Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success

Tom Conrad is a longtime product and engineering leader who has worked at Apple, Pandora, Snap, Quibi, and is now CEO of Zero, a health app. The conversation covers his career arc, lessons from high-profile successes and failures like pets.com and Quibi, how he thinks about companies as unit-economics equations, and his approach to leadership, burnout, and staying motivated.

01Key learnings

• Choose where to work by the people you'd collaborate with, not just the product; your satisfaction tracks team relationships more than external success metrics, according to Conrad.
• Trust your gut about a team's values and working style early; Conrad says he has consistently sensed mismatches before joining and wishes he had listened more.
• Build a model of the whole business equation (investment in, returns out, over a time horizon) so you can see which levers have real leverage, not just product details.
• Stress-test the core growth assumptions with leadership explicitly; Quibi's distribution-in-month-one bet was highly improbable, and Conrad wishes he had pushed harder on that data.
• Early in a company, a little founder-level optimism and risk-taking can pay off hugely, but ensure funding structure allows big swings, as Snap's backing did for Evan Spiegel.
• Be careful as a senior leader: a casual 'what do you think?' about a detail can redirect a whole team's priorities, so label your input clearly as opinion versus directive.
• Reward sustainable output over performative hours; Conrad values people who deliver great work and go home, having learned from a colleague who out-contributed him while working fewer visible hours.
• Not everyone needs to be a founder; joining an existing team with a strong business equation can deliver equally meaningful impact and success, per Conrad.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.