EP18: Building customer obsessed products and culture, with Mari Baker, Silicon Valley veteran who was one of the first 30 employees and SVP at Intuit

Mari has held a variety of incredible roles in Silicon Valley as a product veteran, company builder, and now board member. Mari started her career in startups. She was one of the first 30 people at Intuit and helped grow the company grow over 10 years into a public company with thousands of employees.

At Intuit, Mari went from being a Product Manager for Quicken to SVP and got to work closely with industry legends like Scott Cook and Bill Campbell to shape Intuit’s products and culture. Intuit of course is well known for having one of the most customer centric product cultures and has successfully navigated multiple technology and platform shifts— from Command Line to GUI, PC to Web, and Web to Mobile. Mari shares some incredible lessons and insights from the early days that shaped Intuits product culture.

We also talk to Mari about her more recent work serving on the boards of Stanford, and Blue Shield of California. We talk about how University boards work, Mari’s role in founding the Stanford Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab to tackle the under-representation of women in our industry, and opportunities for innovation in the healthcare space.

This is an incredibly wide-ranging conversation where we cover so many interest topics spanning Mari’s incredible career as a product builder, company builder and board member.

In this episode we discuss:

1. Starting out in Silicon Valley and being early at Intuit 
   • What was the valley like at the start of the PC revolution?
   • Intuit’s first product was Quicken (for personal finance), what was the original insight?
   • What made you join Intuit when it was a small startup?
   • How big was Intuit when you got there and when you left?
2. How Intuit has built customer obsessed products across multiple decades 
   • Intuit was known to be extremely customer focus, how did y’all approach that in the early days and build the product culture? 
   • How did Quicken (personal finance) lead to Quickbooks (SMB accounting)?
   • How did Mari approach marketing at a time when people were new to computers and software? 
3. Working with Scott Cook and Bill Campbell to shape Intuit products and culture 
   • How did Scott Cook approach product management during early days of software? 
   • How did Intuit build its customer centric culture? 
   • You got to work closely with Bill Campbell. What were his superpowers that helped him become such a legendary leader? 
4. Serving on the Board of Trustees at Stanford and setting up the Stanford Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab 
   • What does the Board of Trustees role at Stanford entail? 
   • What led you to setting up the Stanford Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab? 
5. Serving on the board of Blue Shield of California which is a non-profit insurer with 4.5m members and $21b in revenue 
   • Where do you see the biggest opportunities for technology to transform healthcare especially in a post Covid world? 
   • What’s your advice for healthcare founders trying to figure out trade-offs between B2B vs B2C business models?
6. Closing questions 
   • Who is the most talented person Mari has ever worked with and why
   • What’s something you believe that would surprise most people
   • Who are some of Mari’s heroes that she admires
   • What superpowers does Mari lean on day to day

Links

• Follow Mari on Linkedin
• Stanford Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab

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• Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter for summaries

Transcript

0:00  
If a third of the people around the decision making table are women, that actually the ideas the decision start being noticeably different. I wanted this notion of women being in leadership roles to be connected to innovation. If you want to survive in the future, you need to do this or you might not survive.

0:18  
Hey there, you're listening to paradigm shift, a podcast about people building the future and pivotal moments in their journey. I'm Ashish, and I'm joined by my co host, Zane. And today we're super excited to speak with Silicon Valley veteran Mary Baker, about her stories from being an early executive at Intuit, where she worked with legends like Scott Cook and Bill Campbell, to building companies in the valley, serving on the board of Stanford University, as well as Blue Shield California, Healthline health tap, Wiley and Sons, and many more. Before we start, I want to thank the Nita Agarwal at a16z, and Shawn Mira, at Health tap for providing some great questions. And with that said, Thanks, Mary, for coming on today.

1:03  
All right, great to be here, really excited about it.

1:06  
So we got a lot of interesting topics to cover today. But we really want to start at the beginning of your career, because you started working in Silicon Valley at a really special time, it was like, before the late 90s inflection point, and things got really crazy. I think it was like around the time the web browser got launched by mosaic, can you take us back to that time,

1:29  
if you don't mind, I'll come back a little bit earlier. So I graduated from Stanford in 1985, which is just after the Macintosh was first released. So if you remember back to the 1984, Apple ads for the Mac and everything, and in my freshman year at Stanford and the entire dorm, one guy had a computer, just process back when to how usual that might have been. And I can tell you to this day, it was exoti 64, cassette tape drive, green screen computer, and I hadn't worked with the computer before coming to college. And I actually saw that was when I started to fall in love with the notion of working on computers, this notion that you could program a computer to do what you wanted to do. And so that, for me was going way back in time. And actually, while a student and that guy and a couple of other guys from our freshmen dorm, they got these jobs writing software, a software package for a company as they were taking this software product and migrating it as new platforms came out. So I had a TRS at Radio Shack, trs 80, which was a big sell, at the time, the IBM PC Jr, their attempt at copying or kind of having that all in one Macintosh kind of unit, I had a Lisa, at one point, as my role was more to do QA testing and write all the documentation and everything for them. So that was, again, think that imagine everybody doing their college papers on a typewriter. And then because I had these computers, because I was doing this other work, I then started have my own little business of people paying me to write their papers to type up not write their papers, but type up their papers for them. Because it's so much easier to make changes on a computer, stuff like that. So yeah, this stuff was all pretty new. And people were trying to figure out how to make these machines useful, how to do all the stuff that isn't a pain to do by hand. And that is what led to a lot of the companies that got created when certainly venture I went to work for Intuit. But they've Sir, we're not the very first checkbook software's personal home finance management software out there. They're ones who predated Intuit. And so I think people were trying to figure out how to make these things useful. But oh, my guy, like the user interface that a lot of the stuff was terrible. It was a lot of poking around. And then there are also all these great PC users groups. So all these groups are people, right, who originally gotten together to figure out how they get these kits to build their own PCs. And then to figure out how to use all this software and just this avid group, and you could feel it here in Silicon Valley. I came down with a school at Stanford never imagined. i My dad was a school teacher. So I thought I was gonna be a school teacher and again, just fell into being here all the time, everything that was going on, and it was just something you want to be a part of.

4:59  
We don't know It was one of your big early breakout roles. How did you end up there? And what was that moment? Like? I know you mentioned it wasn't the first personal finance product, it probably had a bunch of products, what was like the the primary focus of the company at the time?

5:14  
Yeah. So Intuit first product was Quicken. And at the time, they were programs like Nanjing your money was the big player dollars and cents was another player. And what Skype quotes, Insight was, is that all of these things, it actually took longer to pay your bills than doing it by hand. And so Scott Cook had been at Procter and Gamble for a long time, was a product brand manager on Christgau. And then was at Bain and some other places. And so we're really keen, insolvency actually, and his wife, who always do in their home finances, and she, she told us, there's got to be a better solution to this. And she was also already in a software company at the time. And so we certainly aware of all the things that software could do to help solve these kinds of problems. To start embark on this effort. The story famously, Scott went on to Stanford campus and start wanted to put up signs saying, seeking a engineering co founder to help me start this company and ran into a guy named Tom Prue, who was a senior in engineering at Stanford at the time. And basically, they sat down and they taught, Tom became his co founder, and Scott never finished putting up with libraries around campus, that focus is always most people pay their bills by hand, the idea of a computer is that it should be faster. Nobody likes paying their bills. And you know, that's got to be the bottom line measure, it's got to be faster and easier than doing it by hand. And then one of the things we started to evolve, evolved into into it, we I would have, I would give a local Egghead software and software etc, stores these little letters when I asked you guys, where somebody buys a copy of Quicken and give them this letter. And a letter would say, Hi, I have the product manager for quick and don't open this yet, we would like to come and watch you open it so we can help make this the product better for other people. And this was one of our really good innovations was giving the engineering manager the product manager mean getting the product people out, watching and actually found it's so much more beneficial to go into people's homes, actually and watch them install it. I had been invited to go to usability labs and watch one of the big software companies. And then what you saw in the usability Labs is they'd hire PhD researchers, they didn't have an artificial environment, given artificial scenario and watch people do something. And that doesn't seem to be like what people normally encounter, our strategy was, let's send the product people, let's go into their homes, and just watch them. And it's the little tiny things that we learned, like just a little language that we learned. And I'll give you one example. So this was I think it was Milan. So it's probably the DOS version, a quick and long ago, we the opening screen would say something like register accounts, write checks and settings or something like that. And you really wanted people to start at the register, because it was a check register. And you want them to start with the register. And we couldn't figure out why people were doing it. Like we knew get to number one. And here's the things to do. But still, it's a big problem with tech support if they didn't get there first. And so finally wanted to be our engineering managers were the integral leads on the product. We sit in somebody's house, and it'd be up to Tony, why didn't you choose to register and the guy's I'll come back and register later, it doesn't seem like something I should do now. And it was this little tiny little tiny insight. That was because two people were talking sitting next to each other and talking that we learned we need to just changed some language you shouldn't know this dramatic change people's ability to get up and running much more faster without any problems, all that kind of stuff. And these things seem small. But I think that's that a little bit of attention to things that it's the attention to details, it can make a big difference. Yeah,

9:29  
totally. That's amazing. And what was the like the primary like use case, maybe a silly question, but it's a little before my time. Why were people using Quicken to send checks. So it

9:41  
used to be that you had this thing called a checkbook? your checkbook, he had checks in the back of it, you had a check register, and you were supposed to write down every single check in your check register. And then at the end of the month, the bank sent you your bank statements, okay, this go through this and how much money do I have left in my account. And so it was a very practical mode of making sure you didn't overdraft your bank account or just make sure everything was in there. But the problem is do it all, you're writing it all on paper, and then you're totally by hand. And so that was very tedious, all that kind of stuff. So really, the initial use case was around, make sure your bank fundamentally making sure your bank statement balance at the end of the month, and some and then adding some value around knowing where your money went Basic Search function, basic database kinds of things. Initial basic kind of function today, we don't worry as much about that the by i use i squared, you would find mistakes, you would find mistakes that the bank would have charged, you know, charge you for something wasn't yours cleared, something wasn't yours or whatever, a lot of the stuff was new. And that was a big deal. And we don't really think about it as much anymore. I think we're, it's really so early days. The other thing that we learned over time, is that eventually, we learned that basically half of those people using Quicken, we're using it for their small business. And that over time as Quicken overtook these other competitive products, Quicken not only was effectively the number one home finance package, but also the number one small business finance package but it wasn't really designed didn't really follow GAAP or other kinds of didn't didn't have all the functionality that a medium site. So it's okay if you're a single proprietor, but putting doesn't invoice doesn't send out and he doesn't didn't do a lot of stuff. And so that was a wonderful idea about launching QuickBooks. And it was still the same notion of it, nobody goes to start a business and says, I love doing administrative work. I love paying my bills and doing my taxes. You know, Nuff said no chef ever. And so that really then to read, having this insight into the quick and customer base really led to then QuickBooks, and really that opportunity to make small business accounting as easy, basically easy, so that it was okay to and that was always the focuses. People want to spend less time paying their taxes, doing their finances, they want to spend more time with their kids or on Iran are something they were enjoy doing.

12:27  
And was that an established category? So you had this home finance product, and then people were clearly using it for the higher frequency more meaty use case of small business, finance. And it as you started to move into that, was that an existing category that you weren't able to organically grow into? Or did you create it?

12:46  
Now there were some so clearly, there were bigger packages for bigger companies. But for the smaller business, there was Peachtree accounting was one of the big ones in array and Great Plains software, which Microsoft eventually bought. And yeah, there's a couple of others, I think, teach from yours, that those are the other. Those are the two big players at the time. And again, at least from you know, what we heard from customers. And our view is that they're just big and unwieldy can have a lot of features. But taking too much time, how big

13:23  
was into it, when you got there, and how big was it when you left because you you grew a lot in terms of how much the company grew, and also how much your role grew. So give us a sense of what the size and scale look like in the early days, and then when you left.

13:38  
So when I joined, there are 30 people in the company. And I remember what I showed, I'll share lesson here that some of your listeners are interested in. So when I saw I had been actually working in a sock, working at a software company in Lake Tahoe, I know it's hard to believe, but it was a real software company. And unfortunately, it wasn't gonna make it he was going through declaring bankruptcy he had gotten paid and furniture my last couple of months there had run out of money. And so going to be back down in the Bay Area and saw this ad for into it and went in and you know, obviously interviewed several places. And at this one place, and these guys had their act together. I know it's maybe 100 people or something like that. Everybody in suits, nice offices, a great year for an interview and all that stuff showed up in into it. They're like, Oh, who are you? Why are you here today? And subsequently, I think I spent 1212 hours in the building I squares like there all day, and just very unorganized. And both companies at the end made me an offer. The first company was offering more pay. And actually I reached out to talk through one of my brothers and I'm For advice, and he said, always go work for the company with the smartest people, which do you Who do you think you're going to learn more from? And now that answer was very clear to me. And so I went to we're getting to it. There are 30 people there. When I started, I just showed up in my first day at work is like, oh, who are you, buddy? And so my first day, I cleaned out the closet next to Scott Cook's office to use his office. So they're like, Okay, find a place. Okay, I'll use this place. And it was actually neat, nice. It had windows and everything in it. And then a month later, a new head of sales came so I had to get him that office. So I moved out to a desk sitting right next to Scott's assistant and right outside the door jamb to his office so that I leaked over a little bit, his doorway, but it was great. The I think what Scott really brought was this Procter and Gamble, product marketing mindset, you needed to think about the customer's needs, you need to design solutions that address needs, you need to phrase them in terms of benefits and value propositions back to the customer. This was a time when people were saying our new x p e one feature and not telling you like what it does, like what's the benefit need to sell in those late so that was 1989 when I went to work there. So it said in the in, in those late 80s, early 90s. In Silicon Valley, the kind of the thing was, you would hire engineering managers from HP because they did a great job teaching engineering management, sorry, because they taught me how to be managers, and then good value system and some of that. And you'd hire product marketers from Intuit because it had this whole, Scott was really one of those first people that bring that traditional packaged goods, some of that sensibility and training and really bringing combining it with the technology in Silicon Valley.

17:10  
That's amazing. I just want to jump back to the part before into it for a second, where you got paid in furniture, how does that work?

17:19  
It's the it's when they say where you don't have any money a lot. But we need your help. Don't worry, like when you let yourself sometimes not every company that you go to makes it. And there was a challenge, I think, for people to decide, when do you move on and when do you dig in. And that company, uh, basically, they just they were they ran out of money, it thinks that they're spent all their money working towards this big product release, and which ended up not happening and everything wound from there. But the main financial backer kept coming down to, there's five of us. So he's you guys need to stay here, we're going to get more money, this is gonna happen, don't worry just a little bit more, and we'll pay you in. So when all that didn't happen, I have a good selection of card tables and office chairs for a while. And that can really go on too long. I will say that I know though a couple of people that I worked with that some of them have gone on to be CEOs taking companies public done really well. Some of them have gone from startup to startup that didn't make it. And I think that there's some learning, especially for people early in your career. And again, I have applied for myself this notion of if I'm still learning, and I'm getting responsibility, and I'm growing my skill set, then even if I could go up and get paid more somewhere else, even if things look a little shaky right now, I'm gonna go stick through it, because I really don't know if the grass is greener somewhere else. And I think that the what you don't want to end up being is Gogol. So couple of guys who would work with that company where they just made they went from one that didn't work to one it didn't work, women didn't work. And then they think it's really it gets hard after that gets hard after a while.

19:20  
That's a that's a great learning. Switching back to intuit, it sounds like you all were very product centered org, and that you were also thinking about the products in terms of how its message to the user. How did you all approach marketing at that point, because people were relatively new to computers and software. And so imagine there might have been some challenges and educating them and explaining to them how the product works.

19:43  
Trying to use as simple everyday language is possible and really stay focused on the wider buy and pay really pay attention to what customers are saying to you and I think that's an important Lesson in that too, because customers do a terrible job at product design, right? You don't want to say, Oh, what are the five features you need? You want to come to? You want to say, what is it you're trying to accomplish? It helped me understand what you're trying to do. My job is to figure out how a computer can make that faster and easier. You don't need to think about that. I just need to understand the problem you're trying to solve. And then it and so I think it's a front that you start to become very focused on what is the core language. So Scott would always say what's the wider by five words or less, you got to boil it down. And we would test little bits of copy and financial hassles would it became that under five words, for a couple of years that was a winner? I think we tried save time and hassles. For another that was like the reigning champion for a little while. But constantly like figuring out what is an externality? What's the why to buy? Why should I buy this? And, and I will also tell you in my first six months that I was adding to it, I thought I'd made a big mistake to this Scott was having me right, we're about to launch the new versions of the Quicken for DOS and Quicken for Mac. And so I was writing packaging coffee and writing a press release or doing a draft of these. And I would turn them in and Scott would rip it apart.

21:27  
And I was on the brink of thinking I should quit because I wasn't doing well because he was ripping all this apart. And he finally he sat me down I told him I was like all kind of frustrated and he sent me algos loop. He was the only reason I'm spending so much time marking all this up is because I think you have potential. And again, that's teaching, being very clear on just this need to keep things simple. Keep it friendly. We did research on colors, right? What are the colors to use to communicate easy, right and get packaged goods companies do this all the time, there are all kinds of awesome studies that you could see and you take the same wine and put in different packaging. If you charge 100 bucks more for one than another take the same frozen foods, put them in different packaging and one takes off. And the other doesn't. Same thing with the package that goes on the shelf. Again, this is back to the days when software was sold on a shelf, where what was the color of the package what says easy and some in what pops off the shelf. So don't do that. The other thing that Intuit in Scott started this before I got there. So I talked a little bit about the what we call the follow me home testing where we'd go into people's homes and watch them install the product that he had, I think from day one had two other practices. One was everybody in the company spent time on the tech support lines every month from the CEO all the way down. The product teams were expected to spend more time then maybe the sales guys but everybody spent time on the tech support or customer service funds, probably people ID and tech support. And that way you can develop this empathy for the customer. So you don't you never had this situation where the engineers were sitting there going as customers are stupid because they had talked to enough of them on the phone. To know these are smart people. They're trying what did we what could we have done better? The other thing that Scott did from very early on was we had what we called the National Sales tour. So every time there was a new version of Quicken, and eventually QuickBooks introduced everybody in the company excepting people who had to stay on the customer service lines and stuff, but the CFO, the CEO, in the product team, the marketing team, everybody went on the road to meet with the dealers retailers to tell them about the product because we didn't have a Salesforce. And so when I this is also one of Scott's great things where it's like when I started so how are we going to be dollars and cents and agenda Ronnie, they're so big, and we don't have a Salesforce. And he goes married. The goal is to make every user until the salesman to have a million salespeople she had been so pleased with the product that they go tell their friends about and this was before Net Promoter Score and all this stuff right became popular, this was just this understanding that because Intuit was also totally self funded and Scott, credit cards, second mortgages, money from friends money from parents of other early employees, family members, all that could not get venture capitalists to involve invest in a senior from Stanford and a Crisco salesman and but there is a sense of money being something that's precious. So we're invested in the thing that matters, which is the product and if you make the product so good that people tell others about audits that will be how you win in the end. And in fact, you also bit how to focus was on marketing also needed to pay for itself. So it was very much a good direct response model, we could run an ad in a magazine, and sell and not units direct, to pay the cost of the ad, then all the retail sales were upside. So we sold just enough direct to measure the success of our advertising. But the focus was always in getting it out to retail. And so that was basically, if we could get an ad that paid for itself, then we could keep spending, it was basically the agreement. And that continued, really, I feel like it's only been relatively recently that I've seen into it really do a lot more big brand advertising and big, you know, branding work on top of everything else.

25:51  
But it was oh, do you mean like in store, like people will be walking in Staples, and they'll see the box. And then they'll, like the direct advertising kind of increases the awareness and helps you get the deals in. So you're in the store?

26:02  
Yeah. And then you wait. And then it's sometimes a big tag available at those kinds of places. And but it was that again, like when Microsoft entered the market against Quicken when the world meal from domotz to Windows is when a bunch of prior big players and software went away. That's when Lotus went away being right Lotus 123. That's when WordPerfect went away. And because in my persona with Excel, and Microsoft Word, able to get them to really take advantage of the Windows platform really became the dominant player and just crushed a lot of other players. So this for Intuit was an existential moment, they made it clear they were coming out with a Windows personal finance product. And so we knew we needed to this existential. So we developed our strategy, which was around understanding the pretty simple, it's basically what are their strengths and weaknesses? What are our strengths and weaknesses? How do we minimize our weaknesses? How do we blow holes through their weaknesses and, and learning as much as we could about how Microsoft would respond to things. And I remember going out, I personally, as part of the national sales to Earth illogical good for Windows took on Redmond, and the Seattle broader Seattle area is my district to go to. And I remember going in Microsoft betas to market. And so I went out early. And we went into the software stores in Redmond. And I remember going to this one store, like it had software or something. And the store manager walked in and said, Hey, I'm looking for I just got windows, I want a personal finance package. And what should I get in the store manager? So it's not out yet. Let me write down your name. And I'll give you a call and cooking for Windows comes out because it's going to be here soon. Now that piano ball is Microsoft money over here. Why not that? You said yeah, I've been selling Quicken for one time. They care. It works. I never hear a problem for many of my customers. I'd go to board. That's amazing. It was amazing.

28:19  
Yeah, you want to wait for the third version of any Microsoft product anyway, there you go.

28:24  
That reminds me, I remember in 2011, I was I had a friend who was running a startup, and he had to do payments on the site. And I arrived at his apartment literally, like minutes before someone else left. And he was like, Yeah, I wanted to set up this payment flow. And the company sent an engineer to watch me implement it on my site. Like literally, it was stripe. And he went to the forum. He's only the payment flow. And they're like, just wait, let me send someone, they'll be there in 20 minutes. And they just sat there and watch him go to stripe comm look at the documentation, copy and paste it. And so it's incredible to see like the similarities and how obsessive Intuit was with customer satisfaction or the customer experience. Switching gears a bit. One, one of the people you worked with was Bill Campbell. Right. I think he was CEO of the company. This was after the IPO from 94 to 98. He went on to coach all the legendary Silicon Valley leaders Sheryl Sandberg, Larry and Sergey, Steve Jobs. What was it like working with him? And also when you reflect back on that time, what do you think his superpowers were?

29:32  
His nickname was the coach and let's cuz he actually was a former football coach. He had coached football at Columbia, and his roommates brother was John Sculley. And John Sculley hired Dell initially at pece as a sales manager, and then when Scully went to Apple, brought Gil out to new I ran sales at Apple and was CEO of Clarus. And I was spun out of apple in the early days. And later on, when Steve Jobs came back to RUN Apple brought bill on do his boring that, at least at the time of Bill's passing, had been the longest serving board member at Apple. And Renesis. This background is a football coach and the cellist he thinks about teams, he thinks about people's individual skill sets and how to best deploy those. He didn't try to make you like everybody else, but to say, here's Mary, she's an individual, here's what she is really good at. Here's where she can grow. He was the first person to tell me he thought I could be a CEO. And so he goes, Okay, let's start, let's start giving you more opportunities to run different things. And we'll work on we'll work on making sure you're capable of doing that, whether that's here or somewhere else. He, when he started, he was already a bit of a legend. And I was looking forward to having one on ones with this guy, Bill Campbell. I feel like one of one on ones. And frankly, performance reviews, I feel are two challenges of being a manager. If you haven't experienced a good one, it's really hard to know what they are. And I just never felt like I was good at one on ones that I'm gonna have won awards with Bill Campbell, I'm going to learn how to do great. So, you know, my first one, I went with Dell, and he's like, how you doing? Tell me about yourself? Tell me about your family. Tell me about your kin, and someone got your husband there and tell me what you'd like to do. Okay, go to my second one. So how are you doing? You get enough sleep you eating? Well? How are your kids? How are they doing in school? How did your husband I was okay, this is getting to know me. Come around to the third 141161 doesn't ask me back. I guess this doesn't doesn't pro over to the business along the way. I've had a couple of things up while I said that I'd better take control outs. I know how they should work. I bring topics to Bill. And after a while I asked I said I was I was hoping to really learn how to make a one on one really good. And so I'm a little I'm a little confused by this. Don't you want to know You don't ask me about like financials. You don't ask me about your performance. And he said, Why would I do that? I've got a CFO sitting right next to me. I've got a team of people here in the finance department to give me updates every day on how the different parts of the business are doing. I can get that from them. But what I know is that if you're not taking care of yourself, if your kids aren't doing well, if something's going on in your personal life, that's going to eventually affect your your ability to do their jobs. That's the way things work. So he said I'd like to actually use that time you and I have together to understand how what's going on your life and how you're doing so that, you know I can really be supportive to you. And I was like,

33:08  
wow, it's the Eddie's right. We can't separate these things. And he really, he had this way of you just were willing to do whatever you need, he needed you to go do because you knew he always had your back. He wasn't sitting there waiting for you to mess up. He wasn't it didn't have any ulterior motives except for the company and you to do well. People who do well he loved the notion that he remember him telling me it's not any fun to be the only one in your who has money. You want everybody else to have money to be able to go do all these things with you, right? You want all your friends to be able to buy tickets to the Super Bowl so you can all go together. He very much had this attitude of Life has been good to me. I really want to help elevate others. And I think especially in his last number of years, you rattle off some of the very famous names that he coached. He had a group of women leaders in Silicon Valley, I believe almost all of whom now have become CEOs, somewhat public companies, who he would meet once a month for lunch and culture, keep them together. He had all kinds of people he met with and coached and encouraged and told him when to tell people to go out themselves or dig in and or don't worry about it. He was practical. He was driven from the heart and he really taught you that people's the most important thing that is a leader you need people to follow you. They're not going to follow you if they don't feel that you guys They're back. They it's what, especially in a software company, all of your assets go home every night. And you want them to come back in the morning. And you actually, to the extent that they understand everything that you're trying to do, they can think a lot of those best ideas and innovative ideas happen where when they're on the morning, run or dig in the morning shower when they're not at work. And so being transparent, knowing you've got your you've got your back caring about their lives, not just about work, Bill, it's funny, because Bill would always do things that today I know some people struggle with. So Bill's a big hugger. So he would do one or two things, he he'd walk down the hall and either flip you the bird, or give you a big hug. And whichever one he chose actually didn't mean anything he'd walked by, and he'd go pay bigger. What the fuck did you do for me today? He just yeah, that was just the way he interacted. And just and today in there's something about Seattle getting everybody out. And I know today people feel uncomfortable with some of these things. And I think it's a real shame. Because these are ways that we as human beings communicate friendship and connection and never certainly never want to anybody I knew ever felt like there was anything other than he had had the men and women like this is not just some a women's thing, because he wanted people to know he cared about him.

36:22  
That's amazing. So one of the other types of meetings you referenced was performance reviews, did you have any of those with Bill? What were those? I assume those are a little more operational? And how did he approach theory

36:32  
much along the lines of so I would say not balanced? It would be you're really good at a bunch of stuff. Without feeling that compulsion to have to say, Oh, here's five things you're good at, and five things you're bad at, you're really good at a bunch of stuff, how can we do a bunch more bad stuff, or expand that skill sets to other parts of the business like you were really good at this stuff in. So I was running the Hey, Vivian to run that supplies business unit, because he felt they needed stronger marketing than two. So you're really good in this marketing, let's take you to this business that actually saved the supply its business. So paper products, write checks and invoices and envelopes very profitable, but didn't really grow much. So let's see me view over here. So you can expand so you can bring our marketing sensibility to it. And then over time, when the consumer finance division was created, and actually the internet was coming on, and you're buying some digital companies, I'd really like you to come back over here and run the consumer finance division really low. Most of it's quick and and quick, and what quicken.com and other digital businesses because you understand the product, because you understand the customer, because that's in your bones. And we need these acquisitions. We know it's new hires, we're getting we need that sensibility brought into that part of the organization. So it was always this focus on what you do is certainly let you know, there's some things you do better on or he'd say, I get that the answer is he would reflect on sometimes you show up in your you know, sometimes marry me show up in a meeting and you're quiet. And people wonder what's going on. Because you're not usually that way. Like you show up in meeting usually you bring all this energy that lifts that everybody else, you show up in your quiet. It like lowers everybody else, people wondering what's up? Why is she upset? What's going on? Everybody else is little on pins and needles. So you need to be conscious of that you need to be aware of how you show up to things. And again, that's one of those. Yeah, okay. I can understand that. I can see I can understand it. I understand now why it's important. And I can't just go and mope around.

38:49  
Why do you think he was so focused on like, the superpowers and accelerating those versus focus areas? Because the standard like feedback templates, often like both, as you said, it's like, here's the strengths, here's the weaknesses. So what do you think the strategy was behind that with him?

39:06  
I think it's around this basic notion. People really like to do the stuff that they're good at. People don't like to do this stuff. And they're not good at it are the stuff that they've registered in their brain that they're not good at? Even? And so I think he always it's this, it's this piece of maybe being a coach and knowing that for people to dig deep to digging deeper, getting more out of the player wasn't about beating them down. It's about lifting them up. I can imagine on the football field, you're behind by whatever and you're feeling crushed and beaten up. It's not the time to say you don't know what the heck you're doing out there. And it's you got to do I can imagine that you guys are doing great. You're out there. And even then he was CEO of a public company with a couple 1000 employees. He would make a point of letting his executive team know usually When they go coach football at the local high school team in the afternoon, and I remember so I after he passed away, I'd held this little panel with John Doerr, who had had build advising Google team, Apple, Amazon, all these other Kleiner investments. And then John Donahoe, who was at a new day and is now CEO at Nike and Dinah Divinsky. And I remember John Donahoe telling the story, because Bill coached his son in football, as it turns out, and John would say, there'd be a high school football team, the boys are out there running around all over the place. Soon as Bill stepped foot on the field, they all gathered in the middle and trigone. And that's respect that this is somebody who's it's my heart and my soul, not just my brain,

40:46  
it's amazing. Skipping ahead few years, you leave into it, you eventually ended up, among other things on the board of Stanford, for someone who's not really familiar with how this the system works. Can you tell us more about that? What does that type of role entail? Stanford

41:01  
is certainly a big, fascinating institution. If you think about the academics, okay, in the undergrad, population and graduate population very little bit different and can't I can't imagine managing professors. And then you have a Hospital Medical Center that you're running, that's a pretty big deal. Also can imagine managing doctors, these are skill sets that I feel that that's a different skill set. You have a police department, do you have a fire department, if you had a catering business, you have a housing business? Oh, and you may have big research programs like the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center that you run for the federal government and other things. So they're big, complex organizations. So like any large complex company, if there's a board, there's a bunch of board committees, so things like academic planning and policies, things like random buildings, that's a big infrastructure, constantly new things being built haggling overseeing this finance committees and other other subcommittees where a lot of the actual work gets done. It is a it's a nonprofit, I think is characteristic of a lot of nonprofits to have large boards, part of and that boards get leveraged to help with fundraising, as the university goes out to to try to raise more money, a lot of the board members or people that they look to, I was actually I joined the board, because at the time, Stanford had a program where they had young alumni, I was under 40, think there were two of us under 40 on the board. And the idea was to keep I know that I may not seem super young, but most boards tend to skew over 60. And so it was trying to get people who had had some gotten out understand business and things, but to keep a closer pulse on on what recent or recent graduates or different trends were going on. And so that was part of that was part of, you know, my specific role. Other nuts. It was the time Condoleezza Rice was Provost of the University, and which was great to really work with Pandi, Gerhard Caspar, and in the it was university president had come from Germany versus Chicago, to Stanford. And this may seem surprising, but the time Stanford did not necessarily have the best relationships of the local community and the and so and John Hennessy, who had been at Stanford for a long time, had been dean of the engineering school professor was a co founder at SGI had worked with a local community. When John became university president, you're really the university's relationships with the local community and really, I think got a lot stronger. Gerhard, it brought you at the time, Gerhard brought this real European sensibility place. And Stanford focused a lot on getting back to making buildings that were to last for 100 plus years that were our iconic are redoing the art and architecture around the university, I think and with the new university president who came on board a couple of years ago, really thinking about the university's role in society that especially here in Silicon Valley, in his opening speech, he was first as far as appointments president, he talked about the role in Silicon Valley of not just innovating in technology, but thinking about the ramifications downstream and having a responsibility to think about the the implications, the unintended consequences of some of those, and the evaluating that in the whole process. Really a much more sense of there's it's not quite so maybe the Wild West and maybe there's some responsibility in what we are creating 80 here, that I think is great. So committees are where a lot of the work is done. And then board numbers are not operational. So when you get to bigger whether it's a big organization like Stanford, or Blue Shield of California, or John Wiley and Sons, board members are really oversight butts eyes in hands out. So it's a simple way of thinking about it. It's very different than early stage startups where I feel like sometimes boards act as extensions of a management team, or will actually make it took there's a more in hands on involvement that aren't some of these bigger boards.

45:31  
I don't know if this was while you were on the Stanford board or after but I know you set up the Stanford Center for Women's lead, how did that come about? And what inspired it and we'd love to hear a little bit about that

45:43  
I had been trying to, to think about ways that I could, you know, contribute, don't make the world a better place and really understanding the gender. The unconscious bias is basically used in organizations, corporations, that hinders not only women, but other underrepresented groups from breaking through in organizations. And I saw I had been on the advisory board for the Clayman Institute on Gender Research for a little while ahead of that. And I also got involved on the lean in on the launch team for Lean and for Sheryl Sandberg 's effort in the launch of lean in. And I think all of these pieces together, caused me too then, after the leanin work was done, so maybe it was April, May of one year timeframe really start to think about what how would I go about creating this something around getting more women in leadership, my friends, were advising you go to your own boat, do a start up, you'd be great at nursing. As you guys know, startups have their challenges. And there's a lot of time and effort and things that are just you don't necessarily get from A to Z in the fastest time period, because there's there's a lot of building has to be done. And so this is where I sat back and like thought about my time on the Stanford board, including so one of the things they had us do as new trustees, is actually read the founding documents of the university. And interestingly enough, because Leland Stanford was Governor of California, they're actually elements related to Stanford, written in California constitution, including Stanford cannot sell its land that was granted by the Stanford beating that early at the founding grants. The reason that this university exhibit was, I think, really formational in, for example, in the original vision was affordable education west of the Mississippi, there wasn't anything out here. It needed to be affordable men and women needed to be a part of it at co Ed University was unusual at the time and was part of what was important to them. This was Jane and Leland Stanford doing the surgeon Jane Stanford being involved. And so that combined with really thinking about what is Stanford break, Stanford's brand is innovation. And everybody wanting to come to Stanford like everybody who I knew, tell me about Stanford, I want to get my kids in Stanford, I want to get Stanford professor speak at something I want to go. Everybody that I knew in business from around the world, like Stanford was very much people's focus. And so really occurred to me that if I could marry those two things together and get President Hennessy, to see the way I saw things, I saw things, which was, Stanford should do this, because women are part of our history. And if we do it, it's innovation. And so you have to go do it is is not optional companies corporations out there, you need to figure out how to root out the unconscious biases that are preventing half the population from contributing everything they could contribute. And you had to remember that this has been true for 20 years more women than men and graduated from US universities. But still you only have 10 or 15% of positions on top being held by women. So systemically along the way, we managed to get 85% of the roles to 50% of the end. So how do you were in the US is going to continue to grow and expand and we want new companies and new leaders, we're gonna have to figure out how to tap that other 50% of the population that's already earning 60% 5060 55 60% of the degrees out there. So I went into Jesse John Hennessy had been on sabbatical. I don't remember I sent him an email. I always send emails to CEOs. I ran through people on Sundays because I know they do with their emails before they get to Monday morning because they want to be ready. And I said Jelena note and I figured it was just going to be a while. Within minutes, I got a reply. Say gentlemen habits. I do want to talk to you about within minutes, I got this reply from me popping his assistant saying that sounds great. Mary, talking to his assistant, can you set something up for us this week?

49:54  
Like, oh my god, I was like, wow, this is awesome. And I don't have a PowerPoint. I don't have anything written out, I don't have anything, I just have this idea in my brain that had been muddling through for a while. And so his assistant was like, okay, so set up the appointment, and it's like, I just need one thing, I need a whiteboard. So okay, so I decided that I was just gonna go in and whiteboard it for him, not Chai, I started making PowerPoint presentations spent all the time worrying about fonts and colors, and says that I'm just going to write this on a whiteboard. And I did that. And he gave me my homework, some homework to do after that do a little bit of other buyer and, and eventually and not chilling after gave us our initial seed round. And from there, we really grew that effort. And again, with any startup effort, takes you a little while to find your way. And really realize that, at the time here in Silicon Valley was certainly viewed and still women don't get as much financing. As men and women are still at the tops of all these technology companies, there was enough interest and issues here in Silicon Valley that we've actually turned. And really, instead of trying to get turned towards this corporate model, where corporations pay to belong, they get to participate in a bunch of events. And they share what they have done in making changes internally. So really became one of the best examples of research connecting in with actual what's going on the ground in corporations making things that came out of it actionable, not there's ivory tower stuff, because I'm it's important, obviously research. Academic research is very important. But it's got to get into the flow. It's got to get implemented, or it sits there. And I think that's the sad thing was so much research is we there's a lot of great stuff out there. So for this program, for starters, how do we get stuff out into practice, measure whether it works, so we actually break the cycle of what's been happening for a long time.

51:58  
That's amazing. So this clearly the underrepresentation issue. And through the center, you've done a lot of work to attack that problem and drive some impact through educational programs on the brand initiatives, what have been some of the the learnings or insights you've had around how getting more women around the table has actually led me to

52:17  
say the the research and here's what lots of research around that here that says, When you get the least a third of the people around us as you making table to be women, that decisions just get are made differently. That if there's, first of all, if there's only one woman at the table, she is tends to be seen as one of the guys. And oftentimes, if she thinks there's only one space at the table for a woman, she tends to be not as willing to help other women get on that get to be a part of that group. If there's only one spot, I have to give up my seat for somebody else, that doesn't feel great. If there's two women, you get a little bit more a little bit better. One person does not feel like she's representing half of humanity and that sort of thing. And the real magic seems to start to occur at three where, you know, they women feel more comfortable speaking up, or there's other people who have some shit, some shared experiences with thumb that feel more comfortable bringing those issues up. Women, there's just more so women are actually seen as a group. And decisions are getting made differently. There are some interesting data after I think it was that 2016 are moving really was none of not 2016 He was the 22,008 election that really talked about gender differences in voting, and how women are really looking across a variety of topics, including education, healthcare, a variety of topics and are whereas men tend to focus in on a lower number taxes, economy and military and a smaller number of things. And that that broader again, these are all research. So every individual person can be different, obviously. But that broader way of thinking and the man against thought, pausing and recognizing there's women around this table, I remember the advisory board owns on a group of other CEOs and honestly, I hear two of us women in the group. And the way that guys behaved, was just fascinating standing up literally pounding the table doing some of these things and talking over each other and just everything ran through that fall time. I sat there and just raised my hand for a long time until eventually somebody said okay, what do you say? There's a decision really how we're going to behave. Is it really whose voices The loudest really having a Can we switch to me getting all the ideas out in the table and stuff like that? So can we can we make sure everybody's got a voice? And I'm not saying this the way every table loons? And I'm not saying again, no, but there is enough research to say that makes a difference. And we also know it makes it a reset diversity broadly, there's also a difference specifically related to having women in the room.

55:22  
That's really interesting. And it makes a lot of sense, you have this really fascinating role where since 2016, you've served on the board of Blue Shield, California. And for the listeners, it's a nonprofit insurer, but its massive, it's got 4.5 million members, it's got $21 billion in revenue. So we actually had some friends submit questions. The first is beneatha. She's a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz working on healthcare and biotech. And she had a question around innovation, which is, what do you see the biggest opportunities for technology are to transform our healthcare infrastructure, it feels like telemedicine and video visits, especially during COVID were a total game changer, but also just the beginning,

56:11  
blue shield's focus is around making healthcare sustainably affordable and worthy of our family and friends. And so the notion is really how can we help the cost of health care have been rising steadily for a long time? How did we break the trajectory of that charge and get to a point that's sustainable, which means there does need to be profitless system for people on the way it needs to be not profit for people to invest in innovation and new buildings, whatever clinics and hospitals and everything and all that new equipment, but it can't keep going to the patient's been going. And then it's notion of worthy of our family and friends. Like it's this notion of i Right i want I'm okay, I want my mom to be a member, I want my family to be a number because I know they're going to they're going to understand it, they're going to get a good treatment, they're going to get treated fairly, they're going to his health, the health care system, it's the sort of thing where especially when you're at your lowest like you're not you're sick, you're in the hospital, is when you need the most from it, it can become the most frustrating and challenging. And how do we take?

57:31  
How do we take some of that out. And we know a lot of things, right? We know that it's a lot more expensive to be treated in an emergency room than to get preventive care, we know that people would rather die in their homes than dying in a hospital bed, we know that it's hard, we know that a lot of the people who are not able to get out of their homes, oftentimes miss their visit, and end up in the emergency rooms because it dehydrated they haven't been eating and eaten, they haven't maintained their own health, and then it becomes very expensive, simple solutions become very expensive system problems and loose. So I think so specifically do they need as question innovations that help reduce costs in the system, and improve the member experience, I'd say would be a lot of the vectors that we look at. So costs in the system payment models paint payment is you go to the doctor, you lead you set up maybe a follow up of witness, and then you come home. And maybe you get one one statement from the insurance company, then a couple weeks later, you get another statement from the insurance company, you can't quite tell if it's the same visit or something else, or what is this other one, then you might get something for your doctor's office. And you might get a bill from your doctor's office and they bill you and then you haven't actually heard from insurance till after the fact that they actually paid it. So there's a lot of inefficiencies in the whole payment system. And so one of the things that Blue Shield is one of our partnerships with a company called OODA. I help and is working on making the whole payment system more transparent and just reducing the burden in it. We have the CEO of Blue Shield talks about a vision where when you check out the doctor's appointment, that's it you're done. Like you're not getting all these bills, you're not getting all the subsequent statement. It's done like you're checking out like you would check out of anything else that you do it's done, and taking in roles that underlying the system can take in simply making approvals of claims just swift and transparent. And what can we do from a risk analysis standpoint that says we let's we'll just get up we're going to approve this claim. See was automated, the majority of things can be done that way, leaving a smaller number that really need to go through from a having people look at them individually. Lucia is also investing we have this whole thing. reimagining health is our umbrella term, we we look at social determinants of health, environmental determinants of health, they fit clinical factors, genetic, behavioral factors, and really trying to really view members holistically, we have expanded what we're doing for a mental health unit launched some initiatives around mental health, we are a big fan of some of the stuff that's occurred more personalized data driven care, so that it's really understanding new as an individual and creating and being a part of this incentive system that supports doctors and keeping patients pay doctors to keep patients healthy, rather than just pay shoppers by the hour. Right? If our focus is on keeping patients healthy, and the compensation structures more aligned around that, then we're right, we're keeping people out of the things that are high cost, which is back to those emergency situations that trigger that visit to the emergency room. And so I think technology products are getting them more High Tech High touch, especially as populations age, which is the two companies which if you're in Silicon Valley, the Googles and Facebooks into it's really wanting their health insurance company to be digitally forward their employees expect them to be they expect their partners to be that was one of the reasons I was recruited to join the Blue Shield board was the start was really this recognition of any more voices from really consumer technology on the board. So actually, I joined it at the same time as one of the co founders and CTO at Pandora. Yeah, well and I joined at the same time. And so it's really added also relatively younger tech, consumer tech voices to the table a time when the blue show listens, revitalized, redone this whole app availability website. technical data, infrastructure.

1:02:09  
That's actually a perfect segue to the next question which Shawn Mehra from health tap suggested, before I get to the question, I'll start with a framing which is I think one of the things you highlighted as industries could be grouped in sort of two broad buckets, one being slow, one being fast. So on the consumer side, but there isn't that much regulation, you can kind of ship products and build really quickly slow industries, more complex, more regulated healthcare, real estate education, there's a lot of different players involved. And so there are different go to market strategies. So the question that Shawn had was, suppose you're advising a founder. And they have these two paths in front of them. And one is, they stick with the consumer model, and they just go direct to consumer, the consumer pays them for the service. And they try to scale up independent from the kind of existing healthcare payer infrastructure. The alternative approach is you integrate with the the payer and the provider models, and you basically build built into their b2b as like a b2b business you build into the infrastructure, what advice would you have for a founder approaching this market and trying to figure out whether to play ball or go direct to consumer healthcare

1:03:20  
is big. And so certainly probably depends on the specific startup and what it's trying to accomplish. I think for any startup, being overly reliant on a large, slow moving company, can be very challenging. That's certainly seen in outside of healthcare even seen startups basically fizzle because they really made a big bet with some big partner, Aaron, that partner just moved too slow. I would say broadly speaking in healthcare, there are a lot of opportunities. I'd say somebody like Blue Shield, we do our we do some of our own venture investing, there is the blues across the country have a venture fund all looking to invest in startups in areas that really align with and how do you take cost out while improving quality and things that align with that? I think that you might find a lot of these older people or companies very interested in either investing or in partnering. I think the challenge for some of the big companies too, and I know this from doing startups is for the startup. It's a big deal for the big company. It's this little tiny knacks that won't move much. And so I think startups need to be maybe doing some pieces on your own until you get enough momentum starting out, like how do you scale into those partnerships? How do you start with something small and scale into some things bigger? Oftentimes, even a local clinic can be a good place to start in automating something in a smaller group or in cat in California counties have a lot of control over things that go on and thinking about some things on a smaller basis approves your potential, the cost savings, the ROI, and some of that gets a little bit about worked out. But if you can find something, if you can get a partnership with a bigger player, you get some scale brought right away. So I would probably say as with a lot of things, not to put all your eggs in one basket to try out a couple of pounds. And a lot of it depends on the product, the and the connections and experience set of your team. If your team comes out of pol the insurance world or comes out of hospital world and has a ton of connections, you're probably going to have an easier time getting those partnerships together. If you don't, if you're on a Google and Facebook, then you know it might you probably know better how to go direct to a customer how to go and build up some mass and scale and then maybe come back to some of these guys,

1:06:03  
we definitely wanted to ask you a little bit about your various roles serving on company boards. You've had this incredible breadth of experience from being early at a startup to helping scale it up all the way to running companies and serving on boards of companies of all kinds of sizes, including a public company, at least one in the form of John Wiley and Sons, I believe, and how do you view is the role of a board member in the context of a large company? And what do you think is like the most important part of that that role or responsibility?

1:06:35  
Yeah, I think so again, so first of all, as a board member, you're not an operator at these bigger companies, right? You're not an operator, you're not essentially the executive team, you are a governance body. And so you have certain roles and responsibilities. And a lot of that is to look out for two things. What are the business leaders not thinking about? What is arson risks, based on your experience, your what you're aware of in your world? They don't need another person brainstorming random things, but they're already smart. They're well, for me doing? It's actually saying one of the things I like about being on boards is that people a senior executive teams are smart, passionate, committed people. So the topics that you get to talk about are really interesting topics, right? It's they're generally strategic, right? They're generally, how do we approach some problem. So they're very interesting. And the people and the other people on boards are also very, I feel like I learned a lot from the other people from different industries, different backgrounds, I learned a bunch from them. And I feel that their role in the room is to really it really is putting your thinking cap on, is there something that's a risk that they haven't identified. And the other thing I think about is, what viewpoint has not been surfaced. And in fact, I was I did this for a while, at a John Wiley over a series of board meetings. And I remember in my performance review, which we do annual performance reviews for board members, I got the comment of I don't know where Mary stands, she brings he takes a different view when each of the board meetings. And so I was asked about that. And I said that's actually part of what I feel like the My responsibility is right at it, I just part of their job is to make sure that there's no elephants in the room that the black Pat view, the alternative view has at least been articulated. And but you need to do it in a way. I think one of the biggest things as a board member, is your job is really to ask questions, not to tell what to do. But to be more like, Have you considered this? Have you thought about this approach? Or in my in a prior company, or in my experience in the past? I've seen? Have you thought about that, and to really try to do an open ended open dialogue to expand thinking and maybe, again, thinking in a direction that maybe hadn't been considered, then to think of the answer better than these guys who are already spending 50 or 60 or 70 hours a week, focused day in and day out on this topic. And you come in once a quarter, you just can't assume so I think the other piece is super important is to make sure you're doing your homework, right to just read everything diligently. There's a lot of reading involved with being a board member, I also advise people to go out and connect with and have it not just be in the boardroom, but either stay the extra time but really get to know other people find other ways to connect in with people in the company so that you can be a bit more approachable so you can have some sense that again, you really understanding the pulse because the most challenging thing I'd say being a board member is the only stuff you know is what you're told. And so the challenges how right what are the challenges like How are you making sure you're being told all the right. And I do think that there's a way that you can ask questions that can surface some of that. And there's a way that by building connections outside of just that time in a boardroom, that can help surface some of that, because at the end is the real risk that you're not being told, really what's going on. If you look back at Sydney, bar bank, Wells Fargo and Ron, whatever big things, right, the big disasters that have gone on, it's not clear that all that was going on ever went to the board.

1:10:31  
I think it's also another illustration of why diversity is important. Because like you get more perspectives around the table, something I've always wondered about is what do you think is the right size for a board? Because you see such a wide range from like small boards, like 18 person boards at some point, it just seems like how could this ever work and be effective? What are your thoughts on that?

1:10:53  
I think certainly had the small board and with four person or get earlier tend to be early stage board. And boy, I'm pretty sure there Stanford board was over 20 people and when you and so I think right now why every and Blue Shield are both somewhere around eight turn and wasn't able to stay alive. While on the Blue Shield boards. We got a couple of doctors, couple of tech people, a couple people out of regulated industries, couple people out of government policy, federal and state level, that diversity of it's not all CEOs that people have different levels, backgrounds, a couple of CTOs as technology, cybersecurity can continue to be very important. That variety like you sent in, not everybody will be able to make a comment on everything that's going on. But that in depth knowledge in certain areas really contributes to the overall quality and caliber of the board. Because it's again, back to that thinking of something as a team. If you're all seven foot senators, you're probably not going to win the game. And if you're all six point cart point guards, you're also probably not going to win the game. And getting that diversity around the table. I totally agree with you is, is really key.

1:12:02  
The Mary, we have a few questions that we like to ask every guest on the show at the end. And so the first one is around people. So who's the most talented person that you've worked with? And why?

1:12:15  
So I would say, although we've talked about Scott Cook, and Bill Campbell from Intuit, Eric Dunn was the CFO of Intuit when I started the was I think he was at Bain or BCG before coming to intuit. He graduated from Harvard, got an MBA and went to work for Intuit because he made Scott promise that he could also do coding. So Eric, not only was the CFO but basically built, he built Quicken three he built Quicken forward looking for lead the engineer, he took a company public and CFO. And while and later lie, Quicken was so quickly was spun out of Intuit five years ago, it's it's Intuit moved to focus primarily on QuickBooks in the tax business, and Eric leaden investor group to buy it and take on running and building it again, I have always thought of myself as a very productive person. And if nothing else, I get out work and figure stuff out. I gave up with Eric. He was it's just wickedly smart. highly productive, just he can do something in 10 minutes that would take a normal mortal, half an hour or something anyway, so much more productive. And then just has an amazing work ethic. And yeah, I think from a talented person, that ability to span on being a programmer, being a see the phone, doing a road show what is in directly managing that engineering team and talking to customers and doing it from startup all the way through that the IPO he was very early on my exactly sure which employee number he was what maybe five or six or something like that. I think he's the most talented person I've worked with.

1:14:17  
That's amazing. Second question is What's something you believe that would surprise most people?

1:14:23  
Something I believe that would surprise most people? I'm not sure if it's necessarily I get some insight. I fundamentally believe that people are good. I fundamentally believe that people go to work or start the day wanting to do good things. I think people come to work wanting to do the best job they can. And if they're if that's not happening, it's not their fault. Like what else? What is it a system? I think people get up in the morning and they want that they want the world to be a good place. They want it to be better for their kids. They want it they want things to To be good, and they want to be caring, and all of that I am there are times that I get certainly with what is going on today in the news around Russia and Ukraine is an example of where you can get cynical or all that's gone on climate change and a lack of action, you can get cynical about humans, I think most people want to do good and do the right thing. And to, again, tie back to current events, I think we can see that in some of the people in the Ukraine.

1:15:28  
That's a great perspective to have, especially today. Third, questions around heroes, are there any heroes of yours either real or fictional?

1:15:37  
So I can't say unnecessarily students of these people, but the heroes that I admire are the people who made fundamental change peacefully. And, and I know, again, human beings are imperfect people. So we've can find problems with anybody that, you know, I'd say whether it's gone to your Martin Luther King, or people of that nature, who, again, it's the you can do things peacefully, and you can make fundamental change in need to inspire. And you do that by inspiring others to follow you.

1:16:23  
And last questions around superpowers, everyone has skills that feel like play to them, but work to others things that you're really good at what are some superpowers of yours that you've identified over the years, and that you'd like to lean on day to day.

1:16:37  
But it's funny, because sometimes you can only understand that, you know, when they're reflected back to you. So remember, my ever right CFO at Davie center a number of years ago, she gave me like pages of spreadsheets to look at. And it's like, that number right there? Doesn't seem right. And she just was so frustrated. It's like, how do you do this? And I realized that I have an ability to go look and find that piece that doesn't fit into the state projects, software I was working on earlier today, it just does doesn't make sense. We've got to go ask questions. It doesn't, we got to figure out really the root of this data and where it's coming from. And depending on the group, I'm with the ability to, to whether it's take data, or maybe technology and make it understanding to other to other people, I think is something that I've also had played back to me is some people say, Oh, I didn't see that, or I never knew or just that some of those ways that you can help, you're able to make things a little bit more approachable and talk about in simple terms. I always felt like I wasn't very good in English at school. So I tend not to use like every fancy words about things. And it turns out, maybe there's a benefit. And just getting simple and related to that went on when I was in school, Stanford, I started to figure out that I liked this idea of marketing and product marketing, and Stanford didn't have any degrees in in that field. In fact, back then didn't have a computer science degree was electrical engineering as much CS guys did. And so I got my I double A double majored in econ in sociology. And I've always found that combination, gave me that superpower in being analytical, being able to understand the data, being able to express the data, which is key, to be able to express data in a way that the engineers will actually start to do some of where you could talk to them because they're saying what you're trying to accomplish, and they'll agree with you because you can't do anything. Otherwise, as a product manager, but then the sociology side, I think really helped me understand how to listen to people, and how to have empathy for people and how to ask questions. And how in from gathering that then how do you really implement some things from any yo and really, it's not just about work, that being able to really listen to your kids, listen to your neighbors. I feel like there's a lot more listening to be done in this country right now. I think is is an important superpower.

1:19:16  
Very, this has been wide ranging and really fascinating conversation. Thanks for taking the time to be with us today. We really appreciate it.

1:19:24  
Super fun. Thank you guys and good luck with this really a great thing that you guys are doing. Thank you. Appreciate it.