Faisal Masud knows what it takes to lead a billion-dollar company to success.
The 49-year-old worked his way up to leadership positions at Amazon, Google, eBay and Staples for more than two decades. Now he’s trying to learn lessons from those successful companies as CEO of Fabric, a Seattle-based e-commerce startup founded in 2016 and valued at $1.5 billion. (The company stylizes its name as “Fabric” to avoid confusion with online insurance company Fabric Technologies.)
Masud was hired as CEO in 2020 by co-founder Ryan Bartley, with whom he had worked closely at Staples. When he took the job, Masud said he worked to use what he had learned from his previous employers to create a culture at Fabric that fostered empathy, efficiency and, most importantly, success.
“Culturally, we’ve built a company that’s kind of a hybrid of all the companies I’ve worked at,” Masud tells CNBC Make It. “We’re able to take the best learnings from the places where I’ve had experiences have to take with you and use.”
Fabric makes e-commerce software that essentially competes with platforms like Shopify and Salesforce. However, Masud points out that Fabric is specifically tailored for medium and large companies. This pitch is apparently music to the ears of investors, who have poured more than $293 million into the company.
Some of Masud’s success at Fabric has been a long time coming. He says he learned how work culture can impact a company’s bottom line at Amazon, where he spent nearly a decade tracking the dot-com bubble.
At Fabric, Masud preaches “Ownership,” one of Jeff Bezos’ famous 14 core leadership principles: When a team of employees or a single team leader “owns” an idea or project, the decision-making process can be made more efficient and effective. Masud says he has worked in environments where there were no owners and things became chaotic.
“If something failed, it was no one’s fault. If something was successful, everyone was allowed to celebrate,” he says. “That’s not how start-ups work. Someone has to make a decision.”
After leaving Amazon, Masud spent years at Google and eBay, where he learned a new workplace skill that was in direct contrast to Amazon’s culture: empathy.
“Being very empathetic towards your employees was also really important because that’s something Google does really well, and eBay does too, while Amazon wasn’t so good at it,” says Masud, who was eBay’s senior shipping director until 2012 until 2020 COO of Alphabet’s drone delivery division Project Wing.
Today, the “No. 1 value” that Masud tries to instill at Fabric grew out of these lessons about empathy in the workplace: “Seek to understand before you are understood.” Ensuring a “built-in” sense of empathy throughout Business, in his opinion, ultimately leads to better bottom line results.
“Listening carefully, rather than just because you have to, leads to a thought process that is different from rapid execution,” he says. “Our culture is kind of ingrained in us being good listeners. But we also use data and facts to make our decisions at the end of the day.”
Working with notable startup founders like Bezos and Google’s Sergey Brin, Masud also learned the importance of thinking long-term and focusing only on the core areas where your company excels.
“These founders always think extremely long-term,” says Masud. “You’re always asking yourself, ‘Okay, what’s the ultimate goal of where you want the company to go?'” And then finding a way to avoid the distractions along the way.”
Masud brought with him several senior employees who had also previously worked at Amazon to help instill some of these lessons at Fabric. He calls them the “Amazon Mafia,” and their experience with their former employer could be useful to him: Amazon recently launched a “Buy With Prime” service that competes with platforms like Shopify and Fabric.
Hiring former Amazon employees doesn’t necessarily mean Masud is trying to restore Amazon’s culture. “I don’t think every Amazonian is a good fit for Fabric,” he says, adding that he instead tried to “hand-pick” certain people who agreed with his vision for Fabric’s culture.
Overall, Masud says, the lessons he learned at his previous jobs prepared him surprisingly well for the CEO position: “As one of our investors put it, ‘You’ve spent the last two decades building Fabric. They just didn’t know.’ .’”
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