Why your company needs new rituals w/Shishir Mehrotra (YouTube, Coda)
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You need more than a good product to scale – you need strong rituals. All companies have rituals, from holding all-hands meetings to measuring KPIs. The right rituals in the right places help build your culture, cohere your team, and home in on your targets. The wrong ones can lead you horribly astray. Shishir Mehrotra, former head of YouTube and co-founder of Coda, learned this when he scaled YouTube to a billion hours of watch time each day. He kept the team focused on that audacious goal by establishing fresh new rituals. And in his new role as CEO and founder of Coda, he's learned to constantly ask: What old rituals are holding us back? And what new rituals can we create together that will be inclusive, empowering — and keep us all moving forward? Cameo appearances: George Kembel (Stanford's d.School), Tobi Lütke (Shopify), and Dr. Akhila Cadet (Change Cadet).
Read more about the rituals at Coda — and add your own here: https://coda.io/@shishir/masters-of-scale-rituals
Read a transcript of this episode at https://mastersofscale.com
Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter at https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now, |
| 0:07.8 | with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed. |
| 0:17.0 | We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time. |
| 0:24.7 | So search for rapid response in your podcast player and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes. |
| 0:31.2 | I'll see you on the other side. |
| 0:32.8 | We took the executives out. |
| 0:34.8 | We took the red couches out to the parking lot and we had red couches |
| 0:38.0 | out to the parking lot and we had red couch races. So two people would sit on the couch. Like two people would |
| 0:48.8 | push them. |
| 0:50.3 | That's George Kimball, co-founder of the D School at Stanford University. |
| 0:58.0 | Couch Racing may sound like a stunt from George's student days, but it's actually one of the many rituals he helped develop as a co-founder of the world famous design school. |
| 1:07.0 | And those couches were for more than just high speed, hijinks. |
| 1:12.0 | An iconic part of the classroom is red couches on wheels. |
| 1:16.0 | That you could circle up and have a human debrief, |
| 1:21.0 | or a very human conversation because you weren't behind a desk. You're a... a human |
| 1:25.0 | conversation because you weren't behind a desk. |
| 1:24.0 | You're in a human setting. |
| 1:29.0 | George, an IDEO founder David Kelly, |
| 1:32.0 | set up the D School in 2003 its aim to nurture |
| 1:36.0 | innovation and creativity across all disciplines including high-speed |
| 1:40.5 | furniture face-offs. The D-schools' |
| 1:43.5 | makeshift origins and entrepreneurial spirit |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WaitWhat, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of WaitWhat and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.