The Exchanges

Q And maybe to wrap up where we always do, and this may be particularly tricky for you, given your career, but is there a person or persons that had an outsized impact on the way that you think about all these topics that we explored?

A Yeah, it was the first engineering manager at Netscape, a guy named Tom Paquin. He was the first engineering manager. I was kind of a new engineering manager in a different team at Netscape and Netscape once again, high buzz, instantly found that relevant party. And they were all hockey players and I was a hockey player. So playing hockey with all the founders for like two years. Um, and he was part of that crew. I left Netscape when, uh, just before they got bought by AOL and he actually came, this is, I really admired this guy, engineer from SGI and just super terribly smart. You know, these folks, you're like, Oh God, you're so much smarter than me. I'm not going to be like this ever. And, and he was just, he was just willing to give his time. And I was at the startup as their first Engineering leader. And he came over to consult for us. He was like our interim VP for like, I don't know, seven months or something like that. He said something that changed my life. And this is the moment that there was, it's the reason you and I are sitting here right now, by the way, he said, I was sitting in the ping pong room at Icarion, which is the name of the startup. And he goes, Hey Lop. I don't remember the reason we were having this conversation. He's like, you're a pretty good engineer. I'm like, oh, thanks. He's like, you're never going to be a great engineer. You're never going to…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it was the first engineering manager at Netscape, a guy named Tom Paquin.”

Q What does operationally sound mean in your mind?

A Um, operationally sound. You apply at my startup and, uh, this is 50 people, a hundred people. Do you get a quick response from somebody? Do you talk to someone who knows what they're doing? Uh, does the interview process happen quickly? Are you getting a clue about who you're going to talk to? When you actually show up for the interview, how does that go? Like, is there a conference room? Do, do the people know what they're Is it just Yolo conversation or is there someone who's clearly thinking about this? Everything I'm describing to you is someone creating an operation to do hiring. And I've been through lots of interviews where they didn't respond or it was clearly just sort of ad hoc interview process. And by the way, the excuse is it's a startup or just making up like that's, you don't get to say that you're building a product, but actually what you're building is a company and that's an operation, whether that's the recruiting or the sales or the product process or the quality process or whatever it is. And you're building it to scale. So if you're just shooting from the hip the entire time, you're going to get what you expect out of that. So operationally sound is, to me is, are the people who are building this thing, building it to scale? Are the operations are predictable? Are they understood? Or is it just like three smart people shooting from their hip, making it so…

AI assessment note: “operationally sound is, to me is, are the people who are building this thing, building it to scale?”

Q Can you expand a little bit more on this Shift in language from good judgment to sound judgment, and why you think that is more correct?

A You're going to disagree, and I need to convince you of why this decision that I've made is sound. I'm big on the word accountability. Accountability, if you ask most people what accountability means, they say, well, it means if I don't do what I said I was going to do, I'm going to be in trouble. It's not what accountability means at all. Accountability means to give account, to give the story of why we did this thing. Account. It's literally in the word. Accountable. I can explain why we're doing this, and I am accountable for it. I can tell you why. Sound judgment is judgment which is, maybe you won't agree with it, but it is explainable, discernible, and you understand why I'm choosing to do what I do. And the reason good sounds bad, it's like, good sounds like I'm selling you on it. Like, this is a good idea, right? No. I mean, yes, I can market things and whatnot, but I want it more to be like, is this a sound idea? Does this Stand up to scrutiny. When I explain the story of why we're doing this, do you believe me? And if you don't and you tell me and I convince you otherwise, or I say, this is the way it is. You go, okay, well, it's sound enough that I'll do that. There's something really interesting there in the, in the split between the two words. Good is sort of like, I'm trying to sell it and sound is like, do you believe it?

AI assessment note: “Sound judgment is judgment which is, maybe you won't agree with it, but it is explainable”

Q When, when you think about these core motivations or behaviors, do you think about them in the context of the team that you're creating? So normally I think people think about teams in terms of skill sets, but like these kind of core deep beliefs, I want stability. I want change. I want, do you, is that a way that you construct teams or it just emerges after?

A One of the downsides of rapid growth startup is you don't really get a lot of that during the interview process. So this is one of the reasons we reorg every six months is I, I truly believe we're learning those things and going like, oh geez, Julia is amazing at this and Marcel is great at that. So like, this is more of this and this is more of that. This is why that's there. Your question is, am I thinking about that? As soon as I know it, as soon as I can tell, which is not usually until a lot of time has passed, I am starting to optimize for it. I'm starting to build a team around it. And also Very importantly, if I have a person of Model X, I know that Y, B, and C are great complements to that. So I'm going to go take that X, I'm going to put a B with it as well, because they need a little more poetry, because they're kind of a dictator, but I know they'll get along with this B, so I'm thinking about a lot of those things as I'm sort of constructing that. That is the majority of my job, is what you're asking about, by the way. And by the way, it's not like I'm actively doing it every day, but I'm looking for how to optimize the team such that they have that Whatever core set of skills for that technology or product that they're building. And it's not just one person. It's the whole team.

AI assessment note: “As soon as I know it, as soon as I can tell... I am starting to build a team around it.”

Q When you're living in sort of this, um, storytelling leadership style, when you're trying to give people a suit for them to figure out what to do, are you doing that with an end in mind for them? Or you are doing that and, you know, here's everything and you may make a souple or a soup or what, you know.

A This goes back to the book too. I think for every single person who works for you, whether you're a brand new leader or you're a VP, you should know exactly how you need to grow your team. And if That's too big of a thing. You don't know yet. You should at least know what motivates them. I had an admin at a Palantir. She was amazing. Um, and this was one of those, like you saw someone who was amazing and you're like, oh my God, I need to work with this person. She wasn't an admin at the time, but I'm like, you would be an amazing admin. She was running my business there early on. She's like, I just want you to know I am coin operated. You throw money at me. Everything's going to be great. And it sounds kind of douchey and it sounds kind of weird, but it cleared up everything. Cause when it came to bonus time or whatever, I'm like, okay, cool. Well, Carrie just coin operated. So I'm just going to dial this up and make sure she sees that I did that. And she, and we were great. And that's a simple one. And Carrie had other things that she wanted to do in a bigger career, but she was really like, she's like money is what I want. You know, it's a simple one. That's an easy one to do, but for everyone that I worked with me right now, and then when I can think of, I can say, This is their primary motivation, whether that's, they're very happy in their current role, and they want to, l…

AI assessment note: “You should at least know what motivates them.”

Q If it's a bit antithetical to sort of talk about goals for that idea, is it easier to explain what a company or engineering team misses out on when that's not a part of the fabric of the culture of the engineering team?

A I don't know if that's what you're asking, but it feels sort of like a pivot, but like I have an issue with product managers and some of my best friends are product managers, by the way. So, because, um, They're great people. They're great people. Um, like some of my favorite people, for real. But the bad ones think that, uh, the bad ones create a scenario where engineering doesn't feel like they have a vote in what gets built. And the, this 29% time that we're talking about here is one of my countermeasures to that, in that an engineering culture where they don't feel they can invent things is a super bad engineering culture. An engineering culture where someone's taking You know, whatever so-and-so product manager wrote in Quip and says, this is what we're doing, and it's the law, is super bad news bears to me. One of the things I do at my startups, especially when there's product managers running around doing their thing, I say, hey, Julia, why are we doing this feature? And she says, and she would never say this, if they ever say, well, product said we have to do this, I get livid. And it's not that product is saying bad things. It's not that it's not a bad, it's that it's a bad idea. It's that This engineer doesn't understand why this is important. They've given up on understanding the importance of the why, and they're like on the how, because that's kind of what we do. W…

AI assessment note: “an engineering culture where they don't feel they can invent things is a super bad”