Startups vs. Big Corporations, Regulating Monopolies, and Tech Folly — with Noam Bardin

Noam Bardin, the former CEO of Waze and the VP of Product at Google, joins Scott to discuss all things tech — including what followed when Noam sold Waze to Google, how to think about regulating monopolies, and what founders need to consider when starting a business. Follow Noam on Twitter, @noam. Scott opens with his thoughts on Elon Musk’s decision to not join Twitter’s board. Algebra of Happiness: choose value, not volatility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 154. John Travolta was born in 1954. True story, the Bee Gees are my favorite band. You are supposed to do chest compressions during CPR to the rhythm of staying alive. If that doesn't work, just start singing "For Whom the Bell Holds." Go, go, go!

• 1:44Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 154th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Noam Bar-Din, the former CEO of Waze, the navigation software company that Google acquired in 2013 for a billion dollars. I found Noam to be very thoughtful. The whole time I was speaking to him, I kept thinking, will you be my friend? Guy is really interesting and soulful. We discussed with Noam all sorts of things. Regarding the tech ecosystem and entrepreneurship, including his decision to leave Google after the better half of a decade, or what we call seven years, the role of monopolies and Gnome's notion of tech folly. Folly, it's the town. I used to go to the Ice Follies with my mom. That was a big deal. I remember we went to go see Dorothy Hamill. Oh, my God, what a thrill. Before we bust into today's episode,

• 2:27Scott Galloway?

  we want to remind you that the dog answers your question about business trends, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind on the pod every Monday. So please submit a question by visiting officehours.proptiemedia.com. Again, that's officehours.proptiemedia.com to submit a question. And get your voice in front of dozens and dozens of fans. Okay, what's happening? Well, what do you know? So unlike this megalomaniac to be in the news again, Elon Musk has decided to not join Twitter's board after last week's saga that made it sound like he was pretty sure that he was going to go on the board, i.e., he was offered a board position and accepted it. Call me crazy, that usually means you're going on the board. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal released his statement on Twitter earlier this week,

• 3:12Scott Galloway?

  which essentially contained a whole lot of nothing. I would call it basically a word salad with shavings of nothing. Musk tweeted out a slew of polls regarding Twitter over the weekend that have since been deleted. One of the deleted polls asked a question about turning the company's San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter. And another one was about the company's subscription offering. And the other was whether or not the company should remove W from the firm's name. By the way, what would happen if an employee put out that tweet? What would happen to an employee if they started talking, doing polls about what we should do and saying, should we call Twitter titter? This is a bigger issue in our society. Now, we've decided there's one set of rules for billionaires and another set of rules for the rest of us.

• 3:57Scott Galloway?

  Even according to the SEC, I've been an activist investor. For a large part of my career, and if I blew past 5% and didn't file the next day, that company could not have me on their board, and I would be in all sorts of hot water. And maybe that's what happened here. We'll find out. Several media outlets noted that Musk liked the tweet in response to Agarwal's statement that Elon was told to play nice and not speak freely. A bunch of speculation is likely to follow now, and that's what Elon wants. He just wants to be in the news every fucking 48 hours. He and Trump are birds of the same feather. Trump is literally Musk minus about 700 IQ points. These two feel as if they have to be in the news every 48 hours regardless of why they're in the news.

• 4:39Scott Galloway?

  But he's no longer going to need to cap his stake at 14.9% and can still, quote unquote, engage in discussions with the board and management team without limitations. Agarwal's statement noted that there will be distractions ahead, which is Latin for this dude is fucking crazy and a headache if he hasn't already been that. Let me ask you, how much work do you think Twitter management and the board have accomplished over the last few weeks dealing with this bullshit? And it is bullshit. Musk has a track record when it comes to causing all sorts of errant distractions from the businesses he's responsible for. For the past several years, he's been reckless, toying with companies, cryptocurrencies, and technologies that captured his fleeting attention only to move on when the next shiny

• 5:22Scott Galloway?

  object caught his gaze. Okay, what's going on here? Elon discovered about 48 hours into this, or about half of Scaramucci, that being on a board means you have to sort of pretend to be an adult. That when you start doing these polls, and maybe they include information that is non-public material information that you're violating SEC laws. It means you can't start insulting management. It means you can't say that the company should be called Titter. It means that you have to sort of put on your big boy pants. And it's clear that Musk doesn't want to do this and realized, okay, I don't want to do this about 48 hours in. And wait, if I then don't go on the board, I control the conversation again. Twitter

• 6:04Scott Galloway?

  stock is down 7% over the past five days. We're recording this on Tuesday, April 12th. It was very interesting. The stock rocketed when there was a whale kind of just beneath the surface. And when it breached, it was Musk, stock popped up 20 or 25%. But the moment it was announced he was going on the board. The stock actually went down kind of seven, eight percent because I don't think people thought, okay, this is going to be good for the company to have this guy on the board. Why? Elon Musk is a walking poison pill. What do we mean by that? His errant behavior and his stake and his deep wealth mean that essentially no other firm can come in here, no activist investor, no large corporation that wants to acquire this firm. And part of the thing to put a floor on the stock here was that if it got cheap enough,

• 6:48Scott Galloway?

  somebody, either Salesforce or Disney or a private equity firm was going to come in and take it out because it does have huge influence. The product continues to gain relevance and adoption, but no longer because now they have to deal with the man child who might buy another 15%, which brings up a host of issues around power corrupting and whether or not it really makes sense to have people worth $200 billion. So I don't even know what to say here. I do think there's a lesson and the lesson is the following, that just because you have power or ideally when you aggregate some sort of power, you know, to which for those who much is given, much is expected, I would counsel young men, and I didn't learn this until I was older.

• 7:32Scott Galloway?

  I used to come into boardrooms and want to be bold. I'm here, I took a 18% stake in the New York Times or a 10% stake in a retailer or I bought 12% at Gateway. Realize that's a weak flex, weak flex, but I used to be an activist investor and I'd show up and think, okay, I'm the man. I want to take credit for the change here. I want to be bold and I want to be loud. And here's the problem, here's the problem. This is what real men do. This is what real adults do is they distinguish the difference between adding value and adding volatility. And this is a lesson personally, in a relationship, when you have the opportunity to be in a relationship, when you are injecting yourself into situations, are you there just to watch

• 8:15Scott Galloway?

  yourself and make bold statements and create volatility? Or are you actually adding value? And sometimes adding value means showing a certain level of discretion, a certain level of discipline. Maybe even, well, I don't know, listening for a while. And that's the difference here is that I don't think this individual has the ability to discern the difference between adding value and adding volatility on his non-core pursuits. I want to be clear, I think Elon Musk has probably added more shareholder value than any individual in history with the exception maybe of Tim Cook overseeing SpaceX and Tesla. These are incredible companies that are good for the planet. At the same time, we can be intelligent and that's hold two contrary thoughts in our heads concurrently.

• 8:58Scott Galloway?

  And that is, he can put a man on Mars or a woman on Mars. Actually, I'd like him to be the first person on Mars. I think that would be just awesome. He can have reusable rockets that are gonna decrease the cost of putting satellites into space. He can create tremendous shareholder value. But when it comes to his side hustles, Etsy, Bitcoin, DojaCoin, and now Twitter, we have been to this movie before. Hey, look at me. Look at fucking me. Take the stock up, then do nothing, make a bunch of stupid comments, right? I love Bitcoin. Oh, Bitcoin's bad for the environment. Oh, DojaCoin. Oh, wait, it's a hustle. These are markets. People invest in these markets. People take him seriously and he, I think, abuses that trust.

• 9:40Scott Galloway?

  And coming into Twitter and saying, oh, wait, it needs free speech. Free fucking speech? What is the stranglehold of free speech that Elon Musk needs to be released from? By the way, a total free speech platform is called 4chan. It's a sewer of weirdness and it's the reason why 20 million people go to it every month and the reason why 200 million people go to Twitter every goddamn day is because it is moderated. The free speech, First Amendment, First Amendment, the government shall pass no law that inhibits free speech. Well, guess what? Guess what? Twitter's not the government. It's actually a company with a very challenged business model that does about

• 10:22Scott Galloway?

  a 12th of the revenue of Facebook and maybe a 30th of the revenue of Google, yet supposedly it's the public square. No, it's not. As my pivot co-host Kara Swisher said, it's the private square and they can do whatever the hell they want. As a matter of fact, to compel them to spread hate speech, to compel them to spread vaccine misinformation, to compel them to give a platform to someone who's responsible for 30 to 40% of the election misinformation. Yeah, that's right. I'm talking about the former president. That in fact, is closer to a violation of First Amendment because the government or anybody else isn't supposed to tell media companies what is their voice. If Tesla has a serious radio station, and maybe they do, or that big goddamn screen in my Model X Falcon, you could argue that is media. Well, I should be able to say whatever I want, whenever

• 11:06Scott Galloway?

  I want, and they need to publish it on that damn screen. No, they don't. They're a private company and it makes no sense for me to be spewing my shit on a Tesla screen if they don't want that to happen. And neither does Twitter need to publish everyone's bullshit or hate speech. And the reason why Twitter might someday command the space it occupies is to increase moderation, not decrease. So none of this makes any goddamn sense. And you know what this company needs to do, for god's sakes, for the 45th fucking time? Is start capturing some of the surplus value they add to accounts, including mine. Twitter has been enormously powerful for me in terms of reach. And the fact they don't charge me makes absolutely no sense. What would Elon Musk do if they charged him $10 million

• 11:50Scott Galloway?

  a month or said, "Hey Elon, you reach 81 million people." General Motors spends $2 billion a year on quote unquote, "brand building," yet Tesla has a superior brand for several reasons. One, they execute. Two, they have incredible products. But three, they have incredible reach with 81 million informal journalists and PR associates called Elon Musk's following. So if they said, "Hey Elon, we're shifting to a new business model that's not about attention, and we can clean up all the bots that are just there. We just tolerate them so we can continue to lie to Nissan and P&G about the engagement and activity on the platform." These bots are really, it is just so vile. Look at the most vile comments in my feed. It's simple.

• 12:32Scott Galloway?

  It's someone with 100 or less followers that has a fake photo, i.e. it's someone who is not who they say they are, who is either a Tesla long, a Bitcoin long, someone in the GRU trying to undermine the credibility of anyone who's critical of Putin. I know that sounds paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. You go to subscription, you clean up the platform, and boom, the most accretive action in business history. This company is at triple digits. This is not brain surgery. And instead, instead, we have the walking poison pill come in and offer exactly, exactly the wrong strategy. But he doesn't care. Do you think he gives a good goddamn about Twitter or First Amendment? No, he doesn't. He cares about being in, in the media every 48 hours because we have decided that popularity

• 13:16Scott Galloway?

  and to engage in feeding people's narcissism, lesson to young men, lesson to young men, lesson to my younger self. The reason I'm so triggered here is, A, he pulled the gangster move and went in here before other people, including yours truly, and that's his right. He's a baller and he has much deeper pockets and is much smarter than me. But two, two, I am triggered because I see the same bullshit I engage in as a younger man. And that is, there is a difference. There is a huge difference between volatility and value. What do real men do? They pursue value. And sometimes that means putting on your big fucking boy pants and showing some discretion, showing some discipline, and showing some grace. Oh my God, I'm so righteous today. Stay with us.

• 14:01Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back for our conversation with Noam Bar-Din.

• 14:08Scott Galloway?

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• 16:42Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Noam Bardeen, the former CEO of Waze and VP of Product at Google.

• 16:49Scott Galloway?

  Noam, where does this podcast find you?

• 16:52Speaker 03

  It finds me in Connecticut. I spend most of my time in New York City, but specifically today in Connecticut.

• 16:57Scott Galloway?

  Oh, nice. So let's bust right into it. You CEO of Waze, which Google acquired for a billion dollars, and then you stayed at Google for seven years, which is unusual for CEOs and founders to stick around at the acquirer for a better part of a decade. Well, tell us a little bit about, I'm quite frankly, I'm more critical of Google than than positive in terms of the stuff I look at. But clearly, Google has something outstanding about its culture that it's able to not only attract incredible talent, but retain talent. And you're an example of that. What is it about the Google culture that led you to stick around for the better part of a decade?

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Well, that's a pretty loaded question because I've been a big critic of the Google culture. You know, entrepreneurs have this kind of instinct to try and do the impossible. And we got acquired by Google. You know, there are two options. You can kind of rest and vest. Or, and that was my mistake, I thought I was going to be the one who can change the dynamic, that's going to be able to build a dynamic and entrepreneurial organization within Google. I fought a lot for my independence and Waze, up till today, is run as a separate company almost. And so I would say that was the core of my staying at Google. I did do a few projects within Google to try to kind of understand the belly of the beast.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  So I founded the Google Growth Team at the time. Google did not really have a growth team. I worked on a project to try to make iOS first-party native at Google. But the grand scheme of things, Waze stayed as an independent company, and I stayed running it, and I love the company. I love the team. So I stayed.

• 18:41Scott Galloway?

  And you had said that Waze probably would have grown faster had it been remained an independent company. So the question is, why did you guys sell? Was it for the money? Was it that you thought you'd get scale? What was it? I mean, a billion, you know, there's a billion reasons why you sold, but what ran through your mind when you ultimately decided, okay, let's not remain an independent company. Let's, let's go with Google.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  So as we approached kind of 2013, things got a little kind of obvious that we were going down a path of acquisition. And so me and the founders, we sat down together and we asked ourselves, what do we want to do? And, you know, some of us were interested in selling, we're tired, we're just, you know, burnt out. Some of us wanted to continue and take this all the way. And so we decided to build a model. And our model was basically if we get an offer under 750 million, we're not going to take it. Because we were raising money, we're raising 100 million at 750 then, which in those days was a lot of money, not like today. And we said, if we do that, if it's below 750, we'll continue. If it's above a billion, we said, we'll sell.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Because in those days, a billion dollar company was a lot of money, you know, selling for a billion. If it's in between, it's going to depend who the acquirer is. Now, this is something people forget in an acquisition, you're going to have to go work for four years with that company. And so, you know, in those days, obviously, Facebook was less evil, I think, than it is today. So we were very optimistic about Facebook, we were very pessimistic about Microsoft, just to see how the world has changed, right? Those days, Microsoft was the evil company and Facebook was the upstart. Of course, things have changed since then. And so that was kind of the model that we built together that allowed us, first of all, allowed me to say no to a 450 million dollar offer that we got just immediately. Because obviously, between 450 and a billion is too wide a gap to ever negotiate.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  At the same time, allowing you to say yes to a billion dollar offer. And so that model kind of went or or supported us through the hectic reality of of trying to sell the company. But I will say that, again, some of us really wanted to continue. Some of us wanted to sell. And a lot has to do with also where you are in terms of understanding the market dynamics. You know, my co-founders were in Israel, dealing every day with servers crashing, teams upset, et cetera. I was in the bay, being the the cool kid, and suddenly everything was turning. So we saw things a little differently in that case.

• 21:10Scott Galloway?

  Uh huh. There's something, there's kind of occasionally a product comes along and it captures lightning in a bottle, not only in terms of its utility and the value that it accretes, but it develops a great deal of goodwill. And I I think of Waze as one of those products where whether, you know, I'm trying to think of other products that have resonated like a Spotify where it not only gets adoption, but it gets this level of affection. And people just loved and still do Waze. I'm curious, and a lot of this is out of our control. A lot of it is lightning or just the moon's lining up a certain way. But if you try and dissect as a product person, what it was about Waze that really resonated

• 21:53Scott Galloway?

  with people and developed not only traction and adoption, but real affection? Have you thought about what it was about Waze and how you can?

• 22:01Scott Galloway?

  What learnings for product people out there can you provide?

• 22:04Speaker 03

  So this is the thing that I'm the most proud of when I think about Waze. The thing I'm the most proud of is actually the brand. The fact that people have an emotional connection with Waze. By the way, sometimes it's negative. Some people get really mad that we did something and that's fine, right? But it's not a utility in the sense that people say, oh, yes, I use it. They have an opinion, they either smile when they hear the name or they love it or they hate it. The Waze screwed me or the Waze saved me. So I think that was our biggest success. I give a lot of the credit to our our early product lead, Yael Elish. First of all, a lot of the of the navigation products were built by men. And so they look very much like an F-15 cockpit, right? Lots of dials and different things.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Yael very much brought in the emotional aspect and and really tried to look at it much more as a consumer app versus as a kind of optimization tool. But the second thing is really the community. The fact that Waze is built by a community means that there are real people behind it. And we spent a lot of time trying to engineer those personal human experiences. So, for example, when we started out with Waze, you'd open up Waze in the Bay Area. You would see no one. You were alone. And we learned that one of the most exciting moments was the first time you saw someone else on the map. And you realized there was something going on there that's beyond just navigation. And so we actually engineered the zoom levels and the viewports, et cetera, to try and maximize that experience, to make that happen. Or reports or incidents that people would give.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  At the beginning, we'd show you the 10 closest. If you're in the Bay, the closest might be New York when you started out. And users hated it. And they complained all the time about it. Why are you showing me reports in New York? But the reason we showed it is to show there's someone else on the platform. There's another human somewhere else using it. And although it might piss you off at this time, subconsciously, you're understanding there are people behind it. When there are incidents and there are names of people of who did that. And I think there's something about our need in general for community. And I think that's one of the things we're lacking today pretty dramatically. And I'm not saying that everyone's going to go and edit maps and become hardcore community members. But still, knowing there are other humans involved is something that I think brings other humans a lot of happiness.

• 24:17Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, there is something. One, it feels more friendly and more feminine than some of the other map products, quite frankly. And also the fact that someone, you feel like you're part of this. Remember CB radios and truckers used to communicate with one another? I always thought Waze was a little bit like that, where someone would report, you know, speed trap ahead. And it was someone trying to, you know, pull you into the know, into the community, saying FYI, you know, this is what's happening up ahead. Because there were other maps products, but this thing just seemed to, it literally became part of the, you know, the zeitgeist or what have you. You have used this great term called the March of the Tech Folly. Can you explain what you meant by that?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is a pivot. And one thing that I was consistently surprised on in Silicon Valley is how many, or you know what, let me define differently. You know, folly in Barbara Tukman's book was defined as a mistake that at the time, people doing it knew they were making the mistake. And she wrote about about countries and military and things like that. But to me, you see the same thing in tech. You see large tech companies going at a project that from day one, it's obvious they have no skills or ability to achieve anything in it. But they'll do it anyway. And and it to me that if you think about, you know, building a phone, right? Amazon building a phone or Facebook thinking about building a phone at the time. Google today running a phone like, why does that phone exist?

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Why do you think you have skills to build this into compete in this space? And no one seems to ask those questions very much. And I think we're seeing that over and over again. And this is the opportunity for startups, right? Startups are specialists and the large tech platforms are generalists. And today, I believe, at least especially in mobile, you have to be a specialist in something narrow where you are the best at it. And the and money is not a, money is not really a tool anymore since the playing field is more or less leveled around capital. So the fact that a company like Google or Amazon or Facebook has the money to go after building a phone does not mean they're going to be good at building a phone. That self-awareness is missing a lot of times on companies that have been very successful in one area.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  And then obviously assume they can apply that success to anywhere else.

• 26:36Scott Galloway?

  So you described that Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo AOL as tech folly. Can you identify anything more recently where you think this is? This is an example, current day of folly in the making?

• 26:49Speaker 03

  I would say that that Meta's, Facebook's metaverse, I think, is a great example. The concept that a company like Facebook, whose skill set is on the social layer, very quick web development, mobile development, et cetera, is going to develop the most complicated piece of hardware and the most complicated platform and the applications on top of it, right? And it's going to build all these three things and be successful at it with a new product that nobody knows if anybody even wants. To me, there's folly there. And and I would look at it the other way. If I was approaching this, I would say, let's build an MVP. Let's build a two dimensional meta, right? See if people want this, have people use this product before we decide that this has to be 3D.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Is 3D really that crucial for this experience? Because we see from gaming, right? People do great stuff on 2D gaming, great graphics, great engagement, etc. So if there really is a social need for a graphic or a need for a graphical interface to a social network, let's start around 2D, see if that works, iterate on it, get there. In many ways, Snap is doing something like that i- i- in a way when you think about. So I I would say the the biggest folly I think is going on right now is is a is the metaverse in general. And if I had to bet on on, I I have questions whether or not anybody wants this. But assuming people want it, I would guess the gaming companies have a much better chance at this from the platform perspective. And obviously, Apple has a much better chance at this from the hardware perspective.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  So what exactly is Facebook bringing to bear here that gives them an advantage in building this? I just have why they want it. And this is the problem. The why is strategically, they want to own the next platform. But that's a great strategically, that doesn't mean that what you're doing is going to be successful.

• 28:34Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, we're brothers from another mother on this. I think Oculus is going to be the biggest hardware failure of the last decade. I just, I can't imagine that something that makes forty to seventy percent of people nauseous is going to get the adoption uh they need. And when you look, I I just see how outstanding video games are at figuring out a way to immerse people in a another metaverse. I mean, the metaverse exists. It's all there's metaverses everywhere, and there's people tons of experience. And then I look at AirPods that I'm now wearing Ambien, even when I'm not using them, I wear them. And people are going to whip out a headset and put this thing on. I mean, it folly is the perfect word for this. I don't know if it's folly or arrogance. It seems borderline ridiculous, and I think they're spending about ten billion dollars.

• 29:19Scott Galloway?

  And I agree with you, they need to do something uh to diversify away from ad revenues. And it's a it's a great branding diversion, but it does seem like folly. It seems like Google was pretty fond of folly for a while. And then, and tell me if you think this is right, this is my observation from an outsider. And then an adult named Ruth Peratt showed up and said, all right, curing death and Google Health. And there seemed to be a lot of folly at Google. Your thoughts?

• 29:46Speaker 03

  So, you know, I think, eh, unlike Facebook, I think Google is a net positive for the world. I think it's a company that overall does positive things. I think the leadership wants to do positive things. The people that work there are overall very positive people. So it's not Facebook or an oil company or anything like that. If, that being said, Google has a DNA of being anti-management. And that goes back to Larry and Sergey in the beginning and may or may not have been right in the beginning. But in the grand scheme of things, Google does not have a history of building great leadership. If you think about GE, like in the heydays of GE, right? They, they, they were experts at building leadership or identifying leadership and, and, and growing these companies. They had a clear strategy of being the top two in the market or they're getting out of the market.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Right? They had these strategic pillars that drove eh, eh, the way they went. At Google, it's bottom up. And it's literally some engineer wants to do something and it kind of rolls up. And, and, and that works at certain stick scale and for certain products and doesn't in others. At a certain point, you do need a top-down strategy to decide what's important. If you can't decide what's important, then everything's important. And, and this is, uh, Google has the, the best business model ever invented. And they're very lucky to have that. And, and, you know, there's a saying eh, eh, within Google that revenue solves all problems. And I would say the revenue hides all problems. When you are getting tremendous amount of revenue from a tiny fraction of your company, you can afford to do lots of things and everybody can afford to think they're important.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  And the work they're doing matters because everything's internal metrics, you know, until you hit a customer or until you wanna get someone to pay for something, you really have not seen if your product has any value to it, right? That's, that's the definition of value is how much someone's willing to pay for it. And so when everything is kept separate and revenue is this tiny group, you know, it allows these, I say follies eh, to exist. And, and again, they're lucky to have the luxury to do that. Most companies struggle to hit their quarterly numbers and so that creates a, a forcing function for strategy. You know, eh, Facebook had that after they went public, right? Their IPO blew up. Their stock crashed and Mark had to kind of realize that, you know what? Eh, this HTML five thing on mobile is not gonna work. We've gotta change what we're doing.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  And they did a phenomenal job from a financial perspective, putting aside the evilness, right? Google doesn't have that kind of external forcing function because it makes so much money. And that's, again, it's great for many things. It's great for the shareholders. I don't think it's great for building new products.

• 32:13Scott Galloway?

  Well, so first off, let me say, we agree that Facebook is a net negative and that Google on the whole is a net positive. The problem I have is with the word net. And that is, I think fossil fuels and pesticides are a net positive, but we still regulate them. So if you look at search, it is an unparalleled business. I think it's about 130 or 150 billion dollar business. It's still growing 23% a year, and one company controls 93%. And through no fault of their own, I mean, they're just so outstanding at what they do. And I realize there's network effects, but at the end of the day, is it a net positive for one company that has become sort of our scientific god? I mean, people trust Google more than their priest rabbi, any scholar, mentor, or boss.

• 32:57Scott Galloway?

  Should 93% of us be turning to one source, regardless of how benign the people are behind that? Isn't just the dominance, at the end of the day, doesn't this sort of power corrupt?

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I think search is a natural monopoly, right? There's value in all of us searching the same place so the algorithms can learn and optimize, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think we're in a world of a single search engine, though. You know, when I want to buy something, I go to Amazon. I search for my products on Amazon, and Amazon's built a phenomenal advertising business out of nothing, right, suddenly around that, right? When I want to buy an airline ticket, I go to Kayak, and I search on Kayak or another optimized search engine that's optimized to solve my problem. So I think as a generalist search engine, I think it's actually a positive thing that we have one, and you know, try using Bing, and you know, you will see why, right? But I don't think this idea that because Google is dominant on search, it is impossible

• 33:52Speaker 03

  to build other search engines. It is very possible, but they can't be, I wouldn't compete with Google on a wide search engine, trying to search for anything. I would, I think what companies are very successful is competing on vertical searches that just do a much better job of solving a specific kind of search and peeling off certain valuable searches off the Google mainstream. But that being said, you know, many tech products have value in being monopolies. And obviously, we need to regulate them. I think our biggest problem is the government, actually, not the companies. They're playing by the rules, right? Our government is not doing its job of regulating them.

• 34:29Scott Galloway?

  Agreed, agreed, yeah. So I sat next to Eric Schmidt at a conference, and he made a very compelling natural monopoly argument around search. And my sense is there are a lot of people, unlike Facebook... Who get paid well and aren't shoved on an island of misfit toys when they think about the externalities and the problems of search and they try to address them proactively. I would describe that as an outsider is what I perceive as the difference between Google and Meta, where if you start bringing up issues like, well, this could be depressing people, or maybe we shouldn't be giving them instructions on how to build a dirty bomb. I think there's a lot more people and resources at Google trying to anticipate these problems than there is at Meta.

• 35:09Scott Galloway?

  And Meta, if you say that, my sense is memo to self, put this person in a room and have their career go sideways. At least that's my perception as an outsider. The problem I would say is the existential threat at Google, and I'm very curious to get your thoughts on this, is YouTube. And that is that the algorithm is more attention-based and serves up videos, extremist videos, videos that have been shown to appeal to young men. And I would even argue that putting the most likable person in tech, Susan Wojcicki, who is now the most likable person because Sheryl Sandberg, who used to be the most likable person, but I don't think it's an accident, just as feminine qualities, and I'll get

• 35:50Scott Galloway?

  a ton of shit for this because we like to pretend that there is no gender difference. But I think that Susan has a little bit been weaponized, and I'm not discounting her talent as an executive, but putting the most likable person in tech right now on top of what I think is one of the most dangerous platforms in terms of some of the externalities, which is YouTube, to me, it feels kind of a little Meta-esque, if you will. Your thoughts?

• 36:17Speaker 03

  I would describe it very differently. And Susan's great, and I think the team at YouTube is great and do want to do the right thing. But there's a saying in political science that where you sit is where you stand. And when you sit on a video platform that's measured by watch time, that's where you stand. And that's where you come your political view, and you're going to create all kinds of logical explanations why. Same thing with Facebook and all these companies. None of these people are evil as people, but when you put them in a certain situation, they act a certain way, and probably if you put anyone else in the same seat, they'll act very, very similar. So the bigger question comes from the top when you think about strategy, right? What is your strategy with YouTube, right? What do you want it to be?

• 37:01Speaker 03

  And if you think about YouTube being the dominant video platform for the last 10 years, but yet it missed most of the big trends, right? All the social trends, it missed TikTok, it missed Instagram, it missed, most of the traffic to YouTube comes from Facebook, right? It comes from other sources. And so to me, that's the bigger question. If your strategy is we want to milk as much cash as we can out of our current product, now that is a strategy, but you need to say it explicitly. And if you said explicitly, it has all kinds of ramifications. If you want to be a platform for distributing content that's also a source of good, then that has a price to it that you're going to have to pay at a certain point, right? Or you have to think differently about your product.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  So again, I don't think any of these people are in any way evil. And I think Google has done really the most it can within the constraints of what YouTube is. And I go back again to the government, right? And you think about Section 230 and everything, that's our biggest challenges, right? It's like government needs to regulate its speech. And by the way, my personal belief is that all we need to do is remove 230 protections from a algorithm promoted content.

• 38:16Scott Galloway?

  So anytime, let's, let's put a pause there because I've said this a lot. And quite frankly, you just, you just have much deeper domain expertise than I do. So your thought is once an algorithm steps in and elevates a piece of content beyond its organic reach, that Section 230 protections should go away.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Exactly. And the minute we do that, it's a tiny change, it's one line to add, right? All the, the, the media companies will immediately find ways to limit the, the harm. Because they'll have to, the lawsuits will be off the chart and you know, everything, everything will change. There is no technological problem. It's a hard problem, look at me, it's a very, very hard problem to moderate content. But you know, these companies have solved many hard problems. The question is, what's the motivation to solve the hard problem? And what's the financial impact that's going to have? And right now, there's no motivation and and huge financial impact. So why do it? And unless the law changes, there's no reason to do it. So I don't think you can point to Susan or point to YouTube or point to TikTok, whatever.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  It's I think we need to point at our politicians who are not taking responsibility to do the minimum to provide the right incentives. I don't believe we should. I think regulation should always be at the minimum. Regulation has usually terrible externalities and it's very hard to predict, especially in tech. If you look at some of the European suggestions on regulations around interconnecting instant messaging, I don't even have the words to explain how non rational it is on multiple levels. But at the same time, we have to regulate something and provide the right incentives. If we provide the right incentives, corporations will figure it out. We don't need to worry about that.

• 39:50Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's I think it's a fair point that the person who's culpable here is the man and the woman in the mirror. And that is, we don't seem to want to regulate these organizations and they continue. I mean, there really hasn't been any regulation. If you look at all the issues that have popped up, there really hasn't been any meaningful regulation regarding big tech. Let's talk about antitrust. Do you think any of these companies should be broken up to increase competition? Do you think there's a marketplace solution here?

• 40:18Speaker 03

  So it's a big question of why you're breaking up and what's the effect you want to create? Right? And and I think, you know, if we try and break up today, Google, Facebook, et cetera, it's too late. I mean, it's just it's not going to happen. It's going to take decades. And by the time it happens, it's not going to matter. Right? TikTok is replacing in many ways. Facebook is the number one social network, right? And and this is how tech works, right? We can the one thing we can guarantee is that 10 years from now, the leading technology companies will be different than the ones we have today. And 50 years from now will be dramatically different, right? So we know things are going to change. I think instead of trying to break them up, and especially in the U.S. in kind of regulatory slash legal system, which is extremely hard.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  I think a small amount of regulation would go a long way. Now, not the European GDPR, which gets us all to to blindly click on accept cookies, right? But thoughtful thoughtful regulation about what we're trying to do in cooperation with some of the tech companies. And there's smart people there. But so we should to hear their opinions. I'm not saying to take their opinions because obviously where you sit is where you stand. But there are many ways that we can provide the right incentives and if we provide the right incentives, they will solve the technical problems. But let's not try to make congresspeople engineers. That's where it doesn't work well, when they try to prescribe a solution.

• 41:37Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I think you're, I think you are being a little bit generous to the tech companies because my sense is they talk about, we need regulation and then if someone were to propose doing away with 230 protections for algorithmically elevated content, you see an army of money and lawyers trying to get in the way of that. I'm not sure, I worry and granted, I'm a bit cynical here. I worry if this sort of, please regulate us that you hear from these organizations and we want thoughtful regulation. You know, when it's raining money, it kind of, it blurs your vision. And just doing nothing is like a great strategy for these folks or getting

• 42:18Scott Galloway?

  in the way of Washington, do something. You don't think, my sense is that the greatest tax cut in the history of corporate America would be if we took the three companies, Amazon, Facebook and Google that are getting 80 cents on the digital marketing dollar, 40% of all venture capital invested ultimately ends up going to one of those three companies. Because my sense is they have effectively sequestered the internet from everyone else and the rents are increasing and that the rents have gotten so great because you have to pay one of these three tollkeepers that you would lower the rents on corporate America if you had a more diverse ecosystem and broke these companies up. You don't see that. You see that there's a natural monopoly and that it makes sense here, this concentration of power.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  So, a few different things. First of all, in terms of the tech companies asking for regulation, as I said, they're very smart people. They know there won't be regulation. That's why they're asking for it. So not anyway trying to say that they are pro-regulation, right?

• 43:19Scott Galloway?

  Right.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  If they love the current situation, people in the leadership team, they're making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And you can, you can twist a lot of morality with a hundred million dollars, right? It can really allow you to reposition the way you think very, very clearly. But I am 100% sure that most of those leaders, if they were not employed by those companies, would have very different opinions. When it comes to, you know, the externalities, as you call them.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Yes, it's true that they've cornered the market and in many ways. But I personally believe that that will will change, just the dynamics of the market will change that. If you look at what Shopify is doing with Amazon, very different strategy, right? They're very different company, but it's actually making real progress in e-commerce. E-commerce is not going away, right? And if you think of how easy it is for e-commerce companies today to be formed, right? And we're seeing some changes there. And I don't think that that by breaking up the current companies, you're assuming that the current market dynamics are going to stay. And I think the market dynamics will be very different ten years from now than from now.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  But again, that doesn't excuse the government from creating the regulatory framework to force companies to to support, you know, the citizens of the country.

• 44:36Scott Galloway?

  Let's talk about regulation that I'm increasingly a fan of, and that is we age gate tobacco, firearms, the military, pornography. Why wouldn't we age gate YouTube and Instagram?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Because there's no way we could ever enforce that.

• 44:51Scott Galloway?

  Smartest people in the world couldn't figure out a way to verify identity based on age.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  Smart people in the world are thirteen year old kids. So whatever you try and do, they will get around it. And and it doesn't matter. It's not that if you think about a nineteen year old has been more protected than a seventeen year old, right? It's a gradient here and that the damage is huge to our society. I think we have to take the damage of social media seriously and we have to provide regulation. Someone has to own the problem. And yes, there's health problems of children, especially young women and young girls and women and teenagers. There there's political problems, there's national security problems, right? I mean, this is the this is where the war is being fought between the US and Russia in many ways is on social media, right? So there are real issues here.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Someone has to own it from a government perspective and create the regulatory environment, hoping that companies will suddenly grow.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  I don't know, morality or something else is not going to happen.

• 45:49Scott Galloway?

  Bad strategy. I agree.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  That's not gonna happen.

• 45:52Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, General Motors would be pouring mercury into the river if they're allowed to, because if they didn't, it would disadvantage them versus Ford, right? It's just expect.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  And Exxon still does.

• 46:01Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, and waiting, hoping the better angels of these CEOs is gonna show up is just not a great strategy. I agree. You now, you counsel and mentor a lot of startup CEOs and you have this framework you call VSM. Can you tell us more about that?

• 46:17Speaker 03

  So, you know, since I left Google, I've been spending a lot of time with CEOs, mostly really early-stage, first-time CEO founders, but also really large companies. And something that I'm consistently shocked by is how few companies really know why they exist. They really know, why does the product exist? You know, at Google, I was kind of the community guy, right? So I'd get all these PMs coming to me and saying, hey, we want to do build this community feature or this gamification feature to our product. What do you think? My response would always be, well, first of all, why does your product exist? And when the response is because Amazon's doing it, you know, that's a hard way to build a product. But you see that all over. People understand features, they don't understand their vision, mission, strategy.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Like, why, what do you know about the world that's different from what is today? What's your role making that happen? How are you gonna make that happen? And I find that's probably the biggest thing, the negative thing that I think came out of the lean startup approach. This idea that you can iterate your way to success. And if you read the origins of the lean startup approach, it really was about having a clear vision and iterating towards it. It's not just iteration. And yes, you have the kind of Apple world on one side that says, we know the best, we're gonna go build it and someday we'll launch it and everyone's gonna love it. You've got the Google approach of let's launch quickly and iterate and we'll kind of get somewhere. But I think if you don't know where you're going, if you don't know why you exist, you know, everything else comes from that.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Your whole company comes from that. And when I was a young CEO, I always thought it was bullshit. I thought it was the kind of thing you do for investors, right? The kind of, and I made terrible mistakes because of that, just not having a strategy. Now, simplest example is you have no way of explaining your priorities. And everything becomes, well, because Noam said so, we're going to do XYZ, right? There has to be a framework within the company operates where you can decide what's good and what's bad, what's more important, what's less important. If you don't have that framework, everything's important. At the same time, nothing is important.

• 48:20Scott Galloway?

  Coming up after the break.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  We've got such real problems in terms of how people live and what we're doing to the planet and how our economy is built and how we share our resources and so many real problems. And we get distracted by these gates, right? By these bells and whistles. I think the media has a huge part in that. I mean, the fact that global warming, climate change is not the number one topic on the front page every day is just mind-boggling.

• 48:47Scott Galloway?

  Stay with us.

• 48:50Scott Galloway?

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• 50:28Scott Galloway?

  Now, what's your backstory? Where are you from? You know, how did you get to Waze?

• 50:34Speaker 03

  So I grew up in Israel. And you know, if we speak Hebrew, I'll be as obnoxious and short-tempered as every other Israeli. And but my parents are Americans, so I have the accent. Grew up in Israel, was planning to go save the world, studied economics and political science. It got caught up in startups in 96, when they're just beginning in Israel, 95, 96, when $100,000 was an unbelievable amount of money. And somehow got diverted on that track. Ended up founding a company called Delta 3. It's one of the first voice of IP companies. Took it public in 99, in the heyday of the bubble. Found myself at 28, CEO of a $1.5 billion publicly traded company. Terrible move from the board. I can't understand how anybody would do that and giving a 28-year-old the reins of a public company.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  But so I've made it. After that, I went back to school to do a public policy degree. Now is really going to go save the world. Went back to Israel, spent a year futzing around in the public sector and realizing it's not for me. Went back to tech. Joined a company, it was a terrible mistake, called Intercast. It made all or many more mistakes than I could have done anywhere else. Ended up shutting down that company. But the best thing that came out of that company is I met the founders of Waze. And when I shut it down, I joined Waze. And that's why we're talking.

• 51:52Scott Galloway?

  I'm in Brazil right now and I was with a bunch of government and business leaders last night and I said, what do you think is the biggest threat in America? And they all said polarization. They think strong America is super important for a safe world. And I'm dealing with a lot of Israeli startups. I'm on the board of a company called Open Web. It's started by two Israeli intelligence officers, really inspiring guys. And it's always easy to be more, I don't know, the countries without trouble are the ones you don't know, but I'm increasingly looking at Israel as a place that says, all right, they have their issues, but they don't seem to be quite as divided as us. And I try and immediately, as an American, I think everything is solvable.

• 52:36Scott Galloway?

  And I go, well, we need mandatory conscription or public service such that people see themselves as Israelis or Americans before they see themselves as conservatives or liberals. I'd love to know what you think of that idea and also what, when you look at, as someone who has a master's in public policy, when you look at what ails us here in America, what are your thoughts for solutions?

• 52:59Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, if you think Israel is not divided, it just means you don't really know Israel well.

• 53:03Scott Galloway?

  That's exactly, yeah, I agree. Looking at it from a distance, is it as divided, I guess, as America?

• 53:09Speaker 03

  In a way, it's worse.

• 53:11Scott Galloway?

  Really?

• 53:12Speaker 03

  Because, well, I used to believe, now it's changed in America, but I used to believe that in America, at the end of the day, everybody agreed on some basic rules of the game. And everybody agreed that the rules of the game were more important than the outcome. But in Israel, because everything is tied to religion and there's a God involved, you know, suddenly the rules of the game don't really matter because God said so, right? So the divisions in Israel are huge. But I don't think it's an Israeli or American issue. It's a Western liberal democracy issue. It's in Brazil, it's in the Philippines, it's in Austria, it's in Hungary, it's everywhere in the world now. We have this challenge of this polarization driven, I think we can agree a lot, by social media, but also driven by the lack of existential threats.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  And this is on the media, definitely. I mean, the media has not really.

• 54:02Scott Galloway?

  Enemies. So if you can't find enemies abroad, you worry. We turn it, we start finding enemies in our neighborhoods.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Right. And and the sad thing is, we have real problems to deal with. And instead, we end up spending our time on makeup, make believe problems. Right. If you read the paper, you would think that this cultural war around what pronouns you use is the most important thing right now that needs to be fought, you know, globally.

• 54:24Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  And and we've got like such real problems in terms of how people live and what we're doing to the planet and how our economy is built and how we share our resources and so many real problems. And we get distracted by these games, right, by by these bells and whistles. I think the media has a huge part i- in that. I mean, the fact that that the global warming or climate change is not the number one topic on the front page every day is just mind blowing. And instead, we're talking about what did this politician say to that politician? And what did this politician do with this eh eh person? It's just unbelievable to me. And and, you know, I think if you look what's happening in Europe now, Europe has a huge wake up call with the the war in the Ukraine.

• 55:04Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  And suddenly they're beginning to eh eh understand that, you know what? Eh eh, war is not a thing of the past and power matters, right? The US has never had an internal war in that sense here. And eh eh eh, except, I guess, for the civil war in that sense. But this idea of mobilizing for a higher cause drives a lot of clarity. In terms of of national service, I think that the the national service in Israel is one of the best things that used to be. Eh, today, by the way, less than fifty percent of Israeli youth go to the army. People like to talk about it compulsory, but it's compulsory for liberal, non religious eh eh working people. It's not compulsory for the Muslim Israelis and for the ultra religious Jewish Israelis.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  They don't go to the army. And so it's not so much the people's army anymore. It's actually moving more towards a professional military, which I think is a mistake. I think one of the best things that happened, at least when in my days, when we went eh eh to the military, everybody went to the military. And you were forced to be with people that you would never meet again. Think about in America, the Second World War, the Korean War, you know, you were shipped off with some random people from a different state.

• 56:16Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  And you were sent off to battle. Today, when will a liberal kid from New York ever meet a redneck from Alabama? When would they ever have a chance to meet together? And you know, you put them in the room together, they're gonna be best friends, right? We know that humans get along really well when they're put together, when they, when they operate together. You know, thousands of years of evolution.

• 56:33Scott Galloway?

  There's something about being a foxhole that makes you, makes you focus on your mutual interests.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  And by the way, it's not just being together. Like, send them to Europe to a base now, they will create relationships that are very different. But when we're, each captain are completely different silos and there is no integration within people, it's a problem. So I wish that, I, I don't think it's practical today to, to bring in national service. If someone could do that, then let's first do global warming.

• 56:59Scott Galloway?

  Mm hmm. You know, do you have kids?

• 57:02Speaker 03

  I've got two girls who are eighteen and seventeen.

• 57:05Scott Galloway?

  I'd be just curious, um, how you have approached technology and social media in their lives, especially teen girls. You're in the thick of it.

• 57:14Speaker 03

  So I don't have a, a, a formal, eh, eh, thesis here on, on, on children and tech. I think it really goes back to parenting.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  If, the most important thing, if your kids know they're loved and they know they matter, and they're not fighting for attention, and they're not looking for attention in other places. You know, kids are, are very mature in the way they handle things. Again, if they've gotten a good upbringing and, and, and the thing that I find eh, eh, amazing eh, as, as we were growing up with kids is how few parents actually discipline their kids. And that's become this new kind of way of raising your kids. And I think kids want boundaries and they need boundaries. And as long as you have clear boundaries there on the one side, but the other side, they know they're loved. Then, yes, they have a challenge of, of social media, they have a challenge of drugs, they have a challenge of who they hang out with, or they're, they're gonna have challenges their whole lives. You're not gonna be there as a parent to deal with it.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  So if you try to police it from an early age, all that means is that when they turn eighteen, all hell's gonna break loose.

• 58:14Scott Galloway?

  So you haven't policed your daughter's exposure to Snap or Instagram? You're not?

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Not at all, not at all. And, and they've been very eh, eh, conservative with it. Eh, they are not eh, eh, deeply engaged in it. I think if you're, if you're looking for attention and if you're looking for self-validation online. It's a real big problem. If you know who you are and and you believe in what you are, then you know, an online becomes part of you. It's not who you are.

• 58:44Scott Galloway?

  So just to wrap up here, um, and I just want to say I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm going to do a lightning round. I just want to get some of the some initial thoughts that come to your mind when I ask these questions. Advice to your 25 year old self.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  The world is not black and white. That's the biggest mistake that that I I tried to explain to my kids and to young CEO, etc. Everything is gray. There is no such thing as right or wrong. And this is why politics are so hard, you know, in this divided world. There are no good answers. You know, the Republicans used to have an interesting economic theory and the the Democrats did, and the combination worked. But now that we're kind of black and white worlds, we're getting, I think, the worst of all sides.

• 59:25Scott Galloway?

  Best piece of advice you could give to someone raising girls?

• 59:29Speaker 03

  So I I had a few rules. One, I never lied to my kids, no matter what they asked. And I've gotten to my share of trouble in my life, and so that was kind of hard at different ages. But one is never lie to them, and two is to make sure they 100% know how much they're loved and how important they are. If kids know that, they really know that, everything else is technical. Everything else becomes how do you solve a problem? If they don't have that, everything else is a search for affection, a search for self-worth. And if you're going out to look for self-worth online or in other places, it's not going to end well.

• 1:00:06Scott Galloway?

  Last piece of media that really inspired you?

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  I can tell you a piece of media that inspired me to cancel my New York Times subscription and move to the Washington Post. There was a a piece lately by the editorial of the New York Times around free speech. And basically, it made the claim that we need to allow every voice to say whatever it wants without ramifications. And to me, that was kind of the final straw in in in the New York Times view of the world. I think one of the things that people are missing is that there are ramifications to everything you do. And you need to be able to accept those ramifications and understand that. The idea that you have a right to say whatever you want and not be criticized is is kind of counter to everything of the liberal movement for the last few hundred years.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  And and and this is my fear that this is driving people very much towards kind of authoritarian rulers. This idea that that my rights are unlimited.

• 1:01:07Scott Galloway?

  Uh toughest moment in your adult life?

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  I think the day after we sold Waze.

• 1:01:13Scott Galloway?

  Hmm. Say more.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  Day after we sold Waze was one of the saddest days of my life. And I didn't expect that to be the case, right? I was hero, we sold it for one point one billion dollars, like the the whole world was. But I remember the day after I got this email from HR about all these like tasks I needed to do from all this. And I started realizing kind of what I was getting into on the corporate side, but but more than that, I realized that my baby wasn't mine anymore. That I'm not, I don't own the responsibility for ways anymore. Now, I didn't really understand, I'm I'm using words now that then I didn't understand. Then I just, I just woke up with this feeling of dread, this weight on my chest. That is very hard to explain and and I would say this in general.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  My feedback to founders, when you sell your company is try and get out as fast as possible. It's not what I did, and I think that was my mistake. But it is better for your employees, it is better for your team, in a way, it's better for your customers. Then to fight for independence and try to fight the the behemoth that acquired you. It's just the nature of the beast. Corporations and startups are two different things. They have different priorities, different ways of acting. You cannot make the two work together. And if you do that, you're gonna end up, a lot of people around you are gonna end up paying the price. You might be the hero that can do whatever he wants because you're the the fancy founder. But your team is not going to have a good careers in moving onwards.

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  And I think those were mistakes that that I made now, and this is what I try to coach founders and a lot of people. Reach out to me after they sold their company and try to get my perspective on it. I think fundamentally, a startup is an organization with one goal, and that's the product. The employees, the founders, the investors, the customers, the partners, everyone's focused on the product. In a corporation, the goal is the corporate brand. That's what everyone's aligned to. So I'm a Googler. I'm not a YouTuber. I'm not a Gmailer, right? I I'm a Facebooker, a Meta, or whatever you want to call it. I'm not a WhatsAppper. Or and so you lose that connection to the product and everything begins becoming your personal role within the company.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Does this role get me promoted? What does it do for me, etc.? There's nothing wrong with that, right? That's how most of the world, that's fine. But that's very, very different how a startup works. And when you come to startup mentality, it's very hard to to connect the dots, even understand how decisions are being made in a corporation. And I think it's in, instead of trying to fight it, you need to give in. I think that was my mistake. I tried to fight it.

• 1:03:49Scott Galloway?

  Okay, last question. Biggest influence on your life, no?

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  I think the military service, at the end of the day.

• 1:03:56Scott Galloway?

  And what did you do in the military and why was it so impactful?

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  So I I was in the Special Forces in Israel. And I think for, I think that the big, the regular army, you know, infantry, power troopers, tanks, etc., is the best school for corporate leadership. And I think Special Forces are the best school for kind of startup leadership. You're in a very, very small team of amazing people who are going to do something that's never been done before, a huge risk, and you're going to do it together, and you're going to figure it out and make it work, and your lives depend on it. So it's it's very, very innovative environment where you take tremendous risks and you have to live up to those risks. I mean, they really do. It's not that you're going to get fired. And so I think that was my my biggest influence, especially in how I view leadership.

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  And one of the things in, it's a little different than American Army, but in the Israeli Army is a leader never asks the team to do something they haven't done themselves. So you don't have an officer class. Officers were, first of all, soldiers and then became officers in the Israeli army. Well, the US Army, it's a different track completely. It's a different class of soldier. And I think that's the unique thing about about special forces where the leader of the team is not better than anyone on the team. Their specialty is leadership and another person's specialty is communications and one is medical. But at the end of the day, everyone, there's a kind of an inequality between everyone and what you're doing together. So I would say that definitely impacted me more than anything else.

• 1:05:25Scott Galloway?

  Noam Bardin is the former CEO of Waze and VP of Product at Google. Prior to Waze, Noam served as CEO of Intercast Networks and co-founded Delta Three, a leading international voice over IP service provider where he served for a decade in a variety of executive positions, including chairman, CEO and VP of Operations. He joins us from Connecticut. Noam, I just absolutely loved this conversation. Thanks for your time.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  Thank you very much, Scott.

• 1:05:58Scott Galloway?

  Out of happiness, the things that really upset me about my father are the things that I see in myself. And it really upset me about myself. My dad is a selfish person. I am selfish. And the reason I get so upset at my dad's selfishness is I think it's a fear that I'm becoming my father and not in a good way. I inherited some wonderful things from my dad. My dad is a great communicator. I make my living communicating and I got that gene or at least I got most of it. Actually, my dad's a hell of a lot more charming than I am, but I got some of it and I'm grateful. But he's also selfish and also a bit of a narcissist. And I suffer from both those things and I can't stand them in him because I recognize and I have fear that I'm becoming that.

• 1:06:42Scott Galloway?

  And I think one of the reasons I'm so triggered about all this bullshit with Elon Musk is I recognize so many of my faults as a younger man. I would get on a board at a young age and I would think, okay, I'm the baller here. I'm, I force my way, I bulldoze my way into the boardroom. And I have all these big ideas. I was more interested in getting credit for the ideas and actually implementing them and providing positive change. It was all fucking about me all the time and approached relationships that way or advice. Or if I was at a dinner party, it was felt like I needed to command the room. And you know what? Real grace, real masculinity is about occasionally just listening.

• 1:07:21Scott Galloway?

  And trying to discern the difference between being right and being effective. And that is sometimes giving other people the spotlight, sometimes having the discipline to just be quiet and let other people get their work done. And realize that just because you can foment activity and change and volatility, doesn't mean you should. Let people do their job. Be more graceful. Let people own an idea. Let people come up with the idea. Get out of the sunlight every once in a while and give other people some sunlight. And I didn't do that as a younger man, and I'm embarrassed by it. I'm ashamed of it. I could have been much more graceful. I could have been much more effective as opposed to just kind of charging in and saying, me strong like bull. I have big ideas.

• 1:08:05Scott Galloway?

  I'm the biggest shareholder here. Or I'm the CEO of this small company. And I was, every conference room I went into, every meeting I went into, I felt like I had to make these big declarative statements when I should have just shut the fuck up and listened more often. There is a big difference between showing grace and feeling like you're a leader. I had this weird notion of what leadership meant, that it meant always being right or advocating for a position. You know what is leadership is a lot of the times? It's getting out of the way and just listening or bringing some, and let me use the word, bringing some gentleness to the situation, de-escalating the situation, not creating a win-lose where you always have to be the winner in the meeting advocating for your position and setting everybody straight. God, what an asshole.

• 1:08:49Scott Galloway?

  What an asshole I was. And the reason I find this mush shit so upsetting is because I see a lot of that in myself, and I really don't like it. And I do think, and I'm being redundant here, there really is a lesson for young men. And that is the people who have the healthiest relationships, the people who, in my opinion, have, have the most rewarding professional careers, recognize that greatness is in the agency of others. You can't accomplish anything great alone. I just don't think it happens. I don't care if it's conceiving a child, raising a child, starting a company, taking a company public, building something of real value. And part of that greatness, part of that agency of others, is giving other people agency.

• 1:09:33Scott Galloway?

  It's showing humility, showing discipline, showing grace. There's a difference between value and volatility.

• 1:09:42Scott Galloway?

  Our producers are Caroline Shager and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prodigy Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.

• 1:09:56Speaker 06

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