October 25, 2023 • 28 mins
Beloved tech leader and entrepreneur Tim Armstrong shares stories from the start up days of Google, divulges the secrets of the best salesperson in the game, and admits why he gave it all up—multiple times—to do something crazy. Plus:
🎙️ The 15% rule of a successful sales call
🎙️ Why a leader has to get her hands dirty
🎙️ When to quit a great job
🎙️ And about that time Tom Brady changed Tim’s life by the pool
I think you are going to love this episode. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-office-hours-with-mike-st-122602026/
Go Deeper:
📚 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion https://bookshop.org/p/books/influence-the-psychology-of-persuasion-robert-b-cialdini/15467532?aid=7391&ean=9780062937650&listref=the-careerist-professional-development-must-reads
📚 Thinking Fast and Slow https://bookshop.org/p/books/thinking-fast-and-slow-daniel-kahneman/943943?aid=7391&ean=9780374533557&listref=the-careerist-professional-development-must-reads
📲 Flowcode https://www.flowcode.com/
💪 The Career Manifesto, Mike's full reading list, art picks, and other resources here: www.mikesteib.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome Office hours, where we sit down with the chief
executives shaping the world and we answer your most pressing
questions about leadership, career, and life. I'm Mike Steibe and
today today's a great day. When I started this pot,
I imagine sitting down with a friend I admire who
has great advice to share with our audience. And the
first person who came to my mind was Tim Armstrong.
(00:28):
Tim is the CEO of flow Code, the QR platform
that creators and brands use is used by seventy percent
of the fortune one thousand. He was previously the CEO
who achieved the impossible mission of turning around DAO. Well
before that, Tim was the first US sales leader for Google,
later the president of Google America's where he became most
importantly my boss and my friend TA. Welcome to the show, Mike.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Well, first of all, I got it. What do you
do with your pipes? Pipes? Are he arms? What are
you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
The good thing about a podcast somebody can claim I
look like I'm in shape, and you'll never know. The
audience will never know if that's true. Twenty one inch guns,
if that's amaze or not?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
It look great? I mean, it's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
You know, you get over forty, you start making up
for lost time. I guess I don't know. Tim gevery focused.
So we're going to take back back in podcast. We're
going to take We got questions from the audience.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, people really want to.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Hear about the arc of your career. Uh, they're looking
for advice on where to take theirs. We've got a
couple fun ones at the end. So if it's all right,
we're just going to grip.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
In, let's go.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
So the first one is Jack in Tennessee.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
There have been hundreds of thousands of layoffs in the
tech industry, including in software as a service and web
three companies that were all the raised until last year.
Now all the focus is on AI. I feel like
there's a lot of risk, there's a lot of opportunity
right now, especially as I'm early in my career, but
I don't know where to focus. What's your advice?
Speaker 1 (01:58):
So Tim, for context, you went to Google after the
dot com bust had started. You could have easily gone
to a big, safe company. You could have also gone
to Yahoo or pets dot com. Maybe give everybody that
context first, and then you brought a perspective on the space.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
I'm going to tell you a story I don't tell publicly.
Is when I went to go work in the Internet.
I worked for Paul Allen's company star Wave. It got
bought by Disney. This is in the nineties. We did
ESPN dot com, NFL dot com, etc. Anyways, I got
moved to New York from Seattle. Disney put me on
their Internet strategy team with a couple consultants from McKinsey,
and Disney bought Infoseek and a couple other companies, and
(02:37):
I got put on the team to go visit the
other companies, all these companies that Disney were investing, and
we're all losing money on the Internet. We go to
Infoseek and we're interviewing the Infosek management team and salesforce,
and two of the salespeople get into a screaming match
over the value of the keywords, and so we get back.
We do all the McKinsey work with Disney, and we
(02:58):
come back and do the strategy. And one of the
big strategies was to do go dot com, which is
what the big portal that Disney built. In the meeting,
I was saying, hey, we should do search. The only
thing we saw on all these meetings that was valuable
were the search keywords, and they were sold out on
a bunch of categories. So if we want to make
money doing this, we should go do search. So fast
forward Google. I'd been at another company that we took public,
(03:22):
but Google called and said, hey, we heard you are
internet advertising person and know a lot about it, and
we're thinking about getting in to Internet ads. So I
met with Emi Cortestani, who you know well, and then
flew out to meet with Larry and Serge. Had breakfast
with Sergey, and you know, SERGEI was asking me. He's like, hey,
Google's not a big company, We're not in ads really yet.
(03:44):
Why are you interested in coming here? And I told
him that story about Infoseq, and I said, Hey, the
bottom line is I use Google now as a user.
I know the value of what the search is and
how clean it is. I also know from that Infoseek experience,
you guys are probably sitting on a gold mine of
you know, ads, and Google had just started getting into
ads when they hired me. But that that was basically
(04:06):
how I ended up at Google. But again, I'm going
to go back to my original story. I knew what
I was talking about because I had been in the details,
so it wasn't a blank shot in the dark for me.
And I think that's making career choices. I think the
more educated you are in a space is really important
to think about making career changes.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
I'd also say to our audience, you're allowed to ask
for the receipts if you're thinking about giving a company
a year, two years, three years and more of your life.
You're now an investor, you're investing your time. Ask them
the revenue, ask them the revenue growth, ask from the costs.
Asked them how much cash is on the balance sheet?
What are the ten kp as they watch? Are they
up or down? And at any company under a thousand people,
if you're getting hired there somebody and find I should
(04:45):
be willing to sit down with you at some point
in the NewView process if you ask for it and
show you what you're getting into.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Yes, and Mike, I'd say, when you came to Google,
you went off and pioneered a brand new space for Google,
which was outside of the normal space we were in.
And I think your decision process to come to Google,
I'd love to hear that, because you came to a
company that had gotten a little bit of traction, but
you also went to a brand new space that candidly
(05:12):
not many people at Google were really focused on, which
was the video space ended up being a big, big space.
But you went into TV and started working on that.
How did you make your decision?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Well, I wasn't the company had gone public three years before.
I wasn't exactly pioneering something like you. So for audience,
Tim was sitting in the eighty six Street Starbucks running
a sales team of one when he got there and
tell the facts story like, you don't even have a
fax machine.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
The first order I got at Google, I called Mountain
View and I said, hey, look the bottom lines. I
just got an AD order, but I need a fax machine.
And I figured it was Larry Er. Serge said show
us the order, and I said, I can't show you
the order. I just need a fax machine. I'll show it.
He well, we don't want to spend the money on
the fax machine unless you can prove that you had
the order. So I think I ended up having the
(05:55):
customer write me an email saying yes, we're going to
put this order in. But that's two lessons that one
is how into the detail Larynce Serge were and two
is how careful they were.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
About cost structure. Google looks like a.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
Spending machine, but the reality was back then it was
very careful about spending.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
The facts machine story is a great story there.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
So it was an easy call for me. The company
was doing ten million dollars a free cash flow a
day when I came to Google, and Google wanted to
get in the TV and video space, and I had
background there, and I was like, I can take something
I have some background in parlayed into what appears to
be the most important company in the most important space
at a really exciting time. So I was I was
thrilled to I was thrilled to be a part of it.
(06:35):
Next question is also about Google.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
Hey, this is Maria from Denver. Google invented in many
ways the way tech companies operate today, the way they build,
the way they go to market. So much of that
started with Google. Can you talk about what it was like,
what you learned, and what you might have been able
to carry forward to other companies.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
What I was so so magical about the place was
it had that operational rigger that Eric and the team
he put in place brought and it never lost that
sort of creativity and innovation. I remember when one of
my early meetings at Google, I was so excited both
founders were going to be there. Eric was going to
be their year there. It's like a big meeting, and
while we're doing this business review with Eric, one of
(07:15):
the founders was throwing his phone up in the air
and catching it, and then throwing it up higher and
then catching it. And finally Eric very patiently Sarah Gay,
what are you doing with your phone? And saraghe said, Oh,
We're building a new phone and I've put an accelerometer
in it and right, and like nobody knew Android was
coming at the time. Nobody in that whole strategy was
you had people who were inventors sitting there doing the
(07:37):
cool stuff, and like you know, and those people shouldn't
be losing cycles thinking about how you roll out the
quarterly OKRs and the HR calibrations and so on, while
the operators make room for people like that to continue
to invent.
Speaker 6 (07:49):
It was.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
It was a really uh no exception. I remember the
one one me I had with Larrence Sergei. They had
a camera with a lens off and it was upside
down and they built this kind of like tripod thing
and I was meeting with them, They're like, could you
mind turning the pages of this book? Like while I'm
talking to them about the ads business, and they're clicking
the camera shutter and I'm like, finally, I'm like, what
do you just so I don't I don't want to
(08:11):
interrupt you guys, but what are you guys doing? And
they're like, we're building we want to build Google Images,
but we want to figure out how to get every
book in the world in But we figured we if
we figured out how to use a camera to get
pictures of every book, we could probably do the you know,
Congressional Library. And it's like that stuff would happen all
the time. But that's how, you know, you know, innovative
and inventive they were, and the whole culture.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Was, Oh, it was really great. So the next question
is partly as well into the next question.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
Hi, this is b from Seattle. Both of you chose
to leave Google arguably, you know, one of the best
most successful companies in the world to take the home
of public companies that were really struggling so I just
wanted to like what drew you to these more challenging scenarios?
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Thank you go first? Why did you? Why did you go?
Come on? Tell me?
Speaker 6 (09:01):
So.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
There is this apocryphal quote Caesar once said to one
of his friends. He pointed to a small village and said,
I'd rather be number one in that village than number
two in Rome.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
And there's something about having the agency, having the opportunity
to be the person who decides the direction for an organization,
set the strategy, and really really be on the hook
to fix it. And I got to Google a little
bit earlier. You got there a lot earlier. It still
felt like a small company where you owned a lot
and you could have a lot of impact. And as
(09:36):
it got bigger and you left and other people came
in and it got bureaucratic, suddenly it felt like a
place where you went off sites and did powerpoints. And
I was like, they wouldn't miss me if I wasn't here.
And you're not gonna believe this. After I left Google,
the stock price it didn't go down. So turn it
turns out the place I went and the place I went,
which was smaller and which was a mess at the time,
(10:00):
the stock price went up a lot, and it was
because of the things that the team I put together did.
And that's like, is the best, the best feeling in
the world.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Amazing, it's the best. It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
You went to you went to I mean, I give
you credit before you went to Google after the dot
com bust, and you didn't go to a bunch of
messed up internet companies. And then you went to AOL.
You went to AOL late and things at AOL were
a mess.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
So I left, brought in the left well I left.
I went there because I believed in the fact that
AOL could have another chapter, and I think that most
people in the world had given up on it. And
and you know, having gone to Google when it was
really young, I mean, people thought I was crazy going
to Google, and I saw the opportunity there. And from
(10:41):
the outside, you know, I was I was the main
partner liaison with AOL when I was at Google. So
I understood the value of AOL probably as much as
almost anyone did. And when Jeff Buchez came to me
about going to AOL, I realized it would be opportunity
to do two things. One is what you just said
is like, really take talent and try to maximize them
to help another company out in a group of people,
(11:04):
and I thought I had enough talent. I didn't have
all the experience, but I thought like I could probably
learn things as I went. And the second one was
I thought there were big open spaces on the Internet
that had not been fully fulfilled yet, and the platform
companies were likely not to be great at so I
thought AOL had the scale and distribution and horsepower to
(11:25):
do those things.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
So I went in.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
I will say like I was a shock when I
went in.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
I left Google.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Google had like I don't know, hundreds of billions of
dollar market cap when I left one hundred and.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Everything was beautiful and nothing.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Hurt, nothing hurt. It was awesome.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
And then I left on a Friday and went to
AOL on a Monday, and AOL had gone from one
hundred and fifty billion down to essentially one billion market caps.
So it was the difference in forty eight hours of
seeing a culture probably one of the best cultures that's
ever been built in Google in the business world, and
then walking into a company with a culture had really
(12:00):
there was a lot of incredible people at AOL, but
the culture had gone from one hundred and fifty billion
down to one. And I think the first day I
was there was was I think it it dawned on
me day one that I was like, this is probably
everything I thought it was going to be plus plus
plus plus, And I'm sure you had this similar experience,
and so I don't know. I think it was the best.
(12:21):
It was the toughest decision and probably the toughest thing
I've done in my career, but it was also I
don't regret any of it. There were really hard times,
but I think it was an opportunity for the company
and for AOL, and it was an opportunity for me
and the people we worked with. And I really there
was a time period a well that was as special
as the Google time period for me, and that was
(12:42):
really incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
We've got a commercial sponsor Stay Tuned Tyler, who's getting
his MBA at HBS HI.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
I'm such a huge fan of the show. I just
have a quick question. A lot of your listeners, including myself,
dream of starting their own business. Could you share how
you came up with the ideas for your companies and
what it took to get them off the ground. Thank you.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
In the case of flow code, I traveled around the
world after I sold AOL to Verizon, and I studied
all the direct to consumer businesses I could I could
meet with and find, and I happened to be in
China and I saw on the street. I was late
for a meeting one day in Shanghai and ended up
buying noodles with a QR code. And this is before
(13:33):
the pandemic. I realized that that the camera didn't actually
try to pull up an app. It went right directly
to a website to try to get me to pay,
and I thought that's unsual. I thought, with QR code,
you needed an app. So that night after my meetings,
I met with like Metawan and some of the big
Chinese internet companies at my hotel room. That night, I
went back and read all the product documentation from Apple
and Android, and I realized in twenty seventeen, they turned
(13:56):
the camera on native for QR. And then I started
calling all computer science departments to see if I could
get them to invest with me and give me some
researchers to look at the space. And everyone said the
same thing, Tim QR. They're like This is a direct quote.
Someone said, you went from Google to AOL and now
you're going to QR codes, you know.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And what people didn't realize is that next you're going
to be selling pens that you have to die in
the air.
Speaker 6 (14:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, yeah, we're gonna start making paper.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
So but the thing people didn't realize was I was
walking around a planet Earth realizing that everyone's phone worked
for QR and could be direct to consumer, and everyone
else was walking around the planet or thinking QR codes
were dead, and I was willing to put the time
and energy into doing it. And then the pandemic. We
got a huge tailwind from the pandemic that's undeniable. But
it was another case where I saw a disruption zone
(14:45):
of humans love their smartphones, and smartphones love to eat software,
and everybody, everybody in the business is going to have
to battle the platform companies to be directed consumer eventually.
And the business we built that flow code is doing that.
The NBA just invested in US, We work with the NFL, NHL,
we're doing stuff for Premier League this summer f one.
(15:05):
So like other people have recognized the fact that this
is a great way to go direct the consumer.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
And if any of our listeners don't know. When you
see a QR code and it's like a boring square
QR code, that's the old version. You see these like
cool round branded ones, that's flow Code, and it's now
it's like seventy percent of them.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yes, So we rebranded them.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
We put privacy data privacy behind them, put machine learning
behind them.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
We treated it like the Internet. We treat QR codes
like how the Internet works.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
What's so interesting to me about this this adventure for
you is you sold a well, the Verizon presumably they're
flying you all over the country and the private jet
like life is really good and it's cush, and you
were like Rocky four back to the old gym. When
you started this thing. You were telling me the story
about walking around town looking for office space. Share that
(15:50):
with the audience.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
So the first day I started flow Code because I'd
run my own business back in Boston and done a
couple other startups, so I basically had to get in
founder zone, and I from an intensity level, I just
had some experiences. I told you the story before, Mike,
but I was I was on vacation and ran into
Tom Brady at a pool and I don't know Tom that.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
As one does.
Speaker 4 (16:10):
Anyways, I've known him for a while that we're not
best friends or anything, but but I know him. So I, I,
you know, mentioned hey, I'm going to TB twelve, you know,
next week his workout place workout, Yeah, you know, And
he looked at me and said, what are your goals?
And I'm like, I was like, I don't know, other
than I'm fat, Like as a goal one is to
(16:30):
like try to shed some pounds. But we talked for
about forty five minutes about health and the intensity level
of conversation. I was just starting to go do flow code,
and I'm like, that's one of the humans on the
planet who's absolutely does takes his job as seriously as
a heart attack. That guy is is on it. So
I said, I'm going to have that mentality when I
(16:51):
start flow code.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
What would I do?
Speaker 4 (16:53):
I need to get back to founder mentality. The first
day I started the company, I drove to Manhattan. I
parked on the Upper east Side on Park Avenue. I
got out my car and I walked I used to do,
and I had my newspaper. I started walking down Park Avenue.
Out of Park Avenue in one of the big buildings
on Park Avenue. A big group of people, all dressed
in suits come out. And one of the people there,
(17:14):
this guy named Froz who's a big, big investor, you
probably know him like, says, hey, Tim Armstrong, you what
are you doing? I said, Oh, I'm starting a company.
I'm starting a director consumer company. And today's day one
and I'm walking downtown to find an office. And he said,
I can't believe you're starting a direct consumer covers. We
just got out of the craft Hynd's board meeting and
(17:34):
these are all the board members and we just talked
about direct to consumer.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
So so Ida for Gump starts a company. Just everybody,
It's not usually this easy.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Everybody story gets better.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
So then I walked through Grand Central the tunnel at
Grand Central station and I hear hey, Tim. I look
over at Shelby Bonnie, the founder of US see that.
He says, hey, what do you do? And I said,
I'm starting a company todydays my first day. He goes, hey,
you want to grab lunch? I said yeah. So we
sat down, we talked about what I was planning on doing.
He said, hey, do you mind if I tell Allen Company? Well,
When I get back to he's a partner in all company,
(18:06):
so leave him. He goes back to talk to Allen
a company. They're an investor in aw in flow code.
I walk all the way downtown because I wanted the
office to be downtown. I walked to the Soho Apple Store.
I walk in the Apple store. I'm buying a laptop
and I hear Tim and it's Tom Phillips, the former
president of Starwave, and he says, what are you doing here?
(18:26):
I said, today, I'm starting a company, and I'm like
about to go look for office space. He goes, I'm
here looking for office space. I have Scott Galloway and
my you professor and I are partners. Do you want
to share an office together? And I said, hell, yes,
let's let's do it. So that literally was day one.
Ended up moving in the office with Scott and Tom
and we are officemates to get the company started down
(18:48):
into seventy two Spring Street on the corner of Crosby
and Spring. And you know, startups are really hard. That
that story sounds fun it's day one, but we've been
through all the trials and tribulations, and you know, I
worked from I don't know, five thirty am to seven
thirty at night every day. I worked all weekend. I
was in the office all weekend this past weekend in
New York. So it's I enjoy it though, but it's
(19:12):
definitely it's it's if you're doing startup life, you got
to be all in.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
You got to be all in. You got to be
all in, you know it. I mean, it's it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
But look, most people, once they've been to CEO of
a company, they no longer know how to connect their
computer to the printer. And you were out there on
the ground looking for office space. Now, the fact that
everybody then saw you and knew you and made it easy,
that wasn't the point. The point was you were ready
to go deep and do it the hardware.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
I say this, Mike, I'm a better leader today and
a better CEO than I was before.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
And it's I don't have an assistant.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
I'm like, I'm I'm a lot more capable as a
human being than I was eight years ago. And I
think it's because I went back to going back to
ground zero and learned everything from scratch. And I've been
really happy. I mean, I've been like, I enjoy the company,
and it's really hard work, but I'm glad I did it.
(20:01):
When we're doing it, I mean, when you took over RTC.
By the way, tell me, what what did you do
to train yourself to be able to run the company
in that market.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
The first thing I did was I started going to galleries.
I started trying to buy art. And the very first
one I went to, I walked in and I actually
been in the park playing football with my sons. I
was like, come on, let's go over to this gallery.
And we go to the gallery and I walk in
and guys, I didn't own any art. I didn't know
what I was doing. And I was thinking about taking
cost over perfect Customers, so you would think, and I
(20:32):
was thinking about taking over this company. And I walked
in and nobody would talk to me, and so I
was like, uh, hey, excuse me, how much is this?
Now that I've been in the art world a while,
I realized how much I was embarrassing myself, but at
the time I didn't know. I said how much is this?
And they're like, you know, that's been placed And I
was like placed where, just like with a collector. And
I was like, oh, well, how about this one. They're like,
(20:54):
that's been placed. I said, well, how much was it?
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (20:56):
I was curious, like how much was it? They were like,
it's been place.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's like okay.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
I was like, do you have any art I can buy?
And they're like, we're happy to put you on the
list and get you deeper in the program. And it
was like that scene and Pretty Woman where they won't
sell anything to Julia Roberts and then she goes and
buys a bunch of arts somewhere else and comes back
she buys a bunch of like she goes shopping and
buys some stuff, comes back. I was like, I'm going
to do that with art. This is my goal is
I'm going to come back to this. I'm going to
carry all my art that I bought on Artsy back
(21:23):
and be like you work on commissions, right, Like, big mistake.
But what I learned So by doing it, what I
learned is that the fool in that story was me.
Because what the galleries are doing is they're helping to
craft the arc of an artist's career, and a big
way they do that is by placing the art with
the right collectors who are not going to run off
and sell the painting tomorrow, and who are going to
(21:44):
tell their friends about the collector and that they're going
to hang that art with other important art in their home.
And it helps to build the career of an artist.
So gallery was doing the right thing.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
I was doing the wrong thing.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
But my thesis was we could combine the best of
how those galleries shape with an artist career with the
things that the internet does, which is more transparency and
more confidence and purchase and better aggregation and being able
to find the thing and be connected to the thing
you love and click a button and have confidence that
everything that just transacted is above board. And so we've
(22:13):
you know, we've worked the last three years to really
marry them both and it's working pretty well. But that
was I started, Like I started buying painting by the way,
I own a ton of paintings out.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah, we're basically out of the wall.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
So it's the question if you hadn't just to say,
you went into be CEO, but you didn't take the
time to go have those experiences, what do you think
your success rate? What do you think by having that
level of detail, I.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Would have runed the company right. I would have ruined
the company.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
And I think that happens a lot because.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
In every like any industry, you go into every company,
you go in and they say, look at this, this industry,
this business, this is this is different, and everybody who
thinks they're smarter than everybody else comes in there like yeah, yeah, yeah, right,
I've seen this before, And the truth is you haven't.
You have to go deep in every new subject area
and really understand the thing. So good to you for
parking the car and walking around town and so you
(23:06):
found an office space and Tom Phillips and all those
other wonderful things happen to you. Quick commercial break and
we will be right back. I got one from Chris
sin Hudson, New York.
Speaker 7 (23:24):
My dad was a salesman and always told me that
every job is in a sales job. Do you share
this perspective and could you give us some pointers on
how to be better at sales.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
When somebody says yes, that's when business starts. And when
somebody says no, that's when you's that's the value of sales.
And I think the premise of a company has to
be amazing at customer interface, and it has to be
amazing at product and if you have one without the other.
On either side, companies don't work well. So I think
(23:56):
it's worthwhile for all the focus there is on product
and services and technology, which there's a time, and that's
why I spend most of my time I flow coat
on it's really important you know how to run a
revenue machine. And the revenue machine a lot of it
comes down to whether or not customers can understand your
value proposition cleanly and if you can solve a problem
for them, And that's really what sales is about.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
I know how you feel about it, but I think.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
The premise that sort of every job is sales. It's
like it's in most cases. I really do think it's
it's right, and I'd say in almost any endeavor, if
you want to be a leader, you've got I'm with you.
You have to be a good salesperson. And if I
were to you know, my my my note for for
Chris on this topic is I found that studying human
psychology is really valuable. Read Daniel Kahneman, read all the
(24:40):
read Roy Baumeister, everything that is on how people make decisions,
what makes their brain tick. You're trying, you're trying to
get someone to change their mind. And it's like what
we talked about before, you can you can't really change
someone else's mind unless you understand how the mind works. Yes, So,
so I would just say number one, human psychology is
(25:01):
really important. Second thing I see people in sales. The
difference between the good one, the bad ones, and the
good ones is the bad ones talk the whole time
and the good ones ask a lot of questions. Yes, right,
because number three, you're there to solve problems, and you
can't solve someone's problem if you're talking at them, and
if you walk, if you go into and sales engagement
with the idea that you may not have the right
answer for this person. Like you're recruiting someone, you might
(25:23):
not be the right company for them. You're trying to
get somebody to buy your product. It may not be
the right product for them. Get to know what they
need and then if you really believe they need it,
tell them why you believe it. And if you don't,
thanks for your time.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
You know.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
One one metric I like to use is when I
go to talk to customers, I try to keep my
talking to fifteen percent of the time fifteen And it's hard,
but that but if you have a fifteen eighty five
in a meeting, my guess is you're going to have
to close the deal. Yes, very very high levels, as long.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
As you ask for it. Michael Bloomberg one time said
his number one advice, he's like the best advice he's
ever gotten. Always ask for the order. Never I'll pass
the close. So I always remind the team of that
one too. If you're in a meeting and they say, yes, yes,
stop pack your stuff, yes yeah, tell them some more things.
It's time to go to.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Tim.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
This has been an absolute pleasure. Chuck full of wisdom,
and I know the audience is going to love it,
but just for me to.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Spend this time, this focus time with him, and I
really appreciate it so much.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
And I knew you'd be a big time CEO someday
and it's great to see how how your career has gone.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Thank you, Tim, Well, my friends, I really enjoyed that.
Tim has been a friend and a mentor and someone
I've really admired my whole career, and it was a
thrill to have him on today. I'm sure you enjoyed
it just as much. One thing I want to really
highlight from this discussion, and from Tim's career is that
(26:48):
he's consistently moved from a comfortable to an uncomfortable role
in his career. He was at the top of the
game at Google when everything was great, and he left
to take on a challenging turnaround of a public company
that had been through a lot of distress. He grew
that company five x, he sold it, He had a
big job in the acquiring company, and he left because
(27:12):
he had never started his own business before and he
had an idea and he wanted to try it. And
someone with that kind of growth mindset, someone who takes
on those kinds of hard challenges, is someone who just
gets better and better at their craft and becomes a
stronger and stronger leader every year. And I've seen it
firsthand in Tim, and as you're crafting your own career,
(27:33):
I hope you'll keep that in mind that sometimes the
harder job, the less easy path, often is the one
that's going to lead you to some really great things
professionally and personally. So with that, I'll remind everyone if
you want to submit a question for me and our
future guests, you can use the link in the description.
You can hit me up on Twitter and Instagram. At
(27:54):
Mike steib Or, you can call us and leave your
voicemail and will put you on the air two one
three four oh five nine six. You can leave you
a question in a voicemail at two one three four
one nine oh five nine six. I want to thank
Tim and of course Jen and Meg, Jada, Matt and
the whole team at Blue Duck Media for pulling this
(28:15):
all together, Dylan and Christopher at iHeart, and Ben and
the team at William Morris Endeavor for all of their support.
Office Hours is a production of Blue Duck Media and
it is distributed by iHeartRadio. Thanks everybody, and stay on
your grind.
Welcome Office hours, where we sit down with the chief
executives shaping the world and we answer your most pressing
questions about leadership, career, and life. I'm Mike Steibe and
today today's a great day. When I started this pot,
I imagine sitting down with a friend I admire who
has great advice to share with our audience. And the
first person who came to my mind was Tim Armstrong.
(00:28):
Tim is the CEO of flow Code, the QR platform
that creators and brands use is used by seventy percent
of the fortune one thousand. He was previously the CEO
who achieved the impossible mission of turning around DAO. Well
before that, Tim was the first US sales leader for Google,
later the president of Google America's where he became most
importantly my boss and my friend TA. Welcome to the show, Mike.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Well, first of all, I got it. What do you
do with your pipes? Pipes? Are he arms? What are
you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
The good thing about a podcast somebody can claim I
look like I'm in shape, and you'll never know. The
audience will never know if that's true. Twenty one inch guns,
if that's amaze or not?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
It look great? I mean, it's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
You know, you get over forty, you start making up
for lost time. I guess I don't know. Tim gevery focused.
So we're going to take back back in podcast. We're
going to take We got questions from the audience.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, people really want to.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Hear about the arc of your career. Uh, they're looking
for advice on where to take theirs. We've got a
couple fun ones at the end. So if it's all right,
we're just going to grip.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
In, let's go.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
So the first one is Jack in Tennessee.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
There have been hundreds of thousands of layoffs in the
tech industry, including in software as a service and web
three companies that were all the raised until last year.
Now all the focus is on AI. I feel like
there's a lot of risk, there's a lot of opportunity
right now, especially as I'm early in my career, but
I don't know where to focus. What's your advice?
Speaker 1 (01:58):
So Tim, for context, you went to Google after the
dot com bust had started. You could have easily gone
to a big, safe company. You could have also gone
to Yahoo or pets dot com. Maybe give everybody that
context first, and then you brought a perspective on the space.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
I'm going to tell you a story I don't tell publicly.
Is when I went to go work in the Internet.
I worked for Paul Allen's company star Wave. It got
bought by Disney. This is in the nineties. We did
ESPN dot com, NFL dot com, etc. Anyways, I got
moved to New York from Seattle. Disney put me on
their Internet strategy team with a couple consultants from McKinsey,
and Disney bought Infoseek and a couple other companies, and
(02:37):
I got put on the team to go visit the
other companies, all these companies that Disney were investing, and
we're all losing money on the Internet. We go to
Infoseek and we're interviewing the Infosek management team and salesforce,
and two of the salespeople get into a screaming match
over the value of the keywords, and so we get back.
We do all the McKinsey work with Disney, and we
(02:58):
come back and do the strategy. And one of the
big strategies was to do go dot com, which is
what the big portal that Disney built. In the meeting,
I was saying, hey, we should do search. The only
thing we saw on all these meetings that was valuable
were the search keywords, and they were sold out on
a bunch of categories. So if we want to make
money doing this, we should go do search. So fast
forward Google. I'd been at another company that we took public,
(03:22):
but Google called and said, hey, we heard you are
internet advertising person and know a lot about it, and
we're thinking about getting in to Internet ads. So I
met with Emi Cortestani, who you know well, and then
flew out to meet with Larry and Serge. Had breakfast
with Sergey, and you know, SERGEI was asking me. He's like, hey,
Google's not a big company, We're not in ads really yet.
(03:44):
Why are you interested in coming here? And I told
him that story about Infoseq, and I said, Hey, the
bottom line is I use Google now as a user.
I know the value of what the search is and
how clean it is. I also know from that Infoseek experience,
you guys are probably sitting on a gold mine of
you know, ads, and Google had just started getting into
ads when they hired me. But that that was basically
(04:06):
how I ended up at Google. But again, I'm going
to go back to my original story. I knew what
I was talking about because I had been in the details,
so it wasn't a blank shot in the dark for me.
And I think that's making career choices. I think the
more educated you are in a space is really important
to think about making career changes.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
I'd also say to our audience, you're allowed to ask
for the receipts if you're thinking about giving a company
a year, two years, three years and more of your life.
You're now an investor, you're investing your time. Ask them
the revenue, ask them the revenue growth, ask from the costs.
Asked them how much cash is on the balance sheet?
What are the ten kp as they watch? Are they
up or down? And at any company under a thousand people,
if you're getting hired there somebody and find I should
(04:45):
be willing to sit down with you at some point
in the NewView process if you ask for it and
show you what you're getting into.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Yes, and Mike, I'd say, when you came to Google,
you went off and pioneered a brand new space for Google,
which was outside of the normal space we were in.
And I think your decision process to come to Google,
I'd love to hear that, because you came to a
company that had gotten a little bit of traction, but
you also went to a brand new space that candidly
(05:12):
not many people at Google were really focused on, which
was the video space ended up being a big, big space.
But you went into TV and started working on that.
How did you make your decision?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Well, I wasn't the company had gone public three years before.
I wasn't exactly pioneering something like you. So for audience,
Tim was sitting in the eighty six Street Starbucks running
a sales team of one when he got there and
tell the facts story like, you don't even have a
fax machine.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
The first order I got at Google, I called Mountain
View and I said, hey, look the bottom lines. I
just got an AD order, but I need a fax machine.
And I figured it was Larry Er. Serge said show
us the order, and I said, I can't show you
the order. I just need a fax machine. I'll show it.
He well, we don't want to spend the money on
the fax machine unless you can prove that you had
the order. So I think I ended up having the
(05:55):
customer write me an email saying yes, we're going to
put this order in. But that's two lessons that one
is how into the detail Larynce Serge were and two
is how careful they were.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
About cost structure. Google looks like a.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
Spending machine, but the reality was back then it was
very careful about spending.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
The facts machine story is a great story there.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
So it was an easy call for me. The company
was doing ten million dollars a free cash flow a
day when I came to Google, and Google wanted to
get in the TV and video space, and I had
background there, and I was like, I can take something
I have some background in parlayed into what appears to
be the most important company in the most important space
at a really exciting time. So I was I was
thrilled to I was thrilled to be a part of it.
(06:35):
Next question is also about Google.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
Hey, this is Maria from Denver. Google invented in many
ways the way tech companies operate today, the way they build,
the way they go to market. So much of that
started with Google. Can you talk about what it was like,
what you learned, and what you might have been able
to carry forward to other companies.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
What I was so so magical about the place was
it had that operational rigger that Eric and the team
he put in place brought and it never lost that
sort of creativity and innovation. I remember when one of
my early meetings at Google, I was so excited both
founders were going to be there. Eric was going to
be their year there. It's like a big meeting, and
while we're doing this business review with Eric, one of
(07:15):
the founders was throwing his phone up in the air
and catching it, and then throwing it up higher and
then catching it. And finally Eric very patiently Sarah Gay,
what are you doing with your phone? And saraghe said, Oh,
We're building a new phone and I've put an accelerometer
in it and right, and like nobody knew Android was
coming at the time. Nobody in that whole strategy was
you had people who were inventors sitting there doing the
(07:37):
cool stuff, and like you know, and those people shouldn't
be losing cycles thinking about how you roll out the
quarterly OKRs and the HR calibrations and so on, while
the operators make room for people like that to continue
to invent.
Speaker 6 (07:49):
It was.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
It was a really uh no exception. I remember the
one one me I had with Larrence Sergei. They had
a camera with a lens off and it was upside
down and they built this kind of like tripod thing
and I was meeting with them, They're like, could you
mind turning the pages of this book? Like while I'm
talking to them about the ads business, and they're clicking
the camera shutter and I'm like, finally, I'm like, what
do you just so I don't I don't want to
(08:11):
interrupt you guys, but what are you guys doing? And
they're like, we're building we want to build Google Images,
but we want to figure out how to get every
book in the world in But we figured we if
we figured out how to use a camera to get
pictures of every book, we could probably do the you know,
Congressional Library. And it's like that stuff would happen all
the time. But that's how, you know, you know, innovative
and inventive they were, and the whole culture.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Was, Oh, it was really great. So the next question
is partly as well into the next question.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
Hi, this is b from Seattle. Both of you chose
to leave Google arguably, you know, one of the best
most successful companies in the world to take the home
of public companies that were really struggling so I just
wanted to like what drew you to these more challenging scenarios?
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Thank you go first? Why did you? Why did you go?
Come on? Tell me?
Speaker 6 (09:01):
So.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
There is this apocryphal quote Caesar once said to one
of his friends. He pointed to a small village and said,
I'd rather be number one in that village than number
two in Rome.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
And there's something about having the agency, having the opportunity
to be the person who decides the direction for an organization,
set the strategy, and really really be on the hook
to fix it. And I got to Google a little
bit earlier. You got there a lot earlier. It still
felt like a small company where you owned a lot
and you could have a lot of impact. And as
(09:36):
it got bigger and you left and other people came
in and it got bureaucratic, suddenly it felt like a
place where you went off sites and did powerpoints. And
I was like, they wouldn't miss me if I wasn't here.
And you're not gonna believe this. After I left Google,
the stock price it didn't go down. So turn it
turns out the place I went and the place I went,
which was smaller and which was a mess at the time,
(10:00):
the stock price went up a lot, and it was
because of the things that the team I put together did.
And that's like, is the best, the best feeling in
the world.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Amazing, it's the best. It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
You went to you went to I mean, I give
you credit before you went to Google after the dot
com bust, and you didn't go to a bunch of
messed up internet companies. And then you went to AOL.
You went to AOL late and things at AOL were
a mess.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
So I left, brought in the left well I left.
I went there because I believed in the fact that
AOL could have another chapter, and I think that most
people in the world had given up on it. And
and you know, having gone to Google when it was
really young, I mean, people thought I was crazy going
to Google, and I saw the opportunity there. And from
(10:41):
the outside, you know, I was I was the main
partner liaison with AOL when I was at Google. So
I understood the value of AOL probably as much as
almost anyone did. And when Jeff Buchez came to me
about going to AOL, I realized it would be opportunity
to do two things. One is what you just said
is like, really take talent and try to maximize them
to help another company out in a group of people,
(11:04):
and I thought I had enough talent. I didn't have
all the experience, but I thought like I could probably
learn things as I went. And the second one was
I thought there were big open spaces on the Internet
that had not been fully fulfilled yet, and the platform
companies were likely not to be great at so I
thought AOL had the scale and distribution and horsepower to
(11:25):
do those things.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
So I went in.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
I will say like I was a shock when I
went in.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
I left Google.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Google had like I don't know, hundreds of billions of
dollar market cap when I left one hundred and.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Everything was beautiful and nothing.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Hurt, nothing hurt. It was awesome.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
And then I left on a Friday and went to
AOL on a Monday, and AOL had gone from one
hundred and fifty billion down to essentially one billion market caps.
So it was the difference in forty eight hours of
seeing a culture probably one of the best cultures that's
ever been built in Google in the business world, and
then walking into a company with a culture had really
(12:00):
there was a lot of incredible people at AOL, but
the culture had gone from one hundred and fifty billion
down to one. And I think the first day I
was there was was I think it it dawned on
me day one that I was like, this is probably
everything I thought it was going to be plus plus
plus plus, And I'm sure you had this similar experience,
and so I don't know. I think it was the best.
(12:21):
It was the toughest decision and probably the toughest thing
I've done in my career, but it was also I
don't regret any of it. There were really hard times,
but I think it was an opportunity for the company
and for AOL, and it was an opportunity for me
and the people we worked with. And I really there
was a time period a well that was as special
as the Google time period for me, and that was
(12:42):
really incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
We've got a commercial sponsor Stay Tuned Tyler, who's getting
his MBA at HBS HI.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
I'm such a huge fan of the show. I just
have a quick question. A lot of your listeners, including myself,
dream of starting their own business. Could you share how
you came up with the ideas for your companies and
what it took to get them off the ground. Thank you.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
In the case of flow code, I traveled around the
world after I sold AOL to Verizon, and I studied
all the direct to consumer businesses I could I could
meet with and find, and I happened to be in
China and I saw on the street. I was late
for a meeting one day in Shanghai and ended up
buying noodles with a QR code. And this is before
(13:33):
the pandemic. I realized that that the camera didn't actually
try to pull up an app. It went right directly
to a website to try to get me to pay,
and I thought that's unsual. I thought, with QR code,
you needed an app. So that night after my meetings,
I met with like Metawan and some of the big
Chinese internet companies at my hotel room. That night, I
went back and read all the product documentation from Apple
and Android, and I realized in twenty seventeen, they turned
(13:56):
the camera on native for QR. And then I started
calling all computer science departments to see if I could
get them to invest with me and give me some
researchers to look at the space. And everyone said the
same thing, Tim QR. They're like This is a direct quote.
Someone said, you went from Google to AOL and now
you're going to QR codes, you know.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And what people didn't realize is that next you're going
to be selling pens that you have to die in
the air.
Speaker 6 (14:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, yeah, we're gonna start making paper.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
So but the thing people didn't realize was I was
walking around a planet Earth realizing that everyone's phone worked
for QR and could be direct to consumer, and everyone
else was walking around the planet or thinking QR codes
were dead, and I was willing to put the time
and energy into doing it. And then the pandemic. We
got a huge tailwind from the pandemic that's undeniable. But
it was another case where I saw a disruption zone
(14:45):
of humans love their smartphones, and smartphones love to eat software,
and everybody, everybody in the business is going to have
to battle the platform companies to be directed consumer eventually.
And the business we built that flow code is doing that.
The NBA just invested in US, We work with the NFL, NHL,
we're doing stuff for Premier League this summer f one.
(15:05):
So like other people have recognized the fact that this
is a great way to go direct the consumer.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
And if any of our listeners don't know. When you
see a QR code and it's like a boring square
QR code, that's the old version. You see these like
cool round branded ones, that's flow Code, and it's now
it's like seventy percent of them.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yes, So we rebranded them.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
We put privacy data privacy behind them, put machine learning
behind them.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
We treated it like the Internet. We treat QR codes
like how the Internet works.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
What's so interesting to me about this this adventure for
you is you sold a well, the Verizon presumably they're
flying you all over the country and the private jet
like life is really good and it's cush, and you
were like Rocky four back to the old gym. When
you started this thing. You were telling me the story
about walking around town looking for office space. Share that
(15:50):
with the audience.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
So the first day I started flow Code because I'd
run my own business back in Boston and done a
couple other startups, so I basically had to get in
founder zone, and I from an intensity level, I just
had some experiences. I told you the story before, Mike,
but I was I was on vacation and ran into
Tom Brady at a pool and I don't know Tom that.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
As one does.
Speaker 4 (16:10):
Anyways, I've known him for a while that we're not
best friends or anything, but but I know him. So I, I,
you know, mentioned hey, I'm going to TB twelve, you know,
next week his workout place workout, Yeah, you know, And
he looked at me and said, what are your goals?
And I'm like, I was like, I don't know, other
than I'm fat, Like as a goal one is to
(16:30):
like try to shed some pounds. But we talked for
about forty five minutes about health and the intensity level
of conversation. I was just starting to go do flow code,
and I'm like, that's one of the humans on the
planet who's absolutely does takes his job as seriously as
a heart attack. That guy is is on it. So
I said, I'm going to have that mentality when I
(16:51):
start flow code.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
What would I do?
Speaker 4 (16:53):
I need to get back to founder mentality. The first
day I started the company, I drove to Manhattan. I
parked on the Upper east Side on Park Avenue. I
got out my car and I walked I used to do,
and I had my newspaper. I started walking down Park Avenue.
Out of Park Avenue in one of the big buildings
on Park Avenue. A big group of people, all dressed
in suits come out. And one of the people there,
(17:14):
this guy named Froz who's a big, big investor, you
probably know him like, says, hey, Tim Armstrong, you what
are you doing? I said, Oh, I'm starting a company.
I'm starting a director consumer company. And today's day one
and I'm walking downtown to find an office. And he said,
I can't believe you're starting a direct consumer covers. We
just got out of the craft Hynd's board meeting and
(17:34):
these are all the board members and we just talked
about direct to consumer.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
So so Ida for Gump starts a company. Just everybody,
It's not usually this easy.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Everybody story gets better.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
So then I walked through Grand Central the tunnel at
Grand Central station and I hear hey, Tim. I look
over at Shelby Bonnie, the founder of US see that.
He says, hey, what do you do? And I said,
I'm starting a company todydays my first day. He goes, hey,
you want to grab lunch? I said yeah. So we
sat down, we talked about what I was planning on doing.
He said, hey, do you mind if I tell Allen Company? Well,
When I get back to he's a partner in all company,
(18:06):
so leave him. He goes back to talk to Allen
a company. They're an investor in aw in flow code.
I walk all the way downtown because I wanted the
office to be downtown. I walked to the Soho Apple Store.
I walk in the Apple store. I'm buying a laptop
and I hear Tim and it's Tom Phillips, the former
president of Starwave, and he says, what are you doing here?
(18:26):
I said, today, I'm starting a company, and I'm like
about to go look for office space. He goes, I'm
here looking for office space. I have Scott Galloway and
my you professor and I are partners. Do you want
to share an office together? And I said, hell, yes,
let's let's do it. So that literally was day one.
Ended up moving in the office with Scott and Tom
and we are officemates to get the company started down
(18:48):
into seventy two Spring Street on the corner of Crosby
and Spring. And you know, startups are really hard. That
that story sounds fun it's day one, but we've been
through all the trials and tribulations, and you know, I
worked from I don't know, five thirty am to seven
thirty at night every day. I worked all weekend. I
was in the office all weekend this past weekend in
New York. So it's I enjoy it though, but it's
(19:12):
definitely it's it's if you're doing startup life, you got
to be all in.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
You got to be all in. You got to be
all in, you know it. I mean, it's it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
But look, most people, once they've been to CEO of
a company, they no longer know how to connect their
computer to the printer. And you were out there on
the ground looking for office space. Now, the fact that
everybody then saw you and knew you and made it easy,
that wasn't the point. The point was you were ready
to go deep and do it the hardware.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
I say this, Mike, I'm a better leader today and
a better CEO than I was before.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
And it's I don't have an assistant.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
I'm like, I'm I'm a lot more capable as a
human being than I was eight years ago. And I
think it's because I went back to going back to
ground zero and learned everything from scratch. And I've been
really happy. I mean, I've been like, I enjoy the company,
and it's really hard work, but I'm glad I did it.
(20:01):
When we're doing it, I mean, when you took over RTC.
By the way, tell me, what what did you do
to train yourself to be able to run the company
in that market.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
The first thing I did was I started going to galleries.
I started trying to buy art. And the very first
one I went to, I walked in and I actually
been in the park playing football with my sons. I
was like, come on, let's go over to this gallery.
And we go to the gallery and I walk in
and guys, I didn't own any art. I didn't know
what I was doing. And I was thinking about taking
cost over perfect Customers, so you would think, and I
(20:32):
was thinking about taking over this company. And I walked
in and nobody would talk to me, and so I
was like, uh, hey, excuse me, how much is this?
Now that I've been in the art world a while,
I realized how much I was embarrassing myself, but at
the time I didn't know. I said how much is this?
And they're like, you know, that's been placed And I
was like placed where, just like with a collector. And
I was like, oh, well, how about this one. They're like,
(20:54):
that's been placed. I said, well, how much was it?
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (20:56):
I was curious, like how much was it? They were like,
it's been place.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's like okay.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
I was like, do you have any art I can buy?
And they're like, we're happy to put you on the
list and get you deeper in the program. And it
was like that scene and Pretty Woman where they won't
sell anything to Julia Roberts and then she goes and
buys a bunch of arts somewhere else and comes back
she buys a bunch of like she goes shopping and
buys some stuff, comes back. I was like, I'm going
to do that with art. This is my goal is
I'm going to come back to this. I'm going to
carry all my art that I bought on Artsy back
(21:23):
and be like you work on commissions, right, Like, big mistake.
But what I learned So by doing it, what I
learned is that the fool in that story was me.
Because what the galleries are doing is they're helping to
craft the arc of an artist's career, and a big
way they do that is by placing the art with
the right collectors who are not going to run off
and sell the painting tomorrow, and who are going to
(21:44):
tell their friends about the collector and that they're going
to hang that art with other important art in their home.
And it helps to build the career of an artist.
So gallery was doing the right thing.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
I was doing the wrong thing.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
But my thesis was we could combine the best of
how those galleries shape with an artist career with the
things that the internet does, which is more transparency and
more confidence and purchase and better aggregation and being able
to find the thing and be connected to the thing
you love and click a button and have confidence that
everything that just transacted is above board. And so we've
(22:13):
you know, we've worked the last three years to really
marry them both and it's working pretty well. But that
was I started, Like I started buying painting by the way,
I own a ton of paintings out.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah, we're basically out of the wall.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
So it's the question if you hadn't just to say,
you went into be CEO, but you didn't take the
time to go have those experiences, what do you think
your success rate? What do you think by having that
level of detail, I.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Would have runed the company right. I would have ruined
the company.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
And I think that happens a lot because.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
In every like any industry, you go into every company,
you go in and they say, look at this, this industry,
this business, this is this is different, and everybody who
thinks they're smarter than everybody else comes in there like yeah, yeah, yeah, right,
I've seen this before, And the truth is you haven't.
You have to go deep in every new subject area
and really understand the thing. So good to you for
parking the car and walking around town and so you
(23:06):
found an office space and Tom Phillips and all those
other wonderful things happen to you. Quick commercial break and
we will be right back. I got one from Chris
sin Hudson, New York.
Speaker 7 (23:24):
My dad was a salesman and always told me that
every job is in a sales job. Do you share
this perspective and could you give us some pointers on
how to be better at sales.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
When somebody says yes, that's when business starts. And when
somebody says no, that's when you's that's the value of sales.
And I think the premise of a company has to
be amazing at customer interface, and it has to be
amazing at product and if you have one without the other.
On either side, companies don't work well. So I think
(23:56):
it's worthwhile for all the focus there is on product
and services and technology, which there's a time, and that's
why I spend most of my time I flow coat
on it's really important you know how to run a
revenue machine. And the revenue machine a lot of it
comes down to whether or not customers can understand your
value proposition cleanly and if you can solve a problem
for them, And that's really what sales is about.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
I know how you feel about it, but I think.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
The premise that sort of every job is sales. It's
like it's in most cases. I really do think it's
it's right, and I'd say in almost any endeavor, if
you want to be a leader, you've got I'm with you.
You have to be a good salesperson. And if I
were to you know, my my my note for for
Chris on this topic is I found that studying human
psychology is really valuable. Read Daniel Kahneman, read all the
(24:40):
read Roy Baumeister, everything that is on how people make decisions,
what makes their brain tick. You're trying, you're trying to
get someone to change their mind. And it's like what
we talked about before, you can you can't really change
someone else's mind unless you understand how the mind works. Yes, So,
so I would just say number one, human psychology is
(25:01):
really important. Second thing I see people in sales. The
difference between the good one, the bad ones, and the
good ones is the bad ones talk the whole time
and the good ones ask a lot of questions. Yes, right,
because number three, you're there to solve problems, and you
can't solve someone's problem if you're talking at them, and
if you walk, if you go into and sales engagement
with the idea that you may not have the right
answer for this person. Like you're recruiting someone, you might
(25:23):
not be the right company for them. You're trying to
get somebody to buy your product. It may not be
the right product for them. Get to know what they
need and then if you really believe they need it,
tell them why you believe it. And if you don't,
thanks for your time.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
You know.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
One one metric I like to use is when I
go to talk to customers, I try to keep my
talking to fifteen percent of the time fifteen And it's hard,
but that but if you have a fifteen eighty five
in a meeting, my guess is you're going to have
to close the deal. Yes, very very high levels, as long.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
As you ask for it. Michael Bloomberg one time said
his number one advice, he's like the best advice he's
ever gotten. Always ask for the order. Never I'll pass
the close. So I always remind the team of that
one too. If you're in a meeting and they say, yes, yes,
stop pack your stuff, yes yeah, tell them some more things.
It's time to go to.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Tim.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
This has been an absolute pleasure. Chuck full of wisdom,
and I know the audience is going to love it,
but just for me to.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Spend this time, this focus time with him, and I
really appreciate it so much.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
And I knew you'd be a big time CEO someday
and it's great to see how how your career has gone.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Thank you, Tim, Well, my friends, I really enjoyed that.
Tim has been a friend and a mentor and someone
I've really admired my whole career, and it was a
thrill to have him on today. I'm sure you enjoyed
it just as much. One thing I want to really
highlight from this discussion, and from Tim's career is that
(26:48):
he's consistently moved from a comfortable to an uncomfortable role
in his career. He was at the top of the
game at Google when everything was great, and he left
to take on a challenging turnaround of a public company
that had been through a lot of distress. He grew
that company five x, he sold it, He had a
big job in the acquiring company, and he left because
(27:12):
he had never started his own business before and he
had an idea and he wanted to try it. And
someone with that kind of growth mindset, someone who takes
on those kinds of hard challenges, is someone who just
gets better and better at their craft and becomes a
stronger and stronger leader every year. And I've seen it
firsthand in Tim, and as you're crafting your own career,
(27:33):
I hope you'll keep that in mind that sometimes the
harder job, the less easy path, often is the one
that's going to lead you to some really great things
professionally and personally. So with that, I'll remind everyone if
you want to submit a question for me and our
future guests, you can use the link in the description.
You can hit me up on Twitter and Instagram. At
(27:54):
Mike steib Or, you can call us and leave your
voicemail and will put you on the air two one
three four oh five nine six. You can leave you
a question in a voicemail at two one three four
one nine oh five nine six. I want to thank
Tim and of course Jen and Meg, Jada, Matt and
the whole team at Blue Duck Media for pulling this
(28:15):
all together, Dylan and Christopher at iHeart, and Ben and
the team at William Morris Endeavor for all of their support.
Office Hours is a production of Blue Duck Media and
it is distributed by iHeartRadio. Thanks everybody, and stay on
your grind.
Host
Mike Steib
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.