The Vergecast
Hosted by Nilay Patel
Original podcast
Nilay Patel interviews President of StubHub Sukhinder Singh Cassidy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
9,344 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Have you ever uploaded all of your photos to iCloud by accident? That's not smart. But you know what is smart? Hiring with ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter's powerful technology finds people the right experience for your job and actively invites them to apply. So you get qualified candidates fast. That's why ZipRecruiter is rated number one by employers in the United States based on TrustPilot rating of hiring sites with over 1,000 reviews. Now, Vergecast listeners can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/verge. That's ziprecruiter.com/verge. ZipRecruiter, smartest way to hire. Hey, everybody. It's Yana from the Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who's the president of StubHub. I'm just gonna come out and say it. Sukhinder is a badass. This conversation was super fun. She is incredibly smart. She's been a founder and entrepreneur. She's run big things. She's run small things.
Importantly, she was the president of Google Latin America and Asia. She built Google's businesses in Latin America and Asia. We talked about how she did that. You might know that about two weeks ago, 15,000, 20,000 Google employees walked off the job to protest sexual harassment and discrimination at Google. Sukhinder has a huge perspective on that. She also runs a foundation called The Board List that places women onto the boards of companies. And we talked about how to build better companies with more diverse cultures, how to get started, how to think about starting a company. And we also talked about StubHub. Sukhinder is the new president. She has a lot of ideas about how a company like StubHub, which started out as a disruptor, now has to behave as part of the fabric of the economy
and where mobile ticketing can go next, which is surprisingly interesting. So check this out. Sukhinder, like I said, is a badass. This was a super fun conversation. All right, so I'm joined by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who is the president of StubHub. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. So you and I met a few months ago, right as you took over at StubHub. And I'm just gonna be honest with you. I didn't realize that StubHub was like part of eBay, which is a much bigger company. But you have this like a long history of being a founder, of being a CEO. How did you end up at StubHub? What was your path to there?
So I think I ended up at StubHub for a couple of reasons. Number one, a big part of my career was spent at Google, obviously, where I got to build APAC and LatAm and got to have this incredible journey to scale, but still got to, in many ways, be entrepreneurial.
Wait, so that's Asia-Pacific and Latin America?
Yes, sorry, Asia-Pacific and Latin America, APLA, as it was called at Google. And, you know, got to build that into a multi-billion dollar business, but it was very much an entrepreneur's journey. And before and after Google, I was an entrepreneur. I was the founder at Yodlee. And after Google, I started a company called Joyous, and then I started a company called The Board List. But, you know, from my time at Google, I really learned that I love scale as much as I love entrepreneurship, or scaling. I love kind of, you know, growth when you're already at scale and it's meaningful, and I love the journey of creation. And so as I had started The Board List, it was, I don't know, circa 2016, 2017, and I was in the midst of selling Joyous. I really was thinking long and hard about what was next. And realizing that as much as I loved the last seven years of being an entrepreneur,
I really missed scale. But I wanted a job that combined both with a consumer brand that I really could identify with in some sort of lifestyle category. And lo and behold, I was chatting with an executive recruiter about what my next job would be, and I was like, I don't know, but it looks like this. And she said, what about StubHub? And within a couple of months, I had the job, which was great. So it was really a chance to combine, I think, my love of creating and entrepreneurship with my love of leading at scale and to get that, to do that uniquely for a brand I love in a category I love.
That's a great answer. I want to talk about StubHub a lot, actually, but I'm really interested in these kinds of journeys, especially the people who started and helped build the big companies that we take for granted. So You were actually the president of Asia Pacific and Latin America at Google. And so it didn't exist before, and then it did exist, and you were along that journey. What was that like? Like, how did you say, okay, I'm going to take Google to Latin America? What was the next day like?
You know, it's interesting. So when, to be fair, when I inherited Asia Pacific and Latin America, it was a $60 million business. It was mostly virtual. So AdWords Online, if you recall, my peer, Sheryl Sandberg at the time, was running AdWords Online. And we had a virtual presence where advertisers could sign up, right, in any geo effectively and publish ads on Google. But we had no physical presence. And you say, well, why do you need a physical presence in these countries? And you need it for one of two reasons. Number one, you want to go get all the money, right? Like, all the money. You want to go work with medium and large advertisers in countries, not just sort of the smaller advertisers that you self-serve. You want to get all the money in all the currencies against all the demand on Google's search
platform. And then number two, you expand into countries like, you know, CJK, China, Japan, Korea, where inherently the consumer value proposition is different, and you may need a localized product and engineering team to go think about how to build demand. And then, of course, go get the money.
Yeah.
And so Larry and Sergey at the time, it was circa 2003, basically said international, I think, was less than 50% of Google's revenue, and they had an ambition for it to be more because they saw that search demand was already larger outside the United States than in it. And so they basically said, go forth and multiply faster. Get us all the money faster. Get us there faster. And at the time, I was responsible for Google Local and Maps and a bunch of other business initiatives at Google and was asked to move over and build it out. So what did I do on the day after I got the job? Well, first of all, on the day I got offered the job, I went home and had a rather long few weeks negotiation with
my husband because I was married a year with ambitions of starting a family. And I was like, ah, so they want me to run international. What do you think? And won him over. I negotiated with Google to, I think I remember saying to them, like, I'm going to bring my husband on a couple This first year to just to get them sold and they were like, uh, okay. So it was a long negotiation, actually, but not that long, a few weeks. And then my first, my first job was actually, believe it or not, traveling to countries, opening up Regus offices, renting space in Regus offices. Oh, wow. And finding our on the ground, either country manager or CFO. Those are the first hires you make in any country. And you say, well, why?
And you're like, well, you make sort of a finance hire in any country because it turns out that there's no point in opening up an office and hiring salespeople if you don't support the currencies and the local payment options. You know, a finance person is actually really great to figure out what your payment options need to be. So you hire the equivalent of finance person. And then you hire a country manager that's just effectively an ad sales leader, but who can build an office and morale and be responsible for BD and revenue. And you do it, and when we started, we basically contained every country we wanted to be in to less than 10 people, believe it or not. Wow. We started with the scoring matrix. You can imagine, we looked at all the countries we were in virtually and what our revenue run rate was in virtual, in kind of just in AdWords online as an indication of demand.
We looked at the size of the internet market, blah, blah, blah. We looked at the size of our search demand. And then we prioritized markets, tier one markets. And in the first year, we went, I think we picked five to go after. And like I said, it was Regus offices. Just like little rental offices that you're in. Little rental offices, less than 10 people. Everybody thinks that Google's so mighty, but I always remind people that we were building businesses. And from zero to 10 people, you were allowed to hire as many as you want. And then at 10, you needed to start being measured on your revenue, believe it or not. Really? Yeah, it was either a finance person or an ad salesperson who was the first on the ground. I took people from the US and I shipped them out to markets because we had no local people to start. So some of these markets, well, she shipped somebody from the US to like start the office
and hire that first person and do the interviews. And then I would fly in and, you know, sit in that same Regus office and interview like 10 country managers and then leave and somebody'd have to stay behind and make sure the lease got signed. And literally, we had employee agreements in local countries and all of the shit you go through to open a local office. So that's what it was like in the early days. And then every year, we kind of started measuring people on metrics. Post 10 people, you know, it was largely sales and BD people to start. And then they ended up being full fledged offices that had, you know, sales, BD, finance, marketing, in some cases, product. We opened a number of engineering centers in our local offices, in our local countries. In the time I was there, I think we ended up with nine engineering centers in the APAC and LatAm region.
But that was sort of a combination of local needs and also just where there was great engineering talent, even to serve a global market, we ended up sponsoring and lobbying for engineering to be in our markets as well.
How long were you there? That seems like a really big project. Did that take five years, 10 years? Were you there six months?
I was there for five and a half, I guess. But the first year I was there, I was working, as I said, I launched local and maps with the engineering and product team. So I was on international for roughly five of the five and a half to six years I was at Google. The first year was, as I said, local and maps. So it was a big journey, but you know, it's like anything, it's iterative, right? You start, you start small and then you just keep adding and be, and one day you look back, you're like, whoa, how did that happen?
And in our case, we ended up with 18 offices, nine engineering centers, I don't know, 2,000 people in the region, a multi-billion dollar business. And to be honest, if you contrast that to being an entrepreneur, because sometimes I look back at Google and I thought, oh gee, I thought I worked hard there, not a chance. I always say to people now, when I compare the journey, I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot that, you know, it seemed hard at the time, but Google had all that demand and all I really had to worry about was supply. And actually, in China, Japan, and Korea, I had to worry about creating demand because we were not the winners in that market and search was not naturally growing. But I mean, when you're an entrepreneur, that's a luxury, right? Like at Google, I spent all my time fulfilling demand and outside of Google, I spent all of my time trying to create demand.
I mean, just two fundamentally different jobs.
Were you there when Google left China?
Oh my goodness, thank the Lord not. So I left in 2000, 2009, and I think within a year of my departure, they announced their exiting of China. And my heart broke for my team that was there because it was a really difficult position, right? To, because I was the person who lobbied for us to go into China, along with Alan Eustace, who ran engineering at the time, successfully, you know, five years earlier. So to be the person who opened China and then just saw the team that got, quite frankly, abandoned there when Google decided to exit, you know, it was really tough for local employees. And of course, now Google wants to be back in.
Yeah. What do you make of this sort of shadow project to go back?
To be honest, as the person who thought we should have been in there in the first place and lobbied to be in, and that a strategy with China can either be one of resistance or one of engagement, I continue to believe in an engagement model with China. I mean, you know, I think, I know we like to think of ourselves in the US as the world's largest economy, but let's not forget, it's the world's largest economy. And people get caught up in, I understand, the very dicey issues of censorship, and they are real. The converse is, I would argue that access to more information versus less. And at the time, remember, when we didn't go into China, we were blocked 85, 15% of the time. You couldn't get answers to any search results.
When the reality is, the vast majority of the information people want is relevant and useful. And by being there and engaging, I believe, we have a better chance of opening up markets culturally, socially, by being present than not. So generally, I'm a supporter of Google's trying to re-enter the Chinese market, engage it, engage with it, yes. That may not be what Mr. Trump wants to hear, but I do believe a model of engagement makes a lot of sense.
Okay. So you left Google, and then you went, you did a bunch of entrepreneurial things. You founded Yodlee, which is a financial services company?
I founded Yodlee before Google, yeah. Financial services company, went public in 15, and then got acquired by Investnet, another public company.
And then you were at the Board List, which is super interesting, and I want to talk about, which recruits women to be on the boards of companies.
Yes. It's a talent platform, where we crowdsource from CEOs and senior executives with board experience, great diverse candidates, in this case, women, to serve on boards. And then it's a supply and demand platform, but all focused on boards.
I like this current of supply and demand. It seems very relevant to StubHub, which is what we come to next, which is a marketplace for people who have tickets who want to sell them to other people who have tickets. Here's my big question with StubHub, and it's kind of relevant to what you were talking about with Google as well. Google, famously, is, you know, they started a product called Search, and now they are literally players on a global scale, right? Like, the president of our country is telling them whether or not they can do business in another country. The disruption pattern is real. They started something small that was a service for some people and now they're major players and the world is organized around them. StubHub is in that category of companies in pretty important ways. It was just an easier way to buy and sell tickets and now literally event businesses
are built around companies like StubHub. They're part of reality, they're no longer disruptors. Do you think of StubHub that way? Do you think, well, this isn't a disruptor, this is now the fabric of society? Is that a responsibility that you feel?
I think there are two things. I think that the first day I arrived at StubHub, I wrote a blog post to the employee base. I think the title of my blog was "Scale is a Privilege." Because having come from being an entrepreneur, I'm like, do you realize how hard it is to get here? And once we're here, we shouldn't take advantage of it. So to answer your question, do I love the fact that StubHub is part of the fabric of how tickets get sold and more importantly, how people experience live events globally? For sure. It was one of the reasons I wanted to come back to scale was just to every day, wake up and know that we are impacting millions of people. The converse is, the reason I came to StubHub is because I think there is still a lot of opportunity for disruption in the live event space.
As you and I both know, the reality is that people are increasingly spending their disposable income on experiences, not things. The next generation that continues, whether you're a millennial or whether you're like me, you're old, older, and want to experience these unique moments and take advantage of every single one that comes along because life is short. The reality is that we're in the fabric of a category that's growing. And I'm saying this getting reinvented. I mean, there's a distinction that people used to make between the person who originally sells you the ticket and the person who resells you the ticket. That distinction is gone. People just want a great ticket. People just want to get to an event easily and friction-free. People want access to uniquely, more and more unique experiences.
So I think StubHub increasingly has to think about, how do you give people access to stickier and unique experiences that they can't get elsewhere? How do you think about technology? I mean, technology in our category is changing a lot. People often ask me, gosh, what happens when you think about arenas and amphitheaters around the world going to presence or authentication by fingerprint? What happens to your business? So there's all sorts of technology disruption. You've got a consumer that more than ever wants to spend their dollars on... Not to be forgotten experiences. And you've got, I think, we have the benefit and the privilege right now of having built the largest fan-to-fan marketplace. But yeah, do I feel a huge obligation to, you know, serve those customers well, more
importantly, the fun of figuring out what are, kind of, be the next places that we need to go for the consumer, keeping in mind the category, I'd say, the countries we play in and also the technologies that are going to come to bear on access overall? Yeah, that's a fun combination, and there's still a ton of disruption ahead, I think.
The technological piece of authentication and fingerprint and biometrics seems like a big change to how tickets are going to work. I mean, you used to have a piece of paper and that was it, that was all you needed. Are we moving to a place where you're going to face ID your way into the football game?
Possibly. I mean, right now, we're already at a place where I think, I want to say, something like 40% of our tickets are fulfilled mobilely. I mean, it's an insane amount, but it's such a beautiful and frictionless experience. Now, look, I think there will always be people who want to use paper tickets to get into events, and, you know, that's just the comfort of holding a paper ticket, but access is one piece for sure. As I said, I think another key piece is unique experiences and how to give people even more than just the ticket, and I think a lot about that as well.
StopHub when it first started was kind of like a user experience win, right? Here was something that was hard to do. I've actually bought fake Packers-Jets tickets when I first moved to New York on Craigslist. It was horrible. We were at the stadium, and the Jets were really nice to us. They're like, oh, you got scammed. You can just, like, wait over here and watch the game. So they were very nice to us.
Oh, wow, that's nice.
Yeah, I think we just looked like such sad little puppies that they didn't know what to do with us. And so now, you know, here's a better user experience. You're not going to meet some stranger in a Starbucks, and they're not going to sell you a fake ticket. You're going to buy this thing online. It's a nice marketplace. We've got your credit card. We can give you a refund, all these things. That was the first big disruption. But we, on the Vergecast, were always talking about, here are these great ideas that make something easier, but to make them work, you need to go get deals, right, out in the industry. You need to have partners. The NFL needs to care about you and not try to kill you. I don't know, Verizon needs to not do whatever it is that Verizon does to stop things. You know, Apple and Google run big platforms, you need to integrate with them. Are you still in like the I need deals mode, or StubHub's so big that you can really just work on user experience over and over again?
You know, it's interesting. I think that we're both. Of course, I think about how to innovate the user experience, and you can't not. You can't think about what else does this person want besides the ticket, as I said, and how to make it easy for them. But the converse is, now I think less about deals, and I think more about the unique things we do with content rights holders to really give better experience to fans. So, right, the basics are, look, we have over 200 partners, and the most recent deal we did was with the NFL, right, for what we call open ticket distribution, which is, in fact, you should be able to get into the stadium mobily within, you know, on your StubHub app and get to any game in the NFL. And the NFL, I think, was really key in sort of embracing the secondary ticketing marketing and saying, like, we're going to create an open distribution
system for all fans to seamlessly, you know, buy and sell tickets. So that's a recent example. But beyond deals, so we do deals for a better customer experience and integration. But, you know, I think the other key thing here is getting right closer to content rights holders overall. Like, if you think about the value chain and the world we live in today, and I'm sure you think about this at The Vergecast, I mean, wow, what a great time it is in the world to be a content rights holder, right? And if you're in the business of distribution, you can't help but think about, you know, how do you get closer and closer to content rights holders, right? Because nobody just wants to be a pipe, StubHub included. And so, I think increasingly, I think we feel very lucky and fortunate that we are partnered with everybody from the 76ers to the Cavs
to Roundabout Theater Company and Tessitura, which is a major theater company, and ticketing that are all giving us access to not just an easy customer experience, but increasingly, you know, I think we need to think about how to turn those relationships with content rights holders into a better fan experience for more than just getting in the stadium. So, are deals important, for sure, but I think they're not just important to ease fan friction. I think increasingly, kind of, you want to be closer to content rights holders, I think, if you're in the distribution business anywhere, and certainly StubHub is no exception.
Wait, no, wait, hold on. You're scaring me. This sounds like you're going to start the StubHub Apple TV app, and it's going to be like $4.99 a month, and you get like 76ers games and like some plays. Please tell me that's not what you're doing. Because that's like the nightmare I hear from everybody all the time.
Yeah, yeah. No, no, I'm not. Look, I am not. If you ask me if I'm secretly working on a streaming app for StubHub, the answer is no.
There's your headline.
There you go. But if you ask me that, you know, I've gone from the world where I think about, okay, we need deals to create a frictionless fan experience. Okay, like, yes, we are in that business and as mobile ticketing happens, we will do more deals, right? Because you need to make sure your fans can get in the stadium on a mobile ticket and it's it's a great experience. So and you need deals, it turns out, to make that happen, right?
But I would say, in a world of mobile ticketing, not paper tickets, I'm just saying, beyond that, I'm spending my time thinking about, okay, we have at the table all these content rights holders. How do we use these relationships to create a better experience for fans? That's more what I'm thinking about. You know, I mean, it could be something like, look, I was at the Jets game two weeks ago. And while I was there, I didn't even know I was there. I was going to be there with our CEO and we were there with the folks from the NFL. And turns out that when we were there, you know, we had 60 fans who were on the field getting a premium experience, like pulling out the national flag. I'm like, yes, more of that, please. You know, it should be that being part of the StubHub community over the next five years means more than just getting a great ticket. So I'm spending a lot more time thinking about that and thinking about how do we look at
the these great deals and partnerships we have and turn them into something unique for fans. That's what I mean. Could be super simple. So, yeah, don't worry, there's not a streaming app coming in the next year because
Oh, in the next year?
Because, by the way, I'm not interested in launching one then having Amazon tell me they want to take 50% of my subscriber revenues on my, like, darling new app as I try and make the leap from a ticketing company to, you know, a pure content channel. No, not yet. Ask me in a few years.
I'm just going to start forwarding you all of the pitches I get for other people's bad streaming apps and that'll just keep you it'll just keep you at bay. You'll realize it's not worth it. So what's the one big product you'd like to put out at StubHub? I know that I think for the Super Bowl, just recently you did some AR stuff that was really interesting. What's like the next big vision for, okay, you're going to open this app and here's how the product can develop?
Well, let's put it this way, in a category this competitive, I'm sure you're certainly not telling you what I'm thinking about as my next big consumer product feature.
Well, I gave it a shot.
But can I just say, sorry, no, not happening.
I do think about it a lot, as you can appreciate. I mean, I'll say more generically, I certainly won't give you kind of the roadmap of the things we're thinking about and working on. I'd say generically, I think there are features within ticketing that can be kind of entirely reimagined. And, you know, I'm not going to say anymore.
Sure.
Sorry.
No, that's fine. I was more going at, you talked about authentication, you talked about, you know, like fingerprinting into a thing. Is there a world in which we're not using the phone at all? You just show up at the place and you give them your fingerprint and walk in?
You know, eventually, but the reality is, although I'm talking about mobile ticketing, like I said, as with any old technology, it will take a long time for them all to die, right? Like, I would love everybody to be mobile, but the reality is, like, paper tickets are going to last for a long time and trickle out because it turns out that's how season ticket holders might want to hold on to or have their tickets. They might want the physical book of tickets that you get today. So I think, I mean, I think mobile is probably the biggest trend I would continue to call out. And is there a day that you don't even need an app and, you know, you can just use your fingerprints? Yeah, maybe, but I think we're a long time for that day. I think what you can expect is, you know, within three to five years, are we going to see 90% of tickets be mobile? Sure. But from there to no app at all? I don't know.
And keep in mind, the app can get you, and think about what we were talking about earlier, what else can your app get you besides a ticket? I think that's the more interesting question.
Very cool.
So if I've got you on my app and you're buying a ticket, how else can I service you?
Well, I would ask, but you're not going to tell me, so.
Yeah, I know.
I'll just keep guessing.
That's okay. But at the end of the day, it's an e-commerce marketplace, and every day we wake up thinking about, you know, great consumer experiences. And more importantly, even today, like, you know, don't, let's not dismiss the core work of any great e-commerce marketplace. I've got to get you there easily. I've got to make discovery an awesome experience. And then it turns out, as we said, there's some fun technologies coming along that both will challenge us to think about how we deliver that core experience differently, but then what we add to it. And that's a fun place to think about, but every day we still wake up thinking about how to get fans the easiest experience to get to their live events.
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I want to tell you about something else that is important to you, which is your work on the board list and getting women into more senior management positions. And it just so happens that the day we're recording this... Yesterday, like 14,000, 17,000 Google employees walked out of offices around the world to protest how Google is handling discrimination and harassment. Obviously, you were at Google. How do you read this moment? Is the change here, is this it? Or is this just one more step along the way?
I think when it comes to these issues, I think that this is one more step along the way, but it's an important one. So is this the moment? You know, I doubt it. I think it's like everything else, where you just keep building and building and building, and at some point, you tip something over. And I would say yesterday was a bigger-than-expected building block, right? Because I don't know that anybody expected 14,000 people to walk out. I mean, from what I understand, at first, the expectation was a few hundred. And so I think the signal from, what is it, the third most-recognized brand in the world, from its employees en masse, I mean, if you think about, what, Google probably has 120,000 employees, think about the fact that that means that 10% to 15% walked off the job, and that was not just women.
You know, I think the signal that that sends is a pretty mighty one. I think the size of the signal is probably what's most notable, and employees really using their voice to make very clear, kind of, a defined set of asks.
And so that set of asks is really interesting to me as well, especially because as a founder, somebody who's built small companies, big companies, is at a big company now, who has an organization that places people on boards, one of the asks is employee representation on the board, which is wholly remarkable in the tech industry, less remarkable in like, old, old industries, but still remarkable overall. How do you look at that ask? Is that reasonable? Is this a sea change in how these companies are built and structured and run?
Well, a couple of things. There were two asks that were specific to the board. One was an employee representative on the board. The other, I think, was the chief diversity officer, you know, giving their findings directly to the board. I think both of those are interesting. I think, to your point, the first one is more notable, because I haven't seen it anywhere else. I think if I were to step back, first of all, I would just say, Googlers, in good style, are creative thinkers and empowered thinkers, it turns out. I think the idea of asking for an employee representative on the board, I don't know if they get it. But what is stake in the ground about the voice of employees inside the boardroom, which I think we would all agree is just not present today. It's a different form of diversity, right? Like, at the board list, we talk a lot about diversity from a gender perspective. But the employee voice in the boardroom, to your point, it probably doesn't exist
other than unionized companies. Now, weirdly, because I was in the board at Ericsson, which is a Swedish company, it had three employee representatives on the board. So I'm actually used to it. But that's for a European company, right? That has parts of the workforce that are unionized. So not strange to me. But for an American company, I mean, unheard of. And I would say a really innovative idea. Now, will Google do it? Who knows? But certainly farther than anybody else's proposed. And another take on diversity, so I'm all for it. I mean, I think it's the idea of having an employee representative is a pretty in the, it turns out for US companies, not just tech companies, is a pretty innovative one in this day and age, despite the fact that it's been done before in other industries. In terms of having the chief diversity officer report to the board, I am hugely supportive of some vehicle, whatever it is.
And there are several companies out there that are trying to attack this space as well, of having a feedback loop to the board directly of what's going on inside the company that can be in parallel with HR but is not controlled by HR. And this is no discredit to Google, because Google has some of the, you know, has always been kind of an innovator on the HR side. So this is no discredit to Google whatsoever. But what is the risk? The risk is, as employees point out, and I think was pointed out in that letter, when you are trying to do the right thing, and an employee comes to you, and you're in HR, and you are kind of conflicted, are you there to represent the employee? Or are you also there because you report to the CEO, and you're trying to please that person and look good to them?
And I don't get, I don't mean that in a bad way, but that's, you know, who you're taking your instruction from. Or you are being, you know, peer rated by managers, and, you know, you may be getting a complaint about a manager. I think the reality of today is, although HR is constructed, or theoretically a place that employees are supposed to trust, I think the reality is we need some feedback loops that really are a check and balance to HR. And that is not, again, because anybody is trying to do something malintended. It's just about all of the kind of You know, all the workings, you know, behind the scenes in HR that may or may not make it a place that feels comfortable for employees to go, or to feel heard, or whatever the set of policies are that may or may not let something ever be shown to the board and the CEO.
So I can only tell you, as a board member, I would love the idea for any of the boards I was on to be able to have direct visibility into what is the ratio of complaints. Give me some data on what's going on inside the company. Most often, by the time it comes to the board, it's one crisis situation. But as a board, like, as a board member, I would want to know what the pattern is. Like, am I seeing one out of 1,000 incidents? Am I seeing one out of 100? Like, how do I get the data that something is or is not a problem inside a company I serve the board on? And I think people underestimate or overestimate how much access the board has to information like that, right? I mean, boards are consuming, you know, vast amounts of information, you know, but it
still all comes through one lens in a quarterly board meeting, and they have to distill and dissect a lot. And I don't think there is a good feedback loop on issues relating to employee happiness, talent and culture overall to the boardroom. Most committees, you know, like NOM-GOV committees, or renumeration committees, you know, comp committees, their charter is very narrow today. And until it's expanded to include these things, there's not a natural way that this information is all coming to the boardroom, unless the CEO himself or herself is very attuned to bringing it.
So you are talking a lot about corporate governance, which is super interesting because big tech companies in the valley are structured to kind of avoid it, right? Mark Zuckerberg owns all of the shares of Facebook, and he, it's total, his board can't do anything. Uber was structured that way in a very meaningful way that had to be undone. The Twitter board drama is just like, like, it's going to be a movie someday. Is that something that just needs, everybody, every founder needs to reset? The idea that they need to construct a shell around themselves, the company can't get taken away from them, because they actually need to build a good culture at scale eventually?
You know, I think that you're hitting on two big topics. Number one is obviously super voting, right? And who controls the board? Number two is the consolidation of the founder into the CEO role, and the founder/CEO and the chairman role of a board, and not having those two things separated. Look, the part of me that's a founder and has managed boards, particularly at private companies, where I felt like everybody who's in the boardroom is, you know, venture capitalist and doesn't understand my business, that part of me, and by the way, I've had some good boards, but that part of me really empathizes, right, with the idea of super voting control, because you're like, look, somebody who doesn't know my business is coming in and telling me what to do. So I feel like as a multi-time founder, I get
it. The converse is, there is no, and this is the challenge, there is no lens through which the board will see what is going on in the company, other than through the lens today of the CEO and chairman, which in many cases is also the founder. So just think about that. Like, if you're a board member, the information you see is what somebody's decided to bring into the boardroom, and that person is typically the founder, the CEO, and the chairman. So where is the diverse perspective if that person needs guidance, or if you want to see something else? So for me, there's the super voting control issue, but to be honest, the other issue is the founder controlling also the chairmanship of the board. Like, where is, in private companies, where's the independent lead director?
There isn't one. In public companies, in the US, the chairman and the CEO of the company are often the same person. So I think there's voting control, and that's one issue. The other issue is just like, uh, who's holding the CEO accountable if the CEO is also the chairman of the board? That, to me, is as big a conundrum. So, the part of me that's the founder is always like, very torn on this issue, because I like nothing better than to control my boardrooms, particularly when I feel like nobody else knows really what it's like inside the company, and just how tough it is every time, you know, they give you, you know, an ill-advised recommendation that only is serving the interests of their class A or B or C class of shares, which quite frankly is the problem in private boards,
that everybody really is voting their class, right, even though they're supposed to be watching out for everybody. But theoretically, when you're at a public company stage, you should have the notion of independence, and you should have the notion of a company that can also question the CEO, or can ask for a different perspective. And, and I will just tell you, like, if there's nobody in the boardroom who's the lead independent director at a minimum, and at a maximum, maybe a chairman who is not the CEO, How do you ever foster even a debate with the CEO and ask to look at different information, a diverse perspective?
So is the answer an employee representative on the board? Is the, bringing it all the way back around, does that solve it?
No, I don't know if it does solve it. I think it brings, look, okay, let me separate the two issues. There's diversity in the boardroom and having a great boardroom discussion, right? And you're like, what are all the perspectives that are useful? Is an employee perspective useful? Yeah, interesting idea, right? And so that helps bring more conversation. But you know what the other problem is with boardrooms? They need to be well managed, it turns out. Like, it turns out that corporate governance, particularly in tough situations, takes courage. It takes somebody willing to ask a tough question. It takes somebody willing to dive deeper. So let me ask you a question. Have you ever seen a really good football team, or a basketball team, or sports team, that just naturally comes together four times a year and makes great decisions without a great coach? The answer is no.
Yeah, I guess it's no.
Okay, okay, okay. Unless you're LeBron at the Lakers, and you are the factor, the player and the coach, you know, at the same time. Which, by the way, looks a lot like the founder, you know, CEO, like, I am the oracle. I know everything that's great for the company. And I am not here to dismiss the value of an oracle, by the way. Like, look, I mean, lots of great companies are built off genius, lots of great sports teams are built off a key athlete. But what I will say is, if you want to manage to make good decisions over time, and sometimes courageous decisions, and see all the information, it's not just about having diversity in the boardroom, it's about having a well-run boardroom. And independent voices able to ask the right questions, and I would say, leadership.
Like, leadership in the boardroom matters as much as a diverse set of perspectives.
So, bringing this all back to this moment in the tech industry, where we have a bunch of companies that were constructed and designed to give outside status and influence to their CEOs and chairmen and founders. And then you have tens of thousands of people walking out to say that we're doing this wrong. How do you bring those together? If 20,000 Facebook employees walk out tomorrow because they're mad about Cambridge Analytica, like, what actually happens? Mark Zuckerberg is just like, "Well, we're, get out of here, I'll hire 20,000 more of you." Like, what's the thing that bridges the gap?
My gut is that if you're in a small company and it's one or two people, you can say, "Ah, I can always hire another person." And this is the thing about small companies, right? Like, you can keep churning employees and, you know, and the founder, quite frankly, with lack of visibility to the rest of the company from the board, may be able to continue in that scenario. When you think about critical mass uprisings, which is what we just saw at Google, my gut is that when it's 15,000 people, they don't just forget tomorrow that they marched today. And if you're 20,000 employees at Facebook, there's some number, a threshold number, at which, you know, you can't just replace all that talent. And the voices aren't going to go away. And this is the strength in numbers. This is why, I mean, let me just step all the way back.
Like, so you can say, top down, this is the status quo, right? Because people are invoking kind of these super privileges to founders and, you know, founder CEOs or what have you. But we can agree that bottoms up, what just happened in the tech industry of the past year, these small cases, like ones and twos, whether it's, you know, what happened with somebody experiencing, you know, harassment from a given VC or something else. It turns out that as one and two people start talking to each other and discover that they're not alone, they get to critical mass by having, like, lots of small voices that, you know, rise together and use things like social media and the news to get critical mass. Or if you're someplace like Google, you can create critical mass within your own company by just self-organizing 15,000 people.
So either it's lots of little voices who find each other and social media and the internet and movements like Time's Up, and the more people that speak up, the more people will speak up. Or you're, you know, fortunate enough to be able to self-organize inside of a company of Google's size and scale, that you can get 15,000 people to show up, and it's hard to ignore 15,000 people. So to answer your question, I think it tends to be the same as it always has been when it comes to disruption.
Yeah. One more question. We have a lot of people who listen to the show who want to start companies, who want to be founders, who want to be entrepreneurs. And some feedback I get is, "I hear all this stuff, but my network is small, you know, I just want to start a company with my friend, I can't think about this right away." What's your advice to them on how to expand that network right away? So you have a diverse set of contacts? And then how to immediately start thinking about building a company? So it reflects some of these more important values that seem to be off kilter right now.
So a couple of things. I think, number one, think about diversity in the founding team. You want to build it, build it early. So, I mean, and to your point, often we start companies with people we know, right? But we also, often, when we are looking for a co-founder who's, you know, technical, or in the case of a technical person, a business person, we go to our friends and if they're not free, we ask who they know, right? Most people think they don't have diverse networks. They may not have diverse first-order networks. I would say my first piece of advice is go to your second-order network. It turns out that, you know, you may not know a great girl, but you may have a best friend who has a spouse, or a partner, or girlfriend that you think is great, and you may be able to ask them, too.
And maybe you get a different answer when you ask people in your life if they know a great woman. Ask for it, like, you know, as opposed to just saying, hey, you know, do you know a great guy? I mean, it's very, to me, one of the simple, simple answers is people think that their networks aren't diverse. They may not be diverse at the first order. Do the work to ask for your second-order network, right? And be explicit about looking for diverse candidates, because if you don't ask, you'll never know. Start early. We talked about, I mean, you know, when you think about it, it always surprises me that there are best practices, you probably chuckle at this, too. There are best practices when it comes to like, how to raise a seed financing round, and what the term sheet should look like.
How can it be that you cannot crowdsource the best practices for, you know, what your company should look like on day one to help make it more diverse? I mean, it may be as simple as having a paternity and maternity policy from day one. How about that? How about you don't just stick with like, the six weeks of disability that California gives you? Like, I think companies like All Raise and others are trying to crowdsource and make more common what these best practices are. But you ought to be able to go out and figure out what are some of the smart things. And again, if you don't know, go find a female founder somewhere, or a diverse founder, you know, or go kind of ask five different companies what they do in their early practices that you admire, and how they did it. But we've got to get to some sort of basic best practices for building, you know, the
building blocks of what helps people succeed at work from day one.
Yeah, that's great advice. I think what's really interesting is Most people think their companies are their products. And I think it's kind of important for us to come back to the idea that companies are ecosystems of people. And that's really hard, especially when everything is just like a website. Like, it's very easy to just be like, I made a website, you know? Now it's a company.
No, that's right. You made the point. You have two products, I guess, a company and a product. And we think of our company and the product as the same thing. And again, look, as a founder, I'm as guilty of that as anyone. Like, I mean, Yodlee was started with me and five technical founders, who were all engineers. I mean, like, did I say, like, timeout? Let me go get another founder who's a female? I didn't. I mean, I didn't even think about it. Luckily, none of us were white. But we were pretty darn homogeneous ourselves. So, you know, we all looked a certain different color, and it was all the same color. And we fit our own stereotype, sadly. So, I can't say I've done it perfectly, but I do think today, today's a lot more important
to be thinking about these things proactively if we want to move the needle from here forward.
Very cool. Well, I really appreciate all the time and you sticking around a little bit extra to talk to me about this very unique moment, I think, in tech and culture together. Thank you so much for joining us.
No problem.
All right, that was Sukhinder Singh Kastie, the president of Step Up. Like I said, just the most fun talking to her. We'll have her back very soon. I want to know what you think of these interview episodes, who you want me to talk to you, what you want me to go investigate. Tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. I love your feedback. And we will see you later this week, the regular version.
Page updated October 17, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
