How to solve an impossible challenge, w/Megan Smith (US CTO, Google, shift7)

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Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. We were taken to those villages in an old rusty Russian car

We had to go over. Railroad tracks on bridges. And arrive in the community be checked by the police there. That's Monique Sternin. adjunct professor at Tufts University, who's an expert on nutrition and foreign aid.

She's recounting how she and her late husband Jerry Traveled to the remote farming villages in Vietnam in the early nineties. Their mission? to solve the plague of malnutrition in children. Vietnam's economy was in terrible shape.

And children. We're paying the price. Over sixty percent of the children were malnourished. And many of them severely malnourished. We were in a near famine situation.

So what to do? People trying to solve this problem were getting nowhere. Other relief agencies had failed. Over and over. To make an impact.

When you have a high level of malnutrition usually There's a relief agency that brings food then the children get better. But when the Agency leaves the children go back to being malnourished. Monique and Jerry set out to find a sustainable solution.

They also knew that as outsiders they didn't have all the answers. They partnered with a local women's union. and enlisted their help. in solving the mystery.

Monique start with a specific series of questions. Do you have any children who are well nourished? They looked at their dish and they would say, Caw, Caw, yes, yes. We do have a few children who are well nourished. So we ask.

Well Could we go and find out what those people are doing? And they said yes. Monique and Jerry. Had to meet these families.

Against insurmountable odds. These parents had kept their children. Properly nourished. How did they do it? She started looking around their home for clues.

I saw some crabs, little crabs crawling out of um Straw Basket. And I said, Oh You you collecting crabs? And they said yes, and I said, Do you feed the your children these crabs? And

They were a bit uh A shame. In this community. Eating crabs was considered a taboo.

And they said, Yes, yes, so we said, Oh But this is a Very good food for young children. Munique stumbled onto the answer that she had been looking for. Crab meat.

Far more nutritious than the rice heavy diets. most farming families here lived on. It was a key to keeping kids nourished. She learned more too. We looked at other things, how often they were feeding their children.

because most of the kids in this community spent the day with their parents in the rice fields. They were only able to eat twice a day. But in this family. Who had more mouths to feed. The kids stayed home.

And ate frequently. With all the sibling looking after younger siblings that were able to feed their children a few times a day. This ingenious family had also mastered hygiene. Which helped them fend off disease.

We noticed that they would wash their children's hand quite frequently if the child was playing with a dog or Picking up some flip flops from the ground that would actually quickly. Crab meat. Eating frequently.

Washing their hands. These were practical habits that could keep kids healthy. In the face of poverty. And Monique had figured it out. By going to the source.

Now How to spread the word. Once again. They went to the source. They worked with local groups.

To organize gatherings. Families would bring their children to a a neighbor's house to get an extra meal And they would have to bring food. Shrimps or crab that they could find easily in the rice paddies. These food sharing programs were not only where the kids got nourishment,

It's where the parents Lear these new ideas on how to keep their kids healthy. The result was a success. Within a year, over a thousand children had been rehabilitated. We're able to prove with very good data

That it worked. To date, these programs have reached 2.2 million people. Fifty thousand. Malnourished children.

But what I want you to notice in Monique's and Jerry's work Is the way they arrived in Vietnam. Not with answers. But questions. Instead of reinventing the wheel.

They looked around for someone already driving. A metaphorical car. The same approach. Works for organizations in every field. I believe.

that when faced with an impossible challenge, you should scout for someone Who's already solved it. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right.

Or do we have a free bedroom apartment? Ten years later I'm like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it. This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Co-founder of LinkedIn.

Partner at Greylock. And your host. And I believe. Та when faced with an impossible challenge. You should scout for someone who's already solved it.

When we talk about invention. Or its entrepreneurial cousin. Innovation. We also need to talk Аба пекуліар ча.

Organizations face. As they scale. You might be thinking. Read. I've listened to every episode, and I already know what happens. As companies grow

They lose their pioneering spirit. Or they get consumed with production and lose sight of customer needs. All of these are true. But we're here to talk about a different plague. And a fearsome one at that.

It's called not invented here syndrome. And it can be a killer. If you're a developer. Or came up in tech. You may already be well acquainted.

but not invented here. It means an extreme reluctance to adopt any solution that didn't come from in-house. That could be a programmer stubbornly rewriting her own code instead of incorporating a single line of someone else's. Or it could mean a multinational corporation here. Spending billions to develop a product that already exists just to avoid Working with an outside company.

But both come down to the same thing. Ego. A little bit of ego is not a bad thing. In a founder or a startup. If you didn't think

You were the right person to solve a problem. You probably wouldn't have started a business. But when it comes to innovating at scale, one of the most fundamental lessons you will learn is You can't do it all yourself. There's an antidote to not invented here syndrome.

One that Coders coined long ago. It's called PFE or proudly found elsewhere. I wanted to talk.

To Megan Smith about all of this. Because she spent her career helping organizations and now nations. by championing innovations from all corners. She spent more than a decade at Google. leading the acquisitions that define the company.

Under President Obama Served as chief technology officer of the United States. Her approach is so compelling, I thought I'd scout the theory from Megan herself. One of the things that is a key insight for scale, I would call scout and scale. With seven billion people on the planet, someone around here's probably got a solution to just about everything.

So if you can find them. And you can come up underneath them, they will lift. Megan believes firmly. That you can scout a solution to any problem. And you can see the seeds planted for this.

Way back. When Megan was in Buffalo, New York. In Buffalo the river was on fire. When I was a kid, we had so much going on with challenges in the environment and the steel industry.

The Great Lakes. really suffered and parts of them were dying. During the economic downturn of the late nineteen seventies, Megan watched as potential talent. Fled Western New York State. But she also saw how innovation at the government level could change people's lives.

I was lucky. Because I went to a public magnet school that had no money budget wise, but it had extraordinary teachers And they just pushed us hard on every subject, including STEM.

Project science fair most mandatory for all children. And so it didn't. Have just some kids. who got to do it, all the kids had to do it. And we learned that science and technology was part of the toolkit for solving problems in environment and social justice and other things. The love of science stuck with Megan.

And she went on to earn Two engineering degrees from MIT. But she also kept her love. Of the science fair. The idea of inviting not just some kids but

But all kids to participate. And then celebrating both. The invention And the inventor. Early in Megan's career, after working in Apple's Tokyo office,

She joined a fabled startup. called general magic. A pioneer in early smartphones. Her next move would give her an early example of how growing enterprises scout and scale.

First a COO Then CEO Of a new media company with a quintessentially nineties name. Plan it out. Tom Riley, my genius friend.

Founded Planned Out. Planet Out was very much one of those sort of early new media companies. We We really focused on LGBTQ communities and allies who were on the internet at scale, but didn't have the same offerings of content

Mm. Plan It Out started as a content creator. running a host of websites aimed at the growing LGBTQ community. Getting online for the first time.

But as they grew, Planet Out found that they were being scout by bigger platforms that wanted to reach this community too. Mm, mm. The big companies like AOL and Microsoft and Netscape and Yahoo. We're very busy building offerings, and so

They wanted to serve LGBTQ customers, but it was hard to have uh that skill set with other things they were doing. And so we are often partners with all of them. What Megan observed at Planet Out. Was a growth model built on cooperation. The internet giants of the time were

Worked with Planet Out. We ran our own websites and AOL sites, but we also ran the LGBTQ areas. They were called portals at the time. So we were the LGBTQ or gay news of Yahoo or the partner of AOL.

And the bigger they grew. The more Megan could put to use the lesson of scouting outside your company. To find Who is innovating around you? And then

Working together. As Planet Out scaled up. They acquired more and more media startups with similar missions. And ultimately became the largest. LGBTQ related media company in the world.

Megan stayed on until two thousand and one, and then in two thousand and three. She joined Google. At that time. who was still mainly known as that search engine. with the intriguingly blank front page.

But Google. had big plans to expand past search. As VP of New Business Development, Megan oversaw a number of the early acquisitions that drove its growth. Meghan also led early stage partnerships, responding to ideas from Google's product and engineering teams.

Google engineers have a lot of ideas. We were doing all the early stage deals. So any time any engineer across a company or product manager had ideas, whether it was something that became big like Gmail or Google Docs, we had to go find the first of a kind partner. If you look at Google, it's probably half the products come from in house incubation, of course, search uh Gmail others, but a whole bunch of them, the other half, YouTube and Android and others come from welcoming extraordinary teams. I asked Megan to share her playbook around those early acquisitions. Some of those early stage deals led to massive new projects, right? Uh

Google Maps, Google Photo Sharing What was the process by going from an early acquisition or a thought that we should play in this area and buying a a small product, a team for talent into the global scale that Google had. It's about seeing talent and enabling talent. Let's take Google Earth and maps and those. There's really three acquisitions there. The Kehole team that became Google Earth, the Where to Tech team, which was actually four people doing more of the basic map stuff, and then another group called Zip Dash. They were

At the time figuring out traffic, it's in the nexus of all that different talent coming together. As they came in. They led. The baking of the three tiered cake that became maps and earth. is a perfect example of how you can scout for existing solutions and scale them.

Google could have built the entire project in house. From scratch. They could have spent time and money. creating a product to compete with. And eventually destroy.

Key Hole And where to And zip dash. But instead. Google invited them to join the team.

and continue scaling their individual ideas. Now at this point of the story You might be saying Wait. Did it really play out that way?

Were the teams really invited in? Or was it more like an ultimatum? Join me or die. And by the way. Once you join

Welcome to the machine. Well It can happen that way. You might even remember on this very show. We've seen teeny startups struggle.

And the clause of tech class. This is what Drew Houston of Dropbox said about partnering. With big companies. They would come in with this cavalcade of middle managers and they spin your wheels for a long time and

But at the end of the day, these big companies aren't gonna do you any favors. And so the idea of the startup partnering with a big company ninety nine point nine percent of the time just ends up in a bunch of wasted effort and can kill the company. Then if you're really unfortunate, you actually get the deal and then you get spun around by this massive machine. You may be nodding your head along with Drew.

Because this happens in Silicon Valley. All the time. But Megan. had a different approach. She wanted to help inventors keep

Inventing I've done so many acquisitions. I know entrepreneurs are almost genetically predispositioned to do their thing. They are going to do that. So I think in this case it's find this extraordinary entrepreneurial person who just knows what they're doing. And so in an acquisition, put them in charge. And be like a venture capitalist. Come up underneath them. Give them what they need. This model of coming up under entrepreneurs is

And allowing them to do their own thing. It's natural for investors. but antithetical to how most large companies work. Megan has a great metaphor. for the change in thinking that's required.

John Warnock once showed to a friend of mine about growth. John Warnock Co-founder of Adobe This is it's a visual thing, so this is gonna be hard. A lot of times when people uh think there's a company they draw a triangle at the top of the page.

Then imagine that the triangle grows down. That's how the company grows into a big, you know, pyramid, let's call it if it's three D Instead he drew at the bottom left corner. the the the pyramid and then he uh lets it grow upwards to take over the whole page and some of the team are gonna come up With you. Some of the team are gonna go sideways with you. This is a much more supportive model.

This top down growth model. seems natural when you're part of the founding team. You think I'm the first engineer.

And so I'm going to be the head of engineering for the company's whole history, and all of the teams will report in under me. And that's challenging to the entrepreneurial spirit. People don't found startups with a dream of going to work for the massive machine Drew Houston spoke of. Megan believed that for new partnerships to thrive, Google need to do more than find great talent with groundbreaking ideas.

They needed to let their new acquisitions continue to do their thing. Well the company. Lend support. The approach worked. There's data.

That bears Megan's theory out. We did an analysis looked at how many people were still at Google from the CoreGio teams at the six year mark. It was like huge number of people. 'Cause they basically came in and built their vision. Inside of this larger. Home base.

Granting talent the autonomy to pursue their vision as relentlessly as they were flying solo. That's right. was Google's secret to scaling out in a way that would last. Step one Specify a goal.

Step two Scout. For who's already solving it. Step three. Invite them in.

and help those inventors. Keep inventing. Megan stay at Google for over 10 years. While at Google, Megan also led the nonprofit Google.org. and became VP of Google X.

Megan didn't know it. But at this time. She was the one being scout. After the break. We'll follow Megan to the federal government.

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Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi.

And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Before the break.

We heard how Megan helped turn Google into an environment for small entrepreneurial teams to flourish. What was the first Call like for Hey, we're considering a possible CTO for the United States. Let's talk. How how how did how did that come about?

So it was in Africa. So we were working with incredibly entrepreneurial folks in Uganda and Kenya and I got Z mail. And it was email from US C TO. And I didn't know much about that. And it said, Hey Megan, I've heard of you was from Todd Park. Uh I'd like to talk to you about something. If the fact that there's a job called chief technology officer hasn't been on your radar.

You're not alone. It wasn't on Megan's either. The CTO position was created by the Obama administration in 2009. And by the time Megan received that email in 2014, Cod Park. Was only the second person.

to have held the post. It had never occurred to me. to go work in government, it's not a practice that you see on tech resumes generally. But as Todd Park had started as a tech entrepreneur himself, he could speak to the challenges of this pivot.

This wasn't about Being another bureaucrat. This was about bringing the knowledge and scale of the tech world to to a sector that could benefit from it. The people who worked in government already are incredible.

You service oriented people. lawyers and scientists and operators and communicators and policy people, all these people, but they were missing their technical colleagues at the table. What I learned from President Obama When he went to collect all of us

From the kind of commercial tech sector. To say here's some extra seats. Could you guys join the meetings? This push to include tech voices at the table aligns with the way Megan and her colleagues had used Scout and Scale at Google. When faced with a challenge, Don't reinvent the wheel.

Invite the people who've already done it on your team to And let them lead the way. Megan became the US CTO in 2014. Her first challenge was a big one. Not impossible, perhaps.

But one that would need her to scout. Far and wide for an answer. Our agenda was how do we modernize this government? Sure, no problem. Just modernize the government.

That's all. That may sound like a comically tall order. But Megan. has some historical context. I often give the example, you know the Pony Express.

Where they used to use the horses riding across the country. to deliver the mail in three days. Well President Lincoln had the Pony Express and then it got disrupted by the telegraph and he upgraded. So this is not a new problem of upgrading government.

It's just that you have to have the willingness to really do it. Megan knew that the administration did have the willingness to run a system upgrade on the federal government. Obama's chief of staff Dennis McDonough Китик полісі таскворс. with Megan as chair.

It was like the leap. From the Pony Express. to the telegraph. Replayed. The Pony Express is awesome. I love the freaking Pony Express.

It delivers a mail and it's a cool thing. But we don't need to use it anymore'cause we have this telegraph. Shifting the federal government off its beloved ponies to a more high-tech answer. Would be easier said than done. For example.

Remember talking to uh Matt Mollenweg. Matt Mullenweg Social media entrepreneur and web developer Known for developing the free and open source web software WordPress.

Remember talking to uh Matt Mollinweg. And he told me that he was really excited because finally the State Department was gonna start using WordPress templates. The open source WordPress seemed a perfectly good scouted solution to modernize the State Department's web operations.

But their lack of experience left them open to being taken advantage of. Rather than a fast, easy implementation of WordPress. The government's procurement process. Drag on.

And in the end. They ended up paying millions of dollars to use a free tool. Now someone in State Department had they had this knowledge would have just not do they would have figured out how to modernize that choice. And not cost the American people so much money, but the person didn't know. So lesson learned.

When adopt outside innovations You need to pay just as much attention to the implementation process. as you do the search process itself. And before we move on. Let's take a moment to break down.

how to do that. One of my favorite things I call wisdom of threads. When Megan says threads She's talking about Email threads.

But the idea can apply to any type of communication. You just kinda put a question out to people and if you actually have C seed The right group of people or enough breath. like diversity of opinions, you could say, Hey, I was looking at this thing, what do we think about this? And then you get one person's like I love this because of blah blah blah. Oh my God, that's the most idiotic thing you ever thought. You know, and back and forth and it isn't that They're writing to me.

It was the the other people were witnessing the conversation and responding to it was an open conversation of that particular group. And out of the wisdom of the thread communicating with each other, you could see whether to do the thing pretty quickly. And it was a really fast scale technique somebody could use. To quickly discern a decision.

Megan and I actually part ways on this theory. Very slightly. Megan is strongly in favor of of the breadth of opinions she mentioned. My thesis is if you include everyone, you can fix nearly everything.

I tend to think. It's less about breath. And more about selective scope. I absolutely agree that diversity of opinions is critical. We tend to make our worst mistakes when our scope of advisors is too narrow or

Two insular. Too much like ourselves. But as anyone who's been on a long email thread with a lot of people C seed knows, А тре. Can turn.

In reality. Everyone's threshold. For a number of people C seed. is a little different.

The important thing is to make sure that every single person CC has a good reason to be on the thread. As the head of the tech policy task force. Megan made sure that the wisdom of threads was used in full effect at the federal government. A place that's not exactly known for its tech savvy. Or what Megan calls it.

We call it TQ, like tech IQ? One way they increase the government's TQ. Was to make sure more tech voices were included on project threads. Or

As President Obama had told her. Here's some extra seats. Could you guys join the meetings? The task force started filling in those extra seats. One project. Stood out.

To Megan. One of my favorite projects that happened was uh Someone knew that California was rebidding the child welfare software, and the current RFP they had was five hundred million dollars. R ST Request for proposal

It was a fifteen hundred page RFP that would be delivered in five years by one proprietary vendor. Now we wouldn't do anything like that ever. And technology. But faced with no other option, that's what you might choose. Remembering what happened with the State Department and WordPress. They've developed a faster.

Better. and cheaper open source version of the software. It's not proprietary and it's a hundred fifty million dollars, not five hundred million. Saving taxpayers. Three hundred and fifty million dollars.

While improving, California's child welfare system is impressive, but But the real achievement relates back to Megan's ethos of scout and scale. Make sure you're not reinventing the wheel. What's really exciting is not only that happen for California, but fourteen other states who are looking at what they're doing and what if all those other states could use eighty percent of that base and then adapt locally and we could move faster instead of making fifty versions of something. This speaks.

directly to our theory. When faced with an impossible challenge. Look for who's already solved it. They've save the government millions by adapting and replicating programs.

Set the stage for the next phase of her career. It started. With an observation. We have hundreds of thousands of jobs open and tech. Companies are starving everywhere, every industry. So how are we gonna get people? Enter Tech Hire.

A program that organized and coordinated Adult workplace training. With three month coding boot camps. Online courses, apprenticeships, and more in cities across the country. Tech hire.

Didn't Start from scratch. Instead, it assembled dozens of existing local programs all All over the country. the program tech higher.

was finding people who were already doing coding boot camps, mayors were paying attention, employers were hiring from it, and local tech communities were welcoming. That was happening in St. Louis. In New York. In Delaware. And we were able to get not only those cities but to them to mentor another set another set. So we went from Five to twenty to forty to seventy cities.

Having this tech hire, which was not necessarily a government program. It was really a y'all should meet each other. And see how to share what's already working. Megan left her post. as chief technology officer in two thousand seventeen.

And started scouting again. She co founded Shift Seven. An organization that connects talent. With opportunity. One of their flagship projects.

is the Tech Jobs Tour. Tech Jobs Tour was founded by Leanne Pittsford. Creator of Lesbians Who Tech It's a multi-city whirlwind event touching down in more than twenty five American cities. The Tech Jobs Tour finds local job training programs to work with.

and scale. Only this time their aim was specifically to go deeper into parts of the country the tech sector had been passing by. One of my favorites is the code crew team in Memphis. In Memphis, Tennessee There's forty five thousand young people out of school.

And out of work. And yet it's the same city that has FedEx and Autosone and all these great companies starving for that talent. And nobody was bridging. And so this code group team is doing for folks who are a little bit older out of school, they're doing boot camp training, you know, coding boot camps, tons of people coming through that. And then for younger folks they actually took, you know those container ship boxes?

They took those, but And they put us down boot camp. Into them. And so When uh schools open, they're in the playground, come on out and do STEM and lots of fun.

And then when school closes, they're still open. Ever since her days at Planet Out. Megan's understood that the quality Of your scouting mission. is determined by the diversity.

Of your search. And the variety. of answers you come back with. Megan means to look for answers. Everywhere.

The United Nations Solution Summit is something we came up with While she was USCTO, Meghan launched the Solution Summit with the UN and several partners. It's now in its fifth year. The United Nations Solution Summit is something we came up with We put a simple web form up.

And we just ask who in the world is already solving These goals. This year we got fourteen hundred submissions. In three weeks from a hundred and forty one country's. Um one of my favorite ones is a team from Ghana. They say we grow bikes.

It's the Ghana Bamboo Bicycle Initiative. Their uh brand is called Eco Ride. And they make these beautiful bicycles that are very inexpensive. And they really are sequestering carbon as growing the Bamboo. And then making them into bikes and more than half of the manufacturing team is women and every time they make 10 bikes they give one away to a youth who's struggling to get to school. the team flying drones to plant a billion trees a year.

A team teaching law in prison in Uganda because thousands of people had gone to jail with no representation. Another chunk of our work is around media bias, using AI, data science, machine learning tools to try to see bias media better. When faced with the impossible We often try too hard. To solve it ourselves.

Siloed off from the wealth. of resources around us. Instead, I believe we should find ways to embrace the philosophy of Scout?

and scale. Вате чален. When faced with the impossible. Look around. Find who's already doing the work.

And C What you can do together. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original.

The show is recorded on site in California and produced at the studio inside SY Partners in New York. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Chris McLeod, Adam Skuse, Jenny Cataldo. Jordan McCloud. Catherine Clark Gray.

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