WEBVTT

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So, I'm coming back from Tulu, Mexico, back home. Next day, I'm joining a meeting.

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And I look at those rick-a-ngles, people in Google Meet and people just play their role.

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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?

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Basically, for me, it was a realization, like, whatever is going to happen. Like, this I cannot do anymore.

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Welcome to the Metacast Behind the scenes podcast. This is Episode 55, and I'm your host Arnaud Deca.

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My co-host, Ilia, is under the weather this week, so we couldn't do a new recording.

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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.

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This is a story that some of you have asked about recently again. Back in June 2023, 9 months ago,

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in our two parts of Episode 24, we went deep into it. It remains one of our most popular episodes.

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So, we're going to present it to you again. Remember, back then, we didn't have a product yet,

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and we had just started on the journey. So, keep that in mind as you listen to it.

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By the way, if you're not familiar with Metacast yet, go check out Metacast.app.

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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.

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The Metacast app is in Open Beta, and is available for iOS and Android right now.

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We would love for you to try it and give us feedback.

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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.

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Ilya also writes a weekly newsletter distilling our updates and learnings from our nascent journey.

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You can find the link to it, you guessed it, on Metacast.app.

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All right, without further ado, here is our story.

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Kuku, Kuku, so Ilya, what is this big life event that we've been alluding to?

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Yeah, so today is June 8th, 2023.

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So exactly a week ago, June 1st was my last day with Kuku Gold, and it ended a three-year career at Google.

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It ended in eight-year period in my life with Big Tech, where I spent previous five years with Amazon.

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Yeah, and it marks a new chapter.

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So officially, I'm currently unemployed.

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Yeah. But today, we've filed for incorporation of a company with an undisclosed name.

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Yeah, that you and I are co-founders of.

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So before we get into that, what did you do in Google in the last three years?

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What part of Google were you in?

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Yeah. So, last almost two years, I spent at the Google Maps platform.

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I mean, everybody knows Google Maps, obviously.

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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.

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And there was a Google map in there.

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They added that map to their application, their website using Google Maps API.

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So I was responsible for that map's API on the product side.

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Right.

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And you've been a product manager there for the last three years, right?

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Yeah, so I've been with Maps for two years, and then I also spent my first year at Google at Google Cloud Platform.

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Where I worked first on a product that was supposed to make managing Kubernetes more easy.

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And then I also worked on Google Cloud Functions.

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What do you mean by it was supposed to?

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Yeah, in the end, there was some priority change.

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I guess we couldn't take it as far as we wanted to.

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That's the pretty typical life events in a big tech company.

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Or any big company, to be honest.

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Yeah, when you have a company that does like, I don't know, 500,000 different things with 100,000 employees.

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Yeah, sometimes things get reparatized, deparatized, et cetera.

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Google had to turn for this.

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It's called D-Frag.

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That's not what happened to this project.

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There was going to be different outcome.

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Google Reader is a good example of a D-Frag.

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So for those who have already served her too young, Google Reader was shut down in 2011, I believe.

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Too much big dismay across the whole world.

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Like tens of millions of people probably got like, absolutely pissed at Google for doing this.

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We'll get back to what you were saying just a second, but I want to set a little bit of context.

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In today's world, it's pretty common to hear that Google is shutting down something.

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That's kind of part of the DNA of the company at this point.

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And there's even a website like killed by Google.

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There is actually even a podcast, Corey Quinn's podcast.

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I think it's called Screaming in the Cloud.

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There is an episode with a killed by Google Guy.

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And Corey himself likes to make fun about Google for doing this.

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However, to Google's credit, I've seen that culture change taking effect over my three years there.

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They recognized that it does affect the reputation when they shut things down like this.

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Just like, oh, like next month, study is going the way.

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Like Google Reader is just over a certain, like you have a month to continue enjoying it.

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And then it goes away, right? They've changed that.

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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

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and the whole world going like, what? That makes no sense.

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Everybody loves it. Everybody uses it. Why are you shutting it down?

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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.

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So you would basically have all of those subscriptions in your Google Reader application,

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which was very, very neat. I even read it on Blackberry.

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It was so good that it even worked on like shitty, like, berries browser like 12 years ago.

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It was my favorite app too. It was like absolutely amazing.

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And by app, I mean, it was a website. It was a web-based app.

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Yeah, but it was, I think it was probably the first, but then later came whatever Google Wave thing.

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Wave Do! I don't know how many chat messengers and things like that.

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The big difference between Google Reader and let's say Do and Wave and other stuff, is that probably nobody used Do or anyway?

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But Google Reader was a big deal. It's like imagine Google shuts down Gmail now.

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It's kind of not comparable, I guess, at this stage.

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Not that big, but it is similar.

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But it's like, yeah, you have lots and lots and lots of people.

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Also, I remember reading somebody who was a reporter, I think for TechCrunch, or maybe Venturibit or something.

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For him, it was a professional tool. That's a tool that he used to catch up on news.

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Well, he was writing to the office where people work together.

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Right?

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On a train. Yeah, and like, he had to figure out a new way to do that.

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Shares has never really recovered from that for websites.

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There were other websites that tried to take over, like Bacon Reader and all that.

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And nothing got close to that much, I think, popularity.

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Yeah, I think Fidley was pretty much the careerplaker.

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But I think one Google Reader was gone, like, it was gone, essentially.

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And I think that's when newsletters became kind of the new norm.

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Tools like Substack, maybe, would never have been born if we could still use our sets

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reader today. And by the way, podcasts are fully based on RSS.

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And yeah, actually, I'm going to shoot now to, I think Dave Winner is the guy who was behind the protocol.

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So we'll try to get him on the podcast because podcasts are distributed by RSS feed.

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That's probably the biggest use case for RSS feed at this point today.

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Today, yeah.

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Okay, cool. So fast forwarding to 2023.

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You spent five years in AWS. That's when you worked with me too.

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We had so much fun. Then you decided to leave and go to Google.

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Then you had three years. And now you've left Google.

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We won't get into what we are working on in this episode.

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I think that'll be in the next episode or one of the upcoming future episodes.

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I think we will probably keep secrets what we're working on until we actually have something to show publicly.

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Yeah. And we're very close.

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We're very, very close, but it will probably be another few weeks.

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So you and I are using the app already.

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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.

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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.

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Yeah. He's subscribed.

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Stay tuned to the updates on what we're working on.

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Also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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So today I wanted to ask why.

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So what led you to leave Amazon and Google and go on this thing on your own?

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Yeah. I think it's a it's a theme in my career when I do things until I just can't anymore.

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Like I left my previous job, well, I guess previous previous job.

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I was with DHL for eight years and I was doing business intelligence and also some program management in IT all over the world.

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I wouldn't say the job was very interesting.

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Just jobs I had there. I think I had like six or seven different positions there.

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They were all kind of the same domain, but I was changing countries, changing the regions. It was interesting.

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But because I was able to move so much around the world.

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It kind of kept me going. You know, it never got old.

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We used to live in Singapore, Dubai, Germany, Moscow.

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So it was really, really interesting on the personal level.

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I didn't quite like the job, but like, did you have kids all through?

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So we had our first child right before I left in 2012.

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We were in Germany. My older one was born in Germany there.

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We were here before I left the job.

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But then there, that last job I had there was so unbearable, I guess.

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It was like a typical big company stuff.

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I had to replace the old systems that people use for customs clearance and like shipping processing in European countries

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with the newer systems. And it was just boring.

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I wasn't doing any work on the ground. I was like managing those projects.

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And I didn't enjoy that.

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But these were like software, technical projects.

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Yeah, software were very technical.

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But I was like, seeking an ivory tower, working with project managers, co-remending the projects.

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So I was like managing the project managers. It was not fun.

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What was your role like officially? What was the name of that role?

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I think it was called program manager, senior program manager or something like that.

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And then I'm like, I'm done. So then I left to do an MBA for two years.

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Right. Where did you do your MBA?

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I went to Wharton. That's how I moved to the US.

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It was really nice. But then I did an internship at Amazon and I came to Amazon full-time.

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And your first internship was in the SSB, the seller ads org or in Amazon?

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It was, I think back in the day, it was called Amazon clicks.

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It was, yeah, sponsored products, product ads. And there was a thing called sponsored links.

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I think only sponsored products still exist to this day.

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I think back in the day, they were all pretty small and they were still figuring out which one is going to take off.

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So sponsored products, I think is the one that eventually won the trace.

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Yeah. And then I came back to AWS. I was working on analytics with you.

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Like, I remember when I came in, my man's a crag. He gave me a list of people to meet.

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Yours was one of those few names. He's like, I meet Arnab. He's going to be your partner.

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And then I think we met in my first week, first two days.

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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.

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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.

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Yeah, we launched the always chatbot, which was a great service.

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Well, it still is a great service for managing infrastructure from Slack and other chat clients.

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It was great. And the team was growing quite a bit bigger.

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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.

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And I was actually a product manager, but I was also managing the team.

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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.

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I basically had my hands completely anti it,

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like I was protected from like everything. And so was the team, right?

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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.

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It was possible because it was a very small team at that time and working on a new experimental idea.

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It was almost like an R&D kind of project, go figure out what can we do in this space.

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Yes, that's true.

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Yeah, and we also, like the reporting structure also made it very straightforward

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because the VP didn't have time. We probably had one in one's every two weeks or so.

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And that was pretty much it.

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So like nobody really managed us. So we managed ourselves.

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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.

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And I'm like I'm spending more time managing upwards than actually working on the product.

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And I think I alluded to that in one of our episodes.

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There was one particular meeting that marked the end of the Amazon journey for me.

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It was a two day off site where people were talking about all of these different things where I just couldn't pay attention.

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I'm just not interested.

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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.

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I'm like, I'm not interested.

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If I look for different teams at Amazon and then they just realized it's going to be more of the same.

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But Google was this kind of thing where like I read about Google, I read books about Google.

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Google was this shiny bright company, like the best company in the world.

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And yeah, I had this thing.

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I was rejected by Google two times, I think that's a full loop for that.

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I was not responded to even more times when you would like apply.

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Yeah, and I got to drop out Google and I came in.

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So that was the cloud functions.

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It was the Kubernetes thing.

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It took a few weeks to realize, okay, it's actually one more of the same.

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It's just a different brand name.

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A few weeks?

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Usually that period lasts at least like three months or so.

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It's called the honeymoon period when you join a new company.

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So yeah, maybe a couple of months, maybe two or three months, for the honeymoon to be like done.

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In a year, you just get unplugged into the different kind of matrix, which is better in some ways.

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But worse in some other ways, kind of the same in most other ways.

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I guess you're coming up to a point where you're feeling like this is more of the same.

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I want to do something else.

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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.

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Yeah, that's true.

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I've been wanting to do something on my own for a long time.

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Actually, there was something that I heard recently.

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I was listening to this podcast with the guy called Alex Hermosji.

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I think that's what his name is.

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He's an entrepreneur worth, I think, a few hundred million dollars.

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He was a guest on the diary of the CEO podcast.

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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.

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And he said the main difference is that they want thepreneurs.

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They always read about things, the learn things, but they should never do things.

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You remember how last year in August, I left Amazon.

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And unlike you, because you thanks to me, you have me, right?

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So you know what you're working on, you know immediately.

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Thank you, Arna, but I appreciate you so much.

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I didn't know what I was going to do, right?

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But I knew that it was over for me.

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So the first three months, I basically like hiked around thanks to my wife.

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We had like somebody earning and everything.

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So we spent like a month in Banff in that period.

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Just like you said, I was reading a lot about like entrepreneurship and all that, right?

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I must say this.

00:17:25.500 --> 00:17:29.500
You even had one entrepreneur in your LinkedIn had exactly.

00:17:29.500 --> 00:17:31.500
That's what I was coming to.

00:17:31.500 --> 00:17:38.500
For those three, four months, I actually changed my LinkedIn title to like one entrepreneur.

00:17:38.500 --> 00:17:44.500
The biggest difference was though that you already quit your job with the clear intention, right?

00:17:44.500 --> 00:17:46.500
But I wasn't still sure, right?

00:17:46.500 --> 00:17:49.500
I didn't know whether I do something or not.

00:17:49.500 --> 00:17:54.500
Might have turned out that after four months, I would like go look for a different job.

00:17:54.500 --> 00:17:55.500
I didn't know.

00:17:55.500 --> 00:18:01.500
Actually, remember talking to you back then, actually even before you left your job, you came to Seattle and we were chatting.

00:18:01.500 --> 00:18:06.500
And you said that you'll just go figure things out, maybe build a game for kids or something.

00:18:06.500 --> 00:18:10.500
Maybe very likely, maybe join the smaller company as a CTO.

00:18:10.500 --> 00:18:13.500
I think that that was your sort of game plan, right?

00:18:13.500 --> 00:18:14.500
Yeah, yeah.

00:18:14.500 --> 00:18:15.500
That's what I meant.

00:18:15.500 --> 00:18:21.500
So I think around January, we started the podcast in January.

00:18:21.500 --> 00:18:26.500
Like we had the first episode in January, but we started working on the podcast in October.

00:18:26.500 --> 00:18:34.500
And I think around then is when I kind of started figuring out that no, I actually want to work on this specific idea.

00:18:34.500 --> 00:18:40.500
And that's when I changed it from one to apreneur to an actual entrepreneur.

00:18:40.500 --> 00:18:41.500
All right.

00:18:41.500 --> 00:18:42.500
So yeah, back to you.

00:18:42.500 --> 00:18:47.500
Tell us more about that part of you deciding what you're going to work on.

00:18:47.500 --> 00:18:50.500
Yeah. So I have been a one-to-pean-year all my life.

00:18:50.500 --> 00:18:53.500
Well, actually, I wasn't an entrepreneur when I was 20.

00:18:53.500 --> 00:18:59.500
When I was 20, I started a web development company while still in college.

00:18:59.500 --> 00:19:01.500
So I did it for two years.

00:19:01.500 --> 00:19:02.500
I built a couple of really cool products.

00:19:02.500 --> 00:19:03.500
One of them was a map.

00:19:03.500 --> 00:19:05.500
The other one was a CMS.

00:19:05.500 --> 00:19:11.500
So I have lots of interest actually in mapping and managing content, managing knowledge.

00:19:11.500 --> 00:19:13.500
This was like my very, very early days.

00:19:13.500 --> 00:19:16.500
Do you still have that map, by the way, the one that you made up?

00:19:16.500 --> 00:19:18.500
Was it of your city or?

00:19:18.500 --> 00:19:19.500
It was of my city.

00:19:19.500 --> 00:19:24.500
Oh, I guess the funny story there is, you know, I didn't know anything about licensing or any of this kind of stuff.

00:19:24.500 --> 00:19:32.500
So we just purchased a huge map, like a wall map, that had like 50 or so sheets, like A3 sheets.

00:19:32.500 --> 00:19:37.500
They like the double letter size, the US letter size, like AA4 European size.

00:19:37.500 --> 00:19:45.500
So it was like 50-something big pieces of paper, scanned them all using those, you know, like table scanners.

00:19:45.500 --> 00:19:48.500
Because like, mind you, it was 2003-2004.

00:19:48.500 --> 00:19:49.500
Right?

00:19:49.500 --> 00:19:52.500
So scanned them all, let's teach them together in a huge file.

00:19:52.500 --> 00:20:00.500
And then I wrote software to put shapes around those buildings and roads, and it was all became like a database.

00:20:00.500 --> 00:20:01.500
It was a vector map.

00:20:01.500 --> 00:20:07.500
And I wrote a program in C++, a C++ builder to be precise from Borland, that made it to Windows application.

00:20:07.500 --> 00:20:11.500
And we distributed it on a CD, on a CD-ROM.

00:20:11.500 --> 00:20:12.500
But it was fun.

00:20:12.500 --> 00:20:13.500
I still have screenshots.

00:20:13.500 --> 00:20:15.500
I actually still have the executables.

00:20:15.500 --> 00:20:18.500
And I think I even still have the code.

00:20:18.500 --> 00:20:20.500
I don't have a computer to run it on.

00:20:20.500 --> 00:20:21.500
It cannot run on Windows.

00:20:21.500 --> 00:20:28.500
And I'm pretty sure the Borland C++ builder of 20 years old ID will not work on a modern computer anymore.

00:20:28.500 --> 00:20:29.500
Yeah, in any case.

00:20:29.500 --> 00:20:33.500
So, but yeah, but then I was like always thinking about things.

00:20:33.500 --> 00:20:39.500
I was like doing some side projects, a T-shirt making business, T-shirt making business.

00:20:39.500 --> 00:20:44.500
I had like a website for selling secondhand stuff in Singapore Craigslist kind of thing.

00:20:44.500 --> 00:20:51.500
I had a website for tracking how much carbon and garbage you emit.

00:20:51.500 --> 00:21:00.500
I also had actually another secondhand classified website for university campuses, which I did with two other guys while I was at work.

00:21:00.500 --> 00:21:02.500
So, I did a bunch of things like that.

00:21:02.500 --> 00:21:04.500
But none of them really took off.

00:21:04.500 --> 00:21:07.500
And I think, but then somebody else's products took off.

00:21:07.500 --> 00:21:10.500
Right. Very similar products. Very similar products.

00:21:10.500 --> 00:21:17.500
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.

00:21:17.500 --> 00:21:21.500
Like, if you just purse your energy, think that you don't make money with.

00:21:21.500 --> 00:21:24.500
Always will be like falling by way side.

00:21:24.500 --> 00:21:29.500
If you are making like significantly more money from something else at that same time.

00:21:29.500 --> 00:21:33.500
Right. Yes. So, you have a full-time job that you work with, it also depends on.

00:21:33.500 --> 00:21:39.500
And then you have like a child, and you have a wife, and you also need to rest and sleep.

00:21:39.500 --> 00:21:45.500
And then you only work on this new thing for maybe like an hour to the day, and it just goes nowhere eventually.

00:21:45.500 --> 00:21:47.500
Especially when things start to get hard.

00:21:47.500 --> 00:21:48.500
And you would be like, why am I doing this?

00:21:48.500 --> 00:21:49.500
So, yeah.

00:21:49.500 --> 00:21:56.500
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.

00:21:56.500 --> 00:22:03.500
And leaving the job and joining you was a matter of timing, as opposed to anything else.

00:22:03.500 --> 00:22:05.500
But the thing is like, fear.

00:22:05.500 --> 00:22:12.500
Fear I think is what really stopped me from jumping sheep and just doing it right away.

00:22:12.500 --> 00:22:16.500
And yeah, we can go a little bit into overcoming that.

00:22:16.500 --> 00:22:21.500
Yeah. We'll talk a little bit about the fears and everything else today.

00:22:21.500 --> 00:22:33.500
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?

00:22:33.500 --> 00:22:39.500
So, you are a product manager at Google, raking in like hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

00:22:39.500 --> 00:22:44.500
How do you go from that to basically uncertainty?

00:22:44.500 --> 00:22:46.500
Basically living off savings.

00:22:46.500 --> 00:22:49.500
Yeah. Because that's what I'm doing right now.

00:22:49.500 --> 00:22:51.500
I guess we'll have to talk about fears now.

00:22:51.500 --> 00:22:53.500
Because that was the biggest fear for me.

00:22:53.500 --> 00:22:56.500
It's like, what if it doesn't work out?

00:22:56.500 --> 00:22:57.500
And we run out of money.

00:22:57.500 --> 00:23:00.500
And you have to sell the house and whatever.

00:23:00.500 --> 00:23:04.500
And like, if you think about all of the worst case scenarios, it's like, I would never be able to find a job.

00:23:04.500 --> 00:23:10.500
So, all of those things that even if you spell out on paper, I had like a spreadsheet that showed me the runway.

00:23:10.500 --> 00:23:15.500
And like, let's say if I work X months more, then this is what my runway will look like.

00:23:15.500 --> 00:23:18.500
If I work fewer months, it will be shorter, et cetera.

00:23:18.500 --> 00:23:21.500
And I think it doesn't help.

00:23:21.500 --> 00:23:26.500
So, like, when you really have like fear, that not in your belly, it only helps so much.

00:23:26.500 --> 00:23:30.500
I made the decision to leave the jobs and time in October, I think.

00:23:30.500 --> 00:23:33.500
But it took eight more months to actually do that.

00:23:33.500 --> 00:23:37.500
I would wake up in the middle of the night, just sweating heavy nightmares.

00:23:37.500 --> 00:23:41.500
And like, thinking about quitting the job, it would send me into the panic attack.

00:23:41.500 --> 00:23:49.500
That bad. But I think things start to change when in October last year, I went to a spiritual retreat.

00:23:49.500 --> 00:23:50.500
They don't do it anymore.

00:23:50.500 --> 00:23:52.500
So, the person's name is Sasha Cobra.

00:23:52.500 --> 00:23:55.500
She was a Netflix on the show called Unwell.

00:23:55.500 --> 00:23:57.500
So, she does a bunch of things.

00:23:57.500 --> 00:24:01.500
But that particular 10-dend retreat was based on tantric approaches.

00:24:01.500 --> 00:24:02.500
So, it's about moving the energy.

00:24:02.500 --> 00:24:04.500
You know, letting the energy flow in your body.

00:24:04.500 --> 00:24:14.500
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.

00:24:14.500 --> 00:24:17.500
And I met some incredible people there as well.

00:24:17.500 --> 00:24:22.500
That was in Mexico. So, I'm coming back from Tulum, Mexico, back home in late October.

00:24:22.500 --> 00:24:25.500
And I think next day, I'm joining a meeting.

00:24:25.500 --> 00:24:31.500
And I look at those squares or rectangles of people in Google Meet and people just play their role.

00:24:31.500 --> 00:24:34.500
They connect to the matrix from their bedrooms.

00:24:34.500 --> 00:24:37.500
And like, talking to those, like, whatever, can't phrases.

00:24:37.500 --> 00:24:40.500
It was so bizarre. It was a very bizarre feeling.

00:24:40.500 --> 00:24:42.500
I'm like, what am I doing here?

00:24:42.500 --> 00:24:44.500
Basically, for me, it was a realization, like, whatever is going to happen.

00:24:44.500 --> 00:24:46.500
Like, this, I cannot do anymore.

00:24:46.500 --> 00:24:48.500
This chapter, like, is over. I'm done.

00:24:48.500 --> 00:24:50.500
I can't do this again.

00:24:50.500 --> 00:24:52.500
I remember crying multiple times.

00:24:52.500 --> 00:24:56.500
That day, crying multiple times that week, I was just talking to my wife.

00:24:56.500 --> 00:24:58.500
I'm like, I just want to quit right away.

00:24:58.500 --> 00:25:02.500
But then the fear would start to come back and all that.

00:25:02.500 --> 00:25:05.500
Well, it's not just the fear. It's the reality, too.

00:25:05.500 --> 00:25:13.500
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.

00:25:13.500 --> 00:25:15.500
I guess it depends on how you manage your finances.

00:25:15.500 --> 00:25:18.500
So, yeah, we purchased house last year.

00:25:18.500 --> 00:25:20.500
So, like, there's more of age and all that.

00:25:20.500 --> 00:25:22.500
So, yeah, there are some financial responsibilities.

00:25:22.500 --> 00:25:27.500
So, if this came up right before we purchased the house, I could have just quit the same day, right?

00:25:27.500 --> 00:25:31.500
Because I would have all the money that I poured into the damn payment to leave off.

00:25:31.500 --> 00:25:35.500
But then, actually, I think at the time, I don't know if I would be ready for this.

00:25:35.500 --> 00:25:38.500
But yeah, but that money would have given me a lot longer runway, for sure.

00:25:38.500 --> 00:25:43.500
So, what is the runway length that you thought you could...

00:25:43.500 --> 00:25:48.500
Okay, talking about the runway, take off at and did you wait that runway?

00:25:48.500 --> 00:25:50.500
What is your runway now?

00:25:50.500 --> 00:25:58.500
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.

00:25:58.500 --> 00:26:01.500
So, basically, it was like, let's do the six months runway.

00:26:01.500 --> 00:26:04.500
I figured out if we can launch and get some financing within three months.

00:26:04.500 --> 00:26:06.500
If we can't, I go back to the job.

00:26:06.500 --> 00:26:13.500
But then, the longer, I guess, we thought about that the more it felt like it's just too short.

00:26:13.500 --> 00:26:14.500
Like, three months is nothing.

00:26:14.500 --> 00:26:20.500
And also, the current economic climate, it's not guaranteed that you can get financing so quickly.

00:26:20.500 --> 00:26:23.500
So, eventually, I stayed a lot longer than I intended.

00:26:23.500 --> 00:26:27.500
And I think right now my runway is about a year.

00:26:27.500 --> 00:26:32.500
But there are different options that I can take some debt, for example.

00:26:32.500 --> 00:26:36.500
And also, there are some other ways which I won't go into.

00:26:36.500 --> 00:26:38.500
But I can potentially send it two years.

00:26:38.500 --> 00:26:41.500
If this doesn't work out, I would be like indebted.

00:26:41.500 --> 00:26:42.500
But I've done it before.

00:26:42.500 --> 00:26:50.500
When I graduated from my MBA, I had 180,000 in debt, which I was able to pay off within two years.

00:26:50.500 --> 00:26:53.500
So, I'm not afraid of this anymore.

00:26:53.500 --> 00:26:57.500
I hope you don't get into like 180k debt though this time.

00:26:57.500 --> 00:26:59.500
I hope I would have to use any debt.

00:26:59.500 --> 00:27:00.500
Exactly.

00:27:00.500 --> 00:27:05.500
Yeah. And I'll plug in my bit of like how I prepared for it too.

00:27:05.500 --> 00:27:08.500
Unlike you, I think our situations are a bit different, right?

00:27:08.500 --> 00:27:11.500
Where I was also making a lot of money at Amazon.

00:27:11.500 --> 00:27:17.500
But I also have my wife, who's making a pretty good salary and everything, right?

00:27:17.500 --> 00:27:24.500
So, what we did is we did financial analysis long term.

00:27:24.500 --> 00:27:31.500
For the short term, we knew that our lifestyles will change a little bit, but not that much.

00:27:31.500 --> 00:27:36.500
Like before, when I was working at Amazon, we wouldn't think about like anything pretty much, right?

00:27:36.500 --> 00:27:38.500
We never budgeted for anything.

00:27:38.500 --> 00:27:42.500
Now we do, we actually like look at how much are we spending?

00:27:42.500 --> 00:27:44.500
Is that the right amount?

00:27:44.500 --> 00:27:48.500
Is that what our goal was for the month and did we accomplish that?

00:27:48.500 --> 00:27:50.500
And if not, that's okay.

00:27:50.500 --> 00:27:52.500
But why not buy how much not?

00:27:52.500 --> 00:27:53.500
What can we do?

00:27:53.500 --> 00:27:54.500
That sort of stuff.

00:27:54.500 --> 00:27:59.500
Anyway, these are I think good things to do in your life anyway, whether you're working in a big company or not.

00:27:59.500 --> 00:28:05.500
But what we did is we did like a long term projection, not just by ourselves.

00:28:05.500 --> 00:28:09.500
We got some like actual people who do the scenario planning and all that.

00:28:09.500 --> 00:28:12.500
So, they took some like assumptions, right?

00:28:12.500 --> 00:28:27.500
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.

00:28:27.500 --> 00:28:29.500
What is your net worth?

00:28:29.500 --> 00:28:34.500
Let's say at the age of 70, at the age of 80 and at the age of 90.

00:28:34.500 --> 00:28:37.500
And then we did some scenarios.

00:28:37.500 --> 00:28:41.500
What if I don't earn anything for two years or three years?

00:28:41.500 --> 00:28:42.500
Or five years?

00:28:42.500 --> 00:28:49.500
What is the difference between that net worth at the age of 70, 80 and 90 versus this?

00:28:49.500 --> 00:28:58.500
And turns out thanks to the wonders of the finance world and compounding interests and all, there's almost no difference.

00:28:58.500 --> 00:29:01.500
There is a little difference but it doesn't really matter to us.

00:29:01.500 --> 00:29:14.500
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.

00:29:14.500 --> 00:29:19.500
And that's what made me feel secure that okay, I have the time.

00:29:19.500 --> 00:29:22.500
Let's do it if I don't do it now, I'll not do it.

00:29:22.500 --> 00:29:29.500
Interesting that you think in these terms because it wouldn't even occur to me to do this kind of calculation.

00:29:29.500 --> 00:29:41.500
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.

00:29:41.500 --> 00:29:44.500
I mean I was like freelancing when I had a half time job.

00:29:44.500 --> 00:29:48.500
And I just quit the job like next day and corporate companies started doing the other thing.

00:29:48.500 --> 00:29:53.500
Then I just quit my own company, sold the product, went to work in the poor like DHL.

00:29:53.500 --> 00:29:57.500
And then I got an offer from Moscow, like to move to Moscow, like the salary wasn't good.

00:29:57.500 --> 00:30:00.500
But we just went for it and my wife and I we knew each other for three months.

00:30:00.500 --> 00:30:02.500
She wasn't even my wife then. She went with me.

00:30:02.500 --> 00:30:08.500
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.

00:30:08.500 --> 00:30:11.500
Because for me it's like it sounds like this has a lot of potential.

00:30:11.500 --> 00:30:15.500
The downside is that yeah, we lose the money that we already have.

00:30:15.500 --> 00:30:16.500
But like we learn a lot.

00:30:16.500 --> 00:30:20.500
So like living the life is what I guess I was always after.

00:30:20.500 --> 00:30:25.500
So for me when I was thinking about quitting the corporate career and starting our own company with you,

00:30:25.500 --> 00:30:30.500
it was more like these stars have aligned. It's time to do it.

00:30:30.500 --> 00:30:33.500
Because like, A, we have a great idea on our hands.

00:30:33.500 --> 00:30:38.500
Unicorn or not, it doesn't matter. Like I don't want to think like a Silicon Valley startup.

00:30:38.500 --> 00:30:41.500
It can go different ways. But I think which are where it goes.

00:30:41.500 --> 00:30:44.500
Unless something goes terribly terribly wrong.

00:30:44.500 --> 00:30:48.500
I think we'll be able to make as much money as we make in our corporate jobs.

00:30:48.500 --> 00:30:49.500
Probably a lot more.

00:30:49.500 --> 00:30:51.500
In order if you orders of magnitude more.

00:30:51.500 --> 00:30:56.500
And I think the money itself, money fuels your life.

00:30:56.500 --> 00:30:58.500
But that's risk management part. Right.

00:30:58.500 --> 00:31:07.500
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.

00:31:07.500 --> 00:31:09.500
You can't get that from anywhere else.

00:31:09.500 --> 00:31:14.500
I talked to like ex colleagues and I showed them what I'm working on.

00:31:14.500 --> 00:31:19.500
And I feel so first of all happy and second proud.

00:31:19.500 --> 00:31:26.500
But also the amount of decision making power that's on you.

00:31:26.500 --> 00:31:29.500
At the same time, there's the risk of decision making also.

00:31:29.500 --> 00:31:30.500
But it's all on you.

00:31:30.500 --> 00:31:33.500
I feel like I'm energized by that.

00:31:33.500 --> 00:31:42.500
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.

00:31:42.500 --> 00:31:43.500
That's absolutely incredible.

00:31:43.500 --> 00:31:46.500
Yeah, there is an I mentioned money is because it's a risk management part.

00:31:46.500 --> 00:31:51.500
You can be like excited and all that. But like if you don't have the money to live on, what do you do?

00:31:51.500 --> 00:31:58.500
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.

00:31:58.500 --> 00:32:01.500
Because of all the stress, right? All the stress, yeah.

00:32:01.500 --> 00:32:05.500
I mean, financial stress is probably the one of the biggest stresses in life.

00:32:05.500 --> 00:32:08.500
Yes, especially we have like a mortgage and kids.

00:32:08.500 --> 00:32:19.500
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,

00:32:19.500 --> 00:32:26.500
maybe even less, right? Yeah, I would have had like a very, very long run away if I could afford to live like that.

00:32:26.500 --> 00:32:31.500
Even that could have just rendered like the one bedroom and partially for $2,000 a month.

00:32:31.500 --> 00:32:33.500
Right. And I don't know Gary in D&R.

00:32:33.500 --> 00:32:36.500
Oh, that would probably be like $1,000 a month.

00:32:36.500 --> 00:32:39.500
No, that would be like $400 a month, I think.

00:32:39.500 --> 00:32:50.500
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,

00:32:50.500 --> 00:32:54.500
but this one is very concrete. It's a very specific idea with a very specific business model.

00:32:54.500 --> 00:32:57.500
Then second is like you've already quit your job.

00:32:57.500 --> 00:33:01.500
You can actually coach me on how do you do that.

00:33:01.500 --> 00:33:06.500
I think if you didn't quit almost a year ago, I would have struggled a lot more.

00:33:06.500 --> 00:33:11.500
Basically, I'm following your footsteps. Maybe it would be different to be thinking about this differently.

00:33:11.500 --> 00:33:14.500
But I'm following your footsteps. It gives me a lot of confidence.

00:33:14.500 --> 00:33:19.500
And then third thing is having a partner like you, not like you actually have a new partner.

00:33:19.500 --> 00:33:22.500
Because you and I worked together for five years.

00:33:22.500 --> 00:33:24.500
We've known each other for eight.

00:33:24.500 --> 00:33:28.500
And we worked together really, really well.

00:33:28.500 --> 00:33:30.500
I think we complement each other really well.

00:33:30.500 --> 00:33:33.500
So yeah, that was just kind of perfect.

00:33:33.500 --> 00:33:41.500
That is the one of the biggest struggles I hear from people who start to do indie development.

00:33:41.500 --> 00:33:47.500
So indie, by the way, I think maybe not all of our audiences would know these things.

00:33:47.500 --> 00:33:52.500
Some of them for sure would know more than us, but some probably would not know anything about it.

00:33:52.500 --> 00:33:54.500
So let's just explain what that is.

00:33:54.500 --> 00:34:02.500
Typically when people leave and go create their own companies, the traditional model is like get some sort of venture funding.

00:34:02.500 --> 00:34:08.500
Large amounts of money from a VC that fuels your growth for the next X years or something.

00:34:08.500 --> 00:34:12.500
And then try to grow your business and go from there.

00:34:12.500 --> 00:34:13.500
And sell to Facebook.

00:34:13.500 --> 00:34:14.500
Yeah, exactly.

00:34:14.500 --> 00:34:15.500
Exit, yeah.

00:34:15.500 --> 00:34:21.500
Yes. A newer model is you basically don't take money from anybody.

00:34:21.500 --> 00:34:23.500
You bootstrap your business.

00:34:23.500 --> 00:34:29.500
So it's never going to become like that like Google or at least not in four or five years.

00:34:29.500 --> 00:34:32.500
I don't think it's a newer model.

00:34:32.500 --> 00:34:35.500
It just used to be called business.

00:34:35.500 --> 00:34:37.500
And it's like bootstrapping.

00:34:37.500 --> 00:34:38.500
Right.

00:34:38.500 --> 00:34:40.500
It used to be called more traditional businesses.

00:34:40.500 --> 00:34:43.500
Yeah, like you're opening your restaurant or something like that.

00:34:43.500 --> 00:34:45.500
In software, that's pretty new.

00:34:45.500 --> 00:34:48.500
New as in like maybe last five, six years.

00:34:48.500 --> 00:34:49.500
I don't know.

00:34:49.500 --> 00:34:56.500
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.

00:34:56.500 --> 00:35:02.500
But then for example, I have a friend who started the company 20 years ago in New York.

00:35:02.500 --> 00:35:05.500
Because he was doing some, I think some freelance work for one of the banks.

00:35:05.500 --> 00:35:08.500
And then he figured out that he can actually create a product out of it.

00:35:08.500 --> 00:35:12.500
And then he created the product, which is like a company of just a few people.

00:35:12.500 --> 00:35:17.500
And there are lots and lots and lots of those small companies that create small niche products.

00:35:17.500 --> 00:35:21.500
Like nobody has ever heard about except for that niche where they operate.

00:35:21.500 --> 00:35:24.500
So from this perspective, actually, I don't think it's so uncommon.

00:35:24.500 --> 00:35:26.500
It's just less visible.

00:35:26.500 --> 00:35:36.500
Yes. Today with the internet and social media and all and indiehacker.com and their podcast, it has become very visible and popular.

00:35:36.500 --> 00:35:44.500
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.

00:35:44.500 --> 00:35:49.500
Yeah. I think for us, it's not clear yet whether we are going to take VC funding or not in the future.

00:35:49.500 --> 00:35:56.500
But I think for now, we will just go the bootstrapping route, launch, see how it goes.

00:35:56.500 --> 00:36:01.500
Because I think one of the risk factors for a business like ours is cost.

00:36:01.500 --> 00:36:07.500
Would our business model work to cover the costs of operating?

00:36:07.500 --> 00:36:11.500
And I'm not even talking about our salaries. I'm talking about actually cost of doing business.

00:36:11.500 --> 00:36:15.500
Sorry, what would be called cost of goods sold in the traditional world?

00:36:15.500 --> 00:36:19.500
All the infrastructure that we have to use for doing this?

00:36:19.500 --> 00:36:22.500
Yeah, I would like the free versus paid model work for us.

00:36:22.500 --> 00:36:24.500
All those things.

00:36:24.500 --> 00:36:29.500
For some reason, we get a lot of, let's say, adoption, but nobody pays for it.

00:36:29.500 --> 00:36:31.500
We will break up a lot of costs.

00:36:31.500 --> 00:36:33.500
And then maybe that would be the time to take VC funding.

00:36:33.500 --> 00:36:35.500
We see from this now, right?

00:36:35.500 --> 00:36:38.500
Yeah. Because then you show traction and growth and all that.

00:36:38.500 --> 00:36:41.500
But you have not figured out the actual financial side of it.

00:36:41.500 --> 00:36:45.500
Yeah, but you need time to figure out the economics otherwise you die, right? The business dies.

00:36:45.500 --> 00:36:48.500
Yeah, let's hope my MBA helps us here.

00:36:48.500 --> 00:36:51.500
But you never know, it's so much uncertainty.

00:36:51.500 --> 00:36:58.500
Yeah. Okay, so we talked a lot about the finance side of it, like preparing for it and how you think about it.

00:36:58.500 --> 00:37:00.500
What about the family itself?

00:37:00.500 --> 00:37:04.500
How did you prepare with them or prepare them?

00:37:04.500 --> 00:37:07.500
Yeah, so just give some context. My wife doesn't work.

00:37:07.500 --> 00:37:09.500
She's a whole time mom.

00:37:09.500 --> 00:37:11.500
Yeah, I have two children.

00:37:11.500 --> 00:37:13.500
So she works full time at home.

00:37:13.500 --> 00:37:15.500
Yeah. She makes no money, right?

00:37:15.500 --> 00:37:17.500
She doesn't show any spends money.

00:37:17.500 --> 00:37:21.500
Everybody else in the family spends money at the time.

00:37:21.500 --> 00:37:30.500
So obviously they want to support what I'm doing, but then my wife also is pragmatic.

00:37:30.500 --> 00:37:32.500
Like what about the finances?

00:37:32.500 --> 00:37:38.500
And she was the primary driver for me to like pushing out my exit date with Google for as long as possible.

00:37:38.500 --> 00:37:40.500
Because she wanted to have more confidence.

00:37:40.500 --> 00:37:48.500
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.

00:37:48.500 --> 00:37:50.500
That was the March one.

00:37:50.500 --> 00:37:51.500
It was February.

00:37:51.500 --> 00:37:56.500
February. So I went to Peru to do Ayahuasca, which we can talk about a little bit.

00:37:56.500 --> 00:38:04.500
But yeah, I came back with a very clear state of mind that whatever I'm doing right now, I'm just killing myself.

00:38:04.500 --> 00:38:10.500
So it's like when you were talking about that what will your network be by the time you retire?

00:38:10.500 --> 00:38:15.500
For me, it's like if I retire doing what I'm doing right now, I would have just wasted my life.

00:38:15.500 --> 00:38:18.500
And I would like leave a miserable life for the rest of my life.

00:38:18.500 --> 00:38:21.500
And this is not to say that I will never work for a corporation again.

00:38:21.500 --> 00:38:23.500
Because I might.

00:38:23.500 --> 00:38:30.500
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.

00:38:30.500 --> 00:38:31.500
Or at least I think is right for me.

00:38:31.500 --> 00:38:33.500
I feel is right for me, right?

00:38:33.500 --> 00:38:40.500
So there is a quick framework I'll plug it in here from Jeff Bezos, call a regret minimization framework.

00:38:40.500 --> 00:38:41.500
Right.

00:38:41.500 --> 00:38:42.500
That's what you're following.

00:38:42.500 --> 00:38:44.500
And that was one of my things too.

00:38:44.500 --> 00:38:47.500
Like if I don't do it now, I'm not going to do it.

00:38:47.500 --> 00:38:53.500
Yes. Because I'm like, if you think about time, like do you remember when your child was just born?

00:38:53.500 --> 00:38:55.500
That was how many years ago?

00:38:55.500 --> 00:38:58.500
Remember as in yeah, yeah.

00:38:58.500 --> 00:39:00.500
But it was like how many 11 years ago, right?

00:39:00.500 --> 00:39:03.500
But it still feels like yesterday, right?

00:39:03.500 --> 00:39:04.500
But guess what?

00:39:04.500 --> 00:39:09.500
Like 10 years from now, you will think about today's conversation as if it was yesterday.

00:39:09.500 --> 00:39:13.500
And when you will be 80, you would be like, okay, my life is just all past.

00:39:13.500 --> 00:39:14.500
But right.

00:39:14.500 --> 00:39:21.500
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.

00:39:21.500 --> 00:39:25.500
You know, they talk about the present moment a lot.

00:39:25.500 --> 00:39:39.500
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.

00:39:39.500 --> 00:39:41.500
So it's like, future is non-existent.

00:39:41.500 --> 00:39:42.500
It's just potential.

00:39:42.500 --> 00:39:46.500
The past, you know, it might as well not even ever exist, right?

00:39:46.500 --> 00:39:47.500
It's gone.

00:39:47.500 --> 00:39:51.500
The only thing you have, the only time you have is right now.

00:39:51.500 --> 00:39:55.500
The quality of your life is defined by what you do this very moment.

00:39:55.500 --> 00:40:00.500
And for me, it's like, I make all this money, but like I feel miserable most of the time.

00:40:00.500 --> 00:40:08.500
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.

00:40:08.500 --> 00:40:14.500
And that's what kind of help you make the jump and talking to my wife also, she was very supportive.

00:40:14.500 --> 00:40:18.500
Before we move on, I'll plug in Kung Fu Panda.

00:40:18.500 --> 00:40:22.500
You know what I'm talking, what I'm going to say, I think immediately.

00:40:22.500 --> 00:40:26.500
Now, I watched the movie, but I don't know what you're going to say.

00:40:26.500 --> 00:40:27.500
Oh, really?

00:40:27.500 --> 00:40:30.500
So Kung Fu Panda, you know that master Rookway, right?

00:40:30.500 --> 00:40:31.500
The turtle.

00:40:31.500 --> 00:40:33.500
Now, you have to give context.

00:40:33.500 --> 00:40:39.500
Okay, the turtle, the very old wise turtle who kind of is trying to teach this guy.

00:40:39.500 --> 00:40:43.500
He's like Yoda, Yoda in Kung Fu Panda.

00:40:43.500 --> 00:40:44.500
Yeah, he's like Yoda, yeah.

00:40:44.500 --> 00:40:47.500
So one of his favorite quotes from that movie.

00:40:47.500 --> 00:40:49.500
It's delivered in a hilarious way.

00:40:49.500 --> 00:40:51.500
Go watch it after.

00:40:51.500 --> 00:40:53.500
It's yesterday's history.

00:40:53.500 --> 00:40:56.500
Tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift.

00:40:56.500 --> 00:40:58.500
That's why it's called a present.

00:40:58.500 --> 00:41:00.500
Oh, interesting.

00:41:00.500 --> 00:41:01.500
I definitely have heard this phrase.

00:41:01.500 --> 00:41:03.500
I just didn't know it was from that movie.

00:41:03.500 --> 00:41:04.500
Right.

00:41:04.500 --> 00:41:07.500
Yeah, it's done in a beautiful way in that movie.

00:41:07.500 --> 00:41:08.500
So go watch it.

00:41:08.500 --> 00:41:09.500
All right.

00:41:09.500 --> 00:41:11.500
So now, sorry, sorry for the interruption.

00:41:11.500 --> 00:41:16.500
Yeah. The thing I want to say is, my wife showed me her messages with her family.

00:41:16.500 --> 00:41:24.500
And on the other side, I mean, her mom was saying, like, are you sure, like, you want to leave over your savings?

00:41:24.500 --> 00:41:26.500
You're going to just expand all that money, right?

00:41:26.500 --> 00:41:27.500
And my wife responds to her.

00:41:27.500 --> 00:41:29.500
She's like, yeah, but he earned all this money.

00:41:29.500 --> 00:41:33.500
Or he earned his right to, like, leave life he wants.

00:41:33.500 --> 00:41:34.500
And I'm reading this.

00:41:34.500 --> 00:41:36.500
I'm like, okay, so this is what the support means.

00:41:36.500 --> 00:41:39.500
And she didn't come to me to ask what to respond to her.

00:41:39.500 --> 00:41:41.500
She showed it to me after the fact.

00:41:41.500 --> 00:41:43.500
So she's really supportive.

00:41:43.500 --> 00:41:48.500
And for me, one of the things was, like, let go my attachment to the house.

00:41:48.500 --> 00:41:54.500
And like, worst case scenario, probably have to sell the house and maybe move to a smaller house or like rent.

00:41:54.500 --> 00:41:56.500
Hopefully it won't come to that.

00:41:56.500 --> 00:41:58.500
Yeah, that would be crazy.

00:41:58.500 --> 00:42:00.500
But here's the thing, right?

00:42:00.500 --> 00:42:01.500
It's like fear.

00:42:01.500 --> 00:42:08.500
When you really fear something, fear, fear losing something that you attach to, that's what can really drive you, like, nuts.

00:42:08.500 --> 00:42:11.500
It will prevent you from making the decision you need to make.

00:42:11.500 --> 00:42:19.500
But once you realize that everything in life is temporary, basically, like, this house, like, I don't own this house.

00:42:19.500 --> 00:42:21.500
I'm going to be gone.

00:42:21.500 --> 00:42:25.500
Maybe if 50 years max, right, I have on this earth, I'll be gone.

00:42:25.500 --> 00:42:30.500
Anything that I've made here, even the business that we are going to be working on, all of that will be gone.

00:42:30.500 --> 00:42:36.500
So thinking that we own anything is a delusion in that way.

00:42:36.500 --> 00:42:40.500
So it's like a social construct, like this ownership thing.

00:42:40.500 --> 00:42:42.500
So everybody's going to die.

00:42:42.500 --> 00:42:46.500
And it's a quality of the day-to-day experiences that you have.

00:42:46.500 --> 00:42:49.500
That's what's going to dictate the quality of your life overall.

00:42:49.500 --> 00:42:53.500
And your relationship with your children and wife and everything, so, yeah, totally.

00:42:53.500 --> 00:42:58.500
Yeah, which is part of that kind of quality of life, right, every moment, yeah.

00:42:58.500 --> 00:43:03.500
In the U.S., this is very, I think, important health insurance.

00:43:03.500 --> 00:43:07.500
So for me in Canada, that was another thing I didn't have to deal with.

00:43:07.500 --> 00:43:10.500
And plus my wife is working.

00:43:10.500 --> 00:43:18.500
So whatever other things that is not covered by the government, like dental and all that is covered by her, by her employer.

00:43:18.500 --> 00:43:20.500
So we didn't have to deal with any of that.

00:43:20.500 --> 00:43:23.500
But you, you're not working now.

00:43:23.500 --> 00:43:25.500
Your wife is not working.

00:43:25.500 --> 00:43:28.500
And health insurance is a big deal in the U.S.

00:43:28.500 --> 00:43:33.500
So tell us more about like the specifics of what you have planned for that.

00:43:33.500 --> 00:43:38.500
Yeah, so I just typed health insurance in Google.

00:43:38.500 --> 00:43:42.500
And there was a website that came first in the organic search.

00:43:42.500 --> 00:43:44.500
I don't remember which website it was.

00:43:44.500 --> 00:43:50.500
It was like a broker website where you just type your email and then a couple of people reach out to you.

00:43:50.500 --> 00:43:51.500
Like, agents.

00:43:51.500 --> 00:43:52.500
Got a quote.

00:43:52.500 --> 00:43:55.500
Yeah, it says like get an instant quote, but like you never get an instant quote.

00:43:55.500 --> 00:43:56.500
It's so deceptive.

00:43:56.500 --> 00:43:59.500
Give us your email and we'll get back to you.

00:43:59.500 --> 00:44:03.500
Yeah. Like his name is Ethan, he got back to me.

00:44:03.500 --> 00:44:06.500
He is based here out of Florida on the other coast in Tampa.

00:44:06.500 --> 00:44:08.500
And he was very nice actually.

00:44:08.500 --> 00:44:11.500
So I talked to him a few times and he gave me different options.

00:44:11.500 --> 00:44:13.500
He explained things really well.

00:44:13.500 --> 00:44:19.500
And yeah, then yeah, basically family plan for insurance is like $850 a month, I think.

00:44:19.500 --> 00:44:23.500
So that's you, your wife and two kids?

00:44:23.500 --> 00:44:28.500
Yes. Can you tell us the age of the kids because that probably factors into the insurance?

00:44:28.500 --> 00:44:30.500
Sure, it's 11 and almost five.

00:44:30.500 --> 00:44:33.500
So it's 50 a month that that's quite a lot.

00:44:33.500 --> 00:44:40.500
Yeah, it's quite a lot, but there's another option I could continue the insurance I have with Google for 2500 a month.

00:44:40.500 --> 00:44:42.500
That's what's called cobra.

00:44:42.500 --> 00:44:44.500
A cobra stands for something.

00:44:44.500 --> 00:44:45.500
It's like an abbreviation.

00:44:45.500 --> 00:44:50.500
So you can just continue the coverage you have, but $2500 a month is a lot.

00:44:50.500 --> 00:44:55.500
So basically I just wanted to find the cheapest thing because we almost never go to doctors.

00:44:55.500 --> 00:45:01.500
So it's basically just for a catastrophic kind of event that we needed for insurance insurance.

00:45:01.500 --> 00:45:02.500
Yes, exactly.

00:45:02.500 --> 00:45:03.500
That's what it is.

00:45:03.500 --> 00:45:10.500
So $850, once we start bringing in revenue health insurance is one of the first things I want to accompany to play for.

00:45:10.500 --> 00:45:16.500
But let's say somebody is starting up just them and their spouse.

00:45:16.500 --> 00:45:23.500
Is that going to be like significantly less because they don't have kids or do you know do you have any idea?

00:45:23.500 --> 00:45:27.500
Yes, it will be less. I don't know about how much, but it will definitely be less.

00:45:27.500 --> 00:45:32.500
And is the coverage similar to what you had with Google for this $850?

00:45:32.500 --> 00:45:34.500
Actually, I think it's a bit different.

00:45:34.500 --> 00:45:35.500
I don't know the details.

00:45:35.500 --> 00:45:36.500
It's just so complicated.

00:45:36.500 --> 00:45:37.500
It's a convoluted.

00:45:37.500 --> 00:45:46.500
I like absolutely despise that whole area of business that's health insurance, that's the housing insurance.

00:45:46.500 --> 00:45:50.500
I think current insurance is okay, but like they just intentionally making things so convoluted.

00:45:50.500 --> 00:45:51.500
It's incredible.

00:45:51.500 --> 00:46:03.500
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.

00:46:03.500 --> 00:46:05.500
So I left in June 1st.

00:46:05.500 --> 00:46:07.500
I remember.

00:46:07.500 --> 00:46:14.500
So you and I were talking and initially your last date was made 24th or 25th of Friday.

00:46:14.500 --> 00:46:20.500
And then you figured out that how my insurance will go on for the whole month if I live on the first.

00:46:20.500 --> 00:46:22.500
Yeah, it makes sense.

00:46:22.500 --> 00:46:23.500
Yes, yeah, yeah.

00:46:23.500 --> 00:46:26.500
I worked with you a few more days and that extended my insurance.

00:46:26.500 --> 00:46:27.500
And primarily it was because of dental.

00:46:27.500 --> 00:46:33.500
Because I'm not buying dental insurance, but just before my exit, I'm like, okay, I have unused dental insurance.

00:46:33.500 --> 00:46:34.500
Why did I use it?

00:46:34.500 --> 00:46:43.500
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.

00:46:43.500 --> 00:46:50.500
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.

00:46:50.500 --> 00:46:55.500
And that's what drove me to reconsider the exit date.

00:46:55.500 --> 00:47:00.500
So when you were living, I mean, you first took it like live of absence and all.

00:47:00.500 --> 00:47:03.500
So maybe let's talk about like living nicely.

00:47:03.500 --> 00:47:08.500
Because I think both of us left pretty kind of nicely on good terms and all that.

00:47:08.500 --> 00:47:14.500
Also, it's one thing that Tony Fadell mentioned in his book, Build, he talks a lot about like non-burning bridges.

00:47:14.500 --> 00:47:17.500
And that's just generally has been a philosophy for me as well.

00:47:17.500 --> 00:47:20.500
So how did you plan your exit?

00:47:20.500 --> 00:47:22.500
And actually, let's take a step back.

00:47:22.500 --> 00:47:25.500
Like what actually inspired you to leave Amazon?

00:47:25.500 --> 00:47:27.500
Because you were with Amazon for 12 years.

00:47:27.500 --> 00:47:29.500
You were a principal engineer. It's a big deal.

00:47:29.500 --> 00:47:32.500
I know you will not say it yourself. It's a very big deal.

00:47:32.500 --> 00:47:38.500
A very high level, like highest level, pretty much, I guess highest level for most engineers in the company.

00:47:38.500 --> 00:47:41.500
I would say it's unreachable for most engineers at Amazon.

00:47:41.500 --> 00:47:44.500
And yeah, somehow you decide to leave.

00:47:44.500 --> 00:47:47.500
So what was your motivation? What was your inspiration?

00:47:47.500 --> 00:47:50.500
Why did you decide to, why did you even start thinking about this?

00:47:50.500 --> 00:47:54.500
In the first five minutes, you said something, but I didn't want to interrupt you.

00:47:54.500 --> 00:47:57.500
What I was going to say is, am I you?

00:47:57.500 --> 00:48:02.500
Because what you said is exactly what happened with me to backtracking.

00:48:02.500 --> 00:48:06.500
So 12 years at Amazon, but not in one state, right?

00:48:06.500 --> 00:48:11.500
I started as the junior most level of engineer in Amazon SD1.

00:48:11.500 --> 00:48:16.500
And I spent about five years, I think, in Amazon, in that role.

00:48:16.500 --> 00:48:19.500
And I always wanted to go do startups and all.

00:48:19.500 --> 00:48:22.500
You always didn't want to bring your, yes.

00:48:22.500 --> 00:48:25.500
I was a wonderful entrepreneur, pretty much my whole life.

00:48:25.500 --> 00:48:29.500
But we didn't know exactly what to do and all that.

00:48:29.500 --> 00:48:31.500
And we just had our daughter.

00:48:31.500 --> 00:48:36.500
We decided for family as well as for this that let's go try this out.

00:48:36.500 --> 00:48:38.500
So we both moved to India and our daughter.

00:48:38.500 --> 00:48:40.500
She was six months old at that time.

00:48:40.500 --> 00:48:44.500
Both of us worked in like really small startups.

00:48:44.500 --> 00:48:47.500
But you were in the founder. You were an employee of a startup.

00:48:47.500 --> 00:48:49.500
I was not the founder. Yeah. Yeah.

00:48:49.500 --> 00:48:51.500
I wasn't thinking about founding and all that at that time.

00:48:51.500 --> 00:48:54.500
I just wanted to work in a really small, like early company.

00:48:54.500 --> 00:48:59.500
And to be fair, my wife really worked it like a four person company.

00:48:59.500 --> 00:49:01.500
So that was really small.

00:49:01.500 --> 00:49:03.500
I worked in more like a 50% company.

00:49:03.500 --> 00:49:06.500
So it was already a couple of years old and all that.

00:49:06.500 --> 00:49:10.500
But it was still a pretty big difference compared to like a big tech company.

00:49:10.500 --> 00:49:13.500
And then I'll fast forward two, three years there.

00:49:13.500 --> 00:49:17.500
Kind of figured out that she had a few pretty bad experiences, right?

00:49:17.500 --> 00:49:20.500
Working there in a very small company.

00:49:20.500 --> 00:49:25.500
And my daughter was not happy with like preschool and all that already.

00:49:25.500 --> 00:49:29.500
And we could see like all the stress of academics and all that.

00:49:29.500 --> 00:49:31.500
That's very normal in India.

00:49:31.500 --> 00:49:35.500
In a way, maybe it's good that you're so academically focused.

00:49:35.500 --> 00:49:37.500
But we were not ready for that.

00:49:37.500 --> 00:49:38.500
So we decided to come back.

00:49:38.500 --> 00:49:40.500
And that's when I had a few offers.

00:49:40.500 --> 00:49:43.500
But then I decided I really like the manager.

00:49:43.500 --> 00:49:48.500
So actually Craig was going to be my manager's manager at that time.

00:49:48.500 --> 00:49:50.500
And I really liked it, right?

00:49:50.500 --> 00:49:53.500
Like Tim. And I said, OK, this org will be a good fit.

00:49:53.500 --> 00:49:54.500
Let me go there.

00:49:54.500 --> 00:49:57.500
So Craig, if you listen to this, we love you.

00:49:57.500 --> 00:49:59.500
Craig and his manager, Ken Nexner.

00:49:59.500 --> 00:50:02.500
Ken Nexner was at some point my manager previously too.

00:50:02.500 --> 00:50:04.500
And I really like, oh, you're kidding me.

00:50:04.500 --> 00:50:07.500
Ken Nexner hired me into this role.

00:50:07.500 --> 00:50:10.500
So I really liked working with their org.

00:50:10.500 --> 00:50:12.500
So I came back.

00:50:12.500 --> 00:50:15.500
But that burning desire to like go do something.

00:50:15.500 --> 00:50:17.500
The startup thing was always there.

00:50:17.500 --> 00:50:21.500
But now I think I did get to work on really interesting projects.

00:50:21.500 --> 00:50:25.500
You, especially working with you for those five years was awesome.

00:50:25.500 --> 00:50:31.500
I think that experience that you and I had and our team had is very rare at a big company.

00:50:31.500 --> 00:50:35.500
Which is like start something from scratch with one or two people.

00:50:35.500 --> 00:50:38.500
Grow it over four or five years.

00:50:38.500 --> 00:50:41.500
Almost like a startup kind of experience.

00:50:41.500 --> 00:50:44.500
But without the worries of finance and all that.

00:50:44.500 --> 00:50:47.500
You know that you're budgeted for at least the next year.

00:50:47.500 --> 00:50:50.500
You don't know what will happen after the next year.

00:50:50.500 --> 00:50:54.500
But worst case, you will go on and ask to work on some other projects.

00:50:54.500 --> 00:51:00.500
Now in the second stint, I had a lot of fun working and we built really awesome things.

00:51:00.500 --> 00:51:03.500
Right. And because of all that, the team grew.

00:51:03.500 --> 00:51:06.500
We got more and more exciting people joining in.

00:51:06.500 --> 00:51:10.500
And the products we launched out on the interrupt you and ask you a question.

00:51:10.500 --> 00:51:13.500
So before I left three years ago, we were just.

00:51:13.500 --> 00:51:19.500
We were just starting to work on one thing that launched when.

00:51:19.500 --> 00:51:21.500
Like a few weeks ago.

00:51:21.500 --> 00:51:22.500
A few weeks ago.

00:51:22.500 --> 00:51:24.500
Yes. That's a reality for the company.

00:51:24.500 --> 00:51:25.500
That's the reality, right?

00:51:25.500 --> 00:51:29.500
Like you're launching a major new thing for AWS.

00:51:29.500 --> 00:51:33.500
It has so many things that you need to think of, right?

00:51:33.500 --> 00:51:37.500
Because there are customers of all sizes and shapes for AWS.

00:51:37.500 --> 00:51:39.500
And it needs to satisfy all of them.

00:51:39.500 --> 00:51:42.500
We won't go into the need to create details.

00:51:42.500 --> 00:51:50.500
Feature wise, when I had left last year in like August, features were not pretty much they were done.

00:51:50.500 --> 00:51:53.500
But there are big things that still needed to be done.

00:51:53.500 --> 00:51:55.500
And I don't want to get into all the details.

00:51:55.500 --> 00:51:57.500
So it does take more time.

00:51:57.500 --> 00:51:59.500
So it's a relatively big company.

00:51:59.500 --> 00:52:05.500
You have a product that works perfectly in your six months to tighten it up.

00:52:05.500 --> 00:52:10.500
Like operationally and like process and approvals and what have you, right?

00:52:10.500 --> 00:52:20.500
Yeah. Anyway, so and I think a year or so before I left, I got promoted also to the principal position, just like you.

00:52:20.500 --> 00:52:24.500
And there's this saying, right?

00:52:24.500 --> 00:52:31.500
You will tell me who said it, but you in an organization, you grow to your level of incompetence.

00:52:31.500 --> 00:52:32.500
That's a Peter's principle.

00:52:32.500 --> 00:52:33.500
Peter's principle.

00:52:33.500 --> 00:52:37.500
Yes. I think it says everybody is promoted to their level of incompetence.

00:52:37.500 --> 00:52:43.500
And the premise there is that you can't be promoted further because you already know what you do.

00:52:43.500 --> 00:52:47.500
This is basically you stop at that level where you actually no longer are competent.

00:52:47.500 --> 00:52:50.500
Right. I feel like I reach that level.

00:52:50.500 --> 00:53:01.500
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.

00:53:01.500 --> 00:53:04.500
Nature of your day to day work changes so much.

00:53:04.500 --> 00:53:10.500
Yeah. But by the way, that principal role at Amazon and there's always levels and levels, right?

00:53:10.500 --> 00:53:13.500
There's like senior principal and all that.

00:53:13.500 --> 00:53:22.500
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.

00:53:22.500 --> 00:53:30.500
But it took me very far away from what I like doing, which is working on the product typing on keyboards.

00:53:30.500 --> 00:53:36.500
Yeah. Typing on keyboard and not being on meetings too much, I think.

00:53:36.500 --> 00:53:43.500
It took me far away from actually building things into the strategy and I wasn't a manager.

00:53:43.500 --> 00:53:45.500
So there was no people management.

00:53:45.500 --> 00:53:51.500
But still in that kind of role when you're working with like 60 to 80 people, 60 to 80 engineers.

00:53:51.500 --> 00:53:53.500
I don't remember.

00:53:53.500 --> 00:53:56.500
Maybe 45 to 60 engineers in our organ that time when I left.

00:53:56.500 --> 00:54:00.500
That's a lot of people and you're expected to know about everybody and all that.

00:54:00.500 --> 00:54:05.500
So all of these things was taking time away from what I like doing, which is building the thing.

00:54:05.500 --> 00:54:14.500
And which is where I and you we had a lot of fun in our time at Amazon working on actually building the things.

00:54:14.500 --> 00:54:19.500
So that's what kind of made me feel like, okay, I this is not going to work out.

00:54:19.500 --> 00:54:26.500
But like you said, I didn't know what I was what I wanted to work on yet or where I wanted to go.

00:54:26.500 --> 00:54:30.500
So I took a three month leave of absence.

00:54:30.500 --> 00:54:33.500
The organ everybody was very supportive, right?

00:54:33.500 --> 00:54:35.500
They were like, yeah, go figure it out, right?

00:54:35.500 --> 00:54:38.500
If you want to come back, yeah, this is what will work on together.

00:54:38.500 --> 00:54:42.500
If not, you figure out what you want to work on and that was cool.

00:54:42.500 --> 00:54:45.500
Yeah. What are they expecting you to come back?

00:54:45.500 --> 00:54:46.500
It depends on different people.

00:54:46.500 --> 00:54:50.500
I think some people knew that I'm not going to come back.

00:54:50.500 --> 00:54:53.500
Some people hope that I would come back.

00:54:53.500 --> 00:54:55.500
Some people felt that I would come back.

00:54:55.500 --> 00:55:02.500
Yeah. And I think there was a lot, not a lot, but there was a fair bit of like showing the future part too.

00:55:02.500 --> 00:55:07.500
So that I would come back between me and my manager and a few other managers.

00:55:07.500 --> 00:55:11.500
There was even a chat about like, let's figure out what your ideal role is.

00:55:11.500 --> 00:55:13.500
You come back and you do that.

00:55:13.500 --> 00:55:15.500
Stop doing what you're doing now.

00:55:15.500 --> 00:55:20.500
You've earned your right to have a custom role designed for you.

00:55:20.500 --> 00:55:22.500
That's just how good you were.

00:55:22.500 --> 00:55:24.500
It's not going to be like a custom role.

00:55:24.500 --> 00:55:34.500
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.

00:55:34.500 --> 00:55:44.500
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.

00:55:44.500 --> 00:55:47.500
You realize it's just different branding the same things.

00:55:47.500 --> 00:55:51.500
Yeah. In your case, it would also be the same company.

00:55:51.500 --> 00:55:52.500
Say people.

00:55:52.500 --> 00:55:55.500
At least, you know, part of a subset of them.

00:55:55.500 --> 00:55:58.500
Yeah. Because ultimately, I was happy with the people.

00:55:58.500 --> 00:55:59.500
I was happy with the company.

00:55:59.500 --> 00:56:13.500
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.

00:56:13.500 --> 00:56:18.500
Yeah. Actually, I think it really is very strongly with me.

00:56:18.500 --> 00:56:30.500
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.

00:56:30.500 --> 00:56:31.500
Very, very scrappy, right?

00:56:31.500 --> 00:56:37.500
I remember I did things like, oh, I need some analytics, but I don't want to distract engineers.

00:56:37.500 --> 00:56:43.500
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.

00:56:43.500 --> 00:56:50.500
I could just spend three, four, five days in a row, deep work, building something for fun.

00:56:50.500 --> 00:56:52.500
Not for fun, because I needed it.

00:56:52.500 --> 00:56:55.500
It was like poor quality code, but it did get the job done.

00:56:55.500 --> 00:57:00.500
And I think when I got to principal, product manager role, I didn't have time for this.

00:57:00.500 --> 00:57:05.500
I'm like, yeah, read this talk about things you don't care about and provide your opinion on it.

00:57:05.500 --> 00:57:08.500
I don't want to have an opinion of this.

00:57:08.500 --> 00:57:10.500
One of those things, right?

00:57:10.500 --> 00:57:13.500
If people talk about politics, I don't care about politics.

00:57:13.500 --> 00:57:14.500
I don't have an opinion.

00:57:14.500 --> 00:57:20.500
And it's okay, but it's not okay if you're principal at Amazon, because you're expected to.

00:57:20.500 --> 00:57:29.500
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.

00:57:29.500 --> 00:57:35.500
Because Google has different levels, but I think I joined the equivalent level at Google.

00:57:35.500 --> 00:57:37.500
And yeah, like you want to get some data.

00:57:37.500 --> 00:57:40.500
There is a business intelligence team.

00:57:40.500 --> 00:57:45.500
And just giving them the requirements, like five months later you get your dashboard.

00:57:45.500 --> 00:57:47.500
It depends on teams, of course.

00:57:47.500 --> 00:57:54.500
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.

00:57:54.500 --> 00:57:57.500
One thing that I want to say to Google is credit.

00:57:57.500 --> 00:58:03.500
Google has a very, very stringent internal processes about privacy of data.

00:58:03.500 --> 00:58:09.500
So it's like even the simplest thing that's anonymized and there is no personal but interval information.

00:58:09.500 --> 00:58:10.500
It's still very hard.

00:58:10.500 --> 00:58:17.500
You have to jump so many hopes to get access to the data that are very much respect from an internal perspective.

00:58:17.500 --> 00:58:19.500
Which as a customer, we really appreciate that.

00:58:19.500 --> 00:58:23.500
And as a general human being, I think who doesn't use something from Google today?

00:58:23.500 --> 00:58:29.500
So I have full confidence that actually my data is protected within Google.

00:58:29.500 --> 00:58:35.500
So yeah, that was very eye-opening for me because I didn't realize how strictly it worked.

00:58:35.500 --> 00:58:38.500
But when you work internally there, it's very annoying.

00:58:38.500 --> 00:58:40.500
Because you have to jump all of those.

00:58:40.500 --> 00:58:45.500
Things I did at Amazon like six, seven years ago would be unthinkable.

00:58:45.500 --> 00:58:48.500
They probably unthinkable at Amazon at this point.

00:58:48.500 --> 00:58:53.500
And now, yeah, yeah, especially AWS, especially AWS.

00:58:53.500 --> 00:58:58.500
And also one thing that really surprised me at Google is, you know, Amazon has this writing culture.

00:58:58.500 --> 00:59:03.500
You write the document with the requirements or vision or whatever technical vision, technical architecture.

00:59:03.500 --> 00:59:05.500
It's always very crisp.

00:59:05.500 --> 00:59:07.500
Writing is important.

00:59:07.500 --> 00:59:09.500
Writing gets to the perfection.

00:59:09.500 --> 00:59:14.500
And many people who don't survive within Amazon, they can't write.

00:59:14.500 --> 00:59:15.500
Because they can't write.

00:59:15.500 --> 00:59:19.500
And the culture just pushes them out. They always feel like an outlier.

00:59:19.500 --> 00:59:21.500
And eventually they leave where they get fired.

00:59:21.500 --> 00:59:23.500
I mean, it's like it's more senior levels.

00:59:23.500 --> 00:59:30.500
I think many of our listeners may know this already, but there is no PowerPoint presentations or any presentations at Amazon.

00:59:30.500 --> 00:59:33.500
Except it's a position to a customer or like a training.

00:59:33.500 --> 00:59:41.500
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.

00:59:41.500 --> 00:59:46.500
Yeah. And you spell everything out. I think that's the habit that I learned at Amazon.

00:59:46.500 --> 00:59:48.500
I guess I've always been good at writing.

00:59:48.500 --> 00:59:50.500
I just didn't have to use it as much.

00:59:50.500 --> 00:59:54.500
But when I came to Amazon, like, oh my god, this is like my environment.

00:59:54.500 --> 00:59:57.500
I like kind of writing and rewriting, which was really good.

00:59:57.500 --> 00:59:59.500
When I came to Google, Google is also a document culture.

00:59:59.500 --> 01:00:01.500
It has lots and lots of documents.

01:00:01.500 --> 01:00:06.500
The thing is, like, 80% done is good enough in most cases.

01:00:06.500 --> 01:00:10.500
So basically like you write something and you feel like you figured it out while writing.

01:00:10.500 --> 01:00:13.500
You show that if you people, people give you thumbs up.

01:00:13.500 --> 01:00:16.500
Okay, move on. So go build it, right?

01:00:16.500 --> 01:00:21.500
So the quality of writing is much, much lower at Google.

01:00:21.500 --> 01:00:28.500
And that kind of took away some of the enjoyment of the actual like individual contributor role for me.

01:00:28.500 --> 01:00:33.500
Because at Amazon, sometimes I would clear my day and spend the entire day just like writing a document in a coffee shop.

01:00:33.500 --> 01:00:38.500
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.

01:00:38.500 --> 01:00:40.500
I enjoyed the process of writing.

01:00:40.500 --> 01:00:42.500
On top of that, it was valued.

01:00:42.500 --> 01:00:44.500
It was appreciated, right?

01:00:44.500 --> 01:00:47.500
It made me better at my job when I could write well at Google.

01:00:47.500 --> 01:00:52.500
It wasn't so much. So basically like, yeah, I came into the environment where I can't do much with my hands.

01:00:52.500 --> 01:00:54.500
Because nothing I really like doing is analytics.

01:00:54.500 --> 01:00:57.500
So I couldn't do much there because of all the privacy stuff.

01:00:57.500 --> 01:01:02.500
Yeah, you know, writing, no one really cared much about like high quality writing.

01:01:02.500 --> 01:01:04.500
And it's always freaking PowerPoint.

01:01:04.500 --> 01:01:08.500
When I listen, I know I'm missing a lot of content that's being said.

01:01:08.500 --> 01:01:16.500
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.

01:01:16.500 --> 01:01:19.500
So it's this kind of broken communication channel.

01:01:19.500 --> 01:01:32.500
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.

01:01:32.500 --> 01:01:34.500
The presentation, there are two problems.

01:01:34.500 --> 01:01:43.500
One is you could intentionally not talk about a lot of things because it's in a concise bullet kind of format.

01:01:43.500 --> 01:01:48.500
Or you could unintentionally not about think about a lot of things.

01:01:48.500 --> 01:01:57.500
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.

01:01:57.500 --> 01:02:05.500
That format forces you to figure out each and every detail about the thing that you're writing about.

01:02:05.500 --> 01:02:11.500
And it brings everybody who's reading it to the same page like immediately.

01:02:11.500 --> 01:02:19.500
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.

01:02:19.500 --> 01:02:22.500
You're expected to read and ask questions.

01:02:22.500 --> 01:02:27.500
So like if you haven't read, well, it's kind of obviously everyone that you haven't.

01:02:27.500 --> 01:02:33.500
So it also forces kind of good reading habits reading and taking notes and asking good questions.

01:02:33.500 --> 01:02:39.500
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?

01:02:39.500 --> 01:02:42.500
It's just not working. Let's have a think about my time at Google.

01:02:42.500 --> 01:02:47.500
There are also different factors that hold like presentation culture. I never liked it.

01:02:47.500 --> 01:02:56.500
Let's have a couple of compare the cultures of Amazon and Google. So Amazon deliberates about a problem for a long time.

01:02:56.500 --> 01:03:01.500
Sometimes too long. Sometimes too long. Yes. That's negative of it.

01:03:01.500 --> 01:03:07.500
But like you write a dog, you know, you go through all of those level of hierarchy to review that.

01:03:07.500 --> 01:03:11.500
So like our chatbot, we met with Andy just four times to launch it.

01:03:11.500 --> 01:03:17.500
So you go all of the way up to the CEO of AWS and all of the levels in between.

01:03:17.500 --> 01:03:25.500
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,

01:03:25.500 --> 01:03:31.500
people ask you questions. It's like nobody else who you reviewed it with before thought about it from that perspective.

01:03:31.500 --> 01:03:35.500
Yeah. Because like those people are more seniorly, they know a lot more than you.

01:03:35.500 --> 01:03:40.500
They have much more experience. So you learn from that because like you know that next time you should think about that.

01:03:40.500 --> 01:03:46.500
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.

01:03:46.500 --> 01:03:54.500
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.

01:03:54.500 --> 01:03:59.500
We've been talking about that for months. Nobody thought about that. That's just what you get out of this.

01:03:59.500 --> 01:04:04.500
It's not something simple or obvious. Otherwise somebody would have thought about it already.

01:04:04.500 --> 01:04:10.500
Yes, it's something like very far from being obvious. It's so nuanced, right?

01:04:10.500 --> 01:04:16.500
But it's very important to that product. But when the question gets asked, it's so obvious.

01:04:16.500 --> 01:04:22.500
It's like why did they think about it? But you just, that's why you have these people, high-high-pay jobs.

01:04:22.500 --> 01:04:30.500
Sorry, quick interruption. The last six months of my stay at Amazon, there was a similar, like something that we were trying to build.

01:04:30.500 --> 01:04:37.500
It goes against a lot of foundational principles that is held very strongly at AWS.

01:04:37.500 --> 01:04:43.500
But we were strongly of the belief that we need to do this for the user experience that we are trying to provide.

01:04:43.500 --> 01:04:52.500
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.

01:04:52.500 --> 01:05:00.500
And ultimately, I think one of the last few was from the Eric Brandwine, a distinguished engineer at Amazon.

01:05:00.500 --> 01:05:06.500
And pretty much, it's like a VP level engineer. VP level engineer is basically the AWS and security.

01:05:06.500 --> 01:05:14.500
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.

01:05:14.500 --> 01:05:20.500
Because he saw that, okay, this makes sense. But not in the way how you're thinking about implementing it.

01:05:20.500 --> 01:05:28.500
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.

01:05:28.500 --> 01:05:38.500
Okay. Yeah. So to finish my thought, like you deliberate a lot and then docs really make it more obvious, more crisp, every iteration.

01:05:38.500 --> 01:05:45.500
And once it's approved, then you almost like assemble your troops and you march over it. You don't look back.

01:05:45.500 --> 01:05:57.500
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.

01:05:57.500 --> 01:06:03.500
So on the other hand, the Google's culture is more like, oh, let's do something and then figure out the details later.

01:06:03.500 --> 01:06:10.500
Would you say it's more pragmatic or I think it was more pragmatic when Google was maybe 5,000 people.

01:06:10.500 --> 01:06:16.500
It needed to be in the market. And also when it was only serving consumers. I worked only in the enterprise space.

01:06:16.500 --> 01:06:34.500
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.

01:06:34.500 --> 01:06:41.500
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.

01:06:41.500 --> 01:06:48.500
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.

01:06:48.500 --> 01:06:53.500
And maybe that's actually Google created whatever like 50,000 different child applications.

01:06:53.500 --> 01:07:10.500
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.

01:07:10.500 --> 01:07:16.500
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.

01:07:16.500 --> 01:07:30.500
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.

01:07:30.500 --> 01:07:41.500
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.

01:07:41.500 --> 01:07:49.500
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.

01:07:49.500 --> 01:08:00.500
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.

01:08:00.500 --> 01:08:10.500
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.

01:08:10.500 --> 01:08:21.500
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.

01:08:21.500 --> 01:08:30.500
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.

01:08:30.500 --> 01:08:44.500
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.

01:08:44.500 --> 01:08:53.500
If I were to ask you, what's the one thing you would take away from your experience at Amazon into this new company?

01:08:53.500 --> 01:09:03.500
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.

01:09:03.500 --> 01:09:14.500
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.

01:09:14.500 --> 01:09:24.500
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.

01:09:24.500 --> 01:09:36.500
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.

01:09:36.500 --> 01:09:50.500
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.

01:09:50.500 --> 01:09:54.500
Even though it doesn't work for the company of Google size anymore, at least in the pockets that I've seen.

01:09:54.500 --> 01:10:02.500
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.

01:10:02.500 --> 01:10:11.500
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.

01:10:11.500 --> 01:10:23.500
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.

01:10:23.500 --> 01:10:35.500
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.

01:10:35.500 --> 01:10:44.500
Okay. And I think so actually so listeners should when you get your hands on our app during alpha be prepared for something scrappy.

01:10:44.500 --> 01:10:54.500
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.

01:10:54.500 --> 01:11:07.500
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.

01:11:07.500 --> 01:11:19.500
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.

01:11:19.500 --> 01:11:26.500
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.

01:11:26.500 --> 01:11:38.500
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.

01:11:38.500 --> 01:11:49.500
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?

01:11:49.500 --> 01:11:57.500
I feel like by using a name of a Google product that might be disclosing what we're working on too much.

01:11:57.500 --> 01:12:04.500
Next question, please. Okay. Okay, you can still answer when will it be shut down though?

01:12:04.500 --> 01:12:12.500
Well, I believe it will be a very large and successful product. And it might have just become part of the Google portfolio eventually.

01:12:12.500 --> 01:12:21.500
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.

01:12:21.500 --> 01:12:30.500
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.

01:12:30.500 --> 01:12:36.500
I forgot, I forgot to work for this, but we like to make fun of things. Yeah.

01:12:36.500 --> 01:12:49.500
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.

01:12:49.500 --> 01:12:59.500
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.

01:12:59.500 --> 01:13:10.500
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.

01:13:10.500 --> 01:13:20.500
And then he would ask questions that just pierces through the issue and makes me think. That's what I really appreciate in people.

01:13:20.500 --> 01:13:28.500
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.

01:13:28.500 --> 01:13:36.500
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.

01:13:36.500 --> 01:13:43.500
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.

01:13:43.500 --> 01:13:46.500
Shani, hi.

01:13:46.500 --> 01:13:56.500
And also he has experience in both consumer and enterprise. And I think he thinks in the right way. So yeah, Amit it is.

01:13:56.500 --> 01:14:05.500
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.

01:14:05.500 --> 01:14:11.500
Yeah. So I joined in June 2020. I got my offer in April 2020, I think. And I joined the June or something.

01:14:11.500 --> 01:14:21.500
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.

01:14:21.500 --> 01:14:31.500
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.

01:14:31.500 --> 01:14:39.500
Here's the thing, right? So I'm sitting in this very nice spacious, sunny, well lit room in my house. Right.

01:14:39.500 --> 01:14:48.500
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.

01:14:48.500 --> 01:14:57.500
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.

01:14:57.500 --> 01:15:09.500
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.

01:15:09.500 --> 01:15:18.500
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.

01:15:18.500 --> 01:15:27.500
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.

01:15:27.500 --> 01:15:37.500
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.

01:15:37.500 --> 01:15:46.500
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.

01:15:46.500 --> 01:15:58.500
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.

01:15:58.500 --> 01:16:10.500
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?

01:16:10.500 --> 01:16:25.500
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.

01:16:25.500 --> 01:16:36.500
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.

01:16:36.500 --> 01:16:45.500
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.

01:16:45.500 --> 01:16:58.500
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.

01:16:58.500 --> 01:17:10.500
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?

01:17:10.500 --> 01:17:22.500
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.

01:17:22.500 --> 01:17:35.500
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.

01:17:35.500 --> 01:17:48.500
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.

01:17:48.500 --> 01:17:54.500
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.

01:17:54.500 --> 01:18:04.500
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.

01:18:04.500 --> 01:18:15.500
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.

01:18:15.500 --> 01:18:28.500
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.

01:18:28.500 --> 01:18:35.500
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.

01:18:35.500 --> 01:18:38.500
So I'm like, okay, so I'm going to use those tens of thousands of dollars to do that.

01:18:38.500 --> 01:18:47.500
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.

01:18:47.500 --> 01:18:51.500
It was like, I guess, a similar kind of risk where I didn't know about my future.

01:18:51.500 --> 01:19:03.500
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.

01:19:03.500 --> 01:19:13.500
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.

01:19:13.500 --> 01:19:24.500
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.

01:19:24.500 --> 01:19:33.500
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.

01:19:33.500 --> 01:19:44.500
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.

01:19:44.500 --> 01:19:52.500
And with the young child, but the thing is like, I thought I would use this money to start sucking up.

01:19:52.500 --> 01:20:00.500
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?

01:20:00.500 --> 01:20:06.500
I wish I was hoping I would get laid off. I was hoping that there would be like a second round and all that.

01:20:06.500 --> 01:20:18.500
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.

01:20:18.500 --> 01:20:28.500
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.

01:20:28.500 --> 01:20:36.500
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.

01:20:36.500 --> 01:20:42.500
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.

01:20:42.500 --> 01:20:49.500
I was really hoping they would do something before the second, whatever the earnings call that they had in March or April.

01:20:49.500 --> 01:20:52.500
But they haven't announced anything. Then I'm like, OK, so I have to resign.

01:20:52.500 --> 01:20:58.500
As you speak about living, I put my notice in mid-April and I left at a month and a half later.

01:20:58.500 --> 01:21:02.500
I could have just left and dropped things on the floor because nothing prevents me from doing that.

01:21:02.500 --> 01:21:09.500
But that's not the right way to end the relationship with the company that they can't do anything bad for me.

01:21:09.500 --> 01:21:12.500
Like there were things that, you know, I didn't like particularly, right?

01:21:12.500 --> 01:21:17.500
But there were lots of things that I'm grateful for and lots of people that I've made connections with.

01:21:17.500 --> 01:21:19.500
So I wanted to make sure that I'll leave very nicely.

01:21:19.500 --> 01:21:29.500
And sometimes I think we take things for granted. At the end of it, the jobs at Google and Amazon, those are awesome jobs.

01:21:29.500 --> 01:21:31.500
Compared to some other jobs. Yeah.

01:21:31.500 --> 01:21:42.500
OK, last question. What's your goal for the first year of unemployment and how will you measure that goal?

01:21:42.500 --> 01:21:44.500
I measure goals in my life.

01:21:44.500 --> 01:21:51.500
OK. Yeah, so that's a short answer. But I do have a specific thing in mind.

01:21:51.500 --> 01:21:58.500
So first of all, I wouldn't call it unemployment. I have the whole executive position in the paper company.

01:21:58.500 --> 01:22:00.500
You're the CEO now.

01:22:00.500 --> 01:22:02.500
Oh, yes. And co-founder.

01:22:02.500 --> 01:22:11.500
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.

01:22:11.500 --> 01:22:22.500
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.

01:22:22.500 --> 01:22:29.500
So at least to the extent that my runway is extended, let's say, from one year to like two or three years.

01:22:29.500 --> 01:22:32.500
And then eventually I don't have to use my savings at all.

01:22:32.500 --> 01:22:36.500
You know, and eventually I could save up as well. But that's like a longer term.

01:22:36.500 --> 01:22:41.500
So yeah, I think I would call the success if in six months, I would have to spend my savings.

01:22:41.500 --> 01:22:48.500
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.

01:22:48.500 --> 01:22:53.500
Actually, there was a question linked in that somebody asked under my post that I think we should honor the request.

01:22:53.500 --> 01:23:00.500
Yes. I've been thinking about that question for a few days now because it brought up some good points.

01:23:00.500 --> 01:23:04.500
When I was reading it, I'm like, that's not how I think about it anymore.

01:23:04.500 --> 01:23:07.500
I used to think about it the same way. So yeah, let's bring it up.

01:23:07.500 --> 01:23:13.500
Let me read it out. This is in LinkedIn when you and I posted that we're doing this podcast.

01:23:13.500 --> 01:23:15.500
Who is a question from Alina?

01:23:15.500 --> 01:23:20.500
Okay. I tend to believe that building a carrier is a path to yourself.

01:23:20.500 --> 01:23:27.500
It is winding full of ups and downs, but there is some inner strength that motivates you to go through it.

01:23:27.500 --> 01:23:30.500
Regardless of external circumstances.

01:23:30.500 --> 01:23:36.500
Is there a certain driving force from within which does not allow you to turn off from the path to yourself?

01:23:36.500 --> 01:23:40.500
Do you have something similar regarding your carrier or professional path?

01:23:40.500 --> 01:23:43.500
Yeah. So there are two things in there that I wanted to comment on.

01:23:43.500 --> 01:23:44.500
So first is the path.

01:23:44.500 --> 01:23:48.500
And I think it's implied in the question. And I also imagine it the same way.

01:23:48.500 --> 01:23:51.500
I used to imagine it the same way. It's like path is like a road.

01:23:51.500 --> 01:23:57.500
So it's a certain path that you follow. She's saying it like winds around, you know, the forest or whatever.

01:23:57.500 --> 01:24:06.500
But the, again, after the after the I was experiencing, I came to more of the realization that path is not a road.

01:24:06.500 --> 01:24:10.500
And I really like how the guy called Jerry Colona put it.

01:24:10.500 --> 01:24:13.500
He talks about a pathless path.

01:24:13.500 --> 01:24:23.500
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.

01:24:23.500 --> 01:24:32.500
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.

01:24:32.500 --> 01:24:38.500
So you're basically in the middle of those waters. And whichever way you go, that's your path.

01:24:38.500 --> 01:24:46.500
Because a path on the ground has been laid out by somebody before you already and you're following it.

01:24:46.500 --> 01:24:51.500
Yes. Or maybe like you're in the jungle and you make a path within Machete.

01:24:51.500 --> 01:24:57.500
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.

01:24:57.500 --> 01:25:02.500
But yeah, to your point, like, yeah, the paths, the implied that paths already exist.

01:25:02.500 --> 01:25:05.500
Whereas in the sea, you navigate by yourself.

01:25:05.500 --> 01:25:12.500
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.

01:25:12.500 --> 01:25:18.500
Because like when you're at the big company, you have those kind of your SD1, SD2, SD3, L5, L6, whatever, right?

01:25:18.500 --> 01:25:21.500
And you keep growing up and you start managing people.

01:25:21.500 --> 01:25:26.500
It's a very predefined path, pretty unified across all industries.

01:25:26.500 --> 01:25:30.500
You have a certain difference in levels and all that, but like conception is all the same.

01:25:30.500 --> 01:25:37.500
Whereas when you are an entrepreneur, especially in a small company, like we are right now, you can just go whatever directions we want.

01:25:37.500 --> 01:25:42.500
Roads, we don't need roads. Remember that quote from Back to the Future?

01:25:42.500 --> 01:25:51.500
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.

01:25:51.500 --> 01:25:56.500
But the word career for some reason for me is associated to be like working for somebody.

01:25:56.500 --> 01:26:04.500
For me, it's associated with like levels and promotions, which is all of framework laid out by somebody.

01:26:04.500 --> 01:26:06.500
Somebody smart to make it work for them.

01:26:06.500 --> 01:26:15.500
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.

01:26:15.500 --> 01:26:18.500
I don't know how to make it work otherwise. We will have to make something up.

01:26:18.500 --> 01:26:29.500
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.

01:26:29.500 --> 01:26:35.500
One of my friends is a organization designer. So that's what she does the whole time.

01:26:35.500 --> 01:26:36.500
Sounds fancy.

01:26:36.500 --> 01:26:40.500
Yeah. So the second part of the question was about the internal drive.

01:26:40.500 --> 01:26:47.500
And I think that can take different shapes and sizes when you can be driven by ego.

01:26:47.500 --> 01:26:51.500
And again, that's something that kind of got shot at for me when I was in Peru.

01:26:51.500 --> 01:26:56.500
It's like you want something because other people have it.

01:26:56.500 --> 01:27:01.500
So you are driven by jealousy, you know, or you like want to get to the next level or whatever, right?

01:27:01.500 --> 01:27:05.500
Yeah, you're reducing it to the basics, but yeah, that's what it is.

01:27:05.500 --> 01:27:09.500
You want kind of more of the same that somebody else has.

01:27:09.500 --> 01:27:14.500
You don't kind of keep going there or kind of another way that ego works.

01:27:14.500 --> 01:27:18.500
You want your mom to be proud of you or your dad, right?

01:27:18.500 --> 01:27:20.500
You close that thing. You may not even realize that.

01:27:20.500 --> 01:27:28.500
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.

01:27:28.500 --> 01:27:35.500
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.

01:27:35.500 --> 01:27:37.500
Or you've only gotten praise when you get something good.

01:27:37.500 --> 01:27:41.500
Maybe you haven't gotten that unconditional love from your parents.

01:27:41.500 --> 01:27:43.500
And that's why you have to earn that love.

01:27:43.500 --> 01:27:47.500
And that's what you just keep doing as an adult while working a job, right?

01:27:47.500 --> 01:27:52.500
But also because you can't expect unconditional love from a company.

01:27:52.500 --> 01:27:55.500
No, that's why you're like, you're never going to get that love.

01:27:55.500 --> 01:27:57.500
That's why it's never enough, right?

01:27:57.500 --> 01:28:00.500
Get the senior, you get the principal, then like you're going to get the director.

01:28:00.500 --> 01:28:13.500
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.

01:28:13.500 --> 01:28:15.500
And then they just get trapped in there.

01:28:15.500 --> 01:28:18.500
And I think I'm not immune from that myself.

01:28:18.500 --> 01:28:23.500
It's just like when you like work on your own thing, you start to see things differently when you don't have income.

01:28:23.500 --> 01:28:25.500
But that's like the ego drive, right?

01:28:25.500 --> 01:28:29.500
So let's say unhealthy drive to achievement in a society which I think all of us have.

01:28:29.500 --> 01:28:30.500
In some way or another.

01:28:30.500 --> 01:28:38.500
The other thing is like that internal fire that burns in you, you know who you are.

01:28:38.500 --> 01:28:40.500
And you follow that path.

01:28:40.500 --> 01:28:46.500
But I think that path is usually like, I know I'm meant to be heavy, be at a time.

01:28:46.500 --> 01:28:49.500
That's not the thing I'm talking about.

01:28:49.500 --> 01:28:52.500
Which may be true for somebody, but not for you and me.

01:28:52.500 --> 01:28:58.500
Which may be true, but only in a way that maybe your passion is to not passion like that.

01:28:58.500 --> 01:28:59.500
Your vocation, right?

01:28:59.500 --> 01:29:09.500
Is to do certain things for people that you can get best at while being heavy, be at a time of time.

01:29:09.500 --> 01:29:13.500
Maybe like you really somebody whose path in life is to help people connect, for example, right?

01:29:13.500 --> 01:29:14.500
And you create Gmail.

01:29:14.500 --> 01:29:15.500
Then it makes sense.

01:29:15.500 --> 01:29:19.500
You could have created Gmail by yourself, but it's just easier to do inside of a big company.

01:29:19.500 --> 01:29:24.500
But because you did that, you became the VP of VP in Google.

01:29:24.500 --> 01:29:25.500
Yes, makes sense.

01:29:25.500 --> 01:29:31.500
Yeah, VP is just like a derivative, I guess, success thing by product.

01:29:31.500 --> 01:29:32.500
By product, yeah.

01:29:32.500 --> 01:29:36.500
Think for me, I don't know what my vocation is in this regard.

01:29:36.500 --> 01:29:39.500
And no, I like to create.

01:29:39.500 --> 01:29:45.500
Creating things that I personally enjoy that I love is what I want to be doing.

01:29:45.500 --> 01:29:53.500
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.

01:29:53.500 --> 01:29:57.500
I think that's the biggest similarity between you and me.

01:29:57.500 --> 01:30:01.500
Is this drive to like create things?

01:30:01.500 --> 01:30:08.500
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.

01:30:08.500 --> 01:30:13.500
But I'm okay to compromise on that and just focus on the creating part.

01:30:13.500 --> 01:30:19.500
Because I know that I won't have to do a lot of the things that I did not like.

01:30:19.500 --> 01:30:23.500
I did not like the spending energy and things that I did not want to do.

01:30:23.500 --> 01:30:28.500
Yeah, because when you do things you don't want to do, you spend actually more energy.

01:30:28.500 --> 01:30:37.500
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.

01:30:37.500 --> 01:30:42.500
Or maybe you'll get three times more time because you don't want to do it.

01:30:42.500 --> 01:30:45.500
And it's like you become kind of counterproductive in that regard.

01:30:45.500 --> 01:30:51.500
So yeah, because one thing that came to me in Peru as well is like lead people with your voice.

01:30:51.500 --> 01:30:55.500
And I'm like, wow, let's just like how I felt it.

01:30:55.500 --> 01:30:58.500
And maybe this is where the podcasting thing comes in, right?

01:30:58.500 --> 01:31:03.500
When I came back, I wrote on my whiteboard, amplify people's voices.

01:31:03.500 --> 01:31:06.500
And I like doing that, I like doing that in the podcast.

01:31:06.500 --> 01:31:14.500
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.

01:31:14.500 --> 01:31:16.500
And with other voice, yeah.

01:31:16.500 --> 01:31:20.500
Well, we are almost two hours into this recording time.

01:31:20.500 --> 01:31:23.500
We'll cut it short, but still this is going to be a long episode.

01:31:23.500 --> 01:31:33.500
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.

01:31:33.500 --> 01:31:37.500
If you didn't like it, let us know what you didn't like about it.

01:31:37.500 --> 01:31:45.500
Yeah. Leave us a rating, review, comment, all that good stuff, spread the word if you like this episode.

01:31:45.500 --> 01:31:53.500
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.

01:31:53.500 --> 01:31:56.500
But if you like this episode, share this episode with people you know.

01:31:56.500 --> 01:32:10.500
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.

01:32:10.500 --> 01:32:18.500
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.

01:32:18.500 --> 01:32:24.500
Stop wanting, start doing, or figure out a way to stop wanting.

01:32:24.500 --> 01:32:28.500
Yeah, I'll link that podcast episode with Alex Hermosy in our show notes.

01:32:28.500 --> 01:32:31.500
It was a very good, very, very, very good episode.

01:32:31.500 --> 01:32:34.500
You guys does like gym turn around.

01:32:34.500 --> 01:32:36.500
I don't even go to the gym, I have no idea what he does.

01:32:36.500 --> 01:32:41.500
But the conceptual idea is that he brings up, they are applicable anywhere.

01:32:41.500 --> 01:32:42.500
Right, cool.

01:32:42.500 --> 01:33:10.500
This was awesome. Thank you, Julia. Nice chat.