20 VC FF 032: Jeff Seibert on Lessons From Being Acquired By Twitter & Box and Now Leading Twitter's Consumer Product

Jeff Seibert is an experienced serial-entrepreneur and currently Senior Director of Product at Twitter. Previously, Seibert was the CEO of Crashlytics, which he co-founded in 2011 with Wayne Chang. Crashlytics delivered crash analysis tools for iOS and Android apps via an SDK that reached 300 Million mobile devices worldwide. Crashlytics was acquired by Twitter in 2013 for $259m. In 2007, Seibert co-founded Increo and served as its COO and lead architect until its acquisition by Box in August of 2009. He subsequently oversaw the integration of Increo’s document preview and annotation technologies into the company's cloud-based content platform. A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Jeff made his move into the wonderful world of tech? Today we are going to break up your story into 3 chapters: 1.) Acquisition by Box: What was it like going to Sand Hill Road to raise in 2009? How much runway would Jeff advise for a startup and how can companies know whether a strategic acquisition is optimal or whether they should continue building with a further round? Jeff has spoke before about being overly transparent with this team about the acquisition. What are the problems with being overly transparent and how can you balance the two? 2.) Acquired by Twitter: At what point did Jeff transition to thinking the acquisition by Twitter would be a beneficial and viable and why? A reason for Jeff being favourable to the acquisition was Twitter's agreement of continued investment in the space. How can founders negotiate and ensure that this occurs with their acquisition? One of the mistakes stated about the acquisition by Twitter was the reporting structure. How can founders ensure that they are speaking to the VPs of engineering, CEOs etc and attain the support they need? 3.) Life at Twitter: How life is following the acquisition? What are Jeff's plans for the future as Senior Director of Product at Twitter? Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Jeff' Fave Book: How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Jeff's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Daring Fireball As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jeff on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Now, my word, do I have a very special interview for you today. The 20-minute VC is always on the cutting edge of tech. And with that in mind, I'm sure many of you will have seen about the restructuring that happened at Twitter recently. Well, joining us today is an absolutely phenomenal entrepreneur and currently Senior Director of Product at Twitter, Jeff Seibert. Prior to his role at Twitter, Jeff was the co-founder, alongside Wayne Chang, of the crash analysis tool Crashlytics, which I believe is used on over a billion devices today, and they were ultimately acquired for $259 million by Twitter. However, his entrepreneurial success does not end there, as before Crashlytics, Jeff

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  was the founder of Incrao, which was Box's first-ever acquisition in 2009. Now, this is probably one of my favorite-ever interviews we've done, and it really is a sit-down-and-get-a-pen-and-paper interview with some real gold dust from Jeff here. And I'd like to say a huge thank you to my good friend Nico Bonassos at General Catalyst for making the intro to Jeff, without which this interview could not have happened. However, without further ado, ladies and gents, I'm so delighted to welcome Jeff Seibert, Senior Director of Product at Twitter.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 1:22Harry Stebbings?

  Jeff, welcome to the 20-minute VC. I'm super excited about this interview today. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  I'm happy to be here. Thank you, Eric.

• 1:30Harry Stebbings?

  Now, can you get the ball rolling today by telling us a little backstory about you and how you made your way into the world of tech?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yes, so it starts actually quite a while ago. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, which is not a bastion of computer technology. It's very much dominated by Hopkins. Everyone was a doctor growing up. It was like, oh, you should go be a doctor. And that just wasn't something that interested me. I was very into sort of science and nature, more so than technology, growing up. And in sixth grade, my parents, sort of out of the blue, gave me the book Mac Programming for Dummies. And I was never really into computers. I read the book, didn't fully understand it. In fact, I think it took me about six months to realize that I had to copy the files off of the CD in order to start modifying them.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  But when I finally figured that out, and it was it was just incredible from there. So I, of course, followed the Hello World example in the first chapter. But because this was Mac programming and because this was 1997 roughly, I think, this was the age of macOS 8. And it's entirely graphical. There's no command line interface. So Hello World was an actual double clickable app that opened a window, had an about box, had a menu bar. It looked like a real Mac app. And I changed the text to print Hello World in orange. And literally, I remember it vividly to this day. The moment that text turned orange, a light bulb went off in my head. And I thought to myself, oh, wow, I can make any piece of software that ever exists.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  And that was it. I don't know. I don't know what struck me. But literally from that day on, for the next 15 years of my life, I spent as much time coding as I possibly could, three to four plus hours a day. And just dove into it.

• 3:14Harry Stebbings?

  And then talk to me about Incrao and the origin story behind Incrao. How did that whole journey come about for you?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Incrao, yes. Finished up high school in Maryland, went out to Stanford for college. I, by that point, was very into computer science and software. And so coming out of Stanford, basically put a group of friends together to think about startups. Not with the explicit goal of starting a company, but with the goal of, hey, let's train ourselves to talk through business ideas, evaluate them, and just see like what we would want to do, what is interesting. And so we met up twice a week for two hours, debated all sorts of ideas. And every time we'd met, we'd come up with this thing that we're like, oh, man, this is fantastic. This is going to kill Google, because that was the stated goal. And we went back and so we'd be so excited.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  We'd go back to our dorm rooms, start doing a little more research and quickly realised that whatever we had come up with was perhaps the stupidest idea that had ever been articulated. Either it had already been done, or it was actually impossible, or we didn't have the skill set to do it, whatever it might be. And so we did this for a couple of months and got frustrated with sort of the, you know, the perfect idea, the game changing idea. And I think that was the first big lesson I learned, is not to sort of hold out for this perfect concept that's going to blow the world away. Very, very few businesses start out as this like mind blowing idea that no one's ever thought of. And so we decided, okay, let's just be a little more practical.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Why don't we build something to help people share and iterate and improve on their ideas? And so we started a company called Incraio. The name came from sort of the combination of innovation and creativity. And we were like, all right, let's do idea sharing, let's do document sharing, let's do feedback, let's try to help people collaborate online.

• 5:06Harry Stebbings?

  And if it's okay with you, in today's show, we're going to break down your journey into three chapters. The acquisition by Box, the acquisition by Twitter, and now life at Twitter. So let's start with the acquisition of Incraio. I know we've jumped a few steps and it's been the shortest journey ever in startup land. So, leading up to the acquisition by Box, what was it like going to Sand Hill Road to raise in 2009 with the obvious financial turmoil only the year before?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was fascinating. So of course, Sequoia had put out their R I P Good Times presentation and that definitely put a chill over the valley. And in the course of the spring of 2009, so we had to back up for a second, we had raised our seed round in early 2008. And so we had raised 500K. We believed that would last our small team about 18 months. So it was roughly the right amount for us to raise. And now as 2009 started, we had about six months to raise funding. And so, and that we thought, okay, this is great. We thought it would be more than enough time. Of course, we weren't anticipating the macroeconomic conditions. And so, over the course of the winter and spring of 2009, it became increasingly difficult to raise money.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  And many, many of the investors were pulling back from making any investments at all. And so, we were going up and down Sandhill. I think we met with something like thirty-four or thirty-six firms over the course of three months. It was just incredible. In retrospect, that's too many. I would have stopped sooner, knowing what I know now. But just talking with these firms, they were all taking meetings. They just weren't actually investing. And so, we would go in, do our pitch, get some good feedback, and then there would just never be any follow-up. Very, very few of them ever told us no. They just sort of stopped responding. And that got pretty frustrating because for each one, we thought, hey, look, oh, this one's going pretty well. They seem really engaged. And then it would just peter off.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  And so, it was really a fascinating time in the Valley and incredibly difficult to close any round, I think unless you had just tremendous revenue growth and numbers.

• 7:07Harry Stebbings?

  And you said there you had six months left to raise that funding. Do you think you possibly waited too long and left too little time? And so, you were put in a rather desperate position? Or was it more the fact that the macroeconomic conditions were extremely tough and there was no investment around at the time?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'd say we had the right amount of time to raise money, which was six months. And if you look on the data, the average round takes six to, four to six months to close. And so, we thought, hey, that would be all right. And this is a misconception. I mean, many founders, especially in boom times, believe, oh, I'll just go out, I'll do a meeting in two weeks, I'll have funding and I'm off and running. And even in very, very bubbly times, that's not quite the case. You should definitely plan on it taking a few months. Our mistake was that we allowed the six months for funding, but we didn't start thinking of other options until too late. And so, we had probably burned four of our six months before we realized that, hey, this funding thing

• 8:09Speaker 02

  didn't look like it was actually going to work out. And we needed to start thinking of alternative ways to make the company profitable. And that was our, that was our primary frame. So we decided, hey, okay, what if we accelerate charging? What if we strike a bunch of big partnership deals? We can power document preview. We could license our technology. Basically, you look at your company, look at the assets and try to figure out, hey, how can we actually string this together to improve, to basically give us a bunch more time to try to put a funding round together. And so with two months left in our runway, we started approaching companies for partnership conversations. And that's probably not enough time to close a big partnership deal. And so we were forced

• 8:51Speaker 02

  to rather quickly pivot those conversations more towards the acquisition side. And we're lucky to wind up doing the deal with Box right as our funding expired.

• 9:01Harry Stebbings?

  Would you say if you had more time, you would have had more leverage in terms of increasing the value of your company?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Completely, yes, because they were well aware that we had a very weak negotiation, negotiating position because of our runway. And so, yes, if we had maybe dual tracked it, if we had started in January and had a full six months to sort of side by side pursue funding and partnerships or acquisition, I think we would have been in a much stronger position.

• 9:27Harry Stebbings?

  And you said there that you were potentially overly transparent with your team about the acquisition. But in today's tech age, we're led to believe that transparency is always a great thing with the likes of Ben Horowitz, always proclaiming it. So what do you think the benefits are of being and then not being transparent? What's your take on this?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, transparency is a fascinating thing. And this is something I've spent quite a while thinking about because many people believe, oh, the healthiest company culture is full transparency and you should strive for as much as that as possible. I tend to think of this as, as one of the primary jobs as the CEO. We all know that doing a startup is this intense roller coaster and you have these crazy highs, you have these crazy lows. And the ideal is to actually moderate that somewhat. Like at the peak of your highs, you and your team are probably not as brilliant as everyone thinks you are. And of course, at the peak of your lows, you're, you're definitely not as stupid as everyone thinks you are. By putting the entire team through that cycle, it's a real stress, it's a real strain on product

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Because it's your job as the founder to absorb that and set your team up for success and allow them to focus on what's important. And it's the team's job to, of course, build the business. And so as we were going through this, we were very, very transparent with the team. Not only about the runway, which I think you should be transparent about, but exactly what the different options were and how they were going. And so we let the team go through every up and down that we as the founders did. And so, oh, this B C meeting went well. Oh, they haven't gotten back to us. Oh, this partnership discussion seems to be going well. Oh, wait, it might be an acquisition. And acquisitions are particularly stressful for teams, especially the the product and engineering teams, because they bring into tons of questions about what should we build?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  So should we keep to our current roadmap? Should we guess about what this potential acquirer acquirer might want? What if there are multiple multiple potential acquirers? Do we sort of hedge and build some of each? It brings in a lot of questions. And what we ultimately discovered is it results in paralysis. So for the two, two and a half months that we were going through these acquisition discussions, we built basically nothing. And I think in retrospect, it's your job as the founder to really dampen this roller coaster for your team so that they can remain productive and give your team a really set direction that they feel comfortable and confident executing on. And it's up to you. This is why you take the risk as the founder. You have to swallow

• 11:55Speaker 02

  all of these ups and downs and be a strong leader throughout.

• 11:59Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of communicating to your team, transparency is key, and a lot of your startup employees might have joined you instead of someone like Box.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 12:07Harry Stebbings?

  So how do you maintain a strong sense of communication with them and ensure they feel kept in the loop whilst maintaining this lack of transparency that we just said was beneficial?

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question, and that's very much the case. There's a clear reason why your team joined you, chose to follow you, and chose to join this smaller riskier company than going and getting hired by a bigger one. My belief on acquisitions and and I guess for that matter, exits of any kind, is that they are not about exiting. The entire point is to become more successful at your mission. And so the reason the Box acquisition wound up being quite successful for us is that we were able to stay true to our mission and we were able to show our team that we were staying true to the mission. And so we had been building this document preview technology. Box, of course, had millions upon millions of documents, but no way to show them. And so we could actually take what we had built,

• 13:01Speaker 02

  scale it overnight very broadly, and provide a lot more value to a lot more people in so doing. And so that was the main story you tell your team about how, hey, this actually furthers our mission. And for us to go and actually achieve this independently, we would have had to build a lot of what the acquirer, in this case Box, already had. And so this is simply accelerating our roadmap. This is saving years of our journey, and we're going to be far more successful because of it.

• 13:29Harry Stebbings?

  And jumping to another stage of your life now, we said we'd break it up into three, to the acquisition of Crashlytics by Twitter. So you founded Crashlytics, the wildly successful crash diagnostics mobile platform, and you were approached by Twitter for acquisition. So why did you sell when Crashlytics was going so gangbusters as it was and you had funding in the funnel? Why did you decide to sell? And then at what point did your mind transition to seeing the benefits of a potential acquisition by Twitter?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. And we had had a bunch of conversations with Twitter. They were already using Crashlytics. And so that's exactly right. When they approached us as an acquisition, we didn't understand the point. They were already using the product. Like, they were obviously a consumer product. It wasn't clear why a developer tool fit in perfectly. And what really changed our mind was in talking with their executive team, they had a deeply nuanced view of the mobile ecosystem. And in retrospect, that's not a surprise because Sitting is one of the largest apps on both platforms, gives you not only tons of data, but tons of connections, tons of people are approaching you, telling you things, et cetera. And so they had a really, really deep understanding of how mobile development was scaling, how they believed it would continue to scale over the next few years. And most importantly for us,

• 14:43Speaker 02

  how they viewed the mobile SDK market consolidating over that time. And what would become important? It was a combination of sort of the confidence gained by their deep understanding and their plan to succeed in that environment. And so they were willing to make Crashlytics free. They were willing to help us grow our team significantly so that we could build adjacent products, which we ultimately did and became a suite known as Fabric. And so the combination of like trusting their knowledge and seeing that their plan not only made sense, but was really our ideal pitch deck to the C's was like, hey, we need to become a suite of tools, just crash reporting isn't enough, gave us a lot of faith that this was a really, really strong move.

• 15:23Harry Stebbings?

  And as you suggest that, one of your reasons for being favorable towards the Twitter acquisition was their agreement to continually invest in the Crashlytics platform, something that didn't maybe happen within Creo and Box.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:36Harry Stebbings?

  So how do you think founders can negotiate for this continued investment in their product and sector when in potential acquisition negotiations?

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is really, really important. And the biggest lessons I've learned from Twitter, and to be clear, they are incredibly professional at doing acquisitions. Twitter on average acquires one to two companies a month they have for years. And so over the course of dozens of deals and dozens of experiences, they've really honed their process. And one of the key aspects is total transparency as to the motivations. And so it's really key for the long-term success of the deal for the acquiring company to be completely open about why they are doing it. Why is this strategically important to them? And how do they see that fitting into their future plans? And it's equally critical for the founders to be totally transparent on what they want out of it.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Like, why are they considering this deal and what's important to them? And you're right, our biggest lesson from Increo was was not being able to guarantee future investment in the technology. And so that was a big aspect of our discussions with Twitter. Like, was this strategically important to them? Were they willing to commit future headcount and that becomes part of the deal terms? It's like, yes, we will do this amount of investment over this many years. And were they willing to give us the support and visibility internally so that we don't become some sort of backwater? And one aspect of that is we had started Crashlytics in Boston. It was a great ecosystem for startup, but obviously being acquired by a larger company based in San Francisco, you probably want representation out there. And so as part of the deal, I agreed to move out here to headquarters.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  And so it's sort of a combination of being very, very transparent and open with each other and understanding their strategy as much as you can because ultimately the actions big companies take are guided by their corporate strategy. So the degree you can understand where they see that going, then you can make sort of your own determination of how much your company and team fit into that.

• 17:34Harry Stebbings?

  And being in Boston, how did you find the funding process for Crashlytics? Obviously a second time serial entrepreneur, but how was the funding journey for you the second time with Crashlytics?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, for Crashlytics, it was a very different story. Obviously, the economy had recovered somewhat. It was different macroeconomic conditions. But Boston was actually deeply supportive and deeply excited. We talked with quite a few firms there, had a lot of interest. Strategically, because we were in Boston, we wanted funding and investment from each coast. And so we went with a Boston firm, Flybridge, which led our investments. And I'm a huge fan, I'm a huge fan of Flybridge. And then we also took West Coast money so that we had support on both sides.

• 18:15Harry Stebbings?

  And Flybridge is Jeff Busgang, isn't it?

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Yes, it is.

• 18:19Harry Stebbings?

  Who actually suggested a question for you for today's interview. Jeff wanted to know, how did you select Wayne as your co-founder? He also wanted to let you know that you're a superstar.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Excellent. Yes. So I met Wayne at a Boston startup event. And one of the strengths of Boston is, as we all know, it's a smaller ecosystem than Silicon Valley, but it's very, very tight knit and deeply supportive. And so there are tons of startup events. You can go to more than one a night if you want to. But there's a few big ones year round that lots of people go to. And so we were at this startup dinner that a friend of mine had invited me to. Wayne happened to be there. We happened to be seated at the same table. And we just started talking about side projects. And this was right after I had come up with the idea for Crashlytics, started coding, it started getting a prototype working. And Wayne was telling me about his side project. I was telling him about Crashlytics. And

• 19:12Speaker 02

  we agreed to meet up in a few weeks and just grab a coffee and chat further. And what really struck me was, as I was talking about Crashlytics, Wayne had a really deep understanding of technology despite being more on the business side. He had done a bunch of tech stuff in the past, and an intuition for what mobile developers might want. And so as we were talking about it, he was like, hey, this is amazing. This is not a side project. This is a startup and I want to be involved. And I was skeptical. I was taken aback. I was like, okay, I mean, this is my side project. I'm working at Box. Like, what are you gonna do? And he told me, don't worry, I'm gonna get every mobile app interested in using this. And I was like, okay, whatever. That's a nice empty promise.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Sure enough, three weeks later, he came back to me out of the blue with a list of mobile apps, their lead and their interview notes. He'd talked to them. He'd gotten their feedback on the idea and their commitment to use a beta of it. And these weren't just random apps. These were like VP of Mobile, the Weather Channel. And so that really struck me and I was like, whoa, this is fascinating. This guy executes like crazy. Maybe we should be working together and maybe we should blow this up. And so we got very lucky. It was a fantastic partnership. I led the technology side. Wayne led our sort of sales, marketing, PR and distribution.

• 20:37Harry Stebbings?

  And obviously Crashlytics wildly successful and experienced some incredible growth under yours and Wayne's tutelage. But one of the problems that you did say that you encountered within the acquisition itself with Twitter was a breakdown of the reporting structure. So how can founders in a negotiation and in acquisition talks, how can they ensure that they're speaking to the VP of Engineering, the CTO, the people who are really making the decisions?

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this is also a super important aspect. And we thought we were set up for success here because we did come in and were reporting directly to the VP of Engineering. What we didn't anticipate as a startup was that large companies also go through periodic reorgs. Then, of course, during that, there's different priorities for the company. They maybe put you off in some other location because you're not their focus at the time. And so what I would have done in retrospect is sought some commitment to continue to report to that person for X period of time. I don't think it's fair or actually good to say, hey, I want to indefinitely report to this person. You want to move around as the company changes structure.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  But for us, it was very short term. It was sort of a month in that Twitter happened to do a reorg and we just got unlucky. And so I would have sought some sort of maybe six or nine month commitment to stay at that level so that we could really integrate into the company, understand what was going on, and then identify the best place to report into.

• 22:02Harry Stebbings?

  And I have to ask, with a fantastic team, a fantastic backstory, fantastic metrics, and funding to accompany you along this journey that you didn't maybe have within Creo, why did you decide to sell to Twitter at that point then? Was it the platform?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  It was, yes. So our goal, when we started Crashlytics, was to solve bugs in mobile because apps crash over a billion times a day and it's endlessly frustrating for people around the world. And so we were growing incredibly quickly. We were on hundreds of millions of devices at that point. We had tens of thousands of customers. Everything was fantastic. What Twitter offered the opportunity to do is to leverage their name, which we thought was critically important and would make us sort of the de facto standard in the space, and the ability to offer the product for free. And so rather than go the startup route and build out a sales team and build out a freemium product in an enterprise tier and have to end up doing enterprise sales ultimately in order to make the big accounts

• 23:01Speaker 02

  happen, we believed that, hey, this was the opportunity to make Crashlytics absolutely free for everyone and there would be zero reason for anyone not to use it. And so going back to our mission, our mission was to universally make bugs go away. And the best way to do that is to be in every app and to have total distribution. The best way to do that is to be free. And so as we looked at sort of our goals as a company, this was actually the perfect opportunity. And it's worked out. So today Crashlytics is installed on well, well over a billion devices. We're on substantially every active mobile device on earth. And it's just an incredible testament to that strategy.

• 23:41Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely, and an incredible congratulations on that phenomenal stat. You must be very proud. And I'd love to now dive into the third and final chapter of today's interview and discuss how life is now following the acquisition and what the plans are ahead for the Senior Director of Product at Twitter.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've had a really fantastic time at Twitter and one of the things that was really important to us was the culture. As you start looking at companies to potentially join forces with, I would put culture above anything else and Twitter really struck us. The people there are amazing. It's very chill and friendly, but also passionate and driven and fast-paced and constant change. And so we really enjoyed meeting everyone through the acquisition process and that's become the case ten times over, over the past three years. And so we actually, we're three years into the acquisition as of next week. Our team not only has tripled, but only one person has left in that time. So we have basically our entire team. We're having a blast. It's been fantastic.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  I spent the two years after the deal leading Twitter's developer platform. So all of our SDKs and APIs and through that it was fascinating to meet developers all over the world building on top of Twitter's services. And then this past summer, they asked me to move over and head up consumer product. And so I've spent the past six months leading the Twitter app, or Bluebird is what it's called internally. And we basically build Twitter on iOS, Android, the web and try to make it as great for people as possible.

• 25:13Harry Stebbings?

  And what are the plans for the future, Jeff?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  I can't share all the details. We have a great stuff coming up. Obviously, the rumor mills love nothing more than to speculate on what Twitter's up to, so that's been fun to see from the inside angle. But yeah, we're entering a period of some really, really fun changes and improvements to Twitter's product. And so I'm incredibly excited for the next few months.

• 25:38Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd love to dive into a quickfire round now with you. So your favorite blog or newsletter?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Ooh, Daring Fireball. I'm an Apple fanatic through and through.

• 25:47Harry Stebbings?

  Now, on this one, I'm sure there are many more to come, but what was the career highlight for you so far?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Honestly, it was actually returning to Stanford this fall and speaking. So while I was in school, I led this lecture series called Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders for three years as one of the student coordinators. And we would invite speakers and then meet them and take them to dinner. And being asked to return and present at the lecture series I had run was really, really meaningful. And so I just, I thought that was an incredible opportunity and it was amazing to see how it's changed but also hasn't changed. I recognized a number of people in the room, all the same professors are there. It was just a blast being back on campus.

• 26:27Harry Stebbings?

  Aqua hires, what are your thoughts?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Not a fan. They're pretty good from the larger company's perspective because you get a team for a relatively low price that you know works well together. And that you can't undervalue. From the startup side, I'm not a fan because I deeply believe in staying true to your mission. And in Aqua Hire, sort of by definition, you're joining for the talent you've built up, but not the product. And just, I mean, lives are short. Like, you're joining a company, you're expected to be there four years. Do you really want to do that through an acquisition? Or do you want to be honest and fail and go start something new?

• 27:05Harry Stebbings?

  I'm finishing on one of my favorites. Your favorite book and why?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Ah, that's a good one. I would actually say How to Win Friends and Influence People. I read it when I was relatively young, I think as a sophomore in college. And I was a programmer. I had no, I knew nothing about sales or marketing or anything like that. And just the authenticity of the book, the fact that it's, I mean, very, very old. It was written about the original J P Morgan and all these empire builders of America. But the authenticity it talks to in how sales isn't this sleazy thing. It's about honestly trying to solve people's problems. That was a really fascinating perspective for me to come to as an engineer.

• 27:45Harry Stebbings?

  Jeff, I'd like to say a huge thank you for giving up the time today to be on the show. It was absolutely amazing to hear your story. And I'm just so proud to have had you as a guest on the show. And for anyone who hasn't heard your speech at Stanford, check it out on the iTunes Podcast app. It's absolutely phenomenal.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Oh, it's been a total pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Harry. And it's great talking with you.

• 28:05Harry Stebbings?

  What a legend and again I'd like to say a huge thank you to Niko Bonatusus at General Catalyst for making this happen through his introduction, I'm so very grateful. And if you're loving the 20 Minute VC then don't forget to sign up for our newsletter on the site at the20minutvc.com, all in letters. And I'd love to hear your feedback on the show, so you can send me an email at [email protected], again, all in letters, and I respond to all emails and I would love to hear your thoughts on the show. Thank you so much as always for your continued support and I look so forward to bringing you next week's episode.