturally socially by being president than not. So generally my supporter of Google's trying to reenter the Chinese market engaged with it.
Yes. That may not be what Mr. Trump wants to hear. Okay.
So you left it all and then you went and did a bunch of entrepreneurial things. You founded financial services company? I ended up before Google. Financial services company went public in 15 and got acquired.
That's not public company. And then you're at the board list, which is super interesting. I don't want to talk about which recruits women to be on the board's companies. It's a talent platform where we crowdsource CEOs and senior executives with board experience, great diverse candidates in this case, women to serve on boards.
And then it's a supply-demand platform. But I'll focus on boards. I like this current supply-demand. It seems very relevant to stuff, which is what we come to next, which is a marketplace for people who have to get to want to sell them to go tickets.
Here's my big question. It's kind of relevant to what you were talking about with people as well. Famously, they started a product called Search, and now they are literally players on the global scale. The president of our country is telling them about not the business of our country.
The disruption pattern is real. They started something small. There was a service for some people, and now they're major players, and the world is working on them. In that category of companies, in pretty important ways, there was just an easier way to buy them tickets.
And now literally event businesses are built around companies. So they're part of reality. They're no longer instructors. Do you think of stuff that way?
Do you think, well, this isn't a disruptive. This is not a fabric of society. Is that a responsibility to feel? I think there are two things.
I wrote a blog post to the employee base. I think the title of my blog was scale as a privilege. So I'm coming from being an entrepreneur. I'm like, do you realize how hard it is to get here?
And once we're here, we shouldn't take advantage of it. So the answer is your question. Do I love the fact that stuff is part of the fabric of how tickets get sold to more importantly how people experience live events globally? For sure.
It was one of the reasons I wanted to come back to scale. It was just every day you wake up and know that you're impacting millions of people. The converses, the reason I came stuff up is because I think there's still a lot of opportunity for disruption in a live event space. See, when I both know, the reality is that people are increasingly spending their disposal and come on experience as not things.
The next generation that continues, whether you're millennial or like me, you're old or older. And while I experience these unique moments and take advantage of every single one that comes along, the reality is that we're in the fabric of a category that's growing. And I'm saying that's getting reinvented, right? I mean, there's a distinction that people use to make between, you know, the person who recently gets into the person who resells, you think that distinction is gone.
People just want to take it. People just want to get to an event easily and friction-free. People want access to more and more unique experiences, right? I think so.
How do you give people access to gear and unique experiences that they can't get elsewhere? How do you think about technology, any technology in our category is changing a lot. People ask me, gosh, what happens when you think about arenas and if theaters are in the presence or authentication by fingerprint? What happens to your business?
So there's also technology disruption. You've got a consumer that more than ever wants to spend their dollars on not to be forgotten experiences. And you've got, I think, we have the benefit and the privilege right now of having built that large fan marketplace. But yeah, do I feel a huge obligation to, you know, serve those customers one more importantly, the fun, figuring out whether it would be the next places that we need to go for the consumer, keep in mind that category, I'd say, the countries we play in and also the technology that can compare are access overall.
Yeah, that's a fun combination. And it's still a kind of disruption, I think. The technological piece of authentication and fingerprint and biometric seems like a big change to how tech is going to work. I mean, that was it.
Are we moving to a place where you're not facing your way into the football game? Possibly. I mean, right now we're already a place where I think I'm going to say something like 40% of our tickets are full mobile. I mean, it's an insane amount.
But it's such a beautiful and frictionless experience. Yeah, look, I think there will always be people who want to use tickets to get into events and that's just the comfort of holding a paper ticket. But access is one piece for sure. I said, I think other pieces need experiences and how to give people even more than just a ticket.
And I think a lot about that as well. Some of it was kind of like a user experience win, right? Here's something that was hard to do. I've actually bought fake Packers Jets tickets when I first moved to New York on Craigslist.
It was horrible. You can just wait over here and watch the game. So they're very nice to us. Oh, that's nice.
Yeah. I think we just looked like sample puppies that they know too. And so here's a better user experience. You're not going to need some stranger in Starbucks.
They're not going to sell you a fake thing. You're not going to buy this thing online. It's a nice marketplace. You're going to need to be able to run all these things.
That was the first big disruption. But we always talk about these great ideas that make something easier. But to make them work, you need to go get deals, right? Out in the industry.
You need to have partners. The NFL needs to care about you and not try to kill you. Verizon needs to not do it. Verizon does stuff things.
Apple and Google run big platforms. You need to integrate with them. Are you still in like the ideals mode or something that you can really just work on user experience or whatever? You know, it's interesting.
I think that we're both. Of course, I think about how to integrate user experience. You cannot. You can't think about what else this person wants to take it as I said and how to make it easy for them.
But the converse is now I think less about deals and I think more about the unique things we do with content rights holders to really give better experience to fans. So, right, the basics are what we have over 200 partners and the most we deal with the NFL, right? For what we call authentic distribution. Which is, in fact, you should be able to get into the stadium globally within, you know, on your stuff up app and get to get into the NFL.
I think it was really key in embracing this. We're going to create an open distribution system for all fans to seamlessly, you know, buy and sell tickets. So, that's a reason example. But beyond deals, we do deals for a better customer experience and iteration.
You know, I think the other key thing here is getting closer to content rights holders overall. If you think about the value chain and the world we live in today, I'm sure you think about this in the first cast. I mean, wow, what a great time it is in the world to be a content rights holder, right? And if you're in the business distribution, you can't help but think about, you know, how you get closer to content rights holders, right?
Because nobody just wants to be a pipe. Stop having clitted. And so, I think increasingly I think we feel very lucky and fortunate that we are partnering with everybody from the 76ers to the Cavs around the computer company. And that's the tour, which is a major theater company.
And they're all giving us access to not just an easy customer experience, but increasingly, you know, I think we need to think about how to turn those relationships with content rights holders into a better fan experience from what they're just getting in the stadium. So, our deal is important for sure. But I think they're not just important to use fan friction. I think increasingly kind of you want to be close to content rights holders.
I think you're in the distribution business anywhere. And certainly stop with no exception. Wait, no, wait. Hold on.
You're scaring me. This sounds like you're going to start Apple TV app and it's going to be like 49 a month and get like 76ers games and like some plays. Please tell me that's not what you're doing. Because that's like the nightmare I hear from everybody all the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I am not. If you ask me if I'm secretly working on a streaming app, the answer is no. There you go.
But if you ask me that, you know, I've gone from the world where I think about, okay, we need deals to create a frictionless fan experience. Okay. Yes. We are in that business and it's more deals, right?
We will do more deals, right? Because you need to make sure your fans can get in the stadium on a multiple ticket. And it's a great experience. So you need deals in terms of how to make that happen, right?
But I would say in a world of multiple tickets. I'm just saying beyond that. I'm standing back thinking about, okay, we have the table. All these content rights holders.
How do we use these relationships to create a better experience for fans? That's more what I'm thinking about. You know, I mean, it's going to be something like, look, I was at the Jets game two weeks ago. And while I was there, I didn't even know I was there.
I was going to be there with our CEO and we were there with the folks from the NFL. And in terms of when we were there, you know, we had 60 fans who were on the field getting a premium experience like pulling out the national flag. I'm like, yes, more that please. You know, it should be that being part of the stuff community over the next five years means more than just getting a great ticket.
So I'm standing a lot more time thinking about that. I think about how do we look at these great deals and partnerships we have and turn them into something unique for fans. That's what I mean. Could be super simple.
So yeah, don't worry. There's not a streaming app coming in the next year because by the way, I'm not interested in launching one of them. I tell me they might get 50% of my subscriber revenues. I'm like, darling, you have this.
I'm trying to get away from a ticket company. Do that. You know, a pure content channel. Not yet.
Ask me a few years. I'm just going to start forwarding you all of the pitches I get for other people's bets streaming apps and that'll just keep you. It'll just keep you at bay. You'll realize it's not worth it.
So what's that one big product you'd like to put up? I know that I think this role just recently did some AR stuff that was really interesting. What's like the next big vision for it? I'm not going to open this app.
And here's how the product can develop. Well, let's put this way. In a category that's competitive, I'm certainly not telling you what I'm thinking about. Can I just say sorry?
No, not happening. I do think about it a lot. As you can appreciate it. I mean, I'll say more generically.
I don't give you the road map of the things we're thinking about. I'm working on. I'd say generically. I think the features within ticketing can be entirely reimagined.
And, you know, I'm not going to say anymore. Sorry. That's what I was going at. You talked about authentication.
You talked about fingerprinting into a thing. Is there a world in which we're not using the phone at all? You just show up at the place and you give me your fingerprint. You know, eventually.
But the reality is, I talk about mobile ticketing. Like I said, as with any old technology, we'll take a long time to them all to die, right? Like, I would love everybody to be mobile, but the reality is, like, pay your tickets are going to last for a long time and trickle out because that's how these ticket holders might want to hold on to their hot tickets. They might want the physical ticket tickets that you get today.
So I think, I mean, I think mobile is probably the biggest trend I would continue to call out. And is there a day that you don't even need an app and, you know, you can just use your fingerprints? Yeah, maybe. But I think we're a long time for that day.
And then we're, you know, going to be a great, great guy. And I think that's really, really cool. And I'm not really sure what the case is. You know, within three to five years, are we going to see 90 percent of tickets being mobile?
Sure. But from there to no app at all, I don't know. And keep in mind, I can get you and think about what we were talking about earlier. What else can your app get you besides ticket?
I think that's a much interesting question. So if I got you on my app and you're buying a ticket, how else can I service you? Well, I would ask for your app and tell me. Yeah, I know.
That's okay. But at the end of the days the commerce marketplace, and every day we wake up thinking about, you know, great consumer experience, Let's not dismiss the core work of any great e-commerce marketplace. I've got to get you there easily. I've got to make discovery an awesome experience.
And then it turns out as we said, there's some fun technologies coming along that both will challenge us to think about how we deliver that course differently, but then what we have to do it. And that's a fun place to think about, but every day we still wake up, they give out how to get fans the easiest experience to get to their live events. Everybody, we have a quick advertiser segment from SuperKruder in the Road Hire. Learn more about how one groundbreaking business is attracting the best talent.
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Back to show. I want to talk about something else that is important to you, which is you're going to board list and getting women into more senior management positions. And it just so happens that day we're recording this yesterday, like 14,000, 17,000 Google employees walked out of offices around the world to protest how Google is handling discrimination and harassment. Obviously you were at Google.
How do you read this moment? Is the change here? Is this it? Or is this just one more step along the way?
I think when it comes to these issues, I think that this is one more step along the way, but it's an important one. So is this the moment? You know, I doubt it. I think it's like everything else where you just keep building and building and building and at some point you tip something over.
And I would say yesterday was a bigger than expected building block, right? Because I don't know that anybody expected 14,000 people to work out. I mean, from what I understand at first the expectation was a few hundred. And so I think the signal from what is at the third most recognized brand in the world from its employees on mass.
And if you think about what Google probably is 120,000 employees about that, that means a 10 to 15% walked off the job. And that was not just women. You know, I think the signal that that sends is a pretty mighty one. I think the size of the signal is probably what's notable.
And employees really using their voice to make very clear kind of a defined set of asks. And so that set of asks is really interesting to me as well, especially because as a founder, some of these companies, a big company now, who has an organization that places people on boards, one of the asks is employee representation on the board, which is wholly remarkable in the tech industry. Less remarkable in the old industries, but still remarkable overall. How do you look at that ask?
Is that reasonable? See change in how these companies are built and structured and run. Well, a couple of things. There were two asks that were specific to the board.
One was employee representative on board. The other, I think, was the chief diversity officer, you know, giving their findings directly to the board. I think both of those are interesting. I think the first one is more notable because I haven't seen it anywhere else.
I think if I was to back first of all, I would just say Googlers in good style, hard creative thinkers and empowered thinkers, it turns out. I think the idea of asking for an employee representative on the board, I don't think get it. But what is taking the ground about the voice of employees inside the board, which I think we would all agree is just not present day. It's a different form of diversity, right?
Like, at the board list, we talk a lot about diversity from a gender perspective. But the employee voice in the board was your point. It probably doesn't exist other than unionized companies. Now, weirdly, because of the board of Ericsson, which is Swedish company, it had three employee representatives.
So I'm actually used to it. But that's for a European company, right? And that is part of the work for the unionized. So not strange to me, but for an American company.
I mean, unheard of. And I would say a really innovative idea. Now, we'll Google No, we'll Google No, who knows? But certainly, further than anybody else has proposed and another take on diversity.
So I'm all for it. I mean, I think it's the idea of having a employee representative is a pretty, in the interest of US companies is a pretty innovative one in this day and age. It's by the fact that it's been done before in other industries. In terms of how the chief diversity officer report to the board, I am hugely supportive of some vehicle, whatever it is.
And there are several companies out there that are trying to track the space as well, of having a feedback loop to the board directly of what's going on inside a company that can be in parallel with HR, but is not controlled by HR. And this is no discredit to Google, because Google has always been an innovator on the HR side. So this is no discredit to Google whatsoever. But what is the risk?
The risk is that employees point out. And I think it was pointed out in that letter. When you are trying to do the right thing and an employee comes to you and you're in HR, and you are kind of conflicted. Are you there representing the employee?
Or are you also there because you report to the CEO and you're trying to please that person and look into that and I don't mean that in a bad way. But that's, you know, you're taking your instruction from, or you are being, you know, pirated by managers and, you know, you may be getting completely about a manager. I think the reality of today is although HR is constructed, or theoretically, a place that employs supposed trust, I think the reality is we need some feedback loops that really are checking that one's HR. And that is not, again, because anybody is trying to do something malintended.
It's just about all of the kind of, you know, all the workings behind the scenes in HR that may or may not make it a place that feels comfortable for a voice to go, or to feel hurt or whatever the set of policies are that may or may not let something ever be shown to the board and CEO. So I can only tell you, as a board member, I would love the idea for any of the boards I was on to be able to have direct visibility into what is the ratio of complaints. Give me some data on what's going on inside the company. Most often by the time it comes to the board, it's one crisis situation.
But as a board, like, as a board member, I would want to know what the pattern is. Like, am I seeing one out of 1000 incidents? Am I seeing one out of 100? Like, how do I get the data that something is or is not a problem inside the board on?
I think people underestimate or overestimate how much access the board has to information like that, right? I mean, boards are consuming, you know, vast amounts of information, you know, but it still all comes through one lens at a quarterly board meeting, and you have to still invest a lot. And I don't think there is a good feedback loop on issues relating to employee happiness, talent and culture overall to the boardroom. Most committees, you know, like non-gov committees or enumeration committees, you know, con committees.
They're charters very narrow today, and until it's expanded to include these things, there's not a natural way that this information is all coming to the boardroom, unless the CEO himself or herself is very attuned to bringing it. So you are talking a lot about corporate governance, which is super interesting because big tech companies in the Valley are structured to kind of avoid it, right? Mark Zuckerberg owns all of the shares of Facebook, and he totally can't do anything. Uber was structured that way in a very meaningful way that had to be undone.
The Twitter board drama is just like, like, it's going to be a movie someday. Is that something that just needs everybody? Every founder needs to reset the idea that they need to construct a shell around themselves, the company can't get taken away from them, because they actually need to build a good culture at scale eventually. You know, I think that you're hitting on two big topics.
Number one is obviously super voting, right, and who controls the board. Number two is the consolidation of the founder into the CEO role and the chairman role of the board, and not having those two things separated. Look, the part of me that's a founder and has managed boards, particularly private companies, where I felt like everybody who's in the boardroom is, you know, venture capitalist and doesn't understand my business. That part of me, that's a good point.
That part of me really emphasizes, right, with the idea of super voting control, because you're like, look, something doesn't know my business is coming in and telling you what to do. So I feel like as a multi-time founder, I get the converses. There is no, and this is the challenge. There is no lens through which the board will see what is going on in the company, other than through the lens today of the CEO and chairman, which in many cases is also the founder.
So just think about that. Like if you're a board member, the information you see is what somebody's decided to bring into the boardroom, and that person is typically the founder, the CEO, and the chairman. So where is the diverse perspective if that person needs guidance? Or if you want to see something else?
So for me, there's super voting control, but to be honest, the other issue is the founder controlling also the chairmanship of the board. Like, where is it private companies? Where is the independent lead director? There is one in public companies in the US, the chairman and the company are often the same person.
So I think there's voting control, and that's one issue. The other issue is just like, who's holding the CEO accountable? Is the CEO also the chairman of the board? That to me is as big a conundrum.
So the part of me that's the founder is always very torn on this issue, because I like nothing better than controlling boardrooms, particularly when I feel like nobody else knows really what it's like inside the company, and just how tough it is every time, you know, they give you an ill-advised recommendation that only is serving the interest of their class A or B or C classes, which quite frankly is the problem in private boards, and everybody really is voting their class, right? You know, they're supposed to be watching out for everybody. But theoretically, when you're in a public company stage, you should have the notion of independence, and you should have the notion of a company that can also question the CEO, or can ask for a different perspective, and I will just tell you, like, if there's nobody in the boardroom who's a lead independent director at a minimum, and a maximum may be a chairman who's not the CEO, how do you ever foster even a debate with the CEO, and ask to look at different information, a different perspective? Is the answer an employee representative on the board?
Is he bringing it all back around? Is that all that? No, I don't know if it does all that. Okay, let me start with the two issues.
There's diversity in the boardroom, and having a great boardroom discussion, right? And you're like, what are all the perspectives that are useful? Is an employee perspective useful? Yeah, interesting idea, right?
And so that helps bring more conversation. But you know the other problem is with boardrooms? They need to be well managed, it turns out. Like it turns out that corporate governance, particularly in past situations, takes courage.
It takes somebody willing to ask a tough question. It takes somebody willing to die deeper. So we ask you a question. Have you ever seen a really good football team, or a basketball team, or a sports team that just naturally comes together four times a year and makes great decisions without a great coach?
The answer is no. Okay, okay, unless you're LeBron at the Lakers, and you're the player, and the coach, you know, at the same time, which by the way looks a lot like the founder, you know, like I am Oracle. I know everything that's a great company. I'm not your dismiss, the value of an Oracle, by the way.
Like, look, I mean, lots of great companies are built off genius. Lots of great sports teams are built off a key alley. But what I will say is, if you want to manage to make good decisions over time, and sometimes courageous decisions, and see all the information, it's not just having about having diversity in the boardroom. It's about having a well-run boardroom.
And independent voice is able to ask the right questions, and I would say leadership, like leadership in the boardroom matters as much as a diverse set of perspectives. So bring this all back to this moment in the tech industry, where we have a bunch of companies that are constructed and designed to give outside status influence to their CEOs and founders. And then you have tens of thousands of people walking out to say that we're doing this wrong. How do you bring those together?
If 20,000 players walk out tomorrow, because they're mad about Cambridge Analytica. Like, what actually happens? It's like, well, we're getting out of here all our 20,000 people are you. Like, what's the thing that bridges the gap?
My gut is that if you're in a small company and you're in one or two people, you can say, ah, I can always hire another person. And this is the thing about small companies, right? Like, you can keep trading employees and, you know, in the founder, quite frankly, with lack of visibility to the rest of the company from the board. You can be able to continue that scenario.
When you think about critical mass uprisings, which is what we just saw Google, my gut is that when it's 15,000 people, they don't just forget tomorrow that they march today. And if you're 20,000 employees at Facebook, there's some number, a threshold number, which, you know, you can't just replace all that talent. And the voices aren't going to go away. And this is the strength of numbers.
This is why I mean, let me just step all the way back. Like, so you can say, top down, this is the status quo, right? Because people are invoking kind of these super privileges to founders and, you know, founders that use what have you. But we can agree that bottoms up, what just happened in the second street of the past year, these small cases, like ones and twos, whether it's, you know, what happened with some experiencing, you know, harassment from a given VC or something else, it turns out that as one and two people start talking to each other, they're not alone.
They get to critical mass by having, like, lots of small voices that, you know, rise together using, like, social media, in the news to get critical mass. Or if you're something like Google, you can create critical mass by just organizing 15,000 people. So either it's lots of little voices who find each other, and social media and, you know, and movements like Time's Up, and the more people speak up, the more people will speak up. Or you're, you know, fortunate enough to be able to self-organize inside of a company of Google's eyes and scale, then you can get 15,000 people to show up, and it's hard to ignore 15,000 people.
So the answer to your question, I think it tends to be the same as it always has been, what comes to disruption? Yeah, one more question. We have a lot of people who listen to the show who want to start companies, who want to be founders, who want to be entrepreneurs. And something I get is, I hear all this stuff, but my network is small, you know, I just want to start coming up with my friend.
I can't think about it right away. What's your advice on them on how to expand that network right away so you have a diverse set of contacts? And then how to immediately start thinking about building a company to reflect some of these more important values that seem to be off-kilter right now? A couple things.
I think, number one, think about diversity in the founding team. You want to build it early. So, I mean, at your point, often we start companies with people we know, right? But we also often, when we are looking for a co-founder who's technical or in the case of a technical person, this is person, we go to our friends and we ask who they know, right?
Most people think they don't have diverse networks. They may not have diverse order networks. I would say my first piece of advice is go to your second order network. It turns out that, you know, you may not know a great girl, but you may have a best friend who has a spouse or a partner or girlfriend that you think is great and you may be able to ask them too.
And maybe you get a different answer when you ask people and you're like, if they know a great woman, ask for it. Like, you know, as opposed to just saying, hey, you know, do you know a great guy? I mean, it's very, to me, one of the simple simple answers is people think that they're not diverse. They may not be diverse at the first order.
Do the work to ask your second order network, right? And be explicit about looking forward to first candidates. Because if you don't ask, you'll never know. Start early.
We talked about, I mean, you know, we think about it always surprises me that they're best practices. You probably chocolate this too. They're best practices when it comes to like how to raise seed financing rounds and what the terms you should look like. How can it be that you cannot crowdsource the best practices for, you know, what your company should look like on day one to help make it more diverse.
I mean, maybe a simple is having opportunity and maternity policy from day one. How about that? How about, you know, just stick with like the six weeks of disability that California gives you. Like, I think companies like always and others are trying to crowdsource and make more common what these best practices are.
But you ought to be able to go out and figure out what are some of the smart things. And again, if you don't know, go find a female founder somewhere or diverse founder, you know, we're going to ask five different companies what they do when they're early practices that you admire and how they did it. But we've got to get some sort of basic best practices for building, you know, the building blocks of what helps people succeed at work from day one. Yeah, that's great.
I think what's really interesting is most of the companies are products and I think it's kind of important for us to come back to the companies, ecosystems of people. And that's really hard, especially when everything is just like a website. It's very easy to just be like, I mean, website, you know, that's a company. No, that's right.
You made a point. You have two products, I guess, a company and a product. And we think of our company, the product is the same thing. And again, as a founder, I'm as guilty of that as anyone.
I mean, you only started with me and five technical founders who are all engineers. I mean, like, did I say, like, time out, let me go get another female. I didn't even think about it. Luckily, none of us were white.
But we were pretty darn homogeneous ourselves. So, you know, we all look at a certain different color and it was all similar. And we fed our own stereotype, sadly. So I can't say I've done it perfectly.
But I do think today, today's a lot more important to be thinking about these things proactively if we want to move the needle from here forward. Very cool. Well, I really appreciate all the time and just talking about this very unique moment, I think, in tech and culture together. Thank you so much for your answer.
No problem. All right. That was a interesting cast of the president of Stuff Up, like I said, just a much fun talk here. I want to know what you think of these different episodes.
Who you want me to talk to? What you want me to talk to investigate? Tweet at me on my website. I'd love to see you back.
And we'll see you later this week. Good bye, Richard.