Why did the CEO of Waze leave Google?
💡JC's Newsletter #68
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In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, including a must-read.
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💡The weekly must-read
👉 Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long? (PayGo)
Due to a bunch of mistakes early on, we did not own substantial amounts of equity and had a pretty bad relationship with some of our board members.
Google was true to their promise and gave us this autonomy.
Looking back, this reminds me of the Western CEO and China. Every Western CEO thinks she or he will be the first to be a successful Western brand in China and many try and launch a service there
When we started talking to Google, we had 10M MAU's vs 140M MAU's when I left.
It is a classic fallacy of an acquisition: we will remain “autonomous”. I feel the deal should be clear that there will be integration at some point.
In a Corporation, the employee alignment is to the Corporations brand, not to the product (i.e. Google, not Gmail; Facebook, not Instagram). The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer. Being promoted has more impact on the individuals economic success than the product growth. The decision which product to work on stems from the odds of getting promoted and thus we began onboarding people with the wrong state of mind - seeing Waze as a stepping stone and not as a calling.
It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old "you are not doing a great job"
On the importance of having only missionaries, which is something we really check during our hiring process at Alan.
But not being able to replace them with people that do have the right skills means that people are constantly trying to “offload” an employee on a different team rather than fire them.
Any idea we had was quickly co-opted by Google Maps.
The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus.
That changes the DNA of the company quickly, from customer focused to corporate guidelines focused.
It is important to find the right balance within a company.
The impact of an individual product on the Corp-Tech stock is minimal so equity is basically free money. Regardless of your performance (individually) or your product performance, you equity grows significantly so nothing you do has real economic impact on your family.
Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the teams performance with the employee returns.
I wonder if Alan will have to think about something similar at some point. I prefer that we all aim for the long-term goal, but I see the second order effects.
Young people want it all - they want to get promoted quickly, achieve economic independence, feel fulfilled at Work, be home early, not miss the Yoga class at 11:00am etc. Having trouble scheduling meetings because “it's the new Yoga instructor lesson I cannot miss” or “I’m taking a personal day” drove me crazy
Everyone working in the tech space is SUPER LUCKY. If you happen to work for one of the tech corporations - you are even luckier. You get unbelievable conditions (food, gym, offsites, travel), amazing economic wealth creation, can work on amazing things surrounded by the best and the brightest. But many of the people I met did not understand or appreciate it. Tech workers leaving college directly to Corp-Tech and never working for a “real company” end up spending their time complaining about the wrong things. When COVID hit and we moved to work from home - a huge amount of complaints began around why can't employees expense food since they are not in the office. While most "real" people were worried about keeping their jobs or finding one, many employees were complaining about expensing their food on top of their salaries/stock/bonuses. This entitlement continued everywhere - while Google is BY FAR the most employee centric company giving tremendous hard and soft value to its employees, employees keep creating imaginary problems to complain about.
We should always remember that, how lucky we are, and not feel entitled.
I think that the independent model is a must for acquisitions. No one buys technology, you buy a team and a way of doing things.
Totally aligned: you always purchase a team and how they do things, and you want to empower them.
🏯Building a company
In addition to selected articles, I share one of Alan's leadership principles every week - the same one that I share internally and with our investors every Wednesday.
👉 Alaners are owners (Healthy Business)
We decided to own the problems, not subcontracting it to externalities, and to really understand what makes a difference in a good announcement. Then we distributed it over many Alaners trusting each other.
👉Community-Led Growth: The Product-Led Growth Expansion Pack (Corrine Riley - Medium)
Community-Led Growth acts as a multiplier on top of product-led growth. By actively facilitating user interactions, and providing value past the product itself, Community-Led Growth allows a company to have a stronger pulse on their customer pipeline, feature requests, and real-time support, all while enabling users to get the most of their product. These users in turn become champions, creating a flywheel of active members strengthening the community.
The value of building community-led growth, which we are trying to do with Alan Baby.
Create a Symbiotic Relationship With Users: Community-Led Growth allows you to create something more aspirational for your users — a movement that they can be a part of that revolves around topics of interest to them.
Become a Thought Leader in Your Market: Once you’ve gotten to know and understand your community, you start facilitating the content and services it most needs. A well-managed community answers each other’s questions in the middle of the night, troubleshoots with peers, and shares content about best practices
Real-time Insights and Actionable Responses: Actively managing your community gives your sales team a strong pipeline of engaged potential customers
I am a big believer in being “instant” in communities, and you need a certain scale to reach that.
Communities are typically started by bringing users together on a Community Platform, and over time expanding the ecosystem through multiple community channels (events, job boards, newsletters etc).
There are 2 primary types of company-led communities
Community of Product: Built around your product specifically, this primarily serves as a space for users to ask questions about your product,
Community of Practice: A community of practice ties together members who share the common goal of learning about a specific field.
👉 Jeff Bezos on how to think about what is not going to change (YouTube)
I very frequently get the question: ‘What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one.
I almost never get the question: ‘What's not going to change in the next 10 years?'
And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time …
In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. […] When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
🗞In the news
📱Technology
👉 YouTube tackles TikTok (Platformer)
An ongoing challenge in tech journalism is deciding how hard to be on new products when they arrive. It’s in the nature of tech to evolve, sometimes quickly, and so to evaluate a software product on day one is to risk missing the point: what’s interesting is not what is, but eventually will be.
How to think about innovation, as a dynamic thing.
As Eugene Wei put it last month: “TikTok launches seemingly a new video effect or filter every week. I regularly log in and see creators using some filter I've never heard of, and some of them are just flat out bonkers. What creators can accomplish with some of these filters I can't even fathom how I'd replicate in something like the Adobe Creative Suite.
Super impressive tools to empower creators (who are our creators?)
Google’s experimental product division released a tool for sharing short video messages between coworkers. ThreadIt allows users to add a message to any one they receive, creating a kind of asynchronous meeting that anyone can watch later.
Did anyone test it?
👉Spotify business models from bundle, to ad-supported, to a-la-carte (Stratechery)
In the past on the internet, you’ve seen platforms choose either to be ad-supported or to be subscription. In the future, I think you’re going to see ad-supported, subscription, and a la carte play key roles.
What is interesting about the two subscription options — all of Spotify on one hand, and a la carte on the other — is that while they are broadly the same business model, they do reflect how music and podcasts are different: as I noted yesterday, music is centralized, which lends itself to a bundle price, while podcasts are highly decentralized, which lends itself to a la carte subscriptions.
First is the idea that Spotify was approaching its opportunity deliberately: first get a big subscription base, even if margins weren’t great, and then leverage the Aggregator playbook to extract concessions from suppliers. So far so good.
🏥 Healthcare
👉‘Concierge Medicine On Steroids’ Startup Raised $40 Million To Disrupt Employer-Sponsored Care (Forbes)
Think of it as concierge medicine on steroids. Users download an app that connects them with a doctor via video or chat within 60 seconds 24 hours a day. Easy issues are dealt with online. For more complex problems, Transcarent will map out the doctors and hospitals with high quality and low costs. It will make an appointment for a second opinion.
On the very importance of immediacy.
Taneja and Tullman are so confident this model can generate significant cost savings that it doesn’t charge employers any upfront costs.
Takes a pre-negotiated percentage cut of an employer’s healthcare cost savings after the fact.
Super interesting business model.
👉 Doctolib propose une solution de gestion pour les cabinets des médecins libéraux (Les Échos, in French)
Après la prise de rendez-vous et la téléconsultation, la licorne déploie ce mercredi une troisième activité avec un logiciel de gestion de cabinet à destination des médecins libéraux.
De quoi s'agit-il ? D'une plate-forme tout-en-un, sur laquelle le professionnel de santé retrouve aussi bien son agenda que les outils de téléconsultation, de facturation, d'édition d'ordonnances où la synthèse de son patient (historique des antécédents, des rendez-vous, observations précédentes…). Le prix : 135 euros par mois, qui s'ajoutent aux abonnements pour la téléconsultation et la prise de rendez-vous (79 et 129 euros mensuels respectivement).
La firme de Levallois ne défriche pas un terrain vierge. Le marché est déjà investi par plusieurs acteurs de poids, dont Cegedim via sa filiale Maiia (qui assure aussi la prise de rendez-vous en ligne pour la vaccination) ou l'allemand CompuGroup Medical, qui s'est taillé une grosse part du gâteau européen.
Un sujet sensible : des associations et des syndicats demandent déjà au Conseil d'Etat d'annuler son partenariat avec l'Etat pour la prise de rendez-vous pour la vaccination, au motif que les datas sont hébergées par un américain, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Doctolib vise prioritairement les 50.000 médecins déjà abonnés à son service de téléconsultation.
💚 Alan
👉 Q1 2021 - Letter to shareholders (Alan Blog 🇫🇷). We share our progress quarterly. As such, we have published our Q1 2021 letter to shareholders. Our progress has been such that we have exceeded our targets for signed members and revenue.
👉 Alan signed the Climate Act of startups committing to act on their carbon footprint (La Tribune 🇫🇷). The startups that have signed this Climate Act commit to carrying out a complete carbon assessment before the end of 2021 and to taking strong action to limit carbon emissions.
🙋 Featured in this newsletter
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