Acquired - Episode 9: Writely (Google Docs)

Episode Date: March 29, 2016

Ben and David continue the cloud productivity saga with Google Docs. They examine the suite of acquisitions made by Google with a focus on Writely in 2006. They tackle:The nuts and bolts of the Upstartle (company behind Writely) acquisition, founded by Sam Schillace, Steve Newman and Claudia Carpenter.SaaS offerings in cloud productivity today.Was this a good idea for Google?Google's future bets.A new section: The Carve Out!Sponsors:ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acqsnaiagentsHuntress: https://bit.ly/acqhuntressVanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaMore Acquired!:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Merch Store!

Welcome back to episode 9 of Acquired, the show where we talk about technology acquisitions that actually went well. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. This week, we're going to be covering an older acquisition, but following a theme from our last episode in productivity software we're going to be covering the what became the eventual suite known as google drive google docs google sheets and is it google presentations google slides so i think it started as presentations yeah and then it was the presentation spreadsheets and docs the product

of many names yes we. We'll go through. There were a whole ton of companies that actually contributed to this. David will go through the acquisition history and facts, but largely focused around Rightly, which eventually became Google Docs. Yes. A reminder that if you enjoy the show, leave us a review on iTunes. We would love any feedback. Or you can hit us up on Twitter at AcquiredFM. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about longtime friend of the show,

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Ajax, the browser technology that enabled live dynamic updating of websites had just come out and a group of a group of technologists from intuit had decided to start a little crew to dabble in what they could do with ajax and so they founded a company that they called uh upstartle i love that name. SoBubble. SoWeb2.0. They ran through a couple projects and landed on a product that they called Rightly. It was collaborative document editing in the cloud. I don't know what they called it at the time. Yeah, which now seems so table stakes. Absolutely. the cloud i don't know what they called it that at the time yeah which now seems so table stakes absolutely um founded by sam shalass claudia carpenter and steve newman uh and they worked on it for a couple years it was in beta uh they had a few thousand users uh and then in march 2006

google announces that they had acquired the company for an undisclosed amount rumored in the $10 million range. What's interesting, they'd only hired one person over those two years. So it was the three founders and one other Intuit employee, former Intuit employee, Jennifer Mazan. And they all joined Google and became PMs in Google Docs. And what's interesting is that this was actually the second acquisition that Google had made in their online office productivity suite. The first was another company, a smaller company in New York called 2Web, 2Web Technologies that they'd actually acquired in 2005 that was working on Excel to web. Well, that was something that they brought into Google labs, right? And I think Google labs

created the first Google spreadsheets before Google locks, Google docs even launched. Yes. And this was all happening right around the same time. So, uh, Google spreadsheet launched in labs in June, 2006, rightly was acquired in March, 2006 march 2006 um and then shortly thereafter in the beginning of 2007 google docs uh based on rightly was released publicly yeah i think it was docs and spreadsheets were actually merged right around that time and you could go to doc.google.com and the the i remember the header actually said google docss and Spreadsheets, one big long thing. And it looked like they just kind of like took the Spreadsheets view and just interjected some of your docs in there and you could sort by date. But that was pretty much all the integration they had. Yep.

And then shortly after that launched, two more companies that Google acquired in 2007, Tonic Systems and Zenter, which is an early Y Combinator company, both of which were working on presentation software for the browser. That's right. Tonic, largely the back end, and Zenter, largely the front end. And it's pretty amazing how quickly Google turned these acquisitions around. September 2007, Presentations was launched. And finally, there is now a full suite of microsoft office-esque productivity software in the cloud that's right but don't ask eric schmidt that when they announced google docs

and spreadsheets he definitely told a gigantic audience full of people that they were not indeed competing with microsoft and it was not a competitor to Office. I wonder if our last episode's guest, Kurt DelBene, was listening at the time. Yeah. And then some might say, you know, the rest is history. However, interesting side note of history, 2007, the same year these final acquisitions happened and the full suite was released by Google, June of 2007, Dropbox is founded. Yeah. And that's interesting. I mean, you look at the bet that Google's making here. I mean, this happens so fast. This all happens within a year and a half span.

And all of a sudden, they have a full kind of suite here. And they definitely went through and made very strategic acquisitions here, but built a lot of it in-house. I think what they acquired was super bare bones in each of these applications, all pretty inexpensive. I mean, these are all rumored approximate $10 million acquisitions. You know, last episode, we were talking with Kurt DelBene, and we were looking at what Microsoft paid for Accompli and Wunderlist and Sunrise. That, you know, totals somewhere around half a billion dollars. And when Google was getting into dabble in this game, which is really inventing the market for cloud productivity, super cheap because people weren't flocking there yet. People didn't realize that, oh, I need collaboration tools in real time where I can look at the other person's

cursor in my document. It was largely a toy at that point. Yep. And I think these are all really interesting examples of the buy versus build that we were talking about with Kurt a little bit last week. And what's interesting, and one of the reasons I brought up Dropbox being founded around then, all these companies, these five or so companies that Google acquired that became the backbone of Google Docs, there were all these rumors, I don't know if you remember, Ben, around the time for years about the mythical G-Drive. Yeah, that's right.

The G-Drive. It was coming. It was coming. And it was the Dropbox killer. It was the Dropbox killer, and it didn't launch until 2012. And one can imagine, we mentioned Zenter was an early Y Combinator company, as was Dropbox. How might history have been different if Google had decided that they would accelerate their drive efforts by acquiring Dropbox or Box at the same time? Yeah, it'd be interesting.

Very interesting. All right, with that, should we move on to acquisition category? Yeah, let's do it. Because I think there's a lot of... This episode, I'm most interested in the fast-forwarding to today and looking at how does this impact Google's business as a whole. So I think, yeah, happy to just blow right through acquisition history and facts now on to acquisition category. To me, technology. I think all these acquisitions, you know, primarily, rightly, were these kind of experimental AJAX apps. And everybody was

seeing what they could do with AJAX at the time. Google Maps, I remember, was a very flashy demo example of that. And, you know, I think there were a few different people later on, Etherpad, but a few different companies playing around with collaborative editing. And I think content editable was the new hottest thing in browser technology that they took advantage of. And, you know, this is just acquiring sort of that, the people that were doing that right and so i think you know technology and a people acquisition knowing that there was a lot of technology to to build in-house to really turn it into a product that was marketable yep um it's interesting you know i

was going to go with business line for this category but this is such uh you know we when we started doing this talked about doing this episode we said it was going to be on rightly but as we were doing research we realized you know there are these really five or so companies all these none of them too none of them too much further along than any other ones exactly um and and i think this really you know to me crystallized this being a classic. Google decided they wanted to get into the business of productivity apps, and they wanted to take a typically Google bent on it and put them in the browser instead of being installed software on your PC. And they decided to get into this business

and made the judgment that buying was going to be a faster way to get there than building in-house. Yeah, it sure does feel like a case study in the buy versus build. I mean, I think that dropping, let's say, $50 million shortcutted their time to market dramatically and put all that right brainpower in-house right away. Yep. And what's interesting is it's also, you know, I think blending a little bit kind of the tech themes here, but and I don't know what Google thought at the time in terms of their strategy, but as the battleground for productivity software has really evolved from, you know, at that time it was

Word and Excel and PowerPoint installed on your computer to now it's this whole suite of, you know, not just those applications, but also your email, also your cloud services as an organization. I mean, what do your, not only the third-party software you're running, which is your email, which is your word processing, which is your spreadsheets, but also your internal company apps that you're running on, whether that's AWS or Google Cloud Engine or Microsoft Azure, as that's really evolved in the last few years. It's almost been this mix within Google that they bought the traditional productivity software but the email uh piece with gmail and the cloud piece which we can argue you know about how much success they've had there relative to amazon

they built in-house um interesting yeah so there's the question now of you know before we get into what would have happened otherwise, David, do you think that Google should have gotten into productivity at all? Like, let's zoom out, look at Google as a business. It's an advertising business, primarily driven by AdWords, and you search and people click and Google gets a cut. And, you know, that has always been their cash cow and for the foreseeable future looks to be the largest source of their revenue. Working backwards from that, you either have to believe that that is at some point not going to become their largest stream of revenue or that that's going to rely on some data or some asset

provided by, it could be customers, by the productivity applications, does it make sense for them to be in the productivity game at all? Yeah, it's a good question. My sense is that Google for a long time has been looking for that what's next. Yeah, I mean, in fact, their revenues now are reported, since they're Alphabet now, we should be saying Alphabet, Alphabet's revenues now are reported as Google and other bets. They're so fascinated with this what's the next widget that they've restructured their entire company,

their reporting scheme, and their leadership structure around it. It's, um, it's interesting. And, um, you know, Microsoft had this challenge too,

for a long time. I mean, they were the windows company, the operating system company for a long time. Yeah. And, um, I think perhaps longer,

uh, than a lot of people would have expected that has continued to be an incredible cash cow for them. But now we're in the throes, as we talked with Kurt last week, about what is Microsoft today? It's a mobile-first, cloud-first company. It's not an operating system, an office company. And for Google, they're the search company.

They've been the search company now for nearly 20 years. Wow, I feel old. Yeah. Not quite 20 years uh and when wow i feel old yeah not quite 20 years but 18 years google is going to college you know google's graduating from high school this year and they're going to college um if we had a coin name for naming episodes that's what we named this one and um and and i think this is a big part of the question of what does Google want to be when it grows up? And actually, I think a relevant other acquisition, flashing forward to today, Google recently acquired a company called Bebop, which was founded by Diane Green, who was the founder of VMware. And Diane was on Google's board. And Bebop was nominal.

They hadn't released their product. It was still in stealth, but nominally making productivity software for the enterprise. Now, I don't think it was Word and Excel-type productivity software, but it was software about helping enterprises build their applications uh and and diane is now taking over the entire cloud business for google which includes all of google apps and google for work yeah it's interesting well two directions i want to go with this the the first one is okay maybe they've clearly they've been obsessed with big bets the whole time i mean google itself the the core project back rub the whole academic research project into

organizing the world's information and releasing the the best search engine and the one that's the most sustainable on an ongoing basis um you know that was an enormous bet and i think that now they're thinking totally crazy with these moonshot ideas. When they started with Google Docs in 90, or I'm sorry, in 2006, like, they weren't doing self driving cars, and they weren't doing balloons that deliver internet, and they weren't doing a lot of these, these, these huge projects. So maybe this felt like a possible big bet to them for the future of their company, looking at Microsoft and seeing that productivity of that era was such a cash cow and is just now sort of dwarfed by how big they're thinking with all their current big bets. And this was sort of like an early on possible big bet that we're seeing that's sort of legacy. Like, I'm not sure Google would go into this space starting today. Yep. Yep. I agree. Um, but it's interesting to go back to that time. And I wonder if Google, um, have to, I mean, sitting here today in 2016, uh, Microsoft,

uh, as much as they've had a resurgence in the last couple of years, they're not as relevant in terms of the, you know, most important strategic players into, you know, landscape and technology. But going back to the mid 2000s with Google looking at Microsoft, and I wonder if they saw the Windows Office, you know, two legs of the, you know, the stool, the non-balancing stool and thought, gosh, those two core businesses in an operating system and productivity. And they thought about themselves and said, you know, if we want to be like Microsoft, our analogy for operating systems is search. You know, we're the operating system of the web. What is the productivity on the web? And when you think about when they started Google Docs, that was what it was and still is to a large extent to this day.

Yeah, it makes total sense in that context. And I think that, you know, if we're looking at this like three to five years ago, rather than looking at it today, I'd be sitting here preaching or I guess singing the praises of Google as this is one of the most classic examples ever of low-end disruption. I mean, you have the big thing that the enterprise people are buying with these companies that need every single last feature of Office, even though any given person only uses 5% of it. And most of them use the same 5%, but you need all those features because that's how you get the big enterprise contract. As you know well, did you stuff all 100% of those features into Office for iPad?

No, it was fun. We got to rethink the lightweight productivity, we called it, which was super fun. But in low-end disruption you get this new income this new person that comes along google in this case with google docs everything's a total toy it doesn't have any of the features that the enterprise need they're giving it away for free but like at the end of the day there's so many people that look at that real-time collaboration available on the web cloud storage as like wait this is way

more important to me than all those old things that colloquially everyone believed were necessary and i think the difference of where we're sitting today from a few years ago is i don't think it fulfilled its low-end disruption promise of unseating the incumbent. I mean, I was all braced and ready for, for office to become less relevant and Google docs to be the future and them to slowly add on the rich feature set that people would call the new incumbent.

Yeah. And so, so let me, let me ask you, I'm curious, you guys started pioneer Square Labs in 2015. Uh-huh. Do you have on either your computers or via Office 365 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint?

We do because of BizSpark. BizSpark is the Microsoft program that makes a lot of their software available for free to startups. Startups, interesting. If you didn't have that, would you pay for those? Would you use just Google Docs? At least a couple of us would, just because any of our legal documents are going to be changed in Word, and that needs to have perfect rendering.

There are definitely still industries that require high-fidelity, perfect rendering. There are definitely still industries that require high fidelity, perfect rendering of documents. Yeah. But, you know, like anything that I open that, when I'm writing like a quick feature spec or like a one-pager on an idea or a welcome document that we're going to send out to new users of our application or anything like that,

it's all Google Docs. So, I mean, really, I'd say like anything that I start from scratch these days is Google Docs. It's Google Docs. The other direction that I wanted to go with that is when we were talking with Kurt last week, and something that's become completely obvious with Amazon's earnings breaking out AWS, that, you know, Azure is very much the future for Microsoft. AWS is already as profitable as an independent business as their entire e-commerce businesses in a much shorter time period for Amazon, for Amazon.

Sorry. Microsoft wishes it were part of Microsoft. Well, yeah. So Microsoft with Azure, Amazon with AWS, a lot of interesting news in the last couple weeks with Google and Google Cloud Platform. I think there was some news that Apple was moving there.

There's actually been a tremendous amount of news in the last couple weeks. Apple developing their own internal cloud or their own cloud hardware. Apple developing their own hardware to put in their own data centers and run their own cloud infrastructure. Yep. Dropbox doing the same thing. Yep. I guess where I'm going with this is in these cloud services, you kind of have these three layers. Infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and then software as a service.

Each of these three players, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, have all the layers of the stack. They started in different places. Amazon kind of with infrastructure, Microsoft all the way up with software, and Google with originally Google App Engine with platform as a service. Do you think that as all these businesses are betting on that being the cash cow of the future, do all of them need all of the layers or would google be fine without productivity software and the software as a service it's interesting um this gets a little bit into um maybe i'll just jump into it uh you

know my sort of tech theme um as we've been describing you know all of google's strategic decisions around this business probably made perfect sense to them when they made them in the mid-2000s and even up until a few years ago. But the landscape has changed and the battleground has changed for what productivity is. And that's why I brought up, why you brought this up now and why I was mentioning earlier the sort of cloud and the infrastructure layer. And I think, Ben, the answer to your question is no. And I think one need look no farther than AWS to see that. I mean, AWS started as infrastructure. That's what they do.

And, of course, they've moved up the stack and added other things. But they aren't offering email. I think there is some Amazon email, but nobody uses it. It's not as serious, yeah. And yet they're still at least in you know inning number maybe we're in inning number two of the cloud now uh they're they're pretty far and away you know the leader um and it would be it's interesting to think about like what could google have done rather than copying the microsoft strategy in the mid-2000s of okay we've got the

quote-unquote operating system now we're going to do productivity what if they had instead fought amazon more directly at that point on the infrastructure layer or gone with another another aspect entirely well yeah it's interesting it's interesting. I think with Google App Engine, you were locking yourself into Google's proprietary data storage and you had to use Python. It was like when you were looking at the cloud services in inning number one

or the top half, the choices, it wasn't apples to apples at all because you're like, well, I'm going to either build for Google App Engine or I'm not. I don't really get choices around that. Or Amazon, it looks like, gives me just one level of abstraction about running my own server which i think is what i want yeah and like it was interesting how those two companies made enormously different bets there and amazon and you look at the diversity of of companies and

enterprises and workloads that have that have adopted Amazon over the past few years. And you mentioned Dropbox moving off of Amazon, but for the longest time, Dropbox. Amazon kind of won the first round of this fight across productivity because everybody used AWS. Dropbox paid the Amazon tax. There's a great Stratechery article, which as our listeners know,

we are both big fans of Ben Thompson. But his article last week on the Amazon tax is just fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. And before we move off this point, I want to revisit when I say that the low-end disruption machine sort of failed. Obviously, people use Google Docs all over the place. We even talked about how it's my go-to. For the longest time... But it hasn't become a great business for Google. No, that's the thing. There's been stagnation in Google,

the adoption of Google apps in the enterprise in a way that if they were really displacing the incumbent, disrupting the incumbent, the world would have moved to whatever their new set of features and new sort of market they were creating. The world would have needed those things. And that's not necessarily true from a monetization perspective. Yeah. And instead, actually, I mean, to bring back to our last episode, what you've seen happen is this resurgence of Microsoft, of the original winner in this space, you know, with granted some expensive acquisitions that they've made, you know, as we discussed last week, half a billion or so in total. But Office 365 and now Outlook and Outlook Mobile through Accompli are winning huge share.

Yep. Yep. There's a... I got to find this real quick. There was an interesting point made. Here we go um about a year and a half ago uh google apps had double the market share of microsoft's cloud offering according to a research report by bitglass the 16 versus 8 that whole bunch of people still using on-premise productivity and email software more recently about six months

ago office 365 had jumped ahead of Google Apps 25% versus 23%. And it's a thing where Microsoft got their act together in Office 365 and building the cloud productivity tools. And to be honest, I worked on what was then Word web app before they were called Office Online. It's actually my internship at Microsoft. And it was a joke compared to Google Docs. I mean, I was writing specs and looking at Google Docs for like, well, how did they do it as a reference? And then figuring out, can we do it better?

Side note. Nope. Yeah, not a good place to be as a product team. No, no. We were totally trying to fast follow, but built on much older infrastructure. And it was kind of a nightmare. And what's happened is really that native clients on all platforms at Microsoft have become excellent through building and buying. And the cloud applications have held their own.

And you can do real-time collaboration now with Microsoft's applications. And even if the user experience, which in my opinion of their cloud applications, is still below Google's, they're at least able to tell that the cloud versions of Word and Excel and PowerPoint are great or beating or resurgent or beating Google Docs. But the point is it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's the wrong battleground. It's the wrong battleground. Microsoft is still capturing the majority of the value in productivity. Google is capturing almost zero right now

in terms of the dollars being spent by enterprises and individuals on productivity. Google is capturing almost zero right now in terms of the dollars being spent by enterprises and individuals on productivity. And Amazon is just taking a tax on everybody else. Yep. God, this is such a good case study in incentives. I mean, I think like, if I'm ever struggling to understand a business, taking a step back and saying, what is every party incentivized to do brings instant clarity microsoft is a productivity company operating system productivity company and you know operating system broadly defined that will become something much more cloud oriented google is an advertising company and it's not like this low-end disruption was coming from the the company that represents the future of productivity.

It was coming from an advertising company looking for their next thing. So when push comes to shove, Microsoft needs to defend their castle. And they weren't defending it against a productivity upstart. They were defending it against an advertising company that was looking at it as sort of an afterthought so my opinion the the atrophy of of google docs in in fighting that war or in fighting whatever war they should be fighting where it's going is largely because they have problems to think about in the future of their advertising business what it means as they transition from desktop to mobile and i mean we haven't gotten into android yet at all and i think yeah kind of stay away from there but like future episodes yeah they have advertising problems that they need to address their

that are more serious it's a great point i mean think about it this way like you're uh larry page jeff bezos and steve bomber and then satya nadela like what how much is productivity on your mind like what percentage of your mind share does that occupy jeff bezos probably zero uh and and larry page you know i don't know 10 right like and bomber and then nadela like you know 90 yeah who's gonna win right right or who maybe not who's gonna win but who's going to who's Right. Right. Or who, maybe not who's going to win, but who's going to, who's got their back against the wall

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Well, it's hard to say. This actually is a really interesting one. Had these companies, let's take Rightly, for instance, had that been an independent company launched publicly and let's say they built Google Docs, what would that look like? Yeah, it's interesting in thinking about the incentives. know you have a true new productivity company going after an old dinosaur or is were they still fighting an unimportant battle yeah like well and let's look at um you know let's look at box and dropbox here because these are the closest comps we have would rightly have gone into storage maybe yeah is that interesting or you know i mean mean, storage that Box and Dropbox obviously did. You know, today, who knows what will happen in the future, but I think with both of those companies...

Apple should buy Dropbox. Well, there's history there. Well, it's a different person making that decision now. Yes. it's a different person making that decision now yes we're referring to uh steve jobs famously offered to buy dropbox for a billion dollars i believe something around that uh and then i don't know that it was ever first he called it a feature not a not a company and then when he came back with his tail between his legs then drew houston told him that uh you know politely declined but um again who knows what the future holds but sitting here march 2016 do we think box or dropbox could ever be a company at

the scale of microsoft or google or amazon personally i think that's hard to see. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. If it does go that direction, you know, it's Box going the Microsoft route and Dropbox pioneering some new... Well, they need consumers to pay, which is a really hard thing to do for utility file storage, things like that. But if a mythical rightly or upstartle still existed, would that be more of a contender than a storage-focused company? Yeah, I mean, perhaps what happens is Dropbox buys Upstartle, and then you have a true, you know, the Microsoft equivalent of OneDrive and Word Online. And that is sort of the yep the productivity stack clearly dropbox has uh you know had these thoughts as well i mean they bought mailbox and they bought several other companies god that is a company that's not good at acquisitions future episode yeah all of dropbox's bodies buried. That's mean.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. I already did my tech theme. When do you want to talk about, Ben? Yeah, I had written down that I wanted to draw the parallel to classic low-end disruption, so I think we beat that one pretty good. All right.

Should we do conclusion? Yeah. Yeah. we've beat that one pretty good all right should we do conclusion yeah yeah then we've got one more section that we're adding on yes we'll get to that in a minute yeah stay tuned yeah so we gave youtube i gave youtube a c um and that's that's become a money pit for Google, at least to, you know, I think it's a relatively break-even business, but God, is that thing expensive to run. Yep. This, not terribly expensive to run, not terribly expensive to buy, probably expensive from a manpower perspective.

Like, it probably just takes a lot of uh a lot of engineers to to keep this thing going and develop it but but given i mean google does make money on um yeah so i think i think the business unit of of uh google apps for business is is uh self-sustaining you know i'm gonna also give it a c but more because I think it is a distraction for Google and less because I think it's not expensive in terms of dollars. I think it's expensive in terms of opportunity cost of attention. Yeah. Interesting. So you're making an argument, not this specific argument, but a sort of category argument that by acquiring these companies and taking a productivity-focused strategy for several years, adopting that at Google, it was actually a major distraction from either their core strategy within search or finding another sort of leg of the stool that would be a better fit with their core

capabilities as a company versus trying to go down a path that they really weren't equipped to succeed in. Yeah. I mean, I think at the end of the day, Google was looking for a second huge business, much like for Microsoft, they had Windows and then they had Office. And there's some argument that it contributes to their existing business, but they were going after selling productivity tools. And that just didn't become a huge business for them. I mean, it's a decent business. Um, when really, you know, there's, there's a big potential problem with, with their, their current business as things go more mobile. And now they're looking at all these other moonshot opportunities. And I think for a long time they thought productivity could be a second huge business for them. Yeah. Hmm. So I was going to give this acquisition a B for many of the reasons you

initially started talking about. Well, you know, it wasn't a huge success, but they didn't spend a lot of money and it does, it is, it's not losing a lot of money for them, uh, or consuming a lot of capital like YouTube. But I think I'm convinced by your argument, because for technology companies where you operate in this battlefield every day, where there's this huge fog of war, and it's very, you know, uncertainty is a way of life. The sort of one resource that you have that's most important for startups and big companies alike, even Apple and Google and Microsoft and Amazon, is your focus. And this was a pretty major dilution of focus for Google for a long time. Obviously, they've been very, very successful in things like search and Android and many others. But that resource is very precious. And for both of us working

with startups, this is what we coach founders all the time. Focus, focus, focus. This is the most important thing. It's all that you have as a startup. I think I'm convinced, Ben. I'm going to go B-. it up um i think i'm i'm i'm convinced ben i'm gonna go b minus still more generous than me all right so we have a new section um and this is a section where we talk about things that uh a media or a movie or a tv show or something we're reading or a book or a new publication or something we find fascinating and uh in in true lingo we're calling this the carve out so uh i will start with my carve out from this week um and actually we'll call it since

the last episode bill simmons launched the ringer and for for those of you who are not not subscribed to the ringer um it's totally sports focused but it's it's really the the um kind of crown jewel of the bill simmons media empire i think after after grantland after his for those who you don't know, Bill Simmons partnered with ESPN to launch Grantland, which was incredible long-form content about sports. And it was like the most incredibly well-written prose about sports you could ever read that would take you on this journey and make comparisons to pop culture and an event that happened 50 years ago and truly relatable.

And Bill Simmons is a gift as a writer. And we saw him launch a podcast. And finally, The Ringer, which is the thing that has – it's starting as an email newsletter and a website, but it's a very small staff and it's kind of a new media publication that Bill Simmons has launched after the tumultuous shutdown of Grantland by ESPN. As, you know, it's probably made sense. It's a very expensive property. But I'm going to read a quote from the first email that went out, Bill introducing the ringer. And he does this great little section where he talks about all the names that it could have been. And this is just one of the reasons why he's a great writer to read.

But he's talking about several of the names and the paragraph ends with, Upper Echelon? Sounds like a hedge fund. Barnstorm? Sounds like a horse that would be favored to win the Kentucky Derby. Side 2? Too insider. Grant World? Too ludicrous. F off ESPN? Too easy. Too easy. And I think just rarely do you ever get a startup talking about like their ridiculous naming meeting.

The first email includes the classic photograph of the whiteboard with all the potential names crossed off. It's just like it's some of the most relatable writing. Even if you're not a sports person, it's just incredibly entertaining and erosive. I love it. I love it. I love it. I should say too, part of the inspiration for The Carve Out was my wife Jenny introduced

me to two of Slate's podcasts, the Political Gab Fest and the Culture Gab Fest, both of which are excellent. They both do a segment like this. shout out to slate and and thank you to them um so my carve out for the week is uh is something that i think uh will uh picks up on a lot of themes from our show going back to our very first episode uh and i just

finally finished uh crossed off my reading list creativity Creativity Inc., which is the Pixar book by Ed Catmull. It is fantastic. One of the best books I've read, certainly this year, but in the past few years. Best nonfiction books. And ordinarily, I'm pretty tough on sort of business books. And they can often be trite and repetitive. This was none of those things. And I think listeners, if you enjoy our show, you will love this book.

And the one thing I would say from it, there's so many good stories from Steve Jobs stories to all the Pixar history, and just general management lessons and startup lessons. But my favorite part of it is talking about the creative process and managing that creative process, which obviously Pixar is so good at. And one of the points that Ed makes in the book is that it is always a struggle. Even at Pixar, they've done this so many times. And there's this temptation for them, even within the company, to make it easier, to make it rinse and repeat. Why do they have to struggle every time? But if you don't have that struggle, you don't get something great. And I think that is so applicable to startups. I see it with the companies that I work with.

Every day there are good times and bad times. But even the companies where to the outside world it looks like it's all, let me use my least favorite phrase of up and to the right, because it's always to the right. But it looks like it's all up as it goes to the right. You know, inside, like it's up and down every single day.

And there are periods of just huge existential challenges. And, and one of the book talks about like every Pixar film and every Disney film since, since the acquisition has just had, you know, if you don't have this crisis, you know,

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