The Necessity of Risk
“The common question asked in business school is why? That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, why not?” — Jeff Bezos
In any aspect of life, people have the choice to decide what level of risk they want to engage in. For Doug Sweeny, that risk is often found in places most wouldn’t expect: “Joining a new marketing branch of a startup in Palo Alto wasn’t something that I think a lot of other dads of highschools could have dreamed of, but for me, it seemed to be the best option.”
Taking such a significant risk for Doug may have seemed crazy at the time, but for Susan Wojcicki taking significant risks is a necessary component of life: “Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. Opportunities — the good ones — are messy, confusing, and hard to recognize. They Are risky. They challenge you.”
As Doug and I take a seat to begin our interview, I notice he keeps taking glances at his phone: “Yeah, at One Medical, we’re trying to manage this new project that will go on billboards in the city, but we’re running into some last-minute difficulty. Sorry if it seems like I’m a bit distracted.” Doug recently left his old job at Nest in Silicon Valley to work for a start-up healthcare group called One Medical: “After Nest was bought by Google, my marketing team was just getting absorbed by Google, and we were losing control of our vision of the company. It just seemed like the right time to move on.”
But how did Doug get involved in Silicon Valley and the startup world in the first place?
“I was born in New Jersey, and my only sibling is my younger sister Jill. I didn’t have many fond memories of middle school or high school; it was kind of just a blur for me.” As we continue to talk, Doug elaborates on some of the tougher parts of his young life: “At the time my parents were splitting up, so I just felt very cut off and detached, and I don’t really think I applied myself as much as I should have. I never really found a true passion or a niche that fit me, so I just faded into the background.”
Similar to Doug, Jeff Bezos found himself struggling to find passion in much of his young life. In a 2001 interview with Bezos, he is asked about his famous quote, “I never worked on the school newspaper” and its significance. He responded: “I liked that quote because I think something that a lot of kids do in school and college is work on their school newspaper to show that they are applied, that they care. It’s not that I didn’t care; I just didn’t have a passion for the paper. It seems like a gimmick to me, so I never even really gave effort into it. People always find their own direction in many ways.”
Like Bezos, Doug began to find his direction as he moved out of New Jersey and onto college. Contrary to his younger schooling experience, Doug has only fond memories of his college experience: “I went to Syracuse University, back in the days when you would write your application with a quill and ink by candlelight.” We chuckle. “But yeah, Syracuse was awesome for me as an individual. I joined the Psi Upsilon fraternity at Syracuse, and that for me was like fitting into a new environment I had never been exposed to.” I ask Doug how he thinks being a member of Psi Upsilon changed him: “It was great for me because all of a sudden I got all of this responsibility, because I had to organize meetings and take charge of different events, and I became very social and all of a sudden I had found something I cared about. I would find myself writing meeting plans and doing more than what was required of me. I became a very stand up type of person.”
In a 2005 interview with Susan Wojcicki, the current CEO of Youtube, she is asked about taking charge and breaking through new barriers. For her, it was all about being self-motivated: “If you want to change this world, this community that we all live in, then get up and do it. And start something.”
Like Wojcicki, Doug proceeded to move throughout the beginning of his professional career with little direction: “Right out of college I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I applied for a bunch of jobs and eventually took one that was offered to me by one of my brothers at Psi Upsilon. It ended up being the job where I met my wife. It was a consulting job at Boeheim and Charles, where I did a lot of clerical work and basically just gave general advice and counsel to a lot of different people for a lot of different things. It was like a think tank but on steroids. After Bohemian and Charles, I bounced around between a bunch of firms and eventually landed in marketing at Levis.” He pauses for a moment then smiles: “That was a really great job. It was the first time I made the transition to working on the consumer side of things at any company.” After elaborating on his time at Levis for a few minutes, Doug pauses. I add in, “and that’s when you made the really big leap of faith?” Doug looks up: “Yeah, that was when I joined Nest.”
Nest at the time when Doug joined was just out of the “garage stage” and Doug was the first marketing specialist that the founder, Tony Fadell had hired. As Doug describes it, “Tony had just rented a real office space and was starting to hire more employees. We had fully developed products, and finally, we’re moving into the stage where we would start to ramp things up. I was brought on as the CMO at the time, even though the company only had a few dozen employees, and the rest is history.”
As Nest continued to grow, the age difference quickly became noticeable between Doug and his fellow employees: “Well, Tony and I were in our mid-forties, and everyone else was about twenty-ish years old.” For some, this age gap would be no issue, but for Doug, it was an obstacle in his career: “It was tough. I had two kids in high school at the time, and I was waking up at five every morning to commute for about an hour and a half to silicon valley. I was working seven days a week, and I wouldn’t get off until about 7–9 most days, sacrificing time with my kids. It was really hard on me. But that’s what made the company successful. The fact that we were all their busting our asses for 16–18 hours a day is the reason Google ended up buying us at such a huge price point.”
Working with companies that have a high-risk factor was new to Doug, and no one better than Jeff Bezos knows that success doesn’t always happen on the first try. Jeff Bezos wasn’t always so confident in his idea to make an online E-commerce site work. What might be surprising to most people is that amazon was born out of the failure of one of his other companies, an online marketplace called sling: “Sling was supposed to be today what some people might compare to eBay. It was an online site where people could post items up for sale, and then others would bid on them, making for an interesting mix. But at the end of the day, it didn’t have enough users or a high enough demand to fuel the money needed to make it work.”
“Nest ended up being a huge success, and I couldn’t have been happier with the way everything worked out in my career. At the end of the day, no matter how rocky or crazy the ride got, I enjoyed the hell out of every second of it, and if I could do it all over, I wouldn’t change a thing.” Doug pauses for a moment, “Maybe I wouldn’t spill my coffee on that interviewer at Bohemian and Charles, but what the hell, it makes for a good story.”
