Taking On the Role of CEO from a Founder with David Rosenblatt

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with David Rosenblatt. David is the COO of 1stDibs, which is a publicly traded company that is an online marketplace for art and antiques. I hope I got that reasonably true to your positioning.

David Rosenblatt: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Dave is the former CEO of DoubleClick, had been there for a long time, sold the business to Google, and is someone that I've known and been friends with for a very long time at this point. David, welcome to the Daily Bolster.

David Rosenblatt: Thank you, Matt. And minor correction. We're a marketplace for luxury design. So including art and antiques, but also jewelry, some fashion and contemporary design as well.

Matt Blumberg: Okay, thank you. Correction noted. All right, so David, one of the interesting things about the arc of your career is that you didn't found 1stDibs, you joined it after the company had already been around for eight to 10 years, and was still a private venture- backed company, took it over, scaled it, it's now public. So my question for you, which I think is interesting for a lot of people in our audiences is, " What do you do when you take over a company from a founder that's been going for 10 years?" And, " How do you think about making the shifts you need to make in culture or strategy or whatever to get it to the next level?"

David Rosenblatt: I've always thought of this role in a sense, and this will hopefully resonate with those of us who are old enough to remember this ad, of the old Memorex tagline which is, " We don't make the music, but we make it sound better." I think in the broadest sense, it's important to enter a situation like that with that reference point, that assumption. I'd say it probably falls into three categories. So one is, it's incredibly important, I think, for the professional leader coming in to agree with the founder and investors to the extent that it's a private company, in advance of joining that the strategy and the culture will shift. Because that's not always the case, and it's often not assumed to be the case by the founder.

Matt Blumberg: For sure. Yeah.

David Rosenblatt: And listen, I think that also extends to an agreement, potentially codified with the board so that if there's a disagreement, it's clear how that disagreement is resolved.

Matt Blumberg: Right, because I can imagine... I don't know if you ran into this, or want to talk about it, but I can imagine a lot of founders agree to it because they think they need to agree to it or they do agree to it in the moment, but once they see it happening, they have a harder time with it.

David Rosenblatt: That is exactly the case in many instances. And like any arrangement or relationship, it can be important to think about how to mediate differences in advance, rather than only focus on the best possible outcome.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

David Rosenblatt: So that that's an incredibly important first step. You know, I think the second step or the second dimension in terms of culture specifically is again, I think to recognize that it is a personal subjective process. So the culture of a company, I think, ultimately has to be an extension of or somehow related to the character and the moral authority and the perspective of the CEO, of the leader. Now that said, I think the other half of that coin is for the CEO to think about and identify, " What are the most compelling parts of the culture that the founder brought?" Right? Because undoubtedly those parts led to both the success of the company and also the challenges. And in a perfect world, the new leader would synthesize those things... the good parts, right... that originated from the founder with his or her own imprint stemming from a truly authentic understanding of his or her own character and personality.

Matt Blumberg: I mean, that is literally, " We don't make the music, we just make it better."

David Rosenblatt: Yeah, and I think in most cases that applies. Now the third point is probably the one where it may not apply actually, and that's strategy. Right? And I think in contrast to the formation of culture, which is a subjective personal process, the formation and the development of the new strategy, I think it's important that that be as objective a process as possible. Right? And I think there's just no way around a MBA like quantitatively left brain grounded process, to understand the market opportunity, the company's own strengths and weaknesses relative to that, the financial, the capital requirements, the return assumptions embedded in those investments, and so on. And I think also in contrast to the formation of the culture, it's really important that it be a team- based process. Right? The senior team potentially, depending on the kind of company it is, the product team needs to both develop and then be bought into the strategy itself, and its commercialization so that there is as broad alignment as possible. And that whole schlemiel is very different than how founders often set the strategy of a company.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, that's right. And my guess is of the three things, strategy may be the one that changes the most when someone takes over from a founder.

David Rosenblatt: That's exactly right, yeah. Exactly. And certainly the fastest, right?

Matt Blumberg: Right.

David Rosenblatt: Culture can take a while to change, strategy can change overnight.

Matt Blumberg: That's right. All right. David Rosenblad from 1stDibs. Thank you for being here.

David Rosenblatt: Thanks Matt. Appreciate it.