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Cool. Well, Emily, thank you so much for a great episode. Oh, it's so fun. Yeah. I don't usually do this kind of thing, so.
No, no, you were telling us before recording and this is a, is pretty private and you're generally pretty private. So I think it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a privilege to have you on. Yeah, no, it's fun. It's fun. I, I, you know, it's, I actually honestly had heard so much great things about you guys and you mentioned that you were doing this and I was like, I'd be happy to do it. But I use like any public speaking time normally just really like aimed at an objective. Um,
And it also helps like maintain a sense of privacy and, you know, independence. Right, right. What was it like working for Cheryl for so many years? Cheryl has been an amazing force in my life. So she and I started working together when I think I was like 22. And she is nine years older than me. So she was 31.
I had joined Google about a year before on AdWords. And I think at that point we were like three people in a corner office that no one was paying attention to. Meanwhile, scrambling because...
9-11 had happened and we started, I mean, we're making up everything on the fly. What ads do we allow? What do we not allow? When she joined sort of at the very beginning of the AOL syndication discussion, which sounds so funny now, but AOL was much bigger than Google at the time. And getting our AdWords ads onto AOL was a really big deal.
She had just come off the treasury. She had spent some time at Google acting as external CFO at that point. But then when these conversations started picking up, she joined as our team leader. She was incredible. I don't have enough good things to say about her. She and I shared a cube in an office for a really long time. She was sort of the most impactful mentor that I've had.
she was willing to take bets on people and she believed in meritocracy and she believed in hands-on training. And she gave me the gift of being able to sit next to her and talk about whatever was rolling through our desks, whether I was putting together a PowerPoint presentation on something or something big was happening at the company that wasn't normally something that would land in my world, but she wanted to get me involved, help broaden my horizons, um,
Every day something pretty incredible would happen and that I would get exposure to because she was an incredibly generous person who believed in raising the next generation of leaders.
And she did that for me. She did that for the group that sort of assembled under her. She reached out and ended up doing that at Google more broadly and had developed an exceptional reputation by the time she left of being a phenomenal leader and people manager and someone who could both inspire but also operationalize like nobody else. I mean, our team was...
incredibly tight, very effective and always optimizing for Google, which was really fun too. I think the best employees are ones who can put the company over themselves and sometimes even sub optimize for themselves. And she demonstrated that value to us. Um, so I have such fond memories of those times learning from her, um, both as like a mentor and a friend, um,
And I was devastated when she went to Facebook. I mean, absolutely devastated. And it was bizarrely, it was actually a time that Google was having a little bit of a rough spot. We had, um,
So it was like 2007, 2008. We had obviously the financial crisis. We had laid off some employees and I had decided not to go join Facebook at that time because I felt so much part of the company DNA and I felt like I had to see help the company sort of get through this time and my chapter wasn't done.
And she went to Facebook and she was, you know, able to take that momentum and those skills and that network and really like operationalize and help Mark make Facebook a real company. Certainly it's been like very, I think challenging last several months for her. I also think honestly to do, to be that successful and,
You have to, I mean, you can't, my dad used to say, you're either God or you're goddamn. People are going to love you and they're going to hate you. And it's not, you can't always control it. And doesn't mean that, you know, you're totally imperfect. Doesn't mean you're totally perfect. Everyone is human. And in order to get to that level, you have to have, you have to have some keen wit and some sharp elbows sometimes and have strong opinions. You know what? She's always been in it. She has always worked hard.
That's so cool.
Initially, I think when we had met and we had talked before, one of my takeaways was, and this was incorrect, oh, cool, Cheryl hired you at Google. But you totally predated her at Google. Yeah, she inherited me. How on earth as a 22-year-old did you end up picking Google and your string of picking fascinating websites
winners started very early. Like how did that all happen? I know. So actually I did pick a loser before that for a very brief period of time. I went to work for Mike Arrington who was at a company I know, right? Blast from the past at a company called HX, which I was like on the right concept. I've just picked the wrong company. And this was of course pre-tech crunch. This was pre-tech crunch. So, um, this was in 2000 right after, after I graduated. Um,
I took spring break off of my senior year, came home, had all these tech offers, ended up going to a person-to-person payment company that had launched six months after PayPal did. In Palo Alto? Yeah, great. And in the interview, I had actually driven by PayPal on university on the way to South San Francisco for this interview. And I was like, so tell me about PayPal. Yeah.
And Mike and Cable Desai was there at the time. They're like, oh, it's like palm-to-palm payments. It was palm-to-palm payments. So impractical and we're really about consumer-to-business or consumer-to-consumer. This is sort of the future. They're not the future. Of course, they pivoted quickly while HX couldn't quite get their product to market. And so seven months later, I found myself at the age of whatever, 21, unemployed,
in, you know, when fuckedcompany.com was like every day, you know, listing companies that had done layoffs, including my own. And I had an offer from, oh my God, shoot, what is that dating company? It's still around. Like my, my, no, friend,
What is that dating app? It's like Friend Finder. Friend Finder. Friend Finder. I think they're still around. I had an offer from Friend Finder. I had an offer from Google. And I had an offer from Oracle. And I turned to Friend Finder. Those are three different paths. Oracle would be the logical, safe, you know. I know. And when I turned them down, they're like, you're going where? But, you know, again, I was so young. Right. And I was like, I love this company. I had used Search my senior year of college when doing research. Mm-hmm.
And I thought, you know what? It's really hard to take a risk when you actually have real responsibility and I don't have real responsibility yet. So I'm gonna take another risk. The first one didn't work out, but this one is pretty damn cool. And the folks at Oracle didn't understand what I was doing, but I loved it. I mean, it was an amazing moment to join the company. And I really grew up and had my education, like my master's in business from Google from that 10 years.
Hearing you talk about Cheryl and your relationship to her and her development of people, I'm curious, you know,
What did Cheryl look for? But more importantly, what do you look for in people that you're developing? Because it's a catch-22, right? You want to bring everybody up, but you also need to find the really special people who have the potential. Whether it's hiring or just mentoring, what do you look for? Yeah, and honestly, it's one of my favorite things to find people
people with amazing potential and be the wind at their back to help make them successful. Like that is really what I like live for. And in some cases, I mean, when you're in a fast growing company, that sometimes means that you sort of bring these people up and then they leave, but still it's wonderful because all of a sudden it's your sort of, your work went into making that person great in whatever they're doing and your connections sort of globally or across that industry or across the company become really strong. Um,
What do you look for? God, I mean, a lot of things, right, go into that secret sauce. Interestingly, it has less to do with school and pedigree than you would imagine, although certainly Google screened very, very, very tightly on those things. But at one point, I actually, my husband was at Stanford Business School, and he needed an intern, like a class project. And I was like, will you come up, run a regression and figure out
how we better find great employees before we've hired them and figured out if they're bad or good. And it turned out it had very little to do with education. Which is funny because when I was at GSB, I'm sure many years later...
Laszlo Bach, the head of HR at Google, came, you know, give his presentation to GSB and he said this, yeah, we found that, it was probably your husband, found that we thought education was highly correlated with job performance and it wasn't. And now we've completely pivoted. I'm glad you're all paying for this nice degree here. It doesn't matter. We did our work years before the HR team, years before Laszlo even came to the company.
So this is like way back, right? Google had always had this idea that basically you had to have gone to the Olympics, cured cancer and like have a degree from Harvard or Stanford, preferably actually, uh, to work here. Um, myself being the exception to that rule because I've done none of the above. Um,
And we were hiring, you know, we were hiring like ad sales and support team people. And we had a lot of them from those schools and a lot of them who've done wonderful things. But we had to hire a lot of people and they didn't all look like that. And what we realized over time is that they didn't all have to look like that. It was the unique characteristics were ingenuity, right? The ability to like
take, you know, toothpicks and paperclips and build a monument, right? I mean, the ability to just put one foot in front of the other, ask smart questions, be curious,
learn quickly, and have the ability to sort of unabashedly take things on even if you didn't know what you were doing exactly. And you can see that in leaders as they come out of school. You can see that in leaders as they're more mature in their career. I mean, some of the people who are still at Google and they're like VPs now, we had them in an attempt to perm program where they interned for us for three months before we decided, like approving ads before we decided whether or not to keep them.
So some of them look very nontraditional, but it's really, it's kind of what you're, not always what you're born with, but a lot of it's what you're born with. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
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All right, I'm going to shift the conversation and I want to ask the question that I'm sure a lot of folks who are listening to this show have to be asking. So you helped with the integration and really sort of led the business side on Instagram and then you became COO of Snap. Like how did that happen and what was that like? Oh God. So I loved Instagram. I love Instagram. I love Kevin, the team. I have incredibly positive and fond feelings for them and I was not planning on leaving.
But I got a very aggressive phone call from a very aggressive recruiter who will not be named, but he's fantastic actually. And he left me this voicemail that said something to the effect of like screaming at me on the phone on my voicemail. Like, if you don't call me back, I'm never calling you again.
And so of course I called him back and I'm like, listen, like, thanks for the message. Um, and the threat and the threat. And I really respect you and I respect what you do. And I, and I'm going to need your help in like five years. I don't need your help now. And he sort of needled his way in there just enough that,
That by the time I said, thanks, but no thanks. Actually, he didn't even say the name Snapchat, but he gave me enough of information to figure out what it was. I hung up the phone and my husband, I had said no, and I hung up the phone and Brian, my husband turned to me and he said, what are you doing? It's like, I'm like, what are you talking about? And how big was Snap at this point? 30 people. Okay. He said, people who don't take risks work for people who take risks.
And I was like, fuck you. Do you know how many risks I've taken? Like, let's be clear. That's the kind of thing only a spouse can say to another spouse. But in some ways he was right because as I had sort of noted earlier about, there are two points when people are really comfortable taking risks and that's really when it's not much of a risk. One, when you're straight out of school and you have no mortgage and no kids and you don't have anyone depending on you.
And then the other is like when you've made enough money that you can send those kids to college and you know that your family is going to eat and you can sort of achieve those basic life goals and you want to sort of have your kids
finale or the thing that's sort of the dressing on the cake. But in the middle, that's hard. It's very hard. And I know this now on the other side, trying to recruit people are in that middle. It's very hard. I mean, we had done really well. We had two kids. They were young. We were in a position where we could move them, but you know, there was some risk involved and yeah,
Similarly, actually, to that, I mentioned that app that Facebook had acquired to give us insight into how people were using their mobile apps. We also had information access to what was happening on Snap.
And so purely from an Instagram perspective, I was curious. And so I, this was before any of these conversations had happened. I had had someone on the team go look into how much of the overlap of how much of the user bases overlap. What was, did the usage go up or down if they were also an Instagram and vice versa. And it turned out that actually they were very helpful to each other, that people who are in Snapchat use Instagram more, people are Instagram or you Snapchat more. Um,
And it was that moment where I was like, God, you know, they're onto something like this idea that the mobile phone can be and should be used to communicate in a much more human way than we're used to. Right. I mean, Instagram's on one end where it's sort of like beautiful and being judged. Right. It's kind of precious. And Snapchat's like very raw. And I love those moments when I'm, you know, like sort of looking out at my landscape and like seeing like little really good sparks, really good sparks. And there was a really good spark there.
So my husband said, what are you doing? People would know to your restaurant. Then he said, this is not a dress rehearsal. Like we don't get another chance at this, Emily. Maybe you should have the conversation. And I had the conversation and like a week and a half later, I think I had signed. And I felt like I was cheating for that entire week and a half and it was incredibly hard. I think for me, I mean, I wasn't trying to fix anything at all. I loved my job. I liked...
really the idea of being able to do something very similar, but without a big parent company, right? Cause just in our journeys in life, you ask like, what can I do? What can I do? Can I like really put it together without that level of support? And I think the answer is yes. I'm sure as you know, you know, as an investor, uh, now, um,
It's obvious probably to everyone listening to this show, you know, it's a difference Instagram going from a billion dollars of value to 150 billion dollars of value within a public company You know that value gets realized by a very broad set of mutual funds basically Versus a startup where it's the people that are building it, you know, that's why the valley works. Yes, I
But I will say that people are like, why? This is sexting. You're moving your family to LA to work at a sexting app?
I'm like, just wait, just wait, just wait. Indeed. They have to have that reaction. It has to be a ridiculous thing. It's the same thing as Oracle to your Google move initially, or the same thing as all the Facebook people to why you wanted to go in, I don't know, throw your career away, spending time on Instagram. And it always seems like a toy. I mean, it always seems ridiculous. It always seems lewd or, you know, yeah, that's where these things start. Yeah. Um,
There's some interesting shared DNA, at least at the investor level, between Instagram and Snapchat, specifically in Benchmark. Were they involved in your recruiting? And I could imagine that they would have felt like they missed out on a lot of the value creation of Instagram and that drove a lot of their wanting to be in Snap and what happened there, right? So even though some of the firms were involved, it was not the same people, typically. And I would say my experience with the investors who came in late at Instagram was different.
They were so supportive of the company. And even though, yeah, they had like invested a week before and then all of a sudden was forced to exit. It was a supportive week. Yeah. It was a pretty amazing week for them too. And I think they did a nice job and Kevin did a nice job and Mike did a nice job of really keeping that community close even though they...
they didn't play that same role. And I would say, you know, Evan had a very different relationship with his investors. And while they were involved in my recruiting, their involvement in the company was pretty much at arm's length. Yeah.
I think about this a lot as, as a VC as you know, that is one of the biggest lessons to me of Instagram is, um, you know, if something can truly exhibit the signs that it can be that big, um, a billion dollars is, is, uh, selling the company for a song. Yeah. Yeah. But no one knew it then again. Remember they, this was like the biggest, I mean, I can't even think of another acquisition around that time. It was so few people pre-revenue that was getting that level of valuation. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. A couple more questions. Public company boards. You sit on several. Yes. What was that like doing that for the first time? What's it like now? How is it different than being on private company boards? Yeah, I love it. So and we actually skipped one in introduction, but it sort of wasn't worth it. So I'm on three public company boards now and an advisor to several others and on the nonprofit XPRIZE board.
This is, by the way, where thinking about your employees as whole people and helping them map out what they want to be when they're older is really important. So for me, at one point I was running the Google Women's Group. But before I did that, Cheryl ran it. And she had brought in three people, investors and recruiters, and one public board member who had been recruiting for and building public boards and on public boards. And I was like 25 or something.
And I'm sitting there like, what the hell is a public board? What is this? Why am I interested? And they walked through the whole thing. And also how to think about it. First get on a nonprofit board, then a private company board, then a public company board. And that's exactly what I did. In 2008, I joined the National Center for Women in IT, NCWIT, which is focused on getting more, of course, you know. I have some playing cards. Yes, you have some playing cards. Brad Feld helped found that organization with Lucy, the CEO.
And then I joined a private company board. And then in 2011, I was asked to join Lululemon. And this was before it was really in vogue to have women on your board. I was 32, which was very young also to be on a board. And the founder and then chief product officer, Chip, had had this insight that he wanted someone who looked much more like their consumer and knew digital and was West Coast and was female and...
I think a year after they started their search, they found me and I was an avid consumer of theirs. I love their product and I loved so much even more than that, their mission and who they wanted to be, where they stood and what they stood for in the world. And I, on that board was greeted with such open arms. This group said, listen, you are young,
You've never done this before, and we are not going to treat you like a second-class citizen. We are here to teach you and groom you and show you what it's like to do this. And that's exactly what they did. And it's been an awesome experience. I mean, it's nice that they pay you, but sometimes I think I would have just...
Just for the experience, right? In the time I've been there, we've been through several CEOs. We went through the see-through pants issue. And the company is doing exceedingly well despite those things. And again, it really comes down to people and culture. And I loved it so much that in the last couple of years, I've joined some more. And I'm realizing that they're very different. I mean, the DNA of the company matters so much. And it really impacts what you discuss. Even though technically the job of a public company board is the same, right? It's really about...
you know, looking out for shareholder value and hiring and firing the CEO at the end of the day. But the way you get there is very, very different with some, you know, institutionalized sort of regularity, right? Because of SOX compliant and all of these things. But,
Public boards in some ways are much easier than private boards because they're not chaotic. They're relatively well organized. There's a process. You show up four times a year. There's some calls in between. But private company, it's like, oh, we need this done. And we don't have any expertise in this. And you do. Can you help us? All of the time. It's a very different experience. It's interesting, though, hearing you talk about
the process of being recruited to Lululemon and how you think about your work on public company boards. I'm just contrasting that with like,
What I think of as most public company board members, which are people at the Hoover Institute at... Maybe I'm thinking of Theranos. I'm not sure that one counts. That is a bad example. Never one public. But I'm thinking about the public company boards class at GSB, which I was so excited to take. And then so bored by? It was all about compliance. The whole thing. And I just couldn't believe it. I was so turned off. I guess my question is, in practice...
How do you make it about more than compliance and how do you make it about what Chip the Lululemon founder wanted you to be, which is like a voice in the room of the customer and like actual, you know,
Yeah.
where you can have some sort of impact on the company. All the boards, you know, you can sort of say some of them don't have much impact and others do, but at least a path, right? You're listened to, your voice is wanted in the room. And it's a business that you're fascinated about, interested in learning more about. Not all companies meet those criteria for me. In fact, most don't. Really, it comes out in the self-selection as opposed to like expecting that every board is going to look exactly like that. And I just feel lucky.
Yeah. Yeah. Because I would imagine many or most are pure compliance, right? Well, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, there are always discussions around strategy and around what's happening with the product line and personnel. So there's, it's almost inevitable that you're going to get some other stuff that I would consider more interesting, but your job at the end of the day is compliance. And that's, you know, I mean, we can thank Enron for that. Yeah. Thank God.
Well, Emily, to round it out, I know Anthos is a relatively quiet organization. What can you tell us about sort of the organization, things you invest in and kind of your philosophy a little bit? There's a reason that no one on this listening to this podcast has ever heard of us. You probably haven't heard of us because we are very quiet. If you go look at our website, there is nothing on it.
And that has a lot to do with how we were founded. We were founded in 2007 by Brian Kelly and Paul Farr, who one of them I'm married to, Brian. We were married at that point when he started it. And they are amazing investors who were
fortunate enough to find people who funded the firm at a time when Brian and Paul were both very young and in Silicon Valley. And every VC firm was out on Sand Hill blogging and conferencing and talking about themselves. And Brian and Paul decided to take a very, very different approach to the market, one that involves us not actually giving money to companies who come to us. We instead actually go and find companies that we want to invest in.
In that world, actually, it benefits you to be quiet. It doesn't benefit you to be loud. And so we've taken that strategy quite seriously. And it's one of the reasons you haven't heard of us. We also don't talk about the companies that we've invested in. We let them talk about it. So I probably won't go into the names, but I promise the folks who are listening to this, you know many of the companies we've invested in. Our track record's been great because we get a chance to go and pick the
the companies that we really want to invest in. And that tends to mean that they've already been successful, right? They tend to be a little more, they tend to be bootstrapped. They tend to be profitable. They tend to be off to a really good start and not always have like many of, they don't need money. And so that's sort of where our challenge comes in is how do we convince them to take our money? But I would say, you know, our, our hope, um, and I think our realization is that
we can help them, uh, along that journey in ways that they might not have expected. Yeah. Well, good, good competitive strategy is, uh, uh, picking activities that you want to do that others aren't and not participating in activities that others do. Uh, uh, and how often do we forget that rule all the time, but that guy's doing that. So, uh, over there, uh, yeah. I have one last question very selfishly, but, um,
Given your front row seat when Anthos was started and now as president, any advice for starting and running a venture firm? Don't do it. That's just more competition for us. Get out of here. God, we are, that's it. I'm making these exasperated sounds mostly because I've seen, I mean, I've seen venture really mature. Right.
I mean, I think John Doerr was like this amazing maverick back in the day who had this unbelievable product insight and was an unbelievable salesman and was able to join boards of companies and really, to my point, be winded their back and help them implement things like OKR strategies and really sound management principles to often, frankly, boy founders who really didn't know about that side of the world, human resources and large company management, but they knew how to build a product really well.
I mean, I just as an outsider, I mean, even to VC, because I've only joined recently, what I've seen in the last several years in Silicon Valley and that ilk of investing is that
We've, as an investment community, gotten so swept away in this myth of this beautiful young boy founder who's dropped out of college and given them so much control. And it's so deeply irresponsible. It is driven... I mean, these are platitudes and it's probably not fair, but there are a lot of dollar signs there. And we...
We invest in teams that we believe in and we believe that they make good choices and we're here to be sounding boards when they need it so we don't fiddle a lot. But I wish that in some cases VCs did some more fiddling because a lot of the cultural challenges that we've had in the last several years as a community I think really could have and should have been stopped much earlier on by the adults in the room. And often the adults in the room are the board. And so I think in some ways we sort of let down our community of founders and people who work for them.
So I think about that. How do you invest in good people? How do you instill values? I talk a lot with the companies that we invest in about values and people and culture because I think it's so important. And I want to know, who are you and what do you really stand for? And how can...
Scale comes through by the way cementing those things. Institutionalizing the culture and the values so that a lot of other people can execute on them and carry them around inside them.
Without sort of asking you, should I be doing this? Should I be doing that? I mean, I don't believe in this sort of commander control, like dictator, you know, telling everyone what to do. I want to invest in companies that have a leadership that is relatively low ego and invested in making this business stand with or without them. That's awesome. Yeah.
Well, Emily. Amen. Yeah. Thank you so much. So fun, you guys. Thoughtful. So thoughtful as sort of board member, investor, manager. I mean, all these things are a lot of these values you're talking about over the last episode and a half have been things a lot of people talk about. And I think you're somebody that's clearly done it a lot time and time again through your work and your
So many different roles. It's the beauty of getting older, actually. Now I've seen it a bunch. There is a bright side. I would say also just kudos to you for like having the gumption and the vision to start this little podcast and take it to where it is pretty fun. Well, thanks. It was one of those things that seemed pretty dumb at the time. As most good ideas do. Yeah, it was fun. Awesome. Thanks, Emily.