Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Jeff Lawson, chief executive of Twilio, a cloud communications company in San Francisco. “Conflict shouldn’t be taboo,” he says. “In fact, resolving conflict is one of the key things companies do.”
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
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When you were a kid, were you in leadership roles or doing entrepreneurial things?
I started my first company when I was 12, doing video production. I’d videotape weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, sweet 16s. By the time I graduated from high school, I was doing full weddings and making a few thousand dollars a weekend.
What about early leadership lessons?
My grandfather was a big influence. He started a paint company in the 1930s, and sold it in the 1970s. He built this company for 40 years, and you’d think he would have retired, but he did not. He became a manufacturer’s rep for all the paint accessories. He would go all around Detroit and sell to hardware stores. He did that job until literally the day he died. He was 98.
He was still working at 98?
Other people would drive him around. The owner of every hardware store in Detroit came to the funeral. That was amazing.
What about your college years?
I studied film and computer science. This was when registering your domain name required you to fax documents to people. My friends and I just wanted to play with this technology, and we started a project to do that. We noticed there were companies that hired students to take notes and then sold copies of them to other students.
This was a cottage industry, and it seemed ideal for the Internet. In 1996, we started a company, Notes for Free. We hired college students to transcribe their notes into a Web-based system. We’d give them away and sell advertising on the site. We then raised money, and I dropped out of college during my senior year to work on this full time. We were close to 50 employees in Ann Arbor, and at that point we moved the whole company out west in late 1999. About six months later, we were selling the company to a competitor that had filed to go public. It was an equity deal, and then the dot-com crash wiped us both out.
You were a C.E.O. early in your life. Any early lessons from running the start-up?
We were all roughly the same age and we were just sprinting together. One thing I noticed was that when there was discord and we couldn’t agree on things, we tended not to address those issues head-on. When there was disagreement, we’d all kind of put it aside and say, “Let’s get back to work and go.” That didn’t serve us well.
So in our current company, when people see conflict, they address it, talk about it, bring it out in the open. Conflict shouldn’t be taboo. In fact, resolving conflict is one of the key things companies do, since you have lots of people with lots of ideas about how the company should proceed.
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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.comthat he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here.
His more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.