title: Navigating Success Through the Power of Strategy and Persistence with Jed Simon
author: Pfeffer on Power
publication: Pfeffer on Power
published: 2024-07-31T14:00:00
source_url: https://audio4.redcircle.com/episodes/d405ec27-a8d2-4547-857d-583c0f7c706d/stream.mp3
word_count: 4994
Welcome to the Feffer on Power Podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Feffer, a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, an author of 16 books on a range of topics, including the topic of my oversubscribed MBA class and this podcast, Power. Every other week, I talk to someone about their path to power and provide you with practical guidance about how to accelerate your career. Today's guest is the Jed Simon. I met Jed when he was a student in my class just his past year. Jed came to Stanford as part of what used to be called a Sloan program and is now called the MSX program. And if you think that was worth $100,000, they spent on branding, you need to retake your marketing class. At any event, prior to coming to Stanford, Jed has had a remarkable and interesting career, including starting a Fintech company that he sold and doing some amazing things in the music and entertainment industry. Jed, first of all, welcome to the show and let's begin by giving us a brief career trajectory. Sure. Well, first and foremost, thank you so much. I just want to say off the bat that your class is one of the most sought after classes at Stanford Business School. And past to power, I don't know if it's number one, it's definitely in the top five. And the notion that you take so much of the contents and the book is amazing. And if you pair that with the guests from the class who are also on your podcaster, getting a GSB experience through sort of a free program. So this is a great public service and in any event. So I'm very honored to be on here. So thanks for having me. All right. So tell us about your career career wise. So taking it back, I grew up in Los Angeles. That's from from right next to UCLA. My mom had a house on one side of UCLA and my dad had an apartment on the other side. And I always kind of grew up back and forth between these kind of very stable household with my mom and kind of a little more of a chaotic bachelor kind of household with my dad. And it was a great childhood. I'm super fortunate to have such supporting parents. I started playing water polo at a young age. I really wanted to play in college. And I found, you know, I'm going to Brown University where I played water polo. I studied philosophy and had an amazing experience. When I graduated college, I was thinking about going to law school and I had my eyes on Stanford. But I also was thinking about doing investment banking because I was a philosophy major. And I had zero business experience. So at the long story short, I ended up getting into Stanford by taking the job at Morgan Stanley, which will come back to, because that's something that sort of bothered me. And there's sort of a full circle thing happening here being back at Stanford. But any event I was in the media group investment banking at Morgan Stanley. I then really wanted to work in the music industry and particularly for David Geffen. So Dreamworks at the time was starting. I got a job there, which we can talk about. That was kind of a fun power practice. Worked at Dreamworks for a number of years had a role in corporate strategy where we were in charge of sort of the capital raising special projects. Like I remember doing I had to build the model when Spielberg was buying a Gulf Stream jet. So I was kind of negotiating that, which was fun. Sound stages, all that kind of stuff. Capital raising from Chale J. Dung from our Japanese partner, Asmic Ace and from Universal and Paul Allen. So I was in the middle of that kind of stuff. I then went to the music division where I was kind of the divisional finance marketing media online person for a number of years, which was an incredible experience. We ended up selling that business and I flipped over to the international group for our film division. So I moved to London for a bit, did that, and then I ended up quitting. I sort of needed a little bit of a mental health break and I really always dreamed to start my own company. So through a process I landed on starting a media payments business. We did lending and payments. We raised a lot of capital. We ended up selling it a couple of years ago and I was super burn out and decided now is the time to go to Stanford and I return back and have done this MSX program, which I just graduated two days ago as you can tell from the bags under my eyes. We're still sort of I'm in this kind of reflection resting period. So that's the story. That's a great story. Now David Geffen has a reputation as not being the easiest human being in the world to work for is he is consistent with my past the power course and the seven rules of power book in the sense that he's put his name on a bunch of stuff, including David Geffen Hall, a Lincoln Center, but I'm told by people who have worked for him and with him that he is difficult. I assume that that's true. How do you navigate working for a difficult boss? So let's start with your rules of power because these aren't necessarily rules we want and I hear a lot of MBA students complain about them, but they're it's kind of like physics. It is what it is and these rules are out there and this is how the world works. So rule seven is success excuses almost everything. And I would say if you read the David Geffen book, the operator, which is one that you know I was there and I witnessed the whole process from when he supported it to when he turned halfway through and said he didn't want anyone involved and it was craziness. But I'll say this, I've heard all the stories and I've witnessed a couple things. I'll tell you a funny one, a first hand one, but he's funny. He's smart. He's quick-witted. He makes fast decisions and this guy is amazing and he's remarkable and yes, he's powerful and yes, maybe he's a little bit scary, but he's such an interesting character. I mean, I didn't have that much direct interaction with him and it was pretty funny. So when I got my job at DreamWorks Records, my office was directly across from his and I thought, oh my god, I did this thing to get the job at DreamWorks, which we'll talk about. I got the job. I worked in corporate. I finally got over the record company and my office is directly across from Geffen's and guess what? He never came to the office once. I never saw the guy and actually he came once for a meeting, but in like six years, he came once. He is a work at home. He was a remote worker before there was such a thing and I even I ran into him at a restaurant. There's a restaurant called Dantana's in LA and I saw him once, I don't know five or six years ago and I told him a story. I'm like, I did this. I did that. I freaking get the office. I'm so excited and I'm like, I never saw you in the office once. He is laughed. He's like, hey, what can I tell you? I'm sorry, but he's a fascinating character. I'll tell you this. We were selling the company and it was a confidential sale. Only about three of us knew we were even marketing it. There's a really prominent music attorney named Alan Garouman. He was like the biggest guy representing Michael Jackson and Madonna. You name it all the record companies. He was the crucible of power and I was on the phone with David and we were talking about the strategy. We had to send some decks around all of that. He calls the assistant. Maybe she just was listening on. He goes, hey, get Garouman on the phone. The assistant answers the phone. She goes, Alan Garouman's office. He goes, hey, it's David for Alan. She puts this on hold. She then comes back at moments and says, hey, David, where can Alan reach you? And in this cold voice, like a scary voice says, I just want to know who he's talking to right now who could possibly be more important than this call. And she goes, hold on. And then the phone comes up and it's funny because Alan's this powerful guy goes, David, like he's really high voice. David, hey, so sorry. What's going on? And I was like, this guy is powerful. It's amazing. So one of the things that we've talked about is your use of the rules of power. I think you've got your favorites. So one is networking. Another one is breaking the rules. Why don't you talk about what you've done, both at Stanford while you were in the business school and before to network and to break the rules? I love for it's your story about meeting one on one with about 70 or 80 MBAs. Yeah. Well, look, in terms of the rules of power, you know, so what's interesting about coming back to school is I didn't have this formal business education, but I've been through the ringer I've made every mistake in the book. But there's some of these things I did figure out on my own, but I never had a real framework. It was more kind of instinctive. And I found that in a lot of classes, there's managing growing enterprises, there's formation new ventures, but in your class, breaking the rules is something I've been doing since day one. And it's not sort of an unethical thing. I think some of these rules don't apply. Some of them are arbitrary and I think Jason Calcannis and his interview with you kind of laid it out perfectly. But one breaking the rule story, which you and I talked about was early on, I had this job in Morgan Stanley. We were alluded to that. And we had just done a bond offering for group of televisions. This is like a billion dollar bond offering for this Mexican media company. It was a big deal. And I was just finishing up. In fact, I had taken a job at DreamWorks. And I actually took a vacation the month before a week vacation to start my new job. And then I had to go back and finish my other job. It was kind of like, it was a little bit of a tug of war at that point. But when we did the deal, the guy who's the CFO of group of televisa came around our office and handed out Cartier watches to like six or eight of us. And I'm like a 23 year old, 24 year old analyst making not a lot of money. I know watches. I mean, I still don't wear watches. And they hands me this like really fancy Cartier watch. And I'm thinking fantastic, right? But the manager director of my group came around and said, Hey, guys, I'm collecting the watches. You got to give these things back. You can't accept gifts over $50. I thought, that's crazy. I'm leaving. You're not going to be able to bribe me. What am I going to do? So I said, Hey, Jeff, you know, I left it at home. We'll bring it back. And I wrote a note, a letter, a memo to the CEO of Morgan Stanley. His name was Dick Fisher. And it said, Mr. Fisher, I'm a second year analyst. I'm taking a job at DreamWorks. I really hope to be a client soon. I had a great experience. What a wonderful company. And then kind of like underlined it, saying, we were given a gift of a watch. You know, I pulled all these old niters and a client was kind enough to give me a gift. And I understand there's a policy about receiving gifts. However, I'm leaving. Therefore, there's no sort of moral hazard. And I think it would be in everyone's best interest. And it would be a real honor if you'd allow me to accept this gift. And I'll take it with me as a memento of my two years here. And I sent it off. And my boss was kind of bugging me. Hey, Jed, where's that watch? And every day I was waiting for the interoffice memo days. There was email, but you also had these snail mail things. So one day the memo comes back. I open up the envelope. And it says, Okay, really big scrawl like the Donald Trump kind of handwriting says, Okay, Dick Fisher. So I went into Jeff's office, my MD and said, Hey, Jeff, Dick Fisher said I can keep the watch. He's like, great, fine, keep it. And I still have the watch. It's in a safe deposit box. In case anyone's thinking about anything funny. I probably have a hundred stories like that. You're definitely a rule breaker. But talk about also the networking. And for instance, the one-on-ones with your MBAs and you're other networking because you did a lot of it. Yeah. So just sort of to take it back a quick, I'm very naturally introverted. And I know you may not believe that, but I'm a 10 out of 10 introvert. And networking, I can do it, but it is tiring. It's not my natural. I would say the one rule, which is the building the powerful brand, that one I really do struggle with kind of like being very out there posting on social media, doing those kinds of things. But networking, in your class, there are different guests who talked about how they use networking. And there's certain pieces that which really resonated. And I talked to my power coach and she gave me some insight as well. And look, I recognized early on coming to Stanford that one of the key components of this place is not just the academics. Academics are easy. They kind of over index on because you get graded. It's straightforward. These things are assigned. But the real magic of Stanford is the student body, the classmates and MSX and these MBAs. I mean, this is the hardest business school to get into in the world. These are the most exceptional students in the world. And they're all here. And it's a very friendly, welcoming place. So I decided about six months ago in your class that I'm going to meet as many of these MBAs because I knew all my classmates. I wanted to meet as many of these MBAs as possible. So I started just, you know, when I would go to KUPA, I'd be in class, I'd be in study groups. You get assigned study groups. Anyone I didn't know who I thought was remarkable in any way or interesting or funny or cool or whatever it was. I said, hey, let's get coffee. And the answer resoundingly every time is, yeah, great. Let's do it. And more often than not, they would throw a time on my schedule before I even had a chance to throw a time on theirs. So I think in the last four or five months, I've done on average two to three a day, one on ones. And at this point, I've probably done one on ones with 80 to 100 MBAs. And it's really been a powerful thing. And I'll tell you a quick story, actually, which goes back to your class as well. I had a one on one with someone who had been in my, in one of my classes. And this person, he sponsored, it's a guy, he works at one of the large private equity funds, about 100 billion under assets. And I asked him, we sat down, I said, what's your career goal? Like in the next, tell me in 10 years, like, what role you want to have. And he's like, honestly, Jed, I want to run this place. I want to be the CEO. And I'm like, well, how old is the CEO now? We kind of did the math and thought maybe 10 years, maybe a little aggressive, but 15 years is not an impossibility. He's like, Jed, if you were me, what would you be doing? And I told him, look, the skills you have now to be a successful associate at this private equity firm are not the same skills that are going to get you to be the CEO, those seem more senior, you get the job description changes. You need to be an originator, a deal maker. Right now, you're just an analyst, you're processing. And I said, what you should be doing is you should be keeping a list of all of your colleagues at different firms, investment bankers, lawyers, and other sort of people in your role at all the different PE firms. And you should be meeting with them, having coffee with them. And most notably, there's a couple of big conferences. You should go scout the venues out ahead of time, set up dinners, 12, 15 people, invite the key folks that you want to network with. Maybe get someone to sponsor it or pay for it yourself and get to know these people, get to know them all now because a few of these folks are going to end up being very powerful. And as we'll talk about in a moment, it's a lot easier to be powerful people when their guards are down or when they're not quite as powerful. You know, they might not see the trajectory as clearly as you do. And I said, look, the other thing you should do is if there's people who aren't attending the conference, definitely invite them to this dinner because they will be so appreciative of the invite. It doesn't cost you anything. Those are freebies. In my company, we do that all the time. We do have big events in New York, Billy Joel concert MSG tickets were thousands of dollars. And we made sure to invite all our clients on the West Coast. Maybe one or two of them would show up, but the rest of them were so appreciative because you have to give things. You can't always ask. You got to be of service. You have to offer things. That's how you build relationships. I think too many people think of relationships as one side. This is what I need. But I think you have to start with the opposite sort of framework, which is what can I provide to them of value? That's how you build relationships. So that's probably a long-winded answer. That's a good story. So that reminds me, giving something to somebody reminds me of the story you told me the other day about this nightclub and a woman named Jen. The place that you couldn't get into, but you got in because you offered her something. So why don't you tell that story as well? Well, it's funny. This is probably not the normal GSB anecdotes, but let's go for it. We were talking, and it's funny because I was reflecting on, sometimes in your class, by the way, I would just kind of take notes and think about like, okay, where have I been powerful, and where have I not been powerful? I don't necessarily subscribe that people are necessarily it's binary or they're powerful or not. There's certain, maybe in certain circles and certain circumstances. But when I first moved to LA, I had a lot more energy and we used to go out a lot. And there was this one nightclub on Thursday nights. That was the hottest nightclub. It was kind of like the Studio 54 of its era and the, you know, the early 2000s. And they would close off a lane on Santa Monica Boulevard. There would be hundreds of people outside. It was silly. It's like 300, 400 people trying to squeeze in to get to the person the front who had the clipboard. So this woman, Jen, would walk inside. She'd come out for a moment and everyone's scream her name, she'd kind of look around and go back in. And we could never get into this place. We tried once or twice. We're like, it's futile. But there was a restaurant next door called dantanas, which is one of the great classic Italian restaurants in LA. And we were eating there one night. And we ran into this kind of powerful talent manager and said, hi. And he's like, hey, I'm going next story. You guys want to come? We're like, yeah, we, of course, we want to come. Like we're trying to be cool about it. We walk right in this place is rocking. There's all these celebrities there. Britney Spears was that night. Justin Timberlake was there that night. It was just superb, right? Super fun. But I wasn't enjoying myself. I was looking at the front door thinking, this is great, but I want to get in here every Thursday night. One Thursday night is not going to do it for me. So I was watching this woman walk in from outside and being like, oh, taking a sip of this look on her list, looking around, then she'd go back out. And the thing I noticed was at the end of the night, it was like one in the morning, one thirty, that's someone clubs close. She's just standing there by herself. All the people that were like yelling and screaming for this woman when she was outside, they just walk right by her and the way out. It's like, oh, thanks. I got what I need. Then I look at her. And so I was like, I waited and I went up and say, hey, Jen, I'm Jed Simon. I work at DreamWorks. I came in with so-and-so. She's like, yeah, of course. I said, listen, this place was so great. I had the best time tonight. What an awesome place. What's it like for you kind of getting yelled and screamed out like, what's your job like, you know, just give you anxiety. You enjoy the power trip. What's it like? It just seems like what a hard job. I would not have to be in your shoes. It's like, well, it's fine. You know, I know there's certain people I got to take care of everyone else. We kind of talked for a bit. Then I did something then, which I do all the time now, which is, and God, I give this advice to everybody. And it's like, these are the magic words, which is, so Jen, I love this place. I want to come back here. If you were me, what would you advise I do to be able to come back and come here more often? She looks at me and she goes, just have to ask. I'm like, well, I'm asking. She goes, here, take my phone number. Just text me. And it's not a problem. I'd love to have you back. Great. So the next week, send her a text. Thought she's wrote back saying no problem. I'm thinking, okay, let's see if this actually works. I didn't want to abuse the privilege. I just came with one friend. I don't want to show up with like a full entourage. I walk up, we're in the back. It's packed. She comes out. We make eye contact. She goes, hey, come on in. We were in it. I was good. And I kind of like eventually maybe invited a couple more friends. And I think like you can always make friends on the way out. And you know, this doesn't just relate to nightclubs. So another friend of mine from the GSB raised a series A for his AI company, the $20 million series A. And he got a hundred texts emails. Everyone's like, let's set up coffee. Let's set up lunch. And he's just like, whoa. And I'm thinking, no, no, no, no, no. You can text him the week before for a lunch. But right when he announces this thing, everybody's hitting him up and saying, let's do this. They perceive power and they want to get close to it. But you can't do that. If you really did want to get together with him before and you kind of missed your little window, you got to wait like a month, send him a congratulations, offer him something, send him a candle. But like, I don't know. I think that there's broader lessons to be learned from that kind of early formative experience trying to get into a nightclub in my 20s. Yeah. I think it's a fabulous story. And I really have enjoyed our conversation today. If I asked you to tell me one more typical Jed Simon story, what would you say? Give me one more anecdote about how Jed Simon got to where he is. Well, I'm going to break the rules here because you said, well, I'm going to give you two short ones, but it'll add up to one. You talk a lot in class about the power of a first impression. And I want to say it's not like if you flub the first impression, there's no coming back. But I think it's like maybe a 50x effort to get back to where you could have been had you done it right in the first place. At my company, my startup, we were a FinTech company. We hadn't raised much money. I think a million or two million bucks. And we needed to get some validation. We needed to get a line of credit from some sort of entity that would validate us. I saw Wells Fargo lender finance. It was kind of the number one lender. And I got a meeting with Andrea Petro, who's like, she's the queen. She literally was like royalty. And we killed ourselves to get everything we had a meeting. We had an investor's office. This is beautiful space. We made these books. We had like everyone dress nicely. Everything was set up. We had waters. It was this thing. And we had this meeting. And afterwards, she said, you know, normally we have a $25 million minimum for a loan. We're going to make an exception. I'm going to get back to you. So they ended up offering us a $12.5 million loan. But she said she wanted us to raise some capital. And she's like, from one of these places, I'll make the intro. So we ended up raising 10 million from an investment plus 12.5 million. And this was like that one little thing had this cascading effect. So the first impressions are so important. And we got that right. And the other story is going to be getting the job. It dream works because there were like a thousand people applying for this one job I wanted. And maybe we had two slots. And I was calling the HR's office and I'd talk to the assistant. She'd say, Hey, we got your resume. You know, I left the message. I'm so sorry. There's nothing else I could do. And I did this a couple times. And finally, I did the same thing which we talked about before, which is I said to the assistant, I'm like, look, I've been working really hard. I work every day here at Morgan Stanley. I have the skills. I'm in the media group. I think I'm a good applicant. I would love to be able to interview for it. If you were me, what would you do? How do I break through this pile? And the woman said, you know, I go home at six. Cassie Thomas, who's the head of human resources for dreamers. Cassie goes home at seven. I'd call between six and seven. Maybe she'll answer her own phone. I don't know. So every night between six and seven, West Coast time, I was in New York. I would call a couple times. And once Cassie picked up the phone. She goes, Cassie Thomas, I gave her the spiel. She's like, okay, great, Jed. Call a Romali song instead of an interview. We'd love to meet you. That's how it happened. So, I don't know. I think being smart, asking questions, using power here and there, we're necessary in humility and genuine interest, relationships and kindness. Those are sort of, I think, all things that work in the end. Wow. That's a great story and a great way, I think, to end this podcast. Jed Simon, thank you so much for being our guest today. Total pleasure. Thank you. This has been the Fefferon Power Podcast. Every other week, we talked to an accomplished individual about their path to power and their practical lessons for you. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the podcast on any of your favorite sources. And buy my most recent book on power, Seven Rules of Power. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter and Jeffreyfeffer.com. Fefferon Power is a production of Stanford University and University FM. Fefferon Power, Seven Rules of Power, Seven Rules of Power.