Yeah, one thing that was really interesting, when I was at LinkedIn, they used to talk about how important mentorship was and I had never really had a mentor. And now the thing that’s so interesting five years after leaving LinkedIn and starting, you know? I have some of the best mentors on earth that have completely changed my life, and I didn’t even really understand how impactful that could be until I had it myself.
So, it’s one of those nebulous things and guys, I was 29 years old before I got my first real mentor. Ultimately the one that really changed my life was a guy named Bing Gordon. Bing has been a partner at Kleiner Perkins for 30 years, was one of the founders of electronic arts and the mentor to so many of the best CEOs and consumer internet of the generation. He’s given me so many of these frameworks that have helped, you know, made sense to me, and I’ve tried to share those with people as I learn them.
I think consistency is so important, I think trust is consistency over time. So, having somebody that is not just popping in once a year, two times a year, like being fundamentally—because he spends so much time with us, and me and my co-founder and our leadership team, he understands deeply the biggest problems going on with the business, and he’s helped me create these templates for just having constant improvement.
Secondly, he’s a huge proponent of benchmarking, which I’ve become a much bigger proponent of. So, as a first-time founder, right? As a first-time CEO, I didn’t necessarily know what a world class CFO looked like or a world class CMO looked like. The people that were doing the job two years ago at Cameo might have been the best I’d ever worked with in my life doing it but certainly, there’s levels above that.
So, he really taught me, “Here’s the seven best CMOs on earth in consumer internet. I’m going to hook you up with each one of them. Go meet them, go talk to them and go see what great looks like.” And he has given me an exercise that I love where he has me once a quarter rank every member of my executive team from five to one.
Five being, this is the best person on earth that can do this job. Four being, this is a 10% top 90th percentile person doing this job. Three being, they’re industry average. Two being, below industry average. One being, why do they work for you? And actually, rank your executive team member by member, take a look at it, summit and see where your team is on a quarterly basis. So, these are the type of benchmarking exercises that I found really helpful, that again, being revealed to me and it’s just been transformative.
