ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT Gokul Rajaram A decade ago, Gokul Rajaram fundamentally changed the way he makes decisions. Then a product management director for Google AdSense, he was presenting to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. A gnarly challenge related to Google’s display ads business surfaced, and the discussion got heated. Schmidt’s voice boomed, “Stop. Who’s responsible for this decision?” Three people — including Rajaram — simultaneously raised their hands. “I’m ending this meeting,” Schmidt said. “I don’t want you to return to this room until you ifgure out who the owner is. Three owners means no owner.” With that, the meeting was adjourned and the team dismissed. Ten years and three companies later, Rajaram still recalls and references that moment. Now at Square, he oversees Caviar, the company’s rapidly growing restaurant delivery service. Before that, Rajaram led the strategy and execution for Facebook’s advertising products atfer it acquired semantic technology startup Chai Labs, which he led as co- founder and CEO. At Google, he played a leadership role in building Google AdSense into a multi-billion dollar product line. Throughout his career, Rajaram has noticed how a lot of forward-thinking companies still gravitate to consensus as the way to make decisions. It turns out that for important, diiffcult choices, that approach is otfen ineffective and impractical. At First Round’s last CEO Summit, Rajaram shared a framework that he uses at Square and Caviar to make the most diiffcult decisions, all while assigning ownership, being inclusive and coordinating execution among all stakeholders. 33