The Pomp Podcast - #1146 Howard Lerman | Millionaire Reveals How He Runs Company With No Meetings

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Howard Lerman is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and co-founder & CEO of Roam. In this conversation, we talk about productivity hacks, how to run meetings, how to make a more effective organization, favorite books, YouTube interests, and the future of remote work.  ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th, 2023 in Miami hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of fascinating discussions. We'll cover topics from investing, emerging tech, scientific research, sports, music and more.We have some massive names being announced via Twitter throughout January so stay tuned for details.This will not be your typical event and it certainly won’t be one you want to miss. We’re going to learn a lot, make some smart friends, and as always, we’re going to have fun.Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Howard Lerman is a serial entrepreneur, an inventor, and the co-founder and CEO of Roam. In this conversation, we talk about productivity hacks, how to run meetings, how to make a more effective organization, what some of his favorite books are, why fiction may actually be worth spending your time on, what he watches on YouTube, and we generally pontificate about the future of remote work, corporations, communications, and the various software tools that you'll end up using. I really enjoyed this conversation with Howard. I hope you guys

enjoyed it as well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you agreed with, what you disagreed with, what you liked, and what you didn't like. I always appreciate the feedback. Okay, here's my conversation with Howard Lerman. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson

with Wayfair ever order furniture online and wonder what if like what if it doesn't hold up that sofa was four days old you should have ordered from Wayfair with Wayfair there's no what if just style you love and quality you can trust visit wayfair.ca wayfair every style every home Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments all views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments you should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Howard here

with me. I thought a great place to start. You've taken companies public. You've got a great business today. You've been highly successful as an entrepreneur, but you have a bunch of productivity hacks, which sound like woo-woo nonsense, but you think differently about how to be productive. And then you have these hacks that somebody can watch this right now and immediately go implement in probably like two or three X their productivity. So the first one is the idea of calendar zero. What the hell is calendar zero? Well, you know, it's interesting because we all treat our money as our most valuable asset. But the thing that is scarcest is our time. Yet we dole out our time every time we allow people to book things up on our calendar.

And so think of your calendar like it's your bank account. And it starts with, you know, completely full when your calendar is empty. And every time someone books a meeting, they're essentially taking a deposit out of your bank account. And people's calendars get filled up and clogged up. And we end up with, particularly in business, with people inviting us to all kinds of stuff, which frankly often is pointless, pointless meetings. So there's a lot of – there's a focus around a thing called inbox zero, which is how can I delete all the emails in my inbox. But what I've always focused on is to try to get to calendar zero. Now, this is not an absolute term.

There's still things that are booked on my calendar. for example, this session today, or a thing that I have to do a board meeting, but I try to really minimize what ends up on my calendar. And when I look at my day, the less I have on my calendar, I think the better off it's going to be. In fact, the wealthiest people I know tend to have the least amount of stuff on their calendars. Why is that? That's like a shocking thing to me. And I've noticed that as well. The most successful people have the least amount of things on their calendar. here's what successful people have figured out number one you can accomplish a lot in a very

short amount of time i want to tell you a story about teddy roosevelt my favorite president there's a lot of great books written about him my favorite might be the bully pulpit by doris of course current's goodwin uh so teddy roosevelt used to hold five minute meetings now i want you to think about a five minute meeting and when in business you've ever schedule a five-minute meeting. No one would ever do that. There'd never be a five-minute meeting on your calendar. But the President of the United States used to put people in a line, he'd have them line up, he'd have them come in, and there'd be a clock. And when there's a five-minute clock counting down, you'd be shocked. The forcing function of time helps you accomplish so much.

People get to the point right away. Decisions are made. You move on to the next thing. And so one day I was reading about TR doing this and I was like, well, you know, if the POTUS can do this about matters of extraordinary national importance, I certainly in my company can do five minute meetings and learn about things that might be happening in our company and make decisions quickly. Because the decisions I'm making for a software company in no way are as important as the decisions that were made in matters of national interest. So I adopted these, and we started a thing at Yext called Teddy Roosevelt meetings. Teddy Roosevelt meetings are an hour or two hours. People sign up for a five-minute block.

I might, say, travel to a London office. There might be 100 people in the London office. I would meet with all 100 people. in 500 minutes. Here's how a five-minute meeting works. Person comes in, sits down. I'm really careful to not make eye contact with the person when they're in the meeting, because I found that when you look down and take notes, people tell you more. So I'm taking notes and they begin to talk to me about what's going on. After 10 or 20 meetings, you get a really great sense of what's going on without doing these big 30 or 60 minute meetings and bringing

a lot of people together. And so five minute meetings are an incredibly effective way to really become effective and get to calendar zero. It's funny, the original inventors of short meeting times were lawyers. If you've ever looked at your legal bill, you'll note that lawyers bill you in six-minute increments, one-tenth of an hour. So they are clearly tracking their time and billing you in these little bits of six-minute kind of meeting times. So the other thing I've done is, it's funny, each year, a lot of times when private equity buys a company, they take out the company and they try to take out all the costs. And so they have zero-based budgeting, 3G Capital is famous for doing this. And so they cut out everything

each year, and then you have to rebuild your budget back up from zero. They do that for money. I think people should do that for their time. So constantly, I look at my calendar, and I just delete stuff. So this is like doing zero-based time budgeting for your calendar. And one of the very first things to go on my calendar, and I figured this trick out a long time ago, there is an enormous focus in companies. And maybe you, Pomp, and your companies do one-on-one sort of weekly check-ins with your staff. Like we'll do half an hour with this person, half an hour with this person once a week. And when you do that, you know, and I also like to have a pretty flat organization. So I might have in my company 15 or 20 direct reports.

Now, if I spend an hour with every person every week, all of a sudden, literally half of your, 40-hour traditional working week is eaten up by these one-on-one meetings. Also, one-on-one meetings slow people down. So if you and I have a calendar time on the block and I need to tell you something right now, I might say, you know, I have a meeting with tomorrow. I'm going to wait till tomorrow to give him this critical piece of information. So not only are you clogging your calendar up with one-on-one meetings, you're also actually slowing down information so a different paradigm and a better way is to say let's have no one-on-one meetings with people but instead let's talk to each other as necessary so

if i need to talk to you like i'm going to tell you right i'm going to come find you and if you need to talk to me my door is always open come find me let's talk ad hoc jeff bezos does not do one-on-one meetings he won't meet with people he only will meet in small groups because he knows number two that in addition to slowing down information one-on-one meetings that are recurring tend to become not work focused and you begin to go into other places i remember i was given this advice always have one-on-one meetings with your direct reports and i used to be sitting there and after like the third one they tended to become kind of therapy sessions and you know like if you need therapy like i'm not your guy you know and a lot of times people walk in and

be like how's it going this isn't a one-on-one meeting with a team member so i'm doing great fine i'm like are you sure and they're like well i guess i guess now that you mentioned it i can think of some things that aren't going great and there's just no reason to to add that in to slow people down to do this so i i clear out all recurring one-on-ones with people in addition to having five minute quick meetings. I think ad hoc is better than recurring. Recurring meetings, I don't know if you saw Shopify. Just last week, Toby, he tweets, you know, recurring meetings are a bug. And Shopify literally wiped all of their recurring meetings off the calendar. Now, think about, I mean, how many employees does Shopify have? I'm guessing thousands, thousands, 10,000,

let's say, how many meeting minutes do you think they saved from just wiping every single recurring meeting off the calendar? Millions. And their cost at Shopify is, you know, their primary non-server cost has got to be people. So they just increased their productivity tremendously. Now, some of that will come back, but, you know, wiping calendars, wiping your calendar clean. You'll never get to calendar zero. But I am a huge fan of trying to get to really, really short, crisp meetings. You can get done a lot when you have a little bit of time and time is the ultimate forcing function as as as death looks upon us. So there's two things that immediately come to mind. The first is when I started to say no to

meetings, I thought or maybe it was in hindsight, I realized there's momentum to it. Yeah. When you start saying yes you say yes more often when you start saying no you say no more often and there's like a momentum to it for sure uh and so i would say no but and the but was but send me an email with exactly what the uh information is what they ask is or whatever and i'll quickly get back to you and what i found was not only did i save time for me and the other individual but also i got the information in a much more digestible manner because they were forced to write it down right and so usually what happens in these like uh kind of one-off meetings not the recurring one-on-one meetings, but, but just somebody say, Hey, you know, do you have 30 minutes? I'd love to talk

about something is it kind of come in and they would be like, well, there's this thing. And then this thing, and then, Oh, wait, I forgot about this. Oh, Oh, wait, hold on. You don't have this context. And they were like all over the place, but by having to write it down, it was like very clear. Like, listen, you're going to send me this email. This is the only context I have. If it's not in here, then I don't have that context. And so it made the, uh, quality of the decisions that I would make better as well. So it was kind of a double win. And then the second thing was on the calendar, uh, at the start of this year, I went through, uh, and I did this like huge calendar audit. Now there's two types of audits that, uh, I've done. One is every week. Um,

the executive assistant that I work with, she puts together a report and, uh, I got the template from Mateo over at eight sleep. I think he actually stole it from somewhere else. So I don't want to give him too much credit. Um, but what we basically do is we go through and we categorize every single minute of my week. And we know what is for what business, what is what activity, all this stuff. At the end of the week, I get this report and it tells me, you spent 10 hours doing this, you spent 20 hours doing this. And we try to make adjustments. And it's very clear, like how I'm investing my time is a direct reflection of what is going to happen. And so if there's a business that's struggling and I'm only spending two hours a week on it, well, we probably

we should spend more time on that. Right. And vice versa. So that like, or you should kill that business and then spend all of your time on the one that's doing well. Yes. So like literally we have those conversations, right? Of like, is this not worth spending any time on? So that's the week by week. But then at the beginning of the year, I did what I thought of more as like a macro audit. And when I looked at the macro of what I was doing, I realized the structure of my day was off. And what had happened was over time, over about a year, I had gotten what I call morning creep. So I know myself in that when I write, when I think, when I am most productive is in the morning. And so from the time I wake up to about 11 or 12 o'clock, I will put myself up

against anyone. I can be hyper productive and I can think very clearly. And that's the best time I write. But over the last year, I started to take meetings at 11, 1030, 10, 930, nine. So the point where I was taking me is at 8 a.m. And so we basically just went back to the drawing board and we said, OK, basically the zero based time budget. How do I want to spend every hour of the day? And rather than go to calendar zero, we actually did it try to get to the same thing, but we did it a different way. We blocked the times. So from eight to 11, no meetings, no calls. Right. And we've done it in a way where like everyone knows he is doing X during this block of time. Then from 11 to two, there's a block of time. And then two to four is when I'll take the

meetings or the calls. And so when you, you kind of do that, what it also does is it forces everyone in the organization by damn, he's only going to spend two hours meeting with anyone in the organization today. Is it really worth five minutes, 30 minutes of that two hour block? And so what happens is you're pushing decision-making, you're pushing responsibility to everyone else. And from what I've seen so far, it makes the organization operate much more productively, but also it allows for people to gain confidence that like they can do things without having to come to you, I think. That is absolutely true. People end up making more decisions. They get to the point faster. And, you know, the human brain works on chunking.

The human brain works on being able to, you know, categorize things. And when they can categorize things at a higher level, that's the executive function that you want your team to be doing and making those decisions. In Good Profit by Charles Koch, I know you and I share this love of reading. And for those that don't know, Howard and I, whenever we're reading a book, we like take a picture and send it to each other. And it's always like a 50-50. I already read that one. Or like when you get done, tell me if it's good or not. Right. But in Good Profit, one of the things that I took away from it is they treat the employees like entrepreneurs. What that means is that they try to delegate decision making down the decision making it can only be high quality if

everyone is aligned on what the vision is right so this is where we're all going you're a talented person help us get there and make the decisions that will do that but then they also compensate people on a kind of a commensurate uh um you know perspective as well and they say look if you deliver a certain amount of value to the business you are going to get paid more than if you deliver less value. And so how do you structure both the X, which you took public, and then you've got a new business room. How do you think about this, like a delegation of decision-making, but also then compensating people based on value they create? Right. Well, there's a lot packed into that question. Let me start, just go back 30 seconds and say, I was really glad to hear you

talking about working your day. We just got through the new year and everyone asked me, what are your new year's resolutions? And frankly, I do not have new year's resolutions. I have not made New Year's resolutions in a very long time. I make adjustments constantly. And, you know, at the end, it just so, you know, sort of December 31st or January 1st just so happens to be like a random day. But what I do try to focus on instead of making annual goals, which everyone has annual goals, but you try to focus on the daily routine. And if you can build a great daily routine, then I believe the longer term outcomes can happen in a better way. So I'm not a morning person. You're a morning thinker. I mean, I know because you're up so early and we're all getting your emails and stuff early in the morning. uh you know i'm a night thinker but i try to build my day so that i do something physical

so i do something intellectually challenging so i take a mandarin lesson probably three times a week that kind of thing um and then you know once i've done those two things then i feel like i'm ready to take on anything so i think instead of for people focusing on their uh annual goals focusing on their daily routine is how the stoics would do it and being able to build that up um and funny also because you you blocked off your time i think the the analogy there going back to sort of time being money would be just like that's how you've chosen to allocate your investment portfolio and you've said okay i'm taking you know this particular piece of my investment portfolio which is my time and saying i'm going to put that in i'm just making this up in the s p 500 which

would be one part another part would be you know allocated like this so uh you know smart people the most successful people i know think about their time just like you just said which is we're gonna allocate it like it was our portfolio um and we're different asset classes and you know different parts of the time or different parts but the the way they think about it is totally by morning by time when they know they're most productive least productive and so all that kind of stuff now shifting gears to your next question about uh charles coke and And, you know, his market based management philosophy, I think, is what he called it. He was even he even registered the trademark on it.

So I'm nervous that I might get a lawsuit just by bringing it up in this in this conversation we're having. It was a great book. I enjoy reading about him. He really had a lot of advantages in starting a company. You know, he I don't remember the exact story, but I think his dad started the company. And then he definitely he his brother took it, you know, sort of his dad started it. And then they came in and they were like, hey, do you want to grow it? And his dad was like, oh, we got a good thing going.

And his dad passed away. And then him and his brother took it to the, I think they're the second largest privately held company in the world now. Yep. What's the largest? Mars? Cargill. Cargill. Yeah.

Or at least in the United States. Cargill, I think, is larger. And it's estimated that Coke Industries, I think the latest number I saw was $125 billion in annual revenue. Yeah. You know, so we talk about how they empower people and how they compensate people. And, you know, you asked how we did that at Yext and how we do that at Roam. I mean, the one thing I've learned being an entrepreneur going from zero to one and beyond and now back to zero to one again is just when you're in different phases of a company's lifecycle, you do different things. So when you're running in a $125 billion annual company, he's operating at such a high level that he's just trying to, you know, focus on culture pretty much and probably some M&A.

but the the fact is that running a private company which i think is kind of the point is a lot different than running a public company i ran a public company for five and a half years i did 22 earnings calls i did you know dozen appearances on cnbc and it's a lot different running a private company uh where you can take a little bit of a longer term focus than you know having to explain to jim kramer why eps is off a tenth of a point quarter of a quarter due to currency fluctuations in europe which is definitely not my personal strong suit um so you know when you're running a private company you're not accountable for that so the way you compensate your people is totally different when you're in a public particularly in tech you give out these rsus

which is essentially stock in the company and we can talk about stock compensation in a second because i have a i have a whole philosophy on this too um but the rsus people pretty much treat them is cash. I mean, it's just, it's a way for a company to, you know, give people an incentive. But the reality is that it tends to just be cash. Now you get them in the future, they invest in the future. So of course, everyone wants the stock price to be higher. But, you know, when you're running a private company, if you get a piece of the profit or something like that, you're absolutely incentivized completely differently. And the company itself is not running a quarter by quarter base. I'm sure they look at their quarterly financials, but you

are not doing things that you're thinking about this quarter a lot. And when you're running a public company, you're definitely thinking about your sales this quarter. When you ran the private company and then took it public, is that the biggest difference that you saw was that quarterly earnings report? Actually, no. Okay. The biggest difference between running a, and again, we're talking about the size here. So once you get to, I'm just making up a number, 100 million of recurring at that number you're a pretty big company you can be public or not the biggest difference in addition to you know the quarterly earnings call is the investor base so when you're private your investor base is vcs

and entrepreneurs whoever you have in your cap table and they share one thing they all want you to succeed when you're public you learn quickly that hedge funds and even famous investment houses are not all long only and the thing is you don't know when you're meeting with an investor if they're long on you or they're short on you then it gets even more complicated they don't disclose it absolutely not absolutely not because they're not allowed to or because that would then give away what they consider to be a potential edge in learning something you know it's funny the way that the reporting works i'm pretty sure you can see if people have shares and if they've short your shares you can't tell if they own your shares or they've shorted your shares so it's an

interesting kind of thing to be sitting there saying are you know are these people with us or against us when you're private everyone's with you and it's either going to be a big outcome or it's not and they're all taking that sort of binary risk when you're public it's uh you know people might not be with you and by the way they might be with you for a minute that's the other thing when you're private your vcs you know they're with you for eight years while they you know kind of have the whole life cycle with you people could come in for a minute i had shareholders come in they buy the stock they you know get in the stock and they'd be there for a quarter i'd meet with them they'd say this is great then i'd meet with them a quarter later they say we sold

out but thanks we appreciate you you know making us eight percent this quarter or something like that so they're in and out too and so there's a lot of timing that you don't really think about when you're you know a private company with long-term shareholders there's just there's not a long term there are long-term shareholders and you know who they are often though those same long-term shareholders will own your stock but then they also do complex stuff like loaning out to shorts and so they make money on that too so there's a whole weird sort of it's very complex very complex when you start thinking about overlaying the productivity hacks of your day to the organization what are some of the things that you would do in an organization outside of

just the structure of meetings that would increase the productivity of the organization hey guys i hope that you're enjoying this interview before we continue i want to quickly remind you i'm hosting a conference march 4th at the miami beach convention center that's right it's a big venue for a big event on march 4th i'm bringing together some of the absolute fan favorite guests from the podcast and this show. And we're going to debate ideas. The event is called Lyceum Miami. The Lyceum was the public gymnasium in Athens, Greece. That ancient gymnasium was important because it's a place where people from all walks of life came together to have a war of ideas. You were able to not only participate in the debates, but also people could sit and

watch some of the smartest people in the world talk about important issues. That's what we're going to be doing on March 4th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. If you want to join us, go to LyceumMiami.com or click on the link in the description, and I'd love to see you there. Okay, let's get back to this conversation. Well, you know, I think that it depends on with your pre or post product market fit. Okay. And pre-product market fit, it's super important to be very close to your customers. I want to be talking to my customers all the time. In fact, you know, my new company, Roam, we have this genius bar where we engage with all of our customers all the time and they can chat with us. It's like a support bar. They can come in,

we offer them live support. If they're troubleshooting something, we'll show up to their Roam and talk to them about that. So I think pre-product market fit, the most important thing is to talk to your customers. And by the way, the vast majority of startups are pre-product market fit. Even if they think that they have product market fit, when the founders have used their sort of sales muscle to close some deals, you know, from people they know, that's not true product market fit. Product market fit, I think, is best described as when your ability to keep up with demand is limited. And so most startups are actually not there. So pre-product market fit, you need to be kind of taking in as much signal as you can from

customers, which means observing, talking, tweaking things, seeing what happens, experimentation. post-product market fit for most tech startups i'm talking about software here it becomes all about go to market and so that's kind of a whole different ball game and so okay we have a product that works now how are we going to keep up with the demand we're going to hire a cro and we're going to hire a salesperson we're going to hire a vice president of sales we're going to hire sales engineers we're going to hire sales enablement people we got to train these people we're going to have a whole operation devoted to how to head a customer success how to customer support. We're going to hire analysts to be looking at all these different kinds of things.

And so then the ballgame becomes much more about go to market. And that's an entirely different phase of the company. And it's almost like running a military at that point. I mean, it's like you have these pods of people and you have, you know, when you're pre-product market fit and you have a tight team, I'm just making up a number of 12 people, designers, engineers, you're all in there. It's primordial soup. You're using your creativity to come up with what is the winning formula that is going to get the most possible customers to buy, you know, use and love and buy our product. Once you get past that, then you have to hire in like the generals and the colonels to kind of figure out how to put teams of salespeople together. It looks like the military because

you're dividing up territories, you know, who's got this territory, who's got the Southwest west territory who's got europe who's got japan you know then you go once you once you get the u.s then you go international so um so in terms of productivity hacks you know it's it you really have to just rely on your people because just hire great people and then basically get out of their way i mean especially if you don't know what the fuck you're doing i mean in my case when it came comes to skill and go to market like i legitimately don't know what i'm doing there so i wanted to find great people. And I did that with hiring Jim Steele and Dave Verninski, who ran sales at Salesforce. Jim was the president of Salesforce. Dave was right with Jim and running that. And so

those guys came over to Yext and helped us build out a real Salesforce, real professional Salesforce. In fact, you read Mark Benioff's book, Behind the Cloud. There's an article, a whole chapter about Dave and Jim. So, you know, it's funny though, because all the advice you get as an entrepreneur is you hire the experts and get out of the way. And I did that with our CFO. I hired Steve Cakebread, who was the CFO of Salesforce and took them public in 2003. And so, you know, got out of the way. But at the same time, you lose control. So you don't know how things work like it used to.

You know, when you hire your professional Salesforce, they get in between you and the customer, not intentionally, but that's just what happens because it's the size and scale. And so how do you manage that? Like you're hiring these experts. You're deferring to them. But ultimately, you're still responsible. if things doesn't go right or let's say the CFO made a mistake like people yeah they're like okay the CFO made a mistake but like you're the CEO of the business so how do you kind of give them the space to run and do what they do best and be an expert but also kind of have the controls in

place whether it's on the financial side sales side whatever where you feel still feel like you kind of understand what's happening you know on on the first off don't hire a CFO that's going to make a mistake you don't want your CFO to make a mistake you can have your sales people make a mistake you don't want general counsel or CFO to make a mistake they they don't they don't get to make a mistake they they fortunately have you know a controller auditors and then they have auditors that are looking at their work to double check it and then they even have the auditors have auditors that are auditing the auditors internal audit making sure that they also are not making a mistake you can make mistakes in sales you can make mistakes in r d but just don't make a mistake

when it comes to financial reporting and there's there's all kinds of things to make sure that that that that is unlikely to happen. But putting that stuff in, putting those controls in, slows you down. It changes your business. You don't, you know, when we started early days at Yext, we used to do these deal, you know, you could, we would do all kinds of deals to win customers and they'd look different and they're, you know, different payment terms, all different types of structures and stuff you have to standardize. And so standardizing gives you those controls, but at the same time slows you down. When you start to see the meetings, And then you start to see the organization, you're hiring the right people.

What is the biggest mistake you ever made in business? Biggest mistake I ever made in business was in March of 2020 when I decided and announced to the company right after the pandemic that I would not lay anybody off. Oh, interesting. So that was like a pride thing in terms of I don't want to lay anyone off. So like, let me say it and I'll like force it into reality or what was going through your head? We had 1500 people, pandemic hit. you have all these media reports of you know and again you have to go mentally back to covid march of 2020 now we're not where we are today complete uncertainty you know pictures of people

in new york hospital beds piling up you know italia you know italy everyone's whatever so everyone's freaking out total uncertainty i announced the company we will not lane your jobs are all safe we will not lay anybody off you will uh we're not going to be a raise this year so everyone's salary is going to stay flat year over year but in return for that it seems like the human thing to do right now is to guarantee you all your jobs and your health insurance during a pandemic i'm not going to put anybody out in the street and at the moment i was lauded you know i was everyone was like that's a great you know the employee base thought that was great meanwhile wow, Airbnb laid off thousands of people.

A lot of people. They later that year had a $100 billion IPO. And my big mistake was it turned out that in not laying anybody off, in telling everybody we weren't going to lay anybody off, that it was a performance management nightmare because a lot of the good people that didn't get a raise were like, wait a minute, I can go to a different company and switch jobs and get a raise. So why would I stay here?

so your loyalty was not rewarded number one and then number two a lot of people that were poor or mediocre performance were like performers were like woohoo i can just like do nothing and i won't get laid off and so it gave people an excuse to do nothing and basically remove the the uh carrot and the stick it's a bad idea to take the carrot and the stick away yeah fascinating yeah and so did you have to go back and correct it at some point You know, you do correct it, and you have to correct it over time. It's not the kind of thing that you can do quickly. I think what hurt me most was not that the people who didn't perform well kept not performing well.

It was the people that were the best performers that left that didn't show any loyalty that hurt me the most. now i will tell you today your best people was more painful than keeping your worst people yes like the worst people are already dragging you down so like how much worse could they almost perform but losing your best people was a big blow it was the fact that they showed no loyalty that i thought that and again not everyone not all the best people left some of the best people left And when they would leave for a higher salary somewhere else, after we, as a collective unit, said, hey, we're going to protect all of our people here, we're all in this together, we're one team, they were unwilling to share the sacrifice or burden a little bit. By the way, today, you see Salesforce land people, you see all these layoffs happening. And I just wouldn't have done that again.

that was a that was a mistake it was a mistake because it hurt the best people and it may have saved some of the the worst people but ultimately it hurt the company too much yeah and i would undo that if i could yeah it's fascinating um when you think about rome the business you're building now uh i am very proud to be an investor um uh it is i'm gonna call it a zoom killer i don't know if you're going to call it that, but describe a little bit as to, we moved to this remote work world. Zoom works. It's fine. I use it every day. Why even think about going after an area that already has such a dominant player who is being positioned in the media and elsewhere as the disruptor, right? So it's not that Zoom is some, you know, a hundred year old incumbent company

that no one's tried to take it off. Like they kind of are like the startup that just made it. And you guys are already coming after them. Well, let me just take a step back and tell you about what Roam is. So during March of 2020, when we were talking about, you know, who to lay off and what not to lay off,

I one day set up a Zoom. And when you run a big company or a small company, you're doing Zooms all the time. I put a hundred, you know, and the bigger the company, the longer and more boring the Zoom tends to be. And you're, you know, you set up those calendar invites

It's where you add all the people and you add their email address in. And I was setting up a Zoom calendar invite. And I think it was for 100 people. And I forgot to add someone. And when you forget to add someone to a Zoom in a remote world, that person does not exist. It's like they didn't know the meeting was supposed to happen. Like nobody told them. They just, they blissfully, ignorantly go about whatever they were doing.

And like they missed out. In the real world, if there was like a meeting going on with everyone and like a person walked into the office and saw all the people there and be like, oh, I'm probably supposed to be in there. So it was at that moment that I had this flash of insight, which was, well, what if there was a bird's eye view of all the meetings going on in the company at the same time that everyone could see? Just like in the real world, you walk into an office, I walked into your office here, I see it's a bustling office. There's people talking to all kinds of people here. There's, you know, I see who's in, who's not in, who's talking to who, and I get a sense for what the heck is going

on. We lost all that when we went to Slack and Zoom. And what Zoom did a phenomenal job, better than anybody in the world. Zoom was the first video conferencing technology that worked. And Eric rewrote the video Kodak. He didn't use the existing stuff in web browsers, which didn't really work that well. He rebuilt the whole Kodak from scratch and famously left Cisco and that whole thing. So they solved the video conferencing technology problem. But what they completely failed to solve or didn't attempt to endeavor to solve was the workflow. And so what we have today is this amazing technology, but our workflow around it's totally broken. Things that used to take two people, you know, five minutes in the office to get done right now.

Hey, I walk pump. Can you help me with this thing? We do it like we're done. now is being scheduled for a Zoom call for 60 minutes with nine next week. And so and then the other thing about this that's funny is, you know, when you're scheduling a Zoom call for 60 minutes next week, you know, I put you on, I put you on it and it's like, well, I should probably be inclusive. I'll just invite everyone to it. And so you end up, this is the calendar clutter we were talking about before. The workflow is backwards. The workflow is broken. There's too many meetings. The meetings are too long. Things that, you know, could be done right now are being scheduled next week so it's slowing companies down and so we invented rome

rome is a cloud headquarters that's the positioning for cloud hq it does three things it uh it makes companies it gets it helps them reduce the number of meetings they have the average meeting time in rome is eight minutes wow eight minute meetings not down to six like lawyers but well you know we're gonna we're gonna try to get down to five all right um and i'll talk about more more about the meetings. Second thing it does, it makes companies feel more connected. 90% of people that use Roam feel more connected to their company. In a remote company or hybrid company, or even a distributed company, and let me be clear, Roam is not just for remote or hybrid companies. The fact is any company that gets big enough becomes distributed.

The XTED office is from Berlin to Beijing. We're all over the place. So we put companies together under one roof. Anyone from anywhere can see everyone and see who's meeting with who and pop around. And so this vision is this bird's eye view of the whole company, everyone in one HQ from anywhere. And then the third thing, and we'll talk about this in a second about SaaS and my views on SaaS, we have a business model innovation. We only charge for active user. So where most SaaS companies would say, you signed up 20 people, you owe me X dollars times 20 people per month in perpetuity, you say, no, yes, you signed up 20 people, but only 14 of them actually logged in this month or this week. And so therefore you owe me for 14, not for the 20.

You got it. And it's paid at the end of the month, as opposed to SAS, which says you have to pre-pay us. You have to guess how many licenses you're going to need for this year. 50. Well, you're going to grow. Okay. 60, you know, and there's a salesperson sitting there trying to upsell you more and more and more 60 70 80 and then okay it's 100 you know bucks a year per user or whatever you have to prepay that up front for the year we say we're going to do active user pricing it's an all-in-one bundle so we're going to include the ability to do chat and video conferencing all this other stuff but the time you add up the other apps that we can get you out of by using Roam, it's $2,000 a year for them. It's $120 per active user only for Roam.

So we have a business model innovation here too. And I worry, by the way, a lot about other SaaS companies that have a lot of unused licenses sitting around as companies try to get more efficient. They're going to just cut that stuff out. Of course. If you're paying for something and not using it right now and over the next six months, there's a lot of companies trying to figure out where those are in the company it reminds me a lot of the groupon breakage groupon would sell you know a hundred groupons or whatever and then only 30 of them would be redeemed and that's how they literally made all that's how the merchants for groupon made all their money they could discount it so much knowing people would buy

it and never redeem so i worry about that in sas you see that in sas a lot but rome you know our our ability to look and let's talk about meeting minutes for a second so i said the average meeting time in rome is eight minutes long and it's because when you use this and you have to see it you're in this immersive hq and it's a 2d hq you can see who's meeting with who i see pomp is talking to a designer and i know oh i'm supposed to talk to those two people about something i pop in for two minutes and we have a quick conversation it's serendipitous it's ad hoc i needed to tell you guys about something and we may or may not be pre or post product market fit but i'm able to have that conversation with you as i as i need to have that conversation so i've got the demo i

i uh uh went you showed it to me and let me do my best maybe to describe uh from the outsider's view kind of the initial experience was uh you can look and see i'll call it a floor plan you guys probably call it something else but um on a floor plan what you can see is everyone has kind of their own offices and so there's howard's office or my office so all the way down the line uh and And then there are conference rooms on this floor plan where multiple people can all meet. But you could also meet in one person's office. So like I could come to Howard's office, virtually knock on the door. You say, yep, come in.

We talk. I leave. I go back to my office. Or we could say, hey, me, you, and five other people, let's go to this conference room and we move over. So literally like you would do in the real world, just now you're doing this virtual experience. And the kind of, I'll call it auto-magically, all of the people's video feeds that are in

whatever the one-on-one meeting or the group meeting it just works right when you go into the room bam everyone's connected and like you can just talk uh kind of in that serendipitous way but then uh probably a little bit of showmanship on your part uh you were like hey let's go to the theater and i was like what the hell is the theater and you basically uh sent a message to your entire team and you're like hey guys meet me and pomp in the theater and everyone kind of virtually moseyed their way over and they end up in this theater section. And literally you could go on stage and you could hold a company, all hands with everyone in the entire company. And then they also could react. And so while you were talking, I think they were throwing tomatoes at

you. They were doing all kinds of different things. There's a boot icon to kick me off the stage. Yes. They can boot you off the stage. Like it's very interactive in terms of how it would be in the real world. And so what's fascinating about this is your comment that this is not just remote teams that are dealing with this right when i worked at facebook i don't know i think i joined there was like 3 500 people by the time i left there's 12 000 yeah well guess what we would have meetings there was one meeting that's like now this infamous meeting in the growth world where uh it was all a bunch of growth people would come and a bunch of people from the ads team and this is when facebook 2014 like it just exploded and what we would do is we would have

the people in uh menlo park uh we would have some people dial in from new york but we also would of people in London. So the London team, the New York team, and the Menlo Park team were all in this meeting together. And in the Menlo Park physical location, people were sitting at the conference room table, but there were so many people in the meeting that then there was benches around the edges of the room, and people filled those up to the point where the guy who used to run the meetings, his name is Mike Kudak, used to sit on top of a filing cabinet and run the meeting. And that's how Pacto is. But then we had all the virtual stuff. And you could imagine, the this is way before anyone realized like hey you should care about the people on video like

it was kind of like the meeting was happening in the room and everyone else was just like kind of sort of there maybe they would chime in when needed right it feels like if we had something like this that meeting would be very very different today because you would now have the people in the room and the people remotely all interacting kind of a much more even playing field you know there's a lot of there's a lot the fact is any company that gets successful gets distributed. So, you know, it's not about five people remote or 50 people remote or 500 people. Any successful operation requires people all over the world. And that's what allows companies to go to market in different countries and different regions and have sales reps. People

are in WeWorks. People are in, you know, in the field. People are doctors in offices or retail stores. And, you know, you want to be able to link everyone in a company together in one HQ to make that company to bring that to, you know, to really bring that company together and help them feel more connected and be able to reduce meetings and stuff. But, you know, in the old world, it used to be that I would try to schedule a 60 minute meeting with someone. And now I can just go right over, see that they're available, knock on their door, have the conversation with them, and we're done. And, you know, getting into hybrid for a second, there's a lot of opportunities. let me talk about hybrid. I think the Zoom room concept where there's eight people in a physical

room and there's a TV with eight people dialed in like the Brady Bunch on Zoom is fundamentally broken. Why? Because if we're all in a conference room and the six of us or eight of us, let's say we're in there and there's eight people dialed in and they all get a head on a screen. If I'm talking, my head always goes over to the TV. I'm always looking at the TV, even if you're right in front of me and I'm talking to you because I want to make sure they can see my face. It's an awkward interaction. Now, it technically, again, this is an example of technically works, but humanly, it's an inhuman way to interact. And I think a better approach, just to give you an idea of something that could feel more natural. Well, actually, let me take a step back.

That approach was designed by AT&T for the 1970s videophone, the original videophone for the World Fair. And it works really well when both conference rooms are exactly equal. Makes sense. Yeah. So there's like six people around one side, six people on the other side, there's a camera, and we look like, you know, a circle. But as soon as it becomes multiple people on the screen with different heads from different places, everything becomes kind of uneven. And so a more natural approach would be you and I bring our, everyone brings their own device to the meeting. Forget the TV, turn the TV off. You don't need the TV. You're in a conference

room. Everyone has their laptop or their iPad, and everyone has a camera on their own face. By the way, think of the experience for the people that are dialing in the old way too. Like I can see like one screen. I see all these heads of other people that are dialed in. And then there's one screen where all the people are in a semi-circle around and i can't even see who's talking it's too small like i can't figure out what's going on so a more natural approach is bring your own device to the meeting and you sit there and like you have a everyone has a camera on them so right right off the bat every single human has a camera and is even on the screen and then uh and then when i need to talk like i can kind of if i'm talking to you pomp and you're

across from me instead of looking at the tv to make sure that like the people over there can see me or whatever so i can see them i just like look at you and talk and i can look down and the camera is still on me i don't have to move my head at all i just i think the future of hybrid meetings is going to be people with their own device as opposed to a centralized big device where we all kind of have to look at it yeah how much of um the like video conferencing stuff is actually screwing up companies versus it's helpful like is it a net positive or net negative i'll give you an interesting fact about that which is the most popular meeting format by a factor of three to one in rome is audio only with screen share so it's not just like oh i could call you

sure i can call you but our offices are audio only so there's an audio only room type people pop in i might need to chat with you i don't need to turn the video on or whatever i can worry about like whatever i just go hey pomp can you help me with x and you're like yeah the answer is y or do you think about this and i'm like well hold on let me show you what i'm doing pull my screen up you can see my screen we're just chatting chatting chatting audio only over so audio only formats are 3x more popular than video on and i think people i think personally the default should be audio only and video can be there as necessary but shouldn't be default video and then you can default back to audio i um the reason i asked that is it was like fun and novel at first like oh video like

like oh we're like on the computer whatever now i oh look at my bunny rabbit ears i can use the filter i hate the video because it's like this used to be a phone call right right and then it became like a zoom which was default video right and now i'm trying to as much as possible force back right going to a thing to the point where i was like calling in but then you can't see if they want to pull something up yep so uh you basically you have to get on through the app or online you know in front of the computer um but also then they know that your video is off because it says your name rather than number like the whole thing right well like i said we need to get back to technology that supports the workflow not the other way around and your tech you know what you

were doing before is like we would talk to each other and or call you as necessary and now everything is anchored around zoom technology which is in which is encumbering our ability to interact with each other naturally and therefore be creative you went to a very uh unique high school uh thomas jefferson tell us about uh this high school in terms of uh when you were showing me the demo the first time you kept introducing people on the team like went to tj went to tj went to tj right um what's going on with this high school well there must be something in the water uh you know i was really fortunate to grow up on the wrong side of the tracks in virginia and then have an out in having gone to thomas jefferson high school for science and technology which is a

stem high school uh by the way i'm super pro stem um and none of the companies i've ever created whether it was yext or confide which is a mobile messaging app i made or rome or anything else i've ever made would exist without tj and tj was you got to go back to and again the 80s here it's like stranger things you're you know riding your bike around the neighborhood this is the the era uh was founded in the dc area i think in partnership with corporations because there was a view of corporations and again these are government contractors take lockheed martin with the view that science technology engineering and math was the path forward to make and keep you know america particularly the military to have the most cutting edge stuff and so in the d.c area you have all

these government contractors selling to the government the federal government a lot of them them live in Northern Virginia. And so this idea of TJ was incubated and formed, and it became the top high school in the nation. And the way that, and that's an objective measure, but the way that you got into TJ was pretty simple. In eighth grade, you took a test. It was a math test. And I'm pretty sure they just literally didn't look at anything else. It wasn't like there was was an English component, which was literally just math problems. And they cut off the top 4% or 5% of people that took the test, and they got the letter and they were admitted.

And there was no interview process, it wasn't like if you were good at sports you got in, it wasn't like if you excelled at the flute that you would help build this community of excellence or whatever. literally just STEM. And the consequence of that, Pomp, was you had this bubble of people that were not there because they wanted to get into Harvard, that were not there because they wanted to get to the best school and escape and have a better life and make the most money and become a McKinsey consultant or whatever people do. But they were there because they loved STEM. they were there because they literally

things like a supercomputer which was pretty awesome back in you know 1998 when i went to high school which was in our uh in our computer lab things like that like got people going and they would just like hang out there all day and so this vibe i i imagine was a little bit like Stanford, you know, 20 years ago, but it was this, this vibe of everybody just loving STEM and pure with, with no, with no, it wasn't commercially focused at all. It wasn't commercially focused and it wasn't like a stepping stone to anything else. It was just love of STEM, whether it was robotics, whether it was computer science, whether it was mathematics. And so the people there were really self-selected for that and that alone.

And, you know, I was fortunate enough to meet a lot of really, really, really great people there. There's been some notable alums. Vlad Tenev went to TJ. He's much younger than me, of course. There's other alums that have gone through there. But I met my co-founders at Yext and at Rome and at Confide at TJ. And it has continued to serve as a really tremendous recruiting bed for us in my career. Where, you know, we know if someone was a sysadmin at TJ, which is like the highest

honor, like the students there like ran the school networks. Really? It's actually funny. I had a call with the principal a couple of weeks ago and they were like, I'm sorry, like we can't use Roam. It's not approved by FCPS to, you know, it's not a technology. It's approved. And I was just like chuckling to myself.

Like all I had to do was like ask a sysadmin and like Roam would be through the network in like one second. Did you do it? No, I didn't want to put anybody up to that. we just they actually but here's what i did they said sorry we can't use roam can we use you know the one approved technology from the school board is is zoom can we use that and i said i'm sorry zoom is not approved technology for us to use at rome so what would you do a phone call phone call yeah i mean it makes sense though yeah when you think of a school like that yeah should we have

more of them or is it important to have like a couple of them that are you know have like the uh difficulty to get in and you couldn't replicate 10 000 across the country well they're changed they're they're this is a hot button issue right now and i am not a northern virginia school board political expert but what i will say is that it does appear that they've changed the admissions process to focus less on stem pure stem and more on helping you know people escape and get into a good college and you know the school was not founded to be a college preparatory institute like you want to go to like a good college or you want to go to princeton i don't know go to st albans i'm just making this up i don't know but this this place was like just a

place to go and you know learn about stem and get into that my view is that american exceptionalism is fundamentally driven by stem and that the reason that we have the standard of living that we have today is because of stem the reason we have you know companies and all the things we have this wonderful technology the incredible medic you know medical capabilities of course everything can be improved and get better but what's going to make it better and what's going to make our economy better is absolutely you know leaps in technology right and um and making sure that we recognize and have a system to recognize the people that can excel in that early on and putting them together with other people like them early on is absolutely not just in the interest of

the nation, but the interest of all of civilization. Yeah. I mean, it feels like if we have smart people who are told that they're smart and are encouraged to try hard things, we probably will be better off you were preaching to the choir on that one it goes back to coke right like if you think of uh charles's um one of his fascinations is around creative destruction this whole idea um and it's top of mind because i just read the book um but if we are so big and so successful we could sit back and say like we're great we're too big to fail 125 billion dollars of revenue like we're good right but this idea of creative destruction is they actually view it as a race if you're my competitor i want to destroy my business before you do right and if i can do

that successfully then that means that i have innovated i've created a new product a new service a new type of organization a new whatever to stay one step ahead of you because if i don't do it you're going to do it right and it feels like a school like a thomas jefferson although it's not explicitly said implicitly there's this go build things innovate like you kind of it feels almost like there's like a soft nudge in that direction and then we kind of now see you know 20 years later what the results are it's like pretty impressive failing is okay failing is key you know it's funny you mentioned creative disruption from coke another book i read recently was creative selection i don't know if you've of course you've read creative selection ken cosina

you got it the keyboard you know thank god by the way can you type how do you can you type on your iphone really effectively yes okay can you no i think my fingers are too fat for it or something i i still i still struggle every time i don't do two fingers i just do one yeah okay right just now my thumb will probably fall off yeah like this is actually like a weird question uh i don't think i've talked about this yet do your thumbs hurt at all um they hurt more when i used to use a blackberry oh interesting did you you're too young for black now i had the uh my my first like we had the razors and then uh the remember the sidekick this like you'd slide it and you had the real keyboard the t keys uh yeah and um yeah my thumbs hurt sometimes just from taking so much

and then the other thing too is uh if you had to put a score on the degradate the degradation of your posture as i'm sliding down the chair here like literally literally i want to sit up i was like doing something yesterday and i just happened to walk by uh this like mirror looking thing and i looked and i was like what the who is that guy right and i was like and like immediately you like correct your posture right but you're like dude come on like we're little you know monkeys over the keyboard or whatever um so i think some of that but ken uh his whole story is like fascinating because he basically was like okay how do we create a keyboard without the physical keys we need to do it in this glass right and the problems he describes in there are problems that most

people wouldn't really think about. Yeah. And like the big innovation was not actually the keyboard layout. It was the whole like auto text. Right. Yeah. Which is fascinating. Right. And, you know, what I took away from that was less about that specific innovation, but about the way that Apple used demos to bring ideas to life in a short, concise way. The demo for Steve was the ultimate sort of pinnacle of any Apple inventor, engineer's person of their of their career. But also the, you know, the the fact that when they were all in there together, greatness happened. And it wasn't. Yes, there was the individual that came up with the breakthrough. but getting that quick feedback from people um other like-minded people that shared the love

of wanting to make something great was the key to it all happening and at jefferson tj there was that feeling a bit and so when you're you know 15 and you experience that you can bring that forward for the rest of your life there's a lot of tj people at apple by the way um and uh in fact the ag cloud database at apple uses a technology called foundation db which was which was one of the first databases to break the acid test conundrum and uh one of my high school classmates founded foundation db which apple acquired wow that's crazy how many people do you think have built a successful company that were in your high school class my high school class well there were 400 i would say 10 i would say 10 10 to 10 to 10 yeah 10 out of 400 which is a high ratio two and

a half percent right i have a high yeah high bar for good math right two and a half percent right yeah i don't do public math because you know how that goes um uh i've done too much public math over the years well it's right it's better to run a private company the public company you can make mathematical mistakes yes true um what is the best like three or four books that you've ever read if somebody wants to get into reading uh you and i share this love for reading what would you say some of the top books are well let's go like one for one you say a book i say okay so hey guys i hope that you're enjoying this conversation as you probably realize we don't run any ads on this show that's right all the other podcasts all the other youtube shows that

you watch they have advertisers we don't have any direct relationships with advertisers and we simply create this because we enjoy doing it now that we do that though we have a team and if you'd like to support us one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the pomp letter it's a daily letter that i write to about 235 000 people about my personal opinion on financial markets business technology and bitcoin just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there i'd love to have you join us and it's a great easy way to support the work that the team and i are doing on a daily basis all right let's get back into this conversation you asked if someone wants to get into reading i wouldn't recommend this one for one for anybody who wants to get into reading

but it is my all-time favorite book and i don't know if you've read it it's called gudel escher bach i have not by dr david hofstetter he you might want to warm up to him a little bit before jumping into it because he can be quite tedious uh but goodell escher bach is this just insane book about how your mind works and he you know escher was the artist that makes all these paradoxical images like the hands kind of drawing each other or like the impossible buildings where you walk up staircases that couldn't possibly exist and a better book by hofstetter that you might start with is called i'm a strange loop okay um that one you'd see in airports and stuff and it really gets into cognition he also wrote a third one i guess i'm really going deep on

here called patterns and essences and that one gets into how your mind works and how the human brain uh uses categorization specifically to chunk things together and reference each other Um, and so if you have interest in how your mind works, not at like a, you know, not like a biological level, but like, you know, trying to understand the brain is, is, uh, the study of his career and he, he approaches it from a, from a, in a, uh, uh, in a perspective that we can like kind of relate to. So I love Hofstetter. Guttel, Escher, Bach is this like masterpiece.

piece um i might not start with that one but it probably is my favorite book of all time wow geb it's known as there's like a cult kind of following around it too among some nerdy people so you would definitely like it all right i don't know now i'm nervous um so i'm gonna say two one that i know you've read because we've talked about it and then one that most people uh won't have read uh the rise of american growth uh is to me uh it's super dense there's lots of charts and numbers and all this stuff but um it really highlights from what 1870s to like 1940s give or take uh literally the rise of american growth and how so much innovation happened there and one of my favorite data points is like uh airplanes go just as fast today as they did in

like the 1940s and 50s there's been no real innovation in speed right the worst is actually we had the concord right that was faster yes and we don't have it anymore it makes me so sad yeah it's crazy so there's that that one's fantastic very dense read difficult for some people to get through but if you enjoy that stuff uh and then the other one is uh the book we were talking about before i was showing you uh in the office it is uh laid out like the bible so uh just take a grain of salt but uh 50 cent yes the rapper and robert green the author wrote a book together They're called The 50th Law, a play on Robert Greene's 48 powers or 48 laws of power. And in the book, they basically, Robert Greene goes through all these different things.

And it's really about overcoming fear. Like that's the general premise of the book. But he overlays 50 Cent's life events on top of his writing. And so he talks about all these different details. And I've given the book now to a couple of different people. And like they're from very different walks of life. And they all come back to me and they're like, yo, Loki, when you gave me that book, I thought that was stupid, but that was actually a fantastic book.

So I'm just going to keep beating the drum, and maybe Robert Greene will give me a percentage of sales on that one. What other ones? All right. So I like to try to study people. So Doris Kearns Goodwin is, I think, maybe the best presidential historian. I'm sure you've read all her stuff. I mentioned Billy Pulpit, which about TR is the best.

She also had a couple of others, But she wrote one on leadership that tied together TR and FDR and Lyndon Johnson. And I didn't understand. I knew, obviously, the relationship between the cousins. But I hadn't understood that FDR really helped Lyndon Johnson when he was a, I guess, congressman from Texas and kind of identified him. this was like in the the early you know early 40s before fdr died that in late 30s as like a potential person that could be the you know a president united states and so that that connection was not known to me um and so that was fascinating for me to for me to read that it was interesting

by the way she's got lincoln in there too so you know she's she's got them all covered yeah um but You know, it was it was fascinating for me to learn about that link, which was one that I had not understood before. A Curious Mind, Brian Grazer, of course, which is a is a great one all about curiosity and how important it is. I like to think that I, better or worse, am able to have the curiosity conversation, just publish them while he has them in private. um but another book that and he's the guy that would reach out to people just sort of hey i have nothing that i want from you except 30 minutes of your time yeah and i'd love to just talk talk right and he did it with um i think former presidents he actually uh although it wasn't under the pretense of a curiosity conversation he met with fidel castro with a bunch of like

other movie producer people and uh he tells that story um maybe he's using it as an excuse and he met with uh you know obviously movie stars and all that type of stuff but it was really trying to get and meet with people that are outside of um uh his world and one of them i think if i remember correctly in the what 1980s the riots in la uh happened right and um he met with the police chief like the day the riots kicked off he just had it on the meeting he thought for sure it was going to get canceled or whatever he shows up and like the way he describes it is like there's a lot of police at the police station that day. Right. And he still sits and he meets with the, uh, with the police chief. And he's like, it was fascinating because I saw what was

going on out in the streets. I saw the news. And then like, I just, you know, by the luck of the draw, it was able to meet with a guy, uh, who was like the responder. Wow. Right. And like how he was interacting internally, uh, on the same time. So that one's always a, a good one. What else? Uh, you know, my favorite business book, and again, it's going to be cliche is definitely zero to one. I think Peter Thiel just absolutely nailed every possible concept in there. I even kind of have some passages in my head, you know, my favorite line in the entire book is if you want to build a big business, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business. And when I just, I, I, it's like, I think pulled out like in like a, you know, a special, special phrase

and that, that whole kind of idea where, you know, there's pretty much two, two kinds of businesses those that are commodities and those that are monopolies it's true yeah it's better to be dealing with the antitrust people than to you know be just chopping your prices over time um and that that particular book i just i think absolutely you know encompasses so so much and again we're all we're talking about non-fiction here predominantly um do you read a lot of fiction not really you i don't think i've read a fiction book this is gonna sound horrible in like a decade so i read um the foundation series which is uh a sci-fi series because i saw paul graham tweet about it and i was like okay was it good yeah but i mean i didn't

i feel like i could get most fiction from watching star trek like this is i'm gonna get absolutely blasted for saying this never watched star trek never watched star wars uh i don't really read fiction like any of that stuff i would say that did you read the fountainhead uh yes but like in college years and years ago um i think the last fiction book that i read that i can remember like immediately is um uh damn what are the three books. So when you join Facebook, uh, Sam lesson, I don't know if you know, uh, he, he, yeah, he, he puts together, um, yeah. And so he was at Facebook and he put together, or at least had a hand in selecting the three books that product managers would get. And one of them was snow

crash. Okay. Like, you know, pretty telling, pretty, pretty forward looking. Uh, and there's two others. I forget what they were, but snow crash was probably the last like fiction book that i remember uh reading and um it was like fascinating like you joined this place and and it's supposed to be you know this amazing company that's growing really fast like all these things and like they hand you fiction books yeah and like it just like kind of spoke volumes i think i think the one fiction book that i loved is uh ready player one yeah i watched the movie i didn't read the book oh the movie was awful really oh i thought it was i mean you might have liked it but i mean maybe if i read the book i would have thought the movie was right the other the other

way that you're going to start to read fiction again you're going to discover that the greatest author of i think last century was roald dahl who roald dahl you know james and the giant peach all the kids oh yeah like charlie the problem is you know when you're when your kids get old enough you read this to them and you realize when you get through the final book you do the whole series matilda roald dahl you do james and the giant peach charlie and chalk factory charlie and the great glass elevator and then you're done and there's nothing else nearly as good until you get to harry potter yeah and then you know that's its own thing but at that age the genius of the writing and the storytelling but i did worry a lot about charlie in the chocolate factory i'm sure

you're familiar with the story right so you've seen that movie charlie goes he wins the golden ticket he ends up being sort of the chosen one and willie wonka gives him the chalk chocolate factory and i thought to myself like charlie's main problem is that willie gives him this chocolate factory he is worth nothing and he's come and comes upon this chocolate factory that's worth you know billions of dollars charlie can't pay the tax bill on that it's kind of like in home alone what was uh what was the dad's uh you know profession how do you have that mansion and how do you pay first class for all those people to go to you know europe makes you wonder it's big questions a little bit i also uh was in new york recently and i went to uh the titanic exhibit

which you can take a guess there was two people who went me and plena i'll let you decide who uh whose idea it was um but i enjoy going to that type of stuff just because you learned right and uh and so we go and it was actually like very well done um they kind of have uh all these different stops and they have a bunch of uh things you know original pieces of the titanic and pictures of people and like all the stuff but of course when you get to the end uh every single couple has to have the debate like if jack got on the on the door like you know would he still be alive right didn't the didn't the director recently answer that and say there was only room for one person well i mean i i hear what he's saying but i've seen the door before and you know two humans

could you know and then you get into the weight debate you know bad debate of course um i have two questions for you then i'll let you go one when you read a book what is your process do you read kindle physical book audio book do you highlight do you note take what do you do when you read books always buy the physical book and i tend to buy more than i get to there's what's the the japanese phrase i forget the japanese phrase that means there's far greater knowledge than you could possibly have and so that's why we all when we look at and gaze upon a library it looks beautiful to us because you see so much more than you could ever possibly hope to know and that in a way is comforting so i have a bunch of books that i don't read is what i'm trying to say

from amazon and i try to order them you know when i see somebody like you tweet about like i bought paul graham we mentioned him before he tweeted about this book called life in an english countryside and it's just like a you know it's it's a it's a historical book probably written in the 60s but it's about the medieval times in london and how about you know how the meals were served and i have this thing and it's kind of sitting on my desk like and i'm thumbed through like i'm not going to read it but i still bought it so i have i i keep a constant flow coming that is more than i could possibly keep up with and i feel guilty when i don't read one but that's good see i don't feel guilty i i do the exact same thing if i hear a book or somebody i respect or

you think fondly of and they say something about a book i buy it immediately right and uh i have come to the conclusion that i don't spend any money on anything like i literally have a couple t-shirts, a couple pair of pants. Like I just, it isn't interesting to me. And, uh, I don't feel like, uh, Oh, sorry. I don't feel economic guilt. It's not like, Oh, I waste the money. Well, but here's the thing is I have said to myself, the one thing that I will always spend whatever amount of money that I want to, right. I don't care about dinners and this and that and books. I will always buy books. And so like, you know, I've bought a lot of books on months and some books i don't buy a lot and i have two piles one pile is i want to read the full book the other

pile is what i think of as the sprints so it's like a marathon and sprints the marathons i'm going to read the whole thing the sprints i will say to myself i'm going to read 10 pages of that book today right and it may take me six months to finish the book or to finish enough of the book where i get the point right but i'm reading it in 10 page increments where it's almost like a break from the actual book that i'm reading so that i can get a little bit of it but like it's either too dense or it's not something i'm like super interested in or whatever so kind of like the medieval meal book would be perfect you skip ahead do you ever skip ahead no because if it's not good i almost get to the point where i'm like if it's not good i just stop right like i'm like i'm not

married to the idea of i have to finish books and some books like you kind of read and you're like i don't know maybe 100 pages in 150 pages you're like i get it yeah right right other books you're like man i wish they had you know gone 500 more pages right and so uh i try to find the ones where i wish there was more than the ones i'm like okay like i'm done but once i feel like i got it i just drop it i think this year i saw a lex friedman tweet that he had like 28 fiction books he was going to read like 1980 you know 1984 brave new world brothers cameras of like i did that like 10 years ago and i read pretty much all those that sort of encompassed my my sort of fiction for a long time and i did them all they were all pretty good except the russian ones were just so tedious

my god i could barely get through brother brothers cameras of men yeah see that stuff's just not like super interesting maybe maybe i'm making a mistake right but like i just haven't oh i'm anti i'm anti-recommending it to you right okay all right definitely do not read it it was just a long tedious story with no point yeah now of course you know i mentioned that on twitter and was scolded for of course misinterpreting all of the you know brilliant literature and i'm sure i'm sure there are many people who deeply loved it and respected it and i am simply not an aficionado enough to have appreciated it but i just did not like it at all do you think that there's some people who uh are like predisposed to fiction versus non-fiction or is it like something

happens in your life because i i let's actually go let's actually chunk this up to back to Hofstetter, I bet the human brain is receptive to stories. And if you look at stories, they're the best way to pass information along. That's why even across, you know, cultures in different places end up telling similar stories. And, you know, you have these motifs in your brain. A great book that I loved was Carl Jung's autobiography. I don't know if you've read that. That was spectacular. And, you know, he would get into the symbolism and get into this idea that we have sort of every human brain has figures. So whether or not certain brains are more disposed to that, I think all human brains are disposed to certain religious almost figures

that appear in stories, whether it's in aboriginal tribes, you know, around the world or Native of Americans or English or Indian, you see the same characters kind of appearing for societies that never talk to each other. So that means I think we are all predisposed to stories and characters and these motifs that the best politicians figure out how to tap into that and use those characters and narratives and stories.

So absolutely, is there something innate in our brain that is receptive to stories? No question. Yeah. I just am not super drawn to the fiction. I love, but like, here's the thing that what's crazy is the biographies and autobiographies. I absolutely love those are stories of course. Right. But, but it's like true stories versus like the fiction stories. And then, you know, my, uh, maybe guilty pleasure is, uh, on YouTube. Well, you tell me first what you watch on YouTube and then I'll tell you what I watch. Well, just like you don't read any fiction. I don't watch much

youtube except you of course okay but you don't watch like uh any youtube no documentaries no anything really not oh wow so i am like obsessive about uh documentaries some of them are like actual you and i would think of as documentaries some of them i've mentioned uh before that this guy uh phineas is the name of the youtube channel sounds like a separate piece i don't want to waste uh the next uh week of your life but he does these like 20 30 minute uh documentaries on great investors so he's got peter lynch and warren buffett and all the important boss the reason when he did um and they're just like very well done because it's like obvious that this is somebody who's learning how to do storytelling right but and he's not like some big

production company right so so it's uh uh pretty interesting um and then i watched a lot of interviews. So I've got a, I don't know, maybe 20. Can I ask you, who do you think the best interviewer is? I don't, I don't think that there's a best interviewer because I think what happens, can I ask you a different question then? Okay. What's this, what is the secret to being a great interviewer? Listen, just listen. Right. The reason why I say, I don't think there's a best interviewer is because I actually think people, um, they have good days and bad days and they go through these like cycles i see even with myself but um there's episodes that i'll watch with somebody and i'm like goat right like like that was amazing they got everything out of

that guest right and then there's ones you watch with the same exact interviewer and you're like almost like a slow car crash and my conclusion on why that happens is because you can't evaluate just one side of the conversation a conversation is give and take there's two participants and just like there's no good company culture or bad company culture it's all about fit right where you could take one employee and put them in a company culture and another one hates it one loves it it's all about like the match right same thing in an interview optimization and so when you think about uh that as a dynamic right now it's not about who is the best interviewer it's actually about who are the best combinations of people and so paul and john yeah if you pull out like um

One of my favorite CNBC clips of all time is when Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman jump on live and they're yelling and screaming at each other. It's like that's like electric, you know, entertaining television. What is that equivalent when it comes to interviews? And I asked actually recently, I said, you know, what's the best like podcast episode of all time? and um i think the person i agreed with in all the comments was uh andrew huberman said hands down not even close jocko interviewed uh this guy johnny kim i don't know if you've ever heard of johnny so johnny kim uh i'm definitely gonna screw this up but he was a navy seal in fallujah he was part of uh jocko's team i believe he then went on to become an astronaut and then went to i think

was harvard medical school and became an md and that all sounds crazy right literally as a kid i forget all the details but like there was a like a broken home situation and if i i don't want to misspeak but i think what happened was uh at one point like the police like i think it was his dad in the attic and there was like gunshots like it was like a like a super screwed up childhood and he went on to like all these accomplishments and you listen to things like four and a half, five hours or whatever. And you're just like, that is an extraordinary individual. Right. And him and Jocko, Jocko is not only a good interviewer, but also there's like a level of trust. They're on the same team, like the ability to talk about certain things,

the shared experiences, all this stuff you listen to. And you're like, man, this is one of the best conversations ever documented. Right. You know, it's funny. You mentioned CNBC. I once had to interview Mark Hamill, who I know you don't watch Star Wars, but is famous. Okay. So, you know, i'm sitting there we have a conference i'm like well how the hell you know what do i possibly ask mark hamill who by the way he's an easy interviewer and i'm the easy interviewee and i'm not i have no idea what to ask this guy so i asked carl cantania from cnbc i said carl you know what in your opinion is the best way to interview somebody and what is the key to being able to do a good interview, he said, you ask them about a moment. You ask them about the instant where they felt

something or they learned something, because when you get to that moment, that's how people get in to their own head and open up. So I've always used that when I, and again, I'm not a person who interviews people, but I use that, you know, tell me about the moment when X, when you realize something and that really gets people going so carl told me that different carl different cnbc carl yeah but that's a great uh tidbit well it's all about moments right one you know the moments it's five minute meetings for teddy it's eight minute meetings for rome it's six minute meetings for lawyer and it's the magic moment from carl cantania i'm gonna mispronounce his name but do you know who uh nardwall is i do not know nardwall

i'm about to open up a whole world for you my friend all right so he is uh a guy who let me paint a picture of him um you ever like uh see like people pretending when they go to the golf course and they have like uh maybe they have like a striped pants on they've got like a really weird like 1970s almost like wallpaper style like a golf shirt and they've got like a uh one of the little hats on right and just like it's a look right that's what he wears okay like day-to-day but he interviews the world's top hip-hop artist and he is lights out as an interviewer because it's not the questions that he asks it's the work he does before the interviews so he's and he's doing this for like years and years and years right and he will literally in the middle of

the interview he will ask questions of the guest right and they'll be like dude how do you know that who told you like not like oh you went on google and spent like five extra find something personal that really gets them going like i told my best friend a secret in 12th grade and nobody knows that that person's my best friend and you just repeated to me word for word what the what the secret was right how do you know how do you know that and they'll like stop the interview like how like what the fuck right um the other thing he does is he gives them gifts to start the interview sometimes and there are things that like you know uh i think he had like chance the rapper maybe or something he like gave him like a uh vinyl record but the vinyl record was a

a previous artist that no one really knew chance was a huge fan of when he was a kid but it came from the exact record shop that chance used to go to as a kid wow and so you're just like dude like that is that's an incredible amount of work right and then it's like when i bring chris harris to a dinner with you and he's like you know i roomed with your brother in college yeah yeah which is like the world's small right but also but by the way if your name is nardwall like you're gonna be famous yeah and he also he's just like quirky yeah so it's like you you almost set someone up to not expect a lot. And then you have this like hard hitting,

not like gotcha type journalism, but more so just like I did the work. Right. And I think people respect the shit out of somebody who does the work. Right. And so it's people like that. I'm always on the look. So actually,

if you are watching this right now or listening and you know, if somebody who does stuff like that, like just tweet at me, leave in the comments, whatever, I'll find it. But those are the people who like fascinate me because they're able to get information out of people.

that just like shows who they are as humans right well and that's what oprah does right she gets people to really open up that's the idea but it's like it's on television yeah do they really open up do they really tell you the truth because prince harry did well in the book i don't know i'm not going to read that did you see the uh uh the controversies i read about the controversies like the two that i i don't know they weren't surprising or were surprising uh they actually weren't was like he's like yeah me my brother like fight yeah you wait you fought with your brother and he and he like pushed you over wait how many brothers do you have yeah i have four brothers trust me that happens like that still happens right right right i'm sorry to hear that yeah

but that was kind of like okay yeah um and and uh then the second one was uh he claims that he killed 25 people at war as an apache helicopter pilot people you killed people it's like he's a combat helicopter pilot right who was awarded things for seeing combat right like yeah probably right and uh i think that people when they saw like the headlines they thought that he like walked up to someone like pointed a gun and like you know shot him right and he's like no no like i was like in a helicopter like yes we still see people running and like all stuff but like it is a little bit different than you know he's a navy seal and he's like whites of the eyes in the middle of the night type stuff right um so i don't know it was just like

why do people care right like let the guy live his life let the guy live his life but they care because he's making a big deal of it yeah if you write the book i guess he's trying to make money yeah well does he have to make money yes right he got cut off right uh one of my favorite stats from last year is i did not know that the queen of england or the now the king gets paid a dollar per head of every australian citizen every year that seems about worth it if you think i looked it up before but they've got you know a couple million people and so like just that alone like they're getting a one dollar tax per person in australia well you know if you tax people without representation as they may have learned in the past bad things can

happen it's just a lot harder when you're all the way in the middle of the ocean in australia and they live very far away that's true they can't send people to yorktown yeah but like vice versa can they send people to australia you know i don't think that those two countries are going to end up at war yeah but just like what if australians just were like we're not paying anymore wait who pays who for this australians come out of their wages like a federal tax like it's like a line item or is it just like i'm not i just know that somehow uh the king or queen gets a dollar per head but australian dollar or british pound i guess a good question too yeah but like when you start to think about it it's like what if they all shunned you're just like

no we're not paying we're not paying anymore i think would the uk really like kick them out show up no would they just like show up and give us the money you know i'm not really sure how their whole system of government works but does the queen have to sign off on their prime minister in some way so this is fascinating too because uh who is it ryan holiday uh in his latest book um he talks about how the queen is actually has no power like the queen does not actually make decisions the queen does not you know whatever now i guess not the king um so there's like a separate and distinct government function but like no one wants to piss off the king or queen right and so you almost have to like rule by influence rather than rule by authority

like very interesting uh dynamic it's kind of like running a sales force i think a lot about military is very authoritative leadership like yeah you have a rank on your chest i have a rank yeah like mine's higher than yours like do what i say right um there's authoritative leadership for sure in uh corporations but um it's a lot of influential leadership as well right that uh people kind of forget about yeah well it's funny because technologies like slack have shifted the balance from and frankly any technology that helps people communicate faster and better i don't want to say undermines but reduces the needs for authoritative hierarchies because if you think about something like channels like slack channels like you know anybody that

wants to can make up their own channel and call it whatever they want and add whatever topic they want to it and therefore start a movement so you know it used to be that all communications from a company were top down there's a hierarchy there's a president and a vice president and a you know area vice president and you know in a sales force you have these layers um and you know you'd relay the message down and no longer is that necessary to do so um yeah it's been it's been interesting i think in a military you you obviously still need that in a tech company it's interesting how few people you may need to run a big tech service it's a different world where can we send send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Rome. You can always find me on

Twitter at Howard. I'm OG. So at Howard, and we asked, we also got at Rome on Twitter, but on our site, it's ro.am. Ro.am. Is the website. And then Twitter, we're at Rome. And then you can find me at Howard. I always enjoy talking to you. I expect more book recommendations in 2023. I will send mine as well. And I'll do this again in the future. Love seeing you, Pom.