← BRAVE COMMERCE
BRAVE COMMERCE
Mondelez’s Andrew Lederman on Bringing Startup Agility to Global Digital Commerce
00:21:13
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- [00:00]
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Andrew Letterman
I need a coffee.
- [00:41]
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Andrew Letterman
I think there's something amazing about going for the big opportunity. What are the needle movers that are going to fundamentally change your P and L? Things that will get you to grow or save costs at an extreme kind of level. Doing a lot of very, very tiny moves that won't get you in trouble but will keep things kind of as they are is not that interesting to me. Taking the big swings, pushing away the fear of failure and going for it is definitely more interesting and I think, to be honest, it's an imperative today. Startups are coming for you. The barrier to entry is lower than ever.
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Rachel Tippograph
Welcome to today's episode of Creative Commerce.
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Sarah Hofstadter
I'm Rachel Tippograph, the founder and CEO of Micmac.
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Rachel Tippograph
And I'm Sarah Hofstadter, chairwoman of Profitero plus.
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Sarah Hofstadter
And this is a show that talks about what's relevant in commerce for the world's biggest brand. Sarah, I recently visited you in your corporate office in New York City and I actually laughed to myself when I entered the building because I was like, this is so, so corporate. What is Sarah doing here?
- [02:19]
Rachel Tippograph
Yeah, sometimes I could feel like a fish out of water. But you know, one of the things that keeps me seen in being part of a multi billion dollar conglomerate is reminding myself that my little corner of the woods can be as entrepreneurial as I want it to be. It starts with mindset. Very different from the Micmac offices, I would say, where the entrepreneurial mindset is just woven into every inch of your office.
- [02:45]
Sarah Hofstadter
Well, also, you haven't been to my new office yet, which is a little bit more swanky.
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Rachel Tippograph
When I say entrepreneurial, I don't mean like shitty and scrappy. No, I mean like, like the culture is in everything. And no, I haven't been to the new office, but I've been on enough virtual falls to to see the digs and recognize like this is a branded environment. And it reminds me of when early days of 360I and early days of Propterra, which was you feel the vibe in every step you take. And I think when you get to bigger companies trying to retain that culture and that vibe is very different because if you're a big company and you've got lots of divisions and lots of sub brands and all that other stuff, it's very different from just being knick knack. Right.
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Sarah Hofstadter
Why do you think some executives can make the transition from small companies to big companies and others can't?
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Rachel Tippograph
Well, first of all, you have to have confidence that you know what you're doing and that you recognize what you're coming from and what you're going to and what you want to keep and what you don't want to keep. And often it comes with who's your boss and do they support that. So in the case of our coming guest Andrew, who works for Jonathan Halverson, who I think is one of the people that have been able to balance an entrepreneurial spirit in a large organization, and he brought in Andrew, who also comes from an entrepreneurial background. It's like you're giving them enough of a playground to do what they need to do, but enough of the backing to actually have the scale to execute it right. That's a very difficult balance. You need a really good boss and you need to have a good amount of self awareness of what you can kind of get away with doing. But you know what? Mindset trumps a lot of things.
- [04:32]
Sarah Hofstadter
It's so funny. I'm thinking back to my first week at Gap and my boss, who is the global cmo, Seth Bardman. The first thing he said to me is ask for forgiveness after the fact. The reason why I was able to be successful in that environment is because of what you just said. My boss gave me air cover and created an environment where I was allowed to break the rules.
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Rachel Tippograph
It's an incredible lesson for all of us. I mean, more set, Seth's, more halvas, more Andrews in the world because otherwise, otherwise we're just caretakers in our job. Forget about change agents. So I'm thrilled that we have Andrew on. He's only a few months into his role in Mondelez and already making an impact.
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Sarah Hofstadter
Well, let's bring Andrew onto the show today.
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Rachel Tippograph
We have quite the get. Quite the get. I'm so thrilled that Andrew Letterman, VP of Global Digital Commerce at Mondelez, has agreed to join us on the podcast. And it only took one actual request. I even say, like, oh, my gosh, when is he going to be ready to talk? When is he going to be ready? And I guess the timing worked out. So. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [05:40]
Andrew Letterman
Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. And Sarah's, you're a good salesperson. One and done. You closed me quick. It was really easy. So I'm really happy to be here with y'. All.
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Rachel Tippograph
Timing is everything. I was just biding my time. Well, kind of to get in it, you know, One of the things that struck me even when you and I first met is the breadth of your career. The fact that people can go to your LinkedIn and see the whole story of Abi and all of the great things you did from an entrepreneurial perspective. But, like, if I had to look at, like, almost like a keyword optimization of your career, it would be agility, curiosity, entrepreneurship, and most certainly Mondelez. As is evidenced by some of the prior guests that we've had on Brave Commerce from Mondelez, like John Halverson and Francesca and G and many others. You guys are definitely of the more agile. How do you balance the size and scale of this global juggernaut with the mindset of the startup that you so naturally possess?
- [06:43]
Andrew Letterman
That's a great question. Look, I think in a perfect world, we're all going to be as agile as a startup, but that's just not the real world we live in. Right. So I come back to what you mentioned about the mindset of a startup, and I think it's, how do we grasp that? What does that actually mean? To me, I think about ownership and passion. Sometimes that passion borderlines and a little bit of obsession, but that's okay. Sometimes that's healthy as well.
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Rachel Tippograph
We welcome that. We welcome that.
- [07:08]
Andrew Letterman
But I think if you think about that, how do you apply that into a larger corporate setting, which will ultimately bring agility and action? Right? And to me, I found that for myself, you know, five months into this job, around the responsibility of our brands. We have amazing iconic brands that have been around forever, ones that I've grown up on, and the responsibility to bring those brands to the next generation of consumers gives me the passion and the ownership that I need to apply the kind of startup mentality that I've always utilized into my job today. So I think that's where like the mindset needs to come from. But I do also think that like a little more operationally, Mondelez is set up in a kind of global, local type fashion that works really well for us. The local teams have the authority and agility to go and do what they need to do on a regular basis. And we are a local first organization. We don't want to get caught up in bureaucracy. And it's actually a really positive thing for me from a global perspective to be able to focus on the future of E commerce and see around the corners, understand what's next, start chasing where we need to go. Because as all of you know very well, digital commerce is very fast moving and what we're going to be doing in three to five years is probably very different than what we're doing today. So it actually helps us for me to be able to focus a little bit more on where we need to go long term and strategically.
- [08:40]
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- [10:09]
Sarah Hofstadter
It'S so interesting thinking about the energy that you bring from the startup world. I'm just curious being a product of that for the last 11 years, not all of your peers come from that type of DNA. And so how do you get everyone to move as fast as you?
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Andrew Letterman
You can't always move as fast as you want to, especially in large companies. You have to make sure that you have everybody else on the bus with you when you're driving quickly. So I think it starts from a place of empathy. To be very honest, not everybody's had the same experiences I've had. They've had different experiences where maybe some of that fear of failure or concerns about speed come from a fair place and you have to hear them out, listen to them. And I think, to be honest, it's a big piece of this is inspiration. Get people onto the same page and make them see the vision of the future that you see. And I think that's. I find it a huge privilege to get to actually bring that to others and show them what I see and bring them along for the ride.
- [11:08]
Sarah Hofstadter
It's amazing that you feel that you're a steward of the North Star. It sounds like you get a lot of energy from doing that for others. In cpg, it's interesting. I have found that not everyone is like a mission driven organization and instead they spend a lot of time looking at the competition because their paycheck could be tied to, you know, protecting or growing market share. And so how do you think about balancing likely the traditional CPG metrics that everyone has to be accountable to while pushing them towards that North Star?
- [11:40]
Andrew Letterman
The metrics are important and focusing on these, it's not a nice to have, it's a need to have. So we still have to do this piece on a regular basis. But I think this focus on competition is important on some level. It's good to know what everybody else is up to. But I'm actually not that interested in just copying or being as good as my competition. I want to be better. I want to focus on the consumer and that consumer centricity. Most startups talk about consumer centricity and this is a place that comes very naturally for me. But I think what it does is it gets you in front of competition, it gets you thinking about your consumer and solving real problems. What are their issues? What are the problems that they're having on a regular basis? What is the right innovation skews that matter to them? What is the convenience factors that they need from the way in which they purchase to achieve what they need to in their life? I think it's really about just getting back to the consumer centricity and making it much more simple. The over complication of focused on competitors can actually stop you from being Innovative and getting in front.
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Rachel Tippograph
I mean, I think that's indicative of both the Mondelez mindset, but also yours. I said earlier that people can just go check out your LinkedIn to see the whole pedigree. But. But do you mind giving us a little bit of a. Just a quick briefer on. On your entrepreneurial thing? Because I think it'll just help people get better in the minds of how you think and who you are.
- [13:03]
Andrew Letterman
Break my career up in kind of three segments. Starting off with being part of the founding team of a company called OpenSky B2C Marketplace that we worked on for nine years. Ultimately selling that business to Alibaba in which I was there for about two years working on globalization strategy and cross border trade. After that I met Ricardo Tadeo, the Chief Growth officer of abi and I joined ABI to launch BE and run the marketplace business for Beast, which is selling everything that's not beer just to start with those two pieces. So I kind of consider my first round with Open sky into Alibaba as a more entrepreneurial startup type vision and view. Then going to ABI got to really do a startup within a large organization. Bees was able to run very independently and move really, really fast and I saw the impact that we could make the marketplace business. We were able to take it to $1.4 billion in four years while I was there. From zero. That would have taken an incredible amount of time in a traditional startup background. So that was a really, really amazing experience to get to do the startup inside of the big company. And now in this kind of third leg of my career, coming into Mondelez, taking on a $3 billion digital commerce business and bringing it into the future and seeing where we can go from here, which is a very bright future for us. Looking forward to.
- [14:27]
Rachel Tippograph
I think it's really interesting how public not just yourself and Halbo have been on your digital commerce ambition, but how that actually translates into the way Dirk, your CEO talks and having that top down approach, but also seeing it come up through in the ways of working in day in and day out within the organization. I think a lot of that comes to making big swings and but also making sure that you're dealing with things at the very ticky tack level. And you and I have had this conversation and probably due to both of our love of baseball, albeit maybe not necessarily always the same team, about taking big swings versus bunts. I loved the way you had broken that down for me. Can you share that with the audience?
- [15:13]
Andrew Letterman
I think there's something amazing about Going for the big opportunity. What are the needle movers that are going to fundamentally change? Change your P and L. Things that will get you to grow or save costs at an extreme kind of level. Doing a lot of very, very tiny moves that won't get you in trouble, but will keep things kind of as they are is not that interesting to me. Taking the big swings, pushing away the fear of failure and going for it is definitely more interesting. And I think, to be honest, it's an imperative. Today. Startups are coming for you. The barrier to entry is lower than ever. And being able to break into the digital commerce world, we won't have to name them, but you see companies starting in a year, later, they're climbing the charts on Amazon or running an incredible D2C business. You've got to take the swings to match the consumer needs and solve their problems. Having that passion and fire, even aggressiveness in corporate America is important today. This is what will happen. Keep you relevant and make sure you win. Just to give another sports analogy, if you treat every single day like the super bowl, you're going to do better overall versus competition to solve your consumer problems. That's where I think you have to spend the time. If you spend your time on the small things, somebody else is coming for you. They're going to outwork you if you let them.
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Sarah Hofstadter
With the ambition that Mondelez has, you can't do it by yourself. I'm sure you have a ecosystem of partners, and similar to you, the partner ecosystem has competition. We imagine you're probably getting hit up every single day by the next great AI application. How do you separate the signal from the noise?
- [16:59]
Andrew Letterman
It is a challenge. Let's put it this way. I'll start off with, I have done sales in my life. I know sales and I know that side of the universe. The most important lesson you'll ever learn in sales is listening and listening. A lot of times people will try and pitch me or sell me on their vision of what their thing does and why it's important. And when I explain I don't have that problem or that's not a large cost center in my P and L often goes on deaf ears and they continue on with the script that they're reading. And I think that really listening is actually the real value of a great partner that you can see. And what does that look like for me? How do I think about this? I think about business impact first. So this comes back to the needle movers and where are we going to spend our time? It needs to Be a big enough item. It needs to be something that's relevant enough for us to go and spend our time on it. And luckily, with our structure and the way we think about how we spend our time and who we partner with, I'm able to think about now, which really for now is next year, to be honest with you, at this point, and then next, which is in three to five years and figure out who are the right partners to help in different positions in different places. I've been lucky to manage P and LS for a long time now. And if you have a P and L management perspective, it makes life a little easier on deciding where you spend your time. Because the numbers don't lie and they don't have an incredibly fancy sales pitch with a great deck. It's usually pretty simple on an Excel sheet that you can figure out. And I look for partners that understand that kind of business impact and understand how to help me move the business forward in a real way. That's kind of what I look for when it comes to it. I think it's incredible to me. I will say that there are a lot of folks out there who don't have great business cases on why you should be working with them or using their technology or using their type of solution or something along these lines. And I think that that's really some of the most important piece. Having a little of that GM mindset integrated into kind of the sales and business development approach is incredibly important, at least for me.
- [19:05]
Sarah Hofstadter
Oftentimes it's because the DNA of the leadership could be deeply rooted in technology and not business. And so it's great advice.
- [19:12]
Andrew Letterman
It comes back to what I said about our consumers. It's about solving problems for your customers, whether that be consumers or an enterprise. It's about solving the problems. So first step is listening, understanding those problems and then going out and finding the solution to solve them.
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Rachel Tippograph
So, Andrew, you've been in the role for five months, just a few months now, and you've got a global remit. You talked about the global local bottle. How do you figure out which markets or brands to prioritize as you think through those big swings?
- [19:41]
Andrew Letterman
Look, I think again it comes back to business impact. So if we are thinking overall, you've got to spend your time and attention on the views that are driving the largest amount of revenue into your business. That is just the truth. I tend to get to set up my schedule and my time to think a good point portion of my effort towards the future. So when I get to do that I'm making strategic bets on where I see certain things going. So, for example, social commerce in the West, I think is a huge opportunity. I used to work at Alibaba. I know China pretty well. Our China team does an incredible job with social commerce there. Our Southeast Asia team does a great job as well. But we need to continue to bring that out into the west and grow that into the opportunity I believe it could be. When I think about things like agentic shopping and where technology is bringing us, that's where I look to spend my time. So a little bit of a combo answer. I'll say, let's call it 50% of my time spent. I think about today and making sure that I'm spending the time, the largest bus with the largest customers, working on the largest problems that can actually trigger growth. And then on the other 50%, it's about placing bets for a little bit of the longer term. And it's a little bit of a combo of art and science. It's about seeing the trends of where they're going. But then also you got to make bets and sometimes you're going to be wrong. But that's a big piece. Piece of it. And this comes back to our big swing conversation. You've gotta make a decision and go for it. And then it's all about excellence in your operations and make sure you get it done right.
- [21:12]
Sarah Hofstadter
The worst thing you could do in business is do nothing. So in complete agreement?
- [21:16]
Andrew Letterman
Absolutely. Absolutely, Rachel.
- [21:19]
Sarah Hofstadter
So, Andrew, we gotta ask you our famous last question. What's the bravest thing you've ever done?
- [21:24]
Andrew Letterman
I did listen to a few of the podcasts, so I thought about this one a lot, to be honest with you. I think it was actually a very hard question. Spoke to my wife about it. I really wasn't sure. So originally I was thinking about when I first went to China, when I just New Yorker, no global experience, didn't know what I was doing. And we were working, you know, with Alibaba for the first time and going through kind of that process. I definitely had some imposter syndrome in that one. Then I thought about meeting Ricardo Tadeo and leaving an interview with him and going, I have no idea how to do a business transformation for AB InBev or something like this. This is bigger than what I know how to do and had that imposter syndrome again. But the truth is, what I kept coming back to was becoming a father to me is it's not a job that you can leave and go start somewhere else. You're in it for life. I never held a baby before I held my own son, so it was very scary. Still scary. He's three now, but, you know, I think that is truly the most brave thing anybody can ever do is raise a child in an incredibly difficult world and have them set up for success, but also feel loved and cared about. It's still to this day the best experience of my life, and I've had some cool, great experiences, but that one is probably my bravest and best thing I've ever done. I think most brave things that we do end up being the best things.
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Sarah Hofstadter
That we do, hopefully one day. Your son listens to this episode and knows that he beat beer and China.
- [22:56]
Andrew Letterman
Yes, that's beer, candy and China. And we're still picking Harry.
- [23:01]
Sarah Hofstadter
Well, Andrew, thank you for letting us pick your brain. We're excited to see what Mondelez Global accomplishes next and catch you on the flip side.
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Andrew Letterman
Thank you guys so much for having me. This was really fun. I really appreciate it.
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Rachel Tippograph
If you like what you heard and.
- [23:15]
Sarah Hofstadter
You want to go check out an episode we did way back when with Andrew's boss, John Halvorson, go find that episode with John Halvorson from Mondelez in the archives. If you like what you heard, write a review. Thanks for listening.
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Andrew Letterman
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