Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Snap, Zero)

**Tom Conrad** (0:00)
There's this belief that everybody needs to be a founder. I think in some ways, our industry would be much better off if there were fewer founders. I think there's an entire category of smart, creative, hardworking, talented, borderline visionary people who can raise that $2 million seed and go off and build some stupid company that's never gonna go anywhere. That would be so much better off finding a team that needs their skill set and working on a problem that has a mathematical formula that's going to win on any metric, whatever metric you care about. You want like the acclaim of your peers, you want financial reward, you want outside impact on culture, whatever the thing is, it gets you out of bed every morning.
You can achieve that in collaboration with others. You don't have to be the person that raises the seed round.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
Today, my guest is Tom Conrad. Tom was an engineer at Apple, CTO of Pandora, which he helped take from zero to 80 million users. He's also VP of Product at Snap, where he was the right-hand man to Evan Spiegel for two years. He's been on the board of Sonos for over seven years. He was also part of two infamous product failures, Quibi, where he was chief product officer, which raised over $2 billion and died less than a year after launch. He was also a senior engineering leader at pets.com, which famously went from nothing to a public company to completely out of business in 19 months. Today, Tom is the CEO of Zero Longevity Science, which is on a mission to extend the lifespan and the health span of the human race. In our conversation, we dig into what Tom's learned from these famous product failures, also what he's learned from the many product successes. Tom also shares what he's learned about how to pick where to go work and what to avoid, how important understanding the math formula of the business model is, also lessons on burnout and health and leadership, and contrarian corner. With that, I bring you Tom Conrad, after a short word from our sponsors.
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Tom, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.