2945: Tom Conrad's Silicon Valley Story: From Pandora to Zero Longevity and a Lifelong Metabolic Wellbeing

[00:00:00] How do billion dollar blunders shape the journey to tech success? And how does democratising health data empower people to live longer, healthier lives? These are just a couple of fascinating questions that we'll explore today with my guest Tom

[00:00:17] Conrad. And as CEO of Xero, a health tech company with nearly 14 million users and a mission to unlock sustainable habits for longevity, Tom's insights are profound. Having served as a Sonos board director and co-creator CTO at Pandora, Tom's journey

[00:00:39] is marked by achievements at some of the world's leading tech companies. But he's not just here to talk about his success, he's experienced the highs but also the lows having navigated

[00:00:50] the notorious failures of Pets.com and Queeby. So I invite you all to join me today as we go on that roller coaster ride to dive into his lessons learned, the layers of success beyond just a great product and how Xero is leading the charge to revolutionise health

[00:01:07] tech. So buckle up and hold on tight as I beam your ears all the way to Los Angeles where Tom's waiting to join us today. Hello, a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:23] Hi, my name is Tom Conrad. I am the CEO of a digital health company called Xero. My career goes back, oh my goodness, 35 years in Silicon Valley, mostly making consumer products and software. I worked on the Macintosh in the 90s at Apple. I was responsible for a video

[00:01:43] game series called You Don't Know Jack in the late 90s. I'm one of the people that started the digital music streaming service Pandora, grew that to a couple thousand employees, public company and so forth. I was the product and design for Evan Spiegel at Snapchat, helped

[00:01:59] take Snapchat public. I'm on the board of directors at Sonos, the digital speaker company, helped take them public. And today I run a company that uses software to help people live longer and healthier lives called Xero.

[00:02:13] Absolutely, love that. And there's so much hype at the moment around things like AI and the big change that it's gonna bring in. And listening to your origin story there, it sounds like you've seen a lot of technological change throughout your career already, right?

[00:02:27] Yeah, I felt really fortunate to have come to this career at the moment I did. I was 15 years old when Apple ran the infamous 1984 ad during the Super Bowl and honestly, that was the starter pistol, sort of lifelong obsession with using emerging technology to

[00:02:48] help people do interesting things in the world. And so I got to see the graphical user interface and then of course, the explosion of the internet itself and then the mobile revolution that was kicked off by the iPhone and Android in the late 2000s.

[00:03:05] And I mean, I know it is eye-rolly, but I can see that I am in the camp of people that thinks this step function change we've seen with respect to artificial intelligence and machine learning in the last 24 months is another one of these sort of tectonic shifts.

[00:03:22] It really is. And one of the things I always say on this podcast as well is all too often, we only talk about our successes and that standing at the summit of the mountain, that's

[00:03:31] where all the kudos is. But of course, we don't learn from any of that stuff. We learn from those years of failures and grinding away through our career. So, Tom, if you look back,

[00:03:42] I mean, reflecting on high-profile failures, I think it was Quibi and Pets.com, any lessons that you learned about risk and innovation in tech and how have those experiences maybe helped shaped your approach to leadership at Xero?

[00:03:56] Yeah, gee, I don't know how I did that. I listed off all these things that I've worked on and I somehow failed to mention Quibi and Pets.com. You're right that the things that we struggle with, the failures, whether they're high-profile and make the newspaper or they're

[00:04:12] small and everyday, I think are the things that teach us the most. And it's just such a cliche, but it's so true. And yeah, I've been lucky enough to work on some things that were very successful, but I've worked on some things that were really high-profile failures.

[00:04:27] The first in that category was I was the engineering leader at Pets.com in 1999. So, this is the height of the .com era where the consumer internet was first sort of coming to the world.

[00:04:41] We're all on dial-up modems and more likely to be on AOL than to have ISP. And we started a company to let you order and purchase dog food over the internet. And people remember it, I think mostly because we had a fantastically successful and memorable advertising campaign

[00:05:02] featured a kind of sock puppet that became a kind of cultural icon and ultimately a signifier for all of the excesses of the .com era. And I'll tell you just like a little bit about maybe, and there's so many lessons from these

[00:05:16] things, but maybe a lesson from Pets.com that has really stuck with me. Roll the clock forward 15 years from the .com era, and we found ourselves sort of back in a period where this thing

[00:05:28] that maybe some people called blitzscaling was in fashion. That is sort of the idea that a company in its early stages can raise and spend a large amount of money with the goal of quickly acquiring scale that can force out other players, both incumbents and new

[00:05:43] entrants. And then this is the playbook that was popularized by all kinds of companies, successful or not, I think Uber, Spotify, WeWork, they were sort of happy to take on the risk of operating with huge losses following a kind of winner takes all perspective.

[00:05:59] And Pets.com was, I guess, an early sort of pioneer in the sort of blitzscaling lane, somewhat sort of pushed along by the fact that there was a surprising amount of investment in this online pet retailing space. So, the foundational sort of business insight was

[00:06:19] people back then spent something like $18 billion on products for their pets each year. That's more money than people spent on clothes, toys and food for their children combined. More money than people spent on video games, more money than people spent on video and

[00:06:36] music, huge category. And so, four companies, Pets.com, PetSmart.com and two others that you don't remember all raised a bunch of money and got into this. And as sometimes happens, it happened in 2000 and it happened most recently a couple of years ago.

[00:06:53] The macro environment can change and the investor sentiment can shift away from this sort of idea of blitzscaling into something that I think of like much more traditional entrepreneurship where you just earn each milestone like one step at a time and focus

[00:07:09] on healthy unit economics and more traditional company building. And that happened in 2000, huge shift in the investor community perspective, put a lot of companies out of business including Pets.com. And that experience, I was, I don't know, I was 28 or something at the time and it did

[00:07:26] really leave a mark on me. And I confess that I mostly good and for bad sort of stayed on the sidelines for some of the blitzscaling kind of era. For example, we were at Pandora,

[00:07:36] for all of our success, we didn't really run what I would call a blitzscaling playbook. Spotify by comparison did and the wisdom of those choices is evident now. Pandora is sort of a footnote

[00:07:47] in the digital music world these days and Spotify is the dominant player. So, it's not to say that the blitzscaling sort of thing can't work but somewhere coded in my DNA from those early days

[00:07:57] is a more conservative sort of approach to entrepreneurship. And I guess the good news is it's back in fashion. And so, I think one of the things I took from some of these experiences

[00:08:08] is that there's always a place for companies that build their success brick by brick and that's what we're doing at Xero. 100%. And I think if you go from the dot-com bubble to digital

[00:08:17] disruption, there's so many companies that have appeared at the time to be too big to fail did just that. There's a long list of those names and I'd argue that possibly today the Google

[00:08:28] trusts, the Google antitrust lawsuit at the moment feels very similar to what happened to Microsoft after the browser wars many years ago. But you've witnessed the first-hand collapse of billion dollar ventures. So, what would you say are the most critical insights that these experiences

[00:08:42] provided that possibly aren't commonly discussed in the typical narratives of business failure? Because as I said, we talk about the success all day long but there's so much more to be learned from those other narratives.

[00:08:53] John. The other one that I was involved in much more recently was a video streaming service called Quibi. The company was started by Jeffrey Katzenberg, famous Hollywood sort of mogul and

[00:09:05] Meg Whitman who is the CEO at eBay for years and is an incredible business leader in her own right. Their idea was to build a bespoke video service designed specifically for mobile and on-the-go scenarios and to particularly leverage the capabilities of Hollywood itself to create

[00:09:32] entertainment built from the ground up for the unique capabilities of the phone. So, think you've got a device that has dozens of sensors, a live internet connection, what could JJ Abrams do with storytelling in that medium? I think it was and I think in many ways,

[00:09:45] it remains sort of an exciting proposition to take the best creators in the world and set them loose on a medium that's sort of purpose-built for the phone rather than something that's just been sort of translated from the television or the theater. I think ironically, the capital that

[00:10:02] was raised for Quibi wasn't principally to go into sort of market expansion and blitzscaling but was meant to fuel the content funnel. So, how do we build a content library of bespoke experiences that can't run anywhere else and how do we use the Hollywood apparatus to do that?

[00:10:23] And company did raise more than a billion dollars and put that money to work mostly on creating content and I think ironically, if there's a lesson from that experience for me,

[00:10:37] I think it might have taken more than the company raised to really iterate its way to success. We were able to make in the two years of the company's history, we were able to make about

[00:10:48] 75 shows which is more shows than the traditional US broadcast networks combined make in a year or so. I think we were really surprisingly successful at tapping into Jeffries Network and the Hollywood apparatus to make some really, really great shows that have gone on some success on other platforms.

[00:11:06] But because we were trying to make something that was purpose-built for the phone, all of the content on Quibi we had to make. We couldn't go out and acquire a library of syndicated

[00:11:16] content from other historical channels which is what you might do if you were building Max or Paramount Plus or Tubi or some of these other streaming services that were made for the television. And Hollywood production is expensive and so again, if you believe the thesis that

[00:11:33] there's a place for Hollywood to make purpose-built content for the phone, then I think maybe one of the lessons of Quibi is that you need more than 70 shows to satiate the modern appetite for content.

[00:11:45] So in a funny way, I think to explore the space that Quibi wanted to explore, he actually had to raise more money not less. So for me, the lessons of Quibi are small. I was at a point

[00:11:59] in my career when I joined the Quibi team that I had made a lot of software. I thought maybe I was gonna do something completely different, become a pastry chef or something.

[00:12:09] And Meg and Jeffrey made their pitch and I came on as a consultant and just fell in love with the team and fell in love with the challenge of creating something new from scratch and sort of

[00:12:17] felt back in love with making software. So as much of a kind of, in a way sort of an embarrassing chapter, it's the end. No one wants to be involved in a thing that becomes sort of a notorious

[00:12:27] failure. I'm so grateful that I got to have that journey because it really brought me back into a career that's so much a part of my identity and it's fun to be excited to get out of that every day again and to make software. Marshall

[00:12:43] And on behalf of every founder listening anywhere everywhere in the world, beyond having a stellar product or service, are there any other obvious layers of building a successful company that entrepreneurs often overlook? I would imagine you picked up a lot of advice and experience over

[00:13:00] the years and there probably isn't that one. The biggest lesson is that there isn't that single fix that will help any founder listening, but anything that you'd notice here? Jeff Well, I'll tell you the one that's just top of mind for me

[00:13:12] these days and that's I'm a pretty right-brained kind of thinker. That's the kind of qualitative, creative one. And I had to sort of remind myself to invest in the more sort of quantitative side

[00:13:23] of the work that we do. But you know, through my career, certainly you come to develop the perspective that yes, creating a new product is an act of creation, but it's also a task of sort

[00:13:36] of optimization and there's so much work that goes into optimizing the details of what you do in a really structured way. Come up with a hypothesis, build an experiment that tests the hypothesis, quantitatively understand if your hypothesis is correct or wrong, sort of just endless sort of

[00:13:54] left brain optimization of products. And for a long time I had come to the perspective that the best products in the world are sort of these things that sort of meld the right brain in the left brain. You can't really be maximally successful without doing some of each.

[00:14:09] I think the interesting epiphany for me of the last handful of years is that stepping back to a hundred thousand feet and like looking down at a business, there is this very kind of

[00:14:25] quantitative way to evaluate the inputs and outputs of a business. And to anybody who's an MBA and has finance background and not particularly sort of inclined to be a right-brained thinker,

[00:14:36] nothing I'm saying is going to seem revelatory at all. But it was news to me that there's an opportunity to sort of decompose what you do down to an equation that describes how you take capital

[00:14:48] in and generate returns out the other side. And that in the details, like those are the metrics inside the product and inside the marketing funnels that sort of fuel all of that. And

[00:15:00] recently, I just have a much, much deeper appreciation for a way to look at the health of the business and where it's going. Again, every time I share this, I feel like half the room is

[00:15:11] like, oh my goodness, you're talking about like the basic fundamentals of how business works. But when you're a creator at heart, it's a new and refreshing perspective that I've added to my toolkit in the last few years. And if we fast forward to 2024,

[00:15:24] we're not talking about the health of a business. We're talking about your mission to democratize health data with Xero. So just for people that are hearing about Xero for the first time, let's start with a problem that you're solving here. What are the biggest barriers to making

[00:15:39] health data universally accessible and understandable? And how are you tackling these challenges with Xero? Well, let's see here. Just to give a little bit of personal context, the way that I came to the company, I joined Xero about two years ago as CEO, taking over from the

[00:15:57] Foundry, still with us as our exec chair and a great partner of mine, Mike Mazur. And the way that I came to the company was that I was on my own personal health journey. And annually during

[00:16:08] the pandemic, I had gained a bunch of weight and was sort of in the worst shape of my life. I was out of breath climbing a flight of stairs and for the first time was concerned about

[00:16:17] my weight, not just for vanity, but for really just in terms of my ability to live a long and healthy life. And so I sort of went deep on the topic of metabolic health and longevity and tried

[00:16:32] to decode whether there were techniques that I could make use of that would reset my metabolism and get me out on a healthier path. And I tried everything, Oura Ring and a Peloton bike and a

[00:16:45] continuous glucose monitor and a concierge doctor and thousands of hours of podcasts and video content on YouTube. And I came out the other side with a sort of a central insight, like the key to a longer and healthier life is not some esoteric off-label pharmaceutical intervention. I mean,

[00:17:06] I would love to tell you that I really believe that you take some Metformin every day, you're going to add 10 years to your life. But really the things that fundamentally help us live longer and healthier lives are paying attention to our diet, exercise, sleep quality,

[00:17:21] stress management. And so part of our mission at Xero then is to give people tools that help them decode that universe. So when we talk about democratizing access to health data, like the data here in question is really like the entire world of scientific research and emerging perspective

[00:17:42] on health and just helping people dig into those details, synthesize it, separate the wheat from the chaff, and then to translate that into healthy habit formation and to gamify the experience so that you get sort of short-term rewards for things that ultimately pay off in the long term.

[00:18:02] So we have a product called Xero that begins with the habit of intermittent fasting, which is a great tool for people to help people achieve their weight goal and maintain it in a

[00:18:12] healthy and durable way. And then we layer on other habits and the sort of pillars of exercise and sleep and stress management and so forth. Scott Reilly Incredibly cool. And before you came on, I was doing a little research. And one of the things

[00:18:24] that stood out to me is that Xero's not like other health apps where you don't count calories or follow fads and set people up for failure by prescribing an unsustainable routine. And that's what gets most people every time, isn't it? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, it's such a

[00:18:39] fascinating corner of the universe to play in because there's so much in weight management that preys on people who struggle with their weight. And what we have to do with Xero is to

[00:18:52] give some people a tool that comes from a wealth of scientific research and insight that allows them to think about their relationship with food in a different way and to do something

[00:19:05] that we think is much more durable and sustainable for life than never eating another slice of toast again. Scott Reilly Yes, I know that the struggle is very real. And I suppose one of the things that people always

[00:19:19] think about when we talk start talking about health apps and technologies is that balancing the need for privacy and security with the benefits of open access to health data. So what measures do you implement to protect user data while promoting empowerment? Because we have

[00:19:34] to mention it's a huge topic, isn't it? And quite rightly so, right? Dr. Justin Marchegiani I think when you build in this space at the end of the day, you just have to embrace your responsibility to protect your users data, to treat it as their

[00:19:47] data, not your data, which means basic blocking and tackling of letting them download and see what you've collected, letting them delete the stuff from their or your servers whenever they want it deleted. Of course, protecting access to those systems from outside attackers but also from

[00:20:01] employees who don't need access. It means only collecting the data that you need to deliver the service and not sort of asking for more than is directly related to the service that you provide. Reading that data when you no longer needed in service of the particular individual users,

[00:20:18] again, it just sort of comes back to this value that your members data is their data, not yours. And you just have to keep that at the center of the company and everything that you do.

[00:20:28] And it is a lot of work for young companies, but it's just absolutely table stakes and a big part of what we take so seriously at Xero. Dr. Justin Marchegiani What excites you about the work that you're doing at the moment? For anyone listening,

[00:20:40] thinking of maybe downloading the app, what would you say to them? What can they expect? Dr. Justin Marchegiani I mean, I think what we really try to do is to take the incredible team around me and just all of our sort of lifelong careers and

[00:20:53] building delightful experiences in areas like gaming and music and video entertainment and social networking and sort of applying those lessons to a need state. This is like I need to learn about my body. I need to understand how it works. I need to begin to form healthier habits.

[00:21:15] And it's just really rewarding to at the end of the day know that the work that you're doing in the world really truly is impacting people's ability to enjoy a long and healthy life with

[00:21:27] their children and their grandchildren. I mean, the feedback that we get from our members just day after day after day is just like it's incredible the transformation that people go through. So super, super fun and rewarding. Dr. Richard Dixon

[00:21:37] Yeah, absolutely. Something I'm going to be checking out. I am a middle-aged man, a man of a certain age that's been through that getting up to the top of the stairs and suddenly

[00:21:45] paying out of breath and thinking, man, I think I need to be doing something about this. So I will check that out. And I love how obviously technology is at the heart of all this. And you've got to be

[00:21:56] paying attention to all the big tech trends at the minute, AI obviously being one. But looking forward, are there any emerging technologies or trends that you believe will significantly impact our health data, how it's being used to enhance personal or public health outcomes? And that

[00:22:11] more proactive than reactive approach to healthcare? Dr. Richard Dixon Yeah, we're, I mean, I'm going to say I have some things here that are just completely buzzword compliant. But we are really, really excited about what happens when you

[00:22:25] merge the sort of real-time biomarker data that comes off of things like your wearable, your Apple Watch or your Fitbit, maybe a continuous glucose monitor. And wedding that to sort of the universe of scientific knowledge that suddenly you can interrogate with AI in a much

[00:22:41] more sophisticated and scaled way than we've ever been able to before. I think the roll the clock forward, two, three, four years, I think the way that we interact with our health through technology is just going to be profoundly changed by these sort of emerging

[00:22:59] lanes of real-time bio data access and artificial intelligence and machine learning to decode and find insights that would otherwise be missing. We're super excited at Xero to be part of that. Dr. Richard Dixon Well, I wish you the best of luck there. I'll

[00:23:15] be staying in touch. We'd love to get you back on next year, see how that journey is progressing. But we started about your origin story today. But if we look back for a moment, I think none of us

[00:23:26] are able to have any degree of success without a little help along the way. It's very often somebody that's seen something and has invested a little time in it. So if I was to ask you to

[00:23:36] look back at your own career, is there a particular person or people that you're grateful towards who we could give a little shout out to today? Dr. Richard Dixon I've been incredibly lucky to work with some extremely high profile people. We talked about

[00:23:48] some of them, Jeffrey and Meg and Evan at Snap. But the person who really stands out to me as having the biggest impact on my career is a guy named Joe Kennedy. He was our CEO at Pandora. He

[00:24:01] joined the company literally for the same week that I did a company at the time with something called Savage Beast Technologies. They had sort of a B2B music recommendation infrastructure.

[00:24:10] They sold into retail. And Joe and I joined and some new investors came on. And Joe and Tim Westergren, the founder of the Savage Beast company that preceded Pandora and I did the work that led

[00:24:22] to the creation of Pandora about a year later. But Joe is in that book, classic business book, Good to Great, they talk about levels of leadership. And I think the fourth level

[00:24:34] of leadership is, I'm going to paraphrase this a bit, but it's a person that brings a combination of like endless will and focus, but paradoxically, very, very low ego. And Joe is just like the greatest example of this that I've encountered in my career. Like,

[00:24:53] he always operated from a place where the company and its users came first. And he was incredibly leaned in, incredibly hardworking, demanding in his way, but always from a place of almost zero

[00:25:08] ego. And I don't know that I will ever quite get to the level of leadership that Joe sort of demonstrated for the decade of our collaboration, but he'll always be my greatest inspiration and hero in all this. Matthew 15

[00:25:20] Absolutely love that. What a great answer. And one of the reasons I asked my guests that as well is, I think very often we all get caught up in our own journey, but we don't realize the impact we have on

[00:25:29] those around us. And I'm sure if he was to hear that now and the impact he's had on your career, probably blissfully unaware of it. So it's so important to share that. And for anyone listening

[00:25:40] wants to find out a little bit more information about Xero, everything we talked about today, contact your team or even connect with you. Where's the best starting point for everything? Joe You can find it at

[00:25:51] xerolongevity.com. We are Xero Longevity on all the socials. I'm T Conrad on all the socials. My DMs are open. I would love to hear from any of your listeners. Matthew 16 Well, we covered so much today from lessons learned from billion dollar blunders,

[00:26:06] a company success beyond that great product and from overload to empowerment and democratizing health data. So many cool things and also that great story that you finished on. But more than

[00:26:16] anything, just thank you for spending a bit of time with me today, Tom, and sharing that story with me. Thank you. Tom 18 Andy, it's been great. Andy 19 I think as we've learned from Tom today, success is not just about building an excellent product.

[00:26:28] It's also about understanding strategy, scalability and how failures can be transformed into stepping stones for innovation. And if we look at Tom's story there from Pest.com to Queeby to Xero's mission to empower millions by democratizing health data, Tom's career provides

[00:26:46] incredibly valuable insights into how tech can redefine our lives and businesses and even change the world. But what do you think? How do you see health data shaping the future of tech? How can companies balance those visionary ideas with sustainable growth? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[00:27:03] So please join the conversation, share your perspective by emailing me techblogwriteroutlook.com, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, just at Neil C. Hughes. Let me know your thoughts and if you've got any questions or you'd like to come on the show, just let me know. But that's it today.

[00:27:20] So thank you to Tom for sharing his inspiring story. Even bigger thank you to each and every one of you for tuning into this podcast. I know you have a lot of choice and a lot of podcasts

[00:27:30] in your feed, so thank you for choosing to listen to this one today. I'll be waiting here bright and early in your podcast feed with another interview tomorrow. But thank you for listening as always and until next time, don't be a stranger.