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Ep 90: From Engineer to Top Lawyer at Adobe and Microsoft with Dana Rao
55 Plays2 days ago
How do you make the transition from IP lawyer to general counsel in a typical path? Help Adobe navigate a transition to the cloud, and then the AI era? And make time for your family through all the ups and downs?
Join Dana Rao, former general counsel at Adobe and IP and Licensing expert at Microsoft, as he discusses how he capitalized on his electrical engineering background to skyrocket himself from a patent attorney to the forefront of some of the most consequential technology decisions of the last two decades—including topics like copyright, AI, litigation, and more.
Listen as Dana explains how he became invaluable to Janet Reno’s justice department, how to make ethical business decisions, influencing legislation to combat patent trolls, and more more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-91
Topics
Introduction: 0:00
Relaxing and writing after retirement: 2:23
Transitioning from electrical engineer to DC lawyer: 10:51
Doing the right thing for your company and the world: 21:48
Leaving politics to become tech counsel: 27:21
Combating patent trolls: 36:03
From Microsoft to Adobe general counsel: 41:42
Rapid-fire questions: 51:48
Connect with us:
Dana Rao - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-rao/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues.
Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Transition to Adobe and AI Era
00:00:00
Speaker
So have to ask the question, you know what what is the right thing to do you know for the world, and then for Adobe, and then for our customers? And if you can get an answer that hits all three, then that's the best case scenario.
00:00:15
Speaker
And in this case, we felt like after sitting with down with the engineering team, we could make a model that was what we refer to as commercially safe. And so what we did was we had this portfolio of stock images called Adobe Stock and question to the engineering team was, can you build a competitive model just on that?
00:00:33
Speaker
Interesting. Without scraping. Because if you can, then we're going to be able to go to the artists and the creative community and say, look, this model is here to help you and it's not trained off of you.
00:00:47
Speaker
How do you make the transition from i p lawyer to general counsel in a typical path? Help Adobe navigate a transition to the cloud and then the AI era.
00:01:01
Speaker
And make time for your family through all the ups and downs. Today, we are joined on the abstract by Dana Rao, who recently retired after almost 13 years at Adobe, including about six or seven as general counsel.
00:01:17
Speaker
Before becoming their GC, Dana led Adobe's intellectual property and litigation teams. Earlier in his career, he led IP for the entertainment and devices like Xbox, cool things like that division, as well as company-wide patent acquisition for Microsoft.
00:01:35
Speaker
He started his corporate career at Fenwick & West, and he almost had like a couple of careers even before that, before law school. It was a journey. We're going to talk about it. ah Dana spent time in Washington, D.C. at the Department of Justice working on Native American affairs.
00:01:52
Speaker
Under Attorney General janet Reno after working on the Clinton campaign. And he actually worked as an engineer earlier in his career as well. He did his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering. So there's a through line from, I guess, the beginning to IP. In retrospect.
00:02:11
Speaker
don't let me Don't let me draw conclusions there. When you're living it forward, there was not a through line. But backward, it's all clear how it worked out. Dana, thanks so much
Retirement and Writing Pursuits
00:02:20
Speaker
for joining me today for for this episode. and Okay, you retired recently. ah That's exciting. What have you been up to?
00:02:28
Speaker
I've been up to a lot and nothing at all. I would say ah the first two months I um slept, you know, trying to recuperate all that um energy. it was funny. I had a ah checkup a couple weeks ago and with a doctor who and and I hadn't seen a doctor or dentist in years.
00:02:47
Speaker
And and he was like he was just doing a right regular sleep apnea check. I don't have it. But he was just asking about it. And it turns out everyone has sleep apnea now. This is what he was telling me. he's like yeah My father recently got diagnosed with sleep apnea. So maybe. anywhere We went away with a ah couple of couples to New York two weeks ago. And everybody else, it's so it's a whole thing. I didn't i never heard of it. and ah And he's asked me, he's like, well, do you you take naps?
00:03:14
Speaker
And I'm like, for the last two months, I've been taking naps. lot of naps. I don't think it's sleep apnea. But for prior to that, I've never taken a nap. so So it's quite funny. So the rest was really important. I didn't really realize you know how much 30-year career and pretty um break that pace throughout the whole thing, much that took out of you. So that was, that's been great. It's also been really fun to connect with family and friends and college and high school friends that I just haven't seen haven't had the time to devote to.
00:03:46
Speaker
And that's that's been amazing. um It's been awesome to connect with my adult daughters who are both entering the workforce as of last May with actual jobs. And i um I get to enjoy watching their corporate political struggles and occasionally offering advice, but mostly offering jokes.
00:04:04
Speaker
And so that's been amazing. and And then I've been writing. So before I went to law school... If someone ever asked me the question, know, what would you do if you weren't a lawyer? It was always, I wanted to write because I loved writing. I just used to write creative ah wow fiction. i wrote ah I wrote a novel, which I didn't end up publishing because I was, I wrote the novel, sent it out to a bunch of people, got a bunch of feedback but and chose not to implement it because I was about to start my career at Fenwick and West. And i like, I don't have time for this. And my novel is perfect anyway. So why would I do feedback? So that didn't get published. I wrote a screenplay. So I had had stuff, died stories I wanted to tell. And and so when I retired, I told my wife, I'm like, look, it's probably the time for me to, and before i think about if I want to do anything next, um to really make sure yeah that I can actually live out this dream. So I'm 178 pages into it.
00:04:54
Speaker
Amazing. Another novel? It's a science fiction novel. Cool. Cool. Yeah. I'm leveraging all of my law, technology, and policy experiences into this into this book. And it's been fun. It's been challenging. It takes like three hours a day. I just dedicate to writing. and And then I spend the rest of day doing coffees and stuff like this. Cocktail hours and podcasts and things like this.
00:05:18
Speaker
you like to write in the morning? Are you like, I wake up early? What's that routine? I've always been most creative in the morning. So even at work, when I would write speeches or presentations, it's always 7.30 to 8.30 in the morning. It would be the block of time where I kind of wake up, feel fresh, and just write. So even now, wake around 6.30 or and start at 7.30 and just write until...
00:05:42
Speaker
10.30 and then either go exercise or cook or like I said, go see people and kind of refresh. I was in Florida, mentioned, and we went to the Hemingway house where Hemingway wrote like 75% of his in Key West.
00:05:57
Speaker
you know like seventy five percent of his books in key s And so he had a little writer's nook, he had house and adjacent to it was a little writer's nook. And so they told us his schedule was, he got up at six in the morning, wrote till 12, swam in the ocean till two, ate lunch or dinner or whatever.
00:06:11
Speaker
And then went to the bar and got blind drunk every night. ah So I don't have that
Screenplay and Creative Challenges
00:06:16
Speaker
piece of work into my schedule. But I took notes that you know he did have that morning dedication to writing. And then he didn't work at all afterwards, sort of kind of recharged the battery. So that's that's been my model.
00:06:28
Speaker
The doctor you just saw is probably pleased that you're not indulging in every single night. He did ask me several times how much I'm drinking. So I think maybe he's worried. ah Okay, what's the screenplay? What was the screenplay about? that's actually I'm curious about that too. And then we'll get into the short career. I remember this was probably 1991. Okay. Yeah, maybe retrospect. Yeah.
00:06:50
Speaker
um and so it was it was just funny in retrospect um It was funny, a story about ah a boy and a girl and the boy gets, um they break up, an acrimonious breakup, his fault. huh And she works for the Social Security Administration. And at that time, it was set into the future, um near future. And um at the time, there's database. You have a social security number that ties into all your bank accounts and all your digital transactions and everything. She deletes them. So the screenplay was called Deleted.
00:07:21
Speaker
And so she deletes him. And so then the rest of it is just sort of like, he has to suddenly adjust to this fact where he has no actual identity in the world because his whole identity was, a it's a digital identity. That's the way you go about doing your life. And so he has to go on that journey and all the problems and then eventually overcome his emotional problems too. Yeah.
00:07:38
Speaker
Wow. Get back together. Life may be imitating or may be close to imitating or unpublished art. It was. I mean, again back then I was in LA at the time. And so like everybody was shopping. it So I did. I did yeah knew some people. i took the script to people. And so I did try. But then I left to go to DC. And one of the things you learn about screenwriting or any kind of writing is, you know, obviously you have to able write, but even more important is you have to be able to market and shop.
00:08:04
Speaker
Right. And so writing the screenplay was great, but you really just needed to be in LA and hand it over to people and follow up and be knock on doors. And I left LA to go work in DC. And again, that was the end of that because unless you were there, trying to shop it.
00:08:19
Speaker
But I look back on that and I'm like, i'm it i don't know how the writing is. i have I still have a copy of the script.
Career Path and Political Involvement
00:08:24
Speaker
um But I like the idea. In 1991, that was it wasn't bad.
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah. Premise. That's great. ah So the new book, are are you thinking that you want to see it all the way through and get it published? and or is it more of a personal project for you? I think For me, the way you you write, and again, this is the same thing for people who are doing anything in corporate or personal. like I think it's the same.
00:08:48
Speaker
um is You write for yourself. like It has to be something that you want. You mentioned right before we got on that you wrote ah you read a post I wrote about John Warnock. Like whenever I write anything, it's always like, this is about me yes first.
00:09:01
Speaker
And then after it's done, we will look at it and decide, does anyone else want to read this? Right. Yeah. But first it has to be, so that's where I'm at. I'm writing a book that I want to read. Yes. And when we're done, I'll show it to my wife and select other people. And if people are like, this is the stupidest thing i've ever read and it's boring and I don't like it, you know, then maybe it'll be a personal project. Yeah. Yeah.
00:09:23
Speaker
ah You don't need me to agree, but I totally agree all the time, right ah ah ah my my rule with these podcast episodes or with the webinars that we host or like the marketing content that we put out, I don't want to contribute to it if it's not something that I would actually want to read and consume and think is really interesting and engaging, right? Like that should be, that should be the bar. SEO should not be that. should not be the bar. And it shows up. You can see there's a lot of generic content yes out there. and that's typically as people are trying to triangulate. Yes. Yes. You know, again, I worked for the Bill Clintons you mentioned, and and he invented sort of triangulation as politics. That's probably been good and bad. right You definitely see it even in politics with politicians, like the ones that are speaking about something they care about really resonate. Even if you don't agree with their position, you still tend to like them because you're like, they believe in it yeah and i understand it.
00:10:19
Speaker
And when the politician is merely saying something that you think they think is what I want, then you immediately become a little skeptical and about the cynicism involved in that, and you don't love them. So I think it's true in everything that the more authentic you are, yeah right the better chance you're going to have to connect with people.
00:10:39
Speaker
Authenticity is only going to become more important in the future. and And we'll talk a little bit about that and the work that you've done. why we started the content authenticity.
00:10:51
Speaker
Okay, well, before we get there, okay, so you started your career as an engineer and then you spent some time in DC. Maybe take us through that time a little bit and how that ultimately led you to to law school. Yeah.
00:11:04
Speaker
DC to law school is obvious, but electrical engineering to law school, maybe be a little bit less so. Yeah. And I'm glad it's all it's obvious. yeah So i yeah my dad was the chairman of electrical engineering at Villanova University. Oh, interesting. So he told my brother and i that we were going to be electrical engineers. So there was that. Had that going for us. And always tested um a little better in English than math, but you know okay in both. But So if you to you had to ask me what was easier, English was easier than than math. But I liked math. I was intellectually curious. liked science.
00:11:38
Speaker
So it was fine. I'm like, he wanted me to do it. He's like, i want you to have a job after you graduate. Fine. He also, Villanova was free. So he was like, you're going to Villanova. I get it. i mean, I was 17, so I wasn't that excited. But I, you know, because it's so close to home. I don't want to be anywhere near home. But nonetheless...
00:11:54
Speaker
Running to data around campus. I did have, a i will I'll digress, I did have ah um my second year, I was taking integrated circuits, and and I'm old, so the audience may not remember this, but back then, you would have overhead projectors, so had these transparencies, and you shine the light, right? yeah So 8 o'clock in the morning, you're taking a integrated circuits, they put the transparency down, and he shows the notes, he hands out a packet of the notes of the day's material to you as you walk in, ye he turns out the lights, he puts you know So this is a recipe for disaster for 18-year-old boys or 19-year-old boys. So I fell asleep a lot in class.
00:12:29
Speaker
And I'm like, why? I have the notes. It's dark. I'm tired. um So he complained my dad about it. And he's like, your son's always falling asleep. My dad told me. He's like, your son's always falling asleep in their class and you need to talk to him.
00:12:43
Speaker
And my dad looked at him and said, you need to make your class more interesting. LAUGHTER That's amazing. yeah so he yes But we did have an agreement that would never take his class. he talked That would be too weird. So it was great to have that. so i i I enjoyed learning about things. Again, my grades were were mediocre in the engineering classes and excellent in the English classes. um But I still liked it. And I got a job at GE Astrospace afterwards as a RF engineer, a satellite engineer, designing a ground terminal to talk to satellite a satellite, military satellite in the space.
00:13:21
Speaker
um Which is great. And it's fun. I love the engineering culture. I love the engineers. um It was hard. Again, the um math was hard. i remember one time i was in a four person cubicle just trying to do an algorithm and just been trying to encourage myself and saying, come on, Dana, you can do this. It's not rocket science. And then I'd be like, wait a minute. It is rocket science. It's literally rocket science.
00:13:43
Speaker
And so so I enjoyed the people and the culture and the work was fine. But um it was clear after a year, the way they talked to me was the path for promotion was really to be a project manager, program manager, moving to management. And then I was had the reflection, well, if I'm not and not doing the engineering anyway, then what am I doing here? right What does it make sense? So then i was also tired of living in the Philadelphia philadelphia area. so i quit my job.
00:14:09
Speaker
moved to LA with our college roommate. um The intention was to get my master's, get residency. Obviously, it's because tuition is much cheaper and then get my master's. But I volunteered to the Clinton Gore campaign um just because I wanted to do something. I have no experience of politics.
00:14:24
Speaker
I just kind of showed up every day, did stuff, yeah whatever they wanted me to do. And I became friends with a person who is the director of women's issues state of California. cool And she asked me to be her deputy director. So i became her deputy director and and learned and spoke a lot about women's issues state of California, which is a super fun and interesting career change. yeah and And really enjoyed it. I didn't obviously won I worked on the presidential inaugural campaign ah event in DC. So I went to DC just for two months.
00:14:56
Speaker
Came back, worked on the LA mayor's race. So I was fully committed to the political life at that point where mayor's race, lost the mayor's race. I saw what it was like to lose one of those. then kind of had this fork in the road of, do I want to stay in campaigning? Do I want to just work in politics? What are we to do? Sure.
00:15:11
Speaker
but The person who ran California for Clinton moved into the White House and he sent me a letter saying, hey, come to D.C., I'll get you a job. So I moved to D.C. He did not get me a job.
00:15:22
Speaker
And this is probably my career low. I always emphasize this a little bit because it's because everyone goes through these downs. Yeah. It was a career low. Like it was six months of being in, sleeping on people's couches. i didn't have any money yet i think at this point.
00:15:35
Speaker
um Sleeping on people's couches, eating McDonald's, having no future, not understanding what was going to happen. was very stressful. And i eventually a woman who worked in the Clinton campaign with me in LA got a job at justice and she was a deputy director. And so she, you know, took pity on me and, know,
00:15:54
Speaker
hired me as her uh assistant uh special assistant to the um council to the attorney general so she worked for the council to the attorney general that was a man named gerald torres one of the more most famous legal scholars in america even today i think you're he's teaching at y'all right now and then Attorney General Reno asked him to work on environmental justice issues and Native American issues.
00:16:15
Speaker
My boss took, my direct boss, took the environmental justice issues. And so I had that Native American portfolio, of which, again, I knew absolutely nothing. yeah um And so my actual task was to plan a conference to bring the Attorney General into contact with the 535 federally recognized tribes, the chiefs.
00:16:36
Speaker
And so I planned this conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. was... I think it's the first time the Attorney General of the United States actually met the tribe, well chief even though the Department of Justice has civil and criminal jurisdiction over the tribe. So we have so much power over the tribes, but it's always been an adversarial relationship. and Attorney General Reno grew up in Florida and was close to the Seminole tribe. And so she came in with this idea of kind of repairing relationships between States the United States. Mm-hmm. And the tribes, we had this listening conference. It was what it was called, and it was amazing, and all the tribes got up and spoke, and spoke their piece.
00:17:09
Speaker
And afterwards, they had sent a ah lot of requests um to us, and they all piled up in boxes. Mm-hmm. I no longer had a mission, because my mission was planning that conference. And so I started reading all the correspondence. This is something I say to young people everywhere.
00:17:24
Speaker
I didn't really have a ah clear job at that point. i mean, i was hired. Yeah. I i was getting a salary, but it wasn't clear. Mm-hmm. And I just took it upon myself to be like, okay, no one's looking at this stuff. I'm going to look at it. And so, oddly, after reading all that stuff, I became the person at the Department of Justice who knew the most about what the tribes wanted. Yeah.
00:17:43
Speaker
Because that wasn't really their role. Everyone else it was an adversarial relationship. And so, I was reading it. So, then Attorney General Reno would want the tribes' perspectives on issues. Right. I was the person that ended up talking to her about it.
Adobe's Ethical AI Approach
00:17:56
Speaker
so You're the guy. i ended up having this really cool relationship with me and my big cons, Gerald, the council, and Janet Reno meeting often to talk about like issues from the state's perspectives and the tribe's perspectives.
00:18:10
Speaker
And that never would have been possible had I not just said, hey, I'm just going to read all this stuff and become an expert and do this on my own and take that initiative. Once you become the expert, doors open. Yes. People all of a sudden want that expertise. Yes.
00:18:22
Speaker
They want to know the person who actually knows what's going on. And it was great. And and she was, um Reno was probably my first, maybe my only um hero in that sense. Because she was just, um it's if you ever had a chance to meet her, she was superimposing. She was like 6'4 and thick glasses and probably the smartest person ever met.
00:18:45
Speaker
She was one of those people where you could spend like a week understanding an issue and you walk in and she asks you like two questions and they'd be things you'd never thought of and it's just such a shock to me I'm like wait and how could I have not thought this is so sharp um and funny and funny she wasn't she didn't laugh a lot but I would always make jokes like no one else would even try to make jokes with her and I would always make we were standing the elevator at Tractor Oaks and she'd kind of stare at me But I got this beautiful letter, which I still kept in every office um I've ever been in, which hung from her.
00:19:14
Speaker
And the last line is her appreciating my sense of humor. So I know in retrospect that she was laughing on the inside. But the one thing she said to me, which sort of put changed my life, was we got this issue with, I think it was the state of Arizona um and one of the tribes in Arizona, Navajo maybe,
00:19:33
Speaker
about water rights. And so she's like, what do you what do you want to what do you think we should do? asked me. And I'm thinking about politically, and I'm thinking, well, for President Clinton's campaign, you know, in Arizona, and here's how I think I would come out on it. That's what I told her. And she just looked at me with those you know glasses and just said, you know, Dana, what is the right thing to do? Mm-hmm.
00:19:54
Speaker
And no one had ever asked me that question before. Right. In anywhere in my career. like guess the first time, like ah like, it was like an analytical framework that just got shifted in my head. and there was another way to look at these things that's sort of this greater good and good for the world and good for the country. Like, that was a factor to be considered. And and Reno was the only person who thought about that. She wasn't asking about re-election. Mm-hmm.
00:20:16
Speaker
you know, probably to her detriment, to the extent she cared about her own career. sure But that's not how she was wired, right? And so I answered, you know, i in that moment, I reflected on the the question. I thought, well, really, in the right of it, I think the tribes are right. And she's like, all right, well that's what we're going to to do.
00:20:34
Speaker
and And I learned a lot from that moment. And so the rest of my career, I've always had that question, whether I work for a company, it even even a law firm, but even at a company, you could ask, you know what's the right thing to do for Microsoft?
00:20:45
Speaker
Not like what that right thing to do is for the issue that I'm trying to struggle with with 15 other lawyers or five business people who all have their own agendas their career goals. yeah I'd always elevate the question to like, what is the right thing to do for Microsoft? And I felt like if I was doing that or Adobe,
00:20:58
Speaker
then um then at the end of the day, i was going to be supportive, right? If it got escalated. And then when I had a more of a position of power at Adobe, like could actually ask the other question of what is the right thing to do for the world, right? In addition to what is the right thing for the company, we can take multiple paths and is there a way to account for like the greater good in the way we're doing while still being true to our shareholders, right?
00:21:24
Speaker
And so it really did change, i would say, my entire career for the better. And it gave me a lot of freedom, i think, to do the right thing, which is not only, i would say, um empowering, but it certainly has made my, you know, work and life more, you know, interesting and exciting and rewarding because I've had the ability to make that choice. Yeah.
00:21:48
Speaker
Can you think of a time that you can talk about? ah I always offer that caveat um where you put the bigger version of that question. What is the right thing to do to someone in your organization?
00:22:07
Speaker
And got an answer that changed the direction that the company was going to take. um or led you and maybe other executives to conclude that we could do something that might be a little bit more right for the world in this case than what we were going to do before.
00:22:28
Speaker
I mean, there's a, so as general counsel, you, you get questions like that, you know, pretty often. Sure. So, so that, you know, i would say that that's not unique. I think that the, the good question, a good way to answer this question or good example of this, um, is in ai So when we were building, when Adobe was building our, um,
00:22:50
Speaker
our generative AI model, Adobe Firefly, which creates text-to-image, text-to-video. We were thinking about how to train it on data. And so you know the answer for what everyone else was doing was scrape the web.
00:23:04
Speaker
yep right and And if you're going to create ah creative model, you're scraping the web of you know, videos and art and images that that artists made.
00:23:15
Speaker
Right. And then the tool you're making um is going to be used by artists, but could also be used to displace artists. Right. And so you have to, we asked the question and we asked the question and I've always been a ah business person, obviously, addition to being a lawyer and whatever.
00:23:35
Speaker
um you had to ask the question, you know, what what is the right thing to do, you know, for the world and then for Adobe and then for our customers?
00:23:46
Speaker
And if you can get an answer that hits all three, then that's the best case scenario. And in this case, we felt like after sitting with down with the engineering team, we could make a model that was what we refer to as commercially safe.
00:24:00
Speaker
And so what we did was we had this portfolio of stock images called Adobe Stock. And and the question to the engineering team was, can you build a competitive model just on that? Interesting. Without scraping.
00:24:11
Speaker
Because if you can, then we're going to be able to go to the artists and the creative community and say, look, this model is here to help you. And it's not trained off of you. And that that makes a lot of sense for Adobe because creators are our customers. yeah And enterprise customers are our customers. And the other piece with my IP hat on was, you know i could see...
00:24:29
Speaker
you know years of litigation coming right over these copyright questions. And I think that the United States, probably fair use may be the right answer, technically, if you truly understand how AI models work.
00:24:41
Speaker
I think fair use may be the right answer. but It's years, going to be years of litigation before it gets to the Supreme Court. certainly going to go go to the Supreme Court given the billions of dollars at stake. So that's a lot of anxiety for enterprise customers who are thinking about deploying this technology in their sure in their systems and saying, oh my gosh, you could get ripped out if I you know get a preliminary injunction or whatever it is, right?
00:25:03
Speaker
So this is good for you know the world because AI you know being trained maybe the right way without being copied off of people's work to despise them. It's good for Adobe because of our creative customers and it's good marketing for them. And then it helps us avoid liability, right? Avoid that uncertainty. So it helps us with the enterprise customers. So that was like the way I triangulated all three. And that's what we ended up doing. and and we were the first company to even attempt to do that And even today, there we're still, we just launched, um Adobe just launched this video model.
00:25:35
Speaker
it'll be fine And also same thing, trained off of licensed content. So in that commercially safe way. So i'm excited that we were able to find a way to do things, you know, the right way. But still be true to our shareholders and the best in class,
00:25:51
Speaker
technology Because okay if you don't deliver best-in-class technology, Adobe doesn't make any money, and then we go out of business, and that doesn't help anybody. yes So that's why I'm saying you're a business person, in addition to being kind of an ethicist.
00:26:05
Speaker
It's what I love about being in the private sector, because you have this competing concern. It's more complicated. It's more nuanced. Mm-hmm. i I've never loved academics, as you can tell by my spotty grades and in throughout school, because I feel like they always, they kind of sit in an ivory tower and they just yeah kind of make pronouncements and it's easy to say because, you know, they're getting federal funding, which may not be as attractive as it used to be. Yeah.
00:26:32
Speaker
unfortunate i think for the compromise now yeah but Now they're seeing some of the compromises, right? yeah But it's easy to say from there, but when you're in the business and to to to to make money and give people jobs and create careers and have impact and do the right thing, it's a much more interesting, complicated, sophisticated question you're trying to answer.
00:26:50
Speaker
Well, sure. And I think to that point, the most sophisticated execs and GCs who have to be business people are by necessity having to do this. But a really good CRO is also doing this.
00:27:04
Speaker
have to see the whole picture, right? Like a really good CRO isn't going to be thinking to themselves, how can i most likely, how can I juice revenue just for the next two years and then I'll leave the company in shambles by right like telling the GC you have to take on...
00:27:19
Speaker
You have to see the whole picture. um How did you get started on this journey? Because you spend time in D.C. There's a well-worn path of you're sort of a political appointee in D.C. You go to law school and you go back to D.C. You get another political appointment. I mean, I'm sure, well, I suppose administrations change and that sort of thing, right? But there were opportunities to... Again, it's, you know, you have to think about what my background. yeah When you say well-worn path, like my dad immigrated from India 64, you know, you grew up in a village that didn't have running water or electricity. And, yeah you know, so like...
00:27:52
Speaker
I didn't have any of these, like I didn't know any of this stuff. So I was at the Department of Justice and I'm just looking around and I'm saying, well, everyone here has got a law degree, you know, maybe I need to go get a law degree. And I was also ready, i was ready, emotionally ready to move on.
00:28:06
Speaker
So the most exciting thing about law school, so I decided to go to GW. was, you know, you had 400 people in the in the in the class, and then you have 100 in your section, right? You divide up into four. And there's 13 people in your research and writing section. Okay.
00:28:22
Speaker
And the first day of law school, I met my wife-to-be in that 13-person class, right? Now, we have... That's great. Yeah, we have different versions of the origin story here, but I remember, and i I'm half of this equation, so i my vote counts, i think.
00:28:37
Speaker
I remember seeing her three rows up in this little tiny group and being like, wow, she's Mexican-American from LA and looked beautiful and had a white headband. This is my image.
00:28:48
Speaker
and And I saw her and asked her out and the rest is history. We're 30 years in. um She was like, no, it didn't happen like that. It was like three weeks later. and so and Her version is not anywhere near as fun. and and You're the author, though. You're the storyteller. I'm literally here right now to have microphone. so i yeah So that was great.
00:29:08
Speaker
And so she wanted to do nonprofit work. She worked in a domestic violence clinic. She continues to do this work today. Today she works for the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara, getting wrongfully convicted people out of jail. That was where she wanted to go. i actually wanted to be a public defender. I like speaking. I like being on my feet. I wanted to help people.
00:29:27
Speaker
But I had already gone through this very, very poor, stressful period of time. and and what I'll say about money is, um because people talk about different ways, yeah it it you can romanticize being poor. Yeah. But it's very, very stressful.
00:29:44
Speaker
And you don't need a lot of money to get to a place where you're happy. And you don't need to spend your life making money for ma material things that actually doesn't make you happy. Mm-hmm. But you do need a certain amount of money to get rid of that stress.
00:29:59
Speaker
And that stress is no joke. like you me Like, I was getting red bills from electricity company, you know, all that stuff, right? Like, that is not fun. So I was walking away from that. And I'm like, I don't want to do that anymore.
00:30:09
Speaker
like So we are both not going into some kind of low-paying, non-profit yeah career. I'm like, I'm out. Like, I'm not interested. i i have a a funny story. When I was, during that year or whatever,
00:30:21
Speaker
I actually got shingles. Like, everyone talks about shingles now. oh wow. Yeah, it's crazy. And so, I didn't even know what they were. So, went to the emergency room. I didn't have health insurance. And the guys are looking at me. He's like, you shouldn't have shingles. You're, whatever, 23. Yeah. And he's like, you probably have cancer or AIDS.
00:30:37
Speaker
What? Yeah, that's what he told me. I don't i didn't have either. But, you know, the bedside men are these emergency room guys. Yeah. But but but ah what he ended up saying was like, you're just really stressed.
00:30:48
Speaker
Like, that's the only way you could have your immune system so low that this thing could compromise you during age. And that that's the reality of that. So that's why I was like, i don't to a part of it. And I had engineering degree. loved engineering.
00:31:02
Speaker
technology and GW where I went was great at patents. Like that was, they were known as a law school that was good at patents. And so that just shows that path. I'm like, I'm always going to be, how many engineers are there that went to law school?
00:31:14
Speaker
I'm always going to have a job. That was, yeah that was how, that was my math. And so she's obviously, I mentioned from she went to UCLA, but she's actually from Northern California. So she wanted
Career Moves to Microsoft and Adobe
00:31:24
Speaker
to move back. um And I wanted eventually to be in-house.
00:31:27
Speaker
And there are no companies on the East Coast, really, if you want to be in tech. And so I said, great, we're going to move to the Bay Area. And I'm going to take an IP job, law job, and and we'll see what happens.
00:31:41
Speaker
um And so I joined Femmecon West yeah at the time. And they're great corporate law firm, mostly corporate-focused law firm in palo Alto. And it was really great for me because I started off doing patents, I wrote patents, um but they really had an unusual appetite for flexibility. So for me, while loved writing patents, I wanted to do other things.
00:32:03
Speaker
And so I got the opportunity to work on litigation, work on licensing, general commercial licensing in my you five years there. And I really enjoyed all of it, right? I just enjoyed doing different things. I loved the whole aspect of the law. And I actually loved being in a law firm. I loved other lawyers and and the intellectual challenge of that.
00:32:21
Speaker
But five years into it, um we had our first daughter in 2000. And it was just clear that looking ahead, that, you know, this was not the world's greatest lifestyle if you wanted to spend time with your kids.
00:32:34
Speaker
And so my wife and I had that conversation. And I also wanted to work um at a company because when I was at GE, i knew what it was like to be kind of mission aligned.
00:32:46
Speaker
And I wanted that. Like as an outside lawyer, you are transactional by nature. You know, you have your law firm as your team, but really the work you're doing every day is fairly transactional, even though you can develop really, you know, great relationships with particular clients.
00:32:59
Speaker
And so I knew that was true. And I also realized that my favorite parts of my job at at the law firm was when I got to talk talk to like startup CTOs and help them solve business problems. And and that's what I wanted to do. and that's what the in-house job, I imagined, would be like. So I joined Microsoft.
00:33:15
Speaker
Everyone thought i was crazy because everyone everyone hated Microsoft. They referred to them as the evil empire in the Bay Area. And I have people at my law firm saying that I could never i could never work with them again if i was going to go join someone as evil as Microsoft. Yeah.
00:33:28
Speaker
I don't care. Like, I'm a business person. I've never understood demonizing companies. Like, they're all just trying to make money. And like, there's plenty of demons out there. Go, go attack the people trying to do harm. Everyone else is just trying to make a dollar. And in if you root for a particular company, trust me, they're just trying to make a dollar. Yeah. Like, so that's, that's good marketing. but Right, right. That's all they're doing and let regulators regulate. it yeah Right. And as soon as you see economic pressure, you'll see their true colors, which I don't think are bad, but other disappoint some people, right? Yeah.
00:33:56
Speaker
So I always thought was it weird that people got mad about it. um So I started there. um I worked on their TV product. It was called Ultimate TV, which was the first deep one of the first DVRs, digital video recording, like a Tivo. Yeah.
00:34:08
Speaker
Which is really cool. Back then, yeah. you didn't even have the concept of pausing television. Like it was, tv just came over as and looked at that signal and went into your antenna and you saw it. And if you missed it, it was gone forever, right? And so that was really cool to see that technology flourish there.
00:34:25
Speaker
um Then I got to work on the Xbox. I got to work on Bing, you know, right after Google launch, we created hu Bing is still around. um i got to work on Zune, which is our little music player. Oh, I remember that. Yeah, MP3s. Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:39
Speaker
And we invented, i will say, we invented the subscription streaming model. So you subscribed to songs that got downloaded to the Zune. And Steve Jobs said famously, no one is going to want to rent music when he made fun of our Zune. forgot about that. Yeah, it's quite funny because obviously subscription is whatever it is. But we were way too early for our time, so the Zune failed.
00:35:02
Speaker
But I really loved the work I was doing because I loved... working on technology that was in people's hands. It also had a lot of adversity because um we were not successful. yeah right I was in the business at Microsoft that was not successful, but that's where I wanted to be because all the negotiations were harder, the problems are harder. And again, people, when they think about their careers, it's not always about like the money or the success from the of the business. It's what you're getting out of it and what makes you happy. yeah For me, it's solving problems, solving hard problems and So trying to solve the mobile phone problem for Microsoft was the biggest problem, right? We had a Windows mobile operating system, which we were making $10 a device for years on.
00:35:45
Speaker
And then all of a sudden, you know Apple showed up with the iPhone, and then Google showed up with Android, and Android was free, and our whole business model was being questioned. And and so we were you know I was the chief IP attorney for that group. And and trying to solve those problems was so interesting and and complicated.
00:36:03
Speaker
You told me when we were prepping about um some of the IP acquisitions that you did and and you referenced Nortel and how that kicked off sort of the patent troll movement, which, you know, ah lots of companies deal with today, not just companies the size of of Microsoft. um I'm curious to hear a little bit and about that. That's not something I know a lot about.
00:36:25
Speaker
Yeah. The Nortel acquisition, mean, I don't know that anyone's connected the dots, but I lived through the dots, so I feel yeah feel like I see the dots. um So at Microsoft, where we were, we were trying to decide if we wanted to build hardware or continue with the software play.
00:36:39
Speaker
And our software play was our operating system. And again, being undercut by a free Android operating system. Sure. Right. And so our $10, guess they're free, is not much a choice there.
00:36:50
Speaker
So I worked with the president of the Entertainment and Devices team. His name is Robbie Bach, a great great person. And the first thing I did was say, hey, look, why don't we go charge a patent license fee for all the Androids because they're free and And so we spent a bunch of time looking at different portfolios and what patents we had and other people. And and he's like, do you think we can do it, Dana? And I'm like, let's do it. And he's like, how much can we get? And I'm like, let's let charge everyone $7 a phone.
00:37:16
Speaker
um and and then And I say that because ah people are like, where did that number come from? I'm like, the number came from because someone wants charge $7 Yeah. dvr box And I'm like, might as well port that over. always make that joke because like that's how damages work, right? They're just made up. like they All the science is all, you know, and all these Georgia Pacific factors everything. It's all just crazy. End of the day, people are just picking numbers and going with it, right?
00:37:42
Speaker
And so I picked the $7. And it turned into this huge program for Microsoft. And so I was trying to figure out ways to allow us to get into hardware if we wanted to. And also shore up that licensing program to continue to give us that advantage.
00:37:55
Speaker
um If you're going to get into phones, the biggest problem you have for but phones is um the licensing of the wireless communication standards patent. so three At the time, it was three g so If you wanted to get in there, you get to pay a huge royalty. Everyone did. apple Everyone paid this huge royalty to all these patent holders.
00:38:11
Speaker
and The next thing coming was 4G, LTE. Nortel goes bankrupt, or is going bankrupt, going to the bankruptcy process. and One of the things they're auctioning off are their patents.
00:38:22
Speaker
Everybody at the same time was sort of like, they probably have 4G patents, like the next generation of patents. I see. And so i i said, look, this is going to be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. i don't know if we're going to go into hardware, but know this could help the licensing program because everyone's going to need these kinds of patents. Right. So I made this big pitch about why we should go spend money on this.
00:38:42
Speaker
And we decided to form a coalition with Apple, Sony, Ericsson, and RIM, the maker of BlackBerry. Sure. Five of us got together and said, look, I'm going to bid. against Google and Intel, who are the other people in this auction. And so it ended up being an auction. Bankruptcies, when they have an asset that's that's in dispute, they have an actual auction.
00:39:02
Speaker
And so i had to go um get permission from Microsoft for, I'll just say, hundreds of millions of dollars yeah as our part of it. And there was an actual auction in New York, paddles, the whole thing. And i stayed in California.
00:39:17
Speaker
um But when the licensing team was there and calling back and like, this the number. And yeah, we, the portfolio went for ah billion dollars. Wow. I mean, it was crazy. And we won and we were very excited about winning. But I mean, a billion dollars.
00:39:30
Speaker
And so that really set everyone's mind on these patents are really, really worth something. Yes. and what else could they be worth, right? So that was the one thing. The funny part, the aggression on this, is afterwards, we had to divide up the patents. yeah we won i more than five us and And we did a straight fantasy football draft for them.
00:39:50
Speaker
but Like literally, it was in the contract. In the contract, one of the things I negotiated was we were going to get our first five picks So we got to pick the first five off the top. So we picked the first five. So the first five rounds of the draft, we were out because already got in our five, but we had picked them in advance. So was kind of like having the number one pick.
00:40:05
Speaker
Yeah. And then after that, we were um we we were we were last for the next five rounds ah the of the draft. And then we were like in the middle, like, you know, randomly snake or reverse snake order. Yeah. So he spent like four weeks before the draft you know with the patent um firm um analyzing all the patents and doing claim charts to figure out which ones are the best and then picking on our five. It was the it was crazy. and this like Us at that a little conference table with the other companies and we're all just, yeah, it was a fantasy. That sounds fun, honestly. That sounds really fun. People think of IP law as being, that sounds really fun. I and i was in a fantasy football league with my Fenwick colleagues. So i was that was sort of why that model made sense to me.
00:40:48
Speaker
Yeah. but um But anyway, after that, I think everyone got very excited about the value patents. But I do think that they misunderstood why it went for a billion. It went for a billion because those are standard essential patents for the next generation mobile phones.
00:41:02
Speaker
And you had companies like Apple and Google who are looking at this as an existential threat to them and bidding that value up, right? But everyone everyone took ah took away a different lesson. And then you started seeing you know all these...
00:41:13
Speaker
you know um what we refer to as patent trolls, but patent lawyers are lawyers buying patents and then suing people and just trying to make money. And this whole industry industry started, which I then faced when I joined Adobe and yeah started running litigation and seeing the problem I had helped create on the other side You created a lot of value and then the value became evident to other people who were just trying to make a buck.
00:41:39
Speaker
yeah it was crazy. why Why leave a place like Microsoft then? And um and I guess also I'm interested in the transition out of sort of IP and into a more much more generalist role as as GC then a few years later.
00:41:56
Speaker
i think um for me, the question is about leaving Adobe, i mean, going to Adobe and leaving Microsoft. I mean, I love Microsoft, love the people there, um and love the culture. But I didn't want to go to Seattle um because i had undiagnosed seasonal mood disorder.
00:42:11
Speaker
I'm going to Seattle tomorrow and I'm hoping that it's going to be clear skies. We'll have to see. Back then, climate change has actually helped in Seattle, but back then it was literally September through March it was gray. There's no way I could do that.
00:42:29
Speaker
so um So that was out of the table for me. And that you know eventually, you know you do have to move if you want to get to really high positions. So I felt that. And I wanted to spend more time with my kids. My kids are 10 and 8. And in order to do my Microsoft job, I was managing teams at Microsoft in Seattle. I was flying back and forth every other week. And it was just really hard to to spend quality time with them and...
00:42:50
Speaker
And so I wanted someplace local. I wanted still be in software. um and Adobe at the time wasn't doing great. I mean, their stock 34. Just ah about to move to the cloud with their subscription model.
00:43:03
Speaker
It really kicked off 12 years of success. But um at the time, you know, it was a tricky decision because, again, it was kind of like going to Microsoft. Everyone was like, why why Adobe? And then one of my friends was like, hey, look, if they do six they do great,
00:43:20
Speaker
you're going to do great. If they do poorly, you get to sue everybody on on their patents.
00:43:26
Speaker
And I'm like, yeah, you're right. There's like de-risk for me. So I'm like, I can either way. He's going to work out. So that's what it's like. Not de-risk for Adobe, but de-risk for you. Yeah, exactly. And at the time, I didn't have any loyalty to Adobe. You hadn't even taken a job yet. So it wasn't like an emotional thing, right?
00:43:39
Speaker
yeah um And that's the thing about being a lawyer. So I took the job. and um And then shortly after, we got a new GC and he asked me to take over litigation. Mostly because all of our litigation was patent troll litigation. And so you just wanted the person who knew the patents to to work on it.
Litigation Strategy at Adobe
00:43:55
Speaker
and um And that was super interesting. The first trial I had actually before the GC started, and so the GC hired me, was there. we had we were about to go to trial in Boston ah from a patent troll.
00:44:06
Speaker
and um And she asked me, hey, look, assess the case. Give me a recommendation of what you want to do. And so we were in trial. And it was a case I thought, you know, we should win. I talked to the witnesses, talked, look the patents, patents are stupid. And, and you know, that first week, they and they wanted like $30 million or whatever.
00:44:23
Speaker
And the first week, um you know, they put on their case, didn't look great because it never does look great when the other side is presenting you're defending. And they kept saying 30 million, 30 million. And then we put our case up and, you know, again, I felt very good about our case.
00:44:36
Speaker
And then their numbers started coming down, 30 million, 20 million, 10 million, whatever. And so, until like two days, and I kept saying, and not settling, not settling, not settling. And then the night before the went case went to the jury, night before the jury was going to come back with the verdict, they said, hey, walk away.
00:44:52
Speaker
Like they completely lost faith that they were going to win. Wow. So i i I was like, no. And the reason I said no was strategically, like winning this case doesn't mean anything. u huh What I really needed was the deterrence value yes of winning. right like That was much more valuable to me than than whatever i'm going to lose in this verdict if it goes wrong way.
00:45:13
Speaker
What I love about Adobe was, know, told that to the GC. She's like, let's go talk to Shantanu, who's the CEO. It's the first time I met him. I go into office. I'm explaining, like, why I think we should roll the dice with a jury verdict, which could go either way, as you know. And he's like, do you believe analysis? And I said, believe in And he's like, all right, do it.
00:45:32
Speaker
And that was just like, wow, so empowering, right? But I had all this conviction. Yes. Obviously, how everything worked out, the answer was, jury came back, patent's invalid, not infringed. Quite a different story if it hadn't gone that way.
00:45:44
Speaker
But what was really interesting to me was, yeah all the executives afterwards were so happy, and and you just forget this as a lawyer, and they were happy because they felt vindicated, because they felt like they were being accused of theft. Mm-hmm.
00:45:56
Speaker
Like, they didn't think about this as patent trolls, but they were thinking, someone said that we copied their idea, right and we didn't copy their idea. And how could you say that? And so there was just this sort of righteous vindication that was really fun to see and just really gave me that motivation.
00:46:12
Speaker
so So I felt convicted that this is the right way to go, deterrence. And I felt convicted that at the end of the day, a trial will vindicate me. right So we changed our strategy, which was before we settled all these patent troll cases. Because patent trolls typically will come to you with a nuisance value settlement offer because they don't want to go to trial. They just want to they give you a price that is less than the cost of going to trial and hope you will do the math and just give them money. You don't want to spend a lot of money on outside counsel. extortion. It's basically extortion. Yeah.
00:46:39
Speaker
And so i just we did three things. One, we we said, we're going to adopt a strategy of, if we think the patent is invalid, we're going to take it at to trial.
00:46:50
Speaker
We'll public about it. Second thing we're going to do is come up with, at the time was fairly revolutionary, a litigation flat f feee fee structure for trials. So we need to cost certainty. Like I can't just go to my CFO and say, it's just going to cost some random amount of money to do this strategy. I'm like, we need to know every time i' go to trial, here's what it's going to be. So we had flat fee for, you know, if we get to the summary judgment, flat fee if we get to this point, flat fee if we go to trial, like we just stack them up. And now I could go to the CFO and say, this is what this looks like.
00:47:18
Speaker
That was critical to be able to design this and then get law firms to agree to it. And then that was the second thing. And the third thing was, and this is what i learned from Microsoft, is like, change the world. Like, why do we have to accept this? And let's let's change the law. The law is being stacked against the corporation defendants.
00:47:34
Speaker
It's in favor of patent holders. There's no reason. There's imbalance. They didn't understand the concept of patent trolls when the law was passed. And here's the problem. Everyone's got it. So we did all three things. um The deterrence part was funny because i would get like offers, like $10,000 settlement offers. My head of litigation, who then reported to me, was like, we should take this, right? I'm like, we're not taking it.
00:47:55
Speaker
It's zero. Yeah. I need these people to look at Adobe and say let's just go sue Intuit. That was a joke. Apologies to all the Intuit fans out there. But that's what I would say. you know yeah you know we need to So that was important.
00:48:07
Speaker
Law firms did a great job, the flat fee. But then i we were trying to figure out how to change changed the law. And there were we had other willing participants. So I joined up with Oracle, Google, and Cisco, all our heads of IP. And we created a ah new foundation, the Coalition for Patent Fairness and as a lobbying arm in D.C. to push a new law on how to fix all these problems.
00:48:31
Speaker
And we had just passed the American Events Act like four years before. So Congress was not interested in the new law. But this problem was so dire that they actually listened and were actually engaged in the conversation. So I was in D.C.
00:48:42
Speaker
a lot. Yeah. Writing a law, shaping a law venue and and all the different aspects that were were were we're driving this. um And I got to testify twice in front of, once in front of the Senate ju Judiciary Committee, once in front of House Judiciary Committee.
00:48:58
Speaker
All the bills got killed by the trial lawyer lobbyist association in the Senate Judiciary Committee. They got voted out of the House. 435 to whatever. But then died in the Senate Judiciary Committee. But it did change the law because it had a whole conversation start about patent trolls, which no one even used the word patent trolls before.
00:49:18
Speaker
And I knew we won because we we we um filed as amicus on a bunch of cases, our coalition. And Scalia, in one of his opinions, referred to the other side as a patent troll.
00:49:29
Speaker
Interesting. And I'm like, once you win the vernacular, yeah you've won the argument. And that's why communications is such an important tool for lawyers. lot of people don't think about it. But even during that time, every time we won a trial, I would do an interview. And people are like, oh you shouldn't do it. I'm like, I'm always doing an interview. I want everyone to know what the other side was. right To drive that conversation. They're not independent inventors working out of the garage. That's not who we're talking about here. right right These are just litigation-funded lawyers.
00:49:54
Speaker
So... um So that was great, but it got me to the point of being able to see a lot of things and do a lot of big policy things. And then my general counsel retired. Yeah. And the CEO said, I want to hire internally. And so he asked the people who were interested, and there was four of us, to write up a vision of what you thought about Adobe and Adobe Legal and send them an email.
00:50:14
Speaker
And so I did that. And because of my intellectual curiosity, had a lot of thoughts about Adobe's business and where better. I had a lot of thoughts about our legal department and how we could be better from a legal operations perspective. And I had lot of thoughts about AI. We hadn't even started on the AI journey, but AI had been something been paying attention to and working on for my career. Yeah.
00:50:35
Speaker
And when I was in law school, my law journal article, which got published, was on AI. It was on who owns the output of AI. It's called neural networks, here, there, and everywhere. Way ahead of… 1997. Two ahead.
00:50:48
Speaker
That's amazing. yeah and And it's probably terrible, so don't go read it. but ah But so I've always thought about it. And in my email, I talked about AI and like that very question of like who owns it and how we're going to take advantage of it. And so I really feel like the intellectual curiosity, the ability to stay involved in the world and bring all that business knowledge into that answer has really helped me stand out in that interview process and made him um made him consider me. And the other thing was he's an engineer, right?
00:51:14
Speaker
And so... and so he and I spoke
Leadership Style and Future Plans
00:51:18
Speaker
the same language. We had very high bandwidth conversations on products and technologies, where things were that are going. And so when I became GC, I really felt like had the opportunity to to treat it as GC as a CTO. you know yeah I thought about it, like, what can I do to help the law and technology and policy drive our technical agenda forward, understanding where trends are going, and use the law to get there.
00:51:40
Speaker
we're running short on time. i might have to have you back to talk about all the work that you did on a i um I do want to ask you some of my sort of traditional closing questions because I think a few of them are fun and i'm really curious for your your um your view on on one of them. um The first one is maybe think back to when you were a GC.
00:52:03
Speaker
What was your favorite part of your day-to-day in the job? Day-to-day, I really enjoyed one-on-ones with people. So the way I managed was um i had one-on-ones, like hour-long one-on-ones with all my directs at least once a month.
00:52:20
Speaker
And then I would never pay any attention to anything they were doing. like that was That was my yeah deep dive. Talk to me, ask me questions. I ask you a bunch of questions and then off you go and I don't i don't go sit in meetings with them or whatever.
00:52:33
Speaker
But I enjoyed it because it was fun for me just to sit there and Talk to them, learn about them, learn about their lives, their careers, their issues, everything. And just, it was my favorite. And then skip level one-on-ones were even more fun for me because I got to go throughout or org. I was, oh, I did tons and tons of skip levels because I love seeing the junior lawyers and the ones I felt like had all this potential.
00:52:52
Speaker
um And some people just needed doors opened and you can help them. And they weren't even just lawyers. i When I started AI ethics at Adobe, if I come back, you know we can talk about it. yeah um But there was there was a woman named Grace Yee. She was just a program manager, engineering program manager.
00:53:09
Speaker
And she was helping me out on her project. And I'm just like, this is like the smartest person I've ever met. Like, what are you doing, bury 75 layers underneath, you know, some product guy, right? Like, they don't appreciate you. And so I pulled her out and had her run ai ethics for me.
00:53:24
Speaker
That's so cool. And she's still is doing it to this day. Now she speaks at conferences and it's like, it's <unk> amazing. But it's there's a lot of people like that. Like, if you can just get the time to spend time with them and see who they are and what makes them tick, you can really, you know, let their success bloom.
00:53:39
Speaker
Do you have a professional pet peeve? um I'm a hard grader, i will say. No one you know no one's ever who works for me i will say anything different. um So my biggest pet peeve is not being prepared for meetings. I really think it's about respect.
00:53:53
Speaker
And people will show up at meetings constantly and haven't done the work, haven't thought through if they're a lawyer, the law, the facts, the policy, if they're a business person, haven't modeled. you know, the money or the implications or the technology or the effort or whatever. Sure. Haven't talked to the other people's other stakeholders to get an aligned point of view. they haven't done the work and you sit there and you're like five minutes in, you're like, what, what are we doing here? This is just wasted hour. going have to come back again next week and talk about everything all over again. and like, and it's, it and drove me crazy.
00:54:23
Speaker
We've all been there. I think, um, yeah, do you have I mean, you're writing a book. Do you have a book that you'd want to recommend to our audience? This could be a business book or it could just be something fun that you're reading right I don't read business books. um That's not a bad ah character trait or... I do, yeah.
00:54:41
Speaker
Well, um so I just finished reading. My wife loves this author, Leanne Moriarty, um and I now love her too on her recommendation. I just i'd literally just finished yesterday, I'd recommend it. This book called Hear One Moment. It's her like latest book. Okay. And so she it's just, it's just a regular fiction. She's not science fiction or anything. But this particular book is very fun premise in the first page, so I'm not giving anything away.
00:55:04
Speaker
But on a plane, a woman who you don't know who she is, but appears to be some kind of fortune teller, tells everybody on the plane the how they're going to die when they're going to die.
00:55:17
Speaker
Okay. Okay. And then the rest of the book is sort of about the consequences of that. Wow. was predictions Great book. I mean, I obviously was up till midnight two nights ago finishing it because I was yeah so taken by it. But she's an amazing writer and would recommend it.
00:55:29
Speaker
That sounds great. um I don't think I'd be happy if I am sitting on my flight tomorrow and someone came up to me and told me when I was going to die. Well, some people got like 100 years old of, you know, heart failure. You know what I'm saying?
00:55:40
Speaker
Fair. a Final question for you, my traditional closing question for my guests. It's if you could think back on your days of being a young lawyer, maybe just graduating from GW Law, ah something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then. Yeah, I would say i have two answers. One is um maybe to take all the pressure off of people.
00:56:08
Speaker
I wouldn't be, I wouldn't have accomplished anything I've accomplished if I didn't make all the mistakes I made. i firmly believe that. So I wouldn't change anything. Even the sleeping on the couch part. ah The singles were terrible. So painful.
00:56:21
Speaker
yeah I have not gotten the vaccine yet. My wife keeps getting on me, but I'm like, i don't want to take it. But regardless, I wouldn't change anything. Like in terms of mistakes, like I wouldn't fix any of the problems. I think what you don't appreciate, um which I got a chance to appreciate quicker because of Reno,
00:56:36
Speaker
was that you are free. There is a certain amount of freedom um in your career and in your choices that you have that is not apparent to you when you're in the grind. And you feel like you have to do this thing. You have to impress this person. You have to build these hours. You have to sure you hit this project. And that's all you can do.
00:56:53
Speaker
And having that ability to have that perspective and take a deep breath and say, this isn't all there is. There's more to this than life. And, you know we didn't get a chance to talk about my three-year framework or about how you can pause every three years and examine the pros and cons of what's going on in your world.
00:57:07
Speaker
That's so important to do. And even as early as the beginning of your career to make sure you're checking in with yourself about what really matters because um someone could come up to you on a plane tomorrow and tell you you're going to die in three weeks. Yeah.
00:57:22
Speaker
That's a great as a great circular ah great circular way to end our conversation. um i would actually love to do a part two. I know you're spending a lot more time in New York these days. I do a bunch of recordings and studios there. I think that would be a lot of fun. i think we still have a lot more to talk about.
00:57:39
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. love to. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Tyler. And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in. And we hope to see you next time.