January 17, 2024 • 34 mins
🎙️ On pioneering internet advertising at DoubleClick and their transformative $3.1B sale to Google
🎙️ How the internet is transforming luxury … and everything else
🎙️ Views on the new X.com from a long time Twitter board director
🎙️ And why a leader’s job is “not to make the music, but to be the conductor”
Tune in this week for a great hang with a terrific leader and Silicon Alley OG.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Office Hours, where we sit down with the
chief executives shaping the world and into your most pressing
questions about leadership, careers, and life. I'm Mike steib and
today we are with my very good friend David Rosenblatt.
David is CEO of First Dibbs, a marketplace for the
world's most beautiful things including antiques, furniture, jewelry, art and more. Previously,
(00:28):
he was CEO of double Click, and he orchestrated it's
three point one billion dollar sale to Google in two
thousand and eight. He sits on the boards of IAC
and far Fetch. He is a pillar of the New
York tech community, and he's my occasional tennis partner. David,
I've been looking forward to this. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Thank you, Mike. Likewise happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
So what everyone should know is when I was thinking
about coming to Artsy, the company I currently lead, it's
a company that has a lot in common with David's company,
First Dibbs. And David, you were the first person I
came to see to ask for advice. You said, do it.
I did it. I've had a blast for four years.
So you're not only my friend, I are you a
lot of gratitude for the advice.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
I'm flattered.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
A bunch of other folks have called in I want
your advice today too. So we've got questions on luxury marketplaces,
New York Tech, your career journey. So sorry with you,
We'll just we'll get right into it, okay, all right.
First one is a call we got from Emily in Dallas, Texas,
who says you.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Each came from outside of art and luxury to run
the leading marketplaces in your industries. How did you find
your way to these rules? My career arc has been
relatively straightforward. I did a tour of duty. First of all,
I majored in East As studies and Chinese language, so
not very helpful for the career good so not very
(01:55):
helpful for a commercial career here in the US. But
I spent a couple of years in Asia. After I graduated,
I did a tour of duty on Wall Street in
investment banking. Decided I was neither very good nor very
excited about it.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
We've heard that a lot on the show.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, There's been a lot of Crigerons that started in
Wall Street consulting or NBA.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, yeah, stuff. Yeah, I wonder how much of that
reflects the fact that we're sitting here in New York City.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
There's some selection.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
And you know, my honorable discharge from investment banking was
to go to business school, and I happened to be
at Stanford exactly at the sort of inception point or
ground zero of the commercial web. And you know, along
with many other people, I kind of got the bug
and and wanted to focus after I graduated on early
(02:49):
stage tech companies. So I moved to New York, which
was probably not the smartest way to approach your career
in early stage tech, but I did it because my
now wife and girlfriend was here, and also because I
wanted to live here, and I lived all over the world,
and you know, I was excited by the city streets here.
So I came. I connected very quickly with Kevin O'Connor,
(03:12):
who had previously who had had recently founded for a
double click, and he brought me on board as one
of the early product managers. And it cut a long
story short, it was a real roller coaster of an experience.
You know. When I joined, we were.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Doing double clock, was inventing internet.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, we basically created display the display advertising industry online,
and you know, it was it was thrilling and exciting.
Everything we did became sort of, you know, definitional to
the industry that we were operating in. It was also
a real roller coaster. I mean when I started, we
were very small. We went public in nineteen ninety eight.
(03:53):
By two thousand, we had a market cap of fifteen
billion dollars. A couple of years later, we had a
negative enterprise value, meaning our the value of the company
was significantly less than the amount of cash that we had,
meaning investors. That was probably sort of two to three. Yeah,
right after the bust. But I stuck with it, and
(04:17):
you know, we did have the benefit at that point
of having a lot of cash. We used that cash
in retrospect to do the opposite of what we should
have done. What we should have done is retain confidence
in our market and double down on the display advertising industry. Instead,
what we did is we took that cash and we
(04:37):
diversified into related industries where we thought the things that
we were good at by virtue of having done display advertising,
you know, would apply. And that turned out not to
be a great idea because what happened was the display advertising,
contrary to most kind of projections of a few years earlier,
(04:58):
did come back, but we didn't come back with it
because by that point we were no longer the sort
of you know, proxy on that industry that we had
been going into the market correction. And so what we
did is we decided the board decided to take the
company private, and we ran an auction and ultimately did
(05:19):
take the company private with home and and Freeman. I
became CEO in conjunction with that take private deal. And
essentially what we did over the following four years is
we reversed the diversification process that we had undertaken previously,
doubled down on display advertising, and you know, and that
ended up working, and so I sold the company in
(05:41):
two thousand and eight. As you mentioned a Google spent
a year at Google kind of helping with the integration
and the adoption of.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Its resting investing.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, I was trying to be productive, not not always successfully,
as you know from having been there at the time.
And so a year after that I left and joined
a few boards, one of which was Twitter. Through Twitter,
I met Benchmark. Benchmark had been an early investor in Twitter.
A couple of years after that, they invested in first
(06:11):
St Dibbs, and you know, I got the call from
them to see if I was interested. What was appealing
to me about first Stibbs was the same thing that
appealed to me about Double Click, which was, even though
it was a completely different industry, both companies were kind
of reinventing what had been a very old industry for
a digital age.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Mae Ling, who is in San Francisco, texted this one
into me. She said, how has tech changed luxury buying?
And what about building a luxury marketplace is different than
other marketplaces.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Listen the tex change.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
You can now buy luxury online, so in one way
it's changed it quite a bit.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Well, I mean listen, the internet changes everything it touches, right,
I mean listen. The degree of difficulty, as you know, Mike,
you know, of running a luxury business online, and particularly
one in the in the sort of in the arts
broadly speaking, arts industry, the degree of difficulty is higher
(07:13):
than any other company I've.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Ever been around.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
You're dealing with unique objects, You're dealing.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
With unique options, one of the kind objects. You know.
The sale of those objects requires trust, which is hard
to achieve online. The sale is very complex, both logistically
and also kind of psychologically. It's highly fragmented because you know,
(07:38):
the item that a given buyer is in the market
for might be eight thousand miles away, or it might
be eight hundred yards away, right, and one doesn't know
going into it. And again, the order itself is very complicated, right.
Shipping is complicated, Insurance is complicated, Crossing borders is always complicated.
The communication required between buyers.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Because it's a longer consideration.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Sometimes it's not like buying a razor, right. I think
in our case, the kind of initial value that we
created for buyers was simply aggregating all of sort of
relevant pieces in one place on one website, you know.
(08:22):
And I remember, by the way, I just sort of
back to the sort of the difficulty the degree of
difficulty question. I remember when I was doing my own
diligence on first DIBs, one of the you know, one
of the moments that the difference between this market and
every other market I'd ever been exposed to was sort
of made concrete to me. Was I interviewed I don't know,
(08:43):
nine or ten sellers on first STIPs to understand kind
of how they thought about the company and the market
and their business. And one of the really simple question
I questions I asked them was what do you do
when a piece of yours doesn't sell? And you know what,
almost all of them said, raise the price. Oh and
it's sort of the light bulb went off, like this
(09:05):
is a different thing, you know, that's a different kind
of things, a different kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Well, in art, the if you buy a thirty six
by forty eight painting, the raw materials probably cost thirty dollars, right,
but is the work of the artists that made it
a value that could be tens of thousands or hundreds
of thousands or millions of dollars in value. So it's
you're buying, you're buying aesthetic and cultural appreciation, and you're
(09:30):
buying you're buying a tiny and you're buying a tiny
slice of our of our culture. And it's that is
very different than booking a room in Miami and a flight.
It's very very different than we.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Tea you know, I do consider First DIBs to be
a mission driven company. I think, you know, part of
the mission that motivates me, and I think many of
our employees is what you say, which is, you know,
in less companies like first DIBs and like Artsy succeed
and scale, then you know, the market for a lot
(10:02):
of what defines our culture disappears.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
And you know, and the people who sell these objects,
whether they run art galleries or whether they are an
antiques dealer, they're very special people. They follow their hard
and do a thing that they love. And the business
of selling art is not easy. Business of being an
antiques dealer is not easy. When we can bring more
demand to those entrepreneurs and help their artists succeed, it's
(10:28):
it's really rewarding, and it's and to your point, it's.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Really important, that's right. So in addition to all the
challenges that are specific to working in the arts and
kind of running an arts business as a commercial entity,
you know, they're also small businesses and it's difficult for
them to do things like, for example, figure out how
to work with Google and search engines, figure out how
to ship cross border, right, I mean all of those
(10:52):
sorts of things.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
How many dealers could create their own appeah part of
the app ecosystem and all of that stuff exactly, So
you touch on something in the introot. You followed your
you followed your heart to New York, and you ended
up being an important part of the New York tech community.
Connor and New York City asked the New York tech
scene has boomed over the last twenty years, and first
DIBs and Artsy our two leading examples of New York
(11:14):
founded companies. How is starting and running a tech company
in New York different than Silicon Valley for other places? Yeah,
so it's been so you came here for the love,
you stayed for the.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Tech, stayed for the food.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
And by the way, was the same situation for me.
My wife was an investment banker, and that means that's
a New York job. And so you know, we're not
the first people on this podcast to say we sort
of are in our city because we did it for
love and then and then you wrap your career around it.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah, it's true. I think you know what's interesting, and
I've been at it for a quarter century in New
York tech, so you know, I, in a funny kind
of way, the challenges between New York or the sort
of difference between running a tech business in the Valley
(12:05):
versus New York are almost sort of inverted in the
sense that you know, early on when we were scaling
Double Click, the biggest challenge was just finding engineers and
also separately finding non engineers who understood what it was
like to work in a kind of tech driven business.
(12:28):
And we, of course had no shortage of people that
kind of knew the industry that we operated in. You know,
the Valley was the opposite, right. There were you know,
great engineers growing on trees. There were very few people
who who had experience with the underlying industries. And you know,
I think the two kind of coasts have converged in
(12:51):
that sense. Right There are now plenty of engineers here
and there are now many more people than understand kind
of non tech industries in the valley, And so in
that sense, actually the difference between the two is much
much smaller today than it was before. Those that remain
really have to do with just scale, right. I mean, yes,
(13:11):
there's venture capital in New York. There's a lot more
of it out there. Yes, you know, there's a there
is a developer community here. It's much bigger out there, and.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
I think the numbers are like it's roughly thirty percent
now of sort of US venture starts in Silicon Valley,
and like twelve or thirteen percent is New York City,
so closer, but.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Still civil service. It's still still different.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
One of the things I found different. I don't know
if you have as well, but if you're especially by
you know from our friends who who live in the valley,
it's if you go to the soccer game, you're a
drop off for your kids. All of the talk is tech.
It is definitely a tech town. I remember our kids.
Each of our kids are teenagers now, but I remember
when we were applying my son for preschool and they
asked where I worked, and I said I worked at Google.
(13:54):
And one of the ladies in admissions at the school
gave me your phone and asked me to ask me
to fix it because they hadn't met someone in tech
during the entire process of meeting the parents of the
incoming preschool class. So New York, you have diversity in
New York. And for companies like ours, which are these
sort of culturally rich marketplaces, being adjacent to New York
(14:16):
City culture, I think is a huge advantage. Huge advantage.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yeah, I don't think this. I don't think either of
our companies could operate successfully from you know, San Francisco, potentially.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Especially in the early stages of it, Especially in the stages.
I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
By the way, if I had a dollar for the
number of times people asked me to fix their computers,
you know, in the in the early days, once they
learned I worked on you know, at a tech company
in similar experience, I think we all had that right.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
The next one is from rajesh In, also in New
York City. He asked, online advertising has grown to hundreds
of billions of dollars a year and is the business
model of countless Internet companies. Double Click and Google were
the pioneers in the space. Can you talk about the
evolution of advertising and what lessons you see for other
(15:16):
newer Internet industries.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, I think, you know, the big change in the
digital at least the display ad industry was the shift
from a kind of what I guess you could call
a kind of cut and paste application of the historical
ad model to the Internet, meaning, you know, there were publishers, publishers,
(15:40):
higher salesforces. Salesforces went out and sold ads agency. Yes,
it took a little bit more technology, but kind of
basically it was the same thing. The big change in
the industry was the evolution from that in favor of
AD exchanges and aggregators, so very large AD networks changes
like Googles and double clicks and so on, that had
(16:03):
the impact of divorcing audience from context, right, meaning if
you wanted to buy an in more access to an
in market car, you know, auto buyer. Previous to that,
you bought car and driver. Whether you bought the print
or you bought digital, it didn't really matter, you know.
Once the ad exchanges and aggregators emerged, those two things
(16:28):
could be separated and you could buy an in market
auto buyer irrespective of where he or she is, right,
And that led to all sorts of arbitrage models and
you know, things like that, So that sort of you
know that What was the reason I mentioned that is
that is a I think every industry waits for its
(16:50):
moment where it is reinvented, employing kind of attributes or
technologies that only the has that's unique to digital. It
doesn't exist offline to some degree, you know, I think
first Stibbs, at least in our industry, has created a
(17:11):
version of that, right simply by aggregating all the inventory
in our market that otherwise had been super fragmented, and
then also making it possible to buy that product online
and receive some of the benefits of online of e commerce,
right and being able to talk to the too many
sellers at the same time and all in one place
(17:32):
and compare prices and you know, arrange shipping and so on,
and to do all that without having to pick up
the phone and talk to somebody, which you know a
lot of people don't like, you know. But at the
same time, I don't think we're one hundred percent of
the way there yet. It feels like there's another kind
of chapter in this and you know, part of what
(17:53):
is sort of you know, helps me remain very excite
and engage about working in this industry is that I
don't quite feel that we're one hundred percent of the
way there yet. Sure, even though we've made a lot
of progress.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
An interesting thing that happened in internet advertising is according
to the Department of Justice, Google one and the and
the double click being a part of Google is a
big part of how they're looking now at Google having
won the space. Do you think is that pattern going
to be repeated as we look at sort of what
comes next and what comes next sort of one of
the things everyone's saying is that the Adobe of the
(18:28):
AI world, for example, is going to be Adobe. That
a lot of the technologies that are merging now are
going to benefit more than anyone else the biggest players
in the space get Do you get that sense?
Speaker 2 (18:39):
I do think that will happen, primarily because you know
what the Internet is good at is connecting fragmented sort
of nodes in an industry, right in sellers, buyers, whatever,
And you know that that creates a network effect, and
(19:01):
network effect industries favor scale players, right, And so it's
not just the case that the bigger a company gets,
you know, the sort of more powerful they become. But
the bigger they get, the better the experience for sellers
and buyers, which of course leads to even more scale.
And it's the sort of, depending on how you think
(19:21):
about it, either a vicious or virtuous cycle which ultimately
culminates in the largest companies being the most powerful and
actually having the best products and services. And so I
don't think I'm saying anything that's you know, path breaking necessarily,
but I don't see why that pattern wouldn't repeat itself
in almost every industry online.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Right For years, read Hastings was saying, we have to
become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, bingal exactly.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
They did, good job, guys, Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
But now that's become sort of part of the received
wisdom of running a tech company, and I think it's
to be harder to be a disruptor for that reason.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, all right. The next one is from Malik in Detroit. David,
you sat on the Twitter board during its most formative years.
What do you think of all the changes of Twitter?
Presumably your nbas have all burned off and everything you
can tell you.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
I mean, listen, they have. I mean, I will say this,
I'm not as close to it anymore, just because I
haven't been involved since since the change of control, and.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
I know, and people barely talk about it in the news.
I mean, you probably haven't even heard.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
What's it's true? Yeah, I don't read the news.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Just kidding.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
I mean, listen, I think you know there are there
are a lot of different ways to think about that
company and the impact of new ownership on it. From
my perspective, one of the questions that I think is
among the most interesting, which is sort of a commercial
kind of geeky tech one is you know, one of
(20:57):
the one of the attributes of Twitter that was always
the most compelling from my perspective was its network effect, right,
the fact that it had aggregated, you know, all of
these content providers offered them a unique way to publish
their content and a unique way for consumers of the
(21:18):
content to understand it and read it in the sort
of interaction of those two things. Creator and a network effect,
which is part of the reason why you know, there
is no real and has been no real competition to Twitter.
Some of the changes that the current management are making,
you know, I would think might undo some of that
network effect. Charging for the market is the biggest one,
(21:42):
right so you know, So the question for me that
I'm most interested in, or as interested in as all
the others, but which I haven't really heard anyone talk about,
is what's more powerful the network effect that Twitter brings
into this, you know, by virtue of having been around
or seventeen years or so, you know, or the sort
(22:04):
of negative impact on the network effect of some of
these changes that the current management is thaking, like, you know,
making a blue check mark available for sale. So far,
the network effect is winning, right, So in spite of
all of the changes, so not just the blue check mark,
but also the relaxation of a lot of the content
moderation investment, you know, the seemingly the seeming favoring of
(22:27):
you know, some some tweeters over others and so on,
none of that has undone the network effects. So that's
what I'm going to be looking at over the next
couple of years. And one of those things that I
one of the aspects of this that I think is
underserved but kind of fascinating.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Next to a really good one from Alejandra in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
You've both a lot of multiple companies. What is one
way in which your leadership approach has changed the most?
Speaker 1 (22:53):
What is your advice to new leaders change one? It's
a no question.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, I mean, it's a good ques. It is a
good question necessarily. You know, I do my job differently.
I'm sure you do years differently at age fifty five
than I did at age thirty six, which is how
well I was when I became CEO of Double Click.
I have more things in my life, you know, both
personal and professional and it's my hope that first Ebb's
(23:22):
benefits is it sort of comes out positive on that trade, right,
Like I can't I don't have the ability as I
did when I was thirty six to put every single
waking minute of my life.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Well, could we had twenty six possibly have had time
to sit on two boards, that would have been unthinkable.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
I didn't have time to Yah, everybody cared it was
the minutes.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
We didn't have the minutes.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
And also it would have been hard. Yeah, I mean, so,
you know, on one hand, it just at you know,
at my advanced age. You know, it's it's it's just
hard to put to sort of make any one company
one hundred percent of your time my time. And my
hope is that the company benefits from the pattern recognition
(24:04):
I have and the experience.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
That I have, thee those.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Network and all that that the benefits of that outweigh
the fact that I'm not able to spend as I
did at Double Click at age thirty six, every single
waking minute on the company.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
I've come to appreciate over the last ten or fifteen
years how much my job is getting everyone on the
team to cooperate as effectively as possible. I think everywhere
I've worked as long as I can remember. Now we've
read the Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I'm
sure you guys David's nodding here on the podcast is
a book everyone should read. But one of the core
(24:41):
principles of it is everyone on the team is part
of that's their first team, like your executive team, is
one team that runs the company, rather than a group
of people who run silos. And I have seen in
my career a lot of teams where the leader thinks
of the direct reports as sort of extensions of his
or her greatness other than the team is a unit
(25:02):
that the CEO or the general manager helps to cooperate,
and that is It's something I'm it is a constant
area of development, I think for every leader. But that
is definitely what's changed for me over the long arc
of my career is realizing that that's my role. My
role is to be the My role is to get
the best. Yeah, I'm the conductor. My role is to
get the best out of that team.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Right, you don't make the music, you are the conductor.
It's you need to have the best cellist and the
best violinist, and your job is to get them, not
just to make sure that the company has the best
of each, but that they obviously make beautiful music together.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah, you nailed the metaphor.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
You may have named the episode. I think we've got it.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I think we've got it down, all right.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It's the last one so from you and I have
talked about this casually a number of times. I think
every person with a knowledge worker job is talking about
this these days. So Fatima in Jersey City texted this
one into us, she said. In a recent Resume Builder survey,
seventy five percent of companies said that they are mandating
(26:15):
some form of in office work in twenty twenty four.
What are your views on remote work and how have
those views evolved?
Speaker 2 (26:23):
So, look, my own personal view of remote work is
that I hate it.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
For me, you hate doing it.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
I hate I hate I hate work personally, I don't
like working remotely, and you're an extrovert. I to be
good for companies for employees to work remotely. I mean,
you know, part of what makes any group special, whether
it's a team or a class or a company, is
the kind of results from the connectivity that's created by
(26:54):
people working together, and you know, the better you know people,
and you know, the more sort of intimate that connectivity is,
the better the Helpput, there's no question about it. On
the other hand, you know, I have to recognize that's
not the world we live in anymore. I think it's
I think it's you know, regardless of all of the
(27:16):
sort of movement in favor back to work. My own
point of view is that we're at the beginning of
a very long process of fragmentation where because of technology primarily,
and the lack of friction and the ability of people
to work together even if it's not ideal, and for
companies to find the best available talent anywhere. I think
(27:38):
that we're sort of what's the opposite of what is?
Is it centripetal or centrifugal. There's like this sort of
force right that we're all a part of it, like
the expanding universe as a sort of you know, image,
It's always in my mind, and so I think that's
the world we live in, and I just think because
of that we have to figure it out. I'm a
little surprised that the technology has been so slow to evolve.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
I mean, still we've gotten two new features on Zoom.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yeah, exactly, right, exactly and no, exactly and so no
new product in Zoom itself hasn't changed that much.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
And well, but this is to your earlier point on
the network effects, because everybody else I talk to externally
has Zoom already installed, so to show up with the
new startup it's too large. Video conferencing software is a
pain exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, you know, it's you know, teams Microsoft, you think
would do more, at Google would do more? You know,
I don't. Again, I don't. I'm not smart enough to
know what the answer is. But I am surprised that
none of these there isn't, none of these platforms has
been able to really change the way we work remotely.
I think it'll happen. I think that technology will catch up.
(28:43):
I think our role as managers is to kind of
supply the non technology parts to this and figure out
how do we achieve connectivity to complement the technology that
likely will emerge over time, even if it hasn't yet.
So the bottom line is, I don't like it. I
think it erodes what makes companies special and you know
(29:06):
what provides a lot of this sort of fun and
joy in life, even for those of us who aren't extroverts.
But at the same time, it's the world we live in.
I don't think we're going back to the old one,
and so we got to figure it out.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, And for our company, we're Arts is a global company,
and we have business partners in every time zone, and
we have people and many time zones, and so already
we had to deal with the challenge of being in
separate locations, and in hindsight, we didn't deal with it
very well. I would stand up and do an all
hands in New York and half the company was there
in the room and the other half of the company
(29:40):
was watching on a little window where they didn't They
felt like they were not a part of it. And
so now we've augmented our practices so that we do
we largely come into the office half the time, I'd
say sort of most of the company, the large cern
of the company half the time, some of the company
all the time. It's a mix. But even when we're
in we do a better job with hybrid or remote
(30:02):
practices so that everybody feels included.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
And I think this transition that's important. And there are
many you know, there are many upsides, right, I mean
finding great talent, in allowing that talent to express itself
and realize it's potential wherever they are is really powerful, right,
And so there are many benefits to remote work. But
at the same time, what I miss the most is
(30:28):
the sort of serendipitous or unplanned conversations yep, right, and
just you know, yes, you know, you can invite whoever
you want to a meeting. The meeting could be run
efficiently and well. Tools will evolve to improve in you know,
feelings of inclusiveness and the ability to communicate and so on.
(30:48):
But what you miss is you know, the meeting's over
and somebody walks in early for their next meeting, and
you talk to somebody you wouldn't have talked to otherwise, right,
And so if you don't plan it, it doesn't have
happened in this world, and I think we lose a
lot from that.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
I'm now stacking up my calendar for the in persons
certain days a week, and then the video conferences certain
days a week, and it's it's starting to click in.
But who could have imagined five years ago?
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah. I will say one other thing on this, which
is the part of all this That is most amazing
to me is that, you know, whatever it was on
you know, March ninth, tenth, eleventh of two, that twenty twenty.
You know, there's no way that anyone could have imagined,
you know, the world that we're in today, and yet
it happened overnight, and now that we're in it, it's
(31:33):
difficult to remember what it was like before. It's just
the sort of adaptivity and the plasticity of the human
mind is really just kind of awesome.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Whatever we do now, that's what we do.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, exactly, And it's sort of like you assimilate to
this new reality. And then again, not only is it
impossible to imagine going back to the old one, but
it's hard for many of us to even remember what
it was like.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Right, So, what will be that thing in five years?
So tune back in. We'll we'll know soon enough. We'll
know soon enough. David, this was super fun. Thanks for
common entity, sharing your wisdom, and it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
To see you man Likewise, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Well, my friends. Today we talked with someone who's been
a pioneer in multiple industries and with tremendous success, and
one of the things that I really appreciate about David
is how interesting and interested, how curious he is across
disciplines and across industries. And because David, I think, has
(32:39):
has worked across a number of different formats, he brings
that energy of he brings that approach of asking first
principles questions about the business that he's building and about
the industry he's trying to improve. And anytime we've talked
to an interesting entrepreneur, a successful executive on this podcast
(33:06):
who's done big things in her or his career, it's
been by looking at their business, at their industry, at
the needs of their consumers from a different angle, from
an angle of first principles, rather than saying, how do
we usually do it? Here? Can I do it just
a little bit better?
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Let's you go about your.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Week this week, I'd encourage you to look for the
opportunities to take a first principle's approach to your problems,
to take a first principle's approach to better serving your customers,
to being a better teammate, to scaling up your business.
Assume that there's a different and a better way, And
the more curious you are in more aspects of your vertical,
but also others. The better job you'll do, that's a gang.
(33:47):
We've got some amazing guests coming up the next few weeks,
including a CEO who's helping to cure cancer. Text or
call in your questions at two point three four one
nine oh five nine six, or just hit me up
on LinkedIn Instagram. It's set up at Mike Steibe. I
want to thank David and of course Jen, Meg, Jada,
Matt and the whole team at Blue Duck Media for
pulling this all together, Dylan and Sasha Gay and Nathan
(34:11):
and Christine at iHeart Ben and the team at William
Morris Endeavor for all their support, and of course Byheed
here in the studio on the ones and twos. Office
Hours is a production of Blue Duck Media and distributed
by iHeartRadio. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Everybody,
make sure you stay on your grind
Welcome to Office Hours, where we sit down with the
chief executives shaping the world and into your most pressing
questions about leadership, careers, and life. I'm Mike steib and
today we are with my very good friend David Rosenblatt.
David is CEO of First Dibbs, a marketplace for the
world's most beautiful things including antiques, furniture, jewelry, art and more. Previously,
(00:28):
he was CEO of double Click, and he orchestrated it's
three point one billion dollar sale to Google in two
thousand and eight. He sits on the boards of IAC
and far Fetch. He is a pillar of the New
York tech community, and he's my occasional tennis partner. David,
I've been looking forward to this. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Thank you, Mike. Likewise happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
So what everyone should know is when I was thinking
about coming to Artsy, the company I currently lead, it's
a company that has a lot in common with David's company,
First Dibbs. And David, you were the first person I
came to see to ask for advice. You said, do it.
I did it. I've had a blast for four years.
So you're not only my friend, I are you a
lot of gratitude for the advice.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
I'm flattered.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
A bunch of other folks have called in I want
your advice today too. So we've got questions on luxury marketplaces,
New York Tech, your career journey. So sorry with you,
We'll just we'll get right into it, okay, all right.
First one is a call we got from Emily in Dallas, Texas,
who says you.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Each came from outside of art and luxury to run
the leading marketplaces in your industries. How did you find
your way to these rules? My career arc has been
relatively straightforward. I did a tour of duty. First of all,
I majored in East As studies and Chinese language, so
not very helpful for the career good so not very
(01:55):
helpful for a commercial career here in the US. But
I spent a couple of years in Asia. After I graduated,
I did a tour of duty on Wall Street in
investment banking. Decided I was neither very good nor very
excited about it.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
We've heard that a lot on the show.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah, There's been a lot of Crigerons that started in
Wall Street consulting or NBA.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, yeah, stuff. Yeah, I wonder how much of that
reflects the fact that we're sitting here in New York City.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
There's some selection.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
And you know, my honorable discharge from investment banking was
to go to business school, and I happened to be
at Stanford exactly at the sort of inception point or
ground zero of the commercial web. And you know, along
with many other people, I kind of got the bug
and and wanted to focus after I graduated on early
(02:49):
stage tech companies. So I moved to New York, which
was probably not the smartest way to approach your career
in early stage tech, but I did it because my
now wife and girlfriend was here, and also because I
wanted to live here, and I lived all over the world,
and you know, I was excited by the city streets here.
So I came. I connected very quickly with Kevin O'Connor,
(03:12):
who had previously who had had recently founded for a
double click, and he brought me on board as one
of the early product managers. And it cut a long
story short, it was a real roller coaster of an experience.
You know. When I joined, we were.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Doing double clock, was inventing internet.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, we basically created display the display advertising industry online,
and you know, it was it was thrilling and exciting.
Everything we did became sort of, you know, definitional to
the industry that we were operating in. It was also
a real roller coaster. I mean when I started, we
were very small. We went public in nineteen ninety eight.
(03:53):
By two thousand, we had a market cap of fifteen
billion dollars. A couple of years later, we had a
negative enterprise value, meaning our the value of the company
was significantly less than the amount of cash that we had,
meaning investors. That was probably sort of two to three. Yeah,
right after the bust. But I stuck with it, and
(04:17):
you know, we did have the benefit at that point
of having a lot of cash. We used that cash
in retrospect to do the opposite of what we should
have done. What we should have done is retain confidence
in our market and double down on the display advertising industry. Instead,
what we did is we took that cash and we
(04:37):
diversified into related industries where we thought the things that
we were good at by virtue of having done display advertising,
you know, would apply. And that turned out not to
be a great idea because what happened was the display advertising,
contrary to most kind of projections of a few years earlier,
(04:58):
did come back, but we didn't come back with it
because by that point we were no longer the sort
of you know, proxy on that industry that we had
been going into the market correction. And so what we
did is we decided the board decided to take the
company private, and we ran an auction and ultimately did
(05:19):
take the company private with home and and Freeman. I
became CEO in conjunction with that take private deal. And
essentially what we did over the following four years is
we reversed the diversification process that we had undertaken previously,
doubled down on display advertising, and you know, and that
ended up working, and so I sold the company in
(05:41):
two thousand and eight. As you mentioned a Google spent
a year at Google kind of helping with the integration
and the adoption of.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Its resting investing.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, I was trying to be productive, not not always successfully,
as you know from having been there at the time.
And so a year after that I left and joined
a few boards, one of which was Twitter. Through Twitter,
I met Benchmark. Benchmark had been an early investor in Twitter.
A couple of years after that, they invested in first
(06:11):
St Dibbs, and you know, I got the call from
them to see if I was interested. What was appealing
to me about first Stibbs was the same thing that
appealed to me about Double Click, which was, even though
it was a completely different industry, both companies were kind
of reinventing what had been a very old industry for
a digital age.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Mae Ling, who is in San Francisco, texted this one
into me. She said, how has tech changed luxury buying?
And what about building a luxury marketplace is different than
other marketplaces.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Listen the tex change.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
You can now buy luxury online, so in one way
it's changed it quite a bit.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Well, I mean listen, the internet changes everything it touches, right,
I mean listen. The degree of difficulty, as you know, Mike,
you know, of running a luxury business online, and particularly
one in the in the sort of in the arts
broadly speaking, arts industry, the degree of difficulty is higher
(07:13):
than any other company I've.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Ever been around.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
You're dealing with unique objects, You're dealing.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
With unique options, one of the kind objects. You know.
The sale of those objects requires trust, which is hard
to achieve online. The sale is very complex, both logistically
and also kind of psychologically. It's highly fragmented because you know,
(07:38):
the item that a given buyer is in the market
for might be eight thousand miles away, or it might
be eight hundred yards away, right, and one doesn't know
going into it. And again, the order itself is very complicated, right.
Shipping is complicated, Insurance is complicated, Crossing borders is always complicated.
The communication required between buyers.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Because it's a longer consideration.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Sometimes it's not like buying a razor, right. I think
in our case, the kind of initial value that we
created for buyers was simply aggregating all of sort of
relevant pieces in one place on one website, you know.
(08:22):
And I remember, by the way, I just sort of
back to the sort of the difficulty the degree of
difficulty question. I remember when I was doing my own
diligence on first DIBs, one of the you know, one
of the moments that the difference between this market and
every other market I'd ever been exposed to was sort
of made concrete to me. Was I interviewed I don't know,
(08:43):
nine or ten sellers on first STIPs to understand kind
of how they thought about the company and the market
and their business. And one of the really simple question
I questions I asked them was what do you do
when a piece of yours doesn't sell? And you know what,
almost all of them said, raise the price. Oh and
it's sort of the light bulb went off, like this
(09:05):
is a different thing, you know, that's a different kind
of things, a different kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Well, in art, the if you buy a thirty six
by forty eight painting, the raw materials probably cost thirty dollars, right,
but is the work of the artists that made it
a value that could be tens of thousands or hundreds
of thousands or millions of dollars in value. So it's
you're buying, you're buying aesthetic and cultural appreciation, and you're
(09:30):
buying you're buying a tiny and you're buying a tiny
slice of our of our culture. And it's that is
very different than booking a room in Miami and a flight.
It's very very different than we.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Tea you know, I do consider First DIBs to be
a mission driven company. I think, you know, part of
the mission that motivates me, and I think many of
our employees is what you say, which is, you know,
in less companies like first DIBs and like Artsy succeed
and scale, then you know, the market for a lot
(10:02):
of what defines our culture disappears.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
And you know, and the people who sell these objects,
whether they run art galleries or whether they are an
antiques dealer, they're very special people. They follow their hard
and do a thing that they love. And the business
of selling art is not easy. Business of being an
antiques dealer is not easy. When we can bring more
demand to those entrepreneurs and help their artists succeed, it's
(10:28):
it's really rewarding, and it's and to your point, it's.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Really important, that's right. So in addition to all the
challenges that are specific to working in the arts and
kind of running an arts business as a commercial entity,
you know, they're also small businesses and it's difficult for
them to do things like, for example, figure out how
to work with Google and search engines, figure out how
to ship cross border, right, I mean all of those
(10:52):
sorts of things.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
How many dealers could create their own appeah part of
the app ecosystem and all of that stuff exactly, So
you touch on something in the introot. You followed your
you followed your heart to New York, and you ended
up being an important part of the New York tech community.
Connor and New York City asked the New York tech
scene has boomed over the last twenty years, and first
DIBs and Artsy our two leading examples of New York
(11:14):
founded companies. How is starting and running a tech company
in New York different than Silicon Valley for other places? Yeah,
so it's been so you came here for the love,
you stayed for the.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Tech, stayed for the food.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
And by the way, was the same situation for me.
My wife was an investment banker, and that means that's
a New York job. And so you know, we're not
the first people on this podcast to say we sort
of are in our city because we did it for
love and then and then you wrap your career around it.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah, it's true. I think you know what's interesting, and
I've been at it for a quarter century in New
York tech, so you know, I, in a funny kind
of way, the challenges between New York or the sort
of difference between running a tech business in the Valley
(12:05):
versus New York are almost sort of inverted in the
sense that you know, early on when we were scaling
Double Click, the biggest challenge was just finding engineers and
also separately finding non engineers who understood what it was
like to work in a kind of tech driven business.
(12:28):
And we, of course had no shortage of people that
kind of knew the industry that we operated in. You know,
the Valley was the opposite, right. There were you know,
great engineers growing on trees. There were very few people
who who had experience with the underlying industries. And you know,
I think the two kind of coasts have converged in
(12:51):
that sense. Right There are now plenty of engineers here
and there are now many more people than understand kind
of non tech industries in the valley, And so in
that sense, actually the difference between the two is much
much smaller today than it was before. Those that remain
really have to do with just scale, right. I mean, yes,
(13:11):
there's venture capital in New York. There's a lot more
of it out there. Yes, you know, there's a there
is a developer community here. It's much bigger out there, and.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
I think the numbers are like it's roughly thirty percent
now of sort of US venture starts in Silicon Valley,
and like twelve or thirteen percent is New York City,
so closer, but.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Still civil service. It's still still different.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
One of the things I found different. I don't know
if you have as well, but if you're especially by
you know from our friends who who live in the valley,
it's if you go to the soccer game, you're a
drop off for your kids. All of the talk is tech.
It is definitely a tech town. I remember our kids.
Each of our kids are teenagers now, but I remember
when we were applying my son for preschool and they
asked where I worked, and I said I worked at Google.
(13:54):
And one of the ladies in admissions at the school
gave me your phone and asked me to ask me
to fix it because they hadn't met someone in tech
during the entire process of meeting the parents of the
incoming preschool class. So New York, you have diversity in
New York. And for companies like ours, which are these
sort of culturally rich marketplaces, being adjacent to New York
(14:16):
City culture, I think is a huge advantage. Huge advantage.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yeah, I don't think this. I don't think either of
our companies could operate successfully from you know, San Francisco, potentially.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Especially in the early stages of it, Especially in the stages.
I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
By the way, if I had a dollar for the
number of times people asked me to fix their computers,
you know, in the in the early days, once they
learned I worked on you know, at a tech company
in similar experience, I think we all had that right.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
The next one is from rajesh In, also in New
York City. He asked, online advertising has grown to hundreds
of billions of dollars a year and is the business
model of countless Internet companies. Double Click and Google were
the pioneers in the space. Can you talk about the
evolution of advertising and what lessons you see for other
(15:16):
newer Internet industries.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, I think, you know, the big change in the
digital at least the display ad industry was the shift
from a kind of what I guess you could call
a kind of cut and paste application of the historical
ad model to the Internet, meaning, you know, there were publishers, publishers,
(15:40):
higher salesforces. Salesforces went out and sold ads agency. Yes,
it took a little bit more technology, but kind of
basically it was the same thing. The big change in
the industry was the evolution from that in favor of
AD exchanges and aggregators, so very large AD networks changes
like Googles and double clicks and so on, that had
(16:03):
the impact of divorcing audience from context, right, meaning if
you wanted to buy an in more access to an
in market car, you know, auto buyer. Previous to that,
you bought car and driver. Whether you bought the print
or you bought digital, it didn't really matter, you know.
Once the ad exchanges and aggregators emerged, those two things
(16:28):
could be separated and you could buy an in market
auto buyer irrespective of where he or she is, right,
And that led to all sorts of arbitrage models and
you know, things like that, So that sort of you
know that What was the reason I mentioned that is
that is a I think every industry waits for its
(16:50):
moment where it is reinvented, employing kind of attributes or
technologies that only the has that's unique to digital. It
doesn't exist offline to some degree, you know, I think
first Stibbs, at least in our industry, has created a
(17:11):
version of that, right simply by aggregating all the inventory
in our market that otherwise had been super fragmented, and
then also making it possible to buy that product online
and receive some of the benefits of online of e commerce,
right and being able to talk to the too many
sellers at the same time and all in one place
(17:32):
and compare prices and you know, arrange shipping and so on,
and to do all that without having to pick up
the phone and talk to somebody, which you know a
lot of people don't like, you know. But at the
same time, I don't think we're one hundred percent of
the way there yet. It feels like there's another kind
of chapter in this and you know, part of what
(17:53):
is sort of you know, helps me remain very excite
and engage about working in this industry is that I
don't quite feel that we're one hundred percent of the
way there yet. Sure, even though we've made a lot
of progress.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
An interesting thing that happened in internet advertising is according
to the Department of Justice, Google one and the and
the double click being a part of Google is a
big part of how they're looking now at Google having
won the space. Do you think is that pattern going
to be repeated as we look at sort of what
comes next and what comes next sort of one of
the things everyone's saying is that the Adobe of the
(18:28):
AI world, for example, is going to be Adobe. That
a lot of the technologies that are merging now are
going to benefit more than anyone else the biggest players
in the space get Do you get that sense?
Speaker 2 (18:39):
I do think that will happen, primarily because you know
what the Internet is good at is connecting fragmented sort
of nodes in an industry, right in sellers, buyers, whatever,
And you know that that creates a network effect, and
(19:01):
network effect industries favor scale players, right, And so it's
not just the case that the bigger a company gets,
you know, the sort of more powerful they become. But
the bigger they get, the better the experience for sellers
and buyers, which of course leads to even more scale.
And it's the sort of, depending on how you think
(19:21):
about it, either a vicious or virtuous cycle which ultimately
culminates in the largest companies being the most powerful and
actually having the best products and services. And so I
don't think I'm saying anything that's you know, path breaking necessarily,
but I don't see why that pattern wouldn't repeat itself
in almost every industry online.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Right For years, read Hastings was saying, we have to
become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, bingal exactly.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
They did, good job, guys, Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
But now that's become sort of part of the received
wisdom of running a tech company, and I think it's
to be harder to be a disruptor for that reason.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, all right. The next one is from Malik in Detroit. David,
you sat on the Twitter board during its most formative years.
What do you think of all the changes of Twitter?
Presumably your nbas have all burned off and everything you
can tell you.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
I mean, listen, they have. I mean, I will say this,
I'm not as close to it anymore, just because I
haven't been involved since since the change of control, and.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
I know, and people barely talk about it in the news.
I mean, you probably haven't even heard.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
What's it's true? Yeah, I don't read the news.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Just kidding.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
I mean, listen, I think you know there are there
are a lot of different ways to think about that
company and the impact of new ownership on it. From
my perspective, one of the questions that I think is
among the most interesting, which is sort of a commercial
kind of geeky tech one is you know, one of
(20:57):
the one of the attributes of Twitter that was always
the most compelling from my perspective was its network effect, right,
the fact that it had aggregated, you know, all of
these content providers offered them a unique way to publish
their content and a unique way for consumers of the
(21:18):
content to understand it and read it in the sort
of interaction of those two things. Creator and a network effect,
which is part of the reason why you know, there
is no real and has been no real competition to Twitter.
Some of the changes that the current management are making,
you know, I would think might undo some of that
network effect. Charging for the market is the biggest one,
(21:42):
right so you know, So the question for me that
I'm most interested in, or as interested in as all
the others, but which I haven't really heard anyone talk about,
is what's more powerful the network effect that Twitter brings
into this, you know, by virtue of having been around
or seventeen years or so, you know, or the sort
(22:04):
of negative impact on the network effect of some of
these changes that the current management is thaking, like, you know,
making a blue check mark available for sale. So far,
the network effect is winning, right, So in spite of
all of the changes, so not just the blue check mark,
but also the relaxation of a lot of the content
moderation investment, you know, the seemingly the seeming favoring of
(22:27):
you know, some some tweeters over others and so on,
none of that has undone the network effects. So that's
what I'm going to be looking at over the next
couple of years. And one of those things that I
one of the aspects of this that I think is
underserved but kind of fascinating.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Next to a really good one from Alejandra in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
You've both a lot of multiple companies. What is one
way in which your leadership approach has changed the most?
Speaker 1 (22:53):
What is your advice to new leaders change one? It's
a no question.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, I mean, it's a good ques. It is a
good question necessarily. You know, I do my job differently.
I'm sure you do years differently at age fifty five
than I did at age thirty six, which is how
well I was when I became CEO of Double Click.
I have more things in my life, you know, both
personal and professional and it's my hope that first Ebb's
(23:22):
benefits is it sort of comes out positive on that trade, right,
Like I can't I don't have the ability as I
did when I was thirty six to put every single
waking minute of my life.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Well, could we had twenty six possibly have had time
to sit on two boards, that would have been unthinkable.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
I didn't have time to Yah, everybody cared it was
the minutes.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
We didn't have the minutes.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
And also it would have been hard. Yeah, I mean, so,
you know, on one hand, it just at you know,
at my advanced age. You know, it's it's it's just
hard to put to sort of make any one company
one hundred percent of your time my time. And my
hope is that the company benefits from the pattern recognition
(24:04):
I have and the experience.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
That I have, thee those.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Network and all that that the benefits of that outweigh
the fact that I'm not able to spend as I
did at Double Click at age thirty six, every single
waking minute on the company.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
I've come to appreciate over the last ten or fifteen
years how much my job is getting everyone on the
team to cooperate as effectively as possible. I think everywhere
I've worked as long as I can remember. Now we've
read the Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I'm
sure you guys David's nodding here on the podcast is
a book everyone should read. But one of the core
(24:41):
principles of it is everyone on the team is part
of that's their first team, like your executive team, is
one team that runs the company, rather than a group
of people who run silos. And I have seen in
my career a lot of teams where the leader thinks
of the direct reports as sort of extensions of his
or her greatness other than the team is a unit
(25:02):
that the CEO or the general manager helps to cooperate,
and that is It's something I'm it is a constant
area of development, I think for every leader. But that
is definitely what's changed for me over the long arc
of my career is realizing that that's my role. My
role is to be the My role is to get
the best. Yeah, I'm the conductor. My role is to
get the best out of that team.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Right, you don't make the music, you are the conductor.
It's you need to have the best cellist and the
best violinist, and your job is to get them, not
just to make sure that the company has the best
of each, but that they obviously make beautiful music together.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah, you nailed the metaphor.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
You may have named the episode. I think we've got it.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I think we've got it down, all right.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It's the last one so from you and I have
talked about this casually a number of times. I think
every person with a knowledge worker job is talking about
this these days. So Fatima in Jersey City texted this
one into us, she said. In a recent Resume Builder survey,
seventy five percent of companies said that they are mandating
(26:15):
some form of in office work in twenty twenty four.
What are your views on remote work and how have
those views evolved?
Speaker 2 (26:23):
So, look, my own personal view of remote work is
that I hate it.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
For me, you hate doing it.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
I hate I hate I hate work personally, I don't
like working remotely, and you're an extrovert. I to be
good for companies for employees to work remotely. I mean,
you know, part of what makes any group special, whether
it's a team or a class or a company, is
the kind of results from the connectivity that's created by
(26:54):
people working together, and you know, the better you know people,
and you know, the more sort of intimate that connectivity is,
the better the Helpput, there's no question about it. On
the other hand, you know, I have to recognize that's
not the world we live in anymore. I think it's
I think it's you know, regardless of all of the
(27:16):
sort of movement in favor back to work. My own
point of view is that we're at the beginning of
a very long process of fragmentation where because of technology primarily,
and the lack of friction and the ability of people
to work together even if it's not ideal, and for
companies to find the best available talent anywhere. I think
(27:38):
that we're sort of what's the opposite of what is?
Is it centripetal or centrifugal. There's like this sort of
force right that we're all a part of it, like
the expanding universe as a sort of you know, image,
It's always in my mind, and so I think that's
the world we live in, and I just think because
of that we have to figure it out. I'm a
little surprised that the technology has been so slow to evolve.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
I mean, still we've gotten two new features on Zoom.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yeah, exactly, right, exactly and no, exactly and so no
new product in Zoom itself hasn't changed that much.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
And well, but this is to your earlier point on
the network effects, because everybody else I talk to externally
has Zoom already installed, so to show up with the
new startup it's too large. Video conferencing software is a
pain exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, you know, it's you know, teams Microsoft, you think
would do more, at Google would do more? You know,
I don't. Again, I don't. I'm not smart enough to
know what the answer is. But I am surprised that
none of these there isn't, none of these platforms has
been able to really change the way we work remotely.
I think it'll happen. I think that technology will catch up.
(28:43):
I think our role as managers is to kind of
supply the non technology parts to this and figure out
how do we achieve connectivity to complement the technology that
likely will emerge over time, even if it hasn't yet.
So the bottom line is, I don't like it. I
think it erodes what makes companies special and you know
(29:06):
what provides a lot of this sort of fun and
joy in life, even for those of us who aren't extroverts.
But at the same time, it's the world we live in.
I don't think we're going back to the old one,
and so we got to figure it out.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, And for our company, we're Arts is a global company,
and we have business partners in every time zone, and
we have people and many time zones, and so already
we had to deal with the challenge of being in
separate locations, and in hindsight, we didn't deal with it
very well. I would stand up and do an all
hands in New York and half the company was there
in the room and the other half of the company
(29:40):
was watching on a little window where they didn't They
felt like they were not a part of it. And
so now we've augmented our practices so that we do
we largely come into the office half the time, I'd
say sort of most of the company, the large cern
of the company half the time, some of the company
all the time. It's a mix. But even when we're
in we do a better job with hybrid or remote
(30:02):
practices so that everybody feels included.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
And I think this transition that's important. And there are
many you know, there are many upsides, right, I mean
finding great talent, in allowing that talent to express itself
and realize it's potential wherever they are is really powerful, right,
And so there are many benefits to remote work. But
at the same time, what I miss the most is
(30:28):
the sort of serendipitous or unplanned conversations yep, right, and
just you know, yes, you know, you can invite whoever
you want to a meeting. The meeting could be run
efficiently and well. Tools will evolve to improve in you know,
feelings of inclusiveness and the ability to communicate and so on.
(30:48):
But what you miss is you know, the meeting's over
and somebody walks in early for their next meeting, and
you talk to somebody you wouldn't have talked to otherwise, right,
And so if you don't plan it, it doesn't have
happened in this world, and I think we lose a
lot from that.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
I'm now stacking up my calendar for the in persons
certain days a week, and then the video conferences certain
days a week, and it's it's starting to click in.
But who could have imagined five years ago?
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah. I will say one other thing on this, which
is the part of all this That is most amazing
to me is that, you know, whatever it was on
you know, March ninth, tenth, eleventh of two, that twenty twenty.
You know, there's no way that anyone could have imagined,
you know, the world that we're in today, and yet
it happened overnight, and now that we're in it, it's
(31:33):
difficult to remember what it was like before. It's just
the sort of adaptivity and the plasticity of the human
mind is really just kind of awesome.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Whatever we do now, that's what we do.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, exactly, And it's sort of like you assimilate to
this new reality. And then again, not only is it
impossible to imagine going back to the old one, but
it's hard for many of us to even remember what
it was like.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Right, So, what will be that thing in five years?
So tune back in. We'll we'll know soon enough. We'll
know soon enough. David, this was super fun. Thanks for
common entity, sharing your wisdom, and it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
To see you man Likewise, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Well, my friends. Today we talked with someone who's been
a pioneer in multiple industries and with tremendous success, and
one of the things that I really appreciate about David
is how interesting and interested, how curious he is across
disciplines and across industries. And because David, I think, has
(32:39):
has worked across a number of different formats, he brings
that energy of he brings that approach of asking first
principles questions about the business that he's building and about
the industry he's trying to improve. And anytime we've talked
to an interesting entrepreneur, a successful executive on this podcast
(33:06):
who's done big things in her or his career, it's
been by looking at their business, at their industry, at
the needs of their consumers from a different angle, from
an angle of first principles, rather than saying, how do
we usually do it? Here? Can I do it just
a little bit better?
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Let's you go about your.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Week this week, I'd encourage you to look for the
opportunities to take a first principle's approach to your problems,
to take a first principle's approach to better serving your customers,
to being a better teammate, to scaling up your business.
Assume that there's a different and a better way, And
the more curious you are in more aspects of your vertical,
but also others. The better job you'll do, that's a gang.
(33:47):
We've got some amazing guests coming up the next few weeks,
including a CEO who's helping to cure cancer. Text or
call in your questions at two point three four one
nine oh five nine six, or just hit me up
on LinkedIn Instagram. It's set up at Mike Steibe. I
want to thank David and of course Jen, Meg, Jada,
Matt and the whole team at Blue Duck Media for
pulling this all together, Dylan and Sasha Gay and Nathan
(34:11):
and Christine at iHeart Ben and the team at William
Morris Endeavor for all their support, and of course Byheed
here in the studio on the ones and twos. Office
Hours is a production of Blue Duck Media and distributed
by iHeartRadio. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Everybody,
make sure you stay on your grind
Host
Mike Steib
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