Peter Fenton
- consumer internet, and 2 other divisions
2 stories of failure and redemption
Lue Serney and Jack Dorsey, lost control
- How did they lose control?
- the importance of self awareness. three distinct dimensions
- vision: where are we going
- execution: cadence, and getting stuff done today
- relationship building: being the glue
- Lue and Jack were great visionaries, but they were borderline disabled on all but one
- in both of these companies, the VP’s approach the board to kick out Lue and Jack
- Advice: know where you need to be buttressed and complimented
- do some introspection: what type of person are you?
- you need to think about what type of team and support you need to build
- companies don’t happen alone
- interesting note: Jack and Lou built the companies in the mirror image of their talents and deficiencies
- Lou’s new company reached 10k customers without salesperson… he doesn’t like sales people
- look for TED talk who, what, how?
- Twitter’s why: twitter brings you closer
- any employees needs to always be able to answer
- Twitter’s why: twitter brings you closer
- three reasons to sell a company (silicon valley meme)
- more money than ever imagine
- you’re screwed
- you’re tired
- zuckerberg offered 1 billion from yahoo, said no
learning, always learning
- learn it all, not know it all
- the idea of being too smart to be kept out of opportunities… constant worry today
the three lessons
- self awareness
- start with the why
- keep learning, stay young
Questions
Q: do you look for different people for different jobs
Distance between consumer and producer has collapsed.
Q: what’s a bad why? You should be interested in companies with good why’s but what are bad ones?
Separate good/bad from no why’s.
A bad why: friendster. putting personality before the company’s purpose
Q: what’s your process for investing in a company?
3 reasons:
- an extraordinary person (1/3 of investments, 1/10 of return)
- momentum (interesting, they claim to look at numbers… site analytics that might be easily tweaked)
- with an asterisk: non-toxic founders
- but… there is not one success story without a fair amount of action/violence… toxicity
Q: what was the impact of Dorsey leaving Twitter?
- problem: there was no one voice directing everything… things just bubbled up from the users
- “twitter is supposed to be better at revealing… through magic and algorithms…”