This Week in Startups - E1108: SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie on leading a public company through COVID, championing diversity from the top down, role of a modern CEO & more

Episode Date: September 12, 2020

Check out SurveyMonkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com FOLLOW Zander: https://twitter.com/zlurie FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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life science companies plan for the future. Learn more at SVB.com slash next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next. Hey, everybody, it's September. It's 2020. We're in the middle of a pandemic, six months in, and California is on fire. Social unrest in the streets as we see black and brown brothers and sisters being literally murdered in the streets, it's a tense time in America. It's a very tense time globally. And polarization of wealth, social injustice, fires, the pandemic, and a stock market that is just confounding that keeps going up while people suffer and tens of millions of people lose their jobs during a pandemic.

It's crazy times right now. And I wanted to focus in an episode here of This Week in Startups as we're all going through this, to take one of the people who I've gotten to know over my career as someone who's a calming force, super insightful and exceptional at running organizations, and that man is Zandallori, and he is the CEO of Survey Monkey. We became friends because we had a mutual friend, Dave Goldberg, who passed away tragically, and Xander took over for Goldie, as we called referred to him and carried survey monkey over the finish line to become a public company. And that allowed a large amount of money to go towards Dave Goldberg's legacy.

And for that, I think everybody is really grateful to Zander. And it's great to have them on the program here today to talk about leading companies in a time of crisis. Sandra, how are you doing? Hey, Jason. It's, it's good to talk to you and good to see on Zoom here. As you said in your intro, these are crazy times. 2020 is throwing the kitchen sink at us. And I think it's challenging all of us, humans and leaders especially to make some good decisions

and stay curious and help show people a path towards an optimize a future with a better outlook and a brighter outlook than the one we have today. So I'm doing just fine. And thanks for the good words about Dave Goldberg and SurveyMonkey. Yeah. So when did you realize that this pandemic? was going to be a truly acute, let's say, generational changing event, not just something that would blow over or something we could contain.

You know, we went into shelter-in-place, I believe, right around the March 15th in San Francisco. But when did you get an inkling? Because I know you have a global workforce and customer base. When did you realize that this was going to be different? I think it was mid-February. Actually, I remember vividly. friend Jen Tahada, the CEO of PagerDuty, hosted a nice dinner, and I met Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, and he was talking about just how much inbound demand there was around the world as people

were beginning to shelter in place, or stopping travel, and everybody was getting, you know, up and going on a web conferencing platform in Zoom, as now the whole world knows, is the best product by far. So I think that was one of the early signs. And then, you know, in San Francisco, there was a lot of discussion about travel being shut down, people feeling a little bit less comfortable. I remember going to the last Warriors game was a Tuesday or Wednesday night with Ned Siegel from Twitter. And we were all looking around at each other being like, what the heck are we doing here? And on the way home in the Uber, we crafted the note, my chief people officer and me and on Wednesday morning sent it out to move to strongly encourage work from home

and less you had a critical need to be in the office. And here we are, six months later to the day. And there's no end in sight. We moved our work from home policy to July of next year, which is really just a placeholder until we get a vaccine in. We feel comfortable that we can confidently bring people back to the office safely. It was a surreal moment. I think that the NBA game was canceled that Thursday, I believe. It was either Wednesday or Thursday. you were probably at the game on Tuesday. I think it was the Thursday that the NBA game was actually canceled while the players were just getting on the court for the shoot around.

That's where it really sort of hit home to me. Like, if they're canceling an NBA game and people are in the stands already and they're sending them home, they're not even going to let them. Yeah, it was Rudy tested positive. Referees came out and said, shut it down and send everybody out. And you saw the announcers on TNT and the fans were just confounded. So, you know, like many times, Mark Benioff has been a head. of the curve here. And he, he was about five days ahead of us and some of this, the other tech

companies. And in terms of moving strongly encouraged work from home at Salesforce the prior week. So clearly, you know, just given their scale and their offices and their customers, they saw something before the rest of us. You're old school. You've been in corporate America working at various big companies and startups. The idea of working from home was not something I don't think you embraced early. Now you're forced to have an entirely remote workforce. How have you as a CEO? had to adjust how you manage people, and how is the company had to change, serving monkey specifically? So it's been the challenge of our time, I think, for every executive.

First off, there is no playbook. None of us lived through the 1918 pandemic, so we didn't really have a playbook for, you know, seamlessly integrating to a work-from-home environment. You know, Serving Monkey, whether it's through dumb luck or skill, we're incredibly fortunate. We design code, ship, and sell software, and it's largely over the internet and phone. So we don't build a product in a plant. We don't rely on retail stores for foot traffic. So our business is thriving and we're incredibly fortunate.

But more important than that, Jay, as you know from working with some of the world's best companies, is that we, you know, over the last several years, have built a management team and a culture and values that really enable us to trust each other, to mentor each other, to reward and promote people based on truly good work and treating people with respect and treating customers to give them great value for our product. So I think that foundation is benefiting us today in 2020, much more than it was in 2019 and 2018, because we lacked that physical proximity and we lack that ability to get into a conference room and really read faces.

And so, you know, I like you and many others, I'm tired of kind of staring into a Zoom screen all the time. And, you know, our business is basically headquartered, not in San Mateo today, but on Slack. And that's how we work all day. We work on Slack, Zoom, and email. And I yearn for the day where I can get back in and have those conversations where you can kind of engage without the latency that is, you know, the result of the web. But this is how it's going to be for a while. And there are some benefits. Let's talk a little bit about what the benefits are. You do get to, I think you're forced as a manager to really define clearly what people need to get done in a way that is very different than showing up at the office and being a good team member. Right. There are people who are culture people who come to the office. You see them in the hallway. But now all that interaction is counted for zero. And then all that's really counted, I think, is the actual productivity. So did you find out or have any surprises in your management of people that you now were able to see,

hey, this person is massively productive? I never really realized it. But all of that time walking around the office and the extroverts ruling the roost in meetings, et cetera, goes away. So how is that changed in how you evaluate human and human capital and performance? Yeah. You said it well. I mean, I think there is a sense that managers, leaders have had to be more.

crisp about our strategic priorities. We have 1,300 people at SurveyMonkey. 1,300. We just can't do as many things well as we could when we could all convene and around water coolers and in the offices. And so, you know, we are more crisp, more focused around delivering performance. And the truth is that so much of what we do today can be measured. We can measure lines of code. We can measure Jira tickets. We can measure BDR calls, sales, So, you know, you're really counting on your frontline managers to manage their direct reports and their direct reports to manage their direct reports. And ultimately, you know, you hope people don't have more than seven to ten direct reports. Each manager is really accountable for

how are my people doing? Are they healthy? How's their mental health? Are they showing up every day? Are they delivering on the OKRs and the critical objectives we have to measure our success? And I'm sure there are some people inside of our company that are dialing in it. in a bit, I hope not. But you know, you can't see and touch and feel as much as you could when we convened in physical offices. But we're fortunate that much of what we do to drive our success is measurable. And that does drive our promotion process, our pay processes. We just completed our biannual pay equity audit. And fortunately, we're paying our men and women and black and white employees the same. But when you really get into the data and you're measuring

in every line in Excel, it's illustrative of, wow, we've got a lot to measure and it's harder to do in a remote workplace for sure. When we get back from this break, I want to talk about reentry. It's pretty obvious that rapid testing has worked and trace and track and contact tracing has worked in other countries. We've had the worst performance of all countries in our response to this, but it will be inevitable that the cheap test will be here soon. It'll be inevitable that they'll be, we'll know if the vaccines are going to work, let's just put it that way. But clearly track and trace and cheap testing are imminent.

So when we get back from the break, I want to know how you think about reentry and the workforce coming back to offices sometime in 2021 when we get back on this video start. All right, let's get down to brass tax. I've got $50 to you from LinkedIn jobs. The market is coming back. I know it's really weird to say,

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Those are built into LinkedIn. We know that he hired his favorite candidate over Zoom, and it's worked out great. Congratulations to Jay. Be like Jay. There are over 690 million people waiting for you on LinkedIn right now to do that work to join your team. I want to give you $5.0.50 right now. LinkedIn.com slash twist. That's right. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist to get $50 off. Terms and conditions apply because they're giving you $50. Because you listen to this podcast, the greatest podcast, in startup history. LinkedIn.com slash twist. Thank you, LinkedIn for helping me hire so many great people. I cannot thank you enough. It is the best. Okay, let's get back to this

amazing episode. All right, Zandallori is our guest today here on this week in startup CEO of Survey Monkey previously. He was on the board of Grocker and GoPro and worked at CBS and as one track record in the tech business. How are you thinking about going back to work? Let's just imagine. I'll just give you the scenario. $10 testing in five minutes is available, you know, at the front door. Vaccines are available and essentially free, paid for it by the government and they're working. And the number of people dying from COVID is low single digits in the nation, like other countries. Or maybe there's been zero last week and it's pretty safe and everybody says, hey, we're going back to work.

What does that look like for you in 2021 if you were to do that? And then people have moved maybe, maybe people have relocated? How are you planning on even handling that? Have you started that plan? Or did you just punt that and say, let's just focus on the core business for now and make that decision in six months when we have more data. Oh, it's a great question. And you have written a book and built a career on investing in startups. And, you know, we know the power of first mover advantage. I don't think, Jason, this first mover advantage in returning to the workplace is something that's going to be highly coveted. So, you know, for us, the reimagination of work, as we call it, is a topic we've spent a lot of time on. We've engaged an outside consultant to help us kind of

come in and really think about not just how we go back in 21, but what? What does Serving Monkeys' footprint look like in 22 and 23 and 24? What are we trying to achieve? Why do we come to the workplace? So for me, there are three top of mind reasons why I'm eager to get us back to work quickly. First, we have a large cohort of employees that want to get the hell out of their apartments. You know, they've got roommates. It's difficult to be productive.

They miss the social interaction with people their age. They really counted on our workforce as part of the social fabric. of their life. We have people that are having a very hard time working at home with young kids. So first is just enabling people who really need and want to get back to get back to work. Second is for our customers, you know, eager to get back to a place where our customers, where we can meet in person, you know, for solutions engineers, for our client-facing folks that need to engage with their customers. We know that's going to be important. And then thirdly, it's for the magic that happens when you bring teams together,

specifically cross-functional teams. I've actually found that in the last six months, we've had a lot of success managing in our functions. Our CTO, Robin DeCott, is managing her function. John Seenstein is managing our sales function. But the cross-functional teams is where the real magic happens. It's the five people that can share a pizza that are going to be shipping a new product, launching a new campaign, closing the books, where you have somebody from legal and finance and product and marketing and bringing those folks together, man, I miss getting those people back together, whether it's around a conference room or for lunch or on a walk or in a design studio, you know, your business will be better when they can reconvene.

So we're going to be eager to get back to work, but we're sure as hell not going to be the first. Have you found any sustainable culture unlocked while you're remote, you know, ways for people to build culture or to fill in that social fabric while you're waiting to go back to the office or to enable this cross-functionality and those collisions that occur in offices when people go for walks to go get a fills, to go get lunch, to share a pizza. Those kind of things are just so intangible and hard to do in something like Slack or Zoom. Have you figured it out? Is there any secrets? There's no magic bullet.

I would say that the role of HR, which used to be, you know, maybe a second fiddle to product and engineering and marketing, all of a sudden, you know, is the kingpin. I mean, our chief people officer, Becky Cantieri, is incredibly experienced. And everybody is now looking to Becky as one of the real leaders in the company who have helped bring us together around what has been this incredibly tense year as you articulated at the top of the show. So, you know, for us, clearly, you know, we do troop town halls where we bring the whole company together every other Wednesday morning for a half hour update. I do the Goldie Speaker series, as you know, where I bring on CEOs and authors and philanthropists and politicians to talk to the company. And then it's a lot of fun stuff that our events team and our HR team bring your pet to work day, bring your kid to work day. A lot of mentoring, our intern program.

We had our hackathon that, you know, we saw some great videos and testimonials. So, you know, we really celebrate our employee resource groups around Pride Month, Black History Month. But no, there's no magic bullet. It's like health, you know. Every day you can get up and either eat something healthier, pound down three donuts. And culture is all about being consistent. You know, I ate three donuts before we were on air, so thanks for letting me out. How do you think about Zuckerberg's approach to remote?

He said, hey, listen, if we were paying you a premium to live in the Bay Area and you decide to relocate and work from Nashville, we're going to adjust your compensation. Now, this was looked at as an incredibly polarizing statement, which Zuckerberg is no, you know, it's kind of on brand for Zuckerberg to say something like this, but it does actually make sense when you think about it. If somebody was in a remote employee in Nashville, let's say, and you said to another person who relocated from Nashville to San Mateo, hey, we're going to give you this 25% bump because we know there's a cost of living adjustment and that's reasonable. Now they go back to Nashville. They've essentially given the person in Nashville who didn't come to

San Francisco a pay cut because the person who did, does the same job function, went back to International. How do you think about that incredibly tough issue? Yeah. Well, I mean, we like many other tech companies are fielding inbound requests from employees who want to live closer to home, closer to alien parents in a lower cost location than the Bay Area or New York. I think ultimately, you know, maybe if we had 50,000 employees, I would have to have a vision on policies like that. But for us, it's largely about supply and demand. You know, it's can we, attract the kind of world-class front-end engineers and account executives and product marketers to achieve the ambitions we have? And if we can, what do you pay them? You know? And so what is

compensation? It's base. It's bonus. It's stock. But it's also the intangible culture factors and the values that make your company special to work at relative to some of the companies you're reading about in the New York Times. They continue to screw up around how they treat their people and creating a workforce or workplace that isn't hospitable and inclusive. So, you know, I think on the pay based on location, I don't know, I think ultimately you got to pay what the market commands. And we monitor the Radford data and we benchmark against other technology companies and we want to pay our people at the high end of the market. But ultimately, anybody who is kind of hopping jobs for the next incremental dollar is probably not the long-term

person who's going to deliver the most value to your company. Are you finding now that because you're remote and you're curious how the hiring process is going now, do you just say, listen, we're just going to hire anywhere globally or anywhere within this time zone for positions? Or are you hiring still with an eye towards, you know, people going back to work in San Matea? It's a great question. We definitely are continuing our hiring pace. We've slowed our hiring pace from 2019, but that was part of our plan this year. So we had really stacked up in terms of our sales and marketing capacity last year with the aim of slowing our hiring this year. But we added about 100 people in Q2 alone. So all of those people were obviously

hired over Zoom, having not met a single person in one of our offices. We are still hiring with the intention of bringing people back to the office full time. Now, clearly, you're going to have a more flexible schedule than the one we had pre-COVID. But we're hiring with the intention of bringing people back to the centers. That said, we are making exceptions. And I would say those exceptions, particularly where we can hire diverse talent, we are going to hire the best talent we can. And ultimately, you know, we may be changing some of our policies in 2021 or 22. Whenever we're back full time, we'll likely have more people working exclusively remotely or partially remotely. How do you keep the second, the group of people who are remote?

How do you keep them from becoming second class citizens at the company? We all have had this experience when you're on Zoom prior to COVID and people are dialing in. And you even forget they're in the, they're on the call because you've got six people in the room and then there's two people dialing in. They become by default second class citizens. It's hard to keep them there. I'm curious, how are you thinking about that?

Because when people, I think this is going to become the big. decision for executives. Do I want to be by the locus of power? Do I want to be near the CEO? Do I want to have the collision with the CFO, the CTO, the CEO in the office and happen to bump into them and be on their radar? And then if I'm on Zoom and I'm on Slack, you know, maybe I'm going to not be top of mind when this promotion comes, not be top of mind when an opportunity to run new project comes. When we come back from this quick break, explain how you're thinking about solving the two-class problem when we get back on this weekend startups. 2020 has proven to be the year of many things.

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Gusto, thanks for the help and support with the podcast and our payroll. Okay. let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Zandallori is here, and we're chopping it up. I want to get a little bit into what SurveyMonkey is working on. We'll do that in a second. But tell me about the two-class problem and this sort of strata that could, the stratification of talent that could occur where, you know, you're out of sight,

out of mind. How are you thinking about that? Well, I think it's probably the top issue for this reimagining work discussion that's happening with every C-suite in America, which is, you know, first off, everything pre-examined. Zoom kind of sucked. Like there was no great video conferencing platform that worked consistently and you could communicate in a in a human way. So I'm curious why you think, you said before that Zoom was just the best product ever in this category. Why do you, in your, you study product, obviously,

and you worked at GoPro, which had the best product, the category killer. You've worked at a lot of category killers. What is it about Zoom that makes it the category killer in your mind? It's so funny because it's not like Zoom came out with the first electric car. It was, they weren't the first mover in this market at all with WebEx and Google. I mean, there are multiple products, but whether it's just the design or how intuitive it is or just how consistently it works. I think we were all so turned off of web video conferencing software just because it was so inconsistent. You never trusted that you could have an important meeting on it. So there's something about the reliability. I agree. For me, it's the reliability and the lack of friction. It seems to just

when I would use GoToMeeting or WebEx or some of the other solutions, there was too many numbers to dial in, too much friction to just get on the call. And now it's just like, hey, you send the URL, they're on the call. It's also the network effect of just knowing that everybody else is trusting Zoom, that you don't have to kind of educate them on how to log in and get their 30 minutes before their meeting starts. Yeah, that's a good lock in too. To answer your first question, though, I think it really is, we have to provide workplaces that are inclusive.

We have to enable people to come and feel confident that they can speak up. Their voice will be respected. And I think too often it exacerbates the problem where the white guy in the room is loud and interrupting. And the person who's on video conference doesn't have a chance, especially if it's not, you know, that extroverted kind of chest beating personality. So I think it's incumbent upon leaders like me to say, hey, these are the prescriptive reasons why we are coming to the office.

I've been saying, like, no longer are we coming to the office. We're not going to ask you to battle commutes and viruses. exposure to come have coffee and walk the halls and do email in a cubicle. Now we're going to come with a prescriptive reason. There's a team event. There's a rally around sales. There's a design-focused cross-functional meeting. We're going to come with a prescriptive reason to be in the office. And maybe that means shorter days. Maybe that means less than five days a week. But one of the top of mind challenges is going to be how do we provide for an environment where people who aren't in the room deal included. And, you know, it might mean spending more to bring those people to the office

on those events a couple times a month. But that's definitely tough. So you're thinking intentionality around the purpose of coming to the office and that you'll even just fly those people in. So, hey, we're going to do a three-day jam session. We're going to be talking about survey monkeys, sales, you know, goals for the next four quarters. And it's going to be a big sales rush. And we're going to have speakers and, you know, debates and culture building events. But we're not going to force you to, yeah, battle that 101 traffic every day to get here at nine. I mean, that's the big unlock. For decades, yes, the unlock has been for decades like, hey, it's just like school, you know, the bell rings at nine o'clock and there's recess and there's lunch and then,

you know, you hit the dinner bell at six o'clock and you're out. And now it's more about like, wait a minute, let's first principles. Why the hell are we coming to this place? What are we doing here together? What is the goal? Let's start with the ambition, the aspiration, the thing we're trying to achieve and let that be the reason that we come together. And let's not, let's not all sit in traffic and spend tens of millions of dollars a year on rent and other travel related stuff unless we need to. So I think that, you know, I credit, you know, people like Reed Hastings and others that really strip back all the conventional BS that we've all just assumed, you know, why do you have to wear dress shoes? Why do you have to be at the office by 8.30 days a week?

Like, why do you have to do, you know, reviews four times a year? And those leaders are the ones that are enabling you ask questions and unlock all this awesome creativity that we're seeing in the market today. You've been a big proponent before anybody else, I think, of diversity and inclusion on a corporate level. You famously got Serena Williams to join the board and have really championed trying to get more women and people of color involved in leadership positions. What have you learned on that multi-year?

journey and leadership position you've had in the industry in this regard in terms of best practices of how to make people feel included and how to draw that talent to your company. Because a lot of people say, and the cynical thing I hear is, hey, listen, there is a very small population of people, you know, available for some of these job roles. And now we're all competing for them because we all want our statistics to change overnight. But we hear this pipeline problem, and I'm using that in quotes. Is there a pipeline problem? Is that BS?

and then how do you actually create the environment that draws people in and wants a diverse workforce to actually show up as opposed to trying to convince them to show up? Well, thanks for the question and thanks for the good words. So first off, there is fundamentally not a pipeline problem. Okay. Why do people say there is? Why is that like the first thing you hear? And people won't say publicly, but we hear it constantly.

I didn't get any applications for my CTO position from a black female or my direct of sales, I can't find any more Latino executives who have five years in SaaS or whatever. Easy answer. It's an easy answer. That's why people say. Because white executives have networks that lack diversity. Right. And so you host a party and all of a sudden you have 90 white people to party and one black person. And then when you go to recruit a black engineer, you're like, God, I can't find a black engineer. Well, no shit. You don't have the network. So it's not a pipeline issue. It's your challenge and my challenge.

And that is on us to recognize that the reason we have that challenge is there is systemic racism. The reason venture capital and private equity and technology companies are dominated by white men is because there is systemic racism in the system. It's not an accident that the fifth generation kid from Yale got the job. It's not that he is just way more talented than the black woman from Alabama. It's just that he's been given every advantage in life and there's some real truth to born on third base. So it's on especially the white allies who are in positions of power with networks as big as yours or capital bases or companies to find what are the things that I can do personally. Where do I have power? Where do I have a voice, products, capital influence to change the game because opportunity is not equally distributed.

Talent is. And we know this. So, you know, my challenge and, you know, one of the things we did early was to say, hey, let's make our board of directors one where when you look at their faces on the screen, you're proud to say you work at that company. You're proud to say our CEO gives a shit about providing an environment that is diverse where there is equity and inclusivity is a top priority. And, you know, what I have found is that employees want this. I wanted this when I wasn't, you know, a C-suite executive. I wanted a place that where people were treated fairly, where, you know, the company was, decidedly anti-racist. And we have a long way to go. I am not, you know, taking a victory that by any stretch. We are not diverse enough. We do not have enough black and brown people in positions of power. But we're taking every step we can with our pay and promotion practices, how we're hiring, how much, you know, I spend as much time and money on this as I do on our evaluating our products or hitting our sales goals. And I, you know, my message out to every

every CEO out there is like you're a CEO you have influence with your board if not they're going to bounce you from the job so take this opportunity to say I want our board of directors to be diverse I don't want five white male venture capitalists on our board and today kudos to our friend brad gersenersen kessit for launching the board challenge 42 companies including survey monkey committed to putting at least one black member on the board of directors and I think issues like this I saw that today. He was literally the day we're taping. He was on CNBC all morning talking about it. Explain what that project is one more time, so we all know it. Yeah, it's simple. Brad is a, you know, very celebrated investor. He's got billions of dollars in our management.

His 12-year-old, you know, after George Floyd was murdered, said, Dad, what are you doing about this? And Brad's got a lot of influence on boards like United and others and got Rich Barton from Zillow and me and 40-plus other people to commit to put at least one black person on their board of directors. And if you look, I think in the S&P 500, I think there's 187 companies where the board is all white. 187 of the Fortune 500. So we're talking 36%, 37%, one in three is all white. Check my math there. But it's a, it seems actually reasonably true to me. Yeah.

It's an absurd percentage. Yeah. And if you think about, I mean, you don't even have a pipeline issue here. Like this is really just if you're a white CEO and you don't have any. person of color on your board, you've got to ask yourself, what do I need to do to make this a priority? Is it important to my employees? Yes, I guarantee you it's important to your employees, and especially your employees who are black and brown. Is it important to our customers? Well, it should be. Is there a shareholder blocking you? There's just no excuse from making this

a mandate that you can deliver on. And there is no pipeline challenge. There are terrific candidates out there. We have Erica James, first black woman to be deemed. of an Ivy League school. She's the new dean of Warden and then Serena Williams, who is going to be the all-time winningest athlete in the world. And they're incredible influencers on our board. You know, they are bringing so much value

and diversity and perspective and judgment and insight across a whole number of areas. So we've been a huge beneficiary. I mean, Serena will text recruit the minute I ask her to. Erica is in the world's most interesting board conversations. And there are so many incredible folks who are available to put on your board who can add a ton of value. It's just, this is one of those challenges that should get a ton of momentum.

And I'm excited to see what's going to happen. When we get back from this final break, I want to talk about the changing role of the CEO and then what Survey Monkey's business is today and what and what will be tomorrow when we get back on this weekend startups. This week in startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. What's next? What if? Are we ready? Now what? These are the questions that keep founders up at night, and no one understands this quite like Silicon Valley Bank for over 35 years. Silicon Valley Bank has helped thousands of high growth companies by providing scalable financial solutions along with insights and expertise that many other banks just can't. From health care to hardware, software to infrastructure, Silicon Valley Bank works with companies

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Once again, SVB.com slash next. Silicon Valley Bank built for what's next. All right, Sandra Lurie is with us. You can follow him on the Twitter. Z-L-R-I-E. He is on the Twitter, which makes you crazy, doesn't it? Are you doom-scrolling every night, Zander, before you go to bed when you first wake up? Or have you, have you, have you, have...

You seem to have managed your Twitter. You don't have the same addiction that me and Bill Gurley and David Sachs have and other folks in our group of friends. I don't have your fame and celebrity and good looks and influence. So I don't have the haters that some of you may have. But no, I find Twitter an awesome place for both for news and understanding trends and then also seeing all the quirky shit that you put on there. I enjoy it. So what is the role of a CEO going forward in your mind? What is the skill set that the young people listening to this, you know, who are starting their companies, they're in their 20s and 30s. They might be the first company. They just left a big company to start their own company. What do you think the key skills are to being a CEO specifically, not the co-founder, because obviously it's three or four co-founder.

because obviously three or four co-founders, they don't necessarily go on to lead hundreds of people. But let's just take, you know, when you get to 100 people or more and you have to actually be a CEO, what is the skill set now in 2020 and going forward? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think there's two big buckets of capabilities. The first bucket is, you know, one that's been around for a long time is, I would argue, is kind of table stakes is you have to have the analytical skills and the deep. interest and insight around whatever the product or service that your company is delivering, whether it's a tech product, a software product, or it's actually a hard good, or it's a

consulting service or an investment banking product. You have to have the requisite domain knowledge expertise in that product. And then you have to have some analytics to understand pricing, packaging, margins, competition, you know, where the industry is going. So that's being a strategist and understanding your marketing customers and product, right? Like the classic CEO product market fit. Yeah, I don't think you can luck your way into being the CEO of Nvidia if you don't understand the chip market and the evolution of the chip market and where the industry is going and have the analytical kind of mindset to understand development and innovation and pricing, et cetera. So I think that kind of product

mindset, domain expertise, analytics is something that's always been important for a CEO. I think it was a lot more of the job, call it pre-internet. Today, I think the role of the CEO is increasingly stakeholder-driven, which is to say, can I attract talent when the vast majority of the value in my company is not in my supply chains, in my moats, in my patent portfolio? It's in like the design, selling power, innovation power of the humans that are employed by my company. So there's the culture component for motivating your employees. There's the way that you drive customer centricity in terms of your ethos and values with your customers. There's the importance

of the policies and the stance you take with the community and the work you're going to do. So, you know, the business roundtable last year famously kind of changed the mindset of companies to be shareholder driven, to be stakeholder driven. And I think that really is code for the best CEOs of this generation are going to be ones that really can balance motivating our our employees, delivering for our customers, obviously being a top decile stock or security for shareholders to own, to be focused on the community. And it really is about that balance to deliver for all stakeholders as opposed to just kind of treating your company like a hedge fund. And that stakeholder, you know, addition is critical because the employees used to be kind

of forgotten. They were considered, you know, spokes in the wheel, but it wasn't like super critical that you built this great culture, but I guess the talent wars have made it essential. And then you have the customers. And those customers are super sophisticated and demanding now. The amount of choice they have in just like a SaaS product like yours, there's 50 different companies they could use. You probably have 10 new customers a year, competitors a year pop up, correct? We do have a lot of competition. And I think you said it well. In SaaS businesses and in e-commerce businesses, it's actually, while we've seen incredible consolidation and strength and critical mass

and scale in the mega cap tech companies, there is still competition. There is competition from AWS, right? There are very strong competitors for AWS. Everything you can buy on Amazon, you can buy elsewhere. And for products like ours or are, you know, some of the other SaaS companies, we all have competitors. None of us have this kind of island that, you know, we can protect. So it really is about, you know, we all design software. And software isn't, you know, it's largely not defensible by patent. So if your pricing is bad, Or distribution. I mean, the distribution system is completely open.

You just sign up. Yeah. Google has democratized the access for everybody to bid against your keywords and, you know, your customer acquisition costs. So it really is about like, can I, can I maintain a relationship with my employee base that can continue to innovate, continue to deliver for our customers, build and sell great software. And as long as you can do that, you're in great shape.

But the moment you fall off that treadmill, you hit your head hard. Yeah. You really have to have that flywheel going of understanding you, are a customer and your employees really understanding that customer having empathy for them and keep that flywheel going where you understand them. The original business is SurveyMonkey was just taking surveys and presenting the data and, you know, people used it for forms, I guess. And Google Docs came out and they added forms for free.

So, you know, the business then, I believe, shifted into, hey, you have these panels of people and I can actually use that data to then make better business and inform decisions. what is the, where are the buckets of the business today for SurveyMonkey if you were to look at it? People who are just using, you know, your forms and survey tools versus people who want to use data and panels of people to have deeper understanding of their business and markets. You know, the company's 20 years old. We really were one of the pioneers in what we call the freemium business model. And, you know, what we learned is that, you know, today almost 20 million people come on the web to access SurveyMonkey's products. But, you know, we started as a pure service business. And today it's really evolved as we've moved upmarket to sell into the enterprise. We really have three pillars. The largest pillar is, of course, the service business, which you can access for free. You can pay for on the web with a subscription. But increasingly today, enterprises, and we have 7,200 enterprise customers, are buying a bucket of licenses and then access to the product. And why do you survey your customers, your employees? It's because you're curious, you want to learn, you want to evolve, you want to work on your

packaging, your pricing, your benefits, your services for customers. So the whole notion of kind of surveying people you care about is critical to organizations' health, and that's the biggest pillar of our business today. The second is this market research pillar, as you discussed. We have the largest most liquid panel of respondents in America and someday the world. And today, if you want, if you're Tesla and you want to research Latino buyers who have children and a college education and an ATT subscription and live in a particular part of the United States, you can come and build that cohort of respondents and then survey that cohort and we'll charge you for access to that panel. And then, of course, is our CX offering, which was really born out

of two acquisitions, get feedback and usability. And this is a hot new category where customers, you know, every company today is customer-centric. And this is a purpose-built software solution that works and integrates really well with Salesforce and helping companies really build programs that help them collect feedback, but then take action. So if you have an important customer who gives you a low NPS score and she has a VP title, like get off the dime and call that customer. And that CX program is one that many companies today are a lot of the money. Explain what CX is for people who haven't heard that term. Yeah, it's customer experience. And it's really about, you know, that there's the sweet old lady in the Portland airport that used to stop you and try and do a

survey or the company that calls you during dinner time and tries to interrupt and get feedback from view on how your product experience, your service experience was. And, you know, if you're a big hotel chain or a car manufacturer or consultancy, you need purpose-built software and a structured data program to really measure the health of your clients. Because ultimately, your net revenue retention and your ability to retain those customers is what's going to enable you to differentiate from your customers. And that's really only borne out of good software. SurveyMonkey has long been used for customer experience, but it was this horizontal tool that you had to configure. And so we've really moved upmarket to build a software suite that delivers

on that CX. So instead of starting with zero and saying, okay, I'm going to study our customers, let's build a survey form, et cetera. You're saying, hey, plug this little JavaScript in. We're now embedded in your software and you can track which users are using which features and you can query them about their use of those features and maybe have an early warning system. Hey, this customer may turn. Hey, this customer keeps getting frustrated by this or they're delighted by this and it's an opportunity to land and expand in the organization. You said it. I mean, think about Steve Jobs, who was often kind of lauded for his design functionality and intuition, but Steve Jobs' design intuition was born out of billions of data inputs,

of being a CEO and product builder for 30 years. And so, you know, if you're a company like Salesforce that has several hundred thousand cloud customers, we think at least 100,000 of them need CX software, because if you have tens of thousands of customers, you really need to understand the dynamics between what customer cohorts want and the canary and the coal mine and the early warning signals and really understanding like, hey, our high spending customers like this, our customers on the East Coast don't like this. And I don't know, you know, CEOs and product builders who just have this intuition and this gut for everything. Ultimately, people who are curious and have a growth mindset need to ask the questions. And then how you take that

data and how it leads you to take an action, to deliver a different benefit, to change a price, to launch a new campaign. You know, you see companies that launch bad ad campaigns all the time, and you ask, what the how did the hell did that get? Yeah, some creative person came up with that idea based on no customer feedback or no studying of the customer. You have this incredible panel and insight into America and the rest of the world. And I see you release surveys in partnership with a lot of people, whether it's politics,

you know, or social justice. what are the most insightful things you've learned in 2020 about America and Americans? Because when one turns on the television set or reads a newspaper, it's incredibly polarized and it seems like all the media sources that we used to think we're down the middle have all picked aside. They've gone very far to the left or right. And so it feels like almost anytime you turn on media or try to get some true north, you feel like everybody's at war with each other and this intense tribalism.

Is that true or is that? just our experience from watching media and using social networks? Or are Americans largely in agreement on the majority of issues? And it's just the media and social media that make us feel like we're at war with ourselves. I think Americans agree on a lot more than we disagree upon. But the way it's covered, as you said, advertisers tend to flock to certain networks. And networks are building programming around cohorts they're trying to attract. So it has pushed people from the middle to the extremes. And it does have this unfortunate coverage where we tend to cover sensational news topics, and then they tend to get left and right. Unfortunately, the mask has become the

most politicized symbol in America. And clearly the administration has something to do with that. But I'll give you a couple of insights that we've found. We do partner with New York Times, MSNBC, CNBC, and other news outlets that have large audiences to share data that they'll find insightful. We were on MSNBC this weekend. But particularly around on race relations, which has been such an important topic in America, I would argue the most important topic in business since the George Floyd murder that really brought it to the four. 78% of Americans want their CEOs to get engaged, get active in social issues, to say as far

as if you are quiet, you're part of the problem. And if you're not engaged, if you're not leading and taking a stance, you're complicit in the problems in America today. That's up dramatically from even 10 points up from even where it was a year ago. And clearly Americans are asking business leaders in a world where politicians are a bit more impotent on some of these issues to get more engaged. Black Americans will tell you that race today, 77% of black Americans say race is the number one most important issue today. Less than 40% of Americans who are white agree with that. So clearly you've got a massive disconnect of people who are not affected, who are not discriminated against, who are not feeling.

the oppression of racism in America are saying it's not as important of an issue as people who are afraid to let their kids drive because they're afraid they might get pulled over by cops. It just shows you that, you know, there are cohorts of Americans who are affected very differently by the news of the day. And the advice then to leaders is you have to engage. I mean, whether it was CBS or previous employer or Michael Jordan famously, you know, many people who were celebrities were told, hey, you know, you. you really don't want to take a side. You don't want to lose half your audience. You want to just

stay apolitical, stay out of politics, stay out of these charged issues. What you're saying is actually, maybe it's, you have to engage them because the expectation now is with your company, you do have to show that you have some basic level of empathy for people who are suffering in America. Yeah, I think it's even more pronounced than that. It is in a world where customers have the decision of where to spend their money, customers are going to be looking at what are your values? How are you stepping up in times where America needs you? So your customers care. Clearly your employees care. I mean, Google and Facebook could hire every single one of our engineers, product marketers, designers, salespeople. So if we're not standing up to talk about what's

important, then our employees are going to say, look, I can take my talent elsewhere, frankly for companies that'll probably, you know, spend more on base. You know, and shareholders like BlackRock, Larry Fink, is now saying, look, we are investing in companies that build their company to cater to multiple stakeholders, not just for equity holders. And knowing that those are going to be the companies that stick around long term. So I think this is not only an issue of you're being asked to stand up, you're going to be forced to stand up, or your board, or your customers or your employees are going to run

you out of your company. And even investors are changing now their mindset on it. So endowments that empower private equity or empower public markets, they're starting to say, hey, we're looking for some more responsibility taken by these companies and we're going to direct capital and allocate capital where we think it's more just. I mean, that is a C change. That's a total C change. Their LPs are saying, I'm not going to invest with you unless you have better representation on your management committee. I mean, I'll, for one, I went to investment banking conferences last year when we used to get on airplanes. And I'd sit in a hotel with that weird, like, you know, bedstand behind you and the investors come in every 30 minutes for eight hours and you drink 12 cups

of coffee. And I can remember seeing 50 investors in a day and less than five women and not a single black person. And I told my IR chief, I'm not doing that again. If the investment bank that convenes these mutual fund and institutional shareholders together, if they can't attract a more diverse group, I'm out. And if they can learn about. survey monkey through our filings. And if that hurts our stock, so be it. But I'm going to take my travels and I'm going to spend my time and I'm going to invest in shareholders that have a more conscious bias towards building a team that is diverse and inclusive and hires women and hires people of color. The days of talking to 12 white guys in a room, forget it. Yeah. What are

your thoughts as we wrap up here on the state of California? This has become a pretty acute issue. Many individuals we know, leaders in the industry, are choosing to leave California. They feel that taxes, how the government is run. In San Francisco specifically, the homeless problem, which arguably is the wrong word to use. It's an addiction and mental health problem, according to the statistics. And people who are afraid of being canceled, one person who's high profile said, you know, we're calling a problem of people who are junkies, like literally the candid term for people addicted to heroin specifically. We're conflating that with homelessness, and that's why we're not solving this problem.

They wouldn't obviously say that publicly, but that's how they view it. What are your thoughts on the state of San Francisco and California in relation to high-functioning businesses? Because you must be thinking, you know, or must have people considering leaving California for these issues, and therefore your business is based here. Would you ever see serving money leaving California like some other companies have now done? It's such a fascinating binary set of consideration. So California, not only is at the home to, you know, some of the world's most beautiful

places and beaches and redwoods, national parks, like Yosemite, but we also are the home to the export of the three best products categories in America, if you think about. Internet services, cloud services, entertainment. Yep. Yep. and probably electric cars. Yeah. So, you know, transportation.

Transportation. Transportation where this incredibly thriving place of business and industry, but we have this reputation for being this kind of leftist, you know, crazy liberal state. Out of control, yeah. Out of control. You know, it's a state with multiple different areas that probably have very little nexus between them. Clearly, I think high taxation will be a detractor for a lot of companies that want to set up

shop there. But there's a reason company set up shopping California is because there is access to incredible talent. People want to live in California and avail themselves to all the beauty and benefits of the state. I think the forest fires are becoming too consistent. It's clearly a climate crisis result, which is super scary. But, yeah, the policies have got to get better. I mean, I have so much respect for Daniel Lurie and what they've done at tipping point and trying to get more services, especially for true homeless people that need help and access.

And I think you're right. We're conflating drug addictions with true homelessness in a place that is very hard to afford cost of living. But boy, policing and crime and the systemic racism and how we jail our citizens, if we don't address these issues, America will take a step back. Yeah, and are you optimistic? I am optimistic. I am optimistic. I am optimistic. Why? Why are you optimistic?

Because we just described a racially unjust society. policing problems, taxation problems, homeless problems. I mean, this is a laundry and climate. Like, this is a big list of things that need to be fixed. Why are you positive and optimistic? I think capitalism and democracy are super challenged, but they're by far the best societal structures for how you grow and thrive. I mean, in many ways, the business world has an opportunity now more than it ever has. Our power today in America is so. much disproportionately higher than it was in prior generations. And business leaders have an interest in stepping up to write the wrongs of prior generations. And so if you look at what Bezos is doing

for climate change, if you look at what Beniof and others are doing around racial injustice, you know, business is an incredible platform for change. We have huge capital bases and influence with our products, with our employees, with our money to affect change. And, you know, ultimately politicians will vote for what we ask them to vote for. And if we get the right folks in there with the right interests, I'm incredibly optimistic about the future. And I think climate crisis is probably the scariest long-term challenge that prior generations never had to encounter. But boy, we've got a lot of motivation to fix it. And, you know, when you get red alerts on your apps and you have homes burning, you know, 50 miles from your house, we got to get our act

together and make the kind of change before it's too late. It's very clear. now that this is an acute situation, this is not like some fake news, whether it's the Great Barrier Reef for California fires. I mean, the evidence is there. And so now it's just the will to actually deploy the solutions that we know will solve it, whether it's nuclear, whether it's solar. You know, the solutions are right there. I mean, even for water, we had zero mass water on. And, you know, we have panels that cost $2,000 that can provide a couple of cases of clean drinking water from, you know, just taking water out of the air. we could solve all of these problems just by deploying solar panels, nuclear, and water. We could solve the COVID crisis if we just wore masks and had rapid testing. So there are solutions to our challenges. And I think there are entrepreneurs and philanthropists that have the capital and the mindset and the vigilance to get after it and, you know, defend humanity.

So I'm super hopeful, although, you know, the journey to get there is painful and there's a lot of human wreckage associated with it. Yeah. I mean, one of the good pieces of news is that we see examples of this. What Bill Gates did over the last decade in Africa and with poverty, we've seen individuals of, you know, with the ability to execute and the checkbook, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done just some extraordinary things and lowering just people living in abject poverty. It's stunning. And if Bezos gets his mindset on, you know, global warming and a couple more people get behind

it, yeah, I think we can solve these problems. And it really is strange that it's an execution problem. Like, isn't America good at executing? We seem to be lost our ability to execute on a plan. And I don't know if that's just Trump or what it is or the infighting, but we have to be able to have a plan and execute against a plan. Yeah, it's super disconcerting to see how poorly we have executed relative to other countries on the COVID crisis. But, you know, this administration, maybe their days come to an end, not too far away. And yeah, people like Bill and Melinda, I mean, just think about, you make 100 or 200 or 200. billion dollars and then you turn all of your focus and talents and capital against solving some of these societal ills that you're right there are solutions we can feed everybody on this planet and we can no big deal we can we can fix our water challenges and our energy crisis but it takes incredible vigilance and political will and unfortunately the latter has not been there

over the last few years yeah and sometimes it takes a crisis to maybe appreciate things what as we as we close here, what do you appreciate about life more in month six of shelter in place and the pandemic? I think I have a keener appreciation for just the human connections that are really important to your stamina and your heart and what fills your cup every day and gives you the energy and love to fight hard. And so it's, you know, as you know, with with Jade and your kids and, you know, the 10 or 20 or 30 friends that you care most about and the production team at launch and your podcast that you care most about. Like, we don't need more friends.

You need friends and family that fill you up and give you that energy to leave it all in the field. And I think in COVID, I've recognized that more than ever. It's a bit of a cleanse of, like, what's really, really important to my health, my family, my company, the community, and that's been a good reminder. It certainly clarifies when you pause like this. I have to say, like, the pause has made me realize, wow, like, this is what really matters, right? And these friendships are what matters.

And I consider you one of those friendships, Zander. Right back at you. Yeah, it's great to have you on the podcast. And thanks so much for everything you do. And the leadership you provide to our industry, SurveyMonkey is hiring. It is one of the great culture success stories in our industry. And if you're looking for a job, I would suggest going to surveymooky.com right now. You're looking at their job page and their careers page.

You couldn't work for a better human being than Xandril Lurie. And I'll leave it at that. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate you. Yeah, Jay, thanks for having me. And your access and influence and the network you've built and your ability to kind of spread messages, you're doing incredible work. And I wish you and your team continue success.

So thanks for having me today. Thanks for that, pal. All right. Hopefully I'll see you in person before the end of the year. Maybe we could share a steak or something. Please. Yeah. Let's do it. Take care. Be safe.