Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Zero)

There's this belief that everybody needs to be a founder. I think, in some ways, our industry would be much better off if there were fewer founders. There's an entire category of smart, creative, hardworking, talented, you know, borderline visionary people who can raise that two million dollar seed and go off and build some stupid company that's never gonna go anywhere. That would be so much better off finding a, a team that needs their skillset and that, and working on a problem that has a mathematical formula that's going to win on any metric, whatever me- metric you care about. You want, like, the acclaim of your peers, you want financial reward, you want outsized impact on culture, like, whatever, whatever the thing is that gets you out of bed every morning, you can, you can achieve that in collaboration with others. You don't have to be the person that raises the seed round.

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Tom Conrad. Tom was an engineer at Apple, CTO of Pandora, which he helped take from zero to 80 million users. He's also VP of product at Snap, where he was the right-hand man to Evan Spiegel for two years. He's been on the board of Sonos for over seven years. He's also part of two infamous product failures, Quibi, where he was chief product officer, which raised over two billion dollars and died less than a year after launch. He was also a senior engineering leader at pets.com, which famously went from nothing to a public company to completely out of business in 19 months. Today, Tom is the CEO of Zero Longevity Science, which is on a mission to extend the lifespan and the healthspan of the human race. In our conversation, we dig into what Tom's learned from these famous product failures, also what he's learned from the many product successes. Tom also shares what he's learned about how to pick where to go work and what to avoid, how important understanding the math formula of the business model is, also lessons on burnout and health and leadership, and Contrarian Corner. With that, I bring you Tom Conrad, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Coda. You've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together, and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this firsthand, because Coda does that for me. I use Coda every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar, my interview notes for podcasts, and to coordinate my sponsors. More recently, I actually wrote a whole post on how Coda's product team operates, and within that post, they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run their product team, including managing the roadmap, their OKR process, getting internal feedback, and essentially, their whole product development process is done within Coda. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need Coda. Coda puts data in one centralized location, regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. Coda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place. Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Sign up today at coda.io/lenny and get $1,000 startup credit on your first statement. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash Lenny to sign up, and get a startup credit of $1,000. Coda.io/lenny. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds, and it's all built on Jira, where your engineering teams are already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free, no catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. Tom, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.