Big Technology Podcast - Doing Business With Zuckerberg and Bezos — With Donald Graham

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Don Graham is the former owner of the Washington Post. He's spent countless hours working with Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and he joins Big Technology Podcast to share inside stories about how they operate. Graham met Zuckerberg when the Facebook founder was 20. He then proposed an investment — which Zuckerberg turned down — and eventually joined Facebook's board. Graham also sold the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos in 2013. Join us for a rare view into how these founders do business, and stick around for the end where we discuss the true definition of success.

LinkedIn Presents Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond, but we have some major, major news to share with you today because Big Technology Podcast is joining the brand new LinkedIn Podcast Network. Yes, LinkedIn is introducing a podcast network today and it just announced it a few minutes ago, actually right before we made this episode live, and it's going to feature a handful of great shows. So there's going to be shows from LinkedIn, including Jesse Hemple's Hello Monday, which explores the changing nature of work, and Dan Roth's This is Working, which has conversations

with great business leaders. And then there's also going to be some others coming into the fold from outside. Shows like Rufus Gris comes the next big idea. And of course, my own big technology podcast, the one you're listening to today. So this is a partnership and it's not a sale, which is important because it means that we're going to have the same exact interviews with tech insiders and outside agitators as we've always had here. I'm not pulling any punches. And the only difference is that big technology podcast is going to grow a lot, hopefully. And we'll do it as we get in front of LinkedIn's 810 million members in more than 200 different territories. LinkedIn is also going to take over ad sales. And I have been and I will continue to be extremely active on LinkedIn.

So please go give me a follow over there. Type in Alex Cantorwitz and you should find me. I just launched a newsletter there as well. So I think this is going to be awesome for big technology podcast. It's going to be great for LinkedIn as well. And it means we'll be able to keep stepping up our game and bringing you amazing shows. Okay, let me introduce our guest. Our guest today is Don Graham. He's the former owner of the Washington Post. And the conversation you're about to hear is exactly the type we want to bring you on big technology podcast, one that takes you behind the scenes in the tech world to help you see what's happening behind the headlines. Don spent a ton of time with big technology business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Cheryl

Sandberg. And today he's going to share what it's like working with these people, give you an understanding of how they run their companies and make their decisions. Okay, so Dom will discuss what it was like meeting Mark Zuckerberg when Mark was 20, how he tried to poach Cheryl Sandberg, not once but twice how Bill Gates views founder decisions and what it was like selling the Washington Post to Bezos. Don also spoke with me for my book, Always Day 1, which I will always remain grateful for. So we go over some of those stories again. And listen, this is just one of those shows, I hope that will leave you feeling like you know the tech world a little bit better through the eyes of the people making the decisions. So without further ado, let's bring Don on the show.

Hi, Don. Welcome to the show. Thanks. I'm so glad to be on the big tech podcast, Alex. Thanks. We're thrilled to have you. It's great to be back on the line with you. We're going to get into some really interesting stories. Some you've told me about Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, the way that they run companies, the way they lead. Talk a little bit about what the definition of success is as we go on. But first, I'd love to hear from your perspective. Well, actually, maybe the best way to do this is if you could introduce your, yourself to the audience. I'm sure many of the people listening know you and know your story, but for those who don't, if you could share a little bit. Well, I know very much that many of those listening know much about my story. My name's Don Graham. I was the, I grew up in Washington, D.C., in a family where my grandfather, Eugene Meyer, when I was born, was the owner of the Washington Post. And as I grew up, my father, Phil Graham, became the CEO of the Post. He died tragically by his own hand in 1963, leaving my mother, Catherine Graham in the position of having to decide whether to sell the newspaper that had meant so much to her all her life

or to try somehow to run it, although no woman was running any company at that time. With her children cheering her on, she bravely decided she would try to run the company and became one of the greatest newspaper publishers, and I think, of all time, and I think a really great CEO. So I was born into a family business, went to college, got drafted, was in Vietnam for a year,

came back and had a funny year, a year and a half, where I was a police officer in northeast Washington, D.C. for a year. Oh, wow. And came to work on the, The Post as a reporter in 1971, worked there for 42 years because I was a family member in a family company.

I became the publisher of the paper in 1979, the CEO of the company in 1991. And you want to talk to me about my sporadic acquaintances back in those long ago days with the people you personify as big tech. Yeah, because you have spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. And it is interesting. First of all, it's interesting that coming from the news business, you are so interested in spending time with tech leaders. Can you share a little bit more about what drew you to them? Well, anybody in the news business was, you would have had to be absolutely blind to ignore the fact that starting in the early 90s with the World Wide Web and, and. and AOL, that people were starting to get information online in ways that they had previously got on television through the newspaper, through the radio, or in other ways. And it was obvious

that some of that information was news. AOL pushed out a lot of news. And I was decidedly non-techie. graduated from high school in 1962, you know, 15 years before anybody started to think about making personal computers. And I knew that I, myself, wouldn't be able to puzzle out what role technology was going to play in the future of the news business. So hearing about any bright person in the business I tried to meet them and get their ideas about what a newspaper ought to be doing fascinating and so in 2005 you come across a kind of awkward Harvard I don't know if he was a dropout yet or he was on his way to doing so he was he already dropped out you know so an awkward Harvard dropped out drop out his name was Mark Zuckerberg so

tell me a little bit about how you met him and what your your relationship was like I was CEO of something called the Washington Post company in that day. It's still the same company, but we've changed the title now to Graham Holdings since selling the Washington Post, which we'll get to. But as before, we were trying to understand the digital future. And we're looking always at interesting startups and interesting ideas in the space. I had gone to Harvard. I was a member of the class of 1966.

Mark was a member of the class of 2006. There were only about four or five people reporting to me at our company, but one was a genius named Chris Ma, a polymath, a great editor, a great innovator, and a great manager. And Chris's wonderful daughter, Olivia, was a classmate and friend of Marks. and she, when Mark started Facebook in, I think, the spring of 2004, Olivia told Chris what an astonishing response. Facebook got on the Harvard campus and said, you ought to meet this guy. You really ought to get to know him.

And I, the post had written stories about Facebook, the Wall Street Journal. had written stories about Facebook. I read a fair amount about what it was, but in 2004 and five, the only people with access to it were college students. And in not that many colleges, you had to have a dot edu address to join the Facebook network. So I had never seen Facebook. And Chris reached out, along with Jerry Rosberg, his friend of mine and another person working at the company in a big job. And Chris and Jerry and I, Olivia, I think, introduced Mark to Chris. And Mark and Sean Parker, another person you have encountered in your life, were coming to Washington for an unspecified purpose. And so Chris reached out and asked if they would be willing to meet with us.

Jerry and Chris met with Mark and Sean before I did, and Jerry came running in and said, this guy's fascinating. You really want to talk to him. So that kicked off about a 45 minute to an hour first meeting with Mark. Okay. And what was that meeting like? Yeah, did he live up to the hype? Well, it was fascinating.

This is January 2005. Mark Zuckerberg was 20. I believe he had completed his first two years at Harvard, then dropped out correctly thinking that he had a company growing monstrous, not even a company, a site growing monstrously fast in Facebook, and that he had to try to build it very rapidly. So, Mark sat and tried to describe remembering that I had never seen it, what Facebook was and what it aspired to do. I listened for 15 or 20 minutes, and I was absolutely blown away. The first thing I said was, Mark, I think this is the best business idea anybody's brought to this table.

And I don't give myself much credit for what followed, but I do give myself credit for that. What about it had your antennas, you know, poke up? Because, you know, I was an early user of it back in the days when it was, you know, probably right around the time where you were meeting with Mark. And, you know, it was fine. It was kind of this directory with this feed. But I don't think any of us, well, that's not true. Most of us using it back in the day didn't really understand, you know, how it was going to explode the way.

And neither did Mark. I mean, no one understood it. No one could have understood it. And let us remember that while we're talking about a primitive version of Facebook, and the time when my memory is that Facebook had six employees, including Mark and Sean, and was on a total of 30 college campuses. And it certainly must have had no revenue or next to no revenue. And but what stunned me was that I asked him this, but the Post and Times had both written it. He said that over 95% of students at Harvard College were on Facebook. I didn't ask about the graduate schools. And what did they use it for? They used it as a way of communicating with and understanding each other. They used it. And when I went, Alex, when I went to college, the college newspaper the Harvard Crimson also had a primitive communications network that I had never seen equaled and I had longed to do it. These were four large, old-fashioned ledger books like an accountant would have used that were kept open. Two of them referred to as open comment books

where anybody was entitled to read what we were writing to each other, we wrote in pen, signed with our initials, and wrote anything from our reaction to a story in the paper that day to something we were thinking about, a book we had read, something, a possible news story. Someone else had told us. In two of the comment books, articles were pasted, editorials or reviews or something from that day's crimson. People wrote their comments on them being sometimes very flattering and sometimes very critical, sometimes critical in perhaps a nasty way, but often critical in what was meant to be an editor's way, saying, you know, are you sure this is right or have you thought of this. And it gave you more intense feedback on your writing and thinking that anything I'd

experienced before or since. When Mark described Facebook, I thought of that. And I thought of how hard it was in my world to get people to frankly say to each other openly what they thought in a helpful way. I'd never been able to find such a system of communication in any company. And I thought, well, this could really do a lot. But I absolutely was not thinking about Facebook beyond colleges. I mean, you looked at it and you said, well, could you open this to adults to everybody else one day? And you thought that's possible.

But he had a long way to go before that was possible. Right. And so at a certain point, you decided this is something that I want to invest in. Well, this is what evolved. I said to Mark how highly I thought of his idea and I again give myself credit for this. I said, look, I have to tell you that any venture capital firm in Silicon Valley would outbid us for an obvious reason, which is if you are very successful, we would make money, a venture capital firm would make money. but if you're very successful a venture capital firm, it would be very valuable to them when they were raising their next round and we're not, we don't have a next round, you know,

so all it would be to us is a financial triumph and maybe a way to learn. But the person who responded to that was not Mark, but Sean. Sean, who was the president of Facebook, had previously been the president of a company called Napster, which do you remember? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I was a power user back in a day. So, he felt that he had been unfairly pushed out of Napster, which he had co-created by venture capitalists and was furious with every, with the whole notion of venture capital and what these people could do.

So Sean said, well, we do want to raise money not involving venture capitalists. So, so I said, well, we're interested. So Mark, Sean, Jerry, and Chris took this to another room and emerged, you know, know, nothing was ever signed, but Mark and Sean were very interested. A price was stated and, you know, wasn't objected to. And did we have an agreement in the legal sense? No. In some sense, we did. But they had not agreed. They had absolutely not done anything to agree to our terms or our price that would be legally binding. But I should go back to that meeting because there's one other thing that you sort of indirectly referred to. I've described this meeting before, but it still fascinates me. Mark was 20. My youngest child was 22, and I have four children. So I had watched a lot of 20-year-olds, some of them very bright. And you know, and everyone 40-year-old knows

that a lot of people in their late teens and early 20s are quite shy and awkward, including some very interesting ones. Mark Zuckerberg in January 2005 in this conversation was the shyest, most awkward young person I have ever seen. Really? What do I mean? Yeah. I would ask him a question.

And I'd realize that I was asking him questions others had not because, again, I'd never seen the product. I didn't, I wasn't tuned in enough to ask probably smart questions about Facebook, so I was asking larger ones. And he, when I asked him a question, he would pause. There would be a pause. And I would think, did I insult him? Did he not understand me? But he was thinking.

Before he answered, he wanted to think about it. And I thought to my, I'm from Washington, and people don't usually think before. answering questions usually. Everybody in town has their opinion ready to give you, whether they know anything about the subject or not. I wasn't used to that, and I found that very interesting. And that wasn't once. That was several times that Mark paused over an answer, thought it over, and then gave it to me. I came away quite impressed. And so the other thing I remember was this. I told you that I had spent an absolutely ridiculous amount of my time at Harvard on the newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, which was an early newspaper controlled by undergraduates.

And, you know, maybe 40 or 50 of us just poured ourselves into it spending absurd amounts of time, writing stories, editing stories, getting the next day's paper out. And when Mark told me that 95 or more percent of the class at Harvard was on Facebook, I said to him, well, there goes the crimson, meaning the Facebook had perfect penetration. The tiny advertisers, the class ring company and the bars and the restaurants that advertised on the crimson would have a more effective medium. And Mark laughed. And he said, well, it's true. You know, if we wanted to go into Cambridge and New Haven and pick up this small amount of advertising, we probably could. But what's much more important to us is to get Facebook established in colleges around the United States and maybe one day around the world so that others don't get there first and build a successful product that, that keeps us out when you said there goes the crimson did it strike you that there could go a good chunk of the revenue from newspaper companies as well or was it still too small of a scale it was it was i would like to say that i was that my thinking went that far i probably was in

mark's thinking but it wasn't in no it wasn't in mark's thinking at that point marks but it is how it played out which is interesting well you could say that um yes it is true I would say Google has been much more of a challenge in newspapers than Facebook. But I would also say that the problems of newspapers, newspaper circulation was going down in the United States by 1990 before there was an internet. We were putting out a product at that time that was much better suited to people my age. I was then 45 than to people the age of my children than in their 20s. And, you know, it was, and we didn't fully understand that, or we thought we would have the ability to fix it better than we ever did. So, you know, as people in the early 2000s, the advertising on the web gathered steam, I often thought to myself, well, what would happen if Google went out of business tomorrow?

And I think the answer was it would have been bad for us. we were getting more, we were getting more traffic and more viewers, therefore more revenue. Yeah. Google on the internet than they were costing us, I thought. That's a pretty counterintuitive perspective from, you know, you hear most of the, you know, narrative around news publishers and tech companies and people tend to say that, you know, these companies have taken revenue from them. Well, it is certainly true that had we been.

wiser and more collaborative, negotiating a fee arrangement with Google or Facebook would have been beneficial to newspapers. But if you've ever seen a bunch of newspaper companies trying to collaborate, you'll know why that didn't happen. Yeah, that's right. So let's get back to this investment. So you had this agreement in, you know, a verbal agreement, or, whatever it was. And then Mark came back and basically said, we are going to go with those VCs.

Well, a couple of things happened in the meantime. Mark was working in Palo Alto. And Mark worked in an unusual way. At that time, he was working all night coding. And I don't know what else he was doing, but I could tell that, you know, working on the product was taking up an enormous amount of his time. So when we talked, it had to be at three in the afternoon, Eastern time, or later, because that was when he got up. And so he was waking up. Yeah. We talked once or twice. And Jerry was in, Jerry and Chris were in closer touch with Mark and Sean than I was. But Jerry came to me and reported that by the time, you know, Mark got back to Silicon Valley, that VCs were all but posing as pizza delivery men to get

into Facebook and to pitch. A friend of mine, Jim Breyer of Excel, called me and proposed that we split the post-proposed investment between the post and Excel. Jim and I differ slightly in our memory of that conversation. But I was dealing with a CEO and a president who had told me to my face, we don't want any VC firms in this. So we did not make the arrangement, Jim proposed. And Jim wound up out bidding us, I don't know, two and a half times what we had bid, which was what I figured would happen. Because, you know, I knew that if Facebook was a big success, it would be the

Excel was already a successful firm, but I think the investment in Facebook made Excel much more important and much more successful than it would have been otherwise. Yeah, people see a ruthlessness in Mark. You know, maybe they might read into this story as like, okay, he agreed on doing the investment with you and then, you know, basically, you know, did the thing that would end up getting him further? I didn't see it that way. Mark ultimately called me after Breyer had proposed the much higher price. He told me that Breyer had come along and proposed. He told me that Breyer had come along and proposed this. And he said to me, but I feel I have a moral dilemma. I remember I was on a phone walking up and down on a sidewalk outside a Christmas party at a friend's house, a party at a

friend's house, not a Christmas party. And he said, you know, this is the price they've proposed and it was indeed far more than we were proposed. I thought for a moment of saying, I'll match it I'll top it, but I thought, well, Jim will just double the price again. I mean, there's no, you know, we're not talking, you know, I'm not going to win a bidding war for sure. And my first question to Mark was, do you understand that, you know, when you and Sean were here, you told me you didn't want a VC investment. And I thought that was some pretty, might be reasonable because if the VC makes an investment, it'll come out of a fund. The fund has an expiration date. and they're going to want you to do something so that they get the benefit for the investors in

their funds. So there's a five-year, a seven-year, a three-year termination date after which they're going to be pushing you very hard for an outcome. And we will not. We are as long-term-minded as I think you are. And I said, do you really, does the money make that big a difference to you? Well, he said, yes. He thought it did, and he explained why.

And we talked and went back and forth, again, I remember this is about a 45-minute phone call, at the end of which I said, okay, I will release you from your moral dilemma, go get every cent you can out of those guys. And good luck and stay in touch. And I left thinking about this, thinking, you know, being a little critical of my own. behavior, not on this call, but between the first and second, but between the first meeting and that call. But I really thought about Mark, not this is ruthless. I thought this is pretty good for a 20-year-old. Call me and say, call me and say, I have a moral dilemma. And we should remember that while this now looks very different, at the time, I was getting a call from one of maybe 5,000 people with a startup in Silicon Valley, which might be very successful. Google was already established and was such a story, but also 90% might be worthless. My space was already existed and was much, much bigger. So I was disappointed, but I did not get angry at Mark,

not in the least. Yeah. And then you ended up taking a seat on the board. I'm curious what it was like being on the board inside Facebook, especially so the conventional, you know, wisdom on the Facebook board is that they're just sort of kind of hanging out and Mark is making all the decisions because he has this unchecked voting power. What was it really like? Well, I should tell anybody listening to Alex's podcast to please remember that I'm talking about it. events that took place from 2005, which is already 17 years ago, to 2015 when I left the Facebook board, which is seven years ago, I have the memory of a 76-year-old, which means I am not at all confident that my memory tracks with what I was thinking or saying at the time. but so I just want to say that at the outset.

So I stayed in touch with Mark after that conversation. We didn't talk all the time, but we talked once in a while. I had a daughter who lived in San Francisco and worked at Facebook, and when I came out to visit her, I would sometimes call up Mark and see if he were free for a visit. And once he took Molly and he took my daughter and me to dinner, and that was. was where I first met Priscilla Chan, who was out visiting Mark. Then he said he wanted to talk about something, and I can't even remember what he wanted to talk about. But he took me, he said, I don't want to take you to the office to talk about this. I want to meet in my apartment.

So we went to his apartment, which was, what did it look like? It looked like my son's dorm room at Columbia, but less furnished. It had the total, the total furniture in the apartment. was a mattress, I believe, on the floor, a small kitchen table and two folding chairs at that table. And I thought, well, any success Facebook is having is not rushing right to Mark's head here. He was driving, I think, a Hyundai or something, just the stock model. And he was wearing his t-shirts. So, you know, you could see that.

But the further funny story about that apartment is this. Facebook way back in that day negotiated an agreement with Microsoft. Microsoft invested in Facebook at a very high valuation. And they agreed to some arrangement where Microsoft was going to help Facebook sell and grow advertising. I can't remember what the hell it was about. So Mark told me that Google had learned. in the late stages that this was in the works. And Larry or Sergey had called him and said they wanted to see him.

And they said, well, we can't, you can't come to Google and we can't come to Facebook. So they met in Mark's apartment. He said. Oh, man. But, and Mark sat on the mattress and the two of them sat on the folding chairs. And he said, but they brought Eric and he had to sit on the floor. So that led to Mark's moving to another apartment. which I also saw, and which looked like a one-room suite in a 1950s holiday inn.

I mean, it had to be the cheapest furnished apartment in Palo Alto and was rented not by Mark, but by his then assistant. So Mark did not have the gene of wanting to spend a lot of money at that time. I remember that. So in 2008, I had one conversation with Mark and one with Cheryl Sandberg. I had tried to hire Cheryl Sandberg in 2001 when she left the Clinton White House. I had a habit of going to the White House personnel office when an administration was coming to an end. They all hire brilliant people in the White House.

Some of those people, because they have, they've found a partner or something, like the idea of staying in Washington, there aren't many businesses in Washington, and the Washington Post was one such business. So a couple of times I had found people who had worked out very well at the company from people departing from an administration. Everybody I talked to in the Clinton administration said, well, if you want to talk to bright young talent, you've got to talk to Cheryl Sandberg. So I did. And I wanted to get Cheryl to come to the company and help shape our thinking about the

future. I offered her a job doing that and using my biggest weapon. I had her to lunch with Catherine Graham, which both liked very much. But Cheryl ridiculously wanted to go to this Google place and did, and the rest is history. So in 2007 or eight, I thought Cheryl might be getting tired of Google. And I went out to try to recruit her back to the Washington Post Company in a very senior role running a lot of things. Cheryl, by then, had been running the, she and Tim Armstrong between them had been running the advertising side of Google. And I thought if I could get Cheryl to come back first and foremost, she knew every advertiser in the United States. That wouldn't be bad for our businesses, which included the Post and Newsweek and some television businesses.

And so she and I talked about that, and she was quite interested. Dave Goldberg, a wonderful husband, was not interested in leaving Silicon Valley. He was about to invest in Survei Monkey. He didn't know what he was going to invest in at that point, but he thought he wanted to take over something. So Cheryl then called me and said, look, this isn't going to work. But I've had a conversation with someone you know, which is Mark. and he wants to talk to me about this and I'm not, you know, and that, and I said, well, I would

recommend him, you know, it's a big step for you to leave Google. And I have found him to be honorable and I found him to be very, very far-sighted and very smart. I don't know anything about the business. You know, you know that. I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I have never, this is way before I was a director. So I said, I'm not fit to evaluate it for you. You have to do that for yourself, but I think you'd be okay. I think you'd like each other. Mark then called me and mentioned that he had, you know, what did I know about Cheryl? And I was not influential in the decision of either one of them. They by then, I think, Cheryl was a very well-known commodity in the Valley. And Mark knew he'd be lucky to get her. And I always thought it was incredibly brave of Cheryl.

She was 38. She was, you know, maybe the fourth or fifth ranking person at Google. And she went to work for a 23-year-old. And I thought that was remarkable at the time, and I still do. So that happened. And then subsequently, Mark or Cheryl, both one at a time called me and said that they were working to expand their board, which up to then I think had just been Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel. and would I consider joining?

And I said, damn right, I certainly would. Let me see if I can work this out. I wanted to make sure that I could see that the Washington Post was going to have to cover Facebook. I was no longer publisher of the paper, but I was, you know, a principal owner of the paper. and I wanted to make sure this didn't pose a terrible problem for the newspaper. I talked to Len Downey, the editor. I either to Meg Greenfield or Fred Hyatt, whoever was editing the editorial page at that time, I talked to Fred and spelled it out. And I think the obvious benefits to us of what we might learn as a company from what Facebook was doing were good.

So I, this was in 2008. I joined the board at the first meeting in 2009. I was the head of the governance committee. I put in age 70 retirement for directors of Facebook. And I was the first to retire in June of 2015. And on that board, did you find that it was just kind of a rubber stamp for Mark's decisions or was there a back and forth? Because, again, he has the voting power that doesn't really force him to. This was early.

Right. And the board in that day, the only person then on the board who's still on the board other than Mark and Cheryl was Mark Andreessen, whose qualifications speak for themselves. The board at that time was Andreessen, Peter Thiel, soon after Reed Hastings, who was invaluable as a tech company executive. who could look at Mark as an outsider, and I'm forgetting a couple of people. But it struck me that it was a good board. Oh, and then at some point, after I was on it, we had at Erskine Bowles, who was Bill Clinton's former chief of staff. This was after Mark and Cheryl realized that Washington was going to be more of an issue

for Facebook than it had been, and they wanted to get someone who could advise them on policy. And Erskine, who also had something of a record as a venture capitalist was a choice that could not have been improved on. He was a fabulous director. So at that time, yes, I remember, you know, we understood that Mark was the sole owner of Facebook, that he voted complete control. given that, I thought this board was Frank. Mark was as open as you would want a chief executive to be with the board. He spelled out everything he thought was a present or future problem. He was very young, and there were famous instances where board procedures weren't followed.

And, however, I thought Mark was making very good use of this board and was quite happy when board members disagreed with him. The best illustration of that is someone who has tons of critics, which is Peter Thiel. So Peter is a man of very strong opinions. I don't share Peter's politics. We've never talked about the gawker suit. I'm an instinctive defender of publications against libel suits, but I've never discussed the details of it with Peter. So I don't know how I would have felt about what he did, although I'd have been instinctively

opposed. Peter was a really good director of Facebook in just the sense that your question implies. If you have ever seen Peter Thiel on a video or read his book, you know that he has very strong opinion, some of which are quite eccentric. And you could describe him as a contrarian. I'm sure Mark thought many times, why do I want to have Peter on the board? He invested $50,000 in Facebook in 2004. And here he is telling me I'm wrong every day. Peter would tell Mark over and over again when he thought Mark was making a mistake, including on things that were absolutely central to almost religion at Facebook. And you would say, what's an example? And I would

say, I was chair of the comp committee. And because of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was willing to pay, wasn't eager to pay, but was willing to pay above market salaries and compensation packages for people who Mark thought were super able, the best engineer of this type, the best developer for this purpose. They would pay a lot of money. Peter, over and over again in these meetings, I had bought,

I had, what did I know about the value of the best engineer in the world? So I, you know, with Mark and Mike Shrepfer and Cheryl and others backing Mark, I was fine with that. But Peter really kept asking Mark, look, suppose you get the 10th best engineer in the world for a third less money. Isn't that going to work out better for your shareholders? Mark said no, they would go round and round. But Mark did not discourage. In fact, by having people like Peter and Mark Andreessen on the board, he encouraged people with a very different point of view.

Reed Hastings is not a shrinking violent. And if Reed thought Mark was doing something that was negative for the growth of the company, he would absolutely tell him. It was quite a strong board. Do you think that there were times where Mark was too malleable, where he would, you know, get pushed in a certain direction? I'm sure there were, but my basic answer to that is no. Okay. That Mark, I remember briefly having a conversation about this with Bill Gates, whom I know less well that I know Mark, but Warren Buffett was on the board of the Washington Post Company for 35 years and was crucial to Catherine Graham's education and to mine. And Gates, as you know, Ed Buffett became very close friends.

And I was asking, after I was on the Facebook board, I was asking Bill about one situation in which Mark's bent. Mark wanted to do something, and most of the top team at Facebook disagreed with him. And Bill laughed and said, this is what founders do. There are times when you really have to stand up to all the people you respect. And he said, you're not going to get all those right. There will be times when you want to do that and you turn out to be wrong. And he said, if it gets below two thirds of the time, you're right, you probably shouldn't be in the job anymore. more. Right. But, you know, I did remember that from time to time. But Mark had a very high batting average. And I want to just close this segment before we move on to Bezos with the story about Mark coming to shadow you inside the Washington Post. Yeah, well, this was early on. Yeah, I'm thinking

maybe 2007, so maybe two years after Mark said, Mark called me one day and said, It occurs to me that I am now something like a CEO, and I want to come talk to you about, I want to come follow you around for a day or two and see how you run this company, what you do, and what you focus on and whatnot. And I said, Mark, what I do has almost nothing to do with what you do. You know, this is a decade. This is a hundred-year-old company, and, you know, it does, but he came and he wanted to do. it. So we did it. One of the things I remember doing, it was a wonderful coincidence. The dates he

picked happened to overlap with the one day a year when I and our chief financial officer went up to Wall Street and made a short presentation to a bunch of financial analysts about how the company was doing. And because of some advice from Warren Buffett over the years, we didn't make a big deal of Wall Street were communicating with Wall Street. We thought more about communicating with our own shareholders. And I explained this to Mark. We rode the train up. He watched us present and I told him which others he also ought to watch. And I could see that brain of his listening to, I made clear that I didn't think the advice you would get from questions at security the analyst meetings were necessarily very valuable to a CEO.

And when I was on the board, I offered some advice about a different way of communicating with the public and with shareholders, which was one area where Mark and I differed. Yeah. And then, so he spent three days with you. And then I think at a certain point, he asked you to introduce him to Jeff Bezos because he wanted to shadow Bezos as well. He said it would really be good for me to shadow a tech company CEO. I wrote to Bezos, and Bezos called me up and said, Don, the only thing that would be more

disruptive here would be if I was shadowed by Angelina Jolie. I mean, the difference was, in 2007, when I took Mark up to this Wall Street meeting with a whole bunch of big investors and people for banks, nobody knew who he was. Facebook might not have opened up at all to non-college in high school. people, or it might have just opened up, but Mark was not recognized. Yeah, I brought it up to Mark when I met with him, speaking with him for always day one, and he did seem still a little bit bummed that he couldn't go watch Bezos. Yeah.

So I guess like the last question I want to ask you about Mark, and we're going to have like 10 minutes left to talk about Bezos, is what do you think about his personality has led him to a place where he ends up in controversies so often? Well, Mark's not the lone ranger. I mean, the most controversial person in the Internet and in the technology world in the 1980s and 90s was Bill Gates. And there was concerted anger at him, including from a lot of crazy people, literally. I mean, people who stalked him and whatnot. That was the only thing I've seen equal to what Mark is facing.

The one thing that I'd say that I think everybody who knows Mark would say is his ability to function in the face of extreme public controversy, bitter criticism, et cetera, is extraordinary. That he just puts his head down and keeps on working. I've known people who were badly thrown by one big public controversy. I've known it. I guess if you're in politics, you have to get used to having these things all the time. But Mark is, I think Mark studied Latin and studied ancient history in college. And Mark is a stoic, I guess. I've never used the word with him or disgusted with him. And I'm not, look, I basically knew Mark from seven years ago to, 22 to 17 years ago and I liked him and I like him. However, I'm not saying on this podcast that Facebook has done nothing wrong, that it shouldn't be criticized, that Mark hasn't done certain things that I would have done differently or that he probably in retrospect would

have done differently. Of course, Facebook has made mistakes. But I have a different view of Mark Zuckerberg then is current in Washington or elsewhere. I quite admire him. Yeah, and I'll say this about the podcast. Like, one of the things we want to do on this show is have new ones conversations about topics in the tech world, different people. And, you know, it doesn't mean that like, you know, every view is, I don't know, when I have a Zuckerberg critic on doesn't mean that, like, you know, that's the truth. or when we speak with someone with the warm opinion of Mark, you know, people can make their own assertions.

But it's important, I think, to hear these stories. I also would add, last thing, that you should remember and your view should remember. I cease to be an insider at Facebook about the day of 2015. That means I missed the entire 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, everything that's followed, the enormous controversies that have erupted surrounding Facebook. There were controversies in our day.

If you recall, the Facebook SEO was wildly controversial. And their privacy issues were there as well. Yeah. So now you want to talk about other subjects and let's go. Yeah. So why don't we take a quick break and come back right after this to talk about Jeff Bezos. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily show, a podcast filled with business, tech news,

and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So search for the Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on the big technology podcast with Don Graham, former owner of The Washington Post. We spent a good chunk of good time talking about Mark Zuckerberg. We have a little bit left. Let's speak about Jeff

Bezos in the time we have left. So, Don, in 2013, you sold the post to Jeff Bezos. I'd love to hear your perspective on what Bezos is like as an operator. I think that we have, he doesn't speak to the press often. We don't hear a lot about his decision-making framework, at least from inside Amazon. There are lots of stories about it, but firsthand experiences are really valuable to get a picture of the type of person he is. So if you'd be able to share a little bit about the process of selling the post to him and, you know, if there are things that you think maybe the public doesn't know about Bezos that are worth paying attention to.

I first met Jeff Bezos back in the 1990s, maybe around 2000, but I think before that, when Jeff was running Amazon and Amazon was largely a book site. And I introduced myself to Jeff. as I, when I met somebody I thought knew a lot about technology and particularly about the customer internet, I wanted to talk to them and seek their advice about the newspaper and I talked to Jeff. I talked to Bill Gates. I talked to Steve Jobs. I talked to Mark Andrews and I talked to everybody who would talk to me about what they would do if they were running the Washington Post and how they would change it and what we needed to do.

Jeff was interested and helpful. One thing that came from that was quite interesting. He called me when they were first building Kindle, the first version of Kindle, and asked me the editor of the post and anybody else I wanted to bring to come out and look at the prototype and offer suggestions. And one thing I immediately learned from, I mean, I knew it before, but I learned doubly from that conversation was Jeff's a reader. He spent a lot of time reading books, a lot of time reading news,

and a lot of thought from him and others had gone into the design of the Kindle. We pounded away on it for a day and gave whatever suggestions we gave. I became a big fan. I bought one as soon as they were available. The only person I know who had one before me was Patty Stone Safer, who was on the Amazon board. So that was an unfair contest. But I got one right away, and I still use it massively. The same model, or are you upgraded?

Oh, God, no. No, I've upgraded countless times. I've broken a number of them. But I'm 76, and my eyes are those of the average 76-year-old. And paperback books in general are printed in a type size too small for me to read comfortably the Kindle. I can read any size I want. So I'm, you know, so I knew Jeff.

that much. I would see him once or twice a year. We would talk. I knew his then wife McKenzie, who was also enormously impressive. And I remember, I think, having dinner with the two of them once in Seattle, which I dimly remember. But I remember Jeff's advice being practical, thoughtful and business oriented. It wasn't about changing the product. It was about technology and how it was going to change the way news was distributed to consumers. So I was acquainted with Jeff over 15 years before 2013, not that deeply acquainted, but acquainted. And in January of 2013, guess in December of 12. The publisher of the Washington Post was not me. It was my niece, Catherine Weymouth, who'd been in the job for five years. Catherine turned out to be a very, very good

publisher of the Post. For example, she hired Marty Barron to be the editor of the Post, and she hired a technologist named Shailashh, who came on board in 2013, and who was a good enough technologist that he's still there for eight years under Jeff Bezos. Jeff said to me, he is as smart as the guys at Amazon. So Catherine in December of 12 said to me, Don, we have lost money every year since I've been in this job. We've lost revenue every year since I've been in this job. We hadn't lost money, but we'd had declining revenues. Therefore, we're a public company to keep the losses in a reasonable range or to make a profit, we have had to lay off dozens of people, sometimes 100 people or more in a year, whom I did not want to lay off,

whom it has hurt the post to lay off. We are less good as a newspaper because of it. I look ahead of the next five years, and I think they're going to be like the last five years. And said, Catherine, I don't think this is the only thing we ought to think about, but I think we ought to ask ourselves whether there is some owner for the Washington Post who might be better than our small public company. And my first instinct was not to listen to that advice because I thought we could, we could, we had a unique, we then owners had a unique dedication to the paper and I thought we could work out whatever problems there were. But we kept talking about it. I sought Warren Buffett's advice. I talked to our board about it. And it occurred to me

early on that how do you defend family ownership of something like the Washington Post? I'd always defended it to myself saying, it's good for the post. That is the point of our ownership. And Catherine was now saying to me, maybe. she was now asking the question whether some other owner might in fact be better. Now, if you're selling a business that's part of a public company, you'd normally go through an auction process. That is the very last thing that any of us on the board managing the company wanted to do. we kept the idea of a possible sale.

We had made up our mind to sell. We were going to look and see what was out there. We kept it in a very small circle. We used Allen & Company as an investment bank. Nancy Peretzman, the investment banker at Allen & Company was a board member of Princeton University, knew Jeff through that connection. And with my encouragement, reached out. to Jeff and had two 45-minute conversations with Jeff in which Jeff seemed to her very interested

and then silence. I was a little disappointed because I had thought to myself when Jeff expressed interest, this might be the best person I could think of in the United States, and we'll get to why. Well, let's get to that. Why would he have been good? I thought that what was the central problem at the Washington Post was technology, that we were not as strong technologically as, let us say, Facebook, who's board I'd been

then on for five years, or Google, or the other companies that were looking very much like our competitors. We didn't have equal engineers. We didn't have equal technologists. And we weren't charging ahead, gaining new traffic, gaining, new users as those companies were. And I thought a big part of that had to be that we were very good at producing a print newspaper and delivering it in the morning, really good at that. But that wasn't the, that wasn't going to be the medium of the future. So Jeff had the technology chops.

He had, he then was the third wealthiest person in the world. So we had plenty of money if it were necessary to withstand losses for a long time. The post had often been in the position in its history of losing money, and it was important that somebody have the financial wherewith all to carry it on if that was the case. Finally, I didn't want to sell the post to somebody with a political axe to grind. I didn't want to sell it to a rabid Democrat or a rabid Republican. I wanted to sell it to someone who wanted to run a fair newspaper that was honest in its reporting and balanced in its opinions. And Jeff was the third richest person in the United States with all this money, and I couldn't find out on Google what his political opinions were.

You didn't worry at all that you would try to influence the conversation in Washington around Amazon in particular. I told him that if he, we had a, he, Jeff finally called me the week before the Allen and Company conference in Sun Valley, he emailed me and said, I had some. conversations with Nancy Perritsman about something a couple of months ago, if that's still on the table. I want to talk to you about it in Sun Valley. I said, it is still on the table, and I'd be very glad to talk to you. So we decided to have lunch on a particular day. He bought sandwiches and brought him to place the room I was staying in. And yeah, I mean, I told him if it is inevitable that if you

by the Washington Post. The Washington Post will become the most unsparing critic of Amazon journalistically because those reporters are going to be saying, you know, we're not going to back off from criticizing the guy who owns the place. And you have to understand that. And if you intervene in that of the slightest, if you say, I don't like this reporter, put him on another beat, it will blow up in your face. I said, furthermore, my strong recommendation, I asked him if he were buying, if he were interested in buying the post to advance some set of political opinions. And he laughed, which I liked. And I said, well, look, if you are, even 5%, if you really want to advance some idea you've always had, again, it'll blow up in your face. The reporters

and editors at the post know how to how to get information out. And it will become a negative for your idea instead of a positive. This is a very unusual business in that you have to really, you own it, but you really keep your hands off it. If you want to own it, it's because you believe it does something important. And he later said to me that, he said, there were two people working for him in analyzing private businesses he might invest in, and one of them said to him, there's only one of these.

that was one of the things that got him interested. And just to, do I have time for two more questions? Sure. Okay. Just to fast forward a little bit, you do sell it to him. And you said that Warren Buffett had told you he was the best CEO in the U.S. Yes. What did you see in Jeff Bezos that made you either say, hey, actually Warren Buffett was right about that or he was wrong?

Or was there anything that he did differently as a CEO that you think is worth mentioning? Well, Warren. Warren said that at a big breakfast talking about business in January of 13. And I hadn't heard Warren say that before. I knew Warren didn't known Amazon stock. I mean, he'd never thought Amazon stock was cheap enough that he wanted to invest in it even after he decided Jeff was a great CEO. But I know what drove Warren to say that.

If you said, what separates Warren Buffett from all other CEOs? It's not talking about Warren as an investor, but Warren is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. It is genuine long-term-mindedness. When Warren bought the Burlington Northern Railroad, which is perhaps still the biggest business, Berkshire owns, he said something to shareholders, a company that suggested he was looking 50 years into the future when he made that investment. And, you know, that's the way Warren thinks, and that's the way Jeff thinks. And I think that's what Warren admired about him was that every CEO says we're long-term minded here.

And Jeff really is. And do you think that that's been applied at the newspaper? Well, I think it's a good, I think it's the way to run a newspaper. You can't be worried about the next quarter's profit if you're the head of a great newspaper. And I'm, Jeff is not, has no reason to be concerned about the next quarter's profit at the Washington Post. Right. Okay. The last question I want to ask you is about the nature of success. People, you know, it's interesting because some people hold up Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as like the paragon of success. They went out, they founded these massive businesses, you know, some of the biggest businesses we've ever seen in our lives that have a tremendous amount of influence in billions of people's day-to-day experiences. And then other people, we would be like, you know, these guys are successful, like, look at all the harm they're doing. I don't know.

I'm kind of curious, like, do you, I'm curious how, having been around so many, like, conventional successful people, like, what is your belief in, like, what success actually is in life and how do these two fit in? Well, I think Mark and Jeff are very successful and I think very admirable. Again, I am not versed in the last five years of controversy surrounding Mark, and I never was in the controversy surrounding Jeff. But I think both of them are remarkable, but I know principals of schools whom I don't think there's any doubt at the end of their career are extraordinary successes. I told you that I worked on a police department. I knew police officers there, privates, whom I thought did a fabulous job and had every reason to feel content with what they did.

And I've known a couple of police chiefs who I thought absolutely knocked it out of the park. I can tell you their names. I think if you deal with your life and wind up doing the best you can, There is nobody whose life won't be full of mistakes and full of mine has been. So I've spent my last eight years running a scholarship fund for undocumented students. That's an interesting thing to do. I admire those students more than I can say. I admire the teachers who keep an eye on them, the counselors.

And I've come to look at university, a couple of university presidents who've really really saved their universities and made them great places. There are so many people around who are successful. And I look at some of the journalists with whom I was colleagues at the Washington Post. I look at a man like David Broder who was beloved and admired in a profession political reporting where it's impossible to be beloved and admired. And that man was an enormous success. You know, you and I and every listener to this podcast know so many people we would deem to be successful. And I think Marks and Jeff's successes are extraordinary. Certainly they are measured in dollars. I don't know that they have any greater satisfaction

than a great teacher or a great doctor or a great nurse. But I'll leave that to your to your listeners. Oh, it's a beautiful note to leave it on. Don, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and telling these great stories. Really appreciate. Always great to talk. Enjoyed talking to you, Alex. Take it. Okay, have a good one. Thank you again, Don. Thank you, Nate Guantany for doing the edits. Thank you, LinkedIn, for allowing me to be part of this great podcast network. And we're only getting started from here. So I appreciate it. Thank you all listeners.

For joining us each Wednesday. We'll be back next week for a new show, The Tech Insider or an outside agitator. Until then, take care. Thank you.