Transcript & Video: Claire Hughes Johnson Fireside Chat on Scaling People
I interview Claire about her new book "Scaling People". Thanks to Stripe for hosting.
Video:
Transcript:
ELAD GIL
Yeah, I'll add two more sections about you. So we got to keep pumping sales. So I think we heard about Claire's amazing background, both in terms of Google, in terms of Stripe. You're also on multiple boards, which you may want to talk about a little bit. HubSpot, the Atlantic Aurora, the self driving car company you wrote Scaling People, which I think is sort of an instant classic. And it has a lot of different frameworks you can use as you sort of work through things. And we can talk about that a bit. But I was hoping to maybe start a little bit with your time at Google. And I feel like there's a handful of companies that at any given moment in Silicon Valley are very formative, both in terms of the people who work there, the culture that gets set and sort of spread throughout the Valley. And Google is one of those, and stripe is one of those. And so I was just hoping to start a little bit with, like, how'd you end up at Google, what made you decide to go there? And then I had some specific questions on that.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah. And a lot you and I work together at Google, so you might also answer this question. So in what people ask me about career decisions I made, I think a few times in my life I made decisions not to do the thing everyone else was doing. And one of them was I quit my job in consulting in New York City, and my then boyfriend, now husband, and I decided to move to California and just started new life here and figured we'd find jobs. This was right after the.com bust in the early 2000s. So our families were like, don't love this plan. You irresponsible young people. And I was interviewing at a bunch of different companies, but not all tech, because that wasn't exactly my background, though I had worked my consulting firm had a technology arm, so I worked with some engineers. But I loved Google as a product. And I got introduced into Cheryl Sandberg's org by a friend of mine from business school and was like, well, would they really need me? Because it was early. I was like, I mean, I wasn't and they were they convinced me that they might need my skills. And I walked in. By the way, it was the biggest place I'd ever worked. I think it was around 1800 people. It was extremely chaotic and really fun. We worked so much because we were growing. I think we more than doubled in size my first three or four years. So from like about 2000 to 4000, 4000 to 8000, we were on a really steep and we interviewed you remember this, we were interviewing people like 40 hours a week and then doing our jobs those first initial years. But you're right, it's formative for me, certainly. But I think a lot of what Google put into practice and how it ran itself was studied by other companies. And I think some of those things translated well and some didn't, which you probably have some opinions about.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, no, I mean, I joined right around the same time you did. And I think inside of technology in Silicon Valley, it was a clear choice. Right. It was a company that was sort of sucking up all the talent, and very few people were hiring for a couple of years before that. So all the founders ended up at Google because their companies failed during the.com bus and they joined. When my wife joined, her parents actually told her it was the worst decision of her life. And then later, when she left Google to join Stripe, her parents told her that was the worst decision of her life. And so it's interesting to see how.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
There'S that I think there's a trend. We did not listen to Jen's parents.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, I think that people, when they join companies, they sometimes pick up very good habits there and sometimes pick up very bad habits there. What do you think are the good habits and bad habits that you picked up at Google that you then sort of reset when you came to Stripe?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I mean, a guy that I used to work with at Google who then left and worked at another tech company and now is an investor. But he said to me that after he left, he felt like learning about business at Google, was like learning about gravity on the moon, just because AdWords was just like a money printing machine. And the margins were so beautiful. I jokingly refer to them as drug dealer margins, but, like, really unrealistic. And so I think there's some things that you just take for granted when you're in that kind of a growth with that kind of a profile of your anchor product that you have to almost, like, need to go back to basics and not think about unit economics again. The other thing is, Google, especially early, did not value management very highly. So I was sort of countercultural at Google because I always did. And I think a thing that I took away from that experience was to continue valuing it and to bring it to stripe more strongly than I felt. It was embedded in early Google, trying to think what other but there was also we had fun. I think Google did a nice job of recognition and feeling those earlier years. You really felt like you were part of something. The mission really mattered and didn't take itself too seriously. Took time to celebrate, but people worked very, very hard because you felt like you had this moment and you knew it was going to go away, though. It's been pretty strong.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, I think a lot of people forget that, because now Google is almost viewed as the opposite in terms of a lack of culture and all this stuff. But I think at the time that both of us was there, it was extremely hard charging. It was large groups of very young people, and people you'd be there at midnight, and there'd be all these people just like in the office, working and playing smart.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Very driven life.
ELAD GIL
Yeah.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Every meeting was especially in the product, you'd be hanging out aggressive, aggressively getting to the answers.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. And it was a very blunt culture, too, at the time.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah, it was very blunt, which now everyone's like, oh, it's too nice. And I'm like, well, it wasn't that way.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, it really shifted. It's kind of interesting, because I feel like in that period of any company when there's fast growth, the founders are hyper engaged. The team is very driven. Often the founding teams decide to do almost, like, odd things. And so I remember one of the things that Larry did is you removed the entire middle management layer. He said, we don't need middle managers. And suddenly every director had 50 to 100 reports, and you saw your manager once a year because they were just too busy with 100 reports or whatever. And so a lot of people got kind of lost in that. What was the weirdest thing you experienced at Google, or what was the most unexpected thing from either managerial perspective or cultural perspective?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah, I mean, gosh, there's so many. But that little vignette just reminded me I'll never forget I was working with the Gmail team, and I was very embedded in a good way with the engineers in particular, because we had just launched it. There was a lot of I was on the operations side, but Google had not really had a product that required as much support and explaining because Gmail was a little bit of a new paradigm. Users were very lost. Anyway, I was embedded with the engineers, so I would hang out near where they all sat. And after this middle management layer thing, one of the engineering, I guess, directors then made, like, yelled out into the cubicles, hey, everybody, your bonus letters are in a file on my desk. Come and take yours. Because he didn't have time to do one on ones and hand them and talk to them about their compensation, and I hope they were in individual envelopes, but I'm pretty sure they weren't. So everybody was just rifling through each other's bonuses amounts and taking their letter to find out how much their bonus was. And I was like, this can't be right. This cannot be good. Anyway, a lost opportunity for that. Maybe, but maybe Larry was right. My first meeting with Larry and Sergey actually was about Gmail. We were pushing really hard to get the product into 60 languages. That was the whole push for the whole company, was to get every product into 60 languages within like 30 or 60 days, depending on who you asked. And I was supposed to scale that support of that product in the 60 languages. I had a team that spoke about eleven languages, which was impressive, by the way, because the team was only about 18 people. And so, yes, you can imagine what happened to the folks. The one Korean speaker, for example. So I wrote this pretty extensive presentation on what it was going to take. And we went into Larry and Sergey in one of the conference rooms where they used to have a lot of meetings. And I walked through not much of it because they're pretty impatient and don't tolerate. I was not being very MBA consulting, but I probably felt very much that way to them.
ELAD GIL
They would also exercise in the middle meetings.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Oh yeah, there was StairMaster, and Sergey would be sweating, and it would smell like a locker room, and you're like, trying to explain anyway, that was a different meeting. But after a minute, they looked at me and they were like, no, this is a bad plan, but look at the analysis. Like, look at these numbers. No, do something different. And I was like, yeah, great. Okay. But it was kind of great, right? I think there's like, constraints do create innovation. I ended up coming out of that meeting and building the first peer to peer support platform for a Google product because I was like, well, if we're not going to answer your questions, someone else is going to, and we're going to build a way to do it. But at the time it was demoralizing and embarrassing and all the things, but I now kind of love it as one of my so was I shocked? It was shocking in the moment, but it was kind of amazing.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, they really forced people to think big and do really radical things. One thing that got sparked off of your comment on the bonuses, because I don't know if you remember this, but they used to give out $1,000 in cash to every employee for Christmas.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yes.
ELAD GIL
And it'd be ten hundred dollars bills. And there's this whole debate internally of like, should you give it in cash? Should you give a check? And they wanted it in cash, so you'd viscerally feel the money and spend it for Christmas, for the holidays. And I think eventually there used to be like the rumor is there'd be people who'd wait for the Google buses and SF so that they could mug people coming off with $1,000 checks, like every holiday season. And so then they had to discontinue.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
It, but it would be at the holiday party and the Brinks trucks because we got bigger, and they would pull up and there'd be all these armed carts at the end of the holiday party because we were all walking out with $1,000. I will tell a story about that, which is at the time. So I joined Google, got married, had my daughter, and then had my son. It was like a pretty intense period of my life. And I remember telling a younger employee that I had taken my $1,000. My kids were in the Google Daycare. But by the point that I had my second child, we'd hired this part time nanny who would help. My husband was working full time, and there was no way I could have done all the things without this help. So Berta, who was with us part time for a long time and is the reason my son has a beautiful Mexican accent and speaks Spanish beautifully. Anyway, she would speak to him constantly, but I would just give her the $1,000. And I told this to someone. They were like what? You're giving your bonus? I said someday you'll understand. Like, that woman is helping me raise my kids. Of course I give her my bonus. Like, it's her bonus. But later, that person, that employee came up to me. She's like, I totally get it. She's like, I get it now. But if you're a working mom, especially, you need help. Especially if your family is far away, which mine was. So Bertha was our family.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. It's interesting, the point on innovation at Google and how it forced a lot of people to do very innovative things. Like you building the first peer to peer sort of support platform for the company. Why do companies slow down as they get bigger?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I mean, you have a lot of thoughts on this. I want your opinion. Yeah, I think that there are two things that come to my mind. So the first one, if sort of my book does any trick for people if you don't build in two things, one is smart. Not heavy processes, not painful processes, but smart ways of operating that get the work done in a repeatable. Like you should be able to repeatably do important things for your company to keep velocity right. And if you don't figure out a way to scale, like product launches or marketing campaigns or sales processes, you will start to fall over because you'll be manually building this stuff, and you'll have so many interface points and custom elements that you can't scale it. Right. So that's one reason. The bigger reason, I think, is that founding teams, including the executives and the leaders don't figure out how to push and delegate down decision making and empower and build confidence in the people they're trying to hold accountable. So you'll get this weird phenomenon where people are like, well, I'm accountable for this product, but then yet they're waiting for some meeting to happen to feel like they've got enough alignment and consensus, often with the founders to actually make the controversial decision to further the product. So they're accountable, but they're not actually owning it. And I think that is very poisonous. And I think the other, the third would be when you have a moment, as Google has and Stripe has, I hope continues, where you have a real opportunity in a really important space where there's a lot happening with the technology you're building and it feels ephemeral. You try to do all the things and you don't prioritize, and then you get a bunch of smart people trying to read your priorities and you haven't been clear enough about it. Right? And I think I remember Eric Schmidt when he was CEO going on some road shows because I think he was realizing, nobody, we don't all have the same priorities and it's a problem. And I think we went through some similar things and have gone at Stripe, but those are some of my thoughts. But it's really about not recognizing that the stuff's falling over and then changing leadership behavior.
ELAD GIL
What specific leadership behavior would you change?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
This is the hardest thing to say to a founder, which is, there are things you care about that you cannot be in the room anymore. You will not be the decision maker. And I think the best thing you can do is say, what can we do to help take that thing out of your head? I'm like Picturing in Harry Potter when they take the thing and they put it in the pool of water, like that little thread of judgment, right? And belief, like, this is my vision and this is why this has to be this way, and this is my quality level. How can you imprint that on others? I did a first round interview many years ago where I thought, I think the medical school, c one, do one, teach one, come up with patterns that you as a founder can use to gain confidence that you can trust the people that are going to need to run without you. And unfortunately, I think part of the nature of being a founder is you're innately a bit paranoid and you don't have that kind of trust because that thing is your baby. Like, you created it and you want to protect it and you want it to flourish. And you certainly don't want the thing. That's the irony of this. You don't want things to slow down. You have so much ambition. You want to go faster, but to go faster, you have to give up a lot. And also let people fail and it's hard to watch people injured the thing that you've just spent the last five years building. So I think that's the main behavior is delegating decision making and accountability, teaching owners, teaching the values so that you don't have to be in the room.
ELAD GIL
One of the arguments that I know a founder of a very well known public financial services company, like one of the biggest in the world, and her view was that it's really hard to be both big and innovative. And the reasoning was sort of threefold. Number one is you shift from building mode to compliance mode in certain ways, particularly in regulated industries, right, in certain industries. Second is you kind of start building processes to help the average person do well versus the best people do well. Right. And so you have sort of reversion to the mean and that slows things down pretty dramatically. And then third, the nature of the people that you hire shifts because as you get bigger and become a bigger brand, you start attracting a different type of person. The people are less entrepreneurial.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Well, and they're more specializing in doing their particular local thing well, as opposed to optimizing for the global. That's true.
ELAD GIL
So how do you break that pattern? Because it seems like it's very consistent. And the question is, is that a universal pattern? Is it breakable like other ways to change that?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I mean, I think the things we've certainly tried some of these that even Jack Welch talked about this, which is you hive off parts of the company and you protect them. I mean, Google did this with Gmail initially as they put them in a part of a building that no one else had access to and sort of separated them even from young Google to go and build on their own and experiment and launch. But I think one tactic is for something that is innovative or new. So this is on the innovation point, you eventually do have to separate that part of the DNA out and protect it and treat it a little bit differently, which doesn't, to your point, things regret everyone wants. Well, what about fairness? What about fairness? I'm like, well, it's not actually fair. You're going to pick some people to work on something and you're going to give them special permission to do some things differently. Right? I think that's what sort of Google X tried to be and it's hard, but that to me seems to be the most prevailing pattern to fight that. I think on the regression to the mean and the specialization versus the generalists, some of that is good. I mean, that is how you get sort of I think if you think about McKinsey's sort of growth curves, if you're talking about your anchor mature product, that's very normal to start to solve for more of a mass, like whoever's going to do this onboarding as a customer, those customers are going to be more diverse. They're going to need more support. It's going to need more it's not a regression. It's more of getting to an average, because that is what success is. And having specialists who understand compliance is you're now getting regulated. There are people scrutinizing you. You do not want to get in trouble, certainly not on behalf of your customers. I think that's normal. I think the problem is the next waves that you're working on cannot have the same thing happening. And to finish my own, you can carve off a small team and treat them differently, but can you treat a whole additional business unit differently? Because you're thinking about this growth horizon five years from now. And that one I don't know of a lot of companies that have done that well, I don't know if you have, but I think it comes I mean, often my answers will come down to leadership. And I'll be honest, this is an imperfect example, but when Larry made the decision to buy Danger and bring Andy Rubin in, he basically did this at a bigger scale, which is, I'm going to take this thing. I'm going to bring in a leader who's more entrepreneurial and innovative, and I'm going to give him a big portion of resources and let them do what they want to do. And it was controversial internally, right? People really fought that. But he was building for the future, and he had to separate it from the mothership.
ELAD GIL
I think the acquisition of Android in particular, too, one of the things that they did differently is they actually let Ruben divorce the hiring pipeline from the core Google hiring process. And so he hired all sorts of specialists who never would have made it through Google hiring, because at the time, Google only hired generalist engineers. And if you really, really knew how to hack a Linux kernel, it didn't matter even because you were sort of gauged on all this other stuff. And so I think that was one of the biggest changes that actually allowed them to scale.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah. So I guess the answer is, I think it's very hard to do it all in one unit. And so how do you separate it and how do you hire the right leader for a very different enterprise than the one that is sucking most of your attention and energy, which is your core product?
ELAD GIL
How did you learn about Stripe initially and what made you decide to make the leap?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
So Stripe did a very good job early on, actually, of getting attention, what I would call it, like sort of earned free media from I mean, Patrick and John are fantastic spokespeople. They hired a comms leader early who I think did some very smart work getting the word out about the company. We didn't really have much of a marketing team. We had one product marketer. It was not our own marketing effort. It was much more of a media effort, but also very present in Quora and Hacker News, and IRC, a lot of channels where at the time, developers were really our main audience. So there was buzz about stripe before it was really even a thing, in a way. And I think it's because developers appreciated the product and they were talking, and I was close enough to enough engineers at that point that I was hearing about it. And then I feel like I read one profile in a more mainstream, maybe Wired, maybe something like that, and I thought, you know, I admire what I'm hearing from these founders. So it was like in my brain, but barely. And then actually, a former colleague of mine at Google who'd gone to work at Sequoia contacted me and said, I'd really like you to meet Patrick Carlson, and they think a COO, and I think you should talk to him. And I said, no. I was like, oh, payments. No. He said, Claire, have I ever wasted your time? Of course, he's my friend. So I was like, all right, I'll have breakfast with the guy, whatever. So I meet Patrick and found it was a compelling meeting. But we both, I think, had to go back and think, like, he wasn't sure did they want a COO ahead of sales. He was meeting a lot of people. And then I had just taken on a new role in self driving cars at Google, and I felt committed to them, and I was sort of playing through that. So it was a slow process of getting to know each other. But I do remember a moment a lot where another guy at Google, a leader that I knew who had reported to me at one point but was now a colleague and a friend, said he had met with them. And I was jealous. And it was like, this is where you had these terrible dating analogies. But I was like, wait a minute. I might care more about that opportunity than I thought. And so that was helpful. The next time Patrick got in touch, I was like, yes, let's meet again.
ELAD GIL
And it's interesting because payments went through a period in Silicon Valley where it was not considered a good place to work. And there's a few reasons for that. And I think one of the reasons.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Google and I worked on it at Google, and it was brutal.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, Google had kind of payments product that didn't work quite as well. And then the thinking in Silicon Valley at the time, and I think this was really spread by the PayPal group. The folks at PayPal said that payments were too hard because there was too much fraud, because when they launched, there was a lot of fraudulent behavior on PayPal. And so there was this meme in Silicon Valley for years that you should never do payments because you could never get over the fraud issue. And so.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
That's why had to hire thousands and thousands of people in Omaha.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, you had to hire all these people and do all this stuff. And so there was like a five to ten year gap where there was just no innovation in payments.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah. I think there was also a little bit of and Google had this challenge, which is young tech companies often don't partner very well, and you really have to partner and build into the ecosystem and be credible player early with banks right. And financial partners. And that was not a strength of Google's, certainly, and I was part of some of these experiments, but I think it also became almost a meme beyond Google, which is like, well, you're never going to get these old stodgy, established financial institutions to talk to you. You little young startups, right. And Stripe was like, yeah, we are.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. So how do you think about it from a careerist perspective? And when you think about your career, were you ever doing, like, career planning, or did you just follow what made sense in a given moment, or how.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Do you think I think looking back, it makes a lot of sense to me. But in the moment it was more and there's a chapter in the book called you where I talk about sort of how I pick my head up every six months or so, but really on twelve to 18 month cycles, like, am I learning? Am I in a role that I think could lead to a role? And it's never a title, it's more like, am I going to be doing stuff six months from now that I think I'm going to be learning and having an impact? And it's roughly on a trajectory that makes sense to me. And I think what I loved about my opportunity at Google is I had like, five different jobs in ten years, and they were all quite different, and I learned a ton. I mean, it was a great development journey for me. I didn't really know what it was all going to amount to. I wasn't angling for a particular direction. But it did get to be a point toward the end where I was a very, I think, viable COO candidate. And I was talking to a lot of growth stage startups, and I actually had a very refreshing conversation with Reed Hoffman at one point where I just felt like, look, I've got this job, I've got kids, I can't meet all these people. And he was like, Claire, there's only a few companies at any given time that you should really be considering, and you know who they are. I was like, oh, he's right. There's not some secret thing going. I mean, I'm in Silicon Valley, I have a lot of network, I know a lot of investors. So I started to realize I could be more targeted with paying attention to what was out there. But the real decision came down to. I mean, one for me, I was definitely not learning at the same rate at Google. And even though I'd moved myself into this very entrepreneurial and new and like almost an R and D project with self driving cars, I was pushing up against some stuff that I was like, I'm never going to sort of win this internally. Like, I have made proposals. They were getting rejected. I thought we should have been swinging for the fences. We were out ahead with that technology. A lot is nodding, and now there's a lot of others in the race. Waymo is still there. I actually really admire the co CEOs of Waymo. They're friends of mine, both of them. So I just want to be clear about that. But we're talking now about almost ten years ago, right? Anyway, point is, that was frustrating and I didn't feel I was learning. And I felt like, what am I going to regret? So you get to a point in your career where you're like, you've done a lot, I've had some success. What am I going to regret? And I realized I was going to regret not going earlier into a company and thinking, could I build? Can I help build? Because I joined Google as a manager, right? I eventually left as like a VP, two, whatever, but I really was more rising up through the ranks of Google, which is, by the way, where you should look for talent, pick a great company, someone who's had a great trajectory, which I did there, and reputation and references. But I think I needed to see if I could do it myself, like, from a more executive position. And then stripe represented so much of what I realized I was looking for, which was not payments, I admit, at least not initially, but though ultimately very strategically interesting. It was one, the founders, like, they really matter, and they have to be excellent. It's like you're investing it, but it's your time, not your money, right? The other was I thought that the company was meaningful. Like it had a mission, it was infrastructure, it mattered, right? I was sort of tired of this ad based revenue play. Like, I really wanted to do something that felt important. And I think actually, economic infrastructure is very geopolitically important. I'm more of a mission driven kind of person. Economic growth matters to me at a macro level, and then I could see that I could have an impact. It was clear that they were getting to a point where they could use my skills and I could learn new things, and they were going to give me some stuff to run that I'd never run before, which admittedly, was a trust exercise. And in the end, I called my husband one night, I was like, oh, if I don't take this, I'm never leaving Google. And I knew I was leaving. And so I was like, well, that's obvious then, but it took time to get there. I think there's some lore around my interview process, but it was long, so a lot of mutual diligence. And in retrospect, actually, I felt like it was a big career risk for me. Right. I was, like, really thinking through it. But it's a bigger deal for the founders. It's a bigger deal when you're bringing in, especially COO has a little bit of baggage, good and bad, attached to it. Even if you don't conceive of the role as some kind of proxy, it's conceived of as a proxy, and you really have to be careful. Like, is that person going to be culturally appropriate and good? But both of those things because you can have a real impact on a young company in that role.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. Your book talks a lot about different aspects of leadership and management and mentorship, and I have sort of two related questions. One is, when you come into a situation like that, how should you as a new executive act or what are the first things that you should do?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I mean, I felt very educated coming in because we had spent a lot of time together. I'd looked at a lot of board presentations, internal documents. I looked at the company goals, which I helped write as part of an exercise for one of my interviews. And I knew Patrick and John and Billy, who was a leader in the company quite well at that point. So that was an advantage because the first thing you got to do is let's build some relationships. Let's talk about what do you do well, what do I do well? How do we make decisions together? Is this a divide and conquer on some things? Is this a joint decision making? What kind of leadership team are we building here? But really, I listened. I mean, I did. You can read the first 90 days, but a lot of that stuff is legitimately reasonable, which is, of course, you're getting pulled in immediately to other things. But I worked to learn the product. I worked to meet everyone in the company because it was small enough that I could do that. I took a ton of notes. I distilled it all down to what I was hearing. Just like any good consultant, I was like, here's what I'm hearing. The people internally want to see us do differently or that we need to tackle or we need to build. And I played that back to the whole company, which was well received because everyone cared a lot. They were building it together, and I think they were worried I was going to come in and one, take Google and try to imprint it on stripe, which would have been really inappropriate, by the way. Look at the products, look at the business model, look at the space in the market. All of that was different. And so I think you have to sort of rip. There's a little bit of brain, like, dump all of that and start over and be curious and learn and listen, but then start to have opinion. After about a month or so, you've got to have some opinions about your priorities and what kind of thing you need to do. And honestly, I've said this in a few forums, but I think bringing in some talent if you're in a growth stager, we really didn't have a lot of management experience and starting to think about, okay, if we're going to scale international on sales. For me, I was like, wow, we need to rebuild some of the support team. So starting to do a lot of recruiting. And if you see a new leader and they're not starting to think about talent, they know and holes you might have and putting those things together, I think that's not a good sign. Right. But yeah, it's forgetting the things that your old constructs and building new constructs, but then being smart about where your opportunity is in the near term. You also want to have some impact pretty early. What are you positively viewed?
ELAD GIL
Yeah. What do you think are other signals that a manager isn't necessarily going to scale? Like, I think to your point, one example is there's no sort of team roadmap.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah. They're not attracting talent, they're not thinking about where the team needs to be. I think that's one of the signs. I think another one is I have too many founders come to me and they've hired someone with experience, and then they're kind of puzzling over, why does that person with experience seem to keep checking with me? Right. And I think it's kind of this problem, which is a little bit of an uncanny valley where it's like, you don't want to come in and disrupt the Apple Card and have organ rejection against you as a new leader. So it could be that. But often, unfortunately, I think it's not a great hire because they're not coming in with a sort of confidence from their experience and thinking, okay, well, two years from now, if we're going to be as good at sales as you seem to think we need to be, then we're going to have to do some things differently. And instead they're sort of check checking and the founder gets like, this feeling in their gut, like, OOH, this might not be the person, they might not actually see the field the way I need them to. You're probably right. So I think it's slow to move, slow to hire, too much checking, no opinions.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. When you give people advice on what to do career wise, and again, I think there's really good nuggets in your book. What is the difference in the advice that you give to somebody who's early in their career versus late or later?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah. If you're early in your career, well, one, don't do the thing everyone else is doing which unfortunately is like a siren song to young people. And I get it. But I taught a class at Harvard Business School last fall and so many students came to my office hours and were like, I'm going to go work in venture capital. And I had to spend the entire office hour being like, that is the worst idea I've ever heard. No, but I mean, I was like, go do something. Are you kidding me? That will always be there. And what are they going to do? They're going to be like a spreadsheet monkey. Like anyway, sorry but don't get me started on this, but I really think introspecting check, gut check. Like, okay, a lot of people around me want to do this thing. Maybe that's right for you, but it's probably not. It's that no one can think of a better thing and you've got to know yourself. And what are you curious about? What are you interested in? You can take so much more risk when you're young. I mean, I did a ton of different random stuff in my 20s. Like really random. I mean my career in Tech didn't start till I was in my thirty s and I wouldn't trade any of that experience. I worked in politics, I worked in journalism, I worked in consulting. I did a bunch of different stuff. I made very little money, but I was fortunate. I didn't have a ton of student debt. I could live at home, I could do some things to save up. But I think that one follow your gut, not other people's gut. Be learning constantly, asking for feedback, but not in the grubbing for feedback way, but in the like, really, I want I'm hungry. And I think the other thing is I worked really hard. I mean, be ready to lay it out there and demonstrate and then people notice you and then people introduce you. I'm still surprised at some of the people I worked with in my early career who matter to me now in my network, who are in a totally different world than Tech, but they still one of them is a former governor of Massachusetts who I keep running into now that I live back there. And he's amazing and he definitely remembers me and talks about me to other people, right? Like that matters. He was not the governor when I knew him. Just be clear. So those are some thoughts. I think later in your career you have a different often risk appetite, which is unfortunate, but I think you kind of have studied yourself enough. I hope you're more self aware about what you're great at, what you're passionate about, where you can add value and that you can be more discerning about where you should play or maybe you want to try something new. But I really think that too many people, again, even in their later career, are following the hotness. Right? You don't want to go work at the company that's hot right now. You want to go work at the place that's going to be and for some reason risk aversion takes over. I don't know. Be smart, do the analysis yourself. Don't listen to what other people think. Maybe that's my theme of this whole answer. What do you think?
ELAD GIL
I give slightly different advice. I think that following your passion sometimes is good but sometimes is really bad and it depends on what your passion is.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
That's true? Yes.
ELAD GIL
And so I would really qualify like where your gut wants to take you versus where reality like if you're a.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Terrible poet and your passion for writing poetry but perhaps will not be a good career.
ELAD GIL
Exactly. And I think a lot of people kind of follow that version or follow.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Your curiosity in a direction that you macro environment you're like that analytically makes sense and emotionally that makes a lot of sense.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, and then I think the main thing is there's the old saying that if you see like a rocket ship taking off, get on it, it doesn't matter what seat you have. And so I think a lot of people will start debating role, they'll start debating comp, they'll start debating all these things instead of just saying like, this is a great company and it's going to grow really fast and it's going to do interesting things and I should just get on it 100%. And usually those things are messy and they're ugly and they're painful and you.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Might be in the wrong role and.
ELAD GIL
You have to work really hard. Yeah, it all works itself out.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I agree. It's like take the best professor in college, not what the course is about. I think it's the same thing. Best company wins.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. So I think early on that's the biggest optimization function later in the career. I think it's a little bit about creating doors because I feel like too often people just it's your point on following a specific path, but I also think they stop creating optionality. And I feel like some of the best career moves are like when you're like, oh, I worked on ads my entire life, but I'm going to go to this company that's doing something completely different and have new things. I'm focused on functionally and new things because you kind of reach the peak of what you were doing before.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah, I don't think I actually have this in the book. I always say to people I've always had two and sometimes three potential next paths that I felt were available to me, like career wise, job wise, because you never know what's going to happen, right? This door could get closed. Something could change in the environment in you want to pivot. Like I always had a theory about, okay, well if that happened, if this you kind of want to think a few steps ahead. Whatever organization you're in or political system or whatever it is, and just know that you have another path. I agree. I think some people get pigeonholed and trapped. That's the other thing. People just are afraid to change.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, they get stuck at some point. They get stuck. So we talked a little about how Larry and Sergey ran things in a very different way at Google and everything from, like, getting on the StairMaster in the middle of a meeting to really pushing people to think big. And I think that repetition on thinking big, for example, translated I remember when I first started working on mobile products at Google, I met with, I think, Paul Buche, who started Gmail.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yes.
ELAD GIL
And I talked about, oh, wouldn't it be great if we had Gmail on mobile? Because I was working on mobile and it was a new thing. And he's like, well, how it'll be different from all the other mobile apps and how it'll actually be interesting. And a big push on why is this different, which I think was really sort of Larry and Sergey thinking, like, translated through the team. What do you think was a version of that at Stripe when you joined in terms of either the quirkiness or the maniacal focus on something?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I think that one of the things that I heard about Stripe when I was looking at it was that there's a little bit of a trend that sort of has turned. But I can think of some products I use right now that hasn't, which is that B to B products were not well designed. They were not, like, pleasurable to use either as a developer integrating them or as a user. I'm talking about UI design, simplicity, intelligence, and that Stripe had counteracted that. It was like, no, this is definitely a B to B thing, but we care about craftsmanship and design and experience, but are also quirky and have personality. But I really think that that care for the details and the quality. And then you'll hear a lot of people, Stripe say, we abstracted away complexity. If you think about payments and the infrastructure and the integrations and all the things involved, and all you want to do is accept payments or move money in or out. And Stripe really tried to create an elegant way to get into that system without having to handle all the headaches. And that takes a lot of deep work and craftsmanship. Any review of anything that was going to get launched was serious at Google, but way more serious at Stripe. And you're also dealing with people's money, and so it should be very serious and work very well. Right, but I think that I thought I had a sense of good design and things that were ready to be tested by customers until I got to Stripe and I was like, oh, or maybe not. And you could never launch anything if you had not tested it with a bunch of customers and were in the room, representing their feedback honestly and directly, which Google is not particularly customer oriented because, again, it's more of a consumer, mass consumer company than a B to B company. And I loved that combination of the focus on the customer, the design, the craftsmanship, and the quality.
ELAD GIL
Bar so you had an amazing career in terms of working at two iconic companies and key roles.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
What made you decide to write a book a lot? You are an example to me, an inspiration. Now, I really think it started with you. The chapter that I contributed to in your book got a lot of more attention than I would have expected. Patrick noticed, and then Patrick and John decided I needed to write a book. So it's kind of your fault.
ELAD GIL
That chapter really took off by the way. It was circulating with a lot of different founders, and I saw a lot of people starting to write like, guides to working with themselves.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah, you're in the book. I talk about this in the book a lot. I can't believe you said you're saying.
ELAD GIL
You have a whole chapter.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
You made me include the example of the working with Claire guide in your book, and you said, this is going to be like catnip to founders. And I was like, really? No one wants to read that. People don't even know who I am. You were right. I mean, that's probably the thing that gets, like, tweeted at me or the most of anything that I've ever done, which is interesting. And every journalist, by the way, who interviewed me about this book wanted to talk about that because it's sort of fascinating to people as a concept. So, anyway, your chapter, I think that what John and Patrick felt, and I had to agree with them ultimately, because I did some research on my own. Was there wasn't a tactical enough, like, really practical, more like a reference manual. You look in the table of contents, I want to learn about this thing. And I'm not saying I'm the expert, but I have had about 20 years at two companies that have done well. It's more of my patterns, my examples, a lot of examples from Stripe and some from Google that I've anonymized. But I think that you want to see how someone else did the thing because it's easy to abstractly say, well, this is how you manage someone out. But in the book, I really walk through all the steps that you might take, and I think a lot of that stuff happens behind closed doors or how you put up create structures to run a company. Some of it is a little bit boring, but it's really important. And no one's written it in gory detail because it can be a little bit boring to read, but you want to see it.
ELAD GIL
I think it captured a lot of super useful stuff that nobody's captured anywhere else. And I think that's one of the really unique things about it, and I think it's interesting to see how that gap has persisted. And then you see these books that are 500 pages long with one concept, right?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah, there's like one prevailing framework of a lot of management books, and you can get it in the first intro, chapter one. This is not that book.
ELAD GIL
That's great.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
This is more like the encyclopedia of what's in my head. But I've been really glad that it's been useful and I want to thank you. You did inspire.
ELAD GIL
No, thanks for being part of it. What was the thing that you omitted that you wished was in there? Or is there anything like that? Or if you were to do an addendum, what would be in it?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I have found that as I've been doing this sort of tour and I feel very over promoted and exposed right now and doing podcasts, I have stronger opinions about some of the things in the book that I probably lightly was opinionated about. So it's not that I omitted a particular section, but I think I should have been a little more I could have even had a version of a sidebar where it's like, if you really want to know what I think, lay it out.
ELAD GIL
What's an example of that?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Well, lately I've been talking to a lot of I think you've got to move talent out quick, bad talent out quickly, but in particular, leaders that aren't working more quickly than I even ever was comfortable. I have so much conviction. They can just be such a rot on the culture and on the trajectory. And it's problematic because leaders are not like if they're really overtly bad and toxic, yes, of course they're gone, but I'm talking about the sort of mediocre fumbling in the darkness for six months killing you if you're a young company. That's one thing I've gotten more virulent about recently.
ELAD GIL
What was the most unexpected aspect of writing a book or the most unexpected outcome of it?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I mean, it's like going back to being an individual contributor. I've been managing and leading teams and not done a lot of the work myself, and I felt like the maker schedule versus the manners. I had to write a lot of this book, even though I blocked time during the week, on weekends, when I had an entire day where I could only do the thing. And I hadn't had that for a long time. And I also, I think, hadn't had as much empathy for some of the people who are trying to be makers at stripe. So one was just changing my brain and my ability to concentrate and focus and get the stuff on paper. It is important. I'm more of a talker than a writer, and so to go back to that and try to express myself in writing was like muscles. I hadn't used enough. So it was painful, to be honest. It was pretty painful. But it's very rewarding to me that some people have said to me that it's enjoyable to read and they thought it was going to be very dry and that means a lot to me because ultimately not that you all I'm the child of two teachers. Like, I grew up in a household that valued education and writing and reading highly. And so it's kind of a miracle to me that I've written a book and if someone enjoys reading it, it's very meaningful to me because that was a value system in which I was raised.
ELAD GIL
I guess I'm going to ask you two last questions and then if you have a couple more minutes, we can open up for the audience a little bit. You've had this amazing career arc. You're now doing boards, you've written a book. Is there something specific that you're hoping to accomplish over the next ten years or a specific plan or how are you thinking about what's to come?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
I am iterating toward that I think I am learning already some things that I would have done a little differently. I would not have joined quite so many boards. Too much commitment. I think that there's some very interesting so here's my theory. My theory is that I'm going to do some portfolio of things while my kids are still at home, which is only a few more years because I enjoy flexibility that I didn't have for most of their lives. And then there are so many interesting things happening right now. I'm paying a lot of attention and trying to get more educated as again, more of an individual contributor again and hold on to that and not jump in and then we'll see. But I don't have a particular plan. I don't think I'm done right. It's just sort of like there is another chapter, I just don't know exactly what it looks like. But I'm not no longer anxious about that. I'm kind of interested and I don't feel like I've had such a I know you said to me the career, it's the impact you have on other people. It's the things I haven't done that I think more about than what have I accomplished? I find it very surprising because I think a lot of people could have done what I've done and many have and they just don't have they don't have the PR team that I have. I don't know.
ELAD GIL
So I guess the last question on my side then we can open it up is I've used Stripe as a very optimistic company in some ways as an external viewer. Yeah.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
We're like macro optimists and micro pessimists, actually.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. Which I think is a very powerful combination and it's a very tech forward company. It has acted really early on things like climate from a corporate perspective, like it's very innovative. And I feel that people that come out of Stripe often have this sort of optimistic can. Do view of the world. What are you most optimistic about for the future? At whatever level you want to address that question.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
There'S two things that just sprung to mind. One is an argument I had with a friend in New York a few weeks ago where he's convinced that we might not be alive in ten years because of climate change. And I was convincing him that, like, the brightest people I know are working on the problem. And I have confidence that humans can do better than this. So that's what I'm optimistic about. It feels very dark right now, but we can innovate. I know we can, and we have to. And so that then on the way here, I had this fantastic Uber driver. We had the most amazing conversation. He was asking about my book, and then I was like, no, let's not talk about that. So then we started talking about AI, and he'd been listening to Elon speak, and he's like, what do you think of this? Is the computer going to kill all of us? And I found myself not. I was like, well, this is, like, pretty freaking interesting. I guess what I'm really I'm excited that we're alive to see this a lot. Isn't that? So what am I optimistic about? Is like, it's going to be crazy, right? But you have to be a learner. You have to stay out there and stay curious and think, what could this all become? And I'm really interested. I read a lot of news. I'm on the board of the Atlantic for a reason. I really care about all the levels, like, the doers in the middle of all of this, but also the commentators. And I really am interested in all the observations around what's happening, including what's in the middle. And I feel very fortunate that I have people to talk to on all the levels, and I want to take advantage of that. I want everyone to take advantage of that. Because it's when you realize you're in history, you get old and you're like, oh, my gosh, this is history. We're in it. We are in it.
ELAD GIL
That's very exciting.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
And I think we can impact it. A lot of people in this room can impact it. That's got to feel good, right? Scary, but good.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. So amazing note to, I think, open this up to the audience. So are there any questions? We can go in the back.
AUDIENCE QUESTION
[ASKS A QUESTION]
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah, I mean, the question was, like, some companies really fall over because they grow too quickly. They raise a bunch of money, they hire a bunch of people. They're really not ready for all that. And when I came in, I came into Stripe with about 160 people. And actually, Stripe had sort of the opposite problem, which I think we need more companies to come back to, which is they definitely had product market fit and traction. I think we're a little bit paranoid about is this real? And you could see it, I could see it in the numbers and if you looked at the inbound customer demand, both on the support side but the sales side, we couldn't get back to the leads. I did a whole analysis when I came in that was sort of bottoms up, tops down, and it should have been more like 500 people when it was 200 people. And we talked about that internally and it kind of freaked people out. But I think that there was a lot of conservatism and a desire to really have a healthy PNL and charge for the product and scale in a intentional manner. And I think that's a better problem to have being underbuilt for where you are than being overbuilt. I mean, a lot is nodding. You're creating a bunch of process for like you don't yet have. You've really got to feel a lot of conviction that you have a product that people really, really want and you can't get enough of it in their hands. And I think too many companies are like, well we got some revenue, let's build all the things. And so I think there's probably you could talk about this more, but when we say the words product market fit, different people are talking about different things. Stripe very much had it like well beyond it when I joined. And I think that if I had joined, I don't know when it was 40 people, stripe hung around, by the way, 30 to 40 people for a while, really testing and finding. Did we really have traction, was the growth really going to be real? That would have been a bad I would not have added a lot of value then in that phase. But it was a decent size, 40 people. I think it's product market fit. Let's be really clear about what we mean when we say that is probably.
ELAD GIL
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think people misinterpreted in all sorts of ways in both directions. And I think people have forgotten how capital efficient companies used to be in part due to COVID and zero interest rates and all that. But the reality is the best companies in the world often were extremely capital efficient because a product fit was so strong that you could be capital efficient or you'd effectively be always under hiring because things would be growing faster than you could keep up.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah, there was a joke when I joined Stripe that they kept talking about AR like annualized run rate and I was like, guys, let's just talk about the actual revenue because I think we need to graduate from that because that's just forecasting hope. I mean, Stripe, it was more repeatably because it was very transaction based, but I think there's a lot of SaaS companies that are taking something to the bank that's not in the bank.
AUDIENCE QUESTION
So, Claire, you had mentioned that your chapter in Elad's book was a genesis of this and became a good product that John Patrick had encouraged you to embark on. And Elad had mentioned that there was a corpus of knowledge that isn't really covered in other books. Claire, I'm curious, is there a corpus of knowledge or a person that you wish would write the next book and what would be about.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
You know, I don't have like something off the top of my head. I actually think what Satya Nadella has done at Microsoft is incredibly fascinating and just inspirational. I would love to hear the inside story of that. That would be the first thing that comes to my mind. The other would be for those who know me, a pretty classic Claire answer, which would be there's a lot of books by sports, like coaches that, again, have a lot of platitudes and stuff. They aren't as interesting as what I think actually happens in the best teams. And I would love someone to do and you could argue that Michael Lewis has done a little bit of this with like moneyball and what have you, but I really want to get in that. Bill Belichick, my friend Sid, who I had coffee with today, planted this idea with me. Take Bill Belichick's head and then the level of detail in my book and put them on paper. This would just be interesting to me. How do you repeatedly win with really different okay, you have Tom Brady but a lot of other different players over many decades that's anyway, another one. Hi, I don't know how you're going to get that mic.
ELAD GIL
We can repeat the question.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Can you talk a little bit about your experience both in terms of the joys and some of the pitfalls that we should yeah. International scale is a favorite topic of mine. I worked on it at Google and at Stripe. And I think that the really understanding so Google, the AdWords product is actually fundamentally the same and the buyer and what they're interested in, marketing, all of that is actually quite similar in different parts of the world. And I did travel the world and talk to all of the buyers and I was like, oh, okay. We can actually scale a lot of stuff quite similarly in these markets. Of course, you need to localize in terms of language and in some of the ecosystem around it. Right. Some countries have a lot of agencies, some don't. Whatever payments is actually not like that. Right. So you have to understand there's a different regulatory environment, there's different partners, there's often different cultural norms around money and how exchanges of value. And so you really have to think about, okay, what's my balance between central, like federal versus state or central versus distributed understanding of the market and decision making and strategy for a market. And Stripe was much more strategically interesting and complex, and still is, than Google was in that regard. And so then you have to think, well, how do I go back to that delegated decision making in terms of what needs to be empowered locally? How close do the product and technical teams need to be to the markets? And we've tried various experiments at Stripe to get them closer. It's hard though, because a lot of our core stuff is still built like the core payment stack in the US. Right? And it's not easy. And so we're looking at architectural changes we need to make to enable that, because you have to think at all levels, your strategy, your go to market, and your core architecture and product work, how do you distribute it appropriately at the level of where the decision making needs to happen? That's the easiest thing to say and the hardest thing to do. I think the other is this is happening for every distributed company, but how do you enable people to work asynchronously so that they're not dependent on people in other time zones to really get their work done? And does that mean you have to locate more functions? Does that mean you have to just do a better job of documenting, this is how you do the thing, or this is how we handle it in off hours? I don't know. I think you need to be more intentional about your sort of work day to day and how to enable people so they're not waiting for someone else to do it. And then I guess, finally, there's just nothing that replaces going in the market and feeling it and talking to customers. And I think the pandemic really did a disservice because so much international travel is still kind of disrupted and feels like egregious. And I think the best sort of year I had at Google professionally, I mean, personally, very hard for me, but I traveled like almost at least one week a month. But I think I had teams in twelve different offices around the world and I learned more in that year than I've learned. And I just would encourage that for people because you just can't feel it till you're there. But it's a challenge. Oh, the final thing is it goes back to the carving out. If you're having a small country compete for a resource against a large country and the core product, it never wins. And so your strategy, you say all you want about being international and expanding internationally, but unless you have a way to not create that dynamic of the small market loses, you're not actually a global company. And I don't think many companies have solved that because your prioritization process just doesn't work.
AUDIENCE QUESTION
Cool. Maybe up in the back, in the corner. Hi. My name is Gerkarin. Thank you for all the insights and a great talk. I actually work at Microsoft and I've watched the culture transformation firsthand over the last few years. So now I'm feeling inspired to write a book or at least a blog.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Definitely get in there.
AUDIENCE QUESTION
My question was about your career advice. You mentioned a lot of people pay attention to what's hot and it's fairly clear what that is right now. But your suggestion was skate, where the puck is going, what's going to be hot. I'm curious what your perspective is on what that's going to be or what companies that's going to be.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Oh, the prediction. I feel like a lot this is more your category than we're just going to say Generative AI and then name a few companies. I don't know.
ELAD GIL
I think actually sometimes the thing that's hot is correct. And so I think where people get it wrong is when they think the contrarian answer is default correct. And sometimes the mainstream answer is the right one. And if you just ask there's often this question you ask of why now? Like what's shifted? And there's so much that's shifted from a technology perspective that there's clear things to do. And so I do think that that is the biggest opportunity right now in terms of just like right.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
But I do think what's interesting about Generative AI is that incumbents, if they actually jumped on it, have their own corpuses right, of data and content. And if they came to the table and then combined that with some of the models that are openly available, you could do really interesting things in a large established company in a way that I think you'd get out disrupted in a different era. And in this one you could in fact win. But you have to shelve a lot of your old thinking, which I'm worried they're not going to do.
ELAD GIL
Yeah. And basically I think it's somewhere between what happened in the Internet and what happened in mobile and internet, 80% of the value went to startups and you had Amazon destroy bookstores and you had DVDs go away and you had all these things shift and Travel equity media changed completely. All this stuff changed for mobile. There was a handful of companies that were started that were new and took advantage of mobile affordances, Uber and Instacart. And Instagram. But most of the incumbents just transitioned to mobile.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Right?
ELAD GIL
They just added a mobile app and they were fine. And I think this is somewhere in between and I think there's a lot of trends that are fake trends.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Right.
ELAD GIL
And so that's the hard part. Ed tech in some sense was a fake trend in terms of actual impact and revenue and things like that, and certain aspects of digital health was a fake trend. And so you sometimes have to ask, will the market structure prevent things from actually happening too?
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah.
ELAD GIL
Cool. Maybe right there on the corner.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Hi. Thank you. Thank you. We straddle the intersection of tech and life sciences, and it's been really interesting. To see just the sort of impedance. Mismatch between the different cultures. I was curious to ask, like doing this book tour, you're going and meeting a lot of different people and wondering about whether you think having done that, whether you're thinking the frameworks in the book are universal or whether there's some dimensions that you can have. Like a really high functioning company that just operates in a different place in terms of operating patterns.
Yeah. Now that I'm back in the boston area, biotech and life science is incredibly dominant industry there. I'm spending a lot of time out of my depth with some of these, and the answer is I actually think a lot of it is translatable, but there are more embedded and ingrained. The great thing about tech, we're like a young industry. It's not really an industry. It's like, kind of weird, but so many companies are rapidly evolving and adapting and learning and open to that and young enough that they're not stuck, whereas biotech and life sciences is kind of interesting, right, because there's the large pharma player. You get an industry that has a lot of long term, long tenured DNA. I mean, the laboratory development actually, I think mRNA is going to be such a disruption, right, because it's like, no, actually, algorithms can develop drugs not the way we used to, but I would argue that the longer or the deeper the historical thread of how we do things, then the harder it is for them to see. Oh, actually, you could use a lot of content about what I would think of as more modern leadership or management practices, but they're just having harder time getting there. But they kind of get it. I mean, I went and talked at some MetLife event with these 400 VPs, and they were like, yes, we do need to do things differently. Like, holy crap, what the people we're hiring right now expect from us is not what it was 30 years ago. And I mean, I'd like to I had someone say to me, like, high output management is great, but it is a little bit dated, right. Elements of it are quite sort of manager versus worker and kind of hierarchical or patriarchal even. And that's not my vibe, and so I think they're applicable, but I don't think everyone's open to it is the bottom line. And I also think that in the same way that engineers can get treated as a lot of special snowflakes, congratulations, all of you. The same with the life science researchers, right? And they get away with murder, have your labs. Congratulations. But I think they should maybe learn some new ways of operating and collaborating. $0.01 as an opinion right there.
AUDIENCE QUESTION
So you talked about your early time at google and how the culture there back in the day was very different from what it is now. Can you talk about how the pendulum can shift in terms of the culture of a company over its lifetime and what are some factors that might influence that.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing on the pendulum shifting at Google is I'm interested in your opinion was I felt like there was a moment where we were actually scaling the culture pretty well up to a pretty large size, like past what I would have expected. I'm like 15,000, 20,000 people. I think something happened where the leadership team had a meeting or an off site I'm serious. Where they realized, holy crap. This is going to be 100,000 person company easily. And we are not growing fast enough for our opportunity. And we're going to have to bring in a bunch of new leaders, and they brought in a ton of experience across a ton of different functions without really onboarding them into the culture or expecting they should. And it just started to pull into a more tribal, leader based political environment. And I think some things have changed since then. By the way, neither of us have been there for a long time, so we can't really represent Google today accurately. And I know very many great people who are still there, but I think there's been some swings that were about eras of various leaders being brought in, not all of whom were sort of culturally. And I hate using the word culture because you can't really explain it. It's like when you name it, you kind of kill it. But that's for lack of a better word. But I think the big takeaway for me is onboarding new leaders is more important than the time you spend onboarding new employees, and yet it is the thing that gets the least attention, including especially in big companies, and that's a recipe for disaster.
ELAD GIL
Great. Well, thanks again to Claire for joining us. Thanks, everybody, for coming. And again, everybody should check out the book. I think there's copies at the top. It's called scaling people and it's fantastic. So thanks again.
CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
Thanks, everybody. Thanks for being here. Her thanks a lot.
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