So what is the most important lesson you took out of being a founder in
your company?
>> Well, I learned business lessons, right.
There are things I learned about running a company that I think were valuable.
I've written a bunch about this,
sort of saying don't rely on one channel to acquire all your customers.
And if you do, know the risks.
When you're young, as a company,
you have to rely on things to a degree that's probably not healthy.
And you gotta make that trade, and know where it came from.
Actually, Google did the same thing, right, Google's Yahoo deal.
When Yahoo was sending them all of their search traffic, that made the company.
Had Yahoo pulled the contract or said no, I think Larry and
Sergey would be in a different place.
And maybe, they probably would have figured it out, because it's them.
But that's a trade you gotta make.
But for me personally, I think I just learned a lot about what I'm good at,
what I'm bad at, how to manage people.
How to manage co-founders and work with co-founders
like people who are your equals, but you have to keep them on track.
Which is very difficult, especially as a CEO, where they're keeping you on track,
you're keeping them on track.
That's a really tough thing to manage.
>> And from a product point of view, what is your insights?
>> Know your customer really well.
We built the wrong product at first.
Because we had a conception of our customer that wasn't accurate, I think,
in terms of how we initially built our marketplace.
And I think we didn't understand our customer quite well enough.
And we didn't really solve our own problem when we started.
And I think we should have.
I think we would have been a more successful company,
had we hewn closer to our own really deep problems.
because we lost a lot of iteration cycles on that.
So if I where to start another company, if I left and
started a company, I think it would be something that I
understood more intimately as someone who experienced that thing.
>> Right, so why would I want to be a entrepreneur?
>> I don't know that you do.
It's a funny thing, I think that people give different answers to this question.
Because I think it's actually different for different people.
I don't think there's one way that you can look and say, I checked these boxes,
I know I want to be an entrepreneur.
For me, it was a question of degree of control.
I had worked at companies beforehand, and
just never felt like I was actually influencing the success or
failure of those companies, or the vision of those companies.
And I wasn't happy with that.
I play well with others, but I'm not great at being managed,
depending on who the manager is.
So that's something that indicates maybe I should be a founder.
And I wanted to do something really large, that was kind of out-sized to
the opportunity set offered by working in a company.
We kind of look at startups as the most rapid way to impact the largest number
of people in the world.
To think that Facebook went from nothing in 2005 to having
1.3 billion monthly active users in ten years, is astonishing.
There's nothing else on Earth that I think has reached that many people
that quickly.
I think the closest examples are probably religion, right.
And those take centuries to hit that many people at that
deep a part of their life.
It's technology that can do that.
Radio and television before that, and now it's startups on the Internet.
>> So passion has a big part of it.
>> Huge. I mean,
you have to believe in what you're doing, or really want to do it.
I think there are people who found companies not because they're
particularly passionate, but because they see a really great opportunity for
making money.
And I think that that's always in there somewhere for people starting companies.
They want to be billionaires or something like that.
But I think for the most part the people who really succeed
are the people who aren't doing it because of the money itself.
There was a great quote or
great thing that I heard when I was on Wall Street, which is both good and bad.
There's good and bad to this statement.
But a lot of people there say that money isn't the goal.
It's not how you win the game, it's how you keep score.
>> Right.
>> Right, and I think that's true for a lot of people.
They're not actually earning money for money's sake.
They're earning money because it's the metric, right?
It's the proxy for
showing that you built something huge, something huge and valuable.
So I think that if your drive is to change lots and
lots of people's daily lives, how they work, or
impact a lot of people, then you should probably try to start a company.
If you want just more autonomy in your life, start a company.
It doesn't have to be a startup, right.
It can be a business.
>> Right. >> Like a small business that gives you
freedom in your life.
That's amazing.
Don't fetishize the idea of startups and these things that will touch everyone,
if you just want to build something with your own hands.
I think fundamentally that's what it comes down to.
>> Very cool, starting a company.