When I work on my own thing, it's inseparable from my life, that is my life. But the work career
for some reason for me is associated with working for somebody. For me, it's associated with like levels and promotions, which is all a framework laid out by somebody smart to make
it work for them. Yeah, at some point we will have to lay out this as well if we are successful, and we will be the smart ones laying out.
Hello and welcome to the Metacast Podcast episode 24 Part 2. In Part 1, Arnavonai talked about our decisions to leave our corporate jobs, why we made the decisions, how we finished our planning, how we managed risks, how we prepared our families, etc.
In Part 2, we talked about our nap story, and we also talked about the corporate cultures in Google and Amazon and how they differ, and which culture works better, what kind of business.
We also discussed what kind of culture we want to build in our company, and what we would borrow
from our past experiences. Enjoy!
So when you were living, I mean you first took it like a live of absence now, so maybe let's talk about living nicely, because I think both of us left nicely on good terms and all that.
Also it's one thing that Tony Fadell mentioned in his book Build, he talks a lot about not burning bridges, and that's what generally has been a philosophy for me as well.
So how did you plan your exit? And actually let's take a step back.
What actually inspired you to leave Amazon, because you were with Amazon for 12 years, you were a principal engineer, it's a big deal, I know you will not say it yourself, it's a very big deal, very high level, like highest level, pretty much, I guess highest level for most engineers in the company.
I would say it's unreachable for most engineers at Amazon, and yeah, somehow you decide to leave.
So what was your motivation, what was your inspiration, why did you decide to, why did you even start thinking about this?
In the first five minutes you said something, but I didn't want to interrupt you.
What I was going to say is, am I you? Because what you said is exactly what happened with me to backtracking.
So 12 years at Amazon, but not in one state, right?
I started as the junior most level of engineer in Amazon SD1, and I spent about five years I think in Amazon, in that role.
And I always wanted to go do startups and all.
You always want to bring your, yes, I was a wonderful, pretty much my whole life, but we didn't know exactly what to do and all that.
And we just had our daughter, we decided for family, as well as for this, that let's go try this out.
So we both moved to India and our daughter, she was six months old at that time, both of us worked in like really small startups.
But you were in the founder, you were an employee of a startup.
I was not the founder. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't thinking about founding and all that at that time.
I just wanted to work in a really small, like early company.
And to be fair, my wife really worked it like a four person company, right?
So that was really small. I worked in more like a 50% company.
So it was already a couple of years old and all that.
But it was still a pretty big difference compared to like a big tech company.
And then I'll fast forward two, three years there, kind of figured out that she had a few pretty bad experiences, right?
Working there in a very small company.
And my daughter was not happy with like preschool and all that already.
And we could see like all the stress of academics and all that, that's very normal in India.
In a way, maybe it's good that you're so academically focused, but we were not ready for that.
So we decided to come back. And that's when I had a few offers, but then I decided I really like the manager.
So actually Craig was going to be my manager's manager at that time.
And I really liked it, right? Like Tim.
And I said, okay, this org will be a good fit. Let me go there.
So Craig, if you listen to this, we love you.
Yeah. Craig and his manager, Kennexner. Kennexner was at some point my manager previously too.
And I really like, oh, you're kidding me. Kennexner hired me into this role.
So I really liked working with their org. So I came back.
But that burning desire to like go do something, the startup thing was always there.
But now I think I did get to work on really interesting projects.
You especially working with you for those five years was awesome.
I think that experience that you and I had and our team had is very rare at a big company.
Which is like start something from scratch with one or two people, grow it over four or five years.
Almost like a startup kind of experience, but without the worries of finance and all that.
You know that you're budgeted for at least the next year.
You don't know what will happen after the next year, but worst case, you will go on and ask to work on some other projects.
Now in the second stint, I had a lot of fun working and we built really awesome things, right?
And because of all that, the team grew, we got more and more exciting people joining in.
And the products we launched out on the interrupt you and ask you a question.
So before I left three years ago, we were just starting to work on one thing that launched when?
Like a few weeks ago.
A few weeks ago. Yes. That's a reality of a company.
That's the reality, right? Like you're launching a major new thing for AWS.
It has so many things that you need to think of, right?
Because there are customers of all sizes and shapes for AWS and it needs to satisfy all of them.
We won't go into the nitty gritty details feature wise when I had left last year in like August.
Features were not pretty much they were done, but there are big things that still needed to be done.
And I don't want to get into all the details. So it does take more time.
So a relatively big company, you have a product that works perfectly in your six months to tighten it up.
Like operationally and like process and approvals and what have you, right?
Yeah. Anyway, so and I think a year or so before I left, I got promoted also to the principal position, just like you.
And there's this saying, right?
You will tell me who said it, but you in an organization, you grow to your level of incompetence.
That's a Peter's principle. Peter's principle. Yes.
I think it says everybody is promoted to their level of incompetence.
And the premise there is that you can't be promoted further because you're already competent at what you do.
It's like basically you stop at that level where you actually no longer are competent.
Right. I feel like I reached that level.
I don't know if it was actually incompetence or more like unwillingness to do what that role required on a day to day basis nature of your day to day work changes so much.
Yeah. But by the way, that principal role at Amazon and there's always levels and levels, right?
There's like senior principal and all that. But like you said, it is a pretty prestigious role in a big tech company.
And it was fun being recognized for it and all that.
But it took me very far away from what I like doing, which is working on the product typing on keyboards.
Yeah. Tiping on keyboard and not being on meetings too much, I think.
It took me far away from actually building things into the strategy.
And I wasn't a manager so there was no people management, but still in that kind of role when you're working with like 60 to 80 people, 60 to 80 engineers.
I don't remember.
Maybe 45 to 60 engineers in our organ that time when I left.
That's a lot of people and you're expected to know about everybody and all that.
So all of these things was taking time away from what I like doing, which is building the thing.
And which is where I and you we had a lot of fun in our time at Amazon working on actually building the things.
So that's what kind of made me feel like, okay, I this is not going to work out.
But like you said, I didn't know what I was what I wanted to work on yet or where I wanted to go.
So I took a three month leave of absence.
I was an organ, everybody was very supportive, right? They were like, yeah, go figure it out, right? If you want to come back, yeah, this is what will work on together.
If not, you figure out what you want to work on and that was cool.
Yeah, what are they expecting you to come back?
It depends on different people. I think some people knew that I'm not going to come back.
Some people hope that I would come back. Some people felt that I would come back.
And I think there was a lot, not a lot, but there was a fair bit of like showing the future part too so that I would come back between me and my manager and a few other managers.
There was even a chat about like, let's figure out what your ideal role is. You come back and you do that. Stop doing what you're doing now.
If you've earned your right to have a custom role designed for you, that's just how good you were. It's not going to be like a custom role. It's still going to be the principal engineer role, but the kind of things you want to do and the kind of teams you want to work with rather than what you're doing right now.
But I think those things, like you said, if I had done that within a few weeks, I think I would like you said after joining Google within a few weeks, you realize it's just different branding the same things.
Yeah. In your case, it would also be the same company.
Say people, at least you know, part of a subset of them.
Yeah, because ultimately I was happy with the people I was happy with the company. It's what I want to work on is building things and you just can't be expected to do that amount of hands on work and not do a lot of the other things that the role requires of you at that high level of role.
Yeah, actually, I think it really is really strongly with me because when we were doing our chat board thing, when it was a very small team, like five engineers, I was basically doing all the other functions that needed to be done very, very scrappy, right?
I remember I did things like, oh, I need some analytics, but I don't want to distract engineers. So I'll just write my own script to get the data actually had the time because I didn't have so many meetings.
I could just spend three or four or five days in the row, deep work building something for fun, not for fun, because I needed it. It was like poor quality code, but it did get the job done.
And I think when I got to principle, product manager role, I didn't have time for this. I'm like, yeah, read this talk about things you don't care about and provide your opinion on it.
I don't want to have an opinion of this. One of those things, right? If people talk about politics, I don't care about politics. I don't have an opinion. And it's okay, but it's not okay if you're a principle at Amazon, because you're expected to.
And I think when I left to Google, when I joined Google, that's what surprised me actually a lot is just how hands off you become there, because Google has different levels, but I think I joined kind of an equivalent level at Google.
And yeah, like you want to get some data. There is a business intelligence team and just given the requirements like five months later, you get your dashboard.
It depends on teams, of course. But yeah, like some things I can get for you very quickly, but some things like you have to build all of the pipelines, all the data, all of those privacy approvals.
One thing that I want to say to Google's credit, Google has a very, very stringent internal processes about privacy of data.
So it's like even the simplest thing that's anonymized and there is no personal but interval information, it's still very hard. You have to jump so many hopes to get access to the data that are very much respect from an internal perspective, which as a customer, we really appreciate that.
And as a general human being, I think who doesn't use something from Google today?
So like I have full confidence that actually my data is protected within Google. So yeah, that was very eye-opening for me because I didn't realize how strictly it worked.
But when you work internally there, it's very annoying because you got the jump all of those whoops, right?
Yeah, like things I did at Amazon like six, seven years ago would be unthinkable at they probably unthinkable at Amazon at this point.
At now, yeah, yeah, especially in AWS, especially AWS, yeah. And also one thing that really surprised me at Google is, you know, Amazon has this writing culture.
You write the document with the requirements or vision or whatever technical vision, technical architecture. It's always very crisp.
Writing is important, like writing gets to the perfection. And many people who don't survive within Amazon, they can't write.
Because they can't write and cultures just pushes them out. They always feel like an outlier and eventually they leave where they get fired.
I mean, it's like it's more senior levels.
I think many of our listeners may know this already, but there is no PowerPoint presentations or any presentations at Amazon.
Yeah, except it's a position to a customer or like a training.
Yes. You got to write it out either as a one page idea or a six page like more like a narrative, but it's a document.
Yeah. And you spell everything out. I think that's the habit that I learned at Amazon. You know, I guess I've always been good at writing.
I just didn't have to use it as much, but when I came to Amazon, like, oh my god, this is like my environment.
I like kind of writing and rewriting, which was really good. When I came to Google, Google is also a document culture has lots and lots of documents.
I think it's like 80% done is good enough in most cases. So basically like you write something and you feel like you figured it out while writing.
You show that if you people, people give you thumbs up. Okay, move on. So go build it. Right.
So the quality of writing is much, much lower at Google. And that kind of took away some of that enjoyment of the actual like individual contributor role for me.
Because at Amazon, sometimes I would clear my day and spend the entire day just like writing a document in a coffee shop.
And then I would come out and people would pat me on the back and like, I didn't do it for the past and the back. I enjoyed the process of writing.
On top of that, it was valued. It was appreciated, right? It made me better at my job when I could write well at Google wasn't so much.
So basically like, yeah, I came into the environment where I can't do much with my hands because nothing I really like doing is analytics.
So I couldn't do much there because of all the privacy stuff. Yeah, you know, writing no one really cared much about like high quality writing.
And it's always freaking PowerPoint. When I listen, I know I'm missing a lot of content that's being said.
So therefore when I say something, I know that people will not hear the things that I want them to hear, at least some of those things.
So it's this kind of broken communication channel.
There are probably lots of stuff written about this, but I'll just say that the document writing process forces the writer to actually think a lot deeper than the presentation.
The presentation, there are two problems. One is you could intentionally not talk about a lot of things because it's in a concise bullet kind of format.
Or you could unintentionally not about think about a lot of things, whereas when you write it and it's not just like writing in any kind of writing, there's a specific kind of like format about how to write about idea in Amazon.
That format forces you to figure out each and every detail about the thing that you're writing about.
And it brings everybody who's reading it to the same page like immediately.
Yes, and actually in the culture that like for the first half an hour of the meeting, you actually sit down and read like nobody presents anything to you.
You're expected to read and ask questions.
So like if you haven't read, well, it's kind of obvious to everyone that you haven't.
So it also forces kind of good reading habits reading and taking notes and asking good questions.
That's another good thing about Amazon culture because by the way, first year at Google, I was like, should I just go back to Amazon?
It's just not working. Let's have a think about my time at Google.
There are also different factors that hold like presentation culture. I never liked it.
Let's have a couple of compare the cultures of Amazon and Google.
So Amazon deliberates about a problem for a long time.
Sometimes too long. Sometimes too long. Yes, that's kind of negative of it.
But like you write a dog, you know, you go through all of those levels of hierarchy to review that. So like our chatbot, we met with Andy just four times to launch it.
So you go all of the way up to the CEO of AWS and all of the levels in between.
And you get lots of questions that you learn from because like when you sit in the room with Andy or like previous couple of levels, people ask you questions.
It's like nobody else who you reviewed it with before thought about it.
From that perspective. Yeah, because like those people are more seniorly, they know a lot more than you.
They have much more experience. So you learn from that because like you know that next time you should think about that.
I remember that first meeting with Andy and he reads the dog and he's like, how about X?
You know, I can disclose what was asked there. But everybody in the room, like all of the the CNRS president, like a few VPs, all of the directors, everybody just dumbfounded because like nobody thought about that.
We've been talking about that for months. Nobody thought about that. That's just what you get out of this.
It's not something simple or obvious. Otherwise somebody would have thought about it already.
Yes, it's something like very far from being obvious. It's so nuanced, right?
But it's very important to that product. But when the question gets asked, it's so obvious.
It's like, why did they think about it? But you didn't. That's why you have these people in high-high-pay jobs.
Sorry, quick interruption. The last six months of my stay at Amazon, there was a similar, like something that we were trying to build.
It goes against a lot of foundational principles that is held very strongly at AWS.
But we were strongly of the belief that we need to do this for the user experience that we are trying to provide.
And again, I won't go into any of the details.
And we had a similar, like, kind of write it up and go through layers and layers of reviews.
And ultimately, I think one of the last few was from the Eric Brandwine, a distinguished engineer at Amazon.
And pretty much, it's like a VP level engineer.
VP level engineer is basically the AWS and security. If you take those two worlds, he is the person.
And he reviewed it. He worked with us quite a lot, actually, to refine this idea, because he saw that, okay, this makes sense, but not in the way how you're thinking about implementing it.
And I had a similar kind of experience going through that too. And that's actually one of the things that took that last year to build out after I left.
Okay. Yeah. So to finish my thought, like, you deliberate a lot.
And then docs really make it more obvious, more crisp, every iteration.
And once it's approved, then you almost like assemble your troops and you marched over it.
You don't look back unless you face some things that you haven't anticipated, but implementing.
But the probability of hitting those things is reduced by the upfront deliberation, not fully eliminated, but it's reduced.
So on the other hand, the Google's culture is more like, oh, let's do something and then figure out the details later.
Would you say it's more pragmatic or I think it was more pragmatic when Google was maybe 5,000 people.
It needed to be in the market. And also when it was only serving consumers.
I worked only in the enterprise space. And what happens there is, you know, I won't be mentioning specific details.
Like if you made a wrong decision or like you postponed the decision on some technical aspect of the thing earlier on, when you come to things like compliance and other stuff or like some big customer is asking for something,
it's much harder to change if you haven't built kind of the right framework for this.
Or if you haven't even built it right away. And so that culture creates a lot of charm.
So it's almost like easier to build a new thing that replaces the whole thing than to change the whole thing.
So that's actually Google created whatever like 50,000 different child applications.
I think the cost of releasing something wrong grows almost exponentially with the number of customers you have
because people get used to that wrong thing. And they figure out their own use cases that works with that thing.
That doesn't work with your next version anymore.
Oh, boy. Yeah, you fix a bug and then you realize there are like tens of thousands of customers who actually use this as a feature.
So I think that level of deliberation is required in that kind of enterprise atmosphere, especially in AWS or Google Cloud where there are like people building their whole businesses around it.
And huge businesses.
Again, the Google's created I think things are changing. And I think GCP has hired a lot of people from Amazon, from you know, Oracle and Microsoft, from the companies who know how to enterprise.
But there was always a stark contrast when let's say you work with somebody who only works in consumer products before,
they just don't understand it. The first time they faced your problems.
They're like, why can't you just run the experiment? Well, you can't run the experiment on an API because predictability is expected.
And in consumer world, especially when you use products for free, it's okay to break some customers.
It's okay, you know, if things change a little bit and people have to get used to it.
As Google expands into the enterprise use cases, I think it goes a bit against the company's DNA.
And maybe that's why they hired Thomas Kurian as to be the CEO of Google Cloud.
He was I think a big shot at Oracle. All his life was enterprise. All his career was enterprise.
I think GCP culture is slightly different from the rest of Google.
So we both, I think, really appreciate the document culture and the deep thinking process at Amazon.
You talked a little bit about the other side of that on Google and how it's changing.
If I were to ask you, what's the one thing you would take away from your experience at Amazon into this new company?
I think you and I would probably both say like the document kind of thing, even though it's not operated at that level
because it's just a very small company and we are way more pragmatic. We need to be way more pragmatic.
But let me flip that question and say what would you take from Google into this new company?
And you can name just one thing.
I'll say something very contradictory right now to what I said previously.
So one thing that I think we've already taken into our new company is just structure.
So when you do things, you have to have some structure around it.
Like we set up all of the Kanban boards and we have CI, CD, we built ourselves on serverless infrastructure.
We've made all of the red decisions upfront that initial deliberation I think will pay us off in the long run.
What I'll take from Google though is that half done is good enough. Approach scrappy.
Scrappy, even though it doesn't work for the company of Google size anymore, at least in the pockets that I've seen.
It's perfect. I was going to say this sounds awesome.
It's perfect for startups. It was perfect when Google was just launching at WARS or Gmail or whatever.
It may actually still be perfect for Google's new products, consumer products.
So yeah, I want to take that. Like a couple of days ago I was writing something for our company and I'm like, this is good enough.
Just abandoned the doc. We had a quick chat. We made the decision. We just put the decision in a GitHub issue so that we actually remember how we took the decision.
But doc screwed it. Throw it out. At Amazon, we would have organized over it another few weeks.
And by the way, it was decision about your name.
And I think so actually so listeners should when you get your hands on our app during alpha be prepared for something scrappy.
Because what we want to validate first is the our core hypothesis. We'll talk about it in the next episode.
I showed it to my son and he was like, oh my god, this is so cool. And like he was like doing things enough.
And he's like, yeah, but it's buggy because there was some UI.
So we learned and grew from there, I think, yeah, but the core thing is what we need to validate.
And if you want to be part of the alpha, if you listen to podcasts and if you want to be part of the alpha.
And we know you because I think that was important prerequisite for the first alpha.
Yeah, for the kind of closed alpha, the private alpha where we only give access to people we know.
Yeah, reach out to me or not.
Right. The next few ones are going to be a bit silly, but I want to end on a bit silly note.
Okay, there are a few more serious questions, but I'll try to like, interleave it.
If the new thing that we are working on was a Google product, what would it be called?
And when will it be shut down?
I feel like by using a name of a Google product that might be disclosing what we're working on too much.
Next question please.
Okay. Okay, you can still answer when will it be shut down though?
Well, I believe it will be a very large and successful product.
And it might have just become part of the Google portfolio eventually.
I mean, I will not be surprised if down the line Google might be in a choir.
That's hope for something like that. That will be cool.
Yeah. So we shouldn't say bad things about Google.
We never say bad things about anything.
Yeah, we just been honest and a bit nice guys.
I forgot to work for this, but yeah, we like to make fun of things.
Yeah. If you could have one person as a mentor from Google continuing on, who would that be?
And why?
You don't have to name the person if you don't want to name them, but why?
There is one person at Google.
I'll name him.
It's okay. His name is Amit. Hello, Amit.
Now I have to list this.
Sounds a little too.
He's a director in the same organization where I was in.
He's from Israel.
Maybe that's what makes him a perfect mentor.
He doesn't hold back really good, critical questions.
So he would always be like, hold on, hold on a second.
And then he would ask questions that just pierces through the issue and makes me think.
That's what I really appreciate in people, right?
Amit is very nice, but he can ask those questions where some people would hold back because they would be afraid of being perceived as maybe like not nice.
And I'm saying it in good way.
You know what I mean?
Like some people might have their guard on.
I don't know if he does it to everybody or he does it just to me because he knows that I will take it really well, right?
But that habit of his, I think it's also partially culture.
It's I mentioned Israel because some other Israeli I know they are the same way.
Shani hi.
But yeah.
And also he has experience in both consumer and enterprise.
And I think he thinks in the right way.
So yeah, Amit it is.
All right.
I don't know how much time you got to spend in Google in office because you joined during the pandemic, right?
And then you moved to Florida.
Yeah. So I joined in June 2020.
I got my offer in April 2020, I think.
And I joined it June or something.
Did you work from Google offices a little or?
I never worked full time from the Google office.
I visited the Google office like for three or four days in two trips.
Actually, both of them happened in the last six months.
Right.
I was going to ask what will you miss the most from Google offices?
Now that we want anything.
Here's the thing, right?
So I'm sitting in this very nice spacious, sunny, well lit room in my house.
Right.
So my home team was based in Seattle, both of my teams.
So when I was visiting Seattle, which I spent seven years at, I was visiting back from Florida, I think it was in November.
And I remember like I would walk up at seven or so and I went to the office, it was dark.
And then it was like four or 15 or so.
And I picked out of the window and it's dark.
And I spent most of my day in the meeting room.
And the meeting room in that pre-month office was, all of the meeting rooms were like, they don't have windows, you know.
They're like inside the building.
So that day, the only time I saw daylight was when I maybe was like going to the restrooms between meetings.
And also during lunchtime.
I don't miss that at all.
And also like, being in the office made me so tired.
I don't think I ever want to work from an office again.
I do like visiting the office, like meeting people and all that.
It's a very different vibe.
But I don't want to do this more than a few times a year.
But three snacks, I think, that was cool.
They make you fast though.
I heard amazing snacks too.
But surprisingly, actually, like half of the snacks were, you know, like nice healthy snacks, which you would expect from the company, but Google it, like cares about everything.
But the other half was actually junk, junk chips and all.
And yeah, I was surprised.
I thought it would be only like poles and like kind of bars and all that.
But yeah, they have junk too.
Right.
Okay. Last two more questions, then we'll wrap it up.
What was the biggest risk you have taken previously in your life?
And how does it compare with this one?
I'll tell you this.
When I wanted to go to do an MBA, I was still working with DHL in Germany.
DHL was going through rounds of layoffs.
And by that time, I applied to Harvard and Stanford.
I got rejected from both of them.
And I was scrambling to apply to a few more business schools.
Wharton was one of them, which I eventually got into.
But I was still in the process of applying to like already got rejections from my top choices.
I was applying to my third choice.
I didn't know if I was going to get accepted or not.
But then DHL is doing these rounds of playoffs.
And I'm like, I just can't do this job anymore.
If I get to the business school and I get laid off from DHL, I can use this money to pay off some of that expense.
Because it's expensive to do an MBA, it's expensive to live in the States.
We have a child already.
So when people announced layoffs, because in Germany, they have to tell layoffs are coming.
And then people are in the limbo for a few months.
I raised my hand.
I'm like, can I be laid off?
And I actually don't remember.
Maybe I was just so scared.
I actually don't remember that, but a friend of mine, he told me that's exactly what I did.
Because for some reason I had this recollection that I talked to my manager privately.
But maybe I talked to my manager privately afterwards.
But yeah, basically I raised my hand, like I said, can I be laid off?
I think they deferred answer that question.
I don't talk to my manager.
I was very fortunate to have Mo, his name is Mo, is my manager.
Very supportive.
He did a lot for my career.
But he was also vice president at DHL.
He was very high ranked.
And he's like, I don't know.
I'm like, listen, if I get accepted to the NBA, I'm gone.
But guess what?
You have to fire someone now anyway, because of the layoffs.
And if you fire someone now, because everybody is good on a team.
It's not like you can just get rid of someone.
You have to get rid of somebody good.
And I'm also gone.
You lose at that time, probably like 20% of your team.
And you can't hire a backfill.
And he's like, yeah, my ex-sense.
Send me an email.
And he talked to the CAO and all that.
And they're like, yeah, we'll do this.
But stay for a few more months, finish this stuff, that you work on, et cetera.
I took that payout, voluntary layoff, for a few months, without knowing what I'm going to do next.
And I had these crazy ideas about doing an e-commerce company selling diapers in Germany.
Japanese diapers in Germany, because I really liked those Japanese diapers.
I had to order them from overseas.
It was a very difficult process.
So I'm like, OK, so I'm going to use those tens of thousands of dollars to do that.
Eventually, so that happened like in December of time, I think.
By April, I learned that I got into the business school.
From that point on, it was all kind of laid out.
It was a similar kind of risk where I didn't know about my future.
I think in some ways, it's also even more unknowns, because you were coming to a new country.
You were coming to a study.
You didn't have like immediately in the next two years.
You're definitely not going to make any money.
You're going to be fully absorbed in basically your academics and your wife and your kid are coming with you.
Two way, completely new country and culture.
I didn't feel about this as a risk though, because I thought that if you get into one of those top programs, I think Wharton was top three.
I mean, however, Sanford Wharton, they always used to be.
After two years, you're recouped.
Yeah, after two or three years, you recouped.
I mean, it's not guaranteed, but the probability of that is that the probability of that is very high.
I think where I took a risk is like, if I didn't get into the business school, then yeah, I would have left this kind of pile of cash.
In the country where I don't speak the language, where my status is based on my job, and with the young child.
But the thing is, I thought I would use this money to start sucking up.
Start a business, yeah.
So this time when you left Google, did you try to get laid off?
Because Google did have a few rounds of layoffs.
I wish I was hoping I would get laid off.
I was hoping there would be like a second round and all that.
And Google's layoff was like, it's still bad for the people who are getting laid off.
But it is, I think, one of the best severance packages that we have seen in the tech industry.
I saw the meta-spackage before that.
And I'm like, Google's probably going to do the same thing if not better.
So I'm like, please, but there was no forum to raise my hand at.
So when this happened, it was a surprise to everybody.
I mean, the timing was surprising, but the fact wasn't surprising to me.
And I'm like, OK, so I guess I'm still keeping the list for a while.
Yeah, and then I was hoping for a second round.
I was really hoping they would do something before the second, whatever the audience call that they had in March or April.
But they haven't announced anything, then I'm like, OK, so I have to resign.
As you speak about living, I put my notice in mid-April, and I left at a month and a half later.
I could have just left and dropped things on the floor, because nothing prevents me from doing that.
But that's not the right way to end the relationship with the company that...
They can't do anything bad for me.
There were things that I didn't like particularly, right?
But there were lots of things that I'm grateful for, and lots of people that have made connections with.
So I wanted to make sure that I live very nicely.
And sometimes I think we take things for granted.
At the end of it, the jobs at Google and Amazon.
Those are awesome jobs.
Compared to some other jobs.
Yeah. OK, last question.
What's your goal for the first year of unemployment?
And how will you measure that goal?
I measure goals in my life.
OK. Yeah, so that's a short answer.
But I do have a specific thing in mind.
So first of all, I wouldn't call it unemployment.
I have the whole executive position in the paper company.
You're the CEO now.
Oh, yes.
And co-founder.
But once we launch, I think that she will get real.
Because we intend to have monetization up from the first days, from very beginning, because we need to make money.
So my short term goal is to make sure that our company has enough MRR to pay you and me an infrastructure cost.
So at least to the extent that my runway is extended, let's say, from one year to two or three years.
And then eventually, I don't have to use my savings at all.
And eventually, I could save up as well.
But that's like a longer term.
So yeah, I think I would call the success.
If in six months, I do have to spend my savings.
I would have a big success.
And the moderate success would be like, maybe if I have to use it as much as I'm using right now.
Actually, there was a question linked in that somebody asked under my post that I think we should honor the request.
Yes. I've been thinking about that question for a few days now, because it brought up some good points when I was reading it.
I'm like, that's not how I think about it anymore.
But I used to think about it the same way.
So yeah, let's bring it up.
Let me read it out.
This is in linked in when you and I posted that we're doing this podcast.
Who is a question from?
Alina. Okay, I tend to believe that building a carrier is a path to yourself.
It is winding, full of ups and downs.
But there is some inner strength that motivates you to go through it.
Regardless of external circumstances.
A certain driving force from within, which does not allow you to turn off from the path to yourself.
Do you have something similar regarding your carrier or professional path?
Yeah, so there are two things in there that I wanted to comment on.
So first is the path.
I think it's implied in the question.
And I also imagine it the same way.
Used to imagine it the same way.
It's like path is like a road.
So it's a certain path that you follow.
She's saying it like winds around, you know, the forest or whatever.
But the, again, after the after the I was experienced, I came to more of the realization that path is not a road.
And I really like how the guy called Jerry Kalonon put it.
And he talks about a pathless path.
So unlike a path that goes on the ground, let's say like a path in the forest or like a road, you are like in a lake.
And the lake is so big, you can't see the shores.
So basically, like in the middle of this Kalon waters, or you could imagine this as an ocean too.
So you're basically in the middle of those waters.
And whichever way you go, that's your path.
Because a path on the ground has been laid out by somebody before you already and you're following it.
Yes. Or maybe like you're in the jungle and you make a path with him,
I chat there. Well, I guess it's too much effort.
It's easier to be on the path with the lake.
I like the knowledge more, you know.
But yeah, to your point, like, yeah, the path, the implied that paths already exist.
Whereas in the sea, you navigate by yourself.
So that's why I don't think about the path anymore.
But I also don't think about the career path as a thing.
Because like when you're at the big company, you have those kind of your SD1, SD2, SD3, L5, L6, whatever, right?
And you keep growing up and you start managing people.
It's a very predefined path.
Pretty unified across all industries.
You have a certain difference in levels and all that.
But like conception, it's all the same.
Whereas when you are an entrepreneur, especially in a small company, like we are right now, you can just go whatever directions we want.
We don't need roads.
Remember that quote from Back to the Future?
Yeah, so you just make our own path.
And for me, I think when I work on my own thing, it's inseparable from my life, that is my life.
But the word career for some reason for me is associated with working for somebody.
For me, it's associated with like levels and promotions, which is all a framework laid out by somebody.
Somebody smart to make it work for them.
Yeah. Yeah. At some point, we will have to lay out this as well if we are successful.
But we'll be the smart ones laying out.
I don't know how to make it work otherwise.
We will have to make something up.
Maybe we'll be the pioneers of the, you know, we start with the podcasting company.
And we will end up with like consultancy for organizational culture without levels, culture without levels.
One of my friends is an organization designer.
So that's what she does the whole time, yeah.
Sounds fancy.
Yeah. So the second part of the question was about the internal drive.
And I think that can take different shapes and sizes.
When you can be driven by ego.
And again, that's something that kind of got shot for me when I was in Peru.
It's like you want something because other people have it.
So you are driven by jealousy.
You know, oh, you like want to get to the next level or whatever, right?
Yeah. You're reducing it to the basics, but yeah, that's what it is.
Yeah. That's what it is, right?
You want kind of more of the same that somebody else has.
You can kind of keep going there.
Or kind of another way that ego works.
You want your mom to be proud of you or your dad, right?
You close that thing.
You may not even realize that.
But if you expect somebody to tell you you've done a good job and you reward you for that, and you really feel happy when somebody is doing that, that's not healthy.
And I hate to say this, but it's not healthy because if you work for praise, it means you have not gotten enough praise.
Oh, you've only gotten praise when you did something good.
Maybe you haven't gotten that unconditional love from your parents.
And that's why you have to earn that love.
And that's what you just keep doing as an adult while working a job, right?
But also because you can't expect unconditional love from a company.
That's why you're never going to get that love.
That's why it's never enough, right?
Get the senior, you get the principal, then you're going to get the director.
Each level, most people will start to get more busy, do less of the things that they like, get themselves in golden handcuffs, expand their lifestyle, which they don't need to after a certain level.
And then they just get trapped in there.
And I think I'm not immune from that myself.
It's just like when you work on your own finger, sometimes it's difficult differently when you don't have income.
But that's like the ego drive, right?
So that's like an unhealthy drive to achievement in a society which I think all of us have in some way or another.
The other thing is like that internal fire that burns in you, you know who you are and you follow that path.
But I think that path is usually like, I know I'm meant to be heavy, be at time.
I'm like, no, that's not the thing I'm talking about.
Which may be true for somebody, but not for you and me.
Which may be true, but only in a way that maybe your passion is to, not passion like that, your vocation, right?
Is to do certain things for people that you can get best at while being heavy, you know, at Amazon.
Maybe like you really somebody whose path in life is to help people connect, for example, right?
And you create Gmail.
Then it makes sense.
You could have created Gmail by yourself, but it's just easier to do inside of a big company.
But because you did that, you became the VP of VP in Google.
Yes, makes sense.
Yeah, VP is just like a derivative, I guess, success thing.
Byproduct.
Byproduct, yeah.
I think for me, I don't even know what my vocation is in this regard.
And no, I like to create.
Creating things that I personally enjoy that I love is what I want to be doing.
That was also partially the reason why it was really hard for me to work on some of the things at Amazon and Google.
It's just like I didn't care enough.
I think that's the biggest similarity between you and me.
Is this drive to like create things?
I also like to like mentor and work with people.
And I know that we will miss that part of it at least in the beginning.
But I'm okay to compromise on that and just focus on the creating part.
Because I know that I won't have to do a lot of the things that I did not like.
I did not like the spending energy and things that I did not want to do.
Yeah, because when you do things you don't want to do, you spend actually more energy.
So even if it takes the same amount of time, just like agonizing over like how you don't want to do this review, you will consume like three times more energy for the same amount of time.
Or maybe you'll consume three times more time because you don't want to do it.
And it's like you become kind of counterproductive in that regard.
So yeah, I think that's one thing that came to me in Peru as well is like lead people with your voice.
And I'm like, wow, let's just like how I felt it.
And maybe this is where the podcasting thing comes in, right?
When I came back, I wrote on my whiteboard, amplify people's voices.
And I like doing that, I like doing that in the podcast.
I think with the technology that we're working on, we will give a lot more people a lot more opportunities to use their voice and prefer their voice.
Well, we are almost two hours into this recording time.
We'll cut it short, but still this is going to be a long episode.
I feel like this was one of our best episodes so far.
But listeners who have listened to it all the way till the end, please let us know if you liked it.
If you didn't like it, let us know what you didn't like about it.
Yeah, leave a rating, review, comment, all that good stuff, spread the word.
If you like this episode, if you don't want to share the whole podcast, that's okay because we are a mixed bag of as we grow up in podcasting.
But if you like this episode, share this episode with people you know.
Yes, and if you know somebody who is building some cool podcast technology or have done some work, if you know somebody who worked on the iPod for years, send them out where we would like to interview people like this.
Yeah. And if you're listening to this because you're also a wanter per nurse, let us know.
We love to have a chat.
Stop wanting, start doing or figure out a way to stop wanting.
Yeah, I'll link that podcast episode with Alex Hermosy in our show notes.
It was a very good, very, very, very good episode.
You guys does like gym turn around.
I don't even go to the gym, I have no idea what he does.
But the conceptual idea is that he brings up the applicable anywhere.
Right, cool.
This was awesome.
Thank you, Illia.
Bye guys, chat.