While I was still at Starbucks, I joined the board of directors at Symantec. Throughout the Best Buy experience, I visited Palo Alto for board meetings, so many of my fellow board members and the executive team were aware of my situation in Minneapolis. For that entire period, they had been recruiting me to come to Symantec and take on an executive role there.
Symantec was a very special company to me for reasons that date back to my teenage years in Eugene. It was one of the few big tech companies that had a presence in the town. As a teenager, I would skateboard by the building, fascinated; I knew Symantec because I used their tools and software early in my career. Having them in my own hometown felt very cool. Since I always had an affinity for them, it was a no-brainer when they asked me to join their board.
On the Symantec board I served as the voice of the customer. I had experience using their products, and, as a younger CIO, was from the next generation of IT leadership that they wanted represented on their board. As the customer’s advocate, I always provided a lot of feedback about the type of products they should build, how much they should charge for them, how they should respond to competition, and how they could help solve some of the big problems that existed in their customer environment.
Symantec was a thirty-year-old enterprise software company that needed to figure out how to move into the new enterprise software and service era. As part of this, Steve Bennett, the chairman of the board, stepped into the CEO slot. He was retired, but had formerly held leadership roles at GE and Intuit. The board hired Steve based on their experience with him on the Symantec board.
Steve began to get serious about recruiting me. As a sixty-year-old CEO stepping out of retirement, he thought I would make a good counterpart as COO based on my resonance with both the technology Symantec provided and its focus on the future of IT. Together, he believed, we could successfully lead the company into the next generation of its existence.
As everything unfolded at Best Buy, this conversation became more and more compelling. Not only did it sound like an incredible opportunity at a company I felt connected to, but it was also a chance for my family to move back to Silicon Valley, where Aisha and I always knew we would end up. We just didn’t know when.
At one point, my family and I went to visit Aisha’s parents in Santa Barbara, California, where they now lived. Steve and his wife flew down to meet us there and interview me for the COO position. Steve and I had a far more structured conversation than I was used to, including a PowerPoint presentation he had put together that showed all of the things I could expect from him and, also, what he would expect from me. I found this refreshing, and Steve’s time at General Electric, which is known for process and structure in their leadership framework, was something I always thought Silicon Valley could use a bit more of, especially in the current generation.
We discussed Steve’s plan to stay at Symantec for a couple of years before handing over the reins to his successor. I would come in as his COO and help work on some of the strategic efforts that the company wanted to execute on. Steve would teach me what he had learned throughout the course of his career and, potentially, I would someday take over. I never went into the COO role expecting or wanting to become the CEO of the company. I was more interested in learning from an experienced CEO like Steve.
Since this was a big career decision, I wanted to run my potential move from Best Buy to Symantec by the now late Bill Campbell, who was famous for being a coach to so many Silicon Valley leaders and companies. I emailed Bill and set up an appointment to talk with him while I was visiting the Valley. Bill has a unique relationship with Steve, since Steve was CEO at Intuit while Bill was chairman of the board. I had been a board member with Steve, but working for him directly as COO required someone like Bill, who had a more intimate knowledge of what Steve was like as CEO. Bill and I had a good talk. He had been watching the news about Best Buy and its continual CEO changes. He believed that coming back to the Valley and working at Symantec and with Steve was a good option for me.
And, so, I agreed to come back to Silicon Valley and serve as the chief operating officer of Symantec.
It felt great to not only be back in Silicon Valley but, also, to be back in my rightful home of enterprise software, and IT. Also, the COO position felt like a step forward.
What I did not realize was that Steve viewed his new position as Symantec’s CEO as his second act. His most recent stint as a CEO eight years before had not ended well, which left Steve feeling like he had a lot to prove, both to himself and to the world. (Although none of us realized this at the time.) While I was supportive of Steve, I didn’t realize how much emotion he had attached to the position and how important it was for him to prove himself at Symantec.
I had already seen from my position on the board that Symantec was a very political organization. “Winning” at Symantec required beating out all of the other business units within the organization. This created a lot of internal competition and a ruthlessly political environment that felt a bit like Game of Thrones. People were more focused on outperforming their partners and colleagues inside the company than on the external market, and the company suffered because of it. However, since Steve and I both came into leadership from the board within a few months of each other, we were inoculated against some of the traditional politics of the company.
Steve’s real strength was putting systems in place to change and then operate an organization. I thought of this as the company’s software. At its core, this leadership methodology is about understanding the “what” and “why” of the work being done and how people make decisions.
By the time I came in, Steve was already a few months in at Symantec. He had cleaned up the management team, although, interestingly, he kept a couple of the leaders who were tagged as the most political of the previous generation. Steve also brought in some leaders from his Intuit days and strategically placed them across the organization. He put these people into key roles within the management framework and referred to them as “listening posts.” They instituted control and visibility across all levels.
Steve had a well thought out plan to improve the management framework, which was structured and process oriented. He called it Symantec 4.0. The problem was that, while plans like this worked in some industries, you don’t usually find them in many Silicon Valley tech companies. While I understand and believe in some of the tenets of Steve’s framework, it was different from how I was used to doing things, which is by starting with the people and then organically leading them through the execution of a collective vision to transform the company.
While this was all different for everyone at Symantec, another one of Steve’s strengths is that he’s a man of the people. He was good at rallying team members and helping them understand why he was doing what he was doing. Steve was masterful at evangelizing the fact that, in order to scale, Symantec had to become efficient so that it could return to being a growth company. This would involve managing people, process, and technology. When Steve arrived on-site, he gave a talk during which he said the company was going to eliminate 30 percent of all management and create fewer and bigger opportunities. The room cheered in response. He had the framework for how we could do this, and it involved a rigid structure.
In many ways, Steve and I complemented each other nicely. Ironically, our roles were largely reversed from the traditional CEO and COO dynamics. Whereas I tried to be the technology visionary and the voice of the customer, Steve was more invested in the internal operational process and systems design for running the company.
Our first year together went well. Steve and I had been tasked with figuring out how to fix the company and return it to growth. In the decade prior to our arrival, Symantec had merged with Veritas. This had resulted in an attempt to combine two cultures, philosophies, and value sets. Also, their businesses were different. Whereas Symantec dealt with cybersecurity, Veritas worked with back-up data management. Arguably, Symantec and Veritas had never been successfully integrated and still maintained their distinct cultures and customers. Our challenge was to do what no one had figured out how to do yet, which was to either successfully integrate these companies or split and divest elements of them. Ultimately, we started to figure out the mechanics of how we could separate the companies.
In that time, I versed myself in the history of how the Symantec management operated so that I could tap into the root of the political operatives that were holdovers from the previous management team. Once I did this, I could counter that influence to decrease some of the internal competition and turn us into a true team, focused on the market rather than ourselves.
Unfortunately, in the few months before I arrived, Steve had become captivated by the competition that existed between veteran leaders. Their rivalry hooked into an idea of “horse races” that Steve had picked up on from his time at GE. He believed that we should allow two or three of our top executives to continue competing with one another, and see who emerged the winner. He even tried to force me into the race. I was not willing to work as a political operative or to fight to be the next CEO. As I saw it, my job was to figure out what to do with the company, how to fix our position in the market, drive customer and shareholder value, and position Symantec for renewed success. I also had to focus on the company products to understand how to best return Symantec to a state of growth.
I had the sense that if I was ever going to be a CEO, I wanted it to be for a much smaller company that I worked my way up through. I did not see myself thriving as a first-time CEO in a thirty-six-year-old, $20 billion company in decline. I wanted to be in a place that had its entire life in front of it; a place where I could ensure that I was compatible with the culture, values, and mission of the company. To me, this position at Symantec seemed to be designed for someone who was on their last job as a CEO, not their first.
I wasn’t happy to be in the midst of a horse race, and the board was not happy that Steve was allowing these legacy players to continue engaging in competition. My team and I just needed to get the job done.
When I arrived, Symantec employed twenty-one thousand people, many of whom were doing great work every day. But the board and leadership relationships were unhealthy and the tension between the two entities was palpable. While I belonged to the leadership side, I tried to remain neutral. I didn’t always agree with what Steve was doing, but the job of a COO is to check your ego at the door and execute and support the CEO’s agenda.
At one point, the board launched a 360-degree review of Steve because all of the executives except for me and the general council had quit. Steve was looking for allies during the process, and he only reluctantly had me because I was not willing to get involved. Steve was so upset about this that he made all of our lives miserable for a little while as he fought with the board. I got wrapped up in this as well, because board members reached out to me directly. I recall flying to New York City to meet with our chairman, Dan Schulman, the then-president of American Express and current CEO of PayPal. Dan told me to not get involved and to stay neutral. He told me that if I was perceived as being political, I would be significantly disciplined, which I took to mean I would be fired.
The end result of this was tension on two fronts. The first was between Steve and me. I encouraged him to make the hard decisions that we knew needed to be made from our time on the board. We didn’t need to be jumping into the fray—we needed to get rid of the fray. Steve, on the other hand, was frustrated that I wouldn’t just go along with his plan of action. I think he also got a little bit paranoid that I had direct access to the board members and would go to them when I disagreed with his decisions. He thought I was trying to undermine him, and he did his best to undermine me and other executives through the board.
The truth of the matter is that Steve was undermining himself. There was only one person who could ultimately build relationships with the board and make the operational calls that needed to be made in terms of business and leadership personnel, and that was Steve. On more than one occasion, Steve offered his badge to the board in the midst of disagreements. “If you don’t want me, here’s my badge,” he would say. After Steve did this one too many times, the board finally took his badge. When I encouraged Steve to try to reconcile his differences with the board, he replied, “When you are a CEO one day, you will realize there is only one person in charge.” Soon after, Steve was publicly fired. Once again, I found myself working with an interim CEO.
The interim CEO, Michael Brown, who was also from the Symantec board, had been retired for more than a decade. He was a good, mild-mannered guy, and someone I learned a lot from when he served as the chair of the board audit committee, which I was a part of. Mike worked hard to get the job done, and soon moved from interim CEO to permanent CEO.
I worked with Mike and the rest of the senior leadership team on the effort to divide Symantec between cybersecurity and information management (Veritas). This ultimately resulted in the 2015 sale of Veritas and other non-security assets to a private equity firm for $8 billion. As we moved closer to the separation, the organizational design shifted from being a function organization under Steve—where we had a CMO, COO, CFO, CPO, and so on—to a much smaller product organization designed for enterprise and consumer segments. This resulted in several top execs leaving. I recommended that the COO role be eliminated in this new segment-designed organization. Mike and the board were very open and generous to me and the departing executives as we transitioned out of the company. After serving as the CEO of Symantec for just over a year, Mike was also let go by the same board of directors. This continued the cycle of constant changes at the top and uncertainty within the company, and Mike’s successor left a few years later in 2019.
Despite the politics and uncertainty, I enjoyed my experience at Symantec, first as a board member and later as COO. I grew a lot during those years and, in retrospect, some of my learning was about my own style, limitations, and some immaturity in understanding how to properly handle and engage in hyper-political situations. It was painful and isolating to watch the political elements explode all around me.
Also, I learned a lot from Steve in a short time. I learned about management frameworks and systems thinking. I learned how to create a structure for people to both allow for and teach others to make decisions. I also learned from Steve elements that I never want to bring into the CEO office. His style reinforced in me that one of the primary duties of the CEO is to hire great people who are smarter than you, and to do everything you can to support, encourage, and coach them. Then get out of their way so they can do their jobs. In my mind, a CEO should never try to compete with his own people or politically undermine them.
I also learned that the board of directors at a public company is absolutely critical. The right people, set of experiences, tenure, and ability to work together as a board to help management make good decisions and be a partner to the CEO and executive team is an essential element of good modern governance. The Symantec board had real opportunities for reflection, modernization, and refreshed membership that were long overdue. There is no doubt that this lack of board hygiene added to the supercharged political environment inside the company and the constant turnover in the top ranks of leadership.
When I left Symantec in 2015, I decided it was time to retire—or at least take a long break. The past few years had their fair share of challenging and tense moments, and it was time to relax and re-center. I wanted to unwind with my family, finish building our new home, get healthier, play video games, and read books.
When we returned to Silicon Valley after our short time in Minnesota, Aisha and I found a lot of large and beautiful homes, but we had a difficult time finding a house designed for a family as big as ours. About six months into our search, Aisha and I switched gears and began looking for land to build on rather than a home to move into. We decided we would design our own space, made specifically with our still-growing family in mind.
One day, we discovered a beautiful four-acre lot in a little town called Portola Valley, nestled into the hills just west of Palo Alto. It was remote and felt like country living. There, horses still outnumber the people, yet it’s only a few minutes’ drive to Palo Alto or Menlo Park and the Stanford shopping mall. The land reminded Aisha and me of Oregon, where our story together had begun.
There was already a home on the land so, for a while, our entire family was stuffed into a four-bedroom, three-bath, one-story home built in the 1950s—it came complete with linoleum floors and mercury thermostats. It was last upgraded in the early 1980s. We couldn’t turn on the microwave and fridge at the same time without flipping the power circuit. There was no air conditioning, and the kids slept in bunk beds. Sure, it wasn’t always fun when it was ninety-five degrees outside, but the situation had a grounding effect, and, in many ways, we loved every minute of it. It brought us closer together as a family. We weren’t separated by a huge floor plan, so we all ate dinner together, watched TV together, and the kids all had bath time and bedtime together. To me, it felt like being a kid growing up in the 1980s all over again.
Over the next three years, our big family watched on from our (relatively) tiny house as our forever home went up twenty feet outside of our front door on the same lot. In many ways, it was a sad day when we watched the tractor demolish the home we had lived on top of each other in for the past few years.
In the midst of living in our in-between home, two more little Gilletts arrived on the scene. First came Eleanor, who was born in December 2013. From the beginning, Eleanor (or Eller, as we call her) has been a little adventurer. We have a picture of her standing naked on her little plastic kid-sized kitchen oven, using it as leverage to climb out the window to go see the new garden. That’s Eleanor in a nutshell. She has no fear, and is tough and relentless. Eleanor loves hard hugs, too—I always know that my tightest hug of the day is going to come from Eller. It is not uncommon for us to get notes from her school teachers letting us know that she is being loud and not following direct instructions. She is a free spirit and that is something I never want her to lose!
Twenty-one months later, in September 2015, Gabriel followed. “Gabe the Babe” is our seventh kid. He does everything fast—he spoke and walked faster than all of his brothers and sisters. He has the most logic at such a young age. As the youngest of seven, I guess he had to step right up to the plate and get in the fray. He’s a darling little boy, who is always ready and willing to get dressed up in all of his older sisters’ Disney princess outfits or introduce himself to everyone in a room or to all of the strangers in a restaurant. After dinner he asks his older sisters “Want to go dance?” and they all run into the living room, turn on the voice assistant device, and ask it to play music from the family music streaming account. They run around, twirl, yell, and often one of them comes back into the kitchen crying because they knocked heads or hit the couch when jumping around.
Sometimes, Gabe looks up at me with his big, blue three-year-old eyes and says, “Ooooh, I have to talk to you about what happened today.” He’s incredibly sweet and knows how to charm us all, but has also developed a tough streak, because he has to stand up for what’s his, whether it’s a toy or a fish stick at dinner. He’s got a strong instinct for self-defense, that one.
Around the time Gabriel arrived, I bought an old 1966 truck that had been owned by a woman who passed away in her nineties. It’s a four-speed with an original paint job and only fifty thousand miles on it. I got a license plate for it that says Oregon7, an homage to our seven wonderful kids and our history in Eugene. I probably should have waited to get that license plate. But more on that in a little bit.
Amidst all of the family hustle and bustle, I remained on call for Symantec into 2015 as the company went through its transition, and served on the board of Chipotle, the fast-casual Mexican restaurant chain based in Denver, Colorado. Mostly, though, I enjoyed my family and worked on the house. Life was great! I lost a few pounds and had no financial pressures. Every now and then, I would meet someone for coffee and talk about a startup, venture capital happenings, or entrepreneurial coaching, but nothing serious was on the horizon.
In the summer of 2015, I began having some serious conversations about becoming a venture capitalist. I had cultivated some great relationships over the years with a lot of top-performing venture capital firms and had built a good reputation for myself as an early advisor and angel investor. The venture capital schedule would be good, and I could lead either enterprise IT, or retail, technology-focused investment areas for a firm. I came close to pulling the trigger, but then I realized that if I became a venture capitalist now—after everything I’d learned in the course of the past ten years—it would be like graduating in my junior year of high school. It dawned on me that I needed my senior year. In this context, senior year meant becoming a CEO.
It was then that I began to hear about the executive-in-residence (EIR) role in venture capital firms. In this position, you are not a venture partner or a similarly titled entrepreneur-in-residence but, rather, you work and advise the portfolio of companies that the venture firm is investing or hopes to invest in. When there is a fit, you potentially step into an executive role at one of those companies. The executive-in-residence program seemed to be a great fit for where I was in life. I would see deal flow in terms of where firms were investing, work with entrepreneurs, and bring my experiences at both large companies and small startups to the conversation. I was quite intrigued by the scenario of having a home base, access to a network, and a potential future opportunity to run something interesting. It would also allow me to test the CEO waters in a small environment.
The more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea, so I started talking to my connections at various venture capital firms. What I quickly realized, though, was that once I signed on as an EIR with one venture capital firm, I couldn’t work much with others. The venture community is very competitive, with a lot of firms trying to fund the next big thing. I didn’t want to tie myself down—I wanted the opportunity and freedom to see everything that was out there.
I then began talking to a friend at Google Ventures (GV), which works differently than the other venture capital firms. They are viewed by the people on Sand Hill as a finance-based investor and, in the market, they are seen as a great firm to partner with. Google Ventures has one primary limited partner (LP), which is Google.
GV invests in more than three hundred different companies. At any given time, a percentage of these companies’ founders could be experiencing challenges. An EIR who is an experienced business and operations leader can be a great resource for these portfolio companies, oftentimes offering a different set of experiences than investors can.
I had a few interviews at GV to meet with various partners. Ken Norton was the original partner to connect me in, and I met with several people at the firm, based in Mountain View, California, right on Google’s main campus, which is called the Googleplex. After a series of good meetings, GV felt right. The people, culture, and investing philosophy seemed to be more my style than many of the firms I met with on Sand Hill Road.
My final meeting took place in Menlo Park, at the locally infamous Rosewood Hotel. I met with the managing director and fifteen-year Google leader, David Krane. We shook hands and found a seat outside. He then pulled out of his bag a series of different-colored socks with exotic patterns and told me about the company he just met with that was making new kinds of socks. “You should take a pair of these!” he said. From that moment on, we hit it off.
David calls himself my rabbi. It is an endearing way of saying he is looking out for me and will always be open to giving me his best advice. David’s support and friendship started the next and most important chapter of my professional career.
I ended up signing on as GV’s EIR in October 2015, at thirty-nine years old. In 2015, Google was a great place to be.
GV was a lot of fun. One day I might find myself helping a logistics company decide on their business strategy, and the next I might be helping founders raise money. I helped founding CEOs get product feedback and hire marketing professionals. There were a whole range of issues that I could contribute my experience to in ways that were helpful to these young founders and CEOs. I was also still young enough that they could relate to me. It was a lot of fun and I loved Google Ventures.
A couple of months after I joined GV, Google itself was going through a transition. The overall structure of Google was evolving, and a new parent company called Alphabet was being fully formed and operationalized. Along with the “other bets,” Google became a subsidiary of Alphabet. The “other bets” included GV, Google[x]—now called X—and several others. Whereas Google’s core business is advertising, Alphabet wanted to create businesses that could impact the world, taking a long-term view of a problem set that was economically diverse from advertising.
A couple of months after this transition, David and the managing partner, Bill Maris, called me in for a conversation. They wanted to check on my status working with the portfolio companies to see if I had seen anything interesting. David also wanted me to meet the Alphabet leaders so that I could get to know the people from Google, X, Fiber, and Alphabet overall.
Initially, I wasn’t interested because I didn’t want to go work for a big company again. I wanted to run a mid-size startup or build my own thing. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I shouldn’t pass up this opportunity. David and Bill introduced me to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google; Craig Barratt, who was running Google Fiber; and Astro Teller, who was running X. I met with Eric Schmidt, who I had met years before through Starbucks, and with some of Google’s earliest employees and other leaders of various product areas. It was sort of an Alphabet networking tour and I had the chance to learn a lot more about how Google worked and its many leaders.
Each of the conversations was unique, and it was interesting for the leaders to try and typecast what kind of “talent” I was. The combination of my experience as a technology leader and as a former CIO and COO in the enterprise IT space made some gravitate toward that part of my background in terms of discussions and exploring opportunities. Others honed in on my retail background with Starbucks, Best Buy, and the Chipotle board of directors. They focused on my work in the digital and e-commerce space with mobile payments, Wi-Fi, e-commerce, and remote ordering. In addition to all of this, I had also run large organizations and, while still technical, also had an MBA. I felt like I did not have the same set of experiences as the typical Google/Alphabet leader, who tended to have an engineering and product management background.
By the end of 2015, I had a lot of opportunities across Alphabet. I was doing my EIR work at GV, and Sundar had introduced me to several of his leaders to provide insight and perspective on some of the challenges and opportunities facing them from an outsider’s point of view. In the midst of this, Astro started talking to me about X projects. X included the land of self-driving cars, robotics, electricity kites, and delivery drones. It was based in the Mayfield building in Mountain View, a few miles away from the Googleplex in an old shopping mall from the 1970s and early 1980s. The purpose of the Moonshot Factory is to facilitate great companies that go after a huge problem in the world that requires radical new thinking and breakthrough technology. When you visit the X building, you can feel the innovation and effort all around you. It is not uncommon to see teams working on new robotics, building self-driving cars, or flying aerial drones in an open area next to the outdoor lunch tables.
Astro gave me a desk next to him at the X building, and asked me to spend some of my time there to gain an understanding of X and how their projects worked. By the end of 2015, I had several opportunities to go full-time at various groups across Alphabet. In the end, though, it was the mission of X and the notion that, as a platform, the Moonshot Factory could really invest the time, energy, capital, and patience to go after some of the world’s bigger problems that really got me. I was sold.
In late 2015, I met Mike Wiacek and Shapor Naghibzadeh at X. Mike and Shapor had spent the last decade inside of Google’s core security team, working on some of the most technically advanced capabilities designed to protect Google from cybercriminal attacks. Having spent the last several years as a leader in one of the world’s largest security companies, I had the chance to work on the front lines with global organizations on the security issues they were facing.
The three of us started talking about how we could use X as a platform to address the increasingly complex and global problem of cybersecurity. We also had help from Bernardo and the VirusTotal (VT) team that was based in Malaga, Spain. Over the last decade, VT had developed a very important element in the security industry to analyze viruses and malware. Cybersecurity is an issue that can touch every person, company, organization, and government in the world. It is a borderless problem. Many people don’t think of cybercrime as a critical problem, but I assure you, it is. By 2021, cybercrime damages will hit $6 trillion annually, an amount which surpasses all of the illegal drug trade profit in the world. It is the largest economic transfer of wealth between good and evil in the history of civilization. The seizure of intellectual property and state secrets is also the number one concern amongst nations today.
After several months of iteration and proving out some of our earlier ideas, Mike, Shapor, and I, with the help of others at X, started a formal moonshot coined Project Lantern, in January 2016. The name Lantern was taken from a video game I was playing at the time called Assassin’s Creed, in which the main avatar held aloft a lantern to illuminate the darkness and see the path to the objective. It seemed perfect since our mission was all about illuminating potential security issues within organizations. Lantern became Chronicle when we announced our endeavor to the world two years later in January 2018.
The name Chronicle was born from the notion that we were putting security-relevant data within organizations together in a new and structured way to tell stories or narratives about the kind of security threats organizations were interacting with. We accomplished this quickly and with the most impressive technology I’ve ever seen.
One of the most powerful and important elements of Chronicle is our culture and values. While the press, media, and analysts like to talk more generally about our technology and security, they are less focused on the people on the Chronicle team who make this happen.
From our founding, we have worked to care about the whole person, not just their job description or role at work. I’ve long held the strong belief that if you can create a work environment in which team members (in our case, Chroniclers) can have meaningful, mission-driven work, enjoy a fun and supportive work culture, be compensated well, and have the obstacles to their work removed, both the company and its customers will benefit greatly. More importantly, those team members go home to be better spouses, friends, parents, community volunteers, and people overall. They are happier and more fulfilled, and that, in turn, shows up in their work.
I call this not work-life balance, but work-life fulfillment. I’ve worked at companies in which the workplace was not healthy, and the person I became at work also made me worse off at home as a father, husband, and community member. I lost my patience and got frustrated with those around me easily. Creating an enriching and supportive work environment is an important tenet of Chronicle and something I and our leaders work hard to champion. It is my goal to interact with my team in such a way that considers the totality of their lives, rather than just what they are working on at the office.
As the CEO and co-founder of Chronicle, I am really enjoying and deeply passionate about the opportunity to bring together all of the lessons I have learned throughout the past twenty years, all the way from the hospital in Oregon to Symantec. It also puts me to the final test—to see if I can put all of these lessons and experiences to work and successfully run a company that matters to me and is trying to do good for the world. I’ve been doing this for more than three years now, and I’m so glad I took this path.
I can now say that I have learned what it’s like to be a CEO—to start, run, and scale a company. Rather than graduating as a junior, I will now graduate as a senior when I finally do retire or move into the venture capital world. All those years I spent working close to founders and CEOs taught me a lot about how I want to run a business and, more importantly, make me true to the leader I want to be. I understand that authority is not just designated or granted; it also has to be earned. Just because I have been granted the title of CEO doesn’t mean my team has to respect me—it’s up to me to earn that. That means I have to be accessible and approachable, make tough decisions, and support and be in it fully with them.
I also understand that everyone is human, no matter how much power they may have attained. No one has the Midas touch of decision making. Even the most prestigious among us make bad decisions and have bad ideas sometimes. And that’s okay. What’s most important is having the conviction and vision to move toward what you want to create day after day, year after year, decade after decade.
For as much as I regret how things ended with Howard at Starbucks in terms of our relationship, I now know for sure that I made the right decision. Whereas I lacked passion for coffee, Chronicle is a place where I can invest my heart, soul, and passion, not only into the company and culture, but also in terms of the betterment of the world in a way that I feel will be impactful over time. Chronicle’s slogan is “giving the good the advantage,” and I believe we are successfully doing that. We’ve also been able to cultivate a profoundly mission-driven culture, which means a lot to me.
I didn’t just arrive here, though. I am reminded of the old adage: when you see someone on top of a mountain, remember they didn’t fall there. I would never be who I am or as successful as I have been without all of the experiences that have come before this, and all of the people who were willing to take a gamble on a kid from Eugene.
And, for that, I am grateful.