So, I'm coming back from Tulu, Mexico, back home. Next day, I'm joining a meeting.
And I look at those rick-a-ngles, people in Google Meet and people just play their role.
You know, they connect to the matrix from their bedrooms. It was so bizarre. It was a very bizarre feeling. I'm like, what am I doing here?
Basically, for me, it was a realization, like, whatever is going to happen. Like, this I cannot do anymore.
Welcome to the Metacast Behind the scenes podcast. This is Episode 55, and I'm your host Arnaud Deca.
My co-host, Ilia, is under the weather this week, so we couldn't do a new recording.
So, today we're going to bring you our backstory of why we decided to leave our cushy jobs, and how we started something small and new.
This is a story that some of you have asked about recently again. Back in June 2023, 9 months ago,
in our two parts of Episode 24, we went deep into it. It remains one of our most popular episodes.
So, we're going to present it to you again. Remember, back then, we didn't have a product yet,
and we had just started on the journey. So, keep that in mind as you listen to it.
By the way, if you're not familiar with Metacast yet, go check out Metacast.app.
We have built a podcast player where you can not just listen to podcasts, but with the power-up transcripts generated from the audio, you can search and jump to any part of the episode.
You can bookmark and share specific pieces from any podcast anywhere.
The Metacast app is in Open Beta, and is available for iOS and Android right now.
We would love for you to try it and give us feedback.
On our website, Metacast.app, you can find links to our subreddit, our slash Metacast app, where you can get in touch with us, as well as send us emails.
Ilya also writes a weekly newsletter distilling our updates and learnings from our nascent journey.
You can find the link to it, you guessed it, on Metacast.app.
All right, without further ado, here is our story.
Kuku, Kuku, so Ilya, what is this big life event that we've been alluding to?
Yeah, so today is June 8th, 2023.
So exactly a week ago, June 1st was my last day with Kuku Gold, and it ended a three-year career at Google.
It ended in eight-year period in my life with Big Tech, where I spent previous five years with Amazon.
Yeah, and it marks a new chapter.
So officially, I'm currently unemployed.
Yeah. But today, we've filed for incorporation of a company with an undisclosed name.
Yeah, that you and I are co-founders of.
So before we get into that, what did you do in Google in the last three years?
What part of Google were you in?
Yeah. So, last almost two years, I spent at the Google Maps platform.
I mean, everybody knows Google Maps, obviously.
But if you open, let's say, Airbnb or an Uber app or Zelo or Redfin, or any other account, you name it, an app that uses a map.
And there was a Google map in there.
They added that map to their application, their website using Google Maps API.
So I was responsible for that map's API on the product side.
Right.
And you've been a product manager there for the last three years, right?
Yeah, so I've been with Maps for two years, and then I also spent my first year at Google at Google Cloud Platform.
Where I worked first on a product that was supposed to make managing Kubernetes more easy.
And then I also worked on Google Cloud Functions.
What do you mean by it was supposed to?
Yeah, in the end, there was some priority change.
I guess we couldn't take it as far as we wanted to.
That's the pretty typical life events in a big tech company.
Or any big company, to be honest.
Yeah, when you have a company that does like, I don't know, 500,000 different things with 100,000 employees.
Yeah, sometimes things get reparatized, deparatized, et cetera.
Google had to turn for this.
It's called D-Frag.
That's not what happened to this project.
There was going to be different outcome.
Google Reader is a good example of a D-Frag.
So for those who have already served her too young, Google Reader was shut down in 2011, I believe.
Too much big dismay across the whole world.
Like tens of millions of people probably got like, absolutely pissed at Google for doing this.
We'll get back to what you were saying just a second, but I want to set a little bit of context.
In today's world, it's pretty common to hear that Google is shutting down something.
That's kind of part of the DNA of the company at this point.
And there's even a website like killed by Google.
There is actually even a podcast, Corey Quinn's podcast.
I think it's called Screaming in the Cloud.
There is an episode with a killed by Google Guy.
And Corey himself likes to make fun about Google for doing this.
However, to Google's credit, I've seen that culture change taking effect over my three years there.
They recognized that it does affect the reputation when they shut things down like this.
Just like, oh, like next month, study is going the way.
Like Google Reader is just over a certain, like you have a month to continue enjoying it.
And then it goes away, right? They've changed that.
That's good. Yeah. Why I brought that up is I think from what I recollect, Google Reader was the first of these big instances of like Google shutting down something
and the whole world going like, what? That makes no sense.
Everybody loves it. Everybody uses it. Why are you shutting it down?
Yeah. And Google Reader was a web application that you could use to read RSS feeds, which was an all the way to subscribe to websites.
So you would basically have all of those subscriptions in your Google Reader application,
which was very, very neat. I even read it on Blackberry.
It was so good that it even worked on like shitty, like, berries browser like 12 years ago.
It was my favorite app too. It was like absolutely amazing.
And by app, I mean, it was a website. It was a web-based app.
Yeah, but it was, I think it was probably the first, but then later came whatever Google Wave thing.
Wave Do! I don't know how many chat messengers and things like that.
The big difference between Google Reader and let's say Do and Wave and other stuff, is that probably nobody used Do or anyway?
But Google Reader was a big deal. It's like imagine Google shuts down Gmail now.
It's kind of not comparable, I guess, at this stage.
Not that big, but it is similar.
But it's like, yeah, you have lots and lots and lots of people.
Also, I remember reading somebody who was a reporter, I think for TechCrunch, or maybe Venturibit or something.
For him, it was a professional tool. That's a tool that he used to catch up on news.
Well, he was writing to the office where people work together.
Right?
On a train. Yeah, and like, he had to figure out a new way to do that.
Shares has never really recovered from that for websites.
There were other websites that tried to take over, like Bacon Reader and all that.
And nothing got close to that much, I think, popularity.
Yeah, I think Fidley was pretty much the careerplaker.
But I think one Google Reader was gone, like, it was gone, essentially.
And I think that's when newsletters became kind of the new norm.
Tools like Substack, maybe, would never have been born if we could still use our sets
reader today. And by the way, podcasts are fully based on RSS.
And yeah, actually, I'm going to shoot now to, I think Dave Winner is the guy who was behind the protocol.
So we'll try to get him on the podcast because podcasts are distributed by RSS feed.
That's probably the biggest use case for RSS feed at this point today.
Today, yeah.
Okay, cool. So fast forwarding to 2023.
You spent five years in AWS. That's when you worked with me too.
We had so much fun. Then you decided to leave and go to Google.
Then you had three years. And now you've left Google.
We won't get into what we are working on in this episode.
I think that'll be in the next episode or one of the upcoming future episodes.
I think we will probably keep secrets what we're working on until we actually have something to show publicly.
Yeah. And we're very close.
We're very, very close, but it will probably be another few weeks.
So you and I are using the app already.
We're just waiting to like add a few more things and start giving it to some friends and family and people for alpha testing.
Yeah. Yeah. If you listen to all of our episodes and gather those bits and pieces where we complained about how bad podcasting apps are, we are scratching our own itch and fixing some of those problems.
Yeah. He's subscribed.
Stay tuned to the updates on what we're working on.
Also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
So today I wanted to ask why.
So what led you to leave Amazon and Google and go on this thing on your own?
Yeah. I think it's a it's a theme in my career when I do things until I just can't anymore.
Like I left my previous job, well, I guess previous previous job.
I was with DHL for eight years and I was doing business intelligence and also some program management in IT all over the world.
I wouldn't say the job was very interesting.
Just jobs I had there. I think I had like six or seven different positions there.
They were all kind of the same domain, but I was changing countries, changing the regions. It was interesting.
But because I was able to move so much around the world.
It kind of kept me going. You know, it never got old.
We used to live in Singapore, Dubai, Germany, Moscow.
So it was really, really interesting on the personal level.
I didn't quite like the job, but like, did you have kids all through?
So we had our first child right before I left in 2012.
We were in Germany. My older one was born in Germany there.
We were here before I left the job.
But then there, that last job I had there was so unbearable, I guess.
It was like a typical big company stuff.
I had to replace the old systems that people use for customs clearance and like shipping processing in European countries
with the newer systems. And it was just boring.
I wasn't doing any work on the ground. I was like managing those projects.
And I didn't enjoy that.
But these were like software, technical projects.
Yeah, software were very technical.
But I was like, seeking an ivory tower, working with project managers, co-remending the projects.
So I was like managing the project managers. It was not fun.
What was your role like officially? What was the name of that role?
I think it was called program manager, senior program manager or something like that.
And then I'm like, I'm done. So then I left to do an MBA for two years.
Right. Where did you do your MBA?
I went to Wharton. That's how I moved to the US.
It was really nice. But then I did an internship at Amazon and I came to Amazon full-time.
And your first internship was in the SSB, the seller ads org or in Amazon?
It was, I think back in the day, it was called Amazon clicks.
It was, yeah, sponsored products, product ads. And there was a thing called sponsored links.
I think only sponsored products still exist to this day.
I think back in the day, they were all pretty small and they were still figuring out which one is going to take off.
So sponsored products, I think is the one that eventually won the trace.
Yeah. And then I came back to AWS. I was working on analytics with you.
Like, I remember when I came in, my man's a crag. He gave me a list of people to meet.
Yours was one of those few names. He's like, I meet Arnab. He's going to be your partner.
And then I think we met in my first week, first two days.
And then, yeah, like all my time at Amazon throughout all those five years, I think we never stopped working together for maybe except a few weeks.
It was a great time. But yeah, but then like Amazon at the end of it, I got the promotion, we launched the project that we were working on.
Yeah, we launched the always chatbot, which was a great service.
Well, it still is a great service for managing infrastructure from Slack and other chat clients.
It was great. And the team was growing quite a bit bigger.
Yeah. After getting that promo though, I think things started to change because when we started the project, it was just a few of us.
And I was actually a product manager, but I was also managing the team.
So it was like running a small startup within Amazon, I reported directly to VP and she reported directly to Jassie, who is now the CEO of Amazon.
I basically had my hands completely anti it,
like I was protected from like everything. And so was the team, right?
Like we weren't really part of the whole Amazon kind of politics stuff, which I think was very unusual to a generic experience that people get at Amazon.
It was possible because it was a very small team at that time and working on a new experimental idea.
It was almost like an R&D kind of project, go figure out what can we do in this space.
Yes, that's true.
Yeah, and we also, like the reporting structure also made it very straightforward
because the VP didn't have time. We probably had one in one's every two weeks or so.
And that was pretty much it.
So like nobody really managed us. So we managed ourselves.
But then I think towards the end of my tenure there, we've gotten a lot more people come in, they all grew so much, our team grew so much, we launched all of the expectations from the leadership started to kick in and that's when I started to burn out.
And I'm like I'm spending more time managing upwards than actually working on the product.
And I think I alluded to that in one of our episodes.
There was one particular meeting that marked the end of the Amazon journey for me.
It was a two day off site where people were talking about all of these different things where I just couldn't pay attention.
I'm just not interested.
And then somebody who both you and I know who was also part of our team, but also part to larger team, he told me that when you're a principal now, you like got a step up.
I'm like, I'm not interested.
If I look for different teams at Amazon and then they just realized it's going to be more of the same.
But Google was this kind of thing where like I read about Google, I read books about Google.
Google was this shiny bright company, like the best company in the world.
And yeah, I had this thing.
I was rejected by Google two times, I think that's a full loop for that.
I was not responded to even more times when you would like apply.
Yeah, and I got to drop out Google and I came in.
So that was the cloud functions.
It was the Kubernetes thing.
It took a few weeks to realize, okay, it's actually one more of the same.
It's just a different brand name.
A few weeks?
Usually that period lasts at least like three months or so.
It's called the honeymoon period when you join a new company.
So yeah, maybe a couple of months, maybe two or three months, for the honeymoon to be like done.
In a year, you just get unplugged into the different kind of matrix, which is better in some ways.
But worse in some other ways, kind of the same in most other ways.
I guess you're coming up to a point where you're feeling like this is more of the same.
I want to do something else.
What made you kind of figure out what is that something else you want to make, which makes it concrete for you to be able to leave a really good job.
Yeah, that's true.
I've been wanting to do something on my own for a long time.
Actually, there was something that I heard recently.
I was listening to this podcast with the guy called Alex Hermosji.
I think that's what his name is.
He's an entrepreneur worth, I think, a few hundred million dollars.
He was a guest on the diary of the CEO podcast.
And he said that what made him quit his job when he was very young, he read a book about entrepreneurship, which said there are entrepreneurs and there are wanted-priniers.
And he said the main difference is that they want thepreneurs.
They always read about things, the learn things, but they should never do things.
You remember how last year in August, I left Amazon.
And unlike you, because you thanks to me, you have me, right?
So you know what you're working on, you know immediately.
Thank you, Arna, but I appreciate you so much.
I didn't know what I was going to do, right?
But I knew that it was over for me.
So the first three months, I basically like hiked around thanks to my wife.
We had like somebody earning and everything.
So we spent like a month in Banff in that period.
Just like you said, I was reading a lot about like entrepreneurship and all that, right?
I must say this.
You even had one entrepreneur in your LinkedIn had exactly.
That's what I was coming to.
For those three, four months, I actually changed my LinkedIn title to like one entrepreneur.
The biggest difference was though that you already quit your job with the clear intention, right?
But I wasn't still sure, right?
I didn't know whether I do something or not.
Might have turned out that after four months, I would like go look for a different job.
I didn't know.
Actually, remember talking to you back then, actually even before you left your job, you came to Seattle and we were chatting.
And you said that you'll just go figure things out, maybe build a game for kids or something.
Maybe very likely, maybe join the smaller company as a CTO.
I think that that was your sort of game plan, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That's what I meant.
So I think around January, we started the podcast in January.
Like we had the first episode in January, but we started working on the podcast in October.
And I think around then is when I kind of started figuring out that no, I actually want to work on this specific idea.
And that's when I changed it from one to apreneur to an actual entrepreneur.
All right.
So yeah, back to you.
Tell us more about that part of you deciding what you're going to work on.
Yeah. So I have been a one-to-pean-year all my life.
Well, actually, I wasn't an entrepreneur when I was 20.
When I was 20, I started a web development company while still in college.
So I did it for two years.
I built a couple of really cool products.
One of them was a map.
The other one was a CMS.
So I have lots of interest actually in mapping and managing content, managing knowledge.
This was like my very, very early days.
Do you still have that map, by the way, the one that you made up?
Was it of your city or?
It was of my city.
Oh, I guess the funny story there is, you know, I didn't know anything about licensing or any of this kind of stuff.
So we just purchased a huge map, like a wall map, that had like 50 or so sheets, like A3 sheets.
They like the double letter size, the US letter size, like AA4 European size.
So it was like 50-something big pieces of paper, scanned them all using those, you know, like table scanners.
Because like, mind you, it was 2003-2004.
Right?
So scanned them all, let's teach them together in a huge file.
And then I wrote software to put shapes around those buildings and roads, and it was all became like a database.
It was a vector map.
And I wrote a program in C++, a C++ builder to be precise from Borland, that made it to Windows application.
And we distributed it on a CD, on a CD-ROM.
But it was fun.
I still have screenshots.
I actually still have the executables.
And I think I even still have the code.
I don't have a computer to run it on.
It cannot run on Windows.
And I'm pretty sure the Borland C++ builder of 20 years old ID will not work on a modern computer anymore.
Yeah, in any case.
So, but yeah, but then I was like always thinking about things.
I was like doing some side projects, a T-shirt making business, T-shirt making business.
I had like a website for selling secondhand stuff in Singapore Craigslist kind of thing.
I had a website for tracking how much carbon and garbage you emit.
I also had actually another secondhand classified website for university campuses, which I did with two other guys while I was at work.
So, I did a bunch of things like that.
But none of them really took off.
And I think, but then somebody else's products took off.
Right. Very similar products. Very similar products.
Yes. And I think one of the reasons for that was that unless you pour energy into what you're working on, it's not going to grow.
Like, if you just purse your energy, think that you don't make money with.
Always will be like falling by way side.
If you are making like significantly more money from something else at that same time.
Right. Yes. So, you have a full-time job that you work with, it also depends on.
And then you have like a child, and you have a wife, and you also need to rest and sleep.
And then you only work on this new thing for maybe like an hour to the day, and it just goes nowhere eventually.
Especially when things start to get hard.
And you would be like, why am I doing this?
So, yeah.
And yeah, when we met and talked, and I'm like, okay, so actually, I want to be working with you on those ideas that we talked about.
And leaving the job and joining you was a matter of timing, as opposed to anything else.
But the thing is like, fear.
Fear I think is what really stopped me from jumping sheep and just doing it right away.
And yeah, we can go a little bit into overcoming that.
Yeah. We'll talk a little bit about the fears and everything else today.
So, the next part of this is, how did you prepare yourself, your family, finances, and all that, to like be able to like leave a job at Google?
So, you are a product manager at Google, raking in like hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
How do you go from that to basically uncertainty?
Basically living off savings.
Yeah. Because that's what I'm doing right now.
I guess we'll have to talk about fears now.
Because that was the biggest fear for me.
It's like, what if it doesn't work out?
And we run out of money.
And you have to sell the house and whatever.
And like, if you think about all of the worst case scenarios, it's like, I would never be able to find a job.
So, all of those things that even if you spell out on paper, I had like a spreadsheet that showed me the runway.
And like, let's say if I work X months more, then this is what my runway will look like.
If I work fewer months, it will be shorter, et cetera.
And I think it doesn't help.
So, like, when you really have like fear, that not in your belly, it only helps so much.
I made the decision to leave the jobs and time in October, I think.
But it took eight more months to actually do that.
I would wake up in the middle of the night, just sweating heavy nightmares.
And like, thinking about quitting the job, it would send me into the panic attack.
That bad. But I think things start to change when in October last year, I went to a spiritual retreat.
They don't do it anymore.
So, the person's name is Sasha Cobra.
She was a Netflix on the show called Unwell.
So, she does a bunch of things.
But that particular 10-dend retreat was based on tantric approaches.
So, it's about moving the energy.
You know, letting the energy flow in your body.
And that retreat is when I was really able to connect with myself really well, really feel myself, clear my mind, it was really, really good.
And I met some incredible people there as well.
That was in Mexico. So, I'm coming back from Tulum, Mexico, back home in late October.
And I think next day, I'm joining a meeting.
And I look at those squares or rectangles of people in Google Meet and people just play their role.
They connect to the matrix from their bedrooms.
And like, talking to those, like, whatever, can't phrases.
It was so bizarre. It was a very bizarre feeling.
I'm like, what am I doing here?
Basically, for me, it was a realization, like, whatever is going to happen.
Like, this, I cannot do anymore.
This chapter, like, is over. I'm done.
I can't do this again.
I remember crying multiple times.
That day, crying multiple times that week, I was just talking to my wife.
I'm like, I just want to quit right away.
But then the fear would start to come back and all that.
Well, it's not just the fear. It's the reality, too.
You can't leave a job that's like paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and, like, leave immediately on a whim.
I guess it depends on how you manage your finances.
So, yeah, we purchased house last year.
So, like, there's more of age and all that.
So, yeah, there are some financial responsibilities.
So, if this came up right before we purchased the house, I could have just quit the same day, right?
Because I would have all the money that I poured into the damn payment to leave off.
But then, actually, I think at the time, I don't know if I would be ready for this.
But yeah, but that money would have given me a lot longer runway, for sure.
So, what is the runway length that you thought you could...
Okay, talking about the runway, take off at and did you wait that runway?
What is your runway now?
Yeah, so I think initially I thought like six months would be good enough because we wanted to get venture funding and maybe getting into a white combinator.
So, basically, it was like, let's do the six months runway.
I figured out if we can launch and get some financing within three months.
If we can't, I go back to the job.
But then, the longer, I guess, we thought about that the more it felt like it's just too short.
Like, three months is nothing.
And also, the current economic climate, it's not guaranteed that you can get financing so quickly.
So, eventually, I stayed a lot longer than I intended.
And I think right now my runway is about a year.
But there are different options that I can take some debt, for example.
And also, there are some other ways which I won't go into.
But I can potentially send it two years.
If this doesn't work out, I would be like indebted.
But I've done it before.
When I graduated from my MBA, I had 180,000 in debt, which I was able to pay off within two years.
So, I'm not afraid of this anymore.
I hope you don't get into like 180k debt though this time.
I hope I would have to use any debt.
Exactly.
Yeah. And I'll plug in my bit of like how I prepared for it too.
Unlike you, I think our situations are a bit different, right?
Where I was also making a lot of money at Amazon.
But I also have my wife, who's making a pretty good salary and everything, right?
So, what we did is we did financial analysis long term.
For the short term, we knew that our lifestyles will change a little bit, but not that much.
Like before, when I was working at Amazon, we wouldn't think about like anything pretty much, right?
We never budgeted for anything.
Now we do, we actually like look at how much are we spending?
Is that the right amount?
Is that what our goal was for the month and did we accomplish that?
And if not, that's okay.
But why not buy how much not?
What can we do?
That sort of stuff.
Anyway, these are I think good things to do in your life anyway, whether you're working in a big company or not.
But what we did is we did like a long term projection, not just by ourselves.
We got some like actual people who do the scenario planning and all that.
So, they took some like assumptions, right?
Let's say that both me and my wife keep working for another 15 years in a similar job with a similar salary given the savings and investments and all that that you have and the debt that you have like the mortgage and all that.
What is your net worth?
Let's say at the age of 70, at the age of 80 and at the age of 90.
And then we did some scenarios.
What if I don't earn anything for two years or three years?
Or five years?
What is the difference between that net worth at the age of 70, 80 and 90 versus this?
And turns out thanks to the wonders of the finance world and compounding interests and all, there's almost no difference.
There is a little difference but it doesn't really matter to us.
So that's when I knew that okay, I can easily take like about two years without making a big difference in the long term finances of my family and like for basically legacy.
And that's what made me feel secure that okay, I have the time.
Let's do it if I don't do it now, I'll not do it.
Interesting that you think in these terms because it wouldn't even occur to me to do this kind of calculation.
And now that you've just mentioned how you did it, I leave my life more in risk controlled bets, even when I was still in college, like I quit my job.
I mean I was like freelancing when I had a half time job.
And I just quit the job like next day and corporate companies started doing the other thing.
Then I just quit my own company, sold the product, went to work in the poor like DHL.
And then I got an offer from Moscow, like to move to Moscow, like the salary wasn't good.
But we just went for it and my wife and I we knew each other for three months.
She wasn't even my wife then. She went with me.
Yeah, and then like when we got some international offers, we would just accept them without even visiting the country that we were going to.
Because for me it's like it sounds like this has a lot of potential.
The downside is that yeah, we lose the money that we already have.
But like we learn a lot.
So like living the life is what I guess I was always after.
So for me when I was thinking about quitting the corporate career and starting our own company with you,
it was more like these stars have aligned. It's time to do it.
Because like, A, we have a great idea on our hands.
Unicorn or not, it doesn't matter. Like I don't want to think like a Silicon Valley startup.
It can go different ways. But I think which are where it goes.
Unless something goes terribly terribly wrong.
I think we'll be able to make as much money as we make in our corporate jobs.
Probably a lot more.
In order if you orders of magnitude more.
And I think the money itself, money fuels your life.
But that's risk management part. Right.
Right. But what you really want is the enjoyment that I'm having over the last like, I don't know, four months of working on this thing.
You can't get that from anywhere else.
I talked to like ex colleagues and I showed them what I'm working on.
And I feel so first of all happy and second proud.
But also the amount of decision making power that's on you.
At the same time, there's the risk of decision making also.
But it's all on you.
I feel like I'm energized by that.
Man, the last week of my life after living Google and actually starting to work on this, like being able to open the talk about, you know, the idea is not that.
That's absolutely incredible.
Yeah, there is an I mentioned money is because it's a risk management part.
You can be like excited and all that. But like if you don't have the money to live on, what do you do?
And if you take a jump like that without planning for it, then it's very likely that you will get burned out even faster.
Because of all the stress, right? All the stress, yeah.
I mean, financial stress is probably the one of the biggest stresses in life.
Yes, especially we have like a mortgage and kids.
You know, when I think about those young Silicon Valley, you know, start-ups, who like we live in their friends bedroom, eat ramen, they can probably survive on like $2,000 a month,
maybe even less, right? Yeah, I would have had like a very, very long run away if I could afford to live like that.
Even that could have just rendered like the one bedroom and partially for $2,000 a month.
Right. And I don't know Gary in D&R.
Oh, that would probably be like $1,000 a month.
No, that would be like $400 a month, I think.
Yeah, maybe. But yeah, I think like the risk side of things, like the financial side of things, I think that's one of the start that was aligned because previously all those ideas were like sort of ideas,
but this one is very concrete. It's a very specific idea with a very specific business model.
Then second is like you've already quit your job.
You can actually coach me on how do you do that.
I think if you didn't quit almost a year ago, I would have struggled a lot more.
Basically, I'm following your footsteps. Maybe it would be different to be thinking about this differently.
But I'm following your footsteps. It gives me a lot of confidence.
And then third thing is having a partner like you, not like you actually have a new partner.
Because you and I worked together for five years.
We've known each other for eight.
And we worked together really, really well.
I think we complement each other really well.
So yeah, that was just kind of perfect.
That is the one of the biggest struggles I hear from people who start to do indie development.
So indie, by the way, I think maybe not all of our audiences would know these things.
Some of them for sure would know more than us, but some probably would not know anything about it.
So let's just explain what that is.
Typically when people leave and go create their own companies, the traditional model is like get some sort of venture funding.
Large amounts of money from a VC that fuels your growth for the next X years or something.
And then try to grow your business and go from there.
And sell to Facebook.
Yeah, exactly.
Exit, yeah.
Yes. A newer model is you basically don't take money from anybody.
You bootstrap your business.
So it's never going to become like that like Google or at least not in four or five years.
I don't think it's a newer model.
It just used to be called business.
And it's like bootstrapping.
Right.
It used to be called more traditional businesses.
Yeah, like you're opening your restaurant or something like that.
In software, that's pretty new.
New as in like maybe last five, six years.
I don't know.
I think it depends if you think about all of those large unicorns like Airbnb and Dropbox because those are the companies that everybody knows.
But then for example, I have a friend who started the company 20 years ago in New York.
Because he was doing some, I think some freelance work for one of the banks.
And then he figured out that he can actually create a product out of it.
And then he created the product, which is like a company of just a few people.
And there are lots and lots and lots of those small companies that create small niche products.
Like nobody has ever heard about except for that niche where they operate.
So from this perspective, actually, I don't think it's so uncommon.
It's just less visible.
Yes. Today with the internet and social media and all and indiehacker.com and their podcast, it has become very visible and popular.
And I think it has opened the eyes of a lot of people that I don't need to always go get VC funding and do this.
Yeah. I think for us, it's not clear yet whether we are going to take VC funding or not in the future.
But I think for now, we will just go the bootstrapping route, launch, see how it goes.
Because I think one of the risk factors for a business like ours is cost.
Would our business model work to cover the costs of operating?
And I'm not even talking about our salaries. I'm talking about actually cost of doing business.
Sorry, what would be called cost of goods sold in the traditional world?
All the infrastructure that we have to use for doing this?
Yeah, I would like the free versus paid model work for us.
All those things.
For some reason, we get a lot of, let's say, adoption, but nobody pays for it.
We will break up a lot of costs.
And then maybe that would be the time to take VC funding.
We see from this now, right?
Yeah. Because then you show traction and growth and all that.
But you have not figured out the actual financial side of it.
Yeah, but you need time to figure out the economics otherwise you die, right? The business dies.
Yeah, let's hope my MBA helps us here.
But you never know, it's so much uncertainty.
Yeah. Okay, so we talked a lot about the finance side of it, like preparing for it and how you think about it.
What about the family itself?
How did you prepare with them or prepare them?
Yeah, so just give some context. My wife doesn't work.
She's a whole time mom.
Yeah, I have two children.
So she works full time at home.
Yeah. She makes no money, right?
She doesn't show any spends money.
Everybody else in the family spends money at the time.
So obviously they want to support what I'm doing, but then my wife also is pragmatic.
Like what about the finances?
And she was the primary driver for me to like pushing out my exit date with Google for as long as possible.
Because she wanted to have more confidence.
But I think after I came back from the retreat and then I also went to another retreat and coming back from the other retreat, that was it.
That was the March one.
It was February.
February. So I went to Peru to do Ayahuasca, which we can talk about a little bit.
But yeah, I came back with a very clear state of mind that whatever I'm doing right now, I'm just killing myself.
So it's like when you were talking about that what will your network be by the time you retire?
For me, it's like if I retire doing what I'm doing right now, I would have just wasted my life.
And I would like leave a miserable life for the rest of my life.
And this is not to say that I will never work for a corporation again.
Because I might.
But like right at this moment in time, I feel like I've not tried my best to do the thing that is right for me.
Or at least I think is right for me.
I feel is right for me, right?
So there is a quick framework I'll plug it in here from Jeff Bezos, call a regret minimization framework.
Right.
That's what you're following.
And that was one of my things too.
Like if I don't do it now, I'm not going to do it.
Yes. Because I'm like, if you think about time, like do you remember when your child was just born?
That was how many years ago?
Remember as in yeah, yeah.
But it was like how many 11 years ago, right?
But it still feels like yesterday, right?
But guess what?
Like 10 years from now, you will think about today's conversation as if it was yesterday.
And when you will be 80, you would be like, okay, my life is just all past.
But right.
The only time we really have, and that's what I saw during my Iawask experience is, the only time we have is right now.
You know, they talk about the present moment a lot.
But I personally, you know, I read all those books and for all those people and I like, I never really fully understood it until I actually experienced it, you know, and it's like, it's like a delicate substance.
So it's like, future is non-existent.
It's just potential.
The past, you know, it might as well not even ever exist, right?
It's gone.
The only thing you have, the only time you have is right now.
The quality of your life is defined by what you do this very moment.
And for me, it's like, I make all this money, but like I feel miserable most of the time.
So it was a bit of running away from that life, but also like the stars aligned, I have very certain vision to what I'm running to.
And that's what kind of help you make the jump and talking to my wife also, she was very supportive.
Before we move on, I'll plug in Kung Fu Panda.
You know what I'm talking, what I'm going to say, I think immediately.
Now, I watched the movie, but I don't know what you're going to say.
Oh, really?
So Kung Fu Panda, you know that master Rookway, right?
The turtle.
Now, you have to give context.
Okay, the turtle, the very old wise turtle who kind of is trying to teach this guy.
He's like Yoda, Yoda in Kung Fu Panda.
Yeah, he's like Yoda, yeah.
So one of his favorite quotes from that movie.
It's delivered in a hilarious way.
Go watch it after.
It's yesterday's history.
Tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift.
That's why it's called a present.
Oh, interesting.
I definitely have heard this phrase.
I just didn't know it was from that movie.
Right.
Yeah, it's done in a beautiful way in that movie.
So go watch it.
All right.
So now, sorry, sorry for the interruption.
Yeah. The thing I want to say is, my wife showed me her messages with her family.
And on the other side, I mean, her mom was saying, like, are you sure, like, you want to leave over your savings?
You're going to just expand all that money, right?
And my wife responds to her.
She's like, yeah, but he earned all this money.
Or he earned his right to, like, leave life he wants.
And I'm reading this.
I'm like, okay, so this is what the support means.
And she didn't come to me to ask what to respond to her.
She showed it to me after the fact.
So she's really supportive.
And for me, one of the things was, like, let go my attachment to the house.
And like, worst case scenario, probably have to sell the house and maybe move to a smaller house or like rent.
Hopefully it won't come to that.
Yeah, that would be crazy.
But here's the thing, right?
It's like fear.
When you really fear something, fear, fear losing something that you attach to, that's what can really drive you, like, nuts.
It will prevent you from making the decision you need to make.
But once you realize that everything in life is temporary, basically, like, this house, like, I don't own this house.
I'm going to be gone.
Maybe if 50 years max, right, I have on this earth, I'll be gone.
Anything that I've made here, even the business that we are going to be working on, all of that will be gone.
So thinking that we own anything is a delusion in that way.
So it's like a social construct, like this ownership thing.
So everybody's going to die.
And it's a quality of the day-to-day experiences that you have.
That's what's going to dictate the quality of your life overall.
And your relationship with your children and wife and everything, so, yeah, totally.
Yeah, which is part of that kind of quality of life, right, every moment, yeah.
In the U.S., this is very, I think, important health insurance.
So for me in Canada, that was another thing I didn't have to deal with.
And plus my wife is working.
So whatever other things that is not covered by the government, like dental and all that is covered by her, by her employer.
So we didn't have to deal with any of that.
But you, you're not working now.
Your wife is not working.
And health insurance is a big deal in the U.S.
So tell us more about like the specifics of what you have planned for that.
Yeah, so I just typed health insurance in Google.
And there was a website that came first in the organic search.
I don't remember which website it was.
It was like a broker website where you just type your email and then a couple of people reach out to you.
Like, agents.
Got a quote.
Yeah, it says like get an instant quote, but like you never get an instant quote.
It's so deceptive.
Give us your email and we'll get back to you.
Yeah. Like his name is Ethan, he got back to me.
He is based here out of Florida on the other coast in Tampa.
And he was very nice actually.
So I talked to him a few times and he gave me different options.
He explained things really well.
And yeah, then yeah, basically family plan for insurance is like $850 a month, I think.
So that's you, your wife and two kids?
Yes. Can you tell us the age of the kids because that probably factors into the insurance?
Sure, it's 11 and almost five.
So it's 50 a month that that's quite a lot.
Yeah, it's quite a lot, but there's another option I could continue the insurance I have with Google for 2500 a month.
That's what's called cobra.
A cobra stands for something.
It's like an abbreviation.
So you can just continue the coverage you have, but $2500 a month is a lot.
So basically I just wanted to find the cheapest thing because we almost never go to doctors.
So it's basically just for a catastrophic kind of event that we needed for insurance insurance.
Yes, exactly.
That's what it is.
So $850, once we start bringing in revenue health insurance is one of the first things I want to accompany to play for.
But let's say somebody is starting up just them and their spouse.
Is that going to be like significantly less because they don't have kids or do you know do you have any idea?
Yes, it will be less. I don't know about how much, but it will definitely be less.
And is the coverage similar to what you had with Google for this $850?
Actually, I think it's a bit different.
I don't know the details.
It's just so complicated.
It's a convoluted.
I like absolutely despise that whole area of business that's health insurance, that's the housing insurance.
I think current insurance is okay, but like they just intentionally making things so convoluted.
It's incredible.
One thing that I did do right before living, by the way, I don't know, different companies might have different policies, but at Google, the insurance lasts until the last day of the month of your departure.
So I left in June 1st.
I remember.
So you and I were talking and initially your last date was made 24th or 25th of Friday.
And then you figured out that how my insurance will go on for the whole month if I live on the first.
Yeah, it makes sense.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
I worked with you a few more days and that extended my insurance.
And primarily it was because of dental.
Because I'm not buying dental insurance, but just before my exit, I'm like, okay, I have unused dental insurance.
Why did I use it?
So I went to dentists and I discovered that I need, I think like $2500 worth of stuff with crowns that need to be done.
And insurance would pay for 60% of this. And I'm like, okay, let's do it. But then making those crowns and all that, it takes time.
And that's what drove me to reconsider the exit date.
So when you were living, I mean, you first took it like live of absence and all.
So maybe let's talk about like living nicely.
Because I think both of us left pretty kind of 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 like non-burning bridges.
And that's just generally has been a philosophy for me as well.
So how did you plan your exit?
And actually, let's take a step back.
Like 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.
A 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 didn't want to bring your, yes.
I was a wonderful entrepreneur, 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.
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, OK, this org will be a good fit.
Let me go there.
So Craig, if you listen to this, we love you.
Craig and his manager, Ken Nexner.
Ken Nexner was at some point my manager previously too.
And I really like, oh, you're kidding me.
Ken Nexner 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.
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 for the 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 need to create 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 it's 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 already know what you do.
This is basically you stop at that level where you actually no longer are competent.
Right. I feel like I reach 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. Typing 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.
The 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.
Yeah. 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.
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 very 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 scripts to get the data. I actually had the time because I didn't have so many meetings.
I could just spend three, four, five days in a 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 principal, 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 principal 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 the equivalent level at Google.
And yeah, like you want to get some data.
There is a business intelligence team.
And just giving them 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 is 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 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 have to jump all of those.
Things I did at Amazon like six, seven years ago would be unthinkable.
They probably unthinkable at Amazon at this point.
And now, yeah, yeah, especially AWS, especially AWS.
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.
Writing gets to the perfection.
And many people who don't survive within Amazon, they can't write.
Because they can't write.
And the culture 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.
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.
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.
It has lots and lots of documents.
The thing is, 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 the 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 on 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.
It 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 obviously 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 negative of it.
But like you write a dog, you know, you go through all of those level 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 you read the dog and he is like, how about X? You know, I can disclose what was asked there.
But everybody in the room, like all of the the serious 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 just, that's why you have these people, 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.
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 march 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. But like if you made a wrong decision or like you postponed the decision on some technical aspect of the thing early 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.
And maybe that's actually Google created whatever like 50,000 different child applications.
And 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.
Right. 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 credit, 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 companies 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 pregnant.
We need to be way more pregnant. 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, you know, we built our stuff on service infrastructure.
We've made all of the red decisions upfront that initial deliberation, I think we'll pay us off in the long run. What I'll take from Google though is that have 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. Yeah. It's perfect for startups. It was perfect when Google was just launching at war. So Gmail or whatever.
It actually may 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 dog. We had a quick chat. We made the decision. We just put a decision in a GitHub issue so that we actually remember how we took the decision.
But the dog screwed it through it. At Amazon, we would have organized over it another few weeks. And by the way, it was decision about your name.
Okay. And I think so actually so listeners should when you get your hands on our app during alpha be prepared for something scrappy.
And that's what we want to validate first is the our core hypothesis. We'll talk about it in the next episode. But I showed it to my son and he was like, oh my god, this is so cool.
And like he was like doing things in app. And he's like, yeah, but it's buggy because there was some UI. So we learned and grow 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 is 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.
The next few ones are going to be a bit silly, but I want to end on a bit silly note. 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, I forgot to work for this, but 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. He's a director in the same organization where I was in.
He is 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.
I mean, 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.
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.
And also he has experience in both consumer and enterprise. And I think he thinks in the right way. So yeah, Amit it is.
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 the 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. Okay. I was going to ask what will you miss the most from Google offices now that we want to have 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 for my teams. So when I was visiting Seattle, which I spent seven years at I was visiting back from Florida.
It was November. And I remember like I would walk up with seven or so and I went to the office. It was dark. And then it was like four 15 or so.
And I pick 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 three 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 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 so surprisingly actually like half of the snacks were, you know, like nice healthy snacks, which you would expect from the company.
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 polls and like kind bars and all that.
But yeah, they have junk to 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 like scrambling to apply to a few more business schools. What was one of them which I eventually got into but I was still in process of applying to like I already got rejections for 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 Dichel 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 the child, I can use this money to pay off some of that expense because it's expensive to do an MBA, expensive to live in the States.
I have a child already. So when people announced layoffs because in Germany, like they have to tell layoffs are coming and then people I did a 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 that's 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, like, can I be laid off? I think they did. They deferred answer that question. I don't talk to my manager. I was very fortunate to have a mouth. His name is Moe is my manager. Very supportive. He did a lot for my career.
But he was also vice president at the age, he was very high ranked. And he's like, I don't know. I'm like, listen, if I get accepted to the MBA, 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 then he like talked to the CIO and all that. And they're like, yeah, we'll do this. But like, stay for a few more months, finish this stuff that you work on, etc.
I took that payout voluntary laid off for a few months without knowing what I'm going to do next. And I had this crazy ideas about doing like an e-commerce company selling diapers in Germany.
And I was like, yeah, I'm going to get a little bit of Japanese diapers in Germany because I really liked those Japanese diapers that had to order them from overseas. It was a very difficult process.
So I'm like, okay, so I'm going to use those tens of thousands of dollars to do that.
Eventually, so that happened like in December or time frame, 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 like, I guess, a similar kind of risk where I didn't know about my future.
In some ways, it's also even more unknowns because you were coming to a new country. You were coming to 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 like basically your academics and your wife and your kid are coming with you to a 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 like top three. I mean, however, Stanford Wharton, they always like, well, it's used to be.
After two years, like, you recoup. Yeah, after two or three years, like, you recoup. I mean, it's not guaranteed, but 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 like, 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 that 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 package 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 like the fact wasn't surprising to me.
And I'm like, OK, so I guess I'm still keeping this 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 earnings 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.
Like there were things that, you know, I didn't like particularly, right?
But there were lots of things that I'm grateful for and lots of people that I've made connections with.
So I wanted to make sure that I'll leave 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 you know, she will get real because we intend to have monetization up from the first days, from very beginning.
Because you know, 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 like two or three years.
And then eventually I don't have to use my savings at all.
You know, 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 would have to spend my savings.
I would have like a big success. And the moderate success would be like, maybe if I have to use 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.
I used to think about it the same way. So yeah, let's bring it up.
Let me read it out. This is in LinkedIn 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.
Is there 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.
And I think it's implied in the question. And I also imagine it the same way.
I 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 experiencing, I came to more of the realization that path is not a road.
And I really like how the guy called Jerry Colona put it.
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 calm 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 within Machete.
Well, I guess it's too much effort. It's easier to be on the path in the lake. I like the knowledge of more, you know.
But yeah, to your point, like, yeah, the paths, 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 is 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.
Roads, 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 to be like working for somebody.
For me, it's associated with like levels and promotions, which is all of 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 consultals of organizational culture, without levels, culture without levels.
One of my friends is a organization designer. So that's what she does the whole time.
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 at 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, or 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.
You want kind of more of the same that somebody else has.
You don't 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.
Or you've only gotten praise when you get 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.
No, that's why you're like, you're never going to get that love.
That's why it's never enough, right?
Get the senior, you get the principal, then like 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 like 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 like work on your own thing, you start to see things differently when you don't have income.
But that's like the ego drive, right?
So let's say 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 a time.
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, be at a time of time.
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 by product.
By product, yeah.
Think for me, I don't 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 that Amazon and Google is 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 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 get 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, because 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 with other voice, yeah.
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 us 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.
And if you're listening to this because you're also a wanter for New York, 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, they are applicable anywhere.
Right, cool.
This was awesome. Thank you, Julia. Nice chat.