Creating Customer Love
How Sheila Vashee brought the customer focus shown by leading consumer brands to business customers at Dropbox, architecting a groundswell of devotion based on clear communication and continuous adaptation.
Episode Notes
It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when “cloud” was a word to be avoided for tech companies, but for Sheila Vashee, that was an imperative in the early days of Dropbox. Instead of droning on the next tech buzzword, Sheila helped Dropbox stay relentlessly focused on customer love, making sure that people understood the real impact of the technologies that Dropbox was developing to make their lives easier and help them work more productively. And she grew the marketing team from just two people to 80 in her tenure.
In her talk with Jesse, Sheila shares what drove her interest in technology, how her early experiences at well-established brands prepared her to guide Dropbox through its leap from consumer brand to enterprise platform, and what compelled her to join Opendoor at a time when Dropbox was hitting its stride as a public company. Finally, she draws on her research and knowledge of today’s technology landscape to offer a glimpse at what the future might hold for workplaces in every industry.
Guest Bio
Sheila Vashee is a Partner at Basis Set Ventures, an early stage venture fund focused on investing in the future of work. Previously she was the VP of Growth at Opendoor, where she oversaw the marketing, partnerships, and product teams responsible for growth across the buyer and seller marketplace. Sheila took Opendoor from 4 to 21 markets and billions in GMV in a few years.
Prior to that, she was the second marketing hire at Dropbox, where she launched every major product, including Dropbox Business, and helped 12x the Dropbox user base to 600m users and >1Bn in revenue.
Useful Links
Sheila’s podcast: Hypergrowth: The Early Years
+ Episode Transcript
Sheila Vashee [00:00:08] At the time, the groundswell of demand, I've just never seen anything like it in my life. Every day we'd get hundreds and thousands of people calling us, emailing us, writing us, texting us, saying I just want to use this at work. All you have to do is give me X. I'll put my whole team on it, I'll put my company on it. And that was consumer demand, pulling us into business and pulling us into enterprise. And we were just trying to figure out how to do it differently, how to do it in a way that felt true to Dropbox and was still in line from a brand perspective for what we had achieved with consumers.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:00] From Qualtrics Industries, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:16] I'm Jesse Purewal. Today on the show, How an Entrepreneurial Mom, a stint at Oxford and a set of challenging roles at venerable brands early in her career set the stage for Sheila Vashee to become an architect of company growth and creator of customer love at Dropbox and Opendoor.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:41] I am here with Sheila Vashee. Sheila, thank you for joining me.
Sheila Vashee [00:01:45] Thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:47] Now, Sheila, I want to start off by talking about your history with technology. You've been close to tech just about your whole career. What was it that ignited maybe the initial interest or passion from you around getting involved in technology?
Sheila Vashee [00:02:01] I was always really inspired by my mom, who after having us, she left her job, she used to be in banking, and she would take care of us during the day, and then at night she took courses and became a computer programmer. She got her masters in computer science. I would say that ignited my early interest in technology and also opened my eyes to what was possible, because after she got her degree in computer science, she actually joined a bunch of early stage startups that I worked at. I did internships there in high school and afterwards, and I just felt like anything was possible. This was in the 90s for a mom of two kids to be able to do a complete career switch like that into something that was, you know, traditionally not available to her, and it was incredibly inspiring.
Jesse Purewal [00:02:51] Yeah. And so you would eventually go on to school at both Stanford and Berkeley. Can you point to something that you intersected along the way that stands out as a learning experience, whether it was a course or a class initiative or an internship or a professor or anything really stand out?
Sheila Vashee [00:03:11] Yes, when I was in college, I had the opportunity to study abroad and I decided to do a quarter at Oxford. Stanford had an exchange program. So I am separately obsessed with British history, just like a just a personal kind of fascination. And so getting a chance to go to Oxford, you know, which of course, like the school there, was founded in like 1200 or something or 1100. So the history there is amazing. But I think the most incredible part of that experience was the tutorial system, which Oxford is famous for. So, many of the classes are taught directly one on one instruction from a professor, and it was the most academically challenging experience of my life. But I don't think I've ever worked so hard or learned as much. But it was a fascinating shift in the way that you educate yourself, and I have a deep respect for it.
Jesse Purewal [00:04:06] I want to ask about some of the early unlocks that you had on on that journey before you were at Dropbox, an Opendoor where you were leading early stage growth. You spent some time at some pretty venerable brands that have been with us a while, Morgan Stanley, Gap and Apple. How do you regard the time that you spent at that time of your career and what it opened for you?
Sheila Vashee [00:04:30] I think it's incredibly important. It was an intentional decision on my part to join a more established kind of set of companies, and there's a lot of value in that approach, especially in the beginning of your career, because you get a chance to see what good looks like. I mean, there are benefits to joining early stage companies as well. And I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute. I mean, incredible career trajectory, a chance to experience things that you otherwise, you know, have to wait decades to be able to experience in your career. But what you don't get a chance to see is good at scale. And that's what Apple and Gap and some of these other companies do really well. At Apple, I had an opportunity to work on the launch of iPhone 4s and launching it in a bunch of Middle Eastern markets and and African markets and getting a chance to see how that process worked and how the product was received by consumers there was really kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity, and that stayed with me when I was launching products and doing things that at many, many companies after that, because that is for especially for a tech company, best in class. So that was an incredible experience. Gap I joined early in my career and that is also, a storied brand which is struggling now in this retail environment, but you also, especially back then, you were able to see some of the elements that really drove the success of Gap as a brand in the hearts and minds of their consumers. And so a lot to be learned there and honestly, a lot to be learned even when a company is struggling because you can see what's working and what's not working. I think for Gap, pulling themselves into the digital age has been hard. And seeing that firsthand has informed a lot of the choices I have made career-wise since, but then also helped me understand how to sell to companies like that for either companies I'm investing in now or or companies I've been at.
Jesse Purewal [00:06:35] And whether you make the comparison explicitly about an Apple vis-a-vis a Gap or whether you just think about companies that have contended better with transformation maybe than others, have you been able to identify a handful of forces that you think separate those who've gotten it right from those who've gotten it wrong?
Sheila Vashee [00:06:56] What I found across the board is that the companies who focus and go to extreme lengths to focus on customer experience and customer love are the ones who win in the end. And they're not overly focused on competition or what they're doing they just focus on what their customers want and they build relentlessly and quickly to achieve that. That drives success. I've seen that at every successful company I've been at.
Jesse Purewal [00:07:24] Hmm. So the timing of the early part of your career, Sheila, mid 2000s, that was some time of real transformation in tech, in the Internet and business models being upended. Take me back to that time and tell me how you experienced it, what felt like the big stuff that was going on from your seat at that point in time?
Sheila Vashee [00:07:45] Yeah, I graduated in 2005. It really was an incredible time to be in Silicon Valley, actually. Steve Jobs gave the commencement address at my college graduation, which was at the time I don't think I appreciated how significant it was. And of course, I've listened to the talk years later and just hung on every word at the time I joined Morgan Stanley in investment banking and I was in that space when Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for and it was $1.6 billion dollars. Everyone thought it was absolutely absurd at the time. Like, why would you pay that much money for a company like YouTube? And obviously now driving billions and billions of dollars of revenue for for Google so that was a very prescient decision, back to what I was saying earlier, just that the feeling of of promise. 2007 was when the existing kind of social platforms started to mature, figure out their business models and prove that social could be a thing. And then 2010 was the rise of cloud and cloud apps that decade. Really, that was when I joined Dropbox. And I feel incredibly fortunate to have had that experience because that was really a time when the way that software was built was being completely upended and rethought and product-led businesses and consumers of IT were taking hold. And today they seem so obvious. But back then it was a completely new business model.
Jesse Purewal [00:09:14] I think of Dropbox, where you were the second marketing hire, as in some ways being the application that brought the cloud to consumers in their homes. The notion of storage, well, where am I storing? Well, I'm storing on this thing called the cloud, and we all had to learn what the cloud was. And I think Dropbox played a not insignificant role in bringing people along around the use case of, oh, it's not going to sit locally on my machine anymore. I knew you were attracted to Dropbox as an opportunity coming out of graduate school. So, talk a bit about what compelled you to join what was then very, very nascent business.
Sheila Vashee [00:09:55] I think you're spot on with that Dropbox and a lot of ways really brought into the popular lexicon what cloud was on a basic level. People didn't really grasp that before. That's what was so revolutionary about that approach, is they made it so dead simple. And it's funny. In the early days at Dropbox, I was a very early hire. We actually shied away from using the term "cloud" because we thought that it was too complicated sounding. We didn't want people to have to think about the mechanism. We wanted them to think about what it did for them. So rather than say, Oh, we're going to store your stuff in the cloud, we would say, just imagine if you had your stuff on every device without even thinking you don't even have to worry about it. It's just there for you. And that's what resonated, because if we would try to explain, well, there's a concept called the cloud and there are these server farms where we send your information about no one, no one would care. They just want to know what happens to them, what happens to their stuff, is their stuff safe? So actually, the word cloud was a bad word in the early days of Dropbox. We weren't allowed to say it. We had to find other ways to explain it.
Jesse Purewal [00:11:12] Well, and today it does sound like it's much more closely connected to business-centric use cases like Disney Plus doesn't tell me about its Disney Cloud. You know, there's not my Netflix cloud. I sort of have the understanding that that stuff is a subscription model unless I'm doing the occasional download here and there. But you're right, they've stayed away from the use of cloud and there's the potential obfuscation that you're talking to. Did you ever experience any of the, yeah, but that whole vernacular of cloud is going to be for Cisco and HP and Intel reinventing themselves. Was that also part of the calculus?
Sheila Vashee [00:11:55] Yeah, actually, very much so. So what was so interesting was in 2013 Dropbox officially launched its business product, and we very, very specifically said we don't ever want to be those B2B tech companies that talk like machines and sounds so jargony. We wanted to still be a consumer company just selling to businesses. And at the time, the groundswell of demand, I've just never seen anything like it in my life. Every day we'd get hundreds and thousands of people calling us, emailing us, writing us, texting us, saying I just want to use this at work. All you have to do is give me X, just give me X, Y and Z and I will use this at work. I'll put my whole team on it, I'll put my company on it. And that was such consumer demand, pulling us into business and pulling us into enterprise. And we were just trying to figure out how to do it differently, how to do it in a way that felt true to Dropbox and was still in line from a brand perspective from what we had achieved with consumers. But that consumer love, the only other company I've seen that at actually is Apple.
Jesse Purewal [00:13:11] Let's talk about the creation of consumer love and how marketing and product and sales and other teams have to work together to create it and sustain it and amplify it over time. Tell me about the dynamics that you experienced and maybe that you put in play to help enable cross-functional collaboration at Dropbox to build the company and continue to build the category quarter after quarter while you were there.
Sheila Vashee [00:13:37] So like any fast growing company, I think they say every time your employee count doubles, all your systems break. That is very much true. I feel like we iterated. We had so many different models for how to work together every time we grew as a company. So in the very early days when I first joined, when we had two marketers and three or four product managers and 50 engineers, everyone was sitting in the same room. And so it was so easy and our office was one big room. So that also made it easier. It was no problem to build and launch new things and figure out what customers wanted. Then, as we grew over time, we had to put systems in place and structures and people grew out their teams and we had to figure out the right atomic units of teams to be able to move quickly and launch products. And we got some stuff right we got plenty of stuff wrong. One thing that I found is that you always want your minimum viable team on something so you can be nimble and move fast. So when we launched the business product, which was, you know, grew into its own division and had eventually huge teams behind its sales and engineering and marketing, et cetera, in the beginning it was just four or five people and I was one of them. And we would sit in a room together and we all it was one person off of each team. So one marketing person, one product manager one three to five engineers. And we'd sit in a room trying to figure out what the heck was going on. And then dow do we launched this thing and we worked really hard. I mean, every weekend we were there, we had something called ice cream Sundays because we would be sitting there on Sundays eating ice cream, working on launching these products. So it has to be a small, very dedicated team who's allowed to move fast. And that's always the formula that worked.
Jesse Purewal [00:15:36] I want to ask you about the trajectory of growth going back to Dropbox and just with an eye to coaching or advising other builders, was your experience that the change that resulted from this 40X headcount growth from two when you joined as number two in marketing to over 80, you know, does that happen in fits and starts and waves? Does it happen more linearly?
Sheila Vashee [00:16:02] When you're in the very early days of a company, you are just fighting tooth and nail to get to tomorrow because and that's generally you can't look out too much farther between tomorrow, next week, because if you if your company can't survive until next week or next month, there is no next year. I remember in the early days of Opendoor, a team member had put together like six or nine month plans for something on growth. This person presented their nine month plan to Keith Rabois and he was like, What are you doing? I want to see the one month plan. If it takes you nine months to build this thing, this company is out of existence. And so that's the mentality you have to have when you're an early stage company, you fight for tomorrow, because if you don't have tomorrow, then there's no next week. And and oftentimes when you're kind of building this machine, when you're on the inside, it feels like everything is just constantly on fire and it's just held together with duct. Duct tape and gum Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, used to say this feeling of building the plane while you're flying it, that's how you know that you're growing fast. You're trying to screw the seats in and the plane is already taking off. You can't have any expectations about anything because tomorrow is not certain.
Jesse Purewal [00:17:24] Yeah, yeah. Sheila you spent five and a half years at Dropbox, and then you went over to Opendoor. Talk a little bit about what timing was like for you there, why you made the move at the time that you did and what you saw in the Opendoor that made you say after the Herculean effort of growing this enterprise at Dropbox that you wanted to start again and do it and do it at Opendoor?
Sheila Vashee [00:17:49] Absolutely Opendoor was an incredible or is an incredible company. And it was it was a really interesting time. So so taking a step back, Dropbox, I had spent, as you said, five and a half years there. I felt like we had achieved something. I left a couple of months before the company went public, and I felt like we the company was on a great path and we had achieved something as a company. We had figured out how to not only be loved by consumers, but we were able to penetrate the largest organizations. I mean, the customers, you know, when I left were like NBC and Disney, like those types of customers. So, I wanted my next challenge and and Opendoor was fascinating to me because it was a tech company, but it was also an operations company. And the challenge for Opendoor was not only building technology for the way people would transact real estate in the future, it was how do you build an incredibly antiquated industry and bring it into the new age, all while trying to convince people that this is a tech and a company that you want to use. It seemed like an incredible challenge and it proved to be all of those things. And I can't tell you how highly I think of the team at Opendoor. I mean, what they've been able to build through, I mean, just sheer hard work, blood, sweat and tears is is amazing.
Jesse Purewal [00:19:22] There's a big difference in sort of inventing a category like you did at Dropbox and really disrupting an existing one and shifting customer behavior from the standpoint of let me introduce to you a new possibility versus let me change an existing behavior set. Did that difference prove salient in the either initial going or the eventual going at any of the roles? Or is it like once you're in high growth and you're being customer driven, you're just focused on how you address a need need state and a pain point and a use education?
Sheila Vashee [00:20:00] I think it all comes back to to needs, actually, because whether again, like if I'm the customer, whether you're selling me, you know, cloud technology or you're trying to sell me a new way to buy and sell my home, at the end of the day, I'm only going to care if what you're selling me improves my life in some way. And I can understand that. And so, with the mechanics are different with category creation, because you have to explain to people the problem that they have and why this is better, and with disrupting an existing category, it's a you're telling the story in a different way, but at the end of the day, you're still solving someone's problem. And if you can't do that, it doesn't matter what category you're creating or what you're disrupting, your customers aren't going to care. If you're solving their problem, then anything is possible,.
Jesse Purewal [00:21:00] So recently about a year ago, she later joined up with Basis Set Ventures I know you'd been involved with them for some time as they built out founder and operator communities. But tell me about BSV and what compelled you to join them and be a partner there?
Sheila Vashee [00:21:14] Basis Set Ventures is an early stage fund, a seed fund. And we find and invest in companies that are leveraging AI and machine learning to shape the way people work in the future. And that could be anything from a software company, SaaS business to a company changing the way agriculture works or or machinery or or we've made some investments in welding. I mean, can be real industrial automation. And what I love about this firm, frankly, in the landscape of venture is that we approach everything differently. So we're not just a venture firm. We're a venture firm that leverages machine learning the way that our companies do. So everything internally we've automated. We have a data science engine that scrapes every possible landscape and filter founders. So it's easier for us to know who to ping. All of our internal operations are automated. The way that we approach companies is different. Were the way that we work with them to help them be successful is different. We've automated a lot of that process and so we really practice what we preach. And and frankly, it feels like this is the fresh new wave of venture and what venture will look like in the future.
Jesse Purewal [00:22:35] Are there things that are front and center for you from a technology innovation standpoint that have you excited?
Sheila Vashee [00:22:41] I'm really interested in, you know, as we've said, kind of the next wave of automation and intelligent tools. I think that will completely reshape the way that people work. So, you know, going back to if the cloud helps you access stuff from anywhere and and made it all available. Intelligence and AI will make everything automated and seamless. And some some of the tools that are coming out around this are amazing, the way that they predict the next steps in your workflow and and the actions you should take for all types of functions and tools and people. And that's really incredible when you think about the efficiencies that can be gained that way and really what it can open up. So that's a big one that I'm really interested in. The second one is rethinking workflows more generally. I mean, with remote now and and what that's enabled in terms of working from anywhere in globalization, but then also challenges around working together directly. I know there are new technologies that are addressing that directly, both like delivering that in person contact, but then also making the tools easier to collaborate with others. And you're seeing what Google Docs maybe did for text editing now permeating every kind of of space and technology. And that's incredibly cool. And the third is the democratization of building tools through no code and other things that that's a buzzword in terms of, you know, being a trend in tech but what it's enabling is truly incredible. You know, anyone can build apps or sites or tools. And and what that will enable in terms of creation is incredibly exciting. So those are some spaces. But honestly, I'm just excited every day to see what's new.
Jesse Purewal [00:24:34] I want to ask a couple of broader perspectives of you. The first is if I go back to Clayton Christensen and some of his research and literature, he famously talked about eight out of 10 product launches fail. How can people who are leading growth, leading product or marketing get that number down, or am I thinking about it wrong? And actually, you need the failure rate to be high so that we have the strong successes that we do.
Sheila Vashee [00:25:00] So that's absolutely right. And yes, you do learn from those successes, but I don't think you want to go into a launch expecting a failure. So so it's it's smart to do everything you can to get the failure rate down if you're at a company. I suggest two things. Number one is spread your bets so you never want to have all of your eggs in one basket. I think Google does a really good job of this. Opendoor, did a really good job of this. Dropbox did too. Have five or six or 10 new things happening at the same time, people working on different projects because, exactly, you said eight out of ten are going to fail. So if you want one or two, they're successful. You've got to give yourself enough shots on goal. That's the first thing from a portfolio standpoint. Then when you're in the team building the thing, you have to get customer feedback and you have to be so certain you're building something people want and that they're going to really be falling all over themselves to pay you for. A good friend of mine is a co-founder of Branch Metrics, and she told me once that–she's amazing, by the way, Mada Seghete, she told me once that they when they were building Branch, they didn't stop iterating on the product, they formed the company before they knew what the product was going to be. And they didn't start stop iterating on the product until they had eight out of ten people pulling out their wallets in the conversation. That's how much they wanted it. That's when they knew that they had Product Market Fit. That's when you that's when it's time to build.
Jesse Purewal [00:26:41] Sheila, you were a young leader who drove some pretty great results. That's some pretty incredible companies over the past decade or so. And when that happens to people, they often are in the position of maybe having to say no to different opportunities that might come their way. What was your journey like in terms of staying focused on what you were building? First step, Dropbox, and then at Opendoor? And did you have to develop a mnemonic or any kind of heuristic inside your own mind for what you might be open to saying yes to if the opportunity came versus what you were resolutely going to have to say no to, given what you were building?
Sheila Vashee [00:27:21] You know, I would say there wasn't a kind of mnemonic or a formula in my mind. It was more like situationally where I was at career wise. If I felt like I was still learning on the slope that I wanted to be learning on or if it was time for a change. So as you know, as I said when I left Dropbox, I mean, Opendoor was an incredible company and I was very excited to join. But it was also I felt like I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish at Dropbox, and we had built the thing, launched it. You know, it was driving hundreds of million dollars in revenue. And it was something that I could be proud of, that I was ready for the next thing. And then I was open to conversations before that. It didn't matter who came to me, I wasn't done with the thing I was doing, same thing, an Opendoor, I was I was there to do something. I didn't want to leave until it was done. And then I'd think about the next step.
Jesse Purewal [00:28:14] And what specific advice or input do you have for women leaders, Sheila, on how to harness the super power of being a woman to go pursue whatever it is they might want to pursue?
Sheila Vashee [00:28:24] I've seen everything in my career from the early days of investment banking where I can't even tell you the things that would happen or be said to me to today when, you know, thankfully, I feel people are more aware of the challenges of people from from any background, not not just being a woman, being an underrepresented minority. I mean, there are plenty of challenges that that present themselves as you're trying to gain a career in tech. What I would say is draw on communities to support you. And there are some incredible ones. And we're building some at Basis Set Ventures. Also draw on communities to help give you the perspective and support that you need as you're forging your own career in tech. That that's the first thing. The second thing is don't be afraid to advocate for yourself. And that's something that, you know, often times and this is a stereotype but but it's it's true kind of in large numbers, like women tend to do less of and for good reason there because of unconscious bias are more likely to be seen as pushy or bossy or grabby. And they're very famous CEOs who have said things about this exact topic. But I think if you don't advocate for yourself, no one else will. And so it's something that I've had to push myself to do and I've never been sorry about it. And and so that's that's one piece of specific advice.
Jesse Purewal [00:29:55] And Sheila, as a partner now at Basis Set Ventures, you've got your own podcast. Tell us a little bit about it and where people can find it.
Sheila [00:30:05] It's called Hypergrowth: The Early Uears. And it's it's the early years of these iconic hypergrowth companies. I, you know, have the opportunity to talk to some amazing leaders across companies who have been incredibly successful in and gone through the hypergrowth phase and talking about how they built their businesses and what broke along the way and what are some of the strategies they used to be able to steer their company through the S-phase of hyper growth, which is kind of it's it's exciting to get there, it's really tough, though, to manage your company through that. So so that's kind of what we talk about. And you talk to leaders at Figma and Notion and Miro and all the all the companies that have kind of steered through that path.
Jesse Purewal [00:30:54] OK, Sheila, I want to move into a lightning round here for some rapid fire questions. Are you ready?
Sheila Vashee [00:30:58] I'm ready. I hope I'm ready.
Jesse Purewal [00:31:01] Tell me the best book that you have read lately.
Sheila Vashee [00:31:03] I recently finished Untamed by Glenonn Doyle. And I have to say it just changed my completely changed my perspective. And I it opened my eyes to a different part of myself. And I cried like 10 times reading that book.
Jesse Purewal [00:31:19] All right. All right. Give me three words that you or or others might use if they were describing you as a leader.
Sheila Vashee [00:31:26] I think the first is calm, because whenever you're in an early stage company, as I mentioned, everything's always breaking out on fire. So the ability to remain calm is is actually very important. The second is empathetic. So you have to be able to appreciate people where they are, understand where they're coming from. But the third is uncompromising. So at the end of the day, you still have to build the business. You still have to hit the number. And so you can appreciate where people are coming from, but you can't compromise on your goals.
Jesse Purewal [00:31:57] What do you think you would have done for a career if you hadn't discovered the passion around technology that that you did? What what do you think would have been what you'd be spending your time on?
Sheila Vashee [00:32:08] I probably would have been a writer. I mentioned that I love history. I probably would have been some kind of nonfiction or even maybe fiction writer of history.
Jesse Purewal [00:32:18] Sheila, what's your secret sauce? What's that unique blend of stuff that's distinctly you that makes you make magic?
Sheila Vashee [00:32:25] I think at the end of the day, even if you're doing incredibly hard things in incredibly difficult times at companies, you have to figure out how to have fun. You have to figure out how to have for you to have fun, for your team to have fun, for people to enjoy what they're doing. Otherwise, they're not going to stay and you're not going to be successful. So that's the one thing, no matter what's happening, even if everything's breaking, even if there's a crisis, even if the world seems like it's coming to an end, you have to figure out how to have fun because otherwise, what's the point?
Jesse Purewal [00:33:00] Well, Sheila, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for being with me here on the show. We talked a lot about growth today. I look forward to maybe in our next episode covering a whole range of of British history.
Sheila Vashee [00:33:12] I would love that. Quiz me on anything.
Jesse Purewal [00:33:14] Well, I'll take you up on it, OK? Take care of yourself. Have a great one.
Sheila Vashee [00:33:19] Such a pleasure, Jesse. Thank you for having me.
Jesse Purewal [00:33:32] OK, welcome back to building blocks. I know we left this out of the last couple of episodes owing to show length with Gurdeep, Charlene and Steve, but here we go back on the wagon. The chapter of Sheila's career from 2012 to 2020, which she spent as a company builder and a growth architect at Dropbox and Opendoor, came on the heels of lessons she learned in roles at big companies Morgan Stanley, Gap, Apple. She talked about being able to build and recognize. Good at scale, good at scale. So for this week's building block, I'd like you to think about what good has looked like at different stages of your career, whether and how that has changed and whether you like that change. For instance, in my case, in the early part of my career, good basically meant being a crack shot at analysis, presenting an empirically driven decision persuasively and kind of getting teams to a decision. There were other elements, but but those three were the primary colors and they're still the primary colors, now. The dial up and dial downs of the different variables change more creative versus more linear, more individual or more team, more growth focused, a more operational. So for me, good hasn't really changed except in the ratios that it's required, and maybe sometimes the magnitude, and I love that it's been a source of stability for me is lots of things other than those areas have changed. For Sheila, though, good in the early part of her career was, in a sense, seeing the future. What things could look like when product market fit had been established and brand had been built and scale had been reached and that time machine, so to speak. It was incredibly helpful for her as marketing employee number two at Dropbox, who went on to a great decade as a builder in Silicon Valley. So the three questions, one, what does good look like for you now? Two, how has that changed? And three, based on whether you like that change, what might you want to explore in terms of roles or companies or opportunities where you could get back to your ideal version of good or reimagine your version of good? If you want some help getting started, check out the show notes right here in the app. You're listening to this episode on or over on our website, Breakthrough-Builders.com , that's Breakthrough-Builders.com. Hit me up to the website and share some of your reflections. As always, I'd love to hear from you. Take care Breakthrough. Builders and be well.
Jesse Purewal [00:36:02] Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the Industries Team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal, mastering by Nate Crenshaw, Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio. Part of the Three Seas Collective Design by Baron Santiago Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson and Kylen Lundeen.