Shifting Career Altitudes: Insights from a CPO’s Journey Leading in Nearly Every Function | Anneka Gupta (Rubrik, ex-LiveRamp)

Brett: All right, well, let's let's just kick it off and do it. Thanks for joining.

Anneka: I'm super excited to be here.

Brett: Maybe an interesting place to start would be Just telling the story of LiveRamp. I think it's a company that a lot of people don't really actually know the story and it's a meaningful publicly traded company now.

And it's also interesting because you join there when it was 20 people and then it was, What you did for 11 plus years, which is also rare. I think coming out of school, most people do 18 to 24 months, 18 to 24 months, 18 to 24 months. So maybe we'll just start and hear a little bit about that story, maybe how you found the company and a little bit about the arc of the company.

Anneka: Absolutely. So, uh, when I graduated from Stanford, I was trying to figure out what kind of job I wanted to do. I didn't interdisciplinary degree that included computer science, but it didn't make it super clear to me then what was the next step. I knew I wanted to work at a startup. So I started researching startups, talking to different companies in the space, realizing that I was probably going need to start in software engineering because that's where the entry level jobs were. And I wanted to live in San Francisco. And at that time, 2010, there actually weren't as many startups in San Francisco. So that limited my

Brett: starting to shift. I think 10 to 12.

Anneka: Yeah. I came across LiveRamp, I think, honestly, from the career site at Stanford. you know, reached out, started talking to company across many other companies I was talking to too, but really what stood out to me about the company was the people. I met Warren Hoffman, who was the co founder and CEO of the company and many of the other leaders that stuck around for quite a while and was really impressed with them and felt like I could learn a lot from them. And I actually, at that point, didn't even evaluate what exactly the company was doing because it was doing a lot of different things. We did not have product market fit, and so in many ways it was a leap of faith.

I had no idea whether this was going to go anywhere, but I really just felt like it was quality people. Could not have imagined that I would stick around there for 11 years and for probably four different versions of the company. The trajectory that the company went on was we were in the data space really at the beginning of digital advertising taking off and trying to figure out what role can we play in helping use data to personalize online experiences.

Were lots of companies starting around that time that were looking at these kinds of problems. It took us about a year and a half to find product market fits and figure out, well, what's the niche that we can really play in in this industry.

Brett: What were the products or things that were going on when you joined?

Anneka: Uh, we had a business where we were trying to create our own data sets based on online behavior of users, and trying to figure out how to monetize those data sets in a lot of different ways. We had products where we were trying to take other people's data and connect them into, digital advertising platforms and then help other people monetize their data.

 Those were various flavors of all of these things. We probably had six or seven different experiments that were going on.

Brett: And all as a tiny company?

Anneka: All as a tiny company. Some things we tried a little bit of didn't really get to see the traction. We ended up having this wall street journal article come out about the company that was really negative about the practices that we were using around data collection on the internet. So we ended up having to really shut that down and pivot to a totally different direction, but that was actually a blessing because I think that allowed us to then focus on the products that ended up taking us on the journey of finding product market fit and eventually, the journey after that as well.

and so the product that we ended up really focusing on was a product that helped connect offline assets. So data about people that usually traditional organizations had collected and used for direct mail campaigns or email campaigns and bringing that in in a privacy safe way into digital advertising platforms so that people could say, Hey, I want to take the people that bought these items in my store and advertise to those same people to upsell them on or tell them on new products.

But use the digital, digital advertising infrastructure for that. So we ended up being the connective tissue between the offline data and online digital advertising

Brett: did you figure that out?

Anneka: That was one of the six experiments that was running or 10 experiments that was running when I joined. And I think when we were forced to narrow out and throw away a bunch of the experiments that we were working on, because we're like, this is not a direction, it's going to be create bad reputation for the company and really focus down. We were able to just figure out that these data companies that we were working with to help them monetize their assets, they actually saw a ton of value in figuring out how to monetize those assets in the digital advertising world. So before we ever started working with actual advertisers, we were working with the companies who were already monetizing data, who were trying to figure out an avenue into this world of dollars they knew was gonna come in digital advertising.

Brett: The core product became take your offline data to go do things online, but it was your proprietary data. It wasn't other?

Anneka: No, it was other people's data. We were just providing the middleware on the data connectivity and being able to translate offline data into digital identifiers.

Brett: Was it apparent that this was the direction that the company needs to go? 

Anneka: I think it became binary very quickly because we saw everything else not really getting traction and we started to see real dollars coming in through this and the trajectory on like the metrics that we were tracking, not just the financial metrics, but the usage started to go through the roof. And so I think probably in about 2011, so I joined in 2010, we were still in this experimental stage in late 2011.

It was very clear to pivot the company to this product

Brett: And what were you doing? Just building product?

Anneka: Yeah, I was doing product, but there was no product management really, right? There was someone leading product. No product management. So I was kind of doing a lot of product management work without even really realizing it.

and I was part of the team that was experimenting with building out a couple of these bets. It wasn't the one that ended up becoming LiveRamp, but it was some of the other, earlier stage, things that we ended up discarding. And I was in the rapid iteration phase of working with sales and them saying, Hey, we want to add this in and overnight adding that in.

And then. seeing that come into fruition and seeing how that took off and moving in other directions, pivoting.

Brett: Then the company just everyone at the company focused around that product line?

Anneka: Correct. Yep. And that was about the time that then I was talking, I was given the option to move into product management because I had expressed interest in product management. We didn't have a product management team, so that didn't exist. Uh, but I was given the opportunity to start focusing on product management because there was a need at the company and I had expressed interest.

So as the company was making this pivot. I was also shifting my role to start being at the intersection of what are sales customers? What's the business need and how are we going to translate that into a product roadmap?

Brett: What did the experience of working at a company that didn't have product market fit and then figured it out? What's sort of like the residual value for you as a product person? There's a lot of product people you probably hired that have never

Anneka: Never done that.

Brett: at something that wasn't working and saw them figure it out.

Anneka: I got to be part of the stage where we were experimenting and iterating very quickly and we were building stuff and then six months later, or even sometimes two weeks later, we would throw it out and have to start over. And I found joy in that and I found a way to feel like I was learning all the time.

And not get too attached to the things that I had built and we're getting thrown out the window. And I, I think that is really valuable is figuring out how do you detach yourself from the work that you've done and from what has already happened and say, well, we're learning something new. We're going to pivot our focus to this totally new thing and do that over and over and over again, you had to build the practice and reps and how to pivot at very, and that has carried through as I've been at larger and larger stage companies.

Brett: You went about doing that by just focusing on rate of learning as opposed to sort of traction or some other thing that would create a dopamine hit?

Anneka: I felt like I was always learning. And when I ever felt like in my 11 years at LiveRamp, there were stages in time at the company and with my role where I didn't feel like I was learning, I would actually just go talk to the CEO about that and be like, Hey, I don't feel like I'm learning as much anymore.

Where can I focus my time and energy to increase the rate of learning?

Brett: Did you run, as you were building these products and throwing them away, did you document it in some way or did it just, it was just intuitive? Oh, that didn't work because of X, we're going to do Y. I feel like you can get into this mode where we're building all this, nothing's really working and it, you know, the dominant sort of impact, I think of that would be, it would be demotivating.

Anneka: A lot of people left. We did have a lot of turnover in those days, but I think the people that stuck around were obviously the people that self selected that found joy in the process of innovation, the process of being like really, glued into and tuned into what the sales team was doing and then rapidly building those things and iterating.

so I guess we ended up self selecting out for the people that just weren't that motivated. By that situation,

Brett: Did it feel like the company was failing at the time or no?

Anneka: it did, but it definitely, you could definitely tell that the company was not doing well, especially after that wall street journal article came out. So definitely it felt that way, but it was still fun. And I think actually something that the founders did really, really well is keep the sense of fun and not make the work itself become super stressful.

So don't like, not transferring probably the stress that they were feeling. I have to imagine they were feeling stressed about that. What was happening at the company, not transferring that to the more junior employees and instead saying like, we're going to create this environment where you have the freedom to experiment, where you can bring different ideas together.

We did a lot of hackathons. We did hackathons four times a year. So we were constantly doing just new ideas and that was motivating, especially for the engineers. We didn't have a lot. We had like engineers and we had sales and maybe on one marketing person, right? So it's predominantly those two functions and predominantly engineering and engineers love building stuff.

So we were given the opportunity to just build stuff and try stuff. And I think that ended up again, self selecting for people that really enjoyed that process.

Brett: Pick up the story where you landed on this kind of what would become the first real product.

Anneka: My first job as a product manager was to actually help the team understand what this product was getting everyone rallied behind, okay, we're pivoting the company to this product. Specific product, probably only 30 percent of the company had been working on that product to date, and now we were going to get everyone to start working on the product. And you talked about morale, there was actually like a big morale hit. Then, even though we were so clearly finding success, um, we lost a lot of people because they were like, well, I want to go build. Cause I said, we Selected for the people that love just experimenting and building. And now we're like, well, we have real customers.

We're not going to just continue to experiment and build these side projects. We're all going to focus on this one product and figuring out how to make this one product successful. So it was a really interesting time to be at the company because then we had to it was a real shift in mindset of saying we're building for customers.

We're not building for and we're building for these data companies to begin with. We're not building for developers. We're not building for small businesses. We had experimented all those things. We're actually building for this persona. Now we need to go figure out how to make this a success, and we did.

We were able to really start growing. We've again focused on one persona, the data provider persona and really building products that were, that worked for them. I was entering into product management, trying to figure out what is product management, but it meant doing everything. And I loved it. I was talking to customers.

I was dealing with support issues. I was sometimes writing code. I was, really trying to help figure out, well, what are the things that we need to go build? And once we had these ideas of, well, we need to go fix this problem because we're hearing from customers that something isn't working or we can help with the monetization of their data if we just increase the number of matches and we need to figure out how to do this, working with engineering and figuring out what are the tradeoffs and how do we go make this happen.

So it's a really exciting time because we started to having real requirements that were coming in real challenges that we had to try to go solve for and think about how we're going to scale out effectively.

Brett: What were the next couple acts of the company and kind of where you went?

Anneka: We started to really take off the, you could see it. Every metric was, was going up into the right. So I was did about a year of product management and then, the person that was running marketing left the company. And I had been helping on some of the marketing things, and I was very drawn to learning about marketing because I felt like that was a blind spot for me of, oh, I know how to build the product, but how do you actually market something and get traction?

So I volunteered to help with some of the projects on the marketing side, in the course of those conversations, our CEO was like, well, why don't you just run marketing until we hire someone? I was like, okay, let me try this. Like, what's the harm in that? So I did it, and started really taking over marketing.

When we were focused on a few different things from a marketing perspective, because we were a middleware company, we wanted to focus on our partners and the, basically the destinations that we were sending data and using those partners to really generate leads and interest in LiveRamp.

So we had a partner marketing initiative and then we also had in a big event that we were running, that was going to be kind of it. We wanted to make it into an industry event where, people came together all the best minds in the industry and build a brand around that event. Because again, we're kind of middleware layers.

We want everyone to feel like we're a product for them. And that we're, we're providing thought leadership there. So we're doing these 2 initiatives. So I got thrown in in January for an event that we're running in April or something like that. so I got into full event planning, which is really fun. We totally self funded the event through partnership through sponsorships and everything.

Um, that was a huge success. And then in parallel, we were trying to figure out how do we engage with these different partners, both in the data provider and on the destination side, on the ad tech side and, you know, do white papers and do webinars and really kind of guerrilla marketing style, get our message out there.

Brett: How does sort of understanding or working on marketing make someone a better product person?

Anneka: I think a lot of product people, especially if they come from a technical background, they're very focused in on the technology itself. Feeling like in order to actually have the best product in the market, you have to have the best technology. And really, if you think about it from an outside in perspective, and what I have learned, what I learned in doing marketing and learned over the years is that it's not always the best tech.

In fact, many times it's not the best technology that wins. It's being able to clearly articulate what is an important, urgent problem that you are solving for someone. And having a good enough solution that your sales team can go and actually get that in front of a customer and get people to purchase it.

And so I think in the marketing marketing specifically, it helped me understand well, 1st of all, How do you articulate what a value proposition is for a product? It's not the technology, it's the problem that we're solving. And then how do you think about distribution and getting that message out to the right people?

And what are all the mechanisms at play for doing that? Because oftentimes you may have a product and as a product manager, I think your job overall is to say, like, how do I make this product successful? Well, a product success may not just be about, does the technology work, often the products success is, well, maybe we're not getting the message out. Maybe the message is wrong that we're saying, and it's not actually resonating and solving an important, urgent problem. so there's a lot of different reasons. It could be internal to maybe you have no sales focus because the sales team is focused on this other thing that's making a lot of money and you're trying to get them to focus on this new thing that they have to go learn.

And it's not proven out yet whether they're going to make a lot of money. So you might have an internal issue around, do you actually have organizational alignment? So all of these issues are issues that might impact the success of your product. You have to be able to understand what the issues are, and then at least have some concept of how are you going to fix those issues,

Brett: When somebody hears the phrase like distribution matters, or it's not always best product wins, I think people nod, but a lot of people haven't answered the question, why is that? Why is it that a lot of times or almost all times it's not best product wins?

Anneka: If you think about how people buy products and what matters to them, so if I'm a leader, we'll talk about enterprise B2B products, if I'm a leader within an organization, and I'm trying to achieve a particular outcome for the business, I'm not saying, well, I need these 16 technical features in order to achieve my outcome.

I am by thinking about holistically, what are the people process and technology that I need to achieve my outcome? In order to shift my organization in a particular direction or deliver this particular outcome, and it's all three together. And technology is one piece of it. if I'm thinking about the technology piece of that, I think that a lot of, especially if you're solving something that's super important for someone, it's like a top three priority for the, organizational leader who's going to be buying this.

They want a partner that's going to be on a journey with them. So they don't necessarily, buyers don't necessarily need all the hundred features that are particularly going to make that outcome successful. They need the top one or two and they need a roadmap for the future. there's a lot of times also where, like, if you have a hundred features, even if it's the best product, the reality is, is that the crawl walk run of someone actually adopting the technology and using it isn't such where on day one, they're going to be able to even use a hundred features.

So if you're spending all your time figuring out how to make a hundred features work, okay. But then you don't have like one or two that are really in the crawl phase that are going to work amazing, then you're not going to be able to really even get traction because economic buyers would be like, well, I don't necessarily care about all these hundred.

I want to know that like, I will, get there, but I need these one or two to work super well.

Brett: If you think about quality of product in one dimension and quality of go to market in the other dimension Are there certain setups where one is more important?

Anneka: I think it's very different depending on who are the people that you're selling to. So LiveRamp was selling to a marketing persona rubric. Which is where I'm at today, sells to it and security. The buying process for it and security is radically different, from marketing. So marketing is not going to go and do like a POC on the technology and see if it actually works.

Honestly, most marketers are like, Hey, like maybe they'll do a very light POC, It's a very different sale in the IT and security world, the checklist of capabilities you have do matter. And people will actually issue an RFP for like the hundred things that you need to do, and you need to be able to answer that well enough, but then you also need to be able to run a proof of concept and show up well with respect to your competition.

And I just didn't see so much of that on the marketing side where people were making buying decisions much more, I guess, much less rigorously than they do on the IT and security side. So I think in some ways, like, on the marketing side, a lot more arrests on the go to market and having a good go to market story to tell and is less a little less about the quality of the product of the quality of product obviously, always matters, especially in retention and other things like that. On the security and IT side quality of product matters a lot.

Brett: Why is it that buying processes in the same company based on function often looks so different?

Anneka: It's partially about the functions and how are they, what is the value that they're delivering to the company? If you think about marketing as a function, marketing as a function is delivering, they're focused on brand. It was one thing of like, what's the perception of what my company is.

And then they're focused on actual like demand gen, and, you know, getting the distribution out there at a very high level. Obviously, they're focused on more things than that, too. But those are the top priorities. You think about IT and security. This is the foundational, IT especially, this is a foundational tools that every employee is using across the company to get their jobs done. So if you make a mistake in the foundational tools, you're going to have everyone in the company yelling at you and the CEO yelling at you on the marketing and on the marketing side, a lot of it is about, not all of it rests on the technology.

A lot of it rests on the people and the process more. So the technology piece of it is much more of like, A side enabler may not be where the CMO or a lot of their teams are spending a ton of their time because they're trying to figure out, well, what's the campaigns I should run? Is this the right messaging?

What's the brand image we want to have, working with the agency on some of these pieces. So it's just a very different role that they play in the organization and the cost of making a mistake on the technology is way less than the cost of making mistake on the technology on the IT or security side.

Brett: If you were building a company that serves one of those, is one generally just easier or no, they're equally easy and hard in their own different ways?

Anneka: I would say they're equally easy and hard in their own different ways. You know, marketing is a lot more fickle. Like you'll get, I mean, CMOs, if you look at their average tenure, it's pretty short. And you'll get people coming in and saying, well, I'm just going to rip out what you guys have, because I have my favorite solution in the IT and security world, because it's much harder to rip out solutions.

Even when there's leader turnover, they're not coming in and saying, well, wipe the slate clean, let me start over. And so it's just, it's a different type of problem, is in IT, the products tend to be quite sticky once they're already sold in, and marketing, there's a big challenge around retention. Every company that sells into marketing, they could be switched out tomorrow.

Brett: I think it's conventional wisdom, at least over the last 10 years, that like IT and security, and we could talk about them separately, tends to be a better buyer just because some of the things you talked about, but also there's some budget. And building something that sells to marketing is generally not as juicy of sort of a setup.

Do you think that's correct?

Anneka: I think it's easier to scale out selling to IT and security because there is a process that they're going to go through that's well understood. They are going to be very rigorous in testing out the capabilities and making their decision.

And I think on the marketing side, it just, by and large, the rigor isn't there. And so it's just a lot more fickle. That makes it more difficult because there's just so there's high variance in the way that people are going to make their decisions and what are going to be the critical factors and why they make their decisions.

I think on it and security, the top reasons why people are going to buy a certain technology are fairly similar across. So if you have a value proposition that you're seeing resonating with a lot of your customers or prospects, that's probably going to play out and in a repeatability standpoint.

Yep.

Brett: Let's go back to the sort of the library of journey. You left off that, that you started out as an engineer. Then you were a jack of all trades product person. Then you jumped into marketing. 

Anneka: And added and then I added recruiting in there because our CEO came to me and he's like, well, recruiting is really similar marketing instead of marketing to potential customers, your marketing to employees. I was like, okay, sure. I can bring it on. I'll I'll take it on. So I did that. I did like the marketing recruiting thing for about a year.

And then the company, we were about to go through a fundraising time. So we went and started getting term sheets. And as part of that, we also started to explore, basically being acquired. Process was taking place. I wasn't involved in those conversation. I was too junior in the organization. At that point, we were starting to also thinking about hiring a head of marketing, which was great for me.

I did not want to do marketing long term. I really enjoyed the role, but I really wanted to do product. Go back to product, go back to being in the actual process of building things versus just marketing them. So we started looking for a head of marketing. Hired someone for that. I was given the option to stay in marketing, run HR and recruiting, or we actually had a head of product search to going on or run product.

And for me, the decision was obvious. I wanted to go back into product. It was a little bit daunting to step into that role because I felt like I just had just one year of product management experience. So I jumped in and the 1st job I was given was to go through the 300 question due diligence list that eventually led to, um, LiveRamps acquisition by Acxiom.

So, uh, in 2014. May of 2014 liveramp was acquired by Acxiom. Acxiom was one of our customers They're a large data company. You know, been around for 40 years. They had been trying to develop their own products for how to connect offline data into the digital ecosystem, their own organic efforts had not gone particularly well.

They saw us and they were very interested in acquiring our technology and our, our company as part of their digital transformation. So in May of 2014, we were acquired by Acxiom. We were set up in a way that I think was just Incredibly well thought of because a lot of times when you have like a big company

coming in and acquiring, it's a very, very bad thing, but it ended up being an incredible blessing for us because we were essentially run as an independent division of the company and the project that I was given was essentially the reverse integration of Acxiom and LiveRamp, which meant that Acxiom had this digital product. They had Fortune 500 customers, retail financial services that we're using this product. And our goal was to migrate all of those customers to LiveRamp's product.

Brett: were using the not good competitor that Acxiom came out with? 

Anneka: Yes. And they wanted to, uh, so my job was move all these customers to LiveRamps product.

That product had 10x the surface area of what LiveRamp had. LiveRamp had been really focused. We're just focusing on the connectivity. They had built out website optimization, you know, ad campaign management, all this type of stuff that we did not have. We were basically going to rip out 90 percent of the features, migrate these Fortune 500 customers to our product.

And the directive was, you've got to do this in 6 to 9 months to make sure that the costs actually make sense for the combined entity, because actually was a public company. So we couldn't afford to just like, have these things running in parallel. So we got on that mission. It was very daunting. We were kind of now part of this 3, 000 person company that had been around for 40 years that had been headquartered in Arkansas. Very different culture. many layoffs that happened at the company. So a lot of the people that were very afraid of their jobs and they saw essentially these kids coming in and saying, Hey, we're gonna take all your customers and put them on our product.

There was a lot of like emotional distress happening while we're also trying to push these incredibly ambitious objectives of getting all these customers migrated over. It was incredible learning experience. We had to take a lot of leaps of faith of saying we're going to migrate customers like Citibank and Macy's over to liveRamp as an immature company. We had never signed a fortune 500 customer before, and we're going to rip out 90 percent of the features. We don't even really have good telemetry data on what's being used. The account teams at Acxiom, which was very much a services oriented organization, they had built a lot of custom solutions, if they looked at what they had built for Citi, there was 30 years of custom technology that they had built just for Citi.

And they done the same thing for J Macy's and for like all of their customers. They had very, very individualized, technology stacks. And now we're saying, okay, we're going to put all these customers onto a one solution that everyone is going to use the same solution. We're not going to fork it for all of these different customers.

It's really hard because the account teams were like, our customers are never going to move and we're like, well, you got to move them and we'll see, and then we'll build out the capabilities that they really actually need. So we took a leap of faith. We didn't end up churning any of the customers, even in this move, because what they actually cared about was this piece of the technology really working.

and we did that within nine months. So we got, that job done. And then what transpired after that is LiveRamp went on a tear. When we were acquired, we were 30 million ARR. in 2017, we crossed 200 million ARR on the backs of getting these fortune 500 customers for Acxiom and then being able to use those success stories to sell to other large brands. So we started doing that. we expanded the portfolio. We started not just focusing on, digital targeting as the use case, but also measurement. So we started to really build out that portfolio and shift kind of how the, customers were perceiving what we did so that we could expand with them.

And it ended up being very successful then in 2018, really late 2017, but a transparent in 2018 Acxiom saw the growth of LiveRamp and decided to divest the legacy assets and run LiveRamp as the public company. So we went through this whole process of selling the, legacy business in that time a lot of what I had to focus on was we had integrated some of the technology now, super closely with the core Acxiom business. So how do we decide which assets are going to go where and then how do we actually structure the legal contracts with the buyer? Such that we have the right SLA is because they're now these customers are relying on our technology and that was a very, very messy, very enlightening process.

I'd never negotiated a contract before. And now we're negotiating what ended up being a almost 3 billion dollar sale of the legacy business and figuring out this very complex part of, like, how the product SLAs are going to work and what technology and what assets are going to go where. It was amazing, like, such an incredible experience to go through, and then we completed that, and relisted the company, under the LiveRamp name, in October of 2018 and became a publicly traded company.

Brett: I'd love you to share more about what happened over those nine months that allowed you to successfully transition the existing customers over. Like, curious to learn more about that. And maybe before that, what was going on in the way that Acxiom was being run that they had this vision and were able to execute sort of on this idea?

Anneka: So the CEO of Acxiom, who is now the CEO of LiveRamp and the CFO of, of Acxiom, who's now the CFO and president at Nielsen, they teamed together and had this incredible vision for the transformation that they wanted to drive for the company. And essentially we're like, you know what, we're going to make these big bets.

These were like bet the company. I mean, Acxiom paid a third of its market cap for a LiveRamp, a 30 million ARR company when Acxiom probably had like, I don't remember, like, probably 800 million in revenue at the time. and high cashflow for this company that was like not profitable and had product market fit, but really small.

So they were willing to make these, they, I think they saw what they saw for the future was other data companies, that were just on the downhill slide and essentially close to going out of business. And they're like, we either have this opportunity to radically change this company, or we're going to die.

And they took that attitude and they're like, we're going to make the big bets. And we're going to ride this out. so it was, it was pretty interesting. And then the same thing happened with the split of like, well, it was very clear. I mean, the stock price was like the thing, would just never, never moved with, with Acxiom, uh, when we were a part of part of Acxiom, it just was like, always kind of stable at where it was and they looked at the business and they saw, okay, well, we have this cash cow business that's not growing.

In fact, it's like slightly shrinking. And then we have LiveRamp that's like growing through the roof, but not like, you know, not a high cashflow business. The sum of the parts is not getting us the valuation is not the right thing for for investors. So we need to split this out. And there was a lot of different thoughts on like, different ways we could put things out, spin things off, do that, you know, there was there were a lot of different thoughts.

But then when Dentsu bought Merkle, there was an opportunity to think, well, actually, maybe we can sell the legacy Acxiom business to an advertising agency, and they will want to buy that. I think when we saw that there was a path there that shifted the focus to like, let's just divest the legacy assets.

Brett: Why do you think they were unsuccessful at building the competing product given they had the distribution? Is it more than just they had the wrong people?

Anneka: It was definitely a people thing. And then I think it was also a focus. I think what happened was, when you have all these customers and you have all these customers that are used to telling you, I want this thing and then you go build that custom thing for them and you start trying to shift that into, we're going to create a product for everyone, you end up getting the sprawl. The issue that they ended up having was a sprawl where we're like, we're going to be everything to everyone and instead of saying, we're going to do one thing really well. And that's why that product wasn't successful. It was trying to be everything to everyone. It just couldn't do that. Any of those things well.

Brett: It's always fascinating in the abstract, it seems like, particularly because distribution, particularly in the Fortune 10, 000, is so hard and then so valuable when you have it. And they were able to study exactly what LiveRamp was doing, so much so that they wanted to buy you. It's just interesting how difficult it is to effectively compete.

When you pick it apart, there is, really a cultural thing but it's hard to fully internalize what that actually means. And this is such a good case study.

Anneka: Yeah, it is. I felt that because leading product at LiveRamp when we were doing this integration, I had all of these account teams coming to me from Acxiom being like, you can't possibly move my customer without this feature. And I was like, well, we're going to do it essentially. And like, we had the director from the top to do it, but it was really hard.

And you had to hold your ground and say, you know, no, we're actually going to go and talk to them about this and introduce our team in so that we can have this conversation. Cause they weren't comfortable. They weren't comfortable bringing in our team. There was a lot of things that were highly uncomfortable, but it took that kind of push and saying, well, we're not going to delay it.

We're not going to say we're going to wait. We're actually just going to go ahead and move forward. It was easier for us coming in as outsiders to do that in some ways. It was harder in other ways. Cause we couldn't, it was hard to get invited to the conversation, but I can very much understand how, if you were trying to do this thing within the larger machine, you would just get pushed around so much by all the account teams that you wouldn't be able to get anywhere.

Brett: Was there anything else that made it actually work?

Anneka: We took people from the Acxiom business and put them into LiveRamp, in a few critical places. That helped us bridge the gap between the two cultures and the two companies. and we also actually did the reverse, Essentially, like the COO of LiveRamp, who became the second CEO of LiveRamp, he went in, ran product for all of Acxiom for about a year.

And that was really fast. I think the fact that we did this kind of switch of people allowed there to be this bridge between the organizations that really helped us execute on this vision.

Brett: Okay. So you switch everyone over, and then at some point you become the GM and president in addition to leading product.

What was sort of the story there?

Anneka: So I was talking about how the kind of COO of the LiveRamp business became the head of product for Acxiom. When our founder CEO Auren Hoffman left, which was about a year after a year and a half after the acquisition, Travis, it was a CEO became the, the CEO of LiveRamp within Acxiom.

And then he did that for about, this was 2015, 2 years, and then decided to go found another company. And at that point in time, me and our current head of sales became like co general managers for the LiveRamp business. And that was the point in time as well, where Acxiom was starting this process of figuring out how to divest the legacy business.

Brett: What did it mean, to be a general manager in the context of the company?

Anneka: Figuring out how we were going to successfully keep growing the business and starting to have a lot more functions under me. So I had product at that point. I had before I became the general manager. I had product and I had customer support and implementation, but then essentially, me and James, who was my co GM, we split the functions of the business.

So I think he had. Sales, marketing and finance and I had everything else. So I ended up having a much broader purview and running many of the other functions that were part of of LiveRamp as well and then we would work together to figure out. Okay. Well, what do we need to do to make the business successful?

But the reality is, is that. 50 percent of our time, maybe even less as it got later into that year before we were finally completed the, the, the divestiture, 50 percent of our time was focused on the business and 50 percent of our time ended up being focused on getting this divestiture done.

Brett: After that experience, you ended up becoming the chief product officer at Rubrik, which is where you are now. I'm really interested in hearing more about, how that experience of having 17 jobs, influenced you as a chief product officer. What it makes you think about the value of that relative to, I think a lot of publicly traded chief product officer, 20 some years ago started as a PM out of school, or maybe they were an engineer and then spent 20 years going from senior PM group PM sort of on and on, which is just entirely different.

A lot of times they work at shiny Silicon Valley companies. So they were at Slack and they were at this company and they were, and it's such a different experience and now you're running a product at a very important company. I'd love you just to share more about like what it taught you.

What are your thoughts on having that wide range of experiences before sort of taking the top product job?

Anneka: I think it's really helped me bring an integrated perspective of all the things that come together that need to come together to make a product and overall company successful. I also think what it's done is it's given me high empathy for every function within the company. I'm definitely not a legal expert.

I'm definitely not a marketing expert. I'm definitely not a, finance expert, but I understand how all these pieces fit together. I understand what their jobs are and I understand how to interact and engage with these stakeholders and bring them into the process to figure out how do we make something successful?

and I think what that enables me to do is like, I can hold other functions accountable, to things that are going to help us make the product and company successful. And I'm able to do that much easier and influence people much easier and faster than other product managers or other product leaders.

Brett: Do you think the type of experience you had working on all sorts of different parts of the business is the ideal path for a chief product officer or it was a random walk and there's not that much to learn from it?

Anneka: I think there's a ton of value in it. Obviously I haven't lived any other experience besides my own. So there's a lot that I probably miss in having very deep product specific expertise or product manager expertise, and doing things, but I think, especially if, working at a high paced company, where there's a lot of different things going on, we have a multi product portfolio and we're not just focused on 1 product, then there's a lot of value in having the ability to stitch together the pieces and influence people that don't directly report to you or influence areas where you're not a deep expert in.

Brett: Do you think that if there's a 22 year old CS grad that's taking their first product job and maybe has the foresight that they want to be a chief product officer at a large, important company? that taking a path more similar to yours would serve them well, or again, you can't sort of overly generalize.

And so you wouldn't.

Anneka: I do. I tell, I, I have told people many times giving them career advice that moving horizontally within the company is incredibly valuable and a lot of people think about their career and career growth is like, I have to just keep moving up and up and up instead of thinking, well, there's a path to growing where actually I move sideways in different places before I move up and that your trajectory of moving up after you've moved sideways will actually increase, even if it feels like a detour earlier on. I also advise a lot of people because getting into a product manager role as a new grad is pretty tough is take a role that's adjacent. And that might be an easier in road. And that will actually give you experience that will help you become a product manager and make you more desirable later on.

Brett: When you look at your executive team underneath you, do you tend to hire people that sort of had that trajectory that you had or you have a whole random grab bag of set of experience?

Anneka: I have a mix of experiences. I have a few people on my team that before they did product did sales roles, SE type role, like sales engineers. I think that's An amazing background to have because then you have an understanding of what does it really take to sell a product before you you know start building the experience of building products.

I do tend to hire people that have a range of different kinds of experiences. So I definitely don't necessarily hire people from the domain. I hire people that have shown that they can be extremely good at learning and extremely good at driving clarity when a situation is ambiguous and focusing on those skills versus specifically what company have they been at?

Have they been in this domain? Have they done this particular scale? but before I just hired a woman on my team as a leader who, has done some B2B products before, but has done most of her career in B2C products. And now she's doing great as a direct report of my leading a big part of the product team and a heavy, heavy B2B enterprise product that sells to IT and security.

Brett: How do you figure that out in the context of, an interview? 

Anneka: I interviewed a lot of people and I, you know, I reached out to a lot of people to ask for referrals. People that I respect and saying, Hey, this is the profile of a role I'm looking for. Can you help me? are there people that you know that you think would be really good for this? And at first I started with people that had domain experience because it's going to be easier for them on board.

And when I just kept finding time and time again, as I was interviewing them was that I just didn't feel like they had the drive. They had the people management skills. It's a big team I didn't get the sense that they were going to really be able to flourish in what I needed them to go drive.

And the way I assess for that, because maybe that's part of the question is I wanted them to be vulnerable with me. And I wanted to ask questions that they hadn't prepared answers beforehand, so it's very easy to ask the generic questions. And then people have like, really good stories and you get enamored by their stories.

And so I was asking them questions like, what was the most difficult point in time in your career and tell me about it and seeing like, what they talked about and then diving deeper into that. I asked them questions about, like, what is the hardest piece of feedback that you've received from anyone, whether it's a manager or another stakeholder?

And how did you respond to that? And what did you do about it and getting into the details of that. Oh, I asked people like, have, like, have you ever fired someone before? Shocked how many people I interviewed that were senior directors, VPs never fired someone before. I was like, okay, this is a pretty big red flag to me. So things like that where I was like, okay, let me get to the root of like who they are as a person, how they lead.

How they think about things, what do they consider difficult situations, they get to pick and it became very apparent to me as I was digging into this that a lot of the people I was talking to, I was like, this is not, very low likelihood of success. and so I just kept widening out and I kept asking people I knew for referrals and I was like, you know what, I came into this space into IT and security without having ever sold to this. I know I can help someone on board and be successful. Let me find someone that I just really feel like is super smart, can really handle complex situations, complex stakeholders, complex businesses. And that's what I started asking people for.

I was like, who do you know that has these kinds of capabilities? And I got more referrals. And I, I eventually found someone that, I was super excited to hire and it was a non consensus higher, right? It's not that like people were actively against me hiring, but that they just had questions or like, well, why wouldn't we hire someone with this kind of background or that?

And I was like, you know what? I, this is what I'm looking for. This is what we really need for this, for the business and I will help them on board and we will make this successful.

Brett: When you think about other hiring decisions you make? Are there some where you are not willing to have someone learn the domain? 

Anneka: Yes. so for the security products, there was the first direct report hire that I made when I came to Rubrik. We had no one on my team who had ever built or sold a security product before. I was like, this is including me. So I was like, this is pretty bad. If we want to be a security company and we sell a lot to IT, but we wanted to do more in security, It was like, we have to have a heavy hitter that has security domain experience and can really help us figure out our vision and strategy for how do we sell into security?

Zero compromise on having the domain experience. I needed that 100%. but I also needed someone who could really act as like an entrepreneur in a bigger company, because we had ideas about the strategy we were going to take, but we didn't have clarity on what we were What were the salient problems that we could solve coming from the space that we were already in and 

Brett: hmm. 

Anneka: the assets we already had.

Brett: Did you think about making an acquisition instead of trying to do it all yourself and hire someone?

Anneka: We did make an acquisition later, but we had to create clarity for ourselves first on what we wanted to go do. And I started to dig in working with our CEO or CTO trying to create that clarity. But it was so clear to me in that process. I did that for six months before we hired a person. And it was so clear to me in those conversations it was the blind leading the blind, not totally because like everyone brought some experience and our CEO actually had a lot of experience thinking about and exploring the security space, but no one had like really detailed experience of like, what are these other products?

What did they do? What's our unique, where can we uniquely fit in this ecosystem? We were really missing that. And I could see that. So I was like, this is a place I absolutely need to hire.

Brett: How did you build your own context and knowledge when you joined the company given you had zero experience in the domain?

Anneka: I spent a lot of time talking to people within the company and learning from them. I spent some time reading external resources, but that I didn't feel like ended up being, I mean, that gave me some high level. Okay. I need to under like, these are thematically what people look for when they're buying solutions, but I spent a lot of time with people that were selling our product, the sales engineers.

And then I spent a lot of time with my team because they had a lot of. domain expertise around the space. And one of the ways that I fell into terms of being able to add early value while also learning on the job was, I walked in and I saw something happening. I saw these meetings getting scheduled with our CEO or CTO, a bunch of other leaders and people from engineering people from product.

Our product manager, what we're trying to face basically decide on a strategy for something and product managers are coming in and being like, here's this data. Here's all this stuff. Like, let's figure out what we should do instead of coming in and presenting a point of view. So what I started to do was actually take these, see these meetings are happening.

Saw one, like the next one with schedule, take the product manager who is going to run that and actually sit them down and be like, explain to me what your strategy is. Help me understand. I don't know your space. So just answer questions for me. And I just kept digging and learning and learning. And I was like, okay, let me help you reframe how you can set up this discussion so we can actually make meaningful progress instead of circling around. Why don't we present a point of view? And I would actually help them write their point of view. And sometimes I would question it because I'd be like, this doesn't sound logical to me. So let's go talk about like what the logic is behind this, let's put that logic up on this slide and then let's go into this meeting and have a better conversation.

So I started doing that and the conversation quality, the meeting quality went way up and people were so happy, the product managers are so happy. They're like, wow, we're finally getting a decision and everyone else was so happy that we're not just circling around the discussion. So I was able to do that while at the same time going and like, being okay, these are the different parts of the product.

This is how I learn it deeply. The other thing that I would say that I did was I remember in the 1st month, I was having a lot of conversations. I was taking notes, lots of notes, asking questions. I didn't understand a term I would ask either during the meeting or after to someone. I was like, what does this mean?

Then I go understand that more and about a month in I was like, you know, what I need to do is like, I need to actually write something, write a document. Maybe I don't share it with anyone, but I'm just going to synthesize what I've learned into a description of the products or a description of what I think the strategy should be or is today.

And I started writing those things down and I, I did end up showing it to people. I showed it to people on my team and say, does this make sense? Am I wrong? Have I synthesized this in, the right way or is there a part that's missing? And it helped me fill in the gaps while also creating a framework by which I could understand what was happening in the business, what the different products were, what the strategies were, et cetera.

Brett: How do you approach sort of altitude shifting in the role? When do you tend to stay sort of at a higher level and someone sort of sets direction in their product area and you're like, great, you got it. Versus when you're sort of down in the most granular part of the product and listening to sales calls and or do you generally sort of stay at one altitude?

Anneka: I definitely do not generally stay at one altitude. I'm flipping altitudes all the time. But I do choose strategically, where am I going to go deep? And what I have done is I've chosen the areas that are either the biggest problems or the biggest opportunities, but I think very unique about Rubrik that probably most people don't fully understand about the business is that we have an incredibly wide surface area of product because we have to go, we have to deeply, understand data and be able to back up and recover that data across on premises, um, applications, cloud applications, and SaaS applications. It means that the, the surface area is very, very large. And I need people on my team that are deep Oracle database experts, all the way to people that understand how like Amazon S3 works and what are some, like, I can interact with like the AWS product team and figure out what are places we integrate better.

So it's very, very wide. So what I've done is I've really figured out what are the places that are the top areas that I need to focus on right now and go very deep in those areas. So before I had a security leader, that was like for the first thing, a Rubrik, I went super deep into that area and was like, well, what do we need to do?

How do we understand what's going on? Then quickly hired someone for that. Then my next focus was cloud. And I went super deep on. What can we do in, cloud applications? I was joining the sales calls. I ended up realizing I didn't have the right leader in place. So I, switched out that leader.

And then I basically took on running that product myself until I hired a new leader, which meant that I, Had to like be joining the sales calls, had to be like pitching, had to be figuring out how to change the product roadmap, all of these things, working with engineering. So I actually did that work myself until I brought someone on.

And that actually gave me the context to then be able to help that person on board understand the nuances of that business. So I could make sure that I could shepherd that and hand that off successfully. Today, I'm working on a lot around our three year strategy and working backwards of figuring out what are the things that we need to do a lot differently next year and going super deep organizing these deep dive sessions where we bring a bunch of stakeholders in the room together. We present points of view, but then we iterate on what is it that we actually think we need to go after both from a go to market standpoint as well as a product standpoint and then get deep into making sure that we have a plan in place to actually go address those things.

Brett: I guess in certain situations you'll do a lot of the zero to one stuff yourself. And in certain situations you'll hire someone to do a zero to one build?

Anneka: Yeah, we have like some zero to one, projects going on, for instance, around gen AI, as you can imagine. and I started doing that by myself, could not dedicate the time to it. Um, could dedicate the time on the strategy, but not on the execution. and then now I have someone from my team that was working on a different zero to one project for many years, got it to scale and now moving him into this role to focus on gen AI.

So, I'm not afraid to do the things to do the zero to one projects or to get in the weeds on things that are at scale, but we're hitting significant roadblocks, get in there and and help solve the problem.

Brett: What have you learned about commercial sensibility in product people?

Anneka: Such a great question. I think about this a lot because I think it's one of the big areas that most product leaders do not have good commercial sensibility. And I think it is absolutely important to have that and I do think it's something that can be learned but you have to actually understand why does someone not have the commercial sensibility? Is it because they don't understand the role of selling and making the product successful is it that foundational or they understand it, but they don't understand how sales operates within this business. Within company that you're in, because things are sales operates very, very differently from one company to another.

there are a variety of different problems when you say commercial sensibility and being able to understand what is the foundational building blocks that are missing from this person? Why, why they don't have that commercial sensibility is super important to be able to coach it.

Now, sometimes you can coach it and sometimes you can't as with anything, but it is a coachable skill. It is a learnable skill. A lot of it comes down to, like, getting the right, giving them the right exposure and helping fill in those, like, foundational building blocks that are missing.

Brett: How do you define commercial sensibility and product people?

Anneka: Understanding what's really going to sell. I guess maybe they'll put it that simply, Is the product I'm building going to sell or is it not going to sell and why? Or if it, You have something out there and it's not selling today, why isn't it selling today and being able to really get to the root cause of what the actual problem is. Is it actually that we have the wrong product? Is it, we don't have the right roadmap? We actually have the right product for, I mean, you can't change the product overnight. Do you need to change the roadmap?

Do you need to communicate something differently? What is the actual problem?

Brett: How do you interview for it?

Anneka: It's hard. Interviewing is so imprecise and I would not actually even say that I'm the world's best interviewer by any stretch of the imagination. But I think asking people about the products that they've worked on before, trying to get them to like, articulate what they saw, the challenges were with the product.

And then sometimes it's directly going in if they don't bring up the commercial piece of it, trying to understand how that product was sold, who was selling it. How did that and then ask them directly, like, why couldn't your sellers sell a product just trying to get into the weeds with them and like, do a little bit of a working session around their existing products.

That's usually a somewhat good mechanism, but it's because the selling context is so different from company to company, even if they had a good handle on it there, they may not have a good handle on it. coming into your company.

Brett: If somebody had a stint in sales or sales engineering and product marketing, do you find that it increases the chance that they've developed a commercial sensibility?

Anneka: Definitely if they've been in sales, a little more hit or miss on product marketing, because product marketing is different at different companies. But certainly if you've been a seller or a sales engineer, 100%, you're going to have that. 

Brett: Why do you think it's so lacking in most senior product people?

Anneka: Because I think a lot of them came out of engineering or more technical roles and they never actually had to sell the product.

Brett: How do you get product people, maybe other than just coaching, either how do you get somebody to develop that? Or how are you positioning them to sort of force them to have to develop the judgment there?

Anneka: I've been trying different mechanisms with my own team. We've started having, new product managers go through the sales engineering training we just launched a new first meeting deck at the company and, did a big training with our sellers. All the sellers have to certify, get certified on the first meeting deck.

And I'm actually going to make my team do the same thing, certifying the first meeting deck. so they, they have to show that they can actually pitch the product. I think if you can pitch the product, every product manager should be able to pitch their product and pitch to a prospect pitch to an existing customer.

and if you can't do that, you don't have comfort doing that, then you need to go build that comfort. And that's I think a very good first step.

Brett: Why don't you just make that part of your interview process where the product leader has to sell their current product to you?

Anneka: It's a great idea. I should do that. It's a really good good idea.

Brett: Yeah. I mean, I've spent so much time thinking about this topic and I'm, I think about a lot in the context of founders.

Yeah. There's a specific type of person to your point that just has the taste and sensibility for something that sells it's different than just solving a problem for the customer. It's that there's economic value and there's money to be made and there's good money to be made.

And I think you can develop it in all sorts of different ways, but there's a lot of founders, particularly product and oriented founders who don't have that taste. And there's other people that they can spend time with a customer and they just have the sensibility of, either the product or a lot of it is the way that the story is told in the product marketing around it. I think in the context of a founder, it's harder to develop because you have to learn so many things in a relatively short amount of time. 

But there's lots of technically oriented founders that I think under they think about commerciality as sales, and that's not at all. It's it's this sort of taste and sensibility around what will sell, how much will it sell for, why will it sell for that amount? 

Anneka: Yes 

It is more. I would even say it's more an art than a science is really understanding what's going to sell. What? Why is it going to sell? How much are you going to be able to command for it? Like why would they spend money on your product? And what is it that you're doing? What is the problem that you're solving to them? And how important is it to them? Because people will find budget for the things that they truly think are important.

Brett: A friend of mine a little while ago sent me this interview with Tom Ford and the person that was interviewing them basically asked what's special about you? And he said, you can lay out 10 pair of shoes in front of me and I'll point to you the one that's going to sell. And I thought, ah, that's commerciality.

Wow. You know, that's commercial sensibility. Um, and I thought that was like a good, a good way of sort of getting at sort of a squishy topic.

Yeah, I'm interested now that you're sort of a few years into this experience running product at Rubrik, and you have this sort of crazy multifaceted journey at LiveRamp, what are the biggest ideas that have been crystallized now, the things that you figured out, the things that are might be useful to other people building companies?

that are new to you, given what you've sort of gone and built over the past few years.

Anneka: I'm getting a much better sense of what it takes to sell when you have existing products that you sell to existing personas, what does it take to build new products that sell to adjacent personas? And understanding in what scenarios is this easy? And what scenarios is this harder?

How do you think about your strategy with respect to competitive products in each of these scenarios? Because when you have the existing install base, the advantage you have is almost like the platform advantage of, people don't want to buy another solution to solve an adjacent problem.

They want to buy your solution, but the reality of when you're launching a new product, that's adjacent is you are going to have 10 percent or 20 percent of the features of any other company. product that has been out there for many years. How do you figure out what that new product should be scoped at?

How do you message it? How do you get, you know, the sales engagement and go to market engagement right, such that you can launch something that can get me start getting immediate traction as you build into a longer term, as you build into your longer term strategy and product.

Brett: What are the input drivers to that selling sort of this building and selling the adjacent product?

Anneka: The easiest setup is if you can sell a new product to the existing persona. That's super easy because they're already bought into your product. They know your product really well. You're solving another use case for the exact same person. it gets progressively harder. The further away within the organization, the person that is going to be the buyer or user is from your current person.

I think that's probably fairly obvious because the further away you get, You know, that person that you sell to today is going to have less of a connection. The objectives of that of that other persona are going to be start being quite different than the objectives of your current person and the organization you have to navigate all of that.

I think the thing that is underappreciated is how for these other personas, even if they're very far away, if there's a problem that they have that is important and urgent and is unsolved by current solutions, but you can solve because, and you can solve way, way better, even in with a very light MVP, because you have an asset that everyone else doesn't have, then you can build like a very First, you know, very not shoddy, but like, very small scope 1st product and actually land that with that customer, because you're solving a problem that you uniquely, you uniquely can bring. What makes it possible to sell that is also having the road map and show them that, hey, you're going to build into other capabilities, eventually being able to replace something that they already have too.

One thing that I've learned, and I've learned this from, from our CEO Rubrik, and it's just really gotten embedded into the way that I operate is that you need to just have one killer differentiating feature that you can sell on to begin with. So whatever that is, it might be a killer feature around the performance of what we're going to be able to do is radically better than.

What any competition can do, even though we're missing 20 percent or we're missing 80 percent of the features that they have. So you need a good enough solution on the key things that people are going to say, these are the critical capabilities that I need in a solution. And then you need 1 killer use case.

That's going to be a wow factor. That's going to create the magic of saying, this is the thing I'm going to buy for this 1 capability. And I'm going to believe that you're going to deliver the roadmap on the other 20 things that I need.

Brett: And do you think that's like a globally important idea? It's not just building your second or third product. It's you go and you're forced to start a company tomorrow. That's sort of where you begin? 

Anneka: Absolutely.

Brett: Maybe this is obvious or you're sort of getting at it. Why is that correct? 

Anneka: I think especially if you're starting a company, but even within an existing company, if you want to sell something that is new and innovative and different, not just anyone is going to buy that from you. You have to find the person that wants to be an innovator within their, exactly. 

And if you can find that person that wants to live in the future, then if you can deliver the 1 thing, very differentiated from everyone else, that's part of that future vision and build the rest, then they'll come along with you on the journey. And you need to find those people early on that are going to come along with you on the journey.

Within Rubrik, we have an existing install base of thousands of customers. There are certain customers,

 right? It's like, Hey, you can, you can clearly say that there's this person within that customer that wants to be on the journey. They're the person when I talked to them, they're like, please, like, we want to be a design partner in this.

And those are people that are amazing because those are the people that we can use to then validate new things that we're building, say, like, you know, is this one killer feature actually going to be the feature for you? all of those things can really help us solidify, like, well, what is that one thing going to be that's going to resonate with that person that's living in the future?

Brett: Are there any other thoughts you have on how to make the decision around continuing to sell more product into the existing end buyer, versus changing buyers or use cases or those type of things?

Anneka: I think you have to work backwards from the growth that you want for the business and understanding what's possible in that scenario. I think one mistake I feel like I made at LiveRamp is I didn't think about where was the new growth going to come from and when is the sellable addressable market really going to tap out or slow down and the speed at which we're going to be able to acquire new business from existing customers or new customers is going to slow.

And therefore you need your second, third, fourth act to be at a scale, that's going to make up for the slowing of your, your core. So I think you have to work backwards from, I want to be this kind of growth profile company going for, I don't want my growth to slow. Well, where's that growth really going to come from and how do I back into what I need to do today to make sure that I have enough levers for the future to keep up that growth rate. And sometimes that can be, well, like the persona that I'm selling to today, there's enough there. And sometimes it's like, well, actually there's not enough there.

Brett: What about sort of continuing to build on this, anything else for other people who are thinking about their second big product? Their first thing is a hit. They're at 50, a hundred, 500 million, and they're starting to think about their next product that is sold to someone else that you've kind of debugged or figured out that would be useful for them to keep in mind.

Anneka: I think when you think about building your second big product as early as possible, identify sales. S E marketing resources that are going to be dedicated to figuring out how to get traction with this new product together. And don't make it 20 percent of their job, make it 100 percent of their job, because I think often what happens is like, going and pitching this to 200 customers or 200 prospects is the easiest way to validate whether the idea, the concept of what your second product is going to be and what you're going to include in that.

Resonates or not. So the earlier you can do that in tangent with starting to build some thought around what the MVP is, the faster you're going to get to a solution that really can sell in the market. And I think a lot of what companies do is they're like, well, let me go do the product engineering work to build the second product and product is going to come up with some viewpoint on this.

Yes. Product should come up with a viewpoint, but the actual going and having those 200 conversation and having people that are really good sellers go do that, that's going to help refine the product very, very quickly in terms of what is actually table stakes, 

Brett: Do you always have the zero to one product person heavily involved with selling the first x million? And,

Anneka: Yeah. They're involved in the sales conversations. I want them to be on the sales calls when we're pitching. I want them to be debugging, like as customers are onboarding, what the issues are, obviously in conjunction with engineering and others, but definitely they have to be super involved in that because that's how they're going to build the sensibility of what's really important and what's going to get us from like, we're zero to 0. 5 to one, you know, all the steps in between before you start really scaling it out.

Brett: To wrap up, wanted to end where we normally do, which is in the context of, building products, is there a person or people that have kind of had an outsized impact on the way that you think about this work? 

Anneka: Probably the person I would, point to the most who, uh, Shaped my thinking very early on was, Travis May, who was the second CEO of LiveRamp and was a co founder of the business, and I worked with him super closely for many, many years. He gave this advice on new products that was in, just companies in general which stays with me today. And I pass this on to my team, which is do things that don't scale. A lot of people, when they're building new products, they're like, well, the product manager can't join all the calls because like, how is that going to scale when we have 200 customers? The reality is we don't have 200 customers today. When we have 200 customers, we'll be thrilled about it. So. Do things that don't scale. And that is true for every function, whether it's product, whether it's marketing, whether it's engineering, like you can always think about like, well, if my first milestone is X.

What are all of the ideas that I could do, even the things that are kind of janky and like definitely won't scale that are going to help me get to that first milestone, then think about scaling, then think about that. But so many people miss this concept of do things that don't scale. And I think that's just advice that everyone can take, no matter what stage of company you're in, no matter what you're trying to do is that if you have a first milestone, you need to meet and you're really stuck, open your mind to the possibilities of things that don't scale that are going to help you get there.

Brett: Why do you think people struggle with that? 

Anneka: Some people have a really hard time with systems thinking and breaking down a problem into a set of steps that you have to go through. So they get wrapped around the axle, mudging all of the problems together and trying to solve a problem that's actually 10 steps down versus figuring out what are sequentially the things that we need to go solve for.

Brett: Awesome. Great place to end. Thanks for

Anneka: Yeah, 

Brett: time. 

Anneka: this is really fun. Thanks for having me. 

Brett: was good.