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Dan Rose
@DanRose999
senior advisor at coatue / 20 years at facebook and amazon
metaverse
Joined April 2007
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    Thanks @patrick_oshag this was a lot of fun!
    My conversation with @DanRose999 Dan helped build Amazon and Facebook in the early days of each, and is now the chair of Coatue Ventures He has as many good business stories as anyone, and he shares many of them with us here Enjoy! joincolossus.com/episodes/82256…
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    I was at Amzn in 2000 when the internet bubble popped. Capital markets dried up & we were burning $1B/yr. Our biggest expense was datacenter -> expensive Sun servers. We spent a year ripping out Sun & replacing with HP/Linux, which formed the foundation for AWS. The backstory:
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    In 2004 I got the opportunity to work with Jeff Bezos to develop the original Kindle. It was Amazon’s first foray into hardware and I learned a ton from my interactions with Jeff. Here’s some of the stories and lessons that I took away from that experience:
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    I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a public company that went bankrupt (Borders) and a start-up that went under (Hello). Some lessons:
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    In my experience the best founders develop a fighter mentality. Mark Zuckerberg was a fighter, and without that mentality Facebook would never have achieved its full potential. Here’s what I saw over 13 years working for Zuck:
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    I was ambitious and worked hard to advance my career at Amazon and then Facebook. I thought the way to get ahead was to deliver results, then push for more responsibility and position myself for promotion. I later came to realize I had it totally backwards. Here's my story:
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    Amazon launched in July 1995, and every Xmas was a near death experience for the first 7 years. I joined in ‘99 and got to experience this first hand. Starting in late Nov, all corporate employees were shipped to fulfillment centers to pack boxes for 6 weeks. Here’s what I saw:
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    When I worked at Amazon 1999-2006, Jeff Bezos’ favorite interview question was “are you a lucky person?” What a great way to filter for optimists and people who manifest success.
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    In 2008 Facebook’s user growth hit a wall at 80M and we were having serious debates about whether any social network could ever reach 100M users. 2 years later we had doubled our user base and not long after that we reached 1B users. Here’s how we did it:
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    The most difficult / pivotal moment in my career occured shortly after Sheryl joined FB in 2008. She saw my potential and wanted to give me more responsibility for the business, but decided first to do a 360 performance review. The feedback from my team and peers was devastating.
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    I learned about leadership & scaling from Sheryl Sandberg. My direct manager for 10+ yrs, we spent countless hours together in weekly 1x1s (she attended religiously), meetings, offsites, dinners, travel, etc. Here are some of the most important lessons I took away from Sheryl:
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    People often ask me to compare working for Bezos vs Zuck. I worked with Mark much more closely for much longer, but I did work directly with Jeff in my last 2 years at Amazon incubating the Kindle. Here are some thoughts on similarities that make them both generational leaders:
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    I had an opportunity to spend some time with Steve Jobs towards the end of his life. Over the course of a handful of meetings, he said many things I still remember. He was ruthless, decisive, rude, charming, gracious - sometimes all in the same breath! Here's a few stories:
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    In 2009, an unknown investor from Russia came out of nowhere to make one of the greatest late stage venture bets in the history of Silicon Valley. Why did FB choose an outsider to lead our Series D round? Here’s the inside story: