Doug Leone
speaker
164 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Doug Leone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I try to look for that for the simple reason that I view that to be the greatest advantage but could be the greatest weakness if not channeled appropriately. So one, I look for it to see if it's there, because I like to be it there. Then I look to see what it is and whether it's on the right side of this good versus bad trait.
And thirdly, because once we understand it and then that's the good side, then how do we channel it, complement, and make sure this incredibly wonderful, insecure, scared, because that's what we all are when we're coming up, how do we help them as if we were their brothers to achieve maximum type of success? So I'd dig for that. I just really want to understand what makes this person tick.
And to me, the greatest question is why? Why, why, why? When someone says I was recruited by, I hear I was lazy ass sitting down. I got a call from a recruit. I was nothing better to do. I got suckered into listening to something. I got sweet talked. Then I talked to a company that made me an offer. I wasn't too happy with my job or a little bored and I went.
To me, that's what I was recruited by sounds like. The converse of that, of course, is I was sitting on a job. I saw an opportunity in a market segment that I didn't know existed. I called seven or eight companies. I realized this is the leading company. I cold called the companies. I found a way to get a meeting. I sold my way in. I got an offer. I negotiated.
I took a job and I went, whoa, what an answer. So those are little things I look for when I interview people.
I want to know the upbringing. I want to know what kind of kids they were, their journey through life, their maturation through life. I'd love to ask... whether they have a sibling to describe three adjectives for their sibling, their close sibling, and three adjectives that describes them by comparison. I don't really care about the sibling, but you start learning things.
I love asking the setup question of... Where would you get your best reference? And they're eager to tell you that. Complete setup question. Because the next question is, where would you get your worst reference and why? And again, I'm not looking to nail anybody. We've all had journeys that are up and down. Very few of us have had a linear up journey.
But just understanding, looking for self-awareness. Because self-awareness means breaking problems down to first principles and meaning using your experience to solve a new problem. While we love best athletes, if we find best athletes with little of experience and first principle thinking, that's a home run. And we look for that.
I hate when they set me up for 30 minutes interview. I said, forget it. The first 30 minutes is all make-believe. Got to let people let their guard down. And then if you really want to understand someone, I think it probably takes two to three hours, including a dinner, when people do relax and start showing you things. And you want to see how people place orders.
And you want to see what things they say. I always like to put salt on my food. Well, that tells me you're high-wired and you're not open to new ideas. The old classic, how you treat a waiter or a waitress. Boy, that really drives me crazy. The questions asked, they start asking me, well, Doug, I'd like to ask about your journey. Why would you ever want to ask me? You're in a job interview.
You got to want to learn anything about the role, who you're going to be reporting to, what you're going to be doing every day. If you succeed, why will you succeed if you fail? But the last question's, Doug, let me understand about journey. That's a made-up question. Who cares? That's certainly a question I wouldn't ask somebody if I had 10, 15 minutes to ask about a new job.
So I think maybe the answer to your question is maybe one or two meetings and a dinner.
So I remember when I had my first job at Hewlett Packard, and two guys, they looked like they were 60 years old, maybe they were 40, and I was 22. They said, we'll split Manhattan into thirds, and you don't have to be in the median when we split. And, you know, as a naive young guy, oh, I'm going to get a third of Manhattan. Well, I got north of 96th Street in Manhattan.
North of 9th Street now is cool. Let me just tell you, North of 9th Street in 1979 was not cool. It was downright unsafe. And the formative part is that for me, I didn't give up. And you always ask yourself, how do you turn a negative into a positive? And I was lucky. You know, luck does play a little bit of a role. I was lucky that there was Columbia, the university up there.
And there was a head of computer science called Traub that just came from Carnegie Mellon. And he was big in open systems and Unix. And he drew me a graph of the ARPANET. I never knew what the ARPANET was, which was a predecessor of the internet. So a little negative turned into a little positive, and with a little bit of success.
And then joining Sun Microsystems, or in some ways was shooting ducks in a barrel. And just coming up with a business plan that we could be successful on Wall Street, one of the biggest market segments for Sun. It's all the trading stations. and breaking that market down, and learning to use the we pronoun.
Here's what being smart and not greedy, whenever I sold something and somebody helped, I insisted on commission splits and those things, and I understood management took an eye of that. Well, not only is this kid selling, But look, everybody loves it. It's taking care of other people. And next thing you know, they had an eye on me. And boy, I took note of that, right? Okay.
Ooh, that's how you do things. And the other thing is the mistakes that you make. when you're too aggressive, when you're too hardcore, and you say, boy, I don't want to do that. And the people that you meet, you meet two kind of people that teach you. The one that teach you what to do and the ones that teach you what not to do.
And the trick for me, I never understood when the father is an alcoholic or is an abuser and the son becomes an abuser because I have to tell you, I've had some tough rides, but I made a promise to myself that if I ever became someone, I would not do one to others as I was done to. I thought that was disgusting. I thought it was very upsetting.
And when you've come to Sequoia, when I was running it, I made sure everybody respected the people that feed us. You better put your plate away. You better say thank you and so on because it starts at the foundational layer. And if you do that right, then the culture starts being right. And if you share your winnings and if you just don't talk the talk, we are a team, we are this,
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