20VC: Arm CEO Rene Haas on How The Best Leaders Make Decisions and The Trade-Off Between Speed and Quality | Leadership Lessons from 7 Years at Nvidia | How Companies Can Retain Speed, Innovation and Agility at Scale

Rene Haas is the CEO @ Arm. The technologies that Arm creates are used in over 230+ Bn devices with everything from sensors to smartphones to servers. In 2016 Softbank made Arm it's largest ever acquisition with a reported price of $32Bn. As for Rene, he was appointed CEO in February 2022 having spent the last 8 years in numerous different roles within the company. Before Arm, Rene was Vice President & General Manager of the Computing Products Business Unit at Nvidia where he enjoyed a very successful 7 years with the team there. In Today's Episode with Rene Haas We Discuss: 1.) Entry into Tech from Eastman Kodak: How did Rene make his way into the world of technology and innovation? What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways from his 7 years at Nvidia? How did working with Jensen impact his leadership approach and philosophy? 2.) Decision-Making in Leadership: What is the single biggest mistake leaders make when making decisions today? How does Rene balance the trade-off between speed vs quality of decision? At what point does Rene believe leaders have enough data to make a decision? What does Rene know now that he wishes he had known when he started on decisions? 3.) Scaling the Org and Remaining Nimble: Agile: How does one retain the speed and agility of a startup when one is the size that Arm is today? Ambition: How does Rene as a leader inspire the same level of ambition and vision in his team when Arm is as large as it is? Risk: How does Rene encourage his teams to take large risks when they have so much more to lose? Breakage: What are the first things to break in scaling? What can leaders do to get ahead of them? 4.) Leadership 101: What really is strategy? What is it not? What mistakes do all leaders make when it comes to strategy? How does Rene define "high performance" in leadership? How has his style of leadership changed over time? How does Rene approach vulnerability in leadership? What are the pros and cons?

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  You are listening to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today is a very special show for me in particular. When I was younger, my grandparents lived in Cambridge in the UK, and the shining light of innovation in Cambridge has always been ARM. My grandfather would always speak of the wondrous creations that ARM made and how they powered so much of the world around us. And so to have the chance to have ARM CEO Rene Haas on today was one I was very excited for. Rene is CEO at ARM, as I mentioned, and did you know that ARM technologies are used in over 230 billion devices? With everything from sensors to smartphones to servers. And in 2016, SoftBank made ARM its largest ever acquisition with a reported price of $32 billion. As for Rene, he was appointed CEO in February 2022, having spent the last eight years in numerous different roles within the company.

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  And before ARM, Rene spent an incredible seven years with the team at Nvidia. I do also want to say a huge thank you to Joyce Kim and Drew Henry for some amazing question suggestions today. I really did so appreciate that. But before we dive into the show today, I want to talk about an incredible tool that I use every single day, Notion. Now, I am the worst for having 50 tabs open and constantly hopping between an endless array of tools. Do you feel me? Are you with me? Well, then Notion came into my life, providing one tool to do it all. With everything from seamless project management to easily organizing 20VC's company information. A fascinating stand on Notion usage, more than 70% of companies who start using Notion stop using two plus other tools. And so Notion can even save you money, given how many other tools it can displace.

• 1:28Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:13Harry Stebbings?

  Angel List handles your company's incorporation, banking, cap table and fundraising process all in one single place. And this allows founders to focus on building. If you're a founder, you can launch your company at stack.angellist.com/20vc. Whether you are a founder or a funder, you're in great hands with Angel List. And finally, from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics. Squarespace is the all in one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. There are three things for me that I just love about Squarespace. First, mobile optimized websites. All websites are optimized for mobile. Content automatically adjusts, so it just looks really beautiful on any device. Second, email campaigns.

• 2:54Harry Stebbings?

  Squarespace makes it super easy to grow and engage your audience with Squarespace email campaigns. Say what? No other provider needed? Amazing news. Finally, SEO tools. Squarespace takes the guesswork out of SEO, so you'll get found in search by more people more often. And if that wasn't good enough, go to squarespace.com/20vc for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code 20vc to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. But that's enough for me. So now I'm so excited to hand over to Rene Haas, CEO at ARM.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:35Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Rene, this is such a joy to do. I was so excited when you got in touch and I'm thrilled to have you on the show. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thank you so much for allowing me to join you.

• 3:45Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all. As I said, I was so excited for this, but I want to start with a little bit of context. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of tech first, but come to be CEO of the incredible institution that is ARM today?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  I had a bit of a wandering path in terms of becoming the CEO. I get asked by a lot of our young graduates and such who are starting out their careers who want to know. Gosh, when you were starting out your career, was the CEO of a major tech company your goal? I can surely say most certainly not, but I was a very curious kid, I would say it that way. And my parents were both head of My mom was a Romance Languages PhD in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Latin. And my dad was a research scientist. So books and technology were kind of always around the house. And I remember my dad bringing home a, gosh, this is the middle of late 1970s. What looked like an old typewriter, but it had two suction cups on the edge of it.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  And what it was, was a terminal that could plug into a phone, which back in the day was sitting on the wall. You would take the receiver off, you'd put in the two suction cups. You would dial a number and it would connect you into the Xerox mainframe. And I got introduced into computers that way. And I was so fascinated by the fact that I could type something in and something of regional intelligence would get spat back at me off of the Xerox mainframe. So I wandered into computers that way, which then kind of led me to a math and science proclivity in high school. It was kind of my fascination with technology and curiosity that got me started into it. But I can definitely assure you that looking to become a CEO someday was not in the cards in terms of when I started out. I just wanted to learn new things and felt very, very fortunate to be involved in technology where stuff changed so fast.

• 5:27Harry Stebbings?

  You spent an incredible seven years at Nvidia before being CEO at ARM. Nvidia is likewise an incredible institution. I'd love to understand that one or two takeaways that you took from your time with Nvidia that really shaped how you think today as a leader.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was there for seven years and it was really a delight, to be honest with you. The company was probably 20, 25 years old or so. But because Jensen was the founder, and obviously still is the founder and was the CEO, it really had a very straightforward mindset in terms of how it operated. In other words, it operated a lot like a startup in the sense that alignment was really important. Understanding what everybody was doing was really, really important. Removing organizational barriers were really important. Anecdotally, for example, we never had organization charts. We didn't print them out. Jensen didn't like using words like divisions in terms of describing different operating groups because for him, it was one Nvidia.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  One of the most powerful lessons I think I learned from being there was alignment. People were really, really aligned on a singular goal. And it wasn't really so important what your product did or what your business unit did or any of that nature. It was do the right thing for Nvidia. And that was probably the single biggest thing I took away from being there. Not to mention that one thing I also really loved about Jensen, I guess the other story is that he would make decisions very, very quickly at times where it didn't seem like we had all the data. If you've got seventy-five to eighty percent of the information, do you wait for the other twenty percent? He was not like that. He would move very, very quickly when it looked like there was enough data to make a decision. And that stuck with me. It really, really did because

• 7:05Speaker 02

  in my career, what I've kind of learned is that that last twenty percent probably makes you feel comfortable that you're making the right decision, but you're not going to probably gain any additional data that's going to change your decision. But what you are going to lose is time. And time is a commodity that obviously you can never get back. So I would say alignment and decision making and speed was two things I really picked up there.

• 7:26Harry Stebbings?

  If you learn one thing from listening to the show, as you kindly said you did beforehand, it's that I have a schedule and then I ignore it when I find some great pearls of wisdom. You mentioned the decision making speed there. How would you reflect on your own decision making style today with ARM? And has it changed over time in your progression as a leader?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gotten better. I think I was slower in making decisions earlier in my career. I was more careful to make sure I had all the information as we talked about. And I think being with Nvidia really, really helped me. And then as I got into ARM, I've tried to influence the organization with that a bit in terms of let's be a bit bolder, let's move a bit faster, let's increase the pace of innovation. If we make mistakes, that's okay. In fact, the only way you genuinely learn is by failing. You learn far more from your failures than you do from your successes. If you don't have a lot of failures, it means you've probably not pushed the envelope enough. And there's always room for improvement. I view myself as a constant work in progress, even though I'm in the later years of my

• 8:29Speaker 02

  career. But I think you always learn. I think that is probably the continue evolving piece of me is to continue to evolve in terms of moving at pace, being bold with your decisions, and be ambitious.

• 8:40Harry Stebbings?

  My friend, you are a spring chicken. I don't know what you're talking about. I do want to ask you, managing that learning from decisions. When you think about lessons that you've learned, what was the most painful lesson that you've learned that you're also pleased to have learned?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  There are lots of them, but I would say one of the biggest things, and I'll go back to the early days of Windows on ARM. And we were very, very excited 10 years ago about the promise of Windows on ARM and everything that it was going to realize. And full disclosure, that first Windows 8 machine, and I think it was called Windows RT, was not very successful. The performance wasn't great. We didn't do a very good job with the app ecosystem. And I was really, really at the time at Nvidia just thinking, my gosh, we just didn't get this right. And we didn't do a good job in terms of the naming. We didn't do a good job in terms of the app ecosystem. And just to date ourselves, Harry, I remember when we rolled out the system to reviewers, the first thing they asked was, does it run iTunes?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  And it did not, by the way, if we didn't have the port to run iTunes on the Windows RT machine. And we just thought to ourselves, we're doomed. And if we can't ever get iTunes to run on a Windows on ARM machine, it'll never ever get market share. So why do I bring up that example, lesson learned? At the time, it seemed like we had just made a fatal mistake that we could never recover from. 10 years later, you have streaming platforms. Everyone gets audio in a different way. The point being that the beauty of the technology industry is that stuff changes. Things move around. What may have seen as a cataclysmic failure at the time is all about perseverance and sticking to it. And that's probably why I love technology so much. Because not only does it obviously move incredibly fast around innovation,

• 10:24Speaker 02

  but your past mistakes can be your greatest learning. And what we learned from those Windows on ARM laptops way back in the day that really matters now is battery life. That was still the killer application for the ARM-based machines. And if you fast forward now and you look at everything that's kind of going on with laptops powered by ARM, it's the fact that you don't have to plug it into a wall, the fact that you can run for days. So it's a long-winded way of saying at the time, I thought Windows Windows on ARM and Windows RT when I was working on it back in Nvidia was just a complete train wreck. But looking back 10 years later, I think there's going to be a huge promise and we're seeing it already in terms of the value proposition.

• 11:00Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's the famous statement, there's no such thing as a bad idea, only the wrong time, which I like a lot.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 11:05Harry Stebbings?

  God, you said about perseverance there. I agree with you completely and I think it's the most important thing, resiliency in leadership and entrepreneurship. The hard thing is, there is sometimes a time when you do have to give up, when you do have to cut your losses and say, no, that didn't work. How do you think about the balance and how do you advise founders, entrepreneurs or children on the balance between stick to your guns and stick to your principles versus actually it's not working and we need to rethink this?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  So the way I would think about it is as follows, there's absolutely such a thing as sticking to an idea that's not good and sticking to it too long. And I think that one of the things, whether it's the founder of a startup, whether it's the manager of a product line, I think you always have to have 360 vision in terms of what's going on around you, what's going on with technology and are the assumptions that you made that believed it was a good idea at the time no longer applicable? And I think that is really important because I think there's a difference between resiliency, a consistent drive to improve and a consistent drive to learn as opposed to saying, I'm just going to stick with this idea until it goes over the cliff because I'm resilient.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  There's a big difference between the two and we did a bunch of that at Nvidia, you know, for example, I remember again using Nvidia's story. We were doing CoreLogic chipsets for the x86 platform back in the day. It was a great product, but the market was shrinking on us and that was a big part of Nvidia's business. And as a team, we, I remember it was an offsite one day when we were looking at the roadmap, we were looking at the next generation product and we all collectively decided that this isn't going anywhere, let's just kill the product line and let's pivot to ARM-based SoCs. The company pivoted and that was a really hard call because there was a lot of business, there were a lot of customers, it was a big, big shift. But the resiliency of that was being resilient to find a solution, not being married to the way we were trying to solve the problem.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  I think that's a big, big deal. And it's one of the things I really try to strive for in my new role at ARM is making sure that we're nimble. And I'm always thinking about what's around us, what's going on inside the environment, what changes and be nimble to pivot because you have to be able to be nimble to pivot. To me, residency is about persevering, but having your head up, looking around as opposed to tunnel vision and just ignoring what's going on around you.

• 13:25Harry Stebbings?

  I'm so enjoying this. What are the biggest reasons why companies lose that agility, their nimbleness? If you're fearful of characteristics or traits developing, what are those characteristics or traits that other incumbents can develop, which makes them lose that agility?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  It's really interesting when I look at kind of how I grew up and this is the class, what shapes you and what are the learnings that you get? I grew up in Rochester, New York and Rochester, New York in the 1970s was the home of where my father worked Xerox Corporation, which made tons of money on photocopiers. And then the biggest haymaker in Rochester, New York back then was Eastman Kodak Company. Back in the day, Eastman Kodak was the largest employer in Rochester, New York. They probably employed 100,000 people. What people did back then is believe it or not, they would buy a, they had a camera. You would buy boxed film at the drugstore. You would take 12 exposures, 24 exposures. And believe it or not, back in the day, you put that film into an envelope and you sent it to be processed.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  It was processed in Rochester, New York and they had huge plants and Kodak was an icon in terms of a brand and they were making hay in terms of profits associated with film, et cetera. We all know what happened, right? So what does all this mean? Lesson learned. I saw this happen in real time. I saw Kodak shut plants. I saw them lay off people. I saw a shrinking of Rochester, New York as a result of that. And I would not go so far to say that it deeply scarred me or I have emotional wounds from that, but I watched it happen and I saw it and I said, yeah, this was kind of Captain Obvious. And by the way, in defense of the leaders at Kodak and Xerox at the time, they had these very, very hard decisions to make relative to you have a highly cash generative business, an iconic brand.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  How do you disrupt yourself relative? Relative to digital photography versus classic photography. So I had a front side seat to watching all that. Last story I'll give in terms of just anecdotally how I saw this around me. I remember my father, who was a research scientist at Xerox. And I got him a modem. And this is mid nineteen nineties. I said, Dad, you know, I can connect you up on the modem and you can read all the news that you want to online. So every morning he would wake up, he would go to Yahoo and he would read the news. He would print it. So he printed the internet every morning. He would find all the stories he liked and print fifty pages and then go down with a stack of fifty pieces of paper and read them. So lesson learned is be prepared to disrupt yourself because if you're not, you will for sure get disrupted.

• 15:52Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, question. How do you create that sense of urgency and disruption within your teams? When it's a very strong existing business in large companies, things can get very comfortable. There isn't twelve months of runway like a series A or series B company and you've got to go, go, go. How do you create a disruptive culture within a comfortable environment?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  It's a great, great question. But if I think about the things that I've learned that are really important as a leader is around alignment. And ensuring that everyone understands what the goals are, understands what's important relative to the objectives. And understands what is we're trying to go off and do. That's table stakes. And this I've learned a little bit even more so in my five months as a CEO, I'm always learning. And I should have kind of known this before I became a CEO. People really listen to what the CEO says. People really want to understand what's on his or her mind. They really want to understand what's important. So if the CEO is having conversations often about the future, often about what can disrupt us. Often about what's the next big trend that we need to know about. Often about where is the industry going to five, eight years?

• 16:59Speaker 02

  People start to align with, gosh, if he or she really cares about this and I want to be able to participate in the conversation. I need to start thinking about that. And I think it starts again in the executive room about what are the conversations that you're having? Where do you spend your time? One of the other things I always like to believe in is strategy is not what you write down. Strategy is what you do, your behavior. If you're in a room constantly with your leadership team talking about the current quarter, or talking about something that's in the near term, implicitly, what are you telling your people? You're telling your people, that's what's most important, and that's what we need to be aware of. So when we get together, and our team was together last week in Austin, we spent one full day talking about nothing about, other than a bunch of projects that we're trying to kick off, that really aren't going to materialize

• 17:44Speaker 02

  in the marketplace until five years from now. And again, the CEO has an obligation, but I think also a great platform, to be able to influence people that way.

• 17:52Harry Stebbings?

  I'm asking the easy questions. How do you think about the balance between committing resources to those projects, to those very futuristic disruptive ideas, but then also honoring the core business, which Wall Street loves, and is a cash generative business? How do you think about the balance between maintaining the core revenue generating business, and optimizing that, but also investing in disruption in the future? Because it is a balance.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  It is, yeah. And if I was thinking about the one biggest change about the previous roles I've had to now the CEO role, is that you are faced with that balance question, maybe 15 times a day, in terms of what gets rolled at you, whether it's an operational issue, in terms of something that's gone wrong inside a facility, versus the strategic discussion with a customer of five years, you're faced with those pivots and choices every minute. And they come at you really fast in the CEO role. You're always having to kind of navigate through that video game, if you will. But for me, I think the North Star is thinking about the long game. If you're really focused on looking past the horizon, and understanding that on the margin, that is really where I add the greatest value

• 19:01Speaker 02

  to what the company needs to do, I try to remind myself that every day. We've got lots of great people in the company. We've got all kinds of people who are going to work with the internet being down today in our office. And we've got all kinds of people that are going to worry about what that critical customer call takes place and I need to be part of. But the one thing that I can do, and should do, that the others cannot, is looking over that horizon. And if at the end of the week, I feel like I've spent all my time on stuff that's in the near term, I try to give myself a pinch and say, that's not You add the greatest value to the team.

• 19:31Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of adding value to the team, we've mentioned resiliency, we've mentioned North Stars. I think often like about high performance in business and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. When I say the words high performance in business to you, what does high performance mean to you?

• 19:46Speaker 02

  It's all about outputs. I am very much a measuring the output as far as worrying about exactly how many people are working on it versus how many hours spent, for example, just to back away from hybrid working versus working at home versus everyone in the office. Our policy is it's all about outputs. It's really not about I need you in the office Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, or we're going to be hybrid. It's really all about the output, which means high performance is a bit adaptable. And particularly in this world today where remote working has been put thrown upon us in a way that we never planned for, but now is the new reality on some level. I think it's about measuring output and I think high performance teams are all about outputs.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Inside the team, I'm a huge, huge believer in diversity of thought, diversity of opinion, diversity of skills and diversity of people to get the best output. That is one thing that I think ultimately high performance teams have as a common characteristic. They have a diverse set of individuals and thoughts. So to me, it's outputs and diversity.

• 20:51Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about outputs and then we also said about it's okay to fail at something and the team need to know that. How do you think about the balance within teams of it's okay to fail? It's our job to try things and go big without also creating a culture of acceptability of failure where, oh, it's fine. We failed. It's just another, it's just another fail. How do you think about the balance between it's okay, but not creating a culture of acceptance around it?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  You really have to be sure that you understand the the high level deltas between failure and then accountability. Because if you can't hold people accountable for their outputs and being able to really measure where they're making progress, that is a real problem because back to repeated failures, if you don't have accountability in terms of, well, who was responsible for that action, who is accountable for that result, if you don't have. That you are going to have repeated failures because it's not going to be obvious in terms of who actually owned it. Who actually felt that if they didn't deliver, it was on them. And I think that's a really, really important balance to strike. I'm OK with teams trying something and failing. What I'm less OK with is the project failed. Well, why did it fail?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Well, no one kind of really knew whose job it was to take something over the line. That's a problem. So you have to be really, really clear on accountability.

• 22:07Harry Stebbings?

  It makes me think of Frank Slootman here. When we have him on the show, he said about kind of narrow the focus and increase the quality. Obviously, Frank from Snowflake. I did want to talk to you about prioritization because especially when you're CEO of ARM, there are so many different avenues and routes you can go down. How do you think about your prioritization framework for deciding the one to two decisions that you do decide to prioritize? What does that look like?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  It's a very emotive topic inside our company. One of the balances that you always want to strike is priority and also inclusion. You want to be sure that you're not listing a set of goals and objectives. And then the team looks at it and says, well, my output is not listed there. So therefore, my job is not meaningful. So there's always that balance to strike. But I am a very big believer in setting out a very small number of priorities that to me are a bit like air and water. That if we don't do these things well, the other stuff really doesn't matter. And I've done a few of those inside of ARM. Full disclosure, they've been a bit controversial.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Trying to strike the balance between being very clear on what is air and water versus what is not isn't going to be seen by the entire population at times as being inclusive. It's not intended to be that way, and that's sort of the key point. What it is intended to do is in an area where the team is trying to make a call in terms of what's important, and most importantly, I'm not in the room to help them with that guidance. They know which way is south and which way is west and which way is east and which way is north. And I think that's incumbent for any CEO. I think it is really, really incumbent to be very, very clear with the priorities. And there may be times where, as you list them, all 5,000 people or 10,000 people or 50,000 people or 200,000, how big are your company? Not be able to point exactly to where their role is in it.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  And by the way, that's okay, because underneath that are going to be a set of objectives for each one of the operating groups where their roles will be clear. That's something I'm actually pretty big on.

• 24:01Harry Stebbings?

  I spoke to obviously some of your teammates before, and they mentioned that you're an execution machine, which I would always like to be described as. So I think you should take that as a great compliment. My question to you is, when thinking about velocity of execution, how do you think about not losing quality while maintaining speed?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I think again, it comes down to priority and clarity around the number of priorities. Because if you've got too many priorities, as a result, you can't move fast. And that kind of goes back to if there's only a small number of things that need to get done, i.e. air and water, that helps with speed. And that's why I am very, very big on a smaller set of must haves, because must haves happen with speed. If everything's important, then nothing is important. And if nothing is important, nothing gets done at pace. So you really have to reflect to the team, here are the non-negotiables. We have to do these, and if we don't do these, those are table stakes. And it's interesting you got that feedback from talking to folks, I'm super big on that.

• 24:59Harry Stebbings?

  There we go, my references don't fail me. We look at you today and we see this seasoned CEO, we see this seasoned leader. There's always insecurities and vulnerabilities within every leader. When you think about yours today, are there any that stand out to you that you think about often?

• 25:13Speaker 02

  I think if everyone kind of goes through their career, if they're high achievers, there's this always balance of what drives you is what drives you is the success? Or is what drives you is the fear of failing? And I think there's always a mix of that to some extent, and I think I would fall into that camp. I think I would always do myself as a high achiever, wanting to be successful and wanting to win. But always having this insecurity as I went through my career, but what if I fail? And what if this doesn't go right? And what if the project doesn't ship? And I think what happens is as you get older and as you get more experience, you realize a couple of things. First off, everyone fails. Everyone who's been extremely successful, depending on how you measure success, had had some train wrecks in their career. For example, we were talking earlier about Tony Fadell's book.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Tony was very open about some of the fantastic successes he's had. Which are brilliant and some of the mulligans ARM is owned by SoftBank. So Masayoshi Son, who's I think in the top 50 most wealthy people in the world. In the year 2000, he was the wealthiest man in the world. I think for he likes to joke for about 20 nanoseconds when the SoftBank stock was higher than Microsoft. Somewhere in that period, he lost 90% of his net worth and has since recovered it all. So what does all that mean? I've looked around and I've seen very, very successful people who I admire fail big time. And then as you get older, you realize what is the worst thing that can happen if you fail professionally? Honestly speaking, as you get older, that becomes less and less and less. So I think that's helped me a lot as I've gotten into my career.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  And I've never looked to be the CEO of ARM. And I think my job as the CEO of ARM is I have one major job. The biggest job I have is to leave the company in a better place than I inherited it. If I do that, I will have been successful. And I don't really have so many insecurities anymore as much as I just want to make sure that I'm as successful as I can be. So it's a long way of saying, I think that the fear of failing for me was there earlier, but over time that fades and fades away.

• 27:06Harry Stebbings?

  I always find CEOship quite a lonely prospect in many ways. Do you have people to talk to, whether it be a CEO coach, whether it be mentors? How do you think about that?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  I've had a bunch of them. And one that was very valuable to me was a gentleman, my name is Matthew Key. Hopefully he's listening. Matthew was the head of O2 UK and then O2 Europe and then Telefonica. And I got interested in Matthew when I took over my role leaving our IP products group a number of years ago. It was amazing in just spending time with Matthew. He helped me with that I just intuitively didn't understand or get. So for example, when you're leading 5,000 people, there is no way you'll ever be able to talk to someone individually, you'll be able to reach every single person. So how do you reach out to people in an indirect way? And he gave me so many anecdotes in terms of when you do all hands, when you do town halls, to reach out and connect to people.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And to be sure that you are able to do that in such a way that not only you get your message out, but they can help you amplify that message. That was just an amazing learning to me.

• 28:10Harry Stebbings?

  Effectively, because I spoke to Joyce before the show and she said this is one of your superpowers, you're world-class with it. How do you make everyone feel like they know you? And what does that truly great effective communication at scale mean?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  I really do enjoy meeting new people and I remember very early in my career when I was a young engineer and I was always would love to meet senior leaders. So now when I, when I do all hands or offsites, it's crazier. The amount of engineers that want to take selfies with me is kind of amazing and embarrassing. But what I try to do, for example, when they take the photograph, I just don't take the photograph. I ask them, what do you do? I try to get to know them a little bit. And A, because I'm genuinely curious, because it's such a learning experience for me. But what ends up happening is those folks will tell the story. I met the CEO and you know what? He or she was a normal person and cared about me. It was something that I knew was important to do, but

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Matthew had really advised me that he'll get such huge, huge benefit of doing that. So gosh, when I, and our team jokes about it, that my god, the amount of selfies that people take with you, and maybe I feel like Santa Claus sometimes, but I love doing it, but I also, as much as when the camera's away, talking to them, understanding more about them, back to helping kind of learn at scale, there's a big benefit to that because people like to share stories.

• 29:26Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to ask one final one for a quick fire. People often say that it never gets easier over time. I think personally that's bullshit. I would love to hear, in terms of CEO ship, what gets easier over time and what gets harder over time?

• 29:39Speaker 02

  So I consider myself to be always in a learning mode. I was talking to our CHRO, Kirsty Gill, and she knew I was kind of doing this session. And one of the things I always get asked about a lot is, what's your leadership style? And I was thinking to myself, I can tell people what I think it is, but it's probably more important for other people to describe what it is as opposed to me. So one of the things I asked her was, well, how do you describe it? And we got into a conversation. One of the things she said was, you take feedback really, really well, and not all CEOs do. So to your point of your question about what gets easier with it's harder, I think I'm a constant work in progress. I think the CEO job is all about constantly evolving and learning and adapting, particularly in the tech space, because the world

• 30:19Speaker 02

  is moving so fast that if you're not adaptable, I don't know how you can actually survive and be successful long term.

• 30:26Harry Stebbings?

  Can we move into a quick fire, Hans? I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 30:32Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so what's the favourite book and why? We met through Tony's build, but what's the favourite book and why?

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Full disclosure, I am a, I am a voracious reader and I read four or five books at a time. Don't always finish them and they're always kind of in flow. So I don't know that I have a favourite book. I'm going back through Tony's book, Build. I'm reading CEO Excellence, which was given to me by Lit Bhutan, which is great. I'm reading a book called On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors. So this is the Jean Delorean story. You can learn from the past in terms of big mistakes that, that General Motors made. So those are the three books that I'm reading right now.

• 31:06Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think your biggest strength is? And what do you think your biggest weakness is?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  I like to think for a CEO, I think I'm a, I'm a pretty normal guy. I do pretty normal things. I've got a pretty normal life. That helps me in terms of being grounded. I go back to the question of speed and making decisions. I still think I was faster. Almost every decision that I look back that I made, that I delayed on, I will look back and say, I shouldn't have made this sooner. I knew the answer and I should have just done it. So I'm a work in progress on that. I've gotten a lot better on it, but I wish I was faster.

• 31:36Harry Stebbings?

  What do you know now that you wish you'd known five months ago when you started as CEO?

• 31:41Speaker 02

  I wish I had an appreciation for how the speed, the job was going to accelerate so much. All these things that kind of get thrown at you in a CEO role, suddenly everything kind of goes to you that didn't go before. And Simon and I, Simon was my predecessor and we talked a lot about it. And I didn't have an appreciation for just, if I used a baseball vernacular, how many fastballs would come at you? I wish I knew that a little bit more when I started. Would it have changed anything at this point in time? Probably not. But it would have been nice to know that, hey, you're going up to level nine in the video game and you better up your game here because it's moving a lot faster now.

• 32:14Harry Stebbings?

  How many direct reports do you have? Any big lessons in managing them effectively?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  It's an interesting question. I'm not exactly sure of the number. It's probably eight or nine. I am a bit of a non-conformist when it comes to a rule that says you have to have five direct reports, you have to have nine direct. You can have no more than seven because span of control. I think a lot of that just comes down to the talent of your people and where do you? Want to spend your time and energy. So I think I've got nine or 10 right now, which probably CEO math says that's a bit too many. And again, I remember at Nvidia and other companies, particularly Nvidia Jensen had lots of them. And I've worked in companies where the CEO only has a few. So I don't describe by a number. I describe by what feels right to me in terms of what's making an impact and the level of talent of the people involved.

• 32:59Harry Stebbings?

  What's the hardest element of your role with ARM today?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  People really, really watch what I say. People really, really watch what I do and people read a lot into my words. And people will come back and say, I did that because Renee asked me to. And there's a part of me that thinks, why don't you just not do it if it wasn't a good idea? But then I think back, well, I'm the CEO and if I'm going to ask somebody to do something. When I was working for a CEO and the CEO asked me to do something, I pretty much did it. I think the hardest thing that I had to adapt to is just what I say, what I do really impacts a lot of people. The job itself is massively complex, whether it's the IPO, whether it's customers, whether it's roadmap. But those are all things that I've been trained to do. The new part is everybody's watching you, every single person watching you in terms of when you get on a Zoom call

• 33:44Speaker 02

  and you're kind of frowning, is it because something's wrong with project, is the IPO delayed? No, actually it's because the Roku box that I tried to boot up didn't work. That's why I'm frowning. So it's things like that.

• 33:55Harry Stebbings?

  I totally get you. The weight of words and recognizing that I think is the biggest thing I see CEOs that I work with struggle. What three traits would you most like your children to adopt?

• 34:03Speaker 02

  I think it would be curiosity, resiliency and generosity.

• 34:07Harry Stebbings?

  What's been your biggest lesson on effective parenting? Tough one, but penultimate one.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  That's a hard job. It's a really, really hard job in terms of how to be a great parent. And it's really the balance between, I think it's tough love. What is the definition of success? If you raise children that are kind, generous, resilient, strong members of their community, respected by others. And people say, I've met your kids and they're great people. That's success. When you're raising them, how do you find the balance of being tough on them relative to finding their way? But not being too tough on them because they're your kids. It's when they cry, when they fail, when they're frustrated, you really feel it and you want to help them. First instinct is they fell down, I want to help them get up and I want to help them on their way. But sometimes helping them get up and get them on their way with no impediments doesn't really help them

• 34:56Speaker 02

  learn in the long game. So I think it's finding that balance.

• 34:59Harry Stebbings?

  One of my mentors, who's a seventy five year old like private equity billionaire, said to me the other day, you know how I know when I've been a good father? It's when I have well behaved grandchildren. And I said, ah, that's good. Um, okay, Rene, final one for you. What do the next five years hold for you and for ARM? If we sit here in twenty twenty seven, my word, you'll still be a spring shaking, I will have aged, but where will we be?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Back to the dialogue we were having earlier about looking around corners and looking around in terms of what the future brings. I think we are entering a golden era for ARM. And I think the pandemic accelerated this a little bit, but the digitization of everything has really fostered immense opportunity, whether it's around phones, PCs, the cloud, autonomous vehicles. And I think when you layer onto that, everything going on with sustainability and climate change, and the things that ARM is really good at, which is around energy efficiency and ecosystem. We have an unbelievable amount of opportunity. So five years from now, and there's been a lot of articles about ARM being the most important technology company you've never heard of. I hope five years from now, a lot more people have heard of us.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  But I do think we're going to be in some very, very important places. And I think the world is setting up for that in terms of everything that's going on. I think the next five to ten years are going to be just amazing.

• 36:14Harry Stebbings?

  Rene, I'm so grateful to Tony for Bill because we wouldn't have had this conversation without it. Thank you so much for joining me today and I've absolutely loved it.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 36:25Harry Stebbings?

  I want to say a huge thank you to Rene for coming on the show today. Such a fantastic discussion there and such exciting times ahead for ARM. As always, I so appreciate all your support for the show. But before we leave you today, I want to talk about an incredible tool that I use every single day, Notion. Now, I am the worst for having fifty tabs open and constantly hopping between an endless array of tools. Do you feel me? Are you with me? Well, then Notion came into my life, providing one tool to do it all, with everything from seamless project management to easily organizing twenty VCs company information. A fascinating stand on Notion.

• 36:56Harry Stebbings?

  Notion usage, more than 70% of companies who start using Notion stop using two plus other tools. And so Notion can even save you money, given how many other tools it can displace. Notion has a worldwide network of millions of users, creating templates, tutorials and new inspiration. The product's getting better and better every single day, and you always have the support you need. Learn more and get started for free at notion.soh. Take the first step toward an organized, happy team today, again at notion.soh. And speaking of foundational infrastructure like Notion there, AngelList has been a key partner for me in managing my investments. I just love using the AngelList platform because it abstracts away all the complexity and operational burden of fund management.

• 37:37Harry Stebbings?

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• 38:21Harry Stebbings?

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• 38:59Harry Stebbings?

  As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you an incredible set of episodes next week.