Letter #284: Jason Droege (2020)
Scale CEO, UberEats Head, Axon President, Benchmark Venture Partner | UCLA Commencement Speech
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Note
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Last week, Meta announced a $14.3bn investment into Scale AI (valuing the company at $29bn+) concurrently with hiring Scale Founder Alexandr Wang to lead their new Superintelligence unit. And while their have been profiles and headlines galore written of Alex, far fewer has been written about new (Interim) CEO Jason Droege.
Prior to being named Scale’s CEO, Jason was the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. He joined Scale from Benchmark and Popshop Live, where he concurrently served as a Venture Partner for Benchmark and a full time operator alongside Popshop Founder Dan Dan Li. Prior to joining Benchmark and Popshop, Jason was a VP at Uber, where he founded and lead Uber Eats, scaling the business from zero to $19bn in run rate GMV in less than five years. Before Uber, Jason was the President of Axon, which he joined to help launch the camera and cloud software division. Prior to joining Axon (market cap: $60bn), he served as President of Gizmo5 (acq. by Google), founded The Back 9 Golf Co, and was the Founder of Scour (backed by Michael Ovitz and Ron Burkle; famous as the startup that Travis Kalanick dropped out of school to work on).
Today’s letter is the transcript of a Jason’s 2020 UCLA commencement speech, where he shares why knowing what you want out of life is the most important thing you can know and why there is no such thing as a redo. He starts by sharing his early ambitions to be a writer before he fell into entrepreneurship when he discovered the potential scale of technology, dives into lessons from his first business, Scour, which got him sued for $250bn while still a college student, and shares the set of characteristics needed to know what you want out of life. He then shares the importance of being mindful about your time, decisions, and who you associate with, as well as the importance of taking your bet and just going with it. He ends by sharing a few phrases he tells himself when is about to take a risk (or advising others on taking risks).
I hope you enjoy this speech as much as I did!
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
Related Resources
Axon
Uber
Benchmark
Investors
Letters
Compilations
Bill Gurley Compilation (652 pages)
Mitch Lasky Compilation (474 pages)
Sarah Tavel Compilation (300 pages)
EIRs
Transcript
Hello, UCLA Bruins. I'm so excited to be here with you today, on the day of your graduation. I'm also excited to be your commencement speaker. So thank you to Dean Murthy and UCLA for inviting me to be your commencement speaker today.
It's so exciting that all of you are graduating. What an accomplishment to get an engineering degree from one of the greatest schools on Earth. So I'm here today to talk to you about a few things. One is, knowing what you want out of life is probably the most important thing that you can know. So I'll talk a little bit about that, and talk about how that connects to my experiences at UCLA. As a former Bruin, I went to UCLA in 1996, which is 24 years ago now. Seems like just yesterday. It was an amazing experience for me, which is why I'm excited to be with you here, and honored to be able to do this.
The second thing that I want to talk to you about is this idea of no redos. And there's a bunch of sub concepts that I think are important. And I've learned most of what I've learned in my life through entrepreneurship. And I didn't always plan on being an entrepreneur, it just sort of happened.
I initially wanted to be a writer. And so how did I end up at an engineering school if I wanted to be a writer? Well, I went to UCLA and not another school, because I actually thought that the intersection of technology and media was interesting. I learned about this later in high school, and I saw UCLA as a really interesting place to do that.
And my first plan was to actually go into film school, mostly because I wanted to do something creative, something interesting, something different than where I grew up, which was the Bay Area. And along the course of that journey, I discovered something amazing about technology, and amazing about entrepreneurship, which is it could provide that same level of creativity, experimentation, teamwork, that I was seeking in maybe the creative arts. But at a different scale. And that's the thing that's great about engineering, is you get to build and you get to do things and build things that scale. Think about that as you're going out into your careers and your jobs. The problems you get to solve with the knowledge that you have is unprecedented.
The scale of problems we have in the world, the scale of challenges there are in technology, the scale of opportunities in the Internet and technology, I thought were big back in the nineties. They're 10x, 20x, 100x bigger now. So an amazing time.
But in order to capture it, and in order to capture the opportunities, you have to know what you want out of life.
And so my journey from wanting to be a writer and going to film to being an entrepreneur in technology might seem different, but the characteristics of what they provided me were what I wanted out of life, which is I wanted the ability to create. I wanted the ability to explore, and the ability to discover.
In fact, we started a business at UCLA--me and five other computer science students. It was called Scour. We started in the UCLA dorms--it was an amazing time to be starting a company, back in 1997. It was the first audio, video, image search engine on the Internet, and we were able to start it because UCLA had invested so much in the infrastructure for the network. And UCLA being the first node on the Internet, it's appropriate that this would be a school that had invested in all of this.
So we built this, it got very, very popular, and we scaled it, and you could find anything. We imagined a world where you could find any movie or music or photograph that you could license--except the market wasn't ready for that--yet. So we had satisfied our need to discover and explore, but we were sort of faced with the realities of business along the way. Now, it got very, very popular. It was a very successful service at the time, but ultimately, we were sued for all of the things that happened with file exchanges back in the nineties and early two thousands. We were sued for $250bn.
Now, imagine that. You're 20, 21 years old, you've built something that's very popular, you've innovated, you feel creative, you're very excited about it--and then you realize that there's an entire industry against you. And that led to the ultimate business failure of Scour. However, it led to a huge amount of success in our ability to learn about business, and our ability to learn about ourselves, and how each of us handled risk. Each of us made decisions under pressure.
And those are challenges, those are things that you can learn once, and then every time you relearn it, you get better and better. So I would encourage you, as you look at what you want to do and where you want to go, don't underestimate the power of knowing what you want out of life. And it doesn't have to be a thing, but it should be a set of characteristics.
You want to be creative, or you want predictability, or you want risk, or you don't want risk. For me, it was incredibly positive to understand what risk really meant, what business meant, what organizing people really meant. And it was because I knew I wanted to explore and discover, which led me to take the risks that I took to learn. And it actually led me on a career of entrepreneurship in the technology space that I'm very, very proud of. It's been quite successful--not always successful. Plenty of failures in there. Getting sued for a quarter trillion dollars is not a success by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a huge learning experience at a very young age. So that's one thing.
The second is this idea of no redos. If you're like me, in school, you had some redos. And you had this concept that if you didn't get a good grade, you didn't do something right, you could go and redo it. And that's true in the real world, too. Except there is this other concept, which is time. You only have so much time. So make use of every bet you make. Everything you do, be mindful of the people that you associate with--they will inform your future. Take your bet, and go with it. And just know that looking back isn't gonna do you any good. All you can do is learn from the past. Starting five different businesses over the last 20 years, it's how I got to where I am.
I helped build the Uber Eats business, I led the Uber Eats business at Uber. It's in 50 countries, 500+ cities around the world, it became very, very successful. And a lot of it was because of the lessons that I learned very, very early in life.
Because you can't cram for your career, and you can't cram for your life. And as the ultimate crammer for finals, and the ultimate crammer for tests, I can tell you that you can't do nothing for ten years, then cram for ten years, and catch up to the very best people in the world. Because they've been working for those decades to get better and better and better.
Finally, I want to leave you with a couple sayings or phrases that I sort of tell myself whenever I take risks or whenever I advise people taking risks. One thing about taking risk is that it's, well, it's risk. Not everyone agrees that it's going to be a good idea. And you shouldn't ignore them, but you should take into account that everyone is figuring this out, including you, including me.
Synthesizing the best of what people have to say and offer with your own viewpoint is very important, because it'll allow you to have conviction and minimize regrets. And so I say, People say things. If you worked with me in the past, you would hear me say, People say things. And so just keep in mind that there's a lot of people who want to inform, and want to act like they're the expert, but no one really knows the future, especially in engineering, where you can just build it.
The second piece of advice that I have for you is that the end is never the end. And I don't mean that to be doom and gloom--even though I know we're in a very hard time, and I don't mean it in that context. What I mean is, when you are doing hard things, you will be faced many, many times with moments where your brain is telling your body that you're done, or some form of that. And you're not. And all of the successful people I know, all of the people who founded Scour at UCLA who went on to start other businesses, they all experienced the same thing, which was moments where they just weren't sure if it was going to happen. And the ones who succeeded are the ones that pushed through.
So with that, I'll conclude with a congratulations. Hopefully, some of the stories that I told will be useful to you in your career. Hopefully, I get to meet some of you going forward. And again, thank you to UCLA and Dean Murthy for the opportunity to talk to you, however remote. Stay safe, stay healthy, and Go Bruins!
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Wrap-up
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