Shishir Mehrotra – The Art and Science of the Bundle

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Oshanose Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:21)
My guest today is Shishir Mehrotra and the topic of our conversation is the business bundle, offering access to multiple products, services or providers for a single bundled price. This topic is full of incorrect preconceived notions and as it turns out, the bundle is one of the most powerful ideas in business. Properly harnessed, it is good for everyone involved. Shishir explains the ins and outs of bundles in this conversation. Shishir ran product at YouTube for years and sits on the Spotify board of directors. He founded and now leads Coda, which is a doc spelled backwards in 2014, to bundle together productivity apps like docs, spreadsheets, databases and applications.
I love this wonky detailed conversation which has me thinking differently about many businesses and business strategy more generally. Please enjoy.
Shishir, thank you so much for joining me today. The topic of a lot of our discussion is going to be an obsession of mine since finding your work and thinking and reading on this topic, which is bundling and unbundling of products. It is something that probably most people will not have heard a deep dive podcast on, let alone considered in the depth that will go on today's conversation. But I just think it's one of the most interesting business angles I've uncovered in years. So first of all, welcome and thanks for your time today.

**Shishir Mehrotra** (2:36)
Thanks for having Patrick.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:37)
So this topic of bundling is something that you certainly seem to have thought more about than anybody. I thought a fun place to begin would be with what I would call lightning round context. If you wouldn't mind describing sort of the course or the arc of your career in like two minutes or less, it will provide useful framing for the conversation on bundling.

**Shishir Mehrotra** (2:58)
Sure. So I'll do it going backwards. So I'm currently the founder and CEO of a company called Coda. We make an all-in-one doc, blends together documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and applications into a single surface.
Anyone can make a doc as powerful as an app. Before that, I spent about six years at Google.
I was responsible for the YouTube products, joined in 2008, pretty soon after the acquisition and was there till 2014 So massive growth and value creation in that process. Before that, I spent about six years at Microsoft, worked on Windows, Office and SQL Server, and started my first company in the middle of the.com boom called Centrada. Before that, that's me in a nutshell.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:32)
Fantastic. So tell me how you came to this issue of bundling. The sort of structure of our discussion of bundling will be around four myths that you've identified. But first, I'd be curious just to hear why you care about this issue. How did you come to learn about it?

**Shishir Mehrotra** (3:47)
For your listeners, I'm trying to figure out the best way to express the kind of hobby obsession relationship I have with this topic, because it's not typical.
Maybe the easiest way to put it is my wife will catch me sometimes, especially nowadays where we're like all in one house and talking about bundling again.
So it's something that is top of mind for me a lot and infects a lot of how I think about products. It's how I think about markets. It's how I think about the very specific literal topic of bundling. But also, I think as we'll talk about as we go through it, it's really a philosophy for how to think about anything that can be broken out into parts and anything that can be put back together. My journey with bundling and there's this paper that I think we're going to publish alongside this podcast called Four Myths of Bundling. The reason it's called myths is the journey starts from me having just joined YouTube in 2008 And in those early days, it was pretty clear that YouTube was going to be an ad-supported business. Where we put 98% of our focus was to go make advertising work. And we had a lot of work to do. When I joined, we were losing a ton of money. The product was pretty misunderstood.