Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Diversity in the Tech Industry

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And next, we turn to the effort to launch structural reform of corporate America. It is now widely accepted the diversity of gender, race, and background is in itself a valuable goal, not just morally right but something that makes any organization perform better. It’s something that Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, president of the of the ticket marketplace, StubHub, has been thinking a lot about even finding a talent recruitment forum, Boardlist. She sat down with our Hari Sreenivasan to discuss how you increase that vital diversity.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: You grew up in Canada, the daughter of a couple of doctors, what made want to go into business?

SUKHINDER SINGH CASSIDY, PRESIDENT, STUBHUB: They talk about entrepreneurship running in families and I believe it. I say believe it because although my parents are both doctors, my father-in-law is running a small business. So they had come from East Africa and resettled in Canada late in life, they — we had a medical practice together. But I mean, at 7 or 8, I was learning how to do his books. You know, by 12 or 13, I knew how to do his taxes. My father always told me to work for myself. And he loved business as much as he loved serving people, which he really did. I often tell people the story, I think he was, — you know, and my father was older. So he was in his 70s when I was in high school. And I remember being 15 or 16 and he would call his broker and look at the paper every deciding what stocks to pick.

SREENIVASAN: Because you have to do that back then.

CASSIDY: Because I tried to do it. And his eyes (INAUDIBLE). So this gigantic magnifying glass and he would look at the paper, and I remember his calls (INAUDIBLE) be like Tom, from RBC Securities. And he’d be like, “Tom, let’s buy some AOL.” I didn’t even know what AOL was. But here is my father in his late ’70s who loved innovation, business, serving people, told me to work for myself. And so you look back and I’m like going hindsight it’s probably not a surprise. That by my mid-20s, even though I was in investment banking, I was in London and I worked for BSkyB, which is part of news Corp. By my mid-20s, it’s like, I want to start a business and I didn’t know how. But I really credit my dad. I sort of feel, I didn’t grew up in an entrepreneurial family. And I feel like I saw it firsthand.

SREENIVASAN: How did you get to the StubHub? How did you get to this position intact in the bay area?

CASSIDY: You know, you grind for 20 years. I started a few companies, I spent the majority of my career building my own companies and the other half helping to scale larger companies, so I ended up at Google early on and helped build their local maps business before building their international business. I went back to being an entrepreneur again. And so I think my career has been a journey of big and small companies that I was building. Serendipity and a luck hopefully in there and awesome people will give me some good chances.

SREENIVASAN: As you got into these companies, what about — it was kind of different glass ceilings. What did you find as you went from company to company?

CASSIDY: So it’s interesting because I’m kind of — I have this dichotomous fuse on this. On the one hand, over a long period of time, I feel like Silicon Valley has been a place where I found my throne. I say that because I arrived. By my late 20s, I got to be a founder. I enjoyed a relatively exciting career.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

CASSIDY: I was supported well. You know, I was giving tremendous opportunity everywhere, wherever I was, including at Google. Obviously, I got to be a CEO. So I think for me to say this support me story on either being a person of color, a woman, feels like a fallacy. However, and there is a big however, if I think back to my first job in the valley, I had arrived out of investment banking and News Corp, both of which are aggressive cultures. Largely been award for my — awarded for aggressiveness, right? Then promoted all I’ve gotten. Great projects. And my very first job in the valley on the second day, I’m in the office in my late 20s. My boss tells me that I’ve scared the secretaries. I mean, on day two, and I said, what do you mean I scared the secretary?

SREENIVASAN: By doing what?

CASSIDY: By doing what? Exactly. I didn’t know. And of the ensuing six months, in my first job in the Valley, I become increasingly less confident of my ability to succeed, despite having come from these hyper aggressive, male dominated cultures, and banking and media. I get told that I’m the rookie on the team, even though I see this volatile, very senior male colleague, not my boss, but somebody else he managed who takes tantrums in the office, who gets what he wants. And I’m asking for more responsibility and I’m getting increasingly diminishing tasks. I mean, I’m writing marketing collateral, not that there’s anything wrong providing marketing collateral. You know, I’ve been used to being this like hot shot who gets to like, you know, help take companies public and, you know, is trusted. And I challenged him on that. Again, I kept getting these sort of rookie statements. By month six, I quit. And luckily for me, instead of leaving the Valley, which I really thought about. I really thought, like gosh, maybe I’m just not meant to be here. I ended up at a start-up called Junglee with five computer scientist founders, out of Stanford, all — kind of the tribe of the Indian mafia at the time, right? They’ve all gone, be very successful. And they gave me a shot at a job, at company called Junglee. And I think I hired as product manager by day two. They put me in the business development job. And my very first day in the job, by the way, that was same job I had at the company that I just left. Feeling very insecure. I’ve been going to the — to start a start-up and like my career takes it off. They give me, again, incredible amounts of responsibility, Amazon buys the company six months later. You know, I’m part of the key team that goes to Amazon. My reputation is built and a way I go. And I have a very successful career as it trends out of business development before becoming a general manager.

SREENIVASAN: So tell me a little bit about Boardlist. Why did you start it?

CASSIDY: I came back to sort of an idea I had discussed with the D.C. like when they came to me and said, Sukhinder, how do we solve the women in tech problem in a private conversation? I said, well, you guys always talk about this is the problem of women against them. I’m like, you realize, you can solve a lot of problem without having to wait two generations. I’m like, you’ve got every series B company and beyond and they don’t even have a single woman on their board. So if you really wanted to change the game, I said to VCX in question, why would you just declare and get your some fellow V.C.s (INAUDIBLE) and every series B company and beyond has a woman on its board. You could change the culture right now and you could start at the top. And the VC said in question, hey, that’s a great idea. Six months later, it’s like, did you do anything with that idea though? No. So maybe I should just go straight to founders again and people I’ve respect and say, hey, why don’t we just build a product that helps get more women on board? And why don’t we use technology to do it and the Boardlist was born from the idea that you can crowdsource a number of amazing women today and make available a curated marketplace where people can discover great board talent that’s diverse. And you can solve that sort of mythical problem that there are not enough women for grade.

SREENIVASAN: So, how many women were in that network now?

CASSIDY: So the Boardlist today has about 14,000 members, organically built over the last three years.

SREENIVASAN: How do you get on the Boardlist?

CASSIDY: You have to be nominated by somebody with board experience. That network includes amazing endorsers, that’s what we call them. People like Reid Hoffman or Zander Lurie who runs SurveyMonkey. People who have board experience who nominate people they know from their networks to serve on boards. And then the other half of the marketplace is women who seeks to serve. Today, we’ve had 1400 different companies from private to large global public companies use the Boardlist to find the first board talent. About almost 50 percent of the placements onto boards that are influenced by the Boardlist of women who have never served on the board before. But who are imminently qualified, right? You just want to solve the problem of discovery.

SREENIVASAN: That’s part of the problem is that most of these people in their personal networks don’t include women in the first place.

CASSIDY: Well, it’s not that founders are not intended. I don’t even think it’s the average board director is not intended. I think it’s that they use their first-order network. And if those first-order networks are white and male, well then, how do you find trusted people to bring into your company or to your board?

SREENIVASAN: The S&P 500, there was a recent number that just about 25 percent of the composition of the S&P 500’s boards are women. You still have —

CASSIDY: A long way to go.

SREENIVASAN: Right. And that’s with something like the Boardlist that exist, that’s with at least a national conversation about this bubbling —

CASSIDY: Yes. Without a national mandate, obviously, California has one. But on private companies, that number drops to about 11 percent of all board seats, and that includes investors, right? If you have a female investor that counts towards the board seat versus independence. The numbers are still low, you’re right. And look, I think it’s not just a question of making women, you know, great with female talent or the first talent now. As you know, board tenure, it was a big part of the issue, right? So if you look at the stats, what’s encouraging is more recently, open board seats. You find, I think, a pretty significant number and when can come back with the exact numbers of open board seats going to diverse talent. So that certainly kind of a portion of what’s opened. But the issue is if you don’t have board terms and any requirement to refresh your board, and to bring in the skills that needs to be successful, and the diverse perspectives, there’s just no room.

SREENIVASAN: So what’s the kind of easiest business case that you can make? I mean, is it just that it’s good for business to have a more diverse set of leaders?

CASSIDY: Absolutely. I mean, look, I think that you and probably — you’ve probably seen all the research. There’s no doubt that diverse teams outperform, both the executive level and the board level and there’s plenty of data whether it’s from capitalists or others that supports that fact. That’s the business case, right? I think the — I think the imperative for boards today goes far beyond that. You’ve got disruptions with technology. You’ve got a changing consumer, right? Whether that’s millennial consumer, whether that is the female and household being sort of the chief purchaser. You’ve got a changing demographic of employees. So you can say that base imperative is business performance. But if you look at the level of change that most companies are going through, and their customer-based, their employee-based, and technology, why wouldn’t you rush to the doors, you know, to create those sets of perspectives on your board?

SREENIVASAN: So last night, I went on the app, I tried to find some Lizzo tickets in D.C.

CASSIDY: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: And the Lizzo tickets was a pair of tickets — I didn’t even know that it was expensive to go to her concerts. But two tickets for her are 150 bucks a piece, $300. And then all of a sudden, by the time I get to the very end of the transaction, it’s $400, right? And that’s one of the concerns that people have had is that why isn’t that greater transparency in the very beginning? And I would know OK, if this is for $400, I can’t afford it. So why not put the full all-in price up front in the transaction?

CASSIDY: Back in about 2013, I think it was 2013 and 2014, staff have, in fact, tried what you’re suggesting. We took the all-in price of the ticket, and we moved it all the way up to the beginning of what we would call our buy flip, right? So very upfront, at the top of the flow you saw with the all-in price was. Unfortunately, the rest of the industry didn’t follow. What does that mean? It meant that for the customers, there was confusion. Because they looked at StubHub and they looked at other marketplaces. And, in fact, I believe we were 20 percent more expensive than our competitors because we actually took the action to give them transparency first. So for a feature like the one you’re talking about to kind of work, we wanted to work for everyone. We would love to see all boats rise. We would love to see every ticketer get to the same level of transparency and trust at the same time. Because we live in an environment where the customer is comparing apples and oranges and isn’t even aware. So today, you know, as you know, everybody puts their buy fees towards the bottom of the funnel. If everybody in the entire industry went to the top of the funnel, that would be a great way to make sure that the consumer was able to compare apples to apples. But that would need to happen across the industry.

SREENIVASAN: Well, this seems like a failure of the market to regulate itself. I mean, this seems like a case where somebody in the government is going to step in with a piece of legislation based on a bunch of complaints and say, hey, enough. People are angry about this that as an industry, you’ll have to do it.

CASSIDY: Well, interestingly, that speaks to another point. We spend a lot of time in D.C. working, in fact, with regulators because we actually do want to see a fair and equivalent marketplace for consumers for tickets. So there’s the BOTS Act, which you may or may not be aware passed that really was about consumer protection on one side. There’s a proposed new piece of legislation called the BOTS Act which, in fact, you know, contains thoughts around fan transferability of a ticket, which I noted earlier, is a really big and important issue, particular as tickets become more mobile. Ideas like all-in pricing, what you’re talking about. Do you move the kind of — we’re in our buy or flow. Do you show, you know, the all-in price of the ticket, display fees and fees? And in fact, I think the government does think about how to help this industry regulate itself. And we think of the most important thing is — was what I talked about before, which is we offer higher standards, but we want those higher standards equivalently applied to every player in ticketing.

SREENIVASAN: A lot of tickets are coming from Live Nation and Ticketmaster. What if those guys to say, you know what? If you want to deal with tickets, it’s really got to be our own marketplace. You can’t buy it on StubHub.

CASSIDY: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: What happens?

CASSIDY: We believe any market, including ticketing, thrives when fans have choice of where they buy and sell. To your point, why do I worry about how sellers might interpret our fees or on one side or the other?

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

CASSIDY: Because my entire reputation of this business is built on fan trust and transparency. So we know we are held to that standard every day. And if we need to go back and figure out what else we need to do to create a better experience, I live and die by that sword.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

CASSIDY: But when we talk about Live Nation and Ticketmaster, I think you point to sort of an important thing in this ecosystem, which is if you control the venue, and you control the artists, and you control the ticketing or the place they get the original ticket. Now, you also have a business that’s competitive with StubHub because you also have a resale marketplace. Your ability to try and control the value chain is pretty significant. So I think when you ask — sort of ask the question, well, what happens if Live Nation says, gosh, we want everybody to transact on our platform. I would say, well, that’s a pretty anti-competitive environment for the fans. And I would go at it the other way which says, you know, there are millions of tickets that are being moved and bought and sold by fans everyday around the country. And the, first and foremost, thing we node to insure is, they can take that ticket and transfer it and go to the venue they intended or I can sell it to you and you ought not be turned down at a stadium by virtue of, you know, who controls everything in the ecosystem. So we believed pretty strongly that whether you’re Live Nation, and Ticketmaster, whether you’re StubHub, the number one responsibility is the right for fans to buy and sell what they choose, and to freely and safely, and trustedly (ph) interact, right? And be able to get into any stadium, any concert venue, if they bought a legitimate ticket.

SREENIVASAN: Sukhinder, thanks so much for joining us.

CASSIDY: Thank you.