I am an engineer who enjoys building businesses. I have founded two companies in the past (adtech in '08, gig economy neobank in '16). Both failed and succeeded in different ways. I also work with founders in executing on their vision, where my broad skills can be put to good use. More about me and my 15 year journey, after I list my core beliefs.
While I enjoy taking ideas to market that are strongly tech led, I am most productive in bridging business goals and shipping product, with the long term foundational thinking that comes from an engineering background.
My core beliefs
- Small teams can do great things
- Culture fit & integrity > ability > skills
- I like to measure my success by how others benefit.
- I am biased towards shipping and being intentional. Competent opinionated yet empathetic leaders can lead teams to punch above their weight and do amazing things.
- I take pride in making it easy for new employees to succeed.
- Being able to communicate in a group or long form is a great asset.
- Large complex problems can be broken down into smaller more manageable pieces.
- Coming up with simple solutions is not a handicap.
- Invest in internal tools. Finance, ops and other teams especially need the tools, reports, dashboards as much as customers and product managers do.
- Start small. I managed the expenses of 500M requests one day and had absolutely no problems starting up a micro-instance for my company a week later.
- Allow new employees the pleasure of small wins - seeing the process end to end, and then constantly increase the complexity, scope.
- Even seemingly mundane tasks - viewed from a different lens - can offer challenging goals, such as library / API’s / documentation / adoption.
- Treat teammates like customers. Everyone has a customer, it’s either external or internal. Or another employee/team. Eg: platform/data team’s customers could be the application/product engineering team. It helps to add purpose to your role to know who your customer is - and feedback from what you are building.
- Strong opinions, loosely held
- Keep your team chugging until you reach a point where now what you do matters. My startup experience has helped me realize that in the early days - you are insignificant. You don’t have a seat on the table. Mohammed Ali said he doesn’t start counting until it starts hurting. The role of a platform team is to facilitate the company and organization to move fast until you matter. Eg: ML or A/B testing framework when you have 3 users VS more pressing priorities.
- I have found great success in investing and training raw talent / fresh graduates.
- I like to spend my time on things that can bring exponential impact. A lot of that is patiently learning and investing in training / mentoring / hiring / listening - the hard work.