This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholds on Bloomberg Radio.
This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest. Joanne Bradford has had really a fascinating career in technology, marketing and finance. She was chief revenue officer at Microsoft. She was chief marketing officer at SOFI. She had very senior roles at places like Yahoo, Pinterest, Demand Media, BusinessWeek. She has a number of investments as really a entrepreneur and a venture investor. Domain Money is one of the
big ones. She's also involved with wealth dot com. And I could give you a long list of all the things she's done cahoot, super Telly, just all these really
fascinating startups. She has had just an unbelievably interesting career and is one of these people who looks at every role she's had in a company as a challenge and an opportunity, and she has really managed to accomplish tremendous things, not just at Microsoft where she ran MSN's advertising and marketing, not just at Yahoo or Pinterest, but even a small startup like Honey, which she was president and sold pretty quickly to PayPal for four billion dollars. Anytime I get
to speak with Joanne. I always come away feeling like I've learned so much and gained so much from the experience. I found our conversation fascinating, and I think you will also with no further ado my discussion with domain monies.
Joanne Bradford, thank you so much, very it's an honor to be here.
Well, it's a privilege to have you. You and I had a conversation not too long ago, and so much of what you do is so interesting and so fascinating and so beneath the radar of the average investors', you know, horizon. I thought, let's bring in Joanne and talk about what a fascinating career you've had. But I got to start with your education. You started what is that San Diego State, studying journalism and Advertising ADS TECHS.
I was a journalism major because it was the easiest major at the time, and I went and took advertising courses and went to work at my college newspaper. One side where the writers, one side where the ad sales people. They paid the ad salespeople. So I went in there and didn't turn back for twenty years. And so I've sold billions of dollars worth of advertising in my life.
So southern California in the late nineteen eighties. Yeah, what was the tech world like there?
There was no tech world really, I mean you know. After I graduated from college, I went to work in the Macy's management program because they were the only people that were hiring. It was either go drive a Fredo Lay truck or Macy's management program. I did that for two years. It was fun, learned how to buy merchandise. But my love of advertising called and so I ended up working at BusinessWeek magazine for almost thirteen years.
Right, this was the previous business Week before its acquisition by bloomber so it was.
Part of was part of McGraw hill gra Hill.
I also owns SMP. Yeah, so what did you do with BusinessWeek?
They sent me to a little known land called San Jose and Silicon Valley to sell advertising, and I sold ads to people like Hewlett Packard and Cisco when they had one hundred employees. And I went to Seattle and called on a little company called Microsoft and learned everything I could about technology. Sun Microsystems was the hot ticket at the point in time, and I talked BusinessWeek into buying me an Apple computer and signing me up for an AOL account. And I never looked back on tech.
In hindsight, all these ads you sold, you should have had them pay for it in stock and it would have worked out even better.
Well, you do learn a lesson about equity based comp and I finally got that right later on, which we can talk about. But yeah, I was making commission at that point in time. So when I was a salesperson at BusinessWeek, I sold more ads than anybody and I made two million dollars commission when I was twenty nine years old.
That's a lot of money. It was how do you go from BusinessWeek to Microsoft?
Well, BusinessWeek wanted me to move to New York to become the associate publisher nine to eleven happened. My husband wasn't that excited to come to New York City, and so I said, I have to go beg borrow and steal my way into a technology company. So I got the job as chief revenue officer of MSN in two
thousand and one. Nobody believed the bust had happened. Nobody was buying spots and dots or ads on the Internet, And so I went to work there and Over the course of seven years, I grew it from nothing to two and a half billion dollars in revenue. We did a deal with Facebook to represent them. That led to their investment, Microsoft's investment in Facebook. We did video ads, the first video ads, We formed the Hulu Consortium. There were a lot of first during those periods at Microsoft.
It was an amazing, amazing time in my career, and Microsoft was an insanely good company to work for. To learn how to work at an engineering led company.
Hually really intriguing.
You know.
We look at these economic busts or these market crashes, and it's obvious in hindsight what spectacular opportunities they were. What did you see in two or three that led you to say, I know, let me find one of these broken down tech companies and start something fun there.
Well, you know, so at Microsoft, when I went there, I knew that people were spending more time online, and I knew that advertising dollars would eventually follow. That. We had to convince the industry, and I had to go convince people like Procter and Gamble and Coca Cola and Walmart that they should spend money with Microsoft. They were spending most of their money with Yahoo. Google wasn't on
the scene yet, and so we did crazy things. We did flyovers on the front page because that made marketers feel good and feel like they were doing me.
Someone lands on the page and it's like a takeover.
Yeah, takeovers like that was the hot thing. You could sell a takeover for a million dollars a day at that point in time. So I, you know, I learned so much and Microsoft was like a startup inside of a big company for me. I worked my last job there. I worked and reported to Satia Nadella, which is amazing, Yeah, amazing.
He's done great things as the third CEO of Microsoft, really has led them back to great success. If you're doing MSN at Microsoft, how do you end up at places like Yahoo and Pinterest.
Well, so when I went to leave Microsoft, I'd sort of done everything that I could do up until I was a corporate vice president. There was one hundred and twenty five of us, and I was like, I want to go really be an entrepreneur. I wanted to start something, and I went to a little startup that was a failure. Not all startups are great. This one had taken a hundred million dollars, didn't really have a product, and I spent six months there and said, get me out of here. Safe.
But by the way, safe to say most startups are going to crash and burn.
Most are going to crash and burn. You know, it's romanticized. It's hard to navigate as an employee. You don't know what to ask for, what to look at. So then I knew the Yahoo folks, Jerry Yang and Sue Decker asked me to come in and help them. In two thousand and eight, again a giant crash like right, So I went to Yahoo and worked on their revenue and
sales and marketing for a few years. And then I really still had the entrepreneurial itche So I went to a company called demand Media, which was sort of the first reverse engineering of the algorithm. We looked at what people were searching for, you know, how to make a smoky eye, how to write a check, how to make a strawberry margarita, and then we'd write that content. And it was called demand Media, and we took it public. We were doing four hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue.
Google change the algorithm and wiped out the business and So everybody out there that is AI dependent, Remember, the algorithm can change.
It's really true if you are at all interested. You and I have talked about LinkedIn versus Twitter. If you're on someone else's platform as opposed to your own website, you're absolutely at the mercy and the whim. It doesn't matter if it's Elon Musk or Google just tweaking to get better results. If the algo changes and it affects how often people see your work on that platform, it's a very difficult circumstances.
Yeah, everybody out there that has dependencies on those platforms needs to figure out alternative channels and alternative ways. And you know that is just an important important task for people. You can't just optimize. You know, Google will change the algorithm, they'll change the UI, they'll change the rules. You know, regulatory changes will come. I've seen every change possible impact businesses.
I mean, remember when we used to sit around and talk about the Facebook news feed like it was you know, we don't do that anymore.
So to just put a little little meat on the bounds. This isn't just Google and Facebook. It's anybody that's a creator, an influencer, a producer of content. So it's going to be YouTube and Instagram, yeah, and TikTok and LinkedIn and I don't know what comes next, but whatever comes next, it's their platform. Stop and think about how much time and effort people put into things like Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn and you have zero control over what that final product look.
That is correct.
It's really shocking. So you see the change at Google. It crushes demands media. Where do you go from there? In your were survey of the best tech companies in Silicon Valley.
Well, at that point in time, I was like, Wow, I've been selling Internet ads for a long time. I would like to do something different. So I went back to my roots and I became the president of the San Francisco Chronicle. And why I did that was because I felt like, if you're a Bayery native and you use sf gate, it is not a great product. And I really felt like San Francisco and the tech world should have a bigger voice.
So world class city, it should have a world class media.
It should, you know. At that point in time, I was the independent director for kar Swisher and Walt Mossberg. I helped them leave the journal, raise their money and ultimately I helped them sell it to Vox Media. But I had written a strategy at San Francisco Chronicle for Hurst to sort of reinvent that, and there was wasn't really a ton of appetite for it, so I spent six months there. Again, I do not mind cutting and running if it's not working out right for me. Pinterest
had called several times. I loved Pinterest. I knew pinterest would be big, so I went to pinterest as the head of partnerships. I set up and sold. I hired one hundred and twenty five ad sellers, account managers and a team to go out and sell the first promoted pins. My first hire there is now the chief revenue officeer there are Bill Watkins. He's a great, great guy. And we went out and sold the ads, and I knew
that pinterest would be big. I went in there and the valuation was below a billion dollars and I left after two years. And at two years the valuation was thirteen billion dollars, And so that was a fun run.
I would say, that's a hell of a run, right once and thirteen and then what eventually was the bridge between pinterest and SOFI in twenty fifteen.
Well again I was, I, you know, sort of took stock and I said, look, what the heck do I do. Now I've sold every ad, I've sold videos, I've sold you know, keywords, done deals with every single person in the world in the ad tech business. And so I said, I need to go learn something completely new, and I want to work in an industry with new people and
new ideas. And a friend of mine that I knew from BusinessWeek said, hey, I work at this little company called Sofi and they do student loan REFI and I've always been passionate about money. I think people should really, you know, be educated about money, think about their money. You know, student loan debt is one of the biggest problems in America. And so I said, oh, this is interesting. So I met the founder and I said, look, I don't care if you fire me. I just want to
try to do this job. He was a hedge fund guy, and he said, look, I don't know anything about marketing. I want you to build this brand like it's a multi billion dollar brand. I want you to take risk and let me know what the risk is. I want you to hit the CAC which is customer acquisition cost, and I want you to make sure that we underwrite loans at quality so we can sell them on the capital markets. And I said, I don't even know what you're talking about, but I will get it done.
So that's very much like what takes place with Freddie Mayek and Fannie may where they're buying conforming mortgages, so the banks now have the cash to make more loans and then they sell it to Wall Street. This is sort of like Sally may same basic concept, only private sector.
Private private sector, so we would, you know, and the premise of SOFI is that students that went to good schools and were getting law degrees and MBAs and had high student loan dad and engineering schools were not going to default on their loans, that they were going to be employable for as long as they wanted employment, and
they were, they weren't going to default. And so we really underwrote great qualities of loans and so we did that, and then we got into the personal loan business, which we were when I left there, we were doing about three billion dollars a month. I was there twenty fifteen. There were seventy five employees when I joined we were doing about ten to twenty million dollars of loans a month. When I left, we were doing one point five billion of student loans and you know about one point five
of personal loans of volume a month. Wow, so a lot of funnel.
That's a lot of funnel. Yeah, that's a lot.
And so you know, you had to learn how to you know, make deals, drive, lead gen build a community. And I would say that Sofi was and is beloved amongst that segment that helped them refy their loans. A very interesting fact that we learned while I was there is that people if they had a lot of money at play, they would refy their loans. But if it was a little bit amount of money, they would say, it's kind of a pain, I'm not going to do it. And so the magic number was three hundred and eighty
eight dollars a month. If you could save them that, then they thought it was worth it, which I thought was interesting, Like, why wouldn't you save two hundred dollars a month, you know, to REFI your behavioral psychology, I know, I thought you'd like that.
Yeah, no, I love that.
Stueah.
Before we talk about the chief revenue experience. Let's talk a little bit about Honey. Four billion dollars for a relatively young startup. That's a giant win. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with Honey. You were you present of Honey.
I was the president of Honey.
How did you find your way to Honey? And what made you think? I know PayPal? This is a perfect fit.
So how I ended up at Honey in Silicon Valley? Cheryl Sanmdberg used to hold dinners women in Silicon Valley dinners where we'd all meet each other. I met an amazing woman there. Her name was Emily Is Emily White. She works at Anthos Capital. She had held the CEO job at Instagram and Snapchat and was an early investor in Honey. And when I told her I was leaving so far after four years, just because I was done
with my financial services chapter until now. And she said, Hey, I've got a company for you in LA that I'm just about to invest in with two great founders. Can you go meet them? And I said what's it about? She said, well, it's a coupon code company. Absolutely not who wants to work on coupon codes? Are you kidding me? And she said no, no, just go meet them. And I went and met them, George and Ryan, two of the best founders I have ever worked with in my life.
And to be fair, when you say it's a coupon company, it really isn't. It's a web technology that operates in the background. Okay, like a coupon, but it's really a shopping search engine to find better prices. Am I doing it justice? You are?
Berry? So their insight was that finding a coupon code was a pain, yes, right, and you always want one, And so they built a browser extension on Chrome that you could download in two clicks, and when it detected check out, it would say, pull, look at all the coupon codes, query them all, and apply the right one. And so it was a great service to consumers. And what happened was we started launching. We launched it with gamers playing YouTube on their desktop and a little gamer
called mister Beast. Okay, so we were his first advertiser, and we did a deal with him. He made an ad. You can go look it up. If you look up mister Beast, honey ad and ad comes up. His collective ads. I think have been seen. You know, I'm going to say billions three plus close to four billion times. Every kid in America knows what honey is. Every kid in America was telling their moms and their dads they needed to download coupon you know, honey in order to save money.
The marketing the team did it. I didn't create it, but they did a great job of telling a story very clearly to the consumer and getting them to take action. They started with gamers, then they went to YouTube makeup people. Who doesn't love a Sephora coupon? Did you just get to the Sephora coupon code for the sale this week? Berry? That's like, it's like crazy that one.
You missed that one, But I will tell you it's annoying as hell as you're about to click the purchase. Do you have a coupon code? I don't know. I didn't think of it, But now that you're mentioning it, should I have a coupon code?
Well? They should tell you there aren't any, you know, they should say there are none, because then you'd feel better by saying is there one? You feel like you're missing something.
There have been times where do I really want to buy this mailbox for three hundred dollars. Without the twenty percent off coupon code, the prompt loses them a sale.
It does, and you know, Kurt, abandonment is a big deal, and so this helped improve that. The revenue model was affiliate, so we got a cut of the transactions that would go through there.
Plus the data must be astonishing.
The data. They were very clear, the founders that they were not going to sell the data and they were going to protect the consumer at all costs.
But I mean the data. To the company that's using the code, you could say, here's how we've changed the car to abandonment, Here's how the upsells have gone, here's how the average carts. Like that internal data, not I mean like the Facebook reselling stuff that most people over forty are concerned about, but just the how can we make you better as a retailer.
And you saw, you know, you saw where people came from, how they executed it, and so we built some really great products for the merchants. The funding story of Honey is interesting. The founders, Jorge and Ryan went to every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and everyone turned them down.
Because it was just open they bonds.
So they said they sort of turned their nose at coupons, and they also turn their nose at desktop, not mobile. Mobile was the thing at that point in time, and they were like everything must be mobile. It would be like today you saying we're doing something old and everybody's like everything must be AI today, right, So everybody said no, and so they raised money. They found Anthos. Anthos got on it. There was a bunch of other private investors that did and did very very well. So let's go
to the part where PayPal comes into it. So everybody's like why everybody was surprised when the headline came out PayPal buys Honey for four billion dollars. Shocked, And I say to them, don't be shocked. What Honey had was twenty plus net new active use That was PayPal's.
Metric at that twenty plus twenty million.
Net new active users. Wow, that they could add to paypals numbers. It was a profitable business, so it didn't have an negative impact to the P and L. And it also brought new engineers and new thinking and a different shopping strategy to PayPal. So you know, people always come to me or they're like, oh, this company should buy that company and I just go through the checklist.
Do you have a ton of users, do you have some path to profitability or better yet profitability, and do you have strategic thinking and or talent that would give insight? And so PayPal was smart. It checked all the boxes on that. So it was sort of a no brainer. We did. You know, it was a short time after I joined that we made the transaction, and it was a short time before Covid. We closed the deal January second of twenty twenty.
Right, and I'm assuming Covid didn't really hurt them.
When everybody was excellent for Honey.
Right, everybody's home shopping online, I got to think, turns out, oh, we're not hurt by this acquisition. This is right in.
It was great happening. We were Our biggest problem was creating ads, new fresh ads for Honey. Every employee was shooting ads in their house. I was like, kids, we're making Honey ads on our iPhones. And it was a really really fun, fun time to be there and to be part of such an exciting acquisition. So what it really taught me, you know, out for your listeners out there is you know, when I went in to talk
to that company, I asked for three things. I said, can I see the last three board decks and and I see the roadmap? And can you show me your revenue and your profitability? And they had no problem with it. So, as a senior level employee or potential board member of companies, that's what I do. I go look through those because over a course of nine months, you can see if people addressed a problem, seized an opportunity, know how to
talk about things, know how to think about things. And the honey guys passed all those things with flying colors for me, and they were awesome human beings.
So you're talking the way many venture capitalists talk. But I know you well enough to know you don't really think of yourself as a VC. I know you're an investor in a lot of early stage companies. But when someone says what do you do? Your answer is in venture capital?
Now, I'm a like I think I invest with my human capital, right, I try to get, you know, a sick significant stake in a company and something that I believe in, in something that I can help accelerate. So it is a little bit the same process and how I spend my time and effort, and it has to be aligned with my values, you know. So that's how I think about it, That's how I've made my choices. I've had a few pivots in my life on it
that have served me well. And I think, you know, I think you can figure out almost anything if you've had experiences in startups and doing things like you've, you've built many things, you know how to do it. You know right what's going to happen, and you have to be very open to it. So I was very very open to coupon codes. I was open to pinterest. I was open to a financial engineered product for student loans. You know. I like things that have not been done before.
I like things that are white space in a market, and I think there's just a giant opportunity for talent to find those and to think about it. Don't take the first obvious one, because that's kind of painful.
Right, So, let's talk about some other startups that you have advised or are advising right now. What is Super? Oh?
Super It's a they help you save money on travel and then they have a subscription service that helps people earn money. It's a company based out of Toronto with a really great young founder duo that have built something to help people get deals every day. And it's a it's an app that is helpful in ways that Google isn't. And they're trying to combine all those experiences and give
you ultimately a cash management tool someday. Like everybody will eventually be a financial services company or an advertising company. I think that's just the way it goes. Like, I don't all roads lead to So let's talk.
About a financial company, Wealth dot com.
Wealth dot com. I'm a really great company that is building AI technology for making trusts, wills estates easy to manage. Lawyers spend and run up bills to collate your paper to show you where things are. If you wanted to leave me your watch, or I wanted to leave you a burkin, it would cost a lot on the lawyer. In wealth dot com, you can go in and change it very simply.
It's different in every state. There are different rules.
They have our compliant in every state. It is a very strong platform for advisors RAS and you know a lot of them are using it At Domain Money. We use it because most people don't have trusts set up properly, and so they have done that and they're a B to B company right now, and I think eventually they'll be a B two C company.
So let's talk about domain Money. Yeah, brought that up. Tell us a little bit about what you did starting up domain money last year and some of the all stars you're working with.
Yeah. So, I worked with a certified financial planner called Katie Song when I was at SOFI, and she did a plan for me personally and answered the questions, can I retire? Can I send my kids to school? Should I buy another home? Can I go on vacation every year for a month, Like literally went through my budget, my spending, my potential spending, and my investments. And I loved it so much that I said, let's build a business. I have a moment in time, and so we started
working on it. Then Adam Dell was working on domain Money. He came to me and said, Hey, I'm working on this. I said, I've got you know this product with Katie Song. We put them together in November.
Now let me interrupt you and just point out for the listener. Adam Dell has a brother named Michael.
I've never met Michael, who did something with computers, but yeah, I think so something like that.
That so, and he also happened to set up a little thing called Marcus at Goldman Sacks.
He did he sold Adam was a VC and then open Table was one of his runaway successes. And then he sold Clarity money to Goldman Sacks and ran Marcus for a little.
While and very different Open Table, very different. But that's just a pure technology to drive reservations, which I don't know anybody that doesn't have that on their phone right Literally, it's ubiquit it it.
Is, you know, Rezi versus open Table. We can have both, of course, of course you do. It's like it's like an Amex and a Chase card. You have them both. So Adam, really we have a big vision that there's a very big opportunity out there for people that are not in need of an au M advisor and that
don't want to do it themselves. There's a giant gap in that market sort of you know, the home depot lows of financial services right where you you and you want a little more help, the equinox of it, the pre novo of it, where you you need help but not forever and not at the expense. And I manage my money both ways. I have au M and I
do some you know, flat fee on my own. And so we built this product called the one Page Plan that will literally analyze what you spend down to your door dash, down to your credit card, down to your Amazon and then look at your investments and tell you need to save sixty three thousand dollars a year for the next ten years to get even close to where you're going to be. And here's the five action items you need to take. And so we offer that plan
for twenty five hundred dollars. If it's more complex, we offer a strategic plan or a full comprehensive plan where will help rebalance and do your portfolio for seventy five hundred dollars. We have, you know, people coming to us every day just on word of mouth. People are confused and overwhelmed. They well, they love a you know TikTok, you know budget tool. They can't do it themselves. They need more help. And so that's the place in the
market that we're serving. You know, I'd say, if if I had to describe the consumer, they're sort of thirty eight years old and they wake up and they go, wait a minute, crap, I didn't I didn't do all these things.
Tax Day was Mid's Day was fun?
What did I forget? Why didn't I set my roth Ira up? Why didn't I start my college fund? You know? You put it off every day, and you shouldn't. Nobody here that listens to this show should not have a financial plan, even if they did it themselves, if they had someone do it for them. You have to have one otherwise you shouldn't be listening to the show.
You have some amazing partners with this. I feel like I want to throw a ringer in because people are so Some of the early engineers from Amazon Web Services are part of this. Mark Bennioff, who's certainly super well regarded out in Silicon Valley, Palenteer and all that. Some kid named Ashton Kutcher is involved. Like I'm trying to make up a name and I can't. Yeah, that's an incredible set of partners for what's essentially not even a year old startup.
Yeah, I mean I think you know, Adam's track record and relationship were able to attract quality investors and quality talent, and now we're just trying to deliver an unbelievable experience for people if you don't like it, we'll give you your money back. But we have people that are just delighted every day with it, and that's the goal, you know, we want people to have more financial control in their lives.
It's too important, you know, it's for me. It's a value system and a belief system and what you do with your money and how you think about it and how you live. And so that's why I got involved with with Domain money, and it's it's been very rewarding.
It sounds like it. So I want to talk a little bit about when you were in Silicon Valley and working as a woman in what was very much a male dominated technology field, and I guess the thought was, I know, let me find another male dominating field. Let me let me go to finance and see what I could shake up there. But I use that phrase on purpose because I know you've been very influential in different
fields from the inside. Tell us a little bit about the evolution that we've seen in technology and now finance.
Yeah, let's just in my early career, many rooms I went into and still today I'm the only women in those rooms, and so I take my responsibility pretty seriously that I have to bring the voice of other women into the room. I work with an organization called the Female Quotient. How it started and everybody should go followed on social They have viral videos. They had one go
viral with one hundred million views the other day. They started doing events at Cees and south By Southwest and trade shows all around the world where they created a place for women to go and convene and all of the power women went there. They called it the Girls Lounge. You could go in and get a hair, blow dry and a makeup and have a glass of champagne. It has since turned into the Equality Lounge, and they do programming in every one of those lounges and they let
everybody in. Everybody is welcome. You don't have to have a badge to the show. They're like, look, if you're in town, come by. If your support staff and you can't get into the party, we don't believe in that, So everybody comes. It's one of the most powerful places at Cees, at Davos, at south By Southwest. What it has reinforced for me is that women need to convene, they need to support each other, they need to see
each other being successful. And how that's normalized. So for men and Barry, you and I have had this conversation. I think it's important to Number one, if I ran a company and I was a man, I would give them allowance or budget to go convene as women with other women in their industry. Tomorrow, I'm going to the CNBC Change Makers, which is their women initiative that is launching this year. Would be a great afternoon gathering and talks by other women that have made significant changes for
the year. And there's just a great opportunity to network and connect at those things. If the leader from your organization goes out and shows up in the community, it's going to attract other people from the community, Right, It's pretty basic. And so that's number one. Number two is that you really have to give people responsibility. I asked for responsibility at every turn in my life.
I was about to bring that up because you've told stories about Microsoft. You told stories that I've heard at Yahoo where you went to your management and said, listen, I have more band with and here's what I want to do. Yeah, what are those conversations like? How do they go? And is everybody always receptive?
They're not always receptive. But look today, putting an idea down on a piece of paper and sending it to someone is free. And what it shows people is how serious you are about that idea and that you've put some thought into it. And those have been pivotal turning moments for me in my career where I sat took pen to paper, and you can do it with AI now, So it's not even that hard, right. I take notes
on everything I do. I spit it into I like Bard's tone of voice better than chat GPT, but that's just me, And I'm like, Okay, write me a proposal based on these five things I just saw, and what would it be? And then I'm like, mah, should I do this? Should I not do this? But I did the same thing in my early day at BusinessWeek. I was like, Hey, we need to go buy a uurl. Okay, we and you know, like, convinced business Week that we should put advertiser links on a page in the magazine.
I'm like, I will get money for that page of advertising. So we sold people's URL listings on a page in Business Week. We sold a crossword in Business Week. I was like, let's put a crossword in there. I think it's a good idea, you know, like you just have to keep putting ideas forward and then people will see that. And so as a woman, I said, that's how I'm going to break through. That's that's what I'm going to do.
What happened in a place like Microsoft that was very much an old boys club. It's Bill and Steve and the rest of the crew. When you say, hey, I want to convene a group of women to talk about how we could do better at Microsoft? Do they take it seriously? Is there a little snickering? Like what they said?
They said great? They said great, I you know.
His post dj any trust case, So there was a little sensitivity as to how they looked in emails and elsewhere. I would imagine, yes.
You know I worked. I worked more closely with Steve there and still keep in touch with him. And you know he he has a woman, Gillien Zucker, that runs his operation there. That is amazing. Also. I think the Clippers, Yeah, at the Clippers and the forum now and into its center and has just unbelievable responsibility.
And is that a sea change from twenty years ago?
Look, he always gave everybody opportunity. I didn't. I didn't feel there was any gender bias in his approach. Like he was just like, you know, get it done, get it done. Know your numbers, get it done. And you know, I've always sort of worked for and signed up for tours of duties with people that I felt were just like, yeah,
get it done. And so I think it's just important that you give people the opportunity and I don't care if it's you know, male or female, but to put ideas forth on how they want things changed, because they see them, they know them better than you do. And like I saw the video opportunity. So I did a thing called Live Earth where we seven seven oh seven, where we beamed music around for twenty four hours.
Oh sure, I remember, Yeah, that.
Was you know, I went to Microsoft. I did that. I did that. I did that with Kevin Wall and Bobby Shreiver helped me, and you know, we had every artist in the world doing that, and it was to promote Microsoft's video player. And it was the largest streamed event globally until that guy jumped out of the plane on YouTube, which was a long time and I you know, took the risk. It was Microsoft was not a sustainability focused company at that point in time, and they were like, huh, Joeanne,
this isn't so great. I'm like, I'm going to pay for it with advertising, and I got General Motors to sponsor it and it was a huge It was a huge success. But we wrote that up and took it in and presented the P and L for it and got it done. So it's anything's possible when you put it to paper.
So you're at maybe not a giant company like Microsoft, but a smaller firm that maybe isn't paying as much attention to gender issues because they're you know, they're swimen as fast as they can against the tide. And you bring up an idea, Hey, I want to convene the women on your investment committee or the women who work in your sales group. What's the response like from companies and what are the net results when you get a group together like that.
Yeah, I'll talk about the Pinterest experience. When I worked at pinterest, you know, I was much older than the average employee. A lot of employees were starting to have kids, and the moms were really sort of you know, overwhelmed, right, because it was a startup environment. We were going going hard, hard hearted, and am.
I remember correctly? Was Pinterest very much of female user base? Yes? It was right like eighty percent of crazy number.
Yes, And we were thirty percent women when I was there, so which was interesting. And the moms wanted to convene, and so I said, just give me an hour of meeting space. We just want them to get together and share information and knowledge. Things as basic as you know, how are you dealing with preparing meals for your kids? To my recruiters nanny, she had to fire her suddenly one day, and what do you do in that situation? And how do you communicate that to your to your boss,
your manager in those kinds of environments. And I will say today that Pinterest has carried that on and I still talk to many of those women. I did a sort of a group talk for Pinterest the other day where there's many of those mothers that say that was the difference between this being bearable and unbearable for me. This was the difference between me feeling like I'm failing at my job or doing well at my job. That I have some common ground, and so let people find
common ground. You don't have to control everything. And I just think women, mothers, caregivers really really need to convene and give them permission, give them space to do it, because it will make them more committed, better employees, and more productive on every level. Those things are not hard, they're not expensive.
So I have to point one thing out that I'm fascinated by you. And I don't know if this is coincidental or just a component of your personality, but it seems that each of your major career events all seem to take place in these wild dislocations. So you start at Microsoft in the midst of the dot com implosion terrible, right, nasdak down eighty one percent peak to troth. Yeah, the next gig starts pretty much in the middle of the financial crist and then the honey transaction literally day one
of the pandemic. Y is it that you just see opportunities when there's sort of mayhem and everybody's running around with their with their heads cut off? Or is this just some crazy dumb luck.
I mean, I've asked myself that question. You know, all of my friends would tell me never to do the jobs that I took, right, Okay.
My, well that's some terrible advice.
Yeah, I don't take it. And my youngest daughter told me this, and it's a good friend of mine just wrote a book that's titled it Nobody cares what you do or where you work.
From next month.
Yeah, Erica worked for me and with me for ten years.
Oh, I had no idea. That's completely coincidental. Yes, I love I love the title of that book.
Yeah, And so you know, when I would lament about it, my daughter would just go, Mom, nobody nobody cares. Like, nobody cares what you do, what you put on LinkedIn, what you say, where you go. So you need to just really get over it.
Kids keep you honestly, It keeps.
You really, really honest. And so you know, I don't think you know. When I started working, it was go to work, work responsibly, work up the ladder as far as you can go in a company. I got up the ladder pretty quickly in a lot of company, to very senior positions. And then I was like, wait a minute, do I want to do this for the rest of my life? And the answer was no. The answer was I like the excitement of building. I like the excitement of new territories and new industries, and so that is
really sort of my larger calling on this stuff. Then, like, am I a crazy risk taker, you know, jumping out of you know, corporate jobs for you know, playing the equivalent of that.
No, Well, they seem to have worked out. So it's not like it's not like you're risk embracing with no upside. You seem to be appropriately risk embracing, or at least looking at with the advantage of hindsight bias, looking at the track record, it seems that you took the right amount of risk at the right time in the right places, or you've just been on an incredibly lucky run of dice. And I don't believe it's the ladder. I think it's the former.
Well, well, you know, I do think experience gives you something and I can cut the line in many things in figuring out how to get to the person to the right group. I'm advising two young women that dropped out of Stanford that you'll hear about soon and help them raise money for a very interesting product. And we were able to sort of short circuit the system and get them in front of the right people very quickly.
And you know, I can bring that skill to a lot of different scenarios and so that's what I try to do right and the sort of three key areas I focus on my life or number one is really financial wellbeing. I just I want everybody to just make your life better on every front. You know. Number two is really female leadership and you know, getting them to be all of us to be confident enough to take risks and to like stand up and speak and not
be afraid of consequences in those situations. And then the third category that we've talked a little bit about is I really love resale luxury and I think it's you know, a very big growth market.
Well you're in the right city for it.
If I was ever going to be I wrote a plan a couple of years back to do an activist takeover of the real Reel. I got some investors together. I just hate the way that companies run. So if there's anybody out there listening, I really I wrote a plan. But they have a three hundred million dollar convertible debt note that triggers in a change of control. So I abandoned their private right. You know, they're public.
They were public there.
They went public. I was an investor. They went out at like two billion. I think it's worth, you know, one hundred and fifty million today. I can't even look at it because it's so painful.
Down eighty five percent usually engend. There's a change in control.
I understand. But so in the meantime, that market is going to grow like crazy. So I'm working on a few projects in that category. But you know, I and it's also a community based product, right, like people are buying from each other. There's an unbelievable world of crazy stuff going on on Instagram and social selling in those platforms, and I think that will be a big, big market
for a long time to come. So you know, I feel fortunate that I can do what I want to do and I get to sit here and talk to you about it and like sort of look back on it and say, oh, yeah, I was so smart, but you know, I just I kept swinging the bat is really what it came down to.
Smart, persistent, a little bit of luck. That's a great combination. Tell us what you're streaming these days? What are you watching or listening?
I am watching The New Look because I love fashion and I love history, so I love a documentary, so that's what I'm watching these days.
Have you watched What is It Palm Royal on that yet if you want to see a just lovingly photographed set of fashion and just great the way it's done is on the list. On the list. Let's talk about mentors who helped shape your career.
There was a guy I was on the board of Care, which is the world's largest NGO, for six years, and there was a really excellent McKinsey partner that ran the board practices, Paul Jansen, and he taught me how to be a good board member. And being a good board member means you don't talk too much and that you are supportive in critical moments of decision. So he was one I think. You know, Steve Bomber taught me a lot about how to think in an engineering mindset and
think about technology. You know I have. I think an entrepreneur and someone that starts a company is sort of the bravest soul in the world right now. So anything I can learn from them I do.
Huh really interesting. Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?
What am I reading right now? Midnight Express a tale about someone that helps her sister through hospice and then takes mushrooms to overcome depression and anxiotry.
Not the seventies. Now you're a movie about no, no, no, about bringing how she's now totally different.
That's totally different, huh.
And give me one more.
Financially Fearless by Katie Song, which was written out of a need Facebook group. Moms would ping her every day about financial advice. So she sat down over a weekend and wrote a book for them, and we self published it and we give it to every tech mom we know, so they have a financial plan.
Financially fear Fearless. And let's let's let's throw a bone to Kara. What what your friend Kara Swisher? What's her new book?
That's out Burne? Who doesn't love burn right? You know, I told Kara I was coming here today. She's like Barry is a very good podcaster. I've been on a how.
To get her back into talking about the book because it's literally I just finished a book for next week's podcast. Yeah, and her book is literally next to him.
I'm in the book, I'm in the bank. So the book was fun. You know, Kara is.
Kara is, She's fearless.
There is nobody more fearless than Kara Swisher.
She actually there's nobody names names and nobody and them.
Also loves work, loves to invent, loves to be ahead of things. Really a very very sharp person.
Very much so. So our final two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad who is interested in a career in filling the blank finance technology startups venture? What what's the advice to that recent graduate?
Yeah, do your research. So if you want to go into finance. There's two women that run a a Instagram channel called Wall Street Skinny that teach you how to get jobs and money. You should have them on the show. They both work Wall Street Skinny. They're amazing. They always cite you, but they teach you the ins and outs of how to get a job in finance on every front. I think if you are going to get a job at a public company, you should read their annual report.
The company itself company. You go on an ABC Bank, read ABC Banks.
First stop, first stop on the hip parade. Go read the annual report. It's their strategy document. It's what they tell people. If not, you have to do it right like you read it, you are further ahead than most employees there. So do your research, right. You know, I've gone deep into you know, filings like SEC filings, like you know, I before I go work with a company that's public, I look at every execs comp package like I love to, you know, dumpster dive through SEC filings.
It's not that hard to do. Set your alerts. So do your research. Know what the person cares about, know what the company cares about, and have interest in them, and also bring them ideas. My daughter was once looking for a job and freelance job, and I said, just remake the person's website. It's a company I invested in. Their website drove me crazy. And she's a designer, and I said, he's not going to tell you what he wants,
so just do it and send it to him. So she did it and sent it to him, and he hired her to do that project. Yeah, and she's like, I don't want to do spec work. And I'm like, well, it's when you're starting off, you have to do some spec work. It's just the way it is.
That's tremendous advice. Our final question, what do you know about the world of investing startups? Marketing? And branding today. You wish you knew a couple of decades ago when you were first getting started.
Do not fight so hard on your brand. So I have a brand I advise. It was called four Days f R F O R D A y s dot com. They sold you a T shirt and at the end of life you could send the T shirt back. I worked with the CEO. I said, look, this needs to look a little more like Skittles and be bright. She has rebranded it to trashy dot Io. Has a deal with Walmart and sold out of her take back bags that are going viral on Instagram. And it was too
hard to explain what four days was. Trashy dot io send your old clothes back, get cash reward for it. Very simple, straightforward. It's on a tear right now. When you over complicate what you're selling, it's impossible. Nobody can listen, nobody can follow it. You wide out, So you got to keep it simple.
Huh. Really, really fascinating stuff, Joanne, Thank you for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Joann Bradford of honeypinterst, Yahoo, Wealth dot com, Domain money, go down the whole list. If you enjoy this conversation, check out any of the previous five hundred or so we've done over the past nine and a half years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you
find your favorite podcasts. Check out my new podcast at the Money, ten minute conversations with experts about your money, earning it, spending it, and most importantly, investing it. Find it in the Masters and Business feed, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the correct team that helps put these conversations together each week. Sarah Lidsey is my audio engineer. A Tick of al Brun is my project manager. Anna
Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ridolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.