Even now, I get sent the charts every day, the radio chart positions in America, the box office charts for films and Broadway plays. Most artists donât do that; theyâre not interested. When Iâm talking to them, I know more about how their singleâs doing than they do, which is crazy. The official excuse is that I need to know whatâs going on because, these days, I own a company that makes films and manages artists. The truth is that Iâd be doing it if I was working in a bank. Iâm just an anorak.
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Google Ventures, now known as GV, was an investor. They knew our financials and had always been extremely supportive, so I wasnât worried about the number. I was worried about which teams weâd work with, what technology weâd share, what products weâd build. Nest wasnât joining Google for the moneyâwe were joining to accelerate our mission. So it was always mission first, money second.
Together with Google, we went through every single functionâmarketing, PR, HR, sales, every part of the company. We established where we could create synergies and where we couldnât, figured out which managers would be assigned to us, how we would do the hiring, which perks people would get, which salaries they could expect, which teams would be working together closely, and how those relationships would be established.
It took a lot of time. In fact I was starting to get a lot of eye rolls. âReally, Tony? You want to get into the details of this now?â Yes, yes, I do. Itâs important.
And it wasâcritically important and usually overlooked.
Most acquisitions are driven and overseen by bankers, and bankers only make the real money if the deal goes through, so theyâre motivated to move fast and get paid. They donât care about getting every detail of what happens to employees right. They donât really care about cultural fit. Not deeply.
I appealed to an alternative crowd. We all know that sex sells â but I wasnât that kind of artist. I signed my first record deal when I was twenty-six. I was a grown woman, I had my politics down, I had my attitude and my band. I wasnât manipulable. I didnât get much negativity about being bisexual â by the mid-1990s people were cooler about gay sexuality â but at the same time it meant that I couldnât be marketed as the straight sexy rock chick.
âI knew I wanted to sign with him. Here was a man who never once mentioned money. To me, that was a real businessman. It wasnât that I didnât need money, because I did. But to this day, money doesnât drive me. Money isnât what pushes me to do this or that. Itâs always been about something deeper. For me, it was about dignity, about pride, about the respect I freely gave to others and expected back in return. I may have been a young girl from a rural area, but my parents taught me to value myself, to never think of myself as less than anyone else, regardless of my background or circumstances.
These are all executives who have been trained for years to grow their own businesses and are compensated based on their profitability. Suddenly I was saying to them, essentially, âI want you to pay less attention to the business at which youâve been very successful, and start paying more attention to this other thing. And by the way, you have to work on this new thing along with these other very competitive people from other teams, whose interests donât necessarily line up with yours. And one more thing, it wonât make money for a while.
Iâm always interested in what others, and not just the esteemed critic from The New York Times, think about what weâre doing. If your business involves making people happy, then you canât be good at it if you donât care what people think. The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance wonât be far behind.