Patrick O'Shaughnessy

One of the most interesting investor questions, and I'm curious for your answer from the perspective of a builder and a technologist, is that the degree to which these horizontal model companies are going to destroy

or be very bad for old software companies, because over time it will be trivial to spin up your own Slack that has features that you want for your company.

And it's very reliable in all those same ways that Slack is, and therefore Slack's in a lot of trouble.

How do you think about that question?

Obviously, public markets seem to think software is a lot of trouble.

The multiples are really, really low.

How much would you be worried if you ran a good, solid, but older software company today?

How do you think about stickiness in this era, just as a general concept, when the friction for creators to build something that new is so low, you can do whatever you want really fast.

How is anyone going to use anything for a long period of time?

You've been so lucky to work for some of the most well-known CEOs and founders of this modern era.

I'd love the chance to ask you a little bit about each of them and what you learned from them.

And then more generally, just things you've learned about what great leaders do to run companies.

But maybe going all the way back to Google and starting with Larry and Sergey, what did you learn from watching them operate and lead?

Before we leave Google, you had this interesting idea about communication and Eric Schmidt, obviously another key Google person.

Can you tell the story about him presenting the company strategy using nothing but images?

This is an interesting example of communication.

Do you remember a specific image?

I'm so interested by this exercise.

It seems potentially productive for anyone to try to jam what they're trying to say into only images.

And so I'm trying to pin down an image and how you arrived at it.