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[Treehouse Friends]    [Pasan Premaratne] Hey, Josh, thanks for being with us today. 

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[Treehouse Friends]  [Josh Elman] Thanks. Great to be here. >>For people who don't know you, 

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tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what you've done in the past. 

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[Elman] I joined Greylock about a year ago as an investor looking for 

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the next great companies that we'd like to get involved in. 

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Greylock has been involved in companies like Facebook and LinkedIn

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and Pandora and Airbnb, so these really big, iconic consumer companies. 

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Before I joined Greylock, I spent the last 15 years building a lot of products

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and really working, hands deep, as both an engineer and as a product manager

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on companies like RealPlayer, LinkedIn, Zazzle, Facebook. 

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Facebook Connect was a product I worked very closely on, and then Twitter. 

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And I've just had a lot of fun thinking about these products in the very early days, 

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and how they could really scale, and how could we get these products 

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in the hands of millions and millions of users. 

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By the luck of a lot of the stuff I've been able to work on 

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and the people I've been able to work with, 

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I think Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter have really realized 

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some of the dreams of when I joined those companies. 

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[Premaratne] How was it like working at those places?

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Let's talk about each one, like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn, Zazzle. 

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How was it like working there? 

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[Elman] They were all at pretty different stages, and it was fascinating. 

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I joined LinkedIn when it was 15 people, and Reid Hoffman had this idea

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that if we connect all professionals in the world, 

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we'll be able to create new opportunities for them: professional opportunities, 

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business opportunities, sales opportunities, because instead of 

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needing to find out who somebody knew, to go through everybody's Rolodex

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to find a connection, you'd all of a sudden be able to use this search engine, 

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this network, to find those access points immediately. 

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And then still be able to use your relationships in order to access them. 

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At the early days, we had this really hard problem where nobody would want to sign up for it. 

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They were like, I don't want to put my resume online. 

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I don't know that I want to join this network that makes it look like I'm looking for a job. 

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Because in the past, the only reason you'd ever have your work history online

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was if you were applying to Monster or CareerBuilder to look for a job. 

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But Reid really had this vision that said, once the resumes are online, 

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or their professional profiles were online, the world will look very different.

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And so we spent a lot of time at the company really working through, 

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how do you tweak the product on a daily basis?

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And to engage more people, and to invite more people to the network

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to understand the value of the PR and marketing side. 

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How do you make sure the people understand this isn't just a job site?

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One of the key things we did when we launched our jobs product

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wasn't just to try to launch a big business around job listings and job recruitment, 

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but to show job listings and job recruitment were a subcomponent of the website. 

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There were many more things you could do with your professional network. 

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So lots of crazy challenges in the early days. 

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[Premaratne] And that was at LinkedIn? >>That was at LinkedIn. >>So LinkedIn came before 

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Facebook and Twitter, or--? >>Yeah. So LinkedIn, I was in the creative team,

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and then I left LinkedIn for Zazzle. I joined, again, when it was like 20 people, and it was this vision. 

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If you don't know what Zazzle is, it's this on-demand marketplace for products. 

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You can design shirts and posters and mugs and mousepads

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and iPhone cases with any image that you have, 

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and you can get the product made to order. 

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Zazzle makes it within 24 hours and then ships it out. 

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And the idea is, anybody who is a designer can put a storefront up just with their artwork, 

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and anyone can come buy any of those products without even having to

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have made inventory or purchases in the past. 

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And then you make money for royalties off of your own artwork. 

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And when I joined it was kind of the future of eCommerce. Imagine every store

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instead of just having the 50 things or the 500 items that they have

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in the store right now, you take any content on any product

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and customize it for shirts, any one of the 30 or 40 shirt styles. 

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And when I joined Zazzle, again, it was 20 people and it had this dream

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and it had this challenge of, how do we create a marketplace that makes it work?

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How do we acquire more users using both SCO and advertising and social tools?

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How do we get our sellers more empowered to spread it through their networks?

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And so we spent all of our time iterating on the product

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to make the experience better, to make these virtual products 

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feel more real before you made a purchase, until it really got working.

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And now they're growing really, really fast as a company. 

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[Premaratne] Yeah, I believe we've used them at Treehouse. >>Oh, awesome. 

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[Premaratne] Yeah. We got a puzzle made, right? >>Very cool. 

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[Premaratne] So what next? What happened after Zazzle?

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[Elman] So I'd been at Zazzle for a couple years, 

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and personally was working really hard, almost too hard, 

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and kind of straining my family relationships, which I think is--

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I've learned a lot about how to balance that. 

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And I thought, I've had this great run. 

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I think Zazzle's going to be a great company, but I want to to take on 

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another challenge in my career, and a bunch of my friends had recently joined Facebook

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and were encouraging me to come work with them there. 

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And when I went to meet Facebook, this was early 2008. 

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It had this really interesting phenomenon, which is, the world

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had heard of Facebook and thought it might be interesting.

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It was up to maybe 70 million users by that point. 

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There was this platform that you could build these applications and games on 

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that were spreading and really, really spammy. 

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But it still wasn't clear if Facebook was this fundamental thing in the world

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that people were going to use every day and rely on and connect everybody, 

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and the developers were going to rely on as a core way to build their applications. 

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And I thought getting to work on that problem, if you're going to make this platform 

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really fundamental for every website and application, 

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would be a really great problem to go solve. 

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And so when I joined them, we worked on the platform team, 

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and really, a lot of what we did was work with all the developers and what they were building, 

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and connected that back with the product and engineering team

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that were trying to iterate on Facebook's product and platform

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to make sure that we were serving users better, 

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and we were enabling developers to serve users better. 

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Through one of these initiatives, we realized that a lot of these developers

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were building within Facebook, and these things felt a little bit spammy and a little bit messy. 

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And we really wanted to step back to, what are the core principles?

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What do you, as a developer and a user, really want from these other applications?

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You want to be able to sign in without having to create a new account. 

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Because once you're on Facebook and have your profile, 

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you don't need to recreate all this information and tell it 

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your email address and how old you are and all those other things. 

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You want to be able to find your friends without having to go 

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and invite all your friends to a new game. 

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If your friends are already using this thing, you should just connect with them immediately. 

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You want to share what you're doing back with your friends. 

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We realized these core principles of identity, friends, and the feed and sharing

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really made these core principles that will apply to any website or any application. 

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And we started looking outside Facebook, and said, 

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how do we get websites like CNN or Amazon or Yelp to integrate these same principles?

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So we started a program called Facebook Connect that I ended up leading the launch for. 

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We decided to work with lots of major third-party developers

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for how we can actually get them thinking about this identity

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login, friends, and social graphs and social features and sharing, 

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which I share back to Facebook, but it also brings traffic back to my site, 

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really get that to become a real mainstream thing. 

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And I think we found a lot of early partners

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who were interested to go deep and really try to make those things work. 

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I think we had a lot of successes: Huffington Post is one, a social news site,

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or is a new site that is now known as a social news site

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because they really embraced Facebook and built a lot of these key integrations. 

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That was a really great partner to prototype a lot of the things that now seem just commonplace. 

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I mean, how many websites or applications do you go to that don't have a Facebook button?

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You're like--now you're missing it. 

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But we had to figure out, when we launched our program, nobody had it

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and we had to work through all the interesting things to get the ball rolling. 

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[Premaratne] And then, what happened after Facebook? Why did you leave?

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Again, to move on to the next challenge? 

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[Elman] Yeah. I think I have a little bit of ADD in my career, 

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where I've loved getting involved with these things and getting them 

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started and getting them to start working. 

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But once I feel like something is really working, my radar goes off

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and I'm like, okay, what's the next challenge that I can go tackle?

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And one of the things that I've loved doing in my career is 

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what I call being in product management. 

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Which is really being very close with product development

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and the engineering team, building great new features

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and the day-to-day cycle of doing that. 

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And at Facebook, I found my role was a little bit more

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working with this marketplace of developers, 

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but not really my own core products that I was iterating on a daily basis. 

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And so I'd gotten to know the folks at Twitter at the time, 

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and they--I thought it was just really phenomenal, 

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and I found myself using this product more and more everyday, 

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and said, I'm really happy at Facebook, but if I could ever

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go work on one other product, it would be Twitter, 

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because I think--I can see why I want to use it every day, 

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and many times a day. I can see why, I think, hundreds of millions 

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of people around the world should want to use it, too. 

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So I'd gotten to know that team over 2009, 

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and by fall of 2009 got an opportunity to go join them. 

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And at Twitter we had this fascinating problem. 

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Tons of people had heard of Twitter and had heard Twitter existed, 

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and the media is talking about it and celebrities are talking about it. 

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People are tweeting, but they didn't really know why it would be meaningful to them. 

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And so they asked me to start up a small team there, 

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we called it onboarding and now it's called user growth, 

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where we really tried, step by step, to figure out, how do we help people

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when they sign up for Twitter to get more engaged, 

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to start using the network in a meaningful way, to build

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a daily habit for how they want to use Twitter?

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And over time, I think the phenomenon's growing. 

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I think there's still plenty of people who don't get Twitter, 

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but they've announce numbers that are much, much higher than the early days. 

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So I think we're just starting to see Twitter really coming to fruition. 

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This week there was a seminal moment around the NFL

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that tons of people were tweeting about their reaction to the NFL replacement refs, 

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and if you're watching this video a long time in the future, 

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this may no longer be relevant, but that was, again, another seminal moment

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where the public conversation on Twitter has just become such a phenomenon. 

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[Premaratne] Right. It's very commonplace now. >>Yeah. 

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[Premaratne] So why the change to investing?

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You've been a product guy for so long. >>Yeah. 

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[Premaratne] Why did you jump over? 

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[Elman] A lot of people ask me that, and when I look back at my career

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and I think about investing, I think they are actually very similar. 

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The goal of investing is find great companies that you think can be 

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fundamental, iconic behaviors, companies, brands in the future,

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get involved with them early, do things both financially

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to give the company money, but also time and energy

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and resources and connections to help a company really get to that scale. 

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If I look at my career, I've been really lucky multiple times

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to find a company in the early days that I thought could really be

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one of those long-term, interesting companies, and be involved, 

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and thought, maybe investing is actually a way to take some of those lessons

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instead of going to find one more company to do it, 

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then maybe one more company and one more company with my own

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ADD or other things going on. 

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From investing, I actually have a platform

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where you get to do multiple at once, 

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and you have a little bit more leverage to do the same thing. 

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But my main objective is still the same.

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Find things that can become really important, big companies in the future

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and be a part of helping them grow. 

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[Premaratne] How do you find these new things? Is it the team, or do you look at the idea?

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[Elman] It's a great question, and the answer is always all of the above, and many more. 

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I think there's 3 or 4 key things that you look for

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when you're looking for an opportunity. 

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The first is a vision for this future that you think you can create

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and build a profitable company around. 

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At Facebook it was, we think we can connect everybody in the world

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and they'll share things and all of a sudden it's going to become more 

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connected and they'll be using this to communicate and interact every day. 

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And if we do that, we'll be able to monetize in a variety of ways. 

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At LinkedIn it was, we think we can connect all these professionals

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to open them up to all these new opportunities, 

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and if we do so, there will be some sets of people who will pay for it.

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In the case of LinkedIn, it's sales and recruiting and a few other business lines. 

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And so you look for somebody who has this vision of what a future can look like, 

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and then you look for, do they have the team and the capabilities to go and do it?

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Do they have some unique insights that really help them along the way?

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And it doesn't necessarily matter what they've done in the past

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as much as all the things they've done in the past set them up 

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to have really unique insights along how they're going to go make that future.

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And you look for some wedge, where they say, hey, 

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this future seems really great way out here, 

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but the only way I'm going to get there is if I get to this little proof point first. 

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And if I can get to this proof point, it makes me more confident 

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I'm going to get closer to that future, and then I get to this proof point. 

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And so we really look for people who both have that vision 

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but understand the tactical step-by-step way. 

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They just want to keep proving it to themselves more and more that they can get to their big idea. 

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[Premaratne] So as an investor, do founders have to have revolutionary ideas, 

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or is it the execution of a normal idea that gets to the next big thing?

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[Elman] You know, it's--again, it's a tricky question to answer, 

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because it's not revolutionary or evolutionary. 

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It's always a combination. I don't think anybody looked at the first day 

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of Twitter and said, "That's a revolutionary idea." 

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It felt like a toy; it felt like this silly little thing that you can send messages back and forth. 

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But I think what the best founders do have

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is a deep understanding of behavior

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on the consumer side, a deep understanding of behavior

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and the way in which that behavior will manifest more and more

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through the way that people will start acting differently 

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and communicate differently or think differently in the world. 

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And it's often the simplest little gestures, 

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the simplest little ways in which people will communicate a little bit differently 

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or do things with a slightly different nuance that ends up cascading

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into these really phenomenal, revolutionary changes. 

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It's not, robots are going to be the future and I'm going to go invent  the future of robots, 

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but it's, hey, what if we all started--what if we had our networks together

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so that if I needed to figure out who you know, 

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I can search for it instead of having to ask you?

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It's a pretty simple idea turned out to be revolutionary, in the form of LinkedIn. 

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[Premaratne] Okay, so as an investor, what do you look for 

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that you think other investors may miss? 

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[Elman] You know, I think one of the things I've gotten to see

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and experience from the products I've worked on, 

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and I think some of my instincts that led me into joining those companies 

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is understanding that wedge and that path

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to get from this simple gesture, these simple ideas, 

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to this big revolutionary changing behavior. 

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I think understanding how to both create those step-by-step approaches

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and how to look at data and read the data 

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to give you some signal on what's working and what's not

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are 2 things that I've built a lot of experience and instinct around, 

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and so when I'm meeting founders and drilling the details on those, 

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I hope that I can see some of those same instincts and insights 

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reflected back from the founder, because it's not that I can join the company 

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and help them through all of that. 

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We're really looking for the founders to have those insights to guide a whole company around it.

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[Premaratne] Right. So you've been a product guy in the past. 

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You've mentioned all the places you've worked at. 

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So 2 questions with that: do you think founders should be able to code?

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Well, let's tackle that question first. Do you think founders should be able to code?

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[Elman] I don't think the answer is yes, that a founder needs to code, 

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needs to write the product, needs to be the best writer of their product in order to succeed. 

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But I think the founder needs to have a fundamental understanding

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and respect and partnership around what it takes to build technology 

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to actually be successful at all. 

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I think there's plenty of people who have founded companies--

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Reid didn't write any of the code for LinkedIn, for example, 

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but Reid was very clearly somebody who deeply understood the art 

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of software development and the process of making software,

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and when he was given questions and challenges around how the database

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needs to work or the node graph needs to work, 

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was deeply involved in those conversations. 

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I personally haven't written code in 8 or 9 years now on a daily, active basis, 

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but I still, having done that prior in my career, 

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have been able to work with great engineers to build really successful products

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because I'm able to have that real exchange and respect for what they do.

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[Premaratne] Right. And understanding. Okay, so secondly, 

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do you take that product--what kind of role do you take with companies

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and startups and founders that you've worked with?

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Does your product experience translate into direct mentor roles?

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[Elman] As investors, the first thing we fully understand

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is that the company is the founder's company >>Right. >>And they're building

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this product and this company to their vision, and we're backing them to do that. 

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We're getting involved to do that. 

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I think, having gotten to work at these companies, I can understand the difference

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of saying, here's what you should do or here's what I think 

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you need to do versus, I can tell stories and frame conversations

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in the ways that we had to face similar problems and how we got to similar conclusions. 

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So I think a lot of what I try to do is give them context 

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and help them through frameworks for their decisions, 

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and push the founders on decisions that they're making 

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and why, and give them suggestions, 

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but fully expecting them to really take the onus of making and driving those key decisions. 

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And by offering that up, I think that's experience that they can tap

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anytime that you try to be there when they're wanting to chat at 11 p.m, 

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or needing a full day deep dive on metrics and growth or whatever they would need. 

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[Premaratne] Okay. Now, how do you think entrepreneurs should deal with failure?

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Well, first, when you meet a founder for the first time 

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and they're pitching an idea to you, do you see past failures as 

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battle scars that they've learned lessons from?

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Or is it that they don't have a proven track record because of that? How do you view it?

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[Elman] That's a really good question. 

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I think--I don't think failure is battle scars. 

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I don't think failure is "no proven record," either. 

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I think the key is, how do you, for this opportunity that you're facing now, 

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put all the things you've done in context to help you know why this is the inevitable idea

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and why you think you're going to be able to make this company 

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and this idea work right now? 

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I think when a lot of people say "Oh, my idea was great but the timing was wrong,"

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I think that's an excuse, because I think you weren't looking 

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at the time and the way the world worked today, 

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and building things to create the wedges in the step-by-step path

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to get you through that, and anybody who had any brilliant idea pre or post, 

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it's all about, can you harness the things that are going on right now

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to make something become much bigger? 

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But I think the people who have really healthy reflections on that

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and the people who continue to approach everything in the best way possible

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and understand when to pull the plug because they say, hey, 

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my assumptions are starting to fail here. 

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I'm not actually proving what I thought I could prove. 

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I think it is time to go in a different direction. 

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I think that's a really healthy, very, very positive learning process. 

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[Premaratne] Okay. Now, how should someone approach an investor or VC?

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You can either use your experience or just give a general--how to find someone. 

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[Elman] I think the first thing is to know which kind of investors

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you're approaching for which stage of your idea that you're at. 

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I think every investor, just like every company has a business model, 

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every investor has a business model. 

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And larger venture capitals fund business models to back products 

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that are growing in attraction and to help them become

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these really long-term sustainable companies.

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Early-stage and seed investors often like to help guys with an idea,

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get their first product out the door to see if it can actually 

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test some of the assumptions of their idea to see if it can work. 

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And there's different interplay in the stage and the level 

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and the amount of the investment for all of those things. 

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So the first is, understand what stage you're at and which type of investor you want. 

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The second thing is, the best way to get introduced to an investor

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is always to get a referred and trusted introduction. 

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And that's never super easy to figure out, but it's starting with your network 

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and saying which friends do you know that know this investor. 

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If you're new to a community with investors, and you know there are these programs 

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that--these accelerator programs can do great jobs of helping you to get--

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join a new community, get into a network, start meeting a lot of other 

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entrepreneurs who are figuring out which investors they know, 

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and there's always the--try to find any common ground with an investor that you can. 

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When I first approached LinkedIn, I actually didn't know any of the people at LinkedIn. 

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But I had done the same program at Stanford that Reid Hoffman had done.

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So I sent a cold note saying I've just moved back to the Bay Area

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from 6 years in Seattle, and I would love to meet you and talk about what you're doing with LinkedIn.

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I think it's the future, and I did the same program as you a few years later at Stanford.

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And something I put in the note at least made him blink and say, okay,

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there's a little bit of common ground here. 

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I like people who did the same program, maybe I'll meet this guy. 

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[Premaratne] Right. Okay. Now, do you think VC funding is always necessary?

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Well, first, before that, going back to the previous question, 

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once a founder finds you, 

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what's the best way to get the idea across? 

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Do you still believe in using business models

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and an executive summary and a business plan, all that stuff?

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[Elman] I think I talked about, at the beginning, 

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the biggest way to get this across is you have to be able to tell a great story. 

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You have to be able to tell a story of why right now, the timing in the world is set up 

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for you and this team to go build this company that's going to create this kind of change in the world. 

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And that's for a venture-backed, multi-billion dollar company

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that you want to go create out of this thing. 

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You have to be able to tell a story. There are many ways to tell a story. 

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You can tell a story in a 1-page document.

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You can tell a story in a 30-second video.

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You can tell a story in a slide deck. I often see a slide deck as one of the great ways to frame a story. 

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For people who are really good at it, you can frame a really good story. 

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And the other thing is, the more you've already built and the more product 

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you have for people to play with and understand the key gestures 

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and the things that you're basing your assumptions on is really, really good. 

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Especially for the stage that Greylock is at, I tend to look for people who have products 

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that already exist that I can play with. 

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[Premaratne] Okay, now, moving on, do you think VC funding is always necessary?

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Should companies--you know, there's some people who start

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and work on the idea with the explicit goal of getting funding and then exiting. 

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Do you think funding is always necessary?

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[Elman] I think funding is a great tool, and venture capital 

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and the kind of people who do venture capital are great partners

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to help early-stage people build companies that can become, potentially, 

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these sustainable multi-billion dollar iconic companies and brands.

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Things like Airbnb and Dropbox and Tumblr and LinkedIn and Facebook

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and the kinds of stuff that Greylock's gotten involved with, in particular. 

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Those are all consumer companies. We also have a huge 

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set of companies on the enterprise side that we're involved with, 

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like Workday and Palo Alto Networks. 

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And if you're trying to build a company like that, that causes change in the world, 

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venture capital can be an amazing tool. 

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But it's not the right tool for everybody. 

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It's not the right tool for every business. There are many phenomenal businesses

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that aren't going to become multi-hundred-million dollar, billion dollar revenue

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companies and go public on the stock exchange, 

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even in their wildest dreams of what they could possibly be,

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that are still great companies, but those companies, venture capital

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might not be the right tool for them, because it might set you up with different expectations. 

410
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Because venture capitalists back companies they believe have potential to become one of those. 

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[Premaratne] Okay, and to wrap it up, what advice do you have to future entrepreneurs out there?

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[Elman] The best advice is find something you're really passionate about. 

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Not what you think is an objective potential way to make money, 

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but that you're really passionate about wanting to see in the world

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and you really believe if you can make that thing happen in the world,

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a lot of other people will be excited about it and will want to use your products,

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want to pay you for your products, or advertisers will pay you 

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because your product is getting so much usage. 

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But just, really, find something that you want to see in the world

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and go make that thing happen in the world. 

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If you try to be too rational and objective and-- 

422
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well, I think there's a hole here and I can go fill it but I'm not that passionate about it, 

423
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you're actually not as likely to succeed because you're not going to go to bed

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at night and wake up every morning thinking about it. 

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[Premaratne] Well, I think that's all we have for today, Josh, 

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thanks for taking the time to do this. >>Thanks, Pasan. >>Yeah. 

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[Treehouse Friends]