Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:39
Love that. And then what do you view your superpower as then?
Adam Miller: 16:45
I’d say my leadership style is definitely player-coach. And if I have a superpower, it’s understanding at a high level what the goals are. What’s the top line? What’s kind of the easy way to explain what we’re doing? But it’s also understanding the details. So being able to go super deep. And one of the things that I could do, even as Cornerstone got really big. So by the time I sold the company, we had 3000 employees. It was a big company, right? I started in my apartment and grew that big. And I hired the first 250 people literally. I then hired everyone who would be able to hire anybody else, and then I hired all the leaders. So I’ve, I’ve hired thousands of people literally, and I’ve done thousands of interviews, and what I learned along the way is that you have to understand the details and you have to understand what other people are working on.
So one of the things I’d be able to do, even when the company got much bigger, is I would know what you were working on, and that would freak people out. Like, how was it that I knew what you were working on? But I think that an important part of being a leader is understanding what the roles are, what the importance of those roles is, and how they contribute to the bigger picture. And being able to go down to that level of detail is something that you often don’t see. Someone described it as having, you know, your head in the clouds and the feet and your feet on the ground, that you’re able to do both things at the same time. And most people are one or the other, right? They’re either overly tactical and not strategic or overly strategic and not tactical. And to be truly effective, you have to do both.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:53
I’m sure that gains a lot of respect too, because people are like, oh, this, this guy has his finger on the pulse of things, even though he’s, you know, running the company.
Adam Miller: 19:03
Well, that’s the player part of the player-coach, right? Right. You’re not in the owner’s box. You’re not sitting away from the field and just complaining about what’s happening. You were on the field. You know what’s going on. And that, you know, some people call this leading from the front. There are all different terms for this kind of behavior. Some people talk about founder mode, right? It’s all the same thing. It’s being able to be on the ground and know the details of what’s happening.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:36
You know, really leading and having extensive operational experience go together in a lot of ways. And, I want to talk about some of the near-death experiences you had with the company, because it really just demonstrates some of the hard decisions you have to make at certain times. And one that sticks out to me, and if there are any others you can, you can tell me. But one that sticks out to me was the payroll story where you’re, you can’t make payroll, and then what do you do? I mean, what do you do there?
Adam Miller: 20:15
Yeah. So I spent about seven, the first seven years of the business, raising money. So I got very lucky that first day. Right. The story we talked about was where I announced I’m leaving and people handed me money, but that wasn’t enough to keep the company growing over time. And so I tried to raise venture capital for many, many years. And it was a slog. So I ended up having to raise money. We talked about why this was true, but at the time, I had a company in LA before there were really many tech companies in Los Angeles, and most of the money was still in Silicon Valley. It was before the venture world had become more distributed. And so the bar for getting money from Silicon Valley was much, much higher for companies that were not within driving distance because it meant, theoretically, that the venture capitalists or the partner would have to get on a plane to go to meetings.
And so the bar was, of course, much higher than if they had to get in their car and drive 20 minutes to go to a meeting. And as a result, because we were kind of similar to other startups, we didn’t differentiate at first, and we weren’t able to get that capital. So I got turned down by a lot of venture capitalists up and down Sand Hill Road and everywhere else. But I was able to raise money from friends and family. And so year after year started with my family and my closest friends, and then it went to friends of friends, and then it was friends of friends of friends, but it was essentially that network going to what today we would call angels. This was before there were a lot of angel investors in the venture world, and getting small checks and those checks added up. But at some point, the company was still going. It was 2005. We had tried to raise venture capital. We actually had hired a bank to help us raise capital.
It was a boutique bank in LA Lei, and I had a meeting with the partner at that bank who was overseeing the project, who said, Adam, you know what? We appreciate that you’re working hard. And this is an interesting business, and there’s a lot of opportunity here, but we’re going to have to stop working on this. And I’m like, what are you talking about? You’re supposed to be raising us money. You told me you had all these firms lined up that were potentially going to invest. He was like, ” Look, I don’t think they’re going to do it. And I have other projects I need to work on. So we’re just going to part ways. And I said, ” Are you saying you’re firing me as a client? And that’s basically what happened. They said they weren’t going to help us anymore, and we already were running out of money at that point. And I thought, oh man, we are really screwed because we’re now five years into this.
We have very little capital. And the people I thought were raising our money aren’t coming through, and didn’t really give me very much warning either. So we were on very thin ice. I was able to go back to some of the people who had invested and able to get some people to put up money, but their deal was, we will only put up this money if you get we’ll give you X, but only if you raise Y. So I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was something like we needed to raise $1 million, but we only had had raised $600,000 and we couldn’t take any of the 600,000 unless we raise the million. And so I flew to New York, and I went to every single person I knew and asked them for money, and everybody said, no, everybody. And I went to friends, friends of friends, family, everybody I could possibly go to. And they all said no.
Now, I had raised the 600, but I couldn’t get the other 400. And so I was very depressed. And I went to lunch with two of my friends from growing up, and they said, ” Why do you seem so depressed? I hadn’t seen these guys in a little while, and they said, why you seem so depressed? I said that because I don’t know what to do. I need to raise as much money and I can’t get these dollars. It doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but the company is going to go out of business if I don’t do this, and we’re going to miss our payroll. And my CFO was calling me incessantly that we’re going to miss payroll. If you don’t get the money in four days, in three days, in two days. And I had no money, I had already maxed out all my credit cards. And my friend says, ” Well, how badly do you need the money? I said, I really need the money. He said, ” Well, how badly? I said, well, the company’s going to go under if I don’t do something.
He said, all right, I have an idea. Now, these guys had a gambling problem. And so they had a bookie that they worked with. And this is not the kind of money you want to take. And they said, you’ve got to be really clear, if you take this money, that you’re going to pay it back, and you have to be really certain that you’re able to do this. And I ended up Meeting. This guy was a loan shark. He gave me the loan I wired. We wired the money. It came a day later, but we had missed payroll. Because I was down to the last day to make payroll. We had missed payroll. The money gets wired. We’re able to close escrow. We pull down the money and pay payroll. The employees are saying, how come we didn’t get paid? And the CFO is like, ” What are you talking about? You got paid payroll. You get paid on the 16th. What do you mean?
And actually, we had missed payroll by a day, and we were able to pay the guy back the next day. He made a fortune off that deal because he got a ton of warrants with the money he put in. So the interest rate was insane. It was a daily interest rate. But on top of that, there was a huge number of warrants that he got for the loan. We paid the loan back, drew down the money, made payroll, and then I was able to raise some more money in the company. Lived to fight another day. And we continued with the business. In 2007, I was able to convince Byron Deeter, who’s one of the top investors in the world now, to have Bessemer invest in Cornerstone. That became Byron’s first unicorn investment, and the rest is history. The company kind of took off from there.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:23
There’s just a lot of pressure with this whole situation, but it’s also a lot of pressure because you have taken your friends’ and family’s money, right? It’s like. Absolutely. I mean, I just interviewed The Birth of ESPN and the two authors and then Bill Rasmussen, who started ESPN. And I think the book’s coming out soon, but he did the same thing. He maxed out his credit cards, got friends and family money, and was on the brink of just going out of business early on. Right? I mean, I don’t think of ESPN as a startup until really talking to them about the story. But the same thing, like you’re you’re, you’re losing potentially your friends and family money. That’s a lot of pressure.
Adam Miller: 29:13
It’s a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure. And you have the employees, and you have your clients. So it’s a lot of pressure as CEO.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:23
There was another.
Adam Miller: 29:24
Figure your way through it. You figure a way through it, like we had a lot of crises. That was one of many. We had a crisis in 2001. We had 1 2008, with the financial crisis, we had another 1 in 2011. We were under activist attack in 2017. So we’ve been through the wringer. But you have to have your North Star. You have to understand what you’re trying to accomplish, and you have to have the perseverance to keep going and to overcome the obstacles that are in front of you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:56
Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty remarkable what you have to endure. And there was another, I mean, from a decision-making, there was another pivotal point in the company. And you’re in a boardroom. I think it was AOL. Is that right, AOL?
Adam Miller: 30:11
This is back in 2000 and this was back in 2000. In March of 2000, started the company in November, 99, March of 2000. We had been focused on building an online training system for adults. right? Basically, an online educational system for adults that we thought America Online could be the pivotal partner for. And this is hard for people to understand today, but back then, AOL was the kingmaker because AOL was basically Google and Facebook and Amazon all rolled into one, right? It was all of the top companies together in one. And we had worked very, very hard to cut a deal with AOL to become the premier sponsor of AOL’s Research and Learn Center, which essentially was their educational hub and in many ways, the educational hub of the web at the time, right, of the internet.
And AOL was in such a monopoly position that they would actually have people compete to be allowed to advertise with them and to be exclusive advertisers in the. Various sections of the system that they had. And so this was going to be the way that we became a really big internet company. And we had one. So after many, many meetings all over the country. And remember, we’re a tiny startup working day and night, including all nighters, we were able to be in a position to become the premier sponsor of this part of their site, and we had the chance to do it. We walk into the room. You have to remember that at this point in time, AOL was very arrogant. They were the kingmaker.
And we walk into the room to do the final meeting, and they throw the contract on the table, and they say, ” We’ve talked enough about this. You have two hours to sign, and they walk out of the room, and I thought, ” Wow, I thought, this stuff only happens in movies. This is really happening. And it was just my general counsel and me at the time, Steve Simon. And we’re sitting in the room, very freaked out about what had just happened. And I start pacing back and forth in the room, trying to decide what to do. And this is right when there started to be cracks in Internet 1.0, and it was before the Internet bubble burst, but we were pacing back and forth, and I turned to Steve, and I said, ” You know what? And we’re in a big conference room with a view of the bridge.
It was beautiful, and we were very intimidated. But I turned to him, I say, you know what? This just doesn’t feel right. Let’s get out of here. We did not sign it. We left about a month later, the internet bubble burst, and had we signed that deal, we would have been out of business without a doubt, because we would have been contractually obligated to pay them an amount that we never would have been able to get the return on. At that point in time, we pivoted the business to focus on B2B to start selling to companies right after that. But it was a very pivotal moment in the business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:01
What was it? Was it just the way they were acting? What does that gut feel like? You know what, because I know other companies that you’ve talked to in the past, other companies have done that deal, and it blew them up. Like it just in a good way. Like, it just they were Uber successful because of it. So there was something there. What was it?
Adam Miller: 34:22
It’s paying attention to just signals in the market. So at that time, there were signals that things were starting to break on the internet. It became obvious that there were going to be challenges. I also thought the way they were treating us was not making for a good partnership, and there was a lot of risk for the business of going into business with them at a time when we had no leverage, and the market started to be a little bit shaky, and I just thought, I gotta trust my gut here. And we left. Turned out to be right. You know, a similar thing happened after September 11th.
Our entire pipeline at the time was financial services companies, mostly in the northeast. And when September 11th happened, that whole industry shut down, and all my investors, again, friends and family said at the time, you’ve got to cut at least half the company. Now, we were a very small business. We only had like 15 people working there at the time. And if we cut the company, we wouldn’t be able to service any of the deals that we won. So another time, I remember I was home on September 12th and 13th, and really thinking about what I should do. The other managers at the company wanted me to cut people. All the investors wanted me to cut.
And I saw this great episode of West Wing on the. I think it was the night of the 12th. And on the 13th, I walked into the office and said, ” We’re hiring. And everyone said, ” Are you crazy? And I said, look, either we’re going to go out of business because we tried and we ran off the cliff, or we’re going to die a slow death by not being able to support anybody that we bring on. And we’re not going to be a successful business. And we went for it. We ended up closing three of the four deals we were working on, which funded the business, and we were able to build the company into something really substantial.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:51
Amazing. Adam, I know we have.
Adam Miller: 36:53
Leadership, also, right? Leaders have to make tough decisions on imperfect information. And part of the problem we have in politics is that a lot of times, the people in charge are not leaders. They don’t have that experience. They don’t know how to make tough decisions. And so they waffle, and they don’t decide. And systems break and don’t get better.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:19
You’ve been in the trenches. I know we have just a few minutes, but I wanted you to touch on some of the nonprofit side. Maybe talk about Team Rubicon, Better Angels, and the nonprofit front.
Adam Miller: 37:34
Yeah. So Team Rubicon was an incredible idea. I met a couple of Marines who had this idea that you take the experience of military personnel when they come back home as veterans and give them purpose by applying those skills to disaster zones. And I thought, this is an incredible idea. I became chairman, and we built that organization up into Team Rubicon with over 170,000 volunteers doing humanitarian relief all over the world. So we respond to disasters. We help cities prepare and get ready for the eventuality of a disaster, and we deal with disaster recovery. So the organization is incredible. right. Now we’re responding to we’re on 17 missions right now. And it’s just become an incredible disaster relief organization that also happens to be the top veteran service organization in the country at the same time.
So super successful. Another issue that I worked on after Cornerstone got sold in 2021, my wife and I decided we’re going to focus on intractable problems in Los Angeles. The most intractable problem is homelessness. Spent about a year and a half doing research on the issue, trying to understand why, with so much money and so many people working on it, the problem was not getting resolved. And what we found was that there’s no silver bullet. It’s a very complex problem that requires a holistic response. And we built an organization called Better Angels, which I run, that is focused on five pillars.
And today we do prevention services, shelter, housing, and technology to make the ecosystem work better, keep people off the street through our prevention programs, lift people off the street when they’re down with our services, programs and technology, and help have a real impact across the board. So it’s been an incredible program and had real results across the board, including keeping thousands of Angelenos housed and helping organizations be much more effective in their service delivery, building hundreds of units of affordable housing and about a third of the cost, and a third of the time that the city is doing today, all using the same kind of techniques that I talked about before, right? Bold thinking, pragmatism, fiscal responsibility, and effective leadership and operations.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:46
Adam, first of all, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey, your stories. Let me know if there’s any other place we should point people towards right now. You can go to votemiller.com, and you can support that way. Obviously, we’ve talked about the nonprofits as well, that you could check out Team Rubicon and BetterAngels.la. Any other places we should point people towards, or anything else we should mention before we go?
Adam Miller: 41:15
Yeah. I mean, I work on a number of different issues. So La-Tech.org is also super interesting. They. It’s an organization I started that has an internship program that’s become one of the most effective workforce development programs in Los Angeles, and one of the most successful technology workforce development programs in the country. We take 18 to 24-year-olds from underserved communities and get them internships at companies throughout LA. We’ve done since 2021. By the way, this organization was started in response to George Floyd’s murder and the challenges around inclusivity in these different industries.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:08
Is this right here?
Adam Miller: 42:10
Yeah, been a really successful program. We have delivered over 2000 internships just over the last few years, and this year alone will deliver another 500 internships and apprenticeships. So incredible a program. Very successful and very, very impactful. And another one that I started, and I’m chairman of. So I think the theme is I know how to get things done, and I can apply that to a city that desperately needs to get many things done.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:49
I love it. Everyone, check it out. Check out, you know, VoteMiller.com and the other sites that we talked about. And Adam, you know, thanks so much. Appreciate it.
Adam Miller: 43:00
All right. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Jeremy.
