00:10:20 · Jackie Reses
[00:10:20] S0: Well, bring myself as paparazzi or people, and I'm always the person organizing a group shot. As unprofessional as it is, I kind of enjoy the moment. Are there personalities like how they're described online? Like what are the, what is it actually like working with each of them? So Jack Ma is an incredible visionary, and he is very big picture and thinks conceptually about concepts like, I wanna change what middle class looks like in China. Well, that's a pretty bold vision, and that includes moving a few 100,000,000 people into and out of poverty into middle class. And he just has a point of view about what he'd like to see achieved. Joe Tsai is truly wonderful. He's more of a common figure now in The United States with sports teams that he and his wife Clara own, and his support over even high school and college sports. And so he's a really nice, wonderful, smart human being. And then Masa, I did a bunch of deals where Masa and I were the two independents on the board. And we would end up doing a lot of work, which means that I would do the work with Masa's legal team. And Masa would come in and like, Yes, it shall be blessed. And I was like, Okay, my deal has now been blessed by Masa. That was kind of a fascinating experience to work side by side with him because he wants to also only think about very big picture issues. And so when we were tasked with things that had very execution oriented milestones that had to be achieved in order to get the IPO done, in order to do deals between Pay and Alibaba. Masa would almost just assume that everyone else would do it, and he would take the big picture concepts of it and just decide whether he was comfortable with it or not. And so it's almost the opposite of the way I work. I can't even fathom operating like that, where you're like, I shall bless this. It was quite fascinating to see. Because that was such a unique experience, I don't think anybody can say they've had that experience. What are the biggest lessons that you learned? Jack in particular, I think is a great example of where you have a dream with execution and a good team, you can go do it. And that dream can be company related, or it could be population related. He had a dream. He didn't have the background, but he got a great group of partners who became his management committee, and he went and just executed the hell out of it.
00:13:14 · Jackie Reses
And even in the face of undaunting, you know, just brutal, brutal challenges, or daunting challenges, he just kept at it. And I think there's a power to that execution and tenacity and grit that I think is incredible. I also think he found amazing partners. You know, like he found his alter ego in Joe and other executives on the team. And having that constellation of people that you can trust, who you bring along, who can check you, and who have opinions is incredibly powerful. And I've been lucky that I've seen other founders like that. But to me, that path is one that I've tried to follow around getting a great group of people together, pursuing a dream that you just decide, you know what, I gotta go do this, like go forward and just start marching step by step by step. And I think it really had an impact on me. China also really had an impact on me. Like when you spend a lot of time in China, you just feel like they have a singular mission, and they will not stop at anything until they achieve that mission. And it feels so singular in their approach. Look at these cities that pop up, you look at their focus on technology, you look at how they build infrastructure, and it is mind blowing. And so I think it's the alternative path to what we have in The United States, where we could equivocate and almost go two steps forward, maybe one and a half steps back, two steps forward, and kind of democracy is much messier than a totalitarian government. But like, you kind of watch how they've built that country and it's awe inspiring. Like you really feel like you're living in the future.
00:15:12 · Molly O'Shea
[00:15:12] S1: I want to talk about all the maneuvers that you've had in your career. I mean, I think it's pretty incredible. You were at Goldman Sachs for that long, and then you went to Apex where you stood up their TMT practice and led that. And then from there, you go to Yahoo. And so you get into Yahoo and you're Chief of HR. So how did you get into that role? And then how did you maneuver that role into the other role?
00:15:38 · Jackie Reses, Molly O'Shea
[00:15:38] S0: Yeah, so Goldman was amazing and I had a few twists and turns at Goldman. I invested at Goldman, which was super fun. I worked in equity capital markets for a stint for this legendary executive and management committee member named Eric Dobkin. And, you know, I had just such an amazing experience there, but I wanted to invest on my own. I was always really entrepreneurial. So like my fear with Goldman was that if I stayed there, I'd never leave. Like at the time it was private, and it was an amazing place to work, but I had to go pursue this entrepreneurial dream. And so I ended up at Apex and I founded the media group and there were great investors there like Orin Zeff, who's actually one of my current investors in my company who led the tech group. And we went and tried to build, you know, a media technology practice. And so at least I had this entrepreneurial opportunity within the context of a broader private equity firm. I think private equity at the time was interesting, but didn't satisfy the itch. And I really was entrepreneurial. And my entire life, I just really wanted to own my own company. Like I always had this dream that I wanted to like own the wire hanger company or the box company, Like something that no one really knew. I mean, I guess I own a bank now, so maybe I've achieved that. [00:17:12] S1: I think you I may
00:17:14 · Jackie Reses
[00:17:14] S0: just thought, Oh my God, that's gonna be cool. You own this thing that's just so institutional. And so I wanted to be an operator. And so when I went to Yahoo, I was very lucky to transition from deep finance to tech. And even though I had run my own teams in finance, that's a really hard transition to make, and very few people have actually made it at senior levels. And so when I moved to Yahoo, the first job I was offered was the head of HR. And that to me was like a total head scratcher. And I remember thinking like, why in the name of God would anybody hire me to be the head of HR at a tech company? And when I was flying out to California and thinking about it, I was like, what about what I am good at screams HR? This makes no sense. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I actually had the skills from private equity. This is like an abstraction, like step back and say like, what's a private equity executive good at? So they're good at legal, finance, accounting, tax, structuring, all like the very pragmatic skills that actually get the deal done. That's great. You also get people who are more junior than you to do those things the more senior you get. So they're executable. Now in the world of AI, they're all really executable. The part that is not executable, though, is the judgment part. Like you're sitting in a boardroom, you own a company, and you and a CEO and the board are trying to sort levers of growth. And so when you're evaluating how to go build a company, you're looking at capital allocation. Capital allocation comes in the form of people, and it comes in the form of dollars. And so you have to go figure out what businesses are gonna grow, and how you're gonna build the people and teams to allocate to those businesses in order to supercharge them. That is something that someone in HR could be really good at. So when I was going to Yahoo, Marissa had said to me, well, now that you're coming, you can't come and not run M and A. You can't come and not run BD. There were things that were obvious that my background led to. And so before I even started, I ended up with a whole series of teams that led me to become the chief development officer versus the head of HR. And that function ran a search affiliate business. It was like a third of Yahoo's revenue, but that revenue was deal driven.
00:20:03 · Jackie Reses
Okay, I've done deals my entire career. That makes sense. Running BD and M and A, well, that's all deal driven. Running HR. HR in the context of Yahoo was deeply driven by restructuring, if you go back to that era of Marissa when we were restructuring the company. And so ironically, it led to kind of a skill match around the HR side. And so people don't think of HR as an operational job, it really is. And I ended up restructuring the company and helping to refactor and reorient different businesses and put leaders in there that were the best leaders for the types of growth that we needed to achieve in each of those businesses. We bought a bunch of things, you know, we divested of some assets. Then we took Alibaba public, which was a capital transaction that was just monumental at the time and unprecedented for a US public company. And so those are the types of things that were logical for someone with my background to do. It also gave me product experience because I got to go build the search affiliate business for Yahoo. So that was a great training ground in order to learn how to go build products.