a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Getting That First Board Seat

Episode Date: August 13, 2015

When you're going for a board interview -- especially when it's your first board seat -- you're actually not supposed to go into it advocating for yourself and trying to convince people that you're a good operator, as you might in a job interview. So what does the board interview involve then? Is all the common advice we hear about getting on boards (e.g., "don't talk about strategy") really true? TaskRabbit COO Stacy Brown-Philpot, who was just announced to the HP Inc board (in Hewlett Packard's first major board shuffle since it split into two companies), answers these questions and shares other interesting nuggets from her experience getting her first board seat. She also shares why she went for a public board, as well as what other factors you should consider -- and really matter -- when considering board service. Joining her is Matt Levy, who manages a16z's board and mentor talent network as part of the executive talent team. For more resources on boards, see http://a16z.com/tag/board-matters-series/.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. Our guest today is Stacey Brown and Philpott, the chief operating officer of TaskRabbit. She was just named to the HP Inc. board in the first board shuffle since Hewlett-Packard split up into two companies. Also joining the podcast today is Matt Levy, who manages our board and mentor talent network. In today's episode of the pod, Matt and Stacey cover how she went about getting her first board seat. And what is the difference between a job interview and a board interview? It's not a job interview. So you're not going into these meetings trying to convince people that you're a good operator. The reason that you're at the meeting is because you're a good operator. And they've already decided that is true.

Stacey also shares advice for other seeking board seats. It's a topic we've been covering on the pod since we hosted the Stanford board directors college earlier this year. So what advice did or didn't work out? A lot of the recruiters actually tell you, you know, you don't want to talk about running the company when you're interviewing for a board. You don't want to talk about strategy because they know more about the strategy than you do. So be careful about. answering that question. Okay, so let's hear from Matt and Stacey. Stacey, thanks for joining us. You are the CEO of TaskRabbit, former operator at Google, former EIR at Google Ventures, and the newest board member at HP. Congrats. Thank you. So first and foremost, how'd you end up there? And why HP?

So I've been talking about joining a board for a while. I started talking to people about a year ago. And I got some advice, two pieces of advice. One was define what it is you're looking for in a board. And then the second was define what it is that you bring to the table. And I went through that process for about six months and figured out that I really wanted to be on a public company board, a large company that was growing but thinking about innovation and technology. H.P. was initially a surprise because I'm already in technology. And I thought, that my skills would be much more valuable to a non-tech company. But once I started to listen to the story of where they're going and how they're thinking about consumers and how they're thinking

about innovation, it was clear that they needed someone who understood the newer generation. What did you see in HP that kind of made it compelling for what is your first board? One of my criteria was not to have somebody that was a first-time CEO. But if they were a first-time CEO, I wanted the person to have worked at that company for a while. to have relationships. I hear a lot from operating executives that one of the reasons they're eager to join a board is so they can become better CEOs themselves or they're on track to be a CEO. They want to see what a board is really looking for from that role.

That was important to me. First of all, I'm a first-time board member. And so if all of us are first-timers, then how can we learn from each other? So I really felt like me coming in as a first-time board member, I was going to need to work with somebody who had worked with the board before, who knew how to interact with the board, and that was going to help me. And the other one is exactly what you said. I see that as my next step, potentially a next level for me.

And ultimately, seeing how a CEO operates at the board level was going to help me become a better executive and gain better perspective. And in fact, when I told my board that I was interviewing for this board, they got excited because for the same reason, they said, wow, this is going to be great for us as a company at TaskRabbit and great for you because you. you'll get different perspective on how to interact at the board level and how to CEOs think about building a large company. Well, that brings up, you know, important question, which is, you know, why was it important

for you to go after a public board? I spend a lot of time with my board, and I get a lot of exposure to how private boards operate. And Andreessen Horowitz hosted a director's college for private company boards, and it was a great lens into the dynamics of what are the differences between a private company board and a public company board. And I ultimately walked out of that session thinking there's a whole level of governance. There's a whole level of fiduciary responsibilities that public company boards have to shareholders. There's a set of issues and topics that I don't get to spend any time on because we're still private and we don't have to deal with that yet. We had a whole session, for example,

on note-taking in a board meeting. And at the beginning of that session, I was wondering why I was going to take an hour to talk about the importance of note-taking and a board meeting, by the end, when you finally understand the liability around what happens in a meeting and what gets written down,

it was very clear that the stakes are very high on some of these topics, and something like note-taking, which seems very trivial, actually does matter. So it was incredibly important. The governance issues are just heightened. It's less of an advisory body and more of a regulatory body.

What are some of the other differences you see between public company boards and private company boards? I think that just the charter of the body is the biggest thing, right? You know, public boards are there for governance oversight and essentially to guide strategic direction, but in a way that sort of takes advantage of the momentum of the organization. I think the board at the private level is a little bit more responsible for creating some of that momentum. You're obviously not an operator. You're not actually kind of executing these things. but early stage companies tend to have bigger holes in terms of their expertise, in terms of their knowledge, in terms of their insight.

And so when a private company is looking at building a board, they are looking to bring in that skill set and bring it in at a level that's, you know, two or three times beyond where that company is now. You know, public companies, it's a little bit more about shaping what's already happening. It's almost like judo, right, taking advantage of the weight of the opponent as opposed to kind of creating that leverage itself. Now, I'd like to come back to a couple of things that you mentioned. This is actually a big moment in an executive's career when you jump from kind of the pinnacle as an operator, right? And kind of really knowing what you're doing. Now you're the freshman walking into high school again, right? How did you think about, you know, finding mentors at the board level?

And, you know, what were they telling you in terms of what this jump was going to look like? So I've talked to people who are on public company boards as I started the process of thinking about being on one. And they gave me a lot of good advice. The first was it's not a job interview. So you're not going into these meetings trying to convince people that you're a good operator. The reason that you're at the meeting is because you're a good operator. And they've already decided that is true. You're not actually going to be running this company.

So you're not going in talking about your skills. You're actually talking about, you're having a conversation. And so when you go in, it's about getting to know the person that you're talking to, whether it's the chairman, the CEO, another board member, and the relationship. And they really want to know, can they work with you? And so I had to really adapt my style of interacting and interviewing because for my whole life, I've only ever interviewed for jobs. And this was a very different kind of interview.

And they asked me some questions about, well, why aren't we thinking about PCs the way Apple is thinking about laptops? So I was like, wow, like they're actually open to hearing. what I have to say. And it isn't about telling me what they want me to hear, but hearing what I have to say. And, you know, when you get a question like that, a lot of the recruiters actually tell you, you know, you don't want to talk about running the company when you're interviewing for a board. You don't want to talk about strategy because they know more about the strategy and you do. So be careful about answering that question. But you know what? I answered it. The reaction was

very welcomed. And so I felt like, okay, wow, this is actually real and it's not scripted. So that was a great, that was a really, really, really good learning for me. The other piece of advice I got was that the board has a checklist. And that list is like, this is what we're looking for. This is what we have on the board. This is the makeup of the board today. And here are the things we're going to look for in this seat. And in general, either you fit it or you don't.

And it's not personal. I got to accept that the process of joining the board was not about me advocating for myself the whole time. It was more about building your relationship with a set of people where we'd be governing together over many years, in many cases, depending on how long the term is. One of the things they were attracted to, though, is your operational background, right? What is the expertise that you're bringing to bear? And what was kind of the story that you were putting out there throughout that process? So I've been at TaskRabbit for two and a half years, and, you know, we're really bridging the

gap between online and offline. People who decide to use TaskRabbit want to get something done in and around their home, but they use an app on their phone or they go to their computer and find that person to do it. So that matching process is just, you know, a way that we've built a business on the internet, mobile and social technologies. And so the coming together of all those three things is what has made task grab is successful. Me as an operator, I get to actually operate a real business. Like we are moving people from one place to another. So it's a true operation. We have 30,000 taskers across the country and in the world who are doing this every single day.

And so when HP was thinking about, like, who do we want on our board, they couldn't get any better than someone who's actually building a people-centered, people-powered operation. So that's my job as an operator. That's what I do every day. Okay. So what is operations for you? Because that means many things to many different people. It does.

And everyone says, oh, you're a C-O and what is that? Does that mean a CFO? And I'm like, no, it's not. It's quite different. I like to divide my job in three buckets. So the first bucket is the teams that I run. So I manage operations, marketing, business development. I also lead finance and people operations.

So I have people who report to me. They have objectives. They have key results. And I sort of manage that team to achieve those goals. The second one is just the process. So as we're moving along as a company, there's the part of my job where I have to make sure that I can see the obstacles like down the, down the, down the road and that keep the train moving as fast as possible and clear those obstacles

before we get to that point. And so you're injecting process, you're taking away process, you're adding process where you need to, you're adding people when you need to, you're adding resources when you need to, and just keep the train moving as fast as possible. The third part is this thought leadership. So I'm a thought partner with Leah, who's the founder of TaskRabbit. I'm her business strategist. I help her think about the vision and realizing her vision as a company. And so that manifests itself in the board meeting. So when we go to the board meeting, you got to prepare for the board meeting and talk about the vision, talk about the strategy, how we're going to execute, and manifest itself in decisions around how we focus, how we spend time,

when do we expand internationally? How do we expand internationally? Like answering some of the more strategic questions about the company. So those three parts kind of make up the COO and every company's different, but that's sort of what I do. But there's operations and then there's operations, right? So you're coming from Google, which is, you know, one of the biggest, you know, companies on the, on the Internet. Like, the operations are wildly, you know, outsized compared to TaskRabbit. What did you learn about operations at Google that you felt like was applicable at a company like TaskRabbit? And what did you have to kind of leave behind? It took a lot with me. There's a lot of hats to leave behind. In terms of taking with me, Google did a great job at thinking

about scale, constantly thinking about does what we're doing today scale to, like, hundreds of thousands and then millions and then billions. So when I came to TaskRabbit, a lot of the questions that I asked were, are we thinking about scale? If we do this today, does that get us to the next level of scale? And if it does, great, let's do it today. The other was just focus. Google's a big company. They work on a lot of things that from the outside it looks like is completely disorganized sometimes. But people focus. And so I brought a lot of focus to TaskRabbit. How do we think about focusing on a few things, doing those things really, really, really, really well? And then once we nail that, then we can move on to the next thing.

A lot I had to give up was just resources. When you're at a small company, you do not have an entire IT department there to wait and fix your computer for you. And so when something goes wrong, like you're the person. You have to go figure out, you have to solve it. And so I had to shed a lot of this sort of dependency on other resources and just get a lot more scrappy when I got to tell. grab it. What is the transition like going from a place like Google to to a startup? You know, it's been so fun. I am a huge fan of roller coasters. And when I was a kid, I grew up in Detroit and we used to go to this place called Cedar Point, which is in Ohio. And they have some like the world's tallest roller coasters at one. But I think they're now in like Japan or something. But I was just listening to NPR and there's like another one that's like 400 feet tall is in Cedar Point. And I want to ride it. But being at a startup is like riding a roller coaster. it is exactly like riding a roller coaster. And so what surprised me was how true that is all the time.

Like the highs are really high. The lows are really low. And as the COO, my job is to sort of be steady. Like I can't do the thrills because the team needs me to present, you know, a phase of even if the high is high, right, there's going to be some lows and we can get through it. And even when the lows are low, right, we're only going to be here for a little while and we're going to come back up. And so I had to kind of maintain this steady state when you're on this like permanent roller coaster ride. But what's exciting is the two years I've spent in a new industry that's that's not even defined yet.

Like we are charting new courses. We are defining as we go what the sharing economy means for us. So now that you're at the end of this process and you've been through a few of them now, what are the general trends you're seeing in terms of what boards are looking for? Some of the general trends are, you know, they're looking. for people who are seated executives. A lot of times the typical decision to join a board is after I've been a CEO somewhere and I'm now retiring and I want to go into this encore phase of my career, which is to serve on boards. And I see a trend towards actually, no, we want some people on the board who are seated executives right now. We know they won't have as much time

as someone who is retired, but they're going to bring real time information, real time perspective. I also think diversity is a huge topic and it's real. And by diversity, I mean not just gender and race, but I also mean age in some cases, like really thinking about, you know, do you want somebody on the board who is in touch with a current generation that is going to be your biggest customer in 10 years? And in the beginning of my process, I actually felt like my youth was a, a disadvantage. And it turned out to be more of an advantage than I expect it. I think you bring up a good point. I think it's also the employee base, right? I mean,

folks are just working differently and they want a different type of company. And I think boards and public boards in particular realize they almost have to reinvent the way that they lead and they manage and they organize as a result. You are a sitting executive. You've got a full-time job. How are you going to manage this time commitment? Yeah, I've got a full-time job. I've got two children under five. So I have a family. And it's, it's not going to be easy. But as I thought about the time, when was going to be a good time for me to serve on a board. And so what I've done is said, I have time for one right now. And this is how much time I'm going to allocate to it. And I've had very open conversations with my own board about what this commitment looks

like. Here are the hours that are required. And even in the recruiting process, I ask that question. How many hours a month is this going to take and was very upfront with them about, okay, yes, that works for me or no, it doesn't work for me. And in some cases, for other boards that didn't work out, the hours were just too much of a commitment. So hearts are breaking all over the country now. Other boards saying they can't get Stacey, she's done, it's over. So with that in mind, then, like the next candidate, somebody who wants to be in your shoes, what's your advice to them? My advice is, one, it takes time. So be patient. Number two, think about what your criteria is and why you want to serve on a board right now, what kind of board you want to serve on.

Three is continue to execute and do a great job at what you're doing because it's not a job interview. People are looking at you for what you've already done and assume that what you've done is going to add value to them. And so the more you can build your expertise and your skill set, the more valuable you're going to be to someone else. So tactically, though, I mean, how did you actually get there? did you get your name out, get into that deal flow, and how, you know, what would you recommend others do to do the same? I told everybody that I knew that I was interested in joining a public company board, and most of those people were CEOs of companies, some public, some private companies, and so as

opportunities came to them, they passed my name along. And I always heard that once you get on a board, then you become more marketable, and so all the recruiters would start to contact you. So I talked to people who were already on boards, and I said, you're not interested in a second board, give them my name. And so it turns out that this, the HP board came through initially a referral. I was at a conference a year ago and I was networking with somebody not about being on a board, but mentioned to this person that I was interested in public company boards and never knew that she had given my name out to anyone else. And then two months ago

when the recruiter contacted me, she said, oh, this person told me that you were interested in boards and we'd love to talk to you about HP. And so it actually worked to have a CEO who was already on a public company board who wasn't interested in that opportunity, refer my name in. How would you think about working with recruiters actually going through a board process? The recruiter process is a good one to have. I worked with one recruiting firm that has a board search package. I ask questions about how do I think about the next steps in the process? How do I think about this opportunity? You know, when do you talk to more board members?

Like, what do you ask? You know, educate me on what the board members are looking for. Why am I a candidate for this board? And then once you get to know a lot of the recruiters who are out there, you find out that some of them really care about diversity and they really care about making sure a slate includes women, for example. And so you get to know them. And so having your name among the recruiter,

actually helps get you on the slates of boards that you might not otherwise be considered for. Compare the conversation you were having with the board recruiter versus the conversations you've had with recruiters your whole career. The conversation with the board recruiter is not about what job do you want next. It's more about they get to know you as a person. I think I've told my life story to every single board recruiter, never to an actual recruiter, but they all know I'm from Detroit. You know, my mother was a single mom.

You know, they really get into, you know, your motivations as an individual because I think they're trying to assess your integrity, your character, like who you are as a person. Because when you're thinking about governance and some of these big decisions you have to make, I mean, these boards are thinking about really huge decisions and they want people of character, of high integrity, of high values. And so my assumption is that the board recruiters are trying to assess, you know, my character, my values and what those really were when they present me to. as a candidate. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This has been incredible. Good luck on the board at HP and obviously a task rabbit. Thank you.