The Exchanges

Q them to do great projects, um, how not to micromanage. I mean, you can tell me, we can talk about some of these stories, but this is the insider's guide to working with the great engineering team. This is what it is. There's great stories in others, but, but buy the book, read it if, if you're that person. Would you concur with that as a, as a target persona?

A Well, Jason, that's exactly what I had in mind when I wrote the book, so I'm glad that, I'm glad that came through. Look, you know, I've got a pretty unique vantage point as a software developer myself, but also the CEO of a public company, and so I really see both sides of This equation, right? As a developer, I understand kind of what typically might go on in a developer's head, what skill sets they bring to the table, uh, but also how the process of building software works. And it's complicated and it's hard and it's failure prone. And so it's a complicated thing, but I also am a business executive. And so I've got like kind of the business side in my head and I'm thinking about where we need to go as a company and the things we need to build. And I, like many business executives can get frustrated. Like, of course we want, Better software shipped faster for, you know, with less people needed and all sorts of things like that. And so I sought out to write a book that tries to bridge those two worlds, because I find that most businesses and many business leaders don't really know how to speak the same language as developers, don't really know what happens in the process of building software. And so the result is they get very confusing answers to what they think are simple questions like, can't you tell me what we're going to ship? When we're going to ship it, you know, like …

AI assessment note: “that's exactly what I had in mind when I wrote the book”

Q product team's job, their KPI is to make sure your developers are connected to your customers. It's easy to say that, but whose job is it? Right. The CEO would be great. The CEO can't do everything. Right. So if your head of product has a KPI, Make sure all your developers have one customer interaction a quarter. That could be magical right there, right? If they own the API.

A I shared, I shared this great story from one of the product leaders at Twilio. His name is Ben. And he, uh, was before he was at Twilio, he had, he was a CTO of a startup. And before that he, his first job out of college was, uh, he wrote code at a large technology service. Okay. It's Bloomberg. Um, he worked at Bloomberg on the terminals. And he was, you know, what he, his team had one of the little widgets you see on the screen. Like, you know, the, you've seen the Bloomberg terminal and there's like a thousand widgets everywhere. Well, his team owned one of those widgets and he joined the company. And one of the first things he asked his manager is, Hey, you know, when do we get to like, when do I get to actually, you know, talk to a trader who's using my software? And the manager said, Oh, that's a really interesting idea. We've never done that. And Ben, you know, he's like, you know, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, just out of college, like, oh, really? Like, I'm surprised that we've never talked to a customer. Um, I'd love to do it. And he, so, but the manager was sort of like, well, we just don't really do that. So Ben just found a friend of his that, uh, was a trader and said, hey, do you mind if I swing by the trading desk? And he did that, and the friend showed him, oh yeah, here's the Bloomberg terminal. Oh yeah, here's your widget right here. And Ben was floored, because…

AI assessment note: “I shared this great story from one of the product leaders at Twilio.”

Q their a hundred K deals, a developer makes the decision. Now that's a CDN of course. Right. But I guess a meta question for you. In the world of not just APIs, but low code and no code, is the developer's role getting even more and more important in these buying decisions? And, uh, should you empower them even more, or where's this trend going in the next few years?

A Well, yeah, I think we're still at the early stages of this trend. If you think about, um, you know, the fastest growing companies in the history of software, AWS, Stripe, Twilio, I mean, none of us provide solutions. We provide building blocks. We provide what is essentially the supply chain for the digital era. If you think about it, every mature industry has a mature supply chain. I'm from Detroit originally, so like the auto, you know, you think about the auto industry and the mature supply chain they have there, and, you know, 20 years ago, the software industry was a very small number of companies, and you think Microsoft, Oracle, whatever, and so, you know, they kind of built everything themselves, but now that every company is becoming a software company, Well, you need a robust supply chain to power that, and that's the industry that Twilio and Stripe and AWS are really the pioneers of in creating this mature supply chain for every company to become good builders of software. And so I think this trend is at the very beginning. Now you asked about low code, no code, and are developers getting more important, less important. Uh, first of all, I do take a pretty broad view of builders. There are many types of builders inside of companies, and it's not just the software developers. There are a wide variety of folks who given the right tooling will be able to really impact …

AI assessment note: “There are many types of builders inside of companies, and it's not just the software developers.”

Q use Twilio for a dollar or nickel, right? That's great. But business process change is still tough to absorb in big companies, right? And so you can even experiment, but deploying things into production, uh, it's tough to do that even more than once a year, sometimes, or once a decade for certain applications. How many times are you going to change your communication stack, right? Once a decade, maybe.

A Well, that's where, you know, there's certain process things and certain platform things that companies need to focus on if they want to be successful in this era. So the platform things are you need to build a platform that enables your developers to do that good work. And so I talk a lot in the book about the infrastructure you need to empower developers to do their best work. And again, I make the comparison to sales. Like if you're, you know, if you're an executive and, you know, you've got a relatively good understanding of how sales works, like, you know, that you don't just send Salespeople out into the field with a paper notebook, right? You, you give them CRM. There's sales enablement. There is all sorts of tools that they use to actually do their job. And you recognize how important it is, uh, for making those salespeople very expensive hires, good salespeople. You spend a ton on them. You want to make them productive. You want to help them close their deals. And by the way, you know, that if you don't provide them with a good CRM system and good process and, you know, good lead management, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like they're going to quit. They're going to find a company where, you know, they are going to be more successful. And so you invest in all this infrastructure. The same thing goes for developers. You need infrastructure to make developers successful. That's…

AI assessment note: “You need infrastructure to make developers successful. That's infrastructure to help them write code”

Q How much does the sales rep get credit for that?

A And the usage is, you know, we have multiple vectors of growth inside of an account, but one of the most dominant ones is just, you know, the customer built a thing and they roll it out. And as they roll it out and more and more of their end users use it, we are going to, with a usage based revenue model, we're going to make more money on that account. And so the question is like, do we have a sales rep who is causing You know, Airbnb to rent more apartments that's driving more communications. Like, no, clearly we're irrelevant to that. Like, they, they, they bought a Super Bowl ad. That's, that's what we like, right? Um, a sales rep didn't cause that to happen, and so we're always questioning, but like, and that took multiple iterations. I feel really good about where we're at right now, but it took multiple iterations to figure out, like, how do we separate the organic growth that happens with or without what we do From the inorganic growth that is what we're investing in with a sales model.

AI assessment note: “how do we separate the organic growth... From the inorganic growth”

Q companies. What's, what's changed here in recruiting? How are you thinking about this, especially as a passionate advocate of San Francisco, right? And probably the office to some extent, right? How has this changed? Uh, has it, has the world totally flattened? Can I, can I hire developers from Aruba and Bali? Um, is it a brand new world? How are you thinking about, about this, this everyone's distributed world?

A Well, you know, it's interesting. Uh, you know, I, I am a believer in San Francisco, but it's not because I believe San Francisco or the Bay area has a monopoly on talent or ideas or anything like that. I'm a believer in San Francisco because it's where I live. And I believe that everybody should invest in their local community, like wherever you are. And especially if you're in a position of privilege and we in technology certainly are, I mean, most of our businesses have fared fairly well because we have a lot of knowledge workers because our products tend to be relevant to the world. I think it's incumbent upon us to invest back in our communities because so many other parts of our communities have not fared well. Obviously there's a catastrophe going out there for a lot of workers, a lot of industries, and so let's invest in our communities. Let's help our communities in, in, in this, the generational time of need that we are looking at currently as opposed to bailing on those communities. So that's what I believe. I, you know, I, I believe in San Francisco because I live here and because I want I want to invest in our community and I want others to do it too. But wherever you are, invest in your community. That's the main point. Um, as far as talent goes, look, there's talent everywhere. Um, and I think that, uh, reaching into pools of talent, uh, all around the world is a…

AI assessment note: “reaching into pools of talent, uh, all around the world is a great thing”